You Are Dumb - Field Research

Cowabunga, Douche

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 22:48:21 -0500

Field Research, 16 July 2008

Memo to Target Douchebag: YOU ARE DUMB.

Man, it's been a long time since I've gotten to do one of these. I really prefer to live my life in such a way that I experience stupidity secondhand, through the Internet. But I'm fighting some pretty fucking tall odds there, and there's only so much you can do. Eventually, an idiot WILL cross your path, and in the SuperTarget in Knollwood, MN, it happened. Allow me to enumerate the crimes against humanity committed by the cropped-head, late-twenties douchebag ahead of me in line.

Crime the first: the faded T-shirt from some surf shop or the other. This is Minneapolis, asshole. If you're wearing a surf shop T-shirt here, you either don't surf, which makes you a poser, or you don't surf anymore, which makes you a double poser, because if you give up surfing to move to fucking Minneapolis, land of the ice and the snow, then you damn well better renounce ALL TRAPPINGS of the surfer lifestyle. Do not cling forlornly to the remnants of your surfer past, even if it's laundry day.

Crime the second: purchasing Axe products. If General Motors ever discontinues the Hummer, the people keeping the Axe line of manstank products will move to the top of the conspicuous consumption asshole list. I'm guessing, from the size of the package, that it was some sort of body wash designed to make every inch of your body, from scalp to taint, smell like someone who's dumb enough to have, even subliminally, bought into the Axe brand marketing campaign. And we both know this thanks to your third crime.

Crime the third: trying to EXPLAIN your Axe purchase. Not to me, but to the woman in line in front of you. This, by the way, is where the whole fucking thing began. I wouldn't have noticed the surf shirt if it weren't for the Axe thing, and I wouldn't have noticed the Axe thing if you hadn't tried to explain to the woman in front of you who you were clearly at least sort of kind of trying to chat up that you wouldn't have bought the Axe, but they sent you a free sample in the mail and, through the experience of that sample, determined that Axe products weren't too bad.

It was, in case you were wondering, completely fucking transparent. Clearly you saw her notice the Axe, clearly you knew that the Axe commercials made you look like the complete douchebag you were, and clearly you wanted to cover for it to save face. It didn't work. At least it didn't work for me, and I'm guessing, by the noncommittal "I'm just here at Target, stop talking to me" response you got, that it didn't work for her either. Which, by the way, leads us to:

Crime the fourth: stealing a frozen pizza. Having decided you were a douchebag, I was seventy-five-percent sure that the frozen Target fancy pizza on the bottom of your cart was not there because it wouldn't fit in the top of the cart. I was pretty sure it was there in the hopes that the Target cashier wouldn't see it and wouldn't ring it up, and you'd walk out with a free pizza. But since I hate to judge people wrongly, despite how rarely that ends up happening, I decided to do something that would fuck up your plans if I was right, and help you if I was wrong. So I kindly reminded you so you didn't, you know. Forget your pizza.

At that point, you son of a bitch, you lied to my face that you'd forgotten to put it up on the belt, then LEFT IT THERE, where, as predicted, the cashier ignored it and you went on your way. And on the off chance you were wondering, as you walked out the door and to your car, whether I'd be alerting Target to your petty pepperoni pilfering, let's clear this up. I'm not in inventory control. And I don't have an Uncle Ben you can ironically turn out to have killed with your stolen pizza, teaching me a lesson about responsibility. All I am is a man with a keenly honed douchebag detector, and by brazenly continuing with your cheesy larceny after society had taken notice of it, you'd proven its accuracy to within a milliliter of vinegar and water.

One More Small Step For The Information Age

Mon, 12 May 2008 17:24:26 -0500

Main Column, 12 May 2008

Memo to you and your midnight hassle: YOU ARE DUMB.

One of the great joys of living in the future, neck-deep in the Information Age, is that heaps of useless information is literally seconds away from you at all times. IMDB, Wikipedia, Google - if you want to know something, the odds are pretty good that you can find it. And we get used to having that information available to us readily, with such minimal effort that the apathy threshold is practically nonexistent.

The downside to this, of course, is that when the information you want ISN'T readily available, there's a sense of withdrawal, of powerlessness, that can be infuriating. Which is why I'm proposing, right now, as a further step toward my perfect Utopian world, a set of federal laws designed to create and support a website that, right now, I'm calling www.whatwasthefuckingdeal.com.

Here's the situation. Those of you living in apartment buildings, condos, dorms, or close-set urban communities will relate immediately. Those of you who are suburban homeowners with large lawns and setbacks will have to rely on memory. Anyway, it's late at night. So late at night you'd wonder, semantically, if it wouldn't be better to just say it was early in the morning. And somewhere nearby, in your building, your complex, outside your window, whatever, someone else is undergoing hassle.

It could be a lover's quarrel. It could be drunken assholery. It could just be roommates losing their temper or a party gone wrong. All you know is, you WERE blissfully asleep, and now you're not. You're listening to raised voices, things being thrown, doors being slammed, f-bombs being dropped, car horns being honked, whatever. There is altercation. there is antagonism, there are a bunch of other a-words, and that shit is keeping you a-wake. And what's worse is, it is never, EVER clear enough to figure out the context or narrative.

This is where the website comes in. At whatwasthefuckingdeal.com, you can go, enter your zip code, street address, and approximate time of disturbance, and it will search its database for a match. Now, as voyeuristic and exhibitiotastic as the Internet is, I don't expect this database to be filled voluntarily, which is where federal law comes in. We simply need to define a range of time, say, between midnight and 5 a.m. local, during which any incident that meets certain criteria for behavior, vocabulary, and/or decibel level MUST by law be reported to whatwasthefuckingdeal.com.

Anyone who fails to report their incident would be subject to a $2,500 fine. This money would go into a pool, and be used to fund the bandwidth costs of whatwasthefuckingdeal.com, the task force required to investigate and issue fines, and a telephone hotline service for people without Internet access to report their incidents with a toll-free call. The benefits to society, as you can see, would be enormous.

First, there's the deterrent effect. Are you going to break up with your girlfriend at two in the morning? Or are you going to perhaps think about the hassle of writing the argument up online, and wait until the following afternoon? Or maybe you can find a way to break up with her that doesn't involve anyone sitting on top of anyone else's car while they honk and scream.

And when it's NOT a deterrent, well, we can go online the next morning and, in a matter of moments, at least have an answer as to WHY we lost sleep. Sleep is a wonderful, precious commodity, and like any other commodity, it's even more valuable when it becomes more scarce. If you're going to rob me of that vital resource because you can't manage your fucking life, then the least you can do is repay me with the specific, entertaining details of your inability to get your shit together.

Whatwasthefuckingdeal.com. Look for it in the first six months after I get put in charge of running everything.

Oversharing

Tue, 18 Sep 2007 21:44:01 -0500

Religion, 19 September 2007

Memo to Dare2Share: STOP IT.

But before we begin, a quick memo to you, over there, in the crowd, at the concert*: THE BAND CAN'T HEAR YOU. I don't know how much you know about acoustics, but if there are four to five hundred other people laughing, talking, and cheering, the guys whose job it is to send sound outward are not going to pick up a whole lot coming in the other direction. So stop yelling.

Because even if they do hear you, they've already got a plan for how this shit is going to go down, and they're not going to change it because your drunk ass wants to hear the song they're probably going to play anyway whether you shout it or not. Yes, there are situations where a small enough band in a small enough club might take your requests. This is traditionally signaled by them asking you for them. But if the band seems to have elaborate lighting cues for songs planned in advance, you're not gonna get them to deviate from the set list.

Right. Now, speaking of behavior that's likely to get you punched in the head, I thought it'd be fun to return to Dare2Share, the Christian youth ministry website whose unspoken missionary statement is to turn Christian youth into ostracized, lonely teenagers with an appreciation for crucifixion that can only be gained by daily hanging wedgies.

As you may recall, they have a section of their website instructing students on how to "share their faith" by tying it in to current teen pop culture phenomena. As in phenomenally bad idea.

Case in point. Right at the top of the list now is "How to share your faith using See You At The Pole 2007. Now, without even knowing what See You At The Pole is, my first instinctive reaction is to say "See you at MY pole." And I'm a grown adult. Albeit one whose love of dickjokery borders on the rococo**. I can't imagine it would go any better in homeroom.

It turns out it's an annual Christian prayer event where all the kids gather around the flagpole and pray, presumably a reaction to being kicked out of classrooms by the ACLU. I think it says something that the site feels the need to tell teens how to share their faith using an event designed for teens to share their faith.

In the missed opportunities department, while there IS a "How to share your faith using High School Musical 2" in the list (there's no better teen relationship than a relationship with Jesus!), there is NOT a "How to share your faith using those naked pictures of the chick who plays Gabrielle being a garden-variety webcam Girl Gone Wild". If the students won't come to the pole, bring the poles to the students.

And, just so you know it's not because Dare2Share is afraid of being hideously tacky, there's an entry on "How to share your faith using Owen Wilson's Story", which basically boils down to "If Owen Wilson had turned to God, he wouldn't have tried to kill himself." CLASSY. Whose personal tragedy would Jesus exploit?

*The astute reader will do the math, figure out why there was no column yesterday and a cheap-shot column today, and gain a fascinating insight into my daily life. Nobody said being astute was particularly rewarding.

**Or rococko.

Another Iraq Casualty

Sun, 28 Jan 2007 22:44:58 -0600

Movies, 29 January 2007

Memo to Joe Carnahan: YOU ARE DUMB.

I normally wouldn't do this, as it borders a bit on bloggy confessionalism, but I went to see "Smokin' Aces" over the weekend, and oh, what a steaming piece of shit it was. In this column, I'm going to spoil the crap out of it, and you're gonna read it and not see it. That's the unspoken agreement between writer and audience at work.

Normally, I'll admit, going to see a lousy movie wouldn't spark an entire column. Caveat emptor, and all that. But I was expecting Aces to be a mediocre version of the movie they were advertising in the trailer - lots of hit men, lots of bullets, emphasis on the goofy. I didn't expect it to be an entirely different movie about internal FBI politics and the emotional turmoil of Ryan Fucking Reynolds. Which it was.

Even then, the many flaws of the movie might not qualify it for columnhood. Although I would like to point out that it doesn't matter how many times you jump-cut among five groups of people, opening your movie with FORTY-FIVE MINUTES OF EXPOSITION is still a mistake. Maybe if all of it had come from Jason Bateman, it might have worked. Maybe. Which is a really odd sentence now that I read it.

Back to the point. You see, I read an interview with the director that revealed WHY the movie sucked so hard. ACTUAL QUOTE WITHIN A QUOTE TIME!

"When he was writing "Smokin' Aces," American forces were in Iraq searching for weapons of mass destruction, and he was thinking we were 'being b.s.'d a little bit. So when I look at 'Smokin' Aces,' I see the entire film as misinformation. The twist at the end is completely immaterial to me. I just loved the idea that misinformation could lead to this horribly chaotic violence.'" - Joe Carnahan via the Daily News' Bob Strauss

I'm not sure you can actually stretch the term "immaterial" to describe that twist. Which is, by the way, that Buddy Israel, the Vegas magician and mob guy who's the target of all the hitmen, is actually the illegitimate son of a dying Italian mob boss, who wants Israel's heart for a transplant. Oh, and also, the Italian mob boss isn't an Italian mob boss, but actually a deep-cover FBI agent from the 40s who, after being shot in the face repeatedly by the FBI who suspected he'd gone rogue, got lots of reconstructive surgery and actually did go rogue, but the FBI wants the information in his head so they want to get Israel and perform the transplant themselves. Which pisses off Ryan Reynolds, whose old partner died because of a vague Iraq war metaphor.

I'd like to extend my condolences to the family of the word "immaterial", bits of which were found several miles away from the Carnahan interview site.

Not only does this twist take up about a third of the movie (or 80% of the non-exposition parts of the movie), but it's seriously at odds with the crappy movie I thought I was going to see, which had neo-Nazi hit men with chainsaws in it. And a master of disguise. And about 3 other bosses from 90s video games, now that I think about it. I want to like a movie with those things in it, but Carnahan's got a message, dammit.

"I certainly didn't go through this as an empty-headed exercise in violence and confusion and deliberately troubling the viewer with trying to stay ahead of all this stuff." Yeah? Well, it's better to make an empty-headed movie and have people suspect you're an idiot than to try an inject meaning into it, thereby removing all doubt.

Oooh, government misinformation leads to horrible bloodshed and violence. Just like in Iraq. I can't imagine how my sociopolitical life managed to go this long without an action movie pointing this out to me in the most ludicrously convoluted way possible. Thank you, Joe Carnahan, for incorporating your vague feelings of being bullshitted by the government into your cinematic masterpiece.

And you know what the worst part is? Here's the worst part. For years, one of the slurs the right has heaped on liberals is that we blame everything on George Bush. That we hate him so much that even seemingly unrelated bad things that happen are Dubya's fault. It's a ridiculous stereotype that builds the myth that "liberal anger" isn't meant to be taken seriously.

But this time, it's true. George Bush made this movie suck. And those two hours of my life are the latest, tiniest casualty of the Iraq War.

This Cover Don't Run

Wed, 26 Apr 2006 21:18:41 -0500

Main Column, 27 April 2006

Memo to Random Edina Driver: YOU ARE DUMB.

Despite my hate for it, I do find myself in Edina on occasion. I live just north of the Hated Rich White Suburb, and thus, for certain aspects of the consumer monoculture, it's the closest and most convenient. And I was there last night, minding my own business, driving my car, when I saw the moron.

A lot of people put political statements on their cars. I understand that. Your car is out and about. It mingles. It's seen by people who will never drive past your house. I could reach twice the audience of this column just by putting a bumper sticker on my car, and half the people who saw the sticker wouldn't agree with it.

But the vehicle-based politics I love the best are the ones I know, instantly, the person driving the car doesn't actually understand. Like an asshole in a suit and a cowboy hat doing "Born In The USA" at a karaoke bar and slurring out the chorus like he's Toby Keith. Which brings us to the moron in Edina with the big-ass SUV.

I did not get a make and model, so for all I know it could have been a biodiesel-burning hybrid Escalade. But all I know about the car was that it was big enough to warrant a spare tire hanging off the back. And on that spare tire was a spare tire cover. And on that spare tire were three words and a picture.

The three words? "THERE'S ONLY ONE". The picture? The American flag. And that's how I knew the owner of that tire cover was a fucking moron.

What does that even mean? I know what the owner wanted it to mean. I know what the owner thinks it means. That America is unique, that America is special, that America is best. But that's not what his tire cover says. All his tire cover says is that there's only one.

If the flag means flag, then of course there's only one flag. Every country, as far as I know, has only one flag. It's not like we're special in that regard. It's not like Chad has got a new flag every month. Every country in the world can have a wheel cover that says "THERE'S ONLY ONE" and put a picture of their flag under it. Congratulations, dipshit. You're telling everyone you're proud of your country because it's like every other country in the world.

But what if the flag means America? That's certainly a patriotic worldview, the kind of over-reliance on metaphor that leads to constitutional amendments against burning stuff. But again, there's only one United States of America? Technically correct, but not terribly special. There's only one Iraq, too. At least for the time being. But there will never be three Iraqs. Three former Iraqs, sure. Just like there are a dozen former Soviet Unions.

But there's still only one of every nation. That's part and parcel of the definition of a sovereign state. Which I don't think is the point this person was hoping to get across with their wheel cover.

Is it too much to ask for people to at least parse their fucking slogans? If you're going to condense your worldview into three words and a picture, you owe it to all of us to make sure the subject, the verb, the object, and any modifiers you fit on your bully bumper actually make sense. Cognitive dissonance leads to road rage.

You Deserve To Be Broken Today

Thu, 11 Aug 2005 13:18:55 -0500

Main Column, 15 February 2005

Memo to our nation's overzealous fast food assistant managers: BACK THE FUCK OFF, SPARKY.

Somebody call a taxonomist - these guys are rapidly becoming their own separate species. If you've been in a fast food place, or a counter-service semi-upscale meal-replacement chain (to use the industry lingo) in the past year, you've seen them. They work the evening shifts. They wear short-sleeved, white, button-down shirts. To a man, they look like ex-jocks. And they are trying way, WAY too hard.

They are the Overzealous Assistant Managers, and they must be stopped, before they completely obliterate the fundamental social contract between the people who want cheap shitty food now and the people forced by circumstance to provide it.

Above and beyond the characteristics I've already mentioned, OAM's are always, ALWAYS white. I cannot explain why this is, although i have some ideas. Nine times out of ten, they are the only white person behind the counter. And all nine of those nine times, you will find them loudly, badly, painfully, trying to incorporate bits of his crew's common language into his sentences. If you hear someone ending his sentence with a loud, distinctly pronounced, Midwester-accented "POR FAVOR", you know you've found an OAM.

OAM's have all memorized the corporate training tapes on what constitutes good customer service, and they will implement them at every opportunity. They will go above. They will go beyond. They will give one hundred and ten percent. Some will give as much as a hundred and thirteen percent, because at a hundred and fourteen percent, you can file charges against them. They will engage you in conversation. They will recommend choices as if the food they serve didn't come from nationally standardized instructions and vat-grown identical ingredients. They will praise your selection. They will refer to everyone by a nickname that you cannot quite find yourself able to object to, though you will want to. They will not shut up, they cannot be bargained or reasoned with, and they absolutely will not stop until you are fed.

And it's all a huge lie. I am buying a cheap hamburger. Or a burrito. Or a bit of chicken with two side dishes. I am not having a Dining Experience. I want some biomass in my churning gut that will fuel my continuous rage, I want to spend eight bucks or less, and that is fucking well IT. The other three dozen people in the restaurant understand this. We understand it as we wait in line. Your employees understand it as they listen to you for hours on end, wishing they could kill you, grill you, and serve you on a Caesar salad. The only one who doesn't understand this is you.

We all know that in your worldview, you weren't supposed to end up here. It shows in every aspect of your countenance. But you're not the Green Lantern. You cannot, through sheer force of willpower, transform your assistant manager gig at Boston Market into some kind of Tony Robbins fantasy world of by-your-bootstraps entrepreneurrship. But you try, and by trying, inflict your fantasy world onto our collective personal space.

Stay the fuck away from my tray. I understand that at real restaurants, human beings come and take away your real plates and real silverware when you're done with your real food and take them to be washed and re-used. You don't work in a real restaurant. The plates are plastic and disposable. The silverware is plastic and disposable. The food is plastic and disposable. YOU are plastic and disposable. The food comes on trays for a reason, and that reason is that, as part of the understood agreement that comes with eating in a place like this, that I, as the eater, am reponsible for dumping my own refuse into the garbage can.

By swinging past my table and usurping my end of the deal, you aren't going to convince me that I've accidentally wandered into a quaint roadside cafe with a view of the lake. All you're doing is pissing me off. I dump the tray, you stand in the back and yell at people for taking sixteen minute breaks.

And under no circumstances should OAM's be allowed to ask you how the food is. It's the same. It's always the same. It's designed to be the same. It's probably even designed to mask whatever subtle variations in flavor may be caused by the saliva of thousands of different minimum-wage prep guys. It tastes like it tastes like it always tastes. It is a question that can have no useful answer anyway. What's he going to do about it if I tell him my Big Mac has odd elements of wood-smoke and a coppery brightness? He can't change the recipe. So all he's doing is wasting my time and his.

So, in summary, BACK THE FUCK OFF, SPARKY. Por favor.

Ashton, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?

Thu, 11 Aug 2005 13:23:08 -0500

Main Column, 4 February 2005

Memo to Bus Chick: YOU ARE DUMB.

Yes, it's time for one of those YAD rarities, a Real-Life Dumb Encounter! We don't do these a lot here, because I try to avoid idiots in real-life, and I don't usually have the memory to transcribe incidents anyway. But every once in a while, it happens. Like on the bus.

You would think public transit would provide more fodder, but 99% of the time it's just drunk people, loud people, or both. And I don't get a lot of any of that in the morning anyway, because I take the Yuppie Bus. Starts near the suburbs, traverses a very nice section of town I can't afford to live in, then ends up downtown where we all work. Most everyone is quiet most days, but not yesterday. Not Dumb Chick.

It started off so well, and ended so badly, that it was like the roller-coaster crash of overheard conversations. It's like you're ready for the big drop, and then it happens, and then you hear a metal-on-metal squealing you know you shouldn't be hearing, and the next thing you know your own intestines are mixed with the cotton candy 300 feet away. But it started off fine, by hating Meet The Fockers.

Apparently, Dumb Chick's mother refused to believe that Meet The Fockers could possibly suck, because it had Barbara Streisand in it. Dumb Chick, in a move designed to camouflage her true nature from the world, understood that Meet The Fockers was a shit sequel to a shit movie, and tried to save her mother from the agony of a bland Stiller sequel. All well and good. We've all had that conversation, desperately trying to save those who cannot be saved, tilting at the windmill of "How Bad Could It Be?"

And then, again attempting to show that her heart was in the right place, Dumb Chick explained that she likes smart, witty, quotable comedies, and not dumb comedies. And that men who like dumb man comedies are right out. Again, heart in the right place, but the location of her head was broadcast to the immediate vicinity when she used "Office Space" as the "smart" example and "Zoolander" as the dumb example.

Now, I love "Office Space". And I love "Zoolander". But these two movies are in no way the endpoints of some cinematic bell curve. Her statement was especially dumb-founding when she declared her favorite part of Office Space to be the smashing of the printer, a scene that is probably the least witty or quotable one in the whole movie. It's no "he took my stapler", that's for damn sure.

So things are rapidly deteriorating, and I'm chuckling to myself in the innate superiority of my unchecked ego, when suddenly I hear Dumb Chick say "Oh, or "She-Devil"! I need to see that again! I watch it about once every year!" That's when I learned which dents first - a bus ceiling or a skull. Turns out it's the bus ceiling, but it was a close margin.

Dumb Chick had to explain it to her cohort, so I probably have to explain it to some of you. Roseanne Barr. Meryl Streep. Ed Begley Jr. All in a supposed "dark comedy" so failing in either darkness or comedy that it makes "Death Becomes Her" seem tolerable. It's one of two movies I've walked out on in my entire life. Hearing someone say they watch "She-Devil" once a year is like hearing someone discuss their sulfuric acid enema. It's inexplicable. It's not like she said "Hudson Hawk", or "Starship Troopers", or some other movie that has a deluded but recognized following. It's "She-Devil". In the fifteen years since the movie came out, I have never, ever, heard anyone say they liked it, much less made it an annual tradition.

It's like a chupacabra. You just assume they're a myth, and then one day, on your way to work, there's one two rows ahead of you suckin' on a goat like it's a venti half-caf latte. The soul recoils, the brain rejects, the heart denies. She can't have just said she watches the Roseanne Barr/Ed Begley Jr. "She-Devil" once a year, even though every last one of those words came out of her mouth. Maybe it's spy-code for "the microfilm is taped to the bottom of my seat. Wait three blocks then retrieve it. Long live Iceland."

But, as Ashton Kutcher did not appear to inform me I was the subject of the most elaborate, pointless punk'ding in history, I have to accept that it was just a Dumb Chick on a bus.

Another Pleasant Valley Spastic Topic Monkey Friday

Fri, 19 Aug 2005 10:59:07 -0500

Main Column, 27 August 2004

Some of you may wonder about the nature of Spastic Topic Monkey Fridays. Why on many occasions, your humble author feels the need to dump a big load of half-formed concepts unworthy of full column stature on an audience that just wanted a little diversion, a little comedy. All I can tell you is, to paraphrase the late, lionized-despite-beating-and-torturing-women Rick James, "Caffeine's a hell of a drug." I have a sort of Ike-Tina relationship with caffeine, one in which caffeine and I alternately play both roles, and that frequently results in physiological payback by Friday morning. Welcome to my braindump.

Memo to the dudes in the back of the bus: DUMB. AND LUCKY. Lucky I wasn't feeling particularly Socially Darwinian yesterday afternoon. Because if I had, I might have decided to pass along the epic quantities of information you provided on your drug-buying and dealing activities to the authorities. Just to punish you for being so indiscreet about it. I don't care what you do. I'm borderline libertarian when it comes to drugs. But at least act like it's a LITTLE illegal. Loudly discussing where you live, how to contact you, what you can hook people up with, is just DUMB. And bumming an Oxycontin off the white-trash mother of two who very obviously had already taken a couple was just fuckin' tacky.

I love public transit, really I do. But I just want to ride home, play some Game Boy, and sit in peace. I do not need to spend half an hour listening to the Blue Collar Comics re-enactment of "Traffic". Thank you.

Memo to John O'Neill: DUMBASS. First, you say that John Kerry was never in Cambodia because you were never in Cambodia, which is specious reasoning to begin with. Then, confronted with a tape of you telling Nixon "I was in Cambodia", you supposedly address the contradiction. By explaining that when you said "in Cambodia", you actually meant NOT IN CAMBODIA. Brilliant! I suppose it would be a bit crass to suggest that this whole mess depends on what your definition of "in" is? It's a good thing you're not President. And a Democrat. Not to defend Clinton, but his definition of "sexual relations" is almost exactly the same degree of prevarication that "served with John Kerry" is.

Memo to Dubya: FUCKHEAD. "I understand how Sen. Kerry feels - I've been attacked by 527s too." Take your rattlesnake sympathy and shove it up your ass. Has anyone actually bothered to ask Bush which 527 ads attacking him contain demonstrably false statements? Here's a hint. Being called a shitty President doesn't count. They're not naming specific advertisements they object to for reasons that should be blatantly obvious even to people stoned off their ass on Oxycontin, be they bus riders or talk radio hosts. If Bush were any more transparent, he could strap on a set of clear plastic boobs and play Sue Storm in the Fantastic Four movie.

And on a related note, let me just bitch, briefly, one more time, about the fucking media. Given everything we know now, historically, about the behavior of poiticians, especially Presidents, how in the hell could it POSSIBLY seem like a good idea to start taking them at their word? With the possible exception of Carter, every single President from Kennedy on up has been shown to have been lying out of their asses for nearly their entire terms. Both parties. Just a constant stream of truth-shading, manipulation of selective facts, out-and-out falsehoods, hiding information... it hasn't changed. It's still going on. It'll still go on after November no matter who we pick. That is the reason you are there.

You do not exist so that I can find out what George W. Bush said at 2:42 p.m. instead of waiting until 6:30. You do not exist to sit between two lying assholes and point from one to the other. You are here because if there are hundreds and thousands of people poking at stuff trying to find out as best as they can what is actually going on, the people in charge have to WORK HARDER AT LYING TO US. You're like copy protection on software. You'll never stop the lying. You're just there to make us hunt for cracks and serials on porn-laden pop-up sites if we want to steal the software. And right now, you can't even be bothered to do THAT much, because you suck so incredibly hard. Adobe knows better than to just put a question at the beginning of the install asking "Did you buy this software? Yes/No?", and computers haven't been around nearly as long as lying politicians. What's YOUR fucking excuse?

"Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2" opens today. Authorities have set up elaborate haz-mat "safe zones" around area theaters to prevent vulnerable individuals from coming within 200 feet of the movies. Vulnerable individuals are defined as anyone who has read a book 50 pages or longer in the past two years, anybody who remembers that PBS is on Channel 2, and anybody who can count to eight without taking off their shoes. Anyone wishing to enter the movie's area effect can bypass security checks with proof of purchase of any "Larry The Cable Guy" DVD.

One Small Donkey, One Big Ass

Fri, 19 Aug 2005 11:06:53 -0500

Main Column, 5 August 2004

Memo to Knob Ahead Of Me At Chipotle: YOU ARE DUMB.

I guess this is Have My Worst Sterotypical Assumptions Confirmed week or something, because there I am, downtown Minneapolis, in line at Chipotle just before the lunch rush kicks into high. And in front of me, in line, are three individuals who I immediately, in a very un-liberal way, culturally profile as dicks.

They all had that mid-thirties Power Dude thing going, the dress shirt, the power tie, the short-cropped hair, the slightly... thick build of the middle-aged suburban ex-jock. Bland, midwestern, straight-white-male America in three distinct subgroup packages - The Balding Older Guy, The Always Talking With His Hands Guy, and the Blond Wheeler-Dealer. The odds of at least two Van Halen albums being owned by any one or more of these three people approached 87%, with an 85% probability that one of them is the first Sammy Hagar one.

I know this makes me open to charges of being no better than Anne "Bat-Shit Crazy" Jacobsen, but at least I didn't try to shut down the Chipotle in order to prevent these three men from some unspecified assholic action. I simply waited to see if it would occur. And lo and behold, it did. First, all three of the fuckers ordered burrito bowls.

And here we must digress for a second to denounce the perfidy that is the Burrito Bowl. It is like unto a burrito, except that instead of all the ingredients being wrapped up into a convenient (if massive) cylindrical shape via a very large flour tortilla, the same exact contents are placed into... a bowl. This is, with one exception I'll get to in the next paragraph, a completely retarded idea. It solves nothing, it helps nobody. It's not even an Atkins thing, because there's a fucking pound of rice at the bottom of these things.

Unless you have an allergy to wheat gluten, you should not be allowed to order a burrito bowl. Period. If you think you have a good reason to replace an edible, convenient, one-hand-use wrapper with a large, styrofoam disposable, two-hand-minimum container, feel free to use the FORUM link in the upper left and run it past me. I'll dispense individual indulgences as I see fit. But again, in general, this shit shouldn't even be on the menu. You should just be able to ask for it quietly if a flour tortilla will send you into anaphylactic shock.

So anyway, the three tie-tools ordered burrito bowls, automatically raising their asshole threat level from Yellow to Orange. And then the third guy, Mr. Wheeler Dealer, shot straight up past Red into "What Was That Boom Sound". He proceeded to attempt to exploit the Chipotle system for maximum advantage.

This, frankly, goes for anyone who feels it's their God-given right to min-max* any customer service situation. Fuck all y'all. There's a vast gray area between "sucker" and "man-handle". I'll let you guess where asking the Chipotle guy for two scoops of chicken lies on that spectrum.

"Could I have two scoops of chicken?" FUCK YOU. This is not Kellogg's. Chicken is not raisins. Take your two scoops straight to hell with the rest of you. The whole Chipotle economic structure is built around you getting a certain amount of expensive marinated meat in proportion to your heaping pile of dirt-cheap rice. You know what you get when you ask for two scoops of chicken? Two half-scoops of chicken. You may, if you're lucky, end up with two more cubes of chicken that you would have gotten originally. You sure as hell won't get double. And even if you did, you would not be sticking it to the man. You would not be some master negotiator. You would not have won any kind of personal victory over the forces of minimum wage fast food line staff. You would, at best, have had a bit more chicken.

That wasn't enough, of course. Dude had to tweak every fucking aspect of his order. "A little more green sauce". I'm sure your highly-refined palate can tell the difference between one spoon of green chile salsa and one point two spoons of green chile salsa. You are the very picture of the counter-service gourmand. You're lucky they make the food in front of you at Chipotle, or "green sauce" isn't all you'd have gotten a little bit extra of.

Extra chicken, extra green sauce.... and TOO MUCH LETTUCE! Aigh! It's like there was some kind of Lettuce Apocalypse on your burrito bowl! Your bonus chicken was smothering under the crushing weight of all that lettuce! The lettuce load MUST BE LIGHTENED! But not that much. Just by a little bit. Yeah, just a little bit less lettuce. That's it. That's perfect. You have created the ultimate burrito bowl! You are Iron Chef Ordering Crap! You have mastered balance and harmony, and can head back to your bank with your buddies safe in the knowledge that the Chipotle company did not put one over on you this day. I salute you with not one, but two of my fingers, then buy a plane ticket to England, fly over, and salute you with four.

* "Min-Max": A term used by gaming geeks to describe technically legal but questionably ethical loopholes in the rules of role-playing games exploited by players to provide their characters with a borderline-unfair advantage.

Bragging Rights and Assholes

Fri, 19 Aug 2005 11:43:09 -0500

Main Column, 9 June 2004
Memo to the asshole on Highway 169 North: YOU ARE DUMB.
In fact, let's expand the mandate a bit to any asshole who permanently affixes something to the back of their car without actually thinking about what it says. Like getting a tattoo when you're drunk, it's a bad idea. Case in point. People who spend their money on personalized license plates that say something that was already on the back of their car for free. I've seen a Lexus with the license plate "LEXUS", a four by four with the plate "4 X 4", etc. I can only assume they got hung up on the idea of a personalized license plate, only to discover, to their horror, that there was nothing at all interesting about them, so they panicked.
Similarly, bumper stickers. If you must express a viewpoint using your car's ass as a medium, put some thought into it. Take some care. Try to show us something we haven't seen before. And try to show us something that makes sense.
Which brings us to the asshole on 169. Driving there on Monday afternoon, we saw a bumper sticker that said: "NO ONE CAN KILL AMERICANS AND BRAG ABOUT IT. NO ONE."
Which is an incredibly odd sentiment to put on your car if you take it literally. I mean, no one can play ping-pong with their own spleen, either, but you don't see people with "DOWN WITH SPLEEN-PONG" bumper stickers. If it's so impossible that you have to state not once, but TWICE, that "no one" can do it, then what's there to be concerned about? Obviously, for it to be enough of a problem to warrant a bumper sticker, SOMEONE must be killing Americans and bragging about it.
Maybe he means Dubya? After all, as Governor of Texas, our president presided over 134 executions, including children and the mentally disabled. And in an infamous Talk magazine interview, openly mocked one of them (Karla Faye Tucker). Perhaps he's still incensed at the President's callous attitude toward life and death?
Of course, Americans kill Americans all the time. Maybe he means the perpetrators of the thousands of murders in the US every year. I bet some of them brag. Corporate polluters? The NRA? Those guys at Enron who had the parties and the cheering during the California wildfires? Hm.
That's the problem with unclear bumper stickers. We simply don't know. Oh, of course we could play the ODDS, and assume that since he 's so hung up on Americans being killed and bragged about that it must be non-Americans that are doing the killing and the bragging. Heck, we could even play the odds further, and assume that he means filthy brown Ay-Rabs that are doing the killing and the bragging and must be stopped.
Which brings with it its own set of problems, doesn't it? Because for that to work, for the 169 asshole to be able to take a moral high ground so absolute that it can be printed on vinyl and adhered, permanently, to a steel bumper, then Americans would have to be so noble that none of us would ever even consider bragging about killing foreigners...
Oops.
But this is my point. Ten minutes of sober reflection would have revealed to the 169 asshole that the entire point of his bumper sticker is demolished by the mere existence of Ann Coulter. He'd have reached the conclusion that putting this bumper sticker on his car would make him an asshole, and, ideally, not done it, thus simultaneously saving hundreds of drivers from having to read assholery and depriving me of fodder for the column.
Today's article has been brought to you by yee-haw jingoism and the numbers one, six, and nine.

Short Takes

Fri, 19 Aug 2005 13:07:02 -0500

Main Column, 5 March 2004
Memo to the US Army, Guantanamo Bay Division: YOU ARE DUMB.
According to the Herald Sun in some city I forgot to type (which, by the way, is one of Rupert Murdoch's babies), an inmate at Guantanamo Bay who was recently freed has reported that one of the techniques used against him during sleep deprivation was the non-stop playing of Bruce Springsteen's "Born In The USA".
I can only assume that the same brilliant intelligence that led to the whole mess in the first place was also responsible for analyzing the lyrics to the Springsteen song and determining, just like Ronald Reagan did, that Springsteen wrote the song out of pure, unbridled love for his country, his bandana overflowing with rah-rah patriotism. And we wonder why they haven't found the weapons yet.
I mean, shit, if I had to listen to "Born" non-stop, I'd consider it torture, too, but let's face it, "Dancin' In The Dark" would be three times as effective and barely one tenth as ironic.
Memo to Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer: DON'T BE DUMB.
Variety is reporting that Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer are negotiating for the film rights to the game "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time", widely believed by everyone who is not wrong as the single best game released in 2003.
They should consider themselves hereby warned: fuck this up, and I will be much crankier than usual. Which should tell you something. Remember Pac-Man? Remember how we all waited for the home version, so we could finally play Pac-Man on our Atari 2600's? And then it came out? Remember that sinking disappointment in the pit of your stomach after you played it for the first time, with the square "vitamin" instead of the fruit and the weird dashes and the ghosts not turning blue and that PANK PANK PAPANK sound? If you're in the target audience for this website, you're probably weeping openly at the memory. I know I am.
A shitty Prince of Persia movie, to me, would be MORE DISAPPOINTING. Hiring Brendan Fraser as the Prince, for example. Hiring Jennifer Garner as Farah. Letting Akiva Goldsman come within five miles of anything remotely related to the movie. These would all be mistakes. Don't make them. Don't be DUMB.
Memo to the guy in front of me at the gas station: YOU ARE DUMB.
You spent FIFTY ONE DOLLARS in one sitting on scratch and win instant lottery tickets. Learn math, or forever forfeit your right to complain about taxes. Your choice.
Memo to everyone:
It's been a couple of long weeks full of rage and anger. And at the end of it all, I think we need a break. Take a deep breath, think of something calming. Like a cloud. Yeah, a nice fluffy cloud.
See what they've done! People are so dumb, they've PISSED OFF THE CLOUDS. My work must continue. See you Monday.

Entirely Hypothetical People

Fri, 19 Aug 2005 13:07:20 -0500

Main Column, 4 March 2004
Memo to an entirely hypothetical subset of humanity: YOU ARE DUMB.
We here at You Are Dumb Dot Net like to think of what we do as educational outreach. Of a sort. And most of that educational outreach comes in the form of How To Spot The Dumb (From Quite A Long Way Away). So today, let us examine in more detail the Poking The Nest technique for spotting the dumb.
Poking The Nest is a good way to ferret out the dumbest members of a particular large group of people. It's kind of an informal survey, in which you give a large group of people an identical simple task to perform. Ideally, that simple task should not seem in any way to be a competency test, but should instead be disguised in some way to make it seem like part of the test subjects' normal routine. Then, all you do is sit back and watch the results pour in.
These results traditionally break down into some identifiable subgroups:
The Correct Response: Subject performs the task correctly, reading and following all directions and responding with the correct information. This is, unsurprisingly, rare.
The Nearly Correct Response: The subject has gotten the general gist of the task, and has responded with mostly correct information, however, some portion of the response is incorrect due to a typographical error or other understandable cause.
Individuals in the above two groups are classified as Potentially Not Dumb.
The Conceptually Flawed Response: These people read and follow the directions, but misinterpret one crucial portion of them and respond broadly with incorrect information as a result. For example, if you were to request an alphabetical list of all fifty state capitals, and you received an alphabetical list of all fifty states, this person would qualify as Conceptually Flawed.
Individuals in the Conceptually Flawed Response group are classified as Potentially Dumb, and should be watched closely.
The Ignorant Response: These are the people who omit one crucial part of the instructions. In the example above, the Ignorant Response group would send you a non-alphabetized list of all fifty state capitals.
The Willfully Ignorant Response: Same as above, except the person clearly did it on purpose, because they couldn't be bothered. This is not always easy to distinguish from the Ignorant Response, but that's OK, as both groups should be regarded as Dumb anyway, because for all practical intents and purposes, the difference between "dumb" and "perfectly willing to appear dumb to avoid effort" are equivalent.
The Stupid Fucks: These are individuals who completely fail to grasp the simple task. If you ask these people to provide you with an alphabetized list of 50 states, they will send you a list of 20 cities in a completely random order.
The Belligerent Stupid Fucks: These are people who completely fail to grasp the simple task, interpret it as a completely different task, take offense at being asked to perform this misinterpretation, and respond aggressively with queries as to why you need a list of the top thousand metropolitan areas in the country sorted by population, and why you are bothering them when you could go buy an almanac or something.
The Self-Aware Stupid Fucks: These are people who are able to grasp that they are NOT able to grasp what you have sent them, and send you questions that require you to repeat the directions you already gave them. Upon receiving your answers, these people will generally climb between three and five spaces on the list, but will never ever achieve a Correct Response.
The Hopelessly Stupid Fucks: HSF's are individuals whose first, second, and possibly third attempt to complete the simple task fall into any of the other Stupid Fuck categories. For example, if they ask for clarification, and respond belligerently; or if they get everything wrong, then ask you for clarification, they are Hopelessly Stupid Fucks.
Anyone in the Stupid Fuck category should be treated with as much scorn and derision as is permitted by your social/professional situation. HSF's, by their nature, are also subject to semi-public ridicule by having their stupidity exposed and shared with your peer group.
We hope you've enjoyed this purely theoretical treatise on how to identify and weed out the dumb people in your medium-to-large organizational structure.

Everyone In The Intersection

Fri, 19 Aug 2005 13:07:35 -0500

Main Column, 3 March 2004
Memo to drivers and pedestrians: YOU ARE DUMB.
The urban four-way intersection is, in many ways, a metaphor for our society. Any given individual in society has a number of choices before them, and these choices cause them to cross paths with other members of society. And most of the individuals making those choices do so without looking, listening, or thinking, and as a result, make things difficult for everyone else around them.
There's even an analogy with the current political situation. As a frequent pedestrian, I would love to blame all the woes on those rich drivers, tooling around in their SUV's, talking on their cell phones about venture opportunities, not even noticing the common man in the crosswalk that they crush under their relentless, ever-churning tires.
But as a frequent driver, I would also like to blame all those ignorant, lazy, laconic hippies who stroll idly across the road as if it were a country meadow, pretending that hundreds of years of progress never happened and ignoring the RULE OF LAW.
I am torn, caught in the riptides of a Zoroastrian dichotomy of dumb. Luckily, I am quickly able to remember that, no matter what our differences, rich or poor, Republican or Democrat, walker or driver, we are all, deep down, just human beings. And, as a result, mostly comprised of fucking idiots. And that makes me feel... well, not exactly "better", but at least more comfortable. On firmer ground. The moral quicksand and quagmire replaced by the hard, unyielding asphalt of rage. Rage at the asses whose phalt it all is.
So to all you behind the wheel. We, as a species, have been walking for hundreds of thousands of years. We have been rolling things around on wheels for tens of thousands of years. We have been living in cities for thousands of years. We have had cars for about a hundred years. You have had plenty of time to gradually work your way up to an understanding of how these four things intersect. So you may understand why I feel a bit upset at your surprise and astonishment that a person might be using the legs Darwin gave him to perambulate from one corner to another.
Shock! Horror! Even worse, INCONVENIENCE that you cannot turn your vehicle and proceed on your way! These damn walkies are taking advantage of the system. And these CROSSWALKS. Valuable street real estate being taken up just so people have room to walk! I understand your frustration; the obvious injustice of it all that causes you to protest in indignance by making sure you stick your vehicle eight inches into the crosswalk at every opportunity. Don't mind me. I'll go around. The head start those eight inches give you will be invaluable once the light turns green.
It's enough to make a pedestrian decide to ignore the traffic laws in turn, since the other side is gaining an unfair advantage by ignoring them. Which is fine. As a pedestrian, I break the law on a regular basis for reasons ranging from getting in from the cold quicker all the way through ensuring my personal safety by knowing precisely what the cars I'll be amongst are doing. But for fuck's sake, people, recognize that you're breaking the law and act appropriately.
First, stop sauntering. When crossing oncoming traffic that could CRUSH YOU at speeds between ten and fifty miles an hour, this is not a lingering situation. Do not treat crossing against the light, or crossing away from the light, as if you had just finished a meal in a fine restaurant and have just been served coffee and pie. It's simply bad manners to smugly take advantage of people's desire not to be charged with involuntary manslaughter. Not to mention risking your life based on the attentiveness, intelligence, and kindness of a random driver.
Somewhere there exists a perfect intersection, where pedestrians realize that a green arrow and a don't walk sign combine to form the message "KEEP YOUR ASS ON THE CURB", and where "Right On Red" does not mean "Honk at the guy on foot that's keeping you from your God-Given Right On Red", and people of all races, religions, and modes of transportation live together in peace and harmony. And maybe, someday, we'll get there. You know, once all you dumbfucks have run over and crashed into each other.

Office Partiers

Fri, 19 Aug 2005 13:13:53 -0500

Main Column, 11 February 2004
Memo to the organizers, participants, and attendees of work-related wacky fun parties: YOU ARE DUMB.
Before I get to the meat of this, I think I should probably address the burning question of whether Terri Carlin still qualifies as VERY DUMB despite having dropped her lawsuit, claiming to have 'made her point'. The answer is, unsurprisingly, YES.
So anyway, these fuckheads in the workplace really need to get over their apparent disappointment at not being picked for the school play. Onstage OR backstage.
I mean, that's the nicest possible motivation I can think of for people wanting to spend time and energy turning a conference room into a "tropical paradice", which traditionally means one potted palm in the corner, one pineapple ring in the Hawaiian Punch, three managers you've never met before in grass skirts and leis, and someone's battered Don Ho gag gift CD playing wanly on an underpowered, tinny boom box.
I guess, somehow, I'd wrongly assumed that after two decades of cable TV and one decade of the Internet, that the rest of you would have also come to the conclusion that seeing a coworker in a cowboy hat or a supervisor in a sombrero is actually very fucking annoying.
But you all just eat that up, don't you. The themed raffles, the singalongs, the costumes, the dreaded interpretations of ethnic food by middle class, middle aged midwesterners. Can't get enough of it. Love it so much you make sure to take pictures and cover bulletin boards with 'em.
You love them so much, in fact, that like some kind of head-shaving, purple-sneaker-wearing castration cult, you cannot imagine that people would not want to join in. That someone might look at the soul-destroying potential of the whole sordid affair and decide that maybe, just maybe, a free plate full of Triscuits, celery sticks, and cocktail weiners in a sea of KC Masterpiece ain't worth the trouble.
But, you know. At least I'm not bitter.
It is not my fault that your work and home life is so lacking that you need to prance around in a hat to feel like you're "cutting loose". But since you all universally refuse to back the fuck off, I'm afraid I'm going to have to call you out as DUMB.

The Chick In Line At Target

Fri, 19 Aug 2005 13:17:52 -0500

Main Column, 6 January 2004
Memo to The Chick In Line At Target: YOU ARE DUMB.
I simply don't understand it. You didn't look 50. You looked young. Full of the fruit of life. Ready to take on the world.
You were also inexplicably ringing up everything except organic bug repellent as one order, and the organic bug repellent as a separate order, but that's OK. You have your reasons, and I'm sure that while it looks odd to the casual observer, if you were given the opportunity toexplain your motives, I would nod, say "that makes sense", and "thank you for your time", and "enjoy your organic bug repellent, hope it keeps those bugs off your radiant youthful skin" and other pleasantries. And we would go our separate ways, with me completely unaware that YOU ARE DUMB and you completely unaware that you would be identified as DUMB on the Internet.
But something happened to change all of that. Technically, something happened to change half of that, because you are still, and will likely remain, blissfully unaware of your DUMB status.
It's when you went to pay for your organic bug repellent. With a credit card. And the credit card came up "invalid number". And you asked, in all seriousness, at Target, "You don't take Diner's Club?"
What is someone, in 2004, under 50, even DOING with a Diner's Club card in the first place, much less expecting it to work at Target? It is not 1976. The Diner's Club is now roughly equivalent to the Players' Club, except without the gravitas provided by having the late Telly Savalas as a spokesman.
Why not just whip out your library card and try to rent the organic bug repellent? Or attempt to trade a goat for it? At least that way, the poor cashier wouildn't have to call for backup to figure out how to respond, because everyone's heard of libraries, and everyone'sfamiliar with the barter system. Diner's Club, however, remains a puzzler, because it lies in a vague nebulous zone along with Datsun and Bankamericard, the land of abandoned brands.
For your poor grasp of appropriate tender in discount stores, I'm afraid that YOU ARE DUMB.