I was in a Whole Foods today and feeling very misanthropic; while the second condition is often a direct consequence in the first, this was different because I was craving the outbreak of a global thermonuclear war even before wandering into this madhouse of weird-looking fuckers jaggedly pushing carts of grossly overpriced produce and such around and jabbering on cell phones. I was spewing some kind of dour account of this or that deficiency in myself and others and seeding my lament with profanity when I noticed a sleeping baby being trundled by a foot or two away. I curbed my monologue until the infant and its oblivious mom were out of range and then started in again.

This made me wonder (not for the first time, as I have a couple of young nephews): What age can a human being attain before it’s unofficially no longer appropriate to swear around him or her with impunity?

Of course, this assumes two things: that there is in fact an age range from 0 to X at which hearing curses isn’t going to have a lasting neuropsychological effect, and that there are defensible reasons to avoid swearing around little kids in the first place. Most people I know would probably accept both. So on the surface this is a legitimate question. While I wouldn’t feel as if delivering a loud George Carlin monologue within inches of a sleeping six-month-old’s face was a constructive use of my time, I wouldn’t feel guilty about exposing it to F-bombs. On the other hand, I’m always careful to avoid this around hominids who are old enough to, well, seem to focus on what I’m saying, leaving aside the sobering and telling reality that some people never exhibit this behavior.

Hell, I’ll go with two years on the nose.

Until today, the pressing issue of how these two utterances differ subtly in meaning never crossed my mind. But upon hearing one of these this morning and realizing that my brain was expecting the other, I was forced to do a thoroughly worthless analysis and post my conclusions in the most irrelevance-friendly site on the entire World Wide Web.

“Uh-uh” in response to a question translates so a simple “no” answer. “Nuh-uh,” on the other hand, is used not so much as a reply to a query but as a challenge or refutation, in the spirit of “I disagree,” “Gonna call BS on that one” or “Fuck that noise!”

“Uh-uh,” however, enjoys a purpose that its slightly longer sibling does not: It may function as an imperative verb. For example, when snaking your hand up your girl’s inner thigh for the first time and hearing her say “uh-uh,” you know you’re being told to cease and desist. But were she to declare “nuh-uh” instead, you might not be dissuaded in the least and may even think that she’s encouraging you but telling you to aim for a sightly more sensitive spot.

By the way, I’ve anticipated all of you who have already made plans to respond to this with an “uh-uh” (if trying to be ironic on two levels) or a “nuh-uh” (if shooting only for one). Understand that this is a no-no.

The Freethinker, a British publication extolling the virtues of being unchained by superstitious adherence to outmoded and often goofy belief systems, seems to border on Onion-esque overreaching in its eulogy of Claire Rayner:

An atheist until the end: leading British humanist Claire Rayner dies at 79

At the heart of Claire Rayner’s many admirable accomplishments – as a nurse, writer, commentator, “agony aunt” and vice-President of the British Humanist Association – was her healthy skepticism and her utter rejection of religion.

But you would hardly guess this from this BBC report of her death from cancer, which – apart from saying that she is to have a humanist funeral – shamefully makes not a single mention of the fact that she was a leading figure in the British humanist movement and an outspoken atheist until the very end.

I understand and appreciate the mission of The Freethinker, something that would have resulted in being burned or otherwise tortured to death in most arts of the world a few centuries ago and would invite the same fate in the Muslim world today. But I think that in this case the writer may have left a little nugget of poo on his keyboard; not the type apt to go smearing the bowl upon flushing or stinking up a whole wing, but readily identifiable as a craplet nonetheless. As a god-free person myself I don’t see the need to point out–twice–that Rayner was an atheist “until the end.” That’s the kind of thing that seems more likely to fuel theocrats’ delusions than give them pause: Is it supposed to be a surprise when a vocal atheist doesn’t recant on her deathbed? And even if she had, would this have somehow lent credence to the idea that, say, there was once a handcrafted wooden boat that survived a forty-day rainstorm that flooded the entire globe and held two (or seven) or every kind of animal in existence?

I’m also not sure that it was incumbent on the BBC to explicitly identify Rayner as an atheist. It’s probably more useful to note her deeds–she was an award-winning journalist, a novelist, and a relentless medical crusader–than her beliefs. But I do like the article’s inclusion of what Rayner wrote about about Joe Ratzinger when he was fixing to come to the U.K. on some goat-fucked misinformation campaign or another:

I have no language with which to adequately describe Joseph Alois Ratzinger, AKA the Pope. In all my years as a campaigner I have never felt such animus against any individual as I do against this creature. His views are so disgusting, so repellent and so hugely damaging to the rest of us, that the only thing to do is to get rid of him.

I suppose it remains appropriate at times to point out that people can do great things without the hand of some skygod prodding them along (and can grandly fuck up without the devil egging them on). But this has been proven so many times throughout history that if the diehard delusionals who insist that atheism is somehow irrational haven’t gotten the message yet, they probably never will. Educating them is impossible, but maligning or simply ignoring them is not.

This morning I found an article called “The Eight Habits of Lousy Listeners.” I thought this might be of interest to the scrapes who read the shit I splatter all over my Facebook wall, so I posted the link there. This sparked an amusing comment thread and sparked my recollection of a genuinely appalling Internet phenomenon, known (aren’t they all?) solely by an abbreviation: TLDR. Read the rest of this entry »

First of all, if you’re going to return an item to the supermarket or any place of commerce while simultaneously making a purchase at the register, do not announce in mid-transaction that you left the receipt in your car and go doddering outside to grab it when there are three or four people waiting in line behind you. Secondly, if the receipt perishable item you claim was rotten when you bought it, make sure the date on receipt falls within the last six months.

I’m not sure how doing all of one’s grocery shopping at Whole Foods, living on a diet of compost and ineffective nutriceuticals, and toting around shopping bags that were manufactured during the Eisenhower administration translates into the bizarre combination of obliviousness and self-entitlement requires to perpetrate this kind of shit and smile while doing it, but I’ll know I’ve been in Boulder for too long when I start to empathize with the transgressors, who are as uniquely prevalent in this region as sub-13:00 3,000-meter runners are in Kenya’s Iten Province.

Talk about the bizarre “Red Sox Nation” phenomenon (more Sox caps in Denver-Boulder than Rockies caps, even with the latter a playoff threat) begat talk about Boston pro sports in general, which begat chatter about Beantown anglophilia (read: an unlikely preponderance of white players) which begat chatter about growing up in D.C. as a Sixers fan in Bullets-land, which begat a discussion of the 1978-1979 NBA Finals involving the Bullets and the Supersonics, which begat musings about Dennis Johnson’s career.

Me: “That must have been really early in his career. He went to the Suns right after that, right?”

Ken: “No, the Warriors first. Then the Celtics.”

Me: “Hell, he’s been retired for a lot longer than I realized. So easy for the years to get away from me now.”

Ken. “Yeah. Now he’s not just retired and an ex-Celtic, he’s dead.”

Me: (Snicker)

Ken: “You laugh.”

Me: “Hey, beats Len Bias’s NBA career. Wait. He’s really dead?”

Ken. “He’s been dead for a couple years.”

Me. “You fucking serious?” (quick online search) “He’s been dead for over 3 1/2 years! Heart attack.”

Ken: (Snicker) “I’m aware of that. Wait, that long?”

Me: “How’d I miss that? I’ve missed whole weeks of news at a time thanks to being drunk, but the last athlete death I remember missing for that reason was Willie Stargell. Same with you, I bet.”

Ken: “You wish I was as drunk as you.”

Me: “What the fuck was I doing in February 2007? Wait, never mind.”

(Brief lapse in conversation)

Me: “I remember when Michael Crichton died. Well I remember hearing about it, weeks after the fact.”

Ken (looks up from his laptop for the first time in the exchange): “The writer? He’s dead? When did that happen?”

Me: “Year and a half ago, I think.”

Ken: “Damn. I’ve read that a bunch of that guy’s books.”

Me: “So where were you?”

Ken: “Drunk. Plus I like the NY Times, I just never read it.”

Me: “We suck at this celebrity death thing. Oh, you ever watch any of the ‘Drunk History’ videos on YouTube?”

Ken: (Loads YouTube)

Etc.

Since about Valentine’s Day I’ve been visiting a particular message forum that’s much like any other Internet babble-board except that the women are a little creepier. There’s this one chick who, I noticed right away, is kind of clever with the one-liners and such, and when I first noticed how many of her posts were replies to my own, I chalked this up to her being just one of those innocently gregarious types who responds to pretty much everyone in every topic.

In the six or seven months since, however, I’ve noticed that this isn’t really true. I’ve kept an exact count of the fraction of her replies that 1) are in direct response to my posts, 2) are responses to others’ direct replies to my posts, 3) are replies to those posts, 4) contain vague references to someone who very well could be me, and 5) seem completely unrelated to anything she might have ever seen me express. (I’ve had to do this by hand since the board lacks an automated post-count feature.) As it turns out, it’s obvious that at least 498 out of 513 of her posts in this span fall into one of the first four categories.

This was an especially disconcerting discovery, because this woman had mentioned being married with a couple of teenage kids and also because, frankly there’s something about her that’s kind of alluring. It’s hard to say just what, other than the focused flirting she does with me that she probably assumed I haven’t picked up on–for example, talk about the SF Giants’ chances of making the playoffs, a joke about a talking dog, YouTube videos of I Love Lucy clips, and so on. So this soon became a real concern, because even though I wouldn’t act in any way on any urges I might have in the future, I didn’t want to accidentally become a source of conflict in someone’s marriage (it wouldn’t be the first time). She doesn’t use her real name or post pictures of herself, but I was able to blow up a tiny photo of her from a huge road race where only part of her number and none of her head was visible. Through a combination of meticulously searching through the records of the race to cross-reference the numbers of the runners around her in the photo with finish-line times, e-mailing the photo company giving the part of the bib number I could see and saying I forgot the rest of it and wanted to order “my” pictures, and the services of a PI (cost me over $900!) I was able to get a name, street address, DMV photos, her social security number, the name of her ISP, her husband’s name and place of work, her kids’ names and that of their high school, and the date of her last Pap smear. It turns out that she lives only 1336.2 miles from me, so I’m on my way there later to camp in the woods near her house and just watch her in secret to make sure this crap doesn’t get totally out of hand.

Anyone ever been stalked like this? I’ve agonized over the right course of action but I think calling the cops would be premature.

How about one that takes things a step further and both establishes and reports on a widespread reality that is both contrived and utterly legitimate–sort of a cross between The Truman Show on a societal scale and a straight ongoing documentary.

The burden of stupid has become unmanageable in the United States (and by extension Canada, which is forever destined to be sucked along in the noxious wake of fuckery generated from below). At a minimum, even if it’s not ruining society, it’s created sufficient tension to divide America not on the basis of the actual merits of policies and ideas, but depending on who can yell the loudest. We’re dumb enough to openly champion leaders and potential leaders who are so fucked up that they remind us of ourselves–which is exactly why we shouldn’t vote for them.

So one quick and handy solution to the fact that this divide is unlikely to close via intellectual means would be to just physically separate the warring factions from one another by taking all of America’s stupid people and getting them the fuck out of the way. A huge domed climate-controlled enclave someplace large enough to comfortably contain these 80 to 100 million or so people could be located somewhere in, say, what is now eastern New Mexico and western Texas, parts of Montana and Wyoming, or even Alaska. Something covering about 100,000 square miles would be sufficient, as this would create a megacity with approximately the same population density of New Jersey.

The social and governmental parameters of the place would be simple. Every nominal requirement of dumbasses would be cheaply and readily available: Bibles, all-you-can-eat fast-food and buffet restaurants, access to FOX News and its TV and radio and Internet cousins, some print-media equivalent of the Washington Times, etc. Libraries and schools and research institutions would be banned; attendance at both NASCAR functions and church services (Christian-only) would be mandatory and all citizens would be forced to range-qualify for marksman’s badges by the age of seven. The only legal commercial entity (other than the restaurants) would be Wal-Mart. Homosexuality in any form, let alone same-sex marriage, would be grounds for dismissal from this dystopic neo-nation, as would recycling, the word “green,” and the use of hybrid cars. Excess melanin deposits in residents’ skin would result in reprisals and sometimes outright rejection as well.

For the sake of simplicity and because this is my idea, I’ll decide who qualifies as stupid. With that out of the way, who wants to help me design this place?

I’m just in an ecumenical and filial mood today and thought I’d throw this out there. I will also take a pre-emptive strike at anyone who understandably suggests that I have just described the state of Texas perfectly. There are 23 million or so Texas residents and a great many of them–including many here–are not happy about either the state’s bad rap or the undeniably huge number of people helping to cement its worldwide renown as a vicious backwater rushing unmolested toward a bygone century. There are numerous states that would fare more poorly than Texas if their populations were to multiply fivefold or tenfold. Just imagine a place like Mississippi or South Carolina with no Austin or loci of high-tech industry or solid university system to redeem it. Even my currently bluish native state of New Hampshire, if allowed to bloat to almost twenty times its size, would suddenly be home to the world’s greatest concentration of lunatic libertarians and a veritable carnival of genetic roulette owing to pernicious inbreeding currently limited to swaths of Grafton and Coos counties. No one wants that.

Also, I mentioned climate control and a dome. Texas, as I’m sure you know, is hot as unlubricated fuck in the summer and this, not the citizenry, was why I could not stand being in San Antonio for six long midsummer weeks. There are strip clubs and Negroes and homosexers too; they may not be embraced with open arms, but they are nevertheless legal. And not everyone recognizes the Christ Jesus as his or her personal lord and savior.

So in summary, this place would make present-day Texas look like Haight-Ashbury.

If they are going to introduce something this frigging dumb into the Tour, why not go all-out and put a ramp across the width of the roadway during one of the nasty descents in the Pyrenees? Imagine the peleton soaring en masse at 60 mph off the lip of this bastardized Evel-Knievel-style obstacle, bound for a spectacular array of fates varying only in their levels of morbidity and mortality.

That’s it.