Neighborhood Spittoon

12/28/06

Smoking is a fairly unpleasant habit. For those who do not engage in it, anyway. Even for those of us who are addicted to the magical little coffin nails some of the less delightful aspects of the practice can become annoying. Even a consummate smoker doesn’t like second-hand smoke blown in his face. But that’s not what I wish to speak about today. No, I think the most disgusting part of smoking is the small circle of individuals who seem to believe they have to discharge saliva while exhaling blue smoke. “Chewing” is decidedly grosser than smoking in my opinion, but these wonderful zeros have apparently decided to combine the worst of both habits and squirt a huge dollop of spit out of their mouths after every drag. I can only assume it’s because smoking does dry out the mouth, and with a little working of the tongue you can encourage the salivary gland to aid the situation, so perhaps they have yet to hit the correct ratio and feel instead of swallowing the excess like, I dunno, a human fucking being, they should just share their bodily fluids for the rest of us to trod in. It’s not phlegm, mind you, just spit, but still…

Smokers without even a modicum of smoking etiquette make my asshole twitch for the same reason normal black people wince whenever hearing a story on the news about some African American retard shooting up a movie screen; it gives the rest of us a bad name. My upstairs neighbor is such an oaf when it comes to smoking. He’s either on the third or forth floor (we reside on the bottom) and I suppose I could figure it out if I took the time to calculate the lag time between hearing him make a “P-thoo!” noise and when his expectorant care package makes a huge, wet splat on the concrete directly in front of my porch. Now I am not a squeamish fellow, but the worst part about this whole thing is that we have a sunken porch, and so the sidewalk is chest-high and I just know I’m getting foreign, microscopic neighbor-spit containing God-knows-what horrific diseases all over me whenever our trips to smoke happen to coincide. If his requirements for choosing a sexual partner are anything like his smoking habits Upstairs Spitter probably has enough STDs swimming in his human bacterial frappe to bring down an occupying army.

Worse still, he’s one of these adolescent morons who has yet to grasp the idea of an ashtray, and just casually pitches his cigarette butt off the balcony as if throwing fish to hungry seals. A wonderful shower of sparks ensues and I’m just waiting for the day when I have to show my landlord the ashtray I keep on my porch to prove I smoke white-filtered cancer sticks instead of his orange-filtered ones. Upstairs Spitter’s friends seem of a similar caliber, as a few weekends ago I came out one Sunday morning to find the area in front of my porch resembling the floor of a saloon shortly after closing time. There was even a half-smoked cigar down there, for shit’s sake! In the words of Jerry Seinfeld, “we’re trying to have a society, here…”

Leaving aside how rude and just stupid this behavior, there’s the fact that somebody has to pick this crap up, but what the hell would Upstairs Spitter care about some lowly maintenance worker? Not to even mention the fact that some of these stray butts are probably making their way into the surrounding soil of the apartment complex, carefully not biodegrading for 10-12 years. Yet another incentive for smoking non-filters; they only take upwards of 3-5 months.

Could all of this be solved by a short trip up the stairs to face him man-to-man and ask, very politely, if he could please not treat the sidewalk like his personal garbage can? Perhaps. But more likely it would just cause some worse manner of passive-aggressive hell to be visited upon our doorstep. Plus, I don’t talk to people. Maybe I’ll just pee on his doorknob. That would make me feel a lot better.





Random Thought for the Day:


It’s very difficult to be a mean drunk when sipping anything out of a coconut. Doubly so if it also has one of those little paper umbrellas and a pineapple slice.

Light a Match

12/22/06


Hanni bought some chips made with Olestra the other day. So…you know…this Christmas we're going to be pooping machines afflicted with Rickets.

(For those of you who don't know why that's funny, click the link.)


Biggest Lie I Heard Today

Female Employee: I'm glad I wasn't much in the looks department in high school so I didn't get nominated for queen.



Most Boring Thing I Heard Today

"I saw they had new sugar-free Lifesavers, so I bought some and thought I'd see if I like 'em."


Quackity-Quack, Fuck You



I am baffled, baffled I say, by the number of people who think those damn stuffed toys that dance and sing some twisted, alternate version of a popular song are funny and cute. They're not. They're stupid. And annoying. And playing them in the office makes me imagine what it would be like to shove venomous frogs inside you.

How many times can a duck in a Santa hat singing "Quackity-quack, don't talk back" really be funny? Then again, people seem to like racist rednecks who tell bad jokes, too. People are morons. Holy shit and where's the Tylenol?

Hallmark of the Beast

12/15/06


I don't get holiday cards. I don't mean that I don't receive them; I mean I don't precisely understand the sort of mass mental illness which causes people to send them to me. What are people thinking when they send these things out? And are there any humans out there so terminally starved for whatever minimal contact a thin piece of cardboard can impart that they actually like getting holiday cards? Or cards in general, for that matter. It never fails that whenever the high holidays roll around I hear twelve or thirteen (usually unwed, middle-aged) women in my office maligning over the fact that they're "so behind on Christmas cards this year, and oh it's just going to take me all weekend to finish writing them," or some such nonsense. I mean, hey, there are people who have no place to live and nothing to eat this year, but yeah, you climb up on that cross because you have to affix a few stamps, Delores.

Just what the devil am I supposed to do with this marginally coherent paper greeting? Anyone who lives with fewer than five animals always thinks the same thing when they get a card: "Hmm…I wonder how long I have to hold onto this before I can just throw it away." Is there something that a cartoon snowman/Santa/Christmas tree/Jesus can impart about your feelings to me that a six minute phone call would not? Okay, honestly it'll probably be more like a twenty-second message you leave on my voicemail because I don't like to answer the phone, but still; less work for you, you ink-stained lunatic! If you're going to force me to open and pretend to read your card, at least consider affixing a photo showing, at minimum, a little nipple.


And why in the name of sweet, dancing Moses am I getting these from coworkers? Hey, we've spoken a total of eight sentences to each other this year; here's a slab of wood pulp with some malarkey about sledding and forgiveness! Take some Prozac, would you Phyllis? Greeting cards are like one step above mailing someone a fortune cookie. But at least with those I have something to eat while I read poorly constructed aphorisms. Let's stop all the madness, shall we? Oh, unless you're sending money or something else which can be exchanged for goods and services; that is a legitimate use of a greeting card. Otherwise, please save me the trouble and just throw the card away yourself.

Thank you for your kind attention.

A Shower I Can Get Behind

12/13/06


For any of you interested out there, I just thought I’d give you a heads-up on some interesting astral activity this evening. Tonight the Geminid meteor shower is going to be the heaviest of the year, with an average of one or two meteors per minute. These bodies are slower moving and brighter than most, as well as being observable just about everywhere in the sky.

The shower will last all night, but the heaviest of the shooting stars will come rocketing in at 80,000 mph between 10 p.m. and midnight. It’s best to observe them from the secluded dark of the countryside where you could see as many as 100 per hour, but should you be frightened of monsters and rapists those of us in the city might get a few peeks at the brightest ones.


Just thought I’d give you a “heads up.” Gods, what a terrible pun. Should you be interested in finding out more, your friendly, neighborhood reporter is here with the following links:

Top 10 Geminid Viewing Tips
Where the Meteors Come From

K. Tarin: Feebleminded Apple-John

12/8/06

Yesterday we touched on a particular Amazon.com reviewer who, I feel, represents the curious madness of those who seem to have nothing better to do than heap criticism upon popular culture with barely the slightest provocation. People like me, I suppose. But hey, at least I have the courtesy to possess the literary ability above the common tree frog, whereas K. Tarin treats the English language as his own personal colostomy bag. Since there’s something slightly pathetic about doing a 2-day post on the mild annoyance of someone else’s opinions, idiotic as they are, I’ll keep this short and sweet.

I suppose what I find most curious about K. Tarin’s reviews are that he seems to purchase things he knows he’s going to hate, presumably for the sole purpose of ragging on them through Amazon reviews. His negative (one star) admonitions outweigh his positives by something like 10 to 1, with concert DVDs or videos being the largest source of his ire. Check out this laundry list of concert shows that didn’t make the grade:


Live at the Montreux Jazz Festival 1978

“Getting tired of tarded camera work, someone start a school for these
people?... pure and simple. stop blowing it!!!!! TARDED!”

Metallica – The Videos 1989-2004

“No Closed Captioned, or subtitles, for this DVD Some of my music DVD's
from almost 10 years ago have it. Flat no more excuses anymore, its 2007 now!!
“F+ on this DVD just for this”

Ted Nugent – Full Bluntal Nugity Live

so many good reviews, you people must be young, and or never seen Ted in the
70's. I am talking about he does not use a Gibson Birdland guitar anymore.
Why? is it to hard to play nightly? takes to much out of you? or what?

Styx – Return to Paradise

“before I bounce this thing, "listening" to styx has always been one of my fav
listens. Studio work is killer. live, I guess I am glad I missed them live.
POSERS”

I fail to understand why someone with the worst taste in music ever would continue to purchase metric tons of concert videos which he clearly hates. I don’t think it’s the movies that are “tarded,” you deranged monkey.

You may have noticed that K. Tarin rails against there not being closed captioning on the Metallica videos; this is a common complaint and he lists it in many reviews of DVDs. Uhm…what precisely is enjoyable about reading a music video? If you can’t hear the goddamn music all you’re watching is barely coherent 3-minute stories about angst and women, aren’t you? I just…sweet Christmas I just don’t get this guy. Hey, did it occur to you that maybe the reason you’re deaf is all the concert speakers you sat three inches from back in the 70s?


One more point and then I’ll let you go. K. Tarin did post a favorable review (4 out of 5 stars!) for the movie Wild at Heart; a very odd film by David Lynch which is definitely one of his more tepid ventures. K. Tarin just drops off the fucking side of the earth when he says:

“why they release movies in todays age without this option on it to turn
off the sex and or dirty words, I just don’t get it. So 4 stars not 5 just for
that.”

And there’s really nothing else I can say to make that statement funnier. What an angry, weird little man.

K. Tarin: Nincompoop

12/7/06

I was searching reviews for a book I’m currently reading by Frans de Waal entitled Our Inner Ape, when I came across a post on Amazon.com by K. Tarin “2hard2please”.

I think I might accidentally touch-off a negative feedback loop by amateurishly criticizing the already amateur criticism of K. Tarin, who, it appears, spends the bulk of his/her time vomiting insanity all over Amazon.com reviews. But sometimes the Universe just throws something at me that’s so bizarre and hilariously irritating, I have to vent my frustration or just start chucking live ordinance at people on the street.

Our Inner Ape is a book by a leading primatologist contrasting and comparing the habits of our closest living relatives, chimps and bonobos, with our own social and political proclivities. It’s quite an interesting read, although K. Tarin begs to differ. Here’s and excerpt from his review:

“We share over 98% of DNA and many behaviors [sic] Why then, has never a Chimp
or a Bonobo ever been filmed praying? or making an Idol out of a stick? They use
tools right?
“Why haven't any animals been recorded sitting around having any
conversations? They yell and make plenty of noises, the world over, but none
have ever been recorded sitting around and have any conversations.”

I’ll give you some time to let the heaping craziness sink in there. It’s hard to even criticize this kind of thing, because the statement is just so out-and-out loony. Proposing a rational argument to the above is somewhat akin to trying to explain how you’d really rather keep your legs, thanks, to a marauding shark who has just sheared you off at the torso. I fail to understand the sideways leap in logic that leads K. Tarin to surmise that because we are similar in DNA and some social aspects, chimps should be kneeling in front of deities sculpted from poo or whatever. And as for “having conversations,” what exactly is he expecting to see? It’s clear that apes communicate, sorry if they don’t use the Queen’s English and wear smoking jackets while doing it, you freak.

And yeah, so maybe it’s only a crappy Amazon review, but the trend of refusing to capitalize properly or take the time to put an apostrophe into contractions is just disgusting. Not to mention K. Tarin’s private war on the readability of one’s writing. His sentences read like something written by a sixth-grader, then translated into several different, dead languages and back into English.

Here’s another good one, where K. Tarin reviews A Terrible Love of War by James Hillman. I haven’t read the book, but it appears to be a hotly contested book concerning why we make war, including a rather scathing and possibly misguided assertion that Christians are the worst offenders of all. K. Tarin, as in other reviews, proclaims that “abortion kills more than all wars combined,” and goes on to say:

“This book doesn't address the condition of man and mans condition as its been
forever, as in thousands of years. and to single out Christianity as war mongers
is tarded, the whole world is and has been into wars. Name ONE century in
history, yes all of history, where there has been no wars? ( hint, its zero )”

Oh the sheer, unadulterated glee K. Tarin must experience when trotting out his favorite criticism; that something is “tarded.” My gray matter quivers. I won’t bother to point out that “man’s condition” has been going on for far longer than a few thousand years, but I think his argument might have had a little more punch had our friendly neighborhood psycho said “name on year” where there was no war instead of “one century,” since that’s just the stupidest request in our apparently short history.

But take heart! K. Tarin does appear to like some things. Here in his review of People of God: The History of Catholic Christianity, K. Tarin gives the book 5 stars! I haven’t read this book either, but I can only assume he’s missing some massive point when he writes:

“Points out many great "things" “How about, you never meet people that ( have
read the bible for themselves, as in on their own ) convert from Christianity to
Catholic? Meaning I have never meet a Catholic that used to be a Christian.
However I have met, and numerous numbers at that, Christians that used to be
Catholics. This is taking into account those who read the bible on their own
free will, alone, away from study and or structured organized religion of any
kind.”

K. Tarin is using something popular with most people who don’t know what they’re talking about; the “if I haven’t encountered it, it must be bullshit” argument. And, this isn’t my area of expertise, but I think Catholics are Christians. Yeah, pretty sure. It’s right there in the title of the book, you drooling ninny.

I’ve gone on about some douche-bag reviewer for long enough today, but tune in tomorrow when we examine why K. Turin seems to spend every penny on things from Amazon he knows he hates, and just how empty a shell of a human he must be.

Bathroom Wars

12/5/06


It is definitely a good thing that Hanni and I have separate bathrooms. I’ve mentioned before that the most significant difference between men and women is the amount of dirt and semen they’re willing to comfortably ignore, and the bathroom is a prime example of this. Whenever I go into my bathroom I see just your run-of-the-mill lavatory; a necessary evil where I go to excrete certain unmentionables and occasionally run a comb through my hair so I don’t look like the Elephant Man whenever I’m forced to go into the outside world. Hanni’s bathroom is more like a shrine to the cosmetic industry. I’m pretty sure there’s a toilet in there because often I hear it flush, but finding it would require a machete and native guide. The place is flush with all manner of tubes and bottles full of human maintenance equipment, all carefully placed on the counter within easy reach so they don’t clutter up the inside of the drawers or cabinets. It’s like a medieval apothecary shop in there; I’m pretty sure I saw a copy of the Necronomicon whenever I foolishly went in search of a bar of soap.


Don’t get me wrong; I am fantastically pleased with the results of all those creams and conditioners and…whatever; my fiancé is quite a fetching woman. No, what baffles me is how she can peer into that huge den of sorcery and see animated sparkles dancing off every surface, yet looking into my bathroom an expression comes over her face which can only be equaled by one watching the manual masturbation of farm animals. It’s clear that whenever viewing my water closet Hanni is seeing Ebola virus just smeared over every surface. And my bathroom is totally clean. Okay, so yeah, sometimes there is a tiny amount of dried urine on the floor next to the toilet, but it’s dry and unless you’re licking the floor beneath the toilet, I fail to see the trauma. It’s not like I’m painting the walls with my poo. The sink’s clean, the mirror’s clean and a little stray pee is just the unfortunate payoff of having to urinate through a hose attached to my pelvis.

You know, I think I just figured something out. I think the general female skittishness with floor-pee can be traced to how differently the sexes vacate their bladders. Women hover and blot whereas men stand and shake. I’ll wager the fact that, as children, men are going to get piss all over their hands (and dribbles in their pants, let’s face it) leads to an overall casualness with pee that women just never get to experience. Not that I want the guy at the urinal next to me treating the bathroom as his own personal water park, but a little stray micturate isn’t going to bother me. (Micturate is your vocab word for the day, ladies and gentlemen; try to work it into conversation!)


For reasons which will forever elude me, Hanni thinks I’m kind of dirty. Since the two of us got together she has been preoccupied with making sure I take a shower once a day, silly as that is, I know. Almost always we shower together, which I like. On the rare instance that we bathe apart, it seems inevitable that whoever is not in the shower will mess with the other. Our apartment is too new for simple games like flushing the toilet to make the water run hot and cold, so we have to get creative. Last night we didn’t shower together because I was doing dishes whenever Hanni went to clean her body. I went into the bathroom after she’d gotten in and she touched off the shenanigans by flinging water over the top of the shower at me. The games were afoot.

I retaliated by throwing a gallon pitcher full of ice cold water over the stall; nothing too fancy, and then pitched the container over too for good measure. I foolishly thought that would be enough for the night. The games always involve throwing something annoying onto the other person; sometimes it’s dishwashing liquid, but the best one is baby powder. It forms this odd, cloyingly fragrant paste upon contact with a wet body. At any rate, Hanni gets out of the shower and I’m quietly minding my own business in the kitchen when she comes up behind me and I feel something poured onto the top of my head. For a moment I think it’s water until I realize that whatever it is isn’t dripping off my cranium. Not water. A huge pile of baby powder had just been deposited unto my melon, shortly followed by the sound of maniacal laughter as wet footfalls padded away into the bedroom.


I looked like a very annoyed Founding Father. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to get baby powder out of your hair without water, but it’s nigh impossible. This seemed a nice addition to Hanni’s diabolical plot, because, as she put it, “now you have to shower tonight.” If I didn’t feel that I would suffocate in the night from the powder coating my lungs I would have slept in it just to prove her wrong. But don’t worry; I will get my revenge. Tonight I poop in her pillowcase.

Jesus, this is another bathroom post, isn’t it? There’s something very wrong with me.

Rectum? Damn Near Killed ‘Em!

11/30/06

A few days ago I imparted the story of Hanni and Ryan’s Disgusting Thanksgiving Weekend, and just in case I hadn’t maxed-out your tolerance for anecdotes concerning poo, I thought I’d add a little epilogue to the story.

As I mentioned Hanni’s younger sister Susanne mysteriously came down with the same fluid-spewing condition when she and her husband were on the way back from picking up a vehicle in the Lone Star State. Rumor has it the final leg of the trip, which normally takes 6 hours, took a staggering 12 hours to cross because of frequent rest stops. Although, not all of them were strictly at places designed for such stops, since there isn’t always a bathroom handy whenever your stomach has decided to attempt to escape via your windpipe. I hear tell that my fair, soon-to-be sister-in-law was forced to squat along the side of the road as liquefied fecal matter shotgunned out of her behind, presumably giving her husband’s truck a new and interesting paint job.

Susanne is not the most delicate of flowers, I should mention, and imagining the flood of expletives that must have come from her mouth (in between the vomit) is enough to make Beelzebub weep. It’s also very possible that she’s somewhat brain damaged.

Now, I like Susanne very much, and the fact that she thinks I’m funny doesn’t wear too badly on the old ego, but sometimes she does things that can only be explained as questionable decision making at best, and outright bat-shit lunacy at worst. This is the woman who once punctured her own hand, through both sides, with a kitchen knife because she was trying to remove an avocado seed and felt piercing it with a savage stabbing motion while holding it in her hand was the best method. That being said, I have a hard time imagining what I would have done differently in the following story:

On one of Susanne and her husband’s “rest stops” in their Johnny Poopleseed trek across the country, the two were lucky enough to have indoor plumbing in the form of a McDonald’s bathroom. Susanne was busy painting the interior of the bowl brown when she found herself in the direst of bathroom decisions. I think some of you are already ahead of me here. I speak, of course, of the decision whether to try to clamp off your ass and spin around, or just let fly because suddenly you have to puke. What follows is a reenactment of how I think the conversation went through the door of the bathroom between Susanne and her husband Stephen:

Susanne: “Oh fuck! I have to puke!”
Stephen: “So puke.”
Susanne: “No, there’s still poop comin’ out, you son of a bitch!”
Stephen: “So?”
Susanne: “So if I turn to puke I’ll shit all over my fucking legs!”
Stephen: (No answer because he has gone to wait in the truck.)

The sound of cursing and vomit splattering commercial tile is heard by the patrons of McDonald’s, followed by a loud blast of diarrhea.

And Susanne did what I assume 96% of you out there would do in a situation where you have just totally raped a fast-food bathroom; she bolted like a gazelle being chased by lions. Oh, sorry, she did take the time to gently cover her puke with a thin layer of 1-ply toilet paper before sprinting for the parking lot. I have yet to understand why anyone thinks it’s less trouble for the dude making $4.25/hour to clean up vomit-soaked toilet paper falling apart all over the place than just plain puke, but that seems to be the prevailing opinion.

I think I might lay off the poo-posts for awhile.

Welcome to the Vomitorium

11/27/06


“How was your Thanksgiving” is probably a question a lot of us will be asked a maddening number of times today, and to avoid anyone unnecessarily speaking to me, I’ll go ahead and tell you: Not so good. I had the pleasure of contracting viral gastroenteritis, commonly known as “the stomach flu,” despite the fact that it has absolutely nothing to do with influenza. Even so, goddamn if it isn’t a nasty little bugger.

Hanni calls my “delusion” that I am incapable of getting sick “a Jesus complex,” but really I do have a pretty stalwart immune system, and I’d never had this particular affliction before. Oh sure, I’d faked it probably hundreds of times when I was a kid (lots of noises in the bathroom, throwing water into the toilet, holding the thermometer up to the light bulb) and I shudder to think how many times I’ve called into work with the dubious and vague “uh, yeah, I’m like…totally throwing up so…not coming in…cough.” For those blessed few of you who, like me up until this demonic weekend, have never flirted with V.G., I’ll give you a few highlights from the CDC:

“The main symptoms of viral gastroenteritis are watery diarrhea and vomiting.
The affected person may also have headache, fever, and abdominal cramps
("stomach ache"). In general, the symptoms begin 1 to 2 days following infection
with a virus that causes gastroenteritis and may last for 1 to 10 days,
depending on which virus causes the illness.”

Or, as I prefer to call it, “reverse-rape via projectile vomiting and explosive diarrhea for stretches of time best measured in eons.” Something has clearly gone desperately wrong inside you whenever all the liquids in your body are attempting to abandon ship at once through any orifice not nailed shut.


I awakened Saturday morning around 10 a.m. to the sounds of my fiancé blasting fecal matter into the toilet at orbital-escape velocities and cursing at me for not getting up once in the past 3 hours she had been courting the relationship between her ass and the toilet. Apparently I’d already failed the whole “in sickness or in health” bit. But to be fair, I don’t remember her calling me at all, and why became immediately apparent as I sprinted to our other bathroom and joined the cacophony of horror echoing through the apartment. At first I thought this was the first really bad hangover I’ve had in about five years, but as both Hanni and I lay in bed with stomach cramps and sore rectums the vomiting began.

This is not a hangover, I thought as I spewed into a Styrofoam cooler I’d procured for just this sort of emergency on my way back from my third or forth poo of the morning. Hanni had an empty trashcan on her side. It did not remain empty for long. Oh, did I mention that I had Rotel Queso dip at about 3 that morning when I still felt fine? Yeah. The smell of partially digested tortilla chips and cheese joined a chorus of horrifying stenches permeating our home. By the end of it the apartment would smell not unlike a monkey with a lower G.I. problem got loose in the elephant house.

We weren’t the only ones, either. Hanni’s father, uncle, grandmother, grandfather, aunt and sister would all also come down with this voodoo distress. Her sister Suzanne is the most perplexing case of all, however, as she was out of the state for 3 days already when everyone fell ill; all within hours of each other. She was in Texas with her husband and the only way I can figure this affliction would be worse is to have it at 70 mph, stopping at every disgusting rest area along the way. We at first thought the Typhoid Mary of this case was a baby who everyone delightfully got to see have diarrhea at Thanksgiving dinner, but Suzanne wasn’t there…so I dunno, phantom, syringe-wielding weasels, maybe? And if you’re thinking salmonella trust me, that turkey was cooked to bejezzus and back; it wasn’t salmonella.


Hanni’s family was in possession of some leftover anti-nausea prescription medication, but Hanni’s mother wouldn’t bring it to us ‘cause, y’know, she would have had to drive the 18 miles from Billings to Springfield and, as she put it in one of the all-out craziest fucking statements I’ve ever heard, “how will you be able to go through childbirth if you can’t handle this?”

Fortunately my mother brought us Sprite, Gatorade, ibuprofen, anti-diarrhea and anti-nausea medicine because she doesn’t hate us. Incidentally, she brought over this anti-nausea stuff called Nauzene and let me tell you, ask for this by name because it is dyno-MITE! It comes in cherry-flavored chewable tablets which actually taste good, and “reaches 99% of its neutralizing ability within 4 minutes.” Brother, that’s no brag because literally within ten seconds of swallowing the pills we both felt immeasurably better and didn’t puke again.


By Saturday night the siege seemed to be over and I was finally able to consume solid food, though Hanni is still on a soup and club soda regimen. I don’t think either of us will crap right for several weeks.

K-O’ed; Round II

11/21/06

Yesterday I touched on the fact that John K values a shiny-looking product over actual content. He seems permanently stuck in the 50’s and 60’s, touting Huckleberry Hound and other Hanna-Barbera cartoons as the pinnacle of cartooning mastery. Hey, I like The Jetsons as much as the next person (which is to say mildly) but I hardly think static, painted backgrounds are the end-all, be-all of artistry. He seems to totally miss the point that it’s the core characters and story of the show that made these programs great for their time, and I would submit that Yogi Bear would’ve been just as popular if done as stills cut out of construction paper. South Park comes to mind. But K can’t be bothered with logic when there’s so much vicious bile to spew all over creation.

Also, he’s kind of a racist. Recently he did a post on color scheme. One of his complaints was the colors in Shrek, though he doesn’t really say why or what, if anything is wrong with it. No, instead John points to Anime as an example of good color schemes and suggests that, “if you are a painter and are stuck for color ideas, just steal a pile of these!” All artists steal from each other, so that’s no big deal, but the more I read the more uncomfortable I get because John talks like your benign but racist grandfather who casually trots out the word “nigger” and offhandedly states that Jews are good at hoarding money. For example:

“Thank God our pals the Japs are keeping visual pleasure alive. Let's pay
attention!”

“Fred is coming out of a bag with tiny down syndrome eyes…”

“It's a tad bit on the cold side for me, but then the Japanese are a cold race. We westerners on the other hand are naturally emotional and warm and inventive, yet our stupid-ass corporate franchise controlled society is stopping us from what we could easily do-beat the crap out of cold cultures that are still imitating what we did from the 1930s to the 1950s!”

Wow. Just…uh, wow. Ignorant stereotyping aside, John seems to miss the irony that he had one hit show and since then has just been imitating his own work from a decade ago and is blissfully ignorant as to why nobody wants to hire him. Gee, I dunno, should we hire a young, new animator who actually uses tools invented in the past forty years, or the crotchety old lunatic has-been who screams like a deranged two-year-old anytime someone mentions The Simpsons?
Some of K’s posts seem less about artwork and more about how he hates everything that has happened in the world since 1970. Really. In one drooling, deranged post on what I guess is supposed to be form and structure in artwork, K just stream-of-consciousness rambles for about 10 paragraphs about how “hippies destroyed the western world in the late 60s” and how toy makers must secretly loathe children these days. After lurching around the page in buggy-eyed madness for awhile, K states that “these toys are just one example of the horrible thing that has happened in all walks of modern (post 1970) life. Nothing has form anymore. Music is rambling non melodic nonsense.” Shortly thereafter he seems to come out of his rage-haze and kind of tacks…something about how this relates to art onto the end of the post.

Yes, our friendly, neighborhood ass-clown seems to think that if it happened before Vietnam, it must have been good. K kind of comes off sounding like that crotchety old bastard who lives on the corner and shouts at kids to keep off his lawn and about how much a loaf of bread costs now. Nostalgia and paying homage have their place, but believing that Looney Tunes from 1957 was the last time anything of value was created is just fucking stupid.

“Mel Blanc read the dialogue with verve and rhythm and a huge variety of
contrasts and accents. (no one does this any more)”

Yep; hit the nail on the head there, K. Mel Blanc was phenomenal, no doubt about it, but I’m a little dubious with his assertion that nobody doing cartoon voice work nowadays has any skill. That’s probably the most insulting, idiotic thing I’ve heard since…well since the last thing I read on his page, actually. I forget, how many voices and accents does Hank Azaria do? Oh, right, he’s on that dreaded Simpsons show and everything involved in modern cartoons sucks, right. (Incidentally, Azaria does Chief Wiggum, Apu, Moe, Comic Book Guy, Cletus, Professor Frink and others.)

I do agree with K that Jack Kirby was an astounding comic book art visionary, but he wasn’t art perfection. K seems to totally gloss-over the fact that anatomically some of his compositions are just fucking bizarre. John K is terminally lost in nostalgia and his objectivity is completely clouded by it.

He’s not shy about extolling the godlike talent that is “K”, either. Here’s a little gem where K claims that anyone who was doing innovative cartooning in the 90’s was ripping him off:

“Of all the innovations that came from that show this is the biggest one and the
one that wasn’t carried on by anyone else. People would copy certain specific
Stimpy expressions and use them out of context in their own cartoons, but I’ve
yet to see anyone make their characters have an inner life…”

What a penis drip. I could probably spend the rest of my life happily criticizing John K’s crazy douchebagery, but I think I’ve gone on long enough. Thank you for your kind attention, ladies and gentlemen. We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.




John K’s ass-blog link – Click if you dare!

K-O’ed

11/20/06

In the vein of posting things which maybe I and two other people will find interesting, today I want to talk about John Kricfalusi. John K is best known for creating the wildly popular cartoon Ren & Stimpy, then sort of falling off the map of popular culture. Thanks to Aaron, I recently became aware of John K’s blog and after many painful hours of reading it, have come to the conclusion that John is a bitter dick-hole of a man. Much like my Clonus Island and Clonus Island II posts, there’s a lot of hilarious ground to cover in making fun of this man, so once again I’m going to split this into a 2-day post. First, a little history.

It seems that after selling Ren & Stimpy to Nickelodeon in 1988 John K had battle after battle with network execs and was summarily fired in 1992. Considering the show only ran from 1991 to 1996, it’s arguable that John K was not responsible for the best work of the series, evidenced by the astoundingly terrible re-vamping of Ren & Stimpy for Spike Network which was nixed after 3 episodes. Judging from the fact that every program he’s worked on since then has been cancelled within a few episodes, I submit that John K is a very angry, marginally talented man who completely burned all his bridges because he thought he was King Shit of Turd Mountain.

John K’s blog reads like the deranged manifesto of a man who has come to blame the entire cartooning industry for his frustrated career. If it’s a popular cartoon today, you can bet that John hates it like sour-grape poison. Fiery spittle flying from his lips, John K rails against everything from how nobody can draw in today’s cartoons, to how awful the color schemes are and, I can only assume, how there are far too few matte paintings of boogers and scabs. The Simpsons and Family Guy are two examples of extremely popular shows that draw John’s sad little ire.

His blog is very well frequented, mostly by young K-disciples who identify with K because they too aren’t getting paid to animate, and seem to believe that despite any evidence to support it, they totally kick ass and it’s “the industry” standing between them and countless riches and fame. Either that, or the fact that it’s hard to get a job when you’re an emo teenager with no professional training who sits in your parent’s basement all day long farting up the furniture. But John K does make converts like gang-busters. Here’s a comment one fan left on his blog:

“I was watching The Simpsons today and all of a sudden it hit me how horrible
all those pinks and purples and yellows all mashed together really are. Bit of a
shock, really, considering how long I've been watching the show.”

Yeah, thank the gods that John K has come along to inform us why we should arbitrarily hate something we’ve been enjoying just fine for years. It’s sort of as if K is screaming at the top of his jaded little voice that “the emperor really is wearing clothes; can’t you see it?!” And, naturally, scream anything loudly and long enough and there are bound to be fanboys out there who will eventually agree with you because of the one good show you did fifteen years ago.

John K seems to be laser-focused on one tiny aspect of cartoons, and that is the artwork. While important, you could have the best artwork on the planet but unless there’s a good story and interesting characters to go with it nobody is going to watch your abortion of a program. I speak, of course, of The Ripping Friends.

John K seems to believe that there’s really no reason for art to evolve, ever. I can only assume that’s what he was thinking when he churned out the mindless vomit-fest that was The Ripping Friends. “Hey, people really liked Ren and Stimpy ten years ago. I know! Let’s recycle the same exact style and feel of the cartoon, only let’s take out all that bothersome story and character. What’s that you say? The script sucks? Nobody cares about the script! Just cram some disgusting images up there and call it done!” Either it was something like that or he was high on PCP because that cartoon s-u-u-u-u-u-ucked. In case you missed it, The Ripping Friends was 4 brain-damaged, superhero brothers who ineffectually fight crime in between doing unspeakable things such as biting pustules off their feet and being subservient to their extremely masculine mother. (Paging Dr. Freud) It was cancelled after only one season on Fox’s Saturday morning lineup, but inexplicably reared its inane head on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, one of my favorite blocks of programming. I can scarcely put into words the frustration and confusion I suffered when that asinine fever-dream of a cartoon ate up a half hour of my Adult Swim time every Sunday.

In fairness to John K, I do like the work he does for music videos, especially the Tenacious D and Weird Al Yankovic spots. I probably like them because he does just the animation and has nothing to do with the content of the video. Were that the case, I’m sure it would be a psychotic cavalcade of small, dangerous woodland creatures sodomizing a tree trunk or something. Man, John K is one deranged prig.



Tomorrow: John K gets medieval on modern cartooning AND John K’s deliciously oblivious racism.

Buttered Balls

11/16/06

With the holidays approaching like a commercial-laden freight train, I thought some of you out there might enjoy a few cooking tips and recipes. Remember, the more time your relatives spend cramming things into their rotund bellies the less time they’ll spend actually talking to you. So get out those stretchy pants*, put the doctor on speed-dial and hunker down, you madcap cooks out there, Jett Fumes is comin’ at’cha Thanksgiving-Style, you sum-bitch!

Some of my more faithful and veteran readers may remember that last year for Thanksgiving I was charged with making the turkey to take over to my mother’s house. As per usual with anything culinary, I couldn’t be satisfied with simply popping a gobbler in the hot box for a few hours and calling it a day, no, no. I had to make a Turducken, which is a turkey stuffed with a duck stuffed with a chicken. Read all about it here. This year I think I’m going to forgo Ultra-Mega Turkey and just go with a more traditional bird.

How Much of What Kind?

A good average for how much bird to buy is 1-1 ½ pounds per guest. Unless your guests happen to be those guys who enter professional eating contests.


Now, there are numerous different kinds of turkey. “Frozen” means that the turkey has been taken down to zero degrees F and hasn’t been brought above 26˚F. Why so cold? While water will freeze at 32˚F the fluid in meat won’t necessarily follow suit, since it contains sodium and all manner of other goodies; the more components in water the colder it has to be for it to freeze. These bad boys are rock hard, solid frozen.

“Refrigerated” turkeys are brought down to 24-26˚F, but not frozen solid. They don’t need as long for “thawing” since they’re not technically frozen. But that’s about the only difference. Both frozen or refrigerated are fine; don’t be a snob. There is a 3rd category, “Fresh”, which means the bird has never dropped below 26˚F. This one just seems like more trouble than it’s worth (bruising, contamination, escaping on foot, etc) not to mention hard to find in the first place.

Into the Briny Deep

I cannot imagine why anyone would cook a turkey without brining it. Sure, it’s one extra step, but it’s essential if you want to guarantee a flavorful, juicy bird. However, make sure you’re not using a self-basting bird for this, as it has already been injected with salt and…other stuff.

Brining can be used for any meat, but it works very well with poultry and pork which are easy to overcook but need to be brought to a significant temperature to ensure bacterial genocide. The salt in the brine creates osmosis which drags whatever flavors are in the brine into your meat, trapping them there and holding onto much more liquid whenever you finally cook that bad boy. Here’s the recipe I prefer:

1 gallon (16 cups) vegetable or chicken stock
1 gallon ice water
1 cup Kosher salt (3/4 cup regular table salt)
2 Tbsp whole black peppercorns
2 bay leaves
Several rough-chopped sprigs parsley (about 1 cup worth)

Bring all ingredients except the ice water to a boil, just to marry and release the flavors. In a 5-gallon bucket or other large container combine brine with the ice water. Add turkey. Brine in fridge or a cold area, like the garage (as close to 40˚F as you can get) for 10-12 hours, turning bird once.


You can use just plain water instead of stock for a perfectly fine and cheaper alternative, but double the amount of salt.

Fire It Up, T-Bird

Kudos to you who got The Crow, reference above, by the way. Okay, here’s the skinny on cooking that poultry prize; ignore that demonic little plastic timer. That device is set to pop at 180˚F and while that’s great for dark meat, the white meat will be something not unlike vulcanized rubber by that time. Dark meat does take longer to cook, and to compensate for that use a sheet pan with a lip (to catch drippings) and a flat roasting rack, plus a digital thermometer with a probe. The shallow pan will accelerate air over the lip of the pan and into the dark meat, cooking it faster. The thermometer probe should be inserted into the deepest part of the turkey and set for 161˚F. Yes, this will kill any salmonella bacteria lurking inside your bird.


Rub the turkey down with a polish of canola oil and stuff the cavity with a few sprigs of parsley, rosemary and sage, plus ½ of a rough-chopped onion and ½ of a lemon.

Roast the turkey at 450˚ for 30 minutes, then mold aluminum foil over the breast and return to oven, reducing the temp to 350˚. The timer should go off in about another hour and a half. Pull the bird and let it rest for at least 15 minutes before carving her up; this will give any juices floating around time to reabsorb into the meat.


The drippings from the pan can be used to make a dynamite gravy, but that’s another blog. Plus, with all the TLC you’ve put into your fowl it should be tender and juicy enough to stand on its own. Eat in good health, dear readers.



*Contrary to popular belief, the average American only gains about 1 pound over the high holidays. The trouble is most of us don’t bother to lose that pound over the next year and after mama earth makes 15-20 trips ‘round big daddy sun, that starts to add up.

Ask Dr. Jett

11/15/06


I randomly decided to start a piece where I pretend to be an expert on, well anything, really, and answer questions about which you probably never wondered and couldn’t give less of a shit. Enjoy!





Q: Dr. Jett, why do men have nipples? I mean, other than to make that suit from
Batman and Robin look utterly ridiculous, what purpose do they serve?


A: Yeah, what was that suit about? Creepy. Anyway, nobody can specifically tell you for
what purpose do men have nipples, but we do know why…kind of.


Prior to 14 weeks in the gestation process, all fetuses have both male and female parts. At this point either testosterone kicks in and you grow up to enjoy exploding things and embarrassing junior high erections, or it doesn’t and you get to derive pleasure from things like shoes and Thelma and Louise. Nipples are not tied either to estrogen or testosterone, specifically, and develop well before either hormone makes us male or female. Estrogen will cause them to become fully functional and grow lovely globes of fat around them called boobies that men inexplicably want to squeeze. Men still have remnants of their original hardware and in some cases, with enough estrogen, they can grow breasts and lactate.

More interestingly, we originally have several sets of nipples. Normally only 2 develop fully to have nerves and blood supply, but about 1 in 100 babies will be born with extra titties which usually resemble nothing more than a freckle or mole. Unless you’re that mutant broad from Total Recall.




Q: Dr. Jett, is my girlfriend/wife/hooker just frigid, or am I really that bad in bed?

A: Well, I’ve never met you, but couldn’t it be both? Actually, a lack of female orgasm is just about as common as popular culture would have us think.

Anorgasmia is a predominately female condition, though this may be skewed by the fact that men who can’t achieve orgasm might be a bit wary about letting other people know about it. Perhaps with some complex rig of tubes and warmed yogurt they could fake it, I dunno. According to MedlinPlus Medical Encyclopedia, a staggering number of women don’t orgasm the way they would like, “surveys…suggest between 33% and 50% of women experience orgasm infrequently or are dissatisfied with how often they reach orgasm.”

Good gravy! Primary orgasmic dysfunction (there’s a fun phrase to trot out at parties) where a woman has never gotten her rocks off affects 10%-15% of women. Anorgasmia can be a condition one has always had, or it can develop suddenly and, my guess is, quite frustratingly.

The causes vary widely. It’s been proposed that most often it’s a mental condition owing to performance anxiety or early predisposition to sex being unpleasant or painful. There are some physical causes, such as mood enhancing and antidepressant drugs such as Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft and Lexipro. Hmm…suicide or don’t cum…that’s a tough call.

The bad news is that unless it has a specific physical cause it’s very difficult to pin down what’s causing it and how to fix it. The good news? A large portion of women who can’t orgasm still enjoy and get pleasure out of sex, they just can’t cross the finish line.

My guess is that I’ve unknowingly dated women with Anorgasmia exclusively.



Q: Dr. Jett, what is with that little shudder I get at the end whenever I pee? Do I have cancer?

A: Yes, you have cancer. Or not. Probably not. I do know that some of you out there probably don’t know what we’re talking about, but I’ve experienced this as well so it must be totally normal, right?

This seems to be a condition limited to men, as every time I’ve ever asked a woman if she gets a little shudder or cold chill right at the end of her pee she looks at me as if I’ve just asked if I could fuck her cat. Perhaps I should stop asking strangers in line at the grocery store.

At any rate, it seems that most all of us experience this at some time, but some people take little or no notice of it. Most often it occurs when you really have to pee badly and expel a heroic volume of urine. It’s just a little involuntary shake like a cold chill. Which may in fact be what it is, because I have yet to discover in my perusal of source material any medical reference to this condition. I guess most doctors are working on “sexier” problems such as AIDS and impotence; they don’t have time for my “cold-chill pee” experiments, bunch of philistines.

I’ve only heard guesses as to why this happens, and it was the assumption that I’ve made myself: Whenever you pee you’re releasing a large amount of heat in the urine, and the body wants to hold onto that so it gives a little shudder in an effort to stop it. Not only do shudders generate heat from muscle constriction, but it squeezes veins and capillaries away from the skin to retain heat. Sounds pretty good, right?

I bet it’s embarrassing if you’re giving someone a “golden shower”, though.

That's a 4-person portable urinal in The Netherlands. Drafty.

P.S. The technical term for a “golden shower” fetish is Urolagnia. It’s very powerful word on the Scrabble board.

Window to My Soul

11/14/06

What my car may have looked like at some point in the distant past.

As many of you are no doubt aware, I’ve moved residences recently. Where I was once a scant five minutes from work (about 1.5 miles) I now have the ludicrous travel time of some twenty minutes, or about 6 miles, to sit in a cubicle and goggle at the fact I have not yet been fired.* As many of you are also no doubt aware, much to the hilarity of everyone, my car is…not the optimal method of conveyance over any significant distance. It’s a 1990 New Yorker and the odometer stopped clocking at around 250,000 miles well before I purchased her for $400 some three years ago. The engine has a tendency to get rather warm owing to the fact that the fan doesn’t work, which is only problematic in the summer when you have to run the heater to keep the vehicle from overheating. I don’t take it on the highway because she starts to shudder like an old man with a voracious chill at around 55 mph. The left turn signal doesn’t work precisely right, in that you have to toggle it manually to make it blink and the driver’s side window is permanently stuck in the down position. At least, until last weekend.

One of the many fringe benefits of dating my fiancé is that her brother-in-law is a mechanic, not to mention the fact that she forces me to do things I should do but valiantly refuse to do such as acquiring a valid driver’s license and, as was the case last weekend, drive my behemoth of a car the ungodly 12 miles out to Billings so her sister’s husband could fix my window. Nobody was more surprised than me when the vehicle made the trip (significant portions of the drive are 60 mph and one lane) without incident. We dropped the car off and her brother-in-law not only fixed the window** but also replaced a $2 bulb which repaired the left turn signal. I must confess, I hardly know what to do with myself now that I have what appears to be a legally functioning automobile. I’m as giddy as a budding school girl, I must say.

Of course, there is still the issue of the car’s body resembling something that didn’t place terribly well in a demolition derby, and the back windshield is a plastic sheet sort of rammed in there because the glass was broken out, and the interior is less than pristine due to years of rain coming through the open window and flooding the trash that is now sort of forever affixed to my floorboard, and the passenger side door only opens a crack because part of the body panel is jammed against it, and the brakes will need replaced pretty soon if I do not wish to become interpretive art on Kansas Expressway, but…what was my point again?

Oh yeah; anybody want to buy a car? With all the repairs I’ve made to it I could let it go for, oh, say $800? I’ll even throw in the flat spare tire in the trunk, no charge! No pushing please; form an orderly line to the right.



What's your car worth, suck'a?

*Office Survival Tip: If you suddenly see everyone in your department avoiding eye contact while suddenly going to a meeting to which you have not been invited, you’re getting fired, Poncho.

**That is to say, it is now permanently in the “up” position but cannot be rolled down.