Bullsnark!

Is This Thing On?

2011-06-08T13:56:00.000-04:00

I seriously doubt anyone still checks this, but if you do stumble upon it and like what you've read, I've created a new blog called amoralpanic. It'll be much broader in scope than Bullsnark! was, mostly because the narrow focus of Bullsnark! was part of the reason I quit doing it in the first place. I have a loose framework for the new blog, but I'm just kinda looking forward to letting things flow where they may. Philosophy, politics, religion, sports, music, film, TV...it's all going to be fair game, in my continued insistence upon being a jack of all trades and a master of none.

Hope to see you there.

Oh My God, That Can't Be Right

2010-03-08T14:19:00.001-05:00

This happened a few months ago, but I only heard about it last night, to my knowledge. It's entirely possible that I did, in fact, hear this news back in December, and simply repressed it into the shape of an ever-growing, malignant tumor on the back of my brain.

Nickelback is the top group of the decade, according to Billboard Magazine.

No. This is not possible. No music publication could justify such a claim. Unless...maybe they meant "top group at being a horrible, awful, mind-shatteringly shitty band whose music gives people AIDS." Apparently not, though. It's based solely on chart performance, which makes me feel less murderous toward Billboard and more toward America as a whole. Which is nothing new, I suppose.

Despite a distinct lack of critical acclaim, the rock band formed in Hanna, Alta., has sold more than 30 million albums worldwide.

First Celine Dion, now Nickelback. Dear Canada: Stop spawning terrible musicians. Seriously. Not love, Me. Frankly, I think international law needs to be modified to include the unleashing of a musical plague as an act of war or terrorism. Of course, Nickelback isn't completely at fault here; people still have to buy their excrement. More than 30 million albums worldwide? Who the hell is buying this shit?

Fall in a well and die.

In the last decade, it released The State (2001), Silver Side Up (2001), The Long Road (2003), All the Right Reasons (2005) and Dark Horse (2008), which has garnered them a 2010 Grammy nomination for best hard-rock performance for the track Burn It To The Ground.

Attention, music business: You want to know why so many people hate you? It's not just because of the whole piracy thing. You nominated Nickleback for an award! That's like nominating Saddam Hussein for a Nobel Peace Prize. Not only have you created this monster of bland, generic, cliche and talent-barren "music," you've championed them. No wonder nobody gives a shit about the fucking Grammys anymore, including musicians.

"We've just accepted that we're never going to be the critics' darlings, and we're OK with that," frontman Chad Kroeger told Billboard in 2007.

This is because you are terrible at music.

But it's not only music reporters who disagree with Billboard magazine's assertion. Readers of the U.K.'s Word Magazine recently voted Nickelback the worst band in the world, with Kroeger and company locking down an impressive 20 per cent of the vote.

Between this and the shatterproof pint glass, I'm starting to wonder if maybe I should consider moving to England. Though, shattering pint glasses wouldn't be much a problem for me there, since I only do it whenever Nickelback plays in a bar and I need to shove glass in my ears to distract myself from the pain.

A guardian of sanity.

Looks like not everyone is a fan of greasy, bleached hair and enlightening, philosophical song titles such as Something in Your Mouth and S.E.X. Sample lyrics: "Maybe in the parking lot / Better bring your friend along / Better rock together / Than just one at a time / S is for the simplety / E is for the ecstasy / X is just to mark the spot / 'Cause that's the one you really want."

*cringe*
From top group of the decade to worst band in the world - only Nickelback could be so polarizing.

It makes perfect sense. There are a lot of people out there with horrendous taste, who like Nickelback and similarly shitty bands, and buy their music. Meanwhile, discerning music fans weep as some dumbass frat boy blasts "Rockstar" out of the jukebox at the bar for the 500th time.

If you needed any confirmation that the aughts were a wholly depressing decade, there you are. Nickelback, according to the so-called "Holy Grail" of the music industry, is the top group, with the top "rock" song, of the decade. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to listen to some music from the decade that, since it didn't suck, is much less popular.

Oh No You Din-int

2010-03-04T21:57:00.002-05:00

Moments ago, I was just sort of idly cruising the Internet, as I often do in search of topics upon which to "web log," though finding such a topic was not my intent. Indeed, I was in another of my all-too-frequent "Jesus fuck I am bored, but I will not do anything productive, damnit," sort of moods. So you can imagine that it must have taken something pretty irritating or outrageous to inspire me to post.

I'm a few weeks behind on this whole "John Mayer is a racist douche" thing, but as I generally don't keep up with mediocre musicians, this is to be expected. If you're similarly clueless, there has been something of a backlash against Mayer for some rather less than tactful remarks he's made in recent interviews with Playboy and Rolling Stone. Having read the comments, I can definitively say that his candor is unmatched, and his comments are pretty offensive. Naturally, the biggest problem everyone had was his casual use of the most loaded word in the English language. Hint: It's nigger.

Oh, snap!

Now, I've only got a few minutes before the PC Police arrive to arrest me for daring to utter that most offensive of words, because I am not of the appropriate skin color to be using it, so I'll try to make this brief. What I am concerned with here is not Mayer's "flippant" use of the most stigmatized pejorative in the world, however offensive it might be. People using racial epithets is nothing new, unfortunately, and there's not enough time in the world to write angry essays about every intolerant motherfucker in the universe. Besides, racism only counts if famous people do it, judging by the scope of reactions to Mayer and other celebrities' examples.

Instead, I'm taking serious, Jesus-Christ-are-you-fucking-kidding-me issue with Molly Secours of The Huffington Post, whose response is entitled "White People 'Passing': John Mayer, Racism, and the Arrogance of Whiteness."

I've spoken before about the increasingly broad definition of racism, and the fact that every single person on this earth is racist, whether they believe it or not, whether they want to admit it or not. What isn't hardwired into our biological makeup is supplied by society, where racism still does and always will abound, in both overt and subtle ways.

That article is fucking chock-full of racism.

Secours argues that Mayer "blatantly denigrated black women" with his comments. What he really said was pretty much that he ain't down to fuck with black chicks, which is entirely his prerogative. Of course, he phrased it in such an offensive way that you have to wonder if he was actually trying to piss people off, referring to his penis as "a white supremacist." So, yeah, not a smart move. Had he responded to the interviewer's rather loaded question, "Do black woman throw themselves at you?" with a little more tact but ultimately the same opinion, it probably would not have been taken as a blatant denigration of an entire race.

That's nearly the only remotely defensible point Secours makes in her article. The rest is her own "blatant denigration" of white folks. From claiming that Mayer dropping the n-word and calling his dick a Klansman was "symptomatic and indicative of white arrogance," to insinuating that white people face no adversity to saying "racism resides within all white people," Secours is spewing racist commentary herself. And inferring that John Mayer is in any way a representative of my people is something I'm rather offended by, as well.

I will admit to being jealous of his sexual conquests, however.

"But wait!" you exclaim. "Didn't you just reiterate your own belief that every person in the world is a racist? How is that different from that last quote of Secours'?" Simple. By saying that "racism resides within all white people," Secours is deliberately implying that other races are excluded from this blanket statement. That is untrue, and itself blatantly racist.

Again, I grant that Mayer's comments were pretty terrible, regardless of whatever his intent was. You have to know that saying shit like "My dick is sort of like a white supremacist" and casually dropping "nigger" in conversation is going to blow up in your goddamned face like an atom bomb. So at the very least, Mayer is an idiot. Is he a racist? Well, he lives on this planet, so according to the criteria specified by yours truly, he most certainly is. But at least, unlike most people, he's honest about it. At least he had the balls to openly discuss racial issues without tiptoeing around them, even if the result was, predictably, a shit-show.

Toward the conclusion of her hateful, bigoted, sanctimonious essay, Secours rhetorically wonders, "When will we face that our secret and unrecognized feelings of entitlement and superiority affect everything from the disproportionate number of black and brown men in prison to the astronomical number of black neighborhoods used as toxic waste dumps." (And yes, she failed to apply the proper punctuation to an interrogative.)

Perhaps she's prejudiced against question marks.

I've got a better question: When are overwrought, holier-than-thou editorialists going to worry more about the facts you outlined in that sentence than what some fucking musician said in a past-its-prime jackoff magazine?

I've also got an answer: fucking never, because why would we try to solve actual problems when celebrities are acting like morons? I mean, they're pretty and stuff!

Remind Me To Never Piss Anyone Off, Ever Again

2010-03-03T16:44:00.000-05:00

Hat tip to friend of Bullsnark! and possible future guest blogger Jake Gad on this post.

One of my favorite things to do is have purely hypothetical or academic conversations. Ideally, they not only encourage complex, critical and unconventional thinking, but you can also learn quite a bit about the person(s) participating in the discussion with you. I don't believe you ever stop learning new things about a person, no matter how close you become. They aren't necessarily always good things, but information is typically preferable to ignorance. Of course, happiness and knowledge are seldom dance partners, but some of us have an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. Bliss, being synonymous with ignorance, is usually the first casualty of such zeal. But then, anyone familiar with basic Christian mythology knows the story of Adam and Eve eating from the Tree of Knowledge and giving up paradise as a result. (Minor aside: That story still pisses me off. I mean, how shitty is God's security if the devil can just waltz right the fuck into Eden without him knowing? Maybe it was a test, but all that does is support my ongoing theory that God is a dick.)

Anyway, I really enjoy that sort of discussion because it's particularly revealing in a lot of ways. For instance, Jake and his significant other take pleasure in debating the merits of various methods of murder. A little macabre, to be sure, but there's nothing inherently wrong with considering the matter in a strictly academic fashion. Most of us have fantasized, willingly or otherwise, about taking a life, even if we'd never act on it. Thoughts aren't equivalent to actions, after all. In their ongoing exploration of the subject, Jake unearthed this, and asked for my thoughts.

"Holy shit" pretty much covered it.

That right there is a bear skull in the process of being completely stripped of flesh by wondrous little creatures known as dermestids, or "skin beetles." They're used in taxidermy and by museums to clean animal skeletons. Now, obviously, their utility as a murder weapon is severely limited and almost nonexistent, since, like most bugs, they tend to avoid large living creatures that could easily ruin their shit. Also, the larvae do most of the eating; the adults simply lay eggs on the carcass. So my initial thought of setting a horde of dermestid beetles loose on someone I wished to be eaten alive is pretty much ruled out. But that's almost too ridiculous, anyway. You'd have to really hate a motherfucker to want to kill him that way.

Jesus fucking Christ.

Where dermestes would be infinitely useful is in the disposal of a victim. According to the website linked above, a properly maintained and well-established colony can clean the skull of a bear or deer in a day or two. There are logistical concerns to deal with, but nothing more than you would typically encounter in disposing a body in discrete fashion. Maintenance of a colony is minimal; "a discrete [sic] location or some ventilation," due to the smell a colony can create, and "keeping them warm," as they work best at temperatures between 70 and 80 degrees Fahrenheit, are the only real requirements. And they're entirely legal and relatively inexpensive - a kit containing over a thousand bugs runs for under 250 bucks, including shipping. Anybody can buy a bunch of beetles from that website, and bam! In a few months, you're ready to kill some son of a bitch and get rid of the body. Of course, you're still left with the bones, but hell, Wikipedia's got you covered.

With a little common sense, some careful planning and a big helping hand from the Internet, anyone can rather easily get away with murder. Remember that the next time you fuck with a co-worker. It could save your life.

I'm Back, Bitches

2010-02-25T13:42:00.001-05:00

I know you missed me.

Between moving to North Carolina, trying (and failing) to secure gainful employment, starting work on what will hopefully end up a novel, and various other projects I've undertaken, I have unfortunately neglected this little corner of cyberspace. While I wouldn't anticipate a return to the daily update schedule, I should at least be able to pound out a couple posts a week. I had hoped to cover my absence with a few guest blogs, but I've done a good job at collecting friends who are as lazy and/or busy as I am, it seems.

An issue I have strong feelings about, but have not yet addressed in this space, is the legalization of marijuana. The stigma attached to the drug is altogether hypocritical and antiquated, a confluence of moral panic, misinformation and propaganda. Whether I use it or not has no bearing on my opinion about it, and I know many people who have never touched pot in their lives who are in favor of decriminalization, at the very least. Besides, as an advocate of states' rights and limited federal government (you know, what this country was supposed to be all along), I'd rather it be left to the states to decide whether or not cannabis should be legal.

In addition to growing fields of weed, George Washington also liked the Bill of Rights.

All indications are that we're making gradual progress toward criminal penalties for use and possession to be relaxed, or altogether abolished. President Obama's attitude toward the issue has been likened to the repeal of Prohibition in the 1930s. As Baby Boomers, the nation's first generation of stoners, age, usage has increased among senior citizens. Last month, an assembly committee in California approved a proposal to legalize and tax the drug. Baby steps, to be sure, but better than nothing.

Regardless, this post isn't going to be yet another TL;DR essay added to the "to legalize, or not to legalize" debate. There's plenty of that all over the Internet and the media, and essentially everything that can be said about it has been said. No, what I'm protesting here is the widespread use of drug testing in pre-employment screening, and the ultimate folly of the so-called "War on Drugs" in general.

However, people talk less funny now.

As I've said before, I do not believe my private life is any business of my employer, provided it does not adversely affect my job performance. Responsible adults should be treated as such, not denied the right to exchange their time and effort for sustenance based solely on whatever recreational activities they enjoy while off the clock. My time, other than that I have sold, is mine to use how I see fit. According to an independent inquiry conducted in the United Kingdom in 2004:

"[T]here is no justification for drug testing in the workplace as a means of policing the private behaviour of employees, or of improving performance and productivity. It suggests that although drug testing does have a role to play, particularly where safety is a concern, investment in management training and systems is likely to have a more positive impact and to be less costly, divisive and invasive."

The inquiry found that the links between drug use and work, absenteeism, low productivity, poor performance or accidents were weak or inconclusive. It also criticized the regulation and effectiveness of drug testing policy, as well as the implications for invasion of privacy. Even those who feel that mandatory drug testing is not a violation of privacy and a discriminatory tool should concede that the system currently in place is riddled with flaws.

Such fallibility should be expected from a project that owes its origin to the Reagan-championed "War on Drugs," itself built upon a foundation with a ton of cracks in it (no pun intended). The biggest oversight of this altogether misguided, Sisyphean task is this: People like to get high, and they will always find ways to do it, no matter what laws you try to enact. Pot dealer's dry? They'll go buy some amyls. Coke will show up on a piss test? They'll huff paint thinner or glue instead. Heroin too expensive? They'll find some Oxycontin or Percocet. It's a battle you can never, ever hope to win. All that's going to happen is what we're seeing now: overcrowding of prisons, a flourishing drug trade that supplies criminal organizations with endless cash flow, and a ton of wasted energy by a government that might want to focus on bigger, more resolvable problems, like the worst recession in decades.

Shown: Fascism.

The most practical conclusion, much like the one I presented in my post on prostitution, is legalization and regulation. Again, making things illegal doesn't deter a lot of people from doing them anyway. Why not regulate, and at least have some measure of control over the enterprise? Make it safer. Make it cleaner. Take that source of income away from the shadier motherfuckers in our society. Keep prison space reserved for rapists, murderers, and the other assorted bastards who really deserve to be there.

Drugs aren't going anywhere. If the ones currently in vogue disappear or fall out of favor, new ones will crop up. Because whether it be from jumping out an airplane or facing a blunt, eating a chocolate bar or eating shrooms, shooting a gun or shooting heroin, people like to get high. And you can't stop them.

It's Half Past Rapture. Do You Know Where Your Pet Is?

2010-02-11T22:21:00.001-05:00

Today's Awesomeness in Action goes to Eternal Earthbound Pets, USA, the greatest money-making scheme that doubles as sublimely hilarious satire in the history of mankind.

The basic premise: Your domesticated animals will be left behind when Jesus returns and whisks you away in the long-prophesied Rapture, because they were not fortunate enough to be born with the intellectual capacity to invent and observe religious practices. For a nominal fee ($110 for the first animal, $15 for each additional), an EE-BP representative will locate and assume care of your beloved pet.

The idea is funny, but the execution really puts it over the top. The FAQ, and the Terms and Conditions, cover everything from procedure for pets with special needs to the refund policy for clients who disavow their faith prior to the Second Coming. From the FAQ page:

Q: How do you ensure your representatives won't be Raptured?
A: Actually, we don't ensure it, they do. Each of our representatives has stated to us in writing that they are atheists, do not believe in God / Jesus, and that they have blasphemed in accordance with Mark 3:29, negating any chance of salvation.

It's gold, Jerry. Gold!

As with all satire, some people just aren't going to get the joke. The "contract and payment" area of the site does have what appears to be a valid PayPal payment button, but the site itself appears to be nothing more than a publicity stunt for its owner, whose book is advertised on the home page. It's managed to crack the top 10 atheist books on Amazon. And if a few simpletons do pony up the dough for a service that will never come, well, why should that be illegal? After all, there's a major industry that's made billions of dollars a year working from the very same business model. You might have heard of it. It's called insurance.

Customer Service Sucks, But Does It Have To?

2010-02-08T00:12:00.002-05:00

As most of you know, I'm moving to Raleigh for an indeterminate period of time. Earlier this week, I was still trying to decide whether I wanted to leave Friday or Monday. I chose the latter, mostly because I wanted to use the weekend to spend time with a few people I wouldn't have time to see if I left before the weekend. Of course, I conveniently overlooked the fact that the storm of the goddamned century was about to pimp slap the Mid-Atlantic region. Not only did this squash any plans that could have been made for the weekend, the weather situation has led Amtrak to cancel pretty much anything between D.C. and the Carolinas for the next couple days. I'm now scheduled to leave Wednesday, although apparently there's another fucking blizzard on the way Tuesday night/Wednesday morning. Good thing I don't have any time-sensitive shit happening, although I'm going to run out of money pretty soon unless I get a job, and the longer I'm stuck here, the less time I have to fix that problem.

I had to call Amtrak to alter my reservation. After spending about five minutes on hold - though, as I find being on hold a special sort of annoyance, it felt like much longer - I got this done within a minute or two. The process was simple and completely painless. As usual, my experience with customer service was straightforward and as pleasant as it could possibly be, and my "You've been a great help, thank you," at the end of the conversation was genuine.

So, this post is not going to be me griping about shitty customer service, or having to jump through hoops, or anything like that. No, the experience just got me thinking about why so many people have to make minor inconveniences such a big deal, and why they feel the need to direct their anger toward someone who, most of the time, is just doing his or her job. It comes down to a couple of points I've emphasized before, and will never stop emphasizing: A lack of empathy, and a lack of communication.

The louder you yell, the quicker shit gets done.

Most of us, unfortunately, have had to work in some form of customer service at one point or another, and we've all been on the ass-end of an employee-customer interaction at least once or twice. It's the kind of thing we bitch about to our families after we get home from work, or when we're swapping work horror stories with friends. Yet many of us don't hesitate to be "that guy" when we're on the other side of the equation.

Take my mother, for instance. I love the woman, but I would rather stick bamboo shoots under my fingernails than deal with her as a customer. She's not a discourteous woman under most circumstances; far from it, which makes her transformation into a curt, angry, and occasionally crazy lady all the more fascinating. I most often bore witness to this during my childhood whenever a bill in the mail was incorrectly high. God help you if you answered her call. Once she'd had the matter resolved and hopped off the warpath, I would usually ask her why she'd given the person such a hard time. "It's not their fault something was wrong," I would point out. "What does being a jerk to them accomplish? It doesn't make the problem go away." Now, I've never heard my mother use a single swear word, but her usual reply of "Oh, shut up," had an unmistakable "fuck off," quality to it. Near as I could tell, though, all it succeeded in doing was putting her in a bad mood, and probably doing the same to whatever poor bastard had had to deal with her.

Pssst...he's the red one.

I don't mean to pick on my mom, of course. Like I said, most people have a tendency to take their frustration out on a more than likely innocent employee. When I called Amtrak earlier tonight, I could tell the woman who answered was fried. She'd probably been dealing with pissed off people all day. I mean, they had to cancel a lot of trains. Not to mention they probably had a much higher call volume than usual due to the service changes, which would naturally lead to longer wait times, and even more frustration for customers. Sure, being on hold irritates me, but I don't start screaming at whoever finally takes my call. It's not going to get me those minutes of my life back, after all.

Anyway, it was pretty obvious that she'd been dealing with jerks for hours. And I get it. I understand that a lot of people's travel plans are time-sensitive, that delays and cancellations can seriously fuck their shit up. But, again, how does yelling at some poor bastard making 20 grand a year fix anything? It ain't their fault Mother Nature decided to be a bitch this weekend and dump an assload of snow on the East Coast. Not their fault that the phone lines are backed up. Not their fault that you're going to miss work or little Billy's first hockey game or whatever. Being an asshole doesn't change that.

So, sure, I'm pissed that I'm not going to be able to leave until Wednesday at the earliest. But that's more my fault than some chick who works for Amtrak. I'm the one who decided against leaving before the storm hit. I'm more annoyed with myself than anything else. Even if this had been a situation where the company was totally at fault and complicating my life (keeping with the transportation industry, Greyhound is notorious for screwing me over), I wouldn't be chewing out some low-level lackey. They don't make the rules.

Of course, if I go up to the register and somebody is just a straight-up dick to me, all bets are off. My empathy only goes so far. If you had a rough night or some other customer pissed you off or you just plain hate your fucking job, that's fine, but don't take it out on me. It's a vicious circle in that way, though. Bad moods are contagious, and it only takes one douchebag to ruin a bunch of peoples' days.

Tell me I didn't just ruin your day. I dare you.

I'm not naive enough to think this problem is going to go away any time soon. Frankly, it seems to be getting worse. But it would be nice if people could keep things in perspective a bit more often. Next time the barista uses two percent instead of skim in your latte, take a deep breath, count to three, and realize that this is not, in fact, the end of the world. If you absolutely cannot abide this gross miscarriage of justice, calmly and politely inform the person of the mistake. You might be surprised at how polite they are in return.

If nothing else, they're a lot less likely to spit in your pansy-assed drink. Seriously, Irish up that coffee. At least then, you'll have an excuse to act like an asshole.

Wait, You Mean Fantasy > Reality? No Way!

2010-02-07T00:53:00.002-05:00

Some of the things I discuss on this blog make me laugh. Some make me legitimately angry. But today may have brought us the first topic in the nascent history of Bullsnark! that just plain flabbergasts me. Finding out that Kanye West wrote a book was pretty ridiculous, but after some thought, it made sense in a horribly twisted way. Kanye, being the incredible egomaniac that he is, would naturally take it upon himself to unleash his sad excuse for a "book" upon the populace. I haven't been able to track down sales figures for it, but I am hopeful that they were nothing short of abysmal.

The whole thing with that goddamned groundhog at least has understandable motives behind it, too. The town of Punxsutawney has absolutely nothing else going for it. A sixth of the population lived under the poverty line, according to the 2000 census. It's smack dab in the middle of Pennsyltucky, also known as "the boonies," "Gooberville," or "Bumfuck." I mean, shit, when your annoyingly difficult to spell name translates to "town of the sandflies," it's understandable to latch onto anything that gives you a shred of national relevance. And PETA's role in that squabble is understood easily enough: An animal is involved, and they don't like what's happening, so, naturally, they're protesting. See? Cause and effect. Motive. Reasoning, if unsound and not even remotely cogent.

But even my vast empathic powers only go so far. So, it is without compunction that I paraphrase Gwen Stefani: This shit is absolutely, 100% bananas.

Oh, look. Another shitty thing that was mind-bogglingly popular.

Some people who went to see Avatar are reportedly depressed after witnessing the beauty of Pandora, the alien planet portrayed in the film, and having to return to their miserably dull lives on boring ol' Earth. Take this one post from a fan forum:

"Ever since I went to see 'Avatar' I have been depressed. Watching the wonderful world of Pandora and all the Na'vi made me want to be one of them. I can't stop thinking about all the things that happened in the film and all of the tears and shivers I got from it. I even contemplate suicide thinking that if I do it I will be rebirthed in a world similar to Pandora and the everything is the same as in 'Avatar.'"

Now, it's entirely possible that this particular post was made with tongue planted firmly in cheek. I would like to believe that. But there have been over a thousand such posts in a thread entitled, "Ways to cope with the depression of the dream of Pandora being intangible." Either this is one of the greatest Internet pranks pulled outside of 4chan, or a significant amount of people are actually contemplating killing themselves over a movie. A shitty movie, at that.

I have not seen Avatar. I will never see Avatar. As with Twilight, I've done enough research to know, without actually wasting time or money on the experience, that it sucks. I did so in the interest of due dilgence, but to be honest, I knew as soon as I saw the trailer that this movie was going to be a piece of shit that I had absolutely no interest in watching.

Look, I get that it's supposed to be visually incredible. And from what I've seen, it does look impressive on that front. But there's a lot more to a good movie than visual effects, contrary to what a staggering portion of America seems to believe. Things like plot, character, and dialogue are still important to some of us, and it has been almost universally declared that in all those areas, Avatar falls woefully short. I have heard it called "a $300 remake of Dances with Wolves, Fern Gully and/or Pocahontas." I have heard it referred to as "the most expensive Thundercats episode ever made." It is overly long, overly simplistic, overly smug, and preachy, with all the subtlety of a moon-sized sledgehammer. Frankly, this guy hit the nail on the head.

See? They're tribal. You know, like Native Americans! Get it?!

What people should be depressed over related to Avatar, if anything, is that it somehow got nominated for the Oscar for Best Picture. Generally, I don't give a baker's fuck about any of the awards shows, but the Oscars still seem to get it right some of the time, and my love for film gives me just enough morbid curiosity and interest in the outcome. I have a terrible, sinking feeling that Avatar is going to win, and while I've yet to see any of the other nominees outside of Inglourious Basterds - which, while brilliant, has less than zero chance of winning the award - I know that it will be one of the most egregious decisions in the history of the Academy. I've heard fantastic things about Up in the Air and The Hurt Locker, District 9 looked promising, and A Serious Man almost has to be good, given that the Coen brothers are behind it. It's hard to say anything will top Dances with Wolves beating Goodfellas, or Forrest Gump getting nod over both Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption, but at least those two winners were actually good films. A lot of people were down on Crash winning a couple of years ago, calling it the worst Best Picture winner ever, but Avatar would most definitely be the runaway victor in that dubious category.

Speaking of crap movies that won a buttload of awards, this will make two in a row for James Cameron as a writer/director, after Titanic, another movie that was visually impressive and mediocre or worse in every other aspect of film. There are only three good things about Titanic:

Kate Winslet's left boob.
Kate Winslet's right boob.
The part where that guy falls and hits his head on one of the masts on his way to a watery death.

Also, the part when she was like, "I'll never let go!" and then did. Like, immediately.

When you consider that you can see the first two things in several other movies, as well as the fact that Titanic was responsible for the immense popularity of Celine Dion's oh-God-please-make-it-stop-my-ears-are-bleeding "My Heart Will Go On," which was probably used in conjunction with waterboarding by CIA interrogators...well, that's just not a positive equation.

So, while Avatar fanboys and fangirls are busy slitting their wrists over the intangibility of Pandora, I'll be drinking away the pain of knowing that Cameron has several Oscars and the two highest-grossing pictures of all time, all for a couple of movies that are pretty terrible. Oh, and the fact that there will be at least one Avatar sequel. For all Titanic's failings, at least you knew the iceberg was the end of the line.

The PC Police Strike Again

2010-02-05T00:59:00.000-05:00

NBC, mostly in the news lately for the Conan O'Brien/Jay Leno late-night fiasco, has gotten the media's attention in an altogether different fashion.

On Thursday, the NBC cafeteria served a lunch of fried chicken, collard green and jalapeno cornbread. You might be asking yourself: So what? Well, apparently this particular menu was intended to honor Black History Month, and a sign in the cafeteria proudly announced this aim. ?uestlove, the drummer for The Roots - who, inexplicably, are the house band for Jimmy Fallon's show - snapped a photo of it and posted it on Twitter. Shit promptly got real, because even a whiff of potential racism sends the entire goddamned world into hysterics.

What many people will doubtlessly overlook in their rush to decry stereotypes or whatever is that the chef behind this possible slight faux pas (I would say "done in bad taste," but fried chicken and cornbread are delicious) is a black woman. After the media picked up the photo and ran with it, she said she's been pushing to institute a special Black History Month menu for years and was finally allowed to do so, and she's completely befuddled by the controversy:

"I don't understand at all. It's not trying to offend anybody and it's not trying to suggest that that's all that African-Americans eat. It's just a good meal. I thought it would go over well."

What a racist bitch.

All this woman is guilty of is being naive. There are certain foods linked to racial stereotypes from whatever reason, and choosing some of the prominent ones ascribed to black people in an attempt to honor the month dedicated to their history is never going to "go over well."

I don't know how big a story this is, or will become. My guess is not very. But I can pretty goddamned well guarantee that if the chef had been white, this story would be huge. Whether or not that's valid, we all know it's true. If this even became a story with the person in question being black - which it shouldn't have - the social outrage if said chef had been white would have gone to fucking Warp Factor Nine. Somebody's ass would definitely be getting fired. Isn't there something wrong with that? Isn't feeling some way or making some decision based on a person's skin color the very definition of racism?

Everyone is racist. Everyone. If you don't believe that, you're either a liar or an idiot. It has degrees, of course. There are senior citizens who still use socially unacceptable terms to refer to minorities, or speak of them in hushed tones. There are people who consider stereotypes to be the word of God on how a person of a certain race thinks, feels, and acts. There are people who will drop a slew of ethnic slurs in conversation and, literally five seconds later, deny that they are a racist. Sometimes, it's as simple as being afraid to be in a certain area at night. I know all these types, and many others, and so do you.

Political correctness does not address this. It cannot hope to. As moral, social and legal shifts and changes made it less acceptable and common to be blatantly racist, racism adapted. It quickly became more and more insidious, to the point where hardly anyone agrees where the line is anymore. Free speech isn't nearly as free as it used to be. And you know what? A big part of the reason for that is political correctness. Because of the PC Police, very few people are comfortable even talking about issues of race, lest a poorly worded phrase or innocent misunderstanding land them in hot water. Shit, I feel like I'm tiptoeing through a minefield right now, to be honest.

And that's a damn shame. I've long held the belief that all of life's problems, all of society's ills, are attributable, at their most basic level, to miscommunication. Simply put, if people aren't communicating, at best, the situation does not improve. At worst, shit hits the fan, hard and fast. And what political correctness has done is make everyone afraid to have genuine dialogues on race relations, because even a toe out of line prompts an avalanche of sanctimonious reactions that are often mind-bogglingly out of proportion.

I've been kicking around the idea of a series on political correctness that involves getting some outside opinions for a while now, and if I can get folks to participate, I'll hopefully have that for you guys soon. I bring that up only because this story led me rather quickly into that territory, and if I'm going to get really deep into the topic, I'd like to follow through on that. I'll be contacting the people I have in mind shortly. If you're interested, say so in the comments.

Our Priorities Are Definitely In Order

2010-02-03T17:20:00.001-05:00

I have a hunch that most of my readers are, like myself, avid Futurama fans. So, you'll remember that episode where Fry downloaded Lucy Liu's personality into a robot. You'll also remember the propaganda film from the Space Pope about civilization collapsing because everyone was busy making out with robots. They no longer cared about jobs, school or anything else, since everything we do is just an effort to impress the opposite sex.

We may have taken the first step toward that dismal, yet kind of awesome, vision of the future.

Douglas Hines, a computer scientist and former Bell Labs engineer, has invented what is being called the world's most advanced female sex robot: "Roxxy." In addition to the usual purposes served by your run-of-the-mill blow-up doll (basically, having fuckable holes), this thing can answer questions and carry on conversations. It can be programmed with one of five distinct "personalities." The robot responds to touch, boasts fully correct anatomy, and can even simulate an orgasm. She even snores, for Christ's sake.

Billy Timmons can shove his stupid volcano up his ass. That mall certificate is in the fucking bag.

Unveiled at the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas last month after more than three years of development, industry experts seem confident in Roxxy's viability as a product. And Hines' website, TrueCompanion, is claiming over 4,000 orders already made and five times as many inquiries. The robot won't be available for delivery until later this year, but TrueCompanion is already hard at work on Spanish and Japanese versions (Roxxy only speaks English) as well a male robot, Rocky.

We're a long way from MonroeBots, though. There are, naturally, plenty of limitations still present with this new design. First, the thing is kinda...frightening, in the facial region. Second, despite the claims, and no matter how advanced the computer is, I can't imagine the variety of conversations to be had is especially wide. Third, how much do people even care about carrying on a conversation with their sex toy? Wait, don't answer that.

The two most pressing concerns, from a marketing standpoint: The price tag is prohibitive, and, at the end of the day, you're still fucking a robot. In general, people who have seven grand to blow are a lot more likely to not be lonely, creepy dudes who need something like this to get their rocks off. Besides, wouldn't a lonely guy rather buy a hooker's services for a fraction of the cost, thereby having several thousand dollars left with which to purchase cocaine that would undoubtedly be snorted off said hooker? It might be cliché, but it's cliché for a reason. That reason being: Doing blow off a hooker's body is incomprehensibly awesome.

Cocaine and strippers. At the same time.

The article says Hines is "a self-professed happily married man," which, I guess, is about as close to snorting and saying, "Yeah, right," as CNN journalists are allowed to get. He anticipates his customer base will mostly consist of shy, awkward and/or older gents who "have trouble meeting girls." Either way, there does seem to be a market for this, if only because there will always be lonely, desperate motherfuckers. Robotfuckers, I guess, would be more precise.

In other news: Still no cure for AIDS.

The End Is Extremely Fucking Nigh

2010-02-02T01:09:00.002-05:00

For all the stupidity and greed and general dickishness that pervades the world around us, humanity has managed to do some pretty impressive shit in a short amount of time. And, even in an age of media saturation, good news gets summarily overlooked or suppressed in favor of more reactionary fare. It's sometimes difficult to keep perspective on this, but some days I truly do feel great swells of optimism for, and pride in, my species.

Of course, that paragraph up there was going to turn into "Some days, shit like this happens..." And, you know, this post was actually going to be about some old guy jerking off to some goddamned wrestling pictures in a public library in Kentucky. It would have been fairly simple: Express a mixture of astonishment and pity that he wasn't even looking at porn, and wonder rhetorically how a 58 year old man who looks like a perfectly normal guy arrived at such a nadir in life. Throw in a funny picture or two with smart-ass captions, make 4-6 jokes of varying quality, and shove that sumbitch on the Web. Simple. Elegant.

But while doing research for that post (read: trolling Google for silly images and dumb articles), I came upon an unfortunate fact that apparently happened almost a year ago. I'm actually kind of glad I'm just learning it now, since at the time, I was being butt-fucked by post-graduate disillusionment, and may have purchased a firearm and entered a nearby Burger King.

Kanye West wrote a fucking book.

Ow. My spirit.

That's right, folks. Noted non-reader and complete douchebag Kanye West is a fucking published goddamned writer. His book checks in at a whopping 52 pages, some of which are blank; others have only a few words on them. Despite this, he needed a co-author. It is "a collection of thoughts and theories," which he cleverly dubs "Kanye-isms."

"Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed," West said. "I am not a fan of books. I would never want a book's autograph. I am a proud non-reader of books. I like to get information from doing stuff like actually talking to people and living real life," he said.

West, a college dropout, said being a non-reader was helpful when he wrote his book because it gave him "a childlike purity."

etyjnty rft ne 7l9 m,7 thdfvfx RFGRGO.;[P;

Sorry. I lost consciousness from the stupidity and passed out on my keyboard. Anyway, the one point I am ready to concede even the slightest bit to West here is the bit about learning by doing or whatever. Getting off your ass and experiencing what life has to offer is all well and good. But sometimes, books allow people to learn about experiences they cannot have firsthand. Most people cannot travel to Spain to train as a matador, or climb a mountain. Even fewer people can go into space. And nobody can travel back to the Victorian era and court debutantes, because they stopped making DeLoreans in 1982.

Also, flux capacitors didn't come standard. No wonder they failed.

Regardless, the rest of that article quote just makes blood shoot out my nose, from "they just be so wordy," to West crediting his apparent illiteracy as a source of "childlike purity." Listen, Kanye, I know you don't read, but "purity" is not a synonym for not knowing what the fuck you are talking about. The only thing childlike about any of this is your "bookz iz dumb klol!!1!1" attitude. Oh, and that whole thing about never wanting a book's autograph. I'm hoping that was tongue-in-cheek, and that Kanye West does not actually believe that it is possible to get an autograph from a book.

You might expect my biggest problem with this whole awful, horrifying situation to be the fact that West is pretty much saying, "Books are lame..but buy mine." And, sure, that's hypocritical and irritating and offensive. But you should have seen the look on my face when I came across this nugget of wisdom:

West's derision of books comes despite the fact that his late mother, Donda West, was a university English professor before she retired to manage his music career.

And he dedicated the fucking book to her. Yeah, I know they were close, but how do you effectively shit all over what she held dear and then dedicate the monstrosity to her memory?

Most of the bullshit I come across is absurd enough that I can laugh. This is just depressing.

Wachovia: Profiting From Disasters Since 1908

2010-01-29T22:00:00.003-05:00

Friend of Bullsnark! and newly minted Special Correspondent Mike Twomey is to be duly thanked for alerting me to this little slice of reprehensible behavior.

Old Dominion student Heather Lynn recently used her Wachovia debit card to donate $10 to the Yele Haiti earthquake fund. Each of the four major credit card companies - Visa, Discover, MasterCard and American Express - have waived or rebated processing fees on donations to select Haiti relief charities. Ms. Lynn was under the impression that Wells Fargo, Wachovia's parent company, would follow suit...until she noticed the 3 percent "international fee" the bank deducted from her donation. In response, she created a Facebook fan page appropriately titled "Wachovia = Fail," which has over 800 fans as of 10:00 PM EST, including yours truly and Mr. Twomey.

Wachovia's response was, as you might imagine, completely full of shit:

Michael Klosterman, a spokesman for Wells Fargo, defended the bank's response to the Haiti disaster, saying the money it donated to Haiti more than makes up for their transaction fees.

"We have given $100,000 to the American Red Cross, and on January 19 we pledged an additional $250,000 to support the non-profits in Florida that are mobilizing the relief efforts," Klosterman said. "We decided that donating a sum of money would be quicker and more beneficial than waiving transaction fees because the funds would get to the people quicker. It would take the equivalent of $35 million in transactions to raise the amount of money we actually donated."

Noted. Mr. Twomey: Your rebuttal?

[B]y not waiving the transaction fees, your benefit is becoming less beneficial as you proceed to make money off of the charity of others, thus diminishing the net amount you've donated. That's a dollars-and-cents way of explaining "If you are a corporation with your name on the side of a [fucking] sports arena, you are not allowed to profit from the generosity of others! [N]ot even a little bit, you fucknut!"

Couldn't have said any better myself, other than tossing that extra F-bomb in there. Sorry, mate. Couldn't resist.

Wachovia then charged The Mentoring Center a 10% "giant check fee."

This is just the latest bit of fuckery from a bank that has, in the past two years, been sued for negligence connected to identity theft, sued for negligence connected to telemarketers taking advantage of elderly customers, and accused of money laundering on behalf of Mexican and Colombian firms. This is, quite simply, nothing short of appalling - both the fact that Wachovia would attempt to profit from others' charity in the face of a national disaster, and that they think they can get away with it.

If you'd like to inform them of their mistake, you can do so here.

PETA and Pennsylvania Lob Bullsnark! A Big, Fat Softball

2010-01-29T16:37:00.001-05:00

Sometimes this shit just writes itself.

There's so much stupidity involved here that I don't even know where to begin. Fox News, the biggest joke in the media, is reporting a dispute between PETA, the biggest joke in activism, and Pennsylvania regarding Punxsutawney Phil, the star of the Groundhog Day, the biggest joke of any holiday. My head hurts.

PETA's insanity is old hat at this point. Not a month goes by without them staging some ridiculous, inane crusade that does nothing but contribute to their reputation for ineffectual, alarmist bullshit. More troubling than their frivolous activism, however, are their astronomical euthanization rates and donations to organizations on Homeland Security's terrorist list. For an organization that claims to seek kindness toward all living creatures, that seems just a smidge contradictory.

Bugs Bunny is fucked.

If you didn't click the link to the article - I can't say I'd blame anyone for not wanting to go anywhere near the cesspool that is Fox News - essentially PETA is demanding that the groundhog be replaced with a robotic version. In a letter to Bill Deeley, president of the Inner Circle of the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club (I wish I were making this shit up), PETA'S Gemma Vaughan said that groundhogs "become stressed when they are exposed to large, screaming crowds; flashing lights from perhaps hundreds of cameras; and human handling." Deeley told the Associated Press that the groundhog is "being treated better than the average child in Pennsylvania."

Let's all take a few moments to let those last two sentences sink in.

Not too long, though.

Okay? Okay.

What the fucking fuck is wrong with these people? Why is there an "inner circle club" for a goddamned groundhog? Why does anyone give a shit about this idiotic tradition? Why is somebody claiming that the groundhog lives better than the average child in the state? If that actually is true, why the fuck is that happening?

I can't even talk about this anymore.

A Brief Meditation on Writing

2010-01-28T23:50:00.013-05:00

I doubt I'm breaking the news to anyone who will read this, but J.D. Salinger died today. You may not recognize the name offhand, but you know his work; specifically, The Catcher in the Rye.

This guy killed John Lennon "because of" that book. More like, because he was a fucking psycho.

I imagine mention of that particular novel has elicited smiles from some of you, and groans from others. Since its publication almost 60 years ago, it has become one of the most commonly taught novels in American schools, as well as one of the most frequently challenged. I know at least three people who consider it their favorite book of all time, and a few people who absolutely loathe it. Where I sit on that spectrum, I couldn't tell you with absolute certainty. I've read the book twice - once in high school for a class, and once sometime during my last two years of college for pleasure. My reaction was different each time. I absolutely loved it when I was 15, whereas my feelings toward it at 20 or 21 were much more ambivalent. I don't think I have access to a copy at the moment, but I'm hoping to read it again in the near future and re-evaluate it.

I've had such a phenomenon occur with several creative works, which I think is true of everyone. As people grow and their experiences change them, so too do their tastes change. The film that spoke so poignantly to you as a teenager may seem insipid and trite when you view it again ten years later. The book you cherished as a child may not survive the scrutiny you can direct at it as an adult. The song that made you openly weep during your college days may fall upon indifferent ears in the future.

Just doesn't resonate like it used to.

I find this, and the relationship between artist and audience, endlessly fascinating. It's probably a significant part of the reason I love writing. Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card, has been my favorite book since I read it nearly a decade ago, and in later printings and editions of the book, there's a foreword in which Card reflects on this topic:

This is the essence of the transaction between storyteller and audience. The 'true' story is not the one that exists in my mind; it is certainly not the written words on the bound paper that you hold in your hands. The story itself, the true story, is the one that the audience members create in their minds, guided and shaped by my text, but then transformed, elucidated, expanded, edited and clarified by their own experience, their own desires, their own hopes and fears.

This is what makes writing, or any artistic or creative pursuit, so difficult, so frightening, so cathartic, so beautiful. Whatever you create will be viewed differently, independently, by every person who experiences it, each time they experience it, and not merely due to the passage of time or the gaining of experience. So many variables determine how one reacts to a given work. I could read the same novel or watch the same film or listen to the same song on consecutive days, perhaps even in the same day, and it would elicit different responses. I might notice some detail I initially missed; though I'm a careful observer from years of instruction, I still almost always pick up new things in stuff I've read, watched or listened to dozens of times. I might be feeling different emotions which affect my reading or viewing or listening. I might consider some aspect of the book or movie or song that I had previously ignored. The possibilities are virtually endless.

When I was a kid, I was a big fan of the Animorphs series, and I actually spent a lot of time today re-reading some of those books, thanks to the wondrous powers of the Internet (I do own most of the books, but PDF files are much more convenient). And while my collegiate training as a reader made me acutely aware of some factual errors, loopholes, and lapses in logic, as well as cringe at some of the less-than-stellar passages, I was surprised and glad to learn that I still enjoyed the books immensely. Perhaps it was simply because I'd made an emotional investment in the series long ago, but I still cared about the characters and felt the appropriate emotions at the appropriate times.

Also, becoming an animal still sounds fucking awesome.

I'll never know. That's the beauty, and curse, of art; it's almost entirely subjective, in large part because what I've discussed. Even when I do re-read The Catcher in the Rye, I can't do so in a vacuum; my emotional state and my previous readings, among innumerable other factors, will create an unavoidable bias.

One of my professors used to say, "It doesn't matter if you like the book or not." What she meant was that we were there to discuss technique, craft, the nuts and bolts. Whether or not you personally enjoyed the book was irrelevant; what was of importance was what the writer was doing to create the intended effect, how he or she used all the methods and devices of storytelling. And I will say this: Salinger did an incredible job of utilizing an unreliable narrator and gave his protagonist an undeniable, unique tone. Most impressively, he captured the essence of adolescence, which is the main reason the book became so popular and widely taught. People who have never tried to write fiction have no concept of how difficult it is to effectively narrate from the perspective of a child or adolescent, as an adult. I don't want to turn this into a lecture on how the general public is completely clueless to the difficulties of writing (by which I mean, writing well), so I'll leave it at that. Trust me, it's fucking hard.

So, even though Salinger became a recluse who barely published anything after the massive popularity and controversy of his magnum opus, I'm sad to know that he's gone. From what little is actually known about him, he sounds like he was a fascinating man, although he was not without flaws; according to his daughter Margaret's memoir, he never truly recovered from his experiences in World War II and was a domineering husband, among other things. Some people will doubtlessly hold out hope that some of his unpublished work will be published posthumously. I'm not one of them. For most of his life, Salinger sought only privacy, both in his personal life, and for his work. He refused numerous offers to publish again, or to have The Catcher in the Rye brought to the big screen. In a rare 1974 interview with the New York Times, he said, "There is a marvelous peace in not publishing ... I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure." Unless he expressly directed that something be published after his death, I sincerely hope that it never sees the light of day on a bookstore shelf.

More than anything, I pray that we never see a film adaptation of The Catcher in the Rye. I'm crossing my fingers that Salinger made arrangements before his death to ensure that can never happen. If it does, take my advice: Skip it and read the book. Even if you read it before and hated it. You might look at it differently now.

Just In Case You Thought I Was Going Soft

2010-01-27T00:46:00.002-05:00

I have to say I was somewhat surprised that the feedback I got on yesterday's abortion discussion was entirely positive, and almost entirely agreement. Of course, since this blog is still getting off the ground, its current audience is mainly comprised of friends (hopefully that changes, though it's unlikely), but I still anticipated a little more debate, if not backlash. So I guess it's time to up the ante.

Those who know me are aware of the fact that I am notorious for my sarcasm. It's a running joke that I don't mean approximately 90 percent of what I say; I'll say almost anything to elicit laughter, play devil's advocate, or just plain provoke a reaction. There are, however, some views I hold that, while similarly outrageous when compared to the societal norm, I am completely serious about. One of those views is that prostitution should be completely, 100 percent legal.

Now, I've never paid a woman for sex, unless you count the socially acceptable method of paying for dates, drinks and/or gifts. Nor do I have any particular interest in employing a prostitute. It's dangerous. It's expensive. It implies a desperation or loneliness that I simply don't feel. I doubt I'd even enjoy it, because I'm the weird male who enjoys knowing that the chick I'm fucking likes me as a person. And it is, rightly or wrongly, illegal. On the list of things I'd want to be arrested for, soliciting a ho is pretty low. But, similar to my stance on abortion, I support the right of two consenting adults to exchange money and bodily fluids in the same transaction, even if it's not a choice I'd make for myself.

Let's look at this logically, folks.

Not giving directions.

1. It's going to happen anyway.

There's a reason prostitution is known as "the world's oldest profession." Simply and elegantly stated: People like to fuck. It doesn't matter what laws you pass, what punishments you inflict; a dude trying to get his dick wet (or a woman looking to get plowed, let's not be sexist here*) will resort to paying for sex if he feels he has to. Now, it's true you can say this about almost any crime. "Oh, I guess since murders will happen anyway, we should legalize that, too!" In the words of Ed Lover: C'mon son. Get the fuck outta here with that bullshit. Comparing an act which ends a human life to consensual sex is beyond disingenuous. I won't call prostitution a "victimless crime," because it isn't victimless. But that's only because it's still a crime!

*For the remainder of this post, I'll use males as examples for the sake of simplicity, and because gigolos aren't nearly as popular. The situations still apply for women. And for same-sex relations, come to think.

2. Legalizing and regulating prostitution would reduce other crimes and dangers.

If you've been reading this blog at all, you know I don't make generalized statements, or say things I can't prove with sources, very often without at least hedging my bets. But I believe this so strongly that I'm willing to do so. What are the main issues with prostitution, aside from moral objections? In no particular order: It encourages unsavory activity, employs criminals, and poses significant risks of sexually transmitted diseases. Guess what goes away if you do a decent job of regulation? You no longer need to enter shady parts of town to get your rocks off. Pimps, madams and their nefarious associates become relics of a bygone era. Assuming mandatory health checks and condom use are instituted, STD's become much less of a problem. I believe the domino effect on crime rate would be considerable. Again, this is just my opinion; I cannot prove this, and I doubt you could prove it after the fact, anyway. Causality is a bitch.

Another thing you know from reading this blog is that I am loathe to give the government power it doesn't absolutely need. This country was founded on the principle of limited federal government and states' rights, and I think we'd be a lot better off if that's how shit really got done. But I'm nothing if not pragmatic, and I know that we're on a divergent road that ain't too likely to change anytime soon. So, if I have to live with governmental intrusion - and, sadly, I do - I'd prefer it came in the form of strict regulation.

Let's just hope the fashion never disappears.

3. Legalizing and regulating prostitution would lead to improved quality of life for prostitutes.

Who cares about those disgusting whores, right? What self-respecting woman would sell her body, anyway? Additional rhetorical question, dripping with sanctimonious outrage?

You've got no room to talk, folks. Whether or not you want to admit it, we're all whores in one way or another. Besides, these are still human beings we're talking about, here. Having chosen the profession they did doesn't give anyone the right to view them as anything less. You don't have to like or respect them, but nobody deserves to be beaten to within an inch of their life at the slightest provocation or whim. You don't know how or why these women ended up where they did. People in glass houses should shut the fuck up. Anyway, with proper regulation, prostitution could be much like any other job. No longer would these women be at the mercy of pimps or madams, readily contract diseases that go untreated, or live in squalor.

You can't eliminate all occupational hazards, of course. Clients may still pose a threat to prostitutes, be it physical harm or disease. It comes with the territory. Cops, firefighters, and countless other civil servants run the risk of death every time they go to work. Some jobs are just inherently more dangerous than others. But what you're seeing with the current state of affairs is prostitution being a much more dangerous gig than it has to be.

The loss of sexist humor is an acceptable one, in this case.

4. The sociological impact could be astounding.

Earlier, I made reference to what I consider the socially acceptable method of paying for sex. No, sex is not the only reason for dating - there's that whole thing about finding a suitable person to procreate with - but it's a pretty significant motivator, especially in youth. As it stands, what is considered normal is for a guy to take a girl out somewhere, and spend cash and time trying to score, because somewhere along the line, we confused chivalry with picking up the check. There's an entire system of bullshit built upon this accepted standard, from which date it's okay to have sex on to wondering what your date's real intentions are. True, when Thoreau said, "Simplify, simplify," this might not have been what he had in mind, but how much romantic advice would you take a from a guy whose mom still did his laundry?

I think legalized prostitution could have intriguing effects on the enterprise of courtship. For instance, if the average guy knows he can make one phone call and get some prime trim delivered to his house faster than Papa John's, is he really going to go through the whole song and dance of dating if he's not genuinely interested in a woman? Maybe he is, maybe he isn't. But couldn't he go bust a nut with a lady of the evening right before a big date, so he's more relaxed, and not pressing as hard to get laid? Couldn't this usher in a whole new era of dating, wherein people worried less about whether or not they'd be doing the nasty later, and more about enjoying a person's company?

I'm aware that I'm taking some leaps of faith and logic here, and that there are innumerable sociological factors that would come into play, many of which I likely am woefully ignorant. I'm just saying that these possibilities exist, along with countless others that I'll omit for the sake of time, and that they intrigue me. The idealism that hasn't been crushed out of me by life occasionally surfaces, and this is one of those times.

For instance, cheating would remain a problem.

5. Legalizing and regulating prostitution means more money for the government, and by extension, citizens.

Pimps and hoes aren't exactly renowned for their dutiful filing of honest income tax returns. With prostitutes' salaries being taxed, as well as the inevitable vice taxes that would be tacked on, you're talking billions of dollars of additional income for the government to use in funding education, healthcare, Social Security, and other programs. Or, more likely, buying shit that enables us to bomb more brown people out of existence, which is what America is apparently all about these days. Whatever the case, it's a potential financial boon. I don't understand the first thing about economics - neither do economists, from the state of things - but I do know whatever's being done doesn't seem to be working too well. Maybe it's time to get creative.

As for moral concerns...well, far be it from me to presume I'm the ultimate authority of what's morally right or wrong. I can only look at any given issue armed with my own moral compass. But the reaction I anticipate more than any other is that legalizing prostitution may encourage more women to join the Screamsters union. What I find funny is that this objection is most likely to come from the very same folks who look down on prostitutes as filthy, puerile sub-humans. It can't go both ways. You cannot condemn whores as abject scum with nary a redeeming quality, and then suggest that morally upstanding women would lower themselves to the practice just because it's suddenly legal.

I'm fairly confident that most of the women who would elect to turn their vaginas into toll roads would do it regardless of legality. Maybe the regulations that would make the job safer would entice a few women to take the job when they otherwise wouldn't, but I don't believe for a second that you'd see the kind of wild explosion of the industry that moral alarmists would suggest. Intelligent, ambitious women are not going to suddenly become prostitutes just because they can without fear of legal ramifications.

I said intelligent women.

I'm also not going to pretend that legalizing prostitution wouldn't come with some significant negative consequences. No change is immune to those, especially not one as admittedly drastic as this. You can't plan for everything, after all, and shit always hits the fan in unexpected ways. I'm not so naive as to think this idea is perfect or would be easy to pull off. I simply think there's a certain amount of hypocrisy in prostitution being illegal, and that legalized, regulated practice would do more good than harm in the long run.

Also, I would like to restate my official stance: I am always willing to entertain criticism and be educated on topics in which my understanding is less than intricate. I would hope anyone who takes exception to this post is willing to have a calm, mature debate about the subject. Although I can't say I'm not kind of excited to get this blog's first piece of hate mail. So, hell: Go nuts.

Freedom Of Choice, Not From Consequences

2010-01-25T18:59:00.004-05:00

One of the things I love about blogging is that I can talk about pretty much whatever I feel like at any given moment. In what other medium could I go from making poop jokes to having a serious discussion about abortion in a matter of hours? And make no mistake, this will probably end up being one of more serious posts you'll find here.

I am pro-choice. My reasons for this are simple. I have significant problems with inflexibility. Unwillingness to adapt, to allow for the effect of extenuating circumstances, is to live life in a wholly unrealistic fashion, and is a primary root of much of the world's stupidity. Zero tolerance is wholly ineffective, no matter how and where you attempt to apply it. As a big proponent of personal responsibility and limited governmental intrusion, I find any attempt to regulate the private affairs of citizens inherently disingenuous, and as ~~a godless heathen~~ an agnostic atheist, I have no spiritual objection to abortion.

I hate the broad terms applied to each side of the debate. As a general rule, I abhor any attempt to reduce complex issues to simple black and white. You don't get much more morally complex than abortion, or much more black and white than the terms "pro-life" and "pro-choice." Besides, "pro-life" is a giant motherfucker of a misnomer. Everyone is pro-life, except emo kids. Everybody likes living, and everyone's trying to do it as well as possible for as long as possible, because we are all fucking terrified of death, thanks to millions of years of evolution.

More of an issue than generalized labels are generalized beliefs. As with everything else in life, it seems, we've been treated to narrow-minded, deceptive and simplistic propaganda, from both sides. To hear pro-lifers tell it, people who are pro-choice enjoy nothing more than slaughtering babies by the truckload, except perhaps performing Satanic rituals. Meanwhile, the more militant amongst the pro-choice camp paint their opponents as oppressors not seen since the likes of Attila the Hun and blatant misogynists. In reality, there's a tremendous amount of ambiguity involved in the enterprise. Some people may be mindless, indoctrinated drones incapable of seeing shades of gray, but many people are not, regardless of which side they stand on. All but the most delusional folks understand how complicated the issue is.

You're a fucking asshole.

The purpose of this discussion, however, is not to proselytize. Ultimately, I seek to make my points and let whoever reads them decide for themselves how they feel. If I've succeeded in making you consider something you had previously not taken into account, then I've accomplished my admittedly modest goal. No, I want to talk about abortion on a more personal level, and examine an aspect of the issue that rarely seems to be addressed on the big stage, so to speak.

When I was 19, I was involved in my first serious romantic and sexual relationship. My girlfriend ran out of birth control pills shortly before Christmas break, and we hated using condoms, so we erred on the side of caution and stopped having sex for a few days. We drove to her parents' house in upstate New York once finals were over so I could meet them for the first time. It was a long drive from Pittsburgh, about 10 hours, and we got in pretty late. We decided to take a dip in the hot tub before bed to relax and unwind after the commute.

Now, one of my points of personal pride is that I, based on what I've seen, have a lot more self-control when it comes to sex than most males my age. Don't get me wrong, I like sex as much as the next guy. And considering I'd lost my virginity to this girl only a few short months before the night in question and was also head over in heels in love with her, I was probably as close to "sex-obsessed" as I'll ever be...which is probably why my vaunted self-discipline didn't do me one damn bit of good that night.

I couldn't resist. We had sex. I was about as regretful as I could have been in the immediate aftermath, but I did a pretty good job of rationalizing it to myself. I didn't know the precise odds of getting a girl pregnant in a single instance of unprotected sex, but I figured they were pretty low. There really aren't any concrete odds, of course, since it depends on where the woman's at in her ovulation cycle. And everyone reading this should know this by now, but you should not have unprotected sex, ever, unless you are trying to conceive or willing to risk an unplanned pregnancy. Anyway, before I fell asleep that night, I'd put the matter out of my mind and forgotten about it...Until a few weeks later, when we were back at school, and my girlfriend uttered one of the more frightening phrases in the English language: "I'm late."

My brain, ca. mid-January, 2007.

Anyone who has had this experience can attest to how fucking terrifying it is, particularly if you're a teenager. I do not exaggerate when I say that my life flashed before my eyes. Immediately, I began to panic - inwardly, of course - and imagine the worst possible scenarios. I saw myself and my girlfriend feeling the wrath of our parents, dropping out of school, being poor, working awful jobs, eventually growing to hate each other for our mistake, and on and on. I'm pretty sure I aged five years in that week alone.

When, a few days later, I heard my girlfriend shriek in pure, unadulterated joy from the bathroom of my dorm suite, it was one of the more ecstatic moments of my life. I have never been so happy to know a vagina was bleeding. Thankfully, that has been my only scare to this point, in large part because I have not had unprotected sex since. When that girl and I broke up over a year later and I started sleeping with girls who weren't on the pill, I began using condoms. I'd had sex hundreds of times without one before I ever used one. Of course, I hated it, like everyone does, but I got used to them eventually. And I've never had the misfortune of a broken condom.

But to bring us back to the topic at hand, in those few days between "I'm late" and the merciful, tardy arrival of her period, we talked about our options. A lot. I don't think we talked about anything else during that span. For the first time, abortion was no longer an idea, a hypothetical, an academic question. It was real, and it was scary. Thankfully, we were on the same page. Both of us supported "the right to choose," but weren't at all sure we could go through with it ourselves. A simplistic view of the subject would likely lead one to a conclusion of hypocrisy. It was not and is not true. Being in favor of the choice does not necessarily mean being in favor of the act, and that's a point so many hard-line pro-lifers fail to grasp. It's an eminently sensitive issue, and should be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. For example, had my girlfriend been raped and become pregnant, I would have completely supported her if she elected to terminate the pregnancy.

And that's why.

As it stood, we had potentially conceived together, and were in love, and ultimately neither of us wanted to abort. We were realists, of course- we knew it would be unspeakably difficult to raise a child, given the circumstances. We knew it would require monumental effort and sacrifice for us to give a baby a good home. Neither of us was sure we were ready to even attempt that, and our doubt was well-placed: We weren't. Who is, at 18 or 19 years old? We discussed at length the possibility of giving up the baby for adoption, and had she actually been pregnant, I think that's what we ultimately would have done.

While we were together, we occasionally talked about unplanned pregnancies again - thankfully, on the much more comfortable level of pure academia. I've had conversations about it with other friends, as well as strangers. I've heard positions all over the map, from outright dismissal of even the thought of aborting to what amounted to, "I'd be on the phone with the nearest clinic three seconds after the test came back positive." What has rarely come up: No matter what decision is made, how much of a role should the man play in making it?

This is the question that fascinates me more than whether or not abortion is moral or should be legal, for several reasons. As I said, it seems to rarely be discussed at length. Second, my mind is pretty much made up on whether or not abortion is moral or should be legal. Finally, it's a much more personal question, more applicable to someone's specific situation than the aforementioned broad stroke questions.

I feel that the decision ultimately falls to the woman to make. True, she didn't create the fetus alone, and so it's not just hers. But the woman is the one who will have to endure the trials of pregnancy and the pain of childbirth. If she is unwilling or unable to make that journey, with all the obstacles and sacrifices and tribulations that it entails, she shouldn't have to.

I'm not suggesting that the man should not factor into the decision at all. That's completely idiotic. Both parties must put a lot of thought and discussion into whatever choice is made, and ultimately make peace with that choice. In a perfect world, the prospective mother and father agree on a course of action, as my ex-girlfriend and I did three years ago. That's not the reality, however, and I've never been able to really answer the question of how much the man's input should ultimately be weighted. Hopefully, I never have to.

Today is my niece's first birthday. My brother and sister-in-law planned the pregnancy and were ready for it. They looked forward to her arrival not with dread, but with joy. They were among the lucky ones. She is a beautiful, healthy girl, and I love her implicitly. The thought of her not existing is quite soul-crushing, and if I feel this strongly about her, I can only imagine how I'll feel about my own offspring. But I know that, to a stranger, she's just another baby. Regardless of whether or not I feel that I could knowingly destroy something that could one day grow into my child, that choice is one that should not be taken away.

So many people involved in this debate seem to forget that no matter what decision a person makes, they're the ones who have to live with it.

A Whole New Way To Shoot The Shit

2010-01-25T12:16:00.001-05:00

We here at Bullsnark!, in addition to using the royal "we," take pride in our sense of humor. Simply from reading this blog, you might get the impression that I'm an exceedingly angry person. And a lot of stuff certainly pisses me off, but rarely do I find myself unable to laugh at the sheer absurdity of any situation. To better illustrate that, and for a change of pace from the usual demagoguery, today I'd like to introduce a segment called Awesomeness in Action, to commemorate outstanding acts or decisions.

Today's Awesomeness in Action takes us to Japan. A 39 year old construction worker was arrested this summer for two separate attacks on women near Osaka. The attacks were not sexual in nature (I have a twisted sense of humor, but not that twisted. Come on.), nor did he threaten or physically injure the victims. No, Mr. Tatsuya Moriguchi was a lot more creative, choosing instead to become probably the first guy in recorded history to execute the brilliant drive-by shit toss.

Like this. Except, you know...with poop.

Basically, Moriguchi copped a squat outside, got on his moped and threw his own shit at people walking the streets. Officials were, as you might expect, a bit baffled. "The suspect has told investigators he did it because he felt frustrated when his work didn't go well," one told reporters. "I have no idea what kind of penalty he may face. I have not heard about such a case before."

This story's a bit old - it happened in August - but I can't find an update, sadly. I'd really like to know what they charged Moriguchi with. Oh, to be a fly on the wall at that hearing. I'm also curious as to exactly what could've happened to the dude at his job that would piss him off so much, the only cure for his ills was to chuck his own excrement at strangers. Sounds like a shit job to me. (ba-dum-KSSHHHH! I'll be here all week, folks.)

Maybe the guy's on to something, here. It's an instinct for primates to fling feces all over the place, as anyone who's ever seen monkeys at the zoo can attest. Whether that's a defense mechanism against predators or just plain old fashioned boredom, it's a primal reaction. In humans, of course, it's been sublimated, but who's to say succumbing to baser urges every so often isn't good therapy? Instead of resorting to the tired, twin clichés of rape and murder, Moriguchi took things in a much less permanently damaging and much more interesting direction.

Not funny.

Funny.

Okay, I'm through trying to make this a legitimately intellectual topic or be rational in any way. (Says the guy who just juxtaposed a murder scene with an anthropomorphic turd.) I just find the idea of a grown man throwing poop at people to be ridiculously funny. Sure, it's gross, and can't have been much fun for the victims, but who can argue with a bit of schadenfreude?

For the weirdest and most creative crime I've heard of in quite some time, Mr. Moriguchi earns today's Awesomeness in Action.

Scourge Of The Cyberseas, Part IV: Facecrack

2010-01-22T18:33:00.003-05:00

This is the conclusion of this week's four-part series on Facebook. Click here for previous installments.
My name is Kyle, and I'm addicted to Facebook.

Odds are, so are you, whether or not you know it. There are degrees of addiction, of course. But if you feel a powerful urge every day to do anything that doesn't involve biological needs, you're an addict. Simple as that.

C'mon, lemme get summa dat Facebook, baby! I'LL SUCK YO DICK!!!

I had a 90 minute conversation with one of my best friends. I discussed rules and settings for my fantasy baseball league. I sent messages about a few different personal and professional matters. I promoted this blog. That's just today. Facebook is almost always open in one of the tabs of my browser. A huge portion of my email comes from Facebook notifying me of posts, messages, comments, et cetera.

More and more these days, so many peoples' lives are inextricably intertwined, run through, or even based around Facebook. It's simple fact at this point: Facebook is the predominant social conduit for our society. What used to require instant messaging, phone calls, paper invitations, e-mails...all of that can be done via Facebook now. I can count the number of people I know under 40 who don't have a profile on one hand. For Christ's sake, my niece has one, and she's not even a year old yet.

My own addiction has had its ebbs and flows. There have been occasions where I haven't logged in for weeks at a time, though not many. At present, I couldn't tell you when the last day I didn't at least check it once was. Even when I've been traveling or without ready Internet access available, I've found ways to placate my fix. Thankfully, none of them involved sexual favors. I haven't quite gotten to that level yet, and I hope I never do.

Facebook is something of a rarity - a site that has seen the grip it has on its users do nothing but grow tighter and tighter ever since its inception six years ago. This is an impressive feat, and one not often matched over such a lengthy period. Logic dictates that it's only a matter of time before some upstart begins to siphon from Facebook's clientele. After all, at the time Facebook emerged, MySpace was a dominant force of social networking, and within a couple of years, it was reduced to a punch line in Superbad.

There was some speculation that the hellspawn known as Twitter might pose a threat, but I don't see it happening. Twitter is a good supplement to Facebook, for those who think we need to know every goddamned mundane activity their life consists of, but unless it makes wholesale changes to its infrastructure, it can't begin to offer the scope of what Facebook does. Hell, Facebook's major redesigns over the past year and change appear to have been modeled after Twitter, which, in turn, copped its style from Facebook's status update innovation. Clearly there's some sort of hellacious incest going on here.

I still want to know if George Lucas knew Luke and Leia were siblings when he wrote that scene.

Let's not forget - this is somewhat uncharted territory. We have never seen anything like Facebook, because the Internet is still a pretty recent development in human history. All the big kids on the playground - your Googles, your Amazons, your Yahoos and YouTubes - are different animals. None of them are as broad. None have ingratiated themselves within the lives of users quite like Facebook has. It's still theoretically possible that Facebook could have staying power the likes of which we have never seen for a site of its kind. They have us all by the balls, and they fucking know it. That's why in the face of severe backlash for new features and redesigns, Facebook has made only cursory changes, or ignored it completely. What the hell are you going to do, leave? Of course you're not. You'll bitch about it (on Facebook, without a hint of irony) for a week or so, and then you'll get used to whatever change they made and shut the fuck up about it. I'm half-convinced Facebook could sponsor or embark on a fucking genocide and people would give up protesting after a week.

It is also theoretically possible that Facebook morphs into Skynet or the Thought Police. Scoff and laugh if you must, but I'm not being entirely facetious here. The possibility of Facebook, like Obi-Wan, becoming more powerful than we can possibly imagine is a frightening one, no matter how far-fetched it may be. And it's even more sinister when you consider that we're bringing it entirely on ourselves. Now, humanity has been pretty sure for a while now that we're going have a direct hand in our own collective demise. Nuclear war, robot uprising, global warming...pick your poison. It seems like an established fact that we're going to fuck our own shit up eventually.

I promise you, when the end comes, it will not be amusing Flash animation. At least not until ebaum's world gets hold of video footage.

Still, I don't know about you, but I'm really not cool with the idea of a website started by a drunk, emo freshman getting us all killed. If we gotta go out, I'd hope we can do so in a more dignified, or way more awesome fashion. I'm still rooting for a zombie apocalypse. There's something we can all enjoy.

Scourge Of The Cyberseas, Part III: The Man Keeps Us Down

2010-01-21T19:21:00.002-05:00

This entry continues this week's series on Facebook. Click here for Part I, and here for Part II. Check back tomorrow for the final installment.

Facebook, of course, was originally a site for college students only. Registration required the use of a college-issued e-mail address, and many colleges were not included. Inexorably, Facebook began to expand- to other colleges, to high schools, to corporations, until finally it proudly proclaimed itself a social network that "anyone [could] join." The number of users aged 55 and over - the ubiquitous "Baby Boomer" set - has exploded over recent months. What was once a refuge for college students to troll for booty and brag about how many keg stands they did Tuesday night has become a veritable minefield of professional colleagues, grandmothers, and pastors.

As we've already discussed, there are privacy controls that can hide potentially embarrassing and/or incriminating evidence from whoever you might not want to know what a terrible, disgusting, sinful, law-breaking bitch or bastard you really are. Much better than the awkwardness of having to explain to Uncle Filbert or Grandma Eunice why you refused their friend request, no? And again, personal responsibility comes into play here - if you're not willing to take the risk of somebody seeing a particular item, it might be best to err on the side of caution and not post said item. Freedom of expression - even that which manifests itself as you posting a YouTube video of a dog chomping on a guy's junk or posting some Three Six Mafia lyrics as your status - is all well and good, but pragmatism and tact are necessary. Like it or not, Facebook is freely available now. Act accordingly.

Just gave Great-Aunt Mildred a fucking heart attack. Nice job. Seriously though, don't stop.

It's an adjustment most of us have made well enough. But in the days before Facebook welcomed the world's tired, poor, and huddled masses yearning to breathe free, plenty of us uploaded some seriously compromising shit. We may have placed restrictions on who can see it, or even outright deleted it...but does that mean it's gone?

Not necessarily. In Part II yesterday, we examined the terms of service agreement, as well as a former employee's allegations of the site keeping record of every move made by every member. Bottom line: Anything that you've ever done on Facebook could still be floating somewhere in cyberspace, waiting to rear its ugly head and jam it right up your asshole.

Granted, this is an unfortunate truth of the Internet as a whole: Once it's there, it never really goes away. Still, before its expansion, there was virtually no reason for employers, family elders, and that ilk to be coming within a million beer bongs-length of Facebook. Now, every-fucking-one you know is using it, and you could be extremely screwed. We're not just talking about dealing with family fallout from unflattering photos or drunken rants. We're talking about getting and keeping a goddamned job.

More and more as time has gone on, employers are using Facebook as a means to screen new hires or keep tabs on the personal lives of peons on the payroll. Again, to be perfectly fair, this isn't solely the fault of Facebook. It'd be true of any site with the size and scope Facebook boasts. But as it stands, there's only one site like that: Facebook itself. (Don't give me that MySpace shit. Virtually anyone still using MySpace is a musician, a 12 year old girl, or a pedophile.)

The species duckfaceslutticus Myspacea in its natural habitat: a bathroom on a 45-degree angle.

According to an August survey conducted by CareerBuilder.com, 45 percent of employers are using social networking sites to screen new hires. The sample size is a bit small (just under 2,300 companies) but large enough to illustrate that Facebook is becoming an important and oft-utilized tool in the hiring process.

And that's bullshit.

As long as it's not affecting my job performance, I don't believe an employer has any right to know anything about my personal life I don't choose to divulge, or any right to tell me what is or is not acceptable. This is one of the reasons I am vehemently opposed to the widespread use of mandatory drug testing, as well as prohibition of "employee fraternization." The approach I've always taken to jobs is this: While I am on company time, I will do my job to the best of my ability. Once I'm off the clock, that's it. I leave work at work. I will show up on time and come in ready to work. I leave my personal shit at home. If I want to go out and get shitfaced on my own time, that's my goddamned prerogative and my goddamned business, and as long as I show up to work the next day in functional, presentable shape, it should fucking stay that way.

You, as my employer, are paying me a wage in exchange for my time. Said time does not extend to the rest of my life. I will do what I want, when I want, where I want, when I'm on my own time, and it should be none of your concern. Kindly mind your own fucking business and leave me alone, thanks.

Memo. From: Me. To: Employers Questioning My Personal Life.

That's not the world we live in, unfortunately. And thanks to Facebook's relentless expansionism, employers can be further all up in our grills than ever before.

So maybe, you might be saying to yourself, given everything we've covered in these posts, it's a good idea to cut ties with Facebook altogether? Perhaps. But in tomorrow's grand finale, I'll explain why that is no longer an option.

Scourge Of The Cyberseas, Part II: We Own You (And Your Shit)

2010-01-20T21:20:00.004-05:00

This is Part II of this week's series on Facebook. For Part I, click here.

Roundabout this time last year, Facebook created quite the stir when they updated their terms of service agreement. The change responsible for a majority of the stink raised involved control of the information or material users posted or uploaded to the site. The old TOS specifically stated that Facebook relinquished any license over user content upon deactivation of the account. The new agreement removed that requirement.

Facebook's Palo Alto headquarters.

It wasn't long before official statements were being made to soothe the angry mobs forming over the change, and soon after Facebook again altered the language of its TOS, more or less returning it to its previous state. Still, there is some language within the agreement which should seriously concern any user - if they're even aware of it:

1. For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos ("IP content"), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook ("IP License"). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.

Translated from legalese, this effectively means that anything you post to Facebook* is theirs to use in any way to see fit. They can transfer it to third parties, they can sub-license it, and there's not a goddamned thing you can do about it. They are under no obligation to pay you for any use of your intellectual property.

* N.B. that content posted with certain privacy restrictions is excluded.

As noted earlier, the expiry of said license was restored after complaints, but notice the final part of that last sentence. If your "IP content" was shared with others - and this can be done by anyone who can view the content in question - the license does not expire. Depending on the situation and circumstances, it may be a logistical impossibility to ensure that said content has been deleted by anyone who it might have been shared with.

Of course, in any and all statements from Facebook concerning the TOS, they have stressed that the language within the agreement is simply there to facilitate the sharing of content between users, and that they would never dream of profiting from the intellectual property of others. Legally, however, they can do exactly that if they want to. And we're talking about a corporation that:

Looked the other way on third-party data mining, until recently.
Did not make the option to delete an account available, or ensure deletion of data on a deactivated account, until recently.
Has what, quite frankly, seems like a cultish obsession with the complete eradication of privacy.
Allegedly stores all information ever posted to the site, and features a master password that allows employees to access any user's account. (Emphasis on "allegedly". Consider the source, and the fact that the claims are totally unverified at the moment.)

If a crack addict with a history of stealing everything in every house he's ever been in offered to watch your house while you went on vacation, and his response when you cited his previous fuckery was "Just trust me," accompanied by a toothless grin, would you trust him? (Hopefully I'm not interrupting an actual answer here, but I just wanted to say how much I love the fact that "fuckery" passes Firefox's spell-check without my having added it to the dictionary.)

Well, you do have an honest face...

Oh, sure, if they tried to profit from the use of a member's intellectual property, they'd probably have a lawsuit on their hands and plenty of bad publicity, and the enterprise is making enough money that it's probably non-issue. But there are other ways this can negatively affect users besides, in the parlance of our times, not gettin' they asses paid. Such circumstances will be discussed in Part III.

Scourge Of The Cyberseas, Part I: Leaving The Door Unlocked

2010-01-20T14:49:00.004-05:00

A thousand apologies for the lack of an entry yesterday. I know your lives consist of nothing else but hunching over a computer screen, furiously refreshing this page every few seconds, hoping for a glimpse of my wit and wisdom. I had a minor existential crisis yesterday that rendered me less than capable of writing something that didn't suck. Should you find yourself in a similar situation, I highly recommend Californication as a cure for what ails ya. Damn fine television, damn fine.

But I digress. I promised the people a series of posts on the social media behemoth and future world overlord we refer to in our simple tongues as "Facebook," and so you shall have it.

Hard as it may be for some of us to believe, there was a time when Facebook did not exist. This shall hereafter be referred to as "the before-time." It actually wasn't that long ago - Facebook will celebrate its sixth anniversary in two weeks. In those six years, it has become one of the most popular and ubiquitous websites in the entire world, with estimated revenue in excess of half a billion dollars, offices in California, Ireland and South Korea, and nearly a thousand employees. Hard to believe it began as a "Hot or Not" started by a teenage nerd drinking away the pain of being dumped. Instead of getting plastered, drunk dialing his ex multiple times, and masturbating to Internet porn using his tears as lubricant before passing out in a pile of his own vomit, Mark Zuckerberg began a veritable Internet empire. Give the man credit for resiliency, if nothing else.

Who unleashed SkyNet? This fucking guy.

It hasn't necessarily been all sunshine and rainbows for Zuckerberg and his magnum opus. As you might expect with a service so widely used, Facebook has encountered numerous controversies. One of those is the focus of Part I in this series: privacy concerns.

One wonders how many current users are even aware of this, but Facebook was a vastly different animal when it first began. It was called "The Facebook." The "wall" was a jumbled mess of text not attributed to whoever wrote it. There was no such thing as an "application." Perhaps the biggest surface difference was the lack of a "news feed." That was introduced in September 2006 and met with considerable criticism, for obvious reasons. In response to the protestations of the masses, Facebook enacted privacy settings which allowed users to control what was published in the feed, as well as the ability to manually delete published items. Two years later, when the news feed and wall were retroactively combined, protests sprang up anew, though the controls still existed. As of last month, however, they no longer do. Facebook has removed them, to a considerable lack of fanfare.

Okay. So what? There are still steps a person can take to ensure privacy. Access to your information can be restricted to those you approve as friends, for instance. There are still customizable security settings that allow you to block even people you have listed as friends from seeing certain things you might be posting. This article lists 10 settings that are, in a word, really fucking useful. They also typically go unused because most users are completely unaware that they exist. Even I, a person who takes pride in researching the shit out of almost everything, was surprised to learn of a few of them. Or, if you're really worried about some unwanted party seeing something - and I know this is crazy talk - you could just not fucking post it.

In the case for selective breeding, we present Exhibit A.

It really is that simple, folks. There is no gun to your head. You do not have to write that status update about how much coke you did last night. You do not have to upload those pictures of your trip to the sex shop. You do not have to divulge your love for fisting midgets in the "Interests" section of your profile. As always, there's a little thing called personal responsibility. You might not have heard of it, seeing as it's so rarely used or enforced. Say it with me now: PER-suhn-null ree-SPONS-ah-BILL-ah-TEE. Good!

There are some things that a Facebook user has little to no control over unless they wish to stop using the site, however. I'll discuss that in Part II.

I'm In Ur Facebook, Killin All Ur Dudes

2010-01-18T23:05:00.000-05:00

Earlier this month, a Georgia woman and her two daughters logged onto Facebook from their cell phones and somehow ended up signed into strangers' accounts. According to the article, this is far from an isolated incident, though it's as yet unclear how often this has happened and whether the problem is limited to Facebook. Facebook ~~ducked questions~~ referred all questions to AT&T, which, predictably, downplayed the incident.

Now, is this really that big a deal? As the article points out, sensitive sites and those that use encryption would generally be immune to this sort of glitch, the result of a "misdirected cookie." So there's no need to fear that someone could accidentally be given access to your bank account or suddenly find themselves privy to top-secret government information. The vulnerability of information and the functionality of technology are, thankfully, far removed from the dire straits presented in such intellectual fare as Live Free Or Die Hard.

Achieved with the power of HACKING TEH INTARWUBZ!!!11!1one

Well...yes, it's still a big deal. On the list of things that could possibly be vulnerable to this sort of error is e-mail services. And as ubiquitous as Facebook has become, the idea of unauthorized access is nothing to sneeze at. We're not just talking about someone updating your status to read "I am totally ghey for dudes I like ballz in my mouth klolololol!" although, since peoples' moms and aunts and goddamned grandmothers are using the site now, that sort of thing is more than a little embarrassing. There is a lot of sensitive information available, particularly from the younger set, who don't see a problem with plastering their pages with everything from where they are and what they're doing at any given moment to things like their cell phone number and address. Not to mention the fact that employers are using Facebook more and more to check the background of applicants and current employees.

You are so fired. But, your ability to hit a beer bong like a champ looks great on a resumé.

But I have a lot of issues with Facebook as a whole and the role it plays in our lives - so many, in fact, that one blog post is insufficient to address them all. Check back all throughout the week for a series of posts all about the social networking site.

The Path To World Domination Is Paved With Internet Memes.

2010-01-16T19:09:00.001-05:00

Short post today, I promise.

If you watched more than an hour of the NFL playoff coverage last weekend, you probably saw the trailer for the Harrison Ford/Brendan Fraser flick Extraordinary Measures. The movie looks pretty bad, honestly; it's a virtual lock to be overly sentimental, hackneyed and cliché. That tends to happen with a movie about dying kids. But the film itself isn't what has caught the public's attention, or mine, for that matter. Rather, it's this exchange:

Fraser: We can do this, if we push ourselves, if we work around the clock-
Ford: I ALREADY WORK AROUND THE CLOCK!!!

I can't really tell you what it is about that line that makes me laugh so much, but it seems to have the same effect on damn near everyone else. It took about 0.344534 nanoseconds before somebody posted a YouTube video where the line loops for 10 minutes. We haven't seen something like this since "You're the man now, dog!' was en vogue.

Unfortunately for every football fan in the country, CBS Films re-did the trailer and removed the line, according to ESPN's Bill Simmons. I have a hard time understanding why, since that was really the only reason anyone was paying any attention to this movie. It's apparently the first film to go into production for the company. I guess they've decided that they don't want to make too many more.

Okay, okay. Most of the people giggling at "I ALREADY WORK AROUND THE CLOCK!!!" were not going to actually bother seeing the movie, including me. Like I said, it doesn't look like anything we haven't seen a thousand times before, or particularly well-done. Also, Ford's clearly been mailing it in since Air Force One, if not before. I like to think he's been picking movies based solely on how ridiculous a given line might be in a trailer.

Air Force One: "Get off...my plane!"
K-19: The Widowmaker (in horrible Russian accent): "I'll tell you when the mission is over!"
Firewall: "I wanna know what you're doing, and I wanna know now!" Or: "You get the money...when I get my family!" Or: "Change of plan. I'm done talking." Seriously, there are so many unintentionally funny lines in that trailer, you could use pretty much any of them.

Anyway, I still don't get the motive behind changing the trailer. People aren't going to stop making fun of "I ALREADY WORK AROUND THE CLOCK!!!" just because you took the line out of the trailer. And chances are, in a few years, that line will be all anyone remembers about Extraordinary Measures.

See that clock? I ALREADY WORK AROUND IT!!!

I'm just waiting for the "I ALREADY WORK AROUND THE CLOCK!" and "You're the man now, dog!" remix that ends with a RickRoll. Frankly, I'm surprised it hasn't happened yet. I cannot be the only person this idea has occurred to. I bounced it off a buddy of mine, and his exact words were: "Finish your web browsing, shut down your computer, leave quietly, and never mention this to anyone again...Do you realize what that would do to Western civilization? We'd be shattered. Everyone would be stuck at their computers. Our enemies would rise up and celebrate our undoing."

Maybe so. But, to be honest, I've been halfway rooting for the collapse of Western civilization lately. The only reason I haven't undertaken the task myself is that I don't have the necessary tools or skill to edit it together. So it won't be me. But someone needs to do this. Someone will do this. And once I've successfully looted and beaten my way to a position of power in a world gone mad, that person will be rewarded.

Are We Entirely Sure It Wasn't Crab People?

2010-01-15T14:00:00.000-05:00

By now, everyone knows what's going on in Haiti. The devastation caused by this week's earthquake and series of aftershocks is horrifying. The magnitude 7.0 quake is the worst to hit Haiti - already the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere- since the end of the 18th century. The Red Cross' current estimate is 50,000 dead, and speculation is growing that this figure might actually be on the low end of the spectrum.

Of course, if Pat Robertson is to be believed, Haiti had it coming.

Robertson is the founder of the Christian Coalition of America. Like many prominent televangelists, he has numerous controversial views. If you aren't inclined to read that laundry list, it can be summarized as: Anyone, anywhere, doing anything that Pat Robertson does not agree with, is being punished by God in one way or another, and anyone who is not a Southern Baptist like him is a heathen. Also, he can destroy the world with the awesome power of his legs.

PAT ROBERTSON SMASH!

A common defense of Robertson (excluding fellacious, fallacious, vehement nods of agreement from similarly insane folk) is the theory that, much like talking heads in the media, he doesn't actually believe much of what he says. There's no way to prove that, of course. We can only take his remarks at face value, and the fact remains that no matter what he actually believes, he is saying these things publicly. What's frightening is how many people seem to agree with him.

This man has repeatedly shown himself to be a racist, a sexist, a homophobe, and wholly intolerant of other religions. He has called for the assassination of Hugo Chavez, sitting president of Venezuela. Earlier in the decade, he supported another foreign leader, Liberian President Charles Taylor, who was indicted by the United Nations for war crimes, conveniently not mentioning his $8 million investment in a gold mine in that country. He has been accused of using his non-profit, tax-exempt organization, Operation Blessing, as a front for personal financial gain. Despite all this, he continues to enjoy a position in the public eye. Despite all this, people still support his ventures. Despite all this, we continue to give him power and satisfaction by scrutinizing his remarks.

Oh, and I almost forgot: His facts are way, way off on this one. Not only does he have the history of Haiti completely ass-backwards, he is apparently unaware that, despite common misconceptions, the country is not full of witch doctors practicing voodoo. No, Haiti is actually 80 percent Roman Catholic. 16 percent of the population is Protestant. Maybe they aren't Southern Baptists (who, by the way, make up about 0.25% of the world's population), but they're rooting for the same guy.

I didn't even write this with the intention of devoting so much space to Robertson. I'm pretty sure he's just pissed because his real name is Marion. There's plenty of other controversy surrounding the fallout from the disaster in Haiti. President Barack Obama has pledged millions of dollars, as well as some manpower, to the relief effort. You would think such a move would be generally applauded, or at least acknowledged as necessary, due to our role as self-appointed leaders of the free world and World Police.

Blowin' shit up! FUCK YEAH! Fixin' stuff! ......

Rush Limbaugh, on the other hand, sees things differently.

Unlike Robertson, whose comments were lambasted by pretty much everyone - and that includes people on his side of the religious and political fence- Limbaugh has received a small amount of support and defense. Mainly, it's being claimed that his comments were taken out of context. Maybe so. Perhaps his unrestrained cynicism is right on point and Obama's looking to profit from Haiti's misfortune. He may even be justified in complaining about how much money we're sending to Haiti. After all, we're not exactly flush with cash at the moment. Then again, Limbaugh doesn't seem to have a problem with all the other things we've gotten to do in our unofficial capacity as "The Motherfuckin' Boss"; namely, bombing various brown people, as the late, great George Carlin would say.

It goes both ways, folks. You cannot, in good conscience, support this country gallivanting around the globe, like its shit doesn't stink, telling other people what to do and how to do it, and then bitch and moan when we are the first place foreign nations look to for help. Being "leaders of the free world" doesn't just mean joyriding around the world, doing whatever the fuck we feel like. It also means shouldering the load on global problems. This is the role we asked for. Well, we got it. Maybe you didn't want it; I know I sure as hell didn't. But it's what we got, and we're stuck with it for an indefinite period.

At the very least, Limbaugh deserves criticism for the timing of his comments. I won't get into how I feel about partisan politics (Hint: it's not real positive) but this exemplifies a big part of the problem. Here we are, with at least 50,000 people dead and probably more (by the way, that's over 10 times the death toll of 9/11), and all Limbaugh can focus on is attacking Obama's motives. It's more than a little sickening.

You can take issue with how our government spends it money. I certainly do, and God knows I'd love a little bailout of my own to pay off my student debt. Hell, I'd settle for being able to find a job. But there's a time for that, and it is not in the immediate goddamned aftermath of one of the worst natural disasters we've seen in a long time.

UPDATE: Limbaugh has responded to the criticism of his remarks, and, predictably, isn't backing down. He went so far as to insult a caller, labeling him a "blockhead...a close-minded bigot who is ill-informed." He also claimed that the caller had "tampons in [his] ears," which: ???

I would hope you'll take a moment to appreciate the sweet, delicious irony of Rush fucking Limbaugh calling someone else a close-minded bigot. Seriously, I'm not even mad about this so much as I can't stop laughing.

I Really, Really Fucking Hate Twilight

2010-01-13T12:03:00.000-05:00

There is plenty of garbage out there that is unbelievably popular. This is America, after all, a country that has rarely met a reality show or Michael Bay movie it didn't like. But nothing gets my blood boiling more than the stinking pile of filth that is the Twilight series. I have not read the books or seen the films, because I value my pride and my sanity and also have a penis. However, I have done enough research to know what I'm dealing with. And what I am dealing with is fucking terrible.

I won't summarize the plot, because you can easily find that elsewhere, and also because it physically pains me to do so. Instead, I will lay out in detail six reasons why the Twilight series is possibly the worst fucking shit in the history of everything.

1. There is a staggering lack of characterization.

The main character, whose name is Bella Swan (Get it?! Beautiful swan! How delightfully subtle!), is simultaneously the most blatant Mary Sue in the history of published fiction and the most hollow, shallow character a writer can possibly create. She's barely described at all, either physically or mentally. Pretty much all we know about her is that she's super-plain, intelligent, and a complete klutz (and yet every fucking guy in town wants to bone her). This is done with a cunning purpose: With Bella essentially a blank slate, dumbass teenage girls can project themselves into her shoes that much more easily. At the same time, making her an awkward, plain Jane preys on how many teenage girls feel, only making it easier to identify with her. More on this later.

Edward Cullen is, as Meyer breathlessly reminds us every sentence or so, the most fucking perfect guy in the history of human existence. Whereas Bella gets a cursory physical description, Edward's body is lovingly described in excruciating detail, though it's the same goddamned description over and over again, presumably because Meyer was too busy masturbating to her creation to change things up a little. He pretty much spends the entire series being perfect, other than being angsty as hell.

Ain't got shit on Edward Cullen, son.

Neither of them ever demonstrate even a hint of the complexity and ambiguity that defines real people, and since the series is unblinkingly trained on them, that's kind of a problem.

2. It shits all over traditional vampire mythology.

Which would be fine, if Meyer were doing it in a way that was interesting, cool or made any fucking sense, but she's not. In the first book, Edward reveals that the real reason vampires do not go out into sunlight is that they...sparkle. It was at about this point where anyone holding out hope that this would merely be a mediocre, trashy romance novel should have found a cannon that could hurl the book into the sun, or at least tossed the damn thing in the garbage.

Are you fucking serious? They sparkle? No. Just stop. Vampires exposed to sunlight burst into flame. They turn to dust. They fucking explode. At the very least, they become weak. This has been established pretty much since the invention of vampires. This is not good enough for Stephenie Meyer, who thinks it would be awesome if vampires in sunlight looked like they had taken a bath in glitter.

Much like vampirism, a fate worse than death.

It doesn't stop there. Towards the end of the first book, Bella gets bitten by a different vampire. Edward sucks the venom out of the wound and saves her, and they live happily ever after until the next book comes out. According to Meyer, getting bitten by a vampire - an undead demon - is no more dangerous than getting bitten by a goddamned snake. Which is still pretty dangerous, depending on the snake, but can be treated easily enough if you get to a hospital quickly and/or are with someone who knows how to deal with snakebites.

Meyer's vampires cannot fly. They cannot transform into any other shape. They can, however, brood a lot. So they've got that goin' for them. Which is nice.

3. It is misogynistic as hell.

Let me be clear here: Misogyny in literature is not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, or always an intentional thing done by the author. One of my favorite writers is Cormac McCarthy, who is routinely accused of misogyny in his work. Whether or not that's valid is a topic for another day. I've been accused of it in my own writing, and it was certainly not a conscious choice on my part. If my female classmates and instructors took the fact that all my female characters spend their lives in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant, to be misogynistic, well, that's simply due to their tiny, inferior brains. But I digress.

I'm also not one to foist social responsibility on authors. I can't stand hearing about some whack job opening fire in an Arby's and then claiming it was because he read The Catcher in the Rye. Let's face it, one thing or another was going to set this son of a bitch off. That it happened to be J.D. Salinger's novel is not his fault. But there comes a point where enough is enough. Meyer reached that point, bitch-slapped the female guard at the gate, and plowed on through it.

Given the incredible popularity of the books, Meyer is deservedly being criticized by feminists. There are few demographics more impressionable than teenage girls, and whether she means to or not, Meyer is filling their heads with absolutely terrible lessons:

- If a guy dumps you and claims to not love you anymore, he doesn't actually mean it. He just wants you to prove your love by begging for him to come back. If you intentionally ruin your own life, that helps.
- It's perfectly reasonable to be in love with a guy who is perpetually on the verge of killing you, because it's exciting. Plus, if he does hurt you - which he'd never do, except when he does it - it's only because he loves you.
- Stringing a nice guy along only to dump him when your ex-boyfriend re-enters the picture is not only acceptable, but the right thing to do under any circumstances. Also, telling them both that you love them, for years, is okay as long as you feel appropriately guilty for a few minutes.
- You can definitely count on your boyfriend to be the one who shows inhuman restraint when it comes to doing the nasty, so you should do everything you can short of parading around naked to undermine his efforts in that department.
- Men are way, way more powerful than your soft, fragile ass. So don't piss them off if you want to live.

Gender relations, Twilight-style.

Ultimately, though, this is symptomatic of terrible writing, specifically Bella's ultra-weak characterization. She's the ultimate damsel in distress. She is routinely shown to be completely lost, directionless and paralyzed without some dude to tell her what to do and when to do it. This is not, as Meyer claimed while dismissing accusations of anti-feminism, just because Bella "doesn't do kung fu and she cooks for her father." No, Bella is fucking obsessed with Edward. There's no way around it and no other way to describe it, no matter how many times Meyer tries to ram the "true love" excuse down the reader's throat.

Also, there's that whole thing where in the fourth book, Edward rips Bella's fucking uterus open with his teeth, while Jacob (Bella's lovesick best friend, and a fucking werewolf) randomly beats the piss out of Edward's sister. I wish I were making this shit up.

4. It is "abstinence porn."

That term was coined by the fine ladies over at Bitch magazine (which is a spectacular name for a periodical), and I can't think of anything more fitting. Despite Bella and Edward being all ZOMGINLUV4EVAAAAA, they don't have sex until the fourth book. "In reality, the abstinence message—wrapped in the genre of abstinence porn—objectifies Bella in the same ways that 'real' porn might," Christine Seifert wrote. "The Twilight books conflate Bella losing her virginity with the loss of other things, including her sense of self and her very life. Such a high-stakes treatment of abstinence reinforces the idea that Bella is powerless, an object, a fact that is highlighted when we get to the sex scenes in Breaking Dawn."

Naturally, they get married pre-penetration, and Bella morphs into your typical 1950's housewife, complete with bun in oven. You know, other than the whole vampire thing. Speaking of which, the interesting part of all this is that when Bella does finally become a vampire, she is not only beautiful and more sparkly than a Fourth of July fireworks display, but all traces of previous klutziness are gone and she's apparently the bestest vampire who ever lived. This offends on a couple of different levels. First, it takes what was already a Mary Sue character to unheard-of heights. Second, it implies that submitting yourself to a man is the key to happiness and well-being. Finally, it shows that sex totally makes you a million times more awesome, thereby invalidating what to this point was the only half-decent message to be found in book: Don't go to bed with a man until he proves his love for you. Or at least buys you a lot of shit.

5. Despite that, Meyer manages to cram some pedophilia in.

Jacob - who has heretofore been, like, totally in love with Bella, ohmigawd! - sees Bella's baby and immediately falls in love with it. We're not talking, "Oh my God, she's so beautiful, I feel like she's my own daughter" kind of love. We're talking about he literally wants to have sex with the baby kind of love. This is the same Jacob who previously tried to mouth-rape Bella in the third book, because Meyer realized she had accidentally made his character more interesting than Edward, and thus had to villainize him with the quickness.

Meyer tries to explain it away by claiming that what Jacob did was "imprint" on the baby, which is what a werewolf does when he finds his soulmate. This just makes things even creepier, because that makes them "destined" to be together. Essentially, Jacob just made an infant his sex slave.

I'm strongly against censorship and I enjoy controversial work that borders on disturbing. I read and loved Lolita, for instance. But that shit was for adults, and had a pretty clear message: Fucking a kid will ruin your life. Humbert Humbert paid like a beaten hooker for screwing around with a little girl. Borderline pedophile Jacob gets to live happily ever after as his indentured love slave magically (read: inexplicably, in a vain attempt to make the whole affair less disgusting and creepy) grows into a seventeen year old. So, to recap: Jacob pretty much mind-raped a baby, who then rapidly grew into a teenager so he could bang her, and she will remain permanently underage. Oh, btdubs, Edward and Bella leave the baby in Jacob's care while they gallivant around staring deeply into each others' eyes or whatever the fuck. Vampires make awesome parents.

Somehow, all the parents who were hysterical over Harry Potter to the point of sharpening pitchforks and lighting torches because J.K. Rowling was supposedly encouraging or endorsing witchcraft are totally cool with all of this. How is this okay?

6. It's just plain awfully written.

Stylistically, the books read like the work of a twelve-year-old. Stephen King famously ripped Meyer in an interview with USA Weekend, saying, "Both Rowling and Meyer, they’re speaking directly to young people...The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good." Christ, even Robert Pattinson understands that the books suck. The book was rejected by 14 different publishers, presumably for its lack of artistic merit, before somebody remembered how dumb American teenagers are and figured out this shit was a license to print money.

Typical American teenager. (Artist's rendering)

I think this might be what angers me most about Twilight; not simply that it's legendarily bad, but that it's so popular in spite of that in an age where people are reading less than ever before. Between this and Dan Brown's execrable Robert Langdon series (Angels and Demons, The Da Vinci Code, and The Lost Symbol), one wonders if the average American's concept of "good literature" is forever tarnished.

I'd never hurt a woman. I am, after all, not Edward Cullen. But I'm not above asking another woman to punch Stephenie Meyer in the throat for her crimes against literature and humanity. From the looks of it, I wouldn't have to ask twice.

Bear Shits In Woods; Film At Eleven

2010-01-13T01:06:00.000-05:00

On Monday, Mark McGwire confirmed what pretty much everyone in the world who has a functional brain could have figured out: He used steroids during his time as a Major League Baseball player.

McGwire's official statement is refreshingly frank and blunt in many ways. Typically, a "confession" from a former steroid user involves them claiming to be unaware what they were putting into their bodies, or that they only did it a few times. McGwire admits to "briefly trying" steroids in the late 80's, then using them again in the mid-90's after a series of injuries in an effort to heal faster, and finally using "on occasion throughout the nineties, including during the 1998 season."

1998, of course, is when McGwire and Sammy Sosa embarked on their assault on Roger Maris' single-season home run record. Just four years after the players' strike had almost irreparably damaged the league's popularity and reputation, the country fell in love with baseball again. It was a magical summer, watching the two behemoths duke it out, matching each other moon shot for moon shot.

I was eleven years old at the time, and I remember every last detail of the night McGwire hit number 62. It was a school night and past my bedtime, but I pleaded my case well enough for my mother to let me stay up until Big Mac's second at-bat. It would have been a while before I could have forgiven her if she hadn't. As it was, I got to witness history, and despite my age, I think I appreciated the gravity of the moment.

Back then, I don't even think I knew what steroids were. Nobody was talking about them; everyone was just having fun watching these guys obliterate the record books. McGwire and Sosa both passed Maris' previous mark before the season ended. This was, if you'll pardon the cliché, a simpler and more innocent time. Few people really questioned how a record that had stood for 37 years had been broken in such spectacular fashion by not one, but two players.

Over the next few years, everything changed. Barry Bonds shattered McGwire's new record. Jose Canseco's tell-all book, Juiced, implicated numerous stars and alleged that 85 percent of players were using steroids, which, while not expressly forbidden by league rules, didn't exactly go over well with the public. As evidence began to pile up that performance-enhancing drug use was widespread in the game, Congress eventually stepped in. One could argue that they had more important things to worry about - like a struggling economy, soaring gas prices, or an increasingly unpopular and untenable war - but they subpoenaed several current and former players to testify before a House committee in March of 2005. McGwire, who had retired four years earlier and vanished from the public eye, was among them.

His testimony was, for lack of a better description, a joke. He repeatedly refused to answer questions about whether or not he took steroids, instead claiming that he was not there "to talk about the past." Technically, he was there because he was subpoenaed by the United States fucking government, but presumably they wanted to discuss the past, namely whether or not he had used steroids, which was sort of the entire point of the hearing. He wouldn't even offer an opinion when asked if he considered the use of steroids to be cheating, saying, "That's not for me to determine." Needless to say, the sudden change in temperament from a guy under oath who, up until that point, had repeatedly and emphatically denied using created skepticism. And by "skepticism," I mean "a universal perception of complete guilt."

McGwire to Congress: "There...are...I said THERE ARE! So many amendments..."

In fairness, McGwire wasn't the only witness who made an absolute ass of himself in front of Congress. Sammy Sosa, a Dominican, apparently lost the ability of comprehend English, an ability he had demonstrated quite competently in, among other things, Pepsi commercials. Rafael Palmeiro pointed a finger at the committee members, like he was Charles fucking Bronson at the end of Death Wish, and said, "I have never used steroids, period. I don't know how to say it any more clearly than that. Never." About five minutes later (okay, more like five months), he tested positive.

McGwire once again fell off the face of the earth, but the cloud of suspicion hung over his legacy. He became eligible for the Hall of Fame in 2007. Despite statistics that are more than worthy of enshrinement, in four years he has never received more than 24 percent of possible votes, well below the 75 percent required. The apparent blacklisting has been hotly debated. McGwire's supporters understandably cited the lack of concrete evidence that he had used steroids as a tenet of their argument.

So much for that. McGwire was hired as hitting coach of the St. Louis Cardinals, his old team, and promised to address the question before spring training in February. He has done so unequivocally. Or has he? While his statement is the most straightforward admission of guilt we have yet to see, members of the media are still questioning certain aspects of his story, poking holes, and above all, wondering why it took so long for McGwire to man up and own what he did. There are those who believe he did it in an effort to boost his Hall of Fame candidacy. If that is the case, it's kind of a dick move on his part. It's also not likely to be an effective one. If I had to hazard a guess (and as a blogger, of course I do), I'd say he did it in hopes of avoiding months of questioning. As the Cardinals' hitting coach, he could no longer hide from the media. It could have been a major distraction for both him and the team if he'd continued his refusal to discuss the past. His revelations, so to speak, still might be.

Look, McGwire has earned criticism, both for using steroids in the first place, and for his debacle in front of Congress. That much I agree with. But the sanctimony of certain members of the press and a vocal contingent of fans is laughable. The fact is, no matter how unethical any of us might consider it to be, the use of anabolic steroids was not against the rules when McGwire was a player. There was no drug testing system in place because the players' union refused to accept that as a term of the collective bargaining agreement, presumably because a large number of them were taking an assload of steroids (pun intended).

No one can say with any certainty how much PEDs helped McGwire. An overwhelming majority of the players who have tested positive since the current program was instituted are guys the average fan has never heard of. Not everyone who jabs a few needles in their butt suddenly starts launching baseballs into outer space. Hitting a baseball requires incredible hand-eye coordination, among about a jillion other abilities. Steroids cannot give you that, and these guys found that out when turning their ass into a pincushion didn't turn them into superstars.

In McGwire's statement, he acknowledges this. "I'm sure people will wonder if I could have hit all those home runs had I never taken steroids. I had good years when I didn't take any and I had bad years when I didn't take any. I had good years when I took steroids and I had bad years when I took steroids." Bottom line: There is no way to know for sure. Whether or not you take his words at face value, not even McGwire himself can know how much of his performance was natural ability, and how much was aided by chemicals. Not only that, steroids are also proven to cause breakdowns in the body with prolonged use. It's one of the things that makes them insanely dangerous. It's entirely possible that they contributed to the injuries that led McGwire to retire.

Another thing the holier-than-thou folks like to ignore is that for as long as it has existed, cheating has been part of baseball. Whether it was corking their bats for extra pop or slathering various fluids on the ball for added break on pitches, countless players did stuff that wasn't exactly fair to the competition. Some of these guys are in the Hall of Fame and beloved figures in the fabric of the sport's history. For fuck's sake, some guys in the Hall were allegedly members of the Ku Klux Klan, which is slightly worse than sort of cheating at a game, I should think.

Not as bad as steroids.

Finally, we still don't know just how rampant steroid use was in Major League Baseball. We may never know. Canseco was ridiculed, mocked, called a liar and an attention whore, but virtually all of the big-name players who have copped to juicing are guys he fingered. And he floated 85 percent as an estimate. Canseco is, in fact, a douchebag who published his book more for notoriety and a quick buck than a desire to help the game - I mean, the man honestly believes that every player should use steroids, or at least did at one point - but you can't ignore his track record. If his figures are even close to accurate, how much of a competitive edge did PEDs give McGwire, or any other user?

I have no emotional stake in whether McGwire is enshrined at Cooperstown. I'm a Phillies fan, and while I loved watching him during that now-tainted summer of 1998, he was never a favorite player of mine. And I'm honestly not sure if, were I a voter, I'd endorse him. But I will say this: With the game's history of cheating, with the rampancy of steroid use still shrouded in mystery, with the incredible positive impact McGwire made at a time when the game desperately needed it, with the unprecedented apparent honesty McGwire displayed...with all of that, you are on a slippery goddamned slope if you keep him out. Do you ignore the fact that steroid use wasn't technically against the rules? Does he get credit for coming clean, even if it was five years too late? How much? Where do you draw the line? Who gets in, if not McGwire? A guy like Jim Thome, who has never been linked to PEDs? What if you induct him and evidence of him using emerges after the fact?

Whatever the answers to all those questions turn out to be, to make an example or villain of McGwire is unfair. Then again, perhaps he doesn't deserve fairness.

Bullsnark!: An Introduction

2010-01-12T17:50:00.000-05:00

Possibly the most pathetic four-word phrase to be found, widespread, on the Internet: Welcome to my blog.

The world has become so saturated with the opinions of every half-witted fucktard with a basic grasp of typing skills that it's incredibly difficult to get noticed or build an audience that doesn't solely consist of your mom and a few friends you continually badger for traffic.

That being the case, what is to be gained from the enterprise, either by me, the writer, or you, the reader? Well, like most people, I enjoy hearing myself talk, and I have a lot of views and opinions. Unlike most people, I am not an idiot and have more than a rudimentary grasp of the English language. Ideally, you will stumble upon this blog in one way or another, read it, be entertained, and pass it along so that eventually, I can get paid for doing it. My "hookers and blow" money jar is woefully empty. Hell, so is my stomach.

So, what will the focus of this blog be? I would hope the title gave you some indication, but the fact is I'm not entirely sure, myself. The general idea will be me attacking stupidity wherever it appears- in the media, in politics, in sports, in popular culture. You name it, it's full of stupid bullshit, and I'm going to be pissed off and write about it.

I imagine you've just rolled your eyes at the staggering originality of this. I don't blame you, necessarily, but you have hurt my feelings a little, Mr. or Ms. Nameless Internet Jerk. After all, people have been ripping off Shakespeare or The Beatles or Hitchcock for ages now and still producing pretty good work. It's all about execution, and that's where I plan to exceed your run-of-the-mill Internet polemic.

The lines of genres, disciplines and practices are being blurred more and more, for better or worse. One of the more positive aspects of this is that it allows a lot of creative freedom. You might come back tomorrow to see me make a passionate argument about the merits of excise taxes on cigarettes, or you might return to read me making dick jokes about some celebrity. Or both. Whatever the case, you can be sure it will be smartly written and thoroughly researched...on Wikipedia.

Speaking of smartly written, Sidney Lumet's Network is one of my favorite movies, and arguably the best satire ever committed to celluloid. It can get a bit shrill at times, but its message is one I believe is true to this day: Life is bullshit, and we are allowing it to be. Almost everyone has heard the iconic speech, or at least its most famous line: "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take this anymore!"

WHO ATE THE DAMN PIZZA ROLLS?!

The more I learn about the world, the madder I get. Oh, I know. Things are, relatively speaking, better than they have ever been. People are living longer, eating better, learning more. There are enough self-fellating studies out there making the case that, at least in the so-called "Western world," we're doing great compared to our grandparents. Massive technological advances, many in the name of improving quality of life, have taken place.

The flip side of that is that, thanks to technology, we have more access to more information than in any previous era. The sheer amount of idiocy, inefficiency and injustice that happens every day is stupefying...and not nearly enough is being done about it because not nearly enough people are getting pissed.

Many of us know, or at least believe, that society can and should be better. Some of us even devote considerable thought, time or effort into improving some facet of life. But no one's energy is boundless. Idealism is an exhausting and nigh-impossible thing to maintain in the face of constant, harsh reality. Inexorably, most people just plain quit trying to "save the world" after a while, and just focus on keeping their own lives afloat.

Can you blame them? Hell, no. The world's problems are so huge and complex that they seem damn near unsolvable. It's a lot easier to make sure you've got enough cash to cover the rent or feed the kids than it is to, say, fix the healthcare industry. It's a goddamned thankless job, too, trying to make the world a better place. No matter what you try to do about any given problem, some people (sometimes, a fucking lot of them) are going to disagree with what you're doing, for one reason or another. You can only beat your head against a wall for so long before you say, "Fuck it!" and start drinking. What you ultimately end up with is a bunch of people bitching about everything under the sun and screaming at anyone who will listen that, "Somebody should do something about all the problems!" and a pitifully small, perpetually shrinking number of people even attempting to fix shit.

That's the other way I want to distinguish this blog from a lot of other ones you'll see. Being completely objective is impossible, but much of the blogosphere is heavily biased one way or the other. Same with the media. No one wants to acknowledge that the problems we face are intricate messes that have no easy answer. The path of least resistance (not to mention traffic or ratings) is to blare ten-second soundbites that reduce these complicated issues to simple black-and-white. Few people are willing to roll the dice that honest, level-headed, objective analysis of anything will be paid any attention, and there's a good reason: Few people will pay any attention to it.

So is one blog that tries to do so going to change anything? That's about as likely as someone winning the lottery as they're struck by lightning during a blizzard at the equator while having a foursome with the world's most famous supermodel, actress and musician. But I hope that I can entertain you, and make you think. At the very least, I hope a few people actually read this damn thing.