By emily

GRADE: not good

Here’s the question: do we want to dilly-dally around with Canadianness, or just go ahead and start a moon colony? Maybe we can get Lance Bass to fund it, and then once we’re out of the earth’s atmosphere we can jettison him into the cold, dark vastness of outer space. Or: maybe the coastal regions of America should just go ahead and secede from that horrible middle part. Sure, we’d get our asses kicked by the south and midwest in the inevitable ensuing civil war, but maybe we could somehow join forces with Canada/Mexico and then the red states would be barricaded in, with no access to supplies. And then we would starve them until they surrendered. It would probably take a while because don’t those people all weigh like 800 pounds?

Despite the mad-maxy fun of all these scenarios, I think the most likely one is that we will all continue to experience the scary future here, and that it will suuuuuuuuck in all kinds of ways.

What the fuck, America? What the fuck, The Future? Where is my robot car? Where is my flying skateboard? Where is my government-mandated daily happy pill? Instead all we have is the totalitarian regime part. Can we at least have the cool silvery costumes?

UPDATE: for those seeking vaguely realistic or at least fact-based options re: renouncing your citizenship, you might as well check out this article.

ANOTHER UPDATE: In the interest of balanced pseudo-journalism and, you know, sanity, I recommend that you incorporate a healthy dose of these Top Ten Reasons Not To Move to Canada into your worldview, too.

By emily

GRADE: F

Most accents are so excellent. For example, Southern Belle. Also, British. Every time I speak to a British person on the phone I immediately want to give her everything she asks for (“Excuse me, please, I simply wondered if I might have a couple of your internal organs?” ) just because she sounds so smart and cultured and polite. Other good accents: Russian, French, Spanish, Irish, Scottish . . . all European accents, basically, even German. I also like Sassy Carribean Lady, Minnesota, New England, Japanese . . . the list goes on and on. But it does not include: Long Island accent.

Here is an example: say you are lying on the beach, trying to enjoy one of the most beautiful summer days ever. Twenty feet away from you there is this guy. You can tell he is a guy because EVERY DETAIL of his . . . maleness . . . is disclosed by his belted (BELTED!) Pucci-print speedo. He is shouting into his cel phone. Even though you can hear every word clearly, as if he was speaking directly into your ear, it is still hard to tell exactly what he is talking about because of his Long Island accent. Something about the stock market, or about reading an MRI. Is this man a doctor? You shudder, imagining yourself paper-robed and vulnerable in the office of this shrieking moron. Then he reaches the crescendo of his rant:

“I mean, this place could be the next Fiah Island if it werant foah the shitty suhvice! I can’t get a cocktail on this beach! I have to bring my own cocktails in a thuhmos! They have just terrible suhvice. And you know me . . . I am a stickla for suhvice.”

It is all you can do to keep yourself from sprinting across the sand and strangling this man with his own banana-slingshot. But in your heart you know that this would be futile. He is like a roach, or a poisonous mushroom: if you destroy him, twelve other speedo-wearing, saddle-leather tanned Doctors (maybe he is a gynecologist! Aiee!) will just spring up in his place, because this is Long Island.

And Long Island has much more to offer us, besides assholes and its signature Iced Tea beverage. My very own grandparents happen to live in Long Island, in fact. I love them dearly, in spite of the fact that the only conversational topics they enjoy are:
1. Golf
2. How is Business
3. Art films, especially the ones they show at the Malvern theater which is a godsend because we don’t get into the city very often
4. Cats
5. How skinny your father was as a child
6. Find yourself a rich man and marry him

Ah, yes. Long Island. Home of the original planned suburb development, Levittown.

Home to a ton of nose-jobbed wenchies in Elsa Perretti ‘heart’ necklaces and those stupid ponchos, who come to NYU to major in Puking In A Trash Can.

Long Island. Home of Northern State.

I don’t think any place has ever deserved an F more.

By emily
GRADE: A

On a movie poster in the Greenpoint Avenue station of the G train, a heated, quasi-illiterate debate rages.

Black sharpie:“White people deserve what Bush is given you. Blacks and Hispanics have been get screwed over for years. Now you are being (illegible) by one of your own people.”

(in slightly different handwriting): “Bush is not “my people,” you racist fuck. We must all rise up together to get Bush out. Bush lies, we die!”

(in red marker)“Hispanic are kept alive by WIC checks. And their culturel values leave alot to be disired.”

(college-student handwriting) “It’s not about black, white, and Hispanic. It’s about Green!$$$”

Isn’t that awesome? My favorite part is the commentator who weighed in on the sub-standard “culturel values” of Hispanic people. Dude, you are scribbling a racist slur on a movie poster in the subway! What kind of cultural values do you have? Ha ha!

Clearly, I am a big fan of graffiti rants, the crazier and stupider the better. People love to talk about the fancy graffiti that is done with spray cans and how cool it is. My general feeling is, eh. Though I love to look out the window while traveling into D.C. from Silver Spring on the Metro and see all the places where “Cool” Disco Dan has left his mark, I would still rather read the many, many emendations to the “How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb” joke in the bathroom of Sophie’s. I’m glad I’m much more sophisticated than these people who are so desperate to have a forum to express their viewpoint that they will scribble it in any public venue . . .
Oh wait. I just realized that the internet = a defaced poster for Little Black Book, basically.

By emily
Grade: A for idea, F for word overuse and abuse

In his 1876 nonsense poem The Hunting of the Snark, Lewis Carroll describes an expedition that sets out in search of the titular elusive, undefined beast. Nowadays, snark is a lot easier to find -- in fact, the word itself is downright overexposed. 'Snarky' has quickly become the Paris Hilton of the dictionary, replacing ‘hip’ and ‘edgy’ as the favorite copout for aging ad execs who seek to convey the youthful coolness of whatever they’re selling. They seem to think that it means something along the lines of ‘bad-ass.’ The word has also become popular among literary types, who most often use it when implying that someone whose review they don’t agree with is voicing their opinion in an immature, unfair, self-aggrandizing way. To Heidi Julavits, ‘snarky’ seems to mean nothing more or less than ‘mean-spirited,’ with an undertone of ‘I’m telling! Moooom!” Others use it to mean “spunky” or “snippy” or “nitpicky.” Far from undefinable, the mythical Snark now suffers from a surfeit of contradictory definitions.

So what is and isn’t a legitimate use of the word? Well, we can start by looking it up (yes, welcome to my Safire moment). The dictionary is clearly wrong, at least in terms of common usage. It says that snarky (from snork, to snore or snort, Dutch or Low German origin) just means “irritable or short-tempered, irascible.” Huh? I always thought it pretty much just mean “funny meanness.”

Snark, in the sense of the TWOP slogan (spare the snark, spoil the networks) is corrective, constructive, necessary, and often hilarious. I am a big supporter of the concept. I just think we should give the poor word a break. It has become like the pair of shoes you thought were so cool and special until Urban Outfitters began stocking them, everyone bought a pair, and you had to stop wearing yours. Yes, ‘snark’ is the Nike Dunk of 2004. So let’s all spare the snark for a while, or maybe create a decoy word that will spread like wildfire around the internet and finally infiltrate the mass media. We will know we have succeeded when the word is in a Starburst ad and in The Believer magazine on the same day. I like 'clutchy,' with its echoes of Francesca Lia Block. Or maybe you can come up with something. Please do, because I’m serious about this. I am banning the word (not the concept, of course, because we would have to take down the site) from the Universal Review. Take that, ‘snark.’

By B
Grade: C

TV On-Demand makes you do strange things. I never thought that I would be the type of person to watch 10 straight hours of Queer as Folk. In fact, watching just the opening credits is generally enough to make me change the channel. As much as I enjoy men in their underpants, they are not as appealing when they are dancing around with feather boas and sparkle makeup on their chests. This is what happens during the Queer as Folk theme, and the song that they dance to is the even more embarrassing version of the ubiquitous Queer Eye song. Things just keep getting shamefuller…

Despite my reticence, I found myself strangely addicted to the Queer As Folk show this past winter. I had already on-demanded every episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Six Feet Under, and the Sopranos. What was I to do besides chain smoke on the couch while watching an entire season of the Queer Folk? Here is the one and only thing that I learned from the program: we gays have nothing at all to be proud of. We are so crappy and retarded!

Because of this, the advent of Gay Pride Day mostly made me anxious and disgusted. I’d gone to the parade only once before, three years ago with Emily. It was the most boring thing ever to happen, and I didn’t even get a blowjob in an alley. Emily was more miserable than I, and insisted on leaving after about ten minutes. She is terrified of being labeled a FAG HAG, and as a result cannot bear to be around more than one gay person at once. She says, in fact, that I am the only gay person she likes, and even that seems to be a tossup these days. Does this make her HOMOPHOBIC? (Her many lesbionic classmates at Eugene Lang College have already voted yes, by the way.)

Several of my self-hating friends have been known to complain about the drag queens and leather daddies who proliferate at the gay pride parade and inevitably dominate the evening news. Apparently these Freaks and People You See on TV are setting the Gay Movement back by several decades. Whatever. Anyone who feels this way should go back to eating pussy. Obviously, the real thing to be ashamed about is the fact that homosexuals seem desperate to sell out to any evil megacorporation that is willing to slap a rainbow and some gayfacey couple on its advertisement and run it in The Advocate. As far as I can tell, Gay Pride is just an excuse for a bunch of rainbow waving sparklefags to bend over for Budweiser. We are so desperate for love that we will eagerly open our wallets (and who knows what else) to any brand that is willing to pander to us.

This year, I hit upon the should-have-been-obvious realization that the way to enjoy Gay Pride is not to attend. Duh. Instead, I celebrated my pride by getting drunk on the roof. I could hear the parade in the distance, and that was fine with me. Around six o’clock, the party made its way to the pier, where it was really crowded and I saw some poop that looked like Wendy’s Chili in the portapotty. This prompted me to leave to go to a bar. On the way, the street was literally blanketed with trash. Despite their reputation for fastidiousness, those gays seem to litter a lot! Maybe it was the L's that were responsible for this.

In conclusion, Gay Pride is okay as long as you have a roof to be on. Otherwise you should just ignore it. And after much consideration, here is what I am most proud of: I hold my liquor like a fucking champ. This is the main perk of being a gay Irishman. The down side, of course, is bad skin and a lifetime of loneliness. Happy Pride, Bois!

By Guest Reviewer Alice
GRADE: A

Banks are great in the summertime. The bank lobby is always subzero and when you walk in it's like "Ahh, this is what money feels like." I used to bank at Washington Mutual but I dipped out in the summer of 03, because I wasn't feeling WM's tellers. They definitely weren't feeling me, so it's A-Ok with everyone that I switched to Commerce, the best bank in the Universe. My jaw dropped and my eyes popped out of my head WB-style when Inga, the banker who helped me open my account told me about the free free free gratis checking where they actually refund my money that other banks’ ATMs try to steal from me. For this and other reasons, I am constantly raving about Commerce, and whenever I encounter someone who hasn't heard about the banking utopia where my $38.92 safely lies today, I look at them as though they said they haven't heard of flour.

Which leads me to my scathing capsule review of Chase Manhattan. I tried to open an account there when I was eighteen, and they made it so difficult - even though my parents were with me! - that I was like ‘fuck it,’ and I went to Dime cause it was cuter somehow. Besides the fact that it bears the most asshole-y boys' name ever, Chase sucks for the simple reason that the free checking is not free ($6 dollas every month unless you get direct deposit, which is hard when you're an exotic dancer or you sell gyros on the street). Paying for "free checking" gets even stupider when you realize that check Granny just sent you in your Halloween care package wont go thru till --Egads!-- next week! Too bad you don't bank at Commerce. Commerce will give you the amount in FULL the next day, even on Sunday. Because Commerce is OPEN on Sundays! So don't gimme none o' that "but there are way more Chase branches than Commerces" because the Commerce banking hours will make you puke fire out your nose. Why do you care if you have to trek your lazy butt a few more blocks up if you can bank on SATURDAY?

So this is what brand (or bank) loyalty is. You, the brand, fulfill my expectations (and then some) in a consistent way, and you do it with a smile. I see that no other brand has been able to do what you do. I keep coming back, we get familiar, then friendly, and finally loyal. That is how it works. Here comes the big-payoff anecdote at the end of the review. So I'm in the Chase ATM lobby on Broadway waiting while Bradley gets some money out (he's not a Chase customer, by the way). Being in a bank reminds me of my bank so of course I begin my soliloquy on the virtues of Commerce Free Checking. A guy using the nearest ATM finishes and as he walks by he says to me "You can't come in to a bank and just start yelling about how good another bank is." No he didn't!

"Um, yeah I can cuz it's a free country?" said I. Then he said I was a "dummy" or something so of course I had to run out after him and yell GO RED SOX! I mean, this jackass was STICKING UP FOR HIS LAME BANK!! What, is there some secret blowjob service that Chase offers to premium customers? Maybe that's what they mean by their slogan "The right relationship is everything." Ew. What a tool! Anyway, Chase blows harder than any other bank. Partly because they do terrible things to developing economies, but mostly because that guy is a customer.

By the way, if you wanna be a Commercenist (commercenary?) like me, just lemme know and I'll refer you and when you get an account we'll both get ten dollars! [Editor’s note: Oh, so that’s why you’re writing this.] Whee, then we can go see Infernal Smutshine of the Plotless Grind for the like, 80th time.

By B
Grade: C

(Special note from B – 05/23/2006: It has now been more than 2 years since I wrote this review, and I’m sort of embarrassed to repost it. It’s a little overwritten, huh? I think I was having a bad day. And the E Bishop reference is quite clearly nowhere near as clever as it seemed to me at the time. Anyway, I thought about totally rewriting this post before putting it up again, or just skipping it altogether, but decided that would be dishonest. I’m all about REALNESS, ok? Represent.)

Emily and I were talking tonight of our fantasies of the olden days. Emily says that she has often dreamed of being a character in Laura Ingalls Wilder, or a bebonneted butter churning ladie, a la colonial Williamsburg. I have never been to colonial Williamsburg, have never read the Little House books, and personally think that the olden days in general seem like a terrible idea. However, I have often fantasized that there was no such thing as electricity, which is sort of along the same lines. Because it would make things much more relaxing, aside from all the plowing of the fields and soforth.

Recently I have decided that I would settle for just no internet. It is such a dark God. We would be better without it, even if we would miss the free songs. Historically, the chief wickedness of the beast was its deadly charm. The rote pornography, the hour badly spent. All that. And maybe it is just we never noticed before, but I am thinking things are getting worse; there are greater dangers revealing themselves. Not only is the internet stealing our time, it is collecting and cataloging it in glass cases.

This came to my attention just as I was starting to get (sort of) bored of the porn and et cetera. I was running out of ways to not get crap done when two things popped up that are already leading to far greater problems than idleness: FRIENDSTER and the special diaries adorably dubbed BLOGS.

It took me awhile to begin to grapple with the true evil of these phenomena. For years, I'd always ignored blogs, because they (besides this one, which isn’t even a true blog) are fucking boring. But they are getting harder to ignore. And I knew instantly that nothing good would come from FRIENDSTER.

Too much information is a dangerous thing. I am not talking about the kind of too much information where you tell your prissy coworker about this one time when you were giving a rimjob and she squeals, “OKAY, too much information!” because that is annoying and she should get over it. I am talking about the kind of too much information where no secret is unavailable and some of them are unavoidable. This goes in both directions. Emily, for instance, has just learned that it is bad to post catty gossip, criticize people and diss on their japanese girlfriends (actually, she doesn’t seem too contrite on that final count) on THE UNIVERSAL REVIEW, because people shockingly seem to read it.

And although I have assiduously avoided Katha Pollitesque WEBSTALKING, the friendster-BLOG-google hydra, combined with a level of self control that is merely healthy as opposed to unassailable, sometimes makes it impossible not to semi-accidentally come across the personal details of certain other people’s lives. I am talking about the type of personal information that one is mostly fine with as long as one gets to remain blissfully ignorant of it. You know the kind I mean. But ignorance is no longer an option. These days a few haphazard clicks reveal everything. Like: places, names and where it is they mean to travel.

Things are beginning to linger too long. Maybe they will linger forever now. How long will this post exist? Will it still be here ten years from now? A hundred? This is not natural. There are emails that I sent when I was fifteen still out there somewhere and probably all it takes to call them up is the most cursory google. I don’t like the thought of my fifteen year-old self, trapped and floating in a disorienting field of 0s and 1s. I bet he is cold and lonely. I’m sure he is tired of being fifteen. It's too late though; he is there for good. Because the internet is fucking with time. It is fucking with memory. And loss. There is one art it has not mastered.