Miscellaneous Miscellany

Oh, adorable smoking baby, will I ever get tired seeing your fat, destined-to-die-soon face? No. I don't think I will ever tire of seeing your chubby-wubby, two-pack-a-day face.

Anyway, lots of things to get to this week.

• I watched "Lost" religiously (get it?) for five years, so seriously, I should not have been as upset as I was by the finale. I should have seen it coming. I feel the disappointment of a life-long religious person who just now realizes he's been praying to a fairy tale. That's all I'm saying.
  
  
• I've been sick all week. First, I think I had either a stomach flu or food poisioning. Plus, I've been having kidney discomfort, AND I have a loose filling in one of my molars. I'm really glad this week is over.
  
  
• I had this dream the other night (I know, stories about dreams are awful, so I'll keep this brief): I was making out with a lady (this story won't get gross, promise). Anyway, I'm making out with a girl, something else happens, then she says something like "Oh, I hate the term 'doggy style.' I am not a dog!" To which, in my dream, I respond with, "C'mon, baby. Don't take the term so literally. I mean, when we're doing the Missionary position, I don't feed and clothe you just so you'll believe in Jesus Christ." Even in my dreams, I'm hilarious.
  
  
• I also finished watching the last season of "Deadwood" on DVD this week. I can't recommend that show enough. So great and funny and tense and awesome. Which heralded TV show from last decade should I watch next on DVD: "Battlestar Gallatica" or "The Shield"?

I guess I really didn't have that much to get to after all. That smoking baby was totally worth it, though, right?

Have a great long weekend, everyone.

According To Stereotype

Sigh.

Maybe the South was right. Maybe we should just let them become their own separate country. They could call it the Southern States of America or Bibletucky or Douchelvania. The country would stretch from West Virginia to Florida and over to Arizona. They'd all be white and dumb, and there'd be no taxes, abortion, immigration, or anything interesting or cool. The national pasttime would be NASCAR; the national anthem: "Thank God I'm A Country Boy."

Let them go, I say. It's simply too embarassing that we share a nationality, and quite frankly, I'm tired of their bullshit.

Amen.

What We Did With All That Trash

Despite our supposed environmentally-conscious blog title, WAWGDWATT has rarely delved into issues of Earth preservation. We always seem to get distracted by more important societal quandaries.

Like, for instance, while watching recent episodes of "Saturday Night Live," I was introduced to the musical phenomena of Justin Beiber (adorably asexual!) and Ke$ha (adorably hooker-like, but anybody who inserts a dollar $ign into their name is an asshole, and seriously, you go on TV to sing a song, and you bring with you a U.S.-flag cape and third-grade laser show to distract me from the fact that you're a broke-dick Britney? Weak.)

Anyway, all the trash we keep throwing into the ocean is collecting to the point where an island of garbage has formed in the Pacific Ocean that some estimate is twice the size of Texas. Let's quantify how big that is. If you were to drive east to west across Texas without stopping, it would take you about 14 hours. Times two! But the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (terrible name, by the way; my suggestion: Trashlantis!) is old news. Now, the Atlantic ocean, jealous the Pacific was getting all the Greenpeace love, has started to form it's own trash island.

Usually, this statement of fact would be followed by all manner of disgust and pessimism from me, with a little conspiratorial, anti-capitalism sentiment thrown in just for flavor. But not this time, my friends. This time, I'm going to look on the bright side; I'm going to see our new ocean landfill as half full.

I think the ocean is doing us an incredible and marvelous favor. I think the ocean knows we've been using it as the world's biggest trash receptacle for the past few thousand years, and has chosen to use its powerful currents to collect all of our refuse into a couple of visible-from-space collections. That way, when we finally get serious about preserving our, you know, source of life and shit, we can just build a couple of huge crabbing nets attached to some rockets, throw them around all the garbage islands, and blast those floating heaps of plastic shit into outer space.

Yeah, that's right. I say let space deal with our trash. Fuck space. What's space gonna do about it? Oh, and the best part: we don't live in space. We live here, protected by atmospheres and ionospheres and clouds and shit. Once we get the garbage out of our air space, it's out of sight, out of mind as far as I'm concerned. Plus, space is at least twice as big as our ocean. It'll take us forever to fill it up with trash islands.

Thank you, ocean. Your mysterious, ancient ways give you the foresight we humans lack. For that, we are eternally grateful. And after we send all that trash into space, we'll totally stop throwing our two-liter Coke bottles in you. Promise.

Drill, Baby, Dri---Oh Shit!

As Mike has zestfully pointed out in his last two posts, a lot of seriously fucked up nonsense has been going down the last couple of weeks, so let me add some fuel to the fi--errr.. let me add my two cents..


Offshore Drilling. Hmm. Humph. Oh well, here's to hoping that unrefined oil makes a really awesome fish marinade....Mmmm, this oil is so cruuuuuude. The recent announcement of President Obama's plan to increase deep sea drilling couldn't have come at a more inopportune time. I think the environment is the one area that President Obama deserves to be hammered on (well, and probably the continuation of two, IMO, needless wars--but I don't have enough disappointment & frustration to go around). Obviously, this drilling-for-oil-under-5000-feet-of-ocean practice is not as safe as everyone claims it is. I'm guessing that Obama (or his advisers) thought that demonstrating a willingness to increase offshore oil drilling would be seen as an act of "bipartisanship"--but what good is bipartisanship when the other side has no good ideas whatsoever? Take so-called clean coal, for example. Have you ever touched a piece of freaking coal? It is the opposite of clean, some might call it downright dirty. How do you expect to "clean" coal? Perhaps the same way you shine shit.



Bartering for Medical Services. Some bat-guano crazy politician lady (Sue Lowden--who is likely to beat Nevada Sen. Harry Reid in November--she's currently up {!} by like 10 percentage points or something) suggests that we ought to be bartering for our healthcare to help lower costs. Somehow I don't think my collection of video games is going to cover any type of surgery I may end up needing. Ms. Lowden specifically mentioned that during the Great Depression, people offered livestock, namely chickens, to doctors in exchange for medical services. So be careful, counting your chickens before they hatch could soon carry some serious medical consequences.



Stephanie Grace. Ugh, just STFU. This supposedly educated female sent some idiotic email around about how she thinks that African-Americans are "genetically" dumber than white people. As others have noted, this is pretty much the entire argument behind eugenics and the point blank definition of racism, yet many of her colleagues are rushing to her defense and bemoaning the fact that her identity has now been plastered across the Net (you're welcome). And whoops, now everybody knows about it, and BOO HOO HOO, her career as a lawyer bullshitter is possibly in jeopardy. Look folks, skin color and eyelid folds (i.e. what we call 'race') do not equal genotype and barely has shit to do with our DNA. Check out Gawker (here and here) and PostBourgie (here) for better and more informative takes than I can offer on the matter. And, oh great, she's got a degree in Sosh-ee-ol-o-gee. And she looks like she's Irish. Motherfucker.


Man, I am angry as Hell this week, I'm seriously about to pop off. And I don't even have enough piss left to discuss the new Arizona immigration law, but I think "By the Time I Get to Arizona" applies, so listen to that...

At least May has some cool music coming out, as well as the final episodes of "Lost", so maybe it'll all balance out.

Here's Something That Happened

Here is everything I know about the guy that owns this pick-up truck.

1. He doesn't know very much about Islam.

2. He knows an amateur graphic designer.

3. He doesn't mind bumming everyone out.

4. He gets the best parking at Safeway.

5. He is super proud of the American south (despite their woeful win-loss percentage).

6. He's Ford tough. (And by that I mean he doesn't mind associating the struggling car manufacturer with the worst tragedy ever.)

7. He's kind of hung up on September 11.

8. When he bought the truck, he went all out and got the optional tow package!

9. In traffic, other drivers constantly flip him off for reasons he can't quite figure.

10. His life, to this point, has not worked out as well as he had hoped for. But he's pretty sure he knows who's responsible for those unfulfilled dreams.

11. He looooves Widespread Panic.

This Is A Joke, Right? (Updated)

What. The. Fuck?

I've long held a special kind of contempt toward the kind of self-deluded celebrity that makes a super special announcement via the glossy, inbred pages of People magazine. Weddings, births, rehab: if you're telling the public about some milestone in your life via People, you're fucking retarded. (Apologies to all our retarded readers for my use of the word retarded. But I must contend: your physical or mental differences don't make you retarded. So the next time somebody calls you retarded, respond thusly: "Oh, no, sir, it is not I who is retarded! It's Sandra fucking Bullock!")

But the above cover... holy shit, we're entering into a whole new level of navel-gazing self-congratulatory publicity. There's just so much wrong with this, I feel compelled to deploy a numeric list so that all may understand the hierarchy of fuckery going on here.

1. The headline, "Meet My Baby," right off the bat makes it seem like the kid is, at best, a new gadget or toy. It sounds like someone saying, "Check out my new iPad" or "Isn't this African doll really unique?"

2. Even the baby seems bemused. Look at the look on its face. That's a look that screams out, "Is this bitch fucking kidding me?" And is that a traditional necklace from wherever that kid is from around its neck? That's how you're gonna hold on to your adoptive kid's culture and heritage, through overly large jewelry? Nice touch.

Update: As Pete points out in the comments, I had assumed that this kid was from Malawi or some such place. (And you all know what happens when you assume: you make an unverified conclusion based on available, superficial evidence.) But this kid is actually from N'awlens. Does that mean the necklace around its neck is one of those beaded necklaces for which drunk chicks flash their lady bags during Mardi Gras? Way classy.

3. Because of that ridiculous pose, her phony smile, and the way she's holding the baby like a football, I can just feel the publicists, managers, agents, and stylists all standing over the photographer's shoulder shrieking, "That's the cover!" Fake, fake, fake.

4. You know that joke about African adoptees being trendy accessories for famous shitheads? This picture makes that joke seem less like a cynical snark from jealous nobodies and more like the actual fucking truth. Ugh.

5. The bar at the top informing us that this is the Most Beautiful People issue has a picture of Julia Roberts accompanying it. Fucking People isn't even trying anymore. Fuck.