Why yes, it is certainly fascinating that some of these twelve dollar beers were brewed by Trappists monks hundreds of years ago in Germany or France or wherever Belgian Land is. But did you also know that this particular religious order is renowned for their adherence to silence? Interesting trivia there. Here's what the internet says:

"Trappist monks will generally only speak when necessary, and idle talk is strongly discouraged."

Sort of explains why over the course of a few centuries none of them got around to piping up about this flat, pig sweat recipe they've been churning out. Drinking most of these aspirational lifestyle beers is like sipping last night's champagne off of a hobo's tits.

"Trappists' silence should be understood as the wish to give space to what matters: gaining a deeper love and understanding of God."

That's nice, but the order I belong to have all taken a vow of BULLSHIT, and it mainly revolves around not drinking perfumed flower water. It's all part of our plan to gain a deeper love and understanding of not puking in our mouths. That's the glory of religion though, isn't it? It's all true if you're drunk enough.

So this is a thing now apparently, which is exciting, because people who were throwing pimps and hoes parties last year need a new reason to stand next to each other in a room and drink and take pictures of themselves standing in a room and drinking. Is it just me, or is it kind of hard to tell that most of the people who go to these things are supposed to look that much different than they normally do? A nerd is still a nerd regardless of intent, right?

Here's a question you should ask yourself before you attempt to wear something at a theme party like this: Would I wear this Christmas sweater/gimp mask/space helmet in my normal every day life anyway? If the answer is yes, congratulations, you failed at irony, and life. Although if you're a sex slave on the moon around Christmas time you get a free pass on this one. Everyone deserves to relax on the holidays.

Maybe if I blast off one of these here Twitter posts expressing my sorrow at the passing of someone I've never met -- someone who wouldn't have pissed on my face if my face was on fire and the only cure for that fire was celebrity piss -- then I'll be able to finagle some of that famous person's glowing death shine onto myself. With any luck I can work it into a good two days of run off sympathy-sympathy. Soon everyone will know I'm a very serious person who feels things deeply. From Facebook to Twitter to the comments section of TMZ, I'm going to spread the word. It's my duty as a plugged -in member of the internet community, and all part of the natural grieving process. If we can't get people to notice the way we pretend to feel about things that happen to other people and don't change our lives in anyway, do we really even exist? We do not.

Well, that was a pretty good week around here if I don't say so myself. Anyway, I still don't have anything to add, but I was getting sick of looking at that roofies pic (too soon) so here we are. For anyone keeping track, I just got back from Target where I bought a bunch of shit that no one wants for people who will barely smile for five seconds when I give it to them, including children so small they don't even know I exist. So...I got that going for me. Lazy, not funny, and a hypocrite to boot. Hopefully update later in the week, although I'm planning on being in a ham coma for a good three days, so don't hold your breath.

I know I make cracks on here all the time about the ridiculousness of people being afraid Al Qaeda is going to bomb their local Piggly Wiggly or Wa Wa or any of the other high value targets your mom buys milk at, but I was always sort of exaggerating for comedic effect on that one. Anyway, long story short, welcome to the other side of the looking glass people. We've had a pretty good run all things considered.

Also, and this point can never be stressed enough: Local Newsnnnngghhhhh.

Misunderstanding leads to evacuation of Rockland home

Speaking of terrifying burnt up old lady ghosts who come to your bedroom at night to steal your shit and your soul, can someone get Tony Dungy off my football box posthaste? This gentleman is not meant for tv in any way. Dude starts breaking down game tape and he sounds like Lennie Smalls talking about the rabbits. And he doesn't look much better either.

"He looks like a black dude's skeleton made out of beef jerky," my friend Max just said. (Haha That's classic Max! Good one buddy!) "Like Utzy the Iceman, more or less. The stone-age guy they found frozen in the alps."

Shit, that's who he looks like! Here, let's check the tape

Which one is the 3000 year old ice mummy and which one is the phony, homophobic "conscience" of the NFL? We may never know.

Think it's too late for me to work out some sort of refund on every roll of dental floss I've ever bought in my entire life? Just checking, because I'm a little short vis a vis rent and bills and gambling money this month and I could use the extra $27.50 or whatever it adds up to.

I'm not sure if I'm using it right or not, and admittedly I haven't read the instructions, but is it really supposed to snap off and lodge itself deep in my sugary teeth caves every single time I use it? I've got so many frayed strands of food stained teeth rope caught back there my molars are starting to look like a white dude with dreads. I'm gonna have to start braiding my cavities shut pretty soon.

Anyway, captains of the Dental Floss industry, your product is a fucking sham, and I'll thank you to kindly send me a check in the amount of, uh, literally anything, so we can straighten out this whole mess promptly.


You know what's not on the list though? These little magic wands right here.













Try not to let the fact that they look pretty much exactly like a fossilized vagina bone dissuade you, these dudes will scrape your shit raw. They will own your mouth. In that way they're like the Tiger Woods of dentistry.

How nice of you to say that. Well, fuck you in retrospect.

Because it's our job here to make sure you don't walk around acting and sounding like an a-hole all day, here are a few things you should ask yourself whenever you get the misguided urge to use this expression:

If there answer to any of those three is yes, then you've got the go ahead. Otherwise, this is yet another example of using phony, over-complicated corporate speak to say more than you really need to. We've had another, simpler way to express this very same idea for hundreds of years now that works just fine. It's called saying "please." Thanks in advance for cutting this bullshit right out.

The way things are going with cell phone cameras and the face-books and the video games that the kids like these days with the bippin and the boppin, it's probably only a matter of time before literally every single person you know is going to be caught fucking or naked on the internet. We're all potential porn stars at this point. That doesn't mean the thing where we remove every last stray hair from our bodies like a bunch of pink hairless apes isn't a bit much. God wouldn't have given men thatches of fur on their shoulders and knees if he didn't have a divine plan for it.

That being said, dudes need to regulate the border between the dark territory of their furry orangutan backs and the spot where the hair on their heads end. I see way too many of these guys walking around with giant, unruly neck bushes. Dude, I can't tell if you're just walking away from me or you're going down on a Sasquatch's pussy in the seventies.

The line of demarcation is key. Humans need boundaries to give order to our lives. It's how we keep terrorists from strolling into North Dakota and our girlfriends from playing in our fantasy football leagues.

Think of your head and neck as America, and your comically outmoded, stylistically backwards back as Canada. Separate but equal. That shit's enshrined in the Constitution right next to machine guns and the bit about god hating fags. You think the dudes who wrote that were walking around with their spine pubes flapping in the breeze? They were not. Except Gouverneur Morris, who represented Pennsylvania at the Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. That dude was kind of a pervert.

"Goose and soda please."

My goodness! What a sophisticated gentle-man of the world we have here. He not only knows what he wants, but he's not afraid to ask for it by name. Nicely done there. That stuff is vaguely French and costs a lot. Bonus points for the abbreviation. A man like you doesn't have time for an extra syllable.

Except there are a few problems with this bullshit fantasy scenario. Setting aside the practice of ordering vodka in the first place, which is basically the drinking equivalent of watching reruns of Friends in your hotel room on the big vacation in Disney World, the idea that there is some discernible level of quality between different brands of odorless, tasteless burn water is laughable. What we have here are different marketing campaigns. Some of them have convinced you that hitching your mouth, liver and wallet to their promotion wagon will sprinkle a little magic status dust on your suggestible ass.

Why not just walk up to the bar and admit you are very susceptible to manipulation, incapable of making any decisions for yourself, and will literally drink anything you've seen a male model with a watch on stand next to in a magazine?

You know why any type of product adverstises, right? Not because there is ever any difference between brands and they're dying to get the word out to the people so they can make an informed decision. It's because at the moment of truth, when a guy like you wanders up to the bar with your cologne on and your clueless grin and your calculated facial hair, they know you are going to panic about not looking like you know exactly what the fuck you are doing at all times. They know that you are basically going to say the first thing that comes to mind, which is the last brand name you saw. That's why, to sort of streamline this whole process here, I'm coming out with a new line of premium high end vodka called I'm a Boring Cunt Vodka (From Europe!).

Until that marketing campaign rolls out, I'm still totally into Christiana vodka. Not because it's any different than any other vodka, or because it's distilled six fucking times bro, or because it's from Norway, but because Christiana just really sounds like the type of word a rich person would say. Or a stripper's name. Both of those things are fucking sick.

I know the Champagne of Beers is the official beverage of the New Hampshire State-Highway Sign Shooting Team and all, but is this really necessary? Or is it that some 300-pound hunting fuck in a bright orange vest is genuinely concerned that a five-point buck might spot his fucking beer can and flee to the relative safety of the nearest Home Depot parking lot?

I thought maybe this was the Photoshop version of a Jeff Foxworthy punchline - "Sucks when you can't pound a frosty Golden Shower and enhance your taxidermy collection at the same time, amiright fellas?" - until one of these bad boys singed my eyeballs down the packy a few weeks back. As it turns out, the camo can is no joke. Even though it kind of is.

Nothing says "Americuuuhh!" quite like camouflage and shitty beer, so the marketing wizards over at Miller knew they had a cash cow on their hands when they came up with this one. Some poor genius in the cross-branding department probably tried desperately to cram a monster truck into the equation only to get stonewalled at the last second because the boys in distribution just could not wait one more solitary second to get this patriotic triumph on the shelves in time for football and deer killin'. In fact, the ad copy for this marketing eureka is a paean to xenophobes and awkward-sentence enthusiasts all across our great land: "Due to be released next month to celebrate the hunting season are these camo cans from Miller High Life. Not something you would likely see in Europe."

Can't argue with that, Hoss. You know what else you wouldn't likely see in Europe? Miller Fucking High Life.

Shirley Madden (Backstrom), my maternal grandmother, passed away recently. To put it bluntly, they don't make brassy old broads like that anymore. She is survived by roughly nine or ten grand children I guess, and four great grand children, all of whom loved her very much, only one of which I can be certain disappointed her by not becoming a professor or something respectable. She loved me the best though, so take that cousins. Well, up until recently anyway when the younger male cousins were around more to do errands and shit for her and get blasted in the face with guilt. I was the first born though, so it's tough to beat that in terms of love points.

We called her Mammy because she always liked some old Al Jolson movie where he dressed up in black face and sang that old song, which is really kind of weird now that I think about it. She also used to tell me I looked like old timey movie star Robert Mitchum, so thanks for that anyway. When I was young she would sing "Summertime" to me and my sisters.

She lived to eighty six years old, which is a pretty good time to go I'd say, just before that handsome black fellow Obama ruined the country.

Since I moved away from home years ago she would always send me letters in the mail. The letters would follow me around from apartment to apartment, always scribbled in her nearly illegible handwriting which got progressively worse over time. Some of them were impossible to read, but I'd sit there and read every word anyway. I thought every one over the past few years might be the last, and I didn't want to miss a chance to hear her pester me into going back to grad school. Most of the time she would include a check for five dollars in the envelope so I could "get a pizza." Over the past year or two she started addressing them to my girlfriend, which was cool because I got to read them anyway without the guilt of having to respond. Grandchildren are ungrateful little shits.

Although she worked for the phone company for most of her working years, she was a very creative woman who probably would have been an interior decorator or some other made up job that we have nowadays if she had been born a few years later. Up until the last time I saw her up and about she was painting little knick knacks and furniture and shit and trying to get me to take them home to my apartment.

Her greatest joy in life seemed to be when we would avail ourselves of her house in Maine in a tiny village on the water called Round Pond (pictured above sort of). I loved going there, even though it was musty as hell and looked like it was decorated by a methed up Antiques Road Show aficionado. It symbolized childhood innocence and happiness and a place to bring your girlfriend for out of state banging to me. Everything good in the world.

Mammy was also, like most old people, a total fucking ball buster who drove my mother, aunt and uncle insane. The first time she was rushed to the hospital my sisters and mother and I went over there to see her. We thought maybe we would be saying goodbye. She was passed out on a hospital bed while the four of us stood there crying. Then Mammy woke up for a second, looked at me and said "Get that goddamn ring out of your nose." Ha. She was right on that one.

A month or more ago she finally started reaching the end. They set up a hospice bed in my parent's house, and for about two weeks we watched her fade away to nothing. Here and there she'd show signs of coherence, snapping out of it to say weird stuff to my dad, or hold our hands. At first we thought she might pull out of it. We had hope that it wasn't the end, but ultimately, as they say, all things must pass.

She went peacefully, without much of a fight, and then it was over. But we'll always have the memories of her at the top of her game.





In a related story: