Oldnerd On Instagram

It wouldn't work at all for YAD, and it’s deeply suboptimal even for Oldnerd, but in the post-Twitter social media hellscape, Instagram is the most viable home for the promotion/following of the other blog, Oldnerd. 

You’ll notice new links on the left to the Mastodon (ugh) and Post (double ugh) accounts for this site, and also a link to Oldnerd, which then has a link to the Instagram account where I’ll be promoting new stuff that goes up there. Us it if you find it helpful.

It’s amazing to me that in every single way except the ethics of using it, every single social media alternative to Twitter is somehow worse than Twitter.

The Fifty Hates

And so, 2004 and the first year of YAD comes to a close. Two hundred and thirty six columns. Even knowing how many days there are in a year, two hundred and thirty six seems like a lot. Yet my work has just begun.

Many moons ago, I had the idea of the Map Of The Fifty Hates, a US map showing just where my wrath has fallen. So, to celebrate YAD's first year, I went ahead and took a whack at it. I make no assertions as to its absolute accuracy, my methods were both painstaking and crude. But they'll give you a pretty good idea. I was harshest on my home state, but, you know. I live here. I have to deal with its stupidity first-hand. Plus, our governor is a fuckhead, and so is at least one of our senators.

So here you are, the annotated Map of the Fifty Hates.

ALABAMA: Homophobia, racism
ARKANSAS: Homophobia
CALIFORNIA*: Dihydrogen Monoxide hoax, Schwarzenegger, terror-panicked LA mayor, erototoxins
COLORADO: Rabid pro-life Catholics, BULLDOZER RAMPAGE!, Creationist tour guide
FLORIDA: Low-carb potato, Creationist dinosaur park
GEORGIA: Creationists (2), banning genital piercings, Zell Miller
ILLINOIS: Senator Jack Ryan, Alan Keyes (4), Pledge of Allegiance poster, another politician, crossdressing kiddies
IOWA: Used as punchline once, taco hurler
KENTUCKY: Burning ice cream, Jim Bunning Senate race (3)
LOUISIANA: PIGFUCKING! Also, the Magical Bathroom Cross
MARYLAND: Suing Wal-Mart over Evanescence
MICHIGAN: Stupid article about "Friends", "four more years", undecided voter
MINNESOTA: Taxpayer's League, Ten Commandments, Mark Dayton, Rich Stanek, Tim Pawlenty (2), the Star-Tribune Variety section, the State Fair, the Homer Hankie, Mark Kennedy, Norm Coleman, Mankato bumper stickers, guy in line, chick in line, guy in line, Paul Douglas, Ushers of the Eucharist, gas protests, asshole who wrote a letter (2), smoking bans, IKEA, and Lisa Wright (2). And probably about a dozen more
MISSOURI: Rep. Tom Akin on "Under God"
NEW HAMPSHIRE: Asshole pro-life pharmacist
NEW JERSEY: "Four more years"
NEW MEXICO: Zero tolerance school
NEW YORK: Post VP fuckup, RNC protests, iPod-related wankery (2)
NORTH CAROLINA: Zebra Cake violence
OKLAHOMA: James Inhofe
PENNSYLVANIA: Gas protests, Groundhog Day, crazy Easter play, Intelligent design
TENNESSEE: Janet Jackson lawsuit, gay-banning, Ten Commandments tour, Arab-fear (2), eugenics-loving politician, Scopes Monkey Trial
TEXAS: Nudist barge, french fries, Jap Road, Dazed And Confused trial, Heloise, cross-dressing kids
UTAH: MORMONS!
WEST VIRGINIA: Gas protests
WISCONSIN: Creationists
WYOMING: Kevin Carr's movie reviews, Alan Simpson

There you have it. Twenty seven down, twenty three to go. Thanks to everyone who's stuck with me, whether it be from Day One, or from last week. You all share the common bonds of boredom and a love of free Net content. Never forget that. And I'll leave you with one last bit of wisdom as we head into 2005.

IT'S NOT A BLOG, FUCKERS! IT'S A COLUMN!

*Not including the entertainment industry. I'd need a bigger map, and it wouldn't be done until fucking March.

The Great Pre-Election Cop-Out

It's November 1. It's the day before the fucking election. So what better time is there than now to take a step back from all the bullshit and run a space-filling, administrative, State Of The Column column for today? None better time indeed. There's even a bit of irate comedy content at the end, just as a payoff.

Ten months of DUMB, which seems to me like a lot. Coming up on an entire YEAR of Dumb. 200+ regular readers. A thousand-plus unique visitors a month. Which puts me roughly on par with hundreds of thousands of other tiny, tiny websites. But well above where I was nine months ago, so I ain't gonna complain.

The forum is four months old, and I've only had to nuke one person from orbit, which is roughly one thousandth of the number I feared. Hooray for the Internet!

Anyway, the big thing that'll be happening for the next couple of months, on the forum, which as always can be gotten to from the upper left of the page, is the You Are Dumb Blank Of The Year Awards.

I've covered a lot of ground over the course of 2004, from politics to entertainment to politics to culture to politics to religion to politics to pigfucking to politics to political pigfuckery. And it's time to cull them down to a mighty four, the creme de la cretin, the peak of my pique, the dumbest of the dumb. It's like the Razzies, only, you know. Both smaller in scale and wider in scope.

Open nominations begin today in the Forum, and will continue through December 15, at which point I'll pick the five final nominees and put it up for a vote, again, in the Forum. Then, once 2005 hits, the winners will get announced, revisited, and mocked anew for all to see. There are four awards to be given out, each following the somewhat obvious format of "BLANK of the Year".

THE YOU ARE DUMB MAN OF THE YEAR: I expect this to be a pretty hotly contested category, because of the incredible number of high-profile choices available. To be eligible for this award, the individual in question must have (a) a penis, no matter how tiny, shriveled, or non-functional; (b) appeared in the column this year, and (c) been either the main subject of a full column, or the main subject of part of a multi-subject column.

THE YOU ARE DUMB WOMAN OF THE YEAR: Some may think it sexist to not have a simple Person Of The Year, and, in fact, it is. But it's sexist toward men, who, at least this year, are in a fucking league of their own when it comes to retarded behavior. I want to make sure a stupid woman gets her due as well, so we have a separate category. Other than gender, the same rules apply.

THE YOU ARE DUMB PLACE OF THE YEAR: The YAD Place of the Year must be an actual, physical, geographical location. It must have appeared in the column at some point this year. And something dumb must have happened there. "The Earth" is ineligible for obvious reasons, but beyond that, any place, large or small, you think deserves to be the Dumbest Place of the Year for 2004.

THE YOU ARE DUMB EVENT OF THE YEAR: Again, this event must have been referenced in some way in the column this year. I'm not sure how to define this more precisely, so just suggest stuff and if it's the completely wrong idea, I'll let you know.

That's it. If you've ever felt the desire to get involved in the course of the column in a tiny, infinitesimal way that is still larger than the chance pretty much anybody has gotten ever, head over to the Forum and get cracking. You'll need to create a Forum account to do it, but that's not a big deal.

The dumbest man, woman, place, and event of the year. You won't find that particular combination anywhere except You Are Dumb Dot Net. And if you do, the bastards ripped me off. Or I ripped them off. It's a great, great mystery.

The fucking election is tomorrow. No matter how it goes down, it'll suck. But if we must spend the two and a half months between the election and the inauguration in a crap-maelstrom of epic proportions, we might as well fling a little poop around ourselves. And now, as promised, it's ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"FOX 9 is going to have unbelievable coverage." - Monring DJ, perennial idiot, and potential WOTY nominee Lisa Wright, describing local TV's impending election coverage in terms she thought were flattering, but may turn out to be strangely prescient.

"For his part, the ever-smiling Edwards has turned up the rhetorical heat, focusing on the 377 tons of high-grade explosives that Democrats say went missing in Iraq on President Bush's watch." (emphasis mine) - Reporters from the incredibly liberal LA Times, reporting from Duluth, MN, as carried in the incredibly liberal Minneapolis Star-Tribune, making it sound like the fact that the explosives are gone is just part of the charge and countercharge of this messy political season. GO TEAM LIBERAL MEDIA!

Don't Fear Change

Memo to the world: I LOVE YOU.

There is no hate in my heart today. Only joy. The kind of pure, effervescent joy that can only come from slamming fools into bridge pillars like they were Princess Di. I speak, of course, of Burnout 3, the holiest of holy driving games, a game so good that it makes me love everyone.

I love Dick Cheney. Thank you, Dick Cheney, for putting the lives of everyday Americans ahead of partisan politics. They may say the Bush administration didn't do enough to prevent 9/11, but they've learned from their mistakes. When Dick Cheney had concrete evidence that electing John Kerry would cause a devastating terrorist attack on America, they didn't sit on it. They ACTED. Cheney interrupted his own campaign speech to warn the American public that if they voted for Kerry, we would all die horribly at the hands of Muslim extremists who hate our freedom. You cannot help but love such an act of purest altruism.

I love George W. Bush, whose charming malapropisms and cottonmouth obviously belie a competence so understated as to be almost indistinguishable from random chance and background noise. Why, just the other day, in Missouri, he told a crowd of friendly, loyal Midwesterners that "Too many good docs are getting out of business. Too many O-B-G-Y-N's aren't able to practice their, their love with women all across this country." Thank you, Dubya, friend to horny gynecologists everywhere. You're just like a regular guy. Plus, if I vote for you, I won't die in a terrorist attack ever again.

This is so much nicer, isn't it? Maybe I should see if "youaredumbbutthatsok.net" is taken. Without that extra bit of reassurance, really, the site seems awfully harsh and judgmental for the newfound joyheart beating in my lovechest.

I even love Bob Ferdinand, of Fridley. He wrote an insightful letter to the local newspaper about how global warming can't possibly be real because it was a lot cooler in his backyard this summer. Oh, sure, others have made that point beforehand, usually in jest, but Frigid Fridley Bob was deadly serious. He even used numbers (74% below average days!), so you know he must be a real scientist. I think it's great that scientists have stopped publishing the results of their climate studies in stuffy old scientific journals and put them in the editorial pages of newspapers. I can only hope that one day, there will be a scientist who learns to draw, and then he can teach us all about science right next to "Ziggy" and "Love Is". After all, the editorial page is still a bit hoity-toity, what with it being near all those long, boring stories at the back of the main section of the paper.

I love George Lucas. He's a brilliant writer and an epic filmmaker whose best moments, ironically, are in the small scenes, like when C-3PO got his head stuck on a Battle Droid's body, or when Anakin Skywalker compared Queen Amidala's skin to sand. His only real flaw is that he is, like all great artists, a perfectionist. I think it's great that he's changed the Special Editions even MORE for the DVD release of the Star Wars trilogy, with a new Jabba, a new voice for the Emperor, and putting dreamy Hayden Christenson's ghost where that lumpy Sebastian Shaw guy was in "Jedi". I mean, if I could go back and change my eighth-grade history papers and get them regraded and then bought by millions of devoted Bryan Lambert's Eighth Grade History Paper fans, you know I would.

Actually, that's a great idea! The Web is impermanent! It's all-digital! It can be seamlessly changed. I will follow the example of my new hero George Lucas and create You Are Dumb: Special Edition. Reflecting the newfound joy and love in my heart, I'll go back and "digitally remaster" all my old columns! Zell Miller's not that bad a guy! It's not pigfucking, it's piglovemaking! Ninjas and Mormons CAN get along in peace and harmony! People aren't dumb and wrong, they're just... misguided! Differently-thinking!

Plus, now that I'm a more experienced web-columnist, I can go back and add technological innovations I didn't have available to me back in February, like Flash animations! Multi-colored text! Blink tags! You'll be able to experience You Are Dumb Dot Net all over again, for the first time! Only nicer! And friendlier! And full.... of.... love.........

Why are you all looking at me like that?

With Six You Get Forum

Welcome to the six-month anniversary of You Are Dumb Dot Net.

I know I made a reasonably big deal about the four-month, which was probably unnecessary, but this is two months more than that. Six whole months of swearing at dumbasses. I am truly living the dream.

In June, there were nearly 1,000 unique visitors to YAD, which is a pretty significant milestone. Of course, I read in City Pages that this family man in town who spent three years impersonating a 20-ish lesbian on a blog was getting 5,000 unique visitors a day. It's a good idea, but I don't think I could start impersonating a lesbian now after six months of talking about how much I hate Bush.* So I'll have to settle for my tiny empire.

To celebrate the six-month anniversary of the site, I am going to do what any reasonable web columnist would do under the circumstances. Violate deeply held personal tenets and embark on what may be an astonishingly bad idea. Allow me to presentWe Are Not Dumb, the official YAD message board.

Other than a hyperlink back and forth, those who just want to read the column should be able to remain blissfully unaware of the existence of WAND. Whereas those of you for whom the phrase "online community building" does not instantly incite peals of laughter can come on over and join the "party".

The forum uses Beehive, which is an open-source version of the Delphi interface. It has two vitally important features - first, it keeps track of what you've already read, and second, it allows for draconian, sadistic moderation. This is important, because there are a lot of idiots on the Internet. I don't expect many of them to necessarily read the column and show up in the forum, but at the end of the day, you either crush people like bugs or you end up with a Harry Knowles "talkback" nightmare of epic proportions. Beehive's great at the crushing.

Note that Beehive is currently at version 0.4, and is worked on in people's free time. So it may have, or develop, "issues". It seems to work smoothly, but they always seem to work smoothly at first, don't they.

So why bother? Well, first, it gives me a way to interact with the devoted, motivated, and/or deeply disturbed fraction of the readership without subjecting the rest of you to, well, columns like this one, frankly. This way, you can get an uninterrupted flow of me bitching about fucks like Zell Miller, who, by the way, is one of the big speakers at this year's Republican National Convention. I am so throwing a party the day he retires. And the day he kicks off.

Plus, as I mentioned above, it may be an astonishingly bad idea. There's a reason YAD isn't a blog. Audience participation leads to community. Community leads to fans. Fans lead to fanchildren**. Fanchildren lead to suffering. On the other hand, I've lost count of the sheer number of ostonishingly bad ideas that have worked out pretty well over the years. Like "Hey, maybe I'll start a website about friggin' IDIOTS."

Not to mention, with Livejournal apparently crashing more often than Bill Janklow on a three-day Twinkie bender these days, I figure a significant portion of the audience is bored out of their ever-loving skulls.

So hit the forum and join in if that's your thing. If it's not, tomorrow, I'll be making fun of Mormons. Fried comedy gold, now with black backpacks.

* That's the kind of quality lame filthy humor that keeps people coming back, that is.

** Note the gender-neutral terminology. I haven't even started the forum yet, and already I'm becoming inclusive.

Four Months And Counting

So, we're four months into the grand experiment that is You Are Dumb Dot Net, and I've got to say, I'm pretty happy with it. Fifty three articles, a pretty wide array of topics, some new words coined, some obscure ones pulled out of mothballs, one defenestration chart, and a nifty T-Shirt that I'm the only owner of.

So, in honor of four solid months of insulting idiocy, and because it seems like this won't be the IMMEDIATE victim of my hyperattenuated, teen-of-the-80's, video game generation mayfly attention span, I am declaring May 1 to be the official Tell Someone About You Are Dumb Day.

It's easy to celebrate. Tomorrow, tell someone about You Are Dumb. Ideally, this someone will be someone who did not previously know about You Are Dumb. Ideally, this would be someone who would appreciate You Are Dumb. I mean, you COULD shoot an e-mail to Pat Robertson or David Strom, but they probably wouldn't visit.

And since this column will sit for the whole weekend while the people you tell stop by, I'll throw up some quick links to some of my personal favorite days for them to visit when they get here: Johnny Hart, Atkins, Super Bowl Ad Whores, Terri Carlin, Surprised People, Day 1 of the first and only THEME WEEK, Entirely Hypothetical People, The Cloud, The South, Altovis, and A Change Of Pace. You may notice some formatting issues with the Index and shorter articles; this is actually something we're working on.

And lest you think this is merely a cheap device to pimp the site and increase readership and get out of writing a Friday column, allow me to prove you wrong. Nothing is MERELY a cheap device at YAD. It's always a cheap device AND something more. So here's your something more.

Memo to Vincent Pastore: YOU ARE DUMB.

And you're a boor. A big, beefy boor. Fuck you, and fuck your agent, and fuck the producers of Iron Chef America for picking you as a judge, when you don't even have the cojones to eat a little raw fish.

You're on IRON CHEF, goddammit. Even if it is a slightly neutered American version. Even if Bobby Flay gets to be an Iron Chef. The whole point of the show is to create new and exciting dishes. You're being served a five course meal by a master chef on national television. Try to act like it. You are an actor, right? The Sopranos has won awards and stuff. So at least act like you want to be there.

You got shown up by PAIGE FUCKING DAVIS, for crissakes. There are primordial things clinging to the undersides of rocks that think Paige Davis is stupid and annoying, and you made her look like Julia Child had died and possessed her. If I were the Chairman, I'd have taken you around back after the show and direct-to-video-kickboxed the shit out of you. *

Let's hope the Iron Chef America producers have learned their lesson, and if it becomes a series, screen their judges better. What's next, Paul McCartney judging "Live Cow Slaughter Battle"? Maybe you could get three Christian Scientists on the panel for "Battle Bread Mold". Get Prince up there to help you judge your big holiday special. That sounds like a plan.

Or just, you know, make sure the celebrities you get to give your show some Hollywood cache know that they may have to eat organs they've never heard of out of animals they've never heard of prepared in ways they've never heard of, and if they have a problem with that, they can stay the fuck home.

* Notice - three full paragraphs on Vincent Pastore without making a single "Big Pussy" joke. This, for new readers, is part and parcel of the ever-changing, poorly defined You Are Dumb Dot Net Pledge Of Quality.

Stuff I've Said Was Done Before

Some updates today on past DUMB entries, to show that they're STILL DUMB.

"It's putting us into new places in the stores. We're now showing up in the better-for-you section." - Mark Singleton, Sales VP, Rudolph Foods. Rudolph Foods makes PORK RINDS. Rudolph Foods has seen their sales jump 22% since they proudly proclaimed "Zero Carbs!" on their bags of PORK RINDS. Deep-fried pig skin is now health food. I hope you're all happy.

""I've never seen nothing like this." - Rhea County Attorney Gary Fritts, describing the uproar over the quickly-overturned plan by Rhea County commissioners to try to charge homosexuals with crimes against nature. It's nice to know that the guy they turned to for a legal opinion on kicking gays out of the county has such a fine grasp of the English language.

"The vote came at the opening of the third round of a constitutional convention on the contentious issue, as competing cries of 'Jesus Christ' and 'Equal Rights' shook the Statehouse outside the legislative chamber." - From a wire service article about the Massachussetts legislature approving a gay-marriage ban. I can't think of a better, more compelling image encapsulating everything I wrote about gay marriage last month, and everything I wrote about political discourse a few days ago, than two crowds of people shouting that at each other.

Something I did not know at the time: Altovis, which is to Google searchers as chum is to sharks, is made by the same company that makes Enzyte, the magical dick-lengthening herbal pill with the smiling racist retard for a mascot. I don't know if I'm happy that only ONE company is that evil, or concerned that one company is THAT EVIL. But I bet we'll be hearing from them again.

"The vindictive Clarke has now had his revenge, but what kind of hell has he, his CBS publisher, and his ax-to-grind advocates unleashed? It's obvious to me that this country is rapidly dividing itself into two camps -- the wimps and the warriors. The ones who want to argue and assess and appease, and the ones who want to carry this fight to our enemies and kill them before they kill us." - Which right-wing nutjob said this? Yes, it's DEMOCRAT ZELL MILLER, who went on the Senate floor and actually claimed that the work of the 9/11 commission would "energize our enemies and demoralize our troops". You know, Zell, when you start to make Ann Coulter look like a moderate, maybe it's time to retire, rethink, and refill your meds.

Oh, and the AP gave the news story on Miller's speech the headline "Senator worries about 9/11 dispute", which is kind of like writing a story in which four hundred people are simultaneously decapitated the headline of "Incident at train station causes boo-boos for many."

And while we're on the subject of Zell Miller, who, as you may recall, was originally inducted for railing against that "rap crap" (every time I have to type that, it hurts), I'd hate to leave you with the impression that he's the only old white conservative with a tendency to overreact when it comes to hip-hop. Case in point, World Net Daily's Joseph Farah.

In fact, let's turn it into a game.What hardcore, ultraviolent gangsa rapper or group appeared at a Democratic fundraiser, prompting this response from Farah? "Many parents across America are struggling to figure out ways to protect their children from the effects of a corrosive and pervasive pop culture that promotes death, drugs, violence and sex. Apparently the Democratic Party is not concerned with any of that. It is more concerned with courting the votes and support of mindless, programmed, amoral automatons who look up to performers like...

The answer is... OUTKAST. If you know why that's funny, then you're laughing your ass off right now, and if you don't know why that's funny, just trust that it is and I'll explain it to you later, Dad.

Finally: tomorrow is April Fools Day. That means that the 1% of the Internet that was not lying to you already is GOING TO LIE TO YOU. Except here. We at You Are Dumb Dot Net do not truck with April Fools Day, as it implies that there are no fools the other three hundred and sixty five days of the year. And we know that's not true, don't we.

Aging

Today's my birthday. Thirty-five. Officially out of the desirable demographic. Madison Avenue no longer cares what I think. But that's OK. They're dumb.

I'm taking the day off, but don't say I never gave you nothin'. The cloud from last Friday has gotten an upgrade and a name. You can even click for a bigger version you can use as wallpaper, or print out, or even print out and hang in a public place in your city if you're so inclined.