I Done Good

So yeah you can see the fruits of my labor on the Reggie and the Full Effect bio, which is quite possibly the saddest, most blunt album one sheet ever, here. I guess even power house pillars of the emo rock scene get wrapped up in the same bullshit as regular people. In other rock stars are just regular people news, I interviewed Jason Reece from ..And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead yesterday (which will be posted here after awhile) and though he didn't really have anything all that interesting to say, I did get to record him haggling with a waitress for 10 minutes about how his friends stiffed him on the bill for lunch and how he only owed $13 dollars. DUDE YOU JUST MADE THE MOST EPIC ROCK RECORD SINCE 2112, YOU'RE PLAYING A TWO NIGHT STAND AT THE SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL AND YOU"RE SWEATING THE FUCKING LUNCH BILL?

Fucking Finally

...at Stanford University in California an experiment might be done later this year to create mice with human brains.

Spock Don't Fucking Rock

Dear Everybody,

Please pull The Arcade Fire's dick out of your mouths and realize that shit sounds like Page and Plant Unplugged. Spock rock is the new grunge; Interpol is the new Pearl Jam, and the Arcade Fire is, at best, like Alice in Chains.

The Penis Not Mightier Than The Sword:

For years people have talked about how magazines and fashion models and music videos and media in general have made it hard for the average woman to feel OK about her own body; how the constant bombardment of starved wraiths and surgically perfected bottle blondes has given modern woman a self-image problem. And I guess it’s true; few if any girls I have ever known, even the hot ones, have ever actually been convinced of their own hotness. Most have a thinly veiled neurosis regarding everything from their teeth to their tits to their feet. Traditionally, men have been immune to this sort of self torture; though action movies and Fabio book covers certainly so their best to make average dudes feel like schmoes, there have always been more than enough everyman-as-the-hero stories to redeem the collective worth of the typical non-ripped, non-adventurous, mildly unattractive male. Even when it came to the “true” judge of one’s manhood, dudes who weren’t necessarily packing heat didn’t really have to sweat it. Women would play along, with their helpful lies— “it’s not the size that matters,”—and men would be spared the self-doubt that women faced on a daily basis. Men knew, of course, that there were dudes out their with god-given works of penis art (what we refer to as “The Baby Arm Club,”) but they never really thought too much about it. They figured their 8 inches and 20 minutes were more than enough to satisfy even the most depraved women. However, the times have certainly changed. Men no longer have the luxury of confidence. Now every time you turn on the TV there’s an add for “Natural Male Enhancement;” every time you check your e-mail inbox there are 20 or 30 messages about “Cheap Cialis,” or “Penis Enlargement;” every men’s magazine or even newspaper has a least a couple ads for “performance enhancement,” pills or pumps or whatever. Mass media— and by default, American culture— has hereby decided that your average cock, and what you can do with it, is just not good enough anymore. All these years men have fooled themselves into believing that those odd shaped dildos their wives and girlfriends had laying around were just replacements, for those times when they weren’t around to rock the hard place, so to speak. But the truth is, or at least what men are now supposed to think, is that those giant plastic dildos are everything that women want from men and can’t have: an endlessly rigid, massive, unflinching, unrelenting, unwanting vaginal stimulator. Now whether or not this is actually true is beside the point (plus, I really don’t think I want know). But the fact that this is the unspoken premise behind these advertisements is hard to deny. Cialis, one of the newer “treatments” for old dudes who can’t get hard (and, surreptitiously implied, young dudes fast on the draw), boasts that it lasts up to two days, even earning the name “le weekend” in Europe. And what could be a more natural, more authentic return to adolescent vigor than a two-day boner? Send the wife to Costco for the jumbo pack of KY, send the kids to the in-laws, and lock the door! Because lord knows that anything less than a full 48 hours of carnal, drug-induced humping is not enough to satisfy that middle-aged misfit you call a wife. Now don’t get me wrong, the fact that many older gentlemen do in fact suffer from erectile dysfunction is nothing to poke fun at. But to say that these advertisements are meant solely for that miniscule demographic is like saying Joe Camel was only meant to appeal to adult smokers. Drug companies are not only in the business of marketing their drugs nowadays, but in the business of marketing sickness. And in our search for a fitter, happier, more productive version of ourselves, we, men and women both, and certainly more than willing to listen, especially when it comes to something really important, like cock size or bedroom endurance.

Real Live Animals

So I guess people think I have some sort of obsession with dead animals or whatever and maybe I kind of do. Dead animals certainly have a dignity all their own. But I also like animals that are still alive as proven by the following photograph.



Eventually I'll probably actually start writing about things that make a difference, but for now my mind is not really doing much in the way of functioning. Sorry.

Meat

In two completely unrelated news stories this week, a new study , reinforcing the link between red meat consumption and colon cancer was released, and former McDonald's CEO Charlie Bell died at the age of 44 from colorectal cancer.

The best part is, I totally ate meatloaf last night because my mom made it for me and sent that shit over. And the night before I ate this beef sausage that someone else gave me because I would've felt bad throwing it away. IM GOING TO DIE OF ASS CANCER YEAH

Year of the Cock

In terms of embracing my feminine side, 2004 marked a new personal high. And I was certainly not alone: men across the country joined forces in a mass metrosexing of the American male identity. Though it certainly wasn’t all-inclusive—Nascar dudes and Bush voters proved immune to “homo”genization—for the most part putting a little gay in your straight became the new norm for twentysomething men in training. But looking at the venerable and highly scientific Chinese Zodiac, one notices that 2005 is the Year of The Cock, a foreboding omen to say the least! Already I can feel myself slipping back into meathead mode, letting all the wonderful, sensitive personal habits I worked so hard to procure slip into oblivion. I find myself become more of an asshole with each day that passes in this, the year of our lord, the year of the cock. Bullying those weaker than I, making derogatory statements about women, minorities, disabled people, old people, poor people and just whoever happens to be standing around. Whereas just a few scant months ago, in good old 2004, the year of the monkey, I was a helpful, positive-thinking, progressive-minded steward of all that was good, now I’m just a big, fat cock Maybe it’s the old self-actualization technique, like when you read your horoscope and go out and make it happen. Maybe just knowing that 2005 is the Year of The Cock is making me more of a cock, but I think there’s more to it than that. Cock-like behavior is certainly popping up everywhere of late. For example….



Prince Harry is A Cock: Britain’s Prince Harry, the son of the late Princess Diana, recently attended a party dressed as a nazi soldier, complete with swastika armband. Though this in itself is certainly awesome, even better is the fact that it comes only weeks before Britain is set to mark the 60th university of the Holocaust, and the fact that Prince Harry’s bloodline is directly descended from German royalty, and were known as being Nazi sympathizers during the first World Wars. ACHTUNG.

The Pentagon are a Bunch of Cocks: Recently declassified documents show that the Pentagon looked into developing a “sex bomb,” that would make enemy troops sexually irresistible to each other. According to the documents, provoking widespread homosexual behavior among troops would cause a "distasteful but completely non-lethal" blow to morale. So that’s where all our tax dollars go. We can’t afford to pay elementary school janitors, but we can afford to pay some Army scientist to develop a “sex bomb” that turns enemy combatants gay? What’s next, a bomb that makes Chinese dudes impotent? A chemical weapon that makes hot, young women, like old bald white dudes? I don’t know, I might need that shit in a few years.

Scientists are Cocks: A team of American scientists, in a recent report published in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, claim that the scientific community as a whole is turning a blind eye to the likelihood that extraterrestrial visitors have in the past and likely continue to visit our planet. "We are in the curious situation today that our best modern physics and astrophysics theories predict that we should be experiencing extraterrestrial visitation, yet any possible evidence of such lurking in the UFO phenomenon is scoffed at within our scientific community," contends astrophysicist, and co-author of the report, Bernard Haisch. I guess all the scientists are too busy making sex bombs and trying to find new ways to blow fuckers up to pay attention to something with any actual scientific significance. I mean, turning enemy armies gay is cool and all, but I think aliens are way cooler. But maybe that’s just me.

My Friend the Little Dead Bird

So I have a friend this week. He's a little dead bird outside my front door. Every morning hes there to remind me that no matter what happens, even with nice little yellow feathers, a a little beak for eating the seeds out of the grass and wings for flying and ancient dinosaur wisdom, that you will end up peacefully rotting. But it's not even bad. I was sad once, the first time. But since then it's been nice to have a little dead bird there for me. Except for today when it rained and the carcass got all wet. Then it was a little bit sad again. but then I read some other shit and I felt better about the whole thing:



Phuket, Thailand -- Siripanyo has two special photographs that he uses to practice corpse meditation.

"I have a picture of a cremation with a body very visibly burning on a pyre," he said. "I have another picture of a skeleton."

Cremating thousands of tsunami victims at Buddhist temples is a grim task facingThailand's monks. But they are trained by years of "corpse meditation" - - staring at photos of decomposing bodies to underscore the transitory nature of life.

Years of corpse meditation enable each monk, or bhikkhu, to deal with the nightmarish task, said Siripanyo, a 34-year-old shaven-headed monk. Wrapped in a traditional rust-colored robe, he said the monks meditated on a picture of a dead body "or a body at one of the actual stages of decomposition."

The photographs are sold in religious shops throughout Thailand. They include news photos of people killed in accidents, suicides and fires, and medical autopsy pictures of corpses. Some show the grisly progression of decomposition on the human body.

The purpose of this traditional form of meditation is "simply to hold in your mind, very clearly, that when you look at a (living) person, you're seeing only the external aspect of that physical person," Siripanyo said. "We are obsessed with the externals. No one wants to see the internals. But we try to see them in an equal light, neither delighting nor being repelled by the attractive or the unattractive signs of the external or the internal."

Fuck Off

Before anyone gets pissed and writes me stupid letters let me just say: the tragedy which recently befell Southeast Asia, India, Africa and everywhere in between is a horrendous natural disaster, one which should of course cause us to empathize with the plight of our fellow man and reflect on the nature of things in general. Sweet. But can we please call an end to the fucking backslapping and the thinly-veiled self-congratulation and move on with living our hollow, meaningless lives? How many people can we possibly throw on TV who “narrowly escaped with their lives,” or who “witnessed the tragedy firsthand?” Yeah, we understand that you single-handedly outwitted the forces of nature, that you succeeded where so many of others failed. Good job. How many stories can we have about the outpouring of humanitarian aid, about the kids in Bumfuck, Nebraska who collected their pennies and bought a bag of rice to send to Phuket. Wow, thanks. I’m sure the people who have been subsisting in poverty for centuries after being conquered and colonized by one or more of these suddenly helpful Western nations are super stoked we’re finally sending them some t-shirts. Can we please refrain from further spinning the arbitrary nature of natural calamity into some sort of success for our race of selfish mammals; that somehow the scope of this tragedy will wash all the stupid beefs and cultural vendettas we all hold so dear out with tide? That the good people of predominantly Muslim Indonesia will suddenly sever their ties with Al-Qaida and join the forces of us because we sent a bunch of dudes in helicopters to clean up all the dead people? Hmmm, nice thought. But remember about a year ago, when an earthquake in Bam, Iran killed about 30,000 people, and we sent all kinds of helpful geologists and doctors and official white guys? That really accomplished a whole lot, relations-wise. Iran loves us now. I’m not saying we shouldn’t help. I’m all for everyone doing everything we can to help avert an even larger humanitarian catastrophe occurring in the wake of the initial disaster. Moreover, I’m all for lending the affected areas a helping hand in the months and years that follow to ensure they return to some semblance of normalcy. But I don’t think we deserve a fucking medal; so what if the United State is second only to Japan in the amount of aid being given? We’re definitely first in fucking up the world and blowing motherfuckers up. How else do you think we can afford to send that much scrill? And it’s lucky for them that the tidal wave happened to hit in quaint little island paradises like Phuket and the Maldives where lots of rich westerners like to go and hand out chiclets to the natives. We have to hurry up and clear those bodies so college students on summer vacation can go to Thailand to “find themselves.” Maybe I’m just cynical. It is true that I don’t believe in altruism. But that’s beside the point. People love tragedy. It makes good conversation. It makes the world feel like less of cold mass of elements and more like a stage on which a dynamic, dramatic saga is taking place. Seeing massive loss of life makes us glad at our own remaining vitality. It’s not wrong. It’s just one of those things. And it’s even cool to masquerade this gladness as empathy, but at some point that shit gets old. So we can knock it off now, OK? Thanks

Kmart is the Saddest Place on Earth

People are always talking about Wal-Mart and how evil it is, but it is my belief that Kmart is most likely the single saddest place on God's earth. It feels like communist Russia only the people are nowhere near as cool. No wonder those fuckers went bankrupt. Sorry about Sears' luck for buying that shit or whatever. Those places are all fucked as soon as white trash Americans figure out how to buy their worthless bullshit online.