I'm not talking about some sort of overly-specific sexual euphemism here, my meaning is quite literal in fact. Although come to think of it, I wouldn't mind speaking a little Russian in the old sauna right now if you know what I mean (penis-wise.)

And please don't mistake this as some sort of anti-Russian bias either. In a lot of ways I suppose I'm what you might call a Russophile. They're an often brilliant people with poetic souls and heroically rotted livers. I never miss a chance to let someone know about all the Russian novels I've read so they'll think that I'm smart; I could look at this website all day; and I'm a big fan of some of the contributions they've made in the world of sports and, uh, other arts. In other words, scary Russian dudes, please don't kill me and/or smash my stupid face in. Thanks in advance.

But after exerting myself at the gym just about the last sound I want to hear is two steaming man-bears jabbering in that violently guttural language. (No offense to, uh, violence and guttural people.) I'd rather hear the hiss of my own flesh on the sauna rocks or the soundtrack to my family getting eaten by a dinosaur on the radio.

Jesus fucking christ dudes, can you slow it down with that competitive talking for five seconds. I'm trying to work up a solid thigh sweat in peace. You guys just shooting the shit over there or making a drop off for the top secret launch codes? You sound like a couple Tsarist wizards summoning a Slavic goat demon. WHY ARE YOU YELLING? This is a 6x8 foot wooden box. Wait a second... I think I heard you drop the word pizza in there somewhere. Why are you so angry about pizza? What did pizza ever do to you? I mean besides give you that glistening paunch you're pointing at my face right now.

Ok, so maybe the problem here isn't the Russian so much, just the mere presence of any sound in the sauna whatsoever. It's really a very tense time after all. Here I am, tired, worn out, sweating onto a wooden plank with my eyes closed so I don't have to survey the particular horrors of sweaty gray pubes situation going on. It's all I can do to relax for a few moments and tune out the world. I know that in your country the steam room or whatever is like a big social tradition, but we've got a little tradition of our own here in America called shutting the fuck up. I'll go first so you can see how it works.

It's no secret that I have some shitty taste in bands. I'm basically a 14 year old girl with shoulder hair when it comes to music. If they've got one dude crying at the top of his lungs about the fire inside his heart, and another dude putting on his big boy voice and screaming about December's frozen heart ache, then I'm on board. I'm sorry, that's just how it is. Real life isn't pretty some times. I didn't choose to be this way, I'm simply a product of my environment. My whiny, solipsistic, ego-maniacal, misogynistic, myopic, girl-jeans-wearing environment.

But. Dude. Sometimes in life you have to take a stand. I'm talking about drawing a line in the sand, Dude. Across this line, you do not...

Long story short, take a look at this thing below, whatever it is. I suppose we all knew kids were stupid and they'd fall for any piece of shit you polished up to a slick enough sheen, but this right here, this...whatever this is -- vocoder crunk screamo? -- is literally the end of the line.

It's ok, you had a good run, music. All things must come to an end though, right? I wouldn't have minded squeezing out a few good more years, but I suppose we'll always remember the good times.

I'm no child psychologist, but I am what you might call an expert on assholes, so I've done some extensive research in the field of tattling. A couple key points to consider:

Basically a lot of the literature out there asserts that tattling is a way for children to receive attention. Attention-craving children will try to receive attention any way they can, even at the risk of doing something that they may otherwise know to be wrong. Furthermore, focusing attention on the tattler only encourages this behavior. By giving into the demand for attention that the tattler is looking for, you may give them the idea that this is a real way to become fulfilled.

It can also be about a grab for power as well; a means to get revenge on another child who they feel has wronged them in some way. "It is a quest for power, and tattling fills that inner need. These children long to see another child punished or perhaps delight in how they have managed to control the adult's reaction," says Jennifer White, some author I just looked up five seconds ago who writes about this sort of thing.

"At other times, tattling reflects children's self esteem issues," she continues. "Children may lack the confidence to handle the situation independently. Further, by getting another child into trouble it makes them feel better about their own shortcomings...

A final reason for chronic tattling reveals the deeper issue of children's lack of independent conflict resolution skills. These children have no other strategies to deal with undesirable peer behaviors, and so look toward the adult to resolve the problem. Their limited skills necessitate intervention from adults, rather than relying on internal strategies to resolve peer issues. These children would benefit from peer mediation and conflict resolution training."

I was recently at a holiday gathering, where one person spent a large part of the time jawing in my ear about how they do not have a television. People who have no television all rally around one thing: telling you about how they don't have a television.

There is nothing less interesting than 1) having this conversation in the first place and 2) whatever the television-less are filling that time with. It's not like you can really claim you only do useful things without a TV in your life. How do you explain starting this conversation then?

This went on and on and on and on and then it went on some more, all fucking night. Anyway, I'd finish this post, but I'm going to go play Call of Duty. On my television.

There's a new McDonalds commercial with some cunt who treats people like dirt because he hasn't had his coffee yet that's boning everyone's face right now, so this old List classic seemed apropos.

"Don't even bother talking to me before I've had my first cup of coffee in the morning. Har, har, har. No, seriously, I mean, don't even bother! Cause I'll probably bite your head off. You know, because I need it so badly. Really, I'm, like, completely useless, somewhere between a zombie and a meth addict looking for a fix, until I get that first jug of mild stimulant in me. You definitely wouldn't want to see me like that! I probably drink like six cups a day. That's how hard i need it. I literally can't function without that sweet sweet brown bean sweat!"

Hey coffee drinkers, grow a pair and foster a real addiction. Until then, hang out in the purgatory known as The List.

Praise be to Thomas Jefferson and Jesus and Richard Dobbs Spaight, Sr. of North Carolina and Batman and all the rest of the American heroes for giving us these unimpeachable laws of the land three hundred years ago. Laws that somehow managed to foresee every possible scenario that might arise over centuries of progress. It's truly an all encompassing document that really means a lot for average Americans on a day to day basis. Without it we might have ended up in a pyramid structured society where the wealthy land owners have all the power and regular people scrape by in a mirage of freedom.

But, all that being said, excuse me for a moment if a take a giant metaphorical dump on this anachronistic instruction manual for keeping the people free from the King of England's tax policy.

In case you don't, you know, "read," you might be surprised to hear that the supreme court of the land decided recently that corporations can pour unlimited amounts of money into fucking with elections. It's called freedom of speech, apparently. Although in this case speech means spending a billion dollars to elect retards who believe in government by magic and bombing brown people into sawdust. Apparently that's all in the CONSTITUTION somewhere. I'm no legal scholar though, so I wasn't able to find it.

From the NYT: The court overturned two earlier decisions and threw out parts of a 63-year-old law that said companies and unions can be prohibited from using money from their general treasuries to produce and run their own campaign ads urging the election or defeat of particular candidates by name. The decision, which applies to independent spending that is not coordinated with candidates, threatens similar limits imposed by 24 states. The justices also struck down part of the landmark McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill that barred union- and corporate-paid issue ads in the closing days of election campaigns.

There are some very learned scholars who are more qualified than me that seem to think that this outcome, while not exactly ideal, is nonetheless CONSTITUTIONAL. My boy Glenn Greenwald, for example. He argues here that our personal preference of any given decision should not be based on whether or not we prefer the consequences of that outcome, but whether or not it can be argued to fall within the bounds of the CONSTITUTION!!

Greenwald is brilliant, and almost always right. Still, I'm not necessarily persuaded by his argument here. I am, as I may have mentioned, not a legal scholar, I'm just a regular guy who drives a truck to work and puts his boots on one pant leg at a time in the hunting nest outside my rural anti-abortion cabin, but the CONSTITUTIONAL!!! peculiarities of one law or another mean very little to me. I am indifferent to whether or not something can be argued to fall within the archaic, narrow boundaries of the CONSTITUTION!!!

Granted, it was a nice starting point, back when 1% of people's lives were worth more than a bucket of horse jizz, but it's not practical to filter every imaginable scenario for the entirety of the country's remaining history through it. It would be like playing basketball with the rule book from 1880, or trying to fly a spaceship with the original Wright brothers design, or asking my grandfather for tips on how to impress girls on Facebook. Same rules do not apply anymore.

My friend Paul and I had a pretty interesting discussion about this today. And by interesting I mean it should probably fill up some space on a blog post.

Paul: I guess I don't understand what you're saying. There are two questions: was the supreme court correct, and will the outcome be good/bad? They are entirely unrelated. That process -- our still endeavoring to adhere to the rule of law -- is literally all that separates us from having an absolutist authoritarian dictatorship.

Me: I don't think every law that is passed, in this day and age, by elected officials chosen by the people to represent them, needs to pass the standard of a non-comprehensive, non-future predicting document written 300 years ago.

Paul: Yes they absolutely must, because that is the law. By definition, if you think the government should not be constrained by that (law), then you are arguing that we should have a government bound by no law at all -- an autocracy.

Me: It is not the law. It is an anchor. If a law is deemed to be needed at some point in the future that contradicts something in the CONSTITUTION, then so be it.

Paul: The CONSTITUTION is the law -- the supreme law of the land. If they want to change it, they can.

Me: Right. Therefor the argument that something is UNCONSTITUTIONAL is meaningless. If something should justly and democratically be deemed a necessary law, it should become one regardless of whether or not you can make arcane arguments about why they didn't think of providing for it centuries ago.

Paul: They are laws we have democratically elected not to change. You are literally advocating giving congress absolute power. Lindsay Graham, Joe Lieberman. I don't see how that doesn't immediately kill that train of thought.

I wonder if I managed to make you understand and accept the magnitude and profundity of your error here, you wouldn't end up with a political position more closer to mine. There is something you're not getting. Laws are laws, and until we revoke them we are bound by them. And we can revoke them, but we don't want to. The danger we would face from powerful corporations and sinister politicians and their guns and spies if we lost the protection of the 1st Amendment would be exponentially greater -- literally -- than the danger we face due to being bound by it. Abandoning those laws would benefit these corporations and their minions over good and honest Americans by a magnitude impossible to exaggerate. Those "arcane" relics you disparage say things like "The government can't snatch any American off the street and torture them without trial". If you think that isn't the reason that doesn't happen as a matter of policy then you are just mistaken Aargh!

Me: [fart joke]

So, in conclusion, I don't think either of us exactly learned anything from that, unless you count uncovering the fact that I don't know what the hell I'm talking about learning something. Pretty sure we all already knew that.

The good news is, we all were just given a real representative voice in our democracy by the supreme court, that wizened institution who have thoughtfully and justly kept our interest as a people at heart with this decision. You might call this the most important day in American history since the beginning of the revolution. Truly, we are all free now, and we have this perfect document to thank for it. All we have to do now is start a multi-billion dollar corporation to exercise those rights in the playing field of ideas in order to begin experiencing true democracy. I think I know now what John Adams and all those other cheap fucks trying to move down into a lower tax bracket must have felt like when they invented the concept that a decent proportion of people shouldn't necessarily live a life in slavery -- but ha ha, let's not go over board on that percentage there!! someone's got to do the shit work, amirite? -- I feel truly free. And stupid. Stupid and free. American, you might say.

If those Haitians wanted the money so badly then they probably should have come up with the idea of rapping over other people's hit songs don't you think? Fair is fair. Also, you can't really expect a guy to perform for free at his own charity can you? That's socialism I think.

From the Smoking Gun

JANUARY 14--The Haiti earthquake has already triggered hundreds of thousands of donations to musician Wyclef Jean's charitable foundation, which expects to raise upwards of $1 million a day in the disaster's wake. However, Internal Revenue Service records show the group has a lackluster history of accounting for its finances, and that the organization has paid the performer and his business partner at least $410,000 for rent, production services, and Jean's appearance at a benefit concert. Though the Wyclef Jean Foundation, which does business as Yele Haiti Foundation, was incorporated 12 years ago--and has been active since that time--the group only first filed tax returns in August 2009.

I suppose the only way something like this could be any worse would be if the profiteers in question were getting paid by the people who destroyed the country in the first place. So, you know, regular US foreign policy. Still though, you have to admit, the way Wyclef sort of changed the beat on "Killing Me Softly" then sold it back to us as a smash hit was some genius, next-level marketing trickery. Maybe we should have seen this coming.

Great, just what we've all been waiting for, Mitt Romney with the non-science fiction version of the Bible on his bed stand.

Can someone tell me this? If these gaping anuses hate government so much, why are they always trying so hard to become a part of it? Then again, he does make a few good arguments. The guy drives an old truck in a commercial and he has two daughters. Who can compete with that? The truck makes a pretty convincing case for why a man should be Senator you have to admit.

Yeah yeah, listening to NPR in the first place is on the list, but if you can think of a better soundtrack for unwinding after riding home on my beard-powered bicycle from a long day at the bisexual dildo yoga co-op, then I'm open to suggestions. Anyway, I know most of these people are accomplished journalists, with rich and impressive careers, but I dunno, I'm just throwing this out there, aren't resonance and tenor sort of important in radio? Maybe there's someone who can do the news that doesn't sound like a rusty weather vane creaking in slow motion circles on top of a haunted barn? Finding out what's going on in the Middle East every night shouldn't be like talking to your grandmother when your parents make you get on the phone to thank her for the birthday card.

I haven't had a chance to see this sparkly shit show yet on account of not being fifteen years old and having five hours and thirty bucks to blow on a cartoon about saving trees and fighting dinosaurs, but if there's one lesson we can all take from it -- and no offense to the sophisticated dandies of the internet community -- it's that anyone who finds themselves tempted to use the phrases "Smurfs" or "Dances with Wolves in Space" or "Dances with Smurfs" should promptly report to the business end of a magic alien aborigine's spear and fucking die of cliche poisoning. (Because they're blue, you see, which, of course, therefor, the Smurfs. Also, some guy fights with the space Indians against the cowboy robots, ergo &c.).

I know this is gonna ruin about 85% of the discourse that goes on on the internet boxes, but, and I can't really ever say this enough people, pointing out when things are kind of like other things really isn't as valuable a skill as you want it to be.