Tag Archives: humor

LAWBI #75: Democrats, It’s Time for a Rebrand

Democrat DonkeyWe long ago reached the point at which government became analogous to corporate competition. It’s Coke vs. Pepsi. And if the government shutdown was the Republican Party’s New Coke moment, then the Democrats squandered their opportunity to capitalize on it with HealthCare.gov — a Crystal Pepsi debacle of their own, if you will.

What do corporations do when they’re desperately in need of a boost for their market share, and their big new product has tanked? They rebrand. If you’re not familiar with marketing, a “rebrand” is — to both criminally trivialize and accurately describe it — a reworking of all of the most superficial public elements of a company’s identity, while making the fewest possible changes to the actual way the company’s sausage gets made.

Great at ideas, and terrible at getting things done, the Democratic Party is a perfect candidate for a rebrand. There’s no need to change its fundamental ideology or process; a few key changes to the standard verbiage should put a whole new face on left-wing politics, for a start. Let’s take a look at what can be done to make our liberal leaders a bit more attractive to a wider audience.

Read the rest at Creative Loafing 

LAWBI #72: Grand Theft Auto V Isn’t Kid Stuff

Highly anticipated video game Grand Theft Auto V was released last Tuesday; it earned $1 billion in sales in three days, making it perhaps the fastest-selling entertainment product in human history.

Grand Theft Auto V will undoubtedly be hailed by some as a masterwork of game design, conception and execution. It’s also undoubtedly one of the grittiest, most casually violent and morally ambivalent games ever to earn the Entertainment Software Ratings Board’s “M for Mature” advisory. While the ESRB’s attempts to legally restrict the sale of games based on content have failed thus far, many, many retailers have voluntary policies on the books, and will not sell an “M”-rated game like Grand Theft Auto Vto anyone under 17.

Which means fuck-all if some cretinous parent wants to buy it and use it as a babysitter for their 10-year-old.

On Monday, gaming site Kotaku.com published an essay by an unnamed video game retail worker titled “I Sold Too Many Copies of GTA V to Parents Who Didn’t Give a Damn.” In it, the anonymous author writes about being worn down by selling so many copies of GTA V — and other “M”-rated titles — to parents who are obviously buying the game for kids “who could barely see over my counter,” despite the clerk’s attempts to sway them without pissing them off.

Read the rest at Creative Loafing  

LAWBI #46: Genitology

WARNING: The following article contains explicit if not altogether anatomically accurate references to the male and female sexual organs, i.e. “peepies” and “hoo-haws.”

As a 40-year-old man-boy who is both bitter about no longer being in the youthful marketing demographic and infuriated/terrified by young adults, I spend a fair amount of time lurking on websites patronized by people in their late teens and early 20s. Strictly for research purposes, of course; I gotta stay up on the culture, ya know. So my web browser’s newsfeed is full of posts to sites like TextsFromLastNight, which for years has aggregated drunken, confessional and drunkenly confessional text messages in a sort of never-ending torrent of oversharing by alternately inebriated and hungover kids driven to trumpet their latest ill-advised activities.

Obsessively reading TextsFromLastNight and its ilk, I’ve gleaned two important insights:

1. The American young adults who nurture such sites have absolutely no sense of boundaries, and 2. They don’t like any of the current slang terms for genitalia.

Read the rest at Creative Loafing

LAWBI #27: ChickenGator & The Persistence of Mad Science

Last weekend, UK newspaper the Daily Mail published an article about evolutionary biologists altering the DNA of chicken embryos so that the embryos developed alligator-like snouts instead of beaks. The scientists suppose chickens are the evolutionary descendants of dinosaurs, and that chickens once had reptilian snouts millions of years in the past.

Obviously, the first question any God-fearing American conservative should ask upon reading about scientists screwing around with DNA in order to put alligator snouts on chickens is, “Why the hell do we need chickens with alligator snouts?” After all, the Bible explicitly forbids fooling around with the magic building blocks of human life-it’s in there with the shit about Jesus being Caucasian and the nobility of amassing personal wealth, if you want it to be hard enough.

The Mail story explains this reverse engineering could lead to “improving” contemporary species so they’ll be better suited to changing climates and environments, as well as the usual claims about such research leading to invaluable advances in medical science. In an opinion column on CNN.com, renowned paleontologist Jack Horner also suggests this and other experiments might be used to educate the general public in evolutionary processes.

Of course, none of those is the real reason why we’re making ChickenGators.

The real reason why we’re making ChickenGators is this: Continue reading

9 Web Thingies I’ve Heard of but Never Used, and What I Assume They Do

Formspring – It’s a mattress company. Or maybe undergarments, for awesome curvy ladies.

Del.icio.us – A DIY porn site by some louche asshole named Del, which is weird, because I always thought Del was short for Delbert.

Quora – A non-profit dedicated to the reaching of agreeable means and positions, serving as a shining example of tolerance for the rest of the world. Or, I dunno, more porn, dedicated to an obscure goddess and vaguely sci-fi in nature.

Hipster – FIRST PERSON SHOOTER! FIRST PERSON SHOOTER!

Hipmunk – Also a first person shooter, in which players vote on the popularity of anthropomorphic animal GIFs by ironically “shooting” at them while Journey songs play.

Fab – Shit, I dunno, a social networking site for gay men? In, like, Missouri? In the ’70s?

Mashable – This may be totally off-base, but it sounds like teens talking about other teens and celebrities they’d like to make out with. You know, like maybe some new slang with which I’m “not down?” Is Justin Bieber mashable?

Kindle – Tasteful softcore-tinted dating service for the olds.

Dropbox – Like Craigslist, but without anything that doesn’t involve strangers hooking up in bathrooms.