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The North American Wild Kafka



Last Updated: 11/23/2007

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Gender: Male
Status: Single
Age: 28
Sign: Cancer

City: TUCKER
State: Georgia
Country: US
Signup Date: 2/17/2006

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Thursday, June 19, 2008 
I've been talking about it for some time, and now it's finally happened: this blog has escaped the internet ghetto of myspace! Check me out here. Read. Register. Comment. 
12:04 PM 
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Monday, June 09, 2008 
  • Due to the French Open (Roland Garros to the initiated), my DVR won't have a broadcast of Meet the Press until very early Monday morning, and, on top of that, it decided to record static in place of Stephanopolous. Having become accustomed to mainlining national politics at my leisure on Sundays, I've been relegated to viewing Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, who I previously had assumed to be permanently relegated to The Situation Room. (What is a situation room? Why isn't there one in my home? What if I encounter a "situation"?)
    Blitzer has Dianne Feinstein and Kay Bailey Hutchison in an Obama/McCain surrogate argument. Here are some Kay Bailey Hutchison quotations that hurt my brain:
    "[McCain] wants nuclear power plants, the cleanest, most efficient form of energy which is great for the environment." Nuclear plants are a feasible technology for tiding us over until the Southwest can be tiled with solar panels, but this is the first time I've heard anyone claim that nuclear waste is "great for the environment."
    "We cannot bring down the cost of gasoline at the pump unless we produce more, and that means nuclear power." Uhhh, what?
    Needless to say, the senior senator from Texas makes Dianne Feinstein look good, and the head shot on Dianne Feinstein right now bears an uncanny resemblance to an aging drag queen - or Liza Minelli.

  • The premiere of season 3 of The L Word includes a reference to "the myth of the vaginal orgasm." Gee, I hope not. I mean, granted, that would simultaneously validate my emotional castration and oral fixation, but it would also mean that the twenty minutes I spent reading about how to find the G spot were completely wasted.
    I'm glad I possess the more user-friendly model of genitalia.

  • Iron-Jawed Angels is running on one of the HBO channels at the moment. Beyond its outstanding cast, the narrative of suffrage's accomplishment is quite moving, in that big-budget Braveheart kind of way.
    Watching, I got to thinking about how the impetus to make the movement more aggressive came from the younger suffragettes (though the correct term, this strikes me as somehow condescending). What, then, are we, the relatively-not-old members of the electorate to do with our youthful vigor? The problem, as I see it, isn't merely generalized apathy, but a lack of simple answers. Sure, there are big issues to address: health care reform, the need for better public education, organized extrication from Iraq, and reorganizing the tax structure to facilitate a viable middle class are all worthy tasks. They are not, however, problems fit to be solved with a pithy slogan and a single act of congress.
    Well, actually, come to think of it, there doesn't seem to be anyone pushing a constitutional amendment guaranteeing health care at the moment, despite its slight plausibility. That thought, however, is neither here nor there because the logistic involved in enacting such an amendment would raise the same kinds of complex questions that arise in current debates.
    No, we shouldn't have invaded Iraq, but now that we're there, it seems irresponsible and self-defeating to abandon the country before reconstruction is at least viably under way. Yes, I'd prefer to be guaranteed health care regardless of my income or employment situation, but I don't know how to reconcile that desire with the devaluation of existing goods and services implicit in even a single-payer system (as opposed to full-on nationalized health care).
    To provide the inevitable analogy, perfecting a government appears to be like moving: you think you're almost done when you've spent four hours getting your appliances on the van, but then it takes two days to pack all the knick-knacks and loose ends.

  • Forthwith, Mark Stokes will be migrating Northward to take a position in Manchester (bent over?). Godspeed through Taxachusetts.

"In oranges and women, courage is often mistaken for insanity." - Iron-Jawed Angels. Suffer silently, sultry suffragettes. SoberNomad, out.

3:25 AM 
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Wednesday, June 04, 2008 
  • We need to have a serious and candid discussion about the differences between things like penises and vaginas; testosterone and estrogen.
    Because we're officially on the summer TV schedule, I recently felt the need to bolster my viewing with streaming video from Netflix. Even there, though, there isn't a whole lot worth watching that I haven't already seen. Thus, I came to watch The L Word. Now, I entered into this viewing endeavor with an appreciation for Dan Savage's enjoinder to remember that fiction is fiction. As he noted on This American Life, you wouldn't want kids learning about gay people from their TV depictions any more than you'd want them learning about straight people from "those breeders on Desperate Housewives." At the same time, I'm a bit thrown off by the behavior of The L Word's characters.
    My puzzlement comes from the fact that the fictional ladies of West Hollywood make more questionable choices about their nether regions than most people I know, yet the nuances of their actions don't quite comport with my phallocentric notions of irresistable lust. Being more sedate, more seductive, more, well, foreplay-oriented than my own conception of the biological imperative, these women's coital indescretions strike me as being also less comprehensible than many other depictions of similar undertakings. I have to wonder whether this disconnect is a failure in the fiction, an inability for me as a straight man to understand the whole lesbian "thing," or an exacerbation of my own narrow understanding of female sexuality.
    The idea of a general disconnect between the genders' understanding of lust was brought to a finer point by this post to Slate's XX Factor blog. Here's the clenching sentence: "It's pretty rare that I see a man I want to have sex with...So rare, in fact, that when I do find myself attracted to someone it is a very powerful feeling." Admittedly, I live a pretty celibate life, but I still think I can speak for my gender when I say that the previous quotation expresses an inversion of my experience. On any given day I leave the house, I expect to encounter at least a few women with whom I will be consciously aware that I am not having sex at the moment. Believe it or not, I actually have some academic data to confirm my assertions.
    After a quick search through the piles of papers atop my bookcases (yes, I have piles of papers, and, yes, I do ocassionally read research papers for my own amusement), I found a copy of this study from The Quarterly Journal of Economics. Using a speed dating model, these economists found, among other things, that, while the male demand for women is inelastic, the female demand curve for men grows marginally more selective. The conclusion I reached from reading this and a few similar studies is that, for unnamed reasons, the sexes use different consumer models. Whereas women tend to "shop around" for the "best" suitor/deal they can find, men tend to have a baseline above which any woman/product is acceptably attractive. There isn't a whole lot more to say, but the incompatibility of these varying models would certainly explain some intergender misunderstandings.
    Furthermore, to get back to my initial point about The L Word, I don't mean to harp on the connection between testosterone and the biological imperative, but I have to feel there are moments, at least, which are without parallel. On an odd Sunday morning, for instance, I might wake up after a good night's sleep with the kind of wood Buffy used to vanquish vampires and a metaphorical neon sign in my brain reading "go balls deep." As a fairly rational human being, such an ocassion can be tantamount to waking up as a werewolf. Now, maybe - and I'd love to be corrected or confirmed on this point - there's a similar phase of dumbstruck submission to the breeder's imperative woven into the ovulation/menstruation cycle, but, for the moment, I'm going to go ahead and say that, while a lot of awful things have been done in the name of phallic satisfaction, there is a whole lot of unrecognized restraint taking place, particularly on the part of the penis-wielders.

  • Fuck. I had a whole joke about how much respect I have for the ladies of Slate despite harboring a fantasy wherein Emily Bazelon plays Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Dahlia Lithwick plays Sandra Day O'Connor, and we have a menage a trois wearing justice's robes. Did I mention I'm playing the part of Antonin Scalia in this scene? Now I've missed the chance to include it in the previous rant and been forced to add it as a non sequitor.
    By the way, the Supreme Court fetish may be amusing, but it's not as downright odd as the dream I had a few months ago. I was Walter Benjamin, and I was hiding my affair with Leni Riefenstahl from der fuhrer while she was shooting A Triumph of the Will. Also, I was looking for a way to sneak us both out of Germany before, you know, WWII. That's what paying attention in class will get you: politically loaded sex dreams in an historical setting.

  • Am I a sexist? Gee, I sure hope not. Then again, I suppose I sound like one. The question comes to mind when I read this Newsweek article about how much hating the Sex and the City movie has gotten from men who haven't seen it. Perhaps it struck a nerve because I both thought that movie was a bad idea from the moment I heard of it and maintain a fairly strong aversion to Sex and the City as a social movement.
    If it had just stayed an HBO show, it would've been fine. The first couple of seasons were amusing, but then, just as the whole schtick was getting too tired for words, I started to hear young women say things like "I'm a Carrie" or "She's such a Charlotte." Please stop. I deny no one the right to enjoy empathizing with his or her fictional characters of choice but most characters - and these ones, in particular - are not role models to be emulated. Sure, you might see them as empowered, independent women (which they are, in a sense), but they're also confused, narcissistic devotees of shallow consumerism.
    By deifying clothing and other purchases, these characters lead their followers as sheep amongst the wolves into lives of needless consumerism. Also, the show was a dramedy desperately in need of better jokes and more satisfying drama. Okay, I think I'm done now.

I really am done - or, at least, I'd better be done. I have shit to do. Mock martyrs, meritricious merry-makers. SoberNomad, out.
10:22 AM 
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Tuesday, May 27, 2008 
  • I watched HBO's Recount, a dramatization of the 2000 Florida recount by which Dubya became our lord and savior...err, president. What amazes me is not the clear Democratic bias or the caricaturization of the functionaries involved, but the fact that I have little personal memory whatsoever of this piece of history. Much like February of 1999 or my first few years of existence, it's basically a wash.
    Why? How? I'm not the kind of fellow you'd expect to lose a prolonged moment of historical folly and yet, so it is. I can remember playing fantasy football in 2000. As I recall, that was the year I had Peyton, Edgerrin, and Ricky Williams; led by Terence Wilkins, my receiver corps was abysmal. I remember watching a Charlie's Angels marathon on TVLand because the fraternity house was between satellite service providers. The point is that while, sure, I undertook some - shall we say - memory-clouding activities, not all is lost.
    All I can figure is that, at the time, I didn't really think there was all that much difference between Bush and Gore. Al seemed like kind of a pussy, and I was fed up with the Clinton administration's used-car-salesman brand of gladhanded dishonesty. What a man does with his penis has little or no bearing on his executive capacities when said penis is not in use; I just can't respect a smug bullshitter. Dubya, on the other hand, had yet to wholly unveil his asstarded born-again crucifascism, and Darth Cheney was still a Sith lord masquerading as a stalwart fellow from Wyoming. Karl Rove's name was not yet known to the general populace.
    So, there you have it. It was apathy, pure and simple. How often can you say that?

  • Slate directed me to this release, which highlights new information that most teenagers having anal or oral sex are also having vaginal intercourse. Apparently someone wrote a grant to debunk the idea that America is swimming in nominal virgins; manifest evidence that I need to start writing grant applications willy-nilly. The real news? "Teens of white ethnicity and higher socioeconomic status were more likely than their peers to have ever had oral or anal sex." That quote is the satisfying ass baby of mysogeny and a class warrior.

  • It has been brought to my attention that I've been improperly spelling the word "nuptials" as "nuptuals." I like my version better, but apparently it's not, you know. English.

  • Apropos recent complaints about my own incompetence, headway is being made on the whole XAMPP thing. Thanks to the good (well, inspiringly capitalist, anyway) people at Amazon, who convinced me to purchase the electronic version of a book I'd just ordered. In my defense, even after the additional charge, it was still cheaper than buying it at the GA Tech Barnes & Noble.

  • Allowing myself to drown in worthless Memorial Day TV while I try to get some much-delayed homework done, I've been party to (i.e. I won't own up to actually watching, but it's been on) a few episodes of Keeping Up With the Kardashians. Needless to say, it's not exactly avant garde. On the other hand, I did learn one thing: Kourtney Kardashian is stupid hot. My contention is that she would be the most notable of the sisters, were it not for a certain callipygian Kardashian's sex tape.

  • By the way, if you happen upon Denise Richards' reality show, don't be surprised to find her spouting sailor-like exhortations. Between putting the "ass" in "class" and having an apparently insatiable appetite for pets, she manages to make Charlie Sheen a sympathetic figure.

  • I don't plan to see The House Bunny...ever, but I suspect my coevals will join me in my amusement at the portrayal of ZTA as a sorority full of bookish girls who are "beautiful on the inside." Apparently art does not always imitate life. By the by, you might have a chuckle when you learn that the real ZTA was founded at Longwood University; it's like something from a Rob Schneider movie.

My budget for procrastination was reached and breached some time ago. Chuckle churlishly, cheerful chiggers. SoberNomad, out.
3:27 AM 
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Monday, May 26, 2008 
  • In lieu of proper pre-nuptual debauchery, Doug Jones chose to congregate with his male compatriots at Friday night's Braves game. The seats in front of the Chop House are pretty choice. A few innings into the game, the woman in front of us turned roughly 85 degrees to her left and muttered something about the presence of the children accompanying her. Look, lady, I never complained about you constantly tossing your hair back against my knees - despite the two innings my hot dog spent bobbing and weaving to keep my mustard and your hair on separate and unequal standing - so you can pipe down when I make the innocent sociological observation that both of the prospective grooms I've encountered in 2008 have explicitly declined the opportunity to blow lines of strippers' asses. Seriously, even if it IS cliched, there's a reason this was once a popular activity. It's as though ice cream suddenly went out of style.

  • Today I read Snuff, the latest novel by Chuck Palahniuk, in its entirety. Not as good as Survivor or Choke, Snuff is more on par with Lullaby or Diary. That is to say the book is accessible and more compelling than most other authors' work without being exceedingly funny or novel (adj.; no pun intended). To me, my own tangential awareness of most of what the book presents as historical fact (excepting Rasputin's 18-inch center leg) was a little more disturbing than much of what occurs in the book's fiction. Then again, I may just have a good memory and an unusually open attitude toward pornography, exploitation, and dysfunction. Did I just say "may"? Ignore that word.

  • Walking down the sidewalk the other day, I had an epiphany in which I realized why Hillary refuses to concede the nomination despite all indications of her inevitable loss. In the future, people won't be able to see how contentious and acharismatic she is, and, absent that relevant information, it will appear as though she should have won the nomination, were she not a woman. As such, she can spin herself into some kind of great Third Wave/Post-Feminist martyr when, in fact, her primary constituencies (undereducated caucasians and women aged 18-1,000) reveal that pale femininity and marital attachment are her greatest political assets, not hindrances. If my assertion regarding her motivation is in the ball park of accuracy and the level of discord in the Democratic Party is as deep as I think it is, then my longstanding perception of Senator Clinton as a self-serving douchebag is justified.

  • Status Report: Since time immemorial, I've been promising to exit the internet ghetto and build my own self-promotional site. (Humility and mediocrity be damned!) To that end, I've d/led XAMPP with the intention of having a development environment in which to test drive Joomla, WordPress, and the like. I cannot recall the last time I felt so abundantly clueless. Each piece of software can be initialized with one or two simple steps. Unfortunately, I haven't the foggiest as to what those steps might be. Adding to the perception of my own incompetence is the fact that I have yet to attain the basic knowledge to understand the instructions I find online. I feel like a deaf man with a braille dictionary. Kart acolytes might imagine being victimized by a POW, lighting, and one or two blue shells on the last lap - totally powerless.

  • Has anyone seen A Cook's Tour? Synopsis: A total asshole tours the world, slurping on the native cuisines, inhaling cocktails, and whining about the damage it's all doing to his colon. I wouldn't set the DVR to record it, but if you're like me and you mainline mass media while undertaking all other tasks, it's not the most objectionable program to let play.

Sorry to be so brief, uninformative, and lacking in entertainment value. I must now return to writhing under the seeming infinitude of "shit to do." Warp wonking, wily whack-o's. SoberNomad, out. 
12:39 AM 
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Thursday, May 22, 2008 
  • In its season finale, Law & Order did a nice job of fictively exculpating the wife of Eliot Spitzer. Now, if only someone could give me a credible explanation of the Clinton marriage.

  • Creative Loafing has really gone to shit. Personally, I blame it on the Clear Channel effect: when the Ben Eason-led group took control of the Loaf in 2000, the resulting conglomeration was more concerned with acquisitions and profits than it was with being awesome. As such, Atlanta's pre-eminent alternative weekly has descended into the homogenous mediocrity of most other things.
    What, you may be wondering, illicits such invective? Well, first came the absence of Jane Catoe, whose Jane Says column was once the highlight of Bad Habits, my favorite part of the Loaf. (You can find her CL archive here.) Upon my return to Atlanta from more Westerly parts, I started reading Hollis Gillespie's Moodswing, mistakenly confusing her for Jane, the crazy blonde broad I USED TO read. Hollis is good, but she's a bit formulaic. Like a 1970's sitcom, it always opens provocatively, becomes seemingly thoughtful, and closes with a facile moral. Sometimes I laugh out loud; sometimes I'm nauseated.(Note: If you ever happen upon her book, Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch, the highlight is "Big Dix" on p.64.)
    This week, however, the minions of mediocrity have outdone themselves. Admittedly, when I saw that the cover story was an autobiographical feature about a writer recovering from alcoholism, I knew that I would certainly read it and either be completely enamored or loathe it with all my being. The O/U was very low. Still, I had faith enough to outweigh my misgivings. How could an "alternative" newspaper which runs blatant ads for transsexual prostitutes run a pedestrian story of addiction? "Unapolagetically" is my guess.
    Particular criticism: The "middle-class white boy drinks himself into Grand Mal seizures before making good" trope is worn the fuck out. In terms of being tired, it's somwhere between the sedative-addicted housewife and the cokehead day trader. This version of it is, of course, delivered in the canonically-prescribed repentant tone. The writer's droll, unembittered, humorless delivery lends his story a complete lack of personality/perspective. In other words, the only means by which this patently disinteresting story could have been made engaging was eschewed in favor of sterile political correctness. I expect such choices from network television, not Creative Loafing.
    There were a few points which really stuck in my craw. First off, he whines about how he wasted an all-inclusive trip to Tahiti drinking in his hotel room. I don't know about Tahiti, but my impression was that drinking in your room was pretty much the main activity on cruises. Next, this fellow claims that the last thing he remembers before his first sobriety-induced seizure is posting a plea for help on the Bellevue prayer board. Not only does that strike me as gilding the lily, but I'll also remind the reader that hope, as the saying goes, is not a strategy. Lastly, the choice to close the feature by belaboring the point that every facet of sobriety exceeds the author's experience of inebriation is both offensively pedestrian and patently untrue. Stop lying and be a little wistful, you middlebrow fucktard; were everything now better, you wouldn't proclaim your "struggle," go to meetings, or indulge in any of the other establishment claptrap.

  • Congratulations, Barack Obama! You've clenched a preponderance of the pledged delegates to be counted at the convention, and you're also leading among superdelegates. Unfortunately, it appears that Hillary cares more about hardworking, white Americans than she does about, well, math. No wonder she does so well with the non-college-educated crowd.

...and now I'm running late. Time to shower and get a move on. Drive Dodge Darts, diligent dreamers. SoberNomad, out.
11:14 AM 
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Monday, May 19, 2008 
  • Matt Ellis recently passed the Alaska BAR. I was remiss in not congratulating him sooner. Congratulations! When I inevitably find myself working for whatever multi-national communications/entertainment empire Joseph Frederick founds, I'm calling you after my nervous breakdown and successive indictment for felonies yet to be named.

  • As I told the young woman pouring hooch at the Otchy wedding, I may be clean and sober, but I'm stil a heavy drinker. Soda, water, milk - if it's non-mood-enhancing, arguably non-toxic, liquid, and in a relatively ergonomic vessel, it will likely find its way to my lips. When a man has a thirst like that, he learns about something else: urinals.
    My attention to urinals led me to notice that GA Tech has decided to replace the standard odor removal equipment (imagine the love child of a Tic-Tac and a hockey puck) with what appear to be scented mats. Since they're scented, these mats have a limited lifetime. Applying Occam's Razor to user-friendly sanitation supplies, the maker of these mats decided to have them printed with their intended month of use. All that's left to say is that the April mats were in use until at least May 16th.

  • I'm not sure how many of you sat through Joe Biden's stammering on Stephanopolous to hear what John Boehner (R-OH) had to say, but appallingly full of shit is the closest I can find to an apt description. The highlight had to be his reference to the alleged "Pelosi premium...a dollar and forty cents a gallon - that's how much gas has increased since she took over." The rest of it was the kind of nonsense about Republicans needing to show that they're a party who bring change. Apparently the real problem wasn't the years when a Republican congress passed every bill Dubya suggested, but the past year, when a narrowly Democratic congress couldn't quite accomplish their goals. Let's just say that he failed to shift my paradigm.

  • Sorry, Kyle, but I couldn't polish a turd in time for the New Letters writing contest. I hope the plug serves as some consolation.

  • One of the reasons I didn't get around to polishing that turd was that I was engrossed in the hardbound aggregation of the original Runaways limited series. Whether you know it or not, I'm a former comic book dork. Before taking up football, wrestling, and recreational drug use, I whiled away many hours of my youth with not only the comic books of Stan Lee but also [gasp] numerous dice-based RPGs. Having come clean about my pseudo-literary proclivities, I can now profess a barely-qualified endorsement of the aforementioned series. Once you read the originating proposal (included), you'll realize that it's more of a now-compiled episodic graphic novel than a short lived comic series, if that makes you feel any better about reading fiction with pictures.

  • WTFSM (What The Flying Spaghetti Monster)!?!?!?!? In the process of prepping my DVR for a long week's work, I just finished watching the Desperate Housewives season finale. Skipping 5 years is commendable inasmuch as it helps return the show to its satirical purpose, but I have to wonder whether it's going to be cancelled or proceed from an adjusted premise. I'd like to see at least a few episodes of the latter before the former action is undertaken.

  • Like pimp justice, here's an endorsement comin' on the backhanded tip: Don't buy Mario Kart Wii. It will eat your soul. If it's already touched your life, I recommend engaging your daily tasks with all possible vigor so as to banish concerns about your star rankings and VR points until you have time to properly address them.

  • Matt Johnson has requested a mix of Stroh's and Stroh's Light with which to pre-game the Jones/Edwards nuptuals. Prospective slogan for the latter: "This is not the greatest beer in the world; this is just a tribute." Prospective slogan for the former: "Formerly brewed in the fires of awesomeness. Now brewed locally, for your convenience.

Do you really want to roll with me? "Your training begins tomorrow, at the crack of noon." - Kyle Gass, Tenacious D: The Pick of Destiny. Roar righteously, redacted rockers. SoberNomad, out.
4:54 AM 
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Wednesday, May 14, 2008 
  • After this week's Two and a Half Men, I took a moment to read the vanity card. I had never done this in the past. I was pleasantly surprised to find it highly amusing. I was even more pleasantly surprised to find that Chuck Lorre maintains an online archive of his vanity cards here. Think of them as daily affirmations for people who need their faith that the vanity, violence, and general shitstorm of existence can be flipped into humor affirmed daily.
    Also, I reccomend having a gander at his piece entitled "How to Write a Hit Sitcom." It's pretty amusing.

  • You know, I spend a lot of time expounding about things that piss me off. Well then, let's get down to business.
    Why did I just see part of an ad for some kind of Wendy's wrap? To my mind, there's no such foodstuff as a wrap. If you're wrapping it in a tortilla, it's either a burrito, a taco, or a quesadilla. The wrap is just another way for restaurants to exploit an overwieght nation's fear of bread-borne carbohydrates; what they're really serving are just ill-conceived burritos. Much like Jack-in-the-Box and McDonald's (I'm looking at you, Chipotle.), Wendy's has no business serving burritos.

  • A pound of human fat contains about 3500 calories. Thus, a 400 calorie snack is the equivalent of almost 2 oz. of fat. Note that it's not uncommon for me to down 400 calories worth of nutritional landfill in roughly 3 minutes. Hopefully an awareness of this direct equivalency will help curb that habit.

  • Long-Awaited Retraction: I did the math in my head on the way to work one day, and a small change in a wine glass's diameter can drastically change the surface area of the wine it contains. That said, can someone provide the party line explanation of why white wine glasses are so narrow?

  • I keep seeing ads for Saving Grace during Law & Order reruns, and pentaguanarian Holly Hunter looks pretty good. I mean, if she's a cougar, then I want to be a bighorn sheep. I'll be the May to her December. If she's Jocasta, I can develop a poorly-aimed Oedipus complex. Okay, I think that's quite enough.

  • West Virginia votes today. Based on current polls and Hillary's gaffe, it would appear that West Virginia is filled with non-college-educated white people. This is more of a confirmation than a revelation.

  • You know what a euphemism is? ("make love" and "sleep together," I'm looking at you) It's a false, artificial metonym. I eagerly await Kyle's correction.

I should do some reading. Absolve aggression, agreeable autodidacts. SoberNomad, out.
9:33 AM 
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Friday, May 09, 2008 
  • [Editor's Note: This bullet circa tres de mayo] Earlier this week, I heard Bill Simmons do a podcast with Chris Connelly in which they debated the virtues of Singles versus Reality Bites.
    As luck would have it, E-LOV afforded me the opportunity to see Reality Bites (again?) when I got home from work on Saturday morning. It was a Comcastic experience. In short, Reality Bites kicks the balls off of Singles. Apropos the aforementined podcast conversation, I suppose Reality Bites could be called the defining film of GenX, or, as Connelly referred to it, "the irony generation."
    In that capacity, it makes me feel like my slice of a generation (those born, say, 1978-1982) stands in the shadows of its elders and juniors. The GenXers came of age as the (one and only...ever) Clinton administration was coming into office, and went on to enjoy the swell side of the internet bubble. The kids younger than us grew up with all the modern amenities of telecommunications, most notably the internet and cell phones - in high school, at least. By contrast, what do we get? People in my class were graduating from college on the pop side of the internet boom, in the wake of 9/11, and, on the other side, we were psyched to enjoy dial-up service as teenagers.
    I never patronized UseNet or IRC, but I know people who did. It's safe to say that the internet was still maturing back then, when AOL and geocities were still considered to be worth a shit. What, then, is supposed to be the movie of my demographic's angst? I bet it was really good, so it got canned during the post-9/11 media crackdown from which we're just now emerging.

  • You know what pisses me off about second-wave feminism? They did a whole lot of bitching (non-gender-specific use) about the patriarchy without ever formulating a plan for world domination. I understand that the uterus-bearers get fucked over, and, by the way, you could've made that point with a lot less invective and repetition. Now that you've identified the problem, what are you going to do about it? The aforementioned invective serves to frame society as an epic battle of the genders: cocks v. pussies (be careful with that joke; it's an antique), thus alienating any men, such as myself, who might've agreed with your position. So you've identified the problem - now, how are you going to wrest the power from the menfolk?
    Moreover, the whole "sexual revolution" seems counter-productive in relation to world conquest. The ladies had one commodity in their control which men required, and yet part of their power play was to indulge their desires to flood the market. Where's the discipline, the forethought, the long-term planning? It's like a bakery giving away donuts and then complaining that bread is undervalued.

  • The other night I was, yet again, pulled over riding my bicycle home from work. This time, the pig didn't even proffer an excuse for harassing a lone cyclist riding down the sidewalk of a deserted 5-lane rode. Normally, I don't mind being persecuted for my means of conveyance, but, on this occasion, I hungrier than a billy goat with a fresh tin can. Thus, I may have been brusque with the officer. Nontheless, I have to ask: what the fuck is up w/ cracker-assed ho-lice hatin' on a fella who prefers exercise to pollution?!?!?!

  • Whoever cast The Real World XX: Hollywood really outdid themselves. There's the stripper of unknown ethnicity (either she's black and she's been dyeing her hair blonde so long that it's begun painting her melanin, or she's got the worst case of jaundice known to man) who is recovering from meth addiction and required to make periodic court appearances in PA related to a domestic disturbance with her (ex-?) boyfriend, the meatheaded bodybuilder who claimed he "used to be an alcoholic" until the producers agreed to send him to treatment, and the women's studies major who recently admitted she used to be bulimic. Two black guys (one infantile, one anti-social), a latently racist Southern belle, and the worst kind of frat boy round out the cast. Over the past few years, the show has gotten more and more exploitative of youthful follies, but this choice of casts is potentially reprehensible.
    At the same time, I have to say that I felt a certain kinship with Joey, the boozehound, when he was up all night shouting nonsense and chugging red zin straight from the 1.5L bottle. Watching his double dedication to the hooch and the dramatic lifestyle reminded me why I'm glad not to be that guy any more. It also made me really thirsty. Somewhere, someone is doing a keg stand. Here's to you.

  • Now that Hillary's eked out a win in IN (margin of roughly 1.5 points) and gotten absolutely rectal-ated (yes, I just made that word up) in NC, she finds the silver lining in the thunderhead of her failing race to be the fact that "whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me." If taking pride in hoodwinking the uneducated isn't sad enough, Hillary gaffed hard in saying "Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening." Just step out of the race already, and let the septuagenarian John McCain play the part of the Klansman.

  • This is the part where I share my poor taste in music. As you may or may not know, I have a weakness for the female singers. Dido, Fiona Apple, Regina Spektor, KT Tunstall, Garbage (Shirley Manson), Lily Allen, and Amy Winehouse have all gone through periods (no pun intended) of heavy rotation on my iPod. The latest songstress I've been slurping has two things in common with Amy Winehouse: catchy tunes and a beak that starts forming North of her eyebrows.
    I'm talking about Sara Barseilles, and neither her nose nor her California upbringing can dissuade me from professing a certain amount of fanboydom. I'm not going to say she's a wonderful musician because, well, I'm not musically literate enough to make such judgements. What I can say is that her music is like cocaine: you can listen to it until you crash, and when you wake up, there will still be a lump of it stuck somewhere in your skull. Luckily, the music doesn't make your nose bleed or your penis shrivel - not mine, anyway.
    Thank you, Wikipedia. Usually I just post those links w/o reading them, but I learned moments ago that Miss Barseilles will be opening for Maroon 5 and Counting Crows late in the summer. Sadly, they won't make it to ATL together. Anyone up to celebrate my graduation with a trip to Jones Beach? So infatuated am I with this idea that I know that, as of this posting, I can only find mediocre tickets for the 1 August (fuck you; that's how the rest of the world writes dates) show.

  • Despite being quite sleepy at the time, I finally saw The Darjeeling Limited. It's not The Royal Tenebaums, but most things aren't. I get the feeling that Wes Anderson was trying to put more than satire into this piece, but, then again, it's entirely possible that he's not posing as the ubermensch. It may just be that I'm still paranoid from reading Ulysses.
    Either way, Hotel Chevalier made me laugh out loud. Did anyone else notice the luggage was designed by Marc Jacobs for Louis Vuitton? Pardon me, sir, but the management would appreciate you picking those names up.

  • Not long ago, Kornheiser had to apologize for calling the Pope a Nazi. The Pope wasn't a Nazi; he was a member of the Hitler youth. It's good to see the Catholic Church putting it's silent assent of the Holocaust behind it. By the way, I'll take Israel over the Vatican in any form of celebrity deathmatch.

  • Beauty and the Geek is down to the final three pairs. I think it would be really funny if they decided the winner by secret ballot games of marry, fuck, kill. (Before you start pissing and moaning about my coarseness, you should know that I totally stole that idea from back when Sarah Hepola ran the Scanner) My vote goes for marrying Cara, fucking the cute one, and killing the skanky one. I'm sorry, but there are too many streaky blonde chicks on TV to keep all their names straight.

Aiight, I know it's been a long time, but this is already a very poor excuse for a triumphant return. Now I'm going to check on Warfish - a.k.a. "the same thing we do every night, Pinky!" Carry cudgels, curmudgeonly conquistadors. SoberNomad, out.
9:45 PM 
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Tuesday, April 22, 2008 
  • Gossip Girl returned last night. I'm not sure if it actually got worse or if my standards just lifted during the strike.

  • In other news of things that bite, I hope none of you have been subjected to so much as an ad for the Sex and the City Movie. I think the tag line might be "You thought we were done kicking this dead horse, but we really just went to get a bigger boot." This premise is worn enough to warrant a marathon-inspired comedic simile, but Kenyans don't get that tired.
    Seriously, I'm not sure how they expect this to keep working with the same cast. The whole "clueless broad seeks love and meaning but finds only dick" schtick is amusing when she's in her 30's, but I'm suspicious that Kim Cattrall, for one, has aged beyond cougar-hood and into the realm of the disturbingly pathetic.

  • Have I bitched about the Cadillac ad featuring the redhead from Grey's Anatomy yet? I think it's the explicit contemptuous reference to "the boys' club" that irks me. Is this an expression of some residual intergender resentment, or was the ad written by a man who wanted to project penis envy onto the image of an attractive, seemingly successful woman? Mi no comprende.

  • As previously noted, I consider myself to be a skeptical asshole. Nevertheless, I'm impressed with the Obama ads produced by MoveOn members. They get me a little teary, kind of like a song about 40 Thanksgivin's ago - that's 40 years ago, on Thanksgivin'...

  • It's Earth Day. Woo-hoo. At some point, I plan to get back to promoting Global Oral Sex Day. It's at least as good an idea as Earth Day.

  • Oh, shit! I can't believe Robin Meade had to remind me that today is the PA Democratic primary. That's so much more entertaining than Gossip Girl.

No time for more, but I've got to get this up before that last point is obsolete. Enjoy everything, etruscan earthlings. SoberNomad, out.
5:19 PM 
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