Happy Birthday, O' Upstart Crow

Last week, at least as far as we know, was Shakespeare's birthday (April 23rd, or at least we suspect so, since he was baptised on the 26th and typically it was a three day delay). If he were a vampire, he'd be 444 years old now, which would be weird on a number of levels. Putting aside for the moment any images of Shakespeare roaming the streets at night, marauding for flesh, I thought I might put my expertise in the English Renaissance to use and offer a number of things you might do over the next few days to help celebrate the bard's birthday, things that will help you relive those glorious days of Elizabethan and Jacobean London in which Shakespeare thrived:

1) Blame all venereal disease on the French, specifically syphilis, which you should simply call "The French Disease."

2) Use a silken handkerchief for a prophylactic. You might be historically rigorous and use some sort of silken bow or tie to cinch your "little gentleman's cloak," or acknowledge the unbridgeable divide between then and now by slapping a couple of rubber bands on for good measure.

3) Relieve yourself into a bucket or bedpan for as long as you can stand the stench, and then casually toss your "night soil" out a second-story window into the street below. Bonus points if at least some of your filth lands on a passerby.

4) Draw your sword on a stranger for an imagined slight. Here's a good one: "taking the wall" of someone meant walking alongside the wall when coming against someone walking the opposite direction, thereby forcing the stranger to take the far side and thereby inevitably walk closer to, or in, the gutter and all the delicious filth that entailed (see #3). So, the next time someone coming against you politely cheats towards a building/wall, quickly stab him or her in the stomach with your shank.

5) Accuse a neighborhood woman of witchcraft. One sure-fire way of identifying a witch, according to common practice, was to burn a piece of thatch from her roof. If she came running, that meant she was a witch. And honestly, and poor son of a bitch still living under a thatch roof nowadays needs that kind of excitement in their poverty-stricken life anyway. Ha. Poor people.

6) Torture and execute Jesuit priests for sneaking into your country and covertly saying Mass. Alternately, if you want to play at being from the continent, declare the Queen of England the Antichrist and try to assassinate her. So long as your religious fervor burns bright, either choice is alright!

7) Die by 35.

8) Make jokes at the expense of the Irish and the Scots. Excellent options include jabs about their barbarity, quips about their ignorance, or simply oppressing them as a people ruthlessly for hundreds of years. To Hell or Connaught, right, you limey pricks?

9) Attend an execution during your free time. While hangings and beheadings are, obviously, your best bet, a close second would be pelting people in the stocks with rotten produce, rocks, or any leftover night soil from #3. Either way, make sure to shout and gesture wildly as if you were hammered drunk at a baseball game.

10) Become a candy-striper at your local hospital. Should you, in your expert opinion, decide the patient has 'bad blood,' simply apply leeches or just cut them open at the inside of the elbow--you know, where your heroin goes. If you find an amputee immediately post op, help close the wound by shoving a red-hot poker against it, or if you've got a small cauldron handy, pour boiling oil over it. The tingles, and the screams of inhuman agony, let you know it's working!


Isn't being a modern boring? If only we could be Early Modern all the time. Now that's how I want to live...at least until I hit 35.

Still Waiting on Those Diplomatic Plates

This April marks my two year anniversary as a Marker's Mark Ambassador. Yes, you read that correctly. Yes, Maker's Mark, as in the whiskey. Don't pretend that you're surprised; I like to think that I'm on everyone's short list for likely candidates to represent the political interests of smooth, fine, and delicious Kentucky bourbon whiskey. Did I forget to mention it is also hand crafted? They actually make the whiskey out of human hands. Yeah, I couldn't believe that shit, either. Does it still count if said severed hands are clutching barley and wheat as they're hucked in the vat? I'll have to take this up with my dark masters in Kentucky.

The funny thing--apart from the fact that I'm an ambassador for an alcoholic beverage--is that I have no idea how I came to receive this auspicious post. None whatsoever. About a year and a half ago when I mysteriously received a box of plastic cocktail straws and napkins from Marker's Mark, I just assumed it was some randomized promotion. Perhaps my regimen of persistent liver abuse had caught the eye of some Uncle Jesse-esque (Dukes of Hazzard Jesse, not that delicious manwich from Full House) hick in the moonshine business. But as the gifts got increasingly noteworthy, I realized I had somehow been inducted into a secret cabal, one whose firm grasp on power I could manipulate for my own ends. And while the term "secret cabal" isn't always seen in the most favorable of lights, let me assure you that we're dealing with some classy gentlemen here. First of all, they make Maker's Mark bourbon whiskey, which is easily the finest bourbon whiskey to be made on this planet or any planet for all time. And did I mention it was hand crafted? And smooth? Yeah, that too. More importantly, though, said cabal started sending me devices so clearly anachronistic that my fingers twitched spasmodically at the thought of implementing them in this, our age of futuristic plastic polymers and interwebs. For instance, some months back I was sent a stick of sealing wax and a Maker's Mark seal, so that I can seal envelopes closed with my new lords' mark as kings of yore did:



Clearly, the ascot-wearing sophisticates at the Maker's Mark compound know their ambassadors' twisted predilections intimately, as I understood the seal and wax as not a gimmick but an actual tool to be implemented immediately. So fervent was this belief that I used a photocopy of a 1608 letter to Nathaniel Bacon, folded in the fashion of Renaissance correspondence, upon which to test this gift (I'm not kidding; that's a photocopy from the Huntington of a 400 year old manuscript). Behold the glorious results, and in so doing transport yourself to a gilded age of chivalry and savage venereal disease:

Much like a foreign prince lavishes gifts upon his heart's desire, so too did Maker's Mark continue to heap bounty upon me. The final nail in my bourbon-soaked (and thus even more flammable) coffin was the delivery of official Maker's Mark business cards, complete with my name, Ambassador number, and the serial number of my own cask.

Yes, my own cask. Squirreled away under the bluegrass hills of Kentucky, much like the hobbit holes of the Shire, squats a white oak barrel filled with delicious, smooth Maker's Mark bourbon whiskey with my name on it. Literally. Indeed, I almost like to think of it as my child, if you could split open your baby and fine whiskey would pour out. Of course, were that the case, we Irish probably would have died out a long time ago in feats of Swiftian barbarism. Ah, but we'd have died pissed out of our tree and happy.

And in the end, that's why I'm so proud to be a Maker's Mark ambassador, despite the fact that, in all honesty, I have no idea how I came to be one. I've polled the usual suspects and have been met with only confused, blank stares, as if a penis had started to grow from my forehead and staring at it was the only way to uncover the sacred mystery of its beginnings. Ironically, I've come to believe I was hammered drunk one night on the internet and signed myself up for it. I can't be sure, as the brain cells responsible perished in a chemical fire of sorts that very night. Nevertheless, I feel this sordid truth actually makes me qualified for the position. So while I continue to spread the good word about the smooth, sophisticated, almost white-oaky taste of Maker's Mark bourbon whiskey, sit back and enjoy a glass of delicious, fine, brownish Maker's Mark Kentucky bourbon whiskey. I'll be out killing a hobo to see if this office comes with diplomatic immunity.

If You Wanna Topple an Intergalactic Empire, You've Gotta Break a Few Eggs

Combing the web (i.e. the series of tubes) for a suitable picture of the Death Star (II) to convince you all that we're doomed, I stumbled upon a grim reality regarding Star Wars continuity, one that has never occurred to me despite my fondness for following trains of thought until they barrel past their blockades and plunge off the rails and into the abyss. Anyway, when I read this, I laughed out loud, and continued to do so for quite a while, so I thought I'd share it with you:

"When a moon-sized metallic object in low orbit injects its debris and fallout into the atmosphere below, the result is an immensely potent "nuclear winter" effect which will last for years. Darkness enshrouds the ewoks' homeworld, killing plant life. Herbivore and carnivores starve in succession. A handful of ewoks seem to have been evacuated by the rebels, escaping the biocide, since they are seen briefly on Coruscant in Dark Empire. Nevertheless, there cannot be enough survivors to constitute a genetically healthy breeding population. "

Yup, that's right: the Rebels' successful destruction of the second Death Star effectively killed everything on Endor, including the cutest little savage bear race of pigmies that ever tried to cook and eat Harrison Ford (there's more out there than you'd think--the Care Bears really despise him). And doesn't that just add a delicious new layer of irony to the celebration at the end of Return of the Jedi? To be fair, I can't imagine those furry little bastards had any idea what was going on in the first place. We like to think they were inspired by all creatures' desire to be free and the "can do!" spirit of every primative race, but chances are they were just looking for something to crush with a rock. Sure, there is a sad moment when an explosion knocks down two fleeing Ewoks and only one gets back up, but all we get to see is the survivor mourn his friend. I'm sure afterwards he dragged the carcass back up to the tree village and then brutalized it in front of the deceased's mate and offspring so as to assert dominance and claim that family as his own.

My point is that it's probably a mistake to impart too much of ourselves upon those little furballs, but doesn't it make the irony so much more palpable anyway? One moment, they're hosting their new friends from the stars and celebrating the seemingly impossible victory they have only just recently achieved, no doubt emptying their winter stores of food to show an appropriately impressive amount of largesse on their part, and the next moment ash is reigning from a sky that has been dark for three days straight and your "friends" are making one last check of their ship to ensure none of your tribe is hiding on board (save for the ones thrust into cages to be taken as souveniers to rebel children across the galaxy). Clearly, it ain't easy being an adorable species casually included by George Lucas to garner the kiddie audience. But one thing's for damn sure: C3-PO is a cruel, merciless god.

New Contender for World-Ending Apocalypse! Vegas Oddsmakers Scramble to React

If I were you, I'd do a little research on the interwebs and then call your bookie, because yet another avenue to Armageddon has reared its ugly head, and once again, it wears a thick pair of spectacles and sports a pocket protector. Indeed, it looks like science still might find a way to kill us all and bring an abrupt end to God's creation, skewing the odds on my personal favorites: robot apocalypse, zombie apocalypse, and Menudo reunion tour. Behold the awesome majesty of the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC:

Apparently, a pair of concerned citizens are filing suit against the parties responsible for this particle collision machine to put the project on hold, granting additional time for what they claim are much needed safety considerations. What sort of considerations, you ask? The fear-monger responsible for giving me insomnia lists the following gems: creating a series of microscopic black holes that could combine together to form a much larger gravity well and, I imagine, collapse the whole planet in on itself; magnetic monopoles, which I surmise have something to do with magnets and possessing only one pole (like a fire station?); and my personal favorite, strangelets. Now if you're anything like me, you'll assume strangelets are a new breath freshener designed to lodge themselves in your throat, or perhaps a sexy bevy of background singers and dancers who promise to choke the life out of you. As it turns out, "strangelets" are subatomic particles that could theoretically transform anything they touch into similar kinds of matter in a kind of Midas affect that I can only assume would gradually turn our entire planet into a big grapefruit or something. Rest easy, though, because an expert retorts, "We see no evidence of this bizarre theory." Helpfully, he continues: "Once in a while we trot it out to scare the pants off people. But it's not serious." Thanks, asshole.

Now, normally I'm not one to help spread paranoia, but is it me, or does that HLC thing look a whole helluva lot like the inside of the Death Star?

No? Maybe if you close an eye or huff some paint? I don't know. I've had a long week. But if one moment you're sitting at home screaming at Tyra on America's Next Top Model (as one does) and the next you're in line at the pearly gates, be secure in your knowledge that it's the fault of some scientists working on particle collision deep underneath the French-Swiss border who have accidentally done the equivalent of crossing the streams. And if this doesn't obliterate us all in a flash but rather tears a hole in space time and allows Zuul to finally reach our plane, remember: If someone asks you if you're a god, you say 'yes.'

I Welcome Our New Canine Overlords

As every single one of you probably already knows, the role of supreme overlord in my household is one of the many prizes at stake in an ongoing, savagely fought contest between my wife and our dog. While my wife is a fierce combatant and prone to vicious sucker punching without warning, there are times when it seems the plucky contender without his testicles and a habit of licking the carpet until lather coats his chin (not me, in case you're wondering) seems to grasp the upperhand. I keep up on these things because I will be directly affected by the outcome, but my agency in the matter is limited to merely praying that my new dictator will be a relatively gentle one.

Or so I thought. Apparently my dog is part of a larger conspiracy to overthrow human government as we know it, one bent on raising a master race of canine autocrats to the highest seats of power in the land. Should we try to resume our place in those lofty seats, we will undoubtedly be firmly told we're not allowed on the furniture, hit in the head with a rolled up newspaper, and perhaps menaced with a squirt bottle.

My thanks to Oghrim for the tip regarding ObeythePureBreed, a site which is desperately attempting to uncover this budding coup d'etat before it's too late. The brave souls there have smuggled certain sensitive drafts of insidious doggy propaganda to prove their point, propaganda I feel compelled to share with you in a desperate gesture of resistance. May God have mercy on us all, for our canine overlords shall not.

And most sinister of all:

Spread the Good News: Catholic Church Declares All New Ways to Commit Sin!

In honor of St. Patrick's Day, I wanted to share with you some information all good Irish Catholics should already know, namely that the Vatican has announced brand new ways for you to ensure your soul languishes in the unquenchable flames of Hell for all eternity. If you ask me, this is long overdue. As an Irishman myself, I find that I have far too few avenues through which to channel my innate self-destructive tendencies. Sure, I'm slowly drinking myself to death, and I remain an emotional cripple, but on the spiritual front my near-pathological sense of Catholic guilt keeps me from enjoying the truly heinous sins that are every independent soul's right, the kind of stuff that makes God level your entire city or flood the planet. Old Testament wrath, angels of death, flaming swords, pillars of salt--you know, the kinds of stuff that, when shared with your children at an appropriately impressionable age, can effectively keep them from masturbating for at least two to three years after discovering what touching their no no spot can produce.

With this new announcement, though, certain everyday behaviors of mine are suddenly steeped in delicious new layers of depravity, finally granting me that spiritual bad boy image I've craved for so long. For instance, cloning is now officially a sin, as is drug abuse and destroying the environment. While I've always suspected that smoking crack was tacitly frowned upon by my parish priest, the other two have completely caught me by surprise. Now, when I routinely fly down to South America with an army of clones, order them all to ingest suicidal amounts of PCP, and then see how much tropical rain forest they can chop down before their hearts explode in their soulless chests, I'm suddenly committing a sin. Eternity of gruesome yet ironic torment, here I come!

Other additions seem somewhat beside the point. Sure, when you clone yourself or your neighbor's super hot teenage daughter, you're playing God and thus I can see the sin angle. Ironically, actually donning a flowing robe and a fake white beard to indeed play God is somewhat hazy ground, at least according to the Church Fathers. Less hazy ground is donning said outfit and then standing on the side of the road and swirling around every time someone honks their horn at you, like a nice gentleman habitually does on my drive home. That goofy bastard is gonna burn. But I digress. Ignoring social injustice when one has the financial means to do otherwise (that seductively easy sin of inaction) is apparently a sin now, which I'm fine with. The funny thing, though, is that one article I read interpreted this sin as "being filthy rich." I think this writer is missing the point, though, because if I have obscene amounts of money, it'll be a sin because I'm snorting coke off the back of prostitutes and hunting homeless people on my own private island, not simply because I have a large amount of money in my offshore accounts from the clone logging operation I have running out of Brazil.

In the end, though, I tend to look at sin like cancer: pretty much anything you do causes cancer one way or another, and pretty much anything you do could be construed as a sin, if only from a certain perspective. Well, at least everything I do, though I still maintain telling strangers "That was a stupid thing to say and you're a stupid person for saying it" is neutral ground. And while this point may be overly macabre, I'd still like to think this has a little something to do with why the Irish have such a good sense of humor: when you're damned if you do and damned if you don't, you might as well have a pint and a laugh in the process. And if you're lucky, maybe you can convince St. Peter that it's the guy behind you in line (who happens to look exactly like you) who tinkered with the human genome, clubbed a seal, and did all that meth. Hell, it's worth a shot, isn't it?

Slainte.

Simian Alcohol Abuse, or, Why I Now Hate Ryan Condal

Recently cheered by the prospect of elected officials and prostitution rings, I decided to see what the industries actually designed to provide entertainment had in store, seeing as how state government was doing such a bang-up job all its own. And that's when I found this gem over at Aint' It Cool News (be sure to note the writer's gift for understatement with "tweaks and bends"):

An indie production entity called The Film Department has acquired the rights to GALAHAD, Ryan Condal's spec script which tweaks and bends the King Arthur legend. "Galahad" retells the classic story by portraying King Arthur as an aging coward whose young, ambitious Queen Guinevere murders him, then blames the crime on Sir Galahad. Galahad must escape near-certain death, vanquish the forces of evil and return Camelot to its rightful glory.

Oh dear God no. You can't see me right now, but I assure you that my head is in my hands. What is it with revisionist takes on Arthurian legend? Why do people insist on brutalizing this one mythos so egregiously while leaving everything else relatively intact? Well, come to think of it, Troy was about as much like The Illiad and The Odyssey as a kick to the teeth is like a ham sandwich. Maybe there's some sort of implicit cutoff where if your subject matter is set before, say, 1500, historical or literary accuracy becomes utterly unnecessary. It's not like you'll see Hollywood producing a film about Hitler during the height of Nazi Germany, except that Hitler is a gay florist with a live-in partner, and together the two plan to free the Jews using an army of Persian kittens.

So now King Arthur is an aging coward murdered by his treacherous wife Guinevere. And who gets blamed for it? Galahad, the knight renowned for his purity who ultimately realizes the Grail quest. Yeah, good choice. I've actually got a script about Mother Theresa murdering orphans in Calcutta, so it's good to see there's a studio that'll pick my work up, too. Honestly, who the fuck is this Ryan Condal son of a bitch and why hasn't someone shoved a rusted butter knife up his urethra yet to keep this kind of shit from happening?

Have you ever heard that meditation on probability that says an infinite number of chimps at an infinite number of typewriters would eventually crank out the complete works of William Shakespeare? Well I give "Galahad" three chimps (that's including Mr. Condal), a bottle of Jack, and fifty two minutes. And I'm willing to bet you the other two chimps, drunk on whiskey though they might be, would at least have the common fucking decency to feel dirty after writing that script.