Animals That Deserve Your Respect

My tears cure cancer - too bad the only thing that comes out of my eyes is blood!

There are a lot of very awesome animals on Earth, however, they seldom get credit because by the virtue of their extremeness they’re not particularly cute or cuddly. The Texas Horned Lizard is one of the few awesome things to be in some way tied to Texas (see also: Texas Toast). In most respects, the Texas Horned Lizard is just an ordinary looking scaly animal, but as soon as you try to attack it, you will find that you’re up against the Chuck Norris of the animal kingdom. The Texas Horned Lizard will, in self defense, shoot jets of its own blood out of its eyes at its attacker. Did you hear that? Did you hear what I just said? It uses its own blood as a weapon, and it doesn’t even have AIDS*! Honestly, I don’t even think that’s a great attack from a purely logistical standpoint – unless the attacking coyote is particularly squeamish, getting a facefull of blood is about the same as getting a facefull of thick Kool-Aid, but it’s the sheer awesome factor that I think would make this effective. If I was a predator and I got squirted in the face with a lizard’s blood from its eyes, I’d give up out of sheer awe and respect. Any animal that’s willing to shoot its own blood at an attacker has earned its right to not be food.

*I mean, I hope not, because if it did, it meant that somebody with AIDS had sex with a Texas Horned Lizard, which as I’ve said are far from the most attractive or friendly of creatures. I suppose maybe a masochist would be up for it, or somebody with a blood-shooting-from-eyes fetish, but even then you’d have to catch the damn thing, and then there’s proportions, and I just don’t really want to think about it. Of course, maybe the lizard would have just shared needles with somebody who was HIV positive, but the thought of a Texas Blood Lizard tripping on heroin with nothing to lose is actually scaring the crap out of me right now…

God, out the eyes, too! It could have been anywhere – the nose, the pores, the butt, even – but it’s the eyes. That’s evidence of intelligent design right there. I wonder if the lizard can see while he shoots…

Another animal that deserves our respect is Michigan the Cow. I don’t have a whole lot of respect for cows in general, perhaps because of my lactose intolerance or perhaps because they remind me of people in airports, but Michigan deserves mention because of her incredible luck. Michigan is a cow with a spot on her side that’s shaped like the mitten part of the state of Michigan. That in and of itself is a pretty big deal, but here’s the kicker – she lives on a farm in Spaulding Township, Michigan, and because of her unique markings she’s been spared the slaughterhouse in favor of promotional deals. What are the odds!? If this cow had been born in, say, Nebraska, she would have been a passing curiosity before taking a one way stroll down Stabby Lane, and had she been born in Ohio she probably would’ve been killed sooner!

I give you these examples of animal role models because of a popular group on Facebook right now called ‘Fuck College, I Want To Be A Panda’. Pandas are fat, lazy animals that practically never have sex. You want to live your life like a furry, black and white Truman Capps? You go right ahead, brother, and see how you like it. Only in America would people resent a world-class education so much that they’d wish to be an endangered species. You know what I’d rather be than a college student? Tina Fey’s husband. I said good day.

If Truman Capps' insensitive comments about an endangered species have made you angry, he wants you to know that he might have a birthmark in the shape of Oregon, therefore entitling him to do whatever the hell he pleases.

Forget About It Jake, It's China

From time to time, I’ve been accused of what one Internet pioneer once referred to as Hot Spicy Racism™, and in order to clear this issue up before it even starts, I’d like to point out that this blog is not an indictment of a race, but instead their hilariously negligent government. Also, I think Asian chicks are hot, so, I mean, that’s not racist.

Made in China, along with the Hasbro Ice-Nine Starter's Kit.

You know, you’d think that after the first time you make a serious product contamination boo-boo, or, well, the second time, but definitely by the third time, that you’d kind of have the hang of not inadvertently poisoning thousands of people. You’d think that after the government executes the head of your product inspection agency for his negligence and the CEO of one of the guilty companies hangs himself that maybe, just freaking maybe, you’d stop manufacturing products that double as booby traps. However, it seems that this is not the case, because this is China we’re dealing with, and now that they’ve fulfilled every 1980s parent’s worst Halloween nightmare by putting razor blades in lollipops, they have officially stolen the title of “Most Incompetent Country On Earth” from the United States.

Come on, China. I mean, really, it was cute the first time when you killed a whole bunch of dogs, and the second time with the lead paint endangering the lives of our nation’s children was good for a chuckle, but by the time we had the toothpaste thing it was getting on everyone’s nerves and at this point you’re heading straight for a spanking. I mean, really? A razor blade in a lollipop? How- How did you even do that? Were you trying? I think you were trying. I can’t see that being an accident, China – why would you have razor blades lying around in your candy factory? What were you going to do with them? Can you not make candy if you have a beard? Because, I mean, that’s really the only reason I can see for having razor blades in your candy factory. The only other option is that somebody went out, found a couple of razor blades, brought them to the candy factory, and threw them into the candy making machines. Which one do you want to admit to, China? Blatant stupidity or child-hating malice? I asked you a question, China, and so help me God, you’d better answer. We don’t have to go to Disneyland – I’ll turn this blog around. I am so not kidding. I’ll count to three.

It isn’t just us, though. The Chinese sometimes burn themselves, too. Recently, an investigation revealed that a company in Southern China was turning used condoms into hair ties that were being sold en masse at low prices in markets all over the country. Everyone was shocked to find out that they’d been wearing used condoms all this time, and I’d like to point out that only last weekend the University held a “Condom Fashion Show” in which students paraded around wearing unused condoms in another LOL IRONY type of affair. On one hand, I have to say I respect the ingenuity of the Chinese condom converters, because if you’d asked me what piece of garbage to make hair ties out of I would definitely not have thought of used condoms, perhaps more out of good taste than any other reason. On the other hand, I’m completely disgusted, as I hope you are too. Used condoms? I get that you want to cut costs by any means possible, but used condoms? There’s cutting corners, and then there’s scavenging through dumpsters for latex covered in strangers’ semen and vaginal fluid, and that second one is a surefire indicator that you’re far too greedy for your own good. Honestly, the only reason I can see for making hair ties out of used condoms is just spite for everyone with long hair. Methinks the mastermind behind this scheme was bald.

A few years ago, when we spontaneously realized that there were literally hundreds more Chinese people than Americans, there was a lot of talk about a possible war with a country whose military had more soldiers than Canada had citizens, and how screwed we’d all be if we pissed them off, and how soon we wouldn’t be living in the most powerful country on Earth anymore because the Chinese had ninjas and would be running the show before you could say Jack Robinson. However, in light of recent events, I think we need to reevaulate that position. We need to be more scared, because the Chinese have proven themselves incapable of making any product that does not in some way harm Americans. If this is what their candy does, I’d hate to see what their guns are like!

Truman Capps urges the United States not to get too cocky about now being the #2 most incompetent country on Earth - even though China is a communist pseudo-police state with no regard for the environment, the United States is a capitalist pseudo-police state with no regard for the environment with George Bush as president. He's sure the USA will earn the title back.

That's Amore

No, trust me, this will make sense in just a sec. Just read the blog and then come back, and you'll be all "Oooohhh, I get it now..."

There are two kinds of people in the world: People who think Valentine’s Day is adorable, and people who are single. Based on the content of my blog over the past few months, I’m sure you can tell that I’m not only single, but also jaded and cynical to the point that my heart is as cold and bitter as an ear wax popsicle. Valentine’s Day has been over commercialized – “No duh, Truman” says your 1994 alter ego, “But that’s no reason to be a total buzzkill about it.” Well, with all due respect, I think this is a holiday especially in need of trashing, and also I suggest that you enjoy Clinton while you can.

Valentine’s Day has given birth to the notion that if you want to tell someone you love them, you should do it on one day of the year – the day that they’re expecting it. This takes the spur of the moment, giddy excitement out of love in the same way that calling the terrorists beforehand takes the shock-and-awe fear factor out of late night commando raids. Valentine’s Day is essentially a heavy handed shove toward romance for unromantic guys who, by virtue of Aryan features or a trendy, single syllable name, have wound up with girlfriends. Why be spontaneous and romantic all year round when you can put on a tie and smooth out your spiked hair to take your girl to Olive Garden on February 14th when everyone else is doing it?

Being the prolific bachelor that I am, I tend to get a bit cranky around this time of year. I pride myself on having dated some redonkulously great women; however, none of my relationships have ever fallen on Valentine’s Day, so I’ve never had the chance to view it as anything more than a voyeuristic outsider looking in on everyone else’s romantic bliss. Adding to that is the fact that I’d expected things to be different this year, my freshman year of college. In high school, where I was trapped in an asbestos laced prison filled with cliques tighter than anything Tony Hawk does on his skateboard, asking women out for a guy like me was about as easy as building a treehouse using three nails and my wang as a hammer. But this didn’t bother me too much, because I figured that in college, where social castes weren’t as important and beautiful women practically grew on trees, that I would be swamped with potential mates come February 14th.

I was partially right: there are literally hundreds of drop dead gorgeous women at the University of Oregon. If any of you are reading this, do please give yourselves a hand. However, I went wrong because I came to school assuming that it would be like a petting zoo, whereas it’s actually a lot more like the Lourve: You’re face to face with the utmost in beauty, but none of it talks to you and touching is a definite no-no. And of course, it doesn’t help that I don’t drink, because I get the idea that most relationships are started when one or both involved parties are blitzed out of their skulls. Because, really, women don’t need men, as many girls have tearfully told me after ChadBiffLyle breaks up with them, because we traditionally offer little more than simple physical protection and reproductive opportunities, both of which women can now take care of themselves with tasers and sperm banks. What sober woman would take on what is essentially an emotionally handicapped tumor that will still look at porn while she dates him?

The fun-ness of sex is probably one reason, but there’s another, more sentimental explanation that I prefer to believe. Women and men might just put up with each other because love doesn’t suck quite as much as I say it does (it comes close, though). Valentine’s Day, despite all my griping, is sort of like a homecoming parade for the people who put up with the constant, and believe me I mean really flippin’ constant crap that a relationship throws at them and continue to weather the storm. A lot of people have compared love to a rose, because it has thorns that you have to put up with to enjoy its beauty. These people, despite being well intentioned, have it all wrong, and I’ll take this opportunity to present my own metaphor:

Love is like an MG42 machine gun operated by a crack squad of Nazi Stormtroopers on the outskirts of Stalingrad in early 1943. The Battle of Stalingrad, which is widely considered the bloodiest battle in the history of armed conflict, frequently saw hordes of untrained Russian conscripts charging German machine gun nests in an attempt to overwhelm them when they ran out of bullets. Thousands and thousands of people died this way, but every so often a few conscripts managed to survive long enough to kill the Germans, capture the machine gun, and continue in the fight against fascism. So, you see, that’s what love is. You take on incredible, nay, suicidal risk in the pursuit of something good – and if you don’t, your commanding officer shoots you for cowardice.

Have a happy Valentine’s Day tomorrow, everybody. Chances are, you’ve earned it.

His knowledge of obscure World War 2 history is probably one of the reasons Truman Capps is single.

Three Observations

Jerkface.

Writing Is Hard

Pretty much all great writers have some sort of vice. Faulkner couldn’t write a sentence unless he was submerged in a bathtub full of rum with a vodka IV in his arm and a gin and tonic for each hand, Charles Dickens loved making future generations of high schoolers miserable by writing mind bogglingly long and dull novels, and Edgar Allen Poe was really into cutting himself and listening to My Chemical Romance in his Mom’s Escalade. Why did they do these things? Two reasons: 1) Writers are, in general, losers, and 2) Vice is a great way to get around writer’s block. Between Diet Coke, cheap stir fry, and autoerotic asphyxiation, one would assume that I had enough vices to be able to write two blog entries a week, but more often than not I come right down to the wire trying to think of something funny to talk about.

When you maintain a relatively successful blog (and by “relatively” I mean relative to the success of Crystal Pepsi or Meet the Spartans) you start to look at the world through a different set of eyes, especially on Wednesdays and Sundays, provided that those are the days you update. I try to find the comedy in everything now – I did this before, too, but back then I’d just usually say “That’s what she said” whenever somebody finished speaking, and even though TWSS is quite possibly the finest thing ever created by humans, I doubt that you’d all enjoy seven paragraphs of sentences that involve the words “hard”, “long”, “moist”, “rough”, or “very large penis”. It’s easy to see something and think up some funny stuff about it, but what’s hard is to scrape together enough of that funny stuff to make an engaging and funny read. I carry with me a notebook in which I write down funny stuff I see, on the off chance that maybe it’ll grow into a fertile garden of humor that I can savagely and relentlessly harvest, spray with pesticides, and serve up for you in the Marie Callender’s of the Internet that most people call my blog. If that doesn’t get the creative juices a flowin’, I can at least admire its stylish moleskin cover and gloat about how cool I am for owning such a classy piece of writing paraphernalia.

Banana Chips – Worst Thing… Ever?

I’m trying to eat healthy, and I’m trying to save meal plan points, and I’m also going to college. These three combine to form a veritable dietary perfect storm that rains stale rice cakes and pelts me with brownish, overripe fruit that the University deems “fresh”. The other night I was hungry but I knew that if I ate another meal I would not only become slightly less attractive but also use up points that I would definitely need later in the week. I went down to the University market and poked around for awhile, looking for something good. Now, you’ve got to understand, the market at the University of Oregon is designed to give you school spirit, if you replace “school spirit” with “a nasty case of Type 2 diabetes”. Perhaps Wilford Brimley is part of our endowment. The point is, our market is 80% Hostess and 15% Little Debbie, and the last 4.5% is sort of like lard lollipops, where the sticks are made of bacon and the center is filled with heavy cream and Virginia Slims. I searched through all of this and finally found the .5% of the inventory that was not designed to rot teeth or block arteries. This section consisted of trail mix (good), and freeze-dried banana chips (which I’d never had before). They both cost four points, but the banana chips were marginally less fatty, so I picked them.

Let me tell you, even as I bought them I knew I was making a grave mistake. I mean, since when has something with all the moisture taken out of it been good? Maybe the moisture should have been left in there, because banana chips have an unsettling crunch to them, and an even more unsettling odor that you don’t want to smell coming from something that you’re putting in your mouth. If I had to smell banana chips at all, I’d want to smell them in the house of someone I didn’t like, or on a bomb that was about to be dropped on the factory that creates and exports banana chips.

I Hate The Sun

People in Texas always go on about how big everything is down there, when really the largest state is Alaska. This is probably because nobody would buy a pair of boxers that said “Everything’s Bigger In Texas, Almost To The Point Of Being As Big As Things In Alaska” and because neither one of Alaska’s inhabitants care enough to dispute the point with the state that brought us such travesties as El Paso, our current president, and El Paso. A fun fact that you may not know about state size, however, is that Oregon is the 10th largest state in the US. Pretty cool, huh?

Well, see, here’s the thing: It turns out that the Sun comprises 99.8% of the mass in the solar system, thus negating the importance of Oregon’s size or history, or of anything that has happened or is going to happen in your life. Ever. Whatever your dreams are – money, family, something involving mud wrestling – you’re going to get upstaged by that cocky jerk the Sun, because for all intents and purposes it is the only thing in the solar system. Every human, animal, nation, and geographic feature on Earth, not to mention every other planet near here, is statistically insignificant because we happen to be sharing the neighborhood with an unspeakably huge sphere made of nuclear explosions. Did I mention that in the next few billion years the sun is actually going to get bigger, to the point that it will start absorbing everything around it? Yes, you heard me - one day the Sun is going to eat our planet. Granted, after that it’ll get smaller, but not before ruining all our stuff. My advice to humanity is to try and pack a whole lot of living into the next five to six billion years, because before we know it the real culprit for global warming is going to come a knockin’.

Truman Capps is the only blogger on the Internet with the audacity to take on William Faulkner, bananas, and the Sun.

Of Rats And Sloths

I was going to post a picture of a sloth here, but they're honestly some of the most hideous creatures I've ever seen outside of Congress, so instead, please enjoy this picture of beloved actor Jimmy Stewart, and try to imagine him every time I say 'sloth'.

As I’ve mentioned before, half of my readers are either attending MIT or trying to attend MIT. Based on the two MIT students I know, I take it that you’re all highly motivated, energetic people who feel at a loss when you’ve got no new problems to solve. As for everyone else reading this blog, I’d like to assume we’re more like ordinary people, the sort of people who do what needs to be done and then head home and have a beer, play some Team Fortress 2, and maybe look at a little goat porn on the side.

Let it be known that I don’t like to be busy. Many of my friends, both in high school and now, get to be like lab rats a few weeks into every term. Have you ever noticed that lab rats will periodically decide that enough is enough, that they’ve procrastinated for too long, and that they have to do everything they’d been meaning to do in life for the next ten minutes? It sounds meaningful until you remember that lab rats have the life expectancy of a non-Bauer CTU agent and live in a small glass enclosure that’s pretty much empty. Regardless, you can be watching and suddenly one of the rats will jump up and go running over to the water bottle and sucksusksucksucksuck and then he’ll tear up the alfalfa to get to the exercise wheel and runrunrunrunrun and then he’ll jump out and try to bury himself in the alfalfa and digdigdigdigdig and then he’ll be so exhausted that he’ll fall asleep. This has been a pretty long metaphor, so I’m going to remind you that I’m describing about half of my friends right now. However, I definitely prefer to not be busy. If I were an animal, I’d be a sloth, and I’d love every minute of it because if you can get a deadly sin named after you then you’re probably a badass. However, this term it’s come to my attention between all the work I’ve been doing that I’m taking 20 credits, which is kind of a lot at a school where the recommended number is 15, and I don’t think I’m going to be able to keep doing this sloth thing anymore (however, ladies, if you’d like to help me out with lust you need only give me a call).

So how did the lazy guy come to be taking 20 credits? I blame wizards, and not those benevolent Dumbledore types, either. Whenever I’m not busy, which, and it saddens me to say this, is not that often these days, I start worrying about whether I’m going to be able to graduate in four years because of all the crap I’m not doing. To be honest, none of the classes I’m taking are harder than a couple of the AP classes I took in high school, but this is mainly because the guy who taught those classes was arguably The Best Teacher In The Universe™. If I were return to the animal metaphor, he would be like the Jesus of lions, combined with an eagle, and all the water-centric skills of a shark, and he’d have opposable thumbs so he could use guns whenever he was tired of killing people who turned in homework late with his 12-story scorpion tail. Point being, my college classes don’t keep me quite as busy as my high school classes did, which worries me because I’d been preparing myself for a tidal wave of work in college which honestly still has yet to fully hit me. Whenever I’m not busy, I start to worry that it’s either because A) I’m neglecting some highly important work or 2) Because I didn’t take enough credits and I’m just going to burn more of my parents’ money by staying here for an extra year. I worry about this even now, when I’m one credit shy of the University’s maximum! Granted, I did just wake up from a three-hour nap so I could check my email and update my blog, so maybe the sloth in me lives on.

Yesterday was one of the days that made me feel like a lab rat. I got up at 7:05 so I could go to Spanish, had a bowl of delicious Raisin Bran, went to Visual Communication so I could learn to unlock my intuitive mind through meditation and thus improve visual literacy (keep in mind that this is a required class for the journalism school, lest you ever forget that Oregon is chock full of new age hippies), studied with my Spanish partner at lunch for our midterm, went to my humanities class in which my partners and I tried to use a series of abstract runes to describe a picture of a waterfall in order to prove the importance of a standardized language, rushed to the student union so I could help to film an episode of a campus TV show I wrote in which an activist throws a dead fetus at a public safety officer, went to a three hour workshop in which I was taught how to use PhotoShop and InDesign (and yes, geeks, that does mean I now have additional ranks in ‘Forge Document’), met with the other writer for aforementioned TV show so we could write an episode in which a public safety officer unsuccessfully tries to hide a massive erection, and then went to bed so I could get up at 6:50 this morning for an oral exam, and not in the spanky fun way, either. Mind you, I don’t do coffee or energy drinks, which might be why I took a few surprise catnaps during my classes (including one while I was trying to do a sketch for Visual Communication, which resulted in a straight line quickly becoming diagonal).

At the moment I’ve weathered the homework storm and have a few days of ease ahead of me. I’m a much happier camper this way. However, I’ve found that I only really get pissed about being busy when I have time to think about how busy I am, and when I’m busy I don’t have time to think about much anything but not trampling an orphan in my haste to get to class. What does that make me, then? A person who can handle being busy, but also handle being idle? By that logic, I embody the greatest qualities of both lab rat and sloth*! It’s true what all your hot female friends have been telling you – Truman Capps is truly the greatest human being on Earth, and also a spectacular lover.

*I embody the greatest qualities of both Southern California and El Paso! I embody the greatest qualities of both Metamucil and Oat Bran! I embody the greatest qualities of both Crystal Pepsi and New Coke! I’m like a Transformer that transforms from a forklift into a small, weak robot that can only lift things!

Truman Capps is truly the greatest human being on Earth, and also… Wait, crap.

Bingo Wizard

Cyrano de Bergerac wins at Bingo.

Some time ago, teachers from around the world gathered and decided that there was to be one way and one way only to educate elementary and middle schoolers, and that would be Bingo. Screw textbooks, screw construction paper and glue, screw dodgeball, these days school is pretty much just Bingo and recess. I’m sure there was an AP Bingo class at my high school, and the Department of Bingo sent me a letter not too long ago about a possible minor in, well, you know.

No, I’m serious, though: We would play Bingo all the freaking time in elementary school! That was like the only thing they could think of to do with us! For example, my fourth grade class, like all people everywhere except my readers from MIT, were horrible at fractions. Why was there a line between the top number and the bottom number? We didn’t know, and our teacher sure as hell couldn’t seem to explain it to us,* so she broke out the Bingo cards.

*My fourth grade teacher was a mean old hag who would kick us out of class if we chewed gum or drank pop, but then she herself would chew gum and drink pop at her desk while we worked! I brought the unfairness inherent in this up to her one day, and she said “Life isn’t fair, Truman.” Well, yeah, I know, but that doesn’t mean you have to be part of the problem, lady! What if they started paying you less because you were a woman? You’d just have to suck it up and deal with it because life isn’t fair. What if they paid you less because you were a mean, crappy teacher? That would be poetic justice.

Now, here’s the thing about Bingo: It has no educational value past simple motor skill testing. You hear the word (or fraction, as the case may be in Fraction Bingo) and look to see if it’s on your pink laminated card. If it is, you put a scrap of paper over it. Then you wait to hear more numbers that might make a line of paper scraps, so that eventually you can yell Bingo and get a Jolly Rancher. What kind of education is that!? I know what a freaking fraction looks like, what I don’t know is how to add the damn things! The only thing you can learn from Bingo is that your Bingo card will always come within one square of a winner, and then some Aryan looking kid with a name like Kyle will get a Bingo just before you. And then he’ll join choir in high school and be really, really popular.

I think the number of Jolly Ranchers you received in elementary school determined how successful you were going to be in life. If you drove a Dodge Charger and dated all the cheerleaders and some of their mothers in high school, you probably spent most of your childhood sucking down cherry Jolly Ranchers because you had the Bingo cards that were winners. I did not like Jolly Ranchers, which would explain nearly everything that happened to me in high school, but even if I did like Jolly Ranchers it wouldn’t have mattered because I was bad at Bingo. Now, of course, being “bad” at Bingo is like being “bad” at going to the bathroom: There’s no real conceivable way for it to be possible without considering very embarrassing social issues, and while I’m very sure that I had a plethora of social issues in elementary school, that didn’t seem to be the reason for my bad luck with Bingo. I could find what the teacher called out just fine, and I could recognize a straight line of torn up bits of paper with the best of ‘em, but my cards just never warranted a Bingo. I’m pretty sure that I didn’t win a single Bingo game in my entire educational career, always just coming close to the win and then watching Kyle, who probably grew a totally rad soul patch in like seventh grade, take it away from me. There came a time at which I was in it not for the prize, but just for the very sensation of winning at Bingo and knowing I wasn’t cursed.

Well, big news, everybody: It took me 19 years, but yesterday I won a freaking game of Bingo – and for a $650 jackpot, no less! It’s part of the halftime festivities at the UO basketball games, and a bunch of guys in the band bought Bingo cards, and I won! Me and about 50 other people. When the University mails me my check for $2, I’m going to frame it and hang it on my wall. Bingo, like life, isn’t fair. It’s the one game you play in elementary school where there isn’t a happy, positive ending for everyone, and just when it looks like you’re going to win it, you with the funny name who’ll go on to be speech team vice president and band treasurer and the guy known for nothing more than his hair, somebody with a much more conventional and popular name will get there before you. But you keep playing Bingo, don’t you? Maybe it’s because they make you, but you keep playing Bingo.

Incidentally, last week somebody in the band won a $93 jackpot from Bingo. His name was Kyle.

Truman Capps would like to take a moment to commemorate his blog’s 1000th hit, which came from Ann Arbor, Michigan. If this particular reader would please send him his or her name, address, social security number, credit card information, and birth certificate, Truman will make sure to buy them something nice before leaving the country in his newly acquired zeppelin.

Como se dice "Morning Person?"

Wow Internet, you've really outdone yourself this time. First Google Image Search result for "spanish," ladies and gentlemen.

Every morning so far this term, I wake up and swear profusely, because my alarm goes off at 7:05 AM, and when you’re waking up at what for a college student may as well be the very butt-crack of dawn, there isn’t much else you can do but swear. Sometimes, I attempt to roll out of bed the wrong way and wind up crashing into the wall, like I did this morning, and sometimes I get all the way down the hall to the shower wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts when I realize that I locked my keys in my room, like I did this morning, and some mornings I shower for too long and wind up having to beat cheeks across campus so as not to be late, like I did this morning, and some mornings I come to the uncomfortable revelation that I’ve woken up as Ben Stiller in his typical role of the nice guy who gets all the world’s crap dumped on him, like I did this morning. My wang has yet to get caught in my fly, which I count as a plus, but I also don’t see myself hooking up with Cameron Diaz in the near future.

And why do I get up at 7:05 every morning? Unlike some people, who get up early and do strange activities involving physical exertion to improve their physique, I get up early because I have to go to the building on campus furthest from my dorm so I can take part in my 8:00 AM accelerated Spanish class. Now, when you hear ‘accelerated’, don’t get the idea that I’m some sort of linguistic genius who can whip out a brilliant blog entry in either English or Spanish, because that’s not the case. The way you should think of my accelerated Spanish class is the same way that you should think of your grandma accelerating her 1961 Ford Falcon: moving a little faster than the sidewalk (AKA Spanish 101), but not by much.

I qualified for accelerated Spanish (Spanish 111) by taking a placement test which told me that my two years of excruciatingly boring high school Spanish were not enough to clear the language requirements at the University, but they did qualify me to take a slightly higher level Spanish class. The problem was that by the time I was allowed to register for classes, the following happened:

Truman: “Hi there! I’d like to register for Spanish 111!”
University of Oregon: “Um, yeah... That’s not going to happen. All three Spanish 111 classes are full.”
Truman: “So even though Spanish is one of the most widely spoken languages in the country, you’re not willing to hire enough professors so that the students who’re paying literally hundreds of dollars to come here can learn it?”
University of Oregon: “That would really cut into our ‘Locker Room Juice Bar’ fund.”
Truman: “That hardly seems fair.”
University of Oregon: “You’re right, you know that? You’re right. Just wait here. We’re going to take all of your money, date your ex-girlfriend without asking if it’s cool with you, and then poop in your bed. Go Ducks!”

Fortunately, over Christmas break a few people dropped out of the 8:00 AM Monday-Friday Spanish 111 class, and I was able to beg the professor to let me in. It was a matter of necessity, of course – the 10:00 and 1:00 classes were fuller than a remarkably full bucket of water, and as Spanish 111 was part of a two term sequence, I had to get into it this term or I’d have to postpone my Spanish studies by a year. Even so, it hurt to wheedle a professor into letting me hang out with him and 25 of his student buddies every morning, because I value my sleep. For me, asking to get up at 7:00 every morning for ten weeks is like asking to go to El Paso every morning for ten weeks. If you’re in high school, I bet you’re laughing at me for not liking to get up at 7:00 every morning, because of course you get up at 2:30 AM every day so you can go to jazz band and then your AP Craft Jewelry study session. If you are laughing, feel free to come down here and discuss it with me – just make sure you’ve got a hall pass and a note from your mother so you can leave school. Good day to you, sir!

I feel sorry for my professor, because he’s really enthusiastic and good at his job, and he’s teaching to a class of 26 people who would set fire to Dave Matthews with an armload of iPhones and puppies if it meant they could go back to sleep. Spanish has always been an awkward class for me because it’s par for the course that you’re going to have to partner off with a complete stranger and converse in Spanish. Listen: Out of the 26 people in this class, easily 19 are girls. Since everyone sits in a different spot every day, each boy will inevitably be partnered with a girl the majority of the time. Now, if you know me at all, you’re no doubt aware that I can hardly say more than three sentences to a girl without violently jamming my foot into my (or, in some extremely awkward cases, her) mouth – and this is in English, a language that my high school gave me an award for being so good at! So how can I be expected to learn anything when I’m forced to talk to a girl I’ve never met before, in a language where I have a vocabulary of maybe four words tops, when my face still hurts from rolling into the wall by my bed not more than an hour ago?

Furthermore, the conversation topics we’re given aren’t necessarily the sorts of things I’d want to talk to a complete stranger about, regardless of gender or language. A prompt like Habla de su familia (Talk of/from/about your family) is a little forward for a couple of complete strangers who are still half asleep, don’t you think? How about some small talk, like Vas Los Sopranos anoche? (You see The Sopranos last night?) or Yo quiero Dennis Kucinich (I love Dennis Kucinich).* Whenever I do hablo mi familia, the astounding whiteness of our names throws off the casual Spanish speaking accent I’m trying to cultivate. Names like Eugene, Kelsey, Nancy, Eddie, and Judy stick out in the Spanish language like the callous and one dimensional characters from my science fiction novel would stick out in The Great Gatsby. They’re like linguistic speed bumps: You’re trucking along, saying everything correctly, when suddenly you have to forget all that you know about what consonants have different sounds lest you humiliate yourself by pronouncing “Judy” as “Yoodie”.

*I know that this sounds a lot like the Taco Bell ad, but “I love” translates practically the same way as “I want” (and honestly, I think a Chihuahua saying “Yo quiero Dennis Kucinich” would have done his campaign wonders). Also, the word for marriage, “casado”, is only a letter away from “cansado”, which means “tired.” For a romance language, Spanish seems to have some pretty fatalistic notions about affection.

But I keep getting up every morning and going to Spanish, because it’s very important to me that I learn a second language. You see, if I didn’t take a second language, I’d have to take a math class, and at that point I'd be better off moving to El Paso, getting elected mayor, and spending every day for the rest of my life rolling around on the blistering hot, dusty, loogie ridden streets of the city while being curbstomped by Hannah Montana.

Truman Capps wants to dissuade you from telling him how funny it is that he, who the University considers Mexican, is bad at Spanish. If I come up with new content twice a week, the least you can do is try to be original once and a while. Honestly.

HAY GUYZ, ITS SNOWING!!

Wut.

If you’re the sort of person who randomly shouts “It’s snowing!” to get people’s hopes up, I want you to punch yourself in the face right now. Go ahead, I’ll wait. Maybe do it twice, just to make sure you get all the stupid out. No, I’m kidding, stupid that severe can’t be removed by punching. But if you are the sort of person who does that, today would’ve been the one day you could’ve done it without being a complete attention whoring moron. You know, you should probably punch yourself again, just for good measure.

I woke up this morning to the sound of yelling outside my window, which is nothing new, because apparently the parking lot behind Hamilton Hall is the shizz as far as drunk shouting matches go. But this morning, instead of “I’M SO DRUNK RIGHT NOW” or “TRUMAN’S BLOG SUCKS”, I heard people just hooting and yelling for protracted periods. Pissed off that people should be drunk and yelling at 10:30 AM, I opened my blinds to see what all the fuss was about and found that, lord almighty, there was snow on the ground.

Being as half of my readers now hail from such exotic locations as Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Switzerland, you’re probably looking at my picture and thinking, “Pah! Big deal! You posted a low res picture of the two inches of snow outside your dorm! I live in a freaking igloo, and that’s in the summer!” But the thing is, in Oregon it’s a big deal anytime it doesn’t rain. If the sun comes out, it’s a party. If the rain stops, it’s a party. If it rains scorpions and HIV positive blood, well, it might not be a party, but we’d still be secretly excited for a brief respite from water rain. And then, snow? Snow is the granddaddy of all great Oregon weather events, because it actually gives you cause to go outside and have some fun. You can’t go sledding in blood and scorpions, and you can’t have a blood and scorpion fight*, but snow pretty much makes everything a playground.

*This is untrue, because you totally can, and it’ll probably be the climax of the new Rambo movie, which I think is stupid, in case you’re wondering.

In elementary school I, like all other kids everywhere, was completely enamored of snow and would freak out whenever I saw it start to fall – this included when snowflakes would come down and then melt on the ground, which is the cruelest thing weather can do to an eight year old. When it would start to snow during school, all the kids in my class would instantly stop paying attention and stare out the window at it, trying to will the temperature down below freezing so we could all go and live out wild Calvin and Hobbes style sledding adventures. This was much to the chagrin of our teachers, many of whom were old enough to have been very accustomed to the snow in Missouri before getting on the wagons and coming out to the Oregon Territory. “When I was your age,” one jaded, angry witch of a substitute once told us, “I was so tired of snow by this time of year that I didn’t even care what it did.”* Screw you, lady! Just because you’re lame and boring doesn’t mean we have to be too.

*This was Mrs. Herella, who we all secretly called Herella DeVille. She wasn’t really mean, she was just… Annoying, and not a good teacher. One of my saddest memories from elementary school was when all 30 students in my 5th grade class clustered around the door to the classroom be let in at the beginning of the day, and it was Mrs. Herella who opened the door, and everybody started screaming when they saw her. That poor woman.

Snow at the University of Oregon has turned all the people who were once too cool to look like they were having a good time into 5th graders again. Most people at U of O either come from other places in the Willamette Valley, where snow is rare, or from California, where snow is just a synonym for cocaine and nothing more, so this is a pretty big moment for all of us. Already some guys have broken a window with a snowball, and a few dozen very anatomically correct snowmen are standing guard on the lawn outside my dorm.

There isn’t a moral to this blog for two reasons – 1) There isn’t a moral for snow, and 2) I’m bored and I freaking want to play in the snow. So all of you East Coast/Europe people who think snow is a boring, day-to-day occurrence, try to think of me with my friends, making an ice penis for our Oregon snow hippie. Hopefully it’ll make you smile.

Truman Capps wants the university to cancel classes tomorrow, and maybe for the rest of the term.

Treatises On Birth Control

"I was involved in an extremely good example of oral contraception two weeks ago. I asked a girl to go to bed with me, and she said "No"." - Woody Allen

It seems that with each new school I attend, the administrators get more and more candid about how much sex they assume I’m going to be having. In middle school, I was forced to attend, with the rest of my classmates, a multiple-day sexual education class called Students Today Aren’t Ready for Sex, or STARS, or STARfS if you’re a precocious seventh-grader who thinks he’s God’s gift to third period Language Arts (and I was). High schoolers would lecture to us for half an hour or so each day about all the nasty diseases you would get from having sex, and tell us stories about girls who got knocked up and dropped out of school and spent the rest of their lives working at McDonald’s and cursing their horrible luck of not having anyone to tell them that the only good nookie is safe nookie. However, while the STARfS people would explain to us the various methods of safe nookie, they were sure to stress that no nookie whatsoever until marriage was preferable and foolproof, and I seem to remember that the course ended with us signing a pledge saying that we would wait to have sex until marriage.

As a wise man on the Internet once said, “LOL IRONY”, because of course a good number of people in my class violated that pledge in the following years, some of them quite prolifically, and with multiple people, and sometimes on school property. I don’t remember if I was every really vehemently in favor of abstinence, but I do remember some trepidation when I signed the pledge. In seventh grade, I considered it a good day if a girl touched me – and brushing past in the hall totally counted – and so when I completed my STARfS training I was pretty sure that knowing how to properly put on a condom wasn’t going to be of chief importance to me for a good long while. I wrote my name down on the pledge because I wanted an A, but in the back of my mind I knew that if a chance for nookie presented itself in the future, I wasn’t going to let a Xeroxed paper cutout be the deciding factor.

In high school, things became a lot more no-nonsense. Due to my crackerjack knowledge of the human reproductive system I was able to test out of freshman Wellness I and didn’t have to take a health class until my junior year. Now, if you’re in high school and you’re reading this, I’m going to explain to you how things work. There are some people who are passionately devoted to education, and those are teachers, and there are some people who are passionately devoted to making your senior year miserable, and those are Sprague High School administrators, and there are some people who are really, really good at coaching wrestling and absolutely terrible at teaching, and those people are health teachers. Mr. Cox was my health teacher, a slow witted man who would pronounce “also” as “alt-so” and during one lesson referred to the penis as “the tool,” which begs the question of whether it’s a screwdriver or a power drill, which was why I very nearly wound up getting kicked out of class. Despite not having much aptitude at anything but teaching boys how to put on leotards and “wrassle,” he was pretty good at reading health information to us straight from the book, which was how we got a refresher course on condoms, birth control pills, and the menstrual cycle, which is even more fun the second time around. Abstinence didn’t come up at all. It was sort of like Santa Claus for adults, I guess – when we were young, they enjoyed believing that we’d all heed their advice and exercise restraint, but by high school they all remembered what they’d been up to at that age and just gave up on the wishful thinking. Despite the fact that our teachers had woke up and smelled the hormones, a staunch contingent of parents refused to, which was why condoms weren’t freely available in school. To make up for this, my parents offered to put a basket full of condoms in our bathroom for me, which was not only a waste of money considering my less-than-prolific dating record in high school but also highly embarrassing when one has Catholic friends.

But then came college, and God bless you, sir, should you get a girl pregnant in college, because you would really have to be trying hard. In this day and age it would be a veritable Ocean’s 11 of the human anatomy to successfully make a baby because you can’t swing a cat on a college campus without hitting a pile of condoms and/or spermicidal lube, unless you’re at BYU or Liberty University, where the abstinence dream lives on. They give out condoms for free in the health center here, and the University has people hand out goodie bags with condoms in them on holidays (I got a black Halloween themed condom when I was just visiting the school last year, and you’ll be glad to know that I still have it, waiting in my desk for its day of glory that may well never arrive – not unlike a nuclear missile in its silo or Dennis Kucinich, also in my desk). There’s so many condoms on hand that the housing department, in its infinite wisdom, is organizing a “Condom Fashion Show,” in which people create clothes out of condoms, which is a sure sign that some people weren’t paying attention when STARfS taught us how to use the things. But it’s not just condoms, either – while birth control from the male side of things is fairly straightforward (“Put this on your wang so she won’t get pregnant!”) female birth control tends to be much more complicated and mysterious (“Using a horse bone knife, strip the skin from the papaya and let it simmer in Holy Water all night under a full moon, and once you rub the resulting paste in your hair, you will not get pregnant. Probably.). I was picking up a prescription at the health center and I noticed not only a wall sized poster showcasing the literally hundreds of types of birth control on sale, but also a single bottle on the counter, labeled “Vaginal Contraceptive Foam – 50% More Foam Than Leading Competitor!” I can’t imagine that there’s a whole lot of competition in the contraceptive foam market. I mean, when your product is called Vaginal Contraceptive Foam you’re pretty much just trading on the name right there. You know, Women, say what you will about sexism or poor role models in the media or body image concerns, but at least you get foam.

Sure, I’m glad that everyone (and by everyone I mean “Americans attending a major university”) has access to free birth control, but in the end I wind up feeling sorry for the people who manufacture Trojans. I mean, c’mon! You’ve been in a 7-11: Trojans are expensive! And by expensive, I mean that they cost money, whereas the condoms in the health center don’t. By all accounts, it would seem that Planned Parenthood is trying to put other birth control manufacturers out of business by underselling – nay, dumping! Seriously; why buy the condom when you can get the Vaginal Contraceptive Foam for free?

In the course of writing this article, Truman Capps found out that Trojans are manufactured by a company called Church and Dwight, neither of which is a name that he associates with sexual activity.

I Know, I Know, I'm Late, Shut Up

Hi there, I'm Internet celebrity Truman Capps, and I've let you down.

"Ohh, Truman" - and I'm doing an impression of my Dad here - "If you're really serious about writing, you should be updating your blog twice a week." Well, yeah, that's all fine and dandy until you go to a late night college party and are unable to excuse yourself to write a funny, poignant update about something. Yes, I didn't update tonight because I was the designated driver at a raucous, booze soaked party - I'm a horrible, neglectful blogger and you should never forgive me for it. Sure, I started to write an entry this afternoon, but then my friends wanted me to come over and hit the video games before a big social event this evening, so I did that, and then there was the social event, and then the after party, and now it's practically three AM and I'm already behind schedule with writer's block and a mildly amusing, half finished update about the health center. To make up for this, I'm going to post for you a piece that I wrote for the Oregon Marching Band's newsletter for our trip to El Paso. If you're in the OMB then you've already read this, and if you've got a problem with it then we can settle it via knife fight. For the rest of my readers, though, this should be a pleasant trip down football season memory lane, from a time before I was jaded by my hatred of El Paso. Don't worry, folks, I'll never go to a party again. Enjoy!

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LOOKING ON THE BRIGHT SIDE
A Bowl Game Rundown By Truman Capps

Let’s just face the facts: we all wish we were going to the BCS Championship or the Rose Bowl instead of The Sun Bowl, which is sponsored by the kind of deodorant that doesn’t “turn a nice girl naughty”. But I don’t think any of us realize how lucky we are – there are a lot of bowl games out there, 27 to be precise, and a disturbing number of them really, really suck. So that you can be thankful for our trip to El Paso, I’ve taken the liberty of ranking the top five worst college bowl games. Count your blessings.

#5: International Bowl – Toronto, Canada (Payout: $750,000)

Have you ever been enjoying a mild Oregon winter and suddenly said, “Hey! I want to go to central Canada in late December!” Yeah, me neither. This is the International Bowl’s inaugural year, and it’s the first post-season college bowl game played outside of the United States in nearly 70 years. This year’s game, which pitted one unknown football team who nobody cares about against another unknown football team who nobody cares about, was played in front of an audience estimated by fans at 25,000. This, in case you were wondering, is why we don’t play college football outside of the United States: Americans are the only people who care about football!

#4: Humanitarian Bowl – Boise, Idaho (Payout: $750,000)

The Humanitarian Bowl is the longest running cold weather bowl game currently in operation – but who cares? I’ve met a lot of people from Idaho and they’ve said some nice things about Idaho’s fishing and skiing and resorts, but not a whole lot about the bustling nightlife, which apparently consists of “Y’know, driving around… And stuff.” On the other hand, Idaho senator Larry Craig is currently battling allegations that he was soliciting sex in an airport bathroom, so I guess there’s one way to spend your per diem. I know the OMB has a limit on hookers, but how about senators?

#3: All Praise Be To Our Glorious Leader Bowl – Pyongyang, North Korea (No payout, capitalist swine!)

Who ever said Communists aren’t ready for some football? Although it’s been in operation for several years, the APBTOGL Bowl has had some trouble finding teams willing to play. This could be because of a little-publicized postgame event in which the losing team is executed by firing squad after leaving the field. Sports experts agree that this tradition is why South Muncie Bible Academy’s football program never recovered after their 2003 loss to North Korea Tech.

#2: 7th Circle of Hell Bowl – Banks of the River Styx, Hell (Payout: Souls of the damned)

Thanks to a recent sponsorship contract with home team University of Hell, the 7th Circle of Hell Bowl will now match the UH Fightin’ Brimstones against a team from the realm of the living every year. This is a rough game for the away team, what with the sulfur jets on the field and the eternal torment and all. University of Hell also fields an impressive football team that includes wide receiver Jack the Ripper, running back Lee Harvey Oswald, and Heisman candidate Judas as quarterback. Head coach Vlad the Impaler is also reportedly eager for the death of O.J. Simpson, expecting him to be a great addition to the team. This year, University of Hell plays Notre Dame.

#1: Emerald Bowl – San Francisco, California (Payout: $850,000)

I was back at my high school during the break, and some acne faced, snot nosed freshman in an OSU T-shirt came up to me and said, “So, what did you think of the Civil War game?” “It didn’t really bother me too much,” I said. “Because, after all, U of O is going to a higher ranked bowl game.” The kid just muttered something like “Oh” and walked away. True story.

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Truman Capps enjoys pulling out canned rerun entries like this, because neglecting his fans is his favorite thing ever.

The Fools, They've Gone Too Far!

Enough is ENOUGH!

Have you seen the commercial for Colonial Penn? I can’t find it on YouTube, but if you watched it you’d probably need a double dose of Metamucil just from the sheer AARP vibes radiating off of it. Two old ladies are sitting at a kitchen table, watching a miniature TV, when a commercial for Colonial Penn comes on, featuring Jeopardy!’s Alex Trebeck. “Oh!” One of the women says. “This is the commercial I told you about!” They proceed to watch the commercial while periodically discussing what a great deal on senior citizen life insurance Colonial Penn gives. It’s like an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, only they took out the funny parts and replaced them with the sort of story you’d probably hear from your grandma (“So Edna and I were scrapbooking the other day and you’d never believe it, we saw a commercial with that nice man from the Jeopardy show! Did you know that he was Canadian?”). I’m all in favor of spicing up advertising, either with better writing or boobs (I’m not picky) but Colonial Penn has failed to meet my rather exacting standards. I think a good commercial is a memorable commercial, one that brings something interesting and lively to the table. Instead, I’m sitting around watching TV, on which two old ladies are sitting around watching TV. It’s the lamest infinity money can buy.

Of course, it serves me right for complaining about one commercial within a commercial, because not half an hour later did I see something so horrendous that it drove me to my feet so I could shout, “This is so going in the blog!” In yon commercial, we can finally find conclusive proof that corporations have given up on even trying to hide their desire for our delicious, delicious money. What starts out as a trailer for yet another sub-par movie featuring my man Samuel L. Jackson morphs seamlessly into a commercial for computer-TV interfaces, to Windows Vista, to a plug for Serena Williams, to a plug for Andre3000 (whose hit groove “Hey Ya” puts him ahead of the other 2999 Andres as far as I’m concerned), to a preview of Serena Williams’ new tennis video game, to a plug for her new line of designer clothing, and then back to a trailer for yet another sub par movie hoofidy ploofidy blah blah Samuel L. Jackson.

Here’s what I think happened: Some ad exec read my blog and noticed that it’s very easy to get me ranting about commercials and greater American consumerism, and decided that he was going to provoke me by making God’s gift to capitalist whoredom: a promotion of a tennis star and recording artist wrapped in a thin layer of software advertisement, all of this rolled up in a flaky movie trailer crust and crammed between two freshly baked slices of greed. Granted, most things are better in sandwich form (e.g. ice cream), but this is ridiculous! It’s not enough that we’re subjected to advertisements on buildings and buses or in newspapers, magazines, books, movie theaters, on our food packaging, on certain beaches in New Jersey, on T-shirts, and in movies, but now we’re seeing advertisements inside other advertisements! It’s like opening a 7-11 in a 7-11! I don’t suppose I should have expected much from the society that put cameras in their phones and movies on their iPods* and Thomas Kinkade galleries in places where people with brains can be offended by them.

*David Lynch thinks it’s “such a fucking sadness” to watch a movie on an iPod. Coincidentally, I think it’s a pretty big sadness to make me sit through two and a half hours of Mulholland Drive for one measly lesbian scene. I said good day!

But, I mean, really? Is this how we’re playing now, Mass Media? If I saw this sort of crap on Futurama I’d give it a very hearty laugh! The thought of a commercial so long that it warrants its own flippin’ commercial just naturally lends itself to either lighthearted comedy or consumerism-run-amok tragedy. Now that we’ve crossed this line, the line of ‘easy now, lads, one commercial per commercial’, all bets are off. What’s next, taping video billboards to barnyard animals? Product placements during church services? Something… Something with poop? Like, poop based… Poop advertising? It may sound juvenile, but remember, people, they aired an ad within an ad within an ad within a movie trailer! They’re calling all the shots! They’ve captured our bridge! John Doe has control of the game!

It’s no secret that the only reason anybody puts up the money for cultural edification the likes of 30 Rock is because they want to sell advertising between shots of Tina Fey’s beautiful face and razor sharp wit. I suppose that with television experiencing such a revolution in quality, what with the Heroes and the Lost and the Desperate Housewives and the My Name Is Earl and the CSI and the The Office, that commercials would have to pull something crafty to keep up. Maybe that’s how the universe stays in balance - every time the forces of creativity do something awesome, the forces of consumerism have to pull up alongside them to keep things in check, kind of like that writer’s strike dealio that I can’t talk about without grabbing my sock full of batteries and looking for the nearest MBA. So maybe one day they will bring back Firefly, and they’ll show new episodes seven days a week, but in return we’ll all be forced to receive a permanent IV of Cherry Chocolate Diet Dr. Pepper.

Truman Capps doesn’t think that adding more adjectives to the name of your soda will make it any better.

You Know, For Kids

+ Hannah

I consider Hannah Montana to be just one more signpost along the road to humanity’s doom (other such signposts include American Gladiators and the sanctioned use of synthesizers in high school marching band competitions). Every so often, something becomes popular that in my estimate really has no business being popular, and its resulting popularity drives the rest of the world beans-up-the-nose crazy in their clamor to possess it. Case in point: Tickle-Me-Elmo. People went nuts for that! Why, though? If you poked it, it trembled and made giggling noises – I could get the same results with a Jell-o mold and a tape recorder for a damn sight cheaper, but on Black Friday there were parents beating each other up in Toys-R-Us for the thing! Might I reiterate, why, though? Tickle-Me-Elmo did only one thing! Had I been a four year old who was presented with a Tickle-Me-Elmo, I would’ve given my parents a harsh tongue lashing for giving me a toy with such limited prospects for play.

Hannah Montana is the Tickle-Me-Elmo of the 21st century – a broad statement, considering that we’ve only completed roughly 8% of the 21st century so far, but should the world go crazy for a Tickle-Me-Truman doll sometime in the next 50 years, I’ll be happy to eat my words on this one. The tweenybobber pop star’s latest endeavor has been the Best of Both Worlds tour which so far has been an unparalleled success, with tickets selling out about as quickly as tickets to Elvis and The Beatles concerts back in the day, according to industry experts. Parents desperate to appease their Hannah Montanaphile children are going to great lengths to buy the neigh impossible to find tickets. Some parents stay up all night at Ticketmaster.com, waiting to buy at the very second tickets go on sale, while other parents pay thousands of dollars to scalpers or pretend that they’re war widows.

Oh, what, you didn’t hear about that last one? Priscilla Ceballos, a 25 year old mother of three from Texas who apparently drew her eyebrows on with a brown Magic Marker, helped her daughter write an essay about her father’s death in Iraq so that she could win tickets to see Hannah Montana. It’s all very sweet and tragic until you consider that the girl’s father, Jonathon Menjivar, is alive and well and has never been in the military. The press discovered this minor detail only a few days before the daughter was due to receive the tickets, triggering an outpouring of loathing for the woman willing to parley our country’s greatest diplomatic and military blunder of the past 20 years into an evening of fluorescent pink, girly fun. Now, of course, your first instinct will be to blame the mother for all this, but when you think about it, if Mr. Menjivar was a dead soldier like he was supposed to be, his daughter would have fulfilled her lifelong dream of worshipping at the altar of Hannah Montana – now who seems like a bad parent? Mrs. Ceballos, the feckless, lying curmudgeon that she is, first used the excuse that she had lied by accident, assuming that the contest had been to write a compelling fictional story, which is a lot like a bank robber saying that he thought the money in the vault was for anybody to take, or a murderer saying that he and his victim were just playing a friendly game of “See how many times I can stab you before you bleed to death.” Under additional scrutiny, Mrs. Ceballos began playing the martyr, lamenting that she had made a bad decision in her quest to be a good mother and, due to the considerable bad publicity caused by her actions, has been forced to move out of her home and shut down her Myspace page. In her appearance on The Today* Show a few days ago, she said that, “It was not my intention to mislead.” I have to call BS on this – I think it was exactly her intention to mislead. Very few people say things that aren’t true when they don’t want to mislead people, because four out of five liars agree that lying is the very best way to mislead people.

*Because how better to punish a bald faced liar than to put her in the limelight on a nationally televised TV show?

Children grow into adults, and then as adults they have children, and in their crazed quest to win the approval of their children, parents will regress back into childishness themselves. Kids have always fought over toys on the playground, and then a bunch of them grew up and fought over Tickle-Me-Elmo in toy stores so they could be good parents and give their kids what they wanted. Kids will tell outlandish lies to get what they want, and sure enough, Mrs. Ceballos first pretended to have a dead husband, and then pretended that she had thought she was entering a fiction contest – all so she could get tickets to a concert by a performing artist who targets preteen audiences. And how was she punished? Well, for one thing, she had to get rid of her Myspace.

Truman Capps finds the notion of rubbing Elmo until he trembles just a little bit pedophilic, and wonders how many Tickle-Me-Elmo recipients will go on to appear on To Catch A Predator.

We Don't Need No Stinking Content!

Which bloodthirsty dictator are you? :D:D:D:D

Despite the fact that I make it look so easy, it is in fact kind of tough to think up mildly funny and relatively thought provoking things to write about every week, and so a few days ago, at a loss for what to write today’s entry about, I turned to Google. Google, hand in hand with Wikipedia, is where atheistic geeks go to find life’s answers in lieu of the Bible or friends. It’s the manhole cover over the festering sewer of the Internet, and by prying it off of the ground with a Mozilla Firefox crowbar and sticking your head inside you’ll probably find at least one of the answers to your questions, as well as some kid’s Nerf gun fan site.

I Googled the term “things to blog about”, and the first site I found was Blogthings.com, so I figured I was on the right track. What I was hoping for was an indexed list of interesting topics that are easy to make light of and write metaphors about, but what I saw reminded me that I’m in the minority by actually creating my own content for my blog. Blogthings.com provides you with everything you’ll ever need to get around actually writing. It’s an archive of cute add-ons for your blogs – polls and quizzes* to let you determine what your prom style is, or what 2004 hit song you are, or how Texan you are. All of these are burning questions that I’m glad we’re devoting our time to, and did I mention that there’s currently a genocide going on in Darfur?

*So since when did quizzes become fun again? I seem to remember everybody hating quizzes in high school, and I’m pretty sure I still hate quizzes now, but it seems that everybody else can’t get enough of these timewasters. One of the quizzes on Blogthings – I’m not kidding – is “How evil are you?” Don’t you think we could figure this out for ourselves, Internet? I mean, if a person really, truly is evil, then the voices in his head telling him to kill hookers are probably also telling him how evil he is. What I find really disturbing is that the quiz isn’t called “Are you evil?”, but “How evil are you?”, implying that there are, I don’t know, degrees of evilocity, and all of us are somewhere on the evil scale. I consider myself four dead orphans’ worth of evil, but the anonymous wanker in my hall who seems to like slamming his door as hard as possible at 3:30 AM is probably about 15 dead orphans’ worth.

Y’know, one of the earliest blogging sites was Livejournal.com, which kickstarted blogs as an online diary of sorts where people publicly posted thoughts that common sense dictates should best be kept in a locked pink My Little Pony notebook. The impression was that the blogger makes entries about him or herself, and the bloggie reads them and learns something about the blogger – for example, and I’m just throwing out ideas here, maybe he likes anime. That’s the way blogs are supposed to be. You come here, you find out that I’m determined to be cranky and cynical about everything, you go to Snively’s blog, you find out that he’s a genius with a disturbing amount of time on his hands, you go to The Aspiring Liter and you find out that she doesn’t update very often. But now, with all these add-ons from Blogthings, there’s blogs in which every update consists of a sentence and a quiz, and now the blogger only exists so that the bloggie can find out color his or her toenails should be.

Blogthings advertises itself as a place to find quizzes that “will give you a good idea of who you are.” The quest for identity has been something that’s consumed human beings for thousands of years and has traditionally been a process that includes career changes, drugs and alcohol, listening to Pink Floyd, and divorce, among other things, but now we can axe all that garbage because we’ve got quizzes to find our identities for us. While most dystopic science fiction doesn’t apply to modern society yet, the thought of a simple test to determine one’s place in society seems to be taking shape now that there are entire websites devoted to people testing themselves to get advice. So remember – if we aren’t careful, in ten years our children may well be forced to find out what kind of cheesecake they are.

Truman Capps is waiting for the “Are You A Replicant?” quiz, wherein if your test results are positive, an aging, alcoholic Harrison Ford comes and tracks you down.

Back To School

Sorry, but it's not like that at all. Not even a little. I'm sad too.

Oh, and I was so happy that I finished fall term on December 3rd, and here I am paying the piper. While all my private school friends get to lounge around for another week, in a few hours I’ll be boarding a bus back to Eugene so I can start winter term. Literally hundreds of people have asked me if I’m excited, and I guess I am, but I’m also scared for some of the same reasons I was scared before I went down to school at the end of the summer: 1) Oh snap, what if I have boatloads of homework now? and 2) Oh snap, what if I’m not as smart as I enjoy pretending I am?

All of my friends are excited to go back to school because they, with their newfound college independence, are chafing under their parents’ rules and regulations (which I’m lead to believe are “lame”). Now, as with most adolescent problems, this doesn’t really bother me, because my parents are so easygoing that my home life isn’t too different from my college life. In college I spend most of my time playing video games and surfing smutty websites, and I do pretty much the same thing at home, only I’ve got a private bathroom and shower and no homework to distract me. I mean, who wants to walk away from that? Even if I were the type to stay out all night with my friends getting totally crunk, my parents probably wouldn’t be all that angry about it so long as I did so responsibly. About the only thing I could do to really piss my parents off would be to start attending Bible study or vote for Mitt Romney.

But I have to go back, and I’m not saying that I’m not excited at all, because there’s a lot of fun stuff about college. I’ll meet a whole new crop of girls who don’t want to go out with me and get a chance to load up on chicken Caesar salads again, plus I’ll finally be able to find out whether it was a bad idea for me to leave a half eaten container of hummus in my fridge for the entire break. It’s also a lot easier for me to make funny blog entries when I’m at school. In college, interesting things happen to me on a daily basis (that is, if you find band gossip interesting), and it’s easy for me to whip up some wordy crap with run on sentences about whatever strikes my fancy. At home with my parents, though, I seldom leave the house because I don’t have any friends in the neighborhood, and so the only stuff I have to write about are my parents, and if I’m going to post on my blog about my parents then I might as well grow my hair down to my shoulders, dye it black, wear eyeliner, gain 50 pounds, drop out of school, write freeverse poetry, play World of Warcraft, go to anime conventions, shop at Hot Topic, see The Corpse Bride, change my name to Skyler or Josh or Seth, complain about how nobody understands me, and start dating a high school sophomore with a history of cutting.

Never will I feel more materialistic than when I go from home back down to school. Right now I’m taking my duffel bag, which is so stuffed full of clean clothes that I can barely close it, my marching band uniform, a backpack full of books, DVDs, and Christmas gifts I received, and both my trumpets. The fact that I’m doing this on a bus makes it that much harder, because taking the bus is really only one cut above walking on your hands when it comes to efficient or comfortable travel. Riding the bus to Portland after the bowl game, I made the mistake of trying to use the bathroom while we were in traffic, which would make for a pretty entertaining and challenging arcade game, but in real life it’s more like trying to fill a glass of champagne without spilling it while jumping on a trampoline.

Ah well. School, like life, goes on. I don’t suppose I could exist much longer like this anyway, living it up with no responsibilities and all my wants and needs catered to. Proust (or, more directly, Steve Carell at the end of Little Miss Sunshine, because any 19 year old who claims to read Proust is probably lying) says that only in stressful, trying times can a person see his true nature. He’s probably right, but I think most of us would be willing to give our true nature a miss if it meant we could sleep in ‘till 11:00 and spend all day playing Team Fortress 2.

Truman has made a possibly foolhardy decision, and will now be updating twice a week, on Sundays and Wednesdays. Watch and see if he’s creative enough to be funny two out of seven days!

On Travel

...sucks.

So this weekend I went to El Paso* with the Oregon Marching Band, so I could pep up the crowds and help our football team win, which they did.

*This isn't a blog where you go to learn life lessons. If you're looking for them, you probably shouldn't be on the Internet, because as I've previously mentioned, looking for something worthwhile on the Internet that isn't bizarre pornography is about as productive as shooting yourself in the face on the off-chance that the bullet might be made of delicious gravy. All that aside, I'm going to impart one piece of advice, perhaps the most worthwhile information you'll ever get from me: Never, ever, ever go to El Paso. Maybe you think it wasn't so bad because, being with the band, I got an all expenses paid trip. To put things in perspective, getting an all expenses paid trip to El Paso is like getting an all expenses paid kick in the face, only a kick in the face doesn't last three days (unless you're in a Chuck Norris joke). You know that crappy part of town where there's a lot of strip malls and all the houses are run down and everything has bars over the windows? Those are all little clones of El Paso, except better, because I'm willing to bet they're not prone to temperatures of 20 degrees at 10 AM and 80 degrees at 2 PM, dry enough to make your hands and lips crack and bleed, or dustier than the inside of a vacuum cleaner. Did I mention that it's right next door to the city where hundreds of women have mysteriously been murdered in the past decade? I'm serious, just... Just don't go to El Paso. If you're reading this and you live in El Paso, I'm really sorry. For all I know, I could've only seen the very worst parts of your city, and maybe everywhere else the streets are paved with garlic and there's huge statues paying homage to Kurt Vonnegut, but for the plain and simple fact that I'm not as funny when I'm politically correct, I've got to say that I unabashedly hated being in El Paso. So sorry.

The Early Bird Catches The Worm, And We Hate Him For The Example He Sets

The people in charge of the band made us report to Autzen Stadium at 4:00 AM so we could get on the buses that would take us to the charter plane at the airport. Once we got to the airport, we waited in the terminal for an hour until our charter plane showed up. I'm actually really glad that we did that, because if people don't make me do stupid things then I don't have anything to write about, and who needs extra sleep before a big exhausting weekend anyway? Sure, yes, I get it, we had to make sure there was plenty of time so that the plane didn't leave without us lest there be some sort of snag, but... But it was a charter plane! Had we slept for another hour and then hit some sort of snag in security, that plane wouldn't have taken off at 7:00 anyway without the people who paid for it! But instead, we woke up at 4:00 AM! So that we could go to El Paso! Do you know what that feels like!?

Airplanes Are Not Roller Coasters

When the airplane is landing, don't hold up your arms and cheer like you're on a roller coaster. Why not? Because you're not on a roller coaster. As a general rule, if it's something you'd do at a theme park, it probably doesn't have any place in normal society. Would you get your picture taken with a giant mouse walking around on the street? Would you pay $7.00 for a small Diet Coke at a normal restaurant? Would you get into a decaying, rusty machine operated by a greasy hillbilly if it wasn't the Tilt-a-Whirl? No, no you wouldn't, because that would not be a very smart thing to do. But then again, if you hold up your arms and cheer while the plane is landing, you're probably pretty stupid anyway, so I guess you would be willing to pay a few hundred dollars to get on a roller coaster ride that has a mildly exciting beginning, a dead boring three hour interlude with a drink service and showing of Hairspray, and a mildly exciting ending followed by El Paso.

Mysteries of Sonic Revealed

If you live in Oregon, you've probably been seeing commercials for a fast food drive in called Sonic for your entire life, and you've probably always been wondering why the hell Sonic is paying for ads in states that don't even have a Sonic. Likewise, you may have heard the rumors of the Sonic that now apparently exists somewhere in Hillsboro, a shimmering fast food Shangri-La of sorts. Well, if you can say anything about El Paso, it's that they were kind enough to put a Sonic right close to the hotel we stayed in, so a few friends and I went and tried to see what all the fuss was about. Sonic, I think, is a Venus Fly Trap sort of enterprise - they lure unsuspecting out-of-towners to their restaurants, befuddle them with a highly technical ordering process, and then merely wait for the confused consumers to starve to death while pondering how to eat at a drive in when they have no car. At that point, they take the bodies and make them into Soylent Green Shakes, only one of the 168,894 possible drink combinations Sonic advertises. Fortunately, we outsmarted them and figured out that you had to push a button and say what you wanted, and then eventually they'd bring it to you from inside. And I've got to say that overall, the food there is pretty good. Not worth going to El Paso for, but if you're in Hillsboro and feeling lucky, I'd say you should give it a shot.

School Starts In Less Than A Week

Crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap. I might actually have to do work next term, which will severely cut into my Team Fortress 2 time. This is almost as bad as El Paso...

Truman Capps has been riding Greyhound buses, sleeping on couches and floors, and living out of a single duffel bag for the past six days, and now feels at peace with his inner hobo.

Three Cheers For The Internet!

If not for the Internet, these two uggos never would've hooked up.

Today I found myself staring at a sidebar ad on Facebook. A gorgeous blonde coed was posed in a senior picture-esque tableau, and the caption read “WANT TO MEET GIRLS?” Well, yes, I do want to meet girls, but I can do that without your help, sidebar ad. Hell, I live up a flight of stairs from 20 girls, most of whom I’ve met. This is what I’ve never understood: guys are always complaining about there being no good place to meet girls when it’s really not that hard at all – just go outside. There’s literally hundreds of women on Earth, all of them positively waiting to be met if you’d only go out and meet them. If you’re too lazy to do that, just hang out in the women’s bathroom long enough and I guarantee that you’ll meet a lot of women, and maybe a few angry policemen to boot. But of course, they weren’t asking me if I wanted to meet girls, they were asking if I wanted to date girls, and despite my better judgment I do, so I clicked the link and found myself at an online dating site.

Dating is an awkward, nerve wracking, embarassing experience, and adding the Internet to the equation has only made things worse. Dating is characterized (sometimes) by a search for love and affection, while the Internet is characterized (always) by a search for pornography and free mp3s. Why combine the two!? Looking for love on the Internet is like looking for healthy, nutritious vegetables in a sewer, or trying to find good qualities in a Republican presidential candidate. When you meet a girl and ask her out in real life, you incur a lot of risks. Maybe she’ll turn you down (I’ve been there), or maybe she’ll be a complete psychopath (I’ve been there)* who’ll dope your food with laxatives while you aren’t looking in order to fulfill some bizarre sexual desire (I haven’t been there yet, but I’ve heard stories). But dating on the Internet? That makes things even more dicey! When you meet somebody in person you can at least get some general idea of their personality, looks, and gender, but on the Internet all of that can be changed!

*To put any of my ex-girlfriends who are reading this at ease, the psycho of which I speak was neither half Eskimo nor vegetarian nor a business major. You three dodged a bullet this time, but if you get on my bad side you’ll have a one way ticket to Scathing Blog Entry-ville. That’s no lie.

The site’s main page featured several large webcam pictures of breathtakingly attractive women that it claimed were members of the website, women so mind-bogglingly beautiful that I wondered why they were spending their evenings searching for love among the anonymous geeks of the Internet when they could just as easily go into a bar and have the Duke University lacrosse team buy them drinks and possibly roofies at a moment’s notice. I searched the site for users from Portland who considered themselves “Smokin Hot”, and found myself with the profile pictures for 11 buff, shirtless guys and one girl who was probably 16 and didn’t correspond to my definition of the term “Smokin’ Hot”.

I guess people will defend Internet dating forever as it gets more advanced. Apparently eHarmony.com has distilled love, an ambiguous term that robots can’t understand, into a 250 question test (which gays aren’t allowed to take, because eHarmony is owned and operated by evangelical Christians who were personally told by Jesus that gays can’t feel love). No matter how many relatives I have to disappoint, though, I’m going to stick to my skepticism of Internet dating. Geeky guys have been getting together with good looking women for years without the Internet’s help – for proof, just look at my Dad’s senior picture alongside my Mom’s.

Truman Capps has made jabs at his ex-girlfriends, evangelical Christians, and his father in this update, and no doubt one of the three is going to get him back before next week.

Too Much Geat For 2 Dimensions

...In your EYE!

I was having some trouble thinking of what to write this week, what with me putting off writing this blog entry until the very last minute and having very little to say. I spent most of the day in Salem visiting friends, and then I drove back on the highway through the midst of what I’m pretty sure was Hurricane Katrina’s reunion tour combined with a “Biggest, Meanest 18 Wheelers Ever” convention. A good and eventful day, to be sure, but not a good day for comedy. Mom suggested that I write about how Britney Spears’ 16-year-old sister is pregnant now, but I mean, really? I don’t make this out to be the classiest of blogs, but I’d like to think I could be a little more highbrow than that.

So anyway, today I saw Angelina Jolie Naked 3D, otherwise known as Beowulf 3D. Now I’m proud to say that I’ve read Beowulf (…mostly), and when I first heard that Angelina Jolie was going to be playing a sort of seaborne Hilary Clinton that gave birth to Grendel, which in case you don’t know is what Shrek would be like if he were combined with The Grinch and a double dose of Hannibal Lecter, I was a mite skeptical. I have to say, now that all is said and done, I’m pretty happy about the casting. I mean, seeing Angelina Jolie as a humanoid naked demon is great any day, but seeing her as a humanoid naked demon in 3D? That’s as close as I’m going to get.

Going into the Beowulf movie experience, I was expecting a generic sword and sorcery rendition of an epic poem about the Jack Bauer of the Dark Ages. Instead what I got was a 113 minute long tribute to nudity. The movie opens with a fat king parading around a mead hall with way too much of his body hanging out of the bedsheet he’s wearing, Angelina Jolie, as previously mentioned, avoids clothes in general, and Beowulf is completely stark naked for an entire 10 minute long battle scene. 10 minutes! An entire battle, too, with swordplay and flipping around really fast, and the entire time there’s always something carefully positioned to be in front of his wang. I think that the producers of Beowulf decided about halfway through that they couldn’t make a good enough profit on the strength of the movie alone, so instead they added the naked swordfight scene so that lonely housewives will have something to watch while they drink wine coolers.

This is the first time I can remember that I saw an honest to God 3D movie in theaters. Overall, I found it sort of uncomfortable. Beowulf is a movie with a lot of sharp things (swords, spears, arrows, teeth, claws, splinters) that get thrust or thrown toward the viewer a lot, more than I’d say is necessary. As a young boy, my grandmother instilled in me a deathly fear of poking out my eye on something sharp (which is to say nothing of a Red Ryder BB Gun), so for most of the movie I was instinctively thrashing around in my chair trying to get away from the giant bloody spear that Beowulf saw fit to shove in my general direction. When they weren’t doing that sort of thing, it seemed like the producers were very much in love with the notion of the fact that they were making a 3D movie, so they added lots of things that would seem out of place in a non-3D movie. Grendel screaming directly into the camera, slow motion tracking shots on thrown items, water/blood/pus/drool (3/4ths of these belong to Grendel) dripping onto the camera and, thus, the viewer. While I enjoy a bit of good visual trickery as much as the next guy, these are things I don’t want to directly participate in. I didn’t pay $9 to pretend I’m getting drooled on, because I can do that for free in the privacy of my own home. I really don’t want to feel like I’m back in the Dark Ages (pointy things, disease, and not enough hot evil naked Angelina Jolie to go around) – I’d much rather see Rushmore 3D, or The Big Lebowski 3D, or possibly Superbad 3D.

Oh, and did you hear about the videotapes of CIA interrogations that were mysteriously destroyed before Congress could see them? Yeah, maybe those were in 3D too.

Truman Capps is hoping that something really funny and poignant happens to him between now and next week.

I Cannot Wait To See The Golden Compass

I think God is going to be okay, death threats notwithstanding. I mean, he's got his bodyguards here, plus, he's God.

I really don't like fantasy. I saw all the Lord of the Rings movies and I recognized that they were obviously excellent films, but fantasy just isn't my cup of tea. I can't really say why, but magic and wizards don't do it for me - hell, I haven't even read past the fifth Harry Potter book! I'm a 100% science fiction lover, which would probably explain why I'm sitting alone in my room on a Friday night. All that being said, I'm going to go watch The Golden Compass soon.

I don't know what this movie is about - element number 79 perhaps, or the occasional navigational implement. The poster has a picture of somebody riding an armored polar bear, which brings to mind bear cavalry (as certain a weapon of mass destruction as any cache of Anthrax), which I suppose is okay. I hear the movie is based on some sort of book that a lot of girls I know have read, much in the same way that Eragon was based on some sort of book that a lot of girls I know have read. Honestly, I don't give a rat's ass about the movie. I probably won't like it that much, based on the fact that I genuinely don't like fantasy. I'm going to watch it because apparently it's atheist propaganda, and having never seen any before I'm eager to get all fired up about not believing in God.

All over Facebook and the world at large, people are pledging not to see this movie because the author is an atheist and because he apparently once said "I want to kill God." Now, as an 18 year veteran of atheism (I'm 19, but I went through a year long Buddhism kick in 7th grade) I can tell you that any so called atheist who wants to kill God is not, in fact, an atheist. An atheist trying to kill God is about as absurd as me trying to kill The Fonz, because I don’t know how to kill somebody that I personally believe doesn’t exist. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there’s a contingent of die hard Happy Days fans out there who diligently worship The Fonz and are certain that, in some corner of Wisconsin, he still stands vigil by a jukebox with a girl on each arm, but as I myself don’t believe he exists I don’t see how I could kill him. It’s a fruitless effort! By not believing in his existence, I’ve dealt The Fonz the greatest blow I possibly could, and killing him after the fact is really a moot point (and, as I’ve already mentioned, totally impossible). So my first message to the Christians who want to boycott The Golden Compass because of its atheistic propaganda is that they’re not boycotting the work of an atheist, they’re boycotting the work of a self loathing Christian or a severely mixed up agnostic.

My second message to the Christians who insist on boycotting this movie is that they should stop acting persecuted. I’d get it if this were Rome sometime before the early 300s, but it’s not. It’s America, where the Senate, Supreme Court, and Executive Branch are made up entirely of God fearing Christians; the country where children of all (or no) religions are forced to pledge their allegiance “under God” and courtroom proceedings only take place after individuals have sworn to tell the truth with their hand on a Bible (“so help you God”, might I add). For the record, you’re not the marginalized ones! The film industry is all about money. Now, do you honestly think that a successful production company such as New Line Cinema would spend a near-record $180 million to release a piece of atheist propaganda in a country where 78% of the population is Christian? Believe it or not, folks, in order to sufficiently recoup their losses on a movie, studios tend to greenlight projects that a great number of people will want to go see. I saw Charlie’s Angels, and so did a lot of other people, and it wasn’t because of particularly good scripting or acting, it was because sometimes I like to pretend that Lucy Liu is my girlfriend! Likewise, New Line Cinema wouldn’t spend a fortune filming and promoting a movie that pandered only to the 900,000 atheists in this country! It’s simple business, you idiots! Atheists didn’t boycott The Chronicles of Narnia for its blatant Christian overtones, so don’t get your Little House On The Prairie style bloomers in a knot over a movie that you think a work of propaganda just because it was written by an atheist wannabe whose primary mission in life is to “kill God”!

So that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I'm going to go see The Golden Compass. I'm boycotting this clusterfuck of assumed religious morality that only wishes it were a boycott. Maybe I'll see it twice.

Truman Capps is going against form at the moment: normally, he doesn’t make angry posts about religion or blog more than once a week, but this is what happens when you make him angry.

More Observations

In certain parts of Utah, this is considered pornography.

Get It Togetha, Baby!

As usual, I’ve got a problem with advertising. Have you seen the new Applebee’s commercials? They feature a sassy that goads people by way of snappy and acerbic banter to eat at Applebee’s (home of “Tha Flavas dat bring people togetha!”). So what does this say? Are we saying that now we’re letting fruit tell us what to do? More importantly, we’re letting one kind of food tell us to eat another kind of food. I don’t think that’s really an objective assessment, do you? Next it’ll be a no-nonsense urban cow telling you to eat celery, or Hispanic celery telling you that tofu is where it’s at.

Bee Movie Would Have Been A Much Better Movie If They Didn’t Hype It So Much

I saw Bee Movie this weekend, and it was incredibly okay. I mean, there were some really funny bits, and then there were a lot of bits that weren’t funny, and the story really went crazy towards the end, and I’m not sure what message they were trying to convey, and what sort of relationship did he have with Renee Zellwegger, anyway? I mean, were they an item or not? If so, how can a human have a relationship with a bee? If not, what the hell were all those gooey looks he was giving her? They weren’t platonic, I’ll tell you that! Point being, this movie was getting hyperplugged steadily a good six months before it came out (I sat through a lot of ”Bee Movie TV Juniors” in order to get my The Office fix), and then when it did come out there was such a firestorm of promotional hooha that it pretty much obscured the reviews saying that Bee Movie wasn’t all that great. If, on the other hand, they hadn’t promoted it as much and released it quietly, it would’ve gotten solid B+ reviews and be hailed as a movie that was “Rough in places, but still an underrated gem!” That said, they wouldn’t have made very much money, but that’s not what the film industry is about anyway.

It’s Tough To Find A Manly Shampoo These Days

…and trust me, I would know. There are literally hundreds of women’s shampoos available, and maybe one kind of men’s shampoo (Head and Shoulders), which it just so happens that women can use too without anybody batting an eyelash. Have you ever been in the shampoo section in the supermarket? You practically choke on the smell of lilac and aloe. There’s a whole multicolored rack filled with colorful, odd shaped shampoos, and then hidden in the corner there’s maybe one dusty bottle of Head and Shoulders, and it probably has ‘ANTI DANDRUFF – BECAUSE THE GUY BUYING THIS HAS DANDRUFF – DON’T HAVE SEX WITH HIM’ written all over it in big red letters. But as men, we can’t go the other way – if a guy uses Herbal Essences, everybody looks at him like he’s weird. But maybe that’s just because, unlike women, men don’t need shampoo to have an orgasm in the shower.

Truman Capps is pretty sure that Head and Shoulders, as a counterpoint to Herbal Essences, causes impotence, but he doesn't want to say why he thinks that.

Treatises on Mammaries and Movies

This post was first made on December 5th, 2007, on Facebook.

Evelyn Rasputin McGee's tears cure cancer... Too bad he never cries.

Let’s just take a little test.

1) Have you ever personally met somebody named Sandee, Candi, or Trixye?
2) Have you ever seen a video involving somebody named Sandee, Candi, or Trixye?

Yeah, I thought so, pervert.

I read some study in one of my classes awhile back that said that with each new generation, more and more boys’ names become appropriated to girls’ use (Sam, Alex, and Drew are apparently in transition at the moment), leaving fewer and fewer names for boys in general* and meaning that it’s possible that some men who grew up with manly names will, in their old age, be forced to live the same name as thousands of teenaged girls. This doesn’t particularly bother me, seeing as on Facebook right now there are 42 people named Truman out of 55 million users, only one of whom is a girl. Regardless, the trend seems to be that more and more names are getting feminized. Why?

*Did you know that in the 19th century, Evelyn was a common name for boys? Of course, I haven’t read any history detailing the heroic exploits of Evelyn Rasputin McGee, so I assume that most boys named Evelyn died of Dynamite Wedgies (the Victorian era’s equivalent of our Atomic Wedgie) before reaching prime Heroic Exploit age.

It’s because every day, the porn industry finds a way to smutify a few more names that had once been wholesome, and parents are so desperate not to inadvertently name their daughter after a pornstar that they’ll name her after a guy instead. There was a time when a girl could be named Sandy or Trixie and not be associated with lesbian road trips or unexpected late night sexy pizza delivery. Not Candy/i, though – that name has always been whorish and always will be. That said, I’m sure that one of my readers has a great grandmother named Candi who was the first female firefighter in Delaware or something wonderful like that, so just take this as my advance apology.

I mention this because of a front page feature on YouTube called Videos Being Watched Right Now…, where every ten seconds five new randomly selected videos that someone on the website is watching are displayed. There are three genres of video on YouTube that always get represented in this sampling: Family Guy, Naruto, and Boobs. Now, I don’t watch Family Guy and as you may remember from a much older blog I heartily disapprove of Naruto, but boobs are still A-OK in my book. So it was that, plus curiosity, that drove me to click on the image in the Videos Being Watched Right Now section that showed a well proportioned brunette wearing far too much makeup and holding a copy of Meet the Robinsons. The video was labeled MOVIE REVIEW.

It is the work of a genius. Sandee (I’m not going to give her last name or link to the video, because she’s got enough attention already and if you’re really desperate to watch this you probably know everything you need to about finding smut on YouTube) sits in front of the camera for a minute and a half wearing a “shirt” (40% cloth, 60% air) of sorts and giving an extremely soft pitch review of a Disney children’s movie while frequently throwing her shoulders back, shifting her weight, shrugging, or breathing deeply. She’s done a whole series of these. Her Live Free or Die Hard review has over 1.2 million hits, and it’s been online for a week. 1.2 million! That’s nearly three times the population of the state of Wyoming! All that for a video less than two minutes long that doesn’t even have treadmill dancing or Stephen Colbert in it!

This is why the Internet is so great: if you have implants, a webcam, and a copy of Meet the Robinsons, your video can get more viewers than there are people in Vatican City, San Marino, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Monaco, and Grenada combined. Expect some serious changes to my blog for next week.

Truman Capps didn’t order a pizza, but so long as it’s here and looking so juicy, he just might try it…