| |
|
Washington, D.C. Junior Bacon The president, shown here shaken, but not stirred, by his recent brush with awareness fter years of staunch, stiff-jawed and clenched-buttocksed opposition to human cloning research, President Bush issued a startling reversal to his January “Pig Men” State of the Union address this week, and now is apparently in favor of the controversial scientific pursuit. A tearful Bush, admittedly “a little behind” on his TV viewing due to “the usual work b.s.,” finally got around to viewing the fifth and final season of HBO’s acclaimed drama Six Feet Under on DVD this week, an event that seems to have had a profound effect on the president. “Just being reminded that everyone you know will die one day, that really makes you think,” explained the president, not previously known as a fan of thought. “Keith!” Bush suddenly shouted, mid-sob. “Why’d he have to go so young?” Those in the terrifying position of being close to the president’s thought processes claim that a recent twelve-hour DVD marathon viewing of the show left Bush in a deep near-thoughtful funk, a condition aides hadn’t seen the president in since the cancellation of Timecop in 1997.
“Seeing that documentary really got me thinking about the people close to me, and how to keep them from ever dying, ever,” explained Bush. This reporter chose not to take this opportunity to explain the difference between drama and documentary, or the inevitability of death, to the president. “At first I was thinking about time travel,” continued Bush. “But that never worked out so hot in those Michael J. Fox movies. Plus, it gets all confusing and hard to follow the story. Then I thought about the fountain of youth, but I couldn’t think of any movies where that really worked either. I just kept thinking of the end of Gremlins where that scary thing melts in the fountain—yuck. Anyway, then I turned on the SciFi Channel and that got me thinking about human cloning.” Reports indicate this is not the first time the president’s opinions and policies have been changed by popular entertainment, including Bush’s proposed tax breaks for hot rod owners last year after viewing The Dukes of Hazzard, and the president’s call for storm windows to be installed in the White House after finally getting around to seeing Twister in 2001. Critics have long suggested that most of Bush’s policy moves and public statements over the course of his two terms have been inspired by old Clint Eastwood movies and various Chuck Norris action vehicles. Debate rages concerning the timing of Bush’s 2002 statements about clamping down on whistleblowers, coming as they did days after the president reportedly attended a screening of the environmentally-themed Steven Soderbergh film Erin Brockovich. “I guess it’s easy to feel one way about a subject, until it potentially affects someone you care about,” Bush explained about his change of heart in the cloning debate. Asked if he would then be sending his daughters to Iraq to help with the nation-building efforts, Bush ignored the question and asked if this reporter had time to stick around for a spontaneous viewing of Top Gun on DVD. the commune news was also moved by the final season of Six Feet Under, except less so since Netflix sent us the discs all the fuck out of order and people kept springing back to life like in a George Romero movie. Truman Prudy returns to the commune after a delightful vacation spent locked in the basement of an elderly couple in Saskatchewan. Further information is available on a “We Don’t Know” basis.
| You’ve Got Mail, Iran’s Got Nukes Da Vinci Code Author Found Guilty of Inspiring National Treasure New .eu Domains Popular Among Gross-Out, Childbirth Video Websites Sharon Still in Coma, Phyllis Still Total Slutbag |
You’ve Got Mail, Iran’s Got Nukes Da Vinci Code Author Found Guilty of Inspiring National Treasure New .eu Domains Popular Among Gross-Out, Childbirth Video Websites Sharon Still in Coma, Phyllis Still Total Slutbag |
| |
|
Flinging Out the DeadIn honor of this week’s Six Feet Under theme, and, what the hell, every person who has ever died, ever, we’re going to use this column to take a look at how humans throughout history have dealt with the problem of what to do with dead bodies once the life spark has farted on out the door. It has often been said that a lot can be learned about a culture by the ways in which they honor their dead, which is only really true for the few cultures throughout history that have buried their dead in a papier-mâché shells made from encyclopedia pages. For most other cultures, funeral customs just show how lazy they were feeling at the time. For starters, in really ancient times, no real thought was given to burial formalities, mostly because it was just too much work to dig someone’s remains out of a hunk of dinosaur poop.
º Last Column: What the Sleep Do We Know? º more columns
After dinosaur times, but before Dinosaur Jr., man dealt with the death of his fellow man by getting far away from the dead body as fast as humanly possible, much like the way children deal with breaking a window or rolling a car into a lake. In fact, hauling ass away from death was an effective strategy for thousands of years. Some have interpreted this as evidence of early man’s fear of death, but in all likelihood it was merely a smart move on early man’s part, since funeral details are, without exception, a huge pain in the ass, and you can’t get stuck with the bill if you’re beating cheeks across the other side of the valley before anyone else has any idea what’s happened. This same sensible strategy is, I must point out, frowned upon as highly illegal or at least considerably rude in our own society, so I’ll leave it to you to decide if we’ve really evolved in the right direction over the last several thousand years. As time went by, man eventually figured out that death was nothing to fear, and that for hundreds of years he’d been hastily abandoning family members who were merely sick or sleeping. At this point, it didn’t take man long to discover how fun death could be, and for a time the dead were valued as fun puppets and stunt people for early man’s action-packed theater productions. But eventually man learned that keeping the dead bodies of family members around for group portraits or sex posed some daunting health concerns, and when man discovered bathing and finally washed off thousands of years of B.O., he realized that the dead fucking stank. This led to several hundred years of man burning his dead, for hygiene, cave heating, and general revenge purposes. Eventually the Egyptians would come along, in Egypt anyway, and put a unique spin on death rituals thanks to their paralyzing fear of nudity. Mummification developed as a way for Egyptians to make sure their dead were never caught with their man-dresses down, and to prevent the embarrassment of accidentally seeing some long-dead asscrack. Eventually, the custom grew until it became common for mummification to begin in childhood, with parents taking their kids out in the fall to buy a new wrap for the school year, and making sure everyone in the family got enough preservatives in their diet. By the time the average Egyptian died at the age of 25, their bodies were ready for thousands of years of timeless, decomposition-free sleep. By medieval times, the dead had come to be valued as an important military asset, and no army worth its codpieces would dare go into battle without a fleet of catapults loaded with plague-ridden corpses having their back. During these exciting times, it was within every person’s reach to be a military hero in life, or in death if they were a giant pussy in life. This timeline must, due to its brevity and my weak stomach, gloss over many other customs from around the world, like the Calatians who ate their dead, or the many native tribes around the world who believed the dead had cooties and therefore should only be porked with a condom. I think we can all agree that these dark times, much like haircuts in the 1970’s, are best forgotten to the sands of time. Equally forgotten, but much funnier, were the various foolish customs of the East regarding death, most of which involved honoring a person’s death by killing even more people, and sometimes little yappy dogs. In India, a man’s corpse was cremated along with his live wife, which has to explain the extraordinarily high rate of deathbed divorces among Hindus in those times. Fijians would strangle the deceased’s slaves, wives, and friends, due to widespread confusion between funeral rites and concepts of mafia revenge. A nobleman’s death in Japan was seriously bad news for the deceased nobleman’s slaves, who were all expected to commit seppuku, which is sort of like sudoku but even less fun. In Africa, the death of a king pretty much meant everybody was fucked, so the Africans understandably kept a string of king look-alikes always on hand to step in and secretly take the king’s place should he die, leading to a royal succession that went on like a bizarre game of genetic telephone. As the world became more enlightened and funeral customs evolved, people would eventually stop killing each other to honor the dead. Unfortunately, the part about killing little yappy dogs also had to be thrown out with the bathwater. In more modern times, our present-day funeral traditions gradually came about, mostly for reasons no less stupid than those given by our ancestors. Dressing all in black was originally a ploy to fool the spirits of the dead, who were expected to follow the living home and crash on their couches indefinitely, becoming a major pain in the ass. Wakes were originally attended by people who were waiting for the dead to come back to life, which helped the tribe identify its biggest optimists, who were reportedly the most delicious and the first on the list for when cannibalism would eventually swing back into favor on one of the inevitable 20-year cycles of public opinion about the rightness of eating folks. The custom of firing rifles at funerals dates back to the days when the living would try to spear the spirits of the dead at funerals, just for the hell of it, though modern technology is decidedly more effective for blowing ghosts all to shit than crappy old spears ever were. Most modern funeral rites were designed to placate the dead, in the hopes that they’d take a hike and not hang around, scaring the crap out of everybody forever. In this, not much has changed to present day, as most funerals sill involve dressing a dead body up really nice, and people taking turns flattering the deceased and playing his or her favorite music as if they all enjoyed it. Basically, for the dead a funeral is like being Billy Mummy from that “It’s a Good Life” Twilight Zone episode for about an hour, which isn’t a half-bad consolation for later being blown all to shit by a nearby military funeral. º Last Column: What the Sleep Do We Know?º more columns
|
|
Stan Abernathie's Picks to SuckWell, I’m not quite sure how it happened, but another baseball season is upon us. It keeps coming back, like crabs, or that movie about the dog and cat that got lost and came back like crabs. But however it came about, we have to deal with it now, and the best way I know how is in detailing how much everyone is going to suck this year. Let me get my first 2006 prediction out of the way early: Everybody is going to lose a lot of games this year. Take that to the bank. Even the best team in the league is going to have their pants handed to them at least sixty painful times this season. Sixty long, excruciating, face-first swan dives into mountains of Chihuahua shit, guaranteed. That’s the dirty little secret about baseball that the league doesn’t want you to know: Everybody stinks.
º Last Column: Joy in Mudville (Thanks, A-Rod) º more columns
So the real debate is over who’s going to be the least embarrassing team to follow this season, pretending like you’ve been a fan for years while your hometown nine brings new levels of meaning to the phrase “forcefully violated.” For starters, everyone’s favorite dickweed, A.J. Pierzynski, hopes to lead his Chicago White Sox to a repeat of last season’s improbable championship run, a feat made more difficult by the unlikelihood of the stars being lined up in asshole favor two years in a row. My prediction is the Bite Sox win six games all year. Some may find this unrealistically pessimistic, but they just don’t play the Royals enough times for me to hope for better. Sorry, Sox fans, I’d fear your reaction if most of you weren’t already safely behind bars. Then of course there’s the Yankees, but like I said, the assholes of the world used up all their good karma last year, which also bodes poorly for the White House in 2006. Once the Yankees’ old-as-Moses rotation goes down in flames by mid-season, Yankee fans will be wishing for Small Wang, and that’s never a good thing. Better to cut your losses and start rooting against the Mets now, Yankee fans. Everybody loves the Cardinals, of course, and by that I mean everyone in St. Louis, by decree of the king. Didn’t know St. Louis had a king? They’re lousy with kings down there, so much so that they have to start handing out qualifiers, like “King of Beers” and “King of March-June.” Slavish devotion to the Cards is required of everyone in St. Louis, as their city crumbles around them, but nobody in the rest of the country gives two shits on a bun. The rest of us settle in to watch the Cardinals stomp so much ass during the regular season that by the playoffs they’re tired and roll over like Beethoven on recalled vertigo medication. The Red Sox replaced a guy who looks like Jesus with a guy who sounds like cereal, which is only a good trade if the Jesus-looking guy is the dude from Blind Melon. Spoiler: It wasn’t. While they were at it they tarred and feathered Edgar Renteria and smuggled him out of the city in a burlap sack, all for playing shortstop the whole of last season with a catcher’s mitt. They brought in Josh Beckett to complete their impressive collection of “pitchers who once stomped the shit out of the Yankees but aren’t that good any more.” And as a final touch, they were able to trade the guy from Linkin Park to the Reds for Willy Mo Pena, all because some guy from the Twins doesn’t like hitting. As a side note, I’m sure the thought has crossed all of your minds that they should just fold the Twins and Reds together, either ending up with an unstoppable juggernaut or else a team that can’t pitch or hit, depending on how the meld works out. Entertaining either way, I say: Either we get a team that will pants the Yankees big-time or somebody to fool the Marlins into thinking they have a chance, which would be funny in its own way. So who wins this year? What’s the name of that minor league team that started selling those bacon cheeseburgers on a donut? No, I’m not avoiding the question, I’m just hoping to convince my heart to put me out of my misery before I have to sit through another entire goddamned 12,078 game season. Seriously? You want a straight answer? All right: Barry Bonds wins, at least until a vain, insufferable steroid monster bursts out of his chest five years from now and starts talking about OBP and bitching about the media. Already happened? Well then, I guess we all lose. º Last Column: Joy in Mudville (Thanks, A-Rod)º more columns
|
| |
Quote of the Day“Love is blindness, deafness, muteness, retardation, spinal bifida, shingles, crotch rot, Alzheimer’s, malaria, gout, rubella…” —Doctor LoveFortune 500 CookieDon’t spit, shit, or knit into the wind this week; as a matter of fact—stay out of the wind entirely. And those gibberish Mariachi lyrics you’ve been humming for the last three years—time to give that a rest. You will be mortified this week to discover that the family camping trips you’ve been repressing since childhood were the inspiration for Brokeback Mountain, and that you’re not actually related to your uncle Phil. This week’s lucky colas: Mister Flat, Diet Riot, Vanilla RBX174, Buurp, Cherry Fairy, PreP, Pepsi-dAC.
Try again later.Top Signs You May Be Obese1. | File footage of your last beach trip keeps turning up on evening news “Obesity in America” segments | 2. | Telemarketers disgusted by sounds of your constant eating | 3. | Farm animals instinctively panic in your presence | 4. | Buffet mysteriously closed no matter when you arrive | 5. | You stopped for a snack in the middle of reading this list | |
| Military Man Leads Daring Escape of 200+ HostagesBY violet tiara Meat in the GroundToasters are boasters and otters are modest but the lotto you bought was for the wrong archipelago.
Mangy changers are deranged, sez strange Jessica Lange.
Druids love fluids but who is the wiser the Kaiser? On rye, sir, that miser misspelt Pfizer.
Fuck ‘em.
Loosely my tooth sings of ribald rococo. Yoko went loco and toked all my Midal in a long bong from Hong Kong with tongs from Longs and songs about John’s stained brainbeans and Charlie Sheen’s love of Ween. Cancer is fancier if called carcinoma Oklahoma has roma tomatoes in pails and bails without fail their sails white sheets in seas of wheat and meat in the ground where peat should be found and backsweat from the accident rolled up in rolling papers that taper to a point of tip. |