Archives for September 2004

One of my current pissah-projects is the redesign of a humor site based around the term Masshole, kid. For those of you who don’t know, simply put – a Masshole is a resident of Massachusetts. But it’s deeper than that, you cawk. You can’t just move here from Poughkeepsie and start referring to yourself that way. Massholes aren’t created on the fly, kid – they’re either born or Boston bred over many beer-and-sox-soaked years, dude.

We’ve come up with a lot of funny stuff for this site so far, and I can’t wait to roll it out to everyone in a few months. In the meantime, dig this:

I found a local T-Shirt company who are quietly making nifty Masshole T-Shirts some of you might want to know about. If you’re a certified Masshole, love the feeling of 100% cotton t-shirts against your body and have been looking for something in a Fenway/Highway 93 green, check them out, kid.

Construction of my parent’s new house in Portland, Ontario Canada is now off to the races. To have the keys to an actual physical house that belongs to my family after 5 years of parental trailer transient behavior is going to be absolutely wonderful.

This is actually the back of the house, which faces the Big Rideau. Those tall windows above the back door will look out onto the lake, but there are enough trees on the property that there’s still an element of privacy. We can see the lake, but the lake can’t really see us. And that’s good -because I’ve been rather worried about pirates.

The top floor has 2 bedrooms and a bathroom, and I think there will be another bedroom somewhere on the first floor. My father is skeptical, but I see a lot of potential for the basement. We could easily turn it into a bar and maybe even fit a pool table or at least a dartboard down there. There’s also a garage separate from the house that has a loft which I want to see turned into a bunkhouse of sorts. The best part of having a place like this is being able to entertain – and entertain we shall. But never pirates.

There was a cat in a cage on the Subway this morning. He wasn’t by himself – his people were with him. Woulda sucked if he was alone, cause again he was in a cage and he’d be pretty much f*cked. He was orange and white and mewing incessantly.

I have always had this gift with cats. I can pick up even the wildest of felines, and I have this secret hold that I do where they’ll always just go limp and relax. Might also have something to do with the finger in the butt.

Anyway, I made eye contact with the cat. It stared at me for a bit, cried out again briefly and then shut up. I didn’t hear him mew again for the rest of the ride. Maybe my steely gaze intimidated it. Maybe word has gotten around the water dish that I violate the odd cat with my pinky.

My own cat, Boss – I’ll admit that I have one as I’m comfortable with my sexuality – is remarkably obedient. He comes when I call him, does tricks, yaps incessantly and loves people. He’s like a dog. Or Bryan Whitely.

But I’m good with the cats.

As my friend Mike would put it, my favorite ‘fish-wrapper’, The Boston Globe, decided to run like the wind with a story which apparently proved that some of Bush’s military files were concocted recently – and then made to appear as if they were written in the 1970’s.

The jist is this: Accusations of forgery can be proven because certain documents were printed with “proportionally spaced fonts” that did not come into use “for office memos until the introduction of laser printers, word processing software, and personal computers. They were not widespread until the mid to late 90’s.” Clutch the pearls!

What a scandal. This changes everything. In fact, Katharine Q. Seelye from Free Republic goes a step further: “I am saying these documents are forgeries, run through a copier for 15 generations to make them look old. This should be pursued aggressively.” That’s quite an accusation, Ms. Seelye, but it sounds like you’ve done your homework and unearthed a real administration-killer here.

That is if IBM hadn’t actually introduced the proportionally spaced typewriter in 1941.

Keep digging, kids. You’ve got, oh, 54 days left until November 2nd.

During University of Guelph summer holidays, Gazza, JV and I used to wash windows in Oakville, Ontario. We’d get up at 5:30 and usually work through until 7 or 8 at night. Long hours, but $600+ a week was a fortune to a student, and we’d usually get to take the entire month of August off. Those two summers were hectic – there were good experiences and bad experiences on the job. We once washed a house made entirely out of glass which was pretty cool. But then there was the time we were scrubbing siding with TSP and paint chips began to flake off like confetti. They clogged a storm drain and then flooded a very nice lady’s finished basement. That went over like a belch in church.

My point being, summer jobs in O-Town can be stressful – but never once did I consider mutilating a co-worker (alright, so maybe there was that one time Gary yelled at me after I shattered a toilet tank by dropping a window pane on it). Apparently times have changed. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the Jesus Chainsaw Massacre DVD has now outsold Return of the King. Even the church is getting into torture and dismemberment. Gratuitous violence seems to be the order of the day, and in Oakville – it was yesterday.

Long story short (I have real work to do) crew of landscapers are working at a job site at Lakeshore and Navy Street near Sharkey’s. Female landscaper makes comment to male landscaper who also happens to be doing treework with a loud, smoking Husqvarna. Male landscaper loses his sheehiznit and buries chainsaw in female landscaper’s back. Read it for yourself here.

I also find it odd that Gazza submitted this story, and was recently photographed with the chainsaw man himself, Leatherface. And by odd I mean really disturbing.

Being a Republican in Hollywood can be tantamount to career suicide. It used to be the other way around. 1947 saw the HUAC hearings that would eventually lead to the creation of the Hollywood Blacklist. But nowadays, most of the powerful studio heads, agents and opinion-makers seem to be… wait for it… leaning to the left. And you thought I was going to say “Jewish”. Shame on you.

It comes as no surprise then, that conservative stars tend to keep quiet – while liberal icons never seem to shut the f*ck up. Leonardo DiCaprio went on tour with Michael Moore to promote Farenheit 9-11. Danny Glover was arrested last week at a protest outside the Sudan embassy in Washington. Martin Sheen continues to make a nuisance of himself whenever out-of-doors and I won’t even bring up Sarandon and Robbins out of fear that I may spontaneously combust.

It’s for that reason that I can’t help but salute the Republican superstars that risk all and rear their ugly heads from time-to-time. But are the vocal ones really helping the cause? Ted Nugent is free to advise me on the correct way to skin a boar if he’d like. And if Brooks and Dunn want to give me a hands on “Boot Scootin’ Boogie” lesson I’m game. But on matters of politics I’ll look elsewhere for advice – and to more credible celeb-citizens to stand up for the party.

I recently found a great list of self-professed Republican celebrities and wanted to share it with you. There are some surprises and then there are some… “duh!”s.

Given: Hank Williams Jr., Clint Eastwood, Oak Ridge Boys, Pat Boone, Tom Clancy, George Steinbrenner, ZZ Top, Mel Gibson, Don King, Robert Davi, Dale Earnhardt Jr., Crystal Gayle, Charlie Daniels, John Tesh, James Caviezel.

Shocker: James Caan, Adam Sandler, Norm MacDonald, Paul McCartney, John Travolta, Charles Barkley, Sean Astin, Sharon Osbourne, LL Cool J, Dennis Hopper, Danny Aiello, Vince Vaughn, Marilyn Manson, Mike Piazza.

Regardless of their stature, I wish more of them would speak up and drown out some of the silly twats that are currently influencing the way America’s youth is going to vote in November. MTV’s Rock The Vote (for Kerry) and Choose (Kerry) or Lose campaigns have swamped media outlets that cater to the 18-25 demographic with partisan advertising that is currently scaring the hell out of me. But regardless, thank God Lil Kim registered this year.

Prisoners get creative. There was The Great Escape Tunnel, The Shawshank Redemption chess set and the paper mache dummies from Escape from Alcatraz. And I remember many episodes of Oz where the prisoners would drink some concoction called Pruno that they distilled in a remote janitorial closet. In between ass-rapings in same said remote janitorial closet.

But if there were an Oscar for creative brig intoxication, it would have to go to a group of cons in Grafton prison in New South Wales – where a group of inmates have been milking spiders for their venom, diluting it with water and then injecting it into their veins. And we’re not talking about a few daddy-long-legs here. These lads kept four deadly Aussie Redback Spiders as milkable pets. Think a cow with eight legs. Or a spider with a little mini-udder. Actually completely forget that I just went off on that tangent, please.

Alright, “deadly” doesn’t really begin to cover it. These little bastards are a close relative of the black widow, and are even responsible for the odd down-under death. “The venom acts directly on the nerves, resulting in release and subsequent depletion of neurotransmitters.”

There’s a Flaming Lips tune called “The SpiderBite song” which I always thought was a euphamism for heroin induced needle tracks. So I found this spider milk article strangely ironic. But after a quick bit of research, I found out that Wayne Coyne actually based the song around the time he provided a hungry arachnid with a snack while cleaning his garage and had to go to the hospital. So that angle went out the window like a Great Depression stockbroker.

One politician, from the current NSW government’s opposition, remarked “NSW prisons are more like a holiday farm than a prison system.” I’ll take Cabo and a cold sixy of Corona over spider spit anyday thanks, mate. But maybe the politicians should be worried that the practice of spider juicing could spread beyond Australia’s prison system. Or already has – that theory would explain Savage Garden, at least.