Tuesday, December 28, 2004

We don’t need no ejakashun

Apathy Jack writes:

Alright, to put it bluntly, I don’t think teachers should be paid very much.

Fortunately, the government seems to agree with me, so that’s that problem solved.

Of course I suppose I should clarify:

Teachers at the top of the scale are not paid enough. They deserve more. In fact, not to put too fine a point on it, they deserve a lot more.

Someone who has been teaching for twenty years doesn’t earn the salary of a third year lawyer, which, y’know, kind of blows. I still remember chatting to a computer monkey friend of mine, and discovering that he had paid more in tax that year than I had earned. It was a shade demoralising...

So I believe that teachers should be paid a lot more than they currently are. I wouldn’t feel guilty getting at least half again as much as I currently am.

However, that shouldn’t kick in until, say, year five or so.

Bear with me while I explain.

The thing is, being a teacher is seen as the soft option.

Don’t believe me? Well here’s a little test I’d like to you to do. Think of your job title. Got it in your head? Right. Now think back. How many people have said to you “You know, I’ve always thought about becoming a [insert your job title here].”

How many people have said that to you? I can count how many people have said it to me over the years: Approximately all of them.

Over ninety percent of my friends, and every single person I have ever met at a party, in the queue at the supermarket, or passed on the street, has uttered the immortal line “You know, I’ve always thought about becoming a teacher.”

Worst are the ones who come to me specifically to discuss the issue. Let’s look at how the conversation doesn’t go:

“Hey, I’ve just gotten a massive raise, the dress code has been relaxed again, and I still do nothing all day except check my email and update my blog. But you know, I’ve always thought about becoming a teacher.”

Sadly, it usually sounds more like this:

“I’m unemployed again, my last job paid me so little that I have no savings to speak of, and WINZ are making it difficult to get the dole straight off. Hey, it’s one of those ads where they offer people scholarships to do a teaching course. You know, I’ve always thought about becoming a teacher.”

More than a few of my friends and acquaintances have come to me to ask about teaching (or, more properly, to tell me about teaching, because, you know, they had teachers when they were in high school, so they’re experts in the field), to confide in me that it’s been their lifelong dream, and tell me that they’re serious about helping and becoming an inspiration to young people.

And they’re either unemployed, about to become unemployed, or deeply unhappy with conditions at their work.

The moment they get another job, or a raise, or sort their life out in general, they never speak of teaching again, not even in the abstract.

Teaching is seen as the easy option by people who don’t know what else to do. This is fact. Out of the thirty English trainees in my course, I was the only one who had gone to university with the express goal of becoming an English teacher – the rest had done English degrees because, well, high school was over, they didn’t know what they wanted to do with their lives, and they were good at English. Reaching the end of their degrees still without goals, they had opted for the only career an English degree actually qualifies you for.

I had three trainees in my class this year. One of them was worth even half a damn as a teacher, and we gave her a job – she teaches in the room next to me and is an asset to the school. The other two were less than useless. Oh, certainly, they knew a lot about Shakespeare, and they remembered the names of all of the pedagogues and sociologists I’ve forgotten about since I stopped training, but they were irredeemable arse when it came to actually teaching kids, for the simple reason that they didn’t really want to be there. They woke up unhappy at the idea of spending another day in front of a pack of kids trying to teach them things.

The kids aren’t stupid (well, mine aren’t, anyway, I punish them for stupidity) – if you don’t like them and don’t want to be there, they pick that up pretty quickly. And if you don’t want to be planning a lesson, it’s hard to put in the time and effort required to make a good one.

Should we reward these people? People who only became teachers because they couldn’t think of anything else to do? University isn’t cheap any more, so they had to leave as a simple matter of financial expediency, and we’re letting these infections start on forty grand a year?

No.

They want it; they can earn it.

The tourists won’t last five years (in fact I have a dead pool with another teacher at my school as to whether one trainee we shared will last five months at her new job – I’m betting on her; I say almost a full year before she runs screaming back to full time academia...). We can reward the real teachers.

I do sincerely believe that teachers deserve more. I don’t like talking about it too much because, you know, it’s not like I’m looking at it objectively or anything, but it’s true. The job I do is more important than your average lawyer or your average computer monkey, and yet they earn sometimes twice what I do or more.

It makes me angry when I see letters in the papers claiming teachers should just stop whining and do their jobs. Sure, such letters have happened in the wake of all of the strikes from a few years ago, and I didn’t necessarily agree with how those strikes were done, but here’s the thing; until those strikes happened, the rate that teachers’ salaries was increasing hadn’t matched inflation in ten years.

This is it: People see teaching as the soft option because they think they could do it. They had teachers, and it didn’t look that hard. And I’m not saying they necessarily couldn’t, but of the hundred people in my course less than a quarter are still teaching five years out of the gate. The proles remember the teachers that told them to turn to page fifteen and not make so much noise, but they don’t remember the teachers who worked hard to help them understand a concept, who stayed back after school and gave up weekends. They saw the few periods in front of the class, not the hours of marking and lesson prep that goes into making sure those periods ran smoothly. So of course the assumption is that we shouldn’t be getting paid as much as people in the “expert” fields.

Sitting on the shelf next to my computer are a bunch of Christmas cards from staff and students. One was given to me by an ex-student. Although she has been in tertiary education for a year now, she came back to give me a card because, she tells me, she still thinks fondly of me and credits my advice with changing her life for the better.

What I’m saying here is that I don’t do this for the money.

But it still does chaff a little when the public does its little outcry that I don’t deserve to have salary increases commensurate with inflation, and when the Minister of Education makes it clear that the job I do is not seen as even remotely valuable, let alone of any actual importance.

Sure, I’m not going to claim the moral high ground – I’d like more money because it would mean I could buy more CDs and eat at the flash pizza joints; Capitalism pure and simple. But also, I would like teachers to be paid more because that would be recognition that what we do is actually important. That not everyone who has thought “You know, I’ve always thought about becoming a teacher” is capable of doing so at the snap of their fingers, just like not everyone can become a lawyer or a doctor or an artist.

But still, I have to balance this with the fact that too many people are snapping their fingers and expecting to leave training to arrive on the set of Dead Poets Society, where, you’ll notice, Robin Williams spent the square root of bugger all time writing reports and filling in evaluation forms and taking a sports team on his weekends because it’s part of the contract now...

Hell, at the very least, they could train them up to be expecting The Principal (Jim Belushi as a Principal with a baseball bat) or The Substitute (Treat Williams as a mercenary cum vengeance-bent substitute teacher) or Class of Nuke ‘Em High III: The Good, The Bad and The Subhumanoid (well, you get the idea), or any of those other real-life-teacher documentaries.

And then, after they’ve given them that grounding, throw them into boarder line poverty for five years. Just to separate out the tourists. That’s all I ask.

Sunday, December 26, 2004

Technophilia

Josh writes:


Spongebob
Originally uploaded by Brain Stab.
See this? This is a photo of the Spongebob Squarepants sponge given to me for Christmas. It stands as a symbol of the wonders of modern life in several important ways.

First of all, it is a sponge and it is in the shape of Spongebob Squarepants. This in itself is testament to a level of Genius and Beauty in the world.

Almost as significant is the fact that I took the photo of it with my mobile phone, sent it to my computer via Bluetooth, and uploaded to it the Flickr image-hosting service, from where I generated this blog entry and had it automatically sent here to Blogger. In the space of a couple of days, I've created this site, invited people to join it (some of whom I've never even met), and hooked it up to Flickr, a hitcounter and an RSS feed, all from my desk and all for a few mouse-clicks apiece.

Anyone who wants to tell me the future wasn't supposed to be like this can fuck right off.

Saturday, December 25, 2004

Apathy Jack writes:

If you want to be someone today you must nerve yourself
For deeds that could earn you an island exile, or years in jail.
Honesty's praised, but honest men freeze. Wealth springs from crime:
Landscape gardens, palaces, furniture, antique silver -
Those cups embossed with prancing goats - all are tainted.
Who can sleep easy today? If your greedy daughter-in-law
Is not being seduced for cash, it'll be your bride: mere schoolboys
Are adulterers now. Though talent be wanting, yet
Imagination will drive me to verse, such as I - or any scribbler -
May still command.

- Juvenal, Satire I

God and Politics

Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling writes:

Within the past two years a new word has moved into the English lexicon. “Blog”. Blogs are the effectively people’s scrap books put up onto the internet. Although most scrape to the level of perceptiveness, aptly described of a “link…to a Dominion Post article about John Tamihere standing down as Minister, and then…incisive commentary like, ‘wow. A minister is standing down. This could be bad for Labour’.”, a few manage to rise above this with good analysis and good debate, and an example of good debate found on a politician’s blog roused your correspondent to a bit of analysis.

The argument was on the ideological loading of NCEA economics questions, and more precisely the fact that they currently turn away from the virtues of the market and instead look to the government to dispense assorted mannas. After the pro and anti market forces had initially sized each other up, discussion moved on to just what should be taught in schools - and a curious thing happened. One of those who had made noises about vouchers and abolishing state education was a creationist, and his opponent, decrier of free market ideology as "just as flawed as communism", turned out to be a strident evolutionist.

Why is this curious? Because once the emotions are stripped away the combatants have surprisingly similar outlooks. When distilled, creationism of whatever stripe looks at the complexity of the natural world and basically throws up its hands. "Inanimate" matter, even with the help of the laws of chemistry, physics, and selection, cannot possibly have within it the powers of organisation to mould itself into an eye or flagellum, and so there must be a greater organising power that make sure that the eyes and flagella were put and stay where they are supposed to be.

Now let us look at those who are against capitalism. They look at the provision of education or health and surrender in a similar fashion. Humans, even with the powers of volition and free will, cannot possibly organise for themselves provision of healthcare or education and so must turn to a greater organising power to supposedly ensure that these and other "social services" are accounted for.

That the two positions are fundamentally identical is one thing, of more interest is which position, assuming the choice is mutually exclusive, is the more rational. The theory of Evolution has been with us for only 145 years, since 1859 when Charles Darwin published "On the Origin of Species”. That it took until so recently for someone to tie the evidences together suggests that evolution is not immediately evident. Also relevant is the fact that not everyone is a biologist, or needs to be. Many people get along just fine without knowledge in biology and disagree with evolution because they don't know how it works, and what they assume evolution entails does not appeal to them, or just strikes them, as in chemicals organising themselves into the human eye, as absurd - . This generosity, it must be said, does not extent to creationists.

What about capitalist theory? That has been with us for almost twice as long as evolution, since 1732 when Richard Cantillon published "Essai Sur la Nature du Commerce en Général" some 40 years before Adam Smith. Again it is still fairly recent, and one can claim that a large part of the delay in the discovery and articulation of capitalism and resistance to it since is because capitalism does not correlate with how we intuitively assume the world works. If one accepts Paul Rubin's thesis in "Darwinian Politics" - our minds evolved to understand a world very different from ours, namely the Pleistocene between 1.6 million and 10,000 years ago.

One example should suffice to explain the contrast. Trading in the Pleistocene was a zero-sum game. If I have something, then you do not. The only reason I could have acquired wealth is because I have either used underhand tactics to trick you, bullied you, or stumbled over a natural resource. Even barter of vegetables for meat does not lead to the creation of anything extra, the zero-sum pie is just moved around a bit. There is little room here for today's economy with wealth creation, entrepreneurship, or investment. Since any disparity in the Pleistocene world must be due to foul play, inequality leads to feelings of envy - and this is still very much the case. When things of value were created, it was through hard work. This "labour theory of value" has remarkable persistence. Adam Smith believed in it and it is a central tenet of Marx's thought. The idea that value is completely subjective and that without someone to value your labour your effort is worthless seems grossly unfair and wrong to the Pleistocene mind.

Those paying attention will have noticed an important difference regarding the two positions. The first is more accident than design, and is solved by learning about evolution. The second is more design (or evolution) than accident. One can claim that opposition to capitalism is a vestigal relic programmed in to cope with a long distant past. Is this relevant? The answer is no.

Whatever the cause of either misunderstanding, both can be solved by learning. Humans have evolved a large brain with the ability to control our beliefs in accordance with the evidence. Despite its seeming to cut against the grain of how we think the world should work, simple observation and comparison of how well nations with open economies fare against those with closed. The Cato Institute’s trade openness index did just this when it compared how ninety-one countries fared between 1980 and 1998. The twelve most open countries had a GDP per head in 1998 of US$23,387 with average having grown at 2.5% annually. The average GDP was seven times more than what one would expect in one of the twelve least open, and their incomes grew at a miserly 0.3 percent per year.

Now for the judging. The award, such as it is, for least damnable position goes to the anti-evolutionist. He can claim ignorance since he doesn’t need to understand biology to get by in life and it is hardly fair to damn someone for not believing in something they do not understand or need to (once again, this generosity does not extend to creationists). Secondly, what we are asking the anti-evolutionist to believe really is quite amazing, that chemistry and circumstance can lead to the complexity we see around us with nothing to guide it.

Why does the anti-capitalist fail? For pretty much the opposite reasons. Since questions of economics effect us all it is intellectually inexcusable to persist in opposing the evidence proving that freedom works and is better than compulsion.Unlike the evidence for evolution which is found in a textbook, the evidence that freedom works is obvious. Secondly, capitalism isn’t scary or amazing. It is simply how civilized people behave, voluntarily trading value for value with each other for mutual benefit. This includes everything from chocolate to computers, and ideally health and education.

Finally, countering much of the natural world, humans have volition and free will. Stating that these qualities and the people that possess them not only cannot but should not be allowed to freely organise services from pensions to health-care is arrogant and, since it is so wrong in light of the evidence, evil as well. In order to prosper and even to survive people need to be allowed to live to their potential and keep the fruits of their successes, even with the danger of failure. As Frank S. Meyer wrote: “….freedom can exist at no lesser price than the danger of damnation; and if freedom is indeed the essence of man’s being, that which distinguishes him from the beasts, he must be free to choose his worst as well as his best end. Unless he can choose his worst, he CANNOT choose his best.”

The Long Adolescence

Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling writes:

There are many things that separate the life of a youth in New Zealand from one in Sub-Saharan Africa. Food is one of them, and another is something called childhood.In the third world, as soon as you are physically able to do something useful you are made to go out and do something useful to keep the family going, which you do until you are physically unable again and your children look after you.

In New Zealand, things are different. To get from birth to the responsibilities of adulthood takes many years of training and numerous stages from infant and toddler to pre-teen, teenager and adolescent. What is even more impressive is that these stages are fluid. To the alert sociologist a disturbing trend is underway. Like Eric Hobsbawm’s Long Nineteenth Century, we now have the Long Adolescence.

The cause of this is music. On Wednesday, I happened across Apathy Jack in a music store and we got to talking, unsurprisingly enough, about music. Jack noted that his 23 year old flatmate is still 16. He comes home, does not talk to anyone, goes straight to his room, slams the door, and turns on Linkin Park at full volume whilst doing not-cleaning. After reassuring Jack that he is not alone, I got the funny feeling that we had been through this before, if not in reverese than in mirror image.

Almost ten years ago a band called the Spice Girls were produced and teenage girls loved them. They got all their posters and dressed like their favourite band member, and this behaviour spread down the ages like wildfire. Younger ten year old sisters copied their elders, who then spread the insidious sugary manufactured pop meme down still further to those as young as eight. Parents viewed this with a little disdain, it is one thing for your sixteen year old daughter to start wearing short skirts and the like, quite another if she is only half that age. Once the Spice Girls broke up, Britney Spears and others kept the flame alive. The worry was that young girls were maturing, if that is the right word, too early. Losing the magic of childhood and entering the turmoil of adolescence far earlier than their forebears. Boys, presumably, were still stuffing Lego up their nose as usual, but their turn was to come.

Almost six years ago nu-metal became popular, and teenage boys loved it. Here was thirty year old Fred Durst feeling their pain, hating the world with a sound odious to anything with a cochlea. Instead of moving its way down the ages, or of converting those already over eighteen, nu-metal has gripped those aged twelve to sixteen in the late 1990’s and held them there in its god-awful embrace. Parents suffered twice. Their daughters matured too early and their sons stopped, and what is worse, have often stayed at home or decided to flat with others, which is a curious tactic for those who shun human interaction. One can only hope that these two phenomena have passed.

Friday, December 24, 2004

'Twas the Night Before Christmas...

Josh writes:

...and I decided now would be a good time to organize a collaborative blogging effort. Clever, me.

Complements of the season -- see you in a bit.

Nudity

RSJS writes:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/12/22/world/main662584.shtml

Okay, naked Mexicans and the laws they break. What captured my imagination was the paragraph:

“Pulido said she was confident that citizens who catch a glimpse of offenders would report them to police -- though the law also threatens jail for peeping Toms.”

Now observing someone naked inside their home, and ensuring they are in fact down to their birthday suit (as in wearing nothing but blood and an umbilical cord) is a pretty decent invasion of privacy that requires some dedicated research unless they live in a glass house on the central reservation of a motorway. So basically anyone reporting this act of private lewdness would get cuffed for perving from the peyote bushes. Aha, you say, this makes the law an ass, no-one will report anything and no-one will get arrested at all.

But you are wrong. How wrong? Let me count the ways: One. But it’s a big one.

For this is not a law against getting nekkid behind closed doors. No, this is Mexican population control. When you read “Nekkid” you immediately imagined Salma Hayek all dewy and winsome striding around some hacienda showing off her trim snack crack with some filthy gringo in the cacti rummaging with his junk and saying “Aye, caramba”. And you ought to be ashamed. But I see filthy gringos watching other filthy gringos, all matted sweaty hair and tequila breath being ogled by sweatier sombrero-clad citizens with the junk-rummaging and so forth. This eyeballing leads to reporting leads to arresting leads to both parties, one sweaty and naked, the other with a raging erection of lust poking out from under his poncho, being thrown in a cell together. So the pervert gets his dream-boat object of affection all to himself, all tanned and lithe and without a scrap of decency to cover himself. Only natural that the bushbaby will pretty quickly tear the stalkee’s sphincter to shreds.

Okay, now say 95% of Mexican men will be revolted by the ram-raid on their rectums. Fair enough, a load of beaner semen in the colon isn’t for everyone on a balmy summer’s day. The other 5% might discover it’s what they’ve always wanted (The “Herr Starr” principle) and go on to lead a life of drag and cabaret. But the other 95% who can’t sit on the prison benches due to their prolapsed intestines: of them, maybe a few percent, say 2%, will kill themselves from shame. Hanging from the top bunk or some such. Another 8% will be struck impotent by the trauma, another 10% might be injured by rough reacharound antics, and a full 30% will be disowned by their staunch Catholic families and be driven into the street alike dogs, ending up living lives as hermits far from womenkind. Damned Catholics.

The point is, this double-whammy ruling to catch lascivious suburban striptease artists and tree-hugging homomosexuals will resort in taking half these nudists (and let’s face it, people who get naked often engage in “the sexing”) off the breeding market by rendering them gay, dead, infertile or pariahs. Thereby putting a sizable dent in the production of squalling infants in Mexico.

And why would the government want to limit population by locking up susceptible anal virgins in cages with wild cock-hungry monsters? Because of terrorism. Bear with me: Since the Yankee Doodle Dandies decided to see terrorists in their toilet bowls, illegal immigrants are no longer hunted for sport: they are hunted for patriotism. The Homeland Security Gestapo have cracked down on harmless wetbacks border-jumping and instead of Boss Hog types in aviators and tobacco-stained jodhpurs, these sneaky devils are up against soldiers with tactical nuclear weapons and a mission to eradicate anything that might threaten whatever the hell they’ve got left of their freedom. So Mexico can no longer export the unwanted populace north to the States to mow lawns and sell tacos, no: so they’re controlling the birth rate instead, via vicious sodomy.

In short, the public nudity law coupled with the peeping tom tort is designed to increase the amount of prison-rape in Mexican jails in an attempt to stop so damned many people breeding because America’s war on terror is now terrorising poor harmless refugees so if you ever get your arse ripped open in Tijuana, blame Osama Bin Laden. Thank you and good night.

Thursday, December 23, 2004

Broken Planet

Apathy Jack writes:

There’s the Malibu Stacey episode of The Simpsons where (Metro Newsreader of the year) Kent Brockman is doing an expose on the craze over the new doll, and he asks if it is “arglebargle or fooferal?”

That sentence stuck in my mind, the way some random sounds do. However, the other day, in the course of my scrabble adventures (I’ve found calling them “adventures” removes some of the nerd stigma associated with scrabble, as does replacing the word “scrabble” with “lexicographic ninjitsu”) I discovered that arglebargle is actually a word (meaning a verbal dispute or a wrangling argument, just for those keeping score). The closest I could find for fooferal is furfural, which is a liquid aldehyde made from corn cobs, which doesn’t really make sense in the context...

But still, arglebargle, then. Who knew?

Does remind me how clever The Simpsons is though. They’ve started replaying the first season again. These are the episodes I can pretty much recite due to fourteen years of over exposure. However, I still notice new things. I’ve seen the episode where Bart builds a soapbox racer a bunch of times, but all before I saw Ben Hur, so until last week I never noticed the homage to the chariot race scene. Likewise the episode where Bart feuds with Nelson for the first time – It was repeated so often in the early and mid-nineties that I can still remember the inflection with which a lot of the dialogue is delivered, but I had never noticed the scene lifted directly from Patton.

Of course, then there are the (almost post-modern) down sides: My flatmate and I started laughing the other day while watching the episode where Germans buy the power plant. But we were laughing at a joke that hadn’t happened yet – we knew the punch line that was being led up to, and we started laughing over thirty seconds before the joke was actually delivered.

Ah hell, this is all an attempt to justify spending perfectly good hamburger money on Planet Simpson, a five hundred page book exploring the impact of the show from a sociological viewpoint.

What’s that? The Simpsons hasn’t made that much of an impact onto the zeitgeist you say? Well, when I started this rant with “There’s the Malibu Stacey episode of The Simpsons...” you all knew which one I meant, didn’t you?

Pharmaceuticals

Josh writes:

Current contents of my desk drawer at work: 13 Losec bottles, dating back to August 2002.

Losec is one of the most prescribed drugs in the world, and makes my stomach stop trying to digest my oesophagus though a herniated sphincter. I can help by staying away from foods that result in excess acidity, like soft drinks.
Drawer O' Losec

Current contents of my rubbish bin at work:

Bin O' Dew

I quit Mountain Dew quite some time ago, but now I'm not sleeping well, so I've fallen off the wagon and gone back to its joyous short term sugar rush.

Due to the not sleeping starting to become a pain in the arse, I'm also now on a drug that is technically an anti-depressant, but is also used as a sleeping pill, so I can sleep better, so I don't need the caffeinated carbonic acid so much, so I don't need the Losec so much.

I should mention that I've never been drunk in my life, that the amount of alcohol I've ingested over my lifetime would fit in one bucket, and that the closest I've come to recreational drug use is passively smoking marijuana while in the presence of stoners. The moral of the story is: You can still get all fucked up on drugs while experiencing neither chemically-induced euphoria nor the allure and mystique of illegality.

But it just doesn't seem fair somehow.

Mooning Jesus

RSJS writes:

http://www.alternet.org/election04/20812/

“In Moon's teachings, God himself is shedding tears over mankind's obsession with the cross, which prevents us from recognizing the real "returning lord": Moon himself.”

It’s a strange and twisted world where the Reverend Sun Myung Moon is echoing Bill Hicks. Of course, Bill was a happy cigarette-totin’ atheist intent on pointing out the follies of Christianity between descriptions of innocent girl’s rectums and encouraging advertising execs to kill themselves. Moon Unit, however, is angling to get the crosses dumped, buried, binned or melted down to pave the way for the new messiah: him.

Now I think this is a BAD THING. Y’know how pancakes and maple syrup are a good thing? This isn’t that. This is somewhat far from pancakes with even sugar and lemon juice. This is like a dry pancake with a used tissue on it. I haven’t had breakfast yet, I might add. But despite hunger colouring my metaphors I’d still pass on the hanky and batter number. The point is, Moon buying himself the position of New and Improved Buddy Christ = Bad. But there is a solution to this megalomaniacal Moonie’s mission of messiah-dom:

Declare Bill hicks the second coming of Christ.

Okay, his cancerous corpse would spin like a log on a lathe at such a stunt but this is for the greater good: If Moon’s argument is that the flat-faced chap trying to remove the crosses from churches is the new Son of Sam… sorry, “God”, then fine, let him declare this from the rooftops: once he’s got the slack-jawed yokels in Unistat lined up and chanting the same doomed ditty, wheel out the idea of Bill Hicks. He thought crosses were hindering the second coming, too. AND HE DIED FOR OUR SINS. He keeled over still preaching Goat Boy’s gospel, after releasing an album called Revelations… all we need is to find his smirking, smoking visage in a taco shell and he’ll be slapped up on a stained-glass-window faster’n you can say “Jeebers”. He’s perfect. He’s white, just like the original Jesus (and unlike the scurrilous Moon). He’s a martyr, he hung out with hookers just like JC and performed miracles such as smoking packs of cigarettes a day and not dying of lung cancer. And I hear he walked on water, honest. I read it on the Internerd, it must be true.

So to prevent the Man in the Moon making his own little sweatshop paradise on earth, I say we must enthrone Bill Hicks as the new messiah and worship him accordingly. Save the world from the Moonies, start smoking and throw up your goats…

Tuesday, December 21, 2004

I Started a Blog...

Josh writes:

...that started the whole world crying.

Oh, but I didn't see

that the blog was on me.