Category Archives: badness
On Christopher Jordan Dorner: We might’ve been friends
An ex-cop named Christopher Jordan Dorner wrote an 18-page manifesto that I felt compelled to read for some reason. He’s killed three people so far.
The majority of the suicide letter (let’s not mince words here) lists the specific people who have wronged him and acted unjustly in the past (including a high school administrator who lied to him in 1996). A lot of it sounds legit. He discourages anyone from coming after him, saying they will not survive if they try to pull him over or arrest him. He talks about his experiences with racism, and the need for better gun control laws: “Who in there right mind needs a fucking silencer!!!”
pictured: murderer, victim, human
Then at the bottom of page 12, he starts thanking people for being good friends, honest politicians, talented doctors: “I’m sorry I’ll never get to go on that moose and bear hunt with you. I love you bro.” At this point, I wondered how many people had written letters just like this, and, upon realizing that the list of wonderful people in their lives they would miss spending time with was surprisingly long, got up from the computer, called one of them and made plans instead of going on a killing spree.
Like most manifestos, this one goes off track once he stops being quite so angry, and starts lauding the people he admires (“Off the record, I love your new bangs, Mrs. Obama”) and the things he loves (“Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” is the greatest piece of music ever, period”). While it’s fascinating to see inside someone’s head without a filter, I can’t give this guy too much credit. He’s killing people. Some part of his brain is broken. Still, I can’t help but think of Shan Yu, the fictitious “warrior poet” quoted for claiming that we can only really know a person when they are pushed to the brink. I wonder if manifestos like these seem crazy because we never really know each other; as a result 18 pages worth of raw honesty and what this man considered truth comes across as proof of insanity.
In the order they appear, here are the parts of the manifesto that jumped out at me for their candor and silliness. I am shocked by how much I agree with him on so many topics:
Thank you for the superb surgery you performed on my knee… I never had the opportunity to thank you for allowing me to live a life free of knee joint pain. Thank you.
I thank the unnamed women I dated over my lifetime for the great and sometimes not so great sex.
It’s kind of sad I won’t be around to enjoy the Hangover III. What an awesome trilogy… World War Z looks good and The Walking Dead season 3 (second half) looked intriguing. Damn, gonna miss shark week.
Hillary Clinton. You’ll make one hell of a president in 2016… Chelsea grew up to be one hell of an attractive woman. No disrespect to her husband.
Gov. Chris Christie. What can I say? You’re the only person I would like to see in the White House in 2016 other than Hillary. You’re America’s no shit taking uncle. Do one thing for your wife, kids, and supporters. Start walking at night and eat a little less, not a lot less, just a little. We want to see you around for a long time.
Wayne LaPierre, President of the NRA, you’re a vile and inhuman piece of shit… You are a failure of a human being. May all your immediate and distant family die horrific deaths in front of you.
Ellen Degeneres… You changed the perception of your gay community and how we as Americans view the LGBT community… Oh, and you Prop 8 supporters, why the fuck do you care who your neighbor marries. Hypocritical pieces of shit.
[Redacted] Church, may you all burn slowly in a fire, not from smoke inhalation, but from the flames and only the flames.
Cyclist, I have no problem sharing the road with you. But, at least go the fucking speed limit posted or get off the road!!! That is a feasible request. Livestrong you fraudulent assholes.
Cardinal Mahoney, you are in essence a predator yourself… May you die a long and slow painful death.
Charlie Sheen, you’re effin awesome.
My opinion on women in combat… Many want to see you fail. Remember everyone of you is a pioneer. There was a time when they didn’t allow blacks to fight the good fight. This is your civil rights. Don’t quit!!!
It’s time to allow gay service member’s spouses to utilize the same benefits that all heterosexual dependents are eligible for.
Mr. Bill Cosby, you are a reasonable and talented man who has spoken the truth of the cultural anomalies within the black communities that need to change now.
This is racist, right?
Racism isn’t always marked by a burning cross on a front lawn, or a bunch of dudes in bed sheets marching around holding the Union Jack aloft. Racism can be subtle, it can call on unspoken assumptions (read: prejudices) that we’re not even aware of. Until, of course, some idiot in the marketing department for a new TV show decides to use those very assumptions to sell their product. Observe:
preeeeeetty racist
“Is this the face of a THIEF?” The unspoken answer is: No, of course not! She’s a white, female, well-fed member of the middle class. Judging by looks alone (which is what we’ve been tasked to do), members of the dominant culture (of which I am one) would say No, of course this woman doesn’t look like a thief, and not only because she’s looking away in a typical “Why no, officer” style, but predominantly because white ladies don’t steal shit. Which begs the question: What does a thief look like? The unspoken answer is, of course, someone with traits unlike this woman’s: dark-skinned males.
So we’re being compelled to watch this show based on the novelty of white people breaking the law, because that’s just so crazy, right? Which is racist. Right?
School will make me crazy before it makes me smart
i made this
When a new semester of grad school approaches I disappear into my dark place. A place where no light pierces the inky blackness, which is a metaphor for stress.
I’ve been doing a pretty good job of getting ahead on the readings while I’m not getting bogged down with endless papers and crap. I found some good people to be in “inquiry groups” with this semester (which is apparently a requirement for both classes, oddly), so I’m feeling good about that.
Still, school is shitty because it never ends. There’s always something you should be doing, a forum to post on, an article to read, a paper to outline/write. There’s only a week between this semester and the next, then there’s a three month break because, y’know, they felt like fucking with our schedules or whatever.
But I’m only complaining because it’s inconsistent, and nobody likes change. The one thing in this program I can count on, though, is the confusion. On behalf of everyone. All the time. The professors are confused about the syllabi because they didn’t write them, so they can’t explain them to the students. The students are confused because they don’t get clear instruction from the (confused) professors. The education department is confused because no one seems to know who did write the fucking syllabus for whatever class you said you were in, so maybe try calling back later?
can i still get that letter of rec?
One professor (who was changed a few days before the class began) wrote us three emails in the first week, all within ten minutes of each other, essentially saying:
1) Hey guys, take a look at this outline from class last week.
2) Subject: “Oops!” Wrong class, my bad!
3) Subject: “Yikes!” Jkjk, that was meant for you guys. “Carry on!”
Tonight I got an email from her with the subject “READ THIS PLEASE!” It went on to outline deadlines for assignments that were vaguely gone over in class, and let us all know that a bunch of us had already lost points for not doing shit we didn’t know we were supposed to do. When my world is being turned upside down, this is the consistency I know I can depend on. Thank the FSM for small miracles.
I would bail out if I weren’t already two semesters in. Plus, I want my damn master’s degree. My idea of my adult self has included getting a higher education degree for so long, it would be weird not to have one. Not to mention the added benefit of better job opportunities in the future (PLEASE KTHXBAI).
Parking fail
I park in the same parking garage off campus every day. People who park there are like me: repeat customers. You’ll typically find the same cars in their favorite spots. Every car there belongs to someone who works at or attends the university where I work/go to grad school.
So it’s weird when someone does a horrendous parking job. It’s not like they’ve never parked there before. There is really no excuse.
But since it’s possible that this horrible parker is a co-worker or classmate, I can’t put mean notes on these cars. I have to rely on comedy to get my point across.
Behold:
i made this
UPDATE: April 1, 2013
Once again, some oblivious sheep did a shitty parking job with an SUV in a compact spot. So I became a smartass. Again:
sweet parking job bro
The sleep issue
Boyfriend’s out of town. I’ve killed two whole bugs. I did all the dishes I’ve been allowing to accumulate over the past week.
Side note: The joy of not doing my dishes has literally made me giggle aloud a few times recently. Needless to say, I’m enjoying Boyfriend being out of town a whole lot more than expected. It’s pretty fun, setting my own schedule, not checking in with anyone, sitting around watching Buffy all afternoon and writing my blog [like right now], drinking tea in front of the TV, not paying attention to Boyfriend… overall, a very relaxing, fun experience so far.
But getting to sleep is still a problem. I found this chart to explain. It does a pretty good job (except for the screenplay part: replace that with creating imaginary conflicts in which I dominate).
pretty damn accurate
Haiku distraction: Motivational speaker
At an Office Job meeting some months ago, the invited speaker was a college football coach (for some reason). He went to the podium and spoke enthusiastically (and endlessly) about the football players and so on, none of which had to do with the parents or their kids. And yet on he went, giving me material to haiku about.
Facebones: the ultimate motivational speaker
He’s got that gung-ho
attitude. He’s a winner.
Euthanize him, please.
Coaches are basically motivational speakers with hundreds of sports plays smashed into their heads.
Coach Buck Bobby-Joe
Johnson has a story for
everything today.
“Lemme tell you about this one kid,” he said many, many times. None of the stories were pertinent to the meeting’s purpose or its participants in any way. But football is huge, and the players are mini-celebrities, so he had a pretty captive audience.
He says it’s “college
football, not football college.”
Why’s he our speaker?
Needless to say, I was unimpressed with his presentation, nor am I particularly enamored of any celebrity athlete-types.
For a football coach,
he sure is enthused about
education. Right?
He kept emphasizing the football players’ scholarly pursuits, as if that’s why any of them attend college (or that anyone in the room gave a shit).
pointless pointless pointless
Then someone else stood up to speak, as if that’s what we needed: more monologuing.
This guy’s got a mouth
on him. The crowd loves him. These
parents are sold now.
This guy had started his own email/blog thingie about college sports, and could not stop talking even though he kept saying, “I’ve been speaking too long,” and “I said I was going to keep it short, and I’ll finish soon.” Still, the crowd was with him, so he had no reason to shut up.
I’d had enough of listening to white men wax poetical about their hard-on for football. It was time for dessert.
The vanilla cake
was apparently made by
Hello Kitty. Yum!
The cake had lace and pink shit all over it. I couldn’t figure out what was edible and what was decoration. I think the point was to kill us with sweetness in more ways than one.
every attendee at the meeting resembled this guy
“The most precious gifts
are those unwrapped by the heart.”
Christ, what does that mean?
The time then came for the parents to endlessly thank each other for all their endless giving and “hard work.” The speeches were the worst part.
So many awards!
How thankful can a group of
volunteers be? Guh.
What a monumental waste of time. So much money spent on gifts and certificates and crap, I could not believe the self-congratulatory nonsense my coworkers and I witnessed in just three long hours. I felt like shouting, “Feed some homeless people, you rich, white bastards!”
On an unrelated note, my search for Facebones pulled up this “Jem” (pun very much intended).
killer
Hipster graffiti
Yeah, I know it’s graffiti, and I hate graffiti, but I enjoyed this little guy. He was tagged on the parking lot where my car lives while I’m at work. It is a little hipster though…
breakin’ the law
Twitards with a license
I saw this in Echo Park a couple months ago. Needless to say, I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.
what a waste of gas
Beautiful Creatures is a terrible, terrible book
I noticed a movie about magic people called Beautiful Creatures is coming out, and I figured Ballerina Friend would like to go see it, and may have already read the book. I thought it would be fun to read it and chat about it with her later, a sort of impromptu book club for two. Unfortunately, Beautiful Creatures is a terrible, terrible book.
I wrote a review on amazon.com (see below). I hated this book, but the part of me that hates things is smushed up against my sense of humor, so my vitriolic review had to be peppered with some comedy:
Beautiful Creatures makes Twilight look like Gone with the Wind. It’s hundreds of pages worth of unfounded teen angst. If I hadn’t read it on my Kindle, I would use it for toilet paper.
god it must be hard being the ‘beautiful loner’
The author attempts to end every chapter with a cliffhanger, and ends up using a small variety of the same one every time: “We were running out of time.” The teenage boy who narrates the story is apparently so unfamiliar with (and horrified by) the linear progression of time, than he cannot BELIEVE that time marches forward no matter how badly he apparently wants to… I dunno, kiss (?) this girl.
Every character has exactly one dimension:
-Southerners are nasty, old fashioned, racist, stupid and shallow.
-Kids in bands are grungy, semi-friendly, and give their cars edgy names like “The Beater,” which is a huge opportunity for a penis joke, which the author misses completely.
-The only educated people in town are from elsewhere.
-No one ever leaves the town. EVER. The author feels the need to point this out a couple dozen times throughout the book just so you can remember how hard it is to be a teenager trapped in a beautiful house with a private cook and a free education. Must be rough.
-The old ladies are all genuinely crazy. It’s not cute. They need medical attention.
-The one non-white character is an African American woman who works as a cook, practices voodoo, and sounds like a racist black face character.
-Magical-type people (“casters,” not witches, because that would be just one too many clichés, apparently) all fall within one category only: old-fashioned, slutty as hell, mentally challenged, or goth. Pick one, then add ‘incompetent’ because in a book about “casters,” you’d think some “casting” would occur, but you’d be wrong. When a few spells finally do get cast, all they end up doing is lighting fires and glaring at each other. The tension is non-existent.
Here are a few things that DO happen, inexplicably:
-The main character proves to be psychic. It’s not a big deal for some reason.
-A magic house changes its interior structure occasionally, but this serves no real purpose.
-The narrator is said to have some kind of power, but it’s never explained.
-Various “casters” are said to be types, like “natural” or “catalyst,” but these terms are never explained.
-The evil (and therefore slutty, of course) “caster” is capable of making people do anything she wants, and she chooses to use this power to mess up a prom.
-One of the “casters” drives a hearse for no reason.
-The whole book leads up to a night on which something bad is supposed to happen to this “caster” girl. Her guardian (who has spent the whole book up to this point freaking out and protecting her from death) lets her attend what is essentially a rave that very night, which is obviously a terrible idea, but in the end, doesn’t matter much either.
The inconsistencies in this book were exhausting. Still, I like magic stories so I kept reading thinking, “Surely, SURELY this will culminate in some kind of climax that will ultimately explain what a ‘natural’ or a ‘catalyst’ is. SURELY all those other characters I’ve spent so much time reading about will prove to be more than just talking scenery. Surely I haven’t just wasted $9 and a few days of my life reading this terrible, terrible book.”
Guess what: No. Just no.
Do not buy this book. Do not see the movie. Save your money for food, shelter, or ice skating. Ice skating is a better experience than this book, even if you hate ice skating.
Be Random, Be Clear 
