the world becomes a map of the world...

Pope Quotes!

2010-04-04T15:36:00.000-07:00

Take two parts Emperor Palpatine, one part Steamboat Willie from Saving Private Ryan and one part Michael Scott, mix thoroughly, bake at 350 degrees, and in 30 minutes you'll have Pope Benedict XVI!

In honor of his holiness' systematic dismantling of 30 years worth of PR, I have compiled a list of his finest quotes. Please remember this is for the sake of parody, and while he never actually said any of these, we all know he is thinking them.

"Perhaps if little boys were more willing to give themselves to the church, priests wouldn't have to rape them. This is a lesson for us all."

"All the problems in Africa, be it AIDS, famine, war, genocide, can all be attributed to the fact that Africa is full of black people."

"Mark McGwire was on the Jews? He's a hall-of-famer in my book."

"No, child molestation is not an issue for the Irish Catholic Church. We have been supporting it globally for years."

"Marriage is a gay disease and the use of AIDS during safe sex will only spread condoms."

"The problem with the NBA is that it is full of black people."

"The problem with the new atheism is that it is full of black people."

"Heil Hitler!"*

*- oh wait, he actually did say that.

march madness part 2: you are not an expert

2010-03-18T17:03:00.000-07:00

So I went to BDub's during the opening round of March Madness. This was my first mistake. Incidentally, had I remembered that it was the opening round of March Madness, I never would have gone to get wings as I was wavering quite a bit before hand but ultimately decided to go much to my dismay, because the place was packed at 5 on a thursday and there was basketball on every one of their 90 televisions.

Sitting at the table beside me, and talking unapologetically loud was Johnny McDouchebag, wearing his Red Sox hat and his polo shirt where the collar didn't quite stay all the way down after years of being popped, and a legit silver Fossil watch that he paid full price for "the real thing" because he doesn't use it to tell time but rather to show off the certificate of authenticity he carries around in his wallet that says just how expensive his watch was, and who also had rolled his shoulders forward, which to the untrained eye just looks goofy, but to the trained eye indicates that he only lifts chest at the gym, which means he probably only benches and does other things that allow him to look at himself in the mirror (i.e. shrugs to make his TRAPS HUGE) because his motivation is vanity and as a result doesn't like to lift legs so he doesn't which means he has chicken legs which means he only wears designer athletic pants and puma shoes to the gym to go with his under armor that adequately shows off his love handles.

He was there watching basketball with his pudgy mistress, who you could tell was really self-conscious about her weight and therefore assumed that a guy would only like her if she did the dirty stuff, which is probably why this guy is with her because he needs to feel vindicated by having a subservient woman, and because she thinks that he's the best she can do, she probably completely molded herself to appease to him which is why she is in a bar on thursday night watching basketball trying to offer commentary, but really only regurgitating what he just said while she could be standing up for herself and finding someone she'd be really happy with and not relapsing the women's movement by some 55 years and will probably never know true love or real happiness.

Anyway, Johnny McDouchebag said, or shouted rather, in the UTEP vs. Butler game (clearly the game that would make or break his entire bracket) during the 1st half, "Bro, you gotta make that shot!" after one of UTEP's bench players missed a lay-up.

"Bro, you gotta make that shot."

Now, clearly I am not an expert in basketball, nor will I ever claim to have attained expert status in most things I do, but is there a shot in basketball that you shouldn't make? If so, would it be save to assume that under normal conditions, you ideally should be making most shots, as to not warrant Johnny McDouchebag specifically mandating you to make that one more-so than any other shots?

This is the same principle that John Madden made an entire career; if you state the obvious with enough enthusiasm someone will take you seriously. But this certainly doesn't give you the right to say it. The fact that he felt the need to reiterate to the entire bar, as though anybody had any desire to hear his opinions in the first place( or perhaps they weren't watching the game that was on 11 out of 14 different TVs), the blatantly obvious, only in FratBoySpeak and then have his girlfriend regurgitate it in junior high school prose really made me feel that he thinks that he is in fact some sort of analyst and probably goes home and watches watches the 94 sports channels on directTV and jacks off while his girlfriend watches.

My message to casual viewers of sports: You aren't experts, nor are you alone in your opinions. Stating the blatantly obvious (mind you on every single play) does not incur any feeling of respect for the knowledge of basketball you garnered on the bench in high school. Furthermore, no matter how ridiculous your opinion, and no matter how many times you preface it with "You wait and see, I promise you that this will happen," when Vanderbilt loses, you will not have been the only one to have predicted it. I'm sorry, the world is just too populated.

Is it April yet?

why is march so angry?

2010-03-13T12:40:00.000-08:00

Famous philosopher Austin Santiago Lambert once spoke, in regards to Far From the Madding Crowd, "Thomas Hardy wanted to be a poet, but instead he ended up being a douche bag."

This has no relevance to the post before you. But I want to mention two things.

Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd, like most things I had to read in high school, sans Fitzgerald, turned me off from reading for an irreplaceable 3-4 years of my life until a one Kurt Vonnegut roped me in.
Did we ever figure out what Madding meant in that context? I feel like it was a test question.

This also has no relevance to the post before you.

I came here to talk about college basketball. We are embarking on the time of the year known as 'alliteration season' [see march madness, elite eight, final four, conference championship, texas tech?] where collective American productivity drops to pre-industrial levels as we ignore most important things like work and family to watch basketball games that we have no real vested interest in other than we arbitrarily picked a winner (likely based on whichever team had a cooler name) and then when we luck in to picking half correctly, we boast to our friends as though we knew that Sienna would upset Wichita State.

Perhaps because I went to a school where basketball is played at a junior high school level, I have negative interest in basketball. Regardless, I don't like either Duke or North Carolina, and anyone who has a favorite that doesn't rely on geography or alum status, I have a rough time taking seriously, because they all offer the same reason as to why their given team is better, or how the other team's fans are all on the bandwagon (as though there is a bandwagon-- doesn't a bandwagon imply that there was a down-period/haven't these two teams owned college basketball for the last 175 years?) or for the ladies who ever has the hotter point guard. Therefore, when I fill out my bracket, and I will because I haven't had a unique thought in my entire life which is why grad school is shitting all over me, I am going to pick whichever team is not Duke or North Carolina, and if they are playing each other, I am going to pick Al Qaeda* (the team I pick when the Yankees are playing the Red Sox). Point of fact, based on the principle above, I usually pick Quinnapec to win the national championship, so we'll see how they do this go around.

But this isn't my point. My point is that, just like in fantasy football (and incidentally golf), people seem to think that they can garner some statistical advantage by watching sportscenter and that the entire thing isn't almost 100% left up to the gods of chance, unless you're Tiger Woods at which point you are god and you copulate accordingly, and thus the multi-million dollar business of 'bracketology' and 'fantasy breakdown' is conferred as an opportunity to lead you to believe that:

You can ascertain some statistical edge
It's not based on chance
When you do get lucky, it is because you knew what was going to happen

This is stupid. This is another thing about which I cannot be kind. Your bracket is no better than anyone else's. Your bracket is a feather on the wind of chance and no matter how much ESPN insider you subscribe to, when Memphis gets beat by Sienna in the second round, or Duke and North Carolina shit all over the other school's brackets (because Duke and North Carolina fans always seem to pick Duke and North Carolina to go all the way), you will still lose your poll, unless you are luckier than everyone else. Because brackets, fantasy football, and golf are competitions in luck.

And another thing. If you've won two years in a row, this does not make you an expert. If you win twice in a row at roulette are you a roulette expert? Being lucky does not require any skill. None. Enjoy your luckiness. And get back to work.

This is why I hate poker. And people who think they're good at poker. That is another post entirely.

*- dear FBI, this was a joke. get it? sincerely, eric

so this one time i got stuck in an elevator...

2010-03-09T15:55:00.000-08:00

Near the end of freshman summer, I was going to work at the gym, which was about 200 feet from the archaic Mifflin Hall that resided me for almost an entire year, and at that time was living on third floor, which normally means taking the stairs on the way out and elevator on the back, but this time I decided it meant elevator because I caught two friends, Seth and Stew, on their way out to the gym, so I took the elevator down.

Stew was a character in and of himself, proud owner of two first names. He presented himself like a soon-to-be-frat-boy, i.e. one of those piles of douche who came to Penn State because they got real into football in high school, and decided it was either walk-on at a D3 school or come to Penn State and reminisce and they chose the latter, insistent that their close loss in the regional round of the AA state playoffs was not on account of his missed block, but that the coach called the wrong play, and had he called a full back flat, they'd have won and gone on to win states, and he'd be playing D1 football somewhere, which in turn leads him to believe that he knows more about football than any of the other piles of douche who share the exact same story and completely collapses his entire existence into Penn State football and proceeds to convince himself that he should walk on but never does.

But Stew ended up walking on and made the team, so he showed us.

Anyway, on the way to the ground floor, Stew got the bright idea to pry open the elevator doors. "Hey guys, watch this," he cried in the most artificial, cartoonish voice/grin, as he grabbed onto the middle of the elevator door, mid floor, and yanked as hard as he could, slamming the elevator to a grinding halt as what I assume to be a safety mechanism, but evidently works just as well as an anti-idiot mechanism.

Which is when Seth said in his quintessential nasal tone, "Oh my god Stew, I am gonna kick your ass," slowing his pace as the sentence went on for drama.

Now, we rang the "in case of emergency" bell that apparently has no effect other than to make a ridiculous noise that draws attention to the elevator in question, as it brought out the R.A. from the girls' floor below, who incidentally did her absolute best and succeeded in getting my floor's R.A. fired for being approachable (even though he ended up getting the job back), and who I assume probably had a strange horse thing where she would go back to her room and write in her horse themed diary with the pony-tail bookmark and her horse pencil about how Harry Potter is so good looking even though Daniel Radcliffe isn't, citing Jesus as her muse as she puts in a copy of Gilmore Girls season two, even though she knows every episode by heart, and opens a tub of ice cream until she fats herself to sleep.

She came out to the hall and assessed the situation, telling us in a very loud and a very understanding tone, "You guys are so brave! I'm so proud of you," even though we had been in the elevator for 15 minutes and our only real problem was the Stew was starting to smell because he rarely showered in spite of the 95 degree average that summer. She assured us so many times that we were so brave that we only wanted to break out to get her to shut up, so Seth screamed jocularly "Alright I'm crawling out," which sent her into probably her most intense non-self induced neural output of her life as she fell to the floor and began pleading that we need to stay put, as though we knew how to break out of an elevator and we would and this would get her fired for not consoling three very bored smelly boys trapped in an elevator.

So there we sat for 45 minutes, hearing every minute on the minute how brave we were but in spite of that we shouldn't try to make an escape like it was some kind of caper, until the elevator spontaneously came back on and brought us to the ground floor, where I merrily walked to work, 30 minutes late.

To this day, I don't know that I've ever seen that R.A., and my knowledge of her comes solely from rumors and that event upon which she probably called her mom, as it was the only number in her phone, and told her how calm and collected she was in dealing with this dire emergency in which three small children were trapped in a burning elevator for four hours and one of them almost killed themselves, but she talked them down. I am certain we made her week.

Days later Pocono Dave won the Tour De' Mifflin, nearly going through a window in the process, which is another story entirely. RIP Pocono Dave.

Also, Risa.

commercials in the commercial era.

2010-03-06T19:15:00.000-08:00

Some of my long-time readers might be weary of how critical I am of advertisers, as denoted by this little gem I found today in my internet ventures. This is because it is the job of the advertisers to convey unintelligible information to the lay people in a manner that will not only allow them to make an informed decision, but will ensure confidence in said decision, particularly in the advertisers product. This is a responsibility that is not to be taken lightly, and if Mad Men (or How Many Sexist References Can We Possibly Fit Into An Hour Long TV Show) is any indication, I imagine once upon a time it was a serious business.

But when I look at a 30-second blip of condensed product information in between acts of the Daily Show, and I see utter nonsensical drivel that make me want to drive to corporate headquarters, take the elevator to the 11th floor, walk to the advertising/marketing department, knock on the VP's door, and systematically piss a Monster-laden hole through his office desk, I can't help but judge anyone who has ever told me that their major was advertising or marketing. Because these are the people that are someday going to be in charge of this shit; they are the ones whose job it will be to so actively try to screw up commonsensical approaches to advertising.

Okay, case in point: When Toyota is not asking for their cars back, they ran an ad campaign complete with the slogan "Ask somebody," sung harmoniously by a washed up middle-aged man who just barely missed the cut for "My Hero Zero" and ended up on a similar life trajectory as Uncle Jesse, overtop of smiling faces of people dressed like they are still in 1993 only with modern camera quality eliciting an anachronism that would go perfectly with a Christopher Nolan screenplay but just looks utterly retarded in a Toyota commercial, with the pitchman telling me that Toyota's are the safest most fuel-efficient cars or whatever on the road and that I should ask somebody who drives one, essentially TELLING ME TO DO HIS SIX FIGURE JOB FOR HIM.

This is why I'm convinced everybody who works in advertising is either completely out of touch with reality, or retarded (I suppose those aren't mutually exclusive, either).

Another example came from a Chase commercial, and prevented me from ever doing business with Chase in my life. A mom is with her two children in the mall, when the one little girl apparently is waiting for a text from Josh, and her younger sister is pestering about her crush on said Josh, and her mom gets a text from Chase and the children get excited because maybe, just maybe Josh texted her mom? because I assume pre-pubescent boys send texts to their crush's parents? which is where I proceed to insert an array of question marks because I completely missed the point and am no longer aware of what this has to do with credit cards and I start to worry about the advertisers who are so completely out of touch with their family that they can't go home and ask their kids about cell phone etiquette in the Justin Bieber age and instead make up these completely asinine scenarios and lose my business forever.

This is an issue about which I cannot be kind.

This is why when you tell me you are a marketing major, I am suspect about you and your future.

I'll bring this up again, I'm sure.

Mom says you like Julie.

so i started reading "in defense of food"

2010-03-05T12:25:00.000-08:00

As the name of this post indicates, I started reading Michael Pollan's opus In Defense of Food, which tells the story (mind you I'm only a third of the way through) of America's infatuation with treating food as the sum of its parts rather than food as a whole, which is a demonstrably terrible idea given that food companies are essentially evil corporations (see Food, Inc.) and will put in whatever sounds good at the time. This is bad.

So now, I'm thoroughly afraid of what is in my food, as I hopefully have more than half of my life left, and I ideally would like to keep it that way for as long as I can, and as most of you who know me know, I have a tendency to put shit into my body that probably shouldn't go into my body, i.e. the gallon of sugar-free monster that I have ingested this week that comes complete with unpronounceable supplements to the point where the "nutrition facts" don't even say "nutrition facts" but instead say "supplement facts" even though they could just as easily write "the following substances should not be put in your body, proceed at your own risk" as they come out the other side giving my urine a blindingly fluorescent hue that normal pee should not be.

So the problem, as I see it, I am going to the grocery store today after work and I don't really know what to buy, because the things I usually buy are not really food, but merely conglomerations of parts of food put together to 1) make me feel healthy, 2) make them last longer, and 3) save Monsanto money, and if I do buy something that is really food, I end up not being able to pay the rent. Because it's expensive to do the right thing, right Mookie?

So my plan is to buy some lettuce, because really, what can you do with lettuce; what preservatives can you really put in lettuce? I will make salad without the risk of getting processed food or drinking a monster, and I will live off salad until I figure out how to do the whole "eat natural" thing, even though when I eat salad I'm usually hungry again after 25 minutes (there's a reason the salad fork goes on the inside) therefore requiring me to eat more salad.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Meantime, my pee burned a hole in the urinal. And not the one that is supposed to be there. That's probably not good.

on state patty's day.

2010-02-28T18:45:00.000-08:00

State Patty's Day started a few years ago because St. Patrick's Day fell during spring break, so instead of losing out on arguably their single most lucrative day of the year, the bars in State College celebrated it two weeks earlier, called it State Patty's Day, made a killing, and then made another killing two weeks later when everyone came back for the real St. Patrick's Day anyway. This is funny. This is harmless. I had no problem with this.

Then we did it again, without any rationale, and have done it annually ever since, in spite of the fact that St. Patrick's Day has not fallen during spring break. As though college kids needed an excuse to drink, we went ahead and made one anyway. It keeps the bars busy, the green t-shirt industry alive, and oh yeah, costs the tax payers of the town you've infested for four-five years of your lives thousands of dollars in extra police and damages because you're all too goddamn retarded to do anything responsibly.

But enjoy the twenty some odd thousand dollars you spend every year to attend the number one party school, for your existence is short lived and while your primary concern is what is happening thirsty thursday at the number one party school in the country, some day you'll be in the real world, having to explain to people that yeah, you went to the number one party school, but you got a great education at the number one party school.

This is a symptom of the disease. The same disease that caused us to riot when we beat Ohio State one year, a team that we were supposed to beat. Its not that you invented your own holiday, or rioted because you didn't piss your own pants. Its that you have no respect for yourselves, the people who came before you or the town that supports you. You're primary concern is in the 72 hour weekends, where you find yourself judged on how much you can drink or which pile of douche at the party who claims to be the best beer-pong player you can upset as though thats some indicator of worth. This is the same irresponsibility that killed a freshman this fall, upon which to honor him we decided not to drink on a Thursday.

These things make me embarrassed to say I went to Penn State. Grow up.

old people aren't funny.

2010-02-27T10:18:00.000-08:00

Have you ever noticed that when you're having a nice, funny facebook status conversation with your friends, each one delivering gem after gem of single-lined humor, all of a sudden someone's mom chimes in with a buzzkill statement that can't even in fairness be considered a joke because it's so dumb or irrelevant and delivered with perfect grammar, followed by an ellipses and an "Lol", and it brings the conversation to a grinding halt because no one wants to admit that it was just stupid and no one wants to run the risk of saying anything dirty that might show up on someone's mom's message alert and just as quickly as it started, fun was forcefully removed?

This is because old people aren't funny.

I came to this realization once when I was Stumbling under the category of humor and I was in a particularly unfunny mood and in more of an analysis mode. Not that I was laughing at anything but the things I was laughing least at were all written in Comic Sans font and posted by people named Roger or Harry or Brenda or various other names for people exclusively over 40. They all had introspective undertones and were attempts at being witty while making you think or making you appreciate the simple things in life and other issues that are concerns for people faced with the grim reality of being past the halfway point in their lives and also being able to be forwarded through work e-mail. In other words they aren't funny, only light-hearted.

And while old people are as light-hearted as the best of them, they simply aren't funny. The funny dad who always has a beer in his hand and could do spot-on impressions that made our eleven year old selves pee our pants laughing simply doesn't translate very well over the internet. So while you may be a hit at weddings and family reunions and little league games, facebook status updates are not the venue for that brand of humor.

Moral of the story, if you're old, consider the audience when posting on facebook. Think deep down about who you're trying to make laugh, and what it is that you're saying. Is voice inflexion necessary to deliver the joke? If so, it won't translate. Are we aware of what it is your referencing? If not, fill us in. And most importantly, please don't say Lol!

the diet pepsi drinker's guide to wine.

2010-02-25T18:24:00.000-08:00

So, Larry and I decided to be wine drinkers. This seems simple enough with two constraints:

I have relatively naive tastes.
I'm only really doing it to feel cultured.

My poor palette has never genuinely gotten along with wine, further dissociating me from my objective. I've generally only played the beer and liquor game and in the beer and liquor game there is a fine, dangerous line between sophisticated and redneck and after a few you have a rough time walking it. So after watching Amelie I decided to come full circle and in order to fully appreciate the European lifestyle I long for and also to garner this arbitrary indignation of feeling cultured, I needed to start drinking wine.

Now, in Ohio, you can buy wine in a grocery store. At the local ACME, in order to buy alcohol with an out of state license, you need 11 forms of ID and two government issued visas, and after a 72 hour waiting-period, followed by a strip/cavity search, your name gets placed on a waiting list, a

nd hopefully if someone dies in the next 7 months, you can get some wine. So I went to Giant Eagle.

Which of course is where I ran into the "candy store" as it was once described to me, only with 140 different types of candy varying in price and circumstance from dirt cheap/anytime to a month's pay/only when eating medium rare rib roast. Riding the Amelie wave, I immediately walked to the French wine shelf and stared aimlessly at the price tags. Quickly I came up with an algorithm in my head (and for those of you that know me, you know how good I am at math) that considered overall price, total discount for the sale, how sophisticated the title sounds, and how much time I'm willing to stand in the wine section before I get paranoid that people will start thinking I'm a 17 year old kid who is trying to steal some alcohol.

And the result that first time was Red Bicyclette merlot.

And after the delicious diet pepsi I had before hand, Red Bicyclette merlot tasted every bit as sulfuric as I anticipated. This particular brand of wine may be stunning, but I don't like wine and I don't know the difference. Point of fact: I drank it straight from the bottle. Not sure how that plays a role in all of this.

But I drank it down, by myself, and watched Delicatessen. Cultured.

Updates abound, including my self-education in corkscrews.

bacon cheeseburgers and the fall of a christian nation.

2010-02-25T08:27:00.000-08:00

There is a growing threat to American society that has gone unnoticed in the wake of discourse over homosexual marriage. It is a threat to the moral integrity of a Christian nation. That threat to our establishment is bacon cheeseburgers.

In my America, I was raised on very sacred morals; a cheeseburger consists of American cheese and ground beef. Merriam Webster’s dictionary even defines a cheeseburger as “a hamburger topped with a slice of cheese.” I find it disgusting and appalling that people put bacon on their cheeseburger. Cheeseburgers naturally consist of cheese and ground beef, and anyone who chooses to add bacon to it is clearly in the wrong. I think that these vile individuals should be taken to a distant island and shot.

But now these queers want to call their sandwich a cheeseburger… these bacon cheeseburgers. If the state upholds an individual’s right to call these disgusting concoctions a cheeseburger, it completely destroys the sanctity of a cheeseburger. What is to stop someone from putting ketchup, mustard, or dare I say lettuce on his or her cheeseburger?

A society without a traditional cheeseburger simply cannot function. Within one or two generations, everyone will be eating bacon cheeseburgers, and the traditional cheeseburgers that America was raised on will be a thing of the past. Because everyone acts exactly as their parents, children will be indoctrinated with bacon cheeseburgers. And bacon cheeseburgers are just another step in the moral decay of the country.

I hereby decree the need for a constitutional amendment that would define a cheeseburger as the union between one piece of ground beef and one slice of American cheese. Any other arrangement cannot be recognized by the state as a cheeseburger. This is the next step in ascertaining the ultimate goal of minimal government. Legislating what an individual eats and how he eats it is exactly what the founding fathers meant when they wrote the Declaration of Independence and declared themselves free from the tyranny of bacon cheeseburgers. They created a country where god-fearing white men could go and be free and eat their god-given cheeseburgers. Let this forever be the land of the free, so long as you’re not a queer who puts bacon on his cheeseburgers.

if i'm only patriotic during the olympics, does that make me a fairweather fan?

2010-02-24T11:32:00.000-08:00

Checking the medal count, it appears that (at the time of press with the women's alpine skiing team taking a spoiler alert-worthy dive) the US holds a withering lead of three medals over winter olympic powerhouse Germany. I am overcome with an overwhelming sense of patriotism that I haven't really felt since Obama was elected, a quickly fleeting pride that ran off with promised bipartisanship. I shared a similar feeling in the previous summer games when China took home the most golds, but failed to conquer the US in runners-up. Any color blind American can be proud of that, right? Anyway, generally I am excessively patriotic for a fortnight every two years, but quickly revert to a state of relative shame/apathy. I am not particularly proud to be an American; there are some things I dig, but most things irritate me. But I'll be damned if we aren't good at sports.

So, my question is whether or not that makes me a fairweather fan. I admit that I am a bit of a fairweather hockey fan. When the Penguins are doing well, I'll watch hockey. When they aren't, I won't. But I'm also a die-hard Pirates fan, so I've paid my dues. It is hard to call someone a fairweather fan when their favorite team has had going on two decades worth of losing seasons in a row.

I am critical of the war-mongering my last president did, critical of the not not war-mongering my current president is doing, pissed off that we can't have social medicine, don't like guns, don't like slavery, and hate the freemarket. Is it okay that I can root for Evan Lysechek and Shaun White and Lindsey Vonn? Do I have to have an American flag posted in my front lawn to care?

I don't know. I wouldn't consider myself American by choice. But I'm also not a Pirates fan by choice. Both traits I inherited from my dad (of the otherwise useful genome I inherited, the one trait I could do without is being a Pirates' fan). Even when China was usurping the gold medal count, I still rooted for the US. Now that we have the winter olympics figured out, I've been paying attention more, I admit. So its hard to say.

If I am being a fairweather fan, I blame it on the Pirates. I've paid my dues, just give me this.