You, With The Tiny, Limp Dick

Memo to all you men with the limp, tiny dicks: YOU ARE DUMB.

You couldn't just get over it, could you? You couldn't just buy a sportscar and yell at the mail room guy like your ilk's traditions dictate. No. You had to go and become a market.

And not just any market, no. A market of ULTIMATE IRONY. A market that grows and grows. A market with almost preternatural staying power. A market of length, depth and girth that will not go away no matter how much it's flogged. An inverse penile analogy that would make the late John Holmes say "DAMN!"

As a result, you no longer have to turn to the backs of porn magazines for shady ads for shadier pumps and pills, products where the risk of it turning black and falling off operated as a necessary deterrent. Like a fear hyena culling the herd of its weak members.

Now I've gotta watch fucking Enzyte ads on the Food Network. You've seen 'em. The balding, skinny pusbag with the eternal smile and the giant shoes and the oh so clever innuendos and the blatant racism where the stereotypically small-dicked Japanese businessmen are so awed by Bob's newfound dick-fueled machismo that they submit to whatever Big American Bob wants them to pay.

And you got your Viagra. Hooray. But Viagra wasn't good enough. You had to have Levitra. But Levitra's not good enough either. You had to have Cialis. The thirty-six hour stiffypill.

The list of horrible side effects on this baby would make a grown man cry, which is probably why it's good that it's only marketed to little whining babies who are obsessed with their manparts. Sudden drops in blood pressure when taken with alcohol (seems counterproductive, don't it?) or PRIAPIC ERECTIONS LASTING MORE THAN FOUR HOURS

I don't want anything that lasts more than four hours. I'm terrified of the extended edition of Return of the King. I believe in the importance of federally mandated work breaks. And I certainly don't want to be beplanked for five hours, looking down and wondering "Is this normal?"

But wait, there's more! Headache! Indigestion! Back pain! Muscle pain! The inability to distinguish between BLUE AND GREEN. And then there are the ones they won't even list on their website, that you have to ask your doctor about. You know, assuming you don't die in a car crash on the way to the office because you think all the traffic lights are sales at K-Mart and your penis keeps getting in the way of the steering wheel.

Let me put it this way. You obviously aren't that bright to begin with. Imagine what'll happen if, every 36 hours or so, you pop a pill to send all that brainblood strait to your groin? You'll be EVEN DUMBER. Eventually, we'll be overrun by retarded, naked zombies, clubbing us to death for our pocket change so that they can buy more pills so that they still have clubs to club us with.

Your penis will end civilization as we know it. Best have it removed for the good of society.

Surprised People

Quick memo to Inappropriately Surprised People. YOU ARE DUMB.

In our civilized society, we have developed this thing called language. Language allows us to assign names to things. Often, these names will represent or describe the thing that they are attached to.

If a thing, for example, is named "Mortal Kombat", and you are subsequently surprised by the game's contents of death and fighting, then it is your own damn fault, and you need to shut up and pay more attention.

This means you, Canada. When you shell out dough to bring Big American Star Conan O'Brien to your country in the hopes of allaying everyone's fears that they'll catch SARS if they share a crowded bus with a Canadian, and a character named "Insult Comic Dog" insults Canadians, and you are surprised in any way by this... well, thank goodness you've got the universal health care thing to fall back on, because the whole Triumph thing makes you sound like a bunch of fuckin' doofuses.

And it's always the oversensitive, yippy people who don't pay attention to the warning signs. Which makes even less sense. Because if I knew I was the type to fly off the handle every time a vice was portrayed in a videogame, I'd make sure to stay far away from videogames whose titles promise an entire city's worth of vice.

Do people in other industries have to deal with this kind of thing? Does the owner of Shrimpy McShrimp's Shrimptacular Shrimporium get a regular influx of customers who order the Shrimptastic Shrimplatter, wolf it down, go into anaphylactic shock, and then file million dollar lawsuits claiming there's no way they could have known their shrimp allergy would have been triggered?

They probably do, come to think about it. Probably drove poor Shrimpy McShrimp out of the shrimp business entirely. Which is a shame, because with a name like Shrimpy McShrimp, it's not like he can open a law firm.

Nature gave you eyes and a brain. Civilization gave you letters and words. Make the elusive connection, or be forever enshrimped in the annals of the DUMB.

Zell Miller

Mattel And The Media

Memo to Mattel and "the media": YOU ARE DUMB.

Regular readers of You Are Dumb (and I now know there are some. SUCKERS!) may be aware that a personal pet peeve has already made itself apparent: shit that is NOT NEWS being paraded about as if it WERE NEWS.

Well, it's happening again. And this time, it's the "breakup" of Barbie and Ken.

First, to Mattel, and I say this with all the care and compassion of someone who both enjoys your products, and is involved with someone who REALLY enjoys your products: go fuck yourselves. I mean, come on. If you wanted some cheap publicity, just ship another pregnant doll or a guy with an earring. That's always good for some press. Maybe include something that looks a LOT like a beer bottle, but is actually a juice bottle, in the next toy car in the Barbie line. That'd be awesome.

But this faux "breakup" press release? Someone light a match. "Barbie(TM) and Ken(TM) have always been an extraordinary couple with so much on- and off-screen chemistry," said the pair's business manager, Russell Arons, Vice President Marketing, Mattel. "In fact, they just finished wrapping their fourth movie together, 'Barbie(TM) as The Princess and the Pauper,' which debuts this fall. And now they feel it's time to spend some quality time -- apart."

Here is an important hint. When a Vice President of Marketing spends five to ten minutes pretending to be part of an elaborate fantasy world of his own making, in which he is the business manager for two CGI models on a hard drive in Canada that aren't even models of people, but are instead models of PLASTIC DOLLS, this is not "whimsical". This is grounds for committment in at least 43 of the 50 states.

But hey, companies release dumb press releases all the time. Surely, the fictional separation of two hunks of plastic who have never had any kind of cohesive narrative throughout their 45 years of history anyway; surely, this would not be treated as news, not with a war, an election, and scandals aplenty, right? RIGHT?

WRONG. Meet Samantha Critchell, Associated Press writer and rapidly rising star on today's You Are Dumb Enemies List. Ms. Critchell not only reported on the story, but appears to have expanded on it with her own brand of delusional speculation.

Amongst the concepts in her AP piece on the press release, but not in the press release:

• A shameless, insipid J-Lo/Ben reference (75 points).
• The completely incomprehensible idea that the recently released Cali Girl Barbie's deeper tan, hoop earrings, and board shorts somehow reflect her "single status" (60 points).
• That the Blaine doll has the hots for the Barbie doll (45 points).
• That Ken is jealous of Barbie's many careers, including Pink Astronaut, Pink Rock Star, Pink Veterinarian, Pink Teacher, and Pink Professor of Quantum Pink Mechanics at Pink Polytechnic University, home of the Super Pink Conducting Super Pink Collider. I may have made that last bit up. (25 points).

That's a total of 205 Dumbass Points, which would be a record even if this weren't the first time I'd ever mentioned or tallied them.

Ms. Critchell gets singled out for the dumbhate because, upon being handed the press release by her editor, she did not, apparently, sigh with regret, whip out 500 words of perfunctory prose, then go home and get drunk. No, she decided to have "fun" with it. To "liven up the piece". To take Mattel's nigh-psychotic little fantasy world and just run with it. She's not the only one to have done so, admittedly. FOX News and Ananova covered it, too. But you expect that kind of thing from them. FOX even managed to work in a bit about parents explaining this horrible news to their traumatized children. GO FOX.

You wanna know how much of a non-event this is? By comparsion, this makes the Death of Superman bullshit back in '93 seem like it actually fucking happened. Alien archaeologists are going to see this in the archives, and through comparative methodology, spend five fruitless years looking for the broken-off bone spurs of Doomsday in the rubble of Metropolis. Then, one day, they'll stumble across two or three closets still full of copies of the bagged comic with the black armband in it, go home, and get drunk. Because unlike certain marketing VP's and AP reporters, they will be horribly embarassed that THEY WERE DUMB.

Office Partiers

Memo to the organizers, participants, and attendees of work-related wacky fun parties: YOU ARE DUMB.

Before I get to the meat of this, I think I should probably address the burning question of whether Terri Carlin still qualifies as VERY DUMB despite having dropped her lawsuit, claiming to have 'made her point'. The answer is, unsurprisingly, YES.

So anyway, these fuckheads in the workplace really need to get over their apparent disappointment at not being picked for the school play. Onstage OR backstage.

I mean, that's the nicest possible motivation I can think of for people wanting to spend time and energy turning a conference room into a "tropical paradice", which traditionally means one potted palm in the corner, one pineapple ring in the Hawaiian Punch, three managers you've never met before in grass skirts and leis, and someone's battered Don Ho gag gift CD playing wanly on an underpowered, tinny boom box.

I guess, somehow, I'd wrongly assumed that after two decades of cable TV and one decade of the Internet, that the rest of you would have also come to the conclusion that seeing a coworker in a cowboy hat or a supervisor in a sombrero is actually very fucking annoying.

But you all just eat that up, don't you. The themed raffles, the singalongs, the costumes, the dreaded interpretations of ethnic food by middle class, middle aged midwesterners. Can't get enough of it. Love it so much you make sure to take pictures and cover bulletin boards with 'em.

You love them so much, in fact, that like some kind of head-shaving, purple-sneaker-wearing castration cult, you cannot imagine that people would not want to join in. That someone might look at the soul-destroying potential of the whole sordid affair and decide that maybe, just maybe, a free plate full of Triscuits, celery sticks, and cocktail weiners in a sea of KC Masterpiece ain't worth the trouble.

But, you know. At least I'm not bitter.

It is not my fault that your work and home life is so lacking that you need to prance around in a hat to feel like you're "cutting loose". But since you all universally refuse to back the fuck off, I'm afraid I'm going to have to call you out as DUMB.

The Forces Of Regression

Memo to the forces of regression: YOU ARE DUMB.

It's two thousand and four. I mean, I know you've noticed, because you're writing "'04" on your checks, but have you actually noticed? Three years AFTER 2001. Twenty years AFTER 1984. We're supposed to be better now. Wiser. Smarter. Flying around in jetpacks or something. But we're not. And I've become convinced it's because of forces of regression. A bunch of dumb sonsabitches who are dragging their feet on the march to THE FUTURE. And I'm callin' em out.

Michael Powell, chairman of the FCC: It is not 1962. You do not need to protect us from a tit. Or the F-bomb. We do not need a full-scale investigation into a Super Bowl halftime show while the administration is getting away with shit that makes Nixon weep for being born 30 years too soon. Go back to your office, try to keep the beaver shots on Teletubbies below, say, five a year, consider protecting the public airwaves by keeping them vaguely public, and GET OUT OF THE WAY.

Groundhog Day: Can we stop, now? We've got weather.com, we've got satellites. Right now, even as we speak, there are a couple of tiny, remote controlled buggies tooling around on the surface of Mars, sending us back three-dimensional stereoscopic pictures of another planet. Yet people are still wasting time and energy watching a rat in Pennsylvania for its meteorological insights. The people of Punxsutawney have ridden this freakish ancient superstitious gravy train for too long, now. They're cut off.

Georgia: And speaking of tradition ruining things for the rest of us. Georgia wants to stop using the word "evolution" in schools. Consider this a warning shot across the bow of creationists, who may be the dumbest people on earth: you're gonna show up here a lot.

Creationists are like vile, oozing, black-hearted little idiot savants, who can somehow manage to finagle school boards and politicians into doing their bidding, come up with cute names like "intelligent design theory", all while firmly believing that the earth is only six thousand years old and an invisible man in the sky put all the fossils under Arizona.

And they don't even have an ulterior motive. It's not like, say, certain monkeys in power denying global warming because if they do anything about it, it'll piss off all their friends and wipe out their bank accounts. No. The creationists do all this because, if they don't, a few thousand repeatedly translated words in a millenia-old book written by dozens of people back when writing stuff down was NEW AND TRENDY might not be 100% accurate.

I say we eat 'em. I know cannibalism is a big taboo these days. Thanks to Michael Powell's new scrutiny, they've had to scrap the big cannibalism performance from next year's Super Bowl. But creationists are like a giant, inbred roadblock between us and Utopia. And with all the groundhogs and boobfear holding us back too, we're gonna need a lot of energy to push forward. So let's eat all the creationists. They're probably even low-carb.