Never pass up a chance to sit down or relieve yourself. -old Apache saying

Thursday, August 12, 2010

More amazing truths

Often, when I am feeling rather uninspired or especially tired ... kinda like lately ... I'll read some of Mark Morford's rambling prose. He gives a pretty good mindfuck.

10 Amazing Truths You Already Suspected
Volume V! San Francisco brains, gay disco priests, Wikileaks sighs


Did you already know? I bet you already knew. Or at the very least, had a sneaking suspicion. Here we go...

1) I know what you're thinking: In these times of acrimony and divisiveness, is it still possible to find peaceful consensus? Can any group of educated individuals ever agree on anything worthwhile, besides Blue Bottle Coffee, the Fiat 500 and grilled sausages in summertime?

Good news: They totally can! Watch in awe as every one of the country's 238 respected presidential scholars recently agreed, without the slightest doubt or hesitation and despite all their varying backgrounds, ages, political affiliations, heights and weights and hairstyles, that George W. Bush really is the worst president in modern history, and the 5th worst of all time. Wonders!

2) It's entirely true that San Francisco can be a whiny, opinionated place, obnoxiously politically correct, sometimes a bit too passionate about issues and ideas for its own good. But really, it's all just a happy side effect of the fact we have such a huge and generous surplus of educated, active brains lying around.

It's true. Turns out SF has the highest number of college degrees per square inch, followed by New York, Boston, Chicago ... well, all the major cities, really. The locations with the fewest sophisticated brainstems? Why, that would be places like Oklahoma City, Kansas City, Birmingham ... all those burgs where books are scary, God is always scowling, and deep fried is the only way to cook your squirrel. It might even be easy to suggest that the smarter and more educated you get, the more liberal, healthier and generally less terrified you become. I mean, obvs.

3) Then again, maybe not. As I write these words, it's fairly clear that the BP oil spill, much to the disappointment of many on the far liberal left and the apocalyptic right, has not caused the end of the world via methane explosions, giant tsunamis, acidic toxic rain, or by way of a million horrific screams emanating from all those politicians who've had to swallow their "drill baby drill" chant like a greasy backwash poison.

Make no mistake: The BP spill ruined lives, coastlines, portfolios. It is an environmental nightmare unmatched in our lifetime. But somehow the world still spins; it's just a bit darker and greasier than before. What will the next apocalypse porn be? What will finally spell our doom? Let us ponder.

4) How clever you are, using your kid's birthday as your secret online banking password. Or is it your wedding anniversary? Is it 1-2-3-4? Oh, you silly thing. Don't bother fixing it now; research shows that frequently changing your password is pretty much useless. Here's the thing: If nefarious hackers haven't swiped your password by now, they're not really going to. Or if they do hack it, they'll use it immediately, and hence, changing it every month or two is, well, pointless. Did you already know?

5) Do you love yourself some Vitaminwater? Do you like to think that overpriced product is at least remotely healthy, better than, say, liquefying a Twinkie and injecting it directly into your eyeballs? Nope. Vitaminwater is just sugar water. It is junk food.

Proof: A federal judge has now ruled that a class-action lawsuit against Coca-Cola -- which owns Glaceau, which owns Vitaminwater -- can go forth and lay waste to Coke's insidious claims of Vitaminwater being a healthy happy gulp of drinking goodness. Now, go turn on your tap. Fill up a Sigg. Drink it down. There. About 20 times healthier. And it's free.

6) Your intuition was right all along: Mel Gibson really is a raging lunatic. You already knew his bloodfest slaughter porn movie about that sweet Jewish mystic was even more cartoonishly disturbing than an episode of Happy Tree Friends. But Mel Gibson might be one of the first modern megastars to go completely insane before our very eyes. Would that be something to behold? You can say: Sure my life's rough, sure I have some darker issues, but holy hell on a hand grenade, at least I'm not Mel Gibson. Far more frightening than Tom Cruise and his silly sci-fi cult. So reassuring.

7) "People who are untrusting, fear rejection, or are otherwise insecure about their relationships might be at a greater risk for health problems than their more secure counterparts." Thus spake a new study directly to your overwhelming sense of duh.

No matter. It's one of those delightfully obvious non-findings that tends to eat itself alive. Because upon hearing such terrible news, the fearful and insecure among us will of course only become more fearful and insecure, thus further elevating the risk of heart attack and illness, thus reinforcing the study's findings, thus perpetuating a lovely downward spiral of imminent self-fulfilling doom. Science is neat!

8) Another day, another hidden camera catching three young Catholic priests gyrating, groping and partying hard at a gay disco in Italy, then having hot gay sex in a church building. Dovetails beautifully with the recent tale of the Rev. Kevin Gray of Connecticut, busted for swiping $1.3 million from church coffers to pay for gay escorts, fine restaurants, Armani duds. Awesome.

Not to be at all confused with the ongoing churchly scandals about all the creepy old Catholic pedophiles who prey on young children, gay clergy are far more common, harmless, adorable in their wildly hypocritical, sinful debauchery, all underscoring what has to be the church's worst-kept secret: The Catholic seminary is like a big ol' gay bathhouse. Also: God loves mesh.

9) More than 91,000 classified military documents, one big scandalous info dump over at some site called Wikileaks.org that few have ever heard of, countless Defense Department officials and White House staffers scurrying about trying to do damage control, the NYT, Der Spiegel and the Guardian all happy as clams to be part of the headlines, and yet all of the secret documents about the "truth" of the Afghan war so far only seem to underscore the grand reality you surely already suspected.

It's this: Unwinnable wars are exactly as grueling, difficult, miserable, sad, brutal, dishonest, unforgiving, trivial, insane, damaging, surreal, bureaucratic, technically dizzying, numbingly tragic, and often downright criminal as they've always been. We just never had the Internet to back it all up.

10) Exercise for 10 minutes, and your body feels the positive effects for at least an hour. Exercise for an hour, your body feels good for a day or more. Exercise for six hours a day, consume copious gallons of powdered protein shakes, do a thousand crunches in five minutes and get that manic workout-freak look in your eye, and your body recoils and starts to shut down, spasms, gives you weird dreams, screams, "Knock it off already," urges your to seek therapy, have a pulled pork sandwich and get some sun.

Really now, exercise isn't meant to be all that extreme. Despite what you might've heard, life is not one giant, grueling, joyless endurance test. Well, not always. You're going to be just fine. But you knew that already.

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