Today tried to suck

The least sucky thing from today (how fucking sad is this? Honestly, I have to tell you about the thing that sucked the least about today) was having a long held belief shattered.

See, I always assumed that everyone knew that the bird is the word, however Holly proved me not only wrong but super-wrong.

I mean what kind of world do we live in where a man dressed as a bat... not everyone knows that the bird is the word?

Makes me sick!

I wish I was in Paris, because then I could console myself with a cake, or a raspberry mousse tart. Best baked goods I ever had were in France. I figure it must go like this, the French are socialist atheists who used to be catholic (don't contradict me or this doesn't work) and so they know that life is shit, and that they live in a godless universe, but they want to believe in things like heaven and stuff. So they make a cake that is like heaven in your mouth. Go to Paris, go to this one small bakery that I can find but I can't tell you how to get to (I R helpful!) and get a raspberry mousse tart. It's like having an orgasm triggered by your mouth. You could go on for years, just knowing that stuff like this exists in the world. You don't need to go to heaven because you can have a piece of this cake. That's the French. They know god is lost to them, they know life is shit, they know that existence is fleeting and ultimately futile. The only thing that stops them from just offing themselves as a nation is their baked goods.

You can’t get stuff that good here, I’ve tried. I went to places that should be really good at it, they fail! People in this country believe in God and that life isn’t a huge pile of pain and misery. I figure that cake that good has to be born out of despair, possibly like the despair I feel from having to eat cakes made in this country. Deserts are pretty much the one thing I can’t do, so I’m more or less fucked.

What I’m trying to say is that if you guys really loved me you’d get me a ticket to Paris so I can have some decent baked goods.

EDIT: Even trying a simple link is a complete fucking fuck up. Fucking fuckfaced fuckers!

*Here, click this!

drop.io: simple private sharing

Prezidant Gangsta!

It seems that Barack Obama is some variety of negro. The media is shocked SHOCKED to discover that while he is quite pale for one of them, he occasionally behaves like one of those scary blacks from "The Hood" or some even worse places! It seems he and his wife did a dap or "fist bump" as the white kids call it, and a lot of people lost their shit because the scary black man was doing scary black things.

Every time I see silly shit like this I can only think of people thinking the same thing over and over again. "I need an excuse as to why I won't vote for a ****** but can't say that." So they came out with him supposedly being a Muslim (I still don't get why that should make him ineligible, but whatever) or his pastor said some wacky shit (most of which was true, but wasn't phrased submissively enough for whitey) or some other such shit. They come up with all sorts of silly ass reasons, all the while trotting out reminders that he's a black man and you don't want a black in charge do you?

If you disagree with his fiscal policy, fine, say so. I really won't think you're racist if you just plain disagree with his stance on the war. Seriously, I can see where his ideas of how the country should be run might not jive with yours. However, you really need to stop trotting out "Scary Negro" bullshit because all it does is make you sound like a racist. It also makes me hear phantom banjo music and I don’t need that shit following me all day.

Late Night Foreigners

I know this may seem odd to say, but I really love seeing a foreigner working someplace I was to go at 1:30 in the morning. When it’s that late, nothing is better than hearing an alien accent as they cheerfully greet you coming through the door. Most of them are so goddamn happy just to be in this modern land of milk and honey that they don’t mind the graveyard shifts, so they are cheerful every time. There is not a smidgen of resentment form having to work the 11-6 shift, and if you get someone from the India/Pakistan area you are always (ALWAYS) “My friend” which I find delightful.

Don’t get me wrong, I like seeing these guys during the day too, but at night when I’m only venturing because I “have to get out of this bloody fucking house” they are the best thing in the world to see. Let them all come I say, bring the family! Set up a restaurant too, because lord knows I’m sick to death of burgers and fires. I have no idea what shawarma is, but I want some!*

Case in point.

I had a bad experience with a grocery store last night. I had a grouchy tummy and I wanted something sweet. However, the grocery store had moved EVERY LAST DAMN ITEM around and I couldn’t find the sort of sweets I wanted. I came home feeling defeated and despondent and embarrassed about being humiliated by a grocery store so I just didn’t talk about it with anyone. Later, hours later, I went out to vent my frustration in driving. So I got in the car, wasted about a gallon of gas ($4 we never see again) before thinking that maybe I still wanted something sweet.

So I drive towards the late night Dunkin’ Donuts. There would be something appropriately sweet at the DD. So I drive towards the donut shop, and my prize, feeling paranoia and strain from the afternoon coiling up in my belly. Despite these feelings, I still managed to get out of the car and walk into the store. This shouldn’t have required this much effort, but you don’t have my paranoia and anxiety brought on by a very misty night that was setting off my asthma so lets leave that be for the moment.

When I walk in and start towards the counter a man of about 50 pokes his head out and in what I judge to be an Indian accent tells me he’ll be one moment. I look at the selection, and I’m sad to say it was not as expansive as I would normally like. Less than a moment later, here he comes from the back with a greeting that comes fairly close to “Hello my friend, how can I help you?”

I tell him how I want a dozen donuts and he gets ready to roll with the box and paper slips. When I suggest he grab three glazed, he asks if I want any raspberry or chocolate, which are not on display. He aims a finger towards the back, indicating where the chocolate donuts are waiting for a loving tongue. I don’t like chocolate though, so no sale. Thinking back, I should have taken him up on the raspberry. I ask if he has any Vanilla Creme filled, and he tells me that he doesn’t and he’s sorry. No problem, I pick a few more donuts.

When my order is complete, he grabs a bag and another paper slip and tells me he’ll give me a few extra. I agree that he can do that and he nabs three éclairs and two jelly sticks. My suspicion was, and turned out to be correct, that he was giving me a fistful of day olds to make up for no Vanilla Cremes. Well, I confirmed they were day olds, his motivation is till his own. I liked the éclairs through, so that’s pretty cool. Then I embarrassed myself again by not hearing him properly when he told me the price and thought he was asking if I wanted coffee. After that, I then did it AGAIN! I tried to hand him a ten when I had almost the exact price in my other hand. Didn’t faze him, he just smiled and suggested that maybe I could give him the dollars I had in my other hand and make change easier. I allowed this and went on my merry way with my fried pastries, both fresh and day old.

It was as I pulled a day old éclair from the bag, which I did before even putting on my seat belt, that I do love the foreigners in this country. They’re so happy just to be here that it takes a hell of a lot to spoil their day. They’ve managed to get here from places that have real genuine squalor, the sort where there isn’t even running water or electricity never mind only one Xbox, so they tend to be more cheerful and accommodating to the bourgeoisie bastards that come in late at night. I always try to be pleasant to anyone in a service position anyway, but I find I want to be a little friendlier to someone who actually decided to leave the land of their birth to come here to give me some day old donuts with a smile.

You have to love anybody who can be cheerful at 1:30 in the morning. I’ve got to admire anyone not so eaten up by entitlement and resentment that they don’t look at me like something they scraped off the bottom of their shoe just because I had the temerity to enter their establishment and asked them to let me give them money. They do their jobs cheerfully as if they're just glad to have a job, and I like that. Let them all come, let them wash over us fat, complacent white folk like a brown wave. If they bring the food they cook in those strange and far away lands, then all the better.

*Fancy’s Note: He knows damn well what shawarma is, but he’s making a point.

5 things The Squares have historicaly disapproved of, but are really quite awesome

1. Miscegenation
Everything else in America is becoming homogenous, why not the people? Let’s mix everybody up until we can't tell whether this one is that one or that one is this one or which one is what one or what one is who.

2. Gay Marriage
When everyone has the right, regardless of age, race, religion or sexual orientation, to loose half their stuff in a shitty divorce, then we'll all be free.

3. Legalized Marijuana
If we make it legal, that just might shut the pot heads up for five minutes. That is until they start telling us about how The Cat in the Hat is “Like so deep man… ya know?”

4. Group Sex
It's awesome both in theory and in practice. Consider that porn proves that people want to screw when they see other people screwing. Clearly it’s a team sport, like Basketball. Oh sure, you can play one on one (or just shoot hoops on your own) but it’s always better when the whole team plays.

5. Violent Video Games
Some days the only thing stopping me from running people over and shooting them is the fact that I can do it in the privacy of my own living room.

Open Letter

To: Douglas Fairbanks & Errol Flynn
From: Me
Re: Return

Gentlemen,

It cannot have escaped your attention (Unless of course the Atheists are right and there really is nothing after this world) that the state of movies is in a sorry state. To be perfectly frank, adventure movies are a dead art. I won't bore you with examples, because this isn't about complaining about the problem, this is about a solution. Gentlemen, the world needs you. Come back from the dead and show these sorry bastards how it's done. Now I know what you're going to say, one of you has been dead for almost 50 years and the other is working on 70, but I've got an idea for your come backs.

Follow me on this... Zombie Swashbuckling! It would get you an instant in with the young crowd, and it would actually be almost original!

America Porn

You know about regular porn (sex porn) and torture porn, would Black Hawk Down and Medal of Honor: The Movie* equate to war porn? I got them both this weekend, because I was thinking about how I don't have many war movies. This is what I do sometimes. I'll think about wanting a certian kind of movie, and then buy a fist full of them.

I saw BHD once when it first came out and I’ve never seen Private Ryan all the way through before. I didn’t dislike either movie, but nor will I be placing either in my “Best Movie Evah” lists any time soon. I’m not much into war movies, at least not like these. I’d watch The Great Escape before going back to either of these.

The biggest problem I have with Private Ryan (beyond being in the words of my father “the most pornographic movie my I have ever seen”**) is that it over does the whole “World War II started in 1941 as a chance for our ruggedly handsome, brave and noble men to be bravely handsome and ruggedly noble while being nobly rugged and handsomely brave against cartoon bad guys” thing a little too much for me. It’s totally a matter of tone, and they went too far with it.

They weren’t gods, or even great heroes. They were just guys. They grew up to be dads and grandpas, and there is nothing mythical about any of my grandfathers. Trying to tie myth to them does them a great disservice actually, because it stops them from being humans. It robs them of their accomplishments and makes their flaws shine out more brightly instead of dulling them over the years. Also, it robs the whole situation of its reality and makes it like something that never really happened.

Also, my history might be a little shakey, but I could have sworn that there were English, French, Canadian and Australians all fought with us on D-Day. As it happens, it was just the United States that fought, single handed if these movies and video games are to be believed. Of course I could also have sworn that World War Two started in 1937 for Asia and 1939 for Europe, turns out it didn’t get going until ’41, so what do I know? Why is it you almost never see any European Allied soldiers in an American WWII movie or game? Russians get left out a lot too. That’s why I like Enemy at the Gates, they leave the Americans out for a change.

My generation is so fucked up on the idea of World War II that when we meet a vet of that war we don’t know what to do because it’s been played up so much that we honestly thought that they made the whole thing up for a movie. It would be like actually meeting Indiana Jones or something.
“Hey Joe, you remember that scene at the beginning of Frontline? This old dude was actually there.”
“What, like an NPC?”
“Nah, when they did it for the first time. Like for real and stuff man.”
“Wait, that stuff really happened?”
“That’s what he says. It was like before virtual reality. It was actual reality or some shit.”
“Wow, the graphics must have rocked!”
“Yeah, but it’s fucked up, cause this guy is Canadian.”
“We’re no Canadians in World War Two!”
“He says there were!”
“Yeah, and I bet the Nazis didn’t really almost steal the Ark either. Psht. Right!”
It’s not that we can’t take the truth, I’ve read about WWII and watched documentaries, and even watched old movies. The current crop though, lionizes and fetishizes the idea of being in the army during that conflict that they over do it. The Longest Day doesn’t bang on like Private Ryan and Pearl Harbor do. I’m not saying the guys who fought in World War Two don’t deserve our thanks. In fact nothing I’m saying here really has anything to do with them. It’s not about them, but rather my complaint is about how later generations treat them.

I think it comes from a generation of yuppie assholes who didn’t bother to get out of their solipsistic navel gazing until they got to their 40s and 50s and wanted to understand their fathers before it was too late and not from a real understanding of the war. They hit the age where their own kids are calling them assholes and they get that Dad wasn’t such a jerk after all. Of course if they hadn’t been such total shits during the 70s and not called their dads assholes for not letting them have the car they might have had a relationship with their father. It’s not that hard. I have always had a relationship with my father, we talk about stuff and everything. Sadly I think that it’s still naval gazing for the yuppies, they want to know that they came from the greatest generation, a generation of he-men, so they play up the previous generation. If Gen X ever does this shit to our parents I will come to each and every one of your houses and kill you with my bare hands.

It also occurs to me that the Nazis will never get proper respect again because their crimes are both too horrifying to be believed, while their evilness has been fictionalized to the point of cartoonishness. It’s one thing to say they systematically murdered millions of people, but it’s hard to really get that. You can’t easily you’re your head around the efficient way they murdered millions of people. When you have such an incomprehensible crime on your hands, handled with a great deal of callousness on the part of the criminals, it’s easy to attach other crimes to them. The Nazis became the best enemy for that time period, because they were totally evil anyway. Once you’ve got an entire generation watching them commit every crime from stealing the Ark of the Covenant to being in league with vampires then their actual crimes start to seem like not such a big deal.

The mythologizing takes away from the genuine importance of the facts I feel, and that’s what I have against the whole thing. It took me a while to say it but I feel you can give more respect by just laying out the facts than you can dressing them up and trying to polish them to a mirror shine. I’m more for the possibly boring facts than I am the shiny mythology. I figure the story is interesting enough on it’s own without the children and grandchildren banging on about it.

Actually, there is a Zero Punctuation review of one of the Medal of Honor games that struck a cord with me. The review gets a little nasty at America, but then he’s really complaining about how my generation views World War Two, which is greatly my problem.

As I said already, it’s got nothing to do with the real guys who actually fought, but how we mythologize and fictionalize them.

I can’t say I really liked Black Hawk Down exactly, but I’m not sure you’re really supposed to like it. It’s not exactly a likable film. It doesn’t take its shoes off when it comes in and grunts when it talks. It was an event film, a battle, there isn’t much of a story there. It’s like a big budget historical re-creation for a documentary. I didn’t feel that it was trying to put a noble, brave and ruggedly handsome face on the events. It’s still war-porn, in that it’s a 2.5 hour recreation of a single 16 hour battle, but it didn’t have quite so many false tones to it for me. I felt it was pretty straight forward and honest, which is good enough for me.


*Some one once asked why if so many other popular games had movies MoH didn’t and someone explained they did, just the movie came first.
**My father chooses his words with the sort of care most people would take for what finger they want cut off.

Humility

Christianity states that we’re supposed to be humble in the eyes of God. Then it tried to claim we were so special that the universe revolved around the planet we occupied and that we were singularly picked as God’s chosen people. Not so damn humble.

Now science, science tells us that we revolve around the sun. That the sun isn’t that special, just medium size and age, and that it sort of revolves around other suns in a group. We’re not even in the middle of the galaxy, just shunted off to one side in an unfashionable region. Our galaxy isn’t anything to write home about either, just another spiral galaxy in a cluster of galaxies that spins around and around.

Humans went from being made by God’s hand to being talking monkeys. Not even divinely inspired talking monkeys. We exist by only the merest accident of fate, another three degrees in any direction and it would be talking squid, or talking dromedaries or something else. Science says that you are a small, fragile being, who only exist at all through a series of random chances so vast in scope that it could never be replicated again and you exist in a universe so vast that even a God could live in it. That’ll make you feel small and humble.

If you really want to win the Humble Olympics (which no one would want to win if you think about it) science comes in over religion anytime.