The top story on the cover of April 2002's Redbook magazine: "57 AMAZING LOVE TRICKS (he secretly wants you to know)." I can easily think of one Amazing Love Trick that I'd like repeated 57 times, and I'll go so far as to suggest that I can think of three Amazing Love Tricks in which I'd happily participate 19 times each, but 57 Amazing Love Tricks? What double-jointed freakazoid came up with those? I spontaneously chafe just thinking about it. What happens if you find one you really like, say for instance Amazing Love Trick number eight?

"Can we please do Amazing Love Trick number eight again, honey?"

"No, silly, we have to try out the 49 remaining Amazing Love Tricks first. Then maybe we'll do number eight again. Hold still...I have to go get 200 ball bearings, some toothpicks, and a waffle iron."

It's no use me denying interest in the 57 ALTs because Redbook has already hipped She Who Must Be Obeyed to the fact that my wish for her to know about them is a big secret. If I claim ignorance, she's likely to just wink knowingly and bust out the beekeeper suits. Who the hell are these Redbook people using for sources? Carnies? Time to Get a New Jester

I am currently bummed out because someone I don't know and will likely never meet lost her job because her employer didn't like her personal web site. The person with the newfound free time is Heather Hamilton, and her site dooce.com is one of my favorite places on the web. If you like the occasional grumpy missives posted here, go check out The Dooce. She's like that and worse (which is to say better) pretty much all the time and she's hilarious. Heather has written a lot of funny stuff about people at her (former) work, but she doesn't name names, not even the company's. And it's pretty clear that it's satire...as in entertainment...as in to make people laugh, but it looks like her bosses didn't get the joke. Undoubtedly, some of her stuff was rooted in real dissatisfaction, but most people are dissatisfied to some degree. Heather just has the huevos to shoot her dissatisfaction full of steroids and Jack Daniels and put it up on the web.

The wisdom of doing this is certainly questionable from a practical standpoint, particularly in our current for-shit job market. I wouldn't do it for any number of reasons, chief among them the fact that on a bi-weekly basis my employer miraculously sees fit to send me a slug of US Dollars which She Who Must Be Obeyed then uses to acquire valuable goods and services, and I'm just old-fashioned enough to think that I should therefore not call them names publicly. Maybe I'm saying that I think there's some sort of implied contract between employer and employee that neither will do anything too nasty in their off hours that reflects poorly on the other, or maybe I'm just saying Be Careful if You Satirize the Hands that Feed You. Maybe court jesters need to be careful not to cross certain lines. Maybe I'm just envious that my balls aren't as big as The Dooce's. I've wondered what the total count of beheaded jesters was throughout history. Can't you just picture Harold the Blue-Nose or some other old king dude saying "Sorry, Periwinkle, that's your last joke about my mom. Say howdy to Saint Peter." Dead Jesters might not be a bad name for a band.

The really furry turd in this punchbowl is that one of Heather's coworkers anonymously ratted her out by sending emails to all of her company's vice presidents including, presumably, the gentleman Heather referred to in one post as the "Vice President of Enabling His Fist Up Your Ass." (Like I said, cajones grandes.) Tattling is a scummy thing to do, and when the karma carousel spins back around again, the informant deserves a great big skanky carbuncle on his or her nose and a decade of coal in his Christmas stocking. Contrary to what you might infer from the lyrics of "Santa Claus is Coming to Town," Big Nicky Toybags doesn't like stoolpigeons.

What do you think, visitors of Crunchy? Should they have fired The Dooce? Should she have been more careful? Should we put together a posse to find the rat bastard who informed on her? If we do, should we rent a panel truck? Now that they've hosed her, should Heather start naming names?

PS This just in: Heather's post this evening details the events leading up to her firing, and includes a quote from her former boss saying the company has a "zero-tolerance policy for negativity." Sounds to me like a zero-tolerance policy for humor at their expense, but I guess I'm biased. Today I am enjoying delicately roasted tenderloins of chicken, lovingly caressed with a savory fruit glaze and served with free ranging green beans and a festive rice medley.

Who am I kidding? It's Lean Cuisine, and every one of its pathetic 240 calories is screaming "Smother Me in Cheese, You Pussy!" In the future, we will get Internet reports on the news just like the weather and traffic reports we get today: "The net's all gummed up in the middle Atlantic states, and there's a Sun box in Chicago gobbling every email it gets its hands on." In the future, we will treat depression with software upgrades. If that doesn't work, we'll try hardware upgrades. If that doesn't work, we'll be screwed. Sound familiar? In the future, the boundaries between hardware, software, and human flesh will be hard to discern sometimes. In the future, old people will spend a lot of time on the Internet. In the future, computers will translate most languages on the fly. In the future, we'll be able to bet on all sorts of new things...like the outcomes of sitcom episodes. In the future, people will sell space in their brains. (Now that I think about it, that's already happened.) In the future, people with enough money will have the option to immortalize themselves as computer code. In the future, we will be vaccinated against undesireable emotions. In the future, poor people will get fed up. In the future, there will be some very serious consequences to seemingly innocuous things that are happening now. In the future, the distinction between "food" and "fuel" will become vague. In the future, normal individual people will produce TV shows and movies all by themselves. In the future, the hardware specs of a computer will be irrelevant to most users. In the future, there will be "bugs" in some people's genetic sequences that were introduced by other people. In the future, people who can manipulate the physical world effectively will be harder and harder to find. In the future, it will be possible to advertise in someone's thoughts. In the future, we will be able to purchase and install skills and experiences. The idea of "learning by doing" will be supplanted by things like Microsoft Residential Plumber 2010. In the future, some computer viruses will be fatal. In the future, our machines will have opinions about us. In the future, we will have to reconsider slavery in the context of artificial life. In the future, a generation of sick old people will decide if they'd rather live for the forseeable future as sick old people or just die and get it over with. In the future, humanity will be divided between people with natural human lifespans and people with artificially extended lifespans. The key differentiator will be wealth. In the future, a generation will be known as "the last to die." In the future, life insurance companies will have to reconsider their actuarial tables. In the future, access to key medical and biological technologies will be a strategic and economic differentiator among nations. When these technologies first become viable, certain countries will build their economies around providing medical and bio services that "developed" countries are unwilling to make available. "Yeah, I've got an Angolan liver." In the future, people with artificially extended lifespans will be extremely risk averse. In the future, young men will be more hesitant to marry. In the future, "until death do us part" will seem like a very long time. In the future, marriage contracts will have expirations and termination clauses. In the future, our machines will have health plans and other benefits. In the future, all police departments will need computer crime specialists in order to deal with both the criminals who use computers and the criminals who are computers. In the future, our machines will fall in love. In the future, we will discipline our machines by limiting their access to the Internet. In the future, we will be reminded of mankind's unflagging capacity for cruelty, and we'll be concerned that it may have migrated into some of our machines. In the future, broadcast entertainment will become more and more immersive. This trend, like many key consumer technology trends, will achieve its first market viability as pornography. In the future, we will confront the physical limits of our world in ways we have not yet considered, beyond the amount of oil we have and the net productivity of a square meter of land. In the future, people will get frustrated that travel on spaceships and through time hasn't happened yet. In the future, someone will launch a nuke at the moon. Once again, the Friday Five:

1. Hey, baby, what's your sign? Do you think it fits you pretty well? Aquarius fits me so well because it means I'm ruled by Uranus. Huh huh huh...huh huh.

2. What's the worst birthday gift you've ever received? When I was five or six my grandmother gave me Dr. Denton pajamas (with footies!) which were supposed to have my name on the back like a sports jersey. Alas, there was a typo, either at the pajama plant or in Erla's head, and the word "CHIS" was put on the back in three-inch high letters.

3. What's the best birthday gift you've ever received? A long time ago a young lady gave me her virginity. Recently, and this is going to sound stupid, She Who Must Be Obeyed got me a Sony Playstation which really strummed my heartstrings because she hates video games, it was of no use whatsoever to her, and she usually gets me clothes or art...techweenie toys are way out of character for her.

4. What's the best way you've celebrated your birthday thus far? Fondue party!

5. What are your plans for this weekend? Poker Friday night. No plans for the rest...just trying to get all the sick women in my house healthy. Alright goddammit, I've just been made to watch a whole shitload of figure skating and I say it's about time we fix the goddamn Olympics. All sports with timers or finish lines, pucks or balls, distance, height, or weight measurements, or any sort of ass-kicking and/or guns or other weapons...you're doing a fine job, you're excused, please come back and see us in four years. Now...for all you lame-o index card sports with panels of judges, there are going to be some changes around here. First off, and this goes for all of you, no more makeup. If you're wearing makeup, it's not a sport. It's a leisure activity. Second: no sequins or other unnatural sparkly shit. Real athletes don't dress like Liberace. Third, no flesh-colored leotards, unless you can get them sufficiently flesh-colored so I don't notice that it looks like you're wearing compression hose for your phlebitis. If you want to look like your skin is sticking out, you're actually going to have to let your skin stick out, and you're not going to want to do that for reasons that will be apparent in a minute. Fourth, you don't get to pick your own music anymore. I'm feeling magnanimous, so you can choose: either perform without accompaniment, or I get to pick, and you don't get to know what I've picked until the music starts. Let's see you twiddle off those fancy pants serpentine steps in perfect time with Motorhead's No Sleep Till Hammersmith, or "get radical in the half-pipe" to Kraftwerk's I'm the Operator of my Pocket Calculator. That would be a true test of skill. Fifth, if you participate in one of these newer winter index card things that the US has invented so we can win some stuff in the Winter Games, please keep whatever 50-year-old stoner invented your sport away from the TV cameras, and if you can't manage that, at least have him spit out the monstrous wad of chaw before he does his interviews.

OK, we're also changing the format of all your events. All index card sports will now be conducted in "deathmatch" mode, meaning that you'll all have to compete simultaneously. We're going to be releasing venue-appropriate carnivorous animals in the competition areas. Skaters, skiiers and snowboarders, keep you eyes open for bears and wolverines. Divers and synchonized swimmers, it's going to be piranhas, electric eels, and sharks. Gymnasts, and anyone else performing on warm dry land, we're going to have lions, cobras, and tsetse flies harrassing you. I haven't decided for sure, but there might be some killer robots, too. You'll all be carrying clubs, so you won't be defenseless, and you may use your clubs against other competitors if you are so inclined. All competition spaces (ski runs, ice rinks, whatever the hell the area that the rhythmic gymnastics pixies dance around on is called) will have randomly placed pits that you'll need to avoid. Since we can't dig pits in a pool, we're going to let some Portuguese Man o' wars float around. (You'll want to keep clear of the Man o' wars...they get enough stingers in you and you're looking at an excruciating death.) As you may have noticed, we're de-emphasizing the artistic assessment of your various prancings and gyrations. Gold goes to the last competitor still standing (or not drowned, in the case of pool events). If you want to dance around, knock yourself out.

There, that should take care of that. Oh, let's just offend everybody...

A few things have occured to me with regard to this whole priest-child-molestation situation here in Boston that I haven't seen covered in any of the media outlets I frequent. I hope this doesn't come across as an endorsement or indictment of any particular religion or set of beliefs, which is to say that if the following pisses you off...sorry about that.

1. First off, let's assume, for the sake of argument, that you're a child-molesting priest. Despite being a big perv, you labor all your life and sacrifice greatly to make sure the folks in your care follow the various Catholic rules and get into Heaven. Presumably, you accept the Catholic tenets concerning the afterlife and sin and that sort of thing 100%. Wouldn't it seem that raping children is a basically iron-clad guarantee that immediately following your last gasp you'll be on an all-expenses-paid eternal junket to Hell? You're a priest, so that's really bad, right? Various succubi and caca-demons are probably just dying to get their spiky mitts on you. Does confession and penance have enough juice to absolve you of something so unthinkably evil? Do you believe any of this, or is being a priest just a super-convenient way to find kids to molest?


2. Assuming that extra-absorbent Jesus mops up sins well enough to absolve even child molesters, let's think for a minute about what that means in Heaven. If I'm a low-level, garden-variety sinner, perhaps having made a lot of illegal left turns and maybe doing some coveting and stuff but I'm basically a kind and good person, I really don't want to be seeing a lifetime child molester for eternity, and this may be peckish, but I don't care Who washed his sins away, even if He used 40 Mule Team Borax and a very stiff brush. There aren't enough Hail Mary's and Our Fathers in the world. I especially don't want my kids anywhere near these guys when they get to Heaven, although maybe they'll know deadly kung fu by then so it won't be a problem. Some former perv will try something funny and the girls will rev up and go all White Crane on his xiphoid process and that will be that. I got sidetracked. What I'm wondering is whether the formerly completely hardcore evil pervy but somehow inexplicably redeemed sinners get put in Heaven's general population with the formerly third-string-sinner but basically OK regular folks.


3. Finally, assuming the somehow-saved evil pervs do go straight into Heaven's gen-pop, is there anything we can do about it? Maybe a petition or some sort of appeal to the zoning board?

Of course, this assumes I'm going to Heaven. Maybe I'm not, in which case I won't care about any of this. I'll be busy asking for someone to pass the Chow Foon and tell me when's the next Tenacious D show. FYI: Chicken Picante is now the official food of Satan. Groovy blog from a guy working security at the Olympics. Click here if you think ninjas are totally sweet. For the last two months, I have been negotiating with a long distance giant, let's call them "NCI," in order to try to stop them from being so unbelievably stupid. The mechanics of the problem are boring, but the bottom line is that they have more of my money than they have billed me, and yet somehow I keep getting "Friendly Reminders" to pay my already fully-paid bill. I am not really in the habit of making interest-free loans to utility companies, and so this has been irritating, but not aneurism material...until tonight. Tonight, the Friendly people behind the Friendly Reminders saw fit to block my long distance access. I have to admit that this would not bother me as much if they didn't owe me money. Wait, it gets better.

I call the number that I'm referred to by the disembodied no-dice voice when I try to make a long distance call. Like all other NCI customer service reps before her, the woman who answers requires complete re-education on the mechanics of their problem, because apparently the NCI Customer Relationship Management system gets tired every night and forgets everything. My dad was like that toward the end, so it's a process I'm familiar with. And just like every other time I've tried to resolve this problem, we eventually hit the impenetrable force field that NCI maintains between my money and my long distance account. There is no one at NCI with enough authority to use my money to pay my bill. I could hold the Board of Directors hostage with a very pointy stick and my bill would still be unpaid. Perhaps they think my money is a refund from a disappointing catering order.

But I haven't blown my stack yet. I'm surely on the verbal offensive, using my special voice that I generally reserve for situations like this, launching a withering hail of rhetorical questions that accomplish nothing but making me feel better...and then she says it.

"It's not my fault."

...and with four magic words, she lights the candle. I turn both arming keys and whisper the secret command authorization phrase, unleashing the voice that very few living beings have ever heard, among them the mangy dog that came tearing out of a Vermont yard with murder on its mind toward She Who Must Be Obeyed one summer, which, at a range of about 20 yards, I reduced with a single thunderous word into a yelping ball of wuss. That dog is now deaf and runs from beetles. Full-on, defcon 5, 100% uncut high-octane raging Crunchy.

Let's see...it's not your fault. Hmm. Let me think about that. Well, I've sent you more money than I owe you, so it's not my fault. Who else might be at fault? Dick Van Patten? No, he's busy selling life insurance to Matlock viewers. Arturo Toscannini? No, he's dead. The Bay City Rollers? No, they don't run a long distance company. Who then? Who?

I am not proud of what happened next, but suffice it to say that were it not for the diminished signal capacity of our nation's telephone infrastructure, there would be a crew at work tonight scraping bits of some poor woman's skull and brain off her coworkers, and a call center manager wondering if her headset can't be salvaged with a little bleach and some elbow grease. As it happens, the signal degradation caused by the phone connection resulted in her feeling very very bad instead of having her head exploded at the speed of light. I like to think she's even now planning her Monday morning resignation in the face of my irrefutable evidence that she works for the dumbest people on Earth.

...and no, I still don't have long distance. If you have a long distance deal you like, leave me a comment. And then she got out of the car and commenced a whooping on me... It's an edible Friday Five:

1. What was the first thing you ever cooked? Probably a grilled cheese sandwich. Degree of difficulty: 1.4.

2. What's your signature dish? Omelets in general. If I have to pick one, let's go with sour cream and caviar.

3. Ever had a cooking disaster? (tasted like crap, didn't work, etc.) Describe. 15 years ago in the kitchen of our Watertown, MA, group home for underemployed Schmaverford graduates and their friends, Kluchmaster Dave and I put together a goulash with all the stuff in the fridge. Tomato sauce, red wine, and sausage were involved, and everything was going great...until we added the flour. No idea what we were thinking. Lumpy orange meat caulk ensued. I don't recall anyone being willing to ingest it, including the culinary artistes who were responsible.

4. If skill and money were no object, what would make for your dream meal? First, the venue: candlelit table for two with She Who Must Be Obeyed, set up on Taft Point in Yosemite National Park at sunset. I'm thinking of a tasting menu. I don't have any particular dishes in mind, so I'll just let the menu and preparation to the discretion of the chef at Boston's L'Espalier...with the stipulation that foie gras, truffles, and caviar all need to be involved at some point. L'Espalier can handle the wine, too. Roxy Music and Annie Lennox will provide the music...they can co-headline because we wouldn't want to make one open for the other. Elizabeth Hurley will waitress. Jerry Falwell will bus. Tim Russert will maitre d'.

5. What are you doing this weekend? Haircut and hibernate. [I emerge from my morning regime, well-scrubbed and brimming with Valentine-y cheer.]
Me: Happy Valentines Day, ladies!
She Who Must Be Obeyed: Happy Valentines Day, Daddy.
She Who Must Also Be Obeyed: Happy Valentines Day, Daddy!
She Who Apparently Needs to Be Obeyed Now Too [scowling]: NomahdaddyisnotBalentighisyoyopottyday.
Me: Oh, what's wrong, Schuyler? Happy Valentines Day, honey.
Schuyler [brows furrowed and enunciating as best she can]: NODADDYISYOYOPOTTYDAY!
[I see the yo-yo.]
Me: Happy Yo-Yo Party Day, Schuyler.
Schuyler: Yeth, Daddy.

Happy Yo-Yo Party Day, everyone.
Are you part of the Dido Demographic? I got 6 out of 25. The cutoff was 12, but it's still close enough for discomfort. I was a hyperactive and warlike boy. That is not unusual. Many boys are hyperactive and warlike. What made my situation interesting was that my family and most of our friends were Quakers, members of The Religious Society of Friends. For those of you who aren't familiar, The Friends fled England in the 17th century so that they would be free to cultivate organic gardens and drive standard-transmission Volvos without harassment by The Church of England, arguably the only world religion founded just so one guy (Henry VIII) could dump his wife. Anyway, in addition to worshipping pesticide-free rhubarb and the 240 DL wagon (never the "GL"...too much chrome), the Quakers are a "Peace Church," meaning that they believe that Peace is the answer to just about everything. It never made sense to me as a child, because Peace was getting me nowhere on the playground at school, and from what I was learning about history, it never got anybody else anywhere either, with the exception of someone named Gandhi, and that was only because the British were very polite. Early on, it became clear to me that the choice was between moral superiority and actual superiority, and I was somehow unable to fully appreciate the deep moral satisfaction available to a 7-year-old boy who was willing to just take it while he got his ass kicked by lesser men.

Contributing to my skepticism was the prevailing disciplinary system in our home, which featured occasional spankings and the infrequent slapping. Responding to a spanking by telling the folks "There is no Way to Peace, Peace is the Way," just got me into more trouble. The irony was lost on them. I do not begrudge my parents any of the corporal punishment I got...I undoubtedly deserved all of it and worse. It did, however, seem to offer a ready-made deconstruction of the pacifist line of reason...if two adults couldn't keep one little boy in line without the use of force, could we possibly expect to deal with the Viet Cong or the Soviets with a group hug and a rousing chorus of "This Little Light of Mine?"

Reinforcing my lack of self-doubt in this area were all the other Junior Pacifists at Friends Meeting. While the adult Friends were inside the meeting room contemplating war tax resistance and how to stop the bombing in Southeast Asia, Tony, Mark, Kenny, Joey, Kirk, Hans, Erik, Steve (who eventually broke his parents' peacenik hearts by whittling a fully functional morningstar mace out of a tree branch) and I were outside throwing low-tech organic cluster munitions (in the form of handfuls of acorns) at each other's heads. While there were no "war toys" allowed in First Day School at the meetinghouse, it was amazing how detailed and authentic a TinkerToy Uzi could be with a little ingenuity. (The little plastic orange cylindrical connectors: silencers!) I overcame the war toy ban at home through a simple stratagem: first, I badgered my parents incessantly for weeks. Then, when a big game of Army broke out in our neighborhood, I armed myself with a croquet mallet. I think Bev and Dick (who would have been called "Mom" and "Dad" in any family that hadn't cast off the bogus hierarchical labels of the capitalofascist military-industrial complex) only needed to see one confrontation between a neighbor kid with a fake plastic M-16 and me with a real hardwood mallet to understand that war toys were preferable to my improvisations.

At some point, Dick planted a tiny stand of bamboo on our property. I don't know if this was meant as a display of unity with the people of Indochina, or just the most ill-considered lawncare decision in history, but we quickly discovered that there is no such thing as a tiny stand of bamboo. Bamboo is the Panzer division of the plant world. It spreads at an insane rate, and once it takes an area, nothing else grows there. By the time I was old enough to appreciate it, I had my very own scale model Vietnam in our Central Pennsylvania yard, a completely bambooed area approximately 150 feet long by 30 or 40 feet wide, covering the land between our pathetic little creek (the Mekong river) and our equally pathetic pond (the South China Sea). This became a favorite theater of operations for neighborhood war games, and don't think for a second that I didn't booby-trap the hell out of it. Pit traps, Punji sticks, snares, trip wires, you name it...every nefarious gadget a Quaker kid with a flair for anti-personnel design could come up with. Somehow my traps only ever caught Larry, the minister's kid. He may have taken his religious education more seriously than I did. He also may have become a Navy SEAL, so if you're reading this Larry, please don't kill me, and by the way, I've moved to Saskatchewan.

If you're reading this and you're an Army recruiter, consider the Quaker kids. Their parents may say no, but take a good look at their yards. You've got to get them young, though. I'm 37 now, and it's all relaxed and groovy. It's been decades since I set any traps or hit anyone with a croquet mallet. Or a yard dart (incoming!) for that matter.


She is a master of disguise. Some people apparently don't understand that The WhiteHouse.org is a parody site. (It's also possible that this is a parody of a readers' letters page, but real or not, these letters rock.) In honor of Valentine's Day and courtesy of Heather, it's a frisky Friday Five. This is a fun one...sure beats the hell out of "What's your favorite search engine?"

1. What's the most romantic thing you've ever done for someone else? December 31, 1992: I told a woman named Jennifer that I was conducting an experiment and needed her help. I asked her to close her eyes and fan her fingers out in front of her. She obliged, and I slipped the ring on her finger. Nine years later the experiment is still running.

2. [pardon the cosmo question] What are your erogenous zones? My right thumb. That's why my space bar is ribbed for pleasure. Sorry, that's on a "need to know" basis. You don't need to know.

3. How old were you the first time you had sex? Care to expound? For the purposes of providing wiggle room once my daughters figure out how to use the Web, let's just say between 15 and 20. We were in her bedroom in her folks' house in the middle of the afternoon, with the 'rents downstairs. The strange thing is that I have no recollection of what music was playing. I know there was music. I usually remember...

4. What's the most unusual place you've ever had sex? Somewhere at summer camp, probably. Dining hall, barn, utility closet, tent, car in the parking lot, out in the woods, in the middle of some field...we lived in tents with the campers, so at night all the counselor couples had to scramble to find some privacy. If you got a late start for some reason you had to be creative, because all the good spots would be taken.

5. Do you have plans for Valentines's Day, or is it just another Thursday? Doesn't look like we'll have babysitting coverage, so it'll probably be a quiet dinner at home. Strike that. Dinner at home, punctuated by periodic requests to play Candyland. Suddenly and apropos of nothing, it has occurred to me that I am mightily biased against people who announce that something is a "work of art" and even more biased against the object of their art-assigning. Especially when a celebrity is involved. Isn't art in the eye of the person with the socket? Not that I remember Rosie O'Donnell doing this, but imagine that Rosie O'Donnell is carrying a handbag with a big ole goat head affixed to it, and when some press person indicates interest in it by saying something like "gee, that's interesting," or "who's your friend?" or "what is that rural smell?" Rosie brightens up and announces to the world that it's the latest by Jacques Fleaubleu, and isn't it just wonderful and IT'S A WORK OF ART. I don't know if it is or not, but as soon as I hear that, I think "No, that is a butt-nasty goat head that some dingbat stapled to your bag and sold to you for $5,000." This may be further proof of She Who Must Be Obeyed's thesis that I am prematurely ornery. Three great links, courtesy of MetaFilter. Could you go read MetaFilter yourself? Yes, but I've already done it so you don't have to.

1. Terry Gross of NPR's Fresh Air vs. Gene Simmons of KISS. I'm amazed we weren't all exploded at the speed of light by the matter-antimatter mixture. Some producer either didn't do their homework, has a wicked sense of humor, or had a magic mushroom omelet for breakfast.


2. Prison survival guide. Much more than "just don't pick up the soap." Might come in handy if you're a former top Enron exec.


3. I have no idea exactly what the hell Fusion Anomaly is, but I like it. Click the red buttons once you get there.

It looks like the Google spider has finally decided to crawl through mistercrunchy.com, as evidenced by our somewhat increased traffic levels and some interesting information in the referrer logs. Within the last week, people have found their way to Casa Crunchero after entering the following search words into Google:

"average number of sex partners"
"miscommunication humor"
"foreskins galore" (yikes!)
"giant assholes"
"gunther gebel williams foundation"
"pliocene clam"

I am the current number one Google hit for "pliocene clam." I couldn't be more proud.

As further evidence that I have either too much time on my hands or a severe sleep disorder, I've run some experiments to find other combinations of search terms that yield Your Humble Site as their top result, or even better, their only result. My favorite thus far in the former category is "Sebastian Cabot is a fiend," and in the latter, "Shamen Rednexx KPMG." Note: "Shamen Rednexx" and "Rednexx KPMG" also yield the same result, although "Shamen KPMG" picks up a few more sites. Perhaps KPMG employs one or more shamen in their auditing practice. WOOOOOOOOOOO! PATS, BABY! WOOOOOOOOOO! "We want to expose the horrific realities of abortion, tie in our message of chastity and tell people that condoms are not that safe." -Brandi Swindell, Generation Life.

This group in Utah thinks that limiting the availability of condoms at the Olympic Games will help stop abortion and encourage chastity. Uh...OK. Let's assume they're successful and they manage to stop the jimmy-hats from being distributed. Will there be more unwanted pregancies among participants or fewer? Hmm. I wonder.

Imagine you're a vigorous hot-blooded Olympic athlete of some sort, maybe a luge-person or something, and you're in Utah and you're horny. You are surrounded by similarly vigorous physical specimens of like mind. Here's Generation Life's proposed decision support tree:

1. You (or your partner) can't have an abortion if you cause an unwanted pregnancy. Fine. I don't want to get/make someone pregnant. I'll use birth control.
2. You can't use birth control. OK, well I'm still real horny, so I'll take my chances.
3. No. You must remain chaste. OK, well then I'll just have to pleasure myself silly. Time to go pat the robertson.

That's the only answer, right? Generation Life must be pro-masturbation. They have to be. The alternative is being pro-sexual-frustration and THAT'S JUST NOT GOING TO WORK. I'm sure we'll be hearing a lot about their pro-wanking educational efforts in the coming days, so stay tuned.

(Can someone send these people a case of IQ-enhancing balm?) Today's exercise: Compare and contrast these two "open letters" from Michael "Roger and Me" Moore, one to Al Gore in October of 2000, and the other to Dubya a few days ago. Mr. Moore, not unlike many of us in the general non-celebrity population, loves to complain. It's hard to tell, sometimes, if he's an activist or a humorist. I'll suggest that he sometimes lets the humor get in the way of a persuasive argument. In the case of the Gore letter, he's blasting Gore for his centrism, while ignoring the likelihood that centrism is a fundamental reason the Democratic party is relevant to today's politics. In the Bush letter, he's predicting that Enron will end up running Dubya out of the White House, but it's all smoke, no fire. If nothing else, the Dubya letter is a good set of links to scary Enron news stories.

Also relevant to the Gore letter, in which Moore endorses Ralph Nader and states that he "will not feel one iota of guilt" if Gore loses the 2000 election, I think Moore demonstrates his fundamental lack of understanding of our two party system. When there are only two viable choices, the Lesser-of-Two-Evils strategy is a pretty good one. Moore's whining notwithstanding, one of two guys was going to win that election, his guy was not one of them, and the votes that went to his guy in Florida decided the outcome.

Bonus question: Does Mr. Moore think Dubya is "evil?" Read the letters and judge for yourself.

PS In the spirit of full disclosure: I think Moore is pretty funny sometimes. Also, I voted for Gore in 2000, but wasn't unconflicted about it. (During my shower this morning, I remembered that that's a total lie. I voted for old whatshisname, the Natural Law Party candidate. Howard? Harold Something? If Massachusetts had been contested, or if our national elections were decided by who gets the most votes, I would have gone for Gore. Lucky I'm just a lunatic with a Web site and not a pundit.) At least with Dubya, we don't have to listen to Gore's paternalistic holier-than-thou crap for four years. Bush may be many things, but he isn't holier than anybody. Today's Friday Five:

1. Have you ever had braces? Any other teeth trauma? I had braces for a few years to correct an overbite. Once the braces came off, I had a permanent retainer welded into place behind my lower front teeth. I ignored it completely for about 15 years until one morning when brushing my teeth there was an audible "boing" and it popped out of my mouth. Also, after many years of procrastination, I had my two impacted wisdom teeth removed a couple years ago, when I realized the periodic infections I was getting were worse than the surgery would be. The surgery rocked. They gave me this little nose mask with nitrous oxide in it, and said "If you feel any discomfort, just inhale through your nose." I immediately exhaled and took the biggest nose-hit I could. I could hear the nurse saying "Whoa, there" and then I lifted right up out of my body. I was looking down at myself thinking, "Hey, look, that guy's having oral surgery. That's gotta hurt."

2. Ever broken any bones? Nope.

3. Ever had stitches? Just for the wisdom teeth. I probably should have had stitches for the self-inflicted finger wound I gave myself at the bagel bar in the college dining center, but I was an idiotic college student, so I didn't.

4. What are the stories behind some of your physical scars? I was carrying one end of a heavy table down a flight of stairs and got my left thumb ground between the table and a stucco wall. Bagel-slicing scar on left ring finger.

5. How do you plan to spend your weekend? Party at Ricky's Saturday with kids quarantined in basement, Super Bowl on Sunday.

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