Beauty is Imperfection

(Originally posted Sunday, March 09, 2008 )

What’s New In the Self-Help Book Section This Week?

“How To Eat Flesh and Influence People,” by Dave Smiley

“Get The Life You Want Now (By Taking Power In a Nazi-Style Putsch)” by Sweet Pomeroy

“How A Large Vocabulary Can Show You’ve Got Something To Prove,” by Emily Sontag

” …” or by Susan Sontag, for that matter

“Chicken Soup for the Cock,” by Dan Bentman

“How To Get More Sex By Simply Paying For It,” by Grischa Erdmann

“The Proud Pedophile,” by Gene McCracken

“It’s Not My Business What Anybody Thinks of Me, Especially Sally in Cube 4,” by Reba McClane in Cube 3

“There’s A God Inside You, So Go Ahead and Smite Somebody,” by Shanti O’Dell

“You Must Have Been Through Some Kind of Shitty Ordeal To Be Here,” by Bucky Diamond

“How To Achieve The Wisdom of the Ancients (And Get Better Abs at the Same Time)” by Krishna Dorizzio

“Life Coaching for Dolphins,” by Simeon McNash

“Shana, Stop Whining! You Could Have It Worse,” by Yente Rubenstein

“Someone Needs To Take You Down A Notch,” by Sgt. Barry Swabish

“How High Expectations and Hope Make You Miserable,” by Sally Longbride

“Whatever Doesn’t Kill You Just Makes You Stronger, However the Janjaweed Will Probably Just Kill You,” by Musa Hilal

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(Originally posted Saturday, March 08, 2008 )

2 ABC
This week on “Lost,” everybody must talk like a robot. I’m talking like a robot. You must talk like a robot. Affirmative.

3 CBS
Running out of pompous Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations about the mind, “Criminal Minds” starts off this week with Oscar Wilde’s death bed quip, “Either this wallpaper goes or I do.”

4 NBC
If I don’t recognize you, then you’re not a Celebrity Apprentice

15 Discovery
Discover all the Japanese borrow words for pornographic film maneuvers

17 Cable Access
Pornographic Japanese Film Maneuvers

18 Discovery Kids
Mythbusters see if there’s really such a sexual practice as “donkey punching.”

23 Lifetime
Haley Joel Osment: When The Voice Breaks

48 Ovation
Patti LuPone Special: You Don’t Deserve This Evening Of Fine Entertainment By Me

55 Crosswalk
911 Conspiracy Theorists Show How the Twin Towers Actually Fell Before the Planes Hit Them

57 HBO
Schindler’s List

58 HBO2
Tyler Perry’s Schindler’s List

59 Showtime
Jet Li’s all-martial-arts recapitulation of the 2nd Opium War

59 E! Entertainment Television
This week on a very sad episode of “The Girls Next Door,” playmate Holly has to be put to sleep

60 CNN
Each of the presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, continues to impress upon voters how he is more uniquely qualified than the other in a contest of manipulating the media

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(Originally posted Tuesday, March 04, 2008 )

… than the move my wife and I just endured?

Of course, a lot of things could be worse:

–*Getting a root canal James Frey style

–*Being nostril-raped by a 1 foot tall clone of Napoleon.

–*Having your hamstring cut by an obsessed male nurse who doesn’t want you to leave him.

–*Doing the limbo by driving a Carmengia under a gas truck … and not…quite…making it

–*Having a rigorously copied painting of Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” tattooed on your scrotum by I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby

–*Getting bitch slapped to death by a whale’s phallus

–*Going out into the wilds of Alaska to prove your self-reliance … and then starving to death.

–*Being forced at gunpoint to type out your own suicide note in a POW camp and not being able to come up with any better verbs. Or for that matter a word that rhymes with “recalcitrant.”

–*Eating a Retribution sandwich at the Hard Cheese Cafe.

–*Being ear wigged by an ear wigging ear wigger

–*Having a party in your mouth and your parents are invited

–*Being Old Yeller, as opposed to having to just shoot Old Yeller

As of March 3, my wife and I have moved into our new digs. My desk was dropped and destroyed by the movers, so I will still be writing infrequently for a few days, and only then from a very hard, punishing chair.

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(Originally posted Friday, February 29, 2008 )

Compliments Nobody Wants To Hear, Vol. 2

–*You’re so pretty when I look at you from a very low angle and 10 feet away

–*You have gone about as far in life as a tambourine player can go.

–*You would make a great comic relief part in the ABC After-School Special I’m directing about bulimia

–*I like to call that giant purple birthmark covering half of your body a “God’s kiss.”

–*You are the sexiest rodeo clown alive

–*You sure do smile a lot for a person with so many enemies.

–*Especially you, O.J.

–*A person like you has to be really genuine to have so many teeth missing and not be embarrassed about it

–*You handle your Thorazine so well

–*You jump out of a cake sober and fall into a cake drunk with equal aplomb

–*You must have a heart of gold to be that much in love with a sadistic, abusive, repressed, fetishistic police officer

–*You must have a heart of gold to be that much in love with a limited and smarmy rich kid Republican president

–*You’ve moved up so fast in Hollywood, I bet you could suck a golf ball through a garden hose

–*You are the sexiest, most inspiring movie star who dropped out of high school ever

–*You are the sexiest, most inspiring U.S. president who made straight C’s ever.

–*You’ve got more talent for painting than could have ever been expected from a serial killer of women serving multiple life sentences in prison

–*You’re like Paul Newman without the charisma, looks, brains or talent.

Yes, I was serious, I am busy this weekend, but had 10 minutes to be foolish.

P.S.: –*Eric, you certainly do have a lot of time on your hands for somebody who is so foolish.

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(Originally posted Thursday, February 28, 2008 )

Top 11 Reasons That “Beauty Is Imperfection” Blogs Will Be Less Frequent for the Next Few Days

–*I’m moving
–*My wife is moving
–*I have exhausted all my jokes and ideas. They are all gone. Gone utterly
–*I just want to tease you by holding off on that third installment of “Chad the Dictator” that you all have been crying for
–*I’m writing a very special Top Ten list that is so groundbreaking it will save the polar bears from extinction
–*”Nobody ever expected you to write daily, Eric, so who gives a shit?”
–*I’m going on a hunger strike until Carly Smithson is booted off “American Idol”
–*I’m going on a hunger strike until George Bush is booted out of the American presidency
–*I’m going off to work on a novelization of “Letters to My Imaginary Friend Leticia”
–*I’m mourning the death of William F. Buckley
–*I’m mourning the death of reason

In any case, expect to hear a bit less from me over the next few days as Stephanie and I flee the Cossacks and find a new patch of Earth a few blocks away. After we’re free and clear, I’ll give you the address of the evil management company that has removed us, and you can mail your bags of feces to them.

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(Originally posted Wednesday, February 27, 2008 )

Top 11 Reasons Why We Did It

–*He wasn’t the right guy for me.

–*She was pitchy, dawg

–*Because he kept talking and talking and talking

–*I was tired of being a slave to that old woman and her retarded simpleton sister Lizaveta

–*I didn’t believe that her health care plan was well thought out

–*Because the other one tasted better

–*Because his plot was very confusing, and he even had two different characters named Quentin, one male and one female. What kind of sick fuck does that?

–*Because I am a Nietzschean superman. Pull my finger

–*Because I was rudely stamped. Deformed. Unfinished. … I am determined to prove a villain.

–*Because I am John Lennon, not him

–*It’s none of your business why I did it. I don’t have to explain myself to you.

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(Originally posted Tuesday, February 26, 2008 )

Academy+Awards

Academy+Awards+Europeans

Acamdemy+Awards+Europeans+robbed

Academy+Awards+Tilda+Swinton+makeup

Academy+Awards+Tilda+Swinton+”no makeup”

Oscars and Juno

“What does a home skillet mean?”

Diabalo+Cody

Diabalo+Cody+stripper

Diabalo+Cody+purple

“Roger Clemens”+Congress+perjury+idiot

“Who is Gary Busey?”

“Gary Busey”+”Jennifer Garner”+mauled

“Who would win in a fight between a bull and a bear?”

“Joel and Ethan Coen”

“What does laconic mean?”

“What does nihilism mean?”

“What does misanthropy mean?”

“Who is Wittgenstein?”

“Who would win in a fight between a bear and Wittgenstein?”

“No Country For Old Men”+”No ending”

“Apocalypse Now”+”No ending”

“Boogie Nights”+”No ending”

Heidi+Klum+”no bra”

“James Cameron”+”oscar speech”+asshole

“Spy satellite”+”size of a bus”+”blown out of the sky”

Chinese+satellite

“Space garbage”+fall+kill

“Space garbage”+”size of a bus”+fall+kill

Lighting+”space debris”+”car accident”+”random violence”

Lighting+”space debris”+”car accident”+”random violence”+nihilist

“How do I become a nihilist?”

“How do I become a nihilist in Osh Kosh, Wis.?”

nihilism+”starter kit”

“Osh Kosh, Wis.” + “bus schedule”

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(Originally posted Monday, February 25, 2008 )

My beautiful sister recently tagged me with a MySpace open chain letter, requiring me to post 10 little known personal things about myself. Good on you sis! That fucking rocks. You are fucking God!

I would have done it sooner, but I was too busy writing to Congress about all the goddamned foreigners taking all the beautiful golden Oscar statuettes and shipping them overseas.

Because I don’t think I’m that interesting, I’d like to focus on 10 little known things about my friend, Arliss Treacle.

1. Can’t sleep without he’s got his hand on his private parts.
2. Weren’t goin’ vote for Hillary Clinton ’til Tina Fey done told him to do’t
3. Cain’t stand t’ masturbatin’ without thinkin’ ’bout more than at least three lil’ chippies all at the same time
4. Thinks that a giant naked silver lady on the side of a Galveston motel is some mighty fine art
5. He does as his boss says and shreds every’thin incriminatin’
6. Don’t like it but it’s dipped in lard and fried over hick’ry
7. He still knows in his heart that that LonelyGirl15 girl is real, even if she say she ain’t no more
8. He still prays ev’ry Sunday, even if his altar now has to be only inside his heart … Seein’ as he was run out of church for the fondlin’
9. Likes to eat beast, but sometimes also prefers him some critter
10. Likes to say “that dog won’t hunt.” Because his dog, she won’t hunt.

OK. That’s it. Oh, yeah. About Eric:

1. I like chocolate too much.
2. I thought “Pulp Fiction” was overrated
3. I can’t multi-task and if you ask me to I get pissy and vinegary
4. I have never taken a guitar lesson, which I’m very proud of.
5. I have never taken a voice lesson, which everybody is very irritated about
6. I was intensely jealous of all the Academy Award winners, except for the French girl who won best actress because who the hell is she anyway?
7. I love my family very much because they accept all my evil thoughts and twisted sense of humor. I love my sister especially because she happens to also share all my thoughts and evil twisted sense of humor
8. I always order the same thing in restaurants, and have many times found myself in one of those moments like Miranda from “Sex in the City,” where a Chinese person reads my order back to me and laughs because she already knows what it is. In fact, when I used to go to this place in Brooklyn, the restaurant owners’ children would sing my order out the minute I walked in the door. Very funny, little bastards.
9. I also cannot sleep without my hand coverin’ my private parts.
10. I have very few enemies. But I keep two in the back of my mind on a very short, angry little list slashed with razor blades and soaked with blood. You know who you are.

All right. This letter says I must tag 10 people. But I don’t want you to feel obligated. Just do it because in your heart you know it’s the right thing and your heart is heavy having to keep such 10 secrets like these inside.

Marc, Natalie, Stacy, Monica, Kari, Gene, Corey, David, John, Flight of the Conchords.

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(Originally posted Sunday, February 24, 2008 )

Things We Will Learn At the 80th Annual Academy Awards

–*”Paillettes” is the French word for sequins and there’s a genocide going on in the Sudan

–*George Clooney will be seriously romantically linked to someone, but he will be as noncommital about it to the press as he likely is to the poor girl herself

–*We will find out which of the hottest female stars have “baby bumps,” which is proof positive that these moist starlets are sexually active

–*We’ll find out which starlet with a giant ugly bow on her dress will have rotting pieces of turkey meat thrown at her

–*We’ll find out which actors died this past year besides Heath Ledger, who will likely get the death pimp spot by being named last

–*Abe Vigoda will not be among these people, because THE MAN IS STILL ALIVE. Don’t believe me? There’s a Web site devoted to his life status. (A side note, he lives on my block in New York and I saw him buying fruit two weeks ago. I shit you not. The man is fucking not dead.)

–*Jessica Alba has no business being anywhere near an Oscar, but at least her baby bump proves that she is sexually active, so we’re letting her in.

–*Daniel Day-Lewis, like all great method actors, is a shy person who gives boring speeches, and would be better off not coming up to the podium at all

–*Some female star will profess over and over on the red carpet that she is completely devoted to the man by her side, her husband — which means there is trouble at home.

–*We don’t give Oscars to funny Frenchies whose names we can’t pronounce, in movies we never heard of. I’m looking in your direction, Marion Cotillard

–*The dialogue from “Juno” will be said “to crackle,” and that means it really starts to get irritating on repeated viewings.

–*John Stewart will host, and though he is funny, he would likely not wear Javier Bardem’s Dora wig from “Old Country For Old Men,” like inveterate ham Billy Crystal would have

–*Laura Linney. Subtle. Not showy. Won’t win.

–*Spike. Catherine. Jack. Warren. Cameron. Verbs. George. Harrison. Denzel. Verbs. Al Gore. Oprah. Tom. Katie. Verbs.

–*The sentiment “I’m so happy to be here,” will be uttered with various degrees of false conviction

–*We might find out who Miley Cyrus is. Even though I was working really hard to not know who she was, because I realize that there is absolutely nothing about her that is necessary to my fulfillment, enlightenment, education or understanding as an adult of the way things are.

–*British thespian great Tom Wilkinson reveals his abiding love for the TV show “Friends,” which shows the American success at rotting Europe from within by exposing it to our addictive low culture.

–*Cate Blanchett and Julie Christie will divide the vote of those who love gold standard British actresses, thus throwing the Oscar to a too-young Ellen Page and ruining her career Anna Paquin-style.

–*2007 will be remembered as the year in film of cute pregnant teens and shooting people in the brain with captive bolt cattle guns.

UPDATE: I was wrong about Ellen Page. Guess I blew the Oscar pool. No, actually I mean, that French woman ruined the Oscar pool. Everybody’s Oscar pool. Let’s find her address.

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(Originally posted Saturday, February 23, 2008 )

This spring, the Bush administration will be giving automatic tax refunds of anywhere from $300 for individuals to $1,200 for couples. How will Americans be spending the money?

–*Running down and saving New Orleans

–*Betting on No. 5, Lil’ Phar Lap

–*Taking it back and asking President Bush for gold or specie instead, since $300 is starting to look an awful lot like $175

–*Mailing it directly to Social Security, Medicaid and school lunch programs and other places it should have gone in the first place

–*Recirculating it back into the economy … and by that I mean back to the richest 1% of Americans, which is where recirculated money likes to go

–*Nailing it to the mizzenmast and promising it to whomever catches the dreaded white whale Moby Dick

–*Buying the plasma TV that I always knew Uncle George was going to get me as long as I kept voting Republican

–*Using it to open my own school, train my own police department, and build my own bridges and roads, because that’s what freedom from government tyranny is all about

–*Catching up on the last three months of overpriced cable

–*Buying a memorial plate embossed with a picture of Ronald Reagan, for it was he who first discovered that poor people would stab themselves in the back and sell their country to the Saudis as long as you rubbed their bellies and gave them a little extra scratch.

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