Duder had to travel last weekend for some family type thing (Related: West Virginia or at least the 8 square miles that I was in, surprisingly NOT on the list. Who would've thought?) Anyway, I did that cute thing I do where I drank, I don't know, let's say 5-6000 cans of beer with my brother the night before I was leaving which made for an awesome airport/airplane experience the next day.

So there I am on the plane thinking about who might turn into one of the Others and who won't survive the crash and which person will try to kill me first as the plane turns down the runway to prepare for takeoff. As the psychotic night sweats start gathering on duder's brow, the plane is now traveling about 300mph on the ground when what do I hear but that weird T-Mobile dun dun dun DUN DUN ringtone. I look over and this fuck in the next aisle actually answers the fucking phone. What possibly could be so important? Hey, I know there are federal regulations and what not against this, but my buddy is telling me the line he can get on the BC game.

Needless to say the plane didn't dive straight into the field next to the airport, but it might as well have because when they fired up the tube on that thing, I couldn't even get the Pats game. No big deal, they only won by 59 points. Must've been boring.

Yeah, I know this here soup and half sandwich combo is incredibly exotic, and a real conversation piece, and I know it probably catches you off guard when I’m eating it at 12:30PM, but can you please refrain from asking me about my lunch when I’m in the process of eating it, because it gives me this strange impulse to throw my beef barley soup in your face, and the reasonable side of me knows that this would be impolite. And it’s really not so much the question itself as it is the peering that comes along with it. Like, stretching your neck up high so you can look into my soup container is completely unnecessary. So what started off as a pilgrimage to my cube to explain why you fucked up the TPS report (again) turned into a spectacular lunch show and tell. I know, I know, the sight of someone eating lunch at her desk has a tendency to stop coworkers dead in their tracks, but let’s move along people, there’s nothing to see here.

Can you believe the nerve of these fucks? Wha, wha? But how do I? Where am I? I didn't sign up for... Imagine caring hard enough about Facebook to post something about it looking different?

-An Asshole

What planet are we on? Facebook It's not on the List, but at the same time, it totally has to be, right?

Although, I guess having a place where numerous dipshits log in to to complain about trivial bullshit is our bit and as such should jeopardize our own standing at the pearly gates of the internet. And yet, here we are. Fucking A.

Ok Bruce, now what? I’ll bang out 12 reps, sure. Oh, I’m going for size first … cut later. So what, like 8? Cool. Give me a spot. Yeah, I want a lift-off. Maybe you can yell at me to ‘cmon, cmon, you got it, all you bro, push it,’ around the time my arms start shaking and I foam at the mouth. Oh, I’m a pussy? Fuck you, that’s gonna be another rep. [gruuuuuuunnnnnnnnt] Shit Bruce, It was all me. Give me a fucking fist bump or something. Man, I’m totally seeing the cut. Now I’m making a tough guy face. Grrrr.

I can’t wait to use my bench pressing skills out there in the real world, like when some hot girl is trapped under something roughly 280 – 350 lbs. and I’m able to sort of shimmy under it on my back and just bench press it right off of her … and not just once. I might just get three reps while I’m down there. They’ll give me a medal of honor.

Oh, you've got the one where you can point the phone at a 7-11 and it'll tell you that it's a 7-11? You've got the one that makes you sound like T-Pain when you sing into the microphone? The LED screen can cook a steak in under 200 hours?

That's fucking awesome, dude. I can see that penis-pump app is really working out for you, too. What? No, I was kidding about that one. They haven't actually manufactured an iPump that hooks up to your phone. Yet.

Look, guy, my trusty Samsung can occasionally make phone calls and will be an awesome alarm clock once I figure out how to load "Caribbean Queen" by Billy Ocean up on this bitch, so I'm not exactly sweating it. But thanks for giving me the endless guided tour of all your useless bullshit while I'm trying to make eyes at that aging powder queen at the end of the bar who looks like he might have some extra whiff to share with daddy. Wait, that gizmo of yours can't make drugs happen, can it? Can it?

Not sure if you've had the misfortune to stumble upon this week's groundbreaking sex scandal, but apparently some married turd at ESPN who used to be the manager of the Mets or something had sex with a young woman who wasn't his wife. She then subsequently went bat shit insane and fucked up the dude's whole program (On the List itself.)

That's not really the best part of the story though. The absolutely hilarious, newsworthy part of the story, if you listen to sports radio, or read tabloids like the Post or celebrity gossip sites like Deadspin (oof, oof and oof on all three and eff my life for being the type of person who does) is -- you ready for this? -- the girl in question DOESN'T EVEN LOOK LIKE A MODEL? Can you believe the nerve of these two average looking people for fucking!? LOL.

This shit is blowing my mind. Apparently regular people have sex. I had no idea. Based upon all my experience with sex, which admittedly comes largely from the internet and fantasy land scenarios based on crayon sketches I did back in elementary school, I had assumed sex only occurred between beautiful people and strippers with fake tits. Occasionally with various X-Men characters and girls with pegged pants and Champion sweatshirts too, but that's a whole other thing I don't have time to get into right now.

The biggest offenders are the disgusting, fat, middle-aged sausage-neck neanderthals on sports radio calling in to make light of the girl's appearance. Wonder what most of these tail-gating sub shop ogres look like? Somehow I doubt it's pretty.

I don't want to seem like a moral scold here, or god forbid, a whiny ass politically correct pussy, and it really doesn't seem like I should have to say this, but here's the deal, gentlemen: every time a woman comes up in conversation or appears on tv or on an internet article you do not have to reflexively comment on her vis a vis her potential relationship to your tiny boner. I know it's probably hard to wrap your cheese- and pepperoni-riddled brain around, but the primary function of every woman on earth isn't to star in your masturbatory fantasies. (Except that one bartender at the sports pub you go to that's twenty years younger than you. She's totally into you dude. What are you waiting for?)

No this shit isn't funny, but it's most definitely on the List.

OK, sorry, sermon over. Let's get back to making fart jokes and ripping on the way people's superficial peccadilloes annoy us again.

If there were an official holiday of The List, it's pretty safe to assume that this would be it. Let's just take a gander, shall we? Halloween is essentially "id" day for everyone who participates, even kids, who are 1.) on the list already and 2.) essentially being ruled by their id anyway.

For adults, Halloween brings out people's most subliminal desire under the guise of doing it for fun or going to a party. Usually translates to girls dressing up as sluts and dudes dressing up like women. I'm dressed as a woman, get it? Isn't it wild? What's wild is your innate desire to be a cross-dresser being on display and it's getting weirder the more of those red solo cups of Natural Light that you throw down. Woah there, guy who makes puns all the time, didn't expect you to come dressed up like a "cereal killer" haha, look at the knife through the box of Cheerios! Woah, Sally, I've never seen a firewoman who wears hot pants and a wet white t-shirt with no bra. Anyway it's probably far past due to put away the catholic school girl outfit there Jim and get back to your basics, which is accounting and watching hockey, both of which also happen to be on the List.

These brat kids we've got nowadays are exposed to way too much violence, what with the video games and the hip hop and cannon swing sets.




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"This state of the art toilet uses no water, saving 45,000 gallons every year. Thank you for helping us save the earth's supply of precious water."

Uh, well, that's polite of you to say, toilet. You're welcome? Although all I really did here was treat you like a dirty piss hole then peace out of there before I bumped into anyone I know, so I'm not sure your applause are warranted. My buddy Simian Fever pays good Euros for that sort of privilege over in Ruysdaelkade.

I suppose I didn't already have enough bullshit reasons to walk around feeling sanctimonious about my heroic sacrifice today though, so this is a nice little surprise. In fact just today I deliberately did not hurl a backseat worth of Gatorade bottles and sandwich wrappers all over the side of the highway, so I guess this little piss here makes me two for two on the day. If I can just manage to somehow not leak thousands of gallons of factory waste into the river by the close of business I think I may just have edged myself into the running for Green Man of the Year.

I'm not entirely really sure how these awards things work. Should I give a speech here? I'd like to thank the last three Sammy Lights I tossed down the hatch I suppose. Probably wouldn't be here without them.

Speaking of toilet offenses, what's going on with this flatscreen embedded on the wall at eye level for me to look at while I take a slash in this pretentious bar here? Call me old fashioned but I prefer to urinate when I'm drinking like God intended me too: all over the back of the toilet seat and on the floor around the sink. I'm not sure the audio visual display is exactly necessary. How long are most of you people out there pissing for anyway? Ten seconds? Twenty at tops, right? The occasional slow builder if there are two dudes on either side perhaps?

So what happens if I get caught up in the program on the screen then? Am I supposed to stand here pretending to piss for twenty minutes so I can find out what happens after the commercial break? Look, I'm no stranger to standing around in the men's room all night waiting for the resolution to a weird plot twist, but this isn't really how it usually works.

I paid my 50 bucks. Just play your set. Your whole set.Enough with the cliché rock ‘n roll rigmarole of making us chant your stupid name while the lights are out in hopes that you’ll finish with your best songs. Shouldn’t you just be playing them anyway?
This ain’t 1975 and you ain’t Peter Frampton. You’re not even Bad Co.

If you think we need to meet your egomaniacal expectations of incessant cheering to pry you off the smelly backstage couch, remember there are about 10 million bands on MySpace who would play for seven hours for free to a room full of dying swine flu victims these days in hopes of selling just a few thousand records.

Just for this, I’m uploading all your discs to illegal download sites.

We get it. You are incredibly open minded and very liberal. Frankly nobody cares or is shocked or whatever. Not us, not the people at the tables all around us, not even your parents. Maybe last month a couple of old townie fuckheads at the Dunkies in Charlestown made a comment or something, but who cares, they'll be dead soon. Just stop bringing it up all the time. When we agreed to this dinner and drinks date we didn't realize it was going to be a loud social commentary in the round. We just felt obligated to hang out with you now that you're finally fucking married. Thanks for making everyone uncomfortable, especially your husband who is trying to forget he married a fat, loud, honky, obnoxious white broad.

Apparently this is still a thing a week later, so just to tie up some loose ends, the following is a list of appropriate responses to hearing the news about Obama (or anyone for that matter) winning the Nobel Peace Prize:

The end.

When we were kids jet packs seemed pretty much guaranteed to be a reality by the time we grew up. It’s been three decades now and the jet pack dream is as far away as ever. All these scientists, all this science, and no jet pack. Millions spent trying to find pointless cures for cancer and AIDS and herpes and so on. Why not have them work on the jet pack, the GUARANTEED cure for depression? Lend the most suicidal, miserable putz in the world a jet pack – fucking forget it. You wouldn’t be able to sandblast the grin off that guy’s face afterwards.

Hey, you guys should come out to Clink or Jury's or Noir tonight, it's my birthday! An entire day dedicated to me or my mom, really, who popped me out of her vagina this very day all those years ago. Thanks to the old man for getting 'er done that night too, I guess. Anywho, we're thinking we'll go out for tapas and then head over to some awful place that we'd never go to normally so we can pay for overpriced drinks under the guise that I have accomplished something by being alive still. You don't have to bring gifts, if you don't want to, no pressure. Girls, remember to slut it up but not too hard, THIS IS MY NIGHT. Also, I won't be chipping in for the dinner part so when we're trying to divide the bill by 30 people, remember to throw in extra for my meal. See you guys there!

When I was growing up in regal Kingston by the sea my family observed a lot of venerable Massachusetts traditions. Some of them dated as far back to the noble Pilgrims who discovered freedom from the British terrorists on the very shores of nearby Plymouth. Just like them we pretended to go to church for a few years until that shit got a little weird. And like them we ate a lot of corn and seafood, chain-smoked tobacco and rotted our guts with liquor and murdered thousands of heathens.

We also spent every single moment of the nine month winter in a near catatonic state brought on by impending hypothermia. You see, I grew up in a three hundred year old house, which is cute and quaint and special if you're writing a book report in 5th grade, but when it comes to, you know, not having to scrape icicles off your tits every morning on the way to school it's less than ideal. Because the house was so old there was only one thermostat, and my father watched that shit like the unblinking, disembodied Eye of Sauron. Dude could sense disturbances in the force when he was away at work, and he'd call up to make sure we hadn't moved the dial up above 60 anytime before November.

Fast forward to today, and like in so many other ways, my girlfriend is now pretty much my father. She tells me when I can or can't go out, lets me borrow the car sometimes, makes me do chores I don't want to do and cuddles with me in bed all night in a nightgown. Normal father stuff. She also patrols the perimeter of the thermostat in our apartment like a fucking storm trooper. It's only like forty degrees and rainy in Watertown, MA today though, so I guess she has a point. The heat bill may go up as much as fifteen dollars any month depending on whether or not I turn the heat on a couple times a week, so I guess it just makes economic sense to suffer. And on the bright side, it gives me something to bitch about.

And by the way, that right there is the truest Massachusetts tradition of them all: feeling put upon, inventing and exaggerating a grievance then complaining about it non stop until everyone hates you. My family taught me well.


Haha, look at that picture! Polar bears don't have ipods. Or do they?

Ummm, didn't we fight like 12 wars and go through an entire industrial revolution so we didn't have to do this shit anymore? Am I missing something? Have you people not heard of Stop 'n' Shop? (Or pants? I guess?) Why don't we just go back to knitting our own clothing, sweeping our own chimneys, creaming our own ice, and jerking off manually?

OK, fine, I'll drive 50 miles so I can walk out into a field, get all sweaty and dirty and bitten by flies, mosquitoes and possibly wild animals, and endure the feckless and grating laughter of stupid children whose brains have been addled by the deadly poison contained in apple seeds, just so I can pluck something from a tree that I could've acquired in five minutes at the store. Sure thing, boss!

Hey, I just remembered another guy who went apple picking. Went by the name of Adam. Fuck you.

Bad enough you lured me into a fist bump in public but then you went and did that stupid blow up thing, as though our ill-advised expression of man love was so filled with emotion that it actually exploded.

Almost makes me yearn for a good ol’ “Welcome Back Kotter”-style high-five. Perhaps it's best if we just don’t ever touch hands again.

Spoiler alert, but this one has got kind of a twist ending. It turns out that no matter how bad you thought listening to some East Asian second son who shamed his parents by going to dental school instead of becoming a surgeon prattle on about the weather or the Red Sox while he's got a metal spike jammed into the inside of your face was, the opposite is far, far worse. Dude I'm seeing right now, you know, dentally, does not say shit the entire time. I just had a crown put on yesterday, which if you don't know is like a hat for your tooth, except it costs a thousand bucks and makes it feel like you're chewing on a stone for the rest of your life. The procedure takes about three hours on the first visit, which is bad enough. But try sitting there in stone, grim silence while you stare into another man's eyes. It got to the point where I wanted to pull the drill out of my mouth and ask the dude how his fantasy football team was doing. Just the whir of a tiny bone saw and the meaty, metallic smell of decayed tooth being burnt away by a drill to keep me company. If I hadn't already had to ride the bus to get there in the first place I might have easily imagined that this was my own private VIP area of hell.

Literally anything would have been preferable to staring into that gaping, silent void. Come to think of it, someone write that shit on my tombstone.

I’m not sure if your eyeballs are going or if you’re angry with me or if you’re just some kind of overenthusiastic waterhead, but STOP FUCKING YELLING AT ME.

Okay? Thanks.

While we’re on the subject, it’s about time we discussed the use of multiple exclamation points up in this pig. Skewering the end of a sentence with just one is bad enough, but stringing two or more together should be so high up on the list that if they mounted the Hubble telescope on the back of the Millennium Falcon, you still couldn’t catch a glimpse of the fuckers. I know it’s exciting that you’re excited, but the rest of us buried our inner ten-year old girl in the backyard alongside our wide-eyed wonder and ability to demonstrate joy a long, long time ago, so knock it off already.

How hard is it to find some peculiar human foible that you notice like two people in the world doing and punch up a bit of observational diarrhea about it in like five minutes that makes it seem like it's a pervasive, insidious trend? Then just make sure you throw in plenty of synonyms for poop and penises and affect a sort of phony indifference that makes you seem a lot more angry than you really are. Simple as pie. Boner pie.

I should have some material. I rode the bus across town for like an hour today, then spent three hours at the dentist. Later on I went to a sports bar and ate nachos. That's like seventeen opportunities to destroy the world in the face with spite, but instead of being angry I'm just sort of indifferent.

It shouldn't be that hard. These things practically write themselves. I'd call it laziness, but that would be giving it too much credit. What do you call a combination of lazy and bad at your job, because I've got that one covered here. Covered in pretty much every thing else I've ever done for that matter too. Fuck it, I'm hitting the showers. Someone wake me up when they invent a new type of asshole out there.

So there I am flipping through the old newsfeed in the morning when I see some story about Liz Cheney, Dick Cheney's daughter, possibly running for office. Senator, maybe? Anyway, in browsing through this story, there is the obligatory quote about the ticking time bomb scenario and of course the justification in that scenario to hook up some dark person's balls to a car battery. The thought of this ticking time bomb scenario is the biggest straw man argument in the world.

Never in the history of this country, ever, will that scenario come up. Ever.

Think about that scenario for a second. We've caught a terrorist (Red-handed? How do we even know he's a terrorist?) Fine, let's assume that he is. Knowing the efficiency of the federal government we process this guy then transport him to a facility somewhere where torture is currently legal. Let's say that takes a minimum of what, 10 hours maybe, depending on where we're transporting him to?

Okay, somehow after we catch and transfer him, we also know, not think, know that there is a time bomb that is literally ticking as we speak to this fellow. HOW WOULD WE FUCKING KNOW THAT?

Let's put that aside and assume we somehow know all of this. And let's also assume that in all the time that has passed this bomb still hasn't gone off. This would never, ever happen, except on a tv show. Deciding whether we should sodomize someone while making them wear women's underpants over their head and a german shepherd is ready to rip their throat out shouldn't be left to a fucking show on Fox starring the dude from Lost Boys. It just shouldn't.

As if we needed any further evidence in the case of American Consumers v. Gullibility, the existence of this pretend energy food should probably sway the jury. Just in case we're not clear on what's going on here, what they do now is sell candy bars. In a gym. That people eat before and after trying to lose weight for an hour. Powerbars, Extreme Nutgasms, Man-Tiger Hard-On Bars or whatever, they're all the same and they all taste like wet cement sprinkled with stale nuts (both kinds).
  
And yet there I was eating one like five minutes ago thinking to myself "Woh, 40 grams of protein!" Right, and only ten thousand calories of sugar they need to make that soy diarrhea palatable. Look dude, (by which I mean me), this isn't a video game where you can find magic health kits under an exploding barrel. So unless you start noticing a row of red hearts floating above your head on that vigorous twenty minute tread mill jaunt you can probably skip the power-up routine and end this nougatty facade. If you want to eat a candy bar that's fine, just don't pretend like that snake oil is gonna do anything besides drain your dignity, and your wallet at $4 a pop.


Uh, jsyk, don't do an image search for Man Tiger unless you want to see some fucked up shit.