THE WEEK THAT WAS: SOMEONE CALM ME DOWN

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Well…this week past has been one for the books, no? Every day there was something new to talk about, but I was buried under mounds of awful paper held together with brass brackets, on the pages of which were printed words by people who can't write scripts to save their lives. So why are they writing scripts? Why? Anyway, no spare blogging time.

Can I tell you all something? Just for future reference? If you're an assh*le – and if you're reading this, you're probably an assh*le – don't write a Kid's movie about Xmas. Just don't. You can consider this the one favor I'll ever ask of a nameless, faceless patron of my blog. No Kid's Xmas scripts. Ever. In fact, I'd rather that you forget Xmas exists. Also, I'd like to make this guarantee: if you ever write a script and you think it's funny to have something that's not a car "pimped out" – you know, in the way Xzibit sees fit to destroy the fabric of the definition of "aesthetic" – in said script, be it a toaster or a desk chair or a Granny Smith apple, I will track you down, knock on your door, and knife the f*ck out of you when you open it.

I'm not kidding. I will f*ck you up.

Seriously, how can so many people be so appallingly unfunny in the same exact way? And how did so many brutally retarded motherf*ckers get their hands on a copy of Final Draft? It's madness! While you're forgetting Xmas, you mental little conceptually-challenged scriptwriters, just go ahead and forget English as well. Yes, I'm asking you to voluntarily become illiterate. Can one do such a thing? I'd hesitate to say one way or the other, but I'm told the human mind of capable of quite much. And based on medical research I'm making up as I write this, I'm told you have the capacity to pull it off.

Now that the previous useless rant is done with, here are yet even more useless rants:

-- The Virginia Tech thing. Wow.

There was something I wanted to write about this the day it happened, but I figured (even in light of my minuscule readership) that, for me, it was too soon to get on my soapbox. After watching sh*t on TV about this every day, though, I'm not staying quiet anymore.

I f*cking hate the news. All of it. Every cable news network, every national news show, every local news show, every newspaper, every magazine. I even hate the paperboys, the dealers of moral and ethical filth, and I hate their mothers for enabling the rascals by waking up at 4AM to drive them around so they can sling their inky rags, and beyond that I hate Huffy and BMX and Mongoose for fabricating the modes of transportation for the little c*nts whose mothers don't wake up to drive them, and beyond even that I hate God for blessing with feet the cretins who aren't driven and don't even have low-tech transit of their own. I f*cking hate them all. I'm no longer ashamed to get most of my news from THE DAILY SHOW. Sadly, John Stewart is probably the only one doing a credible job of reporting anything right now.

The coverage of the Tech shootings is just making me sick. I've never wanted to punch anyone more than I wanted to punch the bloated windbag corpse of Lou Dobbs last Tuesday, as his sat is his (compared to his rotund stature) tiny little swivel chair and barked at the camera, calling in his best faux-indignant voice for the University officials to be held accountable for not locking down the campus after the first shooting. You've got to be really, really, really insulated in your CNN-dictated fantasy world to not understand what a chore it is to lock down an entire major college campus. It's not as easy as posting a note on the door to the one-room schoolhouse; we're talking about a little town, for all intents and purposes, and 26,000 people to notify…most of whom don't share any kind of common, ready form of mass-communication.

So the pretend outrage is a little more than f*cking annoying, but it's exacerbated when we all know that you know that you don't have the first blunt notion as to what you're talking about. Does anyone else wonder what's going to happen when someone inevitably goes berserk and starts spraying bullets into a building that houses a major news network? How the hell do they cover that? Who are they going to point the finger at? How are they going to pass the buck? How will they drum up public outcry by negatively sensationalizing themselves?

And if that wasn't bad enough, they won't leave these f*cking kids alone. Jesus Christ you vultures, they've been through enough. What is so important, past the first day, that you have to report ON LOCATION? You can see all the same footage that we're seeing back in your cozy Manhattan (or Atlanta or whatever) high-rise. Why do you need to be right g*ddamn on top of them? It's not enough to hear about them crying, you actually have to see it? Tape it? Coax and stress them into doing it again?

You're soulless, all of you. And to all of you feeding off of it: you're just as bad because you eat in their diner. You should be ashamed. And yeah, I'm ashamed of myself.

Though far less important and upsetting than the loss of 33 lives, we're in for another big problem in the wake of this incident: local and state governments are going to spend way too much f*cking money to talk about and build and implement and fail at keeping us "safer". Because there's got to be some way to guard against this, right? Right? Spending enough money and scaring the sh*t out of every last man, woman and child will keep this from ever happening again, yes?

Wake the hell up. Are you really dumb enough to think that you'll ever be safe from the rampaging maniac who's lost the faculties to care about his actions? The one who's absolutely popped his gourd and feels like he has nothing to lose? You won't, and no matter how many metal detectors you prop up and how much of a police state you cordon off, the one emotional mess with a credit card and the will to down anyone he sees fit will down anyone he sees fit. The only person on the news last week with even a shred of credibility (outside of the VT community, that is) was some therapist and psychologist who was wily enough to sit in on an interview with the reprehensible Paula Zahn. He said one of the wisest and, at least I thought until this week, common sense things I'd ever heard: you can never stop someone from being troubled; you can only try to help them before they do something troubling.

So let's stop spending time dwelling on Plans of Action and Looking Back Ats and Dissecting the Mind of a Killers. Get the cameras out of their faces, stop trying to create an advertising-driven hysteria, and just let these people get the f*ck on with their lives. Don't worry – you'll still have a camera in front of you, and you'll still be fat, soulless, and useless.

-- Since I'm on a roll, I'm going to continue to dole out reprimands to people I hate Hall Monitor-style. Next to have their Locker Pass rescinded? Kirk Jimenez.

I hate this son of a b*tch. If you watch ESPNews he's the Hispanic d*ck who over-pronounces every single Hispanic name he can. Like…WAY over-pronounces, rolling R's like he's a stutterer with Parkinson's. He points out every Hispanic player he can, making sure we know he's Hispanic. "And here's AlbeRRRRRRRRt Puuuuuuuuujjjjjjols, a DOMINICANO!" "And here's Meeeeeguel Cabbbrrrrrerrrrrra, PUERTO RICANO!"

And twice – TWICE – I've caught him doing the unthinkable: he changes the names of American-born (or at least English-speaking-born) players. Like: "A great shot by Meeeeguel Bibby!" Or: "And Juanito Damon steals second base!" Are you kidding me? Me esta embromondo, Sr. Jimenez? I would love to call you up every day at your cubicle (probably adorned with all kinds of Corona promotional material, Enrique Iglesias pumping out of your Los iTunes – un Espanola!) and manipulate your first name to fit my unreasonable cultural obsession, but I don't have an unreasonable cultural obsession and you have the whitest white man's name EVER behind Chip and Winston.

Of course, he doesn't do this for athletes of other nationalities. He'd never stoop to pronounce Wladimir Klitschko's name with a thick Russian consideration (and he'd probably call him Wuh-ladimeer) or lend a Japanese pitch to Daisuke Matsuzaka's given tag, but he'll Sure as September strangle every last tongue-vibration out of every syllable in "Francisco Liriano". Why? Because he's Venezuelan, or whatever the f*ck country he's from.

What this is says to me is that Kirk Jimenez is a blatant, hardcore racist. I have to turn the channel or hit the mute button when he's on because he's so racist. I literally can't stand him. And I can't be alone on this. If you hate this b*stard as much as I do, let me know. Maybe we can create enough of a stir to get him deported or at least sent back to ESPN Deportes. If the last few weeks have taught me nothing, it's that racists lose their jobs in broadcasting. Since Kirk is a Nazi-level racist – he probably has the bodies of dead white people strewn about the back of his 1985 Subaru pickup truck – and a horrible broadcaster and I don't like him, shouldn't he be fired as well?

Hey, I'm all for ethnic pride and celebrating your heritage, but "celebratining" doesn't mean you have to light it on fire and throw it through your neighbor's window at four in the morning. I'm proud to have been raised with Irish overtones, but I don't don a green overcoat and suspenders, dye my hair red, and run around Compton handing out Lucky Charms.

-- Last (in order, but not in spirit) on this list of People I Hate the Most, though to anyone who knows me this isn't a surprise: Bjork.

What surprises me most is not that Bjork has a fanbase – even psychotic d*uchebags with negative levels of taste and hatred for their sense of hearing can band together – but that it's so unilaterally supportive of her. Look, I'm an Oasis fan, and I'll be an Oasis fan until I go the big ugly face-down in my favorite pint. But I'm not stupid enough to believe that everyone loves them, and I certainly understand the people that can't stand them. Then again, I'm f*cking awesome and I always know the how and the when, as it were.

But Christ, you dare to disparage Bjork to one of her fans and they turn into an irked baboon. "What? What are you saying about Bjork? No, you SHUT UP! SHE IS AN INNOVATOR! SHE IS CUTE AND HER MUSIC IS FULL OF LIGHT AND MAGIC AND SONG! YOU ARE WORTHLESS COMPARED TO HER AND YOU SHOULD GO TO HELL! SHE DANCES ON BUSES AND HER SCREAMING SOUNDS LIKE THE CHORUS OF ANGELS, AND I HOPE YOUR MOTHER DIES AT THE HANDS OF A RAPIST WITH A SPIKED C*CK, AND ON THE TIP OF EACH PENILE SPIKE IS POISON SO IT'S EVEN MORE PAINFUL!"

If you've made this mistake you know exactly what I'm talking about; they spit like a Bellevue lockup and stop just short of crapping into their hand and throwing it at you.

Anyway, Bjork showed up on SNL this weekend and, predictably, bounded around the stage like a mobile bobblehead doll and sang a tune that sounded like the combination of a stunted African tribal beat and a bawling Protestant hymn, a song that I can only imagine is the background score in the dreams of drunken jackals. It was atrocious, and yet somehow I guarantee music critics and methadone patients alike will hail it as a visionary musical achievement. I will hail it as a sign that Icelanders have cemented their station of Second in the World Batsh*t Crazy Rankings, just ahead of the Japanese but still well behind the British.

On a Bjork sidenote: I realize this is the same woman that once wore a dress to the Oscars that was made to look like a goose, but her envelope-inspired, color-shifting garb on SNL just scared the hell out of me. I really, really, really want to know how she got into my closet in 1994 and stole my Oakley chroma-sheen jacket.

-- OK, I don't hate ENTOURAGE, but let's put a few things on the table.

First of all, I think we can all recognize that the show's creators and writers screwed something up royally this year. Not only is the show significantly less funny than it used to be, but they made the unconscionable mistake of making Ari the crux of the show. Ari is brilliant in small doses, when he piping in from the background to make an important point in an important scene, or when he's verbally reaming his agent or his wife in a completely pointless scene.

But too much Ari is…too much Ari. The show stopped being interesting and relevant, fellas. You can start counting down to the Final Episodes now. Happens to every show – HAPPY DAYS really bit the dust when they brought Chachi to the forefront, and if you can't make viewers happy with Scott Baio, you just flat-out can't make viewers happy.

But what really pisses me off is that they probably know the ship is going down...and they're not taking any chances. Yes, OK, I'm talking about one obvious flaw specifically: there are eleventy-hundred hot girls on the show every week and there hasn't been even a HINT of f*cking nudity since the middle of last year. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? A show about the Hollywood star who's f*cking every female that falls at his feet and you can't show us their t*ts? Are you people mad? What the f*ck do we have to do to get some skin here? Jesus Christ, I feel like I'm trying to give medicine to a dead person. How am I not a writer for a TV show?

"Geoff, any ideas on how we could fix this scene?"

"Well, if it were up to me, I'd try t*tties."

Tell me I'm wrong.

THERE ARE NO RULES ON CABLE! F*CKING GOD, WHAT DO I HAVE TO DO TO GET YOU TO DO WHAT WE ALL KNOW IS RIGHT AND GOOD? Listen, HBO: you get Carla Gugino and Emmanuelle Chriqui disrobed by the end of this season or you are losing a viewer. And I will do everything I can to take my three readers with me.

-- I'm not mad about this at all, but this is something I had to bring up:

Did you ever look at lava – like, there's a car commercial out now that has real flowing lava in it, but anytime you were watching lava, whether on TV or in a movie or when you lived in Hawaii if you ever lived in Hawaii – and think you yourself, "F*ck – that is melted rock. Lava is MELTED F*CKING ROCK!"

I mean…WOW! Do any of you have any concept of how hard it would be to MELT ROCK? Lava is melted rock! It's rock that's melted! That's, like…superhero sh*t, isn't it? I know we all know about lava, but did you ever think about lava? IT'S MELTED ROCK! How does the earth DO that?

I'm just saying. Melted rock. Just think about it for a few minutes, seriously.

(EDITOR'S NOTE: I do not smoke pot. I realize that trying to believe such a thing could negate your belief in a benevolent God, but it's true. I don't know if that makes me a genius, an idiot, or someone to be carefully watched.)

-- I touched on this just briefly in my piece from last week, but it came up again and I needed to talk about it as though my blog is my own AA meeting:

There's a great TV station available to me on DirecTV called ION; I think it might be a local LA cable station, but I'm not positive. Its slate is mostly full of movies that no one watched before and wouldn't want to watch now, classics like DUNSTON CHECKS IN and JACK. But every weeknight from 7:00PM – 8:00PM PDT…there's magic.

ION is the only network I know of to show reruns of THE WONDER YEARS.

THE WONDER YEARS is, by far, my favorite TV show ever. I'm criminally impressed with any series that can accurately capture what it's like to be a kid, and to this day I'm convinced the writers had a whole class of eight-graders held at gunpoint in their breakroom to help them establish validity. Put it this way: if I needed to move out of LA for whatever reason and I found out that ION was only available in this area, I wouldn't be going anywhere. Seriously.

A big part of the WONDER YEARS magic is, of course, Winnie Cooper. She's my Kelly Kapowski, my Marsha Brady, my Chachi (and of course Scott Baio is also my Scott Baio, but that's a story for another day because I'm a little self-conscious that I've mentioned Scott Baio twice in the same entry. Scott Baio.) and, almost assuredly, the reason any relevant female in my life has to be short with dark hair. Typing – hell, even THINKING – about Winnie Cooper sends a little burst of joy into my heart. However, it's another little burst I want to examine.

Now before you get all up in arms, no. I haven't masturbated to Winnie Cooper since I was like 13. Still, if you have a female-du-jour at any point in your life, she's always going to be special (many guys my age can cop to this for Kathy Ireland, Christie Brinkley and Phoebe Cates as well). But what if she wasn't "of age" when you weren't "of age"?

I'm asking because the 13 year-old Winnie Cooper still turns on the 27 year-old me, and it's horrifying. My feelings and attachments are fourteen years on, but my gonads are very much right now. I scared the piss out of myself when, last week watching an episode, I muttered out loud, "Oh God, Winnie Cooper." In my defense, they had her dressed in a short skirt and bobby socks, a clear sign that these dudes knew exactly what they were doing; no kid has fantasies about a girl in a six-inch joke of sub-waist cover and knee-highs, but plenty of old men sure as hell do.

The thing is…I'm now the intended target of both fantasies, the Eager Young Man Fantasy and the Dirty Jail-Ready Pedophile Fantasy. Teenage Winnie Cooper still turns me on, even when I'm defiant in the face of what I know to be very, very wrong. But I can't TOTALLY blame myself, can I? Don't I get credit for one of one of my physiology's silent echoes? How do you erase something so iconic from your memory banks?

I just want someone to tell me that I'm not a bad person, really. Or…well, I can be a bad person, but just one that's not deserving of incarceration and/or several years of intense therapy.

I'd also like to issue a public apology to Danica McKellar for any unwanted attention you get from your work, whether it be from someone who feels a certain compulsion from my words or just the general unbalanced freak in the world at large who's been fascinated with you for the past 19 years.

Were I you, Ms. McKellar, I would run like hell from any man that approaches you. I would run like hell.

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Ok, enough thoughts out of me for the time being – I've got to barricade my door for the eventual appearance of the authorities. Have a good beginning to the week.

WHY DON IMUS HATES BLACK PEOPLE

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Well, here we find ourselves, delving into another episode of "Geoff Has to Explain to the World How to be More Smarter".

One of my firmer stances in life is a little ideology I like to call Pick Your Battles (TM). It's not only an important practical concept but a way to live your life – a mantra, if you will. There's a ton of sh*t floating around this chemical globe that's going to force you to react, whether it's with general annoyance or outright rage. In that, though, there's a decision to be made on each and every potentially reactable issue: how much of my time and energy do I devote to being pissed about this?

If you've followed the news at all, you know about the whole Don Imus thing. On his radio/TV show last week, comparing the Rutgers Women's Basketball team to the Tennessee Women's Basketball team, he called the former a bunch of "nappy-headed hos".

Roughly six seconds after the comment was made, all relevant life in the universe stood still. Water stopped running, rabbits stopped f*cking, and Al Sharpton fell out of his chair. Why? Because, all of a sudden, Don Imus was a vicious racist.

You ever listen to Don Imus? Don’t answer that – I know most of you don’t and never have. He’s old, he’s a bit out of touch with modern reality, he’s curmudgeonly, and he’s a blowhard…so…pretty much, he’s me in forty years. I don’t particularly like the guy and I think his show is crap. But there are two main differences between me and most of the people getting upset about his comments:

I think he has the right to say whatever he wants to say and make all the jokes he wants to make.

I actually listened to the ENTIRE segment surrounding the comments.

Did you? No, you probably didn’t, and IF you didn’t and IF you STILL felt that it was wise of you to form an opinion on the subject and then, God forbid, express it…well, you’re a f*cking idiot.

Look, I’m not going to come at this like I’m telling you how to feel about what Imus said, especially if you’re black. I have no point of reference to know what it’s like to be a black person. I have no idea what it’s like from a broad, generic standpoint or from a personal, individual standpoint. It’s not my place or anyone else’s place to even begin to think about possibly, maybe, telling you how to feel. But what an individual feels about the comments isn’t the issue here.

Human communication is all about context – that’s why there’s a law prohibiting us from falsely claiming fire in a crowded theater. The same exact phrase, repeated word-for-word, can have 100 different meanings and/or intended values in 100 different conversations. In this instance, does Don Imus calling the Rutgers Women nappy headed hos constitute an abject and repugnant racism? Hell, I don’t think so.

I make fun of black people just about every day. And Asians. And Hispanics. And Jews. And Indians – Dots and Feathers. I also make fun of myself. Why? Because I think all stereotypes – racial, religious, physical, mental, whatever – are absolutely f*cking hilarious. I think racial comedy is some of the highest comedy on the planet, mostly because it has all the right ingredients to get a rise out of people. And that’s what I live for.

A reaction.

And, f*ck, that’s what we got here, yeah? The problem we ran into this time is that people aren’t smart about the way they react.

Al Sharpton, one of the most pervasive hypocrites on the planet, has jumped all over this bullsh*t, media-fueled issue in yet another attempt to make sure he gets his sound byte and his absurd hair on TV. He’s calling for an Imus apology and for the man to be fired from his nationally-syndicated show. He torched and berated Imus for almost two hours on his own radio show the other day and presumes to tell the American public – and blacks in particular – not only how they should feel about the issue but how anyone in Imus’s position should be treated. Because Don Imus hates the black people. Malcolm X he’s not. Jerry McGuire’s antithesis he is.

Right? Right? Well, if you have half a brain…not f*cking really.

The fact of the matter here is something that’s at the core of American society, something I hate about the lazy, gelatinous denizens of this otherwise fine country: very few people who have already formed an opinion on this issue have actually HEARD any part of the Imus’s show from that day. They saw the quoted phrase on the ticker at the bottom of the screen during their daily news show – when, let’s be honest, they were waiting to hear about Britney’s latest crab infestation or the paternity of Anna Nicole’s baby – and immediately jumped to a conclusion.

Whether or not you thought the joke was particularly funny (and I didn’t – I thought it was way too easy and lacked a serious amount of originality and cleverness) isn’t the issue – the point is that the entire conversation was held in a satirical and tongue-in-cheek manner, just like the bulk of the Imus show. If you’re not smart enough to understand that – and really, I worry about more than a few of you – here it is: they were f*cking kidding. They were not being serious. Whether or not Don Imus believes the Rutgers Women are hos with nappy hair, the context in which he was making these remarks was not literal.

And that’s how he’s been trying to defend himself, and rightfully so. If you’ve ever gone to a comedy club or watched television or listened to Howard Stern you’ve heard ten times worse things said. What Imus said was comparatively tame – so why is he being held to a different standard? Because he’s old? Because he’s white? Because he’s on MSNBC? Why is he not given the same Free Speech and creative license parameters that other entertainment personalities are given?

This was not angry hate speech – this was a bad joke. Nothing more. But if you’re going to slap the “Racist” tag on Don Imus, you had better be consistent across the board. You’ve got to call Howard Stern a racist for the things his says to his co-host Robin Quivers about being black, “horribly racist” (if you can’t tell, the quotation marks are there to indicate my blatant, smarm-filled sarcasm) comments that he makes every day. You have to slap a “Racist” bracelet on Dave Chappelle, who suggests in his routine that white cops sprinkle crack rocks on black men they’ve just unnecessarily shot. Stern shouldn’t ever be allowed on the radio again and Chappelle should be banned from comedy clubs across the country.

Wait, what’s that you say? You can’t do that? Because we expect that from Stern and Chappelle? Because they’re performers and comedians (if you want to stretch the boundaries of the term for Stern)?

Then someone tell me why the f*ck Don Imus should be suspended (which he was, from his radio show, for two weeks) or fired because of what he said. Someone tell me, because I’m dying to know. I’m dying to know why Al Sharpton thinks that someone should be fired because they offended his delicate and highly-refined sensibilities. I’m dying to know why he thinks that, as he’s said a million times over in the last few days because he’s more of a parrot than a human being, that, “…We cannot tolerate the use of the airwaves for such blatant racism.”

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: if you see or hear something you don’t like, have the courage and the wherewithal to turn off your f*cking television or radio. That protest, simple in both action in message, is the most powerful tool of defiance that you have. After you turn off your media implement, tell everyone you know about what a flaccid d*ck the person you were watching/listening to really is. But trying to get the guy (or chick) fired, or, hell, even suggesting that this be the appropriate action? That is, plainly and simply, unAmerican.

The only entity in the world who has the right to make that kind of decision is Don Imus’s employer. And that entity should make that decision for none other than business reasons. If they feel like Imus has really breached the integrity of their company and that they’re going to lose revenue because of his comments and continued presence, he should be canned. But to fire him because he expressed, at worst, an unpopular opinion (which is, most likely, not even his REAL opinion)? Come on. Really? REALLY?

Pick you f*cking battles, people. This isn’t Rodney King. This isn’t Medgar Evers. This isn’t Emmett Till. This is an old, boring dude who made a bad joke and who is now burying himself because he’s even apologizing for it. So-the-f*ck-what if he offended the lot of you? He doesn’t owe any of you an apology for his comments because there’s not a single one of you out there who owes him your attention when his show comes on the air. If Imus consistently made himself out to be a racist like Rush Limbaugh or just an intolerant c*nt like Jerry Falwell I could better appreciate the anger…but he’d still deserve a place in the media. Because everyone has the right to express their opinions, even Falwell and Limbaugh, and if there’s someone out there with the technology, the means to make media public and the access to an audience that will listen, either in support or dissention, who are we to deny them that outlet because we have a different viewpoint?

I love racist jokes. I love them. I love joking that a black kid is getting my bike for Christmas or that my Asian girlfriend is a terror behind the wheel or that every 7-11 employee is Apu from THE SIMPSONS. Once I joked with a girl – who was Jewish and whom I had just met – that I liked living in a Jewish neighborhood because, if I forgot to do my taxes, I could throw a rock out my window on April 14^th and hit twenty felonious accountants. She laughed and asked me if I had a case of Jewish Jealousy. When I asked her what that was, she spit this back: “All gentiles want to be Jews, because they’d be exactly the same. Except not poor.”

Brilliant.

So am I a racist? Was she a racist? Do I think black people are scofflaws on Welfare? Do I think Jews are money-grubbing parasites? If you know me you know the answers to those questions, but if you don’t know me and took something I said as a joke to be literal – and therefore my worldview as per race qualities – maybe you should find out what I really think. It’s a common courtesy for us to not jump to conclusions about each other based on a statement or idea we agree or disagree with.

More than that, though, I think you all just need to chill the f*ck out and stop overreacting to every little thing that twists your nipples.