You Are Dumb - Meta

The Conditional Vacation

Sat, 01 Nov 2008 01:15:36 -0500

Election 2008, 5 November 2008

Memo to the American People: YOU ARE EITHER DUMB, MEDIOCRE, OR DESERVING OF SLIGHT GRATITUDE.

First, the important news. I'll be taking my first ever break from the column starting tomorrow. It won't be a long break. Somewhere between two and five weekdays. I think we could all use it, honestly. At least, I know I could use it, and I'm projecting that need onto the audience because I can. So sometime next week - probably not Monday, but no later than Thursday - I'll pick up the keyboard again, having cleared the election bile out of my system and hopefully built up a nice reserve of non-election stupidity to rail against.

And I'm getting a head-start on the break by writing this way, way ahead of time. How can I get away with that? Simple. Being incredibly self-aware, I already know how I'm going to react to the three big possible outcomes of yesterday's election. So I'll just list them all here, in increasing order of probability, and you can enjoy them with the cold, post-election dawn shining in your backward-facing eyes.

WORST-CASE SCENARIO: PRESIDENT-ELECT JOHN MCCAIN.

America, go fuck yourselves. Oh, wait, that's redundant, because you already did. If McCain won, then either you're all even more racist than I gave you credit for, or the old bastard stole it despite around a seven point poll deficit and a Keystone Kops-level organization. Either are hallmarks of a world so completely insane that I'll need the entirety of my break, and them some, just to process how much I despise you all down to a level where I can be comically uncivil.

BEST-CASE SCENARIO: PRESIDENT-ELECT BARACK OBAMA, SIXTY DEMOCRATIC SENATORS

Congratulations, America. You finally figured out that things suck. Don't pat yourself on the back too hard, though. It took thousands of dead soldiers, a trillion dollars in corruption and mismanagement, and the complete collapse of the economic system to get you to notice.

Prepare for the worst. Remember how, back in 2001, all the Bush apologists said you couldn't blame him for the recession that started when he did, because all that trouble was years in the making, and clearly Bill Clinton's fault? Yeah, don't expect that argument to get trotted out in January. I guarantee you that as you read this, the Republicans have already started their guerrilla war against the Obama administration, and the media will be giving them cover for it under the banner of bipartisanship. Well, bipartisanship is for suckers. Words like "moderate", "centrism", "coalition", and "reaching across the aisle" are just code for Democrats not doing what we all put them in power to do. Don't stand for it. America has shifted so far to the right that the most radical leftist agenda Obama, Reid, and Pelosi could muster would only drag us back to Richard Fucking Nixon on the political spectrum. Remember that when you're being asked to compromise with the powerless.

MOST-LIKELY SCENARIO: PRESIDENT-ELECT BARACK OBAMA AND THE FOUR-YEAR FILIBUSTER.

This is going to suck. Let's say you've got a feral child, raised by wolves. You bring that feral child, wearing nothing but a loincloth and a thin layer of its own shit, into your white-collar office workplace because it's Take Your Feral Child To Work Day.

The feral child wants to make copies, but you won't let him. The feral child wants to make mud pies for Janice's retirement party, but you won't let him. The feral child wants to work on linked tables in Access, but you won't let him. In fact, you keep him away from everything. The donuts in the breakroom, the good markers in the supply cabinet, even Minesweeper. You tell him to sit in the hard plastic chair in the empty cubicle and be quiet.

Oh, and you give him a large, heavy stick to keep him occupied.

The resulting stick-rampage, which leaves the duplexer shattered, the donuts scattered, and the interns splattered, is inevitable. And so is the shit Republicans will pull at every opportunity. They will have one tool at their disposal. One means of exercising power and influence, with all else taken from them. And they will beat you over the head with it while you plead with them to be reasonable and cooperate for the good of the country. In other words, it's going to suck, big-time. But at least a senile, power-hungry, amoral fucktard isn't in charge.

See you next week.

Tell Someone About YAD 2008

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 10:18:56 -0500

Main Column, 2 May 2008

Memo to all thousand or so of you: IT'S THAT TIME AGAIN.

Yes, it's round five of the annual tradition, Tell Someone About You Are Dumb Day. As always, scheduled on the closest Friday to May 1. We each have our parts to play. I provide a short refresher on what I do here and a list of some of my favorite columns from the past year, you go out to your favorite Internet haunts (or, if you're feeling cruel, some of your least favorite haunts" and throw the site in front of their faces.

Then they come here, like what they see, my power and influence grows, and I'm one step closer to apotheosis. Or something.

Anyway, the whole idea behind You Are Dumb Dot Net is that stupid people ruin shit for smart people. They irritate us, they annoy us, and they hold us back as a society. The more power stupid people have, the farther we get from Utopia. There are a number of weapons we have against the chronically thick. We can try to reason with them, we can try to educate them, we can try to bring them into the debate. Or, we can call them names and laugh at them. I'll leave those first three weapons to kinder, more patient people. Here at YAD, we traffic almost entirely in mockery and abuse.

Is it constructive? No. Is it elevating the discourse? No. Do I care? No. I'm not here to change lives, make a difference, or save the world. I'm here to laugh at stupid people, from the tap-dancing moron who leads the ostensibly free world all the way down to lowly New Jersey cops caught fucking cows. Which actually just happened, by the way. You know, the only thing I can think of more insulting to a cow than being fucked by a human is being fucked by a human in a state with a breed of cattle named after it. Or a state named after a breed of cattle. I'm not actually sure which came first.

Anyway, if you're new to the site, welcome. The following links should give you a pretty good idea of what we're all about here.

Canadian Spy Coins!

Death And Rockets!

Creation Museum!

Chatting With Jehovah!

Yes, Of Course I Covered Larry Craig!

Yes, And Rick Santorum Too!

There you have it. You Are Dumb Dot Net. Making the Interent slightly more interesting for ten minutes each day. Stick around. After all, it's an election year.

Better Living Via Bite-Sized Hate

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 22:08:52 -0500

Politics, 2 April 2008

Memo to all and sundry: FUCK YOU.

I am, once again, completely and utterly exhausted by April Fool's Day on the Internet. I mean seriously, Gamespot. Rock Band for PSP? If you're not going to even fucking try, don't even fucking try and save us all the trouble of having to experience you not fucking trying. The only good prank you pulled on the entire site was giving that shit-ass XBox Live Arcade game, TiQal, a 7.5 out of ten, but it turns out that wasn't a joke. You're just huge suckers for faux-Mayan color-matching crapfests.

Anyway, today, in an attempt to re-rail a brain thrown completely off the tracks by the Internet's annual comedy suck-fest, I'm going to just throw out micro-memos to people who've been pissing me off in tiny, tiny ways of late. Throwing much of the onus onto you, the reader, to look up the details if you're not familiar already.

To Pat Buchanan: Um, when Obama said he wanted to have an open and frank discussion about race? Yeah. He didn't mean with you, asshole.

To Lou Dobbs: It may be spelled "ethnocentric special interests" on your Teleprompter, but we all know you pronounce it "wetback".

Bonus Lou Dobbs Supplemental: I bet it didn't say "cotton-pickin'" on your prompter, did it, you racist old fuck? Way to make me feel sympathy for Condoleeza Rice for the first time ever.

To George W. Bush: The surge is whatting again?

To John McCain: The what is working again?

To Bravo: Please increase the number of blogs you host for Top Chef. Six hundred a week isn't cutting it. I cannot rest until I know how Sherri Shepherd, Tom Clancy, and the tiger that mauled Roy feel about the last episode.

To The Bonus Supplemental Cable Network, aka TLC: Why not just rename yourself the Advice From Douchebags Network and be done with it?

To Everyone arguing about Sara Jane Olson: You are a bunch of fucking morons. For the second time in a decade, nobody cares. Keep it up and you'll make me tell you why. And the last thing I want to do right now is tell you why.

It's That Time Again

Sun, 09 Mar 2008 20:17:46 -0500

Main Column, 10 March 2008

Memo to entropy: FUCK YOU.

It's my birthday, and as is You Are Dumb Dot Net tradition, I take the day off. But not the way I normally take the day off, no. On my birthday I give you all a little something to tide you over until the next column. So what am I doing instead of hating John McCain? I'm playing Super Smash Brothers Brawl.

And why am I playing Super Smash Brothers Brawl? Because I am a late-life Nintendo convert, and because you have got to respect any game that decides it needs to have Will Wright as a weapon. And the character roster is DEEP. I've only unlocked a couple of characters, but even I've hit some major surprises:

He's fairly slow, but if you hit down plus B, he lets out a devastating indictment of the mainstream media. He made Pikachu cry, and convinced the Ice Climbers to run for their local school board to overturn the creationist majority.

A Thousand Points Of Hate

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 20:03:00 -0600

Main Column, 23 January 2008

Welcome to the 1,000th edition of You Are Dumb Dot Net. Only not really.

I don't have any way of counting other than, you know. Actually counting. But today does bring "node/1000" in the content management system that I use to run the site, and there are only a tiny, tiny handful of nodes that aren't columns, so I've decided to call that the count and celebrate the odometer rolling over.

It's not a huge deal, but milestones are fun, and a good excuse to mention the milestone instead of actually writing about some stupid thing or other. So, in honor of the 1000th column, I've created the following graphic, which amuses me and also fulfills one of my standing goals - to get a Fernie design on a black T-Shirt in the CafePress store that even I forget I have most of the time.

Will there be two thousand? Damned if I know. But there'll be at least 1,001, and probably 1,002.

Stupdate

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 22:39:23 -0500

Meta, 18 October 2007

Memo to various and sundry: STILL DUMB.

Every once in a while, a number of topics I've opined upon in recent weeks get small, noteworthy updates that in and of themselves aren't worthy of a full column. Sometimes, those instances correlate nicely with my inability to string more than three coherent paragraphs in a row. This is what we in the free Internet content business call a "win-win".

YOUR IRAN STUPDATE:

In case you had harbored some doubts about my repeated assertion that yes, Virginia, we will be bombing Iran, check out the latest rhetorical flourish from the guy with his finger on the button and his thumb up his ass.

"We've got a leader in Iran who has announced that he wants to destroy Israel. So I've told people that, if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon."

That says it all right there, doesn't it? First, Bush is adopting that lovely, completely fucking insane Norman Podhoretz "World War III" terminology to describe what would happen if Iran got even a handful of nukes. You know, the formulation that completely ignores the overwhelming odds against Iran -using- them. And second, the KNOWLEDGE necessary to make a nuke? Hell, I have the knowledge necessary to make a nuke. Or at least I have the tool to provide me with that knowledge. It's called Wikipedia.

I mean, that's the kind of low bar that makes Saddam's evidence of having contemplated the development of WMD programs seem like a valid concern. So when the bombs start dropping, just remember - it's because we've received solid evidence that factions within the Iranian government have HEARD OF URANIUM.

YOUR CRAZY BITCH MALKIN UPDATE:

I can't believe the Democrats actually trolled Malkin. I don't know if they did it on purpose or not, but if it was intentional, whoever thought of it should be running the party.

After Malkin's attempt to demonize the Frost family backfired so bad that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell felt the need to lie about having been part of it, the Democrats upped the ante by putting forth another child whose life was saved by S-CHIP. A two-year-old girl with a heart defect.

At this point, Malkin and company had two options. They could quietly back off, or they could continue to fight based on their almost universally-mocked principle that any child put forward was "fair game". What would win out? The desperate pathological need never to admit, EVEN BY OMISSION, a mistake? Or the common sense that going after a two-year-old girl with heart defects won't win you any friends?

If you guessed "Common Sense", please turn in your gold vest and goatee, as you won't be needing them in this universe.

YOUR CRAZY FUCKING REPUBLICAN UPDATE:

A recent perusal of my Election 2008 posts got me to realize that of all the Republicans running for President, Mike Huckabee was the one who'd pissed me off the least. This led me to conclude that while I certainly didn't agree with his positions, Huckabee was like the one-lobed man in the country of the anencephalic. This, of course, was a mistake. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"The best thing to do is to encourage people to make good choices. For example, if we were really serious about stopping a problem, whether it's drunk driving, we don't say, 'Okay, don't drive as drunk,' do we? We don't say that a little domestic violence is okay, just cut it down a little, just don't hit quite as hard. We say it's wrong."

Now, this would be fine if Huckabee was talking about, say, a little torture. Or a little spying on Americans. But he wasn't. He was talking about safe sex. Which means in two sentences, Huckabee managed to use a completely WRONG analogy and a completely inappropriate one.

The drunk driving one is actually a good analogy for safe sex education. We don't go after the recreational activity, we go after the aspect of the recreational activity that causes harm. Drinking, and driving. Fucking, without a condom. It's a simple, straightforward analogy that Huckabee completely blows.

Perhaps realizing, on a subconscious level, that he's made a mistake, he then moves on to analogy #2, in which he attempts to equate something he thinks is bad (sex) with something everyone agrees is bad (domestic violence). Which is the kind of conflation that, no matter which way you slice it, implies that maybe getting into a extra-binding "covenant marriage" wasn't the best idea for one or both of the Huckabees.

At this rate, the lack of an even remotely sane Republican presidential nominee might save me from dying of an aneurysm if I have to vote for Hillary in 2008. Which is, um, good? I guess?

Who Are You Freaks?

Wed, 30 May 2007 22:33:29 -0500

Meta, 31 May 2007

Memo to the casual drive-by's: WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU PEOPLE?

Today, we celebrate the single biggest month, traffic-wise, in You Are Dumb Dot Net history. Over 9,000 unique visitors. Eleven hundred visitors a weekday. Big, scary numbers for a guy who yells at people and tells dick jokes.*

The funny thing about the new bigger numbers, though, is this. I know this is horribly meta, but bear with me, because I find this shit fascinating, and that means that you all have to sit quietly, read your free content, and pretend you find it fascinating too. Anyway, it's almost entirely from searches.

Last month, I got around 3,500 page views from search engine hits. That's about seven percent of my overall traffic. This month, with a day still to go, I got 15,000. Or nearly a quarter of my traffic. I'm thinking this is because my Google page rank clicked up from four to five somewhere near the end of April, but who knows? Maybe it's elves. Or maybe, like the polar bears, all the pollution is making everyone's genitals shrink.

Now, I know that SEEMS like a non-sequitur, and yet another attempt to shoehorn my favorite side effect of environmental damage into the middle of the column, but in reality, it's an attempt to shoehorn my favorite side effect of environmental damage that makes PERFECT SENSE. But to explain it, I need to take you on a guided tour of my top ten search phrases for the month of May. This is what YOU, the casual reader, keep typing into Google. And you see my site. And you click on it, which is the part that completely fucking mystifies me, in some cases.

#1: you are dumb; #6: youaredumb.net; and #7: youaredumb

This one actually makes perfect sense, and I'm happy that it's coming in first for a change, because it's just squeaking ahead of:

#2: tiny dick; #8: tiny dicks

I'm not sure what bothers me more. That a whole ton of people are searching the Internet for "tiny dicks", or that, having done so, they are drawn like a sailor to the siren song of You Are Dumb Dot Net. Because I guarantee you they're NOT looking for my three-plus-year-old Enzyte/Levitra column. Even if it does start with "Hey, you, with the tiny, limp dick..."

Not that I'm not grateful for the traffic - my ego thanks you all. But if you're Googling "tiny dicks", then you either want to look at tiny dicks, or you want to know what to do about your own tiny dick, and either way, I am either unable, or steadfastly refusing, to help you.

#3: kenneth pinyan; #4: people fucking animals; #9: michael patrick mcphail; #10: kenneth pinyan video

You sick fucking monkeys. Sure, part of it's my own fault, because I think that getting fucked to death by a horse, people fucking animals, and a guy getting acquitted of fucking a pit bull are all really funny things to write about. But still, bestiality taking up four spots on the top ten? And trust me, all you people at #10, be thankful you clicked on my site and DIDN'T find the footage. You're better off not knowing.

#5: limp dick

See above, only EVEN MORE SO. Seriously, people. This site will provide you with many things, but access to or directions out of the flaccidverse are NOT AMONG THEM.

So there you have it. My casual audience. A bunch of people who can't get it up, and even if they could, couldn't reach the poodle. I'm so proud. I hope you, my regular, non-perv readers enjoyed this look into the underbelly of the site almost as much as I enjoyed banging out a bit of quick lazy filler, but if you didn't, I still got to bang out a bit of quick, lazy filler. So I still win.

*OK, not Andrew Dice Clay numbers. But still, pretty fucking respectable, especially considering my relative lack of filthy nursery rhymes.

Larry The Keen Sociopolitical Observer Guy

Sun, 13 May 2007 21:09:22 -0500

Movies, 14 May 2007

Memo to Larry and Jack: YOU ARE DUMB.

Obviously, an important event like the World Congress of Families is going to disrupt schedules a bit. As a result, you're getting your Spastic Topic Monkey Friday on a Monday. It's a good thing I'm not a strict constructionist.

I'm sure regular readers of this space were surprised to not see Friday's column given over to Delta Farce, the exciting new Larry the Cable Guy wacky military comedy. I was a bit surprised myself. I mean, it's everything I hate, tied up in a neat little celluloid bow. But on the face of it, it's too easy - at least in a week where I had plenty of other material. But then I realized the funny thing about Delta Farce:

They actually went and made a movie whose premise is that a bunch of inbred, retarded redneck pigfuckers grab their guns and start shooting at brown people, because they CAN'T TELL which kind of brown people they are. That's the plot. The framework on which they hang their imitation processed cheese comedy. Which means that Delta Farce is the only Larry the Cable Guy movie with a socio- and geo-political subtext AND fart jokes. Even if it's just the fart jokes that are on purpose.

Normally, I have a strict policy of not responding to e-mail in the column. For a number of reasons, 99 times out of a hundred, it's a bad idea. But I'd like to extend a tiny modicum of thanks to some guy who signs his e-mails "Jack", but whose e-mail ID is the porntastic John Long, for the information he imparted.

That information is that Michael Patrick McPhail got off. Or, rather, he didn't get off. OK, he got off on account of not getting off in the way he was arrested for getting off, i.e. balls-deep in a pit bull. Washington State's first criminal bestiality charge is now its first bestiality acquittal. So, you know. Yay justice.

Upon the acquittal, which occurred on Thursday, apparently John "Jack" Long took it upon himself to find all the old webmockery based entirely on the arrest of McPhail and send them the news. Of course, not understanding that time is in fact LINEAR, he seemed to think that I should therefore have retroactively not written the October column. Or should have been following the case. Or something. I mean, yes, I'd be a bit touchy if every time someone googled my name DOGFUCKER came up in Arial 16 point, but that's no reason for some other guy to call me a prick.

Let me explain, to all of you and perhaps to Long how this column works. It works a whole hell of a lot like the Incredible Hulk. Specifically, the Bill Bixby / Lou Ferrigno version. Every day, I breeze into a new town. Every day, I see something that pisses me off or cracks me up. I get big, I get green, I metaphorically throw some metaphorical dudes through metaphorical doors in metaphorical slow motion (or actual slow motion if you're not that good a reader). And then I wake up, wearing nothing but torn jeans, and head off to a new day and a new town as mournful piano music plays.

I do not look back. Even if I wanted to, it's just impractical. I don't mind admitting I was wrong. I don't even mind admitting when the facts, as laid out in this column after being gleaned from reasonably reliable news reports, change in a way that slightly impacts my rhetorical thrust. Hell, even though John "Jack" Long somehow expected me to know, three days later, the outcome of a six-month old case I only covered in the first place because it was a much-needed distraction from Election 2006, and sent me an e-mail that contained the word "femi-nazi", thereby firmly establishing his douchebag credentials, I've taken it upon myself to make changes in the original McPhail column to account for the new circumstances.

Because that's how much of a fucking mensch I am.

Tell Someone About You Are Dumb Day

Fri, 27 Apr 2007 13:26:20 -0500

Meta, 27 April 2007

Memo to my audience: TELL SOMEONE ABOUT YOU ARE DUMB.

It's that time again. The last Friday in April, which I have for all time designated as Tell Someone About You Are Dumb Day. The one day a year I ask the readership to create a bit of word of mouth - across the Internet, locally, or however they see fit. You don't have to, of course. We have a basic, simple contract here where I provide free content five days a week most weeks, and you in return think I'm pretty fucking awesome.

But since I am, in your own words that I've just placed in your mouth, pretty fucking awesome, why not take today's chance to spread the word and be my shameful, unnatural marketing minions? It's fun*, it's helpful**, and it only annoys your friends, neighbors, and online associates for a little while.

YAD is now over four years old, and is read by around a thousand people every day. Which is, as far as I'm concerned, already a fucking shitload. Even if you subtract all the Germans and the couple hundred people every month looking for horse-fuckees, it's a lot. The first time I did this back in 2004, if I got 50 visits in a day, it was a good day. A year later, three hundred people were checking in each day. Last year? 550. And this year, a grand. Sure, I'd still be doing this if was just those 30 die-hards from '04, but more ain't worse.

For those of you here for the first time, what I do here at You Are Dumb Dot Net is make fun of stupid people. I cover lots of topics, but generally focus on politics, religion, bigotry, pop culture, and whenever possible, people fucking animals, because people fucking animals is always funny. I call people bad names, because it's funny. I make dick and poop jokes, because dicks and poop are funny. I'm not fair, but I like to think I'm not intellectually dishonest, either.

And for the record, it's not a blog. It's a daily column. Think of it like Penny Arcade, except that I can't draw, so I have to type all thousand words. Oh, and I'm up more days a week and always on time. Since this is not a blog, you don't get to comment on the articles per se, although the FORUM link up there on the left will lead you to the place where a couple dozen regular readers chat.

The site has a mascot. Fernie, a pissed-off plant. We like Fernie. Fernie has a short, convoluted, and odd history which you can explore at your leisure.

If you don't have the kind of free time it would take to read through the over 800 columns I've produced since my modest beginning, I like to provide a helpful list of some of my favorite columns from the past year, or columns that cover particularly famous bits of stupidity.

Going there.
Jews can be stupid too!
The ex-gay movement is always funny.
NAZI!
Rush Limbaugh's penis!
Series! Of TUBES!
Atheissa Explains It All
Old people fucking!
Poop jokes!
Second Life
A shocking confession.
Wedding DJ's are the enemy.
Anger without dick jokes.
Subway Vs. Quizno's Vs. Me
Kicking Chuck Norris' Ass
Ted Haggard!
The PS3
Dinesh D'Souza
Aqua Bomb Boston Force!
Dumber than creationists?
Darwin Day
Comedy Court
The Number 23
Battlestar Galactica
The Return Of Sharkey
Hypothesticles

You Are Dumb Dot Net. My gift to a world that fears and hates me. My gift... and my curse. If you like it, there'll be more on Monday. If you don't like it, fuck you, there'll still be more on Monday.

*...for me.

**...to me.

Who To Blame

Thu, 08 Mar 2007 21:34:59 -0600

Main Column, 9 March 2007

Memo to me: OLDER AGAIN.

Time for the You Are Dumb Dot Net birthday tradition. Sometimes I put a fair amount of effort into photoshopping an image. Sometimes I throw up a fern and some links to past columns. Sometimes I ignore the tradition in favor of some vitally important mocking.

This year, I have an image that doesn't actually mean anything, but I like it anyway. It's a panel from Vertigo Comics' "Jack of Fables", issue 8, by Bill Willingham, Matthew Sturges, Tony Akins, and Andrew Pepoy. The panel has context, but I like it better removed entirely from that context and reappropriated for my own.

I don't know. There's just something strangely appealing about a random, beaten man blaming his woes on my clan. This must be how Jimmy Khan of Bugfuck, Nebraska feels every time he gets to that spot in Star Trek II. You know the spot. And if you don't know the spot, show this paragraph to the nearest nerd and have him explain it to you.

Unprecedented

Mon, 06 Nov 2006 22:18:01 -0600

Meta, 8 November 2006

Memo to [INSERT LOSER HERE]: GO FUCK YOURSELVES.

I know everyone tuned in to You Are Dumb Dot Net today expecting a repeat of 2004's post-election drama-fest, where, depending on the result, I either excoriate the electorate for being even stupider than I thought they were or express begrudging annoyance over what it took to get them to finally wake up a bit, but fuck it.

The entire Internet is going to be talking about the election today. Seriously. Look around. It's everywhere. This thing's being dissected by blog wonk nerds at the rate of thousands of words per minute. Most of them hacks not fit to wipe YAD's bunghole, true, but if you want political commentary, trust me. You have options coming out of places that doctors haven't discovered yet.

Plus, quite frankly, most days I write this shit up in the early evening prior to publication. I've already done the staying-up-late-rewriting-as-the-results-come-in once this year. I've paid my fucking dues. So instead, I'm going to do something completely unprecedented in the history of this column. I'm going to talk about things I like. No hate, no rage, no comedy venom, no yelling. I've never done this before, because that's not why I made this place. That's why, odds are, I'll never do it again. But if you're anything like me, today you need a fucking break more than you need one more electoral dissection. Plus, I get to write this way ahead of time and spend Election Night playing Guitar Hero II. Which is one of the things that I like.

Balsamic vinegar is good. Here's a fun fact. Thirty years ago, almost nobody in this country knew what balsamic vinegar was. It was completely off the radar. Now you can get it at Wendy's. From obscurity to ubiquity in less than three decades. That's fucking astonishing. The "Gold Quality" stuff from Trader Joe's is especially good, if you find yourself shopping.

Okami is a fucking wonder. That's a PS2 game, by the way. You can look it up if you want to know the details. What I like about it is that it's the antithesis of the modern video game industry. It's not a sequel, it's not based on an 80's movie. It's not by Electronic Arts. The whole thing, from start to finish, seems to have been made with care and attention by artists. Except for the goddamn runaway log bit, when they appear to have gone out for coffee and had their offices invaded by twenty sadistic monkeys. The point being, if you have a Playstation 2, it's worth your time.

The music of Jonathan Coulton. Both seasons of The Venture Brothers. The DS Lite. So I Married An Axe Murderer. Narbonic. A bag of Combos. Christopher Moore books, especially "Coyote Blue". All very pleasant ways to pass time. Enjoyable distractions from politics, war, and stupidity. Look 'em up if they're new to you.

Oh, and one more thing I love. Smacking down stupid inbred hick moron superstitious bigoted assholes. Which I'll be back to, in full effect, first thing tomorrow.

The Story So Far...

Thu, 24 Aug 2006 15:19:50 -0500

Main Column, 25 August 2006

We've had a lot of new faces around here lately. Courtesy of Television Without Pity. If you've come here in the last few days because you love Farscape recaps, welcome.

And since it would be incredibly rude of me to assume that anybody reading Farscape recaps has a shitload of free time to fuck around on the Internet, I thought I'd provide you all with a list of highlights so that you don't have to go through the ENTIRE archive. Because while every one of the 666+ columns on You Are Dumb Dot Net are shining beacons of witty hatemongering, some are more equal than others.

I do this every once in a while, so for historical purposes, check out the annual Tell Someone About You Are Dumb Day columns for 2005 and 2006 for lengthy lists of highlights.

And in the past three months alone, we've seen:

The Star Wars Incident and Part Two. Boy, were they pissed off. Seriously. You have no idea how pissed off they were. Or how funny THAT was. I hope they don't still curse my name.

So many things have changed. Why, I remember when Bob Ney still thought he could win re-election. Good times.

NAZI MUSEUM!

I love dick jokes. So when Kanab, Utah pulled a huge boner, you can guess how much fun I had.

And speaking of dicks...

Not a dump truck! - A series of tubes!

MOO?

Zombies, and other hideous, decaying creatures clinging to life after they've been put out of their misery

You Are Dumb Dot Net. Come for the hate, stay for the pie. (Pie may contain up to 98% hate by weight)

Almost Too Proud To Beg

Wed, 12 Jul 2006 14:36:35 -0500

Main Column, 13 July 2006

NOTE: This is going up as a column because otherwise, the people who read via RSS will never see it. Real column probably tomorrow.

Let me just say right up front that I'm very, very fucking ambivalent about this.

It's not that I don't think what I do here has value. And it's not that I don't think that value can't be expressed with a small amount of cash. It's not false modesty, that's for damn sure.

There's absolutely no reason whatsoever why I shouldn't at least allow for the possibility that, for the past two and a half years, some of you have been reading the column and thinking "Damn, if only I could send that guy a couple of bucks".

Except that it's tacky, and it's not why I started this site.

But I do need to replace my computer unexpectedly. It's something I certainly could muster up the resources to do on my own. It's also inarguably something I could do better, easier, and more effectively with a few -more- resources at my disposal.

So I've decided on an elaborate, transparent, face-saving compromise. I've made it possible for you to send money to me if you see fit, using the "Send YAD Money" link on the left. And now I'm going to try and convince you why you might not see fit.

Do not send me money because you think the column will cease if you don't. The column will continue for as long as I have the drive to write it and the means to post it. Not having a computer in the house for a few weeks is inconvenient as hell, but it ain't insurmountable.

Do not send me money you would otherwise have spent on food, rent, car insurance, cable TV, Internet service, personal debt reduction, taxes, small snack food items, your next hot date, actual charitable giving, or any other of life's necessities. If this happens at all, it happens as a shifting of funds from your disposable income to my disposable income.

Do not send me money because you think I'm making a difference. This isn't a cause, this isn't a crusade. It's one writer yelling and a few hundred readers laughing. Which is a glorious thing for what it is, but no more than that. Sending me money will not make the world a better place. It will make my home a better place.

Do not send me money because there is a threshold beyond which it will become feasible for me to make the switch from Windows to Mac. I'm not saying this isn't true - it is. But I'd feel dirty taking advantage of rabid system advocates.

Do not send me money if I see you in person more than once a month. That'll just be awkward.

So what's left? Only the pure, classic shareware concept. Very old-school. If you want to send a few bucks my way as a thank-you for the entertainment, then I'm not going to stop you. And if you don't, that's fine too. There won't be any ads, there won't be any premium content, there won't be any of that crap. This is not a money-making enterprise.

And no, there will not be an "I Saved Ferniee's Computer" T-Shirt.

The Lake Column

Thu, 15 Jun 2006 15:58:57 -0500

Meta, 16 June 2006

Memo to the USDA and Texas: YOU WERE DUMB.

It was like some horrible SAT question gone wrong:

Reagan : Ketchup :: Bush : French Fries

It really was funny the way Dubya chose 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 did the same, but threw in a $200 billion war on top. Reagan surrounded himself with crooks and politicians on the take, Bush surrounded 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, got 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 THREE YEARS AGO, and nobody noticed for a year.

It only came out a year later because someone stood to lose some money off of it. Specifically, Fleming Companies, who made batter-dipped french fries, and went bankrupt. The serpentine bankruptcy laws treat companies differently if they sell fresh fruits and vegetables, you see. They owed 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 only behaved in a completey insane way in order to pander to huge food-processing conglomerates! They didn't expect anyone to actually BELIEVE that a batter-dipped french fry is a fresh veggie, they just wanted to call it one so that their corporate friends could use the loophole to get more money!

In a related story that was not real but instead invented to set up the standard comedy premise of having taken the already ludicrous real-life example and extended it to other products, tortilla chips were considered "corn on the cob" for purposes of interstate commerce, the Wonder corporation received subsidies for all the "wheat" it "grows", and employees had their designation changed to "children" for tax purposes, allowing your company to claim you as a dependent. But don't worry. When it came to school lunches, tortilla chips, Wonder bread, and human employees retained their scientifically determined nutritional value. At long last, somebody thought of the children.

Tell Someone About You Are Dumb Day

Sat, 29 Apr 2006 08:25:09 -0500

Meta, 28 April 2006

Ah, springtime. The flowers bloom, the birds sing, and everyone's favorite not-blog turns to its readership in the annual tradition with the charming moniker Tell Someone About You Are Dumb Day 2006.

Held, as always, on the closest Friday to May 1, Tell Someone About You Are Dumb Day is the one day I ask anything of the audience beyond the motion of your eyeballs. The one day a year I ask you to promote the site. Tell your friends, tell your family, tell the Internet, tell someone, tell anyone. Tell people you think will enjoy it. Tell people you think will be offended by it. The word, as the antediluvian joke goes, is legs. Help spread the word.

Of course, since the Friday column stays visible all weekend long, some of you may be reading this site for the very first time. If you're wondering what the fuck You Are Dumb is and why you've been Told about it, allow me to explain.

You Are Dumb is a daily webcolumn. Don't think of it as a blog just because it has words and mentions politics. Think of it instead as a webcomic done by someone who can't draw.

The column covers stupidity in all its many and varied forms, albeit from a leftist/atheist/nerd perspective. Which doesn't mean I don't beat the shit out of leftists, atheists, and nerds from time to time. It just means I do it from the more loving side of complete hatred. There is anger, there is swearing, there are dick jokes, there are even, on occasion, jokes not about penises. Sometimes there aren't any jokes at all, which, if you have a LiveJournal, will be the times you'll like the best. Don't ask me why. It just works out that way.

To help you get started, I've prepared a list of links to columns covering significant events of the past twelve months.

The release of "Revenge Of The Sith"

The airing of "Videogame Vixens"

The emergence of the "Man-Date"

The Hot Coffee scandal

Crime-fighting cheerleaders

Pat Robertson goes nuts

A hurricane. Oh, and some flooding. And subsequently, lying and incompetence.

Supreme Court vacancies

The resignation of Randy "Duke" Cunningham (who, it was revealed this week, may also have gotten bribed with free hookers. GO DUKE!)

Oh, by the way, they're spying on you.

Vampire candidate

Devo 2.0

The Dover decision

And, of course, the event so significant, so mind-boggling, that people still search it out months later, Kenneth Pinyan gets fucked to death by a horse. If, at the end of things, I'm known solely as the guy who wrote that horse-fucking column, it'll still have been worth it.

Welcome to You Are Dumb Dot Net. Where geopolitics meets Norman Osborne's O-face, and geopolitics is the one to flinch.