To Me, From Someone Who Is No Longer In My Will

I'm here to tell you this in the most loving way possible:

You are totally out of shape.

Like, if you tried to wrestle an organ-grinder's tiny monkey for its shiny, shiny coins, well, I wouldn't be placing my bet based on the so-called evolutionary ladder. I watched you try to do a push-up the other day, and then I held your frail, origami-like body gently as you suffered all the joys of total and epic failure.

I remember watching you struggle with the front door, and then walk outside. As your malnourished pupils attempted to adjust to the terrifying spring day, I noticed you wavering in the light. As if though your twiglike essence was slowly losing a battle against the very photons bombarding your body.

There are a few things you could do to improve your well-being:

1. Food is good. According to some radical thinkers, eating one or more meals a day is a primary factor in you not dying. You understand how, to write a really good book, you usually have to put some letters in? Yeah. Apparently your body works the same way. Just a heads up.
2. A regimen of light exercise can be fun and rewarding. For most people, I'd suggest twice-daily calisthenic regimens. For you, maybe a little weightlifting. Take it easy at first. I've taken the liberty of purchasing you a yo-yo.
3. Wishing that I were dead, while undoubtedly requiring effort, does not actually cause muscles to expand and contract.
4. Gin does not contain vitamins or amino acids. Also, when reading the label, the word "proof" does NOT mean the same thing as "% of your US RDA", like you think it does, all the time. To explain this in a different way, drinking two 40 proof drinks and one 20 proof drink does not mean you have "gained a level", as you frequently say after knocking back one of those horrendous rum-and-meds concoctions that you make.
5. Yes, I know that you pace. You pace back and forth, all the time, deep in thought and completely blind to whatever is happening around you. I understand that walking is good exercise, and that your perpetual, manic strides are probably the only reason your body hasn't completely fallen apart. It's not so much that you shouldn't keep doing it. I'm just saying, would it kill you to grab the trash bag once in a while and pace outside with it? Just a suggestion.

I know these are some pretty revolutionary ideas. Why don't you sleep on it, and then watch that Karate Kid movie a few times? And, if you start to get any ideas, well. I don't want to imply anything, but the kitchen floor could use a good scrubbing.

Yours,

S--------

PS - After you read my last letter about your hygiene, I'm certain this missive will also be deserving of your "Stabby Stabby Death Glare". This is alright. I've made my peace with the world.

Public Safety Announcement: Do Not, Under Any Circumstances, Try To Turn Your Pet Into A Dragon

I know! A dragon would be the ultimate family pet, just on account of the fact that they're the stuff of legend. I agree on the point that the whole "dragonz r kewl" thing has been disgustingly played out, and if I meet people who talk about dragons I usually beat them with a whiskey bottle until either they shut up or I black out. Still, though, come on. "Oh, that's a nice little kitty cat," I'd say. "By the way, here's my fucking sweet-ass dragon."

Still, I have to warn you. The first time you try to staple those wings to your pit bull, well, you'd better be wearing extra pants. Those dogs seem to have groin-seeking laser vision. I went through two dogs and countless pairs of jeans like this until I realized that I should probably practice on chihuahuas first.

Of course, right after I got Paco, I decided I'd play it safe and hold off on the wings until I got the whole firebreathing thing out of the way. One time I was wandering through the park, looking for girls to throw mud at, when I saw what was possibly the gayest thing the world has ever seen. There were all these people in shorts, and there was this guy breathing fire, and there were hackysacks, and everybody was dirty and smelly. I felt like I needed to scrub my eyes.

"What are you extremely gay faggot queers doing?" I asked politely.

"We're having a drum circle. You know, a little weed, a little music."

After the police finally pulled me off of the last gay homo I was trying to kill with the power of my mind (also knife), I asked the firespitting guy how he did his completely queer firebreathing trick while the cops were writing out the papers that said I wasn't allowed at parks anymore. Confident I could do the same thing with my tiny, tiny rat dog, I pried its jaws open and gave it a whole bottle of tequila. The trick is to get one of those sports bottles with the bendy straw and stick it way, way back in the dog's mouth.

Unfortunately, Paco fell asleep, and didn't seem to want to wake up. It was really full of tequila in the middle, so I figured it would only take maybe half an hour for him to get up and start shooting fire and being generally awesome. But Paco didn't wake up, and I got tired of waiting, and when I woke up and looked for Paco the next morning my wife told me he flew away to dog heaven, and that's why I couldn't find my papier-mache dragon wings anymore. It just figures that as soon as I invent an awesome flying fire dog it decides to be completely ungrateful and fly off.

So now I've got this goldfish and some Lee Press-On Nails, and I'm thinking about making this one not have any wings so he can't fly off. But generally, you shouldn't try to turn your pets into dragons, because you have to go through a lot of animals before you find one that works. Also, you never get to play on the swings anymore.

Fear The Super Volcanoes

teleolurian:Dear Plunk: Yellowstone is not a super volcano death area. It's just a place where the mantle of the earth is slightly closer than in the rest of the world.

[3:35pm]mother_effin_kerplunk:hahaha

[3:35pm]mother_effin_kerplunk:oh yeah

[3:36pm]mother_effin_kerplunk:then why did they say it was a super duper

[3:36pm]teleolurian:BECAUSE THE TELEVISION IS RUN BY IDIOTS

[3:36pm]mother_effin_kerplunk:i dont believe you

[3:36pm]mother_effin_kerplunk:so there

[3:36pm]

[3:37pm]mother_effin_kerplunk:because its a SUPER VOLCANO

[3:37pm]

[3:38pm]teleolurian:let me remind you that california is much closer to us, is on the ring of fire, and could probably blow the shit out of us, with nature.

[3:38pm]mother_effin_kerplunk:FUCKING GOOGLE SUPER VOLCANO

[3:38pm]mother_effin_kerplunk:YELLOWSTONE COMES UP BITCH

[3:38pm]teleolurian:lookit

[3:38pm]teleolurian:i am on the wikipedia site for the gay ass docudrama you watched

[3:39pm]derek:super volcanos are ghey

[3:39pm]teleolurian:"He states during the presentation, using a fictional holographic projector known as Virgil, that Yellowstone is on the verge of an eruption, though neither major nor hazardous."

[3:39pm]mother_effin_kerplunk:pfft why dont you say that to LAKE TOBA

[3:39pm]teleolurian:OH NOOO

[3:39pm]mother_effin_kerplunk:no

[3:39pm]derek:they like only male sacrifices, if you know what I mean

Do You Not See This?

Are you fucking kidding me? It's one week after Burger King, embroiled in a bitter battle to keep tomato growers underpaid, decided to be a big company and fork over the extra pesos. All good, right? The tomato growers get to eat higher-grade dirt, and CEO John Chidsey gets to sleep alone, with the Burger King, in his gigantic four-poster princess bed, in sexual congress.

Oh, wait. That would be the Gay Fairy Tale ending. What we want is reality.

Well, friends, the reality is that all of a sudden somebody rubbed their smoked salmonella all over them tomatoes. That's right. Huge megacorpoconglomerate forced to pay slightly higher than slave labor leads to sudden epidemic disease scare in the EXACT SAME INDUSTRY as the pay increase.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I am pretty sure this can't be just coincidence. It's way too pretty.

The Sun Hates Me

I don't know why, but the Sun totally fucking hates me. It may be because I was never really into being outside during daylight hours, since that's when naked dark programming time is. It may be because I don't really give a shit about how the Sun has a spectral class of G2V, even though it talks about it all the time, even when I'm busy being tremendously aroused by ruby code.

Once I was just minding my own business, doing drugs and staying up driving around all night, when suddenly I ran out of gas. I find it tremendously suspicious that at the exact same moment I needed to refill my gas tank, the Sun rose, ending my awesome night. The Sun will claim that things like fuel depletion are totally not its fault, but that's just the kind of shit you'd expect from a fourth magnitude star.

So anyways, this winter, all of a sudden my hands are drying out like Hillary Clinton and when I drive home, the sunlight makes me itch. I even get rashes on my elbows. I thought at first this was just a side effect of heavy alcoholism, but then I quit being a fucking idiot and realized it's because the Sun totally and sincerely hates me, probably because it's a Population I stellar entity and a total prick.

I don't know what the hell you want, Sun. I don't mess with you. I never told your homies Polaris and Proxima Centauri that your ultraviolet radiation has antiseptic properties, which is something you told me to promise to take to the grave with me, even though everybody already knows and you should just deal with it. Just get off my ass already. I'm not going to kowtow to all your idiotic demands just because your oblateness is around 9 millionths. Uppity bitch.

World War ZZ

I accidentally unearthed the horrifying truth, that ZZ Top is composed entirely of zombies who hide their fetid, rotting corpseflesh behind their massive disguise beards of zombie evil. And what was that song they were famous for? Something about legs? It figures that demonic representatives of the unliving would be singing evil hippy music about human body parts.

Oh heavens, how many famous people have they gotten to!? They must have gotten to Kurt Cobain, except somebody found out and ended the zombie crisis before he could spread the disease. Or did they? Just like Paris Hilton's eyes, In Utero was kind of proof that he was completely dead inside. 

It's pretty obvious that the Cranberries were trying to warn us without alerting the zombie bigshots with that bizarre-ass video with the gold paint, conveniently called Zombie. In the middle of all the weird 90's alternative about the Friends of P or whatever, everybody just thought it was some song about war weariness or something and didn't realize that it was probably the most clear and important zombie warning in all of human history (PS- contemporary human history started with the American Oil Crisis of 1971).

Which mean the legions of flesh-eating dead have already gotten to the top rungs of society, breeding us like cattle, preparing us for bacteria-laden death with botox injections, and then having frequent snacks by promoting oral sex as an alternative to losing your maidenhead. I bet the reason there's so many strikes in Detroit is because the auto manufacturers have learned how to make zombie Mexicans, which doubtless work diligently on jobs requiring great manual dexterity twenty-four hours a day, JUST LIKE REAL MEXICANS.

Keep your eyes out. I'll keep you posted. I'll fight them off. I refuse to live in the Zombie States of America.

America The Costly

Ah, subprime. You can hear the venture capitalists screaming in their uneasy sleep as the mortgage-backed securities they used to use to clean up after a steamy session of solo sex plummet in value, like so many used lottery tickets. Hell, out of my back window I can see places that young, stupid couples used to call home. Now, they're like the older prostitutes in a brothel; working double-hard to show that their new, reduced foreclosure value is a good deal, an economical lay for a john with less discerning tastes.

On top of all that craziness is that demon banshee ethanol, the new monkey on the back of the energy economy; a magical elixir sent down upon us from the Corn Goddess herself to keep the truck lanes flowing with overpriced grain and clandestine nuclear waste. Never mind that the grain and milk are more expensive because the Corn Goddess wasn't slutty enough to put out enough produce for both the rice racers and the cattle. You can't blame the farmers; they'll grow whatever crop keeps them from going into debt.

A week or two ago, I heard that gas prices were going to hit $4 by summer, and I pretty much ignored it. That's what we've learned to do recently, collectively as American citizens in a badly mismanaged federation; just ignore the doomsayings and hope that there's enough of a country left at the end of this reign of apathetic terror to rebuild. It was a shock to come back from a long drive and see the pumps had jumped by a quarter, seemingly during my travails. I don't know about you, but I'm going to stock my acorns for winter and hope that somebody is smart enough to blow all this over.

Getting There From Here

Several completely-true future technologies have been proposed by freaks and charlatans to propel us through space, with the intentions of building a Starbucks on Proxima Centauri. Of course, every single one of them was thought up by stoned hippies watching WarGames and fantasizing about Matthew Broderick naming his epic mount "Joshua". Read on, and gaze into the unflinching, uncaring eyes of the alien-infested future.

Solar Sails

When kids ask you where wind comes from, it's a good time to tell them about the butterfly effect, and how evil painted lady butterflies in Costa Rica have formed a Weather Cabal to ruthlessly control the world's financial markets by generating hurricanes in Indonesia. Likewise, a spaceship that uses a solar sail is propelled entirely by nuclear butterflies on the Sun. As the solar wind pushes against the gigantic and dramatically unsexy parachute sails dragging along a spaceship, the future McDonalds slaves on the Good Ship Happy Meal are blown along to the edge of the solar system, where they will eventually run out of sunlight, be forced to eat each other, then freeze to death.

Nuclear Pulse Propulsion

Project Orion sounds sexily steampunk on paper- why not just fly to Pluto with the power of bombs? Well, apparently, it's illegal to blow up bombs in the atmosphere of Earth, which includes all of space. Because obviously space cops are going to write citations to warring civilizations on the other side of the universe. Anyways, even though it sounds dangerous, nobody can deny that flying with the power of nuclear bombs is probably the coolest thing anybody ever came up with. That is, until some retired WW2 general staffing the mission demands that all the Japanese people on the station bunk in the engine room.

Bussard Scoop Ramjets

We're spending a ton of effort right now trying to find cost-effective means of generating hydrogen to power our 2010 Priuses, even though hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. Heck, nothingness is made of hydrogen. In 1960, George Bussard invented a space vacuum whose entire point would be sucking up some of that magical nothing gas and feeding it into a combustion chamber, thereby destroying Exxon's dream of placing refilling stations throughout the Milky Way.

Antimatter Rockets

There are a few atoms of antihydrogen in the upper atmosphere, and we learned how to make it in 1995 by shooting antiprotons (which EVERYBODY has lying around somewhere) into clouds of delicious xenon gas. Despite the fact that producing significant quantities of antimatter (i.e. teaspoonfuls) carries the significant risk of DESTROYING ALL HUMANS, either through radiation or plain old explodeyness, antimatter propulsion would turn every rocket in the universe into a Type-R, instantly, making decal and spoiler manufacturers into millionaires overnight.

Love And Marriage

11:54:23 AM Teleolurian: it wasn't like that

11:54:29 AM Kerplunk: that's still rude

11:54:41 AM Teleolurian: we got married after i got off of work

11:54:45 AM Teleolurian: and then we went home

11:54:51 AM Teleolurian: and drank some champagne

11:54:51 AM Kerplunk: was anyone there

11:54:53 AM Teleolurian: and she complained

11:55:01 AM Teleolurian: because her and alcohol don't work

11:55:05 AM Teleolurian: so she went to lay down

11:55:16 AM Teleolurian: and me and derek and jewmy drove to arizona

11:55:24 AM Teleolurian: cuz i thought she was going to sleep for work

11:55:38 AM Kerplunk: she was waiting for you to SEDUCE HER 

11:55:38 AM Teleolurian: then i came home and found out she wasn't asleep

11:55:39 AM Kerplunk: IDIOT

11:55:46 AM Teleolurian: I DOUBT IT

11:55:57 AM Kerplunk: WHY????IT WAS YOUR WEDDING NIGHT

11:56:07 AM Teleolurian: she gets sick when you even look at booze

11:56:20 AM Kerplunk: hey, i know how she feels

11:56:23 AM Teleolurian: she was totally not being friendly with alcohol

11:56:29 AM Teleolurian: so she went to lie down

11:56:34 AM Teleolurian: like she does every time she drinks ever

11:56:49 AM Teleolurian: unless she's at a concert, then suddenly she can outdrink THE PRESIDENT

11:56:56 AM Kerplunk: LOL

11:57:09 AM Kerplunk: it sucks not being able to drink

11:57:23 AM Kerplunk: you're automatically the designated driver

11:57:36 AM Teleolurian: and i am completely blind to the machinations of women, and she knows this

11:57:50 AM Teleolurian: if she wants me to seduce her SHE HAS TO GIVE ME AMPLE WARNING

11:58:10 AM Kerplunk: ...it was your wedding night, and she went to lay down.

11:58:16 AM Kerplunk: what more do you need?!?!?!?

11:58:20 AM Teleolurian: warning.

11:58:28 AM Kerplunk: that is a warning you doofus

11:58:38 AM Teleolurian: no it isn't, it's a drunk chick

11:58:39 AM Teleolurian: ...

11:58:41 AM Teleolurian: oh.

HostGator Serves With Active Malice

I am currently using three solutions for hosting sites: this site, which is being handled by Blogger; the Edible Unknown, which is hosted on a blazingly fast Gentoo virtual server on vr.org, and the sites Fancy hosts, which are being handled by HostGator.

Now, a virtual server is exactly that: a full Linux install on a chrooted box which gets fractional processor share. If you know how to configure your own server, running a virtual server is like having your websites personally kissed by angels, perpetually, all over the place. It's comparable to just having your own server in the first place, except you don't have to go colocate it yourself. For forty bucks a month, it's even cheaper than colocation.

Recently, however, certain issues with HostGator are leading me to believe that their servers are actually a networked grid of evil robots who delight in temporarily restricting access to individual files. On top of an annoying $10-per-domain jailed ssh fee, I've been working on applications, only to refresh and get an error that "xxx file cannot be found".

Obviously, the missing files are in plain view on their sluggish servers, and upon (multiple) refreshes, the website grudgingly gives up and lets the app work the way I coded it to, like some pissy cybernetic bear. I'm not enough of a *nix guru to understand how this can happen; every time I install apache on a server and leave it there, it tends to happily serve up all the files in the web folder, all the time. It's mildly annoying to work on a server where things are somehow magically worse at being a server than if you just left everything alone. And of course, there's frequent downtime and sluggish ssh response, but those are things I can deal with, if not necessarily like.

I'll be begging Fancy to move us to a virtual server as soon as possible. I can't say enough good things about vr.org. Love them. As for HostGator? Somebody with the skills please tell me how the heck they managed to achieve such a staggeringly mindblowing level of total and complete incompetence, kay?

Your Mission, Should You Choose To Accept It

Agent, this is an important time in your career. Indeed, this is a monumental occasion for all of us at Google. We trust you will undertake this mission in order to further our goals of confusing the hell out of bloggers, partly because it will keep them from uniting and rising up against us in some kind of shitty revolution (like any of those blogging fatasses out there know how to stand up and, you know, get some fucking exercise). Mostly, we like to confuse the bloggers because we find it very funny, on the order of watching infinite monkeys get hit in the crotch with infinite footballs. And let me tell you, we've seen this. Because we're fucking Google. We were gonna post it to YouTube, but then we decided not to. Just because.

Anyways, agent, we have a complex mission with many parts for you. If you somehow lose this document, like, by saving it in your Windows Live!!! Mail or something, you can always find another copy by googling for "pedophobia". Nobody ever searches for that word, ever. We're not even sure that it actually exists.

The first thing we need you to do is go to Petite Pretties and get Operative Midget Elvis, who has been there, partying, for an extremely long time. Like, so long that he can apparently claim all the dancers as wives under common law. On the way back from the strip club, we require you to stop by Green Valley Grocery and get exactly 8 of those mega-burritos. Wait, what? Sorry. Exactly nine mega-burritos, the ones in the foil wraps. Then return Midget Elvis to us. You'll have to ride up the elevator with him, because he can't reach the button. Also, he probably couldn't carry nine extremely large burritos by himself. According to the description on the package, they are, and I quote, "Deceptively Tremendous".

When you arrive, you will receive the custom virus. Find some prurient material on the videodisc Operative Midget Elvis will bring, and create an infected movie. Post this movie to YouTube; it will eventually have to be taken down but by then, every YouTube-cloning site will have "saved" the video. Once it does, the mission will be complete: all major browsers will render all blogs with spamblog-like partial text, and the blogosphere will lose credibility overnight. Except the ones that are mostly whining and pictures of jailbait in various stages of undress, because nobody reads those for the words anyways. Ahem. According to the monkeys.
And the monkeys are always right.

I Think That I Shall Never See

She grinned up at me, impish and beautiful, far away from civilization in the woods of Colorado. When she asked me, it came out like a dare.

No. I had never done it in a tree.

I will reveal something to you. This is meant to be quintessential knowledge, the wisdom of the ages, the flower of advice. Trees dare you to attempt carnality in their horrible, scratchy boughs. Did you know that pine needles have formic acid in them? And that formic acid is the reason why ant bites hurt? I know this. You might say I know this intimately.

Trees want you to die. But first, they want to punish you. They have heard their brethren screaming at the hands of their bipedal aggressors and they use their telepathic mind-waves to lure sulky summer-camp dryads and their July paramours to them. The only thing that was in my mind at that point in time, excepting for the past fifteen minutes of surreptitious petting, was that I had not yet earned my summer camp badge in this particular activity and I sure as hell knew that snotty Brian Connell from the next lodge over hadn't either.

It's a good thing the camp wasn't in Arizona. You think Colorado pine has something against humanity? The saguaros will eat your soul.

Troubleshooting Your Fascist State

Situation: Not enough labor to build palatial estate; streets empty.

Problem: Too many citizens killed in your insane rise to power.

Solution: Legalize gambling, drugs, and prostitution; grant visas to all comers; become tax haven. Wait.

Situation: Fewer reports of insurrection than usual; citizens gather illegally after dark.

Problem: Potential rebel uprising; revolution.

Solution: Hire stunt double; create paid competing rebel group to artificially attempt to oust you just to be 'beaten back' by your army in order to spread your totally awesome climate of hopelessness and fear. Read Orwell.

Situation: Stomachaches; sorrow; penitence.

Problem: Guilt.

Solution: Waste country's money on shameless hedonism. When guilt comes back, buy case of Château Pétrus. Repeat with increasingly more expensive items until country economy lapses.

Situation: Less money than usual; your image frequently on television.

Problem: Threats of foreign invasion, US Embargo, or UN Sanctions.

Solution: Start the ethnic cleansing while you can. Plan escape scenario. Alternatively, begin building McDonalds everywhere until you are considered a harmless American territory.

Situation: Abundance of overweight Americans in flowered shirts and bikinis.

Problem: Your country has become a tourist destination.

Solution: Begin requiring permits for all potential tourist activities, sold at customs. Overcharge heavily.

Situation: Republic suddenly fascist state with no warning.

Problem: Accidental passing of PATRIOT Act.

Solution: Think over next vote carefully.

Situation: Entire population consists of nymphomaniac supermodels.

Problem: Totalitarian state is actually daydream.

Solution: Die a little inside, surf internet for pornography.

Google's Secret New PageRank Algorithm

As Joolz stated, the wizardmasters at Google have reworked some algorithms to change how blogs show up in the search engines. And I tell you, it's a doozy. I was sitting there at a strip club with the Google ubermenschen, eating toro off the naked shaven body of a bored Japanese girl, when all of a sudden one of the engineers claps me on the shoulder and tells me that they've got some whizbang new space magic to calculate blog PageRank. I was all, O RLY?

Apparently, this is a cause for hilarity, because as soon as they told me, the entire group burst into laughter, even midget Elvis, who doesn't even like sushi but likes to stand next to the Japanese girl while she's lying down so they can talk face to face. He doesn't actually know Asianese, but neither one of them seems to care. I guess this is as close as midget Elvis gets to a perfect moment with a woman, and if I didn't burst into laughter every time I see him, I'd get a warm fuzzy feeling just watching them like that, all frozen in eternity.

So anyways, the secret shadow president masters at Google probably don't want me posting anything, but nobody actually reads my blog, so we're safe. There's actually over thirty thousand little rules, but here's some of the highlights of their new algorithm.

• +1 point if you link to that YouTube video where that one guy shoots the other guy in the crotch with a homemade microwave gun.
• +1 point for having your own domain name, unless it contains the following words: "sex", "jello", "zoolander".
• +3 points if you have a post about doing something incredibly nice, like saving up for a year to buy a pet monkey for a starving Somali girl with no hands.
• +1 point if your blog background is green. I don't know why this is.
• -1 point if the word 'unicorn' does not appear on your blog.
• -10 points if your blog is basically about you taking drugs and hitting people, stopping occasionally to tell lies about being friends with Google (they told me they had to put this in because my PageRank kept coming up as 27).
• -1 point if you use the word "wicked" as an adjective. -1 more point if you misspell it purposefully: i.e. Wykkkyyyyyd.
• -1 point if you write about the one time a pair of needle nosed pliers kicked my ass.
• +1 point if your name is an anagram for "Cleveland Steamer".
• +1 point if you admit to posting in your underwear at some point on your blog.
• -2 points if a Google search for your name finds out that you're a member of the frog fetish Yahoo! group.
• -4 points if a Live Search for your name turns up anything useful at all.
• +1 point if you have successfully taught a robot to love.

Who's The Bomb?

This is, apparently: a color photograph of the French (of all people) detonating an atomic bomb as part of their Licorne thermonuclear test. Licorne is French for unicorn, because they obviously needed to think of something pretty while dumping enough radioactive sauce into the French Polynesia to guarantee that the people who bottle our expensive drinking water could purify it with the sheer Cherenkov radiation glowing from their eyes.

As Americans, obviously, we can't say too much about the French playing with nukes (except that they might, you know, blow up all their white flags). Between 1945 and 1992 we split so many atoms for no reason whatsoever that we should all be horribly dead several times over. Here in Las Vegas, the fashionable thing to do was to go to the top of one of our founding skyscraper-casinos, where one might sip on an Atomic Cocktail and watch for the blinding flash and mushroom cloud out in the western desert, mutating cockroaches and warping our minds.

And now, here we are in the Las Vegas of today, where the poor Wynnmaster has some creepy tunnel vision disease and everyone is oddly hostile. No wonder the tourists keep coming here. I'm pretty sure our radioactive roulette tables are pumping out enough addictive gammas to give them serious withdrawals. All the things we do to keep them from enjoying themselves (All those urban legends about Vegas? All true) doesn't seem to do much.

I mean, yes. I admit it. We stuff dead hookers in mattresses (we know enough to check for them before we sleep on the beds), sometimes bums break the bank at a casino, somebody found a finger in a bowl of chili, people kill themselves by leaping off of hotel skyscrapers, yadda yadda yadda. What can I say? Our economy is driven by gambling and by finding creative ways to get rid of bodies. 

You can't just go out and start digging in the Mojave Desert. Do you even know how many corpses you'd unearth trying to get rid of yours? One time my friends and I went out to the desert to blow holes in things with shotguns (which everyone in Vegas does always), and one of us hit a cactus. The cactus exploded, and like six midgets fell out. They were the acrobats who died during training in Cirque du Soleil. Every time one of them dies, apparently, there's a casino employee whose entire job is to drive their corpses south past Sloan, under a pile of fake grass, and then stuff them into cactuses out in the desert. Look, folks: People die. We hide the bodies. For some reason, radiation caused all of this. Check your mattress. End of story. 

Friends Don't Let Friends Get Cloned

I am so totally right. Blood tests are a total conspiracy. Your doctor orders you to get blood tests done, they take a few vials of your people juice, and then they test them.

Some of them.

The rest are sent to Google for cloning.

You see, Google has all of your personal information, and they want fully functioning copies of you to use as philanthropic drones and marketing research subjects.

It all makes sense now, doesn't it?

Blood Thieving Bastards

My doctor announced to us that he finally had my medical history - something which confused me, because I originally thought that he was writing me prescriptions based upon what has happened to me, not because I walked in and told him to give me some pills. Oh, the missed opportunities.

Now, my pertinent medical history starts with trying to quit smoking and ends up sounding like the blurb for Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas. At the beginning of all of this, I had to go to the phlebotomist to get my BMP and liver testing done. I didn't think anything weird about this, because I previously loved getting my blood taken. I always got good results, I liked watching them stick a needle in my arm and sucking out my magic juice, and my veins are just really freaking cool because I'm better than you.

Unfortunately, the medication I was on then messed with my head, and so right as I was giddily waiting to see my human fluid get extracted, I passed out. That's pretty much the end of them treating you like an adult, when this happens - they dump you in a dark room to lie around for four hours before they send the worst possible nurse in to draw your blood. Like I said last paragraph, I have fantastic veins. You can see them from space. Of course, this nurse had to poke me four times to get a flow, and I could feel the needle scraping around inside my juice tubes. All of a sudden, something I'd treated as magical and fun throughout my childhood was now an invasive and annoying experience.

So, my new doctor wants me to get a ton of tests done. I go to the facility, lightheaded from anxiety and fasting, and sit in the waiting room watching Big Pharma drone on and on from the waiting room TVs (active seniors, outdoors in the sunset in beautiful pastures. Lunesta may cause you to vomit every five seconds and forget huge chunks of your evening). They call me back, I march back, throw out my arm, and look away, doing anything I can not to have to get tossed in the cellar for the rest of the afternoon.

Guy was a fucking pro. He tapped me like it was date rape. If I wasn't completely sure they were just going to make up test results and use the samples try to clone me, I'd be enjoying it again. 

The Sweet Smell Of Rejection

Dear [Teleolurian]:

Thank you for submitting your resume and subsequently meeting with us here at [HighPayingJob.com]. We have reviewed the merits and qualifications you have discussed with us thoroughly, and believe that you are indeed qualified for the position of [demiurge].

We have been fortunate in having a high number of applicants, and believe that another candidate is a better fit for the needs of the department. However, we would like to offer a few perceptions we noted to aid you should you choose to seek employment with another company. Not with us. We will never accept an application from you again, and at this moment Kathy from HR is filling out a restraining order that will require you to stay at least five hundred feet from her, her family, her pets, her home, and our offices throughout all perpetuity.

It was a decidedly favorable tactic to show up early for the interview; however, showing up an hour early so you would have time to seduce our intern receptionist in the ladies' restroom may not have been the best exercise of your judgment.

During your interview, you pointed out that your resume includes your qualifications as 'Best Dad Ever', which we assumed to have been penned by your son. Even though this proud achievement is not necessarily pertinent to the position you applied for, we were stunned to find that, upon calling the number you gave as your son's, we were treated to a half-hour lecture about your abusive behaviour and frequent intoxication. Your son also gave us insight into several psychological issues you are reputed to have, which was rather bizarre, because he is only six years old. We thought this was a prank of some sort until we found that googling your name turns up several medical tests for mental diseases ranging from schizophrenia and bipolar mania to the oddly named 'hyperegomaniacal delusion disorder'.

Perhaps pertaining to this disorder are a few of the claims we have on your resume, including your previous employment at the city zoo, where you claimed to have been a 'breeding specialist' with the task of 'shaming the larger animals by the sight of your massive genitalia'. Upon performing a background check, we have discovered that you were fired for an undisclosed discretion from your job as a zoo guide, but apparently nobody knows the reason, as the person who issued your discharge papers apparently felt the need to commit suicide by purchasing several throwing knives from a local martial arts supplies store, lying on the ground outside their apartment, and 'throwing them at the sky until they punctured several vital organs', as detailed on the police report. To be honest, we find this entire situation rather creepy, and did not use this reference as a factor while considering your employment opportunities.

You also have the rather unique honor, as per your resume, as being the leader of the local 'Pink Movement', the suicide cult which accounted for nearly seven hundred deaths in the community in the last year alone. While we appreciate your effectiveness as a manager and leader of people, we have our doubts as to whether you would be capable of using this skill in a way that would prove beneficial to our corporation.

Finally, it has come to our attention that your rather impressive education history, while apparently completely valid, may have caused the famed nervous breakdown which caused Professor [oldguy] to quit his original research and sign himself into [city] asylum. It is noted that the professor was performing sociological research on various habits of peoples broken down by their personal economic status, which was being funded privately by, among others, our company. Given the long and interesting background check you have so kindly burdened us with, we are afraid that our personal rejection of your employment application stems from your involvement in this situation, which lost our company several million dollars. We understand that there is nothing to verify this claim, but given what else we know about you, we find it extremely likely.

May your future employment prospects fare well,

[soon to be dead guy]

If Google Was Evil You'd Already Be Pwned

I seriously don't know what is up with the anti-Google conspiracy theorists. There's a massive chunk of web-paranoids out there too busy dreaming up new almond-flavored Kool-Aids to live a little. Yes, Google is all up in your bidness. It's not like you had to ever use their search engine or their services.

Compared to the thousands of ads the internet soaks you in, Google's ads are small, non-intrusive, and on occasion, even useful. I'm sure that if I've clicked on any ads in the past year (and I have) that they were all Google ads. I'm like a fucking web ninja. I load a page with frame-breakers, pop-unders, and floater ads, and I just weed through that shit like a coked-up gorilla on a banana rampage. John Woo needs to watch me surf the internet and film it for the mass populace. If modern windowing systems allowed it, I'd have the serious two-mouse ambidextrous ad-closing action going on.

I can see the trailers now. "In a world... where ads have taken over." Fade from white. Closeup of scanning eyes. Two arrow cursors, flying around the screen. That be tight, yo. When the US Army shows up to ask me to protect them from our mighty AJAX overlords, I'll be riding shotgun in front of a thousand virtual screen-sharing clients protecting our brave countrymen from V1agr@.

So anyways, yes. Google knows that you buy an unseemly quantity of underwear and bacon salt. Get over it. If you don't want to be tracked, do what I do and use Wikipedia as your web portal. It's not like there's anything else on the internet worth reading anyways.

My Birthday Is A National Day Of Mourning

I've been told repeatedly by teachers, shrinks, and random folks on the street that one day my birthday would be a day when people would wail in collective misery, and I believed them. Of course, they- and I- believed it would happen after I did something perversely genius, like inventing some kind of addictive potato chips seasoned with human skin. Those bastard terrorists have a habit of ruining all your fun.

Don't get me wrong, there are thousands of people who wish I weren't born, including my parents, teachers, friends, enemies, neighbors, pets, and congressional representatives. To all of you: Fuck you, I live another year.

When I was a teenager, I was pretty sure I'd be dead by 30. Now I've only got one more year to go, so keep dreaming those big dreams and sending me envelopes of anthrax. For my part, I will keep feeding your dogs chocolate whenever you leave the house and impersonating you when I prank call the police station. And I promise to get right on those potato chips. If I could stop eating the damn things.