we have become so obsessed with the evolution of social networking that we forgot what evolution means.

i remember a time when everyone was still creaming their pants over their first gmail invite (yeah, you used to have to be invited to join gmail. it was a crazy time).

but even before that, there was a time when, if i had an AOL account, i could only send email to other AOL members... what? AOL. AOL, it was a service provider. A O L... America On-Li... ah forget it. you hipster kids and your google chromes. it's not like i just mentioned linux, or arpanet, or... arpanet... it was the government data sharing network that spawned the inter... ah forget it, you hipster kids and your snow leopard iPads.

look, this is why social networking is such a problem. everyone wants what's next, what's new, what's hot, but we don't care if it's an evolution, because we're too goddamn self centered and scatter brained to remember what we were just doing, anyway.

myspace is sooo last tuesday, it's totally facebook, now.

but do you even remember why you didn't like myspace? if you did, you wouldn't be on facebook either, because facebook was started up only one year after myspace, and was actually the more popular social networking site at first (none of them were spectacularly popular). the makers of myspace (you know, tom, that guy that forces you to be his friend?) admit that myspace's skyrocketing popularity (only a handful of years ago) basically only happened when they started copying facebook's concept (originally myspace was a data storage site, and geared toward musicians sharing their work online), and facebook's recent rise in popularity only happened when they copied myspace's copy of them (facebook was originally a way for ivy league students to connect and network, but the real money is in morons).

this is where we've failed. we've haven't been evolving, we've simply been revamping the same concept over and over. myspace, a place for musicians to store and share their music. facebook, a place for prestigious university students to connect and share the experience of wearing cable knit v neck sweaters and only having sex with girls that their republican secret society elders select and pay for. wayn (it's a social network, look it up) a place where world travelers can find hosts (and pot dealers) and make friends in order to streamline the couch hopping hippie experience. twitter, a place where realtime cultural chatter can be shared with the whole world all at once.

but it's all been dumbed down to one style of homogenous self entitling social network bullshit.

if we just look back a decade and a half, we can find the answer to the idiocy, and the distaste people have for particular social networks, and we can find our guide in the next evolutionary step for the internet.

step back to a world where i can have a hotmail account, you can have yahoo, sally can have gmail, and bill can host his own email through his business account.

a world where we can all exist on the net in different places, but remain connected to the same network. back when they opened up email hosts, i could get a letter from a gmail account and think, hey i just got mail from a pompous a-hole, or a letter from an AOL account and think, hey i just got mail from 1997. but the point is, we haven't connected the whole world with facebook, or myspace, we've partitioned ourselves off from anyone who doesn't want to be a part of one particular network that doesn't believe in privacy, or that won't stop inviting me to play internet mafia wars, or needs to know my mother's maiden name and what hours she is out of the house and which of her doors/windows is the most concealed from street view just to tell me which sex and the city character i am.

what we need to do is go old school. open the web up again to a place where i can have a wayn account (its a social network! look it up!) and you can have facebook, and sally can have myspace, and bill can host his own profile through his business account, and my homepage will host anyone from any network who is a friend of mine. the key change here is not that every social networking host become homogenous in order to ensure compatibility, but that we accept the fact that we may not be able to force other people to give a crap about us. it may be possible to mainstream things like status updates, or photo sharing, or chat, or notes/bulletins/etc, but the key is to highlight the differences as well, and i would actually prefer that. one thing that does bother me about facebook is how my homepage backlogged every single status update and every comment on every update and every "i like this" or "i don't like this" on and on and on. puke!

that doesn't mean that i don't want to stay connected to those people, or i don't appreciate having access to the parts of their lives that they want to share. i just want to be able to decide when i give a crap about that stuff, and not be put in a position where people can say, i know you read my status update, why didn't you comment, don't you care?

i would love to have a little place on the internet to call my own. a place where i can post some information about myself that i don't mind sharing, and have a little status/motto thing, and a profile picture, and a whole log of other photos, and maybe even some of my writings and animations and things, and it could keep me connected with the whole world, even my friends who prefer to do that through facebook, or myspace, or twitter (oh yeah, here it is...), i just don't want to do it the same way everyone else does it. i don't want you to buy me a virtual martini, or invite me to figure out what season of LOST i am, or all that crap, but you know, i also don't appreciate that facebook events don't work very well (or apparently, at all) when sent to an email address instead of a facebook account. it would be nice if we could all socially network with each other from our own different places. like how in the real world, you can come visit me where i live, and have a different experience that reflects who i am and where i'm from and what i'm interested in, and i can do the same with you. for us all to be connected via the same networking site is like we all live in some giant sterile barracks, where we can only choose from certain available forms of culture or experience. slowly but surely we all become afraid of life outside the walls, and we have to have people that are our "friends" there with us, if we are going to venture out. it's so scary out there, there's myspace monsters, and bebo people who live under the streets and eat little children who claim to be 13 to get facebook profiles.

but if we opened up the internet to become a world where your network and mine could exist in their own way, and my profile could be just exactly how i want it, and not just exactly how i want it within the parameters of what myspace wants it to be, we'd be a lot closer to the social networking world that i think we all want (or maybe we don't. maybe we all want to be drones in some sort of post apocalyptic 1984 style plug and play world where big brother decides what we can do, and how we do it, based on data they have collected from spying on us, but hey, if that's what you want...).

now, without getting too andy in my rooney, anyone who really has an interest in social networking, and opening up the world to truly individualized mobile shared expression would realize that the penultimate invention was the cell phone. it's actually much faster than online chat, email, or any of that crap, and you get to hear people's voices. the only real issue with using a phone instead of the web is that you can't edit or censor yourself before you put yourself out there, and you know what? you'll need to just suck it up and accept the fact that putting yourself out there is really only valid if you do it warts and all. everything else is just a plastic facade, and it's not really you. which is, along with privacy, one of the ills of social networking that can never be cured, so long as humans are what humans are, a majority of people will pretend to be something they are not in order to gain acceptance, and for various reasons, certain people will feel the need to collect data and personal information about you, and use it later for their own advantage. it's part of human nature, we are dishonest and nosy creatures.

and a quick note on human nature: to everyone who thinks that the track we are on is fine, that myspace was totally an upgrade from friendster, and facebook was totally an upgrade from myspace, and twitter was totally an upgrade from facebook, and that every time you switched to a new network you were allowed more freedom to be an individual, and a more authentic experience where people were less fake, and less self absorbed, know this, experts in the fields of business, and sociology, and psychology refer to the friendster/myspace, myspace/facebook, facebook/twitter changeovers as "flocking behavior", you're not doing anything unique, you're simply following the herd.

what's more, doesn't it seem like a wonderful world where we can all be connected and take ideas and experiences from our own lives, and bring them back to the hive, and those ideas will be picked up by others who like them, and then shared throughout the world?

it does kind of give me a warm fuzzy feeling in my heart to think of that sort of universal cultural and interpersonal exchange, but face it, that's not what we've created.

we haven't created a hive where all us little bees can bring our own flavor of honey, and make a great wide world of many flavors, and experiment with new flavors, and teach one another how to make this or that flavor, or why, where we come from, that is the flavor of choice, and tell me, why is the flavor of choice thus where you come from? and please help me experience what you have experienced. what we've created is a hive where corporation is the queen bee, and we all swarm to the hive to be given orders, and told what kind of honey we like, and what kind to make, and we don't need to know why, we just do it because the queen bee knows what's best, and then we take that homogenized world view, that single minded consumerism, that blind obedience, and we all fly back to our worlds and spread the pollen, and make the whole world one bland flavor of honey in new and improved packaging.

we have turned the human experience into one boring unisex brown shoe.

please don't get insecticide in my face next time. a reasonable reaction to a gross overreaction.

well, the unpredictable weather continued today.

it rained for near about 10 minutes this morning, then the warm sun burst through the clouds and immediately began drying things out once more.

yet, as i walked to my car, a government vector control truck drove right in front of me, and sprayed copious amounts of insecticide into the approximately 1'x3' 1/4 deep puddle i was about to walk through to get to the driver door. the amount of poison they sprayed was hardly relative to the size of the puddle, but more like comparable to the size of the puddle.

seriously?

i was gone for an hour and a half, and the puddle was dry when i got back.

it makes me wonder if this happens every time it sprinkles and i just don't notice it because they were driving so slow that their engine was silent, and if they hadn't engulfed me in a mist of ddt, as they almost ran me over, i wouldn't have even known they were there. that is unless i had been previously aware that the foamy surface of the puddles in my neighborhood was caused not by some anomaly of nature, but instead by the abundance of toxic chemicals that had been blasted into them.

all down the road they went, as i was stuck behind their slow moving rig for a block and a half, spraying anything remotely damp with an overkill of pest killer.

now, this is a far cry from the time i was in guadalajara, and saw red flashing lights, and heard blaring emergency horns. as i looked out the window which contained no glass, just a rickety shutter with quite a few slats missing, i saw a huge tanker truck with the vector control markings, and haz-mat emblems spraying insecticide from two fire hoses (one on either side) all over the streets and buildings, creating a fog of noxious deadly chemicals.

why?!

why would you draw so much attention to yourselves like that?!

of course i'm going to open my window and stick my head out when i hear what sounds like a tornado warning system going through a concrete mixer, and see flashing red lights outside my window, and frankly people sticking their heads out of open windows is the last thing you want to happen when you're doing something like blanketing the entire community with deadly poison. just ask the people of yolo county.

one muggy summer day in davis, CA, the radio warned me of an airdrop ddt sweep in the county. this to kill those pesky mosquitoes, ooh, they itch somethin' fierce.

the spray is perfectly safe, coos the voice, but here comes the legal: yolo county vector control advises citizens to stay inside their houses or places of business during the spray, with doors, windows, and vents closed tight. yolo county vector control also recommends keeping anything that you eat with or off of in closed cupboards or drawers until the spray has settled. yolo county vector control would also like to remind you to thoroughly wash any and all fruits or vegetables before eating.

well, that all sounds perfectly safe to me.

look, when i'm on my deathbed, probably in a couple of years, probably with some mysterious carcinogenic disease caused by exposure to modern society's advanced techniques for preserving quality of life, i doubt i'm going to look back on those mosquito free summers and think, "wow, dead at 30, but it was all worth it to avoid a few pesky mosquito bites."

but since this lowly little ol' blog isn't going to stop the powers that be from doing idiotic things like this on a regular basis, can i just make one plea for common sense?

if you have to wear a haz-mat suit just to get anywhere near it, take a little time and do your job cautiously. please don't spray it where i walk (sometimes barefoot, sometimes in shoes that i then wear into my house), or on my car door handle, or on the grill of my car (where driving will cause the fumes to circulate through the hvac system), or into my bedroom window, or all over the front door of my residence, or all up in my ventilation system where it will then blanket my silverware, flatware, and glassware. as you zip up your tyvek jumper with vinyl gloves and strap on your gas mask nice and tight, try and remember that if you see me walking down the street, or poking my head out of my window, don't spray the pesticides in my face, or all over my body from a foot and a half away!

if the goddamn gardener on the corner can turn off his leaf blower when i ride my bike past, i'd think you could have the courtesy to not accidentally poison me from point blank range.

thanks for nothing, government employee idiots!

sincerely,

someone with half a brain.

halitosis busters cream pie brigade! hey, stinky, dentyne ice wants you to raw dog it.

sure, i could bring you the news, but...

in the true spirit of the arbitrary, i bring you not commentary on the news, but rather commentary on the commercials that bring us the news.

now, to the untrained eye, this blog might appear to be mostly about industrialized food and the porn industry, but i find that notion a little... hard... to... swallow.

face it, it only seems that way because most of our lives are spent dealing with sex or food, keeping in mind of course that beer is industrialized food, and you are only drinking it because sexy women told you to, when you bought your car you considered how many cup holders it had and/or how many women would be more likely to fuck you when you casually uttered the phrase e-class, and you watch football and stuff your face with giant sauce covered sausages because you have secret deep seeded homo-erotic tendencies that need to manifest themselves somehow (that tight end really knows how pound it up the middle... hey, wanna see how many hot links i can fit in my mouth?). by the way, the reason you watch football may be the same reason you deep fry your twinkies, because you have a need to overcompensate for the fact that you are eating a banana flavored (true) cream filled cake phallus called a twinkie made by a company called hostess, who's mascot wears nothing but spurs, a cowboy hat, and a neckerchief with hearts on it, he wants to tie you up, and boats that "you get a big delight in every bite!".

and you have to deep fry them like a "real man" to justify how much you enjoy putting them in your mouth, you sick repressed self loathing bastard. oh, hello, awkward thanksgiving. i didn't see you come in.

speaking of things i didn't see you come in.

dentyne ice has a little something to say about safe sex.

it's stupid.

come on, guys and gals. how lame is it to put on a condom, or take the pill?

what's really important is that your future baby mama or daddy has nostril stingingly intense fresh breath.

at least that's the message i get from their new ad campaign featuring little vignettes of people about to get their fuck on, at which point the woman insinuates that the man get something for protection, and the man is apparently prompted to whip out a pack of dentyne (or bum a pack off of his man whore roommate, who of course, keeps a pack in his nightstand drawer for all those minty taste-tastic one night stands).

ok, so maybe i'm not reading enough into this (threw ya a curve there, didn't i?).

maybe dentyne ice is some sort of great new method of contraceptive.

maybe...

breath mints are supposed to enhance oral sex, which i guess deters people from the more penetrative bun in the oven kind.

or maybe you're supposed to chew up a big ol' wad of it and cram it in the woman's vagina like a diaphragm.

or maybe just one little piece packed up against her cervix like a today sponge.

or maybe she's supposed to chew it up, blow a bubble with it, and then roll it on the guy's dick with her mouth like how a prostitute puts on a condom.

perhaps ticTacs are really meant to be little penis corks.

perhaps listerine breath strips are to be used like some sort of dental dam.

perhaps the intense menthol sensation is supposed to burn your genitals until you never ever want to use them for pleasure again.

any way you slice it, if breath fresheners are supposed to be used as prophylactics, it would certainly explain why altoids taste like spermicide smells.

the masses have spoken. direct democracy can work! fried chicken and boobs... cannot.

slow down, trigger. this really doesn't affect the way your life will be lived.

it affects the topic i am about to write about.

i have had more pleas to pontificate about this topic than any other in my brief blogging history. the envelope please:

the KFC susan g komen fried chicken for the cure bucket.

i haven't even written about the KFC double down sandwich, yet, and that's just begging for me to rip it apart.

critically! i meant critically. oh god, just the thought of ripping it apart either with my hands or my teeth makes my blood go all greasy (then again, ripping it apart sexually... that might be the next trend in the 25-to-lifer's repertoire. the new guy on cell block D can breathe a little easier in the shower. all the corn holin's going down in the mess hall on chicken night).

but here we are only a few weeks after the unveiling of meat bread aka the chicken bacon fleshlight, and the colonel has teamed up with a breast cancer awareness fundraising group.

where do i begin?

perhaps with the contradiction inherent in pairing up a charitable organization that promotes a cure for cancer and a corporate franchise that promotes a diet that probably gives you cancer?

maybe i should discuss what a shock to my american system it was to see the iconic red and white bucket of dead chicken parts made over in shades of pink, and how the colonel's fancy pants neck tie thing, makes him look not so much like a southern gentlemen when he's done up in pink pastel, but more like a 65 year old lesbian.

maybe i should explain how afraid i am that we are one step away from breast cancer ribbon shaped bacon and pink ranch dressing between our breaded and fried chicken tits (or within our breaded and fried chicken masturbation aides, as the case may be, but chicken ejaculate comes later... cums later? someone want to explain to me why i impose the fast food industry and the porn industry upon each other so often in my life. moving on...).

maybe i'm appalled by something that one of the voters pointed out, which oddly i was thinking right before i read his email. maybe i'm appalled by the notion of women going in for a cancer screening, and having their funbags poked and prodded by greasy fried chicken covered fingers. the oily crumbs in your armpits mean she cares. now go home and see how fast your husband wants to suck on your all white meat boneless tenders, now that you smell like the dumpster behind KFC (someone want to explain to me why i use the phrase "smells like the dumpster behind KFC" so often in my life?). just watch out for his blue cheese ranch dipping sauce. it stings if it gets in your eyes.

should i be appalled that susan g komen encourages you not only to walk 60 miles in 3 days, but also to participate in things like team in training, and other organizations and activities that get you out and active, whereas KFC encourages you to replace your bread course with a second meat course, and eat so much deep fried chicken that they need to serve it to you in a fuckin' bucket?

perhaps i should be outraged that just because KFC is the most visible counter-sponsor for susan g, it is not the only. no, no. susan g komen's sponsorship goes all the way up to the general. general mills, who bring you such mammary euphemistic parts of your complete breakfast as lucky charms, and reese's puffs cereal (yeah, you'll be calling boobs lucky charms and reese's puffs soon enough). general mills, who bring you such healthy breast nicknames as gushers fruit snacks (in reality the candy is more akin to giant, edible, malignant tumors. now stomping out cancer in delicious razznipple red, and candy cantalobe), and hamburger helper (in this case, your sweater meat is the hamburger... look, they're helping!).

komen is also sponsored by one of the general's other major brands, yoplait, who offer such probably cancer causing treats as trix yogurt, and go-gurt (known in the UK as frubes... true, and just see how fast you start calling boobs "frubes").

komen is also sponsored by frito-lay. remember them? they invented anal leakage.

now, whether susan g komen is using these companies for their money, or these companies are using komen to gloss over their reputations, or there is some notion of saving the corporate soul, or that has been cast aside and the corporations are just seeking to expand their markets to the health and lifestyle conscious demographics, who really knows. all i know is that this is about as close as we've come as a religious species to seeing some "god" and some "devil" strike a deal at the cost of the citizens of their kingdom.

but so far, none of this stuff appalls me, really, because none of it really shocks me, though i will admit to having a total WTF moment when i saw that big pink bucket in the colonel's window.

what really gets me about the susan g colonel breasts for boobs thing, is the commodification of breasts in general. they have become marginalized by 2 groups for which astrodomes are the main focus of their business model.

if not for tatas, susan g komen would have to get oscar mayer to sponsor their prostate cancer fundraiser (hotdogs are made of rectum, you know...).

if chickens didn't have such delectable bra rockets, those seven secret herbs and spices would only adorn the lowly leg and wing bits (the wings with bones, boneless wings are just hacked up chesticle meat).

does it not seem like a contradiction to the people at susan g, that they are trying to save the shoulder boulders in order to save lives and promote proud womanhood, while KFC's entire business is based around killing, skinning, and cutting off a chicken's snuggle bunnies and preparing them to eat, then telling their customers that you aren't man enough unless you eat an entire bucket's worth?

hey, i'm on susan g's side here, so far as i can be (in this case we can ignore how much i hate brand name charity, as mentioned a few posts ago). i am a big fan of everlasting gobstoppers, but the notion that we should save our own milk duds at the cost of a systematic slaughter of another species for the sole purpose of mutilating and consuming their jell-o jigglers is counter productive.

it's yet another example of the religious empowerment of the human race. not that there's anything inherently religious about any of this, but i tend to believe that religion is the most potent source of our species' superiority complex over the rest of the animal kingdom.

but it gets even weirder when you look at the specifics, not just that we are saving the hooters by eating at hooters, but that we are attempting to stop an affliction that causes the cells of the breasts to mutate and grow out of control, eventually killing the animal, by encouraging an industry that causes the cells of the breasts to mutate and grow out of control, eventually killing the animal.

factory raised poultry is pumped so full of hormones and chemicals and medicines in order to ensure big juicy brownie points, that the bird's girl scout cookies grow so large as to completely inhibit its ability to move, as well as breed.

factory raised poultry is artificially inseminated. odd? fuck yes, that's odd! at what point does hiring a guy to squirt sriracha sauce up a hen's chicken soft taco, thousands of times a day, become more cost feasible than just feeding the chickens and letting them roam around and build up their muscles on their own?

or even simply selling a slightly smaller chicken breast to the public.

wazzah?

but we're americans and we like our hood ornaments huge, our windbreakers puffy, our tetons grand, and our warheads nuclear. we like 2 scoops of raisins, and vitamin D milk. we prefer our macaroons coconut, please, and our umlauts uber-. we drive with the high beams on, we like 10 gallon hats, and hefty cinch saks, and as great a euphemism as kumquats is, we don't even know what a kumquat is. you know why? because kumquats are tiny, leathery little things, and we don't take kindly to no tiny leathery little things 'round these here parts.

i've seen turkey breasts that, if they were the pectorals on a human male, that man could put a hurtin' on shaq with one hand tied behind his back, but he'd have to bend over to do so. on the other end of the spectrum, if they were the watermelon bubble yums of a human female, her ability to breed would certainly not be inhibited, as she would almost certainly be a porn star. and these are the jigga what's of a turkey. admittedly, the turkey is a large bird, but i'm talking about gun boats that would make you say, "wow, that ostrich is stacked to the rafters!".

so there you have it. lesbian colonel sanders, and brand name charity aside, what really tweaks my udders about this whole thing, is how a really great idea like curing breast cancer, promoting a healthy and active lifestyle, and encouraging pride in womanhood has finally jumped the shark, and sold out to a corporation that, in every way, promotes the exact opposite end of the spectrum.

if we keep this up, the closest thing we're going to get to sexy women is a pair of extra crispy tenders, and a double down sandwich, extra ranch, please!

retooling the tonight show, one tool at a time.

i wouldn't call myself a jay leno fan.

well, ok, maybe that's going to far...

i would say that i hate jay leno's comedy. ok, that's a little more reasonable.

yet, somehow, like so many other things, i have seen enough of, or heard enough about it to be able to speak on it. so here i go: jay leno's WHCD schtick was totally recycled, and i knew that even before politico released this little nugget. dude, leno, your corny. hang it up, man.

look, leno, i know you're a comedian, and too be fair, you certainly ripped on the bush administration enough, but i feel like you don't know how to walk that line between lampooning the absurd, or the unfortunate, or the idiotic, and making disparaging comments that will actually hurt the cause of something positive.

this of course is only my opinion of what is positive, but i don't think that there's any subjectivity to the statement that leno skews way right these days, and his comedy doesn't just push obama toward good things by publicly shaming him where he fails, but also publicly scolds him where he succeeds, and creates a leno fan base that (often too ignorant to get their news anywhere else) will have a warped view of this administration. now, call it what you will, liberal double standard, hypocrisy, but i just feel like bush didn't do much good in the world, while obama is trying to. where leno's bush years comedy was more like pointing out the obviously comical, his obama years comedy is off in the realm of taking fox news talking points and dumbing them down (watch his show, discover that it is possible) into a bonehead one-liner formula.

so what could we have expected when he gets the political comedy gig of a lifetime, and doesn't even bother to write new material?

"cash for flunkers", jay? seriously?

that joke is hardly even funny the first time around. even if you consider things that simply rhyme to be funny, this joke is pretty elementary.

and he's standing in front of the most elite crowd of the year, dumpster diving through his own old, hack material.

comedically speaking, obama wrecked leno.

much like i advocate making dubbya and palin the new host and hostess of the wheel of fortune (because he is good at asinine banter with simpletons, and she might be able to recognize the english alphabet if it were presented to her, one letter at a time, on giant glowing TV screens) i say, give obama the tonight show. he's charismatic, smooth, funny, and he knows a thing or two about current events. meanwhile, leno is pointing out typos in small town penny-saver ads, poorly ripping off SNL skits, still dunking on paris hilton (yep... still), cackling his way through his completely hacked "jay walking" man-on-the-street bits, and sticking his tongue up celebrities asses.

what's more, i can stand to listen to obama's voice for more than 3 consecutive seconds. leno, on the other hand, gets the dogs in my neighborhood all worked up, and then i'm listening to blood curdling squealing from all directions (yeah, that's right, leno's voice sounds like the loosing party in a chihuahua fight).

and frankly, i'll take gaffin' joe on guitar any day over kevin eubanks. fuck, man, eubanks is such a toooooooool. but even better, lets go trans-administration. let's get gaffin' joe in the announcer booth, and get slick willy clinton on sax as the band leader. at least gaffin' joe can put a sentence together. can't say as much for stuttering john. besides, with slick willy as side-kick, all the jokes about chasing young tail will ring comically true, not just creeppily plausible, like with eubanks.

obama set up shop on leno's face at the WHCD.

come on, man, "you know what really tickles me? ... eric massa." that's fucking gold.

"true love is the hardest thing to find... well, that and a birth certificate" dude, that's conan level self-deprecation right there.

having recently had the chance to see conan o'brien live, i can comfortably say that there is no one i'd rather watch on late night TV.

he truly was the rightful heir to the tonight show throne.

but that throne has been sullied. sullied by leno and his tired ass captain sully jokes, and conan doesn't want it anymore. so fine, i will follow coco to TBS. he has more than earned my adoration. but as for leno, by presidential decree, i say we air drop his ass out in the middle of the sahara with kevin eubanks, stuttering john, and nothing but one of his old stanley steamer million dollar classic cars with the water tank running low.

it could be a new NBC reality show. now that's a leno i'd watch in the 10PM slot.

sometimes you gotta say, "fuck it, i'm going to a peta anti-foie gras rally in yountville, california"

and fuck it, i will.

hey, why not?

as misguided, unfruitful, or just plain back-asswards as peta's efforts can be at times, they still have fantastic intentions (this according to me), and do more for animal rights in this country than any other org.

so why not go to a one hour rally, at a restaurant that most people have never heard of, in a city no one has ever heard of, in a state that has already passed legislation creating an impending ban on the thing being protested?

why not indeed.

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a brief history of the french laundry

the french laundry (is the name snooty enough for ya?) in yountville, CA is a restaurant that is so good that you have to be somebody amongst somebodys just to get on the months and potentially years long waiting list to spend $250 a plate on a fixed 2 meal menu (plus wine, selected from their prestigious 101 page list). an eatery voted "best restaurant in the americas" (yes that says americas, as in two friggin' continents), a restaurant that received 3 stars (highest honor) in the michelin guide, an honor only bestowed upon 81 establishments in the entire world (the michelin guide is so goddamn snooty that the rankings are defined as such: one star "a very good restaurant in its category, worth a stop", two stars "excellent cooking, worth a detour", three stars "exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey", dude, i consider cho's dim sum to be exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey, and i'm pretty sure he deep fries his spring rolls in decades old rancid squirrel grease, so the michelin guide is not exactly loosey goosey with the compliments), a restaurant so high maintenance in its cuisine that the chef will par cook an egg, then remove the yolk with a razor blade, season, and whip it, then place it back inside the white to finish cooking so that it will have not just the perfect palate, but the perfect texture, in an enigmatically flawless package (how did this chicken lay a chocolate mousse flavored egg?).

despite a ban that will go into effect in 2012, it appears thomas keller, the chef at the french laundry, will continue serving foie gras until he is actually legally prohibited from doing so. chefs the likes of wolfgang puck have already stopped serving foie gras in their CA establishments, but then again, they have a higher profile, and more product to move.

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a brief history of foie gras

foie gras (pronounced fwah grah, and translated as fat liver, which just goes to show exactly how refined the french are. being that foie gras is a french cuisine, we can imagine that ordering it in france would be similar to going to an american diner and ordering a "slice of the rotting pig corpse", instead of a "pork chop") is the fattened liver of a duck or goose. fattened through force feeding the animal corn, as dictated by french law (seriously). foie gras is such a fancy pants delicacy that it is typically served in one of four ways, of which pâté is the least fancy.

having been born in a country where we think that the fanciest things in the world are champagne, caviar, and pâté, it's hard to believe that there are three levels of foie gras fancier than pâté, especially since foie gras caviar is impossible, and foie gras champagne is almost less appealing than actively participating in 2 girls 1 cup. as an ignorant american, i can only assume then that the 4 levels of foie gras in ascending order are 4) foie gras pâté, 3) supersize foie gras pâté, 2) supersize foie gras pâté with cheese, and 1) the supersize bacon ranch foi gras pâté with cheese (actually: pâté, parfait, mousse, and whole meat).

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is it me or does tortured meat seem to make the most luxurious meals?

force fed migratory fowl yield foie gras.

genetically mutated, non-ambulatory barn foul make damn tasty fried chicken, and low fat alternatives to red meat (gotta love that turkey jerky).

baby cows slaughtered before they are able to walk are $72/lb veal chops.

compared to the above, castrating the cow to "purify" it so that it can be certified kobe beef seems almost tame when you take into consideration the beliefs that kobe beef cows must also be served beer daily, massaged with sake, and brushed to tame and manage their fur.

i don't know if i'd trade my testicles for a lifetime of beer and asian massages (after all, without my fun bits, how could i enjoy the happy ending?) but i'd certainly give up my man nuggets before i submitted to the life of a chicken nugget.

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all in all, i'm not sure why i want to go to this peta thing.

maybe it's because after years of supporting peta's ultimate goals, i feel like i owe them a little effort by way of supporting their means (and i certainly wasn't about to get on the sea kitten bandwagon, or throw paint on liz taylor).

maybe it's because fancy restaurants make me uncomfortable, and i'd like to stand outside one with an angry mob, yelling at the chef.

but probably it's becuase i can't resist the sheer randomness in the prospect of waking up sturday morning and saying to myself, "fuck it, i'm going to a peta anti-foie gras rally in yountville, california. i'm going to the most prestigious culinary establishment in the western hemisphere, and i'm gonna burn that mother down."

update 2: i may never get to sleep at this rate...

BP, the company responsible (or one of them, anyway) for the oil spill has a solution very much in line with gene taylor's solution, but a little more proactive:

let the spill break up and dissolve.

BP isn't just going to let the sun and wind take care of that though.

oh, no, BP has a plan:

dispersants.

BP is using chemicals that can dissolve and disperse oil spills when used in high volume.

sounds great right?

wrong. not only has BP already bought up fully one third of the entire world's supply of dispersants, and yet there is no end to the leak in sight (meaning we will run out of them well before the leak stops, apparently on its own, i guess is BP's mode of thought. remember how the nazis wanted to dam off the straight of gibraltar, and drown the mediterranean, but there actually isn't enough concrete in the world to do that? yeah, it's kind of like that. herman sörgel would be so proud), but the dispersants are known, known as in we already know them to be more toxic and hazardous than raw oil.

oh good...

for a second there i thought we were going to experience some long term effects from this whole thing. turns out the real long term effects will be from the solution.

now i can rest easy...

update: this is what they thought was going to happen...

you know, sometimes i say/write shit, just because i'm in the heat of things, and want to represent an extreme emotional response, simply to get an extreme emotional response.

then i read something like this and it blows my mind...

i was 100% right.

rep gene taylor said, "people shouldn't be so scared" about the spill in the gulf, "it's not as bad as i thought" and that the spill looked like "rainbows and chocolate milk".

oh.

OH!

how stupid of me!

if it looks like rainbows and chocolate milk, it can't be bad. in fact i bet it's a magical miracle from the lord jesus himself!

we drilled so deep we killed satan, and the earth is rewarding us by erupting in rainbows and chocolate milk!

zipitty fucking doo dah!

hurrah! huzzah!

tell you what taylor. you can have the first glass of chocolate milk, and let me know how it tastes.

this fucking a-hole took a 3 hour tour from 1,000 feet above the spill, and he thinks it will "break up" on its own very quickly.

er...

uhhhhhhh...

break up?

how so, fuck face?

and even if the spill did "break up" where would the pieces go?

they'd still be floating around in the ocean somewhere. or washing up on some shore.

or shall we just assume that the feathered and furry aminals will coat themselves in rainbows and chocolate milk and fly away with it to a magic land called extinction junction, and we can resume cranking out 8mpg behemoths over at the nummi plant (just kidding, toyota closed the nummi plant months ago, displacing thousands of jobs. jokes on... those thousands of recently unemployed people who can't collect unemployment because the state thought it more productive to sit around measuring their cocks than pass a budget, and the fed thought it better to play legislative chicken with people's lives. go congress, go prius!)

even more good news from rep taylor. the plan is to let nature take its course and allow the spill to evaporate on its own time(?).

oh, good. for a second there, i thought we were going to have to do something... to help alleviate the catastrophic effects of our ignorant and selfish actions.

that was a close one.

errrr... what exactly did you think was going to happen?

so i know i don't post here as often as i should. but the fact is, i write a ton of stuff either when i've been drinking, or post-ultra realistic dream... that kind of thing, and i just don't have the confidence in the piece to put it out there until i've proof read it while clear headed, and it's not that i don't like it when i'm thinking straight, it's just that i never go back to it.

but you know, i think it's time i just didn't queue it up for post. time that i just let it spill out, to gush forth like black, iridescent fossil fuels from beneath the gulf of mexico.

so here it is...

i'm a guy. just a guy. just a guy who knows a girl. just a girl who was born to a guy. just a guy who is responsible for placing haliburton in the persian gulf.

and you know what?

this girl is one of the most stand up, selfless girls in the whole world.

and i doubt her father is a bad person.

how could he be?

he made a pretty amazing child.

so when i hear that haliburton is on deck to take this whole gulf of mexico spill on the chin, what's a guy to think?

i know haliburton is a fucked up, amoral corporate whore-fest that only wants to make a buck, and if they happen to ruin a large portion of the planet, well, most of them make enough money to move somewhere that they didn't destroy.

and certainly i don't plan on defending them simply because i personally know someone who might be hurt if i went for the throat.

but this is my life.

i think and act often in cold rational detachment, mostly because i have to, mostly because i find myself in these conundrums in which personal experience, and logical thought come to a baffling and contradictory intersection right on my goddamn face.

and ultimately people get hurt, because we are people, and we don't deal in cold rational detachment, even if it gets the conundrum off your face.

but i don't really feel like going for the throat here... why? you ask.

because we were drilling holes, miles deep in the earth, with the intention of dredging up billions of gallons of toxic sludge.

and we fucked up.

no goddamn shit.

what the fuck did we think was going to happen?

that we were going to drill so deep that we would never run out of oil?

or that we would drill so precise that we could never in a million years make a mistake?

mistake or no, this was bound to happen eventually.

ever heard of an earthquake?

a volcanic eruption?

i should fucking hope you've at least heard of a volcanic eruption.

remember last week when you couldn't get a flight back from your wine tour of the parisian countryside because iceland spewed all over eurasia? yeah, that's a volcanic eruption, and shit like that happens, without warning, all the time. especially in places where large, odd, and extremely deep punctures in the earth's crust happen to be.

so ladi fucking dah. here we are with the left hand punching in the launch codes to blast innocent brown people into keeping our gas prices under 4 bucks, and the right hand holding a sign proclaiming "drill, baby, drill!".

and new orleans gets a giant metaphorical cock up the ass, once again.

meanwhile, the government owns a car company that the taxpayers are bailing out, and congress is calling them out for lying to the public, and not even about the things the public knows that that company is lying about, which it is, but we seem to be ok with those things, because we've been lied to about them long enough that it's almost weird if we're not being lied to about them. and one of the things that that company is lying about, yet nobody seems to give a shit about, is their gas mileage, but you know what? nobody cares that that company is lying about it because nobody gives a shit where gas comes from.

as long as it comes from that little nozzle at the ARCO, what difference does it make?

well, when it stops coming from that little nozzle at the ARCO, and starts coming bursting out of the ocean floor at about a thousand gallons a minute, it actually makes a big difference.

we just went from slowly strangling the environment, to instantly drowning it.

fuck fuck fuck, fuckitty fuck fuck, fuck fuckin fuck.

are we this stupid?

i submit that the answer is so above and beyond, far and away, some concept so yes-like, that there is actually no possible way for human brains to understand how much the answer is yes.

not a bunch of human brains that created the situation that we are now in.

you FUCKing idIOTS!

we have absolutely, and for a very long period of time, demolished the nature of a very large portion of the planet.

uhhhhhhhhh...

do you think it might be time to stop now?

you know, i do. but as for a majority of the world, let me take a wild guess...

i submit that their answer is so above and beyond, far and away, some concept so no-like, that there is actually no possible way for my brain to understand how much the answer is no.

do our children literally need to drown in spilled petroleum before we cut this shit out?

you know what? why do i even ask silly questions like that?

we get cancer, birth defects, and record SIDS numbers from carcinogens we put into the atmosphere. we blame someone else.

we get diabetes, and heart disease from foods we choose to consume. and we blame someone else.

we create new continents made entirely of garbage in 5 separate places on the aquatic map. we blame someone else.

we live miserable, pathetic, sheltered, unhappy lives for a staggeringly long time. we blame someone else.

the list goes on. the punchline stays the same... we blame someone else.

some people may wonder why i hate the world.

ha.

that list is long and depressing.

but if we break it down to just one topic...

chernobyl, three mile island, exxon valdez, the gulf coast spill, the persian gulf wars, the explosion of cancers, hiroshima, nagasaki, agent orange (brought to you by the producers of valero gas, think again before you fill up at that trendy new petrol station. think about vietnamese children with fabric patterns melted into their skin...) the pacific garbage gyre, styrofoam (packing peanuts), asbestos, CFLs (danger: product contains a toxic amount of mercury. but they last so much longer, so long as you don't follow up on that claim...) silicone surgical implants, animal testing, animal cruelty, the amount of petroleum and other deadly pollutants necessary to make just one single cel of film (seriously, one film is the equivalent of a tire fire like the size of the empire state building, and i won't even tell you what it takes to make those lithium ion batteries that your prius runs on...), and why we waste that on shit like hot tub time machine... seriously, do i need to go on?

i swear to god, every morning that someone doesn't find me hanging by a belt from the rafters, must be some kind of miracle, because that depressing list is just a portion of one, one single topic for which i find myself completely and utterly depressed, disgusted, and disappointed with this life that i've heard so much about.

we cannot undo the things we have done, and now we will raise many generations of children who won't know that the mississippi delta shouldn't be black and greasy.

does life suck this much when people are stupid enough to create this kind of a world?

i submit that yada yada yada... yes.

congratulations. i'm almost certain that 99.9999999999% of the population will have learned nothing from this.