I know I've said this before. But this time I really, really mean it.

I will NEVER drink again.

Good Idea: Staying up late and studying for the LSAT.

Bad Idea: Staying up until five o'clock in the morning, drinking six beers and studying for the LSAT.

Drink Harpoon Leviathan and listen to the Jin-Roh soundtrack.


I'm wikkid smaht.

Oh my god, watch this trailer right now.
Black Dynamite!

Clearly an homage to every single Rudy Ray Moore film ever made, it even has a character named Bucky* who overdoses on Angel Dust. It has kung fu, disco dancing, fighting for social justice, obnoxious furry hats... All the ingredients for a cinematic masterwork. The day this movie is released just might be the greatest day of everybody's life.

Damn I miss Rudy Ray Moore.







*Unless you have seen Rudy Ray Moore's 1979 classic, "The Avenging Disco Godfather," this will be meaningless to you.

"I think back upon the person I knew you to be
Righting the wrongs in the name of all you believed
The one who brought the fight and never said die
Never letting fate decide

Be all you hoped for, you were the best you could be
All that in tribute, all that you had achieved
No time for words from those with nothing to say
Never letting fate decide

Until the end and back again, defiant to the last man,
'Till there's nothing left to fight against
No surrender
Unto the corners of the earth, defiant to the last breath,
Until there's none left standing
No surrender

Conjured the ground upon which you firmly stood
Bearing the conflicts that had weighed on your mind
Found strength in actions that only courage achieves
Never letting fate decide

Until the end and back again, defiant to the last man,
'Till there's nothing left to fight against
No surrender
Unto the corners of the earth, defiant to the last breath,
Until there's none left standing
No surrender" -VNV Nation, In Defiance

"My name is DJ Phalliz and I'm here to say
Kill your friends, kill them with a knife." Questionable Content, No. 1171

That I might be prevented from killing everyone and then myself, my friends have urged me to stop watching the news for a while. But aside from the news, I watch almost no television at all. I do like to watch a little, to help me wind me down before bed time. If I can't watch the news, what will I find to fill the void?

I haven't watched MTV in, oh, fifteen years. This is because MTV sucks dog bollocks. Clearly I will find nothing there to satisfy my entertainment needs.

Or so I thought, until kylequittheband hipped me to MTV's Bully Beatdown.

I am not guilty of overstatement when I say that this show is the most marvelous spectacle in the history of entertainment. Goes a little something like this: Poor little guy gets severely beaten by some meat-headed psychopath, for years. One guy got beaten up so badly by his bully that he now has a metal plate in his arm. Another was nearly run down by a bully's jeep in a parking lot. Being unable to stand up to his tormentor physically, the poor little guy petitions Jason "Mayhem" Miller of Bully Beatdown to get the bully into a cage match with an MMA fighter.

Hilarity ensues.

In one episode, the bully is a 250-pound tub of arrogant lard who's been picking on his girlfriend's little brother for eternity. So the bully gets to square off against (wait for it...) ANDREI FUCKING ARLOVSKI!!! One of the scariest people to walk the earth since Vlad the Impaler! Former heavyweight champion of the world! Fuken... He's got fangs! And guess what happens?

The bully gets knocked the fuk out, that's what happens! It's the closest thing to George Carlin's idea of "Monday Night Executions" that the world will likely see this century. I think I might actually sleep peacefully for a change.

We are not getting health care reform. The Baucus bill might pass, eventually. But it won't make any difference. Insurance companies paid Max Baucus $1.5 million to make sure of it. Bye-bye, public option.

We will never prosecute the people who tortured terror suspects, nor the people who ordered that it be done, nor the people who re-interpreted the law to let it happen. Illegal wire-tapping of American citizens? Might as well forget it ever happened.

Our president doesn't seem to be paying any attention to the unemployment rate, which has reached the sort of high that ought to be causing mass panic. Sure, some large industries are recovering and posting profits, but they haven't hired anyone. So it really doesn't matter.

With precious few exceptions, our Congress no longer serves its people. Take into consideration that no less than 70 percent of American citizens want universal health care, or at least a public option. Now take into consideration that in spite of this overwhelming demand, Congress isn't going to do anything about it. Neither is the president.

This country spends untold FORTUNES in the half-assed and ill-advised prosecution of the make-believe War on Drugs, which should never have existed. In the meantime, we had to fire 40,000 teachers in the last year, and many schools can't afford to stay open for a full school week. This is to say nothing of the already shameful state of American education.



I want you to get something through your heads: This Is Not A Democracy. This Is Not Your Country. The powerful are corrupt beyond belief, the wealthy are unwilling to help, and a huge number of citizens remain too stupid and lazy to know what is happening to them.

Oh, and by the way: There is nothing you can do about it. Nothing.



"To the songs that sing of glory and the brave
Are we dreaming there are better days to come?
When will the banners and the victory parades
Celebrate the day a better world was won?

On the day the storm has just begun
I will still hope there are better days to come." -VNV Nation, Sentinel

HAHA!

I Will Not Apologize



(link pilfered from binaryj)

... but I won't be getting up today.

"All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good people to do nothing." -Edmund Burke

Went to Senator Kerry's town hall meeting on health care reform this evening. What a waste of time. I agree with the Senator in many respects, don't get me wrong. But nothing was accomplished at the meeting. Nothing could be. I knew this going in.

Afterward, I confronted a group of brainless hatemongers, the ones holding posters of Barack Obama with a Hitler mustache and claiming that the proposed health care reforms will result in a eugenics-like plot to kill the elderly. HUGE mistake. I knew in advance that while I would win the argument without trying, I would not change their minds. I knew in advance that they HAVE no argument to begin with. I knew that as soon as I demonstrated that I was not a great fool, they would stop talking to me and start shouting over me.

So what did I hope to accomplish? Why did I even bother? When am I going to learn?!?

At one point, I noted that one their arguments was a CLASSICAL logical fallacy and said, offended, that I was actually familiar with the language of argument. The response? "Well if you know how to argue, then we don't want to talk to you anymore." They actually said those very words! Not only are they unconscionable, they're practically unconscious.

At the very least, I managed to draw a small crowd of supporters who aided me in ridiculing those demented freaks. In front of a news camera.


In other news, I think I may be having a heart-attack. Possibly two of them at once.

Oh Boy.

I don't reserve much hope that the special prosecutor assigned to investigate torture will bring high-ranking Bush officials to trial. Nor do I believe anything will be done about rendition, whereby the CIA ships suspects off to other countries to whom we "outsource" even more disgusting torture methodologies like cutting and electrocution. You know, to get around the tricky language in domestic and international laws that say we can't commit such heinous fuckery.

No, I don't reserve much hope. But it sure would be nice. There is no way the United States of America can hope to restore her image unless we address these crimes in a meaningful way.

At the bare minimum, Dick Cheney, George Bush, and John Yoo (long may they suffer) should go before a war crimes tribunal in the Hague. Dragged there, if necessary, kicking and screaming.

Write to your representatives. Write often. Call their offices. Carry picket signs. Demand justice. Even though nothing will come of it, let it never be said we did not tilt at this windmill, and that we did not make a stand.

And now some excellent news. Because we all need it.

EUNA LEE AND LAURA LING FREED FROM NORTH KOREA

Living The Dream: working without pants

Keeping The Faith: aspiring to work without pants

Consolation Prize: being given carte blanche by your boss to mess with people



My company saddled me with a BlackBerry, shortly after I was hired. Prior to this, my boss had loaned the device to a friend for a few weeks, strictly for emergencies, until such time as he was able to get himself a new phone.

He did not comply with the "emergencies only" clause. I know this because I get calls and text messages at all hours from the guy's friends. This, as you can imagine, has become something of a bother.

At TWO O'CLOCK THIS MORNING, for example, I received a text message from a number I have never seen. It read:

"So i'm hanging out with brian and i have really bad gas cuz [sic] i drank chocklat [sic] milk earlier and i dont [sic] know wat [sic] to do"

So I replied:

"Oh man, that sucks! Well, the best thing to do in those situations is to never text to this number again, because I don't know who you are and this is a company phone. Also, it's spelled 'chocolate.'"

This was far more polite than I had originally intended.

The Great Outdoors
You know what I miss? Paintball.

Once upon a time, I participated in an event called The Big Game. Held amid acres of woodland in Long Island, this paintball tournament consisted of a grand total of 1400 people, split into two teams of 700. Each team was lead by retired military personnel, and was outfitted with a tank.

That's right. A tank.

In the woods were mock-ups of a city and an oil refinery. Victory hinged on taking and holding both of these positions. And to make things interesting, there was a neutral player in a helicopter.

That's right. A helicopter.

It was about the coolest thing I'd ever seen. For seven hours, skirmishing groups of between 12 and 70 people would set out into the woods and engage the enemy in a fantastic conflagration of paint and screaming and ratta-tat-tat. We all took it FAR too seriously. Lines of camo-clad paintball enthusiasts would charge the field with guns a-blazing, and fall by the tens in enemy fire as though it were Gettysburg. And every now and again, you'd hear a faint thumpathumpathumpathumpathumpathumpathumpathumpa... and realize, to your terror and delight, that the helicopter was overhead. Grass would blow from the force of the propellers and you'd run like hell for the edge of the woods, while the chopper's machine guns pounded the dirt behind you with a BAT!BAT!BAT! tracing a line toward your heels.

It was awesome.

And did I mention the tanks played death metal from loudspeakers? Because they did.

The QUEST!
My office has a Keurig machine. Handy little thing, makes a pretty respectable cup, and I haven't had to pay for coffee in months. But it hit me this morning that despite all this, I really need to get back to the Quest.

When you get right down to it, coffee shouldn't come out of a pod. It should start as a shiny, happy, roasted bean, ground to the coarseness of choice in small batches by somebody who gives a shit about how that coffee will taste. It ought to be lovingly brewed with clean water, and served up in a thick ceramic mug that could just as easily serve as a crucible. What's more, it should be enjoyed in a proper coffee house. Good music. Comfy chairs. Almost no lighting at all. And absolutely, positively, NO DOUCHEBAGS.

So yes, the Keurig machine is a cost-effective way to keep myself alive at 8:00 in the morning, Monday through Friday. But by God, where can that truly enjoyable, soul-soothing, Perfect Cup of Coffee be found?

Not in a plastic pod, I assure you.

"I make the laws, I be the law maker"
Mindless Self Indulgence is an excellent band. You are probably missing out on them.

They are without question one of the loudest, most obnoxious bands in history, and the lyrics to any one of their songs is guaranteed to offend at least some aspect of your person. But make no mistake: Musically, they are no dummies. Smart, smart, smart. I'd recommend picking up a copy of Frankenstein Girls Will Seem Strangely Sexy. The effect is not unlike having your ear canal ravaged by a jagged stick, which for some strange reason you really, REALLY enjoy.

Same Old, Same Old.
Why isn't Dick Cheney in jail? Why aren't Bush, and Gonzales, and Rumsfeld, and Henry Kissinger (I haven't forgotten about you, Hank) joining him? Why have they not been dragged before a war crimes tribunal in the Hague? I know it will never happen. And I will never, EVER get over this. Not in my whole entire life. What a travesty.

"This is an insight
Into my life.
This is a strange flight
I'm taking.
My true will carries me along.

This is a soul dance
Embracing me.
This is the first chance
To put things right.
Moving on, guided by the light.

And the spirit of love
Is rising within me
Talking to you now,
Telling you clearly,
The fire still burns."

It is Independence Day weekend, and I believe I have the Food Poisoning. Delightful.

Cautious mourners breathe a collective sigh of relief as, in the wake of tragedy, we all realize it's okay to like Michael Jackson. There is one less dancer in the world. One less voice. One less Entertainer.

Have you ever heard someone trying to use words they clearly do not understand in an attempt to sound erudite? It seems to be happening more and more lately, at least in my experience, and I wonder if it has anything to do with our new President. Since the election, it has seemed as though "smart" is becoming "cool." And, as is the case with any new trend, some people are trying just a little too hard. Sad, really.

When is this country going to get off its ass and legalize marijuana? This has gone on long enough. I'm not advocating a nation of smoke-addled stoners devoid of ambition and rocketing Doritos sales into the hundreds of trillions per hour, so don't give me that look. All I'm saying is: Marijuana's status as an illegal narcotic is wasteful, stupid, and baseless. It was made illegal largely due to a now-irrelevant political campaign, its effects have been obnubilated beyond the reach of rational thought, bazillions of dollars have been spent in an utterly failed and ultimately lackluster attempt to control it, and people DIE quite regularly in the ill-named and recklessly prosecuted "War on Drugs." Make it legal. Control it. Tax it. For fucksake, consider the revenues! Hell, I say make pot use MANDATORY. Pass a law that says every American citizen above the age of 18 has to eat a pot brownie and read a book once every week, that we may become educated and a little chilled out.

Oh, and Happy Independence Day. Take a minute, if you would, and give thought to those who gave their last breath in defense of liberty. It is because of them that we breathe freely.

Everybody else is doing it, and yet it ISN'T stupid. So I might as well join in, too.

30 Days of Exercise, bitchiz.

Since I'm teaching tonight anyway, I might as well make this Day One.

TODAY:
( Cut for pointlessness )


TOMORROW MORNING:
-the vigorous punching of inattentive motorists
-the strenuous hurling of same off the Harvard Bridge (lift with the legs, kids)
-3,061 mile dash to Mexico, to avoid extradition ("On-The-Lam-Athon," for short)

This is bullshit.

It has been raining for three weeks. Raining, and cold. No significant reprieve appears forthcoming.

Not that I am an avid sunbather, mind you; I'd go up like a match head. But it would be nice to see some sunshine out the bloody window once in a while. It would be nice to sit on my balcony and drink a beer with the speakers in the window. It would be nice to go outside without an umbrella and an autumn coat.

People should not have to wear coats in late June. Not on this hemisphere.

Fuk this, I'm going to Hawaii.