Underpants On The Outside

The ugly guy who looks like me is Big Brother. The vicious-looking mammal beside him is his son. According to my mom, I looked that cute when I was his age, but there is absolutely no photographic evidence to back this up. Nevertheless, if it’s true…well…he’s got about eight more years before things turn south. Sorry, kid. Welcome to the family.

While I hope he’s got his mother’s genes when it comes to preserving his good looks, I have no doubt that his predatory instincts come from his dad’s side:

You see that? You can’t teach that. You either have it or you don’t. And the men in our family have it. (I’m told by Wonder Woman that this is almost exactly how I first “made my move”, even down to the same landing spot on her scalp.) We are a carnivorous and merciless species. Frankly, I was amazed at my brother’s good fortune at getting these shots (not to mention surviving the experience); nature photographers spend years waiting to capture that kind of action. I called him to find out what sort of high-speed sports-photography settings he was using on his camera.

“I was just hitting the button manually every two seconds or so.”

Assuming an initial distance of 6 inches, (I measure everything in six-inch lengths. Wink-wink, ladies.) that means my nephew has a takedown speed of three and one-third feet per minute. It would appear the gazelles can rest easy for now; the boy isn’t so much a leopard as he is a Venus Fly Trap. Nevertheless, he should still have success hunting human females, who are mesmerized by adorability and can be lured into his open, waiting maw…

Go on in, sweetheart, he won’t hurt you…

(For those of you looking for more hard-core cute-on-cute action, go to www.twosloths.com)

There’s nothing like the morning after thanksgiving. I don’t know about everybody else, but it’s the only day of the year where I wake up in pain, confused, disoriented, and somehow positive that the one thing that can restore my equilibrium is Stove Top stuffing.

As an added bonus, Wonder Woman had to go to work today. I realize that that sounds mean, but please understand how much enjoyment I derive out of making fun of her. (Hi, baby! Wish you were here!) Of course I like spending time with her, but even at this point in our relationship there are activities that I enjoy that she doesn’t understand, so today I’m like Ferris Bueller, if Ferris had no desire to see or experience anything other than food-based hedonism and naps. For instance, I can positively say that if I wanted to sit around my apartment today writing a blog post while wearing nothing but a thin layer of turkey grease, I could do it! Hypothetically of course. (giggle)

Here are some of the things I was thinking about yesterday instead of all the things I’m grateful for:

Ask anyone over the age of 25 and they’ll tell you that Thanksgiving is the best day of the year, because Christmas and Channuccquah (you don’t know how to spell it either) suck once you’re responsible for buying OTHER people presents. Meanwhile everybody likes eating. I bet that every November, other countries watch and wish that they’d had American Indians in their country a couple hundred years ago. (What’s up NOW, China!?!)

If people are anything like me, there are certain elements that they require at a Thanksgiving dinner, and it’s upsetting if things aren’t right. For instance, two years ago, we went to a member of WW’s extended family. They are tremendously sweet people; sweet to a fault, in fact. They had invited vegetarians and VEGANS (for fuck’s sake…VEGANS!) and tried to be accommodating hosts, meaning that we had one good turkey and a bunch of crappy side dishes. In my opinion, Thanksgiving should be the one day of the year that it is legal to hunt vegans for sport. We left hungry. I intend to forgive them in eight more years. Yesterday, as we were walking to her parent’s house, WW informed me that we wouldn’t be having gravy and her parents don’t have cable, so, no TV. They say when you marry someone, you marry their whole family. Well, right there, you see two big reasons why I’m still not ready to marry WW. They’re nice and all, but that only counts three hundred and sixty FOUR days of the year. I think I’d actually prefer it if they were anti-Semitic. But instead of breaking up with her, I decided to make the damn gravy myself. (She’s lucky that coin landed heads-side up!) And y’know what? It was awesome. It was full of my favorite flavor: righteousness. Our love is renewed.

As much as people idealize the Thanksgivings of their childhoods, I have to say, my brother has a damn good one going with his in-laws. He married into a gigantic, close-knit family, and they understand what the holiday is all about: old-fashioned patriarchic family values. By which I mean that on Thanksgiving, men don’t do SHIT. The only thing they are responsible for is the deep-fried turkey (there are usually one or two others), meaning one guy stands outside watching it, and the rest come out to bring him a beer, let him know the score or tell him when a particularly good play was made. (If they feel up for it, they might act the play out.) Other than that, all they have to do is eat, drink, play with the kids, and wake up when the pie is ready. They don’t even clean, yet the women are all cool with it, because it’s Thanksgiving. I still haven’t figured out how they set that up; all I know is that it makes Charlie’s day at the Chocolate Factory look quaint.

Uh oh – in all this reminiscing my grease-coat has gotten dry. Time for another Thanksgiving sandwich* and gravy rub-down. Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!

*Turkey, stuffing, gravy and cranberry sauce…on bread. Because non-edible plates are for chumps.

It’s taken me too long to write this, but a travesty has occurred. A hero has been silenced.

I’m talking about a man who has saved Los Angeles and/or the universe from nuclear fire and chemical plagues. If the ancient Egyptians had experienced the terrors he faces in an average work day, they not only would have freed the Jews, they would have sent them on their way with gift baskets and some maps. He has been shot, stabbed, poisoned, trapped, beaten, and tasered*, and regularly goes 24 hours without taking a shit. Yet Jack Bauer has finally met the one force on Earth that can stop him. A bunch of writers.

Fox has officially postponed the next season of 24 indefinitely due to the writers’ strike. I always thought the worst thing the Writer’s Guild ever did to Jack Bauer was Audrey, and for that alone they deserved an evening in Jack Bauer’s Oubliette of Agony**. But to shut him down entirely?? Highly trained terrorists couldn’t do that. By the transitive property, that means that the Writer’s Guild is worse than terrorists. You heard it here first.

These are men whose collective upper body strength would suggest they spent their childhoods selling Thin Mints, yet they were able to incapacitate Jack Bauer by simply not going to work. Meanwhile, Jack Bauer wouldn’t miss a day of work if his life depended on it. (I don’t mean that figuratively; Jack seriously ups his chances of dying just by going in to work in the first place. Of course, it also maximizes his opportunities to inflict pain, so he takes the bad with the good.)

If the average writer is anything like myself, he noodles around on the internet for a couple hours debating who to start on his fantasy team, starts writing around 11:30, hits a snag around a quarter to one and goes out for a burrito. Compare that to Jack Bauer, who in an average work day will be incapacitated up to fourteen times and his first eighteen to twenty plans will go horribly awry. Despite all that, he doesn’t complain about five or six bullet holes, so you certainly won’t hear him whine about “unfair shares of internet revenue.” You hear that, Writer’s Guild of America?!? Thanks to you, Jack Bauer isn’t on the job! Maybe the next nuclear bomb will go off somewhere a little more close to home than VALENCIA, and then we’ll see how much your royalty checks can protect you!

Actually, the more I think about it, the more it seems like Fox had an awfully itchy trigger finger when it came to putting 24 down like Old Yeller. I don’t even think the writers had finished thinking of clever puns for their picket signs. I see it as more of an indictment of how terrible last season was. The story was like reverse-Darwinism: the best characters were killed off, and now only the weak (or not-so-pretty…CHLOE) survive. Fox just saved themselves millions of dollars on advertising a show starring Jack Bauer, Chloe, and 526 anonymous CTU agents with very short lifespans.

There is one good side to this strike issue. Since I’ve started watching the show, I’ve struggled with the fact that Jack does more than an hour than I do in a week. Well, not this year! SUCK MY PRODUCTIVITY, BAUER!

*There’s also a tremendously stupid sounding rumor about an incident with a cougar or puma or something. Maybe a Yeti, or Jawas. I don’t know, I just remember it was stupid.

**That’s my name for Jack Bauer’s basement. I imagine it filled with all sorts of four-point restraint harnesses, handcuffs (both standard and furred; Jack likes ladies who live on the edge), blood-stained tools (sets in both English units and Metric), along with a TV and a beer fridge. Then again, that’s kinda how I imagine every room in the Bauer household.

I’m on a roll, baby! 

Today, Cracked.com has once again been kind enough to publish an article of mine: the Seven Most Terrifying Celebrity Transformations.   I cannot say enough kind things about their editorial staff; not only do they accept my work - and pay for it, the suckers! – they do quite a lot of work on it.  Their contributions are like the 90% of artificial sweeteners that make my 10% cranberry juice into an enjoyable beverage.  (For instance, they probably would have edited that simile out.)