The History of Evil

Star Wars IV: A New Hope as told by a three-year-old

Okay, Okay, I'm posting already!

Sorry, gang, I guess I just got busy with a few other things and let the old blog go to heck for a while. Been busy bringing home the cheese, dealing with the single parent thing, and keeping up with enough stuff in the real world to keep body and soul together.

Doesn't leave much time for idle rambling, as much fun as that can be, but thanks for not complaining. If any of you missed my contributions, at least you had the good manners to keep it to yourselves. Bet your moms would be proud.

So, what do you want to know? Job's pretty much the same, making sure the haters have somebody to focus on...

Boy, you oughta see me shop for groceries, with the coupons and the savings cards and the best cost-per-ounce comparisons, if you took how much I save and spread it over all the time I spend saving it, I'm probably making about $3.85 per hour while I shop! Makes me feel like I'm in 1977 all over again.

And Television? I've got something going every night, and sometimes the TIVO has to pick up the pieces for me at critical times, like when Everybody Loves Raymond is up against Heroes or whatever. Hey, why can't they schedule these things so that doesn't happen?

Anything else? You sure? You might not be hearing from me again for six or eight months, okay? Well, if it won't be too hard on you, I'll just write whenever, like I have been doing, and maybe you can post a comment catching me up on all your doings, instead of all those ads for stock offerings and male enhancement and whatever... how did I get on that list, anyway?

I am Anna Nicole's baby daddy

I know, I know, the line is growing longer by the minute of men who, ordinarily, would avoid a paternity test like The Reverend Al Sharpton avoids diet salad dressing, but there is one reason why all their claims are spurious, opportunistic, and invalid.

The baby is mine.

It started, as many similar tales do, with "Oh, man, we were so drunk that we--" and it goes on from there. Surely you, also, have found yourself in a cold-water flat in Zurich with a hefty blonde with $200 fingernails who's snoring like a weedeater, who says she is Anna Nicole Smith.

Except that, this time, she really was. Yeah, I went through it with her manager, and the bodyguard who fell behind the party after he accidentally set fire to the front of his shirt when he bobbled a flaming shooter at this little public house in the warehouse district, and I survived the frantic phone calls from her mother who offered me money not to marry her little girl and ruin her future. Yeah, that would have been a blessed match, huh? Could you imagine the Thanksgiving dinners with that hateful old sow for a mom-in-law?

Truth was, though I was fond of Anna, I knew I couldn't marry her. Her Hollywood friends were always working to break us up, and she was far more clingy than I like, calling all the time, dropping by my work, checking my cellphone to see who had been calling, and rooting through my wallet for receipts, phone numbers, or whatever she could find.

Not to speak ill of the dead, but what a nut job.

Between that, and the certain knowledge that all of our business would be in the tabloids weekly, our relationship was doomed from the start. I really like shopping for groceries, and those awful cover photos make it hard to concentrate on getting the correct change, so it's for the best, really.

There's only one small matter that is not resolved, and that is-- who is going to take care of our daughter?

Bad Timing

Sometimes they just sneak up on you...

You Clicked The FART BUTTON?

What the heck were you thinking, clicking a fart button? Isn't that for, like, thirteen year old boys who don't have a subscription to Mad Magazine?

I thought, when I put that button up, that I'd just fill the space for a couple of days until I came up with something real to go there. Originally, there was no link to anything, but right after I posted it I started getting flak about the dead link. Dead link? I asked myself, there can't be a dead link, what the blazes are they talking about?

On seeking more information, I learned that everybody, and I mean you, too-- was clicking first on the fart button, then exploring the rest of joeisms.com later. In fact, if the hit counters are correct, the fart button is getting more action than any other feature of the site, including me.

Now, don't get me wrong. If you look at the rest of the contents of joeisms.com you'll see a trend towards sophomoric humor. In fact, there are more than a few sophomores who cringe to hear me use that term on my website. I'm not seeking the most mature of audiences, but I'd have thought that a few of you could leave a fart button alone.

So, disappointed in the whole bunch of you, I've decided not to waste the opportunity. I linked the fart button to my blog, here, so that you and I both can get something out of this. Look around, check out my opinions of stuff, then tee off on me with the comments section.

Just do me a favor. Make sure you understand what I'm saying before you thrash me. I can take the heat generated by opposition to my opinion, but I lack patience with folks who can't communicate on at least a 10th grade level. See? Sophomoric again.

Goblessamerrka

Or something. Man, do we need blessing right about now. I mean it. I've been watching the news on CNN and the broadcast networks, reading Time, USA Today and Newsweek, and following as closely as I can all the commentary from talking heads and NPR's All Things Considered, and I have come to the only possible conclusion: we SUCK.

There's no other way to look at it. As nations go, we are doing a terrible job. Greatest nation on earth? Haw! We can't run a regular bus service to outer space without killing astronauts, we can't put a president in office who will consistently please the people who voted against him in the last election, and, for all of our supposed power, we can't seem to move the whole country a couple of hundred miles one way or the other to avoid a hurricane.

Well, that last one, I may be out of line, there. I'm not clear what the government should have done to avoid the hurricane thing. The response was faster than any of the last five major hurricane strikes, involved more refugees, greater damage, and over a larger area than ever before in US history, but dawgonnit, Bush should have been standing on I-10 handing out bottles of Aquafina the day before the storm, or something. Hey, it's important in this country to first assign blame, then deal with the trouble.

Why can't we force peace in Israel, with seven nations surrounding them who swear to wipe them off the face of the earth? It seems like, if we were as powerful as everybody says, we could just go knock some heads together and make them all play nice, wouldn't you think?

Wasn't Iraq better off before we started freeing all the oppressed majority there? Saddam didn't build Abu Ghraib prison as a day care center for misunderstood teenagers, he fed political enemies alive into wood chippers for laughs. But-- he was pretty strict about that No Flash Photography thing. We could learn from his example, it pays to have a few firm policies that everybody understands.

Let's see, what else? Oh, yeah... in the last week, I have listened while learned men and women proclaimed that we are not handling our relations properly with every country on earth who is not at war with us. The ones where we have soldiers are a big mess, but there is even more trouble brewing in all the countries where we are just importing their goods and giving them stuff in return. We're too soft on dictators, we're too hard on harmless fascists, we're not doing enough to encourage everybody to hum a few bars of I'd Like To Buy The World A Coke, or something.

Among the essential things that we are, as a nation, screwing up:

• poor people are still having to pay for stuff in this country.
• children are being forced to go along with No Child Left Behind.
• we're spending too little to support the arts.
• where's our @#&*! flying cars?!?!?!
• there's still people out there who haven't had an abortion yet.
• our government is in the hands of people who believe in Jesus Christ. No telling what crazy thing they'll do next. To whom can we pray to save us from that, I wonder?
• There is no constitutional amendment supporting a woman's right to change her mind.
• You can still legally own guns here.
• We can't find a way to stifle the free speech of those who disagree with us.
• It's high time we let the minority decide who gets to be president and stack the Supreme Court with froot loops.

It wasn't a total loss, however. While I was listening and making notes, some things that we are doing right came to light. A sampling:

• We are spending just the right amount of time, money and energy trying to find some legitimate reason to impeach the president, damage his supporters and advisors, and obstruct his goals for the nation.
• we're making sure that tiny island republics know that they can't keep on raping and killing our pretty, blonde, teenage girls.
• we're doing a fine job of keeping fingernail clippers off of domestic flights.
• Oil prices are finally at a level where we can afford to destroy Arctic wildlife to find more.
• people who have more money and stuff than me are going to jail for doing the stuff they do that makes more money than me.
• we will soon have a chance to elect a woman president who will make sure that we all have just what we need to have a good life and all the people in jail who didn't do anything wrong will be let out and the descendants of slaves will all get a big, fat check, and nobody will have to pay for health care or anything ever again.
• either that, or we will be over-run by the Chinese who will kill everybody who doesn't join the Communist Party, and nobody will have anything to pay for, or with, ever again.

So, see? As messed up as we are, even a blind squirrel finds a nut every now and then. Maybe we are worth saving, after all.