UNIVERSAL DONOR: MA VIE EN CROUTE
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Universal Donor
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Tuesday, August 30, 2005
It's been a while since I enumerated some of my pet peeves in detail. It seemed unnecessary after I put out the Fear Not Guide to Life, which is essentially an encyclopedic compendium of my pet peeves disguised as a self-published Hints From Heloise. But here's a short bunch of interrelated things that tweak my beak.
PEEVE: People who state their incorrect personal beliefs as fact. I have two examples of this one. The first I encountered while taking a quiz on the MythBusters website -- I love me some MythBusters. Here's the text that grabbed me: In September 2004, Derek Kieper, a senior at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, wrote an editorial for the Daily Nebraskan entitled Individual Rights Buckle Under Seat Belt Laws in which he asserted that "as laws become increasingly strict for seat belts, fewer people will respond positively by buckling up in response to the laws. There seems to be a die-hard group of non-wearers out there who simply do not wish to buckle up no matter what the government does. I belong to this group."So. First of all, though it's not polite to speak ill of the dead, the guy who wrote the editorial is a freaking spasmodic dipshit moron. It's the worst kind of "editorial," where somebody who knows nothing barfs out a prescribed number of column inches of utter caca. Read the full editorial at your own risk. The sentence from the quote that really bugged me was: "as laws become increasingly strict for seat belts, fewer people will respond positively by buckling up in response to the laws." What? Huh? What are you talking about? Shouldn't that be prefaced by something like " I predict that..." or "If all other Americans feel the same way I do..."? This guy's argument basically tells me that he's a Virgo. Or to put it less astrologically, he bucks at authority just because it's authority. Which is another peeve of mine. PEEVE: People who buck at any perceived authority. not to mention: PEEVE: People who say offensive things in public way too loud. I'm talking about this guy, an actual friend of yours, who in a crowded restaurant does this: GUY: That girl over there is super fat and ugly. YOU: Um, wow. Could you keep your voice down a little bit? GUY: WHAT? HUH? DID YOU SAY I SHOULD QUIET DOWN? HUH? YOU: You are an asshole. 'Nuff said. Okay, but backing up a bit, a corollary to the first peeve above is: PEEVE: People with extremist views who really think that their opinion is shared by a majority of the world. Example two is John Bolton, super asshole supreme, the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who looks like Bruce Dern with shingles. Speaking in 1994 at an event called the "Global Structures Convocation" he says: "If you think that there is any possibility in this country that a 51,000-person bureaucracy is going to be supported by most Americans, you better think again." [source] He's referring to the United Nations (great nominee, President Fucktard). This is such bizarre wishful thinking. How can you hold extremist views and not know they're extremist? Maybe it's a kind of invocation, like "if I say it out loud it will become true." Or maybe it's an attempt at mass suggestion: "If I say it out loud to the people, they will start to think as I say they think." Granted, his is not the most extreme viewpoint ever, and it's certainly boring. But it's just a matter of degree that separates his statement from the following: "If you think there's any chance in this country that a pot-legalization bill would fail to pass both houses, you're crazy; Americans just won't tolerate the demonization of hemp or marijuana any longer." No matter how you may feel about the issue, you recognize that a pro-legalization stance is extreme. And finally, for now: PEEVE: Message boards; idiots Forums and message boards are the devil because they give regular old boring stupid idiot people the impression that their opinion, anecdote, or viewpoint is valued, wanted, or valid, when of course it is none of the above. Can you imagine how many discussion forums there must be on the web? Can you imagine the sheer volume of disk space taken up by posts to the same? If you took all the ones and zeros that represented those posts, they would stretch to the horsehead nebula and back, and then you could make a really long rope out of those ones and zeros and then make a lasso with which you could corral all those fucksucking omnitards and hurl them into a FUCKING BLACK HOLE. Here's an example of what I'm talking about, from a forum on (again) the MythBusters site, the nominal topic being the myth of poppy seed bagels causing positive results on drug tests (and every error [sic], naturally): AAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGHHHH!!! I just want to put out my eyes when I see shit like that. There are soooo many things wrong with that, if I were making up a fake example of a bad message board, I would reject this as utterly unbelievable. Gabble. I should really have a seven-second delay (like the Howard Stern Show, or Saturday Night Live when somebody like Andrew Dice Clay was on (Ha! Remember the Diceman?)) to protect myself. If I saw something that would haunt me forever with its badness, the NBC censors in my head would hit a button, I'd jump back seven seconds to the moment before I was exposed to the badness, and I'd avoid it somehow. This next bit doesn't fit, exactly, not being a peeve, but: I love my aunt because she and I share many of the same peeves. We were talking about idiots and she expressed almost word for word a concept I wrote in the FNGL, which I know she hasn't read. I can't remember how she said it but my statement, listed under "Argument," went: "There are certain things that you believe are matters of opinion which are actually matters of fact." After she said her version of this and I howled in agreement, she mentioned what she calls "First Amendment Opinions," that is, completely uninformed opinions that people love to share because it's a free country. This weekend we were talking to a family friend who said he hated musicals, but he loved Rent and Le Miz. She said something like "your opinion is not particularly valuable in this context, K____, because you have already said that you don't like musicals. Why would we listen to, or care about, the musicals you do like? This is like: if you said you didn't like beer and then tried to tell us which beer you do like. it's like: who cares? 'I hate beer but I love Budweiser,' well, obviously your opinion is crap." Woo! I love my aunt. Okay. I know this was a stupid post with more formatting than content, I know it's been too long since my last post for this to be the case. I'm sorry. You deserve better. But seriously, it could be worse. At least I spellcheck, he said pathetically. Tuesday, August 16, 2005
The peeps at Go Fug Yourself pointed it out first, but this Black Eyed Pea named Fergie is slowly turning into a ugly man. I caught glimpses of some BEP videos on MTV or VH1 and I swear, she is now the prettiest man in the group. Nah, I know she's a chick; she used to be on Kids, Incorporated and back then, at least, she was named stacy, and despite some notable exceptions, that's a girl's name (and that picture was a little androgyne, wouldn't you say? Maybe. So what's your point? I don't know, shut up!). Also, if you do a Google image search, you should see proof that she's got boobies. Which doesn't mean anything, I know.
Hey, do you guys prefer the term "shemale" or "he/she"? I like the latter because I think I heard Samson on Carnivàle use it to refer to one of those freakshow acts where a guy grooms the left half of his body to look vaguely female (long hair, shaved legs, falsies) while growing a beard and wearing men's clothes on the right side, but I also like "he/she" because if you say it right ("hey you heeshy bastard!") it sounds like an anti-Semitic slur that's fallen out of favor. That's weird, maybe. But not as weird as some of the shit you'll find while searching Google for picture of a freakshow he/she: This is just a disturbing image. Don't click it if you don't like dirty furry sex art. Yuck. It's always been my stated policy not to blog about the weather, mostly because it's lazy. I fight the urge to do it every dead of summer and cold hard core of winter; it's so very hard to think of anything else when your entire body is filmed with filthy New York City Subway Sweat or when your nuts have just become furry blue ice nodules. But I must blog about something else, or become simply awful. So I'll blog about the symptoms or results of the season instead. Like how the summer emboldens waterbugs to emerge from their damp hiding places. See, they hide where it's wet and muggy, so when your entire apartment is as damp as your mom's underpants at a Beatles concert back in 1964, the roaches can't tell the difference and they wander stupidly into my space GO AWAY BUGS. I know you guys like epic tales of battles against giant cockroaches, and happily or sadly, I've got another one. Midnight last night, I'm again at my Mom's house. Mom and I are frying up some chicken thighs for me to eat cold while I'm cat-sitting this week. I like cold chicken, so we make like sixteen delicious thighs. She's teaching me her technique so I can prepare my own in the future. Yummers. Mom spices hers with garlic powder, thyme, salt and pepper -- the secret recipe, I never would have guessed, especially the OH MY FUCKING GOD IS THAT A BUG LOOK LOOK LOOK STEP ON IT KILL IT KILLIT KILLIT! (that's me, in a high-pitched whisper tuned to convey extreme panic without waking my slumbering stepfather). Mom looks down at the floor, but in the wrong place, and she goes "where?" even as this Volkswagen-sized arthropod cools its jets and twiddles its antennae not three feet from her person. I dunno what it is, but other people seem to have a hard time seeing bugs. Me on the other hand? If there is a bug within twenty foot of me, I see it, unless it's, like, exactly on my six. I can visually sweep a floorspace for foreign brown ellipses in less than a second. But Mom is staring a foot to the left of the monster and she can't see it. I point and squeal IT'S RIGHT THERE AAARRGRGGGGLARGLE! and she finally gets her radar tuned. KILLLLLL ITTTTT!!!! I'm hissing, and she heroically stomps at it, but I can sense her trepidation. (Later she admits that, clad as she was in sandals, she was a little afraid that it would crawl onto her tootsies, which I can attest is an awful experience.) The bug runs away, totally missed, totally unscathed. I see where it went and I keep it in view. It is my experience that, when relying on someone else to murder a bug for me, if I don't do this, the putative exterminator will say shit like "he's gone" or "I don't know where he went" as if this were an acceptable outcome of the situation, as if we could all just go on living with that thing still pitterpattering around the domicile, alive and clicking. Argh! So I keep an eye on it while she roots around under the kitchen sink. "What are you doing?" I say, "Kill it!" "I'm getting the bug spray" she says. "That shit doesn't work!" "Sure it does," she insists. "No! You have to stomp it!" "It works, you'll see. Where'd he go?" I point to his current little hidey place. She gives a blast and then goes "Eeep!" as it changes directions and runs behind her. By now I've teleported a good ten feet away, but this thing is so big that there's no danger I'll lose track of it. And indeed, there it is. "OH MY GOD THERE! ON THE FRIDGE!" I practically weep. It's scaling the handle of the refrigerator, crossing the horizontal gap to the freezer's handle. It's less than two feet from my chicken, sizzling on the stove. I notice something that I noticed the other week when I zapped the bug with a handful of soap: after a zap from the Raid, its wings are poking out from under its wing covers, which gives my mom the same fantods it gave me: is this fucker gonna start flying around? She sprays the bug again, enveloping him in a cloud that would kill a human baby. The bug falters a little, as if to say "My word. Something smells funny in here." But then! He falls to the floor! Mom's into the hunt now, not taking her eyes off him as she whispers at me (so he won't hear her plan) "I need something! Um! To hit him! Paper! Newspaper! Magazine!" I grab an issue of People (she has a subscription. Why? Even she doesn't know. She hates it.) off the butcher block and roll it into a bug bludgeon, which I hand off to her like a relay baton. She advances on his position. And what now? He's crawling up the other side of the fridge. What is this shit? Some kind of atavistic instinct, climb a tree to escape a predator? Isn't that more likely primate behavior? Why is a bug displaying vertebrate instincts? Ah forget it. I'd rather not know. WHAP! She wings him, or the wind of her swat blows him back to the floor. He zooms under the freestanding cabinet we use as a pantry. I grab the Raid from the counter and lay down a line of poison to keep him from escaping on the eastern side of the cabinet. "Damn, he's fast," Mom says with amazement and... admiration? Come on, Ma, keep your head in the game! Do not admire the enemy! There's a tense twenty seconds where we don't see the fucker. He's hiding, playing dead, or dying. I get the lantern-battery flashlight and from a safe distance illuminate the dusty underspace. He's there, twitching in throes of some kind. Or else he's dancing, mocking our useless weapons and pitiful attempts at predation. But a direct zap from the spray can flushes him out, and Mom swoops in with a vengeance. What follows is vicious, vulgar, and frightening. I can't see the bug because she's blocking my view with her body, but Mom just hammers at the floor with that rolled-up People, again and again going WHAP! WHAP! WHAP! WHAP! WHAP! WHAP! WHAP! WHAP! WHAP! WHAP! until it reminds me of nothing so much as that scene in Fight Club where Brad Pitt pulps Jared Leto's pretty face into a permanently mangled mass of brutalized flesh. WHAP! WHAP! WHAP! WHAP! And I'm like "Ease down, Mom, ease down" Like Michael Biehn in Aliens after Ripley runs out of ammo but keeps firing her gun, clickity clickity click. It's over. Some celebrity's face (Tom Cruise? Matthew Perry?) is ruined. Maybe my chicken is, too, either overcooked or doused in bug poison. But the bug is done for sure, smeared into a million brown pieces on my mom's kitchen floor. Dead again. Donors: 2, Bugs: 0. Wednesday, August 03, 2005
It's August and the entire city smells of bin juice. At least, I think that's what they call it -- last summer I read an article about Sanitation Workers' lingo (e.g. disco rice = maggots) and I'm pretty sure "bin juice" is what they call the liquid residue at the bottom of a garbage truck after you empty it of its solid contents. It is as putrid a fluid as Jabba the Hut's diarrhea. Woof! So anyway, that's what the city smells like. The restaurants put out their trash at night but when the air outside hovers above 85 degrees all night the sidewalk acts like a grilltop and those hot bags of meat tailings and liquefying vegetable matter squirt out their essence before they get picked up the following dawn, and it is too humid for the juices to evaporate or dry out or anything so the ground in front of any restaurant is slick and vomitous and you can only imagine the festival of roiling vermin that danced upon the sickening slick the night before.
Speaking of which, I had an awful encounter last night. I was at my Mom's house (air conditioning, yo -- yesterday it was still 94 when I left work) last night, slumbering peacefully, when the need to urinate seized me in the wee small hours of the night. I stumbled to the lavatoire, flipped on the light -- aigh! bright! -- and sat down to take a whiz (I don't trust my standing aim when I'm half-asleep). Just as I was about to loose a sleepy stream, A FUCKING GIANT COCKROACH ZOOMED OUT FROM BEHIND THE TOILET, running between my goddamn feet like he didn't give a shit. I said "holy fuck!" in a nighttime voice and danced away from the toilet, naked and defenseless. I'm so fucking glad I was naked, though, because OH MA GAH can you imagine if he had wandered out on the same path and I had had my boxers around my ankles? Oh fuck what if he had crawled into my boxers AHHHHHHHHHGGGGGGGHHH!!!!! But so I danced, like I said, away from the toilet, but the stupid bug didn't, like, run away -- he just sort of wandered in crazy confused circles without fear of foot-smashing. Well, he was right about that because ain't NO WAY I'm crushing a water bug with my big flat bare feet BBBBLLLLAARRRGGGG. But these days I'm a tiny bit more controlled in situations like this, so instead of teleporting to a different area code and swearing off using that bathroom for the rest of my life, I peeked back at the toilet to see if the stupid bug was still there. And sure enough, his hulking chitinous idiocy was still loitering at the base of the bowl, like nice camouflage, you hexapedal doofus. I learned long ago that bug sprays like Raid don't do anything but clear a New York City bug's sinuses; they laugh at you and do a little jig, but they don't look any worse for the wear. HOWEVER. Soap -- regular soap, or shampoo, or dishsoap especially -- will just completely murderize a bug. I think I first heard about this from The Straight Dope when I was a kid, and it stuck with me. At my house I always keep a spray bottle filled with soapy water, but as I was away from home, I had to improvise. I took two squirts of handsoap into my palm, added some water, stirred it with my finger, and flung it, Byung-Hyun Kim-style, at the brown monster. He sat there a bit, like "so what," but then -- then! -- he was like "whoa, feeling a little woozy" and he started to wander away from the terlet, and he stuck out his wing for a sec, giving me an instant pre-infarction spazzy panic attack thing as I thought he might take to the air in a final death flight into my face, but the wing just stuck out of his back all crazy and he limped under a cabinet to die. I did not check this morning, but I know he lays there still. Dead, motherfucker. Fuck you. |
OTHER REVIEWS: John from Cincinnati Menomena LATEST BOOK REVIEWS: The Game Moneyball One-Upsmanship Siddhartha You need the Fear Not Guide to Life. Buy it already. ($4) Now available! The Broomfield Variations CD ($10) or go to The UD Store 
MY IMAGINARY GIRLFRIENDS Chan Marshall Rotem of the IDF Eleanor Friedberger Amy Goodman Bernardine Dohrn ('69) Maya Rudolph Joanna Newsom Imogen Heap Caroline Dhavernas Shana Rae Ray DISALLOWED FOREVER "I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you!" - "from whence" - "...the exception that proves the rule" - any use of the question "spit or swallow?" - the phrase "drop trou" - fake-o reviewer verbs: "penned" for wrote "helmed" for directed "lensed" for whatever - "expat" - the euphemism "passed away" - pronouncing merci beaucoup as "mercy buckets!" (see also: "grassy-ass!") PET PEEVES "confinscated" - trying children "as adults" - "drownded" |
