Blogger of Light(R)

I’ve decided that I need a nemesis.

A commenter recently suggested that His Excellency Lord Monkeyhands could be my nemesis, but I don’t know. It feels like settling to me. Monkeyhands isn’t up to being my Joker or Lex Luthor. Maybe if he, Human Inertia, Stoner, and three of my other worst bosses got together, they could be my Sinister Six, but that’s about as much credit as I’m willing to give them.

A great nemesis can’t be an idiot; he has to be brilliant but twisted – someone who has the power to accomplish great things, but uses that power only for his own demented ends. Someone like Darth Vader or Hans Gruber from Die Hard. Or Thomas Kinkade.

Yes, you heard me right. I have selected as my nemesis Thomas Kinkade, the Painter of Light®.

If you’re not familiar with this “artist,” he’s best known as the man who has produced essentially the same painting 8,436 times over the past 20 years. Kinkade-land is a place filled with cottages almost militantly cozy, a place where it has always just rained, but it never rains. There is no sun in Kinkade-land – only an endless panorama of supernaturally illuminated clouds. It is a place where human beings, if they are seen at all, are represented only in the distance as Ice-Skating Boy or Man on Horse, never as individuals with names or identities. Judging from the freakish glow emanating from the cottages, the people in Kinkade's paintings are probably too busy stoking their fireplaces and lighting the drapes on fire to be seen outdoors.



Let me be clear: Kinkade’s talent is undeniable. If you’re looking for someone to paint a rain-slicked street, he’s your man. But somewhere along the line Kinkade went from competent landscape painter to billion dollar bullshit artist.

Saying that Kinkade has sold out is like saying that the Nazis lost track of what National Socialism was all about. First of all, any artist who comes up with his own trademarked tagline has preemptively surrendered any claim at creative integrity. What kind of artist devises a particular style and then essentially announces that he’s never going to progress beyond that style for the rest of his life? It’s a sort of deliberate artistic retardation, like if the Beatles had decided in 1964 to be the She Loves You Yeah Yeah Yeah Group®. Although maybe Van Gogh would have had better luck if he had marketed himself as Painter of Swirls®.

Kinkade found something that works, and is sticking with it. I’ve never seen a Kinkade painting of a bowl of fruit or Madonna with child. I’m not sure he could paint a portrait of a human being if he had a gun to his head. Can you have no desire to push yourself, to learn or produce anything new, and still call yourself an artist? I don’t know, but you can make a hell of a lot of money.

At this point Kinkade is a cottage industry (ha!) that is almost entirely independent of the creation of original paintings. Kinkade “originals” are turned out at a rate of nearly 500 a day at a factory in California. His paintings are digitally photographed, transferred onto a plastic-like surface and glued onto canvas. Each print features a nominal contribution by “highlight artists,” assembly-line workers who add a dash of color here and there. This unique touch allows Kinkade to charge up to $10,000 for what are essentially Xerox copies of original paintings. Prints that have had Kinkade’s signature mechanically etched into them – complete with DNA sample – go for quite a bit more.

I frankly don’t begrudge his selling insanely overpriced carbon copies of mediocre paintings by the horse-drawn buggy-load. If I could take a dump in a paper bag and sell it to morons for $10,000, I have to admit I’d be sorely tempted.

What galls me about Kinkade is the way he equates his greeting card sentimentality with Christianity – thereby elevating his cynical, manipulative, greed-driven business practices to the level of “evangelism.” God knows what luminescent cottages and glittering cobblestones have to do with the gospel, but to Kinkade it’s all one big fuzzy package. Go to the Lighthouses wing of Kinkade’s online gallery and you’ll be greeted with the message:

The power of a towering lighthouse, the unforgiving force of the storming sea, and the bravery of a sailor’s perseverance, all remind us of God’s strength.

If you’re like me, you vomited a little in your mouth when you read that. For starters, it reads like it was written by a fifth grade girl. The first sentence, if you remove the modifiers, reads “power…reminds us… of strength.” Yeah, I wonder why that is. Maybe because they’re synonyms? “Bravery of… perseverance” is a phrase devoid of any meaning. And then there’s the intellectual laziness of postulating that every element of the painting symbolizes the exact same thing:

“Jimmy, can you tell me what the lighthouse signifies in this painting?”
“Ummm... God’s strength?”
“Very good! And the storming sea?”
“Errrr... God’s strength?”
“Excellent! And how about the –”
“God’s strength?”

Way to go, Jimmy. You could write copy for the Thomas Kinkade Painter of Light® website, telling the adoring public exactly what each of Kinkade’s paintings make us feel. So far I’ve learned that God is brave, powerful, stormy and unforgiving. Man, who needs the New Testament when you’ve got the gospel according to greeting card art?

The best art, in my opinion, is the kind that asks no questions and creates no uncertainty. True art is about creating graphical representations of objects calculated to provoke a specific, predetermined response.

Wait, did I say ‘art’? I meant ‘pornography.’

Thomas Kinkade isn’t an artist. He’s a purveyor of pornography. And the worst kind of pornography, at that: the kind without any naked people doing it.

Thomas Kinkade and Michael Bay have each had exactly one original idea – and it’s the same idea: to make a billion dollars off the way light refracts off pavement. But at least there’s no Michael Bay gallery at the local megachurch, and at the end of a Michael Bay show a lot of shit blows up.

I won’t even bother to go into what a complete ass-hat Kincade is on a personal level. You can research that yourself. Suffice it to say that Kinkade once said that Picasso “had a talent but didn't use it in any significant way.” Presumably Picasso wasted too much time trying out new things, and never bothered to come up with a catchy tagline, like “Painter of Cubes®.”

Painter of Light®, my ass. Thom, you’re the Painter of Light Porn®. Hell, you don’t even rise to the level of Michael Bay. You’re the Shannon Tweed of oil painters.

F--- you, Thomas Kinkade.

If you enjoyed this post, may I also recommend: Vincent Van Gobot | I Pity the Fool Who Tries to Feminize Me Humor-blogs.com has talent, but has never used it in any significant way.

Don't You Know that You're Toxic?

So lately my neck has been killing me. I’m not sure if it’s the driving or what, but I’ve got this knot in my upper back/neck area. The really messed up thing is that when I went to bed on Friday night, it was on the left side, and when I woke up Saturday morning it was on the right. How does that happen?

I’ve been thinking about going to a chiropractor, but with my luck I’d get somebody who slept through How to Not Paralyze People class. So as a sort of compromise between incessant whining and possibly becoming a quadriplegic, I’ve been getting occasional massages.

My massage therapist, despite the fact that she shares a last name with a famous movie serial killer, is pretty good. One of the things about people in quasi-medical professions, of course, is that they are required to master the art of speaking in pseudo-scientific language. Toxins is a favorite word, generally used to explain why you feel even worse after the treatment. “You may be nauseous for next several hours, but that’s just because of the toxins being released.” (As a side note, I knew guys in college who used that line on remorseful women who woke up next to them after a party. “It’s ok, baby. That’s just the toxins you’re feeling.”)

A friend of mine recently went to get acupuncture for some wrist pain. She got really sick afterwards, but this was – of course – explained by the release of toxins that had presumably been building up in the wrist area. My friend, who had spent years building up that delicate balance of toxins, was understandably annoyed. I believe her exact words were, “Why you gotta be messin’ with my toxins?”

I don’t doubt that there is some bad shit that builds up in one’s body that can be released by these treatments. What I have a problem with is the word toxins. Toxin just means “poison.” So why don’t they just say “poison”? I’ll tell you why: because poison is such a harsh, specific word. That’s the kind of word that makes people ask questions, like “Why the f--- do I have poison in my body? Is someone trying to kill me?”

Toxins, on the other hand, is imprecise yet scientific-sounding. We’ve all come to accept a world filled with toxins – vaguely threatening chemical compounds that waft invisibly through our air, probably as a result of Hiroshima or whatever freak accident produced the Doodlebops.

Modern medicine is, of course, powerless to assist us in ridding our bodies of toxins. For that, we must seek holistic treatment and then drink some completely absurd quantity of water. I think it’s up to 800 glasses a day now. The only way to be sure that you’re completely free of toxins, in fact, is to get impaled with needles in the morning and then spend the rest of the day in the bathroom, simultaneously gulping down water and peeing out toxins. It is rumored that a man in Thailand has, by employing this method, reached the ripe old age of 247. Unfortunately he is not available for interviews.

Here’s a good rule of thumb: The next time someone uses the word toxins, replace the word in your mind with evil spirits. If it makes just as much sense, then the person doesn’t know what they are talking about. For example:

“You may feel ill for several hours after I have slathered your body with a mixture of pork fat and cat urine. This is because this age old treatment releases evil spirits which have been trapped in your joints. After the treatment, the evil spirits are free to intermingle with your bodily humors, causing an imbalance in your chi. To rid your body of the evil spirits, you must fill your pockets with salt and then spin in circles until you vomit and fall over. Also, drink lots of water.”

On the other hand, the evil spirits hypothesis still makes more sense than the idea that all illnesses are caused by “subluxations of the spine,” which is why I’m avoiding going to a chiropractor. I mean, for pete’s sake, Firefox doesn’t even recognize subluxation as a word. Shouldn’t that tell me something? I don’t want to spend the rest of my life blowing myself around in an automatic wheelchair, thinking, “Firefox tried to warn me, but did I listen? Nooooo.”

In any case, the massages seem to be helping. I had one yesterday, and I’m feeling almost back to normal. I’m just hoping that the pain doesn’t suddenly resurface in some completely different area of my body again.

Those toxins can be crafty little devils.


Humor-blogs.com never has an imbalance of humors.

Kidneying Around

In the late 90s, back when Al Gore's Internet was still shiny and brimming with possibilities, I worked as a tech support rep at a large software company. My boss at the time was a good-natured dufus that I'll call Chad. Chad drove a blue Camaro with the license plate YAHOOO, not because he was a fan of the then-nascent web portal but because he was, in fact, a moron. Chad would demonstrate his cognitive deficit by forwarding emails of dubious origin to our entire department. I'm not sure if he ever sent his bank account number to a desperate Nigerian, but one time he did forward the one about people being drugged and having their kidneys cut out. You remember that one, right?

At this point I should mention that I'm a big-time skeptic. Not a Skeptic with a capital S, but a person who tends not to believe anything that sounds a little fishy without some hard evidence. I mean, I believe in UFOs because, well, I've seen one, but I don't buy the rumor that Jamie Lee Curtis is a hermaphrodite because, well, I've also seen True Lies.

So I read the kidney theft email, complete with testimonials from people with reputable sounding names and titles, and thought to myself, Bullshit. I did a web search and found statements by several reliable authorities, including the Las Vegas police department, attesting to the fact that this story was indeed bullshit. I forwarded the information to all the recipients of the original email, along with my own editorial commentary -- which I don't recall in detail, but which I can only assume was an extremely tactful and subtle rebuke of people in positions of authority who should know better than to infect the entire company with their own stupidity. (This job was, surprisingly, not one of the many I was fired from.)

I continued to do my best to counteract this sort of idiocy for several years. Whenever an email started to circulate about little Jimmy whose dying wish was to crash the world's email servers through infinite recursion, I would do a quick search and then pound out a debunking email. I would try to respond almost instantaneously, as if to say, "Hey, it took me 26 seconds to figure out that your email was bullshit... so exactly how much research did you put into this before sending it to 300 people?"

Then, in the early naughties*, something strange happened: People got a little bit smarter. Not a lot smarter, mind you, because they were still people and people are inherently stupid. But for the most part they stopped forwarding ridiculous stories like these, which was of course a good thing. But then people started doing something even more irritating than mindlessly distributing lies: They started mindlessly distributing facts. Or, perhaps more accurately, factoids.

Factoids are more subtle than the Look Ma No Kidneys variety of nonsense, but they are just as widespread and even more difficult to dispose of. A factoid is a kernel of truth wrapped in an oversized package of misleading implications. What happens is that someone picks up -- usually from the internet -- some intriguing 'fact' which runs contrary to conventional wisdom, and then repeats that fact, sans context, at every opportunity.

I was recently treated to a factoid-based discourse prompted by my bout of the "stomach flu." Now if you've had the stomach flu lately, you know that the standard response to this statement these days is: "There's no such thing as the stomach flu." And technically this is true: What we generally call the "stomach flu" is not in fact caused by the influenza virus. Which, while we're being technical, I don't give a shit about.

Look, I'm not using the term "stomach flu" in a clinical sense. I'm using it in place of saying "Hey, I spent all day Monday Voldemorting into a tupperware bowl next to my bed." If you prefer the more graphical description, let me know. In any case, if Sports Illustrated can get away with an article saying that Kobe Bryant had the "stomach flu," then maybe you can let it go, Dr. Literal.

Anyway, the statement that "stomach flu" doesn't exist is an accurate, if entirely superfluous, correction. But the follow-up to this statement -- complete with knowing look and raised eyebrows -- is always: "It was probably food poisoning."

Look, I've eaten bad McNuggets. I know what food poisoning is. And yes, it's remarkably similar to the "stomach flu." But here's the thing about food poisoning: You get it from food. So if my mother-in-law gets sick, and then a few hours later my nephew, whom she was babysitting, gets sick, and then two days later my kids, who were playing with my nephew, both get sick, and then two days later I get sick, and then two days after that my wife gets sick, all with the same symptoms, guess what? It's not friggin' food poisoning. The only way that the food poisoning diagnosis makes any sense is if my family members were eating each other. And I think I would remember something like that.

Oh, and one more thing before I let this one go: Food "poisoning" isn't poisoning. It's caused by a virus, not a poison. So even if you're right, you're still wrong. Suck on that.

Another example is the old canard about how "Most accidents occur within x miles of home." When someone says this to me, I respond, "Wow, I should move somewhere less dangerous!"

The point, of course, is that you spend most of your time within x miles of home. When you say that most accidents occur within x miles of home, all you're saying is that most accidents occur in places where you spend the most time. Gee, thanks for the tip, Mr. Safety. In reality, my odds of getting into an accident on the way to Disneyland are probably 10 times the odds of me getting into an accident on the way to work -- they key difference being that I don't drive to Disneyland 20 times a month. Of course, if you work at Disneyland you're pretty much screwed, but I suppose that goes without saying.

Or how about this one: Someone once told me, in regard to jogging during the winter, that it was important to wear a hat because "you lose 75% of your heat from your head." Again, this is probably technically true. Of course you'd have to stuff the hat down your throat, because you're losing that heat by breathing. But hey, don't let me stop you. Two birds, one stone.

So here's the deal: Reading some factoid off the Internet doesn't mean you know any more than someone who didn't read that little nugget of wisdom. In fact, often the people promulgating those factoids are pushing some sort of agenda that they're hoping you'll help them with by mindlessly regurgitating their blather. Don't buy it. If you want to pontificate on a subject, do a little research.

And when in doubt, think bullshit.


*Come on, people, am I still the only one using this term?


CORRECTION: As the Amoeba points out, what is commonly called "food poisoning" is not caused by a virus, but rather bacteria. Proving that even when I'm right, I'm wrong. Or something.


Humor-blogs.com is a hermaphrodite that had its kidneys forcibly removed.