I was watching porn when I wrote this piece for Vice, but I didn't masturbate to it. Wait, is that worse?

Of all the alarming aspects of the Republican Party platform—and there are many, particularly if you're the owner of a vagina, or a brown vagina, or a poor vagina—there's one particular revelation contained therein that has got the internet's denizens paying attention. According to a press release earlier this week from Morality in Media, a "faith-based" "non-profit" Mitt Romney intends to make a war against porn a part of his presidency, if elected.

Patrick Trueman, president of Morality in Media, and a former anti-porn prosecutor, says that the means through which we consume pornography are “a violation of current federal law.”

“Yet, most children in America have free access to obscene pornography as soon as they learn how to use a computer. The average age of first exposure to obscene Internet pornography is now eleven.”

New, stronger anti-porn language would suggest that “Current laws on all forms of pornography and obscenity need to be vigorously enforced.” Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, was instrumental in jamming this language into the lusty and willing platform.....Read the rest at Vice.

Today Boston writer Karyn Polewaczyk confronts one of the most pressing issues facing the modern woman: Why are all these motherfuckers hitting on me when I look like ass? Read more from her here. This piece has now been cross-posted at Jezebel.

"Oh, she may be weary. Young girls, they do get weary, wearing that same, old, shaggy dress."

Yes, ladies; we can practically hear as we trudge home from the office/gym/Whole Foods. Maybe we’ve just had a rough day putting in our dues as citizens of one of the wealthiest countries in the world, or maybe we couldn’t have been bothered to pull together an outfit that went a step beyond leggings—the ones with with the hole in the crotch—and an over-sized ‘Nantucket’ T-shirt, but we’re down and out, checked out, and are therefore invisible to the crowds surrounding our pity party, table for one.

Or so we think.

In what has to be the most awkward downtime small talk around the water cooler scenario since he teamed up with Mick Jagger and Jennifer Lopez to play choo-choo trains in that one ghastly video, will.i.am has partnered with NASA to blast himself all the fucking way to Mars.

“What’d that cost? Got to be worth a few billion, right?”, the nation’s few remaining tasteful music listeners agreed upon hearing the news, but guess what, the joke is on us, because it was only one of his songs. “NOT PART OF THE DEAL,” said that one mohawked NASA hispter bro.

Despite her name, Amy Kaufman has never been a man, and is in fine respiratory health, (as far as we know). And despite the fact that this lede was written in the Los Angeles Times, one of the most important newspapers in the country, the story she wrote today is neither news, nor timely, nor important, unless you’re looking for evidence of bad writing, which, as someone who’s produced a lot of it over the years, happens to be my area of expertise. Gaze upon with me then, in wonder, the worst sentence you will read all week:

Like a lot of older people, somewhere around 9/11 my one-time hippie mom started to get scared that the boogie-man and A-rab Darth Vader were going to come blow up her local CVS. Thus began a slow, depressing descent rightward in her politics. She’s not racist, or homophobic or anything, thank god, but she’s just saying, maybe there’s nothing wrong with being proud of our troops, and that Bill O’Reilly makes some good points from time to time.

Hey, get me, parasiting off of another publication's shitty link-bait listicle to bait people to click on my own jokes about their bad jokes, then linking to the piece I wrote on another site on my own blog so I can skim a few more links off the top for myself. The internet. 

This post from LA Weekly about the ’20 Worst Hipster Bands’ is making the rounds today, and for good reason; it’s remarkably prescient. A lot of these bands didn’t even exist back in 2005 when this must have been written, a time when the concept of hipster band jokes seemed fresh.

Who are these hipsters we see each day in the streets, on our Tumblr feeds, and on the local news? And why are so many in bands? It’s not the mere existence of hipster groups that distresses us — some of our best friends are hipsters, after all — it’s their lemming-like tendency to, if you’ll pardon a mixed metaphor, ape each other.

All good questions, LA Weekly. Some other good ones that just occurred to me: Who are these bloggers I see each day on my Twitter feed? And why are so many writing pointless slide-show link bait nothingness? And does writing about them writing about things like that make us even worse? How many of these types of pieces have we written ourselves? Should we be ashamed of that, too? Read the rest at Bullett.

I spelunked into the bro-iest depths of the internet's man caves for you guys and came back with a report on how to be a misogynistic shit head. Let's all go have a learn, shall we?

I’m not exactly sure how it happened, but somewhere along the way, I picked up a following among this weird class of neo-conservative man-bloggers, blogging man-ily about important issues facing today’s put-upon manful men. Maybe the poor little fellas followed me home from a certain “hipster racist” site I used to write for? Regardless, I feel like I’ve been walking around with a piece of aggro-toilet paper stuck to my shoe from an innocuous political poop I don’t remember taking.

Being the innocent-until-proven-guilty sort, that means I tend to blindly follow-back the people who follow and re-tweet me and share my links and so forth—it’s just how my grandmother internet-raised me. As a result, I’m continually subjected to posts about the most important issue facing men on the internet today: how to be an alpha male. I had no idea this was such a pressing concern.

Cross-posted at the Boston Phoenix.

There are a couple of reasons why a corporation would dream up a mascot character. 1) Because they want to appeal to children. 2) Because they need an excuse to generate some brand awareness. 3) Because they have incompetent management who spend their time fucking around with trifling nonsense rather than fixing problems, and they need to be able to show that they've at least tried something, no matter how pointless. 

Only one of those applies to the MBTA (guess which?), who unveiled their new mascot Charlie, today. 

"Yeah, but how are all those tattoos going to look when you're old?" some nerd without tattoos is always asking when the subject comes up. Pretty fucking bad ass it turns out. Like this newly revealed and extraordinarily well-preserved skin art from mummified bodies believed to date back to the 5th century. 

Also dating back to the 5th century? Your flowery shoulder piece. ( Siberian Times via Buzzfeed)

Science: Want to Be Happy? Drink More Beer, Semen

 

I took this picture last night, not in 1988, mind you. Just when I think the whole craft beer thing and spirits and cocktails education stuff I write about is kind of old hat, I go into bars like this one and realize that no one has any idea what the fuck they're doing. "Put that shit on the list." - the bar manager here, phoning it in.

Good afternoon, idiots. Here's a slight smattering of the ways we're all acting stupid today. Gawker rightfully points out the ridiculousness of our technicality-based penal system where "actually innocent" prisoners are kept behind bars due to paper work oversights in this piece (based on an LA Times report).

Daniel Larsen, for example. As the LAT reports, he's in prison in California serving a life sentence thanks to the good old "three strikes" law. His first two strikes were burglary convictions; his third strike came when he was convicted of carrying a concealed knife in 1998, after police said they saw him toss a knife under a car after a bar fight.

All of which would be horrifyingly absurd enough as it is if it weren't for the logic behind the 3 strikes system in the first place. Remind me why we're writing laws based on sports rules again? Three strikes? Why isn't it four downs, or two faults? "Your Honor, after further review the defendant's knee wasn't down at the time of his arrest. We suggest replaying the alleged crime from the spot of the foul." 

Tough call on the shittiest women-hating country in the world contest this week. Just when it looked like Russia might be leading the pack after putting three women in jail for two years for the heinous crime of criticizing the church and president Vladimir Putin while carrying a dangerous weapon (vaginas), our own brave nation has bounded back into the mix. What we may lack in outright in your face corruption prowess, we’ve always made up for in horse-titted stupidity, like the statements made by Missouri state Rep and candidate for Senate Todd Akin on Sunday about “legitimate rape.” Read the rest.

Michelle and I went to Oaxaca, Mexico last week, the state where mezcal is produced. We got to tour the mountainous areas where the agave is grown, and stayed in Oaxaca city, a culinary destination with ancient buildings and cobblestone streets rich with history.  In short it was gorgeous, and amazing, and educational, and in a lot of ways I feel like I'm still there, largely because I've been shitting my brains out every hour or so for the past few days. We got to see some traditional palenques, where they make small batches of mezcal by hand (like in this photo above of a tahona, a  horse-pulled grinding stone wheel used to crush the baked pinas), and drink our way through dozens of mezcals. We also spent a night in Houston, which wasn't as bad as that sounds. Check out about a billion photos below won't you? We'll learn a little bit about mezcal, and more importantly, look at lots of pictures of my weird face.

Hating the beach is one of the three original elements on which PTSOTL was founded (along with shorts, and ice cream). We've changed our opinion on the latter two things over the years, and it may be time to reconsider the first. Turns out we just weren't going to right state, as Mint E. Fresh point out below. 

The ocean in Rhode Island is literally like 20 degrees warmer than in Massachusetts, and about a trillion degrees warmer than in Maine. Did people know this? How can this be true? It's  just down the street from Webster for fuck's sake. In Maine in August you can't even go to the beach the water is so cold; you have to drive by it with the heat on and count that as a dip. 

Massachusetts isn't much better. You run in up to your knees and go "Aw fuck" and then force yourself to go under so you can tell yourself it wasn't a complete waste of a trip. Rhodey though, you can actually swim for whole minutes! I swam around yesterday for like twenty minutes, an Olympic record. And then, the weird part is, I wanted to go back into the water after I got out instead of feeling obligated to go back in because otherwise it barely counts as having been there for some reason.

-- MINT E. FRESH

Music is always bad. Usually bad if I'm being generous. But it's rare that it takes your breathe away like this thing that happened from "American K-Pop" star Chad Future which I made words unto at Noisey.

I feel like I've been wasting my time hating on all this other stuff my entire life up until now, never really knowing what truly despising music meant. I honestly didn't know what to say, so I asked a few of my music writer colleagues to weigh-in.

“It's like the Olympics,” said David Thorpe, the man who inflicted this video upon me, “There are new world records for how bad shit can get every year.”

“Whoa. I feel like crying just because I have no other way of coping with this,” Noisey's own Sasha Hecht said....more

More about  Republican music fans, Lady Gaga fights, sexy cocktails, Braid, Fat Creeps, One Direction,3OH!3 + way more from me than anyone would ever need below.

I wrote a "controversial" and "important" story in the Globe yesterday that got some pretty heated reactions. It's about a spate of newly opened bars who are trying to get dudes to step up their clothes game. Naturally, no one likes to be told what to do, so a lot of babies R MAD. 

Am I mad myself? I'm not sure anymore. I went into the story thinking it would be a screed against the idea, but maybe we don't need more bros in bro jerseys out at bro bars around here. 

Check it out. Definitely read the comments too, especially the guy who's blaming this on socialism somehow. There's always that guy. on my Facebook about it as well.

Two of my favorite dudes on the internet, Sarge D from Stuff You Will Hate, and , from Leisure/Platform/Pretty Real spent some time rubbing each other's shoulders today on Noisey. That's like a Voltron of funny blogs right there. Excerpt below. Read the whole thing here.

It's been a rough month for homophobic Christian pieces of shit, and that's taking into consideration how awful every other month of their shitty lives typically are. First Chick-fil-A spokesman Don Perry died unexpectedly right in the midst of that whole controversy (remember how much we cared about that?), then skin-suited Bible felcher Billy Graham was hospitalized. Apparently he's made a recovery, but dude is 93 years old, let's not split hairs here, his day of reckoning will arrive soon enough. Graham, now the wooden-topped sock-puppet of his even more insidious son, took out an ad in support of adding a ban on gay marriage to the North Carolina constitution earlier this spring. "At 93, I never thought we would have to debate the definition of marriage," he wrote.  "The Bible is clear -- God's definition of marriage is between a man and a woman. I want to urge my fellow North Carolinians to vote for the marriage amendment on Tuesday, May 8. God bless you as you vote." The ban passed, you'll be surprised to know.

And now there's this guy, (literally a giant flamer am I right?) who set himself on fire trying to burn a box of cereal outside of General Mills because of, well, who gives a shit why, because he's with Jesus now.

All of which proves something that Christians have long tried to hammer home to us all: god is a vengeful motherfucker. Also probably gay.

Is it bad that I turn into Edward G Robinson in the Ten Commandments every time I hear about some conservative sack of guts keeling over? "Where's your messiah now shit head?" Probably pretty un-Christian of me. Oh well.

If Americans felt a giant ghost boot in their collective pants last night it probably had something to do with the premier of what some people (me, specifically), are calling the worst idea in the history of television, NBC’s valor of battle/depression of faded celebrity hybrid concept Stars Earn Stripes.  Back in August I pointed out that it was likely to be a big hit:

There are a few things that the American viewing public just can’t get enough of: fawning treacle about the nobility of the armed forces, watching vaguely familiar-looking “celebrities” running from one point to another, and the Palins. NBC’s forthcoming reality show Stars Earn Stripes has all three, which puts its projected ratings numbers at roughly 150 million people per episode.

I’d like to tell you that the show was a galumphing horror show failure of nationalism and anxiety-inducing schadenfreude that was instantly canceled, but I can’t. Not because it wasn’t, I just didn’t watch it; I don’t love you people enough to subject myself to that. Also not watching were a group of Nobel Peace Laureates, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who wrote a letter of protest to the show’s host, former big time war guy General Wesley Clark, reading, in part... .

This one guy I know Walter Cornelius hosts a fun comedy night called Storyliars. I wrote about it here that one time. Tonight he's doing called "Dear Mr. Belvedere: an erotic fan fiction throwdown", and I'm going to judge it or what have you. You guys should totally come! I asked him to explain what the deal was. 

Hey dude, thanks for inviting me to your comedy-event [sic]. What is it again?

Hey man, no problem, it's my pleasure, I'm humbled to have a one of the premier bloggers of our very important generation who says very important things about the important big fat dump of a culture that we live in.  Pop-culture? More like PLOP-culture muhRIGHT? Ahhhh, I kill me.

Life is nothing but a series of consecutive anticipatory moments. When you’re a child you want to see what it’s like to stay up past 8 p.m., but only because you’re not allowed to. Nighttime seems like a magical hour, where sprites come alive and dance round the kitchen while your parents laugh and frolic. Oh how they frolic. Of course later on you realize it’s the same shit as other times of the day, and there’s no magic at all. Rip off. Although if you lived in my house mommy and daddy would have had a few glasses of big boy juice by then, so the dancing around the kitchen thing kind of holds true.

When you’re a young teenager you want to be able get your license, because driving seems magical and empowering too. I can go wherever I want now, you think. You drive to the mall instead. You don’t ever really end up going anywhere....

Read the rest of Katy Perry’s Naked Ass and the Crushing Desire of Existential Despair at Bullett.

For years the people who read this blog have wondered to themselves, wonderingly, why is that one guy from that one blog such a fucking pussy? And why is he so desperate for the approval of strangers on the internet? 

Another related question that came up recently: why is this fucking weirdo going to the gym every day on his vacation in Mexico, which is something that was asked by all of the people I was with in the midst of their fun sightseeing and visiting ancient ruins and whatever. Well, this photo here is your answer, speaking of ancient ruins. 

 

All actors are the same boring, predictable automatons. At least I think that’s the takeaway from this remix of writhing-meal-worm-filled scarecrow James Lipton’s 10 Questions segment on Inside the Actors Studio. Then again, that’s coming from a blogger who posts about pop culture curiosities on the internet, so let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves here.

Remixer Jordan Laws mashes together a super cut of some famous actors’ answers to Lipton’s questions, including “What’s your favorite word?” and “What’s your least favorite word?” Read the rest of the post and watch the video over at Bullett, then check out my answers to Lipton's questions below: 

Everything else I have said up until this point has been a lie. This is the real song of the summer. I wrote about it on Bullett the other day. Go watch the video there. Excerpt below. 

Oof, this song sucks, I thought to myself, subconsciously humming it over and over again in my head for the next hour. Goddamit, fine, I’ll go back and take another peak-see at the video (h/t Stereogum), just in case.

I don't get down to the South Station area in Boston much on account of not being a finance douche or a guy who needs a dollar to catch the bus back to Springfield please, so I didn't see this piece of public art everyone is whinging about (from the Brazilian duo OS Gemeos) in person until yesterday. Turns out it does look like a boy in [some vaguely foreign costume]. The proper reaction to that fact, in case you were wondering, is this: oh, that's a nice/surprising/colorful piece of art breaking up the monotony of the dull neighborhood. I will now proceed to go about my day.

Unless, of course, you're a FOX 25 news viewer, in which case it's obviously a terrorist. "This is not something that should represent the city of Boston," says a bald guy with a loose grasp of what the word represent means in this news report, which is crashing the shit out of my browser trying to embed, so go watch it there. Actually, don't.

Lady Gaga has announced the title of her new album in the most shocking way possible: with a tattoo. Check out this bit here on Bullett for more details. Got to say, all things considered this is a lot better than her previously announced working title: Calvin and Hobbes in New York Knicks Jerseys Pissing on Osama Bin Laden’s Face....

A lot of stuff happened over the weekend while you were definitely not surreptitiously checking your phone every ten minutes when the s.o. went inside from the pool/fell asleep at the beach/droned on and on over dinner about that one guy at work that really gets her goat, so here’s a quick recap of important birthdays, the Olympics, and Natalie Portman's wedding. 

Bolt streaks to gold
Speaking of bad puns, Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt won the gold medal in the 100 meters at the Olympics in front of an estimated viewing audience of two billion people, nearly all of which must have been on Twitter, causing it to slow down dreadfully while I was desperate to get out a above. “The thunderbolt strikes again” trumpeted the Evening Standard.  “Lightning Bolt strikes gold” riffed the Daily Mail. “Oh right, because of his name,” I said like five minutes after staring at those headlines. Also streaking for gold? This lady....

The nation was thrilled last week as Gabby Douglas won the all around gymnastics gold at the Olympics, becoming the first African American to do so. Everyone except for the professional concern trolls at Fox News, that is,  who made like Tea Party Tim Gunns and decided Douglas’ costume wasn’t American enough...read the rest of this amazing joke that i worked really hard on here.

PTSOTL is a travel guide now. Fantini Blake is a "21 year old Anglo-Brazilian university drop-out and occasional blogger." He lived in Brazil until the age of 5, then moved to the UK, before returning 7 years ago. He explained what it's like to live in Brazil for us. I'm too American/lazy to fact check any of this stuff so let us know in the comments if he's spot on and/or way off! (Check out previous entries on what it's like to live in Colombia, Canada, Qatar, New Jersey, Illinois, and suburban Mass). Live some place weird and/or not weird and want to tell us about it?

Brazil is the only country in South America that speaks Portuguese. Every Brazilian believes he is also fluent in Spanish; the hybrid lingo we use when trying to communicate with Spanish speakers is dubbed ‘Portunhol.’ Brazilian Portuguese and Portugal’s Portuguese are probably as similar and mutually intelligible as a New Yorker and a Scotsman trying to communicate. 

 

You may have noticed a striking similarity in recent book cover designs. That is, if you’ve even noticed them at all. There are a number of a reasons for that, which The Atlantic looked into in this post Book Cover Clones: Why Do So Many Recent Novels Look Alike? It may be because of the proliferation of e-readers, they suggest. This pattern, book illustrator Duncan Long says in the piece, “results directly from the advent of the e-reader. Thanks to the small size and reduced resolution of e-reader screens, book jackets have become less complex in order to preserve the integrity of the cover art onscreen.

It’s an issue that they’ve examined previously, asking Has Kindle Killed the Book Cover? I wasn’t really aware of this shift myself, because who even knew they made book covers anymore? Much like mp3s did for album art, it seems entirely likely that the book cover is something that will continue to decline in prominence as more and more of us turn to e-readers for our lit fixes. You can’t judge a book by its cover if you don’t even know it’s there. But that’s not the only way that e-readers are changing the game. Herewith, a few other suggestions for how our reading habits, and quite possibly the entirety of civilization, will be forever ruined by the seemingly innocent device. Read the rest at Bullett.

Here's the things I wrote other places that I forgot to include in the last time I did one of these amazing link dump posts who gives a shit. 

I reviewed the new Purity Ring record in the Globe. 

‘Shrines,” the debut album from Montreal’s Purity Ring, calls to mind the old line about monkeys and accidental Shakespeare: given enough time, a million indie-electro duos will eventually stumble upon the quintessential blog-wave buzz record. This is as close to that ideal as we’ve heard in some time.

I profiled all of the New England DJ talent that performed at the Identity Festival earlier this month in the Globe. Check out these cats anyway. 

I interviewed Liverpool FC great Ian Rush about his soccer clinics in the states in the Globe.

I wrote about the difficulties in finding humor in the whole, you know, hate chicken thing for Bullett, and in the process stumbled across the least funny thing I have ever read in my life -- in The New Yorker no less! Read the whole thing here.

I've been interested in Train lately because I find their longevity surprising. Their debut album came out nearly 15 years ago, and about 3 years after that if they had a song on the radio I would say something like "Oh, this band is still around?" And then that kept happening for the remaining 12 years. And now it's happening again with "Drive By." 

"Drive By" is nearly ubiquitous at the moment; it's in car commercials, it's on the radio, it's on TV shows. So again I have had occasion to wonder how this band is still having hits. But this time I also have to wonder what is meant by the lyrics, specifically what is meant by the slang term "drive by." Going by context, it seems Train is using it to mean the same thing as "one night stand", which as far as I know, is not an acceptable use of the phrase. I decided to do a thorough investigation by Googling "train drive by meaning". The only answer I found from this exhaustive two minutes of detective work was no, that's not a new use for the slang term but something Train lyricist Pat Monahan made up to suit his lyrical purposes. Which I think is lazy songwriting. And it doesn't make any sense. 

Gore Vidal, one of the finest minds we've seen in this American era, and one of the last great liberals, has died. The following is an excerpt from a lecture given by Vidal at Harvard in 1992. A friend forwarded this to me today, saying it reminded him of what I was trying to say about religion in this piece here. Naturally, Vidal does it with an eloquence and mastery of language that I, or any of us, could only dream of. Read the entire piece "America First? America Last? America at Last?" here.

"The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved--Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal--God is the Omnipotent Father--hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates. The sky-god is a jealous god, of course. He requires total obedience from everyone on earth, as he is not just in place for one tribe, but for all creation. Those who would reject him must be converted or killed for their own good. Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god's purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature endangers his authority and those of his delegates on earth. One God, one King, one Pope, one master in the factory, one father-leader in the family at home.