Don't Judge

I fear this last post of 2008 will finally reveal the chasms of bizarrity in my soul, but I must confess this about myself: for the past six years, I have been the first person in EST to say the word "goulash" in the New Year. Meaning, instead of saying "Happy New Years!" joyously and kissing the nearest reasonably attractive person and trying to avoid the stroke slurs of a makeup-crusted Dick Clark on T.V. and searching the T.V. guide for the Charles Manson documentary that's supposed to come on at 1 a.m., I have said "goulash" instead. It's not much, but it makes me feel special. It also makes me feel closer to Raskolnikov, whom I've had a crush on since 7th grade when I started this tradition. I would go so far as to say my 7th grade love of Raskolnikov is akin to a community college pothead's love of Holden Caulfield.

A strong, inexplicable bond to a literary antihero is like nothing else, really.

Art Nouveau is super pretty

Fat people already spend enough on food as it is

Dear Gov. Paterson,

I think it's cute what you are doing, really. Who would have thought an obesity tax on regular soda could help to mitigate New York's $15 billion deficit? This seems somewhat problematic to me because first of all, diet soda makes you fatter anyway. And second, Coke is the least of a New Yorker's worries:

1. Bagel with schmear: 450 calories, 21 g fat



2. NY-style cheese pizza slice: 460 calories, 13 g fat



3. Hot dog: 309 calories, 20 g fat



4. Cheesecake: 980 calories, 69 g fat



5. NY strip steak: 450 calories, 28 g fat

I guess the point of this post is, does ANYONE out there listen to Paris Hilton anymore?!

Genuine

I just realized that Genuwine collaborated with Timbaland on 1996's "Pony," which makes the backbeat make A LOT more sense (re: Madonna's Hard Candy "Four Minutes" atrocity). Two things about this epiphany: first, I MISS GENUWINE, and second, seriously Timbaland? You were so much more creative back then...and I always swore to like you more than the shoes, even when you were jacking music from the Finnish underground scene. Boo, you whore.

Thunder, thunder, thunder cats

A guy named "Wormy T" posted a fan-made trailer for the upcoming Warner Brother's Thundercats: The Movie. It's good, but I think Kim Kardashian should fight Katie Price over the coveted role of Cheetara, and then maybe settle the bets on which one is the more untalented, big-boobied celeb.

Though I like the way this trailer-maker casted the movie, I don't think Brad Pitt will be Lion-O; he's too busy getting The Curious Case of Benjamin Button beaten by his ex-wife at the box office with her sugarpop ode to dog lovers Marley and Me, a film I'm fairly certain I would rather be pistol-whipped with a can of Cheese Whiz than see.





The funniest thing about this movie is that all the Gen-Xers that actually watched the show in the 80's have kids just young enough that they won't be able to take them to see it due to violence.

Also, this website is really dumb, but I suppose people need an alternate activity to do when they're not playing the Dungeon Master at their weekly D & D chapter meeting.

Derek Zoolander Got It Right

After finishing the bizarre travel book Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell (a good read if you can stomach the oft stilted metaphors and the detailed explanations of her NPR-endorsed, New York left wing lifestyle, her political alignment, and her favorite yogurt choices for breakfast), I looked up pictures of notable assassins from Booth on, and guess what? Fifty to sixty percent of them have "bedable features," a phrase I read once in a Cosmopolitan while my back was uncomfortably kneaded by a massage chair at a mani-pedi salon.

Here are my top favorites, in order of hotness:

1. John Wilkes Booth (killed Lincoln)

Back in the day, this dashing dandy broke many a heart with his smoldering looks and keen fashion sense. Two parts Rhett Butler, one part Brad Pitt, all sex.

2. Gavrilo Princip (killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand)

Not only did this saucy Yugoslavian Nationalist start the Great War, but he has the emotional eyes and the square jawline of a lady killer as well. The 'stache ain't bad, either.

3. Lee Harvey Oswald (killed John F. Kennedy)

Or did he? His biceps could be a bit beefier and some pectorals could complement the Miami Vice look nicely, but all things considered I give him a 6.5 to 7. Plus it sucks to be an assassin and get assassinated.

4. Sirhan Sirhan (killed Bobby Kennedy)

This mug shot/Marc Jacobs ad has the right mix of wistful remorse, nonchalance, and twentysomething grunge, as if he's saying, "What, did I stutter?"

5. James Earl Ray (killed Martin Luther King Jr.)

He looks like James Dean going as Kurt Cobain for Hallowen.

6. Leon Czlogosz (killed William McKinley)

He's got the bone structure and the cleft chin, but the head to neck ratio, I must admit, is a little disconcerting. His looks are about as forgettable as his actions. McKinley who?


7. Charles Guiteau (killed James A. Garfield)

His Rasputinesque wild eyes freak me out, not gonna lie. But out of all of the assassins on this post, he definitely wins the crazy award. Five years in the Oneida community, stalked the president for the French ambassadorial appointment, the "stalwart of Stalwarts"...he makes John Brown as benign as my grandmother's foot corns.


And now for the BIGGEST LOSERS. Don't ask me why assassins of musicians are always ugly, piggish Weight Watchers candidates.

Mark David Chapman (killed John Lennon)

Yolanda Saldivar (killed Selena)

My dog walker

Help me. I have 80,000 disgusting, grapefruit-size limpomas all over my body and my farts smell like gruyère.

Decide for yourself...

First we have the over-sexed, flat top Detlef Schrempf lookalike with the stolen "Under Pressure" backbeat OR

This guy.

I think the second one is slightly hotter, but that's because I'm into accents. Make your pick.

Whineboro

It's almost the start of a new year, and that means it's the perfect time to check out the upcoming Westboro Baptist Church picketing schedule for 2009! If you are unfamiliar with the WBC, their most charming websites are here and here. Though they claim their beliefs are Baptist with a glaze of Calvinist, their main beef is American tragedies. September 11th? Because of sodomy. 4217 casualties in Iraq? Because of gomorrahmy. 5 Amish girls dead? Virginia Tech shooting? Mine disaster? You get the idea.

Every year I wake up on January 1st and think, "This is the year Fred Phelps Sr. (aged 79), founder of WBC, is going to croak," and every year he continues to outlive my expectations. Of course, he has nine children to carry on the Westboro dynasty (thirteen, if four weren't estranged), the little Raouls to his Fidel. I will admit, the man does have an impressive legacy; no one else wears the crown of "All-American Douchebag," garnished with numerous counter-hate websites. Phelps makes Howard Stern look like the tacky drunk Best Man at a redneck wedding.

WBC has an exciting lineup for the new year, especially on January 19th. They plan to make eleven tour stops in one day (with direct quotations taken from their website) in Our Nation's Capital:

1. Federal Courthouse in Baltimore: "We will come and picket outside that vile Federal Courthouse where they put the servants of God on trial for the simple reason that they SERVE GOD."


2. France Embassy: "...a most debauched, filthy people."


3. Canada Embassy: "land of Sodomites" and "We have DNA evidence against that evil land."


4. Australia Embassy: "Heath Ledger is in hell" and "the entire nation was founded by convicted murderers, rapists, and treasonous peoples."


5. UK Embassy: "The Queen is a whore!" and "Episcopals are tyrants."


6. Holy See (Vatican) Embassy: "What type of tyrannical freaks would call themselves a separate nation and then set about to change times, and laws and subjugate their people to offer up their little babies to the pedophile monsters called their holy priests, except they are in fact the servants of Satan? "


7. Kenya Embassy: "Kenya is a murderous land of heathen, you know!"


8. Switzerland Embassy: "You sit quietly by while those nations around you devour their people, and then profit from their misery."


9. Ireland Embassy: "A most violent, superstitious devout catholic pile of pooh!"


10. Italy Embassy: "From their libidinous leaders, to their really "wise" men, you each one hate God."


11. Israel Embassy: "And just because you pretend you are following the teachings of God - that does not make it so."
    

The reasons for picketing sound like 7th grade world history textbook stereotypes. And many of them are plain wrong: the French are no more debauched than Americans, Switzerland played an anciallary role in WWII in aiding the Axis, Brokeback Mountain is a pathetic reason to hate an entire continent, and Episcopalianism is purely an American phenomena. Plus the one about Kenya is just mean.

Dreamy

I feel like a bad person for watching this and laughing hysterically, but it's Christmas and at least Santa won't judge me. Plus I'm sharing the joy and mirth that marks this wonderful time of year.

In other news, Klaus Kinski is a tad bit schitzo.

Which reminds me of the only dreams I can remember from this semester: a Pixar-style underwater cartoon with battling mollusk and soft-shell turtle, one in which I wrote a 100 word essay and won a billion dollars from a magazine, and one in which I was harrassed by a cheeky spider monkey that looked a little like Jim Carey during his Liar Liar heyday. I'm sure the last one was a result of watching Aguirre, Wrath of God+dream-inducing midnight snacks. No more pepperjack pumpernickel sammies for this snoozer, no siree.

I need a life

2008: Swiss Chalet

(This one I made with an 11 and a 12 year old)

2007: Ginger Plantation

2006: The Victorian

bratzzz

This is a photograph I took four days ago in Longwood, Florida:

The two most emotionally disturbing parts about this photo:

1) The multiplicity of Bratz doll types. Their names from left to right are: Yasmin, Meygan, Cloe, Monica, Lindsey, Sasha, and Jade (not pictured: Leah).

2) The resident of this house spent countless painstaking hours with a jigsaw and acrylic paints to get this desired look. Nothing screams more Florida than the plywood Christmas decor cutouts (except, of course, the nylon Santa alligator in the foreground with bedroom eyes).

After seeing this, I decided to research the Bratz dolls because I wanted to understand the motivation behind such aesthetic atrocity, but now I kind of wish I had rested content in my Bratz ignorance. They were created in 2000 by an Iranian Jewish immigrant Isaac Larin (wasn't Ruth Handler the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants???) because he thought Barbie dolls weren't diverse enough. Hence the main Bratz character Yasmin was born, with a Jewish-Latina background and a passion for fashion.

Unfortunately for the carpenter/creator of these delighful, sugary 4' decorations, the extinction of the Bratz dolls is nigh due to a lawsuit Mattel brought against their manufacturers. You can read the article here.

Here's my favorite quotation from the article:

A 2007 report by the American Psychological Association Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls called Bratz dolls' miniskirts, fishnet stockings and feather boas "sexualized" and argued that the dolls' "objectified sexuality ... is limiting for adolescent girls, and even more so for the very young girls who represent the market for these dolls."

From playing with unrealistic collogen-lipped dolls to two-bit trolling street whore in a matter of moments...how the kiddies grow up so fast these dayz.

I DO

Didn't think this was going to happen, but I'm TOTALLY ADDICTED TO WEDDINGS. Kind of like Edward Norton (used to be a hottie, what happened Eddie??) in Fight Club except not with support groups for terminal illnesses, and not with Brad Pitt. Boo.

JUDGE FOR YOURSELF

<----Then (1999)

Now (2008)---->

I thought the other day how nice it is that I can supplant my Facebook/compulsive email checking addictions with wedding websites, but after a few hours scrolling blogs devoted to gardenia centerpieces and the nouveau riche trendy cigar bars, I feel hungover from prolonged exposure to extravagance.

Best thing about weddings countdown list:

10) Eye-coddling color combinations

9) Bridezillas

8) Fat & bald bachelor groomsmen

7) Cake sans fondant (does anyone else think it tastes like an admixture of old person's skin and wax???)

6) Pigs-in-a-blanket

5) People "dancing"

4) The toasts...ouch, that was an uncomfortable reference...

3) Wedding rice being biodegradable

2) String quartets

1) Open bar: there for you to suck important information out of drunk relatives

Oh yeah, and that love thing too.

Oh Bother

To tamp or not to tamp?...

...TAMP, please, for the love of God!

The other day, a friend of mine sat down at the dinner table with a large bowl of untamped Fruit Loops and immediately lifted the spoon to his mouth. Here's his perspective:

Can you see the moistened Fruit Loops mingling with the dry ones? Are you scandalized? That's what I thought. "But it's all going to the same place!" he protesteth. To that, I answer: would you drink 12 fl. oz. of olive brine with suspended pimento-stuffed olives, chase it with vodka, and then tell people you had a few dirty martinis? Let me answer this unfair rhetorical question: no, no you wouldn't, because it would be stupid and you would die from a stomach ulcer.

I know your stomach is rumbling, but it only takes a few moments to tamp your cereal for complete milk saturation of every cereal particle. Take your spoon and lightly tap all parts of the cereal down until the milk has soaked in. Lift the spoon to mouth and enjoy the fruits of the tamping process (yes, the word tampon comes from the same French root, but try not to think about that when you're eating).

While we're on the topic of cereal, I'm pretty angry Kellogg's doesn't make this cereal anymore. It probably offends their Seventh Day Adventist roots and is full of trans fats and partially hydrogenated soybean oils and corn syrup, but my-oh-MY doesn't it look tasty! This is a cereal worthy to be tamped.

On the other end of the spectrum, however, I was dinking around online and found the worst cereal I've ever seen. Just because the blue cheese is white and is used as a binding medium does NOT make it equivalent to milk. Read this blog ironically; every other interpretation makes me depressed that such a thing as the internet exists. For example:

"A lot of things go through one's mind when chopping up a pound of bacon at 10pm on a Saturday night. The first being "I really need a girlfriend," the other is the realization of how much work it is to make your own bacon bits. Luckily we live in a modern world where bacon is readily available in bit form."

And he didn't even tamp!

I.Can't.Stop.Laughing.

Go here:

http://www.oddee.com/item_96038.aspx

and then after you check it out, click on this gem:

http://www.oddee.com/item_96483.aspx

Actually, check out this whole website and waste three hours like I did. Just now.

Before all else, be armed...thx, Nicolo

With the "cholera epidemic" raging (put in scare quotes because some people seem to think that it's N.B.D.), things are getting hairier and hairier in Harare. Or are they? President Robert Mugabe is sporting a thinner toothbrush mustache style these days, confining it to his impressively large philtrum, a trait he shares with the Mad Hatter et al.

If you haven't heard of Mugabe, allow me to fill you in on the highlights of this Zimbabwean nightmare. He's the guy who once said, "The only white man you can trust is a dead white man." Of course, when it comes to deranged dictators, he's no Turkmenbashi in the lavish personal expenditures department, but he has managed to hike Zimbabwe's inflation rate into a comfortable zone of insanity. But the worst thing of all is that dumb Hitler/Chaplain 'stache. In that centimeter-wide strip resides almost thirty years of totalitarianism and borderline personality disorder. Cute.

enough said

The Black Hole

I can think of few things better than tacky roadside Native American portraits that are sold between the wolf airbrush paintings and the freaky looking dolls. I was scanning the net for said portraits the other night and found this particularly choice delicacy:

I love everything about it, especially the penetrating "White men suck" eyes set into a shallow pan of wrinkles, the incorporated raven headdress, and the Raider Nation makeup. The makeup really makes this picture sing. If this Indian met a Sith Lord and walked a trail o' tears to Oakland, he'd probably end up looking like some sort of hybrid:

Which got me thinking: there's nothing more disgusting than an Oakland Raiders fan.

Don't worry, she's only had 2 1/2 Bud Lights at this game. (But it's fitting...every true Raiders fan probably have some mild form of F.A.S. imparted by their equally mentally stupefied parentals). I figure there are three types of diehards who follow the Raiders, even with a record as shaming as theirs:

1) People who never got enough of Gene Simmons

2) People with mild F.A.S.

3) People who buy roadside Native American art

Sorry, Jessica Alba, I know you're such a fan, but you hate Kiss and I'm pretty sure you're too rich to know what a roadside stand looks like.

Shocker

It's a shame humans don't have twelve fingers instead of ten, because there would be hundreds more finger combinations for offensive hand gestures. Six fingers per hand seems ideal for this. Any more, and after a while diminishing marginal returns kicks in and the effectiveness of the gesture decreases ("Wait, did he just hold up the fourth and eighth finger, or was it the seventh and eleventh? I'm either a pregnant cow or a vulva with herpes...but either way I'm offended..."), and also it would make certain human activities, ahem, difficult.


But with the hand gestures we Americans have, we seem to get by okay. Of course, there's nothing like throwing up a palm in Greece or flashing the peace sign in England, but the good old middle finger usually does the trick when you want to insult a biker outside a seedy redneck bar in the Ozarks. The middle finger is America's premier offensive symbol: simple, strongly erect, relatively easy to negotiate despite the stubborn ring finger phalanges, sexually suggestive...it's everything an American desires in a hand gesture.


Recently, though, the "up yours" attitude of the middle finger has been supplanted by the much more metaphorically complex "shocker" gesture, which is not to be confused with the Pitchfork, the Arizona State official hand gesture (which magically looks exactly the same!). It's amazing to me how diverse our 43rd President George Walker Bush is in the bedroom, because not only does he endorse the "two in the pink, one in the stink" mentality:


But he also does some crap I don't even want to think about:



Stay strong, Laura. We need you until January 20th, 2009.

Piece of Cake?

There's nothing more delicious than a commercial cake made with refined flour and that buttery, whipped-up frosting that goes down the esophagus smoother than a chola puts on her quinceanera lip-liner. I recently stumbled across one of the funniest blogs I've ever seen, Cakewrecks, devoted exclusively to shoddy professional cake jobs.

Obviously some poor soul with a #5 Wilton pipebag had some serious transliteration issues. I think the saddest thing about this website is the fact that all of the cakes were professionally made, meaning people actually paid money for this tripe. Yeesh. At least it makes me feel better about the time I made a cake in the shape of an amphora by Exekias and won first place in a high school Latin competition, which is almost as bad as winning a Razzie for atrocious acting in Gigli. I also once made a cake with integral and derivative equations piped on the side for a calculus class, because it was either distraction through baked goods or the game-where-we-make-each-other-pass-out to help us get through that God-awful hour and ten minutes in second period. I might have fared poorly on the A.P. exam, but at least my sweet tooth and nerdy confectionery penchant were fully satisfied.

Finally

I've been thinking about biting the shotgun shell for a few years now, but I've never gotten around to actually setting up a blog and writing on it. This delay is solely due to my ferocious, time-consuming 11th grade diary habit (like a young Winona Ryder's in the 1989 black comedy Heathers) which treads a thin line between being a healthy moderation of my scattered thoughts and a socially debilitating neurosis. But now it's the end of the semester, and I have more papers to write than I can care about, and I need some alternative procrastination techniques to frequent sobfests with my moleskine.