All a Twitter

I am now officially a traitor and a hypocrite. I’m worse than Benedict Arnold, Judas, Brutus, and that fat guy from Jurassic Park rolled into one. I have started a Twitter page for this site. That’s right, me, a self-respecting journalism major (notice “self” respecting, very few others respect me as a journalism student) is now on Twitter, one of the downfalls of journalism as we know it. I am more of a disgrace to my fellow journalists than Sean Penn is to his fellow chimpanzees.

No matter how many more good things I do with my life, when I stand before the gates of heaven, I will be denied entrance solely because of this sin. In addition of course to having watched the Jonas Brothers 3-D Concert, throwing a Bible into a dumpster once, swearing at my teachers, drinking excessively, cheering for the Jacksonville Jaguars, yelling at small children, pissing in public, listening to Barry Manilow, voting for Joe Biden, lying to a priest, cheating on an exam, betting on preseason hockey, buying sweatshop sewn shoes, kicking dogs, drawing the prophet Mohammed with crayons in the first grade and constantly making fun of minorities, rednecks, handicapped people, women, and Tim Tebow. That’s right; I finally give in to all of you who think that Tebow is the second coming of Jesus. Although you would think that if he were godly he would be able to throw a spiral without looking like a retard and beat a bunch of inbreds from Alabama. See there I go again, I couldn’t go five seconds before I made fun of rednecks, handicapped people, and Tim Tebow in the same sentence.

Okay wow, let’s see if we can recover from that tangent. What were we talking about? Twitter? Why? Oh that’s right; I sold my soul to the devil. So maybe I’m overreacting a bit, sort of how like how Charlie Sheen has a bit of a drug problem. It’s just that for so long I have been critical of Twitter and all of the babbling idiots who use it. I mean, I really don’t need to know what Oprah is putting in her fifth sandwich of the day. I figured that I would become a respectable journalist, writing stories and drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes and looking very journalist-like until I died of lung cancer like all of the other respectable journalists.

But if you have ever sat in a journalism class today, you are instantly aware that this will not happen. For one thing, they reminded me that I do not smoke or drink coffee. But the only thing we talk about in journalism classes are how journalism is dying. We might as well be taking a class on witch-burning. So in my panicked state, I chose to start up a blog and Twitter site, two things I vowed I would die before I did (the others were watch an episode of Gossip Girl and have to use a catheter, so I guess 50 percent isn’t that bad). I figured if it came down to a question of money or morals, I didn’t have morals to begin with so I might as well make some money.

Besides, my Twitter page is just a shameless promotion of my site, so that makes it okay. I mainly use it to put links to the sites and occasionally make jokes about Canadians. It’s not like I’m Ashton Kutcher and I think that I am so important that the world needs to know what my pistachio-sized brain is thinking every five minutes. I mean, I can understand people who use Twitter to keep up with their friends and news, but by the looks of this list of the top Twitter sites, that is clearly not the case with most people. I mean, CNN is the only news site in the top 20, and the only things the other 19 contribute to the world are bad movies, bad music, bad TV, and bad health care reform.

Besides, how do you even follow people on Twitter? For those of you who have remained pure and have no idea how Twitter works, Twitter only allows 140 characters per post. This means that posts are composed of some sort of strange language where whole words are never used. Plus the tagging system involves a lot of those # things and @ things and “RT,” whatever that means. For instance, this is one of Ashton’s tweets: “The @mrskutcher vs kevin bacon race is getting tight. pls vote of wifey http://pep.si/CelebChallenge pls rt.” I swear that is what it says, random letter for random letter. The only words in there I understood were “bacon,” “race,” and “tight,” which leads me to believe that this is some sort pig eating contest. So all we can really gather from this is that Ashton Kutcher eats pigs for fun, and PETA should go bomb his house.

And the Lent is On...

So this morning I once again awoke depressed because I’m stuck in a land-locked, snow-covered, tofu-eating, hippie-hugging city. So you can imagine my surprise when I picked up the paper and discovered that according to a recent poll, I apparently live in the happiest city in America. That’s right; Boulder, Colorado was named as the happiest city in America. Of course when you consider the other lists that Boulder is near the top in (pot usage and party schools) this is not as surprising as it would seem.

What I want to know is how the hell they determine how happy people are. Do they just go up to them and ask which they do more during the week: contemplate suicide or write poems about birds? But whatever method they are using is clearly not correct, because Honolulu, Hawaii was only third on the list, behind some city in Michigan. That’s right; Hawaii was behind Michigan in happiness. Nothing against Michigan, but would you be happier jobless in the cold or sitting on a beach? Besides, I’m almost certain that Michigan is actually part of Canada, and is thus disqualified from this survey. And speaking of Canada, how about the US beating Canada in Olympic hockey? I hope that stung for those Canadians; I bet they all went home and needed to hug their moose and listen to Celine Dion to console themselves.

Anyway, even if Boulder is the happiest city in America, you wouldn’t guess that right now. Unfortunately, lent is underway. Now for those of you who know as little about religion as I do lent is a period of forty days where people often give up a vice for the entire 40 days. I think traditionally, they were supposed to fast for those 40 days. Supposedly it got them closer to heaven (in the sense that it killed them). I was at a party on Saturday and a girl there told me that you are actually supposed to give up alcohol, milk, cheese, and meat. This was ironic to me, since as she was telling me this I was working on a bottle of Jagermeister that was mysteriously empty by the end of the night and may or may not be related to me sitting in the snow wearing shorts for five minutes yelling at my cell phone. But anyway, most people just give up some sort of vice, which means that there are hundreds of people right now walking around without the very things that keep them going, which can be very dangerous.

Take my journalism class for instance. The professor gave out cookies, but several girls in the class had given up on treats, and so they looked at the cookies, started crying, yelled at me to take them away and then yelled at me for taking away the cookies and then yelled at me for giving them back to them and in general just yelled a lot. If any of them had also been PMSing at the same time, the pure hatred and anger would have left a large smoking crater where the class used to be and probably tear a hole in the universe. During all of this, the unstable guy was sharpening his pencil with a switch-blade because he apparently gave up his medication for lent. What’s even weirder is that he sharpens this pencil, but he writes with a pen.

Now, I personally give up Christian traditions for lent, so I don’t go through this. Either that or I choose to give up things that I don’t like or don’t do anyway, like eating turnips and doing homework. For one thing, I don’t have the will power to give up anything I like for longer than about five hours, particularly food and drinks. For instance, I watched a hockey game the other night and the puck instantly reminded me of Hostess Ding Dongs. Needless to say, about an hour later I had bought an entire box of Ding Dongs. But to my disappointment, I discovered that for some reason, Ding Dong’s in the Midwest don’t come wrapped in foil like everywhere else in the country. To my horror, my roommate did not even know that they came in foil, and I had to look it up on the internet to prove it to him. By the way, Googling “Ding Dong” is a really bad idea. I didn’t find a picture of what I was looking for until about the third page. Of course, because I said that, at least 75 percent of you are going to go and Google “Ding Dong.”

Anyway, the point is that when it comes to food and drinks, I am not good with temptation. It’s a good thing that I wasn’t in the Garden of Eden, or I would have eaten the apple before Eve, and then God would have punished men with painful childbirth and unstable emotions instead of women. So I applaud all of the brave souls that are undertaking this challenge, no matter how many people they kill in the process. And there will be death this lent. Just to be sure it’s not me, I’m going to stop going to my journalism class; because if the unstable guy doesn’t stab me, the chocolate deprived girls will.

Tiger In the Rough

In case you haven’t heard, the big news today is that Tiger Woods is making his first public appearance since his life fell apart faster than Lindsey Lohan’s movie career. It’s been several months since anybody has even seen him; for all we know he was going to walk out to the press conference white and announce he was opening a ranch for children. I didn’t actually watch the press conference, because it happened before I woke up. But that’s okay! Because ESPN went into Beast Mode, when they talk about nothing but Tiger Woods all the time (if this sounds familiar, they do it every offseason with Brett Favre).

Anyway, even if he didn’t crash and burn quite as bad as Michael Jackson (after all, the guy died, and there isn’t really a lower low than that), Tiger sure did give it the old college try (by that I mean he tried to sleep with everyone he met). It all started when Woods crashed his SUV into a fire hydrant about five feet from his house, which was the first warning sign. Men don’t crash into things five feet from their own house. Women do. The other suspicious sign was that this occurred at about two in the morning. Now, with the exception of Lassie reruns on Animal Planet, almost nothing good happens after two in the morning, especially for married fathers.

Slowly the details finally came out that Tiger’s wife had apparently gotten mad at him for something and turned his head into a driving range, giving him a concussion and causing him to crash. This just proves that every single car accident in the world is caused in some way or form by women. Anyway, it then came out that the reason was that his wife Elin had found out that Tiger Woods was having an affair. Of course, we would later find out that by “affair,” he meant “I slept with enough women to repopulate an entire country.” This especially puzzling when you consider that Tiger’s wife looks like this. But maybe Tiger was simply trying to break Wilt Chamberlain’s record of 20,000 women.

Now, all of this news was devastating to his career. I mean, finding out you’ve slept with dozens of women behind your family’s back would ruin most people’s reputations (unless it’s Jude Law, in which case everybody would just pass it off as a juvenile attempt to convince the world he wasn’t gay). But it was especially damaging to Tiger, whose entire image was that of a person who never got into trouble and was as clean as a whistle. (By the way, I never got that saying. I mean, whistle’s go into everybody’s mouths, so I don’t know how clean they are).

There was a while where Tiger Woods pretty much sponsored everything, including (but not limited to): razors, cars, power drills, dating websites, condoms, tampons, birth control, etc. But apparently a healthy sex drive is not something that companies like to have associated with their product which is confusing if you watch commercials today, which appear to want to convey one message, which is: SEX SEX SEX SEX SEX.

So to solve this problem, Tiger has gone to sex rehab to treat his apparent sex addiction. Now I personally do not think there is such a thing as “sex addiction.” There are people who are having lots of sex, and those who wish they were having lots of sex. Technically, by Darwinian standards, Tiger is what we call a success. People like T.S. Eliot on the other hand who never have kids and just write a whole bunch of jibberish poems are what we refer to as “failures.”

Lost in all of this is what will happen to golf. That’s because nobody cares what happens to golf. But those who do care have to admit that most people couldn’t name a golfer other than Tiger Woods anyway. So golf might have to find a new temporary star. I propose Phil Mickelson who, while Tiger was sleeping with hookers, was helping his wife and mother deal with breast cancer. The only way he could be more wholesome and family friendly is if he crapped fruit loops.

Personally, if I were Tiger I would retire from golf and try to mend my family. Not because I care about family, but if his wife leaves him, she’ll take half his money and his kids. That is a lot of money, and since Tiger was dropped by a bunch of his sponsors, he doesn’t just get free stuff anymore. So keep Tiger in your prayers. He’s got a reputation that is falling apart and he’s married to an angry woman with access to plenty of golf clubs. I don’t care how much money he has, that is a scary thought.

Love Is In the Air, and It's Starting To Set Off My Allergies

So this past weekend was Valentine’s Day. For being a very short month, February is filled with a lot of random holidays (by the way, does anyone else think it’s a little suspicious we made the shortest month of the year Black History Month?). Luckily Valentine’s Day only comes once every four years and compensates for the rotation of the Earth. Wait a minute… dammit wrong February Holiday.

Nobody really knows how Valentine’s Day began (okay so by that I mean me). I’m pretty sure it is a holiday conceived by women in order to get flowers and candy. And like many cherished female traditions, this one started with an innocent man suffering. Saint Valentine was some poor soul who lived a long time ago and was killed by somebody. I don’t really know how he died, the Wikipedia article started to get really boring and it began involving French people so I stopped reading and decided to make up the rest of the facts. Besides, if you read this to learn things, you have bigger issues.

Anyway, what better way to celebrate some guy’s life than by connecting with that special someone. And by “connecting” I mean “buying them a whole lot of s**t.” At least that’s the case if you are a guy on Valentine’s Day. You have to buy cards, jewelry, dinner, and lots of chocolates (which they never eat because they say it will go to their hips but still insist you buy). Let’s think for a second who Valentine’s Day truly benefits. Women in a relationship get a whole bunch of stuff, men in a relationship have to buy a whole bunch of stuff, single women are reminded how single they are (which is when they need all that chocolate), and single guys laugh the laugh of the carefree and then go to the store the day after Valentine’s to take advantage of all the cheap candy on sale.

Or at least that’s what I did on Monday night. I went to Safeway and ended up buying a box of Twinkies (which I have been subliminally craving since “Zombie Land”) and Ding-Dongs as part of my new diet, the “Have a Stroke Before You Can Gain More Weight” plan. As if that weren’t enough, there was a Girl Scout stand outside. And I just couldn’t turn down the chance to help out my community by supporting the scouts by stuffing my face with cookies (and for some reason, it took the retarded girl scout almost ten minutes to give me change, so they need all the help they can get).

Anyway, Valentine’s Day is not just about food (or so they say). It actually helps men out in their relationships, because while women are in touch with their emotions all the time and can talk about them any day of the year, men need some advance notice. So having a set day gives men time to prepare to have emotions and communicate and all that other mumbo jumbo. A great example occurred in my journalism class the other day. We were all asked to name our favorite Super Bowl commercial. The women all named the Google one about finding love in France as their favorite, whereas the men in the class had trouble even remembering the ad. We were a little too busy thinking about the Megan Fox ad, thumb doubles and all (which was stupid, because Megan Fox could have gills and antennae and she would still be one of the hottest women in the world).

Do you want to know what men think of true love? Just watch one of the fifty dating reality shows that are on TV at the moment. It always consists of about twenty very emotionally unstable women who think they are there to win the love of a celebrity and one celebrity who is there because the producers told him he could make out with twenty women in a mansion and then ditch all but one of them (and the last one too if he wants another season).

I bring this up because I recently watched the finale and reunion of “For the Love of Ray J 2,” (and for the record, both my roommate and I think he made the wrong choice). Now, Ray J would get mad at the girls for doubting his ability to settle down even though he 1. didn’t bother to learn their names but instead gave them stripper nicknames, 2. spent the entire show making out with twenty women at a time and 3. was on his second season. Yep… can’t see why they wouldn’t trust him.

I feel like I would do well on that type of show. It would be called “For the Love of Mitchell,” and the entire episode would show me trying to choose between a Twinkie and a Ding-Dong.

Got Luge?

The weather in Boulder (and pretty much everywhere else east of Las Vegas) has taken a turn for the worse, and many experts believe that at least half the country will die in the next week (by many experts, I mean me and the unstable guy who sits next to me in my media history class). Thankfully, this weekend is the start of a wonderful television event that will unite people from all different walks of life and countries to yell at each other in different languages. That’s right, it is time once again for the Winter Olympics; which along with presidential elections, leap year, and Jake Gyllenhaal movies, is one of those dreaded events that occurs every four years.

Now, allow me to explain why I don’t like the Winter Olympics. It somehow manages to combine so many things that I do not like: Canadians, snow, cold weather, Canadians, hockey, men in leotards, NBC, Canadians, extreme sports peoples, people with funny accents, and last but not least, beavers (I am going on the assumption that beavers are somehow involved in the Winter Olympics). Also, I don’t like sporting events that the US doesn’t dominate. I am a patriot. So you can imagine why I would not look highly upon an event in which miserable little snowbound countries like Norway get glory. The only reason these countries do well is because they have nothing else to do trapped in the snow all year but practice skiing and inbreeding.

I mean, just think about it for a second. At least three-quarters of the events in the Winter Olympics aren’t even sports (or if they are, they are very boring sports). Take curling for instance. If you want to go see people sweeping the floor, go into a kitchen and watch women (that horribly sexist remark was sponsored by “Valentine’s Day,” starring a whole bunch of people you can’t stand and five large fish). I mean, there are a bunch like the biathalon or the octathon or the geriatricthon that I’m pretty sure just randomly combine a bunch of stuff together like a winter sports hot dog. I’m not certain here, but I think there is even one that involves skiing and shooting a gun, which is not so much a sport as something a person might do in winter after consuming too much alcohol.

One of the more popular “sports” in the Winter Olympics is ice skating, even though I am still not exactly sure why any male would ever watch ice skating. Maybe you could say that it involves women in skimpy outfits, but most of them are five years old and are raised in the same cages used to stunt growth that house gymnasts. Ice skating just sort of involves going around in circles and then jumping and falling down (which, let’s be honest, is the only interesting part). And don’t even get me started on Johnny Weir.

Thankfully there has been a recent shift towards more extreme winter sports. This is good because US competitors tend to be better at these events. However, this is bad because nobody who isn't stoned knows what the hell is going on in extreme sports. Have you ever watched extreme sports with a stoner? This person can’t remember how to spell their last name, but they can watch some random flipping and instantly identify it as a “540 backflip over-under daisy chain cross-grab.” I’m almost certain that the announcers are just making things up as they go.

Announcer #1: “And he approaches the ramp… oh my god he just pulled a 645.8 double-pump tomahawk twisty-tie celery biscuit triple-bypass spiral notebook spleen toss! Dude that was rad!”

Announcer #2: Cough, cough. Gasp. “Man I’m hungry. We should order like fifty Sausage McMuffins.”

It doesn’t help that unlike the Summer Olympics, I have school during the Winter Olympics. That means I’m a little too busy pretending to be busy to watch bobsledding in the middle of the day. And apparently nobody else does either, because NBC anticipates they will lose $10 million dollars on the Winter Olympics. Now I am neither a business major nor a math major, but something about that doesn’t seem smart to me. I think they might be better off televising a large pile of money being burned. I actually might watch that, because it might make me feel a little warmer.

The one thing that is kind of cool about this year’s Games is that they are taking place in Whistler. I’ve been to Whistler two times and I liked it. Not because of the skiing or the snow, but they had this really good restaurant called Mongoli Grill. But while we were up there a few years ago we did see some of the sites where some of the events were to take place. The locals were pretty excited about the Games; you could hear it in the higher pitch of their “ehs!” And after walking around, I understood why. Unlike NBC, Vancouver was ready to cash in on this thing. You couldn’t walk five feet without seeing some sort of Olympics merchandise. They just take a $5 t-shirt, put that stupid Olympic multi-colored lego-Frankenstein logo on it and BAM: it costs you $50.

Of course, the only thing I want from there is poutine. Poutine is a Canadian dish made by topping fries with cheese curds and gravy and is my favorite food in the world. You know what’s fun? Eat an entire bowl of poutine while watching curling and see what kills you first: boredom or severe artery blockage.

I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing, Or At Least Miley Cyrus

Like many Americans I, for some reason still unknown to me, spent my Sunday night watching the Grammy’s (unlike most Americans I did it wearing a pink snuggie eating spam, which might actually be illegal in Singapore). Now, the Grammy’s are just another reason for celebrities to get together and drink and get free dresses, but unlike the Oscars, I actually watch them. That is because the people at the Grammy’s are at least talented (or in the case of Jenifer Lopez, jumped the fence). Thankfully, this means that the Grammy’s really consist of about five actual awards and a whole bunch of singing. Whereas the Oscars are a bunch of boring people like Nicole Kidman talking a lot and pretending that their jobs require skill and wasn’t just reading and looking good (trust me, if acting took skill Jessica Alba would be a waitress somewhere in Texas).

The only problem sometimes with the Grammy’s is that in their effort to produce “one-of-a-kind” performances, they pair the weirdest people together, which doesn’t so much produce awe-inspiring performance as much as awkward tension. For instance, take the first duet of the night between Elton John and Lady Gaga. One was sexually confused, dressed in strange alien outfits and sings songs about dancing. The other is Lady Gaga. But the awkward pairings weren’t limited to the performers. Ke$ha and Justin Bieber were paired as presenters, but came across looking like a ten-year-old boy and his recently grounded crack-whore sister who was trying to borrow his bike so she could ride down to the abortion clinic.

Now amidst all of that there were some good performances. Coincidentally, they were all from oldies bands, which is further proof that music today sucks. Fleetwood Mac, Jeff Beck, Andrea Boccelli and Bon Jovi actually sounded good, whereas T-Pain and Jamie Foxx sort of just jumped around while a recording of their song played in the background. Then there was Eminem and Lil Wayne, who I think were rapping. It was sort of hard to tell considering CBS cut all of the sound on entire sections until they looked like some sort of retarded charades game where the answer was always “black people!” I guess I can understand, since CBS was the channel that aired the infamous “wardrobe malfunction” at the Super Bowl (for those of you who don’t know what I am referring to, surprisingly it does not involve Lady Gaga). But this is hypocritical, considering they are the same station that willingly airs David Caruso uncensored on television.

But for me the highlight of the evening was the tribute to Michael Jackson, which featured Carrie Underwood and four other not as good-looking people who we don’t really care about at this moment. The song was great, but the one thing that bothered me was that the tribute was in 3-D. Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t have a pair of those stupid 3-D glasses just lying around, especially since I started buying generic cereal in bags. So like many of you, the video looked to me like something I would see after I drank an entire bottle of rum and had been smashed over the head with a baseball bat. I blame Avatar for this. After that movie came out, everything has to be 3-D, including C-Span. President Obama tried to get his State of the Union address to be aired in 3-D to make his finger pointing more effective, but he was warned that a 3-D image of Hilary Clinton might cause nationwide panic. Of course, Obama also wanted to show up painted in blue a riding a giant flying lizard and rally the country to fight for Ewa, but that’s a whole other story.

Of course, eventually they had to give out the actual awards. By the way, does anybody think that Stephen Colbert’s daughter was way too big a part of the show? Anyway, the whole awards thing was sort of anticlimactic, since everyone knew that Taylor Swift and Beyonce were going to win everything. In fact, in the unaired segment of the ceremony Swift was named the Pro Bowl MVP. I mean, it was so unexciting that Beyonce wasn’t even there to accept her trophy because she was backstage trying to organize her army of RoboCops (which was apparently made up of the entire unemployed population of Michigan). Of course, Taylor Swift tried to show some mock surprise when she won, but her acting made even Jessica Alba cringe. She could afford to take her time to get up on stage, since at least this time she got to make her acceptance speech with Kanye West noticeably absent (probably because she hired one of the Jonas Brothers to assassinate him).

I’m sure there were other exciting moments that happened, but I have to admit I didn’t watch the entire ceremony. Independence Day was also on TV, so I was sort of switching back and forth. Which led to me mixing up the shows a bit. I mean, at one point I could have sworn I saw Will Smith trying to kill Fergie while the aliens sang with Will.I.Am. Oh wait, never mind that’s actually right.