Author: Joey deVilla

While flipping thorugh some of the photos in Yahoo News, I found this shot of Charlton Heston and just had to post it.

Two men say they’re Jesus, one of them must be wrong

— lyrics from Industrial Disease by Dire Straits

I know that the plastic Jesus figures (“with gliding action!”) are the all the rage, but if you’re considering buying me one for my birthday, don’t — I already have one.

I am, after all, a good Catholic boy.

[Thanks to Cory at BoingBoing for the link]

Last month, I stumbled across the eXile, Moscow’s alternative paper written largely by expats driven by American xenophobia, culture shock, homesickness and the fact that communism tends to turn places into joyless hellholes. What it lacks in journalistic standards — consider their current contest: whoever guesses the date closest to the American invasion of Iraq wins an hour with one of the prostitutes featured on page 23 — it more than makes up for in hilarity that makes you feel slightly guilty for laughing.

Anyone who’s done a little travelling is probably aware that Europeans generally perceive Americans as bloodthirsty, greedy gun nuts who make lousy beer. This is why the Lonely Planet set often do un-American things such as sew Canadian flags on their backpacks and maybe even attempting to learn a few phrases in the local blabber before hiking across Europe.

What a lot of people don’t know is that Europeans hold their neighbours — Europeans other than themselves, that is — in equal, and possibly greater, contempt. While the worst thing the Americans did to most Europeans is flood them with bad food (Spam during the Marshall Plan, McDonald’s today), Europeans have been raping and pillaging each other since the earliest days, when the rivalries were between villages, not nations (this sort of rivalry continues today). I’m surprised that the word “neighbour” doesn’t have a secondary use as an insult in most European languages.

The eXile have done a little research — and I use the term “research” very loosely — and the result is a feature article called 18 Ways to Hate Your Neighbor. Here’s an excerpt from the introduction:

Bigotry and hatred are the bread and water of European life. This isn’t a vague, impersonal hatred; rather, it’s a profoundly evolved, carefully tailored hatred, a SMART Hatred if you will, tailored as tightly as a Swiss banker’s shirt towards the village over the hill, where your bosom enemies live.

Through hard and thorough research (ie., by pouring beer into the throats of selected Europeans and letting them rant), the eXile has managed to isolate and map the 18 fundamental hatred genomes that Europeans carry towards their neighbors—the RNA strand of Euro-hatred, if you like.

So put away your Lonely Planet guides, and pick up your Euro-Bigotry primer. It’s because of European hatred that the biggest massacres in human history have taken place. And the wonderful thing is, in spite of all the post-war European talk of peace and understanding, all the bigotries still live on, waiting for the day when they can transform Europeans back from harmless disco-dancing buffoons into the murderous village brawlers they once were, and may someday be again.

You should probably take any primer on Europe that makes liberal use of the word “Eurofag” with a grain of salt, but there’s quite a bit of truth in the article and the accompanying charts.

I’m just surprised that the increasingly popular Simpsons description of the French, cheese-eating surrender monkeys, doesn’t appear at all.

Martin “Coderman” Peck can’t resist poking fun at my Microsoft-style fake “Switch” testimonial. We’re both fans of the online comic Achewood, and we’ve both “sampled” it to make our own commentary. Here’s mine:

and here’s Coderman’s.

In the past couple of weeks, I have stumbled across a number of Web pages in which the word “ball” was used when author clearly meant to use the word “bawl”. The misuse is always the same:

I balled my eyes out.

Many people make this mistake. See for yourself.

“I balled my eyes out” is both incorrect and funny in a Beavis and Butthead sort of way. When “ball” is used as a verb, it means either “to form into a ball” or even better, it’s a vulgar slang term for “to have sex with”.

Of course, if you wrote that you “balled someone’s brains out,” you’re probably using “balled” correctly.

The correct way to write the phrase is:

I bawled my eyes out.

That’s because “bawl” means “to cry or sob loudly”.

Class dimissed.

The survivor of the bombing in Bali who has the fewest degrees of separation from me is Rick Gleason. He’s a friend of a fellow blogger, Chris “Stavros the Wonder Chicken” Kovacs, a hard-drinkin’ Canadian living in Korea who writes the weblog EmptyBottle.org. From his writings and a couple of e-mail exchanges, I know that Chris is a stand-up guy, and the reports about the kind of person his friend Rick are nothing short of glowing: a real go-getter with four degrees who spoke five languages, always ready to go somewhere. Rick was badly hurt in the explosion, sustaining burns to almost half his body and internal injuries. Chris is, understandably, quite shaken.

If you have the time, please send Chris — or anyone else you know who’s had a friend or relative hurt or killed in the blast — some words of sympathy.

If you have a little extra spending money, you can send it to the fund started for Rick at:

Brian L. Morris, in trust for Rick Gleason

Transit #0998

or the Australian Red Cross’ Bali Appeal.

If you’re the praying or well-wishing type, I’m sure your prayers and wishes would be appreciated.

If you’re the drinking type, raise a glass for Rick and Chris, as well as all the victims and their families. At the very least, I know Rick and Chris would appreciate that very much.

Here’s the meat of an entry of mine made on Tuesday, September 3rd, 2002:

Stupid online comic of the month

Just in case you thought only “The Left” were masters of ham-fisted witless diatribes attempting to pass for humour, may I present The Leftersons (“America’s favorite liberal family!”). The Leftersons are a nuclear family of sorts — there’s an unnamed Mom and Dad, a daughter named Hillary, and a son named Stalin (Leftersons cartoonist Colin Hayes is probably still slapping his knee over that witty little gem). There’s also a goldfish who plays the double role of being the only sensible (read: extremely conservative) member of the family and Greek chorus as well as Stalin’s pal Tommy, a sensible (read: extremely conservative) African-American (well, Stalin calls him “African-American”, to which he replies “You mean black?”) whose role models include Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell and Dr. Tony Evans.

Hayes’ line-drawing style is pretty good, and he owes it to the fact that he’s been drawing since the age of four. The problem is that it looks as though his writing style is stuck at that age, as he goes straight for “Liberals are stoopid, just ’cause” angle rather than spelling out his case. Sir, I’ve read lots of P.J. O’Rourke, and you’re no P.J. O’Rourke.

I still stand by my opinion — good drawing, bad joke-telling.

Earlier this evening, just before I went out to join my friends in some dancin’, drinkin’ and accordion playin’, an e-mail message from Leftersons artist Colin Hayes appeared in my inbox. Here it is (cut-and-pasted verbatim, with his permission):

Subject: goodbye cruel world

It’s time for me to end it all. I can no longer go on.

I read your review of my comic strip, The Leftersons, on your masterpiece of a webblog and…well…I’m crushed. Your opinion means more to me than life itself.

By the way, drawing “since the age of 4” has been good for an annual income into six figures a year…helping me to be the capitalist pig that I am.

So…the question I’m now facing is, do I take my life with a gun, a drug overdose, slitting my wrist…or reading more of your web site…

Considering how boorish the worlds of Internet dialogues and politics are, this was a downright civilized response in comparison. A tit-for-tat jab, a little sarcasm, no swearing and no ad hominem attacks.

And he had the good taste to acknowledge that this blog is a masterpiece. I’ll borrow a quote from Rush Limbaugh and say that thanks, but really, my talent’s on loan from God.

I wrote back:

Hey, I don’t like Garfield either, and Jim Davis is doing just fine. Looks like we’ll just have to agree to disagree.

May I reproduce your e-mail, as-is — I promise I will not alter a single word — in my weblog?

And he graciously replied in the affirmative, adding more evidence to my half-joking summary of the political spectrum: the Left are people with whom you agree but can’t stand, while the Right are people with whom you disagree, but would gladly invite to parties.

C’mon, Colin, you’ve got a gold mine of a target — the Left have such a gift for self-parody that your material could almost write itself! Hey, here’s some real-life ammo for you: the “Reclaim the Streets” rally (see the September 5th entry) recently held here in Toronto, or how ’bout this one about my housemate’s diet-as-religion ditching of dairy products (which isn’t terribly consistent — he had some cheesecake with me before he realized that it was dairy. Earth to Paul: cheesecake is made from cheese, and guess what cheese is made of!)? In Sacrelicious, I could’ve simply had a couple of Bible literalists go “hyuk hyuk hyuk, mah momma’s not a monkey!”, but instead I took the premise of trying to explain the universe to people from 1280 BC. Satire isn’t a blunt club swung wildly in the dark, it’s a carefully-aimed arrow with a finely honed point. Brush up on your right-wing funny and check out P.J. O’Rourke or the National Review’s Jonah Goldberg. I don’t agree with everything they write, but they’re always entertaining and make me think. This is all just a little friendly advice — take it or leave it, whatever pleases you. If you’re makin’ a buck doing what you love and pleasing your readers, more power to you.

As for my readers, what do you think? The Leftersons’ archives are here for your perusal.