It's been a while since I've mentioned Lisa Wright, hasn't it? But she's STILL DUMB.

Precis for new readers - Lisa Wright is a morning DJ on a Minneapolis 80's radio station. The one I wake up to in the morning. Because Minneapolis Radio sucks, because news and classical don't wake me up, and because hideous beeping noises wake me up with so much excess hate and rage that I'd have to start a second website. LIsa Wright is also an idiot.

This morning, Lisa Wright was discussing Barbara Walters' most fascinating people of 2004. Of which there were ten, but only four were discussed on the radio - Oprah Winfrey, Donald Trump, Paris Hilton, and the super-secret #1 pick. Wright then proceeded to embarass herself more than usual. First, by making fun of Barbara Walters accent slash speech impediment, calling her "Baba Wawa". Which, as a comedy touchstone, is five years too old for an 80's RETRO STATION. Whatever hole she pulled that out of was covered with a thick stone block with warnings of a curse carved into it. I know you can't qualify as a morning DJ without the uncanny ability to fail at every single joke they attempt, but, BABA FUCKING WAWA?

Then she proceeded to make fun of Trump's new fiancee as a golddigger while simultaneously saying she'd do the same thing, proving once again that Lisa Wright is to feminism what strychnine is to cuisine. But then it was time to "reveal" Walters' already-revealed #1 pick, Karl Rove, and Wright was SHOCKED.

"I thought it would be Britney Spears, or Barry Bonds."* Yes, Lisa. How could the guy who masterminded the last two presidential elections be more fascinating than the woman who had "Toxic" written for her? Britney and Barry are both famous this year for one reason - sticking things in 'em that they shouldn't have. And despite Paris Hilton's inclusion on Walters' list, that does NOT in fact make someone "fascinating".

---

It's gotta suck to be Donald Rumsfeld right now. Publicly shamed and embarassed by a grunt at a photo op, and having to put a brave face on it for at least four days until everyone, including the media, forgets who Sgt. Thomas Wilson Is and the government can safely toss him into Gitmo and stick electrodes to his scrotum.

But until that sweet, sweet day comes, again, next Tuesday or Wednesday, Rumsfeld's gotta suck it up and say nice things about how "healthy" it is for the troops to question him about why they're digging through junkyards for scrap-metal armor. He's gotta smile and be nice and talk about improving the problems. He's gotta live with his weak-ass answer about "the Army we have" being replayed ad infinitum, and hope that a whole bunch of people don't make the connection that he's the one responsible for the condition of the Army we have. And whatever he does, he has to make sure he doesn't say anything that sounds like a vaguely ominous threat of reprisals. It's ALPHA QUEBEC TANGO!

"I don't know what the facts are, but somebody is certainly going to sit down with him and find out what he knows that they may not know." - Donald Rumsfeld, today. Oops. Reports that Rumsfeld found Wilson's lack of faith... disturbing were unconfirmed as of press time.

---

At the risk of sounding very 1998, America Online can continue to go fuck itself. Admittedly, they're not the blight on the Internet they were six, seven years ago, back when AOL was the major conduit for stupid fucks making it on to the Internet. Now you can barely exchange a packet over a network without it brushing up against some idiot's e-mailed Flash cartoon about a transvestite Republican penguin.

But running ads claiming to "make the Internet better"? Please. Animated emoticons do not make the Internet better. Taking all the porn out of it does not make the Internet better. Giving people anti-virus software doesn't make the Internet better. You'd think it might, but if it weren't for rampant viruses culling the herd by making their computers spontaneously combust, the net would have 30% more dipshits by weight than we do already. You don't take away a species' only natural predator without horrible environmental results.

On its home page, AOL has a link that people can click on. Clicking on this link runs software that checks the clicker's PC to tell this person if they have AOL installed ON THEIR OWN PC. Anyone who needs to be told this is not going to make the Internet better, no matter how many housewives stand on boardroom tables.

* All Lisa Wright quotes in You Are Dumb are, by necessity, rough approximations, as they are heard in the blurry, pre-morning haze and then written down 60-90 minutes later. The essential spirit is there, though. Those were the names.

Spastic Mucus Monkey Friday

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Topic Monkey Friday Is Adjusting Its Meds

Memo to Jay Leno: FIVE MORE WHAT?

It's like getting to the top of the rollercoaster, looking down that big first hill, and suddenly realizing there's a giant vat of rotting cheese at the bottom. I see the headline that Leno is stepping down at Tonight, to be replaced by Conan, and then I read that it won't be until 2009. And that's assuming we're not all dead of mercury poisoning, terrorist attacks, or space mutants by then.

Can someone please explain to me what Leno needs five more years to accomplish? Here, I'll help you with that. Please complete the following sentence.

"Man, I remember that one time, on the Tonight Show, when Jay Leno _________________________________"

You can't finish it, can you. Nobody can. The only reason he needs five more years before he can step down is that it's gonna take the archivists that long to compile a retrospective "greatest moments" reel longer than 45 seconds. Leno got the job in the first place because he was the safe, Nerf, middle-America guy who wouldn't traumatize the Carson-deprived with any of those fancy "ideas" or "concepts". And in the intervening dozen years, he's done that. Nothing more. Frequently less. All he's going to manage with five more years on the job is five more years on the job.

I hate Leno. From the standpoint of a connoisseur and occasional purveyor of Sweet Mother Comedy, he is everything that is wrong with everything ever. You just know that, if he hadn't gotten the Tonight Show gig, his career path would have included two failed sitcoms and a basic-cable talk show that would have siphoned away three of Dennis Miller's six viewers.

I feel bad for Conan. He'll get handed the reigns to what was once a vital cultural institution, at age 46, after seventeen years of being bleached and made flaccid by Captain Chin. It's like being a cast member on SNL the year after Anthony Michael Hall. Or being president after Dubya. It's like winning a classic car in a contest and finding that the delivery guy has stripped out the engine. Jay Leno, ruining things for the rest of us.

Speaking of ruining things for the rest of us, Jim Hertz, of Frankfort, Illinois, is nowhere near as famous as Jay Leno, yet he is just as deserving of our notice. Jim, whose first name was invariably spelled "Dick" throughout his school career, is a dumbass.

You see, Jim visited the local library over the summer with his wife, Jan. Based on subsequent events, I can only assume they stopped in because one of them needed to relieve their bladder, as people like Jim and Jan Hertz use books for table-propping and spider-killing, and you rack up hefty fines if you do that with library books.

While in the library, Hertz became incensed when he saw a poster of the Pledge of Allegiance on the wall. The poster lacked the words "under God", of which we have spoken at least twice before, and which have been the subject of much kerfluffle amongst the nations anticognoscenti. Furious that the gay liberal homosexual communist atheist agenda had infiltrated the heart of the Midwest, he called the library later to complain.

The incident should have stopped after the library informed Mr. Hertz that the poster was a historical item, one of several posters donated to the library by a railroad company. Before 1954. Back during the Dark Ages when "Under God" had never actually been IN the Pledge. Realizing that Michael Moore hadn't been in the library with a big eraser, Mr. Hertz accepted his mistake, went home, and nobody heard from him again.

As if. This is the problem with stupid people. When they're caught being wrong, it's never their fault for being wrong, it's YOUR fault for knowing something they don't. Hertz got all up in the Frankfort village library's grill about the lack of a note on the poster explaining to fucking imbeciles like him that the poster was old. He's fighting back, offering to replace the old, crappy, atheist, Satanic poster with a brand new spiffy Godariffic one from his Successories catalog, that has both "Under God" and a picture of a kitten on it.*

The library board, secretly laughing at Mr. Hertz behind his back, was willing to accept the donation, sell his new poster, and keep the proceeds, hopefully to buy some new history books, but that wasn't good enough. Lest you think I am making Hertz out to be a buffoon, I give you his own words in that wonderful tradition we have here, ACTUAL QUOTE TIME:

"I also pointed out to them that I found their copy of the pledge for sale for $5 on what I would call anti-Christian Web sites. We might put together a slate of candidates who will better reflect the wishes of the people of Frankfort. It seems to me they are not meeting the wishes of the people by not posting a corrected copy of the Pledge of Allegiance. In my opinion, the board is not taking this very seriously.

Yes, the board is surprisingy unresponsive to the only two fucking nutjobs who've ever complained about the poster. Those bastards! And as the proprietor of what I'm sure you would call an anti-Christian website, I take grave offense that we would offer "copies" of items as merchandise. We use only the finest CafePress sweatshop workers to provide our readers with the opportunity to never order any of our T-shirts. So there.

*Certain portions of this sentence deviate strictly from purest fact, but the essential spirit is there.

Another Pleasant Valley Spastic Topic Monkey Friday

Some of you may wonder about the nature of Spastic Topic Monkey Fridays. Why on many occasions, your humble author feels the need to dump a big load of half-formed concepts unworthy of full column stature on an audience that just wanted a little diversion, a little comedy. All I can tell you is, to paraphrase the late, lionized-despite-beating-and-torturing-women Rick James, "Caffeine's a hell of a drug." I have a sort of Ike-Tina relationship with caffeine, one in which caffeine and I alternately play both roles, and that frequently results in physiological payback by Friday morning. Welcome to my braindump.

Memo to the dudes in the back of the bus: DUMB. AND LUCKY. Lucky I wasn't feeling particularly Socially Darwinian yesterday afternoon. Because if I had, I might have decided to pass along the epic quantities of information you provided on your drug-buying and dealing activities to the authorities. Just to punish you for being so indiscreet about it. I don't care what you do. I'm borderline libertarian when it comes to drugs. But at least act like it's a LITTLE illegal. Loudly discussing where you live, how to contact you, what you can hook people up with, is just DUMB. And bumming an Oxycontin off the white-trash mother of two who very obviously had already taken a couple was just fuckin' tacky.

I love public transit, really I do. But I just want to ride home, play some Game Boy, and sit in peace. I do not need to spend half an hour listening to the Blue Collar Comics re-enactment of "Traffic". Thank you.

Memo to John O'Neill: DUMBASS. First, you say that John Kerry was never in Cambodia because you were never in Cambodia, which is specious reasoning to begin with. Then, confronted with a tape of you telling Nixon "I was in Cambodia", you supposedly address the contradiction. By explaining that when you said "in Cambodia", you actually meant NOT IN CAMBODIA. Brilliant! I suppose it would be a bit crass to suggest that this whole mess depends on what your definition of "in" is? It's a good thing you're not President. And a Democrat. Not to defend Clinton, but his definition of "sexual relations" is almost exactly the same degree of prevarication that "served with John Kerry" is.

Memo to Dubya: FUCKHEAD. "I understand how Sen. Kerry feels - I've been attacked by 527s too." Take your rattlesnake sympathy and shove it up your ass. Has anyone actually bothered to ask Bush which 527 ads attacking him contain demonstrably false statements? Here's a hint. Being called a shitty President doesn't count. They're not naming specific advertisements they object to for reasons that should be blatantly obvious even to people stoned off their ass on Oxycontin, be they bus riders or talk radio hosts. If Bush were any more transparent, he could strap on a set of clear plastic boobs and play Sue Storm in the Fantastic Four movie.

And on a related note, let me just bitch, briefly, one more time, about the fucking media. Given everything we know now, historically, about the behavior of poiticians, especially Presidents, how in the hell could it POSSIBLY seem like a good idea to start taking them at their word? With the possible exception of Carter, every single President from Kennedy on up has been shown to have been lying out of their asses for nearly their entire terms. Both parties. Just a constant stream of truth-shading, manipulation of selective facts, out-and-out falsehoods, hiding information... it hasn't changed. It's still going on. It'll still go on after November no matter who we pick. That is the reason you are there.

You do not exist so that I can find out what George W. Bush said at 2:42 p.m. instead of waiting until 6:30. You do not exist to sit between two lying assholes and point from one to the other. You are here because if there are hundreds and thousands of people poking at stuff trying to find out as best as they can what is actually going on, the people in charge have to WORK HARDER AT LYING TO US. You're like copy protection on software. You'll never stop the lying. You're just there to make us hunt for cracks and serials on porn-laden pop-up sites if we want to steal the software. And right now, you can't even be bothered to do THAT much, because you suck so incredibly hard. Adobe knows better than to just put a question at the beginning of the install asking "Did you buy this software? Yes/No?", and computers haven't been around nearly as long as lying politicians. What's YOUR fucking excuse?

"Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2" opens today. Authorities have set up elaborate haz-mat "safe zones" around area theaters to prevent vulnerable individuals from coming within 200 feet of the movies. Vulnerable individuals are defined as anyone who has read a book 50 pages or longer in the past two years, anybody who remembers that PBS is on Channel 2, and anybody who can count to eight without taking off their shoes. Anyone wishing to enter the movie's area effect can bypass security checks with proof of purchase of any "Larry The Cable Guy" DVD.

Comedy Death Blossom

This doesn't even qualify as a Spastic Topic Monkey Friday. It's been a solid week, comedy flowing like sweet sweet wine, but I'm tired and spent. So here's a bunch of crap that's crossed my mind in the last 24 hours.

- I saw Joan Rivers on Graham Norton last night. I've decided, now that Bob Hope has finally passed on that Joan Rivers is the celebrity who should just fucking die already, please. Useless protoplasmic cyborg bitchsack. All she's done for the past two decades is provide surgeons with boats. She's had so much work done that she now looks like the Spitting Image puppet of herself. Wayland Flowers keeps putting his hand up her ass by MISTAKE. Skynet learned to make Terminators from her fucking X-Rays.

- A commercial claims that Joel Siegel claims that nobody watching the Manchurian Candidate will be able to exhale during the last 30 minutes of the film. I assume that's some sort of compliment. The movie is so good it turns your lungs into Bags Of Holding. You can inhale all you want, but you can't exhale. It's like Hotel California with oxygen molecules replacing Don Henley. Normally, I would be 100% behind any circumstance in which Don Henley is replaced by free-floating molecules of oxygen, but come on. Better pray for immortality, Siegel, because Pauline Kael is waiting in the afterlife with a spiked club and a long memory.

- Your Compassionate Conservatism Moment: "Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy, or go on Prozac?" Bush campaign assistant Susan Sheybani. Sheybani made the comment while transferring a phone call from a reporter asking about poor-quality jobs. The bad news is, she didn't think the reporter could hear her, and he could. The GOOD news is, he works for USA Today, and they needed someone to replace Ann Coulter with anyway. Thank you. I've been here all week. Try the veal. Next week on Leno, Ben Affleck.

I mean, come ON. How many times does the veil need to slip off before we realize under the flimsy fabric of "compassionate conservativism" are a whole bunch of greedy assholes who've gotten theirs and only pretend to give a shit about other people because it's good P.R.? The Democrats care about people's suffering*. All they pretend is that they can do something about it. It's part of their broader plan of pretending, in general, that they can do something.

- "Revenge Of The Sith". Yay. Here's my prediction. Over the next however many months before Episode III comes out, I will occasionally mention to my geek friends, nerd aquaintances, and probably within earshot of creepy stinky guys in comic shops, that I will not be bothering to see Episode III. I base this decision on Episode I being shit and Episode II being shittier. Dungfests. Craporama. Even discounting Jar-Jar. Even discounting Jimmy Smits infamous-only-to-me-and-people-around-me-a-couple-of-years-ago crocheted neck doily. I ain't going. And every single one of those people are going to tell me "But you GOTTA."

Why? Am I somehow not going to hear what happens in it? Will I be bereft entirely of Star Wars, at least in non-toy, non-videogame, non-three-minute-not-sucking-animated-shorts, non-napkin, non-shitty-Kevin-J-Anderson-novel form? Why do I gotta? No, screw that. I know why I don't gotta. Why do YOU gotta? Look within, young retardawan. Find that within yourself which blinds you to history and reason. Find it, and stab it in the gut with your mechanical pencil and leave it bleeding in the gutter. And then we'll go see Serenity again. You'll be happier. I'll be happier. We can hear about how that whiny pudpuller gets his black suit on the Internet in three minutes if you're that desperate to know.

- Fuck "bounce". For the rest of the campaign, if you hear anyone using the word "bounce" in regards to the election or polling, they are to be considered a fuckhead and not worthy of your attention or trust. Especially if they're predicting a bounce. Especially especially if they're comparing actual bounce to their prediction. Especially especially ESPECIALLY if they're comparing actual bounce to someone ELSE's predictions. It's bad enough that we have reports of meaningless, barely accurate polls every single day. Now, suddenly, it's a story when the numbers in these meaningless, barely accurate polls do not match up with politically-motivated predictions pulled out of the major-party asses?

Does nobody in the media evaluate ANYTHING? It's not as if the motivations behind "bounce prediction" are even remotely opaque. Political parties low-balling their own or high-balling their opponent's expectations is just noise. Everybody knows this. Five-year-olds can figure this out. Yet, seemingly, nobody is actually willing to make the decision that yes, this whole thing is bullshit, and we have an obligation, as journalists, to NOT SPREAD BULLSHIT.

Oh, wait, I'm hearing from Fox News that, counter to Karl Rove's predictions, John Kerry was not immediately carried off into Heaven to replace God Almighty Himself on his throne following his acceptance speech last night. That has to be a major blow for the Kerry campaign. Coming up next, Bush and a puppy!

* OK, Lieberman doesn't. But he's an ass.

Spastic Topic Monkey Friday II: The Spastening

In a new "I, Robot" TV spot I saw yesterday, Will Smith says, in character: "Robots building other robots? That's just stupid." I think that sums up the movie in a nutshell right there. The one part of the script that's likely to make any sort of sense, and Our Hero thinks it's dumb. What does he think, that when we start making robots, they're going to be artisinally hand-crafted by the Amish?

I know some of you, reading this, are gonna go anyway. You can't help it. I'll have the same problem when Alien Vs. Predator comes out. It's going to suck, but it still attaches to some kind of geek receptor in my nervous system. But try to fight the urge anyway. This is Akiva Goldsman we're talking about here. This isn't Ordinary Summer Bad. This is the man that wrote "Lost In Space". Just let go.

When you think about it, "I, Robot" isn't really an adaptation of Asimov's classic stories. It's actually an adaptation of the 80's video game, "Berzerk". You've got a lone human running through hallways shooting at robots who are trying to kill him for two hours. It's a pity Brando died, frankly. He'd be perfect for Evil Otto. Stop the humanoid. Stop the intruder.

I'm not even going to get into the whole Whoopi Goldberg, "Hollywood Hatefest" thing. It's only mid-July. There's going to be almost four full months more of this bullshit before we get to vote, anyway. I gotta pace myself. If I blew an arterial gasket every single time the right went on one of its hypocritical tirades at the left for being a smidge harsh, I'd be forced to drink Fix-A-Flat every morning instead of Vanilla Coke.

I do think it's a pity that a comedy pioneer like Whoopi gets slammed just because she happened to be the first person in the country to finally realize a possible sexual connotation to Bush's last name. I just hope nobody finds a way to "crude up" the name of our beloved vice president, Mr. Richard Cheney.

OK, maybe I'll get into it a little. Whoopi Goldberg making Bush jokes and John Cougar Mellencamp calling the President a "cheap thug" is not a HATEFEST. You know how I know this? Because I've been presiding over a fucking hatefest myself since the start of this year, I've never used the words "cheap thug", and I only made the obvious Bush joke once. And it was filler. But "Hollywood Mild Attack Of Sporadic Grumpiness" doesn't roll trippingly off the tongues of your Fox News anchors, so I guess all us real hatefests have to deal with a wimpy, half-assed poseur who just crashed our annual convention.

And the next day, Dennis Miller, whose resume for the past three years has at least eight different entries for "redefining pathetic", spoke at a Bush fundraiser, said Kerry and Edwards should "get a room", and called James Carville a "Satanic Chihuahua".

I'm actually not particularly concerned with the controversy. I'm just enjoying Miller's slide into oblivion. You look at his material now, and it's almost impossible not to imagine his writing process. I picture a dark hotel room, a bottle of vodka, a thick stack of Bushie talking points, and a laptop. And on the laptop there's two windows open. One to Google, and one to an elaborate Excel spreadsheet that tells him the last time he made a "Beverly Hillbillies" reference.

Gulp of vodka. Talking point: Flipflopper. Hm. Did Buddy Ebsen ever flipflop? What else flips? What else flops? Gulp of vodka. Google "flop". Flophouse. Megaflops. Those sandal things. Gulp of vodka. Stare out window. Remember being funny on Weekend Update. Stare at joke in progress. "This guy..." Need a verb. What was that talking point again? "This guy flipflops... " I'm supposed to say he does this a lot, right? Vodka. "This guy flipflops more than..." OK, cultural reference time. You can still do it, cha-cha. You've sold books. You've done movies. You were in "Bordello of Blood", for fuck's sake, so you can damn well think of something he flipflops more than.

Shit. Nothing. Back up. What about a Match Game thing? "This guy flipflops so much that..." and then the audience yells "HOW MUCH DOES HE FLIPFLOP!". Wonder if I can count on that. We'll be in Wisconsin. More vodka. Screw the audience. I don't need an audience for my CNBC show, dammit. "This guy flipflops so much he needs..." what's that thing? That thing in the car? Google it. A GPS navigation system! That's hip new technology. I'll seem cutting edge. "This guy flipflops so much he needs a GPS navigation system to know which way he's gonna vote." There you go. You still got it, man. You still got it.

Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.

Spastic Topic Monkey Friday

"White Chicks" opens today.

I like to think that I don't have to say anything. After all, last week, people actually chose the vastly superior "Dodgeball" over the latest Tom Hanks / Spielberg piece of manipulative bullshit, "The Terminal". It is as if, perhaps, in some small way, you all are learning.

So, ideally, this would mean that I shouldn't need to say "don't go see 'White Chicks'". In much the same way that I shouldn't need to say "don't stick your genitals in an industrial press". It should be self evident. But since its only competition is a controversial documentary and Yet Another Titanicy English Patienty Flashback Love Story, aka 'The Notebook', odds are many Americans will start looking at the industrial press with a bit of a seductive gleam in the country's collective eye.

I mean, I suppose people could go see "Fahrenheit 9/11", but hell, we can just follow everyone else's lead for the past two weeks and spout off opinion about it without actually seeing it. Saves us eight bucks and two hours, and we'll be just as well informed as anyone else is.

And now, if you don't mind, I'd like to take a brief leave of my senses and come to the defense of Dick Cheney. Dick Cheney told Patrick Leahy to either "go fuck yourself" or "fuck you" or "fuck off" yesterday. This has caused a bit of an uproar, because it was on the Senate floor, and because if there's one name that's synonymous with decorum and integrity, it's DICK CHENEY.

Please. If this is the thing Cheney gets in trouble over, you're all completely bugfuck. I mean, I'll take it, because in politics, if an insane ref decides to fuck over the other team, you don't argue. But I won't be happy about it. As the world-renowned T-shirt says, f-bombs don't kill children. Cheney's been fucking up, and fucking over, all of you for the past three years, so if you're only going to get upset when he actually utters the verb, you fuckin' deserve him.

Politics needs more swearing, more yelling. Not less. You know why? Because the vaunted "level of discourse" is a big lie. Most of these people on opposite sides of the aisle do not like each other, and do not like what each other stand for. Most of the people on both sides of the aisle are there because they like the money and the power. And they know they gotta look good to stay where the money and the power is. So whenever they want to swear or yell or slap Zell Miller upside his fucking HEAD, they instead repress.

Look at Al Gore. Back when he was worried about getting into and staying in power, Gore was Captain Repression. Wound tighter than Ann Coulter's biological clock. Didn't dare say "boo" for fear of pissing off some constituency or another. And look at him now. Yellin' and screamin' and hootin' and hollerin' and smackin' people upside their FUCKING HEADS. I guarantee you, 95% of those of us that voted for Nader in 2000, even the ones (like Humble Author) who did so 'cause theywere safely in a blue state, would have voted for the real Al Gore. Instead, we got some bland robot fucker who kept the tone civil and lost the war.

Repression always comes back to bite you on the ass. Or comes back and asks you to bite a stranger on the ass while it watches. Just ask Jack Ryan. Midwestern, Republican, Illinois Senator Jack Ryan. Married to Jeri "Trek Virgin Masturbatory Fantasy Of Nine" Ryan until about four years ago. Up for re-election. Divorce papers released. Turns out Midwestern Repressed Republican liked taking his Borg Princess out to sex clubs and tried to get her to do things with strangers that'd make Kirk blush all the way down to his cloaca. OOPS. The then Mrs. Ryan refused, but then went on to have sex with Brannon Braga, so it obviously couldn't have been on the grounds of tastefulness and decorum.

So, what have we learned? A little swearing every once in a while is good for the soul, and the re-election campaign. At least, I hope so, because if that's true, this website should propel me into Global Dictator for Life status by 20-fuckety-12.