Don't Quote me on this...

I love quotes. Like a man loves a woman, a dog loves his master, or Donald Trump loves himself. They can be anything and everything. They are rallying cries, teaching tools, time capsules, prophecies. They can be funny, inspiring, sobering, and even tragic. Quotes tell you a lot about the people who said them, and tell you even more about the people who use them in arguments. I’ve always wanted to be quoted because it seems like the most concrete indication that you were prominent and your opinion was valued for posterity. I tried to write my own quotes when I was younger (12) and I have to be honest, things didn’t work out the way I hoped. I wasn’t aware that before you actually do anything of importance, people don’t give a shit what you have to say. This is especially true when you don’t even have peach fuzz on your balls yet. A tremulous, breaking teenage voice emanating from a hairless prepubescent doesn’t command the kind of respect you think it would. As a result, I gave up on my dream of being a Professional Quote writer. I gave in to all the naysayers who told me “that job doesn’t even exist.” Truly, it stands as one of my life’s greatest regrets.

I intend to change that here by rolling out some of the gems that have come to me over the years. If you like them, tell me. If you don’t keep your stupid opinion to yourself you son of a bitch…

I am going for a kind of Socratic wisdom mixed with some Napoleonic arrogance, and some Kierkegaard (I have no idea what that means but smart people frequently reference Kierkegaard in conversation).

“Life is like a roller coaster. Its very scary, and sometimes you soil yourself.”

“Strip clubs are stupid. Why pay 60 dollars for an erection when you wake up with one every morning for free?”

“There is no such thing as doggie heaven. Only doggie hell.”

“When God shuts a door He opens a window. Unfortunately that window is four stories up.”

“Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm. Oddly enough, Success and foolish optimism are one in the same.”

“Before you give way to anger ask yourself a simple question: Can I take this guy?”

“Crime doesn’t pay. Unless you factor in all the money. Then it looks pretty alluring.”

“A cynic always looks like a douchebag until it turns out he’s right. Then he looks like a pompous douchebag.”

“If women ran the world there would be no threat of nuclear war 25 days out of the month.”

“I’m fine with men and women being equals, but women could probably do a lot better.”

(See how I balanced that out? Eh?)

“There is no such a thing as a completely level playing field. If there was everything would end up as a tie.”

“We’ve all made mistakes…but none as colossal as that one you made that summer when you were a kid. You know the one I’m talking about you sick bastard.”

I am going to end with one of my favorite quotes. Its not mine, but that’s the point.

Write a wise saying and your name will live forever.
- Anonymous
(Didn’t seem to work for this guy)

This Week in Feminism...and Poker?

A few days ago I happened to be leafing through the Sports Illustrated 2009 Swimsuit issue (there are some really compelling articles this year) and I came across a two page advertisement for PokerStars.net. The page on the right was a beautiful woman looking like a hardened Poker junkie with PokerStars attire on with “Strength is Measured in Chips” in bold font above her. Okay, so far so good. Then I look to the left and that same beautiful woman is in a swimsuit, standing in a body of water teeming with sharks. Below her is an interview, and above her is the caption “Swimming with Sharks.”

Well apparently this beautiful woman’s name is Vanessa Rousso (which is odd because in my experience all beautiful women have had the same name: “I’m not interested”), and she is a major poker stud. To top it off, not only is she blessed with defined cheekbones, blonde hair and a statuesque body, she’s also really smart. She received a full scholarship to Duke and graduated in less than three years. I know, what a bitch. Apparently her main course of study was game theory, which allows her to mathematically analyze people’s behavior and has earned her nearly two million in winnings in a few short years.

What pissed me off in this ad wasn’t the poker playing fembot, it was the first line of the interview. “Professional Poker has long been a sport dominated by men. So when Vanessa Rousso came to swim with the sharks, her looks may have thrown the guys off.” I have so many problems with this statement I need a moment to collect myself.

First of all, enough talk about poker as a sport. Yes it requires skill; no it’s not purely a game of chance…I get it. However, chess masters aren’t demanding they get into the Olympics. And you can make fun of ice dancing, or equestrians all you want, but remember that at least their activity requires participants to stand up. I know what you’re thinking: “what about NASCAR?” Let’s make this clear; while I will not watch NASCAR, these guys aren’t just sitting down. If poker players can call somebody’s bluff while doing 220 mph around a turn as fifty other players try to do it too, only faster, then poker requires more skill then racing. At any point during a poker tournament do people crash into each other and burst into flames? I don’t know, I rarely go to poker tournaments.

Secondly, who are these sharks they constantly refer to? I know, I know, its terminology based around the game, but have you seen the guys who play poker for a living? Half of them look like they had to come up from their mother’s basement to take a shower before the tourney. This isn’t Casino Royale, there aren’t billionaire tycoons, secret agents, and criminal masterminds playing for amounts equivalent to the national debt.

Finally, is poker really “dominated by men” or is it dominated by people who like to play poker? There are sports in which gender plays a big part. I have never met a guy who can match the grace, agility, and skill of a female figure skater. They’re better. You know it, I know it, let’s move on. On the other hand, I’ve never met a woman who could hit like Mike Singletary or get off the line like Jared Allen (look on nfl.com if you don’t know these names). To be fair though, I have always attributed the absence of female football players to the fact that women are too smart to play a sport that requires you to run into another person every play.
Saying poker is a sport dominated by men is like saying “knitting is a pastime dominated by women.” Nothing is being dominated, it’s just something a percentage of the female population chooses to do that men typically won’t. If women decide to play poker its not like they’re Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier, they’re just sitting at a table with a bunch of guys who probably haven’t dated in awhile. My real beef here is that Vanessa Rousso may be a woman (a gorgeous woman at that), but it doesn’t sound like that’s the thing winning her poker tournaments. It always seems a shame when a fine intellect is reduced to a pretty face.



p.s. : my apologies to whoever wrote that interview, I’m sure you weren’t loading those two sentence with that much meaning.

My Saintly Sister

For a long time, my sister has been a better person than me. I don’t say this in a self deprecating way, she’s better than most people. When she was explaining to the babysitter that our mom did NOT usually give us that much ice cream, I punched her in the face. When I was saying yes to peer pressure, she was deciding which college scholarship would be the best long term move for her. When she was in the church choir at college, I was in the back of a squad car. Needless to say I’ve almost always had an elevated opinion of her. So imagine my surprise and confusion when I went to see her play in Washington D.C. (Hexagon Theatre’s “What So Proudly We Bailed.” All the proceeds went to charity. The theatre was not shaped like a hexagon. Freaking liars) and my saintly sister comes out for a musical number dressed in nothing but a Playboy bunny outfit and a smile. My memory of what happened afterwards is fuzzy, what with the blinding rage and all, but I remember a few specifics.
I’d like to say I briefly considered killing everyone in the theatre who had set eyes upon her, but I have to be honest. I considered it for a LONG time. I considered it in the theatre, I considered it after the show, I even considered it on the car ride back to Philadelphia. I also recall a cat-call coming from the corner of the theatre when she came on stage. My instincts got the better of me and I stood up in my seat, scanning the audience for the source of the noise so I could mute him by punching his mouth through the back of his head. Thankfully my friend Maggio was there with me, and he had the sedatives ready for just such an occasion. I woke up 15 minutes later and enjoyed the rest of show, which I must admit was very funny. It was like the Daily Show, but with music…and an audience composed of liberals age 45-80.
When I got back home and tried to purge the image from my head by dousing my brain with alcohol, I stumbled upon a realization (truth be told, I stumbled on a lot of things that night). What if my sister was as pure and saintly as I imagine her to be? I probably wouldn’t even be able to spend time with her.

Me: Hey Julia, do you want to see a movie?
Julia: Sorry Fran, I have to pray for the poor tonight.

Me: Hey, you wanna’ grab a bite?
Julia: Not when so many around the word are wanting…

Me: Are you going to be around tomorrow?
Julia: No, I have to martyr myself for the betterment of humanity.

Sufficed to say, it would be a drag. So it occurred to me, maybe I don’t need a saint for a sister. I’ll settle for a good person. And I can rest easy in the knowledge that despite the fact she’s not a saint, she is still better than the rest of us.

The Most Existential Post Ever

I wrote it here. You read it here. Neither one of us was actually here.







Did I just blow your mind dude?









Wait! Don't go yet! I didnt mean it, there's more to the post!

This was all meant to illustrate a point. That point is the frequency with which young drug users are fed misinformation, which they then carry with them the rest of their life. Having formerly been (emphasis on formerly) a card-carrying member of the college/drug counterculture, I can tell you that despite the fact that a stoner will refer to existentialism about twenty times during a conversation, he/she will have no idea what it means. One might think this is an isolated problem, but people are overlooking the drug-induced, faux-intellectual epidemic sweeping our country’s youth.
Before we go on lets clarify one or two things about the drug community. Having not dealt with them personally, I have to exclude injection drug users and pill community from our conversation. Sorry guys, keep reading though. My next post is probably going to be on the importance of sterilized needles and what to do when you’re caught at a rave with no pacifier. Moving on. As I see it, there are three major branches of the stoner community that most people will fit into.
1) The College Stoner – Didn’t smoke before college, won’t smoke after college. However during college…wooo! These people will smoke anything that happens to be on fire at the time. They aren’t interested in drug culture though and temper their drug abuse with a healthy dose of alcohol abuse. When they get older they’ll get married, have kids, then yell at the kids for smoking pot.
2) The Life-Long Stoner – These people will most likely be buried in a casket made of hemp. They started smoking before freshmen year in high school and haven’t looked back since. You can tell these people apart from most because they are skinny, wear clothes that smell like if Petuli and weed had a baby, don scraggly facial hair (if male), there is a 60% chance they have dreadlocks and they are in the process of handing you a PETA pamphlet. The Life-long stoner has accepted weed not just as a drug but as a lifestyle, and will probably end up owning some property in Vermont, selling homemade crafts (candles, preserves, wood-carvings) to yuppies at craft fairs.
3) The “Learned” Stoner – This is the problem group that’s disseminating misinformation across an impressionable young stoner community. These are people who consciously decide to mix a mind-numbing drug and dense scholarly material. They started smoking pot to gain a measure of individualism, but still wanted to believe they were better than most people. At some point in their college career they’ll talk about expatriating to France because of America’s “moralistic hegemony,” but won’t because they don’t speak French and are cowards. The Learned Stoner has never played a sport for more than a year but has no problem labeling everyone that enjoys sports as plebeians. Their greatest crime however is their abuse of knowledge. They’ll pick up the works of Kant, Kafka, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard without a teacher to guide them and try to interpret it through their juvenile, drug-addled mind. You might ask, “Why do you hate this group so much?” My answer is simple. They enjoy the idea of being intelligent more than they enjoy actual intelligence. That and they frequently misquote Voltaire. Voltaire deserves better than these douche bags.
Perhaps the best argument against weed is that it will bring your children in contact with group 3. However, I still hold strong to my belief that the most harmful substance in this world is ignorance. Keep your kids ignorance free or they might grow up one day and vote for someone like George W. Bush

The Best Ways: to end someone else's conversation

Look at em’…with their suits, and false smiles, and haughty “I’m a contributing member of society” bourgeoisie bullshit. They’re probably at a conference somewhere in Des Moines, talking about the conference they last met at in Cincinnati. If you’re anything like me (bitter/poor), you resent these binder carrying, name tag wearing, corporate sentries because...in the best-case scenario, you'll probably end up as one. When that day arrives, we'll need something to distract us from the mind numbing tedium of our jobs. So, in that spirit, I'd like to make a few suggestions for how you can disrupt this civil, productive conversation pictured on the right....

For the purposes of this list we'll name the man Ted, and the woman Janet. Ted is from Accounts Receivable, Janet is from Human Resources.

1. (Sliding up behind Ted and putting your arm on his shoulder) "Ted my man! I can't believe you look so crisp after last night! (look at Janet) This guy right here...how do you get that many private dances in one night and still come to work in the same outfit... they should give this guy an award!"
2. "Porn's okay at work as long as I keep it softcore right?"
3. "We're out of coffee, someone needs to make more..."(awkward pause) "Janet, I'm looking at you."
4. "What's company policy on using the freezer as a temporary sperm bank?"
5. "Janet you should know this...is it still sexual harassment if I give her money afterwards?"
6. "Hey Ted you wanna' grab a drink at the bar?" Ted: "Um, its 10 am." "What are you, a Mormon?"
7. "Hey Janet you wanna' grab a drink at the bar?" Janet: "Um, its 10 am." "So that's a no? (turn to Bill and whisper loudly) I think Janet is a lesbian."
8. (Walk up to Ted and slap him firmly across the face) "How could you! I thought what we had was special!" (turn to Janet) "Keep him, he'll just break your heart too."
9. "Tell me Janet, as a woman, do you resent Ted for doing less work and getting paid more?" (walk away briskly)
10. "So Ted, hows the vasectomy working out for ya?"

Hold it right there Kitty!

You know, the word "cute" is thrown around alot these days...but if you'll look to your left, you'll see something way too freaking cute. Normally I would let such cuteness stand alone, for what can I do to enhance it? However, this picture has alot of unanswered questions, and I'd like to take a minute and explore them with you.

First of all, is the kitty merely being reprimanded for some minor misdeed, or is this the end of a long, protracted hostage situation? Perhaps the kitty went on a rampage, shot up a burger joint and took some employees hostage. Sadly, we've all seen it before. Granted this might be difficult seeing as the kitty would have to make a special effort to get a kitty-sized gun that could fit his kitty paws, but if you note the obvious deviance deep in this kitty's eyes, we can't put it past him. Some might say "Well, thats ridiculous, there isnt even a kitty gun in the picture," to which I have to respond: Of course the gun isn't in the picture! This snapshot was obviously taken after the SWAT team had gassed the area and subdued the kitty. Note the grief that seems apparent in the kitty's eyes. Thats not grief my friends. That's tear gas.

Secondly, while the "rampaging kitten" idea seems perfectly valid we can't discount that the kitten might be the victim. That accusing finger on the right may not belong to the owner. The kitten may have gotten outside, and its common knowledge that kitties love having "foldin' money" on them at all times. Its stupid I know, but then again, so are cats.

Finally, we are forced to ask ourselves this basic question: if you were looking at a kitty, and it did that, could you survive the sheer impact of that much cute hitting you at once? It makes me concerned for the photographer.

God bless, and stay alert for rogue kittens.