Appendix A

Trust me, nobody wants to look at a picture of an appendix. Instead, enjoy this picture of me in ten years.

Things I’m scared of:

1) Slugs
2) Appendicitis
3) Identical twins standing in hotel hallways

If I could make a pie chart of all the feelings I’ve had in my life, it would probably show that I’d spent a solid 10% or more of my time on this Earth worrying that my appendix has become infected and, unless quickly treated, will burst, filling my body with toxins and killing me. This is especially impressive because I only became aware of appendicitis three years ago.

When I was a senior in high school, a girl I knew was spontaneously struck down with appendicitis – an ordeal that began with a lot of puking and ended with her being rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery. Up until then I’d been aware of appendicitis, but had never known how quickly and severely it could strike. Once I figured it out, appendicitis quickly usurped cancer on the List of Ailments I Automatically Assume I Have When A Part of Me Hurts.

What scares me about appendicitis isn’t that it could kill me. 1 in 15 Americans gets appendicitis at some time in their life, and basically all of them survive after a few days in the hospital. The thing I don’t like about appendicitis is that it sounds like a nasty case of the stomach flu coupled with a trip to the hospital – I hate hospitals – wherein a bunch of complete strangers will proceed to cut my body open and take a part of it out.*

*I guess I shouldn’t have a problem with the notion of strangers performing surgery on me, because when I look at the company that I keep I’d much rather have my life be in the hands of people I don’t know than the people I hang out with on a regular basis. I also shouldn’t get too sentimental about my appendix, a body part that I don’t use anyway whose only purpose seems to be to try and kill me when I least expect it, like a ninja hooked up to my large intestine.

I suppose that you could say everyone isn’t enthusiastic about appendicitis for these reasons, but I’m outright obsessive about it because I know that having my appendix removed is something that will only happen once (hopefully), and I desperately don’t want it to conflict with any major school deadlines, football games, or episodes of The Office. I guess in that respect – desperately wanting to control every aspect of a big event that only happens once – I’m sort of like the Bridezilla of appendicitis. The difference is that I doubt that many women are willing to acknowledge that there’s a good chance they might not get married and are seriously hoping that that’s the case.

The one surefire test that I know of to be sure whether you have appendicitis or not is to poke the lower right side of your stomach. If you feel searing, blinding pain, something might be wrong, whereas if you don’t, you’re probably okay (unless you’re experiencing the phenomenon known as “silent appendix,” in which case you’re pretty much fucked). I take this test (which even Wikipedia admits isn’t especially accurate) more seriously than I take most of my schoolwork, and will not hesitate to start prodding my stomach in public if I feel so much as a twinge of pain anywhere on my body. Better safe than sorry – you will notice that the word “dignity” isn’t anywhere in there. Sometimes I poke the right side of my stomach so much that it actually does start to hurt, and I have to remind myself I’m not feeling pain because of my appendix, but because I’ve been relentlessly jabbing myself in the side for 20 minutes.

Today I had a particularly bad appendicitis scare during the humanities class in which I’m a teaching assistant. On my way to class I felt a quick burst of pain on the right hand side of my extreme lower abdomen. Like, almost too low. As in, if it were maybe half an inch lower, it would be in the general crotchal region that I do my very best not to talk about on the Internet. That being said, this pain wasn’t actually in my crotch, but again, dangerously close.

Once I got to class, I took a seat at the table the three other teaching assistants and I sit at – off to the side of the room and more or less in plain view of all the students. I opened up my laptop and quickly went to the Wikipedia article on appendicitis. Whether this was actually appendicitis or just something going horrifically wrong inside my body (near my crotch), I was determined to find answers – if I could prove to myself that my appendix was not in danger of rupturing, I knew my mind would be at ease. As far as I’m concerned, a mysterious and inexplicable pain is far better than one where you know it comes from a useless, bacteria filled time bomb.

The Wikipedia article did not necessarily confirm my fears, but it certainly gave them fertile ground to flourish. As it turned out, the location of the appendix can vary from person to person, and I was not about to rule out the possibility that my appendix could have been located remarkably close to my crotch. I mean, hey, it’s an evolutional dead end anyway – maybe Evolution decided to get creative with its appendix placement.

My next option was to press the affected area and see if it hurt. This presented a problem, being as the area of pain was, as I’ve mentioned, pretty damn close to my crotch, and I was being paid by the University to sit within plain view of a large group of students and be generally helpful. Touching the area very close to one’s crotch (an area which, at a distance, might even look like the crotch) is not traditionally known as helpful, unless you’re demonstrating proper crotch touching technique.

The rules of etiquette are somewhat flexible when it comes to things like standing when a lady leaves the table or which fork one uses to eat a salad. However, there is no debate about the fact that if you give 40 people reason to believe that you’re masturbating, you have clearly done something wrong.

So let it be said that I offered up a very sincere prayer to whatever force governs the universe before I started mercilessly prodding at an area strikingly close to (but not actually) my crotch.

Happy ending – not only did I not have appendicitis, but nobody saw me and thought that I was trying to surreptitiously whack it during class.

Today was a good day.

Truman Capps prodded his stomach in search of appendicitis six times in the course of this update.

3 Things To Remember About the University of Washington

Boomtown.

Hello, folks - I wrote this a few days ago for the Oregon Marching Band newsletter which they hand out on the busses to keep us occupied on long road trips, such as our recent jaunt up to Seattle (the land God forgot). I understand that probably 98% of my readership is the marching band and has thus read this already, but screw you guys - I have homework to do.

1) NEVER BE ALONE

This doesn’t just apply during the game – as a general rule, being alone anywhere on the University of Washington campus is a surefire recipe for getting stabbed in the face. Why? Because while the University of Washington may have international recognition for its science and literature departments, little has been said about its remarkable ability to generate necrophile rapist serial killers.

In 1965, Ted Bundy transferred to the University of Washington. He worked odd jobs to pay his way through school, volunteered for political campaigns he supported, and was possessed by a burning desire to murder people and violate their corpses. Yet another everyday, ordinary Husky.

Bundy eventually went on a cross-country killing spree that made him one of the nation’s most prolific serial killers. He murdered 36 women, escaped from jail twice, and when they finally caught him he acted as his own attorney in the trial. Clearly his alma mater taught him a lot about how to be slippery and amoral.

You may think that it’s stupid to assume that the University of Washington is a maven of serial killers just because one really dangerous serial killer went to school there. But that’s the thing: Ted Bundy, who killed almost enough people to fill Bus 1, is the only one the world found out about. All the University of Washington’s other serial killers – and I assure you, there are thousands of them – haven’t slipped up and gotten caught yet.

Never. Be. Alone.

On a side note, while Bundy did represent himself in the trial, he didn’t win – in his defense, the University of Washington is not really known for winning things.

2) WATCH WHERE YOU STEP

The University of Washington has chosen to sully the reputation of the Alaskan Malmute, a fine and intelligent animal, by latching onto it as the mascot for their unrelenting campaign of losing football games and necrophilia. Rather than have a cheerleader put on a big animal suit like all forward thinking and generally good schools, though, UW has an actual, living Husky trotting around the sidelines at all of their games, presumably to energize all 38 fans in the stands.

Again, the Husky is a wonderful breed of dog, but no matter what breed of dog you’ve got walking around the sidelines of your football game, there’s still a better than average chance that it’s going to take a dump at some point. And then there’s dog poop, on your football field, while you’re playing a game – that being said, in light of Washington’s standard of play, dog poop is probably the most interesting thing going on on the field.

The point is, make sure to look around when you’re going onto the field for halftime. While I doubt that there will be enough Husky students around to throw paint at us, it’s pretty much certain that the real Husky will leave at least one land mine for us by the sidelines. The UW Band has gotten pretty good at stepping over their mascot’s crap – that is, after all, why they march in the ridiculous way that they do.

3) DO NOT BE ALARMED WHEN YOU ENCOUNTER HUSKY FANS

Either at the game or around the hotel, you might bump into people wearing purple and gold who are not hanging their heads in shame the way they’re supposed to. These are called “Washington fans.” They do not appear to be ashamed of their school because they are stupid. This is in keeping with the motto of the University of Washington, “We are stupid and nobody likes us.”

They’ll probably yell stuff at you, perhaps rhyming the word “duck” with “fuck,” and it’s an absolute statistical certainty that they’ll mention their recent victory over USC. It’s science. However, no matter how tempting it may be to remind these creatures that USC hasn’t won a single game in Oregon for the past four years, don’t. Also, do not remind them that the University of Oregon has been to a bowl game in recent memory.

Just smile and let them say their piece, maybe offering a helpful, “Go Ducks!” along the way. But in the end, nothing you say to them will have any effect. They’ve completely bought into their silly little school and no amount of fact or reason will convince them otherwise.

Also, it’s not nice to argue with retarded people.

Truman Capps is vehemently opposed to blind hatred and intolerance, two qualities the University of Washington wholeheartedly embraces.

On Art

This... This I would frame and hang on the wall behind my headboard.

Anyone who is enough of a pretentious bastard to have taken an art history class will tell you that during the Renaissance, art was a big industry. Young boys with rich parents and an interest in art were apprenticed to established masters of the craft, who in turn would make them into great artists themselves, provided there wasn’t a plague outbreak and nobody got punched in the face so hard that their nose was permanently fucked up. After their apprenticeship was completed, young artists could make a healthy living in cities like Florence or Rome, which were full of rich patrons who were eager to blow hella ducats to commission paintings and sculptures for their houses.

Art today is a big industry as well, but in a way that most people would agree has far less cultural merit. The good news is that unlike Renaissance art, popular artwork today is not entirely made up of pictures of some poor man nailed to a piece of wood. The bad news is that some of the most popular artwork today is manufactured by Painter of Light™ Thomas Kinkade, who many people would argue should be nailed to a piece of wood.

A lot of Thomas Kinkade’s criticism revolves around the fact that his art is mass-produced and sold on QVC or in mall galleries. Yes, it turns out that when you drop hella ducats on a Thomas Kinkade painting, what you’re actually getting is a high quality digital print on a canvas which has had some paint daubed onto it by a migrant worker in the Thomas Kinkade Artistic Sweatshop of Light. People say that this is dishonest and manipulative – that making a career out of painting sub-par artwork is fine, but that printing the sub-par artwork on sub-par materials is bad.

Thomas Kinkade makes glorified posters – but that’s kind of the new style. Posters are our art.

If you walk into a room occupied by a college student, you have about as good a chance of seeing one of the following posters as you do of smelling severe body odor:

1) John Belushi in a sweatshirt that says, “COLLEGE”
2) The poster for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
3) Bob Marley doing pretty much anything
4) Tony Montana

When I first came to school, I saw these posters so much that I honestly thought that all students at the University of Oregon only bought posters from one predetermined source so as not to create too much unwanted cultural diversity. Imagine my surprise a few weeks later when I found out that I was right – more or less every poster on campus comes from a poster vendor who sets up shop at the once-a-term University street fair.

Every time I’m at the street fair I browse through the poster guy’s selection in hopes of finding a poster for a movie I like so much that I’m willing to spend $20 to hang an advertisement for it in my room. This has yet to happen, because posters for the things that I’m interested in are definitely underrepresented at the street fair.

There are pictures of bikini clad women with big boobs, and let me say right off that I wholeheartedly support bikini clad women with big boobs. I am all about that shit. At the same time, though, I’d feel kind of awkward hanging a huge poster of a bikini clad woman with big boobs in my room, because it’s more or less saying to everyone who visits you, “Hey! Guess what I look at when I masturbate!”*

*There are also realistic drawings of fantasy-style topless elf girls with big boobs, which say, “Hey! Guess what I look at when I log out of World of Warcraft long enough to masturbate!”

There are pictures of huge disasters, like old-timey train crashes or the Hindenburg exploding, accompanied by the words “OH SHIT!” in huge block letters. Don’t get me wrong – I love laughing at the misfortunes of others, but if I died in a horrible train or zeppelin accident and found out 70 years later that some 19-year-old douchebag had a glib picture of the disaster on his wall, I’d be a little bit pissed off. I’m actually sort of worried that in 70 years there’s going to be an “OH SHIT” picture for September 11th.

And then there are the movie posters, by which I mean, the posters for 300, Scarface, Donnie Darko, and Moulin Rouge!. No other movies exist in college.

The only reason that art patronage ever happened in the first place was because people wanted to spend money to have things they liked in their homes. The primary reason that people hired artists to create their decorations was because there was no such thing as mass produced art one could buy on the street – also, 300 had not come out yet.

Now, though, people still want to adorn their houses with things that they like, but since everyone sees the same movies and posters are easy to make and cheap to buy, that’s what people wind up going with. Even a non-college student is far more likely to go with a high quality print of his favorite Rembrandt than dig up a living painter (if they even exist anymore) and spend considerably more money on an original picture that he may or may not like when it’s finished. I’m sure that if during the Renaissance patrons had a way to get cheap, high quality copies of the finest art mankind had to offer, a lot of them would have done that instead of taking this kind of risk.

So yes, mass produced art may be driving original artists out of business and limiting artistic progress. But apparently the customer is always right.

Truman Capps has a high quality print of Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks” hanging in his room, so he’s part of the problem. However, he has also ordered a print of a fake oil painting of humans doing battle with evil robotic Cylons, so say what you will about that.

Wait, I Do A Blog On Wednesdays?

I'm getting teabagged by journalism and physics at the moment, so don't expect my update until sometime this evening once everything has blown over and I've had a chance to wash the taste out of my mouth.

Recent Thoughts Of Richard Heene, Self-Proclaimed 'Psyentist' and Father Of "Balloon Boy"

October 3, 2009

Oh my God, what am I doing with my life?

I mean, really? “Psyentist”? That’s what I’ve been calling myself? That’s a title that I willingly self-applied? Psyentist!? It sounds like some sort of faggy electronic music duo! For God’s sake, I don’t even have a psyence degree! I just like fucking around in my garage and following tornadoes around!

Where did I go wrong? This contracting business isn’t working out at all, the UFO search is turning up bubkis, and nobody takes my psyence seriously!

Well, actually, in their defense, me spelling it like that probably isn’t helping matters.

Man, what I wouldn’t give to be on Wife Swap again. Those were the days – attention, cameras, craft table, people listening to me… I mean, in that regard I really was a pioneer in the field of psyence – the first psyentist ever to be on Wife Swap! Sure, that Duane Burroughs asshole on www.realamericanpsyentists.com has his grainy footage of Bigfoot masturbating, but did he get to trade in his wife on national TV? Twice? Yeah, that video might have made him the darling of the psyentific community for now, but sooner or later his 15 minutes will be up, and he sure as hell isn’t going to have a complimentary box set of the first five seasons of a certain ABC reality program.

That’s what I really need – I need to get another 15 minutes of fame. Only this time, I won’t waste my time swapping wives; I’ll dazzle the world with untold psyentific wonders and stand proudly before them, a bold new American god!

Easier said than done, though. How am I going to get the country’s attention? To get in the national spotlight, you need to use something that everybody finds interesting. Like children. Or things that fly.

…oh, dear, I do believe I’m onto something.

October 5th, 2009

Why didn’t I think of this sooner? I’ve had the balloon back here all along – sure, if I send one of the kids up in it I won’t be able to use it for all those alternative transportation experiments anymore, but on the other hand the Segway pretty much has me beat there anyway.

All I’ve got to do is give one of the little bastards a fiver and have him hide in the attic while I cast the balloon off, and viola! I’m in the spotlight, I can blame the kid for tampering with the balloon and squandering thousands of taxpayer dollars, and then I unveil my blueprints for the hydroelectric urinal on national TV!

God damn, I love smoking crack.

I should smoke this much crack every day.

October 14th, 2009

It’s settled. I’m using Falcon. Here I’d thought it was going to be difficult to decide which of my kids I was going to humiliate on a national stage, but then Falcon up and hit me with a “Wild Draw Four” when I was about to school his ass at Uno last night. It’s like, why do they even put that card in the game? Do they want you not to win?

Family game night shall be your undoing, young Falcon…

October 15th, 2009, 11:30 AM

Shit. You called the news station before you called 911.

No, it’s cool, it’s cool – nobody’s going to notice. Who checks these things? And who’s going to give you any shit about it? Remember, your son is supposedly trapped in a homemade balloon flying across the state. You’re a frightened parent! You’re under a lot of emotional duress! You’re so worried about your son’s well being that you neglected to call 911 right away! That happens all the time, right?

Shit.

October 15th, 2009, 1:40 PM

“To the editors of www.psyentificamerican.blogspot.com: I received your request for an interview regarding my son’s tragic balloon escapade, and would like to respond with a request of my own – kindly jump up my butt!”

That’ll teach those sly bastards to call Amanda Snuggie a genius when everybody knows she just stole my prototype for the Blanket With Arms 2000.

Oh, hey – looks like the balloon finally landed. Figure I’ll let Falcon sweat it out in that box for a couple hours before I “discover” him.

Not so big without your Wild Draw Four card now, are you? Huh?

October 15th, 2009, 9:05 PM

He did not just say that. Oh shit. He did not just say that. Did I… Yes. Yes, I’m about 89 percent sure I just pooped myself a little.

“We did it for the show”!? What’s your angle, you precocious little shit? Don’t play dumb – was the $5 not good enough for you? Did you want a later bedtime? Did you want me to lift my ban on grape Kool Aid? You could have had it if you’d just goddamn asked, instead of blowing my whole plan out of the water in front of the entire country, not to mention Wolf fucking Blitzer!

And all this right before I was going to segue into my pitch for the hydroelectric urinal! “Say, Wolf, did you ever wonder if, by putting turbines in urinals, we could generate electricity? Well, I sure did – and I’ve got the blueprints right here for a system that could generate enough peelectricity to power Denver for a year!”

Nope! Not anymore! Way to go, Falcon – your greed and inability to negotiate has deprived the world of a revolutionary form of alternative energy. Good luck getting laid in high school now, douche-nozzle.

Okay, easy now Rick – cameras are still rolling. Just play it cool. Laugh it off. You can deal with that little walking condom advertisement later. Just say what you need to say to keep your ass out of the frying pan and end this interview.

So help me God, I will use that peelectricity line some day…

October 16th, 2009

Wow. This is some boy I’ve raised. Most kids would only vomit once on national television, but my Falcon? Twice. Both times when asked whether the balloon thing was a hoax or not – arguably the worst times to do something that implies that your conscience isn’t clear. Like, y’know, puking.

He’s like some kind of special robot designed to ruin his father’s life.

If he’d only puked once, we could have covered for that. Kids puke. It’s just a thing they do. Or if he’d puked for two different questions. But twice for the same question, on two different shows? Nobody can deny that there’s a correlation there. It’s psyence.

I am so fucked.

October 17th, 2009

Hey, who knew ordinary citizens could call press conferences?

Some old colleague of mine sold me up the river and from the sound of things the sheriff, the National Guard, and the FAA aren’t too pleased. So what does Richard Heene do?

He solves the problem.

All I’ve got to do is call a press conference and tell everyone I’m going to make an announcement. When the press gets here, I have them write down their questions on pieces of paper and stick them in a cardboard box. Then, I tell them I’ll read their questions and answer them later.

Then I just head on back into the house and peace the hell out to Mexico in the balloon. Meanwhile, I have the family tell the cops I’m hiding in a box in the garage. By the time they figure out the box is empty and I’m actually in the balloon, it’ll be too late.

I would’ve got away with it, too, if it wasn’t for that meddling kid.

This was supposed to be my day in the sun, and instead Falcon gets all the attention! Balloon Boy, they’re calling him! Who designed the balloon? Who created the boy? Nobody cares!

And is that selfish little bastard giving any credit where credit is due? No! He’s just sitting there at the center of a media circus I created for him, and I haven’t heard so much as a “Thanks, Pop!”

I can’t imagine how somebody could have so little regard for a family member’s feelings.

Truman Capps thinks that "Wife Swap" didn't have any credibility to lose.

Responsibility

Pic awesome, yet unrelated.

I’ve always been profoundly lazy, but I feel as though recently I’ve been less vigilant about being lazy, and my laziness has fallen into a slump of general productivity and mild efficiency. Don’t get me wrong – I still calculate the route of every bicycle trip I make based on how best to avoid riding up hills and on two or three occasions I’ve come very close to calling my professors late at night and asking them if they could maybe bump their 9:00 AM lecture back by a couple of hours. Alas, much like Duran Duran, my best work is behind me.

If we’re going to continue with the Duran Duran metaphor (and if there’s one thing I love, it’s continuing lame metaphors), senior year at Sprague High School was my “Hungry Like The Wolf.” Not only did I not want to do any work, I was openly contemptuous of the very notion of work.* I took as many campus releases as I could, worked as a classroom aide, and shelved books in the library in lieu of actual classes like AP English or European History. What little homework I had I threw together at the last possible second.

*No matter how good I got, though, I could never outdo my classmate Ashley, who during the spring told all of her teachers she was on the tennis team (she wasn’t), so that every time the tennis team was called away on the PA system for a game during the school day, she’d get up and go home. Genius.

This laziness contributed to my somewhat lax scholarship search. Sure, I wrote a few essays and filled out a few applications, but had I applied myself with the same tenacity as some of my classmates I’m pretty sure I could have gone into my first year of college with more than $400 from the Dean’s List. I suppose my strategy at the time was to ambush the school with my academic prowess rather than making my intentions known, hoping that they would be so pleased and surprised at my good work combined with my humility in not asking for money that they would spontaneously give me $30,000 or so, no strings attached, along with a new car and maybe a lifetime supply of Hostess Fruit Pies.

Maybe you’re laughing, but it actually half worked – in the spring of my freshman year I was surprised to find that I’d been awarded a $600 Hendricks Scholarship on top of the $400 I was already receiving. What I later found out was that I got this award because I had filled out the University’s general scholarship application when I first applied, which made me eligible for a variety of different types of money the school was tossing at students. Still, even though I didn’t surprise the school into giving me money, they definitely surprised me by giving it to me – and let me tell if you, if you have to be surprised, free money is the best way for it to happen.

I took the money and didn’t ask too many questions about it, which I recently learned was a bad idea – however, if I had to learn that anywhere, I’d much rather figure it out with a college scholarship than with a loan shark.

The $600 scholarship did not come through on my bill for this term, and after talking to the somewhat testy counselor at the financial aid department I was surprised to find that the Hendricks Scholarship is one that you must reapply for every year. I had not known this – I’d figured that since I was receiving it thanks to the same application that got me the Dean’s List scholarship, which does not need to be renewed, that the school would continue to shovel money in my general direction without so much as a second thought. It is, after all, a government institution.

At first I was pissed that the school had not so much as sent me a letter to remind me that I needed to reapply for my scholarship. After all, how was I supposed to know that I needed to renew it? I could find no information anywhere on the Internet about the Hendricks Scholarship, and I hadn’t heard so much as a peep out of them after their first letter informing me that they were going to start giving me money, the bastards.

But then I realized that there had probably been something about needing to renew my scholarship in that initial letter, which has since been lost to the sands of garbage in my room. So really, the person at fault wasn’t them for not notifying me, but me for not taking the initiative to 1) Hold onto the letter and B) Remember that this was a scholarship I would need to renew.

Because, really, what’s in it for them if they remind me to keep taking their money? If I’m not with it enough to stay on top of my paperwork, maybe that in and of itself is an indication that there’s somebody far more intelligent and responsible who deserves the money more than I do. After all, what sort of organization awards a scholarship to somebody who has proven himself to be irresponsible?

Oh, right.

One of the reasons I was so lethargic and spiteful toward high school in my senior year was because I felt like I was well and truly finished with having my hand held and being told what to do. I was looking forward to the independence of college, where everybody backs off and lets you make your own mistakes. At the time, I had assumed that I would not make a mistake in the next four years – I was doing pretty well, too, but then I paid money to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. That mistake, however, only cost me $8 as opposed to $600.

You win this round, University of Oregon. But I’ll remember this.

Truman Capps would like to take this opportunity to inform his father that he plans to apply for roughly $3600 worth of scholarships over the next two weeks – it’s under control.

What the HELL, People

Future recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize!

There are times in my life when I go onto Digg and see a news story on the top ten and my first reaction is to assume it’s a joke story from one of those fake news sites like The Onion or Fox. I usually make this assumption when I see something so outlandish that I actually can’t believe that it happened in our world – something fanciful and impossible that can only exist in the world of science fiction or rap music.

So when I saw the other day that President Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize, I was all, what? For serious?

Don’t get me wrong – I love Barack Obama. I think he’s a man of exceptionally high moral fiber and a damn good leader. I do not think he is a socialist, Nazi, or Muslim, and while I do hold out hope that he might in fact be a secret atheist, I’m pretty sure he isn’t. That being said, out of the 205 people nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize this year, I would say he’s pretty far from the best choice on the list. To be honest, I’m still waiting for Ashton Kutcher to make an announcement to the United Nations revealing that everyone on Earth just got Punk’d by the Nobel Committee.

The nomination deadline for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize fell just two weeks after President Obama started work at the White House. At this point, he’s been in office for nine months – this time last year I was still deathly afraid that Tits McGee was going to wind up one heart attack away from the Oval Office. And now he’s got a Nobel Peace Prize for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”?

I feel like I do a pretty good job with current events for a college student. Sure, I don’t read the paper or watch the news every day, but my patronage of Digg keeps me abreast of all the top stories and I swing by the websites for CNN or MSNBC every couple of days to see what’s shaking in the world. When I’m at home in Portland, NPR is always droning out of one of our many radios and I subconsciously absorb information like a big political sponge. And from where I’ve been sitting over the past nine months, I haven’t been aware of a lot of groundbreaking foreign policy decisions coming from President Obama.

I know that he made a speech in Egypt about fostering communication between the United States and the Middle East, and I know he’s pursuing diplomatic relations with Iran, and I know he was recently at the G8 summit. He’s probably done a lot more for international relations that’s slipped under my admittedly faulty radar.

But hear me out: If the man won a Nobel Peace Prize after nine months in the White House, I’d God damn well better know about something he did to create world peace. For him to go from a Midwestern junior senator on the campaign trail to a Nobel Peace Prize recipient in the space of a year, Barack Obama should have done something so phenomenally, overpoweringly brilliant to end human suffering that everyone on Earth, right on down to Tibetan monks and unborn fetuses, knows about and is impressed by it.

You know what I have heard a lot about? I’ve heard a lot about President Obama busting his ass to get a public healthcare option for all Americans and I’ve heard a lot about him sending more troops to Afghanistan. I’m pretty glad he’s doing both of those things, but neither one of them contributes an awful lot to world peace. In fact, one of them is kind of antithetical to world peace.

The Nobel Committee explained that they selected President Obama because, “We would like to support what he is trying to achieve.”

Emphasis on trying.

Hey, People magazine! I’m trying to lose some weight – how about showing some support for what I’m trying to achieve by picking me as the Sexiest Man Alive this year?

The problem with awarding a Nobel Peace Prize to someone based on what they’re trying to do (as opposed to what they have done) is that it puts the very credibility of the prize and the organization at risk should the recipient fail to live up to his goals.

That being said, the Nobel Committee has already done plenty of damage to their credibility by giving Nobel Peace Prizes to Yasser Arafat, who could be charitably described as a terrorist, and Henry Kissinger, who spent a lot of time in the 1970s working to topple democratic Marxist governments in South America in favor of right wing capitalist dictators with a penchant for chopping off hands.

One of the nominees for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize was Greg Mortenson, a former US Army medic who has spent the last 16 years traveling to remote parts of third world countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan to build schools, with the express aim of promoting literacy among girls. In the process of building these schools, Mortenson has been shot at by Afghan opium warlords, had fatwas declared on him by Islamic clerics for trying to educate girls, been kidnapped for eight days, and received death threats from Americans for trying to educate Muslims.

But the Nobel Prize Committee gave the award to President Obama based on what he’s trying to accomplish in the international arena.

I’ve got a lot of faith that Barack Obama is going to do some really great things over the course of the next eight (God willing) years, and I think that there’s going to be plenty of time once he’s out of office to reflect on his accomplishments and give him awards. Right now, though, he still has to prove to the world that he can do what his supporters think he can do.

Truman Capps hasn’t been this frustrated by an award recipient since Crash won Best Picture.

On Cooking

We're gonna need a bigger bowl.

My roommates from last year will be the first people to tell you that I’m no good at cooking. They say this because over the course of last year I displayed very few culinary skills, opting instead to patronize Subway and my good friend Chef Boyardee. I also learned a lot about canned soup last year.*

*If you ever see a can of soup with some sort of meat in it, you’d do just as well not to buy it, because every kind of meat in every kind of canned soup will always taste like socks, and not necessarily clean ones, either.

I have to say, though, that while I may not have shown a lot of proficiency with knives or stoves or ovens or Dutch ovens,* I got really good at the microwave. If you want to make a quesadilla (in the microwave, naturally), first you’ve got to take your tortillas and put them in the microwave under a damp paper towel for 45 seconds on 70% power. They’ll come out of there tasting like you just got them from an authentic street vendor in Guadalajara (who bought them at Safeway and microwaved them, that is).

*Forgive me for being footnote heavy here, but thanks to the Internet I’ll never be able to respect the Dutch oven as a cooking tool.

My old roommates gave me a lot of grief because while they would spend half an hour cooking our frozen mini pizzas in the oven, I would spend three minutes microwaving them. Their argument was that oven cooking ensured bubbly cheese and crispy crust; mine was that no matter how you cook it it’s going to be a shitty frozen pizza, so you may as well do it fast so you don’t have time to get your hopes up.

It was by observing my old roommates that I finally learned how to make pasta. I’d never paid much attention to the (phenomenal) cooking that my mother did while I was growing up, preferring to merely enjoy the end result, and I guess I’d never noticed the steaming pot filled with slowly cooking pasta before. I think I’d assumed that pasta was delivered hot and fresh in the same way people used to deliver milk to your door. Or maybe I believed in some sort of omnipotent pasta fairy. My childhood memories are murky and highly perplexing.

Last year, though, I discovered that pasta was purchased dry or frozen and then cooked in a pot of water, after which a sauce is added – usually one that comes in a bottle that says “Safeway Select” on the side. Later on in the year I discovered that sauces could be created independent of Safeway’s influence. It was an exciting time.

A lot of what prevented me from cooking last year, aside from outright stupidity, was the fact that our quad-style apartment’s kitchen was set up as though someone had put a set of cabinets and an oven in the middle of a narrow hallway, either as a cruel joke or a means to ensure that nobody ever enjoyed using the kitchen, ever. This year, though, I’ve been blessed with a very spacious kitchen that affords ample room for both cooking and, more importantly, beer pong.

So I’ve decided to get into cooking (as opposed to beer pong*) – partially to stick it to my old roommates, partially to take advantage of whatever talent I’ve inherited from my mother, and partially because Mike is also an excellent cook, and once the two of us are able to get together and swap recipes we’ll have no trouble winning the Gayest Straight Guys 2009 title.

*I just really don’t like beer, and I have too much dignity to play and let somebody else drink the beer for me like some high school cheerleader at a frat party. It’s a Go Big or Go Home situation in which I opt to Go Home.

In these first few weeks I’ve been sticking largely to simple pasta sauces, just so I can get an idea of how cooking works and what happens when you put splattery things over a fire. The good news is that I’m getting the hang of it, sort of. The bad news is, for the first few weeks it was really kicking my ass.

Only in the last few days have we acquired a garlic press, and so up until then I was mincing the garlic on my own, which is a very time intensive process. Therefore when I was first experimenting with sautéing garlic in olive oil I was very cautious to avoid burning it, as I had learned during a failed cooking venture with The Ex Girlfriend last year that burned garlic is what Hell tastes like and was unwilling to risk ruining the food I’d spent so much time preparing. As a result, many of my early garlic and olive oil sauces were essentially olive oil with chunks of raw garlic floating in it.

Tortellini, I’ve found, is a double edged sword. One edge – the good edge – is the euphoria all humans experience when they’re eating something and they discover that it’s filled with cheese. The other edge is that that very cheese filling makes it tricky to cook. Maybe it’s just me – maybe I’m really bad at cooking tortellini – but every time I’ve tried so far it’s resulted panic and profanity.*

*When I get nervous in the kitchen my first response is to start talking to the food. Thus: “Alright, just gonna throw a little salt in the- Woah! Fuck! Slow down, tortellini, what did you do to the water? Why are you making it boil over like that? Fuck you! I’m just gonna turn this shit down a bit, and… Okay, tortellini, I turned the heat down, why are you still boiling over? You got to hold up your end of the deal, tortellini – I turn you down, you stop making the water boil over! Piss! Shit!”

Most recently, I tried to make a vodka sauce, wherein you make a standard tomato sauce and then add cream and vodka to it – basically, if I added Kahlua it’d be like dumping a White Russian into my marinara sauce. What I discovered when I tasted what I’d made was that the sauce was unsettlingly creamy and sweet for something that I’d put two full onions and God knows how much garlic into, forcing me to toss it with a fair amount of red wine vinegar to try and make it taste less like a dessert. Even now it doesn’t taste so great, and at the moment I can’t figure out if I fucked up or if I just don’t like vodka sauce.

What I find encouraging is that, unlike most of my many failures, this one has yet to produce any significant embarrassment or self-loathing. Up until I inadvertently poison myself, cooking could turn out to be a pretty worthwhile hobby.

Truman Capps has plenty of mediocre vodka sauce that he might not be using, if you’re interested.

H One N One

It was either this or find a picture of a real pig.

It’s really wonderful how after a couple decades with no massive global pandemics they decided to have one just in time for me to be in college, rubbing elbows (at the very least) with 20,000 other people in close proximity. That being said, I’m pretty happy the swine flu is happening while I’m in college as opposed to while I was a student at Sprague High School, where the ventilation system piped the same air from one roomful of coughing students to another, making regular attendance about as healthy as eating a piece of raw chicken you found behind the toilet on a Greyhound.

In the past, I’d worried that The Media would whip everyone into a frenzy about swine flu, leading to massive panic about an ailment that really isn’t that big of a deal unless you’re really old, really young, or otherwise ill. What I’ve found in the past month back down at school is that authority figures have whipped themselves into quite a frenzy while the students have opted to sit back and let everyone else do all the worrying.

The Oregon Marching Band is a hotbed of new and interesting diseases, maybe 10% of which are not venereal. As such, on the first day of band camp two nurses paid us a visit and made an announcement about good ways to avoid catching the swine flu – for example, they recommended that we avoid eating out of shared food sources like bowls filled with chips and refrain from sharing drinks.

And yeah, all of that sounds great, and I’m sure lots of people our age would do those things, but when you’re at a party and everybody is snacking on a big bowl of taco flavored Doritos and everybody wants to try the glass of vodka that has bits of gold floating in it, all those health-friendly tips go by the wayside. When given the choice between becoming a part of a global pandemic or being a buzzkill, a college student will always choose the global pandemic. After all, nobody wants to hear about the time you were lame and healthy at a party, but if you mention that you had the swine flu, there’s a pretty good chance someone will buy you a drink.

I can’t really tell whether the swine flu has had a massive impact at the University of Oregon yet, because my primary social outlet is the marching band, and people are always sick in the marching band. Every year during band camp roughly 40% of the band winds up getting sick with something as students’ immune systems, weakened after three months’ rest, are put to the test against puddles of freshly emptied spit and impromptu spooning. When I was a freshman something like ten people made the mistake of eating at Muchas Gracias and paid the price for several days. During my sophomore year at camp, one senior trumpet player was so badly stricken with the trots that our section leaders decreed that if you soil yourself, you’re excused from rehearsal, no questions asked.*

*For the record, each member only gets one of these per season; otherwise there would be an easy (if not necessarily dignified) way out of rehearsal every time there was a downpour.

Not helping matters is the fact that the primary bathroom for the OMB’s practice field is an aging porta-potty chained to a lamppost which, according to a sign posted on the inside of the door, is only intended to service 10 people over a 12 hour period of time before being emptied, as opposed to 200 people for two weeks (or more). I don’t know if stench translates to overall infectiousness, but I will say that if there was one person who wasn’t all that worried about stopping the spread of the swine flu, it was the guy who waited a week to come and empty out the porta potty.

I’ve always been something of a germophobe, and so the presence of a global pandemic really helps to legitimize a lot of the behaviors that people used to think were crazy, such as carrying Purell and opening the bathroom door with a paper towel. The problem is, in light of the swine flu some peoples’ germophobia has begun to outpace mine, and now I’m encountering people who carry larger bottles of Purell than mine and wear surgical masks in public. Suddenly, my old standards of germopobia aren’t good enough anymore – for hand washing to be effective, apparently, it has to last 20 seconds or more, and touching of the eyes and face is right out.*

*Sometimes I’ll get home after a long day of not touching my face, gives my hands a thorough scrubbing with soap and hot water, and then spend five minutes just touching the shit out of my eyes to make up for all the times I couldn’t during the day.

The primary reason I try to avoid getting sick (aside from the fact that being sick isn’t necessarily fun) is because being forced to miss class in college is a quick way for your grades to tank. However, now that the University administration has whipped the faculty into a frenzy over the swine flu, many of my professors have noted on their syllabi that they’re willing to make special provisions for students who are sick with the swine flu.

What this means for me is that if I’m feeling stressed out and want a little vacation during midterms, all I have to do is find the nearest frat party and start licking people until I pass out. This global pandemic stuff really isn’t all that bad.

If Truman Capps actually gets the swine flu, he hopes his professors will recognize the last paragraph as the lighthearted comedy that it most definitely is.

Forget About It, Jake, It's Switzerland

Poland has a short but sweet walk of fame, adorned with horribly misshapen stars.

Fate has not been kind to poor ‘ol Roman Polanski.

For one thing, he was Jewish in Europe during the late 1930s, which at the time was considered something of a social faux pas. He and his parents were sent to the Krakow Ghetto and soon enough the Nazis did what they were best known for and shipped Polanski’s parents off to concentration camps – his mother died at Auschwitz and his father narrowly survived a less-infamous facility somewhere in Austria. At the age of 10, Roman escaped the ghetto and spent the rest of the war in hiding with various sympathetic Catholic families throughout Europe.

Just before I wrote this, I was clipping my toenails when a fragment of one flew up into my eye and stung like a motherfucker. I got it out of there, but my eye still hurts a little bit. That was probably the greatest tragedy of my day, while meanwhile people like Roman Polanski go through life with memories of having their families hunted down like animals. Clearly, when they were passing out personal attributes, Roman Polanski got bad luck and I got exceptionally brittle toenails.

Despite his harrowing personal tragedy during the war, Polanski was able to pull his life together and go to film school. He became a successful filmmaker in Europe and the United States, making classic movies like Rosemary’s Baby, which is sort of like Juno if you replace Michael Cera with Satan. Roughly 25 years after the Nazis destroyed his childhood, Roman Polanski was riding high on a tidal wave of fame and married to beautiful actress Sharon Tate, with whom he was expecting his first child.

And then, in 1969, while Polanski was out of the country, members of Charles Manson’s murderous “family” broke into the Polanski home and murdered his wife and unborn child.

I feel kind of bad making any sort of lighthearted statement in a blog entry that spans both The Holocaust and the Manson Family, but I think this needs to be said: If this happened in a movie – a man has his life destroyed by the Nazis only to rebuild and have it destroyed again by an infamous psychopath – you wouldn’t believe it was even possible. The chances of one man having such horribly, tragic bad luck are pretty much astronomical. Keep in mind, the Mansons weren’t specifically trying to kill Sharon Tate – they were looking for somebody else, and she just happened to be in the house when they broke in. It is perhaps the worst possible case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Several years later, Polanski drugged a 13-year-old girl and raped and sodomized her. He pled guilty to all charges and was given a 90-day gap before sentencing to allow him to complete the film project he was working on – apparently, California in the 1970s was pretty lenient on the whole “child rapists freely walking the streets” thing. Polanski, upon hearing that his forthcoming prison sentence could be quite a doozy, fled the United States for France, where he’s stayed ever since.

A few days ago, Polanski was traveling in Switzerland when the Swiss authorities arrested him on the 31-year-old warrant, proving that the one area in which they will not remain neutral is fugitive child molesters. At the moment, the Swiss and US governments are cutting through the red tape surrounding a possible extradition, while prominent members of the international film community are protesting the arrest, pointing out that Polanski has already reached a civil settlement with his victim, who does not wish to see the matter pursued any further, presumably because she has already been the center of a media circus once and has had enough of it.

I love Roman Polanski, I really do – he’s a fabulous director and Chinatown is my favorite movie. And I think that it was a really classy thing for him to reach a financial settlement with the victim and do his best to atone for what he’s done. That being said, I think it would’ve been a lot classier if he hadn’t drugged and raped a 13-year-old in the first place. Sure, in some cases it might be easier to ask for forgiveness than permission, but I feel like statutory rape is not one of them – also, according to court records he was refused permission several times, so really he’s 0 for 2 at this point.

Roman Polanski is a convicted child rapist and there’s no way around it. Yes, he’s a very talented filmmaker and he only raped one child, and that was many years ago, but no matter how much you dress them up, the words “child rapist” just don’t ever go away. He committed a crime – a particularly heinous one, really – and he should be punished for it. That’s kind of how justice works. We can’t start handing out freebies just because one of the perpetrators directed The Pianist.

Remember when Paris Hilton got sent to jail for drunk driving a few years ago? Remember how happy we all were? I wrote one of my first ever blogs about how happy I was to see a famous person paying the same price as the rest of us slobs. The fact is, Paris Hilton committed a crime and was punished for it like anyone else, in spite of the fact that she really didn’t want to be. Roman Polanski, unlike Paris Hilton, is highly intelligent, respected, and talented, but he is guilty of something far worse than climbing into his Escalade after one too many chocolate martinis.

I don’t think that Roman Polanski is going to strike again – I think that he was in a pretty weird place in his life, which manifested in the horrible things he did to that poor girl. The thing is, being in a weird place might be a suitable explanation for flipping off your boss, but it doesn’t really fly in a sex crimes trial.

Polanski still has to serve his sentence, whatever it is, if for no other reason than to prove that everyone is equal in the eyes of the law – not just ordinary citizens and celebrities we hate, but the celebrities we like, too.

Truman Capps promises that he will have a less rape and genocide related update next week.

Technical Difficulties

Hey there - I've heard from a few people who've said that the last update didn't show up correctly when they tried to view it, so I'm trying to figure out some of the problems on my end. The post will be up later than normal - sometime tomorrow afternoon and evening, most likely - but hopefully you'll be able to see it at that point.

Best And Worst Mascots

BAD: Boilermaker Special/Purdue Pete

I guess I just don’t get it.

I’d venture that the reason most schools have animal mascots is because animals have the ability to be ferocious in ways that humans forgot around the time we invented the Snuggie. In addition to all that, though, there’s each animal’s special ability – Bruins (which, apparently, are some stuck up L.A. name for bears) are strong on the ground, while Boston College’s Screaming Eagles are capable of both flight and (reportedly) screaming.

But Purdue’s mascot is a goddamn train.

Trains are not what I’d call ferocious; sure, maybe if I was a Native American seeing one for the first time in the mid 1800s I’d be a bit freaked out at first, but when you strip away all the sentimentality a train is basically a big metal caterpillar that only goes where expensive track has been laid down first.

The primary advantage to an animal-based mascot is that animals seldom become obsolete – they may go extinct, but being dead has never kept anything from being awesome (just ask Obi-Wan). Trains, on the other hand, have been solidly kicked to the curb by airlines and, to some extent, busses for the past 35 years. The fact a Greyhound, which is little more than an unsanitary serial killer factory on wheels, is a more reliable form of transportation than Amtrak is a sure sign that Purdue’s mascot is in need of some serious change.

Well… No, that’s… That’s not really a step in the right direction. That’s just a guy. And frankly, I find it slightly depressing that we’re labeling him as the symbol of Boilermakers everywhere just because he makes boilers for a living. If we identified schools based solely on what their mascots did all the time, Oregon would have just won a match against the Cal Frantic Masturbators.

This girl may be over 18, but only because Oski kept her in his basement for 10 years.

GOOD: Indianapolis Northwest High School Space Pioneers

There's no picture available for the Space Pioneers, so I took the liberty of finding the best one ever.

I’m going to be honest – when I started this list, it was just going to be me making fun of college mascots I thought were silly. But then, by pure divine happenstance, I stumbled upon this gem.

Do I even need to explain what a great mascot the Space Pioneer is? Indianapolis Northwest High School seems to have clued into the fact that by adding “space” to an otherwise ordinary word you can instantly transform it into something that inspires awe in fans and strikes fear into the hearts of one’s enemies.

Of course, the Space Pioneers could well fall victim to the same problems I’ve got with the Boilermaker Express – in 30 years, Space Pioneers could be old hat and nobody will care anymore. But I’ve got to say that the thought of facing down a football team comprised of rough and tumble veterans of the space program is one hell of a lot more intimidating than a train.

Also, if I were the coach for that program, I would make this speech in the locker room before every game.

GOOD: Michigan State University Spartans

MSU can thank the movie 300 for completely revitalizing their choice of mascot, much in the same way that the University of Oregon owes a debt of gratitude to Emilio Estevez and all the fine people who made The Mighty Ducks. Of course, while our movie shot for children who liked hockey (a decidedly narrow margin outside the Midwest), 300 appealed to just about everyone who enjoys violence and testosterone, both of which are abundantly present in college football.

BAD: Glencoe High School Crimson Tide

True story:

I first visited Glencoe High several years ago for a speech and debate tournament. This was only a few weeks after the Indian Ocean Tsunami that killed something like 200,000 people. I distinctly remember walking through the front doors of the school and looking at the graphic of a frowning wave with balled up fists and thinking, “Damn – too soon, Glencoe. Too soon.”

A wave is not especially threatening because, all tsunami destruction aside, at the end of the day it’s still just water plus energy, neither of which strikes fear into the hearts of one’s enemies unless they don’t know how to swim. Also, Glencoe’s choice of illustration doesn’t do much to help matters – it makes the wave look more like a character from Dennis the Menace than an intimidating adversary.

The other issue I have – and bear with me here, folks – is that whenever I hear the words Crimson Tide, the only thing that comes to mind is the menstrual cycle. Unlike trains and tsunamis, the menstrual cycle is very frightening to most men, but I feel like it’s almost a cheap shot to play on that sort of fear. It’s like having your mascot be Doubty (“The fightin’, naggin’ suspicion that you’ll never find true love!”) or Blasty (“That mischievous, scrappy specter of global thermonuclear holocaust!”) or Toomie (“That bulbous, lumpy mass you can feel near your lymph node!”).

Truman Capps neglected to mention the Stanford Tree because really, what more can you say about a green felt cone with googly eyes?

Safeway Observations

It's kind of a fatty S, when you think about it.

1) Safeway has a very small DVD section where you can get movies like Ghostbusters II and Space Buddies for $7. Over the course of multiple trips to Safeway, I’ve discovered that they’re selling no less than five movies featuring Tom Selleck. There’s a couple of made-for-TV movies where he plays a gruff (and, presumably, mustachioed) small town detective along with two to three different westerns. I find this interesting given the fact that I could spend all day in the Blockbuster Video next door and find perhaps two Tom Selleck movies in the whole place.

2) Furthermore, only one of the movies available at Safeway features Gene Hackman (it’s Hoosiers). This is difficult to get my head around, because experience has led me to believe that Gene Hackman has been in every movie ever made, right on down to Super-8 Russian horse porn from the 1960s. I’m serious; ask somebody to name the first ten movies they can think of and I’ll bet you anything Gene Hackman was in one of them. The reason people don’t play Six Degrees of Gene Hackman is because it’d be like playing Six Degrees of People Who Urinate On a Regular Basis – you can’t swing a cat in Hollywood without hitting Gene Hackman.

3) Next to the DVD section is a rack of Personal Distress Alarms – essentially tiny keychain sized speakers which you keep on your person and then activate when you’re in Distress. Then, (as the package gleefully explains) the device will emit a 95-decibel alarm klaxon to “signal for help and frighten away your attacker.” I have two problems with this:

i) Unless a gang of unusually skittish deer attacks you, a loud noise isn’t going to frighten away somebody who wants to beat the shit out of you bad enough to try in the first place.

ii) People already have a built in Personal Distress Alarm. It’s called Your Voice, it’s highly versatile in terms of volume and content, and it doesn’t cost $14.95.

There were only two of these left on the shelf when I was there, as though their arrival at the store had sent waves through the community of paranoid people who can’t afford guns.

4) I’ve made a resolution that at any given time there will be no more than three (3) frozen dinners in my refrigerator, in a weak attempt to purify my diet. In order to go one step further, when I hit the frozen food aisle I make a point of searching out the organic options that aren’t full of ingredients that have words like “hydrogenated,” “syrup,” or “____ dye no. 7” in them. This limits me to about one shelf, half of which is occupied by items that are chock full of mushrooms, limiting my choice to Organic Mac & Cheese. This ensures very little variety, as most of my dinners for the past two weeks have either been pasta I’ve made myself or pasta someone else has made and I’ve heated up.

5) I buy an awful lot of Yoplait (item #307 on the list of Things I Do That Make People Question My Manhood), and I’ve noticed that for the past year or so they’ve included an offer on the top of the cup to donate ten cents to breast cancer research for every foil lid that consumers mail in, up to a total of $1.5 million. I don’t understand why if Yoplait is willing to donate $1.5 million to breast cancer research they don’t just fucking donate it already instead of waiting for millions of people to mail them their garbage first. Cut out the middleman and save some lives, already!

6) Whenever the automatic sprinklers in the produce aisle go on to water the merchandise, they play the sound of a thunderclap on the store P.A. system, presumably so that people will get the impression that a rainstorm has swept in to keep Safeway’s produce delicious and fresh, the natural way. This makes me sad every time I hear it, and I can’t quite put my finger on why.

7) Safeway is a wonderful crossroads of college hipsters and crazy hobos. On any given evening late in the week, one can find a small army of Greek life types buzzing around the store in search of mixers and ping pong balls as well as homeless people who appear to be lost. On my most recent trip, I passed by a homeless man on my way to the store who was screaming profanity at the top of his lungs at the cars that passed him on the road. Fifteen minutes later he was calmly paying the checkout lady for a tall boy of Miller High Life.

8) Pop-Tarts are not located in the convenient breakfast area. I see this as a profound mistake, because I’ve never encountered a breakfast more convenient than Pop-Tarts. When you don’t want to wake up more than ten minutes before class but know you’ll be hungry if you don’t eat something, you grab a packet of Pop-Tarts and eat them while you’re walking out the door. The only way it could get more convenient would be if beautiful women hand fed them to you and then moved your jaw up and down.

Truman Capps spends far too much time at Safeway.

What Have We Learned?

"Oh, THAT'S what he's writing about tonight."

About Kanye

Big surprise - an international superstar in a field where humility is not encouraged is actually a huge asshole. Who saw that one coming? This is the guy who has referred to Jimi Hendrix and Paul McCartney as “those artists in black and white photos,” has labeled himself the voice of this generation, and is on the record as saying that if the Bible were to be written today, he’d be a character in it. No, I was not surprised in the slightest when it turned out that he was a rampaging douchetruck.

Seeing him up there grabbing the microphone and completely taking a dump on the greatest night of Taylor Swift’s life was classic Kanye. When you type “Kanye West asshole” into Facebook, 43 different groups pop up. If being an asshole was basketball, Kanye West would be Michael Jordan.* By that logic, then, this VMA debacle would have gone down in history as one of the most astounding and incredible moments in basketball history – if asshole basketball were college football, it would be The Play.

*I would be Clyde Drexler. Mike would be Superman.

None of this makes what he did okay, of course. Being generally accepted as a gigantic asshole does not make it okay to be one (something Saddam Hussein figured out the hard way). Kanye apologized on his blog (available here if you like caps lock and questionable grammar) and then did the talk show circuit to further apologize. He’s been playing it out as one grand social faux pas, which might work when you double dip at a Super Bowl party and give everybody your cold but is less effective in the face of wrenching a microphone out of the hands of a 19-year-old girl to brown nose Beyonce.

Sources say he was drinking beforehand,* which is still no excuse, but I really think the whole thing was a publicity stunt that Kanye concocted on the spot. It sure as hell got his name in the papers, but I don’t think he anticipated quite how many of his followers were going to turn on him.

*And just why would you get sauced at the Video Music Awards? I understand why people show up drunk to the annual Oregon Marching Band Banquet, but the VMAs are a multimillion dollar event specifically designed to be incredibly entertaining.

Also, Kanye was wrong - this is the greatest music video of all time.

About America

I feel certain that if I were to travel through time and grab an 1840s plantation owner, a turn of the century Klansman, and a Nazi storm trooper and then show them the comments section for any YouTube video involving black people, all three would be thoroughly shocked and disgusted by the abundance and potency of the racism contained therein.

I’m serious – look for a video of Barack Obama, or Samuel L. Jackson, or a video of Phillip Seymour Hoffman at his nephew’s bar mitzvah where there’s a black guy walking past in the background and I guarantee you there’ll be at least three posts making heavy use of the N-bomb, coupled with suggestions of long term vacations to Africa.

So imagine the Internet’s reaction when a muscular black guy jumps onstage and impugns the honor of a cute, innocent 19-year-old white girl.

Well, at least he said please.

It’s been pretty well established that Kanye is an asshole, but the Internet reaction shows that a prominent opinion is that Kanye is an asshole because he is black, not because he’s just an asshole. In this case, the racial hatred spread from YouTube all the way to Twitter, which tends to be less racist in favor of simple inanity. So many people uploaded violent and racist remarks after the VMAs that one blogger went to the trouble of tracking all of them, which after the first few lynching threats became a lot like trying to track every drunk person at an Oregon football game.

To my knowledge, this is the same America that was thrown into a moral outrage a few years ago when Michael Richards started threatening to lynch a bunch of black people at one of his comedy shows. This leads me to wonder if the thousands of racist Tweets and YouTube comments come from people who are, in fact, ardent Michael Richards supporters – people who look at the video of him threatening to stick a fork up a black guy’s ass and say, “Fuck yeah! You tell ‘em! Lousy black people!”

The other possibility is that they’re flip-floppers in the worst sense – they’ll be more than willing to publicly crucify a public figure’s racist tendencies while simultaneously harboring the same ones. I agree wholeheartedly that everybody has some prejudice, but there’s a difference between a secret, deep down distrust of people of another race and the willingness to post Internet bulletins attached to your name declaring that Kanye West is “yet another nigger with a chip on his shoulder” who should “go back to the slime pool he crawled out of.”* It implies that there’s a lot of people out there who are either adverse to introspection or think they’re immune from the laws of common decency.

*My personal favorite is steverock100’s comment: “kanye is a dirty nigger. no offense to anyone else.” This forever illustrates that no matter how heinous your statement, “no offense” absolves you from any responsibility. Joseph Goebbels actually added the words “no offense” to the end of every one of his propaganda films.

Again, Kanye West is a huge asshole. Really huge. He’s sorry now, but he’s probably going to do something assholeish again in the future, because that’s just his way. He’s drunk on massive celebrity, and for that we have free reign to make fun of him and his ego. But folks, he’s just an asshole. He doesn’t deserve to be lynched or killed in a drive by, like a lot of Twitter subscribers suggested.

About Jay Leno

In the aftermath, Kanye appeared on Leno to further apologize for what he’d done. However, this apparently wasn’t good enough for Jay, who proceeded to ask Kanye if he thought his late mother would be proud of his actions, prompting one of the awkwardest silences in late night television history,* followed by tears.

*At least since Michael Richards’ apology on Letterman – and the parallels continue.

Fuck you, Jay Leno – Kayne did a stupid, nasty thing, and while in so doing he totally opened himself up for jokes for years to come, it doesn’t justify seizing on the emotionally traumatic death of his mother to humiliate him on live television.

Perhaps Leno’s logic was that since Kanye humiliated Taylor Swift, he deserved to be humiliated himself. I think he failed to realize that an asshole for an asshole makes the whole world stink.

Truman Capps knows Styx never would have pulled a stunt like this.

5 Famous Artists Who Could Fuck You Up: Tokyo Drift

And now, the highly entertaining follow up to Sunday's entry...

#2 – Cellini

Why he was famous

Sculptures, all of them nude, most of them of dudes.

Why he could fuck you up

At 16, Cellini was involved in a brawl in Florence. Apparently, punching people in broad daylight wasn’t acceptable in Florence no matter who you were, and Cellini was forced to flee the city to escape prosecution, a trick he no doubt learned from just about every other artist on this list. In Rome, Cellini’s sculptures and flute playing abilities won him the good graces of the Pope. It was during this time that a French douchebag named Charles III led an army to capture Rome and “chastise” the Pope, presumably with a sword to the face. However, the French had failed to realize that the country they were attacking was packed right to the brim with homicidal artists, and they wouldn’t have Paul Gauguin on their side for another 300 years.

It was here that Cellini dramatically put his life on the line in defense of his homeland, like an artistically inclined Italian Jack Bauer. He shot not one but two officers of the advancing army. The first was Prince Philibert de Charlon, a commander who clearly couldn’t have put up much of a fight being as his first name sounds more like a Muppet than a conqueror.

Cellini’s second victim was Charles III, the fucking leader of the advancing army, who he claims to have killed right outside the walls of Rome. For this act of bravery, Cellini was hailed as a hero and granted a pardon for his crimes in Florence, and everyone was so excited that they pretty much forgot about the fact that Charles’ army, deprived of its leader and hungry for loot, went on to sack the bejeezus out of Rome anyway.

Having saved Rome and earned his redemption, Cellini lived the rest of his days in quiet- Nah, just kidding. He actually went on to kill two more people, one of them a Roman police officer and the other a rival goldsmith, before being sent to prison… Ten years later. For embezzlement. It’s cool, though – he escaped.

#1 – Caravaggio

Why he was famous

Dramatically reducing the population of Italy through unbridled, nonstop murder. He also painted, occasionally.

Why he could fuck you up

Many artists are defined by their work while their personal lives exist more as colorful footnotes in their biographies. Not so with Caravaggio; the most reliable record of his life comes in the form of his criminal record, which is several pages long and spans multiple cities. Mention his name to any Art History major – just look for the nearest park bench, they’re probably sleeping on it – and the first thing you’ll hear about is how his life was basically Grand Theft Auto: Renaissance.

Caravaggio was born in Milan in 1571 and was forced to flee at the age of 21 after “certain quarrels,” one of which resulted in the wounding of a police officer. The next time you and your girlfriend quarrel over whether to rent Die Hard or Maid in Manhattan, know that Caravaggio is laughing at you, along with every healthy and uninjured cop in town. By the way, get used to the words “forced to flee,” because you’re going to hear them a lot in the next few paragraphs.

Like Torrigiano and Cellini, Caravaggio fled to Rome, which was apparently a mecca for violent tempered artists on the run from the law. He arrived penniless, but his considerable talent as an artist quickly earned him commissions from wealthy families, almost all of which he spent on alcohol when he wasn’t busy engaging in his favorite hobby: street brawls. Along with his paintings, Caravaggio became famous in Rome for how much he liked to fight, and this was in a time when just about everybody would get drunk and fight for lack of anything better to do. Internet comedy would not be invented for several hundred years.

Caravaggio.

Caravaggio’s rich patrons had done a pretty good job of protecting him from the authorities when he got into trouble with the law, most likely by paying the police a few thousand ducats in order to get Caravaggio released without any of his weapons or power ups. In 1606, though, his luck ran out when he killed a former friend and was outlawed by the papal authorities who controlled Rome. Once again, Caravaggio was forced to flee the city.

He spent a few months in Naples where he painted a few pictures before moving on to the island of Malta, presumably because he’d killed all of his potential clients in Naples. In Malta, Caravaggio did some painting for the Knights of Malta, a group of badass mercenaries who were charged with defending Christianity from Muslims. In return for his work, Caravaggio was knighted and inducted into the Knights of Malta, where he hoped to use the organization’s all-around coolness to earn a pardon from the Pope, or at least drop the name to pick up chicks.

But of course, Caravaggio being Caravaggio, he fucked that plum position up in good time with another of his trademark brawls, during which he smashed through the door of a house and seriously injured a fellow knight. In Caravaggio’s defense, Scrubs was a rerun that night and he had nothing better to do.

The Knights of Malta didn’t take kindly to this, and he spent most of September 1608 in a jail cell in the Knights’ fort. Then, taking a page from The Joker’s book, he decided he was about done being in jail and walked right the hell out of the mercenary army’s impenetrable fortress, first rappelling down a wall and then disappearing from the island. Historians still aren’t sure how he did this, but the general consensus is that he hijacked Da Vinci’s helicopter.

He acquired a six star wanted level soon after.

At that point, things started to get fucked up. Caravaggio spent time in Sicily before fleeing again to Naples, believing that he was being followed by unknown assassins. Most people would write this off as paranoid delusions, but Caravaggio had the last laugh when an attempt was made on his life, which resulted in severe facial disfigurement. To this day, nobody knows who the culprit was, but based on the nature of the crime it sounds a lot like Torrigiano.

Face slashed and eager to flee another city, Caravaggio took a boat north in hopes of staying ahead of the legions of people he’d pissed off over the course of his life.

And then he fucking disappeared.

In July of 1610 word reached Rome that Caravaggio was dead from fever, but no body was ever found, and no one in Italy was willing to accept that the Chuck Norris of the Renaissance would die of something so wussy as fever. Some say he faked his own death and went to work for the U.S. government, but if that were true, Osama bin Laden would've been hanging by his underwear from the Washington Monument on September 12, 2001.

Truman Capps has now exhausted his reserves of pre-written drivel and must return to the creativity mines for Sunday's update.

5 Famous Artists Who Could Fuck You Up

A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece for submission to Cracked.com about the more badass tendencies of Renaissance artists. They passed on the article, and I now pass the comedy directly to you. It's a long piece, so I've taken the liberty of splitting it into two pieces. This has nothing to do with me copping out of writing a blog during band camp next week.

PS - Should my high school art history teacher Mr. Nickel wind up seeing this, I hope that he accepts my most heartfelt apologies for taking advantage of artistic pioneers in the pursuit of cheap laughs.

Members of the “art crowd” are generally not perceived as pinnacles of manhood, from Andy Warhol’s all out, no holds barred gayness to the fat kid in high school who sat around drawing pictures of Pokemon. Sure, they can paint a pretty picture, but when the chips are down and people are getting ready to throw punches, it’s generally acknowledged that the artist in the room is the one curled up on the floor hoping his attacker will slip in the puddle of fresh urine.

However, this was not always the case. As early as just over 100 years ago, there were plenty of artists walking the streets who you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley. Artists like…

#5 – PAUL GAUGUIN

Why he was famous

Gauguin was a pioneer of early "The Simpsons" fan art.

Gauguin was a leader of the Post-Impressionist movement whose use of bold color brought about Synthesism while simultaneously bridging the gap to the Primitavist Movement and a return to pastoral themes in artwork. Also, he got pissed at a guy and chopped off his ear.

Why he could fuck you up

Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh were arguably the original BFFs. The two first met in Paris in 1887 and quickly hit it off due to a mutual interest in Post-Impressionism and, presumably, cornholing, because less than a year later they were living together in Arles with the intention of starting an art colony. Only in France is the cover story for a gay love affair even gayer than the sum of its parts.

Sadly, not all was well in paradise. Gauguin and Van Gogh fought often over their artistic differences, fights that were fueled by Van Gogh’s unraveling mental condition and the fact that their grand artist’s colony was still just two gay dudes in a rented room.

As the winter wore on, the weather worsened and both angry men were forced to stay cooped up indoors for days at a time. Cabin fever quickly set in, and as we all learned from The Shining, that can only end with somebody waving something sharp around.

In December of 1888, tensions between the two reached a breaking point, prompting Gauguin, an experienced fencer, to grab a sword (apparently these sorts of things are just lying around in an artist’s colony) and lop off part of Van Gogh’s ear, in an event that would go on to inspire the hit film Reservoir Dogs.

Gauguin threw his sword into the river and fled the scene while Van Gogh set about tending to his mangled ear – namely by leaving the chopped off piece of ear in the care of a friendly prostitute and then falling asleep. He and Gauguin never met again, although they exchanged several letters and, experts agree, struck an deal in which Van Gogh would say he cut off his own ear to save Gauguin from police action while in return Gauguin presumably would not come back to finish the job.

The clincher? In a letter to his brother Theo some time after the attack, Van Gogh commented, “Luckily Gauguin… Is not yet armed with machine guns and other dangerous war weapons.” This would be the last time in history that the concept of an armed Frenchman did anything but make people laugh.

#4 – LEONARDO DA VINCI

Why he was famous

The Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, a terrible movie with Tom Hanks.

Why he could fuck you up

Let’s begin by saying this – Leonardo Da Vinci didn’t actually do anything particularly violent or shocking. He spent most of his life painting, being famous, and (possibly) having sex with younger men. Although to clarify, this was during the Renaissance, and back then having sex with younger men was like having an iPhone.

However, in addition to all of his artwork, Da Vinci spent a lot of time sketching out potential war weapons in his notebooks, in which he wrote down his notes backwards so that his competitors couldn’t figure out his secrets.

Apparently he thought his competitors wouldn’t understand the complexities of a cannon with 12 barrels unless they could read his notes, which most likely read “BOOM, MOTHERFUCKER!” in backwards-Italian.

That wasn’t it. Da Vinci’s notes contained diagrams of shrapnel filled cluster bombs, helicopters, and a chariot covered in whirling blades (accompanied by multiple illustrations of decapitated soldiers, just in case you thought it was a bread maker or something).

Maybe you’re saying, “Bullshit! He just drew pictures of guns and stuff! He’s not so tough!” But that’s the thing – he spent hours sitting around drawing intricate and detailed diagrams of weapons of mass destruction, accompanied by notes written in his own secret language. Imagine if you saw somebody doing that in the lunchroom at your workplace. Or in the student union. Or in a post office. Would you fuck with that guy?

And that’s just some guy; this was Leonardo Da Vinci, widely regarded as one of the smartest people who ever lived. If anybody could make this stuff work, it would have been him. If he hadn’t lost interest in all these projects, there’s a very good chance we’d be living in the United States of Da Vinci right about now.

#3 – PIETRO TORRIGIANO

Why he was famous

A whole lot of sculptures of dead saints, some of whom you might have learned about if you hadn’t kept sneaking your Game Boy into Sunday School.

Why he could fuck you up

While artists like Gauguin waited most of their lives to fuck a guy up, Torrigiano started early, and he didn’t need a sword, either.

During the Renaissance, artists became artists by participating in apprenticeships offered by older, master artists. These apprenticeships would start from an early age and continue well into young adulthood, which really helped to facilitate the whole “sex with younger men” thing a lot of artists were into back then. Torrigiano was an apprentice of one such master.

Now, by all accounts, Torrigiano was a really good sculptor, especially for his age, and he outshone all the other students taking part in the apprenticeship save for one – Michelangelo Buonarroti.

Yes, THAT Michelangelo.

This was incredibly frustrating for Torrigiano – and who can blame him? It’s like if you were taking lessons and working hard to become a really great guitar player, but Jimi Hendrix was taking lessons from the same guy. Nobody gives a shit about you, they only care about the big dog.

One day, while both students were carving sculptures, Michelangelo made a wayward snarky comment, to which Torrigiano responded by punching the young master in the face (Oregon running back LeGarrette Blount is apparently a big Torrigiano fan). But this was no ordinary punch – the teenaged sculptor hit Michelangelo so hard that his nose was flattened, permanently disfiguring him.

Unfortunately for Torrigiano, breaking an artistic genius’s nose carried a pretty heavy penalty during the Renaissance, and he was forced to discontinue his apprenticeship and flee the city before the cops showed up. This probably made a pretty big dent in his artistic progress, but not nearly as big as the dent it made in Michelangelo’s nose.

Michelangelo was not as well known for his contributions to the Renaissance's quirky romantic comedies.

After escaping trial in Florence, Torrigiano settled in Rome, where he made several sculptures on commission before he decided he was done creating art with stone and instead wanted to create pain and suffering with his fists. Thus, he gave up sculpting for a while and became a mercenary in the employ of various powerful Italian lords. The most notable of these was Cesare Borgia, the Pope’s illegitimate son (celibacy being more of a guideline than a rule back then) who led a mercenary army that conquered a good-sized chunk of Italy. No doubt legions of defeated enemy soldiers left the battlefield with their noses flattened beyond recognition.

Torrigiano spent his last years in Spain during the Inquisition, which was precisely why they were his last years. Legend has it that when he became dissatisfied with a statue of the Virgin Mary he was working on, he smashed it (most likely with his nose-breaking fist) and was thrown into Inquisitional prison for heresy. Unwilling to let the Catholics have the last laugh, he starved himself to death before they could sentence him to any sort of punishment. That’ll teach ‘em.

Meanwhile, Torrigiano’s archenemy Michelangelo outlived him by 33 years in spite of bubonic plague outbreaks and frequent warfare between Italian city-states, and went down in history as arguably the most famous artist of all time. Historians agree, however, that his nose was ugly as fuck.

Truman Capps reminds you to tune in Wednesday for the thrilling conclusion!

In The Club

Much harder to get into than the Safeway Club.

I had always seen the Safeway Club Card™ advertised, and as a child I had many times glimpsed that plastic red rectangle of consumerism whilst shopping with Mom. In later years when I’ve been doing my own shopping, Safeway checkers have often asked me if I had a Safeway Club Card, to which the response was always a disheveled, “No.” I was not in the club, and figured that I never would be.

Last year, when my Old Roommates and I went shopping, we travelled to Costco, where Josh had a membership that entitled him to all kinds of discounts, and seeing as we shared food and expenses it made the most sense to buy in bulk for cheap there as opposed to going to Safeway.

Alas, those days are over. The Old Roommates and I have gone our separate ways into adulthood, and we are now all living amongst new roommates.

Yes, I mean that – “adulthood.” Sure, I may have felt like an adult last year, living in my $400 a month, all utilities paid, WiFi included, 150 square foot shithole of a quad, but there is a reason that the jingle for Pull-Ups diapers is “I’m A Big Kid Now!” It’s the illusion of independence and control, of walking a tightrope of responsibility when in reality there’s a safety net in case you shit yourself.

Living in the dorms was essentially infancy – we were fed, we were close to our classes, we had RAs to mediate our disputes and give us stern lectures when somebody poured a bottle of barbecue sauce on their door. There were all kinds of safety nets in place because God only knew what we’d do once we were away from the nest. In spite of these safety nets, drunk assholes routinely fall out of third story windows – proof that until they build subterranean dormitories, college will always be a risky proposition.

Moving from dorms to quads in my sophomore year, as many sophomores do, I felt like truly hot shit, as many sophomores do, and was completely wrong, as many sophomores are. Sure, we were on our own for buying food, and without an RA our only recourse to settle disputes was leaving passive-aggressive notes on the white board, but the place was basically a furnished stepping stone from living in a school-sponsored warehouse for horny stoners to life as a pseudo-functioning pseudo-adult.

Now, my New Roommates and I are living in a three story townhouse a few blocks from campus, and the experience of moving into an actual apartment instead of a glorified dollhouse has been both liberating and frightening.

Fortunately, Bret (New Roommate #1) lived in a big boy apartment last year as well, and as such has a lot of furniture and kitchenware to offer. Insofar as furnishing my room, though, I was on my own – this forced me to get acquainted with the fine folks at IKEA.

Walking through an IKEA showroom, one quickly lapses into a spare, ergonomically designed, Swedish utopia. Traipsing through rooms of incomparable luxury and style in spite of the fact that they’re smaller than most prison cells, one’s response is, “My God – my life up until this moment has been an orgy of clutter and wasted space. I must burn down my house with all my possessions in it and begin anew in a 200 square foot studio unit filled with IKEA products.”

It’s all so ingenious because you get so amped up about how cool your house is going to look that you forget that you actually need to build all this shit. It’s like going to Izzy’s and getting all excited about the pizzas you see at the buffet, but as soon as you make your choice you’re led to a room in the back where you must knead, garnish, and bake the pizza yourself with only the scantiest of instructions. God help you if you want seconds.

I’ve never been especially handy (and I hope that doesn’t come as a surprise after the last two years of run-on sentences and Firefly jokes), and so it was with a great deal of trepidation that I tore open the flat six hundred million ton cardboard box that contained my new desk, which IKEA had helpfully named MIKEAL.* Inside were four sturdy pieces of wood and a bag of screws and nails. Using a hammer and two screwdrivers I’d borrowed from Bret, I set to work on the grandest construction project of my life.

*Pronounced the way Gob says “Michael!” on Arrested Development.

After an hour and a half of sitting in my room hammering and screwing* I finally stood back and beheld my beautiful, sturdy desk that I had created with my bare hands. I felt indescribably manly. I had employed guile and problem solving to create something out of a bunch of nothing. I was, in that moment, MacGyver, or at the very least The A-Team during that bit at the end of the episode where they make a nonlethal weapon out of cabbage and PVC pipe.**

*I will not make a joke here, because there are some laughs too cheap even for me.

**Actual episode, by the way.

Bringing this whole emergence into adulthood full circle, I am, as of today, the proud holder of a Safeway Club Card, which I used to purchase $44.38 worth of food with a total savings of $12.67 (or 22% - thanks receipt!). If I have any regrets, it is that there was no Club Card special on pornography. Shopping brings out the “gatherer” side of human nature, but the Club Card emphasizes the “hunter” element as we lucky cardholders stalk through the aisles in search of the ever-elusive savings.

Safeway Select™ pasta sauce has never tasted so good.

Truman Capps has yet to build his desk chair yet - if this is his final update, he trusts you will understand what became of him.

That Happened

You are cool if you get this reference.

Wow. Where to begin?

How about here:

There is a tradition in the Oregon Marching Band that whenever the game turns against us or it starts raining or a ref makes a bad call (in the Pac-10, of course, that’s every call) we yell, “Worst – game – eveeeeer!” Just about every game the marching band has gone to has been the worst game ever, and some games have been the worst ever multiple times over. We’ve won plenty of those games and lost some of them too. Sometimes we just brand a game as the worst ever because we’re bored. But believe me when I say:

It's really fun if you yell "FALCON PUNCH!" right when he hits the guy.

WORST. GAME. EVER.

For those of you who weren’t watching the game and aren’t friends with at least one Oregon student on Facebook, I’ll explain:

On Thursday, the University of Oregon played Boise State in Boise, where they apparently have a nearly undefeated record, due mostly to the fact that they’re an above-average team in a conference full of schools that aren’t necessarily known for athletic prowess, and in some cases aren’t even necessarily known. This was supposed to be a pretty huge game for everyone involved – it was Boise’s only real challenge of the season and would prove whether they had the Moxie necessary to win a BCS title, and it was the first game of Oregon’s highly anticipated season under a new coach.

I once compared college football to paganism on here, and then plagiarized myself so that I could do it again in the Daily Emerald, but in light of this game I’ve got to go back on what I said. College football is a lot more like Gangs of New York - mobs of drunk people in brightly colored clothes hating one another with a few brawls thrown in for good measure. There’s a game in there somewhere.

Going into this game, everybody was pissed. Literally everybody. Last year Boise State beat us at home, which was upsetting, and our team was eager to stick it to the Broncos and humiliate them on their home turf in front of a national television audience, crushing their BCS hopes. Oregon is the first ranked opponent Boise had ever played at home, so again, there was a lot riding on this. And everyone was pissed.

To say that Oregon played poorly in this game that had so much riding on it would be a real disgrace to the word “poorly.” We played beyond poorly. We played Washingtonly. There were all sorts of fouls and dropped catches and interceptions and just downright stupid things that shouldn’t have happened – and this is coming from the guy who doesn’t know what most positions do, the names of the plays, and the names of most of the players (in spite of the fact that they’re written on the jerseys). If you can shock a sports-luddite like me with bad playing, you’re definitely doing a bad job. It’s like showing a medieval peasant a video game and having him criticize the graphics.

We lost the game pretty badly due to severe sucking. But sucking is one thing. Being a bunch of dicks is another.

I think I’ve reached the necessary level of pretention to call in an Orwell reference, so here it is: In George Orwell’s 1984, which I totally read, a common part of the downtrodden citizens’ day is the Two Minutes’ Hate, wherein the government uses propaganda to whip the populace into a rage at their enemies and keep them loyal. As described in the book (which I’ve read), people get violently angry in the course of those two minutes.

This game was the three hours’ hate – and not just the good old fashioned “Fuck you, you’re from Idaho” stuff that we’re all used to. Oregon players scuffled with one another. Some of them talked down to or yelled at the new coach. And then, at the end of the game, our all-star running back LaGarette Blount punched one of his teammates, sucker punched a helmet-less Boise State player, tried to attack two Boise State fans, swung at the cops and security guards who came to restrain him, and was dragged screaming into the locker room.

It was probably a really awkward bus ride back to Eugene.

Sure, tensions were running high, everyone was angry, and he was provoked. But I’ve been provoked by assholes before and I never sucker punched them – primarily out of high moral fiber, and also because my punching skills leave a lot to be desired. And I’ve certainly never sucker punched somebody in front of the entire country. While representing my school. Which spends hundreds of millions on marketing itself as legitimate and trustworthy.

What I’m drawing from this is that the University of Oregon was spending big money on a scholarship for a guy who the entire nation now knows as Captain Angrypants. That’s close to $80,000 for his out of state tuition. But that’s fine – when they first gave him the scholarship, nobody knew he was a ticking time bomb of fury. But now they know the truth, so that’s bound to shake things up, right?

The school has suspended Blount for the entire season – and this is his senior year, mind you – and sources close to the NFL have already dubbed Blount “undraftable.” It’s funny how you can spend a few hours playing some really terrible football but then derail your entire career in the course of about a minute and a half; funny in the self loathing, broken dreams, increased potential for alcoholism kind of way.

However, the University will continue to give Blount his athletic scholarship, even though the most athletic thing he’s going to be doing is showing up to practice and watching games from the sidelines. This strikes me as a monumental misappropriation of funds – I show up to every football game, that ought to entitle me to at least half as much as he gets.

The idea, I suppose, is to give Blount an opportunity to pursue his education as some sort of attempted redemption for what he’s done – after all, the chances of him getting paid to play football are pretty much nonexistent at this point unless they reinstate the XFL, so he may as well really focus on his political science degree. I’m in no place to judge whether Blount is genuinely devoted to his studies or just sees them as a minor distraction between practices – more than one Oregon player has gone on to become a lawyer, but there are also quite a few used car salesmen.

I just think it’s unfair that Blount still gets to attend the University of Oregon for free while in stark violation of the Student Conduct Code, which gives the University the right to exercise disciplinary action over incidents that involve physical abuse (to say nothing of incidences of physical abuse that take place at official athletic events being broadcast to the entire country). The Student Conduct Code states that for infractions such as this, the University may impose a wide variety of sanctions such as disciplinary probation, suspension, or expulsion. Blount has received his punishment from the athletic department, but he’s a student as well – is the academic end of the University going to do anything about the fact that one of their students sucker punched somebody?

I’m not out to nail Blount to the wall. I just think that if there are any students who ought to be held accountable for their actions, it’s the ones who wear Oregon’s colors and represent us on a national stage.

Truman Capps hopes LeGarrette Blount doesn’t read this and come a-punchin’.

A Decade On The Internet

Anybody up for Minesweeper?

I've had my own computer for nearly ten years now. This is a side-benefit of my father's undying fascination with technology, brought about by six years in the high-tech sector.

When I was a child and everybody else was still going to stores and buying their pornography in the form of magazines, my Dad signed us up for some crazy magic experiment called "The Intar-Net," which I at the age of seven though was basically just a box that made funny noises. When I was in middle school, Dad was one of the first people in Salem to jump onboard the broadband high-speed Internet train, ensuring that I could be shocked and horrified by the Internet twice as fast as all my friends. Dad has promised that once Apple gets off its shiny, ergonomically designed ass and signs a service contract with Verizon, we'll all get iPhones, and I feel certain that in a few years we'll be the first family on the block to have our own personal Skynet, and thus the first family to be murdered by Terminators once it becomes self aware.

My father's technological inclination means that he goes through a lot of computers - when he was at the peak of his game, he had seven computers in one room. That may sound bizarre to you, and it once did to me, but then I realized that when compared to all the other things you could have seven of in one room, computers are probably the least harmful. Imagine: A man with seven guns in one room. A woman with seven cats in one room. A family with seven children in one room. Thank you, but I'll take computers any day.

This benefitted me, because whenever Dad got a new computer he would dispose of the old one by giving it to me. My first computer, upon which I started writing Perfect Dark fan fiction in the summer of 1999, was more or less a box full of doorknobs by today's standards (and a box of slightly more impressive doorknobs by 1999 standards) that Dad gave to me when he bought himself a brand new Dell, all tricked out with Windows 2000 and a DVD drive. It wasn't much, but it was mine and mine alone, and it had lightning fast Internet access too - although those were the days when you could visit every website on the Internet in one afternoon if you took your time about it, so there really wasn't much need for speed. Back then there was plenty of Internet to go around.

In 7th grade, Dad got a new computer and I once again got his old one - this time around, through, his old computer was capable of running Half Life, and, more importantly, games like Team Fortress and Counter-Strike (back in the CS 1.5 glory days) which allowed me to postpone social development until well into high school while I spent my afternoons and weekends tearing up public servers and generally being the trash talking 13 year old that most people imagine when they think of playing video games online.

Just before going into high school, Dad got me a Dell Inspiron laptop, which was definitely cool by 2003 standards. It was big and clunky and it sucked power from a variety of cords that snaked down to a power strip behind my desk. It was also prohibitively large and heavy – and not just because my arms at the time were the equivalent of toothpicks held together with week-old Juicy Fruit. The carrying case had handles and a shoulder strap, both of which were padded to shield your hands/shoulder from injury because of the downright heaviness of the laptop. When, in my junior year of high school, Dad first got involved with Wi-Fi, the only way I could use it was by plugging a big wireless card into one of the computer’s USB ports. When I got my first MacBook, the notion of a laptop so light you could pick it up and take it with you anywhere with built in wireless capacity was pretty much intoxicating.

Having moved on to a new MacBook Pro in the wake of my old MacBook’s spontaneous hard drive failure a few months ago, I’m almost astounded at how much crap I’ve been dragging with me from one computer to the next over the years.

I’m currently in the process of packing up all my stuff to move back to Eugene, but this year I’ve decided to go through everything very carefully to make sure I only take what I need, in order to save on how much grief (and effort) I have to go through in the moving experience.* I’ve trimmed a lot of fat, and I’m only taking five boxes down, as opposed to the eight that I brought with me (however, one of those boxes is the box that I keep my XBox in, so I think that technically counts as like two boxes, and then maybe a third if you consider the XBox to be a box full of technology.) This happens a lot when I move – I take inventory of the stuff that I have and try my best to separate the bullshit from the non-bullshit.

*For the record, I’ve decided that while I do not need my set of big pink plastic boobs, I do need my Nerf pistol.

Not so with computers, though. In every computer change over the past decade, we’ve simply backed up everything on my hard drive and loaded it onto the new one, meaning that I’ve got files on here that I created when I was in 5th grade. Seeing as I only got serious about organizing my file folders two years into high school, most of my Documents folder looks like a robot threw up. I found a saved .jpg image of a Hot Wheels car (last modified in 1997 – clearly something I saved onto my first computer when it was still in Dad’s possession) tucked in among 8th grade science papers and a list of every stupid thing a girl in my 10th grade Spanish class said.

Trying to organize my hard drive is like walking through The Truman Capps Memorial Archives, which, true to my nature, have little to no organization and are, in the end, a waste of time.

Camping II: Die Darkman Die

Jesus on the Columbia.

Boardman, and, for that matter, the entirety of Eastern Oregon, give visitors the strong impression that they are unwanted and would do best to pack their things and leave, or better yet, not even visit in the first place. Everything in Eastern Oregon is really far away from all the major population centers in Western Oregon, the climate is a tad inhospitable, and there is the ever present Puncturevine.

I had never known that something so insidious as Puncturevine existed, but I found out quickly when Whitney, who had been walking around our campground in cheap rubber flip-flops, shrieked several times and then presented the sole of her shoe to us, revealing several small spikes that had embedded themselves so deeply into the sandal that the spines had come through the other end to poke her foot. This was Puncturevine, the spiny offshoot of an indigenous plant that’s so sharp it’s been known to deflate bicycle tires. The City of Boardman had put wanted posters up, advertising that they would pay people $1.00 for every bag of Puncturevine they brought to city hall. When a cash-strapped village of 1000 is willing to pay people to go and tear up local flora even in these environmentally conscious times, you know you’re dealing with a plant that is, to say the least, a bad motherfucker.

Most of our second day in Boardman was consumed with the aforementioned construction of the awning and expedition to Hermiston in search of propane. That evening we lit multiple citronella candles well before the mosquito horde arrived; as a result, the bulk of the pestilence stayed away and let us enjoy our bratwurst in peace. However, several times I thought I heard rain pattering against the awning, only to see it was swarms of flies and mosquitoes trying to find a way to get at us that didn’t put them in citronella’s line of fire – for them, this meant repeatedly flying into the roof of the awning in hopes that it would eventually tear open and grant them better access to our delicious blood.

We had been unable to go tubing on our second day because the Columbia River was too choppy, thanks to the heavy winds coming from the Gorge which succeeded in destroying our campsite while we were gone in Hermiston. However, on our third day we awoke to find the river calm and serene, like a muddy mirror filled with seaweed.

We hopped into Henry Winkl- We hopped into Whitney’s Dad’s motorboat and set off down the river, looking for a suitable place to tube. Sitting at the bow of the boat was a refreshing and wonderful experience for me, because it exposed to me to an unending windstorm in the face. You see, at that point, I had not showered for over a day, which meant my hair didn’t have any product in it, which meant that it was constantly flopping down into my eyes like a thick greasy blindfold. The wind at the front of the boat, though, plastered it all back to my head like a thick greasy form fitting helmet.

To look at the Columbia River you’d think its deepest point was in the middle, but that’s not the case. Whitney’s Dad had a depth indicator set up in the boat that would frequently jump from 30 feet to about 2 feet as we moved through the Columbia, as though the riverbed was trying to spring up surprise us. In some places in the middle of the river the water was so shallow that you could look over the edge and see the sandy riverbed. I was tempted to get out and go for a stroll around the river, but we were in a hurry to find a suitable depth for tubing.

What can I say about tubing? Tubing, I believe, is almost all my fears at the same time – all of them if a bikini-clad Sarah Palin is along for the ride. I had expected that we’d be using innertubes for our tubing, but in fact Whitney’s Dad owned a big inflatable craft with three seats and handles in it; truly the Titanic of innertubes.

Well, okay, maybe that’s a bad comparison.

The innertube was connected to the boat by way of a long rope, and for the next ten minutes Whitney, The Girlfriend, and myself were towed along behind the boat as Whitney’s Dad did donuts in the river. This sent us skipping off the wake like a big inflatable rock and at other times sent water cascading over the front of the innertube, leading me to believe that everything I’d learned about air being lighter than water was false and that we were all going to die. I guess I have a hard time enjoying an activity where it’s basically accepted that the vehicle you’re riding in will eventually spectacularly crash and send you flying God knows where. Grand Theft Auto is a rare exception, mainly because the aforementioned crashing can also be used to kill hookers.

Before we could crash and kill any hookers, however, the boat broke down, marooning us in the middle of the Columbia. I was more than willing to walk over to shore to get help, but a friendly couple on jet skis arrived first, noticing our orange distress flags.

“We’re dead in the water.” Whitney’s Dad explained. “Can you go get someone to tow us in?”

The man, suntanned and powerfully built, his head shaved, eyes hidden behind Oakleys, said, “I can do it.” He ran his hand appreciatively across the handlebars of his jet ski, and I suddenly knew what pure testosterone looked like. True to his word, the friendly giant towed us back into Boardman Harbor, refused any payment, and then rode off into the sunset. As we loaded the decommissioned boat back into the trailer, I looked over my shoulder for one last glimpse of our rescuer. I think, but I’m not sure, that I saw him kicking a rampaging grizzly in the face as he and his wife blazed downriver.

The boat’s engine out of commission, we spent the rest of the day swimming in the harbor before going back to our campground for a dinner of steak, potatoes, corn, chicken, hamburgers, s’mores, and cigars. People may go on vacation, but hedonism does not.*

*Of course, by its very nature, hedonism is always on vacation. Work would be a vacation for hedonism.

The next morning we dismantled our equipment in record time and trekked back home again. There isn’t much I can do to make this paragraph terribly funny, so let’s move on to the next one, shall we?

In spite of anything in this update or the previous one that’s made camping sound un-fun, I actually had a remarkably great time. Yes, there were mosquitoes and yes, I did have to walk farther than I normally want to when I had to pee, but that’s really what camping is about. In a world where everybody is so hooked up to technology, it’s really refreshing to be able to take a few days where the only people you have to contend with are the ones right in front of you, not the ones on your cell phone or your Facebook page.

What’s more, camping is an opportunity to truly rediscover our roots as hunter-gatherers: Being out in the open, confronting and solving problems that don’t involve finding reliable Internet access. Like a good fight club, a camping trip offers a chance to reclaim the instincts and abilities we’ve lost thanks to evolution and indoor plumbing.

And tubing? Tubing reminds us what fear really is.

Truman Capps didn’t smoke any cigars, but the s’mores were probably less healthy.