This is like that time we went to see the re-released Star Wars and had to pay a toll to get INTO Oklahoma.

Internets, I feel like I'm being held hostage by the Air-Industrial Complex.

I'm checking flights -- which I do as sort of a hobby, always planning the next or potential next or fantasy next trip -- and I figure I'll check to see what this year's Xmas-to-visit-the-fam-in-Texass trip is gonna run us. Doodly doodly doo, ballpark the dates, yada yada, the usual airline, the usual airports, I know it's gonna be higher than it would be in like April because they gotcha by the short'n'curlies with xmas travel in general but hey I'm doing this in July so maybe I'll get the early ...

HOLY BALLSACK.

Son of a ... what the fuck, did I put in eight travelers or something? This isn't a motherfucking private charter, is it?

Nope. Even if we don't get the baby his own seat, this absolute cockaround -- in nonrefundable internet-only fuck-you steerage class, with no fun little extras like enough room for Mr. Gleemonex's knees, from one heavily-traveled California airport to the airline's goddamned global hub in a state only halfway across Our Great Nation -- is two-and-a-half times the price of our upcoming trip to Hawaii.

And because I like to torture myself, I ran the same dates for Xmas in Paris. Air France, nonstop.

Two hundred and seventy-three dollars less.

STAB STAB STAB STABBITY STAB.

Artie Lange wins Olympic gold!

This guy -- Michele Frangilli -- is by far my favorite Olympic athlete. There oughtta be (and maybe already is) a tumblr just about him and the rest of the Italian archery team. Holy bearded, HST-hatted, fat Shatner do I love this fucking guy!

DRUGS are an ILLEGAL NARCOTIC!

Christ, Mitt Romney is a fucking dumbass dickface moron.

I mean, in case y'all didn't know that yet.

That's why her hair is so big. It's full of secrets.

So in the quest for authentic details for the thing I'm writing, I asked a few friends (Berwie, Lab Partner, and Lita Fajita) to xerox and send me whatever I wrote in their HS yearbooks. I don't have any of it in hand just yet, but from their responses, a picture is emerging of me that is ... not exactly how I remember it. What I'm saying is -- I thought I was a put-upon insecure outsider who covered her secret total awkwardness with loudmouthed "can't make fun a me if I do it myself first!" kind of transparent foolery. But I'm beginning to get the idea that I might have been -- how to say. I might have been a bully -- a junior asshole -- a Mean Girl. 

It's like when Liz Lemon went to her high school reunion, terrified of all the girls she used to think of as Mean Girls, and they were like, "Fuck you! You were so mean to me!" 

Ahh, well. My mouth, it seems, has a very long history of writing checks my butt can't cash. 

And that's today's roundabout Top Gun quote. 

Well, they often call me Speedo but my real name is Mr. Earl

Inspired by a little vid of David Foster Wallace talking about the despair-inducing use of words like "utilize" when you mean "use" and "prior to" when you mean "before," sent to me by Mr. Gleemonex today, I am about to throw down on a kind of writing that makes me figgedy-fucking crazy.

I don't know what else to call it but verbal clip-art. It's when the writer just falls back on the obvious, expected expression or offers useless little brain-prompts that invite you to "see:" or "read:" or "think:", e.g. homewrecking hussies (think: Angelina Jolie) as filler that really add nothing to the meaning. My former boss was the King of Verbal Clip-Art -- in the spoken as well as the written word -- but I don't feel like talking about that douchekayak. Better to give as an example Real Simple, a magazine I kind of love and also totally hate.*

Here's what I mean. You're writing a blurb about productivity, under the number headline 9%, and you say: [9% is] How much more productive workers who take short Internet breaks are. But in between the words "breaks" and "are," you have to insert "(say, to check Facebook or read the news)." Why? You don't trust us to supply our own idea of what a short Internet break is?

The New York Times does it -- that One-Page Magazine thing they do now is a terrible offender. I'm still annoyed by one I actually ripped out and carried around for awhile -- something about permanence, tattoos or something, which ended with "Kim Kardashian is not a fan." See what they did there? Toss in a dumb topical reference to make their dumb point instead of letting you figure it out?

It's just so fucking lazy. People giving their opinions always have to "weigh in." Your feature is about workout clothes, so you have to say "no sweat." Exfoliation? Better say "here's the rub"! Snacks? "Chew on this!"

Ucch. I don't know, I think I'm explaining this badly -- I just want people to permanently retire the cut-and-paste bullshit and come up with something original. You and me, we understand each other, right?

--------------
*It's fun to get it in the mail each month, and there's often lots of good content, but A) the problem described in this post and B) reading it makes me feel like the sweet soft mooshy hydrogenated center of a demographic target market that I try really hard with my Pixies tees and BUST subscription to pretend like I'm not in at all. 

Leonard Edward Funt

I'm pretty sure there's nobody -- not even Anthony Edwards's mom -- who has seen How I Got Into College more times than I have. It's one of Savage Steve Holland's unsung masterpieces, and endlessly, stupidly quotable in that sort of Tourettey fashion my brain kicks into automatically all the damn time. (Like f'rinstance, I see the word Yale, and I think "One girl took up wrestling, and she got into Yale!" "No, Harvard!" And sometimes I say this out loud, and people around me are like " ... the fuhh?") It's crammed full of awesome actors (but as is often the case with this type of movie, it has a lead who is nobody and went nowhere after). It's ridonculous, but has sudden stabs of truth (remember that girl calling her mom at home to see if she got any college letters, and she's yelling into the phone, "Is it fat or skinny? Fat or skinny! FAT OR SKINNY!!!"). Fun as hell, y'all.

--------------------------
This post brought to you by the fourth waking of one of my vampire children (TM Berwie), in which I got back into bed at 4:04 in the a.m., that's ante meridian, but couldn't go to sleep until I typed "DK post: How I got into college" into the Notes app on my iPhone. 

I know you do your own taxes -- which you really shouldn't do, by the way --

Internets, do you know who goes to Red Lobster?

I mean, besides little old me, forced there by the twin lures of those goddamn tasty-ass cheddar biscuit crack nuggets and the fact that the place shares a parking lot with the bookstore where I went with my four-and-a-half-year-old and eight-month-old, both of whom require carseats and the complex settling and buckling-in thereto and eternally drawn-out extraction processing therefrom, so that I now arrange all forays from my house in terms of least number of stops required, all other factors be straight-up damned, because Holy Ass-Pained Shatner De Todos Los Santos Madre de Dios y Nuestros Dolores is that a pain in my ass. Which raises a question: Are the chain restaurants of American Suburbia in league with the Carseat Mafia, in which one reinforces the other and e'rbody get paid? [SOUND OF ONE THOUSAND MINDS BEING BLOWN]

Anyway: So you know who really goes to Red Lobster? Women over the age of 55. That is ALLLL who else was there yesterday. They go in pairs, threes, sevenses. Some are all diety about it (forgoing the cheddar biscuits [the horror! ... the horror!]), ordering the broiled catch of the day with the plain steamed vegetable side. Some are like "All of the fats, be they cheeses or sauces or fried preparations, I will have them brought to me now for eating." Some are enjoying a glass of wine because this is a Sophisticated Joint where you can day-drink without judgment. Some you can tell just came there because at least that picky-ass Laureen can find something on the menu to eat, even if she will complain about it. But there was no table except mine that didn't have at least one over-55 female at it.

And the two gals in the booth right back of ours yesterday ... y'all! These two were borderline sexual-harassing the cute young waiter serving our section. I'm not kidding. They were going to town on this guy. Every time he came near us, they're like, "Hey Victor,* would you mind taking your cute bod to the kitchen to get us some more biscuits?" "I bet you have a lot of girlfriends, huh?" "How come we've never seen you here before? I'd remember a face like that." "Way to handle that heavy tray -- you must work out!" I was dying, listening to this -- it was hilarious, and Victor was handling it really well, but if customers had harassed me like that back in the day, I'd've been a furious embarrassed mess within minutes. I just ... hope they left a good tip. I did, because I'm like that anyway, but also because when I'm around a table of people who I suspect intend their good company and jolly banter to be the tip, I tend to put a little extra cash down to make up for my fellow humans' boobulousness.

So when the kids and I finally gathered ourselves to go, I checked the ladies out -- they were seventy-five if they were a day, and, AND, they had a dude with them! Whaaat! Obviously the husband of one of them, completely normal-looking guy, not deaf or senile, just I guess ignoring them while he read a newspaper. This changed the dynamic completely -- but to what, from what, I can't really say. Total WTF moment in an already WTF episode, I guess.

In conclusion: Red Lobster be cray.

-----------
*Not his real name

Three Things (Out of Many) on the Internets Which Upset Me, for Vastly Different Reasons

#1. Destiny in Bloom, which bills itself as "A Women's Online Magazine." I was going to link to it, but I got paranoid that a trail could somehow lead back here to good old foulmouthed godless commie homo Damn Kids, and the person who inadvertently caused me to know of this site's existence might come to know of Damn Kids' existence, which would not be good for anybody. So just google it. And when you do, you'll know why it is one thousand pukes into a dirty bucket. These people refer to the deity as "Father God," they reiterate and reinforce again and again their take on the proper state of male/female relations (he's the Head of Household, the leader in matters spiritual and otherwise; she's "submitted" and "receptive" and such, and neither are they equal nor shall they ever really understand one another because Father God made them different according to His Divine and Mysterious and Perfect Plan, yada yada yada), etc. Plus I'm pretty sure they didn't pay for any of that stupid stock photography that's all over the place.

#2.  A website selling junkola, with the tagline Boomers and Beyond.  A special computer that "you don't have to ask your children or grandchildren to set up." A cornucopia of personal magnifying and amplifying devices. Guardrails, hand rails, a dozen different kinds of foam wedges to make your bed more comfortable. Watches with gigantic faces. Products addressing foot care, incontinence and "weather" needs. Oh, Internets ... don't go there unless you want to ruin a perfectly fine day by confronting the reality of all of humanity's inevitable decline into senescence and death. I'm not kidding.

#3. This insane Teddy Ruxpin art installation. Less "upsetting," and more "bug-eyed goosebumped creeped-out-beyond-reach-of-Ativan." This is truly wild stuff. Guy wires 80 Teddy Ruxpins to a wall and has them set to speak (at random apparently for all time) -- in their creeptacular Fitter/Happier Ruxpin voices -- things people have typed on blogs & websites ("emotional messages gathered live from the Internet," if that helps to clarify). This one, you gotta go see. You will trip balls. TRIP BALLS.

Is he strong? Listen, bud -- dude's got radioactive blood.

Some Thoughts While Watching the U.S. Olympic Trials on the Televising Machine

--I must make Sarah Brown aware of the fact that there is a runner named Bershawn Jackson. 

--It is amazing what this level of dedication to a sport does to the human body. Sprinters, for example, look like horses standing on their hind legs; swimmers look like they are made of Silly Putty; gymnasts appear to have been fed, in my brother's long-ago judgement, "nothing but cigarettes and coffee from birth, to keep them small." 

--I believe that the first out gay male superstar athlete will come from track and field. Team sports will be last, and this pioneering person's successful exit from the closet will require Derek-Jeter-level superstardom. 

--It would be interesting to time myself in, say, the 100m run. Get warmed up real well, wear the right kind of outfit and shoes, learn to use blocks, recognize that if I finish the distance at my fullest, best most insane level of effort I may require hospitalization for various pulled and/or torn internal tissues, and just go for it. I just want to understand in a physical way exactly what that order of magnitude is, the difference between my personal human best and the superhuman best of these elite athletes. 

--I find I am straight up rooting for the old people in pretty much every competition. And not even in a "Hey, you go, grandpa!" kind of a way -- more like, "IN YOUR FACE YOUNG PUP! OLD PEOPLE FUCK YEAH!!!!" kind of way.