The Life Vitriolic; or "Shit I Hate That's Also Gotta Stop, Part I"

[NOTE: I've gotten dozens of imaginary e-mails angrily demanding to know why I didn't acknowledge that storm we had the week before the election, the people whose homes were destroyed, and why I didn't urge everybody to donate their plasma or urine or whatever.  

To them I say: 'You need moi to tell you about that shit? Because that would truly shatter my penis, and most likely my balls as well.  Like literally.  Seriously, tell me that I am your source of information and morality, and my genitals will explode into a trillion crystalline shards.  It would be like my cock was Samuel L. Jackson's character in Unbreakable.  That shit would look like the end of The Dark Crystal all over my nuts.  In short, spare me a full dick defragmentation and please look to me as neither your source of news nor your ethical arbiter.']

They call my wang... MISTER GLASS!

Now on with the article.

_________________________________________________________________________________

Weeeellll, I hates me some stuff.  Whole lotta stuff.  But not all the stuff I hate can really be gotten rid of, nor would I want to if I could.

There are some things I hate, but the world needs, like rain, or bees:

Even Batman doesn't fuck with bees, yo.

There are some things I hate, but love to hate, like reality television, or The Family Circus:

Search "Worst Family Circus" on Google Image Search, and this is #1.  I dunno though, they're all the worst to me.

But then, THEN, comes the real putrificence of life, those things which I both hate and need to be annihilated.

So here's some shit.

Shit I hate.

Shit that's gotta stop:

FIRST SHIT THAT NEEDS TO STOP: Whatever the fuck the Guinness Book of World Records devolved into

Exhibit A: The 1986 Guinness Book of World Records.  An essential piece of my childhood, filled with pages upon pages of stats and facts.  And its cover always bore a seemly countenance of both class and worldly grandeur:

If you sit back and squint a little, it looks kinda like an early Choose Your Own Adventure book cover, doesn't it?

This version of the book was a neat little paperback, and its pages looked like this:

Oh My, what dignity, what composure, what elegance in record keeping.  Truly a book of gentleman and kings alike.  

Informative.

Sophisticated.

Deeelightful.

This, THIS was a book.  A scholarly, Arthurian tome, well worth treasuring one's whole life long.

But Camelot was not to survive, it seems.


Exhibit B: The modern GBOWR (Which I'll now refer to as "Juhbower").  They can call it "Guinness World Records" all they fucking like, it's still Juhbower to me.  Let's see what the cover can tell us, eh?

Oh, that's another thing I fucking hate.  Why the fuck do people have to label shit for next year?  It's clearly not 2013 yet.  Not one iota of this book was written in the year 2013.  Fucking absurd.  Oh, and car dealers are even worse: "But ohhhh no, herp a derp, that's a 2013 Mazda, yessirree.  IT'S FROM THE GODDAMN FUTURE!"  ... FUUUUUUUCK!

Ok, you can't really tell from this pic alone, but this fucker is yearbook sized.  And now, instead of a mosaic of random Round-The-World-In-80-Days-type shit (which, if I didn't properly emphasize before, is fucking awesome), we get... bubbles?  Because when I think of world records, one thinks of bubbles, right?

Well, ok, don't judge a book by its cover, they say.  But something gives me the creeping feeling that Guinness may have sold out.  Let's take a look inside the modern Juhbower:

When I do a hate list for my future Video Game blog, I can almost guarantee you that Halo will be #1.  

Pictured: Apparently Conventions deserved two pages of their own?  Ohfuckpleasesomebodychainsawmyeyesout.

WHAT THE HELL GUINNESS?

WHEN THE FUCK DID YOU TURN YOUR WONDERFUL BOOK OF DIVERSE STATISTICS INTO A GIANT MAGAZINE?

WHOSE RESPONSIBLE THIS?!?!

I'm going to pretend that I didn't look up the answers to these questions (a. They're assholes. b. around the year 2000 c. Currently the assholes in charge of this shit are called Ripley Entertainment), and instead focus on what is so very WRONG with these pictures.

Before I get into the inherent Neo-Nerdiness of the two pages presented above, let's talk about what's not here: very goddamn many statistics.  Sure, that first page has a bunch of numbers shoved up in the corner like a naughty child, but then you have Master Chief chilling in the opposite corner taking up twice as much space.  In the Juhbower of my childhood, the pictures were of a modest size and interspersed modestly, so as to leave most of the space for, uh, you know, THE WORLD FUCKING RECORDS! 

So now that we've established that the current Dark Lords of Juhbower prefer giant pictures of space marines to actual information, I've also discovered that they've actually removed a large number of their statistics, not just from the book, but from the website as well.  Sometimes it was for ethical reasons (apparently listing the world's largest pet Fish led to a bunch of morons overfeeding their animals, for example), but I have a feeling a lot of the current omissions are because the people running the book are a pack of fucking mouth-breathing idiots who didn't want to do the work of keeping track of gentlemanly records like Polo and Fencing and Chess and Squash.  Philistines.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the book is turning away from the kind of records it used to hold.  The book used to record statistics of great feats and flukes of nature and man - the tallest buildings, the tiniest people, the fattest twins.  Things you couldn't replicate, at least not without tremendous wealth or effort, and sometimes not even then.

Now?  Now Guinness is in the business of self-promotion.  Instead of recording actual world marvels, they focus on recording and promoting new and more arbitrary human feats.  Want to set a record for the number of marbles one can hold in one's nasal cavity?  Go for it!  Wanna set the record for the high score of Pac Man while playing only with your dick tied in a double sheepshank around the joystick?  And then go and set a new, wholly independent record for the same thing, only now with a stevedore's knot?  The sky's the limit, baby!

In my day, the Juhbower was an adult book that appealed to kids, and rightly so.  It was a book that contained the world's marvelous extremes without stooping down to patronize its younger readers with flashy pictures and holographic covers.  And that was what made it great.  It was a book that called us away from childhood fantasy into the world of concrete facts and figures, which is not, as some may bemoan, a bad thing, because facts can often free us from other people's lies and idiocy.  Once I know that Robert Wadlow was the world's tallest man at 8' 3", nobody can bullshit me with stories about his 9-foot-tall brother who's going to beat me up if I don't hand over my Game Boy... at least not again.

I wanted to break up the wall of text, so here's the fifth picture to come up when I searched "gameboy stolen" on Google Image Search.  Yeah, I don't get it either.  Maybe the cousin took it?  Or was it that dastardly Grandpa?

This present version of Juhbower, however, leads not children into the world of men, but children into the present world of man-children.  By enshrining arbitrarily narrow feats that can be accomplished by anybody with enough ingenuity to make up some stupid new kind of record, and then putting them in a big glossy Teen-Beat-esque book, you only encourage more people to go out and make up more arbitrary, stupid shit so that they too can appear somewhere in your sellout book.

This shit, man, this shit has got to stop.  Records should be about framing the world, seeing its extremes, its limits, in order to get a better grasp of the differences in the world between fantasy and reality.  Guinness, get out of the game of making up bullshit accomplishments for dumbfucks to aim for.  Return to paperback, get rid of the gloss and the graphic design, and give me back my wondrous gooey statistics that I so beloved!

Or else... I'll have to set the fucking record for complaint blogs written about Juhbower.  Let's see how you like giving me that prize, heheh.


SECOND SHIT THAT NEEDS TO STOP: Tag questions on the News

NEWS!

How many times are you watching the news when, right before a commercial break, you hear:

"Up next, what new fad is killing local teens?"

or

"Up next, what city has just been revealed to have a full-scale Ebola outbreak?"

or

"Up next, what neighborhood do the police think the Evening Strangler is going to strike next?"

NO.

NO NO NO.

I know, they're trying to keep us watching over the commercial break, and giving us more information before the break would mean that people might change the channel.  I get that.

According to Google Image Search, also NEWS!

But guess what, fucking nightly news, I don't give a shit.  If this information that you have is actually important, as you claim it is, THEN JUST GIVE IT TO ME ALREADY!  MAYBE I'M IN A HURRY! MAYBE I HAVE A TEN MINUTE SHIT I'M ABOUT TO TAKE AND SO I'M GONNA MISS YOUR IMPORTANT INFORMATION UNLESS I HOLD IT IN FOR THREE MINUTES UNTIL YOU COME BACK!

NEWWWWWWWWSSSSSS BITCHES!!!!!

NO, this shit has got to stop.  If you are talking about life-and-death shit, you do NOT ask me to wait three minutes to find out what it is, when instead you can give me a one-sentence summary immediately.  What we need now is those questions turned into answers.

For example, let me rewrite the questions above for how they would appear in my newscast:

"Up Next, the razor-bladed Yo-Yo fad claims another teenage life."

"Up Next, your city has a full-scale Ebola outbreak."

"Up Next, your neighborhood is where the police think the Evening Strangler will strike next."

And you know what?  I bet that if the local news took on my advice, their ratings would skyrocket.  Oh wait, no, I'm sorry, the news is still 99.99999% garbage and lies and is in perpetual moral and journalistic decline.

Fuck them all.  

Except for you, Rachel Maddow.  You're cool.

[Also, no, I'm not going to discuss the election, save to say that I wrote in Ernest Goes to Camp for President.  Not Jim Varney, mind you; I know he's dead.  I voted specifically for my VHS copy of the movie.  Fuck the DVD.]

Keep It Stankin'

Shamrocktober Sky, Part 3: The Leprechaunining(ining)

(In our previous episode, I finally arrived at the Festivale of Nyckbeards, and began my intensive get-drunk-the-fuck-up regimen.)

A beer in each hand, my arms pumping up and down like a toy robot, I chugged my way through the thronging swarm.  My awesomeness and charisma increased by leaps and bounds with each mouthful of frothy ale.  My inner Renaissance Man roared awake with a mighty belch.

This isn't me, but add an extra mug in each hand and some more Henry VIII-esque paunch, and you'd be close.  

Once my Renaissance Powers awoke, and my first sextuplet of beers had been devoured, I heard the dulcet tones of weapons being thrown.  Of course!  Now that I was a man of the 1500's, I had to prove myself in feats of combat!  Nearby, I espied a gentleman selling the opportunity to fling his fine sets of knives and axes for a modest sum.

"GOOOD YON SIRRAH!", I belted in my finest Renaissance voice, "I DO WISHETH TO THROW YON CUTLERY!  HERE ARE MY DUCATS!" With great straining against the tightness of my plump hand in my pocket, I pulled out my wad of pocket change (which I sometimes call "Mt. Chingy") and scattered it across the vendor's booth.

"HOWE MANYE THROWS WILL THESE DOUBLOONS GET ME, COXCOMB?", I barked, spreading out my change as much as possible, so that the vendor might see the true breadth of my wealth and status.

"Sorry sir, cash only", the fearful vendor replied, shivering in fear of my manliness. "And you'll need to pick up that change," it squeaked timidly.  "Now, please."

"ZOUNDS AND MALDICTIONS UPON YE PAPER MONEY!  TIS' 1568, AND SCRAP MAKES NO REPLACEMENT FOR PENCE!", I masculinely shrieked.  "BESIDES, SIRRAH, I HAVE SAVED THAT MONEY FOR MEAD AND WENCHES!"

"Well then, you can't throw these kni-"

"WHAT?  THESE KNIVES?" I said as I held before him the three throwing knives that he had laid at the counter when I had walked up.  The ribald fool had clearly been fooled by my throw-coins-down-as-a-distraction trick, and I took the opportunity to snatch up my prize.  Cash or no cash, I would die before I failed to demonstrate my martial prowess.

Before the stunned vendor had a chance to make a feeble attempt at recovering his knives, I reared back my throwing arm, all three dagger blades in hand, and with a mighty "HWAAAAAAARGGHH!", I threw them toward the nearest target.

I blinked.  When my eyes opened, I gazed again upon the target.

Nothing.  Not a single knife hit.  No knives even close to the target.

Astounded, I turned around to see a horrified crowd running from the stand as a knife flew down to the ground and landed blade-down right before my feet.

I looked about, horrified.

What had I done?

WHAT HAD I DONE?

How did I fail to see that what I had thought was a common vendor was in truth an evil wizard?  How could I have not expected any skilled wizard to put a teleportation rune on their weapons, in case they are wielded by one too skilled in their use?

"Security!", chirped the vendor/mage, "This guy's drunk!", he said, pointing at me.

"HOW DID YOU KNOW I WAS DRUNK?", I roared.  "THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A DETECT DRUNK SPELL!  YOU'RE NOT A WIZARD!  YOU'RE NOT A WIZARRRRRD AT ALLLLLLL!!!"

I spoke the truth.  This vendor wasn't a wizard after all.  There's only one kind of creature that can detect drunkenness, but it would be the wrong time of year...

My dizzied mind raced faster, unhindered by the repeated cries of "Doctor! Medic!" from somewhere in the crowd.  Possibility after possibility played out within the supercomputer that is my mind.  That's when it hit me like a diamond shamrock through the skull:

I wonder if shutterstock will mind if I use their watermarked photo.  Actually, no I don't.    

The vendor was a Leprechaun, and Leprechauns are the only creatures that can detect drunkenness in humans - That's what brings them out on St. Patrick's Day - to beat up drunk people and steal their shoes.  This is known, Khalesi.

But now, times are changing, and with the advent of the Ocktoberfests and the Renaissance Fairs, the Leprechauns were finding new hunting grounds in the drunken masses of the fall, which means the entire month of October was now a target.

It was all so clear now.  Leprechauns rarely intruded upon October, and even then, only on Halloween.  But this?  This was a full-scale invasion.

I gasped.  

A nightmarish hellscape opened in my mind:

                                SHAMROCKTOBER                        

I saw before me my neighborhood, but transformed.  All manner of horror had been inflicted upon the spookiest of seasons, not the worst of which included:

- Green Jack O'Lanterns, which are now called Finnegan O'Sheas.

- All costumes are Leprechaun costumes, but there are no sexy Leprechaun costumes for the ladies, just the ones that go from upper neck to ankle.

- Instead of doling out candy, adults pour Guiness and Jameson into children's buckets.  This becomes known as the new Shamrock shake.  (Also, the old Shamrock shake dies because of this.)

- Instead of Haunted Forests, thrill-seekers of all ages go to regular forests to be assaulted from the shadows by heavily drunken teenagers.  (For some reason the thought of this made me semi-chubs.)

- The Monster Mash is replaced by "Sunday Bloody Sunday" on all radio stations.  Likewise, Thriller is replaced by the rap from the end of "Leprechaun in the Hood."

Teh horarr.  Teh horarr.

The terror was mind-shattering, that world of October verdancy.  I screamed, and could take no more.

As reality came rushing back to me, I realized that I was now in the arms of a pair of not-so-festively-garbed security guards, or as I call them, Leprechaun collaborators.  Though they were dragging me out of the park, that didn't mean that I couldn't warn the common folk.

"SHAMROCKTOBER IS COMING!!!  SHAMMMMROCKKTOBER IS COMING!!!!  WHEN MARCH SEVENTEENTH MEETS OCTOBER THIRTYFIRST, ALL SHALL CRUMBLE!!!"

I don't know who heard me.  I don't even know if they believed me.  And if they believed me, I have no idea of whether they cared or not.  But I do know that this Halloween was an orange one, like it should be, which makes me think that maybe, just maybe, I made enough of a difference to stop those Leprechauns.  Well, for this year anyway.

I'll be here, though, at the ready, making sure that America never knows a Shamrocktober Sky.

Oh, also, I spent the rest of the month in jail on manslaughter charges.

Keep it Stankin'