So my friendly local tobacconist informed me that the flavored cigarette ban goes into effect August first. So if you want some clovey goodness, or that last pack of Sweetwaters, today is the day.

The pretext of this new law is basically that flavored cigarettes somehow trick otherwise unsuspecting kids into wanting to smoke. Right. Most of my friends either are, or were, smokers. I can't think of a single one of them that ever said, "Pfft, smoking is for chumps. Wait, what? They come in vanilla? Well that's different. Sign me up!" Flavor isn't really a big factor when you're fourteen and sneaking drags behind the gym with your friends. Flavored cigarettes are generally the kind of thing that people only start smoking well after they've already started smoking. On top of that, with the exception of those nasty PrimeTime stogies they sell at 7-11, flavored cigarettes are mostly only sold in specialty tobacco shops. Specialty tobacco shops are not where kids go to try and get their cancers, because a) it's inconvenient, and b) tobacco shops card everybody (I'm almost thirty, I go into the cigarette store by my work like twice a week, and I still get carded! Every. Freaking. Time).

But no, Obama says flavored cigarettes have to go--menthols too, apparently. Which is a pretty serious dick-move considering that Obama (reportedly) still manages to pack a few puff sessions into his busy schedule. Normally I wouldn't blame something like this directly on Obama--I don't dig getting into that Bill O'Reilly/Glenn Beck sort of headspace--but this one comes to us via a presidential directive. Straight from the top. You really have to wonder what goes through a politician's head sometimes: Hey, here's a bill that will solve nothing, piss off a big chunk of my constituents, and make me look like a total hypocrite. Well, that's for me!

Fucking idiocy.

I know for many of you, your inner goth is screaming, "Nooooo! Not my cloves! How ever will I make my lungs as black as my soul now!?" But fret not, Djarum apparently now makes clove "cigars" (yes, as always, the newest bullshit tobacco law doesn't apply to cigars. Shocking, I know). You might be thinking, Clove cigars? Yuck!. And that was my first thought too, but the girl behind the counter (would that make her a tobacconista? That's a good band name) gave me a couple to try, and they're pretty much exactly the same as the cloves I was buying before. They're slightly fatter, a little smoother, but are otherwise exactly the same. You gotta love that good ol' American sense of selective reasoning. I'm sure calling them "cigars" is totally going to fool everyone.

If Sarah Palin ever had a coherent thought go through her head, I'm pretty sure it died of loneliness. Listening to her give a press conference is fucking painful. I don't know how any of the talking monkeys at the cable news networks ever managed to get through an interview with her with a straight face. If there were any journalistic integrity left in this country, every other question in the interview would be, "Excuse me, what the fuck are you talking about?" I swear she must have ripped her style of rhetoric straight out of the pages of a dystopian science fiction novel.

Also,

Dear Microsoft,

Fuck you, and fuck your automatic updates.

I only got up to get a glass of water. It's not like I was in the middle of working on something I'd just spent hours on.

If I ever see you on the street, I will fucking cut you.

Sincerely,
Me

They posted The Doom Generation up on Hulu. It's got Perry Farrel, Skinny Puppy, Margaret Cho, the people who played Marcy D'Arcy and Peter Brady, Heidi Fleiss, the guy from 21 Jumpstreet (not Johnny Depp, the Vietnamese guy), and Rose McGowan's tits from back when that still meant something. Plus some stupendously bad acting. I mean god-awful, fucking horrible acting. It's good stuff.

I hadn't seen it in over ten years. I only bother mentioning it for the benefit of those of you who will feel nostalgic about watching it again (you know who you are). Oddly, the last time I watched it I was sitting on the floor, less than a block from where I'm sitting right now, in Misha and Corndogg's apartment drinking 50/50s of Jim Beam and purple Kool-Aid. Brought back a lot of memories I'd totally forgotten about.

I still want that belt buckle. 

Good times.

I'm a little torn about how I feel about this. On the one hand, it's kinda awesome. But on the other hand, ouch, my childhood.

This is quite possibly the absolute coolest thing I have ever seen, ever!

You know you're digging yourself a hole when even your own fan club is saying shit like this about you:



Jesus, Barack, you were a constitutional lawyer for fuck's sake! What the hell? Don't you think you of all people ought to know better?

P.S. - I'm not real thrilled that you're taking away Vicoden and my cloves either.

So Michael Jackson is dead. Heart attack, they say. But me, I'm not so sure. I say he was murdered. Assassinated, actually.

One might ask, But who would do such a thing!? Assassinate the King of Pop!?. Ridiculous! If true, one might suspect a disgruntled parent with a vendetta from all that, erm, "unpleasantness" a while back. But one would be mistaken. No. I say he was killed by the Iranian government. Injection of Demerol in lethal dosage. Purpose: to dishearten the pro-Mousavi movement.

One might say, Dan, that's the dumbest goddamned thing I've ever heard. But is it? Is it really so far-fetched? Michael Jackson might be a cartoonish self-parody here in the US, but in the rest of the world--places like Iran--the level of his fame is completely unquantifiable. There he is loved. And when you consider the fact that the latest and best idea to quash the protests in Tehran is a freaking Lord of the Rings marathon, it suddenly becomes a lot more plausible, doesn't it? 

So there you have it. Michael Jackson, dead at the age of fifty, victim of political intrigue. You heard it here first.

Also, something that's been on my mind ever since the protests first started--and I know I'm not alone in this because Indigo said something to the same effect the other day--how are all the female protesters so ridiculously hot!? I mean, you just wanna run up to them and be all like "Hey kitten, how you doin'? Aww, you're being oppressed? Why don't you come on back to my place, let me make it all better."

And yes, I am, in fact, aware that I am a complete bastard.

So glad it's finally the weekend.

This week was fucking bizarre. Doctors and dentists and crazy gotta-get-this-shit-done-two-days-ago stuff at work (which is weird considering how slow we are at the moment). A full night's sleep is starting to seem like some kind of abstract concept that only ever really happens in fairytales or something. I've been pretty much running on latte and the weird greasy adrenaline thing that happens when you've been running short on sleep for too long. I'd probably just pass out face down and do some kind of coma thing for a couple of days, but I can't. I have a whole long list of shit that has to be done by Saturday night, some of which involve some serious baking.

My trip to the doctor left me with a massive heroin-addict bruise on my left arm from having blood drawn, but since my trip to the dentist on Thursday I now have all my teeth again! It's awesome, but also weird. I had a tooth pulled like seven or eight years ago because I was too broke at the time to afford a root canal. I got so used to not having that tooth that now that I have a permanent bridge there it feels all creepy and unnatural. Chewing is a lot nicer though. Flossing, on the other hand, is a lot more complicated now and requires tools.

As nice as it is to have all my teeth again, I can't help thinking of it terms of what I could've gotten instead: a brand new top-tier Les Paul; a MacBook; a shiny shiny new Gretsch plus a bunch of effects pedals I've been meaning to get since dirt was new; that Blue Voodoo half-stack I've been wanting forever; a plane ticket to London; a quality (though fairly low-end) katana; and I don't even want to think about what it adds up to in books and fountain pens. Oh well. Not like I can return it or anything.

I should be sleeping right now, but my brain seems wholly unwilling to shut off. For the moment I'm stuck in wide-awake mode, yet completely unable to focus enough to accomplish anything constructive. So instead of doing any of the long list of things I should be doing, I'm sitting here at 4:00 in the morning listening to Coast to Coast Am, reading Dharma Punx with a head full of Vicodin (which is a fairly ironic thing to be doing), and writing blogs about shit that nobody probably actually gives a crap about. Sleep disorders are a bitch.

Good times.