You Are Dumb - Texas

My Latest Moral Superior

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 21:21:23 -0500

Sex, 23 April 2008

Memo to LaVerne Jordan: SURELY YOU ARE DUMB.

As an atheist, I am accustomed to certain fundamental societal assumptions. And foremost amongst those assumptions is that I, the godless, lack a moral code handed down on high from a celestial being 2,100 years ago and scrawled by relative primitives onto scrolls. And as a result, I cannot be as moral as someone who follows the teachings of the Abrahamic God, and, very often, his bastard son Beardyface.

Which is why I feel particularly compelled to point and laugh whenever these inherently moral people turn out to be perverted, classless horndogs. Especially when they're striving for at the very least the bronze medal in the two-hundred-meter ick. And extra bonus especially when they hold a position of power in the church and abuse that power. And whipped cream especially with an especially cherry on top when they're a pigfucker from Texas.

Which, in the traditional manner to which we've all become accustomed, brings us to LaVerne Jordan, whose name is French for "The Verne Jordan". Jordan runs Parkway Christian School in Houston, Texas. Parents in Houston, Texas, who want only Jesus's best education for their children, but can't be bothered to home-school, want to send their children to Parkway Christian School. Of course, quality religious education does not come free. It costs $300 bucks just to ENROLL.

Luckily, Parkway Christian School is a progressive, forward-thinking organization, and it recognizes the effects of the weakening of the dollar during the Bush years. Therefore, LaVerne Jordan is prepared to accept innovative alternative payment plans. I think you know what's coming. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"For the uh, enrollment fee and stuff like that, maybe you and I can do something, you think? ... The enrollment fee, yeah... If you and I get together... Excuse me and I don't mean to be so blunt but I am talking about fucking you."

Now imagine that sweet talk, like a Shakespearean sonnet only without the rhyming or meter or number of lines, coming from a late-middle-aged, paunchy, white-haired, bespectacled dude in a checkered shirt. How could any woman resist those considerable charms? It's like being hit on by a jowly, stupid Hank Hill, only 20 years older. Still, LaVerne thinks he's got a rocket in his pocket, along with a value-pak of Viagra from the Wal-Mart:

"For the $300 I would expect maybe we could get together several times, you think?" When pressed for an explanation, he replied, "Well I don't know, you might like whatcha getting." I would like to point out that while the official transcript that I'm using*, from KTRK in Houston who conducted the sting operation, includes the final "G" in "getting", there is NO EVIDENCE for the existence of that "G" on the tape.

But wait, you ask. Could that be all there is? An icky old Southern Christian clumsily attempting to extract sexual favors from a parent in need? We demand more from our free web columns! We demand horrifyingly-worded attempts to ease into said sexual favors! And I have cunningly anticipated your demand.

"If you're not in like just a great big hurry, I know uh, of a place not too far that we can go and I can just do that we can just do some play around a little bit. Would you like that? We could go and we could do some titty play."

I tell you this, there are only two reactions to hearing a guy named LaVerne offer up some titty play in his Texas twang. If you are a man, your penis has become a hermit, and now lives in a shack in the woods writing manifestos, and will continue to do so until we can find a way to make Y chromosomes apologize. And if you're a woman, your legs have permanently fused together, and I deeply regret all future hopping today's column has caused you.

LaVerne Jordan, ladies and gentlemen. Place him and me side by side, with our curriculum vitae and religious affiliations prominently displayed, and most of the people walking past would chuck clods of dirt at MY head, not his. Yet I never have, and never will, ask anyone for three hundred bucks worth of titty play. Because I don't need a two-thousand-year-old book to tell me that's wildly inappropriate and seriously wrong.

*Although I did replace the censor-dashes, because the FCC has no jurisdiction here.

Alice Doesn't Bark Here Anymore

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 22:39:26 -0600

Texas, 7 February 2008

Memo to Grace Saenz-Lopez: YOU ARE STUPID SORBET.

Sometimes, you just need a palate cleanser. Three days of Dane Cook, with Super Tuesday smack in the middle, can leave a heavy, oily taste in your mouth, thick with punditry and a distinct lack of funny. You need something crisp, clean, and utterly ridiculous to cut through that and get you ready to take on the world again.

So, while the former mayor of Alice, Texas may not be dumb in the globally-polluting manner of Dane Cook or John McCain, she is dumb in a special and uniquely self-destructive manner. She was forced out of her office for dog-rustling.

Oh, not Michael Vick style dog-rustling, or even shady-ethnic-cuisine-comedy dog rustling. No, this is the kind of case that, in a simpler time, would have been handled by Judge Wapner. Last year, the Gutierrez family needed a dog-sitter for their Shih Tzu*, Puddles. So they turned to their neighbor, who, in classic small-town fashion, also happened to be Alice Mayor Grace Saenz-Lopez.

But when they returned from vacation, they got some horrible news. Puddles had dried up. Their beloved barker had, like all dogs, gone to heaven. The pooch, as they say, was screwed. Dead. Metaphorically. Not screwed until dead. That would be a different part of Texas, I think. So they went away and mourned the loss of poor Puddles.

Until, in a twist we never saw coming because Lifetime and Animal Planet are two entirely different channels, a friend of the family thought they saw Puddles in a local grooming shop. They called M. Night Shyamalan, but the director assured the family he was not fucking with them, and once again put a Post-It note on his fridge to remind him to get an unlisted phone number. Then they checked with the grooming shop, only to learn that the dog was owned by the mayor, and was named... Panchito.

She took care of the dog, decided she liked it, then kept the dog in secret for MONTHS and told them it was dead. In a small town. In Texas. God, it feels so good to say that. There's no crazy like hick crazy. Secret dog. STEALTH SHIH TZU. I can't think of anything that would make it more awesome. Well, maybe if the mayor had, like a twin sister or something. With a similar name. Then there'd be this weird, freaky parallel where one dog was passed off as an identical but different dog by a mayor with a twin.

I think you know what's coming next. Gracie Garcia! The mayor's actual twin sister! She looks just like the mayor, but she's not. And in January, when the mayor reported that the stolen dog had been re-abducted, guess where they found the dog? In the TWIN SISTER'S BACKYARD ten miles out of town. It was, as Clouseau would say, a ruse. A ridiculous, crazy ruse.

Does Lopez have an excuse for all this? She does. She claims she was rescuing the dog, who was abused and near death. So clearly she had to lie and nurse the dog back to health in secret. If only she had some kind of authority or power in the town to deal with a criminally abused Shih Tzu, but she was just a humble mayor. What else could she have done?

That was enough to get her arrested, and last Friday she resigned, but for some reason she gets to keep the dog until the trial in April. Disappointingly, there are no really crazy quotes from her, although she did say in her resignation letter that "It was never my intention to bring any negative exposure to our city.", which is obvious, because it was never her intention to get caught with the stolen dog. That's what all the "telling them it died" and "renaming it Panchito" was about.

Wasn't that refreshing? If it weren't for the four kids who, you know, thought their dog had died, I'd almost be grateful to Saenz-Lopez, for reminding us that in this fast-paced, hectic world, the kind of small-town stupid you can only find in America's heartland is still thriving.

*Watch, as I pointedly avoid making the joke for the entire rest of the column!

In Which I Do, In Fact, Mess With Texas

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 22:55:23 -0600

Texas, 16 November 2007

Memo to all and sundry: MAKE FUCKING SENSE.

Maybe it's just because I'm feeling like crap*, but I find myself particularly irritated by the psychotic ramblings of crazy people with access to the media. So today, I'll be taking a brief tour of rambling nonsense that sticks in my craw like crazy craw glue.

We start with the Rev. Rusty Lee Thomas, who has decided to speak for God. Now, this is nothing particularly new. It'd be easier to count the folks throughout history who HAVEN'T spoken for their god or gods at one point or another. But Rev. Thomas takes it a bit farther, issuing, in God's name, an eviction notice. To the city of San Francisco.

This proclamation came out a week ago, and a quick check of Google News shows nothing about a parade of wicked sodomites walking toward Oakland, so I can only assume the Bay Area found Thomas' notice as laughable as I did. Or, more likely, were much too busy trying to pull down enough money to pay their hideously overinflated rents and mortgages to notice some Texas nutfuck calling them out. My rent is fairly reasonable, so I get to read shit like this. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"God stands poised with his flaming sword ready to strike your city. He is prepared to exchange Sodom and Gomorrah with San Francisco to serve as a warning to all cities and nations of men "do not follow in their pernicious ways." Your city will be turned into a scarecrow and used by God as His enemy to warn future generations, lest you repent and turn from your wicked ways of child sacrifice, which is the shedding of innocent blood and homosexuality. You must stuff these abominations back in the closet of illegality and punish these criminal acts as God prescribes or your entire house (city) will collapse upon your wicked heads. With all diligence, take heed to this warning, repent or perish, Christ or chaos."

OK, first of all, Rev. Rusty Thomas is from Waco. So, you know. People who live in heavily fortified glass compounds shouldn't throw grenades. At the ATF. I think I'm supposed to mention Janet Reno here too, but I'm not sure. It's been so long since we had to worry about the civil rights of white Christian religious psychos that the details are fuzzy.

Second, I get how the wicked ways of child sacrifice would be the shedding of innocent blood, but where does the homosexuality enter into it? That whole sentence is a grammatical and lexicographical nightmare. A city turned into a scarecrow? To warn future generations? Rusty must realize that the purpose of a scarecrow is to scare crows. I mean, it's right there in the fucking name. Scare. Crow. They're not called "serveasawarningofimmoralitytopeoplewalkingthroughcornfieldses". I'm pretty sure that what Rusty meant was that God would cut off San Francisco's head, stick it on a pike, and people walking past that city's piked head would then be afraid of God's terrible wrath.

It still doesn't make any fucking sense, because cities don't have heads, they have mayors. And putting Gavin Newsome on a pike could be interpreted as any number of different dire warnings. But at least the metaphor would be somewhat more consistent.

Still, at least Rev. Thomas had a clear, well-defined goal. He hates gay people, knows God hates gay people too, and is looking forward to God destroying San Francisco because it's full of gay people. Simple and forthrightly wrong. Which is more than you can say for Wayne Johns, resident of Waco's distant neighbor to the south, Victoria, Texas.

Johns dropped four paragraphs of whatthefuck on the Letters To The Editor page of the Victoria Advocate, the premise of which completely eludes me. Two girls are inspired by two female astronauts on either the International Space Station or the Space Shuttle. I don't know which, because Wayne Johns can't fucking write. What he says is, "One day on TV they saw the space station being docked by the space shuttle. Great they thought. But best of all it was being commanded by two women. Outstanding they thought."

This is why I need you stupid people to make more fucking sense. What is "being docked by"? Was the space station having its wages garnisheed? And that's just the start of it. Johns' point seems to be that the two young girls being inspired to play astronaut by a pair of successful women leads directly to anarchy, chaos, and the eventual domination of males by packs of roving girls gone wild. And not in a titty way.

"They played well for a day or two, but then things went wrong and they begin quarreling. The two girls were angry at each other; neither wanted to share the little boy. So they started flinging their pampers at each other. And they threw pepper at each other." At this point, I am completely bewildered. Either Johns is making some kind of allegorical reference to the crazy astronaut love triangle kidnapping attempt, or the children of Victoria, TX are potty-trained late enough in life to still be in diapers when they're capable of being inspired by female role models. What possible conclusion could Johns draw from this? Only one:

"Whatever happened to little girls playing with dolls and dreaming of becoming wives and mothers? Whatever happened to young men looking for a good Christian wife and finding a young woman still clinging to her doll? Me, old fashioned? I guess. Me, a male chauvinist pig? To answer that I would have to say, 'Oink, oink, oink.'"

I need to give a special shout-out to the editors of the Victoria Advocate. It takes a certain type of editor to read Johns' letter and decide that yes, these diaper-filled ravings of a self-described old-fashioned chauvinist accurately represent the community views we want to showcase. That certain type of editor is called "comatose".

*Every time some motherfucker calls this site a blog, I earn a tiny amount of "blog credit", allowing me to provide blog-like information when I deem it necessary. This exhausts all credit earned in September and October.

Well-Apportioned Blame

Mon, 22 Jan 2007 22:35:05 -0600

Racism, 23 January 2007
Memo to Rick Perry's Inaugural Ball: YOU ARE DUMB.

Bit of a switcheroo today. Normally, we take a look at one individual and the wide variety of ways they were dumb. But today, we have one particular situation where EVERYBODY involved was dumb in one way or another. I refer you to Texas governor Rick Perry, whose name anagrams to Erry Prick, and his big inaugural bash last week. During which invitee Ted Nugent got up on stage in a Confederate T-shirt, with some machine guns, and proceeded to shout a bunch of stuff about non-English speakers. That's all you need to know. Let's start the Moron Parade, shall we?

TED NUGENT. Arguably the least culpable in all this. I'm not saying I'm a huge fan of the Confederate flag or ethnic slurs, I'm just saying that if you don't want guests to lick their asses at your party, don't invite dogs. The only way Nugent could have been more Nugenty is if he'd shot a vegan in the leg with a bow and arrow. He probably wore the Confederate cutoff T because one of the three dozen that he owns was on top of the "clean" pile.

RICK PERRY. His spokesman, who we'll get to in a second, described Nugent as "a good friend of the governor's". Let's assume that's true. How can any good friend of Ted Nugent's think it's a good idea to take Nuge out in public? The man's insane. He moved from Michigan to Crawford, Texas. You know what that means? That means Ted Nugent thinks everyone in the government is out to get him, EXCEPT FOR DUBYA. If you're the governor of Texas, you don't invite Ted Nugent to a Wal-Mart ribbon-cutting, much less your inaugural.

ROYAL MASSET. No, that's not a snooty breed of dog. It's the unfortunate name of a Republican strategist who got quoted for the story, saying: "I think it was a horrible choice. I hope nobody approved it."

The embarassing thing about that quote is that it lacks the word "of" between "approved" and "it". With the "of" there, it's a noble, albeit misguided, sentiment. He'd be hoping that the good people of Texas had the common decency to repudiate Crazy Bowhunting Crackerdude. Without that all-important preposition, though, it's political ass-covering at its most craven, hoping that Nugent acted completely without sanction so that Perry would be spared political damage.

GARY BLEDSOE. I'm going to give Bledsoe a bit of a break. He's the president of the Texas NAACP, which can't be an easy job on the best of days. And it's a job he has to do, so I can see why he was forced to say "Whenever someone sports the Confederate battle flag, many Texans will be offended, and rightly so, because of what it symbolizes." Even if it's not strictly true.

Let's face it. When someone whips out a Confederate flag T-Shirt and hurls ethnic slurs at a Texas inaugural ball, Bledsoe's gotta be a bit surprised, like I was, that they're finally limiting that shit to special occasions. Treating the racism like the fine china. It's something that, to Texas, vaguely resembles progress.

ROBERT BLACK. Perry's afore-mentioned spokesman, who also claimed that: "He asked him if he would play at the inaugural. He didn’t put any stipulation of what he would play." Which is either a lame dodge or a fuckup of epic proportions. Because Black might want to make a distinction between "Rick Perry" and "All the people in charge of arranging Rick Perry's inaugural wishes", but when something like this happens, the two are inseparable. So that means that either Black is lying, or nobody on staff had any discussions at all with Nugent beyond "Be backstage by 7:30. You go on at 8." I know which one I find more likely.

And finally, THE MEDIA. Goddammit, how am I supposed to do my job if you don't do yours? If it's reported that Ted Nugent "shout[ed] offensive remarks about non-English speakers", then someone, somewhere must know what the fuck he shouted. But could I find it anywhere? I could not. And that's an important piece of the puzzle. There's a huge continuum separating "Why should we have forms in Spanish at the DMV!" and "Fuck all you Spanish-speaking el motherfuckos! Speak Jesus' language, English, or go the fuck home!" It's important to establish how egregious the faux pas was, and how big a fucking douchebag Ted Nugent is. But nobody saw fit to report it. News I can use, my ass.

The Ten Percent Problem

Thu, 05 Oct 2006 11:12:30 -0500

Texas, 5 October 2006
Memo to the dumbest ten percent: WOW, YOU'RE DUMB.

In case you're still wondering why, after everything else, that it's taken covering up for a congressman who skips votes to have cyber-sex with sixteen year old male pages to even make a FUCKING DENT in the electorate of this country, you need to look at the bottom ten percent.

I think, in the past, we've discussed the bottom 27% - the crazy people, as determined by the percentage of Illinois voters who cast ballots for Alan Keyes in 2004. The bottom ten are a subset of the 27% - the bone-stupid. The asses. The people who, even after years of this, astonish me with their impervious thickness. We need to look at the Alton Verms.

First, his name is ALTON VERM. Verm, I believe, comes from the Latin, for "eater of roadkill". Verm and his family are from Conroe, Texas. Verm is also one of those parents who gets upset when, in a desperate and likely futile attempt to ensure the next generation of Conroetexans makes it into the bottom FIFTEEN percent, the school system exposes these younguns to literature. Literature that may include the kind of language that would give CAPAlert a mild case of the hives.

Despite being incredibly stupid this is not in and of itself all that uncommon. Especially in Texas, a state where, just recently, a teacher lost her job for taking her students on an approved trip to a museum where one of them saw a stone dick. I shit you not. Look it up. What makes Alton Verm extra special, even by comparison to the rest of Texas, is the book he objected to and the... linguistically unique way he did so.

The book, and I hope you have your irony overflow buffers primed and waiting, was FAHRENHEIT 451. The classic dystopian tale of government eliminating unapproved literature with the cleansing power of fire. The only way Verm could be any less self-aware is if he tried to ban Ray Bradbury's unfinished sequel, "Trying To Ban Books In Rural Texas Public Schools Is Wrong, You Inbred Fuck".

Lest you think that perhaps I am exaggerating Alton Verms hickitude, enjoy this rich slab of his pigfucking dialect. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"It's just all kinds of filth. The words don't need to be brought out in class. I want to get the book taken out of the class." Tell him about the rabbits, George. I had to scrape cornpone off of my fingers after typing that, and I don't even know what cornpone IS.

Verm is apparently an idiot savant, because without even reading the book, he was able to determine that it contained drinking, smoking cigarettes, violence, "dirty talk," references to the Bible and using God's name in vain. Civilization has survived all that, Verm. Hell, even rural Texas has.

So their daughter, Diana, and a classmate whose parents were smart enough not to talk to the Montgomery County Courier* got to read an alternate book, "Ella Minnow Pea: A Progressively Lipogrammatic Epistolary Fable". Which is brilliant, because Alton Verm will stare at a title like that the way a chipmunk stares at an electron microscope. Unless he gets upset at "Epistolary", of course.

*A newspaper which, judging from the level at which its article was written, certainly serves its community.

Belated Evil Playthings

Wed, 04 Jan 2006 20:56:32 -0600

Main Column, 6 January 2006
Memo to toy activists: YOU ARE LATE.

And I am disappointed. Every year, I look forward to the Lion and Lamb Project's "Dirty Dozen", a list of violent, inappropriate toys for children. Since there's twelve toys, it takes a village to get them all, so I like to do my part.

But despite my usual newshoundery, I never saw any of the stories that accompany the annual list. And looking at their website, I find they didn't do one LAST eyar, either! What had happened to the busybodies of the toy aisle? Who would warn me against the corrupting influence of graven plastic images? Who would I laugh at?

It turns out, like the rest of you, the busybodies took the holidays off. But once the New Year had been rung in, they were able to once again turn our attention to sinister manufacturing defects and sinful agenda promotion in the land of Geoffrey the Giraffe.

In Dallas, which longtime readers will recognize as the Motherfucking Capital of Dear Sweet Lord Get Me The Hell Out Of Texas, a pair of fine, upstanding citizen Angela Bolls has alerted us to the secret murderous longings that lurk beneath the blood-red fur of world-famous muppet Elmo.

Bolls purchased the book, "Potty Time With Elmo", for her sixteen-month old daughter. "Potty Time With Elmo" is one of those books with the cheap electronic thing on the side. You know, the ones where you press the buttons, and a low-quality sound sample plays from a shitty speaker? Anyway, they pushed the picture of Elmo, and heard the sickening phrase "WHO WANTS TO DIE?"

"It's a sick joke. If it's a joke then it's a bad one, you know? And it's not necessary. It's inappropriate." - Now, I don't think anyone would argue with Bolls that such a joke would be unnecessary. Any sound-playing book about Elmo dropping his red, furry friends off at the lake fits the "unnecessary" definition all by itself.

But what are we to say about Dallas Local 6's journalistic claim that what the book says, and what the book is supposed to say, are "completely different"? What the book is supposed to say is "WHO WANTS TO TRY AND GO POTTY?"

That's not completely different. That is what mathematicians refer to as THE FIRST FUCKING HALF, YOU TEXAS MORON. Take "who wants to try". Now put that through Elmo's high-pitched, speech-impeded vocal stylings. Now put THAT through a piezoelectric speaker in a five dollar book from a Target endcap. I bet what comes out would sound a hell of a lot like what the Bolls heard. I'd listen to it myself, but the Dallas TV station that's supposed to be hosting the video refuses to deliver.

In other malicious toy news, Barbie, through her corporate parent Mattel, wants children to grow up transgendered.

And, according to the Concerned Women of America, they're doing it through a plan so insidious, so evil, and so utterly genius, that only a bunch of conservative, tight-lipped Christian activists could have exposed it. You see, in an online survey, Mattel asked children, age 4-8, to provide their gender, and gave as options "I am a Boy", "I am a Girl", and "I don't know".

Mattel claims the third option was meant to be an "I don't want to say" option, but the CWA knows better, dammit. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"It's the idea that well, maybe people aren't born a particular biological sex - or they are, and that shouldn't determine their gender identity. And that's a very big component of the homosexual activist agenda now. - Robert Knight, director of the Culture and Family Institute of Concerned Women for America.

And when it comes to gender confusion, if you can't trust a man at Concerned Women For America, who can you trust?

Spastic Protest Monkey Monday

Mon, 15 Aug 2005 08:11:36 -0500

Texas, 15 August 2005
Boy, the fun never stops down in Crawford, does it? And neither does the DUMB floating around the protest by Cindy Sheehan. If you've been under a rock (or limiting yourself to network news, same difference) for the past week-plus, you may not know that Cindy Sheehan is down in Crawford demanding to meet with the President during his five-week summer vacation. Cindy Sheehan's son died in Iraq, you see, and so she'd like another word with the President.

She did talk to him once, but that was pre-Downing Street. Pre a bunch of stuff, really. And while there's certainly a bit of political grandstanding in what Sheehan's doing, I'm comfortable with that. After all, if you subtracted the political grandstanding and the brush-clearing from Bush's two terms in office so far, all you've got left are the seven minutes he kept reading My Pet Goat.

Sheehan's protest is drawing attention from all types - filthy hippies who realize their path to respectability lies through Sheehan, local conservative deejays who realize their path to notoriety is through Sheehan, and, oh, by the way, a Protest Warrior.

The Protest Warriors have had a lot of time to catch up on their crocheting and Scrabble since the start of the war and the election. They're just a bunch of assholes - line-toeing, boot-licking fuckwads with the bitter, acrid scent of the Konservative Kool-Aid on their breath. They show up when there's an anti-Bush protest and counter-protest. And since they're buddies with the Bushies, their free-speech zones usually have plasma TV's and catering.

One of them, one Bill "Mrs." Garrett of Dallas, came down because the country needed him. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"I feel sorry for Cindy, but I think she went about this the wrong way. Somebody's got to stand up to them." I'm sure the Bush Administration, the State Department, and the Pentagon are glad ol' Bill Garrett's there to help them stand up against a 48-year-old woman and a couple of hundred leftists sharing one bathroom. I believe no less a personage than Donald Rumsfeld breathed a sigh of relief when Garrett pulled up in his Ford F-250 Super Duty festooned with so many Support Our Troops magnets it's actually better-armored than most of the Humvees in Fallujah.

Not all the idiots are imported from the exotic, far-away land of Dallas, though. Local resident Larry Mattlage, presumably overcome by the smell of patchouli and the tromping of Birkenstocks, lost his temper yesterday and fired off his shotgun in the air.

Showing that when it comes to plausible deniability, Mattlage is considerably less ept than the president he follows, he told people he was just "getting ready for dove season". DOVE SEASON. Get it? Doves? Peace? Hippies? This is why all of Texas' comedians end up going into politics.

Your media advocacy moment - the Daily Telegraph, in Britain, reported this story with the headline "Shots Fired Near Bush Protesters".

Fox News gave the story the headline "Bush Neighbor Suffers Protest Fatigue". In many ways, it's not so much a "no spin zone" as it is a "net zero spin zone", as every bit of angular momentum Fox builds up around stories like this is matched precisely and oppositely by the rotation of Edward R Murrow in his FUCKING GRAVE. I suspect that if Walter Cronkite doesn't die soon, he'll have to be hooked up to a centrifuge so that our day stays the same length.

Fox quoted Mattlage extensively, by the way, including this gem. ACTUAL GUN-TOTING PIGFUCKER QUOTE TIME!

""I mean, would you like somebody invading your house for a long time and blocking your view and blocking your road? I wake up every morning [with] this crowd, and I go to bed every night with this campground down here on a public road, which I'm paying taxes to, the middle of this road." - I suspect other news outlets didn't use this quote because, well, the protesters aren't actually on Mattlage's property at all. Much less "invading his house". Which he then admits in the second half of the quote.

That second half is also where he seems to claim that we get to fire off guns whenever we see something we don't like on the road, because we pay for the roads with our taxes. I'm not sure that reasoning will fly with local authorities the next time a Honda Element cuts me off on the highway, but I'm certainly tempted to see how far it gets me.

Deep In The Heart Of Darkness

Wed, 10 Aug 2005 11:24:50 -0500

Main Column, 4 March 2005
Memo to Texas: WHY?
I've raged. I've insulted. I've yelled. I've wept. I've railed. I've beaten my head against the turdobe wall that is our 28th state. And now I've resorted to asking. To begging. Begging for someone to explain to me why. Why you're such assholes. Why you elect such assholes. Why you allow assholes to have such a voice.
There is only so much I can attribute to inbred hick pigfucking ignorance. At some level, these people have to know what assholes they're being, what assholery is implied by the actions and statements of the wastes of biomass they pick to represent them. Is it plumb orneryness? Is it outright malice? Come on. You can tell me. It can't possibly be worse than my worst suspicions, which mainly involve the unique confluence of high lead levels in the water supply, Nazi experimentation, and excessively tight cowboy hats.
Come on. I double dog dare you to justify Frank Corte and Joe Pojman. Even for a state representative for San Antonio, Corte is astonishingly thick. And let's face it, most state representatives qualify for their job by having a pulse and being able to get Tuesday afternoons off. But Corte is a fucking piece of work, he is. And Pojman... Pojman goes beyond even what I'd expect from the head of a state "Alliance for Life".
The issue is one we've brought up before - Embryo Fetishists Vs. Contraception. The battleground are a pair of proposed Texas state laws - one that would require doctors to prescribe, and pharmacists to provide, emergency contraception for rape victims if the victims ask for it. The other would permit pharmacists to NOT fill emergency contraception prescriptions. J
That first law makes perfect sense to me. Hell, it doesn't go far enough, considering that the Ashcroft/Gonzalez Department of Justice is going out of its way to make sure nobody tells rape victims they CAN ask for it in the first place. But if they do ask, they damn well ought to be given a prescription. The decision to have a child is one of the most important ones people can make. It's bad enough that it's being made on a near-constant basis by idiots who don't know better, but now the Pro-Egg Movement wants to force that decision on rape victims, just so the poor, innocent lump of half a dozen CELLS doesn't suffer. Even if the rape victim doesn't believe in "souls", or the radical embryo agenda.
It's not the eggs that need protecting, folks. It's people who need to be protected from moralizing pharmacists. We've covered this before, too. It's never Viagra these fucks refuse to fill. You don't see these people demanding their right to not give customers their Lipitor on the grounds that they should just become vegans. Nope, it's just birth control pills and emergency contraception. Count the pills and shut the fuck up. If you can't perform those two simple tasks, GET ANOTHER JOB. Walgreens will get along fine without you shepherding a flock of unwilling participants through your little morality play. Pojnan gives you ignorant fucks more sympathy than he does rape victims. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!
"Well, one thing I point out is that pregnancy after assault rape is extremely rare. For one thing, the woman may already be on contraceptives. Very seldom does an assailant ejaculate; it's all about power and control. A woman has gone through a trauma; for these reasons her body may not be fertile."
Pojnan's statement is, in every sense of the word, indefensibly stupid. It's ignorant of biology, it's arrogant, it includes the word "ejaculation" in a really creepy way, and let's not forget the subtle reverse implication that if someone does get pregnant, then it wasn't really a traumatic rape after all. This vile little pusbucket puts the lie to the extreme pro-life movement. They're not about improving life. They are, in the way of all dumb people, merely making things worse for the rest of us.
Corte's not much better. The dissembling little fuck writes a bill that specifically targets emergency contraception, then has the gall to sit there and say "I don't see how rape victims will not be able to get emergency contraception under my bill." Well, your bill lets pharmacists keep it from them, dipshit. You can claim all you want that even small towns have more than one pharmacy, but what if all the pharmacies decide to exercise their moral objections? You've got a day or two after an incredibly traumatic experience to prevent a pregnancy, and Corte wants you to jump through fucking hoops for the sake of a pill-counter's conscience?
So explain it to me, someone. Explain to me how these people, these moralizing busybodies who have no problem ruining lives and causing suffering while cloaking themselves in absolutist morality, explain to me how these people are given, and allowed to keep, power in your state. Explain to me why they are not laughed out of office, run out of town on a rail, or at least given a swift kick in the ass.
And I need the explanation pretty quick, before Michele Bachmann's political career gets any farther up here. So get cracking.

Monday Is Blasphemy Day

Thu, 11 Aug 2005 13:22:36 -0500

Main Column, 7 February 2005
Memo to God: YOU ARE DUMB.
You know I had to get around to it eventually. But follow my reasoning here. It is said, and said so often that even my admittely limited theological knowledge covers it, that God created man in his own image. Man, collectively, is a dumbass. God's image, collectively, is therefore that of a dumbass. So it follows, from a logic perspective, that perhaps God is a dumbass. An omnipotent, omniscient dumbass, but a dumbass nonetheless.
It would explain a lot, you know. Sure, it woudn't explain how you could have an omniscient dumbass, but with God, as I've also heard them say, all things are possible. Not things like tsunamis or mass murderers or "Son of the Mask", of course. God's not involved in our greatest tragedies, from what I hear. Probably 'cause He's too busy performing PT on TO before SBXXXIX.
Now, of course, the Super Bowl is over, the guys with the silver helmets are triumphant over the guys with the green helmets, and we've all learned that if you don't use Degree anti-perspirant, you're a genital-free Oedipal wuss. But last week, Terrell Owens of the Philadelphia Eagles was absolutely sure that his ankle injury wouldn't keep him out of the Super Bowl, because God had cleared him to play. ACTUAL DEIGNOSIS TIME!
"A lot of people don't know the extent of my pain, and they don't know my body. They can go by the doctor's prognosis. I respect Dr. Myerson and his decision to not medically clear me. But prior to going down to see him for that last visit, I can honestly say God had already cleared me. It really doesn't matter what a doctor says. I've got the best doctor of all, and that's God."
- Nice of God to check Terrell out, really. Pity he was spending so much time fucking around with Owens' ankle that he forgot to help Owens' team win the Super Bowl. It's unclear at press time which deity or power WAS helping the Patriots win. They ARE from Massachussetts, though, so it may have been the satanic power of thousands of gay marriages that gave the Pats their three-point victory.
A wise God would have snapped Owens like a twig on the first play, frankly. A smart God wouldn't have been talking to Owens in the first place, so the smart God would have been pissed off at Owens trying to turn "I'm famous and don't want to sit out the Super Bowl" into some kind of religious statement. A God who protects his rep would have done something. But Owens made it through the game, and presumably Owens will continue to selectively apply Dumb God's Will to all the aspects of his life. Traffic light just turns green? Thanks, Dumb God! Grocery store's out of snickerdoodles? Well, God must be busy down in San Marcos, Texas, scratching Teflon off a pan.
I traditionally ascribe miraculous appearances of Jesus and Mary images in everything from potato chips to bathroom windows to idiots who don't understand caramelization and refraction, respectively. But what if I've been wrong? What if they're absolutely right, and God is actually manipulating events to cause vague, Christ-like images to appear in ridiculous places? What if God just can't draw worth a damn? "I think it looks like Mary. It's impressionist. And you try working in pudding skin sometime. Not exactly a fucking Sharpie, you know?"
In San Marcos, Texas, they've discovered the image of Jesus in the scraped-off teflon of a cheap, non-stick frying pan. Specifically, an eight-inch frying pan owned by the Pastrano family. The Pastranos, who do not, by all reports, spend their spare time swallowing caps every March, did what any self-respecting family of God-loving, pan-owning family would do. Put the pan in a Ziploc bag, hang it on the wall with a bunch of crap bought at the Rejoice! Bookstore in the San Marcos Strip Mall, and called the local news.
The family sees the Pan Scratch Jesus as a sign that their matriarch, Mary Lou Pastrano, would recuperate successfully from a recent stroke. One part culinary, one part reliquary, and one part ACTUAL QUOTE TIME.
"We were praying and praying the whole time that she would be well. We think of this as the Lord letting us know she's going to be OK."
- Juan Pastrano Jr., who, if what he says is true, has answered one of theology's most pressing questions: Is God an asshole?
Think about it. Say you're God. And say you feel like randomly dispensing medical expertise, because you're God, and despite being made entirely of light and joy, you're not actually that bright. So you go to Terrell Owens, big, rich, famous football star Terrell Owens, whose only problem in the world is a bum ankle that's already being treated by some of the highest-paid trainers and sports medicine experts in the country, and for T.O., you appear personally and say "Terrell! It's me, God! It's OK! Your ankle's fine! You're cleared to play on Sunday! Don't listen to the doctors, listen unto me! Love your work! Bye!"
And then you head down to Texas, where a family is struggling with the illness of a loved one, and do you stop by, chat for a bit, tell them everything's going to be fine? No. You scratch some graffiti of your son's face in their frying pan and hope they notice it and get the message. That's the behavior of an ASSHOLE. What if one of the Pastranos had accidentally grabbed a metal slotted spoon while making dinner? God's message of love, glory, and successful stroke recovery would have vanished, and God would probably be too busy telling Michael Jackson everything's gonna work out just fine to even notice.

With Whom Shall I Not Mess, Again?

Thu, 18 Aug 2005 13:45:20 -0500

Main Column, 18 November 2004
Memo to Texas: MAN, YOU DON'T FUCK AROUND WHEN IT COMES TO DUMB.
Dumb in the morning. Dumb in the evening. Dumb from Oklahoma to Mexico, and dumb from the deserts of New Mexico to the sweet sweet pig vaginas of Louisiana. So dumb they wouldn't be able to remember the Alamo if its name had a few more letters in it. So dumb that the residents of Austin must feel like a domed, time-traveling city of the future, stranded amidst the barbarous wasteland that lies just outside their borders. So dumb that making fun of Texas actually releases endorphins into my brain, resulting in at the very least a mild psychological addiction. So dumb they're ALMOST as dumb as Tennessee.
So, what's the latest word out of Texas, the unofficial capital of Jesusland?* Well, you know the Classic Red-State Trifecta of God, guns, and gays? How does two out of three strike ya?
In East Texas, in the Spurger school district, a longstanding Homecoming Week tradition is being cancelled because one redneck mom was convinced it would turn her nine-year old son into a homosexual.
The event, TWIRP Day, stands for "The Woman Is Requested to Pay". It apparently involves reversing the traditional gender roles most of us pretty much abandoned 20 years ago, like girls paying for sodas, and asking boys out on dates. As part of the admittedly quaint tradition, girls and boys also dress like their opposite gender for the day. Having been informed about the perfidious Homosexual Agenda, Delana Davies took a stand.
"It's like experimenting with drugs. You just keep playing with it and it becomes customary. ... If it's OK to dress like a girl today, then why is it not OK in the future?" Davies, being an idiot, is incapable of discerning the difference between "wearing a frilly dress" and "hot anal sex". In a completely unrelated note, Mrs. Davies' husband stops at Laura Ashley about once every three weeks to get a present for his wife.
The school has replaced TWIRP day with "Camo Day", in which students are encouraged to dress like overweight armchair mercenary wannabes who subscribe to "Guns And Ammo" and play their paintball "for keeps". Mrs. Davies is fine with that, as it will let her son look like a brave American soldier and play "shoot the wounded Iraqi" with the other kids, and will make her four-year-old daughter look like a huge dyke.
In Texas' defense, this same issue has come up in two other schools - one in rural Illinois, which is like Texas except you can go into the city for deep dish pizza, and one in New York, where they felt it was offensive to the transgender community.
One hundred and fifty miles west of Spurger, where the pernicious agenda of Team Selfish Hedonism is being painstakingly eradicated, one elementary school student at a time, lies Houston, TX, the Bizarro to Austin's Superman. Like Austin, Houston has a burgeoning technology industry. Unlike Austin, where much of the tech industry is devoted to helping gamers pretend to shoot each other over the Internet, Houston's tech industry is working on letting people ACTUALLY shoot things over the Internet.
It's a heady idea, a surefire contender for the Worst Fucking Idea Ever award, and it's the asschild** of John Underwood, who by day works in an auto body shop, but is an idiot in his free time. The idea is to place a remote-controlled camera and gun on a ranch, and allow people to connect to that camera and gun over the Internet and shoot whatever deer, antelopes, moose, pets, children, airplanes, or space aliens appear on-screen. To give you an idea of the kind of mentality we are dealing with here, I'll allow Underwood to relate the tale of where his inspiration came from.
He and a friend were looking at a webcam set up in some woodlanda area that allowed you to take pictures of animals. "We were looking at a beautiful white-tail buck and my friend said 'If you just had a gun for that.' A little light bulb went off in my head." Unfortunately, it wasn't a stroke. "Man, that's gorgeous. If only there were some way to KILL IT FROM MILES AWAY WITHOUT IT EVEN KNOWING."
Underwood was quick to conceal his bloodlust behind a veneer of charity, noting that his technology could be a boon to disabled hunters no longer able to hold a gun. In addition, once the animals are killed, they could be cut up and their meat could be donated to animal orphanages. I am not fucking kidding you here. A human attendant will retrieve any animal corpses, and Underwood would arrange for the taxidermy of the trophy and the dispensation of the flesh. That service will be offered as soon as they find someone who's tired of their dull job at the slaughterhouse and want to combine the fun of handling dead animals with the adrenaline rush of walking around in front of a remote controlled Internet gun. So, basically, as soon as Ted Nugent finishes his latest tour.
Ah, Texas. Don't ever change. And don't ever visit, either, now that I think of it. You're incredibly useful to me right where you are.
* If you don't know what I'm referring to here, then you need to turn in your Card-Carrying Internet Liberal card, and become, um, a non-card-carrying Internet Liberal.
** Normally, this sentence would call for the word "brainchild", but my fingers refused to type it, for obvious reasons.

Don't Go Back To Huntsville

Thu, 18 Aug 2005 14:06:22 -0500

Main Column, 11 October 2004
Fuck politics.
I mean, sure, it was unavoidable, with the debates, and the election only a few weeks away, that the column would turn excessively toward the nation's #1 sport for the stupid and evil, but I'm tired of it. And I bet you are too. Except for the bit about Bush part-owning a timber company, which, since it turned out to be true, is pretty fuckin' funny. "Need some wood", indeed.
But I've felt for a while now that it'd be a good idea to get back to the roots of the column, the kind of thing that I'm known for. Which is why I was so very happy, in my perusals of the news, to stumble across three brand new retarded Texans.
So, with a nostalgic tear in my eye, I would like to issue the following memo to Huntsville, TX residents Bobby Wooderson, Andy Slater, and Richard "Pink" Floyd. YOU ARE DUMB.
The three men, you see, went to school with acclaimed film director Richard Linklater, who, in his admittedly semi-autobiographical movie, "Dazed and Confused", included three characters - David Wooderson, Ron Slater, and Randall "Pink" Floyd. The movie came out in 1993, to modest success, but it apparently took over a decade for it to reach the desert hinterlands of Huntsville, TX, because now that the DVD has been out for two years, the locals have, according to the brand new lawsuit filed on behalf of the retards, made the three men's lives a living hell.
The case, which is being tried in New Mexico because the movie is eleven fucking years old and the New Mexico legal system is kind to slow people, raises a number of interesting legal questions. Can an artist freely utilize his own past to make works of fiction? Is it possible to make life in Huntsville, Texas more of a living hell? And is it possible to have any sympathy whatsoever for a car salesman who has kept his high school nickname of "Pink" Floyd for the past 28 years.
So what form, exactly, did the "relentless harassment, embarassment, and ridicule" take? What cruel emotional torture did these three men suffer to such an extent that they finally got around to taking legal action? The pain must have been unimaginable. Luckily, we don't have to imagine it, because it's ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!
"People make assumptions, basically, that he's [Slater's] involved in illegal drugs." - Attorney Ernest Freeman.
"We had fun in high school, but there is nothing true about that movie. Yet, I am having to deal with it all the time." - "Pink" Floyd.
And when Wooderson brought his son to Harvard, "all the kids there wanted to do was smoke pot with him", according to lead attorney Bill Robins III. Pronoun experts analyzing Mr. Robins' statements were unable to clarify whether it was the father or the son who received the cannabis-related taunting at one of the nation's most respected institutions of higher learning.
That's... pretty much it. No death threats, no vandals painting large "Have A Nice Day" smilies on the plaintiffs' new vinyl siding, just a bunch of pot jokes from a bunch of Texans who ran out of things to rent at Blockbuster and thought "Dazed and Confused" was a season-set of "That 70's Show" with that nice Ashton Kutcher boy in it.
The fact of the matter is, nobody would have made the connection to the movie if any of these guys had been either willing, or able, to GET THE FUCK OUT OF HUNTSVILLE. That's what Linklater did, and he got to make School of Rock. You three stuck around, and all you get to do is sell cars, put in kitchen cabinets, and "work in the technology sector", which is so vague that it probably means "holding the keys to the video game cabinet at Wal-Mart". And all of a sudden, now it's Linklater's fault that your lives suck? Just because people in Huntsville think it's funny to make toking gestures in your direction? Get over it. The people of Huntsville probably think it's funny to tell people the town was named after a guy named Mike.
Why, were it not for your lawyers' strident assurance that you were "not the type of people who are out to get a cheap buck", I would have thought you were precisely the type of people who are otu to get a cheap buck. Also the type of people who don't stay through the credits. Also the type of people who don't read much. I mean, having never seen the movie, I cannot guarantee that the disclaimer about "any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental" is in there, but I bet it is. Of course you weren't nearly as interesting as the characters in the movie. Of course your dialogue was worse. It was a MOVIE.
And you should be thankful it's a movie. 'Cause if it was a documentary, you know what they would have done for the DVD? They'd have come back to Huntsville, cameras in hand, to shoot a special feature about where the three of you are now. And if you think you were relentlessly harassed, embarrassed, and ridiculed for "appearing" in "Dazed and Confused", that hypothetical followup would have you jumping off the nearest bridge.

And Cracker McCracker As... The Racist.

Fri, 19 Aug 2005 11:26:05 -0500

Main Column, 22 July 2004
Memo To Texas: HERE WE GO AGAIN.
All right. Time to stop picking on poor Halle Berry, even though she's dumb and crazy and runs into things a lot with her car. It's time for a good old round of one of You Are Dumb Dot Net's favorite pastimes, KICK THE REDNECKS.
Since my plan to incorporate a sterility-inducing quantity of radium into the pressing process for the "Blue Collar Comics" DVD ended in dismal failure in no small part due to having thought of it after the stupid thing came out, I am forced, once again, to use this column as my sole vehicle for revenge against the mostly white, mostly southern, mostly male, mostly NASCAR-watching, mostly hootenannying hordes that embrace racism, stupidity, and pleistocine culture as their inalienable heritage. Plus, they keep giving Jeff Foxworthy money, and that's just fucking inexcusable.
Today, our ire returns to Texas, where the famed Yellow Rose is apparently made that way with an excess of chromium-laced paint, and where the natives then apparently gobble the roses down like White Castle sliders. Specifically, scenic Beaumont, Texas. Named after Hugh Beaumont, who played Ward "Lord Of All Repressed White Males" Cleaver, Beaumont is home to an astonishing array of beauty and culture.
Well, OK. They've got "Ford Park Entertainment Complex", which at first glance seems to be a pickups-instead-of-chocolate version of Hershey Park, but instead is just some form of low-rent arena where you can go hear Aaron Carter sing on August 14. They also have (and this is all going off the official Beaumont website, which is startlingly difficult to glean actual information from) a giant fire-hydrant-shaped building or silo painted like a cow; the Beaumont Drillers, which is either a sports team or a live sex show; the Texas Wildcatters, which is again either a sports team or a live sex show; and an active natural hazard mitigation plan of some sort.
Oh, and Jap Road. But if you want to see historic Jap Road, you'd better get down to Beaumont fast, because this piece of local history is about to be wiped off the map, literally, by a bunch of pinko commie P.C. liberals who don't understand how important Jap Road is.
Jap Road is a small country lane in Beaumont, allegedly taking its colorful name in honor of Yoshio Mayumi, who introduced rice farming to the region. No, really. It comes from a quaint time in Beaumont's past when you could honor someone simply by referring to their ancestry in a derogatory manner. This time is referred to by locals as "Last Tuesday".
But finally, after a ten-year fight, in a FOUR TO THREE DECISION, the local county commissioners decided they should change the name to something less offensive. Popular suggestions by locals include Yellowman Ave, Slanteye Lane, Pokemon Plaza, and We'llkickyourassifyoubuyatoyota Boulevard. But no new name can salve the loss from locals who, when Jap Road vanishes, will take a part of their history with it.
"It's our history, it's our heritage. I can remember when it was a dirt road, now it's being portrayed as a racial divide between us and the Japanese-Americans," said Jap Road resident Earl Callahan. Some say Callahan, who's lived on Jap Road all his life, was incensed because he'd just ordered four reams of custom "wacky" stationery with his address on it from Abercrombie and Fitch.
But the County Commission, apparently having read my previous statements on the South, decided that even though none of the residents of Beaumont, TX would ever consider even thinking about being racist, especially to those nice Japanese people, they should probably change the name to keep them from looking like complete and utter redneck hicks. But Jason Marshbum, whose last name sounds like a British euphemism for diarrhea, didn't get that particular memo.
"It feels like we're in the middle of a George Orwell novel. It's like me suing Keebler or Nabisco because the word 'cracker' is offensive to us white people." Yes, it's exactly like that, except for there being no actual food product named "Jap" that the road was really named for, you fucking cracker. If you're going to name-drop George Orwell in an attempt to distract people from the pig attached to your crotch, you should have someone read one of his books to you first.

You Want Some Comedy With That?

Fri, 19 Aug 2005 11:39:12 -0500

Main Column, 16 June 2004
Memo to the USDA and Texas: YOU ARE DUMB.
It's like some horrible SAT question gone wrong:
Reagan : Ketchup :: Bush : French Fries
It really is funny the way Dubya is choosing to take up the "Reagan legacy", by basically taking Reagan's evil ideas and then ratcheting up the stupidity to the breaking point. Reagan cut taxes so that there'd be no money for leftist social programs; Bush does the same, but throws in a $200 billion war on top. Reagan surrounded himself with crooks and politicians on the take, Bush surrounds himself with crooks and politicians on the take from the crooked and corrupt companies they "used to" work for. Reagan slowly deteriorated into a drooling vegetable, Bush came roaring out of the gate with the mental capacity of an underfed zucchini.
Which, in a borderline-masterful segue, brings us to the regular kind of vegetables. Reagan tried to get ketchup classified as a vegetable for nutritional purposes in school lunches, and failed. Bush's USDA, two decades later, has gotten ketchup's symbiotic partner, the batter-dipped, deep-fried French Fry, classified as a "fresh vegetable". And in an unlikely triumph of Bush administration subtlety, managed to do it a YEAR AGO, and nobody noticed.
It only came out now, a year later, because someone stood to lose some money off of it. Specifically, Fleming Companies, who makes batter-dipped french fries, and is now bankrupt. The serpentine bankruptcy laws treat companies differently if they sell fresh fruits and vegetables, you see. They owe more money if french fries are fresh, so they took the USDA to court over it. This is apparently what Republicans mean by allowing market forces to self-regulate. As soon as the mass warping of the fabric of reality and the meanings of words impacts someone financially, they will then work to correct things so that "fresh vegetable" and "batter-dipped, deep-fried, frozen hunk of starch" are no longer synonyms.
Except that they sued in Texas. And in Texas, food comes in two classifications: Hacked From The Still Warm Quivering Flesh Of A Cow And / Or Steer, and Fresh Vegetable. So the Texas judge had no problems going along with the french-fry industry's argument that chopping up a potato, dipping the pieces in batter, frying them in oil, and then freezing the result is no different than waxing a cucumber. Yee. Haw.
Representatives from the USDA, dimly aware of an epic public relations clusterfuck, were quick to reassure the American public that the ruling did not apply to nutrition, only to laws involving commerce. That's comforting. They're only behaving in a completey insane way in order to pander to huge food-processing conglomerates! They're not expecting anyone to actually BELIEVE that a batter-dipped french fry is a fresh veggie, they just want to call it one so that their corporate friends can use the loophole to get more money!
In a related story that is not real but instead invented to set up the standard comedy premise of taking the already ludicrous real-life example and extending it to other products, tortilla chips will be considered "corn on the cob" for purposes of interstate commerce, the Wonder corporation will now be receiving subsidies for all the "wheat" it "grows", and employees are now designated as "children" for tax purposes, allowing your company to claim you as a dependent. But don't worry. When it comes to school lunches, tortilla chips, Wonder bread, and human employees will retain their scientifically determined nutritional value. At long last, somebody thought of the children.

Tour De Dumb

Fri, 19 Aug 2005 12:28:57 -0500

Main Column, 4 May 2004
It's always important to remember that the DUMB can take many forms. I think today would be an excellent day to take a bunch of small bits that aren't worthy of their own full-day column and shabbily dress them up as a Tour De Dumb, to remind us all that there's more than politics and religion to inspire idiocy, although not MUCH more.
For example, there's BOOBIES AND WEINERS. And TEXAS. Pretty much any time you get boobs and Texas together, you get a primo example of Funny Dumb.
Funny Dumb is when a barge tips over in Texas. Because all the passengers were on one side of the barge. Because the barge was tied up near a nude beach. A nude beach named "Hippie Hollow". When there's only one nude beach in your entire state, and it's named "Hippie Hollow", you really don't get to bitch when people call you backwards.
Apparently, there is no Internet in Texas. Or premium cable. Or 7-11's. Because only in a world without these things is seeing naked people such an event that it could get EVERYONE on a barge to come out and stare. PLUS, the beach was being used for a semi-annual gay and lesbian event, so I can just imagine what must have gone through the minds of the 60 Texans on the barge, from "Hey, naked people!" to "What are they DOING!" to "Why are my feet wet?" to "Glub". Funny, funny dumb.
And then there's Creeeeeeepy Dumb, which may be the nigh-exclusive domain of Michael Jackson. Attentive readers may have noticed me not making much fun of MJ, because the as-yet-untold Michael Jackson joke is an elusive beast indeed. But yesterday, the contents of some confiscated stuff were revealed, amongst them a note. And in the note, MJ refers to his young guests at Neverland Ranch as "rubbers". GAH! Creepy dumb!
If they ever find a note where MJ calls himself "glue", he's going to jail, as "bounce off" and "stick" are not verbs you want associated with your underage sleepover guests.
And, of course, there's Wuss Dumb, which is always my favorite kind of dumb. Wuss Dumb occurs whenever someone important is caught on tape saying something that is... inconvenient later. And so they either pretend they always meant something else ("weapons of mass destruction related program activities"), claim youthful indiscretion ""I think the word [atrocities] is a bad word. I think it's an inappropriate word.", or, when these aren't an option, just completely wuss out. My PDA just beeped, which means one thing. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!
"The new administration seems to be paying no attention to the problem of terrorism. What they will do is stagger along until there's a major incident and then suddenly say, 'Oh, my God, shouldn't we be organized to deal with this?'" - Paul Bremer, February 2001
"Criticism of the new administration, however, was unfair. President Bush had just been sworn into office and could not reasonably be held responsible for the Federal Government's inaction over the preceding 7 months.'' - Paul Bremer, WUSSING OUT yesterday.
And speaking of months of inaction, BONUS QUOTE! - "In November I talked to Mr. Bremer about human rights violations in general and in jails in particular. He listened but there was no answer. At the first meeting, I asked to be allowed to visit the security prisoners, but I failed." - Abdel Basset Turki, former Iraqi human rights minister. This makes Paul Bremer the official poster boy for Wussy Dumb. Asshole.
And finally, there's Whiny Dumb. Once a month, like clockwork, I have to experience Whiny Dumb. No, not that, you misogynists. I'm talking about the kind of whiny dumb that happens when little children don't get what they want the instant they want it. See, there's a version of Dance Dance Revolution for XBox. And every month, Konami puts up five new songs to download. And every month, Microsoft is less than completely diligent in getting the song pack up on the servers. And despite this happening five times now, people still WHINE on the big DDRFreak.com message board. Like this guy, who uses the handle "wesdives":
I wouldn't be concerned except we were never given a date, and it takes me a grand total of ten to fifteen minutes to shut down my computer, unplug eth. cable from modem and replace it with one that goes down to the xbox, then turn the modem back on and wait for it to warm up, go downstairs, disc swap, wait for ultramix to load, wait for live to load, and wait for the songpack screen to load, by which point I know I must either A.) download the freggin' songpack which'll take twenty minutes or B.) repeat all of the above steps in reverse order so I can complain as I'm doing now. Not very keen on the idea of doing that 10 times a day.
Man, what a hassle. If only there were some large group of DDR fanatics. DDR Freaks, even. And if only there were some way for this large community to talk to each other, some kind of... FORUM, that's it! And on this forum, whoever noticed that the song pack had been posted could, and I know this is radical and revolutionary, but they could MENTION IT. And then all the other people reading the board could go check for the songpack. Oh, sure, this would require some kind of national computer network for sharing data, some kind of... Internal Network or something, but maybe there's some military technology we can adapt. All to save poor wesdives the trouble of checking TEN TIMES A DAY for a song pack that nobody will ever play online anyway because they're busy setting up Castles In The Sky Light games non-fucking-stop.
That last bit was just for me. If you laughed at it, you should send me your gamertag.