I've Discovered "Hyperbole and a Half"

A few weeks ago, a post by Mr. Sullivan led me to Hyperbole and a Half, and I spent much of the day giggling/LOLing uncontrollably at what I found there.

If you have not yet been to Hyperbole and Half, please go right now.

I think my favorite is "Why I'll Never Be an Adult". Like many of the 848 commenters, "I could have written that!":

I literally laughed for days, and still laugh every time I think of this highly personal vignette:

I begin to feel like I've accomplished my goals. It's like I think that adulthood is something that can be earned like a trophy in one monumental burst of effort and then admired and coveted for the rest of one's life.

What usually ends up happening is that I completely wear myself out. Thinking that I've earned it, I give myself permission to slack off for a while and recover. Since I've exceeded my capacity for responsibility in such a dramatic fashion, I end up needing to take more recovery time than usual. This is when the guilt-spiral starts.

The longer I procrastinate on returning phone calls and emails, the more guilty I feel about it. The guilt I feel causes me to avoid the issue further, which only leads to more guilt and more procrastination. It gets to the point where I don't email someone for fear of reminding them that they emailed me and thus giving them a reason to be disappointed in me.
(emphasis totally mine)

Then the guilt from my ignored responsibilities grows so large that merely carrying it around with me feels like a huge responsibility. It takes up a sizable portion of my capacity, leaving me almost completely useless for anything other than consuming nachos and surfing the internet like an attention-deficient squirrel on PCP.

"surfing the internet like an attention-deficient squirrel on PCP"!!! Is that not one of the funniest and most apt things ever written? Again, brilliant. Substitute chips & salsa or a Tombstone pizza (oh yeah, and vodka) for "nachos" et voila - c'est moi.

The final panel is perfect, and all too true.

OK, so as I write this it's only 10:35PM - but I've seen plenty of 3:17AMs in my time - and quite a few 5:17AM or 6:17AMs when I thought: Hey, it's getting light out there - should I go to bed?

Ah, technology.

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(It looks like some of the posts have been turned into YouTube clips, complete with Carmina Burana-esque scores - those literally had me in tears. I would link to them, but I've got a bit of the nv4_disp thing going on with this particular laptop at the moment, so I'm avoiding the YouTubes. Sorz. They are easily found, and worth it.)

For Scott G

Source: The incomparable Mangina Monologues.

Ian Welsh Sounds the Alarm

The headline reads: "When Medicare is destroyed is only a matter of when".

He predicts a future as slaves - yes, slaves, "in all but name" - for Americans too lazy, stupid, misled, or whatever to do anything to prevent it.

Given the unmitigated cruelty of the current band of Repulicans and the maddeningly wussy Democrats who "oppose" them (including our Bipartisan in Chief), I'm inclined to agree:

Welcome to the Repo culture. Everything you have, everything you are, can be taken away from you, and you are nothing but a series of revenue streams to your lords and masters. Fail to pay, and you won’t even be allowed to be a debt and wage slave, you’ll be in a cardboard box or a debtor’s prison.

Modern Americans are mostly descended from people who didn’t say “this pisshole country is worth fighting for”, they’re descended from people who said “screw this, I’m outta here”. Emulate them and leave, if you can’t leave do the other thing they were willing to do: prepare for a revolution and be willing to die in it.

Or accept your fate as slaves.

Your choice.

Today's Edition of "Why I Love the Rude Pundit"

Inimitable Rudeness:

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's eyes have the glazed over look of a man who just jacked off to a Facebook album of your niece's fifth birthday party.

Now that you mention it . . .

There's more (saints be praised):

Actually, that's not accurate because that assumes that Walker would try to hide his proclivities. Indeed, Walker seems more like the kind of guy who'd walk into that party with a Koch Industries dildo in his ass and tell everyone to watch while he yanked it to the musical chairs songs. God help the little girl who is in the last chair. For what else do you say about a governor whose official website has a press release titled "Walker Calls Democrat Legislators Back Into State." You got that? Not "Democratic," but the politicized, insulting "Democrat" as adjective. It's like getting a note from your boss on company stationery that calls you a "cocksucker."

Seriously. The Republicans, who love to label themselves the "grown-ups", are actually the asshole in the fifth grade classroom who gets off on disrupting everything by being the most annoying version of his asshole self that his fifth grade brain will allow him to be. How else to explain their joy in perpetuating the use (by alleged adults) of the idiotic, juvenile "Democrat"?

Walker starts this press release with "Out of respect for the institution of the Legislature and the democratic process, . . ." (Wait - should that be the "democrat" process?) Actually, asshole, if you really did have any respect for the institution of the legislature, you would call the other party in the legislative body by its correct name, instead of acting like a Vinnie Barbarino wannabe just to annoy libruls.

Yes, Pavlov would tell me to completely ignore it in order to extinguish that behavior - but it's just so breathtakingly assholish and dumb. I think that part of what makes it all so completely mind-blowing is the fact that these elected officials are supposed to be capable, mature adults - adults that an astonishingly large percentage of the population thinks are worthy/capable of governing - and yet, here they are, saying "Democrat", acting all "Wut?" any time anyone calls them on it, and it's not even clever enough to sniff Beavis and Butthead's crunchy pieces of Kleenex.

Industry Trade Publication . . .

. . . or is he taking / bragging about the measure of something else?

So that's how we are measuring performance these days? As if anyone ever doubted it.

I swear I've seen a former Advocate Men - ahem, personality - on the cover of this particular publication.

Worst Show Ever

OK, I've watched more than 10 seconds of Two and a Half Men. I admit it.

At least in doing so I've learned how truly horrible it is, and how frightening its popularity is as well. What kind of society thinks this vile misogynist crap is funny?

If anyone does not already know about a very excellent blog called The Mangina Monologues, please allow this to be your introduction. [The Li'l Bastard Comix are pure genius and some of the funniest, LOL things you will see on teh interwebs.]

Its creator has generated an excellent post regarding that show. An excerpt:

My greatest hope is that ol’ Chuckles dive into rehab sounds the death knell on 2.5 Men.

Oh please! Pretty please?!?

So, for the sake of humanity, let’s hope Chuckiepoo stays in rehab a good long time. In fact, let’s get him the best care money can buy.

What’s the number for Michael Jackson’s private doctor again??

The Michael Jackson's private doctor quote alone is worth a Pulitzer, IMHO.

Galveston

We have not had enough photos around here lately.

This is Galveston:

(Usual apologies for first-generation iPhone fuzziness.)

At any rate, this is some an Arc de Triopmhe-like (OK that's a stretch), very lit-up structure that they have here on Ship's Mechanic Row. I'm not sure of its purpose - but it is very bright and colorful. When I see it I think of the garish, non-genuine Christmas trees in A Charlie Brown Christmas.

Questions

Let me get this straight:

1.) So - if it gets down to 30 degrees in Houston, and if Dallas gets snow, the entire Houston area (including Galveston, 50+ miles to the southeast) has rolling blackouts because the grid can't handle everyone turning up their heaters? (Same for Chicago when it gets super-hot in the summer.) What year is this? 2011?

2.) Now that Uhmerkah, Jeebus's Favorite Country, the Most Exceptional Land of the Free (Refill) has "spoken" by "electing" John Boehner to be King (or something), our top priorities are re-defining rape in favor of the rapists and undoing the pathetic excuse for health care "reform" that Ronald Reagan's new BFF rammed down the throats of 1000% self-sufficient, totally-private-pay-for-health-care Teabaggers last year??

Just checking.

Land of the Free?

This. Absolutely.

The ruling class regards you as their greatest natural resource, and theirs to be exploited. America’s wealth was built on exploitation. First we exploited the Native Americans, by killing them and taking their land. Then we exploited the forced labor of African slaves. Then, economic policies have enabled predatory lenders to exploit multiple generations of immigrants and the otherwise poor.

If you think you aren’t being regarded as a slave or an Indian, ask yourself:

Are the richest 1 percent not enjoying the most wild-eyed orgy of prosperity since the time of the robber barons? Have financial lending institutions not taken your homes, after fiscal policies were put in place to enable predatory lending?

Have American wages not been suppressed, since 1980, until they are now essentially incompatible with actual living expenses? (Moyers points out that the income of average Americans — the bottom 90 percent — has increased by only $303 dollars in the last 28 years. The super-rich, on the other hand, have been having a real lulu of a decade.) Have insurance companies not been empowered to deny you health care and medical treatments, because their greed is regarded as being more important than your health? Have corporations not cut your pensions and benefits to the quick, while enjoying record profits? Are American children being given a fair and equal public education which can enable them to reach any goal or opportunity in our new globalized society? (No, actually: 2005, according to an article in the New York Times, was the year that 12th-grade reading and math scores were at an all-time low in the U.S. This is what happens when you keep cutting public school budgets.)

It is not unreasonable to infer from these nauseating statistics that if you make less than $250,000 a year, our leaders are casually planning for your children to grow up desperate and stupid, so that the ghoulish libido of imperial expansion will have warm bodies for America’s “voluntary” army — the employment of last resort. Alternately, they may go to a privatized, for-profit prison — the new American gulag of slave labor. The War on Drugs and the Three Strikes laws enabled a for-profit prison industrial complex to flourish, and now the U.S. incarcerates more people per capita than any other nation in the world, including China. The middle class is the new wretched refuse of our own teeming shore.

This is institutionalized rape of 90 percent of Americans at the hands of a klepto-capitalist, plutocratic minority acting in lockstep with itself. Our Congress and our corporations are now Imelda Marcos, and the boots are walking all over you.

It’s still not a race-war, a holy war, or a culture war. It is, it always has been, a class war.

Waaaa! Socialfascinazicommunism!!! Jesus! Librul media!! Uhmerkanexceptionalism! Guns!

Today in the Nooz

Peter Daou tweets:

Annoying that these #Egypt protests prevent us from getting continuous updates on Charlie Sheen's drug-fueled parties and his rehab.

I was thinking the same thing this morning when I happened to be in a room with a TV tuned to Showbiz Tonight the Today Show. The Charlie Sheen story (he wants privacy!!) was reported before the latest news from Egypt.