Never Say It Can’t Get Any Worse.

This past week may well have been too depressing on a global level to produce a solid article, much less one that’s replete with the requisite amount of Swiftian satire and jokes about people’s naughty-bits that you, my loyal 20-25 readers, have come to expect from me. However, I’m going to take a stab at it anyway and therefore, without any further pomp and circumstance, here is the week in review:

On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court slashed $2.9 billion in damages against the Exxon Mobil Corporation for that little tanker spill the Exxon Valdez had in 1989. The oil giant now only has to pay $507 million in punitive damages to meet the amount of compensatory damages that they have already paid to “fix up” the 1,200 miles of Alaskan coastline they drenched in oil. Is the legalese getting to you a little bit? Let me put it this way: Before Wednesday’s decision, every one of the 32,000 individuals whose lives were directly and drastically affected by the spill would have received $75,000 in compensation from Exxon Mobil. With this new settlement everybody gets about $16,000 in compensation. Did I mention that the region’s fishing based economy is still irreparably damaged and that everyone in the area is fiscally fucked? God, don’t you love it when Big Oil wins. It’s just so heartwarming to see the little guy get knocked on his ass by the highest court in the land and a massive corporation at the same time. Oh, also on Wednesday, the Supreme Court ruled that giving the death penalty to child rapists was unconstitutional. When the Supreme Court vindicates child rapists and Exxon Mobil on the same day, that means it’s time to head over to Wal-Mart and grab another red, white, and blue magnetic ribbon for your Chevy Silverado. Ain’t this country the shit?

Then, on Friday, the Supreme Court ruled with a 5-to-4 majority that the right to bear arms is not a collective right, as has been the prevailing wisdom for the past seventy years, but is an individual right. This of course makes perfect sense when you hear the majority’s explanation, written by Justice Antonin Scalia that says, “The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.” This is only logical coming from Scalia, a man who claims to be an Originalist who views the constitution as a document that should be interpreted as if it were being read by reasonable persons alive at the time of its inception. Clearly, a reasonable man in 1787 would read the Second Amendment (which for those of you with hazy memory of high school civics and U.S. government, states that, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed,” ), ponder it over for a moment, and reasonably conclude that it meant that all citizens had the right to a .357 Magnum, and that the whole bit about militias didn’t much matter.

Finally, today marked the end of the presidential run-off election in Zimbabwe, where the incumbent Robert Mugabe won a landslide victory with 85% of the vote and has been sworn in to begin his sixth five-year term. Of course, the outcome may have been slightly affected by the somewhat unorthodox campaigning strategies of Mugabe’s party officials against Morgan Tsvangirai of the Movement for Democratic Change. Mugabe only drew 43% of the vote to Tsvangirai’s 48% in the first election, so, the question that gets raised is, “how did Mugabe gain 42% of the electorate in under four months?” Well, this picture from the front page of this Thursday’s New York Times says it all:

That is an 11-month old boy whose legs were broken by members of Mugabe’s ruling ZANU-PF party to force citizens into voting for him in the run-off election. If you didn’t know, Tsvangirai officially dropped out of the race last week to prevent the killing and abuse of his supporters and fellow countrymen. He watched the “election” take place from the safety of the Dutch Embassy in Harare.

And, that was a brief week-in-review from yours truly. It might seem a tad grim, but don’t worry. With any luck, next week we’ll be authorizing some serious offshore drilling that not only won’t have an effect on the price of crude oil, but will destroy the environment as well.
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Editor’s Note, July 10th, 2008: It turns out, according to the corrections department at the New York Times, that the photograph seen above and on the front page of their June 26 publication wasn’t entirely factual. Yes, the 11-month year old Zimbabwean had casts on his feet and, yes, his mother and he were targeted by Mugabe’s ruling party because her husband was a supporter for the opposition party of Morgan Tsvangirai. However, the mother did keep mum about the fact that her child was wearing the leg casts before the incident with Mugabe supporters due to the fact that the child has club feet. The New York Times discovered this when they took the child to Harare to get medical attention and found that he had no bone fractures. The mother hid the information from reporters in an effort to get help in curing her son’s ailment, but she still maintains, bolstered by some shaky testimony by people near the attack, that her child was harmed by youths supporting Mugabe.

George Carlin: It’s About Time you Septuagenarian Motherfucker

“Fuck you, you motherfucking cunt, I hope your funeral consists of a steady stream of crusty old syphilitic cock-suckers shitting and pissing in your open casket, and then slapping your bloodless face with their floppy pancake tits.”

There you are: the perfect obituary for George Carlin, which not only uses all of his seven words that you can never say on television (even though this is, indeed, print), but does so in a joyously obscene and scatological fashion. But, quite honestly, I say good riddance you crazy old coot. You might have been funny once (god knows when, but it was certainly before I was born), but for the past two decades or so you’ve been nothing but a geriatric waste of TV space, taking up countless hours in HBO’s programming schedule that could have been much better served with re-runs of The Chronicles of Riddick and documentaries about the 1980 U.S. Men’s Olympic Hockey Team. Oh Lord, and the books…the pages and pages of material that you just had to put into book form even though we’d already heard about 90% of it in your stand-up special that aired last week. Do you have any idea how many trees you butchered, you hypocritical hippie-dippie bastard? You were responsible for more literary abominations than the illegitimate love child of Nora Roberts and Dean Koontz.

I would also like to extend a giant fuck you for subjecting me to what is bound to be at least a month solid of inane fucking retrospectives about how revolutionary a comedian you were and how many boundaries you broke down. I’ll have to watch countless hours of obligatorily tearful remembrances from whatever-the-fuck-number wife you were on to when you went six feet under and from the kids that you no doubt neglected, but who forgave you when they realized you’d be dead in a couple of months and they’d get all of your cash. Not to mention the other comedians talking about you like you were Sojourner Truth or something when all they’re really thinking is, “Thank God that cunt-rag is finally dead. If I had to see him bitch about backwards baseball caps one more time I would have killed him myself.”

I think what it comes down to is that you were just a lazy son of a bitch who couldn’t wait to kick the bucket. And yes George, I realize that when you die you don’t literally kick a bucket. You probably had an entire routine about that shit? “What fucking bucket? I’ve never seen any fucking bucket. Are you born with this bucket or do you have to buy one when you get old and start shopping for caskets. And do you actually kick this bucket while you’re dying or just before you go to meet your maker? And who decided that we have a maker in the first place…” It’s a fucking metaphor you over-analytical shit-brick! Ha ha! The English language is so fucking quirky. We get it.

Shit. The truth of the matter is that you got it. I can’t make this obituary entirely farcical, because you were too fucking important. When the FCC has a fucking law drawn up in response to a stand-up bit you’ve done, it goes beyond comedy and into the realm of truly important social critique. Your spot on the comedic Mt. Rushmore is already being carved right next to Richard Pryor’s combustible head. You weren’t Gallagher, smashing melons with a fucking mallet to make us laugh. Your comedy made us laugh, but it did so not by pandering to the lowest common denominator, but by flipping society on its head and shaking it like a bottle of orange juice until all the pulp had been evenly distributed throughout the audience, everyone the better for the experience.

Now that I’ve completed the sappy portion of this obituary, I would like to finish by telling you to fuck off and by hoping beyond hope that God is a devout Catholic who will give Beelzebub the charge of performing rectal probes on you in hell while making you watch your performance in Jersey Girl for all eternity.

How Does This Man Keep On Making Movies?

It is time for us, the citizens of this grand and glorious nation, to take a stand. To take a stand against the oppression, degradation, economic loss, and irreparable psychological damage caused by a single man. A man, whose reign of terror now stretches almost a decade in length and, despite all rational indications, appears to be growing stronger. He titillates us with the possibility of something that at worst will be interesting and at best will be nigh perfect in its power to entertain and enthrall us. This demon spawn of hell of whom I speak is M. Night Shamalan. And he will wrench our souls from our bodies and take about $9.50 from our wallets. Unless, you have a student ID, in which case you’ll only lose your soul and about six bucks.

You may or may not have noticed that I spelled M. Night’s name incorrectly. I know that there is a y between the h and the a in his last name, but I refuse to spell his name correctly out of principle and encourage you to do the same. Hopefully, if enough of us butcher the phonetics of his surname, we can deflate his ego enough to make him reconsider making whatever shit-storm of a movie he’s writing at this very moment.

Now, I saw The Sixth Sense when it came out in 1999 and I will readily admit that it was thoroughly enjoyable thriller, in spite of the fact that it caused a 3 to 4 year epidemic of people making half-assed jokes involving the phrase, “I see…(insert word here)…people.” However, while the movie was good, I think that people drastically underestimate Haley Joel Osment’s off-the-charts creepiness in the movie’s success. You take that kid out of picture and replace him with any other little tyke (with the exception of Dakota Fanning who is Osment’s female creeper equivalent) and the movie would have been just above mediocrity. I just thank God that the kid never made it into any TV or commercial spots. Can you imagine a Life cereal ad with Haley Joel Osment? Oh, Mikey would like it all right, and then he’d gouge out his brother’s eyes with his cereal spoon.

After The Sixth Sense is where M. Night Shammalamma’s reign of terror truly begins. Since that film came out, the man has written and directed five movies, none of which could be qualified as good. Granted, there are some people who will claim that Unbreakable and Signs were solid, enjoyable films, but I think these people miss what has become one of the key features of a M. Night production: a terrible, trite, and downright stupid ending that ruins everything that came before it. Signs is a perfect example of this as M. Night builds up the suspense of whether or not the world is going to be destroyed by evil extraterrestrials only to bust out the amazing plot twist that the aliens are deathly allergic to water. Water! That’s the best this dumb motherfucker could come up with? The substance covering 2/3 of the fucking earth? Why the fuck would aliens invade a planet that is predominantly made of liquid that burns their skin off? No, no, I’ve got to stop this now because attempting to apply reason and logic to any of this man’s films only leads to frustration and aneurisms.

I went to see Signs, and I ended up going to see The Village as well, which illustrates the second major flaw in all of M. Night’s films: his total inability to write even palatable dialogue. The Village had a cast that included Joaquin Phoenix (two Oscar nominations), Adrien Brody (one Best Actor Oscar), William Hurt (one Best Actor Oscar), Sigourney Weaver (three Oscar nominations), and a bevy of other talented actors. However, in spite of this collection of thespian excellence, the script that M. night wrote for them was so bloody horrendous that I felt like I was watching a high school production of The Crucible. This man managed to flummox the abilities of some of Hollywood’s finest actors with his complete and utter literary handicap. No actor, no matter how talented, could possibly say lines like, “I love you… like the day is long!” or, “We’ll be safe, we have the magic rocks,” with a straight face. It is somewhat needless to say that the shit-tastic “twist ending “ to The Village was really of no consequence because the film was pure drek from the opening credits and you can’t ruin something that was never any good to begin with.

This leads me to this past Friday when I went to see his latest offering, The Happening. I had no expectations for this movie whatsoever and knew beforehand that seeing it would be an exercise in masochism, but I went anyway. Part of the reason I went was that my friend wanted to see it and agreed to pay for gas and parking, but the other part was a morbid curiosity as to how M. Night Shamalan could possibly find new ways to fuck up a good premise for a movie. The idea behind The Happening, that some chemical or force reverses our survival instinct, causing us to become intensely suicidal, is a good one. However, true to form, M. Night managed to screw it up with his horrendous dialogue and a gut-wrenchingly sappy, pandering message of eco-consciousness. The idea that plants can adapt and “fight back” against our destruction of the planet by releasing spores is just idiotic and it completely ruins an otherwise intriguing premise. And, contrary to what you may think, what I just wrote doesn’t deserve to be prefaced with a spoiler alert because there is nothing to spoil. You will be just as unsatisfied with The Happening whether you know his signature “plot twist” or not.

I feel a great deal of guilt for paying money to see The Happening because I believe it is morally irresponsible, especially in these times of economic downturn, recession, and increased unemployment rates, to support the gainful employment of M. Night Shahmaylan. Just because a man made one good movie does not give him license to make bomb after bomb after bomb. The man is not talented, he is not original, he writes about as well as first-year theater major, and he has some sort of terrible power over us. He manages to get movies green-lighted that should never be in production and he gets the general public to come out in droves to watch films that even Pauly Shore could rightfully call crap. This man is one of the two major cinematic conundrums that I cannot for the life of me wrap my head around (Tyler Perry being the other). All I know is that M. Night Shaminahalalan must be stopped before he makes a movie so truly horrific that gives legions of moviegoers post-traumatic-stress-disorder. Don’t think it couldn’t happen. Thirty-three people had to be committed after they saw Battlefield Earth and a further fifty-two theatergoers were hospitalized with 2nd-degree burns on their corneas after watching Glitter from start to finish. The next film M. Night Shyamallan makes, and there will be a next one, could do even more damage than that.

Gkl

Of Waffles and Wenches

“People are always like…‘You’re too pretty to be working at Waffle House’”

The above quotation, and all of the events surrounding it, represents the most concentrated stupidity that I have been privy to in quite some time. On Saturday night I went to a house party hosted by one of my friends in Mt. Washington. One of her housemates decided to invite some of her friends from Lebanon, OH, or some such place where having a full, working set of teeth is to be envied. I hate to come off as some sort of elitist urbanite who thinks anyone grew up in rural America is a ignorant fuckwit, but I kind of do feel that way, and the events of Saturday night, most specifically those perpetrated by the Waffle House Wench, back this up.

There were many people at this party whom I should give cursory notice too, most specifically a scruffy son of bitch who wouldn’t stop expounding his theory that it was the right course of action to beat up a cop if you were caught with weed on you, provided said copper was alone and without a camera (The fact that all cop cars have cameras on the dash or that cops are equipped with those guns what that shoot the bullets at you must have escaped him). However, I must focus most of my attention on this one tragically slutty woman. And I use the term woman loosely, as any sensible person with a vagina would be ashamed to be placed in the same category as this turbo-slut.

I honestly can’t remember her name, but that doesn’t really matter as I will be referring to her using a bevy of epithets for the entire article. She, along with her much nicer, less whorish, but no more intelligent friend Brittney, apparently double-dipped by working at Waffle House and Hooter’s. The ho-bag apparently also stripped, which really isn’t that much of a surprise as working at Hooter’s is the community college to stripping’s main campus. Over the course of merely an hour and a half I witnessed this woman engage in the following acts:

A) Bending over a dishwasher and shaking her scantily clad ass to “demonstrate” to another guy at the party how she exploits old men for cash
B) Flip-Flapping her (most likely) fake tits up and down while surrounded by people who had no interest in seeing that.
C) Uttering that mind-bending sentence: “People are always like…‘You’re too pretty to be working at Waffle House’”.
D) Proclaiming that women should have equal rights, but only if a sugar daddy will pay for everything she wants.
E) Complaining about how her sugar daddy wasn’t paying for everything she wants.

Now, maybe I’m just too sheltered, but I wasn’t aware that something this trashy could actually exist. It was astonishing how shallow, amoral, and downright foul this woman was. I can say, without guilt or shame, that this woman offers the world absolutely nothing. As a matter of fact, it would be a safe to say that she actually detracts from the quality of life on this planet. All she can provide us with is silicone, vacuity, and a feeling of improved self-worth because, well shit, at least we’re not her. Perhaps that’s her charge in this life. She is the keeper of the bottom of the barrel, a constant reminder that things could be worse, that our gene pool could be shallower. As paradoxical as this sounds, in her utter uselessness she has a use. So, if you’re ever feeling like your life has amounted to nothing and that you’re spiraling headlong into abject failure, just go to the Waffle House up by Lebanon and you’ll feel better. Just don’t eat any of the food. You know who’s been handling it and she’s probably got Herpes.

21 Can Salute

Right now, I’m at a stage in my life where it’ll be a good three or four decades before I begin religiously checking the obituaries for “death notices,” informing me that a good number of my friends have shuffled off their mortal coils. However, since the Internet at the Coffee Emporium is on the fritz and they have free copies of yesterday’s Cincinnati Enquirer lying underneath the airpots of coffee, I am willing to check the obituaries for writing fodder. I could have paid a $1.50 for today’s Enquirer, but, as I have stated many times, the Enquirer is a journalistic abomination whose only redeeming qualities consist of the daily crossword, the comics, and movie listings, which don’t justify doling out a dollar and a half. Plus, not to sound too callous, but dead folk are going to be just as bereft of life yesterday as they are today, if not more so.

Granted, I did not set out to write this article about the obituaries, but am doing so out of necessity. I thought I would be able to get some funny snippets from the “Your Hometown Enquirer” section, but, alas, all I found were little pieces on local academic achievement and Memorial Day parades. So I turned to the Obits and saw a headline that arrested my attention:

“Fredric J. Baur was designer of P&G’s Pringles container.”

My initial reaction of smug amusement quickly turned to one of mild depression. This man who spent 89 years on this earth will be remembered, if he is at all, as the guy who created a cardboard cylinder into which Proctor & Gamble could put potato chips. Then it dawned on me that this man had been deemed the most successful and prosperous person to die in the Greater Cincinnati area on that day, according to the Enquirer. Now, what’s more unsettling: The fact that inventing a potato chip container is seen as the crowning achievement to a man’s life, or that no one else had any accolade to match it?

All of these thoughts, to some degree or another, passed through my mind just as I was reading the obituary’s headline. When I actually got to the article itself I became bewildered and, ultimately, incensed:

“Dr. Fredric J. Baur was so proud of having designed the container for Pringles potato crisps that he asked his family to bury him in one.”

Those are the first words of this man’s obituary and, while they may seem laughable, are for me quite disturbing. A man desired to be buried in a Pringles can, a can you can find on the shelves of any Circle-K or IGA across the country. How deep was this man’s emotional attachment to a casing for a snack food that he wanted to rest for all eternity inside of it? Part of me hopes that this was simply senility kicking in and that his request was made with all the sound judgment of a six-year old, but something tells me he genuinely wanted to buried in a Pringles can. That leads to even more absurd questions like what type Pringles can he wanted to be kept in. Would he choose regular because that was the only one P&G sold when he first designed the can or would he go with his favorite flavor: “We have lovingly placed the deceased in this can of Sour Cream & Onion Pringles. They were the only flavor that…I’m sorry…that when he popped, the fun indeed did not stop.”

What you might not have caught in the opening of Fredric J. Bauer’s obituary is that he was a doctor. Not only was he a doctor, he received his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from Ohio State. I cannot think of a harder degree to get than a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry. Basic classes in O-Chem are what send med-school students into semester-long bouts of lunacy where they remember nothing save waking up three months later in their dormitory, weeping uncontrollably while clutching their report card amid a pile of laundry that reaches the ceiling. Shit, I’d bet even money that 95% of Congress isn’t smart enough to get a PH.D. in Organic Chemistry, and the Enquirer buried it in the seventh paragraph. Dr. Bauer also was an aviation physiologist in WWII, testing out the medical effects of flying on pilots. That information wasn’t given until paragraph eight. His work with the National Presbyterian Church didn’t make it until the very end of the article. Oh, but the fact that he developed a fucking freeze-dried ice cream for Proctor that didn’t even sell well was important information about this man’s life that we needed to know right away.

My internship this summer is with an advertising company and it is part and parcel of the reason why this man’s obituary is so tragic. I could just go on a rant telling the Cincinnati Enquirer and the woman who wrote the article to go play in traffic, but it would be giving short shrift to a larger problem endemic to our society. We are a grossly consumer culture that has spun out of control to the point that bright men and women start to believe that promoting a snack food or a dish soap is something to be proud of and, in some cases, proud enough to judge your entire life’s worth by it.

But I could just be flat-out wrong. I’ll probably never look at a can of Pringles without thinking of this man being buried in one, so he’s found a small way to live on. I just hope this isn’t a trend because I don’t want to be constantly thinking about dead folks when I’m at the grocery store.