Month: November 2008

Take it from Snee: I’m thankful

Every year, Americans do what we do best: sit around a table to observe a once-meaningful holiday because we’d look funny if we didn’t.

Me: Hey, Ted from Accounting. Big four day weekend, eh?

Ted from Accounting: Yep, gonna eat turkey with the family and watch some football. You?

Me: Oh, I’m going to Aruba for the long weekend to collect orgasms.

TfA: Well, that makes too much sense. Freak.

Thanksgiving, like every other U.S.-observed holiday, has auspicious, yet bullsh-t, origins. But if you boil that bathwater past the paper headdresses, you find a story that doesn’t matter anymore today: a group of proto-Americans are starving to death, yet finally scrape up enough farming to survive … until winter starts in earnest.

They’re thankful for managing with what they’ve got to enjoy each others’ presence, which ironically helps spread the cholera.

We don’t have that problem anymore. Even if we catch childhood leukemia, we still get an awesome last wish. (That’s only because Leonard Nimoy can’t catch leukemia from his Make-A-Wish cancer kid.) And we don’t really enjoy each others’ company. If it weren’t for Thanksgiving, entire families would never see each other except to marry or bury someone.

And we definitely aren’t just scraping by. Outside of a certain percentage of poor people, the modern Thanksgiving is a modern festival of consumer distractions. The table is full of food that will go uneaten, and those who attempt to finish it off will slip into a gluttony coma on the leather sofa. This happens while everyone watches a parade full of cartoon characters selling toys, the latests must-see TV stars and the pirate of plastic productions, Santa himself. Then there’s football, which features players goosed up on the latest pharmaceuticals beating Vegas odds so the owner can sell more ball caps to guys trying to find cool new ways to cover up bald spots.

Even the idea of a feast in today’s America is ridiculous. The idea of a feast is to celebrate having plenty when you normally have little. Seen those obesity numbers lately?

So, with all that in mind, here’s my list of the things that I am thankful for this year: Continue reading Take it from Snee: I’m thankful

Well don’t go looking to Georgia for help

The world is in a deep, deep financial crisis. So much, in fact, that Russians are having to cut back on their national pastime, communism drinking vodka. But according to this Yahoo! report, vodka related deaths rose for the first time since 2006. Though there is no direct link between the global economy and alcoholism, we here at SG played connect the dots as children … and high schoolers … and college kids … and as working class adults.

Unbearably perverse news from Nippon

If you thought this would be a slow news week, hold on to your butts, animal warriors.

Japan, which has had her share of animal menaces — from giant wasps to Gojira! — faces her worst threat yet.

One Tsuyoshi P. Bear was brought to the municipal zoo in the city of Kushiro in Hokkaido for one purpose only: to make sweet, sweet love to their female bear, Kurumi, so she could have puppies or something. (We’re not veterinarians.)

The only problem? Tsuyoshi is a Tsuyoko!

…

He’s a she. “Ko” is the traditional ending of a Japanese girl’s name. That joke kills in Japan. Just … whatever.

So, we have two female polar bears that are gay-married, destroying the sanctity of Japanese marriage. This is, clearly, the worst thing that has ever happened to the tiny island nation.

In related news, at least now we know why the polar bears are going extinct. Sarah Palin, Ted Stevens and ExxonMobil are off the hook.

Eat My Sports: Turkey Day revisions

As we approach Thanksgiving 2008 we’re all prepping with last minute runs to the grocery store, saving up for the big meal, and of course the annual Detroit Lions’ Thanksgiving Day football game. Right, that doesn’t sound correct to me either. How does the crappiest team in football get a Thanksgiving game every year? I watch it out of sheer boredom sympathy.

I get watching the Cowboys game. Even in their worst years, at least it is entertaining football. But what in the hell is going to attract an audience to watch an 0-11 team with Daunte Culpepper at the helm? We need some changes folks.

First off, we need to change the team. It’s like watching the official final nail starting to be driven in to the Lions’ season come Thanksgiving. So, we need to put in a team that at the very least is in contention yearly. Which is why I think we should seriously consider putting in the New York Giants, New England Patriots or the Washington Redskins. After all, with the Redskins, we at least have representatives of the first Thanksgiving … I mean, before we took away all of their land and unjustly forced them to live on reservations. Continue reading Eat My Sports: Turkey Day revisions

Don’t let Alzheimer’s dampen the holidays!

As the holidays that don’t involve bobbing for little bottles of liquor approach, those of you with elderly relatives may encounter some memory loss (that, once again, doesn’t involve little bottles of liquor).

While Alzheimer’s means that your mom or dad might not recognize you, that doesn’t mean they want to be bored with the same old reintroductions to their bastard grandchildren. Give them the life they’ve always wanted — you know, before you were born.

1) Total Recall: “What do you mean you want to go to Mars,Grandpa? Mars is terrible. How about a nice tour of the rings of Saturn?” Then have your mom try to kill him with a cooking knife. The fun starts when Grandpa’s WWII training kicks in.

2) The Bobby Darin Story: Convince your grandmother that she is your mother and that your mother is actually your sister. Bonus points if you don’t tell your mom whats going on.

3) Clue: It’s murder! And your Aunt doesn’t remember killing the butler in the library with the rope … until you arrange the clues so they point to her.

4) The Alzheimer’s Game: Convince a suggestible older relative that they’ve entered the early stages of dementia by having the entire family reminisce about things that never happened. Will they catch on by Christmas? That’s the Alzheimer’s Game!

Forethought is the mother of accidental porn

Good idea: Keeping a hold on your phone, especially if you’re grabbing fast food and it has a camera on it. An Arkansas couple ended up as accidental porn-stars after losing a phone at McDonald’s. Now they want to end up as accidental millionaires.

Better idea: Just opt to not eat at McDonald’s.Ever.

The biggest case of the year

It’s a slow news week, we get that much. Here at SG, we thrive on the stories that don’t always make it to the front page, but when the major news corporations start doing that, you know it’s almost time for a holiday.

Just yesterday, still only a matter of hours ago, CNN broke a shocking story in Massachusetts: there’s a piano in the woods! Luckily the Harwich, Massachusetts police are on the case, and they always get their piano man.

As if this were not enough, the details that have come out so far from the case have been nothing short of shocking.

“Discovered by a woman who was walking a trail, the Baldwin Acrosonic piano, model number 987, is intact–and, apparently, in tune.”

Mother of god, no! Why did it have to be a Baldwin Acrosonic piano, much less model number 987, which is the deadliest model number of all Baldwin Acrosonic pianos out there? And intact? Sweet C minor, we’re all doomed! What kind of diabolic mind would set up such a music instrument?

Stay in your homes, people of Harwich! You never know what other dangerous musical instruments you might stumble across trespassing in the woods.

We prefer Grandma unplugged

The dead are pretty useless unless you’re a cannibal or necrophiliac. Well, the Spanish town of Santa Coloma de Gramenet has found another use for the ex-productive members of society: power source.

Coste-Live Energy, which runs the town’s cemetary, has just activated 462 solar panels mounted on top of masoleums. Their “justification” is that the tombs are the only expansive flat and sun-drenched property that effective solar collection requires.

The townspeople briefly fought the idea, but then decided that zombie power might save them some energy costs. Unfortunately, we all know where those savings are going into: the Anti-Zombie Military-Industrial Complex that the US narrowly avoided by oil dependency.

It’s probably best to avoid mentioning the third day

We at SG are usually nonplussed about religion and any wacky aspects that people infer in their daily lives. I mean, ultimately, religion is a can of worms that we just don’t want to get into.

But really Sweden? A religion dedicated to worshiping le petit mort? I mean, hasn’t that type of thought gotten your churches into enough trouble already? (Link is most probably NOT SAFE FOR WORK)

Panda Watch!

Sure, they may seem cute and cuddily, but these mean-spirited oversized Teddy Ruxbens mean business. All a child wanted was a hug from a Panda Bear at a zoo in China. The little boy was rewarded with a bite. Oddly enough the same bear bit a drunk tourinst two years ago, proving once again that the animals are out to feed on the flesh of the innocent.