Here's why your taxes are so high:


It's an escalator in the Herald Square subway station, and in case you were wondering, it's an up escalator. You know how I can tell? There's a little up arrow next to the escalator... and also, I was standing there when I took the picture, so I could see the damn escalator going up. But that arrow's helpful, too... if one day, Earth happens to morph into an M. C. Escher world.

It's not that I have a problem with the arrow itself, because I can imagine some dingus hopping on the escalator and then being like, "Why do I appear to be moving in a skyward direction? Oh, I see, the arrow's pointing up." I get especially confused when I use one of the planet's millions of escalators that doesn't have an up or down arrow right next to it. "Where does it go? Up? Down? Sideways? Mommy, hold me!" It's that the subway people bought this high-tech electronic scrolling light sign, as if just spraypainting a damn arrow next to the escalator wouldn't be informative enough. We need to see the arrow physically move up, just in case someone, somewhere is confused about the whole concept of "up."

I'm dying to know where one purchases a scrolling up-arrow sign on a fancy metal post, and how much they go for. It has to be at least a hundred bucks, right? Probably more if you want one that can be switched from up to down, in case you ever change the direction of the escalators. Which I really hope they do, just to confuse the people relying on the sign.

I'm embarrassed for my fellow fat-ass man after stumbling across a qualifying heat on the Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Championship Circuit this afternoon. It's bad enough that we – who are no longer under the influence of our college fraternities – made a contest out of who could stuff the most hot dogs in their fat face, and it's even worse that "competative eaters" call it a sport, instead of one of the deadly sins. But I despair because of the spectators gathered around. There had to be at least a hundred people standing around, all of whom couldn't find anything better to do in the whole wide world than watch guys eat.

I didn't stick for the eat-off because – and this surprised me – there's a lot of tedious pre-game show that goes into an eating contest. You'd think everybody could just walk up to the table, and “On your mark, get set, go!” but no. We need to be introduced to the competitors, like we give a shit. The only competitive eater who was even mildly interesting was Kobayashi, and only because he was so much smaller but so much "better" than everyone else competing. So even he doesn't need an introduction, just a leaderboard.

But anyway, we're introduced to these total drains on our healthcare system – I mean, it's your Medicare dollars that are gonna be paying for the inevitable massive cardiac failure you get from eating three dozen nitrate-filled fake-beef sausages in ten minutes – and even that's disappointing. You're probably aware that the hot dog eating world championships, or whatever, are held on the Fourth of July down at Coney Island, where the original Nathan's stand is. What you probably don't know, unless you make trips to South Brooklyn for some reason, is that, thanks to complicated socio-economic factors, modern Coney Island is a faded relic of its old glory. Before we as a society were inundated with television-on-demand and special-effects crammed blockbuster movies, Coney Island functioned as this sort of half-beach, half traveling-carnival production. The people working the Coney Island booths were showmen, and when a carney told you that the law said he has to charge five dollars for you to see the two-headed man, but just for you, he'll charge three, you'd suspend your disbelief. That was the point. Now, it's just some dippy high school kid looking for extra money, too jaded to put on a show, and the whole experience is just perfunctory. With that in mind, three words: Worst. Announcer. Ever.

He thought he was the announcer for a boxing match or something, but he came off more like a guy trying to sell Dr. Murray's Zinc Sulfate Cure-All Miracle Solution. Fine, he knew how dopey this whole thing was, made tragically worse by the fact that each of the competitors had a ridiculous back story, bur really, dude, you're standing up on your dais, reading from your index card, and all you gotta do is sound a little excited. Our first eater was some woman, and what I got from her backstory was that she's a woman, and she stuffs food down her gullet, and she's a woman. Frankly, I'm relieved to know that being a total pig isn't gender specific.

Contestant number two was an old guy, and there was this whole spiel about how he always ate a lot, but he never heard of competitive eating, then his wife told him about it and that he had to compete, so he trained and eventually won in the seniors' divison or something and here he is... except since he's old, he can't hear his name when it's called, so we're all literally waiting like five minutes before one of the other competitors taps him on the shoulder and tells him to go out. And yet this is still more exciting than baseball.

Oh, did I mention that all the competitors stand at this long table, but all the hot dogs are on a different table, and they have to be carried from one table to the other one competitor at a time, while everyone's watching. Because this isn't drawn out long enough.

The third contestant was some guy with a sad story. Here's what the announcer had to say, and I swear I'm not making this up: “Competitor number three had a tragic upbringing...” Aww, what could've possibly happened to him? Did he grow up somewhere there was no food, yet he managed to overcome the limitations of not having any food and made it to the top ranks of competitive eaters? Not quite. “...yet today, he has triumphed over adversity. He was born without tonsils.” What?! He was born without a vestigal organ! This is when I left, because honestly, I couldn't deal with this dude's childhood suffering, all those times with his tonsils not getting infected and needing to be removed.

Now, if he climbed the ranks of competitive eating despite being born without a mouth, that would be something worth watching.

Good News For Once!

I can't believe we have two happy news stories today!

First, Bill O'Reilly gets owned! Twice!

Moral guardian O'Reilly was following up on a story from ages back, throwing a hissy over a left-wing Hollywood extremist high school assembly in Boulder, Colorado. BOR was outraged; the assembly was supposed to warn the kids, honestly, about the risks of drugs and sex, but there was no closet-pervert fearmongering priest among the assembly panel. Without God's guidance, the assembly turned into a meth-fueled orgy, according to reports that BOR completely made up. It's bad enough, but then the school principal, cowed, had the gall to apologize for the assembly. BOR lost his shit, again; his basic argument was "How could this gay-marrying, hybrid-driving, cut-and-run principal think that a mere apology could reverse the irreparable damage done to America's moral fiber?" Some sophomore dink from the school was booked on the Factor to validate BOR's indigance.

But then, enter American hero Jesse Lange, sixteen-year-old Boulder High student, who puts the loudmouthed bully in his place. Lange is basically the debate team Zen master in this clip, calmly correcting BOR's fantasy recollection of the assembly's transcript, then later pointing out BOR's hypocrisy by quoting The O'Reilly Factor For Kids. BOR responds by turning into a first-grader and calling Lange "a pinhead." Just enjoy the clip below. You half expect BOR to retort, "I know you are but what am I?"



But wait! There's more! The judge handed down a verdict in the case of our favorite fashion conscious abuser of the legal system, and I'm just a little less cynical today. You'll recall that Roy Pearson, human hole of suck, sued his dry cleaners for $54 million dollars after they temporarily misplaced his pants. We all knew he wasn't going to win a penny from them, and he didn't. But the story gets better: according to the L.A. Times reports that bringing his frivolous lawsuit actually costed Pearson a thousand dollars. Which he could have used to buy at least four pairs of new pants.

And normally, that would be the end of the story, but it's Opposite Day or something because the judge in the case is now considering a motion to force Pearson to pay all of the legal fees of the people he sued. And Pearson's job — remember, he's an administrative law judge in Washington, D.C. — is in peril! I am giddy over this!

This almost makes up for Paris Hilton getting out of jail today. Although I'm sure she'll be back before too long.

"You could be a part-time model/but you'd probably still have to keep your normal job."

I'd just die to see the mean, median, and standard deviation on one eHarmony question in particular, "How satisfied are you with your physical appearance?" My answer was two out of seven, but now that I've had a few days to live with my hasty choice, I'm afraid I've fallen victim to confirmation bias. Something sounds right when I say I'm 28.6% satisfied with my appearance, but way off when I deduce that means I'm 71.4% unsatisfied with my appearance. Most of the time, I'm indifferent to my physical appearance, and I'd like to tweak the numbers a bit: 25% satisfied, 30% unsatisfied, and 45% neither — and if you do some math with that, eHarmony-dot-com, computer-matching me on twenty-nine freaking vectors of love, the results seem to correlate with my true opinion of my looks, bias and chronic self-deprecation and just objective comparisons between my appearance and the physical appearance of the cast on the CW network included. I really wish I told eHarmony three or (gasp!) even four for that question.

The stats on those descriptive rankings — well-groomed, handsome, athletic, overweight, fit, and sexy — would also be illuminating, especially with the data on how people feel about their appearance. How many self-confessed overweight people are also satisfied with their looks, for example? (What if they used "big-boned" instead? Or if they asked people to rank how thin they are?) The thing that most fascinates me is how people rationalize their vanity. I mean, most people aren't all that hot in the first place. We're not kittens or pugs or panda bears, where you're automatically cute as a member of the species. To my eye, maybe one in twenty people could realistically rank themselves a seven out of seven in the "sexy" category, and one in ten men could do the same in for "handsome." Hollywood aside, and even then sometimes, the scale goes from unkempt to plain to trying too hard, with only a sliver of space for the mutants with perfect skin, zero body fat, and a thousand-dollar smile.

Let's not call it the myth of beauty, since there's plenty of good-looking people at the unkempt and plain ends of the scale. Instead, it's the myth of stunning, eye-catching, head-turning beauty, sucking people in for botox and plastic surgeries — half-man, half-gelatin — and screwing up the pretty curve for the rest of us.

The other question eHarmony asks is, "How important is it that your partner be physically attractive?" And in light of all this, I can honestly be happy with my answer of two out of seven. I was really going to put one out of seven, but I was sort of afraid then they'd hook me up with someone who spent the past twenty years living next to Chernobyl, growing an extra face or something.

I Rationally Deconstruct eHarmony's Relationship Profile

People change, eHarmony.com, and it wouldn't kill you to let users update their personality profile. Maybe I've matured since eHarmony did it's algorithm-match thing for me, and I'd like to find out. I'm still answering honestly — I think that's really the only way to find the woman of my dreams... or the woman who can tolerate me — but there's always the chance that eHarmony will find deep inside me reservoirs of affability I never knew I had. I got a new email address, so a brand new Relationship Questionnaire will follow, and let's see where it takes me.

The first page of the eHarmony profile is just basic personal info, plus (I think) your soulmate's height and age, so onto the profound stuff, right?

Page Two. Oh... I remember why I stopped this. "What is your personal income?" Less than $20,000 — although I like how $0 is an option, too. This seems superfluous; first, last time I was in math class, zero is less than twenty-thousand, and second, how many homeless people are actually posting profiles on eHarmony in the first place? And then there's another problem question, which is "How important is your match's income to you?" The short answer is, like everything else in this stupid survey, I don't know. There are so many ways of interpreting this question — are they asking if I wouldn't be happy unless I married rich? I think most people's gut response, certainly mine, to the idea of marrying into wealth is that it would be great. No sitting in traffic commuting, or ordering a small coffee to save money, and you can make a hobby out of getting ineffective plastic surgeries. (I can't believe those trophy wives haven't filed lawsuits yet.)

But Western society also has a complicated, several-millenia old history of gender relations, and frankly I already have an inferiority complex without a pre-nup and yet another, quantitative, measure of my worth. Maybe they're asking how important it is that my "match" have a similar income to me? Or is it a negative question, would I reject my "match," my soul mate that God, in His infinite wisdom, has chosen for me, because she's poor? How much of a golddigger am I — what if I loved her in every other way, would the money still matter to me? Would I even give us a chance to find out? Plus, there's political correctness to take into account: I think this is a good question to be wishy-washy over, on a scale of one to seven, I'm choosing a three.

My ethnicity: that's easy.

What ethnicities would you be willing to accept as matches? Mother-fucker! Maybe I'm reading too much into this, because you look around the room and.... Maybe it's just me, since I've never really asked anyone about this, but everybody I know who's married is married within their race. I see people walking down the street holding hands, and they're usually the same race. You look around the room and you first focus on people of certain races. You have to pick someone to talk to, to get to know, and it's not like you've got a ton of information about them. I guess I can check off all the ethnicities here without feeling like a liberal guilt jackass this time; presumably eHarmony takes care of the awkward compatibility testing, and then I've noticed that no matter what their appearance is, people look a lot more attractive once you get to know them. I guess "How important is your match's ethnicity?" Not very.

Now I get to describe my appearance, via vague characteristics and this coarse seven-point scale. (FYI: Seven means the given characteristic describes you perfectly.) Rank the degree to which I'm: well-groomed, handsome, athletic, overweight, fit, and sexy. Well, Mom says I'm handsome... Here goes, in order: 4, 4, 2, 2, 3, 2, but that last one's really for women and himbos, right? I want to explore this a bit further...

Honestly...

I put this application called an "Honesty Box" on my Absolutely Indispensable Facebook Profile, which never really seemed like a super idea. The idea is that people can leave little notes anonymously; officially, "Honesty Box lets users send each other anonymous messages, removing any inhibitions and letting people be completely honest with you." Honesty Box basically presents you with a decision: do you want to know what people honestly think of you? There seems like not only a good potential for abuse — it's restricted to your friends (or "friends") thankfully — but also a great way to shatter your blissful ignorant belief that people actually like you. I was conflicted over the concept, but I eventually decided that, first of all, my friends/"friends" are completely indifferent to me. (Check out my Facebook wall. It grows at a rate of about one post a year.) There are days when I feel like I could grow to fifty feet tall, start breathing fire, and walk around stomping on Tokyo and the people who know me would still be completely oblivious. Well, things are busy at work, and I'm totally stressed, and it's my other friend's birthday next week or whatever.

My other thought is that if my friends do hold an opinion about me, which they don't (see caveat below), their opinions can't possibly be any worse than the opinion I have about myself. This is what we call a "win-win" situation, right? But then, here are the first four reviews for the Honesty Box application:

[anonymous person] (Putnam City North High School) wrote at 12:52pm I NEED TO DELETE REPLIES. SOME ARE... NOT APPROPRIATE. Message - Report

Whitney Porter (LA Tech) wrote at 12:41pm I want to delete replies Message - Report

Lyndsey Shea (Hingham High School) wrote at 12:27pm i want to delete my reply threads too. how do i do it ? Message - Report

Alicia Colón (Howard) wrote at 12:05pm What if I want to delete a reply thread? I don't see where I can do that. Is there not an option to do that?

I think that speaks to the quality of some people's friends.

Much to my surprise — I was really expecting "Jay, you are an ass." — somebody wrote something nice to me. I quote, out of sheer joy, "Hey Jay. I think you're a very cool person I knew from a very long time ago. I always pictured you working at NASA or something just because you're so smart. Anyways, I really do hope you're doing well and having a happy life." Thank you, Anonymous Person. That really made my day; I'm even going to resist the temptation to cynically pick it apart because I'd like it to keep making my day. (This does not come easily to me.) Did you hear that? Somebody thinks I'm a very cool person! Smiley emoticon, please! I see a meet-cute romantic comedy in the making here: like Anonymous Person turns out to be my most despised rival at work, but it turns out that from behind the Internet, we're great friends.

I can't say anything because I'm about to cowardly compliment my friends through Honesty Box — my original plan was to cravenly tell people off via Honesty Box instead — but what the hell? Call me crazy, but I think being nice should be, uh, a nice thing... free of subtext, ulterior motives, and face-to-face. I'd like to extend a little invitation to them: Contact me! Leave messages! Constructive criticism appreciated! (Euphoric praise appreciated even more!) I don't bite — okay, I do, but not the amiable — and I won't read into your comments or develop expectations (really, when have I ever had expectations?) or anything. Just want to share the love.

A Completely Impartial Review of an Expensive Toy I'll Probably Be Bored With in Less Than A Month

Just last weekend, I got around to plugging my Nintendo Wii into a television and fooling around with it. I have mixed opinions towards Wii: On one hand, it is a hell of a lot of fun, dancing around with that remote in your hand. (Note: Me dancing and me pantomiming playing tennis look more or less the same.) But at the same time, playing Wii sort of feels like exercise, and you walk away from the TV tired, sweaty, and just dying to sit your ass down on the couch and play some video games. It's an insidious little monster, that one.

My home, growing up, was a sad Nintendo-free zone. It was tragic. Instead of running home after school to immerse myself in the choose-your-own-adventures of a cartoon plumber, I was expected to do my homework and read. Books. Not interactive at all. I was totally deprived. My parents figured that video games would turn me into a spaced-out zombie, playing until my fingers fell off and my retinas burned out, trying to reach a high score and forsaking my dying social life. So now I work with computers and don't talk to people. Another successful parenting job. Let's say that I have a lot of repressed shoot-em-up energy looking for an outlet — I seriously do plan on going to a shooting range sometime before I die — but until then, twenty-first century Duck Hunt will do fine. Give it a couple of months and the whole thing will be out of my system, and I'll be onto a sports car obsession or something instead.

Maybe not, though. The Wii is a toy that can be packed with shareware and keeps on giving — at least until the remote slips out of your sweaty hand and into your TV — and I've spent enough quarters in arcades, fiddling with joysticks and slamming my fist into random buttons to be really impressed by the clever team of Japanese fun-gineers stepping out of the mold with their videogame interfaces. I can't wait for the next generation, when they actually implant the video game in your head, which would return video games to their rightful place as a boredom cure for couch potatoes when there's nothing on TV.

Breaking News: Kim Jong Il Praised!

This is why the North Korean state press fascinates me: they have headlines like "Kim Jong Il Enjoys Art Performance," "Kim Jong Il's Party Leadership Praised," and of course, "U.S. Attempt to Perpetuate Its Military Presence in Iraq under Fire." It's basically all the propaganda of FOX News, plus the quality, sophistication, and spell checking of my town paper. My personal favorite headline just reads "Kim Jong Il Praised." (North Korea needs to dump their bootleg Microsoft Word and replace it with the real one, which green-squiggle underlines the passive voice.)

Pyongyang, June 16 (KCNA) -- Niculae Pavelescu, chairman of the Executive Committee of the Left United Party of Romania, made public a statement on June 11 on the occasion of the 43rd anniversary of Kim Jong Il's start of work at the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea.

He said in his statement that the WPK has grown stronger to be the party of President Kim Il Sung from A to Z since Kim Jong Il started the work at the Party Central Committee.

Under the Songun revolutionary leadership of Kim Jong Il the WPK has become a revolutionary party invariably holding high the socialist banner and an invincible party firmly defending the sovereignty and dignity of the Korean people, he noted, adding that the undying feats Kim Jong Il has performed for the cause of the party building serve as an example to be followed by the world progressive parties and a precious wealth for them.

It probably makes more sense if you've been brainwashed by the Juche government. Well, at least they're not Scientologists.

I bought a new TV for myself yesterday, and it's awesome. It's a flat-screen high-definition LCD digital miracle of modern technology and I plugged it in, turned it on, and got no picture for about two hours. But once I got it up and running for real: wow, am I impressed! It gets around two-hundred channels I didn't even know existed. It gets three NBC's, and three of those TV Guide channels, and channels that aren't even listed in the TV Guide. There's way more channels than they know what to do with — we have about five channels that are two rows or pictures-in-picture, showing you what's on other channels. It takes half an hour just to cycle through all my channels.

Now if there was only anything good to watch...

Just when you thought Pants Lawsuit Guy couldn't possibly be a more infinitly huge jackass abusing the legal system, Reuters reports that Pants Lawsuit Guy has become an even huger jackass. In case you've been busy following seriously less disturbing courtroom news, here's the story in a nutshell. This guy, Roy Pearson, took a suit to this Korean dry cleaners for alterations. The dry cleaner lost his pants. Then they found his pants, only Roy says those aren't his pants. Now Roy is suing the dry cleaner for $54 million, because they had a sign in their window that said "Satisfaction Guaranteed," and he wasn't satisfied. Some of that money — $15,000 a day — is for covering the expense of renting a car to drive to another dry cleaners. Oh, did I forget to mention that someone appointed Roy as an administrative law judge in the District of Columbia? Yeah, they did. I guess it's not too surprising in a city that elected a crackhead mayor.

Even the wire services aren't hiding their contempt for Pants Lawsuit Guy, as the Reuters report reads, "Pearson's lawsuit has drawn international ridicule. It also drew plenty of chuckles from spectators who crowded into the stuffy municipal courtroom. Even Bartnoff [the judge] had a hard time keeping a straight face as Pearson, wearing a gray pinstripe suit and a stained lavender tie, wielded a 6-inch-thick (15-cm-thick) binder of laws and court decisions that he said bolstered his case." You've got to admire this jerkwad's dedication, if nothing else (and seriously, there's absolutely nothing else about PLG that's worth admiring). He uses his esoteric legal knowledge to exploit some immigrants who don't really speak English, then everybody in the world calls him on it, and what does he do? He shows off his esoteric legal knowledge! Brilliant defense! He's his own counsel, by the way, and he really illustrates the adage about the lawyer representing himself having a fool for a client.

Pants Lawsuit Guy managed to catapult himself into unseen levels of jackassery when he announced that, although he's suing for $54 million, he only needs $2.5 million to cover the emotional distress he suffered by having his pants switched on him. Yeah, that ought to just about cover it. PLG is planning on donating the other $51.5 million dollars he'll never, ever see to a fund for other victims of mild inconvenience who feel the need to abuse our justice system for comically hyperbolic revenge. PLG said his winnings would be used "as an incentive for other attorneys in private practice to take on these kinds of cases."

The plus side is that Pants Lawsuit Guy is gonna feel soooooo stupid when those pants mysteriously turn up in the back of his closet.

Good Samaritan

There was these pigeons — I know, rats with wings — over in Penn Station while I was waiting for the train. Anyone who's lived in a city for more than, say, a week has to be totally over the birds — even old men on park benches don't bother feeding them — and just perplexed by the attraction they seem to hold for others. In the suburbs, there's no way you can sneak up on a robin or a crow before they'll fly off; pigeons are so used to people that they won't even move if you're about to step on them. But what was special about these birds is that there were three of them, and one was sort of lopsided. I'm no veterinarian, but I think it had a broken wing, kind of slouched over and wobbling. I'm gonna name him George, after one of my pet damselfish, a gimpy, depressed fish who spent his short time in my aquarium nitrifying the environment and getting his food stolen by the other fish.

Avian George had his own tormenter, a white speckled pigeon, tall and upright — I'll call him Butch — who kept jumping on his back and pecking at him, because Butch is a total douche. The third pigeon, Calvin, more or less watched the fight from a distance. Kind of like the crowd of humans around. I was torn — I think most of the people there were torn — part of me wanted to break up the pigeon fight; part of me was eight years old, wanted to take George home in a little shoebox and nurse his wing back to health; part of me wasn't really sure what to do. Not that it's not my fight, but what do I know about avian morality: they're not sentient in the same way that I am, and what right do I have to impose my morals on them? Not to mention, what right do I have to side with George over Butch — maybe in pigeon-land, Butch has ethics on his side here. The good news, if you can call it that, about my moral waffling is that no one else had a strong urge to help out George, or maybe just turn the train platform slightly less violent, either. A few people sort of walked up to the fighting birds, but being a city pigeon, Butch hardly noticed. No one actually swatted at Butch with their Daily News (which might be illegal, anyway) or ran at the birds or threatened them. I waited for the train to come, figuring that either the locomotive would scare Butch off, or the throng of passengers disembarking would. But no. As far as I know, Butch is still there, wailing on George.

I love how it's so freaking easy to make huge moral pronouncements about stuff like, say, Israel and Palestine or ideological demagoguery, but when it comes to actually having to step up and take some action, I just watch and write about it later. No one steps in for right and justice. And it's a couple of birds: like, what are they going to do to me? Flap around? I certainly hope I never have to... none of us bird watchers ever have to help another human in trouble, because they're screwed.

Loneliness is haunting me, following me around from one desolate happy hour to another, leaving my Facebook feeds unchanged for a week, and taunting me with commercials for Age of Love. I have some time, just me and my computer, and I thought I might try expanding my social network... but I don't want to go outside my bedroom. I don't feel like putting a shirt on. I gave online matchmaking a shot two years ago, only to have that snooty bitch eHarmony.com reject me. I answered eHarmony's personality profile honestly and the computer dating monkeys at eHarmony headquarters were unable to match me "at this time." Should've lied, I guess.

Anyway, I logged into eHarmony again — still going to answer honestly, but I figured that maybe I've grown a bit since eHarmony unceremoniously snubbed me. Or maybe eHarmony's grown, not so much superficial, self-absorbed, and marginalizing... diverse... profiles. Nope. I love this little blurb from the home page: "Meet and communicate with quality women today" — and that emphasis is theirs. "Quality" women? This is exactly why personal relationships are bullshit: I've never used an adjective to describe both women and snow tires, but somehow that doesn't factor into the love equation.

I'm re-reading my eHarmony personality profile, now outdated, and I'm thinking this is a good place to put some links explaining the Forer effect.

Fine. Fuck eHarmony anyway. I'm moving on to Match.com, which is endorsed by Dr. Phil, so it'll probably berate me into dating, right? I was signing up for Match.com, but then I stopped and thought it might be fun to take you, my adoring public, on my journey through the world of online dating. I can make fun of it, be self-deprecating, so it won't matter and it'll sting less when I fail. Ingenious.... But you know what would be even better is filling out a fake form, pretending to be an Asian-American hog farmer from Montana or something, then when Match.com rejects me I can just be like, "Ha, joke's on you, Dr. Phil!"

The only questions Match.com asks before matching you up with, by my count, sixteen random eligible singles are your location and the age range beyond which you absolutely will not touch. Today, I'm 25, so I figure there are three ways to answer this question:

• The open-minded, full of shit way: "I'm looking to meet someone between the ages of 18 and 114."
• The honest way: "I'm looking to meet someone between the ages of 25 and 25."
• And the perverted, I know the age of consent in all fifty states way: "I'm looking to meet someone between the ages of 16 and 18."

(By the way, I had to look up the age of consent in New Jersey, just in case you were wondering.) I mention this because the next page on Match.com has this pull-down menu where you give them your birthdate, and it goes all the way back to 1919. I really want to know just how many octogenarians are actually on Match.com, how many are looking to meet someone in their twenties, and whether Grandma will let me put up a profile for her.

Okay, now I'm onto the search part of our evening. I didn't set up a profile on Match.com, so I sort of feel like this is the electronic version of peeping through a hole in the girls' locker room... but somehow when you're hiding behind a computer this all becomes appropriate. Don't ask. Here's the search criteria I'm offered:

• Height: Anywhere from 3'1" to 8'11". Three foot, I can understand, cause there's a population that's three feet tall. But eight feet, eleven inches?! There's one guy in history who's that tall, and if he's your soulmate, then you're S.O.L. cause he's dead. I don't know, maybe Match.com just put that in there to satiate the pituitary disorder fetishists out there.

No idea what keeps me going to these alumni happy hours, but they bore the hell out of me. I sit. I stand. I look around, maybe someone I know will show up. It's unlikely, because I only know... let's see: one, two, three, four other alumni. I do get to observe the social dynamics of young strangers on alcohol, and I think it's amazing how quickly happy hour conversation motives go from, "I'm talking with you because..."

• "I want to sleep with you," to
• "you look like a fun person," to
• "you're standing next to me," to
• "you're alone and it's pathetic."
  

I hate rain. Well, I like rain - what I hate is New Yorkers in the rain, cause they're the hugest weather pussies ever. God spits a few droplets on us and suddenly every single awning and doorway has a clot of people huddled underneath, like the rapture's upon us and a vinyl sheet is all that's standing between them and a hail of fire. It's only water, people - not like it's sulfuric acid falling from the sky. At least not yet.

My first year in New York was filled with a parallel fear: that some some stranger would try to sneak under my umbrella to keep dry. Really. The treatment was a succession of smaller and smaller umbrellas, but thankfully I cured myself of this phobia or I'd be sloshing around the city in a poncho trying to keep midgets - well, kids I guess - from scampering under the plastic. This is why I can no longer go to Disney World and deal with the daily 2 pm monsoon.

People assert themselves in strange ways, and I have to ask, "Why bother?" You're walking past the Whole Foods market and there's some dude in a hemp Greenpeace shirt asking you to sign a petition. I'm a big supporter of our planet not turning into a boiling desert wasteland, but seriously, what's one signature, or ten, or ten-thousand signatures really going to accomplish — and I don't want to be the guy who has to tell these innocuous kids that no amount of petitions will keep the German riot police from beating up protesters armed with paper mache puppets. The Bush administration is going to do whatever it's going to do — there's three-hundred million people in America, minus the Twenty-Eight Percent, deluded fundies who are happily following Dubya into hell, leaves two-hundred sixteen million... even if the liberal idealists, bless their hearts, on the sidewalk with the clipboards and everything, collect two-hundred sixteen million signatures for whatever: anti=globalization, anti-strip mining, chocolate sauce reclassified as a food group, these college kids won't be changing anything. They ask for my signature, and I smile and say, "Sorry, no," because I don't want to encourage them.

That leads to this morning's news: angry Sopranos fans crashed the HBO website complaining about the series' deliriously unsatisfying ending. Why???!!! It's not like the bosses at HBO are going, "Hmm, turns out America didn't appreciate that little joke. How about we all take a mulligan and re-shoot the ending, just to please our neanderthal customers." Seriously, you're so pissed: go ahead and cancel your HBO. I dare you to go on Entourage withdrawl. You're angry now, but give it a week till that comfortable numbness sets in and everything will be okay.

You might have heard about the German man who tried to hitch a ride on the popemobile yesterday. The New York Times reports, "The 80-year-old pope did not seem to notice as his security guards quickly subdued the man, a 27-year-old German who appeared to hold briefly onto the rear of the white vehicle. The Rev. Federico Lombardi, the pope’s spokesman, said the man, wearing shorts, sunglasses and a baseball cap, was not armed." I'm not a theologist, and I'm not even a good Christian — but I try to be a moral person and, even though I'm skeptical of His divinity, I think Jesus Christ is a pretty damn good role model. So when something like this happens, it seems like a good idea to reflect and ask, "What would Jesus do?" And also, "Would Jesus have armed guards, and a spokesman?"

I know that the New Testament was written in a pre-9/11 mindset, but I don't recall the chapter and verse where one of the faithful tries to touch Jesus's robes and he goes all Akon on their leper ass. My recollection of the Bible is a little fuzzy here: The blind and crippled and just general assholes who wanted to trick up Jesus needed to go through Ticketmaster to get an audience with him, right? And Jesus lived in a giant house covered in gold stolen off Roman ruins, and he totally kept women out of his ministry. You know what else Jesus was really big on? Adhering to ridiculous centuries-old traditions that distanced people from their faith.

When you use the brain that God gave you, rather than ideological dogma, Jesus and Benedict seem more and more mutually exclusive — the latter's single-minded focus on the dissolution of his spiritual authority in the information age, and the former encouraging spiritual growth between individuals, society, and God. It doesn't surprise me when a certain Texan born-again demagogue doesn't get Jesus's message, but isn't Ratzinger a professor of theology? (According to Wikipedia, he was also a leftist in his younger, wilder, more Christ-like days.) Again, my Revelations is rusty, but I'm pretty sure one sign of the apocalypse is when I'm a closer adherent to Jesus than the pope is.

Pimp My Kitten

Of course your cat is special — to you. The way she jumps on your head while you're asleep, or how she's scratched her name into your leather sofa, or how you weaned her from the litterbox and now she hogs the toilet. But when it comes to showing off your cat, impressing the neighbors, shutting up your friends who insist that having a cat instead of a dog makes you totally gay... then your cat's not worth so much. She's insolent and apathetic, and if you die alone in your home, with no one around to open up her Whiskas, she'll only wait about twenty-four to forty-eight hours before eating your corpse. This only one of many reasons that dogs, who'll go hungry for about a week before postmortem predation, are superior to cats. Another reason is, of course, after a week, since the cat's already devoured you, the dog will eat the cat. Your whole apartment-slash-death chamber turns into a Looney Tunes cartoon, and it sucks that you're too dead to enjoy it.

But what if there were some way to prove to everybody, quantitatively, that your cat is awesome? Enter niche breeding outfit Lifestyle Pets, tapping into the market of crazy, but rich, old cat ladies out there. While there are plenty of adorable cats out there in dire need of adoption, you can buy an Ashera, a feline genetic freak and — it's a hypoallergenically-bred cat — abomination of God with a tiny twenty-two thousand dollar price tag. You might want to keep that price tag on the cat so everyone who meets it knows that it's worth more than their car.

According to the press release, "Lifestyle Pets, Inc. developed the Ashera by way of the proprietary blend of the exotic bloodlines of the African Serval and the Asian Leopard Cat," like it's a cup of coffee, "subsequently bred with a domestic cat." I know that's what breeders do, make new, better animals while evaporating the gene pool by inbreeding: "Ashera cats are highly intelligent, very affectionate and have great temperments," and to be honest, I don't trust any animal that would make a better boyfriend than I would, "...and unusually for cats, the Ashera takes well to being walked on a leash." So if you're into S&M, and you can't find a boyfriend, well have we got the substitute for you.

Obscenity Is Now Allowed On The Public Airwaves: Fuck, Yeah!

Good news for fans of artistic freedom and foul language: a federal appeals court struck down the F.C.C.'s prudish indecency rules, calling them "capricious and arbitrary." You'll recall that back in 2003, when a shattered America was still recovering from seeing Janet Jackson's bare breast for a fraction of a second, Bono used the f-word during the Golden Globes, on live television, calling U2's win "fucking brilliant." Alarms immediately went off blaring at the Family Research Center, where they alerted the president, the vice president, the Department of Defense, and Homeland Security, who finally contacted the F.C.C. to save us all from Bono's Irish potty mouth. "Fleeting expletives," is what they're called, although that's kind of a euphemism, like "improvised explosive devices," the main difference being that the government won't bother keeping people safe from the latter. (In case you're worried, our government really is working to keep our soldiers in Iraq safe from the f-word, thank God.)

The best part of the ruling, of course, is that it's brought out the expletives in everybody. Moral guardian Kevin Martin, the F.C.C. chair, put forth an ironically unbroadcastable statement — containing the unmentionable words at least ten times — reading, "I find it hard to believe that the [elitist gay-marrying tree-huggers in the] New York court would tell American families that 'shit' and 'fuck' are fine to say on broadcast television during the hours when children [who those liberal New York activist judges are obviously trying to turn promiscuous and gay] are most likely to be in the audience." The argument the government makes is that there are certain words so vile that they're unacceptable in any context, but...

...and I have to say we never had irony this delicious when Clinton was fucking Monica in the Oval Office...

...the court pointed out that the seven dirty words can't be all that obscene if our president says them on a live television feed, or if the vice president says them on the floor of the Senate on the very same freaking day the Senate passed the law that raised the indecency fines on broadcasters. Ha!

It took six years, and in the pantheon of ways Bush has screwed this country and its constitution, broadcast obscenity is relatively minor, but it just feels gooooood to have these guys' behavior finally come back to haunt them. We all knew it would happen sooner or later, but it was a distant future kind of thing: the sort of long-term that escapes the administration's peripheral vision. Twenty years from now, desertification will kill the Crawford ranch. Ten years from now, it'll be suicide bombers — Christian suicide bombers. America's economy falls behind when tech jobs are lost to students from other countries, whose children haven't been left behind. And of course, the Rapture, where Michael Moore and Al Gore will be playing polo in Heaven, and laughing at the loyal twenty-eight percent way, way down below.

Film Review: Across The Pond Edition

My plan yesterday was to see Hot Fuzz and Severance and write an all-British humour film review, but the movie times didn't work out for me, so I'm not going to be able to make quite as many wry observations about the differences between British and American comedy. Still, I'm glad I got the double feature that I did — I can't speak for Severance yet, although its reviews were generally less glowing than those of Hot Fuzz — I saw Once right after Hot Fuzz got out, and it was sublime. I seriously want Once singing through my head twenty-four hours a day, and I'd be a much happier person for it.

But Hot Fuzz first: It's not bad. It's pretty funny, and I laughed a good bit through it. But the creepy old guy sitting near me who coughed up his soda in the hair of the girls in the row in front of him, and who laughed his ass off during the trailer for Balls of Fury — I can see the reviews right now: Christopher Walken gives his best performance aimed at eleven-year-olds since Kangaroo Jack — he thought it was fucking hilarious. I'll grant him that Hot Fuzz isn't as, uh, subtle as your typical British comedy.

It's not as incisive a satire as the Shaun of the Dead, the previous collaboration of writer/director Edgar Wright, writer/star Simon Pegg, and awesomely laconic pile-of-blubber Nick Shore... or maybe it just doesn't translate from British to American so well. The zombie sub-genre, especially the George Romero take on it that Wright, Pegg, et al spoof, is in itself a commentary on commercialism, materialism, and other mindless patterns society falls into and individuals are too braindead to pull themselves out of. The zombies just need to be there, lumbering around in large enough numbers, to say all they have to say — Pegg's walk around London in the opening sequence of Shaun of the Dead tells us all we need to know about the non-zombies. The action genre, the kind of crap they show on TBS on the weekends, is more inane in its application. It's just a big, dumb kid talking shit about how awesome he is, Michael Bay looking for attention and believing (correctly) that if he makes an explosion big enough and films it from the right angle, you'll forget what a vacuous dumbass he is.

So the opening scene of Hot Fuzz — you've seen it in the previews — where Pegg's well-decorated police officer character is castigated (by woefully underused Martin Freeman, Steve Coogan, and Bill Nighy) for being too good at his job, that looked like there was some satirical possibility there. I don't know too much about British police, other than that they don't carry guns and wear ridiculous hats, but we've had at least one case in America where a prospective police officer was rejected from the force (or the "squad") for being too smart. Thing is, Hot Fuzz is too schizophrenic to really run anywhere with that idea... although Martin Lawrence has more or less demonstrated that "police are incompetent" conceit really doesn't travel well in the first place. The first half of Hot Fuzz targets the quiet hamlet of Sanford — I think it's supposed to be the British countryside version of Marc Cherry's Fairview: snootier, (much) older, and possibly whatever the English version of redneck is. I'm not sure if Sanford is supposed to parody a real sub-culture, like Fairview supposedly does, or if its self-parody of idealized British countryside living. When the town's Neighborhood Watch Alliance has a meeting and says that their biggest crime issue is the guy dressed like a living statue by the town fountain, I'm sure that's funny but I'm kind of puzzled as to why.

The second half of the movie is the action half, and it's much better done than the Bruckheimer crap it parodies. The characters may be deadly serious, but the people making the movie are, for once, aware of how preposterous their material is. I can't help but feel they're pandering a little bit though. Again, you've seen the preview where the town priest pulls two guns on our heroes. There's nothing inherently funny in that — it's even less funny within the context of the whole scene — but my audience, which consisted of me, the guy who laughed at Balls of Fury, the girls he coughed his soda up on, and two kids making out, thought that was a great moment. I could count at least ten better ones. In fact, I'll give Hot Fuzz more credit as an action movie — and a well-crafted one — than a comedy. I guess that Pegg and Frost are such good comedic actors that it's tough for them to top their previous work; Michael Bay is such a hack that just about anything spoofing his style automatically transcends its source material.

---

I had reservations about spending my time on Once, because its an Irish musical drama about a street musician and a Czech emigré falling in... well, uh, here's the problem with the American romantic comedy. In addition to resuscitating the careers of some of our most annoying actors (I'm talking to you, Ashton), it's also killed off the beauty of true love, keeping it alive only in a trite vegetative state. To say that Once is about these two characters falling in love over their music makes it sound much cheesier than it is. Almost instantly, you're watching two people who you really like trying to find a fleeting happiness and hoping they can carry maybe a little piece of it with them once it passes.

I almost feel like not telling you what you're in for if you check out Once. It just reads so badly. It's a musical. It's shot in digital, handheld, and usually in pretty poor light. It's totally low-key. The only conflict to speak of in the movie is, "Will he let her drive his motorcycle?" The climax of the movie is these guys recording a song. And it's not like, will they record or won't they record, or will the record be good, will he get a record deal? That crap is for lesser movies, movies that need artifice to get you involved with the characters. Once strips out everything unnecessary — the glitter, the dance numbers, the melodrama, the orchestrations — and just lets these characters grow in front of your eyes like flowers.

I'm not doing Once justice here, or maybe I'm just spewing acclaim everywhere in my first-ever case of logorrhea. Once isn't merely good filmmaking: it does practically nothing yet elicits something in you, or in me, and it overcame my misanthropy and found something human, empathizing and connecting with these people. It's art, and as it left its protagonists, the guy and girl, a little better for having known each other, it also left me a little better for having known them.

Playboy: The Hot Former Justice Department White House Liaison Issue!

Our friends at the House Judiciary Committee held what had to be the steamiest, sexiest Congressional hearing since Valerie Plame gave Georgia Representative Lynn Westmoreland a boner during an Oversight Committee hearing. "Dear Penthouse, I never thought this would happen to me, but this afternoon my darkest high-level Bush administration official fantasy totally came true! I was minding my own business, watching C-SPAN when this hot, innocent, 33-year-old blonde lawyer came on to give some testimony, if you know what I mean. Sweet! So there was Monica Goodling, sweating behind that bendy microphone, getting asked all these questions — uncomfortable questions — by one tie-wearing, square-jawed, chin-dimpled Ohio Republican Jim Jordan and I was getting so horny! That's when the high school cheerleading squad dropped by... and we discussed the overturned conviction of Georgia Thompson."

The current theory, and there has to be some truth to it, is that Goodling wasn't hired for her extensively sparse credentials so much as for her affliation to Pat Robertson's Regent University law school. Because if there's one thing Jesus was a fan of, it's lawyers. And defense contractors. I'm sure if she went to college at Sodom Tech and law school at Gomorrah A&M, she'd be paying off her student loans as a drug rep, sleeping with doctors for commissions instead of fucking around with the Justice Department. But I have to believe that her qualifications for chief legal counsel to Gonzales and senior Justice Department White House liaison aren't just that she's a Christian fundamentalist; she got the job because she's a hot Christian fundamentalist. Sitting around the conference room, you've got that troll Alberto Gonzales, M. C. Rove, Kyle Sampson looking like a Karl Rove bobblehead doll, Paul McNulty, Harriet Miers, and they obviously wanted someone at the table you could look at for more than five seconds without your eyes melting.

Politicians, especially puritanical, sexually-dysfunctional right-wing politicians, are pervy like that. Gonzales was "comforting" Goodling during a "difficult period" in her life, our abstinence-promoting AIDS ambassador slept around with D.C. hookers, and Wolfie diplomatically negotiating peace in his own bedroom by giving his girlfriend (who always seems to appear in news reports as his "companion," whatever that means) a six-figure salary at the State Department. I'd totally not be shocked to learn that Rumsfeld used to be gay for Doug Feith. Really, it would explain so much. Love makes people do crazy things, like invading Troy. Or Iraq.

Bad Idea in Tennessee: An Update

"Fajita," who has thirteen blogs but still magically managed to find time to not only read but also comment (much appreciated) on mine, said I should follow up on the fake-gunman story out of Tennessee I posted about last week. The prank brought up two separate issues: The laughable one, how can you be a grown-up in America and believe you could pull this politically incorrect shit — with kids — and the entire community would just be cool with it. There are school districts that won't teach evolution because it's too controversial, but turning a retreat into a real-life Camp Crystal Lake is going to go over smoothly? (Also, Camp Crystal Lake is maybe one of those names, like Hitler Industries, Inc., that you might not want to give your business, negative associations and all. I bet this "outdoor education center" down in Florida was disappointed when they found out "campcrystallake.com" was taken.)

There was also the serious issue that rubbed me the wrong way: the teachers pulling off this prank by abusing their students' trust. As an educator, it's your job, for example, to remind the kids that tragedies like the Virginia Tech shooting are extraordinarily rare (at least in America). If there were a crazy gunman, the adults around would take responsibility instead of just telling the kids to duck and cover and gleefully watching them cry.

That being said, I found a follow-up article, and Fajita is right. The laughable point still stands, and the Thinking part of me has responded, "Good, the teacher and assistant principal are suspended without pay for the rest of the year and world makes sense." But there are mitigating factors, the main one being that they told the kids that there'd be some sort of prank during the retreat, so the whole trust-abusing thing pretty much goes out the window. Just don't make a career out of playing Ashton Kutcher, guys.

The ABC News follow-up article contradicts the Associated Press article I originally found. ABC News implies that the students weren't told there was a gunman on the loose; instead, they were told "there were people inside the state park shooting guns." Big difference. I'd be surprised if there weren't people shooting guns in a Tennessee state park. Yeah, it's an easy joke, but I guarantee you that as you're reading this, there's someone in that park hunting ducks or deer or something. Also, the ABC News article says that the group discussion the students had — the topic was "what to do if there's a gunman on the loose" — happened before the prank. (Editor's note: that's not explicit in the ABC News article, so I might have culled that from one of the less informative articles I found on the subject, or I could just be totally making that up.) Assuming it's true, though, if none of the students found the timing a little suspicious, well, joke's on them.

As our president once told the people of Tennessee, "Fool me once, shame on... shame on you. Fool me, you can't get fooled again." See, lesson learned.

Silent Single Mingle

The New Jersey Young Professionals held their "Silent Single Mingle" last night. The rules were cell phones off, keep whispering to a minimum, and passing notes is strongly encouraged. I'd been looking forward to this one for a while, since most of my NJYP events tend to be pretty silent anyway, the silent single mingle seemed tailor-made for me. And let me just tell you, it was freaking awesome! The first half-hour or forty-five minutes, especially...

I got there right at the beginning, cause I tend to do better at these social things when no one's around. People — guys — trickled in, and what happened couldn't have gone better if it was planned. Each of us walks in, takes a pad and pen from the table in the middle of the room, gets a drink (we scribble down our orders for the bartender), and takes it to a seat around the perimeter. And we sit there. Perfectly evenly spaced out, each by ourselves and no one moves for at least fifteen minutes. It's super-awkward, but I can't help from giggling: for once, the other party people are doing the same thing I am!

The good times didn't last. Girls showed up eventually, and twenty-something guys in the room coalesced around the six girls, and it wasn't silent anymore. Low point of the night: some bland douchebag Mike takes a break from chatting up a girl, who clearly has lousy taste, and turns to me, "Having fun?"

"Sure," I said with uncommon enthusiasm, the joy of the earlier sitting around like a lump not completely worn off yet.

"Hey, you're not supposed to speak," Mike chastens me.

Oh God, Mike, that was fucking hilarious! I bet you spent all night thinking that shit up! I left after that.

Mom told me about when she was in fifth grade, going to school in Newark. There was this boy who liked her, Charles Unger-something... I was too distracted by the idea that someone actually like-liked my insufferable Mom to pick up on the name. But Mom didn't like him, because he was a year older and he smoked. Mom's not exactly good at math, so I had to make sure she got the timeline correct here: Charles Ungersomething smoked — cigarettes — in the sixth grade. What, was he drinking coffee as an infant?

So I want all the anti-smoking nutballs out there to shut the hell up, cause when was the last time you saw an eleven-year-old smoking? The fifties, that's when.

In Today's "Bad Idea News"

CNN reports from Murfreesboro, Tennessee, "Teachers stage fake gunman attack on sixth graders." That's one of those awesome headlines that simultaneously tells you everything you need to know and leaves a million questions. I'll answer the most pressing one: it was supposed to be a "learning experience," like on one of those corporate retreats, where they make you fall backwards into the arms of someone else or do the zip line, except this was children "begging for their lives, because they thought there was someone with a gun after them," in the context of psycho mass-murderers saturating the media. Assistant Principal Don Bartch led the trip and tried to justify it afterwards, in that cautious manner public servants develop when they're surrounded by outrage. He comes off hilariously stoic, though: "We got together and discussed what we would have done in a real situation," he said, ignoring the fact that you can discuss that without the live simulation.

I'm surprised at how much effort these teachers put into frightening the kids.

During the last night of the trip, staff members convinced the 69 students that there was a gunman on the loose. They were told to lie on the floor or hide underneath tables and stay quiet. A teacher, disguised in a hooded sweat shirt, even pulled on a locked door.

After the lights went out, about 20 kids started to cry, 11-year-old Shay Naylor said.

I had teachers who wouldn't even bother to mimeograph their dittos legibly. Admittedly, this teaching strategy could potentially solve a lot of classroom behavior projects — "If I catch you passing notes one more time, I swear I'm gonna call in Johnny The Ax-Wielding Psychopath, and he'll give you so much detention...."

The parents, of course, overreact, but — unlike their poor kids — for all the wrong reasons. It's politically incorrect to make the kids think there's a gunman on the loose right after the Virginia Tech massacre, which is bullshit. I read the article the first time and I thought it actually sounded like a kind of cool way to play make-believe, like people who take vacations at spy school or something. Granted, you're kind of forced into this little mind-fuck here, but it's honestly no different than going camping late at night, telling ghost stories and holding the flashlight right under your chin, right?

You're scared cause you don't know what's out there. But you're also scared cause you're on your own... and so there really is something to learn from this whole fear experience, but it's not what do we do in the incredibly small chance we're being hunted down. I would feel betrayed, the lesson being not to trust the lying, manipulating adults around you — bet they're all back in the teachers' lounge having a good laugh about that one. And in sixth grade, too! Shouldn't you at least be allowed to hit puberty before turning all jaded towards the authorities?

Next Time, I'm Switching to Linux

My goddamn computer is sick again, for the third time in three months. The computer isn't finding the hard drive, and I screamed, "It's inside of you, you piece of crap! Next to your video card!" But that didn't help. Go figure. So now I'm peeved, like totally despondent, trying to remind myself of those poor Honduran children and how they're still using Amigas down there; but, away from my internet, Word, and games, I have little sympathy. I took my computer down to Tekserve where the prognosis looks bleak — their diagnostic software won't even start the machine — and this was when I, uh, thought it might be a good idea to purchase the extended warranty, while it's still available.

But my guess is that this whole broken computer thing is a scam Apple perpetrates: I have two major tech support issues right before time runs out on the warranty, and now that I have two more years of protection, I'm sure nothing will go wrong again... until 2009. The day the extended warranty expires, I swear.

So in addition to my computer frying itself, my iPod is also on its death bed, and the lack of options in the computer industry is incredibly frustrating. I can either replace the iPod with another Apple product that I'll have very little faith in. I can go for the Microsoft Zune, as if I've never had any crazy blue screen of death issues with any of Microsoft's products. Or I could go for something significantly less cool. Creative Zen player, anyone?

There's this guy at work who's trying to get me investing in the stock market, so I picked up a book and started looking through it, and... how is this even legal?! Just on the surface, it sounds like the biggest scam of all time. You buy stock, which means you buy part-ownership in a company, but you don't actually see any of the money that the company makes. As a matter of fact, the company can be losing money while the stock price rises; the stock's value is totally a function of how much the millions of greedy, fearful idiots in the market think the stock should be worth. It has absolutely no direct relation to anything concrete, and people can lose money off of well-run companies and can make their fortunes off of companies that don't make a dime of revenue. I wish I had more readers — like, lots more — and then I'd totally put bizarre financial pronouncements in my blog, just to screw with people. Mayonnaise is hot! Put all your money in mayonnaise! Then the next day: Sell your mayonnaise and put the money into the kitten industry!

What I don't understand is that since the value of these stocks isn't tied to anything, other than how much someone else is willing to pay for them, what stops me from just going around selling random worthless junk? Like, I'd try to sell you my dead skin flakes for fifty bucks. You'd be all, why would I spend fifty dollars on your dead skin flakes, and I'd say well, you'd try to sell them to someone else for sixty dollars. Ten dollar profit. But you'd go, who'd want to buy your dead skin flakes for sixty dollars? And I'd answer, someone who's going to try and sell them for seventy. This is essentially the stock market, except you do it wearing a suit and tie, and for a lot more than fifty bucks.

What The Hell Is Wrong With England?

They have a queen, for Christ's sake, and they treat her like freaking royalty. It's the twenty-first century. We've had an Enlightenment, invented democracy and liberalism: get with the program, England!

And get with the program America, while we're at it with the program-getting. Our President held a white-tie banquet for the queen and her totally emasculated prince husband, and seven-thousand of their closest friends. The White House spent the weekend getting ready, spending your tax dollars on floral arrangements, touching-up paint jobs, and gold-engraved invitations. It would be a obscene waste of money even if this weren't a president who hasn't bothered to attend a single funeral for a soldier killed in Iraq. I know, I know: our soldiers didn't have the good fortune to be born into one of history's most prestigious inbred families. Screw them. Well, I guess that's what the Bush administration's doing.

For some reason, whenever the British come and visit, Americans have to turn into the same foppish dandies our forefathers fought a revolution to get the hell away from. Have you seen Entertainment Tonight's coverage of David Beckham's move to Los Angeles? Or that Katie + Peter show on the E! network? Who the hell are Katie and Peter, why should I care, and what are they saying? You're from England; speak English, dammit! The queen's got to be the worst though, and Bush's usual obsequious nature in the presence of his political betters — Dick Cheney, queen of England, American Legion — is just sickening.

Here's the protocol: The queen shall be addressed as "Your Majesty." One does not shake the queen's hand unless she offers her hand first. After the queen is done eating, everybody is done eating. Um, has it occurred to anybody that maybe the other guests aren't finished? God, how I'd love to be the one greeting the queen here in America: "Welcome to America, we don't have royalty here. You can carry your own bags." The protocol may be fine when our head of state visits England's backwards aristocracy, but when you come over here, you follow our customs.

In other news, Paris Hilton got her ass arrested because she thought that, being Paris Hilton and all, it was cool for her to drive with a suspended license. You know, because she's more important than the rest of us. Her family actually got mad at the judge for sentencing her (instead of at the celebutard who drove drunk in the first place, then got and violated her probation), and Hilton apologists took time off from swooning over the queen to complain that forty-five days in rich white person Beverly Hills jail was too harsh. I see absolutely no connection between the two attitudes.

In Today's Ape News...

We have a headline from the Associated Press that reads Activists want chimp declared a 'person'. Animal rights advocates in Austria are petitioning a court to have Hiasl the Chimp legally declared a person — although not for the "animal rights' activists are nutballs" reason that you think. The sanctuary Hiasl calls home went bankrupt and is shutting down, and Hiasl's homo sapiens friends want to collect donations so he's not out on the street, dancing for food. Trouble is, under Austrian law, only humans can collect personal donations; hence the court case. I guess I'm the only one who thinks it might make more sense to change the law than to grant Hiasl human rights.

The story made me pine for the old days of Monkeynews, which was a regular feature on Ricky Gervais's former radio show. The show's star was this bald round-headed Manc bloke Karl Pilkington who had a gift for whatever the opposite of critical thinking is, and he reported on, among other things, the latest monkey news. Calling it "news" was a little misleading, since the Monkeynews wasn't timely or topical, and was pretty much always untrue. (Although there's this outfit here called "Fox News," whose stories are also made up — new study at James Dobson University reveals links between supporting Barack Obama and liver cancer — but they manage to hold on to their "news" moniker.) Typical example: There was this barber shop, right. And they were looking for somebody to do haircuts, but they couldn't find anyone. So one day, this monkey walks in, and the boss is like, "Well, hand him a pair of scissors, let's see what he can do."

And the story goes on from there, rambling through the inter-species behind-the-scenes politics at this haircutters. (The monkey could do haircuts but they wouldn't let it work the till.) Pilkington's ingenuous sincerity sells the whole bit — he found it online, after all.

I guess that's the monkeys' bad fortunes, sharing 98.5 percent of our DNA.

Matt Lauer was doing his annual "Where in the World is Matt Lauer?" travelogue this week, instead of reporting on actual news. On Wednesday, Matt was in Bhutan, a country that you probably first heard about on Wednesday, and will never hear about again. My guess is that Today's producers chose Bhutan because it's a nation transitioning to democracy — peacefully — under the auspices of its royal family, and the Bhutanese recently held mock elections for practice. The Yellow Party won and the Red Party was the runner-up; the Blue Party came in third, and just like in America, the Green Party came in last. Goddamn Nader!

After visiting Italy last year, I've really wanted to do a lot more traveling. Like everywhere: I bookmarked the Lonely Planet website and everything. Bhutan isn't exactly listed in Tourism for Dummies; the country only issues six thousand tourist visas every year, is pretty unfamiliar with comforts of modern life like electricity and roads, and is physically challenging to get into in the first place. But that's part of its appeal over, say, Disney World. It was early in the morning, I had to go to work, and I was grumpy when out of nowhere, I asked Mom, "How come Matt Lauer gets to go to Bhutan and I don't?"

"Because Matt Lauer has a good job and you don't. Once you get a good job, you can go to Bhutan, too." Which is bullshit: when you have a "good" job, they expect you to be at the job, and not trekking the Himalayas in Thimpu. I decided to call Mom on it.

"You have a good job. How come you don't get to go to Bhutan?... Or anywhere else for that matter." That shut her up for a little while, until Matt Lauer starting talking Bhutanese politics again.

Bhutan is moving towards democracy because the Dragon King Jigme Singye Wangchuk is abdicating his post and installing his son, the Crown Prince Jigme Khesar Nagyal Wangchuck as the head of state. Matt pointed out that Jigme Jr. is the world's youngest head of state; he's twenty-six, less than a year older than I am. "Look at this," Mom said, still with that early-morning half-pissed facetiousness, "He's twenty-six and he's the king of a whole country. What have you accomplished?"

That shut me up. It's probably not as depressing as being in your fifties and walking into the office one day to discover that you now report to a twenty-six-year-old hot shot just out of Harvard Business School, but still. Ouch. I felt a little more cataplectic than usual. I'd make a good king of Bhutan — at least for someone who knows zero about Bhutan; I'm a fast learner — but it looks like that position is already taken.

Eloquent Quotes from Our President

Speaking of faux superheroes, our president, The Decider, has christened himself Commander Guy. At least that sounds a bit more innocuous than The Decider, who I believe was a rejected character from the Legion of Super Villains. ("What's your superpower?" "Eeny, meeny, miney, moe.")

Look, I know the man's no Cicero here, and while he's made more than enough verbal gaffes to support a thriving page-a-day calendar industry, I'm not going to fault him for sounding like he's twelve. I'm sure many of his constituents talk like they're nine. What's worrisome is that Bush actually wants recognition as the guy in charge of our troops in Iraq. Wasn't that supposed to be the responsibility of the war czar, anyway?

I liked the timetable idea, although I think maybe it's misdirected. The terrorists aren't going to just wait for us to pack up and leave, like the right-wing mouthpieces predict; in fact, the terrorists don't seem to be waiting at all. Success for our troops isn't... uh, whatever the hell Commander Guy says it is this week — usually something having to do with fighting al-Qaeda in Iraq so we don't have to fight them here, even though they weren't even in Iraq until we showed up. It has to be looked at on a more micro level, at least for now. How about we try to get the Iraqis to go a week without blowing up all that infrastructure we're apparently building and the media isn't reporting on? Let's shoot for a decrease in the violence.

Which is why I don't think the troops can leave: someone has to keep the mess we made from completely imploding, and it doesn't look like any other country is volunteering. I wonder why. But something has to change since our troops are easily eroding what little stability there was in the country — you know, in the five minutes between when Saddam was deposed and when the Iraqis went mad looting his palaces. Here's my idea: we've spent five hundred billion dollars already on this war. There are twenty-seven million Iraqis. (Love the favicon for the CIA's website, too. Screams "professionalism.") That's about $18,500 per Iraqi. So what would've happened if we just gave each Iraqi $18,500 in cash, told them to go buy a flat-screen TV or a hot tub or something, just leave each other the hell alone? They'd all be too busy partying to blow up marketplaces and stuff. Peace!

People are going apeshit for Spider-Man. Thing is, I can't think about Spider-Man without falling head-first into some gaping logical holes. Okay, he's bitten by this irradiated spider, and how does that make him half-arachnid? I've never lived on a farm, or been in 4-H, but I'm pretty sure you don't get a mule when the horse eats the donkey. There needs to be some fucking going on, and the offspring gets the magical powers, or the nearsightedness, exostosis, and sluggish metabolism, if your sire and dam are my parents. I can see a radioactive spider bite giving you cancer, maybe. Or this. (Warning: eeewwwwww.)

I don't know how other people aren't bothered by this. Are the special effects that great that you can watch the movie and not be like, "But... spider silk comes out of their butts. Why would Spider-Man's webs come out of his hands? And isn't that convenient, how the unstable radio-isotope he's infected with makes the webs come out of his fingers, and not, say, his ears?" Anyway, I went to this Spider-Man page on Wikipedia, and what starts out ridiculous just becomes insulting. Here's a partial list of Spider-Man's superpowers: he can heal himself rapidly, has enhanced resistance to drugs, has enhanced vision, has superhuman strength, clairvoyance, and — for some reason — is immune to vampirism. Yes, but can he also keep aphids from destroying crop yields? Apparently the one beneficial thing spiders provide to the ecosystem, and Spider-Man can't do it. Pathetic.

Hanami

Today was a sunny afternoon, around sixty degrees, perfect to spend at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden — unless God hates you and cursed you with allergies. I'm not a big fan of plants, but there are two good reasons to check out the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens when the weather's right: the Japanese garden and the cherry-blossom season, which is in peak bloom right around now.

I'm a bit jealous, since every plant I touch turns to dust in a matter of days. We've got something that kind of resembles a garden at our house, tulips and lilies, but its life cycle is so depressing I wish it weren't even there. Fifty-one weeks of the year, they're just these ugly brown leafy sprout things. One day in April, they bloom and they're gorgeous, and for the next six days, they pretty much fall apart, leaf by dying leaf. I don't know what I'm doing wrong: they get food and water and only occasionally run over by my car.

We've also got a bunch of hideous, non-flowering plants in front of our house and I'm surreptitiously trying to kill them, with no success at all. My dad actually pays to have these monstrosities put into the ground, and I'm supposed to water them. (Dad, plants have survived hundreds of millions of years without me watering them. We're disrupting their natural evolution! This is just playing God! Uh... plant God.) I don't get the point of non-flowering shrubbery — aside from their role in the carbon cycle and keeping life on the planet functioning, I mean. They're just big blobs of fauna, without any structure like a bonsai tree, shape like an evergreen, or color like flowers. And they attract bees, but thankfully not so many lately.

Seriously, pests though they are, the disappearing bees — colony collapse disorder — is a big damn problem. No bees means no pollination, which means no plants, which means no animals that eat the plants, which means no food for us. On that happy note, here's the obligatory pretty pictures.


Ironically, the cherry blossom garden and the Zen garden are both full of New York City's perennial Japanese tourist population. Which confounds me. When I get the time and money to visit Tokyo, it's not like I'm gonna be spending my vacation at Hyper-Convenience U.S. Mart.