Not One Damn Lick Of Sense

Memo to Bored Lefties With E-Mail: YOU ARE DUMB.

You may have gotten an e-mail or seen a message board posting about "Not One Damn Dime Day". It's been making the rounds of the usual places this week. The idea is that on Inauguration Day, as a protest, people don't spend money on anything for 24 hours. Not food, not gas, not toilet paper, not a single quarter in a single soda vending machine.

As far as I can tell, the idea behind it is that a couple hundred thousand Internet liberals not shopping for 24 hours will send an incredibly powerful message to our Bush-supporting, corporate overlords and, according to the e-mail, try to "shut the retail economy down". There are a number of small problems with this plan, unfortunately. The most significant and glaring flaw, of course, is that it is FUCKING STUPID.

It's not that I'm opposed to protest. It's not that I'm opposed to the taking of action to effect change. I am, however, opposed to a handful of idealistic wankers running around in circles for a day then patting themselves on the back thinking they've won the New York Marathon. Allow me to present you with the official stated objective of Not One Damn Dime Day.

"The object is simple. Remind the people in power that the war in Iraq is immoral and illegal; that they are responsible for starting it and that it is their responsibility to stop it. 'Not One Damn Dime Day' is to remind them, too, that they work for the people of the United States of America, not for the international corporations and K Street lobbyists who represent the corporations and funnel cash into American politics."

There are two possibilities here. First, that this will work, and second, that it will not. For it to work, the idea has to become widespread enough, and participation high enough, that the drop in economic activity is noticed. So let's say this happens, just as a lark. Let's say the idea gets out there to tens of millions of people. Let's say these people are swayed by the charm of the awkward wording. Moved by the passion of the slightly addled rhetoric. Let's say that, in a success beyond the wildest wet dreams of a Seattle anarchist blogger, this campaign reduces all economic activity in the nation by 65% for one day.

Who will notice? Who will be hurt? Remember, this will affect everyone by the same percentage, from the Alcoa CEO who rapes dolphins on his lunch hour to the mom-and-pop hemp store down the block. Remember why, as progressives, we're in favor of PROGRESSIVE tax structures? it's because when you take the same percentage out of the income of a poor person and a rich person, the poor person is hurt more.

Ergo, the radical left has just, in essence, proposed a protest that inflicts a flat tax on the nation for 24 hours. BRILLIANT.

But that's only in the incredibly unlikely scenario in which NODDD would work at all. The numbers just aren't there, people. Nineteen percent of the actual U.S. population voted against Bush. Around 30% if you only count eligible voters. How many of that 30% will even hear about the "boycott"? How many will care? How many will care AND decide to participate? And then be able to?

How much money do they have? What would they have bought that day? Will they just buy it the day before or after? Do corporations even take note of one-day aberrations in sales trends? And even if they do, how, exactly, will that be translated into an anti-war message in their minds? One that they'll pay heed to, and do something about?

What it boils down to is that the left would like to show our rulers just how much power and influence they can wield. And unfortunately, they will. Like a four-year-old hitting his father in the shin with a couch pillow, the shin of authority will remain intact, and the worst that could happen is that a hand-made vase from Berkeley might get knocked off the coffee table. It's stupid.

I understand you feel powerless. I know you want to stick it to The Man. But the world has changed a lot in the past 40 years. The playing field is no longer on the streets, because they've shown they can ignore the streets. Remember what the various Million Blank Marches were supposed to accomplish? Me neither. Folks protested at the Republican National Convention, and were ignored. Folks protesting the inauguration are going to be ignored, too. You know why? Because it's the INAUGURATION. And while you're standing outside in your black hoodie in the cold with your sign and your Hey Hey Ho Ho, the people in power will be inside, spending more money on this party than they're committing to Asian disaster relief, and they will be laughing at you.

The battle is for eyeballs. It's for eardrums. It's for the vaunted "hearts and minds". The right wing has systematically, for three decades, controlled the public image of the left. And anything that reinforces that image, like Not One Damn Dime Day so patently does, just plays right into their hands. And is DUMB.

Brushing: Tool Of The Corporate Power Structure

Memo to Colgate and Crest: YOU ARE DUMB.

I'm beginning to think that the Cavity Creeps are actually a brave, rag-tag group of rebels against your dental tyranny, and that the commercials I grew up with as a child were actually filthy totalitarian propaganda. And that maybe, just maybe, the polyglot multinational dental force described in those ads weren't heroes at all, but puppets of the oligarchy.

I have not taken leave of my senses and decided to come out against dental hygiene. I have, however, come to the conclusion that the toothpaste industry now disturbingly resembles a trip to Coldstone Creamery. Pick any ingredient you want, you name it, and we'll shove it into a tube for you to smear all over your word-hole. I came to this conclusion after the fine people at Colgate introduced "MaxFresh", which allows one to take freshness, apparently, to the MAX, by including micro-sized breath strips in with the toothpaste.

You know breath strips. Breath strips are the neutron bomb of oral care. They're thin gelatin strips imbued, as far as I can tell, with equal parts menthol and bleach. You pop one in your mouth, and it instantly cleanses it of all life. It's like The Day After, only instead of wandering around and pontificating, the tiny bacterial version of Jason Robards dies a horrible death, and his corpse is expelled from your body in your futile attempt to get the taste out of your mouth.

Oh, the breath strips may say "Icy Refreshing Cool Extreme Mint Arctic Frostbite Blast" on them, but the reality is more like Lysol, with the refreshing undercurrent of five million bacterial corpses. And now, there's a toothpaste loaded with the little fuckers.

My original thought was that some byproduct of the breath strip manufacturing process left a whole bunch of leftover, unusable breath-strip, and thus, some brilliant executive said, "Hey, load some into the paste vats and get a team on a new logo. Five thousand fucking varieties of toothpaste isn't enough", but in trying to remember which company was actually shoving the breath strips into the toothpaste, I came across an article explaining how the breath strip manufacturers were ramping up production. So apparently, they're pouring extra resources into this idea.

Here's a helpful tip from me, the writer, to you, my loyal readers. Never, EVER visit the Crest website. To do so is to peer into madness. A twisting maelstrom of options, none of which make sense, all in the blinding gradations between medium blue and white that are the chromatic stock-in-trade of the oral care industry. Should you visit Smiles Central or Sparkle City? Or peer into the distant future of Crest HealthySmiles 2010?

That's depressing, by the way. 2010 used to be the year that we flew to Jupiter, made contact with the monolith, and learned that all those worlds were ours except Europa, and that we should not attempt any landings there. Now, all we know about 2010 is that there'll probably be a Bush or a Clinton in the White House, and that Crest has some kind of long-range plan for our teeth. The future sucks.

If you manage to make it to the actual list of toothpastes provided by the Crest people, you find twenty three different kinds of toothpastes. And they don't even have a Neutron Bomb paste like Colgate does. At the risk of sounding like a pissed off old guy, only ONE of these is, as far as I can tell, toothpaste. I have to guess, because it's named "Cavity Protection". That used to be the primary purpose of toothpaste, back in the day. Preventing cavities. Now, toothpaste is a magical form of urban renewal in your mouth. These toothpastes will remove any historic old brownstones you may have lingering in your gob, and replace them with Starbucks and condos.

Fourteen of the 23 pastes involve whitening, which is to your mouth what Rudy Giuliani was to Times Square. You can choose between Dual Action Whitening, Vivid White, and Extra Whitening, plus three different flavors of Whitening Expressions. such as "Extreme Herbal Mint", which I can only assume makes your mouth smell like potpourri... ON A SNOWBOARD! WOOOOOOO!

So, yeah, I may join the Cavity Creeps. They're the kind of direct-action leftists I can support. Plus, they've called for a flash mob demonstration at the left rear molar at 2 this afternoon, and those are always a blast. DOWN WITH THE MAX FRESH OPPRESSORS!

Den Fuurnihooars

Memo to the hundreds of people camped out in front of the new Ikea store yesterday morning: YOU FUCKING STUPID FUCKING FUCKS ARE FUCKING DUMB.

As a resident of Minneapolis, about a year or so ago I lived through the Krispy Kreme Onslaught. Minneapolis did, up until that point, not have any Krispy Kreme lardpuck shops. The donuts, which were just donuts, goddammit, had somehow accreted dozens of near-godlike qualities through word-of-mouth and mass delusion. Eating a Krispy Kreme donut was supposed to be akin to a mouthgasm, the kind of pleasure usually reserved for royalty. A dripping torus of pure heaven. And we were finally going to be able... no, we were going to be given the honor of being permitted the HONOR of buying them.

There were lines around the block. To be in possession of even a single Krispy Kreme donut gave you the ability to wage confectionary class warfare upon your friends and co-workers. Honest, caring Midwesterners wrestled with the "share or hoard" ethical dilemma. There may have been rioting in the streets.

Eventually, as more locations opened and boxes of the fucking things started clogging a rack at Target, we all came to our senses, realized they're just donuts, and moved on. Plus everyone jumped on board with Atkins, and as it turns out, KK donuts have WHEAT in them, so they became anathema. I hear Krispy Kreme is working on a low-carb donut now, but so far all they've managed is a bowl of hot fat with a layer of melted sugar on top, and it keeps melting the cheap plastic spoons.

You'd think we'd have learned our lesson, but nooooooooo. Now we've got an Ikea. Cheap, functional Scandinavian furniture. I have nothing against Ikea furniture. I'm not going to go all Fight Club on you, don't worry. But nearly 200 people CAMPED OUT OVERNIGHT so that they could be amongst the first to shop at the store Wednesday morning. And if an errant bulldozer had come careening through their ranks, killing them all, the average IQ in the Twin Cities metro would have jumped three points.

At least with the stupid fucking donuts, if you didn't have a KK shop in your area, you were out of luck. You had no other options, short of FedEx overnight, and all that nets you is a huge shipping bill and a box of day-old donuts. Furniture, on the other hand, deteriorates at a much slower rate.

If you live in the Twin Cities, and you wanted Ikea furniture before July 14, you could FUCKING WELL GET IT. Ikea does mail order, people. What kind of mentality, exactly, leads you to decide that sleeping overnight on pavement near the Mall of America is perfectly acceptable behavoir, yet going to a website and placing an order is TOO MUCH HASSLE? You people need help.

The first fucker was out there on Sunday night. SUNDAY NIGHT. There were actually six people there, but five of them won a contest and got a couple of grand worth of stuff to be there. I don't know if I'd swim in my own filth in Bloomington for four days for $2,000 worth of furniture, but you know what the sixth guy got? An eighty-buck armchair. That's 20 dollars a day. That's ninety five cents an HOUR. Toothless whores with only three limbs sell themselves for more than 95 cents an hour. Sweatshop workers in third-world countries are lining up to offer 30-year-old Carl Aasen career advice.

Aasen is Swedish for "asshole". And I believe, to use another Swedish phrase, that it's AKTUAAL KWOOUT TYM! ''I've never done a crazy thing in my life, and this is probably the last one."- Carl Aasen. So the guy decides to do ONE SINGLE CRAZY THING in his entire lifetime, and it's waiting four days in line for an eighty buck chair. You wild man. Either Carl is the dullest human being on the planet, or he's got a collection of mummified neighbor heads in his basement.

I just want every last one of the 2,000 people in line yesterday morning when the store opened, at least one of whom actually wept with joy according to news reports, that I hate you and I hate your shelves. Happy Belated Ikea Day!

Cloacas In Space

Memo to Universal: YOU ARE DUMB.

Could we please, please, put a bit of a brake on DVD packaging gimmicks? The whole point of DVD's is so that we can own copies of beloved movies and TV shows that we will never watch. And if we're not watching them, they need to be stored. And if they need to be stored, they need to fit on shelves. And if they need to fit on shelves, they should be shaped like BOXES.

But no. We've got Cylon heads, oversized tins, rubber Necronomiconi, etc. to contend with. They're saying the Invader Zim special edition box will look like Zim's house, which, while cool, ain't gonna fit nicely next to my normal, sedate clamshell of Power Rangers: The Movie. The new Star Trek: The Original Series box looks like Captain Kirk laid an egg. A big, yellow, rounded space egg. And if Kirk is laying space eggs, that means William Shatner has a cloaca, and on the big list of things I never wanted to imagine, William Shatner's cloaca stands at #2, right below Harry Knowles Jr. and right above Soul Plane 2.

But apparently, it wasn't enough for the entertainment industry to make us design custom glass display cabinets just to hold our objects d'art that coincidentally also hold between one and eight DVD's. Now the fucking displays have to be soundproof.

Here's the bad news. Universal's box set of "The Apprentice" is going to have a cover flap. Inside the cover flap will be a giant freaky picture of Donald Trump and his Shroedinger's Lenticular Hair Weave*. And when you open it far enough, you'll actually hear a voice chip of Donald Trump saying "YOU'RE FIRED".

Here's the good news. If you're dumb enough to be buying The Apprentice on DVD, you deserve a box that yells at you when you open it. In fact, I humbly offer my services to Universal, who are also producing the Sliders Season 1&2 DVD box set, FREE OF CHARGE. If you'd like the box to yell at anyone who buys Sliders on DVD, I can fill up whatever voice chip you pick.

But you know it won't be restricted to The Apprentice and (Seriously, get in touch with me, Universal. I've already written five alternate takes.) Sliders. Talking DVD boxes are like Pandora's Box, only without the free hope with every purchase. Eventually, they'll use it for something we want. Imagine if they used it for the Lord Of The Rings: Complete Extended Extended Trilogy Forty Disc Box Set? And every time you opened one of the gatefolds of the twenty pound, two acre monstrosity, you had to hear Gandalf reading the ring? There'd be a huge upsurge in the suicide rate, and at least three dozen accidental deaths by dehydration of uberfans spontaneously climaxing every time it happens.

And have they really tested this thing? Made sure it can't go off accidentally? I don't want to be walking through Target on the release date of the Catwoman DVD, only to find that every single unsold box is randomly playing a low-quality sample of Halle Berry doing her astonishingly poor Eartha Kitt impression. At least not without a flamethrower and a sympathetic judge lined up ahead of time.

You know what else is available in the digital versatile disc media format, and is therefore eligible for inclusion in a talking box with hilarious and disgusting comedy potential to be exploited by Internet sages such as myself? Pornographic content.

We must strangle this trend in its cradle, because if we don't, within a decade, there'll be a Star Trek V Super-Deluxe High-Definition Director's Edition, and it'll ship inside a replica of William Shatner's talking cloaca. And it'll all be Donald Trump's fault.

* The most fascinating thing about Donald Trump's hair is that, depending entirely on the angle of the lighting, it is either there on his forehead, or completely absent. His baldness rests, like the quantum states of particles, in the hands of the observer. In addition, when it is there, it looks like a dead cat.

The Hummer People

Memo to the fine people at Hummer: YOU ARE DUMB.

I am trying to figure out exactly how this works. I mean, you've already firmly established the Hummer H2 as a crime against humanity of the first order. We get that. And this is aside from the whole seven miles per gallon thing, which is an entirely separate obscenity.

Big, boxy, ugly, gratuitious, excessive, pointless. We know. American Assholery imbued into every weld. But it seems, somehow, that wasn't enough?

H2 owners are capital A assholes. It's a magical, 100% correlation. If you drive an H2, you're an asshole. If you don't like that, tough. That's how it works. You're a self-selecting set. You're drawn to the H2 through some sort of... if you'll pardon the unpleasant term... asshole pheromones.

If you KNOW someone who drives an H2, they're an asshole, and you have to accept that and stop making excuses for them. There is no explanation for owning a Hummer that does not also apply to some other vehicle. Some other vehicle that costs less or gets nine miles per gallon. When Plymouth Aztek owners are looking at you and thinking "Man, what an asshole", there's SOMETHING WRONG.

But this is all preaching to the choir. And worse, it's an old sermon we've all memorized. Hummers. Schwarzenegger. Assholes. Earth-rapers. It's so obviously evil that even the fine people at the Hummer corporation must have figured we were getting tired of the whole thing.

Maybe there's some kind of Big Scoreboard for these fuckers. Like on a secret website or something. A place where the Richard Perles and the guy who made the H2 and Ariel Sharon and Zell Miller and all these bastards can check in and see, in relative terms, how much they're ruining things for the rest of us. And the Hummer guy, whose name I can't be bothered to Google up beyond a half-assed attempt at "Hummer CEO", which gives me all the hits for a venture capital firm and none for the car company, so he will henceforth be referred to as Hummer Guy, and Hummer Guy checks the super-secret website, and finde that he's about to be overtaken by Donald Rumsfeld, and he calls the marketing department, and in some arcane, lost language of the damned, conveys certain instructions.

And as a result of these instructions, animators are hired, footage is filmed, a 30 second ad is produced, time for that ad is purchased on a cable station, possibly the Food Network, although my memory is hazy for reasons that will soon become apparent, and I watch the ad, because for the first 20 seconds of the ad, you don't know what it's an ad for, and in the last ten seconds, you find out it's for the Hummer H2, and that's when your skull explodes and your brain flies out of your shattered skull and it gets caught in the ceiling fan and it whirs around and around and around and that's why I'm not sure what channel the ad aired on.

Because the first 20 seconds of an ad is a game of Asteroids. Just a game of Asteroids. The beloved 80's game we all know and love and have bought in various and sundry updates and classics packs over the years. Or at least I have. So there's 20 seconds of an Asteroids game, and then this white outline of what I was shortly to learn was a Hummer H2 comes on the screen with the UFO sound effects, and the Asteroids ship tries to shoot the Hummer, and the bullets bounce off, and the Asteroids ship runs away from the Hummer, and then we see some footage of some asshole driving his asshole truck down some asshole road somewhere in beautiful, scenic, Asshole, AH.

All advertising sends a message. And this ad very obviously sent the message that BRYAN LAMBERT DOESN'T HATE HUMMERS ENOUGH. Well, mission accomplished. You know, they really are assholes.

Producers Of The Useless

Memo to Producers Of The Useless: YOU ARE DUMB.

For the most part, despite being a rabid, foaming leftist, I like the capitalism. But one of the consequences of capitalism is that assholes will use it to separate idiots from cash. For example, there are a whole lot of products and/or services out there that nobody needs. And I'm not talking infomercial bullshit, like the Eggstractor or the magic flipping pancake pan. I'm talking about huge mass-market stuff, put out there for the general DUMB public to jump on board with.

Like the Panera Card. The Panera Card is a service offered by Panera, which sells bread and bagels and sandwiches and soup. I spend a lot of time at Panera, actually, which is how I know about the Panera Card, because all the signs that aren't touting the low-carb qualities of its MEAT SALAD are pushing this card. The food's fine, but I have to defocus my eyes and not read anything if I don't want to get pissed off.

The Panera Card is a refillable debit card you can use at Panera to buy things. You put money into the card, take the card to Panera, and exchange the money you've put into the card for Panera food. I have spent months trying to figure out who, apart from Panera, this helps, and I just can't do it.

You can use it as a gift card, but that's not how they're marketing it. They're marketing it for personal use. Which makes no goddamn sense. And, I think, Panera realizes this. On their website, they say, "And other times, you want to treat yourself to the convenience of plastic currency that works just like cash."Treat? Since when is currency exchange a treat? I blame Atkins. In the post-South-Beach culinary apocalypse, the only "treats" left are raw bacon and moving money into less useful forms. This is what happens when you deprive yourselves of candy, people. When plastic currency starts seeming like a "treat" to you, it's time to eat a fucking muffin.

I could see the use of the Panera card, perhaps, if Panera were some extranational Communist state which only accepted, say, pennies and German bearer bonds in exchange for food, but they take all denominations of cash, they take checks, they take credit cards, they take debit cards... they take pretty much any form of tender short of barter. And I only assume that. I haven't actually tried bringing in a goat and a hand-woven blanket to see how many garlic bagels they'll get me.

Who falls for this? Who thinks it would be better to live a life where you find yourself stopping into Panera to put twenty bucks on your Panera card because you think you might be going to Panera tomorrow to eat? Or: "Hey, let's go to Panera!" "OK, but hold on. My Panera card's almost empty. Wait a sec while I use my dial-up connection, log on to their secure server, type in my credit card information, wait for my confirmation number and e-mail... OK, we can go!" It's just DUMB.

Another useless product that sent $54 million dollars flowing from the stupid to the assholes in just three days? "Van Helsing". This is yet another phenomenon I have a difficult time figuring out. We live in an age of hundreds of different cable channels. Internet. DVD rental and purchase. Computer and video games. We are not, by any stretch of the imagination, a MEDIA-POOR SOCIETY. But something like Van Helsing comes out, and we all react like we're on MASH or something. Like we've been cooped up in a tent in Korea for a month, and headquarters finally shipped us a new movie.

There is always something better to do than go see a shitty movie on opening weekend. I don't know how much plainer I can say it. This is true of everybody in our society. If you've got the six bucks to spend on a shitty movie on opening weekend, I don't care who you are, what you do, or what your life situation is, there's something better you could be doing with those two hours and those six bucks. And it's not like the people behind Van Helsing didn't go out of their way to point out to you at every opportunity that this was going to be a shitty movie. They did everything short of actually titling it "THAT SHITTY VAN HELSING MOVIE". But millions of you couldn't find something better to do with your two hours and your six bucks.

If you people pull this again when "Catwoman" comes out, I will have measures in place to track you, find you, and slap you upside your head. Remotely. From orbit. My satellite goes up at the end of June. You go see Catwoman on opening weekend, you better park yourself under a tinfoil awning for the rest of your life, because SMACKSTAR-1 will be waiting.

ClearPlay

Memo to Wal-Mart and ClearPlay: YOU ARE... eh.

See, this is exactly the type of thing that SHOULD send me into a spittle-flying, rage-filled polemic on the dullards and morons who infest society. But I just can't work up the anger. The whole thing is sad, yes. It's disappointing. But at the end of the day, it's like watching people walk the wrong way on the merry go round. You know they're not going anywhere. You know they're gonna end up getting a pole in the face. But they're only fucking themselves over, and they're idiots, so who gives a damn?

Here's your obligatory backgrounder: RCA has struck a deal with ClearPlay to incorporate technology into a new DVD player, to be sold for eighty bucks at Wal-Mart. The people at ClearPlay watch movies and create a set of instructions for the DVD player. The DVD player then mutes the audio every time someone swears, and skips ahead anytime there's nudity, violence, or sexual content.

Which is, admittedly, completely and utterly obscene. An affront to art. A crazed "solution" to the perceived threat of media filth. But you know what? If people really want to go to Wal-Mart, buy their ClearPlay player, and watch their fullscreen, butchered version of Lake Placid which, according to ClearPlay's own site, has had the "Blood and Gore" reduced from EXTREME to MILD, the viloence reduced from EXTREME to MINOR, the language, including Betty White calling people "cocksucker", reduced from EXTREME to NONE, and the sex reduced from, um... MILD to MILD... well, let 'em. I'm sure it'll be a big time-saver, as they watch the stirring tale of eight people who go to a lake, and the two people who leave the lake.

I mean, it's barely even worth poking fun at the ClearPlay site, which mostly deals with the software-only version that works with your computer's DVD-playing software. I can see where this would be a big move for ClearPlay, as there's a bit of discrepancy between the markets of "people with the technical savvy to watch DVD's on their computer" and "mouth-breathing reactionaries with their heads up their ass". The Wal-Mart deal is a MUCH better fit.

The fine people at ClearPlay do warn people that "due to the story nature of some movies, and because ClearPlay only uses legal methods to control the DVD decoding, you will notice some of the ClearPlay skips and mutes. However, most subscribers quickly become accustomed to them and find them much less interruptive than the language, nudity or graphic violence that has been removed.", which I'll admit, is one of the all-time great sentences ever featured on YAD. The claim that only some movies have story elements. The implication that if only there weren't pesky legal restrictions holding them back, they could do a much nicer job of filth removal. And the knowledge that frequent jump cuts, discontinuities, and missing chunks of story are much less troubling than a boobie to their target audience...

I could even mention the blatant hypocrisy coming out of ClearPlay, which states repeatedly that its service exists to deal with "PG-13 and R-rated content", yet manages to find objectionable things to edit out of such PG-rated kids' fare as the two Harry Potter movies, Big (was there "mild blood and gore" in Big?!), The Iron Giant, the Freaky Friday and Parent Trap remakes (the latter of which has had its blood and gore reduced from Minor to Mild), and E.T. (because apparently Spielberg didn't fuck his own movie up enough).

But you know, at the end of the day, this kind of technology is actually great. Because it allows these bluenose, uptight assholes with no clue about art or entertainment to further isolate themselves from the rest of society. And it allows them to do so in the privacy of their own homes. It'll be like there's an entire nation of people who only saw the TV edit of Blazing Saddles. Eventually, the cultural gap will grow wider and wider. In time, the people with these players won't even know that "Aliens" has killing or that "Shrek" has fart jokes. And then they'll try to interact with the society they've rejected, and they'll be like an Amish elder at MacWorld, confused and frightened by all the flashing lights.

I figure it'll only be a few years beyond that when they all become like John Travolta in the plastic bubble. They'll have isolated themselves from violence, sex, and profanity so much that they'll have no natural defense against it. And on that day, "fuck" will become a KILLING WORD.

And they probably won't even understand the concept of a killing word, because their DVD player skipped over that entire section of Dune. Hoist on their own retard.

Little Debbie

We will proceed with informing our loyal readership on the dangers of Little Debbie in a moment. But first, I would like to take a second to send a message out to all of you, everywhere, on the Internet.

As some of you may have heard, Jack Black (of Tenacious D and School of Rock fame) has been cast by Peter Jackson as the filmmaker in his King Kong remake. For those who have made the "...as the giant ape?" joke in news stories abouit the casting, ha ha, yes, very clever. For those who have made the "...as the giant ape?" joke on the Internet, be advised that you have been beaten to the punch by wire service hacks, and that your comedy services were not required. For those who are just hearing about the news, and may still be tempted to make the "...as the giant ape?" joke, please devote your time and effort to some other comedy cause, as this one actualy started OUT beaten into the ground, and has now lodged itself in the earth's core in record time. Thank you.

Now on to the insidious nature of Little Debbie. I don't know who this Debbie is, but she's been unleashing small-scale, individually-wrapped evil upon the world for decades. Some of us still remember the horror that is the Oatmeal Creme Pie, Debbie, and we will not surrender easily.

But now you've gone too far. Joe Lieberman can rail all day about video games poisoning the mind's of America's youth, but when will he launch the clarion call for the eradication of the Zebra Cake? This is, if you'll pardon me saying so, a simple black-and-white issue. The Zebra Cake must be stopped before our children turn on each other like rabid dogs.

You scoff, but have you seen the news out of North Carolina? Which, despite sneakily having "North" in its name, is just east of Tennessee, and we already know what lurks in Tennessee, don't we? Anyway, the demonic powers of the Zebra Cake have induced violence, stupidity, vapidity, and insanity amongst the small backwoods community of Greensboro, NC (pop 223891).

It all started innocently enough. But then, it always does. Eight-year-old Kevin Logan* started his happy, eight-year-old day with a Zebra Cake in his lunch and a song in his heart, and ended the day in the hospital, with his mother and principal somehow suffering brain damage.

On the bus ride to school, Logan was hungry, having declined to eat his French Toast Sticks at breakfast*. He pulled out his Zebra Cake, which immediately exerted its One Ring-esque power over his seatmate, a boy two years senior, who asked for some of the precious cake. When Kevin refused, he got a beak in the face for his troubles. A plastic beak* attached to a plush Tweety Bird* gripped in the hands of the older boy. The older boy was not named, so we will henceforth refer to him as Gollum.

Gollum, obviously seized by Debbie's evil madness, then attempted to blame the toy, claiming "That was Tweety Bird. It wasn't me."** Then Gollum opened the super-size snack pack of whoopass, slamming Kevin into the window *, shoving him on the floor *, and stomping on him *. The bus driver eventually stopped the bus *, broke up the fight *, and took Kevin to the hospital *, but not before taking a long, greedy look at the Zebra Cake, which seemed to be calling out to him with dark intent. ***

But the Zebra Cake's influence didn't stop there. Despite the damage done to her son, all his mother could think about was the boy's future relationship with Debbie, The Dark One: "He loves Zebra Cakes, so that's not going to stop him from eating them. And I'm not going to stop buying them just because of this. It's just a shame that it got to this point over something like that." **

Obviously, Debbie knew she had gone too far. Overplayed her hand. The time was not yet ripe for her to make her move. So she needed an authority figure to calm things down, a patsy to placate the community at large. Debbie thus infiltrated the mind of the school principal, Renee McKinnon, who first sent a letter to parents asking them to "reassure your child that a school campus is one of the safest places for children" **, and then amended her daily reminder to the students. "I hope that you made good choices today. If not, be sure to try much harder tomorrow. We expect you to be responsible for your work and behavior at all times. Today I ad-libbed a little and said, 'This includes the cafeteria, the halls and, especially, the buses,' " **

Obviously, evil mind control was at work here. Why else would a mother feel the need to defend a SNACK CAKE'S HONOR after her son got pummelled? Why else would a principal attempt to pass off a Zebra Cake induced head-stomping as a "bad choice"? Even for a state that close to Tennessee. No, Ockham's Razor is sharp, and it tells us that between the choices of two people being that incredibly dumb, or a snack cake utilizing dark forces of evil to control the minds of those around it, the evil thing is much more likely.

* ACTUAL DETAIL provided by news report.

** ACTUAL QUOTE provided by news report. 

*** OK, that one was all me.

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.