N.M.F.P.

Jesus, Moderates and One Tough-Ass Weiner

2011-01-19T18:49:00.000-08:00

Why hello. You may have noticed that this blog page has been somewhat, shall we say, deficient as of late. And by that I mean I haven't posted up a goddamn thing since right after the mid-term elections. Now, I could be like a good, little over-politicized American and blame this on the divisive political climate the country has been embroiled in for the better part of my adult life, or I could just be a responsible, adult human being and lay the blame for my shortcomings squarely at the feet of the person who is most responsible for them. That person is, quite naturally, Jesus.

"Oh, what? You feelin' froggy? Well, then JUMP motherfucker!"

That evil fucker really did me in this last year. A "job" that barely made any money. A swirling milieu of dead-end relationships. A certain smartphone that is only available through AT&T (well, Verizon is picking them up sometime soon, but still...). Too many distractions and stressors for a humble, unpaid blogger such as myself to overcome. Yes, 2010 has truly been a red-letter year for my increasingly forced First World Problems. And yet, here I am, a mere two weeks and change into 2011 and already the endless, Bataan Death March-like slog that was 2010 seems to be fading from my memory, like a half remembered, mildly disturbing nightmare that prominently featured center-left Senators and my inability to grow facial hair.

Not that I have those. It's just...

SPEAKING of center-left Senators, Sen. Joe Lieberman is getting the fuck out of dodge. On the one hand, the imminent (OK, two years from now, but no takebacks) departure of one the political arena's most cripplingly divisive and infuriatingly bland figures gives me a warm feeling just somewhere under my pancreas. On the other hand, he is depriving me the sweet joy of watching him get publicly crushed in the next election cycle. Even as I watched a clip of his retirement speech (preceded by an appropriately bland ad for a credit union), I was struck by the disquieting sensation that the bastard knew exactly what he was doing to me.

"I can smell your sorrow."

Sure, nothing will ever bring me back to the mountaintop of pure glee that was the excruciatingly slow collapse of the Paladino campaign (Carl! Hey, CARL! Missin' you, buddy.) and anything that is scheduled even remotely close to Nov. 2012 will no doubt be dwarfed by the long-awaited appearance of the Bedazzled Alaskan Clusterfuck once again wandering out of her natural habitat to root through the dumpsters behind Fox News Channel. All the same, a quiet loss for political bloggers who hate people they have never met.

Still and all, my outlook for the year is quite rosy. Sometime during the Reeps recent House cleaning, the Dems seem to have found their long lost spine tucked away in a box of Tom Delay's old sex toys. Early reports indicate that, while the spine is somewhat brittle from years of neglect and "smells like a skeleton's vagina", Democrats immediately strapped it on and got some actual goddamn work done before losing their fleeting majority vote. Several historic, progressive bills were pushed through during the last days of the 111th Congress, such as the repeal of DADT, the Health and Compensation Act for 9/11 first responders and a long overdue overhaul of the FDA. Very nicely done. So, how are we holding up under the new 112th Congress, lead in part by Speaker of the House John "There's a Tear in My Beer" Boehner?

Ah. Seems today the House voted to repeal the Universal Health Care Bill. BUT! All is not as bad as it seems, for even in defeat, the Democrats were resplendent in their new chrome-plated spine that fairly blazed with their unity and determination with a feisty New Yorker leading the charge (as it should be, as it should be).

While the unfortunate title "Weiner Rants on House Floor" brings strange connotations to mind, you gotta give it to the guy. He let fly like only a dude from South Brooklyn can. First he calls the Republicans liars and proposes making a drinking game out of their shit-talking. He then carefully includes any health care opponent who happened to not be lying that day while throwing a special jab at the newbies of the House who are mostly Tea-Baggers with heads full of pendantic Beckisms. And for the big finish? A football analogy! You know that no matter how hopped up he is at the conservatives at that moment, somewhere in the back of his head he's thinking,
"Aight, where am I meeting the boys up for the Jets game on Sunday? We are going to kick the Steelers' ASSES! J! E! T! S! JETS JETS JETS! Anyways, fuck these assholes; this bill is gonna die in the Senate."
Somebody start grooming this guy to run for President. But not too much.

So there we go. The political climate isn't as dire as it seems, my personal issues seem to have been sorted for the time being, NYC is as great a place as it ever was, the Jets are most assuredly winning the Super Bowl and I'm back to blogging. Hey, Jesus! Tell you what, give me a three month head start and we'll go head-to-head again in the spring. And stop with all the fucking snow, would ya?

-NMFP

I'm Back and I've Brought a Political Agenda with Me!!!

2010-11-05T14:02:00.000-07:00

OK. Been a minute. This is a far more taxing of an activity than I had anticipated. Waking up every single morning and trying to find something in the world that is worthy of being mocked is, in and of itself, not a difficult thing to do. We live in vacuous times, after all. The act of dredging up skepticism and scorn, no matter how happy you are, on a daily basis is liable to put a bit of a crimp in your outlook on life, though. Consequently, I hit a bit of a wall. I realized that there were many things going on in my life that I was neglecting while I busied myself with fairly unimportant things like Carl Paladino, Juggalos and "breige" and so I took an unannounced leave of absence to further muddy the waters of my the runoff ditch I call my lifel. While I never want to make this blog a soapbox for me to whinge endlessly about my petty first-world problems, I must say my life isn't the easiest thing to deal with. I'm living in NYC, rounding the curve into my 30's, single, without a traditional career, tending a bar whose business level could best be described as "mehnifficent" and fighting a pitched battle against nicotine addiction. For example, this past Wednesday morning greeted me with the realization that I had broken up with the woman I was dating, cracked the screen on my cell phone and was now living in a country where the Tea Party had a substantial voice in the Federal Government.Needless to say, I was less than chuffed.
Only one of those items is really important, really pressing, really worth addressing in depth, so let's get right down to it:

NOOOOOOoooooOOOOOoooooo.......!

It's OK! Mine's not cracked nearly as badly as the one in the picture (my High School English teacher just contracted dropsy because of that sentence). In all actuality, if I hold my phone just so, most of the cracks aren't even visible. It's a very minor problem and yet, it's one that has been pressing on my mind even more than the fact that one of Ron Paul's barghest whelps is now elected to the US Senate.

Pictured: Rand Paul as a D&D reference

It would seem that I, and what feels to be the vast majority of America, am so turned off by the puerile dog and pony show that we have standing in for a political system that I have ranked it beneath "slightly damaged consumer electronics" on the scale of shit to be worried about. And why not? What was there that I could have possibly done about Rand Paul getting elected except make a very ill-advised trip to Kentucky to have my head stood on my some hick? Call me selfish, but I somehow feel that would not be my best contribution to the democratic process. To be perfectly honest, I would much rather have my impending, night terror-inducing visit the Genius Bar be at the top of my list of "What is Fuckered About My Life Today" but sadly it is not. So, like many other Americans, I bury my head in in the sand on the Beach of Mundane Horseshit and try to forget the fact that this world is going to hell in a handbasket just as quickly as some douchehammers with gaudy lapel pins can (edibly) arrange it.

Problem with that line of non-thinking is, while we all are worrying over our digital personality accouterments, we lose sight of the fact that rationality is being poorly represented in the halls of power. We have let a ludicrously small, yet obnoxiously vocal segment of our society seize a modicum of control over our daily lives because the Democrat we elected to the White House wasn't made of magic and couldn't whisk us back to whatever glory days we think used to exist in this country. These people represent a dangerous blend of aggressively blind patriotism, toxic xenophobia and willful ignorance that would feel right at home in North Korea. When that mentality is corralled into some rogue state such as North Korea it presents a fairly limited threat to the rest of the planet, albeit one that should still be dealt with gingerly. Yes, North Korea has nukes and Kim Jong Il appears to be a crazy person but I suspect he knows that heading too far down that road would be the end of him and his family and the country they have effectively turned into their own private cult. So they act like the ADHD kid having an fistfight with his imaginary friend on the playground of the world: leave them alone and they'll keep playing by themselves. When it manifests in the 6' 4' 285 lb. football player with a chip on his shoulder because he got beat up by his dad (British Empire) when he was a kid and who goes around picking on anyone he deems to be even the slightest threat, well, then we, as the whole of humanity, have a real problem on our hands.
So I'm going to go out on a limb here. This is probably not a new idea but it's definitely one that is not being implemented and one that I feel needs to be implemented with all due haste. After the 2008 elections, the freshly disenfranchised crazies of the Republican Party formed the Tea Party, yes? In the following two years they managed to steer that party's ruling establishment on a path of their own choosing in exchange for not breaking completely away and voting for their own on an independent ticket. Why, pray tell, is this not happening within the Democratic Party? Now, I'm not saying, "Let's round up all the far left whackjobs and throw a national screaming match". What I'm thinking is a liberal mirror to the Teabaggers, and I do mean mirror in the sense of "an exact opposite reflection". Where they are irrational, let cooler heads prevail. Where they are reactionary, we should be progressive. Where they are ignorant, we will be informed.
The one and only thing that should be copied from the the Tea Party should be it's aggressive stance on what it believes. I watched two years of a Democrat-controlled congress repeatedly bow down to the whims of their minority opponents and allow themselves to be brow-beaten with political epithets like "unpatriotic" and "elitist". The Democrats have been by turns apologetic, uninspired and self-divided for the better part of the last two decades, no matter how much control they exert in the government. If anything at all is going to get better, that behavior has to stop and it has to stop DAMN skippy, too. The Obama campaign of 2008 proved that grassroots political movements are highly effective in the Information Age and the Tea Party reiterated that point last week. What we need are progressive political candidates that are from the people they intend to represent. If they focus on core progressive issues that effect everyone while remaining apart from the "moral" issues that the right wing gets so riled up about, I think there's a better than even chance of turning this thing around. After all, what farmer in Oklahoma is going to be against regulating commercial agricultural conglomerates that force him to buy GMO crop seeds that won't reproduce, thereby hiking his yearly overhead to a point where he can barely make ends meet? What factory worker in Ohio is going to to complain about higher EPA standards at his plant that effectively add years to his life expectancy? Who in the entire country could not get behind a system of tax incentives to corporations that keep jobs out of third world sweatshops and in the hands of a country that used to be known for what it could build instead of what it could buy? Who in any of the deeply Republican states on the Gulf Coast would vote against politicians who would jointly tell BP that they could not do any business in their states whatsoever until they had fully repaired the damage they have caused? Who, on either side of the political divide could call putting the country back together "unpatriotic" or looking out for the best interests of the Working Class "elitist"?
Look at it this way, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert got the ball rolling with their rally. They proved that, if nothing else, there are more people out there willing to attend a rally for sanity than there are to listen to Glen Beck's fear-mongering. You want that change that Obama promised? Then we have got to stop playing the game. We have to look at our surroundings and form real strategies for fixing our very real problems and we can't do it without the people that have been co-opted by Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. Fuck "hope", let's shoot for "results". Hope is a real hard sell in a country that is this bankrupt and broken. Fear is a much more powerful emotion, after all and right now the Reeps are wielding that sucker like a battle axe.
Let's fight them where they can never win: fundamentally changing the lives of average citizens for the better. Yeah tax cuts put more money in people's pockets for the short term but it also leaves our children uneducated, our environment undefended and our infrastructure unattended. Do you really think if we made a society where it was economically attractive not only to keep jobs in the country but to make them environmentally stable and to pay living wage, that all the corporations would flood out of the country to open up sweatshops? Some of them, maybe, but certainly not all and, knowing this country, the void left by the defectors would be filled rather quickly. The Golden Age of the 50's and it's resurgent Middle Class that people like Bill O'Reilly wax so eloquently over would never have been possible without an economy anchored in jobs exactly like this. Whether Republicans like it or not, well-regulated, Unionized corporations are what put this country on the peak it used to claim and deregulation and the gutting of the Labor Unions in the 80's triggered the nadir in which we now find ourselves. Tell me, what is patriotic about making it convenient to ship jobs overseas and disenfranchise a generation?
It's time to call the greedy bastards out on their lies. If they want to point to liberal eggheads hiding in their Ivory Towers then we can point their landed gentry and moneyed industrialists hiding in their gated communities, as well as what appear to be our tax dollars in their bank accounts and the deed to what's left of the country in their back pockets. In the rural areas, we focus on the economics of everyday life. In the cities we do the same but we push for the social issues such as gay rights and reproductive rights that don't play in the sticks. After all, just because someone doesn't approve of abortion doesn't mean their only voting option is for a party that repeatedly bends them over a counter while reading from The Bible. Reasonable compromises can be made while still achieving the goals that will better not just Democrats or Republicans but Americans as a whole and it's high time someone found their voice (not to mention their cojones) and went to work instead of backing up every time Ann Coulter gets shrill. Guess what? EVERYBODY is angry at the state of the country! That's probably why so much of middle- and lower-class America jumped on the Tea Party bandwagon in the first place. I mean, when I'm pissed off, the last thing I wand to see is Al Gore giving a PowerPoint presentation. Let's drop the whole hippie-shrinking-violet act and go about the work of fixing a country that is so deeply broken that it's future, and quite possibly the world's future, is rapidly becoming our worst nightmares. No one else is going to do it for us. Please remember that: NO ONE.

Whew. I do apologize. That was a lot of words without a funny picture with a pithy caption included for levity's sake. Here you go:

At least California came out of the elections OK.

Well there you have it. I don't know how in the first place to begin implementing my angry political screed but I am definitely open to suggestion so feel free to bring anything you can think of to my notice. Unless it involves canvassing for NYPIRG or GreenPeace. That way lies madness.

-NMFP

(but actually it all really is...)

An Uncanny Penchant for Citrus

2010-10-22T12:57:00.000-07:00

It's no secret that New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority sucks on a level that is usually reserved for Fow News personalities and band that feature the "musical stylings" of Mike Patton. The last two years, the entire NYC subway system has been held in a death grip of schedule changes, service suspensions, fare hikes and outright line cancellations under the dubious guise of a rebuilding project. Basically what this has boiled down to is NYC citizens shelling out more money for less train while the MTA helps itself to a pay raise, spirals wildly into debt and awards contracts to companies with mob ties. Fun for everyone. New Yorkers are a tough breed though and when life hands us lemons we throw them shits back and say, "I ordered GRAPEFRUIT, motherfucker!" Thus we have a whole galaxy of transit based blogs and websites to help us vent away our frustrations with a system that may actually drive us all completely insane one day. When perusing straphanger sites, it's important to remember that there are several different styles to choose from.
The largest category is that of the Traditional Subway Grouser. These are fairly straightforward in their mission to deliver provide a soapbox for people who have "just had it up to here" with the fares/delays/changes/yadda yadda yadda. Sites like these usually range in tone from information provision to active bitching. I rarely check these sites if for no other reason than the only thing I find more depressing than riding the subway are people whose lives revolve around how depressing it is to ride the subway.

Time to get a little more sunlight, hey grumpy?

In the same vein but much more light hearted, are the blogs of the Transit Sociologist. Subwaydouchery.com used to be a prime example of this, but has recently succumbed to putting LOLcats style captions on all their photos. These are usually dedicated to chronicling the many ridiculous ways humans will act when crammed together in a rickety metal tube and hurled blindly towards their destination. I myself have witnessed behavior in the subway both quizzical and obscene but after the hundredth time, you kind of get to this point where King Aurthur could ride a horse through the car demanding tribute from the peasants and I would only be mildly nonplussed and then turn up the volume on my iPod.


You really think I'd make something like that up?

Not all subway blogs focus on the negative aspects. My current favorite is the Subway Art Blog which is doing an outstanding job of archiving the guerrilla art that is curated daily beneath our feet. Amidst the photos of tags and the burgeoning field of poster modification, you will notice evidence of New Yorkers actively hurling their lemons:

The newest entries to the online transit world come from Twitter. While I bear an aversion to Twitter that verges on religious conviction, Fake MTA has been a consistently funny way to waste ten second intervals of my time.
And that's it for the week. I would like to thank everyone for making this the lowest traffic week my blog has ever had. The lack of support is so thick I can taste it. And yet? I live to write another day. Gimme back my lemons.

An Inspiring Interuption

2010-10-21T12:42:00.000-07:00

A rather unsettling thought descended upon my silly head today: what the hell am I going to write about when the elections are over? Sure, I'll be able to get in a good post-action mop-up and if I'm really lucky (which prior forays into the worlds of skateboarding and snowboarding have proved I am anything but) there'll be a nice, fat voting irregularity scandal to feast upon for a couple of weeks. And then? Make no mistake, New York is not in any way a boring place to write about. Seeing as how this blog was birthed in the madness that is the 2010 election cycle, though, I feel it owes it's very existence to the Paladinos and O'Donnells and Iotts and, yes, the McMillans that have energized me to write so... well I guess the best word choice here would be "loudly". Sadly, none of my political muses seem to have a chance in hell of winning anything but footnotes in the history books for being some of the most "tetched" candidates this side of Ross Perot.
I would really like to keep writing about my love for junk politics but I find myself disctracted. You see, the freegan/hippie/artist/psychonaut barista at the coffee shop I am currently writing from has begun to blare the emotionally stunted screechings of some hellish new Mike Patton "music" project which is about as distracting as having a four hundred pound autistic toddler poke you in the ear with a Crazy-Straw full of yogurt every ten seconds. Can I just say, it's none of my business if you wish to drop eight-plus hits of acid every day of your life and then drink some opium tea with your pot brownies. I would normally have no problem with anyone turning their heads into tapioca through excessive drug use EXCEPT when said tapioca head grabs a guitar and an effects peddle and makes a beeline for the recording studio. If you want to take a magical mystery tour through canyons of raping babies and oceans of three headed kittens with no eyes on a boat made out of rat skeletons that is being piloted by and anthropomorphic syringe full of AIDS who is wearing clown makeup and vampire teeth, that is entirely your business. Would you be a peach though and keep it to your fucking self? It's generally considered bad form to drag as many people as you can with you when you slip off the raft of sanity.
This is not some Nancy Regan, stick in the mud anti-drug rant. I've done my share, as well as a few other people's share, which is also considered bad form. I just hit a certain point with the whole "third eye" scene where I paused a moment, took a long hard look at reality, and decided that I was good to go. Sure, I still dabble from time to time and alcohol is still my constant traveling buddy, but there really is a line you cross with the drug use, booze included, that you aren't coming back from.
I'm as excited as anyone else to hear news of pot decriminalization and California's Prop. 19 and any other general ceasefire in the war on drugs. The part I'm not so stoked on is that these moves give rise to people who think things like this are funny:

When I read that, I put my back out from cringing so hard. There's always someone with either poor impulse control or overzealous fervor who will actively wreck anything worth doing. Vegans take the fun out of eating, Tea Baggers take the hope out of politics and druggies actively kill any buzz I might have been working on. There seems to be some kind of unspoken race to the bottom within the druggie community. For example, you think that flag is bad? Check this one out:

I believe the term you're searching for is "doucheflag".

When confronted with that image, my first reaction was to hit. There was nothing in particular I wanted to hit, just punch the air like a teenager with Tourettes. It's rather hard to keep in mind that the author of that lovely bit of verse probably had more drugs in them than an urn full of Mitch Hedberg's ashes and, therefore, should not be hunted and killed for sport in retaliation for their crimes against the English language.
Legalizing pot is going to be such a double edged sword. Should this country ever have the collective common sense to actually legalize marijuana (good), smoking weed will probably become necessary, if for no other reason than to blot outhete towering tidal wave of stoner/druggie-themed marketing (unspeakably evil) that is headed for shore even as we speak. Here are some things to look out for:

1) Anything having to do with Alice in Wonderland.
We get it. Lewis Carrol was a wacky motherfucker and and you're all "down the rabbit-hole" and "through the looking glass" and totally amazed that the guy was writing drug references into a children's book. That's really great. Now stop. And leave Willy Wonka alone while you're at it.

2) Things that are unnecessarily "freaky".

"Yeah, man, my company is totally weeeeeeiiiiirrrrddd! We don't think like you do! We're totally so out there that we have to go to these really great lengths to let you know that, this ain't your dad's shitty beer, man! This is only for people who are totally, like, into stuff that's totally...weeeeeeeeiiiiiirrrrrdddd!"

3) Aliens
OK, so this one is from Roswell and therefore makes some sense as far a marketing gimmicks go. As for the rest of it, aliens have gone from terrifying invaders to little, green (like weed, dude!) intergalactic stoners that want to put on one of those insufferable Dr. Seuss hats, lie under a giant mushroom and light up a doob. I'm with the rednecks on this one. Shoot them sumbitches! And last but not least:

4) The completely obvious.
Wow,Ralph Steadman designed your label? Tommy Chong endorsed your product? Cherry fucking Garcia?! No thanks. I'll just muddle through with my usual choice and it's "boring" packaging.

You know what all these things have in common? They are, to a one, fucking terrible. Really. None of the products that pictured here are in any way good to consume, but I'm sure they all do a great job of separating stoners from their money. I mean, hell, if I wandered into a 7-11 while tripping balls and saw a six-pack that had a body pierced caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland chilling with an alien as imagined by Bob Masse, I'd probably gravitate (slowly) in it's general direction, stare at it for a bit, forget how money works and wander away, secure in my knowledge that, when I finally come down, there is a beer out there made just for me.
So brace yourself for the nonstop train to Wacky Land we're about to unleash on ourselves. If we're lucky (and I think I've already established how bad mine is) it's not going to get any worse than this:

But those are some long odds my friends.

Beard With Authority

2010-10-20T10:50:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I briefly touched on the gubernatorial campaign of Jimmy McMillan of the fantastically named Rent is 2 Damn High Party. Well, at least everyone else's rent is too damn high. Jimmy himself is only paying $800 a month for his one-bedroom in Flatbush. But that's OK. I'd much rather it come out that a politician who's rallying against high rent actually has low rent, rather than a politician who's rallying against gay marriage getting caught in a gay tryst. But who is this mustachioed candidate of mystery?
Turns out, the 64 year-old ran a much less electrifying campaign for the guv-spot back in '05, albeit under the much more electrifying name "Prince Jimmy McMillan (aka Papa Smurf). He served in Vietnam, where he was apparently exposed to Agent Orange which, like Bruce Banner's gamma ray exposure, imbued him with powers that are often out of his control.

Mustache Powers.

His website seems to be similarly irradiated, or perhaps his web designer was a little "too damn high" during it's creation, which, judging from the caliber of the graphics, would be sometime back in the mid-Nineties. There is evidence of rampant abuse of quotation marks throughout this migraine inducing minefield of shrinking letters, violently clashing colors and to cap it all off, my newfound desktop background:

This is why the Internet was invented in the first place.

The man is also a non-stop quote machine. I had a recent interview with the man himself but I was so captivated by the facial hair that I forgot to record the bulk of it. Here's what little snippets I did manage to get on tape:

NMFP: "But how can tomatoes be a vegetable when the seeds...OK, know what? We're getting a little sidetracked here. Where were we?

McMillan: "Rent is too...damn high"

NMFP: "Yes! I think we've been over that...several times now. Just...let me look at my notes for a second. OK, what is your opinion on the current conflict in Afghanistan?"

McMillan: "I’m a war vet. Don’t forget I was in Vietnam for two and half years and I have three Bronze Stars, but the chemicals of Agent Orange -- dioxin and a lot of other chemicals mixed up -- I would get sick. When I get home tonight, I know I’m not going to be able to breathe if I take them off. It could be psychological, I don’t know, but I just put em on and wear them anyway."

NMFP: "Take...take what off exactly...I'm not sure...what, your shoes?"

McMillan: "If you want to marry a shoe, I’ll marry you."

NMFP: "..."

McMillan: "Rent is too..."

NMFP: "GOT IT! Got it. Yes. Fine. Moving on. In the past, what has been your stance on global warming?"

McMillan: "To be honest with you I was cool as hell. Even with my gloves on I was freezing, it was like I was in the North Pole!"

NMFP: "Uh-huh. I'm gonna mark that as 'against global warming' OK, I think that's all I need. Any final remarks, Mr. McMillan?"

McMillan: "I'm a karate expert and a musician: I have 15 seconds. Now its time for the humorous Jimmy McMillan to come out."

NMFP: "I assure you, sir, you've been quite entertaining. OK, that's it for today I think...

McMillan: "Rent is too..."

NMFP: "DON'T YOU FUCKING SAY IT, MAN! I'M WARNING YOU!"

McMillan: "...damn high."

OK, all joking aside, I am actually going to vote for Jimmy McMillan, and it's not because of his beard/mustache combo or because of his antics or because it's ironic (and he is going to get a huge amount of irony votes) or even because the rent is too damn high. I'm voting for him because people like Jimmy McMillan are the only hope this city, and to some extent the country, has of getting through our newly christened age of fading empire. They are the concerned, everyday citizens who live in your neighborhoods and shop in your stores and rub elbows with you on the subway (until you ask them to stop being creepy). They have found one or two particular axes to grind and they don't particularly give a shit about anything besides their stated goals. So what if Jimmy McMillan can't balance NY's budget because he lacks an economics degree? Make the Lieutenant Governor take care of that. I mean, what the hell else it the Lt. Guv doing?
Point is, politicians are, for the most part, nothing more than politicians. No matter what they say during their candidacy, they will go about business as usual as soon as they are elected to office. Sure, Jimmy McMillan is crazier than a shit-house rat but, unlike Cuomo or Paladino, this is a man who has seen the real problems facing his city and state from the only place where you can get a decent perspective of it: on the ground. We can poke fun at this man and others of his ilk all we like, but one day we are going to pray that we have an outspoken, passionate, grass-roots candidate who won't merely feed us some "Change we can believe in" pander but never actually make good on that promise. We need valid third party candidates in the country worse than the Pope needs to get fucked.
We live in a country that views third party candidates like Nader as nothing more than a sideshow at best and a spoiler at worst. This perception will never change unless people start taking risks and breaking away from both of the established parties in favor of someone who might actually do something different. Join me in voting for Jimmy and fire a shot across the bow of the political establishment, if for nothing more than to return the country to the facial hair golden age that peaked with Chester A. Arthur

and let the mustache hairs of freedom flow again!

I Have Reached the Peak of Mt. Paladino. And I Can See Taiwan.

2010-10-19T13:13:00.000-07:00

I've been having what the "youthfully challenged" crowd refer to as "senior moments". Now, I'm not quite at the Oops I Crapped My Pants level yet, unless I drink tequila, whiskey and red wine in a single sitting and then the odds are dead even. My "senior moments" are more along the lines of forgetting what I went to the store to buy or not remembering what day it currently is or how to spell rutabaga. And yes, I did have to spell check that just now. It also includes not finding out about rather large events that could possibly have an impact on my life until they are done and over with. While a lot of them are things I can quickly forget about, like bands that I love playing free concerts or a few pounds of C4 being found in the cemetery behind a place I occasionally work at, there are others that wound me to the core. For example, this last Friday, immediately after I finished posting, I was rather perturbed to discover, via Gothamist, that this little tidbit had escaped my drunken-hawk-like scrutiny:

Ho. Lee. Fuck.

This just might be the best Taiwanese export since the Nankang Rubber Tire. As you may or may not be aware, I have a morbid, death pact-caliber fascination with Carl Paladino, and I say to you, it is, quite simply, nothing short of INEXCUSABLE that I failed to notice this treasure, this nugget, this absolute gem of a video until now! This is tantamount to being the biggest Black Sabbath fan, only to discover after a few odd decades of fandom, that someone named Ozzy Osbourne had in fact founded the band and recorded eight albums with them before Ronnie James Dio ever came along. Or something to that hysterically hyperbolic effect.
Anyways, while the video is a well-honed piece of modern journalism, the English subtitles seem to have lost a bit in the translation. Some scenes play themselves out in a straightforward manner, while others delve a little too deeply into the well of symbolism for their meanings to be easily divined. As such, I have taken it upon myself to give you a scene-by-scene commentary that will, with any luck, enhance your understanding of the this most bizarre of nature's aberrations, The Greater Buffaloed Tea Bagger.
Right off the bat, the whimsical kazoo soundtrack really captures the awe inspiring lack of regard for reality at large that has been such a calling card of the Paladino campaign. My only gripe with it is that they went with a generic jingle that sounds like a knock-off of some incidental music from Animaniacs instead of using something much more appropriate when portraying a politician of his standing. We open scene with Paladino, inexplicably wearing a top hat and smoking a cigar (perhaps a reference to the historically corrupt Tammany Hall?), sending "racy e-mails" to a woman who appears to be an attache to Chairman Mao. Clearly stumped over how to render bestiality into CGI without actually making porn, the animators decided to go with the two dogs fucking right through the computer screen.

I can't quite make it out, but I believe the picture in the background is a waist-up photo of Cthulhu.

Next we have Carl hucking apples at a scarlet letter sporting David Patterson before being interrupted by his illegitimate daughter, played to disturbing effect by an inflatable sex doll.

Enraged by his daughter's crass appearance, he turns his anger on a nearby Candid Camera, while a presumably offscreen Peter Funt stares across the eighth dimension for comedic effect.

I can smell your soul.

In the next scene, the kazoo music is ditched for some tuba-heavy "Ompha" to appropriately capture the gravitas of the Paladino-Dicker brouhaha. Carl is all kinds of up in Dicker's grill when a man with a bigger top hat than him runs in between them. Paladino, in fit of millinery pique, breaks off the argument with Dicker to lumber after the hat of his dreams. Halfway down the hall he remembers he missed his cue to start his stirring "I'll Take You Out" speech and opts instead to shoot Dicker with his heretofore invisible tommy gun.

Dicker shows his disdain for Carl's bullets by doing his best Baby Cha-Cha impression before tripping over the corpse of Paladino's credibility and collapsing in a heap of bald.

We suddenly cut to the ghost of Paul Newman, dressed in the finest smoking jacket Hell had to offer, awarding Andrew Cuomo a medal for the ferociousness of his underbite. Cuomo is all like, "Sweet action!" and celebrates with the universal hand gesture for "Facemasking".

"15 yard penalty. First down."

Meanwhile, Carl gets a friendly visit from some neighbors who want to sign people up for their annual block party/rummage sale to support the troops or firefighters or retired police dogs or what have you. While their list of participants is indeed prestigious,

Paladino is forced to politely decline as he was already scheduled to appear at a Spanking Safety benefit in Rio that day.

After this scene, I must admit, I get a little out of my depth as the images take on a decidedly fever dream-like quality. In rapid fire secession we are presented with an aquarium inside of a fireplace:

A gassy Bill O'Reilly:

children's literature:

and an M60 machine gun for the TV shootin'.

My best guess would be that the aquarium/fireplace is representative of how time slips through our fingers like water no matter how brightly we burn, while O'Reilly's cramped face is symbolic of the increasingly desperate fossil fuel industry. Old MacDonald's Farm is, of course, a reference to the Pope and the machine gun is a cipher for the arch-nemesis of Catholicism, The 24 Hour Church of Elvis. When I tie together all these seemingly disparate images, the only meaning I can discern is that China just might be letting Taiwan play "Sovereign Country" for a reason
The poignant closing shot shows Paladino on the receiving end of an unjust baseball bat raping issued upon his person by Leonardo DiCaprio, Aaron Ekhart and a, as of yet unidentified, hood-rat.

Moral of the story: Be sprightly to the incorrect rutabaga farmer.

While this incoherent jumble of CGI is a fantastic testament to how unrelentingly insane Carl Paladino is, I am compelled to inform you that he no longer holds the"Craziest Person Currently Running for Governor of New York" crown. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you, the founder and CEO of the Rent Is 2 Damn High Party, Mr. Jimmy McMillan:

Now THAT, my friends, is how you get asses in the voting booth.

Joops

2010-10-18T14:59:00.000-07:00

Couldn't get today's post out before I had to go into work. So sorry. I'll get the hang of this one day, I swear. Tomorrow's post will be plus-sized to make up for my shocking lack of discipline. See you then.

-NMFP

Gone to Smoke. Don't Fuck With My City.

2010-10-15T14:59:00.000-07:00

Writing this blog is a bit of an evolutionary process. I didn't start out with any clear topic in mind other than to grouse endlessly about my petty First-World Irritations. While this is no doubt charming to people who think on the same lines that I do (roughly .00000001% of America), I believe I'm really homing in on the politics, culture and daily life of New York City. Sorry rest of the world. Please feel free to move on to all the wonderful blogs about Des Moines or Shreveport or Leeds or whatever shit-hole you decided was a better place to live than NYC.
Now that that dickish little anti-everywhere-else screed is out of the way, I'd like to point out, I'm not nearly this much of an asshole in real life. I'm kind of Asshole Light which is a lot like Amstel Light which is hardly offensive and actually sounds appealing provided the name is being spoken by Metallia frontman James Hetfield.

Barkeep! On bottle of AM-stel LY-TAH for my beard(s) if you would be so kind.

I find it difficult to keep my assholishness in check when I write largely due to the fact that, no matter how highly I sing it's praises the City and it's inhabitants are relentless in their search to find fresh new ways to piss me off. For example, ever since Fiorello LaGuardia left the mayor's office in 1945, it would appear that there has been a secret clause to ensure that nearly every mayor after him would be a gigantic prick. Mike Bloomberg is a perfect example of this. Actually, Rudy Giuliani is a perfect example, but speaking his name causes him to manifest and increase in power much like Beetlejuice or The Candyman. By this logic I can only assume that typing his name does no less than give him a "woody" so I try to refrain whenever I can and drink to unconsciousness when I cannot. But I digress.

Bloomberg, while not the perfect prick, is rather a mixed bag of prick, asshole and surprising cool dude that has made him a fairly successful mayor. The biggest gripe that many New Yorkers have with the man is his adherence to Giuliani's (GAAHH! I did it again!) Disneyfication of the city. Now don't get me wrong, I'm all for lower crime and better parks and making the place a better place to raise *shudder* children, but do we really need to ban cigarettes in public? I already pay 12 fucking dollars a pack, man! I already have to go outside to smoke in the dead of winter! I already have to endure being coughed at by passerby every time I have to enter the dreaded enclave of self-righteous, misplaced suburbanites that is Park Slope! And you're gonna tell me that I can't light up in a park? As the founding fathers said in the Declaration of Independence: Get the fuck outta here with that shit! We've all heard the arguments of the health risks of second hand smoke. What these people with over delicate shonzes can't seem to grasp is that A) those studies pertained to people in enclosed areas that much more closely resemble the bars and restaurants from which we are already banned, and B) do you see that diesel truck over there? What about the city bus that's behind it? And that stretch Hummer that appears to have fallen out of a giant man's crotch? Those delightful vehicles are spewing WAY WAY WAY more carcinogens out of their tailpipes than I am blowing out of my mouth. Here, let's listen to what an expert with a clear anti-smoking bias has to say about outdoor smoke:

Pretty scary stuff. Well, right up until the end anyways when the narrator let's fly with all the "could's" and "possibly's" that he had been trying so hard not to use throughout the rest of the video. He also glosses over the whole "dissipates quickly" thing in favor of "being aware of (your) exposure". Hey you know what else "could" "possibly" happen in NYC? You "could" "possibly" fall onto some subway tracks and then you "could" "possibly" get run over by a train in which case you will "dissipate quickly" from this planet because you were not "being aware of (your) exposure" to the very deadly First-Hand Edge of Platform Body Placement that was combined with Second-Hand Bumped Into You Cause Some Self-Important Dick Was in a Rush to Get Somewhere Not At All Important. There are thousands of more likely ways you will die on any given day than catching a whiff of my cigarette and, should this ban pass, being savagely beaten to death by a nicotine-deficient smoker will probably be one of them.
You know, just because we are addicted to a dangerous chemical doesn't mean we are spawned from Satan's perineum. We are usually just average people who engage in something that is not particularly healthy. If you have a problem with the smoke, just ask if the person would mind not smoking around you. One of two things will happen. The smoker will politely oblige or they will say some permutation of the word "fuck" as directed at your person. But before you go demanding everyone snuff that Marb out whenever they come within a 50-foot radius of you, here is a handy guide to imposing your personal preferences on other people:

Scenario: You sit down at a park bench/sunny patch of grass/ outdoor cafe table where someone nearby, who was there before you, is smoking is smoking a cigarette. You ask them to stop.
Outcome: "Fuck off."

Scenario: You are walking down the sidewalk and stop at a red light. A smoker walks up and stands next to you a moment later. You ask them to stop. (Smoking, that is. They've already stopped walking, but that's very thoughtful of you.)
Outcome: "Fuck off and die."

Scenario: You are at home and your downstairs neighbor is a smoker. Every so often you can smell cigarette smoke coming from their apartment. You ask them to stop.
Outcome: "Go fuck yourself."

Scenario: Since asking people to stop smoking hasn't worked out very well for you in the past, you decide to be a sanctimonious ass and cough at every smoker you see regardless if you can smell it or not.
Outcome: You get fucked up for being a sanctimonious ass.

Scenario: You are at the park/beach/outdoor congregating area and are finally having a blissful, smoke-free moment. A smoker sits down near you and lights up. Still sore from the beating you caught the last time, you swallow your rage and politely ask the smoker to put out their cigarette or move away from your delicate nasal passage and/or small *shudder* children.
Outcome: "Oh sure. Sorry about that"

Now isn't that easy? Oh and if you were wondering, no, I did not quit smoking yet.

Two Gifts for the Price of One

2010-10-14T12:35:00.000-07:00

Oh, dear god help me, I think I'm addicted to Carl Paladino. Those sunken eyes full of mystery... the drab grey suits to hue of a late autumn sky...the mouthful of gumless teeth that gently hint at a capacity for political leadership that is almost Giulianiesque...who wouldn't want to? As discomfited as I am to admit this newfound passion, I soldier on with the knowledge that I am not alone in my obsession with this soon to be anonymous political murder/suicide. As I'm sure anyone reading this blog for the past few weeks is aware, Gawker has been my constant companion through this increasingly obsessive descent into the abyss. They were the figurative dealer who gives you that first hit for free and waited for you to come running back for more, which, admittedly, was also free. Point is, I've always been a bit of a political junkie. My behavior leading up to and during an election cycle most closely resembles that of a soccer fan on the build up to the World Cup. Statistics are analyzed, commentary is processed and the news sites are constantly checked for that most glorious of American political events: Blood in the Water.
By most counts, Paladino has been hemorrhaging blood (as well as sweat, tears, words, decency, common sense and at least a quart of sperm every time he has to talk about "The Grinding") for so long now that logic dictates the pendulum will swing the other way any time now. When his supernova of a campaign has reached it's zenith, he will begin to implode, creating a political black hole that sucks in all the advisers and flacks in his close orbit and leaves nothing but the screaming void of an utterly failed political bid for miles around. Hopefully he is in Buffalo when that happens.
Before Hot Carl takes his final swan dive off the national stage, I think it's important to let him know how much he has meant to me, to us, to the nation. But how does one get in contact with would-be Governor Palpatine with out your heart felt missives being intercepted by an army of handlers?
Well why not just email him at his personal account?

Don't say I never give you anything. This little nugget came from Gawker, which I believe is their way of trying to move me off of my usual weed-strength Paladino bashing, to black tar heroin-strength Paladino Bashing. As you can see from the subject line, Carl is quite used to offensive material in his inbox (I believe he finds it "awesome"), and so I would encourage you to send him some parting gifts for his many contributions to the political crazy box. Some tasteful gay porn should do the trick. Or perhaps you could forward him all (and I do mean ALL) of the mail caught in your spam filter. Personally, I'm thinking about just dropping it on the /b/ board at 4chan and seeing what happens.

Be careful with that last link. That site is where hell bubbles up into the world.

But wait! I have yet another gift for you, the last ten or so people who read my blog! After weeks (eons in blog years) of procrastinating, making excuses and generally dropping the ball, I am proud to present you with...

Hipsterpedia Vol. 3

Yes, dear sirs and gentlewomen, after meticulous research and hours of field work, I have compiled enough data to publish my third entry in my soon to be Kinkos-collated, multi-dozen page edition of The Great American Hipsterpedia. Today's topic is a fascinating subspecies of The Hipster that has, through decades of evolution, become utterly symbiotic with it's chosen mode of transportation. Before I begin, I must reference the man, without whom, none of my research would have been possible, the incomparable Bike Snob NYC. I am but the blogger John the Baptist to his Jesus Christ, except he's been blogging a lot longer than I have and has no idea I exist. So a crappy analogy, all in all. Without further ado, I give you: The Fixter.

Hipsterus Apparatus Fixus

While the bicycle is a widely used tool of personal transportation for many a Hipster, this sub set has taken the humble machine beyond mere utility and elevated it into a realm of blind adherence usually inhabited by religious cults, drug addicts, and Tea Baggers. In actuality, the Fixter's obsession with the bicycle parallels many facets of each of those groups of people. They hold the bicycle in fierce, maniacal reverence, like a cult. Their bikes are a ubiquitous part of their daily life they cannot fathom parting with, like the junkie. They are tremendous douchebags to all who do not share their myopic worldview, like the Tea Bagger. They are, in short, quite insufferable.

Origins: While Fixters may lay claim to consanguinity with the fabled bike messengers of yore, they are lineage is more closely tied to the legacy of Don Quixote as they dash about madly on cobbled together equipment, in a haphazard search for all that is "epic".

Habitat: Most video footage of the Fixter would give rise to the notion that they exist entirely on steep hills and the middle areas of busy intersections. This is a clever ploy used to throw off their many natural predators, such as the Yellow Flecked Cabbie, the Asian Panel Van Pilot, and the Lesser Donged Hummer Owner. They are most at commonly found salmoning their way along a bike lane, track standing in crosswalks, sitting in front of coffee shops or just standing around, bike in hand, waiting for someone to mention it.

Appearance: The Fixter's regalia is somewhat more utilitarian than the average Hipster, but the same affinity for blindingly mismatched colors is evidenced on their steeds.

Oh, it BURNS!

One standard accoutrement are keys worn on carabiners affixed to the belt loop, which appear to serve the same function as the traditional bike-mounted bell (i.e. "I am drunk and our collision is imminent"). Also frequently spotted are hats either quite small and streamlined or flat-brimmed and aerodynamically challenged. As the two are interchangeable, I must conclude they serve no practical purpose. A dizzying galaxy of messenger bag varieties have been spotted. I would go into greater detail but I tend to find myself experiencing acute narcolepsy during any conversation that revolves around the word "bag". In the colder months, the plumage consists of tight pants unnecessarily rolled to mid-calf, waterproof windbreakers over hoodies, and the occasional cold weather face masks that run the spectrum between urban ninja to Hannibal Lecter. In the Summer months, the Fixter molts it's heavy outer layer to reveal its cutoff shirts, ankle socks and obscenely short cutoff shorts.

Behavior: Whoops! Already covered this in the opening paragraph. They are simultaneously Crazy, Needy and Douchey which, indecently, are my three favorite of the Seven Dwarves.

Modes of Transportation: Fixed gear track bikes. There's much to be said on the topic of makes and models but I find myself experiencing acute narcolepsy AND Irritable Bowel Syndrome during any conversation that revolves around "how I'm getting to work today". Please visit Bike Snob for more in depth coverage.

Mating Call: No particular call, as their entire sexual energy is focused on an inanimate object. The act of copulation is as follows:

Musical Taste: The discordant symphony that can only be heard after repeatedly doing something incredibly stupid directly in front of any motor vehicle equipped with a horn.

Bottom Line: Quite delicate. Would immediately become endangered should the world's supply of carbon fiber and PBR ever dry up.

And there we have it. Not only did I finally deliver on a long promised post, but I did it before five in the afternoon. Oh, this blog is growing up so fast!

I'd Much Rather be Watching BSG, but Here You Go Anyways

2010-10-13T16:07:00.000-07:00

It's rather miraculous that I'm posting today. I had to resist a deadly combination of unexpected overtime at the bar and the recent, unexpected premiere of the entire Battlestar Galactica series on Netflix Instant, but I am posting nonetheless. But enough about me. Even though it's been a mere 48 hours since we've checked in with Superfriend-for-Mayor Carl Paladino, it feels like ages, doesn't it? One can only hope that Fox News will take pity and make a talking head out of him after he loses to Cuomo. In the meantime, let's not waste one glorious second of Buffalo-brand Batshit, hmm? Since he began his one man off-off-off-Broadway comedy of errors, he has been utterly incapable of adhering to the "if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all" guideline that is generally followed by most political hopefuls whenever there is a video recording device present. He also hasn't been able to wrap his head around the fact that these new-fangled interweb machines will make cannon fodder of your previously-private life at the merest push of a button. As a direct result of his own stupidity, we now know that Paladino is a racist with a passing intrest in bestiality, has a deep hatred of the poor, has a mistress despite running as a proponent of family values, will "take you out" if you displease him, and last, but most certainly not least, really not that big a fan of the gays.
Sooooooooo...
Basically what I'm taking away from this is:

But hold on there, hoss, this race to the bottom ain't over by a damn sight! In a desperate attempt to regain some infinitesimally small shred of respect from the population of people who don't used their heads for toilet paper, he issued a six point apology for his prior denunciation of folks he feels don't use their respective holes properly. And then promptly lost the support of the folks he made those comments to. I suspect that somewhere in whatever passes for his inner monologue, this video, complete with music, is on a never ending loop right about now:

To anyone outside of New York who's reading this, I am deeply sorry that your local politics are so unspeakably boring. Please feel free to relocate here, just so long as you're sure you can handle it.
Now, please excuse me but I REALLY need to watch some BSG.

Interrupted By Real Life

2010-10-13T12:47:00.001-07:00

Got called into work unexpectedly today so the post won't be up until round 8pm East Coast Time. Sorry, y'all. I am but an amateur.

-NMFP

What's In a Name? More Than I Wanted to Know.

2010-10-12T15:20:00.000-07:00

While pondering the greater mysteries of life, such as why am I here wasting my time writing a blog no one reads, I stumbled upon the fact that the acronym NMFP is being used for a vast array of other projects and purposes unrelated to my own. Tossing NMFP wantonly into a search engine will bring uup things like the rather obtusely named Nebraska's Money Follows the Person project, which really is a bit of unfair shoehorning on their part. Just go with NMFTPP or, better yet, how about rethinking that name all together? Sounds like code words for secret agents in some cheesy Cold War spy thriller:

"How is the lobster in Vienna?"
"Nebraska's money follows the person"
"It's a fine day for pontooning."

And then cyanide capsules and microfilm all around.

Then there's the ubiquitous Facebook page for something called Team NMFP, which as far as I can tell is some kind of group for office drones to empty their impotent anger at a life gone sour into, much in the same way one would empty a mouthful of chewing tobacco into a spittoon. Some clever wag will no doubt draw a comparison between my blog and their spittoon of beige rage (raige) but I say to you, we are nothing alike. They have an extravagant 142 member while I am sporting a modest 2.
I also found this lovingly uncurated website which gives you a whole 30 definitions of the NMFP acronym, 10 of which are grammatical variations of themselves. What really stands out for me would be the curious inclusion of New Mexico Film Please and Neutrino Mean Free Path and yet nary a mention of Nipples Made From Plastic. While I'm sure begging the state of New Mexico for film is a very valid and noble calling, we should never be so blind as to forget the plight of those who, but by the grace of modern science and the the petro-chemical conglomerates, would face each new day cruelly devoid of chest mounted fleshy bits.

We will never forget.

This blog finally makes an appearance 41 hits into the search, with a Hipsterpedia entry, reminding me that I have, yet again broken a promise I made, like that deadbeat father in Angels in the Outfield. Maybe Christopher Lloyd will ghostwrite one for me.

After he gets done watching Danny Glover and Tony Danza eat small children.

But what is in a name? In the first issue of his seminal underground comic, American Splendor, Harvey Pekar relates how he once looked up his own name in the phone book (the 60's version of googling yourself) and was surprised to find that he shared that name with several other people. While my name is unique enough that I don't have to share, this last time I googled myself (as I am wont to do most mornings, nights and shower times) I discovered a rather sad list of things attached to my name. Since no one is reading this blog currently, I feel quite comfortable outing my pathetic internet legacy for my own amusement and perhaps the amusement of anyone who accidentally stumbles across this blog while looking for the Person Nebraska's Money was Following.
All of five hits come up on an exact search of my name, two of which are people locating services with outdated information on my whereabouts, phone number and even age. I would think that these kinds of sites would keep their info up to date, seeing as how they're selling it to anyone who wants to know. Then again, I find it rather comforting that the only thing some stranger who is trying to find me will get for their one-time purchase of $8.99 is a snootful of inaccuracies. I'm not paranoid or anything, but if you don't know where I am or how to contact me, odds are that there is a very good reason for that. That's right, Faith Bible Christian School Class of 2001 10-Year Reunion Committee. I'm talking to you.
Another unsolicited appearance of my name pops up on hot-people.info. At first I was pleased that my natural state of hotness was being given the proper spotlight it has so richly deserved all these years. I was quickly disabused of this opinion upon scrolling down to the bottom of the page where I was informed (in a font that says, "I never knew I could change fonts until this morning!") that it is in fact a list of people who live in close proximity to "hot" toxic waste dumps. I lived in Texas for three years and all I got was my name on this list of people who can probably expect to undergo chemotherapy in the future.
The next search result was something that had lain dormant in my memory for many, many years, the sight of which caused me to violently blush and void my bowels even though no one else was in the room. Once upon a time, when I was but a geekling, I submitted my name to an organization called the Nitpickers Guild. The guild, which is run by this goober, is dedicated to, I shit you not, finding and publishing plot holes and continuity errors in Star Trek and X-Files episodes.
And I found one.
Is a joke even necessary here? I think the whole premise of the Nitpickers Guild and my involvement with it is such big circular train of uninterrupted virginity and stolen lunch money that we can just let it sit there, sweaty and pasty in the light of day, without actually having to poke at it with any further remarks.

Not me, but you'd be justified in thinking it was.

Ah, and then the Pièce de résistance (means "death of dignity" in Aramaic or something). The Friendster account that was never closed. Do you have one of these things? Dear god, it is the most excruciatingly painful reminder of how cool you thought you were at a time before hanging out in bars was a legal option. The stupid jokes. The bad pictures. The "friends" you'll never see again. It's actually shocking to me that someone is actually still paying for the server space necessary to keep the ghost town of spammers and porn-bots up and running. Even more shocking? People are still using the damn thing! At least two of the "friends" on my account have been active in the last year. That's almost more traffic than this goddamn waste of time blog is getting. Once upon a time, Friendster (or MySpace's MySpace) was the hottest thing on the internet. It was the progenitor of all the social networking sites that currently rule the cyberscape. Now it's the internet equivalent of running into your best friend from 8th grade who's now selling PCP-laced weed under and overpass in Spokane, Washington.
Let that be a lesson to us all. Today we are hot shit. Tomorrow we are toxic sewage.

Carl Paladino, The Political Giving Tree

2010-10-11T12:02:00.000-07:00

Despite the fact that he is diametrically opposed to every political tenet I hold dear, I'm heavily considering placing my vote for Republican gubernatorial candidate/mafia strongman Carl Paladino. Why would I suddenly turn on my spotless liberal voting record you ask? Quite simply, the biggest factor would have to be that Paladino is far too batshit insane to let drift out of the spotlight. I could power this blog for years based solely on his fever dream calibre utterances.
In the aftermath of his little imbroglio with a reporter from the NY Post, Paladino realized that his reality show-like sheen of mental instability was losing it's previous luster, so he decided to go off and dump on the gays while giving a speech to a group of Orthodox Jews. An I quote:

"I didn't march in the Gay Pride parade this year. My opponent did. There is nothing to be proud of in being a dysfunctional homosexual. That's not how God created us, and that's not the example that we should be showing our children - and certainly not in our schools." -Carl Paladino

Let's check the scorecard on that pullquote real quick. Bashing the gays? Double tap. Bashing his opponent while tying his opponent to the previously bashed gays? Done and done. Invoking the children? Holy hells yeah! Tying the whole thing up under the guise of talking about the education system? Flawless victory!
Or at least it would have been, if reality even closely resembled the deathscape of screaming mason jars full of horse cum and flying rape turtles that is the inside of Paladino's head. So, meanwhile back on Planet Earth, "Hot" Carl had to weather the backlash to his unabashed gay-bash. But where weaker men would have crumbled, Paladino dusted himself off and did what he does best: talk like a crazy person.

Because everyone knows, if you get dizzy from spinning, just spin the other direction. The best part is where he starts talking about what it's like at the Pride Parades he in no way participates in or has any fantasies about or anything:

"I don't know if you have ever been to one, but they wear these little Speedos and they grind against each other and it's just a terrible thing."

You can almost hear his butthole quivering with anticipation of all the grinding! And yet, Paladino was not alone in his blind charge into the face of measured reason and logic this weekend. It was discovered the other day that Ohio GOP congressional nominee Rich Iott likes to play dress up. Specifically, Nazi dress up. When asked why in the world an utter cracker from already crackertastic northern Ohio such as himself would dress up like a racist fascist, he replied,

"I've always been fascinated by the fact that here was a relatively small country that from a strictly military point of view accomplished incredible things. I mean, they took over most of Europe and Russia, and it really took the combined effort of the free world to defeat them. From a purely historical military point of view, that's incredible." -Rich "Putting the Id Back In" Iott

Hmmm. You are fascinated by a small group of ideological whackjobs who sought to eradicate everything on the planet that didn't conform to their diseased, racist worldview? And you're running for congress under the Tea Party banner? I'm no Sherlock Holmes but, I do believe I've found a connection here.

Not satisfied with the Tea Baggers having all the fun, West Virginia's Democratic Governor and Senate hopeful Joe Manchin threw his hat into the three ring circus by running a campaign ad that assures the rest of the world know that West Virginia is still as fucked up as they think it is.

Yee-HAW! Shoot that pesky sumbitchin' cap 'n' trade fucker! I'll shoot it till it get's gone, cause that's what I do when them durn foxes gets into the chicken coop! Shoot em! I did like that they finally found a new use for The Man From Snowy River soundtrack, though. Not nearly enough rustic guitar music in our politicking these days.

And then God looked down from the clouds and realizing that his creation had clearly lost it's fragile grip on sanity, dialed up hell and told them it was OK to take New Jersey back.

Starting with Hoboken.

Balls and Tunnel

2010-10-08T13:17:00.000-07:00

Everybody has a favorite sport, even pasty, skinny hipsters like me. For you that sport could be baseball or long-rules cricket or marathon masturbating, but for me, that sport is basketball. I grew up as a fan of the Portland Trailblazers. Despite their many flaws, such as having a logo that is utterly incongruous with the team name,


That symbol purportedly represents two five-man teams playing basketball.

or a crappy mascot,

"Blaze the Trail Cat"? Fuck you, dude.

or the fact that, at one point, the team was made up almost entirely of criminals, I have stood by them since my childhood. Part of this would undoubtedly be due to the fact that there is no other professional sports team in the entire state as well as the fact that the next closest city with pro teams was Seattle. First off, I would like to point out, fuck Seattle with a barnacle encrusted portafilter. Secondly, there was a point in my callow youth where I tried being a Mariners and Seahawks fan and all I got was a systematic dismantling of my faith in a higher power. So some thank yous are in order for that, I suppose.
But I no longer live in Portland. I live in Brooklyn, a city whose heart is still broken by the loss of their baseball team over a half century ago. No, being a sports fan doesn't make any sense. Despite the cross-continental relocation, I still make an effort to find the least annoying sports bars in the borough so I can simultaneously watch my home team and confuse the hell out of all the old guys at the bar who aren't entirely sold on the whole "there are other states west of New Jersey" thing. All is not lost, however. Many people, myself included, wait anxiously for the New Jersey Nets to make their long awaited move to BK. While NYC has a long history of dumping it's sports teams (amongst other deterius) in Jersey while maintaining the New York name, this team will be the first to sport the Brooklyn tag since the Dodgers skipped town. It has been a long, hard wait, fraught with asshole developers, bickering residents, delays in completion and communist invasion plots but make no mistake, for better or worse, Brooklyn will get it's team.

Whilst simultaneously shitting all over what used to be a nice nabe.

It appears that fading basketball star/failed rapper/failed actor/noted man of letters Shaquille O'Neill thinks this should not be so. What altruistic ideals have motivated this anthropomorphic side of beef to toss his opinion to the winds?

"I would have liked to see the new owner get with the guy who built the arena and keep the Nets [in Newark]. I don't want to see the team go to Brooklyn. Maybe the two heads can get together, they can do that and I can come down there and become general manager." -Kazaam

Ah. Selfish ideals.
Shaq, buddy, c'mere let's huddle. Um, OK so, you know how you have kinda failed at everything in life except putting a ball into a ring of metal that's all of three inches away from your outstretched arm? And also there's the whole thing about you having the communication skills of that robot from Lost in Space? And you're aware that people usually can't contractually walk away at a moment's notice from their involvement from $300 million development projects? Yeah? How about the fact that no one who has any better options on the table want's to be in Newark for even a day? Hmm? Oh, it's OK, buddy, no tears now. No tears! I'm sure some night club somewhere will be needing door staff when you retire. Or the circus might need a strongman! See? It's gonna be OK. Now run along and do a good job warming up that bench for all the other senior citizens that play for the Celtics.

Although we are stealing their basketball team from them, Jerseyans (Jerseyers? Jerseyites? Jersetarians?) are a benevolent people and their Governor, Chris Christie has seen fit to put a stop to the greatest threat Manhattan has ever known: a planned mass transit tunnel capable up to 44 million passenger trips a year from Jersey to Penn Station. This proposed breach of our carefully dug siege moat would have run a second rail line from Secaucus, NJ:

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you, The Garden State.

to Penn Station in midtown, thereby aiding and abetting the ungodly chorus of the damned that is Saturday night in Manhattan while simultaneously providing easy transportation alternatives to the Meadowlands that would allow New York "businessmen" an environmentally friendly option for their corpse disposal projects. In all seriousness though, we really dodged a bullet on that one.

What's that? "Hipsterpedia"? Well, shit. OK, watch this video and just imagine all the jokes I'll have come Monday.

Why accomplish, when you can postpone?

2010-10-07T13:50:00.000-07:00

Sad to report, my Hipsterpedia entry has hit another snag: not feeling it today. I just can't seem to focus the angry black spot in my brain that makes the haha onto hipsters today. Probably has something to do with this tidbit of news.

If places like the Waldorf-Asotria Hotel, Time Warner Center and Goldman Sachs are getting infested with bedbugs, what, pray tell, are my chances? Let's put this into perspective shall we? The Waldorf costs $730 a night for a room which is exactly $30 more than I pay in rent every month. The Waldorf hosts movie stars, diplomats and other folks not commonly associated with vermin infestations. My apartment hosts two bartenders, two cats and a dog who, when not rolling in decomposing what-have-you every time he goes out for a walk, is loudly and slowly licking his obscenely large dick while sitting on my couch.

I have successfully bribed my cat to refrain from such activities.

Due to these facts, I feel I might somehow be at a higher risk for bedbug infestation than your average Waldorf resident.
Since I lack the necessary funds to do the fancy bedbug removal treatment, I would be forced to pitch out anything that I couldn't fit into a dryer. While pondering what it might cost to replace such items as a bed, couch or giant screaming demon rabbit from beyond the veil of sanity, I was reminded once again by a spiteful god that that I am well and truly fucked. While the article does not deign to define the parameters of what is considered "skinny" amongst the penis-bearers, I feel confident that, at 6' 4" and 155 lbs. I am, in fact, the perfect example of what they are talking about. While that kind of build is ideal for cavorting about the Burg of Williams, it apparently doesn't pull much weight (haha-HA!) in the workplace. The secret to my eternal financial nadir, revealed at last! And the whole time I thought it had something to do with my ass being incredibly lazy. What a sucker I was, what a rube!

Well, that's all I got for the day. Might be because of something like this:

Not sure. Can't remember. Try again tomorrow.

The horror...the horror...

2010-10-06T11:09:00.000-07:00

I know I've been out for a couple days and promised to do a Hipsterpedia post but dear sweet, fucking god will someone please grab a cattle prod herd Donald Trump and his toupee (yes it IS!) into a small, iron room with no windows and turn the thermostat on to "braise"? The reason behind my sudden madness for Trumpy Pie has to do with no less disturbing news than Donald Trump is seriously considering running for president.

Has your brain stopped screaming yet? I almost can't make jokes about something as abhorrent as that. What in in the name of Jesus Creeping Shit is going ON in this fucking country? I swear, you elect one center-left black man to the White House and then what appears to be two thirds of the entire white population collectively loses their goddamn minds and sets their volume knob to eleven.

Footage of a Greater Pasty Volume Knob in it's natural habitat.

One question, if I may: what, EXACTLY, has Obama done, that is so incredibly damaging to this country that it has brought us to the point of even considering Donald Trump as anything more than the anthropomorphic piece of flotsam that he is? Neither the President nor either house of congress have produced fuck all in the two whole years they've been in office! Wait, wait. Let's take a look real quick. Mayhap it is that I have missed something.

Jan. 29, 2009: President Obama issues an executive order to close Gitmo within a year. OK, right out of the gate that's a solid...wait, it's still open? What time is it? Oh, it seems to be a quarter to two whole fucking years later. Moving on we've got a lot of talking about things with people, some more talking, oh hey on March 9th he overturned a Bush-era ban on federal funding of any research that deals with embryonic stem cell research. That is quite the controversial move. So controversial in fact that two days later he signed into law a bill that contained a renewed ban of federal funding for stem cell research. April through June of '09 saw a lot of meeting with other heads of state, some town hall appearances, a Jay Leno appearance, the mighty Cash for Clunkers act and the beginning of troop withdrawal from major Iraqi cities. July's major activity was cracking open some cold ones with Henry Louis Gates and the racist cop who arrested him. In August he continued his never ending deathmarch of town hall appearances and got yelled at by hicks. He kicked off September with a much needed vacation before going on David Letterman's show. October actually saw him enacting laws with an expansion of the definition of hate crime to now include gays, lesbians and mixed bag of other gender identities, as well as repealing a travel and immigration ban of persons with HIV. There was a turkey pardoning in November and then in December, a richly deserved Nobel Peace Prize.

BJC says, "Shit, more like Nigga Please Prize."

Hrm. Should I leave that caption in? WWBJD? Fuck it. Hate mail away.

OK so first year not so hot, but hey! Give the guy a break. I'm sure that job comes with one hell of a learning curve. How's the sophomore year panning out?
Not much went down in the first two months aside from a new regulation on banking, but holy hells yeah, did March ever bring home the bacon! Health care reform! That's where all the anger is directed, right? His evil, commie plot to kill your grammy is just the thing to get this country all riled up. So what are the gory details of this pinko, fuckhole's eeeeevil masterplan anyways? Here's the rough sketch:

1. If you are single and make less than $14,403 a year, you get Medicaid. If are single and make less than $43,320 a year, you get "gubment" credits (like "gubment" cheese but much more green) to help you pay for insurance. If you make more than that a year, well just keep doing what ever it was you were doing before. which I assume was being comfortably Middle Class. If you own a business, the "gubment" will help you stop being a dick to your employees and get them some health care before you go back to crushing their hopes and aspirations.

2. Insurance companies can no longer fuck you over when you get sick.

That's it.

Wait, no "death panels"? No transforming of hospitals into scary, dimly lit recreations of the Hostel dungeon? No military police in the ER performing triage? Well. If you still think I'm a lying pinko-commie-faggot in league with our evil oppressors, you can wander over to this site that deals almost solely with the topic of how to make you more richer better and read a more in depth explanation of what I just wrote. Hell, I don't know what everyone is all ferklempt about considering this terrifying act of political terrorism won't even go into effect until 2014, so it'll be just in time for Donald Trump or Sarah Palin to dismember it with the newly minted Rupublican congress we're about to get for Christmas.
As for the rest of the year, he signed a nuclear arms limitation treaty with Russia just as every other president since Kennedy has done (Gerald Ford doesn't count), told NASA they couldn't go play on the moon again and started the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, leaving a modest 50,000 troops in country for strategic tanning purposes.

Again, that's it.

At this rate he's gonna have promised more change than FDR but had a presidency more similar to James Buchanan.


But with 100% less awesome hair.

And yet STILL with screaming and the yelling and the crying and the predictions of doom and gloom. Sure, Republicans aren't built to play nice with anybody but when your last crack at the white house went as swimmingly as it did, one would think a small measure of candor would be approp....what's that? You're better at screaming? And you're secretly racist? And Jesus told you that the blueprint of how to fix the economy can be divined in Donald Trump's hair?

Oh, don't mind me. I'm just warming up my passport.

Dharma Pot

2010-10-05T11:34:00.000-07:00

OK so that 10% chance of me not putting up a post today? Totally happening. Well, partly happening, so I guesss 50% of that 10% is actually happening which makes this, what, 5% likely? Fuck a bunch of math. Well, since I'm already typing, I've decided to give you something to hold you over until tomorrow, when I will make my glorious return to pissy, under-read blogging. Can't you just wait?

Seems like a certain prospective marijuana-industrial complex can't wait for Prop 19 to hurry up and get voted to law and have released this rather creepy infomercial about their operation.

First off, "Gropech"? Is it just me or does the word "grope" just come flying right out of that name? I mean, I suppose it's possible that they used to use that computer generated warehouse to manufacture rohyphenol, but you could at least change the name on the sign.

Second, do you really want to buy your weed from a warehouse that looks disturbingly similar to this:

We're gonna need snacks.

I'm not the biggest fan of going over to some resin-crusted hippie lair to purchase my Kind, although I'm even less of a fan of some hippie crusting my house with his resin. This still does not make me want to buy my weed from our all seeing, digital overlords. Think of the levels of paranoia that place would induce. Harsh.

And lastly why is Dr. Pierre Chang narrating?

Namaste, and...*cough, cough*...ah, shit..*cough*....good luck!

Great. The future of pot is in the hands of a cyborg Alvar Hanso who's lacing everything with roofies. I'm heavily considering renaming this blog, "Daddy Drinks Because You Cry and Hippies Ruin Everything".

Back in full force tomorrow. Promise.

-NMFP

Gone Job Huntin'

2010-10-04T11:51:00.000-07:00

Dear faithful readers,

In a sudden turn of events, I have realized that the time has come to elicit employment opportunities at somewhere other than my current job. I wish I could remain there longer but the sad fact is that remaining in that job is becoming rather similar to trying to hold in that morning corn snake: there's only so long I can hang on before shit goes down.
Thusly, it is with a heavy heart that I come bearing the news that I have decided to forfeit the writing of my Monday post in favor of job hunting. I do hope you understand and if you don't? Well, there's this great big, as as of yet, unused comment box into which I invite you to drop any and all pissy missives, suggestions and coins of foreign origin. There's a %90 chance that I'll have a post up tomorrow but seeing as how there's no one but myself to crack the whip on this thing, well, I'd say yr pretty lucky to have gotten what you did up to this point. Wish me luck.

NMFP

Taking out the trash

2010-10-01T11:44:00.000-07:00

Update on yesterday's post:
I was cruising my usual news sources today looking for cannon fodder, when, to my surprise, I discovered that I had, yet again, made another mistake. As you might recall, all the way back in the good old yesterday I made some crack about California stoners voting for Schwarzenegger predicated on their enjoyment of Total Recall. Turns out, he's not running for office. Not a monumental cock up, I know, but one that is of a variety which I have called to account in the past: An error of information gathering. Instead of doing my homework, I just assumed that Arnie would be running again because, well, I personally don't think he can pull off the aging-action-star-goes-dramatic angle. Actually, I don't think there are any aging action stars that can pull off that career shift. Stallone comes closest but ever since he had his plastic surgeon give him permanent kissy-face, it's getting harder to take him at all seriously.

mmmmmmm-wah!

Actually, looking at that picture, I guess he could play somebody's stoner uncle or a pawn shop owner with a heart of gold. I will cast him in a dual role in my upcoming screenplay about the Proposition 19 vote called, Prop 19: Fire From on High. It's the story of a mild-mannered, Jeff Bridges-esque stoner uncle from who teams up with a gun-toting, Libertarian pawn-shop owner from Modesto to kick ass for civil liberties. Stallone will play opposite himself through the magic of CGI, with Skeet Ulrich as "The Dweeb" and Martha Stewart as "Ma Bell". I'm thinking we get Brett Ratner to bring the magic in the director chair so long as I can convince the Weinsteins to produce. And hells yeah it'll be in 3D!

Speaking of the Jew-run media and journalistic foul-ups, CNN anchor Rick Sanchez, who famously called Obama "the cotton-pickin President", has decided to put his foot into his mouth, all the way up to the knee. On some dude's Sirius radio show, he went on a pissy tirade against Jon Stewart and the ever-present "elite, Northeast establishment liberals". First he started up with calling Stewart a bigot(!) before moving on to the real steak at potatoes of the issue:

"I’m telling you that everybody who runs CNN is a lot like Stewart, and a lot of people who run all the other networks are a lot like Stewart, and to imply that somehow they, the people in this country who are Jewish, are an oppressed minority? Yeah." -Rick "Dirty" Sanchez

And another unfortunate soul was added to the unemployment bonfire. In the man's defense, he said all this while on Sirius radio, so he probably just assumed no on was listening.

In other loose-lipped news, NY gubernatorial hopeful, Carl Paladino did a semi-furious backpeddling of some comments he made during his spat with NY Post's Fred Dicker earlier this week. During the altercation, Paladino can be heard at one point threatening to "take (Dicker) out". Turns out, he was not, despite all indicators to the contrary, threatening to put a hit out on the Dicker's bald head. He was just, you know, referring to his campaign slogan, which has something to do with "taking out the trash". He was just making an iconic soundbite, y'see, much like someone would make a small turd in their unmentionables in times of extreme duress.
So let's see, we're going to believe that a second generation Italian-American from Buffalo, NY who cut his teeth in the real estate business, runs a law firm, has close ties to a lot of people in the construction business and has a goomah on the side was NOT threatening to have someone killed when he bellowed the phrase "take you out"? Let me just punctuate this with a couple of pictures. Here's Paladino:

Fugeddaboutit?

OK? Now here's Dennis Hopper playing a mob boss:

Yeah, fugeddaboutit.

OK then. Well at least he doesn't resemble Frank from Blue Velvet.

Hopper is on the left; Paladino on the right.

I think I'd be a little less critical if the argument looked more like this. EEEEEEEEE! So CUTE!

OK, that's it for this week. Sorry for the short post, but hey! At least I got it posted before 5pm EST so, that's something, I guess. I'll hit you back with some Hipsterpedia come Monday.

Madone, I'm a fuggin' stunad!

2010-09-30T12:59:00.000-07:00

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!

2010-09-29T14:47:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-28T13:14:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-27T12:31:00.000-07:00

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!!!

2010-09-24T15:54:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-23T08:31:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-22T12:07:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-21T14:22:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-20T12:07:00.000-07:00

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.

Just say "pffft" to politics.

2010-09-17T13:25:00.000-07:00

MORNING CRAPPER UPDATE:
So Brooklyn got hit by a motherfucking tornado yesterday. A F2 class motherfucking tornado.
Here's some video of a couple douchebags freaking out about it.

Pretty crazy stuff, but then again, pretty crazy stuff is all part and parcel of living in NYC.

You might recall how a couple days ago I was too exhausted/hungover to give more than a half-hearted "Pffft" to this great country's primary elections, while simultaneously coining (I hope) the phrase "God's Iron Balls". I feel like I've heard that phrase somewhere before but that might just be the voices again. Please send me any links to prior usage of "God's Iron Balls" that you might know of, as I am fearful of what digital leavings such a web search would incur on my innocent BacMook. Also let me know what comes up when you google BacMook.
The point I'm dancing so deftly around is, who am I to "Pffft" at a national primary? Am I not a citizen of this great nation, and thusly subject to all of the her great...electoral...fluff'n'stuffs? YES, by god, and I fully intend to set my past transgressions right! WITH SHOUTING! Just like Phil "The Great Communicator" Davidson!

OK, mebbe not like that if for no other reason than I'm a bit low on Benzodiazepine.
I'll try to lead you through it in Phil's words.
Phil here, is addressing the stark county republican party...executive committee. It appears he has either been watching far to many videos of Bill O'Reilly being pre-menstrual and not enough videos of Glenn Beck being pre-menopausal, or his volume knob is broken.

This one goes to eleven.

But what do we know of this would be savior of the Stark County Treasurer's Office?

1. He is from the village of Minerva where he is serving his 13th year (holds up four fingers) as an elected Minerva Council Member. The four finger salute is no doubt a reference to his "Double the Peace or Get Shouted At" campaign platform. Either that or he's repping Ohio's own 4th Street Low Brim Crips set.

2. He is well educated, boasting "a bachelors degree in sociology, a bachelors degree in history, a masters degree in public administration...*stare down off-camera illiterates*... and a masters degree in communication!" The last one served him well that day...

3. He means business because "he will not apologize for his tone tonight", which no doubt stems from the fact that he has "been a Rupublican in times good" which plays well to his claim to "HAVE BEEN A REPUBLICAN IN TIMES BAD!" You can tell he means it when he takes a moment to search out any would be doubters in the audience; his goggly eyes clearly blinking "trouble" in morse code.

You have to wonder what exactly it is that pushes him over the edge less than a minute and a half into his speech. Perhaps a derisive eye-roll. Maybe a subtle "pfft". Whatever it was, I'm sure the bobbling of "one of (his) most favorite quotes in the history of the spoken word" just exacerbated the whole situation. You can actually hear his mind snap at the 1:47 mark. That is the whimper of a broken man. Yet on he soldiers on and we are rewarded for it, for at the 2:50 mark, magic happens.
When asking what, I'm sure the majority of the audience is hoping is, a rhetorical question (Drastic times calls for what?), some knob out in the audience actually answers!
Well, the sound of ol' Phil's forehead blowing through the back wall was heard well into the next county and was considered a warning shot to all of Phil's Democratic contenders: This man is pure bugfuck. As if that were not enough, he officially deep sixes his nomination chances when he announces that what the F6 class (inconceivable strength) shitshow that they had just witenessed would be exactly what they could expect for the next eight weeks until the election. That's what you call upselling, I guess.

Trying to get a handle on why Phil here sound's so familiar? Prolly cause he reminds you of this:

Meanwhile, back in New York, embattled veteran Congressman Charlie "No I'm not the Ghost of Cab Calloway" Rangel, won his primary. Rep. Rangel is under investigation for more than a dozen ethics violations, which range from misuse of campaign contributions to failing to declare a small boatload of money on his tax return. Voters apparently took a long, hard look at Rangel, then a long, hard look at themselves and decided not to call the kettle black.

Opting instead to call him Burnt Umber.

Out in California, it seems Republican John Dennis has co-opted an MC Hammer video in his race against Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Hilarity ensues.
My favorite moments are when a clearly lip-syncing Hammer is flopping around in what appears to be the earthly remains of a polar bear in front of a bunch of VERY clearly lip-syncing stand-in's for the congressmen and women who refused to be a part of his madness. Would love to see the certainly imminent firing of the PR guy who recommended using that video to build Dennis' "street cred". Trying to build street cred in a congressional race is akin to wearing spurs while playing hockey: I'm sure someone thinks it will help, but it's more likely you'll just end up impaling some part of you that is soft and fleshy.

Gawker has the rest of Tuesday's gory details, including the primary victory of Christine O'Donnell, the Tea-Party's anti-masturbation candidate, who proves once and for all that a having nice cup of Earl Grey (hot) is really her idea of partying.

Hipsterpedia Vol. 2

2010-09-16T15:48:00.000-07:00

Couple things to get out of the way before we move on to my 3rd favorite sport: HipsteRipping.
I've come to the conclusion that I can no longer even think about writing these posts first thing in the morning. Fact is, I can barely think in the morning, much less think about writing and even less so write something humorous and not entirely stultifying. I set a high standard for myself, although it's probably much lower than most people's standards for "things to do on the internet that don't require foffing off". With that said, I will attempt to have the bulk of my daily post written the day before I post it, that I might easily drag myself halfway out of bed at noon-time (aka Dawn of the Drunk) and laboriously click the "publish post" button before lapsing back into alcohol-induced fever dreams featuring me, Zooey Deschanel, $100 worth of quarters and my own personal nemesis. Expect me to post updates to these pre-written posts while I have my daily congress with the crapper.

In an update of an earlier post, turns out Joaquin "I grew this beard to shut you fuckers up about my harelip" Phoenix's year-long, expertly documented, and suspiciously cohesive descent into madness was a hoax all along, leaving the B+ list star with a box office bomb, a dubious career outlook, and a personal style one could only describe as

Zach Galifinakesque.

Speaking of descents into madness, here's a bit of fluff that I laughed at, yet have nothing to add. How odd. Perhaps some more beverage will fix that...

And on with the show.

2. Categorization of the Species

We've covered the broad strokes of The Hipster's general habitat and behavior patterns. The Hipster, however, displays a staggering array of biodiversity, the likes of which put Papua New Guinnea's birds-of-paradise to shame. While they do share a certain thread of commonality with each other, their drive to attain "Uniqueness" has caused a once easily identifiable species to mutate and branch out into new and wholly different sub-species. (Author's note: For best results, please imagine the following as being read by David or Richard Attenborough.)

Let us start with the archetype:

Hipster Prime

Hipsterus Primoris

While not the origin of the species, Hipster Prime would be the hep world's analog of Nietzsche's ubermensch; the gold standard by which all else is measured. They are by far the most common and populace of all the Hipster sub-species.

Origins: The most direct descendant of the Proto-Hipsters of 1990's, they can also trace their lineage to the emo, no-wave and playground-bully-fodder movements.

Habitat: Almost any urban environment provided that it is easy walking distance from a cool bar or record store. It is not uncommon to find them nesting above coffee shops and independent book stores. A communal creature, they have been known to co-habitate with upwards of four of their own kind. They're presence in a neighborhood is always evidence of that particular region having "made it".

Appearance: Colorful, even painfully so. It would appear that this species has yet to discover the color wheel. Two or more items from American Apparel are standard plumage. Converse and New Balances are acceptable footwear. Pants are worn skin tight for men and women, while the upper torso should usually be well shrouded in irony, unless the shirt is from American Apparel, in which case it will be a blank void of a primary color. When confronted with the seasonal "shorts dilemma", the answer will usually be "cutoffs". Hair is best described as "baggy". Thick rimmed glasses are ubiquitous, but seem to be purely ornamental, as their parents paid for Lasik surgery while the braces where still on.

Behavior: The two main emotional states of Hipsterus Primoris a curious blend of carefree whimsy and withering scorn. The whimsical nature is believed to be derived from the fact that their parents have yet to cut the apron strings or checking account access, thereby giving rise to an opinion of life's realities that could best be described as "stunted". The scorn on the other hand, is typically a self defense mechanism designed to scare away large predators (Primes are notoriously small and adorable). When confronted with a challenge to their habitat or lifestyle a keen observer will note a highly choreographed display of eye-rolling, forced exhalations through the nose and cold-shouldering.

Modes of Transportation: Usually consists of a rusty, "vintage" Raleigh or Schwinn with cruiser bars and 2:1 gear ratio. Foot travel is common as is public transportation, as it gives rise to more mating posibillities. A second hand Volvo is not out of the question either.

Mating Call: Entirely non-verbal. Consists of furtive glances up from book/drink at the coffee shop/bar with mental note to post vague missed connection on craigslist tomorrow.

Musical Taste: Like grade C maple syrup: weak and sappy, yet overly cloying.

Bottom Line: Meh. All they want out of life is art that features lots of glitter and the next Grizzly Bear/Arctic Monkeys/ Syphilitic Koala record. They mean you no harm.

Next time on Hipsterpedia: The Fixster

Smoke and Smoke.

2010-09-15T18:50:00.000-07:00

Got a little carried away today.
Cloudless skies. Temperature in the low 70's. A couple early afternoon drinks and a cute girl on a bike who's going my way. Anyone who hates autumn can fuck off right now. This is, hands down, the best time of year. Sure there's that twinge of regret that you didn't pack all of the your planned epicness into the summer. Yeah, all the beach trips are done for the year. On the other hand, your face doesn't look like a sweat waterfall, the brainless summer movie season is at an end and that person you've been flirting with for the past few months is ready to shack up for the winter. Complain all you want, but from where I'm sitting, pulling my hoodie and jean jacket out of the closet is like getting reacquainted with old friends.
Soon the leaves will be dropping and the air will be crisp. The only thing that's missing right now in NYC is the smell of wood smoke. See, in Portland, fireplaces are about as ubiquitous as air-conditioners are in the rest of the country. Every September, the air would be full of the smell of burning oak and the aroma of wet moss would roll down out of the hills and lumberjacks (or bike messenger that looked like lumberjacks) ruled the land. Fucking magical.

Jesus, what am I, Henry David Thoreau over here?
Back in pent-up angry rant-land, I've finally made the decision to quit smoking. This decision comes not as a response to the laughably aggressive NYC anti-smoking campaign,

So do car doors, box cutters and culinary career paths. What's your point?

nor is it due to the hip, neo-puritanism of truth.com. No this change of heart is due solely to the fact that smoking has given me a gift. And by "gift" I mean "chronic, wheezing cough". You know, the type you expect to hear from old men who get to their local bar at 9AM for their breakfast of hard boiled egg in a beer. So tomorrow I'm going to wake up bright and early and put a call into the NYC Quits hotline for my free $100 worth of nicotine patches, continue to smoke for another week and finally give smoking the hard goodbye.
In a perverse way, it feels like a betrayal. I've been a smoker for (wait for it!) 13 years, and I feel like cigarettes have been an integral part of each of those years. I think it's only fitting to have a brief retrospective of those dizzying highs and phlegmy lows that have been my love affair with carcinogens:

1988: I steal my first puff off one of my old man's unattended Camel straights. I subsequently swear off smoking for the rest of eternity.

1997: An eternity later, my friend's older brother charges me double for the service of buying me a pack of Camel Filters. With a staggering $5 price tag, I don't foresee myself doing this too often.

1998: When caught reeking of the menthol cigarettes I had been smoking on the train tracks (no joke. I'm just that classy), I tell my folks that I had not been smoking, but in fact someone must have had a campfire going. Somewhere. Or something. I am grounded when my parents somehow see through my brilliant lie.

1999: As a junior camp councilor(!) I am faced with the inexplicable unavailability of cigarettes at the camp canteen. I then follow through with the equally inexplicable plan of rolling up dried pine needles and smoking them as a substitute. Hilarity and bronchitis ensued.

2001: I make my first legal cigarette purchase and immediately launch on a year-long habit of two packs of Lucky Strike straights a day. Coolness and bronchitis ensued. That same year, Oregon decided to stop being trashy and banned smoking in restaurants, thereby cutting my all-night coffee binges at Denny's in half.

2002: I promise myself I'll quit smoking as cigarette prices skyrocket to an unheard of $5.50 a pack. Or at least I half-heartedly tell myself I'll start buying cartons.

2005: While living in Austin, TX I have my first of many encounters with a cigarette ban. In bars. In BARS for fuck's sake! Madness!

2007: Pretty much every city in America that I would consider living in has banned smoking in bars by this point. The end of an era.

2008: I move to NYC and learn to control my gag reflex when paying $10 for a pack of cigarettes. And then smoking them outside in 20 degree weather.

2010: Twelve. Fucking. Dollars. You couldn't even just bump it up ONE dollar and fucking ease us into it, could you?! NO! The first time I saw those prices, I actually almost physically assaulted a cashier at a certain notoriously over-priced natural food store in Bushwick, because I didn't know it was a tax and jumped to the conclusion that the man was a thief with a really novel M.O.

Dramatization

And so we come to the end of our strange odyssey. I must once more tell a former loved-one, "Baby it's not you it's me...see, I don't like you." I'm going to have to get rid of all my cool vintage ashtrays, scrub the nicotine stains off my fingers and Febreeze the couch. Oh, and I'm gonna have to get used to saving an extra $4,380 a year. I tell ya, it's not gonna be easy.

Sunny day disclaimer

2010-09-15T11:55:00.000-07:00

Today's post is going to show up later in the evening. Reason being it's a perfect early fall day in New York and a very cute girl wants to ride bikes with me this afternoon. I'll do my best to sequester myself in my darkened apartment and hammer out some angry screed about something or other later.

Hand crafted blanket statements

2010-09-14T13:28:00.000-07:00

My work week would best be described as not for everyone. I start my job at 3:30 in the afternoon and get off at 4:30 AM. This happens three days in a row and then I get four consecutive days off. Sometimes I come out of it feeling great. Then there are days like today where I feel like a frenchman hs been shitting in my skull. I have to confess, I have no fucking clue what I'm going to write about, so what's going to happen is I'm going to drink this coffee over here and peruse the news for content.

By God's iron balls, it's election day! Who are we electing? Oh, it's a primary? (derisive mouth-noise, here) I think one of the most apt quotes I've heard to date was "A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy but won't cross the street to vote in a national election". -Bill Vaughn
Stings don't it? What stings even more is the guy who said that made a living writing for Reader's Digest, which everyone knows is marketed squarely at water-headed midwesterners who eat folksy aphorisms and shit lawn ornaments.
Ah. THERE'S my subject for the day: FOLKSY APHORISMS!!!!

Many Americans confuse plain-talkin' and straight-shootin' with over-simplified blanket statements geared to piss off anyone whose synapses fire on a regular basis. Plain-talkin' would be this: "Seeing as I am running for public office, I feel it is my duty to inform you, the voting public, that I have consumed illicit drugs in the past. Just like almost half of you judgemental bastards have." The blanket statement goes more like this: "The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil." Ladies and gentlemen, the one and only, Sarah Palin.
See the main difference here is I had to make that first quote up, because you never hear that type of thing out in the wilds of the American electoral system. On the other hand, thousands upon thousands of cubic feet of air are wasted on a daily basis fueling Sarah Palin's logorrhea. Somewhere between the fabled truth and the Fox News soundbite, lies the folksy aphorism, the homespun wisdom, and the whimsical musing. This is anything from a trite poem with religious overtones to Kids Say the Darndest Things.
For example, if you grew up like me, your parents had a copy of Footprints in the Sand hanging up in every bathroom in the house (3). This "poem" as about some dumb jagoff walking down a beach that represents his life.

...that's full of half-buried syringes and angry guidos.

There are two sets of footprints in the sand. One set is his, the other is god's. The jagoff looks back at his beach of a life and sees that when he was going through toughest times, god's footprints were nowhere to be seen. He turns to god and asks, "What the fuck, bro jangles?" He is answered by the echoing void of space where his perception of a god has once and for all dissolved and is replaced by the knowledge that his religion has basically been a lifelong opium dream, there is no god but man and that he is standing thigh deep in the remains of a beached walrus.
That "poem" is so popular with religious bathroom decorators that three seperate douchbags wrote their own versions of it, none of which involve god pimp-slapping the shit out of the whiny jagoff and telling him to grow a spine.

Carry yo ass? Muthafuckin' crackers be trippin'.

Keeping with the spirit of the "sandiness is next to godliness" bathroom accouterments (means "if it's brown flush it down" in Farsi or something), we move on to The Legend of The Sand Dollar. This charming little bit of fluff intones how a common sand dollar embodies all the characteristics of the life of Jesus plus some junk they made up to pad the damn thing out. Poinsettias are the Christmas flower? Why is that? Oh, I see, you just inferred holy significance in an inanimate object. Christians' favorite passtime is ascribing divine symbolism to the mundane. Because of this, roughly one out of every thousand flour tortillas is a holy relic. Thusly the story of Christmas can be read in the skeletal remains of a bottom feeding shellfish, much in the same way you can read the your fortune in the entrails of a chicken. I would actually hang a quaint multimedia collage of poultry offal telling the story of Pentecost in my bathroom. Somehow I think gazing at a mummified chicken intestine would greatly speed up the dropping of my morning deuce, if for no other reason than it provides incentive to get the fuck out of the crapper as soon as possible.

Not all folksy ramblings come in the form of non-rhyming religious "poetry" however. Take the teeth-grindingly inane stylings of Mary Engelbreit for example.

The root of illiteracy: FOUND.

This is the type of shite that litters craft stores and Cracker Barrels across the country. It's a safe bet that if you see some of Engelbreit's "art", you are no more than two yards away from a hot-glue gun, a scrapbook and a swag made of dried eucalyptus and pussywillow. People who love her whimsical scribblings and simplistic brain leavings are also probably WAY into seasonal/holiday correct banners and Precious Moments figurines. Engelbreit and her fellow hellspawn Anne Geddes have made a cottage industry out of being precious and non-threatening (hell they make Thomas Kinkade look like Salvador Dali) and thus they are adored by all of our mothers. What's that lady? You'll never take out that nose ring, get that tramp-stamp removed and wear pleated, high waisted jeans? Well check this out. Somewhere inside you just went "Awwww!" didn't you? Your fate is sealed.

Sadly, this type of asinine drivel isn't limited to the pages of Mom Pants Monthly or the checkout racks of Jo-Ann Fabrics. The inspirational office poster has been with us since the late 80's. You know, a picture of a bald eagle soaring over the Rocky Mountains or a snow leopard biting the head off an ibex with the definition of fortitude printed below in tasteful Times New Roman. It's only natural that something as affected and "inspirational" as yoga would pick up on this trend. The same basic construct as the office poster is intact but substitute majestic wildlife with a silhouette performing downward dog on a beach (again with the goddamn beach!) at sunset and switch the font to

because it's the most natural and organic font available. Replace the definition of a word meant to invoke a correlation between bending over REALLY FAR and scaling Mt. Everest with a Buddhist koan and you've got yourself one hell of an irritating poster. It's a safe bet that if you see a poster like that, you are no more than two yards away from a bottle of Kombucha, a miniature rock garden and a mess of sweaty bamboo fiber gym clothes.
If you need these posters in your home (or office or bikram yoga studio) then do you really love what you're doing? If your life's ambition is to scale the corporate ladder one staple at a time, how does a picture of a bengal tiger make it anymore more worthwhile. If you truly wish to attain the level of flexibility required to perform autofellatio, how are you aided by a beatific photo of Buddha? Although if you are one of those people who cherry picks what they want out of an ancient religion because a regular gym doesn't go as well with your mock-hollistic lifestyle, I would argue you are already quite a cocksucker.

So where does this leave us as a people? It seems to indicate that we are a bunch of childish imbeciles who need everything in life to be pigeonholed, pre-packaged and dumbed-down so we can slurp it up through a straw. Certain aspects of our culture are beginning to resemble the dinner options at a nursing home: soft, bland and colorless. When will we grow our adult teeth and learn to chew with our mouths closed? When will be able to deal with the ungarnished truth and deal with all the nasty surprises life affords us every day? When?!

Oh, right.

Professionalism is...and that's what I expect.

2010-09-13T14:49:00.000-07:00

Here are some quick updates on some things I was twaddling on middlingly about last week. I call them Twaddling Points:

1.
Sometime over the weekend Sweden joined the illustrious list of countries who have one or more citizens with enough time on their hands to read my blog. They join Singapore and South Africa as the next step in my 26 part plan to brainwash and dominate all countries that begin with the letter "S". Now all that's left are St. Kitts and Nevis (my least favorite funk rock duo), St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines (my most favorite doo-wop combo), Samoa, San Marino, Sao Tome and Principe (the latin-influenced lite jazz band about which I feel decidedly "meh"), Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Slovakia, Slovenia, Solomon Islands, Somalia, South Korea, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Suriname, Swaziland, Switzerland and Syria. I'm banking on Saudi Arabia to be the next to come around to my wittily off-kilter yet tastefully irreverent comic stylings.

2.
Rev. Terry "My Mustache Ate Chuck Norris' Beard for Afternoon Tea" Jones forged ahead in his hot streak of impeccable good taste by showing up in NYC on 9/11. He was here to meet with Imam Feisal "You're Going to Take my Long, Hard Mosque and Like it" Rauf, who had previously agreed to stop building his mosque and meet with Jones so long as Jones converted to Islam. Upon hearing that the Imam would not meet with him due to the slight technicality that the entire conversation, agreement, and penciling in of said meeting were all constructed wholesale out of the Rev's hate-addled skull, Jones reportedly cocked his head to the side, circled around three times and lay down to lick his balls.

Rev. Jones w/ Mustache

3.
Somewhere in the utter joy of ripping on Juggalos, I forgot to give them a proper definition. Luckily for me, the Village Voice hires journalists with a much higher caliber of discipline and professionalism than I could even vainly hope of attaining. Courtesy of same discipline and professionalism, I give you, Juggalos: A Definition.

"A characteristically blunt track on ICP's breakthrough platinum-selling 1997 release, The Great Milenko, proffers a few descriptions. A Juggalo is unflaggingly honest with women ("He could give a fuck less what a bitch thinks. He tell her that her butt stinks"). He's good at board games ("He'll eat Monopoly and shit out Connect Four"). He does not have a degree, but he is an entrepreneur ("He works for himself scratchin' his nuts, ha!"). He will exercise to fight upper-class oppression ("He'll walk through the hills and beat down a rich boy"). He is one hell of a dinner guest ("He walks right in the house where ya havin' supper, and dip his nuts in ya soup—bloop!"). A Juggalo doesn't even know what a Juggalo is exactly ("What is a Juggalo? I don't know, but I'm down with the clown, and I'm down for life, yo")."

There was not, is not, nor will there ever be, anything I can add to that.

Except this.

While we in New York have the luxury of having one of the finest examples of print journalism delivered right to our door every morning, only the have it stolen by the neighbors, statistics show that we LURV us some tabloids. The whole western world can prattle on all it wants about the professionalism, poise and accuracy of the NY Times all it wants; give us our 50 cent news rags. (I just now realized for the first time that there is no cent symbol on the keyboard. That is just...subpar.)
The New York Post and The Daily News have been the traditional rulers of Gotham's trashscape and provide a delicate balance of views for reactionaries of all walks of life. The Post is owned by Rupert Murdoch's Newcorp and frequently makes Fox News look like a bunch of Nader Fellators. Here's a real chestnut that popped up during the early days of the Obama Administration:

Needless to say The Post was shocked - SHOCKED(!) - that anyone would make a racist correlation between a picture of two cops shooting a monkey and the subtext that the country's first black president was really fucking everything up. Besides, everyone knows that if you're using a monkey to personify a president, that president is George W Bush, right?

Oh, wait...

Ahem.

True, that cartoon did come out right after some Jersey woman's pet chimpanzee decided to rip her fucking face off. It also came a mere 40 years after the civil rights movement so, you know, they're just getting the hang of this whole "no lynching" thing the kids are all into these days.

The Daily News on the other hand is more like Alan Combs on Benzodiazepine high. They will quietly bop along in their limp-wristed, center-left manner, with a car crash story here, a low-level police corruption story there, maybe a little sports and the next day they will FIND YOUR GRANDMOTHERS DIRTIEST SECRETS AND EXHUME HER FROM HER SHALLOW GRAVE TO CAST FORTUNES FROM HER ENTRAILS!!!!!
For example, when you run down to the bodega in the morning for coffee and cigarettes the Daily News headline looks something like this:

It's a safe bet tomorrow will be looking like this:

It's widely believed amongst New Yorkers that The News is suffering some serious headline envy. I mean:

How you gonna compete with that?

The new New Yorkers, who claim that new New Yorkers are the new Old New Yorkers, have statistically yet to be won over by the old standbys. This probably has something to do with the fact that they purchase coffee from espresso bars and buy their cigarettes at natural food markets, thus limiting their exposure to sensationalist pap. However, this does not mean that they don't want sensationalist pap, but rather they want sensationalist pap on their MacBooks (my own MacBook is absolutely covered in it).
Enter Gothamist: The Official Tabloid of West Brooklyn. Aside from offering up notoriously slow page load times, Gothamist endeavors to bring the news much in the same way one would presumably bring the noise. It keeps the trashy and irrelevant headlines (Woman Jumps From Bridge During Sept. 11th Memorial Run, Woman Stabbed By Mugger Just Want's Purse Palliative) while interjecting the snarky and irreverent commentary ("The bad news is that cops still haven't recovered her purse, which is one of those totally special amazing handbags that has the power to make knife wounds irrelevant.") that the kids really flip for these days. Just since I've started writing this article the top story on their site has gone from "Laday Gaga Distracts From Scandal With a Meat Dress" to "Jet's Ready to Lead the League in Wins" (ha-HA!), to "Coney Island Beard and Mustache Competition 2010". The Post and News can only dream of such versatile crapsploitation.

Bringing up the caboose, in more ways than one (I don't even know what I mean by that) is Gawker. While not a New York tabloid per se (means "in the biblical sense" in Swedish or something) it does deal heavily with New York gossip and goings-ons when it's not preoccupied with gossip and goings-ons in "The Beltway" or from "Hollywood to the Valley". They seem to rely heavily on sex to generate page hits, a tactic I've been heavily considering adopting for my own sit.

Hello, ladies!

(Suddenly Self-Conscious Anonymous Blogger Disclaimer: That is not a picture of me)
A sampling of sexy Gawker stories is as follows:

Stupid California Police Warn Parents of Pedobear, 'The Pedophile Mascot"

French Have Awful Sex Lives

and let's not forget

Will This Comical Anti-Masturbation Lady Win a Senate Primary?

If she can stop Gawker from glazing their tube socks every half-hour, sure I'll vote for her.
And my burrito was just delivered. Hope your Monday is as short and sweet and full of horrendously shirtless fat dudes as this post.

Heavy Meta

2010-09-10T13:50:00.000-07:00

Well. One week under my belt and I haven't missed a post, cracked up or received any threatening hate mail from Juggalos, which is very disappointing because they look like they could write some really scary hate mail. Considering the state of things, I thought it might be good to spend a little time doing some well deserved navel gazing. Oh that's right! Talking bout Google muthafuckin Analytics!
I really wanted to put up a screen shot of my stats for this blog (oh, and I know you do too) but being that my computer knowledge is limited to pushing clearly marked buttons and a smattering of HTML, doing so lands on my personal possibility scale somewhere between driving a stick shift through Manhattan rush hour traffic and getting my picture taken with Shiva the Destroyer. Nor can I link to the page without backdooring my blog to anyone who would wish to tamper with it. Feel free to submit any jokes you come up with about Juggalos accessing my backdoor in the comments section.

Oh, wait a minute..."Cut and Paste" you say? Hmmm.

Pageviews by Countries

United States

: 80

Canada:

Singapore

: 2

South Africa

: 2

Well OK then. I in no way know what I'm doing, I promise.
So, I know those numbers aren't much to look at (I blame you! YOOOOOOUUUUUU!) but something about it does seem a little off, a little...little...very little...wait where the hell IS Singapore? I can't even see it on that map. It's somewhere China-esque, right? And South Africa? Really? Don't get me wrong, I'm stoked that people on the other side of the world are reading my middling twaddle, but it's really not one of those things you expect when starting a blog that has promotion beyond word of mouth. If someone had asked me to guess which would be the first foreign country (after Canada, natch) that I'd get page hits from, no offense but I'd be about as likely to blurt "Singapore" as I would "The Federated States of Micronesia". Well, in all honesty The Federated States of Micronesia are exactly one square mile bigger than Singapore, so I suppose it has a leg up in the Blogger Blurting Competition.

Well hey there, whoever you are in South Africa and Singapore, thanks for reading and know that by doing so, you are helping to alert probably DOZENS of Americans to your countries' existence. Oh, and Canada...keep up the good...um...socialized healthcare. And stuff.
One final note before moving on:

Pageviews by Operating Systems

iPhone:

28 (33%)

Macintosh:

26 (30%)

Windows

: 26 (30%)

Linux:

2 (2%)

SAMSUNG

: 2 (2%)

63% of my readership owns Apple products? I do believe I've found my audience.

Sadly, a full none % of my audience is this guy:

"Muh stache use ta be THIS wide till that incident with thuh cotton gin."

This, of course, is Terry Jones, proud papa of Florida's own Dove World Outreach Center. While it's certainly nice to that someone is caring for the birds (Feeeeeed the birds. Tuppence the bag.) it seems the Rev. Jones is a little low on people skills. I'm sure everyone in North America has heard about this guy but I'll recap for S.A. and Sing-Sing over there, as well as for my own enjoyment.
Like many of his fellow southerners before him, Hizzoner Rev. Jones decided that god was calling him to commit hate crimes to show the world that Jesus truly loves us, namely by hosting International Burn a Koran Day on this Saturday.
Which is 9/11.
I'm assuming he didn't know that that particular day was already double booked with, I shit you not, Patriot Day (Jesus, wasn't Bush just the WORST?) and a local New York holiday called How Many Fuckin' Years It Gonna Take Ta Build A Got-Damn Skyscraper Day. Despite knowing full well that yet another holiday in the Sept. 11 box on the calendar is going to make it nearly impossible to pencil anything in, the Right Honorable Rev. Jones was forging ahead with his international holiday. Which, incidentally, seems like it will only be celebrated in Florida. The ensuing media blitz had people from all sides of the political spectrum condemning his planned bookbeque for the decidedly Hitleresque connotations it drew and for the unbelievably violent shitshow it was sure to trigger across the Muslim world. After all, radical Muslims are the folks who called for the murders of Salman Rushdie and that dutch dude who drew a picture of the prophet Mohamed. Anyone know how to say "hit squad" in Arabic? I'm sure His Mustachedness Rev. Jones doesn't, what with being from Florida and all. It has been hinted, however, by a not-so-radical Muslim sorta-millitant group, that if the burning was to proceed, they would merely kidnap Jones (sorry, I ran out of cutesy titles for him) and replace him with the other one.

He only burns witches.

So earlier today, after a few weeks of having everyone from Pres. Obama to Glenn Beck call him out as the bigoted, fuzzy faced inbred that he is, this 'stache-hole has called the whole thing off! Why? Well according to him, he had a phone conversation with Imam Feisal Rauf aka "Dude who's building a mosque at Ground Zero well not really Ground Zero but around the corner and down a few blocks in an old Burlington Coat Factory". Jones claims that Imam Feisal told him he would call off building the mosque if Jones put the kaibosh on his book burning. Excellent! A meeting of minds in a not at all equal exchange of planned action cancelling.
Except theres the tiny fact that Jones pulled about 100% of that story straight out of his nethers. Imam Feisal said Jones never contacted him and furthermore that he would never accept a call from Jones, as the technology that allows one to slap someone else in the face with your dick through a telephone hasn't been invented yet.

What HAS been invented and recently patented by Nike is this.
Holy hells yeah! 25 years after the original Back to the Future was released (first movie I ever saw in a theater) Nike, realizing that their reputation was on the line and that the year 2015 is fast approaching, dropped their proposed design for power lacing shoes off at the patent office, presumably with a triumphant cry of "First!".

They then turned to Adiddas and rhetorically asked if they were "chicken".

Hear that skateboard companies? Five years left! I want my fucking hoverboard!

Anyways, moving back to self-centered jackasses with more facial hair than is warranted by their current circumstances, Joaquin "It's not a hairlip" Phoenix decided to pull a Howard Hughes about a year back. After a lifetime of staring into the face of the fact that he will forever be eclipsed by a dead sibling, he traded in his acting career to become an aspiring...rapper. But how to go about such an ambitions career change? Well, first he outfitted himself with all the physical accouterments one typically associates with modern hip-hop: pot belly, Grizzly Adams beard and straggling hobo dreads. The next step was to consult P. Diddy on how best to attain the dizzying heights of success that other movie star musical acts had achieved before him.

We will never forget. And, believe me, we've tried.

Well, you might be asking why I know so much about Phoenix's activities of late. That's because in his quest to exit the crushing grip of the film industry, he enlisted the help of other perpetually-overshadowed-his-older-brother actor Casey Affleck to...make a movie about it. So he's starring in a movie that's about how he doesn't want to be in movies anymore. That's kinda like saying you kicked heroin because you went from mainlining to freebasing.

Of course the whole thing is probably nothing more than a an elaborate prank to attract more attention to his middling acting career. Let's be honest. Doing that is only slightly less stupid and self-serving than burning a pile of Korans in order to draw attention to your epic mustache. While wearing future-shoes. In Singapore. While reading my blog TIED IT IN FULL CIRCLE, WHAT!

I'm tired and words fail me

2010-09-09T10:45:00.000-07:00

I got roughly two hours of sleep last night before coming wide awake at 3:30 in the goddamn morning. See, that's a problem because 3:30 is usually my bedtime. I spent the next six hours alternating between worrying on things that I could, in no way, do anything about in the wee hours of a Thursday morning and surfing the internet for something I could fall asleep to. The result of the night are as follows: I smoked half a pack of Camel lights, I now probably have an ulcer from worrying about quitting smoking, watched the season 5 finale of Lost (post spoilers in the comments and I will eat you. Not kill you. Not hurt you. Eat you. Whole.), watched the season 3 premiere of Sons of Anarchy, texted a friend who lives on the West Coast (also an insomniac), and found this little bundle of very low hanging fruit that I decided to incorporate into today's post: Juggalos!

Haven't really thought about this group of people in a while. Probably because NYC, while very accommodating to all levels of craziness, asks nothing more of it's denizens than to grow a think skin. Juggalos, being the grown-up (that term is used very loosely in this context) glue eaters that they are, aren't really down for reliving their worst high school memories every time they get off the train in Bed-Stuy.

Helps keep the Hippie population down, too.

Remember yesterday when I waxed eloquent about geeks? Here's an analogy that, what with it being school time and all, I've constructed into classic SAT form.

Geek : Mogwai :: Juggalo : Gremlin

In their formative years pretty much every geek is subjected to ridicule of some form. They either learn that life is often a shit sandwich of which we all must partake and hold their nose and get it over with, or they choose a lifestyle that is the social equivalent of holding their breath and kicking their feet in the air. It's like some kind of Shogun Assassin multiple choice test: choose the comic book or the grindhouse movies or hell even the D&D and you might one day have a social life; choose the greasepaint and in four years time you will be effectively dead to anyone you currently know. Because really, what better way to escape the near-eternal shitshow that is adolescence than to become permanently juvenile? Yeah! Riddle me that Mr. Pants!

So what do you do when your chosen lifestyle is basically the equivalent of walking around with a sandwich board that reads, "Please go well and far out of your way to fuck with me"? (oh we ain't done with the analogies by a damn sight!) Well you can go to what ICP (I'm Currently Pedophiling) co-frontman Violent J calls, "motherfuckin' Juggalo Woodstock, only better".
Truly? And what, fine sir, makes it better?
"There's more to do, more to see, more 'ho's to fuck, and it's all insane as hell."
Insane! Like a posse of clowns, I'll bet!

The Village Voice's Camille Dodero recently visited this gathering of Juggalos, which is rather creatively named "The Gathering of the Juggalos" and wrote an excellent article which you can read here. While there is this one picture that is NSFW or your continued mental health, it's worth reading, if only to watch her desperately try to maintain some level of objectivity and fail miserably at it. Being that I'm fantastically short of sleep, I'm just going to cherry pick some quotes out of it and make snarky comments. Lazy? Yes. Satisfying? Like a full night of sleep.

An INSANE full night of sleep, that is!

ICP (Into Capricious Parenthesizing) co-frontmen Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope are, as you might deduce from their names, eloquent men of letters. They are quotable in a way that Winston Churchill could have only hoped to be. A sampling:

"Let's paint our faces like clowns, and be the Insane Clown Posse: clowns who murder and kill people who deserve to be murdered and killed!" -Violent J

"Juggalos are just as human as the President!" -Violent J

"This shit is. A. Lot. For Us. To Take. Both of us are on medication for this shit. It's too overwhelming. This shit is—[long pause]—unreal! Everyday. Is Breathtaking. Every day, it's amazing—that Juggalos even exist! And we appreciate it. We don't control this. We're not the leaders of this. All we do is provide a soundtrack." -Violent J

Poetry.

Murder and kill people? Sir! It takes a brave man to be so bold as to kill someone twice, or to even be able to. I'm sure Fox news will spin that second quote during the 2012 Elections. O'Reilly will thunder, "Can this country really afford to have a president that is a closet Muslim and a Juggalo?" while somewhere offscreen, Glenn Beck weeps softly into an American flag. And it's always nice to see someone, no matter how eloquent, take time to think about what the next word out of their mouth will be, even if that word turns out to be "a". A misplaced pronoun or article has been the bane of many a public speaker. I do believe, however, that Mr. J does himself a disservice. In no way does he talk like a person who is taking medication. He has clearly been off his meds for quite some time now.

While Shaggy 2 Dope (I get the trots every time I write that name) wisely leaves the interviews mostly in Violent J's capable hands, he is no lyrical slouch, as he demonstrates on their finest musical accomplishment to date: Miracles. Do not, I repeat DO NOT click that link if you don't feel like losing brain cells today.

"Water, fire, air and dirt
Fucking magnets, how do they work?
And I don't wanna talk to a scientist
Y'all motherfuckers lying, and getting me pissed" -Shaggy 2 Dope

Oh, um...

Who peed in that guy's mother, anyways?

The Juggalos, clearly impressed with their idols' mastery of the Queen's English, endeavor to keep their discourse equally eloquent. In the Voice article, they weigh in on a variety of issues such as

Gender Equality!
"Welcome to the fucking ultimate vacation! Hope you're not a feminist!" -Chris

Family Values!
"I know that every motherfucker here has had the most fucked-up childhood that you could possibly think of. That's why we all relate. That's why we're all fucking one." -Jazmine Voyce

Mental Health!
We're all crazy as fuck. How can we be fucking normal? How can we if we haven't started off normal, you know?" -Jazmine again

How ICP are OBVIOUSLY not Pedos!
"He's trying to help keep kids safe. He doesn't want them to get fucked by an adult." -Andrew Picerno

Because if you're going to feel comfortable leaving your child alone with an 38 year old, overweight man from Detroit, then it really ought to be a 38 year old overweight man from Detroit who's fucking wearing evil clown make-up.

Available for birthday parties, pool parties, sleepovers...

I know, I know. It's like shoving the retarded kid around the playground. It's just that when you see someone living a lifestyle that is the social equivalent of crushing your dick a vise because you don't want kids, what are you gonna do? Give 'em a hug and say it'll all be over soon? Sure, I guess, if you're about to shoot them with the gun you're hiding behind your back. Know what? When I see even Martin Bashir bashing these guys (on national TV no less!), I feel completely justified.

I'm going back to bed, but I'm getting drunk first so that ICP (Incontinence Creates Puddles) doesn't murder me in my dreams with axes made of candy and guns made of child rape.

Geeks to Mainstream: We have your culture surrounded

2010-09-08T14:08:00.000-07:00

Well. Nominally at least. OK, more like we're all up in your culture's shit and are fiddling with it to our liking. Somewhat.
Regardless of that fairly hyperbolic opening statement and it's fairly tacky powder coat of not-exactly-unbridled optimism, I gotta say, things are looking up in the geek world.
Throughout my life, I've been an avid fan of sci-fi novels, video games, heavy metal and shlocky B-movies. It was never considered cool by society at large, and I think that is what drew me to it. It was a whole world of amazing stories and endless possibilities (how many hours in a row can I play Final Fantasy?) that it seemed no one else wanted and I was more than happy to claim. Over time, I would meet others just like me, guys and girls who would spend hours sitting around, their minds completely blown, talking about how two comic book story lines had just crossed over and what that meant for the universe (Marvel Universe, natch) at large. It was a quiet existence and perhaps we all didn't get laid quite as much as we would have liked, but we were happy. Or at least content.

Smash Cut to 2002. The towers are down, the country has a brand new bouncing baby war with another on the way and, like it or not, the terrorists were winning. They may not have been winning militarily, but on a psychological level they were kicking our ass. I think we can safely say they beat us to the whole "Shock and Awe" punch by a couple of years. Everywhere you looked there was a shoe bombing over here or anthrax junk mail over there. Botch and Fugazi broke up while Fear Factory and Phish got back together.

Truly, terrifying times.

And then May 3rd rolled around. A certified geek director was bringing his vision of a beloved comic book property to life on the big screen. Someone at Columbia Pictures had delved into the depths of the fanboy underworld and, for his troubles, returned triumphantly wielding a Sam Raimi. The comic book movie genre at this point in time could best be summed up by those first four Batman movies: "fun but flawed" to "Ice to meet you".

What can I say about this movie that this picture doesn't already?

Oh. Yeah.

Quick geek side note: I am fully aware that The Fellowship of the Ring came out late 2001 and was directed by Peter Jackson, one of the few people who could conceivably out-geek Raimi. The reason I chose Spider Man as ground zero for the geek movement hinges mainly on the fact that, despite Tolkien's magnum opus being firmly in the fantasy genre, it's really more of a literary classic than a geek property. So take that you nerdy, dorking geeeeeeeks.

The "It takes a geek to reach a geek" strategy ended up working far better than expected. It went on to become one of the highest grossing films of all time(24th actually, just above ID4 and below Transformers: Revenge of the Schumacher-Style Eye Rape). But what had happened? Why was something that society at large had, until now, shunned running away with the box office? One answer is technology finally caught up with Stan Lee's imagination, allowing for what once would have looked like hokum to appear in a quasi-realistic light.
The other, and one that I much prefer, is that we needed out. Out of all of it. We desperately needed to TEFT ourselves away from the ongoing collective shitshow that was about to define us as a nation for the rest of the foreseeable future. Escapism is nothing new in times of crisis (see Energy/Iran Crisis; Star Wars) but this time, when the nation turned to Hollywood for it's usual dose of Schwartzycontin, they found that we were already living in a shitty action movie. Only this time the lead was Woody Allen channeling Bruce Willis.


Box Office Poison

And went screaming back to our childhoods. Comic books, sci-fi, fantasy; these became the rising force in the battle to forget how quickly a handbasket can travel to hell. Over the course of the next few years, we saw adaptations of nearly every major (and quite a few minor) comic book character that had ever been inked.
Suddenly, like a dam breaking, all the things I had loved in my formative years burst forth into the public consciousness. Comic book and fantasy movies were headlining the box office. I mean hell, freaking Stoner Metal even made a comeback, and Stoner Metal is the dorkiest music genre ever, barring Fantasy Speed Metal! For those unfamiliar with both genres, the former is pretty much lyrically about smoking weed and wizards and witches while the latter is the same with less weed and more dragons.
Pop culture was rapidly beginning to resemble a Jack Kirby/Frank Frazetta opium dream. For the briefest of moments I and many like me, thought we were on the verge of a total coup. The mainstream had attempted it's usual co-opting of a counterculture, only to find itself being the co-optee. The difference lay in the nature of what it was attempting to exploit. Punk had yielded nothing but anger and untenable political theories. Grunge gave nothing back but nihilism second-hand clothes. The geek culture however, is built around creativity and imagination. For decades, it's adherents had labored in obscurity to craft the things that they loved and the moment Hollywood swooped down with it's Scrooge McDuck-level Money Bin, we dug ourselves in deeper than an Alabama tick.

Credit where credit's due.

Nearly a decade later and, while not exactly king of all we see, the changes we have instigated seem to have stuck. It's been said that you can get a pretty good bead on where America's head is at based on their cinema. Consider this last weekend's box office winners: The American (sleeper indy-lite), Machete (mexploitation), The Expendables (B-movie action throwback), The Last Exorcism (genre horror) and Inception (big budget indy mindfuck). True, we'll probably never experience the level of success that can be had from playing to the lowest common denominator, but then again, that bar is markedly higher than it was 20 years ago. Don't believe me? Labor Day weekend 1990 saw Ghost at the number one spot with Presumed Innocent, Young Guns 2 and fucking Men at Work not far behind. Notable exception? Sam Raimi's Darkman coming in second place.

You've come a long way, baby.

And now I leave you with what is, in my opinion, a perfect example of where we've been and where we're going.

Every asshole has his day

2010-09-07T13:23:00.000-07:00

Over the holiday I've been feeling rather neck deep in assholes...
...

...

...

Oh, don't mind me. I'm just waiting for you to finish chuckling at the VERY clever gay porn joke you just told yourself. Everyone ready to move on? Excellent.

Asshats and douchenozzles of every possible background and persuasion (the average range in background being Pasty to "Look at that fucking cracker", while the persuasion category ran Fundamentalist to Pentecostal) took the Labor Day weekend here in NYC, turned a critical eye on their beloved Bennigans, Applebees and TGI Fridays and said in a mutual voice quite brimming with resolve, "Time for something new".
They should be commended for that. I myself can't even even string two syllables together when my voice is brimming with

And so these brave, brave Americans trundled themselves into their Tastefully Economic Family Transports (TEFTs) and made their way to the big city to celebrate Labor Day the way god intended: by pestering the lower class who actually have to work on major holidays. Yes from Long Island to New Jersey, Staten Island to Yonkers the great Burbgolian Horde TEFTed their way to pay homage to we, the low of class, and our commitment to helping them have it their way.
Or at least that's how I would imagine it played out in their bubblewrapped heads. It was probably something closer to them reading the weekly culture section in the times and feeling that a little dash of big city life was just what was needed to spice up their tuna noodle casserole of a 3 day weekend. Now don't get me wrong, I am a huge proponent of city life. Especially THIS city life. Sure it's full of deranged whackjobs and muggings and Yorkie-eating sewer rats, but it also has museums and parks and nightlife that rival anything else you could find anywhere else on the planet


OK, so we're a little short on rain forests in New York.

I would openly invite any one in the world to come kick it with me in Brooklyn for a day provided they remember to pack an open mind.
Which brings us right back to the nightmare that was this past weekend. Every goddamn visitor to my fair city this weekend came with the notion that paying $15 for a cheeseburger and $6 for a Bud Light Lime was the pinnacle of what NYC had to offer. And they were damn sure of it too. I am a bartender by trade, so my exposure to this herd of blandaholics is semi-limited in that while we are a rather nice looking craft beer bar, we don't provide that same, safe, family oriented drinking experience as Bennigans or Wingers. This does not, however, mean that my bar is any kind of refuge from Hurricane Meh. All day and night, I was besieged by men clad in the forever chic polo shirt/cargo shorts/dress socks ensemble who wanted nothing more than beer that tasted like seltzer. My supply of Buckler evaporated, my Stella taps gave up the ghost and when the Jager ran out, I had to employ a cattle prod to regain order.
When confronted about my overall lack of inoffensive quaffables, all I could do was hold up my hands and say "We were ~~hoping you were not~~ not anticipating you all coming to visit us."
And naturally they would then go on to assume that I was in fact the person who made the egregious error of not getting my hands on all the near-beer I could find in anticipation of their foretold coming. In fact, I was given so many pieces of various and sundry minds that I was later able to reconstruct an entire mind from scratch, which promptly belched, ordered a round of MGD 64 and demanded I put on a UFC match. I was forced to euthanize it with a claw hammer.

Then there were the women, or as the polo shirt set referred to them, "Laideeeeees". They had to be rapidly disabused of the notion that every bar in the world maintains a comprehensive wine list and that every bartender clutters their head up the recipe of every layered shot known to man. My saving grace was that we as a bar do not regularly carry mint, otherwise I'm sure I would have been the head-to-toe sugar coated nightmare that is The Post-Mojito Rush Bartender. The sound of mint being muddled with ice and simple syrup is like blood in the fucking water. If you should ever find yourself confronted with more than 5 simultaneous mojito orders, be prepared to do nothing but make the fucking things for the rest of the evening. Life, as you know it, is over.

Gaze into the Abyss.

One of the most beautiful things I have ever seen was a particularly beleaguered bartender who, when confronted with a mojito order that was somewhere north of 8, locked eyes with the customer and told her that he was out of mint. She looked at his garnish station, pointed at the large amount of mint sitting in an insert and asked "Then what's that?" Without losing eye contact, the bartender picked up the insert, dumped the contents on the floor and maintained "We. Are. Out. Of. Mint."

So she ordered caipirinhas.

The Abyss gazes back.

Labor Day is special because not only to we get the usual tourists, both international and domestic, but those lovable scamps, The Students, are back! Oh sweet Jesus where do I even begin with this? The Student presence gave my job that little extra kick in the balls that says "You're not fucked. There. NOW you're fucked." Just keeping track of which zitty little faces I had already carded was a full time job unto itself. They like to arrive in intimate groups of 30 or so and stand at the bar talking to each other for the first 15 minutes, which is the bar equivalent of a full naval blockade. Then come the questions, oh dear god, the QUESTIONS!
What does that taste like? Which beer has the most alcohol? What's your cheapest drink? Are you hiring? Can my underage friend come in if they don't drink anything? Do you think my friend is cute? Half an hour later, you have served 5 of the 30, your regulars have fled in terror and you have netted approximately $2.17 in tips. I would almost rather make mojitos all night.

While I would certainly hate to live in a world made up of people who think exactly like me, as a wise man once said, this aggression will not stand, man. By Monday, I was a hair-trigger attitude problem with lasers for eyes and poison darts for nipples. The shear amount of savage violence that I wished upon my customers would have made Spanish Inquisitors soak their shorts. And yet? The worst verbal bashing I doled out was to a group of Frenchmen (natch) who wanted me to bring their order to their table. All I could muster was a flustered, "I'm not a fucking barmaid", to which they hushedly replied "Zut alors!" (means "clear the poop deck" in Welsh or something).
I know full well that I have no one to blame for the industry with which I have saddled myself, but myself. Also I should be grateful that, despite putting on my best impression of an Easter Island stone head this weekend, I was tipped out better than expected and committed no crimes of passion. But for fuck's sake, if anyone is reading this from the comfort of a booth at Bennigans (BTW my spellchecker keeps insisting I want to spell "benign" which, in my own way, I am) please take note. If all you really want is the same exact damn things you are used to getting back home, then I offer the following as a substitute to the hours of TEFTing it will take you to come to the city: pull up the Google street view for Times Square while eating a hot dog of indeterminate origin while sitting next to an open sewer. It's almost like the real thing, but easier on us all.

Hipsterpedia Vol. 1

2010-09-06T11:51:00.000-07:00

What better way to start the week than by talking about everyone's favorite demographic: The Hipster. Many people seem to think that The Hipster is not their favorite demographic which I am here to tell you is patently untrue. Yuppies? Too clean. Hippies? Too dirty. And so we end up at the lovable Baby Bear Hipster. Don't argue. I just beat you with science.
But what, exactly is a Hipster? Theories are as diverse as they are numerous, but I have been studying them in their natural habitat for the better part of the last decade and fancy myself as the Grizzly Man of the Hip.

Hizzly Man.

I had originally intended this as a one-shot article but once I got going I found it was really hard to stop. Consequently I chopped it up into a bunch of pieces and we're going to be revisiting this subject at regular intervals till it's all gone. There's a hipster/cocaine joke to be had in there somewhere but it's Monday and I'm new at this so just be happy with what you get. If you want more then I suggest you go buy your own. Fucking mooches.

1. HABITAT AND BEHAVIOR:
It is commonly agreed upon my biologists, that The Hipster has four natural habitats and/or spiritual homes: New York City, San Francisco, Portland and Austin. (No, L.A. You incubate douchebags.) It is important to note, however, that relatively few of them are actually from these regions. Studies indicate they are spread by Liberal Arts Colleges From these regions, this group has, over the past few years, spread over much of the continent, with reports of sighting coming from as far away as Mexico. Upon further study, it was determined that they have not yet reached Mexico, but have thoroughly infested Puerto Rican neighborhoods throughout Brooklyn.
While not a very adaptable creature, The Hipster instead employs a rather novel reverse-darwinian tactic: it adapts it's environment to itself, usually at the expense of the area's indigenous inhabitants. It is believed that this behavior, while somewhat unique, was copied from the behavior of The Greater Entitled Straight White Male, who are historically harder to contain than bedbugs.


S.W.M.

While highly sexually active, The Hipster experiences a shockingly low birth/fuck ratio. While in many species this would be tantamount to genetic suicide, studies indicate that their numbers are growing rather than shrinking. While the source of their population boom is a mystery, I am inclined to believe the theory that their young are incubated in Chrome messenger bags, rapidly aged in Sculpting Theory or Film Appreciation classes, and finished off like a fine scotch in a custom made dive bar.

The beachhead of any new Hipster enclave is, of course, cheap housing. It is important to note that while not all hipsters have unlimited access to their parent's bank account, one must conform to the time honored facade of the starving artist. This has been the calling card of every counterculture since the beat poets of the 50's first skipped on their rent and started sleeping in the back room of the red wine wholesale warehouse where they worked.
One may opt to live like the little prince/princess they are but must in turn sacrifice a considerable amount of "cred" whenever they are exhibiting their plywood/tempra paint/glitter art projects. If said plywood/tempra paint/glitter objet d'art (means "junk I found in the art supply store dumpster" in Swahili or something) is constructed in a drafty, cobbled together loft in a former speculum factory however, it is infused with the naturally occurring "cred" that is known to exist ambiently in such buildings. Once the proper credibility terroir, or creddoir, is selected, it is best to create whatever art one chooses so long as the most tenuous line can be drawn from where the art was made to what the art is made from. For example, do you live in a loft that is close to Puerto Rican neighborhood? Then apply the paint with an old Choco Taco wrapper. Just moved in to a black community? Perhaps you should make the frame entirely out of found Newport butts. And for those who just got set up in the aforementioned speculum factory, well, now you can give that menstrual blood the new life it deserves.

Once the living conditions are secured, next comes the driving out of all those pesky burrito shops and lame hair/nail salons. It usually starts with a handful of bars, and then a cafe and before you know it, there are combination artisinal brick oven pizza/independent publisher book stores across the street from each other. Most landlords will notice that the neighborhood seems to be staying white out later and will consequently start jacking the rent. The local stores die out, the normal child bearing people who drive Subarus move in and a once vibrant neighborhood is reduced to pithily named wine shops and stroller parking. It's a slow process but one that, once started, is almost 100% terminal. Good reference points would be Park Slope in Brooklyn, The Pearl District in Portland and roughly 9/10 of Austin, TX.

Because it is inevitable that their neighborhood will one day be referred to as "a great place to raise a family" by Mom Pants Magazine, The Hipster becomes highly possessive of their newly claimed territory. Many defensive tactics are employed, ranging from active camouflage (leaving doors to shops and bars unmarked) to passive camouflage camouflage (opening a shop in an old storefront without changing it's former name or signage, i.e. "My new favorite bar is called Venturas Deli Grocery 2 Inc.") to passive aggressive camouflage (talking loudly and often about how awesome some place they've been to is, while declining to give out information on it's location).


"Are we open? Fucking, I guess, man. Whatever."

However, just as quickly as The Hipster will defend their newly co-opted nabe, they will also turn on it with little to no provocation. The common reason being that a particular neighborhood or bar has been "blown up" i.e. overrun with so many other people that look exactly like them, that the fragile illusion of total uniqueness is stretched to the breaking point. There will be much complaining and declarations of how things were better "back in the day" before the inevitable skulking off to virgin territory like so many locusts in tight pants.

FAQ, FTW and other acronyms of note.

2010-09-03T13:41:00.000-07:00

This is going to be my first blog post ever. Why do this now? Well there comes a time in every self-centered narcissist's life when you simply just don't know enough people willing to listen to your sublime insights of the world at large.
Me, I just got bored one day.
Well, let's get the basics out of the way shall we? I'm going to set this post up as an FAQ because I am self-possessed enough to assume this blog will actually generate a level of interest from people, who will then presumably tell their friends about it. These friends will enter the narrative in media res (means "missed connections" in Esperanto or something) and feel like they showed up to a friend's party only to find their friends have left, the beer has been drunk, and the only people left look, how shall we put it? Sticky. Kinda like logging on to your old Friendster account. This FAQ will hopefully serve the same purpose as running into your friend at the door to the aforementioned party and having them put their arm around you and drunkenly slur, "Dude! You DON'T want to go in there."

Q: What does NMFP stand for?

A: I don't like being explicit about things I feel people should already know so let's just say it either stands for Not My Fucking Problem or Nipples Made From Plastic. I'm sure you'll be able to deduce the correct answer over time.

Sad but true. SAD. But fucking true.

Q: Why use some acronym if you're not even going to tell us what it is?

A: Because I belong to the smuggest generation to ever walk the planet. If people my age can't find at least one tidbit of information a day to lord over some poor, square schmuck, then we feel as though we are not fulfilling our purpose. Also I'm from the Pacific Northwest where passive-aggressiveness is the number one local pass-time (the Thousand Yard Surl is a close second, followed by Functional Alcoholism).

Q: Um...OK, so what are you going to write about?

A: A general all around critique of a world that I do not see eye to eye with, I suppose. I'm kinda taking the organic approach with this thing. A lot of stupid shit happens in my life, mostly due to the fact that I live and work in NYC. I'm snarky by nature (Naughty by Nature was my side project) and though I don't suppose the rest of humanity gives a toss about my thoughts, I'm more than happy to provide them as a service to people anyone who happens to stumble upon my blog.

If I were a video store, this would be me.

Q: Whatever dude. So I'm guessing NMFP stands for Not My Fucking Problem, right? What does that even mean?

A: Which word is it that's confusing you?

Q: I mean what does it mean to you, asshole?

A: Ah. Well, looking back over my life, I realize that there are three main eras that could be generally described with simple acronyms. Years 0-13 are represented by WWJD which of course stands for "Who Whacked John Dillinger?" I had a deep and abiding interest in conspiracy theories lasting until halfway through 7th grade at which point I started growing the fuck up and thinking about things critically instead of hysterically.
Years 13-21 can be commonly referred to as the FTW years. During that stretch, I quite literally wanted to Fuck The World. Boys, girls, inanimate objects; if it wasn't actively protesting and was in possession of some hole-type orifice, I was pretty much on board. Also I thought the world should go fuck itself because it would be really interesting from an spacial astrophysics point of view.
And at last we arrive at the storied 21-??? period, where Functional Alcoholism (see: Portland, sports) is the order of the day. Unless the order of the day is bacon. Or migas if you got em. They are so hard to find in this damn city.

If you have these, and you are in NYC, I will be your apprentice.

Q: So you're some douchebag hipster from Portland that's going to get drunk and write a self-righteous blog complaining about a city you're not even originally from?

A: Prolly. Don't jump the gun though. I'm writing about hipsters next week.

Q: Fuck you.

A: Phrase it in the form of a question! Jesus, didn't anyone watch Jeopardy growing up?

Hopefully that answers all of the questions you have for me. I can't possibly think of anything else anyone would want to know. I'll try to keep this a daily Mon-Fri type of operation for as long as...

Who am I kidding? No one's even reading this shit...

{throws mic down and walks off stage}