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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No Fat Jokes

I don’t make fun of fat people for a number of reasons.  Principle among those reasons is that fat people are bigger than I am.  They can squish me.  If the world were truly a Darwinian playground, fat people would rule us all.  We would most fear fat people wearing big shoes because they could step on us.  The fattest fatties with the biggest feet would be our kings and queens.

Instead, we treat fat people like shit.  We call fat people “obese,” which is not so bad because “obese” is just a word that means “fat.”  But we call the fattest fatties “morbidly obese.”  Is that very nice?  I mean, look up the word “morbid” on dictionary.com.  That is just plain old disrespectful.  We don’t have a nasty-assed name like that for any other group.  For instance, you don’t hear people calling old folks “cadaverously old” or “lifelessly geriatric” or anything, and that is an accurate description of somebody whose social security number is in fucking roman numerals.  Meanwhile, we could kick old people’s asses!  I mean, the skinniest person could step on any human fossil and squish it.  And let’s face it: we all look at grandma every now and then and wonder whether she is good for anything at all, and follow that up by briefly musing about whether she contains any nutrients we could use.  But we treat her nice anyway and smile as she tells us about how, when she was just a girl, she ate nothing but broken glass for an entire winter and wore red potato peels in her hair just to be fashionable.  Yeah, right, granny.  Still, we don’t even accurately call old people “delusionally old” or anything.  But it’s okay to call fat people “morbidly obese?”

We should respect fat people.  They are bigger than we are!  They could squish us!  And, if we keep disrespecting them, they will squish us.  Listen, we have all heard news about people so fat that they can’t fit through their front doors to leave their homes, and that may be all that saves us from their wrath. 

When you think about it, it’s got to suck to be so fat that you can’t leave your home.  And there must be some particular day when that happens.  Like, you get dressed to meet some friends to go see a movie, and then you get to the front door and you just can’t fit through it.  You can’t get outside.  So, you call your friends and you have to tell them. 

That has just got to hurt, and there must be some anger behind that.  Even worse, imagine if you go out to have a disgustingly colossal dinner befitting a behemoth such as yourself and, when you get home, that’s when you can’t fit through your front door!  You’re just stuck out there on your front lawn wondering whether the lawn gnome tastes good.  Think about that the next time you presume that fat people don’t want to squish your skinny ass.

And what if all the fattiest fatsos got together tomorrow?  I don’t mean got together in the same place, because where would they all fit?  But I mean, what if they started their own social networking site, FatSpace or WhaleBook or something?  What if they all decided that they were going to squish us?  What could we do?

Very fat people are like superheroes.  They can absorb bullets.  They can flatten cars.  Yeah, they’re not so fast, but what does that get us?  Even if we could catch them and somehow wrestle them to the ground, handcuffs won’t fit on their bulging wrists.  And what jail cell could hold them?  Already, we let fat people out of prison because they are too fat for us to hold them.  Hey, this woman got house arrest — because she was too fat to leave her house anyway — after she killed a two-year-old, probably to make a sandwich!

So, don’t fuck with the fatsos.  They are not even the minority anymore.  I suggest that, before they organize the Million Pound March, we start to show fatsos the respect they deserve.  For instance, instead of calling them “morbidly obese,” why not “godlike obese?”  And maybe we should all follow Eddie Murphy’s and Tyler Perry’s lead, spending half of our lives in fat suits and making believe it is inexplicably funny.  Hey, Tyra Banks wore a fat suit for one day and she cried so much that genuine fatties in the audience of her show who wore a flesh-and-bones fat suit 365 fucking days a year consoled her.  Poor, skinny supermodel Tyra!

By “don’t fuck with the fatsos,” I don’t mean “don’t fuck the fatsos.”  There are a lot of dudes out there who are into fat chicks and vice versa.  More power to you!  There used to be a myth that all fat people were as happy and jolly as Santa Claus getting a Christmas blowjob, and that has been replaced with a myth that all fat people are depressed and lonely.  I suspect that, just like other people, fat people might just experience a full range of emotions.  In fact, fat people probably experience emotions more intensely than the rest of us, if you count hunger as an emotion.  Whether that’s true or not, to whatever extent we can, we should strive to keep fatties happy and satisfied so they don’t decide to squish us.  So, please, fuck fat people.  Fuck away.

Like many other people, I used to have a bias against fat people, with the slightly fat drawing less derision from me than the very fattiest fatsos.  I thought that making fun of fat people was okay.  Now I realize that this was nothing more than prejudice.  I don’t make fun of them anymore.  Yes, it’s true that every one of us knows a fatty we can track walking down the street by looking at satellite images on Google Maps.  Just don’t bring it up to them anymore.  And, yeah, we all know some fatsos who call restaurants and, instead of requesting reservations, get competitive bids.  Fine.  Just keep it to yourself.

I know that it sucks that we can hardly make jokes about anybody anymore.  The sense-of-humor deficit seems to be growing and growing.  Well, that’s a fact, and your jokes had better reflect it.  We can celebrate our differences as long as that celebration is somber rather than funny, or as long as we are celebrating our differences from able-bodied, very normal white dudes.  All I can say is that you had better realize this, too.  Otherwise, you might just get squished. 

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Political Comic

Lest you think that all stoogepie does is watch porn and eat cake, here is my first (and likely my last) political cartoon.

In case you don’t recognize them, one of the three senators depicted will be the next president of the United States unless a snowball’s-chance-in-hell third-party candidate wins.  Or unless, far more likely, martial law is imposed and elections are put off until there is even more peace on earth and good will toward men than we already have right now.

There.  I have earned some credibility.  Stay tuned for more porn and cake (unless I think of something really fucking hilarious to say about the subprime mortgage crisis).

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Mister Shorts Number 2

Here is another Mister Shorts comic.

That crazy Mr. Shorts!

What will Mister Shorts do next?

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Of Governors and Whores

Let me get my Elliot Spitzer joke out of the way.

Q: Why did Elliot Spitzer go to a prostitute?
A: Because his wife wouldn’t swallow.  She was a Spitzer.

Whew!  I feel better now.

Right now, the big thing in the news here in New York is all about the new governor, David Paterson, who became governor after Elliot Spitzer’s resignation.  The two burning questions for Governor Paterson from the press appear to be (1) “Who does this New York governor fuck?” and (2) “What drugs has this New York governor taken?”

I don’t really know why anyone gives a shit.  The point with the whole Spitzer thing was that prostitution is illegal and that fucking prostitutes is illegal.  Besides, Spitzer prosecuted prostitutes before he was governor, so he was a no-good fucking hypocrite.  Even there I think, geez, when did it become a big deal for a politician to be a hypocrite?  Shit, I’m not even a politician but if all of a sudden I couldn’t be hypocritical, I don’t think I could ever browbeat anyone again.  The horror!

So I think it’s the illegality of his conduct that landed Spitzer in hot water.  But nobody has even asked this new governor, as far as I know, “Alright, so you fucked around.  But anything illegal?  You ever killed a guy or, you know, knocked over a liquor store?”

And it’s not like Governor Paterson hasn’t admitted to illegal activity!  I mean, he has admitted that he has smoked weed and used cocaine in the past.  That’s illegal, yet I don’t see anyone calling for Governor Paterson’s resignation. 

Maybe it’s because he’s legally blind that nobody cares whether what he did was illegal.  But I think I heard somewhere that blindness to the law is no excuse.  What the hell does it mean to be legally blind anyway?

All that I’m getting at is that I don’t care whether Governor Paterson snorts cocaine off the bare back of a ten-dollar whore while he fucks her up the ass on the steps of City Hall, just so long as he doesn’t arrest her afterward.

Why is prostitution illegal, anyway?  I mean, porn is not only legal, it is fan-fucking-tastic!  So why is prostitution illegal?  How come, if I hire someone to go with me to a motel room and fuck my brains out, I go to jail?  But if I also hire a cameraman, the police will stand outside and make sure nobody bothers us while we’re filming.  Does this make sense to anyone?  Is the cameraman union that powerful?  What, exactly, is the difference? 

It’s freedom of speech, right?  You’re thinking that pornography is entitled to protection as a form of expression, but fucking in private is not.  Well, if you don’t think that fucking is not only a form of expression but a pretty goddamn loud one at that, if you don’t think that fucking can be art, if you don’t think that any blowjob can be worth a thousand pictures even if the exchange rate is bad, then you are fucking the wrong people.  Maybe you should see a professional.

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