Survivor: IRS

It has been recently announced that infamous 43 year old, bare-assed Survivor winner Richard Hatch has been arraigned on federal charges of tax evasion for failing to report his million dollar TV prize and related earnings to the IRS. As a result, Hatch is now risking a potential 10 yr prison sentence and a $500,000 fine. He has already handed over his passport and $50,000 in bonds to be released pending his trial with the U.S. Attorney’s Office of Rhode Island (with which, he has already pleaded guilty to two previous charges in exchange for a more favorable sentence).

Well, I guess that means that the polls are closed to determine who will be recognized as the first official “Tool of 2005”, huh? What a Million Dollar Meathead!

“Hellooooooo? Earth to Dumbass!”

Only about a 3 megazillion people tuned in each week to witness him actually WIN the million dollar prize! Sure, Vince MacMahon has proven to the world that the average attention span of your average blue-collar American citizen is only about 6 seconds, and that their instant recall memory is about non-existant at the best of times…but to think that the IRS wasn’t going to take any notice on your W5 was absolutely fucking ridiculous and unlikely! Shit, the IRS are probably still trying to squeeze airport taxes out of the Wright Brothers! So what the fuck was Richard thinking?

Sure he was able to “Outwit, Outlast, and Outplay” his fellow 15 survivors in Borneo way back in 2000, but I’d say that his cleverness has been significantly reduced since being rewarded with that cool million smackers. But who could blame him really?

I would expect that anyone who was granted instant access into a lap of luxury and convenience that can only afforded by those with similarly large bank accounts (especially those who survived a 39 day ordeal of hard island living in the middle of the Pacific Ocean to get it) would also have the automatic right to no longer be required to use their brain anymore either. Hey, I know if I were ever to win a million-fucking-dollars, you had better fucking believe that I would be turning off my brain for the rest of my spoiled, privileged life (except in order to decide endangered animal entree I would like to have next, or to state my preference of diamond-encrusted sports car)!

Unfortunately for Mr. Hatch, his little unwise indiscretion is now going to bring down an IRS investigative shitstorm, that by the time it’s finished, he will have to legally change his name to ‘Ard Hatch’, as he will no longer even be able to afford the ‘Rich’ in his own name!

Dedicated Follower of Fashion Updates

I was bothered by something peculiar last night, which I hope, isn’t a sign of future media trends to come.

Here I was, camped out in front of the idiot box as usual, when suddenly, my chosen program was rudely interrupted in order to bring me such an important “Fashion Update”. WTF? Has it finally been declared that wearing white pants after Labor Day is a recognized capital offense punishable by lethal injection or something? What in the all-encompassing world of dedicated fashion is so bloody important that it’s worthy of preempting my beloved television programs? This had better be fucking good!

Of course, it wasn’t.

What the fuck is the point of broadcasting a “Fashion Update” anyways? There is no sense of immediate urgency or crisis involved in the situation whatsoever, so what kind of ‘Update’ IS this exactly? And what purpose it is serving exactly by interrupting my regularly scheduled programs so that I can be brought up to speed on the ever-evolving world of High Fashion? You just know that Wolf Blitzer wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about any ridiculous ‘Fashion Update’, so why should the rest of us? So, get back to me when Mother Nature goes all ape-shit again.

It’s not like whatever new chic fashion runway craze from the mean runways of Milan is ever going to ever have any direct bearing on my current social life now is it? How many wealthy Italian playboys do I hang out with? Umm...let me see.....oh yeah, fucking NONE! If I, or anyone else within my immediate sphere of social influence, were to ever show up to any 'Bowling Night' wearing one of these extreme 'Fashion Update' monstrosities, they’d be automatically ridiculed as a fagpie and probably be forced to bowl on their own at the far end of the alley.

It’s not like anyone I know ever wears, or can even afford to wear any of these 'Update' fashions anyways. I don’t expect that any of us ordinary middle-class schlups are going to alter our established blue-collar threads anytime soon, nor do I believe that there are any esteemed fashion designers who may have been interested by such a late-breaking 'Fashion Update', sitting at home on their couch watching community television either. So why the fuck should any of us be interested in an important ‘Fashion Update’ for? I don't get it.

As I see it, I’m not likely to begin wearing $3,500 designer leather pants with a $14,000 one-of-a-kind stitched jacket made form specially bred Californian baby seal hides…so, where’s the “Update” exactly? The models are still gorgeous aren’t they? Of course they are! I don’t doubt that for a second. Hell, a chiseled Swedish supermodel could be on her hands and knees rolling a dog turd down the runway with her nose while scantily clad in an outfit made entirely of old oyster shells and used dental floss, and she’d STILL look absolutely uber-fucking-hot! This is not an “Update” per se.

Perhaps the real ‘Fashion Update’ would be if they instead decided to use more homely, unattractive runway models in stained track suits. That would at least be out of the ordinary and therefore worthy of preempting my precious programs!

Putting the Ice on Blizzard Reports

Over the weekend, we had what could be considered our first committed heavy snowfall of the season in the North East. Already, the buzzing CNN as well as other related media channels has labeled this not-so-unusual weather pattern as the ‘Blizzard Report’*.

Why is it we now seem to skip from “light flurries throughout the night” to automatic “blizzard conditions” immediately on each aired weather update? It is WINTER right? Did I miss something in translation? Don’t we ever simply get innocent “heavy snowfalls” anymore like we used to get as kids when life would still continue on and we did not necessarily have to live in the shadow of terror of regular “Blizzard Report”?

Why all the drama? Sure it’s been a bad year for freak natural disasters and atmospheric anomalies…but that doesn’t necessarily mean that Mother Nature has a personal vendetta against us! The planet is going to continue experiencing it's normal weather patterns. Are we so wrapped up in our ‘Culture of Fear’ today that everything becomes an instant crisis worthy of regular CNN update reports?

Honestly, after each and every broadcast 'Blizzard Report', the only end result is that I instantly crave one of the specials with ground up Scor bars into a cup of soft ice cream available for a limited time only at the Dairy Queen down the street.

Pretty soon, if this method of crisis weather reporting continues, we won’t even be able to bring ourselves to go outside during a commonplace, and otherwise necessary and pleasant Spring Shower rainstorm lest we should get washed away in the raging drainage water being reported to be flowing down city streets by some CNN reporter whose name sounds like he should be color commentating a WWE main event match-up instead.

Imagine that paranoid broadcast in the future:

“Thanks, Wolf. Tonight, here in St.Catharines, Ontario, residents are getting cruelly pounded by a particularly vicious April rain shower that continues to pour down with unrelenting fury now for the past 3 hours, and there is still no signs that the floods of rain water will let up soon. Tulips are blooming brightly in flower beds, dog shit is being cleared from sidewalk pavements, baby duckies are swimming contentedly in overflowing ponds, and children are racing around attempting to catch rain drops on their tongues; it’s absolute chaos, Wolf! Local authorities and meteorologists are recommending that everyone stay home and avoid making themselves damp with the torrential rain until further notice. The future here looks wet and bleak for the survivors of this recent light precipitation front from Hell, but still they struggle on to reclaim their otherwise dry lives”.

* Which sadly, has overshadowed the tragic death of famous comedian and all-round swell guy, Johnny Carson who also passed away this weekend at the age of 79.

The Five Burritos of the Apocalypse

I just popped a button on my trousers.

Shit! Judging by the sheer velocity that my pants button just shot across the work floor and lodged itself into one of the barricading cubicle walls…it’s Diet time, fat boy!

That’s right! Time to shake off those excess “I’m quitting smoking” pounds that I’ve been adding on for the past three years before I won’t need Richard Simmons any more so much as I’ll be needing a fucking ballistics expert after I’ve killed the person working beside me at point blank range.

Who knew that getting to be such a large person was going to have the added responsibility of being a lethal weapon? That’s a responsibility I don’t need! Shit, it was bad enough knowing that I could turn this entire place into another Bhopal tragedy if I were to carelessly squeak out any of my patented toxic air éclair’s into my surrounding work environment. But now I have to also be wary of assassinating someone each time I stretch or stand up!

I’m a loaded fucking weapon! Cool.

But I'm sure it's soon going to get very tiring of having to first be conscious of who I’m facing before I stand up to be sure i'm not accidently facing anybody I like or who I wouldn’t particularly want to see come to any unintended harm.

I feel like the newest addition to the ‘Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’…Fat. Now, riding out of the very pit of Hell would come the new Harbingers of Death: Plague, Pestilence, Famine, War, and Fat. I’d be the tubby Angel of Death that’s always out of breath and riding on his slower, fatter burro a little ways behind the other riders gorging on Twinkies and Taco Bell burritos that I had previously stocked up on and squirreled away into my saddlebags at the last Rest Stop.

Ode to 'On-Hold' Soundtracks

I have made a startling personal discovery today: half my life is spent “On Hold”. I’m ALWAYS either waiting for someone or something and forced to listen to crap while I'm doing it! When I think about all the wasted time I have spent in my life waiting "on hold" it makes me want to go all medieval and being drilling holes in my forehead in an effort to exorcise the angry spirits.

I made this realization today while waiting for an agent with a ‘Merchant Resolutions’ department over the phone in order to dispute unrecognized charges on my credit card bill. At the time this dawned on me, I happened to be listening to Michael Jackson’s ‘Ben’ droning sappily over the telephone line.

Are you fucking kidding me? Wasn’t this tune originally written and intended to be a love song for a fucking rat? Isn’t that a bit too tongue and cheek for someone currently upset and stressing about fraudulent activity on his personal credit? Whose side are they on anyways? I’m ready to string some bastard up with piano wire by his testicles for charging $80 worth of god-knows-what from WetnWildTeens.com and here I’m listening to:

“Ben, the two of us need look no more
We both found what we were looking for
With a friend to call my own I'll never be alone
And you, my friend, will see
You've got a friend in me”

Somebody sure dropped the fucking ball here! In my current emotional state, I would rather be listening to screams echoing from a subterranean torture chamber or a more aggressive and grating Einstürzende Neubauten soundtrack or something.

Whose job is it to make these “On Hold” compilations anyways? That’s the job I want!

I think I would be more than qualified to perform the required duties for a position of this nature. I’d think that all those late nights in my dorm room smoking pot and listening to music in my headphones when I should have been studying for my Economics exam instead would automatically make me the perfect fucking candidate to take on such a creative responsibility!

There's a work day I can look forward to! Each day, I'd just burrow into my office with my dusty cassette tapes, Columbia House CD's, ghetto blaster, and bucket bong to crank out the perfect "On Hold" soundtracks that every business would be proud to play while transferring thier customers into the labryinth of inter-department call holding queues. Soundtracks that will not only be a pleasure to listen to, but will encourage people to be more patient in their business while they contentedly relive old memories of lost innocence. Wouldn't you be in a better mood to debate your Annual Percentage Rates after you've just spent 4 minutes "on hold" reliving that forgotten Grade 9 'Spring Fling' memory of sipping peach schnapps under the bleachers and peeking up girls skirts that was innocently triggered after listening to Howard Jones 'Everlasting Love'?

Perhaps we could go one further and play more educational soundtracks to waste your time on while waiting "...for the next available agent". So, if ..."your call is very valuable", you may as well be getting something out of it right? Why not play practical college Accounting lessons or maybe even more advanced subject matter like Calculus, Mico-Economics, or Astrophysics.

The sky's the limit!

With all the time I spend on hold I could have achieved any number of certified Masters PhD thesis's. We could be training for better lives by better utilizing this wasted time that we inevitably must spent each day to transact any of our regular personal business.

Imagine the options:

"Hello, and welcome to our new automated voice service. For service in English, please push #1. For service in Spanish please push #2. (pauses) If you are calling to check your balance and available credit limit, please push #1. If you are calling to make payments, or are inquiring about your recent or past billing statements, please push #2. If you are calling to speak to a 'Customer Service Representative', please push #3. And, if you know the correct answer to last weeks 'Advanced Trigonometry 101' homework exercize question, please push #4."

The Gay Bomb

"It’s official! The Pentagon has considered developing a host of non-lethal chemical weapons that would disrupt discipline and morale among enemy troops, newly declassified documents reveal."

Most bizarre among the plans was one for the development of an “aphrodisiac” chemical weapon that would make enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to each other? This provoking of widespread homosexual behavior among troops would cause a “distasteful but completely non-lethal” blow to morale, the proposal goes on to say.

Wait! Are we talking about some kind of “Gay Bomb” here? How does that work exactly assuming that we aren’t really at war with some kind of rare species of tree frog? Are we just going to airdrop Richard Simmons exercise videos, the latest Greatest Hits CD release from Queen, and pairs of pink workout tights into enemy territory or something?

Other ideas in this proposal included chemical weapons that would attract swarms of wasps or angry rats to troop positions, making them uninhabitable. Why don’t they just erect low-income housing and achieve the same effect? I would even happily donate a few angry rats and wasps from my own apartment to the cause...what the hell, I'm a humanitarian afterall.

Another idea was to develop a chemical that caused “severe and lasting halitosis”, making it easy to identify guerillas trying to blend in with regualr civilians. WTF? I’d think that months on end of living in dank concealed bunkers and eating only scraps of rancid leftovers may already be taking care of the bad breath among enemy soldiers since I don't believe that oral hygiene is considered a high priority among front line rebel soldiers. Nature is already working that angle for us, fella's.

“I could name that guerilla terrorist in three breaths, Jim.”

Yet another idea was to make the opposing troops skin unbearably sensitive to sunlight. How the fuck are they going to do that exactly? Is there some kind of transmittable disease that turns people into vampires, or are they just planning to bleach all the body pigmentation from each enemy soldier so that eventually they look like entire legions of Glad Bag guys?

These plans, from U.S. Air Force Wright Laboratory in Dayton, OH date back to 1994. The lab sought Pentagon finding for research into what they then called “harassing, annoying, and “bad guy”-identifying chemicals.”

Pardon? Did they say “Bad guy”-identifying? You mean to tell me that some lunatic dressed in a turban and carrying an RPG launcher while shrieking out some blood-curdling war cry at the top of his lungs like some enraged banshee isn’t enough of a “bad guy”-identifying indicator for most people?

Granted towards this six year research plan, was only a mere drop in the bucket at $7.5 million dollars. SEVEN-POINT-FIVE-MILLION-FUCKING-DOLLARS to design something that will “harass and annoy”? Fuck, how do I get in on that easy money?

I’m a certified expert on the art of harassing and annoying. In fact, I have already in my short 31 years of existance on this planet achieved a master status black belt in the "Annoying Arts". Just ask my Grade Six teacher, Mrs. Walker when they finally release her from the Norris Wing of the St. Catharines General Hospital.

Why didn’t somebody just consult me directly? I could have cut a deal and maybe saved taxpayers some serious coin. Shit, I could conceive more harassing and annoying ideas just on the commercial break for Battlebots alone, than the Wright Laboratory ever made during their entire 11 years of research at the extortionate price of $7.5 million dollars in government funding!

For example, why not save all the “chemical” wear and tear on the environment altogether and just spend the same monetary equivalence that you would have spent on research and development to airdrop a perfectly environmently friendly Jim J. Bullock into enemy territory to attract homosexuals to the sight to make the area equally uninhabitable to the enemy?

Who knew that my talents learned as an old bartender and currently as a “Customer Service Representative” would have best suited me for a career in ‘Top Secret’ weapons design? Talk about missing your calling!

Lastly, while I’m on the topic of chemical weapons? Weren’t we supposed to be crusading an international cause to eliminate the mass-producing and usage of chemical weapons just only recently? Or are “Gay Bombs” not considered “Weapons of Mass Destruction”?

Apparently, “Weapons of Mass Discomfort” or “Weapons of Mass Gayness” are only merely considered as “non-lethal”, and therefore are okay for use on our enemies. Isn’t that kind of hypocritical?

Chemical is chemical isn't it? Perhaps it's not dropping bodies in gasping fits and seizures or burning out their lungs from the inside, but I'd sure still hate to visit the area a few years into the future when the real environmental damage begins to be assessed. Entire species of desert animal will all become extinct because they suddenly stopped naturally reproducing as they were all transformed into Liberace.

Besides, I don’t know about you, but if I was ever faced with the possibly of having my nads shrunk up into my chest to form some kind of unnatural “man-gina”, or to begin wearing frilly peek-a-boo fatigues and developing the inexplicable urge to remodel my spiderhole…

...I’d happily leap into an oncoming cloud of mustard gas!

The Flukes of Hazzard

Cable television, like that old box of miscellaneous crap that I found under my bed that harbored all those long forgotten dusty volumes of Hardy Boys adventures, allows me to once again revel in the glorious television rituals of my childhood.

As kids, we literally danced around the television when it was turned on and basked in its warm familiar glow like tribal villagers around a campfire. It was our god! We paid daily tribute to the various heroes and idols that magically appeared like clockwork on the old family Zenith 20” tube television; such familiar Hollywood icons as the Six Million Dollar Man, Yogi Bear, Godzilla, G.I. Joe, B.A. Baracus, the Smurfs, Larry & Ponch, Starksy & Hutch, Mr. Dress-Up, the Incredible Hulk, Wonder woman, Scooby-fucking-Doo…the list just goes on and on like the guest list at the Greek Acropolis come orgy time.

Lately, my newest guilty pleasure on the boob tube is available through the miracle that is cable syndicated television; the Dukes of Hazzard. What a treat to once again be able to relive the adventures of the Duke boys, Bo and Luke. These guys were the archetypical cool rednecks back when Jeff Foxworthy was still mopping the floors in the public bathroom at the local Speedway’s ‘Whataburger’.

Unfortunately, what I am finding is that the old magic surrounding Hazzard County doesn’t have the same appeal that it did for me as a child. I guess I just can’t suspend my belief anymore like I used to be able to in my youth.

In fact, not since the Hardy Boys hometown of Bayport that I read recently in those mystery books under my bed, have I seen such a fucked up place! Considering the small, rural backwoods town that Hazard clearly is, where do all the con men, smugglers, escaped prisoners, counterfeiters, mobsters, bootleggers, and all-round evil masterminds come from? Hazzard County must be where all the criminals and evil-doers go on vacation when they are not terrorizing the streets of Bayport. Shit, you couldn’t swing a dead parole jumper without hitting somebody who was either spying, slinking, thieving, plotting, or generally just up to no-fucking-good. Even LA gangbangers wouldn’t feel safe walking down the center of Hazzard without a police escort.

Even the good ‘ol Duke boys themselves have been in and out of jail so often that you’d think that the Hazzard County Jail would just have installed revolving doors in all their holding cells. This little tidbit of information makes me now realize as an adult why the Dukes never seemed to be ever gainfully employed. Who the fuck would hire guys with a rap sheet longer than Courtney Love?

Now, in a small town whose total population would equal that of the maximum seating capacity at the local Wendy’s restaurant, I bet the competition for employment must be pretty fierce. How are these two hillbilly dipshits ever going to compete in the local job market?

Imagine how Bo and Luke’s police file must have read to potential employers: poaching (CLEARED OF ALL CHARGES), arms smuggling (CLEARED OF ALL CHARGES), bootlegging (CLEARED OF ALL CHARGES), disturbing the peace (CLEARED OF ALL CHARGES), reckless driving (CLEARED OF ALL CHARGES), larceny (CLEARED OF ALL CHARGES), grand theft auto (CLEARED OF ALL CHARGES), racketeering (CLEARED OF ALL CHARGES), suspicion to commit murder (CLEARED OF ALL CHARGES), arson (CLEARED OF ALL CHARGES), endangerment of public property (CLEARED OF ALL CHARGES), kidnapping (CLEARED OF ALL CHARGES), trespassing (CLEARED OF ALL CHARGES), treason (CLEARED OF ALL CHARGES), conspiracy to sell government secrets (CLEARED OF ALL CHARGES). Would you feel that you could trust these guys enough to hire them? I don’t know about you, but I think I’d be more than a little fucking suspicious.

As well, how many fucking times can two guys break their parole in a rural township as small as Hazzard County? Christ, they’d probably be in violation of their parole just by crossing the street to the Boar’s Nest for a couple “two-beers”. How stupid is that?

Which brings me to my next point: how many fucking shortcuts are in Hazzard County anyways? Doesn’t anyone ever take the long route? It seems to me that there are so many shortcuts to other shortcuts in Hazzard that the next immediate shortstop will just involve teleporting their automobile directly to the intended destination! Honestly, the place has the same special territory as the parking lot at Walmart…so why is everyone is such a fucking hurry? Aren’t they supposed to be simple, slow-paced, country folk?

Perhaps this is the reason why there are so many traffic accidents and multiple car pile-ups in Hazzard County. Speaking of which, with all the obvious automotive damage occuring in Hazzard County…why isn’t ‘Crazy’ Cooter the one dressed in the expensive white suits and smoking the big cigars? He should be the richest person in Hazzard what with all the repeat business his garage must be doing*! So why then is he always wearing that grungy sleeveless shirt all smeared with axel grease?

As a matter of fact, NOBODY ever seems to change his or her clothes in Hazzard at all! Doesn’t anyone do laundry in Hazzard County? Are there no decent Laundromats? I would wager that the very air in Hazzard County must absolutely reek of overwhelming body odor. Just imagine what Daisy Duke’s shorts must smell like by now! Probably like the cargo hold of a deep-sea fishing trawler.

One other thing that doesn’t sit well with me now as an adult, is why the fuck everyone addresses Uncle Jesse as “Uncle Jesse”? I mean he only has the two nephews and one niece that I know of, so why then do all strangers, and non-related town folk still address him as their Uncle? How is he related to EVERYBODY? I know incest must run rampant in small rural bumblefuck towns like Hazzard…but Uncle Jesse must have sure been one randy motherfucker in his formidable years banging everyone from LuLu Hogg to Mable the town switchboard operator**, and any other upright female primate from the neighboring Chickasaw County.

There are also unsettling natural anomalies existing within the Hazzard County as well. For example: does it ever fucking rain in Hazzard County? Where do these people live, the planet Mercury? And where the fuck do all the bales of hay come from? I’ve never seen any growing in the passing fields, and yet if hay was a recognized world currency Hazzard County would make Monaco look like a Haitian slum town.

And lastly, has anyone ever wondered how someone named Enos Straight could ever be a deputee sheriff working for a corrupt city commissioner?

* Although, judging by all the car doors that seem to fall off in Hazzard County, I wouldn’t say that Cooter was a very good mechanic at all and was just playing everyone for suckers.

** Come to think of it, there weren’t exactly a hell of a lot of chicks that ever lived in Hazzard County, were there?

Curse of the Dummy

(Inspired by a thread posted to the Terrapin Message Board)

The body of the infamous King Tut is currently undergoing a complete reexamination by a specially appointed team of research Egyptologists, who are initiating the first CT scans of the boy pharaoh in 37 years. How fucking cool is that?

The body of Tutankhamun was last examined back in 1968 when scientists then cracked into his sarcophagus like a frantic squirrel into a golden hazel nut. This newly conducted CT scan of the notorious pharaoh will show a computed tomography*, and scan-produced three dimensional image x-rays of his remains in an attempt to not only solve once and for all how he met his end, but to lay to rest any lingering notions or concerns that there still exists a “Curse of the Mummy” that has been popularized by legend.

This “Mummy’s Curse” legend has existed through the ages as the popular scary campfire tale passed down by generations of archaeologists since the time that Howard Carter first discovered King Tut’s tomb hidden beneath the shifting sands of the ‘Valley of the Kings’ in 1922.

Now, I’m not sure if anybody else has been paying attention to the other breaking news stories also playing out over the various media along with this particular “Mummy’s Curse” inquiry…but Brad Pitt and Jennifer Anniston have also recently publicly announced their divorce.

How’s that for a fucking sledgehammer between the eyes? Is that enough “curse” for you? How much more fucking proof do you need that this “Curse of the Mummy” is every bit as alive and kicking as the day it was sealed up along with the young pharaoh’s body?

Brad and Jennifer, this century’s most recognized celebrity couple, have shockingly separated! Fuck, isn’t that the 3rd Sign or something from Revelations? I bet if we were to also conduct a thorough investigation into the detailed hieroglyphics inscribed on the walls of Tutankhamun’s burial chamber we may just rediscover ancient undeciphered inscriptions that depict the prophesied rise and fall of Hollywood’s uber-glamour couple as further testament to the impending dangerous curse still laying dormant in the dust and sand within the tomb's confines.

Is this divorce just a random coincidence? I think fucking NOT!

As far as determining the means by which King Tut met his final demise, the verdict is still yet to be actually determined from the ongoing examination. The initial examination of his body back in 1968 revealed a chip of bone in his skull from which they concluded that he may have possibly died from “a strong blow to the head”**.

This “death blow” they are hypothesizing, could possibly have occurred as a hunting accident, a battle wound, or a successful assassination attempt by one of his appointed generals or high priests. Or maybe he just innocently fell off his horse-drawn chariot while he was out joyriding along the Nile Valley trying to pick up chicks***.

Boys will be boys after all; even boy kings.

I say however, that the smart money is on "Cirr-Osirus of the Liver".

* Who the fuck is this “Tom” guy anyways, and what does he have to do with King Tut exactly? You’d at least think that he’d have thought of a much more clever name for his computed test anyways.

** Well, fucking DUH! Thanks for pointing that out, Sherlock!

*** Who, it must be assumed from the many colorful papyri scrolls, would all have a striking resemblance to Cher.

Lucy in the Sky with Walmart

While venturing through the aisles at Walmart today, I was greeted by an employee offering me a single colored “Smartie” looking candy in a small paper sample cup. To execute this task, she was dressed in a pearl white lab coat, body apron, hair net, thin latex gloves, and a look of concentrated repulsion in her eye as if she were serving a colony of lepers.

How tempting do those candies sound, eh? Fuck, it was all I could do but fight past the oncoming surge of hungry mindless Walmart shoppers as they all maneuvered for their free paper cup sample! That woman could have been serving little samples of radioactive waste and these people would not only have scarfed it down unquestioningly like a starving dog, but come back for seconds as well.

But what is the Biological Scientist getup for? Are they concerned that I might be harboring some highly contagious disease that may possibly get transmitted to the other Walmart shoppers and trigger some serious infectious breakout where the military will have to initiate Martial Law, quarantine the entire store, and declare Aisle 7 as a dangerous ‘Hot Zone’ or something? Or, are the employees working here at Walmart so personally foul and unkempt that they are required to wear entire space suits while serving their samples in order to comply with the local Board of Health & Hygiene and prevent the mass spread of bacteria, germs, minimum wage, and the omnipresent Roll Back Sale?

Somebody should be insulted, shouldn't they? Somebody is definitely being patronized here!

I swear, each time go to Walmart it becomes that much closer to falling down Alice's rabbit hole. First, mad looking employees are offering me colored candy pills in Dixie cups, and then I'm smoking a Coleman brand hookah with a caterpillar in a pair of $7.99 flannel pajama pants in the Men’s Wear section of the store. Lewis Carol would no doubt be plagued with terrifying psychadelic product nightmares if ever he should step foot into any neighborhood Walmart.

Who needs to take drugs when you can just go to Walmart and achieve the same state of fantastical euphoric bliss? Just trying to make your way through the store to purchase socks is like taking two hits of strong bathtub LSD. I’ve had incredible mind-expanding experiences just shopping for shoelaces at Walmart. It's far trippier than anything I ever experimented with in University! Christ, I half expect to encounter enormous hammers scissoring their way down the store aisle ways in procession to a droning Pink Floyd soundtrack whenever I spend more than 15 minutes in the store.

Future generations of consumers will be checking themselves into Walmart Anonymous programs in order to curb their escalated Walmart addictions. Can you picture addressing that "Circle of Trust" at one of those 'WA' meetings?

"Hi, my name is Terry and I'm a Walmartaholic. It started out innocently at first as a recreational pleasure, something to do on a Saturday afternoon. But soon I started shopping three or four times a day at Walmart. Pretty soon, I had a full-blown Walmart addiction and I kept going back shopping for everything from crossbows to chewing gum. Sometimes, when I had maxed out all my cards, I would just come in for a quick fix to use the bathroom or even just the 25 cent novelty machine in the entranceway."

Walmart is an enormous cultural vacuum that sucks the very essence of smart consumerism and modest subsistent living right out of your soul the very second you walk through those mechanical sliding doors! With each additional accumalated minute that you spend within its red, white and blue walls, your intelligence level drops one whole IQ point. Your brain begins to slowly liquify.

You could have a Masters PhD in Nuclear Physics when you first enter into the belly of the beast, but by the time you’ve located and secured your precious purchase for whatever low-low price that was advertised on the cardboard sales sign in black magic marker, you’re sporting an oversized ‘Goonies’ lunchbox, talking to yourself in public, and racing for the coveted “Priority Seating” seat at the front of the bus behind the driver.

Walmart is killing the intelligent human race and our collective conscience. Turn on, tune in, and drop off your brains and credit cards at the counter before you exit the building. Go forth into the world; breed, multiply, and consume. Feed the machine. Take the candy sample.

Walmart will be waiting.

Notes from the Ground Zero at Corporate Hell (Part VI)

I’m not one who attempts to get in touch with my “Inner Flake” very often. I mean, I’m not going to complain if somebody wants to suddenly strip down naked and perform a ceremonial jig in the middle of the work aisle for all to enjoy…but I’m not about to get sized for any flowing white robes anytime soon either.

Having said that; I think that we should be incorporating more pagan rituals and practices at my current place of employment, where I dutifully serve as a ‘Customer Service Representative’, would prove extremely beneficial. By utilizing these primitive approaches to our routine workday, it would better create an equal playing field on which to deal with the average fucknuts that call in regularly each day.

People don’t want detailed logic or simplified explanations; they want easy quick-fix solutions, and they want them right fucking now, motherfucker! That’s all! They don't want to hear about additional programs that they can add to their account to assist them, they just want to be able to call in, lay down some fabricated sob story, maybe throw in one or two personal insults just for good measure, and then bitch and complain until the poor CSR on the other end of the line gracefully submits to their demands. Simple.

Neotlithic Caveman no doubt conducted his personal finances in much the same manner whenever he felt compelled to increase his line of credit to 4 rocks and a mammoth bone. Very little has changed since those primitive times...including the uni-brow I expect.

It’s already an unnerving situation for them to be in. No doubt, they’ve inevitably been waiting “on hold for a Customer Service Representative” for over an hour listening to some deep mournful classical muzac rendition of ‘Peter and the Wolf’…so they’re bound to be just a wee bit testy by the time we answer the phone. After all, how much droning bassoons and oboes can one take before you’re subconsciously driven to mass murder? It’s no fucking wonder our work environment is so stressful. I’d be packing heat too if I had to fuckin’ listen to such an intense soundtrack before conducting important personal business!

As a result, I think that the common blue-collar monkfish that end up inevitably calling in to blindly request credit limit increases and lowered APR’s are more capable of understanding primitive pagan solutions than they would be of any detailed high-brow synopsis on their erroneous spending habits. Attempting to provide logical explanations to most people would automatically be interpreted as insulting and discriminating, even though the poor simpleton on the other end of the phone probably doesn’t have the equivalent mental capacity to even calculate the %10 gratuities on their final bill at Denny’s.

They would simply rather hear:

“Sir, what I recommend to protect yourself from further Past Due fees on your account is to bury a radish in your backyard by the light of a full moon while chanting the lyrics to Tori Amos’s ‘Cornflake Girl’ backwards.”

Heavens-fucking-forbid you should ever offer to provide the proper time frames for particular payment methods so that they can ensure no continuing delinquency or negative activity on their meager accounts! Shit, who has the time or energy to participate in a mature conversation involving detailed personal finances, much less to actually take any responsibility for their own fucking actions?

How do you handle someone who probably doesn’t commit to making any major life decisions without first consulting ‘Jojo’s Psychic Hotline’?

They don’t need skilled ‘Customer Care Representatives’; they need a cult of specialized Wiccan financiers to help “master their own destinies” by consulting the soggy tea leaves in the bottom of their cup of oolong and getting approval to waive finace fees from their spirit guide, before redirecting their deadbeat asses back to the Mother Ship!

The Al Quida-Tsunami Connection

CNN broadcasts of the ‘Tsunami Corpsefest’ are reporting that American military advisors and diplomats are now concerned that the Al-Quida network may be using the recent Tsuanmi disaster in Asia as a means to further recruit support for their campaign of terror against the American Imperialist Infidel.

I don’t think that this is a very realistic concern and is instead serving only as manufactured propaganda to capitalize on people’s paranoid fears and help carry favor with the delusional citizens of the Western democratic world. In other words: It’s total horseshit!

How can you recruit people from a “Disaster Area”? They’re all fucking dead! Isn’t anybody paying attention to the CNN updates? There’s only a calculated death toll of 150,000 bodies counted so far, with the estimation that thousands more have yet to be added…that’s why it’s called a fucking DISASTER AREA! I highly doubt that the few dozen remaining survivors would be enough to tip the scale in favor of International Terrorism. How intimidating do you think that the few remaining villagers of the Banda Ache province are going to be as a regimental squadron of professional Al-Quida soldiers? Shit, the fucking Girl Guides could kick their collective asses in battle in their present fragile condition!

Likewise, how likely is it that Tsunami survivors are going to be so eager to enlist so that they can simply have a bomb strapped to their body and forced to board a public bus somewhere? I think we should give the survivors a little more respect than that! I highly doubt that any tsunami refugee is about to begin thinking to himself while being served in line at the ‘Osama bin Laden Community Kitchen and Recruiting Center’:

“You know, I’ve lost my family, my home, and all my wordly possessions. In fact, I’m extremely lucky just to be alive. Maybe I should better serve the memory of my lost loved ones by wastefully sacrificing my own life in order to take those of innocent bystanders and help spread global chaos and Anti-American sentiments.”

Not fucking likely at all, Jack!

Winter Wasteland

Why do people enjoy winter? What possible enjoyment or appreciation can one obtain from winter as an adult?

I remember as a kid, waking up to large snowdrifts outside after a heavy snowfall in the middle of the night was an exciting thing; something to be anticipated and revered. To us back then, snow was still fluffy, white, and beautiful. It was still snow! Not this industrial fallout we get now.

As a member of the embittered, and experienced adult world, snow just plain fucking sucks! It’s nothing but dirty, gray, slush and sloppy salty shit that stains, rusts, corrodes and turns everything into a potentially dangerous chiropractic nightmare as most sidewalks and walkways are turned into slushy concrete ‘Slip n’ Slides’. For the elderly or handicapped, simply getting around must be like trying to walk across the surface of the sun.

Snows magic and purifying qualities are lost within urban boundaries. To city folk, such as myself, snow is just a dirty, destructive hindrance in our already tough day. We still have thinks to do, tasks to accomplish, and we’re still in a rush. But now we have to worry about visibility conditions and not having our automobiles hydroplaning through traffic intersections like an out of control bobsled.

I like snow for maybe the first 10 seconds as it first begin to fall for the first time of the season…then I’m ready to pack up all my worldly possessions and make a run for the border with my Spanish-to-English Dictionary and Immodium tablets.

“Chestnuts roasting over an open fire, Jack Frost nipping at your nose.” This doesn’t exactly sound like such a fucking great time now that we’re adults, am I right? Sure, lets cook up my testicles over an open flame while some dude named Jack bitch slaps me like a three dollar hooker. Woo-ha!

Fuck snow! I hate winter! I can’t stand having to spend time getting myself all dressed up and ready in order to simply go outside. By the time I’m ready to go outside, you’d think I was preparing for a Medieval jousting competition instead of just going outside to warm up the car and unfreeze the car door locks.

I can’t stand the icicles that form in my nose so that when I arrive at my destination I look like some kind of mutant albino inland walrus. “Brrr. It’s cold out! Look at me! Goo goo g’joob, asshole!”

I can’t stand the frostbite on my balls after spending hours of heavy manual labor shoveling piles of heaping white shit from my walkway lest any clumsy fart should loose their footing in their rubberized zero-traction shoe protectors out front of my house and end up suing me for every fucking penny I own (with which they could probably use to purchase a bus ticket instead of trying to walk on dangerous icy pavements).

I don’t build “Snow Forts” anymore either like I used to do as a kid. Now I would happily spend large amounts of good fucking money to build an entire fucking “Snow Bunker” to keep out all the cold drafts and driving snow each winter!

Likewise, the days of hurtling myself down a frozen hillside on a thin sheet of smooth plastic at mach speeds with no other protection than my own body fat are a thing of the past as well. Suddenly as an adult, the thought of an ice cold, high-speed enema just doesn’t seem like such a good idea on a frigid January weekend.

Ice skating? Don’t get even me fucking started! The only thing separating you from plunging into the dark subzero waters below and being instantly turned into a human popcycle is a thin layer of frozen water maybe two inches thick…so you decide to go sliding around on it with miniature cutting blades on your feet? Good fucking idea, Frosty! Somebody alert the Darwinian Society. I’d rather leap into a volcano. At least the weather would be nicer.

Even the traditional making of snowmen in the front yard is too heavy a dose of reality to deal with as an adult now. As a child, it was the best thing on earth to roll huge balls of snow to construct a big snowman complete with a corncob pipe, button nose and two eyes made out of coal. But now, with our adult minds, by the time we've finished laboring over making our dirty gray, sloppy snowman...it's like we now have a homeless vagrant squatting in the front yard. It's not Frosty the Snowman anymore, it's Nick Nolte! It's like looking into a mirror to the future and we see ourselves in those poorly contructed slouching snow ragamuffins that we just created. And before you know it, we end up hacking them down again with a fire axe the next day before making appointments for regular sessions with a psychologist.

Also, fuck even the walking through any Winter Wonderland whatsoever while you’re at it! Such excursions into snowy winter landscapes are best enjoyed from the vantage point of the heated passengers seat of a luxury passenger wagon with good radial snow tires. I’ve read ‘Into Thin Air’ and watched oodles of Everest mountain climbing documentaries on the Nature Channel, and I’m not about to even attempt a trip to the corner ‘Chesterfield Chicken’ for a busket of ‘Spuds n’ Chicken’ unless I have full Winter Survival equipment and a team of skilled Sherpa guides. I can just see me panicking half way down the street and having to slit open the belly of ‘Sinbad’, the neighbor's dog, so that I can crawl up into its gutted body and lock myself into a naked embrace with my Sherpa in order to keep warm against the icy winds when the temperature drops just another degree below the freezing point.

Why risk the extreme cold temperatures and having your toe amputated due to hypothermia? How cool would you look in your Birkenstocks come Springtime then, huh?

"Oh, I had that toe amputated this past winter by a Sherpa with nothing but a dirty bandana and a bottle of rubbing alcohole when our party became stranded four doors down in extreme snowstorm conditions. I'm really just lucky to be alive."

Winter fucking sucks.