No pope for atheists!

If you thought the Pope was like the Dalai Lama where he loves everyone, think again! The Pope loves only two kinds of people: Catholics and Catholics that can keep a secret.

During his visit to the United Kingdom, Pope Benedict XVI gave a speech at Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh in which he warned the Queen about how “atheist extremism” leads to “a reductive vision of a person and his destiny” and, ultimately, Nazis.

Yes, the Pope Godwin’d his argument against atheism.

Atheists, of course, are outraged that the perceived voice of a God that does not exist would say such things about them. Oh well.

You know who else supported highways?

The Neo-Nazis may be cleaning up a town near you!

Did that just send chills down your spine? Then shame on you, because at least one branch of America’s Nazi Party has adopted a 1 mile stretch of highway in a Denver suburb.

It’s a win-win situation.

As Doug Neal, the group’s spokesfuhrer, put it, they’ll be seen “doing good things,” much like the sentiment of Hitler “doing good things” for Germany before those things were overshadowed by trifles like genocide and waging a war of global domination.

And, the suburb is allegedly relieved since the previous highway clean-up was performed by members of the Aryan Brotherhood from the local prison. At least these Nazis aren’t convicted felons, right?

You know who else had a wishlist?

One of 31 albums of artwork that Adolf Hitler wanted will be returned to Germany in January. The album is a collection of photographs of artwork that Hitler hoped to collect for his Führermuseum in Linz, Austria.

The album was taken by John Pistone at the end of World War II when he entered Hitler’s home in the Bavarian Alps in 1945, which is surprising when you consider that of all the souvenirs he could have grabbed–weapons, uniforms or cloning vials–he choose a 12-pound picture book.

You Missed It: Caught in a pickle edition

Sometimes at the end of the week I find it hard to concentrate. But this Friday is harder than most. You see, I was at one of those Windows 7 launch parties last night, and let me tell you, it was wild. I am so hung over I am considering never drinking and downloading an operating system ever again. Let’s just say my stomach has uploaded several times. If you were busy flying past your airport this week, odds are you missed it.

The only baseball suspension that doesn’t involve steroids
Steve Phillips works at ESPN’s “Baseball Tonight,” but baseball wasn’t the only night activity he had, and now it’s lead to his suspension. Phillips, 46, had an affair with Brooke Hundley, a 22-year old coworker. It wasn’t even his first affair, but what happened this time was he had the mistake of dating a crazy person who left angry notes on his front door and put an ad on Craigslist offering $50 to harass his wife. Getting called out at home is never fun.

Earhart is still missing
The movie Amelia opens today, amid less than stellar reviews. Critics say the lines are terrible, there is little character development, and the dude who plays Amelia Earhart doesn’t even look like her. Personally, I’d like to see Charles Lindbergh’s life get made into a movie. Not only is there a kidnapping, but there are Nazis, too!

Bada-bing
A Sicilian builder serving a term on house arrest for dumping hazardous waste asked to be transferred back to prison to finish the rest of his sentence in prison. The reason: he wanted to get away from arguments with his wife. I–I don’t know what to say. There’s no punchline for this one. It really happened.

Passen Sie heraus für die Dornenbüsche auf

Something tells me that, much like nude beaches, the people who will be hiking nude will be the last people on earth you’d like to see hiking nude.

Except now they’re German and obviously Nazis. Because if we didn’t stereotype, then someone else would.

“You know who else liked to be nude? Hitler!”

MasterChugs Theater: ‘Inglourious Basterds’

Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is filled with vicious Nazis, British spies, American commandos and French collaborators all deceiving and destroying one another in occupied Paris. But it’s not a movie about the war. It’s a movie about war movies.

Of course, for some film fans, that’ll be evident from the onset. The film borrows its title but little else from Enzo Castellari’s 1978 WWII film. In Tarantino’s version, a small group of Jewish-American soldiers under the command of Brad Pitt’s Aldo Raine terrorizes Nazi soldiers in Occupied France, performing shocking acts of savagery and corpse mutilations. How close they come to war crimes is unclear because, in a very un-Tarantino manner, he shows little more than a few scalpings that earn Aldo the nickname “Apache” from the Germans and one execution by a baseball bat.

But is it any good? Well, it’s a QT film: a lot of the time, that can break up people into two distinctly diverse groupings. Of course, those people either love anything done by him or hate anything done by him. Now, for everyone else, the question still remains about the quality of the movie.

Guess I’m going to show some of my own “basterd” behavior and make you hit the jump to find out that answer. Continue reading MasterChugs Theater: ‘Inglourious Basterds’

The fall fashions are in!

You wait long enough and eventually it comes back into fashion. In this case, it is once again cool to dress like a Nazi. Remember a few years back when Prince Harry dressed up like a Nazi for a party? How awesome was that! Who could ever take offense in dressing like that?

This fall, it’s what everyone’s going to be wearing, if the mayor of a Romanian town and his teenage son are any indication. They both dressed up in full World War II German Army officer uniforms (there’s a difference between Nazis and the German military, but whatever) to a fashion show. The father-son fashion duo entered the stage goose stepping, too.

For some reason, people want the mayor to step down.

Take it from Snee: Denying denials of Holocaust-deniers

Man, World War II. It seems like it ended just yesterday, you know? Between every movie using the Nazis as villains to every moral argument reducing to the Nazis, it’s almost like we’re still fighting them today.

Of course, there aren’t any real Nazis anymore. Sure, there are skinheads and neo-Nazis, but these are not your great-grandfather’s Wehrmacht.

No, there’s only one type of actual Nazi left: the one trapped in our brains that we just won’t let die.

Americans were one of the last countries to enter World War II, so maybe we just didn’t get our fill of killing them. Or perhaps the post-war Holocaust footage was so horrible that we feel like we didn’t kill them enough. Either way, without any actual Nazis left, we continue to fight the idea of the Nazi and anyone who considers them almost human is now a Nazi by proxy. Continue reading Take it from Snee: Denying denials of Holocaust-deniers

Take it from Snee: Hollywood’s shameless legacy

You know, considering the events of last year, I really thought we had turned a new page in America, that hate was to become a thing of the past.

But now there are not one, but two movies in theaters about the indiscriminate killing of Nazis. There’s Valkyrie, of course, and now there’s Defiance. This winter, it is a veritable holocaust of German fascists on the silver screen.

I wish I could say I expect more out of Hollywood, but I can’t. We have a long, inexcusable past when it comes to bigoted depictions of Nazis in our film history, starting with Casablanca to The Incredible Mr. Limpet to Raiders of the Lost Ark. Continue reading Take it from Snee: Hollywood’s shameless legacy

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