If It's Not Christian, It's Crap!

Bill O'Reilly and his pro-Christmas crusade is really the gift that keeps on giving. I look forward to O'Reilly rants about how "secular progressives" are destroying Christmas like some people look forward to that stop-motion animated Rudolph special.

(Did you ever really think about that Rudolph special? Doesn't it teach children that only those people who are useful are deserving of our love and acceptance? I mean, even if Rudolph's nose didn't light up, and he wasn't useful in guiding Santa's sleigh, shouldn't he still be invited to play in reindeer games? And the whole concept of an Island of Misfit Toys is just disconcerting. What kind of odd eugenic experiement is sending away all the "broken" toys anyway?)

This rant, from the November 8th edition of Willy's Fox News show, helpfully transcribed by Media Matters, might be the single most amusing Bill O'Reilly session I have ever seen. He's really elevating narrow-minded angry politically-themed ranting to the level of fine art. Have we ever considered the possibility that Bill O'Reilly is actually a character created by a brilliant performance artrist, the perfect loudmouth caricature?

As you know, Christmas has become controversial in America. Public displays of the federal holiday are under attack by the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union], and some department stores even tell employees to avoid saying "Merry Christmas." So we decided to look at some retail policies this year, and here's what we found out: Sears/Kmart would not answer our questions. Spokesman Chris Braithwaite simply ducked the issue. Their website banners: "Wish Book Holiday 2005." They were the worst we had to deal with. OK? Sears/Kmart.

What is Bill upset about, again? Firstly: Sears/Kmart calls their holiday catalog "Wish Book Holiday 2005" instead of something more Christmas-y. I don't know exactly what it is that Bill would prefer..."Christmas Wish List for Chrsitians" or something like that. Maybe "Jesus' Big Book of Bargains." That has a nice ring. Secondly: Spokesman Chris Braithwaite didn't return Bill's phone call.

And, folks, let me tell you, Bill is kind of sensitive about getting return phone calls. He waited up all night for Chris to call, pacing around his bedroom, asking anyone within shouting distance why Chris, who seemed like such a nice guy, and who really seemed to like him, wouldn't call him back. Then, he ate an entire pint of Ben and Jerry's Chubby Hubby ice cream and went to sleep listening to his favorite Sarah McLachlan albums on repeat.

JCPenney says its catalog is always called "Christmas catalog." Federated Department Stores -- Macy's, Bloomingdale's, Burdines -- says the words "Merry Christmas" will be used in most advertising. Same thing at May, Filene's, Lord & Taylor, and Marshall Field's.

I just want to reiterate that this is all really stuff that Bill O'Reilly said on television. You know, it's not like there isn't anything important going on in America right now. 2005 has been perhaps the most eventful year, current events-wise, of my entire lifetime. Ongoing war and tumult in the Middle East, massive horrific natural disasters, protests in France rivaling the student unrest of 1968, the indictment of a high-ranking government official, an ongoing investigation into the leak of an undercover agent by the White House, shutting down the government to discuss possible fraud in the lead-up to the Iraq War, the reversal of America's long-standing policy against torture, the nomination of a hard-line conservative to the Supreme Court...And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

And this guy is analyzing how each individual department store is choosing to refer to Christmas? Even if you are Christian and you love Christmas, who gives a flying fuck?

But Kohl's refused to define how the company will deal with Christmas. Dillard's, however, will use the slogan "Discover Christmas, Discover Dillard's." So there you go. Shop where you like the atmosphere. Just remember, Kohl's and Sears/Kmart, basically, not all right.

Oh, man, that last sentence is classic, classic O'Reilly. "Shop where you like. I'm not telling you where to shop. Just know that you shouldn't shop here or here. But shop wherever you want! There's no spin here!"

Does he genuinely believe that Christmas is under attack by the ACLU and some shadowy, mysterious group calling themselves the "secularists"? Or is he just using this lame theory as a way of inducing panic into the simple-minded and ultra-religious, preying on their fanaticism, love of Christmas and fear of non-Christians?

I'm tempted to say the latter, that O'Reilly is just an opportunist latching on to this issue, but I'm not positive. Mainly because he does such a poor job of making a reasonable argument. A cynical opportunist would probably research the issue, in order to formulate an argument likely to resonate with the most people. O'Reilly seems to just blurt out whatever fool idea enters his head, which would be more the tendency of a mindless ideologue with no agenda outside his own, personal prejudices. Check out some of this exchange between Billy O and business/retail affairs author Phillip Nulman:

O'REILLY: All right, 85 percent of Americans say they're Christians. Christmas is a federal holiday, signed into law by [President] U.S. Grant. And we're living in a time where some retail outlets will not say "Merry Christmas." Insane?

Insane? Is that really the right choice of word? Is that a good way to open a topic, blatantly accusing anyone who holds a different opinion of actual insanity? Why is it insane to not alienate 15% of the population, when a formulation like "Happy Holidays" does the same job without alienating anyone?

This is basically what Nulman, a seemingly normal person of reasonable intelligence, says:

No, no, I don't think it's insane. I think that it's good business practice, actually. And many organizations are trying desperately to be inclusionary. They feel that the use of "Merry Christmas" in their packaging, their bags, their messages, their environment is just the opposite. It's exclusionary to the 15 or 20 percent of the customer base that is not Christian.

These companies are not beholden to any bizarre secular conspiracy. I know, because I'm a secularist! If there was an atheist conspiracy to rid the world of Christmas, I'd have probably heard about it. (And if I had to vote on one Christian thing to get rid of from American society, it wouldn't be Christmas, which sometimes means cookies and presents even for little Jewboys like myself...It would be, in this order, (1) The Intelligent Design non-debate, (2) Pat Robertson and the 700 Club and (3) those stupid Jesus "footprints" wood carvings all those douchebags have up in their living rooms...What a steaming load...)

They're just making a sensible business decision...More people are likely to be turned off by a message for a religious holiday they don't celebrate than by an intentionally generic phrase that can be applied to any religion. In other words, Christians don't get pissed when you say "Happy Holidays," but some Jews or Muslims or Buddhists or Hindus or atheists get pissed when you say "Merry Christmas." So by saying "Happy Holidays," you avoid upsetting anybody. That's just logical.

I mean, it makes some sense, right Billy O?

See, I think you're, I think you're crazy. And here's why. I think the backlash against stores that don't say "Merry Christmas" is enormous because now people are aware of the issue. There's going to be -- it's like the third or fourth year that we've reported it. I know everybody's hypersensitive about are they going to say "Merry Christmas"? Are they going to say "Happy Holidays"? What are they going to say? Are there decorations that say "Merry Christmas"? They're hypersensitive.

It's stunning, isn't it? Please, take a moment and reread that. The man's ego dwarves anyone else's I've ever encounted...in my life. Not only is he insinuating that he has some measure of influence over some people's way of thinking. Bill here actually asserts that he's capable of steering the national dialogue, of dictating views to not just some but a majority of Americans.

"People will be upset when they hear 'Happy Holidays' because I've been talking about it for four years in a row."

Can you imagine anyone, anyone, being asked a similar question and responding in that way? What if you asked Steven Spielberg, "Why do you think dinosaurs so capture the imaginations of children?," he would respond, "Well, I made Jurassic Park like 10 years ago! Of course everyone likes dinosaurs now."

Of course, he'd never take credit for something like that. Because he has some semblance of decorum and humility. Even in cases where it might be true - like Lance Armstrong causing Americans to get more interested overall in cycling - you wouldn't really hear such self-aggrandizing statements from the individuals themselves.

Now, the other thing is, I don't believe most people who aren't Christian are offended by the words "Merry Christmas." I think those people are nuts. I think you're crazy if you're offended by the words "Merry Christmas." So you're basically only knocking out your nutty customers. And why do you want them anyway?

First off, I'd like to point out that without the all-important "nutty customer" demographic, Laser Blazer would probably go out of business this week. Bill is clearly not a businessman, as I have never heard any executive speak favorably about alienating any potential customers. Businesses must grow to survive, and the best way to grow is to make yourself accessible to the most customers possible. If that means removing explicitly religious rhetoric from your marketing, that sounds reasonable enough to me.

But the larger issue here, of course, is that Bill has called anyone who doesn't like being wished a Merry Christmas crazy. And not like, "Oh, come on, that's crazy...", using the phrase colloquially. He's actually saying you're crazy. Like, "Hey, this guy hates Christmas! He's dangerously insane! What horrible psychosis could cause such a strange reaction in a human being?"

As for me, even though I downright dislike Christmas, I've been wished a Merry Christmas thousands of times, and it has never actually upset me. Usually, by late November, I get numb to holiday cheer, and it stops fazing me all together. (Except Christmas carols...Oh how I hate stupid sing-songy Christmas carols.) But that doesn't mean that someone who is more sensitive on this issue than me is nuts. I suspect someone who took their Judaism or Islam or Hinduism or whatever seriously might be upset if, everywhere they went the last 2 months of the year, people spoke to them about a holiday they don't celebrate.

If people stopped Bill every day to wish him a Happy Ramadan, you figure he'd just take it and not respond in any way?

Here's the last part of the interview I'll excerpt. Nulman makes a reasonable point:

"Season's Greetings" and "Happy Holidays," Bill, does not offend Christians.

To which O'Reilly responds:

Yes, it does. It absolutely does. And I know that for a fact. But the smart way to do it is "Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukah, Season's Greetings, Happy Kwanzaa."

So now, when you're greeted in a store, the helpful employee has to reference every upcoming religious holiday, rather than some generic catchphrase that summarizes them all? In LA, I sometimes go into stores where they can't be bothered to lift their head up and acknowledge my existance, where you have to actively beg the employee for a little help. Just today, I went to New Japan, a great take-out Japanese place on Santa Monica Blvd., and waited nearly 15 minutes for service because the cashier was making a personal cell phone call.

According to Bill, she not only should have taken my order more speedily, but sang the first three verses of "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen."

Can you believe this man has his own radio and TV shows? He's clearly a completely out of touch idiot.

Special Guest Blogger: Arnold Schwarzenegger

[For those of you from out of state, California Governor Ahnold initiated a bullshit special election to pass through some of his more aggressive policies. The strategy backfired, as California voters, fed up with Arnold's failure to keep any of his electoral promises and his terrorizing of labor unions and other so-called "special interests," failed to pass a single one of his proposals.

The Governator requested that I provide him some blog space to explain how he intends to move forward from this point. Why didn't he want to use some other venue, like national television? I don't know. If he wanted to use the Internet, and even a blog, why not go to a resoundingly popular one like AndrewSullivan.com or Atrios? I'm not sure. It does strike me as kind of a bad call. But then again, he's clearly not the best strategizer.]



The people of Caleefurneea have spoken, and they have declared that they don't like me very much. This is surprising, because I have been very popular in Keelifurnya for many years, dating back to when I made them all a shitload of money by taking off my shirt and shooting at kidnappers and invisible aliens and Sarah Conner. I haven't felt this rejected by my public since I saw the first-weekend Box Office take for Jingle All the Way.

Here is what I said to the press earlier today:

Asked if there was anything he would do differently, Schwarzenegger said, "If I was to make another Terminator movie, I would tell Terminator to travel back in time to tell Arnold not to have another special election."

And right after I made this statement, I realized something...The voters of Chellefernia only seem to like me when I remind them of all the great movies I have starred in over the years. So, from this point forward, i want to make a promise to all of the citizens of this great state:

I will only advance policies based on my old films.

Here are some of the planks in my new platform:

- We must immediately institute a new TV game show in which Callllleeeeeeeephornians who have committed crimes are placed inside an elaborate death trap. Then, I will come out wearing a colorful suit covered in spikes, and try to kill them. (The advertising proceeds can go to midnight basketball games for inner city kids!)

- All kindergarten teachers must be proficient with a shotgun and familiar with advanced interrogation techniques, including the extraordinarily useful "Who Is Your Daddy And What Does He Do" protocol.

- We must set up an investigative committee to look into the advanced research being done by Cyberdyne Systems. I don't trust those guys.

- If a man, through advanced scientific techniques, somehow gets pregnant with Emma Thompson's baby, he cannot get an abortion after the first trimester.

- Track down all living members of the Crimson Jihad and smoke them out of their holes.

- Universal "face exploding due to the intense atmospheric pressure on the Planet Mars" insurance

- Issue a public apology, on behalf of myself, Joel Schumacher, DC Comics and the entire Warner Brothers development team for Batman and Robin

There will be many more proposals to come, but I think my new message is clear. Love me not because I am a competant leader or politician, but because I have starred in several fun movies, many of them featuring elaborate special effects.

Exceedingly Strange Brew

Rick Moranis has recorded a country and bluegrass album full of his own original songs.

Yeah, seriously.

No, for real. Rick Moranis. The SCTV guy. If you'll all recall the movie version of the Little Shop of Horrors musical, Rick sang all his own songs in there. He doesn't exactly have what I'd call a beautiful voice, but his vocal stylings aren't as embarrassing as, say, the dirtbag husband of a certain former pop icon.

It's just weird to hear this nerdy guy from New York, famous for being 1/2 of the Mackenzie Brothers and starring in some classic 80's comedies (Hello? Ghostbusters?), singing goofy country music.

And the songs are pretty goofy, at least the two they have available online. One is actually a parody of that old Johnny Cash "I've Been Everywhere" song. What can I say? Rick's really got his finger on the pulse.

That Joke Isn't Funny Any More

I don't watch "The Tonight Show" ever, because I can not stand Jay Leno. He's the absolute definition of safe, bland, middle-of-the-road comedy. I understand that he has to try and appeal to the widest possible audience, and most Americans don't want their post-news fall-asleep hour to be too edgy, outrageous or exciting. But, Jay Leno is just such an unfunny, fawning simp. He wasn't funny even before he had a TV show, when he was free to appeal to any audience he chose.

But there's something, I think, a bit more pernicious about Leno. And not just Jay Leno, but a lot of political comedians of his ilk. I think that sometimes, they take real problems and issues and make them frivolous. I think that sometimes, genuine and truthful observations about our world are turned too quickly into just another cliched punchline.

Here's the best example I can think of...The role of Dick Cheney in our government for the last 5 years. Now, we all know that Dick Cheney has been a powerful vice-president. A party leader who essentially appointed himself to the VP position, Cheney and his office have set much of Bush's overall agenda since 2000, most notably in the lead-up to the Iraq War.

Leno and other political comics started goofing on this from Day One. It has become standard to refer to Cheney as "The Real President" and so forth. But when you just make this into a joke, it cheapens the reality. It makes a highly unfortunate situation - the fact that a shadowy figure, whose background remains unknown to most Americans, singularly wields an inordinate amount of power - into an accepted, everyday fact.

There was a time when I would have said, "Well, so what? You can't stop people from making jokes, and it doesn't hurt any one, and it's just how some people process new information." But now I think I can differentiate between types of humor.

When "The Daily Show" makes fun of Dick Cheney, they don't just make a cheesy "he's the real bhehind-the-scenes president" joke. They actual give you some context, often using a quote from Cheney or a real piece of found footage to highlight their message. The joke itself is the same - this unelected guy actually runs shit - but you come away with more insight into the situation than you might have had before.

But when Jay Leno or some other shitty "current events" comedian does yet another lame "Bush is stupid and Cheney is the actual president" joke, it actually kills the dialogue about that topic. There is a chilling effect, because to make that real observation is to repeat a stupid punchline.

Think about it. Let's say, you're in a coffee shop and you've just finished reading Dan Drezner's terrific column from yesterday about Cheney's excessive influence over US policy towards the torture of detainees. You comment to the person next to you - "Hey, did you read this thing Drezner's talking about from the Washington Post? Dick Cheney's still trying to convince people that torture is okay!"

And they'll just respond with something trite: "Well, we always knew he ran the show, you know."

And that's it. Conversation over. It's no longer an item of significance, because Carlos Mencia has been cracking wise about it 24-7 for a year now.

I can think of many, many topics which have suffered this fate. I'll call it Bad Comedy Fatigue (or BCF, for short). Bush's lack of intelligence is another big one. So is our failure to find any WMD's in Iraq. (And if you think I'm just making this whole phenomenon up, consider this article about Bush intentionally trying to turn the WMD fiasco into a joke).

And as long as I've brought up Carlos Mencia, is he not the worst professional stand-up comedian of all time? Seriously, he makes Carrot Top look like Eddie Murphy in Delirious. His jokes are absolutely ridiculously ancient and stupid. Every single joke is a Leno-style "zinger."

Here's how you compose a Leno or Mencia-style zinger. First, think of something that happened this week that you want to write a joke about.

It should be either something that everyone knows about (like a big news story) or something that can be easily explained in about 20 seconds. For my example, I'll use the nomination of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. (Bearing in mind that, in my joke, I won't be able to discuss any specific details about Samuel Alito, for fear of going over someone's head...Only the fact that he's a judge nominated to a big court).

Okay, now all you need is a lame joke about a famous person. Here are some samples:

- Michael Moore is fat
- George Bush is dumb
- Elton John and George Michael are gay
- Ted Kennedy is a fat drunk
- Madonna is a whore
- Paris Hilton is a rich whore
- Tara Reid is a stupid whore with big fake cans
- Lindsay Lohan is a whore who does a lot of coke
- Kevin Federline is a redneck

Please feel free to think of your own. Try to think of a celebrity everyone in America knows about, including old people and out-of-it weirdos and people who work 80 hours a week. Also, try to think of obvious flaws. Courtney Cox may have one arm that's slightly longer than the other, but that's not really going to sell the joke.

All you need to do is pair a celebrity with an obvious flaw to your news story. After thinking about it for all of 2 minutes, I have realized that I can tie Samuel Alito's nomination as a judge to Lindsay Lohan's legal troubles (particularly in terms of her jailbird father).

Then, it's just a matter of getting the wording right. So the joke would sound a little something a-like a-this...

"I don't know if you guys saw this...Sam Alito, new judge, nominated to the Supreme Court. They say, if and when he's confirmed, he'll have a backlog of something like 200 cases to deal with. Yeah! You believe that? 200 cases. And that's just Lindsay Lohan's file!"

Broken Social Scene at the Henry Fonda Theater

Just got back from seeing Canadian supergroup Broken Social Scene at the Henry Fonda. Overall, it was a terrific show. They played a lot of great songs from their awesome new self-titled, and many of my favorites from their previous album, "You Forgot It In People." BSS brings along a huge group of talented musicians - there's a horn section, a violinist, multiple vocalists and drummers on many songs, and 5 guitar players. They have a really full, baroque, lush kind of sound, and a lot of the up-tempo songs really rawk hard live.

It also never hurts to have 3 attractive female musicians on stage with your band at all times. One of the girl vocalists had this Princess Leia-style haircut, which taken along with her beautiful voice and the fact that she's in a cool indie rock band, makes her the most desirable girl I have encountered in a while. Seriously, a girl would have to be a nymphomaniac with an endless supply of Oxycontin who worked in a chocolate factory to be more desirable than a cute indie rock girl who's reminiscent of Princess Leia.

Highlights from the set included "Lover's Spit" and "Almost Crimes" from "You Forgot It In People" and "Major Label Debut," "Superconnected" and "Ibi Dreams of Pavement" from the new album. "Bandwitch" also sounds great live, which is surprising because it's probably my least favorite song on the actual LP.

I did have a few complaints about the show, enumerated here in no particular order:

- Lead singer/de facto frontman Kevin Drew kept making googly eyes at the female lead singer from Feist, the opening act. She sang with BSS for most of the set, but was be distracted often by Drew's constant attention. At one point, they slow-danced on stage together. It was semi-gross. Also, why no love for the Princess Leia girl?

- The band jammed out the last song of the encore forever. I have it when bands end a show with a really long, slow, pointless jam session. Are they trying to fool you into thinking the show was longer than it really was, so you think you got your money's worth? Is it just egotism? Like, a show by Broken Social Scene is such an epic, important undertaking, you need time for the experience to soak in? The single longest, lamest end-of-show fade-out I have ever seen was Built to Spill at the House of Blues on Sunset. I think Doug Martsch held a single note on the guitar for 45 minutes to end that goddamn show. Hey, Doug, you may not have to wake up early in the morning tomorrow, but not all of us get paid to diddle around on an intrsument until 3 am. We have jobs. (Back then, I had an actual job.)

- Kevin Drew did that thing where the guy in the band tells the audience to yell really loud, and then everyone yells and then they tell you that you didn't yell loud enough. I hate that thing. It's such bullshit. I didn't pay $30 and drive across Los Angeles after a long day at work to yell. I did it to listen to Broken Social Scene play music. So, get to it. Why does every rock singer feel the need to do this? Do they teach it the first day in Rock School? "Kids, if you ever feel that the audience isn't connecting enough with the music, just tell them to yell really loud, and then discourage them by saying that they didn't yell loud enough, and force them to do it again. Also, tell an anecdote about the last time you were in their hometown, preferably one that doesn't go anywhere."

- I was considering getting a Broken Social Scene T-shirt, mainly because I'm running out of clean T-shirts. But they only had shirts appropriate for girls or little weenie guys who want to wear extremely tight yellow or pink shirts. And I am neither of the above. So I don't get a shirt? I don't get it...When did every indie rock band become Jean Paul Gaultier, designing clothing only for the 1% of Americans without a visible paunch? From now on, Broken Social Scene, all your shirts should come in S M L and XL, and they should come in some color other than "Goofy Homo Pink." Deal?

Other than that, a good time was had by all.

We Do Not Torture

I've been trying to branch out from screenwriting. I'd like to start writing plays. More specifically, theater of the absurd. Here is my first attempt. I call it "We Do Not Torture."

CAST OF CHARACTERS

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH
VOICE OF REASON
SENATOR MCCAIN

[The PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES and the VOICE OF REASON sit on a rock. As they speak, they try on a pair of boots (one boot each), then switch boots, then discard them altogether.]

ACT 1

BUSH: We do not torture.
REASON: But what about those people in Abu Gharib? Surely we have confirmed reports that some of them were tortured.
BUSH: We do not torture.
REASON: But there are pictures.
BUSH: We do not torture.
REASON: They're famous! They've already become cliches in America. Like that one with the woman smoking a cigarette and pointing to the half-naked Arab man.
BUSH: We do not torture.
REASON: I've seen them.
BUSH: We do not torture.
REASON: But other countries have confirmed that we house prisoners there.
BUSH: We do not torture.
REASON: Well, why would we even be hiding these people, including people who have committed no crime and have never been officially charged with a crime, in foriegn prisons if not to torture them?
BUSH: We do not torture.
REASON: You're going to deny it in the face of all that evidence?
BUSH: Hang on. I'm going to go clear some brush.

[The PRESIDENT leaves the rock and disappears off-stage.]

ACT 2

[The PRESIDENT, having returned from cleaning brush, is now perched atop his rock again. He's naked except for a cowboy hat. Another man, dressed in a smart suit, enters from off-stage. He is SENATOR MCCAIN.]

BUSH: We do not torture.
MCCAIN: Well, then, Mr. President, woudl you just sign this paper promising not to torture anyone?
BUSH: No.
MCCAIN: Why not?
BUSH: We do not torture.
MCCAIN: Then just sign this paper promising that you don't torture, and won't torture, and I'll get out of your hair.
BUSH: Um. No.

ACT 3

[PRESIDENT BUSH stands alone on a dark stage. He has some clothes on now, a suit like the one MCCAIN wore.]

BUSH: We do not torture. We do not torture. We do not torture. We do not torture. We do not torture. We do not torture. We do not torture. We do not torture. We do not torture. We do not torture. We do not torture. We do not torture. We do not torture. We do not torture. We do not torture. We do not torture. We do not torture. We do not torture. We do not torture. We do not torture. We do not torture. We do not torture. We do not torture. We do not torture. We do not torture. We do not torture. We do not torture. We do not torture. We do not torture.

What I Did Today

Normally, I hate blogs where the authors just write about whatever they did that day. Unfortunately, this accounts for 99% of all blogs. It's usually something like this.

SUNDAY, NOV. 6

OMG WTF today B told me he wasn't going to no party at Fawntenelle's place, tho he sed he wuz the other day when we wuz chillin' by the bleachers bumping that hot new Chingy joint... SMD OMFG 11111

<3<3<3

At 11:30, I went to work. You can usually tell when it's going to be a particularly crazy day down at the store (a crazy day being one in which more than 5 totally batshit insane people come to shop there), and this morning started off slow. But after the first hour, I'd probably helped at least 3 nutjobs. So I was getting wary.

A few hours in, the boss told us that one out of the three working employees could take off early. He did not, however, specify which employee. And of course all three of us wanted to leave.

We thought for a good long while about how best to handle the situation. All the usual suspects were mentioned: rock paper scissors, drawing straws, flipping a coin, but all had significant down sides. There's really no way to do a totally fair rock paper scissors decision between three people, unless you devise a sort-of RPS Tournament. And that's just kind of lame to take part in (not to mention time-consuming and requiring rudimentary math skills).

And, if we were to draw straws, we'd first need three straws, and then a sufficient cutting tool. I could see that whole situation going awry really quickly.

So I suggested the following: we have a randomly selected customer take a piece of paper and write down a number between 1 and 100, not showing the paper to any of us. Then, we each choose a number. Whoever gets closest to the number of the paper goes home early.

And none of this "Price is Right" no going over nonsense. Whoever's closest in either direction takes the taco. Once we agreed to this strategy, and that no one would call foul afterwards for some sort of ticky-tack BS, I asked a regular customer to pick a number. He spent a little bit too long thinking of a number - as if the mere act of thinking of any random number from 1-100 was some sort of strenuous labor - and then jotted something down. I held it, for safekeeping, under a nearby leftover Halloween jack-o-lantern.

Co-Worker #1, Ari, chose 3. It was an interesting decision, cutting himself off at the very bottom like that. If there was the "no going over" rule, I could see his decision-making. We'd all probably go a bit higher, so if the number was anywhere from 3-20 something, he was nearly guaranteed a win.

I went next. I chose 32. I figured, it's a good distance from 3, so I get a bunch of numbers in that direction, and my next co-worker would probably go with a high number after that, meaning that anything from 17 to something like the 50's would be mine.

Instead, Co-Worker #2, Ray, went with 13. An interesting move. Okay, I'll say it, a bad move. I think maybe he and Ari were both still thinking that they couldn't go over the chosen number.

Anyway, the number was 64, so it wouldn't have mattered. I won outright, no matter how you figure it. And I instantly felt really guilty. I had chosen the game, and I had blurted out "32" before Ray had a chance to speak, so I felt like there was an appearance of impropriety. I was even going to suggest a do-over, but I had been the one to initially say "no do-overs," so it just felt kind of wrong and hypocritical. My co-workers took it really well, but was there, deep down, burning feelings of resentment? Only time will tell...

So I got to leave work at around 4:30, which was nice. I proceeded to utterly waste the "found" afternoon watching the first season of "Veronica Mars" on DVD. I also took a break to go check out the brand-new digs of my friends Jeff and Garth, two-thirds of the terrific LA band The Ventriloquists. We watched the local news until it became depressing, and then Garth played for me and Jeff the brand-new mix of their song "Toxic Sun."

We then made a bizarre discovery. If you play the chorus of said song backwards in ProTools, it sounds exactly like South African music. Seriously, this could have been a B-Side from Paul Simon's "Graceland" album. We started having strange science-fiction themed ideas, like what if our language and some African language were actually identical, only with all the actual sounds reversed. I suggested that this would make a good Dean Koontz story...A composer writes a great new song, but discovers that, if played backwards, his song is actually some crazy old tribal song used to summon a demon to Earth or some bullshit like that.

It could be very Lovecraftian and awesome. If you're a huge movie producer and are interested in funding a big-budget adapatation of this idea, please e-mail me as soon as you've finished wiring the money to my Swiss bank account.

Then I came home and discussed Roommate Crisis '05 with Nathan and Chris. See, Roommate Chris is moving out in two weeks, with November being his last month as a dues-paying member of Team Palms. Vineet was originally going to fill Chris' vacancy, but he is a dirty double-crosser. Now we are actively showing our apartment to potential new roommates.

Unfortunately, prospective roommates don't stay for long. Usually, we let them inside, they take one look around, and then make for the door like the place was filled with flu-infected seagulls. Seriously, we had a guy in here the other day who left so quickly...I don't even think he went out the door. He just flung himself out the nearest available opening.

And they always want to be polite, these prospective roommates. They never want to say, "Oh, this place is small and gross and you guys are lame, I don't want to live here." They always have to pretend to really like your apartment.

"Oh, yeah, this looks nice, well, I'll give you guys a call, I have about 8 more places to see tonight, so I've got to go, but let me know if you don't find anyone because I think it might be okay, and I really should get out of here, but you've got my number, oh you don't, well, I've got yours so I'll be in touch okay you guys have a good night I'm gonna go. Nice 'Simpsons' poster."

Yes, I do have a poster with The Simpsons on it, but we also have a Kandinsky print hanging up. So it's, you know, classy.

Hopefully, we'll eventually get someone to hang out for long enough to enjoy our sparkling personalities. Then, I'm sure the fact that we live in a cramped, unkempt hovel above a parking lot that substitutes as a Daycare Center and Produce Market will cease to matter entirely.

7 Things I Hate About You

(With "you" in this sentence meaning you, dear reader, only if you happen to be Jennifer Aniston.)

Special thanks to Atrios, king of the lefty blogosphere now that that Greek guy has imploded, for pointing out this delightful (by which I mean hilariously nonsensical) Newsweek interview with Jennifer Aniston.

In it, she describes the 7 things she'd prefer to talk about than her recent divorce from Brad "You're Not Your Fucking Khakis" Pitt and copulation with Vince "That's So Money, Baby" Vaughn. She clearly doesn't understand that hooking up with movie stars is what makes her interesting in the first place. I mean, you know, now that people are over her amazing goddamn haircut.

So here are, in order I presume, things Jen finds more interesting than her various sexual and romantic escapades.

1. My new movie, "Derailed."

It's a really sexy psychological thriller with Clive Owen. I had never done a thriller before. It was hard to kiss Clive, but you know what? Somebody had to do it, and that's what they pay me for.

Right away, the lunacy begins. This article is titled "Things I'd Rather Talk About Than The Men in My Life." And the very first item she'd rather talk about...is getting it on with a sexy famous guy. Jen, have a seat, let me explain something to you...

See, the thing is, you're intensely shallow. It's okay. Lots of people in Los Angeles are this way. But you've got to stop pretending that you're not intensely shallow. Please. Whenever you're around a famous guy, you go a big wet one. I'm cool with it, I just wish you were cool with it, too.

And, by the way, whenever the actors in a movie describe the movie as "really sexy," that means it's not sexy. If a movie is actually sexy, the actors involved describe the experience as "really degrading."

2. My dog, Norman.

I got him from the animal trainers on "Friends"—the ones who worked with the chick, the duck and the monkey. He was an actor dog, but he was so lazy that he had a terrible reputation. He wouldn't hit his mark. He just sat there. They said they sent his doggie head shot out and he wasn't getting any calls.

Your dog's name is Norman? What kind of lame, boring dog name is Norman? Does he work in the Doggie Accounts Payable Department or something? Today, my co-worker Ray was openly considering the possibility of naming his first-born son Qui-Gonn, and even that seems more reasonable than naming a cute little dog "Norman."

3. How little I actually cry.

I'm pegged as a crier, aren't I? I was upset about the Vanity Fair article. I had one moment when I got emotional because I hadn't sat down with an interviewer since this whole debacle took place. It happened for a second and then it was over. But I do cry when I watch shows about babies being born. And I can turn on Terms of Endearment at any point and start crying—or The Champ with Rick Schroder.

"When I watch shows about babies being born"? What shows are these, exactly? Does she mean, like, episodes of sitcoms in which babies are born? Or whole TV shows about the birthing process. Because I saw one of those "shows" in high school health class, and it certainly brought out strong emotions, but it was more like intense nausea than sadness.

4. The long-term effects of Botox.

It seems like people are messing around with dangerous stuff. Look at some of the faces out there! Men age gracefully, although you're seeing more men having plastic surgery, which is weird. Nothing is worse than a guy with an eye job—and don't think we can't tell.

I really must invite Jen over next time I have a dinner party. She sounds like a truly fascinating conversationalist with a lot of insightful opinions about the key issues of the day. I'm sorry, but I've now run out of sarcasm. I'll post another quote from her interview to give myself a chance to reload.

5. The state of television.

Where are all the sitcoms? Why are we so obsessed with reality TV? We don't know how to write and create good shows. I wonder if reality TV is adding to the obsession with the rag magazines that create all those soap operas with celebrities. So-and-so is scratching so-and-so's eyes out—and, oh, my God, they may meet! It's so pathetic.

Oh, man, is there anything more obnoxious than pampered celebrities railing on and on about the tabloids? Seriously, I know you guys hate the tabloids. They invade your privacy, it's embarrassing, I get it...But you've really got to stop bringing it up constantly. We're all sick to death of hearing about it from you all the time. And that beating up on papparazzi thing that Sean Penn and Clooney do to feel like big men? That makes you guys come off like little whiny bitches, okay? Just deal with it. You're rich and famous, for fuck's sake, things could be worse. If you really can't stand it any more, make a movie with Mark Steven Johnson. Things will probably take cvare of themselves from there on in.

Plus, the ex-star of a lame sitcom going off about how there should be more sitcoms and less reality shows...Guess what, Jen, I've seen a bunch of episodes of "Friends," and you guys aren't 1/100,000 as amusing as P. Diddy ridiculing a room full of exhausted, malnourished girls wearing nothing but spandex and navel jewelry.

6. The state of the world.

How about that indictment?! And why did it take so long to respond to the crisis in New Orleans? Everything is imploding. It all seems to lead back to our dear president.

This is #6 out of 7? We had to talk about Botox and your fucking dog before this? Next time you're ranking things that are more important than the fact that you're schtupping the guy from Wedding Crashers, maybe START with the thousands dead in New Orleans and the crisis of corruption in the highest levels of our government, how's about that?

7. Radiohead.

When are they going to make a new album? Where are they? Where did they go? I also want to know why Steve Perry left Journey.

Oh, it sucks when vapid celebrities reveal they have your exact same taste in music. (Although was "Hail to the Thief" really that long ago? Are we already at the point of demanding new Radiohead music vocally?) And, please, Jen, don't even discuss Radiohead in the same sentence as Steve Perry. It hurts my soul.

Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang

It's difficult to write about Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang for the benefit of those who have not seen the film. Really, the movie is about layered storytelling. What initially seems like it's going to be the story is really just a lead-in to the lead-in to the lead-in to the actual story. Writer/director Shane Black has piled so many levels of artifice into a single 100 minute film, the final effect is bewildering. You feel as if you've been told seven or eight engaging, funny and outrageous stories, and they all kind of link together in an odd way, but the experience taken as a whole it doesn't make any logical sense.

A simple summary might go as follows: "A thief posing as an actor and his childhood crush become involved in the complicated kidnapping case of a wealthy heiress." But the mystery itself is only background. This is a story about the fun and excitement of telling a story, and Shane Black's enthusiasm for this kind of punchy, strange, absurdist, darkly comic post-modern action-adventure is evident in every frame.



Dopey NYC transplant Harry Lockhart (Robert Downey Jr. in maybe his most fall-down funny performance ever) narrates the entire film in a wry, self-aware manner. He's a movie narrator in the style of Christina Ricci in The Opposite of Sex or Ed Norton in Fight Club. It's a risky technique. Often, this sort of constant "commentary" on the action of the movie can grow tedious and annoying, particularly if it's clear that the narration exists only to tie together disparate plot threads or hold the audience's attention through a dull stretch of narrative.

But in Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, Harry's voice is essential. Not only because he's our guide to a considerably confusing and wholly original Los Angeles underworld, but also because his observations about the act of telling a story underline the entire point of the movie. Without Harry actually fretting about getting the details right, and nervously trying to contain his enthusiasm for the bits when the story gets really good, this could have been just another backstage Hollywood satire, albeit with more gunplay and gay jokes.

So what is the movie about? Harry, through a bizarre series of coincidences, finds himself giving up his criminal ways in New York and coming out to Los Angeles at the behest of a producer (Larry Miller). Soon enough, he finds himself at a party with a childhood friend, the stunningly beautiful Harmony (a wonderful performance from relative newcomer Michelle Monaghan), as well as the openly gay private investigator/movie consultant known to everyone as Gay Perry (a delightfully deadpan Val Kilmer).

Perry is working on a case for a young woman, tailing the scion of former actor and current wealthy socialite Harlan Dexter. Harry, on the other hand, is hired by Harmony to find out the truth behind her younger sister's recent suicide. (Harry has lied to Harmony and told her he is a private detective in order to get into her pants.)

Of course, the two cases turn out to be connected, and all three will spend the next several days pursuing men with guns, engaging in all manner of fight sequences, shootouts and car chases, and Harry will even be tortured with electrodes attached to his genitals. Though Black's witty, nimble dialogue garners a lot of laughs, it's really the outrageousness of his vision and the element of surprise that make Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang so ridiculously entertaining. Every time you think he has allowed the violence or the comedy to go as far as it can go, there's another scene with another shocking moment at the ready.

But, again, this is the point. It's a movie about what movies do, looking into how we can get swept up in an adventure that's constantly alerting us to its own improbability. Black gets us involved in a scenario before turning everything on its ear and uprooting the viewer again and again, but even better, he tells us beforehand that he's going to do it.

In a particularly clever device, Harmony initially came to Los Angeles because of an obsession with a series of pulp novels following a detective named Johnny Gossamer. Early on in the film, she and Harry reminisce about the books, noting that they always involve two mysteries that congeal into one, that they always include a gratuitous torture scene, random sex and a violent climax. One guess as to whether Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang will include all of these sequences (not to mention featuring a title that could suit any Gossamer book).

There are many many many more levels to the film I could discuss, but as I said, it will only really work as an immersive experience. Describing this kind of exuberant, over-the-top comedy doesn't do anyone any good.

What I can say is that the performances, particularly those of Kilmer, Downey Jr. and the beautiful Ms. Monaghan, are stellar. Kilmer plays a variation on several other characters, even his gruff, no-nonsense spook in David Mamet's somewhat disasterous Spartan, but with that real movie-star charisma he channels occasionally. I don't know what it is with this guy...When he's on, he's fucking dynamite - Jim Morrison, Doc Holliday. Iceman! But in so many other films, he slips into this tedious, bland, ponderous, nearly comatose state. Maybe he just needs to connect with the material. Gay Perry is one of the best characters I've seen in any movie this year.

And Downey Jr. also rises to the occasion. He's got more screen time than anyone else, and it's a role that requires a certain amount of manic energy. It would have been possible to go way too far and turn screechy rather than just neurotic, whiny and occasionally in pain. If this were Robin Williams and not Robert Downey Jr., the thing could have been an unmitigated disaster. But Rob's on top of his game, and manages to keep the whole convoluted thing together through sheer will.

And as I said before, Monaghan is incredibly beatiful and engaging and fun to watch (and willing to do one phenomenal scene topless!) She has that rare ability among attractive young actresses to seem entirely at home using salty language, cracking wise and cleaning up corpses. She's quite a find, and if only more people were going out to see this film, it could be a breakthrough performance.

And last but not least deserving of my unadulterated praise is writer Shane Black, famous since the 80's for penning the scripts to films like Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout and The Long Kiss Goodnight. (Yes, fine, okay, and Last Action Hero). I enjoy the first three of those movies, but to my mind, Black has never written a more delirious, chaotic and funny script. The fact that he makes his directorial debut with a movie this complex and layered is rather stunning. Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang is that rare movie with the ability to not only entertain but surprise, not just in how well in all comes together, but that something so unique, strange and disarming would be made at all.

The Devil's Rejects

Rob Zombie clearly loves 70's grindhouse films. And not just their grisly love of violent mayhem and fascination with rage and depravity. He has internalized their visual style, their gritty sense of atmosphere, their washed-out cinematography, their amoral, fatalistic mindset. Everything in Devil's Rejects feels right, feels authentic to the period and the style Zombie's recalling.

Some quick background: In the days before Times Square was a haven of Disney-themed family fun, it used to house a lot of skeezy porno theaters. Some of these 42nd Street theaters, during the week, when they weren't showing porn, would show the 1970's equivalent of direct-to-DVD B-movies...Dirty, shocking, perverse or otherwise "inappropriate" movies made on the cheap. Guys like Harry Novak, Jess Franco and Bob Cresse have since become cult legends, but at the time it was about making a quick dollar churning out disposable, titilating cinematic trash.

Zombie's new film doesn't just recall these movies, it recreates them down to every last exacting detail. (The movie even takes place in 1978).

But what's his purpose? What is revisiting the grindhouse gorefests of the 70's supposed to mean? I suspect, nothing at all. Zombie probably just likes these kinds of movies and wanted to make one of his own. That's fine, I suppose, to create a pastiche of conventions from an all-but-dead style of filmmaking. It's an excuse to get a bunch of old actors together, which is always fun, and the genre is certainly appropriate to Zombie's taste for the perverse. The entire enterprise, though, is a bit hollow.

The original grindhouse films were the way they were for a reason. They were made by amateurs with no time to make a movie and no real financing. They needed to be shocking in order to grab people's attention, and to provide a genuine alternative to Hollywood product. If you wanted to see a film about a beautiful woman dying of a terminal disease, you could go see Love Story. You only went to Times Square to see the sort of fucked up shit Hollywood doesn't put in real movies.



In his debut film, House of 1000 Corpses, Zombie gave us yet another in a long line of bad Texas Chainsaw Massacre remakes, stranding a bunch of random idiots in a farmhouse and turning some psychos loose on them. There was some controversy upon the film's original release, more I suspect for its unseemly atmosphere than its actual on-screen violence, but it was nothing that a low-budget horror movie fan hadn't seen before. That entire film, really, was nothing more than a tired retread.

The Devil's Rejects, by moving the action away from the farmhouse and on to the open road, gives Zombie a lot more to work with. More space, more characters, a wider variety of classic exploitation movie scenarios to play around with. More than just a violent horror film, Devil's Rejects is an ode to the "killers on the run" genre, a reunion of B-movie actors of the 70's and 80's and a pretty horrifying revenge film to boot. It's a far more confident and assured film than his debut. In fact, the attention to detail, the confident direction and the wonderful cinematography of Phil Parmet are light years ahead of 1000 Corpses. They are the marks of an interesting filmmaker who may just need a few more films to really figure out what it is he wants to say.

But this movie's content to serve as nostalgia, albeit nostalgia for a certain type of filmgoer who likes really intensely messed up, violent, gruesome, cruel stories about death and depravity.

As the film opens, hard-ass Sheriff Wydell (veteran character actor William Forsythe) has laid seige to the compound of the family of Satanaic nutcases who populated House of 1000 Corpses. Some family members are killed or captured, but a few escape, including insane clown Captain Spaulding (70's B-movie mainstay Sid Haig), his daughter Baby (Zombie's wife, Sheri Moon) and Charlie Manson lookalike Otis (Bill Moseley, a veteran of mainly films with names like Silent Night Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out!).

Together, they flee the scene, leaving in their wake a trail of massacred bodies and tormented victims. Nearly everyone they encounter on their travels has some kind of pop culture cachet...There's indie comic Brian Posehn as an oafish roadie, 70's Penthouse Pet Priscilla Barnes as a hostage who is violently and sexually assaulted by the sadistic Otis, Western mainstay Geoffrey Lewis as a country singer, Robert Rodriguez featured player Danny Trejo as a hired gun, the late "tallest man alive" Matthew McGrory (who also appeared in Tim Burton's Big Fish) appears briefly, Dawn of the Dead star Ken Foree as a backwoods pimp and even Halloween vet PJ Soles as a woman who gets carjacked.

It's fun to play Spot That Reference for a while, but by the halfway point it starts to feel like a gimmick. Casting an old-time actor or an infamous face doesn't have to be a stunt, if they are right for the role, but it kind of takes away from the effect when every single part goes to some known personality. That's what sets apart a John Waters camp-fest from a more thoughtful homage.

Zombie, to his credit, understands that it's not the on-screen violence that gives these grindhouse films their power to repulse, horrify, amuse and shock - it's their constant focus on nihilistic cruelty. The Devil's Rejects isn't a fun movie with a few scattered scenes of horror. It's a non-stop celebration of carnage, torture and bloodshed. Its main characters (including Forsythe's maniacal cop) are soulless killing machines. Even their victims aren't really allowed any humanity or life. They are puppets to be manipulated, humiliated and then eviscerated.

I know I'm making the movie sound disgusting and fairly repulsive. You don't know the half of it. As I said before, Zombie has internalized the twisted logic of these movies, and even if his choice of topic isn't exactly innovative, he has come up with some moments of genuinely outrageous, ugly intensity and surprise. I'll spoil one sequence...An unfortunate young woman (Kate Norby) runs out into the middle of a highway, half-insane, wearing a mask made from the peeled-off face of her dead husband, and is hit by a big rig.

Zombie lovingly photographs the aftermath, the most hideous intestine, bone and brain-filled skidmark imaginable. I have seen a number of incredibly violent movies, but this shot elicited a loud, verbal reaction from me. That's saying something.

And I do mean "lovingly." The entire movie has the feeling of a labor of love, the culmination of a lifetime spent watching gross-out, underground cinema. And I don't necessarily want to come down on that. I had a good time being disturbed by Devil's Rejects. But I'm not one of those people inclined to like a filmmaker just because we clearly share the same tastes in films. Quentin Tarantino, in the Kill Bill movies and his other films, has demonstrated an ability to reimagine old forms of cult storytelling for our times. His movies make old forgotten 70's style and music feel essential and contemporary.

Zombie hasn't quite gotten that far. His final shot, in which The Rejects face their law enforcement persuers head-on to the sounds of Lynard Skynard's "Freebird" on the soundtrack, works as a nifty little post-modern moment, as irony. And it's a very well-shot sequence. But it's not exactly Pulp Fiction, colliding the past and the future into a single film and giving it a timeless quality. More an engaging, debased in-joke that hardcore movie nerds will appreciate. Fortunately, I am one of those nerds.

O'Reilly's Adventures Through Time

It's early November, so you know what that means. Bill O'Reilly begins his yearly attempt to convince everyone that there's a conspiracy to wipe out the holiday of Christmas. Every time Bill says something cataclysmically stupid on TV or radio, I keep thinking that he'll be fired or silenced. But, no, he's clinging tenaciously to the airwaves for another merry ol' season of crackpot paranoia and condescending dementia. Here's Bill's favorite website Media Matters:

Fox News host and nationally syndicated radio host Bill O'Reilly claimed that "traditionalist" Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito Jr., like the country's Founding Fathers, does not "want all mention of Christmas stricken from the public arena."

Clearly, you can see why Bill hates Media Matters for America. They repeatedly insist on writing down all the idiotic things he says and putting them online for people to read. These bastards must be stopped! Bill O'Reilly is a broadcaster; he's not in the business of making public statements, obviously!

Also, I'm not sure if you knew this, but Bill has fashioned something of a time travel device, allowing him to interview America's Founding Fathers. He has returned to 2005 with a panoply of insights from Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Ben Franklin and others about all sorts of topics, from strict constructionism to even partial birth abortion!

Here's Bill's actual statements from his Westwood One radio show on November 1st:

O'REILLY: By the way, if Alito is confirmed, that will be a good thing for conservatives. That's the bottom line. Because Alito will take a more traditional view than a [Supreme Court justices Stephen G.] Breyer or a [Ruth Bader] Ginsburg. OK? He'll look at things, and he'll say, "You know, the Founding Fathers didn't want partial-birth abortion. The Founding Fathers didn't want all mention of Christmas stricken from the public arena." That's what Alito will do. He's a traditionalist. He's going to rule that way.

How does he do it? How does he manage to generate the 1.21 jigowatts of electricity needed to power his flux capacitor without getting his hands on some weapons-grade Lyberian plutonium? A bolt of lightning?

Well, regardless of the futuristic technology involved, one thing is unavoidably clear...Bill O'Reilly now has domain over the whole of space-time. He's able to glide easily throughout American History, asking the really crucial questions that we, the People of the 21st Century, need answered.

Now, I understand that he has a book coming out full of his adventures through time, but Bill said it was okay for me to give you all a sneak preview of some of the interviews he has conducted. You know, cause we're such close, personal friends. First, here's Bill with one of my favorite Founding Fathers, the Father of our Country, George Washington.

O'REILLY: Mr. Washington, thank you for having the courage to speak with me, unlike that total coward Nathan Hale. He refused to appear.
WASHINGTON: Well, I hardly think Nathan Hale...
O'REILLY: One question, Mr. Washington...Do you like Christmas?
WASHINGTON: Actually, Bill, it may interest you to know that many of us who resented years of tyrannical rule by the British rejected traditional British holidays following the American Revolution. Did you know that, at one time, it was even a crime in the city of Boston to celebrate Christmas?
O'REILLY: Just answer the question, sir...Do you like Jesus?
WASHINGTON: I suppose he wasn't a bad sort of guy, although many of us Founding Fathers are deists, which means we...
O'REILLY: Shut up, Mr. Washington, for a minute...
WASHINGTON: Actually, Bill, it's General Washington, and...
O'REILLY: Don't try to spin me. This is a no-spin zone.
WASHINGTON: What is the spin...
O'REILLY: I will shut off your microphone, okay? I will do it unless you can be civil. Now, answer my question, yes or no. Would you like to murder Christian children in their sleep the night of December 24th?
WASHINGTON: Well, of course not.
O'REILLY: Okay, fair enough, you favor Christmas. I'll give you the last word.
WASHINGTON: What?

Fascinating insights...After that, Bill jumped ahead a ways. Here's him speaking with Abraham Lincoln on the eve of his historic Gettysburg Address:

O'REILLY: Mr. Lincoln, thank you for meeting with me.
LINCOLN: Well, you just sort of barged in here. Didn't leave me much choice. I am actually quite busy.
O'REILLY: I appreciate your time.
LINCOLN: I guess I can just write the speech on the train there tomorrow. Hope I can come up with something good.
O'REILLY: Here's my question. Lots of people owned slaves, right? Even Thomas Jefferson, one of the Founding Fathers, he owned slaves. What's the big deal? Your thoughts.
LINCOLN: But does the Declaration of Independence not say, "We hold these truths to be self-evident. That all men are created equal?"
O'REILLY: Don't try to spin me, okay? That's the interpretation of useless liberal activist judges and you know it, sir. I won't be spun.
LINCOLN: I don't know why you keep talking about spinning...
O'REILLY: You know, in the Bible, lots of people owned slaves. Are you saying that The Bible is wrong?
LINCOLN: Of course not, but...
O'REILLY: Okay, then, we agree. Slavery is in the Bible, so it's okay. I'll give you the last word.
LINCOLN: This is highly irregular.

Thank goodness it was a real informed journalist of O'Reilly's stature who made this phenomenal discovery, and not some loudmouth jackass. We might have hard a real crisis on our hands. Here's one final Billy O. interview, this time with the 20th Century's most notorious madman, Adolf Hitler.

Yeah, that's right, I'm going there.

O'REILLY: Wow, what a thrill. Here I am, in a bunker deep beneath Berlin with the original Ubermensch, Der Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler.
HITLER: Danke, danke.
O'REILLY: Can I just say, I love what you've done with the place. Very homey.
HITLER: Yes, Eva is a whiz vit design. Did you see those lacy doilies unter all the bottles of suicide pills?
O'REILLY: A classy touch.
HITLER: Bill, I asked you down herr because I haff somezing to say to the zee Americans of zee future.
O'REILLY: Yeah, but before we get to that, can I just ask you one thing about America?
HITLER: Vell, I don't know about America in zee future. It's January of 1945.
O'REILLY: Why do you think these liberals hate Christmas so much?
HITLER: Vat are these liberals in America? Vat do they stand for?
O'REILLY: Oh, liberal is just a code word I use all the time for rich Jews who live in big coastal cities and run everything.
HITLER: Juden!
O'REILLY: Yeah, exactly.
HITLER: They hate Christmas because they were sent by the Devil to undermine the good, honest Christians. Zat is why they will try to eliminate Christmas, and Christianity. And it is why we have to eliminate them first!
O'REILLY: Yeah, totally. That's exactly what I've been saying.
HITLER: Bill, this comes right around into what I wanted to tell all the future Americans.
O'REILLY: Oh, yeah, what's that?
HITLER: I vill be back! Right now, in Brazil, brilliant Nazi scientists are developing a plan to clone me unt bring me into zee future! Once again, I vill make an attempt to conquer ze vorld!
O'REILLY: Really? Cause they tried that in a movie once and it didn't work.
HITLER: Really?
O'REILLY: Yeah. Gregory Peck was in it, I think.
HITLER: Schnell! Perhaps I vill just have to have them save my brain.
O'REILLY: Oh, jeez...

It goes on like that for a while. Anyway, you can check out the full transcripts once that book hits shelves.

Hopefully, after that, Bill will tell us about the mind-control device he has likewise developed, that allows him to view the contents of Samuel Alito's brain, including how the man will vote in any sort of hypothetical case that may one day arise.

I Guess That's Why They Call it the Glues

A guy is suing Home Depot because someone glued him to a toilet seat. That's awesome.

Home Depot was sued by a shopper who claims he got stuck to a restroom toilet seat because a prankster had smeared it with glue.

Bob Dougherty, 57, accused employees of ignoring his cries for help for about 15 minutes because they thought he was kidding.

It's already unpleasant enough to make a doody in a public restroom. There's always gross smells, and wadded-up little wet pieces of toilet paper strewn about in an unsavory fashion. And those paper toilet seat coverings are so thin and flimsy! They're not even 1-ply. That's, like, .25-ply. I want 3-ply toilet seat coverings, goddammit. There's asses touching that seat all day - we demand protection.

So this poor guy is already dealing with all of this, and then on top of that, he finds himself planted to the seat with glue. And then on top of that, everyone in the store ignores him.

A store employee who heard him calling for help informed the head clerk by radio, but the head clerk "believed it to be a hoax," the lawsuit said.

Man, that is great. Because you know that line, "Believed it to be a hoax," means that all the Home Depot employees were laughing at this guy while he's glued to a toilet in the back. That's got to be a trifle bit humiliating. I think, rather than go through such an ordeal, I'd probably just content myself to just live out the rest of my years on a toilet in the bathroom of a Home Depot.

The lawsuit said store officials called for an ambulance after about 15 minutes. Paramedics unbolted the toilet seat, and as they wheeled the "frightened and humiliated" Dougherty out of the store, he passed out.

This is seriously the most pathetic story I've ever heard. It starts out, and it's about a middle-aged guy getting stuck on the can, which is always funny. But by the end, you really start to feel for this guy, Dougherty. I mean, it doesn't sound like the entire incident was that big a deal, and it would make a kickass blog post if it happened to me, but he sounds genuinely traumatized by the event.

Which is why I can't understand suing the company. I mean, I guess he'll get some kind of cash settlement, and everyone's greedy, but it just menas he has to recount this entire trauma in front of a national audience. I mean, I would never even know about Bob Dougherty of Boulder, Colorado getting his ass stuck to a toilet seat if there wasn't this Associated Press article about the entire affair. Now and forever, the rest of his life, he'll be the guy who got glued to a toilet seat. How dignified.

"This is not Home Depot's fault," he said. "But I am blaming them for letting me hang in there and just ignoring me."

Bob, as someone who has worked retail for years, let me assure you...The Home Depot emplyoees were not ignoring you. They were having a cheap laugh at your expense. In fact, if my instincts are correct, one of those very employees is most likely your initial seat-gluer.

Party Down!

Of all the whackjobs on all the Internets, Bill Frist M.D. may by the wackiest. The guy is nuttier than the old ratty T-shirt under Pee Wee Herman's bed. (Give it a minute...There you go...)

He's the chairman of the Volunteer Political Action Committee, which goes by the charming and not-at-all-menacing-sounding acronym VOLPAC. Seriously, that sounds like the name of a Sith Lord, not a forward-thinking political organization. Fristie, do something about that.

Anyway, this entire website is stark raving insane. Frist does this thing where he pretends that nothing goes on in the Senate other than Democrats antagonizing Republicans. Seriously, to hear him tell it, the entire Capitol Building is exactly like a high school in a John Hughes film. The ruggedly handsome and ceaselessly macho jocks like Harry Reid (played by Emilio Estivez and Judd Nelson) run everything, while the nerdy but well-meaning heroes like Frist and Tom DeLay are your Anthony Michael Halls.

One need look no further than Frist's own column following Harry Reid's heroic and historic "closed session" of the Senate to discuss the intelligence leading up to the Iraq War. Frist whines about Reid making any decision without his prior approval.

Leave it to the Democrats to find old ways to sink to new lows ... Today ... for the first time in more than 25 years ... Harry Reid - backed by a loyal following of obstructionist Democrats - invoked an obscure rule under which the Senate chamber can be ordered into closed session.

Okay, first off, the rule isn't that obscure. Recent closed sessions of the Senate included discussions of chemical weapons and the Clinton impeachment hearings. And the Democrats are attempting to condcut an investigation about the intelligence that lead America into a long and costly war. The Republicans are the ones who are obstructing said investigation, not the other way around.

But the real point here is that Frist is supposed to be a professional politician, and here he is whining on his blog about having to discuss what Democrats want for one day without being able to grandstand for TV cameras. What an embarrassing excuse for leadership.

It was an affront to the Senate; it was an affront to the American people; and it was an affront to the principles of democracy. This political stunt, in truth ... reinforced the difference between US and THEM.

To accuse Democrats of reinforcing the current divide in American politics is the exact definition of projection. Frist rebukes others for things he does every day. The last 5 years of Republican rule is nothing more than the clever use of wedge issues like gay marriage to divide Americans by geography and religion. That's it.

Look ... it's no secret that Washington has been tense lately over numerous political issues, but this can be healthy. To debate is democratic ... a sign of progress ... a means to a resolution.

Maybe I'm wrong about Dr. Bill. Maybe all he wants is factually-based, well-reasoned debate. Why, just look at the poll on the front page of the VOLPAC website:

Why do you think Democrats shut down the Senate yesterday?

• Party of No Ideas
• Party of No Principles
• Party of No Hope
• All of the Above

Oh, jeez, this is hard...

Let's see..."Party of No Hope" doesn't make any sense...So it can't be C or D. I mean, what does that mean? The party has no hope of winning elections, or their platform is based around a lack of hope?

"Vote Democratic in 2006. We Support the Abandonment of All Hope for America. Our Main Proposal to Move America Forward is the Dissemination of a Poisoned Cocktail That Will Mercifully Exterminate All Human Life Over the Next 5 Years."

So, it's down to "no principles" or "no ideas." Well, I guess there would have to be at least some principle for which the Democrats stand. Even if that principle is just "Screw You, Senate Republicans." So I'm going to vote for "The Party of No Ideas." But, please, don't take my word for it. Make up your own mind; choose which of that diverse bevy of options makes the most sense to you.

I Am the Stupidest Man Alive

Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, he's pretty stupid. He thinks that authorities should be allowed to strip search 10 year old girls for drugs, even if the warrant they have been issued says nothing about searching any occupants of the house other than the adult male suspect.

And our President? We all know he's stupid.

And a lot of the customers we get at the store are intensely stupid. The other day, I had a woman come in and ask me if there was a movie called Space Odyssey. And then when I said there was, 2001: A Space Odyssey, she shot me a confused look, as if this was the strangest and most obscure fact anyone had ever laid on her. Also, today, we had a crazy man come in and tell us that he, personally, had faxed George Bush proof that there were no WMD's way back in 2003.

But none of these people are as stupid as me. I have just thrown the most important document in my life into a dumpster.

Alert readers may recall that yesterday, my roommates and I engaged in an unsurpassed fit of cleaning. Regrettably, included in the massive trash-collection effort was a single brown envelope, put aside by me to mail my parents, that included, among other important items, my copy of the contract I signed with a literary management agency.

Now, on one level, this is not the world's largest deal. They still have a copy of the contract, which they can copy for me I suppose. And it's not like they were planning on screwing me over anyway. But still...this makes me look like a complete assclown.

And I have that intensely frustrating feeling of wanting to turn back time a few hours, so you can prevent a bad thing from happening. I can actually picture myself placing that envelope down the other day on a speaker in the front room, and thinking "This may not be the best place for this item...it could get thrown away..." but then ignoring this thought and going about my business.

Superman never has these sorts of problems. If he throws away an important paper, he can just reverse the rotation of the Earth and turn back time, and put the paper safely away in a filing cabinet. It might mess with the space-time continuum and pervert the whole of human history...but he wouldn't lose that essential contract. Plus, he's Superman. Fuck the space-time continuum, he can only be hurt by Kryptonite.

Unfortunately, I have larger problems. Mainly, my parents, who are going to be completely infuriated and irritated by this shocking turn of events. This is one of those things I'm still going to hear about 30 years from now, when I visit them in the Hom...I mean, in the lavish mansion I'm planning to purchase for them!

"Son, would you hold on to my purse for me while I use the ladies' room...But, actually hold on to it, don't just throw it away like you did that management countract back in your mid-20's."

But perhaps the largest problem will be dealing with the management company. Do I just ask them to make me another copy of the contract for safe-keeping? Doesn't that make me look like a World Class Asshat? I'm trying to convince these people to help me start a writing career...I don't want to come off like Corky from "Life Goes On."

In a way, though, Corky and I aren't so different. If people really wanted me to safely move documents and contracts from one point to another, they should really pin them to my overalls and tell me to walk straight home. It might be a bit undignified, but at least shit would wind up in the right place, and not under about a dozen oozing trash bags in my driveway.

The UCP and Other Tales of Horror

The following will be the scariest story you hear from this Halloween...If you are pregnant, have a heart condition or are upset by stories featuring massive clumps of dust and strewn debris, please go read another post.

Today, my roommates and I cleaned our living room. If I had to choose one word to describe the experience, that word would be "harrowing."

First, some background. My roommate Chris is moving back to North Carolina. We're sorry to see him go, but he's simply had enough of life on the lowest rung of Los Angeles. I can't say I blame him. In fact, he's not the first Los Angeles refugee I've known. My brother Jonathan has wisely retreated back into the comforting bosom of Orange County, a more comfortable and safe community, where the worst thing that ever happens is some maniac wearing a cape running around killing families at random. That's still a lot better than trying to get on the 405 from 3 to 8 pm, let me tell you...

So, he's out. And our good friend Vineet was planning to move into Chris' room, but in a stunning last-minute reversal, is now refusing to live with Nathan and myself. What could have prompted this decision?

Well, to be honest, the apartment is a little bit messy. Well, okay, the apartment is a little bit messy in the way travel in Baghdad is a little bit unsafe. Nathan, Chris and myself are...I don't want to say "degenerates," but let's say "gentlemen who value their leisure time more than being able to actually see their carpet."

In my more optimistic moments, I like to think of us as somehow above cleaning. We are men of ideas, we spend our days problem-solving, pondering the nature of life, and so forth. But, in reality, I spend my days blogging and watching trashy 70's Italian movies and they spend their days playing online poker and watching reality shows. I'm not sure if this qualifies as living the life of the mind.

Perhaps we are just slobs. I mean, I certainly am. I'm not sure I own a shirt without some sort of sauce-related stain on the front, and I'll go more days in a row without shaving than Mohammad Atta.

So, now that Vineet will not be moving in, we'll need to actually convince some stranger to spend their hard-earned money to move into this apartment with us. This is not an easy prospect. I feel like, in order to sell someone on moving in to this dank filth-encrusted shithole, an apartment without a single instance of insect infestation because the bugs all have found more comfortable, cleaner environs, I would have to employ sales tactics like the ones in Glengarry Glen Ross.

GET THEM TO SIGN ON THE LINE WHICH IS DOTTED!

In anticipation of this glorious event, Nathan and Chris and I decided to give the apartment the old once-over. Clean it up a bit for the benefit of prospective tenants. Yikes. Tom Savini on his best day has not described gruesome imagery such as I found underneath our couches.

There are a few problems here to be discussed. I believe our largest single cleaning dysfunction is a failure to dust...ever. You don't think of dusting as being a particularly big deal, but no one tells you that if you leave dust undisturbed for too long, it becomes quite simply a part of your apartment. After a while, it simply refuses to leave. You can wipe shit down for hours, come back and in two minutes, it's caked with dust and grime once again.

This seems to violate some basic law of physics. But the fact is that we spent several hours throwing out trash, wiping down every surface in the room and vacuuming, and the room doesn't really look significantly cleaner. I mean, there's visibly less stuff in there. We threw out at least six big trash bags full of stuff. Here is a list of, I believe, all the unique items found during the cleaning frenzy:

Old newspapers, magazines, Victoria's Secret catalogs, opened and unopened mail, an unopened Starburst candy, cigarette packs, food wrappers, used-up lighters, soda cans, toothpicks, pennies and dimes, scrunchies, make-up (at one time, a girlfriend lived here), pens, movie and concert tickets, wire hangers, books, DVD's, CD's, folders, spoons, chewed gum, socks, little electronic toys that play 20 questions, broken PlayStation controllers, bottle caps, undershirts, jackets, underwear (why?), empty coffee cups, checkbooks, a passport, a USB cable, wads of cotton, old ashtrays, a piece of glass broken off of the entertainment unit, a copy of the PC Game "ChessMaster 8000," several broken plates, poker chips, a dried-up nearly-unrecognizable pepperocini, paper clips twisted for use as pipe cleaners, unusable broken speakers, AV cables, speaker wire, ear muffs (in California?), a pillow with a T-shirt serving as its pillowcase, a large metal tray, rolling papers, an old cell phone, brads, twist-ties, a Swiss Army Knife, sandwich bags, a law school application essay and about 100,000 take-out menus.

Once all the trash was taken out, and the dusting was done as well as it could be, we looked around and realized that the room was just ugly and dirty, that we were basically dirtbags, and that no on in their right mind was going to give us actual money to live in this place.

We also realized that it would be up to Chris to clean the bathroom he and I share (it's his turn), as well as his, quite franky disgusting, room before we show the apartment to anyone. I'd say the chance of these activites actually occuring in the next 48 hours are slim to nil. He's got to do something about that room. It looks like Meatwad's Room on "Aqua Teen Hunger Force." He's the only person I know to have little broken-up bits of styrofoam spread all over the floor of their bedroom. How does that not drive you crazy? Stepping on little bits of styrofoam peanut all day?

Anyway, the UCP...That's the Unclaimed Clothes Pile. During our cleaning, we found an entire wardrobe full of clothing. Some of it was comprised of long-lost roommate items. I found a jacket of mine, Chris a sweatshirt, and so forth. But much of the pile's contents are unknown to us. A few undershirts. A gross green blanket. Some kind of odd quilt thing. Some of this stuff has been behind the couch or under the entertainment center for so long, I can honestly say I've never seen it before. It predates me here. I'm actually quite new to the apartment, in geologic time.

We feel kind of guilty just chucking the UCP contents that aren't ours. What if it belongs to a friend who has stayed here before, and who will want their filthy green blanket back some day? (If you think this is impossible, it's only because you don't know my friends.) And isn't there someone less fortunate who could use this stuff? (Although you'd have to be really unfortunate to want to sleep under this blanket. I'd probably rather sleep under some fiberglass insulation.)

We'll probably end up throwing it away. We really ought to throw away (or burn) everything in this apartment, burn the whole building down really, and start fresh somewhere else. But we have, combined, about enough money for one night's stay in West LA's cheapest motel, so a little Fall Cleaning will have to suffice.

Songs That Once Spooked Me: A Halloween List

Last night, I watched a horror movie double-feature in honor of perhaps my favorite holiday, Halloween. It's not a huge contest for Lons' Favorite Holiday, just so you know. I hate all the Jew holidays, because they are all, every single one, depressing. Even the happy ones are only happy because something really depressing didn't happen.

Take Purim. This is the Jew equivalent of Easter, a Springtime celebration of renewal. Christians celebrate the resurrection of their Lord around this time of the year, and Jews celebrate the fact that once upon a time there was a really really evil guy named Haman who wanted to kill them all...but then he didn't! And now we eat three-cornered cookies called Hamentaschen (meaning Haman's Hat) that look nothing like a hat. Oh, and we wave around this bizarre fruit called lulov and egrog or some such nonsense inside a thatched hut we've constructed the day before.

Seriously. This is as ritualistic, primitive and ludicrous as lax American Judaism gets.

That's a stupid holiday. Halloween doesn't even have to work so hard to kick Purim's ass. It doesn't hurt, as well, that it's the patron holiday of horror movies. As someone who enjoys a nice gory horror movie year-round, I welcome a day set aside throughout the country for others to join me in watching splatterfests, grindhouse features, slasher films and giallos.

So, anyway, long story long, last night I watched the classic George C. Scott haunted house movie The Changeling and John Carpenter's original Halloween. I fell asleep about 3/4 of the way through that second film (don't worry...I've seen it before...), and woke up as the end credits were playing.

There's something rather unsettling about waking up in a darkened room at 3 in the morning to the sounds of John Carpenter's eerie synth theme to Halloween. (Trust me, even if you don't think you know it, you know it from 100,000,000 horror movie previews). It reminded me of being a little boy.

You see, when I was a kid, I would listen to the radio as I fell asleep. I guess I was a nervous, exictable sort, even when I was young, because I used to find getting a good, solid night's rest quite difficult. I would actually lie in bed at night and worry about whether or not I'd be able to fall asleep. Weird, no? But what do you actually do about that situation? The more you think about it, force yourself not to worry, the more you are, in fact, worrying.

Frequently, my solution to this dilemma would be to wake my parents up for no reason. Eventually, they devised a different plan - by listening to the radio, I could distract myself long enough to doze off. It kind of worked most of the time, except that, for whatever reason, certain songs would creep me out, there, alone, in the dark in the middle of the night when it seemed like the whole world was asleep.

Much of it has to do with how weird popular music was during this time period (roughly 1984-1988). Nowadays, I'd probably just hear Gwen Stefani declare that she was not, in fact, no hollaback girl, whatever the fuck that means. But back in '87, you were far more likely to hear some weird, Dio-esque power ballad about love in the time of the Vikings as you were 50 Cent inviting you to the candy shop.

So, after perhaps the longest and sloppiest introduction in Crushed By Inertia History, I present the songs that freaked me out as a young child listening to Top 40 radio late at night. You know, in honor of Halloween (it's all there in the first paragraph...)

Owner of a Lonely Heart by Yes

Something about the timbre of Jon Anderson's voice, or the weird freak-out synth part after he yells "Heeeeeeeeaaaaarrrrrrrrrttt!!!" used to genuinely rattle my young mind. Once or twice, I did have to get out of bed and turn off the radio when this song came on. I still don't like it, but it's hard to imagine what bothered me so much about it at 8 years old. I think maybe I was taking the lyrics to literally, imaging a man who actually owned someone's heart. Say, keeping it inside a heart-shaped box.

Thriller by Michael Jackson

I really liked this song. Still do. But when it was late at night and I was trying to go to sleep, the Vincent Price bit at the end used to bug me intensely. The song would come on, and I'd decide I was going to finally grow up and be a man and listen to the whole song without getting out of bed to turn it off, but then VP would come on informing me that darkness had fallen across the land, and that the midnight hour was close at hand. (I think this used to double unnerve me because quite often the midnight hour would be close at hand, which really drove the notion of zombie/werewolf violence home).

King of Pain by The Police

It was the very very beginning of this song that freaked me out. "There's a little black spot on the sun today...It's the same old thing as yesterday..." Why is that concept scary? What did it even mean? I have no idea. Even today, with Sting at his most nasal and the band totally quiet and then building to a crescendo behind him, that part's a little strange. During the day, I could listen to this song no problem, but I would turn off the radio the second I knew it was coming on.
Mexican Radio by Wall of Voodoo

There is absolutely nothing scary about this song. 9 year old me was kind of a pussy.

Invisible Touch by Genesis

Am I going to be really embarrassed by this list tomorrow? Maybe you all should pretend you haven't read this. Anyway, this is clearly a case of a metaphor going over my young head. See, Phil Collins says "She seems to have an invisible touch/She reaches in and comes out holding your heart/She seems to have an invisible touch/She takes control and slowly tears you apart."

He means she's a cold-blooded woman who has left him, and he's heartsick. I thought he was discussing some female version of Mola Ram actually reaching into men's stomachs to remove vital organs. Which I now realize would be a far cooler song. Also, this was the same album as "Land of Confusion," which spawned that hideous, bizarre Reagan-puppet-head music video, which TOTALLY used to give me nightmares.

Little China Girl by David Bowie

I really like this song now, but as a kid, I hated the part where David Bowie goes "shhhhhhhhh." Oh, David, just you shut your mouth.

At This Moment by Billy Vera and the Beaters

Okay, maybe this song didn't so much spook me as annoy me, but I used to dread hearing it more than any other song that would ever come on the radio. Maybe that's just because it used to come on the radio so goddamn much. And it's a terrible song! Did you know, in 1986, it was at the top of the Billboard charts for a while? The top! A #1 song.

You may not remember "At This Moment." It features Billy, a white guy soul crooner, singing a bunch of verses that begin "What did you think I would do at this moment" Except he doesn't say "do at this moment." He says "dooooooooooooo at this mo-meeeeeeennnnnt." At one point, he wails something like, "If you'd stay, I'd subtract 20 years from my life..."

As a young person with no conception of romantic love, this concept was very strange to me. He'd actually be willing to die 20 years earlier if this woman would stay with him? Forever, or just for a little while? Now, I realize it's just that kind of sentiment balladeers throw into love songs all the time.

There is a genuinely haunting, eerie quality to the song, aside from the fact that it just isn't very good.

Somebody's Watching Me by Rockwell

This is a tremendous song. Did you know that Rockwell is actually Kenneth Gordy, Motown founder Berry Gordy's son, and that the backing vocals on this track are done by Michael and Jermaine Jackson? Anyway, I still really like it. Classic 80's R&B.

I used to hate it because it reminded me of a scary story I had read in a random book once that had always stuck with me, stood out as particularly terrifying. I don't even remember the book. But it had this story about a little boy who heard a voice talking to him at night. And his parents would come in and look all around the room and show him that there was nothing there, and then leave. Eventually, after they did this a few times, the boy relaxed, safe in the knowledge that no one was in the room with him.

"Thank goodness," says the boy. "There's nobody here but me."

"AND ME!" responds a deep voice from his closet.

That's how the story ends. It touched a nerve in me. The idea that your senses and rationality could deceive you. That there's a man or a monster in the closet and the parents didn't see him, even with the lights on. Basically, it's that fear that the rational order of the universe is imperfect or uncertain, that everything we accept could disappear, or be proved wrong.

Anyway, it used to really bug me. I would look around the room and see no one was there, and then lie down and think about what might be right behind my head, out of my field of vision. And here was this catchy pop song about that very concept!

Darth is Going Down

OHMYGODTHISISSOFUCKINGGOOD!

I'm not gay, but I'm developing something of a man-crush on Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald. Check this out from today's Drudge Report.

Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald is planning to call Vice President Dick Cheney as a witness in the trial of Lewis Libby, the DRUDGE REPORT has leaned.

But the high stakes move could result in an executive privilege showdown between the White House and Fitzgerald, a top government source said Sunday.

"If Mr. Fitzgerald is going to demand a public recounting of conversations between the vice president, or even the president, and his staff, on matters he, himself, has acknowledged are 'classified,' executive privilege will obviously be invoked."

Is anyone else hoping for a Few Good Men-esque showdown in which Fitzie catches the Dickster in a web of lies, leading to a frothing-at-the-mouth, angry rant by the soon-to-be-ex-Vice President?

"The Middle East has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You, Special Counselor Fitzgerald? You Lieutenant Jew-Boy? You want me torturing those detainees. You need me torturing those detainees!"

I see Danny DeVito in his Penguin make-up from Batman Returns as Cheney and, I don't know, Chris Cooper for Fitz? Peter Sarsgaard? Robert Downey Jr.? I'm open to suggestions...

Fitzgerald has made it clear to lawyers involved in the case that he prefers Cheney appear as a witness in open court.

"Mr. Fitzgerald is starting from the position that this should not be done on remote or videotape," the well-placed source said. Fitzgerald and Libby's attorney Joseph Tate discussed possible plea options before the indictment was issued last week, TIME magazine reports in new editions. But the deal was scotched because the prosecutor insisted that Libby do some "serious" jail time.

The three greatest words in the English language...Serious Jail Time. I hope they lock that scumbag Scooter up in Abu Gharib. Let's see how he likes being held under ice water until he nearly develops hypothermia (tested via anal thermometer, of course) while loud music blares and giggling soldiers coat him with imitation menstruel blood. I'm thinking he's going to be into it.

Now, I know what you're thinking...There goes Lons again, calling every Republican a scumbag and wishing for them all to be tortured and killed in various, horror-film-inspired ways. But, no, like all the other right-wingers discussed here on CBI, Libby earns the term "scumbag" all on his own.

Here's the Center for American Progress:

It was Libby - along with Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, and a handful of other top aides at the Pentagon and White House - who convinced the president that the U.S. should go to war in Iraq. It was Libby who pushed Cheney to publicly argue that Saddam Hussein had ties to al Qaeda and 9/11.

Libby's the Guy behind The Guy behind The Guy, you know? This whole Iraq thing was just some wacky idea cooked up by him and a few other neo-cons, possibly after smoking a massive blunt laced with methamphetamines, formaldehyde and fabric softener.

It was also Libby who prodded former Secretary of State Colin Powell to include specious reports about an alleged meeting between 9/11 terrorist Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence official in Powell's February 2003 speech to the United Nations. Libby and his staff reportedly badgered Powell's speechwriters for weeks, culminating in a meeting where Libby presented information in a manner that, according to those who were there, was aggressive and over the top.

Neato!

And here's the most important part of the article...About a paper written by Libby while working in the Department of Defense under the first and only sane President Bush.

The paper - highly praised by neocons at the time - called for the United States to build up its military capabilities to the point where no other country could ever rival them. Cheney, who was then secretary of defense, liked the document so much that he ordered parts of the usually secret plan declassified and made them public. This Planning Guidance document went a long way toward endearing Libby to Cheney.

That's what you need to know. That's where this guy is coming from. Endless militarism, fascistic levels of governmental control, disinformation campaigns. He's a scumbag. I hope he goes to jail for a long time, and I hope he takes his former boss with him. Actually, no, I don't want Dick to die in jail. I want him to die in some really humiliating way, like having a coronary on the shitter before a formal dinner at the White House. Or at the end of a brief address held at a convention or large event, so he can fall off the stage and directly into the orchestra pit, possibly weding his head inside a large brass instrument. Dying in jail is too good for him.