It would be easier to make fun of kids' boxing if this picture WAS NOT SO ADORABLE
GateHouse — Well, the chances are pretty good that if you’re the type of person who is moved to reflection by the headline “Pediatricians put the kibosh on boxing for kids,” you are already PRETTY WELL IMMERSED in the world of boxing for kids.
This is the sort of headline that only a country where half of the Major Presidential Candidates are still wobbly on this confusing “science” situation would require, the sort of news that’s news only if your daily planner includes the words “Nancy Grace” in pink bubble lettering, yet here we are: Last week the American Academy of Pediatrics and its Canadian counterpart, Rush, issued a joint report that came out against the sport of boxing for children and adolescents. Reasons included: a high risk of injury, potential for possible concussions and Listening To The Instincts Burned Deep Within The DNA Of Every Human Alive Over Millions Of Years Of Evolution.
What could turn A Lady on more than doughy fiftysomethings with exposed white fishbellies and facepaint?
Metromix — Spoiler alert: This list is going to end with a 1996 Bryan Adams song called “I Wanna Be Your Underwear.” It was Adams’ inexplicable panties-transfiguration compulsion that got us thinking: Any website can hope to rack up page views by putting the phrase “songs about sex” in a headline, but it takes a site full of trained professionals to do the exact opposite. As such, our criteria here were simple: The songs had to be directly sexual in nature, they had to not be by comedians or parodists (i.e. Lonely Island doesn’t count) and they had to be at least partly designed for the actual seduction of a human.
Pictured: Basically what all Scientists look like.
GateHouse — So, just to straighten this out, just to quell the controversy, there’s a new study that says watching TV is a drain on your lifeforce somehow? WELL THANKS FOR KEEPING ME CURRENT, SCIENCE. What’s next on the list? Is it teleporting? I hope it’s teleporting.
To jump back to before the previous paragraph (yes, I have solved COLUMN TIME TRAVEL), a recent study published in Australia revealed that watching too much TV increases your chance of dying early from health problems. It also apparently reveals that science is out of things to study. No no, guys, thanks, since we’ve got all of our other problems so skillfully figured out, I guess it’s OK for you to start going back to the mid 1950s to CHECK YOUR WORK. It’s a good thing our Future Republican President is planning to make sure all your textbooks are flamethrowered.
See, people, this is why Brave Patriots like Rick Perry and the additional 400 GOP presidential candidates are so wisely poking holes in Science things like “evolution” and “global warming” and “Avogadro’s number” and “the atomic weight of cobalt” (the “Periodic Table” will tell you that it’s 58.933, but that’s just a theory that’s out there): Not because Science is filling our children’s precious spongebrains with facts and empirically proven evidence instead of merely our own desperately held belief structures, because it’s MOSTLY REHASHING THINGS WE KNEW ALREADY. Last week saw another round of stories about how eating processed meats made from the feet of animals you would hit with a subway train if you could might not be so good for the ol’ Heart. WELL THANKS A HEAP, SCIENCE. I suppose next you’re going to report some bungling nonsense about how easy access to “guns” increases “the rates of violence in America.” Science is such a loser.
Pictured: Boehner and, I don't know, Cantor? Harry Reid?
GateHouse — Good morning, America! Or at least the small percentage of you who have successfully avoided the impulse to beat yourself silly every morning with a box of Lucky Charms (or whatever kind of cereal box is most damaging, it’s up to you, although I find the purple stars pretty hurtful).
I have found myself drawn to the Debt Ceiling Negotia — well, Negotiations is an incorrect word, because it indicates on some level the involvement of adult humans, so let’s go with Pathetic Caterwauling By People Who Sound Like Ralph Wiggum — for the same reason that I was once drawn to pro wrestling: Because I like listening to silly cartoonpeople in costumes read from goofy scripts in an attempt to emanate impressions of grave importance.
Also, I like my house, and with Sunday’s deal/compromise/fiesta of Democrat giveaways I’m glad to know that in theory I can keep it through September, or until my mortgage is sold to China or Cobra or the evil Thundercats or whoever. Wait, were there bad Thundercats? I can’t remember now. If there were bad Thundercats, someone please email about them, in the precious last few days before your Internet bill jumps to $450/mo and you pay it directly to a Koch Brother. .
Tatooine = Preferable to America this week, for two reasons: 1. Vaporators. 2. Droid sales.
GateHouse— As a licensed Reformed Humor Professional — having graduated from a monthslong Comedy Immersion Program led at a secluded Wisconsin camp by Dr. Marcus Bachmann, who helpfully compelled me to Pray The Grim Away (incidentally, it’s basically just 12-hour “Growing Pains” rerun marathons, save your money) — I can confirm that it’s currently too blank-wording hot to be funny. Go ahead and fill in your own expletive there; the newspaper has rules about such things, though I’m guessing that most editors are too sweaty to care. (If you are having trouble finding just the right bad word, go outside in a pair of sweatpants and jog to the end of the block. By the time you return you will have thought of dozens.)
There is hot, and then there is slap-your-belly-and-run-to-your-mama hot. I don’t want to turn this into a game of Heat Dome Story Trumping, but I live in South Carolina, where we routinely enjoy the kind of heat that makes grown conservatives go running to the government for Oscillating Fan handouts, the kind of heat where you go to get the mail and then stop on your way back to hallucinate.
Within 12 seconds of going outside in South Carolina your clothes grow damp and heavy enough to make you feel like you’re wearing a used beach towel. I recently saw a Facebook experiment in which some a friend’s kids tried to literally fry an egg on the sidewalk, a plan that unfortunately foiled when the sidewalk liquefied. On the plus side, when it’s this hot, you feel less weird having your morning margarita at work.
According to my son, this animal is not harmful to humans. So go ahead. Stick out your hand.
GateHouse — So I’ve found spiders crawling on me twice today.
Small spiders, sure. Un-fatal spiders, I think, although it can be hard to tell because spiders are cunning and often disguise themselves as non-fatal spiders in order to sneak into places and sometimes pass through airport security.
But twice I have looked down upon my own shirt to find myself being traversed by something with body sections, multiple legs and venom — or, if not venom, at least pincers, which is basically scientific code-word for “venom.” Either way this is not going to mean anything very positive for my evening’s sleep schedule.
Now, I pride myself on being powerfully and masculinely unafraid of most things, including inventing adverbs for pointless jokes. Most things, that is, except for spiders. And the at-least-two snakes who live in my backyard now. And that skywalk thing with the glass floors on the 750th story at the former Sears Tower in Chicago. Also, the spectral librarian from “Ghostbusters” and those dreams about rollercoasters and clowns. Otherwise, I’m good.
GateHouse — BARACK OBAMA HAS FAILED, according to basically everyone whose cocktail money depends on squealing like a monkeyperson on television about how everyone currently in office has failed, preferably on a show that’s on loud enough to prevent you from having to talk during dinner.
This is to be expected, as it’s been like 12 years since Obama murderated Osama bin Laden, and the question America wants answered is WHAT HAVE YOU EXECUTED FOR US LATELY? Oh, I guess we’re just all supposed to sit around and WAIT for Decepticon attacks? Why hasn’t he taken care of errrmm whatever the villain in the “Green Lantern” movie is supposed to be? Seriously, someone tell me, because that looks like a very silly video game for children.
Anyway, the news is so bad for Obama right now that he’s currently losing to a giant gaping yawning abyss of hopelessness. As most Republican voters wouldn’t be caught dead stepping one half-inch off the Party Line lest they be laser-fried alive by Michelle Bachmann’s avada-kedavra-powered deathray eyebeams, and full well knowing that their field currently resembles the undercard at a regional professional wrestling exhibition held on a Tuesday night at the high school gymnasium, a Gallup poll last week showed the troubled president down by 5 points to the generic opponent “A Republican,” which is funny for those of us in the writin’ business and officially tragic for those of you who HAVE OFFICIALLY SPENT A FAT CHUNK OF MONEY CAMPAIGNING ALREADY.
The poll showed 44 percent of respondents saying they’d vote for a blank space and 39 percent for Obama, with an unconscionable 18 percent saying they had “no opinion.” Maybe they’re waiting for a yearlong miserable economy, some clarification on social issues or the extermination of the world’s most hated bearded guy before getting around to brainstorming.
.
.
I love this idea, like Obama loses in 2012 and they just randomly draw some white dude in a televised lottery between the monologue and first sketch on “SNL” and introduce him on Inauguration Day: “Ladies and gentlemen, please congratulate President Glen Jenkins, unemployed former used-car-lot assistant manager from Dublin, Ga! Where’s Glen? Is he here? Wave, Glen!”
(Incidentally, replace “A Republican” with An Actual Republican, and suddenly, according to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, Obama beats Romney 49-43. The state of politics in 2011: EVERYBODY IS LOSING TO NOBODY.)
So instead, I have a much better idea: With the GOP field making up for in volume what it lacks in pleasantness and electability, the way to go is clear: Create one, monstrous, all-powerful, Devastator-like SUPERPUBLICAN from the few appealing parts of each of the 250 embarrassing candidates, attach them to a faceless simulacrum floating in a tank full of saltwater in a secret evil underwater lab and give birth to a perfect cloneperson, Kid R if you will, who will not wake up sucking a lemon, as that is sort of gay.
Republican Serpentor will be perfect: He will have the fierce tenacity of Newt Gingrich, without the jewelry bill and wife-abandonment but with a campaign staff, which will help. He will have the single-minded focus of Michelle Bachmann, without the need to drink cord blood to survive. He will have the smooth, approachable, presidential-looking appeal of Mitt Romney, but without the weird religion that those nice “South Park” boys did the play about or the 800-lb. weight of a healthcare plan hanging off his hair. He will have well pretty much nothing from Tim Pawlenty. He will have the business acumen of Herman Cain, but without having to be identified as a “pizza magnate,” and not even one from a company anyone knows. And he will have Sarah Palin’s kingmaker powers and ability to make news with his every proclamation, bus tour or tweet, but with the ability to recall American history and go 10 minutes without being on a reality show. Also he’ll have Storm Shadow’s ninja powers.
GateHouse — There isn’t much glory in being a newspaper copy editor and/or page designer these days. The hours are miserable: You almost always work nights, clocking in at 3 or 4 p.m. and blinkingly re-emerging into the real world around midnight to do your grocery shopping or coping-mechanism drinking — and that’s only if you’re one of the deliriously lucky schmucks who works only on one section and that section is not sports, where you sit alone in a desolate newsroom, accompanied only by the disembodied whirrrrr of deserted aging computers, waiting for the close of a crucial June game involving the Arizona Diamondbacks. If you misplace a comma, or leave a participle dangling someplace it shouldn’t be dangling, someone with a fierce, weirdly passionate grip on the thrilling world of grammar will send you a snarky email, grump about you publicly and probably invent a nickname that’ll stick with you for years. And even if all your modifiers are situated in their appropriate latitudes, chances are solid that you’ll soon see your pay cut, be furloughed or impolitely directed to relocate to a centralized editing mothership in a town the newspaper isn’t in. To enjoy these honors you’re paid almost enough to, if the markets hold, retire at the age of Yoda.
And yet, peopledo this job! People sign up to do this job, and people go into stomach-churning volumes of student loan debt to do this job! And that is because they are a singular kind of person, a dark kind of person, the kind of person who takes a position for criminally low pay because there might be, on a ghostly, distant evening in the future, a chance that they’ll spend their days writing Weiner headlines for money, and nothing can take that away from them.
Now, if there’s anything left to be done with this Weiner thing I can’t think of it, except of course for that clause. I just don’t know how many other ways to handle this Weiner business, and yes, promise, really done now. Which is good, because I can’t imagine what else anyone could possibly squeeze out of Weiner.
Pictured: Fonts that freakish super-geniuses use, but go ahead and stick with Garamond, dummy.
GateHouse — You probably don’t need to be reminded of this, but I have a lot in common with Kanye West. We share a taste for red leather suits, we have many of the same ex-girlfriends and we once both released albums called “Late Registration” with anthropomorphic-bear-mascot cover art, which was awkward, but he and I joke about it now, usually while throwing wads of $100 bills into the air and driving around at 8 mph.
Kanye and I first bonded over our two shared passions: pink vertical-slat sunglasses and fonts. “Sometimes I get emotional over fonts,” Kanye tweeted last summer, and it’s like he was peering into my soul. As someone who grew up with early Macintosh computers — and thus not having to worry about squandering quality brain-juice on such decisions as “Is he thinking breaking ball here?” or “Six girlfriends, one Homecoming, whom do I select?” — I found myself very early thinking things like, “Why don’t people use Palatino more IT IS SO CLASSY!” and “I know San Francisco is supposed to be fun but this pro wrestling fanzine is supposed to look PROFESSIONAL.”
Fonts, as you probably already know if you’re still reading for some reason, are of great importance. They convey ideas, they offer sly, subliminal insights into the minds of their designers and they can be very helpful in making harsh, uninformed early opinions about people you don’t know (i.e., “Oh, this resume’s header is in Impact?” Why not just print it dot matrix?” one might think, which among font people is a CRUSHING BURN.) I have personally been involved in conference calls in which full-grown adults spent 30 minutes debating the relative merits of Bold vs. Semi-Bold. Dozens were bloodied.
I'm a a writer for such outlets as Men's Health, Paste, Billboard and brucespringsteen.net, a writer/editor at Nickelodeon's humor site NickMom.com, a syndicated humor columnist for GateHouse, a very slow runner and a father of two (the younger of whom has been personally approved by Bruce Springsteen) living on the coast of South Carolina. Even longer bio/clips.
GateHouse — Welcome to Self-Checkout, automated for your convenience. Please slide your VIP card to continue.
