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Local Hemorrhoidal Man Wishes He Got Dementia Like His Father

This article is brought to as a part of our new integrated marketing strategy by Taco Bell’s new Fiery Doritos Locos Taco©. With this new spicy Dorito shell to house your daily fixing of beef, cheese and lettuce, Taco Bell invites you to ¡Live Mas!TM

 TULSA, OK - Local man Brett Fulbright, diagnosed with an acute case of hemorrhoids last Tuesday, shared with the media his vexation that he was not diagnosed with a more pitiable condition, like his father’s dementia.

 “So, I go to the doctor, thinking, ‘Okay, there’s blood in my stool, this has got to be something serious,’” Mr. Fulbright said Thursday, the corners of his lips speckled with Fiery Doritos Locos Taco Dust©.“And he tells me that it’s ‘just a little case of inflammation in the vascular structures of my anal cavity.’ Who’s going to give a shit about me and my anus while my dad is sitting in his armchair thinking that Eisenhower is president?”

 “I mean, honestly, my dad’s living the dream right now. Everyone wants to talk to him, he doesn’t have to work anymore, he doesn’t even have to do his own laundry. When I got my diagnosis, I didn’t get shit, and I had to give up Taco Bell’s new Fiery Doritos Locos Tacos©. How am I supposed to ¡Live Mas!TM now?”

 We reached out to Mr. Fulbright’s father, Ken Fulbright, for comment. “This jackass Joe McCarthy will be the death of our country! Did you see the last Series game between the New York Giants and the Cleveland Indians, by the way? What a way to end it! I couldn’t believe...wait, Brett’s not here? Oh, thank God, it’s hard to keep that up.”

 “I don’t have dementia. It started out as a way to get out of conversations with Brett, but once people started leaving me alone and making my dinner, I just kind of rolled with it.”

 “I know it seems bad, but c’mon, the kid’s fucking insufferable. I mean, he keeps complaining about a little blood coming out of his asshole. I was in Korea - in war, everybody bleeds a little bit out of everywhere.”

 As of the time of publication, the younger Fulbright had decided to forgo the advice of his doctor and ¡Live Mas!TM

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LEBRON JAMES GREATER PLAYER THAN MICHAEL JORDAN, SAYS SOME FUCKING NERD

CHAMPAGNE, IL – A new study published Thursday by some righteous fucking nerd at the University of Illinois, Champagne, found that Lebron James has been a more valuable player to this point in his career than Michael Jordan.

The study, published by Associate Professor Scott Tainsky, who holds a PhD in Sports Management from University of Michigan and clearly has not watched a game of basketball in his pathetic little life, used an adjusted box plus/minus model to compare the value that each player added to his team over the course of his career.

“The model is rather simple,” said the 5’3” Tainsky, whose most recent athletic endeavor was as a 10-year-old in some garbage Little League in some garbage town in southeastern Utah. “I reviewed game records over the entirety of each player’s career and compared their team’s performance when the player was on the court versus that when the player was off the court.”

The study found that James was worth an average of 8.4 wins above a replacement-level player per season, 0.3 wins higher than Jordan’s 8.1 wins above replacement, which is, like, what does that even mean?

Some, like Chicago Bulls fan Darrin Monteith, disagreed with the 5’3”, 140-pound calculator gnome’s misguided analysis. “This is such bullshit! No fucking way could Lebron take Jordan one-on-one in his prime!” he said between swigs of his 40-oz. bottle of Rolling Rock. “Besides, the methodology used in the study doesn’t even consider Lebron’s aging curve, which, given that the study is basing its results on an average WAR over the course of a career, overestimates Lebron’s annual value, assuming that Lebron’s value continues to decline, akin to that which Jordan faced after his second retirement. Talk about fucking stupid!”

At the time of publication, Tainsky and his wife Sarah, a fellow professional idiot in the University’s Sociology Department, had applied to similar posts at the Lebron-fellating University of Akron.

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In This Post, I’m Wearing My Grandpa’s Sweater

Hey everyone, how you doing tonight? So, just for starters, I am a straight white male, no matter what this sweater is telling you. (To clear things up, the part of that description you might have been skeptical about, I presume, would be the straight part. The other two, I believe, are clear enough.) I actually got this sweater from my grandpa, and he was a huge bigot, so, if you needed any proof that I was not repressing homosexual tendencies…there you have it.

My grandpa was not the most likeable guy, but I had to figure that out very incrementally. For instance, he was a plastic surgeon, which I found out in the sixth grade meant he made boobs bigger for a living, really a peak in my admiration of him, until I realized in the tenth grade that he was leveraging 12 years of medical school, interning and residency and six years as a doctor in the military to help people suffocate their sadness with silicone and Botox.

Then, in the eleventh grade, I did a little research into Grandpappy’s career, and it turns out that he was put on probation for five years thanks to an orgy of malpractice concerns, so, while he was still making boobs bigger for a living, he was also making them very…very asymmetric.

So, since he was horrible, educated and white, he was absolutely loaded. I remember going up to his house for every Easter Sunday, he would always want to show me his two Jaguars (the car, not the jungle cat, he was not a negligent asshole), he would play his two grand pianos, I’d play his third, much less expensive piano (he didn’t like me touching expensive shit), and he always managed to say some racist shit. Visits to his house became measuring tape for my racial awareness. He’d be like, “Muslims are ruining this country.” And I’d be like, “Oh man, that makes me way more uncomfortable than last year, I must have grown like four inches in racial awareness. Must be going through a growth spurt.”  

              One line that my grandpa always went to was that Mexicans (or, depending on the general conversation flow, everyone) should speak English, that it would make America a happier place to be if everyone spoke English. It always got to me, cause I’d think, “Well, grandpa, you speak English, and…you’re never happy. In fact, you’re kind of an asshole.”

              I think underlying his unequivocal racism, though, was a very basic human desire: to communicate well with those around us. It’s weird to think that, no matter how much I would like to, it would be difficult to hold a conversation longer than two minutes with 80% of the people in the world, and that is a conservative estimate. Like, I think that, for most of the world, I could get to, “Hi, how are you?” ‘Good.’ “Good, good…so, where’s your bathroom?”

              And I think everyone agrees that it would be nice if everyone in the world could speak the same language, maybe we’d avoid a few wars. “Ohhh, New Bruno Mars, I thought you said ‘nuclear bombs!’”But even if the UN was like, “Okay, yeah, we’ll do one language from now on…which one are we going with?” Everyone would just be like, “…uhhh, mine? I don’t want to try to learn any of that other bullshit, I can’t understand a lick of it.”

              If we did go with the one language, I would think that English had a good shot of taking it. With all the destruction of cultures and seizure of lands America has done, the English market share is fairly robust. Like, I was in the Philippines last month (they used to be an American protectorate), and all of their signs were in English. And the whole time I’m like, “This is super convenient for me, but the dark, blood-filled subtext underlying these signs does give me pause.” But if someone suggested English, the Germans would be like, “But you guys don’t have a word for a punchable face!” And the Chinese would be like, “Why don’t we just put it to a citizens’ vote, just see how it plays out?”

              The only alternative to doing this vote now would be delaying it for a few decades, teaching our children as many languages as their little minds can handle, thus preparing them for the possibility that their one language isn’t going to cut it in the unified language world. The only issue with this is that, every time I hear a parent go, “Oh, my child can speak eight languages,” all I think is, “Well, I only need one language to tell her to go fuck herself.”

              I’m not too heartbroken over Grandpappy’s dream of English-only never coming to fruition though. I do share genetic code with the man, but I wouldn’t mind if he were in Hell right now, giving Hitler a horrible nosejob*.

*In this case, when I say nosejob, I mean the sexual act of rubbing one’s nose against another’s penis until the other comes to orgasm.

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My Set for 2/23/17

Hey everyone! So, I just got back from the Philippines a week ago, which means that I’m finally pooping normally again. Now, you may be thinking, “oh, nice diarrhea joke, buddy, way to joke about a disgusting, serious problem that those folks over there have.” Well, haha! Fooled you! It was a constipation joke, because they’re not big fans of dietary fiber in that country, evidently. "Can I get brown rice instead of white rice?” (Smiling and shaking head) “...no, sir.”

So, I spent three weeks there, so I’m going to recount every detail of the trip in this...3-5 minute set. So, I get to the airport for this trip about 3 hours early, because I like to be prepared for a worst case scenario (although, if I were really thinking worst case scenarios and airplanes, I probably wouldn’t be going on a plane at all). 

But I get there, get in line to check my bags, and a guy comes up to me and says, “Hey can you watch my bag for me for a couple minutes okay thanks.” So, I have two issues with this: 1. his sentence structure is all over the place. Like, it seems like he’s asking a question, but his intonation at the end suggests he’s not, there seems to be two independent clauses right next to each other, this dude has to get his grammar checked out. 2. How the fuck are you gonna unload a 50 lb. responsibility on me like that without even asking? (Now, No. 2 is definitely my bigger issue, but I said No. 1 first to undermine this guy’s credibility, get you all on my side in this predicament...check.

The guy left too quickly for me to say anything, so I was just kinda fuming, talking about how common courtesy is out the window, when the voice of God himself boomed through the airport. “Please do not leave unattended luggage in or around the airport. If you see unattended luggage in or around the airport, please notify the nearest security official or dial 911.” (Makes idea face) 

My friend saw me make that face exactly, and immediately tries to convince me not too, saying, “this is a totally unnecessary escalation.” And I was like, “fuck this guy, he escalated this shit when he left his bag without asking.” But, I’ll be honest, the voice of reason won out...coincidentally, the voice of reason was saying, “fuck this guy, he escalated this shit when he left his bag without asking.” So dialed 911, and they whisked him away, presumably delaying his travel plans. And, the guy was Sikh, so...he’s fucked.

Actually, he wasn’t really Sikh, because none of this really happened, except that I was at an airport, because I can lie to you all I want with absolutely no repercussions. Honestly, I just wanted to watch the way the audience turns against me when there’s any hint that my asshole-ish behavior is racially-motivated. Like, y’all went from, “Okay, this decision seems like a little much, but fuck this guy, he escalated this shit when he left his bag without asking,” to “fuck (points to self) this guy, he’s racist as shit.” 

I actually want to take this as a teaching moment, about how Sikhs never have a good experience at the airport. My friend Prince, short for Princeprett (he was never formerly known as Prince, don’t want things to get misconstrued), summed it up pretty well: “I’m standing over here like, ‘even if you think all Muslims or all middle-Easterners have a 100% chance of blowing up a plane, I am neither of those things!’ While TSA agents are like, “Brown guys who wear turbans all the time and have to carry around swords as a signal of religious devotion? You are my nightmares every night.” 

So, I guess that’s all the time I have, I never really got through the rest of my trip I guess, but buy a drink, save this place, and do something nice for you Sikh friends!

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Day 2 - Ties

Did you know that two teams can tie in an NFL game? Ties are by no means an omnipresent phenomenon in the NFL specifically (this past season had two ties, which was on the higher end historically) or in American sports generally (among the four largest sports leagues in the US, the NFL is the only one that has a true tie. In hockey, you can get some cred in the standings for losing in overtime, but that’s as close as any other league gets). So, now you know that football teams can tie. This means that you now know something about football that Donovan McNabb did not know about football in 2008. Donovan McNabb, a potential Hall of Fame NFL Quarterback, who had played football for the first 32 years of his life, upon tying a game with the Washington Redskins (or, as I like to call them, the Washington Dud PR Timebombs [seriously, DC is a pretty liberal place, how the fuck has that persisted]), replied to a reporter’s question that he did not know an NFL game could end in a tie. Like, if someone asked him, “Hey Don, you know your whole playbook?” He’d be like, “Fuck no, I don’t even know the whole rule book!”

While Mr. McNabb’s response to the question may be disheartening to the more intellectual football fans out there (they exist, don’t laugh), his response is not the worst I’ve heard from an NFL player regarding a tie. Bubba Smith, all pro-defensive end, played ball in the 60s, went on record, in a newspaper, in print, that he would rather lose a game than tie. Well, Bubba, I know you died in 2011 and I’m speaking to you rhetorically right now, but I feel like you wouldn’t have been singing that same tune if 10-5-1 would have gotten you into the playoffs but 10-6 wouldn’t have. A tie is, after all, effectively worth half a win, which is exactly one half win better than losing the game. (Math is important, kids.)

Now, Bubba was clearly suffering from two issues here. The first, repeated head trauma. Like, massive amounts of good ol’ American  pre-team-doctor football head trauma. (Smith eventually passed away after long bouts with alcoholism, issues with his heart and with his brain, namely CTE. If you actually would like to make a difference instead of laughing about other people’s degenerative issues, donate to fund research at Boston University’s CTE Center, you cynical asshole: https://www.bu.edu/cte/financial-support/). 

The second issue Bubba faced was an inability to handle America’s most important endangered species: nuance. It seems that Bubba should have preferred a tie to a loss because, as discussed earlier, math. But that (admittedly somewhat small) benefit of the tie versus the loss was outweighed in Bubba’s mind by the tonnage of having to have mixed feelings about the outcome of game. If Bubba wins the game, it’s a big “WOOHOO” moment, and he carries it into the next game. If Bubba loses, it’s more of a “BOOHOO” moment, but he still gets to get angry, get amped up, and carry that energy into the next game. If he ties the game, it’s a sobering moment for him - ambivalence doesn’t translate well into unadulterated emotion. 

I think this phenomenon is one that I deal with pretty frequently - it’s just so much easier to have a view of the world that’s rigid, that draws lines very clearly, and comments all over the internet whenever some guy named Milo crosses one of those lines. Gradients are so nice in theory - they provide flexibility when trying to understand the world around us. But it’s a whole lot easier to draw the rainbow with exactly seven solid brush strokes (especially because I can’t paint for shit. That part’s not a metaphor - I am awful at painting.)

The reason that folks like myself and Bubba prefer to think in terms of black and white (or, if we are referencing the races of the respective individuals mentioned, white and black) is that it takes conscious, active, tiresome thought. Take, for example, discussing the current leader of the free world, Donald J. Trump (highly topical, whether or not you think he’s the best example, this is the only way I have of getting this blog read by anyone who doesn’t know me personally). While those who support him and those who loathe him hold diametrically opposing viewpoints on many issues, there is one thing that many on both sides of the aisle share: their opinion of the man is dishearteningly lacking in nuance. I have heard plenty of Trump protesters suggest he is a devil, a demon Satan, Armageddon, the Apocalypse, a felon, a fascist, a neo-Nazi, a regular Nazi, Hitler Himself, and, of course, orange. While these attacks regarding his rhetoric, actions and skin tone have catalyzed many a high five and chortle between folks who dislike the man, none of these epithets categorizes the man in these somewhat more moderate terms: a human being with some pent-up anger, a lot of money, an uncanny ability to navigate the American media, and a lot of people who are buying what he is selling. While I believe that describing him in these terms better outlines the danger he poses to many groups in America, it takes a lot longer to type it out, and I’d usually rather type 5 letters than type three lines if I’m trying to get a point across.

On the other side of the aisle, the simple terms in which he is described are a bit longer character-wise, but just as lacking in moderation as those used on the other ideological pole: Trump is a businessman, he’s an outsider lookin’ to drain the swamp (short aside: a show called Swamp People on the History Channel just premiered its 8th season, and there has yet to be a single politician on the show [this fact is entirely unconfirmed, but they are documenting people who live in a literal swamp, so I am confident in my guess]), he doesn’t talk like those politicians who lie all the time. The main failing with this broad stroke is the failure to convey any further why an outsider would be better at a job than an insider in any industry (I’ve heard of an outside hire before, but should a real estate firm hire as its CEO someone who spent the previous 40 years as the Commissioner of the NFL? [Roger Goodell, it seems that you may have some serious prospects in other industries when you’re done.]) For many who support Mr. Trump, the characterization he has cultivated as a champion for running the government like a business crumbles under a simple question: do businesses have to make sure homeless people don’t die on the street? Because governments do.

I think this is all I’ve got to discuss on the matter for now, but it shall return again (blogs are like gyms - it’s a nice first step to get yourself into one, but you have to keep going back and working on the same stuff consistently if you want to feel good about yourself). In the meantime, try to avoid the pitfalls of Mr. Smith - try to find the tie, try to consider all sides of the issues with which you are confronted in your daily life, and...try to minimize head trauma.

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Day 1 - Some Marilyn Monroe Musings

I think it's really sad that Marilyn Monroe said so many things that should be empowering, both to women specifically and to people generally, given the fate she eventually met. For those of you who don't know, Marilyn Monroe, the embodiment of both the nascent empowerment of female sexuality and the apex of dumb blonde jokes in American cinema, killed herself after finally submitting to her battle with modern civilization's three most prolific killers: drugs, alcohol, and men. Like, for instance, Marilyn Monroe was once quoted as saying: "...if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best," a quote that could be found on many a Myspace page once upon a time. This is a wonderful, liberating sentiment - the idea of burning those bridges which would not stand in even the most feeble of storms seems both obvious and groundbreaking simultaneously. The issue, though, in light of Monroe’s death, is that it does not seem that she could even handle herself at her worst. Like, I hope she wasn’t sitting at her house in Brentwood like, “...shit, I guess I don’t deserve me at my best...Mom, where’s the barbiturate?” She was also once quoted as saying: “Fear is stupid. So are regrets.” To which I would reply, “So is OD-ing.”