Oh It Starts With Fart Jokes, But Before Long You Have Men Walking Into Bars

So, Tuesday the FDA ban of "flavored" cigarrettes took effect. Apparently, the thinking is that the mint, fruit and candy flavored cigarettes appeal to a younger crowd, and by removing them from the market, they can help keep these young'ins from getting addicted. It's...interesting.

I find this move confusing for a couple of reasons. First, they seem to be suggesting that the flavored cigarettes are marketed to kids and young teens. Personally, I would have guessed the target crowd to be college girls who want a smoke that matches the flavor of whatever sickeningly sweet schnapps she's using to find her inner girl-gone-wild that evening, but I'm not big on marketing so what do I know? So the theory is that if you get rid of tasty cigarettes, the kids will no longer be interested.

Huh.

Two things. First, I have no problem with anyone who wants to ban clove cigarettes, not because they are a "gateway" cigarette to the real things, but rather because their smell is reminiscent of, say, a hippy pyre. It's like someone ran out of pot at a Phish concert, and they decided to try smoking eachother's hair. It's...unpleasant.

Second, and more to the point, this is so ridiculously transparent a political maneuver that any meaning behind it is lost. Look, if you really think cigarettes are bad for people, then ban all of them. If, on the other hand, smoking is a personal choice, then leave it the Hell alone and stop with the constant "it's for the kids" posturing. If people want to do something bad for themselves, let them. If we don't want kids picking up stupid habits, educate them and hope they make good choices. I don't think regulation is the answer to people's health problems.

Seriously, what's next, banning the sodas that kids drink most because they're a gateway to the Mountain Dew? Force Doritos to only offer flavors that appeal to grown up tastes? (I'm still wanting to try Bourbon and Disappointment flavored Doritos myself, but then I have grown up tastes.) Ooh, I know, take all children's programming off the television. Sure, some of it is educational, but it's a gateway to sedentary lifestyle, and we can't have that now can we?

I'd say more, but DLOG is proudly notorious for immature bathroom humor, and I don't want to attract the Government's attention and get banned as a gateway to full-blown dirty jokes.

Just Don't Bring Up The Environment And Your Golden

Assuming you haven't been living under a rock for the past few weeks, you've probably caught wind of the brouhaha that has been the health care protests. Essentially, town hall meetings all over the country are being disrupted by loud protesters who are touting claims of "death councils" and painting swastikas on public buildings. Unfortunately, this is now the cynosure of the national coverage, rather than the points being made on the other side of the debate, and today I realized why.

Conservatives, I don't know how to say this, so I'm just going to come right out with it: you guys suck at protests.

It's not your fault. While protesting has been a hallmark of the American experience since the Boston Tea Party, for the last sixty or seventy years all the really good protest topics seem to have fallen on the liberals side. War protests. Equality protests. Workers' rights protests. The fact is, you guys are totally out of training for this sort of thing.

Now you guys are out of power, and naturally you turn to this established tradition to be heard. You wanted to be heard on the issues of taxes, a perfectly justifiable concern given the agenda of the new President, but a lack of research meant that you allowed the term "teabagging" to be associated with the protests, thus turning a protest movement into an off-color joke. Now you want to stem health care reform, but any real protest is being drowned out by people equating Obama with Hitler, which just makes you all look like kooks. Between this and leaving trails that show some protesters being shills for insurance companies or Republicans (or as it's being referred to now, "Astroturfed"), the protests are losing all of their meaning.

Do the liberals do the same thing? Of course they do - it would be naive to think otherwise. They're just better at it.

So, how do you solve the problem? It's simple - you guys need some hippies. Seriously, who knows more about protests that hippies? Now this is going to be no small task, what with the difficulty in finding conservative hippies, but I'm sure you guys can put your heads together and come up with something. If nothing else, you can offer them lots of money for consulting, or if that fails to sway them offer to build a Whole Foods near them or maybe start a patchouli farm. They eat that stuff up.

So there you go. Get yourself some expert advice, and try this thing again. I'm sure with a little coaching, you guys could be putting together protests that actually sway opinions instead of just supplying MSNBC and Fox News with soundbites and annoying the rest of us. You can do it, you guys! Now get out there and try again.

Oh, and if you follow my advice and get the hippies, stick to your own food unless they bring brownies, but by all means, try the brownies.

The Birthers Got Nothin' On Me

Once again, despite my best efforts, I have allowed information about politics to enter my brain. I would blame my wife and her habit of putting on MSNBC when we go to bed, but that doesn't work because a) she's not forcing me to listen to it and b)my wife has no natural faults, and blaming her for something suggests otherwise. Regardless of how this came to pass, I'm forced to face yet another mountain of ignorance, this time in the form of "birthers".

Birthers, for those whose wives do not control the remote at bedtime, are the group who insist that Barack Obama is not qualified to be President of the USA because he is not a natural born citizen. Some claim they'll be quiet when they see his birth certificate (the link is his Certificate of Live Birth, which is apparently something else). Others claim even that won't change things, because his father was not a citizen, so that disqualifies him.

I'm not going to sit here and pick these people apart for the same reason that I don't pick on my daughter for believing in fairies: the sensible among us know better, and we're the majority. Rather, I'm kind of wondering at how something like this gains traction. We've discussed individual yahoos before, but really, what does it take for these loons to unite into a full blown...I'm not sure what the proper term is for a group of yahoos. A flock? A bushel? An asylum? Yes, that sounds right. What does it take for a weird idea to amass a full blown asylum of yahoos to argue for it?

Things like this always resurface my temptation to start a completely unfounded rumor here on DLOG, just to see how far I could get it. Originally I was going to go for something in the movie industry. Speculation on Batman villains is always a hot topic (Neil Patrick Harris as the Riddler - you heard it here first). Now, however, I'm thinking of something more nefarious. I mean, at this point these people seem willing to believe anything, so I could really go to town, and as long as it get's picked up by the right yahoo, we could be making history here.

Tomorrow on DLOG: I'm pretty sure Barack Obama has a tattoo on his left butt cheek of Stalin sitting on a throne with his feet on the back of Ronald Reagan dressed in a gimp suit with a ball-gag in his mouth, and I refuse to believe otherwise until he gives an address that involves him mooning the entire press corps.

I'm Going, and Yet I'm Not Going To Go There

As mentioned yesterday, the family and I are headed for Walt Disney World. Well, we're arriving tomorrow, the first week in June. For those that don't know (the only reason I know is that I was clued in by a more Disney savvy co-worker), this is actually a special day annually at the Magic Kingdom park. For tomorrow culminates Gay Days, a whole week of...well, I'm not sure what, and I'll be damned if I'm going into a bunch of research online for it. The line must be drawn somewhere, and I'm still hurting from the dinosaur junk thing.

Seriously though, the bit of looking I did do doesn't concern me much. Apparently Gay Day started as a grass roots effort by a guy named Doug Swallow (assuming that's true, and it's on WikiPedia, so it must be, that is the most unfortunate name that could be associated with such an event). It's not an official Disney thing. The guy wanted to get a day when a bunch of the LGBT community would show up at Disney in red shirts (one would assume that the cross section of the LGBT community and Star Trek fans would have protested, but whatever), just to be seen. It got a lot bigger over the years, and apparently now attracts over 135,000 people. Yikes.

Now, ordinarily this is the part where I would make a bunch of jokes about this, but I'm not going to, and not just because my lovely wife put a hiatus on me making jokes about wearing chaps without pants underneath after an unfortunate indecent on Facebook. No, I'm not going to make jokes because thanks to our good friends in California, that would force me to count myself amongst the haters, and I can't do that. I've said it before, and I'll say it again - once we work past this ridiculous "debate" (it seems I find very few people actually debating about anything), people are going to look back on this controversy of ours the way we look back on segregation. So I, who ordinarily takes the stand that pretty much anyone or anything is open for joking about so long as it's relatively good-natured, is backing off this one time.

I hate to admit it, but this is killing me. This shouldn't really surprise anyone. I'm a big fan of the easy joke, and this whole thing is rife with potential. As stated, however, I will stand resolute. No princess jokes. No Chip and Dale jokes. Nothing. Once in a while, even I feel the need to take a stand.

Just to reassure you all, though, if it was Furry Day at Disney (which, let's face it, actually makes a lot more sense), there would be no mercy shown. &$%#ing freaks.

On the Dangers of Name Etymology

Having recently discovered that I get to be someone's strange uncle (woot!), I find myself once again on those websites that give the etymology and meaning behind names. I love this stuff, because it has almost no real application. Apparently, my surname means we hail from England (someone once claimed to have traced my family to the Mayflower - not sure if I believe that one, but there you go), and it's based on on the word for flame. Hopefully, saying someone was flaming back then meant something different.

Then I looked into the etymology of my first name, and I kind of wish I hadn't. Apparently, Roger means "famous with the spear". If that's not phallic enough for you, according to this site, it was also used as slang for a man's you-know-what from 1650-1870, and then was used to mean getting it on from 1711. I guess now we know why the pirates considered it jolly. Charming.

Anyway, what put me on this path was seeing a headline where a dude running for some Government position has the last name Weiner, which I consider to be one of the more unfortunate last names for obvious reasons. I decided to seek out where the pejorative use of wiener came from, and according to the same site, it's actually a shortened version of wienerwurst, which is a sausage. Due to the sausage shape, it too became a word to refer to a man's junk (just how many names do we need for this thing, anyway). Sure, they switched the 'i' and 'e', but we all read and pronounce it the same, and I'm sorry, but the headline "Weiner Running For Mayor" will always make me giggle no matter how old I get.

I keeps it real like that.

If this is accurate - and it's on the internet, so I have no reason to doubt it - that means that at some point, they were handing out surnames, and when they got to Hans, they said, "Dude, I think we're just going to name you after those sausages you're always eating", and Hans was all, "Whatever. Did you remember to grab some mustard on the way over?". (I don't speak a lot of German, but I understand that to those fluent in the language, they all sound like that.) From that point on, there were a group of people who were inextricably tied to sausages, as well as other, more saucy themes, through their names, and they have bravely gone forward, bringing generation after generation of Weiner into the world. Good for them.

I'd of changed it to Smith myself, but I guess that's what separates me from the Weiners.

What Does Wonder Woman Say About You?

The wonders of the sleeping mind fascinate me completely. What goes on when we sleep is such an odd process, and while I'm always interested in the debate of whether our mind is just wandering when it creates those bizarre visions it presents us, or if it's attempting to update some sort of internal filing system to make sense of the past day's events, the results are always interesting. Perhaps my favorite part, though, is in those moments just before we completely give ourselves to Lord Morpheous' embrace, instead slipping between wakefulness and dream. It was in this moment, I suppose, when the following bit of advice was given to me:

"That's easy. You just need to ask them who their favorite superhero is."

These were the words spoken to me by my lovely wife Saturday night as I lay there waiting to sleep. They were said with the complete conviction of someone who has seen the light and determined the best course of action. They were clearly not words to be taken lightly.

The only problem was that I didn't know what the *$&% she was talking about.

So, being me, I asked, and this is where things get wonderfully weird. See, she remembered saying it, but could not for the life of her figure out why. So by the time I asked, mere milliseconds, her mind had already done away with the process that had led up the statement. We have no idea where that came from.

So now I keep asking myself what possible problem, what ponderous question led to such a solution. Was it about someone's moral character (are you a Superman or a Wolverine)? Did it have to do with determining potential (I'm guessing Aquaman fans don't expect much of themselves), or maybe social tendencies (Ooh, Batman huh? Not good.)? Maybe it would help if you were buying someone tights and needed to know what color to pick.

Dammit, what does it mean?