Columbus Day? What a farce...

Columbus Day 2006

So, this week we celebrate another supposed “holiday” in America. Another Columbus Day has come & gone and what do we have to show for it? The usual crap associated with any other contrived special occasion…banks were closed, post offices were closed, too. Most kids had the day off, after they “learned” a watered-down and sugar-coated version of how this great brave glorious explorer discovered America. The malls and car dealers will hold mock sales where they supposedly slash their over-inflated prices so that you don’t actually save anything and instead are left with the false perception that you got a great deal.

So let’s call a spade a spade, shall we? What exactly did Columbus do? I’ll tell you: HE GOT LOST. We’re honoring a guy who got lost. We’re celebrating a holiday that’s all about a broke-ass Italian who got run out of Genoa for lack of financial backers, conned the Queen of Spain into pawning her own jewels to buy 3 raggedy-assed sailboats, and set off to find a shortcut to India.

After several weeks the ships are falling apart, mutiny is in the air, and Columbus is pretty close to getting fed to the crabs. However…LAND HO! He discovers land and calls the locals INDIANS. What balls. Dude, those natives aren’t Indians. We still erringly call the natives of America Indians, and that’s utter bollocks. At least the Canadians call their natives First Nation Peoples. Very few Americans ever call our own tribal nations “Native Americans”. We just call them Indians, and only think about them when we need to go to a casino & Vegas is too far away. Once proud & vibrant cultures, reduced to penny slots and blackjack. God Bless America, but I digress….

Back to Columbus: Did he actually discover anything? No. Here’s a clue—If there’s already people there, then there’s a realllly fucking good chance that you didn’t discover it. But I guess the mind-set is that unless a white European doesn’t discover it, then it never existed, right? All these “explorers” discovered was that Hey, there’s an assload of other cultures we can rape, pillage, exploit, and forcibly convert to Christianity before we kill or enslave the ones who survive our diseases & plagues.

The Incas, Aztecs, Mayans, Toltecs, Sioux, Iroquois, Navajo, Cherokee, Australian Aborigines, and dozens of others…all great civilizations already in place but “discovered” by broke white Eurotrash and subsequently killed off for profit and religious zealotry. I bet your kids won’t learn THAT in class this week, will they?

Soundtrack To My Life

The Lightning Man’s MojoSteve Soundtrack:

It’s no secret to anyone who’s known me for more than 17 seconds that music is one of my absolute true loves. I can associate so many songs with pivotal moments in my life, and for so many songs I can tell you exactly where I was & even in some cases what I was wearing when I first heard it.

Truth be told, I agonized over this list. Some of the songs came easily, the first 8 or 9. Then I started to think of more songs that were important to me. I wanted a list of 10 songs, then it became 20, 25, and then I thought 37 songs, one for each year of my life…I ended up with a list over 50 songs long.

So, here’s a list of my defining tunes; a soundtrack to my life, per se, if you will.



1.Enjoy The Silence- Depeche Mode
It’s an obvious choice. My most favorite song ever. I never get sick of it. It’s the one song in the known universe that my friends can hear & instantly think of me. If ever I had a signature song, this is it. It brings back so many great memories, in addition to being a great track.

And the rest of the songs are in no particular order. Not all the songs will receive lengthy comments.

2. Just Like Heaven—The Cure
How can people say the Cure’s music is always doom & gloom? Not hardly. This song has a timeless beauty to it, and always makes me smile.
3. Dreamlike State---Erasure
Simple, beautiful, and yet layered in a complex cascade of yumminess. Erasure is one of the best synth-pop acts ever, and have been so overlooked that it's nigh-on criminal.
4. There Is A Light That Never Goes Out---The Smiths
Sure, you don’t think of Morrissey as a romantic guy, but the song is so plaintive.It yanks at your heart-strings.
5. Vanishing Point---New Order
Awesome beats & complex layers of tracks, but the chorus is the killer. “I’ve seen what a man can do; I’ve seen all the hate of a woman too.”
6. One—U2
It’s achingly beautiful and emotional. Probably the best U2 track ever.
7. Red Letter Day---Pet Shop Boys
It was hard to think of just one PSB track, but this is bouncy and happy yet carries a great message of love & hope.
8. Fall On Me---REM
One of my first REM songs. Along with South Central Rain, this song got me into REM. There was this douchebag in high school who said REM was *his* band and that I wasn’t cool enough to listen to them because I liked Depeche Mode. What a fucking tool. Last I heard he was getting beat up by the U-Maine rugby team on a regular basis.
9. The Scientist/Fix You---Coldplay
Okay, so it’s really two songs from 2 different cd’s. But these songs are so sad and mournful and brilliantly gorgeous. Listening to them back to back, if you have a dry eye by the end, you’re a cold, cold creature.
10. Tainted Love/Where Did Our Love Go?---Soft Cell
Hell, how can anyone not dig this song? It was one of the first synthpop songs, and it was critical in forging my love of synth music. Catchy keyboard riffs and it guarantees to get you dancing. Get me some eyeliner!
11. Wishing (If I Had a Photograph Of You)---A Flock of Seagulls
The Flock were never appreciated in their time. They also helped get me into the alternative music scene.
12. Only You---Yazoo
This was supposed to be a Depeche Mode song but it turned out even better with Alison Moyet’s vocals. Another great synthpop song of love lost.
13. Forever Young---Alphaville
Whether the original ballad or the club version, this song is just incredible. It was the only reason I thought Napoleon Dynamite was worth watching.
14. I Melt With You---Modern English
Granted, this song is overplayed now. I hear it every day it seems., thanks to those wretched 80’s Lunches on every top 40 station. Back in 1983, only the coolest of cool people knew the song and had the album it came from, in addition to the soundtrack to Valley Girl, which made the song famous. The song itself was my measuring point for what a cool date was…if the date was so awesome it made me think of this song, it was a memorable date.
15. Love My Way/The Ghost In You---Psychedelic Furs
Again, you have to play them together to fully appreciate the magic of these songs. Forget "Pretty In Pink"; these are the true great Furs’ songs.
16. Cuts You Up---Peter Murphy
You have to listen to this at 3AM, driving under a full moon, letting the violin and Peter’s rich voice meld together to suck you under…
17. The Killing Moon---Echo & The Bunnymen
Also a good one to listen to at night, but preferably with the lights out, laying on the bed, staring at glow-in-the-dark stars. It also will suck you under. Play this and Cuts You Up back to back....wow.
18. Let Me Go!---Heaven 17
One of the quintessential dance tracks of my time in Germany.
19. Bittersweet---Big Head Todd & The Monsters
A great song about being miserable in a relationship and neither of you know quite what to do to fix it. "We work our way around each other..."
20. Never Tear Us Apart---INXS
Achingly beautiful. The last song to make the saxophone cool.
21. Possession---Sarah McLachlan
Almost sinister, yet mesmerizing.
22. Love Will Tear Us Apart---Joy Division
So what if it’s on every essential list of the 80’s? It’s there for a reason.
23. 88 Lines About 44 Women---The Nails
The dude is singing praises about 44 women he’s screwed. Everyone who was worth hanging out with in the 80’s knew this song by heart. It was the coolest in-joke ever.
24. Troy---Sinead O’Connor
Long before she conquered the universe with Nothing Compares 2 U, the girl with the most powerful voice in Ireland was blowing me away.
25. Under The Milky Way---The Church
Another song to listen to in the darkest hours. Any song with bagpipes has to be good, don’tcha think?
26. If I Had $1,000,000.00---Barenaked Ladies
My first BNL song. Absolute genius at its wittiest. Dijon Ketchup!
27. Adam’s Song---Blink 182
It reminds me of a friend who died.
28. Any Little Town---The Push Stars
Hard to believe I discovered this awesome song on the store Muzak in an Eddie Bauer at the mall.
29. Hum---The Shiela Divine
TSD is what Nirvana could have been if they’d had talent & wrote decent songs and Cobain could sing. Along with the Push Stars, some of the best unknown talent in Boston.
30. Headhunter---Front242
One of the greatest electronic body music songs ever. Period. This is what techno should have been if the kids on X hadn’t taken over.
31. Lightning Man---Nitzer Ebb
The song that spawned my alter ego. Baby! Come to Daddy!
32. October Love Song---Chris & Cosey
Part spoken word, part lullaby, completely gorgeous.
33. Du Hast---Rammstein
I first heard this song sitting in my car in a Boston suburb, and I was totally hooked. Of course, I actually knew what the words were too, which helped. The perfect song to play when stuck in traffic.
34. Modigliani (Lost In Your Eyes)---Book Of Love
One of the most under-rated synthpop acts ever. Another song you can’t get enough of.
35. Books on the Bonfire---The Bolshoi
An incredibly powerful song that brings the novel Fahrenheit 451 to life.
36. This Is The Day---The The
I love the opening lines: Well... you didn't wake up this morning,'cause you didn't go to bed. You were watching the whites of your eyes turn red……
37. Solsbury Hill---Peter Gabriel
A timeless classic. It always reminds me of a time when I felt I didn’t quite fit in anywhere, and in my head I was like, so what?
38. Holiday In Cambodia---Dead Kennedys
The song that gave me an outlet for teen angst & anger, and I wore the t-shirt at graduation under my cap & gown.
39. Mad World---Tears For Fears
Forget Shout. Forget Everybody Wants To Rule The World. This was their best song, long before they got huge.
40. Rock The Bells---LL Cool J
One of the greatest hip hop songs ever. I was 16, and here was this kid, also 16, tossing these unbelievable rhymes. And it made me think, if he can do it at 16, hell, I can do anything too.
41. Moments In Love---Art Of Noise
This song is epic. A trip across the mindscape in an ocean of bliss.
42. The Band Played Walzting Matilda---The Pogues
Me and my inner circle in Germany, walking across the base on a Friday night, a bit intoxicated, all of us singing this song together. And then we run into the base chaplain, walking with the Archbishop of San Fransisco. And all we could think of was , wow, that’s a HUGE cross that dude’s wearing.
43. Love Is a Stranger---Eurythmics
While everyone else was over-playing Sweet Dreams, I was listening to a much cooler song.
44. Why?/Small Town Boy---Bronski Beat
A screaming falsetto layered over great synths. Maybe it’s an acquired taste?
45. Head Like A Hole---Nine Inch Nails
This song single-handedly kept me sane when I was sent to Fort Riley in 1990. I’m proud to say I was into NIN before it was cool & trendy.
46. Here’s Where The Story Ends---The Sundays
A gorgeous little gem by a band that should have gotten a lot bigger.
47. Paul Revere---The Beastie Boys
I was 17 and impressionable. And the Beasties ruined me.
48. This Corrosion/Lucretia My Reflection---Sisters of Mercy
Sweeping epic Goth operatic opus that makes me yearn for a leather jacket and black boots
49. Sandstorm---Darude
Perhaps the most absolute perfect techno dance club track to drive a hunnert miles an hour to.
50. Love is a Shield---Camouflage
Great dance-pop from Germany. They deserved to get bigger, but people thought they sounded too much like Depeche Mode I guess.

Big Awl

I recently found out something disturbing, something that I probably already knew in the back of my noggin, but never really registered. It turns out that the third largest oil-producing country in the world, after Saudi Arabia & Russia, is the good old U-S-of- A.

That’s right, it’s us… Yet we import kajillions of barrels of oil a day at outrageous prices from hostile countries like Venezuela, a country on the verge of communism and who’s president is so buddy-buddy with Castro they give each other reach-arounds with their after-dinner cigars, and from Arab countries who do their level best every day to kill us all. So why do we import so much from angry brown people who all hate us with a venomous passion?

The knee-jerk reaction is to say, hey Steve, it’s because of our dependence on fossil fuels for all our cars & planes & pleasure boats and our carefree lazy lifestyle of leisure and war-mongering. Sure, most of that is valid. The Department of Defense uses an awful lot of POL (Petroleum/Oil/Lubricants) to continue killing terrorist scumbags, and I’ll gladly pay a couple extra cents at the pump to make sure our troops have what they need to fulfill the missions our geniuses in power set before them. And yeah, when I see some douche pulling his McYacht with his Hummer to his beach house, I wonder how many feet to the gallon he gets. But the real problem is a tad more basic & a lot more sinister, friends. It’s pure corporate greed.

See, America’s dependence on fossil fuels is a direct result of us being held hostage by the internal combustion engine. And who, pray tell, is holding us hostage with it? Why, Corporate America, of course! You think the oil companies, with bullshit contrived shortages from Katrina-bashed refineries and busted pipelines, and who already won’t part with their record profits to build any new refineries, want to see their choke-hold on the nation released by all of us switching to alternative fuels? Puh-leeeze.

Also at fault? The automobile industry, which is so far in bed with the oil companies that they don’t even mind the morning breath anymore. These hybrid cars and tiny forays into electric cars are just window-dressing, if you ask me. It makes it look like they’re doing something without really doing all that much. I keep hearing conflicting reports on whether they even get all that great mileage or even really save much money. Back in the late 90’s, GM leased, not sold, their EV-1 electric spaceship mobile for about a year or so, and only in Arizona & SoCal, with no real fanfare or publicity, or even any real support after a few months. Honda’s Insight hybrid insect has done a little better on publicity and sales were a little better. I’ve even actually seen 3 or 4 of them on the road. And now everyone is putting out a hybrid model because it’s trendy.

But you mean to tell me that a country that made the atom bomb (using German scientists), put man on the moon (using German scientists), and made invisible stealth bombers (using German designs), can’t get a car company, even one that’s half German, to really go full out with efficient, inexpensive, mass-produced alternative-fuel vehicles to break the cycle of gas consumption? It’s been tried before, by another enterprising German, Rudolf Diesel. His original design allowed the engine to run on vegetable oils and seed oils, even hemp oil! The idea is now called bio-diesel. But the big business interests of the day like Dupont, Hearst, and coal companies smeared diesels and basically forced the engine to use POL-based fuel sources. Today’s diesel fuel is one step removed from home heating oil. Every time someone says hey, we can run on corn, ethanol, peanut oil, sunshine, or fucking hamster power, some CEO says oh HELL no, I’m not gonna put money into THAT. It might cut my profits or hurt my salary. Instead, let’s get together with our oil masters to keep America hooked on giant SUV’s (Stupid Useless Vehicles) that cost 60 grand to buy and an arm & a leg to drive.

They screwed the Japanese too. Our Asian brothers pioneered small inexpensive fuel-friendly cars during the artificial shortages of the 70’s. And have you noticed that most all their SUV’s are full-time all-wheel drive instead of selectively 4WD? That way they’ll burn just as much juice as our big stupid SUV’s as soccer moms run to Wal-Mart for milk. Take that economical Toyota engine and kill its economy so it’ll run like a pig like a Ford Excavation or Chevy Subdivision. At least Toyota has continued to pursue small fuel-cheap rides, even though the Echo and Prius both looked like turtles fucking a football. They recently went larger with the Yaris, and Nissan just introduced the Versa. This week I’ve started seeing commercials for Chevy claiming that gas pumps hate their cars, and I just 5 minutes ago saw a Chevy commercial about flex-fuel cars. So maybe the auto industry is making another attempt to look good until they rankle their masters. If Big Oil gets too riled up, they’ll just jack it up to $3.50 a gallon again just to make us grateful to see the $2.54 I just paid this week. And prior to Katrina just 12 months ago, we were bitching about it being over $2.00. Hell, we’d sell our daughters to Ron Jeremy for 2 bucks a gallon again……

Horses Taste Like Chicken

To paraphrase an old movie title, they eat horses don’t they?

I read a bothersome A.P. bit in the newspaper a couple days ago. It seems that the US House of Representatives voted to ban the slaughter of horses for meat. The article, by Libby Quaid, was full of interestingly irksome information.

Most bothersome is that how, with oil prices through the roof, brave young Americans getting killed daily by third world jihadists, and Iran waving the nuclear flag around, Congress has found the time to debate the merits of horses as the other other other white meat.

The article stated that, “Opponents of the practice showed pictures of horses with lacerated & bloodied faces, the result of being crammed into trailers”. Y’know, kids, the same things happen to cows and pigs when they go to slaughter, but no one’s mentioning that little tidbit. Anyways, we’re carting you off to be ground into burgers, but you might have gotten a cut on the way? Sure, makes sense.

Representative John Sweeney, a New York Republican, argued that the slaughter of horses is different from that of cattle and chickens because horses are American icons. I beg to differ, Congressman. The bald eagle is an American icon. The horse is an American load-bearing beast of burden and occasional afternoon payoff at Churchill Downs. The closest thing horses get to being American icons is that they hauled around white Europeans as they killed off native tribal nations and stole their lands, but I digress.

Embarrassingly, South Carolina Democrat John Spratt, who represents my adopted home state’s Fifth Congressional District, said, “They’re as close to human as any animal can get.”. Holy shit, are you for real? Try the Bonobo Chimp, John. A little closer genetically, so sayeth I. Hell, we only share 98% of our DNA with them. How about that opposable thumb, Congressman? To the contrary, only a small number of people are genetically close to horses…we call them porn stars.

And herein lays the crux of the matter, as stated by Republican Christopher Shays of Connecticut: “The way a society treats its animals, particularly horses, speaks to the core values and morals of its citizens.” No, you delusional asshat; the way a society treats its military veterans (like shit), treats its poor and middle class (like shit), and funds its educational systems (like shit) speaks of our core values and morals.

No, our core values and morals don’t want us to kill horses because they’re pretty. America loves pretty things. If horses weren’t so cute, we’d eat them with special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, & onion, on a sesame seed bun, super-sized with fries & a Coke. Instead, the less attractive animals like cows, pigs, and chickens, get consumed by the megaton, and no one says Boo. Actor/comedian Denis Leary, who by his own words represents angry, gun-toting, meat-eating people, said it best when he said “We only want to save the cute animals, folks”.

This might explain why the same newspaper had a mention of the Phoenix, Arizona police arresting a scumbag serial rapist buried on page 12, while the front page had the DUI arrest of notorious waste of skin Paris Hilton on the front page. If anyone could use a double horseburger with cheese, it’s that wretched excuse of a human being. That’s hot…

Mother of all Storms!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hurricane, my plump juicy succulent ass.

I never saw more than a 15-minute sprinkle all day. Panicked people closed schools, closed businesses, activated every emergency operations plan in the book, and basically made like the end of the known universe was nigh.....and the newsies on TV are STILL milking this fucking thing and preying upon people's fears. Sure, downtown Charleston got a lotta rain today (35 miles east of me) but not any more rain than during a summer deluge t-storm. But these dillweeds are standing around telling us that it could still get worse....winds could still pick up....rain could still drown us all....shelters are open (but no one's in them)....power crews are ready.....the National Guard is on standby, 300 highway patrol troopers are on standby......stay tuned to Accu-Weather Live Eye Storm Team Disaster Watch Operation Urgent Panic Precipitation Response Team for all your drizzle details.

It's a slow news day...we tracked this thing for a week, so we gotta milk it by reporting NOTHING but storm-related drivel. And once the news hour is up ...wait, scratch that....the news starts at 4 now, then goes to 5, then 5:30, then 6, and repeats again at 7....the earliest coverage and the latest coverage, and if we don't have the news on, there'll be a crawler repeating the same shit over & over again. But wait; let's see the same animated tracking footage of the cloud system that we showed you ten minutes ago, along with 8 different scenario situations for projected tracks and possible floodings and the decimation of all humanity.

Every time a black cloud gets spotted offshore, the local newsies all join forces to make sure everyone panics as soon as possible, and stays afraid. Fear keeps us pliant, and we’ll be too scared to change the channel. They act like at noon tomorrow, Nostradamus and Rasputin will rise from the grave to lead the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse down Meeting Street.

Once a butterfly in South America flaps its wings, it sets forth in motion a Doppler radar system that tracks the ensuing hurricane. A tropical flap becomes a tropical flutter that becomes a tropical breeze that becomes a tropical wind that becomes a tropical front that becomes a tropical wave that becomes a tropical depression that becomes a tropical storm that becomes a hurricane that becomes the MOTHER OF ALL STORMS.

Hollywood Sucks

Hollywood has officially run out of ideas.

All they seem to be doing is remaking old films because there's nothing new to write about. That, and taking every shitty old TV show & making a movie version. They're doing a movie version of Welcome Back Kotter, with Ice Cube playing Gabe Kaplan's Kotter. A tubby ex-rapper playing a 70's Jewish standup comic? Sure, they both have an Afro.....

Miami Vice? The TV show sucked. Why make a movie? A remake of Lassie comes out next month, like that was needed? Even more unnecessary: Jackass 2.

There's some film called Step Up...a dancing movie with a street dancer who falls in love with a classical dancer....bullshit, it's been done before. Save the Last Dance, it was called...which stole half the idea from Flashdance.

All these bullshit psuedo horror movies now where everything is filmed in the dark and the evil creatures are pale forms in blue lighting....and these are all remakes of Jap films anyways.


Lest we forget, Rocky 6 is filming.....


But Snakes on a Plane? Are you for real? The commercials are vague so I'm guessing at what passes for a plot. It looks like some kung fu gangster badass tries to kill his nemesis by filling an airliner with snakes...and then they fly into a storm & the snakes attack. Enter Samuel L. Jackson, who must have lost a fucking bet or something to have gotten involved in this pig. Was there a contest to see who could come up with the lamest plot & sell it to a studio? Sounds like it was written by a fourth grader on crack.

SURVIVOR: COMPTON

I'm about done with Reality TV.

Reality, my ass. The REAL WORLD? Oh, please....a handpicked crew of extras from a Bennetton ad, living rent-free in a fucking penthouse full of Ikea furniture and going on exotic roadtrips & hosting huge parties, and getting just drunk enough to fuck their gorgeous castmates and start a blood fued with the Bad Boy character? Horseshit. You want the Real World? Put 4 starving, unattractive college kids together in a rat-hole tenement with milk-crate & cinder-block furniture, pulling together penny rolls to buy a six-pack of PapSmear Blue Ribbon Beer, and working crap jobs at a pizza place to pay the rent. That's the real real world. In the real world, you have bills & shitty jobs and at least one doofy room mate who sits around in his undies playing Warcraft or some crap on the Playstation.

Survivor? More bullshit. They act like everyone is starving & eaten alive by leeches, but I guarantee you, someone is slipping the camera guy a knobjob for a Snickers and a Pepsi. You want Survivor? Drop these clowns off naked on an island with nothing but a sharpened stick and some string for 30 days. Whoever is still alive at the end is the survivor. Or better yet, drop them off covered in 50 dollar bills and wearing a white hood in Compton. Whoever makes it to Hollywood is the winner.

And Fear Factor? Oh please...more like Nasty Factor. A show that has the formula of: Pretty people do a stunt with 250 percent more protection than a stuntman gets, then eat something so fucking nasty that even Joseph Mengele and Jeffrey Dahmer would cringe, and then do another stunt. I could see if things were always based around real, rational fears, like spiders, snakes, rats, lawyers, and heights, but who wakes up in the morning with a phobic, irrational fear of eating a pig's uterus? OH, NO! I hope I don't get forced to eat a horse's asshole today!!!! I may not get out of bed!!! The earthworm and congealed blood pizzas might find me!

How about Peer Factor? Where your friends egg you on to do dumber & dumber shit? Or Beer Factor, where you get so drunk you'll do anything? First one to pass out & shit their pants without dying of alcohol poisoning is the winner. Or Queer Factor? Where 5 totally homophobic contestants have to do progressively gayer & gayer things until they find themselves naked in a hot tub with Carson Kressley and Steven Cojocaru?

Contrived Oil Prices

It seems that they've found a new way to jack up oil prices again.


Back 4 years ago when we decided it would be a nifty idea to invade Iraq & steal their oil supplies to make Dick Cheney even richer via Halliburton, everyone thought gas prices would come down. Unfortunately, Iraq owed so much money to every other country on earth that any money generated by their oil went to pay everyone else off first. Shit, we thought we'd get the employee discount since we owned their oil fields now....stupid us.

Then every time some yahoo in a checkered head wrap got an itchy trigger finger, which has been pretty often, oil prices went up. Then, the Year of the Hurricane hit us, and gas prices went fucking insane. Gotta cash in on tragedy, y'know. It's the American Way. And once the prices evened out again, some new disaster would come up to jack the prices up again.

So here we are....Summer 2006, and what to do? We could raise prices because Israel is shelling Lebanon, but that whole war in the Middle East shit is getting old...and there hasn't been any sign of a hurricane yet this year, and it's already almost mid-August. We needed to jack them prices up again before Labor Day and squeeze all the money we can out of travelers on the last big holiday before Thanksgiving, so now all of a sudden, the Alaskan Pipeline is falling apart?


Bullshit. Pure utter bullshit. You mean to tell me that a multibillion dollar pipeline just all of a sudden develops so many worn out places & weak spots that you gotta shut it down? Bullshit! I'd like to think someone has the sense to check this thing REGULARLY, especially in the age of global terrorism, so how the fuck do they miss the fact that it was falling apart? You mean to tell me it fell apart overnight? Sure....sure it did. Or are you telling me no one has checked this thing in the past, oh, say, 5 to 10 years and noticed it was maybe coming apart?


Pull the other leg, assholes; it plays "Jingle Bells".

TELL ME WHY

Why is it that it's okay for these dustbunny scumbag insurgents (a polite term for organized terrorists) to behead Americans on live TV and the Internet, to kidnap American soldiers, kill them, and booby-trap the mutilated bodies, to kill civilian contractors & burn the mutilated corpses, and hang the remains from bridges so more of these assholes can beat them with sticks like a piñata, but if an American says something about the Koran or some Iraqi prisoners get embarrassing pictures taken of them, the media explodes like it's the second coming of Hitler?

Why is it that the media never shows images of US troops feeding starving villagers, or air-dropping thousands of food packets, or building schools, or giving inoculations for cholera to people who shit in their own water supply, or training police officers to take care of their own country, and instead only focuses on the rare occurrence of some dipshit who snaps and kills a civilian? Why is it only the bad things get hugely publicized while the good things get forgotten?

Why is it that most junior enlisted troops, who have to do the bulk of the shitty details the military gets tasked with, are so poorly paid that they qualify for FOOD STAMPS? Why do so many troops have to take second jobs delivering pizza and stocking shelves at night at Wal-Mart to make ends meet? Why is it that it took a Doctorate in Aeronautical Engineering to design a plane, a Master's to build it, a Bachelor's to fly it, and the millions of dollars of electronics, avionics, and weapons are maintained by a high school graduate who is paid less than the drive thru clown at Hardee's, and isn't old enough to even by a beer yet to toast the news that he's again getting deployed to some Third World shit hole where every day angry people will do their level best to kill him for trying to help them?

Why is it that troops have had to beg Rumsfeld for armor kits for their vehicles and in many cases have had to scrounge steel plates from trash piles to weld onto their vehicles for protection from people who strap explosives to pregnant women & send them into wedding parties to blow themselves up?

Why is it that we have Israel, Lebanon, the Hezbo's, and every other Jallallahoolabooladurkadurka jihad teetering on the edge of potential nuclear war, and the biggest story in the news is what Mel Gibson said about a Jewish cop during a DUI arrest? At this rate, Israel will get wind of the anti-Semite remarks of Gibson and start bombing Hollywood. No big loss….

Why is it that the average American has no clue that Venezuela, whom we import an assload of oil from, is on the verge of going communist, but knew that last night was the series premiere of Celebrity Fit Club and Flavor of Love?

Why is it that the average American will gladly tell you that he lives in the greatest country on earth because we're free and can vote for our leaders, but that they have no idea who their elected representatives to Congress are and didn't vote in the last election? Why is it that more Americans voted for American Idol than in any American presidential election, ever?

Yeah...can you tell me why?

I Love Me Some Me

I Love Me Some Me

You know, some people just love themselves too much. Many of these same people seem to live for feeding their own publicity machines. Perennially problematic notable media whore Terrell Owens, in a post-game interview, said once (or twice), “I love me some me". Sure, T.O., and everyone else in football thinks you're a pariah.
The United States Marines are the few, the proud, the ones who have to tell you time & again how great they are. Every Marine, current & former, has no shortage of hats, bumper stickers, flags, and t-shirts proclaiming their status as the most dangerous oxygen-burning carbon-based life form ever to grace this rock. Now, don't get me wrong; I love Marines, even though I was Army. My oldest friend in the world is a former Marine. But the self-propaganda machine amuses me. It's almost like they have Short Man Syndrome...the smallest branch of the military always puffing itself up. Look on any (and I do mean ANY) military t-shirt web page and the shirts for the USMC will outnumber the other services 5 to 1. Shameless self-promotion..... don't hate me, Chris!


Rush Limbaugh toots his own horn for 3 hours a day, telling his mindless sheeple zomboid listeners how great he is and how America would crumble into dust without him. You'd think that blowhard would have gone into the shitter after his Oxycontin scandal, but like Marion Barry, he fell into shit & came out smelling like a rose. It's funny how Limbaugh spent 8 years beating Bill Clinton like a gong, and the two of them have more in common than you'd think...they both are enamored of the sound of their own voices, both are beloved of throngs of dolts, and both came out of potentially career-ending fuck-ups more popular than ever.

Aw yeah, boyeee! Gots me some bling!

It simply astounds me, the very nature of human beings.

It mystifies me, the stupidity of my fellow humans. Why, oh why, would you put 5000 freakin' dollars worth of ugly-assed oversized rims on a 500 dollar piece of shit car?


A barely drivable mobile-unit, with a paint job that's primarily primer, that's been paid for since Carter was in office, and then you went to some fly-by-night finance place and took out a LOAN for 5 grand to buy WHEELS? Are you HIGH? Or are you just stupid?

I get a kick outta the ones that are on a payment plan & have just rims on the back, and regular wheels on the front because they haven't bought the others yet....or better yet, what happens when you can't pay the payment? Do the repo guys come & repo your wheels? I can see it now...it's 3AM Eternal, and the repo man wheels into the trailer park, jacks up your car like a NASCAR pit crew & takes back your wheels, all in under 60 seconds.

I absolutely love the ones who feel the need to tell you what the size of the rims are with numbers painted on the rear quarter of the car. Whether it be 22's, 24's, or even 26's....I mean, does anyone really give a fuck except the other douchebags with rim-envy and numbers on their own rides? I even saw one twat riding around town in a beat up Ford Probe and on the back it had 16" in big stickers on it, under the Lee Press-On Spoiler kit. Yes... a Ford freakin' PROBE! Advertising 16" rims! Whoopty shit. My mom's Kia Amanti has 16" rims. Then again, this was a supposed adult driving a car named after something that goes in your ass. Need I say more?

Yeah...a 500 dollar car with minimum coverage liability insurance, with 8000 dollar rims, 2000 dollars worth of dumb-assed TV’s in the headrest and a 5000 dollar stereo & speaker set up. Makes sense to me.

Wutz a Bawlzy?

Wutz a Bawlsy?

With these three words, “What’s a ballsy?” American Idol contestant Kellie Pickler surpassed Jessica Simpson as The Dumbest Bitch Alive. Never did I think that I’d hear someone say something dumber than Simpson’s diatribe on whether Chicken of the Sea was fish or chicken. No one can be this damned stupid. I live in the Deep South, and I’m confronted with uneducated ignorance daily, and I’ve lived in rural Maine amongst Yankee Rednecks, yet I have yet to physically run up against Capital-D DUMB of this caliber in person. Not even innocent naiveté could cause a rational adult human to continually spew forth dumb-isms about calamari, salmon, spinach salads, being labeled a minx, the terms “ballsy” and “on paper”, and whatever shucky-darn down-home crapola we’ll see this week on American Idol, or as I like to call it: Televised Crack for the Suburban Masses.

I’m starting to agree with the various conspiracy theory websites that Miss Pickler is bullshitting us all with her feigned folksy innocence. She seems to have lied about never having performed in public, and if you’ve ever seen her prom picture, innocent is a word that never comes to mind. I’ve seen hookers in Germany wearing more clothes.

So here’s my list of the Top Ten Things Pickler Could Say Next:

10. What’s a Korean Basket Job?
09. What’s a Money Shot? Is that like a rim job?
08. What’s a Pre-Op Tranny?
07. What’s a Tijuana Donkey Show?
06. What’s Rollin’ a Fatty?
05. What’s a Dirty Sanchez?
04. What’s a Teabag?
03. What’s a Shart?
02. What’s a Crunk?
01. What’s a Haggis?

Total Hockey Fag

You know you’re a total hockey fag when you sit and watch a seven-year old hockey game on ESPN Classic, a game that you already know the outcome of. But then again, it wasn’t just any ordinary game, either. It was a game played in Madison Square Garden on April 18, 1999 between the Rangers and the Penguins. The Pens won it 2-1 in OT. This was back in the days when Pittsburgh had a solid team & could actually finish out of the basement, unlike today.

The game was literally riddled with all-stars:
The Pens had Jaromir Jagr, Robert Lang, Martin Straka, Alexei Kovalev, Jiri Slegr, and Darius Kasparitis, while the Rangers had Brian Leetch, Peter Nedved, Marc Savard, Kevin Stevens, Niklas Sundstrom, Mike Knuble, Mathieu Schneider, Dan Cloutier, and Mike Richter.

The sidelines were filled with such luminaries as Paul Coffey and Mark Messier watching from the pit rinkside, and Mario Lemieux, sitting up in the stands.

And all these names pale in comparison to whom they were all there to see. This game was special. Number 99 was playing his last game ever. The Great One, Wayne Gretzky, was retiring after breaking and setting pretty much every record in the NHL. The greatest player the sport has known, hockey’s greatest ambassador to the world, a true Canadian Hero, and he was calling it quits on his own terms.

It was surreal to see it again after all these years. I was mesmerized. Yeah, you’re a total hockey fag when you watch a seven-year old game. Especially when you own a double-DVD set chronicling Gretzky’s career & have seen the footage a dozen times over. Especially when you sit there unabashedly teary-eyed, weepy over watching Wayne skate around the rink, waving goodbye to a 20-year career. Yeah, a total hockey fag indeed.

So what? It’s Gretzky. Enough said……

Who teaches these assholes how to drive?

Allow me to preface this little rant by stating my qualifications to comment on the topic at hand. I am a licensed professional. I hold a current Class B Commercial Driver’s License, or CDL. I partially make my living by driving. I have about 18 years experience behind the wheel, including my time driving in the Army. I’ve driven in 4 different countries (The USA, Canada, Italy, and Germany), sometimes at high rates of speed, through countrysides, on trails, over mountains, on Autobahns, and through major cities like Toronto, Montreal, Boston, New York, Washington, Stuttgart, and Munich.

This is mind, I do believe I’m qualified to make this statement: people in South Carolina are among the worst drivers in the known universe.

Never in my life have I seen more reckless, ignorant, obstinate, inconsiderate, and downright stupid drivers than here in SC. Tailgating is a sport here, although the popularity of NASCAR here has the local rustics thinking they’re drafting me. Dear me, here they are imagining they’re Greg Biffle or some such other overdone circle-driver, and if I have to hit my brakes hard they’ll be eating 13 tons of bumper. Remember, kiddies, if you can’t see my mirrors, I can’t see you.

Passing on the right is popular here, too, as well as passing 6 cars in a row on a 2-lane backroad in a no-passing zone before forcing themselves back into the traffic flow to narrowly avoid a head-on collision. And then the asshole will apply his brakes. Why? This makes no sense. Why pass me and then slow down? Again, I blame NASCAR. I may be slow but I’m ahead of you, so I must be going faster than you…

The other thing that people here do that frikkin’ stupefies me is when you’re cruising along at terminal velocity and some desperately stupid cretin pulls out in front of you going 20 below the speed limit instead of waiting for you to go by before pulling out. Hell, there could be 2 miles of empty road behind you, and rather than wait, they pull out. NEWS FLASH: a 13-ton truck going 60 mph does not gracefully stop on a dime like a German sports car. Granted, those air brakes work great, but be realistic.

Many a time I’ve had a nimrod do this and then have the audacity to shoot me a shitty look because I came up to within a few feet of their ass end, close enough to read their “My kid is a mediocre underachiever at Bubba Dillweed Middle School” bumper sticker. The infuriating topper to this episode is that 90% of the time, this waste of oxygen is gonna pull out in front of you doing 30, and then go about 200 yards before turning off the road again. Yes, you read that right. They couldn’t wait til the truck goes past, and the next 2 miles of road is empty, to creep that 1982 Dodge Diplomat out onto the road for a 300-foot excursion to the next driveway.



I’ve seen imbeciles of all ages guilty of this heinous act, but the main perpetrators are Blue Hairs, folks that were driving Miss Daisy in a Model-A Ford to the Scuffleville General Store when gas was a nickel. Nothing like a 300-year old driver with a handicap tag and glasses so thick they say “Five Cent Deposit” on the rim to make that big blue vein in my forehead twitch like an epileptic on crack.
Nothing at all, unless it’s a frikkin’ Moped…

Never in my days have I seen so many people on Mopeds & scooters as I do here in SC. I could see if the underlying reason was Manhattan commuter traffic snarls, or if it was to save gas by getting 17 million miles to the gallon, but face it: the truth of it is that 99% of these Ped-Heads lost their licenses on a multiple DUI conviction and can’t get an SR-22 insurance waiver thingie. So they’re stuck doing 25 mph on a rolling chainsaw carting their purchase of a 22-ounce Steel Reserve and box of White Owls in a stolen milk crate bungee-corded to the back fender. For every scooter being jockeyed by a clown wearing leather and an airbrushed helmet like he’s on his way to Daytona, you’ll find 11 motorists behind him grinding their molars to dust and screaming like Gunny Hartman in Full Metal Jacket.


And before I go, I have a question for all you Playa Pimps out there driving a 200 dollar Hooptie with 5000 dollar 26” spinners and a 10,000 dollar subwoofer system: How the bloody hell can you drive that thing while pretty much laying down and trying to peer out through a foggy haze of dope smoke and windows so black they absorb light? Enquiring minds wanna know.