It's Friday, and since Bob Jones didn't write any other long letters that I know about, that means it's time for Spastic Mucus Monkey Friday, in which my normal, video-game induced inability to focus on anything that isn't a videogame for more than five minutes starts seeming like a far-off ideal. With my body concentrating on manufacturing as many vile fluids as it can manage, and delivering them to any orifice it can find or make, my brain is left adrift, touching down briefly at various points on the Retardomagnetic Spectrum.
In the movie world, today marks the openings of both "Finding Neverland" and "National Treasure". You know how they say when you clone something, and then clone a clone of that clone, and then you clone a clone of the clone that's a clone of that clone, and so on and so forth until you've typed clone about two hundred times and the word's lost all its meaning... anyway, they say that when you do that, the result is this freakish, degraded, drooling pathetic parody of the original.
OK, technically, I suspect genetic engineers would not use the phrase "pathetic parody", unless they were watching Scary Movie 2, but you know what I mean. "Neverland" and "Treasure" are perfect examples of cloning taken too far. The only difference is, one was cloned from "A Room With A View" through a hundred other costumed, British intermediaries, and the other from the mutated descendants of "Raiders of the Lost Ark". Just stay the hell home this weekend, people. And don't go see the Spongebob movie, either. That porous yellow fuck and his handlers do not need any more encouragement.
This week, we've talked a lot about science, and thrown around fancy, ten-dollar science words like "clone". So it is with a heavy heart that, once again, I must report on scientists pursuing goals I simply cannot agree with. A report from the Baltimore Sun today describs a clinic at Johns Hopkins where people go to treat their addiction to caffeine.
I can understand wanting to help people. Really I can. But we've GOT to have a few things left we can work through on our own, without even a Dr. Phil book to guide us. Treat the cocaine people. Treat the heroin people. Put the people responsible for making "Apprentice" clones* in a support group and help THEM to stop. We'll get through the caffeine thing just fine on our own, thanks.
Some psychologists want to categorize caffeine withdrawal as an official Capital M Capital I Mental Illness. And while many of the caffeine addicts I know are also not right in the head, I don't think it's the caffeine's fault. Look, the effects of caffeine withdrawal are headaches, fatigue, and irritability. If your "mental illness" can be cured by an aspirin, a nap, and a blowjob, then it's not much of a mental illness, is it? But people are making caffeine logs** and discussing caffeine with a therapist. Stop wasting therapists' time, dammit. There are actual fucked up people out there who'd find that hour a week really useful, you know. Stay out of Starbucks, ride out the headaches, drink water for a week, and get over yourselves.
Mallard Fillmore is in my newspaper now. Sympathy e-mails can be addressed to the link in the upper left. You see, there was a hole on the comics page that needed filling, and they're trying out different stuff for a while to see what people like. And they're trying out "Mallard Fillmore", which, as far as I can tell, is what you would get if Ann Coulter wrote "Mother Goose and Grimm". It's not a pretty fucking sight, I'll tell you that much. Today's wacky hijinx involve a highbrow, elitist member of the "mainstream media" calling stock car races "NASCAR maches" like he's Thurston Fucking Howell the Third. just in from a brisk walk around the polo field.
Even discountin my obvious biases and hatreds, from a purely comedic standpoint, that shit is Hagar The Horrible horrible. The right wing really needs to abandon comedy, and leave it to the left. How many more Dennis Millers do we need before that simple fact is accepted? Much like the Democrats need to give up on "courting bigots" or "personality". When Republicans try to do comedy, you end up with Larry the Cable Guy, and we all suffer.
* I thought, briefly, about misspelling the word "clones" a bit more egregiously each time I typed it, but that's the kind of elaborate, subtle comedy that requires me to be at peak form to not completely screw up.
** This is a reference to actually writing down and tracking one's caffeine intake, not the notorious effects caffeine has on the lower gastrointestinal tract. On the other hand, poop is funny.