Paying For Plastic Shopping Bags

Once upon a time stores used paper bags and that was fine. Then, after awhile, they switched to plastic bags and that was fine. Now some stores are charging their customers 5¢ per bag for plastic shopping bags and I'm not cool with that. If the 5¢ fee is supposed to offset the environmental cost of the plastic bags, why not go back to paper bags or make bio-degradable bags? Here's an idea: if your company/store thinks that plastic shopping bags are so bad, stop fucking using them. Don't nickel and dime your customers to death because you're not willing to find an environmentally friendly alternative to plastic bags.

Rating: 0.05%

(Image from milkandcoco.ca)

Vonage and ATT

Vonage's broadband telephone connection service provides reasonably priced long distance that never, ever fucking works. The best part about having your phone attached to your Internet is that whenever you lose the Internet, your land line goes down too. This is great news for people who enjoy burning through cell phone minutes while they wait for a rude, mouth-breathing ex-convict at AT&T to take them off hold. In fact, if you want to be angry pretty much every time you (try to) use the phone, I can't recommend a better combination than Vonage and AT&T.

RATING: 4%

(Image from bobbeckstead.com.)

Tales of the Black Freighter

The animated title feature is gorily true to the comic but doesn't amount to much of a story on its own. Under the Hood was so boring that I spent most of its run time trying to decide whether or not I should turn it off. Both belong on a special edition Watchmen DVD, not a $20 stand alone release. Between this, David Hayter's whining letter to fans, and the reputed squidless ending, the Watchmen movie is getting on my nerves and I haven't even seen it yet. I fucking hate Hollywood.

RATING: 25%

(Image from slashfilm.com.)

This Fortune

When I was digging in my cabinets a minute ago I found an old fortune cookie and figured hey what the hell. Little did I know that this cookie contained some sort of bullshit metanarrative/ironic fortune. (Actually I only have the vaguest memory of all that literary theory nonsense from undergrad so I'm not really sure what this fortune is, but it certainly feels like bullshit.) This is totally unfair. Fortunes should strictly tell fortunes. I don't need it to tell me I'm nice, or that the sky is blue, or that life is all a crock of crap. Just tell me my fortune, you stupid cookie!

Post-Modern Cookie Fortunes: 5%
(Okay so it is a little funny)

Grad School Pettiness

Everyone at grad school takes the wrong shit waaay too seriously. Like today these two mutants nearly came to blows over whether <<Il n'y a pas de hors texte>> translates as "There's nothing outside the text," or "There isn't outside the text." I'm serious. I wanted to be like, "Hey, you two, let's take a look into the crystal ball for a sec. It's 15 years down the road: you're still a woman who looks like a man, and you're dead!"

No one chooses to be ugly, but why would you want to be ugly and unnecessary?

RATING: 11%

(Image from www.michelart.net.)

Jacques Lacan Wants to Poop on Your Chest, but He's Dead

According to Lacan (pronounced "LAKE-in"), as well as Freud, all little boys want to fuck their mommies. Fortunately, your dad jams his dick up between you and your ma, poking you out of the "mirror stage" and into the "symbolic order" with his veiny, throbbing paternal prohibition, and it's a good thing too because your mom's cooter is like a giant crocodile and your dad's phallus is a stick wedged between her "jaws," keeping them from clamping down and destroying you like how that crazy governess kills the kid at the end of The Turn of the Screw (SPOILER). And that's also (somehow) why we have letters and words, and the "true" subject is unconscious which means that none of us really "thinks," and the unconscious is structured like a language. Watch out for jouissance, which is a bit like a creepy, intellectualized orgasm, and the Real, which is the traumatic, impossible keystone of the whole anti-structure. Whatever the Christing fuck any of that's supposed to mean. The End.

RATING: Take my money, UTD%

(Lacan and Mirror Lacan from http://www.campfreudiano.es. Don't ever send your kids to Camp Freudiano.)

Car Alarms

I don't know why people bother putting alarms in their cars, and I especially don't know why some twat would let his fucking car alarm go off for over an hour and not do anything about it. This one time I was sitting out front of Starbucks with this really old guy, and a car alarm started going off, so he stood up, fished his keys out of his pocket, hit a button and his car alarm started going off too. That was pretty funny, but this isn't funny at all. You know what is funny, though? "SHUT THE FUCK UP" dug into the hood of a beeping car with a screwdriver. I mean, it's not like anyone's coming, right?

RATING: Bad citizen%

(Image from cache.gawker.com.)

Friday Night in Dallas

Friday night in Dallas is like New Year's Eve every week. And I don't mean in a good way.

RATING: 14%

(Image from lorla.com.)

Trooper

Everyone likes "Raise a Little Hell" and "Here for a Good Time" when they're drunk, but if Trooper come to your town and tell your friend that they'll buy him a case of beer if he can score them some weed, tell him not to believe them because they're LIARS.

RATING: washed up%

(Image from www.trooper.ca. Drugs are bad, m'kay?)

The Last Bowl of The Box

I've been enjoying an increased consumption of cereal the past few months. From Frosted Mini Wheats to um, Frosted Flakes there's only one major issue I've got with cereal. With the level of technological innovation in the world today there's no reason why I shouldn't expect every bowl of cereal to be consistently delicious. Instead, the last bowl of cereal is the crushed bits of cereal and sugar at the bottom of the box. Why aren't we solving this problem instead of finding a new way to mix corn, peanut butter and chocolate so we can call it breakfast? This is the kind of shit that needs to stop. First, let's perfect the simple sugary corn flake.

RATING: 8%

Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst is a British artist who's famous for installation pieces featuring dead animals floating in formaldehyde that sell for exorbitant amounts of money. He also does "spin paintings," which are created by someone (not Hirst himself, but one of his employees) dripping paint onto a flat, revolving surface. His piece For the Love of God, pictured here, was fashioned from a real human skull to which he affixed 8,601 diamonds. Whenever I think of Damien Hirst, I'm reminded of the painter Rabo Karabekian from Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, who "with his meaningless pictures had entered into a conspiracy with millionaires to make poor people feel stupid" (Vonnegut 214). Hirst doesn't even paint most of his own pictures, and I think the idea of the mastermind conceptual artist taking all the credit for merely signing his name on the work of others, especially as some sort of "ironic" critique of capitalism and mass production, was fraudulent and boring when Andy Warhol did it 40 years ago.

Damien Hirst's work is smug, nihilistic, and morally and aesthetically repulsive. Moreover, I think his exploitation of dead people and animals for his own financial gain is blasphemous on a level that any thinking, feeling creature should be able to understand. He's not an artist, he's an artiste, and celebrity bullshitters like him are one of the main reasons why average folks don't visit art galleries.

RATING: 9%

(Image from myartspace.com.)