So I started listening to the news again…Damn, people, I go away for a few weeks, and when I come back, Rush Limbaugh’s a drug addict, some guy is getting death threats because he tried to catch a baseball, the Terminator is the Governor of California, bags of box cutters were found on an airplane, and Florida is starving some girl to death for the crime of being in a coma.

Seriously. You people have to do a better job of watching things while I’m away.

First, Rush Limbaugh. Although everyone who sends me hate mail trying to insult me calls me a Rush Limbaugh fan/wannabe, I am pretty lukewarm on the guy. I tend to shy away from anyone who thinks they are right all of the time. Shying away from myself is difficult, but I manage. So he had back surgery and got addicted to painkillers. I had two back surgeries, and am surprised that I didn’t become addicted as well. They heap those suckers on you when your spine is all torn up. There is a lot of gray area around the difference between “abuse” and “dependency”, so I won’t try to breach that subject. The people on the far right are praising him for owning up and taking responsibility while ignoring the crazy irony and seeming hypocrisy of the whole thing, and the people on the far left have finally found a drug user they don’t like. So everybody’s happy. This would warrant more talk and fun being poked at if he had been found in the trunk of a ’73 Dodge Javelin smoking crack with a 12 year-old quadriplegic Cuban she-male, but as it stands, I’ll give it a paragraph. It was shocking on the surface, though.

This poor bastard goes to a Cubs game, and POW! A ball comes off the bat and right toward his seat. Color him unlucky. EVERY FAN IN THE STADIUM WOULD HAVE DONE EXACTLY WHAT HE DID IF THEY HAD BEEN SITTING IN HIS SEAT. So the guy with the glove doesn’t get the ball and the team loses the game. The Cubs have to go home to their supermodel wives and sixty makillion dollar mansions and cry. On his way out of the stadium, the other fans are throwing beer and poop at him because they’re all mad about their baseball team losing. I have been to a few sports events, and people do get emotional, so I thought that was not so bad.

I also thought that like normal, well adjusted humans living in an advanced first world nation, they would go home and joke about it.

When I found out that he had to have 24-hour police protection because he was getting death threats and he might even have to leave the state, I wanted to barf. I can’t believe that there are that many people who are maladjusted enough to want to kill someone over a baseball team. IT IS A GAME, PEOPLE. Maybe I just don’t get the sporting world, but it sounds like some folks need to be recalibrated. Jeb Bush offered him asylum in Florida, but if he moves there, he might become the next victim of a state-sanctioned starving*.

All of the Arnold jokes possible have already been done, so I’ll just recount a conversation I had with someone about his being elected to office.

Him- “I bet the rest of the world thinks we are such morons for electing an Austrian bodybuilder/terminator to government office.”

Me- “Jeez, man, how many frigging countries do we have to bomb to prove we don’t give a shit what the rest of the world thinks? Just kidding. Why do you think that?”

Him- “dude. Look at the situation. He is an actor with big muscles, and we elected him governor”

Me- “First of all, I didn’t elect him anything. I live in Georgia. Second, he does have some political background. Third, I think it is cool as hell that a guy born in Austria to a nazi-sympathetic father who hated him can so completely succeed at everything he tries. There are lots of people who consider him a good example of the boundless opportunities we have here. Of course, I have no idea if he can govern his way out of a soggy box of tampons, but do you really think he can fuck up California’s economy any further than it already has been?”

Him- “Well, Gov. Davis is sure going to try to make it tough for him before he leaves office. He’s busy appointing his democrat buddies to jobs as fast as he can.”

Me- “That guy sounds like an asshole. He also seems to genuinely not care what happens to his state.”

Him- “probably”

Me- “Don’t you think “Gubernatorial Runoff” sounds like a venereal disease?”

Him-“hmm…It kinda’ does.”

Then there was the bright idea some college kid had to “test airline security” by seeing if he could sneak some box cutters bleach, matches, and modeling clay onto a plane. For now, let’s put aside the fact that this was probably the dumbest idea since those big mufflers they put on Hondas, and consider how completely overboard we have gone with airport security. Everybody they interviewed was saying how they were “trying to estimate the degree of the threat” and “determine the intent of the placement of these weapons” and all sorts of other official sounding crap. Umm…hello? When was the last time you were attacked, or even threatened, by a small pile of inanimate objects in a shopping bag? Aside from that time a can of peas glared at me menacingly, I have never heard of such a thing. I know it would be very scary if some guy was coming on the plane making little clay voodoo dolls with matchstick arms and then pouring bleach on them to burn the eyes of the intended victim, but that seems a bit labor intensive for a terrorist plot. Now let’s consider the scenario that some guy gets all whacko and goes charging down the aisle screaming allah this and infidel that. I would be surprised if he got to first class (box cutter or not) without having his arms and legs torn off by “concerned passengers” like myself. My point is, there is no real threat of another plane being taken over as long as there are passengers aboard who don’t want to die. 9-11 changed all of that, and the bad guys are going to have to think of something new.

*Finally, we have a case in Florida where some girl is in a semi-vegetative state and has been for thirteen years. Her husband and family are battling over whether to pull the plug or not, and it appears that said plug has been pulled. I saw video of this girl, and she was clearly interacting with her mother, which says to me that she has some quality of life. However, that’s not what bothered me so much. If the docs say she is completely non-responsive-all-but-brain dead, I can’t argue it based on having seen fifteen seconds of video of her watching a balloon float across the room. For me the shock came when I found out that “pulling the plug” was an all too euphemistic term for “starving her to death”. She’ll live another two weeks or so while lack of nourishment and fluids ravage her body until it shuts down.

I can’t begin to comprehend that. We try so hard to find ways to ethically euthanize (if all attempts at rehabilitation have failed) our beloved mass murderers and baby eaters without so much as hurting their feelings, but starving a woman to death for no crime is somehow going to happen? If it has been decided for whatever reason that she absolutely has to die, is there no more humane way to do it? Then I hear today that she was denied having her last rights administered by a priest because it involves eating a holy cracker thing, and the court order says, “…nothing is to be placed in the mouth…” Holy messed up system, Batman. That story bothers me way more than the others.

Man, I can’t wait till I’m boss of the world. That kind of crap would never happen.

On to less depressing things- My low-key birthday celebration last weekend…maybe the weekend before that. Anyways (don’t you hate it when people say “anyways”?), I got together with most of my friends and had a nice dinner at a local dinner-eating type place. I’m not sure if it was just because it was a good day overall or what, but I enjoyed the hell out of those couple of hours. Have you ever laughed so much that at the end of the day you feel light headed, and it’s not from being drunk? Yeah. That.

I don’t know if my friends realize how much it meant to me to have them there that night, but it made me a very happy dude. So Buttless Chap, Dave, Jennifer, Ladyfriend, Cram, Josh2, Skankington Q. Sinatra (who was with us in spirit), and our talented stewardess, this is me saying thank you for a very memorable evening.

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