Lord, Bless This Bounty For Which We Are About To Conceive

In case you haven't heard, a set of octuplets was born in California last week. All eight babies are said to be doing well, as it their mother. As usual when a woman gives birth to a litter of Frankenstein children, the media is going gaga apeshit over this news. Personally, I find it highly disturbing. Highly.

We don't know much about the mother, because she and her doctors are in some sort of weird media blackout, only occasionally updating us on the status of these freak kids. But we can surely conclude that mother used fertility drugs and that she's a paranoid narcissist.

Because, seriously. How fuckin' full of your own infertile shit do you have to be to think you deserve to have six plus children at once? Only in America is this type of behavior celebrated and encouraged. Remember the McCaughey septuplets, the world's first surviving set of seven babies, born in Iowa in 1997? I do. They were on Oprah the following year, paraded out by their Christian nutbag parents in front of the bright lights and television audience of millions, all in an attempt to prove what a "normal" family they are. A "normal" family that gets a pre- babyproofed mansion as a gift from Oprah.

Now, of course, we have "Jon and Kate Plus 8," a TLC reality show dedicated to this couple with a set of twins and a set of sextuplets. We learn that they are also Christians and full of their own infertile shit. I love how these families are always religious, as if subverting god's own will is going to get you into the express lane to heaven. There's a reason he made you infertile, asshole! Fuck, they're not blessings, they're science experiments. Allah forbid you just adopt a kid or two and leave it at that.

I was watching "Jon and Kate Plus 8" a few weeks ago and Kate was talking about how she gets the kids to line up for shit. She says something like, "I just say, 'Birth order,' and they just know. They know that their birth order was chosen by god." No, not so much. Their birth order was chosen by which fetus was closest to the hole they cut in your overstuffed uterus. And the neonatologists did that, not god. Or Jesus.

There is nothing at all normal or healthy about a woman carrying more than, like, three babies in her at once. And even triplets is a stretch, both morally and anatomically. I can't believe any insurance company in this country would be willing to cover the delivery of eight premature babies at once and the subsequent ten years in the NICU they'll require. But then again, I guess that's what Oprah's for.

More Crap In My Eye

The plan. I was tempted to give this one its very own post but it isn't worth it. Mother Dearest has been on me to come up with a "plan" for my life. I'm all like, "But I did the plan. The plan was college. My high school guidance counselor told me if I went to college, all the doors in the world would open up to me, flowers would bloom in the desert, Muslims and Jews would get it on, and my life would resemble a trendy sitcom about Modern Woman if I got a framed piece of paper with my full name on it. I did the plan. THE PLAN FAILED." I guess what she really means is that she wants me to solve this historic global economic crisis all by my lonesome in between blog posts and gin shots. "Well, you have to get a job," she bitches. Right. Because I haven't ever tried looking for a job. I'm waiting for one to knock on my bedroom door, take me by the hand, and introduce me to his (or her) HMO and 401k. Here's the rub, Ma: We're. In. A. Depression. No. One. Hires. In. A. Depression. Speaking of declaring the obvious...

Generation Y Job-Seekers Hit Hard. That's an actual article title on MSN. One, two, three: NO FUCKIN' SHIT! I really should quit reading MSN. It always pisses me off.

Automatic things. Everything is automated. Think about it. Doors, sinks, toilets, hand dryers, "people movers" (or as I call them, "flat escalators"). I was in a mall bathroom the other day (not soliciting a handjob, Senator Craig) and all of a sudden, I felt like I was living in a lame episode of The Jetsons. If, you know, people in the 60s thought automatic sinks were blazing new technology. The philosophy behind this shit is astounding. Automatic bathrooms? Well, we're saving trees by not wasting as much TP and paper towels. Wow, except for every piece of already recycled paper towel you save from being recycled again, you've wasted more than that in electricity to run this Lay-Z-Boy bathroom! You, sir, are a tool.

I, and you, are capable of touching things and wiping our own hands with paper towels. Allah gave us manual dexterity and opposable thumbs for a reason. Not to wave them under literally stupid computer chips that don't always detect our presence all in some vein attempt at eco-conscientiousness. Besides, every time I approach an automatic door, I get that Simpsons episode in my head where Bart sells his soul to Milhouse for a comic or something and all of a sudden he cannot walk through an automatic door because he lacks a soul. I have a mild panic attack every time I see an automatic door, knowing if it doesn't open, I'm most certainly soulless. Which leads me to my next beef...

I am the living embodiment of entropy. Entropy is the second law of thermodynamics that states the universe tends towards chaos and decay. I am that principle in action. More on that later.

The plane that crashed in New York yesterday. It's a bird! It's a plane! No wait, it's a bird in a plane! I am legitimately relieved to hear there were no causalities, but come on! How insane is it that a plane crashes in New York on the very same day George Bush gives his farewell address on keeping us safe! Well apparently, he should have declared a War on Ducks because those fuckers almost killed 155 people yesterday. Or a War on Human Error. Remember the plane that crashed in Queens on November 12, 2001, killing 265? No you don't! Because it crashed from run of the mill, and way unsexy, piloting error. Certainly nothing to steamroll the Middle East over.

I don't believe in fate but if there is a god, he has a cruel sense of irony. I like that!

Not Another Israel Post

I'm sick of that shit so I'm going to ramble incoherently for this particular entry. Here are some things that are chapping my lily white ass right now:

Number one: The cover of Joe The Liar's new book. Presumably, "Joe The Plumber: Fighting for the American Dream" means fighting against the forces of the gay liberal conspiracy to destroy America under a fake persona with an exposed ass crack via a book that was ghostwritten by someone smarter than you.
-Nostradamus, his fan club, and Nostradamus-related programming. He was not a prophet. He wrote vague statements about the events of his day that people later interpreted as prophecy. Sort of like the people who wrote the Bible. Take this quatrain: "The sky will burn at 45 degrees / Fire approaches the great New City / Immediately a huge scattered flame leaps up / When they want to have proof of the Normans." Clearly this references airplanes flying into the Twin Towers on 9/11. Because if there's one thing the hijackers hated, it was a lack of proof of the fuckin' Normans! Goddammit, they hated that shit! I think that's also mentioned in sentence one of bin Laden's first fatwa against the U.S. Check it. But it does teach me an important lesson if I ever decide to enter prophecy as a profession: if it's vague bullshit, the people will come. I just want to thank the History Channel for airing three successive and sincere programs on this asshat.

-The Bible Code. Basically like Nostradamus for your computer nerd religious fanatics, the Bible Code is supposedly a series of secret messages hidden in the Bible that can only be found via a computer program that runs a series of matrices on the text to find vague, chopped up words that, if you squint your eyes and damage your cerebral cortex, clearly predicts events of our day. If god is omnipotent, then I think he can do better than "the assassin will assassinate" in reference to Yitzhak Rabin's murder. Yeah, god, assassinate is what assassins tend to do. Funny thing is, some Australian scientist ran the same matrix on "Moby Dick" and found similar shit. So I think there's one thing to conclude here: HERMAN MELVILLE WAS THE SECOND COMING AND WE FUCKIN' MISSED IT! OMFG!

-Educational bureaucracy. It took me a half hour to unenroll from a community college where I was planning on studying something in the medical field. I had to fill out a form in one building, drive to the other side of campus to get it signed by my advisor, drive back to the first building, and then take the form to three different offices to have it notarized by two different people. And you know they'll still send me a bill for the classes I'm now unenrolled from.

-My town's roundabout. In an effort to be cool, European-like, and save money on another useless traffic light, my town erected a roundabout (or "traffic circle," if you're a lame Yank) near said community college. Problem is, the local yokels cannot figure it out. As I was passing through it today, a guy in a truck did like a 380 in it; he went around it completely then took the right he was closest to when he pulled up to the damn thing. During that minute he was driving around, he must have been pissing himself in terror that he'd died, been sent to hell, and give this Sisyphean task as eternal punishment for his inability to understand the hard science of yielding to your left and exiting to your right. And I'm sure he's not the only one who's had that existential crisis while frantically trying to exit this black hole of a demon known as our town's roundabout.

-Maintaining this constant level of outrage. It's exhausting. :)

*Yawn*

Time magazine has named our next president as Person of the Year in its annual issue. And yeah, that's not the right cover. This cover is from 2006 and note the title of the article: "Why Barack Obama Could Be The Next President." Come on! Two years ago, we were all laughing at that shit! A brotha? Are you kidding? The next president all the way back then was maybe going to be Hillary or quite possibly Rudy Guiliani (because he was fucking there on 9/11). Barack Obama? Shit, with that name he should be glad he made it to the Senate. And that was before we even knew his middle name. I mean, the fact that we were even considering Hillary as a viable candidate was too much for most of America. A white woman as president? Whoa whoa whoa there, little lady! Why can't you bitches just be glad one of yous is Speaker of the House? Leave the commander in chiefin' to the men. ROAR!

Anyway, that was before Obama kicked the shit out of Hillary and John Edwards in the Iowa caucases, before the country got used to his booming smokers' voice speechifyin' about hope and shit in packed stadiums coast to coast, before the youtube videos and "grassroots" Internet campaigning. Before the $700 million raised and the Obamamania...OK, you get it.

As I've written before, I'm glad he won. I'm really really really glad he won. But this is such a boring, predictable, political choice by Time. Not as political as selecting Rudy Guiliani over Osama bin Laden in 2001 (bin Laden was the original choice but the Time peeps pussied out at the last minute) but it's just expected. Just to be an asshole, I would have picked Sarah Palin or Rush Limbaugh and written articles about how their brand of hate, "anti-intellectual pride" (David Cross quote, I loves it!), and lowest common denominator bullshit brilliantly backfired this year. I then would have parlayed that into how America is changing and shit, you know, the stuff we progressives love to hear.

But seriously, I hope this will be the last of the Obama apotheosis pieces and we can get down to the business of being more skeptical and critical of his decisions. The election's over, America has climaxed, and now we're waiting to see how our baby develops. Obama has a lot on his plate, which means he actually has to do shit. And a lot of it. Let's leave Obama the Celebrity in '08, please?

Rural America: Living Up To Stereotypes

This is the state of the state I live in. The state of Maryland theoretically ends at Frederick, which is located roughly at the black line. To the right of that line lies Baltimore and the D.C. suburbs. That's where all the people and wealth in the state are located. That part of the state is overwhelmingly Democratic, which is why Maryland is always a solidly blue state. The Eastern shore and the area to the left of the line are, well, not so Democratic. But because no one really lives there, the Southern sympathies of those areas are easily overriden (praise Jaysus).

Of course, being a denizen of that lovely place I affectionally call "Eastern West Virginia," I get to put up with racist and backwards shit that should have been settled decades ago. Just this year, at a vocational high school near my hometown, a controversy erupted over some white students displaying the Confederate Flag. Yes, the Confederate flag...in Maryland...a state that was a member of the Union, not the Confederacy. Now while most of us consider the Confederate flag to be a symbol of hate and division, others see it as a symbol of pride and unity. The furor from this shit even reached as far as The Washington Post, which painted my hometown as some shithole relic of the Old South (which it both is and isn't, since Maryland isn't the South!). As you can see, it was clearly just the honor students worried about their constitutional rights to free expression and not just idiot neo-Nazis. After all the dust was settled, it was ruled that the racist assholes were allowed to keep displaying their hate flag, for after all, it's their constitutional right.

Now, despite my personal opinions on the Confederate flag, I actually agree with the ruling. Because if I ever got caught burning a U.S. flag (which I've never actually done), I could just point to this event as precident that it's free speech. And then I'd inform all the haters to kiss my blue ass and move to West Virginia (which is a state that seceded from Virginia to be a part of the Union, though don't tell them that. There's plenty of Confederate flags in that state as well).

Fun times in Appalachia.

There's Only One President at a Time

OK, B. We know. You don't have to say it everytime you're on tv or giving one of your youtube speeches. Of course, it'd be great if Bush would abdicate right now. I was thinking that pretty vehemently during that shit in India last week. I can't wait until it's popular, fresh-faced B. Hussein Obama talking down countries rather than flaming asshole hypocrite George Bush. 45 more days! And you know Dude could still invade Iran.

Sort of piggybacking off of yesterday's post, I was conversing recently with a Republican friend of mine who isn't a huge fan of our president-elect. And it suddenly hit me then that now I am able to use all those sore winner phrases on Republicans that they were so fond of four years ago. So I told this friend, "You lost, get over it" and "This is America, love it or leave it." And it was everything I thought it could be. Being a prick is bipartisan, bitch!

Moving on to horrific economic news, the current US unemployment is 6.7% and the big boys predict it could hit as high as 10% by early next year. While this is definitely shitty news, it's not going to get as high as the 25-30% it was at the height of the Great Depression. *whew* For a second, I thought George Bush had turned us into France.

Man, fuck this decade. I prefer to live in the 90s that still exists in my own warped mind. I lionize the 90s the way Republicans masturbate gently over black and white images of the 50s. I loved the 90s: The Secret World of Alex Mac, Clarissa Explains It All, Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Hanging with Mr. Cooper, My Brother and Me, All That, Ren and Stimpy, Hey Arnold, Beverly Hills 90210 (which totally owned The fucking O.C.). *sighs* Here's a little ode to the 90s:

Get Your Fat Ass Outta My Face

The other day, I found myself in a similar argument with a friend over my smoking:

Friend: But why do you do it?

Me: Because I enjoy it and everyone hates it. You know I'm a contrarian prick.

Friend: But it's disgusting and it kills you.

Me: What doesn't kill you these days?

Then I proceeded to launch into my typical defense of smokers, which invariable involves comparing smoking to eating shit. To wit, there are roughly 400,000 Americans who die of cancer each year and not every single one of them was a smoker. In fact, most of them were probably fatasses who lived off sugar, uncaffeinated coffee, and high fructose corn syrup who passed anti-smoking laws because they worried about the effect of second-hand smoking on their treasured health. Let me repeat that fact: 400,000 Americans die every year of cancer and most of them were not smokers.

Secondly, what pisses me off as a smoker is that we as a society placate, coddle, and pity the fatties. "Oh, wah. I'm 600 pounds and I don't know why God did me like this!" God didn't shove mountains of shit down your throat. God did not invent the Oreo pizza or the deep fryer. And God probably doesn't consider being fat a "curse." Dude used to make shit rain frogs and killed tons of people just to prove a point about his severe jealously. You know, we shouldn't make excuses for these people. Just like me, they have a vice that should be frowned upon. But unlike me, they get Oprah specials and a bizarre outpouring of sympathy. Just because everyone is fat doesn't make it right, mmmkay? Besides, it's funny as hell to watch fat people fall down.

This brings me to the state of Maryland's decision to ban smoking in bars and restaurants a few years ago. OK, right. Because people go to bars and get shitfaced out of concern for their health. People waddle into restaurants to stuff themselves numb at the buffet (with room for desert!) out of concern for their health. If you're going to make it difficult for me to light up without being cited, then you better make it hard for fatties to access their drugs. Ban fatties from fast food joints! Make McDonald's, Burger King, and Little Debbie shell out big like the tobacco companies did in the 90s! Jesus! The hypocrisy here is really astounding.

Anyway, after I went through all that, my friend had to admit I had a point. Fuck yeah I do.