Human Jukebox

He has little plastic groupies, too.

Ah, poor Thanksgiving – sandwiched between big consumer holidays Halloween and Christmas, it always gets overlooked in the media frenzy. It’s just not a very easy holiday to promote. How can advertisers put a price tag on a holiday devoted to counting your blessings and appreciating your family? They can’t, because people who are thankful and appreciative can’t be duped into thinking they need to spend $150 on an indoor lawn for lapdogs to shit on or a quick and easy way to get drunk. Thus, Thanksgiving is left in the cold while corporations and their ad men think of the best ways to convince us to turn our house into a frightening demonic horrorfest and then, two months later, a beautiful birthday tribute for Jesus.

The Christmas gift ads have started running already, and just like last year I can’t help but be appalled at the sort of crap they’re trying to get us to buy our kids. This is nothing new – capitalism gone awry chaps my caboose all year round, but a few days ago I saw a commercial that made me realize just how blogworthy this year’s Christmas shopping season is.

Front and center, Pop Tunes Big Rocker Guitar.

There was a time when if you wanted to be a rockstar you’d get a guitar, learn to play it, grab some friends, rehearse in their garage, play in a few bars for about six months, talk about moving to L.A. to try and get things off the ground, never do it, sell your instruments to pay the electric bill, get an associate’s degree in business, and go to work as a mattress salesman, doomed to spend the rest of your days saying words like “Sealy” and “Postur-Pedic” while wistfully wondering why you didn’t try to shoot the moon with your rock band and faintly humming the ballad from that rock opera you sort of wrote while you and your lead singer were drunk in his Mom’s basement. Yeah, it’s a crushing, depressing experience, but at least you sort of learned how to play the guitar!

Kids these days (and by that I mean “People my age”) have cut out the middle man with Guitar Hero and Rockband, games that simulate the experience of playing in a Guns ‘n Roses cover band from the comfort of your own home. Nowadays, rather than dropping out of school or quitting their jobs to play rock music, people are fitting it nicely into the fabric of their social lives by working out those impulses on a video game – and sometimes they aren’t even drunk! The same experience I related in the above Faulkneresque sentence could play out with a copy of Guitar Hero; the only difference being that the hopeless losers in question didn’t even try to dream big in the first place, and in the end they still don’t know how to play guitar. It’s sort of like “The Man” has taken that which he couldn’t conquer and made it “safe” by turning it into a toy.

But Jesus, look at me go on. I certainly don’t have anything against Guitar Hero – it’s pretty fun to play at parties and it’s certainly a lot healthier than the ultraviolent first person shooter games that I tend to play. My problem with Guitar Hero isn’t with the people who play it recreationally, but with the people who treat it like it’s an actual musical instrument; namely the kid who learned how to play the speed metal classic “Through The Fire and the Flames” with 95% accuracy. All the time those people invested in learning to push buttons in the correct order to replicate popular songs written by others could have been invested in something different – something, say, creative rather than imitative? God only knows what would have happened if there had been Harpsichord Hero in Mozart’s day.

But I digress – Pop Tunes Big Rocker Guitar. It’s a plastic toy guitar that, when your kid presses the right buttons, will either make musical note-esque sounds or play one of five predetermined songs, such as “Message in a Bottle”, “Wild Thing”, or “Love Shack”. Yes, that’s right; “Love Shack”, by the B-52s. This toy designed for toddlers and infants plays “Love Shack”.

I mean, “Love Shack” is about an orgy. It’s about a score of big-haired 80s hipsters going to a house in the woods and just fucking each other all damn weekend. It’s a five minute long ode to doin’ it. For crying out loud, one of the lyrics is, “Huggin’ and a kissin’, dancin’ and a lovin’, wearin’ next to nothin’”. There’s no ambiguity as to what that means. There’s no symbolism here. This is not American Pie.*

*This isn’t the first time people have tried to repurpose rock and roll as family friendly. Carnival Cruise Lines steadfastly uses Iggy Pop’s “Lust For Life” in its commercials about happy families having the time of their life in the Caribbean, despite the fact that it’s a song about being a heroin addict. That being said, I’m sure snorkeling with dolphins is about a thousand times cooler when you’re on heroin.

Now, as a youngster I listened to “Love Shack” a lot – my parents and their oft-played 80s dance mix tape are probably to blame for that, but it didn’t have any negative effects on me (depending, that is, on your definition of the term “20-year-old man”). The fact that 3-year-olds will soon be jamming out to “Love Shack” isn’t what I find so amusing, it’s the fact that we’re essentially training our toddlers for their future Guitar Hero “careers”.

I’m pretty sure I had a toy xylophone when I was a little kid, and there is grainy video evidence to prove that I was fully capable of playing one incredibly annoying note on my plastic recorder. These toys were simple, sure, and they may have gotten on my parents’ nerves some or a lot of the time, but the annoying noises I made with them were mine and mine alone. There wasn’t a button I could push that would make “Comfortably Numb” come out of my recorder; I had no choice but to make unique, original, and usually ear splitting music. The Pop Tunes Big Rocker Guitar embraces some of that Creativity by having a “free play” button, but then it punches the Creativity in the kidneys by turning itself into a radio. As we speak, Creativity is pissing blood while three-year-olds get a head start on pretending they’re Sting.

But on the other hand, my parents gave me toy musical instruments and right now my primary musical outlet is a 200-piece band that plays instrumental covers of rock and pop songs. You know what? Nevermind. Go stock up on Pop Tunes Big Rocker Guitars – even if you don’t have a kid, buy one in case you have a kid later. Hell, buy two.

Truman Capps knows that if he had his chance, that he could make those people dance, and maybe they'd be happy for awhile...

Facebook Psychology

As seen in the Oregon Daily Emerald!

It’s a generally accepted social practice that, when someone walks up to you and asks how you’re doing, you always lie to them at least a little. This is because nobody actually wants to know how you’re doing, they just want to show you that they care enough to ask. That’s why you bend – or perhaps break – the truth when you reply by saying that you’re doing pretty well, thanks. When my friends say, “Truman! How’re you doing?” I don’t say, “Well, at the moment I’m really worried that I might have appendicitis. I mean, my appendix doesn’t hurt or anything, but I read on Wikipedia that sometimes appendicitis doesn’t have symptoms, so your appendix just gets bigger and bigger without you knowing until it bursts and you die. So I’m sort of worried about that right now. But how’re you doing?” Sometimes, there are just things we don’t want to know about each other.

On Facebook, however, we do not pay one another same courtesies that we do in real life. For example, outside of Facebook I don’t run around Poking people – if I want to convince someone to have sex with me, I’ll find a more effective method than that. In much the same way, it seems that the time honored “Lie about how you’re really doing” rule does not carry over from real life to Facebook.

One of Facebook’s many features is the “Status” bar, which you can edit to tell the Internet how you’re feeling and what you’re up to. Facebook users find many applications for this tool: some explain what they’re actually doing as though we care, others put up inside jokes, and still others fill this space with song lyrics in an attempt to seem deep and vaguely meaningful. There are a few people in my network, however, who take the Status bar much too seriously. To these people, the prompt “What are you doing right now?” is an honest, caring question from their good friend Facebook, and they answer it truthfully.

“_____ is crying right now because its like drew nods & smiles but just doesnt understand!! :-(”

“_____ just wishes she would GROW UP already i mean jesus”

“_____ really wants sarah to call because he can totally explain it ok??? why do you always just assume stuff about me omg”

Since when did Facebook become a psychiatrist? It’s one thing to update your status to say that you’re feeling down in the dumps, but turning your Status bar into a political attack ad makes it really awkward for everyone else on Facebook who happens to be on the outside of the issue. It’s like going over to a friend’s house for dinner as a child and seeing his or her parents have a noisy argument at the table – you don’t know whether to watch or pretend to not notice, but you do know that it’s an uncomfortable experience you’d just as soon forget.

I’m not trying to tell you what you can and can’t do with your Facebook. All I’m saying is that when you’re angry at someone and are considering turning your profile into a billboard declaring your angst, step back and ask yourself whether you want all of your friends and casual acquaintances to become acquainted with your personal problems as well. In the long run, I think you’ll appreciate the extra second’s thought, and I’m pretty sure your friends will too.

Writers - Episodes 1 and 2

"Aw, come on, Rocko! Any idiot can get on television!" - Heffer, Rocko's Modern Life.

It took us seven months from conception to uploading, but now my aforementioned public access masterpiece is complete. Tonight, please enjoy the first two of our six episodes. Gentlemen... Behold!*

*Women who are nursing or may become pregnant should not view Writers. Do not watch Writers while taking prescription sleepaids or MAO Inhibitors. Side effects of Writers are mostly just diarrhea.

Episode 1



Episode 2



Truman Capps expects you to be so wowed by his TV show that you won't hold him accountable for not actually writing anything tonight.

Ethics of Fandom

As seen in the Oregon Daily Emerald!

The start of this article is a lot like an earlier update I made here about football - forgive me, but I was facing a deadline and figured that plagiarizing from myself made a lot more sense than being creative.

College football is an oddly pagan experience. Just about every Saturday, tens of thousands of people fill up a giant stadium for several hours in order to watch two groups of strong men beat one another up to gain possession of a ball that is ostensibly made of a pig’s skin. On the sidelines, women dance suggestively, people prance around in animal costumes, and hundreds of musicians bang on drums and blow horns in support of the whole affair.

Oh, how I love it!

More and more it seems as if football is one of our last unifying cultural institutions. Sure, we’ve got movies, TV, and religion, but nothing gets people out of their houses and into the rain and cold like a good game of football. For proof, all you have to do is drive down I-5 on a Saturday. Those hundreds of cars aren’t full of people going to church or to see “Madagascar 2” – they’re going to jostle into an uncomfortable seat, eat expensive food, and take part in the common goal of yelling until their team wins.

As a member of the Oregon Marching Band, I’ve been to every home game for the past two seasons, and if I’ve learned anything, it’s that we have some very devoted fans in the student section; devoted, that is, to the art of drinking. Don’t get me wrong: the majority of the fans I see in the student section are really dedicated to the game and support of the team, and whether they’re drunk at the time or not is of little importance. However, I’ve noticed a few things happening during the football games that I consider unacceptable when compared to the general drunken debauchery of an Oregon home game.

I think that the Pac-10 has some of the worst refs in the country. In both football and basketball I’ve routinely watched them make ludicrous and biased calls, time and again, and I’ve never hesitated to shout my opinions about their officiating ability at them in the wake of these errors. I consider it “deconstructive criticism”. But on the rare occasion that they make a call against my team that is justified, I sit on my hands, because for once they’re actually doing their jobs right. This is why I’m dismayed to hear the crowd booing refs for making legitimate calls against the Ducks – no team plays perfectly, so don’t act like we do.

I suppose I can understand the overzealous booing of the referees; after all, we’re eager to support our team. But if that’s the case, I can’t understand why the isles start to fill with departing fans once it becomes clear that the game is, for all intents and purposes, over. Supporting your team is about being there for them until the end, win or lose, rain or shine. That’s what makes the game exciting: knowing that, should we lose, you will face an embarrassing walk past the other team’s jubilant fans, but that, if we win, the subsequent gloating will be all the sweeter for your dedication.

What is most appalling and unacceptable, though, is when I see our fans booing our team for fumbles or poorly executed plays. If you want to boo the refs unilaterally, great. If you want to leave early, there’s nothing stopping you. But if you see your own team falter on the field and start booing them for it in the time that they most need your support, you need to seriously reconsider your motives for going to the football game in the first place. To boo your own team in their home stadium just doesn’t make you look like a two-faced idiot, it makes all of us look like two-faced idiots.

So yes, football is paganistic. But that’s no reason to be a savage.

Barbershop

I was nowhere near awesome enough to get my hair cut here.

Back when I lived in Salem, I would get my hair cut at Don’s Barber Shop, a humble business that made its home in a tiny strip mall across the street from a much larger strip mall. Don’s was a throwback to the classic barbershops of old – there were five worn leather chairs, one wooden bench that was uncomfortable as it was long, and a low table in front of it littered with magazines that featured articles about the best hunting knife with which to skin a deer. Most of the clientele were old, and all of them were male. We patrons of Don’s Barber Shop were a solemn brotherhood of men united by a single goal: Shorter hair.

Seeing as I named my blog after the cult status of my hair, you the reader can surely imagine how highly I value a good barbershop. My hair is unruly – it is thick like molasses, and upon delving into it with scissors and a comb one will be quick to discover a labyrinth of cowlicks and perhaps a family of gnomes. Indeed, while most people need only a mere barber, I require someone who can truly break my hair’s wild nature and tame it; a Hair Whisperer, if you will. These intrepid masters of the craft are not so easy to find. I once made the grave mistake of trusting an Axe-scented, sideways baseball cap wearing, scissor wielding buffoon with the care of my hair, which resulted in me looking like an Eastern European refugee for the next month.

Over the years I discovered a great many Hair Whisperers at Don’s – there was my first barber, Don (yes, that Don) who died of a heart attack, to be followed by Jeremiah, a lanky man with a lazy eyeball who I later found out carried a handgun at all times, and, after I was too scared to go to Jeremiah again, Clive, who was a great barber up until he stole all the money out of the cash register one night and was arrested halfway to Washington. As you can see, cutting my hair takes severe toll on a man.

In Portland, I’ve found a reliable Hair Whisperer in Barber Dan, a former military barber who steadfastly refuses to take my hair’s shit. He is professional and efficient; there is little small talk. To make idle chit-chat with him while he does battle with my hair would be like talking to He-Man while he’s locked in combat with Skeletor, only He-Man doesn’t run the risk of an embarrassingly botched haircut. As great as Barber Dan is, though, I spend most of my time in Eugene, and it’s not even worth trying to find a Hair Whisperer in a city full of hippies who haven’t had a haircut since Cat Stevens converted to Islam.

So usually I just wait until I go home to get a haircut, which tends to get dicey toward the last few weeks of the term. My hair is thick and heavy as it is, and not getting it cut for three months is like walking around with a sack full of doorknobs tied to your head. Also, while my hair starts out looking very clean cut and proper after a trip to the barber shop, it gradually becomes more and more ragged until it looks like a combination of a bowl cut and a mullet.*

*While the mullet is commonly referred to as “business in front, party in back”, I feel like the terrible form my long-uncut hair takes is more “party in front, party in back, both parties suck”.

A few days ago, I was caught in exactly this situation. I hadn’t had my hair cut for an especially long time, and with each passing day I looked less and less like a progressively minded college student and more and more like a guy whose favorite show is Cops because he’s in four episodes. In desperation, I went in search of a barbershop within walking distance of campus. The closest I came was a salon.

What’s the difference between a barbershop and a salon? When you walk into a barbershop, it is dimly lit. Decoration is sparse or nonexistent. The patrons regard you coolly, and one of the barbers grunts at you to indicate that you should write your name up on the white board, take a seat, and start educating yourself as to the best knife with which to skin a dead deer. A salon, on the other hand, is brightly lit and smells strongly of fruity industrial strength hair chemicals. Colorful pictures of beautiful people adorn the walls, as if to suggest that you, too, could be in a giant wall picture if you play your cards right and keep getting your hair cut at this particular establishment. Bouncy, cheerful people greet you enthusiastically while the constant thump of techno echoes from hidden speakers around the room – the salon has consumed you, and now you can hear its heartbeat.

When I first arrived at the salon, I found that aside from the aesthetics the experience is very much the same. I entered, put my name on a waiting list, and then took a seat on a highly uncomfortable bench to wait for my chance to pay $20 for a haircut. The reading selection was limited – ESPN Magazine and Glamour, the two opposite ends of my disinterest spectrum. I first read an article about the Seattle Sonics’ change to the Oklahoma City Thunder, which I followed up with an article about what it’s like to have sex with a male model (apparently, not all that great). The woman who eventually cut my hair had little to say, save for various muttered epithets about how thick my hair was. She did an admirable job – not Hair Whisperer quality, but good enough to keep me looking like I’m not a convicted sex offender for a few more weeks.

I’ve gained some trust in barbers thanks to this experience – up until now I had trained myself to see every new barber as a horrible haircut waiting to happen, but having walked out of the salon with a well trimmed, slightly fruity haircut, I have a little more confidence in barbers other than my own. Also, should I ever need to get highlights, I know exactly where to go.

Truman Capps had taken over a year to write an entire update about his hair despite the title of the blog – it’s all downhill from here, folks.

Knight At Your Service

As seen in the Oregon Daily Emerald!

As a dyed-in-the-wool procrastinator, I can proudly say I almost never do my homework while the sun is shining. Indeed, it seems like the only time I can really buckle down and get to work is at night, preferably 12 hours or fewer before the assignment I'm working on is due. Maybe this is because I'm lazy, or maybe I subconsciously enjoy the thrill of racing against the clock to complete my grammar homework before class, like an episode of "24" with gerund phrases. I don't think I'm alone here. I doubt many of my classmates are strangers to the "all-nighter," that fabled nocturnal orgy of academia and Red Bull that often makes up for many weeks of skipped classes and neglected textbooks. Procrastination and late-night cramming sessions may not be the most logical way to approach one's college education, but if all college students incorporated logic and careful consideration into everything they did, there would be no need for a University Health Center or a Department of Public Safety.

Therefore, it's to all our benefits that Knight Library is now open 24 hours a day. The ASUO is funding the library's extended hours on a provisional basis and will analyze the number of students who make use of the library late into the night to determine whether it's worthwhile to keep these hours in the future. Even if the number of students using the library at night doesn't match the daytime numbers, I still feel the extended hours are worthwhile because of what they offer to the University community. Like a 7-11 that sells knowledge or the world's lamest nightclub, the largest library on campus now maintains the same night-owl schedule as most of its patrons.

Granted, I say this as someone who doesn't use the library very much at all. While the library is a great place to do homework and study, I prefer to do these things at my apartment because, unlike the library, my apartment supplies free food and a private bathroom that I know a homeless person hasn't slept in. Furthermore, I have yet to reach the point in my education where my classes require me to use a stronger source of research than Wikipedia, so I don't need the library to make use of its books or archives. Despite this, on the few occasions I've been in the library late at night, I've seen 20 to 30 students hard at work on the first floor alone. If this service remains available, I get the idea that more students will start to take advantage of it, and perhaps feel safer procrastinating more.

My reasons for wanting the library to stay open all night may not be conventional. I don't have a color printer. The Internet access my apartment complex provides tends to fail at inopportune times. But sometimes, my neighbors party a little too hard and I like to know there's a quiet place to study should I really need it.

need it. The library is the center of knowledge and academe on campus, and as such it should be open to suit the needs of its patrons, many of whom don't necessarily study between 7 a.m. and midnight. This is why the 24-hour library is important to me: While I don't use it all the time, there are occasions when I truly do require its services, and knowing it's open all night gives me a certain sense of security. Armed with the knowledge the library will always be there for me, I'm free to procrastinate to my heart's content - in the long run, it might not be helpful for my study habits, but at the moment it feels like the greatest thing in the world.

Keystone Light

My ire for Time and Space can only be expressed through horrible Photoshop projects.

Every year I worry that maybe I’ve overburdened myself schedule-wise and will be forced to miss out on all the truly great moments of my youth because I’m sitting inside doing homework. This has never happened, because I habitually take easy classes, shirk responsibilities, and mooch off of my study partners in order to reduce the total amount of work I have to do. Furthermore, I never really do anything truly “great” with all the free time I make for myself anyway – if I’m not playing a video game or aimlessly wandering the Internet, I’m probably sitting next to Mike in an editing room, engaged in our unending game of “Find A New And Interesting Way To Imply That The Other Guy Is Into Dudes”.* Still, that’s the sort of time I value, and so ordinarily I take steps to preserve it.

*By the way, Mike: Oreck called – you know, the company that makes the vacuums? Yeah, they want you to come down to their factory and, like, give a seminar on sucking. Because you’re so good at it. The only problem is that your area of expertise is cocks, and, well, why build a vacuum to suck cocks when it’s much cheaper to just call you?

As you may remember, I really feel as though I actually did overburden myself this term. Taking a bunch of classes is one thing – in general, the school has measures in place to ensure that you don’t bite off more academically than you can chew. But when you throw in various extracurricular activities like band, a newspaper column, and a public access TV masterpiece, each with its own demands, things change a lot. The University won’t ever say “Hey, you – too many extracurricular activities!”; at least, not until they send you a grade report full of Fs thanks to your poor time management skills. So going into this term, I wasn’t so much worried about having homework as I was worried about whether my schedule was actually possible given the physical constraints of our dimension. Has anyone ever written, co-produced, and starred in a TV show while also playing in a marching band and building conversational Spanish skills? Andy Griffith was too cool for band and too down-to-Earth to meddle with the innumerable conjugations of gustar. Seriously, there’s literally hundreds of them.

We’ve finished principal photography on Writers, which, if you’re not up with the current public access TV lingo, means that we’re done making people act stupid and read trite dialogue in front of cameras and have now moved on to the part where we sit in a cramped room and edit the stupidity and triteness together while swilling Red Bull and Gummy Frogs.* This was initially a cause for celebration in my eyes, because I’d seen Writers as the biggest timesink out of all the stuff I was doing this term. It was pretty stressful at times, but in the end I made it through the process mostly unscathed without having weathered any major disasters or failed any midterms. My assumption was that life post-Writers would be a walk in the park – albeit a stressful walk, like a walk in a park in a sketchy part of town after dark, but a walk in the park all the same.

*Gummy Frogs are essential to the creation of television. Andy Griffith, in his prime, would just stick a funnel in his mouth and have Ron Howard shovel Gummy Frogs into it. My hand to God – you can Wiki that shit.

What I’ve found after nearly 20 years of being me is that as soon as I start assuming anything will happen, fate will bend over backwards to see that it doesn’t just so I can be wrong. Thus, it is for the good of all mankind that I make a point of being surprised to see the sun rise each morning. The past week since the completion of Writers has not been quite the delicious relaxing pie I had hoped it would be.

Last Sunday I, like all other non-Arizonans, set my clocks back an hour for Daylight Savings. Traditionally, this gives me something of an advantage over my old nemeses, Time and his good for nothing cohort, Space. I’ve spent most of my life running to beat the clock and whatever symbolic piece of imagery represents Space, but for a few days after the start of Daylight Savings Time, I always feel a touch ahead, and had been looking forward to it this past week. No such luck – while I set my clock one hour back, Time and Space had clearly set their clocks two hours ahead, because I spent most of the week scrambling to catch up to my schedule with all the flustered desperation of an overweight tourist running to make his connecting flight to Cleveland. I was late to classes, caught completely off guard for two Spanish pruebitas (“small test” or “destroyer of worlds”), and yesterday almost missed our call time for the football game due to a combination of sleeping through my alarm, missing two different buses, and discovering that several articles of clothing I needed for the day were inexplicably locked in the laundry room. Time made me late while Space came in at the last second with the locked laundry room finishing move – their Saturday combo attack was a Fatality of sorts to my mixed up, hectic week.

All of this stress occurred in a week without Writers. At first I was confused as to how what was supposed to be an easy, more relaxing week turned into such a nightmare, but after reexamining things I think I get it: Writers was my keystone – the one stone in the arch that held all the other ones together (thanks to some physics property I don’t understand). When I had Writers to worry about, I naturally assumed that I would never have an ounce of spare time, and thus I constantly budgeted my time well and refused to procrastinate. In a Writers-less world, I tend to assume “Hey, I can do it tomorrow – after all, I don’t have to worry about Writers anymore!” And then, when things inevitably go differently from how I assume they will, Time and Space have a jolly good laugh at my expense.

Although Truman Capps does believe that two fundamental forces of the Universe are out to get him, he doesn’t consider that a bad attitude.

Change Can Unite Us

As seen in the Oregon Daily Emerald!

Here we are, then – after over a year of mudslinging, bile, lies, angry preachers, medical records, secret Muslim ties, POW camps, plumbers, and pit bulls, it’s finally over. No longer will volunteers harass us with voter registration inquiries and we won’t have to see that damn clip of Tina Fey dressed as Sarah Palin holding a flute anymore. With all the class and decorum of a fight in a middle school girls’ bathroom, we the people have exercised the democratic process, and now finally can go back to what we were doing before. Say what you will about England, but they didn’t have to put up with this crap from King George.

Some of you probably won’t be thrilled with the outcome of the election, but at least take solace in the fact that the whole sordid affair is finally behind us. An election, like puberty, is a highly important period of change, and just like puberty, it’s a highly unpleasant experience we’d all prefer to forget once it’s over. It makes sense that this election, which hinged so heavily on change, was a nasty one. There has been little debate that change is necessary; the point of contention has been which candidate is best poised to offer it. To those of you disappointed with this outcome, I have a few words of wisdom for you.

The United States presidency is most definitely a winding road. For the past hundred years or so, the Democrats and Republicans have been passing control of the White House back and forth at roughly ten to twenty year intervals. Knowing this brings a certain fatalistic quality to every election; history has proven that whichever party wins will be unseated in a matter of years, only to return eight to sixteen years after that. That’s the beauty of our two party system: sooner or later, everybody gets a chance to drive the America Bus.

I’m sorry, Republicans. Although I am a bleeding heart liberal, I can sympathize with your cause – my roommate, ex girlfriend, and godparents are all Republicans. Thanks to them, I understand the validity of small government and fiscal responsibility. I feel your pain at having lost such an important election, but in defense of the Democrats, your party has been driving the bus for the past eight years and it’s about time somebody else got a chance to try it. To be honest, Bush hasn’t been driving the America Bus so much as he’s been repeatedly crashing it, and as much as we’d all like to just forget his misrepresentation of the Republican Party and start again with a clean slate, that’s clearly impossible. Your time to shine will come again, and hopefully that guy will represent your party with the intelligence and leadership it deserves. The next Abraham Lincoln or Teddy Roosevelt could be waiting in the wings to take the GOP’s reins.

What we have to remember is that no one candidate can reunite America alone; we all have to help out. Don’t get off the bus just because you disagree with the driver – wait long enough to see if he’s going where you want to go. Keep this in mind if you’re down in the dumps about what happened yesterday. Whoever won the election has to get the bus up and running again before he starts to drive it, and I think that’s something we can all agree with.

Halloween: A Treatise

I've been a pretty bad Internet Celebrity recently, what with my ever-shortening articles and later and later updates. For that I apologize, and I apologize even further, because this update is going to be pretty short too - it was a bonus column I wrote for the Emerald's Halloween page. The fact is, I spent 14 hours hosting a marching band competition today and I have to get up in a few short hours to clean crap out of the stadium we hosted it in, so I'm going to take the coward's way out and just paste in something previously written. This is a lot like a celebrity chef serving Kraft macaroni, I know, but bear with me - I'll try to make this up to you guys.

Crowd of girls walks by
One is “Sexy John McCain”
What the HELL, people?

Fear is a big part of American culture – all year round, not just on Halloween. It seems like every day there’s a brand new predator Chris Hansen has yet to catch or a new toxic substance hidden in products manufactured in China. The media keeps us up to date on all the latest global pandemics, while the “Saw” movies remind us that, should we have the audacity to leave our houses, we will most certainly be abducted and then tortured to death in a series of sadistic Rube Goldberg machines.
What’s with that Jigsaw guy, anyway? Did he get a master’s in Deathtrapology from MIT? You never see him calling tech support because his room full of mechanically operated rusty steak knives breaks down.
Wait, what was I talking about?
Right. Fear. It’s everywhere. There’s a good chance you live in a house with an alarm system – God knows I do. I insist on walking my female friends home when it’s dark out. And as you may have read, I have so little trust in my fellow man that I’m unwilling to even let my bike out of my sight. Now more than ever, we have come to accept the fact that every passing stranger either wants to rob us, molest us, or teach us the value of life by forcing us to chop off our own limbs.
So what do we do? We retreat into our houses, triple bolt the doors, and clean our guns while Dateline NBC tells us what we should be ready to shoot at. That’s the best way to not get killed by our incredibly scary world.
But there’s one night, every year, when we cast our paranoia to the winds and freely open our doors for any stranger with a hankering for candy. On Halloween, people everywhere leave most of their fears at home and wander the streets, mingling with folks they’ve never met and generally having a good time. What’s so ironic about this is that Halloween is also the one night of the year that it’s socially acceptable to pretend you’re a monster or a serial killer (or, for college students, a sexy monster or sexy serial killer). It’s as though on one magical night, we’re suddenly willing to look everything that scares us in the eye and give it a fun-sized Snickers.
Happy Halloween, everybody! Check your candy for razor blades and don’t leave your drinks unattended.