Very Small Rocks

There probably is not a sentence adequately dexterous to both excuse and explain my absence for the last seven months.

Was I off in an undisclosed location working on the cure for the Lazy Eye while teams of international terrorists swept down upon me one after the other? (Spoiler alert: that’s the next season of ‘24’)

Was I down in gutters with a mad old soldier, telling tales of brothers in arms?

Was I playing my guitar until my fingers bled like some drawn-out, lame stereotype from 34.6% of every third tier power ballad ever written?

Was I learning how to love you like only a hot Latina can?
No, I was not. Well, I did have this thing happen where two of my fingers bled, but my wife has since instructed me not to perform dentistry on the cats…and the cat is Latina, so there’s that.

But I can tell you where I will be.

I have become a humor contributor for the James Randi Educational Foundation – a site which is currently boisterously unfunny (but on purpose). This is an organization that is near to my intellectual interests and my heart, so being asked to write for them is very, very delicious.

The JREF is a registered non-profit organization trying to flood a little logic and skepticism into the belly of a fine assortment of human persons who are making the world harder to live in by playing fast and loose with pesky little things like facts, science and reality. My regular readers (all 2.3 of you) will know that this is already a very big interest of mine.

They also get an ass load of traffic as such things are measured in my neck of the woods.

Ironically, the second reason that I’m posting this here is because I will be writing a lot more, and some of that will not be a fit for the folks at JREF – when that happen I will be posting here as well as any other crap that slides out of my face and onto my keyboard.

As a result, I will probably be here more, as well as posting at JREF.

If you were a fan of what I did here (and how likely is that?), you will be a fan of what I will be doing there; I was specifically (and very generously) directed not to change what I do.

My first column for the Foundation is HERE. I’ll post additional linkage when others go up.

Now bugger off.

I’m With Stupid.

I thought that I was done; finished with the millstone of writing a blog. I had grieved (mostly by eating pudding), accepted my loss (by learning to make pudding) and moved on (by using my pudding as crack-fill after tasting it). But since the world is a large sphere, a notoriously vindictive shape, I have been forced back.

Why? The stupid sings to me. I can hear its song.

Admittedly, it’s a song that sounds like a loop of Goofy saying “gorsh!” while an energized accordion is dropped into a vat of oatmeal, but it is a song nonetheless.

This may be my new purpose for this space, because my old purpose…well, frankly it wasn’t worth a pinch of hammered shit. In retrospect, I cannot even identify it.

Maybe that’s why I stopped showing up.

But now I will listen to the song, and I will tell you what it says.

Yesterday, the song was loud as thousands gathered all across the United States to take part in Tax Day protests. This in itself is not that unusual because taxes rate somewhere near Lindsay Lohan as being universally objectionable. However, this year the protests were especially musical because they were, we are told, the Start of a Grassroots Movement.

I took part in a Grassroots Movement once, but it was only because I ate lawn clippings.

That’s a poo joke, incidentally.

This Grassroots Movement was to be a new chapter in the American experience, when people gathered, in an unrivaled populist throb to relate the opposition of the ‘silent majority’ to the fiscal policies of President Obama.

Neither ‘silent’ nor ‘majority’ are being used correctly in this context.

As a parent of young children, I equate all protests with a collective, slow moving tantrum. A five year old who absolutely must have the yellow fork with the green plate at the picnic and CANNOT POSSIBLE EAT ON ANYTHING ELSE BLEEYAAAAAAH… makes about as much sense as any political activism requiring a mob.

But what they lack in coherence, thought or argument, they make up for with crappy signs. Having studied the information carefully for as long as it took for my panini press to finish ruining a perfectly good sandwich, I have identified the following harmonies within the symphony of stupid:

1. The Rhythmically Obvious; Because they are conservatives and libertarians and whatever the hell the people from Texas are, they still think that it’s 1982 in The Republic of Gilead. As such, they don’t know that to ‘teabag’ someone means to rest your scrotum on their face. Har, har, that’s naughty. Now shut up about it, MSNBC.

2. The Melodiously Dull; The federal debt of the US has been increased to help stimulate the economy. This will result in the destruction of prosperity of future generations. This is true of course, it would be better to resort to soup-lines and Thunder Dome style justice sooner rather than later. Just don’t tell them that the highest income tax bracket was 94 percent during World War II and that this was followed by the greatest economic expansion on American history.

3. The Harmoniously Ignorant: Americans clearly have no idea what in the hell socialism actually means. Try paying 60 percent income tax and slaving your life away in the Agnetha Fältskog Memorial Lingonberry Jam Collective and then see what you think, Jimmy Arkansas.

4. The Chorus of the Simple; Many tax protesters appear to be unaware of, or are unwilling to accept the acceptance of Hawaii into the Union in 1959. As a result, the citizenship of any Hawaiian born person is highly suspect. Obviously, this poses serious problems for everyone on Magnum, PI.

5. The Guitar Solo of Unrelated Topics; The TV is on in the background and they’re showing the episode of Star Trek: Voyager where the holographic Doctor makes a holographic family. This is either the worst thing I’ve ever seen, or there was a writer’s strike on at the time and the script was improvised by the guys with the gaffer tape.

6. The Crescendo of Creeping Paranoia; While most people understand the meaning of “taxation without representation” and “armed insurrection”, our pals at the Tea Party protests are not so lucky. Because of all the whacky, good-natured fun the Governor of Texas is busting open the secession meme and a few people want to hang some members of Congress just for hoots and giggles.

What fun! A veritable panoply of laughs! Of course, unlike the Revolution or the Civil War, most Americans have at least heard of Twitter; and that’ll have to help.

The kids love Twitter. The feed from Andersonville will totally bury Ashton Kutcher.

This particular song of stupidity protesting a big federal government took place almost entirely in public parks.

Good work, Einstein.

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It’s the Stupid Economy, Stupid.

I was twitchy like goldfish to make up some stuff about the farewell address by President Bush. However I was resolute in my inclination to take on a topic that would not require me to watch the President maul the English language one last time. According to media sources, the speech is scheduled to last thirteen minutes.

For a President, this is brief.

In thirteen minutes, President Clinton could only begin to explain why having some pogo time with a thick-bodied intern was actually just the exercise of making a recess appointment.

President Lincoln won the battle of First Antietam in just under twelve minutes, but he had a lightsaber which he did not take to Ford’s Theater. If he had, George Lucas would never have made those prequels.

In twelve minutes, John Quincy Adams could twice ‘powder his wig’…if you know what I mean.

Of far greater importance is the current state of the economy.

It’s bad, Jim.

What began as a poker game between the CEOs of Bear-Stearns and AIG has turned into a problem for everyone. Unlike your poverty, corporate poverty is freely ejaculated across the economic strata until it becomes…well, it becomes your poverty again.

Now soggy with corporate ejaculate, you may be wondering what you ought to do.

This economic ass bomb has sent a runny, steamy sluice of the world’s money down the crapper. Credit is scarcer than people willing to see Nicole Kidman movies and the cost of basic commodities is fluctuating like the emotions of a 16-year old emo girl. The stock markets of the world, the global trough of general funds now makes less sense than the last season of Lost.

So what are you to do? Other than drinking, may I suggest:

1. Don’t Despair – This is good advice for two reasons. Firstly, no one will hear you as they jump out of buildings or burn their retirement plan statements to keep warm. Secondly, if you really were in Dire Straits, you’d be rich and laughing off of your ass. Let’s face it, if you had a piece of over 120 million album sales you would be using a fifty dollar bill to light a cigar made of thousand dollar bills; you’d eat dinosaur egg omelets for breakfast and a plate of pure sunshine for lunch. Your money would be for nothing.

2. Get a Camera – If the old saying is true and a picture is worth a thousand words, then taking pictures of your money should more or less be a sure bet. For example, if you were to take a trio of five dollar bills and photograph them, you would have enough money to go to a car dealership and get arrested for being a loon.

3. Printers are Gold – At times like this, people are always complaining that the government should not “print more money”. The fear is that for each dollar printed, existing dollars will lose value. This is all well and good for economics professors and other academic, lab coat-wearing geeks who use particle colliders, but let’s face some reality. If the people in power could keep track of money – and I mean no more than having a general idea what mattress it’s under – this problem would never have happened in the first place. Seven hundred and fifty trillion dollars were placed in the emergency TARP fund back in September, just go ahead and try to find it.

Not only do I suggest that you print your own money, but I suggest that you don’t even try to make it look like real money. If anyone asks, just tell the blathering, busybody questioner that these are emergency dollars and as such, there was no time to have them properly printed.

3a. You’re too poor to buy a printer – steal one.

4. Donkeys! – Properly trained, your donkey can find Treasury Secretary Paulson and give him a withering kick in the pills.

5. Destroy Your Television – The twenty four hour news extruder will provide you with maniacal pundits who cannot get through a sentence on the economy without spitting. The “stories” that they report will be about families with thirteen children who sold little Billy to Wal-Mart in order to get another six dollars. By the time they are done with you, the situation will seem so hopeless and despondent that you will take your ATM card and bury it in the back yard. Not only is this a bad idea because you need an ATM card to jimmy locks, but since your house is being foreclosed, the dude from the bank will find it when he plants his face in the dirt to eat worms and muck.

Now that you know these rules, send me fifty bucks, but don’t think it over too hard.

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Of Tyrants and Boobies.

For weeks this space has remained largely unchanged; haunting and beautiful like a petrified forest. This is not mysterious since this author is a huge, slothful creature unwilling to drag itself from the labyrinthine caves of its birth and into the harsh light of having to write second third rate sarcasm.

Upon lifting its leviathan bulk from the Sinister underworld, what does it find?

An assload of Google searches for TV chefs with big boobs – that’s what.

There are some readers of The Reasonable Ego who are interested in basting their own tenderloin to images of a select number of mammary-intensive television chefs. In the past, searches have been entered for Christine Cushing, Giada De Laurentiis, Laura Calder and a few others.

There have been no inquiries for naked pictures of Alton Brown even though he has the best food show ever.

It would be an obvious ploy to post pictures of the these women seductively pulling a pork shoulder or deep frying funnel cakes while their come-hither stare longingly taunts the camera and their low cut attire strains to contain its warm, fleshy cargo.

It is so obvious in fact that it might just happen in order to boost the traffic for this site.

None of these others culinary succubi, statuesque though they may be, float in the same rarefied air as British TV epicurean Nigella “Thunder of Love” Lawson. For every naughty Google of Giada leaning waaaaay over to open the oven, a dozen voices cry out to this page to see Nigella make pudding in the nude. In one day there were sixty-two searches for the front-facing mammalian chest globes of Nigella, daughter of the Baron Lawson of Blaby.

It should be noted that on the same day, the only other search was for the new Star Trek movie; this really sums up the entire internet if you think about it.

Often referred to as the Queen of Gastroporn and only rarely as the Queen of Gastropods, Nigella is a Rubenesque, voluptuous sex symbol and there is no doubt that scores of fans are praying for a personal encounter in which Nigella would…um….fry their bacon.

…crispy, savory, delicious bacon…

Sorry, this author is on a diet.

A dangerous trend looms that might impair the ability of those twisted, instawebs-searching drool engines to find lascivious pictures of Nigella Lawson and her ridiculous bosom in print, on the internets and in formats of all types.

As with most global problems this one, of course, originates in Sweden.

Under the tyrannical heel of King Carl XVI Gustav and his parliamentary lapdog, Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, the people of this cloistered and backward nation have long toiled at the reindeer farms, the herring pools and even the dreaded knäckebröd mines for the pleasure of their pale, sneering overlords.

As if that weren’t bad enough, and it is not, they are now being oppressed even further by having the government monitor the sexual parity of advertisements. In a program managed by Sweden’s Trade Ethical Council against Sexism in Advertising, persons may report adverts that they find to be sexist.

While the article in question is not clear on this, it is not specifically spelled out that the adverts need to be offensive or obscene, but merely sexist. Sexism is certainly in the eye of the beholder. The deluge of ads featuring stupid, fat husbands and hot, smart wives leap to mind, but those do not seem worthy of a government hotline.

The example attached to the article is this:

How could any thinking person find this to be sexist? All that is featured in this photo is a pair of hyper-sexualized breasts devoid of any meaningful, human context being used solely to entice drooling male consumers to purchase more fizzy beverages, car lock de-icer or whatever the hell the boobies want you to buy.

If you are old enough, you will remember the days before boobies were employed primarily to tell you what to think. In that dark era, all ads were either for Ovaltine or Palmolive Soap Flakes. The only medium for the pitch were chain-smoking white mean in horrible suits and hair that weighed as much as Hulk Hogan because of a lifelong abuse of Pomade.

Nobody should have Edward R. Murrow sell them deodorant.

But if the Swedes have their way, the boobies will no longer be allowed to talk to you in the media. Today they are targeting advertisements but how long before Nigella becomes a target?

If it is unacceptable for boobies to tell you what to buy, how is it permitted for boobies to tell you what to eat? The freedom to watch undulating curves and mounds of Nigella preparing Spatchcocked Birds is in peril – and what creeping repressions lay beyond?

The terrorists have won.

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Canadian Apocalypse.

Canada is a mysterious place with bags of milk, an inexplicable fondness for the fluids that drip from trees and an amusing game of three-down football that clearly belongs on the short bus of professional sports. However, what is at issue today is the unprecedented political situation in which the nation now finds itself; a non-boring political event has occurred in Canada. That last phrase bears repeating, with a bigger font and in purple.

A non-boring political event has occurred in Canada.

If it seems that this is unusual for a nation that issues commemorative stamps in honor of the civil service, consider this: Canadians are hard drinkers.

On 14 October 2008, Canada went to the polls after Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper declared that Parliament has ceased to function and that an election was necessary. The nation, knowing full well that Parliament had only experienced “function” three times since Confederation nodded in mute dismay. In this election, the Conservatives (in true Canadian style) nearly destroyed the Liberal Party of Canada but still did not manage to get a majority of the seats in Parliament.

Everyone, we were told, was expecting a more cooperative Parliament *snort* that would be more *chuckle* open to compromise.

Please take a moment to giggle in disbelief.

On 27 November 2008, the Conservative government – strengthened but not actually effective – submitted an economic “statement” that was meant to act as prologue to their budget and to assuage the worries of Canadians forced to eat old tin cans and their classic collection of Glass Tiger records.

In a flurry of activity for the politically challenged the following then occurred:

1. The Opposition Parties (the Liberal Party, the New Democratic Party and the Bloc Quebecois) threatened to form a Mighty Coalition to bring the government down if they did not change their ways. This would, presumably, be similar to how those robot tigers turn into Voltron.

Jack Layton would be near the groin.

2. The Government told the Opposition to please have carnal relations with a mollusk.

3. In a bold move of defiance, the Liberal Party decided to ouster their already ouster-is-nigh leader more quickly. They did this, in adherence with the finest traditions of democracy, by having all the other leadership candidates quit the race and proclaiming one guy the new leader by acclamation without a political convention. Given the success that the Liberals have had with large votes recently, this was probably a good choice.

4. The Government, with a head full of steam and the bloated indignation of the Right, asked very politely if the Governor General could write the Prime Minister a note, telling him that he did not need to even let Parliament assemble until the 26th of January.

The noise that you are hearing now is your irony alarm ringing of off the hook. The Prime Minister who called an early election because the Parliament was not functioning has now shut it down because it was functioning too much, but in a way that made him feel sad.

The other option is that Prime Minister Harper was just hoping to get some quality face time with the Governor General. The current occupant of that office is Michaëlle Jean. Among her credentials, Governor General Jean is as cute as button and maybe Harper was hoping that the spiraling emotions of the current crisis would propel their relationship to the next level;

Michaëlle Jean: Mister Prime Minister, I understand that you’d like me to prorogue Parliament?

Stephen Harper: And my pants, please prorogue my pants.

Michaëlle Jean: What?

Stephen Harper: Can I call you Mickey Jee?

Michaëlle Jean: Get out.

Canada now has a distinct privation of government, but has nonetheless managed to appoint 18 new Senators while everything is on hold. When the new budget (which is real meat compared to the economic statement) is released, government may well gridlock again when Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff (his nickname is Iggy) threatens to swing the club of an Opposition party coalition if his needs (#3; waffles!) are not met.

Why is all this being done? To avoid an election; both sides claim the other is being undemocratic, but neither will consider taking the matter to the polls. This sounds like the guy who cut you selling you the band-aids.

Their fear of the electorate is well placed.

* * *

Election Season is NOT Over.

While the trivial election of the American President has come and gone with little or no coverage in the press a far more important matter is now before the citizens of the world.

The blogging overlord of this space and many other spaces, the Mighty, Terrifying and Mostly Agreeable Diesel has gotten his blog Mattress Police in the finals in the humor category in the 2008 Weblog Awards.

That’s right, Jim. The frikkin’ finals….

I don’t know any of the other finalists personally, but I’m guessing that they are probably very bad people who would steal from you if they got the chance. Diesel on the other hand can cure your bronchial congestion with just the touch of his calming, magical half-beard.

Who else could do that? Only one man and he died for us a long, long time ago. But that doesn’t matter because Wilt Chamberlain never even wrote a blog.

But Diesel wrote a blog, and still does — and it is good.

You can vote for Diesel here, and obviously you should vote for Diesel here. He writes a tremendous amount of really high grade material. There are three blogs that make me laugh – Mattress Police is one of them and the other two aren’t.

Change You Can Laugh At. Diesel ’08.

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The Sinister Decision – 1130PM

1143PM EST

It’s official. Senator Barack Obama has become the 44th President of the United States and the first African American to ever hold the office. Also, Joe Biden will break another historic barrier by being the first person named Joe Biden to be elected as Vice President. Chester A. Arthur was going to change his name to Flo Walden, which would have been pretty close to ‘Joe Biden’, but he was interrupted be needing to become President.

Oh, what could have been. And for the record, I really miss Tim Russert right now.

When delivering his concession to Obama, Senator John McCain noted that above and beyond everything else they were both Americans. He continued:

“…and no association means any more to me than that.”

Not a bad repudiation of his own campaign while swallowing a steaming wad of fail. I won’t call it classy, but it’s better than where he’d been.

There’s not much funny left at this point, except the look on McCain’s face when he pretended that Sarah Palin had been an asset.

So, barring a strong burst of energy that sloth and my comfy couch will make impossible I will end – as only I can – by only seeing the patient after they have died.

As such, I will now announce that The Reasonable Ego would like to endorse John Edwards for President in 2008.

John Edwards – Building America by Making Babies All Over the Damn Place