Growing Up Bald

I can’t find the time in my day to read twitter.  People tell me to follow someone interesting.  I’ve tried to many times.  I admit, there are some good twitter feeds out there.  I’ve followed some very creative and original people (most of whom are contrived characters like DadBoner) but I just can’t do it for an extended period.  I think at any given time I can come up with at least 10 things more productive or entertaining to do with my time than read twitter.

Same with facebook. Call me a crankly old man but I liked facebook when it was just a person’s summary, their interests and pictures of them puking at a bar (back when our mothers weren’t on it).  Even sans the embarrassing bar photos and drug references, it was still a better website.  At least back then people took the time to be creative and write something witty in their profiles.  My facebook feed nowadays has been reduced to 50 character status updates regarding topics more boring than the font they are rendered in.  It’s sad that years of cutting edge computer advancements have culminated in the broadcasting of one’s  dinner order.

Perhaps the witty people in my life have been drowned out by a mass of persons whose lives are so boring that they are currently on facebook.

Perhaps I need a drink.

Jonesy: And I just ordered a Gin and Tonic! YAY!  #ILoveCats

Really, FOX?

So you got the fat guy from LOST and a plot that revolves around an island where people mysteriously appear and disappear.  Kinda sounds a lot like LOST to me.  I got an idea for you Fox, let’s take Angie Harmon, put her in a New York District Attorney roll alongside a brash but promising young detective, Ice T. We’ll call it Law & Crime.  All rights reserved.  You heard it here first.

I haven’t even watched this show yet but I already know it’s going to suck.  I could tell from the one line promo: ”In 1963, Alcatraz was closed, and all of the inmates transferred.  Only that’s not what happened.  Not at all”  Let me tell you how this show is going to go down.  The entire first season is going to dance around and promise to answer that question “what really happened?”.  I mean, I’m curious, aren’t you curious?   Let me save you the time, it’s never going to be answered.  The writers probably don’t even have an answer to that damn question yet.  Not in season 1, not in season 5.

Perhaps when the show’s ratings go to “shit in a hand basket” and they need to draw some more shallow viewers with another promising 20 second promo they’ll give you a half-way promising answer.   But by the time FOX’s writers figure out what the fuck that answer is,  the answer will be hopelessly irrelevant and fail to tie together five seasons of subplots that were hatched without any consideration for how the fuck the whole plot begun in the first place.

Save yourself the time and read a book.  Happy Valentines day.

I walked into my local grocery store today and found that they placed anti-bacterial hand-sanitizers at the ends of every aisle.   I stopped to ponder the ridiculousness of the situation when a girl next to me walked up and squirted some into her hands, proclaiming how much she “loved” the new dispensers because she hates “grabbing meat”.  Despite the open-ended sexual innuendo she had just gifted me, I took the high-road.  I made a passing remark on how, not only was the meat far cleaner than her hands, it was likely pumped with far more anti-bacterial drugs than the hand sanitizer.   She gave me a funny look and walked away.  That’s what I get for taking the high-road.  Story of my life….

Anyway, this fear of germs has gotten out of control.  You all realize that you are victims of a $500 million dollar industry that has used fear-mongering to convince Americans that harmless invisible organisms are lurking in your grocery store aisle waiting to kill you?  Kill you of what? Bubonic plague? We can cure that now you know.   There is no other way to explain why intelligent people would be so fearful of something they can’t even see that they would rub their hands in a pungent, artificially created, corrosive chemical that says on the label that it kills 99.9% of something we’re made of.   Yes, the human body is made of germs, over 100 trillion of them.  Our bodies contain large swaths of symbiotic bacteria that are essential to our health and well-being.  Our skin especially contains indigenous fungus and bacteria that serve to protect us from that .01 percent of far more harmful germs that are now developing stronger resistances due to everyone’s overuse of this goddamn hand sanitizer.    Step back for a second and think about this.  Not only are you hurting yourself and everyone else by using these products, many of them are known carcinogens.   Would you rather get the flu this year or die of lung cancer?  Choose wisely.

Don’t get me wrong, personal hygiene and modern sanitation methods are beneficial to our overall health and are necessary in many circumstances.  Medical professionals for example should sanitize their hands.  They deal with open wounds and immune compromised individuals, however; the average person is not a medical professional (thank god) and there is a large difference between washing dirt off your skin and lathering yourself in a heavy dose of highly potent chemicals.

Your long-term health depends on your exposure to germs.  When polio struck the United States in the early 19th Century, it was found that inner city children were highly immune to the disease and suffered far lower mortality rates than their suburban counterparts.  Why? Because of their high exposure to germs throughout their childhoods.   Their immune systems were so advanced from everyday exposure that they were better able to fend off fatal illnesses.   So please ladies, before you squirt yourself with Johnson & Johnson’s laboratory creation next time, think about the children …and grab that raw meat with both hands.

By all the facebook complaints I see on my wall today I take it that Casey Anthony was found “not guilty”.   OMFG I didn’t see that coming.  For everyone in my feed who thinks they know what the outcome should have been, I’ve got an opinion for you facebook lemmings:

I’m sorry. I thought we lived in a country where a person is sent to the chair only when clear evidence “beyond a reasonable doubt” links them to a crime, not because CNN dedicates a 24-hour cable station to predicting their trial outcome.   Sadly the entire U.S. witnessed this month-long charade go down and now everyone thinks they know what really happened.  I’d say “the world” witnessed it but everyone else in “the world” is probably busy worrying about more important shit than the tragic death of a toddler in Florida.   Perhaps the death of 6 brave US service members in Afghanistan who paid the ultimate price this past week in order to give you the  “freedom” to eat corn dogs and post on facebook all day.   Or the hundreds of people dying of genocide in Darfur as we speak.  God forbid we spend 2 minutes caring about those people.  But I digress….

Now, I am not saying Casey Anthony didn’t do it.  Frankly, she appears very guilty.   But thank god we live in a country where appearances alone do not justify a prison sentence (otherwise Liza Minnelli might be scrubbing cells in Sing Sing (reality show right there. I coined it. Count it)).   Was Casey Anthony an awful person? perhaps. Did she lie about her daughter’s death? yes.  Were her actions surrounding the event outrageous and strange? yes.  Did she kill her daughter? Who the fuck knows.  I know I don’t.  I wasn’t fucking there.   The cops couldn’t even prove cause of death.   The prosecution had zero evidence linking Casey to the crime beyond persons claiming to “smell” decomposition in her trunk and a very speculative particle examination based on a brand-new “scientific technique” invented just for this trial.    For all the evidence presented, the Easter bunny could have killed that child so stop lying to yourself like you know what happened because of what garbage CNN fed you.  The facts don’t show anything conclusive and an un-biased jury concluded that in a very short time.

Evidence aside, the bitch probably killed her child. There, I said it.  She probably did it.  But I’m sorry America, you need to prove that, not just “feel” it in your loins.  That’s not how the system works.  You cannot convict someone on suspicion alone.  If the evidence isn’t there, the system didn’t fail anyone.  It did exactly what it was suppose to do.  So stop calling this a “miscarriage of justice” or whatever tagline the media is cramming down your throat for the day.   Just be happy that if you were ever in that situation that a “reasonable doubt” would be on your side.

I know what you’re going to say: “But I would never kill my kid and lie about….” BITCH PLEASE.  You took the morning after pill three times in college and lied about your cup-size on eHarmony last week.  You’re not a saint.  You’re 4 Hail Mary’s away from hooking yourself for the devil if he bought you a Prada bag so I don’t want to hear it.   We all make mistakes.  If half of you people were the “Christians” you claim to be you’d let the poor girl get on with whats left of her soul.   Her life is already ruined anyway.

And besides…. she’s hot.  There’s a shortage of hot chicks outside of prison.  Don’t be compounding the problem.

No we’re not talking about that drunk girlfriend who keeps preventing you from getting laid.  We’re talking about blocking an intersection.  Not with a car but with your fat ass, thunder thighs.  Blocking the box in the street is a $250 fine in NYC.  If we follow the precedent set by the Rockefeller drug laws… blocking the box on the sidewalk should get you about 25 years of hard prison time.

This is a common situation:  Persons A and B arrive at a sidewalk intersection at a 90 degree angle.  Both persons want to walk straight but their paths collide.  One of them must stop and let the other pass.  Which one will it be?

If you answered the woman, the elder, the disabled, or the kid dying of cancer, you’re as wrong as Miley Cyrus doing a playboy center spread (or assholes who make fun of kids with cancer).  The answer depends on the traffic signals – which is why rule #3 is so important: be aware of your surroundings.   At any intersection in NYC at any given time of day only A or B will have a clear walk signal in front of them, the other won’t.  The person without a clear walk signal (B in the example shown) is going to have to stop and wait for the light in 5 feet anyway so it saves person B no time to go first.  Person B should be aware of this and let person A go ahead of them.   And if the intersection is crowded, person B risks blocking person A completely to the extent that they miss the light and they both have to wait for life to pass them by – just like that kid with cancer.

Potential "Blocking the Box" situation

Resolution

Bottom line, if you are person B and you cut in front of person A, you’re an ignorant douchebag.   End of story.  If you both follow this simple rule, at least one of you will save time.  If you don’t, both of you will potentially lose time.   It’s that simple.   Right and wrong.  God and Devil.  Journalistic integrity and Fox News.

This example was pretty simple but I run into it so often it pains me to think about it.  For those of you who don’t live in the city, you have to understand that on just one intersection in midtown Manhattan during rush hour – this situation occurs almost every 10 seconds.

Stay tuned for some more complex situations.

Walking the streets of New York (while seemingly simple in theory) can at times be more painful than a frontal lobotomy.   A little courtesy can go a long way out there. Unfortunately, you’re among some of the most cut-throat power thirsty people on the planet, competing for a ten foot wide slab of concrete often wedged between a cold marble building and unwavering high-speed traffic.   It’s a war out there and sometimes in life and republican primaries, the biggest douche bag wins.

For the rest of us trying to make a concerted effort to better society as a whole, it would be greatly appreciated if New Yorkers as a whole could stick to a few simple rules of the sidewalk:

1. Try to walk on the right side – simple concept but so very hard for some people.
   
2. Be aware of your surroundings – If you’re looking at the sky or reading your blackberry, you’re not following this rule.
3. Don’t be a jackass. - Calm down. Your latte isn’t going anywhere and if your wife is cheating on you, an extra few minutes with her lover won’t hurt anymore than it already does.

In addition to these very reasonable rules there are a few specific situations that I run into on a daily basis while walking the streets and I want to discuss them in more detail over the next couple days,  so pay attention.  They may seem like very specific situations but they are very common and they can be broken down very easily using simple, every-day logic to produce an optimal solution.

Regardless of your personal situation, your boss’ temper, or your menstrual cycle, there is a right and a wrong way to deal with the following situations and no matter how dense you are [cough] Sarah Palin [cough], you should be aware of them.  It’s not a matter of courtesy or respect, it’s a matter of not being a dip shit.

You know what grinds my gears? Chicks who take an unnecessary 10 minutes at the cash register.

We’ve all been there.  You swing by the corner store for a six pack of Four Loko on an idle Tuesday. You’re in a hurry, you gotta pee, you’ve got a hooker bleeding out in the trunk of your car and you want to get home quick so you can get that fetish porno out of the DVD player before your girlfriend gets home from work.

But just as you arrive at the checkout line, Paris Hilton’s wanna be BFF manages to wiggle her way in front of you.  She has tits and a box of extra wide tampons in her hand so you let it slide.

Despite waiting in line for 5 minutes she arrives at the checkout counter as unprepared as France in 1939.  She must drop all her shopping bags on the floor, put her cell phone on the counter, take off her over sized bug-eye sun glasses, open her mega purse, take out her inner purse, unzip that and pull out her actual wallet (which is somehow the size of a foot long subway-melt with double meat), comb through 2 years of superfluous receipts in order to find some legal tender and then hand it to the cashier all while making a baseless joke about how busy she is.  Hold up, she has to find her discount card.

You breath. You think it’s over.  It’s not even close. She instructs the cashier to return her last dollar because she “thinks” she “might” have exact change to pay the 99 cents due. God forbid she end up with an extra penny that she can throw in a bowl and take to the bank at the end of the month.  That would take too much “effort” (read: advanced planning).

She must now drop her subway-melt wallet, go back into her mega purse and search for her separate coin purse under what appears to be a birds nest of beauty products and glamor magazines.  She then proceeds to count her nickels out loud for 2 minutes until she realizes that she only has ten cents. And we’re back at the same place we were two minutes ago – sans the condensation on your now luke-warm Four Lokos.

The cashier hands her her penny, bags her tampons and hands them over.  Transaction is done.

But is it? The cashier waves you on but there’s no where to go.  For despite the fact that she has paid and received her goods she must now use the entire counter in order to re-assemble her matryoshka purses.  The line is out the door, the guy behind you is mumbling racial slurs, a ticket fairy outside has stumbled upon your illegally double parked car and the bum barbie bitch in front of you doesn’t have a care in the fucking world beyond her wide-set vagina and whether Lindsay Lohan is going to be let out of rehab tomorrow.

In the meantime China has developed a stealth fighter, some child in India learned how to calculate Price Elasticity of Demand in three different languages, and your girlfriend found the porno DVD.  Looks like it’s gonna be you and some empty Four Loko cans sleeping on the couch tonight.

I hate people who talk about their kids.  I was in a bar having a casual drink next to a mildly attractive cougar the other night and just when I thought the conversation was going somewhere other than her sagging features,  she whipped out a picture of what appeared to be two mildly retarded kids.  Before I could order another round of “kill me now”, the conversation degraded into wandering, boring child talk about “Jake” and “Daniel” or whatever the fuck their names were.

People tell me I don’t understand because I don’t have kids but I honestly think it’s a deeper issue.   When I have kids I’m not going to talk about them. Why? Because I know that no one fucking cares.  90% of socializing is about NOT bringing up topics that people across the dinner table don’t give a fuck about.   Most people begin to understand this in middle school. Some people seem to forget about this when using cocaine.

And do you know why no one cares about your fucking kids? I’ll tell you why.  No one fucking cares about your fucking kids because as BIll Cosby stated in his infamous angry rant: everyone on the fucking earth is born capable of making babies, you’re not fucking special.  Not only can everyone make babies, but everyone has a natural urge to make babies every day (sometimes every 15 minutes on birthdays).

The real test of your growth as a human being and away from a nomadic troglodyte, is to resist this natural hormonal urge and NOT make babies until you can adequately care for them and raise them to be productive human beings and/or doctors (used to be that lawyers were in this category too, but my friend Frank has proven that Law is not such a lucrative profession anymore. Sorry Frank.).

So until your money sucking poop machine turns into either an astronaut doctor or a bartender, I don’t care to hear about how he rubs his little weiner to Dora the explorer and can read “the patriot act for kids: A post 9/11 american handbook” in one Fox News hour.  In the words of my severely overweight friend as he beached himself on my couch with a beer in one hand and a canoli in the other, “I just don’t give a fuck”

The fact that you have kids doesn’t make you important to anyone aside from the tit fed brat who now requires your breast milk to live.

Congratulations, you have the social importance of a hamster mother.

in fact, I have more respect for hamster mothers.

As you may have heard, the dearly beloved concoction of alcohol and caffeine known as “Four Loco” has been banned in many States across the country ever since some dumb underage college kids hurt themselves a few weeks ago and the story spread like wild-fire.   Because college kids never hurt themselves.  Ever.

I prided myself on the fact that New York had not succumbed to the nanny-state  hysteria and held it’s citizens to a higher standard.  Sadly, Chuck Schumer (NYS Senator) decided to lead a charge to ban the substance and succeeded.  Four Loko will no longer be distributed to New York retailers as of 11/11/2010.

I decided to write Chuck a letter expressing my thanks:

Dear Senator Schumer,

Well done, sir. You’ve successfully banned Four Loko in the great state of New York.  Pat yourself on the back.

Never mind the fact that it was a great product for a recession conscious drinker in a state where the price of one cocktail often exceeds the cost of a grade D lunch sandwich.  Never mind the fact that no person of legal drinking age who observed responsible drinking behavior was ever harmed by the substance.  Never mind that equivalent drinks with twice the price tag have been marketed and sold for over a decade now.  No, that didn’t stop you. Nor did the fact that in most places it was sold less than 5 feet away from the deadliest substance $10 can buy: a pack of government-subsidized cancer sticks.  But no, the great state of New York makes too much money off of those deaths.

Of course, you care so much about New Yorker’s health, surely your next step would be to ban toilets. I hear nearly 30 people a year die while seated on toilets, Chuck.  What gives? Think about the children.  Are you aware of how many people died in the last year due to serrated knife wounds? I think it’s about time the great State of New York promptly replaced all serrated kitchen knives.  We can offer sporks as an alternative to compensate individuals.  No one ever brings a spork to knife fight, right? I’m just looking at the facts here. I mean, 3 people reportedly died last year alone while laughing.  You know what to do.

I’m not laughing, Chuck.

Stop trying to protect Americans from themselves.

- A concerned constituent

I left out the profanity because I thought it was a little harsh to send to a US Senator.   After all, he is only trying to do his best for New York and for that I thank him for his service.

I hope he still gets the point though.

I heard a radio ad over the weekend that really grinded my gears.  It essentially went something like this:

“You wouldn’t ask a plumber for health advice. You wouldn’t ask an accountant for cooking tips.  And you certainly wouldn’t ask a doctor for gardening direction.  So why would you look towards the church and people just like you and me who work for the church for advice on how to get closer to God?”

At this point I’m thinking, great, this commercial is actually going somewhere.  It’s a logical interpretation of religion.  How refreshing?  And then it continued…

“If you want to get closer to the Lord our God, all you have to do is pick up a bible and read the exact words and teachings of his son Jesus Christ, our savior.  You wouldn’t take advice from someone besides an expert, so why not take advice from the Lord himself. Pick up a bible today.”

And then it occurred to me that these people are as high as Georgia pines.  Holy shit. Wow.  Just wow.   How arrogant and hypocritical to condemn the church as being a false gateway to God only to then turn around and essentially dismiss every other religion on earth and put your own religious opinions above others.  How are you any better than what you just condemned in the first 30 seconds of the commercial?

The hypocrisy was mind boggling.

Not to mention the obvious hypocrisy in their statement that the bible contains the “actual words” of Jesus Christ.  Let’s pretend for a second that Jesus really existed and isn’t almost entirely based on the stories of the Egyptian sun god Horus (look it up, it will free your mind).

It is widely accepted by Christians and historians alike  that the New Testament was written almost 200 years after Jesus’ death by descendants of the disciples who loosely translated the original disciple’s notes.  It was then translated into many languages,  re-copied, edited, chopped, screwed, and censored by the various  warring churches of Europe thousands of times over before arriving in the drawer of your hotel room end table (you know, right next to the empty condom rapper and that stained cocktail napkin with the female escort’s phone number on it. The one you met at the bar downstairs. Although you’re now wishing you hadn’t met her because you have to call your wife in five minutes and act like you didn’t just sleep with a hooker and you don’t have to get an STD test when you get home).

The point is, if you think that even half of the bible’s text is original and historically accurate then you should lay off the dope.   I will stop my bashing of religion there because I am sure to have already created some enemies.

It just never ceases to amaze me how religion causes intelligent people to defy all logic.

And yes, I just went there.

Sorry mom.