The campaign to recall oversize novelty Mayor Mark Funkhouser turned in 13,000 new signatures to the city clerk yesterday. Apparently, the city clerk has to work on holidays, probably because some bitch supervisor keeps denying her vacation requests. Anyway, those signatures are on top of 7,400 valid signatures turned in earlier this month, so things look statistically grim for Big & Tall embarrassment M. Funkhouser and his magnificent First Lady G. Squitiro. Funkhouser tells KMBC Channel 9 "If anything, I haven't fought hard enough. I haven't been aggressive enough. I'm only going to ramp it up." Pretty tough talk! On the other hand, while he's getting all aggro about the recall, he has managed to build a consensus of people who basically hate his administration. As Tony's Kansas City points out this morning, there weren't a whole lot of groups out there pushing back against the recall effort this time around.
As I learned from Encyclopedia Brown mysteries, one single counter-factual slip-up can mean the difference between a successful triple murder and a long stretch in jail -- or a long stretch in "gaol," as they call it in the cheeky British version of Encyclopedia Brown, "Encyclopædia Browne." That's why it's so important for triple murderers like Bugs Meany to know that the Hindenberg was not full of "explosive helium" and that heavy objects don't fall faster than lighter objects. So when Gloria Squitiro tells The New York Times, wrongly, that her expulsion from City Hall by the city council was because "The establishment saw a formidable team... and they wanted to break it up," the inescapable conclusion is that GLORIA SQUITIRO IS GUILTY OF MURDER! How did Encyclopædia Browne know??? (Turn your monitor upside down for the answer).
"Meth lab" is no longer an acceptable punchline for a joke. So this federal grand jury has indicted 22 area residents for alleged involvement with the theft of $22 million of allergy medicine, an important chemical constituent for meth labs, the moonshine stills of the 21st century. The Roscoe P. Coltraines who made the arrests, probably by cutting off Coy and Vance Duke before they could reach the county line in their racist muscle car, were probably just trying to help Boss Hogg get the deed to the Duke family farm. Here is a picture of Coy and Vance Duke shirtless:
You know what it takes to sell real estate? It takes brass balls to sell real estate: Some city council members are on-board with this whole awesome 1,000-room downtown hotel plan. Maybe they really love "staycations," a douchetarded portmanteau generated by untalented travel writers to describe a phenomenon that sounds like it should be happening but actually isn't. The Kansas City Convention & Visitors Association says Kansas City has lost $4 billions of dollars to rivals like Denver and bitch-ass Indianapolis by not having a hotel close to a convention center, which is a lot of money whether you look at it as 4,000,000,000 one-dollar bills, or just one big oversized novelty check for $4 billion. You could really walk around feeling like a big-shot with that thing. Anyway. I WONDER HOW KANSAS CITY WILL PAY FOR SUCH A HOTEL. That's non-rhetorical, you guys, can you solve this mystery? The first person to respond with the correct answer, "tax-exempt bonds," wins this beautiful collectible porcelain bisque figurine of the late G.G. Allin, a precious heirloom your family will treasure forever:
GET THEM TO SIGN ON THE LINE THAT IS DOTTED: The 2009 performance of the Actors Theatre is David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, so I'll take this opportunity to reiterate that if someone mounted a production of this play starring talented 8-year-old children, and tickets to the performance cost $1,000 each, I would sell a whole lot of my stuff in order to attend opening night. My only stipulation is that the production has to use the revised 1992 version of the script produced for the film version, which added Alec Baldwin's character Blake. In fact, if somebody could just videotape their 8-year-old kid performing that one scene and put it up on YouTube, I'd be happy:
A little kid visiting the White House wanted to know if President Barack Obama's haircut felt like his own. So Obama bent over and let the kid pat his head. SO ADORABLE! And this is absolutely going to slay my coworker Nadia. When she gets distracted by this photo and starts making the "precious cooing" noises she always makes over the President, I'm going to snatch her wallet out of her purse. When she gets to the end of this sentence, it's already TOO LATE.
IT'S A BABY DAMN ELEPHANT! This baby damn elephant fucking owns you, motherfuckers. SO FUCKING CUTE. He was born in Antwerp on Sunday. Nadia wasn't carrying any cash today, but I think I can sell her Social Security card.
Your Pocketbook and YOU, oh, haha, you carry a "pocketbook":The Senate passed some new credit card legislation that protects consumers from, let's say, themselves. I really don't feel like going into the details today, unless those details are completely made up. Consumers were asking for all the abuse the banks administered and I don't have any sympathy or, according to the DSM IV, feelings of empathy, remorse, or regard for the safety of others. I have a condition.
Basically, if you filled out the pre-approved application during the salad days when credit was cheap and delicious pork sandwiches hung heavy on the vine, and now you're upset that your credit card company has made its due dates into a moving target, try to focus on the fact that you specifically asked for the interest-rate-based abuse they're heaping on you and your bank account, and there is no "safeword" for this particular BDSM financial arrangement. ATTENTION LADIES: I'm debt free, plus I can palm a basketball, if you know what I'm saying (with my right hand, my left one is malformed and tiny, like a doll's hand. But still).
The Kansas City Star has this timely business article on the slow death of the independent bookstore. Timely, because I finally got all my various payday loans and car title loans paid off, thanks to God and the Amazon Kindle. With my new clean slate and slightly better credit rating, I'm planning to take out a loan for a huge truck. The dealer says I'll be able to make the payments easy, so I'm not too worried about that whole thing. Like the free second Snuggie that comes with your order of the first Snuggie, paying off that rapidly accumulating debt and getting approved for a Ford F-250 also came with the free bonus of winning a bet with Justin Kendall and Peter Rugg.
Google News was down this morning. AGAIN. My early-morning work-flow is so firmly established at this point that instead of writing Daily Briefs, I left some trouble-maker comments on The Kansas City Star's Midwest Voices blog.
Midwest Voices blogger Erni Meade posted an entry expressing horror over a Barry Road bicycle lane.
Finally, hippie socialist and Kansas City Star columnist E. Thomas McClanahan took a few minutes from his busy schedule of advocating for the legalization of marijuana to say some unflattering things about Nancy Pelosi, which you can read here. I totally agreed with E. Tom:
In space, no one can hear you bitch: The only people allowed to go into space are extraordinarily rich people like Mark Cuban who can actually pay Russians to launch them into orbit, or the astronauts in government space programs, who are qualified via a lot of fancy, rarefied knowledge such as how to fly jets and how to fuse four protons into one single alpha particle. Fat, farty-smelling old Earth-bound you and handsome, Aqua-Velva-scented me will never have the opportunity to escape the gravity well because we're all too busy with our shards of mastodon bones scraping survival incomes from the hides of the telemarketing companies we work for.
But it's axiomatic that everyone wants to bitch about their work, no matter how insanely priveleged they are. Get KMBC Channel 9 sports anchor Len Dawson alone for a beer, and he'll probably just gripe about all the prank phone calls he gets from prancing WDAF stallion Phil Witt and having to call the police twice a week to request Silver Alerts whenever Larry Moore wanders out of the building.
NASA astronaut Don Pettit, who should really SHUT UP, bitches like a small, bepigtailed girl to National Geographic about having to suck beverages from a straw in free-fall. "You feel like an insect sucking juices out of another insect," he says. Such are the horrible conditions on both the space shuttle and in any given McDonald's, a chain of Scottish restaurants I discovered recently on a trip. It's not like NASA is requiring astronauts in orbit to audit an entire quarter's worth of expense reports in one day because there's a regional vice president coming to the office in three days. That's your job. All Pettit has to do at work is have incredible adventures while sipping Tang through a straw. Anyway, Pettit invented a cup astronauts can use in space, which he did in space, Apollo 13-style, from available materials. The end. Although I intended to append a complaint about having to sit in a really uncomfortable chair while typing up descriptions of Phil Witt saying "Hey, Jerky," into the phone in his smooth, velvety news anchor voice. But who has time these days with all this damn straw-sucking we have to do?
Closed captioning for my inner monologue: "Two of Kansas City's iconic fountains are coming off the grid -- the electric grid," says this story in The Kansas City Star. Midway through the wet and exciting water flume ride of that sentence, I tapped my chin and said to myself, "Off the grid??? What grid could they possibly be referring to? I seem to remember a two-dimensional grid in the 1982 Disney film Tron on which diode-suited competitors raced fanciful 'light cycles,' but I don't recall the presence of any computer-generated fountains there... I guess the Master Control Program didn't see the aesthetic utility in decorative landscaping accents, HAHAHAHA! Wait! What's this at the end of the clause? An emdash??? Curiouser and curiouser! Why, here's a direct article -- 'the.' How strange! Just when I thought I'd reached the conclusion of a sentence about a mysterious grid, it continues with an additional noun phrase! 'Electric.' But this is only the penultimate word, as I can see that it's followed by another word just as plainly as I can see this Jostens brand high school class cockring on my penis. What's this? 'Grid.' The. Electric. Grid! Well, alternate my current, Matt Campbell, how could I not have seen that coming?"
Anyway, the article continues discussing the installation of solar-powered water pumps on city fountains, but I'll spare you the rest of the exciting inner monologue I experienced while I was reading it. WHY NOT HAVE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE WITH READING?
EconoMarketCommerceWatchNewsTicker or something: I have literally no idea if the economy is improving or getting worse. This article says things are pretty bad, but I read the news every day, and there are so many contradictory arguments and statistics flying back and forth that I'd really rather just read something I already have a prefabricated and irrefutable opinion about, such as this sentence I'm writing now about how director Kevin Smith ruins everything in the world that's good by liking it. The biggest surprise about this interview in which he raves about Star Trek, a movie I used to think was great until five minutes ago, is that Smith actually gets through the whole thing without making a predictably profane and empty-headed reference to somebody fucking his wife. OH, WAIT:
"I'd watch [Chris Pine] do anything," Smith said with a laugh. "I'd watch that dude have sex with my wife at this point. He's such a good actor."
BARF. What an incredible journey it's been since the start of the previous paragraph, which was about the economy if you'll recall. Now I feel complete and total despair for the country and the tattered, stinky remains of our collective innocence. Goodbye, cruel world.
Here comes the Pulitzer Prize Patrol with a balloon bouquet and a giant novelty check: KMBC Channel 9 scored quite a journalistic coup with this interview of KMBC Channel 9 anchor Larry Moore, in which he absolutely blows the lid off tomato gardening. How did they manage to get that interview? Journalism! YOU HAVE NO IDEA how deep this "summer tomato" story goes. If KMBC Channel 9 keeps following the money or the trail of organic fertilizer or whatever, they're going to uncover more than they ever bargained for. I managed to get an interview with a top-secret anonymous Pitch insider named "Shmustin Shmendall" who says this "home grown tomato" business is all a cover for some pretty serious shit that important people will kill to keep quiet. By executing an SQL injection hack, we gained access to to KMBC's Web server and issued some shell commands and uncovered this Larry Moore blog entry where he lays out the whole tomato garden plot. WARNING: You will see things you can't un-see. 8MM, you guys.
ONE HUNDRED BAGS OF POPCORN!!!!! It's been quite a season for heavy-duty soul-searching and a reappraisal of priorities. I used to be an atheist. Then, after a bad public huffing experience, subsequent arrest and the publication of my spraypaint-covered mugshot in The Kansas City Star, I became a born-again Christian. At the time, I was really mad at Mike Hendricks for printing that mugshot, but now I can say through gritted teeth and a similarly gritted sense of suppressed resentment: Mike, I forgive you.
I used to think I didn't care about the Kansas City Royals. Now I worry about them when they go on the road.
Finally, I used to know the formula for Star Trek: Think up a crew of effete, prancing tea drinkers who have no sense of humor, quote Shakespeare and act ostentatiously polite to each other and then hire the wimpiest available actors to play them. I'm still putting the finishing touches on a hypothetical Aristotelian dialectic in which you suck in a lungful of albuterol bronchodilator from your inhaler and then in this sneering nasally voice, you say, "Captain Sisko could totally kick your stupid ass," and then I say, "Rene Auberjonois, LeVar Burton, Wil Wheaton and Robert Picardo would all lose trying to kick their own asses. Game. Set. Match. Checkmate. Uno. Basketball." That's a rule of basketball, right? You have to say "Basketball!" or your shot doesn't count? Anyway, as if I hadn't already won this argument forcefully enough, this picture is the rhetorical equivalent of strangling you with your own intestines, Story of Ricky-style:
Mouth-breather in a miniskirt FTW. I mean, FTL. As you're probably aware at this point, against all probability, somebody has actually made a good Star Trek movie. There was not one single quotation of Shakespeare. Nobody had an evil twin. There were no lengthy speeches during which the characters said overly nice things about each other. The movie actually mocked Star Trek conventions by flamboyantly killing a guy in a red shirt and having Kirk fuck a green chick. HAHA, I'm a movie critic. I wear sweaters and seriously concern myself with what your mom would enjoy watching at the theater. Here is a picture of me:
CRIMEWATCH! According to Kansas City police and Federal drug authorities, in 2007, a dude named James Everson entrepreneurially broke into Aventis Pharmaceuticals, Inc. in Kansas City and stole 110 pounds of pseudoephedrine during Super Bowl Roman Numeral 41. Once a popular over-the-counter allergy medicine, pseudoephedrine is now used exclusively and solely in clandestine meth labs to make crystal methamphetamine, period. Which Everson allegedly did, like $6 million Americos worth. And now he's in jail, because that's where operating a Crystal Methery will get you. I guess from now on, he'll be synthsizing his sympathomimetic phenylethylamines in crystalline methamphetamine hydrochloride jail!!! I love that joke; the clumsier you make it, the funnier it gets. It's like magic. CRIMEWATCH!!!
In addition to my obesity troubles, the hepatitis I acquired from a jailhouse tattoo rig, and my homodontia (all of my teeth are mandibular lower incisors, it's weird) I have pretty bad springtime allergies, and I used to take Claritin-D to feel, y'know, healthy. Or at least as healthy as this old, jaundiced, diabetic ex-convict with an unfair advantage in the ripping-and-tearing-meat department is able to feel on a good day. But since the sole effective ingredient of Claritin-D, pseudoephedrine, is now a controlled substance, you have to present a birth certificate and fill out a bunch of forms before they let you buy any, just like in fascist Britain. But still, America is the BEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD if you include handicaps for math scores, health insurance availability, gun homicides, prison population, etc. etc. USA!!!!!
I miss the old, stupider Funkhouser: So, the petition effort to recall Kansas City Big & Tall Mayor Mark Funkhouser came up short by something like 5,000 signatures. That's pretty good! On the other hand, now that there's a serious recall effort underway, Funkhouser's political profile, largely defined by doing or saying dumb things in public, has been a lot lower lately. DISAPPOINTINGLY LOW. Some time in the next two weeks, I seriously need to see the Mayor and his strap-on spouse module on national television saying gross things about how much they love cuddling or something, or I swear to god I'm signing that petition.
Obviously, I am 100 percent against any recall effort as long as Funkhouser's political instincts are being allowed the full stinky flower of their stupid expression, preferably in the form of saying or doing ridiculous crap on TV. In fact, now that I think about it, we need to be seeing a whole lot less of the mayor and a whole lot more of Gloria, because, as somebody might say to a Roman gladiator hosting a 30-minute advertising spot about buying real estate for no money down, no, Maximus, as a matter of fact we are NOT infotained. In fact, lately? Kinda' bored. The most frustrating part is that you just know that Strong Political Spouse Gloria Squitiro is saying all kinds of idiotic shit in private meetings that now gets vetoed by professional message consultants.
In closing, here is a completely true anecdote that happened Monday at my night job at the paper sack factory: A guy I barely know walked up to me while I was mopping the break room and said, "So, did you hear the BIG NEWS?" I said "Uh, no," and he continued, "Some twink ran up onstage during a Britney Spears concert and got within ten feet of her!" FIRST OF ALL, this marks the one and only time I've ever actually heard the word "twink" used in a sentence. Secondly, the way he asked me the question implied that I'd immediately know exactly what he was talking about. So he had already sized me up as a guy who follows Britney Spears news and wouldn't object to the word "twink" in casual conversation. And finally, I think it's clear to everyone that Gloria would have known immediately what "big news" he was talking about right away, and would probably have had her answer ready, complete with the gross word "twink," or a reasonable facsimile.
Dear Penthouse, I never thought these Gospels were true until it happened to me: Christian parents have always had a hard time keeping the curious, insatiable eyeballs of their children out of the Precious Moments Bible's filthy Ezekiel chapter 23, which Biblical scholars have long regarded as the "Cinemax After Dark" of the Precious Moments Bible. I'm quoting it here not as a disgusting prurient display, but as a scholarly exploration of God's adorable, pastel-colored and large-eyed Word:
19Yet she became more and more promiscuous as she recalled the days of her youth, when she was a prostitute in Egypt. 20 There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses. 21 So you longed for the lewdness of your youth, when in Egypt your bosom was caressed and your young breasts fondled.
For some context, the story is about two prostitutes named Oholah and Oholibah, whose names turn out to be Hebrew language puns about vaginas and boners, and who represent the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, respectively. The book's author (God) was really annoyed at the two kingdoms for establishing diplomatic relationships with gentile countries, and was really getting some political beefs off His chest in the form of some filthy political allegory that included nasty anogenital punsmithery. All of which begs the question, does God kiss God's mom (Mary) with that mouth? Anyway, your assignment over the weekend is to walk in the footsteps of our Lord and compose the filthiest gutter allegory you can think of about the Missouri legislature rejecting expanded health-care coverage for poor people. Tip for aspiring King James authors: Begin every sentence with "And so it came to pass..."
Daily Briefs is now for sale: Let's say you're a rich guy, or a big rich corporation, and you keep all your cash overseas in offshore havens, safely protected from U.S. taxes, thereby freeing you up to collect Lipizzaner stallions and priceless chandeliers. Pretty sweet life you've got there, Thurston, now have your man bring the car around so you can drive to your Jew-restricted golf club and eat the sandwiches of rich people, club sandwiches. As regards your offshore tax haven, Pres. Barack Obama says he wants to close all the tax loopholes that make those possible. This is really only a minor worry since a lot of congressional Democrats are rich, or have rich friends, and because Obama may not even really want to do it -- Clinton-era Secretary of Labor Robert Reich says it's strategic, and that Obama's strategy might be putting new bargaining chips on the table, strategically, for the coming health care fight with tax-haven-loving pharmaceutical and insurance companies, represented here by this drawing of the villainous "Blacky Carbon" and "Gummy Rings," the culprits who make your engine run harder:
While you can stop "Blacky Carbon" and "Gummy Rings" with a Jiffy Lube Signature Service® oil change to preserve the value and longevity of your vehicle, you can only bargain with pharmaceutical and insurance corporations by threatening to take away their tax havens. This whole entry is a proof-of-concept for my new Daily Briefs product placement advertising program, because if Jiffy Lube steps up with some advertising dollars, I'll be able to take advantage of the blood-diamond-encrusted offshore tax havens Barack Obama isn't really trying to get rid of.
Unsatisfying public transit service about to get unsatisfying-ier: I ride the bus almost every day, because it's cheaper to commute while surrounded by surfaces that are probably covered with antibiotic-resistant strains of mycobacterium tuberculosis. So when I say that the Kansas City Area Transit Authority should just go ahead and rename itself "M. Night Shyamalan's Kansas City Area Transit Authority" because of its totally unacceptable quality, I'm speaking from the experience of waiting for upwards of twenty minutes for a bus in the middle of the afternoon. And you'd think that, what with the Federal Stimulus Clearinghouse Sweepstakes Prize Patrol, Kansas City could score a balloon bouquet and an oversized novelty check for improved transit. But, like the time when you told yourself that there's no way anybody could fuck up a waffle, and that Waffle House would therefore be an OK place to get food, you would be wrong. While St. Louis scored a sweet $12 million in transit dollars in the Missouri legislature, Kansas City's sad-sack reps negotiated exactly zero dollars and zero cents for KCATA. Therefore, in June, Kansas City's bus service -- against all probability -- will become even worse than it is now. Which is OK when you think about it, since the buses are only filled with poor people trying to get to their jobs on time while avoiding contracting any flesh-eating bacterial infections by touching the surrounding surfaces.
Clay Chastain is one of Kansas City's major recurring characters, kind of our beloved "Boner" Stabone, although now that I've said that, Chastain's probably going to start ringing Pitch phones until somebody connects him with me in order to insist at stentorian length that he's way more like Kansas City's Luke Brower Seaver, the Leonardo DiCaprio character adopted by the Seavers in the last season of Growing Pains because the ratings were terrible. I couldn't find a good picture of "Boner" Stabone, so instead, The Cosby Show's "Cockroach" Bradley is pictured at right.
Anyway, in this week's episode, Chastain has come back with more of his crazy schemes -- he has a new, scaled-back light rail proposal on the table and he says he wants to work with Kansas City to make it happen. His only caveat, and it's a minor one, is that he'll rescind the whole thing if he wins his lawsuit against Kansas City w/r/t the previous voter-approved light rail plan that was overturned by the City Council. You know -- the one that had
in it. Incidentally, that image of a prancing unicorn is the first thing that pops up when you type "Clay Chastain" into Google Image Search. It's so weird.
It's been a long weekend of repetitive news about the airborne death flu and nerd movies. And if you're like me, then you're a huge fan of pun-based entertainment headlines such as "Wolverine Claws Its Way to Box Office Top," although a more nerd-oriented hed would have specifically mentioned that those claws were made from "nerdamantium," and somehow worked in a reference to boobs. After the jump, some more mean comments about nerds! Click here or on this picture of what it looks like when comic books are translated from the page into real life:
In accordance with the wishes of the National Pork Board, I've stopped saying "swine flu." I have a soft spot for vested corporate interests and trade groups and the factory-produced meat industry in particular, and I love it when those organizations literally tell me what terminology is and is not supposed to be coming out of my mouth. After the jump, some stuff about flu preparedness and Pres. Barack Obama's press conference, which is ALL VERY INTERESTING, as officially certified by this notary public:
The news anchors have all been talking in very scary voices lately. They all sound like Jigsaw, and you're handcuffed to a sink in a grimy concrete bathroom and if you want to survive, you're going to have to do something horrible, like naked-hug Larry King or some damn thing. As an antidote to the swine flu scare, all I can offer you is the serenity that comes from not talking about it. After the jump, a news roundup of items that bear no relation to stories about flu, or to each other. Click here or on America's favorite pastime, video games:
When I used to live in a fourth-story apartment, I thought that a cool invention would be a charcoal grill that you mount outside your window frame so that you could enjoy the delicious, smoky flavor of meat slow-cooked over compressed briquettes of petroleum waste without any need for a patio. The obvious disadvantage is that a window-mounted grill might fall out of the window and plunge four stories into somebody's baby carriage, incurring the wrath of consumer safety watchdogs. Still, the superiority of my imaginary invention over the real-life boxer-endorsed dual-press grill is obvious. But I present to you the unfulfilled promise of the window-mounted charcoal grill as my credential for genius, a rhetorical tactic called the "appeal to authority," hoping that it will entice you to click through the jump to the day's news roundup, which includes sports journalism about the Talladega Speedway and tips to avoid a mortgage-related confidence scam. Click here or on this award they gave me:
The generally negative valence of Daily Briefs has been pointed out to me recently, much to my shock and amazement, a hybrid emotion that dog breeders have called "shamazement." Starting today, with Super-Positive Rainbow Teddy Bear Monday, and continuing tomorrow with Happy Flower Club Ice Cream and Puppies Tuesday, you'll be seeing a whole new morning news roundup while you drink what I assume is your fifth or sixth cup of coffee, since it's not like this gets published in the wee hours of the morning.
I know it's raining outside, you guys, but that's no reason to have a gloomy case of the Mondays! This morning, I'm trading in my usual catch-phrase ("This hand lotion smells like hot dogs!") for my new cloudy Monday catch-phrase, "Life is a rainbow -- it's made of white sunlight refracted through water or any other medium with a given refractive index and dispersed into its constituent color components at different angles." I actually stole that from an inspirational office poster.
(click through for the amazing slideshow!)
To make you feel even better about life, I'll point out that ordinarily, I would have posted this actual screenshot from the Huffington Post as an example of the domination of a dying world's E.C.G. readout, the Internet, by people who I might have characterized via a multi-morpheme sobriquet incorporating the word "douche" and the derivational suffix "-tard." But instead, I'll suggest emailing the link to your mom, because it's good to stay in touch with your mom, and I genuinely think that she would find the slideshow about Hillary Clinton's brooches to be both interesting and funny! She might also like the other offerings at the Huffington Post, such as anything written by Jamie Lee Curtis or Nora Ephron.
Scary news, made cute! There's only one story in the news worth talking or thinking about, but refracting the terrifying global swine flu outbreak through the prism of Super-Positive Rainbow Teddy Bear Monday is proving to be quite a challenge! The best I could come up with was this Anne Geddes photograph of a cute li'l baby dressed up like the swine flu virus:
He's so totally adorable and orthomyxoviral! The best method I know of for imparting bad or scary news is via the medium of cute babies or, alternatively, cute puppies. For some information about the European Union advising people not to travel to North America, click on this unbelievably precious beagle puppy:
My daddy brought me to work at his office today for Take Your Daughter to Work Day. That means yesterday was Take Your Daughter to Work Day Eve. We lit up the Take Your Daughter to Work Day tree and sang Take Your Daughter to Work Day carols. I was so excited that I almost shit my pants. Can you tell that was sarcasm? If not, go read this instead because you are stupid like a little toddler. It's boring here! But a man named Peter who called me "little cutie" left his iPod on his desk and now I have a new iPod!
Another man named Scott asked me if I was going to work at a newspaper when I grow up. HAHA. That's funny because there won't be any newspapers when I grow up. So I asked him if he was going to go and work at Chipotle when all the newspapers shut down. I love Chipotle! Whenever Scott comes out of his office, I do a little pretend mime of scooping rice into a tortilla with a big spoon. Because Scott is totally going to work at Chipotle. HAHAHA! He looks so sad when I do that. Monday, my daddy tried to say we couldn't go to Chipotle for dinner, so I jumped up and down on the floor and screamed "STOP HITTING ME!" over and over again. Sometimes the neighbors downstairs call DCFS when I do that. But not on Monday night, because my daddy ran out and got Chipotle for dinner.
Now I am writing Daily Briefs, which is a job my daddy does every day. "I write funny things about the news," he said.
"You know what was funny?" I said. "When your car bumped into that man's car at Metro North. And that man punched you in the nose! That was so funny!"
Daddy said that wasn't funny at all, but it made me laugh and laugh. So I'm writing it down here.
Stupid president gets stupid dog:President Obama's daughters got a new dog named Bo. Bo looks like a dumb little fuzzball compared to my dog. MY DOG IS SO AWESOME! She is the best dog in the world. She likes to kiss my face. I like to give her cans of chili because she eats them all up and then daddy has to get out of bed a hundred times a night so she can poop outside. "I don't know why this dog is so sick!" he says. HAHAHAHA! It's because she has Dinty Moore Disease. My dog also likes Coke.
Someday, I will kill all the boys: Oh, look! In Japan, there's a girl named Eri Yoshida who plays baseball. Weekly Reader thinks I should give a shit because GIRLS CAN DO ANYTHING BOYS CAN DO, WHOOOOO! Maybe I should just move to Japan, because this is fucking America. I've seen baseball in America, and it isn't played by girls, it is played by boys who take steroids. Why do baseball players have to look like the Hulk? Because it's totally the girliest game in the whole world. If there were a game where you had to dress in a tutu and prance around on your toes and sing in a high voice about having your period, it still wouldn't be as girly as baseball. Baseball players should all wear dresses and play with dolls and have vaginas, because they look so stupid in their dumb uniforms and their little caps. I like football. Maybe girls play football in Japan, too, but in America that's a total sausage festival just like baseball.
News for Kids! At school, they have an Internet filter so kids can't look at bad stuff. All they let us look at are "News for Kids" Websites. Guess what those Websites talk about? Climate change. The people who write those Websites think kids don't care about anything else. Climate change, climate change, climate change. And Miley Cyrus interviews. But mostly climate change. Maybe they think it's not controversial, but I used to have a teacher at school who said climate change is a lie and that Jesus would never let the planet get too hot. She gave me a "C" on a quiz, so I told the principal how much she talks about stupid Jesus, and now she works at Chipotle. And I'm still SO SICK of climate change. Now I just want all the animals to die, because I am so sick of reading about it. Sorry, polar bears, it's called overexposure.
My daddy is sleeping on a couch in his office because he was up SO LATE last night. We were at the mall, and I got bored and started playing a funny game. It's called the "YOU'RE NOT MY DADDY, HELP HELP" game. It is the funnest game ever, and the way you play it is, you pretend like you can't get away from your daddy and you scream "THIS ISN'T MY DADDY! WHERE ARE YOU TAKING ME?" And then the police come and they lock your daddy up in jail and they let you color and drink Coke until mommy gets off the night shift and comes to the police station to get daddy. Tomorrow, I have to go back to school, but my new iPod has lots of Motorhead on it so I won't have to listen to a bunch of stupid bullshit about dead polar bears. The end.
HAHA, you're stupid: Inasmuch as signing the occasional internet petition, belching, and then clicking over to 4chan to look for torrents of Wolverine constitutes "affirmation," I affirmatively support the rights of gay people to get married. But you guys, the homophobic Miss California, Carrie Prejean, vs. Perez Hilton is a two-way tie for last place. Prejean lost the Miss USA pageant on Sunday, probably by voicing her opposition to gay marriage to the openly gay dumb douchebag Hilton, thereby inadvertently winning the Miss Your Grandpa's Girlfriend pageant. Right? Because your grandpa says that thing all the time about how God "didn't create Adam and Steve."
"That's not the kind of woman I want to be Miss USA," Hilton later told MSNBC, which first of all brings to mind the question about who Perez Hilton does want to be Miss USA. Probably a man. But honestly, who really, actively holds an opinion about which specific pampered, genetically blessed pageant pony gets to wear the Miss USA sash? Prejean's old-lady response just proves that she didn't really want the crown. Because if she had, she would have ground her expensively crowned teeth and asked herself what Perez Hilton wanted to hear her say. How badly do you want to wear that stupid crown? Obviously not badly enough. You guys, I have a lot of important goals in my life, and I guarantee that I'll lie, cheat and betray my own principles as a means of accomplishing those goals. Therefore, that Miss USA crown is rightfully mine. But there is some serious satisfaction in the realization that Prejean's irrational bigotry just cost her the one thing she'd been striving toward for her WHOLE ENTIRE LIFE.
Not that I'm bitter: They held the Pulitzer Prize Awards Ceremony yesterday, which is basically to journalism what the Eugene Fuller Triennial Prostate Award is to the American Urological Association. In fact, since the Eugene Fuller Triennial Prostate Award is only given out every three years, it's actually three times more prestigious than a Pulitzer -- that's buttressed not so much by the field of mathematics as by simple arithmetic. Advancements in the field of journalism, like advancements in the field of butthole health, enrich the culture by shining the bright light of empirical reason on society's darkest buttholes. Speaking of which, every year that the Pulitzer committee does not give another journalism trophy to Thomas L. Friedman is another year in which it inches a little closer to the credibility conferred by the very prestigious Eugene Fuller Triennial Prostate Award. That mustached goon has three Pulitzers, which he won for writing unbelievable sentences like this one:
I basically did all the library research for this book on Google, and it not only saved me enormous amounts of time but actually gave me a much richer offering of research in a shorter time.
CONGRATULATIONS, lazy eighth graders; you are now eligible for a Pulitzer prize. Anyway, here are this year's winners. The Pulitzer committee has now failed to give Thomas L. Friedman a trophy for the seventh consecutive year; a 10-year shutout strips him of one of the Pulitzers he's already been awarded according to a rule which sounds totally reasonable to me, am I wrong?
Aruba, Jamaica oooh I wanna take you/To Bermuda, Bahama come on pretty mama/Key largo, Montego, baby why dont we go:A Jamaican gunman took a planeload of passengers hostage at Sangster International Airport in Montego Bay, just the mention of which set off a Beach Boys "Kokomo" neural bomb in my head. It's not even the whole song, just the fucking chorus repeating over and over again, which makes me want to take whole airplanes of people hostage. The one good thing you can say about "Kokomo" is that it knocked Phil Collins' "Groovy Kind of Love" out of the Billboard number one slot in 1988, but on the other hand, all of you people and your parents made the Beach Boys' "Kokomo" and Phil Collins' "Groovy Kind of Love" number one hits. Do you actually let other people look at your CD collection? That question presupposes that you have a tiny measure of self-awareness and therefore regard "Kokomo" as a "guilty pleasure" which you would not tell your best buds about. For all I know, you actually think the Cocktail soundtrack is really, really cool.
Finally, with reference to the apparent attempted hijacking of a passenger plane in Montego Bay, I'll just point out that Brian Wilson didn't even sing on that goddamn record, which means that the song was kind of like those episodes of Airwolf filmed after the departure of Jan Michael Vincent and Ernest Borgnine, but all y'all went out and bought it anyway. And before you get up my ass about it, yes, I know Brian Wilson sang "Kokomo" in an episode of Full House, because you watched it and treasure your beloved VHS copy of it, and clearly won't shut up about it.
Life sure is depressing! Striking an actual blow for poor people, Kansas City and St. Louis are asking the Missouri legislature to bail out their respective transit systems which poor people such as part-time editorial assistants use to commute between their multiple jobs despite the fact that the Kansas City bus service is extremely unreliable if your schedule doesn't have a lot of flex. So, great. Now I've got Tracy Chapman's depressing "Fast Car" playing in my head, the title of which makes it sound like it might be an awesome Sammy Hagar anthem or something, FAST CAR WHOOOOO!!! Seriously, here's what the title of "Fast Car" looks like if you've never actually heard the song:
But then you listen to the actual lyrics and realize that not only will you not be going to Montego Bay anytime soon, you will have to pick up an extra shift at Walgreens on the Saturday because you've missed the electric bill one too many months in a row and they're going to shut you off, and your boyfriend keeps taking out payday loans without telling you about it and plus maybe you've also missed a period on top of all that. Depressing! There's a reason the Tappert brothers haven't ever used "Fast Car" as bumper music on the irritating NPR broadcast during which they laugh at their own hilarity in thick Boston accents.
Science Whatever: Apparently, scientists have known for years that blood comes squirting directly out Antarctic glaciers, but didn't bother to tell anyone because when Antarctica's "Aunt Flo comes to visit" or whatever, it's a really private, sensitive time. Congratulations, Miss Polar Continent. Now you are a woman. And it's not actually blood, you guys, it's a salty, red, iron-rich liquid. Uh. Like blood. So, what the hell, the scientists went ahead and called the eruptions "blood falls," just to be all terrifying and gross about it. Anyway, samples yielded proteins highly suggestive of microscopic li'l life-forms which may have survived under the ice for millions upon millions of years. This has been another edutaining edition of Science Whatever.
Journalists need your help! On April 22, WDAF Fox 4 has an interview lined up with 4-H Blue Ribbon-winning American Idol David Cook and the little farm girl who raised him from a calf. Cook is almost impossibly reclusive and never returns to visit his Kansas City home town or talks to reporters, obvs., so this is a really big deal. Normally, I call him "Dave," for instance, when I'm addressing one of the many hundreds of magazine photos I've taped on the wall next to my canopy bed so that his beautiful face and his weird haircut shaped like Richard Dreyfuss' mashed potato sculpture of Devils Tower from Close Encounters of the Third Kind is the last thing I see every single night. So I'm really looking forward to this interview.
Besides focusing all of their laser-like journalism on a single, sexxxy David-Cook-shaped point, Fox 4 is alsosoliciting suggestions from Fox 4 Website readers for questions they can ask him in the event that they run out of journalism and have to resort to embarrassing themselves. More. Which is a really good idea, because people can contribute questions like this one:
Now that it's out there, I don't see how any respectable Fox 4 journalist could possibly avoid asking it -- unless they're so "in the tank" for David Cook that they blatantly avoid asking the one single question on everybody's minds now that somebody has posted it to the Fox 4 Website.
HEY HEY, HO HO, PROGRESSIVE TAX RATES REPRESENTING AN EQUITABLE DISTRIBUTION EFFECT HAVE GOT TO GO! Look. I know that in an ideal realm consisting of nothing but perfect expressions of Pi, Roman statuary and isosceles triangles, there are no taxes. I wish I lived there. But I wanted to address the following circumstance: There's been a lot of toilet talk recently at the expense of decent, hardworking, tri-cornered-hat-wearing Americans about "tea-bagging." I don't want to seem like a snotty 13-year-old girl, but that's soooo mature, you guys. Let the dynamically-generated electronic record show that Daily Briefs not only didn't engage in any tea-bagging humor (my mom and dad read this), the sparsely attended protests weren't even on my radar -- I don't want to seem like a special snowflake, but I made so little money last year that the government gave all my taxes back. THANKS, GOVERNMENT!
So while you -- or, based on what I saw of the crowd at Liberty Memorial, your elderly relatives -- were protesting some non-existent tax hikes that won't actually be happening on behalf of a group of rich, right-wing, private-jet-owning Rockefellers who endow an astroturfing organization called FreedomWorks, I was out comparing vibrating chairs that connect to my Xbox 360. My girlfriend says that I look WAAY cooler than these guys when I'm playing Half-Life:
I guess these guys spent their tax refund checks on "suburban stepdad" jeans and douchey frat-boy footwear. But as long as that money is making its way through the economy back to the Chinese port-towns that load all the shipping containers on cargo ships the size of California school districts, I think we'll all be OK.
Carry on, my wayward economy: The economic crisis is over. Or, to put it in the celebratory language of drunken Mardi Gras revelry, WHOO-OOO, THE ECONOMIC CRISIS IS OVER, SHOW ME YOUR TITS, WHOO-OOO! The Federal Reserve Bank says the regional economy is great! Or at least stable. WHOO-OOO! THE REGIONAL ECONOMY IS STABLE! Chad and Derek could not be happier about the impending expansions of their douchey and ill-considered wardrobes:
Now that the crisis is over, I'd like to thank economics for all the money. None of this would have been possible without the spendjamins, you guys. The Fed points out that consumer spending and manufacturing activity fell "at a slower pace." Guess who's excited about that? The new symbols of the everyman/proletariat/subaltern, Chad and Derek:
HAHA. I just noticed that Chad and Derek seem to be enjoying glasses of Sunny-D. We're all Chad and Derek, now, you guys.
Our Sincerest Condolences on the Occasion of Your Unemployment: Kansas City-based Hallmark Sentiment Prefabrication Industries, Inc. is laying off eight percent of its tearful, sensitive workforce globally. They're going to fire around 250 workers from their Kansas City headquarters alone. Hallmark is probably the only privately held company in the world that once made a profit by manufacturing products regularly hand-made by kindergartners from folded-up pieces of paper and crayons. At least Chrysler never had to defend their practice of selling a product a little kid could make in his spare time during last month's bail-out talks. Which means buying Crayola, thereby directly selling the raw constituent materials for greeting cards to their competition, was a pretty Machiavellian move by Hallmark. During the global economic collapse, it's clear that unemployed workers are finding cheaper ways of expressing indifferent sentimental bullshit than paying $3 for a folded-up piece of paper manufactured in Mexico by cheap Mexican paper-folder-uppers and shipped across the border in trucks.
Boyz II Men: According to KMBC Channel 9, two men were arrested yesterday in connection with attempted armed robbery in Shawnee. According to The Kansas City Star, the two "armed men" were actually "armed teens," with all the zits, cracking voices, spontaneous boners and preference for Sunny-D over the purple stuff that teenagerhood implies. The suspects are 17 amd 18 years old, which clearly means that they're not "men," although I should point out that I was sent on my vision quest at age 15, alone in the desert with no food and a large amount of peyote. Following my one-week experience with my animal spirit guide, a triassic-era pachypleurosaur who spoke with the voice of Fonzie, I was considered to be a man and could legally purchase beer and lotto scratchers (following a painful circumcision ritual). But hey, not everybody is brought up the same way I was.
Anyway, it's obvious that KMBC Channel 9 wants to see these two hoodlums sentenced to fifty years at hard labor under the supervision of whoever is the Kansas equivalent of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and that the Kansas City Star wants them to be sent to some kind of hippie earth-mother counseling session to get their auras massaged.
The new Power & Light District dress code began yesterday, and all patrons will now be be required to wear those little black shorts Henry Rollins used to wear when he fronted Black Flag. Button-down dress shirts must be TUCKED IN to little black Henry Rollins shorts. The only permissible hats are the race-neutral Darth Vader helmets which truly bring us together as one people, you guys, regardless of ethnicity, gender or unexplainable lack of fondness for famous records everyone says are really, really great because that's what they've been told for a couple of generations. This is SERIOUS BUSINESS, and probably like the only thing standing between society and racism. I mean, besides a general societal consensus that racists are assholes, we've all agreed about that, right? I'm not sure about the URL for the part of my brain that just made all this up, so instead, here's a link to KCTV channel 5 coverage of the actual dress code that contains only slightly more actual information than everything I've written here, and one fewer references to Henry Rollins.
Kansas City Royals ball club boss-guy Trey Hillman didn't let third bassist Alex Gordon into the baseball ring during yesterday's sports tournament at The Kauffman Stadium of Sports, because the sporting-turf was too wet. And Hillman just couldn't take the risk that a high, hard and inside foul ball or illegal contact by the opposing team's defense would, uh, exacerbate Gordon's sports injury? GO WILDCATS!!!! The team might have scored some touchdowns or something against the Cleveland Sports Players yesterday in the first of a several-game-series which the Home Team is expected to win decisively with victories in several events including the long jump, archery and field identification of songbirds. Fans were charged up with excitement by the hot dance stylings of the Kansas City Royals Cheerleaders. And who's that I see on the Kiss Cam? Why, it's love-birds Darla Jaye and Walt Bodine. ONE WAY, ALL THE WAY! TO STATE! Sorry, you guys, unlike my actual hypertrophic body muscles, my sports writing muscles are atrophied and flaccid from the disuse caused by my unfortunate indifference to sports. HOW DO YOU DO IT, Bob Dutton of the Kansas City Star? I'm going to stick to my core competency from now on: Reviews of stereo components on Pricegrabber.com.
The markets and pundits who talk about the markets were all heaving exaggerated, comical sighs of relief last week about the end of the new depression, because some reports from a few banks weren't completely negative. Then there was a TOTALLY UNEXPECTED retail sales drop in March, so they're all freaking out again. It's like keeping a toddler up really late at night, for fun, just to watch all those conflicting emotions come bubbling explosively to the surface.
As I read about all this in the Wall Street Journal, I had a startling epiphany. This immediately annoyed me, because I hate epiphanies in books and movies. Whenever I get to the part of the book in which the character says, "...and as I looked out the window, I realized that...," followed by some sort of idiot, reductive little truism, my tendency is to hurl that book against something breakable. And epiphanies absolutely suck while you're driving a car. Like the time I modified my theory about the so-called "George Foreman" grill. It used to seem completely obvious that one fine morning, George Foreman was watching his wife use a waffle iron and thought to himself, "Man, I could put a HAMBURGER in there."
But then one day while I was driving down Southwest Trafficway, I had a melodramatic epiphany, pulled my car off the road (which on Southwest Trafficway means I parked in somebody's yard), and fumbled with my cellphone. In the kind of stunned voice people usually reserve for telling the babysitter that the CALLS ARE COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE, I said to my girlfriend, "GEORGE FOREMAN IS A PAID SPOKESMAN! HE DID NOT INVENT THE GEORGE FOREMAN GRILL!"
Instead of screaming and running out of the house in terror, she chose not to say anything. I halfheartedly shrieked a little bit, to prompt her. Finally, she said, "Are you on your way back from Sunfresh yet?" As she was saying that, the guy whose yard I'd parked in ripped the door open, dragged me out of the car by what would have been my lapels if I'd been wearing a jacket and in that voice that starts off really quiet and calm, but by the end of the sentence is violently screaming, demanded to know how I intended to pay for his rose bushes.
Anyway, my epiphany was this: I'm going to go shopping at the new Dollar Store next to Half Price Books in Westport this weekend, because I am one poor motherfucker.
So now everybody who has any kind of a small problem is going and begging President Obama to fix it, including Merchant Marines, who are supposed to be brave and manly, like Ice Road Truckers. A headline at the Dunhills-smoking, barrister-retaining BBC News reads, "American crew members of a ship that was at the centre of a hostage drama have urged US President Barack Obama to end the 'crisis' of Somali piracy." I like how "centre" immediately snaps the internal narrator inside my brain into a British accent. Anyway, even though some perfectly capable naval snipers killed the pirates holding Captain Richard Phillips hostage, piracy now rises to an executive branch level, like "war" and "agriculture." Also, think about how funny it would have been if Obama had run his campaign last year on a platform of DESTROY THE PIRATES.
Over the weekend, I saw a performance by my favorite transgressive punk performer, G.G. Liddy. Basically, he takes the mic, defends the Watergate break-in, urges the assassination of ATF agents, shits all over the stage and gets arrested. The percentage of readers who won't understand the human portmanteau I just created is really tempting me to jump in and over-explain it, but instead, I'll refer them to the radio program of conservative pundit and former Nixon administration plumber G. Gordon Allin, who usually urges listeners to stockpile guns because of Democrats, plots to bomb the Brookings institute, shits all over the studio and gets arrested. I think they carry it on KMBZ. At any rate, whatever the reason, gun sales are surging in the United States -- maybe because of Democrats, maybe because of talk radio and antisocial punk performers -- which is really going to increase the number of dumbasses who accidentally put bullets through the bedroom wall while doing their Travis Bickle impressions in front of a full-length mirror. In conclusion, here is a video of you out at the firing range:
I'm just going to point out that for the first few sentences, reading this article will make you feel like you've traveled backward in time, to a simpler era in which local news was dominated by carriage accidents and tuberculosis deaths. Then you get to the part about the medical helicopter, and you realize that we're living in a DYSTOPIC SCIENCE FICTION FUTURE like some kind of Bladerunner in which Democrats go all Fahrenheit 451 on your guns.
Basically, I'll do just about anything for money, up to and including dressing up in pleated khakis and working in your call center. I don't have much in the way of conscience about that. On "Office Food Day," I'll even set up a mini Crock Pot in the break room and fill it up with Li'l Smokies. I have no soul. So it goes without saying that if you dangle a few thousand dollars in front of me, yes, I'll do some script doctoring on the screenplay for your remake of the 1982 Kenny Rogers NASCAR comedy Six Pack which you are developing as a vehicle for Blue Collar Comedy Tour headliner Bill Engvall. A lot of people say you shouldn't tamper with a classic, but my feeling on that whole thing is that if a frightening angular sculpture of Kenny Rogers can be made out of Kenny Rogers' actual head by plastic surgeons, I can write a remake of the family classic Six Pack.
WHAT? You DON'T REMEMBER SIX PACK? Actually, there are a lot of people who don't remember Six Pack (which includes the singing and acting debut of a young Anthony Michael Hall), giving me a lot of creative wiggle-room where the reinterpretation is concerned. Whenever anyone mentions Kenny Rogers, you probably think of The Gambler, The Gambler Part II: The Adventure Continues, The Gambler Part III: The Legend Continues, The Gambler Returns: The Luck of the Draw and Gambler V: Playing For Keeps. I know, right? Me, too. But in fact, Kenny fell so naturally into the role of a bland, stiffly acted avuncular NASCAR racer with no comedic timing, it was like he was born to play it. Here's the plot synopsis from the Internet Movie Database:
Stopping briefly in a small Texas town, an itinerant race car driver finds that his stock car, on a trailer behind his motor home, has just been quickly and expertly stripped. He chases down the miscreants, who turn out to be six orphan children. He has no recourse to the law, for the corrupt local sheriff takes most of the proceeds of their thievery in exchange for not putting them in an orphanage. They are charming rogues who are in turn charmed by him. Disliking their arrangement with the sheriff, they stow away with him, and he finds himself becoming a reluctant stepfather. Thanks to their enthusiasm and incredible mechanical know-how, he begins to make a name for himself on the racing circuit. But the sheriff doesn't take kindly to losing his extra income...
Did you read all that? If so, you're qualified for a drawing; leave your name and email address in comments. One lucky winner gets Matrix shampoo and conditioner.
Anyway, once the producers signed loathsome racist ventriloquist Jeff Dunham to play the evil sheriff, they decided they needed a top-to-bottom rewrite to beef up the role and incorporate more filthy racist puppets. So basically, they called me in to punch up all the racism. Oh, they know the film won't play well in major metropolitan regions, but it will totally clean up across Waffle House country -- do you have any idea how much money Delta Farce made? They actually don't know, because that possum turd is still generating so much revenue that Larry the Cable Guy bought his own Research Triangle for the development of life-enhancing technologies for racist white people who don't know shit about anything and hate anybody who does. So anyway, the sheriff's adorable puppet deputy is exactly the sort of African-American racist stereotype that Jeff Dunham can really sink his bigoted teeth into.
One of the challenges has been incorporating all the great, memorable lines of dialogue from the original film. If you go to the IMDB entry and click on "Memorable Quotes," there are two of them:
I don't want to tip my hand, but in my script, the racist sheriff says, "GET YOUR ASSES OUT HERE ON THE DOUBLE" at the most surprising moment of the film (when he wants everyone to get their asses out here on the double). Seriously, you don't fuck around with great, totally memorable lines of dialogue. To the IMDB user who considered that to be a memorable quote: I tip my Bass Pro baseball cap to you, sir.
Anyway, all of this is a long way of explaining why I only had time for one news link this morning, which is that satisfied Hair Club For Men client Emanuel Cleaver is touting a $200 million Green Zone project in Kansas City, totally go read about that, because I'm a busy man and these horrible racist jokes about Mexican immigrants, Hindus and Muslims aren't going to write themselves! As a special bonus, here is the most amazing commercial for douche I've ever seen, via Everything Is Terrible:
Recreational drinkers at La Cygne Reservoir in La Cygne, Kansas will have to conceal their cans of malt liquor in paper sacks from now on, pending the enactment of some unfun new regulations.
A Baptist minister in St. Joe learned the hard way that all preteen girls on the internet are actually police officers with an interest in Hannah Montana and Juicy brand couture.
Hair Club for Commandantes en Jefe: U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, he of the miraculous advancing hairline, has come back from a life-changing diplomatic trip to Cuba and determined that we can take years off the appearance of the U.S.-Cuban relationship by covering the "bald spot" of the 50-year-old U.S. embargo with the "microscopic follicular unit hair transplant procedure" of increased diplomatic ties. Henceforth, everything I write about the political career of Emanuel Cleaver will be framed in the marketing terminology of the hair replacement industry.
"We meet with despots all over the world," Cleaver told the Kansas City Star, running a hand through his luxuriously thick head of hair. "What we've done in the U.S., which is tragic, is we've let some Cubans who left Cuba in the 1950's dictate national foreign policy," he added before diving into a pool and swimming confidently to the opposite side. Personally, I'd like to blame all the world's ills on people from the 1950s, with their stupid Big Bopper records, their Cialis prescriptions and their coming-of-age memories about hiking through the Maine countryside to see a dead body. Let's blame everything from global warming to nuclear proliferation on Fonzie and move toward some kind of mini-micrografting solution that nobody will notice, no matter how close they get.
Centaur Bodies Revealed:Union Station will host a traveling exhibit based on C.S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia in an effort to attract families. I never saw the new films, but I remember watching an animated version on TV when I was a kid and being subsequently disappointed to discover that Edmund Pevensie had betrayed his siblings in exchange for the second filthiest-tasting candy I'd ever eaten, Turkish Delight.
The filthiest-tasting candy I ever ate was a tamarind lollipop covered in chili powder. In an effort to trick children into eating tamarind candies, I'm going to write a young adult fantasy novel in which one of the main characters sells his entire family into slavery in exchange for an everlasting tamarind gobstopper lollipop covered in chili powder, and if I can win myself a fancy Newberry medal in the process, believe me when I say that I will wear that fucker everywhere I go. Because nothing says "Safe for Kids" like an embossed Newberry medal pressed into the dust jacket of a book. I assume the same thing would be true for a dude wearing a Newberry medal, or even eight or twelve, like a confidence-inspiring Michael Phelps of excellence in children's literature. Having gained their trust, I will then sell those children short-term, high-interest loans and make a million dollars, the end.
Being For The Benefit of Mr. McCartney: FYI BEATLES FANS, the music industry has been consistently releasing non-Beatles music for the last 40 years, and is probably going to continue doing so in the future! You might look into some. But I assume that there's somebody out there, such as your Nana or smelly old Jimmy Carter, who still cares that they're going to release the first decent digital remasters of all of the Beatles albums since the 1980s. FINALLY! "Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite" the way it was intended to be heard, just as crappy as the day the Beatles listened to the final mix, sheepishly looked at each other and heaved a tired, collective three-part-harmony fart. Since the digital mastering technology of the 80s was basically the equivalent of smashing mastodon skulls together until a shard broke off that could be used to poke holes in giant sloth hide, there's probably a whole generation out there that hasn't really experienced the full sonic breadth of the ghastly "Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite," or really any of the overrated garbage from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Oh, and there's still no word about whether those two remaining dumb old men will ever allow legal digital downloads of Beatles music, as if the whole entire world is poised and waiting for Her Majesty Queen McCartney to smash a bottle of champagne against the H.M.S. Revolver. Fine. Y'know? If you aren't interested in selling your music in a format people actually want in exchange for actual money, I believe I've pointed out before that high-quality digital copies of the entire Beatles catalog are already available on the internet at the extremely competitive price-point of fucking nothing, so it doesn't matter anyway.
Then they'll discontinue rotary dialing: AT&T would very much like permission to stop delivering the white pages phone book in Kansas City and St. Louis, please, since the internet sucked all of the value out of the paper phone books we all used to buy on the newsstand and read on the train. Now if they could stop dumping four Yellow Pages directories per year on my goddamn porch, my whole life would probably be ice cream cones and trade-show hostesses. That's our Western version of "milk and honey," a beverage of extremely questionable deliciousness apparently consumed in the Middle East. I like honey. I sort of like milk, kind of. But somehow, it never crosses my mind to combine the two. I guess that's why God created artificial chocolate-flavored powder made out of corn and packaged with a bunny rabbit mascot who has impulse-control issues.
Anyway, ATTENTION LOCAL BUSINESSES: I do not read the stupid Yellow Pages, ever. Instead, I direct my Netscape Gold browser to the flash-based Website of your restaurant and wait for several long minutes until the opening animation ends, click on MENU, and admire the artistry with which your LOADING animation was designed. Extremely pretty! Then I dine at the restaurant of whichever of your nearest competitors has an HTML-based Website that doesn't try to impress me with its David Lean production values. As a smooth segue to the new Daily Briefs mascot, the Buddha of Douchebags, I'll point out that many sushi restaurants print their menus out in the preferred font of the Buddha of Douchebags, the irritating Papyrus font:
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