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.

The note was an elaborate rap written by a boy from whom you’d never expect an ounce of vulgarity. His behavior record is exemplary. The note went on to say things about a classmate’s mother that….well, it warmed my heart. The kid had talent. I had no idea that there were so many words that rhymed with “boner.” The pwned classmate in question was 85lbs, glasses, 4 foot 8, and on the wrong side of quite possibly the greatest mom-joke humiliation in my school’s history. The writer of this rap will speak of this event when he’s 45. 22 children looked in horror and awe at the evisceration of this child’s mother on the note. I left it on the projector for about 10 seconds….but it was all the time needed for everyone to witness the destruction of another child’s will, self-esteem…..and their very soul.

“Daaaaaaaaamn, he came at your throat, that shit was WRONG!” was all i could hear as i tore the note from the projector and immediately filed it for the principal. I went on to learn that these two had been writing raps about each others’ mothers for awhile now, and were finally caught by me. They both will serve 2-hr detentions, with this story in their hearts forever. I wrote all this because it reminds me of a tender story from 1994, when I took it to another level:

Kevin Nolan, of course, was my best friend through all of grade school, and through the first couple years of high school. From 2nd through 8th grade, we were forbidden to be in the same class. Both of our 8th grade language arts journals were dedicated to defecation. I’m not joking. 177 entries, all dealing with how cool poop was. We both attended an all-boys preparatory high school, and were incessantly bored with the tedium of academia. We decided it would be funny to write fake hate letters/death threats to each other, and try to be as creative as possible. I had typing class 2nd period, and he had it 5th. I would drop these notes in his locker after my typing class and he would do the same. Note: I was watching 80’s horror movies on a regular basis at this point, and most of my notes read like John Carpenter’s The Thing. ‘Nuff said.

My notes were of legend. Classmates would approach me, praising my many uses of curse words and wishing for Kevin’s untimely death (of course, i was joking) through the most horrid of means. The coup de gras came when I was having nose bleeds one day from the cold weather. I came up with the idea of writing something absolutely dreadful in my own blood, since it was available at the time. I know what you’re thinking, I need psychological help. You have NO idea. Anyway, Kevin LOVED the note, and his face turned red from laughing so hard as I told him how the blood got there. It literally couldn’t get any worse, so the notes stopped.

guess what? KEVIN WAS AN IDIOT.

He left ALL my notes out on his desk one day, and his mom and dad found them. Yeah, my day sucked. All I remember was Kevin coming over with his parents that evening. It was a set-up. I was completely oblivious since my parents and his were also close friends, so i figured this was a social call. We all sat at the dinner table….. and just as i took a sip from my coca-cola, the blood-soaked hate notes fell on the hardwood table. My face turned white, and I almost passed out. I tried to explain that we were just kidding around, but the evidence was overwhelming that shit just WASN’T RIGHT. Kevin and I couldn’t stop laughing about it, and both sets of parents immediately considered changing their positions on abortion.

At that age, you realize that farting is hilarious, mom jokes are priceless, and inappropriateness is a gift.

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.

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.

Best of the Best is the tale of the US karate team as they prepare to compete against the Korean tae kwon do team, who “enjoy complete government support and funding” and whom they have never beaten.  If you ever wanted to create a compelling argument for not using untrained actors to play martial artists, this would be all you would need.  There are however plenty of notable names.  Eric Roberts is the incessantly crying main character, Alex Grady, James Earl Jones is coach Clouzo, the worst coach of any kind ever, and Christopher Penn is the profane cowboy Travis Brikley.  Phillip Rhee (by far the best martial artist of the bunch) plays Tommy Lee, not the drummer but the tae kwon do instructor with the troubled past.

This is by no means a good movie, but it is fun and it is possibly the most quoted kung fu Friday movie ever.  Here are a few of my favorites:

Alex: Tommy! No! Coach! Coach! He’s gonna kill him!

Tommy: I wanna kill that son of a bitch.

Alex: Then kill that son of a bitch.

Tommy: Alex! I’m afraid!

Travis: You shouldn’t block with your face

Best of the Best also features the best bar fight scene ever!

Best of the Best is worth the watch. While the fight scenes featuring the “actors” aren’t very good, the rest are pretty descent.  There is plenty of 80’s cheese, a training montage, and a climatic final battle.  I give it a rating of 7 roundhouse kicks to the face.

Honestly, I really enjoyed this film.  It tells the story of Riazo, played by Korean pop star Rain, an orphan who is brought in by the Black Sand Ninja clan, from his training from his eventual defection from his clan.  Lots of flashbacks and training sequences smattered about between the intense action sequences, I just really liked the movie.

Within the first minute, the tone is set as the top of a triad gang member’s is lopped off with his body spurting blood on his friends.  Repeat for the next 99 minutes and go home happy.

I also like how the movie follows the ninja henchman paradox.  This theory states that the toughness of a ninja is inversely proportional to the number of ninja present.  While one single ninja represents an unstoppable killing machine, in large groups they tend to die rather easily.  We also see the impact of this theory in that as the ninja henchmen are killed off, the individual ninja get tougher and tougher.  So a small piece of financial advice to you, a ninja bodyguard is a better investment than an army of ninja henchmen.  Just an FYI.

So, in summary, see Ninja Assassin.  It is worth it.  It is gruesome and fun, everything you would want it to be.

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.)

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.

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…

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.