Nostalgia, 2024 Edition

 Not trying specifically to be shitty, but Jon Stewart returning to The Daily Show, and the joy with which the announcement was received, feels to me like a very reactionary sort of center-left nostalgia for the “halcyon” days of the pre-Trump 2010’s when we could still pretend one political party in America wasn’t engaged in an all-out war against every single marginalized group in the country.

I mean, maybe he’s learned his lesson and no longer thinks that if both reasonable sides just turned down the rhetoric, talked things through, and found common ground we’d reach Utopia? But the Jon Stewart Daily Show was emblematic of a particular mindset that utterly failed to see how bad things were getting until it was far too late. Going back to that is comfort food for those of us who live in the back half of the First They Came For quote.

By The Powell Of Emptyskull

Memo to Michael Powell: YOU ARE STILL DUMB.

It's Wednesday, and you know what that means! It's NEW WORD... wait. No it's not. It's just your regularly scheduled rant about our government being run by a bunch of nimrod prudes with Doric columns where their large intestines should be. Nevermind.

Yes, we're talking about the FCC, bastion of decency, protector of our nations airwaves, and the second-largest concentration of tittyhaters in America. Whether it's Janet Jackson's boob, Nicolette Sheridan's asscrack, and Saving Private Ryan's F-bombs, the FCC, under Michael Powell's not-nepotistic-at-all leadership, has been, first and foremost, a responsive agency, acting only when they receive complaints from a significant portion of the population.

Of course, "significant portion" means something a little bit different to Powell and the Bush administration than it might to you and me. For example, if I were to suddenly decide that our nations airwaves had a massive obscenity problem, I wouldn't base it almost entirely on the automated, one-click testimony of the LARGEST concentration of tittyhaters in America.

Yes, it's the Parents Television Council, who, if they had their way, would fill the airwaves with nothing but Lawrence Welk reruns and a new version of "Seventh Heaven" where all those naughty ankles are covered up. The PTC hates everything, and not in a cheery, daily web columnist kind of way. To them, the common, everyday nipple is Satan's Warhead, delivering pure, evil, Immorality Devil Milk through the corneas of any poor soul who catches a glimpse.

According to MediaWeek, citing internal FCC numbers, in 2000, the FCC received about 350 indecency complaints. In 2001, they received about 350 as well. In 2002, they got about 14,000. In 2003, they got 240,000. Powell, who I cannot stress enough in no way got his job because he is Colin Powell's son, used this increase to justify the FCC's indecency crackdown on fuck, shit, and all the other fun words that enrich the fucking language and keep it from being all shitty.

Completely coincidentally, in 2003, the PTC developed a web-based form by which people could send form-complaints about indecency to the FCC. Completely coincidentally, in 2003, these complaints made up NINETY NINE POINT EIGHT PERCENT of the indecency complaints by the FCC. That means the PTC bitched about 239,500 times, and the rest of America bitched about 500 times. This is what happens when you listen to people on the INTERNET.

The PTC's spokesperson, Lara Mahaney, who I am led to believe is in personal possession of not one, but TWO of the deadly, soul-destroying nipples, offered up the kind of defense that, even for a bunch of fundamentalist, crusading loonies, is just sad. It's NIPPLE FUCK ACTUAL NIPPLE QUOTE ANUS TIME!

"I wish we had that much power. Why does it matter how the complaints come?? Mahaney said. ?If the networks haven?t done anything illegal, if they haven?t done anything indecent, why do they care what we say??

That's lovely. When accused of manipulating public officials to get their narrow viewpoint forced down the deep throats of the viewing public, all Ms. Flanagan and her nipples can muster is "I wish!". Yes, if only they could truly dominate the public discourse on obscenity and make up that last point two percent! Then we could digitally clothe all that filthy naked skin on the Surgery Channel!

As for the rest of her defense, I'm sure Ms. Mahoney knows from her head to her areolas that "indecency" in this country is defined by two things - what gives a judge an erection, and "community standards". Send enough form letters and dominate the complaint system, throw in a complacent, fundie-loving administration, and suddenly, the "community standards" are being redefined by a bunch of maroons who think the biggest problem with the country right now is Howard Stern talking about stripper's cooches during drivetime.

And Powell, willfully or otherwise (the Official Line is that he was "unaware" of the PTC's dominance) went right along with it, taking a much needed break from not making digital TV happen to fight the good fight against the bad tit. Ergo, HE IS DUMB.

Just Sit Right Back And Fuck Yourselves

Memo to Sherwood Schwartz: YOU ARE ETERNALLY DUMB.

Last night marked the premiere of yet another crime against humanity that can be laid at the feet of Sherwood Schwartz. "The Real Gilligan's Island", the TBS reality series stranding two teams of Gilligan & Co. impersonators in a Survivoresque competition. If you watched it, by the way, fuck you, because you are part of the problem.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. If I had a time machine and a shotgun, first on my list would be Sherwood Schwartz. Not Hitler, not Pol Pot, not the inventor of the Swiffer. Sherwood Schwartz. You take out Sherwood Schwartz around, say, age 17, and you remove Gilligan's Island and The Brady Bunch from the timestream, leading to Utopia.

Because you don't just remove the Brady Bunch, you remove all the spinoff Brady TV movies, the spinoff Brady series, the Brady musical, the SNL sketches, the fucking Shelley Long motion picture remake, and every single bit of "post-modern", "ironic" piss-takery on the Bradys that inevitably involves some asshole making a "Marcia, Marcia, Marcia" joke. Every last bit of it, gone, never to have even happened. The collective national I.Q. jumps by 15, and everyone's correspondingly happier except, perhaps, for Barry Williams, and he can fuck off in the New Utopia, as far as I'm concerned.

Take out Sherwood Schwartz and you take out Gilligan's Island. But you don't just remove Gilligan from the timestream, you remove the Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island, the cartoon, the "New Gilligan's Island" series, the TV movies, the SNL skits, and every single "Three Hour Tour" joke in the history of our species. But most importantly, you unexist every single "Maryann or Ginger?" conversation EVER. The collective national I.Q. jumps by another 20 points, we have flying cars and national health care and nobody's ever hungry ever again except, perhaps, for Dawn Wells, and she can join Barry Williams in selling their bodies for smack in the New Utopia, as far as I'm concerned.

And you take out "The Real Gilligan's Island". In case you needed confirmation of the creative bankruptcy of post-millennial American culture, this show is the new platinum-iridium bar of one unit of creative bankruptcy, known in the English system as the Sherwood, and in the metric system as the Bennyhill.

On "The Real Gilligan's Island", there are two sets of castaways chosen so as to match the official archetypes as spelled out in the non-and-the-rest version of the theme song. There are two sea captains. Two millionaires, and their two wives. Two professors, two farm girls, two skinny first mates, two stupid fucking white hats, and two washed-up starlets. The only thing they didn't include were two shits. They asked me, but I just couldn't GIVE TWO SHITS.

One of the two washed up starlets is Nicole Eggert, who's taking a break from her grueling schedule of direct-to-video movies where she takes her shirt off to play one team's Ginger. Nicole, who's primary claim to fame is being one of Baywatch's many Not Pamela Andersons, will surely put her knowledge of sand and water to use in ways that will, with luck, cause her team's skipper to kill and eat her, then make a raft out of her skin, bones, and implants.

Her opposite number, Ginger II (or possibly Ginger I, I'm sure they mud-wrestled for the numbering or something) is model/actress Rachel Hunter. Ms. Hunter is taking time from doing all the direct-to-video movies that Eggert turned down. On the bright side, being stranded on a retarded reality show island based on one of pop culture's nadirs is a vast improvement over her last significant paying job, FUCKING ROD STEWART. So things are looking up for Rachel, and anything that takes anyone far, far away from Rod Stewart's hair, voice, and/or penis cannot be hated in its entirety.

So let's settle on 99%. Let's hate that a band called "Bowling for Soup" produced a "rockin'" version of the theme song, as if a rockin' version of a theme song had never been done before by anyone ever. Let's hate the Castaway Quiz on the show's website on general principle, and the Flash-animated googaw that asks the motherfucking "Ginger or Maryann" question that should, in and of itself, be due cause and justification for assaulting the genitals of those responsible with a nail gun. And then let's reload the nail gun and use it on everyone on the show's Fan Forums, on which the longest thread is... "Who's sexier? Ginger or Marianne" [sic].

And then we can all sit down, have a good cry, and get cracking on that time machine.

Welcome To The New Dark Ages

I need you all to be strong today.

I've uncovered something that many of you will find troubling, disturbing, even chilling. For a wide variety of reasons. Some of you may think that what I've found is redundant, others may think that there must be some mitigating circumstances that can counter the great, seething deposit of stupidity I've stumbled across. But you need to be strong, and face head-on the fact that there is a better reason than ever before to hate the Sci-Fi Channel.

It's difficult to believe, I know. After all, they've given us new Cylon fuckbots. They produced "Mad Mad House", a reality show about a collection of "alternative" (meaning less photogenic) freakjobs with issues. They've spent years giving money and a forum to John "Not The Loser, The Psychic" Edward, who exploits the ignorant for his own personal gain by making up fake conversations with real dead people. They've produced, aided, abetted, and aired hundreds of low-budget direct-to-video features that debase and dilute the genre the channel is supposed to celebrate. And what's worse, they've aired "Sliders" reruns.

But the channel that is basic cable's closest equivalent to the Bataan Death March is not done with its black-hooded experiments into perfidy. They are, apparently, now airing a show called, and this is IMPORTANT, so pay attention, called "Proof Positive: Evidence of the Paranormal".

As we know from previouis experience, c.f. John "Charlatan" Edward and any number of cheap syndicated shows hosted by Jonathan Frakes, the Sci-Fi Channel is no stranger to the short-bus world of ghosts, vampires, strange forces, mysterious disappearances, U.F.O.'s, and their spooky ilk. So with a title like "Proof Positive: Evidence of the Paranormal", what you'd expect would be yet another show filled with synth music, dark rooms, spotlights, and "eyewitness testimony" from the usual collection of people who can't spell S.A.T. and couldn't count how many teeth they had until it hit single digits. You would expect this, but you would be tragically, horribly wrong.

Allow me to introduce you to the host of the show, which I will derisively refer to from now on by its initials, "P.P.", which is also a childish euphemism for male genitalia. The woman who holds P.P. firmly in her grasp is Amanda Tapping. Some of you may know Ms. Tapping from her regular role on Stargate SG-1, and as a result, I pity you. Older readers may be more familiar with the classic dance style invented by her eponymous great-grandfather. As a bit of eye candy on a basic cable spinoff show, Ms. Tapping is eminently qualified to explore the scientific basis for the paranormal. But if her C.V. isn't enough for you, wait till you hear how well she interviews. It's ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"Conceptually, I love it. I love the idea that we actually put things to the test, that there are actually forensic tests that you can do to determine the veracity of paranormal phenomena."

Man, she's so dumb and stupid and dumb and... wait a second. That actually sounds reasonable. After all, in the post-election landscape, with creationism running rampant and "ignoring global warming" fast becoming the national pastime now that all the ballparks have sunk under the rising oceans, forensics is the only science people actually believe in. After all, if it's the basis for 97% of the prime-time network schedule, forensics MUST be true, even if it never directly refers to Jesus.

So using forensics to test the claims of paranormal believers... that could actulally work! Boy, I sure hope that later on in the intervew, Tapping doesn't go on to undercut her point with something so mind-bogglingly moronic that it will crush my nascent, flowering hope! Let's look together! Hold hands... take a deep breath...

"I'm a huge believer in the paranormal, so some of the stories really freaked me out." (Uh oh.) "Some of the stories, even though they [may be] proven inconclusive or proven proof negative, you can still go, 'Wait a second. I don't know about that. Just because that test didn't work doesn't mean ... .' So I think it makes for some great debate. I watched the first episode with my twin brother when I was in Chicago, and we had a big debate over it."

There are times that even I come up against my limitations as a writer. I want to convey the image of a broken, dejected man, lying on the floor in the fetal position, weeping quietly, his face covered by his tear-dampened hands. Weeping in utter disbelief that we have sunk to the point where not only are we taking bullshit like faith healing and "intelligent design" and poltergeists at face value just becuase people say they experienced them, but that we're actually going to the trouble to perform tests, for a show called PROOF MOTHERFUCKING POSITIVE, and then utterly dismissing the proof when it comes back negative. And all I can think to write is "Take your P.P. and shove it up your ass."

People, it's one thing to believe in Invisible Bearded Wish-Granting Punishment Man. You can't do tests on a god. But to produce a show that claims to deliver scientific results, and then to say that those results DON'T MATTER in the end because it fosters debate... that's fucking criminal, is what that is. I mean, after Test Subject #5 Of Five drowns horribly, you don't keep debating whether people can breathe underwater, just because you think FISHIES ARE PRETTY.

At least in the Dark Ages, we had an excuse. Nobody knew shit. There was no Google. There were no rocketships. Life was short, knowledge was scarce, and people could be excused for believing that their crops failed because their neighbor gave them the evil eye. Tapping and her fellow P.P.'s have no such excuse. We're awash in facts. We're up to our asses in technology. Every single moment of our lives is better than it could be because a few people, throughout history, spent five seconds realizing that evil eyes were FUCKING STUPID, and spent a few years figuring out that maybe the crops were failing for actual, tangible reasons that could be stopped or mitigated without immolating the old hermit down the road.

If you want to ignore your own tests that tell you the fuckhead with the widow's peak and the robe isn't really reading minds, then do us all a favor and stop taking antibiotics, stop using indoor plumbing, and go back to eating the half-dozen moldy potatoes you can manage to grow by waving your hands over the dirt. And while you're at it, stop using fiber-optic cables and routers and switching systems to send your stupidity out to hundreds of thousands of people who don't need to be any stupider, thank you. Just write your missives on a rock with your own dung, as God intended.

The High Road Remains Free Of Traffic

Memo to Andrew Sullivan: ARE YOU LOOKING FOR YOUR HEAD?

I'd always felt a little bit sorry for Andrew Sullivan. As a gay Republican, he can't help bt act in a completely self-destructive, contrary-to-his-own-interests manner, but in recent times, he has come out against George W. Bush. Which proves he, like the Log Cabin Republicans all but the 20% of the gay population who voted for Dubya, are capable of finally recognizing a direct threat to their existence when it jumps up and down in front of them waving big red flags with flares tied to the tops and yells "I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU AND I'M IN CHARGE, FAGGOT"

Sensing this vague, tenuous animosity from the Republicans, Andrew Sullivan voted for Kerry, and for that, I give him credit. But he's still a dick.

Sullivan appeard on "Real Time with Bill Maher" last Friday, a show which had already been marred* by a bizarre exchange with former senator Alan Simpson. Simpson took the peculiar view that political comedians like Maher shouldn't make jokes at the expense of politics, parties, policies, or voters, and defended Wyoming's gay population by reminding Maher that Wyoming is where Matthew Shepard was killed.

Toward the end of the show, Maher had, for the first time on any of his shows, Noam Chomsky as a guest. Noam Chomsky is the Samuel L. Jackson of political argument. You may not agree with him, but you do not fuck with him, because he's better at it than you. This isn't a matter of his opinions, this is a matter of pure skill. Noam Chomsky is to logical argument what Michelangelo was to doodling. So Chomsky came on via satellite for his interview, he and Maher talked for a while, and then he went away. Chomsky was coherent, completely devoid of rhetoric, and name-dropped Zbigniew Burzynski. And the instant his screen went dark, Sullivan pounced.

He started going off on the kind of rant that would make Tucker Carlson say "Dial it down a notch, buddy." He went after Chomsky, who conveniently was no longer able to respond, like Ann Coulter going after a liberal pork chop**. He accused Chomsky of hating America, of loving Saddam Hussein, of a whole bunch of things that Chomsky didn't actually say. He even accused Chomsky of being paid money to speak to people, which as we know was outlawed in 1972.

He accused Chomsky of besmirching freedom and democracy, and supporting oppression and tyranny, and said "I hope he's smart enough to know he's lying". And he completely dismissed the "100,000 civilian casualties in Iraq" study, which shows that Sullivan did not so much come to his senses when he voted for Kerry, but rather executed a classic gravity slingshot maneuver around his senses, spending a brief period of time in orbit around his senses before shooting off into Fuckety Cuckoo Land.

Maher tried to engage him on the topic, but Sullivan could not see or hear him through his righteous berzerker rage. And then, as the credits rolled, Sullivan started... rubbing his ass. I know you find this hard to believe. I missed it entirely the first time I watched the show, because I wasn't paying attention to the credits. But for whatever reason, going apeshit on an elderly professor gave Sullivan a wedgie, or a rash, or something else I don't even want to think about.

Now, normally, I would not automatically make fun of someone for their moment of inadvertent public embarassment. That's why I've taken great, epic pains to demonstrate that Andrew Sullivan is a dick, and thus a completely valid target for the utterly cheap, completely immature, and otherwise uncalled-for bit of graphic kerfluffery I'm about to commit.

Are you looking for your head, Andy?

* Get it? "MARRED"? You wouldn't get this kind of comedy from a "blogger", you know.

** Dress it up all you want, but it's still COMMIE PINK on the inside.

Live, From Funkytown, It's YOU ARE DUMB!

Memo to America: DEEP BREATH.

OK. I know the election's got you all squirrely. I know the campaign's been going on forever. That is no reason, however, to take leave of your fucking senses. Get a grip. Of COURSE Ashlee Simpson lip-syncs.

If you give a shit about this, you have a number of mental and emotional problems which I will discuss and dissect in excruciating detail for you, and it's your own damn fault, because if you give a shit about this, you haven't been paying attention since January 1 whan I started this little endeavor.

Here's your first clue that Ashlee Simpson lip-syncs. Her name is spelled A-S-H-L-E-E. A spelling from which it is possible to extrapolate every single useful fact you could possibly need about Ashlee Simpson. She was raised by people who thought A-S-H-L-E-E was the best way to spell that. And felt that way in1985. If you're named "Ashlee" in 1985, it's inevitable that by 2004, you will be caught doing something wrong on national television.

The Simpson parents ought to express their eternal gratitude that it was singing on Saturday Night Live, and not flashing her cooch on Girls Gone Wild, but they can't, because we haven't developed UPLIFT TECHNOLOGY YET. I mean, even assuming that Ashlee is the brains of the family, a little Darwinian backtracking based on available evidence of her and her sister tells us that their parents previous address was most likely 1 Primordial Ooze Lane. Or possibly Tennessee.

Second vital clue that Ashlee Simpson was lip-syncing: ASHLEE SIMPSON'S MUSIC. You know how much Ashlee Simpson music I've heard? The fifteen seconds or so from the lip-syncing clip. And from that, I can determine that even if everything had gone perfectly, there is nothing in her entire repertoire that (a) she wouldn't have lip-synced given the opportunity, or (b) she SHOULDN'T have. Why the hell not? It's shitty pop-rock. If you think this incident exposes the music industry to be a fake, a sham, in which musical acts are assembled out of pretty bits and pieces for broad market appeal, then I say to you, congratulations on your successful revival, and I trust life in the 21st century is more comfortable than the GLACIER you've been frozen in for two centuries.

If, on the other hand, you are an Ashlee Simpson fan, and are traumatized at the news that your idol engaged in a bit of pre-recorded trickery, it's important for you to understand that your eighth-grade biology homework isn't going to finish itself, young lady, so get your ass off that goddamn Internet and hit the books. If you're not a 14-year-old girl, and you're listening to Ashlee Simpson music, you're either a pedophile or the victim of some elaborate, illegal scientific experiment.*

Third major clue that Ashlee Simpson might lip-sync when appearing on Saturday Night Live: She was appearing on SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE. Has nobody else ever watched this show? If so, it would explain the popularity of Chris Kattan, but odds are it would have gotten cancelled at least a couple of years ago if I were the sole, sporadic audience. People lip-sync on SNL all the friggin' time.

If you really think SNL is some musical institution, where great musicians deliver classic performances, you need to stop smoking crack with Lorne Michaels. I know he has the best crack in town, but that doesn't mean you have to hang around and listen to his bullshit. For every brilliant, memorable song like... like... actually, the only SNL performance I can remember is when the lead singer of the Pogues, drunk off his ass, wandered aimlessly behind the drum set during what was suddenly an instrumental.

But what about the hypocrisy angle? After all, she told "Lucky" magazine she'd never lip-sync! FUCK YOU. Stop holding 19-year-old girls to a higher standard than your own fucking president. A higher truth standard, a higher honesty standard, fuck, a higher grammatical standard, even. And stop reading "Lucky" magazine while you're at it, you freak.

Ashlee Simpson lip-syncs. Big fucking whoop. If this is your idea of a big deal, I hope you never find out that Santa Claus isn't real, and that prostitutes aren't anything like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. Or, if you do find out, I hope to hell I'm not walking in front of your high-rise when you get the news. I just bought these shoes.

*This sentence ensures that I will get at least one Google hit for "Ashlee Simpson pedophile", but I can live with that.**

**This sentence will make it two to four hits. So I won't type it again.

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.

Guilt By Association Hits Home

Today on YAD, I need to clear something up.

Remember what I've said about the South? How, if Southerners wish to shake off the Deliverance, Hee-Haw, America's Twangy Halfwit image that they currently have, they need to do something about all the pigfuckers that embarass them on a regular basis?

Well, in the interest of fairness, I must inform you all that as an avid fan of videogames, I can, for the time being, apparently be assumed to love the titties and the porno. Because like the one guy in Mississippi that subscribes to the Utne reader, it really doesn't matter that I personally have what most people would consider an unremarkable, reasonable attitude toward both the titties and the porn. Until the game industry and the fanbase stop being populated by vast numbers of creepy, teat-slavering fanboys with sore wrists and a four-digit annual hand lotion budget, I'm stuck with the stereotype of the subculture.

I watched about ten minutes of this year's "G-phoria", G4TechTV's* annual awards show. Having occurred two years in a row, it now has earned the right to be called "annual", a milestone that seemed iffy at best after watching LAST year's. Anyway, for some reason, video game awards shows are the only ones who will, completely unironically, invite big-name porn stars to present awards, complete with REALLY WEAK innuendo-laced banter.

It's a no-win situation. Awards show presenters are there to speak nice and wear pretty clothes, two things porn stars are, thanks to a self-selection process that borders on the Darwinian, notoriously bad at. So not only do video games strengthen their association with sad wankery, all anybody gets out of it is Jenna Jameson in some awful Goodwill-rack knit dress reading clumsily off a teleprompter. But the crowd cheered her like she was managing to use both the award statue and the teleprompter operator in her professional capacity. You sad bastards.

So you've got the porn stars, and the scantily-clad models at the trade shows, aka "booth babes", and the Japanese body pillows with the game characters on them, and all of a sudden, I'm sorely tempted to join a less creepy, sex-obsessed subculture. But then I realize, I fucking HATE scrapbooking.

Still, the latest news out of game-land has me reaching for my glue-stick, and not in any kind of phallic euphemism, either. Last year, there was this shitty game called "BloodRayne". BloodRayne featured a leather-clad (to the extent that she was clad at all), giant-chested vampire chyck. Who fought Nazis. You can point to your copies of Rez and WarioWare all you want, but one game like BloodRayne hits shelves, and it's back to Creepy Perv Lane for you, Mr. Artsy Gamer. Have some hand lotion.

The game wasn't good at all, but since it starred a half-naked, leather-clad, Nazi-fighting, mammengorgic vampire, it sold enough to warrant a sequel**. And to promote the sequel, BloodRayne will be the first video-game character to appear topless in Playboy. I kid you the fuck not. Topless, computer-generated game character with a Playboy spread. That right there is going to make the stereotype stick like the pages it's printed on, so you might as well get used to it. At least until next E3, when, with any luck, a well-trained "Hands Out Of Your Pants Squad" will lace all the food in and around the convention center with saltpeter, then wander the show floor with Authentic Baby Seal Clubbing Clubs (TM) to deal with the 30% of the gamer population so astonishingly frustrated that to them, saltpeter is like Cialis laced with Ecstacy.

Then maybe we can start rebuilding our image.

* And boy howdy, isn't that the worst possible name for a cable network, ever? I mean, yeah, G4 (bad name) merged with TechTV (still not great), and the best they could manage was to smoosh them together? Seriouisly, they could have changed the name to the Used Tampon Network and it would be an improvement. And probably help their demographics.

** And a movie! Starring Ben Kingsley, who, following the Orson "Transformers" Welles and Raul "Street Fighter" Julia rule, should kick off shortly after filming ends. Kingsley will, disappointingly, not be playing the title character.

I Hardly Knower!

Memo to America: OK, THAT'S ENOUGH POKER, THANKS.

It's funny how these weird, sudden obsessions spring up. I mean, three years ago, "scrapbooking" was four middle-aged suburban women sharing a gluestick, and now there's an entire billion-dollar industry devoted to ugly-ass teddy-bear frames being stuck around a Polaroid of some grandson asleep on a couch. I have a number of vague, unformed theories about why scrapbooking is actually a Satanic ritual, but they'll have to wait for another day, because today, we're talking about poker. Specifically, Texas Hold 'Em.

Now, I admit, I have mellowed from my original position on televised poker, which was "Who the FUCK would want to watch POKER on TELEVISION". My position is now the much more refined "Who the FUCK would want to watch THIS fucking MUCH fucking POKER on TELEVISION." As you can see, wisdom develops over time. As do poker shows on basic cable.

But where wisdom accrues slowly, like the buildup of wax in the ear, basic-cable poker multiplies like ebola*. In the next two weeks**, if you wished, you could watch televised poker matches one hundred and thirty two times. That means that if you turn on the TV, and can't find a poker match, WAIT AN HOUR. That's too much poker.

There's Celebrity Poker Showdown, whose fault this all arguably is. Celebrity Poker Showdown is not without its charms, but would be much more interesting if I were in charge. First, celebrities would be betting their own money. And second, the amounts risked and betted would be weighted by the stars' individual successes. So when, say, Gabe Kaplan lucks out on the river, getting his straight flush draw, he takes Ben Affleck for more than a bit of charity chump change. Put some danger into the game. Some drama. I want to see sitcom stars and celebrity chefs at each other's fucking throats, don't you?

That's another thing. I should not be able to throw out phrases like "river" and "straight flush draw". And neither should you. But we can, because the poker in inescapable. We're channel-surfing, and before we can even say "Hey, is that David Cross in a bathrobe?" we've absorbed half-a-dozen bits of vocabulary that we otherwise would have to pawn our kidneys in Vegas to have learned.

But if the allure of famous people just distracts you from the intricacies of the Card Game of Kings Du Jour, don't fret. There's the World Series of Poker, the World Poker Tour, Championship Poker at the Plaza, the Poker Superstars Invitational Tournament, reruns of the World Series of Poker from ten years ago, and even the Strip Poker Invitational, which I'm sure uses a fairly unique variant on "Hold 'Em".

Coming soon are the Superstars of World Poker Tournament Invitational, the Showdown Poker World Challenge, and a very special episode of Veggietales in which Jimmy the Apostate Radish bluffs on a six-two off-suit, loses all his money, curses God from a cardboard box in an alley, and eventually ends up selling himself on the street for ten bucks a tossed salad.

You know who I feel worst for? (Well, besides the whoring radish, of course.) The poor, overworked poker players. With all the touring and invitationaling and championships, I bet they never even get home to see their families anymore. Plus, I can only imagine what this fearsome schedule is doing to their unlit cigar and funny little hat budgets. Not to mention the harried souls at the International Poker Nickname Registry, who are forced to tell people at least thirty times a day that "Moneybags" is taken, as is "Bling" and "The Hammer", and perhaps they could settle for "Fishtank", "Germanium", or "Peel-N-Eat".

Of course, if you're sick of watching poker on TV and have digital cable, you can always watch Celebrity Blackjack! Yes, if all that pesky strategy of poker gets on your nerves, and you just want to sit and watch semi-famous people be handed random cards until one of them cheers, presumably having won, then Celebrity Blackjack is for you. Make sure to catch it before the FTC forces them to put quotes around "celebrity". I mean, the only Baldwin they could get was Billy, and I'm pretty sure the charity Kevin Nealon is playing for is the Kevin Nealon Is Really Really Hungry Foundation.

* Normally, a sentence like this would end with a situation where ebola would thrive even more virulently than it normally does. But I think ebola pretty much just has the one level of near-instantaneous horrible bleeding death.

** Why, yes, I used online television listings in the course of writing this article, why do you ask?

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.

Frickin' Friends

Memo to.... ah, FUCK the memo. No memos. No warnings. No quarter given.

Just when we're starting to let the LAST great American narcissistic grief-fest fade (at least until the Republican National Convention), we have to go through an entirely new set of histrionics, complete with weeping, wailing, ashes, sackcloth, self-flagellation, and black armbands with Jennifer Aniston's picture on them.

You may have heard that Friends is done after tonight. If you haven't, I would like to welcome you to the fabulous world of the future, and can only hope that scientists are able to determine the process by which you were held in stasis.

Fuck the Friends. Fuck Joey, fuck Rachel, fuck Phoebe, fuck Hawkeye, fuck... Sneezy, fuck the rest of 'em. Fuck any animals, children, or Tom Sellecks they may have added to the cast over the years to boost ratings. Fuck it all. It's going, and good riddance.

If Friends going off the air makes you sad, fuck you. You had ten years to get sick of it. If that wasn't enough time, tough. You can get in line with the stinky guys from HEAT, they've been wasting the last decade, too.

If you're planning on watching the Joey spinoff, have the common decency to take a vegetable peeler to your corneas instead. If that strikes you as a bit harsh, then at least lie on your Nielsen diary or unplug your people meter or something. It's taken us 22 years to eliminate the last vestiges of Cheers from the universe, and I'd still wanna check the sub-basement of the NBC studios in case Bebe Neuwirth laid any eggs in the boiler room.

Fuck the media, who fuel the whole thing with stories like "Cheers, Friends - Loose parallels exist between TV faves and area coffee lovers." In FLINT, MICHIGAN. The show's dying of natural causes. It's not like it rammed into a bridge support or something. Last week of Friends! Last month of Friends! They taped the last-ever Friends! You don't need to tell us some people cried once they finished filming. If they'd all flipped each other off and walked out without saying a word, that'd be worth telling us about. OF COURSE they cried. People cry at high school graduations, and that's only four years, and nobody'll buy it for strip syndication.

Fuck the syndicated reruns, fuck the DVD's. Especially the "Friends Party Pack". This is a "Best of Friends" DVD, some Friends trivia, some coffee, and some other shit that will guarantee you will have the second-worst party in the history of our species. * If youi've bought, and used, the Friends Party Pack, well, I simply cannot Google up an image of a building tall enough for you to jump off of. I'm sorry. Perhaps you could finagle your way onto the International Space Station and sort of... push off.

The only way a Friends Party Pack could even be remotely useful is if it contained Kool-Aid and strychnine. Or if it was some kind of Deluxe Party Pack that included a monkey JUST LIKE ROSS'S, only this one runs around and humps the futon and flings poop into the Central Perk Instant Coffee and finally knocks the 17" combo TV/VCR onto the DVD player, and the sparks light the box of wine on fire and it explodes and they find the charred corpses being violated by the monkey who miraculously survived due to the processing required to keep him fresh on Target's shelves.

I'm not trying to be some cultural elitist, some kind of snob. Friends was perfectly mediocre. Not "Love Boat" bad or something. It's just that it going away shouln't cause such a case of national schadenfr... THE THEME SONG. I forgot to say FUCK THE THEME SONG. Fuck the Rembrandts. If Rembrandt had drawn one thing in crayon, and it got used in the front of every book in Amsterdam until about 1650, then maybe you'd be justified in naming your band after him. But he didn't, so fuck you, too.

I'm off to the boiler room with a flashlight and a motion tracker. I swear I saw David Arquette cocooned to the wall.

* The worst party in the history of the species being, of course, the 'all the spoo you can eat' B5: Legend Of The Rangers premiere party.

American Idolators

For those of you who clicked over from John Haley at 411Wrestling looking for the article on Eugene, it's yesterday's. You can even browse the archives if you like. I'll be nice and not make fun of them for getting the link to the site completely wrong.

For the rest of you, my loyal readers, who have been somewhat concerned that Wednesday would become a DUMBless void, fear not, because the goddamn American Idol thing has now grown to the size that it needs mentioning.

For the three of you that remain blissfully unaware, there is some controversy surrounding the fact that the (allegedly) most talented, and darker people on this season of American Idol are receiving fewer votes than the untalented, lighter-skinned hacks who are dominating the voting, and thus the whole American Idol process is corrupt.

Let's run by this again. There is CONTROVERSY over the fact that American Idol may not be rewarding pure talent because the American public is doing the voting. And there's even some talk that the American public might be racist, because of the six contestants, the three who got the low number of votes were minorities, and two of the top three were not minorities, and apparently some people don't think the minority in the top three is actually a minority. Other than being the only non-white in a group of three, which technically would make her a minority on a purely statistical basis.

Sure, I can understand people getting upset about someone losing on American Idol. I mean, for one thing, everything else is absolutely perfect in the world. Plus, as Clay Aiken has taught us, people who lose on American Idol with a correspondingly huge amount of press coverage will never realize their dreams of undeserved success and will end up living in a cardboard box holding a "Will Sing 'Unchained Melody' For Food" sign.

And now Elton John's gotta get in on the action, calling the results "incredibly racist". Elton was a guest celebrity judge on the show, which strikes me as odd. Not that you would want to have Elton John judging talent. That would be the obvious joke. No, my question is, why does a show whose results are determined by phone-in vote have JUDGES IN THE FIRST PLACE?! Maybe Elton's just feeling impotent.

ACTUAL QUOTE TIME! - "America, remember, you have to vote for the talent. You cannott let talent like this slip through the cracks." - Ryan Seacrest, host of American Idol. Because if the American people lose faith in the validity of phone-in voting for reality shows, the very fabric of our democracy is at stake. And while we're here, does anyone have a copy of Ryan Seacrest's resume? A C.V.? Something scrawled on a napkin, perhaps? Really, I'm looking for anything that might describe in what way Ryan Seacrest is qualified to do... anything. 'Cause I can't seem to figure it out on my own.

You wanna know how stupid this whole thing is? It's so stupid, it's forcing me to REUSE A POPULAR FEATURE to adequately describe it. Yes, it's time for the Dumbness Defenestration Punishment Chart! Remember, the way this works is, you find which category you belong to. Then, follow the arrow to a floor of a five story building. The category you are in will complete the sentence: "You are so fucking dumb, you need to hurl yourself from a BLANKth story window to atone for your stupidity. Get cracking."

If anyone knows where you can get a used pneumatic cannon for under $1,000, please notify Mr. John through his management.