Category Archives: Life In These United States

Life In These United States, Self-Righteous Rants

Epic Fail: Lunch Edition

Today I ate the worst sandwich ever made. I am sure of it.

Sure, Turkish prison food is probably worse, if Midnight Express is any indication. I bet there’s some street food in Mumbai or Caracas that’ll make you doubt the existence of God. In a purely qualitatively way, this sandwich was not worse than these things, or any other filthy comparison you could conjure up.

This was the worst sandwich ever made in the way that Plan 9 from Outer Space and Manos: The Hands of Fate are the worst movies ever made. There are worse movies, but their failure is not compelling. Plan 9 and Manos fail in such grotesquely unique ways that you can’t help but watch the whole cinematic train wreck.

Ever head home really late after drinking too much, but by the time you get home you’re starting to sober up? So you decide wolf down some food before you go to bed so you won’t have too bad of a hangover the next morning? And while you’re waiting for a Hot Pocket to heat up in the microwave, you turn on HBO and they’re showing The Wicker Man? And you sit down and watch it, and you find out it’s even more insane in non-You Tube form?
So you stay up way, way too late, knowing you’re going to totally feel like shit at work the next day, because you just have to see how Nicolas Cage is gonna up the retard quotient in scene after scene?

If so, you will understand me when I say that this sandwich was so monstrously awful that I had to keep eating it.

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Life In These United States

This Plan Is So Stupid, It Has to Work!

Years ago, there was an article in the Onion entitled, “Romantic-Comedy Behavior Gets Real-Life Man Arrested”. As with most late-90s Onion material, it was letter-perfect in its execution. Movies routinely depict characters doing things that would get an actual person some serious jail time. Or at the very least, would not be considered brave or charming, but just downright creepy.

The Onion article was the first thing I thought of when I read this story in The New York Times. The “plot” reads like a bad 80s action movie starring Patrick Swayze (I realize this sentence is redundant). Except instead of becoming the most famous bouncer in America, the protagonist of this story gets a lot of people thrown in jail, ruins a whole bunch of reputations, and inspires millions of dollars in lawsuits.

A federal agent calling himself Sergeant Bill showed up in a small town in Missouri, an area plagued by a methamphetamine problem (in your SAT drug analogies, meth : rural
America :: crack : ghetto). Sergeant Bill vowed to clean up this one-horse town, and the town, which had applied for federal law enforcement grants, was grateful for his help. With the help of local police, he used strongarm tactics to put the dealers out of business
(this is where you’d put the montage of bad guys getting busted). Peace and quiet returned to this sleepy village.

Except a few months into his crusade, it turned out that the “federal agent” was nothing of the sort. Sergeant Bill had deceived local police and politicians through a labyrinthine series of ruses, aided by some collaboration and childlike levels of gullibility. Sergeant Bill had no federal connections whatsoever. He wasn’t even being paid by anyone. He just showed up in the town to smash some drug dealers’ skulls, and the entranced local officials followed him merrily as if he were the Pied Piper of Ass Kicking.

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Life In These United States, Parental Guidance

Playing Catch-Up

Hello, and happy new year to all. As will become abundantly clear, the post below was written before Xmas. I never got a chance to post it, so now here it is in all its outdated glory. Enjoy, and I will have more timely stuff posted very very soon.

The Baby has made a few forays into Outer Space (= Not The Living Room) in her first few weeks on planet earth, but most of these trips have been to relatives’ houses. Friendly territory, where she gets poked and prodded and photographed until her psychological defense mechanisms kick in and render her catatonic. So we thought it might be a good idea to toughen the girl up, get her out of the house and acquainted with the evil world that will one day crush her fragile spirit once she’s sufficiently cognizant to realize its true depths. Fun!

My original plan was to teach her some survival skills. We would drive out to the Meadowlands and drop her off in a tied-up sack with a map and some C-rations, to see if she could find her way home. But The Wife suggested that this might be seen as child abuse.

So we did something more acceptable to society but no less cruel–we took her to the mall. We had Xmas shopping to do, and there’s only so many people you can buy hilariously ironic eBay gifts for. “Here, Uncle Phil, have this Lucky Strike ad clipped out of 1954 issue of Collier’s. It’s funny ‘cuz it’s old!”

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