Weblog Sin Pies

By Charley Daniels

This week I partook of the sweet nectar that is “what everybody else is doing” (versus my usual activity of “mostly working and not much else”). Yes, I picked up a copy of Grand Theft Auto IV: Lord of Illusions and I went and saw Iron Man on opening weekend.

Iron Man made eleventy-billion-ten dollars and seventy-five cents domestically, and five-twenty times that combined with its international numbers. (I know because I work in entertainment journalism, so don’t get too impressed.) Oh, and the $10.75 was from me, thank you very much. So you know it had to be a good movie, even if our particular screening didn’t show the secret scene after the credits.

Grand Theft Auto IV, on the other hand, lets you punch a bitch out for absolutely no reason. If you’re like me, you do this often enough that it actually gets in the way of your trying to do the missions in the game. Like, I’ll need to get from point A to point B — it’s simple really, just go there. But on the way a homeless man asks me for money, so I hit him with a brick. Then the cops come (since when do cops care about homeless people?) and I have to steal a car for a fast getaway, which makes them even more duty-bound to stop me, or whatever. So now I really need to escape, except I’m not very good at driving yet because I’ve spent most of my time hitting people with bricks. It doesn’t help that in my panic I inevitably grab some delivery van or airline luggage cart. So it takes a ton of time to lose the fuzz, and by then I have to go do something in real life, and I can’t finish the original mission: getting from point A to point B.

You learn a lot about yourself from playing this game, which means it’s educational, which means it’s good for kids.

By Charley Daniels

I have a conservative grandfather and I have a liberal grandfather. Neither is what you would call fanatical in his beliefs, but both definitely have an opinion and aren’t afraid to forward it along as an e-mail attachment. Oh yes, my grandfathers took the senior cruise across the digital divide, lingered in the “using e-mail” seminar and then grabbed a nap during the “please don’t forward everything” post-seminar lecture.

Interestingly, I get a lot of the same things from both of them, with slight differences. Replace “Hillary” with “McCain” or “communist” with “racist” or red font with blue font and much of what they send is basically identical. I usually refrain from responding to it, as I hate to encourage them, but a while back I got one that I couldn’t ignore.

It claimed that recently all the schools in the U.K. banned teaching about the holocaust in order to avoid offending Muslim students. There are about a million reasons that immediately flashed through my mind that there’s no way in hell that would happen, but to be be sure I checked a couple places. Turns out I was right, the U.K. didn’t ban teaching the holocaust, although that did happen in one school, apparently.

But boy, this is how prejudice takes off running and keeps on truckin’, isn’t it? My poor grandfather read that and believed it. He’s a really smart guy, too. I once saw him build an airplane out of a rake and some rubber cement. But he believed this forward enough to send it to everyone whose e-mail address he has. The message ended: “How long will it be until we forget about September 11th?” Or some crap like that. Look, no one is forgetting, okay? Who could forget? More importantly, even if the “banning the holocaust from history class” thing were true, that wouldn’t be forgetting. That would be altering curricula to placate the religious beliefs of a certain group, something we’d never do in the U.S., right? Oh, wait…

And sure, people who deny that the holocaust happened are operating on a level of blind faith that I can’t begin to imagine, but so are people who pray to an invisible man who apparently died for our sins (well, for the sins of those who pray, at least) and now lives in a magical, wonderful place where there’s no evil and no pain and free cookies.

There was a point in there somewhere, but I blacked out. I suppose things like this don’t need to have a thesis that’s all neat and tidy. That’s for college kids. Doesn’t the bloggers’ handbook say that you aren’t allowed to conclude a post with a paragraph that begins “In summation…”? This is “take away what you will” prose. What does it mean to you?

In summation, you don’t need to travel to dusty foreign countries to find religious fanaticism running rampant over sacred, government-run institutions. Take a walk around the block.

(By the way, this post had nothing to do with sex. What made you think it should?)

By Charley Daniels

I spend a good deal of time assuming that our next president will be an order of magnitude better than our current president. Which is fine, since I also spend a good deal of time realizing that that probably isn’t true and our president will likely always leave something to be desired, and by that I mean I’ll almost certainly have to vote for the least bad of two people I probably wouldn’t even trust to run a wet T-shirt contest.

But maybe I shouldn’t be so critical of the candidates, especially since when it comes down to it, if I were a Democrat on the fence during primary season, this might help me decide:

And if it did help me decide, would that make my vote count any less? Would that make the title any less important to the person who is elected?

This may not be an official product of the Hillary Clinton campaign, but if it’s not it’s genius negative publicity, so the opposition gets points for that.

By Charley Daniels

Yes, yes, I know. I’m not even going to start by acknowledging that it’s been a while before I’ve posted anything. Ah hell, I just did. Moving on …

At some point in the last several months I predicted that 2008 was going to be the greatest year of my life, and so far I’ve been right, provided you read the fine print in which I specified the definition of “greatest” in that case as relating to tons of work and not enough time. Yes, I went and got a new job with a weird schedule, have half-assedly took on too many extra things, and am still finding time to make up cool new words like “half-assedly” and “extra” (you just prove that I didn’t make that up, smart ass). But things should settle down. When I’m dead.

And this month — don’t even get me started on this month. The writers strike ended, which is great now that it’s over because I’ll have a smidge less work to do, but jeez it was hell while it was ending. “Smidge.” Did I make that up, too? Lookit me go!

Also, Oscars are coming. Cue Jaws suspense music. That weekend will not be good for me, lemme tell ya. Speaking of Jaws, Roy Scheider died. Defamer had the best headline (though I’m sure it was oft-repeated in many forms, I saw it there first): Heaven’s gonna need a bigger boat.

I’ll stop complaining right after I mention that we’re trying to move this month, and at this point we have nary an option for parking our belongings. But hey, there’s still 16 days left in February. No sweat, right? Wrong! No time, no time! Help me!

Also, I’m getting sick, so that’s good.

In politics, Clinton and Obama, McCain. Huckabee? Not Romney, etc. That about sums it up. McCain is the Republican frontrunner. The Democrats don’t have a frontrunner because they’re commies, and that’s not the way commies roll. Back in April I wrote a post on this blog defending John McCain in a way, though I was mostly defending the idea that politicians should be allowed a bit of levity. I said:

Look, If politicians aren’t allowed to have a sense of humor in a situation that’s informal and lighthearted, maybe we should just skip to the part where robots take over, since we’re already at least a third of the way there.

What I was referring to was a joke McCain made in which he took the hit Beach Boys cover “Barbara Ann,” which is the title and 95% of the lyrics, and cleverly switched the words to “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran.” Many people saw that as callous, and I definitely agree, but that’s sort of why it’s funny, so I’m not very torn. When you have a choice, humor always trumps tact. Always.

So now he’s the frontrunner, and if he becomes the nominee I’ll definitely be giving my support wholeheartedly to not him. With this in mind, it’s a good time to get that video out again and revive the outrage. I mean, do we want this callous megalomaniac running our country?

By Charley Daniels

I should have posted about this sooner, but the last couple weeks have been crazy. Stephanie Haranczyk, who disappeared more than a year ago, has made contact with her family and is doing well.

Thanks again for everyone who showed up seemingly out of the clear blue sky to help a bunch of strangers.

Special thanks to Maryam Scoble, Teresa Valdez Klein and Hasan Diwan, whose efforts got a lot of attention for the cause.

Updated to add Maryam Scoble to the short list. She certainly isn’t the only one I left off, so thanks to anyone and everyone who belongs there. Feel free to remind me in comments and I’ll keep adding.