Ex-Girlfriends

Ex-girlfriends. We all have them, but some are crazier than others. This week I’m going to recount the tale of two especially crazy ones from my past. The reason I do this is that you can’t make shit up this good. I also don’t know why I ever put up with this, but I did. The following is based on 100% authentic and true events. Names have been changed to protect those that are crazier than a shithouse rat.

First off, there was “Tandi.” She believed that everytime you said the word “faggot” or used “gay” in a derogatory manner that somewhere, a gay person would feel it and be ashamed of being gay and/or a hate crime would happen.

She insisted that supporting Microsoft was wrong because Bill Gates uses the money to support anti-gay agendas and that is why she only buys Apple products since Steve Jobs is a closet homosexual who doesn’t come out because Apple stocks would drop.

She also recounted the tales of how she used to be a heroin addict, was once molested by the cops, kicked her drug habit, relapsed and sold her mother’s wedding ring, and then got clean again. All before the age of 17 while living in a miniscule tiny town in backwoods Utah. She also claimed relation to Steve Martin.

"I LOVE heroin!"

After our relationship ended she told me that she had a brain tumor and that she would likely die within 12 months. Obviously, that never happened.

Then there was “Tara.” The first warning sign to me was the day we were chatting on the phone, I was playing Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver and pretending to listen as she blathered on about being bipolar.  This was pretty much the norm. “Vampires, metal, blood, blahblahblahblahblah.” While I beat Soul Reaver again.

Until the fateful night that she calmly explained to me, in that glossy-eyed lunatic voice where you know the person believes it, that at birth her FANGS were filed down. Furthermore, that it is a common practice for doctor’s to file down excessively large canines on babies. She went on to explain that when she drinks blood, her own being the only source available, she feels healthier and more revitalized.

Okay, whatever. I’ll roll with this. Dating someone crazy makes it wild and exciting or something I guess. So, I’ll continue to put up with this and let her be my special lady. My special crazy lady.

Not long after the “I’m a vampire” plot twist, the other shoe dropped. Once again, the authentic “I believe every word of this” voice came out of her fangless hole to tell me that she could make it rain whenever she wanted it to. Seriously. She said that the weather reflected her mood, when she was happy it was cloudy out (vampires hate the sun, dummy), and when upset it rained. If she felt like rain she just concentrated and it happened.  Why she wasn’t working as a meteorologist, the world may never know.

I worked hard on this image.

How was this amazing feat possible? Are these new and unknown vampire powers even gayer than anything Stephanie Meyer could create? Don’t be absurd. Obviously, she’s part fairy. (I’d like to remind you that this took place before the rise of True Blood.) You see, fairies, or fae people, live amongst us like normal people now, but their bloodline sometimes causes certain powers to manifest. Her parents were good at predicting things, but Tara was able to alter the weather as well as read minds. Amazingly, as she told me this she said “I know that you’re thinking I’m crazy right now.” Astonishing! How could she possibly even know that unless it was true?

I asked the obvious question anyone else would when confronted by this situation.

“Does being a vampire conflict with your fairy instincts?”

She explained that the thirst for blood is really just a thirst for LIFE, which is what fairies love anyway. Nature and life and shit.

Shortly after, I calmly explained to her in my “I believe this” voice that we weren’t meant for each other. “Things aren’t working out between us, you’re obviously crazy and I’m pretty much not so I don’t think we should see each other anymore.”

That’s it for this week, short and sweet. Next week’s blog is about children (not in a gross way)!

Literature, Twilight and Loving Books

I’ve come to the realization that my life will never be fulfilled so long as I have not published a book. I think about it everyday. Walking into a bookstore and seeing it there. To be a producer of the magical tomes of entertainment and wisdom that have filled my life with joy since I was a kid.

When I was six years old my teachers told my mother that I was retarded (Okay, not REALLY, but they said I had difficulty reading), little did they know I’d read the newspaper at home and beg to stay up late, not to watch TV or play with toys, but to read books.

It started with shark books, dinosaur books, and my late father’s collection of National Geographic magazines. I can still recall him reading to me from a book of legends and unexplained phenomena. Ghosts, Spring-Heeled Jack, UFOs. It gave me nightmares and I loved it. It eventually progressed to the world of fiction. I would sit with my mom and watch the Stephen King made for TV movies on ABC. Tommyknockers, The Stand, IT, The Langoliers. All of’em. (Yes IT traumatized me, all clowns must die and cannot be trusted. Also, don’t walk anywhere near a storm drain.) I loved them so much that at about ten or so my mother signed me up for the Stephen King book club. I tried to read the first book that arrived, the massive Insomnia, but I was 10 and it was a bit much for me. I did pick up and do well with Nightmares & Dreamscapes, a collection of short stories, which is easily the genre King excels at.

Fast forward a year or two and my sister’s boyfriend lets me play DOOM on his computer. It blew me away, I got DOOM for my Playstation not long after and devoured it. I played it over and over again while listening to Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson and White Zombie in my room. It also prompted me to buy two DOOM novels based on the game, these I devoured in about a week, but in them one of the characters mentioned that the monsters, demons, and the entire situation that was happening was something out of a Lovecraft novel. Lovecraft, huh? I shall have to investigate this name. My mom purchased for me a Lovecraft collection and I was ruined. It floored me.

Over the years since then I read anything I ever wanted to, nothing was ever taboo or off limits. My southern mother’s love of books was passed on to me, along with her progressive open mindedness. I was allowed to read anything I wanted. From the books of “The Great Beast” Aleister Crowley to The Satanic Bible by Anton Szandor LaVey, nothing was off limits.

It’s for this reason that I can usually appreciate something about nearly everything, but my standards for what is “literature” are a little bit high, biased and convoluted. Basically, I’ve become a jaded book snob. A semester ago on the first day of class we were asked to give our name and list our favorite book or books. A lot of Twilight and Harry Potter answers. Some of the guys answered with things like graphic novels, Watchmen, 300 and the like. I was the first, in my opinion anyway, to answer with actual literature when I said Lovecraft, Homer, and Melville.

My personal definition of literature works like this: it needs to be a text that is prolific enough in scope that the ideas embedded in the story allow it to be timeless.

Basically it works like this:

This is fucking awful.

This is not literature. In fifty years, I sincerely hope no one is reading this fucking garbage. The late Peter Steele of Type O Negative once said that “functionless art is simply tolerated vandalism.” I agree completely. What is the function of Twilight? What does it accomplish? What is the message it conveys?

 Does it teach young women to fight for what they want? Well, no. Does it teach men that if they want something they should fight for it? Well, no not that either. So, what the hell is the moral of this story? If you meet a vampire let him put his sparkly weiner in you, it’ll be great?

Something else that always bugged me about the story is this, Bella is a teenage girl and this Edward vampire kid is over a hundred years old, they both look around the same age, physically. But mentally he is much older than her, he’s had plenty of time to read all the classics, visit every major museum, learn every language, study countless fields of science… why in the fuck would he have ANYTHING in common with or be able to talk about with a teenage girl? Teenagers aren’t deep, they’re retards. I’m almost thirty and if I had to carry on a conversation with a teenage girl for an hour I probably couldn’t do it. I can barely tolerate and get along with college kids in their early twenties. I can barely tolerate and get along with anyone. Let alone some expressionless mopey girl in the backwoods of Washington.


I won’t pick on Harry Potter too much, because it does actually bestow concepts like perseverance through adversity, courage and things like that. However, I do get annoyed when people act like J. K. Rowling is the greatest author in the world.

 “Hogwarts! Totally original!”

Remember this guy? That's Hoggle. Back in 1986 a young Jennifer Connolly kept bungling his name. You just got it didn’t you? You remember when she called him Hogwart? Yeah, I know.

Then there’s the name for the spells… first of all, Tolkien invented A NEW LANGUAGE for his books. Rowling’s spells are mostly Latin and Greek words cobbled together that just so happen to mean exactly what the spell does. Let me show you how it works, I’m going to make up a spell right now.

Ignarussygkrafeas! I have cast the spell of “ignorant author” on J. K. Rowling. It took me two minutes to assemble that spell.

Now, I’m not entirely innocent of this practice, I’m writing a fantasy/fairytale style novel and coming up with names is difficult. Half the time I want to delete everything I’ve just written because I think it is stupid, we use what we know.

Literature should be thought provoking. It should teach you something, or at least get you to think about things in ways you never have before. Melville can give you a greater appreciation for life at sea and travelling abroad. Lovecraft can redefine what horror is and can be. And Star Wars novels, well you see they uh… increase your power in the Force. Knowledge is power. Yeah.

Darth Bane taught me that “Honor is a fool’s prize.”



That’s it for this week kids, see you next week when I enthrall you with the ghastly tales of… MY EX-GIRLFRIENDS. (Spoiler: I dated a vampire fairy once.) See you then.

Science, GMOs and Why You Should Love It

While I primarily work with rhetoric and words, I have a deep seated appreciation for science. Let me tell you why you should too.

First of all, science doesn’t require a leap of faith. Computers, medicine, astrophysics; they aren’t magic; they’re just science at work. Some fields may seem like they require faith because the concepts contained in them are so vast and involved, but that simply isn’t the case. Critics of science usually say that astrophysics and other hard sciences require a leap of faith because they (the critics) don’t understand it. Well, of course not! To reach that level it’s like building a skyscraper. You have to clear the ground and lay a foundation (basic math), from there you have to put in support beams (algebra), then you can start adding layers (physics, calculus, etc.). Without this foundation to stand on of course everything seems like magic. This is simply someone mistaking their own ignorance of a subject for that subject being beyond understanding.

It still amazes me that science has so many critics and idiots in opposition to it. People who plug their Facebook page with anti-science sentiments while using a computer and being alive probably due to advancements in medicine prior to their birth.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." -Charles Darwin

In science, if a theory is proven to be wrong, it is discarded. No crying, no feet stomping, no separate sects forming, no reformations, just throw it out. It’s useless to the advancement of science from then on out. It is this willingness to throw out incorrect information that makes science so amazing.

I wish that more people thought like scientists. Where beliefs and incorrect information, no matter how sacred, are discarded without tears or tantrum in favor of demonstrable, repeatable, fact based evidence that may be contrary to what we already know.

Instead we have assholes that fight against science without pausing to consider the ramifications of their fight. This leads to people fighting against Aspartame, GMO crops, and things that are “unnatural.”
The latest trend is “if you read the label and you can’t pronounce it or spell it, don’t eat it!”

Okay, well let’s test that theory. Here are some ingredients: Thiamine, Fructose, Cellulose, Riboflavin, Niacin, Pantothenic acid, Vitamin B6, Folate, Vitamin C, Calcium, Iron, Magnesium, Phosphorus, Potassium, and Zinc.
Some of these words aren’t very common, anti-science food weirdoes probably wouldn’t eat this product.
What is this insidious and evil product?

Yeah, I know.

Then comes the fight against GMO products. GMO stands for Genetically Modified Organism which sounds scary, but sorry, science is direct and to the point, it doesn’t care if terms sound scary to you or not. They attempt to describe quickly and accurately. Would we be having this problem if they were called GPO’s (Genetically Purified Organisms)? No, that sounds like apples made by Hitler.

Basically, a GMO is… well, pretty much everything. Like bananas? Cool, me too. We’ve been eating the same cloned species of banana for about seventy years, which is itself a descendant of the first domesticated (modified) varieties from about ten thousand years ago. Prior to that there were roughly two different species of bananas domesticated, grown and sold in stores. But disease rampaged one but did not affect the other. Therefore, we have only the one species now. Resistant to disease, huh? Sounds UNNATURAL.

Genetic modification works by either selecting specific genes in an organism to present more strongly, or, more commonly, by artificial selection. Despite what Greenpeace and other whack jobs want you to believe, THERE ARE ABSOLUTELY NO ANIMAL GENES TRANSPLANTED INTO FRUIT, GRAIN OR VEGETABLES. It simply doesn’t happen. Terms like “Franken food” are misleading and stupid. Here’s how it works, let’s do some roleplaying.

Hi, I’m an (evil) scientist, specifically a microbiologist. Greenpeace and assorted food idiots hate my guts and compare me to Dr. Frankenstein (who is also a pretty good guy but that is another blog). Well, I recently heard that in third world countries there are people STARVING TO DEATH. I will go and help them using the power of SCIENCE!

I notice that the locals’ wheat isn’t producing enough food for people to eat. Well, what if we speed up breeding by using the two growing seasons available in this country? During summer, we’ll breed in the highlands, like what was being done before, but then we’ll take the needs north to a valley with different altitudes and temperatures. Eureka! More crops every year and more food for starving people!

But wait, only the best seeds were selected to be moved from one location to another, and in a short time they started developing resistances to photoperiodism, which is a natural reaction of organisms to day/night cycle changes. This meant that the wheat could now be grown in both regions, nearly all year.

I have created a GMO wheat crop that is saving people’s lives!
“You monster! You’re creating Franken food! They’re KILLING Mother Earth and altering our food!”

But I saved a lot of people from starvation and now we have MORE food for people to eat! I’ll take my techniques and my research and travel to another third world country where people are starving to death. I’ll bet I can help them with science also!
“Evil!”
After many years I have improved wheat and rice strains so that they are resistant to disease, weather, and other conditions. I am awarded a Nobel peace prize for my work and it is estimated that I have saved over a BILLION people.

But now this has happened…

People in countries that don’t have problems relating to starvation are trying to undo my life’s work trying to save people.

Pretty compelling story, isn’t it? Well, it’s a true story. The man that I “role-played” for you there is Norman Borlaug. He has saved over a billion lives by using artificial selection and other techniques to make crops more resistant while yielding more food for people to eat. He dedicated his life to try to feed the entire world through science and now, every day, Greenpeace and other morons disrespect him and his work by protesting GMO food. Remember the part where he immediately transplanted the seeds? There was a scientific theory in place that proclaimed you couldn’t do that, they needed a ‘rest’ period before being planted. When Borlaug’s boss upheld this theory he resigned. The dispute was eventually settled and Borlaug was proven correct. This incorrect theory? Discarded. I could tell you its name, but it doesn’t really matter now, does it?

But what about the health risks of GMO foods?

Well, nothing. GMO food products are some of the most tested products on the market and are still stamped safe to eat by the EPA and FDA.

If it’s GMO, astrophysics or evolution, science is working towards a brighter future. I could write a ten thousand word blog entry on science explaining to you everything it has already done for it and has the potential to do for us, but I think it’s time you discovered some of this for yourself.

Next time you sit down to eat breakfast, pop open your phone, tablet, laptop or whatever. Go to a search engine and type in the name of something you’re eating. Ham and onion omelet? Look up onions. They help prevent cancer cell growth. Using artificial selection, we could selectively breed a crop of onions that were extremely effective at inhibiting cancer cell growth. See where this is going? Science allows us to know these things, more importantly, science allows us to do these things.

Science doesn’t ask for your faith, it’s true if you believe it or not.
Please, watch the video below and I will see you here next week.

For more awesome science information, you can purchase books by or watch documentaries featuring the following:

Norman Borlaug, Carl Sagan, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Isaac Newton, Brian Cox, Richard Dawkins, Charles Darwin, Marie Curie, Louis Pasteur, Albert Einstein… I could go on, but start there.