Happy HanuChrismaKwansika

12/21/07

My wife likes her family. She likes traditional things. I have my suspicions that she popped, fully-formed, from the cover of a Hallmark card drawn by a drunken and dangerously insane Norman Rockwell…because her family is, like most of ours, delightfully dysfunctional. I like my family, too, I just don’t really have the seemingly irrepressible compulsion to hang out with them the way Hanni does. I have never particularly understood why someone should feel closer to another on the sheer Universal happenstance that you share a huge swath of DNA. I’m personally closer to my friends, and feel about them in the same way Hanni feels about her family. I think she has always looked upon this view as somewhat perverse. Whenever we discuss why oh why she feels we have to call every sibling on every birthday, my dear one gives me the sort of look usually reserved for wet, smelly things recently pulled from a shower drain.

I admit, in many of my opinions, I am unconventional. But I don’t think Hanni fully appreciates that my seemingly idiotic values have as much worth to me as her more traditional ones. No, dear readers, I fear what we have here is a value-superiority complex. Christmas is a prime example.

I love Christmas. LOVE it. You might think it bizarre for an atheist who seems to regard humanity with constant disappointment and distain to go a big rubbery one inside at the thought of tinsel and lights, but it’s true. I love almost everything about it*. I even love the commercialization aspect of it. I love the fact that every year it seems to gobble up more of the calendar, like some unstoppable Pac-Man juggernaut. I love that most people seem to be just a little bit nicer, even if it only means dropping a few pennies into a large, red pot because of liberal guilt under the stare of a bell-ringing madman. I love that people actually wear clothing with decorations on it a 3-year-old should be embarrassed sporting. I love the crowds, I love the shopping, I even love that it takes 2 hours to drive 3 blocks, and that you have to park far enough away from to entrance so as to require a native guide. I fucking love wrapping presents.
I love the fact that, for a few weeks out of the year, drunken, semi-dangerous individuals are allowed to dress in disguise and interact with children.

I love egg-nog, spiked with whiskey, please!

I love White Elephants, I love bad and embarrassing employee parties, I love buying toys and gloves and food for needy children. I love snow, I love the food, I love Christmas movies; I love Christmas with a sort of teary-eyed wonder that should only be possible for characters of Claymation™.

It’s a Wonderful Life makes me cry every time. But to be fair, I’m usually pretty drunk by the time Jimmy Stewart starts bellowing “Merry Christmas, you old Building ‘n Loan!” in his curiously penguin--esque voice. Ryan’s (No Longer Lonely!) Christmas Eve is a thing of beauty, ladies and gentlemen.

My wife does not love these things. She loves Xmas, but for all the wrong reasons. She seems to be operating under the delusion that Christmas is the celebration of some jive turkey who had an awfully trusting step-father and a mother with a highly suspect story. She is also under the impression that this time is about being close to your family, and that one should spend huge cross-sections of the day interacting with people who, let’s face it, we wouldn’t be friends with were it not for the outside chance we might need a kidney or some bone marrow someday. Sure, I like my family and I go to their houses to open presents and spend like, a few hours there, but nothing like the marathon Yule-fest I fear my wife has planned this year. I’ve heard some horrifying talk of…games, and dangerous speak concerning…Christmas Eve services.

But we make a pretty good compromise of it; I see far more family and consume far less booze than I am comfortable with, and Hanni only gets to play 4 hours of dominoes with her kin instead of 8. I am grateful this holiday season to be married to a wonderful, understanding and loving woman who last night described being hitched to me as taking care of a horny 4-year-old. We celebrate it in vastly different ways, but I can think of no one with whom I would rather share the forty or fifty more Christmas’s to come.

Happy Holidays, everyone. And I cannot be more sincere when I say, peace on earth and goodwill toward man.


*Well, I mean, except for the religious thing, but thankfully that’s been almost bred out of it.

It’s a Gerbil Xmas, Charlie Brown

12/11/07


As I may have mentioned in a previous post, Hanni and I procured a couple of gerbils after my goldfish, Mr. Tickles, went fins-up. Through the ignorance of myself and the pet store employee (though, to be fair, pets aren’t my fucking business) we did not end up with two males as previously thought, but a male and a female. Our first clue came when puberty descended on the male like an Acme safe. It looks like he’s carrying two hairy lima beans down there. Naturally, our house turned into a sort of incestuous gerbil-porn-show for a few days. ‘Cause, y’know, their brother and sister. The sounds of Barry White, banjo music and squeaking nigh drove us to madness. If images of freakish, inbred, flipper-baby gerbils are playing through your head, don’t fear. Provided our guys weren’t terribly inbred already (and they showed no obvious genetic defects to believe this) it’s highly unlikely incest of this nature would result in genetic monsters. Good news, Alabama! Long story short, last Friday the gerbils we named Alexander and Hamilton used the latter’s vagina like a log-flume and out came seven tiny, pink and distinctly alien-esque babies.

This is the pups at one day old. See that white part of the stomach? That’s actually milk; their skin is so thin you can see right through it.

Yes, we have handled the babies, and no, she didn’t eat any of them. That’s only common in hamsters; gerbils should be fine with your smell on their tots. The only times a mother will eat her babies is if there is no water available, if they smell of something truly bizarre like an unfamiliar gerbil, or if one dies. The father’s cool, too. Apparently gerbil fathers watched a lot of Leave It to Beaver, because their fairly attentive parents.

The really troubling thing is that Hamilton is almost certainly preggers again. You see, gerbils mate right after the litter is born, and the embryos are implanted after she’s finished breast-feeding. So, in about 40 days, we will have another swarm of pink science-fiction creatures.

We have six pups that will almost certainly be black like the parents, and this one guy here who we think will be blond…or albino…I don’t even know if gerbils can be albino. It will almost certainly have pink eyes, which is visible through the skin. I’m pretty sure it’s a lab rat pretending to be a gerbil. Clearly Hamilton is a tawdry whore.

Dude. Gerbil 69. Nasty:

We are now in the uncomfortable position of either separating Alex and Hamilton and keeping him with one son and her with a daughter (they must be kept in pairs) or enduring the laughter and ridicule of several veterinary professionals until we find one who will neuter a tiny rodent.

Sometimes They Come Back

12/4/07

You know, there are certain objects that, despite their astoundingly useful existence, never really get the credit they deserve. A can opener, for instance. That is the sort of thing that you just never think about until you suddenly discover you are powerless to get into that tin of cream of mushroom. Sure, you could puncture it with a knife enough times to pry the lid off, I suppose, and after a trip to the emergency room you might even be able to enjoy your lunch. But the can opener is an object with only one specific purpose, and it performs this job so swimmingly that no other tool even comes close.

These are the things I thought while watching in horror as poop slowly rose perilously close to the lip of my toilet bowl like horribly little brown ships on a polluted tide. I’m pretty sure I must have brain damage, because despite the fact I have lamented on occasions just like this the fact we don’t have a plunger, once the danger has passed I am immediately afflicted by plunger-purchasing-amnesia. I’m no world-class pooper or anything, it just so happens that a few times a year something frigs up and the toilet suddenly reverses its only job, which is to make waste go away.

I can tell you here and now that there is no object quite as useful as a plunger when you need it. It’s not even as if you can rig some kind of MacGuyverian stand-in to work as a plunger; there is no object or combination of objects that will do. Well, I suppose you could use the hose attachment of your vacuum, but that plan seems to have three or four severe flaws, not the least of which is the horrors of accelerating feces to hurricane speeds. What’s the other option? Straighten a hanger and just sort of jab at the fibrous mass of impacted TP until it is sufficiently aerated to give way? The mind recoils in terror. A non-brain damaged person would probably get in their car and aim it toward the nearest hardware store, I guess. But not your intrepid, neighborhood reporter, ladies and gentlemen! I would have none of that malarkey. I opted for the method kids have been using to get out of doing dishes since time out of mind – the soak. I let time and water work its erosive magic until the paper fell apart and was whisked away. Thankfully, this happened automatically, because with the water level a scant 2 millimeters from the rim there was no way I was going to test the situation by flushing again. All was well by the next morning. But can I count on being so lucky next time? Images of poo logs melting all over my bathroom floor like decaying goldfish rise in the mind.

That reminds me…I need to buy a plunger.

The Devil is in the Details

12/3/07

In its ever-continuing attempt to finally make television unwatchable, Fox Network has upped the bottom-scraping once again with its new game show “The Moment of Truth.” Now, I’m sort of a default Democrat, since I happen to care whether the planet’s weather system collapses and believe that old men shouldn’t be shot in the face, so I’m pretty much on the writers’ side in this whole strike situation. But if there’s one reason to be angry as a wet badger in a bag about it, it’s the fact that the strike will invariably increase the number of unscripted, “reality” programming out there, and “The Moment of Truth” is its whorish herald.
The show features “average” people strapped to a lie detector and asked devilishly embarrassing and personal questions such as:

· “Do you really care about starving children in Africa?”
· “Are you sexually attracted to one of your wife’s friends?”
· “Do fat people repulse you?”
· “Would you cheat on your wife if you knew you wouldn’t be caught?”
· “Do you think you will be with your husband five years from now?”

Whenever I told Hanni about this historic shit-pile, she asked me how you win at such a game. My first thought was, “Does anyone win?” The object is to answer up to 21 questions. If you answer all 21 honestly, you get $500,000. The player can stop the hemorrhaging at any time, but once a question is asked it must be answered. I suppose you could argue the people participating in this televised abortion of entertainment deserve what they get, especially since they know all of the questions they’re going to be asked. You see, in order to obtain a level with the polygraph, the contestants are asked 75 questions beforehand, 21 of which will be asked on air, in front of a live audience including your soon-to-be former loved ones. They aren’t told the results of the polygraph, so I’m sure a great number of these greedy lunatics figure they can beat the box.

Said friends and family are even provided with a button meant to “rescue” the contestant from a particularly spiky question. Naturally, since the type of people this show would attract are the ethical equivalent of week-old afterbirth, they never use it for the intended purpose. Instead, they dive for it like a lion on a bunny whenever a question hits them where they live. For example, when asked if she would be more attracted to her husband if he dropped twenty pound of lard, the woman’s partner couldn’t jam that button fast enough. According Fox’s president of alternative entertainment Mike Darnell, “What ends up happening is they use it to help themselves because they don’t want to hear something revealed about themselves.”
So, basically what you get to witness is the worst factions of human selfishness trotted out because of greed. Fantastic. Aside from the fact you’re watching a physical manifestation of the Id, the fact that polygraphs aren’t particularly accurate may give one pause. They’re dynamite for telling whether someone is nervous or not, but in determining the validity for a statement their accuracy has been put somewhere between 80-98% by the American Polygraph Association. That’s…a pretty big gap.

A version of the show originally aired in Columbia. Of course it did; the rest of the world is America’s testing ground for shows we can’t think of on our own. But in the Columbian show the questions were…a bit different. The show was temporarily taken off the air when a player confessed to hiring a hit-man to bump-off her goddamn husband. I would have loved to be in on the meeting where that question was thought up. What sort of ad campaign would you air during that show? Rat poison? Surprisingly, Fox has decided questions related to a felony aren’t going to be part of its package.

The really depressing thing about this whole matter is that I have just described something that will be wildly successful. Fuck you, you human bastards. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go empty the world of whiskey and try to forget all this.

Source: TV Week, Darnell in Defense of the ‘Truth’