Floating tits up.

I guess I’m probably not the first person to mention this on the internet today, but did anyone else notice that OMG THE STOCKMARKET WERE ALL GONNA STARVE was not exactly the popular feeling outside the mainstream media? Isn’t that a little weird to anyone? I realize that most of us probably don’t own stocks–or at least not enough for a crash to completely cripple us–but fuck me, the market is not only crashing, but everyone seems to think it’s going to flatline. 

I’m really curious to find out who’s going to be eating their own words over the next few weeks. Whoever else it is, it sure won’t be Wolf Blitzer. It bothers me that he’s able to be right much of the time, but without ever actually saying anything to put himself in an awkward position. That seems like a difficult job. 

I’m even more curious (curiouser) to see what the wise and soft-spoken future Mrs. Veep has to say. I sure hope it isn’t something that manages to be stupid, insane, and hilarious, while at the same time being absolutely sermon-on-the-mount serious. That would be unfortunate for her pristine, blameless reputation. 

On the other hand, I bet all three* of them are going to have some really interesting things to say over the next few days. Rest assured that whatever John McCain has to say will be unsaid by next week, thereby lengthening the Daily Show’s McCaintradiction Montage (I don’t think that’s what they call it), and making the world a happier place. 

Whatever happens, remember: my blog will always be here, at least until the revolution. Peace out, foo.

* Not counting Joe Biden, because really? Joe Biden?

Oh Opera, how you failed me.

So, lately I’ve been burning through web browsers like they were light-colored pants. IE 7, IE 8 beta, Mozilla Firefox, Opera 9.5, and Google Chrome–like I said, I’m going through them. Of the five, Opera was most impressive, except for one tiny little bug: crashes every eight or nine minutes. 

Opera is slick, fast, and easy to use, but with so many problems with app extensions–and especially with it constantly peaking my CPU usage and freezing my computer–I had to give it up for the ever-so-slightly-worse Google Chrome. Chrome’s not bad–especially since I use Google Images so damn much–but it’s a little, um, clunky? Yeah that’s probably it. Clunky. When it’s quick, it’s really quick; mostly it’s a little better than the IE 8 beta.

There are customizable themes, though! Just like Opera’s different skins, except it involves manually removing and replacing .dll files! Yes!

So long, Luke

I hate waking up to find out one of my heroes is dead. Paul Newman succumbed last night to his lengthy battle with cancer.

Kudos, Paul. Your spark made our lives brighter for a good long while.

My favorite Man vs Wild is the one where Bear’s face explodes.

Heard prior: "...starring David Allan Grier!"

I don’t know how many of you are fans of the Discovery Channel show, Man vs Wild, but I love it. Even in the face of the “man vs hotel” fiasco, I found the show interesting and compelling. So what if he receives outside assistance? He still ate that fucking monitor lizard raw, didn’t he? That at least deserves a little respect.

Having said all that, I have to admit that my favorite episode of Man vs Wild is the one where Bear Grylls is stung by a bee because he robbed their hive of honeycombs and neglected to cover his forehead. An “oversight”, he called it.

 Right.

Anyway, Bear proceeds to cross the desert and as he goes along, his face progressively swells as he reacts to the bee sting. This in itself isn’t funny, and the image isn’t really either; the image is just plain old unsettling.

Remember: Always decompress before returning to the surface.

I remember being actually afraid for him for about five minutes, longer than any other survival series. I actually cared about a t.v. personality’s well-being. I’m getting soft.

Why I don’t discuss the hot-button issues

It's a button. Get it?

For those of you who’ve been reading for a while, you may have noticed that I don’t discuss three of the major political and social issues in America, namely: abortion, gay marriage, and God’s prominence in our government. It’s not that I’m disinterested or ignorant of these subjects, it’s just that I don’t like to discuss them with people because of the inevitable shitrain each conversation becomes (in Texas) after bringing any of them up. I may be an asshole, but I occasionally have the good sense to keep my damn mouth shut.

I have strange justifications for stepping out of or purposefully derailing those kinds of conversations. For abortion, it’s that I don’t have a vagina or a degree in medicine, and for all intended purposes those are champion reasons. For gay marriage, my reasoning is similar: I’m not gay, nor do I ever intend to marry a gay man; I am neither a priest or a rabbi. (I’ve recently said outloud some stupidly negligent things about this topic, but apparently at least one person found them insightful.)

As for God’s place in our government or on our money, I say that I am not a legal American citizen, and therefore my slobbering heathen origin precludes me ever having anything intelligent to add to the subject. I then prove this by cracking open an expensive antique globe to find the delicious fruit inside.

There rarely is any fruit inside.

Porn and Fat People

If you look closely, well, don't look closely.

It has recently come to my attention (I just realized) that porn and fat people bring in the most hits to this blog. As a kind of experiment–in the very loosest sense–I am now preparing to write an article devoted entirely to adult video entertainment and the morbidly obese. I admit to some reservations…

I have not yet decided how to arrange this article, due in part to my crippling fear of what will surely appear in Google images when I search for “porn and fat people”. Let’s see. Hmm, it appears that the first three results are actually moderately SFW. What’s more, they’re even slightly unrepulsive. Let’s try it from another angle.

Google search for: “fat people and porn”.

Oh. Oh goodness.

That’s… I, uh, haven’t the words. I knew something awful would happen. The least offensive image of the top three…

Take that, libido!

…proves it.  There’s a definite point at which irony reverses itself and terrible things happen. Whether that sentence refers to me or the appetite-ruiner above, or both, is yet to be said. That fucking picture isn’t helping things, either. What bothers me most is that she’s obviously posed–there’s even something stuffed between her…leg, or whatever…and her windward side–eating a whole cake in her no-doubt sturdy undergarments, but looks actually impatient for the picture to be taken so she can put down the fork and grab two meaty fistfuls of icing and diabetic shock.

Let’s move on,

Some of the top search phrases for this blog involve porn actresses and fists, or some combination of the two along with “anus”. I’m not sure, but I don’t think I’ve written that much on the subject of anal sex, although I know I have discussed it or referenced it on a few separate occasions, and have in fact used both–okay, fine. I talk about butt sex too much.

Butt sex. There.

Porn can be pretty entertaining sometimes, but it has its major drawbacks. Most people know the whole “I don’t want to see some guy’s balloon knot staring me in the eye while I’m trying to test the mic” line. Despite its lameness, that’s a fairly true statement. Another one would be “I don’t want to look at some dirty chick with a pimply ass who looks like she left the kids at 7-11 so she could go screw herself some crank money”. That’s a turn-off for a couple reasons, but primarily it’s because they always look tired and strung-out, or worse, when they look like they’ve been tricked into it. Maybe I’m too sensitive, but that’s a little much.

On the other hand,

Some women would have to try pretty goddamned hard to turn anyone off. Sadly, my ideal porn scene involves two women who are actual actresses, one who is now an actual dead actress, and two of me, which will never come to pass, since Fate shit on me when I sold my necromancing kit to buy a cloning lab. Although, if I could clone an army of Megan Foxes, I could use them to protect me (with sex) from the other army of Megan Foxes who want to kill me (with more sex, and maybe katanas, because evidently I think Evil Megan Fox would all be ninja).

"Throwing stars? No, this is where I keep my car keys."

A note on the history of the blog.

So I recently passed the 10,000-hit mark on my sad, sad blog without even really noticing. This in itself is not that important. Guys like Perez Hilton get 10,000 hits while they’re in the middle of posting, never mind over six months.

No, the important thing is that 4,327 of those hits can be attributed to a single post. 43% (oh yeah, I can move the shit out of a decimal) of my blog’s entire traffic came from an incredibly racist post explicitly about fat people. Weird, huh? No, what’s weird is that the second-biggest drawer of hits is also about fat people.

What the hell?

The War on Drugs gets stupid.

I’m sure a lot of you know my stance on illicit drugs. For those that don’t, it’s basically like this: if it can be controlled and enjoyed responsibly, it should not be illegal. That’s it.

Salvia Divinorum is a plant sold in the US as an “herbal alternative”, the smoking of which has psychoactive properties of its own. You smokes it, it gets you high.

Now, it should be noted that smoking salvia is not even remotely fun. Five minutes of whooshing in your ears and blurred vision followed immediately by headache and nausea is roughly what you can expect from the experience. Most people do it once or twice out of curiosity, and that’s enough for them.

There is no available data on whether salvia is dangerous to your health, but it’s probably safe to assume that it isn’t a big concern. Punching yourself in the liver is likely bad for you, but not many people party like that, and for pretty much the same reasons.

Because they like to at least be art of the Parade of Dicks, Texas is considering criminalizing the sale of salvia and its derivatives. This decision is based on…well, nothing. I guess they just want to make it illegal.

From the Dallas News:

Dr. Kurt Kleinschmidt, chief of toxicology at UT Southwestern Medical Center, said some preliminary research into salvia has emerged in the past two years, but not much clinical research into the drug’s long-term effects has been done.

That’s why Mr. Anderson says it’s important to outlaw the plant.

Right. Well, I guess if you want to party in a way that won’t get you arrested, but isn’t really any fun anyway, salvia is your answer for at least a little while. I don’t recommend it.

The time is now!

My article on the six vigilantes is up on Cracked’s front page right now. It’s been noticeably edited, cleaned up a little, but otherwise it’s the same article. More importantly, it marks the first time anyone has ever been unfortunate enough to give me money for my humor writing.

The article follows on the heels of one by a guy named Ian Fortey, who is apparently the second coming of Christ in internet humorist form. His article, Five Real-World Supervillians, ran yesterday and, like everything the fucking guy touches, it was a smash. Hopefully, mine will at least be comparable.

Anyway, go read the article. Read it. Like it. Digg it.

Everyone you know is going to die.

So I went home to Moulton* today and hung out with the family. My stepdad’s mother was there, and my brother came around later on, so it was kind of small affair. No bouncers, or anything. Very few, if any, strippers.

I also went, as usual, to visit my buddy Rae and talk shop about a few things. While there, he was explaining something to me about how a starter solenoid works, when I noticed he was a little more out of breath than usual. It reminded me of a while back, when I first began to notice that Rae is actually getting old.

It’s not that I can’t understand people who live past thirty, or anything like that, but Rae just turned 64 this past July. When I met him five years ago, he had long, wild blond hair and wore enough Native American jewelry to costume every single back-up dancer at a Cher concert. When I found out that he was about to turn the big Six Oh, I couldn’t for the life of me reconcile those two things in my mind: the wild-eyed Vietnam vet I hung around with, and my own preconceived notion of what a sixty year-old person should look and act like. He just seemed so damned young. Perfect eyesight, quick, clear, modern speech, and a mind like the proverbial steel trap.

I kind of pieced it together today, when I noticed his speech is beginning to slur, and his encyclopedic knowledge of cars is beginning to blend together. It could be his medications–God knows he takes enough–but I think life has caught up to him again**, maybe for the final time. He could very well be at the beginning stage of the inevitable ten or twenty-year downhill slide. Hell, it could be sooner than that. Who really knows?

Anyway, the point is I had one of those moments today where you realize with over-sharp clarity that every single person you have ever known is going to die. Many of them will go before you do, while many more will wait (perhaps spitefully) until you’ve passed. I couldn’t give any less of a damn about who would smile at my funeral, but I absolutely do not want to watch my friends die. And, because I feel so strongly about it, I’ll probably outlive every last one of the lucky sons-of-bitches.

*Why did I make a 140 mile round-trip just so I could hang out for a few hours? Because my mom made meatloaf, that’s why.

**I say life caught up to him “again” because of the sheer insanity of the first fifty years of it. If I get his express permission, I might write about his life, maybe share some of his stories with all of you. Some of them are nigh on poetic.