Majorly English

Christmas is just around the bend, and if you’ve been in a mall since the fall equinox, you’ve no doubt had your eardrums vibrated with the staples of consumerism and pushing people over at Wal-Mart for $99 laptop computers: Christmas songs. Yes, it’s the time of year where all people, black and white, rich and poor, Christians and Jews, pull out the dusty old CD’s emblazoned with falling snow and proud pines to listen to some great Christmas music.

However, sometimes Christmas songs are not all they appear to be. They also can carry a dark side. For example, “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” tells a story of innocence lost and bitterness gained anew.

I’m sure you know it, but this song allows us adults to have a small joke at a child’s expense. After sneaking downstairs, the aforementioned child, in this case played by John Cougar Mellencamp, sees his mother kissing Santa Claus. Of course, we recognize that Santa Claus is actually his father, and therein lies the joke. However, I’m not entirely sure why Dad decided he needed to wear the whole costume even if his child was already in bed. There may be some perverse fetish that Mom wanted to fulfill for Christmas. Ho, ho . . . ho.

While we get to laugh at the child’s moronic confusion, consider what is going to the young tyke’s mind. On the one hand, if the kid is the type that reads ahead a few grade levels, he might make the realization that it’s his father inside the Santa suit. Congratulations, young man, you just found out that your childhood idol, the mysterious man who benevolently bestows gifts upon deserving young children, is nothing but a lie! (NOTE: My apologies for breaking the news to all the 8-year olds who read this blog. Go drink some chocolate milk and mull over it, I know it’s a bombshell.) Merry Christmas, Jimmy, you’re living a lie.

However, if the child doesn’t make the realization, consider the alternative: his mother is kissing a man who isn’t his father. On Christmas Eve, he’s watching his mother make out with another man. Merry Christmas, in addition to your Hot Wheels, we’ve decided to give you the crippling realization that your mother is a cheating whore. And there’s no receipt for that.

So this Christmas, when you’re buying sensible slacks at the Gap or some sort of prefaded socks from American Eagle, pay attention to the songs you’re humming along with. You may be supporting the loss of childhood innocence, and encouraging mothers to cheat on their husbands with geriatrics.

Boxing News :: Breaking News : Mike Tyson: Fighter, Champ, Male Escort?

It’s just too easy. Let’s do away with pretenses and paragraphs, and just list as many ways this can be worked into a nice little joke.

1. Tyson may make an outstanding prostitute, but some people worry that he may take it on the chin too much.
2. A great endeavor for Tyson, but some people may frown on him taking a dive.
3. Something about nibbling ears.
4. The ladies love when Tyson whispers thweet nothingth in their ears.
5. “Iron Mike” doesn’t just refer to his punches.
6. Yea, Tyson may service 20 women a day, but Don King then takes like 17 of them.
7. It’s not rape if she pays for it.

I can’t even begin to comprehend this.

Please, I beg of you, click on this link. It will take you to a terrifying place, a place where the Black Eyed Peas “My Humps” is covered to create a Christmas rendition in the form of an e-card that you can send to Grandma or your favorite pastor.

Let me put this another way: Somebody took a song about asses and breasts, and rewrote the lyrics to make them about praising baby Jesus. That is all.

Oh God, will it??

You’re god damn right it will.

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Be thankful I don’t have a day job. As such, I had the rare privilege and pleasure to watch President Bush sweat and mumble incoherently while under fire from a suddenly vigorous press corps after announcing that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld will resign his position. It truly was a thing to marvel at, as all of a sudden the Washington reporters were calling Bush to task on his inconsistencies, none of the least being that he said a week ago that Rumsfeld was here to stay.

Please, if you missed it, be sure to find a tape of the press conference, Bush really appears to be blindsided by the Democratic avalanche, as if he never saw it coming. Once again, it proves that blind optimism is not a strategy, and we shouldn’t expect our Commander in Chief to simply make decisions and hope things work out for the best.

Of course, the only problem with the Democrats taking over the House and seemingly the Senate is that the entire legislative arm is still entirely made up of those damn politicians.

Unless you haven’t looked at a newspaper, a television screen, or yards for the past six months or so, I’m sure you know that today is Election Day, a day of great excitement in the United States. We finally get a chance to exercise the right that thousands of people have fought and died for, and more importantly, we don’t have to watch campaign ads anymore after today.

Per usual, I encourage all of you to vote, unless you believe in Creationism, in which case I encourage you to sit quietly and let the grown-ups handle things. However, how many of you really know what camp you fall in based on your personal beliefs? Well, worry no longer, the Internet comes to save the day:

You are a Social Moderate (50% permissive) and an… Economic Liberal (23% permissive) You are best described as a: Democrat Link: The Politics Test on OkCupid Free Online Dating Also: The OkCupid Dating Persona Test

Through this quiz, I’ve learned that I’m not an empty shell of a political person, I tend to vote Democrat, and conveniently I happen to think Democrat as well.

Basically, you can take this quiz, give your position on a variety of situations, and it will tell you where you fall on the political spectrum, complete with how you stack up to famous politicians! According to my graph, I fall right in line with Mikhail Gorbachev, am less economically permissive than John Kerry, and most importantly, am closer to the Pope (JP2, not the creepy new guy) than Bill O’Reilly.

Oh, and here’s what it has to say about me:

You exhibit a very well-developed sense of Right and Wrong and believe in economic fairness.

Suck on that, Republicans.

Now that I’ve waxed nostalgic on Bob Barker and his impending retirement, it’s time for me to note how he is undeniably the coolest 82 year old man on the planet. First off, he gets some heat for dumping some of his Beauties after they got a bit high in the age department (seriously, Janice Pennington was a Barker’s Beauty from 1972 to 2000. 28 YEARS! Didn’t her wrists get tired from showing all the great prizes with appropriate flair and spunk?) and replacing them with some foxy new meat.

Secondly, when Bob was asked by Entertainment Weekly what his most memorable moment in his 35 years of hosting The Price is Right, this was his answer:

He said the most memorable moment on the show was when a young female contestant’s tube top slipped when she jumped up and down with excitement, exposing both breasts.

Yes, in 35 years of producing daily, 2 hour episodes of The Price is Right, Bob Barker’s favorite memory is when he got to catch some freebie boobage.

Finally, Bob Barker will forever be remembered as a cool-ass mofo for this:

Spaying and neutering your cats and dogs just got way less hip.

Bob Barker to retire from The Price is Right in June after hosting the program for 35 years.

It’s like finding out that Santa Claus is hanging up the sleigh reigns. Bob Barker, the man who made millions of people lose control over A NEW CAR, rolled out everyone’s favorite game, PLINKO!, and made us all scream, “1 dollar, Bob,” is calling it quits after 50 years hosting TV game shows and 35 with The Price is Right. It truly is the end of an era.

If you saw the advertisments that run during The Price is Right, Wilford Brimley selling diabetes medication, ads for fiber pills, and low-cost life insurance plans, you would think that liver spots and early onset Alzheimer’s were prerequisites for watching the show. However, I believe that The Price is Right holds a special place in the heart of every person who ever came down with a nasty 24-hour bug as a child.

I remember curling up on my couch as a child, the late morning sun beating through the blinds, my fevered body shivering under a blanket while dry toast and Sprite attempted to sooth my flu-ravaged stomach. You know who was always there to comfort me? Bob Barker. The Price is Right, which seems to be America’s only 8-hour program, was always on when I was sick as a child, and having no interests in Days of Our Lives or The Young & the Restless, I, like almost everyone I knew, turned to Bob for some savvy consumer competition to distract from cramping digestive tracts and prodigal meals.

Bob Barker may be just a game show host, but you’d be hard pressed to find a man alive who brought more joy to more people on a daily basis. He is probably the only person alive who carried the power to make a person scream, yell, and break it rapturous bliss day in and day out.

Even as I went into college, I found myself continually drawn to Barker and The Price is Right. I would sit there with my roommate and argue over bids, laugh at bids so extraneous, contestants so set on their ridiculous prices despite Bob’s best attempts to convince otherwise, they couldn’t fit on the screens; an empty-hearted ding registered an empty field. I think that’s part of why I love Bob Barker so much. In days where intense competitiveness rule, where people will go so far as to cheat on a game show, where parents explode into violence over youth football games, where a coach will pay a player to intentionally injure an autistic teammate so he doesn’t drag down the team, Bob served as a much-needed reality check. He hosted a game show, it was meant to be entertaining and fun, so he wasn’t above joking around with contestants, helping them spin the big wheel, or even deferring them from bets that might not be so smart. While Who Wants to be a Millionaire? asks the audience with statistics and hard percentages, The Price is Right asks the audience by asking them to scream whatever they want as loud as they want. The Price is Right was old school, come on and have some fun, maybe walk away with a nice dinette set. Oh, and don’t forget to spay and neuter your pets on the way out.

With Barker trading in Plinko chips for shuffleboard ones, so too ends the era of television personalities who were just regular guys. Johnny Carson, Ed McMahon, and Bob Barker are all cut from the same mold; regular Joes who do a job and try their best to entertain people. Now we’re forced to listen to bloated talking heads like Bill O’Reilly and human caricatures like Oprah and Regis.

I sincerely hope that they take Bob’s retirement as an opportunity to end The Price is Right. Just as Bob never changed, so too went the show, staunchly sticking to ancient set designs and cutting-edge technology from the Nixon administration. CBS, I hope you realize that The Price is Right is Bob Barker, and let the show fade away with its host.

While the toast and Sprite helped in calming a young upset stomach, I now feel a bit unsettled as a 22-year old. With Bob gone in June, I’ll no longer have the security of knowing that if I flip on the television sometime between 10 AM and 1 PM, I’ll find him with some ecstatic audience member.

Bob Barker, we’ll miss you.

Barnes & Noble has begun putting out their Christmas displays! Yes, yesterday evening, it was out with the Satanic Halloween children’s books, and in with the sacred consumerism. May you all have a blessed, needlessly long shopping season.