For those of you not in the know Dan Quayle was the media darling of the early 90's. Of course, this really wasn't a good thing for him because he became famous for being a complete idiot. Then again, saying a politician is an idiot is a tired repetition of an already-known fact of life. The event that probably sealed the deal for the re-election campaign of the Bush-Quayle ticket occurred during an elementary-school spelling bee, attended by the Vice President as a photo-op. As the kid was writing the word "potato" on the board, Quayle urged the poor child to add an "e" at the end, despite the fact that he was holding the goddamn card with the word spelled on it. It's this sort of genius that makes you feel secure about the leadership of your own nation.
For any of you who have followed the old TV series Murphy Brown, he was a constant figure of satire and ridicule, and probably for good reason. Quayle previously came under heavy fire after an admonishing speech about family values and Murphy Brown. Apparently, his issue was the fact that she was a single mother and decided to raise the child without a father. While the role of the father can be helpful for a child's development, it probably isn't very wise to lambast people who like to find their own value outside the boundaries of relationships and marriage. This is even a dumber move since the womens' sufferage movement allowed this section of American society to vote. Besides, children are pretty fucked up with both parental figures anyway. What these people fail to realize is that the gender and number of parents is completely inconsequential to children, it's the quality of the parenting that matters the most. There are plenty of single mothers and single fathers that can have well-adjusted children.
What's the most disturbing thing is how invasive the government has gotten in regards to people's personal lives. These public figures keep on telling us how to run our lives when they don't seem to be doing a very good job with theirs, or even running the country which is their goddamn job title.
Don't even get me started on the oil crisis. Maybe people should rise up and storm DC, because obviously the current set of people have royally fucked the citizens of this country. Ironically, there's a nice passage about this sort of thing in the Declaration of Independence.
That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
I promise something funny in the next entry. Or something. May I never get political again.
Today, we've reached the 100th comic. I also redesigned the entire site from the bottom up. Unfortunately, there's still a few bugs to work out and the changes probably won't be seen until later today because of the delays with the hosting service. Hopefully the site looks nice. I decided that flat colors fit in well with the flat-color style of the comic.
Some people wonder what my position is on video game violence. You see, I don't think the video games make kids more violent than the children of previous generations. I just think the kids of this generation are dumber. Seriously, the problem isn't that the games are violent, it's that the kids don't differentiate the mechanics of games from reality. When people murder each other over some rare sword in an online game, or kill someone for beating them at Counter Strike, you get the idea that people don't realize that there isn't a respawn in real life.
You know whose fault this is? Parents. They are the ones who are supposed to teach kids that there's a difference between violence on TV and in real life. And if they've done that, maybe their kid is just dumb and good ol' natural selection culled them out of the gene pool. Seriously, it's not that much of a loss when a ten year old jumps off a building with a towel tied around his neck, because anybody that age that doesn't know better must be pretty fuckin' dumb.
Perhaps the video games are helping the evolution of humanity by giving dumb kids bad ideas. TV wasn't efficient enough.
This is a section that I call Artibtrary Stereotypes.
Sanctimonious, fear-based Catholic Midwesterners who live in homes with 13 garden gnomes, a duck-shaped postbox, a "bless this mess" welcome mat, Thomas Kinkaid paintings in their bathrooms with extra-large toilets with handlebars on the walls because the stretch-pants wearing, cheesecake-eating, Oprah-watching, Bible-thumping woman that lives there with her even fatter husband doesn't have the strength to lift her 400 pound frame off the john by herself because she's been on the Atkins diet and doesn't have any ready-use energy on hand, but the handlebar is rickety because the man of the house has to lean on it all the time because he gets winded taking a dump, but luckily they can afford to repair it because the state pays them welfare since being overweight is considered a disease these days.
15-year-old, female, grossly overweight pagans who wear indian beads, dream catchers and crystals on strings over their black "wolf-in-the-snow-in-the-forest-at-night" t-shirts without any understanding or belief of the cultures they're dealing with, with their boxes of vampire-themed tarot cards stacked in tow with their art books of smarmy fairy paintings, who try to cast their "magick" spells on people who are more popular and attractive than they are, and spending their evenings constructing mental universes where they aren't hideously disgusting on the outside AND inside, living in their upper-middle class, suburban Californian gated communities.
Birkenstock-wearing, pot-smoking, anarchists in Abercrombie & Fitch clothing in high school who believe that shitting on paper and using the word "man" after every sentence constitute as intellectual literary analysis, trying their best to sound intelligent with their proclamations that beat poetry isn't dead and that it's very different from getting high next to a typewriter, while at the same time hoping to someday become filmmakers within the corrupt capitalist system of Hollywood by making skater films with their homogenous skater friends showing them doing the same goddamn unimpressive move fifteen times in a row, frequently interrupted by glowing neon text that informs everyone that it's time for the cast to get a cheeseburger, followed by clips of horrific accidents involving them injuring their testicles on ramps.
One of the most interesting things about the internet is the sheer amount of drama it generates. While all of this is quite hilarious, it makes me wonder how people can get so emotionally wound up by things people say on the internet. Crying over what some idiot writes in an e-mail, or IM, or forum post is just plain retarded, because it's just some guy. Usually, the grieving process involves various angry e-mails, IMs to friends with quotes of what "the insensitive jerk" said, LJ posts with the names changed to creative titles like "person A", and cries for attention on public forums. It's absolutely incredible the amount of energy people spend this way. Perhaps the best way to illustrate the absurdity of this is to make a real-world comparison.
Bob, an everday office peon drives home from a long day at work, when suddenly he is cut off on the freeway. And he sees that it is Mike, from accounting! Bob, hurt so deeply inside by his co-worker's insensitive actions, quickly drives home and then cries for hours into his pillow. His sadness quickly turns to anger and a desire for pity, so he crafts 200 passive-aggressive post-it notes that he'll attach all over Mike's cubicle in the morning before work. Still not satisfied, Bob calls everyone he has in his address book, playing up the situation as a battle of good versus evil, that jerk Mike doing this horrible thing even though Bob has never done anything to Mike before. He absorbs the awkward sympathy from his friends, who don't really care but want to at least appear like good people, so they pretend to feel just awful about Bob's situation. All of these people will be buying caller ID the next day. As he hangs up the phone, Bob looks out the window and sees his neighbors sitting down for dinner. Oh boy, an audience! As the loving wife passes the mashed potatoes to her daughter, a mysterious stranger busts through the kitchen door, sobbing widly about a highway and accounting. He throws himself on their table, sobbing heavily and covering himself with their dinner. This lunatic's sobbing becomes so heavy that he proceedes to throw up all over their kitchen and inside their turkey, garbling something that sounds like "Ike" and "asshole" between vomits. The father of the household, realizing that they're dealing with a crazy person, tries to talk him down, much like attempting communication with a schizophrenic in the middle of a psychotic episode, while the mother makes a signal to her 8 year old son to call 9-1-1. In about 10 minutes, the family has convinced Bob that they are sympathetic to his problem, until the swat team arrives and fills him with enough tranqs to drop an elephant. Shortly before being shoved into the padded van, he shouts "Mike runied my life!", followed by a final vomit that lasts about 2 minutes, a new world record. The next day, the family sells their house and moves away, closing this dark chapter in their lives forever. And in the end, it wasn't even Mike who cut him off. It was John from procurement.
So next time you see someone on LiveJournal or on your favorite forum being a drama whore, remember the story of Bob.
