My Turn At The Apocalypse

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Let's Set A Few Things Straight

We are told that Obama's victory in last night's Iowa carcasses was "decisive" (a word I heard on a major radio network newscast this morning), and that (according to CNN's interpretation of the increasingly annoying and reality-dissociated John Edwards' coy remarks) Hilary's third-place finish in those same carcasses means that there are only two candidates in the Democratic race, and that people (primarily the media) are a pack of braying idiots in desperate need of lives.

Let us examine the relevant facts. At present, winning the Democratic nomination requires 2,025 votes (of 4,049 delegates to the Democratic National Convention, known in some circles as the Satanists' Ball, and the caveats on that including delegates and superdelegates and hookers and cigar vendors are too numerous to recap here or anywhere). How many of those were at stake last night? According to CNN, which will be the information source of record for this post? A whopping 45 of them. That's about 1.1 percent. Wow.

How many delegates did Senator Obama win in his decisive victory last night? Uhm...16. Senator Edwards won 15. Senator Clinton won 14. Holy shit, she must be crushed. For those of you doing the math, that's about .8 percent of the delegates required for nomination, .75 percent, and .7 percent, respectively. Jesus Christ, stone her to fucking death and bury the body under a mound of feces.

At this writing, some 327 delegates, including those won in Iowa last night, are pledged or thought to be pledged or some such, according to CNN (as of this writing, and the linked page is dynamic, so you're gonna have to take my word for it if you're reading after today). That's about 8.1 percent of the delegates. Who, you might reasonably ask, is in the lead in the accounting for that monstrously significant chunk of delegateage?

Senator Clinton, of course. She has 169 pledged (for want of a realistic word) delegates, or 52 percent. Senator Obama has 66, or 20 percent, and Senator Edwards has 47, or 14 percent. Yes, Senator Obama has cut Senator Clinton's lead by 2 votes.

All of which is my prolix way of saying this:

Shut the fucking fuck up.

All three Senators and former Senators, and all of their fellows so unfortunate as to not meet the Iowa Democrats' 15-percent threshhold for receiving delegates, are asshats. Each and every one of them has lied to you, me, and all of us, and has done so today, and in all likelihood are doing so right now, as I write this and you read it. Each of them, like every single person who seriously runs for the Presidency, is a psychotic shitheel. The only thing separating the eight Democrats who have pledged delegates from the multiplicity of discrete puddlings of diseased afterbirth pursuing the Republican nomination is that they're slightly less reprehensible in a political sense. And so I give you some facts relating to the 2008 Presidential election:

Your next President will be an asshole, personally and politically, although the degree of political stench will vary from "Run Far, Far Away" to "Hang Curtains Impregnated With Lime Chloride" to "Might Not Fuck Up the Supreme Court Too Terribly Badly."

On January 21, 2009, there will still be American troops dying in Iraq. The Supreme Court will still lean violently to the right. Americans' constitutional rights and civil liberties will still be gravely imperiled, to no end. More humans around the world will die preventable early deaths each and every single day than died on September 11, 2001, and in fact more than have cumulatively from causes attributable to terrorism, ever. I might be one of them. You might be one of them. The chance that one or more of them will be known to or loved by you or me or both of us is overfuckingwhelming. Two distinguishable income disparities--that between the rich and poor in our country, and that between those who fucking eat and those who don't around the world--will not have noticeably improved. Religious repression and intolerance will still rule an unconscionable proportion of peoples' thoughts and dreams. Your government and mine will still suffer from grave structural problems that render it, at times, completely dysfunctional, because that's the fucking way it goes when you try to govern 300 million assholes. All of these problems and more will continue to exist regardless of who is elected President. Are these problems unsolveable? Of course not. But the identity of our next President is not integral to the solution (Republicans excluded, but that's another rant).

So please. Just do me the great and good favor of drinking a nice hot cup of Shut The Fuck Up.

Once Again, Our Most Special Guest

It's a special day here at Minions as we welcome back our favorite guest, Landru.

Landru: So...fucking...tired...

YAMM: So what brings you back as our guest today?

Landru: The fact that you're my blog. And I haven't been your guest for like eleven days now. And I'm too lazy to write you in anything but this hackneyed hackney of a formackney.

YAMM: Oh, it's not like you barged in and threatened us at gunpoint.

Landru: Of course it is. Dimwit.

YAMM: So what's stuck in your shitter, Landru?

Landru: John Edwards' haircut, Bill Clinton's cock, Sarah Gore's engagement dinner, impending unemployment, worksuck despisement and an overwhelming desire to not be employed there, the return of the pain-in-the-ass child from a blissful two weeks at Grandma's, and losing to that stink-dicked cocksucking futbol traitor Bruce Arena the other day. And bDr not being incensed enough about it and pussywhinging that we're becoming a parody of our badfan selves. That guy just makes me want to poop vomit sometimes.

YAMM: You're deeply disturbed.

Landru: And you're not? What are you, retarded?

YAMM: That's not a very nice word.

Landru: It's okay, my retarded son doesn't mind.

YAMM: You're really very cruel.

Landru: Okay, clearly, you're new here. Anything else?

YAMM: Well, sure, we were talking.

Landru: No, I was ranting. You were transcribing. It appears to be an appropriate level of relationship.

YAMM: Is there nothing good about your life?

Landru: Sure. Pork products. A lovely HD television on which I play FIFA 07 and watch actual grown men kicking actual futbols and each other. A nubile and pliant wife who keeps the pitcher full of iced tea and whom I fuck and you don't. The phantasmagorical array of links to your right. The knowledge certain that if I keep swilling sausage while smoking Camels and sitting on the couch playing FIFA, I won't have to keep worrying about politics, unemployment, DCU, and Bruce Arena's shit-cock. My seething hatred of Dook, the Cowboys, the Red Scum, the Devolution, the Yellow Football Team, the Fire, the Galaxy, the Burn, the Dynamo, and Real Salt Lake, coupled with knowing that Kansas City and Colorado are too consistently insignificant to hate, Toronto's too new to hate, and my secret inability to hate Chivas makes them no less worthy.

YAMM: Is there anything that can be done to bring you under control?

Landru: Nothing short of the Grim Reaper himself. Or perhaps Jonathan Bornstein.

YAMM: That's really sad.

Landru: You could really stand to read some Nietzsche.

YAMM: Thanks, Landru.

Landru: Fuck off. See you the next time I feel like doing some pathetic attention-seeking.

The Sainted Dead

I'd have to say that I was a fan.

I think that LBJ was a severely underrated president. The man had a hard run. He suffered mightily for a series of bad decisions that led him to cave in to the then-strong impulse to fight Commies. No one had yet disproved the Domino Theory (for some real fun, read the Wikipedia article on the same topic). Postwar babies were fueling all kinds of scary stuff like cultural upheaval and civil rights. Johnson himself was a product of smoke-filled rooms, of ticket-balancing, and of the yellow-dog era of Democratic politics.

And yet? He propelled forward his sainted predecessor's civil rights agenda, the single most important sociological development of the century, let alone the decade. He guaranteed himself a place where he could be reviled by peaceniks and racists alike.

Into all this stepped his lovely and gracious wife--an early political manifestation of the nascent environmental movement, among other things, a woman who sealed her place in the American consciousness as the person comforting a blood-soaked Jackie Kennedy on the day every boomer remembers. No one could hate Lady Bird and still face their God in the morning. It just couldn't be done.

Now, some might say that putting up with a rattlesnake-and-bunny-rabbit-dicked motherfucker like Lyndon Johnson and holding a blood-stained Bible on America's Bad Day, Part One, were funny ways for a nice old Southron lady to achieve a state of grace in the hearts of the American people. But it was a funny time. And there's no cause to hold anything against her. Rest nice, Lady Bird.

Special Guest

We have a special guest here on Minions today. Welcome, Landru.

Landru: Fuck you. This interview format is getting really tired.

YAMM: It never gets old for us.

Landru: Sigh. I've already done the meta joke. Just get on with it.

YAMM: Firedoglake wants to tell you how to become a rich famous super mayamayablogger.

Landru: Firedoglake wants to do some self-congratulatory wanking.

YAMM: No, no, they're trying to help build the online progressive movement.

Landru: Ki yi yi. The online progressive movement is a pack of crunchy fucknuts screaming at each other, when they're not busy screaming at the other side. And you yourself, YAMM, and me myself are but a tiny bit of willing windsmear on the underwear of that alleged phenomenon, I mean like molecules of it, not even enough to stink. And really? Super mayamayabloggers are just bigger, and in the case of everyone at FDL but TRex, stinkier stains. People who truly haven't made up their minds aren't reading this shit. And if they're reading it, they're just thinking whatever the last blogger told them, whether it's Gun Counter Gomer or a fucking hippie retard like the guy who runs MyDD.

YAMM: Harsh words for your fellow man, there, Landru.

Landru: Fuck 'em. People are people, WTF you gonna do? And new media are just media. They're slicing up the same pie as the old media, and while the selectivity offered by participatory media such as BlowTube is appealling to a lot of people, most of those are already Internet-savvy. The masses are still watching the television, despite the degree to which the Web has penetrated our culture.

YAMM: So what brought all this on? You're so angry when we talk to you this way.

Landru: In-laws on final approach. Wrong side of the bed. CPAP machine is probably good for me, and it certainly lets my beloved wife sleep better since I'm not gasping and snorting like a dying swine, but I hate the thing. No matter how determinedly we wank, they're still lying fascist crooks. Even those who are, in theory, supposed to be on our side. And as a side note, let me just express my feeling that, even though I am essentially an atheist, I sincerely hope that fascist-enabling cockwhore Lanny Davis has himself a nice long roast in Hell. I love my children, no, really, I love my children, dammit. And best of all, best friend has taken on a melancholy oddness, and I'd hate to leave that uncompeted with. Fucker.

YAMM: Okay, seriously, have you considered antidepressants?

Landru: They constipate me.

YAMM: It sounds like you're a mess.

Landru: I am nancy, hear me roar. Look, I'm fine, I made choices, choices have consequences, end of story.

YAMM: You're never going to do what Firedoglake wants if you keep up this self-indulgent whinging.

Landru: Fuck you. I don't want to do what Firedoglake wants. This is a vanity blog, pure and simple. It is a way of shouting to my friends that, even though I'm too fucking busy to be a human being any more, and part of that is self-imposed and part of it is because I'm dysfunctional and part of it is just fucking because, I'm still here and I still love them and I still sometimes have something to say that will make them snort coffee through their noses. Or not. So fuck off with the what other people want bullshit. This blog is a self-indulgence, and sometimes it's a reachout, and sometimes it's a reacharound, and other times it's just a granfalloon. Okay?

YAMM: Always a pleasure, Landru.

Landru: Oh, for fuck's sake, go do something useful, would you?

Teh Stupid

It's impossible (and not at all desirable) to be funny about the horrible events at Virginia Tech yesterday, so let's just make a point or two.

1. Giving guns to everyone does not prevent events such as those yesterday, you fucktard.

2. If you feel a need to shout that it's a terrorist act every time someone pulls the trigger of a gun in this country, you really need to re-examine your belief structure, you fucktard.

3. "Paki" is, in fact, a racial slur, Debbie Schussel, you malignant megafucktard, one you casually tossed about speculatively before anything was known about the shooter beyond that he was "Asian." I try not to even give idiots like you the time of day any more, but really, you're just too fucking stupid to be allowed to communicate. You fucktard.

4. There is nothing suspicious about the police taking their time to publicly release information about the shooter. While an investigation is developing, you, Mister Conspiracy Theorist, do not, in fact, have a right to know squadoosh, you fucktard.

5. Every jingoist Christian word you speak gives comfort and raison d'etre to those who are actually radical Islamists; stop shooting off your idiot mouth, you fucktard.

6. If you used the words "trained," "professional," or "military" in reference to the shooter yesterday, you possess the intelligence of a chunk of driftwood. You fucktard.

That is all.

Foma

I can't really talk about this.

This man had more sense than any two or three thousand of the rest of us put together. Idiots spew about Great Americans. People who know what Great Americans are will remember Kurt Vonnegut.

I shouldn't be sad. The man spent 62 years suiciding. Why should I begrudge him that supreme effort--dishonor it, really--by weeping my day away?

But I cannot come close to articulating how much this man influenced my entire system of belief, how he saturated my thought process. I am caught off balance by this (though I should not be), forced to examine my own life. I will not report to you on what I find.

It is worth remembering, on this day, that all namecalling can be reduced to this: there are those who truly believe that we have, or will, become Bokonon's heirs; and there are those who do not.

And now, if you will pardon me, I must go smoke a cigarette.

"The dilettantes ask for Pell-Mells."

The Tipping Point

We all experience the accumulation of idiocy in various forms, affecting various aspects of our lives, many of them trivial, some of them less so. I decided a while back that the genus of idiocy relating to politics and worldviews was one I no longer wanted to significantly engage in this blog. The thoroughgoing blindness and pervasive dishonesty of the other side just saps my soul. Should somebody engage them? Sure, somebody should, but I'm mostly not going to, and in so deciding, I forgo the right to an opinion on who should.

Yesterday's little dustup in Boston, though, is not possible for me to ignore; it is the tipping point of my rage on this issue. The "war" on terrorism is unadulterated bullshit. If you are not a law enforcement or intelligence official and you go around worrying about terrorism, you are either a complete fucking idiot, you are seeking an excuse to impose your brand of fascism on our country, or you are psychologically disturbed and should seek some help. Multiple choice is plausible.

Let me be abundantly clear about this: if you see a small electronic sign, one with blinking lights in a pattern that appears to be flipping you off, and your first thought is that you are looking at an explosive device? You need competent medical help. Seriously. It is not possible for a sane and rational person to look at this:

and think, "I am looking at a terrorist bomb." It's just not possible.

It would be easy to write this off to the stick up Boston's ass. We are talking about the descendants of the folks who brought you the Salem Witch Trials. Today's news bears this out; the two poor bastards hired by Turner Broadcasting to carry out its nefarious plot of using art installations as advertising are facing arraignment in Boston-area courts this morning, and city officials are acting like the company--and its temporary starving-artist hires--are actual agents of Al Qaida.

Let's set the terrorism thing straight: you, personally, are not going to die of terrorism. It ain't gonna happen. Let's take a look at the things that will kill you.

The World Health Organization estimates (and by the way, I worked on the book pictured on the linked page, there) that, in 2002 (the most recent year for which WHO has published data), there were about 291 million people in the United States (please forgive my national chauvinism if you're one of Minions' 0.135 non-U.S. readers). A little over 24 million of them died. That's about .08 percent of Americans. Eight tenths of one percent, eight out of every one thousand Americans, died that year (the actual figure is 831.7 deaths per hundred thousand population--I'm even willing to put the worst possible face on it and call it a whole nine out of a thousand).

That's a slim chance of dying to begin with, on the low side of the middle of the spectrum, around 80th in the world (191 countries are listed), a death rate most similar to that of, oddly enough, France. Our national death rate in 2002 was not very far from the global death rate of 918.5 deaths per hundred thousand population.

Various countries in Africa approach or exceed a death rate that triples ours. Stop. Think. Triples. Around 2.7 percent of the denizens of Sierra Leone (not a particularly safe country for humans, I grant) died in 2002.

So, when it comes to dying (at all--we haven't even gotten to terrorism yet), you have a middling advantage in that you are an American. You would do a bit better in any of a number of countries--including, interestingly enough, Israel and Syria--and significantly better in a handful of countries, all of them (with the exception of Brunei) oil-rich countries that border Saudi Arabia.

Why did people die in 2002? WHO classifies deaths by cause. Globally, about 26 percent of deaths in 2002 owed to infectious diseases of various sorts, 12 percent to cancers, a whopping 29 percent to cardiovascular diseases, and smatterings of 4 and 5 percent attributable to various other causes; 58 percent of deaths owed to causes classified as noncommunicable diseases, which subsumes everything not infectious or injurious.

Only 9 percent of deaths in 2002 owed to injuries, and of those, two-thirds were accidental in nature--traffic accidents, falls, drownings, and the like. Another 17 percent of injury-caused deaths were from self-inflicted injuries, meaning suicide. Only 1 percent of deaths (and it's almost exactly 1 percent) resulted from violence or war.

As a citizen of the world, you had less than a 1-percent chance of dying in 2002. If you died, there was only a 1-percent chance that you died from any violent cause--including terrorism.

As an American, your advantage here really kicks in, unless you're me. 87.5 percent of U.S. deaths in 2002 were caused by noncommunicable diseases--23 percent by cancers, 38 percent by cardiovascular diseases, with smatterings attributable to other disease-based causes. In the U.S., only 6.3 percent of deaths were attributable to injury, and of those, around 70 percent were accidental.

Roughly 157,000 Americans died of violence-related causes in 2002, less than six-tenths of one percent of all deaths. In 2002, you were seven times more likely to die from an accidental cause--itself not all that likely--than from any violent cause, including terrorism. Even if we take a liberty with the numbers and add in 5,000 terrorism-related deaths from 2001 into the totals, the incidences don't change significantly.

Now let's talk about preventable deaths. Well over half of cancer and cardiovascular deaths can be prevented. Compare the amount spent on preventing deaths from noncommunicable diseases to the amount spent on the so-called war on terror. No rational person can look at these proportions and think them appropriate.

Like I said, if you're scared of terrorism, you're either stupid, lying, or deeply troubled. If you're deeply troubled, I truly hope you can get some help for that--it's not surprising that, given the government's propaganda campaign of the last five years, people's heads are twisted by this issue. But if you're stupid or lying--and if you have a fear of terrorism for any reason other than some psychological disorder, you're one or both--just shut the fucking fuck up and consider a fact or two.

Obligatory Football

My friend Goth, a Bears fan, writes in another (secret) place that Da Bearss are going to "celebrate their victory" over America's former sweethearts by "killing some kittens and eating babies. With a fine chianti." His sentiment best encapsulates my feelings about the week-long slobber job that the Aints have enjoyed at the hands of the media, right up through their death throes in yesterday's game.

Let me clarify my base position. My wife, the lovely Ilse, calls herself both a Redskins fan and, at a secondary level, a Bears fan. Since this is mathematically impossible, and I have no way to address it without resorting to saying bad things about my wife, I have concluded that she's just stone fucking batshit. There's a Daddy thing here, too (he inexplicably taught her that this madness was okay), but I will leave this and continue to love my wife and her Daddy without reserve.

Like any actual Redskin fan, I hate the fucking Chicago Bears, in a primal, atavistic way. Ilse questions my sanity with the insouciance of those who can't manage to respect their elders, boggling that this atavistic hatred is based on events that occurred 20 years before I was born. Of course it is. That's what fandom is about. It's about carrying on traditions of hatin' and doing your level best to ensure that peace can never be restored--which, in the case of football, it should never be. The Bears' grandfathers once beat my grandfathers 73-0 in an NFL championship game--the game that saw the introduction of the T formation, by the way--and this can never be forgotten or forgiven. Ever. Do you fucking hear me, wife? Ever.

Understand, then, my dilemma of the last few weeks--of the whole season, really. I've actually had to hope that the reprehensible, T-Rex-to-my-mastodon, herpes-embracing, Grossman-loving, Ditka-worshipping punkass bitch Chicago Bears win football games. And it's been a unrelenting succession of no-brainers, because the Bears schedule has been an unrelenting succession of pansies and dickheads. I'm not trying to diss the Bears here; they've won two tough playoff games to get to the Stupor Bowl, so it's not like I'm saying they're undeserving. But until yesterday, the only team they played all season that approached minimal competence was the Seahawks, and "minimally competent" is a pretty dubious assertion even there.

Not that I haven't enjoyed this. That bizarro Monday night game when the Bears nearly choked on the fucking Cardinals was one of the most entertaining evenings of my life, mostly because I had no real stake (I hate the Buzzsaw with a passion born of remembering well when they were division rivals of the Skins) and got to fan the flames of my wife's twitching, spastic nervous breakdown. That shit is what we call pure comedy gold, ladies and gentlemen.

Which brings us to yesterday. We only got to watch the first half on television, because we had to make a 5-hour journey into the winter wonderland of the DC metro area to go fetch the childrens. But the one thing that CBS and Westwood One (the radio carrier) had in common was their shared love of gobbling the penii of Sean Peyton, Reggie Bush, and Mamasboy Brees. I thought Bob Trumpy (Westwood One's color guy) was gonna have to take a shower after Bush's touchdown catch/run (which, courtesy of YouTube, I now understand was a really fucking dumb thing to do--can you imagine a world where taunting a diseased felon like Brian Urlacher is a good idea? Conveniently, Trumpy and his radio broadcast didn't tell us about that part of the play.).

This, coupled with the week-long suckfest that has been your American sports media, pushed me way over the edge into open, unabashed Bear-loving. When former Dallas Cowgirl (NEVER FORGET!) Billy Cundiff missed a figgie and the Bears subsequently went up 18-14 on Brees' badly timed grounding, the radio guys still swore that the Aints had the momentum and the Bears were foundering on the rocks. Perfectly content with not having been paid in advance, these morons kept slobbering away until the very end, hoping for that yummy, humiliating money shot. Pack of fucking diseased whores.

We missed most of the other game, too, although we got home in time to see the part that counted and, more importantly, the look on Dreamboat's face when the Colts went up for good. The Patriots and Manning-bashing are another pair of playoff-time media sex obsessions. I've told you that I'm not a Manning fan (and I don't like his coach or his team, either), but to pretend that yesterday's result wasn't righteous is to admit that one is a pure Patriots fan. If that's what you are, fine, you're entitled to it. But owing to its perpetuity, the annual media suckoff of Dreamboat and Homeless Bill is far more galling than their temporary insanity over the Aints. It was also pretty satisfying that the game's outcome revealed what a mannerless piece of fuck Belichick is. His appallingly rude postgame snub of Manning and his monosyllabic interview outside of the locker room after the game were classics of childish passive-aggression. Homeless Bill is a cast-iron fuckhole who should be punched in the fucking mouth.

Who to pull for in the big game? I'll save myself the tsuras and sort of half-assedly support the Bears. The whole thing will be a bit of a yawn for me unless I make my own entertainment. But with Mister Laser Rocket Arm and the Jizzmeister competing for my satirical energy, I ought to be able to get somewhere with that.

Gained In Translation

My friend Blondie from Texas commented after yesterday's post about never expecting to see bunny pics on this site. Because I am such a keen observer of womens' wants and needs, I have successfully translated Blondie's comment thusly: "Please post more bunny pictures. Bunnies make me hot."

Here you go, Blondie:

The pink bunnies are named Ann. The yellow bunnies are named Michelle. The purple bunny is named Liberal Faggot AntiChrist. There's a-gonna be a lynchin'.

These bunnies are cruising for tail. Ann and Michelle say, "You're next, gaymos."

These bunnies look like America. Ann and Michelle hate that. Especially Michelle. She's third from the right, on the bottom row. Note her white ears.

These bunnies look like rats.

These bunnies have been eaten by a cat.

These bunnies make it burn when I pee. Quite a lot, actually.

These bunnies are called the Lonestar Bunnies, which would make them Blondie's neighbors. I'd be deeply concerned about that, if I was Blondie.

These bunnies are going to fuck you up. Seriously.

Remember, kids. Don't look for the shoutout. The shoutout looks for you. It worked for Blondie, right?

You Piss Me Off

I am sometimes asked this:

"Andy, why are you such an angry and bitter little man?"

Of course, I am rarely asked this more than once by the same person, although there are those with pretty flat learning curves. Mom comes to mind. My mother, that is, not our Mom?, who is a perceptive fellow and understands the response range associated with such a question, having no small challenge in the area of emotional response-suppression his ownself.

I digress, of course, because that's what I do.

There is no simple answer to the question, although like everything, it probably goes back to some weird environmental thing that occurred between the ages of four and seventeen and is therefore almost certainly BdR's fault. BdR and I are verging on 35 years of friendship, no small accomplishment given what incredible honking jackasses each of us has managed to be during occasional years of those 35, and considering how very, very few other things have attained any sort of permanency for either of us--the few that come to mind are my smoking and his not ripping baby bunnies to shreds with his bare hands at mealtime.

BdR neither asks nor wonders why I am such an angry little man, because he's angrier about some of the same stuff, and not-at-all angry about more stuff. And the stuff I'm angry about, he understands perfectly fine, having had most of a geological age to study its development. It is likely enough that he will comment on this post to tell you something cryptic and funny about my anger, and you will laugh. It's remotely possible that he will enlighten you, although I doubt it. It's not like he's your fucking monkey or something.

Of course, it all goes back to parents, because everything does, yes? I'm not here to say bad stuff about my parents, who did, after all, a pretty good job of escaping the weird strictures of having been young adults when Eisenhower was President. Life had to have been pretty odd back then, even for people whose minds were relatively open to the massive cultural and social changes of the times.

This is not to say I'm not angry at my parents. Dad and I handle it pretty well, recognizing a common strain when we see one. My mother and I are handling it better than we used to; she niggles at me about why I'm so uncomfortable around her, and I scream, "Because you're a goddam Nazi control freak, Mom, why don't you just Fuck the Fucking Fuck Off and worry about your own Fucking Shit for a Fucking change, BITCH!"

Then we just talk about politics. I mean, all I wanted was a Pepsi.

This post is dedicated to Psyche, talky-talk doc extraordinaire.

Personal Growth

Owing to strict adherence to my personal principles, I had managed, for over 45 years, to avoid cleaning up other persons' medical waste. My principles have been heretofore bolstered, late in my thus-far life, by an Ironclad No-Diapers Policy, under which I get to periodically bang Ilse like a screen door in a hurricane at a cost not involving really even thinking about little Bam-Bam's diapers, except to the extent that the little poop machine occasionally makes me wrinkle my nose with one of his less pleasant deeds. And it's a net benefit to Ilse on those rare occasions when I'm around to notice such things, because honestly? Her sense of smell ain't all that sharp. Not so I could count on it; I mean, I only hang out in strip clubs where the dancers don't wear perfume.

All things must pass, however, and yesterday, phony history and Ilse's parents conspired to topple my principles like a statue in Dzerzhinsky Square (also known, apparently, as Lubyanka Square--who knew that Iron Feliks merely lent a nickname to this place beloved of Ian Fleming and Tom Klancy?).

See? That's real history, albeit of a populist sort. Columbus Day, while no less populist, is certainly a welcome holiday, but hardly much of a commemoration of real history. The guy found islands. The guy never really knew where the hell he was. The guy got run out of Italy (whose American sons and daughters now embrace him fervidly on the second Monday of each October, and well they might, given the bounty of Americanness which has descended upon the millions of descendants of Italian immigrants to this country) and basically soaked the Queen of Spain for a job. He died syphilitic and useless. Okay, I made up that last sentence, but given the prevailing winds of the times, I estimate a 70-percent chance that it's actually true. I'm sure that Minions' official history grad student will be along to advise on this shortly, having earned beaucoup bonus points with his agreeable assessment of this writer's theories--dismissed by many of you as purely Frenchified lunacy--about George Washington. Who has a holiday of sorts, too.

Columbus Day, then, deserves a certain amount of disrepect as a holiday. We don't go around hammering this home on our fervidly Italian friends; why rock their boat? They're entitled to their worldview, and I'm entitled to an official U.S. Government holiday. Everyone can remain happy without causing anger and hurt and conflict. Which are bad.

Even schools in My Local Neighboring State of Gilead respect this holiday. As do day-care centers. Sadly, this lofty example is not followed by many Gilead employers, including Ilse's. This left a slight void in the child-care department, since Databoy and Bam-Bam, Ilse's wee persons, are not noted for their ability to sustain themselves.

Fortunately, this void was filled by Ilse's parents, to whom I shall decline to assign a moniker. They were able to watch the Ilseissue until about mid-afternoon, but were on their way to somewhere and had to be gone by then. So I stepped in to care for the little crackers, because I am, after all, The Good Boyfriend.

Upon my arrival, Mrs. Ilse's Mom told me that little Bam-Bam's personal hygiene system had just been cleaned and recharged, and I greeted this news with much joy and glee and salaaming. I even promised, silently, to be nice to the Jesus for a short time in honor of Mrs. Ilse's Mom, who thinks that such things are important.

And I was nice to the Jesus for a short time, refraining from throwing Databoy, Ilse's smartass punk seven-year-old who thinks he's unassailably cute, out of any windows or other egresses for a good 15-20 minutes after his grandparents/bodyguards left town.

In truth, the little peckerwood was reasonably well-behaved, needing no corporal punishment and only one short term of imprisonment during my stewardship, and that only after a half hour of very nearly good behavior preceded his sudden and unexpected infraction. Usually, Databoy is a slow learner, but his seven-minute confinement convinced him that his most reliable forms of verbal communication were limited to "Yes, SIR!" and "No, SIR" and "I don't know, SIR!" For Databoy, this is the equivalent of monkeys speaking Mandarin, so we're gonna put that one in the win column.

We played our version of living-room soccer, which consists of Databoy trying to hit a target with a soft soccer miniball while I guard said target from a thoroughly encouched position. Databoy thinks this is soccer, and pretends to be his hero, Brian Carroll.

Yeah, everything's a fucking conspiracy, innit?

Bam-Bam, who is five and is, as you may know or recall, autistic, spent his time weaving through the room, or off in his own room, bouncing and shrieking. Bam-Bam is built like a linebacker/tight end/fullback--I can't decide yet which role he'll best fulfill, but the need to settle that just now isn't great--and likes to do about five things: shriek, run, bounce, chew on or play with strings, and eat. This last, of course, has consequences.

After a time, I noticed a rubbery odor. I ascribed this to the fact that Bam-Bam was chewing on three rubber bands, the closest thing to strings upon which he could manage to lay his grimy little paws yesterday. But after a time, he began to emit demanding shrieks that were not diminished by offerings of grape juice and potato chips. I investigated and discovered that my time was at hand.

I'll leave the details to clinicians. Suffice it to say that this was a five, count 'em, FIVE babywipe event. I emptied the babywipes box and started a new one, which created a convenient depository for the remains of the day. Later, upon hefting the hermetically sealed package, Ilse pronounced a birth mass of about five pounds. For my part, I am convinced that priceless hoards of Japanese war gold discovered in the Philippines have weighed less.

I recovered from the sensory assault in time to choke down some dinner. And it is actually moderately horrifying, in a tribal responsibility sort of sense, that I managed to go 45 years without changing a diaper. But I am no longer entertained by my own farts. Little Bam-Bam's weapons of mass destruction have robbed me of my innocence.

Corrections

Minions tries ever so hard to be a responsible purveyor of information and analysis. Like any provider, we of course make the occasional mistake, which we're quite certain we deeply regret. We gather from all manner of places the news that we transmit to you, and in the journalistic arena, we're only as good as our sources. This sometimes necessitates some corrections.

Yesterday, we reported that Sean Hannity sucks sailors' cocks because he enjoys the taste of syphillis. What we meant to say was that Sean Hannity rapes children because he believes that intercourse with virgins will cure his syphilis. While Minions comes from an Army family, we nonetheless regret, in all likelihood, this error, and do apologize to the United States Navy, just this once.

We also reported that Matt Drudge requires 40 "midgets" to jizz in his hat each morning. This was an editorial error caused by our failure to sanitize the information we received; we meant to say, of course, that Mr. Drudge procures the ejaculate of some 40 persons of extremely diminutive physical stature to prepare his hat for the day's labours. We also neglected to report that he milks these shorter persons with his own lithe fingers. We're really quite sure that we regret this emission. Omission. Whatever.

Finally, we reported that Edward Klein was fired from the Times for killing a transvestite hooker in that institution's august cafeteria. We meant no offense with our selection of the word "hooker"; we have nothing but the greatest respect for this great Nation's transgendered sex workers and apologize to them sincerely.

We are investigating separately allegations that Mr. Klein murdered the prostitute in a broom closet, and will, if necessary, issue a revised correction.