After buying a mandolin on six cups of coffee and a whim this past weekend, I rediscovered this song, which was a huge hit in my youth that I’d completely forgotten about. It’s the kind of song that pretty much everyone can relate to, especially once you realize it has absolutely nothing to do with religion, except the kind that centers around another person, to the exclusion of sense and reason.

Or more accurately, it’s about losing your values and ideals by obsessing about another person. I kind of wish I’d paid enough attention to figure that out as a kid, because I was an embarrassingly hopeless romantic. It would have saved teenage me a ton of heartache and drama.

But in hindsight, taking an ass-kicking, literal or emotional, is sometimes the best learning method.

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Driving through NYC, I caught myself absently thinking “huh, there sure are a lot of NPCs here”.

That’s right, folks: put me behind the wheel and my subconscious apparently thinks I’m the only Player Character in a driving simulator. 

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Apparently it’s illegal to camp on Walden Pond. I don’t have the words. 

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It’s not the first time this has happened, but it’s definitely the most ironic. A few years ago, in a fit of frustration at stupid crap being posted on Facebook, I created the following image, from clip art I found on Google images:

Today, I find the thing popping up in my news feed, with 30k shares including the one that brought it to my attention, off a Facebook page about paganism. The image quality was so degraded that they apparently didn’t notice the fake URL at the bottom, which reads:

“Seriously Dude This Isnt The Bronze Age We Have Science And Computers And Shit.com”

So much irony I wouldn’t be surprised if I got a nosebleed.

You know, if the President just came right out and said “yeah, that stuff about chemical weapons and humanitarian aid was all BS; we’re interested in deposing Assad in order to ensure Russia doesn’t have a monopoly on oil sales to Europe”, I’m pretty sure the American people wouldn’t be as quick to roll their eyes at this whole ‪#‎Syria‬ thing.

But given the last 10 years, I don’t think anyone’s buying the narrative that America is a real-life Justice League, and with more and more people turning to the Internet instead of traditional outlets for their information, treating the public like a bunch of kids sitting around a TV on Saturday morning isn’t going to be an option much longer.

The Internet has made it much harder to wag the dog, but that apparently doesn’t stop the ass-end from trying. (Conversely, any wonder why Internet freedom is under attack from all directions right now?)

Originally posted on Facebook here

…part American Pit Bull Terrier, part Prehistoric Alligator from the Cretaceous period.

Here she is, trying to eat my foam roller:

and a Chinese vase…

and a wrought-iron end table…

(All of these pictures were taken within the space a few minutes…)

I wanted to name her “Lady Planetwrecker, Princess of Destruction”, but my wife explicitly stated “none of that nerdy crap”, so she named her “Honey”.

When I mentioned my naming choice on Bullshido, this was posted:

All hail Lady Planetwrecker, and look for her upcoming biography, “Fuck Your Sneakers – My First Few Weeks in the Fletcher Household”.

Seriously, people. Your watermarks are bad and you should feel bad.

2012 saw more archers as action heroes than fat people at Hometown Buffet on half-price Wednesday. And for the life of me, I can’t figure out what crawled up the spectral bum of the zeitgeist to prompt this. Especially considering most of the archer characters, like Hawkeye and Green Arrow, have been around for decades.

Anyway, instead of wasting time trying to puzzle out the human race’s collective idiosyncrasies, I’d rather capitalize on them. If people have an underlying action fetish for outdated weapons technology, then boy do I have a super hero for them:

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I don’t get why people think New Yorkers are rude; over the last few days I’ve found the exact opposite to be true, and there’s a damn good reason for it. A rock that sits in a river long enough won’t have very many sharp edges. Or less poetically: when you have this many people crammed onto a relatively small island, individuals who are rude won’t remain un-stabbed for very long.

People here hold doors for strangers, smile and nod, and say “excuse me” when pushing through a crowd standing shoulder-to-shoulder in an over-packed restaurant on a Saturday night.

There’s a difference between rudeness, and having well-drawn lines, beyond which, courtesy turns into open contempt. I imagine this subtle difference is lost on a lot of those who either haven’t spent a lot of time around people from this part of the country, or just don’t possess the force of character needed to draw those lines for themselves.