Mister Green

James Lileks is Dead Wrong

Lileks asserts, as a side note in discussing Harvey Fierstein playing Mrs. Claus in drag, the following:

I also don't think Mrs. Claus should be played by Heidi Klum in a white-fur thong, stroked by buff oiled-up elves. Think of the children, I say. Think of the children.

James, that is actually the best idea I have ever heard, provided I get to be an elf. To hell with the children.

Mmmmm, food.

Happy Thanksgiving. Blogging to resume Friday if I don't pull a Mr. Creosote.

I Hate My Brain

Stuck on you
I've got this feeling down
Deep in my soul
That I just can't lose

That's Lionel Richie, folks, from his 1983 album "Can't Slow Down". This morning, for no reason at all, my brain has decided to torment me with this song. I didn't hear it on the radio, or anything like that. But now it's stuck in my head on an endless loop.

I think this is evidence that all the brain cells I have sacrificed to Demon Alcohol over the years served some useful function after all - protecting my conscious mind from this song. D'oh! Stupid brain!

Ha!

This picture at Eye on the Left is fantastic. (Link via Taco Flavored Kisses.)

More Sullivan

From today's action at Andrew Sullivan's blog: "I know I'm a broken record on this but we truly need some kind of third force again in American politics - fiscally conservative, socially inclusive, and vigilant against terror."

Sign me up.

Economics by Dick

I thought this was interesting. An article in this morning's Chicago Tribune (registration required) outlines Dick Gephardt's attacks on Howard Dean. Gephardt felt Dean was insufficiently liberal as Vermont's governor:

"Time after time, when faced with budget shortfalls, Gov. Dean's first and only instinct was to cut--cut education, cut prescription drug coverage, cut Medicaid funding, cut aid to the elderly, blind and disabled," Gephardt said.

Afterward, Gephardt said Dean should have considered higher taxes on Vermont's wealthier citizens, made cuts in other programs and looked at such actions as raising the minimum wage to spur economic growth. (Emphasis added.)

Gephardt also suggested Dean could have disbanded the state's criminal justice system to discourage crime, mandated that all public school classes be taught in Swahili to improve English skills, and outlawed hand washing in public restrooms as a means to fight infections.

The saddest thing about the 2004 presidential election is that somebody has to win. As Andrew Sullivan said about the choice between Bush and Dean: "So we have to pick between a budget-busting, free-spending, entitlement-expanding Republican and a Democrat opposed to many critical aspects of a free and dynamic economy. We're stuck between a reckless liberal and a regulatory liberal. It's the 1970s all over again - and too depressing for words."

The Warrior Caste

Blackfive had this great post about what he calls the Warrior Caste, families that have served in the military through the generations, and about what some feel is the widening difference between civilians and the military.

I didn't serve, mainly because when I was of an age to make the decision I was a smartass punk who thought he was too good for it. It was only much later that I fully understood that I had it backwards; I wasn't good enough. I wish that hadn't been the case.

But although I didn't choose that path, I have a ton of respect from those who did, and do. And if I could check a box on my 1040 to pay extra taxes to go to increased military pay and benefits, I would do it in a heartbeat.

Bet you didn't think I could make it through an entire post without being sarcastic, did you?

Mr. Green Has the Answers

If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably been asking yourself, “Am I sober enough to drive to the liquor store? If not, do I have time to walk there before it closes?”

But happily for you, you’re probably not like me, and thus are probably concerned with more universal questions such as, “What can be done about spammers?”

Well, on the supply side, not much. There are all sorts of reasons why it will be difficult or impossible to shut them down, but they all boil down to this: Where there’s money to be made, there will always be slimy bastards willing to do whatever they have to do to make it. And no matter how much 99.9999% of people with email accounts would like nothing more than to pick up a baseball bat, find a spammer, and whack them in the knee like Barry Bonds pounding a hanging curveball, spam will continue to proliferate because of the other 0.00001% - the people who buy from spammers.

So we have to address the demand side. Frankly, I would have expected this problem to take care of itself long ago. If you really believe that hot slutty teenaged girls want to talk to you if you give them your credit card number, or that you can get cheap boner pills without a prescription that actually contain something other than generic baking soda, or that you can make millions of dollars if only you send your entire life savings to a stranger claiming to be Nigerian royalty, then I would have pegged you as a Darwin Award impatiently waiting to happen. You should have accidentally choked yourself to death with the plastic bag your computer came wrapped in long before you had a chance to hook it up and start using that interweb thingy.

But clearly that hasn’t happened. So here’s my plan. We start our own spam campaign. In this one, the email claims to be from Microsoft, and it will go something like this:

Security Notice – Turn off your computer immediately. There is a new virus going around called “Mr. Green Laughs In Your Stupid Bovine Face”. It instantly destroys your hard drive and simultaneously makes you immune to boner pills and repulsive to hot slutty teenaged girls. A security patch from Microsoft will be beamed to your PC via satellite as soon as it is developed, and your PC will turn on by itself when it is safe to operate it again. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO ACCESS THE INTERWEB UNTIL THIS HAPPENS! A man from Houston disregarded this warning and his genitals imploded. Another man from Minneapolis followed these instructions and now he is sleeping with Heidi Klum. Thank you for your cooperation.

Problem solved. Tune in next week when Mr. Green tackles telemarketers. Literally, God willing.

Save me, Santorum!

Thank God for the Republicans. Although the Massachusetts Supreme Court has basically come out and said there is no valid reason to ban same-sex marriage, Congressional Republicans and President Bush appear poised to push for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to ban it.

And it can’t come a moment too soon. After Texas ruled that sodomy was legal, I was seized by a nearly uncontrollable urge to suck cock.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m as straight as they come. But once I found out that it was legal to smoke pole, I was barely able to refrain from doing so immediately. Fortunately, I was alone when I found out. I shudder to think what might have happened if I had been, say, on the train.

And it’s not that I don’t love my wife. God knows, I love her more than life. But just knowing that I could drop her like a hot rock and get me some of that hot cock… Man. It’s taken all of my willpower to stay with her and engage in state-sanctioned, church-endorsed, fully legal, lights off, missionary position sex just as often as we wish to attempt to procreate.

But now that the prospect of divorcing her, moving to Massachusetts, marrying a man, and getting all of the red-hot anal action I can physically stand seems open to me – well, all I can say is, I hope the law prevents me from doing so before I lose all control and start chugging dick like it’s going out of style.

And I know it wouldn’t just be me. What heterosexual male, if given the choice, wouldn’t opt for the gay life? What husband wouldn’t leave his wife? What father wouldn’t desert his children? And it’s not just the men, of course. What woman would stay with a man if she were legally allowed to marry another woman? You know they'd all be munching carpet! It would be the end of the world within a hundred years, just because nobody would want to have intercourse with members of the opposite sex.

But mercifully, the Republicans are all over this one. Hopefully they can get the Constitution changed before it’s too late. Never mind terrorism, the mushrooming federal budget deficit, the death of personal responsibility, our failing public schools, the war in Iraq, global warming, the continuing existence of Ted Rall – the prevention of marriage between consenting adults of the same gender is our most urgent problem.

An Open Letter to Ted Rall

Dear Ted,

I read your column entitled “Why We Fight”. Simply brilliant. Shifting the reader from the perspective of an ignorant American duped by a lying President and his venal administration to that of a noble Iraqi freedom fighter “under the brutal and oppressive jackboot of the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority” was a masterstroke.

Your hero notes: “Soon the American public will note that the anticipated five-year price tag of $500 billion, with a probable loss of some 4,000 lives and 10,000 wounded, is not a reasonable price to pay to get our 2.5 million barrels of oil flowing to the West each month. This net increase, of just 0.23 percent of total OPEC production, will not reduce U.S. gasoline prices.” I’m not going to fact check your figures because I naturally trust your integrity. How come you are the only one who gets this? Why do the supporters of this war insist that it’s not about oil, when the far more compelling explanation that it is about the oil but nobody in the Bush administration can do math? Once you understand that Bush is simply a cheap knockoff of Hitler (but not as bright), it’s an elementary insight. One need not consider the matter any further.

And now I call on you, Ted, to step up and help right this wrong. I know you are a lone voice of sanity in the wilderness, bravely tapping away at your computer keyboard and drawing your wonderful cartoons, but your talents are needed elsewhere. Ted, the Iraqi people need you. Those brave Saddam loyalists who only want to return to a simpler time when they were free to rape and torture without fear of repercussion – they need you. The fundamentalist Islamists who understand that the West needs to be destroyed so they can continue oppressing their women and fighting to overthrow the vast Zionist conspiracy that controls everything on earth – they need you. Those shell-shocked Iraqi civilians who haven’t yet heard the message that America is the Great Satan, never mind the running water and open schools and improved electrical systems and the end of the torture chambers and children’s prisons and mass graves – they need you to understand that they’re being oppressed.

Go, Ted. Go to Iraq. Leave as soon as you can. Get over there and fight the good fight. Roll up your sleeves and get to work. If you end up being killed there, then at least you will have died knowing that you were a martyr to a noble cause – the fight against Bush. Godspeed, Ted.

America doesn’t deserve you.

Sincerely,

Mr. Green

Raised by Wolves

I was talking with one of my co-workers today, and he said he had never seen the movie Stripes. This surprised me, since he's my age and I remember seeing it at least a thousand times on HBO as a kid. It was on something like five times a day for three straight years. I thought it was the law that you had to see Stripes at least once if you had cable TV.

Then he admitted that he had never seen Caddyshack, either. At that point, I began to wonder whether he wasn't actually an extraterrestrial. Then I figured, the aliens would probably be smart enough to have their spy watch Caddyshack before being deployed, just in case he ever had to converse with a human and parse the phrase, "Big hitter, the Lama". How can you grow up male in America and never watch Caddyshack?

But then he said he had one worse. He has never seen Animal House.

Really.

There's got to be a program for people like him, hasn't there? A program to help unfortunates like him achieve some basic level of lowbrow cultural literacy? What does it say about our society that we can put a man on the moon but we can't find it in the budget somewhere to help these poor people? My God, have we no compassion? WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN?

Traffic

Wow. I got a ton of hits today from Anna's link at Primal Purge, and lots more from several people who read her post. There's no way I can live up to her high praise, so I apologize in advance for the imminent suckage.

Thanks to all of you who linked and/or visited. And continued thanks to Blackfive, who only charges me $10 for each time he gives me a mention on his site.

Observation

Sometimes I buy a beer at the train station to enjoy during the ride home. But the conductors get so pissy when I pour some on the floor for my dead homies that it really detracts from the experience.

Men, men, men, men...

I read Kim du Toit's rant about how modern men are a bunch of pussies. I was confused, so I asked my wife what I thought about it. She told me to shut up and get back to dusting.

I know she wouldn't yell at me if she didn't really love me.

Diversity Training Update

It wasn't nearly as bad as I feared it might be. On the whole, pretty good, actually. Much more practical than the 100% content-free touchy-feely "we're all different, but we're all really the same" stuff we had in the one aimed at all employees. This was for managers only, and actually had some useful stuff. I think my boss was disappointed there was no hand-holding and singing "Michael Row The Boat Ashore" or "Kumbayah" or anything like that. I'm not entirely convinced it was a better use of my time than a day sitting at my desk working, but on the whole not bad.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death...

Diversity training today. Opening lines I've considered, if we have a chance to "introduce ourselves":

I don't need this training, because I already hate everybody equally.

Anybody who isn't like me is deviant and wrong.

You're all a bunch of whining pussies! Fuck this, I'm outta here.

Does anybody have a gun? I'd like to shoot myself in the head now.

BFREWURFFOEAWRIPGFR! [fakes seizure, falls to floor]

Most likely scenario:

Hi, I'm Mr. Green from the IT Department. [spends rest of day feigning attention while plotting to replace boss's Michael Bolton mp3's with music that does not suck]

All Hail Jen!

Many thanks to Jen, who created the new look and is responsible for kicking your humble author in the ass a sufficiently large number of times that he finally broke down and implemented her creation.

Jen rules! Now if I can only get her to write for me, too...

Responsible Drinking

Here's how you drink an entire bottle of Scotch without dying:

1) Don’t do it. Just say no.

1) No, really. You don’t want to do this.

Sigh. All right, suit yourself. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.

1) Be a large person. If you don't happen to be a large person, start eating and drinking a lot. If you tend to pass out after three drinks, you've got a lot of training ahead of you. Snap to it!

2) Early in the process, eat a bunch of fried chicken. Pizza is a good substitute. This coats the stomach with a protective layer of grease, which is key. Sure it's bad for your heart, but if you were concerned with your health you wouldn't be drinking an entire bottle of Scotch, would you?

3) Stick to the Scotch. Mixing liquors or throwing in some beer along the way may be tempting 'cause they're yummy. But be strong. People who climb mountains don't try to simultaneously work on their long jump, although that would be fun to watch. Drinking even more alcohol than is in your bottle of Scotch is sort of like long jumping off a mountain at 14,000 feet. Entertaining to those onlookers who enjoy watching others suffer, and probably fatal.

4) When you're done with the bottle, savor your accomplishment. Don't go looking for more. You might want to make sure there is no more before you start, because at this point your judgment will be compromised to the point that drinking a second bottle sounds like a great idea.

5) Start drinking water. As much as you possibly can swallow before you cannot stay awake any longer. Your body will be trying to go to sleep because it no longer trusts you to not kill yourself. This is a reasonable response, but in this case you know better than your body. Fight to stay awake, and keep drinking water. This will reduce the extent to which you hate yourself and life in general the next day.

6) Find a good place to pass out. A bed is good. The floor is bad. The floor at a party with a bunch of people you can’t trust to not abuse you when you’re passed out is very bad.

7) Wake up. Hate yourself and life in general. Wonder how you could have possibly done that to yourself. Marvel at how you never learn. Swear not to do it again, and that this time you really mean it.

And congratulations! You are now officially as big of an idiot as I am, because I drank an entire bottle of Scotch at a party this weekend. (I even followed it with a bourbon before realizing that I had better start chugging water because system shutdown was imminent.) I felt okay on Sunday, all things considered. Mercifully, I didn’t say or do anything to embarrass myself, although I’m told I was very entertaining in a “being witty, saying funny things” way and not in a “dropping your pants and howling at the moon while the cops drag you off” way. But still not a performance I care to repeat any time soon.

* Happy side note – only once was I selected at the airport for additional security checks. Usually on a round trip like this I’m grabbed two or three times. I don’t know what it is about me, but I swear I could be in line between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden and 30 seconds later I’d be the one standing off to the side in the crucifixion pose while one security guy walks me through the Hokey Pokey and waves the metal detection wand with the sensitivity level set so high it registers the iron in my blood, and his partner lubes his arm up to the elbow in preparation for the body cavity search.