Church of Hell

So Barack was on the idiot box this morning, doing what all of our wonderful candidates do; namely spewing a line of mind numbing drivel (my bullshit filters have been on lately so all I hear is a mumbling similar to the voices of the grown ups in Charlie Brown special but with more drooling). Don’t get me wrong, as US political candidates go, I would not want to see Mr. Obama ground up alive and mixed with savory pork fat and secret spices (and fugu toxins) and made into a huge sausage to be served to the families of rich Republicans, but I just wish we could have an election with a decent candidate instead of the typical ‘Who-is-the-least-corrupt-prolapsed-rec tum’ array of conniving, rich, lobbyist toadie assbags who would sell your soul to the Wal*Mart board for a Post It to write down the address of your mother so they could drive over later in their Hummer and beat her with the stack of bills that her Medicare didn’t cover. (more…)

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Most people are aware of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, whose arrival, filled with Death, War, Famine and, er, that other thing, announce the End Times. What they may not know is that, much like a stand up comedy club, you don’t send your headliner out before the lesser known opening acts. There are, in fact, a vast and sundry horde of less dire omens that signal the coming of the coming of the End. I like to call them the Fluffers of the Apocalypse and I have begun to see them. (more…)

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I borrowed Call of Duty 4 from a friend of mine the other day and started playing the Solo campaign. It’s a very beautiful and enjoyable game. Eventually I tried the online, multi-player mode. 16 minutes later I was ready to purchase the game, new, for what is about half the annual wages of your average Kyrgyzstanian. This is odd since lately I’ve not been a very big fan of online shoot-em-ups. I love World of Warcraft and back in the day I was a huge Unreal fan, but they’ve done something to the modern shooter that makes it almost impossible to enjoy as a post-30 year old. They invited children to play. (more…)

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I may sound like a grumpy, cynical bastard but I’m not. I’m a grumpy, cynical misanthrope. My parents were married, and I’m more sociopath than you may have thought.
I may complain a lot, but I am a genuinely happy person in real life much of the time, usually when I’m complaining. I would be slightly frightened by the amount of raving that I do if it weren’t for the support I get from apparently sane people and the amount of similar complaints that spew from others who seem more stable and publicly accepted than me.
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So, Aurora bought some interesting coffee yesterday which she made this morning. Sipping and thinking about the flavor and packaging on the way to work, I felt very chock full o’ rant.

Let’s start with the packaging. The way a country packages their foodstuffs says a lot about their culture.

If you’ve ever shopped in an Asian market, you’ve no doubt seen Japanese packaged food. There’s usually some kind of overly-cute comic character which has no relation to the product (think Hello Kitty laxatives). There’s the obligatory poorly translated, philosophical poetic blurb. For some reason, every package, sign and t-shirt in Japan has some kind of hokey, incomprehensible English saying on it. There’s entire websites devoted to pictures of these things. I think it’s a law there, designed to confuse other nations into believing that the Japanese are deep and poignant.
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I am almost, nearly, completely ashamed to call myself an American.

Part of that comes from the fact that, in the U.S., we’ve completely co-opted a term that covers two continents and many diverse countries for our own selfish use. There are literally over 30 countries in the Americas and most of them are filled with smiling, happy, indigenous people who share the right to call themselves American, although, since this term has forever been tainted worldwide by countless Bermuda shorts wearing, loud, annoying, rude, socially inappropriate, xenophobic and asinine tourists from the U.S. who have been so downright embarrassing as to make your stereotypical German tourists look downright pleasant, I don’t think anyone will be fighting too damn hard to reclaim the already irrevocably smeared name ‘American’.

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This is the view from my car this morning as I shoveled the heavy, gods-forsaken white evil from my poor little car.

I am pretty tired of this shit.

What makes it extra-special funny it that I spent half a decade or so in Los Angeles, a city where snow is only used to discuss drugs or as an epithet for a person afflicted with a too-dry scalp or eczema. After years of perfectly warm weather, where the worst weather you could hope for in the winter was a little extra wind and two days of rain, I realized that I missed the midwest and its seasonal changes. I wholeheartedly missed the fall with its glorious changing colors and delicious smells. I remembered fondly the fun of building snowmen and tobogganing of winter.

“What the hell was wrong with me?” I think now.

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My disdain for over large vehicles and my firm belief in their owner’s lack of mental capacity isn’t a secret. There are some people who could generally profit from owning an SUV. Most owners, on the other hand, want large, flashy billboards that cry out “Look at me! I am important and wealthy and have a large penis!” even if they are women, which scares me.

If you have an eight child family and an hour commute, you might need an SUV.

If your job requires you to tote three hundred-odd pounds of scientific testing apparatus into the swampy heart of a peat bog to study the intricate mating rituals of the Great Crested Newt, you might need an SUV.

If you are a balding, middle aged ass-bag who’s toting nothing but a set of golf clubs, a laptop stolen from your last job and your wedding ring (in a cup holder next to some Binaca and a condom) to the local coffee shop to pretend you’re day-trade while sipping your whipped-creamy mocha and casually stalking the hot, pink haired barista with the tongue ring who’s two decades younger than you, you most definitely do not need an SUV.

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This morning sucked. First, it looks like my state was suckered into voting for the wanna-be Bush Jr., McCain ass-sucking, Republican-in-Dem clothing Hillary. I didn’t vote. I have no great excuse other than my registration, which was turned in on time, apparently wasn’t entered into the system and I didn’t want to drive with two children in bad weather halfway around the state to cast a ballot in a county in which I no longer live to nominate someone who won’t be elected because he’s not on the right payrolls. After the enormous amount of fraud that happened in the last few elections here, I’ve lost any respect for and faith in our electoral system. So I didn’t vote.

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I’ve been watching the RIAA sort of crash and burn (or at least trip and smolder) in what, as a consumer, appears to be the kind of blunders that dominate best selling books on business a scant few months after some major corporate upheaval (written in the ‘what-not-to-do’ flavor). It seems to me that the music industry wants to spin this whole decade like it was a war between the evil and smelly peer-to-peer-software wielding computer pirates and the Holy Knights of Musicdom, providers of the Healing Sounds of Peace for the worlds impoverished and diseased orphans, who are being systematically decimated by these wanton and gluttonous ne’er-do-well teenaged demons.

Bullshit.

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