Beauty is Imperfection

(Originally posted Saturday, December 06, 2008 )

Many self help gurus like to talk about things like the “10 Steps to Success” or the “Road to Riches” or the “Path To Self Actualization.” However, nobody ever gives you an easy 10-step manual that explains how to go to hell in your own way. Seeing that there was a huge market void here, I decided to craft my own: “Ten Steps to Abject Failure” TM

Here is a rundown of the 10 steps, everything you will need to get on your way to not achieving any kind of success:

1. A Totally Shit Attitude

People often say that your attitude tells other people how you feel about them and about yourself. But “attitude” means many other things as well. It is also a dance maneuver like an arabesque in which your raised leg is bent at the knee. It is also the position of an aircraft on its axis which lets you know if it’s going to land or if it’s going to fall into the ocean. If you appreciate me mocking the use of the word “attitude” then you probably have the exact kind of shit attitude you need to fail and to FAIL BIG!

2. You Need A Lot of Totally Unreachable GOALS

Many little girls not only want to be like Britney Spears. They want to BE Britney Spears. In other words, they identify so much with this person, just because she’s famous, that they have completely abdicated their responsibility to their own lives and to live in their own moment and the reality they share with friends and loved ones. Hindus say that everybody can have what they want. But if you want to be Britney Spears, you should know now … you’re totally fucked.

3. Have a lot of terrifying OBJECTIVES

There are some people who can’t achieve their completely unreachable long-term goals without first coming up with some spine-chillingly stupid objectives. Take for example John Hinckley and Mark David Chapman, two troubled men who, through a little initiative and brio and good-old-fashioned hard work, managed to get their names in the papers and become notorious historical figures that society will always remember. If that sounds too extreme, you might settle for something like a psychotically single-minded pursuit of money, perhaps by selling unregulated securities to old people.

4. Create rigidly organized filing systems that completely hamper inspiration.

Everybody knows that you have to be organized to make your goals and objectives come about. I suggest that you create your own Byzantine bureaucracy modeled on the U.S. Postal Service. The slow-moving, laborious, Sisyphean effort to get just one thing done will totally make none of it seem worthwhile.

5. Be obstinate

Willfulness and pride for its own sake can lead you to make killer decisions like impeding someone from getting what they need or standing in their way of their progress or quashing their idealism with gratuitous negativity. In other words, be like Dick Cheney.

6. Copy other people’s ideas

There are people who move us through inspiration. Dancers. Writers. Philosophers. Artists. It’s helpful for you to realize as a failure, however, that most of the best stuff has been done already, so the best you can do is pass it off as your own at a party in hopes of getting laid. Trying something new will be too weird and uncomfortable.

7. Don’t learn from failure

If you’ve failed once, you’ll probably fail again. Ouch! That hurts! For God’s sake, just stop trying! Successful people always stay committed to their dreams. But how obnoxious are they?

8. Not everybody can be a leader, so why in the hell are you so special?

The world would be pretty mixed up if everybody was a chief and nobody was a brave. Why, that wouldn’t work at all. Leadership is best left to people who have the guns and money.

9. Blame other people

It’s not written anywhere that you have to be accountable for everything. Take war and famine and economic collapse. Or your own unhappiness. That’s a lot of stuff for you to take on your own shoulders. Why not blame somebody else? You can blame almost anything on George Bush these days. Even your bad breakup, your bad test grade, or your burst appendix.

10. Have something to prove all the time.

Whether it’s a need to have a trophy wife; a need to have a million dollars in the bank; a need to invade the Crimea; a need to show that you, the short person, now has all the power; a need to show that your penis isn’t really the smallest in Queens; or that you’re not from a West Virginia white trash trailer park anymore; or a need to show that you are no longer the young, black, tiny lead singer of the Jackson Five; or a need even to show that you were an outsider as the only Jew in a small town in East Texas … whether it’s any of these things, you can’t help but need to have something to prove to people all the time. And boy, is that a recipe to fail!

If you want to join my program for the Ten Steps To Failure, just send me a check for $2 million, which I will then use in a Ponzi scheme to pay off my investors. And we’ll all be on our way to failing in no time.

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(Originally posted Friday, December 05, 2008 )

–*Walking

–*Riding

–*Skipping this advertisement

–*An awkward segue

–*An awkward Segway

–*Trampling through the Oprah studio with the rest of the elephants

–*Using Keith to get to Mick

–*Wonkavision

–*Mailing myself to the woman who broke up with me

–*With a poorly thought out middle-eight harpsichord solo

–*Swimming through the uterus with my long tail

–*With a giant, gas-guzzling SUV. Hell, U.S. automakers are making MILLIONS of them.

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(Originally posted Thursday, December 04, 2008 )

What super powers do everyday humans have that are much envied by Martians?

–*We can jump up on the air, not touching the ground for a small period of time.

–*We have long muscles called tongues that shoot out of our mouths by an inch or more, depending on how nimble we are.

–*We can shoot pockets of air out of our mouths or from between our buttocks.

–*We talk in a highly sophisticated system of signs and sounds called language that allows us to facilitate action and make people do what we want through persuasion rather than by hitting them with a stick

–*We can fart under our arms

–*Our visual, auditory, gastrointestinal, respiratory and urogenital systems are all covered in thick protective mucus.

–*We can produce saliva and spit it as far as a few yards.

–*Some of us produce food in the form of milk. The female some of us.

–*We have opposable thumbs

–*We can scream

–*We can give birth

–*We can produce the music of Kenny G, which causes an overwhelming sensation in Martians that makes them die

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(Originally posted Wednesday, December 03, 2008 )

In the past three months, the stock market has endured wild fluctuations in value as market data and analysis give confusing and contradictory signals about U.S. economic health. Here is a time line of some of the most critical events:

Sept. 19, 2008: The Dow Jones Industrial Average drops 10 points after the U.S. government hands out smallpox infected blankets to investment bankers at Lehman Brothers.

Sept. 28: U.S. automakers have to write-off a billion dollars after announcing the failure of their experimental new product: cars without wheels, a setback that causes the S&P to nosedive 10%.

Sept. 30: The Dow gets a 10% boost that market economists attribute directly to faith in Jesus Christ.

Oct. 2: The Dow falls 7% when Guy Ritchie makes his comment about his divorce from Madonna being like the Cold War, which, along with the Russian invasion of Georgia, sparks fears of another Cold War

Oct. 10: The Merrill Lynch headquarters, when visited by reporters, is found to be full to the rafters with nothing but a large gelatinous blob of something resembling rich creamy pudding. The Dow plunges 20%.

Oct. 15: The Dow rises 10 points but then falls 17 points as analysts cannot really determine whether Justin Timberlake has really brought sexy back or whether sexy has just suffered a little “dead cat bounce” before lying terminally dormant.

Oct. 18: The Dow rises 5%, as Americans show enthusiasm for the latest slang phrase, “Booty grazing.”

Oct. 19: … and the popular British slang for “say cheese”: “Show me yer tits.”

Oct. 20: The Dow falls 21% when vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin promises to lay waste to Canada.

Oct. 25: The Dow makes an anticipated surge of 20%, then a decline of 20% and then another rise of 20% when Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson reminds Americans that money is just a symbol not tied to any metal or commensurate product, and is actually just something we have all agreed means something when it actually doesn’t. Americans go wild with confusion and animal fear.

Oct. 30: The Dow slips 5% when Microsoft announces it has divested itself of all its computer assets and is now pretty much just selling t-shirts with its logo on it and hoarding goverment bonds.

Nov. 1: Lawmakers agree to a large bailout of America’s largest financial institutions by giving them $700 billion that they will do absolutely nothing with. The stock market does nothing.

Nov. 8: Barack Obama is elected president. The Dow Jones has already anticipated that he is going to raise taxes, which caused a plunge, so now it goes back up as if it doesn’t care that Barack Obama is president. Which makes the Dow Jones pretty passive-aggressive if you ask me.

Nov. 15: The Dow falls 40% as global economists and Oscar Wilde comment that Americans know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Nov. 28: The Dow rises 10% as economists note that Americans are still so willing to purchase durable goods that they will even trample people to death to do it and get the economy back on track.

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(Originally posted Tuesday, December 02, 2008 )

I hope everybody had a great Thanksgiving, and that the many many problems of the world we sadly read about in the papers managed not to be yours.

Have you ever wondered to yourself while watching The Retributioners, “Hmmmm? Something’s missing.” Well, you’re right. What’s been missing is a dedicated Retributioners home page. Well, you need wait no longer.

Stephanie and I are tonight unveiling the official Retributioners Web site at TheRetributioners.tv. Here you will find updates, bios of the cast and crew, and other assorted goodies. In the future, we hope to make this page the center of most of our projects, including my blog, which I am planning to move to a Blogger account in the near future (I will still post to MySpace for those of you reluctant to give up this wonderful community site/computer crasher/child stalking apparatus you’re currently reading.)

Consider the Web site a one stop shop for everything Retributioners. Here you can:

1) Watch all the episodes
2) Comment, bookmark, and share any of the episodes
3) Read all the great bios of the cast and crew
4) Talk to each other and debate on the Discussion Board
5) Access all of our other sites, including Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, YouTube, Funny or Die, Blip, and MySpace.
6) Find out the latest news, interviews and articles about The Retributioners
7) Send us direct messages

Stephanie wrote a little mini blog about the launch, which you can find here:
http://bit.ly/17xaD

We are really proud to have worked with so many talented people.

Of course, we will continue to post future Retributioners episodes to The Axis of Comedy, blip.TV, and Funny or Die, though we would love for all of you to go check out our new site, kick the tires, and make it your own personal treehouse.

We are still fiddling with Episode 11 and have a few other ideas in the pot once we can nail down locations and actors.

In the meantime, my birthday is coming up Saturday and I have absolutely nothing planned. So give me your shout-outs here, lest I completely forget it’s happening.

Peace out,
Eric

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(Originally posted Wednesday, November 26, 2008 )

What meals will we be enjoying this Thanksgiving as we repast with our Red State relatives?

–*A dish of revenge yams (best served cold)

–*A plate of warm Obama stuffing

–*Some hard-cheese dressing

–*Retribution fries

–*Some “payback is a bitch” five-cup salad

–*Stuffin’ Your Muffin’ Welfare Gravy

–*Acorn Squash With Rainbow Coalition

–*New (Deal) Potatoes

–*Socialist Welfare State Braised Cabbage

–*The Fidel Castro Octopus Special

–*Green Bean Casserole with Extra Alternative Minimum Tax

–*Horseshoe Bend Squash With Gay Marriage on the Side

–*Re-educated Thanksgiving Turkey

–*Tacos! Courtesy of all our new migrant laborer friends, legal and otherwise.

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody! Expect fewer postings for the next few days as my wife and I enjoy the holidays with friends.

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(Originally posted Wednesday, November 26, 2008 )

Why should we take back our boyfriend and/or General Motors executive when he’s done wrong?

–*He said he will never cheat on you again.

–*He said he wouldn’t spend years building up an inventory of gas guzzling SUVs that he can’t sell even at a discount ever again.

–*He promised to listen to you more, and not take it as a personal attack when you are just voicing your needs.

–*He promised to shut down dealerships across the country, even though that will cost billions.

–*He promised to let you be alone more and not be hurt when you also need a life outside the relationship.

–*He’s cutting the pensions for retirees, which will help him save billions.

–*He promised not to withhold love to manipulate your behavior.

–*And he’ll ram a new contract down the United Auto Workers’ throats.

–*He won’t buy expensive cars on credit cards because he wants a “pussy puller.”

–*Oh, and he won’t build any pussy pullers either.

–*He said he’ll stop treating you as a doormat whose unconditional love he can count on in bad times.

–*He said he’ll stop depending on the unconditional love of tax payers to bail him out when his company is burning through $2 billion a month and only has $16 billion on the books.

–*He won’t abuse you and take all your money.

–*He won’t abuse you and take all your money.

–*He’ll get a real job.

–*He’ll get a real job.

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(Originally posted Tuesday, November 25, 2008 )

It was reported today that liberal Fox News pundit Alan Colmes will be leaving the highly rated “Hannity & Colmes” show on Fox, splitting up his long-running partnership with right-wing foil Sean Hannity.

What will the show now be called in Colmes’ absence?

–*Hannity and Cheese Whiz

–*Hannity and Gas

–*Hannity & Straw Man

–*Hannity & Medieval Show Trial

–*Hannity & Weltschmerz

–*Hannity & Who

–*Hannity & Hippie

–*Hannity & Insert Puppet Liberal Here

–*Hannity & Sturm & Drang

–*Hannity & The Bear

–*Hannity & Foil

–*Hannity & Punching Bag

–*Hannity & Allie

–*Hannity & He Who Accepts Hannity’s Intellectually Dishonest Terms of Discussion

–*Hannity & Who Is Going To Take Up My Fallacious Arguments Now?

–*Hannity & Cock Block

–*Hannity & Butter Bang

–*Hardcastle & McCormick

–*Malkin & Bindi

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(Originally posted Sunday, November 23, 2008 )

Dear God,

I am writing to ask your forgiveness about something I am deeply ashamed about. I’m writing to you because last night rather than read a book, go to an art museum or see a film, I stayed home to watch the Diane Sawyer-Ashley Alexandra Dupre interview on ABC, and for this I beg your absolution and grace.

I beg it, oh Lord, because I was momentarily caught up in the tut-tutting housewife’s prurient fascination with this horrible, stupid, smutty topic. The story of a small-time hooker who brought down the governor of New York. I usually stay away from bad TV, Lord. I don’t like the faux reality concocted by television, and normally I am wise enough to stay away and understand it for the waste of time that it is. And yet there I was last night. I had to watch.

I’m sorry because I, like many Americans from all walks of life, no matter what our pedigree, level of academic achievement or phase of maturity, had become sucked into the drama that had engulfed the New York state executive branch this year-had watched as a smart, brash Democratic politician draped in piety and self-righteousness debased himself and degraded his office to spend a few hours with a large-breasted, provincial high school dropout from New Jersey, exit 98. A reform minded man of arrogance who saw himself as protector and destroyer, who wielded power with great fluence and total confidence, Eliot Spitzer entered the office of governor with a great wave of popular support and widespread gratitude for all his efforts to bring Wall Street corruption to heel. He took the office not only with a mandate but with the bearing of a king.

I beg your forgiveness, God, because for some reason, I again needed to hear the story about how this great man with so much potential for greatness fell from grace because of a simple tragic flaw, a fussy adolescent need for instant sexual gratification. I watched because the archetype of the great man brought down by his hubris is one of the most compelling in our collective unconscious, an atavistic thrill that has stirred mankind for thousands of years. It is the subject of both Greek drama and I’m sure an episode of Desperate Housewives, too.

I watched because I so needed to hear once again the not-illuminating story of how a cute bridge-and-tunnel girl with strict parents rebelled, took drugs and sought out easy money.

I’m sorry God because I knew she would cry, and I wanted to see it so I could feel that the chickens had come home to roost, that the moral circle would be squared and the karmic ship righted. I am sorry, God, because I secretly hoped that she would have a thick New Jersey accent-which would just make the whole thing more stupid, tragic and sexy.

I’m sorry because I was gratified to hear that she only took solace in the arms of men who showed a remarkable willingness to lie to her on a daily basis and shelter her from reality, and thus it sounded to me like she had always been happily complicit in her own exploitation and debasement (the tale of her one sexual assault notwithstanding, obviously).

I’m sorry, God, because I let Diane Sawyer narrate me into the most titillating aspects of Ashley’s biography, from her first time with a john, to the regular rituals she performed before her assignations. (Ashley would hug her dog before going to work!) I’m sorry, because I played my stupid part in the gestalt, yelling at Ashley through the screen for her foolish choices, just as Diane Sawyer wanted me to do. I’m sorry that I let Diane Sawyer take a self-righteous tone on my behalf, which allowed her to hide her own complicity in the tawdriness of this tale by amplifying the awfulness of it all for an audience of peanut crunching, gum-smacking mouth-breathers – like me, dear God. Oh, I know. They are all just like me.

I’m sorry because I, like Ashley, sometimes feel a need to be special, too, and because of that, I also make bad choices. I am susceptible to flattery, sometimes, or I’m lazy and selfish. I, too, would every once in a while love to have members of the opposite sex lie to me so that I wouldn’t have to deal with the pedestrian heaviness of real life and all its burdens. I turned to Ashley to forget, God, how flawed I am.

I have never gone to a prostitute and never committed a crime, God. No, I was just sitting there on my couch, watching her suffer so that I could feel better about myself. And so I am so horribly guilty.

Dear God, who I don’t even believe in. Please forgive me in my horrible wretchedness for playing my part in this horrible affair. Please, please, please forgive me and have mercy on my TV-watching soul.

Amen,
Eric

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(Originally posted Friday, November 21, 2008 )

Cupertino, Calif. (API) Apple Inc., the company that revolutionized personal computing and electronics, has pulled the plug on its operations after 32 years because its executives say they have have “gotten kind of bored and want to move on to other things,” said CEO, chairman and co-founder Steve Jobs.

“It just got kind of old after a while,” says Jobs, who founded the company with Steve Wozniak in 1976 to sell Wozniak’s hand-made “Apple I” personal computer. “I mean, we’ve got ADD around here and get really irritated by repetition and redundancy. I kind of wanted to start a rock band and take up parasailing.”

CFO Peter Oppenheimer agreed.

“It was really happening for 32 years around here,” he says. “We’ve had a lot of ups and downs, rising and falling stock, corporate shake-ups; we reinvented ourselves as a personal technology company with the IPod. But come on. We’ve all got a bunch of other stuff we’d like to do. I was thinking of going back and getting my graduate degree in Medieval Literature or something.”

“My girlfriend wants me to settle down a bit,” said Cokey Stevenson, a senior vice president in technology and design. “This Apple thing was great, but it’s hard to collaborate with the same people for so long. You start to get on each other’s nerves, and the spark just goes out of it. We thought it’s better to go out with guns blazing and people screaming for more, remembering us at our best. We wanted to get out before the company starts to feel like a nagging wife.”

Apple has about 28,000 employees around the world and had $24 billion in sales for its fiscal year ending in September 2007.

Apple became famous for building one of the first marketable personal computers. Its Macintosh line was seen as spearheading that revolution by introducing the first product with a mouse and a graphical user interface.

“GUI. It’s like sequins to me,” said Jobs. “That’s so 1984.”

Afterward, however, the Jobs & Co. suffered many slings and arrows. First he was defenestrated in a corporate power struggle. Then the company lost market share for several years because it couldn’t adapt its insular operating system to cheaper commodity PCs the way rival Microsoft could. When its ignominious failure seemed all but complete, however, Jobs returned to the fold to focus the product line, open up the operating system, and then reinvent the company as a consumer electronics powerhouse with the IPod and IPhone. It has since become a big media company with its ITunes store, which has changed the face of the music and film industry.

“Wow, it’s all just a blur now,” says Jobs. “It’s really hard to say goodbye to that rich history. Yet every time we come up with a new idea, you know we feel like we’ve ‘Been there. Done that.’ Just look at our history. We’re really bipolar over here. I think we’ve done just about as much as we can do with this particular hackneyed business concept.”

Jobs says he’s much more interested in other things now like writing music or screenplays or maybe staging Commedia dell’arte theater in Ibiza, his new favorite destination. He also wants to learn to how to be a teppanyaki chef at a Benihana-type restaurant. Stevenson says that he has taken a newfound interest in studying the linguistic origins of Yiddish.

Glen Turknow, COO, hopes to quit Apple and go to work in Third World poverty zones like the Congo and the Managua garbage dump as a Jesuit priest after attending seminary.

“Why would I want to spend the rest of my life figuring out how people Twitter each other?” asked Turknow. “This was a blast, but here at Apple, we’ve all decided to move on. There are other computer companies. Other electronics companies.”

Stevenson says that the entire Apple inventory will be sold off or melted for scrap, its goodwill and intangibles written off, and much of the company’s intellectual property and patents handed off to young people at a big party in Golden Gate Park.

“We just want people to remember the good times,” says Jobs, “Maybe pull out that old IPod after the battery runs dead and say, ‘Hey, I remember that company!’ But as for me, I don’t want to sell brightly colored lava lamps to stoners anymore, know what I mean?”

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