Chick-Fil-Lay

S. Truett Cathy, the founder of Chick-Fil-A and I have been dating for some time and I’d like to clear up some misconceptions. He’s not homophobic, he just thinks gay sex is filthy or, as he puts it, “at least when it’s done right.” S., as I call him, is a good man and fine boyfriend as long as he has a supply of those little blue pills. He’s very business oriented. “My franchise is expanding”, he said. “Mine too,” I said, looking down. The wife thing. That’s a problem. But he needs someone to go to church with and it ain’t gonna be me. I’ve met her a few times and it hasn’t gone well. She once slapped me in the side of the head with a hand full of cole slaw and in return I boxed her ears with a couple of biscuits. “Keep it civil, ladies,” S. cried (he thinks of me as a woman in order to deal with some issues he has) and forcibly restrained her from going after me with a serrated knife. She bit him on the arm, drawing blood. It was not the best picnic I’ve been to. S. is fine with the cocksucking and all, he just doesn’t believe two guys should get married. (Although a guy in a gown and veil gets him pretty hot. He has a wedding dress in a box under his bed he makes me put on; a sexy little number with a mini-skirt and thigh-length hose and garters. Just the sight of me in that, prancing and blowing kisses, causes him to, ironically enough, choke the chicken, if you know what I mean. He usually puts on a confederate soldier outfit and spanks me with a riding crop. I have welts across the back of my legs as a testament to his love.) But he mis-spoke in the press about his feelings toward homosexuals and now there’s a shitstorm of bad things being said that doesn’t at all relate to the man I love and who loves me, thanks to the Pos-T-Vac. It’s true, he smacks me across my whore mouth while he’s giving me a rim job and beats off while listening to Focus on the Family, but S. is just a regular guy like you or me or Mel Gibson. (I can’t count the times we’ve seen the first twenty minutes of The Passion of the Christ.) Also, during sex he tends to call me Robby Benson. But he’s not this hater everyone is trying to make him out to be. Sure, I’ve lost a tooth or two and been called faggot a couple of times while he was trying to stuff his crank in my manhole, but that shit happens. If someone loves you, there’s bound to be a point where they blacken your eye while spurting on your chest. Afterwards, there’s cuddle time so it all works out ok. An elderly man snakes his hand into yours and says “I love you, dick-smoker”, details his plan for putting jalapenos on a chicken breast and all is right with the universe. I pat him affectionately on his colostomy bag and drift off to sleep. I showed S. how the whole damn Internet was talking about his comments and that he was the poster child for being a tool. He didn’t get it. “I’m doing right by the Lord,” he said, then went into a conversation about who was hotter, Ted Neely in Jesus Christ Superstar or Robert Powell in Jesus of Nazareth. “You’ve got to get this fixed,” I said, “The whole world hates you.” “I don’t give a crap,” he said, his speech mumbled as he was tonguing my nipple. He rolled over and my hand grazed across his elephant-grey buttocks, caressing the tattoo he had across his ass cheeks: CLOSED ON SUNDAYS.

Switch It Off Now

Been a while, hasn't it?

No easy explanation. Creatively, I'm blank as a fart. Nothing to say.

It's just the way it goes. I have many obsessions, hobbies, outlets and whatnot but none can be counted on to have exclusive staying power. I get hopped up on one thing for a while and then it dries up and goes away. It always comes back, someday, but in the interim other things take its importance in the scheme of my life. I think I've had a good run with this blog (certainly not based on popular response but rather my own fun with it) but I just haven't been motivated for a while and other things are occupying my mind. I haven't done any Spookshow In Your Pants stuff for a couple of years now, but I'm certain someday I will again. So it goes with Der Spookhaus. The stuff filling my mind these days I just don't feel like writing about for everyone to see. Or maybe I just don't feel like writing, period.

Maybe I just want to take a Summer Vacation. I don't know. But my heart's not in it these days. So I think this is going to be goodbye, for now, but certainly not permanently. I have had enough experience to know that something wacky just might happen tomorrow and jump-start the Muse so that I'm off pell-mell for another few months. The shit I'm into and extremes in terms of interest swings back and forth so wildly there's no way I can predict what I want to be doing from one day to the next.
On the other hand, I might just walk away from it all and never look back. It really could go either way and I have no perceptible sense of what's gonna happen.

Shit, I might restart Der Spookhaus in YouTube format. I have some ideas but so far nothing worth writing home about. Brute honestly, right now, I don't want to create; I just want to be entertained by others for the moment. But keep checking back. Like I say, who knows when I'll get a second wind.

I've enjoyed doing this immensely. Just not for now. I think the earliest posts, with the stories and music and all, were the best and when the blog turned into the standard daily diary type of stuff was when it went to shit. I just haven't taken the time to write-and-rewrite-and-rewrite-and-rewrite, which it what it takes to make a good story, for a while now. The music vids and the vintage video are fun--and trust me, everything posted in those categories means something to me, it's just I probably should be crafting a decent story instead of farting out stuff about jerking off into tube socks.

Click on the title if you want to hear the theme music to this post. The song references, I think, Heroin addiction which is NOT what's cluttering up my mind these days, but still is an apt metaphor for how I'm feeling at the moment.

Still, I think you should always leave 'em laughing, so I'll close for now by telling my favorite joke of all time.

Little Billy was sitting in class and the girl behind him tapped him on the shoulder. "Ask the teacher what a 'Purple Poodle' is," she asked, as the class was too young to understand the importance of not ending a sentence with a preposition.

Billy raised his hand.

"Yes, Billy?"

"What's a 'Purple Poodle'?

The teacher could not hide her shocked reaction and screamed, "That does it, Billy! You're going to Mr. Yodelbeans' office!"

"What?"

"Go to the principal's office! Now!"

Billy made the long trek down the hall. The principal was extremely surprised to see him. "Billy," he exclaimed, "What are you doing here?"

"Teacher said I had to come and see you."

"But you've always been a model student! What could you have possibly done to make her send you here for punishment?"

"All I did..." Billy stammered, "...All I did was ask her what was a 'Purple Poodle'."

Mr. Yodelbeans spluttered, his face changed several sets of colors, he slammed his fist on his desk and finally raged, "GET OUT! You are expelled from this elementary school! You sick, sick child! We won't have you infecting the other students! GO!"

Billy walked home in the middle of the morning. His mother greeted him at the door. "Billy! What are you doing home from school this early?"

"I got expelled."

"Expelled? You? How? Why?"

Billy tearfully explained to his mother that all he did was ask the teacher the definition of a 'Purple Poodle.'

She burst into tears; howling, racking sobs the likes of which Billy had never seen come out of her. "Go upstairs," the woman commanded through her hysterics, "and stay there until your Father gets home!"

Billy spent the day in his room, listening to the muffled sounds of his mother crying for hours and hours. Finally he heard his father's car pull up in the drive, the door slam shut, then hushed, hysterical whispering below. He heard the clomp, clomp, clomp of heavy work boots ascending the stairs and suddenly his bedroom door was wrenched open, his father standing there, glowering.

"What's this I hear about you gettin' kicked out of school?"

"All I did," Billy said, "Was ask the teacher what in the world is a 'Purple Poodle'?"

"YOU ARE NO SON OF MINE!" Billy's father shouted. "DO NOT EVEN THINK OF DARKENING THE DOORWAY OF THIS HOME AGAIN!" He was roaring, frothing at the mouth. "YOU ARE A SICK, SINFUL, PERVERT AND TO KNOW IT AT YOUR TENDER AGE IS A SIGN THAT THE DEVIL HAS INFESTED YOUR VERY SOUL! GET OUT OF MY HOUSE, YOU FILTH! YOU ABOMINATION!"

So Billy left.

He walked up the off-ramp to the interstate and walked along the highway. A trucker pulled up beside him and stopped. TCH-TCHSSSS! went the brakes.

"Hey kid, need a lift?" asked the trucker.

Billy climbed into the cab. "Shouldn't you be in school?" the trucker scowled.

"Yeah. But I got expelled."

"Expelled? Do your parents know this?"

"They kicked me out of the house."

"Son, what exactly did you do?"

Billy again explained, "All I did was try to find out the meaning of 'Purple Poodle'."

The truck driver slammed on his brakes, again with a loud TCH-TCHSSS!

"Son, I been in truck stops all over this land of ours and heard a lot of filthy talk but I never, never, never, EVER heard anything as disgusting as that. I think I'd like you to get out now."

Billy put his head in his hands and started sobbing.

"BUT," the trucker added, "Oncet you leave I think I can help ya. If you really, really want to know about the 'Purple Poodle' you have to do this: Find your way to 3rd Street. Walk around until you reach 333 3rd Street. It's a hotel. Go in, git in the elevator and press the button marked 3. That'll take ya to the 3rd floor. Get off and find room 33. Go inside. You'll see a chest of drawers. Open the 3rd drawer and I think you'll find what you're looking for. Now get the fuck out of my truck, you freak."

Billy found 3rd Street. He wandered up and down until he found the address marked 333, and sure enough it was a hotel. He got in the elevator, got off on the 3rd floor and sure enough there was a room 33. He twisted the doorknob and it was open. Inside the room was totally bare. No bed, no TV, no lamps, just a big bureau drawer set pushed against the wall.

Billy opened the third drawer down. A HUGE poodle, painted purple, leaped out of the drawer and ran out the open door. Billy chased it, and the poodle ran for the open stairwell and ran down three flights of stairs, the boy in hot pursuit. The purple poodle ran across the lobby and ran out the open door of 333 3rd Street. Billy was so close he could feel the wisps off its puffy tail against his fingers, but not quite enough to catch it. Chasing the lavender beast, it ran straight out into 3rd Street, into oncoming traffic, and SMACK! Billy was instantly struck by a car and killed dead on the spot.

And the moral to this story is:

Look both ways before crossing the street.

Second Guessing

This is how I learned about abortion:

I attended a private, Christian school and when I was in 7th grade our teacher passed out sealed manilia envelopes with the edict we were NOT to open them until further instructed. He carried on about how the less wholesome segment of society were planning to murder babies, detailing in very specific ways just how it was done, then let us open our packets containing color photos of teency dismembered arms and legs and crushed skulls swimming in a sea of gore. At that point we were dismissed for lunch.

Naturally, the cafeteria served spaghetti.

At thirteen I found this ludicrous, obvious propoganda. It didn't slow me down in the slightest when it came to my appetite; no more than when they served ravioli after making us watch 'Red Asphalt', the gory safe-driving movie. I like food. Just because I'd recently seen pictures of chopped up babies was not going to deter me from a zesty tomato sauce.

They had a point. The stuff in the photos were easily recognized body parts and putting the 'fetus' spin on things didn't detract from the fact that what was going on was no less brutal than putting a premie in a blender. It wasn't a zygote, or some other clinically detatched term for shoving the surgical equivalent of a weed-whacker up a woman's womb and chopping her kid into bits. Abortion is, absolutely, murder.

But so is sending teenage kids into another part of the wold to die in the name of patriotism. That is murder as well. And if you're going to see one as a-ok then you better see the other as kosher as well. Oh sure, trot out your blah-blah-blah "innocent" life schtick. Call me crazy, but a kid at nineteen is no more prepared to be dropped in another part of the world where people want to kill he or she than a crack-whore's baby being aborted instead of plopped out in a toilet bowl. You call war "neccessary" murder? That's what I call abortion in some cases. Okay, most cases, given that children in general are vile to be around.

At last, both sides of this highly volitale argument can come together in the shared hatred of a common enemy: me. 'Cause I think you're both nuts.

Over The Rhine And Through The Woods To Grandgansta's House We Go

I lived in Cincinnati and needed to get a job, pronto, before my boyfriend bludgeoned me in the head to death with a plastic thing he'd bought initially to shove up
his ass. I found employment in a blood plasma center in the middle of Over-The-Rhine, Cincinatti's well-publicised answer to the ghetto. I was a small, skinny white boy, and signing up for this was tantamount to saying that active-duty in Afghanistan gives me tittie hard-ons.

Because blood-plasma centers are not known for drawing the future standouts of the local board of education.
Becuause blood-plasma centers are not generally a gathering place for lively discussions of post-modern approaches to music and literature.
Because blood-plasma centers have yet to be considered a haven for the concept of free thought.

And because I was tiny and white.

This was a slight few years before the Cincinnati riots of 2001 broke out, and although the reslults were less than honorable, not that they were without
good reason. Some fucking cop shot a kid just because he had 14 outstanding warrants, not getting that, duh, all of them were non-violent. But this was simply
the straw that broke the camel's black. This kind of shit had been happening for years and the people who lived in the neighborhood had gotten sicker and sicker
and sicker of this shit until one day it fucking broke and Helter Skelter came raining down. The mood was there, in '87, when I arrived, and years of white
cops getting away with killing black kids for no real reason was uppermost in the minds of the community. It hadn't reached the point of crazy looting and kicking
in windows and screaming "Fuck this!" But it was getting closer and closer. White motherfuckers were coming into a historically black neighborhood and killing people, including children. This is when I landed my job in the middle of Over-The Rhine as an intake clerk.

"Hi," I said to the people gathered in the lobby, "I'm new here!" I waved cheerily like a faggy white boy. Not the best plan.

My co-workers were mostly black, educated and gave me the low-down. "You gotta prove yourself as something different than the cops. This neighborhood can
be cool with white people as long as they distance themselves from the people who are killing their kids."

Sadly, 'Fuck tha Police' wouldn't come out for another few years, so I had nothing to go on. I would have thought that as a freaky punkazoid, sporting
hair down to my shoulders on one side, buzzed off on the other and sporting eyeliner; while wearing a white lab coat to denote me as an employee of
the place that would give them cash money for the malt-liqour infused stuff from out of their veins, would have distanced me enough from the five-oh.

But no. You have to prove yourself in a place like this. Appearances count for nothing. Much as it should in the real world.

This was about the time I took up smoking. I did it so I could learn some really cool magic tricks involving cigarettes. Not that if anyone knew this it would boost my street cred. This was back in the day whereyou could smoke pretty much anywhere, and I thought perhaps my newfound fondness for coffin nails would make me seem just a little cooler and therefore less like an opressor. Unfortunately, my job consisted of having to stab anyone who came through the line in the finger with a pointy thing that drew enough blood to smear on a little card for processing. If someone does this to you, most likely you are not going to consider them on your side, even if you get a teeny-tiny check at the end of the maze.

But I lit up, just to show the inner toughness of the guy wearing Maybelline. But I'd just started and I was no good at it so right after I stabbed a
local gang leader in the finger I coughed loud, hacking sobs and blew most of the contents of my nose on his specifically-colored shirt.

You would think of course that I'd be instantly dead but instead the hoodlum showed a remarkable instinct for subtle sarcasm (my favorite kind) and said,
"Been smoking long?"

I thought this was hilarious, but the woman working alongside me wanted me to live to see another day. "He been smoking forever!" she shouted,
"Don't you know asthma when you see it?"


This is what saved my life. Not her version of cunning strategy but the fact that me and the guy who now had my phlegm across his shirt looked at one another and cracked up together. We both thought it was the stupidest thing to say ever, as if, "Oh yeah, that's gonna work" and shared a moment. And THAT is what turned the tables and made my being there no longer an onslaught of fear.

He spread the word that I was ok. If that woman hadn't said that completly dumb thing it could have been oh so horrible. But because we laughed together, my life in the plasma center got a whole lot better by the very next day. The cold crowd of stare-you-down thugs became warm, personable and funny. They would insult me and I would insult them back and we'd laugh together. I loved it. Me, the whitest man
in America, connecting with the most dangerous part of town. I don't know this for a fact, but I'd like to think that some of them saw the beauty in the very same thing.

My Twinn. My God.

My Twinn is a company where you send them 149 clams and a photo of your kid and they will create a toddler-sized doll in your child's image. Paul showed me their catalog some years ago and I could feel my flesh crawling right off its bones. Children are born egotistical, they hardly need further encouragement through props. The only way I could see such a contrivance as a positive step toward mental health would be for a parent to order one, keep it hidden away for those difficult days, then send the real kid outside to play and bash the doll's head repeatedly against the coffee table until you feel better and it's safe for the kid to be around again.

The first thing you do when creating your kid clone is pick an outfit. This is where the concept becomes even more revolting, because My Twinn just happens to sell a full line of children's clothing that match exactly what the dolls are wearing. Yes. They encourage a child to appear in public with this thing looking like Dr. Evil and Mini-Me. Little girls might be taught to go in for this sort of thing, but clearly these dolls and the line of clothing are marketed to hysterical, deluded mothers who truly think the world revolves around their offspring's attention-seeking ass and just one copy of perfection is not enough to go around.

The next step after choosing the outfit is to select eye and skin color. You would think the next part of the ego-run-amok process would be hair color, right? No. Before hair color on the importance chart comes the proper freckle and, ew, mole assortment. A handy tool on the website enables the customer to specify exactly where on the face these are to be placed. I am sorely tempted to order one just so I can dot the thing all over and make it look like I'm raising the poster child for melanoma, or perhaps a many-warted creature with skin like a toad. Nah, I'd probably just send in a picture of one of those third-world kids from the cleft palate hospital with an upper lip split into thirds, the kind where you can see exposed teeth and gums all the way up to the nostril, and see if My Twinn would make me one of those.

Then you pick a hair color, style and texture and submit a photograph.

But it gets even crazier than the love letter to stage mothers everywhere. They also suggest this:



I don't have a problem with a boy playing with a doll if he wants to but THAT, dressing him up in the same outfit and forcing him to play outisde, is asking for trouble. It's quite possible My Twinn has created the first ever Make Your Own Queer kit. I know there's plenty of evidence to support Nature over Nurture, but this sort of insanity would override any genetic disposition toward hetersoexuality whatsover. The straight gene would take one look, say screw it, I'm not even going to try, and order an appletini. Hard-liners on the nature side of the argument aren't going to agree, so let's just agree to disagree, compromise and instead call it a Make Your Kid Get His Ass Kicked In Ten Minutes kit.

Are we not a vain enough society as it is that we can't just give a kid a doll and maybe let imagination come into play? Do we have to reinforce 'It's all about me' instead of letting a kid know early on the fact that, most of the time, it's not?

My Twinn. Making society grotesquely self-indulgent one mole at a time.

Vendorbending McDonald's

Okay, first you have to have a look at this news story and then come back. Although it's not so much the story itself you should pay attention to but the general public's response via the crazy internets.

This, my friend, is why Al Queda will win.

There's just no middle ground here. Either people think all they have to do is say 'no' and their kids will magically obey, or they see Ronald McDonald as a red-headed Svengali with the eerie abilty to cloud their children's minds.

I don't have children, and for good reason: I can't stand the little shits. But god damn, I was once a child and haven't forgotten (as so many parents do and slap on the blinders once one comes plopping out of their womb) what it was like to be one. Essentially, you put on a good show for mom and pop and then do whatever it is you feel like doing. This is the way kids operate. Period. They know you don't want to imagine them lying or stealing or having sex, so they give you just the image you're looking for and live a completely different life outside your scruitiny.

Kids are going to eat at McDonald's. Not because some pedophile (yes, that is exactly how one hysterical respondent to this story viewed a cartoon clown, apparently equating the eating of french fries with forced anal rape) has lured your children against their will; but probably because it's affordable if your only source of cash flow is your goddamn allowance. Organic whole foods are pretty damn pricey. Oh, and that, to a kid, McDonald's tastes good even, or perhaps especially more so, if you've been raised your entire life on salads and vegan-equivalent hot dogs. Kids want most what they've been told they cannot have, be it fast food, booze or someone else touching their privates. Deal with it.

So as a parent, it's your fucking job to know where your kids are and what they're doing. GPS cell phones make it easier for you than any other generation of nutjob guardians. Quit whining, quit putting the blame on advertising icons and do just a smidgeon of actual parenting to find out what's going on with your goddamn children. On the other hand, if you are one of these chest-thumping yahoos who claim "I've TOLD my children not to eat there, so, by God, they won't!" you have your head every bit as far up your ass as the folks who think Ronald McDonald is not only real but has the same skill set as Derren Brown. Because children are hardwired to be lying little bastards. If you think your coming across as a bully is going to change this, you're fooling yourself.

You wanna raise your kid vegan and not give them the opportunity to make this choice for their own self, the way you did, fine. That's going to be it's own punishment in a few years when they discover pulled pork and chicken fat as a means of rebellion. By all means, feel free to place the blame on The Hamburglar so you can sleep at night. Likewise, those of you turning a blind eye to the fact your child is swelling up like The Hindenburg, keep on maintaining that whole glandular line of crap. As always, the truth is somewhere in the middle, and reading the responses to this news story goes to show how stupidly hard-line America is when it comes to belief over reason as long as someone gets to pretend they're always right.

Makes me wanna puke both my #1 Value Meal AND my Paul Newman Southwest Salad.

Hippity, Hoppity, Easter's On Its Way!

A rabbit is sent to stand before the lord God almighty.

“So here’s the thing,” God says. “Above all species you and your kind are known for fertility. Hell, ‘fucking like bunnies’ has become a friggin’ cliché.”

“Okay,” says the rabbit, not sure what’s going down.

“Well,” says the creator of the universe, “we have sort of a P.R. problem here. This time of year is supposed to be about the resurrection of my son—which is really only me in another form—and how he sacrificed himself to save the world from the eternal judgment I doled out in the first place…just go with it; it’s complicated…but the calendars got all F’d up and somehow it turns out that his martyrdom coincides exactly with previously-existing dates of Pagan fertility rites.”

“ I see,” said the rabbit, not seeing at all.

“Anyway, we’re going to call this thing Easter, and as a means of appeasing centuries of legend that came before our own, we thought it might be cool to have an Easter, you know…bunny.”

“I don’t get it. What do I have to do with Judaism?”

“Mmn, actually the overthrow of Judaism. But let’s not split hares. Get it?”

The rabbit rolled its slick, pink eyes. “Yes, I got it.”

“Just kinda kicking it around the office so far…but we’re thinking, what if a rabbit became the symbol of my only begotten son’s death and resurrection. Cause then you could have that old school fertility thing but whitewashed into something that would play with the tenets of the New Testament.”

“Not sure people would get the whole fertility thing,” the rabbit said.

“I don’t think so either,” said God. “Evangelicals are not big on allegory. Sure, they see Christ’s parables as such, but they don’t allow themselves to see anything else in the bible as anything other than literal, word-for-word absolute truth. They think the bible was written for the lowest common denominator so any standard literary conceit is fucking lost on them. So we’re going to have to hit them over the head with symbolism in the densest possible fashion in order to get them to see the whole fertility angle.”

“How’s that going to work?” asked the rabbit.

“We’re going to have you deliver eggs.”

“Come again?”

“You’ll be the Easter bunny. You’ll go around putting eggs in people’s houses, as a reminder of the Maypole dance and all the other fertility rituals, but at the same time be a symbol for our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.”

“Isn’t this trying to have your cake and eat it, too?” asked the rabbit.

“Look,” said the lord God Jehovah. “We’re not stupid. We’re going to hedge things in our favor.”

“How’s that?” the bunny asked.

“You’re getting an image makeover. Less Druid, more Republican-friendly. From now on you’re going to be called Peter Cottontail. You know, as in the apostle Peter. The first pope.”

“Or the slang term for phallus, depending.”

“Now you’re just being insolent!” God thundered. “You have no proof that bit of history originated before my story!”

“Actually, it’s pretty well documented,” said the rabbit. “But for the sake of argument, we’ll pretend it’s not and simply agree to disagree. We’ll just pretend it’s an unsolvable mystery. You know, which came first, the Christian or the egg?”
“So we want you, like Santa Claus, to travel the world in a single night and hit every household and give them eggs.”

“Okay, Santa brings Playstation 3’s and gobs of cash. The same kids are going to be placated by some hardboiled eggs?”

“Well, there’s candy, too.”

“What if they’re diabetic?”

“Look, we just need you to do this.”

The rabbit thought for a moment. “You know, I am reminded of the words of Christ crucified, the ones that never made it into the bible.”

“And what quote is that?” asked God.

"The thing he said, nailed to a cross, right before someone stabbed him in the side with a spear."

"Refresh my memory," said God.

"Just before he was forced to drink vinegar while blood was pouring out of his wrists, right before he had a crown of thorns driven into his head."

"What, what did he say?" asked God.


“This is a hell of a way to spend Easter.”

Gimme That Old Time Religion

My plea, sincerely, to the Motion Picture Association Ratings board, who in the seventies rated Jesus Christ Superstar, with its gory finale of a man being nailed through his palms, G, for general audiences, but in the here and now sees fit to slap right-winger Ben Stein’s pro-creationist Expelled with a PG-13 just because it contains archival footage of Edwin R. Murrow smoking, is to take a minute and get over yourselves.

Actually, I love the movie Expelled. Not because I believe in creationism but because I wholeheartedly believe in freedom. People are losing their jobs and having their lives turned upside down because what they want to say doesn’t match the P.C. thought police’s idea of what constitutes a valid argument. This is crap. I have a blog where I tell a story about jacking off into some socks, and these guys are right behind me in terms of my right to put it out there. Someone else believes in a Jewish zombie crawling from the grave and oh no, we can’t have this at all. I just think it’s wrong. You either believe in freedom of speech, period, or you don’t. There’s no such thing as middle ground. You don’t want to hear about how all the homos are going to hell and they don’t want to hear buttfucking jokes on Will and Grace at 4pm when the kids come home from school. Both points of view should be allowed to be aired. If you can’t get this, you are the worst extreme on either side of the argument. So you simply cancel each other out, as no particular party line can be judged by its crazy extremists.

But no, both sides have their share of morons who are more interested in being right; in holding THE TRUTH over everyone’s heads so they can feel a little bit better about themselves by pretending they’re the big expert and confusing belief with proof, rather than finding fellowship despite differences. These people will spend the remainder of the brief slice of life we’re given arguing with one another and no doubt deserve one another. Because being right and therefore smarter is above anything else. What a sad and pathetic way to view humanity.

Anyway, back to you, MPAA ratings board: Let me get this straight--capital punishment in the most violent way is wholesome, family fare, but someone puffing on a butt, back before the link with cancer was known, is something only teenagers should see?

Or Tim Burton’s filmed version of the children’s classic, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It got a PG for insanely ambiguous quirky situations but the seventies musical Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory got a G even though it was strongly implied that all the bad kids died horrible, mutilating deaths whereas in Burton’s version they all showed up for the finale. But oh lordy, Johnny Depp is more peculiar than Gene Wilder so by all means, warn the parents.

What the fuck is wrong with you people? The F-word, of course, gets an automatic R, meaning that Little Miss Sunshine deserves the same classification as the Saw movies. You can watch entrails being pulled out of someone in slow motion, but speaking a good, earthy word describing the sex act—or in most cases, used as a simple expletive—is just as wrong. Murder and cursing are on equal terms? But have you seen this show, Family Guy that comes on right before Will and Grace in syndication that the kiddies are watching?

God has cursed you for your pious sins and it’s called flat screen plasma and Blu-Ray.

Fun With Verizon

I bought the Verizon USB760, advertised as "wireless broadband" and it's been hell. I even popped for a signal accelerator from a third party company but still, if I try to watch net video it plays for ten seconds, stalls for a full minute, plays another ten seconds, stalls another minute, and so on and so on. Thing is, I have a damned strong signal but apparently that means nothing.

I called Verizon and the service rep told me, "Well, wireless broadband isn't the same thing as actual broadband." This is like being suckered into an ad for a jet-powered Volkswagon. "Wait a minute...I've been in a jet but this thing is spluttering and clunking down the street..."

"Well, Volkswagon jet-powered is not the same as actual jet-powered."

Then the guy tried to sell me on the fact that the G4 network will be coming out at the end of the year, which supposedly promises to replicate cable broadband. But, hello, this is only fucking February and the end of the year is a long way off. Plus, I'd have to buy a new G4-compatible toy to get it to work.

Thing is, the Verizon Droid is an awesome phone and streams net content without skipping a beat. Why can't they use the same technology for the modem as they do the phone? It's amazing, but the USB 760 is the dictionary definition of rip-off. Apparently this thing is good for checking your e-mail but that's all it does. It's not broadband in the slightest; it's dial-up circa 1990.

I'll be returning this piece of shit tomorrow. Buyer beware.

UPDATE 3/3/10: Ditching Internet Explorer for Google Chrome has made this worlds more practical. Video sputters a bit during the first minute, but then plays fine for the duration of the show. Google Chrome is way faster, so in the chance I might wind up somewhere without Wi-Fi or net access I'm keeping the gizmo and the account after all.