schadenfreude

it began with "cops." it got uglier with "street brawls." it hit an all-time low with "bum fights." now, filling the softer, gentler niche in the "there's nothing funnier than white trash under pressure" genre, we have "supernanny."

it sounded like a stupid premise to me: mary poppins gets inept parents to regain control of their bratty kids. whatever. put it on lifetime and leave me alone. but then i actually saw an episode of it last week, and holy crap, it's FUNNY. crack a beer, and it's even funnier. and best of all, i feel like a superhero parent compared to these people. i immediately acquired both seasons on dvd, and began watching them in my hallowed tv-on-dvd-watching time-slot right before bed, an honor usually reserved for such quality shows as invader zim and the angry beavers.

my favorite episode involves a family with 7 kids, ages 17, 8, 7, 6, 2, 18 months, and 6 months, who all (with the exception of the one kid who couldn't crawl yet) beat the crap out of each other all freakin day long. it's funny on so many levels. first off, they have more kids than i do, which is funny in its own right. secondly, they live in what looks like a double-wide, so even if they were trying to avoid each other, they can't help but run into each other CONSTANTLY. and watching a 6-year-old throw punches at a 7-year-old who retaliates by kicking her stepsister in the head is one of those horribly engrossing things that's so wrong, it's funny. like bumfights, you kinda wonder why the responsible, sober adult in the room doesn't stop it, but you're not entirely sorry they didn't. really, the only thing that would be more wrong would be laughing at a dvd of retarded midgets fighting each other with blowtorches.

the best part is that all these kids cuss like sailors. at one point, as three of the older kids are screaming at each other, the angelic little 18 month old with her sprouty pigtails toddles by, pauses to watch for a moment, pops the pacifier out of her mouth, and yells, "SHUT UP YOU FUCKING IDIOTS!" then somebody punches her.

now, i haven't let the twins watch any of this, since they'll just see mommy laughing at violence and get the wrong idea. EG, on the other hand, did get to see this episode, and i quickly explained that it was funny because it was so BAD, and if he ever did anything like that... i didn't even have to finish; he jumped in with exactly what awful punishments he'd have coming if he ever hit a brother or called them names like that. "did somebody forget to teach them how to be good, or are they being bad on purpose?" he asked. i really wasn't sure myself. it became sort of a game in which he tried to identify every basic rule of decency these kids broke. so it turned into a good lesson for him; he was entranced by the second half of the show, in which the supernanny imposes rules and actually manages to make these semi-feral kids behave. he was genuinely relieved when, at the end of the show, everyone was acting more or less civilized.

now, that's all fine and good, but after he's in bed, i'm just going to rewind and watch the toddler call her siblings "fucking idiots" repeatedly. PRM doesn't appreciate the show like i do. not because he doesn't have the same twisted sense of humor, though... schadenfreude is universal. women gossip, hockey fans love blood on the ice, and even if you don't watch cops, i bet you watch oprah or springer. he was just so annoyed by the children's bad behavior that he had to leave the room after 5 minutes worth. it wasn't a lack of schadenfreude that made him hate the show; this is a man who loves a particular episode of "animal rescue" wherein a house is overrun with dozens of feral cats who have to be captured one by one. he cackles like a madman when one particularly pissed off cat, having been caught in the noose at the end of a stick, flops around on the sidewalk yowling. it was kinda like what you might expect to see if satan had just been electrocuted.

schadenfreude. to each his own... but we all dig it.

head on! apply directly where it hurts!

that's the second-most annoying ad campaign on tv right now. there are several close runners-up, including the geico caveman ad campaign, which has gone all post-modern and meta-fictional. sorry, but "so easy, a caveman could do it" just wasn't funny enough to begin with to justify the spate of cavemen-with-hurt-feelings-about-the-ads ads. also, any republican political campaign ads (for example, fox news shows) that force me to look at dubya. especially when he's smiling, his smile being a heady mix of smugness and vapidity. should you ever need further proof that we done condescended from monkeys, look no further than our president.

anyway. the most annoying ad, by far, is the ad campaign for the new HPV vaccine that will prevent 70% of cervical cancers. in it, dozens of healthy, pretty women declare, "i want to be one less."

nice sentiment. good idea. (note to the geniuses on the religious right: if you oppose the vaccine to avoid "encouraging" sex, i guess y'all better start lobbying against those damned seatbelts, which obviously just encourage people the world over to speed like bats out of hell. what would jesus do? why, obviously he'd keep sex as deadly as possible! now to start the "flush those aids drugs before they get to africa!" campaign! you know, the one mentioned in luke 3:22.)

the only problem is that "women" are not like some great, innumerable mass of playdoh from which you can lop off any number of woman-chunks... nope. surprised? no, really. with the exception of siamese twins, each woman is a discrete unit unto herself.

hence, it should be "i want to be one fewer." ARRRGGGHHHHHH!!! AND THOSE STUPID TWITS MAKE ME LISTEN TO THE GRATINGLY UNGRAMMATICAL TAGLINE ABOUT 50 TIMES IN EACH AD SPOT!!!

and the moral of the story: that's what happens when you let women write ads and stuff. it's about time to end this recent experiment in educating women, and go back to keeping em knocked up, and seen and not heard. yep. probably shouldn't let the bitches drive, either.

easily impressed

you could almost hear his thoughts: "dude! they just gave me two whole TOYS! i now have toys of my very own! SWEET!!!!"



yeah, i guess they're his in theory. they won't really be his until he's strong enough to defend his possessions, though:

i can FUCK UP a chicken fried steak!

for those of you who don't know what chicken fried steak is: leave. just leave my blog now and do not return. you are too nice, shiny, clean and white to be here. go. click here:

"I LIVE IN AN EXPENSIVE HOUSE IN AN ALL-WHITE SUBURB AND DON'T KNOW WHAT CHICKEN FRIED STEAK IS."

(after educating yourself on the finer points of soul food, you may return. unless, of course, your first thought was "lard? oh my goodness..." in which case, you should probably continue to fuck off.)

okay, so hospital food sucks. everybody knows this. being a rather healthy and cautious kid (translation: "huge pussy on a skateboard or bicycle,") i had to take this on faith until the age of 27, when the twins were born (EG was born in a hospital too, but i got all kinds of good drugs and stayed under 24 hours, so i'll be damned if i can remember what the food was like - or if i even ate any hospital food at all, for that matter.) turns out, the hospital food around these parts is actually pretty good. hell, this time around, i was looking FORWARD to it. so i loaded up on cheeseburgers, chicken pot pie, jello, pudding, carrot cake, chocolate cake (notice how you can order as many entrees and desserts as you want, and totally skip the side dishes with those pesky vegetables and shit? rock on!)

then, three and a half weeks later, i landed in the hospital again, this time for three days. more on why in a moment. because the why of it is nowhere near as important as the fact that, for my first meal during that stay, i ordered the chicken fried steak... and holy shit. that's all i can say. holy shit! if i could order that stuff from home, and get some nurse to deliver hospital-made chicken fried steak to my door, i would never order papa john's again, i can tell you that much.

now, as good as hospital food is, everything else about it sucks. staying in a hospital is like hanging out in satan's asshole. from the ER exam room where i spent just over 4 hours that had to be 112 degrees (an overweight dude complaining of chest pain would have been stone-cold DEAD after 20 minutes in that fucking room) to the bed that seems designed to cause maximum back and ass pain, everything in a hospital is like a cheap, ghetto, barely functional version of the real thing. like blankets that are thin and scratchy. the worst-tasting toothpaste (and really, isn't fucking up MINT flavor damn near impossible?) that leaves your mouth feeling gritty instead of clean...

okay. i know i sound like an old lady fervently bitching about minutiae. bear with me. i have some legitimate complaints too.

like the band aids. i mean, jesus h christ. it's a hospital. you'd think the least they could manage would be a wound covering at least as functional as the superman band-aids i buy my kids for $2 a box. nope. what do you get? a folded square of gauze held down with a piece of tape. when you wash your hands, the gauze gets soaked, leaks bloody water everywhere, the tape gives you a massive bruise from how tightly it was clamped down, and when you pull it off it takes body hair and possibly a layer of skin with it.

and like hygeine! christ, i haven't felt that nasty since i roughed it in some remote camping location for an entire week. actually, i think i felt cleaner after the whore's baths i took while camping that week than i did after my "bath" at the hospital. i understand you can't take a shower when you have 3 IV lines in. but for fuck's sake, what happened to sponge baths? from hot nurses (male or female, whatever your preference may be?) some nurse came around and asked if i wanted to take a bath... after 36 hours there (which was kicked off, mind you, by four hours of sweating my ass off in satan's asshole,) and having bled on my hospital gown multiple times, yeah... i wanted a bath. so she "prepares my bath" ... and comes back five minutes later with a packet of 8 disposable, pre-moistened, pre-soaped washcloths she has microwaved. so my "bath" consisted of scrubbing a thin film of cheap-smelling soap scum onto myself and being unable to rinse it off. yep. that was awesome.

but hey, the chicken-fried steak three meals a day totally made up for it. okay, not really. but the not dying part did! yay for modern medicine! apparently, even after an office procedure 5 days post-partum to pop out a big lobe of left-behind placenta (yeah, that didn't hurt), there was still some crap left behind. last saturday night, it decided to start dumping blood, and lots of it. so i ran to the ER, and the nice young ob/gyn on call got to do an emergency d&c, during which she discovered that the "retained products of conception" had implanted into the actual uterine muscle. she discovered this when trying to scrape it out dumped another 1.2+ liters of blood all over the operating room (yay for general anesthesia! i didn't have to see it!) so, after losing what nodamnsense pointed out was about 1/3 of my total blood volume, i got my first blood transfusion, a bunch of medication... and chicken fried steak. yeah.

and this is the little turd responsible for it all. should you see him, please beat his ass. i'm still a bit too weak to do it myself.