Corduroy Pillows Make Headlines and Other Donkeyshit

For some reason, when I got home from work on Sunday, MSN.com by HP Desktop was up on the computer.

It's as stupid as other default homepages-- like Comcast or Yahoo!News-- filling our brains with all manner of insipidity that makes us wish we were semiretarded farm animals, content to stand around in the mud and mire waiting to get struck by lightning.

I don't know why MSN.com by HP Desktop was up-- I haven't used my Hotmail account in at least three years, and, when I want news, I usually just end up making it up myself. And, speaking of which, I thought it would be fun to take the 7 "headlines" up on the MSN.com by HP Desktop and make up the stories that go with them, without actually reading the "real articles," because that's how I roll, 'cuz.

Remember: headlines real, content not. That is how the game is played.

BRAIN DISORDER BEHIND PICKY EATING?

Scientists have decided that the word "neurological" is precisely four syllables too many for the average human brain to comprehend, and so, at a conference held recently in the Poconos, the American Society of Neurologists voted unanimously to rid the American lexicon of the terms "neurological," "neurology," "neurovascular," and "neuropenis."

"We really feel that this is in the best interests of the average American, who simply cannot be expected to formulate, spell, pronounce, or even live in a world where terms like 'neurological' are present," said Dr. Adam Steinberg, a brain doctor from Madison, Wisconsin.

A local Gumby, standing in the middle of a street with a rolled up handkerchief on his head was interviewed about this latest linguistic development, and he said, "My brain hurts."

GET AN EARLY START ON CYBER-MONDAY

Marketing experts and brain doctors alike agree that setting your alarm clock one hour earlier than the next guy on Monday, November the 29th, will give you a super-competitive edge when it comes to online shopping on so-called "Cyber-Monday."

"We believe that these chances increase triple-fold if you decide to wake up three hours early and hit up Amazon.com and Overstock," said Yosef Paralympics of the marketing firm Lexington Steele, Ltd. Paralympics also advised bypassing the traditional "morning dump" in favor of snagging those limited-time bargains.

U.K. HIT WITH MOST SNOW SINCE '93

Meteorologists all over the United Kingdom are baffled by the recent snowfall that has hit England and environs recently, although they are unsure of whether this is the most snow since 1993, 1893, 1793... or you get the idea.

"We know those feet, in ancient times, walked upon England's mountains green, in 1808, so it wasn't then," said BBC Meteorologist Whaddwick Elesmere Boffington, "but, other than that, we're pretty well buggered."

The 12 CYBER-SCAMS OF CHRISTMAS

1.) An email sent to you through Facebook claiming that Santa's not fat, he's really pregnant, and asking you to buy him a bunch of shit at "Babies R Us." You should know this is a scame because, like, what-- he couldn't just give the baby all the goddamn toys and cribs and shit in the universe, because he's Santa-- even with a vag?

2.) The chain letter begging for money because Rudolph has leprosy and his goddamn light-up nose fell off.

3.) Any FB friend request from someone named "Judas."

4.) An e-coupon from Best Buy offering flatscreen TVs on sale. Dude-- they're filled with heroin and they are programmed to only play old episodes of "Maude."

5.) Just kidding-- there are only five Christmas Cyber-Scams. That's, um, the other scam. Totally fuckin' with you, those cyber-scammers are.

10 MOST OVERLOOKED SCI-FI MOVIES

1.) Some Star Trek piece of shit that got overlooked or whatever

2.) Herbie Goes to Nebulon-5

3.) Blackula

4.) Assault on Precinct 13

5.) That one Harry Potter movie that nobody liked. What was it-- the second one? That blew.

6.) Alien Autopsy (Unrated Director's Cut-- some hawt alien pudding in that jaun...)

7.) Howard's End

8.) 9 1/2 Weeks

9.) Ender's Game (if it's not a movie yet, it should be, and it should be overlooked, too)

10.) The episode of "American Dad" where Roger dresses like a chick.

MOTORBIKE CHAMP DIES AFTER WIN

"He died doing what he loved," said dead motorbike champ's former best friend, Raging Asshole. Dead Motorbike Champ's recently impregnated former fiance, Suicidal Sally, could not be reached for comment, because she was busy dying doing what she loved: sticking her head in a gas oven.

BING: FIND THE PERFECT GIFT FOR HER

How 'bout some edible underwear, a vacuum cleaner, and a snake-finger punch in the throat-- chicks dig that shit! Happy Holidays from MSN.com by HP Desktop!

Sperm Donor + Vag Hag = Hollywood Gold

If you've turned on your television set (do they still call them "television sets" and, if so, do they still turn them on?) or gone to the cinema (I know they don't still call it that) recently, then you've most likely seen a TV show or a movie about at least one lazy, incompetent dumbshit, maybe two, hamhandedly having and/or raising a child, as a couple of rodeo clowns might do so after a month-long boozer.

Film:

Knocked Up
Juno
The Backup Plan
Expecting Mary

I'm sure I'm forgetting about some, or am ignorant of the existence of others. Please feel free to chime in, like a fucking doorbell, you ridiculous hottie, you.

Now, television's getting jealous, or getting smart, so they're coming out with "Raising Hope," featuring a hapless, white-trash dunderhead who wears opened plaid shirts and feeds his baby out of a rubber glove filled with milk.

Oh, men! How did we all make it into adulthood without mandated bike helmets?

Then, of course, there's all the "Didn't-Know-I-Was-Pregnant", "I'm-16-and-Pregnant", "My-Boo's-Pregnant", "I-Took-an-Extreme-Trembly-Shit-and-a-Motherfuckin-Baby-Fell-Out" choice television programs on MTV. Again, what's the common theme? Immature retards diddling around with same and the existence and future of a precious, precarious infant hangs in the balance.

We as a culture are, apparently, eating that shit up-- you know, like a pregnant chick. The question is, why? Why are we so fascinated by watching an ignorant bumpirate leaving a child asleep in a carseat outside a locked apartment door for twenty minutes? Is it shock value? Sure. Is it so we can nestle back into our couches and our choices and smugly report to all who care to listen, "Well, I would never do that!"

Of course not. And my mother would never forget to pick up my sister at school and my father would never run my foot over with the car.

Oh, wait.

I took a playwriting seminar in college, and it really was a seminal event (heh heh-- I used "seminar" and "seminal" in the same sentence, and, yes, I am still twelve) in my life as a writer. It was in this class where I learned about the importance of raising the stakes in comic and dramatic writing for the stage. Don't just make the main characters about to get divorced. Let them have a fourteen-year-old son who's a target masturbator with Aspergers and have Dad about to lose his job and let Mom pop Vicodin so much she calls them her "Little Vickies." Mix in pedophile Uncle Thad who has a beer gut, eczema, wears Bermuda shorts with the fly down all the time-- oh, and the house as about to be foreclosed on by the bank and NOW you've got yourself a show.

The stakes, motherfuckers, hath been raised.

So, maybe that's what this new phenomenon is about. I mean, television and film are both media formats that have been saturated with d-bags and bullshitfaces for decades upon decades. Remember "Married with Children"? That show was what it was, but, had the head writer (was there a head writer?) decided to throw a newborn baby into that mishegoss, well, he probably would have been fired. The times were.... different. Nobody was prepared to quite go there.

So why are we prepared to go there, and so frequently it seems, now? What's changed? My very smart and cutie-patootie'd wife suggested that we've now become thoroughly accustomed to the two-income family, and, with mom and dad off doing their job things, now our generation is growing up either being or feeling as if they are totally inept and not exactly up to the task of child-rearing.

I'm not sure if that's true, but I am becoming increasingly sure that Hollywood is trying to make us think that we, Generation-Y'ers (I'm 30 and so I still count. Barely.) inept and stupid and incapable of raising child, and all we are confronted with are similarly fucked up models on television and film. Now, granted, that's interesting to watch. There's nothing particularly interesting about watching two income-earners in their early thirties semi-successfully juggling work, fun, occasional intercourse, and parenting. I get that. We'd much rather watch 16-year-olds picking up their children by their feet as if they were gorilla babies.

Wouldn't we?

Yo, Phrom Philly Wit Brotherly Love

You've gotta hand it to Philadelphia-- not even three feet of snow, the result of a historic blizzard, can keep its young sons from killing each other in the streets.

On Thursday, while most people were fast asleep under cozy down blankets or having massive heart attacks from too much shoveling, two young men were slain, in separate incidents, on the streets of North Philadelphia, the latest victims to drown in Philly's brotherly bloodbath.

Now, say what you want about lazy people in the inner city, sucking on the teet of unemployment or SSI or resorting to nefarious proto-occupations like pimp, crackhead or burglar, but you've got to be a pretty industrious S.O.B. to make your way out of your house onto an unplowed North Philly street and take the initiative to put four holes in some other motherfucker's torso, probably over a bag of dope no bigger than my cornhole.

Now that's Philly pride.

When we get bitchslapped by Mother Nature, we don't cower in our rowhomes, we fight back-- against each other, of course. And we don't bother to wait for the cover of darkness to commit these acts of brutality-- the first fatal shooting took place at 10:50am, illuminated by the glow of the sun bouncing off the endless mountains of snow. We don't care who sees-- after all, who's going to stop us? The overworked, underpaid, mismanaged Philadelphia Police Department?

Greenpeace?

No way, man. We've got work to do. There's tons of asses out there to be capped, yo, and Philly is always up to the challenge.

The police have often relied on poor weather to reduce crime rates, citing the fact that, in normal cities, bad weather drastically reduces crime because even hardened criminals historically don't like to get wet or slip on the ice and bruise their tussies. "Rain & snow are the best police partnership in the world," high-ranking cops in white shirts have often said. Well, not in Killadelphia, they're not. Rain? Please-- I'm reloading. Snow? You better duck, motherfuck, 'cuz it's payback time on Cecil B. Moore Avenue.

If you think Philadelphians are going to be deterred from blowing unnatural holes in each other by a little fluffy white stuff, think again. It's like throwing a toy poodle in a black and white striped shirt into the middle of a rabid pit bull fight and expecting it to referee.

You may have your own opinions on murder, but you've really got to respect the dedication to task. I mean, I work for a small non-profit, and I couldn't even be bothered to shovel out my car this morning to go to work, and yet, there are shitskins and fucktards roaming Philly, armed to the grills, who are totally undeterred and undaunted by whatever precipitation threatens to stand in their way. Not only that, their potential victims even find a way to get outside of their shitty, pointless dwellings to offer themselves up as visible targets. And, even as their blood colors the snow a sickening sanguine crimson, I applaud their sheer pluck in just fulfilling their destiny as another dead Philadelphian.

Forget Rocky-- we should build a statue commemorating you, dedicated crime victim, and put it in front of the Art Museum. It would be bronze, of course, and, instead of a triumphant, imaginary figure wearing boxing gloves with its arms upraised, it would be a bronze cast of you, sprawled out on the sidewalk, like a 3-D chalk-outline, and tourists could lie down on the pavement next to you, their limbs grotesquely splayed and their friends could take pictures of it and post it on Facebook. This would require much less energy than running up and down the museum steps.

Yup-- that would be just fine.

Conjunction Misfunction

I normally don't cringe too much when people flog the Queen's English. I don't know why, really, because I'm a pretty pretentious and uptight kind of guy, and I like to think I always know when to use "whom" and how to spell "efficacious" without looking it up.

But I just looked it up.

My wife is usually the one who is most significantly bothered, of the people I know and love, when folks commit their linguistic solecisms. One of her co-workers made up a word recently, I can't remember what it was, and, when my wife heard it, she told me, "I died a little inside."

The thought of one of my dear, sweet wife's ribs or ovaries shriveling up, turning black and decomposing inside her body is most distressing to me, far more upsetting than some random schmuck-ball using "there" instead of "their." However, when I went to check my email this morning and was greeted with the following headline and teaser sentence from Yahoo News, I have to confess that I, too, died a little inside:

Mishaps, Spills at American Music Awards

“Taylor Swift wins big, Paula Abdul has a mic misfunction, and Jennifer Lopez falls down while performing.”

I'm sorry-- what, exactly, is a "misfunction?" Is it a function that has yet to get married?

The sad fact, ladies and gentlemen, that will be immediately apparent to anyone who has ever graduated middle school and/or was raised on "School House Rock" that "misfunction" is not a word. When I copied-and-pasted it into MS Word, it got the red-underline-of-death.

The word is "malfunction," motherfucker.

This stupid grammatical misfunction shouldn't make me angry, but it does. Why? Because there is some arrogant little shitbird who probably spends more time on Facebook than s/he does at his/her job who gets to work in Manhattan probably and has no concept of how to write in the English language. And yet, that is what this person gets paid to do. S/he gets to call him/herself a journalist. Or a writer. A professional, at that. And if that doesn't make someone like me mad, well, then nothing, short of dropping a large piece of furniture on my left testicle will.

I was tempted to click on the headline to read the rest of the article to see how many other typographical misfunctions there were, but I just couldn't bring myself to click. Clicking on the article, I think, gives my acquiescence to the piece as a whole, and I can't do that.

Of course, I could go into another direction here and rant about how J. Lo falling on her famous ass or Paula Abdul's mic missssssfunctioning isn't really news in the first place, but why bother. On the Today Show, there was a five minute piece about how Prince William might get engaged to his girlfriend. Because there was a picture of her wearing a ring. Not an engagement ring, though. And not on the right finger, either. It's just, you know, gossip.

Not, you know, news.

Which is just another example of how the modern media is all kinds of missfucked up.

What to Do About Binge Drinking?

On July 1st, the New York Times ran a shitload of letters to the editor about what to do about binge drinking on college campuses. I don't know if they appeared in the print edition of the NYT, because I'm not one of those snobbish Philadelphians who feels the need to pay a ridiculous sum to get some other city's newspaper, but I read these letters online.

You can too!

I was actually pretty surprised that these letters ate up a whole editorial section of the paper. I was surprised that people had so much to say about this particular topic, but I guess it shouldn't really be all that surprising: it's a hot-button issue. Well, I have something to say about it, too. And I guess that's not terribly surprising.

It's a hot-button issue because stupid people love defending their stupid behavior. Once they're sober enough so to do, of course. Once a 20-year-old dies at a frat party with enough alcohol in her system to kill twelve elephants, her mother will pick up flag and carry on the march-- blaming the college, the campus police department, the beer distributor, perhaps even the beer manufacturer. The frat house will be shut down, which probably isn't such a terrible idea, but it's misguided blame. Fraternities are a fucking joke, and the people who continue to justify their existence because they "help charities" are living in a seventy-year-old dream world where college lads slicked their hair back with brylcreme and took their hats off indoors. But that's another blog post.

Here's the cold, hard fact: binge drinking is fucking stupid. Funneling copious amounts of alcohol into the fragile system that is a young human body is fucking stupid. If you do it, then you're fucking stupid. Fucking stupid people need to take responsibility for fucking stupid behavior, even if it kills them.

What to do about binge drinking? Um, how about "nothing?" I don't think we should do anything. I think we should stand back, with our hands clasped behind our backs and do absofuckinglutely nothing. Why? Because there's nothing to do. Why try to protect people who don't want to be protected, who chafe under authority and paternalistic rules? Why bother with them?

I say, if they want to put on tube-tops and black ass-pants and drink themselves until they go into cardiac arrest on some sticky floor in a basement somewhere, and the last thing they see is some thick-necked frat asshole in a sleeveless t-shirt and mesh shorts vomiting on a tye-dyed Bob Marley wall-hanging, then that's just fine with me. And it should be fine with you, too. You know why? Because it's natural selection, folks. You can go cry all you want about peer pressure and social loafing and easy accessibility of alcohol and all that other horseshit, but you can't argue with the fact that stupid people do stupid things and that there are dire consequences, and society at large cannot and should not be responsible for standing in the way of stupid people who want to off themselves by doing stupid things.

Go ahead-- go binge drink. You're only killing yourself. What the fuck do I care? I have to pay my car payment like a real adult. Don't bother me with this horseshit.

The problem, of course, is drunk driving. If you want to go drink yourself into oblivion, awesome. Rock on, step right up. But, if you want to get into a car afterward and mow some poor old grannie-grans who's standing on the corner waiting for the bus with nothing between her and your Daddy's out-of-control Nissan Maxima, well, then we have a problem. Fortunately, most binge-drinkers are too fucking blitzed to even remember they have a car, let alone get out the keys, find their car in a parking lot, get in and drive it anywhere. It's the shitheels who hit the bar and have one-too-many and then try to drive home that need to be body-slammed by The Law.

But, college binge-drinkers? Who gives a shit about them? Let them choke on their own vom. They're only hurting themselves. I would love it if our society spent more time and effort trying to protect people who actually want protection, and can benefit from it.

Like people who are in favor of jumping out of planes buck-ass naked without parachutes over the White Cliffs of Dover. I wonder what kind of laws we can pass to help them.