You Are Dumb - Media

Can't Spell Dumbledore Without It

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 23:03:06 -0500

Nerds, 26 October 2007

Memo to Jeffrey Weiss: YOU ARE DUMB.

It was inevitable, really. As soon as J. K. Rowling announced to the world via a book tour stop that Albus Dumbledore was, in the vernacular, a gay homosexual, wheels were set in motion.

The turning of those wheels would lead to many, many stupid things being sent out into the public sphere. And with a pile of stupidity that large, someone was bound to beat the odds and crack the threshold for YAD's sublime, albeit fickle, attention.

To be even franker than usual, I couldn't give two of someone else's shits about anyone actually upset about Dumbledore's sexuality, at least from a moral turpitude standpoint. He's already a pagan warlock with a history of child endangerment - the small number of people who could overlook that, but be pushed over the edge by a retroactive outing can safely fuck off without any help from yours truly.

Jeffrey Weiss, however, is a problem. Because his outrage is rooted in the depths of Bad Nerddom. And unlike most Bad Nerddom, it's not confined to the message boards and comic shop back rooms that are its natural habitat. No, in a horrific case of nerd mainstreaming, we've got an entertainment writer for the Dallas Morning News sounding like Harry Knowles after a three day Red Bull bender. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"But telling us that Dumbledore is gay, as you did last week? Why would you do that? As a fan, I can understand both the authorial impulse and the public interest. As a reader, it's making me nuts."

First, Weiss deprives me of a perfectly good testicle joke by not going with the more traditional "driving me nuts". And second, he's got his roles completely backwards. A reader would be the one to understand authorial impulse. It's the fan in him who's got his panties in a twist. Case in point:

"Jo – can I call you Jo? Like all of your myriad fans, I've spent so much time exploring the children of your mind over this past decade that I feel we are friends. You lived with Harry, his friends and his foes for so many years. You birthed them, shaped them, honed the fine details of their existence. And you thought long and hard about exactly which of those details were so important to the story that you would include them in the books. For all of those years, until those books were published, the characters and settings were yours to command and control. But then you let them go. And speaking for all of your happy readers I need to tell you: Now they are ours."

NO THEY FUCKING WELL AREN'T. They're still hers. And you're not her friend. You're the creepy dude she's forced to interact with on these book tours. She tolerates you because you have collectively given her vast sums of money, but all you bought were the books, not the intellectual property rights. You're a hobby-stalker. Nothing more. A hobby-stalker with - at the very least - closeted fabric tendencies. Get a load of this:

"Based on what you decided to put in the books, I can imagine that Dumbledore once had a girlfriend or that he was so emotionally crushed by guilt that he sealed himself off from romance or that he was one of those rare men for whom romance never really came up – or that he was gay. I can consider any of those possibilities as I read – or I can mull over all of them at the same time. Talk about magic. Is Dumbledore gay? He is for you, apparently. But unless you said it in the actual books, must he be so for me? Your saying so now makes it harder for me to imagine anything different. Do you really want to limit your fictional world that way?"

She's not limiting her fantasy world, Mr. Magic Pants. She's limiting your fantasy life. Which is not her problem. Dumbledore is gay. Apparently he always was. Your inability to cope is not proof of Rowling's secret malevolent plot to crush the delicate spirits of you and your fellow dreamers.

Although if such a secret plot existed, I do admit my respect for Rowling would grow faster than the Dumbleschlong* at a merman orgy. Because a good solid spirit-crushing is exactly what's called for here.

* Everyone and their gay uncle have been doing "magic wand" dick jokes for the past week. It's phallic. We get it. Move along.

No Sympathy For The Devils

Tue, 19 Jul 2005 10:31:05 -0500

Republicans, 13 July 2005

Memo To The Potentially Sympathetic: FUCK OFF.

It's tough holding certain principles. It really is. Because if you believe strongly enough in a certain principle, an individual who's caught on the wrong side of it should garner some sympathy, even if they're otherwise wholly unsympathetic. To do otherwise would be hypocrisy. It's like the saying goes: I may not like what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it. That's a stone bitch to pull off in practice. Similarly, I've found myself failing to feel sympathy for a number of individuals whose situation warrants it, because, well, I don't fucking like them very much.

Like Judith Miller. Judith Miller is in jail right now because she's refusing to reveal a confidential source. This is a big thing for journalism. A vital and important principle to uphold, even if you're upholding it to defend scumbags. Not that journalists are doing much these days with their confidential sources, and when they do, nobody listens anyway. The principle still stands, and Judith Miller was brave to choose jail time to uphold it. That said, fuck her.

More than anyone at the New York Times, Judith Miller was the one responsible for the shoddiest, flimsiest stories that supported the case for Saddam Hussein's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. Relying on Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress, she put a ton of misinformation out there. Mobile weapons labs? Aluminum tubes for nuclear centrifuges? Nerve gas antidotes? Miller believed it all, and pushed this bullshit on her readers, directly aiding the trumped-up case for a fucked-up war. So you'll have to forgive me if I take a certain attitude of revelry toward her current discomfort.

I also believe that "sin taxes" are, as a general rule, regressive taxes demonizing bad habits and unfairly punishing the poor. So I'm not thrilled that Minnesota seems to be balancing its budget on the backs of cigarette smokers. Other than giving smokers something fresh and new to bitch about now that you can't smoke in restaurants anymore, I really don't see an upside.

But when they announced a huge tax increase on other tobacco products - cigars, pipe tobacco, and chaw - well, welcome to Toughshittia, population YOU. If there are three groups of people I have a nigh-impossible time scraping up sympathy for, it's pipe-smokers (high demographic correlation with wankery), cigar smokers (high demographic correlation with dickheadery, plus they make the world smell more like vaporized wet dog ass), and smokeless tobacco connoisseurs (high demographic correlation with pigfuckery). Sorry. I feel bad your hard-earned dollars are going to pay for poor people's health care, but not bad enough to actually give a damn.

I don't think it's right when underlings are put into awkward, uncomfortable positions because their boss is an incompetent, lying criminal who consorts with even worse criminals. That said, Scott McClellan can twist in the fucking wind until he's press-secretary jerky for all I care, and I will weep not one iota of tearwater for his sorry, sorry, Rove-ass-covering-ass. It's not like Scotty didn't know the job description when he came on board. Not like he hadn't had to watch Ari Fleischer spin as if his life depended on it during the first part of the Bush presidency. And now the press corps, sensing the possibility of making something stick that the public will be able to understand, are after him in a manner analagous to real journalists after real crooked politicians, albeit on a lesser scale. Enjoy the rest of your week, McClellan. I know I will.

And finally, I believe that when Big Media releases stuff on DVD, they should do their damndest to completely release that stuff on DVD. That means paying for music rights, negotiating for footage, restoring syndication cuts, and generally doing the fucking job right and getting it all in there. If they don't, someone else is gonna do it right down the line, and we'll all end up buying it over again.

That said, no matter how hard I try, no matter how many muscles I strain, I simply cannot empathize at all with a message board poster complaining about this week's He-Man and the Masters of the Universe DVD's. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"'Diamond Ray of Disappearance' is missing a huge chunk of footage (Orko-related, notes this fan of the little Trollan) around the act break." - One "Garrett".

Garrett does not live in a world I can sympathize with. Maybe that makes me a bad person, but I can live with that. Garrett lives in a world where the excising of Orko footage is not the act of a benevolent god or gods. In which Orko, along with his spiritual brethren Snarf, Blip, Gleek, Cringer, and Scrappy, is not a blemish upon an otherwise fond childhood memory, but is rather an object of nerdworship, to the extent of actually knowing the little fucker's SPECIES. I can't do it. Unlike Orko (apparently), I am only human.

It's Not Bad, It's Worse

Thu, 18 Aug 2005 13:54:48 -0500

Main Column, 28 October 2004

National politics got you down? Then whatever you do, for fuck's sake, do NOT look at the local races. Becuase THEY ARE DUMB.

I have never in my life wished for another man to fuck a pig and get caught more than I do right now. Except that if he did, if there was some Austin Gullette protege out there, he wouldn't make the news unless he was running for Congress. And even then, they'd get confused over the term "pork-barrel". The news is 80% politics, 20% Iraq, with a 15 percent overlap of Iraq/Politics. If Ashlee Simpson had appeared on SNL three weeks from now, her story wouldn't have petered out in less than a week. Thank goodness for small favors.

Anyway, they say that all politics are local. And I say that all politics are fucking stupid. By applying the Fucking Stupid Commutative Principle, then, we find that all local politics are fucking stupid. But now we need evidence to back up our theory. Can we discover any? Let's find out together.

ILLINOIS: You've heard of Illinois. That's where Barack Obama is giving Alan Keyes the kind of man-spanking Keyes professes to hate, but secretly loves. Only it's in the polls. But you may be surprised to know that there are other politicians in Illinois, some of them potentially almost as dumb as Keyes.

Jerry Weller, a Republican congressman from Illinois, is being challenged by Tari Renner, head of the poli-sci department at Illinois Wesleyan U. Weller, like some high school jock filled with roid rage, apparently feels the need to refer to his opponent as "the professor" at every opportunity, although there is no evidence as yet that Weller's campaign literature features crudely-drawn caricatures of Renner in a cap, gown, and big glasses. Weller, who is engaged to marry the daughter of a genocidal Guatemalan ex-dictator after the election, also is telling people that because some fringe anti-drug-war website "endorsed" Renner, that Renner is PRO-HEROIN. That entire preceding sentence is 100% true, especially the part about the dictator's daughter. I know. Even as I typed it, I thought to myself, "Damn, I'm making up some funny shit... wait, this is the TRUE part!"

KENTUCKY: Still, that's nothing compared to Kentucky, where Senator Jim Bunning is suddenly fighting for his career after going what many independent observers are calling COMPLETELY FUCKING NUTSO. He accused Democrats of beating his wife. He repeatedly changed the rules of his one debate with his opponent Daniel Mongiardo, performing his half of the debate on video from Washington, D.C., in an RNC studio, with no independent observers present. And he STILL got caught breaking the rules by using a teleprompter.

Faced with trouble, Bunning's camp did what any self-respecting Kentucky Republican would do. Called his opponent a queer little faggot who likes to fuck other men in the ass. Not in so many words, of course. This is Kentucky 2004, not Kentucky 1992! They've moved out of the Dark Ages, people. No, instead, David Williams, president of the state senate, made the point with subtlety and class. It's ACTUAL HOMOPHOBE-BAITING QUOTE TIME!

"What a shame it would be if we traded the strong left hand of Jim Bunning -- the punch that he has -- for the limp wrist of Mongiardo. [Bunning is] fully capable of still throwing that hard pitch from the mound. And his opponent is a switch-hitter who doesn't know if he's on the left or the right."

See? It's a baseball metaphor! 'Cause Bunning used to play major-league baseball, which is 100% straight and American. Williams, of course, denied that his statement was meant in a sexual way, and to give him the benefit of the doubt, allow me to list all the various connotations and meanings the term "limp wrist" has that do not apply to homosexual slurs.

There, I'm done.

MINNESOTA: And how much more local can you get than my own back yard? In our own Sixth District, just a ways north of me, Republican Mark Kennedy is staving off a challenge from Patty Wetterling, who rose to prominence after her son was abducted in 1989. Kennedy, who is apparently a bit of a complete asshole, started running ads that accused Wetterling of having "latched on to radical extremist groups".

My heavens! Did she visit a Hezbollah training camp? Join PETA? Was she, in fact, an Al Qaeda deep-cover mole, and her so-called "abducted son" was actually a DIRTY BOMB? No. "Latched on to radical extremist groups", translated from Asshole Politician into English, comes out as "Received support and money from MOVEON.ORG". Folks, if MoveOn is a radical extremist group, then Habitat for Humanity is the Symbionese Liberation Army.

So, over the next five days, as you look at the presidential election and despair at the state of politics, take heart in the knowledge that it gets much, much worse the farther you move down the ticket.