On the Rampage.

I've been reading the news coverage of the shootings in Arizona. I read some articles on MSNBC, just because the old man insist on keeping it set as the homepage and they're right in my face when I log in. I dislike MSNBC's coverage of just about everything, on the grounds that it's dumbed-down, and more than a little biased.

This site, as well as a number of others, are all frothing at the mouth in blind leftist ecstasy because they've all decided that they get to blame this particular incident on the right-wing entertainers they so despise (I call them entertainers because they're not journalists. Just like network hacks like Meredith Viera or that Olberman douchebag more vaudevillians than journalists, but I won't elaborate on that at this time.) People also seem to be calling for the head of Sarah Palin on a platter, as they have decided that it's also her fault.

I don't have the audacity to presume that I can say who is to blame, although my money is on the guy with the gun. I don't watch Fox News, and I think Sarah Palin not only a disgrace to conservatives and Republicans, she makes all women look bad. She's another sinewy, b'suited corporate bitch with a stupid haircut, just like every female executive I've ever encountered; women like her are the scourge of the earth.

The vitriol and bile I've seen in the comments sections of the news stories I've been reading (why, oh why, do I ever waste my time with the bloody Huffington Post?) are coming from those who are gleeful about their certainty that the responsibility for the catastrophe can be laid squarely at the feet of the other side.
"Oh, yay!" they're shouting. "Score one for us!"

It reminds me of April 1997. Hitler's birthday, to be exact. Remember? Two teenage boys carried bags of weapons in to their high school and laid waste to a number of school mates and faculty. Remember that? Remember how the right wingers were pissing their charming underclothes in self-righteous glee because they were convinced that they'd get to pin the whole thing on violent movies, video games, and most importantly, Marilyn Manson?

It was a shining, golden moment for the religious right...except that they were wrong. The shooters were not Manson fans. The shooters, it seems, thought Manson was a tool, and favored German industrial metal like Rammstein. Imagine that! To this day, Manson maintains that Columbine ended his career. Too bad the shooters weren't even fans.

Those kids were narcissistic little turds and were likely psychotic. Just like the guy in Arizona is a narcissistic turd; preliminary reports indicate that they guy is anti-government period, and doesn't seem to favor one side over the other.

Again, I don't presume to know one way or the other. What I do know is that at this point no one knows what really motivated the shootings, and like Columbine, it's possible no one ever will. In my mind, the political affiliations of the assholes laying the turds are irrelevant; whether it's a right-wing evangelical shitting stupid unfounded divisive rants all over the comments sections of national news sites, or a left-wing progressive shitting stupid unfounded divisive rants in the same manner, it's still shit. You can slap all the pretty pink ribbons of justification on that pile of shit as you want...it still stinks, and no one needs it.

Zoo Sign.

**Credit where credit is due: my pal Rosenrosen made a sign similar to this one, and hung it up in her cube at work in an attempt to prevent people from bothering her. I stole her idea and modified it to suit me.

The North American Boden (praecantrix misellus)


Native to the wilds of Hummelstown, the North American Boden is easily startled once you get its attention, and has been known to react violently to stupidity and the threat of taxation. Selectively deaf, it is only able to be safely approached by people whom it does not dislike. The Boden has been known to slay its victims with a barbed tongue and rapier wit; its mean-spirited sarcasm is often mistaken for humor.

The Boden responds well to "Top Gear**,"70's arena rock, British comedy, and subtitled films. It also enjoys McVities Milk Chocolate Digestive biscuits, icy-cold cans of dietCoke, and dark beer. If you don’t have any of these to offer, then please observe from a distance, and quietly back away.
**BBC "Top Gear," not the shitty American version.

Happy Christmas from the Douchebag Family

  I have been thinking about Christmas newsletters. You know, those long-winded and boring letters that some people tuck in to their Christmas cards where they tell you all about what they've been up to during the past year.

  It seems to me that if I cared enough to know about your husband's promotion or your son's hockey league or the family trip to Mexico, I might have called you up at some point during the year to chat. But I don't...so I didn't.  There seems to be a new twist to the Christmas newsletter: the Year End E-mail. Maybe this is not a new thing, but this is the first year I received one. This one involved each member of the family listing the top five things that happened during the year, and came with a PowerPoint photo slide show of the year's best photos attached.
  It seems that you send this out to everyone in your address book, with no regard to whether or not they might actually give a shit about what happened to you this year. I would think that one would want to be at least a little selective, a little considerate, when sending out something like this. I have email addresses of businesses in my address book, and I'm reasonably certain that Bank of America, LTD Commodities, and eBay aren't terribly interested in my family's lists of of the top five occurrences from the past year.
  I would enjoy receiving Christmas newsletters, in traditional paper or electronic format, if EVERYTHING that happened during the year were discussed. Like how the Mexico trip resulted in dysentery and your daughter's very first dose of the clap on account of that terrible business with the Mexican border guards, or how your husband's hemorrhoids got so bad during tax season that you had to spend hours on the Internet tracking down those special ice trays that make ice cubes shaped for rectal insertion. Your struggle to rid your home of bedbugs would be an interesting topic, as would the day you lit the gas grill with the lid closed and burned off your eyebrows. The zenith would be the newsletter in which you announce your impending divorce and/or sex change, although you could only do that once. That's a PowerPoint slide show I'd be interested to see.

Biography

A few years ago, when I worked in a fun department, we were informed that the intranet site was going to be updated, and they wanted a short biography for each person on staff. My co-workers and I each collaborated on one another's blurbs. We weren't allowed to use them, of course. I found my bio in my email archive today, and decided that it's a shame it's never been published.

"Short, squat, and gruff yet lovable, Linda startles easily. She is not as dim-witted as you think. She likes to swear. When you leave after speaking to her, she makes fun of you. It is rumored that she collects dust. Has 17 confirmed kills in the field.


Once had 4 GI Joe torsos, a pack of gum, a baby starling, 16 marbles and 1 very rare replica of Tom Selleck's moustache removed from an unmentionable area by a veterinarian after a long night of binge drinking Mad Dog 20/20 and doing body shots off a very confused elderly couple.

Nickname: "Butch", "Babs"

Favorite Song: "A Country Boy Can Survive"

Favorite Quote: "Milk, milk, lemonade, around the corner fudge is made."

Marital Status: Yes

Children: Two (Inadvertantly purchased with Marlboro Miles. She thought she was getting a commemorative Dale Earnhardt collector's plate.)

Hobbies: Huffing paint fumes, BMX bikes, Fistfighting, Scrapbooking."

Sweet Leaf My Ass.

I am sick to bloody death of paranoid pot smokers.



Disclaimer: Everything I'm about to say is wholly anecdotal and based on limited personal experience with dope-smoking fucktards. I have no empirical data with which to back up my claims and accusations, no scientific studies with caged monkeys or lab rats or control groups or placebos. It is based solely on my own observations. Furthermore, I'm not interested in debate. I don't care what anyone else thinks about this particular subject. You want debate? Go somewhere else.


People who smoke pot get weird and paranoid and annoying. They develop a special type of narcisism wherein anything and everything anyone says or does can somehow be interpreted as a personal slight. Because dope-smoking also fries a fucktard's short-term memory, their recollections become half-assed and distorted, so that when they choose to throw past events back in someone's face, they're forty-nine shades of wrong.


You take a fucktard who is predispositioned to depression, and you give that fucktard some pot. The pot enhances the depression, so that its width and breadth and depth increase exponentially. Then you take the fucktard to the doctor, and the doctor gives the fucktard some antidepressant medication. (Which, more than a few studies have shown, are remarkably ineffective in the majority of patients and have no more effect on the clinically gloomy than sugar pills. This is true, look it up.)


Pot is a depressant, as is alcohol. I think that physicians should be required by law to test mopey fucktards for drugs. If they are found to have drugs in their stupid systems, they should be informed that perhaps their outlook would improve if they laid off the depressants. However, there are no kickbacks from the pharmaceutical companies in that approach.


Antidepressants change people, never for the better. So you take a paranoid mopey fucktard with a bad memory and then you throw some Prozac or Zoloft or whatever on top of it, and they seem to get pissed off. Their interests change, their likes and dislikes change. Their personalities are altered.


Then you have a dope-smoking fucktard who was mildly annoying but had some good points and rearrange their personality with the magickal anti-glum pills, and you're left with someone you probably don't want to know.


You might get to the point where you don't want to be around that person very much, and you might discuss this loudly and abundantly with other people who know the fucktard. Then the fucktard might go and commit suicide in the woods with a box cutter so that you're left feeling guilty for the rest of your stupid life.


Or worse yet they don't pick up a box cutter and off themselves, and you're stuck listening to their ridiculous dope-smoking antidepressant-addled bullshit nonsense.


I can't decide which is worse.

Pondering Dawkins.

I've been thinking a lot about the notion that the world would be a better place without religion. I was watching Ben Stein's documentary "Expelled," which addresses academe's treatment of researchers who study Intelligent Design, and it set me thinking. I've heard the anti-religion sentiment from many camps, from journalists to academics to entertainers. Citing the many atrocities committed in the name of one god or the other, it is supposed that eradicating religion would enable humans to become more civilized and stop lobbing bombs at one another.


I reckon there is a preponderance of evidence supporting this viewpoint, between the Crusades and the Inquisition and the entire history of the Middle East. One could argue, however, that there have been just as many horrors inflicted by one group of flag-waving humans on another group of flag-waving humans that were not motivated by religion. Pick your communist government as an illustration of this, given their fascist tendency to kidnap, imprison, and murder dissenters. The National Socialist German Worker's Party is also a fair example of this; you may know them as the Nazi party.


Buddhists and Hindus also seem to put a rather large whole in the "religion is responsible for all the bad things in the world" theory. Admittedly, I am not a scholar on such things, and there very well could be some horrible atrocities committed at some point in history in the name of the Buddha or Ganesh. In any case, I can't recall any recent instances of groups of pissed off Buddhists bombing shopping malls or abortion clinics. Also consider that there are many religions not only are non-violent, but also are responsible for much of the charity in the world. Do a Google search on the outreach ministries of the Mennonites and review the long list of community services the church provides. The Salvation Army? Great organization, outstanding charitable works...no guns.


Acts of war and terrorism, whether committed in the name of a god or a political party, seem to stem from the very human desire to achieve some kind of perfect state. Whether the result one seeks is heaven or a perfect society, it seems that once a group of zealots are whipped up in to a fever about the possibility of perfection, they will maim and kill anyone they see as an obstacle to its attainment. If you're a Muslim, infidels stand between you and your 40 virgins in heaven. If you're a Christian in the Middle Ages, dirty Muslim heathens befouling the Holy Land stand between you and the Perfect Kingdom of God. If you're a Nazi, Jews, Gypsies, retards, and other assorted imperfect human detritus stand between you and Utopia. If you're an environmentalist, whaling ships, loggers, and people driving large SUVs stand between you and a perfect, pristine planet. Combine humankind's desire for perfection with a propensity for smug self-righteousness along with some faith, ideology, or creed that accommodates both, and you've got a recipe for disaster.



I'm of the opinion that eradicating religion would not make the world a better place. Making a civilized, rational, and concerted effort to contain zealotry in all its forms, however, would probably work to the benefit of everyone.

Obituary

I wrote this for a co-worker who is actually not yet dead. Names have been changed to protect the innocent.
_____________, affectionately known as "Bear," was recently dragged across the river Styx by the icy hand of death after an incident involving a power surge and a sex robot.

He was born in 1973 to Bob and Shirley _________ in ________, Pennsylvania.

Bear was a 1991 graduate of ________High School, and a graduate of the University of ________, where he majored in drinking, falling in to shrubbery, and harrassing exchange students. Bear was a member of the water polo team, and had many funny stories about wet socks, Uzbekistanian pornography, and van-clearing flatulence.

Bear is survived by: his parents; two brothers, Chet and Botetourt; a retarded uncle who will outlive the whole family; his imaginary wife, Agnes; his dog, Tom; his cat, Cat; and his sex robot, Sparky.

In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions can be sent to the ___________ Institute for Furthering Sex Robot Technology.