Leave Government Alone!

Welcome to Hair Guy, where the references aren't topical and the points don't matter.

Yesterday at work, as I dashed off the last few words of my blog about hurricanes or whatever the hell I was talking about, we turned on the TV in the writers’ office just in time to see Rick Santorum take the podium to address the Republican National Convention. I then realized that Hell is a very real thing which exists on Earth: It’s being stuck in a room with Rick Santorum, forced to listen to him give a speech so hammy a rabbi couldn’t eat it while everybody around you applauds, and you’re in Florida.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many people who want to run the government talk so much shit about the government in one evening. I mean, with all the vitriol Santorum, Oklahoma governor Mary Fallin, and Baron Harkonnen were spewing about the evils of the government providing assistance to its citizens, you’d think there was some kind of personal vendetta at work, like maybe the Department of Health and Human Services screwed the Republican Party’s girlfriend or something.

Take, for example, this excerpt from Santorum’s speech, which came after he reminded us that he’d run for president but before he trotted out his developmentally disabled daughter for political karma:

My grandfather, like millions of other immigrants, didn't come here for some government guarantee of income equality or government benefits to take care of his family. In 1923 there were no government benefits for immigrants except one: Freedom!

In case you missed it, the bad guys in that anecdote are equality and providing for needy families. I guess freedom really is all you need – the freedom not to mind that women earn 82 cents for every dollar a man makes (all the more incentive to stay home and give birth to rapist’s baby, I guess!), or the freedom from your children when they die of polio you can’t afford to treat.

If you want to talk about shitty, fiscally irresponsible stuff the United States government does, why not focus on all the fucking wars, maybe? Those wars were way more expensive than feeding hungry children; in fact, a big component of those wars was dropping bombs on hungry children. And as if that weren’t bad enough, those bombs aren’t exactly cheap.

I don’t exactly relish paying taxes or anything, but if I had to choose what they went to, I’d much rather see them go to some family in the projects than a Predator drone that’s going to blow up a wedding party in Pakistan that a suspected terrorist may or may not have been at. Even if the family on welfare isn’t actively looking for work and they’re using the money to buy crack, I’d rather my tax dollars subsidize crackheads than dead innocent people, in a pinch.  

This might just be the fact that I’m an Oregon-raised atheist liberal talking, but in a lot of ways I really don’t see the idea of ‘big government’ as a scary thing. I’m crazy about big government, actually. I’d love it if we had a Veterans’ Administration so huge and well funded that every returning soldier had prompt access to high quality physical and mental care, or some tricked out Pell Grants for needy students, bridges that stay standing, levees that don’t collapse, maybe even a universal healthcare system or something? (I wouldn’t miss the DEA, though. We can cut that!)

In a way, the Republican platform is pushing for big government – it just happens to be exactly the sort of big government that scares me. No, you can’t get married, faggot, because the Constitution says so. You got raped by your Dad? Well, deal with it, you 15 year old girl, you. You want to go to college? Well, you should’ve thought about that before you were poor!

The big government I like opens a lot of doors by giving people options for education and healthcare if they can’t get it themselves; the big government the Republicans are pitching closes a lot of doors to people who aren’t white, Christian males with significant financial means. That doesn’t sound like freedom to me, but according to Rick Santorum that’s basically the one thing America’s got going for it at this point.

That’s not to say I’m completely opposed to privatization, either – I think private industry is going to rejuvenate space exploration, and I've read some compelling arguments that it would probably improve airport security too. The Republicans, though, seem to look at privatization as a magic wand made out of the ground up bones of Ronald Reagan that can make all aspects of government cheaper and more efficient while simultaneously making their friends rich.

The fact is, helping people isn’t profitable – that’s why you don’t see a lot of Red Cross employees driving Lamborghinis. Private enterprise is great for spurring innovation and driving the economy, but when a tornado hits your town, Disney and Viacom aren’t going to be there to help you rebuild, because the margins in rebuilding poor peoples’ houses and issuing grants to help them get back on their feet aren’t so great for the company.

Even when the government is writing checks for private enterprise to do some of these things, it still doesn’t turn out so well, since contractors tend to cut corners in search of profitability.

I see it like this: We’ve got a great thing going with capitalism right now. It’s super. But it tends to leave varying numbers of unlucky people out in the cold from time to time, and that’s why we’ve got government. It’s there to look after people when they’re having a hard time,* no matter how unprofitable it is, so that eventually they can recover and get back to work making money to pay taxes.

*In a perfect world, that is – one where bureaucracy is streamlined, all the forms can be submitted online, and they have a 99 cent coin for use at Taco Bell and thrift stores.

I’m no economist, and the one political science class I took in college was so boring that I dropped it after the first hour. All this shit about government being some selfless, Batman-style protector of the masses could be even more factually dubious than any given word being said at the RNC.

I just think it’s pretty telling that all the people calling for the end of government benefits in Tampa right now have full time jobs with six figure salaries and top tier healthcare. 

Truman Capps has no idea what he’ll write about after the election.

Isaac

Okay, but seriously, why does his tie match his face?!

I’m sort of ashamed to admit it, but some small part of me envies people who live on the Gulf Coast right now. I don’t envy the heat, or the humidity, or the obesity, or the crime, or the environmental catastrophes, or the bonkers adherence to the more conveniently hateful parts of the Old Testament, and honestly I’m not even crazy about the accents. But damn it, those lucky bastards are getting rain!

I know – Hurricane Isaac has done a lot of damage in the Caribbean and there’s an outside chance it could really mess up New Orleans. It’s a powerful, awesome destructive force of Courtney Love proportions, and much like Courtney Love it isn’t the sort of thing that somebody should want to be close to. I know that rationally, but then I see Shepard Smith on TV getting drenched by waves and driving sideways rain and I start to swoon just a little bit.

I’m experienced with inclement weather the same way a white 13 year old who’s seen 8 Mile a few times is experienced with the thug life. Growing up on the West Coast has sheltered me from all the worst that nature has to offer – sure, back in Oregon I had my fair share of rainy marching band practices and from time to time we had to contend with wet dog smell, but a few ruined sneakers aside we generally got by. One time in high school our storm drain clogged and flooded our driveway. That was our Katrina.

Weather in Oregon was atmospheric at best and inconvenient at worst – never something that could kill you. Really, when I look at other regions of the United States, I don’t get why people live anywhere but the West Coast: In the Midwest you’ve got black spinning air vortexes of death, in the Northeast you’ve got blizzards, and in the Gulf Coast you have severe proximity to Florida, not to mention terrible hurricanes.

Most Americans look at their severe weather as a fact of life; I look at it as a not-so-subtle hint that maybe nature doesn’t want you living there. That said, I usually look at most adversity as a covert hint to give up and do something easier, so my opinion probably doesn’t carry a lot of weight here.

Living in Los Angeles, though, has me so starved weather-wise that I’m desperate for any sort of change, in spite of all the times I got soaked in a spontaneous downpour on my way to class in college and swore that when I moved to LA I’d never miss cold and rain again. 

It hasn’t rained here since April. The air I’m breathing is equal parts dust, smog, and spray-on bronzer. The Mystery Wagon is now less a station wagon and more a rolling hunk of dusty grime with questionable gas mileage. I could wash it, sure, but thanks to my Oregon upbringing I have it hardwired into me that your car gets clean when nature damn well wants it to, and that car washes are an affront to nature invented by Californians.

So when I see images of people in New Orleans scurrying indoors as storm clouds gather, I start to miss driving through puddles on my way home from school, scampering inside the house, and eating pot roast while rain hammers against the windows and the wind smashes our neighbors’ wind chimes against the side of her house. Hurricane Isaac has already killed 24 people, making this perhaps my most insensitive nostalgia yet.

There’s something about crappy weather that brings people together like nothing else can. The murderous weather that the rest of the country experiences brings people together in real, tangible ways as they rebuild homes and house refugees; what I’m more familiar with is the way people act when it’s simply kind of nasty outside.

Shitty weather keeps you indoors and more or less forces you closer to the people you’re with – in college, my roommates and I used several severe rainstorms as excuses to get drunk and watch Death Race. (Admittedly, we used a lot of things as excuses to get drunk and watch Death Race.) It’s also a great excuse for laziness – when you spend all day in bed with your laptop when it’s raining, people say you look cozy; when you spend all day in bed with your laptop and it’s nice outside, people say you’re ‘showing signs of depression.’

And before I moved here I never realized how much shitty weather does to improve smalltalk. Let me tell you, when I run into a coworker in the break room at work, I’ve got nothing to say short of asking about their weekend plans – and if you do that too much you turn into the creepy nosy guy (or so I’ve been told). Without weather, the next best thing to make small talk over in LA is traffic, and since I ride my bike to work now I’m up shit creek there, too.

I bet right now a lot of people in the Gulf probably envy LA’s absence of weather as much as I inexplicably envy their presence of weather – but in both cases it’s probably a grass is greener thing. People who grew up with annual hurricanes presumably have some of the same nostalgia for sandbags and boarded up windows that I have for wet dog smell and fashioning crude rain hats out of copies of the Oregon Daily Emerald.

For as exotic as it looks on the news, though, I doubt I’d last very long in New Orleans right about now. I lose my enthusiasm for rain pretty quickly once my feet get wet, and all the shrimp in the world won’t make Shep Smith’s fake tan any less terrifying.

Truman Capps is going to delete this update with extreme prejudice if the levees break.

Akin

I'm reasonably sure he thinks this is an integral part of human reproduction.

When I read about what yet another in a long line of inbred criminally stupid fuckwits from the great state of Missouri said last week, I was reminded of a quote from Louis CK. Admittedly, virtually everything reminds me of a quote from Louis CK, but here’s the quote anyway so we can get on with this thing:

”They definitely gave the pussy to the right sex. Because women take care of things…. If guys had vaginas, they would be so gross! You’d always find things in there, like dice and stuff, and little salt packets from McDonalds… Receipts from a gas station three months ago…"

Keep that quote in mind when you read the comment that landed Todd Akin in hot water:

“If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

For the same reason men would make terrible vagina owners, they make terrible legislators on vagina-related issues, because most of us have no idea how anything down there works.

Ways to shut that whole thing down – Akin is talking about a woman’s private parts like they’re a partially classified failsafe measure in a nuclear power plant, not something you can figure out if you spend a couple of minutes with a junior high health class textbook. Keep in mind, this guy is married to a woman, and he made use of her “female body” to produce two children, who are also female.

His house is 75% women. He is beset on all sides by female genitalia – a veritable rogues’ gallery of cervixes, uterine walls, ovaries, and up to three feet of fallopian tubes. You’d think he would’ve picked up some level of comfort or familiarity with female reproductive health simply by fucking osmosis, if nothing else.

By no means am I trying to position myself as the end-all, be-all authority on lady parts – I’m no gynecologist, nor do I play one on TV. However, I’ve got a pretty solid understanding of how a pregnancy works, and enough common sense to figure that an egg doesn’t discriminate between consensual or nonconsensual sperm and decide to become fertilized or not as a result.

Above all, though, I’ve got enough common sense not to try to legislate something that I don’t know anything about, which would put me at odds with a big chunk of the Republican Party.

In 1988, Stephen Freind, a Republican member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, claimed that being raped causes women to, “…secrete a certain secretion” that kills sperm, making the odds of a pregnancy from rape, “one in millions and millions and millions.” In 1995, North Carolina State Representative Henry Aldridge said, “The facts show that women who are raped – who are truly raped – the juices don’t flow, the bodily functions don’t work and they don’t get pregnant. Medical authorities agree this is a rarity, if ever.”

These opinions suggest that there’s a contingent of old Republican men who truly believe that women have some sort of mysterious, preternatural, Bene Gesserit-style control of their entire bodies in ways that have yet to be fully explained by science.

And if that’s the case, I don’t get why Republicans seem to be hell bent on marginalizing and denigrating these magical creatures whose vaginas have built in defense mechanisms. If Republican assumptions about the various abilities of the female body are true, we probably shouldn’t be pissing them off – for all we know they could have telepathy and pyrokinesis hidden in there too.

While women’s ability to automatically lock down their reproductive organs at the first sign of attack hasn’t been proven (it’s actually the opposite!), they do have a very well documented ability to vote, and recently they’ve been using it against the Republicans in greater and greater numbers.

As much as I’m enjoying the fact that the Republican Party seems to have forgotten that people have to like you in order to win an election, I’m kind of dismayed that this is what political discourse in our country has come to. Like most young people who’ve skimmed the first page of an opinion feature from The Atlantic, I agree that the two party system isn’t doing America any favors, but right now we don’t even have two parties – we’ve got one, and it’s the Democrats.

The Republicans are now less a party and more of a general, spiteful, gleefully ignorant ideology which, thanks to the Tea Party, has picked up all manner of bottom feeding crazies like a Swiffer broom picks up dust bunnies and pubic hair off a hardwood floor. Hell, sometimes I wonder if the Democrats only look like they’ve got their shit together because their competition is such a disaster that FEMA needs to start handing out blankets and bottled water.

What I’d really like was if I could disagree with the Republican Party purely on economic and foreign policy issues, and if they’d articulate themselves on those issues in such a way that I wouldn’t disagree with them by yelling at the TV and throttling an imaginary GOP Congressman. Sure, Barry Goldwater probably would’ve started a nuclear war, but at least he would’ve started it for purely secular reasons – and while I wouldn’t agree with that decision, I could at least respect it.

The obvious benefit to Akin’s comments is that he’s easily derailed Republican efforts to retake the Senate, and given the Obama campaign yet another boost on top of the Romney campaign’s nonstop gaffe parade. Better yet, as the bulk of the Republican establishment distance themselves from his statement (even though they pretty much agree with it), a number of Republicans have come out in support of him, led by Mike ‘August 1^st is Chick-Fil-A Day’ Huckabee.

In an email today, Huckabee talked about the support he’s rallying behind Akin. “There is a vast, but mostly quiet army of people who have an innate sense of fairness and don't like to see a fellow political pilgrim bullied…” I don’t know what ‘fairness’ has to do with an ignorant old man using pseudoscience to trivialize rape, but that’s neither here nor there.

What I want more than anything is for this vast, quiet army to come forward and make themselves known so that the women of America can lay waste to them with their supernaturally powered vaginas – or simply vote them right the fuck out of office. Either one is good.

Truman Capps has made a marked departure from reading smutty literature into his webcam.

Logistical Issues

I've had one hell of a time getting my hands on a copy of 50 Shades of Grey. Hopefully I'll have the video online tomorrow evening.

The Sushi Closet

This amount of sushi costs more than my car. 

On a scale of ‘Not flaky’ to ‘The flakiest’, people in LA tend to fall more on the croissant and pie crust side. I’m not saying that everyone in LA is a flake – hell, I’m not even saying that the flakes are bad people – but only in LA have I spent an entire hour alone in a bar waiting for someone to show up, or been stuck in traffic on my way to meet someone when they text me and cancel our plans a full 15 minutes before we were supposed to get together. That’s just how it is – a lot of people here are like the crust on Hot Pockets. They’re like Kellogg’s cereal. They were made with a lot of grated butter mixed with flour. Do you get it? Do you get the jokes?  

There is one thing I’ve found, though, that no young LA professional will flake out on. It’s an expensive, sometimes pungent substance, oftentimes green in color, and it’s thoroughly ingrained in the culture of Southern California. Yes, that’s right – I’m talking about sushi.*

*This double entendre would probably work better if sushi wasn’t in the title of the update.

People in LA will be habitually late and crap out on plans at the drop of a hat unless your plans involve the consumption of sushi, in which case you can count on your companion being well ahead of schedule and dressed to the nines, eagerly rubbing his or her chopsticks together in anticipation and muttering the names of the various rolls on the menu with the manic intensity of a bit player on The Wire.

At work, for example, we have this thing called Sushi Friday, where everybody goes out and gets sushi on Friday. But this isn’t just some halfassed tradition – it’s basically law. Friday is the day that we eat sushi, and it’s so heavily ingrained in company culture that people actually strategize and discuss their hour lunch break up to three days in advance.

One time, everybody was jonesing so hard for sushi that we did Sushi Friday on a Wednesday. And then we did it again on Friday. I’m pretty sure this is exactly what LA ad agencies were like in the 1980s, only it was cocaine.

Honestly, though, I really don’t get what all the fuss is about.

To be clear, this isn’t like Dubstep, where I both don’t get what all the fuss is about and also view it as a cancer upon our society that needs to be wiped out in order for humanity to progress. I enjoy sushi – I think it’s tasty. One of my friends is having a birthday party at a sushi place tomorrow and I’m really excited to go eat some sushi and have a good time. I’ve got no problem whatsoever with sushi or the consumption thereof.

That said, maybe I’m missing something, because I really can’t understand why people are so fanatical about it. I mean, people are militant about sushi. I know minimum wage earners who won’t bat an eye at dropping $20 on a sushi lunch. People here talk about sushi the way Paul Ryan talks about Ayn Rand, or the way I talk about boobs: With immeasurable, almost creepy enthusiasm.

I always feel sort of behind the curve when I go get sushi with the office guys, because sushi consumption has about as complex a preparation ritual as heroin injection* – right away everybody is pouring soy sauce into their personalized dish and mixing in wasabi and rubbing themselves down with hot towels like on an airplane, and I’m still trying to figure out how to use chopsticks.**

*I only know that from the scene in Pulp Fiction, Mom.

**Look, with all due respect to Japan and sushi, forks are far better eating tools than chopsticks. You don’t see me using a VCR just because I want to watch Swingers. Whatever. Not the point.

I don’t know – is there something I’m missing? Quality of sushi certainly isn’t an issue; we routinely partake in some of the finest sushi that Burbank has to offer, and again, it’s certainly tasty, but it’s not something that I fantasize about in my spare time.

On the other hand, I don’t get why people aren’t as obsessed with Indian food as I am – particularly the ubiquitous $8 all you can eat Indian lunch buffet, which is 100% guaranteed to have you in a food coma before you’re even back to the office. All the elements of a true American culinary phenomenon are there: A low price (way lower than sushi!), an unlimited amount of food (way more unlimited than sushi!), a buffet (I’ve never heard of a sushi buffet, which is probably a good thing)… I guess the only stumbling block is that there’s no beef, but lamb is a kickass replacement – it’s The Other Red Meat. 

Every time I try to pitch Masala Mondays, or Tandoori Thursdays, or The Five Day Saag Paneer-aganza, though, it gets shot down – India, for its 1.2 billion people and its colorful, goofy film industry, just can’t seem to get a leg up on Japan.

Maybe it’s just differing tastes – or maybe there’s something wrong with me. Much like sushi, I like The Beatles, but I’m not fanatical about them the way everyone else is,* nor is everyone fanatical about Pink Floyd the way I am. I like Star Wars, but not as much as Battlestar Galactica; the rest of the world feels differently. And as long as we’re making confessions, I wasn’t crazy about Inception, either.

*That said, I totally get the fanaticism surrounding The Beatles.

I go to great lengths to not be perceived as a hipster, so having these feelings inside of me is kind of difficult – I don’t want to suddenly look like I’m too cool for the current hip food in America. So I remain in the sushi closet – save for the part where I just posted about it in great detail on the Internet – and cross my fingers that either I’ll start loving sushi, my coworkers will start loving Indian food, or sushi places will at least start putting forks out on the table so I can quit fiddling around with those fucking chopsticks.

Truman Capps totally loves Forrest Gump, though.

50 Shades Of White

Above: A white person.

1)   I’m from Oregon.

2)   I drive a Subaru station wagon.  

3)   When I was 16 and my grandmother asked me what my dream car was, my immediate response was, “Whatever has the best gas mileage.” 

4)   In high school, I was elected student treasurer of the band program. 

5)   I put this on my resume for years afterward. 

6)   I have consumed at least a dozen cans of peach flavored Fresca in my life. 

7)   I keep two bags of trail mix in the center console of The Mystery Wagon at all times, just in case the car breaks down and I need a snack while I wait for the tow truck. 

8)   I bought a pair of Ray Ban Wayfarers. When they were stolen, I bought a pair of $10 knockoff Wayfarers at Venice Beach. For Christmas, my parents got me a replacement pair of Ray Ban Wayfarers. I will only allow my eyes to be shaded by vaguely square-shaped lenses. 

9)   Not only do I wear a helmet when I ride my bike, but I also signal all my turns with my left arm – straight out to my side for left turns, cocked 90 degrees upward at the elbow for right turns. (I seem to be the only person in Los Angeles who does this, so I imagine drivers think I’m either trying to gain lift and take off or do a really clumsy sig heil.) 

10) I sometimes eat Clif bars for breakfast. 

11) Whenever I talk about how much I love Ghostbusters, I feel obligated to mention what a shame it is that Winston never gets to do anything, just so I don’t seem racist. 

12) I once saw Chicago live in concert. 

13) When in a situation where I’m being forced to dance, my go-to move is to put my hands in my pockets and sway awkwardly back and forth while looking for an escape route and trying desperately to think of an excuse to leave. 

14)  In college, I once got sent out to the store to pick up some soda to use as a mixer. Indignant at being the soda bitch, I found a 24 pack of Tab and brought it back out of spite. I tried a can out of curiosity and then drank Tab quite regularly for the next several months. 

15)  I always use my turn signal. 

16)  Back when I was trying to swim for exercise, I bought a waterproof shirt because it was an outdoor pool and I was scared I’d get skin cancer spending that much time in the sun.

17)  It pisses me off when people refer to themselves as ‘McGuyvering’ something, because any idiot knows that his name was spelled ‘MacGyver’. 

18)  I watched MacGyver regularly.

19)  In elementary school I was an avid Frasier fan even though I usually didn’t understand what was going on – I just liked the way everyone talked. 

20)  I own a pair of cargo shorts. 

21)  I wear slippers around my apartment, and I take them with me whenever I go somewhere for more than 24 hours.  

22)  The custodian at our office is a black guy who shows up around 6:00 every day – so at 5:45 I start trying to think of stuff for us to banter about when he shows up so I don’t seem awkward and silent and come off as racist. 

23)   I eat HealthyChoice frozen dinners because they’ve got less sodium than the competition. 

24)  When someone offers me a dessert, my immediate response is always, “Oh, God, I shouldn’t.” 

25)  After saying, “Oh, God, I shouldn’t,” I invariably go ahead and eat whatever they were offering me. 

26)  Whenever someone asks if they can have some of my fries, my immediate response is always, “By all means! Save me from myself.” 

27)  I admire Snoop Dogg’s freewheeling, devil-may-care attitude, but I don’t listen to any of his music. 

28)  People have assumed I was Jewish for months at a time. 

29)   Hair. 

30)   Whenever someone refers to the Ewoks attacking the Stormtroopers on Endor, I always point out that that battle actually took place on Endor’s forest moon. 

31)  I wore a silver Timex wristwatch all through college. 

32)  Whenever I see that somebody has gum, I always immediately ask if I can have some. 

33)  Whenever I throw away a junk mail credit card offer or an old bank statement I always meticulously tear it up into dozens of small pieces and throw it out in two separate garbage cans, which I empty at different times, because identity thieves are desperate to get their hands on my information. 

34)  I never hit the back of the ketchup bottle, but instead tap on the neck, because when I was a kid somebody told me one time that that was a more effective way to get the ketchup to come out and I immediately convinced myself it was true. 

35)  I cry at the end of Terminator 2. 

36)  I saw Baby Mama in theaters. 

37)  When I was a senior in high school, I went to an informational interview with a professor at the University of Oregon wearing a polo shirt tucked into a pair of khaki slacks with brown loafers and argyle socks. 

38)  I like Steely Dan. 

39)  I dated a vegan for seven months and frequently said things like, “I don’t know why Obama hasn’t cracked down on factory farming,” or “These vegan cupcakes are delicious!” in order to get laid. 

40)  I own a pair of padded, fingerless bicycle gloves. 

41)  When someone asks me if I’ve heard of a rapper I always say, “Yeah, I think so,” and I’m always lying, because I’ve never heard of any rappers. 

42)  When it rains, I’m the first one to say, “Hey, look on the bright side – it’s like a free car wash!” 

43)   I read The New Yorker, and I leave them conspicuously lying around my apartment so visitors will know that I read The New Yorker. 

44)  I get irritable if I’m without Internet access for more than 45 seconds. 

45)  I’m on Reddit. 

46)  If I swear and then notice that a child is anywhere nearby, I immediately want to apologize profusely and start a college fund for him. 

47)  I dedicate a significant portion of my day to feeling guilty about not reading more. Never has it occurred to me to use this time to read. 

48)  On more than one occasion I have gone to the grocery store specifically to buy a wedge of brie to eat all by myself. 

49)  I laugh at Aflac commercials. Especially this one. 

50)  I have a blog.

As Seen On TV

Everybody knows my name at Chipotle, I guess...

Sometimes I sit and fantasize about how normal and well adjusted I’d be if not for TV. I mean, just imagine if I’d been one of those weird kids whose parents didn’t even have a TV, and all I ever did was read books, frolic in the trees, and churn butter or whatever the hell people without TV do when the rest of us were watching Wheel Of Fortune.

For one, this blog would probably just be about interesting wildflowers I’d picked recently and recaps of heated games of pinochle with my parents. Also, I’d probably be a lot happier.

For the past few weeks I’ve been going back and forth over whether my move to North Hollywood was a good idea or not. Regular readers will remember that I wrote a fairly extensive blog shortly after signing the lease in which I explained my hesitance regarding the San Fernando Valley and the distance the move would put between me and my friends, but ultimately decided that it made sense because it would put me closer to my job.

I’m not good at many things, but I’m great at doing something and then convincing myself afterward that I made the best possible decision. In 6^th grade I asked for and received a Nintendo Gamecube for Christmas, and it immediately proved to be by far the worst of the video game systems available at the time. I, however, became a fully fledged Nintendo fanboy, spending hours on the school bus and the Internet desperately and futilely defending the Gamecube as the greatest game system ever.

Of course, it wasn’t, but it was far easier for me to lie to myself and tell me I was happy than it was to confront the ugly truth that I had squandered my one big ticket gift of the year on a purple box that came with Universal Studios Theme Parks Adventure as a launch title.

North Hollywood is nowhere near as big of a blunder as my Gamecube – I can ride my bike to work instead of driving 20 miles each way and paying over $4 a gallon for gas, whereas all the Gamecube ever did for me was give me an opportunity to play Crazy Taxi without having to go to a movie theater arcade – but when I’m not on my bike I find myself counting the months until my lease is up.

The fact is, while I can ride my bike to work, I have to spend half an hour in the car to go see most of my friends, and that sucks like nine different kinds of dick. Getting caught in traffic on the 405 and being late to the office means I miss out on some work; when I’m late to hang out with my friends, I’m missing valuable 20something shenanigans, and unlike work, those won’t be around forever.

I wind up spending a lot of time alone – which was something that I was really excited about pre-move, but I guess I’m not as antisocial as I’d thought. For all the frustrations of roommates – and trust me, I have not forgotten about them – there’s still nothing quite like coming home on a Wednesday to discover your roommates getting drunk on the back porch because they’re bored and then immediately joining them.

So I guess my big gripes are that I have to drive to see my friends, I’m only really social on the weekends, and most of my weeknight evenings are me in bed getting straight up crazy with some Netflix.

I’ve got great financial security, zero debt, my apartment complex is very well managed, and I’m white, so the only way I’m getting arrested is if I actually do something wrong. I’m currently better off than a sizable number of people my age – or people in general – but I’m miserable because I’m slightly bored.

Why is that?

Television. That’s why.

Never in my life have I been more like a character on the sitcoms I grew up watching. I’m a young guy in the big city with a little disposable income in his pocket at long last – according to Cheers and Seinfeld, I ought to be spending every spare moment in either a bar or a coffee shop with my best friends, having witty banter and generating sexual tension. Sure, Frasier eventually moved far away from all his friends, but his condo was always full of eccentric people doing crazy things and having even more sexual tension.

Of course, I know these shows are all bullshit – nobody really spends all their time having a ball with their conveniently located friends, making great memories and occasionally learning lessons about stuff. But for most of my formative years, those shows were my sole impression of what young, single adulthood was, and it’s tough to undo that damage.

So if I’d grown up without TV, I’d probably be a lot happier right now (nevermind the fact that TV was the only reason I moved to LA in the first place). I’d be content to play solitaire and see my friends on the weekends, and just accept the leisurely pace that life was doling out.

But because TV ingrained in me an impossible standard for my social life, I’m not satisfied, and I’m doing my damndest to improve it. For the past week now I’ve been fighting past the social anxiety that has been a hallmark of this blog and actively making plans with people to get out and do things, every night. I went to three different bars with work friends on weeknights and spent Christ knows how much on non-well drinks, just like a grown up on TV. 

The Gamecube was a bad choice, and I covered for it by lying to myself. North Hollywood was a questionable choice, and I guess I’m going to cover for it by trying to turn it into an outright good one. Sure, I may not be able to spend every night in a bar having witty banter and sexual tension, but even three nights a week with some halfway decent banter would be a vast improvement over where I am now. And sexual tension with anyone would be welcome – right now I’ve only got sexual tension with myself, and that never lasts too long because I’m kind of a slut.

Truman Capps wasn’t really into Metroid, hence his tepid memories of the Gamecube.

The Dark Knight Rises Is A Shitty Movie

Yes, of course there are spoilers. Don't read this if you don't want to read spoilers. 

[Thumbs down, accompanied by a farting noise.]

Twice in my life I’ve seen a movie in theaters that was so bad that it actually made me physically angry – and in both cases, the movie starred Christian Bale. The first time was in the spring of 2009, the movie was Terminator Salvation, and I walked through the parking lot shaking my fist and yelling at the sky, cursing McG for making such a shitty movie, and also cursing myself, in a way, for being duped into thinking that a competent science fiction movie could be directed by a person calling himself McG.

The second time was on Friday night, when, as the credits for The Dark Knight Rises began to roll and the audience in the IMAX theater began to clap, I slowly rose to my feet and extended both hands toward the screen, middle fingers aloft, as Christopher Nolan’s name appeared.

So yes – this is not false advertising. The Dark Knight Rises is truly, earnestly shitty, and the worst thing about it is that I got fooled. I went into it with high expectations; not for a movie that would top The Dark Knight necessarily, because that’s an impossible act to follow, but at least for a competent, enjoyable film that would put an end to the story that Christopher Nolan started.

What I got instead was the approximate equivalent of the stories I made up when I was playing with my Legos and action figures as a child. Seriously, I’m pretty sure the screenplay was just a transcript of his stream of consciousness as he ran around his house with a bunch of green army men and Batman toys from the late 90s:

”So then the cops are running at Bane’s guys and Bane’s guys are going to shoot them but then the Batmobile flies down because the Batmobile flies now and it does something and Bane’s evil Batmobiles can’t shoot the cops and then they fight and then they’re on motorcycles with bankers tied to them and then Batman shows up on his motorcycle and then EVERY COP IN GOTHAM CITY is chasing him and then he shoots a conveniently placed trailer and jumps it and then drives away and then they chase him but then he gets in the flying Batmobile! Who’s writing this down!?”

I guess that same argument could be made about any Batman movie, though – you need to suspend your disbelief to a point if you’re going to take a movie seriously where the badass hero wears a bat costume and talks like he’s doing the world’s worst Gob Bluth impression.

When I watched The Avengers, I gladly accepted that the US government had a top secret flying aircraft carrier captained by Jules Winnfield and Robin Scherbatsky, because all of it still made sense and hung together with a bare minimum of plot holes. What’s wrong with The Dark Knight Rises is that where most movies want us to suspend disbelief, it asks us to suspend our common sense. 

WTF GCPD?

Okay, here’s the situation:

The police are engaged in a pitched shootout with a bunch of criminals who they believe kidnapped a sitting Congressman. The kidnappers escape into the sewers and Commissioner Gordon jumps in after them to give chase, along with several other cops.

There’s a massive explosion, several cops die, and Gordon eventually washes out of a storm drain, wounded. He tells his subordinates that there’s an army of criminals building some terrible structure in the labyrinth of tunnels under the city, and their response is to… Dismiss what he’s saying as the ramblings of a madman.

Why the shit wouldn’t you listen to him, you stupid motherfuckers!? Sure, maybe what he’s saying sounds unbelievable, but if you don’t believe his story about an army of bad guys under the city, how do you explain the explosion, the dead cops, and the fact that he came out of a storm drain with a bullet in his leg?

I mean, is it really that far-fetched to assume that there’s a criminal enterprise beneath the city? These are the same cops who eight years ago were chasing a psychopath clown who robbed banks with school buses and dangled dead Batmans off skyscrapers, and the idea of evildoers in the sewers is just too crazy for them to get their heads around?

And even if it is too crazy, Gordon is their fucking boss! It doesn’t matter how crazy his orders sound – he’s in charge, so when he tells you that the sewers are full of bad guys and you need to go down there and catch them, you fucking do it! Why the hell does Gotham’s top cop have to lie in a hospital bed and repeatedly nag the people whose paychecks he signs to go and look for the people who kidnapped a Congressman and killed a bunch of cops!?

WTF GCPD 2

Okay, but eventually the police decide that, yeah, maybe it would be a good idea to take a look in the sewers and see if Gordon’s theory makes any sense – naturally, though, they only decide to do this once Bane’s plan in is in action.

So, to check the sewers, they send every cop in Gotham City marching into the dark and uncharted labyrinth of tunnels under the city with some Maglites to see what’s going on. No real semblance of strategy here, either – they literally form a parade block of cops and just send them into the abyss, the logic being that if they throw enough policemen at the problem it will eventually go away.

Does any part of that not seem like a stupid idea? Sending every fucking cop you have into the abyss in search of a criminal mastermind who’s had the lay of the land down there for God knows how long?

Nevermind the fact that you’re essentially providing zero law enforcement for the 12 million people above ground – ”Well I’m very sorry your toddler was kidnapped, ma’am, but you’ll just have to hold your horses until every cop in Gotham City is done spelunking in the sewers!” – but you’re also putting every last one of your eggs in one basket, which anybody who’s played as much as one game of Risk or Starcraft will tell you is profoundly fucking stupid.

Okay, but you know what? I’m being too hard on it. It’s a movie, after all. I’ll buy that circumstances were bad enough to pull every cop off the beat and send him down there, and I’ll buy that they wagered they were making a serious calculated risk.

What I won’t buy is that the Gotham City Police Department got tricked IN THIS EXACT SAME FUCKING WAY by agents of THE SAME DAMN ORGANIZATION less than ten years ago!

Batman Begins, act III. There’s serious riots in The Narrows, the mid-city island that’s home to Arkham Asylum, and in response the entire GCPD is mobilized and sent to the island. Then, the League of Shadows promptly destroys all the bridges into and out of The Narrows, trapping every cop in Gotham while the rest of the city completely goes to shit.

Sound familiar?

Fool Gotham City Police Department once, shame on you. Fool Gotham City Police Department twice, shame on Gotham City Police Department – and also Christopher Nolan, for writing a shitty fucking trash screenplay.

Bane Capital

Look, first and foremost, Bane’s plan to isolate and then destroy Gotham was positively ludicrous and relied on countless strokes of inconceivable luck to succeed, and it’s just really tough to buy that when one of the major aims of the Nolan trilogy has been to try and stay pretty realistic.

Yeah, a lot of The Joker’s activities were similarly luck-based, but I bought it with him because, by his own admission, he doesn’t really make plans, and instead just kind of trolls everybody and treats the resulting chaos like it was the plan all along. Bane, on the other hand, has invested years of his life and untold millions into a plan that hinges on the barricades at the stock exchange rising to a 45 degree angle perfect for motorcycle jumping, the police only investigating the tunnels when he’s in the stadium to blow them up, the US Army not staging a lightning offensive to retake the nation’s largest city, Batman not immediately dying when he breaks his back, and so on and so forth.

But, you know what? Fuck it. I’d buy that – grudgingly – but even if I did, the film’s incredibly lazy screenwriters still rigged his plan with the end-all be-all of weaknesses: The fact that he not only imprisons the police beneath the city, but that he then proceeds to go to great lengths to provide them with food, water, and supplies to make sure the only well armed and organized resistance to his regime is in tip top condition when Batman shows up to break them out.

It was a massive screenwriting cop-out to send all the police down into the sewers in the first place, because it was not only an obviously stupid move but also an obviously stupid move that they’d made before. To then have Bane – the guy so psychotic and evil that he got kicked out of the League of Shadows – merely trap the cops under the city instead of killing them and then provide them with a better standard of care than most American prison inmates, all glossed over as part of his general ‘give people hope then blow them up’ plan, is the biggest screenwriting cop out I’ve ever seen this side of the shitty unproduced scripts I was reading at my internship.

I mean, Batman didn’t even have to come save the cops from the tunnels – they could’ve just crawled out through the gigantic PLOT HOLES! What’s up?

Epilogue

How would I have done it differently? Well, to start, I would’ve had Heath Ledger not die. Step one, right there.

What, I don’t get time traveling omnipotence? Okay. Well, how about this:

I’d have Bane isolate Gotham City within the first half hour of the movie – no pussyfooting around with the stock exchange and Wayne Enterprises or whatever. His plans have been in motion for years, the city was complacent, and Batman was too busy being emo over Rachel and Harvey Dent to notice.

The rest of the movie takes place during the occupation as Bruce Wayne grapples with the decision to become Batman again and fight back with significantly limited resources. The cops would be rounded up and killed in some other way, leaving the rest as a French Resistance style guerilla army led by Commissioner Gordon, but in the end it isn’t just the police who revolt against Bane – it’s ordinary people, civilians. The entire city rises to defeat him, and watching this, Batman sees that now the city truly no longer needs him, because they can do right on their own.

That’s the script I’d write, and I could probably shave half an hour off the runtime, too.

But in all truthfulness, Nolan probably just shouldn’t have made another Batman movie. The Dark Knight was the best superhero movie ever made, and Heath Ledger’s Joker was the best villain ever. That movie had levels and philosophy going on – it was about escalation, the War on Terrorism, the nature of insanity, lawful society versus anarchy, the inherent goodness of mankind, or the lack thereof.

This movie tried really hard to be about hope, and there were some competent scenes tying into that theme, but it got bogged down with flying Batmobiles, three Tumblers, the unnecessary presence of Catwoman and Robin*, and the Wayne’s World style surprise mega-happy ending where all semblance of heroic sacrifice is set on fire and kicked into a ravine.

*By the way, you guys know that you have to take a series of exams and meet several qualifications to become a police detective, right? You can’t just get promoted to detective on the spot because you’re a ‘hothead’. This movie was so stupid I wanted to throw it over my knee and spank it.

Several of my friends have told me that they were similarly disappointed after they watched the movie the first time, but insist that I should go see it again, because apparently a second viewing clears up a lot of the issues. To them, I say this:

Fuck off! If I’ve got three hours to kill and $15 burning a hole in my pocket, I’m sure as shit not going to go see a movie I hated for a second time! Repeat viewings won’t make up for a Swiss cheese plot and dialogue lifted straight from FanFiction.net, and I definitely don’t want to put more money in Christopher Nolan’s pocket for halfassing a movie.

So fuck Christopher Nolan, fuck his brother and co-screenwriter Jonathan Nolan, fuck Christian Bale for being in both this and Terminator Salvation, fuck Batman’s gravelly voice, and fuck this festering turd of a movie. Screw Flanders.

That being said, I give the movie high marks for Marion Cotillard in a tight sweater.

Truman Capps apologizes for saying ‘fuck’ so much.

The Bike Commuter

I'm not quite eccentric enough to try this yet. But when I am, there will be pictures.

I have a little morning routine that I’ve gotten into since moving to North Hollywood. The alarm on my phone goes off at 7:30, waking me up way earlier than I want to be up and causing me to violently jerk forward in fright before getting my bearings and realizing that, no, it’s not the end of the world: It’s just my phone telling me that I have to stop sleeping. For me, this is only barely preferable to the apocalypse.

I roll over and silence my phone, and then usually spend ten wistful seconds trying to figure out a way that I can keep sleeping. This is my asshole brain giving me shitty, self-destructive ideas as revenge for staying up late watching Frasier and thereby short changing it on a full eight hours of sleep:

“You could call in sick and then keep sleeping. Tell them you have sleeping sickness. You wouldn’t even be lying, necessarily.”

“You could quit and keep sleeping. C’mon, what’ve you got to lose? It can’t be that hard to find an equally creative, fun, and financially lucrative job that also only requires you to be at the office from noon until 3:30 like three days a week. Go back to sleep.”

“You could give a homeless guy a wig and $20 and have him go sit in your cubicle and then you could keep sleeping. Dude, nobody would notice the difference. Trust me, I’m your brain.”

I can usually get my brain to shut up about screwing my career in favor of sleep by the time I’m in the shower, but then it starts in on its campaign to make me fat:  

“Hey, Truman, brain here. You probably shouldn’t ride your bike to work today.”

“Why’s that, brain?”

“Well, you’re pretty sleepy, so…”

“How many people die every year from riding bikes when they’re sleepy?”

“You know I don’t know that. We looked it up on Wikipedia together last week because we were worried about it, and there wasn’t an article on it.”

“So I’m riding my bike to work, then.”

“But wait! It’s going to be pretty hot today.”

“Really? How hot?”

“Well, I don’t know. We haven’t looked at the weather report. But it’s summer in the Valley, so probably pretty hot. You want to get heatstroke, bro? Make the smart choice. Take The Mystery Wagon. Your electrolytes and shit will thank you later.”

“I’m riding my bike, brain.”

“…I hate you. I’m going to worry about having cancer all day!”

The whole reason I moved to North Hollywood was to be closer to work, and one of the benefits of my apartment is that it’s maybe half a mile from a beautifully maintained bike trail which runs pretty much the entire distance to my office, four and a half miles away.

It’s a real testament to my brain’s contempt for me that every morning it tries to talk me out of biking to work – it’s a great ride, it’s eco friendly, biking is pretty much the only sort of physical activity I enjoy (besides walking to Chipotle), and a nine mile round trip bike ride every day goes a long way toward working off the Chipotle that I walk to get at lunch every day. There is honestly no reason in the world for me to not bike to work every day, but that hasn’t stopped my brain from trying to find one every morning due to some hardwired, classically American desire to commute to work in a seated position with air conditioning while listening to the Drive soundtrack on my car stereo.  

Of course, I’m still commuting to work in Los Angeles, so naturally the trip isn’t without its stressors, even on a bike. The big difference is that while most commuters are dealing with traffic, freeway snipers, and the profound incompetence shared by all California drivers, I have to deal with California cyclists and pedestrians, who are the same sort of stupid, but just in a slower, more eco friendly way.

The bike path I ride is great because it’s very well partitioned – on the right is a pedestrian only lane, while the left side of the path is divided into two little lanes for bikes, complete with a dashed yellow line down the middle and arrows in each line pointing out which way traffic should be going.

Some serious tax dollars went into making this path a streamlined and efficient commuter experience, and California cyclists and pedestrians just shit all over it every morning. I have to navigate around trios of soccer moms powerwalking three abreast with strollers and blocking all the lanes, or oncoming cyclists stubbornly riding in the oncoming lane and looking at me like I’m crazy.

This is especially frustrating because in The Mystery Wagon I’ve got a nice loud horn I can honk at assholes, but on the bike all I have is a bell that makes a really cheerful ‘ping!’ noise that doesn’t do a lot to convey anger or indignation. I suppose I could just yell nasty things at people, but not only would that make me an asshole, it’d also put me at risk of being chased down and beaten up by people with faster bikes than mine.

In all honesty, so far I’m pretty underwhelmed with my decision to live in the San Fernando Valley – which is a whole ‘nother update in itself – but the ability to ride my bike to work every day comes pretty close to making it all worth it. As someone who has an extensive list of both physical and psychological reasons that he won’t go to the gym, getting an hour of cardiovascular exercise* every day has me feeling healthier than I ever have before.

*No, I’m not going to call it “cardio.” I may look like a big time city slicker with my job and my apartment and my Jewish friends, but I come from a small town where people took the time to say “-vascular”, and I intend to stay true to my roots.

But even with all those tangible benefits – eco friendliness, getting in shape, feeling the burn in my legs in the morning, girls in yoga pants jogging in the pedestrian lane, hipster bike cred, “fresh” air day – I still wake up every morning with my brain telling me to drive.

On the outside I may have grown into my baby fat and begrudgingly started exercising in hopes of getting ahead of my metabolism before it starts working against me, but my brain seems to be the same fat, lazy fourth grader it was in the mid 1990s – the one who went into all physical activity flailing and bitching, since kicking and screaming would’ve been too much work.

Truman Capps gets a lot of awesome stares from the Latino day laborers in his neighborhood when he rides around with tufts of hair sticking out from under his helmet.   

Hair Guy EXCLUSIVE: Interview With The Family Of Dick Cheney's Heart Donor

BREAKING

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, in a rare moment of not having a heart attack.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney is no stranger to heart problems – or, put more specifically, it’s a bizarre and alien experience for former Vice President Dick Cheney to not be sweating bullets and struggling to breathe. Six heart attacks isn’t just misfortune – it’s a way of life. For Dick Cheney, heart disease was a passion, but after 346 years of partisan politics, CIA black site administration, and nightly dinners of human souls washed down with orphan tears, his heart had taken all it could, and it was time for a change.

Four months ago, Cheney received a heart transplant where his blackened, General Grevious-style pulmonary artery was removed and trucked to an EPA Superfund dump site somewhere in Nevada, replaced with a healthy donor heart which reportedly began to smolder and blacken the moment it came into contact with the rusted pipes and copper wires that constitute the former vice president’s cardiovascular system.

In his first interview since the transplant, Cheney told ABC’s Jonathan Karl that while various privacy laws prevent him from knowing the identity of the anonymous donor, there are programs to help transplant recipients get in touch with the families of their donors, which Cheney has expressed an interest in.

“At some point I would be amenable to contact with the family,” Cheney said in the interview, conducted over a breakfast of live doves and single malt scotch. “The main thing I’d say is thank you. I can’t think of a more magnificent gift than to be given more years of life.”

In a spectacular coup, the investigative journalism wing here at Hair Guy Media LLC has discovered that the identity of Cheney’s heart donor was a 21-year-old Filipino man named Carlos Mendoza, who at the time of his death was living in San Francisco. We go now live to Manila for an interview with Mendoza’s mother, Pilar, conducted via translator.  

Hair Guy: First of all, thank you, Pilar, for taking the time to meet with us.  Our condolences for your son.   

Pilar Mendoza: Thank you. We were all very upset about Carlos’ death, but sadly we were almost expecting it, what with his lifestyle.

HG: Lifestyle?

PM: He was, how do you say, a bakla. I’m not sure how to put it lightly. What is the word you have in America for a man who has sex with other men?

HG: Your son, whose heart was given to Dick Cheney, was a homosexual?

PM: Oh my, yes. My, my, my, yes. Yes. Very homosexual. We didn’t approve, of course, but Carlos could be very pigheaded when he cared about something. And God forgive him, he truly did care about having sex with men. Frequently. Sometimes in public.

HG: This is something of a shocking revelation, given Mr. Cheney’s political stripe.

PM: Really? I don’t actually know much about the man. I never followed American politics very closely – even after Carlos moved there last year.

HG: Why did Carlos move to San Francisco?

PM: Oh, that was where his boyfriend lived. He was so desperate to be with him that he stowed away on a cargo ship to get to the United States.

HG: So you’re saying that Dick Cheney’s new heart came from a gay Filipino illegal immigrant?

PM: I suppose so, yes.

HG: Was Carlos in the process of applying for a green card, at least?

PM: Heavens, no! He loved receiving free government services financed by hardworking white American taxpayers. He was on welfare, food stamps, MEDICAID… He’d brag to me on the phone about it. “Mama, you would not believe all the great things the stupid Americans are giving me! At this rate I’ll never need to get a job!”

HG: So he actively delighted in taking advantage of the welfare state?

PM: It was ironic, too, because he was so active in the socialist party here in the Philippines. Whenever we weren’t bailing him out of jail for having homosexual intercourse in public, it was because he was always out demonstrating and protesting with fringe socialist groups. I mean, we’ve got universal healthcare here and everything, but even by our standards these guys were left wing nutjobs.

HG: So you’re saying Carlos was a socialist.

PM: Socialist, communist – you name it, he supported it. He actually founded a political party that was devoted entirely to taking away peoples’ guns and convincing unwed Christian mothers to have abortions. He even tried to start a Filipino version of NAMBLA, but it never panned out.

HG: So Carlos was pretty politically active. How did he die? Was it politically motivated?

PM: Not that I know of – it seemed like an innocent accident. The bustier was just too tight.

HG: Excuse us. Bustier?

PM: Oh, I forgot to mention – he was performing in a drag show when he died.

HG: Of course he was.

PM: They were doing a Pirates of the Caribbean theme, and in the end he was supposed to come out like Keira Knightley in this bustier, but the wardrobe people cinched it so tight that it… That his ribcage was… Crushed, and he couldn’t…

HG: It’s alright, Mrs. Mendoza. You don’t have to go on.

PM: I’m sorry. It still hurts. How many more lives have to be lost before drag show wardrobe designers understand that there are limits to how much boosting the male ribcage can withstand?

HG: Thank you for your time, Mrs. Mendoza. So, you heard it here first, folks: Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s new heart came to him by way of a flamboyantly gay socialist illegal immigrant Filipino drag queen who died in a tragic bustier accident while impersonating Keira Knightley. We can only imagine the forthcoming outpouring of gratefulness and compassion from the Cheney family. Before we go, Mrs. Mendoza, is there anything you’d like to add?

PM: I’m sure that Carlos is so happy that this was the outcome of his death. He must be delighted to be inside of one last man.

HG: Yeah, we’re cutting that in post.   

Truman Capps would like to issue a retraction - in the above picture, we have learned that Vice President Cheney was, in fact, having a heart attack. Hair Guy regrets the error. 

Chick-Fil-Gay

"Damn it, Jenkins, I don't care HOW long we run this campaign, it's bound to be funny eventually!"

Why yes, as a matter of fact, I have been boycotting Chick-Fil-A. I’ve been boycotting them since the day I heard that the company opposes gay marriage. In fact, I’m so pissed at their bigotry that I’ve been retroactively boycotting them for like nine months before the announcement. Actually, aside from the one time I went to the newly opened Hollywood Chick-Fil-A in October, I was boycotting them for the 22 years that I lived in Oregon before that. I’m kicking your asses at this fucking boycott. I’m making this boycott my bitch, boy.

It’s pretty easy for me to be a self-righteous liberal in a boycott-happy society because of my frugal nature and distaste for shopping. Sears advertises with Rush Limbaugh? Boomtown – 23-year preemtive boycott. Geico is an ALEC supporter? I’ll continue my unbroken record of not having Geico insurance. The president of Urban Outfitters is a Rick Santorum donor? The only way I could boycott that place harder is by forgetting it exists, and I wish I could. 

If the Mexican take out place a block away from my apartment came out against gay marriage, though, I would weigh my love of equality against my love of convenient access to burritos, and burritos would completely win. Sorry, gay people – if you want my total and unconditional support, I want you on call with refried beans and carnitas.

So Chick-Fil-A COO Dan Cathy is supportive of, “The Biblical definition of the family unit,” which I imagine is a family unit that’s cool with domestic violence, slavery, and almost slitting your son’s throat on a mountaintop because God told you to. That this family unit has no gay people in it goes without saying.

Now, fuck this clown, but you’ve got to admit that it takes guts to say something like that. Not stupidity; guts – Chick-Fil-A is a very well run organization and Dan Cathy clearly possesses a lot of business acumen. As both a business leader and a social conservative I’m sure he’s well aware of the turning tide of corporate support in favor of gay marriage, from the store where I buy jeans to the snack cookie around which I cannot physically control myself.

He sees that popular opinion is turning in favor of gay marriage, and he’s still firmly stating that he’s against it and praying for, “God’s mercy on our generation that has such a prideful, arrogant attitude to think that we have the audacity to define what marriage is about.”

Before I say anything else, can we shut up about redefining marriage? Well into the 1800s marriage was an economic transaction based around property inheritance and ensuring that fathers didn’t have to provide for their useless baby factory daughters anymore, hence arranged marriages, dowries, and various property laws from Victorian England that routinely screwed women out of land that was rightfully theirs (see every Jane Austen novel, ever.) Before that it was about international diplomacy and matching up family members to preserve pure bloodlines. We’ve redefined marriage in the past two hundred years to be strictly about love (or covering for an accidental pregnancy), so I don’t see the harm in redefining it to include Anderson Cooper and Portia de Rossi.

In the face of growing controversy, Cathy has, to borrow a phrase from a competing chicken vendor, doubled down on his rhetoric, boasting on Twitter about how he ‘lit up the LGBT community.’ The boycott has picked up steam, with everybody from The Muppets to Boston attacking Chick-Fil-A and boycotting the chain.

Jonathan Merritt at The Atlantic recently called America out on its boycott-happy nature, and asked if we truly wanted to be a country where we’d refuse to do business with people who we simply don’t agree with. He pointed out that Chick-Fil-A has made generous contributions to many charitable organizations, and that on the customer side they’ll serve you a chicken sandwich no matter how much buttsex you have.

I think I can get along with people I disagree with – my boss is a Republican, and arguably my favorite TV show was written by an ardent reader of National Review.

But I think that right now we’re at a historical turning point in the gay rights movement. There’s a lot of momentum and a lot of publicity, and I think when it comes down to rooting out bigotry, there isn’t a lot of room for compromise. Dan Cathy and, by extension, his restaurant are in violation of principles that are both quintessentially American and quintessentially Christian, and for that we ought to hold his feet to the fire.

That said, we should probably stop short of viewing Chick-Fil-A as the chicken sandwich arm of the Nazi Party or anything. While the man at the top may be kind of a shit, Chick-Fil-A in many other regards espouses the very best of Christianity: Chick-Fil-A donates generously to a foster care program, offers thousands of college scholarships to employees, and distributed free chicken sandwiches to policemen in Aurora, Colorado.

Dan Cathy may or may not make a halfassed apology, but either way the controversy will eventually die down, and Chick-Fil-A will not see a significant loss in sales. What’s important is that we make it understood that this aggression will not stand, man. It must be made clear that opposition to gay rights is as much of a wrong as racism.

Because no matter how strong Cathy’s resolve is, he’s old, and one day he’ll either retire or die. It’s almost a statistical certainty that stewardship of the company will eventually fall to someone who loves God and is also A-OK with gays.

And when that day comes, I might just cease my boycott of Chick-Fil-A. Or, y’know, maybe sooner, if they open one a block away from my apartment. 

Truman Capps gives the South a lot of grief, but he's got an unhealthy love of sweet tea. 

People Killing People

Fuck this clown.

I’m sick of all these people trying to get abortion banned because they say it kills people – if you think that, you’re totally misinformed. Abortion doesn’t kill people; people kill people. Duh. I want to say the same thing to MADD – drunk drivers don’t kill people, people kill people. And we really need to lay off on the Taliban; after all, fundamentalist Islam doesn’t kill people, people kill people.

I can only engage in satire for about a paragraph before it gets too difficult to maintain that level of cleverness, so here’s my point: When you apply the right amount of reductive reasoning to anything you can always steer it into some bullshit territory where you don’t have to confront the ugly truth.

So sack the fuck up, gun owners – if so much of your literature portrays you as stalwart, unflinching defenders of what’s good and true, how about acknowledging the fucking core of your hobby? Guns are tools – labor saving devices – designed to make it easier to kill shit. To try and spin it any other way is fundamentally dishonest.

That said, I’m a Second Amendment supporter, and here are some of my favorite guns:

The .42 LeMat pistol. Designed for Confederate officers during the Civil War, it could fire buckshot and completely demolish a dude at close range. AWESOME.

The .30 Browning Automatic Rifle, or BAR, saw wide use in both World Wars and was the preferred weapon of Bonnie and Clyde.

Standard issue for the United States Colonial Marines in ‘Aliens’. Makes that cool ‘duggaduggaduggadugga’ sound when they fire.

I think guns are awesome, probably because I grew up watching movies and playing video games. I have absolutely no desire to own one myself, because I don’t see the point in owning a gun when crime rates have been in free fall since 1991. I support the Second Amendment because it’s in the Bill of Rights, and because it’d be profoundly conceited on my part to want to deny something to everyone in America just because I don’t see the point in it.

Would limited, strictly controlled access to guns have prevented the terrible thing that happened? Yes, probably – as would limited, strictly controlled access to tear gas grenades, which you can apparently buy legally.*

*What the actual fuck, by the way? I understand the argument for legal ownership of firearms, but why the fuck can people legally buy tear gas grenades? Hunting? Amateur riot control? Is there a National Tear Gas Association? Tear gas hobbyist magazines with sexy girls in bikinis holding tear gas grenades on the cover?

The fact is, trying to champion strict gun control in the wake of a tragedy like this is effectively shutting the barn door after the horse has run out – only the horse ran out in 1789 and has reproduced and seeded the land with millions of other entrenched horses, many of whom are heavily armed.    

Gun control works in England and Japan because they’ve always had it. Americans’ love of gun ownership seems just as alien to them as Branston Pickle and used schoolgirl panty vending machines are to us. America, though, is chock full of guns and gun owners, and that’s how it’s going to be forever. We can go forward and explore a lot of options to prevent these sorts of tragedies, but widespread gun control is about as plausible as having the Federal Bureau of Wizards turn all guns in America into mayonnaise.

I mean, look what happened when the president tried to give Americans easy, cheap access to healthcare – the entire country lost its fucking mind and the GOP went full retard. If that’s how America reacts when you try to give them something good, what happens when you try to take away an American institution that has real, genuine, sentimental value to millions of people, the bulk of whom are rational, law abiding, well intentioned folk?

So gun owners, know that I fully support your right to own pistols, rifles, and shotguns. But for Christ’s sake, let’s renew President Clinton’s Federal Assault Weapons Ban, shall we?

I understand why people buy pistols, rifles, and shotguns – for hunting, or for self defense, or because they’re collectors items. Yes, they’re deadly weapons, but ideally they’re treated with respect and caution by their owners, who have some degree of training with them.

I don’t understand why you’d want to buy an AR-15 assault rifle like James Holmes had. It’s illegal for hunting and impractical and grossly overpowered for self defense. If you’re in such danger that the only way you can defend yourself is with a military grade assault rifle, you might be Scarface – ergo, a criminal, and the last person who I want to have a military grade assault rifle.

Yes, even if the AR-15 were illegal, James Holmes would’ve probably been able to get one, and if not he still would’ve killed one hell of a lot of people with the two handguns and the shotgun he had with him. But I don’t think, “He would’ve gotten one anyway” is a good enough reason to keep letting people buy assault weapons legally. What do we stand to lose by making mass murder a little bit more difficult?

And for the rational, level headed firearm enthusiasts who just want to own an AR-15 for show, maybe this would be a good time for you to be rational and level headed and understand that this is a case of the greater good. Given a choice between being able to mount a military weapon on your wall as a conversation piece and making it harder for somebody to shoot 71 people for the hell of it, which would you choose?

Truman Capps got himself on a lot of gun owners’ shit lists the last time he talked about gun control – let’s see what happens this time around!

365

It almost looks crappier at a distance!

A few weeks ago I’d gone over to a friend’s house in Burbank to get drunk and play Super Smash Brothers, and shortly after I arrived he realized that he was low on hooch. My friend assured me that he’d be back in five minutes and ran out the door to go to Albertson’s, leaving me alone in the kitchen with his quiet and reserved roommate, a guy maybe a year or two older than me, who was eating a Hot Pocket and trying very hard not to make eye contact.

The only thing more awkward than making small talk with a complete stranger is standing two feet away and pretending that they don’t exist, so I started idly chatting with my friend’s roommate, who proved to be somewhat reserved but achingly polite.

After a couple of minutes, I asked the question that inevitably gets asked in every conversation you have in Los Angeles:

“So, are you from LA originally, or…?”

It’s an important question, because virtually nobody in LA was born and raised there. Everybody moves there from somewhere else, and the resulting story of where they moved from and for what reasons is ample fodder for hours upon hours of endless, meaningless small talk.

“Uh, no.” He said, nervously. “I’m from Kentucky.”

“Oh!” I said. “Kentucky! You’ve got the… Derby thing out there, and the… Fried chicken. When did you move out?”

“About five months ago. How about you?”

I did the math in my head, an arduous and painful process. “I moved down from Portland on July 18^th, 2011… So I guess it’s been almost a year. What’d you come out here to do?”

“Acting.”

“Cool. Have you been in anything?”

He laughed sheepishly. “No.”

“Been going on lots of auditions?”

Another nervous laugh. “No.”

“Have you signed up with Central Casting to do background actor work? I hear that’s a pretty good racket.”

“Yeah, I should do that…” He shrugged and smiled. “But I haven’t.”

I sensed that I had somehow discovered awkwarder territory and was diving headlong into it, so I tried to diffuse the tension. “Well, you’re still getting settled – you’ve got to get a job before you do anything else, right?”

He nodded. “Yeah, I should probably start applying to some jobs. I’m just sort of burning through money right now.”

And with that, he finished his Hot Pocket and we bid one another adieu, and two minutes later I was drinking a John Daly and kicking my buddy’s ass all over Hyrule with Link, as is my style.

Up until this conversation, I’d been feeling – without any pretense of fishing for compliments, here – kind of shitty about my time in LA thus far.

I’ve met a bunch of really, really talented people out here who’re roughly my age and trying for the same sort of thing I am, and every last one of them is way more devoted to their craft than I am. My Jewish friend David is, at any given time, working on a spec script, a TV pilot, and a screenplay simultaneously. My friend Patrick will completely isolate himself from his friends, family, and girlfriend to work on a script. Jonathan Denmark lives hand to mouth and spends money he doesn’t have to make elaborate music videos and Dylan is teaching himself Adobe AfterEffects and AVID in his spare time.

And me? After buying my PS3 I beat Uncharted and Uncharted 2 in one week, I liberated Neon Island in InFamous in the space of twelve hours, I’ve got over 5000 comment karma on Reddit, and I’m Facebook friends with two prostitutes.

A lot of people talk a good game about moving to the big city and getting famous, but they never do it – the usual story is something where they get a good job at the horse butthole factory in their hometown, and then when they’re thinking about quitting they get a promotion and a 401k, and then somebody gets pregnant and the whole thing turns into Jack and Diane. I’ve always felt a smug sense of superiority for avoiding that trap, if only because all my Oregon jobs were dead end positions and nobody would even let me try to get them pregnant.

But that same trap exists once you get to LA – it’s a city full of pretty girls who skipped college to come out and become famous actresses and models and instead spend years climbing the ladder at Forever 21 and the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company at Santa Monica Pier, or guys who’ve been idly picking away at the same screenplay for a decade while working the valet booth at The Grove.  

I was afraid – and to a degree I still am – that I’d fallen into that trap as well: My ad agency job gave me financial security to the point that I wound up with more money than I’d had when I left for LA, and the freelance schedule gave me plenty of free time to spend writing, which I instead spent doing virtually everything but.

I guess it’s cold comfort to talk to somebody who’s spent five months in LA doing nothing at all and immediately feel better about myself by virtue of having at least worked a bunch, written some, and accosted Jeffrey Tambour once.

What I’m trying to remind myself is that the work I’ve done has been sometimes more creatively rewarding – and at all times more interesting – than any other work I’ve done in my life. The writing I’ve done has been hands down my best. Jeffrey Tambour was pleasant, if not a bit distant.

I made it a year without going broke and having to move home – I’m sure a lot of you probably lost some bets because of that – so I’m going to call the first year a success overall. I guess the goal for the next year is for my work and my writing to become the same thing, and then do more of it than ever.

But since I’m a big believer in setting realistic goals, I’m going to focus on beating InFamous 2 ASAP. Once I’ve got that under my belt, then maybe I’ll focus on my writing.

Truman Capps can't stress enough how hot the waitresses are at Bubba Gump Shrimp Company. 

Off Limits

Doesn't he look nice? That's your first mistake.

I never quite know how to feel when I see a comedian apologizing for offending someone. My immediate reaction is to think of a plumber apologizing to a toilet for removing the thick mass of shit and toilet paper that jammed it up in the first place. ”I’m so sorry from taking your friend away from you, toilet. You two seemed pretty close.”

To a degree, a comedian’s job* is to be offensive – standup comedy gives you a certain carte blanche to say things that most people never say out loud for fear of offending anybody, which is what makes it both a valid form of entertainment and societal critique (unless the comedian in question is Jeff Dunham, in which case it’s neither).

*I occasionally fantasize about doing standup, thus making me the foremost authority on what a standup comedian’s job is.

This line of reasoning covers comedians like Chris Rock and George Carlin, who use rough language and some pretty shocking statements to make some insightful points about society and human nature that people would otherwise be afraid to discuss in polite company. It sort of falls apart when Kramer goes on a tirade that would make Strom Thurmond blush, or when Daniel Tosh does what he did the other night.

Daniel Tosh is a young shock comic whose bread and butter is being aggressively, confrontationally, unapologetically un-PC. And bless him, he’s pretty good at it – my friends and I listened to his first album while driving to the coast, and we laughed our asses off. Unlike Jeff Dunham, whose puppets are racist just for the sake of cheap punchlines, or Carlos Mencia, whose entire routine is, “Mexicans – am I right, folks?”, Daniel Tosh has something to say, and he just happens to be saying it in the most horrifyingly crude way possible.

True to form, earlier in the week he was performing at The Laugh Factory when he launched into an extensive routine about how hilarious rape is. A girl in the audience found this to be in poor taste and interrupted him to call him out on it, and then this, in her own words, happened:

"After I called out to him, Tosh paused for a moment. Then, he says, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like, 5 guys right now? Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her…” and I, completely stunned and finding it hard to process what was happening but knowing i needed to get out of there, immediately nudged my friend, who was also completely stunned, and we high-tailed it out of there. It was humiliating, of course, especially as the audience guffawed in response to Tosh, their eyes following us as we made our way out of there. I didn’t hear the rest of what he said about me."

Whether you’re a Tosh fan or not, I think we can agree that there’s really no circumstances under which a statement like that is okay. That isn’t a shocking statement that serves a greater introspective purpose – that’s a debilitating verbal attack.

In Tosh’s defense, he was being heckled. That in no way makes what he said okay or acceptable in any light, but you need to keep in mind where he’s coming from – he’s on stage in front of a large crowd of people, under tremendous pressure to perform, and in character as a guy who has absolutely zero filter and no regard for anybody else’s feelings. When somebody attacks him from the crowd, he’s got about a second to formulate and deliver an in-character retort that gets a laugh and shuts the heckler up.  

That’s dangerous territory. The rest of his act was crafted over a period of months by him and maybe some of the writers from Tosh.0 to walk a very fine line between baseless slander and social commentary, but going off script like that he didn’t have the luxury of time to analyze what he was saying, and his mouth ran away from him. I think that if he'd had 15 seconds to think of a response instead of one, he would've said something different. This doesn't exonerate him by any means; I just believe that what he said was the result of shitty improvisation rather than a calculated desire to destroy this woman.

You’re also entering some pretty dangerous territory when you heckle a comedian, though, especially one like Daniel Tosh. I’m uncomfortable writing this, because I feel a lot like I’m blaming the victim, but the fact remains that she kicked a hornet's nest. It doesn’t in any way justify Tosh invoking personalized gang-rape imagery, and she’s completely owed an apology, but you’ve got to understand going into a comedy show that you’re virtually guaranteed to hear some unpleasant things, and that hecklers, to a comedian, are worse than Osama Bin Laden fucking Hitler while Ted Bundy watches. There's no blameless party here. 

As the girl in question states in the blog post, she’s not normally the sort of person to heckle, but she was of the opinion that the rape jokes Tosh was making were so terrible that she couldn’t in good conscience not speak up.

It’s tough to judge just how over the line Tosh was being in his on-script routine without having seen the full act – you can’t accurately gauge a comedian from one anecdote from early in the show taken out of context, because context is absolutely crucial for a comedy routine.

Louis CK isn’t just my favorite comedian; he’s one of my favorite people. As far as I’m concerned, he should be crowned god-emperor of all Earth. If nothing else, he’s the funniest man alive. This is an excerpt from his special Chewed Up:

“You broke my mirror, you faggot cunt nigger deer!”

Out of context, you see something like this and you kind of wonder why Louis CK’s daughters haven’t been taken away by social services. But this moment comes half an hour into his act, after he’s done several bits in which explains in detail why he uses words like those and why he thinks we as a people are too obsessed with the words people are saying as opposed to what they’re actually trying to say. Also, this line comes at the end of a rambling story about how much he hates deer, and is directed at a confused deer that ran headlong into the side of his car and broke his rear view mirror – I’d use colorful language too.

Tosh could’ve been working up to an eloquent – or at least as eloquent as Daniel Tosh allows himself to get – point about which subjects are untouchable for comedy. Immediately following his apology on Twitter, he alleges that that was what the act was going to be about before he got interrupted.

So what this really comes down to is, can a joke about rape be funny?

I can’t confidently answer that question, both because I’m not a comedian and because I have a negligible risk of being raped. I’m about as far removed from the situation as it’s possible for a person to be. I will say that I used to make rape jokes in private situations among close (usually male) friends, the same way people secretly make racist jokes behind closed doors without actually being racists.

Awhile ago I read an article which suggested that rape jokes trivialize and whitewash something that ought not to be trivialized and whitewashed, so I stopped, and for some time I restricted myself only to rape jokes about men raping other men, because I felt that when a woman wasn’t being victimized and it was just some Pulp Fiction style man on man shenanigans it was somehow just goofy fun.

Then Penn State happened, and it became clear that men being raped by men is just as damaging and unfortunately quite prevalent – I mean, male rapists even have their own fancy little country in central Rome, along with an enormous, sophisticated, and well funded support system to protect rapists from scrutiny and discredit and silence victims, headed up by a grand rapist master who used to be a Nazi.

So now I don’t make rape jokes anymore, because that’s not the sort of thing I want to make light of. But I’m hesitant to say that it’s a topic that no comedian should touch.

Turning rape into just a cheap punchline is bad because it normalizes a heinous act – that being said, I think treating rape as an off-limits topic that no comedian can ever touch is kind of like pretending it doesn’t exist, and that isn’t a whole lot better.    

Truman Capps apologizes to those of you who came here to read me talking about TV shows and making jokes about porn like usual.

Seth MacFarlane

The update will eventually be about this. Keep reading.

I’ve never been a huge fan of Family Guy - but, to be fair, we got off on the wrong foot.

You see, back when Family Guy premiered in 1999, I really wanted to see Die Hard 2, but my Mom would only let me watch it if they showed a censored version on TV, because apparently it was too rough for my 11-year-old self. So I waited and waited, desperate to follow up on the continuing adventures of John McClane, until I saw that it was scheduled to air on Fox immediately after Super Bowl XXXIII. I was more excited than any person in the universe has ever been about watching Die Hard 2.

So I sat through the entire long-ass football game that I didn’t care about and, once the Broncos had left the field in victory and the commentators had thanked all the appropriate parties, I giddily readied myself for three hours of prime, early 1990s Bruce Willis.

Much to my dismay, what I got instead was the first ever episode of Family Guy - apparently shoehorned into the schedule at the last minute after TV Guide had gone to print. Having waited so long to get what I’d wanted, this delayed gratification was a sort of frustrating disappointment that I wouldn’t experience again until I started dating in high school. Regardless, I angrily sat through the whole episode, figuring that Die Hard 2 would begin afterwards, too butthurt about the situation to laugh at the Griffin family’s antics.

Then, after the episode ended, came the final blow: A black title card reading, “WE NOW BRING YOU THE FOLLOWING FILM, ALREADY IN PROGRESS,” followed by Die Hard 2 about half an hour in.

I was livid. I was seeing red. I had more emotional investment in Die Hard 2 than anyone else who has ever lived, including the people who actually made and got paid for the movie. Right then and there, as I stood on the couch hurling every PG-13 swear word I knew at the television, I swore that I would never forgive Family Guy for this horrible wrongdoing. Those responsible for Family Guy would rue the day they had crossed Truman Capps.

Years went by. I grew from a weird child into a weird teenager. Family Guy gained cult popularity, got cancelled, and then came back and grew into a national phenomenon. I eventually saw Die Hard 2 in its entirety and was humbled by how truly, earnestly shitty of a movie it was, but that didn’t do anything to stop my hatred of Family Guy. After all those years, my animosity toward Family Guy had grown far larger than the post-Super Bowl Die Hard 2 preemption (Black Sunday, as it came to be known) – it was a part of me, a hatred as deeply ingrained as the roots of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Of course, I wound up watching more Family Guy in high school, because all of my conservative Christian friends inexplicably loved it. This gave me a chance to solidify what I didn’t like about the show: Most of the jokes came as one-liner cutaway gags unconnected to the episode’s plot, which I thought was pretty lazy writing. I made sure to tell my friends this every time somebody mentioned Family Guy, because I was an insufferable douche pretty much nonstop between 2003 and late 2009.

Now that I’ve grown from a weird teenager into a weird adult, I’ve gained some perspective on the whole thing. I still don’t like Family Guy that much – I think that the show is packed to the gunwhales with talented writers, but the cutaway-heavy format just isn’t for me. I think American Dad and The Cleveland Show are so derivative of Family Guy that they can barely be considered their own shows.

I can pinpoint the exact time that I quit hating Family Guy and could merely acknowledge that I personally dislike it, and that was when I read the Wikipedia page for Seth MacFarlane, the show’s creator. Even though I don’t particularly enjoy the man’s life work, I really like him.

It goes beyond just the natural kinship I feel to someone whenever I find out that they’re a left-leaning atheist – he handles himself really well in interviews, loves big band swing music so much that he released his own album, and shows a real and genuine affection for American television and pop culture in general. One gets the idea that he’s really not taking any moment of his superstardom for granted.

So, three quarters of the way through the update, that brings us to what I really wanted to talk about today: MacFarlane’s feature film debut, Ted.

It’s rare that I watch a movie where I laugh so hard that I nearly fall out of my chair. Ted is one of those movies. It’s way more focused and cutaway-free than Family Guy, and beyond that it’s an incredibly sweet movie about friendship and growing up. Admittedly, it completely shits the bed in the third act, but these days virtually every movie does so I really can’t hold that against it.

There are still glimmers of MacFarlane’s Family Guy-style boner for pop culture of the 1980s – an extended, shot-for-shot remake of the disco scene from Airplane! with Mark Wahlberg and Mila Kunis in place of Robert Hays and Julie Hagerty, an excruciating vocal rendition of the theme song from Octopussy, and the protagonists’ obsession with smoking pot and watching Flash Gordon.

In Ted, these elements are more or less part of the plot rather than cutaway gags, which makes it easier for me to laugh at them without getting my writer panties in a bunch. And what I realize, watching Mark Wahlberg and his profane teddy bear dissecting the minutiae of Flash Gordon the same way my friends and I do with Starship Troopers, is that Seth MacFarlane really is one of us. He appreciates pop culture as something that we as nerds share and discuss at length in the absence of anything more interesting to talk about.

I don’t think it was Seth MacFarlane’s intention to preempt Die Hard 2 with the premiere of the show that would make him rich and famous. But in retrospect, I’m sort of glad that he did - Die Hard 2 is a real partial-birth abortion of a movie, and seeing it at such a young age would’ve probably broken my spirit and ruined the original Die Hard for me.

In a way, Family Guy protected my childlike innocence for a couple more years, allowing me to remain enthusiastic about sequels until The Mummy Returns taught me that Terminator 2 and Aliens were exceptions, not the rule. And I’d like to think that if Seth MacFarlane knew the circumstances, he’d be proud to have protected an impressionable child from the horrors of Die Hard 2, even if the kid didn’t appreciate it at the time.

Truman Capps has always been too frightened to try Die Hard 3.

Celebrity: Jeffrey Tambour Edition

Don't know who Jeffrey Tambour is? Here's a super old picture of him that won't help you at all, then!

After a year in Los Angeles, eight months of which I spent working directly in the entertainment industry, I am officially the worst at encountering celebrities. Literally everybody else out here has a handful of awesome celebrity encounter stories except for me. Maybe, when celebrities see me arriving someplace, they all flee the area, and then because of the displacement there’s so many everywhere else that all my friends are statistically guaranteed to bump into them at Payless or Fatburger.

I’m really not exaggerating here – I have multiple friends who have all had their own individual encounters with Danny Pudi from Community, who is apparently as friendly as Mr. Rogers and at least two and a half times as charismatic. One girl I know bumped into him at a coffee shop, and in the process of gushing to him about how much she loved Community she mentioned that it was her birthday. In response, he reportedly gave her a big hug and did a little dance for her.

This is what I’m missing out on! Hugs from strangers and dancing, things that I’m normally not so keen on, are totally awesome in my book if they’re coming from famous people. Hopefully this casts a light on the true depth of my shallowness.  

Yesterday, while driving to Pacific Palisades for a 4^th of July party/concert at the local high school, I caught myself daydreaming about how I’d react if I wound up standing in line behind, say, Samuel L. Jackson at, say, Boston Market. (Because the top grossing actor of all time obviously pays $7.99 for 2^nd rate meatloaf.)

It’s a worthwhile thing to wonder, because talking to strangers out of the blue has never been a skill I’ve had. I’ve got roughly as much anxiety about approaching a celebrity as I’ve got about approaching a girl in a bar, because in both cases there’s really no reason for you to be talking to them, short of fulfilling some selfish desire of your own. If anything, your motives are probably more pure talking to a woman in a bar than talking to a celebrity:

GIRL IN BAR

”Hey there – we’ve never met before, but you’re so attractive that I’m willing to risk absolute humiliation and spend upwards of $25 on drinks on the off-chance that you’ll let me see you naked.”

CELEBRITY

”Hey there – I, just like the other seven complete strangers who have interrupted you this evening, really liked when you did that thing on TV that time. The only reason I’m telling you this is so I can tell my friends about it later. Now let’s get a picture with your arm around me so people will think we’re actually friends!”

Because really, that’s the only reason why anybody approaches a famous actor in public. It’d be another story if you were doing something useful for them, like stopping them from walking through a spider web or offering them some gum when you can tell they really want some gum, but that’s never the case. You’re just wasting their time for your own benefit.

The picture thing is what really makes me uncomfortable – I got my picture taken in front of the Tower of London because that’s an inanimate object of historical significance and I wanted to prove that I’d seen it. It’s been there for almost a millennium; it’s not like it’s in a hurry to get anywhere.

Celebrities, on the other hand, are living, breathing human beings, and to me the idea of flagging one down in the middle of his or her day just to get your picture taken together is essentially relegating them to the level of living, breathing tourist attractions. It’s golden calf-style idolatry – and as we all remember from the Bible, when we worship golden calves the Virgin Mary gets so angry that she turns us into pillars of salt.

All of this self-righteous, sour grapes, anti-celebrity glorification bullshit was percolating in my head yesterday as I wandered around the 4^th of July extravaganza with my friends. Onstage, the mediocre warm-up band stopped playing, and one of the event organizers stepped up to the microphone.

”And now, to tell you more about tonight’s schedule of events and introduce our next band, you may know him as George Bluth from Arrested Development, I know him as my good friend and neighbor, Jeffrey Tambour, everybody!”

I whipped around in delight as Jeffrey Tambour mounted the stage and began to lightheartedly explain to us where the bathrooms were in his goofy, friendly baritone voice. After several seconds of a pure and indescribable glee that transcends all words, I regained my senses, and the first thought I had was:

I should go say hi to him! Maybe get a picture together that I could post on Reddit to score some karma!

I’m very principled right up until I see something I want, and then all bets are off.

I picked him out in the crowd from a distance once he’d left the stage and slowly ambled closer to him, desperately trying to think of something original to say as I watched him talk with a couple of his friends. I had almost immediately ruled out the photo idea – some of my principles remained in the post-Tambour discovery glow – but I knew I couldn’t leave this high school football field without saying something to the man.

Finally, at the moment he appeared to be least busy, I strode up to him, catching his eye.

“Excuse me, Mr. Tambour,” I said, keeping a respectable distance and making no effort to touch him. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I just wanted to let you know that the episode of the Mark Maron podcast you were on was absolutely hysterical.”*

*Listen to it. Seriously. I don’t ask you guys to listen to lots of stuff, so believe me when I say that this is an hour of Jeffrey Tambour being hilarious in every sense of the word while talking about his career and Judaism.   

He smiled and nodded. “That guy’s a riot, isn’t he? Thank you.”

“No – thank you, Mr. Tambour.”

And I stone cold walked away, right into a restricted area by the stage where a cop yelled at me to get out.

My principles returned immediately after I’d done the deed, and I spent the rest of the evening feeling bad for having bothered the poor guy when he was just trying to be a bro and help his friend out with the high school 4^th of July fundraiser. Upon further analysis of what made me run up and make some utterly useless comment to a man who probably forgot that I existed as I was speaking to him, I came to this:

When they asked Sir Edmund Hillary why he climbed Mt. Everest, he famously responded, ”Because it’s there.” I think the same is true – or perhaps truer -for celebrities.

When you’re sharing space with a celebrity, it’s easy to walk up and say hello – way easier than climbing the tallest mountain on Earth, unless the celebrity in question is Jack Nicholson and he’s got a golf club. In return for saying hello, you get a story about a celebrity’s one-on-one personal skills that, good or bad, might actually be more interesting than a story about climbing a mountain - especially if you irked Jack Nicholson within reach of a golf club.

Truman Capps resisted the urge to greet Jeffrey Tambour with a hearty, “HEY now!”

The Waterboy

I have absolutely no idea what this means, but it comes from the Wikipedia page for 'water', so I guess it's relevant.

I hate it when people get to talking about what kind of water is the best water. Mind you, not ‘SmartWater’ or ‘LifeWater’ or whatever other sugary de-carbonated diet soda gym people are drinking these days; I mean actual, regular water. I can’t tell you how many shoots I’ve been on where someone is bitching about how Dasani is inferior to Aquafina, or office conversations I’ve overherad where everybody is singing the praises of their hometown’s tapwater over LA tapwater.

It’s ridiculous that people even discuss this nonsense. Because clearly Dasani is the best bottled water and the best tapwater in the world comes from Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Case closed.

I am a self loathing water snob. It’s one of my deepest, darkest shames. I mean, here I am, dedicated to keeping my ridiculously cushy white middle class college educated American life in perspective and staying as down to Earth as possible, but I buy my drinking water in gallon jugs at Ralphs for $1.89 apiece. Yeah, that’s right – I will only drink water that costs as much as gasoline in 1998.

This has nothing to do with safety concerns – public water supplies are pretty much the only thing left in America that is tightly and properly regulated by the government. Gallon for gallon, there’s less cancer in our tapwater than there is in literally anything else in this country, save for perhaps chemotherapy drugs, which I am just as happy to not have piped into my home.

Drinking bottled water is, by all accounts, far worse in everyway for both me and the environment. Bottled water is 10,000 times as expensive as tapwater, it’s largely unregulated and untested for bacteria like tapwater, and the oil-based bottles require three times as much water to produce as they do to fill – and only 20% of them get recycled. I may as well just run over a manatee in a Hummer made out of dolphin corpses.

I’ve known all of that for years, but I continue to buy bottled water here in LA because LA tapwater tastes really bad. Yes, even through a Brita filter.

So, for the record: When faced with a choice between drinking overpriced, unsustainable, and potentially harmful water from a bottle or a glass of the safest tapwater in the world that I find to taste slightly off-putting, I will immediately forego all of my eco-friendly liberal tendencies in favor of a beverage that tastes simply ‘neutral’ as opposed to ‘kind of bad.’

When I lived in LA two summers ago between my junior and senior year of college, I didn’t buy water at the store – I just resigned myself to sack up and try to get used to the taste of the tapwater in my apartment. Since the water was unpleasant to drink, I wound up just not drinking a whole lot of water that summer, which is a powerfully bad health decision when you live in a city that’s in a desert.

When I came back for this new, more permanent stay, I knew that something had to change – either the city would find a new water supply that tasted more ‘Portlandy’, I would die of dehydration, or I’d develop Fremen-style water discipline to carefully trap and reclaim all the moisture that left my body. Barring any of those, I could just buy jugs of bottled water at the store.

While buying gallons of water instead of just drinking the (basically) free shit the city pipes into my house has been bad for the environment and my pocketbook, it’s been doing wonders for my health. I’m drinking more water now than I ever have before, because I’ve always got a jug of it sitting at my desk. I drank an entire gallon in one remarkably humid evening – a fact that would probably be more impressive if it was milk or some other substance that doctors don’t encourage you to consume as much as possible.

Maybe there’s something more alluring about having the water right at my desk, so close that I don’t even have to go to the trouble of going to the faucet and getting a cup. Or maybe the same part of me that goads me into finishing all my French fries even when I’m completely stuffed is telling me to drink up because I paid for the damn stuff, it’s mine, and I ought to make the most of it.

It’s very depressing for me to realize that the only way that I’ll give my body an ample supply of the one substance it absolutely needs to survive is if it tastes good and it’s within arm’s reach. Walking to the faucet six paces away for less-good tasting water is simply not an option: It has to have minerals added for taste, and I have to be able to grab it without having to take off my ear buds and interrupt my episode of Frasier.

I don’t want to say that we humans are devolving, but I sure wouldn’t say we’ve been getting any more adept at survival as the years go by. I think we hit our high point with Ryan Gosling and Alison Brie, and now we’re evolving our way down the other side of the mountain, slowly getting fatter, lazier, more complacent, and generally less willing to survive than our ancestors who would walk across miles of savannah for one sip of water from a muddy puddle that a tiger crapped in.

For what it’s worth, though, when the last human dies of starvation because the last vending machine is out of Cooler Ranch Doritos and he doesn’t want to eat Nacho Cheesier, he will at least have the most impeccably honed taste of any creature in the universe.

Truman Capps drank half a gallon of water while writing this update.

Being Outspent

 

Mitt Romney thinks this guy is Kanye West.

I think I’ve donated something like $75 to Barack Obama’s campaign so far, because in spite of his Puritanical stance on marijuana and the fact that his foreign policy involves more Predators than the movie Predators, I still think he’s a pretty swell guy and I’d like to keep him around for another four years. Now that Obama has the coveted Truman Capps endorsement, I imagine the next five months should be pretty smooth sailing.

Part of the online donation process involved me submitting my email address, which is why every morning I check my email and see that I’ve received messages from people like Elizabeth Warren and Michelle Obama, thanking me for my tireless efforts in support of the President and gently requesting that I donate whatever else I can spare.

The Obama campaign is running a number of pretty cool promotions as incentives to get people to donate, but I think I’ve thought of a better one: Donate $1000 or more and they’ll never send you another email. Sure, small ticket donors like me would probably just opt not to donate at all, but I think a scheme like that could really ensnare a lot of the limousine liberals who can’t in good conscience not donate but don’t want to get spammed by a who’s-who of the Democratic Party.

Both the news media and the emails have recently taken on a more and more bleak tone regarding fundraising. The general theme is this: MittRomney is going to outspend Obama in this campaign, which will make Barack Obama the first incumbent in history to be outspent in his reelection campaign. This is bad news, so give us more of your money.

I keep hearing that statistic over and over again, and it’s not striking fear into my heart for three reasons, which I’ll share with you below. If you don’t want to read them, I guess you can stop reading the blog here. I mean, it’s up to you.

LIES, DAMNED LIES, AND INANE SPORTSCENTER BULLSHIT

Whenever I watch a football game I’m always kind of shocked at the sheer volume of useless statistics the good people at ESPN have pulled together for the color commentators to say before kickoff and during time outs.

”Well, Oregon has won the coin toss – now, interesting statistic here, in 63% of games in program history, Oregon has gone on to win the game after winning the coin toss. Anybody want to call this one?”

”Weather in Eugene at kickoff is light drizzle and 43 degrees – and it’s interesting to note that since 1977, Oregon has only won three of the eight games where the temperature at kickoff was 43 degrees, so this could be a bad sign for the Ducks today here at Autzen Stadium.”

”Something something time of possession something something.”

I like to think that somewhere in the basement of ESPN headquarters they’ve got Rain Man sitting in a room full of televisions watching every sporting event in history with a plate full of pancakes, and there’s a bunch of interns there taking notes on all the statistics he says, which they then transmit to Lee Corso via satellite.

The fact of the matter is, none of these type of statistics have any more bearing on the outcome of a football game than astrology has on our day-to-day lives.* They’re interesting to think about – depending on your definition of the word interesting – and they prevent dead air, but if you want to accurately predict who’s going to win, you’d be better off analyzing the two squads who are about to play instead of the size and density of their bowel movements the morning of the game.

*Yeah, that’s right, I said it.

Certainly some statistics are well worth analyzing – past performance on turf versus grass, weather conditions, home field advantage, etc – but those generally aren’t determining factors. They just influence the other factors in play.

Assuming that Mitt Romney is going to win because he’s going to be the first guy to outspend an incumbent is like saying that Oregon is going to lose because they’re playing on a grass field and they lost on a grass field at the Rose Bowl in 2009. It’s a point of concern, but it doesn’t deserve the amount of attention it’s getting, particularly because…

CORPORATIONS ARE PEOPLE NOW, APPARENTLY

Mitt Romney is one of the richest presidential candidates in history and he happens to be in balls-deep with Wall Street, whose residents have literally all money. On top of that, this is the first election where corporations can make unlimited political contributions.

Of-fucking-course Obama’s going to get outspent. That was pretty much a certainty the day Citizens United was decided. It’s the perfect storm – a rich douchebag who happens to be friends with some of the richest other douchebags in America, who have just been told that their multi-billion dollar investment banks can contribute as much money as they want to the original douchebag’s campaign. I’m sure Andrew Breitbart went to his grave with a raging stiffy just having witnessed such an event.

The statistic, “Barack Obama is the first incumbent in history to be outspent in his reelection campaign,” is misleading. It should be, “Barack Obama is the first incumbent in history to be running for reelection after Citizens United.”

Campaign finance is just different now, and what’s happening to Obama is going to happen to every future president who isn’t giving and receiving reacharounds from bankers.

Mitt Romney is going to spend over a billion dollars to try and defeat Barack Obama, and none of that means a damn to me because…

NO AMOUNT OF MONEY WILL MAKE ANYBODY IN THE WORLD LIKE MITT ROMNEY – EVEN FOR A SECOND

Nobody likes Mitt Romney. He is an unlikeable, shitty dude. If he was an ice cream flavor, he’d be pralines and dick. These are immutable facts, and we all know I’m fucking right.

It’s been a red-letter year for Obama – he tied up gays and Latinos pretty handily, he’s still got black people, and sometime in March the GOP just decided to up and hand him women as well. His party loves him, celebrities love him, people my age love him. He’s a great public speaker and he’s got swagger for days.

Who does Mitt Rommey have? Well, he’s got old white people. But not all of them, since a sizable contingent of Evangelical Christians have decided that his religion is too weird for their blood and are just going towrite in ‘Jesus’ on the ballots instead. So he’s got some old white people.

You can run all the slick campaign ads you want, but they won’t make up for the fact that Romney’s party and policies have alienated a huge chunk of the electorate and that the man himself has all the charisma of a character in The Polar Express.

AAAAAAHHHHHH!

The Obama campaign has to play this thing up and be worried, because if they let Democrats get complacent then they’ll lose momentum and maybe the election. I get it. I wouldn’t have it any other way, honestly, because I want Obama to win so very badly.

But this isn’t what I’m worried about. The Supreme Court healthcare verdict, on the other hand, is giving me an ulcer that I may not be able to afford treatment for in the morning.

Truman Capps knows how you feel, Republicans - his name was John Kerry, and he sucked on toast.

Kim Kardashian Free iPad Miami Heat

With that title and a cat picture, I estimate everyone on the Internet will have visited this page by next week.

Widespread fame and record breaking numbers of pageviews were never my intention when I started writing this blog. I’m not saying that I’d turn those things down if they were offered to me, but since day one I’ve been pretty sure that this blog isn’t going to become an Internet sensation, because every update is a massive block of text containing many big words and very few pictures, none of which feature anime characters doing it, and on the Internet that combination is practically a big sign that says, “MOVE ALONG – NOTHING TO SEE HERE.”

If I wanted to be popular the changes are obvious – write shorter, list-based updates more frequently and post funny videos and images – but that would do fuck-all for my growth as a writer and alienate the 15 diligent souls who’ve been following me for as long as I’ve been doing this.

Because let’s face it: Right now I’m pretty much the NBC of the Internet. NBC, as an NBC employee I went on one date with and never saw again explained it to me, is ‘the most popular network with people who don’t really watch TV.’

The most successful TV programs are either glorified talent shows, good looking detectives scrutinizing semen, or doctors and nurses bumping uglies in hospital supply closets. NBC’s Thursday lineup, which over the past several years has been as close as I’m ever going to get to religious devotion, includes none of those things, which is why it’s scarcely watched in spite of its critical acclaim.

I by no means am trying to imply that my blog is as good as 30 Rock, or that shorter blogs designed to attract more views are necessarily bad – I’m just saying that it takes a special sort of person to get all amped up about sitting down to read a thousand or more words as I meander my way toward a point, much in the same way that it takes a special sort of person to get wrapped up in a show like Community or Parks and Recreation, and those sorts of people are in short supply, which explains why those shows don’t get big ratings and my blog doesn’t get big hits.

Honestly, though, I like it that way. Obscurity protects me from the scrutiny of the collective sociopathic middle school that is the Internet and allows me to fuck around and experiment with my writing in front of a small, safe audience of friends and family like a kid doing tricks on his skateboard in the driveway. Sure, sooner or later I’ll have to expose myself to a wider audience who’ll presumably take me to task for my run on sentences and gross overuse of semicolons and dashes, but hopefully by the time that happens my writing will be a full time job with a robust salary that allows me to order guacamole at Mexican restaurants without caring that it costs extra.*

*What’s that old saying? ‘Guac at Del Taco is the best revenge?’ Yeah, I’m sure that’s it.    

About six weeks ago, Blogspot made a pretty huge update to their interface – if you want to know specifically when, look back at my past updates and make a note of when the font went from the friendly, demure old version I liked so much to this new, overlarge monstrosity I’m writing in now.

Besides completely fucking up the look of my blog, though, they also added a tool that allows you to track how many hits individual updates get. The results, like most things in my life, started off confusing and ultimately led to disappointment:

You’ll notice that older updates seem to have more hits than the newer ones, which I imagine is a result of everybody getting sick of my constantly blown deadlines and just stopping by once and a while to catch up on everything they’ve missed. However, some updates have fared significantly better than others – my update ‘Money’, for example, has been viewed 10,651 times, while my update about the gay marriage debate has only been viewed 90 times.

At first I was giddy that the equivalent of a small town in a John Mellencamp song had read one of my updates, until I got suspicious and started looking at the referral pages. As it turns out, most of those 10,651 visitors were people who had done a Google Image Search for the word ‘money’ and found my blog because the first result was a picture of money that I’d uploaded. Samesies for the 2473 people who viewed my update about Workaholics, or the 2157 strangers who showed up to read about Risk.

Yes, it turns out that for all of my lofty talk about text and building a small, committed, literate reader base, you guys are a statistically insignificant percentage of my readership compared to the folks who show up in droves via Google to right click and save a couple of images I posted on a couple of blogs that happened to have frequently searched titles.

I wear my ignorance of search engine optimization as a badge of honor, but I am kind of kicking myself for not figuring this sort of stuff out sooner – if I’d taken advantage of some of Blogspot’s monetization options I probably could’ve made some decent cheesesteak money off of the ten thousand people who showed up last month to steal my picture of money (which I, in turn, stole from another website).

So today is the start of an experiment: We’ll see how many hits this update gets with its provocative title and popular image, and if it’s impressive, well… I mean, they show ads during 30 Rock and nobody accuses Tina Fey of selling out, am I right?

Truman Capps hopes that this is the last time he gives press to Kim Kardashian. 

Funny Women

If only.

I didn’t even know that Adam Corolla said what he did until days after the fact, when I got clued into it by all the Adam Corolla jokes coming from the female comedians in my Twitter feed. At first I couldn’t believe that I’d missed something so big, but then I remembered that it was Adam Corolla who said it, and since I watch lots of popular TV shows , look at funny internet videos, and listen to hilarious comedians, I obviously have no way of knowing what that guy is doing.

I mean, shit, what is Adam Corolla doing? My last memory of him was when a stoner in my 11^th grade math class said that his three month long talk show was ‘totally groundbreaking.’ What was he doing in the seven year gap between then and him telling the New York Post that women aren’t funny? For some reason I’m picturing him working at an Outback Steakhouse in Bloomington, Indiana – although the Bloomington part might just be because I’m thinking of a Bloomin’ Onion.  

Are women funny? Of course they are, you fucking idiot.* Anybody who says that women aren’t funny obviously hasn’t met my mother.

*Critical responses like this don’t carry the same weight when you’re answering a rhetorical question you just asked yourself.

This is my mother wearing a Viking hat.

My Mom is arguably the funniest person I’ve ever met. She’s witty, irreverent, cerebral, and totally unafraid to be completely vulgar and make dildo jokes if the situation calls for it (which it often does in the Capps household). If not for my mother, this blog would be about fiscal policy analysis and black and white historical photographs of bridges instead of dick jokes and profanity. You can decide for yourself which one is a better use of my time.

Of course, that doesn’t necessarily disprove Carolla’s argument – as he puts it, in his 50’s greaser lingo*, “When it comes to comedy, of course there’s Sarah Silverman, Tina Fey, Kathy Griffin — super-funny chicks. But if you’re playing the odds? No… The reason why you know more funny dudes than funny chicks is that dudes are funnier than chicks.”

*I realize that I use the term ‘chicks’ occasionally to refer to women, but after seeing Adam Carolla’s heavy use of it I’m going to quit. That douchewaffle ruined the word for all of us.

Now, I believe that Adam Carolla’s observation – that there are more men who are successful comedians or just ‘funny’ in general than there are women – is, in a way, correct. Unlike Adam Carolla, I don’t believe that it has anything to do with some sort of hardwired genetic predisposition, probably because, unlike Adam Carolla, I’m at least reasonably intelligent.

The fact remains, though – when I list off friends of mine who crack me up on a regular basis, I find myself listing more men than women. What this comes down to isn’t the fact that with a vagina comes the inability to tell jokes; it’s that on a cultural level I don’t think young girls get as much encouragement to be funny as young boys do.

A sense of humor isn’t something you just decide to have – it’s developed over the course of a lifetime, starting when you’re a kid. With little boys, it starts out with talking about forbidden topics, like farts and wieners, to make other kids laugh, because farts and wieners are and always will be funny.

Those are really the only things little kids can make jokes about – for one, vulgarity is the easiest comic territory, and two, with relatively little life experience, understanding of social norms, or mastery of language, about the only way you can make other kids laugh is by talking about the stuff that comes out of your butt.

For the most part, parents accept and tolerate some amount of this under the ‘boys will be boys’ clause, but girls aren’t so lucky. Even in the 21^st century, the majority of girls are taught from an early age to be proper and ladylike, qualities that explicitly forbid rewording nursery rhymes to talk about Disney characters drinking pee.

Things like this have longstanding ramifications: Boys grow up encouraged, or at least allowed, to crack jokes and hone a sense of humor, while girls are steered away from it. Even girls with progressively minded feminist parents still have to go through the shark tank of being a teenaged girl trying to be popular in high school – and adolescent female social cliques don’t really value humor unless it’s being used to make fun of somebody else. (I would know – I was usually the one being made fun of.)

So it’s not that women aren’t funny, it’s that society has been telling them that they shouldn’t be funny since pretty much day one. How can you fucking blame them? You go out and overcome a lifetime of social conditioning and then hone a skill that the other half of the planet has been encouraged to have since birth and tell me how easy it is!

Women like Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Sarah Silverman, Kathy Griffin, Rachel Bloom, Aubrey Plaza, Ellen DeGeneres, my mother, my friends Kristin, Holly, Amelia, Lizzie, Allison, other Lizzie, Katie, Molly, Kristen, other Holly, Sarah, Bri, Chloe, Sonia, Emily, Danielle, Shelly, and the tens of millions of other funny women in this country aren’t mutants who won the genetic lottery and magically gained the ability to have tits and be funny at the same time – they’re funny people who gave a hearty ‘fuck you’ to social norms dictating that jokes aren’t okay for girls.

And to any of you who are raising daughters, let me say this: For Christ’s sake, encourage them to funny. Force them to tell you jokes at the dinner table – even bad ones. If they want to keep the funny on the DL during high school, that’s alright, but you let them know that in the real world there isn’t a single guy who’s ever said, “I was talking to this awesome girl the other night, but then she made me laugh. Huge turn off.”

Hell, it’s a source of constant frustration to me that Louis C.K.’s oldest daughter is still something like 11 years younger than I am. Because I guarantee you, both of his daughters are going to grow up to be the funniest, most well adjusted women in history, and if by some wild luck I were to start dating one of them once she was of legal age, Louis C.K. would devote the rest of his career to talking about the poofy haired old creep who was fucking his hilarious daughter.

Truman Capps acknowledges that this whole fracas was obviously Adam Carolla desperately clutching at publicity.