#20

And why should I believe myself?

#19

Now that you’ve found it, it’s gone
Now that you feel it, you don’t
You’ve gone off the rails

#18

Everything is broken
Everyone is broken

#17

Up above, aliens hover
Making home movies for the folks back home
Of all these weird creatures who lock up their spirits
Drill holes in themselves
And live for their secrets

#16

Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon…

#15

We don’t want the monster taking over
Tiptoe around tie him down
We don’t want the loonies taking over
Tiptoe around tie him down

#14

Either way you turn, I’ll be there
Open up your skull, I’ll be there

#13

Maybe you’ll be president, but know right from wrong
Or in the flood, you’ll build an ark, and sail us to the moon

#12

I’ve no idea what I’m talking about
I’m trapped in this body and can’t get out

#11

This is what you get
This is what you get
This is what you get when you mess with us

#10

I would like to change back now
To the shadow of
Shadow of my former self

#9

You can try the best you can
Dinosaurs roaming the earth

#8

Come on if you think you can take us all
You forget so easy…

#7

Plastic bag, middle class, polyethylene
Decaffeinate, unleaded, keep all surfaces clean
If you don’t believe in it, sell your soul
If you don’t get into it, no one will

#6

Pull me out of the aircrash
Pull me out of the lake
‘Cause I’m your superhero
We are standing on the edge

#5

Just ’cause you feel it
Doesn’t mean it’s there

#4

All my lovers were there with me
All my past and futures
And we all went to heaven in a little row boat
There was nothing to fear and nothing to doubt

#3

I’m not living
I’m just killing time
Your tiny hands
Your crazy kitten smile
Just don’t leave
Don’t leave

#2

That’s it sir, you’re leaving
The crackle of pigskin
The dust and the screaming
The yuppies networking
The panic, the vomit
The panic, the vomit
God loves his children
God loves his children, yeah

#1

And it wears me out
It wears me out
If I could be who you wanted
All the time

You all know that I have been sustained throughout my life by three saving graces? my family, my friends, and a faith in the power of resilience and hope. These graces have carried me through difficult times and they have brought more joy to the good times than I ever could have imagined.

The days of our lives, for all of us, are numbered. We know that. And, yes, there are certainly times when we aren’t able to muster as much strength and patience as we would like. It’s called being human.

But I have found that in the simple act of living with hope, and in the daily effort to have a positive impact in the world, the days I do have are made all the more meaningful and precious. And for that I am grateful.

It’s a simple, graceful, and moving message, an eloquent summation of the philosophy that living a good life and helping others is its own reward. Nobody could possibly find anything controversial in Edwards’ words, right? RIGHT?

Well, my friend, you obviously don’t know Republicans.

Donald Douglas points out that Elizabeth Edwards has failed to give a shout-out to He Who Gave Her Cancer.

The story’s trending at Memeorandum. And at ABC News, “Elizabeth Edwards Won’t Receive Anymore Cancer Treatment: John Edwards’ Joins Family at His Wife’s Side.” But I notice at her farewell statement an odd aspect to her “three saving graces”: She doesn’t list faith in God as one of them.

Yes, you read that right: Elizabeth Edwards, who has previously had to deal with her son being killed and her husband having an affair (and child) with another woman, is dying of cancer…and this asshat decides to call her out, on her deathbed, for not giving props to his Invisible Sky Buddy.

Now, at this point you might be thinking, “Well, Douglas’ statement is kind of ignorant and insensitive, but surely he didn’t mean to be that much of a dick, right?” But just in case you were tempted to give him even the tiniest benefit of the doubt on that score, Donnie Boy helpfully expands upon his point:

Clearly Elizabeth Edwards wants to put her faith in something, be it hope or strength or anything. But not God. I wonder if it’s just bitterness, that’s she’s been forsaken by more than just her estranged husband — that’s she’s been forsaken by Him. And imagine if she’d have become First Lady. Americans generally expect outward expressions of faith in our presidents, Christian faith especially, and thus in our First Ladies as well. The Democratic base obviously doesn’t care, as we can see in the “wow factor” expressed by the author at the American Prospect. Being anti-religion is cool, so Edwards’ non-theological theology gets props from the neo-communists. Still, at her death bed and giving what most folks are calling a final goodbye, Elizabeth Edwards couldn’t find it somewhere down deep to ask for His blessings as she prepares for the hereafter? I guess that nihilism I’ve been discussing reaches up higher into the hard-left precincts than I thought.

Again, to sum up: Elizabeth Edwards’ refusal to mention Jesus on her deathbed is not only proof that she hates him, but also that all liberals are nihilistic atheists who hate god, as well. And, because she didn’t give props to The Big JC, he’ll be sending her…well…you know where.

Wow. Just filled with Christian compassion, these Culture of Lifers are. Who would’ve ever guessed that they and Stevie Johnson worship the same god?

I don’t watch football anymore, I gave that up. I got tired of the interviews after the games, because the winning players always give credit to God, and the losers blame themselves. You know, just once I’d like to hear a player say, ‘Yeah, we were in the game, until Jesus made me fumble. He hates our team.’
–Jeff Stilson

I suppose that, weighed against the overall record of death, destruction, oppression, and rank hypocrisy accrued by religious types since the beginning of recorded history, this barely rates a mention, but nevertheless, it’s always annoyed me: I HATE IT when professional athletes thank God for winning the game. The sheer, unmitigated gall of those statements grates on me. Seriously, Jethro? You live on a planet replete with war, slaughter, starvation, disease, slavery, rape, and murder; a world where millions of people are forced to drink out of the same rivers they shit in… and you think the omnipotent, omniscient deity that supposedly created this mess gives a flying fuck about whether you scored a TOUCHDOWN? (Or hell, maybe he does. This would actually go a long way towards explaining why this planet and species are such a mess: God ignores human suffering because he’s too busy watching sports. He’s a Republican!)

So you can perhaps imagine my sense of transcendent, rapturous joy to find out at that finally, finally, the shoe is on the other foot. A pro athlete has finally taken the “God loves sports” line of reasoning to its logical conclusion: ie, if your team’s win means that God loves you, then your team’s loss must mean that GOD HATES YOU.

This week, with a chance to win their third-straight game and upset the vaunted Steelers, Johnson watched one of his five dropped passes fall through his hands as Pittsburgh forced overtime and defeated the Bills. It was the kind of humbling reminder that so many athletes take to heart and learn from.

Not Steve Johnson. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away and Stevie is PISSED RIGHT OFF!

I PRAISE YOU 24/7!!!!!! AND THIS HOW YOU DO ME!!!!! YOU EXPECT ME TO LEARN FROM THIS??? HOW???!!! ILL NEVER FORGET THIS!! EVER!!! THX THO…

Stevie’s post-game Twitter twat is approximately 397 kinds of awesome, but my favorite part? The last two words. It’s as if, at the last second, Stevie suddenly remembered that his Invisible Sky Buddy is one seriously vengeful mofo, and thought “Uh oh, better hedge my bet. Still love ya, Big Guy! Ha ha LOL!”

Or perhaps he was afraid that the kinds of loving, God-fearing Real Americans who worship pro football might subject him to a

Later, in the finest tradition of an evangelical preacher caught in a hotel room smoking meth with a male prostitute, Stevie issued his predictable mea culpa. (Unfortunately, this also destroyed my last lingering shred of hope that perhaps, just perhaps, Johnson was really a brilliant satirist, lampooning his fellow athletes for their god-thanking hypocrisy. Ah well, such is life.)

The saga of “Stevie Johnson vs. Jahweh” raises another important philosophical question, one which I alluded to in this post’s title: when God bets on football, does he bet straight up, or does he get points? Because Pittsburgh was a six point favorite in this game. Had Stevie held onto the football, Buffalo would have won by exactly six (since teams don’t bother kicking the extra point in overtime games.) This means that the Allmighty would have gotten, at best, a push on his bet. However, if Jehovah was betting only on the winner, regardless of spread, then his intervention on behalf of Pittsburgh makes perfect sense.

I just hope the moral of this story isn’t that God is a Steelers fan. I don’t want to live in a universe that cruel and pointless.

(UPDATE: Crap! Upon further reflection, my betting analogy doesn’t work, because if God bet on the Steelers and gave the points, he’d already have lost his bet. Since the game was in overtime, Pittsburgh could not possibly win by more than six, regardless of whether Stevie dropped the ball or not. Therefore, God has to be betting straight up on football games. But maybe if he was also betting the over/under…)

Sorry, did I say “terrorists?” I meant Bit Torrent websites.

Following on the heels of this week’s domain seizure of a large hiphop file-sharing links forum, it’s clear today that the U.S. Government has been very busy. Without any need for COICA, ICE has just seized the domain of a BitTorrent meta-search engine along with those belonging to other music linking sites and several others which appear to be connected to physical counterfeit goods.

(snip)

Aside from the fact that domains are being seized seemingly at will, there is a very serious problem with the action against Torrent-Finder. Not only does the site not host or even link to any torrents whatsoever, it actually only returns searches through embedded iframes which display other sites that are not under the control of the Torrent-Finder owner.

(below: actual message displayed on torrent-finder.com website)

Unfortunately, I neglected to also stop reading articles about the Democrats.

Doug Schoen and Pat Caddell, two purported Democrats who haven’t voted for a Democrat since James Buchanan ran for President and who are mostly engaged these days as Fox News’s resident concern trolls (at least when Jane Hamsher isn’t available), have penned a WaPo op-ed calling for Obama to announce that he will not run again. The reason is because the Republicans in the House of Representative have vowed to work with Obama but only if he does exactly what they say and that therefore the only way to avoid this partisan gridlock is for Obama to declare himself a one-term President.

Yes, you read that right: Very Serious Opinion Makers in a Very Serious Important Newspaper believe that, in order to extend an olive branch to an opposition party that, even before he took office, promised to block everything he tried to pass, spent the past two years in full Scorched Earth Mode, and has already promised to do exactly the same thing for the next two years… President Obama should make a announcement that will indicate his total surrender, turn him into a de facto lame duck, validate all the shit they’ve pulled, and virtually guarantee Total Opposition as the new Republican modus operandi whenever they don’t get exactly what they want, forever and ever.

You know, because his surrender will make them more likely to work constructively with him in a bipartisan manner.

And this editorial, lest we forget, was written by two Democrats.

I eagerly await their next Very Serious editorial advocating teen suicide as the only rational, proper response to the problem of bullying.

Lord knows, I tried. Back in the college days, when I viewed pot smoking an an endurance sport, I tried to enjoy jam bands. I got to the point where I could at least tolerate the Dead, Allmans, and Widespread Panic. At least those bands would occasionally tone down the endless noodling, and could actually write songs with catchy hooks and comprehensible lyrics. But Phish? Nope. God, they’re awful. Sure, they’re talented musicians and all that, but their songs are flimsy excuses to launch into another 20 minute guitar solo, and the lyrics? Seriously, I defy anybody to tell me that this means. Go on, decipher that Dadaist jabberwocky. You can’t! Because it means nothing.

So, needless to say, when this video started making the rounds, I loved it. Finally, someone has accurately captured what Phish sounds like people who don’t like Phish.

My only quibble: speaking as someone who, as previously noted, did listen to them quite a bit back in the day, the only way this parody is distinguishable from a real Phish song is that, at a tidy six minutes long, it’s about a quarter of their normal length.

November 11th is known in the United States as Veteran’s Day. In most of Europe, it’s still known as Armistice Day in commemoration of the end of World War I, “The War to End All wars.” Today, 91 92 years after the end of that horrific conflict, there are just three living WWI veterans left in the world. (Their numbers are dwindling fast; in 2008, there were 10.)

This past June, Harry Patch, Britains’s last WWI veteran and the last living veteran to have seen trench combat in that war, died at the age of 111. Traumatized by the horrors he had witnessed on the Western Front, he spoke to no one about them for almost eight decades. Finally, at the age of 98, he began speaking out, and at the time of his death he was the world’s oldest peace activist.

Like most of those who had survived the war, Harry Patch simply returned to his former life as a civilian and settled down to married life. But he returned to Combe Down “thoroughly disillusioned”: “I could never understand why my country could call me from my peacetime job and train me to go to France and try to kill a man I never knew. Why did we fight? I asked myself that, many times.”

(snip)

“Some of the boys buried here,” he remarked, “are the same age as me, killed on the same day I was fighting. Any one of them could have been me. Millions of men came to fight in this war, and I find it incredible that I am now the only one left. Just like them, when I went over the top I didn’t know whether I would last longer than five minutes. We were the PBI – the Poor Bloody Infantry – and we were expendable. What a waste. What a terrible waste.”

After Harry’s death, Radiohead wrote a song in tribute to him, with proceeds from sale of the single going to the British Royal Legion. The lyrics, taken from Patch’s own words, are simple, poignant and brutal:

I am the only one that got through
The others died where ever they fell
It was an ambush
They came up from all sides
Give your leaders each a gun and then let them fight it out themselves
I’ve seen devils coming up from the ground
I’ve seen hell upon this earth
The next will be chemical but they will never learn

I can, for instance, understand how many people could be upset that their taxes are too high and the government wastes too much money, even though I believe that the social programs thus funded do justify those taxes and that spending. Similarly, even though I opposed the Iraq War from the outset and always will, I can at least acknowledge that the ouster of Saddam Hussein was a very good thing.

However… one issue where I do NOT acknowledge the legitimacy of the opposition is that of same-sex marriage. To be blunt, no argument I’ve ever heard against allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry stands up under even cursory levels of logical scrutiny. They all, at some point, end up boiling down to “I Don’t Like Queers.” It’s as close to a true black-and-white issue as can possibly exist. Quite simply: either you believe all Americans deserve equal rights and protections under the law, or you don’t. Period. There are no other options.

If you disagree with anything I’ve just said, do both of us a favor and just stop reading my blog. Un-bookmark it, unsubscribe from the feed if you’ve subscribed to it, and don’t even bother commenting, because I’ll delete it. Normally, I love a good argument with strangers on the internet, but I won’t on this issue. Because to argue with you would imply that your asinine, bigoted viewpoint is in any way legitimate and worthy of constructive debate, AND IT’S NOT. YOU ARE A HOMOPHOBIC DOUCHEBAG. THE END.

Good luck, Edie. Take ‘em down.

Genius Idea Alert! A remake of The Ten Commandments with Jerry Stiller starring as Moses. Upon descending from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments, he yells “I got a lot of problems with you people!” When Pharaoh tells Moses that he will not let his people go, Moses bellows “You want a piece of me? YOU GOT IT!!!!” Later, he spends 40 years wandering in the desert screaming “Serenity Now!”

Genius Idea Alert! Jack White and Jack Black should form a band called the Tenacious Gray Stripes. I would stab your mother for tickets to that show…and also serve as their unscrupulous, svengali-like manager for a generous cut of the profits.

Genius Idea Alert! After Pope Ratzinger finally dies and goes to Hell, we need to shake things up. Think “Irish Pope.” How about Pope Seamus I. All sacramental wine would be forthwith replaced by Guinness. James Joyce readings at Mass instead of all that boring Bible crap. And dour Catholic hymnals replaced by boisterous singalongs of “Finnegan’s Wake” and “Rocky Road to Dublin.”

Genius Idea Alert! A new video game to compete with Rock Band and Guitar Hero. Your game controller is a plastic flute, and the soundtrack consists of every song Jethro Tull ever released. You have to play while standing on one leg.

Genius Idea Alert! It’s time to make the War On Christmas a shootin’ war. For far too long, we’ve tolerated a foreigner from Old Europe flying over our great nation on Christmas Eve in a sleigh pulled by invasive (and potentially diseased) livestock, then committing home invasion by sliding down our chimneys. The sanctity of American military airspace AND private property are being violated at the same time! To make matters worse, this “Kringle” character gives presents away for free, thereby undermining our children’s faith in the essential rightness of Free Market Capitalism. (Need I even point out that his sleigh is Red? Do you think that’s a coincidence???) And since NORAD tracks this invader every year and makes no effort to stop him, we must assume that they are in on the plot, riddled with traitors selling their country out to the forces of One World Government.

Well no more! NORAD’s tracking of their socialist ally has unwittingly given me the necessary information to effect his demise! Even as we speak, negotiations are underway to procure the anti-aircraft gun with which I will protect this great and beautiful nation. Mounted on my roof, it will fill the Christmas Eve skies over Portland, Maine with a withering barrage of flak the second Mr. “Kringle” gets within range. If he perishes after being shot down, then a great blow will have been struck for Freedom; and if he survives, we hold him hostage in exchange for the safe return of Amelia Earhart. This plan has literally no flaws!

No need to thank me. Genius is its own reward.