Features 13: a teenager, after all these years.

Feature #130:

Intros are overrated, right? Here's the feature:

1. Life in Florida
2. Strom has been alive for nearly half of this country's existence
3. Andrew Jackson has little in common with Dubya

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1. So, going to Florida for Thanksgiving was dandy. Saw some friends and relatives, enjoyed the tofurkey, reverted to my former sleep schedule (get home late, get up late -- as opposed to my all-too-ordinary working life of bed before midnight, up before my body would naturally prefer), saw my friend's band, saw a bad movie, saw a man's penis..

saw a man's penis?

So, I'm in the bathroom of this sub shop, taking a piss. (how much information will make your day worse? is it getting there already?) The door is locked, and the handle starts jiggling, but I'm not concerned because, like I said, the door is locked. Then, by the magic of a low-quality locksmith, the door opens, and in walks a less-violent, equally-discombobulated, slightly shorter and weaker version of Stone Cold Steve Austin.

"Whoa, uh, hey," I say, which means, "Whoa, uh, we may live in a very private culture, and i know it doesn't always seem reasonable, but damnit it's all i know, so go away."

"What, not room for two in here?" he says, and walks towards the toilet.

As he's walking, I finish my business, and am in the process of being back to a properly dressed position. He walks right up next to me, and although I generally like to think that I am quick enough to know what to do in most situations, I have no idea what to do right now. I'm not threatened. It's just weird. So, I follow procedure, and flush the toilet.

"Hey, what'd you do that for?" he said.

I walk over to the sink, do a quick hand wash, and look down at the toilet because, well, I don't really know. He was standing there, and I think I was wondering if he was actually going to just take a piss while I was standing there. And that, sadly, is the moment in which I saw his penis.

"WHOA!!!!!" he says, as if I had just said something rather lewd to his mother. Strangely, i felt like i did.

Once again, not knowing what to do, I turn around to leave.

"What, are you not going to take a pee?" he said. I'm assuming he didn't realize I had already gone to the bathroom, and he thinks he just scared me off.

"No, I already took a pee!" I said. It's funny how you use other people's vernacular in response.. or, well, at least how I use it. I don't know if you use it. Do you? Probably. I'd say you do. At least, I do.

What's also funny is walking out of a bathroom and announcing to a sub-shop full of people that "No, I already took a pee!" Because, well, nobody knows what just happened in that bathroom, but they do know that I emerged from the bathroom and announced my conquest over a basic bodily function. For that information, they stared.

I bought a cookie, and left.

And that's my story, in a strange and kind of annoying constantly switching tense format. In the present? In the past? What is it, Jason? Why are you lost in time?

I don't know.

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2. A reporter friend of mine had to write about Senator Strom Thurmond turning 100, which happened on Dec. 5. I wrote this for her amusement, and when it actually turned out to be (i think at least somewhat) funny, i thought i'd share it with all you as well.

God registers Republican, admits keeping Strom Thurmond alive
By Jason Feifer

WASHINGTON -- After a near-infinite string of neutrality, God finally registered as a Republican yesterday, citing a sense of duty to offer full disclosure to his creation.

"God felt that with Strom Thurmond turning 100, it was getting obvious that no man could mortally carry a Republican torch that long," said White Cloud Press Secretary Jesus O'Nazareth. "The fact of the matter is, Strom was slated to choke on a ham sandwich when he was 76. But, he was such a loyal voice for the conservative movement that God decided to keep him around."

O'Nazareth opened his statement with a joke referencing the left-to-right political spectrum: "God didn't say 'Let there be light'. He said: 'Let there be right'."

The news came as a shock to many Washington insiders and Church leaders. An independent poll released last night showed a sudden spike in Jewish converts, presumably encouraged by a hurried shift in priorities from the small, remaining faction of liberal Christians.

Thurmond himself had no direct comment, but instead issued a statement about his birthday.

"I am pleased to be celebrating my 100th birthday today," he said in a statement sent out by his office. "South Carolina is the finest state in our great nation and I am grateful to the people of South Carolina for allowing me this long and full career in public service. God bless the United States of America."

Aides said it would be some time before they could properly communicate what God had said to Strom.

"Quite frankly, the man is so deaf that even the voice of God would sound like a whisper down the street," said one aide.

Through O'Nazareth, God cited a number of reasons he has kept Thurmond's body from naturally collapsing into itself.

O'Nazareth said the support Thurmond lent to the civil rights movement "reminded God of Noah," but that "when it comes down to it, God just really loves tax cuts for the rich."

"Oh, and he's tickled by heavy funding for the military," O'Nazareth added. "Remember, this is the deity that brought you the plagues. He's a military buff. He sure misses all that crazy Midieval shit."

Both the House and Senate had to convene before issuing a statement, which is expected sometime early next month. President George W. Bush also refrained from public comment, but did briefly acknowledge God's message during a photo op at an elementary school in Topeka, Kansas.

"Clearly, God loves freedom," Bush said. "I also have proof that God hates Iraq."

O'Nazareth had no comment about Iraq.

The only notable political figure to make any public mention of the annoucement was Pat Buchanon. The former Reform Party presidential candidate said that O'Nazareth had no business being on American soil, since he was technically born in the Middle East.

"That is God's will," Buchanon said.

"I have no idea what he's talking about," O'Nazareth said of Buchanon. "I think that guy's got a ham sandwich coming his way."

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3. I feel like modern leaders are so far removed from their people that they cannot competently lead them, particularly when it comes to war. I wrote something of an editorial about it, and surprise surprise, here it is:

War from the inside out
By Jason Feifer

Despite a temper shorter than most CNN news reports, Andrew Jackson was the definition of the American war policy. As the 17th president, Jackson had punched and kicked his way through life, ravenously avenging even the slightest challenge to his wife’s honor. In his brazen defiance, even as a child, Jackson took a sword to the face when he refused to polish the shoes of a British soldier. He was tougher than Rocky and scrappier than Mike Tyson — with or without a bloody ear dangling between his lips.

Yet, whatever he stood for and whatever policy he scratched his name into is buried under one gruesome, awesome, remarkably unprecedented historical event. As a small-time politician, Jackson was challenged to a duel, and he gladly accepted. He may have had the inflated ego of a prom king, but he was not afraid of the barrel of a gun. Had George W. Bush accepted such a challenge, he probably would have sent Press Secretary Ari Fleisher as a body double. After all, Fleisher’s entire job is to stand in the line of fire.

It is not Jackson’s simple lunacy that parallels him with American war, but his dueling tactic. He was to square off against Charles Dickinson, who was considered to be a faster and better shot than Jackson. Still, Jackson said that he was going to give Dickinson the first shot, so that he would have time to aim. On that fateful day, a ferociously nonchalant bullet traveled from Dickinson’s gun into Jackson’s chest. In turn, Jackson carefully aimed, shot Dickenson in the head, and went on to be president of the United States of America.

Johnson waited to be attacked, and that is what’s crucial to the story. This country holds enough weaponry to revert Earth to a twitching ball of dirt, and it has been the country’s long-standing policy to not launch unprovoked attacks. These days, as that tradition is on the verge of being obliterated in Iraq, I wonder if it is valuable to evoke a “WWJD” approach. It seems to work for some religious-minded folks. But instead of Jesus, let’s ask: What Would Jackson Do?

If the above history lesson is worth anything, we know exactly what Jackson would do. He would have taken up Iraqi vice president Taha Yassin Ramadan’s suggestion that Bush and Saddam Hussein end this issue with a duel. With all seriousness, Ramadan said the duel could be held in a neutral site, with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan as the referee. "A president against a president and vice president against a vice president and a duel takes place, if they are serious, and in this way we are saving the American and the Iraqi people," Ramadan told the Associated Press Television Network.

Although the suggestion was immediately disregarded by the White House, I think it deserves some merit. Since Jackson, when have our leaders been so brave? Where is Marcus Aurelius, or Alexander the Great? I wonder what happened to the tradition of the ruler leading his troops into battle. As Bush gears up for war with an obviously debilitated foe, I must wonder what war judgment from the White House is like. Does a leader become trigger-happy when his own life is not on the line? Would war have a different flavor if its leaders’ decisions affected the leader itself? I think it would.

If Bush has a problem with Saddam, then let them have at it. It may not solve the world’s problems, but it makes more sense than letting innocent civilians die. That is what Andrew Jackson would have done. I am sure of it.

Without Jackson, there is this:

I flew a few months after those planes crashed into those buildings. The cabin was quiet, as fear and racing heartbeats electrified the normally dense, stale air of commercial airliners. As the plane raced up the runway, two people held hands from across the center aisle. They were a few rows in front of me, and I couldn’t see their faces. But as the plane rumbled its typical rumble, and the tops of heads rose and fell in unison like a lumpy, hairy sea, those hands remained held, swaying slightly, nonchalantly, until we were parallel with the Earth. They weren’t gripped, or trying to trade pain. They were just limply attached, like a memory, reminding each other that they aren’t alone.

That image will forever define today’s world for me. We don’t know what’s going to happen these days, but we’re all along for the ride, so we might as well hold hands. At least then we’re doing it together. Our leaders ride Air Force One, though. They have underground bunkers, advanced warning, swarms of people paid to die in their place.

What do they know of this world? What do they know of being on the outside, waiting for that first shot to be fired? Whatever it is, it’s not what Jackson knew.

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Feature #131:

This is going to have to be a relatively short feature, and i do realize it's already a few days late. Somehow, i ran into what i can only call a complete content slump.. i had nothing all that funny to say, nothing interesting happened to me, nobody sent me anything terribly entertaining. I was stuck.

I am starting a little three-week preview of Dirty Laundry's next issue, so hop on over there to check it out. Otherwise, here's the feature:

1. Twice-hit blunders
2. A beard and a suit

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1. I wish I had made this up, but i didn't. The God Of E-Mail Forwards did. That is one mighty diety.

POSSIBLE FOLLOW-UP SONGS FOR ONE-HIT WONDERS:

How Are We Going to Get These Dogs Back In?

Bust an Additional Move

Seriously, Eileen, Come On

(Won't You Give Me A Ride Home From) Funkytown?

Remember When You Lit up My Life? That Was Great

I Will Now Pass the Dutchie Back to You and Thank You for Passing It to Me

Originally Because I Really Enjoyed the Dutchie

Everybody Was Kung Fu Making Up

Whoomp! There It Continues to Be

867-5309 extension 2

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2. I suppose this article came from me reading Adbusters for so long. It's not all that funny, but i thought it was worth writing.

A beard, a suit, and a culture to fix
By Jason Feifer

Ronald Dixon defended his family by shooting a man in the chest and the groin, and it’s hard not to sympathize with him. At 8 a.m. this past Sunday, the Canarsie, New York man was in bed, when he spotted the reflection of a stranger in his bedroom mirror. He grabbed his 9-mm Ruger pistol and stalked the man, who had since creeped into his 18-month-old son’s bedroom. Dixon confronted the man. The man started walking towards Dixon. Then: bang! Chest. Bang! Groin. The man fell down the stairs.

I don’t know Dixon’s religion, but I wonder if the same result would have come if the burglar was wearing a red suit and a fake beard. After all, parents nationwide have no problem setting their children upon the laps of strangers in red suits and fake bears. This costume is like the golden ticket, the unmovable “base” in a game of tag. Parents frame photographs of these moments — the child with an anxious grin, being held loosely by this stranger, whose wide eyes peer out from behind a mass of cotton.

Personally, I think Dixon would have shot Santa. Costume or not, there was a stranger in his son’s bedroom, and he was defending a family. Dixon is not alone, either. Of the more than 281 million people in this country, there are more than 11,000 gunshot deaths annually. Like Michael Moore said in his movie Bowling for Columbine, this is a trigger-happy nation, and we’re fueled by an industry that wants people to be afraid and then consume out of fear. If ever there was an argument against Santa’s existence, it is this: if Saint Nick snuck into every house in America, there is a chance he would be shot and killed thousands of times over.

How, then, does Santa get away with it? How is he sitting in malls and touching children without the skepticism of parents? How does his story get passed on without somebody wondering if sends the wrong message and advocates home invasion? We are a paranoid culture, but without fail, we tolerate the red suit and beard. Why?

The answer: Santa is a marketing dream, and he’s got friends in high places.

Santa’s real feat, though, is actually appearing to stump the marketing world. In a culture that is as hungry as it is fearful, companies are applauded for making things as quickly, and often as dangerously, as possible. We eagerly drink milk from cows that are hiked up on Bovine Growth Hormone, which makes them produce more milk. We devour food whose genetic code was altered simple so it grows faster, bigger, stronger. We clone animals to avoid that pesky random birth thing. We want more, and we want it now.

But not Santa. The story says there is only one Santa, and corporate America is sticking to it. If a little child saw two Santas in a mall, and heard an elf explaining that Santa was cloned into an assembly line so the line would move faster, the child would probably convert. Children are satisfied with a line for Santa because, hey, it’s Santa! The jolly guy took a day off work at the North Pole, told his elves to hold his calls, and came to a mall in Anytown, America, to pose for a few Polaroids. It makes perfect sense.

Yet, in a world where our corporate fathers dictate culture, there is no possible way a lucrative figure such as Santa could possible have escaped untainted. Sure, lines at Santa’s mid-mall village may be long, but they’re still bringing in potential shoppers. Christmas is behemoth business, to the tune of $33.9 billion in December, 2001 retail sales for the nation’s department stores, and that only makes the corporate world hungry for more.

Everything that touches Christmas turns to gold — consider $841 million in tree ornament imports from China between January to September, 2002! — but Santa is just the decoy. By showing up on Coca-Cola cans and little trinkets of Christmas paraphernalia, Santa has become the unwilling poster child for increased sales. The marketing world is perfectly happy with there being only one Santa, because he can maintain his squeaky-clean, child-friendly persona and still sell a whole lot of junk.

Not convinced? Earlier this year, Time, Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report, all admitted that they sell more issues when a picture of Jesus Christ appears on their covers. They said they are always searching for stories that can be related to Jesus, so they can stick the man on the cover and make more money. If Jesus can sell magazines, can’t Santa sell toys?

It hardly matters what we think of our culture, because we unconsciously accept whatever it is the Invisible Hand of Marketing guides us towards. Just consider how we speak. Christmas lights are suddenly “holiday lights,” and Christmas sales are now conveniently inclusive “holidays sales.” As philosopher Michel Foucault said, knowledge is power, and the ability to control a language means the ability to control its people. I think it’s rather clear who controls our language.

Christmas lights were never “holidays lights.” The first lit Christmas tree was put together in 1882 by an associate of Thomas Edison, three years after Edison invented the world’s first practical light bulb. That year, descriptions of the tree made its way into the Detroit Post and Tribune, and 13 years later, President Grover Cleveland sponsored the first electrically lit Christmas tree in the White House. As time went on, the decorative Christmas lights moved from adorning trees to lighting houses. At some point, their name changed from Christmas lights to “holiday lights” so that the buying demographic would be not be limited to Christians. It’s just that simple.

The marketing forces have hi-jacked religion, and nobody seems to see it. They made the relatively insignificant Jewish holiday Hanukkah into a whirlwind of gift-giving, and they made Santa a salesman. They did it, as Foucault says, by redefining the language and meaning behind specific events and symbols. For that, America should be desperate to reclaim its religion, to draw it back home and out of the malls. It should look to do the opposite of what has been done, to define these symbols and holidays in its own unique way, and sever them from the Coca-Colas of the world.

Given his status, and the damage he has done, I believe it should start with Santa. If a stranger can be Santa by putting on the costume and sitting in a mall, then a stranger can be Santa anywhere, at any time. Santa not just a sales pitch or a time-honored tradition. Santa is a vehicle.

On Sunday, the same day that Ronald Dixon shot a stranger in his home, over one hundred people in Santa outfits took that message to Washington D.C.’s streets. They call it “Santarchy,” a movement that began in San Francisco in 1994, and has been steadily spreading its wings ever since. On that day, they drank, they ran, and they handed out candy canes to children and condoms to adults. They had devious fun with a symbol that is as revered as it is reserved, and they probably confused everyone in sight.

But, as one of the Santas in D.C. told the Washington Post, the real point is to "shake people's ideas of Christmas up a little bit” and to have “people getting together and taking back the holiday, taking it back from the commercial, corporate control of this imagery." This rowdy fellowship of fake beards know that holidays are about the people, not the bottom line, and they said it in numbers.

Santa has a responsibility here. As a man who is supposed to bring toys to children, he has inadvertently taken too much money away from parents. He has taken a religious celebration and handed it to the highest bidder. Santa has been misguided, sure, but he is open to suggestion.

After all, it only takes a suit and a beard, and Santa is capable of anything.

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Feature #132:

There was a story on NPR recently about a judge's decision over a Barry Bonds homerun baseball, for which two people claimed ownership. The reporter called it a "Solomonic" decision and I thought, considering the reference, that they were going to split the ball in two.

Then i had to brake to avoid hitting some car, and stopped paying attention to the radio. When i mentally tune dback in, the reporter was talking about two newborn babies, one of which died suddenly. So, in a sneaky fit of jealousy, the mother of the one who died snuck into the other mother's house, and secretly switched the babies, so that she walked out with the live one and left the dead one to this other woman.

And i exclaimed rather loudly: "HOLY SHIT!"

Because, wow, that's one fucked up woman. This is really crazy news!

And then i realized: oh, that's a bible story. They're still talking about Solomon. Har.

If you say "holy shit" and there's nobody to hear you, are you talking to yourself? Did you make a sound? What about if a tree says "holy shit" and there's nobody to hear it?

I don't know.

Oh, as for the news story, the two guys had to sell the ball and split the money. Hardly Solomonic, i think.

This is something of a place-holder feature, since i don't have time to run a real, proper one, and i wanted to get an update in here. Call it the holiday headache, call it the year-end slump, but either way, i just don't have any content sitting around. In the last week, i have produced absolutely nothing worth your time, and i'm not afraid to admit it. I have been, you could say, totally useless.

There is a new letter in Dirty Laundry, though. Check that out.

Also, you may be entertained by the following. This is a pretty colorful personal ad from Craigslist in San Francisco. Someone must have had a pretty nasty break-up.

Ugly, needle-dicked lunatic burdened by pathological social problems and overwhelming physical abnormalities seeks lackluster head from someone who uses his few remaining teeth and can't consume an inch without gagging and sputtering and perhaps vomiting. If the chemistry's right, I'll return the favor.

I have the face of a potato, the body of a mossy fallen log. I'm covered from head to toe in purplish spider veins, many of which support ticks. A failed piercing has given me a forked tongue and I have a glacial weepy birthmark that resembles a tribal tattoo. I have a severe soap allergy, so please don't wash before we get together. I also have a terrible time with stoma hygiene.

Hope that's not a problem 4 U.

Entirely straight acting / straight appearing. UB2.

Anyway. That's about all i have for now. I'll toss up a new feature soon after the new year. I promise.

Oh, on a very self-indulgent note, i have exciting news that may really only be exciting to me. Columbia/Tri-Star released a DVD called "An Evening With Kevin Smith," which is a collection of stories that Kevin told six schools around the country. If you recall feature #, Clark University (where i graduated last year) was one of those schools, and I was the guy that weasled my way into a student organization and got the school to pay $22,500 to get him there. It was a wonderful, outstanding, exciting evening because i've had a huge respect for the guy since high school, and meeting him was a rockin' time.

The DVD came out in late December, and i'm visible in the crowd. For this, i am quite pleased. If you're looking for cliche images, it's icing on the cake. If you're looking for self-indulgent photos, then you're in luck:

1. Kevin and crowd (i'm in the green shirt, bottom of the shot, just to the right of the podium)

2. Kevin and larger crowd (same description)

3. Close-up of crowd (again, i'm in the green shirt. my girlfriend lisa is to the left of me)

4. The credits (self-explanatory)

Ok. That's that. I'm excited.

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Feature #133:

I was thinking about doing some kind of year-in-review thing, but that seemed obnixous (unlike, of course, my flaunting photos from a DVD). Not to mention, every source of media seems hellbent on doing something like that, so this will be your safe haven. No years in review here. If you're looking towards the future, this is your place. Forget the past. It's over. Done. Kaput. Unless there's a magical boom in medical science, 2002 was the last palindrome year we'll ever be alive for, but it's nearly gone now, so palindrome be damned. Onward, we say. To the next year. Bring it on. We've waited a year for it.

Thanks for wasting a small part of your life in 2002 with my page. It's been a pleasure.

You're probably expecting more than this. It's been weeks -- yes, weeks! -- since i updated this feature last. In fact, this is the first update all damn year. Sure, i generally kept up with the picture of the day, but that's easy. I'll admit it's easy. People send me links, sometimes i find them myself, and then i post them. There is only one real excuse for this lack of productivity, and it's a rather simple one:

I was, uh, holding off to make sure Y2K wasn't three years late.

No, i wasn't. That wasn't even a clever excuse. You didn't even laugh at that. You shouldn't. It wasn't funny. If you laughed at that, you need to up your standards.

The bottom line is that i was lazy. Sure, i was busy, but not overwhelmingly busy. I've been busy before. I was just lazy... and I've also been lazy before. You've all experienced this laziness from me before. I'm sure this won't be the last. But, be encouraged: to stick with this page through all my aimless invisibility just makes you stronger. I'm building character. Putting hair on your chest. Or your head. Or your toes. Or, well, whereever you want hair. Hair? There!

This is absurd. I'm at a loss for words, but i continue to type. This needs to stop.

Ok, on with the feature.

1. Cheese!
2. Journalists do it daily
3. The swamp of the earth

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1. I've spent the last week covering a murder trial, which has been extremely interesting and equally bizarre. It sounded open-and-shut when we first heard the evidence -- one man stabs a woman, his three relatives see him do it, and they immediately havesomeone call 911 and, when the police arrive, they all point to the guilty man -- but it got more outlandish every day. The local cops were mad at the state cops, and changed their stories in the middle of the trial. The relatives turned out to be huge meth addicts who not only couldn't keep their stories straight, but even after consulting the handwritten statements they gave to police two years ago (when the whole thing first went down), they managed to contradict those, too!

Perhaps my favorite moment was when one of the three relatives revealed that, on their way driving from Oklahoma to Massachusetts, they stopped off in St. Louis to do a lot of drugs. This guy's wife, however, remembers no such thing. She said she slept the entire drive up, and the only thing she remembers about St. Louis is not the drugs, and not seeing any people. No, the only thing she remembers is...

eating a block of cheese.

I almost laughed out loud when she said that in the courtroom. A block of cheese. The whole block of cheese. What amazingly unexpected testimony.

Consequently, cheese has been on my mind lately. Not obsessively, mind you. I don't look down the street and see walking cheesewheels. But, like those "Behold the power of cheese" commercials from a few years ago, I feel awoken to the humorous power that cheese holds within its slimy, kind-of-melted-but-kind-of-not grasp. It is awesome, indeed. Behold.

So, with this in mind, i give you...

Five short comics about cheese

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2. I didn't write this, although i wish i did. Instead, i'm just continuing to subject you to journalism humor. Sorry. 

A bawdy bumper sticker proclaims that “Journalists do it daily.” But diurnal routines alone do not good lovers make. Which leads Dr. Ink to pose this question: Which kinds of journalists make the best lovers? (No, not Italian journalists, thank you.)

Doc will get the ball rolling with these speculations:

1. Television news anchors
Benefits: Likely to be physically attractive and well-paid. Good hair, if you don’t mind the lacquer residue. Good breath control. Breezy Banter.
Risks: Very self-involved. In the end, it’s all about them.

2. Investigative reporters
Benefits: Like to work in depth. Great curiosity. Can sustain an effort.
Risks: Long periods of inactivity. Trouble finishing. Too eager for prizes.

3. Photojournalists
Benefits: Adventurous. Will assume any position to get the job done. In to visual stimulation. Heavy lifting no problem.
Risks: Too dependent upon technology. May way to go digital. May not work without written request for specific services.

4. Beat reporters
Benefits: Staying power. Focused on getting the job done every day.
Risks: Burn-out. Conventional and predictable approaches. Paranoid about getting beaten.

5. Designers
Benefits: Highly creative. Enjoy teamwork. Can play for either team. Good color sense. Nice lingerie.
Risks: Can be flaky. Prefer style over substance.

6. Copy editors
Benefits: Regular schedules. Not afraid to work hard well into the night. Uninhibited on the rim or in the slot. Happy to read behind you.
Risks: Will point out flaws in your technique, even the little ones. Obsessed with length.

7. Writing coaches
Benefits: Generous. Attentive. Passionate. Share tools and tricks.
Risks: Never want to take control.

8. Online columnists
Benefits: Freaky. Uninhibited. Into surprise and disguise.
Risks: Often rushed and reckless. Either finishes too soon or goes on and on.

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3. My friend Mike, who years ago was the mastermind behind the whole "Madmarcy" saga, e-mailed me a little ditty about south florida. I thought it was well worth sharing.

as i will return to south florida on thursday, i have dug up a piece i wrote for the comedy central email newsletter but was consequently rejected:

now i will review what has occured thus far of summer 2002 in a piece called "revisiting south florida and other events of summer 2002 as experienced by mike singer."REVISITING SOUTH FLORIDA. . .

this summer i traveled to a place called, and i am not making this up, "plantation, florida." vacationing in south florida is like poppin' the pus swelled acne that is clustered inside of carson daily's asshole with a tobasco drenched toothpick that is jammed into your penis -- only i dont want to brag about going to south florida. i'm really looking for empathy i guess.

"well, if you hate it so much why don't you just not go and shut the fuck up you whiney piece of shit?"

no YOU SHUT UP!

south florida has left me weak, bored, and cantankerous.

if you were to celebrate a birthday dinner at any restaurant in south florida, you would be subjected to 4 to 7 obnoxious teenage girls singing a horrendous acapella rendition of the song "happy birthday." this would never happen in new york city. this leads me to conclude the following:

south florida is neither the south, a floor, nor the indie pop band Ida. It's a fungus.

somehow south florida is responsible for the fact that i gained twenty pounds. now this wouldn't be so bad if i was a british bank account, but when you're a lame motherfuck in south florida with nothing to do but sit online and eat phish food, there is no reason for things like this to happen.

bluh.

movies and television often depict south florida as a place where sexy and hip italo- casual clad white and black cop partners battle a dangerous and fast-paced world of fiesty drug lords, but this isn't entirely factual. In reality, many ducks reside in south florida, but they are not cute ducks. these ducks look as if they were at one point normal ducks but then vomited all over their own beaks and necks at which point said vomit hardened to their bodies and made them utterly horrendous.

next to these ducks you will find many strip malls and retirement homes. i also visited cuba this summer and that was pretty interesting.

in conclusion:

the case for/against south florida

for:
baby ducklings

against:
adult nasty molten nubby beaked ducks

for:
chick fil a

against:
the rest of the mall

for:
dedicated cable connection online

against:
dedicated cable connection online

for:
my dad. he's a pretty good guy sometimes

against:
every other man and woman in the state who may or may not be dads.

this is not the last you'll here for me. ya fucks.

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Feature #134:

I wrote a story recently about a program over at the local hospital, which is actually quite an impressive situation, and i managed to get a guy on the phone who is uninsured and benefited from the program and described to me in detail -- detail that, for the benefit of you living a happy life, i will not repeat -- what happened to his testicles every morning, due to a serious case of a hernia. In brief, i'll tell you this: i do not want a hernia. lordy lordy, i do not want a hernia.

As you may have noticed, the front page is quite different, and the "ramblings" page no longer exists. I think this little reorganization was a long time coming -- and, if i might add, a fair amount of reader suggestions later. The page evolved in content over the years, but its design never really did, and so the ramblings page became rather obsolete. If you've been with me for a long time, you'll remember that the ramblings page used to be the original main page, and it was then sidelined when the choose-your-own-adventure game came in. Then, well, then things got lazy.

Anyway, i'd be interested to hear what you all think, but i'm pretty happy with the new design. It's less confusing, a bit more aesthetically pleasing, and i've tried to minimize my inane introductions to pages. I figure, if someone wants to go, they'll go. If anything, my blabbering is probably a deterrant.

Considering how bad i am at organization, i'm surprised anybody visits this page at all. I must not be the only one.

Anyway, here's something of a shortish feature.

1. Le fate, on the road
2. Dear Abby is awful as always

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1. Lisa and I drove up to Montreal a few years ago, and passed through Quebec as the sun started to fizzle. In the distance, we saw a giant illuminated structure, perhaps 80 feet tall, like winding metal laced with white neon. I couldn't begin to imagine what it was, but it looked like something I needed to see up close, to inspect, to fully embrace and take part in whatever it is 80-foot glowing metal structures are capable of.

As we got closer, the structure changed shape. It tilted slightly, its bends became less exaggerated, almost flatter. I was still fascinated, and looked for any kind of sign that might indicate what it is. Eventually, we passed a roadsign with a few cities and distances, one of which was "Ufoland."

"Holy shit, UFO Land!" I said. It was a UFO theme park! The big structure was probably some outlandish representation of alien technology. Oh, this was brilliant. I couldn't wait. I was filled with a love for Quebec, and ready to lean the words to "Oh, Canada."

When we finally got near the large structure, it only glowed with disappointment. It wasn't a large structure at all: it was some fucking ski slopes, lit up on a dark mountain. I felt a bit foolish, but then wondered... if this isn't UFO Land, then what IS UFO land? Or for that matter, did I really see that sign? Maybe I made it up. Maybe it was an optical illusion as well, or I read it wrong. Maybe it said, oh, "Ofolind." What's Ofolind? Hey, what's Ufoland?

On our way back home, we both kept careful watch on the roadsides for this mysterious Ufoland sign. If it advertised a reasonable distance from the road, we'd follow it, and solve this mystery by the grace of wheels. It it was unreasonably far, we'd just stop and take a picture, because we were tourists and that's what tourists do when they see something they don't recognize.

We saw no sign, but we needed to stop for gas, and eventually pulled into some little town where people were not too pleased with our ignorant Hellos, and returned them with grunts instead of Bonjurs. When the tank was full, we headed back towards the road, and there, posted on the exit ramp for the highway, was the mysterious Ufoland sign. It was there! Oh, mother of mercy, it was there. There may not have been 80-foot-high glowing metal structures, but damnit, I was right about Ufoland.

It was getting dark already, and we decided that whatever it is, we didn't feel like adding an extra hour to our trip to find out. So, we ran outside, snapped a picture, and hopped back in the car.

When we got back to Worcester, I searched the net for any mention of Ufoland. I asked people who had gone to Canada if they knew of it, looked it up in every search engine, and always came back with nothing. If we didn't have the picture, I'd have doubted we saw it the second time. I eventually resigned to letting Ufoland, in all its glory, remain a mystery.

...that is, until today.

Today, Ufoland lives up to its expectations. It is just as bizarre and unexpected as I had hoped. It is the homeland of a brief cultural joke, the skull that cases the brainchild the world's most recent hoax. Today, the Associated Press ran a story about the Raelians, and here are the first two paragraphs:

VALCOURT, Quebec (AP) -- From the first sight of a futuristic, curving concrete building amid the barns and grain silos of southern Quebec farmland, something is off-beam.

Entering the headquarters of the Raelian religious sect, past a sign welcoming visitors to UFOland, is like strolling onto the set of a bad 1950s sci-fi movie, complete with a replica of the flying saucer that supposedly brought the space aliens who visited Rael, the sect founder. But the display lights don't work and inflated plastic pool seats create the command post.

Oh wow. Wowee-wow. I wish we had taken that extra hour on the trip, but I am satisfied nonetheless. Long live UFOland.

Here's the picture:

Here's the rest of the article:

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2003/01/20/13407-ap.html

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2. If anything, Dear Abby is great for inspiration. Every day, i read that backhanded column just to see what kind of advice i should give people if i ever want to ruin their lives. It's a great study in psychological warfare, but it's also just plain infuriating.

This is something i wrote after getting especially mad at one of the columns:

We thought it was a breakthrough. Over a week’s worth of high school lunch-time debates, as our words were muffled by mouthfuls of pizza, my friends and I finally cracked our boy-crazy friend. She had made a mistake, and we loved it.

She was the one girl that accompanied us to lunch, always stressing how she adored our bluntness, the way we amused each other with awful truths. So, as if lending a favor, we buried her in observations. We milked the details of her life like a golden calf, because she was a magnet for absurdity. She put herself in situations that made fiction jealous, and wore them like a badge of honor. Without her, we would have had video games. With her, we had video games and something to talk about.

And so, when she told us of the night before, when she whispered into her boyfriend’s ear that she loved him, we scoffed. She had been dating that brainless blonde bicep for two weeks, and it seemed that where he excelled in hockey, he lacked in, say, everything else. Not only were we appalled by his fine-tuned ignorance, or the way he offhandedly bragged about eating an entire pizza, but we were shocked by our friend’s Shakespearian emotional leap. Two weeks ago, he was a complete stranger. That day, she loved him. It was like a bedside time warp.

It took a while, but we finally convinced her that love takes longer to grow than mold does. She didn’t love him — she didn’t even know him. She defended her love as true — perhaps not in a poetic way, but certainly in a trashy romance novel way — and we, in our brazen defense of truth, disagreed. After a week, she shook her head and laughed. We were right, she said. We nodded.

Two days later, she had more news:

“You’ll be so proud,” she said. “I was thinking about how you were right, about how I jump into love too quickly.”

“Good,” we said.

“And I decided that I never really loved my ex-boyfriend,” she said, of a boy she had dated for two years.

“Oh,” we said.

“So, I told him.”

“What?”

“I told him. I didn’t want it hanging over my head,” she said.

We spent the next month telling her she made a mistake.

A character in Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie Magnolia said something to the effect of “You may be done with the past, but the past isn’t done with you,” and I suppose it’s true. Corny filmmakers and novelists would be begging for spare change if people were not haunted by their pasts. Inevitably, like gum on the bottom of a shoe, the past will come back. For our friend’s hapless ex-boyfriend, the past came with a busty vengeance. It was insulting. It was needless. It was, I’m sure, depressing.

I’m glad that our friend, in some quirky way, discovered something valuable about herself through that knowledge. For the boy, though, the information was maddening. He didn’t speak to her for months after that, and with good reason. She ripped out a piece of his life, stamped it null and void, and shoved it back into his biography. What was the point? She had already learned what she needed to, but the lesson she taught him was one he could have done without.

I think the Magnolia line needs to be altered: “You may be done with the past, but the past isn’t done with you. If you are the past, however, stay there. Spare someone else your troubles.” The past isn’t some abstract ghost, lumbering back into town. It’s people confronting people, unable to swallow their own troubles. It’s a passing of the buck, a shouldered burden dropped into an open lap.

In Monday’s edition of Dear Abby’s idiotic advice, a reader was advised to send her grown son to apologize to her friend “with cash in hand” for a radio he stole years prior. Dear Abby says that the friend might not understand the apology, but that she hopefully will “find it in her heart to forgive him, but even if she doesn’t, your son’s conscience will be clear.” In essence, she’s endorsing the re-victimization of the victim. The thief’s conscience will be clear, and the bad feelings over the theft will be re-brewed inside the friend. Awkwardness, and perhaps a loss of friendship, will ensue. How is this fair? Moreover, how does Dear Abby get a paycheck for this garbage?

We have a culture of avoiding responsibility. Our president does it with tax cuts and confusing foreign policy, and we do it with everyday people. We turn responsibility into guilt, and then reappear from the past to spew it onto someone else. We think we’re being fair, but we’re just being selfish.

Sure, if a person is seriously wronged, they have the right to confront their oppressor — as a part of a healing process and poetic justice. For the less-serious matters, though, even an apology has an expiration date. Then, no matter how it’s presented, the truth inevitably tastes stale.

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Feature #135:

I started taking the sideroads to work, because the highway was draining my gas too much. I don't mind the sideroads, except for the people in front of me. Why do people have to come to a nearly complete stop before making a turn? Does the world drive on banana peels? I can't understand this.

I don't really have much to say in the ways of introductions this week. So, pull up a seat, crack some knuckles, and enjoy the best damn feature that has ever been posted on the happy scrappy page in early February, 2003.

Damn straight, my friends. Damn straight.

1. Ferrets!
2. Bring on something new

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1. Ferrets. For the entire year, every day, i will look at a photograph of ferrets, thanks to our $3 "Ferret Frenzy" calendar. Usually, i just grab one of the free calendars at the grocery store, and then just ignore whatever inane photographs they decided would make a charming accompaniment to the month: a bridge, some trees, a lady in the park. There must be a list somewhere of the most painfully boring subjects of photographs, which the makers of cheap calendars flock to come calendar-making time. But, not the ferrets. No way. I forgot all about getting a calendar this year, and by the time it seemed reasonable to get one, the price had dropped to three bucks. And there it was, like an oasis: ferrets. frenzy. Ferrets in ballet outfits, ferrets playing basketball (in the FBA, thankyouverymuch), ferrets as detectives. Oh yes, this will be quite a year. Quite a year, indeed.

When did ferrets become funny? I always thought goofy animal photographs were limited to monkeys and the occasional cow. Suddenly, ferrets are cramping their style. These animals look like someone stretched out a guinea pig, and put magnets in its head and ass. I'm not saying they're not funny -- clearly, ferret frenzy is something to behold -- but are they really that popular? Most conversations about ferrets are:

"Blah blah something on and on yadda shmadda ferret something something blah blah blah," says 1.

"Ferrets smell," says 2.

That seems to be it. A stinky reputation, to be sure.

Anyway, i became inspired to make a little game out of the ferrets. All i have available to me here is microsoft paint, which is a good program if you're looking to make crappy things, but i substituted the faces in some famous shots with that of our loveable and odiferous ferret. Guess them if you can. There's no prize, so no pressure. The answer is written invisibly under each photo, so just highlight it to see the answer.

It'll go from easy to, uh, easy. I think. I'm always a bad judge of these things.

George W. Bush, giving the State of the Union address. I know this one was too easy, but seeing as how he actually looks like a ferret, it seemed warranted.

E.T., starring in his biography, E.T.

Shaq, doing the single only thing he knows how to do.

Cameron Diaz, in Something About Mary.

Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective

(hint: imagine that singer about 90 years older)

Ok, so i don't have any idea what that guy's name is. He's one of the former drummers for the Rolling Stones. I apologize if you tried really hard to think of it, and then looked forward a sense of satisfaction from the answer. Does it help if i say, "Hey, you were right! Way to go!" No? Ok, well, nevermind.

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2. Why can't i stop writing about this stuff? Why?

In search of a new joke
By Jason Feifer

I would have punched that thing. I would have given it a good uppercut, and if I were feeling particularly acrobatic, I would have drop-kicked it. If it could feel, that inflatable punching bag would have considered my fist the servant of sorrow, the porter of pain, the bringer of bruises.

As a 12-year-old boy drunk on Hollywood action sequences, I desperately wanted my own enemy — preferably one that would not fight back. Thus, it seemed no birthday present could surpass the possibilities of an inflatable weighted punching bag with a cartoon character, the kind shaped like a life-sized bullet that infants bump into and giggle.

“You mean the thing for little kids?” my dad said when I told him. He wasn’t being mean — he was just confused.

“Um, I don’t know. Yes. I guess,” I said.

“What will you do with it?”

“I don’t know.” Flying elbow! Tomahawk chop! Anything! Violence! Violence! “Just, stuff.”

And that was that. I never received my inflatable punching bag, and with good reason. It would have popped at the first battle sequence, when things were just warming up. Furthermore, my parents knew not to get what I asked for. I was awful at picking presents, and I still am. My gift wish list could be marketed worldwide as the products to most avoid. I would have companies lining up at my door, begging me to adore the competition. My judgment is so bad, there is no English word for it. It is Über-bad.

My parents often did indulge me in my wishes, perhaps when they were fresh out of good ideas, and these are the ghosts of my childhood. One in particular — a collection of Family Circus cartoons — is particularly embarrassing. The book is no more than a series of circles, page after dirty page, in which life picked up and moved to Wholesomeville. Two lanky parents and three plump children, all living peacefully, playing host to dead grandparents and the kind of kid-sayings that make Rosie O’Donnell squeal. The Family Circus isn’t a circus at all. It’s the Family Church.

At some point in my life, as ashamed as I am to admit it, I must have loved the Family Circus. I also loved Garfield — a strip which asks, “How many years does one punch line stretch?” — and Hi & Lois and Beetle Bailey actually made me laugh. Today, these strips seem bland and formulaic, beating the same tired gags into characters that evolve at a slower rate than most rocks.

Perhaps a strip such as Hi & Lois — a suburban family floating in time, enjoying the family values of the 1950s without those pesky social restrictions — loses its bite when comics with actual wit run alongside it. Hi & Lois has been running for nearly half a century, and the children in the strip have only nominally aged. This is a family in suburban purgatory, an illustration of Jean Paul Sartre’s notion that “hell is other people,” where options are limited to pot pies and sunbeams. Similarly, the folks in Beetle Bailey have been milling around since the Korean War. Go home, boys. The war’s over.

Next to them, relevant strips such as the Boondocks or Non Sequitur are refreshing, almost jarring. They are written by fresh minds, not tired writers like Mort Walker, the creator of both Hi & Lois and Beetle Bailey, who seems to create a new strip every time he goes to the bathroom. The old strips have had their say, and it wasn’t much. Cats like food, kids say funny things, some soldiers are lazy. I think we got the message. It’s time to move on.

The Boondocks, for instance, takes on class issues with the kind of savage wit that makes the characters both ingenious and embittered. Yet, with a circulation dwarfed by three boxes of a striped cat eating lasagna, it has to scream to be heard. This is absurd. There should be no room on the comics page for tired cartoons. Newspapers do not run stories twice — comics should follow suit.

The comics I once laughed at were probably just as bad as they are now, but slowly, tastes have changed as newspapers are letting in more quality. Surely, old humor can still be enjoyable, even comforting, just as those little punching bags can. Two months ago, in what can only be described as the height of maturity, my friend and I kicked one of those bags down our apartment’s hallway until it popped. No, we are not above many things. We readily admit that.

The bag emitted a sort of dull thud, and wiggled in the air before crumbling. When it did, we laughed. There we were, 22-year-olds playing with a children’s toy, something we hadn’t done in ages. We actually broke it. It was a tiny return to youth, the kind that just might draw readers back to Garfield. Three squares later, they leave pleased, knowing that despite their travels the cat is just as fat. Yet, had we actually halted progress to incessently return to those moments — oh, had we been trapped in three squares a day, every day, kicking children's toys and laughing the same laughs, making the same useless, almost invisible point, living only to see another day of the same — then there surely would be nothing to laugh at. No, nothing at all.

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Feature #136:

Ok, I have a three-part feature, which breaks a rather unfortunate dry spell here at happyscrappy.com. So, on with it.

1. the Produce(r)
2. First-name Saddy
3. Eleven percent???

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1. I really have no explanation for why i spent two hours making cartoon renditions of movies, all starring fruit and veggies. But, i did, and now you get to read them. Hollywood, beware.

I call this project...

the Produce(r):

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2. Ever wonder why Saddam is always referred to in the papersas "Saddam," and not "Hussein"? I did some research. Here's the answer.

Basis for a first-name basis
by Jason Feifer

It is difficult to fear a man with a goofy moustache and the kind of faux grin generally reserved for family snapshots. Sure, Saddam Hussein killed his own family members and has shown a hankering for mass murder, but let’s size the guy up: he’s a two-bit dictator in a poor country twice the size of Idaho, and the majority of the world calls him by his first name. Just check the papers.

It is standard practice for newspapers to use a person’s full name on first reference, and then a surname on all subsequent references. That is, except for children under 16, who are continually referenced by their first name, according to Associated Press style. Given this, according to most newspapers, Saddam is swimming through puberty — an entirely different kind of biological warfare, and only slightly less hairy, than the one George W. Bush fears.

Joseph and Benito never got this treatment. Even wacky Kim Jong-il, the permed-hair and platform shoe-wearing North Korean leader, gets his full name referenced in most newspapers. So, why Saddam? Is he trying to woo Western culture with our familiar and beloved one-name monikers, a la Cher and Madonna? Or, is he just abnormally friendly — as if he tells captors, “Listen, I’m going to chop your head off in a moment, but before I do, please, call me Saddam.”

Indeed, the first-name usage has already received its fair amount of abuse. Readers of newspapers worldwide have complained, noting that the first-name basis is ignorant or, more often, insolent. When George mispronounces Saddam’s name — “SAH-dum” instead of “Sah-DAAM” — it isn’t just another case of his quirky accent. He’s changing the Arabic meaning of Saddam’s name from its intended “one who confronts” to “barefoot beggar.” Unlike George’s bungling of the words nuclear (he says “new-cue-ler” instead of “new-clee-er”) and terror (“terrah”), this one is clearly intentional.

So, why is the Western media chummy with Public Enemy #1 (or #2, depending on if George stopped trying to forget Osama)? It’s because neither the names Saddam or Hussein are actual surnames. An Arab male’s full name consists of his given first name, followed by his father’s first name, then his grandfather’s, and then the geographic origin of his family. Thus, Saddam’s full name is Saddam Hussein abd al-Majid al-Takriti. “Saddam” happens to be the only name that is his own. To call him “Hussein” would be like calling George, well, George. Ok, so that was a bad example.

To make things more complicated, Iraqis don’t even have surnames, because Saddam abolished them in his early presidency. According to the book “Sandcastles: The Arabs in Search of the Modern World,” by Milton Viorst, Saddam began his presidency in 1979 by stacking the Ba’ath party. He filled key positions with his most loyal supporters, all of whom had come from his birthplace, Tikritis, and had the surname al-Takriti. So, to make his near-complete nepotism less obvious, he banned surnames. Don’t get any hints, George and Edward.

When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, newspapers had to make a choice. With no actual surname, Saddam inherently defied the style rules of most papers, and so many different decisions were made. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal called him Mr. Hussein, but they ended up in the minority. According to the Los Angeles Times, many papers avoided calling Saddam by his second name because they wanted to sidestep confusion with King Hussein of Jordan (who had only one name, like Queen Elizabeth). King Hussein died in 1999, but according to the Times, “what binds Saddam to U.S. readers and listeners is more habit than anything else.”

And so, there it is. To be called by a first name in the newspaper, one has to be under 16 or eliminate an entire country of surnames. That is, unless someone manages to write annoying pop songs long past her prime. Saddam, Cher, Madonna — all with their own brand of weapons of mass destruction. Which one will go first? It’s a toss-up.

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3. My paper gets a fax once a month from this sex toy company called Adam & Eve, which is actually a pretty awesome company in that it spends a lot of its profits promoting contraception in third-world nations. The faxes used to just get tossed in the trash, but now i snatch them up because they're generally entertaining.

Each month is some kind of wacky sex-related poll, which includes painfully obvious quotes from "experts" in the field. (for instance: "How people think about sex, how they imagine their partner, how they fantasize in general appears to be perhaps the strongest component of the many factors that produce sexual actions," according to certified sex therapost Kenneth R. Fineman, PhD. Well, duh. And furthermore, Ken, we all appreciate you being as direct as possible in explaining that your list "appears to be perhaps" a good explanation. Way to enlighten, sort of maybe.)

Anyway, this month's poll was rather surpring, to me at least. Maybe you'll just shrug. Who knows. Here we go:

Of a random survey of 1,002 adults between the ages of 18 and 65, we have:

How often do you have sex?
At least once a day: 11%
3-4 times a week: 27%
1-2 times a week: 25%
2-3 times a month: 13%
Less than once a month: 24%

Who the hell is this lucky 11 percent? Where are they, and more importantly, who are the poor souls living near them and taking out their garbage? Is this what supports the furnature industry in America? I'm stunned. My friend Sara said that 11 percent are all in their sixties and up, because they're retired and have ample time. Sadly, the survey doesn't offer any hints on this, and our friend Ken would probably just tell us, "As people get older, they still have sex, because they also had it when they were younger, and they might sometimes sort of perhaps possibly have it a lot."

So, we're in the dark, so to speak.

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Feature #137:

For those of you looking or recalling, this was the feature with the hat contest. Feature #138 will have the stories from that contest.

And then, there was this stuff:

1. More Produce(r)
2. The idiot tax
3. Snow more snow

1. That's right, it's time to suffer through more of the Produce(r). For those who didn't catch last week's installments, the Produce(r) is a comic strip re-cap of movies, starring fruits and vegetables. There might not be any value to this, but at least there are vitamins.

2. Here's a little ode to a system we all know and love...

The charge we all deserve
By Jason Feifer

I was charged for being an idiot, and I deserved it.

I had signed up for what I believed was a free online fax service, which seemed useful until it was clear that there was no reason for anybody to fax me anything. The service provided me with a phone number in some distant area code — I imagine a vapid, frightful place, ever-buzzing with the sound of absent fax machines — and all faxes would be delivered to me by e-mail. Had there been even a minimal need for someone across the country to get me printed information at the speed of fiberoptics, this would have been a wonderful plan. Instead, I just forgot about it.

As it turns out, I accidentally signed up for some sort of premium service, which required payment. I suppose I should have caught on when I was prompted for my credit card information, but I punched it in anyway and promptly forgot about it. A few months later, I noticed a mysterious $20 charge as I scanned my bank statement. I traced it back, called the company, and discovered that I bought them a new fax machine. Or, well, I might as well had. I paid $100 for a service I never once used. For that, I could have bought my own stupid fax machine.

The chipper woman from the company was generous — and by that, I mean she didn’t laugh at me — and eventually refunded $80. The rest, she said, was “our non-refundable connection fee.” Really, though, that’s the “idiot tax.”

Not only did I deserve that tax, but I welcome it. It is the one tax in this giant, tax-loving country where I know exactly where my money goes, and why it went. When I look at the merciless, tax-inspired bloody beating my paycheck takes every week, I feel hopeless and abused. But with the idiot tax, I feel satisfied that money was exchanged with a clear purpose, and an obvious direction.

Not to mention that without that tax, I would have paid a lot more for film developing in college.

It was a great scam: I went to an unnamed store — Seavess, we’ll call it — and picked up my developed film. The film clerk would ask if I had any other shopping to do, and I would reply affirmatively. Then I’d take my film, pick up some apple juice, and plop the two items in front of the cashier. If the cashier asked if I paid for the film, I would admit that I had not. But, more often than not, the cashier assumed I paid for the film, and just charged me for the juice and bagged both items. I was then free to go, satisfied that I had charged Seavess a much-deserved idiot tax.

That’s the way the world works. In grade school, we call it “Finders Keepers.” In politics, we call it “George W. Bush is president.” Sure, profiting off the mistakes of others is morally reprehensible, and I applaud those who are unwaveringly honest. But, not me. I go to uncomfortable extremes to profit from the idiot tax. I peel unmarked stamps off my mail, and glue them onto new envelopes. I park my car at toll booths, and pick up stray quarters that previous motorists had dropped. I don’t do this because I’m miserly. I do it because I can.

And so, let me take this moment to strongly condemn — and if “condemn” is not strong enough, then I am outright declaring war on — Fleet Bank. Last week, a grand jury in New Jersey indited a man for profiting off of Fleet’s mistake. Charles A Delveccio Jr., 36, had gone to a Fleet branch in Phillipsburg, N.J. on April 3 to cash a $26 check. The bank teller mistakenly paid him almost $2,600, and in response, Delveccio allegedly thanked the teller and walked away.

Whose mistake was this? It was Fleet’s. Yes, Delveccio could have been a good Samaritan and returned the money. Yes, there is comfort in trusting our fellow humans, and yes, it is a shame that we do not all look out for one another. But, the man is now facing third-degree theft charges, and could be tossed in jail for five years. Is he guilty? Absolutely not. The only thing he’s guilty of is a stroke of luck.

In its case against Delveccio, Fleet Bank has taught us something wildly depressing. Enron and WorldCom had already shown us that large corporations can evade taxes, but Fleet has taken it a step further. Armed with a group of expensive lawyers, corporations like Fleet can avoid even the unspoken tax, the one respected and cursed in sandboxes and swing sets everywhere.

We have grown up with this idiot tax, and it works well. It keeps us in check. It reminds us to pay more attention to our lives, and it rewards us handsomely. For this, we should be grateful — and that means occasionally paying up.

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3. The east coast got hammered with a snowstorm last week, as I'm sure you heard about on the news. Over and over and over again. I wrote this on Feb. 20, and probably should have posted it then, since it's somewhat outdated now. But hey, what good is a column if it's not read, right? Right.

Snow it out your ass
By Jason Feifer

Whoa, snow!

I finally ponied up $11 and bought a shovel, and my back still hurts from clearing my apartment’s walkway. I almost skidded into a jogger on my way to work. I approach my front door with the utmost of trepidation, carefully eying eight-foot icicles that threaten to crush my skull. After the storm in December, I slipped on the ground twice. The first time, it sent Christmas presents flying across the road, and the second time, it was my Chinese food.

In short, I know it snowed. I knew about it before, during, and after. My wet socks knew about it. My friends without televisions, who often ask me to summarize the world’s news, knew about it. The two dead birds that mysteriously showed up on the side of my house before the storm? They probably knew about it.

But, did we know about the special U.S. forces that have already entered Iraq? How about the French threatening to block potential European Union members from joining the fray if they support America? No, we didn’t hear much about these things, because even as it covered the roads, the snow somehow managed to white-out the news.

On the evening of the “Blizzard of 2003” — an title that too eagerly suggests infamy for completely forgettable precipitation — FOX evening news devoted half its program to the snow. They had four “reporters” in different sections of the state, proudly bracing against the ceaseless flakes to report with drama and dignity that, indeed, it is snowing. As if we didn’t know.

Seemingly every news source followed suit. National Public Radio’s “Talk of the Nation” set aside an hour for people to call up and talk about the snow. The day after we saw nothing but snow, we all read about nothing but snow. Every paper from the Boston Globe to the Gardner News rolled lightly-packed snowballs and splattered them on their front pages, complete with giant pictures of cold people. There are cold people in the snow? Why, imagine that.

In the words of Cool Hand Luke, what we’ve got here is a failure to communicate. Our inane dialog with casual strangers revolves around the weather — “It’s sure cold out!” or “Finally, a nice one!” — and it seems our news sources don’t know any better. They forgot that we follow the news to learn, not to look in a mirror.

The news media has access to information that the public does not, as well as the resources to present it in user-friendly formats. That is what makes them so valuable, and that is their responsibility. As such, there’s little use in reporting about what everybody already knows, and everybody knew about the snow. Reporting on it was a waste of time and paper, and a disservice to the important things happening around the globe.

Granted, there’s nothing wrong with the news media acknowledging the snow, or focusing on the impact it has on a region. Many papers follow the pompous lead of the New York Times, which considers itself a historical recorder, and the snow inarguably has a place in our short-term memory. But, the gratuitous and lazy coverage we endured was a dismal storm all its own. We traded knowledge for in-depth reports on the obvious. The storm surely won, and it’s enough to make me scream, “Hoodie-Hoo.”

That’s right. Hoodie-hoo.

Today, it just so happens, is Northern Hemisphere Hoodie-Hoo Day. At noon today, according to brief tradition, people go outside, wave their hands over their heads, and chant, “Hoodie-Hoo!” Supposedly, the event will scare the winter away, although it has a better chance of scaring the neighbors. (The Southern Hemisphere has their chance at Hoodie-Hooing on August 22).

The day is an amusing victory for random initiatives. It was created by Thomas Roy, a Pennsylvania native that holds copyrights on over 70 holidays, including “What if Cats & Dogs Had Opposable Thumbs Day” (March 3) and “Be Bald and Be Free Day” (Oct. 14). It caught on 14 years ago when it was printed in the annual volume, “Chase’s Calendar Of Events.”

Hoodie-Hoo Day is a great product of creativity and innovation. Instead of judging winter by something familiar — Groundhog Day, for instance — Roy did something unique and paved his own way. His reward is to see his creation actively celebrated in both North America and Europe. Although, really, it is only celebrated because most people prefer to follow pre-made paths instead of making their own.

This is a lesson the news media could benefit learning: it is easy to follow others, but it is valuable to take the lead. When it snows heavily, the obvious action is to write about it. But, in drowning its primary news coverage in sheets of ice, the media is not living up to its purpose. If it cannot learn this, and if it continues to snow this winter, then we are in for a serious lack of knowledge. In that case, there is clearly only one thing we can say:

Hoodie-Hoo! Hoodie-Hoo! Oh please, Hoodie-Hoo!

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Feature #138:

This feature was taken up almost entirely by stories from readers, which were submitted as contest entries. I've posted them in another page -- this one, in fact -- because they were so lengthy (and quality, i might add) that it would have made this archive page just way too bulky.

And, after all the stories, i embarked upon my typical media lashing:

Our of the world loop
By Jason Feifer

This past Sunday, a friend e-mailed me an article from the London Observer and quipped, “Man, this pre-war stuff is fun! And nothing like the liberal UK press to hype it up.” I took a quick read of the article — an allegation that the United States was spying on security council diplomats — and quickly wrote him back: “What are the chances that this'll make it into American papers tomorrow?”

He never wrote back. It turns out he was right.

That day, the story was reprinted in the Guardian, the Observer’s parent paper, and the British-based Islam Online. As this week chugged along, the story started making front-page headlines around the world. “Uncle Sam Spies on U.N. Delegations,” decried an Australian paper, and the Asia Times Online headlined, “US takes bugging at U.N. to ‘new levels’.” But, the only press it seemed to scrape up in America was in alternative online magazines and the ignoble and smug DrudgeReport, which took issue with the Observer’s changing the source’s text to standard British spelling.

The source is a leaked memorandum allegedly written by Frank Koza, a chief of staff at the National Security Agency’s “regional targets” division. The NSA is the US group responsible for intercepting worldwide communications, and as the memo details, the group decided to focus their tactics on the world’s central meeting point. It is stunning — even laughable — that such a snarky plan would involve a paper trail, but the communication ends where the page does. The United States government has refused to comment on the issue, and no further memos have surfaced.

The three-paragraph memo begins with this: “As you’ve likely heard by now, the Agency is mounting a surge particularly directed at the UN Security Council (UNSC) members (minus US and GBR of course) for insights as to how to membership is reacting to the on-going debate RE: Iraq, plans to vote on any related resolutions, what related policies/ negotiating positions they may be considering, alliances/ dependencies, etc — the whole gamut of information that could give US policymakers an edge in obtaining results favorable to US goals or to head off surprises.”

The immediate ramifications of the article are splintered. For a world already weary of America, this is like finding Uncle Sam in bed with the Earth’s wife. If America hopes to rally what George W. Bush called “a coalition of the willing,” it is quickly going to be molding a coalition of the suckers.

Plus, this is direct proof of what many polls say people have believed all along — that the United States does not take the United Nations seriously. Rules are only as relevant as they are respected, and with its bloated sense of purpose, America is now perhaps the largest threat the U.N. has faced. George W. Bush has already threatened it with “irrelevance,” America rarely pays its membership dues, and it has a history of abusing countries that do not side with it on important votes. Just take a look at Yemen, a tiny country that had a seat on the security council the last time America wanted to invade Iraq. It voted against the plan, and in return, America stopped giving it aid — for nearly four years.

Is this a case of a country showing respect for a meeting ground of the world, or of a country that believes its power and importance supersedes that of the democratic process?

But, as someone who puts a fair amount of faith in the tenants of journalism, I am most disappointed with the virtual silence that this story has received in the American media. Our newspapers already ignore the majority of the world — take a look at the skimpy international sections in our country’s largest daily papers — but now it has intentionally shrugged off the world’s concerns. It has said, in essence, that this story is not worthy of its pages.

To most people — including the citizens of America’s allies — this memo captured the arrogance they despise in American foreign policy. Yet here, most citizens do not even know what the world thinks. The post-Sept. 11 explanation of “They hate us because we don’t know why they hate us” is beginning to ring true for the rest of the world. France is still fuming over Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s remarks about “old Europe,” but we’ve largely forgotten about it here. Afghanis are so concerned that America will wash its hands of their war-torn country that Afghan President Hamid Karzai came to America to plead for attention. This is a sad, sad state of affairs.

I’m sure the American media had its reasons for ignoring the story, although I doubt they’re reasons worth respecting. For the most part, the media here has become docile to the White House, blindly following Bush’s agenda and largely ignoring the issues not discussed in press briefings. Perhaps they feared that running the story would sacrifice their meetings with ambiguous “senior White House officials,” or that they would lose their rank on the pecking order of controlled leaks. Either way, this is no way to serve the American readers, and it is a slap in the face to the rest of the world.

When news breaks overseas, it should be important. And when it is news that could enter Americans into the global community — and not, say, isolate them through ignorance — then the press should stop at nothing. If not, what good is it?

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Feature #139:

On with the feature!

1. Flashy carrots
2. Classy sports
3. Brassy protesters
4. Assy politicians

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1. Is this a sign of things to come? You better hope not.

I snagged a copy of Flash, with which i hope to soon make goofy movies with equally absurd soundtracks. But first -- ah, but first! -- i must learn how to use the damn program.

What follows is my first attempt at a movie. It's a silent one, and it stutters at the beginning -- an annoying feature i can't seem to get rid of. I won't lie to you; this is pretty far from useful, or even relevant. Or, hell, let's me brutally honest: in the river of quality, it's clearly sinking.

But, i showed it to some friends, and they laughed to make me feel good, and that gave me enough encouragement to post it here. Have i no shame? Perhaps not.

I call it simply: CARROTS.

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2. This is from an e-mail my dad forwarded me. I don't know who took the time to compile these photographs, but they did quite a fine job. I figure that with baseball coming up and the NCAA March Madness in full effect, i might as well give you something sports-related to appreciate. And this, at the very least, i appreciate. So, here are...

The top 10 classiest moments in sports history

(in the interests of making this page load faster, i moved the pictures here. check 'em out.)

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3. The war may have started, but that shouldn't stop anyone from complaining. I've heard this too many times: now that combat has begun, we need to stop our squabbling and support our president and our troops. And i say: that's a failing democracy.

Of course, i wish nobody over there any harm. I'm sure half of those guys don't want to be fighting, and the other half are just plain scared. I would be.

But, stop criticizing? Stop questioning? Bullshit.

This is a column i wrote, which ran in my newspaper the day the day after bombs started dropping.

The protesters that shouldn't have
By Jason Feifer

It seems like everyone wants to be politically repressed, but nobody actually wants the hassle of being repressed.

That must be it. I can’t come up with any explanation for the pro-war movement other than that. They whine. They complain. They claim they’re being ignored. They call themselves the “silent minority,” a throwback to a 1969 Richard Nixon speech about Vietnam. If theirs were the only argument ever aired, the world would think that Americans are ready to charge desperately into battle.

But oh, that’s right — theirs IS the only viewpoint officially aired! All they’re doing is agreeing with the Bush administration — that is, they’re parroting the words of the most powerful leader on the planet — and yet they still feel slighted. I wonder if they’d prefer trying to oppose someone with Bush’s power. Although, my guess is that while they like to complain about not being heard, they are rather comfortable knowing that, in the end, their side wins. Hell, it’s already won.

Across the country, anti-war protests have been countered with pro-war protests. Pro-war protesters may have the civil right to take their cause to the streets, but their displays show a comical lack of understanding for the power and purpose of a protest.

The heavily-armed front gates of the White House are already wide open for them. Their opinions may only be an echo of what Bush has said, but they have been heard. Clearly, the pro-war folks don’t seem to recognize the meaning of their actions, or they would have saved their energy for applauding on their couches when CNN airs videos of Baghdad bombings.

In a representative democracy such as ours, where an elected official is under no obligation to act in accordance with the wishes of his or her constituents, the views of the people often get overlooked. When it is clear that a governing body is moving in a direction opposite from the desires of its people, the usual channels of political influence are closed. Phone calls to senators won’t do much now, and anti-war activists know it. So, they are left with no choice but to show their numbers — loudly, fervently, and publicly.

A protest is a depressing symbol, in which the small people must physically gather together in order for their voices to actually reach the ears in the ivory tower above. While the anti-war protests have gained some international media coverage, they have still barely registered on Bush’s ears. Once, he said he “respectfully disagrees” with his citizens, but he usually leaves the casual dismissal up to his press secretary.

The gathered voices have reached ears over the oceans, though. These protesters have played a vital role in America’s relationship with the world, because they have been the only sign that America is not, as 57 percent of Germans believe, “a nation of warmongers.” That poll, along with the following, was reported last week in London’s Sunday Independent: 77 percent of the French oppose war, 85 percent of Spain, 86 percent of Italy, 87 percent of Russia and 90 percent of Turkey.

Without the protesters, the majority of Europe might get the wrong impression. They might fear Americans for resembling our leader. They might assume we are all foaming at the mouth, a “silent majority” hungry for gore. But, as American protesters joined international war opponents in grabbing worldwide headlines, the protesters may have fostered the one human link between American and the world’s citizens.

Even though their protests could not stop the war, their actions were still valuable. They have marked public opinion on the historical record, if only as a footnote of restraint.

So, in a political climate where the government is free to act without the will of the people, no possible influence can come from people who support the government’s decisions. With or without this seething silent majority, Bush is going to war. By the time this editorial is printed, he may already have. For people who oppose the war, protesting is the only option.

So, when we look back upon this cluttered time of war and rhetoric, I wonder if we’ll be confused by the pro-war protesters. They seemingly act without motivation, with no unique voice on which to float. They want to be heard, although they already have been. They want to speak, but they’ve been spoken for. They want war, but war was inevitable.

Protesting should be left to those who have something to contribute to a debate. But instead, when Bush preached to his small choir, the choir didn’t sing. It grabbed picket signs, and it never knew why.

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4. And this is a column that ran a week ago, right after the House began serving "freedom fries." I've heard some great jokes about all this: that France re-named American Cheese "Idiot Cheese," that America should re-name France "Freedom." This whole situation was an easy target for late-night stand-up routines, but overall, it just made me mad.

If this looks familiar, it's because i had posted it as the picture of the day.

They will never be freedom fries
By Jason Feifer

Welcome to the Republican-led America, where racism is patriotic.

In the name of war, the House of Representatives cafeteria will now be serving “freedom fries” and “freedom toast” instead of french fries and french toast. It is a “small but symbolic effort to show the strong displeasure of many on Capitol Hill with the actions of our so-called ally, France,” said Republican rep. Bob Ney, whose committee is in charge of the eateries.

Our “so-called ally”? What exactly is “so-called” about France?

France opposes the war. It would prefer to see weapons inspections continue — which, up until American politicians began spinning the meaning of inspections, is exactly what America begrudgingly asked for. But, France still welcomes Americans into its country. It still plays host to a McDonalds and EuroDisney. It is, for all intents and purposes, still a friend of America.

But, it seems, America only wants yes-men. It only accepts friends that agree with it, because to this country, friendship isn’t a give-and-take. It’s an all-or-nothing. As Bush said, you’re either with us, or you’re against us.

This is a dangerous precedent to set. Not only does it promote a sense of isolationism, in which America’s allys slowly sever their relationships with us, but it encourages racism. For, when our own government isn’t willing to accept people from countries whose governments disagree, the weak-minded citizens soon follow suit.

That’s what happened in North Carolina, where a fast-food restaurant first introduced “freedom fries” last month. The owner of the restaurant said he did it in the name of patriotism, much like frankfurters became “hot dogs” during World War I. But, this isn’t just a sign of patriotism — it’s a direct assault on a specific group of people. Patriotism is waving a flag. Racism is dismissing a nationality.

So, when the government decides to take up the cause and adopt the “freedom fries” name into its fold, what else can it be called but government-sponsored racism?

Granted, this is a heavy meaning to be assigned to a relatively petty event. But, in heightening aggression against the French, this is one step away from French tourists being threatened the way Arab immigrants were after Sept. 11. There needs to be some level of understanding, both from a political and social level.

Politically, America needs to recognize the value of contrasting opinions. The only way we can grow as a nation is to respect and incorporate the positions of others. We gain no ground by holding steadfast to our own beliefs, and we lose ground by outright rejecting disagreement. We have been unequivocally unfair to our allies, and it is slowly alienating us from the rest of the world. Look at what has happened here: we didn’t just reject France’s position. We rejected France! We were rebuffed by Chirac, and now we’re rebuffing every single Jacques.

What is the message here? Is America saying that it only respects countries that agree with us? That friends with disagreements are enemies?

The real sobering message here comes from the French people, who still accept Americans and all their exports. The French still believe in the “American Dream,” a concept that most Americans consider long past its prime. But, more importantly, they see the difference between American politics and the American people — and they do so not because American exports are so appealing, but because they have a comprehensive international viewpoint that Americans sorely and obviously lack.

A National Geographic study shows that 87 percent of 18- to 24-year-old Americans cannot find Iraq on a map. Our newspapers have, at best, skimpy amounts of world news. Most Americans cannot name the leaders of the major international players. Hell, most Americans probably can’t name the prime minister of Canada. These basic facts are the stepping stones of international understanding, which the French — and the rest of Europe, for that matter — are blessed with. But in America, we are ignorant.

And ignorance breeds racism. And racism breeds freedom fries.

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There are more features to be had. (well, old features, that is.)

Features I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X XI XII XIII XIV XV XVI

Or, we can always go back.