Two funerals. Need I say more.

Great movie. High camp. High concept: women are being brain washed into women's lib by the hidden tape recorded messages in their hair dryers. Happy Face cosmetics or something like that. Of course, Flint's women (they are always in multiples) are immune to the messages because he's such a hottie.

Here's my theory based upon observation: the world is being brain washed by the secret, hidden taped messages inside our cell phones. I don't know what the message is, maybe "George Bush is good. George Bush is right. George Bush was elected president. Iraqis flew the planes into the World Trade Towers." Maybe the reason I don't believe any of that is because I rarely have my cell phone attached to my head. And the reason that Dubya's approval rating has gone up is because everyone else on this freaking planet DOES have a cell phone attached to their head and they NEVER SHUT UP.

Is there no place left where there can be peace and quiet? I don't want to listen to your insipid conversations, in any language. I understand enough Spanish to know that those conversations are no more interesting than the ones I'm unwillingly privy to in English. I don't want to hear the music you are playing on your personal music system, be it i-pod, rio, mp3 player or old-fashioned walkman. Turn it down, not up so loud everyone else can hear through your earphones.

I don't want to listen to your car stereos, either. I don't want to hear you, and I probably don't want to know you. And you know what? You probably wouldn't like me either. I have way too refined a sense of propriety.

Bite me.

I seem to remember that this was a snotty English poet's way of dissing the religious of his era, implying that the virtuous suffered from a particular type of sexual dysfunction. Popular usage, however, refers to an early or untimely death. Right-o.

I am so angry and so saddened by the news I received last night, that my friend Joy was found dead of no apparent cause. She who had finally begun to live as her name implied. And then that got me thinking about all my other friends who are no longer with us. I'm not yet 50 years old and I have more dead friends than living ones. There aren't enough fingers and toes to count them all. Anger and sadness.
Scotty, Richard, Rick, John, Nick, Ken, Shel: AIDS. Sharon, Gary, Carol, Jeannie: Cancer. Sherri: survived cancer, died of a brain embolism. Leapin': helicopter crash in Bahrain. Chip, Joy, Bob: causes unknown. Jay: suicide. Bill: pneumonia.

Anger, pain, and sadness. Fuck it. Fuck it all.

"I got your letter yesterday, about the time the doorknob broke,
when you asked how I was doing, was that some kind of joke.
Yes, these people that you mention, I know them they're quite lame.
I had to rearrange their faces, and give them all another name.
Right now I don't read too good, don't send me no more letters, no,
not unless you mail them from Desolation Row."

Today I struck a blow for civility and I'm proud of the results. As usual, I was on the train. As usual a woman sat down across from me and began the ritual of making up a face. She took out her eyelash crimper and started on her left eye. I took out my trusty digital Nikon and pointed it at her. She looked up and glared daggers at me. I blandly continued to zoom in on her at eye level. She flung herself sideways in her seat and huddled down, now working on her right eye in a cramped little ball with her back to me.

At the next stop, she got up, flung another dirty look at me and flounced off to another seat, far away from me and facing in the opposite direction.

Despite the fact that my battery was low and I was unable to get the shot to add to my hall of shame I was pleased with the results of my attempted photograph.

My only regret is that despite the hateful looks, the woman didn't say anything to me about my trying to get a photo. I practiced my most polite and proper response, and never got the chance to use it. So here is what I WOULD have said:

'Madam, that which you are attempting to do in public, you should be doing in private. If you do not wish to be observed or your acts to be documented, I suggest you carry out your morning ablutions in the privacy of your own home, and not on public transit."

Boo-yah!

I really, truly do. I hate what they have done to my profession. I hate what they have done to human discourse. Most of all, I hate that they have become so insidiously necessary to all aspects of human endevour, and when they fail, they take with it all ability to function. Case(s) in point: last night I attempted to order groceries on line. It took two and a half hours to do something that, had I gotten out of my bathrobe and into the car, I could have accomplished in 45 minutes with much less aggrevation. But it was 9 at night, I'd worked a full day and then endured a homeowner's association meeting that would have driven a sober man to drink, much less a lush like me, and there was no way I was going to drive to the nearest Publix and roll a wobbly-wheeled cart through the Muzak-filled aisles as I searched for a decent head of lettuce.

Instead, I spent two frustrating hours having my laptop time out and refuse to accept input, only to discover as I attempted to check out that I had 5 heads of lettuce and other mistaken multiples. Which I then could not edit out of my basket. It took so long to navigate through this morass that I lost my original delivery time. And ground about a quarter of an inch of enamel off my back molars.

Today, my e-mail has disappeared from register.com. But so has Register.com, it would seem. No matter what you type in, no matter what you click you get the same frustrating screen of this domain has just been registered, and information will be coming soon. As fucking if. I have tried to link to their help page, their manage my account page, their search for a domain name page, and two separate e-mail accounts. All I get is this lame "soon come" crap.

I don't have much more enamel on those back teeth. Can something get fixed? Anything?

I'll make an exception. Here is yesterday's release from WhiteHouse.org (not to be confused with the official government site)

FORMAL STATEMENT BY THE PRESIDENT RESPONDING TO RECENT CONDEMNATION OF CLUSTER BOMBS BY SIR PAUL "FRUITY-FOGEY WASHED-UP LIMEY VEGAN ZOMBIE" McCARTNEY
Statement by the President

THE PRESIDENT: Good afternoon. Today, virtually anyone and everyone who ever dared question the heft of my hairy war balls is standing in humiliated shock and humble awe now that I've effortlessly run roughshod over the ridiculous concept of Arab sovereignty. And while Shiite -

(Laughter.)

Hey, man, I'm just pronouncing it the way it looks. As I was saying, while Shiite Muslims make their loony pilgrimage to Karbala this week to ritualistically beat their chests bloody like a pack of orangutans that escaped from a CIA experiment to see what happens when you substitute methamphetamine for water over a two year period, our administration is engaging in our own mirror-like ritual of frantically running around in public patting ourselves on the back. Yes, it is an amazing feat to actually win a war when you only spend thirty billion dollars to defeat a country whose army has less fire-power than Jennifer Lopez's personal security detail.

But as I basked in the glow of press adulation this morning, I was slightly annoyed to find that I still have an adversary or two. Indeed, while I thought I had successfully squashed every last dissenting anti-death cockroach there was, it seems I missed a Beatle in the process - namely, Paul "the cute one" McCartney.

Yes, earlier today ? "Sir Paul," as those wig-wearing limeys still like to call their men who've been "honored" by being told to get down on their knees like a velvet-mouthed New Haven streetwalker while my totally relevant cousin Lizard the Queeny-Pops pretends to hack off their arms in slow motion with a jewel-encrusted girl-sword ? voiced his worthless opposition to the continued military use of cluster bombs. That's right, it seems Mr. McCartney, who became a minor cultural figure in the free-love, disease-swapping 60's by strumming backup guitar on a few forgettable elevator songs written by his long-haired commie partner who knocked up that screeching chinkazoid art freak Yuku-Duo, is all worried that a few thousand Arabiac children will benefit from free cosmetic amputations provided by one of the most benevolent implements of liberation in America's arsenal of mass freedom: the cluster bomb.

Now, don't get me wrong ? I haven't forgotten about the Walrus' patronizingly tedious, yet lyrically BRILLIANT post-Sept. 11 grandpa rock ballad "Freedom." No one appreciates opportunistic tragedy profiteering ? be it political or be it little bags with dollar signs on them ? more than yours truly. Mr. Eleanor Rigby did a smashing good job of milking America's bed-wetting terror and hard-wired affection for cheap, emotional crack rock from billionaire jingle writers from Liverpool. But then he had to go and get all high on his kidney pie farts ? he forgot that it's all about the money? well, it's all about the kids. Then the money. Talking trash about harmless mommy bombs that bloom mid-air and release their pink bonnet of little baby bombs that go POW and hurt the bad men is not in his financial interest. If Paul was smart, he'd write a song called "Happiness Is A Freedom-Protecting Cluster Bomb."

But no, clearly Mr. McCartney knows about as much about dispensing blissful freedom as my spirited twin daughters know about making a convincing fake I.D. card. And if he values the 1% of whatever's left of his career in the United States, he'd do well to just shut up. If he's still pissed off about his music catalog being stolen by someone transgender, just wait until he has to deal with having his balls lopped off by someone transatlantic.

You know, you'd think that by now, British pseudo-royalty would know better than to start flapping their snaggle-toothed mouths about small munitions that make their pansy-talking asses queasy just because they're still blowing the limbs off little sand negro babies decades after we drop them. I mean, first it was old ex-Princess Die, who the CIA was going to have live up to her name after she started moaning about land mines, but was spared the trouble when some zillionaire greaseball French Arabiac terrorist named "Mohammed" killed her for smearing those taut, pink Christian ta-ta's of hers all the scruffy face of his sexaholic, Viagra-mainlining Muslamian son "Doo-Doo." And now we have Sir Paul bellyaching about a few tens of thousands of unexploded cluster bombs around Iraqi and Afghani-Rican kindergartens! I mean, HELLO PAUL! Fate doesn't like to be tempted - especially by some Jurassic-era Rockasaurus whose accent makes him sound like Ronald Reagan mumbling about which unicorn he's gonna ride to the Depends? wholesaler today.

I'm not going to pretend to give a shit about Paul McCartney's notoriety just because a bunch of fat, still-idealistic baby boomers think that noise of his is music. Now sure, back when I was at Yale, there were tons of kids who were playing their Dung Beatles LP's in the dorms morning, noon, and night. And yeah, I heard it all: the "Magical Mushroom Trip Tour" and the "Sergeant Crouton's Lusty Tax Man's Polka." The Yalies said it was "groovy," "hip," and even "with it." Well, speaking as a life-long Lawrence Welk man myself, all I can say is that I rightly opted for buying the kind of records that weren't bound to leave me shampooing my crotch afro with pesticidal Breck.

In the end though, even though Mr. McCartney is proving himself to be nothing more than just another in a long string of detestably populist, pseudo-intellectual celebrities who are determined to chip away at my political armor, I will not begrudge him his foreigner false right to be utterly wrong about everything. Nor will I will surrender to the temptation to pray to Jesus that someone had had the sense to buy Mark David Chapman a trans-Atlantic plane ticket so he could have finished the job of permanently retiring the Fag Four back in the early 80's. No, I will not do any of these things, because I know that Sir Paul has been rendered effectively retarded by the same vegetarianoid diet that gave his tambourine-playing ex-wife cancer and killed her.

And on that note, I bid Sir Paul's pathetic self, and the rest of the world, a very magnanimous good day.

Thank you, and God Bless America.