The hyperbole is so exhausting, isn't it? In the same way that Trump is neither Satan nor the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, Biden was neither the worst president we've ever had, nor a transformational FDR 2.0. His administration's foreign policy was incoherent, but not as disastrous as Dubya's. Domestic policies were a mixed bag. Of course many people panicked at the COVID inflation spike. However that was happening all over the world. Globalism FTW, remember? And those same people weren't complaining too much when they got their big fat pandemic checks and interest-free loans. It's not really Biden's fault if you spent it all on fireworks and jewelry and drugs, although it might be partly Hunter's fault. The truth is, Americans just really like free money. Like paying pennies on the dollar for goods (ideally made by child slaves overseas) and services (performed by cash-strapped immigrants).
Mind you, it pains me to defend Joe Biden, because I've always thought of him as a finance shill, borderline race-baiter, and kind of a blowhard bully in general. But I'll say this one last time before they get the axe: his populist cabinet members rule! It almost felt like Lina Khan, Jonathan Kanter, and Rohit Chopra got in there by accident. Still, it sure was nice to have even a few short years of Big Government pushing back against Big Business. Like the good old days.
Historically, the left has demonized big corporations and the right has demonized big government. Recently, things have shifted. It seems like the 'new left' is starting to trust both, and the 'new right' is starting to distrust both. Does that make me a Republican? No, because Republicans are gross weirdo Christian pedophiles and I'm not, OK?
In the end, it's all immaterial because we agree that left and right are meaningless terms now. Robber-barons of every stripe are salivating for Trump to roll back all those annoying little roadblocks hampering Americans' freedom to pollute and price gouge. Even the NY Times is getting on board with MAGA. They just ran a front-page article on how Trump can save the world from nuclear war. That was confusing because I thought he was Hitler.
Issue: 17-5 (orig. pub. date: )
Horses have giant, stretched-out faces. They're fast and strong and can trample you to death. They have eyes on either side of their head, like hammerhead sharks. What is it with little girls bonding with these gigantic, dangerous beasts? Why do we allow it? They also have disconcertingly large...well, turds. Is this all supposed to be training for a future filled with repulsive male interactions?No doubt about it, horses are creepy, but so is everything else. I just spent a few minutes trying to think of things that couldn't possibly be creepy, and failed. Flowers. Dolphins. Elizabeth Warren. A beach towel. If you don't think I'm right about this, just ask ChatGPT to draw you a creepy painting of something you think is light, lovable, and cuddly.
Issue: 17-5 (orig. pub. date: )
Serial killer / cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer was beaten to death in prison by a fellow inmate!
Sometimes murder *can* be kind of funny
Richard Chase, The Vampire of Sacramento, once injected rabbit blood into his veins, and told a psychiatric clinician that eating raw animal flesh kept his heart from shrinking!
He did his own research
Serial killing has been on a steady decline since its peak in 1989!
Surveillance state W
Issue: 17-5 (orig. pub. date: )
One lyric in the song 'American Pie' has always bothered me: 'and good old boys were drinking whiskey and rye.' Bro, rye is a kind of whiskey. That's like saying 'they were drinking water and Dasani.' Or 'they were eating sandwiches and BLTs.' I'm going to assume, since we're talking about a bunch of hobos or local wastrels sitting down at the levee, that the 'whiskey' was probably cheap bourbon. So then say: 'good old boys were drinking bourbon and rye.'
I'm beginning to get the sense that this singer was never even down at the levee getting drunk with the guys. He probably heard the story from his grandpa.
Issue: 17-5 (orig. pub. date: )
--> Gender essentialism is peak toxic patriarchy
-->Men are basically awful
Issue: 17-5 (orig. pub. date: )
(peers at cover of book Yawny is reading)
"What's this? Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion. Well, they got that right."
Issue: 17-5 (orig. pub. date: )
Am I the only one around here who's kind of weirded out by seeds? They're these dormant little dried-up life forms that can just sit on a shelf literally for years: doing nothing, not moving, not respiring, like zombies or mum- mies or vampires in a coffin. Then you add... WATER. And they start growing! What the hell. It's not like you need to use some kind of critical enzyme or catalyst or ionizing radia- tion or anything special like that. Just ordinary water. Why can't they do that with people. Just dry them out like tardigrades or sea-monkeys and put them on a shelf somewhere. Then one day hit 'em with a garden hose.
I know we humans currently lack the proteins for that, but I mean you can take photographs of electrons, turn penises into vaginas, and have robots driving taxis, so I think this kind of genetic modification is probably doable.
Tardigrades are actually pretty terrifying. Just about anything microscopic is extremely scary up close. If we all woke up tomorrow to discover that fleas were human-sized, I reckon most of us would run on down to Civic Center and get ourselves a life's supply of heroin.
Issue: 17-5 (orig. pub. date: )
I can't tell if today's cars are designed to look like sneakers, or if sneakers are designed to look like cars. Regardless, why does every- thing have to be imagined through a comic book superhero lens now? Only small boys and incels like Marvel things, and those are not the biggest car- or shoe-buying demographics.
On a related note, who thought it would be cute or fun to make automotive lights resemble eyes? I get that they already kind of did look like eyes, but now they're putting eyebrow lights over the eyeball parts. Sometimes entire rear lighting schemes are designed to look like faces, including 'mad' faces. Is that supposed to help with anything? Is it supposed to elicit a little chuckle from drivers? Or could this all be, just possibly, a WEF plot to ramp up road rage, because angry plebians are more easily controlled?
The umbrella sure is a primitive little item. It's like something invented by a precocious second grader. Or by some idle 16th century friar with too much time on his hands, giving gret consideration to thee problem of suche chamber-pots emptyed thurgh yon parlor-window downe onto thee streets benethe.I don't know what the alternative to an umbrella would be, but I believe this is the kind of challenge that tech dorks should be focused on, rather than developing yet another way for people to move brightly colored objects around on a little screen within a limited amount of time. Or figuring out yet another interface for foreign-language flash cards, which incidentally have never worked. Or coming up with new weight-loss apps that purport to also save the world in parallel.
Issue: 17-5 (orig. pub. date: )
Sometimes I just want to chat with a large language model. And when I do, it's often about food. Try asking it about the potential dangers or benefits of eating ________ and then fill in just about anything. Pangolins, eyeballs, toys, light bulbs. You'd be surprised at some of the results.
For instance, I asked it if I could use motor oil as salad dressing, or drink my own blood, and it said no to both. So far so good. But it did say that in certain circumstances I could eat grass or seagull meat, and was surprisingly bullish on tree bark, algae, and LSD. Best of all, it did not judge me in any way for persistently following this line of questioning.
Issue: 17-5 (orig. pub. date: )
Issue: 17-5 (orig. pub. date: )
Issue: 17-5 (orig. pub. date: )
I'm sure scores of stand-up comics have hack bits about how modern medicines have a bottomless list of side effects that are way worse than the symptom they're treating. "Please consult your doctor if you experience irregular heartbeat, diarrhea, blurred vision, numbness, or death."
I wonder how often that medical warning is entirely due to one person, who maybe subsisted on pizza and Coke for 20 years, drank a quart of whiskey, then took the meds and died from internal bleeding. At which point his feckless sibling sued the pharma company for $20 million and actually won.
Or think about how Richard Reid, the failed shoe bomber from 23 years ago (he didn't even explode anything!) has slowed down international travel for billions of flight passengers ever since. I asked ChatGPT about lost productivity due to delays in airline travel resulting from Richard Reid's shenanigans, and it estimated about $750 million per year.
Do I even need to mention the part where we citizens get stuck with the bill for some greedy bank exec gone rogue placing incredibly risky and reckless bets with other people's money?
To sum up, when one person is a total POS, we all have to pay for it? wtf. Yet nobody questions this kind of collective punishment anymore, because they drill it into you starting in kindergarten: little Johnny defaces Sally's drawing, but denies it, so everyone gets to miss recess thanks to Johnny. Fucking Johnny!
Issue: 17-5 (orig. pub. date: )
Issue: 17-5 (orig. pub. date: )
I know he's a huge star, a multiple Grammy award winner who's rich and knighted and everything, so the last thing he needs is my pity. But I still feel a little bad for Elton John. Because at the beginning of his career, he had to compose wistful tunes about girls, and sing a love duet with Kiki Dee. And write honky-tonk bangers about getting into fights on Saturday night. When we all know pudgy little Reginald was doing no such thing. Unless by 'fighting' he meant slapping the face of the lecherous old bloke who gave his bum a bloody good squeeze on the dance floor. Now of course, Elton had every right to put all that into a song. What choice did he have? The Village People weren't even invented yet.
Eventually Reggie stopped playing the game and sort of came out. His handlers finessed his outlandish behavior by marketing it all as 'eccentric rock star' vibes when he was really just being super gay. One of the first signs was his song 'Candle in the Wind,' a ballad about Marilyn Monroe. You get it! Another milestone was 'The Bitch Is Back,' which I recall being completely confusing as a kid. Like, the riff goes pretty hard, but then you have a male singer bragging about being a total 'bitch.' I remember thinking, is this a thing you can say now?
By the time Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy was released, it was all pretty much above board. I mean, come on, that title. Sadly, at that exact point, everyone stopped listening to Elton's music, possibly because despite leading the world in gay rights legislation, the West is massively neurotic with all kinds of unresolved homoerotic impulses.
Of course nontrad sexuality has always been around, it just used to be relegated to the edgy underground. For example Andy Warhol was a trailblazer for 'aces' everywhere, and 50% of my favorite filmmakers are midcentury queermodern. Like no offense but Fassbinder and John Waters were centering trans pride decades before you, dear reader, were even born, probably. Hey, I just realized that in Fassbinder films, every female character looks like a drag queen, i.e. like David Bowie. Whereas in John Waters, the female characters actually are drag queens. I'm glad Chappell Roan is here for the kids of today, and 'lesbian drag queen' is kind of a new twist I guess, but Divine was 50 years ago. Rspct r eldrz, b*ches!
Issue: 17-5 (orig. pub. date: )
Why are ladybugs 'cute' but regular old black beetles are creepy and disgusting? This is obviously racist (dark things are bad), classist (giving preferential treatment to fancy coats), and ableist (shaming a living creature for an immutable trait). The irony is that ladybugs are beetles too! Go look at a ladybug under a microscope and tell me how 'cute' that face is.
Having said all that, I do still hate a lot of ugly things, including the ugliest, vilest bug on G-d's green earth, which is the Fuller rose weevil.This thing looks like a piece of melted plastic. Its larvae eat roots, while the hideous adults surface mainly to devour disproportionate amounts of your beautiful, peacefully growing leaves. And get this, one of the bug's scientific names is Asynonychus godmanni Crotch. Could that be any closer to a Mr. Bungle album title? The only good thing about Fuller rose weevils is that they're so slow, you can easily cut them in half in situ with garden shears. People think beheading is barbaric, but I am of the opinion that it is probably painless.
Issue: 17-5 (orig. pub. date: )
Issue: 17-5 (orig. pub. date: )
Liberals keep giving their kids Texas names. They're all called Austin, Tyler, Dallas. Even the girls are named Addison and Houston. I thought liberals hated Texas. Maybe since Joe Rogan and Elon Musk moved there, things will start to change. If only urban pro- fessionals would look right across the border, they'd see a boatload of great baby names: Matamoros, Matehuala, Saltillo, Torreon.I guess that might be considered cultural appropriation, but tbh (a) Texas is practically a different country already, and (b) Mexico and the U.S. are basically conjoined twins. So then what does that make Canada? Just soy?
Issue: 17-5 (orig. pub. date: )
What are people afraid of? Trying to make ends meet. Growing old or irrelevant. Crime. These things might keep a fully grown adult up at night. Whereas kids tend to fear things that are less abstract. As a child, night terrors don't 'keep you up' so much as violently shake you, freezing your blood with terrifying intensity. When I was a kid, the featured stars were Frankenstein, Wolfman, the electric chair, and this Raggedy Ann doll that my mom placed on a chair in our bedroom. That thing would hover over me in my dreams, its stupid button eyes and twisted yarn smile taunting my total inability to move or even make a sound.When I recently told my brother about my childhood fear of that doll, he said: 'Why didn't you tell me? We could have fucked that thing up.'
100%, if I could go back in time, I would absolutely crucify that damned doll. I would take it outside, urinate on it, tear out its stuffing, and set it ablaze with lighter fluid. I think that would teach it a lesson, and I would have slept better at night. It's possible that its disembodied, pissed-on corpse would return to haunt me, but I doubt it. That kind of thing usually only happens when there's some element of remorse.Why did my mom think that her boys would enjoy having a string doll in their room? We didn't play with dolls. G.I. Joe is not a doll, it's an action figure, and for the record we tortured them. I remember drowning G.I. Joe with my friend Mark. Then the year I got a chemistry set for Christmas, I naturally boiled some copper sulfate solution and burned G.I. Joe's face off with it. Were we monsters? No. We were actually pretty cute and very normal.
Issue: 17-5 (orig. pub. date: )
One time at a party with Alice Donut I said that Jimi Hendrix was overrated, just to see if anyone would say anything. Jimi Hendrix was a fucking genius on the guitar! But not every- thing has to be trolling. There are plenty of people and things who are actually overrated.My favorite targets are Barbara Kingsolver, mid-to-late Pink Floyd, Christopher Nolan, Infinite Jest, and Can. Whenever anyone name-drops Can, I always say how Faust was so much better. Look, I'm sorry Damo Suzuki just died, but his voice was almost as annoying as Thom Yorke from Radiohead's.
Issue: 17-5 (orig. pub. date: )
In December I started rewatching Twin Peaks to compare it with its distant offspring, Lost. It's hard to recall how shockingly weird Twin Peaks was in its day, since surreal supernatural murder mysteries are now a dime a dozen, but I remember at the time thinking, how the hell did they manage to get this on network TV?
Then I remembered The Howdy Doody Show. That program was #1 in America, and is actually every bit as unnerving as Twin Peaks. The host of The Howdy Doody Show looks and acts like a serial child molester. He advises kids on his show to accost strangers in public, vigorously shake their hands, and yell 'Howdy doody!' His name is literally BOB. And he's constantly touching and pawing the kids. Um, pedo alert? But wait, there's more: he co-hosts the show with a COWBOY PUPPET. And...a mute clown named Clarabell, who is-wait for it-an OLD BALD MAN. No wonder this generation all grew up to be acid heads.
Issue: 17-5 (orig. pub. date: )
Yawny: I'll put on a TV show for you while we wait for the medication to work. Let's see what's on. Do you want to watch The View?
Mother: I hate those girls.
Issue: 17-5 (orig. pub. date: )
Isn't it hilarious how Covid is still raging all over the world and nobody cares? Covid was so cringe. Now there are no Saint Fauci devotional candles on eBay anymore, but plenty of Luigi Mangione ones.
In other news, Trump was re-elected, the GOP retook Congress, unions are back, the DEI fever broke, and supposedly you can say 'retard' again. But if 2024's theme claimed to be pushback, I'm claiming that, once again, this is all just lipstick on a pig.
Of course I still think Trump is, as Tillerson put it, 'a fucking moron,' while also being a total genius at self-promotion, and a world class troller. But I'm also super pumped at some of his cabinet nominees! Will they make a dent? Well, I'd say RFK has about as much chance of weaning Americans off of crap food as Michelle Obama did. DOGE seems like a pretty good setup for a big SpaceX contract. And I imagine Tulsi will go full military warrior before long. As for the gradual slide into neo-feudalism, that was actually carved into stone some time ago.
Issue: 17-5 (orig. pub. date: )
You know how when you enter your teens, you start having to attend to things like acne and shaving? While you're also perhaps trying to raise your dating profile? In the process of dealing with all that, at some point I guess I judged my eyebrows to be a little too bushy, so I tried plucking a few stray hairs with my fingers in an effort to thin the forest, and that eventually became a lifelong habit. I'm not proud of it, in fact it's kind of weird, but apparently this is a common disorder called trichotillomania, and I actually know other people who have it, including one guy who for the sake of anonymity we'll just call 'Eric.'
Look, it's not like I'm yanking handfuls of hair out or anything. It's just a gentle little tic, like nail-biting, or checking your phone every five seconds. And for context, some other things listed in the DSM-V as 'disorders' include anxiety, substance abuse, depression, gambling, insomnia, dementia, dyslexia, and ten thousand assorted phobias. In other words, the entire spectrum of human experience.
Issue: 17-5 (orig. pub. date: )
Can you believe these email addresses are already taken??
Issue: 17-5 (orig. pub. date: )
Why is being 'up' for something the same as being 'down' for it? Up and down are opposites. Similarly, 'sick' means both ailing and totally awesome. Other synonyms for awesome include both 'hot' and 'cool,' and now even 'cold.' Opposites!
But most pressingly, why do you say 'take a crap' or 'take a piss'? Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that you're 'leaving' a crap?
Issue: 17-5 (orig. pub. date: )
Actions do have consequences! Blowback! Karma! Fuck around and find out! Yes, yes, we know: correlation is not causation. So everyone, please. Be careful when connecting the dots. Of course, these days everyone's an expert at connecting the dots, in whatever way makes sense to our gaslit, overloaded brains. And since each one of us has been deprived or spoiled, traumatized or blessed, or hit by a car, all in unique ways, and given a different roll of the genetic dice, our pattern- making machines are all different. But you can't *not* connect the dots. If you never connected any dots, you'd probably die, or besent to a mental institution, i.e. the streets of a major metropolitan city in the USA.
The big question in the information age is whether or not you can and should trust the experts for answers. On the plus side, experts theoretically devote huge amounts of time to studying their area of specialization. On the minus side, someone with plenty of cash is greasing their anuses.
Issue: 17-5 (orig. pub. date: )
