“I know. It’s not easy,” Ariana said, shaking her head. She hugged her notebooks to her chest and curled her slim shoulders in against the wind, her chin tucked down so it was almost hidden behind the books. “But if you’re going to put something on a page and ask people to read it, you have to be able to handle the criticism.”

“I guess,” I said as we reached the front door to Billings. “It just seemed mean.”

Not taking the bait.

I totally forgot I was making eggs…, originally uploaded by Lintilla.

I’m a little absent minded these days.

Oh well.

More booze.

More pills.

More hours and hours of tedious, torturous audiobooks about vampires by Stephanie Meyer.

I am addicted to pain.

Ugh, I just got to the part where she tries clumsily to write dialogue between two teenagers deciding whether or not to have sex.

I very nearly vomited.

So, so, so very awful. I didn’t think the writing could get more torturous. I hope nobody was looking at my face while I was listening to that garbage on the bus. I must have looked ghastly.

(Synonyms for ghastly: grim, grisly, gruesome, hideous, horrible, horrid, lurid, macabre… If I was Meyer, I would be using each one three times in the next paragraph. That woman must have hours of fun hitting [Shift]-[F7] in Microsoft Word.) (Remind you to post a [Shift]-[F7]-encoded secret message post here sometime in the near future… it was a favourite game back in grade school…)

Plus, that Edward fuck is a dick, prick, cocky sonnuvabitch penis wiener, and Bella is dumb as rocks. The entire plot is so unbearably obvious (almost as unbearably beautiful as Edward, whose beauty is too beautiful to bear), and they take pages and pages and pages and pages to figure out the simplest of things. It’s infuriating. It makes me clench my fists nearly 1% as often as the characters in the books do, so… yeah, that’s a lot of fist clenching.

Gives me something better to be infuriated about than having to go to work, I guess?

And still, I gotta keep up with what the kids are into…

I’m going to go try to cook something edible now.

“You feel chilled because you have no character. You’re a depressing assemblage of pop culture influences and cancelled emotions, driven by the sputtering engine of only the most banal form of capitalism. You spend your life feeling as if you’re perpetually on the brink of being obsolete — whether it’s labour market obsolescence or cultural unhipness. And it’s all catching up with you. You live and die by the development cycle. You’re glamorized drosophila flies, with the company regulating your life cycles at whim. If it isn’t a budget-driven eighteen-month game production schedule, it’s a five-year hardware obsolescence schedule. Every five years you have to throw away everything you know and learn a whole new set of hardware and software specs, relegating what was once critical to our lives to the cosmic slag heap.”

Says Douglas Coupland in “jPod”. He also keeps making references to himself, and really, it’s pretty annoying. Yeah, yeah, Coupland. You’re some kind of Generation X icon. Sure. You invented the term Generation X. Whatever. It’s still kind of… I don’t know which word I’m looking for. Sleazy is close, but doesn’t feel quite right. Tacky? Cheap? Anyway. I keep sneering at my book. Self referencing sure is… meta… or something. And by “or something”, I mean gay.

Other than that, though… pretty good book so far.

Weeeeeeeeeoooooowwweeeeeoooooowwwweeeeeeeoooo!!!

Blah blah blah. Richard Dawkins on Colbert, yo.

Now. More nog! And chocolate!

I thought I’d link to it again because a) “Kevin Trudeau” is the number two search term used to find my website (second only to “nautical star tattoos” — and kids, bad idea = getting the new trendy symbol marked on you, because: do you know how long trends last? now, do you know how long tattoos last? compare your answers here…), and b) I still feel irresponsible for having access to a television station’s copy of this bullshit without so much as “misplacing” it when I quit. I feel a little bit better to know that nobody watched anything that station aired except for The 700 Club and American Idol. But somebody managed to get the book out of Walgreens, and I still feel compelled to write at least 47 letters of complaint. Maybe not until I acquire a typewriter and become at least 5% more curmudgeonly. I mean, I’m already curmudgeonly, but not so much that it overcomes my affinity for doing absolutely nothing…

One day I hope to become at least as curmudgeonly (er, pseudo-curmudgeonly) as Ted L. Nancy, Lazlo Toth (Don Novello) or these guys. So far, I have only one cat. I’m aiming to collect at least 27 more.

P.S.

Curmudgeonly.

Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. The argument goes like this: “I refuse to prove that I exist”, says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.”

“But”, says Man, “the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.”

“Oh dear”, says God, “I hadn’t thought of that,” and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

Ah, Douglas Adams… He was very much ahead of the times.

But, wait. Nevermind. Intelligent Design has nothing to do with God, religion or faith. It’s a good thing, because if they screw up one of these days and accidentally stumble upon some real facts or evidence, it would denigrate their presupposed beliefs to the level of despicable, despicable science…

[EDIT]: Okay, well. Ack. Douglas Adams was ahead of his time, and is probably also rolling in his grave. I’ve seen people quote the passage above to make fun of Intelligent Design before, but a Google search reveals that these IDiots are also using it as an allegory to demonstrate their argument (they really don’t know a joke when they see one, huh). Asshats. Hands off! You have your Good Book, and I have mine.

Also, they struggle with the very issue DNA pointed out. What is God without faith? And OMG! What would happen if Intelligent Design actually did prove God! Wouldn’t that undermine Christianity? There are more than a few people out there that think this, and if they’re going to believe something stupid anyway, I fully support this viewpoint, because at least they’ll stop bullshitting about science. Because seriously. Proof is dangerous! Belief that isn’t based on irrational superstition doesn’t count, because faith should be enough, they say. And I’m sorry, but once I’m given facts, they’re going to take precedence over everything else. Therefore, evidence for ID would prevent me from ever having faith, and probably condemn me to hell. They don’t want that, do they?

Yeah, I’m not going to read any more about this right now. I hate the “we don’t need no steenking facts” argument. This is why run away from preachy religious types. Even if you finally get them to accept that there’s no way they’re going to convince you of anything without facts to back things up, and to admit that they really don’t have any facts, they just start ranting about how you’re being stubborn and shallow to require them in the first place. And how do you argue with someone who’s essentially saying “Hi! I’m full of shit, and I’m better than you because of it!”

I have to return that DVD now, anyway.

This is my favourite part of the infomercial:

There are health freedoms in this country that are being taken away from us. There are more people sick today than ever before. There are more people that are overweight. There are more people that have diabetes. There are more people that have cancer. There are more people that have heart disease. There are more people that have migraine headaches. There are more people that have arthritis. There are more people that have virtually every major health abnormality.

Yes, Kevy. There are more people. Period. Point, plz? He sounds like enough of an idiot here even before anyone gets around to pointing out anything about better diagnosis or treatment of these diseases (i.e. nobody had epilepsy in the 16th century, when it was so obvious at the time that the symptoms were caused by demons (also the cause of just about every other disease, I’m sure), and that the cure was exorcism — that’s an increase in the number of cases of oh… infinity percent), or that people are also living longer than ever before… Yes, it’s so obvious. Modern medicine is failing us. Miserably.

Which reminds me how happy I am that I no longer work at Fox. I will never again have to watch 12 infomercials over a weekend, Fox News Sunday, or The 700 Club. We all know that I still will, because I just love getting myself angry… but I don’t have to anymore. I am doing a little dance of joy right now, but you can’t see it.