Thursday, July 31, 2014

We Are Hand-Egg Heads

I anticipate a barrage of hate mail for my next statement: Fuck the National Football League.


I am not saying this because of my longstanding belief that a game called “football” should involve a foot coming into contact with a ball more often than after players just carried the ball most of the time. I am not saying this because I think it should be named “Hand Leather Egg” or “Rugby for Pussies” until they shed all that armour, and that we should call soccer “football”, since it’s played with FEET. I’m saying fuck the NFL, because the NFL hates you. The NFL hates every one of you, yet you (and I) still patronise the League and eat up all the abuse it doles out. Roger Goodell knows this, and is laughing at all of you (and me).


The NFL doesn’t give a damn about its employees.


It makes sense that a bunch of 300-lb men crashing into each other may yield some injuries. the effects of this may be felt for years and cause great pain and anguish. this is why former players wanted to bring attention the the brain injuries that occurred due to prolonged exposure to literally bone-crushing hits. Many doctors and researchers over the years verified that brain damage is a very real risk of being an NFL player.  Even Teddy Roosevelt mandated that reforms be made, or else football would be over. They complied with his edicts, but after that, the policy was more to cover up and lie than acknowledge the truth. Money beats safety. Most recently, THE NFL settled a suit regarding care for injured players, but a stipulation of the suit was that they take no responsibility for the injuries. The whole thing was rejected by a judge, though, because he said it wouldn’t cover enough players. So fuck the players. Wear them out like cogs, and then replace them when they’re broken.


The NFL doesn’t give a damn about your brown (or red) ass.


The Washington REDSKINS. Do I really need to elaborate?


The NFL doesn’t giv-...FINE! I’ll elaborate.


The Redskins name is offensive. That has been known. Don’t think this is a cause brought up just a few years ago under the umbrella of “political correctness”. Fox has been lying to you about this, and JUST this….this hour at least...This has been brought up since the 1960s. There have been protests. There have been meetings. Dan Snyder, owner of the team, showed that he doesn’t give a damn about history when he created a charity that would give textiles to poor Native Americans. The Federal Trade Commission revoked the team’s name trademark, citing how racist the name is. Meanwhile, Roger Goodell, who has the ability to tell Dan Snyder to change the name to something less offensive, has done nothing. Why would he? he’s making BANK! Fuck your brown and red ass.


The NFL doesn’t care about your two X chromosomes.


Don’t be fooled by the launch of pink NFL gear and slimmer jerseys for purchase for the feminine form. The NFL doesn’t give a damn about women. Ravens player Ray Rice knocked out his now-wife last year. Not only did he not get jail time, but he is now married to the woman he hit. The was a great opportunity for the NFL to show how far they’ve come since only giving the Steelers’ Roethlisberger a 4-game suspension in light of his sexual assault charges (He didn’t do jail time either). So what was Ray Rice’s punishment? After a year of now punishment: two games and suspended pay for those games. Two. Games. Even ESPN suspended commentator Stephen A. Smith for insinuating that women should stop invoking the beatings they receive about two days after he said that. Two games a year later shows you how much the NFL doesn’t care about women. Furthermore, Josh Gordon was suspended for a year for smoking marijuana. Plaxico Burress was suspended 4 games for accidentally shooting HIMSELF. Michael Vick Was suspended INDEFINITELY for his dog fighting ring, and then they brought him back. However, if you get caught beating a woman? 2-4 games. Domestic violence Sexual assault incidents and allegations in football are not an uncommon thing. The only thing uncommon is the NFL suspending people for them.

What about the famous NFL cheerleaders? Cheerleading, while not considered a sport by some, is physically grueling. The Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders are world famous. So what is their compensation? LESS THAN MINIMUM WAGE. No pay for rehearsals, hardly any out-of-town travel benefits, besides getting ogled by people outside of their home towns. The mascots make more money than the cheerleaders! For all that athleticism, the cheerleaders would make more money becoming mercenary superheroes. Just imagine: a team of 50+ women clad in black and body armour clearing out a drug-laden street using Batmwoman-like acrobatics and exploding pom poms...I'm digressing. My point is that the NFL doesn’t give a damn about your sister, daughter, mother, or friends.


The NFL is not afraid of you.


It is highly doubtful that beyond a few minor policy changes, the NFL will not change. The NFL loves your money, and we will continue to give it to them. As much as people raise highly vocal anger over things that the NFL does/ignores, they still will go to games and get their season tickets and buy their Dish Network team packages and consume their merchandise like they are Pacman pellets in a dark room. The NFL knows this. Dan Snyder will still get black people to defend a racial slur. Women will join their friends and husbands to Steelers and Ravens games. We will all cheer when there is a tackle so loud that you can hear it without microphone enhancement, and the target will wobble off the field, not knowing that he just got 10 years knocked off of his life. Even though I specified only three groups of people, the NFL really does not care about any of us, and they are insulting all of us when they practise disrespect via inaction against any group, and we are all complicit.

This isn’t a call for a boycott of the NFL, because under NFL policy, boycotting the NFL will result in a 10-game suspension and a $250,000 fine, which is 9 games and $249,999 more severe a sanction than if I called a woman out of her name. Besides, hardly anyone would join in the boycott. We’re like Macheads, but more violent. We’re hand-egg heads. Why else would we not question the logic of the very name of the sport? No, this isn’t a boycott call. This is just a reminder. The NFL does not give a fuck about us, but we will give them all our money regardless.

Monday, July 28, 2014

Pride and the Prejudiced

Summer in Rochester is great, because there is a festival nearly every weekend. On 18-20th July, the annual Rochester Pride Festival occurred, complete with a flag ceremony, a parade, a HUGE festival, and a picnic. I volunteered every day of the festivities, as I am want to do. If you are supportive of a cause, it is a lot more fulfilling to physically help than just re-tweet snarky quotes...thought snarky quotes are fun to do as well.

Favourite Sign
Another fun thing I like to do is go to the Pride Parade. I go there with a few of my friends and stand next the the anti-gay religious zealots holding giant hateful signs and heckle the parade via bullhorn, and we protest them. We hold signs full of sarcasm, and they usually take a few minutes to realise that we are not with them, and they look more like idiots than they before. They also direct their hate speech to us, but at least they’re not berating the parade-goers. Some of the crowd favourites of our signs were the following:
  • I’m only “protesting” so that I can come to Pride.
  • Holding signs at parades is gay.
  • God hates bacon cheeseburgers.
  • S. Benson
    God Hates figs (Matthew 21:19. Look it up. Jesus smote a fig tree because he had the munchies).
  • Jesus thinks you’re FABULOUS! (Complete with a happy Jesus with open arms.)
  • If Jesus hated gays, then why did he have a beard? (Quote from Sara Benson, a very funny woman. Expect to see her on Comedy Central within 10 years.)
  • My personal favourite: Homophobes are just too scared of black people to be racist.

The latter one is not true, though. They are likely pretty racist as well.

While I would counter their screams of, “YOU’RE GOING TO HELL!” with screams of, “ONLY CLOSET CASES USE BULLHORNS!”, they definitely started to run out of excuses for their mind set. They claimed that gay people were performing witchcraft. Gay readers, is this true??? The you bump dicks, do you turn into frogs or wolves or something? If so, where do I sign up? I want to be a velociraptor! You've been holding out! The bigots then went into how selfish everyone there was, and that they don’t want to share their toys. This explains a lot: all this time, I thought homophobic bigots who hide behind religion and heckle parades are made up of extremely closeted people who are hiding their true selves by hating on open people. They are actually middle children who didn't get enough attention when they were young! It was all about Marsha, Marsha, Marsha! Parents, pay attention to your middle children, or they’ll waste their time berating people for no reason!

My favourite moment of the Parade was when I was my way to volunteer for the Festival after some good-hearted ribbing, People wanted to take pictures of me next to a sign-waving bigot, and I obliged. Sadly, he noticed what my sign said, and he sneered and walked away. Then this conversation happened:

ME: Aw, where are you going? I thought we were having fun!
SIGN-WAVING BIGOT: I'm not scared of you. You just stay there, and I'll go over here.
ME: I'll go over there too. No big deal.
SWB: No, you go over there.
ME: No, I think I'll go here. This is a public sidewalk after all.
SWB: NO!
Me in action.
ME: Oh, what's the matter? Do you not like it when someone comes around you mocking & berating your very existence?

It is highly doubtful that we’ll be friends. The one bad part about this experience was that a woman approached me right after that exchange and very angrily asked me if I was gay, and what did I think I was doing. I paused and let her read my sign, and then she got it. She told me that she was about to say that I looked “gay as all get out” and I had nerve...were it not for me haveing to run to volunteer, I would have asked here what exactly was “gay as all get out” about me? I was wearing a t-shirt and jeans. What does “gay” look like, for that matter? In an era of Michael Sam and Anderson Cooper and Sheryl Swoopes and Ari Shapiro, I think we’ve proven that “gay” looks like everyone else.

Volunteering was fun. My friends set up a history exhibit on Friday, and given the amount of people that were helping at the peak and the amount of people giving us different directions, I felt like Yakkety Sacks should have been playing in the background. However, it looked AWESOME when it was done. On Saturday, we wristbanded people entering the Festival. I got hit on numerous times. Two drag queens asked if I’d be their baby-daddy. One of them had her mother with her...mom was very hot. this raises the question: is there any good way to ask a drag queen if you can get her mother’s number? During the Picnic, I just directed foot traffic with a bullhorn, so is was kind of like being at the parade, but I was yelling encouraging things instead of kvetching about not sharing toys and witchcraft.

So the weekend was fun and full of a few takeaways:

  • Anti-gay protesters talk more about penises than the people they are protesting. It is very telling...
  • Protesting protesters is fun, but it’s about as pointless as snarky comments on the internet unless you get your hands a little dirty by volunteering.
  • Trying to put down a person by saying that he/she looks “gay” is kind of dumb. Allies should keep that in mind.
  • If I WERE gay, I would have gotten so much play that weekend...though I definitely did get fucked. $5 for a Budweiser?
  • The biggest downside to Pride is that nearly all of the women I want to hit on at Pride want to hit on all the other women I want to hit on at Pride. C’est la vie.

Pride is probably my favourite Rochester festival. The Lilac Fest is only enjoyable for me if I overdose on Claritin before I go. East End Fest should be renamed BRO-FEST DAY OF AXE SPRAY AND JAGER BOMBS! RAAAARGH! Jazz Fest is fun, but a little bit expensive. Perhaps next year for the parade, I’ll just get a 10’x15’ flag and figure out a way to roll it out in front of the hate-sprayers, completely blocking them from view. I’m taking volunteers now...

Wednesday, July 16, 2014

Not Thorita. Thor

A black person forced to
contribute to the success
of America? NONSENSE
Thor is going to be a woman in the next volume of the comic series. This may not be a big deal to you, but this news incited an amazing nerd rage, not seen since Idris Elba was cast as Heimdal in the Thor movies. Or when Marvel made a black Spider-Man. Or when the origins of Captain America not only resembled a superpowered Tuskegee Experiment, but also yielded a family of black Captain Americas. Or when DC made the original Green Lantern gay. Nerds hate change. They love their angrections™, though.


When I collected comic books, I did not pick up Thor. A big blond white dude who came from a European historic theology did not sound that appealing to my adolescent, pro-black, D. Militant mindset. I was more into the freaks and geeks of the comic world, so Spider-Man and of course the X-men, the black people of the comic world, complete with their own Martin Luther King and Malcolm X rivalry! Thor was way too Aryan for me to get into him. I still am not into Thor, but 50% of the Thor movies were cool, and I respect him as a Marvel staple. So why write about a character about whom I don’t really care? Because of two things: The announcement was covered nearly every news outlet, and it proves once again that Marvel > DC.






Twitter went nuts with this news. I heard it on NPR. NPR! Do you know what this means? Comic culture is more and more mainstream. Back when I was deep into comics, I had to hide them with my porn stash (THEY WERE ACTUALLY MAGAZINES! :-o) so as to not be ridiculed for having them. Comics were not cool! I did nothing for my popularity by having a copy of Uncanny X-Men sandwiched between my math and English books! Now, not only are there blockbuster movies that are actually good coming out, but now we are hearing about what’s happening in the actual books from whence they came! It’s like Entertainment Weekly, but with laser beams!


You must love Joss Whedon.
The reason why Marvel > DC right now is that they have been blazing trails in depicting more diverse characters. Ever since Black Panther came on the scene, Marvel has been innovating. Granted, the last time Thor was a woman, it was a punishment. Odin made Thor a woman because that was the “weaker sex”. This is insulting to everyone. This book hopefully makes up for that little indiscretion. A lot of people have been saying that Marvel needs to better develop its female superpowered stars. Well this definitely beats trying to familiarise the masses to Ms. Marvel! The rage will subside. It’s somewhat amusing. Where was this rage when the rebooted Battlestar Galactica made Starbuck a woman, and when Boomer went from being a black dude to an Asian woman? DC needs to step up its game now. I hear a Wonder Woman movie is in the works, but not before yet another Superman/Batman film, a Shazam movie, and a Justice League movie! Really? They should be making up for the whole Women in Refrigerators thing. Having Gail SImone on your staff isn’t absolution for such terrible development of female characters in comic books! It’s not penance! You actually have to DO SOMETHING to develop them...and not kill them off. Marvel has not been an angel over the years, but at least at least they seem to be moving in the right direction. Good for them. At least they don’t have a whole website dedicated to stupid things they did.

Wednesday, July 2, 2014

Hobby Sloppy

By now, you know that the Supreme Court sided with Hobby Lobby regarding women’s health, thereby making women less human than the fetuses that grow inside them and corporations. A company can now refuse to fund certain forms of birth control that they deem abortifacients, based on the owners’ religious beliefs. Bonus: the decision further proves that John Lennon was right. Women are the niggers of the world.



Originally, I was going to talk about how hypocritical it is for Hobby Lobby to not fund birth control, yet still covers vasectomies and erectile dysfunction pills. Given that the founders are Christian folk from Oklahoma, I would gather their stance on sex “only procreation”. Vasectomies MAY be done for certain health reasons, but the majority of Cialis and Viagra are being used by old men who just want to have more sex, for enjoyment. Birth control is used for much more than birth control. Some women need the hormone balance that birth control provides, among other purposes. Ever heard of Endometriosis? It’s a debilitatingly painful condition that causes uterine scarring. I have a friend who has it, and were it not for her birth control, she would be in pain during every waking moment of her day. Viagra let’s old people have sex. They’re definitely not having sex for procreation. But I digress, as that is not why this all happened.


Originally, I was going to lament about the abortion misnomer regarding birth control. Yes, some deem IUDs as a form of abortion, but those people ARE NOT SCIENTISTS. I would not take automotive advice from a syphilitic cat seriously, so why would I take medical information from a person who is not a medical professional? It makes no sense that women’s health is so regulated in Congress and state legislatures based on so much false information. Men can pretty much do as they please, but a woman’s health, the element of her that makes her survive, is up for a vote by a majority of people who are not women and have little to no knowledge of female physiology.


Originally, I was going to rail about the precedent that is set by this decision. Alito claims that this only applies to Hobby Lobby and its religious objection to women being healthy and does not count for other forms of discrimination, but if that were the case, then the only racially desegregated schools in the 1950s would be in Topeka, and only for Mr. Brown’s children. The only place where one would have an unregulated interracial marriage would be in Virginia. You would think that a member of the Supreme Court would know how the Supreme Court works. How soon before a deli decides that it will not serve homosexuals, based on the owner’s “religious beliefs”? When do we see a Muslim man turned away from restaurant, and the proprietor will not have to veil his racism? When will someone who beats his wife and children use the defense that he was just doing his “biblical duty”? I wonder if Hobby Lobby will mind me shopping their store nude. My religion is Hedonist.


Originally, I was going to request that everyone get to work on a Ruth Bader Ginsburg action figure, because her 35-page dissent may have been the best rallying cry for anyone who cares about human rights. If you don’t have time to read the entire dissent, here are a few gems from her statement:
  • Would the exemption…extend to employers with religiously grounded objections to blood transfusions (Jehovah's Witnesses); antidepressants (Scientologists); medications derived from pigs, including anesthesia, intravenous fluids, and pills coated with gelatin (certain Muslims, Jews, and Hindus); and vaccinations[?]…Not much help there for the lower courts bound by today's decision.
  • Religious organizations exist to foster the interests of persons subscribing to the same religious faith. Not so of for-profit corporations. Workers who sustain the operations of those corporations commonly are not drawn from one religious community.
  • ...in a decision of startling breadth, [it] would allow corporations to opt out of almost any law that they find "incompatible with their sincerely held religious beliefs.
My favorite:
  • The court, I fear, has ventured into a minefield.


Originally, I was going to bring up the coincidence that the Court decision came on the same day as the anniversary of the release of Do the Right Thing. Perhaps it is a sign. If anything, there will be a stronger mobilization for people to go to the polls in November, before women are not allowed to vote again. DO we need to get all women prosthetic penises to wear so that they will be taken seriously?Perhaps it is time for feminism get a new anthem: PE’s “Fight the Power”. Maybe it’s time to go to Hobby Lobby with polished up metal trash cans and scream, “RADIOOOO!!!” at the top of our lungs*.


These were going to be the points I brought up, until I found out that Hobby Lobby COVERED all forms of birth control UNTIL the Affordable Care Act went into effect. They didn’t object until an outside force urged them to sue. Women weren’t the target. Barack Obama was the target. Women were the casualties in a war against a President they just didn’t like. So what is worse, that this whole suit was just a veiled attack on the President and his perceived policies, or that no one seemed to care that private citizens would be hurt in the process, or both?


The United States is in a state of moral decay, and it is not due to sexual freedom, or safer sex, or men kissing each other on national television. The US’s moral decay is being perpetrated by the citizens who are harping about the moral decay of America. Those who seek to hide behind the Bible to justify their hatred of acceptance of all are the ones who will destroy this country. They are the ones who claim that want freedom for all, but then aim to turn the political landscape more into a feudal system instead of a democratic republic. This court decision proves that no one is safe from the war for a Red, White, and Blue oligarchy, where sexism, racism, homophobia, and most importantly, classism rule. If citizens don’t make their voices heard, then we are all going down. Get out, and Fight the Power. Fight the powers that be.**


*DON’T throw cans into Hobby Lobby’s windows. Thanks to ANOTHER Supreme Court decision, you can stand in front of Hobby Lobby and just wave them menacingly. You don’t even have to be 35 feet away!

**That was really corny, but it was either that or “Vote or DIE, motherfuckers!”

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