September 30, 2009 | lists

1.  If a couple takes a vow of chastity, the male half will invariably cheat, a violent fight will occur, they will reconcile and the female half will break her chastity vow. A variant: the female half exacts revenge by sleeping with a close relation of the male half.

2. If someone throws a house party, someone will get punched in the face and be charged with a DUI.

3. If you lose your virginity and don’t fit the type outlined above, it’s to a complete stranger and/or while drunk.

4. If the star goes on a road trip, they will be mugged/carjacked/run out of gas/and/or meet a stranger who imparts a worldview that causes the protagonist to return home immediately and pursue option 1.

5. Nobody ever drinks pints. It’s always bottles or cans.

6. When a major couple spat occurs, it is always in a packed 4-star restaurant.

7. When you get pregnant, it’s preferable to keep this information to yourself, or better yet, tell an elaborate lie about it.

8. It’s never acceptable to log off your email account, especially if there is a plot to be advanced.

9. People never die instantly, but linger on in hospital long enough for those cast members whose contracts have already been renewed by network executives, to assemble at their bedside.

10.  Fatherly talks are good, but no life lesson is more taken to heart than a night spent inside a) hospital b) the drunk tank c) someone attractive.

September 28, 2009 | lists

The occasional good looking flasher or 10-car pileup aside, long driving trips are often boring. Drivers usually rule the stereo, realizing just how precious a fiefdom this is when you’re crammed into a giant steel box with five people and no hope of escape that wouldn’t involve serious injury at high speeds. Ask any truck driver and they’ll tell you that if it weren’t for  highway strip clubs and strangling the occasional hitchhiker, their jobs would be too dull to tolerate.

Bumper stickers offer a welcome distraction from the drudgery of the open road that doesn’t involve a point system for running over woodland creatures (squirrels, 5 pts, raccoons, 10 and up to maximum points for a bear. Rulebook must be consulted if, say, a giraffe escapes from the zoo and you somehow manage to bring it down with your Toyota Corolla).

Part of the fun with bumper stickers is that many people who aren’t using them to identify where they work or go to school are yahoos. They are somehow affiliated with a cause that a critical mass of people don’t care about or openly repudiate, and they want to share that with everybody mentally finalizing their orders at the McDonald’s drive-thru.

Here we have 7 bumper stickers we’d like to see, starting with a tribute to the man who gave us our most visited blog of all time:

September 24, 2009 | lists

1. In the title, declare ‘the end of something’, democracy, reason, faith, literacy, the draw-string pant. If that doesn’t work, go with The Culture of ___________and insert something you find particularly loathsome that you’d like to see the end of, but doesn’t lend itself to the preceding title. Better still, combine the two: The End of Participatory Democracy: The Culture of Apathy, Disengagement and Eroding Civic Discourse.  Use any of the following phrases: ‘The Culture of’, ‘The End of’,  and then ‘How to’, and then, ‘A Guide to’ .

2. Quote De Toqueville’s ‘Democracy in America’ at least 5 times in the first two chapters. Then, quote H.L. Mencken quoting De Toqueville’s Democracy in America, before finally,quoting Mencken on the subject of your choosing, preferably, democracy in America.

3. Profess disdain for people’s popular tastes and bemoan a bygone era’s passing. This includes a remark about how television dulls the senses and how the author is above such things, despite including an entire chapter about how television dulls the senses and which particular programs are most likely to do so. Two choices here: blame every prevailing social ill on the internet, TV, or a combination of internet and TV. Add a dash of Neil Postman, Marshall McLuhan.

4. Sprinkle liberally with the terms ‘frisson‘, ‘solipsistic’ and ‘iconography’. Quote Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class.

5. Begin each and every chapter with a quote from a syphilitic philosopher, preferably in a language other than English (translation not required).

6. Use phrases like ‘inform the political discourse’–in the dedication.

7. Find someone pompous enough to make the author look like a Salvation army soup kitchen prep cook by comparison, to write a back cover blurb. Make sure back cover encomia contain impenetrably obscure terms. Have a critic in a city with more than 1.5 million people declare somewhere that the author is worth his/her weight in some precious metal.

8. Include a note about how the font was originally developed by a 17th century club-footed Belgian printer who succumbed to pleurisy.

9. Include 50 pages of footnotes, which, if they were printed in 12 point font would make Atlas Shrugged look like a pamphlet on how to prevent osteoporosis.

10. Declare something ‘vulgar’ in at least every third chapter. Bonus points if the term is used in the title.

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