Madone, I'm a fuggin' stunad!

It would seem that despite all of my intentions, both pure and immoral, I cannot stop making a total ass of myself. There really doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it other than I can be assured of firmly sticking my foot in it every chance I get. OK not every single chance, but it feels like at least a 10:1 ratio. I've always taken great pride in my critical thinking abilities, but lately I'm starting to wonder if that's warranted. This last year in particular was a real dust up, bearing witness to everything from me moving in with a junkie to working full time at a bar that is clearly on it's last legs to trying to date an old friend of mine.
Well. Now that those highlights are in print, I can certainly see where I went wrong, but then that's excruciating benefit of hindsight: if you're paying attention, you only have to make the same mistake once. This past year, my Ego appears to have been circling around my past mistakes, chin in hand, while thoughtfully looking at all the angles and kicking the tires and tweaking the nipples, before saying, with a contemplative scratch of hs wispy stubble,
"Well sure that didn't work out before but what if I try this exact same mistake...wait for it...here in New York? Eh? Like what you're hearing?"
My Id then spins around in his high-backed leather chair, props his feet up on the desk and, after a long pull on the cheap stogie he's been chewing on, replies,
"Kid, I like the cut of yuh jib. Yuh gonna go far in this town, mahk my woids. Where do we go from heah?"
Ego, who had been flop-sweating up to this point with anticipation, flops down on a surprisingly lumpy couch and pours himself a tumbler of J&B scotch from the imitation crystal decanter on the end table, carefully pondering his next words.
"Well", he says after a nervous sip of sub-par whiskey, "Let's do everything pretty much exactly the same as the last time."
Id raises his head from the rail of cocaine and baby laxative he'd been snorting, no mean feat considering he was doing so with his feet still on the desk and the cigar in his mouth, and says,
"Dis is hot shit. I also like where yuh takin dis repeat mistake thing. But I gotta axe ya, won't he notice dat it's the same gotdamn thing dat got him in dat pickle a few yeahs back? How we gonna sell dat?"
Ego leans forward on the couch and almost falls off due to the cushion sliding in an oblong manner over a rather sizable lump,
"That's the beauty. Technically these mistakes are brand new. I mean, he's never asked that particular chick out. We can always sell him on the fact that he liked her since he first met her and damn the torpedoes and all that crap. And who knows, maybe that junkie won't be the stealing-type. Oh, and hey, we can go with the angle of 'you can single-handedly turn that bar around so long as you really work hard of next to no money'! It's all justifiable."
Id tilts his head and swivels around to gaze out his floor-to-ceiling picture window. The coke is running through his veins like white fire now and, realizing the baby laxatives will start kicking in soon, he says,
"OK den. I'll have my people call ya when we're ready to go to woik. Yer a good kid, ya know dat?"
 Ego rushes to his feet, ecstatic,
"Oh, thank you sir! I'm so happy you approve!"
"Yeah yeah yeah. Gwan get outta heah. I gotta drop a corn snake in the terlet, knowattImean? We'll be in touch."
Once out in the hall, Ego feels a strange tug at his heart. He knows he just satisfied Id better than he could have hoped but there's something nagging deep down inside. I feel like I'm forgetting something, he thinks as he makes his way out of the building, but what could it be?
Meanwhile back in the office, Id rises from his chair, scratches his not inconsiderably sized balls and pads over to the couch. He bends down and pulls the cushions off to reveal my Super-Ego, bound and ball gagged. Id pulls the gag off and looks down menacingly at his incapacitated counterpart,
"Well, chumly, you hoid da kid. He's woikin fer me know. How's dat feel, knowin' youse lost again?"
Super-Ego opens his mouth to reply, but is cut short by two bullets to the head.
"Fuggedaboutit" Id chuckles, and wanders away to the john to take care of some unfinished business.

Anyways.

Got a little carried away there. I forgot I was writing my blog instead of auditioning to ghostwrite Snookie's first novel. Hey we all gotta make a buck. Sure, everyone is scoffing at the fact that the words "Snookie" and "book" are showing up in a sentence unaccompanied by the traditional "has never read a" or "doesn't know where to go to buy a" or even "couldn't figure out how to work a box of matches when she was trying to burn a". That's really no reason to slag the poor woman. In my mind, people who have their books ghostwritten for them and conceptual artists are sort of one and the same, except no one calls conceptual artists out for having more imagination than talent. In fact, Snooki already proved her artistic worth when she worked on a collaboration with Damien Hirst recently, entitled, All You Haters Suck My Bun:

It was auctioned off at Sotheby's for a cool $3.5 million, while the artistic integrity of a generation was hocked at the pawn shop around the corner for a measly $29.15 and a free hand-job from "Ethel".

In a totally unrelated and abrupt switch from what I was just talking about, for the first time this year California's Prop 19 (you know, the one where they legalize pot?) is showing signs of passing! I do believe, as much as I love NYC, I might have to look at the possibilities of wintering out on the West Coast. An unintended side effect of this groundswell of voter support is the possible across the board bolstering of California's Democratic candidates. It's looking like all those stoners, whose usual level of political activisim peaks at managing to watch the Daily Show and The Colbert Report back to back without falling asleep, have finally found a reason to head on down to the polls and do their civic duty. Political calculus whiz and possible necromancer Nate Silver had this to say about the upcoming races:

"There is a ballot initiative in California this year, Proposition 19, which would legalize the possession of small amounts of marijuana for personal consumption. The initiative, which polls suggest is a favorite to pass, might be motivating more young voters to show interest in this year’s elections, and that may translate into more support for Mr. Brown and Ms. Boxer, even though both have come out opposed to the initiative (as have the Republican candidates)."

While it is common knowledge that everyone under the age of 30 votes straight Democrat (with the exception of this wormy, little fuck), getting them to put down the gol-dang Xbox and Facepages has proved notoriously difficult in the past. Now, with a proposition to legalize possession of small amounts of marijuana for personal use on the ballot, Silver predicts they will bring a much needed boost to the Dem's middling charge and maintaining the status quo we can believe in. The only way I can see this backfiring would be an "ironic" outpouring of support for Gov. Schwarzenegger cause he was in that one movie where they went to Mars and that one chick had like three tits, you know? That movie was fucking awesome, dude.

This is why you don't mix your zeitgeist with your schadenfreude.

What's amazing is that special effect head is the most emotion ever recorded on Arnie's at any given time. Still, he might be able to pull off yet another term as the Guv, so long as he keeps this little expose` out of the media.



While certainly embarrassing it's not quite as damning as the GOP/Tea Bagger candidate for governor New York, Carl Paladino's little dustup with a NY Post editor in which he threatens to "take him out". That's the nice thing about the political system in this state: They know that you know they're crooks so let's just put it out there that you try any of this recall bullshit, well, not for nothing, but you know what's gonna happen.

You got some noive!

It's always nice to wake up ridiculously late, flip open the laptop and find that, at least for today, all is right in the world. Kinda makes me want to just roll over and go back to using my cat as a pillow, but I inevitably do rise and shine, cause carpe diem (means "I gotta take a crap" in Basque or something) and all that.
But wait, you might be asking, how exactly is everything alright in the world? Well first off, I said that all is right in the world, not everything is alright. Huge diff. Everything being "alright" would mean exactly that: all war has been called off, the various and sundry assholes who govern the planet have decided to not run the place into the ground and we've all somehow just learned to get along. That never happens, and I'm rather glad about that as it would really dry up the endlessly bubbling font of materiel I write about on my shoddy little blog. Truly a loss to civilization.
I use the phrase "all is right in the world" to rather hyperbolicly note that yet another facet of human ugliness has finally passed on into the undiscovered country. Look forward to seeing me use this term when Donald Trump goes bald or Crocs goes out of business or George Bush finally finds that pretzel that gets the better of him. The reason I make this call today, however, would be the recent announcement that the Sex and the City franchise is indeed dead. Glory hallelujah, let me hear you SING children! The damage done to my fair city by that show and it's cinematic spawn pales only in comparison the the exponential growth of NYU. Countless housewives the world over watched this steaming pile of dreck and then descended upon the NYC as packs of screeching, cosmo-swilling harpies in knock-off Prada over the years and their voracious appetites have turned whole swaths of the city into smoking rubble (in a cultural sense of course). I would like to lay the rapid decline of TriBeCa and Soho and Chelsea at the feet of this episodic monstrosity but I can find to hard evidence of this being the case. In the fine journalistic tradition of Fox News and the NY Post, however, I will do it anyways.
Sex and the City killed Lower Manhattan. And now, we have killed it back. Or New York Magazine killed it at least. Some guy who used to be on the show whose name I can't be bothered to run through a search engine because then I'd have to drag my browser cache behind the digital equivalent of a shed and put it out of it's misery, had this to say in an interview with the gorgon-slaying magazine:

"The press killed it. Your magazine fucking killed it. New York Magazine. It's like all the critics got together and said 'This franchise must die.' "   -some failed actor

Woah, there hoss! Let's not drop all the blame on the critics now. This was really more of a joint effort between (cue up "We Are the World") critics, editors, studio heads, the SAG, the NYC Better Business Bureau, any waiter who's ever worked a brunch shift, department store clerks, cabbies, women with high self-esteem, feminists, musicians, artists, artisans, hair stylists, nail stylists, hot dog vendors, firemen, police officers, paramedics, hobos both with and without shotguns, and anyone currently on the planet who was born with a penis except for that lone, failed actor. Pretty much anyone who isn't either a rapidly aging, self-conscious bitch with more money than sense or a gay man was killed this franchise. We all brought it down with a gut-shot to the box office and for that, New York thanks you.

Make no mistake, though, this poor city's culture and identity are far from safe. For years it was argued that immigrants from abroad were the root of NYC's many failures but find this to be untrue. It is exactly those immigrants that raised this city up to become one of the foremost cultural powerhouses on the planet. It's as if the entire world condensed itself here with all of it's respective strengths and weaknesses and the end result was a multicultural dynamo the likes of which hadn't existed since the height of the Ottoman Empire.
The real threat turned out to be our fellow countrymen.It has always been a harsh mistress, but ultimately a fair one. For the last hundred years, stories and fables of New York have spread far and wide, enticing those who would test themselves and repulsing those who wish for an easy ride.
With the rise of the Internet Age and the ability to separate fact from fiction (well, theoretically at least) at the whole world's fingertips, people who, before, might not have made the leap to New York, started to think that this was indeed the place for them and began arriving in droves. When they got here, they elected Rudy Giuliani as their mayor and the Great Unraveling began.

I am death and I have been visited upon thee.

Times Square was cleaned up, the homeless were thrown out and west Brooklyn was rezoned with an eye toward development. Only the Village remained. It was NYU that brought it all together. NYU had been nesting like a parasitic larva in the heart of The Village for decades and in the early 2000's it began eating it's way out. Several years later, the damage was permanent. The East Village and Alphabet City, once bastions of underground NYC culture had been laid to waste by frat bars and novelty t-shirt shops as every year it played host to an ever-increasing crowd of entitled little pricks from all over the country.

NYU and The Village circa 2008

Underground culture isn't the only endangered species in NYC today. A couple days ago I mimicked the classic Brooklyn patois which I rarely hear these days. In fact, I rarely hear any of New York's accents. Here's a quick rundown, borough by borough:



Listening to that woman talk almost makes you glad these accents are dying off. Of course, everyone is going to have an opinion on which accent comes from where so I'm not backing up her assertions in any way. After all, when she's talking about Brooklyn, the screen is showing a map of Queens, so how accurate can she be? She also fails to include my two favorite New York accents. Lucky for you they have both been preserved for posterity in one of my favorite Bad Old New York movies ever: The Taking of Pelham 123. We're talking the original starring Walter Matthau not that dogshit Travolta movie that came out last year. Here's a clip:



Figured out which two I love? First, Matthau is just killing it. "We call it the noive centah." "Robbarry, assawlt, moidah..." Every sentence just drips with the long-suffering weariness that was probably standard issue in 1970's New York. But he pales in comparison to the walking ball of stress and agitation that is Tom Pedi as Caz Dolowicz, who makes his thunderous entrance at the 5:30 mark. Holy shit, that accent is amazing. I can't even type it properly because it misses all the cadence of the delivery. I don't know from whence it came or where it has disappeared to, but I think it ought to me mandatory for any male living in New York who's over the age of 50 to have to speak like that. God knows I wish I could.

The fire has gone, my friends. We are still an amazing city but certain hallmarks of NYC have receded into obscurity, perhaps never to return. It's a difficult thing to put into words, the love/hate I feel towards a time that I never knew and probably wouldn't have been able to survive in. The closest I can get is to link you over to Thomas Wolfe's seminal short work, Only the Dead Know Brooklyn. Sure things ain't like they used to be, but for right now, I gotta say, I sure is glad ta be heah.

Blacklists and Black Jesus

While city folks are busy evolving faster than their countrified counterparts, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life is reporting that Athiests know more about religion in general than religious people do. As a longtime Militant Agnostic (I don't know and neither do fucking you) I have to say that this comes as expected. Many of us atheists and agnostics think the way we do because in the past we had some form of religion crammed down our throats, and as such, vividly remember silly little details about it. These silly little details, of course, became the catalyst that ignited our departure from the church. You can really only know so much about a religion before the plot holes start to become a little glaring. Believe it or not, I can recite the name of every book of in the bible, as well as tell you how they are categorized, while balancing on my head on wooden pew, while writing the Apostle's Creed with my left hand. See the wonders that come of six years of christian school? These are vital skills for today's increasingly competitive job market, people! How can one be expected to pull a decent shot of espresso without knowing one's catechism?
Author's note: From this point, I spent roughly and hour and a half blogging about religion before realizing I had not cracked one single joke. While angry rants are my bread and butter, I do like to spice it up with a little wry. KA-ZING!!! As such, I will defer to the advice of Black Jesus and continue the post in a secular manner.

Slow yo roll, cracker!

In keeping with the spirit of self-censorship I present you with this little item
With organized religion continuing to ravage reason and sanity on a global scale, it's only natural that other, non-religious entities would be inclined to jump on board the Scold Bus.  Google, for example, has recently incorporated a "blacklist" of words it will not auto-complete when typed into it's search box. The search function will still run once you press the return key, but Google isn't gonna recommend the correct spelling of autofellatio for you anymore. A user generated list can be viewed here, although it's a little creepy, what the webmaster giving a shout out to everyone that submitted a blacklisted word. I'm looking at you, "Bill". The only reason for this new development, at least as far as I can deduce, would be to protect the fragile minds of iPuritans who do not wish to be reminded that "penis" and "Pentateuch" have a few letters in common. Most of the list is directed at words that might have pornographic connotations, while others are geared toward racial hate. A few however, had me a little stumped. At the top of the list is "4chan". While I think we can all agree that 4chan is indeed one of the most exceedingly obnoxious and juvenile sites on the entire web, blacklisting it does seem a bit harsh. Perhaps someone turned a photo of Larry Page into a lolcats-style internet meme?

Not sure, but I found this on 4chan instead so, here you go.

The word "lesbian" is also blacklisted because, I guess, Larry Page frowns on that sort of thing. It's interesting to note that "Heterosexual" pops up just fine as does "gay" just so long as you don't try to type in another word after it. Google wants nothing to do with your "gay old time" even if it is a "Yabba-Doo time". Google really jumps the shark, however, when the programmers apparently tried to anticipate how an offensive search might possibly be misspelled. Thus we end up with "rapping women" and "women rapping" being on the blacklist. While Li'l Kim might not be everyone's cup of tea, don't you think she's really just more comical than offensive? The best of the bunch has to be, by far, "wrapping men". Firstly, I do not think a would-be rapist, no matter how illiterate, is going to put that "w" in there. Secondly, if we really are googling "wrapping men", I have to wonder in what manner we might be wrapping them? Cellophane? Wax paper? A whole mess of festive ribbon? Is this some obtuse reference to porn stars who wear condoms? I suppose it's entirely possible that this is some sexual fetish that I was heretofore ignorant of. I didn't know what the term "blue waffle" referred to until I saw this list and now the damage to my brain is good and permanent. Maybe someone out there likes their packages well wrapped, if you get my drift.

Hot.

The blocked misspellings got me thinking though. I think one could reasonably state that if you have to google how to rape someone, chances are when the rapey time comes, you're prolly going to do it wrong. Like get your dick stuck in someone's ear or something. Same goes for searching how to kill someone. You clearly lack the mental facilities to get away with something like that so let's just not even bother, shall we? Oddly enough, "how to get away with hypocrisy" seems to be blacklisted as well.

Post-Human shack dwellers

I'm living 32 years after and a continent away from the time and place Fear sang about in their first single "I Love Living in the City" and yet it's overblown lyrics about urban decay still ring strong. While I am pleased to report that I've never had the uncomfortable sounding dilemma of discovering grass growing on my balls, there is a roach of not-inconsiderable proportions making rather good time up my wall. I'm hoping it's on the way to my upstairs neighbor's room because he's been blasting shitty dubstep for the last hour and it's beginning to seriously damage my calm. Sadly, I have not yet reached the point in my life where I think it's reasonable of me to ask a neighbor to turn it down at any time prior to midnight. It's moments like this that make or break a New Yorker, or any other urbanite for that matter.
 What it all boils down to is City vs. Country. Everyone comes down on one side or the other because no one loves the suburbs unless they have access to large amounts of prescription pharmaceuticals, in which case I would argue that they still don't love it. Beige acceptance is a better term, I think.
"I Heart New York"
"I Beigely Accept Gilbert, AZ"
There's a t-shirt to be made from that phrase as soon as I can figure out a picture that succinctly embodies beige acceptance. I would imagine it looks somewhat like a Ford Taurus.

But, as I so often do, I digress. There are many a point and counter-point to the great City/Country debate. Convenient location or wide open space? More in touch with the world or more in touch with nature? Easy access to arts and culture or easy access to woodland print bib overalls? The back and forth has been a at a cultural stalemate since this country came into existence. 
 Until now.
The BBC reports that a group of British scientists have declared that city life is putting modern urbanites on the fast track to immunity from a variety of diseases. This new finding represents a paradigm shift in the British medical establishment, whose previous recommendation for effective disease control had been to supplement a spoonful of sugar with each dose of medicine. While this strategy had been deemed ineffectual in the past, the Brits stuck by it, claiming that while it might be ineffectual, it was ineffectual "in the most delightful way".  

Avoidance of singing chimney sweeps is also recommended.

The study claims that, by living in constant contact with all the other filthy, dirty people who make up a large percentage of every city's population, we are making ourselves genetically resistant to many forms of illnesses that have historically plagued humanity. What has basically happened is that, over the last couple thousand years that people have been living in cities, there have been widespread epidemics ranging from leprosy to the black plague to the flu. As each wave of disease has washed over a population, there are people who are less resistant to disease that are killed and there are more resistant people who survive. The survivors pass their tough-ass genes on to their children and so on and so on. Then, all these disease-hardened post-humans go and live really close to each other and get exposed to infectious diseases an a much higher basis than their country cousins, which is essentially like getting free immunization shots every day of your life. Remember how everyone was terrified of H1N1 last year? 

"So dis flu show's up in New Yawk, right? An' it's all like, 'Hey, fawkin check me out", right? An' we was like, Jimmy was dere, ask 'im. We was like, 'Not for nuttin' but, ah, why don' yooze go an FAWK yuh self', am I right?"


That's not to say that city folks don't get sick. They do, just like anyone else, but they are also successfully fighting off a much higher number of bugs than one would have to out in the sticks. This is why you probably won't get sick when you eat a brown-water hot dog before washing your hands when you get off the subway and your visiting relatives from Louisiana get explosive diarrhea. Every generation is gradually getting closer to being a group of people who are naturally more resistant to disease and infections on one hand and a bunch of sickly, evolution-denying inbreds on the other. Guess who lives where. 

While Mom Nature is doing her best to transform us into walking bottles of Purell, we are actively trying our damnedest to undo all of her hard work. See, that same evolutionary theory that's making us more disease resistant? Works the same way every time you wash some anti-bacterial soap down the drain. Right now, diseases are living in their very own Dark Ages with antibiotics standing in for the bubonic plague. You know how every hand sanitizer commercial claims to kill %99.9 of germs? Well that last %0.01 is going to be a real bitch to deal with someday.

I'ma gonna kick yer ass, boy!

Scientists have discovered an array of antibiotic resistant bacteria ranging from relatively benign to... oh wait, antibiotic resistant bacteria are working together now. Well, we were a nice species while we lasted, I suppose.

But all is not roses  in the big city. We suffer from terrorist threats, high crime and an often ridiculous housing market. Here's a quick example of just how bad it's getting in NYC. Yes it's true. Someone in Brooklyn is renting out a 8x10 Rubbermaid tool shed in their backyard for $500/month. Indeed, you would have to be quite the tool to rent this place out. Oh, is it really "probably" best only to use it as a studio during the winter months? Yeah I guess $500  a month is a totally reasonable amount to pay for an unheated fucking shack in the middle of the fucking winter. I'm sure frostbite will "probably" only take a couple of fingers and toes, so what's your problem? People in West Virgina do all the time! It's the new trend! Ironic shack dwelling, soon to be followed by ironic coal mining, ironic toothlessness and ironic banjo playing. Oh, I'm sorry. Ironic banjo playing is already a trend. I just...I mean...  Here. Have a picture.

See, it's perfect for ironically playing your toy dual-necked banjo while idly wondering why everything good in life seems to keep passing you by and all the people you bring home for the night never return your phone calls. Come January, someone will "probably" have committed suicide in that thing and the rent will go up to $550 because it comes standard with the angry ghost of some hipster chick. This is what we've boiled ourselves down to: we can withstand the ravages of whatever the bacterial world can throw at us but voluntarily give them a hand in destroying us because we think dirt is icky BUT we're OK with paying out the ass to live like a hobo. 


OK, Country. You win.

You'll listen to me ramble and LIKE IT!!!

Just Prior to Weekend Updates:

Briefly touching back on the topic of "Whitey is Funny", I just saw a middle aged white dude in a Jetta rolling down Myrtle Ave blaring Run-DMC's cover of "Walk This Way". Two things struck me simultaneously. The first being how much a street that runs through some of the toughest neighborhoods in Brooklyn and used to sport the nickname "Murder Ave" has changed. The second was, that's probably the only rap song that guy knows and I might lay money down that he had it on repeat. It's another classic way of how us white folks invite ridicule: the louder you proclaim you are "down with the hood" or whatever, the more obvious it becomes that you are absolutely not and in fact quite close to peeing your pants.

Also, what I said yesterday about apropriating other culture's style? Yeah that's really a two way street. For your consideration, Lenny Kravitz:

 

Seeing as how a picture is worth a thousand words, I will refrain from comment and let you be alone with your thoughts. Following that logic, my post yesterday was a staggering 11,500 word treatise, by far my largest and most verbose work on any single topic to date. Yay, me.

What I really want to talk about (type about? Rant impotently about?) today is a sentiment that I have heard drunkenly espoused at least five times this week. We are living in the future. Yes, this is going to be one of those "Did you ever stop and think that _____" type of posts, the kind that make readers wonder just how baked I might be as I write. Fact is I haven't gotten to that part of my day because NYC weed generally sucks, both in terms of quantity and and as a descriptor of what it does to the money in my wallet, so much that I have actually gotten to the point where I drag my feet at the thought of sparking up. Lucky for me I no longer have to wonder if I'm getting ripped off thanks in part to living in the future which has brought us this.
Yes. That is in fact a website tracking the average price of weed throughout the US and Canada. All prices are voluntarily posted by anonymous users and curated by the website to remove any outrageously high or low claims. My first reaction to this info was that I really want to move to Canada now. Also, when looking at the recent entries for NYC, it seems that as of the 24th, and oz. goes for either $65 or $600, depending on how much you like getting ripped off and/or how many guns your are currently wielding. My guess for the dude that got that $65 oz. is eight guns. This was made possible by the fact that he is clearly tripping on something and his hands are fucking HUGE right now, bro!
Aside from that, this map gives a very clear picture to anyone curious as to where pot comes from. West of the Rockies seems to be a safe bet, as well as Canada and the parts of Mexico that don't butt up to the parts of America that are absolutely filthy with Minutemen.

Or, as evidenced by the price drop in Florida, anywhere Don Johnson isn't.

But back to the future (ha-HA!), we are living in a techno-dream world the likes of which Gene Roddenberry and Arthur C. Clarke could only dream of. I'm not talking space stations and commercial space shuttle flights or anything like that. I'm talking about the fact that things if you took and iPhone back to that most future-celebrating of times, the 80's, there's a good chance you might have been burned at the stake for being a communist witch. The the advances in simple everyday consumer tech over the last ten years is, to put it mildly, shocking. Just to put the exponential tech growth into perspective, here's a quick rundown of what has been considered cutting edge in consumer products for the last 60 years:

1950's:
This is a great place to start because, much like their brother-in-neon, the 80's, these neanderthals thought they were living in the future. It's also played witness to the birth of much of the components that would make up the nuts and bolts of modern technology. Microchips, fiber optics, bar codes, modems and integrated circuits were all invented in this decade. To their credit as well as their detriment, their imaginations were a wee bit ahead of their capabilities. For example, atomic cars. Because putting the most destructive force known to man in the hands of methadrine-addled housewives and their Pinko-Commie hatin' husbands was considered progress at the time. Thankfully, someone somewhere bitch-slapped the progenitor of this idea back into his own decade and the idea was scrapped. On the down side, synthesizers were also invented, paving the way for geeky asshats the world over to have an outlet for their terrible taste in music. Contraceptive pills were introduced a decade too late to prevent hippies from existing.  Fact is, most of the tech that was invented round this time wasn't nearly as impressive as what people yearned for.

Or their bitchin concept art.

1960's:
Getting better. This decade was a little more grounded in their futuristic hubris although they saw far greater advances in technology. This is where tech really started to enter the consumer market with such advances as permanent press fabric, astroturf and breast implants. Not particularly futuristic, but many found the thought of women with breast implants, wearing permanent press clothing while posing on astroturf to be appealing at the time. At the end of the decade someone remembered that credit cards and barcodes had been invented, so they made ATMs and barcode scanners. Better late than never.  The 60's also saw the creation of a few things that wouldn't be used to their full potential until much later, such as tape cassettes, RAM, and the first version of the internet, which was developed on the other side of the continent from where Al Gore was going to university. The moon landing gave America one more reason to rest our balls on the rest of the world's collective chin and it was generally accepted that we would be living there, for some inexplicable reason, in the near future. Why we wanted to do this at the time is a mystery to me, here in the future, where it's starting to look like that might become a sad necessity.

The idea of intelligent, walking buildings, however, makes Blade Runner look like Little House on the Prairie.

1970's:
Now we're talking. The computer age gets a real jumpstart with with introduction of microprocessors and word processors. The dot matrix printer was invented and then rapidly made obsolete by the laser and ink-jet printers in the space of four years. By the end of the decade, typical Americans were rocking their Walkmans and the VCR was almost affordable enough to buy. People were not nearly as obsessed with the future at this point in time, although one can't really say why, what with the near utter implosion of the Executive Branch and a gnarly recession and disco and shit. I would imagine this was probably due to heavy quaalude, cocaine, and disco consumption. Concept artists finally figured out the the future was going to look less like a souped up present and more like, well, the fucking future:

1980's:
It's easy to see why these folks thought the future was now. Computers, which had required warehouse sized rooms up until this point, had finally reached desktop proportions. Microsoft and Apple were squaring off by 1984, thereby marking the first time in the history of that term that it could be taken to be meant literally. Nintendo and Sega would later follow suit, all the while pointing and giggling at Colecovision. The overall style of the 80's was sharp and angular, perhaps replicating the fact that all of their computer graphics were a bunch of comically huge pixels. There were also comically huge cell phones, comically huge laserdiscs and comically huge bangs. Portability was somewhat irrelevant due to the fact that the oil crisis was "over" and we all had money to burn. While the tech boom was officially on, it was still quite nascent, insomuch as it took people quite a while to realize that other colors besides green could provide a more fulfilling visual experience whilst perusing their DOS files. From the music to the clothes to the movies, every man, woman and child in the country was convinced that this was the future their parents had been dreaming of.

The whole Future-as-Ancient-Past fad was really big too.

1990's:
The decade I remember best in that it was the last time alcohol didn't feature heavily in my lifestyle. Nintendo got super, the internet got user friendly and the president got a hummer. Miniaturization had now caught on as the wave of the future. Through the miracle of science you had your choice of playing video games on a handheld device that replicated the look and feel of the last decade (GameBoy) or you could play them in color while setting a land speed record for depleting AA batteries (GameGear). Cell phones were now small enough to fit in a pants pocket, a trend that skyrocketed with the introduction of the vibrate function. The nation, as a whole, turned it's back on synthesizer music. We were truly standing at doorway to a brave new world.

Our idea of the what the future looked like took a pretty bad hit, though.

2000's:
Still not sure what we're referring to this last decade as yet. The Aughts? Fuck that. This is arguably when the future started, especially at the end. Everything went digital and I do mean everything. The flip-phone made the old Star Trek communicator a reality and then Smartphones made them look as silly as Star Trek. We've crossed that barrier where the past's imagination had sputtered out and died for lack of information. We are living in ways that would seem nearly unfathomable to those poor bastards in the 50's. Only people in the 80's and 90's had anything close to an accurate guess of where we'd be right now. I mean tell me this doesn't look like a prop from Back to the Future 2:

Computers on bikes? Oh, yeah. We've made it.

The Pains of being Purely White

A friend of mine recently drew my attention to this flickr account. What's notable about it is that instead of using his account to showcase the shitty "art" photos he took with Hipstamatic or an album dedicated to his corgie, Eric Fischer is displaying computer generated ethnicity maps based on 2000 census info of the country's biggest cities. The results are moderately horrifying. Take NYC:

Each dot represents 25 people of a given ethnicity. Red is for Whites (although I believe pink might have been a more apt hue), blue is for Blacks, yellow is for Hispanics and green is for Asians.I think you can tell where fucking Midtown is, right? Over in Brooklyn the mass of blue is Bed-Stuy and southern Bushwick. I live up top where the blue is meeting the yellow. Even when enlarged it's easy to see that, while we are a crazy diverse city, we all kinda keep to ourselves. Still though, we're doing a fuckload better than Detroit:

 

Jesus, Detroit! Looking at that makes you think there's a thirty foot tall electric barbed wire fence made out of Sickle Cell Anemia and topped with burning crosses running all the way down 8 Mile Road! I mean you're making Mobile, Alabama look like a bastion of racial tolerance by comparison.

Admittedly, not by much though...

Then there are cities that can only be described as "Homogeneous Zones". It would seem that El Paso has been reclaimed by Mexico, Honolulu was never America's to begin with and Portland? Oh, my beloved hometown what can I say except:

What a bunch of fucking CRACKERS!

I mean, I always know Portlanders were a little pasty, what with the near total lack of sunshine, but I had no idea that we had all of, what? 50 black folks? The Great White North indeed.
What is it about white folks that just opens us up for ridicule? Is it our inherent lack of rhythm or dance moves? Is it our terrible fashion sense? Is it because we over-saturate the airwaves so much that by default we make up the majority of on-camera boners? I would wager multiple centuries of raping, pillaging, enslaving, massacring and otherwise lording it over the rest of the planet would have something to do with it. It's always more fun to pick on the powerful. That's why stand up comedy routines and satires have a famous person/average shlub ratio of 1,000,000,000,000,000:1. People that laugh at the underprivileged are generally considered to be dicks.
Religion is pretty good cannon fodder no matter who's practicing it, but once you get it all sparkly white, the comedy gold really starts to shine. Check out some gospel music from this Black church choir with the world's most awesome conductor:



Hot shit. Now let's check out the competition. This next video, I'm told, get's "quite rocking" around the 1:06 mark.



I'm pretty sure this is authentic footage of my own personal hell, namely being trapped in a stone box in some undisclosed midwestern location with potentially rapey priests for all of eternity. While there's no shot of the congregation in the first video, I would be willing to place a substantial wager that it outnumbers the two whole families who showed up to that voluntary torture session they're calling Lutheranism. I particularly like how at 1:49 we see the girl on the far left glaze over while her mom talks get's beatific about how "it's the same every week". That face she slowly makes just screams, "I can't even think about church without need a stiff drink".
Then there are Pentacostals, although the less said about those wackjobs, the better.

Style is another good one. Our history is littered with unfortunate choices, from striped bell bottoms to pleated jeans and from sweater vests to argyle socks. Pompadours and mustachios and mullets, oh my! We are unquestionably at our worst when we use our greatest ethnic power, appropriation. First we came for the clothes:

But no one said anything because they assumed we must be joking.

Then we came for the hair:

But no one said anything because they just felt bad for us.

Then we came for the gang signs

And got robbed of our costume jewelry by actual gangsters for acting like a bitch.

 Even on the athletic fields of the world, we just can't help but make ourselves look like walking punch-lines. On the one hand you have every famous modern basketball star, on the other you have cricket. While both where invented by white dudes and both are played by people of all ethnicities, one is very engaged with the style and sensibilities of a modern, young, black fan base while the other is...cricket. Your average basketball player looks like this:

Cricket, on the other hand...well:

Kinda dress like guidos.

OK, OK. While white people are not universally the shnooks I make them out to be, we are an understandably large target for ridicule. We have a history of privilage that makes us fun to mock. Call it the legacy of everything from The Crusades to Manifest Destiny. We have (for the time being) the power to call a lot of the shots on this planet and our complacency in that role has made our culture about as vibrant as cottage cheese. I disconnected from my own culture long ago.Where Williamsburg gives me irratble bowel syndrome, Midtown gives me pants ripping diarrhea, and while I don't go prancing around wearing Coogi sweaters and a do-rag, I have made an attempt to live as far past the ever advancing white line as I can without getting my cracker ass jumped every night for being in the wrong neighborhood. Right now, for example, I live in a vibrant, spirited Puerto Rican community in Bushwick. When the sun is out there are people selling fresh fruit and BBQ pork skewers on the sidewalks. Kids play in open fire hydrants. Little old ladies sit and gossip on their stoops and say hi when you greet them. Hell, even the lady at the bodega knows my name although she prefers to call me, Papi.
Guess what I'm getting at is, if I was born and raised in an environment such as this, I would look at all the white folks who never know their neighbors and live in a cultural waste land of chain restaurants and Wal-Marts and think they were pretty funny too.

Journalism as sideshow

OK, let's try this again shall we?
How bout I pick up where I left off: three foot long corn snake in a toilet.

Mine was a little *ahem* darker hued.

 True to their unflagging journalistic integrity, Gothamist won't let a good story die. Turns out, not only did the snake end up in a toilet, but it ended up on a toilet on the 19th floor of an apartment building. While very well might have been a released pet that just crawled in through a hole in the wall, I like to think that there are big, ol' snakes all over NYC that are more than happy to crawl through hundreds of feet of vertical, water filled pipe with the sole intention of biting you on the taint. Takes my mind off the impending bedbug apocalypse.
As banal as this "news" might be, Gothamist did do me a favor of unprecedented magnitude by revealing to me that "The World's Only Reliable News" source lives on into the digital age. Yes, Weekly World News lives! I was under the impression that when this venerable rag ceased printing hardcopy a few years back, that America had lost one of it's truly bat(boy)shit crazy national treasures forever. Now it seems that the paper most famous for pictures of Elvis' face on Mars and babies found in watermelons has found it's natural place in the order of things: teh interwebs. Emblazoned with the image of junk media's patron saint, Batboy, WWN's front page has all the usual quicktabs you would expect from any fine online media source: Headlines, Politics, Sports and Mutants. While the composition of their reporting seems to have taken a hit in the move online (less old school BLAM-O style hyperbole, more grammatical errors) their photography department can only be described as "top notch":

Their tagline for this is "Beck: Only Bat Boy Can Save Us". Seriously.

While the WWN is clearly utter horseshit from front to back, I think it provides a rather interesting picture of what is happening to American's critical thinking. Sure, you might look at WWN and easily dismiss such obviously made up headlines as "Chinese Release iPhone 8" or "Bigfoot Hunts Ted Nugent", but you will notice something strange if you actually read the articles. A shockingly large number of their stories are rooted in some kind of truth. For example, a Chinese company is really making knock-off apple products and the reason for Bigfoot's supposed vendetta against his closest rival for the title of Ugliest, Hairiest Thing Lurking in the Woods actually happened. This is where the secret to WWN's continued success lies. Rarely do they make up anything out of whole cloth, but rather pick the most polarizing things they can find in the 24 hour news cycle and spice it up with a demon from hell or a government conspiracy or the ghost of Glenn Shadix.

"I know just as much about the supernatural as I do about interior design"

And before you take a sophisticated, city-slicker corn snake all over the notion that anyone could ever take any of those stories seriously, I would like to point out that there is another, much better funded news source that uses the exact same tactic every, single day. Have you figured it out? If you guessed "Fox Fucking News" you are correct.
Sure they're a little light on alligator men and poop monsters (Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck aside), but that doesn't stop them from spinning and twisting every story they report beyond it's original form. They have taken the great art of journalism as sideshow from the capable hands of the Weekly World News and all it's tabloid brethren and made it the face of the modern 24 hour news cycle.
And at last we come to rest at the feet of what is now America's journalistic monolith. No one in this country, from the far left to the hard right, is paying attention to unbiased news. Traditional bastions of journalistic integrity are closing their doors and slashing their payrolls every month. Even the Old Grey Lady is losing employees to the siren call of pundit- and opinion-based online journalism. In the meantime we are deafened by talking heads and blinded by three paragraph news condensations that are fueling everyone's suspicions that the guys on the other side of the issue are evil fucks hell bent on nothing less than the eternal rape and pillage of all we hold dear. None of this was unavoidable but the sad fact is that our nation's abiding legacy is that we are a bunch lazy, credulous rubes who would rather swallow anything said by someone in a nice suit and tall hair than do a little research on the greatest repository of information the world has ever known: The Internet. It's rather ironic that all of this information, be it biased, baseless screeching or sober, unvarnished facts is all available through the exact same technology that churns out roughly two stupid LOLcats pictures per every man, woman and child on the planet. It takes literally no extra physical effort to type in a google search on any given topic and click through the top five hits. Are they all saying the same thing? Well you might have the truth on your hands, although it's far more likely that you got bored with all that fancy readin', did a second google search and you now have cum on your hands.

And this woman would like to talk to you about that.

This is shift toward letting the news be dictated to us by people whose only thought is to better serve their own agendas, in my opinion, the single biggest threat to this nation as well as the world as a whole. How can we, as the last remaining superpower, be expected to conduct ourselves on the global stage with the same respect and integrity we claim to expect from everyone else, when our leaders are being chosen by a mass of willfully ignorant asshats?
For christ sake, think things through, do your own research and stop listening to the Batboys on cable news because if we don't WWN's claim to be "The World's Only Reliable News" might not be a joke anymore.

Boy can you tell I'm a pastor's kid, or what? Instead of leaving you with a jock strap full of fire and brimstone, I'm going to sign off with this recent stat from FiveThirtyEight. In the gathering darkness, it's nice knowing that a guy who famously predicted the entire 2008 elections with a staggering 98% accuracy says Christine O'Donnell has a handjob's chance in Iran of winning. Now THAT'S news that's fit to print.

10% Corn, 90% Lazy

Jesus.

I really tied one on last night. Rest assured, it was all for a good cause though. And that cause would be New Orleans Saints football. Yes, the older I got, the more time I found myself sitting at a bar watching groups of grown men in tights behave in a peculiar manner so that they might have a chance of holding a ridiculously shaped ball on national television. Then I found myself having opinions on said groups of grown men in tights. Then I found myself comparing and contrasting said opinions of said groups of grown men in tights with other people at the bar whose names were likely Hank or Al. Now I work at a bar that, while nominally a craft beer bar, also serves double duty as a Saints bar and last night, they beat the 49ers. Which is why I woke up at 2:30 in the afternoon and couldn't even think of staring into the glare of a computer screen until 4:30.

Thinking hurts too.

Happily, when I finally got around to opening up my BacMook, I found that the gods of internet bullshit had noticed my plight and put all the silly news within easy stumbling distance of my haphazard googling. For example: Mother Nature is apparently trying to take NYC back. In two stories that are unrelated, yet both on Gawker, Brooklyn has a self-inflicted possum infestation and a Bronx man found a three foot long corn snake in his crapper. My will to resist the obvious joke possibilities inherent in the phrase "three foot long corn snake in the toilet" is very weak right now so let's skip that story and go right to the possums.
At some undisclosed time in the past, some undisclosed city department let a bunch of possums (I refuse to put the "O" in front, just as I refuse to say "croissant" like a Frenchman) loose in Brooklyn's parks and under the Coney Island boardwalk in the hopes that they would eat all the rats and then die.  The whole concept of this thing just reeks of someone who can count on one hand the number of times they've been more than fifty yards from an electrical outlet. There is no doubt in my mind that at this very moment there is a toothless hillbilly somewhere in Mississippi laughing his corn-whiskey-soaked ass off.

Because it's the first thing that comes up when you search "hillbilly laughing"

Then, while loitering around over at the New York Post's website, I was rather unsurprised to see this:

But is it art?

This was in their "Day in Photos" slideshow for some reason. That reason is probably that someone at that paper want this to be an actual photograph SO HARD right now.
Also interesting but fairly irrelevant, is the fact that Phil Davison sounds 10% less crazy but a staggering 200% more awesome when he screams uncontrollably to an inspirational soundtrack. I'd vote him.
Know what? I can't even pretend like I can do this today. I just finished two cups of coffee and all I want to do right now is drop a three foot long corn snake in the toilet and go back to bed. Here's the movie Joaquin Phoenix should have made to play you out.

How I repelled a Turkish invasion this weekend and other bits 'n' bobbins

Some will probably find it very self-serving that I will, at times, use this blog as a podium to vent all manner of gripes about my job. Even more of you will probably find it boring. I, on the other hand, find that bitching into the faceless, digital void (one that seems averse to using the comment box, anyways) is incredibly therapeutic. In light of this insurmountable chasm of opinion we find between us, I think the answer is to keep it brief and move on to subjects better suited to bringing us all together into that big, happy group-hug I like to call "lightly bemused".

Right off the bat, my bar played host to a cask beer festival this weekend. If you don't know what that is, you may learn about it by clicking over to my friend Alex's website here (Warning: that link leads to some VERY heavy British-ness). Just never ever ask me to define cask beer again, as I only explained it 5,000 times over the course of three days. While I wasn't really all that begrudging of the people whose only wish was to learn more about something that I truly love, I've repeated the definition of craft beer so many times that the words have begun to sound like gibberish. Especially when one of the words you have to keep using is "firkin". Say that twenty times into a mirror in a darkened room and a deranged Brit with an impenetrable accent will appear, chop off your head, pour yeast and hops down your neck and then store you in his cellar (at an optimal 54-56 degrees) until you are ready for the drinking.
Beer geeks, both aspiring and experienced, are really hard to get mad at. Irritation does rear it's head however, when you've got forty-odd pairs of expectant eyes on you and you've been tied up for the last five minutes with someone who wants to know what the ABV is on every beer you have. These guys (and really, it's a dude-heavy scene) seem to have come by the notion that every craft beer bar in America operates on the same basic pattern as an Apple Genius Bar.

But how many firkins to the hogshead do you reckon?

After many consecutive hours of beer geekery, I was feeling a bit raw which set me up to be strangely charitable to the trio of foreigners who showed up late last night and began ordering Car Bombs. This is not a drink that I particularly relish making, mostly because of the stomach contents-like residue that it leaves in my pints, but also because people who order these are usually on the short path to getting "belig". However, several days of dealing with people who want to get highly technical about their beverage made those Car Bombs orders seem mildly comforting. Besides they all seemed to be in good spirits, politely asking for round after round of Car Bombs to be put on their tab. My first warning should have been when I looked up to see they had left the bar without closing their tab. Hey, it happens to the best of us. I still get my tip at the end of the night when I close out all the tabs left open, so I wasn't annoyed by this development. About fifteen minutes later I saw two of the three walk by the front windows, so I ran out and informed them that their friend had forgotten his card. They thanked me and went off to fetch him back. So far, so good. Sure enough they returned, but instead of closing the tab, they ordered two more rounds of Car Bombs.
Now I'm beginning to suspect things will go badly for someone. Sure enough, they call for the check and, upon delivery, I am told that they are unsatisfied with my service. When I inquire through now-gritted teeth whatever seems to be the trouble, I am informed that the service of this bar was not what they are used to back in Turkey. And what had so greatly offended the Ottoman Empire?
No table service.
Yes, these travelers, who insisted through their drunken bitching that they loved New York City and blah blah blah, had expected me, the ONLY person working a bar that had multiple stools open AT the bar, to be their personal barmaid. To cut a long and testy story short, I got elevated and threatened to invoke the Treaty of Ouchy (I believe the exact phrase was "I will drop some Ouchy all over your ass"), they paid and retreated while also pulling all military personnel from Libya.

"No, we don't have fucking table service."

Thusly we come to the trademark-pending Daily Main Point of My Rambling Diatribe: If all you want from life is the familiar comforts of home, stay fucking home. I think I speak for all New Yorkers, both native and adoptive, when I tell any prospective visitors or transplants that this city is and has been for quite a while now, it's own thing. It's a loud, dirty, rude place where people move very quickly and have learned to sacrifice a few creature comforts for the privilege of living in one of the capitals of the modern world. If you are seriously ruffled by brusque counter service? Don't come here. Do you blanch at the thought of being crammed into a rickety metal tube and hurled blindly underground while surrounded by people with varying levels of hygiene? Don't come here. Do you wish to revel in the coolness of living in a loft apartment above a faux-dive bar but need absolute silence from the hours of 10pm till 8am? Stay in fucking Des Moines.
I'm not a monster. I can understand a tourist, especially one from another country, might experience a fair amount of culture shock upon arriving here. Hell, I experienced culture shock when I first got here and I'm from this country. New York is a beast of a place to wrap your head around, but when you start burning the locals because you can't hack the thinly controlled dance with chaos that we call daily life, don't expect us to coddle you with a warm blanket and extraneous table service. No one here cares how you get it back in the Motherland. When we show up in Ankara, please feel free to put the skids on us.
And if you plan on moving here? Please do not delude yourself by thinking that this city is in any way about to bow down to your expectations of what reasonable is. Sure, the huge influx of delicate out-of-towners have already done away things like late night patios at bars and a whole generation of rock clubs. Fine. Damage done. However, if you move into a neighborhood that was, until recently, an industrial area, you should realize that the pastrami factory across the street is going to be firing up the forklifts and banging shipping containers around at 5am, just as they've done for the the last four decades. You can call 311 and drop noise complaints every 45 minutes of every day you live across from that factory and the only thing you're going to achieve is pissing off some underpaid city employee.
And them's the facts. The walls here are thin, the rats are huge, the bars are open till four, the trains never stop running, and crack-head-hollerin' time is always right now. Sound awful? Yeah, well, we're not all that stoked on the suburban shit hole you're from, either.

That's why you never see us there. Please reciprocate.