Fucking Blasphemy

A few nights back I watching a rerun of Conan O’Brien. One of his guests was Hilary Duff. Apparently on her new CD she does a cover of The Who classic “My Generation”. Now while just the mere thought of Hilary Duff singing The Who is bad enough, Conan mentioned that she changed the line “hope I die before I get old” to “hope I don’t die before I get old”.

What the fuck kind of bullshit is this?

Now, I’m not about to enumerate every reason why Hilary Duff should be painfully killed (the list would surely push me over my monthly bandwidth limits), but this has got to be pretty fucking near the top. I’m sorry, but you simply can’t do that. Many would say that rock and roll is all about being a pissed-off, angst-ridden, rebellious teenager, and “My Generation” is probably the single purest example of that concept. You can not take it and sanitize it like that. That’s a fucking crime against music.

Conan gave her some shit about it, but he kept it light. That’s why he’s a talk show host and I’m not. I may have snapped, yelled “Well too fucking bad!” and bludgeoned her to death with a microphone.

I’ll Take “Things That Make You Feel Old” for $500, Alex

It occurred to me the other day that I’ve now spent more of my life not a virgin than I spent a virgin. The line was actually crossed roughly 10 months ago (funny that I don’t remember the exact date) but I didn’t realize it until a couple days ago. I’m not sure if—or how—I should celebrate.

God’s Underwear

Hypertext is dangerous stuff.

In a prehistoric article from 1989 titled Hypertext: Beyond the Hype, the author says the following:

Another criticism of hypertext is that users are presented with so much information that their human circuits burst with cognitive overload. While reading through a document, choices must constantly be made about which links to follow and which to ignore. […] Although this problem is not new with hypertext, computerized access does add a sometimes overwhelming dimension to it.

The same article mentions that prototype hypertext applications are in development at several educational institutions, but they are not yet commercially available. At this point in my little story (which is growing longer and more bloated by the keystroke) I’d like to ask all of my readers (ie. both of you) to grovel at the feet of Tim Berners-Lee, not just for creating the HTTP protocol, but for giving it to the world free of charge. Other people, I dunno, Bill Gates for instance, might have tried to profit from their invention and we wouldn’t have the internet we do today.

So what was I saying? Oh yes, hypertext is dangerous stuff.

Sometimes I’m amazed at the journeys the web takes me on. And on some nights I do find my human circuits bursting with cognitive overload. Tonight was one of those nights.

It started innocently enough. I was kinda bored with the web. I’d read all my usual sites (over there on the right, below the archive) and didn’t know where to go. Then I remembered I hadn’t read Robot Johnny in awhile. So I went there, and he just mentioned kind of offhand that he had a new favorite Wikipedia entry. It was the entry for undergarment.

Now as I’ve said twice already, hypertext is dangerous stuff, and possibly it’s most concentrated form is Wikipedia. If plain hypertext has a danger level analogous to, say, drinking beer, then Wikipedia is like smoking a mixture of hashish and crack while mainlining heroin and getting a blowjob. I’ve learned that if I want to be productive, it’s best not to follow a link to Wikipedia, because once there I’m pretty much done for the day.

So I read all about underwear. I learned its varieties, nicknames, and history through the ages. But most interesting to me was the link regarding the Mormon temple garment variety. This just in: Them Mormons is some goofy fuckers.

Unfortunately for me, that article referred to the Judeo-Christian God by name, and before I knew it I was not just knee-deep in the etymology of the tetragrammaton (and learning fancy big words to boot). Of course as close as anybody can figure, His name is Yahweh (pronounced ee-ah-oo-ay), but the real pronunciation may have been lost due to strict adherance to the “name in vain” commandment and the general lax rules regarding vowels in early Hebrew.

This led me to my theory (which is mine) that the original, lost pronunciation of the name of God is “Oy Vey“.

It was just one innocent link. Now it’s 3 hours later, my eyes are bloodshot, my head aches, and I know way too much about underwear and ancient Hebrew texts. Is there such thing as hypertext detox?

The Most Obvious Joke Possible

Is Robert Blake now going to team up with O.J. Simpson to find the real killers?

Tales of Misspent Youth (Part I)

In the early spring of 1987, two candidates were battling to be the next mayor of Des Moines Iowa. These men were George Flagg and John “Pat” Dorrian, and it was a special election to replace the recently-deceased Mayor Pete Crivaro. Dorrian was way ahead in the polls, but all over town were enormous yellow signs that read “FLAGG MAYOR” in big black letters. Nothing else, just a yellow background with a gigantic “FLAGG” in a sans-serif font and a smaller “MAYOR” centered below it.

Now I try to keep this non-blog non-political, so I’m not going to mention which political party Mr. Flagg belonged too. Besides, for the events I’m about to describe, our motivation was not particularly political. It was far more humor motiviated. But Flagg was an asshole, and that certainly didn’t hurt.

I think I was the ringleader on this caper, but it’s been 18 years and my memory is foggy. Other participants may believe it was all their idea. If so, they can get their own blog and write up their version of the events.

I’m going to use first names only to protect the guilty. There was me (that is Dave), Bill, Harry, Rob, and Joel. I think Kathy may have been there too, but that seems like a lot for one car. We were all around 17 years old, it was spring break and, as I’ve said before, there was never anything to do in Des Moines. We decided that those yellow and black signs were just begging for some creative modifications.

The first stop was a hardware store (may have been Menard’s) where we picked up 6 or 7 cans of spray paint. Apparently it was nothing unusual for 5 teenagers to be buying spray paint in quantity, late at night. Other adventures had us buying 10 dozen eggs or carts full of toilet paper. Never seemed to be a problem.

Again, some details are fuzzy, but I think Rob was behind the wheel of his bitchin’ Camaro on this night. Bill had somehow aquired (stole it from the dealership) a magnetic dealer plate, which was probably stuck over Rob’s real license plate. I know we used it a few times, this was probably one of them, but I can’t say for certain.

It wasn’t long until we found our first FLAGG MAYOR sign. They were fucking everywhere. We crept up to it, armed with our paint cans, and sprayed over the L and the first G, leaving a sign that quite clearly said “F A G MAYOR”. It was a thing of beauty. The spacing of the letters worked out very nicely and the paint color was a near-perfect match.

Five people turned out to be the perfect number. The signs were double-sided, so four people could spray (two per side, one on L, one on G) while the fifth played lookout. Somebody was spraying somewhat haphazardly, which prompted Harry to say “no, no, nice…even…strokes.” He demonstrated, slowly down one side of the letter, back to the top, and down again until it was very professionally covered.

I’m not sure how many signs we hit before we were done. The newspaper article said “at least 12″ but I think we got far more than that. We covered every corner of town. The sun was coming up when we got back to Bill’s house, which was nearly always home base because his single mom worked the graveyard shift.

Now, if this were the end of the story, I probably wouldn’t have written about it. Just some teenage vandals out having fun one night. But one of the candidates (can you guess which one?) took it to a whole new level.

We hadn’t been back home but a few minutes when Bill got a call from another friend telling him to turn on the channel 8 news. There was mayoral candidate George Flagg looking pissed. He wasn’t blaming teenage hoodlums like a rational man would. He was blaming his opponent, John “Pat” Dorrian, and demanding that he fix his signs. Apparently he thought that Dorrian’s master campaign strategy was to deface his signs. While I can’t remember Dorrian’s exact response, I believe the gist of it was “whatever.”

The Des Moines Register ran an article the next day, complete with a very large and very nice photograph of one of our altered (I like to think of them as improved) signs. We made the front page. A witness the reporter interviewed said it was “very neatly done”. Harry was especially proud of this.

Anyway, we thought Flagg was being a real dumbshit, so we drafted a letter to the Register claiming responsibility. The phrase “no political motivation” was used, which was mostly true. Bill came up with a brilliant paragraph that included something along the lines of “while we realize that what we did was immature, that’s no excuse for the candidates to act like children”. We typed it up in AppleWorks on Bill’s bad-ass Apple //e, signed it with our initials and sent it off. They didn’t print the letter, but Flagg shut the fuck up about his precious signs the next day, so I have a feeling they forwarded it to his people.

Dorrian went on to win the election and served two additional terms. He retired from office and now has a trail named after him that runs along the river through the heart of downtown Des Moines.

Eighteen years later I still look back fondly on this night, even though I’ve lost touch with most of the people involved. The one exception is Bill, who I still email regularly though I haven’t seen him in person for years. He helped me to recall a lot of the details of this story.

As an intersting side note, a few years later we learned that Rob, our faithful driver and co-painter that night, was gay. That made sense, given that every girl we knew wanted to totally fuck him silly. At any rate, he thought making the signs say “fag” was just as funny as any of us did.

The Peanut Butter/Love Equation

So I just saw this commercial for Jif brand peanut butter. It was the one where the dad makes his little daughter a peanut butter sandwich, and explains why he folds it in half. You know the one. I’ve seen this 30-second piece of shmaltz at least 100 times, but today was the first time that I was able to pick up on the subtext.

At the end of the commercial they say (and I’m paraphrasing here), “Buying Jif is an easy way to show your loved ones how much you care.” This got me wondering.

You see, my wife has certain responsibilities in our house, not the least of which is buying peanut butter. Of course, had I realized that so much rode on the Peanut Butter decision, I may have opted to handle that duty myself. Anyway, I decided to investigate the pantry.

Imagine my utter shock when I saw, not a jar of Jif, but a giant Sam’s Club sized can of Peter Pan peanut butter. Even after I regained my composure, I still could not escape the undeniable truth of what my wife’s choice of peanut butter said about her: She loves neither me nor our children.

If anyone can recommend a good divorce lawyer in the Chicago area, I would appreciate it.

Nothing But the Dead and Dying Back in My Little Town

Though I’ve lived on the outskirts of Chicago for going on five years now, I spent the first 30 or so years of my life in Des Moines, Iowa. Most people don’t know much about Des Moines (pronounced “duh-MOYN”), so I’m going to tell you about it as it may feature prominently in future stories of my misspent youth.

Des Moines is the capital city of Iowa, with population just under 200,000, 500,000 counting the suburbs. Not huge, but not exactly tiny either. They are the largest city in Iowa, an urban area sprouting in the middle of endless corn fields. Their contributions to society include Slipknot, Cloris Leachman, and that’s about it. The best burger in Des Moines is from B-Bops, the best taco is from Tasty Tacos. And aside from having family and friends there, in my opinion B-Bops and Tasty Tacos are the only things Des Moines has going for it.

I left Des Moines for a reason, or technically for many reasons. It’s actually an old tradition for Iowa to hemorrhage young people. Even my 75 year-old retired mother wants out. People only stay because they’re stuck there. Everybody I know who has had the opportunity to get out has taken it. My wife and I refer to Des Moines as “the joy vortex”, because once you enter its borders, the overwhelming despair of the residents settles on you like thick smog, suffocating you and draining every ounce of joy from your being.

I think the biggest problem is simply that the town is dead. Dead Moines they call it. Seriously, there is not a god-damned thing to do if you’re too young to drink, and if you’re old enough to drink, well, you can drink. There are movie theaters I guess, but there was even a few years in the 90’s when there weren’t any of those. 90% of the theaters in the town were owned by one company, they didn’t make enough money and got the fuck out of Dodge. It took some time for anybody else to come in. Can you imagine? This is a town that wasn’t even able to keep an arena football franchise. How shitty do you have to be to not even have an arena football team?

So, for entertainment in Des Moines, what you do is if you’re old enough you drink in bars. If you’re not old enough, you drink and drive around in circles downtown. Since the downtown area virtually shuts completely down at 5pm, it’s not too big a deal to have drunken teenagers circling every weekend. And while doing either of these activities, there’s a higher-than-average likelihood that someone will try to start a fist fight with you for no real reason.

And in addition to the deadness, the town is completely fucking uptight. More than one friend has compared it to the town in Footloose. Here’s a city where when rave parties were all the rage, they passed an ordinance banning all-night dancing. When the local heavy metal station wanted to put on a concert in the park, the city refused them a license to sell beer, saying something along the lines of “if these here kids wanna have fun, why do they gotta be so noisy about it?” And don’t even get me started on the cops, who are absolute fucking cocksuckers. Christ, I’ve got six or seven stories on those bastards alone. It wasn’t until I left that I realized that not all cops are assholes. Imagine my surprise.

To make matters worse, in the 90’s crystal meth took the city by storm. No tank of anhydrous amonia was safe. As far as I know, nothing has changed in that regard. Nothing makes a dead, uptight town more livable than a bunch of pissed-off trailer-trash tweeker scumbags everywhere you go. I once worked in a restaurant where I was the only person on the kitchen staff who didn’t crank it up nightly. It worked well for me though, because in an effort to keep themselves occupied, they’d clean the whole kitchen and I wouldn’t have to.

I wouldn’t be surprised at all to get a bunch of angry email from residents of Des Moines about this post. That’s because many of them live in a profound state of denial. It’s not uncommon for people to say how friendly people are in Des Moines. Well, that’s bullshit, and I imagine that the people who say that have, like many of the people there, never been anywhere else. I’ve had more strangers on the street start conversations with me in Chicago than ever did in Des Moines. The way I remember it, in Des Moines the rule is “avoid eye contact lest ye be snarled at”. I’ve never seen some random asshole try to start a fight since I left. There it was a regular occurrence. Guess meth makes you violent or something. The other one I heard all my life was “Des Moines has the best schools in the nation!” Well, having been through the schools there, I can tell you that that’s bullshit too. Every fucking town in every fucking state says they have the best schools in the nation. I hear it here all the time too, only I’m more inclined to believe it.

But you know, shitty a place as it is, it is where I grew up and I do still have friends and family there, and I’ve probably made it seem worse than it really is. Despite the lack of anything going on there, my friends and I were able to make our own fun, though we weren’t ever able to do so within the rule of law.

The title of this post comes from the Simon and Garfunkel song “My Little Town”, which my wife is sure was written about Des Moines. It also says:

And after it rains there’s a rainbow
And all of the colors are black
It’s not that the colors aren’t there
It’s just imagination they lack

While I know Paul Simon isn’t a native of Des Moines, when I hear those lyrics I think he must have at least visited it.