• Awkward endings to news articles

  Did you ever notice that online news articles often conclude with inelegant, poorly written endings? I’m not even talking about bad wording or syntax; I’m talking about those awful, lazy, awkward conclusions that only have the slightest bit of relevance to all of the information that precede them. These terrible endings always include some bizarrely inappropriate, non-topical point of fact that seems more jarring and confusing, rather than informative. It’s almost as if the authors just ran out of time before they could wrap things up satisfactorily, so they just reached for the nearest piece of trivia that came to mind, and they jammed it in at the end.

  I admit, this may be an esoteric thing to complain about, but don’t tell me that you have never read a single online article that ended as badly as the following example:

  . . . .
  
  Having run out of bullets during the sixteen hour standoff with police, the unidentified gunman killed his oldest and final hostage — 94-year-old Maurice DeCampo — by savagely beating him to death with a Snuffleupagus stuffed toy. The gunman then turned the toy on himself, somehow managing to jam the trunk of the stuffed Snuffleupagus down his own throat, thereby blocking his windpipe. The gunman had died by asphyxiation before SWAT team members could secure the building.

  

  Snuffleupagus is the lovable, woolly-mammoth-like Muppet sidekick of Big Bird on the Emmy Award winning public television series Sesame Street.
  

Who the hell are the editors who are letting this sloppy bullshit slide? I mean seriously, are these journalism professionals actually trying to be terrible at their jobs?

“Bullshit” is a common American English expletive, often used as an interjection, which connotes disapproval due to unfavorable circumstances, or disapproval in relation to misleading, disingenuous, or false language.

See what I did there? Somebody from the Associated Press should be calling me any day now with a job offer.






• Regular strength first aid ointment

  
  
  

  Why does Neosporin offer both regular strength and maximum strength healing ointments? What market segment is Neosporin trying to capture with a product that has inferior healing qualities? I can picture some guy standing in the first aid aisle of a drug store who would be thinking to himself: “Well, I like the idea of treating my cuts with an antibacterial cream, but I’d like to bleed as much as possible before my wounds are healed.”

  




• Talking like Yoda from Star Wars

  Yes, Yoda is an awesome character. I dare say he was too good for the travesty that was the Star Wars prequels. He deserved so much better than that.

  

  Yet as much as I love Yoda, I can’t stand it when lame motherfuckers try to capitalize on Yoda’s awesomeness by speaking in the little green Jedi’s backwards vernacular. For a taste of what I’m talking about, try opening up a new tab on your internet browser and running a Google search for the phrase, “does not a Jedi make”. For some variety, try diversifying the results by searching for the phrases “does not a” and “make” within the same search. You’ll find plenty of examples of jackasses on the internet who think it is clever and cute to imitate Yoda’s signature cadence.

  I’m sorry, but there is nothing remotely cool about talking like Yoda unless you happen to be Frank-Fucking-Oz himself. I tend to group those people who attempt to talk like Yoda in the same category as those pathetic people who think they can do a dead-on impression of Austin Powers. Both endeavors are equally capable of making a rational listener cringe. Both endeavors are equally lame.

  Imitating Yoda’s speech pattern is about as cool as young Anakin Skywalker’s “Yippee” in Episode I.

  Yeah … remember that shit? Star Wars is fucking lame.

  




• People who mock the Chinese for mispronouncing the letter “L”

  I understand where the jokes about bad driving come from. And I get it that our slanted eyes make us look wacky and blind. I’ll even let it slide that there are those who talk shit about about Chinese people eating cats and dogs, because there are other ethnic groups out there that eat far crazier things. But Jesus, people, get a clue about basic cultural and geographical differences. China and Japan are completely different countries. I mention this because it’s primarily the Japanese who famously have trouble distinguishing their Ls and Rs, because there is no “L” sound in the Japanese language.

  

  Many westerners lazily assume that if one rule applies to a single group of yellow people, then it must be that way across the board. I assure you, though: the phonetic “L” sound is alive and well in China and Taiwan. Haven’t you people ever heard of the Shaolin monks, or Lao-Tzu, the father of Taoism? How about Bruce Lee, Jet Li, Ling Ling the giant panda, Lucy Liu, movie director Ang Lee, or even Chun-Li of Street Fighter fame? You stupid dipshits. That whole “Asiany” side of the globe isn’t exclusively populated by an interchangeable mass of “Chinese” people, you know.

  Now that I’ve done my part to dispel that popular misconception about the Chinese, why don’t I set my people back a few more decades by reveling in the self-parody of Notorious MSG?

  China White, bitch.

  




• The “Legitimacy” of Twitter

  I am hardly the first person to hate on Twitter, but I sincerely hope that I am not the last. Why the hell is this gimmicky website so popular? The concept of Twitter is asinine and shallow. If you have something to say, then why would you arbitrarily limit yourself to 140 characters? I liked the original incarnation of personalized online expression back when it was called “blogging”.

  

  Yes, I realize that young people in Iran launched a would-be revolution back in 2009 with the help of their incendiary tweets, but I believe many of those protesters sacrificed substance for the convenience and immediacy that Twitter provided. Imagine how much more impressive it would have been to read a whole host of blog entries decrying the corruption that enabled a tampered presidential election, versus bullshit like, “Protesting Ahmadinejad ftw. The Green Movement shall prevail! Gather @ coffee shop by 1400. Farrokh: Bring your bongo drums.”

  Honestly, am I the only American who’s irritated by the fact that Twitter has gained so much undeserved legitimacy, that our politicians are now embracing it as a viable means of communicating their thoughts to the public?

  For the sake of illustration, I have randomly decided to pick on Chuck Grassley, the republican United States senator from Iowa. On September 2, 2010, Grassley tweeted the following message:

  Great Qs @ Moravia Senior Hi They have good perspective on fed govt thanks to good teacher

  Notice the abbreviations. You understand what Grassley is saying when he talks about “Qs” and the “fed govt”, but it might take you second to realize that “Hi” is short for “High School”. It also doesn’t help matters that this tweet lacks any kind of punctuation, presumably due to the fact that Grassley was worried about capping out his 140-character limit. For the record, Grassley’s tweet is only 74 characters. I don’t know very much at all about Senator Grassley. My opinion of this elected official, however, has lowered considerably because he seems to have no qualms about communicating his thoughts in text like an illiterate, net-speaking teenager.

  Why are so many public officials enamored by Twitter? Why do America’s news outlets pay such deference to what famous people are tweeting? Reporters quote tweets all the time in their news stories, as if the American public has been clamoring to hear topical commentary by somebody whose online handle might as well be “xXbigdixmcgeeXx”? Fuck Twitter up its stupid fucking ass.

  Do you remember when actress Brittany Murphy died in December 2009? Apparently, more than one news outlet saw it fit to quote Ashton Kutcher’s eloquent eulogy tweet during that sad episode:

  2day the world lost a little piece of sunshine. My deepest condolences go out 2 Brittany’s family, her husband, & her amazing mother Sharon.

  I don’t think any further explanation is necessary for you, the reader, to grasp just how much I hate the previous two sentences. But I will say this: If, when I die, anybody ever tries to euologize me in 140 characters or less by employing that abbreviated, internet shorthand garbage, I promise you that my corpse will rise out of the grave as Zombie-KZ, and with whatever portion that’s left of my departed consciousness, I will hunt you down and punch you in the fucking face.

Like I said, I’m just a cantankerous old crank. The world is full of things that I love to hate, and thank God for that.

One of my favorite stand-up comedians, Emo Philips, tells a relatively benign joke that kind of creeps me out whenever I think about it:

“I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this.”

The connection between the brain, consciousness, and human identity is really a bizarre thing. The brain is this squishy, unassuming organ that resides in the head, and it processes countless actions per second. It is the source of conscious and unconscious thought. It dutifully delegates commands to regulate respiration, digestion, muscle control, and immune system defense. It performs all of these actions in perfect concert with each other, and yet it perplexingly remains a mystery to itself. If it weren’t for the benefit of research and education, a person’s brain could potentially remain unconscious of itself throughout an entire lifetime. The thought of that is strange and unsettling to me.

In Julia Sweeney’s one-person monologue, Letting Go of God, Sweeney aptly illustrates the tension between biological truths and human perception:

When I think of myself as my innermost being, I just don’t think of it as a body function. My brain creates this idea that my “self” is not it “self”. I mean, I think of my “self” as something separate looking out from my eyes, listening through my ears, pulling the strings that make my body move. And that’s because the brain is not able to perceive its own functioning. And this is true for all of us, by the way, right from childhood. When a child is told that it’s their brain that thinks … they don’t think that their brain is them. They think their brain is this thinking, computing machine, something that is added to their “self” to help them understand things. And yet the mind is what the brain does, just like pumping blood is what the heart does.

So what is consciousness, and what is self? And how much room is there left for the existence of a soul? I’m afraid those are questions that I’m just not equipped to answer.

The more I think about my own brain, it seems stranger, and more unfamiliar to me. Yet isn’t that a strange thought to have? My brain — the computing center of all my feelings and thoughts — is unwittingly disturbed by its very own mundane existence and processes. There is a cyclical conflict inside my own head that exacerbates with each revelation, and with each reaction to those revelations. I think of my mind, and I realize that it’s just a function of my brain, and it spooks me to think that there is an entity within myself that can be so intimately intertwined with my identity, and yet it feels so distant and unfamiliar. But then my brain pushes back, almost as if it were offended by the very thoughts that it just created, and suddenly I find my head folding and unfolding in a perpetual spiral of self-doubt and confusion. It all just makes me very dizzy.

I consider the sensation a mild form of madness, something akin to the distress that Linus from Peanuts feels when he becomes aware of his own tongue.

These are the kind of thoughts that keep me awake at night. It drives me crazy, because I know my brain knows better than to provoke a fight with itself right before bed. This is probably where all of the insomnia comes from.

“Good Grief” indeed, Lucy.

I can’t wait for the days to be revered as a prophet, a shadow of a savior who led the way for the ones seeking refuge from the bleak, savoring the opportunity to exchange bewilderment for certainty, hardship for providence, protection from human nature, natural change, estrangement from rationality, a forfeiture to Fate. I can’t wait for those words of admiration. How loyally they’ll bend their brittle wills, formed from malleable shells of fervent understanding. Setting a revolution in motion from a distance, in the name of faceless Certainty, a deity of my design, who shall be praised loudly and with the softness of clasped and swollen hands, and the hardness of a saber.

Amen I say to you. I can’t wait.

Edric had some choice words to say about my previous blog entry. Little did he know that he was making the wrong choice when he decided to raise up on KZ without provocation.

Edric: that was disappointing. too much hype, not enough substance. i was expecting something funnier.

Kevin: i was expecting you to be funnier!

Edric: nice comeback, writer =)=)

Kevin: YOU are a nice comeback, writer!
…
Kevin: Nothing to say, huh? I’ll take your stunned silence as a concession of defeat.

Edric: oh…i’m sorry, did you say something? i was waiting for something worth responding to.
…
Edric: hah! now i stunned you into silence.

Kevin: oh, you’re still on that? that was so 3 minutes ago. you’re so 2000-and-late.

Edric: hatez

Edric: by the way, what’s up with you Zings and cats? get a real animal, like a dog.

Kevin: Awesome things meow. Cats meow; therefore, cats are awesome. Simple, really.

Edric: I never thought of it that way. You are a wise man, KZ. I especially enjoyed your sarcastic syllogism, which was humorously, intentionally, and satirically unsound. Might you have been teaching me a lesson by “coming down to my level”? Also, might I add that I appreciate the way you faithfully reproduce online conversations for the viewing pleasure of your blog readers? You report the truth with such competence and integrity. In short, you are my idol, KZ.

Kevin: hellz yeah, i don’t make shit up.

Edric: remember the time i dropped my ice cream cone, and i cried for 12 hours?

Kevin: maybe i should take a snippet of this conversation and post it in a blog entry. i’ll make it look like i won, of course, because on the whole, i did.

Edric: such lies. =)=)

Kevin: get your own blog then, and fight back!

Edric: those lies of yours are unbecoming of a wannabe journalist. =)=)

Kevin: i pay no heed to the voiceless

The message written on the bill says the following:

Please return this bill to me
Gary
. . . . . . . . .
Phoenix, AZ 85053
I am very poor.

You may be a poor man, Gary, but I tip my hat to you for having the guts to write your address on a stray dollar bill. You are a far richer man than you may ever know.

By the way, just so we’re clear on this, I’m not sending this one back to you.

Sometimes when I sit down to write, I end up sitting still for long stretches of time, hovering a pen over an empty page while I sort out my thoughts. More often than not, the words just never seem to come. It’s always during these moments when I’ve reached the most agonizing depths of writer’s block that my cat, Momo, will sit down to watch me write. Without having to look up, I’ll feel his gaze. It’s hard to ignore those wide, golden eyes piercing the back of your shoulder.

For as long as I remain still, Momo’s gaze never wavers. He stays fixed to his spot, forever vigilant, ever watchful of my desperation, my creative stupor. Momo is the fiery sentinel who guards the unwritten word, the gatekeeper of clarity and literary madness.

Momo will stare at me perplexedly with his limited understanding, asking me in that silent way of his, “You could be doing anything with your free time right now, so why are you sitting still?” Most of the time, I’m not even sure of the answer myself. Am I a writer, or aren’t I? Why does writing have to be such an unnatural, labored act for me? How can I be a novelist if I lack the discipline to write on command, or to update a blog on a regular basis?

Then my attention drifts to other questions. What is the point of writing, in the end? How far removed is the desire to be heard from the crassness of vanity? Why am I doomed to serve this agonizing compulsion to express a collection of thoughts that I never seem to have at my command?

Sure, Momo never intended to thrust my thoughts into a spiral of introspection and self-doubt, and yet he takes me there with that curious little stare. How can I write with that furry little inquisitor judging me so passive aggressively, posing those debilitating questions through his muffled, unspoken meows?

Momo has a staring problem.

For nearly one whole week, the wall behind my apartment building stared out defiantly at all those punk kids with its clean, untarnished surface. It was gray, and dark, and severe, but hell, at least it was clean. That was a good week.

By the following week, some hardcore, schoolyard gangster decided that enough was enough, and so he cut second period and most of recess in order to spray up the neighborhood walls. I came home from work that afternoon to find that the recently reformed “VNG, Fack You, Thug Life” wall was now the “S … s … SC” wall.

Isn’t that one of the saddest things you’ve ever seen? Either the person responsible for this tagging has no confidence in his penmanship, or else he just has a huge stuttering problem, and he’s using this public medium as a forum for catharsis.

Fail, motherfucker. You fail hard. You’re not fooling anybody with those fancy manuscript lines running down the completed “SC”. I still see your rough drafts on the left, you stupid amateur shit.

I might have forgiven the kid’s attempt to advertise his dubious gang affiliation with criminals whom he’s probably never met, but only if his graffiti had been the slightest bit impressive. In light of the genius that was once the “VNG, Fack You, Thug Life” wall, I’m offended that I have to look at this half-assed garbage every day.

Fail, motherfucker.

F … f … FAIL.

So where does that leave us? The entirety of human expression amounts to a feeble shriek, a derelict distress call doomed to echo in dutiful repetition.

That’s just my suspicion, anyway.

Honestly, I get it. But then again, I kind of don’t. Why do people always wait until the 1st of January before they initiate all of those lofty, life-altering projects of radical self improvement? I’ve never believed in making new year’s resolutions because I’ve never viewed the start of a new year as a monumental event. Life is life, no matter the date, and no matter the year. The quality of life is generally unaffected by the numerical value that we’ve assigned to our days.

Whenever people tell me they plan to lose weight as part of their new year’s resolution, I always have to prevent myself from blurting out something snarky like, “I never knew being a fat-ass was a seasonal condition.” Okay, so I’m a sarcastic, holiday-bashing asshole, but at least I’m skinny, you Auld Lang Syne bitches! But seriously, consider this: I lost thirty pounds in 2009 between the months of May and August. When I finally got serious about losing weight, I didn’t stop to make sure that the earth had made its full rotation around the sun before I got my shit together. If there’s something that needs to be done, and you aren’t doing what you’re supposed to be doing, then don’t blame the position of the planet for your lack of action.

So on that note, I’m going to contradict myself and make a new year’s resolution without any sense of irony. I resolve in 2010 to write a novel. I’ve been kicking around ideas for more than eight years now, and all of my good intentions have amounted to an unimpressive collection of notes and infrequent blog entries. This year will be different. I’m not sure what I’m going to write about, and I’m not sure if what I have to say is really all that worthwhile. I just know that I have to try for once, instead of coasting dreamlessly through the gentle, ferocious monotony.

Diana: That’s because all of your references are stupid and obscure.

Kevin: They’re not obscure, they’re subtle. You know, like the “b” in “subtle”? You don’t really notice it in there, and you never, ever see it coming. It’s just a silent letter. It’s kind of funny when you stop to think about the word, actually. The letter “b” subtly epitomizes the very essence of the word, “subtle”. That’s a highly unusual thing, isn’t it? I mean, isn’t it fascinating how the letter “b” in a word like “subtle” can so perfectly illustrate the definition of the word that contains it?

Diana: . . . (sigh)

Kevin: You like that, Diana?

Diana: Nope.

Kevin: That’s always your answer. Do you ever like anything?

Diana: Not anything that ever comes out of your mouth.

Kevin: Well, that’s not very subtle. That’s like the “s” in “subtle”. Or the “t” in “subtle”. Or to a lesser extent, the “l” in “subtle”. Because you see, you hear the “l”, but it’s not as pronounced as . . .

Diana: Kevin, go away.