Lumpy Junk

"Star Wars 9: Return of the Jedi 2" Review

2019-12-26T01:11:00.001-06:00

Star Wars 9: Return of the Jedi 2

Palpy is back baby. How? Is it a clone? A Sith Force ghost being brought back to life? Doesn't matter. Besides, telling the audience the details would be boring exposition, what are you gonna do, just write like a paragraph on screen at the beginning to explain it? ...And what does it matter how he died and came back? (Cut to the end of the movie where everyone celebrates that he's dead and they all just assume he's like, really, surely, dead this time...)

Palpy is back in the title crawl. What a great way to reveal a twist, super exciting stuff, totally doesn't undercut the intrigue or mystery of the opening of the film. They use title crawl to explain something that is going to become obvious, while offering zero exposition about how/why he is back. Basically they just reveal shit in the title crawl because it's Star Wars and they need a title crawl, but they put no thought into how to use it.

Palpy's not just back, but he's got 1,000 Death Star Destroyers. So he sets off on his murderous rampage, blowing up planets and revealing to the Galaxy the scope of his power. Just kidding, he sends like a galactic voicemail message? He announces to the universe that he's back...while his fleet is still grounded and vulnerable...because?

Where did they get the manpower to staff 1000 death star destroyers? From the sith planet? The Sith planet that looks like it's made of ruins and lightning and ghosts? Are we saying that in the mystery realm, secret uncharted lightning planet, full of sith ghosts...that they've got like a billion contractors manufacturing all the space toilets and star destroyer cafeterias? Or is Palpatine using Sith magic to conjure up star destroyer toilets? Hilarious.

Member the whole “arms dealers” thing from The Last Jedi? J/K the whole Sith fleet is just made in the shadow realm or whatever...oh and they have MORE advanced technology in the secret shadow realm!

Why is the massive fleet all just on a planet and not in space? Like, is it too hard to have them deployed? Is it some kind of logistics/supply problem? I ask because...well they didn't seem to have any problems manufacturing a thousand of these things that are each more sophisticated than the Death Star... But then they leave them on the planet where they can't activate their shields and are totally super vulnerable. And they can't take off because they need a beacon to know which way is up? Because it's full of gravity wells or some shit? So the whole last act of the film is set around the idea that the 1000 super advanced ships can't just fly up, that they need a beacon or guidance. Keep in mind that this is their home planet, and they can't even try to navigate their way...up.

Meanwhile thousands of rando good guys show up and can fly around no problem. But the fleet that is fucking from there has no idea how to fly up?

When the good guys discover the existence of this Super Mega Massive fleet in the uncharted, unknown region of the galaxy, on some secret Sith planet that they have to track down multiple Macguffins to even find...they immediately somehow know intricate details of how the mega massive fleet works, requiring beacons, and knowing where the beacons will be and how to take them down. That's like Columbus arriving in the New World, and the Native Americans see his ship and are like “We have to murder them before they give us all smallpox.” (Hey! There's an idea, maybe instead of more giant super weapons, maybe...just maybe, you could have something different happen, like a biological weapon. Sithphylis!)

Hey Disney, I've got an idea for another Star Wars spinoff movie. It's called Rogue Two. It's all about how the rebellion figured out how the like beacon things worked.

Just imagine if your enemy announces to the world that he's got a massive new set of super weapons, but they're all in one place, defenseless, and useless, and he's announcing it really loudly for all to hear during this period of vulnerability for no good reason . . . You would assume that this is the galaxy's most obvious trap of all time. (Cue up the fake underage girl from To Catch a Predator shouting from the next room: “I'm just gonna change into a bikini, you help yourself to a Mike's Hard Lemonade!”).

Why doesn't Admiral Ackbar's son, Aftab Ackbar, immediately shout “It's a Trap!” At the very least, why isn't everyone really suspicious about this being a trap? Why do I as a first-time viewer feel like I've put more thought into the movie than any of the writers? If you're thinking right now, “okay, that's a bit harsh.” I'd like to point out ... Aftab Ackbar is not a joke I made up. He's in the movie!

So the plot boils down to a series of Macguffins: go to a place to find a thing, but to understand that thing, you need to go to a place and find a guy, and then you'll understand that thing and it'll tell you how to get to the next place to find the next thing, which will lead you to the secret planet.

Why did someone make a special knife, with ancient Sith writing on it, for the purpose of being a clue as to how to find a thing on the wreckage of the second death star? Like who is making this thing? Why? Who are they leaving this trail of breadcrumbs for? Is it the Emperor? Pulling all the strings and leaving the clues to lead the main characters into a trap? Except, he's also the emperor who really super doesn't want anybody to find the secret planet where his massive fleet is completely vulnerable and useless. We also know that Kylo didn't make it. So like, there's somebody with knowledge of secret Sith stuff who's leaving these clues behind...because?

The special dagger clue is only useful if you are standing in one exact place, and if the death star never moves or deteriorates in the constantly crashing waves. Yet the main characters just use it without needing to be in the right place? They just are there? Why hasn't the death star been reduced to scrap in the waves? Wait, why isn't it already just tiny pieces after we saw it explode into millions of tiny pieces at the end of Return of the Jedi?

We know Kylo worships Vader, is like a fanboy who has Vader's helmet. We also see him seeking out a Sith wayfinder...but there's a sith wayfinder in the Emperor's throne room on the Death Star 2...Why didn't Kylo find that already?

In the desert, why does Kylo fly so low and try to ram Rey? Is he trying to run her over? Isn't he trying to turn her? So what is this manuever supposed to achieve? Why not just like shoot her from a distance? Obviously his real motivation here is that he's being stupid so that Rey can do a cool backflip thing.

We're 9 movies in to a series that's almost entirely about turning to the dark side, or resisting and staying on the light side. The path to the dark side is tempting and a slippery slope. Yet 9 movies in and we still haven't seen a good depiction of what it means to be tempted by the dark side. Like, why is it so tempting? Why would a character that's repeatedly shown that they are good and pure be afraid that they would somehow be turned into child murderers? What would tempt them to do that? As far as I can tell, the entire series revolves around bad guys attempting to turn good guys to the dark side. Palpatine turning Anakin, Vader/Palpatine trying to turn Luke. Snoke/Kylo/Palpatine trying to turn Rey. Yet in all of their grand planning, 9 films worth of Palpatine pulling the strings, the grand plan they come up with is to have a really obviously evil, devil-looking mother fucker, say creepy shit and hope that a few words will make the good guy decide that, “sure, okay, I'll start murdering children for you.” Hilariously, this actually works one time.

What you could do, is really illustrate the slippery slope. Show how doing a little bit of evil, embracing your hate/anger actually makes your more powerful, and you feel more powerful, and how that changes you. In Return of the Jedi this is manifested as Luke basically being able to swing a lightsaber a bit harder. In Revenge of the Sith, Anakin turns to the dark side and starts murdering children because a guy who just transformed into a demon in front of him promised to teach him how to cheat death (but then doesn't teach him that?). In this, Palpy again just looks like the devil and tries to say evil shit to a girl who wants nothing to do with him or his stupid powers.

Why not do something like show that if she embraces her hate/anger/dark-side she could gain more abilities. Like, maybe she does a mean thing, but then gets more power and can suddenly use that power to heal people. Maybe you could put someone she loves in serious danger/pain/dead and the only thing she can do to save them is to embrace the dark side at least a little bit to achieve that power? Or you know what, instead, let's just have her be able to heal for no reason. Yeah, let's go with that. How does she learn it? Doesn't matter. Remember when a dude became Darth Vader in the hope of achieving that power and then never was able to get it? Yeah, she can just do it. Oh and let's have her get Force Lightning powers too. By going a little evil and then getting a new power, thus illustrating how the dark side is tempting? No, actually it'll be by doing something good, but then a little lightning squirts out like when a pregnant lady laughs and pees a little bit.

Rey goes out of her way to heal a sand worm/snake thing and heals Kylo because, even though he's like a Space Hitler, she's pretty sure he's got a heart of gold and wants to make out with him. Yet elsewhere in the film she's fine with letting tons of Stormtroopers die like they don't matter at all and aren't people. In fact, she sometimes uses the Jedi Mind Trick so they can get past some guards, while other times they just fucking shoot them in the face. Good thing we know Stormtroopers are all evil. Oh but one of the main character good guys is a stormtrooper who turned good, and then we meet a lady who tells us about how a whole unit of stormtroopers defected...but then our heroes continue to murder them, even when it's not even necessary.

Speaking of Stormtroopers doing the right thing and not following orders... Remember how like a major part of The Last Jedi was that one of our heroes had to learn a lesson to...umm...blindly follow orders.

Member how the resistance is whittled down to like 14 people at the end of The Last Jedi? This movie starts and we're just back to being the same rebellion again, with no discernible difference really, and apparently with enough power that going to take out 1000 death star destroyers is doable (with a little help from "people"). The resistance was down to 14 people and their entire fleet destroyed, and then Palpy sends his voicemail that he has a massive mega fleet that's way more powerful than the First Order which has already wiped out the resistance fleet. And their response to this news is to just go on a series of side quests to find the massive mega fleet, because once they know where it is, they can totally take on that fleet directly . . . Why not spend some of the plot of this movie showing how they got their strength back up. Like maybe there are stormtrooper units defecting, people are rising up against the forces of tyranny. You could show why these people have been inspired, why they have hope now. Is it because they believe in Rey? Do randos all over the galaxy even know who Rey is? She walks around at Burning Man next to Chewbacca and nobody recognizes her. So why do they have this hope? Was it because of what Luke did at the end of The Last Jedi? Cause, I seem to remember that what he did was he was a ghost and people shot at him but missed because he was a ghost. Meanwhile the resistance was basically wiped out...so that's the point people were like "Yeah, you know what, I think I'll join. Back when they had a fleet and Luke was alive, I wasn't that into it, but now that it's a suicide mission just to even join, sign me up!" Instead of showing how/why anyody has hope, why people all over the galaxy suddenly decide to fight (which is like the whole point of the end of the film) insted we get video game side quests and one-linery quips.

So the fact that the rebellion is basically wiped out in TLJ is totally inconsequential, and even the idea of "no suicide missions" is stupid too because no matter what, when Palpy shows back up the whole fucking galaxy shows up to fight, so you're going to have basically unlimited manpower. In fact, a few suicide missions might be really helpful, like, you know, that part in The Last Jedi when the suicide mission is like the coolest visual of the movie?

Finn has a super secret he wants to tell Rey when he thinks they're dying. But then he never brings it up again in the rest of the film. Cool. His weird girlfriend, who we learned in The Last Jedi is sexually aroused by car crashes, is in this film too. She doesn't have anything to do, but she's there still.

WE gotta save Chewie! – Because he's such an important character, super vital to the rebellion, worth taking additional risks on their mission to save the entire fucking galaxy, you also need a side quest to save a geriatric wookie.

C-3PO can't translate a thing because it's illegal? Like he has to follow the laws of the Senate? Wouldn't aiding the fucking rebellion against that empire be illegal too? He's been doing that for six fucking movies. He's like Trump, committing treason on behalf of Russia on like a daily basis, but then suddenly because you need the plot to do a thing, Trump is all “Actually I can't download a movie on The Pirate Bay, that's illegal.” If 3PO can't because it's illegal...couldn't you just tell him it's legal now? In any case, the fact that his eyes turn red when he reads Sith is fucking hilarious.

Palpatines' all “my grandaughter has finally come to see me” and it's like he's in a retirement home. Hilarious.

Palpatine is force lightning-ing an entire fleet and overpowering Rey...but then she has a second lightsaber...sooo he fucked... Why is two lightsabers all it took? What if she went all Grievous and had 4 lightsabers? Totally unstoppable?

Kylo and Rey then fucking make out immediately. I laughed.

So Palpy somehow hasn't used this as a giant ambush/trap, and the good guys actually take down 1000 death star destroyers... After doing that...The First Order still exists? Like the Empire that nearly wiped the rebellion down to like 14 people in the last movie, it still exists. So uhh... Oh but its taken down all over the galaxy all at once by “people” just showing up. Question: why did none of these people show up in the last movie when they put out their distress signal? Now suddenly everyone shows up because... Because Luke inspired hope by... you know, dying to accomplish nothing? If anything, people showed up because Palpy sent out his idiotic space voicemail, telling the whole galaxy that now is the time to actually show up.

In A New Hope, some small fighters can take out the giant death star because it has a fatal flaw that was intentionally put there, then the secret of it was gotten to the rebels. They made a whole movie about it. And then, even with the knowledge of the flaw, it still takes a fucking wizard kid making a one-in-a-million shot to destroy it. They made a whole movie about that too. Also, before the attack, the small band of heroes escape the death star because the bad guys are letting them go to track them. That's right, the bad guys lay a trap and aren't just wildly incompetent.

In A New Hope 2 and now in Return of the Jedi 2, apparently just any small band of heroes with a millenium falcon and a dozen x-wings can take out just about anything . . . because. . . and can sneak in and out of gigantic enemy bases . . . because. . . And the bad guys STILL haven't learned that small fighters or a small band of heroes is a problem and build their fleets as if they are gonna go fight in the battle of Jutland.

Adam Driver is so good but has been totally wasted by this shit trilogy. Somebody cut together one good movie out of this trilogy, just telling Adam Driver's storyline.

Which, if you look back now on this trilogy...it's all ruined?

Force Awakens and the Starkiller base...well in like two years Palpatine is coming back with 1000 death stars, so who gives a shit about this one super weapon?

The Last Jedi, they kill Snoke, but who fucking cares, in like two years Palpatine is back with a 1000 death stars.

Member how Kylo in TLJ was all, "the Sith, the Jedi, let it all die. Join me." Yeah...so Palpatine has a 1000 death star destroyers, so like...the Sith be coming back baby.

They really wasted the characters. Finn, a defecting storm trooper. Then what? He has an arc in TLJ going from deserting to willing to go on a suicide mission because of his chinese girlfriend? Then in this movie... has a secret that doesn't matter...and gets a girlfriend.

Poe is barely in the first movie because they want you to think he's dead. In the second he has to learn a lesson about following orders blindly. In this movie...he...gets a girlfriend.

And in the end, "knock knock," "Who's there?" "Rey." "Rey Who?"

"Rey Skywalker" – k, but why?

Why not Rey Organa? She was closer to Leia anyway. Why not... “Just Rey.” And say fuck all that history. Instead...Rey Skywalker. Gotta insert herself into the lineage known for producing fucking Vader and Kylo (and I guess a failure of an old man in Luke). "Just Rey" – THE END. Would have been better, but then the title wouldn't make sense. Fuck this title anyway. A New Hope makes more sense, cause the whole point is that the whole galaxy has hope and shows up to fight Palpy.

And this is the story of how they finally, in the 9th film, really, surely killed Palpatine. Probably. I mean, his ghost isn't gonna come back from that, right? Right? Because...we don't know how he came back from dying the first time...so the fact that they are all, “We definitely killed him this time! That...two lightsaber trick definitely did it. I mean last time he fell down a shaft, then exploded, and then the thing he was in exploded...but this time, the 2 light saber thing, that surely killed him for real. Let's Party!” is going to obviously remind you of Return of the Jedi, when they...did exactly the same thing? Partied thinking they killed him. They were mistaken back then though...because...Reasons. But this time, we definitely killed him for realzies.

You know who they should call to make sure? The fucking Ghostbusters. Which...

Tell me if you've heard this movie pitch before:

Star Wars 10: Ghostbusters 5

Conservative Media Says Liberal Media Quoted Jeb Bush Out Of Context: Invents Fake Context To Prove it.

2015-07-14T15:39:00.001-05:00

(This particular post is not satire)

July 14, 2015

So Jeb Bush made a Romney-esque comment that people need to work "longer hours."

Here's what he said:

Bush: “My aspiration for the country and I believe we can achieve it, is 4% growth as far as the eye can see. Which means we have to be a lot more productive, workforce participation has to rise from its all-time modern lows. It means that people need to work longer hours and, through their productivity, gain more income for their families. That's the only way we're going to get out of this rut that we're in.”

The media ran with the “longer hours” bit as proof of Jeb being out of touch.

However, in the conservative media, they tell the story much differently.

Business Insider ran this story, insisting that Jeb was being taken out of context:

Democrats say they've found adevastating Jeb Bush gaffe, but he's mostly right

On Wednesday, Democrats seized on Bush's comment in an interview with the editorial board of New Hampshire's Union Leader. He said growing the economy would require people to 'work longer hours.'

But there's much more context to that statement, something Bush's campaign tried to explain when it spent Thursday morning clarifying that he was talking about part-time jobs.

Here's the full exchange:

BUSH: My aspiration for the country and I believe we can achieve it, is 4% growth as far as the eye can see. Which means we have to be a lot more productive, workforce participation has to rise from its all-time modern lows. It means that people need to work longer hours and, through their productivity, gain more income for their families. That's the only way we're going to get out of this rut that we're in.

QUESTION: To keep us from taking it out of context, what you meant to say — when you say more hours you mean full-time work.

BUSH: Given the opportunity to work. Yeah, absolutely.

QUESTION: Not that a full-time guy or somebody working two jobs needs to be working even more time.

BUSH: Absolutely not. Their incomes need to grow. It's not going to grow in an environment where the costs of doing business are so extraordinarily high here. Healthcare costs are rising. In many places the cost of doing business is extraordinarily high, and the net result of that is that business start up rates are at an all-time low. Work-force participation rates are low. If anyone is celebrating this anemic recovery, then they are totally out of touch. The simple fact is people are really struggling. So giving people a chance to work longer hours has got to be part of the answer. If not, you are going to see people lose hope. And that's where we are today.

Okay, wow, so Jeb immediately clarified that he was talking about people who are working part time being given the opportunity to work full-time. He didn't mean we should all be working longer hours.

That damn liberal media is just trying to quote him out of context!

The conservative media seized on this transcript from Business Insider and has generated plenty of articles about the liberal media and how they lie and quote Republicans out of context.

The Washington Examiner ran this story:

“Mind the gaffe: Jeb Bush'scautionary tale”

As made plain during the interview, the last thing Bush meant was that struggling poor and middle class Americans already toiling full time must work longer hours if they want to get ahead.

But plug 'People need to work longer hours' into an Internet search engine and what comes up are pages of headlines similar to this one: 'Jeb Bush: People need to work longer hours.' Democrats moved swiftly to undercut Bush, scion of a wealthy, politically-connected family, with attacks...

Yes, they actually used the phrase “but plug” in the Washington Examiner.

After crying foul, they then reproduce the same transcript as Business Insider. Except they make one change. Rather than saying “Bush:” and “Question:” in the trasnscript, it alternates between “Bush:” and “U-L:” meaning the New Hampshire Union Leader.

Something called “Front Page Mag” Subtitled: “A Project of the David Horowitz Freedom Center” ran the story as:

WHY CAN'T PAUL KRUGMAN STOP LYING?

It's a question as to whether Krugman is ridiculously sloppy or ridiculously dishonest.

They say Krugman “tried to clumsily jump on the Jeb Bush 'more hours' bandwagon.” Then they reproduce the transcript from Business Insider. Then they sum it up as Paul Krugman either not reading the full quote or he did read it and chose to lie about it. Then they call him either “ridiculously sloppy” or “ridiculously dishonest.”

Here's the thing.

You see that full-context exchange?

It didn't happen.

The Union Leader put the video of that interview online, you can watch the whole thing here: http://www.c-span.org/video/?327013-1/new-hampshire-union-leader-interview-jeb-bush

Go to 16:15 and press play for the relevant section.

Follow along with the Business Insider transcript and see if you can spot the problem...

If you can't access the video, here's a transcript of what's said

Jeb: My aspiration for the country and I believe we can achieve it, is 4 percent growth as far as the eye can see. Which means we have to be a lot more productive, workforce participation has to rise from its all-time modern lows. It means that people need to work longer hours and, through their productivity, gain more income for their families. That's the only way we're going to get out of this rut that we're in. And you can't grow at 4% unless you do a whole series of things, one of which, maybe the most important of which is tax reform. So simplifying the code as dramatically as you can. Lowering--eliminating as many of the tax expenditures that exist, and lowering rates, and shifting power away from Washington, and all of the protectors of the protected class. I mean go from Dulles to Washington... in every building is full of people who are making a lot of money...or trying to create another sanctuary or fighting to tear down another one. It's all about something that shouldn't exist. We should be shifting power away from Washington, and one of the most dramatic ways you can do it is by simplifying the tax code.

He goes on to talk about the Estonian model of taxation, shrinking the federal government, then sanctuary cities, illegal immigration, marijuana legalization, and many other things.

Everything that follows Bush's first quote in the Business Insider transcript is not from this interview.

So when they say this is a transcript:

BUSH: My aspiration for the country … people need to work longer hours ... That's the only way we're going to get out of this rut that we're in.

QUESTION: To keep us from taking it out of context, what you meant to say — when you say more hours you mean full-time work.

They're neglecting to mention that between Jeb saying “this rut that we're in” and someone asking him “To keep us from taking it out of context...” he had traveled to a different city, attended another event, and then addressed totally different reporters. In fact, between those two quotes being said, the first quote had become a gaffe, been spread on twitter, and the next quote is actually in response to the gaffe already being a PR problem for Jeb!

At 3:47 pm, ABC News had already tweeted the “longer hours” quote:

By 4:32 pm, the 21 second video was on twitter.

At 6:30 pm, Jeb attended an event at the VFW in Hudson, NH. After that event ended, he spoke to reporters and that is when the rest of the “transcript” is from, which you can see at The Guardian

Bush was asked about the comment by reporters after a town hall event in Hudson. He said the US economy needs to grow far faster than currently to allow people to move from part-time work to full-time so they can better provide for their families.

...

“If anyone is celebrating this anemic recovery, then they are totally out of touch,” Bush said. “The simple fact is people are really struggling. So giving people a chance to work longer hours has got to be part of the answer. If not, you are going to see people lose hope. And that’s where we are today.”

See that second quote, that's what's in the Business Insider article. At least 4 hours or so had transpired between the quote being spread as a gaffe on twitter and Jeb!s “clarification.”

Business Insider and others have mashed two interviews together into a phony transcript and then attacked the media, liberals, Hillary, Paul Krugman, et al. For quoting Bush out of context and proving it by creating fake context.

Maybe Jeb did mean that people working part-time should be given the opportunity to work full-time when he said that original quote. In any case, Business Insider and others have created fake context and reported it as proof that he was taken out of context, and that should be a story.

So let's give Jeb a chance to explain what he really meant:

Jeb: If we’re going to grow the economy people need to be—stop being part-time workers. They need to be having access to greater opportunities to work. Look under this administration they have created rules that make it harder for people to work. This overtime rule is going to end up creating not more opportunities and higher income for people—people are going to end up working less. Obamacare has forced people, businesses to hire people for 30 hours rather than 40 hours. Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton think now that’s great because they are free to pursue their dreams that they might want to do. Well I think people want to work harder to be able to have more money in their own pockets, not to be dependent on government. You can take it out of context all you want, but high sustained growth means that people work 40 hours rather than 30 hours and by our success they have money and disposable income for their families to decide how they want to spend it rather than getting in line and being dependent upon government.

So what he's really saying is that businesses trying to avoid Obamacare and save money by cutting people's hours to keep them technically part-time and thus screwing them out of health care...shouldn't be doing that. So is he saying businesses should stop screwing their employees? Or is he saying we should get rid of Obamacare?

It seems that Jeb thinks it's not the businesses fault that they screwing their employees by denying them healthcare. Instead it's Obama and Pelosi's fault for forcing businesses to do this to their workers. It would be one thing if he attacked Obama for not envisioning the unintended consequences, but he doesn't say that, instead apparently Obama likes that employers did this because his goal was to get people more free time and be more dependent on the government.

So he wasn't saying you should work longer hours because you're lazy. He's saying we should get rid of Obamacare so you can work longer hours and still not have healthcare.

After watching the whole interview with the Union Leader, I have to say that there's a certain section in which Jeb! Seems to be doing a great impersonation of his brother.

It's worth a watch, trust me: http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4543699/jeb-w-bush

Adjunct - Gesundheit

2015-06-01T16:56:00.000-05:00

Me pretending to be a writer for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.

And finally tonight: College. We've previously covered the monumental problem of student loan debt and predatory for-profit colleges, oh and also collegiate athletics and how they're bullshit, but we've still barely scratched the congealed surface of the pile of bullshit that is college education.

We all know that a college education is now very expensive, in fact over the last 30 years the price has tripled. College is supposed to be an investment in your future, which is perhaps why we don't look all that closely at where the money goes. After all, it's probably going to your professors so that they can buy Priuses and humus and corduroy pants.

But a study done last year found that 76% of instructors across all colleges and universities in America are adjuncts and not professors. Unlike professors, adjuncts are part-time employees with little to no benefits who are employed on a per-course basis.

In the 1960s, about 4 out of 5 college instructors were full-time professors, and only 1 in 5 was an adjunct. Today, 3 out of 4 college instructors are adjuncts, and 40% of adjuncts claim to work more than 40 hours per week despite their part-time classification. You might be thinking, “get to your thesis already John, this is a very muddled introduction lacking in action verbs.”

So here's the point: these so-called “part-time” adjunct professors are drastically under-paid. Just how under-paid? 31% of adjunct faculty in the United States are near or below the federal poverty level. 16% are paid less than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, and 43% are paid less than $15/hour, which is the minimum wage in Seattle.

The result of this low-pay is that many adjuncts work multiple jobs, often at more than one college, with no benefits, but it actually gets much worse than that, as one adjunct professor explains:

Interview 1: “I have a Phd, I teach four courses a semester, plus two in the summer, that's ten courses a year. A full-time professor usually doesn't teach more than 7 or 8 courses a year. Yet last year I made $16,000 before taxes. At this rate, I won't pay off my student loans until I'm 185 years old. The worst part is that they can fire me at any moment, for any reason, and I will get no benefits, I wouldn't even qualify for unemployment.”

That's right, adjuncts are contract employees, just like the seasonal workers at Wal-Mart. So when the semester ends, so does their contract, therefore they aren't eligible for unemployment benefits, and the university can terminate them for any reason they please because they aren't firing them, merely allowing their contract to expire. It's a lot like how John Travolta doesn't date, instead he uses month long sex-contracts that he allows to expire.

But in most cases, adjuncts aren't short-term employees:

Interview 1: “I've been doing this for eleven years, and I have no hope of ever being promoted to a full-time position. This is my reward for getting a bachelors, a masters, and a PhD, and then working full time as a college professor: I make $10/hour.”

And the problems go further than just the low wages. Because they are paid per course, there is no clock to punch, which leads to something that many fast food workers will find familiar: wage theft.

Interview 2: “Since the colleges want to keep you technically part-time, they'll have 4 part-timers instead of 2 full-timers, and that means that I work part-time at three different universities. Not only do I have to commute to multiple jobs and all the time that takes, but it also means I have to go to three-times as many meetings and training sessions and seminars, usually on Saturdays, that are mandatory, and un-paid. The most insulting part is that these administrators stand up there and mumble while standing in front of a poorly constructed power-point. It just shows how little they appreciate teaching when they incompetently do it at you.”

If you work at an office job and you have to sit through a three-hour meeting, you at least are getting paid your salary to be there. If you work at Wal-Mart and they want to put you through training, they have to pay you minimum wage. Adjuncts are just paid a flat fee per course, and anything else like meetings or advising students is considered part of that fee. Which makes perfect sense, because professors would go to meetings anyway if they weren't paid, that's basically what they do for fun.

Adjunct pay has gotten so bad, well, just listen to this:

Interview 2: “I honestly don't know why I'm doing this anymore. The other day I was looking at starting salaries at other jobs and I discovered that I would make more money as a janitor at the high school just up the street. And I would get benefits. About 100 students a year call me professor, and yet none of them would suspect that the high school janitor down the street makes more and gets more benefits than I do.”

Holy shit. I told you college was bullshit, and now you see, it pays more, to literally clean up shit than it does to teach at many universities. And this is not an isolated incident. The average adjunct pay nationally is $3,000 per course. An adjunct teaching 10 courses a year, more than what's considered full-time, would make $30,000. The median salary for garbage collectors in the U.S. is $32,000 a year.

If the average adjunct college instructor with at least a master's degree is making less than the average garbage collector, what's the value of a masters degree? Why are students paying universities all that money for an education in the first place if even the universities themselves don't value that diploma?

At this point universities are in the same business as Hallmark. They sell extremely over-priced pieces of cardboard that you show to other people as proof that you are willing to waste your money to impress them.

Maybe universities don't have the money, after all there are frequent cuts to education. In just the last decade, the cost of college has gone up about 40%. However, during that same time, the cut of college revenue that actually ended up in the pockets of teachers has dropped 24%. In other words, the money is there, they are just choosing to give less of it to teachers.

Interview 3: “When I teach a full course, there are 16 students each paying around $4000. So the University is taking in about $64k. They turn around and pay me $4k. That's less than 7% of the revenue. In other words, each student is paying $4000, and only $250 goes to me. My students are required spend more than $150 on books for my class.”

So when it's all said and done, a student is paying almost as much to the textbook company as they are to their actual teacher, meanwhile this university is collecting 93% of the tuition to spend elsewhere. It's no wonder the universities have shifted so much of the teaching load to adjuncts, they are payed about as well as subway buskers.

Instead of picturing teachers with an apple on their desk, we should replace the apple with a fucking tip jar. If the adjunct we just showed had a tip jar and each student gave on average a 6% tip, that would double her pay.

A. Students shouldn't have to tip, because they're already paying triple for tuition as students a few decades ago, and B. Fuck you universities, what the fuck are you doing with that money?

Well, a lot of it is going to administrators, presidents, vice presidents, provosts, deans, and chancellors and whatever other bullshit job titles they can pull out of a thesaurus. You can call yourself a chancellor, but we all know you're just an over-paid principal that gives handjobs to donors.

Administrative bloat is a huge source of the increased expenses at universities. Twenty-five years ago, professors outnumbered administrators two-to-one. Now that's completely flipped. From 1975 to 2005, college administration staff grew by 135%, and spending on administrators has tripled. Yet during the same period the faculty-to-student ratio has remained constant. In fact, US schools have added more than 500,000 administration jobs in the last 25 years. Administrators constantly talk about improving efficiency and keeping down costs. But economist Richard Vedder is calling bullshit:

Interview: “It's a lie. It's a lie. It's a lie. . . They'll say we're making moves to cut costs, and mention something about energy-efficient lightbulbs, and ignore the new assistant to the assistant to the associate vice provost they just hired.”

At Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute, the president, Shirley Jackson, made over $7 million in 2012. And because it's so difficult to live on 7 million, the university also provides her with a mansion in the Adirondacks, a support staff of housekeepers and body guards, and a chauffered luxury car.

Well the free-market has spoken, she must be doing a great job if she earns that much. Under Jackson's leadership, RPI has seen its debt go up by more than 600%, and they have seen their credit rating downgraded twice. Meanwhile, an adjunct at RPI, Elizabeth Gordon, was making $4000 per course, which she calculated to be equal to $10/hour. In order for Gordon to make as much money as President Jackson makes in one year, she would have to teach 1,750 courses, which would take more than 200 years. In other words, RPI pays the president as though she is worth as much as 200 teachers. They only have 440 teachers. If you cut just Jackson's pay from 7 million to poverty wages of only 1 million per year, you could give every teacher at a RPI a $13,000-per-year raise. And that's without considering any other administrators and their bloated salaries.

So why does the board think Jackson is worth such a high salary? What has she done to make RPI a great university? Well, in 2006 the faculty senate nearly passed a vote of no-confidence in her. So she responded by dissolving the faculty senate, taking a page directly from Grand Moff Tarkin's textbook on business management. She has also been accused of using union-busting intimidation tactics, for example, firing a janitor who joined a union organizing committee.

But it gets worse. President Jackson has a set of rules, and these are all true:

-She is always to be introduced as “The Honorable Shirley Ann Jackson.” - because nothing says honorable like dictating to others that they call you honorable.

-Cabinet members must rise when she enters the room.

-Only she is allowed to set the temperature in conference rooms. - presumably because she's a cold-blooded velociraptor that's very sensitive to temperature.

-If food is served at a meeting, vice presidents must clear her plate.

Wow. That's some Saddam Hussein level shit. I bet George W. Bush is wishing he'd thought of that while he was president. Imagine Dick Cheney being forced to scrape half-eaten tuna salad off W's plate, or wiping off the desk in the oval office. It will warm your heart a little bit, if it doesn't, you're a robot and a jaded one at that.

While Darth Jackson is an extreme example, universities all over have seen both the size of the administration increase as well as administrator pay increase drastically, while teacher pay has stagnated or even fallen.

You've got to pay administrators a massive salary otherwise they'd go elsewhere, I mean who would be willing to do all the hard work of being chauffered to meetings where you get to piss on people for only a few hundred thousand dollars?

At the University of Alberta, four professors combined themselves Captain-Planet style into a single entity and applied for a single job as Vice-Chancellor that paid $400,000 per year. The four professors offered to each take a quarter of the pay and a quarter of the duties. You'd think that four professors could do the job better than one person, but the administration disagrees, and would rather pay one person all that money. That's because these four professors put together aren't qualified to do the job because they clearly don't understand the purpose of being an administrator is to make lots of money while shitting on teachers. Teachers shitting on themselves would be a clear conflict of interest.

And this brings us to an important point: college professors are smart people. So why do they work for such low wages? Well, adjunct positions are often seen as stepping stones to jobs as full-fledged professors. Most adjuncts are qualified to be professors and so they take these jobs in the hope that it will allow them to make connections, add to their resumes, and soon lead to a full-time job. But remember that now 3 out of 4 college teachers are adjuncts, and that trend is only getting worse. Basically adjuncts are full-time professors but university Grand Moffs are pretending they aren't really professors and they pay them like they're garbage collectors.

But college professors are smart, and so they are realizing that they are being exploited and that the adjunct job is a stepping stone that just ends at a cliff where there used to a bridge that took you to a now mythical professor-land.

Basically we can go one of two ways: the smart, talented, passionate teachers that are professors in all-but-title will quit and find work in other fields, leaving the universities to hire less and less skilled people to fill their McJobs, and like McDonald's food, it will cause higher-education itself to urgently need a toilet. OR, adjuncts can band together, unionize, and demand fair wages, which has been happening at some universities recently, so there's some hope.

But in the mean-time, I have a solution. (Pull out a tip-jar and put it on the desk). Tip your teachers. They work way harder for you little shits than that barista did on your iced mochaspressachino vanilla bullshit you needed so you could stay up late to write that non-sense about how Buffy the Vampire Slayer is an example of formalism, and you tipped for that, remember? Meanwhile, that teacher has to read your bullshit paper for $7/hour and no tips.

(Enter an announcer): Presenting the Honorable Shirley Jackson.

(John stands at attention as a velociraptor enters)

That's our show for this week, thanks so much for watching.

(John feeds the velociraptor by hand, and wipes its mouth).

Interstellceptmento

2015-05-27T11:06:00.003-05:00

May 27, 2015 .... or is it? BWAH

Let me start by saying that I enjoyed Intersetllar quite a bit. I'd give it 4 thumbs on my 5 thumb-scale (don't ask where I got the other three thumbs). It was entertaining, I didn't hate it. But there were some issues... And of course SPOILERS:

The premise doesn't really make sense. Thanks to Coop, they figure out gravity manipulation, launch enormous city-sized spaceships that can traverse worm holes. BUT they can't figure out how to grow Okra on Earth? This flaw is present in every “find a new home” save-humanity movie. If you have the ability to move thousands or millions of people off world, if you can traverse worm-holes, if you can figure out how to survive on some new alien world that's different from Earth, if you can terraform another planet...then you can make it work on Earth. If you can make plants grow on Alien World 7, with different soil chemistry, different lightning conditions, different seasons, a complete lack of insects and all the intricacies of agriculture that are present on Earth...why can't you figure out how to grow wheat back on Earth? Interstellar only explains it by saying that there's a “blight.” Which doesn't really make sense because when they move off Earth, how are they going to make sure they don't take the blight with them? If it's infecting all plants everywhere, why do we assume it can't get into their escape colony? They don't seem super strict about contamination when they let random farmer Coop show up at NASA's Ark headquarters and they just let him waltz in with Blight all over him. It seems like it would be easier to stop a viral plant fungus than to figure out wormhole manipulation. Then again, a movie about a man inventing a vaccine for plants might not be all that exciting.
They have no MRI machines left on the planet. But they have wormhole-hopping super spaceships and joke-cracking AI robots. So why can't they make MRIs?
Let's fucking walk everywhere...IN SPACE!

They send Coop and the gang through a wormhole near Saturn and then they go visit a black-hole and three alien planets...yet when they get to a planet, they have to walk long distances with no other method of travel. They couldn't bring along a rover like they did on mythical Apollo missions. That would be too hard, wasn't enough room in their ship for a tiny rover. Hell, send a segway. Coop and Matt Damon end up treking across ice for long distances. Anne Hathaway causes everyone to age 23 years because she slowly trawdles through ankle deep water. Seriously people, you've got interstellar spaceships and walking and nothing in between? A plastic kayak weighing four pounds could have prevented half the problems in the movie.
NASA needs a random farmer to be their savior for this mission that's just about to launch? Why? They mention that they don't have any astronauts left that have left a simulator. But remember, they just sent a bunch of people to a whole host of alien planets just 10 years ago. They forgot how to go to space in the meantime. Don't have the budget? In any case, wouldn't you rather send someone that's been training for this for a decade instead of a farmer that wandered in covered in blight talking about ghosts? They could explain this away, maybe explain that humanity is down to such a low population that they've actually tapped out the talented pilots or something. But as it is, it seems totally absurd that Coop is suddenly the savior. And what happened to the guy who was going to be the savior pilot? He just gets bumped from the flight and sits on his ass for 50 years?
See, big fucking rocket!

Remember when they launch from Earth? There's a massive Saturn V-ish looking rocket, and it launches just this small shuttle like spacecraft into Earth orbit. From there, they dock to the bigger interstellar ship, they head off to Saturn, then wormhole. Then they take the small shuttle-like-ship down to a planet that has 130% of Earth's gravity. Then they do some surfing, then take off and fly away. Recall that getting from Earth to Earth Orbit required a Saturn V-ish massive rocket? Well now leaving a planet with 30% stronger gravity requires no such rocket, they just fly away. I'm sorry, what? This makes no fucking sense. If this spaceship is capable of just flying off a planet with stronger gravity than Earth, then it should be capable of just flying into space from Earth. And if you have the technology to build small ships that can just fly up to Earth orbit, then you don't need massive Saturn V rockets and you don't need gravity manipulation technology in order to put a lot of shit into space. You guys have the technology to easily get into space. Because remember, after they take-off from 130%-gravity world, which is a manuever that should be more difficult than launching to orbit from Earth, they then head off to another planet, then take off from that planet. They've got a ship that can launch into orbit from two planets one after another...but it can't get to Earth orbit without a Saturn V? This might sound like a nit-pick to you, but to someone that knows anything about rockets, this is like mind-numbingly stupid. They obviously tried to make the movie somewhat realistic when it comes to depicting black holes and relativity, but they wave a wand and hope you can't think about 1960s technology?
Let's walks some more.

So you arrive through a wormhole, you have 3 planets to check out. It seems like they don't know shit about the planets other than knowing that the explorer has given them a thumbs up. Not sure why they can't just look at the planet now and do spectral analysis or even receive more detailed info from the explorers that could tell them that this planet is covered in a giant rolling tsunami. But whatever, assume they can't get more info and have to actually land on a planet and check it out (apparently just orbiting it and looking at it with their eyes isn't an option either?). Fine, so then which of the following planets do you pick? Two planets that are basically normal...or a third planet that's so close to a black hole that 1 hour on the surface is like 7 years on Earth? Let's go check out the crazy time-dilated world first! Remember that they sent explorers out a decade ago to check out the planets? Well the explorer that landed on Tsunami-World just landed there like 80 minutes ago. The explorers that landed at the other two planets are still broadcasting thumbs-ups after a decade. Which is more likely to be habitable, a planet that has supported a signal beacon for 10 years, or one that has supported such a beacon for 80 minutes? Why in the hell would you check out that crazy time-dilated planet first? Even if you get there and it's a great world and humans go settle there...they will always be dealing with crazy time dilation from being so near a black-hole. Does that sound like a nice stable place you want to make home? That'd be like deciding of all places to live on Earth, a trailer-park in Oklahoma is the best bet for survival.
Hurr durr, I'm an astronaut.

I hate Anne Hathaway. Oh my god, shut up. You are so annoying. All you do is cry and screw things up, then blabber on about love.
You made a sort of believable story about worm-holes and warping space-time...and then you crammed in the idea that love is an actual super-natural force that transcends space-time, but not just any love, father-daughter love? A. It's corny as fuck. B. You don't need to tack on something super-natural like love being an undiscovered aspect of physics like it's the god damn Higgs Boson. It just makes people roll their eyes and try to ignore that Anne Hathaway was in the movie. Let their love speak for itself.
If you want to make a movie that's like 2001 A Space Odyssey, why do you edit it like it's a music video? 2001 is full of incredibly long shots of beautiful space things with no dialogue and sometimes no music. It gives the audience space and time to think about what's happening, to live inside their own heads for a moment and wrap their heads around what's going on. While I think 2001 does this too much and could have done with a good trim, it still stands that one of the reasons 2001 is good is that it is not in your face and it gives you time to think. This movie throws three times as much information at you, but before you can think about it, it then slams you with a plot twist followed by a bunch of crappy dialogue. For example, any space-travel sequence is filled with non-sense pilot chatter. “Full reverse thrusters” “On my mark, 3, 2, 1” “Match the spin now.” A. Pilots don't narrate what they are doing. B. It's not even necessary, it's not like the audience would be totally lost if Coop doesn't explain what he's doing. C. Imagine instead that these sequences don't involve rapid cuts and shitty fake-pilot dialogue, and instead consist of long shots and no dialogue that let you just appreciate the visuals and have some space to think. I think you get more tension from silence than you do from random fake pilot speak. Also, for all the pretty visuals, they sure like to cram in as many cuts as possible. No, stop looking at the wormhole, instead, look at Anne Hathaway passing out and then a close up of the ship exterior, now back to Coop, now back to Hathaway, now back to the exterior. How about an iconic long shot as they traverse a worm hole that doesn't cut away from the pretty visuals? And it's not just a problem with space travel. They also cram in random shit throughout the whole movie. Clips from the future of people talking about dust storms, let's just cram that in to the beginning. This movie is nearly 3 hours long, yet it can't ever find more than 15 seconds to let you think without hitting you over the head with corny dialogue about love or stupid fake pilot speak or a random plot twist. It's almost like Nolan is afraid that if a scene takes more than 40 seconds we'll get bored. You make so-called philosophical movies that make you think, but apparently the thinking is homework for when the movie is over.
Astronauts cry a lot right?

The ending sucks. So Coop makes it out of the black hole alive, is recovered floating in space, then meets Murph as a grandma, but just for about 30 seconds before she tells him to leave (cause the audience is bored already, it's been 30 whole seconds). Then he steals a spaceship and heads to Anne Hathaway because she was the only woman in the movie he's allowed to have sex with so he has to go to her now or something. So, they choose to have Cooper live through a black-hole only to have this not really pay off. Sure he meets Murph again, but she tells him to leave almost immediately and she dies. Was that worth it? Then he goes to Anne Hathaway...who is still alone on that planet for some reason? They've launched massive city-sized ships, but they couldn't send a single shuttle with like 4 people to go help Anne Hathaway? They even send for grandma Murph to come out to Saturn and meet Cooper, and they have a hangar full of ships...so they're heading to the new home for humanity, but haven't bothered to send anyone to help the single individual woman who is on the planet by herself getting it ready? Why? It's not even a plot hole because the fact that she's alone doesn't really matter for anything anyway. Why do we make such a leap, that Cooper lives through the black hole and is recovered, only to have such an unsatisfying ending?

Here's how I would end the movie instead:

Remember how Cooper could move her books on the bookshelf? Then at the climax, as she's figuring out that he's the ghost...she starts moving books. I thought she was going to communicate with him inside the black hole by writing something in morse code by moving her books. And he could respond, since he can see into that room. Right? They could have communicated back and forth. How's that for an ending? She can't see him, but he can see here, and they communicate with morse code by moving books around, they both cry tears of joy, he then gives her the data. Since he's inside the black-hole, time moves really slowly, almost a stand-still, so he doesn't' die, he's just left in the black hole forever living in that moment. Meanwhile outside the blackhole it just looks like the black hole disappears along with Cooper. He's gone. But to him, time was passing so slowly that he's in there basically for an infinite amount of time living in the moment where he talks to Murph. Then we glimpse her figuring out gravity manipulation and then we see the giant ships leaving earth. The end.

Is Jennifer Lawrence Retarded?

2015-02-06T12:25:00.002-06:00

In Arrested Development, Charlize Theron plays an English woman who seems quirky, down-to-earth, good with kids, with a strange sense of humor. Michael falls in love with her before he realizes that she is, in fact, retarded. That English accent really makes you sound smarter.

I have a theory that Jennifer Lawrence is secretly also an MRF like Rita Leeds. We're all so distracted by her good looks and her down-to-earthiness that we have been reduced to Michael Bluth levels of awareness.

So I now present...Jennifer Lawrence...retarded?

GOOP

2015-01-19T12:22:00.002-06:00

Me impersonating Bill Maher:

I don't hate the Republican party, but I do think they are a party of baby-murdering demon-cyborgs.

Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that there was a party of demon-cyborgs that need stem cells from abortions in order to sustain themselves. What policies would you enact to create a surplus of stem cells?

First off, you'd do away with sex education. Tell the kids that condoms don't work, so don't bother, that they have to wait until they're 29 and married until they can have sex. Then make it hard and expensive to get birth control, oh and constantly insinuate that birth control is for sluts.

Now we've got a huge population of young people who don't think condoms work, so they don't bother using them, they don't know how to use birth control or can't get access to it, and they of course aren't waiting for marriage. Nobody waits for marriage.

Sarah Palin didn't wait until marriage and she married her high school sweetheart. Between high school and marrying her high school sweetheart, she had an affair with a future NBA player and got knocked up. So yeah, let's go to her for abstinence advice. Hows that working out for her kids?

So now we've got tons of unwanted pregnancies. But, if being a single mom isn't so bad, if you get help from the government, you might keep the kid. Oh wait, Republicans are constantly cutting benefits to poor single moms. Free school lunches, bullshit, use your bootstraps kid.

So you've got a nationwide campaign of disinformation where they say condoms don't work, birth control causes breast cancer, just ask conservapedia about that, tell young people who are known for self-control to not have sex for a decade, then you try to make access to contraception as difficult and expensive as possible, even taking it to the supreme court, then you make it really fucking hard to be a poor single mom.

That is clearly the strategy of a party of demon-cyborgs who need to feed on aborted fetuses.

BUT! BUT! You say, Republicans are for closing abortion clinics! They can't be trying to maximize the number of abortions if they're also trying to close abortion clinics.

What happens when you make something illegal? Does making it illegal make it go away? This country banned alcohol and then we stopped drinking forever, don't you guys remember that.

No, what happens is that this industry then goes black market. Instead of Anheuser Busch making money, it's the bootleggers and moonshiners. Instead of pharmaceutical companies making money, Colombian drug cartels make money. Instead of Planned Parenthood doing abortions, the Demon-Cyborgs with their fetus pincers perform abortions and then get to feed on the results.

BUT! BUT! Republicans are against stem cell research!

Yeah, they're against us researching what they're doing with all those stem cells (whisper: they're eating them).

The Republican platform when it comes to sex education, contraceptive access, childcare, and abortion access all come together in one clear strategy to create an enormous and delicious abortion black-market.

Now, I don't actually believe the republicans are demon-cyborgs. I haven't ruled it out either.

But I do believe that they are terrible parents. That's what defines them: Being a particular kind of shit parent.

The purpose of parenting is to help mold a child into a human being that can make decisions for themselves.

But they seem to think they can construct an elaborate set of rules, essentially become computer programmers and create an operating system that makes the decisions for the kids. Anybody who's done much computer programming knows about If-Then functions.

If you aren't married, then no sex. If he tries to put it in my butt, then say exit only. If someone offers you drugs, then just say no.

But you can't account for every possible situation. That's why computers suck at everything. We've got Google driverless cars that never get in accidents, they drive flawlessly because driving is pretty simple. But you know what they'll really suck at? Getaway drivers. You laugh now, but what happens when some murderer is after you and you get in your self-driving car and tell it to get you the fuck out of there, the murderer will just rear end you and the car will pull over so you can exchange insurance information and he can murder you.

That's why computer people are obsessed with AI. They want something that can learn on its own because you can't possibly account for every possible situation.

Republican parents are doing the exact opposite. They have things that learn, that have intelligence, but they're trying to beat the thinking out of them so they will just follow the rigid rules the parents create for them.

Republican parents have decided on their kids behalf, that they are A. Heterosexual, B. Not having sex until marriage, and C. Christian.

Go against any of those and they will flip their fucking shit. They don't want their kids to learn about evolution because they don't believe in it. They've made the decision, now the kid is just supposed to follow orders for their whole lives.

And if you stray, you get punished. If you're gay, you get AIDS, you get disowned, then you go to hell. If you're an atheist, you get disowned and then you go to hell. If you have pre-marital sex, then you get STDs and an unwanted pregancy, then you go to hell.

They see STDs and unwanted pregnancies as god punishing you for being bad. HIV kills gays because god hates gays. Sluts get STDs because they're dirty sluts.

But if you're a good girl, you won't need to worry about STDs or unwanted pregnancy. So you don't need any sex-ed!

Just know sex is super dangerous and then don't have it and you're fine.

It used to be true that sex was dangerous, that STDs and pregnancy were huge risks. But now we have technology. It's the future. The risks aren't the same anymore. You can use condoms and birth control and then spend a decade fucking whoever you want without having an AIDS baby. And then you can settle down and have kids when you find the right person and are ready to.

We can fuck safely now. As long as you know how to do it right.

But shitty Republican parents don't want their kids to know how to do it.

It's not just that they want to keep information from the kids. They actually want there to be STDs.

There's a vaccine for HPV, and so if all girls get it, we can basically wipe out one whole STD for future generations. Republicans are largely against it. Michelle Bachmann said the the HPV vaccine causes mental retardation. They want STDs to exist so that if their kids stray from the virginal path they set for them, they'll get spanked with the clap. They don't want abortion to be an option, that way their daughters will be so terrified of getting pregnant that they'll be afraid of having sex until they're ready to be a mom.

If it were the movie Jaws, Republican parents would be saying:

Don't catch the shark, because then my kids might go swimming.

But the shark is what makes it so dangerous.

Yeah but my kids don't know how to swim, and if they try, they might drown.

Well then teach your fucking kids to swim.

No. Swimming before you're 21 is a sin. The shark is god's way of punishing young people for sinning.

So you want the whole world to be actually more dangerous than it needs to be because you can't be bothered to teach your fucking children.

And then they complain constantly about our culture and its liberal values.

If my daughter's friends watch Sex and the City and they think it's okay to be a slut, then they'll be sluts, and then my daughter will be pressured to be like them. It's so hard to be a parent now.

No! It's not hard at all to be a parent now. It's hard to brain-wash your kids when they have Google and they can easily prove your bullshit wrong.

Morals aren't a list of do's and don'ts. Shitty lists don't impart morals. That's how you know religions are bullshit.

The Ten commandments, God's list of do's and don'ts, doesn't include rape or slavery. Those are fine. Hell, you can combine them into sex slavery and Moses will just look at his list and go, yeah, that checks out.

If we actually try to make a list of all things you shouldn't do, it won't work because in 50 years the world will be different. We'd need to constantly be adding amendments like, don't hack into people's phones and steal their nude pictures and then post them on 4chan.

Making a list just turns us all into language-rapists who are trying to interpret laws and find loopholes. And if you can find a loop-hole then you should be fine. That's how we got the Missouri Compromise, where anal sex before marriage is fine because the hymen stays intact. That's also how it's somehow okay to murder abortion doctors.

You can't list every shitty thing. You can't possibly do it. That's why no list of commandments can ever work. Instead, you need a principle to follow.

And I've got it. This is my principal. My one commandment:

Thou Shalt Try Not To Be Epically Cunty.

You tell me, is sex slavery is a work of epic cuntyness?

Go ahead, find a loop hole in Thou Shalt Try Not To Be Epically Cunty.

“Try?” You're thinking, why is the try in there. What if I try just a little bit, and then give up?

If you aren't really trying, then you're just pretending that you're not a cunt. But actually, you're being cunty.

The try is there because sometimes you should act like a cunt. The ten Commandments fucked this one up too. Thou Shalt Not Kill? But God commands people to kill only about a thousand times in the bible.

What about Hitler? Are we not supposed to kill Hitler? Of course sometimes you should kill. But you shouldn't just kill someone for no reason.

If someone is being an epic cunt to you, and you bite your tongue and let it slide, and then they epically cunt on you again, and this time you say, hey cunt, quit cunting on me, and then they keep cunting on you, then you've tried enough and you can be a cunt back to them.

That's it. That's all you need to know about morality for the rest of your life.

So what do you do if you're 18 years old and you're waiting until marriage to have sex and you really want to have sex with your 18 year old boyfriend. Should you get married so you can start having sex? According to Republican parents. Yes. Yes you should. Get married, then have all the sex you want, and you'll live happily ever after.

But my one commandment says, for fuck's sake, NO! Being 18 and hormonal and horny as fuck and really badly wanting to fuck somebody is not a good reason to make your teenage courtship into a death-pact. That's a really good way to be already divorced when you're 22.

Confounding horniness and teenage lust with the reasoned, mature desire to spend the next 60 years with someone you will grow to hate and making all your friends and relatives gather together for a ceremony in which your father hands over his deed to your hymen to your boyfriend is pretty cunty.

This is a map of how ignorant your children are.

You can't just give over a list of do's and don't to your children. They will be making decisions, and so the best you can do is give them the most accurate information you can. Just telling them to wait until marriage and then denying them information on birth control and condoms is clearly a recipe for teenage pregnancy and catching STDs, just look at this map of the prevalance of teenage pregnancy.

The actual sex ed that I got went something like this. We looked at pictures of herpes and syphilis. We watched a Lifetime movie about a girl who had sex one time and got AIDS. Then we got to feel a set of rubber testicles to see what cancer feels like.

I came away from that thinking that unprotected sex is fucking dangerous. I thought if I banged a girl with no condom and she had HIV, that I would of course get the HIV. So I thought one-night stands were like Russian Roulette with HIV bullets. That's fucking scary.

So I spent several years thinking that sex was dangerous as fuck. But do you know what the actual odds are of getting HIV?

If I bang a girl, no condom, she has HIV, what are the odds I get it? 1 in how many? One in five? One in ten?

It's actually 1 in 2,500. That means, if I had 25 one-night-stands, and every single time, I somehow managed to always hook up with an AIDS girls, I have some kind of AIDSDAR, and never used condoms, I would have a 1% chance of getting HIV.

The odds that you get AIDS from blowing an AIDS dick are less than the odds that you will be killed by a police officer.

That's how you know America is a fucked up country. Our police are more dangerous than blowing AIDS dicks. And that's based on a national average. Imagine what the figures look like if you're black. Being black in America is like blowing ten AIDS dicks, just all the time.

My impression of John Oliver.

2015-01-19T12:04:00.000-06:00

Language Rape

I like to imagine the world as it would be seen by a Martian, an outsider, who doesn't have our culture and experiences. What would the world look like to that person. For example, laying down and spending a third of our time in some kind of hallucinogenic state seems odd.

From that perspective, I started to wonder...what are lawyers? What do they do? Laws are rules, basically we figure out what shitty things people shouldn't do, then we write down, don't be an asshole and do these things. And the job of a lawyer is to then work with these written rules and figure out what precisely they mean.

But it seems like what they really do is twist language and manipulate it and figure out how to take something and make it mean something else.

Basically, lawyers are language rapists.

A lawyer would say, it's not rape, we're just massaging the language – well it's a very deep massage that the language didn't want and afterward it feels violated. To me that's rape. .

For example: The First Amendment says “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech.” Congress has gone on to make all kinds of laws that abridge the freedom of speech, and when challenged in the supreme court, several supreme courts have done a little tap dance and ruled that congress can make laws abridging the freedom of speech if they have a good reason. For example, you can't threaten to kill people, that's illegal, and we all go, yeah I guess that's kind of a good thing. Then they decided to make it illegal to print and sell pornography, oh and communist literature. And the supreme court said, yeah, I mean obviously when the founding father said you “shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech,” they meant you can make laws abridging freedom of speech when it comes to things you don't like such as titties and Marx.

According to these “lawyers” on the supreme court, the phrase “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech” somehow means you can make pornography and political speech you don't like illegal, but you can't limit how much money corporations spend on politics.

This is clearly language rape.

This brings me to my favorite case in the history of law.

A Panera opened in a mall. They had a contract with the mall that stipulated that they could not let in any other sandwich places. Then the mall allows another restaurant to open, and the guy who owns the Panera gets pissed and yells, “hey assholes, you weren't allowed to open another sandwich place.”

Now, does anyone want to guess what this second restaurant was? Subway? Planet Sub? Maybe McDonald’s?

No. It was a Qdoba.

Judging by your reactions, I can tell all of you people are too morally good to be lawyers.

Here's how you know that the job of a lawyer is to basically be a rapist of language. The judge didn't just throw the case out as being fucking stupid. Judges can do that. But this went to trial.

An actual trial, wherein the prosecution made the case that burritos are in fact sandwiches, and the defense had to prove that burritos are not sandwiches.

In a sane world, the mall owner could have showed up to court with burrito, eaten it, and said “wow, that was a delicious burrito, I rest my case,” and that would have been that. But we all know this isn't a sane world, and if he didn't get his own lawyer he wouldn't have known the right things to say and the judge would have made burritos and sandwiches into the same legal entity.

And what about this Panera owner? Here's a guy who runs a sandwich shop who can't tell the difference between a burrito and a sandwich. I think I know why his sandwich shop isn't doing so well. Does this guy think Taco Bell is a bakery? Does he think Waffle Tacos are just open-face breakfast sandwiches? This is a man who owns a sandwich shop, and yet he can't tell the difference between a grilled cheese and a quesadilla.

And here's another absurdity, this trial creates precedent. In essence, the decision in this case determines once-and-for-all-time whether a burrito is a sandwich. This judge by random chance is now the one member of the human race who has the power to decide if a burrito is a sandwich. I think anyone with that much power should be elected to the job. What if that judge hated mexican food, and now he is the one person on the planet tasked with deciding if a burrito is a sandwich.

In the arguments, both sides were quoting dictionaries as to how burritos and sandwiches are defined, and at some point this needs to be made into a dramatic courtroom film. They not only cited dictionaries at each other, but they both called expert witnesses. But expert witnesses are complete bullshit, because both sides will produce experts. We have a sandwich-expert who can't tell the difference between a reuben and an enchilada but he runs a sandwich shop, so trust him, he's an expert.

The US government actually has a definition of a sandwich. They need to have a definition because we have two agencies that inspect food and so they need to decide who inspects what. The Food and Drug Administration is the ones that make you label foods with nutrition facts and they inspect processed foods, soda, and things like that, while the US Department of Agriculture, or USDA, inspects farms and meat plants and the more agricultural side of things.

The USDA says a burrito is a “Mexican style sandwich-like product consisting of a flour tortilla, various fillings, and at least 15 percent meat or 10 percent cooked poultry meat.”

So that settles it right? It's a sandwich-like product. So it's...not a sandwich?

And apparently, according to the USDA there's no such thing as a vegetarian burrito?

Here's where it goes from weird to disgusting. If you package a sandwich and sell it, which agency inspects you, the USDA or the FDA?

If it's closed-face, i.e. it has two pieces of bread, then you are inspected by the FDA. The FDA does inspections daily. If however, you package an open-faced sandwich with just a single piece of bread, then you are inspected by the USDA. And the USDA inspects open-face sandwiches sold in interstate commerce an average of once every 5 years.

So don't ever eat a packaged open-faced sandwich. That's what I've learned out of all of this. Because it's legally distinct from a closed-face sandwich and it turns out that legal distinction might actually kill you.

It's not negligent homicide, it's just an advanced case of inside-out syndrome where the intestines decide to leave the body.

So it's all settled then. A burrito is not a sandwich. Fuck you Panera guy's lawyer, because you just got paid thousands of dollars because you convinced an idiotic sandwich shop owner that burritos are sandwiches and then put us all through this ordeal of language rape.

And here's the worst part. If tomorrow a Qdoba opens up in a mall, and the Qdoba makes a deal that says the mall can't bring in any other burrito places, and then the mall lets a Panera move in, the Qdoba owner could sue, because we have only legally settled that a burrito is not a sandwich. Whether or not a sandwich is a burrito is legally unsettled ground. And I bet you that somewhere there's a lawyer who is trying to date-rape the word burrito so he can make tens of thousands of dollars on a stupid lawsuit. And if the Panera guy shows up with just a sandwich and common sense and no language-rapist on his side, then the judge will rule that sandwiches are burritos.

Then we'll live in a world where a sandwich is legally a burrito, but a burrito is not legally a sandwich.

Here's some more language rape for you. Subway Footlongs. People started measuring them and many weren't a foot long. Some were right at 11 inches. What Subway should have said was, bread rises and expands when you cook it, so it's not always going to come out exactly at precisely 12 inches, but we do our best and you'll find that many come out longer than 12 inches and we're not systematically trying to screw you over.

Instead, what they said was: 'SUBWAY FOOTLONG' is a registered trademark as a descriptive name for the sub sold in Subway® Restaurants and not intended to be a measurement of length.

Not intended to be a measurement? That'd be like if the McDonald's quarter pounder weighed way less than a quarter pound and McDonald's said, “the name just describes how heavy it looks.”

Here's another example of language rape. The 2nd amendment. Hopefully I won't be shot by the time I finish this.

The 2^nd amendment is a single sentence. “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

Now, a lot of people like to forget the first half of the sentence. In fact, in the Lobby of the NRA headquarters, they have the text of the 2^nd amendment on the wall. Or, they have the second half of it. They conveniently leave off the first half that talks about militias, because they couldn't be bothered to put the whole sentence.

I'm no language rape expert, but when you spend the first half of a sentence saying that a militia is good, I think that is relevant to the meaning of the second half of the sentence. That's what punctuation is for. If these are unconnected thoughts, you would use a period.

The modern interpretation of this, by the Republican Supreme Court is, and I quote, “The second amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia.”

What they're saying, these brilliant language-rapists of the highest caliber, is that the 2^nd amendment means “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed,” and that the first half of the sentence is meaningless and is just there because the founders felt like saying that militias are nice, especially well-regulated ones.

That would be like if I wrote a law that went like this:

“Farting being one of life's simple pleasures and also a necessity for comfort, the right of the people to pass gas shall not be infringed.”

And then the supreme court decided that this meant that companies could release all the toxic pollutant gases they felt like because they have an unlimited right to pass gas.

And when somebody says, isn't that sentence about farting? Antonin Scalia says, “oh no, the founders were just saying that they liked farting, but unconnected to that, and in the same sentence for some reason, they also think unlimited pollution is a fundamental right. They're unconnected thoughts, that's why they're separated by a whole comma.”

If the founders wanted to give us all the right to bear arms unconnected to anything to do with militias, then the second amendment would have said: “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” But they didn't just say that!

There's an earlier draft that said:

“A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, being the best security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; but no one religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person.”

Let's break that down:

A militia, what is a militia, why militias are good, therefore militias should be able to exist, and you can't make Quakers join the militia.

Every bit about this is about militias, not rednecks with AR-15s. And if it's all about the militia, it also says “well regulated militia.”

So it seems to me that the amendment is saying “you have a right to form a militia, as long as it's well regulated.”

A few years ago, the city of D.C. Passed a law that banned handguns and it was challenged and went to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court struck it down because the Republicans on the court ruled that the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, therefore you can't ban handguns.

If you interpret the second amendment this way, then doesn't that mean you can't make laws banning any kind of arms? Tanks, Napalm? Can I own a tomahawk cruise missile? Can I own an ICBM and a missile silo? You know, for self-defense.

Well. . . Actually, you can own a flamethrower if you want. We have no regulations on flamethrowers. You don't even need to pass a background check. You can buy a flamethrower online.

According to genius language rapist Antonin Scalia:

“Obviously the amendment does not apply to arms that cannot be hand-carried, it's 'to keep and bear,' so it doesn’t apply to cannons,”

Okay, so I have to be able to hold it. I've seen Arnold Schwarzanegger hold an 8-barrel Gatling gun. So according to Scalia, what guns you can own depends on how strong you are.

He goes on to say:

Scalia: “but I suppose there are hand-held rocket launchers that can take down airplanes, so that'll have to be decided.”

Fox News Person: “How do you decide that if you're a textualist?”

Scalia: “Very carefully. My starting point and ending point will be what limitations are within the understood limitations that the society had at the time.”

So Scalia is saying that it might be unconstitutional to ban heat-seeking shoulder-fired missiles if his gut feeling is that people in the 1780s would have been cool with it.

Which do you think is more likely: that the founding fathers wanted to give everyone the right to own any weapon, no matter how powerful, just as long as they could physically carry it, OR that they wanted to make it so that we had a right to form a well regulated militia?

Which of those two options seems like something that was thought up by complete fucktards?

GirrlaCanes

2015-01-17T11:19:00.001-06:00

Friday June 6th, 2014

Nation, have you ever met a lady and had a hot, steamy connection, a real wet and wild affair, only to discover that when she left, she took your car and your house? It's a phenomenon that affects millions of men every year. I'm talking of course of Hurricanes.

A new study claims that female-named hurricanes are more deadly than male-named hurricanes, saying that when people are dealing with female named hurricanes they are “not as willing to seek shelter” because they are “viewing women as warmer and less aggressive than men,” and implies “implicit sexism.”

Did you catch that folks? Female hurricanes kill three times as many people as male hurricanes, but the gender-police at Arizona State think this is proof that we're all a bunch of sexists who can't take women seriously.

Well I've got another idea. Maybe female hurricanes are more deadly. (Lightning Bolt)

Of course it's gotta be men's fault. Mother Earth wouldn't be more deadly than Daddy Globe. Of course not, Mother Earth would never drown her kids in the tub.

Poppy-cock! Daddy Globe might yell and spank and throw a baseball at you, but Mother Earth is burying all of that emotional trauma deep inside until she snaps and tries to murder us all with a barrage of Hurricanes and Femnados and Vag-canoes.

The government agency that is concerned with giant floods and hurricanes, which is aptly named “Noah” (NOAA), suck on that Atheists, which is short for National Oceanographic and Atmospheric's Anonymous, has been called on to give all hurricanes male names to fix the alleged problem of people not thinking that women named Katrina could possibly ruin their lives.

But those Mother-Earth worshiping Feminists are protesting this move, saying that naming all hurricanes after men would merely treat the symptom, not the problem, and that clearly the easier thing to do is to change all of society so we all respect and fear women as much as we fear men.

We could start by naming scary things after women. Tornadoes are now called Sheilas. We're tracking a category 5 Sheila, you better take cover. History channel can have a show called “Sheila Chasers.” Ebola is now Shebola. Pooping your pants is now pulling a Vicky. Surely this will make people take cover when Hurricane Mercedes is coming.

Of course, you know I'm not buying this feminist argument that female storms are more deadly because they're misunderstood. That's why I'm calling on NOAA to do a better job of probing our Hurricanes so we can find out their genders ahead of time. Don't bother telling us when we've got a harmless male-a-cane, but you sound the alarm when it's a herricane.

So come on NOAA, get out there and sex our hurricanes.

NOAA has two flagship hurricane hunter aircraft, which are named, and this is true, Kermit and Miss Piggy.

I never thought I'd say this again: Save us Kermit, you are our only hope.

Some groups are calling on NOAA to give hurricanes all male names, but now we're talking about reverse-sexism. Oh sure, let's reinforce the stereotype that males are more likely to stab you with a marlin. That's totally fair.

Other groups are saying that we must give hurricanes androgynous names. Names that could belong to a man or a woman... or a pet piranha. Names like Paco, Fram, or Steeee. But this suggestion was immediately shot down as “trans-phobic” and cis-het-normative, which coincidentally is the name of my cat. You know it's its name because when you say “cis-het-normative,” it won't come to you because it's a cat.

So nation, what are we supposed to do? Using female names kills more people because we've become desensitized to periodic female problems. Using male names reinforces the stereotype that men are dangerous. Using androgynous names demonizes the transgendered. So what's left? What kind of name would instill fear without creating a negative stereotype?

Wait. I think I have it.

Call all Hurricanes Hurricane Obama. He's already caused millions of scared white people to horde supplies, and that's without even showing up on radar. Let us all just pray that Hurricane Obama never develops a stealth capability that he could use to evade being detected by Miss Piggy and Kermit.

And it wouldn't create any stereotype, we all already know that Obama is destroying America. And when Obama is out of office, we can just move on and name all hurricanes Hurricane Hillary.

(This is part three of the "I pretend I'm a writer for the Colbert Report" series. Part Two Part One.)

Macaque's Selfie

2014-08-18T04:51:00.002-05:00

Friday, August 8th, 2014

Nation, have you ever wondered how Wikipedia is able to obtain pictures for its articles without infringing on copyrights? Neither have I.

Wikipedia can only use images that are either in the public domain or are specifically licensed for free use by third parties, otherwise they are guilty of copyright infringement.

If you go to the wiki article of a famous person, let's pick one at random, how about Stephen Colbert, D.F.A.? You'll find that there are no pictures from my show, since screenshots of the Colbert Report are copyrighted by some guy named Via Com. I think he's Italian.

So Wikipedia has to get creative to obtain images.

One method is to wait for some moocher to ambush me with a camera. That's how those non-profit fat-cats obtained this photo of me and First Lady Michelle “I don't wear mom-jeans” Obama. This image was taken by the White House's official photographer, and therefore the picture is owned by the US Government. Since the Government is not a corporation, it cannot be a person like Mr. Via Com, and therefore it cannot hold a copyright and therefore the image is in the public domain.

Another method is to wait for users to upload and license their own images to Wikimedia. In such a communist utopia, fine people everywhere take time out of their busy lives to photograph and upload images so that all Wikipedia articles may have wonderful and free illustrations.

Just kidding, Wikimedia has been completely overwhelmed by user-submitted dick pics, and they would like you all to please stop.

It's hard to pin down an exact figure of the number of dick pics because Wikimedia uses sub-categories that can themselves contain further sub-categories. For example, under the category of “Human Penis,” there are 24 sub-categories such as “Human penis size by degree of rigidity,” which itself has four sub-categories. I'm guessing, those four are hard, soft, really soft, and Cheney.

Other sub-categories include “human penis facing left” and “human penis facing right,” which of course is needed to make sure that penis pictures remain Fair & Balanced, “Human Penis in Art,” which has a further 7 sub-categories, “Ultrasound Images of fetal penis,” which is not Child Pornography because it's difficult to be aroused by SONAR if you aren't a Dolphin, and “Sex Practices involving the penis,” which contains a further 8 sub-categories, one of which is “Male masturbation,” which itself contains a further 8 sub-categories, including “videos of male masturbation,” which itself contains another four sub-categories, one of which is “videos of male masturbation by posture,” which itself contains three sub-categories which are “Videos of recumbent males masturbating,” “Videos of sitting males masturbating,” and “Videos of standing males masturbating.”

Thanks to the generous giving from thousands of volunteers, now wikipedia editors have plenty of videos to choose from to illustrate how congress works.

Wikimedia doesn't list the total number of images and videos in all the sub-categories of sub-categories, so you would have to pour through each sub-sub-sub-sub category to take an accurate dick census, and nobody has time for that. Except for Jay the Intern, who reported back that there are over 9000 dick pics and videos.

This bouquet of phalluses has led to protracted battles as users try to prop up their dick pics as the best. Some users go around nominating other dick pics for deletion while simultaneously inserting their dick pics into articles, fighting to make their penis the actual protypical penis pictured in the world's most used encyclopedia, making them a true modern Vitruvian Man.

While the penis war wages on, many other Wikipedia articles are lacking in the picture department.

Please don't sue me.

One such page is that of the “Crested Black Macaque,” which is unfortunately not a sub-sub-category of penis, it's a kind of monkey. Wikipedia uses this selfie that a Black Crested Macaque took after it stole, I mean, borrowed a photographer's camera in Indonesia.

The photograher, David Slater, claims that he owns the copyright to this image and requested that it be taken down. Wikimedia responded by sending him a picture of their black-crested macaque and balls, saying that he is not authorized to request the removal of the photo because he is not the photographer and therefore doesn't hold the copyright. According to Wikimedia, the image was taken by the Macaque, so only the Macaque can hold the copyright, and since a macaque is not a person, the image is therefore in the public domain.

And That brings us to tonight's Word.

Macaque Selfie

How can monkeys take selfies if they don't have a self? Or do they?

What does it tell us about humans that the Macaque took selfies of its face instead of thousands of neatly categorized close-ups of its genitals?

That it's a female.

Slater claims the picture belongs to him because he engineered the shot saying “It was my artistry and idea to leave them to play with the camera and it was all in my eyesight. I knew the monkeys were likely to do this and I predicted it.”

“Artistry”

Which is how I wrote my book I Am America and So Can You, by leaving my laptop open and predicting that my interns would write something in it.

Interns are non-persons and cannot hold copyrights. :(

Wikimedia countered that the person pressing the button is the photographer, regardless of who owns the camera. But Wikimedia might be opening up a huge barrel of angry monkeys with this argument.

The Precursor to the Legal Precedent of the Origin of the Inciting Incident of the Planet of the Apes.

If a monkey is capable of being a photographer, why then can't the monkey own the copyright on the image? And if monkeys can own copyrights, why can't they, I don't know, own people as slaves?

Many of us are already slaves to Macaques.

Slater claims that his career has been ruined and figures that he has lost around 10,000 pounds in royalties.

Which is equivalent to 160,000 ounces of Freedom.

There's a famous saying that a monkey at a typewriter, if given an infinite amount of time, would write the complete works of Shakespeare. Now we know that a monkey with a camera can ruin a photographer's career in about five minutes.

Monkey see, monkey do. Monkey take selfie, monkey become world famous photographer.

If your income is jeopardized by monkeys hitting buttons, then maybe you should have majored in something a little more useful than photography.

Monkey Business?

And if Macaques are capable of taking selfies, why didn't Anthony Weiner defend his dongle tweet by saying “I didn't take the picture, Macaque did?”

That picture is filed under “Human Penis – Concealed by Boxers – Penis Selfies – Career Ending”

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then if a Macaque named “Romeo” takes 885 selfies, he will have contributed more to society than Shakespeare.

Luckily, I happen to have a Macaque named Romeo in my pants, and I have been training him to take selfies.

Eww...Wherefore art thou Romeo?

I'm coming for you Shakespeare!

Not literally.

Nation, it's happening. Monkeys are contributing to Wikipedia. What's next, monkeys commenting on YouTube videos? That's absurd, it would quickly degenerate into a massive shit-flinging nightmare – (REALIZATION)

Now we know what those monkeys at typewriters have been doing while they were supposed to be writing plays.

Nation. If Monkeys are photographers who spend their days writing Youtube comments, then that can mean only one thing.

Macaques are college students?

Monkeys are unemployed free-loaders. Get a real job macaque! Your picture taking and internet arguing is being subsidized by my tax dollars.

Or it would if I paid taxes...

Well I won't be a monkey's uncle or his sugar daddy.

Mr. Obama: De-port Ma-caque.

Macaque just hangs out all day, checking out girls, getting in fights,

Sword Fights?

And taking selfies. Just ask Wikipedia if we need more macaque selfies.

Wikipedia: "Please God Make it Stop."

President “Mom Jeans” – Deport Macaque. And that's tonight's word.

(This is part-two of the "I pretend I'm a writer for the Colbert Report" series. Part One.)

Space For Sale

2014-02-22T14:25:00.004-06:00

As I type, I'm perhaps a month away from finishing Moon For Sale, my second novel in a planned trilogy about Kingsley Pretorius, a South African billionaire who starts his own space program.

The idea for this trilogy is not to predict the future but to offer up a possible future that realistically could happen. I don't believe the plot of these novels will come true. I believe that I have done my research, that these books will never violate the laws of physics, and never sacrifice realism for fake drama.

Really the germ of this idea came from a perceived lack of near-future science fiction. There's plenty of sci-fi in far-flung futures, with terraforming, human civilizations spread across the solar system or the galaxy. There's also plenty of sci-fi about alien contact, space monsters, space wars, etc.

But both of these types of far-flung futures have almost no resemblance at all to actual space travel. They wave a magic wand and launch massive colony ships.

Sure, I'm interested in seeing far-future humans spreading across the solar system and galaxy, but I also want to see how we get there from here. What's the first step? When do we get to Mars? When do we go back to the Moon? Who will do it? Will it be a cold-war-like space race between US and China? Or will it be an international cooperation like the European Space Agency teaming up with NASA and RSA?

Apollo and the early space programs live large in our collective imaginations, and I'm very interested in seeing the next Apollo. Maybe that's a moon base, maybe a base on Mars. But I don't want wand-waving that skips to the supposedly more interesting story of discovering aliens, monsters, alien-monsters, etc., but rather a story like that of Apollo, of real people with limited technology, bravely leaving the Earth, heading out into space, and hoping they aren't lost in space, to orbit the sun for millions of years if the mission fails.

What comes closest to this kind of premise, from the popular culture that I can remember, are films like Red Planet and Mission to Mars. They both came out in a short period of time, and both portrayed the first attempts at sending humans to Mars.

But in Mission to Mars they discover that the face on Mars is an alien artifact and they try to solve all the mysteries of life in the last 10 minutes of the film. In Red Planet, they encounter flesh-eating nematodes and their robot companion turns against them. Evil robots, flesh-eating alien monsters....doesn't exactly sound like Apollo does it?

The film Europa Report which just recently came out was supposed to be a more realistic space film (than say Sunshine and it's monsters...), but Europa Report did some very silly things. They send humans to land on Europa before humans ever land on Mars or Ceres. Their ship and mission design make very little sense, and then they run into monsters. There's also Apollo 18, about a lost Apollo mission...where they run into Moon monsters.

Look, I'm sure there is alien life out there somewhere, but we've had so many alien monsters in fiction...can't we just get one example of space that doesn't include monsters, doesn't include wand-waving that makes orbital mechanics go away (Like the film Gravity which ignores basically all of orbital mechanics...), doesn't resort to the low hanging fruit of space monsters, space-splosions, and pseudo-scientific plot points.

So with that in mind, I was very interested in writing about the next 20-30 years. Realistically, how do we take the next step? How would we go to Mars? What would that program look like? Apollo on steroids?

I had been thinking about this kind of story for several years, but I didn't have much of an idea about how we would get there. The easy answer seems to be a new space-race against China. Reach a little higher in the creative tree and you might get to massive corporations replacing space programs. There's plenty of sci-fi in which nation-states have been overcome by massive corporations, and that's not all that far-flung an idea.

But the problem I see with the idea of massive trans-national corporations launching the next space-race is that there's not a lot of profit to be made in just sending people to Mars or Ceres. This is why much of that far-flung sci-fi skips a long period of time and jumps to the time when these massive corporations can be turning profits with space mining and such. But that's a big leap in time. Sure companies probably will be turning profits by harvesting resources from space...but that's not going to be the next step, we have to start actually exploring space before we start sending miners to the Moon or Mars.

If nations aren't willing to drop hundreds of billions on going to Mars, and corporations aren't going to turn a profit until we've already expanded a good way into space...how do we ever get this period of exploration kick-started?

When I started learning about Elon Musk, at first, like many people, I was skeptical of him. But about two years ago, I realized that he was the real thing. And he provides the answer. Maybe not him personally, but the idea of him...

Sure, it's possible that the US or China or Russia decides to stake their claim on being the world's foremost power by sending humans to Mars...but politicians won't be the ones making the trip, and politicians aren't typically big fans of science fiction or all that interested in space (The US Military budget is something like 40 times bigger than NASA's). Sure it's possible that some corporation will decide they can turn a profit by going to Mars, but I just don't see them making those numbers work...

But what about eccentric billionaires?

We live in a time when there are a few hundred or a few thousand people who literally have the power to go to Mars if they want to. If Bill Gates decided he wanted to move to Mars and had 60 billion dollars to throw at the project, it's certainly possible that he could do it. Eccentric billionaires can put billions into a project that has absolutely no chance of turning a profit, because they personally will profit from the experience. And that, I believe, is how the next step in human space travel will be taken.

So now that I finally had a vision of space travel that felt both compelling and realistic, I set out to learn everything there is to know about Elon Musk, SpaceX, NASA's plans, and everything there is to know about the near-future in space.

The direct result is a trilogy of books: Space For Sale, Moon For Sale, Mars For Sale.

Without going into too many details, you can see the progression of the story in the titles. But if the story I had to tell was nothing but details about space missions, Tom Clancy-like expounding on the specific impulse of the engine, the mass fraction of the rocket, some kind of study or report on the feasibility of a series of space missions, then that would not be a very compelling story.

These novels are about going to space, about revolutionizing space travel by bringing costs down, about electric cars replacing combustion engines, about congress meddling in NASA, about corruption, about corporate espionage, about space firsts...but they are mostly about characters, people who have dreams and goals and flaws, and some of those people are eccentric billionaires with money to burn.

When you open the world's first space hotel, you're not going to be launching spacecraft filled with boy-scout-like-astronauts who follow orders.We're talking about Russian gangsters with billions to spend trying to avoid prison by living in space and Justin Bieber and his pet Capuchin trashing their space hotel room (which they paid for in bitcoins). We're talking about George Clooney buying spy satellites to spy on genocidal fuck-heads in Sudan and the first ever porn filmed in space. We're talking about things that are both absurd and absolutely realistic.

That's what these books are about: The absurdity of the reality we actually live in. They're about a dream of making space travel cheaper, and all the obstacles that stand in the way of a bold thinker that tries to make his dream a reality.

I would describe the series as being like Apollo 13 and The Right Stuff. It's funny, it's realistic, and it has authentic space drama.

The first book is out. The second book is coming in a few months.

Here are some excerpts from early reviews:

-Best 'modern' setting book I've read.

-There must have been a great deal of time spent on the research for this book; I actually feel like I received an education on the history of manned space exploration from this book. With this book, I think Jeff Pollard has done for space nerds what Ernest Cline did for 80's pop culture geeks with Ready Player One. There are tons of nerd culture references scattered throughout the book, and looking for these little Easter Eggs became a meta game for me.

-There were some pretty memorable passages in the book too, and I thought Kingsley's epiphany speech to Caroline was one of the hardest hitting pieces of self reflection I've ever read.

-All in all, I thought this was a really enjoyable read, and I would recommend it to anyone interested in science fiction, space history, Elon Musk, pop/nerd culture, etc.

22 Answers to Creationists with Dumb Questions

2014-02-05T13:30:00.002-06:00

5 February 2014

Over at the paragon of intellectualism called Buzzfeed, they posted a series of 22 questions posed by creationists in attendance at the Creation Museum where Bill Nye debated a talking ham.

I will now answer all of their questions.

1. Bill Nye The Science Guy teaches children about reality. What are you doing at the Creation Museum? Lying about reality, telling people not to listen to scientists, undermining science teachers, attempting to replace science education with religious indoctrination. Are you telling me it's healthy to tell children that an after-life of eternal torture awaits them if they question what you teach them?

2. No. I'm not scared of something that has not been proven to exist. I'm also not afraid of Big Foot or a Flying Spaghetti Monster or Sharknados.

How's this for a question. Are you afraid to imagine that you cease to exist when you die, and that you won't be reunited with loved ones and that death is final? Are you so afraid of not existing that you'll seize on the fairy-tale that you will live forever in a magical land despite no evidence to back it up? When smart people come along and point out that the book which you claim proves this fairy-tale ending is actually riddled with falsehoods and contradictions and doesn't match up with the nature of reality, will you plug your ears and insist that the scientists are lying? Will you be willing to brain-wash your children to ignore the facts of reality in order to keep alive your fairy-tale idea about your immortality?

3. I'd add: too many layers of ice, visible stars that are billions of light-years away, dinosaur fossils from millions of years ago...

Sure, it's possible that it was created like this. A god could make the earth and make it so that stars that are billions of light years away already have their light 99.9999% of the way to earth so that we can see them even though the light hasn't had time to get here, or he/she/it could manipulate the composition of radioactive elements to make it erroneously appear like things are billions of years old...

But why would god go out of his way to make all the evidence point to a universe and an earth that are really really old?

Don't you find it a little weird that your god is using the nature of existence to lie to you?

You think you have a prankster god? I'll let Bill Hicks handle this...

4. No. It doesn't. Thinking that it does shows that you don't understand thermodynamics.

The second law of thermodynamics basically says that a closed system will grow more disordered over time. Order in thermodynamics is really refering to usable energy, so like a small pocket of high heat surrounded by areas of low-heat. This is ordered.

Over time that heat will spread out and the whole area will be the same temperature.

In other words, you don't pour a room temperature bath and then discover hours later that there are ice cubes floating in one end of the tub and hot water on the other end.

You can throw ice cubes into a hot bath, but over time the whole bath will end up at a uniform temperature.

The 2nd law says that you always go from more order to less order and inevitably to the lowest-ordered state.

Creationists then take this to mean that you can't go from low-order (primordial soup) to highly ordered (complex living things).

However this is a completely wrong assessment for a number of reasons. For one thing, the 2nd law isn't talking about this kind of order, and even if it was, the Earth is not a closed system, there is heat pouring in all the time.

For another thing, there is no mechanism in a closed system by which a bath of uniform temperature would then stratify into ordered layers...but you could create such a mechanism, and evolution is a mechanism that creates order out of less order. That's the whole beauty of evolution.

Saying that evolution violates the 2nd law because it creates order out of less order is like saying that your freezer violates the 2nd law because it creates ordered ice cubes out of disordered water.

It's a nonsense question that only sounds smart if you don't know anything about thermodynamics...

6. The laws of thermodynamics do not debunk either The Big Bang Theory nor the Theory of Evolution. At the big bang we had essentially a soup of highly charged particles, nothing but the simplest of things. But from this lack of order we get ordered galaxies, stars, people, etc.. This kind of order (spiral galaxies, planets around stars, DNA) is not the kind of order talked about in thermodynamics. And there are processes that create this order. You can see computer models of dis-ordered clouds of dust and gas becoming ordered solar systems. Gravity and the conservation of momentum will create this order. But all the time, the thermodynamic order of the universe is decreasing, in fact, eventually, if the universe doesn't collapse, if it is a closed system, then we will reach a point when the universe will be at the lowest possible ordered state of thermal equilibrium. At that point no work can be done, not even computation. This possible end of the universe is called The Heat Death of the Universe.

5. A sunset occurs when the sun dips below the visible horizon on a round planet. Why do we need god for a solid object to block light?

This question might as well be "How can you explain that anything exists without a god." So we all ask where the universe came from, and we say that the earliest thing we can explain is the big bang, and you say "what was before the big bang," and we say, well, before that, space and time did not exist in our universe. Our universe may be part of some bigger structure, a multi-verse, a series of bubbles or branes in 9 or 11 dimensional space, but here in our universe, we can't see outside of it and so we don't know.

You say "god made the universe." Where did this god come from? Has it existed always? If you have no problem saying that god has always existed then we have no problem saying the multi-verse has always existed.

Why are you anthropomorphizing something that has nothing at all to do with people? There are a septillion planets in the universe, but you think god is an understandable personality similar to the intelligent apes found on one of those planets? Or do you think it's more likely that whatever creatures reach intelligence are likely to invent a god that is similar to them?

7. Wikipedia says: "In philosophy, noetics is a branch of metaphysical philosophy concerned with the study of mind and intellect."

So this isn't really a question, but I guess she's trying to imply that intelligence and consciousness come from a soul and can't be explained by physical processes.

We have evidence of consciousness. We have no evidence of souls... We have plenty of neuroscientists that can tell you all the ways that physical processes in the brain create consciousness. You can shock a part of the brain with an electrode and make someone become instantly euphoric. Zap another spot and they become suicidal. Cut out a section and you can make a sociopath. Insert a tumor and you can remove all inhibitions. Where's the soul in all of this?

8. Inside our heads. It's nice when questions are posed in a way where you can actually answer them. Meaning, experience, love, anger, you name it, it's in your head. Go study evolutionary psychology if you want to know the origins of these things.

Life arising from non-life is called Abiogenesis.

The Miller-Urey Experiment set out to show that a soup that was like the ancient Earth, with simple compounds, if exposed to heat and electric sparks (like lightning) and given a long period of time, could produce more complex amino acids which are the basic building blocks of life. The experiment created at least 20 more complex amino acids from simpler compounds. In other words, a soup made in a lab given a few years can make the building blocks of life. Now lets make that soup so large it fills the oceans of the planet, and rather than a few years, lets give it a billion years and see if something happens by chance in all of those countless chemical reactions and protein interactions all over the planet.

There are over a septillion planets in the universe. Perhaps one in a billion of those planets are potentially habitable. That leaves a quadrillion habitable planets. Let's let 13 billion years go by and see if any of those quadrillion planets might at some point spontaneously create life out of non-life. Remember, we're not talking about an ape crawling out of the ooze. We're talking about something that is microscopic and barely removed from a chemical process.

Do you think that quadrillions of oceans with billions of years might once in a while create life?

Or is it more likely that a complex, thinking, all-powerful, omniscient life existed already at the start of the universe?

Centuries ago, when it was thought that the Sun or even the Earth was the center of the universe, and there was only one star, only a half-dozen planets, then it might seem more likely that a god existed than life spontaneously coming about on one of those few planets. But now that we can see literally septillions of planets, it doesn't seem so unlikely does it?

Creationists will counter this by saying that the odds of life arising on Earth are miniscule, so the fact that we are here shows that we are special. Let me ask you this: if life hadn't occurred here, if our ocean wasn't the right composition and life didn't arise here, would we be here to think about it?

If life can arise from non life and perhaps a thousand intelligent civilizations have arisen across the universe, all of those civilizations will be on a planet where life was possible to arise, all of them had long odds...but it happened somewhere... To say that we are special because we are here is like saying we are special because we are the sperm that made it...of course we are! You don't see the sperm that didn't make it walking around do you? Or it's like the lottery. If you are the one person in a million to win the lottery, you might think you are special and it happend to you for a reason. But to the person pulling the balls out of the machine to pick a winner, it's not magical at all that somebody is going to be a winner.

10. Genesis also says more.

Bill Nye was booed when he pointed outan error in Genesis.

"Nye calmly riled everyone up, by bringning up Genesis 1:16, which reads, “God made two great lights — the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars.” Nye then corrected the Bible. “The lesser light is not a light at all, but only a reflector.”

At this point, the Waco Tribune records that one mother jumped up from her seat and screeched, “We believe in God!”, then ran away crying, dragging three of children away with her. As she ran off, the mother was seen visibly cupping the ears of the child in her arms so her baby would not have to hear any more of Nye’s science."

So God created two great lights. The Sun and the Moon...

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.

Take note, when god said "let there be light" he is talking about our SUN. Not the big bang. Also, the book puts The Sun as the main light, then the lesser "light" is the Moon, and oh yeah, by the way, he also made the stars. See the order of importance? The other stars are just an "oh by the way." That's because they didn't know that the sun was just one of billions and billions of stars. They thought it was the only sun. So basically Genesis, at best, is an account of the creation of our solar system and that's it. Not the universe.

Now if Genesis had talked about the big bang, and galaxies and supernova that created the heavy elements and then collapsing dust and gas clouds that created our solar system and then the nuclear fusion that powered the sun, that might be quite a story, one that would show that the writers had some knowledge that was not available to scientists in that time. That might show they were divinely inspired. Instead it has every hallmark of being written by people who had no more knowledge than anyone else at the time...

11. Umm...they don't?

The idea that life on earth was engineered by aliens is an interesting one, but is not at all embraced or accepted by the scientific community.

This is called Exogenesis or Panspermia.

It's certainly possible. We are now capable of genetic engineering. We could theoretically go out and find a habitable planet where life has yet to arise and then seed life there... However, ultimately, if we wash away the problem of life arising from non-life by saying Aliens did it, we still then have to explain the origin of Aliens, and ultimately they would have to arise from non-life.

I think this person is watching too much Ancient Aliens on the (NOT)History Channel.

12. Evolution says that humans arose through gradual changes, with each generation being almost identical to the generation before it and after it. But those small changes add up over time, and so if you go back a thousand years, people won't be much different at all, but if you can find the fossillized remains of people from a million years ago or two million years ago, you'll find that they are different and see how humans changed.

Lucy is one of many examples of these intermediate human forms.

Check out a giant list of these forms.

Check it out and you'll see the idea that there is "one lucy" is absurd.

13. Yes.

All living things undergo some kind of metamorphosis. Look at human fetuses and infants and then look at an 80 year old. We change. Animals change too. There's nothing magical about it.

14. A scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on knowledge that has been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experimentation.

The bible is not a theory.

Gravity is a theory. Theory does not mean "wild guess."

15. A scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on knowledge that has been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experimentation.

Creationism is not a scientific theory. It is absolutely not well-substantiated, nor is it testable or has it ever been comfirmed through any kind of experimentation. Intelligent design is absolutely not science, it is religion and does not belong in a science classroom.

Why do you object to the teaching in schools that a flying spaghetti monster created everything?

16. All genetic information has arisen through evolution. All of it. A common point made by creationists is that the human eye is "irreducibly complex." That is, that you can't have half of an eye, it offers no advantage, and so evolution then must be saying that things without eyes suddenly had awesome eyes out of nowhere by random chance...this is not how evolution works.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_eye

The eye began with the creation of light-sensitive cells. Simple cells that could tell light from dark and that's all. Look at the diagram on that wiki page. If you make a dip and put the cells in that dip, then you can have very rudimentary directional vision of light and dark. From there the pinhole camera type of eye can arise, and from there the evolution to modern complex eyes has no trouble. Eyes have evolved in different ways and seem to have arisen multiple times. We can even see the early form of the pinhole camera in creatures still alive today: the Nautilus.

17. Purpose is an objective human construct. Things are, there is no why, only how. We have consciousness and we get to decide what our purpose is. You have chosen that a bronze-age book has the answer to your purpose. Congratulations...

If you want to know what science says about the origin of human motivations, emotions, and so on, try watching this.

18. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_evolution_fossils

19. Can you believe that Australia exists if you have never been there? I have never seen Australia with my own eyes. However I see all kinds of evidence for the existence of it. I have seen pictures. I've met Australians.

We see the signature of the big bang in the Cosmic Microwave Background.

We can see that all of the universe is flying apart, as if coming from a central explosion at some point far in the past.

I think there was a big bang, but if evidence were provided that pointed to a different origin, then I would be willing to change my mind.

If evidence were produced that showed that the bible were full of contradictions, would you continue to believe it to be true?

20. Because I paid attention in Chemistry, Physics, Biology, and Astronomy class. Amazing does not mean designed. Order can arise from non-order. A big bang of energy and particles and given the laws of physics will produce stars and planets and sunsets and rainbows. Why must there be a creator for these things to exist?

21. The Big Bang was not a star, but a singularity. We don't know where it came from. If the answer to a question is "we don't know," that doesn't then mean "god did it."

If you were to ask a Christian where illnesses and plagues come from in the 1700s, they would say God is punishing us. But some people were not satisfied with such answers and we discovered germs and viruses. Just because science didn't have an answer then does not mean that god was responsible.

22. We did not come from monkeys.

Humans and monkeys share a common ancestor from millions of years ago. Humans and Giraffes have a common ancestor from millions of years before that. Humans and trees have a common ancestor from millions of years before that. All life came from a single origin, and we are all descendants from that origin.

Let's suppose that we take a pack of wolves and breed them, selecting the nicest, friendliest wolves of the bunch and allowing them to breed. After dozens of generations we could have animals that are like dogs, floppy eared, bushy tailed, very friendly, very nice.

You can do just such an experiment.

And if you do, and come up with a new kind of animal, that doesn't mean that there are no longer any wolves.

Humans did not come from monkeys. Monkeys and humans are descendant from a common ancestor. The line to monkeys has been evolving all this time, the line to humans has been independently evolving all this time. The common ancestor which both humans and monkeys come from is not still around.

The Luck of the Chiefs

2014-01-06T02:07:00.001-06:00

(Apparently Scarf Messages are a thing in Soccer.)
KCMO or KCK?

6 January, 2014

Deja Vu, all over again.

You might have thought Kansas City's decades long drought was over when Sporting KC won the MLS championship just a few weeks ago, but the heartbreak from the Chiefs most recent loss is evidence that Soccer doesn't matter. Nobody is comforted from this soul-wrenching loss by remembering that we as a city just won a Soccer championship. Some people might count Soccer as a major sport, but not us.

I don't know a single person in Kansas City who was relaxed when the Chiefs took a 38-10 lead. We know better. We knew half of our team might simultaneously tear their ACLs.

Or that we might once again become a highlight reel for another future hall-of-fame QB. Even while we were still winning, even when we had the ball and were poised to get into position to kick the game winning field goal, we all knew we were going to lose. Something would happen. We'd miss the field goal, or maybe we'd score and the Colts would win on hail mary.

I started Saturday by not being able to sleep on Friday night. I was too nervous for the game. Not excited. Nervous. I finally got to sleep and woke up around 2 O'clock in a daze. There was a football game on the TV and in my dazed condition, and not wearing my glasses, I thought for a moment the red team on the field was the Chiefs. It was actually the Houston Cougars playing against the Vanderbilt Comodores. Vanderbilt was up 24-0 as they came out from halftime. For a moment I thought the UH on the Cougars' helmets was the outline of the state of Texas on the Chiefs throwback Texans helmet.

As I realized I wasn't watching the Chiefs getting blown out in a post-season game, the Houston Cougars suddenly stormed back. Down 24-0 at the half, they quickly scored to close to 24-17 with 3 minutes to go in the third quarter. Everyone loves an underdog. I have no idea who was favored in the BBVA Compass bowl, but after watching the Cougars storming back, I cheered out loud when they connected on a long pass to score a TD to tie the game with seconds left in the third.

The Houston Cougars had become my team.

They wouldn't score again as they would return to first half form and watch Vanderbilt score three times in the fourth to win 41-24.

That's the life of a Chiefs fan. Don't let us jump on your bandwagon, we're all just going to die of dysentery.

We don't have hockey because the Kansas City Scouts lasted only two years before moving away. They've since become the three time Stanley Cup Champion New Jersey Devils. The Devils were in the Stanley Cup Finals just two years ago.

We don't have basketball since the Kansas City Kings left for Sacramento. We were really just a brief stop on their trip out west, having previously been in Cincinnati. The Kings last won a playoff series in 2004.

The Kansas City Royals haven't made it to the playoffs since 1985. The last time the Chiefs won a playoff game, it was against a team that doesn't exist anymore. In 1994, the Chiefs beat the Houston Oilers in the second round. That season, NFL teams had two bye weeks in a one year experiment with an 18-week season. Remember the double-bye? That's how long it has been.

Expect the Unexpected?
Like moving to Sacramento?

Why aren't we allowed to have nice things?

Boston had a curse. They traded away Babe Ruth. I hate to blame the victim, but come on, that's asking for it. The Patriots were bad for a long time, except for those pockets of greatness that got them blown out in two Super Bowls. The Bruins were great once, but then had decades of futility. Same goes for the Celtics. Of course, all four Boston teams won titles in the 2000s.

The Cubs have gone over a century without winning the World Series. Since winning it all in 1908, during that reign of the Ottoman Empire, the Cubs have won only a single playoff series in 105 years. That one playoff series victory was followed by the collapse against the Marlins, partly due to the Steve Bartman incident.

The Cleveland Browns had their hearts ripped out of their chests by John Elway in consecutive years. Then they had their team taken away and moved to Baltimore and renamed for some goddamn emo poetry. Then the Ravens went and won two Super Bowls, while Cleveland is stuck with an expansion team trying to pretend to be an NFL team. That's some Shakespearean tragedy right there.

The Browns are cursed for not making this their logo.

That's before we get to the Indians or Lebron James breaking up with his hometown on national TV.

The Buffalo Bills were cursed with four straight Super Bowl losses and futility ever since. Oh except for the Music City Miracle totally screwing them over. But hey, at least they have the Sabres. Except they lost the Stanley Cup, in Overtime, via an illegal, but not reviewed goal by Brett Hull.

The only team with a longer NFL playoff drought than the Chiefs is the Bengals. I feel bad for the Bengals. Draft bust after draft bust, you'd think they'd eventually find a star. They were good in the 80s. Good enough to lose two Super Bowls. Hey at least they have the Reds...oh yeah. What about Basketball? Oh right. Hockey? I suppose you could say they have the Columbus Blue Jackets, but that's not gonna help.

If there is a god, he sure hates Cleveland, Cincinatti, the Cubs, definitely Buffalo. Oh and Kansas City

Is his foot in the crease? Better review it...
Nah, they're celebrating already, too late to review it.

.

Perhaps the worst part of being a Chiefs fan is that we don't even get the lore. We don't have Buckner or Bartman or Babe Ruth or Art Modell stealing our team. We don't have The Drive or The Fumble or The No-Goal or The Decision. If and when those curses are finally broken and say the Browns finally win a Super Bowl, most people will celebrate the lifting of that curse. But if the Chiefs or Royals ever manage to win something, will anyone really notice or care?

This weekend, all the wrong teams won. Every game went the wrong way. Which tells me that there's either no god, or a maybe he's letting Satan run sports because of all the stupid prayers.

The Chargers somehow made the playoffs, needing a bunch of other teams to lose, and facing the Chiefs backups. We rested our guys so we would be healthy for the playoffs (that sure helped), besides, we had nothing to gain. The Chargers get in, and are sent to Cincinnati. The Bengals won their division, making the playoffs for the third year in a row.

Wait, let me back up.

The Bengals last playoff victory came in the 1990 season against the Houston Oilers. Sorry Houston. You guys have the Texans though...so it's not all bad. And the Astros. Are they good? I don't watch baseball, so I don't know these things.

In '91, the Bengals went 3-13. In the following draft, they picked Houston Cougars QB David Klingler. He's now a Biblical Studies Professor in of course Houston, Texas. So you might imagine how he fared as an NFL QB.

The Bengals didn't have another winning season until 2005. That's 14 seasons where they never did better than 8-8. With all those bad years, you'd think they'd draft some great players. Guys like Defensive End John Copeland #5, with hall of famer Willie Roaf going 8th. Dan Wilkinson #1, when Marshall Faulk went #2. Running Back Ki-Jana Carter #1 overall. Had they picked Faulk the year before, maybe instead of Carter they take QB Steve McNair who went #3? They took Reinard Wilson and Brian Simmons in the 97 and 98 first rounds. Who? In 1999 they took QB Akili Smith #3. The next 5 picks were pro-bowlers. Akili Smith had 5 TD passes...in his NFL career. Cam Newton had more passing yards and TDs in his first 8 games than Akili had in his entire NFL career.

Is this how you Quarter Back?

In 2000, they followed up the Akili bust pick with WR Peter Warrick. RB Jamal Lewis was the next pick. Brian Urlacher a few picks after that.

2001 is when the Bengals finally figured out how to Draft. They got DE Justin Smith, the next year was OT Levi Jones, the year after that was Carson Palmer, Heisman Trophy winning, National Champion, pretty boy from USC, face of the franchise. They finally got it right. In Palmer's third season, he led the Bengals to their first winning record since going 9-7 way back in 1990.

The only joke here is the Bengals uniform.

The Bengals were 11-5 and won their division. That's right, they beat the seemingly always good Ravens and Steelers and won their division. First playoff game in 15 years, and it's at home, and guess who? Pittsburgh's coming. Carson Palmer's first pass was a 66 yard completion, and it was his last of the day. Torn ACL. Jon Kitna came in and played well, but without Palmer, the Bengals lost to the Steelers 31-17.

First fucking drive, first pass, star quarterback tears his ACL.

Bengals go 8-8, 7-9, 4-12 over the next three years.

Then they go 10-6 and win their division again in 2009. A home playoff game! They lose in the first round to the Jets. The Jets only got in because they played the Curtis Painter-led Colts. If Manning had finished that game, it's not the Jets but the Houston Texans coming to Cincinnati. Somebody would finally win a playoff game. Bengals go 4-12 the next season, Palmer, not wanting to stay in a cursed city demands to be traded or he'll retire.

The Bengals go ahead and draft a replacement in Andy Dalton in the 2nd round, having the balls to take WR A.J. Green in the first round and wait on their QB in the 2nd. The old Bengals wouldn't have made such a shrewd move.

Tom Bahali - Yoga Instructor

Dalton plays well and then a Cincinatti Miracle happens. Jason Campbell gets hurt, the Raiders decide to trade for Palmer. The Bengals get a 1st and a 2nd rounder for their no longer needed QB. Everything's coming together.

The Bengals go 9-7 and are one-and-done in the playoffs after losing to the Texans, but hey, a rookie QB gets you to the playoffs? And you have an extra first rounder next year? In 2012 they follow up with another playoff year and another first round loss at the Texans.

Now it's Dalton's third year. Time to step up in the playoffs. This time they won the division again. Dalton and A.J. Green's first chance at a home playoff game.

Hey refs, what are you looking at exactly?

And who are they playing? Will it be the Dolphins? The Ravens? The Steelers? Or the Chargers? Going into week 17, it could have been any of those teams. The Bengals beat the Ravens, having already won the division, this is just salt in the wound as they knock the Ravens out of playoff contention. The Dolphins could have been going into Paul Brown stadium, but they can't get it done. The Steelers take care of business and are headed to Cincy if the Chiefs can beat the Chargers later that afternoon. The Chiefs have nothing to play for and put in their backups. The Chiefs JV team still nearly beats the Chargers, and in fact drives in position to kick a 41 yard game winning field goal. But Ryan Succop misses it (and the refs miss an illegal formation that should have given Succop a second try). The Charges somehow make the playoffs.

We're sorry Cincinnati. The Chargers just went into Cincinnati and beat the Bengals. Philip Rivers' smug ass, the god damn Chargers. The team that fired Marty Schottenheimer after a 14-2 season.

It has to be tough to be a Bengal fan today, but hey, at least you guys got beat pretty bad. Not a lot of "what ifs." At least your QB didn't tear his ACL. At least you didn't blow a 28 point second-half lead...

I guess the Colts-Chiefs game is payback for the hubris of resting our starters. The 2009 Colts got Tracy Porter'd for resting starters and in effect screwing the Houston Texans out of a playoff spot by handing a win to the Jets. The Texans had to play the real Varsity Colts twice and lost twice, and lost out on the wild-card because the Jets got a freebie from Curtis Painter. Sorry Houston, you got screwed, so you got to watch Peyton throw a game clinching pick-six. Does that make up for it?

The Chiefs and Bengals both lost. The Packers lost to the 49ers, not a lot of sob stories between these teams, but the Packers had to endure a season where their star QB's collar-bone became the most talked about bone since Josh and Donna finally boned.

The Saints went into Philly and beat the Foles-led Eagles. Come on, god, can't you let the Eagles win something?

Prior to this weekend, if you asked me who I wanted to win each game, I would have picked every loser. I wanted the Chiefs, Packers, Eagles, and Bengals. Since what I want to happen is the opposite of what will happen, I guess that makes me like Cassandra. I can see the future, but I'm just gonna hate what I see.

I mean, the Ravens led by the "non-murderer" Ray Lewis won it all last year. It couldn't have been the Falcons and Tony Gonzalez. That would have been too good of a story.

Did you know he played basketball?

When rumors swirled about the dismal Falcons trading Tony Gonzalez at the deadline to the suddenly good Chiefs, perhaps giving him one more chance at a ring, I had visions of our offense suddenly becoming the real deal with a hall-of-fame Tight End to make us deadly in the Red Zone. But no, of course that's not what would happen. Instead the Falcons would just continue to suck and the Chiefs would continue to have no solid option at TE, no receiver to step up to make those pivotal 4th and long catches. Of course not, we'll probably just be one-and-done in the playoffs again to probably, the Colts.

If the last thing I'd like to see is what's really going to happen, then Peyton Manning and the Broncos will win the Super Bowl, probably over the Seahawks or Panthers, teams who've played highlight-reel fodder to the Patriots and Steelers in recent Super Bowls.

The worst part of our loss again to the Colts is the lack of a moment to blame it on. There's too many moments. It'd be almost nicer if we had one thing to seize on. In our 2003 38-31 loss to the Colts in which neither team punted, we had a phantom Offensive Pass Interference call that went against Tony Gonzalez and took a TD off the board before half-time. In 1997, the Broncos came into Arrowhead after we had a bye and beat us while wearing something greasy on their uniforms. Bunch of greased up cheaters. Oh and there was a Tony Gonzalez touchdown that was called incomplete but replays showed him in bounds. Replay would be added the following year. There's the Lin Elliot misses.

Good Guy Eli. Sucks so you can draft a QB to replace him.
"You guys said Peyton did this right?"

People remember Lin Elliot blowing it on three field goals, but that's about it. We don't have a scapegoat this year. We can't point a finger at Bartman and say it's his fault. We could point out the injuries to Jamaal Charles, Brandon Flowers, Justin Houston, Donnie Avery, and Knile Davis. But even with all those injuries, we still had a 28 point lead. There's too many injuries, no one to seize on. There's no blown call to blame. Maybe we point at Dwayne Bowe coming down out of bounds to end the game, but that's not like a dropped gimme, he's not the sickest man in America after that. It's hard to put the blame on anyone on the offensive side of the ball. Maybe you blame Bob Sutton for being unable to figure out how to stop them, or our secondary for being abused. But that's not one moment you can hang your hat on.

See, we're left with dozens of little moments, injuries, decisions, what-ifs? What if Alex Smith's fumble tumbled toward the boundary just a little faster and the Colts couldn't pick it up before going out of bounds.

When the announcers mentioned that Donald Brown had never fumbled, everyone in Indianpolis cringed and yelled at the annoucners for jinxing him. Everyone in KC cheered, and waited in anticipation for the Donald Brown fumble. We weren't too happy with how that turned out.

What if we recover that ball? We win. What if we punch in a touchdown rather than settling for 3 after that 3rd Luck Interception? We Win. What if we call a different play and dont' get that intentional grounding call on our final drive? We win. What if we have not Jamaal, but at least our backup running back for the whole second half to grind the clock? We win. What if Flowers doesn't get hurt? We win.

There's too many moments, too many scenarios, so we're left in a daze, wishing we could go back and change them, wondering what might have happened. There's just too many horribly wrong details to forget. We dropped 44 points on them and lost? Alex Smith had the best game of his career and we lost? We were +3 on turnovers and we lost? No missed field goals? How does this happen?

Joe always did know how to talk dirty.

After we scored to go up 38-10, the odds of a Chiefs victory were 500-1. That's 99.8%. I wish a bookee had called me up then and offered me 500-1 odds. I think most people in KC would have instantly bet against the Chiefs. We know better. We knew we weren't a 99.8% lock to win. We might allow ourselves to think we were at 80%. But no better. We've seen Joe Montana concussed in the AFC title game. We've watched Lin Elliot kick under pressure. We've watched a bunch of greased up cheaters get bad calls go their way. We've seen our offense be unstoppable and our defense incapable of getting one. We've seen "not" a
murderer Ray Lewis get sent off with a second ring. We've seen the Steelers beat the Cardinals and the Seahawks. We've seen three expansion teams that didn't exist when we last beat the Oilers, win playoff games ahead of us.

Maybe our uniforms are cursed. How's this?
Awful? Wait, I've got another idea!

We're not allowed to have nice things. I'm convinced the Royals will continue to suck. The Chiefs will go 8-8 next year, 7-9 after that, then 3-13 and Andy Reid will be gone. We'll get a top draft pick and there will finally be an actual QB that we can draft! He'll be great and we'll win the division and get a bye and then he'll tear his labrum on his first pass and never be the same QB again.

After watching the Packers-Niners game,
I've decided the Chiefs flaw is a lack of Gold Pants.

If you wanted a curse to root against, an underdog to get behind, well, the Chiefs and Bengals are predictably out again. Maybe root for the Seahawks who got screwed out of a Super Bowl by bad refs. It won't help though, because it's going to be the Broncos. It's the last thing I want to see. So it will happen. For a moment during the Super Bowl, while the Broncos are winning, I'll think, "Maybe Peyton will retire now," and I'll be hopeful, like the hope you feel when you lock up the #1 overall pick in that last game of the season. But that hope will be crushed when there's nobody to draft, or when Peyton pulls an Elway and comes back for another season.

If I sound like I've lost hope, it's because I have. I know the Royals will suck and the Chiefs will continue to tease us with hope and then really stick it to us. That's just what they do. The Royals might be cursed because of the blown call in the '85 World Series that kept them alive. At least there's something we can pin that bad karma on. What did the Chiefs ever do?

At this point all I can do is root for other underdogs. Sorry Cincinatti. I think I screwed you over today.

I guess I can try to like Soccer.

The Sweet Thirteen

2014-01-03T00:57:00.000-06:00

January 2th, ~~2004~~ 2014

I've posted on here a few times now about the NFL's playoff system and all the ways I think it sucks. Let me boil it down real quick.

Having only 4 teams in each division makes it so that you will have 7-9 and 8-8 teams win a division some of the time, and 9-7 quite regularly. When you guarantee a home playoff game to each of the divisions, that ends up with things like the 11-5 Patriots missing the playoffs entirely while the 8-8 Chargers not only get in the playoffs but play at home against a team that went 12-4, as it actually happened in 2008. Basically, if you guarantee home playoff game to division winners, you're discriminating against teams because they play in good divisions. The 2010 Saints went 11-5 but had to go on the road against the 7-9 Seahawks. Why are we rewarding teams that are in shitty divisions and punishing teams that have a really good record but happen to be in the same division as another team with the same record?

So, I've proposed eliminating the reward for winning your division, perhaps stipulating that if no team in a division 9-7 or better, then that division's spot becomes a wild-card. OR just ranking teams and forgetting about who wins a division. The argument against this is that divisions wouldn't matter and nobody would care about division titles. To that I say...do people care a lot now about division titles? I think they care about getting into the playoffs. Do people care about conference titles? It's super bowl or bust isn't it?

You can also change the divisions up. If you have 5 teams in a division, then the odds of a 7-9 team winning a division are astronomical. If you look through the standings from 90s to 2001 when they switched from 6 to 8 divisions, you'll find that almost every single division winner is 10-6 or better, because having 5 teams to choose from makes the likelihood of one of those teams being quite good, quite high. I found only two instances of a 9-7 team winning a division, and one of those was in a 4-team division, and the other happened in a division in which 4 of the 5 teams were 8-8 or 9-7 (i.e. the wins were just too well divided up, and change a game here or there and one of those teams gets to 10 wins). The problem is that with 32 teams you can't easily have any other divisional setup, other than 4 5-team divisions and 2 6-team divisions. You could go to 36 teams (London, LA...), and go to 6 6-team divisions, but that many teams means you would play 10 divisional games, leaving only 6 left, not great for scheduling (unless you add games...).

I've also argued for the elimination of the AFC-NFC split in the playoff system. What is with all this arbitrary splitting up of teams into conferences and divisions? Sure there's some history to it, but it's not like the AFC and NFC are all that distinct. Why does the title game have to be a battle between an AFC and an NFC team? Why not just have the best two teams? Think back to all those blowout Super Bowls we had because the NFC was so dominant. Why arbitrarily draw a line and say one super bowl team has to come from each side of the line?

Our current system often results in situations where teams know too much about their playoff seeding ahead of time. This year is a great example. Because the Chiefs are in the same division as the Broncos, they knew after week 16 that they could not catch the Broncos, but at 11-4, they also knew they were far and away better than any other wildcard team. Theoretically, the Chiefs could have known they were locked into the #5 seed with 2 or even 3 games to play. Since the Chiefs had nothing at all to play for, they rested their starters and ended up losing a close game. This let the San Diego Chargers into the playoffs, while had the Chiefs had something to play for, they probably beat San Diego, and the Pittsburgh Steelers are in the playoffs instead. The Steelers are at home right now because the Chiefs knew they couldn't improve their playoff seeding.

I have argued in the past for a 16-team tournament, but the main criticism is that it makes the regular season matter less. I counter this by pointing out that the current system allows the team with the 5th best record to miss the playoffs while the team with the 19th best record can get in and get a home game (cough, Seahawks, cough). I also point out that the current 12-team playoff lets in 9-7 and 8-8 teams that get home games, while a simple 16-team tournament would indeed let in more 9-7 teams, but they would not be getting home games, and that the last teams looking in in our current system often have the same record as the last teams in, but happen to lose a tie-breaker like conference record (ummm...so we draw a line in the sand and look only at your record against teams on this side of the sand...for some reason). Basically, we're letting tie-breakers and stat columns decide who goes home and who goes to the playoffs.

But, I will concede that perhaps 16 is too far. Half the league is a bit much. There has been talk from Goodell of going to a 14-team playoff, with only 2 byes instead of 4, and letting in an extra wildcard. I'd like this change and think that's a good way of improving.

But instead, I'd like to present my own new fangled, too-crazy-to-work, playoff insanity tournament to go to the Super Bowl for make benefit the NFL's bank account.

So here's my proposal:

All NFL teams with a winning record get into the playoffs. That actually might be only 12 teams, or it could be 16, but usually the number will be between those two. So how do we make a bracket with 13 teams? You vary the number of byes to make it work.

Here's the ~~2013~~2014 NFL Tournament, or the Sweet Thirteen.

#1 Seattle 13-3
#2 Denver 13-3
#3 Carolina 12-4
#4 New England 12-4
#5 San Fran 12-4
#6 Cincinnati 11-5
#7 Indianapolis 11-5
#8 New Orleans 11-5
#9 Kansas City 11-5
#10 Philadelphia 10-6
#11 Arizona 10-6
#12 San Diego 9-7
#13 Green Bay 8-7-1

Baltimore, Miami, Chicago, Dallas, Pittsburgh, Jets all just miss out at 8-8.

To make this work, we have 3 byes: Seattle, Denver, Carolina, leaving 5 wild-card weekend games 13 at 4, 12 at 5, 11 at 6, and so on.

Looking at those records, I want you to notice that in the real playoffs Arizona is out, while 8-7-1 Green Bay is not only in but is playing a home January playoff game at Lambeau field and hosting #5 San Francisco. The 49ers are having to go on the road to Lambeau as reward for having the 5th best record in the league. Does that seem in any way fair? #5 AT #13 makes no sense at all, and we have that matchup because of divisions.

Now actually, if this were the real playoff, then the Chiefs would not have rested starters and so they would have almost certainly won (since the backups played into OT and lost because of some bad refs...), which means the Chiefs would have been 12-4 and the Chargers 8-8. In other years you'll see teams at the top of their conference resting starters when in this sytem they would still be battling a team in the other conference for the #1 overall seed.

So let's look at this system with a Chiefs win:

#1 Seattle 13-3
#2 Denver 13-3
#3 Carolina 12-4
#4 New England 12-4
#5 San Fran 12-4
#6 Kansas City 12-4
#7 Cincinnati 11-5
#8 Indianapolis 11-5
#9 New Orleans 11-5
#10 Philadelphia 10-6
#11 Arizona 10-6
#12 Green Bay 8-7-1

With 12 teams in, we need 4 byes: Seattle, Denver, Carolina, New England.

Because of the unknown of how many byes there will be, that makes it much less likely for teams to KNOW if they have gotten a bye or not, as a change in the KC-SD game decides if it's 3 or 4 byes. In addition, Seattle and Denver wouldn't be able to rest starters if they wanted to grab the top seed.

So, we have 5 hosting 12, 6 hosting 11, and so on, right?

WRONG.

Being a top seed means you get to pick your opponent. That's right.

So we have a draft. Make a TV thing of it. The #5 49ers are on the clock and they have their choice of the bottom 4 teams. So San Fran, do you want to host the Saints, the Eagles, the Cardinals, or the Packers? They beat the Cardinals twice and now them well, but then again, they beat the Packers too. Maybe the Packers are better than their record when they have Rodgers back...Maybe you're more confident you can take out the Carson Palmer Cardinals...

#5 49ers select #11 Arizona Cardinals.

#6 Chiefs are on the clock. Who do you want coming to Arrowhead, the Saints, the Eagles, or the Packers. The Saints are a different team away from the Superdome and Alex Smith has had playoff success against them. Then again, Andy Reid knows the Eagles better than anyone. That Chiefs defense shut down Rodgers and ended their perfect season a couple years ago.

#6 Chiefs select #10 Eagles

Alright Bengals, who do you want? Saints or Packers? Brees or Rodgers? That's a tough pick, and this shows how important it is to get a good record and get a top seed. #5 seed lets you pick Carson Palmer, at #7 you're picking between Brees and Rodgers...

Bengals decide that they'd rather go against Rodgers since he's banged up and has missed a lot of time.

#7 Bengals select #12 Packers.

The Colts have no choice.

#8 Colts will host the #9 Saints in a super bowl re-match.

Do we have enough interesting story-lines? Andy Reid confident he can beat Eagles. Colts-Saints rematch. 49ers and Cardinals in a divisional re-match, the last game at Candlestick.

I'm going to project these games using magical thinking

Cardinals 14
49ers 27

Palmer throws 5 too many INTs. 49ers offense struggles but the turnovers are all the difference.

Eagles 27
Chiefs 31

Chiefs finally break playoff curse. The Walrus has too much knowledge of that Eagle team to let them get by. Foles has a solid game, but Alex Smith and Jamaal Charles are just too much for that Eagle D.

Packers 23
Bengals 28

The Bengals break a playoff curse too. A.J. Green lights up the Packers D, Rodgers is good but not great in a tough road loss.

Saints 34
Colts 35

Brees and the Saints come out strong on the turf at Lucas Oil stadium, putting on quite an offensive show. But Luck storms back to take the lead with only seconds remaining, getting payback for that Super Bowl.

Round two:

Our four teams on bye:
#1 Seattle 13-3
#2 Denver 13-3
#3 Carolina 12-4
#4 New England 12-4

Now have their choice of meals:
#5 San Fran 12-4
#6 Kansas City 12-4
#7 Cincinnati 11-5
#8 Indianapolis 11-5

#1 Seattle picks first. They know they can beat the 49ers at home, but a recent loss at Candlestick stings a little too deep to make that ballsy pick. Luck and the Colts are the lowest seed but they also delivered one of the Seahawks three losses in the regular season. Who scares you more, Chiefs or Bengals?

#1 Seattle selects #7 Cincinnati.

Coach Carroll, why did you pick the Bengals? What about them makes you think you stand a good chance of beating them? Let the twitter-shit-fest begin. Maybe the Seahawks figure they can shut down A.J. Green with their secondary and would rather face the Bengals running game than Jamaal Charles.

#2 Denver, your turn.

Do you want the Colts who are one of the few teams to beat you in the regular season, and beat you bad? Maybe the Colts are too much of a ghost in Peyton's closet. Monkey in his back? Something like that. You've been the Chiefs twice...

#2 Denver selects #6 Kansas City

Panthers, who you got? 49ers or Colts? Tough call. they beat the 49ers at the Stick by a point, but maybe the Colts without Reggie Wayne aren't quite as scary. Then again, Luck's comeback ability is quite a threat.

Riverboat Ron takes the Colts.

#3 Panthers select #8 Colts

#4 Patriots will host #5 49ers

So we've got round two:
#1 Seahawks host #7 Bengals.
#2 Broncos host #6 Chiefs
#3 Panthers host #8 Colts
#4 Patriots host #5 49ers

Harbaugh vs. Belichick. Cam Newton vs. Andrew Luck. Chiefs v. Broncos III. Russell Wilson vs. gravity.

Bengals 13
Seahawks 31

That secondary is too much, Bengals don't stand a chance.

Chiefs 38
Broncos 34

The Broncos terrible defense really steps it up in the playoffs. Manning is great as always, but John ~~Pussy~~ Fox is too timid, kneeling before halftime, not going for close 4th downs, and playing not to lose rather than playing to win. Chiefs come out in a stunner.

Colts 23
Panthers 26 (OT)

Another comeback from Luck, but Cam Newton comes through in OT to send the Colts home.

49ers 18
Patriots 19

Close game where neither team can get it done in the red zone. Patriots squeak by in a game that makes both teams look bad.

Round Three:
#1 Seattle 13-3
#3 Carolina 12-4

#4 New England 12-4
#6 Kansas City 12-4

See how important that #3 seed was for Carolina and New England? Because the Panthers got the 3 and the Broncos lost, that lets the Panthers play both games at home before a possible trip to the Super Bowl, while the Pats have to go on the road.

Seahawks pick on Kansas City, figuring they'd rather face Andy Reid and Alex Smith than Belichick-Brady.

Chiefs at Seahawks
Patriots at Panthers

We have an old AFC West re-match, as well as Alex Smith going back to Seattle where he's lost many times before.

We also have a Super Bowl rematch. Cam Newton and Riverboat Ron might not remember it, but Brady sure as hell remembers winning a super bowl over these pussy cats.

Seahawks home-field advantage and defense are too much for the Chiefs. The Patriots offensive struggles are exacerbated by a tough Panther D.

Super Bowl:

Panthers vs. Seahawks

Two teams with no Super Bowl wins, one will break that drought. Who will rise up to join the elite QB club, will it be Cam Newton or Russell Wilson?

Aaron Hernandez Suffers Shanked ACL, Will Stand Trial On Crutches, Bernard Pollard Wanted For Questioning.

2013-12-10T15:20:00.003-06:00

"Did I do that?"

10 December, 2013

There are once again, no healthy Tight Ends available for those popular prison football games.

His ACL was not torn from a quick jump-cut, but was rather whittled away over several minutes with a spork stolen from the cafeteria.

So while Mr. Hernandez will stand trial in a few months, he will likely have to be aided by crutches in order to do so.

In Vegas, the odds of a successful Hernandez escape from prison have dropped from 10-1 to 140-1 thanks to his diminished skills. "I just don't see him leaping out of a tunnel and being able to juke his way out of the spotlight," Vegas bookee Mick Walters said.

ACL's and Sporks don't mix.

Prison officials have not officially charged any inmates in the attack, though a few persons of interest have been named including Titans safety Bernard Pollard. "He's not the prime suspect by any means," Warden Smithers said, "but we would like to speak to him about his whereabouts."
Mr. Pollard insists he was in Denver at the time of the Spork-Shank, adding "Just ask Wes Welker where I was. Well...maybe not Wes. Ask Eric Decker, he'll remember me. Maybe."

You can scratch Hernandez from the all-prison team for a while, but come next summer, you might have quite a formidable team for that annual Guards vs. Inmates game. The projected line-up looks like this:

At Quarterback, Ryan Leaf, because when I think of skills that come in handy at Quarterback, I think of Meth-ed up burglars.

At Running Back, O.J. Simpson. He's got a Heisman trophy on his resume and good running backs need to be elusive, so I don't know who's more elusive than a guy that got away with an obvious double-homicide (though he seems to lack that 3rd gear needed to outrun anybody [get it, that's a Bronco joke]).

At WR, we've got Rae Carruth, who was a first round pick in 1997 and had over 800 yards and 4 TDs receiving before he had his 8-month pregnant girlfriend murdered.

Selfies: Worlds Best Alibi.

Also at WR we have Brandon Marshall, 4-time Pro Bowler and 6-time domestic violence perpetrator. He's not in jail at the moment, but we're projecting that he will be in time for next year's prison game. We feel confident in this projection based on his history. He was arrested for assaulting a police officer while in college, he has been stabbed in the stomach by his own wife, and the cherry-on-top was his story about how he suffered severe cuts to his arm that damaged his muscles and tore tendons: he claimed the injury occured when he "slipped on a McDonald's bag and fell into a television set." Given his street cred as a walking yakkety sax video, we're projecting that on Christmas morning he will be attempting to open one of those ridiculous clamshell plastic things forged in the fire of Mount Doom that's encasing a new pair of White PowerBeats when he will slip and accidentally bury his scissors six inches deep into a Police Officer's groin.

Then at TE, Aaron Hernandez will probably be healthy, if not Super Bowl champion and child molester Mark Chmura will fill in.

Richie Incognito will play left Guard, while the Pouncey brothers of "Free Hernandez"-hat fame will play Center and right guard.

Sebastian Janikowski will be both kicker and punter, which might cause a few problems for Head Coach Jerry Sandusky as Janikowski will insist on attempting a field goal regardless of field position.

At Kick-Returner, the world's-worst valentine's day gift-giver and famed Blade Runner, Oscar Pistorious will add some spark to the return game as he really puts the "Special" in Special Teams.

Friday Colbert

2013-10-05T11:13:00.001-05:00

Friday, October 4th, 2013

This is Tip of the Hat, Wag of the Finger:

Tip of the hat to Representative Tim Griffin of Arkansas. Only Two minutes after reports emerged of a shooting outside the capitol, Griffin showed that he has what it takes to be a congressional Republican. He didn't wait for all the facts to come in, in fact, he didn't wait for any facts. He took to twitter within two minutes of the first reports of gun shots and tweeted the only fact he needed to know. It was president Obama's fault.

Tweeting: "Stop the violent rhetoric President Obama, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi.#disgusting.

You see folks, Representative Griffin doesn't need to wait for facts because he has all the truthiness he needs right in his guts.

Everyone remembers the Apostle Paul's tweet in the bible from 30 seconds after he heard about Jesus's crucifixion:

“Some Jews just nailed up Jesus, where are the Romans when you need 'em. #hang-in-there-jesus”

Wag of the finger goes to Representative Tim Griffin of Arkansas for immediately deleting his brave tweet and pretending like it didn't happen.

He later apologized for his tweet, saying “the shooting today is a terrible and inexcusable tragedy and an act of terrorism. No one but the shooter is to blame.”

Seems Representative Griffin may have wanted to hear some more facts before issuing his apology for saying things before he knew enough facts.

It turns out that the incident was caused by a woman suffering from mental illness trying to ram the White House gate. The woman was shot and killed by capitol police despite the fact that she herself was unarmed and had a baby in the car. Thus the only shots that were fired, were fired by police. So Representative Griffin has bravely called the Capitol police terrorists and put the blame squarely on them.

That might explain why he thinks they shouldn't be paid.

Tip of the Hat to the unpaid Vigilantes guarding the White house. I mean, sure they fired dozens of shots at an unarmed woman who had a baby in her car, but what were they supposed to do when a black woman tried to get into the White House?

Thanks for your service, unpaid vigilantes. Or as I like to call them, good guys with guns.

Wag of the finger goes to Bill O'Reilly. On Monday BillO went on my hated enemy's – I mean, dear friend Jon Stewart's show. When Stewart asked BillO what he would have done in Lybia, he answered:

“I would have sent a few exocets over, bang.”

Now I'm all for indiscriminately lobbing missiles into a war-torn part of the middle east, just like Jesus would have done. But BillO said “Exocet.” I don't know if you guys are as big of Falkland Island War Buffs as me, so let me tell you, the Exocet is a FRENCH missile.

BillO didn't say he wanted to launch a bunch of American Tomahawks, or unleash Obama's terror drones, no, BillO said, launch a bunch of Exocets. What's wrong Bill? Are American missiles not good enough for you?

Unless....

Tip of the Hat to Bill Oreilly, for his bold plan of invading France, stealing their French missiles, cause they're not gonna use 'em, then finding those missiles a good home in the middle east where they'll be appreciated.

Wag of the Finger to Bill Maher. This week Maher said “Atheism is the new gay marriage,” and that more and more atheists will be coming out of the closet.

(applause) - I know Nation, I'm just as outraged.

Maybe these silly atheists haven't seen the holy light yet because they've been hiding in a closet.

I don't know what this means, the new gay marriage, what is that? Is every atheist going to marry Richard Dawkins? The old gay marriage was a concerted effort by liberals to ruin my marriage, but joke's on them, I'm still happily married to a WOMAN.

Are Atheists going to try to make us all have Satanic weddings? Who's to say? Judging by the number of smug atheists on the internet, my guess is that atheists will be marrying themselves. I mean, if they won't even listen to Jesus, what are the odds they could listen to a woman?

And finally, a Wag of the Finger, to Bill O'Reilly. He's really tearing up the charts today, two Wags and a Tip, usually you have to pay extra for that.

Bill O on his show:

“It’s like this: Your teenager comes to you, saying she wants to attend a dance. You have some misgivings, but you say okay because she’s so passionate about the issue. Then you learn a vicious motorcycle gang may well show up at the dance, so you change your mind based upon best available evidence. And you protect your daughter from possible danger. Obamacare is like that.”

(Audience shock) – I know Nation, it's shocking just how insightful Bill can be.

First of all, who lets their daughter do something so dangerous as go to a dance, just because she's so passionate about the issue of dancing.Secondly, changing your mind based upon the best available evidence? Who is this, Bill O – Dawkins?

But I have to give BillO a Tip of the Hat, making 4-4 on the day, with two tips and two wags, for his spot-on analogy. Obamacare is exactly like a vicious motorcycle gang.

Who hasn't had the experience of being surrounded on the highway by a motor cycle gang that intimidates you and then makes you buy health insurance?

They're like the mafia coming into your house and saying, “those are nice Kidneys you got there, it'd be a shame if anything happened to them. . .because you don't have health insurance and you would probably go bankrupt paying out of pocket. You should really do the sensible thing and pay some protection money to me, or one of the many fine health insurance providers listed on the new exchanges which allow you to easily compare before you buy.”

So vicious.

(This is Part One of the "I pretend I'm a writer for the Colbert Report. Here's Part Two and Part Three)

Exxon Develops New Boat That Runs Purely on Spilled Oil

2013-08-27T15:07:00.003-05:00

26 August, 2013

Like a vacuum cleaner at the front, the new Exxon Crude-Burner ship needs no onboard fuel supply. It swoops across the seas, skimming spilled crude oil off the top of the waves, sending it to it's efficient crude burning engines. "It's so green, it's amazing," said Exxon Engineer Bill Bowersox. "The thing will run anywhere, thanks to all the oil we, I mean, those other companies have been spilling. That's the beauty of the modern world, there's crude oil just laying around ready to be used everywhere you go. Now you don't even need to top of your tanks."

The Crude-Burner made a voyage from Florida to Texas without using a single drop of onboard fuel, proving the usefulness of the system. And this new technology is very green, as it skims away the harmful spilled crude oil, burns it into a black smoke and releases the smoke into the air, leaving the waters a crystal clear...ish sort of blue, with a hint of all the colors of the Rainbow glimmering in the waves. "The waters are beautiful and the pollution is gone," said Bowersox. When asked about the fumes given off by burning crude oil directly, Bowersox dismissed the fumes as harmless, saying, "Well we're developing a plane to take care of that."

What The Chiefs Should Have Done

2013-04-28T07:14:00.001-05:00

28 April, 2013

The Chiefs made these picks in the draft:

1-1 Eric Fisher, Left Tackle, Central Michigan
3-63 Travis Kelce, Tight End, Cincinatti
3-96 Knile Davis, Running Back, Arkansas
4-99 Nico Johnson, Linebacker, Alabama
5-134 Sanders Commings, Cornerback, Georgia
6-170 Eric Kush, Center, California (Pennsylvania)
6-204 Braden Wilson, Fullback, Kansas State
7-207 Mike Catapana, Defensive End, Princeton

The new face of the franchise...

Personally, my first reaction to their draft is...it was fucking awful. Terrible. Ridiculous. Of course, I could be totally wrong and these guys might be building blocks to a Super Bowl victory in three or four years (I'd wager against that though).

First off, they had the number one overall pick. This pick needs to make a HUGE impact. This is where Peyton Manning, John Elway, Andrew Luck, and many other quarterbacks were selected. Well the Chiefs were just unlucky enough that the one year they finish dead last is the first year in a while in which no quarterback would go in the top 10. "Earning the #1 pick" meant you got Andrew Luck or Cam Newton the last two years. In 2010 it meant Sam Bradford, or if you want to go on the other side of the ball, Ndonkeykong Suh. 2009: Stafford.

Back in 2008 there was no quarterback "worthy" of the number one pick. The Dolphins went with Jake Long, Left Tackle. Now five years later, they simply let Long walk in free agency because he was demanding too much money for his second contract. The Chiefs follow in the 2008 Dolphins footsteps by picking a Left Tackle because there's no Quarterback worth a shot (plus we already traded for Alex Smith). The Rams picked second in 2008 and they went with Howie Long's son Chris. The Falcons at 3 picked Matt Ryan...so, hey Dolphins, wanna try that 2008 pick again?

I'm not saying that E.J. Manuel or Geno Smith is going to be Matt Ryan, but I don't think a Left Tackle is going to have enough impact to warrant the pick. I mean, this Fisher guy needs to basically be a hall-of-fame Left Tackle. He needs to be like Orlando Pace who was so good he made Mike Martz look smart. Any offensive coordinator would look smart calling plays down to Kurt Warner with him standing behind Pace and throwing to Holt and Bruce and Faulk. So if Fisher is that great. Alright, that might be okay. But...if Fisher is THAT great, why was there not a consensus on who was the best Left Tackle in the draft? Three LTs went in the first four picks, and up till the draft, most seemed to think Joeckel was the best tackle. What's more likely: there are 2 or 3 amazing, hall-of-fame caliber left tackles at the top of the draft? Or there are 3 pretty good left tackles, maybe one is hall-of-fame caliber, one will be mediocre, and one will be a bust?

This guy was drafted 6th overall in 2009.
Look how Athletic he is.

In 2009, the Lions took Matt Stafford with the first pick and the Rams took Tackle Jason Smith with the 2nd pick. I recall many people suggesting that the Lions should take Jason Smith, because any quarterback picked by this 0-16 team would be murdered trying to stand in the pocket, so you need to get that left tackle this year and try for a quarterback next year. That's how good Jason Smith was supposed to be. He went second to the Rams, and guess what, he's not even a Ram anymore. They only had him for three years. He's on his third team after being drafted in 2009.

Any draft pick can be a bust, we have no idea who will be good. There are guys who seem amazing and destined for greatness that completely fail. There are undrafted guys in Canton. It happens. So if that's the case, if every draft pick is a lottery ticket, then shouldn't you treat them accordingly? If you can trade down and turn one lottery ticket into 3 lottery tickets, shouldn't you do it? Of course, the 1st pick is a better lottery ticket than the 30th, but they're both lottery tickets nonetheless.

Sweet block Branden.

Let's go back to the 2008 Dolphins. They took Jake Long 1st overall. Eight Left Tackles were drafted in the first round that year. If the Dolphins didn't take Jake Long, instead they took Matt Ryan, then they took the best Left Tackle with the first pick in round two, then they might have gotten the 8th left tackle taken (If the Dolphins don't take Long, then you could plausibly shift each tackle down a spot, so only 7 go in the first round). So the Dolphins get Matt Ryan, and then at the top of the second round they get the 8th Left Tackle, who was Duane Brown, who made the pro-bowl last season as the left tackle for the Texans. Arguably, the Texans got the better deal. They just re-signed Brown to a 6 year extension, and his rookie contract was for less money than Jake Long got. So if the 8th Left Tackle and the First Left Tackle are a toss-up, then why would the Dolphins waste all the leverage of the 1st overall pick? They could have had Matt Ryan and a pro-bowl left tackle in 2008.

Let's get back to the Chiefs. There they are, sitting at #1, staring into the abyss. Three Left Tackles would go in the first four picks. They're drafting a Left Tackle because they want to get rid of Branden Albert, a capable Left Tackle that has a history of back injuries and is demanding too much money for a long term deal. So the Chiefs were shopping Albert in a trade to the Dolphins to replace Jake Long who left in free agency. It sounded before the draft like they were haggling over which of the Dolphins second round picks would serve as compensation for Albert. No deal was done, and now the Chiefs have Albert and Fisher. Albert has said he won't move to the right side. So the Chiefs might move Albert over anyway, or have Fisher play right tackle for a year, and then move him to left tackle when Albert walks in free agency. Either way, you've used the number one overall pick to somehow not really improve your team. If they do manage to trade Albert before this season, we might see an improvement from Albert to Fisher, but there's no guarantee of that. What they should do now is hang on to both until at least camp, then if they can see that Fisher is clearly better, trade Albert to a team that needs a tackle, waiting up until the end of pre-season, hoping that some starting Left tackle somewhere in the league goes down for the season. The Chiefs would then be able to get a 2nd rounder in the 2014 draft. But after seeing how poorly the Chiefs handled the Alex Smith trade, I'll bet they do something much dumber than that.

So what should they have done?

On Thursday, the first round kicked off with the Chiefs on the clock and the whole draft class is their oyster. They can get any player they want. OR, they can trade down and turn this best lottery ticket into several lottery tickets. They hold the following picks:

1st
63rd
96th
99th
plus a 5th rounder, 2 6th rounders, and a 7th rounder

The Raiders traded down from 3 to 12, as the Dolphins moved up to get Dion Jordan. To make that move, from 12 up to 3, the Dolphins gave the Raiders the 42nd overall pick. So that's what it costs to move up 9 spots.

Dion Jordan

The Arizona Cardinals were desperate to bolster one of the worst offensive lines in football. They had the 7th overall pick, and yet at 7, they could only get the 4th best Left Tackle in the draft, and so they instead picked the best Guard available. This is a huge mistake, Guards just don't have the value to be taken here. The last time a Guard went in the Top 10 was in 1997. The Saints picked Chris Naeole 10th. Tony
Gonzalez went three picks later. Tarik Glenn, a Left Tackle went 19th in that draft, and he was the anchor of the Colts for a decade, retiring after they won the Super Bowl a decade later. Guards just don't have the value because even a great guard isn't all that much better than a mediocre guard. Compare this to Quarterback, where a great QB is a huge difference over a mediocre QB. You win championships with elite Quarterbacks, not with guards.

So the Chiefs arrange a trade with Arizona. They swap the 7th and 1st picks, in exchange, the Cardinals send the Chiefs their 2nd rounder (45th overall), which you can see is actually less compensation than the Raiders got for the 3rd pick. So I'll say the Cardinals have to give up a bit more. They also send KC their 3rd round pick (69 overall) and the Chiefs send back their first pick in the 4th round (99th pick).

The Cardinals take the best Tackle in their estimation, which might be Fisher or Joeckel. The Jaguars at 2 take whoever the Cardinals don't take. At 3, the Raiders traded down with Miami so the Dolphins could get Dion Jordan. In reality, the Rams traded up to 8, swapping first rounders with the Bills to get WR Tavon Austin. The Rams are desperate to get receivers for Bradford to throw to. So let's say the Chiefs get the same deal Buffalo got, and the Chiefs move down from 7 to 16. In exchange, the Rams sent Buffalo the 46th overall pick, they swapped 3rd round picks, (Bills had 71, Rams had 78), and the Rams sent their 7th rounder. So basically the Bills dropped 8 spots in the 1st round, and 7 spots in the third round, in exchange for an extra 2nd rounder. Let's have the Chiefs make the same deal.

Now the Chiefs have the following picks:

16th (from Rams)
45th (from Cardinals)
46th
63rd
78th
96th
plus a 5, 2 6's and 2 7's

In Walrus we Trust.

At 16 they trade down again. San Francisco traded up from 31 to 18 with Dallas, giving up the 74th overall pick. So let's say that the Chiefs make that same deal for swapping 31 to 16. So that 15 spot move is worth the 74th pick.

Chiefs now hold

31
45
46
63
78
96
plus a 5, 2 6's and 2 7's.

The Vikings traded up into the tail end of the first round to get WR Cordarelle Patterson. The New England Patriots and Darth Belichick, knowing that draft picks are lottery tickets, often trade back and turn one pick into many. They also have been to 5 Super Bowls in the last 12 years, and only missed the playoffs twice in that stretch (going 9-7 in 2002, and 11-5 in 2008 with Matt Cassel) That's 11 seasons with 10+ wins in 12 years, and the one exception was a 9-7 performance. So maybe those guys know how to draft, and they are notorious for trading down down down.

Well the Vikings moved up to get New England's 29th overall pick. In exchange, the Vikings sent the Patriots their 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 7th round picks (52,83,102, and 229).

We've got the Chiefs sitting at 31, and the Vikings were moving up from 52 to 29, and probably were making the move to get ahead of Baltimore at 32 (who lost Anquan Boldin). So let's say the Chiefs get the same deal. They move down from 31 to 52 and pick up 3 picks for their trouble.

Day 1 ends without the Chiefs making a pick, despite being on the clock 4 times. Instead of just Eric Fisher, who they'll use to replace Branden Albert, thus making the team not all that much better, they have acquired many lottery tickets. I'll have them hang on to Branden Albert, and use some of these extra picks to take some Left Tackles with these lottery tickets later in the draft.

As Day 1 ends, the Chiefs have the following:

45
46
52
63
78
83
96
102
plus a 5th, 2 6ths and 3 7ths.

Before Day 2 stars, the Chiefs package some of these picks together to trade toward the top of round 2. After trades, they look like this:

Geno the Chief

35 (a move up from 45 for the 96th pick)
37 (moving up from 46 for the 102nd pick)
52
63
78
83
plus a 5, 2 6's and 3 7's)

Zach Ertz

Finally the Chiefs start making picks. At 35, I have them take QB Geno Smith (Who was actually drafted 39th). He'll compete with Alex Smith. Maybe he'll become great. Maybe not. It's a crap-shoot afterall, but the Chiefs come out of this draft with arguably the best Quarterback in the class. Not bad for the 35th pick.

With their first pick after Fisher, they took a tight end, but not someone who was all that highly rated. Instead, I have them use the 37th pick on Zach Ertz, the 2nd rated Tight End (who was actually drafted 35th).

In reality, they used their third choice on running back Knile Davis, who in his senior season averaged 3.4 yards per carry. WOW, this guy must be amazing to get 3 yards a carry in college. Instead of taking Knile Davis, they take Montee Ball at 52 (who actually went 58 to the Broncos). Montee Ball was a 2-time Consensus All-American in college. He rushed for 77 TDs and over 5000 yards in
college.

Montee Ball

At 63 the Chiefs actually took Tight End Travis Kelce. I've already had them take a TE in this draft, so they don't take a TE. Instead I have them take WR Keenan Allen, who was projected by some to be a first rounder. He slipped to the Chargers at 76 in reality.

At 78, I have the Chiefs take Damontre Moore DE/OLB, who actually went 81 to the Giants.

Keenan Allen

At 83 I'll have the Chiefs take whoever they think the best Tackle is, either David Bakhtiari (who went 109th) or Brennan Williams (who went 89th).

Then with their 6 remaining late round choices they can grab the same guys they really did, plus 2 more.

So here's a summary of the difference between what would have happened if I was running the Chiefs and what actually happened:

They drafted:

1-1 Eric Fisher, Left Tackle, Central Michigan
3-63 Travis Kelce, Tight End, Cincinatti
3-96 Knile Davis, Running Back, Arkansas
4-99 Nico Johnson, Linebacker, Alabama
5-134 Sanders Commings, Cornerback, Georgia
6-170 Eric Kush, Center, California (Pennsylvania)
6-204 Braden Wilson, Fullback, Kansas State

Damontre Moore. I think he majored in Chiropractry.

7-207 Mike Catapana, Defensive End, Princeton

And are probably going to get rid of Branden Albert for maybe a 2nd or 3rd rounder next draft. Or they'll use him this year and then get nothing for him as he leaves in free agency.

I drafted:

2-35 Geno Smith, Quarterback, West Virginia
2-37 Zach Ertz, Tight End, Stanford
2-52 Montee Ball, Running Back, Wisconsin
3-63 Keenan Allen, Wide Receiver, Cal
3-78 Damontre Moore, DE/OLB, Texas A&M
3-83 David Bakhtiari, Tackle, Colorado

Brennan Williams

+ the real late rounders

5-134 Sanders Commings, Cornerback, Georgia
6-170 Eric Kush, Center, California (Pennsylvania)
6-204 Braden Wilson, Fullback, Kansas State
7-207 Mike Catapana, Defensive End, Princeton

and an extra 6 and 7.

6- Kenjon Barner, Running Back, Oregon

and another Tackle in the 7th round.

Which Chiefs team would be better off in 2013?

I think my team, with Alex Smith competing against Geno Smith (who can take over in a year Kaepernick-style), with Jamaal Charles, Bowe, Moeaki, a pretty solid offensive line, PLUS Keenan Allen, Zach Ertz, and Montee Ball should make for a pretty productive offense. Add in Kenjon Barner and McCluster to mix things up, maybe Jon Baldwin can finally do something. They should be able to put some points on the board.

Kenjon Barner

Instead, we've got just Alex Smith, nobody of any quality to compete with him, and no long-term answer at QB. The offensive line might be better, but no real improvement in terms of weapons for the offense, and just some boring late round picks to fill holes. I think we would be better off.

tl;dr

If you use the 1st overall pick to trade down multiple times, you could essentially make this trade:

Give Up:

Eric Fisher

Travis Kelce

Knile Davis

Nico Johnson

Get:

Geno Smith
Zach Ertz
Montee Ball
Keenan Allen
Damontre Moore
David Bakhtiari
+ 2 late round picks

How does that trade sound?

Draft Day

2012-12-18T02:30:00.000-06:00

17 December, 2012

The Blacklist 2012 edition came out today. If you don't know, these are the top unproduced scripts floating around hollywood, as voted on by "insiders."

I'm planning on reading, or trying to read, the entire list, but I will of course lose interest within about a week or two.

The #1 script on the 2012 Blacklist is "Draft Day," which is accompanied by this logline:

On the day of the NFL Draft, Bills General Manager Sonny Weaver has the

opportunity to save football in Buffalo when he trades for the number one pick.

He must quickly decide what he’s willing to sacrifice in pursuit of perfection as the

lines between his personal and professional life become blurred.

Kevin Costner is allegedly attached to play the Bills GM.

This script was an easy, fast read. I sat down and read it straight through without losing interest. It has a hell of a pace, momentum, whatever you want to call it. I can see why it finished so high. I didn't know anything about the writers, but from reading it, I could tell they had a playwriting background, but perhaps aren't the biggest sports fans in the world.

It's a lot like Moneyball, in that there are numerous scenes of GMs haggling and playing mind games with each other. However, unlike Moneyball, Draft Day takes place entirely on draft day. There's no big payoff. As is said in the script, draft day is about trying to predict the future. With hindsight we can look back on great steals and big blunders, but on Draft Day, you have no idea how the future will play out.

Sonny (Kevin Costner) Weaver, starts the day by finding out that his assistant who he is secretly banging (except everyone knows about it) is pregnant. They aren't excited and she plans on leaving Buffalo to go home and have the kid without Sonny's involvement. Great start for a football movie right? Nothing goes together like football and thinking about abortion.

So then they establish that Sonny is kinda like Marv Levy's son. Where Marv Levy had made the team great, is a legend. Marv (though he's not called Marv), makes his son, Sonny, the GM. Sonny fired his dad after a couple of seasons, and his dad just recently died. The past few years have been marked by draft busts and disappointing seasons. So everyone in Buffalo hates Sonny, wants him gone, and is afraid the team is going to be moving to L.A. any year now. Top it off with an eccentric impatient owner who wants Sonny to "make a splash" and doesn't really care about winning as long as butts are in the seats, and you'll see what's at stake in this draft.

Oh, and Sonny has a hot-head young coach (the script compares him to Jon Gruden), who he hates.

So, here's the draft situation, and here's where shit kinda starts to suck.

The Bills have the 7th pick.

Sonny really loves this outside linebacker who is compared in the script to Ray Lewis. So Sonny wants Ray Lewis at 7, and he's supposed to fall to 7. Ray Lewis guy is really great person, who we see being like a father to his sister's 4 kids. He's like the older, wiser, religious Ray Lewis as 22 year old.

Jon Gruden really wants this running back from Auburn, even though he was just arrested for getting in a bar fight.

The Lions have the 1st overall pick, and are going to take the consensus best pick in the draft, Bo Callahan, QB from Michigan. The talking heads on Tv say Bo is better than Elway, better than Manning, he's obviously the greatest thing ever, and the Lions are going to pick him, done deal.

But, as Kevin Costner is heading into work, the Lions GM is calling him and trying to give the Bills Bo Callahan, the greastest thing ever, since Detroit "already has a quarterback." So Kevin Costner haggles with him and makes this deal. You ready? The Bills give up their #7 pick, plus their first-rounder for the next 3 seasons, to get the #1 pick and Bo Callahan.

Okay. Let's stop to think about this. You've just used four first round picks to get a quarterback, that the worst team in the league didn't want. The Lions were calling him, trying to move down. Why? Because they already have a QB? But they have the first pick in the draft? What great QB do they have that gave them a 2-14 season?

Okay, so in real life, if a guy came along who was better than Elway, it's possible that you trade 4 first-rounders for him. But, that would only happen if a bunch of teams are bidding against each other for the rights to him. But in Draft Day, it's a weird situation where the Lions are trying to sell the pick, and calling Kevin Costner. There doesn't seem to be any other team in the running, and Kevin Costner pulls the trigger on the trade without discussing it with anyone. Nobody. No scouts, no coach, just pulls the trigger after a couple of phone calls.

So then there's a lot of excitement as everyone's thinking the Bills are getting this great QB. Although, Jon Gruden, the coach, wants to draft a running back who was just arrested, and Kevin Costner keeps finding more things to like about pseudo-Ray Lewis.

So far, I've only covered about 30 pages of the script. There's some weird personal stuff between Costner and his mother, and Jimmy Johnson (calls him a madeup name), and how Jimmy Johnson is banging his mom...And of course, his knocked up assistant. And Jon Gruden is fucking pissed because he just traded away 4 first rounders and Gruden wanted a thug running back. Oh and the aging quarterback that the Bills have is pissed that they're going to replace him.

So draft time comes and guess what. After spending 4 first rounders to trade up, Kevin Costner uses that number one pick to take...Vontae something, the Ray Lewis dude. He's a good kid, there's reason to believe he's going to be amazing. While there's reason to believe that this greatest QB ever, Bo something, is not all there, and he doesn't care about winning, thus he's apparently Jamarcus Russell.

So it's a big moment in the movie, where Costner is all like, yeah, I picked the best guy, he's a good kid, head on his shoulders, gonna be great. But, anyone in the audience who cares about football is going to be like...wtf. You spend 4 first rounders to trade up to get a guy you were supposed to be able to get at 7. What the fuck?

Then Bo Callahan keeps falling in the draft. People are afraid he's a bust. So they stay away. The Lions, who were going to take him at 1, remember that foregone conclusion, now they're sitting at 7, and they might walk away with Bo, plus the 3 future first rounders. But...they wanted to trade out of drafting him, as if they knew he wasn't a bust...or that they "already have a quarterback."

So Kevin Costner is like, Detroit's gonna look like a genius if he falls to them at 7. So he calls up the Raiders who have the 6 pick, and since their GM is a noob, he's going to fleece him. Well, he ends up trading him this years 2nd rounder, plus their 2nd rounder for the next 3 years to get that 6 pick. This trade makes even less sense. 4 2nd round picks for a 6th overall pick...and you think you're pulling one over on him?

The Raiders GM takes the deal, partially because he's panicking, thinking that Bo is a bust and everyone knows something that he doesn't, and that's why he's falling.

So they make the deal. Then Costner calls up the Lions, who have the 7th pick, and offers to give the Lions the 6th pick and Bo Callahan, in exchange for their 3 1st rounders they traded Detroit earlier. This offer makes no sense at all. In reality, Detroit would have laughed in his face and hung up.

They didn't want Bo, they wanted to trade down from the 1 spot. Then, When the Bills spent all those picks to go up to 1, they didn't take the QB, they took an outside linebacker because he's a nice guy. So why would the Lions think that the Bills are going to take Bo now? If they want Bo, they could just wait for the Bills to pick someone else, since clearly they don't want Bo...

But anyway, Costner convinces the Lions GM to send him back 2 of the 3 first round picks, plus a 2nd rounder, to swap 6&7.

The Lions then take Bo at #6, and have an extra first rounder in a few years to boot.

The Bills use the #7 pick to take that running back that Gruden wanted.

And the real winner in all of this is the Raiders, who gained 4 2nd round picks.

So...the script is about the behind the scenes wheeling and dealing of some GM genius, who spends 4 first round picks to get an outside linebacker he could have had without trading in the first place. Then trades 4 2nd round picks to get a running back at #7.

This is the story of how an idiot GM cripples a franchise for a decade...and then decides to actually try to date his assistant rather than let her move away...Or something.

So, aside from all the draft dealings making almost zero sense, there are a number of weird things that show the writers don't know what the fuck they're talking about. For example, in talking about how the draft is a crapshoot, Kevin Costner and Jimmy Johnson are talking about how the Chargers GM got a bad rap for drafting Ryan Leaf over Peyton Manning, even though all 32 GMs in the league would have done it with the information they had at the time....

Can you spot the number of errors in that one sentence? For one thing, the Chargers were picking 2nd. They didn't take Leaf OVER Manning at all. The real event was that many said Leaf and Manning were both going to be great and were about equal, and that ended up being dead wrong. So not only weren't there 32 GMs in agreement that Leaf was better than Manning...there weren't 32 GMs in the league at the time, since there weren't 32 teams yet...But that line of dialogue comes from a guy who was supposed to have been a head coach in the NFL at the time; he should really fucking know that.

But you don't really stop to think about the trades because everyone's too busy screaming at each other, whether it's Gruden (rightly) pissed about Sonny's idiot trades, or the other GMs constantly paranoid that somebody's pulling one over on them or bullying each other into making a deal. This script uses people yelling like Michael Bay uses explosions. Yelling equals drama right?

That's the script in a nutshell. It's well written. It carries you through the scenes, it gives you big explosions of arguments and people hating each other. But when you stop to think about just about any of the facts, they don't make sense. It's kinda like if Michael Bay watched Moneyball and decided to make a movie about GMs making trades. But the trades make no sense.

Ohio GOP Switching to Drive-Thru Voting

2012-08-28T16:41:00.001-05:00

28 August, ~~1908~~ 2012

"We're trying to make voting easier, faster, more convenient, and most of all, more easier," said Grover B. Frobe, the head of Ohio's Election Commission. "Drive-Thru voting will accomplish all of those goals. No more lines, no more parking headaches, you'll drive right up, cast your vote, and drive right out."

When asked whether drive-thru voting will discourage those without cars or driver's licenses from voting, Republican Governor Kasich replied, "It's 2012, who doesn't have a car?"

See, in the United States, we have election officials, people whose sole job is to oversee elections, make sure there is no vote tampering, no vote fraud, the counting is done correctly, no ballots disappear, nobody is going around intimidating voters, or any other nonsense. Great idea, except that our election officials are partisan, meaning they are Republicans or Democrats. So what could possibly go wrong when the election official of a precinct where 80% of the voters are Democrats is a Republican? Thirty-three states have introduced Voter ID Laws just this year, all of them by Republicans in the State legislatures, signed by Republican Governors. Requiring voters present a driver's license which isn't free to get, and for many people, especially poor people who don't own cars, an unnecessary item, means that across those states, thousands of people will not be able to vote unless they obtain a new government ID (and we all know the DMV is easily capable of dispensing hundreds of thousands of new IDs all at once).

You might wonder, why does it matter? The election is going to end up being 51-49 for one of the candidates in the popular vote, so making voting a little harder for everyone will hurt each candidate equally. Right?

That might be true if poor people were split 50-50 on Obama or Romney, or if Black voters were equally split. However a poll released last week showed that Obama led Romney among likely Black voters by a razor thin margin of 94% to 0%. That's right, a national poll couldn't find a single black person planning on voting for Romney. Latinos favor Obama two-to-one. Women favor Obama. In fact, the only demographics in which Romney leads are in White Men and the Elderly.

Ohio, one of the swingiest of swingy states, is controlled by a Republican Governor, Republican State Senate, and Republican Election Board. These totally trustworthy and impartial Republicans wouldn't dare threaten the democratic process by making it much harder for Democrats to vote while making it easier for Republicans to vote, of course not! That's why they ended early voting in predominantly black and poor precincts, while extending early voting in predominantly rich, white, old people areas. "We weren't trying to make it harder for quadroons to vote," Grover B. Frobe explained, "Black people like crowds and big events, we were just trying to encourage them to all go on the same day, so they could shout out to their peeps and carpool and such. It's like a party and they're all invited."

This week the state election board announced that they would convert polling places into drive-thrus to speed up the process of voting. "Voting should be easier and faster, and what's easier or faster than delicious McDonald's food?" Frobe explained, while eating a Big Mac.

Lucious Theodis Malrom, head of the National Association for the Advancement of Bad-Ass-Mo-fos (NAABAMFS), believes this move is part of a honkey conspiracy: "They know brothers and sisters can't drive, how we supposed to vote? Next thing you know, the ballot is gonna be in some secret white language like Latin or Canadian."

Mitt Romney the Republican nominee, kept with his recent practice of pivoting every question to something about the economy, when he said "You people vote in person? I just pay a guy to vote for the whole family. It's his job, see I'm a job creator. This guy has a job because I pay him for a service, and then when he gets the money, he goes to a bank so that the bank can turn the Swiss money into US Dollars, so that gives a banker a job, and somebody had to print that Swiss Franc, so there's a woodcutter guy and one of those paper people and all those kinds of things that have jobs because of how I vote. That's my voting record as a job creator. Obama doesn't create those jobs."

When asked about the new tactics of the GOP, former President George W. Bush said, "Why don't they just rig the machines like turd-blossom did? Or kick all the people who might be felons off the voter rolls, you know, anybody darker than Wesley Snipes, that's what Jebby did in Florida and that worked. I guess they're trying to sell more cars in Ohio, it's a pretty good idea for a stimulus package, buy a car, vote for president, that's a good sales pitch. Where are you going, I got plenty more ideas, I haven't talked to anyone in months. Please don't go."

Meanwhile former Governor Romney is facing stiff questions about the GOP's apparent voter suppression tactics. When asked why he has zero support from African-Americans in a recent poll, Romney replied: "Well, whenever you see a number like that, you have to think that Racism plays a big part. You don't ever see a poll saying all white people agree on something, or all Latinos or all Asians, or all Millionaires. But this shows all Black people are on one side of the fence. Clearly they're just racists who think that they have to vote for the Black president because he's black like them. It's sad really, because Obama is hurting them. Under my economic plan, they would be learning new skills and finding all kinds of new jobs, because of the Welfare reform, plus with all the tax cuts for the job creators, that money would inject all kinds of things into the black community. To find polling data like that, I think you probably have to go back to Nazi Germany to find that many people all agreeing on something. I'm not saying we're heading for a race war or anything like that, so don't twist my words around, but I'm just saying, where there's smoke, there's ovens filled with people you hate, know what I mean?"

There are 70 days left until the General Election.

Solipsis: Escape from the Comatorium

2012-07-04T05:24:00.000-05:00

4 July, 2012

The rejected cover.

So I've not been posting to Lumpy Junk in a while because my junk has been busy writing a novel called Solipsis: Escape from Jeff's Brain. The e-book was published yesterday. The paperback will be available in about a week.

This project started as a screenplay, and after several drafts, I decided to expand it into a novel.

Solipsis is my take on the Virtual Reality genre (See also: The Matrix, Inception, Thirteenth Floor, eXistenZ, Neuromancer, Total Recall, Source Code, and Spy Kids 3-D).

I began by identifying the issues I have with Virtual Reality stories so that I can find a way to fix or circumvent those problems.

Problem # 1
Realism

It's one thing to ask the audience to suspend disbelief. It's another thing to ask them to take your stupid ideas seriously. But Jeff, you say, if stories are totally realistic they'll be boring.

"Brain Spiral" The painting I picked for the cover.
Used with permission from Laura Freeman

My contention is that you don't have to abandon logic and realism to have an exciting story. It's easy as hell to come up with cool shit if you don't actually have to stick to any logic at all.

Think about the Matrix. Why do the robots keep humans in the Matrix? So they can extract thermal energy from them. Does that make any fucking sense at all? No. It doesn't. You're telling me that this super intelligent AI couldn't come up with a better power source than comatose people? Not only are humans a terrible energy source, but they also have this nasty habit of waking up and, you know, being hackers. They're breeding hackers instead of figuring out geo-thermal energy, or utilizing their "form of fusion."

Basically The Matrix gives us an epic story of humans vs. robots in an awesome virtual reality where there is no spoon and explosions happen in slow-mo and shit looks cool.

But do you really have to abandon realism to tell that story?

What if the AI actually are keeping the humans alive and in a matrix set in pretty modern times because they need help from human computer programmers? The AI aren't quite creative enough to figure out all their problems, so they keep these human slaves and trick them into helping them. Instead of embracing a sensical story, we get sequels that ignore the billions of people inside the matrix and focus instead on a weird dirty city of raves and flying octopi.

See this post for what I would have done with the Matrix sequels.

Problem #2
Stakes

If you are in a computer world and it's just some video game, then what the hell does it matter? Nothing's at stake. So if you're telling a story in a virtual reality, you have to find a way to make things matter.

The Matrix solves this by the amazing logic "If you die in the Matrix, you die in the real world."

It makes no sense at all, but hey, it leads to cool shit.

The Thirteenth Floor, another virtual reality film, made you switch bodies with your avatar, and if you die in the virtual world, the AI who you swapped with is suddenly in your body and you're dead. Huh?

In Surrogates, people remotely pilot robot bodies that aren't fat and ugly, living vicariously. The plot of the film revolves around some new weapon that kills the people piloting the robot via some virus or something....how original.

You can tell it's fake because of the pixels.

In Inception, at the beginning, dying simply wakes you up. This is much more realistic, and leads to interesting situations where people can be tortured and you might want to kill your friend to free them from torture. The stakes are still there because they are trying to accomplish a mission and dying/waking up prevents them from doing that, and can get them in trouble in the real world.

But rather than embrace this, they change the rules shortly thereafter so that dying sends you to limbo. The movie makes it work, but it's much less realistic.

Why do dreams have to make any sense when it comes to biology/death/physics? Add onto that the pretty non-sensical idea of "militarized sub-conscious." Really? It's movie logic, so okay, it's exciting, but ultimately pretty shallow.

Problem #3
Ambiguity

Virtual Reality movies embrace ambiguity for ambiguity sake. For example, the whole ending to Inception rests on this (maybe) twist-ending. Is he still dreaming or isn't he? I've written about Inception in more detail, but my beef here is that this ambiguous ending is totally uninteresting. It thinks it's really clever, but it isn't.

Beyond that, I don't get any pleasure out of watching things purposely not resolve and pretend to be clever. Total Recall and eXistenZ also fall into this camp. The whole plot of both films centers around trying to figure out "are we still in the game/dream or aren't we?" It's as if Hollywood sees something shiny (ambiguous reality) and can't see past it. It's okay to introduce some ambiguity, but when the whole story is just a series of contradicting clues telling you one minute that it's real and the next minute that it's fake, then the whole thing seems like a philosophy major's circle jerk.

Problem #4
Wasted Opportunities

In the film Surrogates, the coolest thing they could
come up with was blonde Bruce Willis.
Talk about a golden opportunity.

If you are in a virtual reality, then you can do anything. Of course films are limited by budget constraints, but even within those limitations they still waste their chances left and right.

For every cool thing in Inception there are five totally cliche things.

So in Inception, on one dream level, they're in a van, falling. This causes the dream world one level down to be in zero-gravity. So Joseph Gordon-Levitt ends up in a whacky gravity spinning fight, followed by a cool puzzle where he has to make sleeping people fall despite having no gravity to help him. So since falling in one level causes zero-gravity the next level down, then the zero-gravity in the hotel should cause zero-gravity in the next dream level down, thus leading to an awesome climax of the film taking place on a space station.

Except that didn't happen. Instead we get a final act set in the snow level from Goldeneye, where they have gravity...somehow. Add that up with the fact that Juno has the ability to bend the world, turn things upside down, do crazy shit to physics, and yet...after establishing these powers, never uses them again.

Problem #5
Bullets that never hit anything

Gun fights have serious realism issues because the main characters seem to dodge bullets. James Bond has dodged 4662 bullets in his film career. We can call this henchman syndrome or Stormtrooper's malaise. In Bond movies and regular action flicks, they have no explanation for this.

The most common way of getting around this issue is to have the bad guys want to capture the main character because they need them as a hostage or need some information from them.

Another way around this is to have main characters who have super powers (Superman, Wolverine, Jedis), equipped with superior equipment (Batman, Iron Man), or are hackers (Neo). Jedis and super heroes and Terminators can't just be killed by some idiot with a gun. But there are no such thing as super powers or the force or time-traveling robots, so how else can we have our main characters be powerful?

The worst tactic for dealing with this problem is to do nothing at all. Inception has no explanation for why these dream hackers are able to win every gun fight they are in. No explanation at all.

In the Matrix, realizing there is no spoon allows you to dodge bullets. But Neo can do it better than Trinity and Morpheus for some reason. Because he is the one...what does that mean exactly?

Why don't the agents just spawn with awesome machine guns instead of dodgeable pistols? Why not spawn with grenade launchers? There's absolutely no reason the agents only have these shitty pistols. Remember, they designed the world, they're in charge, and yet they play it out under these weird restrictions. Is it because spawning too awesome of weapons, or spawning wherever they want would be unsettling to the population and lead to people "rejecting" the illusion? If so, why not use that in the sequels. Maybe they start to get desperate and use bigger and better weapons, causing thousands of matrix dwellers to die.

This is what I'm talking about when I say wasted opportunities.

Jedi and Sith have a kind of future sensing intuition. This combined with a light saber makes them able to block bullets and lasers and sense their way out of problems. This is one of the main reasons Star Wars is good.

Paycheck, the film and the Philip K. Dick story, is about a guy who had been able to see the future, but his memory has since been wiped. But before the memory wiping, he mailed himself some clues that had to be seemingly innocuous. Thus you have a plot where a guy always has the exact right thing to get him out of any jam, kind of like a psychic Macgyver. Or you know...Q. That's an interesting way of explaining how your main character can get out of so many sticky situations.

Virtual Reality, body augmentation, trans and post-human worlds offer up super powers and such without the need for suspension of disbelief. I mean, the Matrix could have been about a guy whose just the most talented video gamer on the planet, with amazing reflexes and such. But instead he's fulfilling some kind of prophecy...

Which leads me to my next point:

Problem #6
Too many leaps of Faith

You get ONE leap of faith.

Movie Idea: Geese lay golden eggs that
are actually human heads. BWAH!

Back to the Future asks you to buy that Doc Brown built a time machine. That's the one leap of faith. If you buy that, everything follows pretty logically from there.

This is a principal of post-modernism. There's one weird thing, everything else has to follow logically from there. Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine, both Charlie Kaufmann films, require one leap of faith. In BJM it proposes that there's a portal into John Malkovich's brain. Beyond that one weird thing, everything else is believable. You don't have this weird brain portal AND time travel. Eternal Sunshine proposes that there's a procedure you can have to erase bad memories you don't want anymore.

The beauty of stories like this is that they are set in worlds that are different, thus the story can be original, but they aren't unbelievable worlds. Everything after the one weird premise has to make sense. If you drop the audience into a world with magic and clones and weird shit everywhere, they're going to have a hard time relating to characters or believing the world. I'm not saying it's impossible to do, it's just extremely hard to pull off.

The first three Indiana Jones films feature religious/mythological/occult kinds of things. So that's the audience's leap of faith. Then in Indiana Jones 4, Aliens show up... And it's not in a way that's related to the Ark of the Covenant or the Holy Grail. So now this story which has asked you in the past to believe in these religious artifacts is also asking you to believe in Ancient Aliens. Now if these ancient aliens were part of the Ark of the Covenant or Holy Grail stories (presumably with some kind of alien Jesus), then perhaps you could do it as a single leap of faith. But when the film asks you to make a second, unrelated leap of faith, everybody is like, WTF? Aliens. It's pretty weird to think about it, but Indiana Jones is set in a universe where Christianity is correct, AND there are weird aliens. Are the aliens Christians too? Did they have their own alien Jesus. (Idea for a movie: The Passion of the Beeblebrox).

The Matrix sequels start asking multiple leaps of faith, and that's where you lose a lot of people (Neo is the one in the matrix, AND he can make EMPs with his hands in the real world?).

So you get only get one leap of faith.

Having identified all these problems, I set out to create a story that followed those principals. In a few other posts written in the past year and a half, you'll see other principles of mine at work.

For example, I'm not a fan of over-the-top evil bad guys who have no apparent goals other than gaining power and being dicks to everyone. If you want there to be an interesting conflict, the way to do it isn't to come up with better trick photography and CGI, it's to come up with real dilemmas, hard decisions, you know, things that require thought.

Goals of Solipsis (Spoiler Free Section)

1. Realism. Logic. It all needs to make sense.

2. Have stakes without sacrificing realism (dying in virtual world will not kill you in real world. In fact, you can't die in the virtual world. You could be decapitated and you'd still be alive and in control of your body [good luck seeing where you're going]). Having said that, there still needs to be consequences, otherwise, what's the point.

3. Ambiguity is okay, but the plot won't just be a contradicting set of clues to which there is intentionally no answer.

4. Don't waste your opportunities. Don't resort to a simple gun battle.

5. No bullet dodging (unless there's a good reason for it). Bad guys have ability to aim guns in roughly the right direction.

6. Only one Leap of Faith.

7. Make the main character's goals be more nuanced than simply "give me back my family" or saving the girl, etc.

8. Bad guys have actual goals and aren't simply evil dicks. It's not black and white, good vs. evil.

9. Don't use female characters as shrieking damsels.

10. Make this thing have some real ideas, not simply a way of coming up with excuses to have some action set-pieces.

Alright. Got all that? Now if you want to know more, here is the premise of the novel. I'll only reveal details that are established within the first third of the novel. Read at your own risk.

MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD

My novel supposes a near future in which people can be plugged into a shared neural network. While the Matrix just jams a metal rod in their necks, in my novel you have to have every nerve ending wired up. The only way to do that is through a procedure called a vivisection, in which the brain and nervous system is extracted from the rest of the body. You have to become a brain-in-a-jar.

I would have just ripped this off and
used it as the cover.

This setup creates some interesting circumstances. Only vivisected people can be plugged in, and once you are vivisected, your body is gone, you're a brain-in-a-vat. So this means that obviously not everyone is going to rush out to get this procedure done. It's a select few. And who would it be? The dying. This is a way of cheating death.

Vivisected people can either remotely pilot robots, like Surrogates, or they can live in the virtual world called Solipsis.

The few vivisected people are outcasts in a society of able-bodied people. They live in vats on an ocean platform, sharing a virtual reality world called Solipsis.

Since most people can't get the procedure, they rationalize it away as inhuman, barbaric, etc. That combined with the religious concepts of heaven and hell, and the fact that more Americans believe that angels exist than any other country's population, and you'll see a conflict brewing.

Ultimately the conflict in Solipsis comes about when a religious cult, thinking they are doing god's work, takes over the Ocean platform and takes the brains-in-jars hostage. The bad guy' goal is to restore god's order: People die, god judges them.

Taking over the virtual world of Solipsis, the bad guys create a virtual hell and put the vivisected people in it, torture them, try to convert them. These religious cultists don't think it's wrong to kill these vivisected people because they think god wants them dead. So it's not murder to them.

So that's the premise of the conflict, which takes place inside of Solipsis, a virtual world. The brain-jars are in a giant room called the Comatorium, hence the title.

Comatorium. Vivisection. Televator. Anybody get it yet?

So far everything is realistic, it asks no real big leaps of faith. The idea that we could hook a brain up to a computer is no longer a new idea, (nor even science fiction). People are already controlling prosthetics with their minds. They've augmented mice brains with microchips. So does anyone really think it's outlandish that fifty years from now they'll have the technology to plug directly into a virtual world and experience it just as you would the real world? Maybe it's not the most likely thing, but it's certainly more realistic than fighting a war against AIs that are keeping us in pods and using us as batteries or something.

This premise also takes care of the problem of stakes in a virtual world. The people of Solipsis are trapped in hell, being tortured, and they feel pain just as if it were really happening, and you can't even kill them to put them out of their misery If you put a bullet in their head, they feel it, but it won't kill them. If you decapitate them, they feel it, but they aren't physically harmed in any way. So this leads to situations where main characters can be reduced to nothing but severed heads. The stakes here are high. Renee, the main character, has the ultimate goal of defeating the cult, taking back the station, but she also has smaller more immediate goals like helping comrades by relieving them of the pain of being tortured/decapitated etc.

That's not Stormtrooper Syndrome.
That's what happens when you eat Yoda's cooking.

As to the issue of stormtrooper syndrome, I avoid this problem by making Solipsis a virtual world where no guns or explosions are allowed. It's a safety measure built into the code (Solipsis is the main world, there are other worlds for playing games and such with other rules). This means that fights inside Solipsis don't come down to who has the better aim. The non-vivisected bad guys interact with this virtual world like they are playing a video game, so they don't feel pain, can't be physically harmed, but also don't have great control over their avatars. Since they are in control of the simulation, they have the high ground, can re-spawn, can change things, can make their avatars bigger, stronger, etc. BUT they are at a disadvantage because they're using a joystick and the vivisected people are controlling their avatars directly with their minds. So this avoids stormtroopers malaise, and explains the "super power" of the main characters.

As for wasting opportunities, you're just going to have to read the book and trust me when I say that I don't waste my opportunities. There is actually quite a lot more to this story, a couple of "holy shit" plot twists, and a I haven't even said a thing about the characters. Honestly this description barely qualifies as spoilers because it's doesn't give away much more than the premise.

The main character, Renee, is a teenage girl who has spent her whole life living inside of Solipsis. Much of the early plot is about her discovering the nature of her world, and is thus the audience's surrogate.

As for ambiguity, the story has some, but it's not about the ambiguity, it's just an added layer.

And really there is a lot more to the story than just the premise and the mechanics of the world. It's about the nature of the self, what it really means to be human, psychopathy, the neuroscience of free will, science vs. religion, what kind of life you live when you can essentially live forever (for example, does monogamy make sense when you're going to live hundreds of years?). So much of our lives is dictated by biology, so when we become post-biological, how will that effect us? Should death be a natural part of life?

This is right after he pulled a thorn out of its paw.

The conflict at the heart of the story is something that's very relavant. How will society adjust to the changes technology ushers in? Science and Religion are already fighting battles over science textbooks. In Louisianna they just started teaching that the Loch Ness Monster is proof that evolution is wrong. Once we start entering the transhuman and post-human realms, do you think the religious forces that are currently fighting against the ability of women to control their reproductive systems are going to just go along with it?

The conflict of my story is a conflict of ideas. The bad guys aren't just some evil robots who decided that humans are the enemy. In the future, the bad guys aren't going to be invading aliens or sentient robots. Hell is other people.

So that's what I've been working on. Really though, most of what I just wrote is what I was doing a year ago when I was writing the script. The last eight months has been a lot more about making scenes more interesting, giving characters more depth, and trying to make my writing not sound like a screenwriter wrote it. (Close up on cool shit. Pan over to reveal an awesome thing.)

After writing this project, and the months of thinking about it, it's time for me to start my next project, and it should be a topic that requires as little thought as possible: Sarah Palin.

P.S. Check out my new website.

Script Ideas

2011-11-11T06:47:00.000-06:00

11/11/11 11:11 A.M.

Come with me if you want to save
15% or more on your car insurance.

It's a math holiday (in base 10 countries) and so that means it's time once again for me to outline the script ideas I'm currently kicking around.

1. Something Terminator related.

Terminators 1, 2, and 3 are all centered on a mission to kill someone in the past. They begin with a good guy/robot racing against time to get to the target and save them before the bad robot can kill them. Of course it's really close, but the good time traveller gets there just in the nick of time and gets them out of there, and thus leads us on an hour and a half explosion filled chase. But...wait a second. Howcome the time-travellers go back at such exact times as to arrive at the target at the same time. I mean, you'd think sometimes one or the other would get there much sooner. So that's when it hit me:

A good and bad Terminator race to the target, but the bad terminator gets there first, killing infant John Connor. With the target dead, neither Terminator has any purpose any more. So they become roomates in this existential comedy I call, The Ex-Terminators. The trailer should show them as roommates and arguing about who's turn it is to do the dishes. Then Arnold drives up to a restaurant, "I was told there would be valet parking." Make it two Arnolds, and you've got the best 80s buddy movie of all time.

OR

Seriously guys, that's a lesbian.

You know how Skynet takes over the military and sends all our drones and shit after us, then we get into a nuclear war. Then somehow the survivors start a guerrilla resistance led by fucking Edward Furlong for some reason? What if instead of it being a whiny bitch from LA, why not have the resistance be a group of soldiers and Al Qaeda. Think about it, Al Qaeda is already fighting against drones, they're probably the best in the world at this kind of warfare. It could be a really interesting unholy alliance. I call it The Turbinator (actually that was Gromling's title).

2. 72.

When a muslim suicide bomber blows himself up along with some infidels, he is instantly transported to heaven and greeted by his 72 dark-haired virgins. However, it's not quite the paradise he pictured, as they are forever virgins who cannot be penetrated, also they are fucking annoying bitches.

3. Queer Madness

Just like Reefer madness, but with teh gays.

Bet you didn't see that coming.

4. Red Herring

A native American named Red Herring finds a floppy disk that contains all the nuclear launch codes. Then he meets an attractive asian woman and they have kids. Then he opens a deli and they enjoy a lot of smoked meats together. Then it turns out that he's actually not a native american, but a Martian.

5. Existentialist version of Where's Waldo: Why is Waldo?

(They actually just sold the film right to Where is Waldo? so that film is in the works. I'm not kidding)

6. Don't Ask Don't Tell

Basically just Top Gun.

7. A movie where the rapture occurs, but it ends up making the world a much better place as all the illogical people are beamed skyward into the waiting arms of Lord Xenu. I call it: The Crapture.

8. A parody of superhero films called The C-Men. There's Penicillis, he pees fire. And Tangle, she can untanlge any cords in seconds, no matter how tangled. Gender-Man, who can switch gender at will. And of course, Hottie, a hot chick with the power to eat any food, no matter how spicy.

So their powers of course come in handy. They have to hook up a laser to shoot down an incoming asteroid, but the cables are all tangled up, so Tangle goes to work. But then a swarm of cockroaches attack them, so Penicillis pees fire all over them. But then that fire pee starts to build up and burn everyone, so Hottie has to drink his fire piss. And then Gender-Man has to switch to being a woman so he can bear that child of the super villian, but then the cord gets wrapped around the baby's neck, so Tangle of course, untangles it. You see where this is going.

9. Satan Claus

A heart-warming christmas movie about Satan, living on the South Pole, pretending to be Santa Claus. Santa and Satan engage in a christmas holy war, lobbing ICBMs at each other, causing sea-levels to rise drastically. And by ICBMs I of course mean Icy BMs.

10. Toy Story: The College Years

There's a snake in my boot!

So in the world of Toy Story, anything at all considered a toy is actually a living thing with emotions and relationships. Mr. and Mrs. Potato head are actually married and she nags him. So...in this world...doesn't that mean that sex toys are people too. I figure the little sister from Toy Story gets a purple vibrator named Amy. Amy makes friends with the other toys. Then one night, she's selected from the toy chest and then is crammed somewhere. She's badly scarred by this, and then this abuse happens every night. The other toys decide to bust her out and they help Amy escape from the evil vagina. Victorious, the toys go back to their toy chest. The girl comes looking for Amy that night but can't find her, so it's Buzz Lightyear to the Rescue!

US Finally Captures the Flag; begins withdrawing troops from Iraq.

2011-11-05T14:48:00.000-05:00

November 5, 2011

"They really hid that flag good," said PFC Tim Johnson, a veteran of three tours. "When we went in in the first place, we figured Saddam would keep the flag on him or at least close to him so he could personally guard it." Upon Hussein's capture in a spider-hole, the flag was not found. Extensive searches were performed on the surrounding area, but the flag was not to be found for another Seven years.

However, today the mission is truly a success as Iraq's flag was found and brought back to base, completing the capture and ensuring Iraq's defeat. So where was it?

They sang "We are the Champions" while
avoiding water balloon barrages.

PFC Tim Johnson from Abilene, Texas was the man who finally discovered the flag. "They had us looking in holes everywhere, under buildings, we even bulldozed an entire neighborhood on a tip that it was under it. No dice. We looked in their old nuclear reactors, nothing. And then it hit me, where's the last place you would look for a hidden flag? A flag pole!"

Johnson discovered the flag flying proudly at the Baghdad Soccer stadium.

Johnson personally escorted the flag back to base, thus ensuring victory: "It was just like when we raised our flag over Hiroshima and ended the war. It was a lot like that."

CTF_2Fort

But Johnson hasn't let his personal achievement get to his head: "It was a team effort. We couldn't have done it without all the support people we had that were guarding our flag, and of course all the people filling our water balloons."

Saddam Hussein's downfall can now be added to a long list of dictators ended by a flag capture. Even Hitler was done in by a Private that captured his flag. Just this month, Moammar Qaddafi's reign in Libya was ended upon his capture, because, amazingly, he was wearing the flag. "He really needed to hide that thing better. Lol," the President said when reached for comment.

Wow Them in the End: How To Finish Strong

2011-11-04T01:26:00.000-05:00

4 November, 2011

Viking Cops?

It's NaNoWriMo, so you know what that means: lots of idiots penning novels that nobody will ever read (including the writers). Personally I think it should be called NaWhoGivesAShitMo.

Yes it's National Novel Writing Month, where dozens of bloggers and hipsters set out to pen the great novel in just the month of November. So if you see a dirty neckbeard riding a fixie and carrying a typewriter on his back, then you can figure that he's celebrating NaNoWriMo and No-shave-November. Or he's just participating in the Occupy Stereotypes Protest.

So if you are actually participating in NNWM, I'm here to tell you how to write an ending. Of course, I write screenplays, not novels (unless you count that bildungsroman about strippers I wrote when I was 21 [that's not a joke]), so my advice will apply mostly to film, but alas, stories are stories.

Ohhhh, Stars above!

The keys to writing endings:

1. Bookends

Simply have the ending refer back to something that happened at the beginning. It doesn't need to be clever in any way. Take The Social Network for example. Basically the plot shows us how Mark Zuckerberg is a douchebag. The very end is of him adding his ex-gf as a friend on facebook and hitting refresh constantly, waiting for her approval. The film opened with her breaking up with him and she's barely in the rest of the film. It just refers back to something from an hour and a half ago, and if the audience goes "oh yeah, I remember her" they think they "get it" or something and so they feel smart. People love to feel smart.

Another example of this technique would be any movie that uses flashbacks and eventually gets you back there at the end (see: Fight Club, anything by Tarantino)

2. Fuck your main character in the ass

No More Rape! Wooo!

Then murder them, piss on their ashes, shit on their grave, kill their whole family, and then have them miraculously win somehow.

Basically, right before the end, the main character should reach a lowest point, where it seems that not only have they failed, they're doomed, and so are their friends. Look at The Matrix. It's all leading up to Neo being THE ONE. And by The One, we mean Mr. Right for Trinity. So Neo's dead, shot repeatedly, in the real world he flatlines, that's game over. Then Trinity whispers to this dead guy that she loves him and suddenly he comes back to life....cause he's Mr. Right I guess, or One, which...hold on a second, rearranging the letters spells NEO. OMG I get it! This movie is so smart!

Any actiony film will follow this formula, as will just about ALL films. Rom-coms will have the couple break up for a while and seem doomed. Make sure that right before the end it seems that all is lost.

They replace Apollo Creed with a Cow. Goal change!

3. Move the goalposts

Main characters should have one clear big goal. Win the big game. Blow up the Death Star. Have sex. Don't get anally raped (Shawshank Redemption...not sure why he fled to Mexico).

So when everyone knows the goal the question simply becomes, "will they or won't they succeed." This is why sports movies tend to be more cliche. If they win the big game...predictable. If they lose the big game: well aren't you mr. non conformist. Basically you have no way to surprise us, they win or they don't.

UNLESS, you find a way for them to achieve some kind of victory, perhaps a small one, a moral or personal victory while still technically losing. See Rocky. His goal ends up being just proving he can cut it, not that he has to win as a gigantic underdog. If he wins, nobody believes it.

The Departed: Leo is the MC, wants to bring down the big bad mafia guy. Will he succeed? He does! BUT WAIT...there's still the bad guy's mole in his own department. Can he beat him? Ohhh...ohhhh, well fuck. SPOILER ALERT: he fails and is killed. Talk about moving the goalposts. Now defeating this bad guy is passed off to a different character. So we ultimately have a minor character take on a different main goal than was seemingly the main goal of the film. That's a lot of goalpost moving.

4. The Twist

OMG, he's the bad guy!?!?

Twists are tricky because they have to make sense for the whole plot. The easiest, stupidest twist is to reveal that an ally was actually a double-agent. See all bad cop/spy/thrillers. Oh my god, he's on the other side! But when you think through it, you'll realize that the traitor character's actions earlier on rarely make sense. For example, the film Unbreakable turns on a twist that reveals a seeming ally to actually be a supervillain. But he helped along the hero so much, his only goal was to make the hero eventually catch him. He's CRASY!

Howabout an example that comically checks all 4 boxes.

Signs

The Jew Media is trying to get in our brains.

Mel Gibson is a widow who tries to protect his family from an Alien invasion. We see his wife's death in flashback, and just before she dies, her eyes glass over and she says: "Swing away." Doesn't mean anything. Moving on. The daughter fills a glass of water, takes one sip, says it tastes funny, then sets it somewhere. She fills the house with these glasses of water. The son has bad asthma, and Mel Gibson's brother is a failed minor-league baseball player.

So when Alien shit starts happening, the clear goal is to board up the house, keep the Aliens out. The house is totally taken over by Aliens, they are trapped. They defend the basement, stay safe. They apparently have won. They go back upstairs, seemingly in the clear. BUT THEN. An alien takes the asthmatic son hostage.

Now the goalposts moved, the Alien Invasion is over, there's not an endless horde of bad guys...just this one. So they don't have to mount a huge defense, just kill this one. But how?

The alien then sprays some chemical weapon in the boy's nose. Oh fuck. At that instant, Mel Gibson tells his brother to "swing away," seeing as he's a baseball player, he's bad ass with a bat, so he swings, and hits those water glasses the daughter set out, splashing the alien. TWIST: it turns out the Aliens are allergic to water (glad they picked a planet that's surface is 70% covered in water). So the splashing water kills it or whatever.

So we have the twist, we have the bookends of "Swing away" and Meryl being a baseball player, and the girl leaving the glasses of water, and since the boy's asthma kicked in, the poison couldn't get past his blocked throat. See! Everything happens for a reason. I remember all those things, and then they came up again at the end. Also, while Mel Gibson wasn't dead, his whole goal of protecting his family was nearly a failure as his son passes out from asthma and is taken hostage by an alien that sprays chemical weapons down his throat. BUT he totally lives.

See, it's not that hard.

Think about how dumb that ending is without bookends or a twist. So his wife's last words, and his brother's failed career, and his daughter's weird behavior, and his son's asthma all align to allow them to kill an alien. OR you know...if they just had a water balloon handy. That would have probably worked. Or a gun. Or just an untrained person smashing an alien with a baseball bat would probably do the trick. Or they all could have peed on him. Humans are mostly water, all we really gotta do is bleed on them and they die. What pussies. Our butt-sweat is like anthrax to them.

So those are the simple things you can do, just have somethings come up that were mentioned at the beginning, come up with some twist, have a perfect storm bring the MC to the lowest possible point, then change the goalposts and have them win somehow. Done.

Let's look at some more examples:

I N C E P T I O N

Wrinkle Twister!

So they are about to accomplish the goal when Leo and Juno are sent down to the infinite subconscious that we've been hearing bad things about all movie. So they're in this lowest point, where they could fail at their mission and be trapped for centuries in this awful sub-dream place that drives them mad. Quite a low point. Then, we realize that we've seen this before. The film actually opened on this, but then flashedback several weeks or months. So we've bookended to something that the audience saw at the beginning. Remember that opening, Leo wakes up in the Ocean, then is brought in front of a really old Asian guy, then it kind of jump-cuts to Leo in the same room in front of the same Asian guy but younger. This beginning doesn't really make sense on first viewing, we don't know at all what's being implied and then it flashes back a long time, but we don't really know that it's a flashback. So basically it only really serves a purpose to A. give you that "Oh right, at the beginning, I get it," moment on first viewing. So then from this lowest point, book-ending twist ends up changing the goalposts drastically as Juno and Leo now have a completely different goal.

Imagine the ending not having that bookending which doesn't really accomplish anything in the first act, it's simply there to be recalled later. Imagine it isn't such a perfect storm of a shitty situation, and that the goal doesn't change from the previous level. Suddenly it ain't so climactic or "profound."

Minority Report

So Tom Cruise is accussed of the future murder of a man he doesn't even know. He knows he's not a killer, so how could this possibly be true? About all we know about him is that he's a great cop, an upholder of justice, protector of the innocent, and that he is haunted by the kidnapping and probably murder of his son. So what could be a lower point than discovering the killer of his son and being faced with the choice of killing this man, but becoming a murderer, or letting him live. What if instead of being his son's kidnapper, the temptation is that the guy hired a hitman to kill Tom Cruise or something. He could have been a really bad guy that needed to be killed. But that wouldn't make for a very personal involvement for Tommie. What's the one weakness that Tom Cruise has? His son. So of course, that's going to be a factor.

I like surfing movies.

Always make the lowest point the "Perfect Storm" for that character. It has to be the worst possible thing to happen to them. Not just a bad thing, but the one thing. They're afraid of snakes, so of course it's an anaconda. They're afraid of heights, so they have to walk a high-wire. Make it a perfect storm. Thinking backwards from the perfect storm can give you character ideas. They need a weakness or a flaw in order to have a perfect storm. So figure out what that perfect storm bad thing might be and work backwards to that character flaw.

So there you have it. Give it a twist, move the goalposts, make it rain a shit-ton, and show them something they remember from an hour and a half ago. That'll make it "deep."

All Shallow's Eve

2011-10-25T16:08:00.000-05:00

October 25, 2011

Wow, those costumes are great. I could have
sworn I was looking at real sluts.

It's almost Halloween, so I'm going to explain to you people how to come up with a good costume.

1. Be Slutty

Wear as little as possible. Get naked, then cover up as little of yourself as possible, then say you're going as a "Sexy _____."

Just come up with something to put in the blank. Here's a few ideas:

A. Put on a dog collar : Sexy Lassie.

B. Put on a beard: Sexy Chuck Norris

C. Cover your face in cocaine: Lindsay Lohan

She's going as an inside-out cow.

D. Cover yourself in red meat: Sexy Cow/Lada Gaga

E. Put a trash bag on your head : Sexy Baby Lisa

2. Too Soon

Go as someone who just died. Al Davis doesn't count, he's been dead since 1993. Or go as an event.

A. Wear a cardboard box covered in Foil with a model airplane crashing into the side: 9/11

B. Dress up in the shape of Japan somehow, drink 4 red bulls, and you'll vibrate your way to a hit costume.

C. Peyton Manning jersey + neck brace = millions of pissed off colts fans. (See also: Bernard Pollard jersey)

D. Put hair in a pony tail and just look like a bitch: Casey Anthony.

Never forget.

E. Look like a small jewish girl and carry a diary around : Helen Keller.

3. Have some jokes

Last year I went as Harry Potter/stripper. That is, it was like you had booked a harry potter themed stripper to come to your party. I went up to people with my magic wand (slim jims) and offered to cast a spell of protection. Abracadabra and here's a condom. Then I offered to magically make people sexier, then handed them gum. Also I had a banana in my pants.

A. Go as 9/11, whenever anyone asks what you are, very very seriously say "you said you'd never forget."

B. Dress like a caveman, dirty as shit, loin cloth, then run around screaming "Wilson!?!?"

Tap that keg.

C. Dress like Michelle Bachman (crazy eyes), and then say any of the stupid things she has said (Carbon Dioxide is safe because it's a natural product of nature, I'm the only person that said they'd build a double wall on the border, etc.)

D. Go as a dog then hit on girls by saying, "I want to get your leg pregnant." or "I'd bury my bone in her backyard."

E. Go as a cat and then say and do nothing, just stare at people with utter contempt.

F. Dress like an old person, then chug a bottle of whisky. You'll have no idea what the fuck is going on or where you are for the rest of the night: Alzheimers.

4. Puns

Make your costume into a pun. I was once called "Cougar bait" by a middle aged woman, prompting someone to suggest to me that for Halloween I simply show up to a party covered in raw meat..."Cougar Bait." Here's a helpful tip: try not to creep the fuck out of everyone.

A. Tape dozens of razer blades to your hands and feet : Blade Runner

B. Cover your entire body in green jello and leaves : Forrest Gump

C. Dress up as a giant douche : Nickelback

D. Does Hipster Hitler count as a pun?

E. Print off thousands of pictures of your friends and glue them all over your body. Then wear a dust jacket: Facebook.

5. Offend your friends.

One year as a kid, I went trick-or-treating as a "fat guy." Then a stranger asked me what I was, a particularly portly stranger, and so...yeah that was awkward.

A. Go as one of your friends. Steal some of their clothes, and just generally pretend to be a moronic version of them all night, including hitting on strangers using his/her name and phone number.

B. Dress like a complete slut, offer to give free HJs or fifty-cent BJs, or do anal if they buy you one of those cheesy hot dogs at quicktrip for you. When anyone asks who you are : "Your Mom." Another variation is to answer that you're one of your friend's girlfriends. It's comedy gold.

Here's a few more:

Go as a friend's recently deceased grandparent.
Go as your friend's recently miscarried/aborted fetus.
Go as your friend's under utilized penis.
Go as your friend's over utilized vagina.

So there you have it. Folks. Happy trick-or-treating. Or as Tibbs' Mom calls it "sucking dick for candy."

Tony Gonzalez: Best Receiver Not Named Rice?

2011-10-16T09:59:00.000-05:00

16 October, 2011

When he retires he plans to be a fire
department's designated baby-catcher.

Tony Gonzalez can move into 2nd all-time in receptions today. He has 1,096 and is 4th. Cris Carter had 1,101 for 3rd and Marvin Harrison is 2nd with 1,102. 1st all time is a bit out of reach. Rice had 1,549. He needs 7 catches to move into second.

I don't mean to alarm you, but if you look up the active leaders in career receiving yards in the NFL, you'll find Tony Gonzalez at the top of the list. I would imagine this is the first time in history that a Tight End has held this distinction.

He gave up Basketball because it was far too easy.

Pro Football Reference actually lists him at #3 with 12,752 yards, trailing Randy Moss with 14,858 and Terrell Owens with 15,934. Moss retired and Owens is a free agent, though he claims he's coming back. So depending on how strictly you define "active," you could have Tony G on top.

Gonzalez is the best Tight End ever. He holds all TE records there are to be had. He's also a hell of a blocker.

Some of the TEs these days are more like Wide Receivers. They line up outside more, they aren't often asked to act like an Offensive Tackle and help pound the rock. So some of these younger TEs are putting up bigger numbers than Tony did, but it's almost like they play a different position. Tony was part of the offensive lines that made Priest Holmes, Larry Johnson, and Michael Turner into running machines, while he was also setting records as a receiver.

He gets confused about the NFL's alley-oop rules.

So clearly he's accomplished more than any other TE. But is he one of the best Receivers of all-time?

We like to talk about how many 1000-yard seasons receivers have, because we like base-10. Tony G has 8 900-yard seasons and 4 1000-yard seasons.

In 2004 he led the league in receptions. He's caught at least 70 balls in 11 seasons.

He's 14th on the all-time list for receiving yards, ahead of Art Monk and Michael Irvin.

AND-1

By the end of this season, he'll probably pass Irving Fryar (needs 33 yards), Steve Largent (needs 350 yards), Andre Reed (needs 450 yards), and could pass Torry Holt (needs 650). If he plays next year he could pass Henry Ellard (about 1000 behind him), Cris Carter (about 1200), and James Lofton (1400 or so). He could easily be 7th on the all time list in 15 months.

He's 9th all-time in Touchdown catches. 1st amongst active players (again if you don't count Moss and Owens).

Tony G's greatness goes beyond statistics.

He saved a man's life with the heimlich maneuver. A Charger fan.

He literally saved a man's life by knocking him over. No seriously, he ran into a photographer after a play, causing a concussion which led to doctors discovering a brain tumor that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. That's Jesus territory.

Oh and he literally fucks October. And I mean literally, because he's like Paul Bunyan. His wife's name is October, but it's also the month his teams have the best record. So when Tony bangs October, they made a River...River Gonzalez. Seriously, he IS Paul Bunyan.

And he's only ever missed 2 games. Drafted in 1997, he missed one game in '99 and another in '06. That's it. That's 231 games in the NFL.

Before Leaf and Manning there was the
Lafleur/Gonzalez debate. Good call Cowboys.

The sad footnote to his career is 0 playoff wins. He lost to the '97 Broncos as Elway led them to a championship. He lost in '03 to Manning and the Colts in a game that had no punts. He lost to the '06 Colts on their way to a Super Bowl win. And he lost to Aaron Rodgers and the Super Bowl champion Packers last year.

Tony recently said he could play another 3 years. It sounds ridiculous. But you know what, Tony Gonzalez is pretty ridiculous.

He's a hall of famer without doubt. But at some point we're going to have to stop thinking of Tight Ends and Wide Receivers as totally different positions. So where does he rank amongst TEs and H-Backs and Wideouts and whatever the hell Reggie Bush is? That's what we're going to have to figure out at some point. (Just not about Reggie Bush, he sucks. FYI, Reggie Bush has fewer rushing yards in the NFL than Mark Brunell.)

So today, watch for Tony G to maybe move into #2 all time in receptions.