I went over to a Super Bowl party tonight. I’d tell you my thoughts on the game, but apparently re-broadcasting, or any pictures, descriptions, or accounts of the game, without the express written consent of the National Football League, is strictly prohibited.

My friend Brian made chili seriously amazing chili. I couldn’t stop eating it. Now I feel like something’s going to burst out of my chest like in Alien. So, I’m going to take a break from studying for the quals to curl up with a bottle of Pepto-Bismol until this all blows over. Still, there is the very real chance, given my genetic make-up and family history, that I am currently having a heart attack.

So, with what may or may not be my dying breaths, I want to tell the world that I hate Christianity, because they keep doing shit like this:

That cost $3.01 million. That guy in there was Tim Tebow, who’s made something of  a name for himself by being pretty and using makeup, effectively making him the Taylor Hanson of collegiate football. The ad was paid for by Focus on the Family, a non-profit, tax-exempt hate group which runs the gambit of all the common causes with which Christians poison our society. They are devoted to the suppression of individual liberties through a staunch anti-choice agenda, compounded with a decided anti-science philosophy via their alliance with the Discovery Institute.

Most heinous of all, Focus on the Family opposes the rights of people of all orientations to marry the ones they love. Read that again. They oppose people being in love, and anyone who opposes love is the enemy of Yellow Hat Man.

Focus on the Family begged for change to scare up $3.01 million, to tell people that abortion is bad. I beg to differ, case and point:

I wondered how many people starved tonight, because the Religious Right was neither: opting to keep Haitian food banks empty to keep the cable networks laden with their precious propaganda. I made a few calculations to see what exactly $3,010,000 can buy in this day in age:

At this point, August has already sent an angry letter out to be proofread before sending it to me. This is about when other Christians approach me and say: “You complain about how these ‘Christians’ act…but that’s not the ‘real Christianity’…” Everyone claims to have the real Christianity. Well, I offer a challenge to the “real Christians”. If you really love your neighbor, you’ll find a way to stop these people. Have your God use his magic if you need too. I thought I was a real Christian for a while. Then I remember that Jesus was a long-haired construction worker who shot his mouth off at every opportunity. If Christ were here today, he’d walk into your churches, break all your shit, and somehow weasel out of doing any jail time. He did it before, and allegedly, he’ll do it again.

Don’t try to save me. Save yourselves from yourselves.

I’m doing the Christians a favor by going to Hell. By going to Hell first, I’ll have the keg tapped by the time they all get there, so I’ll have worked out those first few cups of foam.

I was on Facebook, minding my own business, when I saw that someone had posted a link to my buddy Dan’s wall, which I thought to be amusing.

It seems that the Japanese, being from Japan, had managed to one-up the Snuggie by creating a footie sleeping bag. With this, kids at slumber parties can just  pass out anywhere and be golden, and Jake and Lenny would not have almost been mauled to death by that bear at camp that one time, a funny story I should tell you sometime.

That’s not why I’m writing this.

No, because I saw something bewildering on the side of the page.  I clicked it, somehow forgetting my last fifteen years of Internet experience, telling me that something should not be clicked. Apparently they a make vagina-scented perfume now.

Once again to reiterate, you can buy a vial of human cooterstink. As perfume.

You should be revolted. I however, could not be revolted. I, being an engineer, instead immediately asked: “Whose cooterstink are they bottling?” and “By what process does one extract and refine human cooterstink?”

This persistent analytic worldview is a blessing, and as shown, a curse sometimes.

When Ames was going under, Mike immediately ran out and got one of those inflatable chairs, because they were popular at the time. It became readily obvious as to why they went out of style, because it was a total pain in the ass to inflate and keep inflated. It came with patches for when it sprung leaks, but we’d gone through them all within the week.

It was a cold Saturday afternoon. I arrived at Mike’s house, as it was the de facto assembling point at the time. Joe was there, so was Mindy, the chick he was dating at the time, along with Tim ‘n’ Rick, and maybe Jered and Ken. As we were loading up out cars to head over to Behrend for sledding, Mike walks out with the inflato-chair.

“Are you throwing inflato-chair out?” I ask.

“Yeah, but I’m going to ride it down the sledding hill first,” said Mike.

“Oh, so you’re going to deflate it and sit on it, like one of those roll-up toboggans?” I ask.

“No, I was just going to keep it as it is, and ride down the hill on an easy chair,” said Mike.

I collapsed with laughter, because the movie in my head was just that great. So we all drive to Behrend, and trudge up the hill. There were about thirty people there, all of whom smiled at the prospect for fun upon seeing the inflato-chair. Mike mounts the inflato-chair, and we push it down the hill, except that we just wound up pushing Mike off the chair.  We repeated this another six or seven times to collect enough data to conclude what was going on. Apparently inflato-chair had a coefficient of friction large enough to render it unusable as a sled. We also found that to keep from being pushed off, you had to recline almost, by leaning back. Even then, the chair’s bottom would remain in place, and the rest of it would just ooze over that point, kind of like a Caterpillar drive, eventually ejecting the passenger. WD-40 could not correct this. In anger of the massive disappointment that was inflato-chair, we kick it into the wooded thicket atop the hill.

“Stupid inflato-chair,” mutters Mike.

“I hate inflato-chair,” declares Joe.

So we sled for a while, I had some pretty neat jumps and wipe-outs on the Saucer of Doom, but nothing as epic as last time. Little kids kept coming up for a hit of WD-40, and their parents would pull them away, fearing for their safety. Eventually, I discovered the solution to our problems.

“Dude!” I shout. “We need to put inflato-chair on the saucer!”

Everyone’s eyes light up, then fade away as Joe points out:

“You’ll just be pushed off of it.”

“No, I wont, because you’re pushing the saucer, and not the chair,” I tell him.

Without speaking, we all run into the thicket to retrieve inflato-chair from the woods. I WD-40 the saucer and set the chair on top of it. Everyone backs the fuck up, I align the chair with the jump in the middle of the hill, lean back, and give a thumbs up. Joe and Mike pushed me down the hill. It worked flawlessly. I was about halfway to the jump, when a little kid, maybe about six or seven — old enough to know better — was standing in the middle of the hill. No one saw him before because the jump had obstructed him from our view. It was a really sweet jump. I started shouting at the kid:

“Dude! Move dude! Get out of the way dude! Dude! Move!”

The kid didn’t move. He just stood there for what seems like a minute. I want to think that his brief life was flashing before his eyes, but that couldn’t have been it. He hadn’t accrued nearly enough life experience to cause him to seize for that long. He stood there because he was too damn confused, because a twenty year-old man with a beard and a silly hat was hollering all kinds of sentence fragments at him, while barreling towards him in a bright yellow Barcalounger at thirty miles per hour. I drew closer and closer, and screamed louder and louder.

“Dude! Get the hell out of the way dude! Run, man! Run! Move dude! Dude!”

I want to say that everything was ok.  I want to say that kid was… well, fuck, sentient. He wasn’t.

I totally crushed that kid. Bad.

I should be in jail, that’s how bad it was.

Imagine a hovercraft running over a speed bump. That’s an accurate portrayal of events. He didn’t even have time to scream as he got sucked under.

“Oooooh!” shouted the thirty people atop the hill in unison.

A second later, I hit the jump, and became a projectile. I flew in a parabolic path, similar to an Olympic ski jumper, but without skis or training. As the ground rapidly approached, I tucked my chin and did a proper ukemi, and log rolled about 300 feet down the hill. I laid there for a second, testing each joint to make sure my spinal cord was still intact. When it was, I walked in a sine wave back up the hill, picking up my saucer and inflato-chair, breathing deeply to get the stars to stop. Towards the top of the hill, sitting next to the jump, was the crying child who I completely and totally destroyed, and his dad. He was angry.

“Why did you do that?” asked the dad.

“I tried to tell him to move,” I explain.

“You could’ve done something,” snaps the dad.

“No, I was stuck in that that thing. I couldn’t move, he could,” I explain.

The dad wants to be angry, but can’t.

“C’mon,” he says to his brutally crushed and p0wn’d son. “Let’s go!”

I want to feel bad, but I can’t because it’s not my fault that his kid was too dumb to move. At least that’s how I think the conversation went; my razor-sharp memory fails me in this instance. I likely suffered a minor concussion, so I get a by for that.

I can’t bad for the Whos, and I’m glad they get robbed. Yeah, I said it. Because I too, have been driven to madness by all the noise, noise, noise, noise, noise!

The problem with X-Mas music, is that very rarely, is it sung or performed by actual musicians. People play X-Mas music because its X-Mas, and not for any artistic merit that it may have. The record labels know that, and will mint a metric fuck-ton of CD’s every year of whatever scuzz they could scrape from soup kitchens and plasma centers to sing the same damn songs, over and over, because they know people will buy those discs without ever looking at them.

I remember back when I was at Miami, there was this one radio station that would switch to all all-X-Mas 24/7 format on November 1, and stay that way until January 1. That’s 16.71% of a goddamn year. I shared an office with this one chick who kept her radio on, and tuned to that station, even when she wasn’t there.

Because of this, I wanted to stab people in the face, all day, every day. After class, to prevent face-stabbing, and its legal repercussions, I would leave immediately, with a note on the door reading “Office hours have been canceled due to incessant X-Mas music.”

I asked her to please stop, but I was only met with the “You’re a Grinch who hates Christmas,” which would lead into the “you’re with us or against us” rhetoric that was popular at the time. If I wanted to hear that crap, I just would have hung out with out delusional neo-con department chair.

The only reprieve came from Bruce Springsteen and his E Street Band. Only the Boss knew X-Mas. Well, the Boss and Bowie.

Then I went home. My sister replaced her text-message ring tone with the Whos singing their Whoville song. So anytime she recieved a text, at maximum volume, her phone would blast:

“Fah-hoo-door-heys Dah-hoo-boor-hays… Fah-hoo-door-heys Dah-hoo-boor-hays…”

Ten seconds later:

“Fah-hoo-door-heys Dah-hoo-boor-hays… Fah-hoo-door-heys Dah-hoo-boor-hays…”

Ten seconds after that:

“Fah-hoo-door-heys Dah-hoo-boor-hays… Fah-hoo-door-heys Dah-hoo-boor-hays…”

This repeats until I go to karate, go to a bar, or leave to start the Spring semester. Sometimes she’ll take a nap on the other side of the house and just leave her phone on, so it just keeps going off until she answers it in a few hours, or until I snap and pull the battery in a few minutes.

Also, around 2000, for reasons known only to her — and in spite of all evidence, which only points to the contrary — my mom became suddenly and irrevocably convinced that Yoko Ono was the single best thing that ever happened to music.

Yes, you read that correctly.

My mom bought one of those cassette tapes of butt-ass horrible X-Mas music explicitly for “Happy Xmas (War Is Over),” and nothing else. My mom would play it as we came into the dining room for our Christmas Eve dinner, and when it ended, she would get up, go into the other room, rewind the tape, play it again, sit back down, and get up three minutes and thirty-seven seconds later to do it again.

After the fifth time, I dropped my fork.

“I can’t do this. I refuse to be part of a family which enjoys the music of Yoko Ono.”

“Oh come on, Ryan, why not?” said my mom.

“Because that malignant cunt broke up the Beatles!”

“Don’t use that word!” said my mom.

“Sorry. That vorpal cunt broke up the Beatles!”

My dad wanted to be mad, but couldn’t because he knew I was right. He used “Rocky Raccoon” as his CB handle back in the 70’s, and was the one who turned me onto the Beatles, and taught me the importance of hating Yoko Ono. The soundtrack of my high school years drew largely from Sgt. Pepper’s, so we were both offended, just I was more vocal about it.

All these stories went on in tandem, and became annual traditions, like the January 8^th Party, Mouthpiece Cleaning Day, or Indiscriminate Thursday. So once X-Mas degraded into Post-Halloween Psychological Torture Season, it became pretty easy to hate X-Mas. It became hard not too.

Fortunately, I no longer feel this way. Apparently, the rest of the universe must have felt as I did, because the then-novel Trans-Siberian Orchestra quickly became mainstream, and an annual favorite. On top of that, other artists followed suit, and began to produce much-needed unshitty X-Mas music. My sense of hope in mankind was momentarily restored in 2006 when it was announced that Billy Idol released a X-Mas album.

The only thing better than news of a Billy Idol X-Mas CD was Mike’s reaction to it. It went a little something like this:

Do you want to know what the real dicked up part about the Billy Idol X-Mas album is? Your grandma will love it. No, seriously:

I thought that was the non plus ultra of holiday-themed awesome. I thought wrong. A year later,  We Wish You a Metal Xmas…and a Headbanging New Year was released, featuring every single type of awesome. No, seriously it has:

• Ronnie James Dio and Vinny Appice (Dio; Black Sabbath)
• Tony Iommi (Black Sabbath)
• Lemmy (Motörhead),
• Dave Grohl (Nirvana; Foo Fighters)
• Billy Gibbons (ZZ Top)
• Geoff Tate (Queensrÿche)
• George Lynch (Dokken)
• Jeff Scott Soto (Yngwie Malmsteen; Journey)
• Chris Wyse (The Cult)
• Ray Luzier (Army of Anyone; Korn)
• John 5 (Marilyn Manson; Rob Zombie)
• Rudy Sarzo (Quiet Riot; Ozzy Osbourne; Whitesnake; Dio; Blue Öyster Cult)
• Scott Ian (Anthrax)
• Bruce Howard Kulick (Grand Funk Railroad; KISS)
• Carlos Cavazo (Quiet Riot)
• James “JLo” LoMenzo (Megadeth)
• Simon Phillips (The Who; Big Country; Toto; Asia; Pete Townshend; Jeff Beck)
• Tim “Ripper” Owens (Judas Priest)
• Steven J. Morse (Deep Purple)
• Tracii Guns (L.A. Guns; Guns ‘N’ Roses)
• Steve “Luke” Lukather (Toto)
• Joe Lynn Turner (Yngwie Malmsteen)
• Tommy Shaw (Styx; Damn Yankees)
• Kenny Aronoff (Cinderella, Bon Jovi, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Smashing Pumpkins)
• John Tempesta (White Zombie)
• Stephen Pearcy (Ratt)
• …and Alice Cooper

I mean, listen to this shit! It’s perfect!

If there’s one thing which Christian holy days need more of, it’s Black Sabbath.

(Yes, I know that Toto is totally not metal, but I don’t care. Toto IV is a great album.)

Earlier today, Ray “Bananaman” Comfort and Kirk “College Kids are to Young to Remember When I was Famous” Cameron, went viral with their remix version of Charlie Darwin’s smash hit, On the Origin of Species.

Their version intentionally omits a few chapters, and includes a fifty page reductio ad Hitlerum introduction, which Comfort wrote/plagiarized.

These doctored copies were then distributed around the country to be handed out to random-ass people on the campuses of top universities yesterday. That makes sense, because when I think of a fundamentalist Christian jihad, I immediately think of MIT and Caltech. They came to Purdue a day later, since I guess we were a second-round draft pick.

I’d review the introduction in detail for all of you, since they were being handed out here, but I didn’t get one, which sucks. I knew I should’ve taken the long way home today.

However, since turnabout is fair play, I have come out with my own version of the Holy Bible. The SuperFunAdventureBible clears up and confusing or flowery passages and allows the reader to concentrate on the real crux of the Christian faith:

Christians should be thanking me, as I carefully removed (with a utility knife) all of the times the Bible urges people to participate in:

• murder (Ezekiel 9:5-6)
• genocide (Deuteronomy 20:16-17; Exodus 17:13-16)
• incest (Exodus 6:20; Genesis 19:30-38)
• abortion (Hosea 13:16)
• cannibalism (Jeremiah 19:9)
• materialism (Proverbs 14:20)
• domestic violence (Proverbs 20:30)
• shit-eating (Ezekiel 4:12-15),
• genital mutilation (Genesis 17:9-13)
• …and Communist party membership (Acts 4:32-35)

Thanks to me, the Christian apologetics have less to apologize over. Now, Christians can concentrate on the central themes of intimidation and greed without the requisite cognitive dissonance.

A few months ago, I reported on the semi-serious internet campaign to get me to re-grow my mullet.  Well, a few weeks back, I was invited to a large-ish party to celebrate another successful Nuke Week and to commiserate with those still recovering from the aftermath of the thermohydraulics midterm. Shortly after the festivities began, someone found a ginger mullet wig laying about the apartment. (I never really had a chance to figure out whose apartment it was, but that’s besides the point.) The wig was being passed around, and I knew that I had to try it on.

My co-workers were mortified.

“It…it…it…” said Doug.

“It…kinda works…” admitted Tom.

I looked into the mirror…

…and I saw what should have been, for a fleeting moment, before the wig was passed on. The important thing is, we now all know what I look like with a mullet. Will we ever see it again? It remains to be seen.

X-mas is coming, by the way…

Yesterday, in a stunning blow to freedom and justice, gay marriage has been re-illegalized in Maine. This anti-civil rights campaign was received large amounts of funding from a number of notorious hate groups, such as Focus on the Family and the Catholic Church, in another example of the Religious Right being neither.

Sure we read in Leviticus 18:22 (and Leviticus 20:13) that “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination,” but that doesn’t say anything about girl-on-girl. And why would it? Yahweh is said to be male, and therefore, by definition, is a big fan of lesbian porn.

Leviticus 11:12 tells us to avoid Maine lobster, and Leviticus 19:27 bans shaving and haircuts, but we ignore those. Why? It all comes from a little thing theologians like to call “exegesis.”

Exegesis is the process of sticking one’s hand up God’s ass, in order to make him talk. Since the Bible is the compiled mythology of wandering Bronze-age goat headers, it cannot be made applicable to modern day without creative interpretation. Say I wanted to convince people of something, like that I had the power to fight off a pack of crazed unicorns (Pslams 22:21), or to go about rationalizing the destruction of an entire race of people, like those fucking Hittites two doors down from me (Exodus 34:11-14). Well, the Bible is a pretty thick book with a large number of whacky statements, so I just need to leaf through it and cherry-pick out some lines, and then pepper them in to my next hate speech/homily to make my personal agenda sound like it’s God’s agenda, much like how I’m about to do.

See, in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus explicitly states that homosexuals should be able to legally marry in the State of Maine.

No, seriously. I just leafed through the one of those little green Gideon’s Bibles which tend to pile up in my office, and I saw it there plain as day:

Sure, your bible may be a different edition, and that line may have a different wording, or not be presented in my large, effeminate, cursive script, but it’s just as true as anything else the Bible has to say. God divinely inspired the hand of [this] man to write [in] the Bible. So although it was written by [this] human[‘s] hands, it is is none the less the inerrant word of God. This is true, and I know it’s true… for the Bible tells me so.

A few weeks ago, a bunch of the Non-Theist Society and I packed up the ol’ SuperFunAdventureBus with magic and good times and trekked through the pre-apocalyptic wastelands to Bloomington, IN, to the see the famed evolutionary biologist, popular author, and rabble-rouser Richard Dawkins speak as part of his international book-signing and lecture tour. During the question-and-answer session which followed, My friend Jen, the BlagHag, asked Prof. Dawkins:

“I had the misfortune of visiting the Creation Museum this summer. While there were many scary things there, the scariest was how it was full of children. When you see kids like this or those who are home schooled or going to religious school, they’re effectively being brainwashed. Is there anything we can do to teach them science, or are they a lost cause?”

This sent Dawkins into a stirring diatribe, but he never explicitly answered Jen’s question. He’s human, and he doesn’t have all the answers, and I’m sure if he knew how to reach those …well, lost souls, he’d already be doing that. It’s hard for us, because we have no default person or think to consult with our problems, we have to be crafty enough to solve each problem as it arises and to have the strength to look within ourselves to find the answers. Fortunately, I have both and have taken the liberty of solving this problem.

To reach the deceived youngsters, Richard Dawkins must undergo either DNA splicing, the Fusion Dance, or the unholy powers of the Necronomicon to combine all of his powers and abilities with those of 80’s metal legend Don Dokken, to form Richard Dokkens, who must then go on tour. The mind-bending awesome that would ensue would permeate through every strata of society, exposing everyone to the Gospel of…well, no one really. For those who doubt the feasibility of this plan, I present, in evidence, the last half of Dokken’s “Dream Warriors”:

Now, take that, and multiply it by an integer greater than one. That is the power that Richard Dokkens would command. The only fault in this cunning plan is that the human mind would not be able to process awesome of this magnitude, so we may have to delay this until after the Kurzweilian Singularity. I’m doing my part with that, so to all the genetic engineers, ascended Sayians, and Kandarian translators out there: the ball is in your court.

One time, while at Joe’s mom’s house, we came across a MicroMachines garage playset, which wasn’t his.

It belonged to Mindy, Joe’s ex, and was the only thing of hers that we were able to confirm was entirely hers and that she’d forgotten when she moved out of the basement.

Being the well-adjusted individuals that we are, decided to destroy it, and in the most spectacularly awesome way possible.

Without hesitation, we decided to pack it full of fireworks, and blow it the fuck up. That wasn’t going to happen though, since Tom Thompson* had used up all of his quarter sticks, so the best we could do was melt it, but we tried to blow it up, Cthulhu help us, we tried. I ran home and grabbed whatever fireworks were there, leftovers from Tom Thompson’s parties and a bunch of PA legal bullshit that I bought when I was twelve. We packet that shit tight with ladyfingers, M-200’s, Moon Travels facing outward to cut in half, disco flashers, and paper towels soaked in Aqua Net hair spray.

It was all sorry and half-assed. We were rightfully ashamed.

So I went home and got some old model rocket engines from when I was a kid. We packed a handful of model rocket engines in there, and that made it novel, fun and acceptable. We sealed every hole with study tape, to keep the explosives in and though we knew the tape would blow out before the walls, we at least tried. We laughed, because now the toy garage looked like it was all boarded up and abandoned.

“Look at it!” said Mike. “It’s all ghetto now!”

I picked it up and proclaimed it “The Ghetto Blaster.”

Joe keeled over from laughter in the spiteful schadenfreude that I had brought into his house.

We detonated the Ghetto Blaster to initial disappointment, before it erupted in white flames which completely and totally ruined all of its shit. Post-blast analysis, combined with out extensive fireworks experience brought us to conclude that the PA legal fireworks did the most damage, because the Disco Flashes have magnesium in them, and a little burning magnesium goes a long way.

____________________________________________________
* Names have been changed to protect those with outstanding warrants.

I wouldn’t go as far as to have ever called myself a “Conservative Christian,” but up until I started graduate school, I was both conservative, and Christian. Shortly thereafter, the neocons went mad with power and began to force their Christo-fascist agenda onto most aspects of American life. Upon realizing that the Religious Right was neither, I renounced my erroneous ways in an attempt to atone for my past.

Lately, the whole US is ranting and screaming one way or another about Obama’s plan for universal health care. Last I checked, LBJ and Reagan were the ones who socialized health care in the United States, and no one goes around bashing them for that, or even talks about Reagan’s socialist policies.

I could make all kinds of rants about health care, like the ones available at 10^34 other places on the internet, but I don’t want to go through all that. Instead, I want to show this video i found of some guy, because this is the true face of health care in the United States of America. This is what the greatest country in the world has chosen to to offer its citizens up to now. Keep in mind, this guy could have been sitting next to you at the movies:

If a picture is worth a thousand words, than a video is worth 1000*[frame rate (frames/s)*video playtime (s)] words. This passes for health care in the US. Beer and some paper towels.