How Mormons Are Solving Homelessness

Yes, Mormons are strange.  But they are systematically eliminating homelessness in Utah.  Here's how. 

Another Right Wing Moron

Back in November, Hawaii state representative Tom Brower went around his district with a sledgehammer, smashing the shopping carts of homeless people.  “I want to do something practical that will really clean up the streets,” he said.

The Most Hated Man... in New Zealand

Cameron Slater is a New Zealand-based blogger with personal problems.  He says mean things about people, and now everybody is threatening to kill him.  And his family.  He is the Most Hated Man in New Zealand.

Smart Career Move - Ass Selfies

Jen Selter has made a name for herself by obsessively taking and posting online photos of her own ass.  Now, it could turn into a lucrative career.  Nice yoga pants, by the way. Lululemon?

Rob Ford: Best Mayor Ever

Mayor Rob Ford of Toronto, hanging out with some buddies in front of an alleged crack house.

80 Years After the Invention of the Tampon, Another Massive Breakthrough

80 years ago, Tampax founder Dr. Earl Haas invented the modern tampon, dramatically improving the lives of countless women.  Tampax, now a brand of Proctor & Gamble, has hit the jackpot again, discovering a solution to the question of anti-gravity, and possibly time travel.

Dolphins Aren't Fish. They're People.

Japanese "fishermen" load dead bottlenose dolphins into a boat at Taiji Cove.  Yes, they murdered the dolphins, and yes, the water in the cove is red with the blood of dead and dying dolphins. 

Forget Netflix. How To Watch Nearly Any Movie For FREE

You and your best pal can watch nearly any movie, online, for free.  Here's how.

Sometimes, It's Okay to Shoot People in a Movie Theater

American hero Curtis Reeves, a man who was driven mad by movie theater texting.

An Image That Will Haunt the World

Mangled beams recovered from the area where a hijacked plane hit the north tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 show what many believe to be a face.  Scientists and religious leaders are in agreement that the face appears to be that of Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger.

The Jewish Queen of Butt-Selfies

Jen Selter, the newly crowned "Jewish Queen of Butt-Selfies."

North Korea Executes Dennis Rodman

North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and former NBA player Dennis Rodman in happier times. 

Man Dives From Dizzying Height Into A Glass of Water

A man calling himself Professor Splash dives from 35 feet (about three storeys) into a foot of water.  The crowd doesn't seem to quite know what to make of it, but I do.  He's the modern day version of Fearless Freep:

Miley Cyrus Was The Most Important Event of 2013

A reader's poll has determined that Miley Cyrus was the most important thing that happened in 2013.  See more pictures, video...

Man Descended From Apes? Please.

A display at Yale University circa 1935, purporting to show how humans descended from apes.  A new Pew poll suggests that 33% of Americans...

7 Fun Facts About the Wolf of Wall Street

This is a bad man.  Jordan Belfort, the self-described "Wolf of Wall Street," is more than just a fun-loving, coke-snorting, Quaalude-popping white collar criminal.  Here are 7 fun facts about Hollywood's favorite pathological liar.

Blood Sucking Parasites Cheer On Wolf of Wall Street

A group of blood sucking parasites raucously cheered at an advance screening of "The Wolf of Wall Street" last week.  Turned out they worked on Wall Street.  It also turned out their disgraced hero is doing just fine.

Santa Claus Gets Shot

Xavier Hawkins playing Santa Claus during toy giveaway in Washington, DC, moments before he was shot in the back.

Drag Queens Ruined Our Christmas

The Prancing Elites dance team is ready to put on some family-friendly entertainment.  

Man Installs Festivus Pole (made of Pabst Blue Ribbon cans) inside Florida State Capitol

Florida resident and self-described "militant atheist" Chaz Stevens has installed a Festivus pole made of empty Pabst Blue Ribbon beer cans at the Florida State Capitol building.  He did this after learning that for the first time ever, there would be a Nativity scene inside the Capitol. 

Who's Dumber - Phil Roberston or A&E?

“Don’t be deceived. Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers—they won’t inherit the kingdom of God.” - Duck Dynasty star Phil Roberston talking to a reporter for GQ magazine.

What's the Deal with Frenchmen in Banana Hammocks?

The Fantasy - it almost never looks like this.  Much more often, it looks like... 

You Would Have Strip Searched Her, Too

Indian diplomat Devyani Khobragade was strip-searched while in the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service last week.

How to Convince People That You're Jesus in 5 Easy Steps

A.J. Miller has decided he is Jesus.  He has moved with his followers to a rural compound near Kingaroy, Australia, and an estimated 60 people have joined him there.  These kinds of arrangements usually end pretty well.  How does he pull it off?  He follows the 5 easy steps... 

Bruce Jenner Just Got Weirder

Former Olympic Gold medalist Bruce Jenner has had 147 plastic surgeries so far.  Now he's planning to have his Adam's Apple removed.  "I just never liked my trachea," he says about the surgery, which is normally part of a male to female sex change.   

Obama Livens Up Boring Mandela Memorial, Gets Smack Down

From left to right, David Cameron, Prime Minister of England, lovely Helle Thorning Schmidt, Prime Minister of Denmark, and President Barack Obama cheese it up with a group selfie at Nelson Mandela's otherwise boring and rather cheerless death event.  Mrs. Obama was not pleased.

Restoration Gone Wrong, Goes Right

100 year old Spanish painting of Christ, Ecce Homo, before restoration efforts ("Antes"), and afterwards ("Despues").  This is thought to be the worst art restoration job of all time.  And yet...

Let's Give Everybody $2,800 a Month

This guy looks a little bit like the actor Liam Neeson.  By the way, I do this with money in the bathtub, pretty much a lot.

What's the best black tea in America for the price? It's a surprise. Trader Joe's.

This young lady is a stock photography model pretending to enjoy a perfect cup of tea.  Notice the devilish glint in her eyes?  That tea or coffee or mud water went cold hours ago.  None of it shall pass her lips.  What's going on with her fingernails?

The Time We Burned Down the Used Car Lot

61% of Americans still believe JFK was killed by a Conspiracy

President Kennedy, all smiles, less than one minute before he was shot.

I've been a conspiracy buff my entire life.  I'd say it's been more than a hobby, and less than an obsession.  To a great degree, this was instigated by the murder of one man, John F. Kennedy, nearly a decade before I was born.

When I was a child, JFK's death was still on a lot of people's minds, as a sort of given.  It was a gigantic presence, and adults often talked about where they were and what they were doing when they first heard the news.  Probably what cemented it for me was that every now and then, you could actually watch Kennedy get murdered right on TV.  Abraham Zapruder had filmed the whole thing.

If you like, you can watch the Zapruder film right now, slowed down and in super digitized modern high quality (WARNING: very graphic footage - watch at your own risk):

The JFK Assassination was The Moment when everything went sour, when the American dream died.  This had a lot to do with the fact that, at the time, most people seemed to believe that some part of the US government, maybe in cahoots with the Mafia, had killed him.  That the murder wasn't just a random assassination by a crazed lone gunman, but was in fact a coup d'etat. 

Most people thought the official story was ludicrous - that Kennedy had been killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, an idea that stood in opposition to mountains of evidence to the contrary, and which required one "magic bullet" to penetrate both Kennedy and Texas governor John Connally a total of seven times.  

Funny how times change.  As the years pass, an interesting thing is happening to public opinion about the murder.  

First off, it's always been a rule that major media personalities have to believe in the official explanation, and have to foist that explanation on their audience.  For example, in our era, people as far apart in the political spectrum as nice, reasonable, liberal hero Rachel Maddow, and rabid right wing pit bull Bill O'Reilly, both profess their devotion to the official story.  

But even in the absence of any compelling evidence for that story, the general public is also starting to believe it.  Check out this handy dandy infographic from a Gallup poll conducted in November of this year (click to enlarge):

             

         

As recently as the year 2000, 81% of Americans polled believed that Kennedy's murder was a conspiracy.  Only 13% believed it was the work of Lee Harvey Oswald alone.  Those numbers had stayed reasonably consistent for 25 years.  Now, just 13 years later, 61% of Americans polled believe the murder was a conspiracy, and 30% believe Oswald acted alone.   

What's causing this change?  I believe there are several reasons.  The generations who lived through the Kennedy assassination (and for whom it was a raw and open wound) are slowly dying off.  Media mind control techniques are slowly being perfected.  And those techniques are being marshaled to discredit conspiracy theories in general, especially in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.  

As a result, people are gradually coming around to the official way of seeing things.      

A photo of Scarlett Johansson's Ass...

...will get you web traffic.

 

I was on Facebook yesterday, don't ask me why.  And someone posted the above screen grab from maybe Tweeter or Instamagic or some fucking thing.  Which is a picture of a famous celebrity named Scarlett Johansson who a) is a pop singer, or b) a movie star, or c) has a sex tape, or d) stars on Celebrity Rehab.  

Or all of these.  Or none.  I honestly don't know, and I'm too checked out to ask the Googler.  I've heard the name.  I've seen her on the cover of supermarket tabloids.  That's plenty.

See Related Article: Smart Career Move - Ass Selfies

I clicked on the photo.  Of course I did.  Two million years of evolution and survival of the fittest demanded it.  Reason is a raisin taped to the head of a 2,000 pound charging, raging bull of primal drives.  

So, as I say, I clicked on it.  Which brought me to a nice inspiring blog called Go Kaleo, and a post about how women should be proud they have cellulite.  Which is cool with me.  I'm proud of women who have cellulite.  I'm proud of people who talk about personal tragedies on television.  I'm proud of dogs who have three legs.  I'm proud of everybody.  

But digging deeper, I found some research which suggests that most people who clicked on that photo were not really all that interested in cellulite.  If you look at the amazing graphic below (click to enlarge), you'll see that by a significant margin, the largest group of people who clicked on the photo were men who wanted to get a better look at Scarlett's Johansson's ass (48% of all clickers).

Following that were women who wanted to get a better look at Scarlett Johansson's ass (33%).  This suggests that 81% of clickers just wanted to see that ass a little better.  If you add in the 7% who didn't know why they clicked, you've got an astonishing 88% who probably didn't even realize the article was about cellulite.  Only 12% of clickers were women who were concerned about cellulite.  Not one man (0%) shared their concern.      

The Blowjob Date

One day I picked up a hitchhiker.

I was driving into Portland, Maine, from where I lived outside the city. You come into town through this rundown section, cross over some railroad tracks – the freight trains stop traffic there sometimes – there’s a payday loan place, a McDonald’s, some cheap retail stores. 

The County Jail is near there, and then the Greyhound bus station. Vagrants and various down-on-their-luck types often blow into town on the bus.

It was raining out, a steel gray rain typical of Portland. Makes everything look like shit. A young woman stood by the side of the street, her thumb out, hitching a ride. She wore a pair of jeans and a gray hoodie sweatshirt. 

What I figured was this: it’s cold, it’s raining, and she needs a ride to the other side of town – where the homeless shelter and the soup kitchen are. It happened I was going that way. My gym’s over there, in another bleak wasteland full of junkyards and parking lots.

I pulled over, just a little past her.

She walked to the car, opened the door and climbed up inside. She was soaked, her clothes saturated with the rain. She took her hood down, releasing a blondish ponytail, and I realized she was a lot older than I first thought. Maybe 50, but an old 50. Fifty hard years, like 50 going on 100. 

Then I looked again. Every time I looked at her I saw something different. The woman was like a mirage in the desert, a shape-shifter. This time I guessed 27. It was impossible to tell. The face was young, but pale and too thin. The eyes were old.

Old.

She paused to light a cigarette, cupping the flame in gnarled hands. Her fingernails were dirty and chewed down to the skin. She didn’t ask if I minded.

“Where are you going?” I said as I pulled out into traffic.

“I’m looking for a date,” she said.

I was busy watching the cars ahead, too busy to focus on what she was saying. “What are you looking for?”

“A date. I’m looking for a date.”

I’m slow, in the sense that my brain seems to work slower than other people’s brains. I hear slowly. People say things and I have no idea what they’re talking about. Don’t tell me a joke. Five minutes later, I get it. It’s a common thing with me.

I puzzled over what she’d said. So she was out in the rain, looking for her date. Maybe he had ditched her, stood her up. Now she planned to… what? Find him?

Well, I wasn’t about to drive around looking for him. I wanted no part of that. I had things to do.

“You lost your date?” I said.

She turned and stared at me. We were stopped at a red light. I looked at her. I almost asked how old she was, but she talked first. She spoke in slow motion, so even someone like me could understand.

“A blowjob date,” she said.

“What?”

“I’m looking,” she said, even slower this time, because now she realized she was dealing with an imbecile, “for a blowjob date. Is it you?”

I sort of laughed. It was more of a snort. “You want to give me a blowjob?”

“Exactly. Not for free, but pretty cheap.” She nodded to herself. “You’ll like it.”

I looked at her again, really seeing her for the first time. I couldn’t begin to guess at her age. And I couldn’t think of much to say.

“You were hitchhiking.”

She shrugged and smiled. “That’s what I do.”

Thoughts flooded my mind. It was like complex math. Blowjobs, money, promises made, promises broken, undercover cops and diseases, all added up, subtracted, divided and multiplied by the square root of sweet nothing. In a few seconds I had my answer.

“No thanks.”

Now that I finally got it, I acted. I didn’t ask any more questions. I didn’t try to tell her about Jesus, or about serial killers. Maybe I should have. Instead, I pulled the car over to the side, reached across her and opened the passenger door. She didn’t move. It was raining harder now. 

"Get out." I said.

“What?” she said.

“Get out of the car.”

“Really? You’re sure?”

“Oh yeah.”

She slid out into the cold, dirty, New England rain, and I drove away. When I glanced in the rearview mirror, she was still there, standing on the corner. She already had her thumb out.


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20 Years Since Snoop Dogg's Doggystyle

Smoke weed every day for 20 years and you too will see the light of Rastafari.

Twenty years ago this week, Death Row Records released Snoop Doggy Dogg's first album, Doggystyle.  Everybody seemed to have that album.  It was really good music for driving around, getting high.  I didn't know this at the time, but that was because the whole thing was built on samples from old Parliament and Funkadelic songs from the 1970s.

When you listen to the album now, it's striking that most of the songs are in such bad taste.  There's a lot of "keepin' it real" ghetto gangsta nonsense that had people up in arms, I guess because the lyrics were going to be a bad influence on the vulnerable Youth of America.  Except that jazz was going to do that in the 1920s, and Elvis was going to do it in the 1950s, and Metallica and Madonna and Miley and etc.

Whatever.

In any case, the album still sounds great, as long as you don't listen too closely to what they're saying.  Then it sounds dumb.  Embarrassing.  Still, it's hard to find fault - Snoop was only 21 at the time of the album's release, and the actual masterminds behind it, Dr. Dre and Suge Knight, weren't too much older.  I think you and I would be mortified if someone played us a tape of the things we were saying when we were 21.      

Here's an interview in Rolling Stone with Suge Knight about the recording of Doggystyle (you didn't think I actually knew, on my own, that this was the 20th anniversary, did you?):

Suge Knight interview  

         
And here's the first single from the album, the signature Who Am I? (What's My Name?).  Enjoy:

How did you get a book deal with Rutger Hauer?

"All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.  Time to die."

People ask me this a lot.

In early 2005, my novel SMOKED had just gotten a deal from St. Martin's Press in the United States, and a worldwide deal from Headline Books in the UK.  I had never had a book deal before, after years of trying, and now I had two big ones in one month.  So I was hyperventilating a lot.

One night, my agent called me and said, "Do you remember Rutger Hauer?"

I said, "The name rings a bell.  He was only like my favorite actor when I was a kid.  Blade Runner, Nighthawks, The Hitcher... Yeah.  I remember Rutger."

"So," he went on, "I've been trying to get him interested in doing a book for a while, and he finally said yes.  I think you're the guy to write it with him.  You guys will have to do a book proposal on spec, but once we get a deal, you'll be the one.  How does that sound?"

Glub. 

"Pat?"

"Uh, sure..."

"Okay, good.  He's in New York at a hotel, waiting for your call.  Here's the number.  Give him a shout.  Let me know how it goes."

So I called Rutger.  We chatted somewhat awkwardly.  He sounded just like Roy Batty from Blade Runner.  He said, if I could be in New York in a few days, maybe I could stop by his hotel room and we could do a little work together.

That seemed weird.  I had this image of turning up at his hotel room, and then what?  The two of us, sitting on the bed together, with a notebook and a pen.

I didn't have to worry.  He was in New York shooting a movie, and the film company was paying his expenses.  The "room" was a two-story, three bedroom, two bath penthouse, with a full kitchen and dining room at the top of a hotel in mid-town Manhattan.  The sundeck gave 180 degree views of the skyline, including the Empire State Building, which seemed like you could almost reach out and touch it.

I was 34 years old.  It had actually never before occurred to me that there were hotel rooms like this.  So much for seen-it-all, done-it-all Quinlan.

Two things about Rutger surprised me as soon as he answered the door.  One is, he's old.  That was the most surprising.  Rutger is no longer the beautiful young thing from Blade Runner.  Oh, he's still handsome and all, but his face is very lined, and it appears that Rutger, unlike so many celebrities, is too modest to go in for facial surgery.

The other surprising thing is I'm just as tall as he is.    

This was the very beginning of a two year process that eventually resulted in Rutger's autobiography, ALL THOSE MOMENTS.         

Full Contact Medieval Jousting

Went to the Sarasota Medieval Festival over the weekend.  It was fun.  The funnest part was watching the Knights of Mayhem, full contact jousting.

These guys really do gear up in armor, climb aboard massive horses, and race at each other at top speed, with solid wooden lances at the ready.  The collisions are amazing.

The guy who runs this attraction is named Charlie Andrews.  He goes by the name "Sir Charles" during the show, since, of course, he is supposed to be a medieval knight.  Every time the announcer called him Sir Charles, I thought of Charles Barkley.

Sir Charles is a weird mix of entertainer, megalomaniac and menace to himself and others.  He refers to himself, and has others refer to him, as "The World Champion of Full Contact Jousting."  This is probably true, as far as it goes.  But since there can't be more than a dozen people who actually participate in this sport, it doesn't go all that far.

During breaks in the action, he was hitting on a young woman in the audience, from atop his mighty steed.  When her boyfriend took offense, he openly mocked the guy, and seemed to threaten to kick the guy's ass after the show.  Which he could have easily done.

Charlie Andrews is around the size of your typical NFL linebacker.  Big.  And he was very eager to demolish his opponent, a young jouster who, as an employee of the Knights of Mayhem, actually works for none other than Charlie Andrews.  How'd you like to have as your boss, a gigantic madman who every day is trying to obliterate you?

On his website, Charlie suggests that very soon, the sport of Full Contact Jousting will catch on, and he will be a household name worldwide.  Hmmm.  In any case, it's fun to watch.    

Maine city votes to change name from "Portland" to "Panhandle"

The city formerly known as "Portland, Maine" has voted to change its name to "Panhandle Maine."  The vote came about after an alarming increase in the number of people visibly begging along city roadways.  The problem was most acute in the late fall of 2012, when the spectacle of two, three and sometimes four people jockeying for position on the same street corner became a common sight. 

City officials commissioned a study, and discovered that fully one out of every two adults in the city is a homeless person who holds a cardboard sign and asks passersby for money at traffic stoplights and along median strips.  The city Tax Department also did an exhaustive audit of their files and found that "Homeless" (including alternative spellings such as "Homless" and "Hoamles") was far and away the source of income most often described on city tax records.  "Social Worker" was a distant second, followed by "Barista."  "Municipal Employee" was fourth, with "Lawyer" in fifth place.  There were no other jobs mentioned.

"We feel like Panhandle Maine sends the right message," said mayor Michael Brennan.  "It really tells you what this town is about.  And you'll notice we took the comma out between the words Panhandle and Maine.  That's because it's not just a name, it's also a command.  It's an exhortation.  We want you to get out there and really do it, really get after it.  You've heard of Ski Maine?  You've heard of Build Maine?  Well, we're Panhandle Maine, and we're proud."

The Mayor went on to add that city councilors are currently exploring the possibly of adding an exclamation point to the name, which would effectively make the city "Panhandle Maine!"  The City Attorney, notably both a Municipal Employee and a Lawyer, was thought to be studying the constitutionality of such a move at press time.   

Can you feel better on a banned performance enhancer?

Me & OJ.  NBA player OJ Mayo served a ten-game suspension in 2011 after he tested positive for DHEA.  Stanley Kubrick loaned him that chair to sit in while he wasn't playing.

If you're anything like me, you spend your life careening from being severely bummed out, to optimism that borders on delusion, to periods of fear and loathing, and finally paranoid terror.  It's fun!

Eh, not really.

Recently, a naturopathic doctor recommended that I start taking a supplement called DHEA.  DHEA is short for Dehydroepiandrosterone.  Yeah, it's a mouthful, and with a name like that you know it's gotta be a steroid.  Which it is.  In fact, it's the most abundant steroid that the human body produces, and it appears to help the body manufacture both testosterone and estrogen.

Although DHEA is available over the counter in the United States, it's a prescription drug pretty much everywhere else.  It's also a banned substance in sports, policed by the World Anti-Doping Agency.  Several professional and amateur athletes have been temporarily suspended from competition for using it.  

I was reluctant to take it.  Long-term, nobody knows what this shit can do to you.  Some researchers believe that long-term use of DHEA can lead to prostate cancer in men, and breast cancer in women.  There's no hard and fast evidence that that's true.

Here's what is known to be true:

- Numerous studies have shown that low doses of DHEA (25 to 50 milligrams per day) for periods up to a year have few if any side effects.

- Levels of DHEA peak in your 20's and slowly fall as you age. By the time you reach 40 (as I have already done), your body makes about half as much DHEA as it used to. By 65, levels drop to 10 to 20 percent; by age 80, it plummets to less than 5 percent.

- Numerous studies, including large-scale studies, have shown that supplementation with DHEA alleviates depression, especially in middle-aged and elderly people.  Also, low levels of DHEA are associated with higher rates of depression.

My doctor thinks the mindless, random terror I experience, and my frequent bouts of health anxiety are actually symptoms of depression.

Okay.  So I started taking the stuff.  I mean, what the heck, right?

Sure, I'm only taking a tiny amount for starters (about 5 mg a day), and I have to constantly refrain from administering a prostate self-exam. 

But I'll tell you what.  I feel a little better.  I have more energy than before, and it's not frantic, panicked energy.  For example, I've gone skiing three times in the past two weeks.  That's a big deal.  Just a month ago, the mere thought of getting on a ski lift made me dizzy and afraid.  Now I'm ripping up the hillsides pretty good.

And I've just started working on a new book, after months of not doing anything constructive at all.

Could be DHEA is just what the doctor ordered.      

Then again, could be a lot of things.

How to Smuggle Dope into the US from Canada

The Peace Arch border crossing between British Columbia and Washington State.

When you think of the phrase "illegal drug trade," you probably don't often think of the word "Canada" during that same thought.  Usually, you probably think the word "Mexico."  This is natural, because the drug trade from Mexico gets all the headlines.

It turns out that Canada, and especially the province of British Columbia, is one of the major sources of high-quality marijuana coming into the United States.  The Council on Hemispheric Affairs estimates that anywhere from 60% to 90% of all the marijuana grown in Canada is smoked in the United States.  The trade could amount to as much as $20 billion a year, making marijuana the most lucrative agricultural product Canada produces, one that employs hundreds of thousands of people.  

So let's just say you want to bring some of this dope into the US for yourself.  The border between the two countries is 4,000 miles long, and not exactly what you'd call heavily defended.  Even so, it might not be immediately obvious how to go about it.  Here is a way that has been described to me by someone who has pulled it off.  The method isn't without risks, but has apparently worked more than a dozen times without a single failure.  Proceed with caution in any event, and don't blame me if something goes horribly, horribly wrong.

You will need three things to carry out this method: a reliable car, outfitted with a secret storage compartment; a good place to cross; and a mule to carry the drugs, one who is unlikely to attract much attention.

1. The Car.  Pretty much any late-model sedan in good to excellent condition will do.  The inside is clean and well-kept.  The outside doesn't have to be immaculate, but no big dents, no broken lights, no obvious rust.  Depending on the size of the load you want to bring across, you have options on where and how to build your storage compartment.  For example, you can create a false bottom in your trunk.  If you're planning to bring a lesser amount across, you can always build a compartment inside your dashboard.  The possibilities are as wide as your imagination.

2. The Crossing.  An excellent place to cross is the Peace Arch border crossing between Blaine, Washington and Surrey, British Columbia.  It's a good place because it's close to where the dope is grown.  It is also a hugely busy border crossing, the busiest US-Canada crossing west of Detroit.  The sheer volume of visitors means that most visitors are unlikely to get much scrutiny from the border guards.  Further, this is a crossing that literally thousands of bargain-hungry shoppers from Canada pass through each day.  The combination of high sales tax in Canada; the rise to parity of the Canadian dollar; an increase in duty-free limits; and American free-trade policies that mean retail stores in the US are cheaper than ones in Canada, make the big box stores in Bellingham, WA an irresistible destination for Canadians.  This is important because your mule is going to look like a shopper.

3. The Mule.  First and foremost, the mule is someone who can remain calm during stressful situations.  If everything goes according to plan, the mule will have to do no more than exchange a few pleasantries with the border guard.  Considering she'll be driving a car loaded with illegal drugs, this would be enough to give a normal person a very visible nervous breakdown.  Your mule will not be a normal person.  She will be Grace Under Fire.  And yes, it will be a she.  Your mule should be a woman, middle-aged to early senior citizen, wearing nice, but casual and comfortable clothes.  See, your mule is going bargain shopping at the Costco in Bellingham. 

As an aside, make sure your mule is a white woman.  Under no circumstances try to send anyone of any other race across as a mule.  An open secret about the US-Canadian border crossings is that racial minorities get hassles that white people don't get.  Also, when the mule goes home at the end of the day or the next morning, carry the cover story through to the end and make sure the car is full of stuff that she purchased at Costco during her visit to the United States.  Hell, make sure she has the receipt. 

There you have it.  A three-step tried and true method for bringing dope over from Canada.  Give it a shot, be careful, and let me know how it goes.       

       

How I'm Like Woody Allen

"Has anyone ever told you that you remind them of Woody Allen?"

This is a question I've gotten a lot in my life.  The answer is yes.  Plenty of people have told me that. 

It isn't that I look like Woody Allen.  I don't.  In fact, people have often told me that I look a lot like the notoriously handsome Irish actor Colin Farrell.  So much so, in fact, that I apparently make a lot of the same facial expressions as Colin Farrell.  Could be we're related.  We come from the same gene pool, and there's only so much genetic material to go around.  

This is a facial expression I make a lot.  Normally, it has to do with gas pains from eating too much roughage.

Less often, but still enough to be worth mentioning, people have mentioned that I bear more than a passing resemblance to that other notoriously handsome actor of Irish descent, George Clooney.  Depends if you catch me on my good side.

Hooray for me.  A few acting classes, a trip to Hollywood, and I should be all set.

In the meantime, how am I like Woody Allen?  Here's how: I often think that I'm dying.  Or rather, I often think that I have a dangerous or potentially life-threatening disease.  This can be funny.  For a while.  Then it's not funny.  In my case, it stopped being funny a long time ago.  It's much funnier when Woody Allen does it in the movies.   

I've believed, at one time or another, that I've had about a dozen different serious illnesses.  They include diabetes, melanoma, colon cancer, prostate cancer, brain tumors, and heart disease, to name a few.  In many cases, I've gone through more than one episode per disease.  For example, I've been convinced I had diabetes on at least four separate occasions.  I went to the doctor in each case, and got checked for diabetes, and in each case didn't have it, not even close.

The odd thing is I've almost never actually been physically sick in my life.  I've had strep throat twice.  I can remember a pretty gnarly bronchitis I had back in my 20s, when I needed an antibiotic.  And I had chicken pox when I was in high school.  And that's about it.

The amazing thing is I get the symptoms, right up until they tell me I don't have the disease.  Then I go home, some time passes, and I get the symptoms of something else.  And I get the fear, of course.  And in my quieter moments, I grow reflective, and I sit on the patio and watch the sky, and the water, and I reflect about God and about what a beautiful life it's been.                     

Petraeus Ain't My Hero

"About this big, Senator."



So we've got one of these spectacular flameouts that happen from time to time.  Four star general with a Roman Legion sounding name, moves from big post to bigger post to head of the CIA.  There's talk that he might consider a run for President one day.  Suddenly he resigns, caught up in a sex scandal where he was cheating on his dowdy, grandmotherly wife with a sexy, chiseled newcomer 20 years his junior.  Every ambition he had is toast in one nanosecond. 

The thing that I don't really grasp about this whole event is the thing that remains unsaid.  What did we ever like about this guy?  In any coverage I've seen, it's just assumed that Petraeus is an American hero, a great man brought low by something that eventually brings many a great man low.  Yeah, but why is he a great man?

Until a minute ago, he was head of the CIA.  I don't know about you, but I don't like the CIA.  I'm afraid of the CIA.  The very idea of the CIA used to keep me awake at night.  The CIA does bad things, often enough to good people.  In fact, that's what they do for a living.  The CIA is exactly the type of agency that Darth Vader would run, if he were to live here on earth rather than wherever Star Wars happened.

Before the CIA, Petraeus was in charge of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Personally, I was against these wars.  I protested against these very same wars, which I saw as colonial dirty wars.  I know that millions of people did the same, and felt the same way.  The fact of these wars also used to keep me awake at night.  Of course, nowadays I rarely think about them, but I'll just weigh in here and note that I'm still against them.

It says a lot about the USA that the news coverage of Petraeus is generally so positive.  I'd like to see a headline that says, "Creepy Warmonger and Spymaster Caught With His Pants Down."

Mad Season



 

Dreary, rainy day and night in Maine.  Has me thinking about Layne Staley.

Need a Murder Weapon? Try Rice.

"Yummy rice!"

So rice is in the news, and for all the wrong reasons.  Come to find out, rice is loaded with arsenic.  This according to a new study released by Consumer Reports.

Arsenic, as you may know, is a heavy metal with many uses, not least of which is murder through poisoning.  Arsenic intake at high doses causes diarrhea, vomiting, blood in the urine, cramping muscles, hair loss, stomach pain, and convulsions.  It shuts down the lungs, kidneys and liver.  Eventually, it results in coma and death.

Now, no one is saying that there's a lot of arsenic in rice.  There's just a little arsenic.  Chronic exposure to arsenic in low doses over time is associated with heart disease, stroke, bladder cancer, skin cancer, lung cancer, and diabetes.  These are things that won't kill you today, but you still might prefer not to have.

I mention this because I eat a lot of rice.  Or did until yesterday.  Rice is (was) a staple of my diet.  For example, I've often eaten rice cakes as snacks.  Rice cakes make good snacks because 1) they taste like cardboard and 2) within 15 minutes of eating one, you become much hungrier than before, so ravenously hungry in fact, that you feel sick and your body starts to shake with hunger sickness.  The combination of 1) and 2) tends to discourage you from snacking between meals.  This keeps you thin.

Mostly, I have eaten a lot of chicken and rice.  I do (did) this because, eaten along with a vegetable like broccoli, chicken and rice is (was) a very healthy meal.  To be clear, the chickens I eat are not your typical factory-farmed chickens, who are basically victims of a chicken holocaust, living and dying in mini-chicken-Auschwitzes across this great land of ours.  No.  The chickens I eat are the very most organic happy chickens, who are treated much like guests of the Ritz-Carlton hotel chain, and who are priced accordingly.  These are healthy chickens.

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But we were talking about rice, weren't we?  Yes.  Very bad.  The rice is poisoned with arsenic.  Arsenic is a toxic chemical.  For those of you that enjoy irony, the good healthy brown rice has higher levels of arsenic than the vitamin-denuded and much-maligned white rice.  Also, the rice you buy at fancypants Whole Foods tends to have more arsenic than the rice you buy at regular po' people supermarkets.

Thankfully, we have the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which is tasked with making sure that our food supply and the prescription drugs we take are safe.  The FDA has weighed in on this rice issue, saying, "Based on the currently available data and scientific literature the FDA does not have an adequate scientific basis to recommend changes by consumers regarding their consumption of rice and rice products."

I've worked in government and feel qualified to translate gov-speak into a language everyone can understand.  It goes a little something like this: "Rice growers are a powerful lobby.  It's better that we don't annoy them.  So keep eating rice, you dummies!  It probably won't kill you.  Today."

                    

When She Says: "Does My Ass Look Big in These Pants?"

The correct answer, in most cases, is:

"No."

Stop Alien Mind Control with the Thought Screen Helmet

Melissa demonstrates how to wear the Thought Screen Helmet

Stop Making Sense

Mitt Romney had a dad who also wanted to be President.  Dad's name was George Romney, and George, oddly enough, was born outside the United States (in Mexico) to Mormon separatists from Utah.  They had left the country because they were against the idea that marriage should be between one man and one woman.  Naturally, they felt it should be between one man and several women. 

George Romney had a tendency to say things he later regretted.  The most famous of these described his interaction with American generals while on a fact-finding trip he had taken to Vietnam in 1965: "When I came back from Vietnam, I'd just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get."   

The public, perhaps rightly so, felt that someone who wanted to be President shouldn't be so easily led.  They also wanted someone who had better control over his own mouth - in George's case, someone who could lie a little more.

In a lot of ways, George and Mitt couldn't be more different.  George Romney was by many accounts a decent man.  He was an early supporter of Civil Rights.  When he decided to run for office, he immediately released ten years' worth of his tax returns.  They showed that he was wealthy, but that he also gave large sums of money to charity and to the Mormon Church.  George was the CEO of a company, American Motors, that actually made something: cars.  Not very good cars, but cars nonetheless.   

Mitt, as we know, made his living by borrowing huge amounts of money to buy, and then gut, formerly productive companies.  By his own account, Mitt likes to fire people.  He ties dogs to the tops of cars.  He steals money from working people, then hides that money in anonymous accounts on Grand Cayman.  He buggers small children.  He eats the flesh of the living to satisfy his inhuman appetites.

With all these differences in mind, I find it interesting that one trait Mitt did inherit from his father is George's gift for saying the wrong thing.  And in all likelihood, for not becoming President of the United States.