Tuesday, February 27, 2007
On Saturday—a good, oh, ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY-TWO FUCKING YEARS AFTER SLAVERY ENDED—the Virginia General Assembly apologized for it.
And now comes word that a New York congressman wants to honor Anne Frank—WHO'S BEEN DEAD FOR SIXTY-TWO YEARS—by granting her U.S. citizenship.
Let's keep the ball rolling, people. I hope these two bold (if odd and useless) gestures inspire a groundswell of long-after-the-fact humanitarian action.
I'll start. I would like to personally apologize to everyone whom the Vikings raped and pillaged. Furthermore, if I were alive at the time it was happening, you can bet I would have told them to knock it off.
Posted by jg @ 01:44 AM PST []
Monday, February 19, 2007
OK, so after your lip augmentation and collagen injections and tummy tuck and birthmark removal and laser spider vein treatment and electrolysis and dermabrasion and citrus fruit peel and boob job and Botox therapy and laser skin resurfacing and labial rejuvenation and armpit waxing and that radically overhauled facelift, you still feel like something’s not right, don’t you?
It’s your asshole, you stupid asshole.
After your asshole is bleached, will you FINALLY feel good about yourself? Will your new miracle anus that twinkles like a star be the trick that leads you down a pathway of self-esteem and stable relationships?
Historically, the asshole has perhaps been the most cosmetically neglected area on the human body. And yet, as we grow more and more naked as a culture, as the ass increasingly becomes a sex organ, and as our friends in the sex-positive community teach us to become more anal-accepting, discerning individuals frown upon brownish bungholes. How could you possibly live with a stained starfish? A darkened anal nimbus would only bring shame upon its owner. No one likes a “brown-eyed girl” these days, if you catch what I’m tryin’ to say.
Of course, one might rightly wonder who’s complaining about all these discolored anuses. With God as my witness, I can’t ever recall getting a good, cold look at THE PLACE WHERE SHIT COMES FROM on any another human being. I’ve only slammed two girls in the pooper, and I made sure that the lighting was dim or nonexistent on both occasions. Even nude and under surgical lights, it’s next to impossible to see someone’s anus unless they deliberately spread their cheeks and present it to you. And fuck knows what mine looks like—no one besides a physician has ever gotten a good, hard, well-lit look at my Most Private of Places.
Exactly WHO is staring so intently at your poop chute, people, that you’ve become so self-conscious about it? Anal cosmetic enhancement might be understandable for the narcissistic porn star or erotic dancer…or maybe even receptive gay men who insist on having sex under Klieg lights and want to make their lovers’ boners just a wee bit harder…but is anal bleaching a procedure of any use to society at-large?
There persist rumors that perky white-chick semi-actresses Courtney Cox, Lara Flynn Boyle, and Katie Holmes have undergone the procedure. These allegations may be the stuff of false innuendo and malicious Internet scuttlebutt. For a long time (all right, maybe about three weeks), many people presumed that anal bleaching itself was nothing more than an amusing urban legend. However, there exist at least three beauty salons that perform the procedure—Pink Cheeks in Sherman Oaks, CA (employing their own “Pink Cheeks Amazing Anal Cream”), a place called TRIM in Chicago, and Bees’ Knees way on down in Sydney, Australia.
Typically, the process involves smearing a cream containing approximately 2% hydroquinone around the patient’s anal rim, which may have become initially discolored from factors such as natural pigmentation and/or lifelong staining from doo-doo and dyes contained in processed foods. Before someone got the bright idea to apply it on THE ASS, hydroquinone had historically been used in skin-lightening products used by the more self-loathing members in the black community. Hydroquinone is illegal in several countries but not the US. Although the World Health Organization claims that there is “inadequate evidence” that hydroquinone is toxic, others have linked it to “skin cancer, liver damage, kidney damage, [and] poisoning,” as well as leukemia and thyroid disorders. It has also been shown to cause mutations in developing animal fetuses. Merely knowing that the chemical has been used to process photos and manufacture rubber might scare away those whose concern for their health outweighs their anal vanity.
Applied improperly or in excess, the cream may also make your ass burn more than the most flagrant burrito. The female author of a webpage designed to “keep your asshole from getting burned to a crisp” claims that a friend became fecally incontinent after a botched anal-bleaching procedure and ultimately had to undergo laparoscopic colorectal surgery.
So where does it end? The final frontier is, of course, the internal organs. The day is nigh when the ultra-vain will elect to have colon straightening, liver smoothing, esophagus sculpting, and pancreas whitening. I do not doubt that people will one day undergo surgery or take medication to ensure that even their bowel movements are more attractive.
Posted by jg @ 10:05 PM PST []
Friday, February 16, 2007
As the 21st Century began, human evolution was at a turning point. Natural selection…a process which had once favored the noblest traits of man, now began to favor different traits. Most science fiction of the day predicted a future that was more civilized and more intelligent. But as time went on, things seemed to be heading in the opposite direction: a dumbing-down. How did this happen? Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence. With no natural predators to thin the herd, it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most and left the intelligent to become an endangered species.
—Introductory voiceover to Idiocracy
Demographic studies generally indicate that the more intelligent and educated women in affluent nations have much lower reproductive rates than the less educated….
—Wikipedia entry on “Dysgenics”
The world is getting dumber before your eyes. There’s a reason for this, and it has very little to do with our educational system: Simply put, the dumb ones have more babies. There are exceptions—you might be one of them, so don’t freak the fuck out on me—but that’s the general rule. As the world grows dumber, the smart and discerning will become even less willing to plop their frail offspring into this squalling, dysgenic soup bowl. And things will get worse.
There seems to be no one in modern pop culture who is smarter about stupidity than Mike Judge, creator of Beavis and Butt-head and Office Space. His film Idiocracy, recently released on DVD, is the funniest and scariest movie that no one is likely to see this year. I want you to rent it, and I want you to think about it. If you’re smart, I want you to start having babies, and if you’re stupid, I want you to stop.
In Idiocracy, Luke Wilson stars as Army Private Joe Bauers, chosen as a candidate for the ultra-secret Human Hibernation Experiment for no other reason than he is painfully average—Joe scores right in the Bell Curve’s middle on all known indices of human physiology and intelligence. Joe’s cryonic freeze was only supposed to last a year, but due to Army bungling, his frozen pod didn’t hatch until 500 years later in the Great Garbage Avalanche of 2505. Joe awakens to a world in which “mankind became stupider at a frightening rate” and “the English language had deteriorated into a hybrid of hillbilly, Valley Girl, inner-city slang, and various grunts. Joe was able to understand them, but when he spoke in an ordinary voice, he seemed pompous and faggy to them.”
Joe rises from his centuries-long slumber to find that, in essence, Beavis, Butt-head, and some really dumb chicks have repopulated the planet. In this Dumb New World, America’s #1 movie is called Ass, featuring nothing more than a naked male posterior farting for ninety minutes. The president is a musclebound “five-time Smackdown champion” and former porn star named Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho. Corporate sponsorship is plastered on everything, even people’s names—there’s a Dr. Lexus, an Officer Tylenol Jones, and a lawyer named Frito. Television is awash in sex and violence, with stations such as The Masturbation Network and The Violence Channel, whose top show is called Ow! My Balls! Costco offers law degrees, while Starbucks features handjobs and “full-body lattes.” One of Carl’s Jr.’s many slogans is “Fuck You! I’m Eating!” I won’t spoil too much of the plot except to reveal that Joe helps the government realize the nation’s crops would grow better if they were watered instead of sprinkled with a sports drink called “Brawndo—The Thirst Mutilator.”
The film’s opening sequence is a split-screen comparison of a high-IQ yuppie couple contrasted against a trailer-park ’tard named Clevon. The yuppies, sometimes with good reason, consistently hesitate to reproduce, while Clevon’s fertile scrotum effortlessly yields multiple progeny. As the male yuppie finally succumbs to a heart attack while masturbating to produce sperm for artificial insemination—effectively killing his bloodline—Clevon survives a jet-ski injury to his testicles and continues to impregnate multiple dimwitted females. The screen rapidly becomes overpopulated with a flow chart of Clevon’s descendants. As we watched this segment about the stupid’s birth rate running roughshod over that of the intelligent, my brother said, “What’s scary about this is it’s so true.”
It’s true—inarguably—but nearly impossible to mention without facing the wrath of censorious egalitarian fascists everywhere. These days, it is nearly a crime—and it may be a literal criminal offense in the near future—to imply that intelligence is hereditary and that society’s interests might best be served if stupid people took a chill pill on the breedin’.
Liberals seem sensitive to everything except what’s truly important. Back in the early 1970s, population control used to be a solid plank in the liberal platform until it was deemed culturally insensitive to imply that many women should keep their frickin' legs shut. Now there are nearly TWICE as many people on Earth as there were then—and most of them seem highly stupid—but the “sensitive” lefty cowards are too afraid to make a peep about it. Perhaps because of this, Idiocracy was released with almost zero publicity.
Things don’t magically become untrue simply because they hurt your feelings. The passage of time does not always bring progress. People ARE getting dumber. A middle finger and the word “whatever” are the closest to articulation that most folks can muster. We’re already halfway to the world depicted in Idiocracy. Sterilization is probably too harsh and inhumane, but after all, the stupid are stupid. There has to be some way we can trick them into using birth control.
Let’s get to work.
Posted by jg @ 12:01 PM PST []
Wednesday, February 7, 2007