Best of MP: My Jesus is Whiter than Your Jesus

Man, Paul Newman cannot take a joke. I guess I'd better hold off on that parody of Jeremiah Johnson that I was planning.

I know, I was supposed to be done with the Humor-Blogs.com upgrade by now, but I had to delay the launch until tonight. What do you want, it's free. Get off my freaking back already.

In any case, you still have to suffer through another week of Best of Mattress Police posts while I recover. I thought it was a good time to repost this one, since the new season of Heroes has just started. Let's hope Milo Vermicelli has been taking his blood pressure medication.

My Jesus is Whiter than Your Jesus

God spoke to me today.

Well, He didn't literally speak. He sent one of His divine messengers to do the speaking. I was sitting on the porch with my laptop when she approached. "Can I leave one of these here?" she said. I was tempted to pretend that I didn't hear her angelic inquiry over the sound of Incubus blaring in my earbuds, but I broke down and made eye contact. "Sure," I said. She left a flier on my porch and bid me good day, in that slightly off-putting way that divine messengers have.

After she drove off in her heavenly Buick Skylark, I snatched up the flier. "FOLLOW THE CHRIST!" it yelled in 48 point Times New Roman. At first I was skeptical. Can you imagine following the Christ? I might be willing to open for Him, but follow Him? Even John the Baptist knew better than to follow the Christ. He was all like, "Thanks a lot folks, you've been great. Don't forget to tip your waitresses. Now here's the guy you've been waiting for, the Christ!"

But upon closer examination, the flier wasn't at all what I thought it was. I ran inside and showed it to my wife.

"Look at this," I said. She read the headline, and then her eyes fell to the illustration of a well groomed European gentleman whose smiling visage filled most of the page.

"Hey," she said. "Isn't that...?"

"I think so," I said.

"The similarity..." she said. "This can't be a coincidence."

"No, it can't. There's no other explanation."

"So...."

"That's right," I said. "Peter Petrelli from ABC's hit TV show Heroes is the long-awaited Messiah!"




A closer look at Peter, highlighting the facial characteristics suggestive of deity:


He's tall, handsome, charismatic... everything you could ever want in a savior. And he can fly and absorb other heroes' powers, just like in the Bible. What more evidence could you need?

Man, I would love to hang around with Messiah Peter Petrelli. We'd vanquish evildoers, play touch football, hit all the trendy clubs....

Ah, who am I kidding? Messiah Peter Petrelli is way too cool for the likes of me. Chicks would be swarming all over him, and people would be taking his picture, and I'm sure he'd be cool about it but it would always be, "Hey, Diesel, just one more autograph, ok? Then I can save you from your sins and we can go do karaoke." But hours later, I'd be drowning my sorrows alone in a bar, racking up sin after sin as I mangled the lyrics of STP's Interstate Love Song.

Nah, I think I'm going to stick with the swarthy little Jewish dude. He's more my speed.

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Best of MP: Aaron Sorkin: A Season in Hell

While I'm on hiatus, working on the new version of Humor-Blogs.com, please enjoy this classic post from the Mattress Police archives.

Aaron Sorkin Developing Show Based on Studio 60

NBC and Warner Bros. TV are back in business with Aaron Sorkin, the mastermind behind The West Wing and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. The new show, tentatively titled A Season in Hell, chronicles the travails of the cast and crew of a struggling television drama.

Coming on the heels of the the much ballyhooed -- and now cancelled -- Studio 60, the new show follows an ensemble cast of eccentric characters trying to put on a dramatic show about a cast of eccentric characters trying to put on a sketch comedy show.

"We think we really have something special with the show-within-a-show-within-a-show format," said NBC's director of programming, Karen Singer. "It really adds a new dimension to the drama." The show-within-a-show is called Studio 7 on Sunset Boulevard. The show-within-a-show-within-a-show is called Live from Studio 7.



The show will star Jimmy Fallon as Matthew Barry, an actor who plays Matt Allen, the head writer for the sketch comedy show; Peter Krauss as Brad Whitley, an actor who plays Eddie Katt, the producer in charge of the sketch comedy show; and Zooey Deschanel as Alyssa Peel, an actor who play Morgan McTiernan, the network's director of programming. Bradley Whitford will play Eric Sorin, the drama's creator.

"My character is a talented writer who is expected to deliver a surefire hit for a struggling network that has just lost several of its most popular shows," Whitford says. "To make matters worse, the network has also decided to air a much better half hour show that is also a look behind the scenes at a sketch comedy show. Also, I'm a cocaine addict. Well, not me. My character. And my character's character."

The show is intended to be an ironic look at the ups and downs of network television. Sorkin notes, "In the show, everyone expects Live from Studio 7 to fail, and it succeeds, while everyone expects Studio 7 on Sunset Boulevard to be a big hit, and it gets canceled after one season. The irony of this is that LS7 is painfully un-funny, while S7SB is borderline watchable."

The show introduces a concept known as "dollylog," a twist on Sorkin's trademark "walk-and-talk" scenes. In a dollylog, the camera follows the actor playing the cameraman as he follows the characters conversing in rapidfire dialog while walking the corridors of the set.

Other Sorkin trademarks are also evident: Characters in LS7 sketches make knowing references to events occurring on S7SB , and S7SB characters make knowing references to Aaron Sorkin's drug problems and other real life drama. Characters at all three levels of the Sorkinverse also make knowing references to Saturday Night Live, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, The West Wing, Sports Night, Lou Grant, Network, The Magnificent 7, MacBeth, Marshal MacLuhan, Thomas Becket, Voltaire, Heidegger, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and Manimal.

On the pilot episode, Allison Janney guest stars, playing a White House press secretary who is unhappy with the portrayal of her on a sketch on LS7. In the sketch she is played by cast LS7 member Allison Jansen (also portrayed by Allison Janney). Whitford's character, Eric Sorin, ends up rewriting the scene to have Matt Allen rewrite the scene to include the press secretary (Allison Janney), as well as Allison Jansen (Allison Janney), playing herself and the press secretary, as well as Allison Janney (Allison Janney) playing herself. When the sketch bombs, the Sorkinverse implodes and Aaron Sorkin finds himself dumped on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike.

NBC also announced that it will be airing a half-hour comedy based on the hit comedy 30 Rock.

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Best of MP: American Ingenuity

While I'm on hiatus, working on the new version of Humor-Blogs.com, please enjoy this classic post from the Mattress Police archives.

American Ingenuity

So I guess they killed off Captain America. Like, um, a year ago.

I'm a little late on this, because I haven't read comics for a while, and I never really did follow Captain America. I like the idea of Captain America, but he always seemed like a dull character to me. First, there's his secret identity: Steve Rogers. I mean, come on. Steve Rogers? What, was the name Jim Blandguy taken?

Captain America's origin isn't exactly inspiring either: As a young man, Steve volunteers to serve in the military during World War II, but is turned down because he is too weak and sickly. He is offered the opportunity to become a subject in a "super soldier" project. A prior subject has already been driven insane by the "super soldier" serum, but Steve lucks out: The serum greatly enhances his strength and reflexes, transforming him into a "nearly perfect human being." He is given the name Captain America, and sent off to fight the Nazis.

So, to recap, our plan for defeating the Nazis was to conduct horrifically dangerous experiments on civilians in an attempt to transform them from pathetic weaklings into perfect specimens of flag-waving Aryan humanity. Hard to see how a plan like that could fail.

The character isn't helped by the cutesy patriotic touches either, like how Steve Rogers was born on the Fourth of July and he had a girlfriend named -- no joke -- Betsy Ross. Now I can go along with the kind of inexplicable comic book synchronicity where the guy who becomes Dr. Octopus just happens to have been named Octavius, but at some point these gimmicks start to sound like the punchline of a bad joke:

Q: How patriotic is Captain America?
A: He's so patriotic that when he went inside the Statue of Liberty, he came in his shorts.

Then there are his "powers," which, well, he doesn't have any. Wikipedia says that "Captain America's strength, endurance, agility, speed, reflexes, and durability are at the highest limits of natural human potential," which is a tactful way of saying that he's as fast and strong as you can be without being, you know, superhuman. So basically he's Batman, except that instead of a utility belt filled with all kind of useful gadgets and a dark, scary costume that helps him blend into the night, he has red pirate boots and a big round shield that looks a lot like an archery target.

I'm not going to begrudge a superhero the use of medieval weaponry if that's the way he wants to go, but shouldn't he at least have a 2x4 with a nail in it or something to go with that shield? What was the discussion like that led to sending Steve to fight the Nazis using only his right fist and a big round shield? What did they expect him to do, other than draw fire?

At some point it occurred to Captain America that when you're fighting soldiers with machine guns, it would be really handy to have some sort of projectile weapon. So he took to throwing the shield, like a big vibranium frisbee that would carom off Nazi skulls with uncanny precision, taking out as many as four Nazis with a single toss. The trick, you see, is to get the Nazis to spread themselves out evenly like pinball bumpers, and then hit the first one at just the right angle. I always thought Captain America should have some sort of battle cry to go with the shield throwing, like "Oh, shit, I've thrown my shield!"

I mean, if the one thing keeping you from being riddled with Nazi bullets was your indestructible shield, would you go throwing it at people? You'd better be pretty damn good at the multiple target shield ricochet if you're going to do that, because if you miss just one Nazi, guess what? Now he's got a machine gun and an indestructible shield. Next thing you know, you're standing there with nothing but a big white star on your chest and a capital 'A' for Ass on your forehead, playing monkey in the middle with the Schutzstaffel.

(There is something to be said for the symbolism of Captain American throwing a defensive weapon at foreign enemies when he really should be holding onto it, but for some reason I doubt that the writers saw the irony.)

Captain America's popularity waned after the war ended. They tried to bring him back to fight the Communists, but that didn't go very well, probably because when you're fighting a cold war, a musclebound guy wearing a red, white and blue costume isn't your strongest asset. How do you even maintain a secret identity when you have to carry a big metal shield with you wherever you go? Steve Rogers must have had a pretty good cover story at the ready. "A shield? That's ridiculous. Of course it's not a shield. It's a, um, sled. I'm going sledding. After work. Where I work, at the, um, office building place."

The cold war got really cold for Cap at that point: He was frozen in suspended animation, to be reawakened into the Marvel Comics universe in 1964. He went on to lead the superhero group The Avengers, a group which at the time included Thor and Iron Man. For those of you who aren't familiar with these characters, that's like putting Dakota Fanning in charge of Mike Tyson and Dog the Bounty Hunter.

And now powers that be at Marvel have gone and killed Captain America. Well, technically they killed Steve Rogers. Apparently Captain America will live on, but with somebody else behind the mask. And it looks like this time they've given him a gun, which should liven things up a bit.

I for one look forward to seeing Captain America take down America's enemies by throwing his mighty gun at them.

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Best of MP: All Hail Goat Head

While I'm on hiatus, working on the new version of Humor-Blogs.com, please enjoy this classic post from the Mattress Police archives.

All Hail Goat Head

Recently I wrote about how my yard is infested with a satanic weed known as Goat Head. It occurs to me now that my characterization of this plant may have been a little unfair. The fact is that Goat Head is an integral part of the ecosystem in this area. Every living thing in creation has a purpose, and the purpose of Goat Head is to rule with a great fiery sword over the Infernal Dominion of Demon Weeds.

In case you missed my previous post about Goat Head, here he is now:



I know, he doesn't look that bad, but when you step on him it feels like this:



And don't get me started on what he can do to your tires.

Legend has it that Goat Head came into being when Cerberus, the three-headed demon dog, humped Satan's leg. Some of Cerberus' demon seed dripped off Satan's ankle and landed on Satan's Area Rug -- also known as the California Central Valley -- and Goat Head was born.

Goat Head gathered strength from the ungodly Central Valley heat and, unlike non-Satanic vegetation, did not require water to survive. Rather than using the energy of the sun to convert carbon dioxide and water into sugar, Goat Head used the energy of hate to transform hope into fear, joy into sorrow, and puppies into sugar. Goat Head laughed at 110 degree heat and chortled at dry, cracked earth. He was also mildly amused by fire, although it did tend to get old after a while. Soon Goat Head was strong enough to raise up for himself an army of demon-weed minions.

First he spawned his lieutenant, Stinging Nettle. Stinging Nettle looks like this:



Stinging Nettle's leaves are coated with microscopic protrusions that irritate the skin. Magnified 1000 times, they look like this:



There are many lesser demon-weeds, such as Foxtail, shown here:



Again, it doesn't look very threatening, but magnify it ten thousand times and you can see that it's made up of demons with the face of Pauly Shore.



Sorry about the nightmares, by the way.

Fortunately, I have found a way to live in harmony with the demon-weed population by carefully introducing the demon-weed's natural predator, Roundup(TM). I doubt I'll ever win the fight against the demon-weed hordes, but with the help of concentrated poisons I may at least be able to make the infestation seem relatively innocuous by dying slowly of cancer.

Cancer, by the way, looks like this:



That's right, cancer is a big, scary clown with the face of David Hasselhoff.

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Best of MP: The Legend of Diesel

While I'm on hiatus, working on the new version of Humor-Blogs.com, please enjoy this classic post from the Mattress Police archives.


The Legend of Diesel

Ok, so this is the first time I've ever felt the need to put a disclaimer in front of one of my posts. A few people have asked recently how I ended up with the nickname Diesel, and as the truth is not particularly interesting in this case, I decided to do what I always do: Make something up. The idea was to come up with a story that explained the nickname yet was so absurd and out of character for me that there's absolutely no way anyone would ever believe it. But, as generally happens, I completely lost control over the direction of the post about a sentence and a half in, and the result is something like an abbreviated version of Cool Hand Luke as imagined by Quentin Tarantino. Not only is it thematically divergent from pretty much everything else I've ever written, well, it's just plain divergent. So if you’re easily offended, maybe skip this one. Also, it’s about four times as long as a typical post. And if you do end up reading it, please remember that this is a work of fiction, and does not in anyway reflect my actual views or correspond in any way to reality, except for the facts that:

• I am a male


• I once drove through Texas


• Some people really do call me "Diesel"

Clear enough? Ok, so there's no lifeguard beyond this point. Proceed at your own risk. No children under 18 admitted, and all that.


The Legend of Diesel

There wasn't much to do in the tiny West Texas town I grew up in 'cept throw rocks at crows and rip off car stereos, so I was bound to get busted for the second one eventually. At the time I was runnin' with a couple of other no-good dead-enders, who went by the names Skeet and Colt. "Skeet" because his daddy was always shootin' at him, and "Colt" because he kicked so hard that his momma died two months before he was born. Me? Hell, nobody even thought I deserved a name. They all just called me "kid," usually with a "good-for-nothing" in front of it. Skeet and Colt were sixteen. I was only fifteen, but they let me run with them cuz I was good in a fight and could out-smoke and out-drink the both of them combined.

So after they busted us we got hauled before the judge, all dressed in our Sunday best. The judge was probably just gonna send us to the juvie camp, cuz that's what they do around there to kids what ain't got no future. But then our no-good fat-ass public defender opens his pie hole and says, "Yer honor, these is just three messed up kids." He meant it to be helpful, but wouldn't you know that right then and there was when I got all fed up to here being called kid, so I says to the judge, "Yer honor, I ain't no kid." Which is how Skeet and Colt got sent to the juvie camp, but me, the youngest one, got seven years hard labor.

I ain't gonna lie to you, that work farm wasn't no fun. We spent fourteen hours a day breakin' rocks with picks. They didn't tell us why, and we didn't ask. We ain't never seen anybody pick up any of them rocks we broke, so we figgered we was breakin' rocks to build character or some such nonsense. Well, my character got built into a mean-ass sonofobitch with hands like leather and arms like steel cables. The guards was hard on us, but the way the Texas sun beat down on us there weren't no question whose bitches we really were.

They labelled me "uncooperative" on account of that's what I was. The other convicts took a break every couple hours to have a cigarette, but not me, cuz to have a cigarette you had to say "Please boss can I get a light?" and I wasn't please-bossin' nobody. I went for six months without a cigarette, which was tough, cuz I started smoking when I was four. Then one day it got so hot that an old dead oak tree caught on fire, and I ran right over there and lit my cigarette. The other convicts was mighty upset that the one shade tree for a hundred miles around got burnt down, but I was happy as a pig in shit to get a light that I didn't have to please-boss for. I chain-smoked from that one cigarette for the next six and a half years, and never once had to ask for a light.

Once I had my cigarette goin', them other convicts expected I was gonna join them for their breaks, but my daddy always told me not to fraternize with no-good reprobates, cuz that's how he became one. Well I shore as hell wasn't gonna turn into a no-good reprobate like my daddy, so I just kept on breakin' rocks and chain smokin' while they was chattin' up the guards at their cute little ten minute convict picnic. Only reason I ever came over there was to fill up my drinkin' bottle from the big water tank on the back of the prison truck. The water tasted like iron and pesticides, but I figured I was gettin' my minerals and keepin' my insides clean of bugs, so I didn't mind.

This went on for awhile, but pretty soon the other convicts got sick of me actin' like I was better than they was, and breakin' six times as much rocks as they was breakin', and the guards were itchin' for a please-boss, cuz please-bosses are what prison guards get instead of the love of a good woman. So they was makin' fun of me and callin' me a bitch for workin' through my break, and then somebody says, "Man, he must have gasoline in that bottle, the way he's workin.'" And then another guy, the biggest, meanest guy in the place, who they called Tex on account of he was from Oklahoma, spoke up. He says, "Naw, the way he smokes, he's a diesel engine." And then they started callin' me Diesel, and saying, "Hey Diesel, come get some more fuel" and dumbass shit like that. When I just kept breaking rocks, they says to the guard, "Boss, make him come over here." Boss didn't want to, but then they started sayin', "I bet you couldn't get old Diesel to come over here if you tried." And Boss didn't like that. They kept on him until finally he says, "Boy, get yer ass over here." And he put a period on it by spittin' his Skoal juice in my direction.

Well I figured I was there to break rocks, not to entertain Boss and the no-good reprobates, so that's what I kept doin.' Boss told me two more times, but I just kept on breakin' rocks. Finally he says to the no-good reprobates, "You grab that sorry sumbitch and bring him over here." And it took eight of them, but that's what they did. I fought like a wildcat, but Tex socked me good in the gut, and I went down. The rest of them piled on, and pretty quick I was flatter on the ground than roadkill. Somehow I still had my cigarette in my mouth, and Boss came over and plucked it out with his soft little pudgy fingertips.

Boss was one sorry excuse for a man. He used to tell us how he'd punish his dog when he misbehaved by whuppin' him til he bled, and then tyin' him to a tree and puttin' hamburger patties out on the ground just out of the dog's reach, so the poor mutt would spend all day cuttin' up his neck just to get a sniff of that meat. It wasn't long after the day I got named Diesel that we heard that Boss's wife left him for a ballet dancer, and he had to quit because he couldn't get no respect any more from the convicts. Even a pansy-ass ballet dancer was more of a man than him, the convicts would say.

But we didn't know about the dancing fruit that day he got the convicts to hold me down and he plucked the cigarette from my mouth. After that he spat a big wad of chaw juice in my face, which was bad enough, but what he did next marked the both of us for life. He ripped my shirt open and started burnin' me with that cigarette. It hurt so bad I didn't notice what he was doin' at first, but then I saw that we was making letters. That must have been the slowest burnin' cigarette in the history of Injun tobacco, cuz it felt like it took him an hour to burn D-E-S-E-L into my skin. It smelled like hamburgers, and made me think of Boss's sorry-ass dog. No dog deserves to be treated like that, I thought. And right then and there I swore some day Boss was going to know what it felt like to be hamburger.

After he was done burnin' me, he flicked the cigarette away and the convicts let me go. I just lay there for a spell, restin' up and smellin' the hamburger smell. If they figgered I didn't have no fight left in me, boy was they wrong. I got to my feet, brushed myself off, then laid the biggest haymaker you ever seen across Tex's jaw. There was a POP! that they must have heard in El Paso, and Tex fell to his knees, his jaw hangin' down three inches farther than the Almighty intended, so he looked like one sorry-ass dumbfounded okie, which is what he was.

Then, while the rest of them were still standin' there doin’ their best impressions of a dumbfounded okie with a busted jaw, I reached down and picked up my cigarette, which still had about a quarter inch of life in it, took another cigarette from the pack in my sleeve and lit it from the dying butt. I got a real nice cherry goin' on it and then planted that red hot tip on my chest, right between the D and the E. When I had torched a real purdy letter I, I took a nice long drag and said, "I before E, shitheads." Then I went back to breakin' rocks. Nobody laid a finger on me after that, and six and a half years of rock-breakin' later, I was a free man.

First thing I did when I got out was look up that sorry-ass pudgy-fingered prison guard, who wasn't a prison guard no more on account of gettin' his ass fired for havin' a cheatin' whore ballet-dancer-lover for a wife. He lived in a dirty old trailer that smelled like onions and sweaty feet. When I came by, he was up to his old tricks, teasin' his mutt with hamburger. The dog was chained up to a tree out back, and a nice big pancake of ground beef lay on the dirt just out of his reach. Boss was sittin' there in a lawn chair, drinkin’ a Blue Ribbon and laughin' at the poor starving mutt. That dog was the ugliest damn creature God ever put on this planet, and I ain't entirely sure God's the one what did it. He looked like he was half doberman, half rottweiler, and half demon from the pit of hell, cuz that's just how big and mean he was. Boss had drawn a line that marked how far the dog could get from the tree, so he could tease him all he wanted without gettin' bit. Boss kept sayin', "Come 'n' get it, Duke! Come and get it!" And all I could think of is what kind of sorry ass pansy you have to be to give your dog a fag name like Duke. When Duke got too close, Boss would spit a wad of Skoal juice in his eyes.

I was about to walk up and give that jackass what-for when a phone rang and he high-tailed it back into his trailer. I strolled right up to the demon-mutt, picked up the hamburger patty he'd probably been eyein' since last Tuesday, and tossed it where he could reach it. The dog gave me no mind and went to work on that meat. I had just enough time to scrub out that line Boss had drawn and make another one with my boot. Then I went back and sat down under a tree, where I'd have a good view of the show.

Soon enough Boss came back out the trailer and got back to his fun. He pulled his lawn chair up to the line I'd drawn and said, "Dammit, Duke, you better not’ve ate my hamburger!" Now I know dogs can't smile, but I swear that demon dog looked over at me for a split second and gave me the evillest fang-filled grin you ever saw. Then he launched hisself toward that sorry-ass dipshit and sunk about sixty of those teeth into the right side of Boss's face. Boss screamed like a little bitch, but that dog held on like it was the one thing he was put on earth for. Finally he ripped half the meat off Boss's face like chicken from a bone, and Boss fell back on his lawn chair, sobbing and trying to hold on what was left of his face.

That's when I walked up and threw another hamburger patty to the dog. He dropped Boss's cheek and gobbled up the hamburger. I picked up the bloody chunk of flesh and tossed it at Boss. "You're lucky your face tastes as bad as that shit you chew," I said.

Boss looked at me with the same look he probably used when he walked in on his wife gettin' friendly with the candy-ass dancer. "You...?" was all he could muster.

"Yeah, me." I said. "I'm takin' yer dog." I gave the demon-mutt a rub under the chin and unsnapped his chain. The dog licked me real friendly-like.

"No!" Boss yelled. He was so worked up that I thought he musta figgered I was gonna let that demon-mutt at him, which I probly shoulda, but it turned out that he was just worried about losin' his damn dog. Here he was with blood gushin' out of where the right side of his face used to be, and he was cryin' about losin' a dog he'd probably never said a kind word to. "You can't take Duke from me!" he whined, like the dog had just been sucklin' at his teat or somethin.'

"His name ain't Duke," I said, lookin' over the dog. I could see one of his eyes was all fucked up, probably from gettin' chaw juice spat in it. Poor dog was scarred and half-blind for life. I said, "His name is Skoal now."

For some reason that made Boss real mad. He started to say, "Listen to me, kid...."

But something in my eyes must have scared him pretty good, cuz he never got past the word kid. "Name's Diesel," I said, lightin' a cigarette. "Now why don't you go get yer face put back on?"

Skoal and me got in my truck and took off, and we've been together ever since. We don't talk much, but the two of us have a bond – the kind of bond that only two mean-ass animals can have.

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Don't Stop Thinking About Tamales

Sorry about the lame post on Friday. I realized like 5 minutes before I had to leave for a camping trip that I hadn't done the caption contest results post yet. I went with a group of boys from our church to a place called Spicer Reservoir, which is between Tahoe and Yosemite. Here's a pic of the 4th grade group. Guess which one is Climber.



We had a good time, although I'm happy to be back in the world of showers and flush toilets.


Anyway, HeyJoe won the caption contest. Joe, you may post the In Your Face award.




Sparrow came in second with:

"Diesel, I don't care HOW scared you are, I'm NOT going to 'hold you 'til the fear in you subsides', dammit!"

Dave Crane and CrummyJoel tied for 3rd.

Dave Crane's caption:

With your donation you can help people like Diesel live a normal productive life.

CrummyJoel's caption:

Stop making fun of his big head! You're making him cry!!

And now for some good news and bad news.

The good news is that this coming weekend I'm going to be launching a much improved version of Humor-Blogs.com. I've made a lot of improvements over the past year, but thus far I've just been hacking around with the original code that I wrote back at the beginning of 2007. I never expected the site to take off the way it has, so I didn't spend the time to build it right from the beginning. As a result, the site is buggy, slow, and not very easy to navigate.

I built the new version almost completely from scratch, so it won't have all of those problems. Don't worry -- the basic voting/ranking mechanism won't change, but the site will run a lot more smoothly. Some of the improvements include:

• Support for a broader range of xml feeds (yes, including Typepad)
• Fewer problems with delays in posts showing up
• Easier signup for people who just want to be able to vote
• Easier voting (similar to the way you rate movies on Netflix)
• Blog snapshots instead of banners
• Better search feature
• "New Blogs" and "Latest Posts" features to help less well-known blogs get exposure

And on top of all that, it will load faster, look nicer, and generally work better than the current version.

The bad news is that between work, painting my house, and this Humor-Blogs stuff, I haven't had much time lately to write. So I'm going to have to take a little hiatus while I get caught up. My plan is to start posting regularly again on October 6 -- although that's Mrs. Diesel's birthday, so who knows.

In the meantime, I'll dig up some Best of MP posts for your reading pleasure, starting tomorrow. If you want to throw a few smileys my way so that I don't drop off the HB front page while I'm revamping HB, that would be cool.

I have no idea what the title of this post is supposed to mean, by the way. I just couldn't think of anything else.

Help keep me alive at Humor-Blogs.com!

Congrats, Hey Joe

HeyJoe won this time around. Congrats, Joe.

In second place was... actually, just scroll down. I gotta leave to go camping. See you on Monday.

Do You Know the Way to Tuscan Hills?

Lately I've been painting the interior of our house. You may recall that I've been building this house since before I even started this blog -- which is to say, before time began. The house is finally nearing completion, and I've been trying to get it painted so that we can move in our furniture and tiki dolls and whatnot.

We painted most of the interior a light sage green color. When people see it, they invariably say, "Ooh, I like that color. What's it called?"

And I tell them, "Tuscan Hills."

Don't go looking for "Tuscan Hills" at Home Depot, though, because Mrs. Diesel and I made it up. So if you ask the guy in the paint department for that color, he will just stare blankly at you as if you had asked him... well, any other question, actually.



The standard way of picking a paint color is to go to the paint store, grab a bunch of postage stamp-sized color swatches with uncannily descriptive names like "Autumn Mist" or "Monterrey Fog," and then take them home and hold them up against a wall. If you're smart, you hold the swatch up against several different walls at several different times of the day, so that you can see what it would look like to hold a postage stamp against several different walls at several different times of the day.

Then begins the delicate process of color negotiation. It seems that your wife likes "Autumn Mist," but you prefer "Monterrey Fog," so you discuss the relative merits of each for several hours, break for some hot color-selection sex, and eventually end up compromising on something halfway between your respective preferences, like "Irish Breeze."

So you paint your whole house "Irish Breeze," after which you and your wife agree a better name for the color would have been "Monkey Vomit." But you pretend to like it, and you tell yourself that you're going to want to paint again anyway after the kids go away to college in fourteen years.

This method works remarkably well for most people, but here's my problem: I'm rather tall, and as a result many of the rooms in my house are significantly larger than a postage stamp. Some of the rooms, in fact, are the size of several dozen postage stamps. I do my best to picture those color swatches tiling my walls, but even my imagination has its limits. The only way I can know for sure whether I like a color is to paint a sizable portion of a wall that color. But then what do you do if you don't like the color? Buy another color, right? And what if you don't like that one? Eventually, even if you just buy a quart at a time, you end up going through a lot of paint until you finally give up and settle on something that you tell yourself is, if nothing else, not as bad as the sixteen quarts of stuff slowly hardening into big globs of latex in your garage.

Twelve years ago, Mrs. Diesel and I were faced with the challenge of painting our first house, and we made the mistake of asking the guy in the paint department of Sears for advice. We followed him as he wandered through the paint aisle making painfully obvious paint-related observations. He would dispense helpful tidbits like the fact "off white" isn't quite the same as white, and that semi-gloss paint isn't as shiny as gloss paint. To this day Mrs. Diesel and I can't walk through the paint department of any store without one of us remarking, in the manner of the Sears Paint Guy, "This here is kids' paint. It's good for kids' rooms."

The fact is, painting isn't rocket science. Other than picking the right finish*, the only important decision to make is regarding the color. And here's something I realized in kindergarten, when my teacher let me in on a little secret she called the "color wheel": There's nothing magical about making "Autumn Mist" or "Monkey Vomit." Every color is just a spot on the color wheel.

A little color primer (ha!) for those of you who skipped kindergarten: There are only three variables that go into making a color: Hue, saturation and lightness.**

• Hue refers where the color falls on the color wheel, from red to orange to yellow to green to blue to violet.
  
• Saturation basically means how intense the color is. Adding white or black (or gray) to a color lowers the saturation. You can also lower the saturation by adding a complimentary color. For example, to decrease the saturation of a bright red, you could add green (yellow + blue).
• Lightness means how bright the color is. Adding white increases lightness; adding black reduces lightness.

Using those basic principles, you can now create any color you want. All you need is red, yellow, blue, black and white.*** With our second house, I started keeping some of each of those colors on hand, so that I could make little adjustments to any color. This has come in handy on several occasions.

A couple of years ago, my father-in-law wanted to paint the interior of his house. I have a paint sprayer, so I told him that if he got the paint, I'd paint it. He went and got ten gallons of paint, so I set up the sprayer and popped open the lid of one of the buckets.

Now I should mention that my father-in-law -- whom I call Opie, for reasons I won't go into here -- is a nice guy, but he's not the most practical person in the world. Opie sometimes makes decisions that seem to defy common sense.

"Wow," I said, regarding the substance shimmering at me from the five gallon bucket in front of me. "Do you really want to paint your house the color of a Thin Mint Blizzard?"

He looked at the paint and just shrugged, unable -- or unwilling -- to imagine what that color was going to look like on his walls.

There's a color called "institutional green" that is used in insane asylums because it supposedly has a soothing effect on the inmates. I don't know how effective it is, but I have no doubt that a good lawyer could mount a pretty successful murder defense based on the defendant's excessive exposure to Thin Mint Blizzard. "Yes, your honor, my client killed those seventeen people, but look at the color of his living room!"

I painted a little Thin Mint Blizzard on Opie's living room wall. It was even more garish and horrific than I had pictured. Just that four foot square section of TMB on his wall made me want to go on a murderous rampage and then burn down a Dairy Queen.

"Shit," said Opie. Because you can't return ten gallons of Thin Mint Blizzard.

Fortunately for Opie, I have mad color blending skillz. I went to our barn and grabbed several cans of leftover paint.

First, I added some red. If you're a girl -- or a boy with bad acne -- you know what happens when you mix red and green. If you put some of that green coverup stuff on a big red blotch on your forehead, the red blotch will magically disappear -- although the underlying cause is still something you should probably see a physician about. (I'm not normally one to advocate that males wear makeup, but seriously, if you're a guy between the ages of fourteen and twenty-five, get some of that green stuff. I wish I had known about that stuff when I was in high school.) Anyway, that stuff works because red and green are complimentary colors, so they cancel each other out. By the same principle, if you add a little red to a particularly garish shade of green, it will nicely take the edge off.

Next I added a bunch of white, to make the color a little lighter. The problem with adding white, though, is that it turns colors into pastels. So unless you're going for an Easter themed house, you also need to add a little black to bring down the saturation and lightness a bit.

I tweaked it a bit more, eventually ending up with ten gallons of a nice sage green, which, now that I think about it, is where I always end up. I'm not actually sure that this method works for any other color.

In any case, Opie was quite happy to have his house painted something in the ballpark of Tuscan Hills rather than Thin Mint Blizzard -- and without having to buy any more paint.

These days when I want to paint something, I go to the paint store and buy just those five colors. I usually buy five gallons of white and just a gallon (or maybe only a quart) of each of the others. I mix paint until I get something I like. Then I paint a little on a wall to see what it looks like. If it's too intense, I add some gray (white + black, in case you're not sure) or a complimentary color. This is how I painted our last two houses.

One caveat about this method: If you go to Home Depot and ask the guy in the paint department for "yellow," he'll look at you as if... well, he'll give you that look we talked about earlier. Despite the fact that yellow is one of the three primary colors that make up all other possible colors, you can't just buy "yellow." You see, the Home Depot guys don't know anything about how colors actually work. They don't know the magic of the color wheel, because they were pulled out of kindergarten to go to a special school for future Home Depot employees. All they know is that to make "Sandusky Tan," they press the buttons to make the machine add 8 units of RAW UMBER and 3 units of LAMP BLACK to a white base. They're pretty much color-retarded.

To keep the Home Depot guy from freaking out, you have to go pick out something like "Flame Yellow" or "Lighthouse Blue" and hand the postage stamp thing to him. He will see the comforting color formula on the postage stamp thing and mix it up for you like the dutiful color-mixing monkey he is. Nevermind that to make "Flame Yellow," all he's doing is adding 17 units of something called PERM YELLOW to white paint. You still can't just ask him for yellow, because he will pull his Construction Sign Orange apron (PERM YELLOW 17, EXTERIOR RED 10) over his head and sob uncontrollably until they cart him off to someplace painted with Institutional Green (PERM YELLOW 14, THALO BLUE 9, LAMP BLACK 6).



And it's not just Home Depot. I sent Mrs. Diesel to our local Ace hardware store a few days ago to get "yellow." She knows, of course, that you can't buy yellow at an Ace hardware store, because even though their employees are culled from a slightly deeper gene pool than Home Depot's, they have been specifically instructed not to acknowledge the existence of primary colors, because doing so would cheapen the art of Fancy Color Naming. So Mrs. Diesel picked the brightest yellow she could find, and asked for a gallon of it.

The Ace dude told her that such a bright color required a more expensive base -- and I'm sure there's a reason for that, assuming that the customer actually intended to paint something that shade of yellow. Of course, you can't tell the Ace dude that you have no intention of actually painting anything with the paint you're purchasing, because then they will assume that you are insane and start talking to you in the voice they reserve for the guy who is building Jacob's Ladder out of PVC pipe. Mrs. Diesel called to ask whether I wanted the more expensive base, and rather than make her fight the Ace dude over what we could or couldn't do with paint, I told her to just get the brightest yellow that they offered in the cheaper base. So the Ace dude happily complied, adding the Ace version of PERM YELLOW along with WHITE to a white base. Yes, despite the fact that all we wanted was yellow, the machine told him that he needed to add some more white to the white, so he did it. Whatever. It was yellow enough for my purposes.

So if you're about to embark on a painting project, don't be duped into thinking that you're limited to choosing between postage stamps labeled "Nantucket Moss" or "Cambridge Lichen." Your options are as limitless as the color spectrum and your imagination. And if you need help, just let me know. I can make any color there is. As long as it's pretty close to "Tuscan Hills" (BROWN OXIDE 2, GREEN OXIDE 20, LAMP BLACK 7).


*Ok, yes, I did once take a painting job in college where I accidentally painted the ceilings of an entire apartment in gloss paint, so that it resembled a cave. But I was only 22 at the time.
**Yes, I know, your kindergarten teacher told you that you could make any color with the three primary colors. Technically this is true, because black is actually the absence of color. You wouldn't need white if you were working with photons rather than paint; in physics you can combine red, yellow and blue to make white, but with paint it just makes monkey vomit.
***It gets a little complicated because these factors are all interrelated. For example, by adding purple to yellow, you change the hue, but you also slightly lower the saturation and lightness. It just takes a little practice to get the hang of it.

If you enjoyed this post, may I also recommend: Continuity Test | Construction and Deconstruction If you liked this post, please vote for it at Humor-Blogs.com!

Vote!

CrummyJoel said...

Stop making fun of his big head! You're making him cry!!


HeyJoe said...

Diesel: YOO HOO!! big shiny metal man with the huge guns!! We're over here!!


Mother Theresa said...

Sarah: Come on babe, you can do it. Just one big burp and you'll feel so much better.


Rickey Henderson said...

"Feel my bosoms if you want to live!"


Avitable said...

Diesel's research for his new book, "Upskirt Photos", is tragically cut short.


Brad said...

"Come with me, if you want to---hey, is that a squirrel?"


Doug at Taunt Vortex said...

Famous dramatic epiphanies :

Anne Sullivan teaches Helen Keller the connection between "water" and the word spelled in her hand.

Sarah, forcing Diesel to look into the mirror, finally convinces him of his overbite.


Anonymous Jess said...

Sarah: ..and this is the 'brace/capture position'. Read me that that next direction?

Diesel: Turn StuntGuy's head 'till you hear his neck cra-AACK!


Dave Crane said...

With your donation you can help people like Diesel live a normal productive life.


Sparrow said...

"Diesel, I don't care HOW scared you are, I'm NOT going to 'hold you 'til the fear in you subsides', dammit!"

Online Surveys & Market Research

Seriously? No smileys for my last post at all? Help me out here.

Sock Drawer

First, I'd like to thank those of you who, according to Technorati, have been linking to me since December 31, 1969. It takes a lot of faith to link to a blog that doesn't yet exist, written by someone who hasn't yet been born, using technology that hasn't yet been invented -- and I want you to know that I won't let you down.

In case you don't know, 12/31/1969 marks the beginning of "the epoch" in the Unix world. That's the earliest date that many computer systems will recognize. Evidently Technorati lost some records, which caused a bunch of their dates to default back to the beginning of time. Good work, guys. It's nice to know that Humor-Blogs.com isn't the only blog directory that has the occasional hiccup.

Software developers often use '12/31/1969' as a dummy date, to indicate that a real date hasn't been specified for some variable. That always seemed kind of silly to me, to pretend that time didn't start until 1/1/1970. I decided to put a stop to that when I worked at Galactic Invertebrates. Which is why GI now has dozens of lines of code referring to '4/29/1970.' Happy birthday to me!

*****

One of the applications I wrote while I was at Galactic Invertebrates was a consortium management system, which stored information about member companies located all over the world. There were several administrative employees who were charged with inputting new companies into the system.

One day one of these employees, a middle-aged woman who spoke with a thick Russian accent, called me over to her desk because she was having trouble entering a new member company from Korea.

"The program makes me pick North Korea or South Korea," she said. "But they just wrote 'Korea'."

"It's South Korea," I said, without even looking at the paperwork. "It's very unlikely you'll see any companies from North Korea."

"Then why are there two Koreas in the program?"

"Because there are two Koreas in the world, and the program lists every country in the world."

"I think it would be easier if there was just one Korea," she said.

"Well," I said, unfortunately for you, there are 30,000 American troops preventing that from happening. So you'd better get used to picking South Korea."

*****



*****

Another time a Hong Kong-based company got upset with GI because we had listed Hong Kong as part of China. I believe we eventually appeased them by separating out Hong Kong as its own country. Problem solved! Except, that is, for the problem of Hong Kong being part of China.

*****

Speaking of things that are unnecessarily complicated, I've been thinking lately about all the communication problems between the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. I think I've figured out the source of the problem. The F.B.I. is a Bureau, and the C.I.A. is an Agency. They're two completely different kinds of organizations!

When I'm president, all government functions are going to be consolidated by the type of organization. For example:

Federal Agency of Agencies
Includes:

• Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
• Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)
• Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

Federal Bureau of Bureaus
Includes:

• Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI)
• Bureau of Labor Statistics
• Bureau of Engraving & Printing

Federal Administration of Administrations
Includes:

• Farm Credit Administration (FCA)
• Federal Railroad Administration
• National Aeronautics and Space Administration(NASA)

And then there would be the Federal Commission on Commissions, the Federal Board of Boards and the Federal Authority Authority. Think of the efficiency!

*****

Oh, I almost forgot: September is National Preparedness Month. This year, let's make sure we get the word out early. Crap. Ok, next year.

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Caption Contestical: Terminator: The Sarah Chrono Connicles

I have no idea what is supposed to be going on in this scene, but I thought it would make a good caption contest photo. Besides, that's what you guys are for.

That's me with Sirah Chronic of Terminator: The Saharah Comic Calicos. Er, Sorta Comic Follicles. The Colonic Conical Cubicles. Coptic Catacomb Cuticles.

That's me with the main character of that Terminator show.

Submit your captionicals in the commenticles. The best ones will have been posted in a poll last Tuesday. Good luck!

Find more funny blogs at Humor-Blogicles

Reflections

Wow.

Sorry about that rant yesterday. I mean, I'm not sorry sorry -- I still wish everybody would stop using those retarded buzzwords. But I understand that you come here looking for a little light humor, and you don't expect to get blindsided by a tirade about abortion and family values. So... sorry about that.

The point, on this 7th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, is that if we, as a vast and diverse people, are going to have any chance of understanding and getting along with each other, we have to avoid using words that deliberately label our opponents as stupid or evil.

I've known nice, perfectly reasonable people who are anti-abortion and nice, perfectly reasonable people who are pro-legalized abortion. I can't tell which is which just by gaging how big an asshole the person is. This leads me to believe that neither being anti-abortion nor being pro-legalized abortion is the result of some kind of fundamental character flaw. I have to believe that these people just have different ways of looking at the world, and that maybe if they didn't immediately assume the other is stupid or evil, they might have a chance of understanding where the other is coming from.

The risk inherent in understanding someone else's point of view if, of course, that you'll be converted to that point of view. So it's much safer to label yourself and your allies with a codeword like "pro-choice" or "saved", or to label your opponents as "evolutionists" or "homophobes."

Anyway, when I come across these words on someone's blog, I think, "Well, I don't fit into that category, so I guess I'm not welcome here." The other possibility, of course, is that the blogger doesn't mean any harm, but just hasn't thought very much about what the use of those words imply. So consider yesterdays' post an opportunity to put some more thought into the words you use. If you really want to exclude people like me, who don't fit nicely into most of those prefabricated boxes, then keep using those words. I'll get the hint.

Just for today, let's try thinking the best of our fellow Americans (and Canadians, and Brits, and Australians... hell, maybe even the French). Let's try assuming that they have some halfway decent reason for their crazy, mixed up opinions.

Even the guys who flew those planes into those buildings had some kind of reason. I'm not saying their actions were in any way defensible, but it can't hurt to try to understand why the hell someone would do something so horrible. The other option is to just label them as evil and eradicate them as if they were gnats or gophers. That was certainly my gut reaction after the 9/11 attacks, but maybe after 7 years we need to start reassessing things. How is that strategy working out for us? Are they all dead yet?

The fact is, I'm not an idiot and you guys aren't dumb. We just have different ways of looking at things. Let's not let that stand in the way of begin decent to each other.

Shalom,
Rob "Diesel" Kroese

The Unbearable Dumbness of Being

So lately I've been trying to catch up on reading other peoples' blogs, and one of the inevitable consequences of that activity is me being irritated by how dumb some people are.

Before I continue, I should explain that I myself am an idiot. A few days ago I tried to zip past a massive truck in my Nissan to get in front of it before the road narrowed. I misjudged how much space I had, and ended up having to make a choice between hitting the truck and hitting the concrete median. I went with the median.

Except it wasn't a regular median. It was a series of five inch tall ribs of concrete, spaced about eight inches apart, oriented perpendicularly to the direction I was moving. I'm not sure why someone would design something like that unless they were doing their best to make the hitting-the-truck option look as attractive as possible.

So I hit these things at about 40 miles an hour -- BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! -- and ended up getting in front of the truck. Which would have felt like a victory if I didn't have two flat tires. I pulled over to the side of the road (with the driver laughing his ass off at me, I have no doubt) and inspected the damage. My tires weren't just flat -- they were destroyed. I had to call a tow truck to get me to a place where I could have the tires replaced, making me roughly 2 hours late for the meeting that I was in a hurry to get to.

This is the sort of stuff that I do, because I'm an idiot. I'm actually a decent driver, because my survival sense generally trumps my spaciness, but I do occasionally get into these situations because my mind is busy solving the world's problems or coming up with items for my sock drawer when I should be paying attention to where I'm going.

On the other hand, while I occasionally do things that are fantastically stupid, my crazy hyper-analytical brain inoculates me against the mundane dumbness that afflicts many people. As I detailed in my last post, I can't watch The News (TM) because the cacophony of Dumbness drowns out anything of value that I might pick up from it. I avoid political discussions for the same reason: the debate is inevitably characterized by the way The News(TM) has framed the issue, so I feel like I've been sucked into a particularly lame episode of Hannity & Colmes.

So how do you, as a person not equipped with the Cerebronix Diesel 1000 Brain, know if you've been afflicted by The Dumbness? Well, my friends, that's where I come in. Since the world was so kind to inform me of my error in judgment the other day by gently correcting me with a series of unforgiving chunks of concrete, I've decided to do the world a service by enlightening it regarding some basic elements of The Dumbness. Some day, if you pay close attention, you might one day recognize The Dumbness for yourselves. Today's lesson:

Words and Phrases that are Symptoms of The Dumbness

Pro-choice
As far as I can tell, "Pro-choice" means "pro-legalized abortion." So why not just say "pro-legalized abortion"? It's a few more syllables, but it has the advantage of communicating what you actually mean, which is always a bonus when using words. "Pro-choice" could mean anything. It could mean that you're in favor of allowing people to choose whether they want to smoke marijuana. Except that those people helpfully just call themselves "pro-legalized-marijuana."

Pro-choice is a euphemism, and people generally employ euphemisms when want to avoid using a word that has bad connotations, like, say, abortion. And you wouldn't want people to think you have a problem with abortion. Of course, pro-legalized-abortion has the disadvantage of not implying that those who disagree with you are somehow "anti-choice," as if people who are against abortion are motivated by their loathing for freedom.

Here's a helpful tip: If the word or phrase you use to describe your own political position implies that anyone who disagrees with you is an idiot or fascist, you may not have picked the most objective term. If you really think you have the stronger argument, then start trying to convince people with that argument rather than trying to win by misusing language.

Pro-life
This one is slightly less egregious than pro-choice, because it is often used as an umbrella term to indicate that one is against abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicide, and anything else that is deemed as "unnecessary" killing. Still, it has the same problem as "pro-choice." If you're "pro-life," does that mean that your opponents are "anti-life" or even "pro-death"? And are you "pro-life" in all cases, or is that "pro-life" with an asterisk for enemy combatants and murderers?

My church celebrates something called "Sanctity of Human Life Sunday." I like that. It doesn't mean that killing is never necessary; it means (among other things) that the loss of any life -- whether or not that life is a fully developed, cognizant or morally admirable person -- is a tragedy.

Anti-war
Just to be clear, Mr. Anti-War Activist, you're against this particular war -- the war in Iraq -- because you don't like the idea of "war for oil," or because it's going badly, right? You're ok with invading Afghanistan, stopping the Axis in World War II, and freeing the slaves in the Civil War? And you're going to keep driving your gasoline-powered vehicle to work and whining about gas prices?

By the way, not sure if you noticed, but the war in Iraq is essentially over. What we're doing over there now is keeping order as best we can and rooting out insurgents. If you want to see a real war, though, we could always pull out. So really you're not anti-war so much as you are pro-washing-your-hands-of-war. It's not terribly catchy, but I think it would fit on a bumper sticker.

(Apologies to any actual solar-powered car-driving pacifists out there amongst the legions of self-righteous "anti-war" pricks.)

Homophobic
Man, how I hate this one. According to Wikipedia, Homo is the genus that includes modern humans and their close relatives. According to the Random House dictionary, Homo- is a prefix meaning "same." A phobia, is of course, a fear of something.

So homophobic literally means "afraid of humans (and their close relatives)" or "afraid of sameness." Under either definition, I qualify as homophobic. I'm scared of people and monotony, and especially monotonous people.

But language evolves, you say. Homo- in this context is short for "homosexual."

Right. I'll try that argument the next time I'm talking to one of my gay friends. "So," I'll say, "how's the whole homo thing working out for you? What are you and your homo pals doing tonight?"

I'm guessing most gay people don't want to be called "homos." They might even be afraid of people calling them "homos." Which would make them homophobic, right? Whee, language is fun!

Why aren't people who hate Jews called Semitophobic? Well, because it implies that antisemites are afraid of Jews, which may very well be the case, but is an additional conclusion that isn't supported by the observation of antisemitic behavior. Was Hitler afraid of Jews? That's a question for somebody's PhD dissertation, not something that should be assumed by calling anyone who is anti-Jew a semitophobe. Foisting a nonsense-word like homophobic on the culture may make you feel good if you've been the victim of anti-homosexual bias, but all you're doing is painting a diverse group of people with an overly broad brush, much as they do when they refer to you with anti-gay epithets.

Family values
Thankfully, this one seems to have run its course, as it's usually only used ironically these days. Family values is so vague that I've never even fully understood what it is supposed to mean. Presumably family values are diametrically opposed to single person values. And we all know what single people love: Promiscuous (preferably gay) sex, strip clubs and pornography.

The invocation of family values seems like a way to smuggle Christianity into politics. The problem is that the key doctrines of Christianity (something about Jesus Christ being God incarnate and dying for humanity's sins) are really hard to camouflage, so the Christians end up leaving that crap behind and foisting a bunch of Old Testament-style morality on people with a load of mumbo-jumbo about the Founding Fathers and Judeo-Christian tradition. And then they are surprised when it doesn't take. "I just don't get these heathens," the Christian Right says. "Why don't they respond correctly to being pummeled with arbitrary moral laws like the Israelites did back in Leviticus?"

Judeo-Christian
I've met Jews, and I've met Christians, but I've never met a single Judeo-Christian. Judaism and Christianity are two separate, and very different religions, folks. There aren't any "Judeo-Christian" churches or annual conventions of Judeo-Christians. Not even ethnically Jewish Christians refer to themselves as "Judeo-Christians." Once again, this is just the Christian Right trying to increase their political influence by implying that there is some kind of united Jewish/Christian political front.

It's true that Christianity grew out of Judaism, but so did Islam. And as far as I can tell, Islam and Judaism have more in common than Christianity has with either of them. Where are the Judeo-Islamic values?

War on Terror
You can't fight a war against a state of mind ("terror") or a military tactic ("terrorism"). You can only fight wars against groups of people. Yet somehow "war on terrorists" sounds too narrow, like the war consists of going from cave to cave, rooting out a bunch of misfits hoarding explosives. Which, come to think of it, is basically what it is.

Sure, there's more to it, but can taking your shoes off at the airport really be considered part of the "war effort"? This seems more like one of those metaphorical wars, like the war against poverty or the war against drugs (both of which should be wrapping up pretty quickly, I think). It worries me when we combine a literal war with a metaphorical war, because it starts to get really easy to employ very real, literal military tactics against very fuzzy, metaphorical threats.


Ok, that's it for now. Hopefully you've learned something, and I've offended you all more or less equally. Oh, and if you want to leave a comment letting me know how offended you are, that would be great, because offensive is currently my least favorite word in the English language. Go ahead, give me an excuse to tell you why.

If you enjoyed this post, may I also recommend: Blogger of Light | Throwing My Vote Away (On a Smaller Vagina) | This is My Brain Without Drugs Find more funny blogs at Humor-Blogs.com