>>> Text-Heavy
By staff writer E.E. Southerby
Volume 62 – January 4, 2004
Now Playing: “Disco 2000” by Pulp
Welcome to 2004, everybody. I hope you all enjoyed your holidays as much as I did. By this, of course, I mean ‘not very much', because I'm a bitter hack internet writer who spent his Christmas vacation waking up at 4pm and checking email 50 times a day. As it turns out, that doesn't actually increase the amount of email you get. But you feel like you've accomplished something. Anyway, without further ado, here's what happened:
-I swear if one more person tells me that the reason I'm tired after Christmas dinner is because there's tryptophan in the turkey I'm going to lose it. How about maybe it's not the tryptophan that's making me tired, but rather the fact that I just spent an hour listening to family I hate tell stories I've heard before? You and your tryptophan can just screw right off.
-Did you know that Jerry Springer is still on the air? I thought it was cancelled years ago. Why didn't anyone tell me? The thing I used to love about Springer was the fact that they gave each show a name. How many different ways can you think of to paraphrase the words “I'm cheating on you”?
-Actually, that's not my favorite part of Springer. I love the fact that whenever someone gets naked the studio audience goes absolutely apeshit, while meanwhile on TV they've pixelated all the good parts so you can actually see less skin than you could when they were just wearing clothing. It's like they've created antinudity.
-Why do they even bother numbering magazine pages? It's like 20 pages of advertisements, then a table of contents, then another 40 unnumbered pages, then page 63, more ads, then 71, then 108. It just doesn't make any sense. (I thought of that ‘joke' while leafing through a copy of Hustler at the airport, and then I thought: “Who the hell is going to buy Hustler at the airport? Are they planning on sneaking it into the airplane's washroom?”)
-Quote of the Moment: I went to a restaurant named Moxie's and ordered a Moxie's Margarita (I like alliteration. Leave me alone.) The waiter asks me “Do you want to Moxiesize it for an extra $2?” Problem is, I don't know if this is a good deal or not, since ‘Moxiesize' isn't found in the Standard Weights and Measures of the Imperial OR Metric systems. I panicked, as is so often the case when I don't know what to do at a restaurant, but I ended up declining the Moxiesize. As a general rule, you should be wary of any restaurant that has to make sizes up and name them after itself.
-I like how people make fun of karaoke yet think American Idol is the greatest thing ever. It's the same damn thing, you fools.
-Have you ever picked up a newspaper and read a “shocking” article like ‘Over Half of All High School Students Choose Abstinence'? This doesn't strike me as true. I think back to high school, and over half the students I knew didn't CHOOSE abstinence. They chose to play ‘Dungeons and Dragons' and watch Sailor Moon. Abstinence chose them.
-Somebody needs to explain the ‘Milkshake' song to me. You know, the one that goes “My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard, and they're like, it's better than yours.” Do you think even the writers of this song know what it means? It sounds vaguely sexual in that hard-to-pinpoint sort of way. But then, that's also what I thought when I first heard the term ‘Shawshank Redemption'.
-Things That Aren't Called What They Should Be: I was recently told of a rather juvenile form of public humiliation called ‘pantsing', wherein a pack of children with too much pent-up sexual frustration descend upon an unsuspecting kid and pull down his pants. That's it. That's the whole joke. The thing that gets me really upset, though, is that the word ‘pantsing' is a counterintuitive name for this form of torture. ‘Unpantsing' would make more sense. Because to me, ‘pantsing' would be when the group of children surround a lone child who's walking around wearing NO pants and then the leader of the pack (who's probably, not that I like calling upon racial stereotypes, a Hawaiian kid) says: “Boys… Get the cotton dockers.” Now THAT's pantsing.
-One of the many perks of being a big-time local comedian is being invited to attend lavish New Year's Eve parties complete with fantastic free food and populated by famous people. It was, without a doubt, the greatest New Year's Eve ever. Only trouble is, some famous people can just be jerks. Like when I saw Ray Romano, and I went up to him and said “Hey, aren't you Ray Romano?” And he was like “No.” But he totally was.