Happy Biochemical Reaction Day

So, it’s Valentine’s Day as I write this. Or, more precisely, Saint Valentine’s Day.

Yeah, that’s right. This is a religious holiday.

Yep, this is a religious holiday, even though nobody knows who the fuck Saint Valentine was. In fact, there were numerous saints named “Valentine” and we don’t know shit about any of them. In 496 AD, when Pope Gelasius I first established the feast of Saint Valentine, he said that nobody knew one fucking thing about the dude. If the fucking pope didn’t know shit about a saint 1,500 years ago, you can be pretty sure that we are not in better shape today. Usually, all we know about saints are the lies told a couple of hundred years or so after they died.

I know that a lot of you say, “Whatev. Valentine’s Day ain’t no fucking religious holiday. It is all about just telling someone you love that you love them. What’s wrong with that?”

There’s nothing wrong with that. And all that Valentine’s Day stands for supports that very sentiment. Valentine’s Day may, for that very reason, be the most perfect holiday ever.

See, on President’s Day we get a fucking day off and we don’t do shit. What has being on vacation got to do with any president except George W. Bush? And on Christmas we exchange gifts and decorate trees that we chop down so that they can die in our living rooms. What has that got to do with Jesus or even with zombies in general? And on Thanksgiving we eat like disgusting fucking pigs and then nap and watch football all day. What has that got to do with being American? Okay, never mind that last one.

But on Valentine’s Day, we do lots of things that symbolize modern love. We exchange cards, which are mass-produced emotions we are supposed to feel. We go out to expensive restaurants that we can’t actually afford to eat at everyday, to get food and service we wish our spouses would provide for us. We exchange huge candy assortments knowing that we will only like maybe three or four of the fifty candy pieces, but we will suffer and eat the other 47 nasty candies because, well, they’re there. We give flowers that we will watch wither and die as they struggle to live and reproduce before death takes them and they are forgotten forever. What could better symbolize modern love and marriage than these things, and paying twice as much for them as at any other time of the year?

The things we do on Valentine’s Day are perfectly symbolic. Valentine’s Day is the most symbolically honest holiday ever!

I know that, in a country in which, by all accounts, the divorce rate for all marriages is close to fifty percent, it may be hard to get behind this whole Valentine’s Day thing. Maybe you even have a hard time getting your head wrapped around the whole idea of love.

But don’t let divorce rates hinder your appreciation of love. Divorce is complicated and really shouldn’t be used as a gauge. For instance, divorce is higher among conservative and born-again Christians than among any other group, including atheists and agnostics. And divorce is highest in Bible Belt states, with Florida number one in the nation followed closely by Texas. God is love? I don’t think so.

But here is the thing. You can excuse the bible thumpers for not knowing what love is. After all, Adam and Eve never fell in love. They just got stuck with one another. Maybe they spent their days fucking when God was not walking around the Garden of Eden naked talking to himself, but love is never mentioned in Genesis.

So the Christians have an excuse. You atheists, who are not stoopid, believe in evolution. You believe that humans, like other animals, have evolved with an optimal strategy for reproduction. Love has nothing to do with it and, in fact, to the extent love exists at all, it is biochemical.

Human behavior dictates that monogamy is social and not genetic. After all, the divorce rates aside, 50-60% of men and 45-55% of women have extramarital affairs. But, to the extent that we feel an attraction to another person, those of you who believe in evolution know this must be a biochemical response to an evolutionary need to reproduce. The same way you feel hunger and cravings rather than actually feeling the emptiness of your stomach or the need for particular nutrients, you feel love because you need to bust a nut. The same way you feel fear rather than actually hearing your blood pumping more quickly through your veins or adrenaline thrusting itself into your bloodstream, you feel love when you want to fuck. In fact, love feels a lot like hunger and fear.

And, of course, we know from history that humans were not monogamous. At the very least, they were polygynous, with one man having as many wives as he could afford. I’m sure those dudes loved each and every one of them, too.

That’s why women are so into wealthy men. Oh, I know you hate when people say shit like that. Well, I didn’t put Who Wants To Marry A Millionaire on TV. Also, when was the last time you dated a homeless dude? What, you’ve never dated a homeless dude? Isn’t that interesting? If love was truly blind, every now and then a woman would fall for someone entirely beneath them in social status. But that’s a real rarity, as it turns out.

Study after study confirms a few things. First, women look for signs of wealth in men as a first determinant of attractiveness. Men look for physical beauty first and, as a result, prefer younger women. Women are not so picky when it comes to age: status is key to them.

That’s what love is all about.

So, to all you lovers out there, happy biochemical reaction to environmental stimuli that maximizes your chances for reproduction and optimizes species survivability and adaptability! Or, put another way, Happy Saint Valentine’s Day!

Actually, I’m posting this so late that it won’t be Saint Valentine’s Day anymore by the time you read this.

But Valentine’s Day also happens to be stoogepie’s birthday. So happy fucking birthday to me.

That’s all I have to say about that.

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Happy Black History Month

February is Black History Month, and I am kind of disappointed about how few bloggers have written anything about Black History. I think that’s because most of us aren’t black and maybe a lot of us think, “If I do a funny post about Black History, it will come out sounding all racist and supremacist and shit.”

Yeah, maybe. But that’s what stoogepie is here for.

So, I looked up some stuff thinking, “Maybe I will do a post on Black History.”

But history is Boring with a capital fucking B. And I have BDD. Boring Deficit Disorder.

So this is pretty much all I have been able to come up with.

History does not interest me all that much. Even Black History, which is honestly a lot more exciting than White History.

White history does not even get its own month. American Black History is more exciting because a lot of it involves slavery. So, let’s talk a little about slavery because slavery gives me a hard-on.

Black slaves were not the first slaves. In ancient Greece and ancient Rome and all over the fucking place throughout history there were slaves. In fact, the bible is full of slavery because slavery gave God a hard-on, too. Whenever you read the word “manservant” or “maidservant” or plain old “servant” in the Christian bible, they are talking about slaves. Since slavery is kind of out of style nowadays, translations of the bible try to disguise it, like in that passage in Exodus where they tell you that it’s okay to beat slaves to death as long as they live a day or two after the beating because, after all, they are your property. Yeah, “servant” means “slave.” “Money” means “property.” Now those are family values you can whack off to!

The rule was that whenever you had a war, the winners could enslave all the losers. That was a sweet rule! That’s what we should have done in the South after we won the Civil War.

Let’s face it, as long as you’re not the slave, slavery is a good deal. In fact, it fucking rocks!

But, in modern times, with slavery being officially illegal, modern slaves don’t have much to hope for in terms of relief. See, here in the North we have always had slavery, too. The only difference is that skin color doesn’t define who is free and who isn’t. And modern slaves haven’t got a prayer. No civil war will free them. There will be no civil disobedience.

You know who I’m talking about. The poor people who can’t afford to quit the jobs or careers they hate. The sad stooges who live from paycheck to paycheck, paying off their student loans until they don’t even remember what school they went to anymore. They ride the modern underground railroad here in New York City every day, but it doesn’t make them free. There is no ride to freedom for them.

And here is the paradox: those people think they are free. You know how Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus? Well, I recently flew to Los Angeles. Up in the front of the plane sit people who have a greater level of freedom. They get free booze before the flight takes off, a flight attendant takes their coats, they have lots more room, and they have a segregated bathroom. But if you sit up there with a coach ticket, you will just as surely get arrested as Rosa Parks did. Where are the boycotts?

If you have money, you can belong to clubs and live in neighborhoods that poor people simply can’t. A recent study by the Center for an Urban Future found that New York City is now so expensive that its middle class earns six figures. In order to buy an apartment in Manhattan, you need to earn at least $250,000 per year. Everybody else is fleeing the city or living on its outskirts from one paycheck to the next. Is that freedom?

At concerts here in NYC, the priciest tickets come with their own entrance. So there is one entrance for poor folks and another for the wealthy. Remind you of anything?

Recently I discovered that a prominent hospital here in NYC has devoted its top floor to the wealthy. That floor has spacious suites with great amenities, round-the-clock room service, and no pesky, ill, poor folks hanging around. Pretty excellent, unless you’re the unfortunate jerk waiting in a clogged hall for a room on one of the poor floors.

There are laws against things like sexual harassment in the workplace, but think about what that means. The government recognizes that you might need a job so badly that you would endure all sorts of harassment to keep it. So, instead of making it so that people can afford to tell their bosses to shove their abusive behavior up their asses, the government tells the bosses that certain kinds of harassment are illegal but certain other types are perfectly fine. And that’s without even mentioning just how boring and demeaning and stifling many jobs can be. And the slaves don’t do shit about it. Boycott anyone? Civil disobedience? Riot?

Why do people put up with this shit? It’s the myth of the American Dream. Poor Americans actually believe that they too can one day make millions of dollars a year. Maybe they will win the lottery. Aside from that, I really have no fucking idea how they think it’s going to happen. Yeah, maybe you will be Bill Gates and become a billionaire even though you are born to a modest family. Oh, yeah, that’s right. The Gates family was pretty well off. Bill’s father was a prominent lawyer, his mother was on several boards of directors including an international bank and the United Way, and his grandfather was a bank president. And, yeah, he got 1590 out of 1600 on the SATs and went to Harvard, then started Microsoft with one of his Harvard classmates. But that sounds like a lot of poor people’s backgrounds, right?

The American Dream is just that, for most people. Yes, every now and then a person who isn’t born privileged strikes it rich. But that is about as rare and lucky as winning the lottery. The key to keeping this system of slavery alive is to make people believe it can happen to them.

Stoogepie knows from personal experience that the best way to enslave someone is to pay them a little more money than they can make elsewhere until they get used to making that much money. That’s right. Overpay them just a little. Then you can do anything to them, especially if you pay for that, too.

This brings us to the next paradox. See, when you think about all those executives on Wall Street who are paid millions of dollars to lose billions of dollars, those people are slaves, too. They know that no sane company would pay them so much money to do such a shitty job. This is the era of enslavement at both ends of the spectrum.

Yes, it’s true that the bonuses and perks given last year to 600 of the bank executives whose banks asked for bailout money would pay for the bailout of 53 of the 116 banks that have so far taken our bailout money. But, for that money, we get slaves. Overpaid, incompetent slaves who can afford to live anywhere and do anything they want. Also, think about this: if we continue to overpay those executives at those banks, we keep them from leaving, moving into another industry, and fucking that industry up like they did with the financial industry. That’s worth a few billion dollars all by itself.

My point is…. Wait, were we talking about black people? Oh. Well, almost none of those bank executives getting all those bonuses and perks are black.

So, yeah, my point is, black people were slaves when it still always sucked to be a slave. And for that, we owe them. I say, give black people all the southern states like we should have done right after the Civil War. Except that tumor on the ass of the United States we call Florida, which we should simply use to test nuclear missiles.

And let’s all of us aim to be the banker slaves rather than the paycheck-to-paycheck slaves. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, especially if you paycheck-to-paycheck types are going to send the bankers your tax dollars to keep them so lavishly enslaved.

That’s all I have to say about that. Happy Black History month. I hope you learn something useful.

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Stoopid Is As Stoopid Does

Are you stoopid?  I ask because, according to some, a whole lot of you are, indeed, stoopid.  Like, maybe most of us would have done about as badly as Kellie Pickler (of American Idol fifteen minutes) does here when asked a third-grade geography question on the show Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader.  I think I would have gotten this particular question right, but that certainly does not prove that I’m smart.  Why the fuck do I even know what country has Budapest as its capital?  Why the fuck do I need to know that?  Why is it important at all to know what the capitals of any countries or states are?  Why are we teaching third-graders this crap?  They will just forget it like the rest of us.  They will forget it because they have absolutely no need to remember it.  We could instead be teaching children valuable lessons they will use for the rest of their lives, like how to mow the lawn.  It’s not going to mow itself, you know.  How about we teach third-graders how to make a decent batch of cookies?  I want some cookies and I don’t feel like making them myself, and I don’t want any of those hard, crumbly cookies I can buy at the store.  I want fresh cookies.  Now, third grader!

What has remembering anything at all got to do with being smart or stoopid?  I guess am so stoopid that I don’t even know what stoopid means. 

According to a National Geographic survey, most young adults in America don’t know shit about geography.  They can’t locate anything on a map.  About eleven percent can’t even locate the United States on a map.  Well, National Geographic, have you noticed that most maps have words on them indicating where particular places are?  Do you think that maybe there is a reason for that?

So, a lot of Americans don’t know where they are in the world.  Why is this a big deal?  Is the fear that one day one of those people will be piloting a spaceship in outer space, just floating around, and he will need to get home without a GPS or anything else to show him where the US is?  He won’t even have one of those crazy maps that has the names of places in big letters over each place, so he will be stuck in outer space forever.  Big fucking deal.  If that happens, too fucking bad for that dude.  Boo fucking hoo.  Let him float out there.  He should at least have brought a goddamn map with him.  Or, how about this?  He can just land any-fucking-where.  As long as he doesn’t land in the water, he can probably get home no matter where he lands his goddamn spaceship.  He can stop in, let’s say, Sweden, where people apparently know a whole lot of geography according to the survey, and ask someone, “Do you know where the United States is?”  Hopefully, Swedish people also know English since they are so fucking cosmopolitan, and they would say, “Ja!” 

I used to know a girl who was a Geography major in college.  Let’s call her Sabrina.  And, yes, you read that right: she was a Geography major.  In college.  I guess she intended to go into one of the Big Five geography firms after she graduated.  Anyway, Sabrina was from Canada and she knew a whole fucking lot about places.  If you put one of those maps without the names of places in front of her, she could find anywhere.  And Sabrina knew the capital of every goddamn place.  I knew Sabrina because, at a very young age, she married a friend of mine here in the United States.  She met him over the internet and, one day, drove down from Canada and married him.  She probably didn’t use any maps the whole way down.  After they were married for a couple of years, Sabrina ran off to the Midwest to live with the brother of a has-been movie star.  No kidding.  She just picked up and left my friend one day, and headed for the Midwest United States.  I think she had met the brother of a has-been movie star over the internet, too.  Then she dropped the brother of the has-been movie star and, after that, I lost track of Sabrina.  I don’t know what the fuck Sabrina is up to today or where she is.  But she does.  Sabrina knows exactly where she is.

But you know what?  I do not want Sabrina piloting my goddamn spaceship anyway.  Even with a bunch of maps with words on them and GPS and other navigational devices, I do not want Sabrina piloting my spaceship.  I would rather just take my chances that I can land somewhere and find some Swede who speaks enough English to tell me where the United States is.

Like I said, Swedish people seem to know a lot about geography.  If you are American, when you are floating around in space without a clue about where to land your spaceship, maybe you can ask some Swedish dude who floats by in one of the spaceships that is part of Sweden’s massive space program.  Uh huh.  You count on that Swedish flagship passing by.

As far as I can see from the survey, the likelihood that people in your particular country know a whole lot about geography is directly related to just how lame your country is.  Sure people in Sweden know where they are.  They probably cry about it every day.  “Shit!  I’m still in Sweden!  Might as well yodel while I stare at the map some more.”

The only people who did worse than the Americans in the survey were the Mexicans.  But I think the Mexicans were lying.  When they got a call from National Geographic they didn’t know it wasn’t a call from the US Immigration and Naturalization Service.  So, yeah, they were like, “No, I don’t know where the United States is!  I have no fucking idea!  I don’t know where anything is!  Hey, where the fuck am I?  Oops, forgot my name.  No, my bags are not packed.”  All I know is that, when the time is right, Mexicans do not seem to have any more trouble finding the United States than the Swedes.

There was another survey that was supposed to show how stoopid Americans are.  That study was done by a group called Common Core.  It asked a bunch of questions about history and literature, with a question about Plato and Aristotle thrown in there just to make you sweat.  If you want take the test yourself, you can download the quiz here.

This test was given to seventeen-year-olds, and the results demonstrate that seventeen-year-old Americans don’t know a whole lot of the history and literature they were asked about.  About one in ten thought that Hitler was a munitions manufacturer between the world wars.  Big deal.  Everyone knows he was a big prick with a little moustache.  Everybody knows that, if you want for people to think you’re a prick, wear a moustache like his.  Hitler is dead but his fashion legacy lives on: you will never see anyone with a stoopid little moustache like his again.  The correct choice on that question was, “Adolf Hitler was the Chancellor of Germany during the Second World War.”  I bet it’s the “Chancellor of Germany” part that tripped up the seventeen-year-olds.  If the correct choice had been, “Hitler was a big prick who was dictator of Germany during the Second World War and had a nasty-assed little moustache that nobody has worn since,” you can bet that our nation’s youth would have done a lot better.

All the other questions are just like that.  Yeah, 26% of seventeen-year-olds thought that Christopher Columbus sailed after 1750.  So?  Big fucking deal.  Here is what you need to know about Christopher Columbus: when he got to America, he did not know where the fuck he was in the world.  He could not have identified the United States on a map that did not have “United States” written in big letters across it because, even though he was in North America, he had no fucking idea where he was.  If Christopher Columbus had been in a spaceship, he would still be floating around in space watching porn and eating cake, and Sabrina would have ditched you in your spaceship to go to Chris’s.  If it matters to you whether you would be floating around aimlessly in 1492 or 1792, you deserve to be floating in space with Christopher Fucking Columbus.

I could go through all the questions, but I won’t because it is boring.  The whole report is boring.  The quiz is boring.  The information is useless.  I bet that everybody at Common Core could score an A on that quiz.  Whoopty fucking doo.  Now that they have aced the history and literature that they chose, maybe they can figure out how to design a decent website without text so small you need a magnifying glass to read it, except for that one sentence on the front page that is in type so fucking huge that Chris Columbus can see it from the window of his spaceship.  Maybe in between coming up with tests designed to stump American seventeen-year-olds, they could pop over to MySpace or Blogger and see that seventeen-year-olds kick their asses at designing web pages.  Oh, knowing about Geoffrey Chaucer, with his “Knyghtes Tale” and his “Hoost to the compaignye,” is so much more relevant to modern life than knowing how to put together a proper goddamn website, right?

I read Chaucer in college in its original Middle English.  Today, I have no goddamn clue what “the Freres Tale” or any other one of the stories was about.  If I knew a seventeen-year-old who read that shit, I would kick his ass.  What kind of whacked-out freak are you?  How much time do you spend reading Tolkien and playing D&D?  You are just about to shoot up your fucking high school, aren’t you?  Can you please help me design my website and whip me up some fucking cookies?

If you ask me, memorizing useless shit like the capitals of things and what year particular events occurred is pretty fucking stoopid.  How smart would it be for you to memorize all that geography crap based on the snowball’s-chance-in-hell theory that maybe someday you will be stuck in a spaceship without any navigational equipment?  That’s like you memorizing every organ in the body because, you never know, you just might have to sew together a human being from scratch someday.  Hey, maybe you had better just memorize everything about everything because tomorrow you could be God. 

Hey, you elitist cocksuckers at Common Core and National Geographic, how come I never see headlines telling me about how some guy is alive today only because he knew where Japan was on a map without any places named on it?  And how come I never hear about how the next generation of hybrid cars was inspired by The Federalist Papers?

Maybe I am stoopid, but if I am ever out hanging with my friends and one of them tells me that he was able to solve any problem — any problem in his personal or professional life at all — by remembering Chaucer, I will have his ass committed in a heartbeat. 

And don’t accuse me of being anti-intellectual.  I am not saying you shouldn’t read Chaucer or you shouldn’t read The Federalist Papers or you shouldn’t stare at maps and yodel for hours on end.  Be my guest.  Just don’t expect for me to do it and think that it’s what makes me an intellectual.  If I’m smart at all, it’s because I don’t allow a bunch of assholes to tell me what to read or what I need to know.

Oh, also, those assholes are just wrong about kids: see this article and this article.  Kids today are doing better than they have ever been.  Maybe the assholes at Common Core have their hearts are in the right place, but I wouldn’t know.  How the fuck am I supposed to know where a goddamn heart is supposed to be?

One other thing: it’s the Swiss who yodel.  Not the Swedish.  Whatever.

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