With Whom Shall I Not Mess, Again?

Memo to Texas: MAN, YOU DON'T FUCK AROUND WHEN IT COMES TO DUMB.

Dumb in the morning. Dumb in the evening. Dumb from Oklahoma to Mexico, and dumb from the deserts of New Mexico to the sweet sweet pig vaginas of Louisiana. So dumb they wouldn't be able to remember the Alamo if its name had a few more letters in it. So dumb that the residents of Austin must feel like a domed, time-traveling city of the future, stranded amidst the barbarous wasteland that lies just outside their borders. So dumb that making fun of Texas actually releases endorphins into my brain, resulting in at the very least a mild psychological addiction. So dumb they're ALMOST as dumb as Tennessee.

So, what's the latest word out of Texas, the unofficial capital of Jesusland?* Well, you know the Classic Red-State Trifecta of God, guns, and gays? How does two out of three strike ya?

In East Texas, in the Spurger school district, a longstanding Homecoming Week tradition is being cancelled because one redneck mom was convinced it would turn her nine-year old son into a homosexual.

The event, TWIRP Day, stands for "The Woman Is Requested to Pay". It apparently involves reversing the traditional gender roles most of us pretty much abandoned 20 years ago, like girls paying for sodas, and asking boys out on dates. As part of the admittedly quaint tradition, girls and boys also dress like their opposite gender for the day. Having been informed about the perfidious Homosexual Agenda, Delana Davies took a stand.

"It's like experimenting with drugs. You just keep playing with it and it becomes customary. ... If it's OK to dress like a girl today, then why is it not OK in the future?" Davies, being an idiot, is incapable of discerning the difference between "wearing a frilly dress" and "hot anal sex". In a completely unrelated note, Mrs. Davies' husband stops at Laura Ashley about once every three weeks to get a present for his wife.

The school has replaced TWIRP day with "Camo Day", in which students are encouraged to dress like overweight armchair mercenary wannabes who subscribe to "Guns And Ammo" and play their paintball "for keeps". Mrs. Davies is fine with that, as it will let her son look like a brave American soldier and play "shoot the wounded Iraqi" with the other kids, and will make her four-year-old daughter look like a huge dyke.

In Texas' defense, this same issue has come up in two other schools - one in rural Illinois, which is like Texas except you can go into the city for deep dish pizza, and one in New York, where they felt it was offensive to the transgender community.

One hundred and fifty miles west of Spurger, where the pernicious agenda of Team Selfish Hedonism is being painstakingly eradicated, one elementary school student at a time, lies Houston, TX, the Bizarro to Austin's Superman. Like Austin, Houston has a burgeoning technology industry. Unlike Austin, where much of the tech industry is devoted to helping gamers pretend to shoot each other over the Internet, Houston's tech industry is working on letting people ACTUALLY shoot things over the Internet.

It's a heady idea, a surefire contender for the Worst Fucking Idea Ever award, and it's the asschild** of John Underwood, who by day works in an auto body shop, but is an idiot in his free time. The idea is to place a remote-controlled camera and gun on a ranch, and allow people to connect to that camera and gun over the Internet and shoot whatever deer, antelopes, moose, pets, children, airplanes, or space aliens appear on-screen. To give you an idea of the kind of mentality we are dealing with here, I'll allow Underwood to relate the tale of where his inspiration came from.

He and a friend were looking at a webcam set up in some woodlanda area that allowed you to take pictures of animals."We were looking at a beautiful white-tail buck and my friend said 'If you just had a gun for that.' A little light bulb went off in my head." Unfortunately, it wasn't a stroke. "Man, that's gorgeous. If only there were some way to KILL IT FROM MILES AWAY WITHOUT IT EVEN KNOWING."

Underwood was quick to conceal his bloodlust behind a veneer of charity, noting that his technology could be a boon to disabled hunters no longer able to hold a gun. In addition, once the animals are killed, they could be cut up and their meat could be donated to animal orphanages. I am not fucking kidding you here. A human attendant will retrieve any animal corpses, and Underwood would arrange for the taxidermy of the trophy and the dispensation of the flesh. That service will be offered as soon as they find someone who's tired of their dull job at the slaughterhouse and want to combine the fun of handling dead animals with the adrenaline rush of walking around in front of a remote controlled Internet gun. So, basically, as soon as Ted Nugent finishes his latest tour.

Ah, Texas. Don't ever change. And don't ever visit, either, now that I think of it. You're incredibly useful to me right where you are.

* If you don't know what I'm referring to here, then you need to turn in your Card-Carrying Internet Liberal card, and become, um, a non-card-carrying Internet Liberal.

** Normally, this sentence would call for the word "brainchild", but my fingers refused to type it, for obvious reasons.

Don't Go Back To Huntsville

Fuck politics.

I mean, sure, it was unavoidable, with the debates, and the election only a few weeks away, that the column would turn excessively toward the nation's #1 sport for the stupid and evil, but I'm tired of it. And I bet you are too. Except for the bit about Bush part-owning a timber company, which, since it turned out to be true, is pretty fuckin' funny. "Need some wood", indeed.

But I've felt for a while now that it'd be a good idea to get back to the roots of the column, the kind of thing that I'm known for. Which is why I was so very happy, in my perusals of the news, to stumble across three brand new retarded Texans.

So, with a nostalgic tear in my eye, I would like to issue the following memo to Huntsville, TX residents Bobby Wooderson, Andy Slater, and Richard "Pink" Floyd. YOU ARE DUMB.

The three men, you see, went to school with acclaimed film director Richard Linklater, who, in his admittedly semi-autobiographical movie, "Dazed and Confused", included three characters - David Wooderson, Ron Slater, and Randall "Pink" Floyd. The movie came out in 1993, to modest success, but it apparently took over a decade for it to reach the desert hinterlands of Huntsville, TX, because now that the DVD has been out for two years, the locals have, according to the brand new lawsuit filed on behalf of the retards, made the three men's lives a living hell.

The case, which is being tried in New Mexico because the movie is eleven fucking years old and the New Mexico legal system is kind to slow people, raises a number of interesting legal questions. Can an artist freely utilize his own past to make works of fiction? Is it possible to make life in Huntsville, Texas more of a living hell? And is it possible to have any sympathy whatsoever for a car salesman who has kept his high school nickname of "Pink" Floyd for the past 28 years.

So what form, exactly, did the "relentless harassment, embarassment, and ridicule" take? What cruel emotional torture did these three men suffer to such an extent that they finally got around to taking legal action? The pain must have been unimaginable. Luckily, we don't have to imagine it, because it's ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"People make assumptions, basically, that he's [Slater's] involved in illegal drugs." - Attorney Ernest Freeman.

"We had fun in high school, but there is nothing true about that movie. Yet, I am having to deal with it all the time." - "Pink" Floyd.

And when Wooderson brought his son to Harvard, "all the kids there wanted to do was smoke pot with him", according to lead attorney Bill Robins III. Pronoun experts analyzing Mr. Robins' statements were unable to clarify whether it was the father or the son who received the cannabis-related taunting at one of the nation's most respected institutions of higher learning.

That's... pretty much it. No death threats, no vandals painting large "Have A Nice Day" smilies on the plaintiffs' new vinyl siding, just a bunch of pot jokes from a bunch of Texans who ran out of things to rent at Blockbuster and thought "Dazed and Confused" was a season-set of "That 70's Show" with that nice Ashton Kutcher boy in it.

The fact of the matter is, nobody would have made the connection to the movie if any of these guys had been either willing, or able, to GET THE FUCK OUT OF HUNTSVILLE. That's what Linklater did, and he got to make School of Rock. You three stuck around, and all you get to do is sell cars, put in kitchen cabinets, and "work in the technology sector", which is so vague that it probably means "holding the keys to the video game cabinet at Wal-Mart". And all of a sudden, now it's Linklater's fault that your lives suck? Just because people in Huntsville think it's funny to make toking gestures in your direction? Get over it. The people of Huntsville probably think it's funny to tell people the town was named after a guy named Mike.

Why, were it not for your lawyers' strident assurance that you were "not the type of people who are out to get a cheap buck", I would have thought you were precisely the type of people who are otu to get a cheap buck. Also the type of people who don't stay through the credits. Also the type of people who don't read much. I mean, having never seen the movie, I cannot guarantee that the disclaimer about "any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental" is in there, but I bet it is. Of course you weren't nearly as interesting as the characters in the movie. Of course your dialogue was worse. It was a MOVIE.

And you should be thankful it's a movie. 'Cause if it was a documentary, you know what they would have done for the DVD? They'd have come back to Huntsville, cameras in hand, to shoot a special feature about where the three of you are now. And if you think you were relentlessly harassed, embarrassed, and ridiculed for "appearing" in "Dazed and Confused", that hypothetical followup would have you jumping off the nearest bridge.

And Cracker McCracker As... The Racist

Memo To Texas: HERE WE GO AGAIN.

All right. Time to stop picking on poor Halle Berry, even though she's dumb and crazy and runs into things a lot with her car. It's time for a good old round of one of You Are Dumb Dot Net's favorite pastimes, KICK THE REDNECKS.

Since my plan to incorporate a sterility-inducing quantity of radium into the pressing process for the "Blue Collar Comics" DVD ended in dismal failure in no small part due to having thought of it after the stupid thing came out, I am forced, once again, to use this column as my sole vehicle for revenge against the mostly white, mostly southern, mostly male, mostly NASCAR-watching, mostly hootenannying hordes that embrace racism, stupidity, and pleistocine culture as their inalienable heritage. Plus, they keep giving Jeff Foxworthy money, and that's just fucking inexcusable.

Today, our ire returns to Texas, where the famed Yellow Rose is apparently made that way with an excess of chromium-laced paint, and where the natives then apparently gobble the roses down like White Castle sliders. Specifically, scenic Beaumont, Texas. Named after Hugh Beaumont, who played Ward "Lord Of All Repressed White Males" Cleaver, Beaumont is home to an astonishing array of beauty and culture.

Well, OK. They've got "Ford Park Entertainment Complex", which at first glance seems to be a pickups-instead-of-chocolate version of Hershey Park, but instead is just some form of low-rent arena where you can go hear Aaron Carter sing on August 14. They also have (and this is all going off the official Beaumont website, which is startlingly difficult to glean actual information from) a giant fire-hydrant-shaped building or silo painted like a cow; the Beaumont Drillers, which is either a sports team or a live sex show; the Texas Wildcatters, which is again either a sports team or a live sex show; and an active natural hazard mitigation plan of some sort.

Oh, and Jap Road. But if you want to see historic Jap Road, you'd better get down to Beaumont fast, because this piece of local history is about to be wiped off the map, literally, by a bunch of pinko commie P.C. liberals who don't understand how important Jap Road is.

Jap Road is a small country lane in Beaumont, allegedly taking its colorful name in honor of Yoshio Mayumi, who introduced rice farming to the region. No, really. It comes from a quaint time in Beaumont's past when you could honor someone simply by referring to their ancestry in a derogatory manner. This time is referred to by locals as "Last Tuesday".

But finally, after a ten-year fight, in a FOUR TO THREE DECISION, the local county commissioners decided they should change the name to something less offensive. Popular suggestions by locals include Yellowman Ave, Slanteye Lane, Pokemon Plaza, and We'llkickyourassifyoubuyatoyota Boulevard. But no new name can salve the loss from locals who, when Jap Road vanishes, will take a part of their history with it.

"It's our history, it's our heritage. I can remember when it was a dirt road, now it's being portrayed as a racial divide between us and the Japanese-Americans," said Jap Road resident Earl Callahan. Some say Callahan, who's lived on Jap Road all his life, was incensed because he'd just ordered four reams of custom "wacky" stationery with his address on it from Abercrombie and Fitch.

But the County Commission, apparently having read my previous statements on the South, decided that even though none of the residents of Beaumont, TX would ever consider even thinking about being racist, especially to those nice Japanese people, they should probably change the name to keep them from looking like complete and utter redneck hicks. But Jason Marshbum, whose last name sounds like a British euphemism for diarrhea, didn't get that particular memo.

"It feels like we're in the middle of a George Orwell novel. It's like me suing Keebler or Nabisco because the word 'cracker' is offensive to us white people." Yes, it's exactly like that, except for there being no actual food product named "Jap" that the road was really named for, you fucking cracker. If you're going to name-drop George Orwell in an attempt to distract people from the pig attached to your crotch, you should have someone read one of his books to you first.

Want Some Comedy With That?

Memo to the USDA and Texas: YOU ARE DUMB.

It's like some horrible SAT question gone wrong:

Reagan : Ketchup :: Bush : French Fries 

It really is funny the way Dubya is choosing to take up the "Reagan legacy", by basically taking Reagan's evil ideas and then ratcheting up the stupidity to the breaking point. Reagan cut taxes so that there'd be no money for leftist social programs; Bush does the same, but throws in a $200 billion war on top. Reagan surrounded himself with crooks and politicians on the take, Bush surrounds himself with crooks and politicians on the take from the crooked and corrupt companies they "used to" work for. Reagan slowly deteriorated into a drooling vegetable, Bush came roaring out of the gate with the mental capacity of an underfed zucchini.

Which, in a borderline-masterful segue, brings us to the regular kind of vegetables. Reagan tried to get ketchup classified as a vegetable for nutritional purposes in school lunches, and failed. Bush's USDA, two decades later, has gotten ketchup's symbiotic partner, the batter-dipped, deep-fried French Fry, classified as a "fresh vegetable". And in an unlikely triumph of Bush administration subtlety, managed to do it a YEAR AGO, and nobody noticed.

It only came out now, a year later, because someone stood to lose some money off of it. Specifically, Fleming Companies, who makes batter-dipped french fries, and is now bankrupt. The serpentine bankruptcy laws treat companies differently if they sell fresh fruits and vegetables, you see. They owe more money if french fries are fresh, so they took the USDA to court over it. This is apparently what Republicans mean by allowing market forces to self-regulate. As soon as the mass warping of the fabric of reality and the meanings of words impacts someone financially, they will then work to correct things so that "fresh vegetable" and "batter-dipped, deep-fried, frozen hunk of starch" are no longer synonyms.

Except that they sued in Texas. And in Texas, food comes in two classifications: Hacked From The Still Warm Quivering Flesh Of A Cow And / Or Steer, and Fresh Vegetable. So the Texas judge had no problems going along with the french-fry industry's argument that chopping up a potato, dipping the pieces in batter, frying them in oil, and then freezing the result is no different than waxing a cucumber. Yee. Haw.

Representatives from the USDA, dimly aware of an epic public relations clusterfuck, were quick to reassure the American public that the ruling did not apply to nutrition, only to laws involving commerce. That's comforting. They're only behaving in a completey insane way in order to pander to huge food-processing conglomerates! They're not expecting anyone to actually BELIEVE that a batter-dipped french fry is a fresh veggie, they just want to call it one so that their corporate friends can use the loophole to get more money!

In a related story that is not real but instead invented to set up the standard comedy premise of taking the already ludicrous real-life example and extending it to other products, tortilla chips will be considered "corn on the cob" for purposes of interstate commerce, the Wonder corporation will now be receiving subsidies for all the "wheat" it "grows", and employees are now designated as "children" for tax purposes, allowing your company to claim you as a dependent. But don't worry. When it comes to school lunches, tortilla chips, Wonder bread, and human employees will retain their scientifically determined nutritional value. At long last, somebody thought of the children.

Tour De Dumb

It's always important to remember that the DUMB can take many forms. I think today would be an excellent day to take a bunch of small bits that aren't worthy of their own full-day column and shabbily dress them up as a Tour De Dumb, to remind us all that there's more than politics and religion to inspire idiocy, although not MUCH more.

For example, there's BOOBIES AND WEINERS. And TEXAS. Pretty much any time you get boobs and Texas together, you get a primo example of Funny Dumb.

Funny Dumb is when a barge tips over in Texas. Because all the passengers were on one side of the barge. Because the barge was tied up near a nude beach. A nude beach named "Hippie Hollow". When there's only one nude beach in your entire state, and it's named "Hippie Hollow", you really don't get to bitch when people call you backwards.

Apparently, there is no Internet in Texas. Or premium cable. Or 7-11's. Because only in a world without these things is seeing naked people such an event that it could get EVERYONE on a barge to come out and stare. PLUS, the beach was being used for a semi-annual gay and lesbian event, so I can just imagine what must have gone through the minds of the 60 Texans on the barge, from "Hey, naked people!" to "What are they DOING!" to "Why are my feet wet?" to "Glub". Funny, funny dumb.

And then there's Creeeeeeepy Dumb, which may be the nigh-exclusive domain of Michael Jackson. Attentive readers may have noticed me not making much fun of MJ, because the as-yet-untold Michael Jackson joke is an elusive beast indeed. But yesterday, the contents of some confiscated stuff were revealed, amongst them a note. And in the note, MJ refers to his young guests at Neverland Ranch as "rubbers". GAH! Creepy dumb!

If they ever find a note where MJ calls himself "glue", he's going to jail, as "bounce off" and "stick" are not verbs you want associated with your underage sleepover guests.

And, of course, there's Wuss Dumb, which is always my favorite kind of dumb. Wuss Dumb occurs whenever someone important is caught on tape saying something that is... inconvenient later. And so they either pretend they always meant something else ("weapons of mass destruction related program activities"), claim youthful indiscretion ""I think the word [atrocities] is a bad word. I think it's an inappropriate word.", or, when these aren't an option, just completely wuss out. My PDA just beeped, which means one thing. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"The new administration seems to be paying no attention to the problem of terrorism. What they will do is stagger along until there's a major incident and then suddenly say, 'Oh, my God, shouldn't we be organized to deal with this?'" - Paul Bremer, February 2001 

"Criticism of the new administration, however, was unfair. President Bush had just been sworn into office and could not reasonably be held responsible for the Federal Government's inaction over the preceding 7 months.'' - Paul Bremer, WUSSING OUT yesterday.

And speaking of months of inaction, BONUS QUOTE! - "In November I talked to Mr. Bremer about human rights violations in general and in jails in particular. He listened but there was no answer. At the first meeting, I asked to be allowed to visit the security prisoners, but I failed." - Abdel Basset Turki, former Iraqi human rights minister. This makes Paul Bremer the official poster boy for Wussy Dumb. Asshole.

And finally, there's Whiny Dumb. Once a month, like clockwork, I have to experience Whiny Dumb. No, not that, you misogynists. I'm talking about the kind of whiny dumb that happens when little children don't get what they want the instant they want it. See, there's a version of Dance Dance Revolution for XBox. And every month, Konami puts up five new songs to download. And every month, Microsoft is less than completely diligent in getting the song pack up on the servers. And despite this happening five times now, people still WHINE on the big DDRFreak.com message board. Like this guy, who uses the handle "wesdives":

I wouldn't be concerned except we were never given a date, and it takes me a grand total of ten to fifteen minutes to shut down my computer, unplug eth. cable from modem and replace it with one that goes down to the xbox, then turn the modem back on and wait for it to warm up, go downstairs, disc swap, wait for ultramix to load, wait for live to load, and wait for the songpack screen to load, by which point I know I must either A.) download the freggin' songpack which'll take twenty minutes or B.) repeat all of the above steps in reverse order so I can complain as I'm doing now. Not very keen on the idea of doing that 10 times a day.

Man, what a hassle. If only there were some large group of DDR fanatics. DDR Freaks, even. And if only there were some way for this large community to talk to each other, some kind of... FORUM, that's it! And on this forum, whoever noticed that the song pack had been posted could, and I know this is radical and revolutionary, but they could MENTION IT. And then all the other people reading the board could go check for the songpack. Oh, sure, this would require some kind of national computer network for sharing data, some kind of... Internal Network or something, but maybe there's some military technology we can adapt. All to save poor wesdives the trouble of checking TEN TIMES A DAY for a song pack that nobody will ever play online anyway because they're busy setting up Castles In The Sky Light games non-fucking-stop.

That last bit was just for me. If you laughed at it, you should send me your gamertag.