On the Subject of knockers.

So I am watching this news show about "extreme" body modifications and they have the typical folks that they tend to have on these shows. You get the girl with the cat whiskers and the guy with, what looks like a starfish, under his forehead. All the regular people that, at one point though, "This will set me apart, I'll do it", which is a viable idea, until people start copying them. One cat girl, that's kind of cool, two cat girls, that's just the beginning of being over done. They, of course, interviewed tattooed people as well. I do not think many tattoos fit in as body modifications. They are more like paintings on a wall. Some are bad, some are good and almost everyone has one now so they do not really count as an "extreme" body mod. The thing that struck me about the show was this. Toward the end they had women that had had breast augmentation, I'm not talking about any giant 55 double F's or anything. they just had normal woman that had gotten their breasts enhanced. It seamed so odd to me. Do some people really think that breast enhancement is an "extreme" body change? Have they never been to Venice Beach or La Jolla shores on a sunny day? A body mod is usually something that sets you apart from most people and makes many others standoffish when you are in the vicinity. Breast enhancement does something completely different. Small breasted women can suddenly fit in with their larger breasted counterparts and fit into those "really cute" blouses they couldn't wear before. Overly large breasted women can do the same, in reverse and finally not be shunned for their prodigious mammaries. At any rate, having your tatas redone will usually add to the level of your personal and public acceptance. Having a two foot length of ceramic anal beads surgically embedded into your flesh, most likely, will not help you get that promotion you were hoping for. I'm not even sure why I watched that damn show, maybe I was bored, maybe I was drunk, maybe both. At any rate, I had to turn it off, it was just getting too stupid. I know the folk that keep making those shows, probably won't read this but if they do, I just wanted to say, body modification is something that is done by a very small portion of the planet, were as breast augmentations can be found on women all over the world and, in Vegas, a lot of guys too. it is a widely accepted practice and probably the single most performed operation in the world. It doesn't belong on your shows unless you are doing a piece on Voom Voom McKnockers the woman with breasts the size of a slightly under developed bison, then you can do that show. Regular woman with normal breasts are great but they do not belong on your show. Don't worry though, as time goes on and the world gets more boring, body mods will get weirder and stranger and more bizarre, until only a small amount of the world population will have the most odd of the mods. Fads like this will come and go, they will seem common place one day, yet the next, they may all but vanish but titties will never go out of style, not ever that you can take to the bank.

George Carlin has left the building.

It always comes in threes, doesn't it? The day after I write about the worlds loss of Harvey Korman and Tim Russert, another one of my favorites slips away. I shouldn't even say one of my favorites, I should say "The greatest gift to comedy that there ever was or will be". George Carlin died of heart failure yesterday. It is so hard to describe what Carlin meant to me, in a way, he was my muse. If I was blocked and couldn't write I would pop on some Carlin to clear my head and knock the dust out. George made me want to do stand up comedy and he was the most influential person to my short lived comedy career. He kind of showed me that words are wonderful weapons and, if used properly, could build up or destroy, just about anyone. I had the pleasure of seeing him live a few years ago and couldn't get passed security to actually talk to him. He was amazing, I would have loved to meet him. Usually I try to avoid meeting entertainers I respect because, when you meet them, you invariably lose all respect for them. Carlin wouldn't have been like that he was too real, even on stage, you knew he was just being himself. I found this quote from him,

“I was doing superficial comedy entertaining people who didn’t really care: Businessmen, people in nightclubs, conservative people. And I had been doing that for the better part of 10 years when it finally dawned on me that I was in the wrong place doing the wrong things for the wrong people,”.

That was his answer when a reporter asked him about why he quit working with Jack Burns in the 60's
( It is also a quote that is on my writing room wall, I just want to explain that, those words go through my head before I set foot on a stage to do comedy. I want to make people laugh but I don't want to lower myself to do it. George did help me remember that.) Burns and Carlin had both gone to see Lenny Bruce and Bruce changed Georges perspective on comedy. Carlin could not go on doing clean comedy, even for the paycheck. That is something that, if you can't respect, then you are a douchebag . The world is full of hack comics that just regurgitate the same garbage over and over, tons of noise and very few voices. Now there is one less. I think of all the entertainers in this world, Carlin is the one I deified, gods shouldn't die but, sadly, sometimes they do. Sure he was losing a step in his last few appearances but he was still good, I was gonna get to see him again this October and I was giddy like a dork about it. George was one of a kind, no one could twist words like he could. I am a huge fan of alliteration and you can pretty much hand the to him. After all the plastic people and the newsies have had their time telling us what Carlin meant to them and after the media thoroughly bastardizes his image by calling him buzzwords like "edgy" or "envelope pushing". After the week long newsie love affair with him, wherein people praise his name, even though they couldn't quote a word. After all that, I know myself and several true fans will still be looking toward his bits for inspiration, hell, just for the will to leave the house and piss someone off, which is a reason to leave the house that I live for. Today I am going to walk into a convenience store and shout "Is today Thursday?" and walk right out. That is in tribute to George. I will also use most of the "Incomplete list of impolite words" to describe a person in line at Dairy Queen. As long as I live, I will remember two important quotes.

" Think of how stupid the average person is, now realize that half of them are stupider than that."
and

" I think it is the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately"

Two thoughts that get me through the day. Well George, I don't know if there is an after life but I do hope that if there is you finally found a place for your stuff. The world will miss you. For your sake I hope the Catholics are wrong but if not, I will at least get to meet you in Hell, so that's a bright point, right?

Death

I just wouldn't feel right if I didn't put down some words regarding a couple of recent deaths. This will nor be horribly sarcastic like my usual writing because it is about people that I respect. In less than a month two people that have shuffled off their mortal coil and joined the choir invisible. Harvey Korman of movie and television fame, too me best known for playing Hedley Lamarr in Blazing Saddles, recently died at the age of eighty one years old. Korman had been suffering from an aortic aneurysm for several months. I have to say even my dark heart was saddened by his loss. You always hope that one day you might be able to shake hands with a legend like him before it's too late. It's about as big a pipe dream as being kidnapped by a bunch of Victoria Secret models and being forced to be their naked sponge bath slave and, just like that scenario, it never really happens. Harvey Korman always made me laugh and I was a huge fan of his since I was a kid and would watch him and Tim Conway on the Carrol Burnett Show. Hilarious, One of a kind and a true comic genius. The world will miss Harvey Korman just please don't forget him.
The other tragic death recently was another favorite of mine. Tim Russert of Meet the Press died of a heart attack at the age of fifty four. Now you might have guessed that I am a news addict and you would be right. I have logged several thousands of hours on global events and when it came to American politics, Tim was one of my favorites. I think it is because I felt he was relatively genuine. He was not another out of touch, blow hard (O'rielly and Limbaugh, I refer to you. Oh and if I misspelled their names I really don't care, they are not worth the time it would take to spell check it). Mr. Russert seemed very easy going and real when he reported discussed a topic, like a normal guy talking about something during a commercial while he waited for the game to pop back on. I was pretty knotted up when I found out about his passing and, if you know anything about me, you know that the death of public figures rarely bothers me. Tim was different, I never met him but I liked him and I am pretty hard to impress. I will miss him and his, let's call it, easygoingness.
That's all, just wanted to say that, I am sure you know about all that anyway but I just wanted to say a few things.



Come on, tell me these guys weren't awesome.

On the subject of children.

Today an amazing, life changing thing happened to me. With a burp and a blast of spit up, a baby came into this world. Now, before any more terror is placed in the trembling bodies of my close friends I should tell you, I refer neither to a human child of my own, nor do I refer to an ungodly abomination that I may have created via a pact with the devil and the spare parts from a 1978 Pontiac Lemans. No, the child of which I speak, is a bubbling, burping, bastard I like to call, Home Brewed Beer. Using nothing but grain, water, hops and yeast, my friends and I have turned the most rudimentary and inert ingredients and created life. Well, granted, the yeast was already alive but to be fair, I could have just killed it but I didn't, I fed it, so in a way, I played god and it all works out in the end. Today was the second day of fermentation and my beer is going strong, I must admit, I am a little giddy. I figure that this is what expectant fathers feel like. I am over joyed yet nervous. Beer is, after all, a lot like a child. You must keep it healthy as it grows, not allowing any contaminates to enter it. Otherwise you could end up with a retardation problem in the beer. Of course, you can pour bad beer down the drain, unlike what that woman in Kansas found out she could not do with her children. Beer can be harmed by sunlight and too much oxygen, children should be allowed to experience life out doors and should have plenty of oxygen. This is a good point for the great unwashed of our country, beer goes in the fridge, children go outside, not vice versa and if by any chance you are one of those people with an old fridge just sitting out near your child's swing set, at least have that common decency to shoot some air holes in it but and this is important, DO NOT SHOOT THE FRIDGE THAT HAS THE BEER IN IT! Unless it's a product of Budswieser, Coors or Miller, then what the hell, fire away. Hell, who am I kidding? If you are a fan of those beers, you probably don't read too much anyway and are even less likely to use the internet for anything more than finding NASCAR related pornography. Back too my point though. I am now worried about my beer as worried as I would be if I was to have a child, which I would also raise in a bucket in my basement. I am worried that I used too much of certain ingredients. Will I recognize it when it is ready or will I feel like the blond haired, blue eyed business man when he realizes that his green eyed, red headed wife just gave birth to their brown eyed, black haired, baby that bares a striking resemblance to the black guy in the office that always gets to work twenty five minutes after you even though he lives right next door and is usually heading to his car as you pull out of your drive way. What if I under cooked it, like some strange premature child? It was not in the oven ling enough and must struggle to make it. Could the struggle be too much? Will the beer never really mature but simply sit in my basement for the next fifty years playing X-Box and wondering what could have been? I simply can't answer these questions, i just don't know. Making beer takes so much preparation and planning, trial and error and trying again. It is a relatively exact science yet, still takes an amount of disregard for tradition and a lack of worry about failure to really make it work. So, I take it back, making beer is not like having a child, making beer is actually difficult, whereas any mook can miss spray his inferior genetics into another genetically inferior dolt and create a bumbling, drooling, poop machine that will probably grow up to be a senator and push for more mandates to hinder the art of brewing.

On the subject of domestication.

" You know Joe, you clean up real well". That is a quote I have heard several times in my life and it bothers me. I understand that it is meant as a complement. I get the idea that it is used as a flirtacious line at weddings and formal events. I get that is is not meant as an insult but, I have decided to take it as one. What am I, Pigpen? I am always relatively well groomed, well, at least showered off. I try not to stink too bad but I am a man and I do sweat and I have a very physical job. A job, wherein I get really dirty. Yet, every day after work, I go home and clean myself using hot water and a lather creating object some of you know of as soap. That is why I consider the afore mentioned line as an insult, to me it implies being dirty as a habit. I said this jokingly to a woman one day and she told me I just needed to be domesticated and then I would get used to it. Domesticated, me. I take exception to that as well. Domestic pets, domestic partners, domestic living, white picket fence and a mini-van... the American dream. That " you just need to be domesticated" comment really rang true in my mind. See I feel that I am about as domesticated as a man needs to be. I wash dirt off me, I mow my lawn, I crap in a toilet and, probably most important, I do not react to my urges to play smashy, smashy, brick face with people that get on my nerves as I meander through the city. Sure I still sleep on the floor, or under the table, now not so much because of a cave instinct but because I overdid it on the rye. And, yes, if a stranger enters my yard unannounced they are taking their concern for keeping their teeth and skin a tad haphazard. I am after all, a mammal and my space is mine, not yours, so stay the hell off of it unless I say otherwise. I think I am pretty tame though but, I am no family dog, nor am I a broken animal. Not as vicious as when I was young and angry at my balls for overdoing it on the testosterone but still, not the first person on someones "Let's piss this guy off list". I actually like the animalistic and savage side side of my nature and, truth be known, I believe that being kind of savage in the head is a boon to the enjoyment of the experience of life. After all, it wasn't until I realized that you can actually smell when a fight is going to happen, or a girl is turned on by you, or a turned on girl is about to try and fight you, that my life really perked up. Not until I started to truly embrace the more feral components of my psyche and shed many of the habits forced upon people by society, did I even become interesting to myself. Sitting in a tree on a cool summer evening, eyes closed, just smelling the world around you and listening for intruders and zombies, maybe werewolves, is a thing I have done since I was a child and I will not give up until I am buried, though the tree part gets harder every year. There are things we all do that are rooted to the days when we barely spoke in anything but grunts and refrigerators were but a pipe dream. Every year that passes these things are taken from us, most people deny they actually happen. Men walk through life broken and scared but accepted as civilized. This is domestication? They can have it. I will keep my ability to smell pheromones and my keen sense of peoples weak spots. I will not allow intruders into my cave, even if I am only renting it at the time. I will also not dance around a fire in the woods crying about my mother issues like an idiot, in a pathetic attempt to get in touch with my inner animal. I will imply sit in my tree and enjoy or hate whatever comes of the experience. I will, of course, do this with a rather fine snifter of Scotch, after all, I may be a bit of a barbarian but I am by no means a monster.