Mmmmmm, sheep

Oh, right, my website! I remember when I used to update that! Hey, by the way, if you're shopping for your special Kwanzaa someone, don't forget to use that Amazon link over there on the right. It helps fund the awfulness that is this site.

The historical internets: President Obama's first chat

Barack Obama made history (admittedly, very obscure and irrelevant history) by posting the weekly Democratic radio address on Youtube. I assumed this was historical because it completely defied the concept of a radio address when you could actually see the person talking, but apparently this was the first time a major political speech was given on Youtube thatt didn’t involve a documentary about Bush plotting 9/11, a cat jumping onto a baby’s face, or Tina Fey. We’re being told that President Obama will be the most tech-friendly president we’ve ever had, and in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt’s fireside chats, Obama would conduct his chats via the internet. This would allow for two-way communication with the people that make this nation great.

Actually, no it won’t. Those people will be at work. So the chat will actually look more like this:

PresidentObama: Welcome, my fellow Americans, to the first ever presidential chat room! I look forward to discussing and debating the issues of the day with you, and I hope we can work together to realize the potential of this great nation.
xxxFalloutBoi14xxx: FIRST! FALLOUT BOYT ROXXX!!!1!!
PresidentObama: I do not condone the wearing of tight pants by males, but I appreciate your feedback. And thank you for being the first response.
PwnUrFace: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2b1D5w82yU. lolz i jus rick rolled the prez!
PresidentObama: Actually, I believe that to succesfully Rick-roll someone, they have to click on the link you provide while expecting to be linked to something else. However, I thank you for your participation.
Xerox J. Dominate: Want a bigger pen1s? Cheap v1ag4a c14L1s click HERE!
PresidentObama: Xerox J. Dominate? You belong on the Justice League of Direct Email Marketing! That Poorly Drawn Life is a great site. But how about we start this chat by focusing on the issues? Does anyone have any questions or concerns about the health care program I announced earlier this week?
BushMurdersAmericans: I have a question about health care. What are we going to do about the health care of Americans who are lied to and killed by their president? Wake up, America! 9/11 was an inside job! Read all about it at 911truth.com!
PresidentObama: While I don’t subscribe to your conspiracy theory, you can rest assured that I will not be murdering Americans.
PresidentObama: Does anyone have any comments regarding my cabinet-level appointments? What are your reactions to Rahm Emmanuel as my chief of staff?
OgreSlayr2014: FOR THE HORDE!!!
PresidentObama: Perhaps we should do a little more filtering of the comments here…I’m looking for feedback on my policies and decisions.
VeganGrrrl91: I would like to know what you will be doing in your personal life that’s green.
PresidentObama: I often find myself trapped by these questions and thinking to myself, 'You know, this is a stupid question, but let me answer it.' So when Brian Williams is asking me about what's a personal thing that you've done that's green, and I say, you know, 'Well, I planted a bunch of trees.' And he says, 'I'm talking about personal.' What I'm thinking in my head is, 'Well, the truth is, Brian, we can't solve global warming because I fucking changed light bulbs in my house. It's because of something collective'.
PresidentObama: Well, at least we’re getting on the right track here. Let’s keep this going!
CEORickGM: Can I have $25 billion?
PresidentObama: We’ve been over this already…Next!
ClientNumber9: When will u legalize prostitutes?
PresidentObama: We’re dealing with the largest financial crisis in several generations, fighting two wars, and facing a trillion dollar deficit. Let’s just say it’s not a priority.
Lulzmaster023: i can has cheezburger?
PresidentObama: lol
PresidentObama: We’re almost out of time. I’ll take one last question.
Hilly4prez08: u r a bad prez. i wud b much better!
PresidentObama: Sigh. Well, thank you all for coming to the first and only presidential internet chat!

Farewell, soccer season

At the closing ceremonies of the youth soccer league, I gathered my team of five- to seven-year old kids around and told them I just wanted to say a few quick things before I gave them their trophies. This is mostly because with kids in that age group, there is only enough attention span to listen to a few quick things. I told them that I enjoyed coaching them, that they all made a lot of progress and learned a lot, and that I was really proud of…

A hand went in the air. It was the hand of the cutest little five year old girl on the team, the one NurseSexy and I had agreed we’d buy on the black market if her mother was willing to negotiate a reasonable price. Since this might be my last opportunity to see her (her mother seemed very offended at our initial cash offer), I couldn’t refuse the chance to see what she had to say, so I asked what she wanted.

“Aaaaaand…..aaaaand (she often begins her sentences with one word drawn out way too long while she thinks of the next part of her sentence, which is adorable)….one of the Wiggles is like you.”

Since I don’t have kids yet, I am only aware of the Wiggles; I have never actually seen them. I do know that the Wiggles are to children what botched plastic surgery is to Jenna Jameson, so I assumed that was a compliment. (From coaching this girl for a whole season and learning her language, when she says he is like me, she means that we look similar. This is the same girl that told me “My right here hurts” and held her stomach as she came to the sideline.)

When we got home, NurseSexy googled the Wiggles. We looked at their pictures, and saw no resemblance. “I think,” I told NurseSexy, “she just meant that we look alike because we’re white.”

Unless she meant I look like the Asian guy.

You: Owning a business

Suppose for a minute that you own a business making cribs for adorable little babies. Your crib-making business is hugely successful, and you run your company well. When research proved to you that lining the cribs with asbestos was a bad idea, you stopped doing it before the government even bothered to step in and stop you. And when people discovered lead paint was making babies retarded, you immediately stopped making your super-deluxe Baby’s Delicious Lead Paint Chip Crib, even though it was a huge moneymaker, because you figured parents might not want to buy such cribs when they found out it would fuck their kids up.

Now suppose that your biggest rivals in the crib-making business did not run their company quite like you did. When they found out lead paint turned babies into lifetime slobber factories, they didn’t stop using lead paint, they just used less, because they were making too much cash on their lead paint cribs. Even worse, since they were making such a killing on lead paint cribs, they started making Baby’s Spent Uranium Rod Playpen. They knew irradiating babies might be a bad idea, but when the government asked them why they were making such cribs, they just said, “Hey, people want babies with flippers for arms, and we’re giving them what they want. Besides, babies look cuter with prehensile tails.”

In the course of operating your crib-making empire, Alanis Morrissette bought one of your cribs. She was impressed, and she called you with some questions: “Your cribs are excellent, ay? I bet you sell aboot a billion of them. I want to buy half your company and move it to Canada. Let’s celebrate over Molson and hockey!” You moved your thriving crib empire’s headquarters to Canada, but kept most of your operations in America. Your employees were ok with the move, because they could go visit corporate headquarters to smoke weed and get gay-married.

As time went by, more and more parents began buying your cribs, realizing that raising a slobberbucket child or a kid with one foot and one hoof is expensive and bad for the environment (radioactive hooves leak a fluid that poisons groundwater). Your fortunes improved, and your competitors promised to change so that they could keep pace with your non-mutating cribs, partly to mirror your success, but mostly because the government told them to stop causing irreparable harm to infants.

The promises your competitors made soon proved to be hollow, when an economic boom caused many parents to buy the pricier products of your competitors for status alone. The Machete-Laden Bassinet was a huge hit for your competition, even though it leaked battery acid from the battery that was used to swing knives at the infants it carried. Parents didn’t care about the battery acid leak, and began claiming it was their right as Americans to be able to drip toxic fluids.

But soon, the economic boom ended. Parents could no longer afford the expensive arsenic and uranium necessary to operate the cribs of your competitors. The crashing economy made life difficult for everyone, but your company fared better than your competitors, thanks to your strong business plan. Your rival crib-makers, on the other hand, began hemorrhaging cash the way their Baby’s First Sharp Object Blanket made infants lose blood. The downturn would hurt everyone, but it could potentially kill your backward-thinking competition.



As a wise executive, you were planning to take advantage of the misfortunes of your competitors. You planned to let their companies collapse, then buy the few good pieces that were left and expand your business. Soon, you would have a huge market share, creating the best products and making smart investments in your company and your employees. This, after all, is how capitalism is supposed to work.

But suddenly, your failing competitors had a plan. They assembled a massive public relations campaign and claimed that the reason they were about to collapse as corporations was because the government had imposed too many restrictions on them. Asking them to reduce the near-lethal amount of carcinogens that they used in their crib blankets imposed an undue burden on them, they said. It would cost them billions to create new cribs that didn’t fire cute little lasers at sleeping babies, and they still had to unload all the Used Syringe Playpens they had in stock. What they needed was billions in government loans.

This made no sense to you, since your company had made all these changes without billions from the government, and your company managed to survive. In fact, you had adjusted your product line to keep up with changing consumer preferences. When parents realized how costly it was to keep buying fuel to keep the Ring of Fire Bassinet going, you were there with a cheaper and less deadly alternative.

But now the other cribmakers were insisting that they needed these loans to stay in business, because despite their inferior products, they employed tens of thousands of Americans. Of course, so did your company, but the other cribmakers insisted you were a Canadian company, even though you built most of your cribs right here in the U.S. of A. And don’t forget, if those other companies failed, you’d be hiring just as many Americans as you took over more of the crib market from the failed companies. Perhaps new cribmakers would even come along offering products equal to or better than your own, because everyone wants a piece of the huge American crib market.

I tell you this tale for two reasons: One, I really wanted to have a reason to make “Baby’s First Sharp Object Blanket”. Two, General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler are asking for $50 BILLION in government money. Billion with a B. You decide if they deserve it.

The shocking development that could change this election

I don't often like to overstate the importance of this website. PDL is certainly a powerful voice for the herpes-ridden majority, but it only comes in second in terms of Internet popularity to some site called Google. I expect a flood of traffic today, though, as news outlets all across the country pick up this amazing story.

Are you sitting down?

Here's the news: John McCain is one of the guys at the Lemon Party. I have photographic proof.

(Note: If you click on the link below while you are at work, you are going to get fired. If you don't know what a Lemon Party is, you don't want to find out while your boss stands over your shoulder. Instead, wait until you get home, cozy up in your chair, and prepare a nice bucket to vomit in. I'm just saying, you've been warned.)

The link: I REALIZE THAT I'M AN IDIOT IF I CLICK ON THIS LINK WHILE AT WORK.

Get the word out, kids. I'll be awaiting the phone call from Fox News.

An over/under bet I never want to make

In addition to our campaign to spread unfounded racial stereotypes, BlackLikeMe and I keep running bets on the possibilities of an Obama administration. We speculate on what sort of thinly-veiled racism will be thrown at an Obama candidacy and offer suggestions on campaign strategy (BlackLikeMe started a campaign to not remind people that Obama is black, I started a smear campaign to convince people that McCain is an illegal immigrant). But as you can imagine, we also speculate on the most terrifying possibilities of an Obama presidency: assassination attempts.

Now, just to be clear, we both want Obama to win, be one of history’s greatest presidents, and enslave white people (I initially voted against that last aspect, but BlackLikeMe convinced me using some very persuasive Powerpoint slides). The PDL.com endorsement alone is probably going to help swing three states in Obama’s favor. But BlackLikeMe and I are also realists; we know this equation to be true: crazy + 7(racism) + guns = tragedy. (Note that racism is multiplied by seven in this instance because racism is directly proportional to anger, and few things could be more frustrating for a white racist than a black president).

I’ve pitched the idea that what I’d most like to see is a huge assassination comedy of errors, where a series of assassination attempts all fail, with the failures becoming more spectacular each time. For instance, you could have a crazed racist charge towards Obama with a knife at a black tie fundraising dinner, only to trip over a 4’9” cocktail waitress, who then proceeds to beat his ass for making her spill the tray of hot dogs wrapped in croisants (I’ve never been to a black tie fundraiser, so I’m just guessing about the hors d’oeuvres here). A few weeks later, you could have a guy who keeps shooting random black people in DC, then gets pissed when he goes home every night and sees Obama is on TV and still alive, only to become convinced that Obama is some sort of messiah, thus turning his “all black people look alike” racism into “Holy shit, Jesus is back…and he’s black!” I look forward to that guy’s Oprah interview.

Well much to my surprise, some white people just couldn’t wait to get started. Some skinheads, clearly lacking my finely-honed procrastination, decided to make a plot to kill not just Obama, but 88 other black people , while beheading 14 more of them. There are so many, many problems with this story, other than that whole “It’s not ok to kill someone because they have different amounts of melanin than you” thing.

First of all, even though I’m not one of those “when the kids are fucked up, blame the parents” types, these kids weren’t raised well. They were probably raised to believe that they could do anything if they put their mind to it, which is a ridiculous thing to teach a kid whose goal is to grow up and shoot the blacks. Lower that kid’s expectations! Don’t tell him he can do anything, tell him the Waffle House can always use a good short-order cook!

Secondly, the education system failed these men, and not just because they probably dropped out in third grade. Killing 88 people and beheading 14 requires a lot of effort and ammunition. I mean, we’ve had someone take out 30+ people with handguns at Virginia Tech, but that took not only accuracy but the foresight to bring enough clips to keep firing AND lock people in to the building. These skinheads were hoping to more than double that body count, and I think they overestimate their abilities. As for the beheadings, there was a recent case on a Greyhound bus, but that was only one beheading. It’s exponentially harder to lop off 13 more heads. Besides, the skinheads couldn’t have turned to either of those other killers for tips, because they were both Asian. Coincidentally, I bet those Asian murderers set more realistic homicidal goals for themselves, because we all know Asians are good at math.

BlackLikeMe agreed with my assessment that the skinheads were aiming too high, and summed up the whole argument pretty well:

“What white person is capable of that much killin'? They're not Asian. Decapitate 14 people, really? White people haven’t done that kind of killin' in the United States since pre-Civil War days.”

By the way, in those days, BlackLikeMe and his four siblings would be counted as three people, according to the Constitution. Don’t say I never taught you anything.

The sanctity of capitalism

Because Congress has been slow to pass my proposed bill (entitled Unregulated Spying by Owners and Operators of Dick Joke Websites, or USOODJW for short), I do not know how many of you are married. I do know that under the Mandatory Fucked-up Marriage Law passed by President Spears in 2032, all of you will have the experience at least once, no matter how ugly you are on the inside. And when the time for your marriage arrives, you will be faced with the horror that is wedding planning.

Wedding planning actually predates what we think of as a modern wedding. In the hunter-gatherer days, potential grooms would plan their weddings by hiding in the bushes with a large wooden club, then leap from the bushes and bash a potential bride over the head before raping her. Over time, it has evolved to become far more complex, expensive, and free of wooden clubs. To maintain the tradition of the original wedding planners, modern wedding vendors rape your wallet.

Planning a wedding, in theory, is like planning a party- a party where people dress up, drink, and hope to bang someone on the Groom Team or Bride Team. In that sense, it’s a beautiful event. What could be more fun than hanging out with a bunch of well-dressed people, getting them drunk, and then preying on their lowered inhibitions and self-esteem?

But something changes when the word “wedding” is mentioned to a vendor. If I were to throw a party for 70 of my friends, I could go to the local Crapplebee’s, offer them $30 per person I’d invited, and everyone could eat, drink, and question my culinary tastes for hours. The restaurant manager would be happy to have $2,100, his servers would be happy to get good tips, and perhaps some of them would get to put their hands down the pants of my friends. In other words, everybody wins, even if the $2,100 hurt my wallet a bit.

Now take that exact same scenario, only this time tell the Crapplebee’s manager that you’re having a wedding party. Suddenly, he can’t accept $30 per person. My guests, he’ll tell me, will consume a lot of alcohol, even though the wedding party would have the exact same drunks that my other hypothetical party had.. “We’ll need to upgrade the silverware, place settings, and centerpieces,” he’ll add, “because ours are complete shit. And do you want your wife to have complete shit?”

And what about the food? Oh, you can’t have normal food at a wedding, says Crapplebee’s manager, you need an “upgraded” menu that has weird foods in smaller portions, the kind of things most people don’t eat very often because they aren’t that appealing. “If you like boneless buffalo wings,” he’ll say, “just imagine them cut into four pieces, with no buffalo sauce, and dipped in a cherry-mango-passionfruit salsa. Oh, and instead of chicken, the buffalo wings are actually fried balls of beef liver. Your guests will be amazed.” Yes, my guests will be amazed, mostly because they won’t believe I bought them such shitty food, when all they wanted was some fucking chicken. You know who else will be amazed? American Express, when they see that I had to spend $120 per person because I replaced the word “party” with “wedding”.

Of course, that huge increase in costs would just cover the reception (note that the word “reception” is used to make it sound classier and more expensive than “party”, even though the only difference is one tends to have less cocaine…I’ll let you guess which one). There is still the matter of having an actual wedding. To put that into perspective, consider the following scenarios:

NurseSexy and I are out for a stroll one day and see a nice gazebo. We have a few friends with us, and we say, “Hey, let’s all take some nice pictures of each other at this cute little gazebo here. That’ll be great.” In any other scenario, that is absolutely free. If you change that to a wedding, a gazebo owner appears and demands $5,000, and suddenly your friends want $2,500 to take your picture. You could probably pay less money if you wanted to conduct a Zoroastrian ritual at the gazebo and sacrifice a goat to your pagan god.

But mentioning a wedding allows the gazebo owner to use the same rationale as the Crapplebee’s manager: “You’re having a wedding here, and my gazebo that is beautiful for any other occasions is an absolute pile of shit when we’re speaking about weddings. You’ll need to spend a few thousand dollars decorating it, maybe drop a grand on some flowers that will die in three days, and then MAYBE you won’t be ashamed and embarrassed to be seen at my shithole of a gazebo.” But for the $5,000 he charges to rent the gazebo, he adds, he’ll hire a 72-year old man in a golf cart to patrol the perimeter of the gazebo and make sure nobody else gets to watch me getting married. So that’s nice. That must cost at least seven bucks an hour.

As for the pictures, NurseSexy and I could walk into a photography studio, tell them we want some nice pictures of us that we can put in an album, and they’d probably charge us $100. Since we’re so exceptionally pretty, they wouldn’t have to spend a lot of time Photoshopping the pictures. If a photographer comes out and takes amazing action shots of the soccer team I coach, he can sell each one of those pictures for five bucks. I know this is true because I’ve had photographers do this before.

Ask that same photographer, using that exact same camera, to come take pictures at a wedding, and he now needs at least $500 per hour. Why? “Oh my fuck,” he says, “you want me to take pictures of people dressed up and looking good? People that pose well so I don’t have to take 20 pictures to get just the right shot of a kid kicking a soccer ball? Well Jesus Christ, even though that sounds like a lot less work, my pictures will look a lot better if I charge you ten times more than I would under any other circumstance.” Am I being too hard on the photographer? I mean, after all, he is going to Photoshop the pictures. Well you know what? I’ve Photoshopped pictures; I can make Beyonce beam with pride as she holds up an enormous buttplug. And my family and friends are fucking beautiful people who don’t need hours of retouching to look good (with the exception of my drunk uncles- “drunkles”, if you will- who won’t be there anyway).

Of course, it wouldn’t be a wedding without a cake. So could I walk into Costco, spend $50, and get an enormous sheet cake? “Holy shitballs, that’s retarded,” the Costco bakery person would exclaim. The correct thing to do is spend $450 on a cake. Now, it doesn’t matter that I don’t like cake, and would much rather have cookies or ice cream (or, failing that, a cookie cake or ice cream cake). What’s important is that the cake be tall, ordered weeks in advance, and cost an exorbitant amount of money. Because suddenly, Costco wouldn’t dare sell me a regular-priced cake. “This is for a wedding,” they’d say, “and our normal cakes suck ass. What you want is the exact same cake, only stacked higher and made prettier, with the price multiplied by ten.”

And just to add one last bit of fuel to this fire, let’s go back to Crapplebee’s. Tell them it’s your birthday. Did they give you a free piece of birthday cake? Did they sing to you? Now tell them you’re getting married. They’ll charge you $50 for that same slice of cake to celebrate your special occasion. But wait, we’re not done! Let’s go to the bartender and tell him it’s your birthday. Did he give you a discount? A freebie? Maybe a little 2-for-1 drink action? Now tell him you’re getting married, and your watered-down drinks will cost $10 each, and he’ll expect better tips.

So to Crapplebee’s manager, gazebo owner, photographer, and cake slanger (what do you call someone who sells cakes? Baker doesn’t seem specific enough), I thank you for your help. I only wish I had a nice wooden club so that I could share my love with you like the cavemen used to do it.

Formula for home improvement: add poop

I have now had my dog for almost two weeks. This is the first dog I have ever had, and it is the coolest fucking dog ever. I apologize to those of you who thought your dog was the coolest dog ever, but your dog is- at best- number two. My dog is an adorable genius who humps things, so he’s basically like a canine version of me. Only a genius. And adorable.

The breeder shipped our dog to us the day after we got back from a trip to DC. I spent the day before he arrived on a last-minute puppy shopping binge, buying toys, a bed, a baby gate, treats, and a collar. As we were getting ready to go to the airport to pick the dog up, I pondered rubbing dog treats and bacon all over my hands and arms just to guarantee that the dog would love me the most. In human terms, it would be the equivalent of me landing at a foreign airport, and having a hot naked chick holding up a sign with my name while three other hot naked chicks were behind her- two of them making out and the other holding a sandwich for me to eat while I watched the football game and got a BJ. How could the dog not love me with a welcome like that?

In the end, I just grabbed two bags of treats to take with us so that I could just fill him up with treats to bribe the shit out of him and get him to like us. I learned this technique from the pedophile that lured me into his van when I was eight. Man, that was some delicious candy. So worth the rectal tearing.

Anyway, NurseSexy and I arrived at the airport and I headed for the baggage claim. Why the baggage claim? Because I’m an idiot. I assumed that since the dog was being shipped via a plane, his little crate would come rolling along on the conveyor belt and as everyone looked in the cage amazed at how cute he was, I’d be like “That’s right, bitches! That’s MY dog!” But in that dreamed-up scenario, I must have forgotten the part where getting smashed around in a luggage compartment would’ve left my new puppy beaten to shit and terrified.

Luckily, probably thanks to some of the crazy fucks at PETA, my dog (and everyone else’s pets) are sent in a special section of the airplane and have a specific person at the airline in charge of their handling and care. Unfortunately, that person was nowhere to be found. We asked several airport employees where one would go to find the terrified dog that was shipped to us from across the country, and all of them pointed us to an office door. But that door was locked, and there was nobody behind it.

This set off a frantic run around the airport, where I went to the ticket counter ready to dry-hump anyone who could successfully lead me to the location of my new puppy. But it was late, and there was nobody left at the ticket counter. After that failure, I asked a cop where I could find my dog, and he assured me that it would be in the office that every other employee had directed us to earlier. At this point, I was convinced that someone had see how awesome and cute my puppy was, and had abducted him. I vowed to find the puppynapper and eat his or her face before lighting him/her on fire and posting the video on Youtube (as a deterrent to other would-be puppynappers...and for the lulz).

Finally, there was stirring in the locked office, and through the window I could see animal crates being wheeled in. The first crate was enormous, so either that wasn’t my dog, or that was the dog that had eaten my dog. But just a few seconds later, another cart wheeled in with a smaller crate that had the world’s most awesome puppy in it. I saw a brief glimpse of him in his crate as they rolled him by, and I started knocking on the door gently. If they hadn’t come to open the door, the knocking would’ve regressed to stage two: hostage taking. But luckily they let us in, and I hurried to the back room to see my puppy.

I began feeding him an endless supply of treats, and he started licking my hand through the grate of his piss-filled crate. NurseSexy dutifully handled the paperwork required so I didn’t have to stop feeding and petting my new dog, and in a few minutes we were allowed to take him. We hurried to the car and took him home, feeling bad for him as he cried in his crate, clearly terrified about what the fuck was going on.

We finally got the puppy home, freed him from his crate, and spent the next few hours playing with him. It’s amazing how much the dog ‘s personality matches mine; when I rolled a ball to him, he was confused and terrified as to how it kept rolling when he smacked it with his paw. Then, just like me, he barked at the laws of physics that govern inertia. Seriously, it’s crazy how much this dog and I are alike.

So without further ado, I present to you, the loyal PDL readers, my new puppy. His name is Sir Milo Trogdor Hobbeston, Earl of Lancastershire and Heir to the Hapsburg Fortune. But if you wish, you may call him Hobbes, which is what the rest of us are calling him.

Sometimes they write themselves

I love it when life hands me gifts. This is one of those times:

One funeral and a guestbook

Due to my concerns about karma, I have generally shied away from making fun of the mentally handicapped. You see, in high school, I actually gave nicknames to every retarded kid in the school: there was Clapping Retard, Sumo Retard, Violent Retard, the Leprechaun, Fast Walker, and Jimmy Walker (Note: Jimmy Walker was not related to Fast Walker. He just really resembled Jimmy Walker from Good Times). But as I got older I realized it’s much more fun and fair to make fun of those who can control how retarded they are. I also realized that every time I made fun of retards, the chance of me ending up with a retarded baby someday increased by another percentage point.

However, one of the other things I’ve realized as I get older is that I need humor to get over sad situations. When some crazy white guy (or perhaps Asian) shoots President Obama in a failed assassination attempt, I will be sad that our country- and humanity, really- is still angry enough about race to do such a thing. So you know what I’ll do? I’ll make fun of the shooter for his poor execution and suggest that perhaps he’s responsible for killing other blacks because he thought they were Obama (it’s well-known that racists all think members of other races all look the same).

So what do these two seemingly unrelated points about myself have to do with anything? This past week, I went to a funeral. It was, as I assume most funerals are, a sad event. And it was made even more sad by the presence of an open coffin. I have no idea who the first person was to suggest that an open coffin was a good idea, but I guarantee that person was white and evil. A nice picture of the person while he/she was still alive and healthy would be perfectly acceptable. The actual dead body being present and exposed is just creepy.

As the various clouds of sadness floated around the room raining tears and eulogies all around, I tried to pretend I was somewhere else, to not concentrate on what was going on around me. Being sad made me uncomfortable, and I wished I had something to laugh about. And then, as luck would have it, I found just the thing I was looking for.

There is a man in my extended family who is, as they say, mentally disabled. And as I looked at the guest book, mixed in with everyone’s elegant signatures, I saw the following, scrawled in all capital letters and mixed in with a little gibberish I couldn’t decode: “JOHN (gibberish) GOD GOD (gibberish) CHICKEN”.

The first thing I though was, “Who the fuck let him sign the guest book!?” But that was quickly followed by my seocnd thought, which was “Thank God they did!” I have no idea what connection was being made there between John, God God (yes, it was written twice in a row, just like I wrote it), and chicken, but it certainly allowed my mind to consider the various possibilities and forget I was 20 feet from an open casket showcasing a dead loved one covered in makeup. And that’s all I needed.

Although in hindsight, maybe my mentally disabled family member has taken up voodoo and plans to raise the dead. I’m pretty sure that involves God and chickens in some way.