By Sean “I Care About Facts” Torrie

(Nail on the head, good sir! And with all the cultural sensitivity of mercilessly tickling a child of Thalidomide.)

I love the Tea Party Movement. I really do, I mean that. I’m a huge fan of a free show; this is why I go to the mall after I’m done with all my Christmas shopping, just to watch other people look insane. I feel like the Tea Baggers have all the potential to pull the severely retarded members of the Republican party out and into a third team and maybe we’ll have at least one political party that can function without a complete and undisputed majority, or without referring to their dark master for instructions on how to further deplete the United States of post-Enlightenment thought.

What I really enjoy is the complete lack of research with these folks. Are there any economists in this team? Is there a single lawyer who hasn’t been disbarred?

“Oh Sean, you’ve just been reading the wrong sources, you’ve been corrupted by your generation’s hard-on for ‘hope,’ and ‘yes you can’.”

No. But fuck you very much for judging me. I voted for Nader. I did it with a smile on my face because this Obama guy seemed too idealistic, and McCain TOTALLY SOLD OUT TO PANDER TO THE FAR RIGHT REPUBLICANS. I dug McCain as a presidential candidate, until he became a presidential candidate.

I’d have also loved to see a New Yorker in the White House, but Giuliani is a whore.

I’ve digressed.

Do you know what happens with the ginormous bank that you borrowed money from becomes bankrupt and has to close down? The answer isn’t that you get to own your partially paid for house. I’m not even sorry, you’re a nitwit if that was your answer. Your house gets sold and you get much, much less than a fair notice of eviction. Odds are good your house will be purchased by a less ass-backwards corporation who will know to demand a higher credit rating than the bank did, and either way you’re homeless. Then the government can pay for the construction of a few million shelters. We saw how well they did with that task in Louisiana a few years ago. [All dirtying up the Superdome with the filthy riff-raff and assorted hoipoloi - ed.]

I think it is pretty fair to say that the bank bailout was with a great deal of the “representation of the people” that the Tea Party claims a lack of. If your concern with this is a fear of socialism then you have a series of other concerns to address: like the fact we’ve been a socialist republic since the ’30s, or that while socialism is communism’s cousin, it’s communism’s cousin that got a degree in stable economics, not totalitarian politics.

“But Sean, the Nazis were socialist, that makes it bad, right?”

Ok. This is important, kids, and I think it is something everyone should know: under the correct temporal circumstances, everybody is Hitler.  I’ll shorten Godwin’s Law for you: The first person to bring a comparison to Nazis into an argument loses. It’s a god damned cop-out. You’re not thinking creatively enough to be winning an argument and have not only lost that argument, but for the sake of argument, all of your friends and loved ones because they don’t respect you anymore.

Lemme tell you about Nazis for a minute here. The fun things. Nazis had one of the strongest nationwide anti-smoking campaigns in history. That’s right, they were militantly against smoking cigarettes. Hitler was a vegetarian. He didn’t eat meat because he felt it was cruel. Hitler was also militantly loyal to his girlfriend. They got married like 2 days before his documented suicide. Never cheated on her. Ever. Period.

To be fair, his hobby of making adorable striped pajamas for mice didn't leave much time for browsing JDate.

Now, I don’t know about you, but if you wanna worry about Nazis, then I’d be far, far more concerned about a pair of unmarried heterosexual life-partners who shop at Wholefoods, than a blink-of-the-eye decision to save a few million homes by throwing money at a failing bank, in order to protect the people of a nation. Frankly, people who shop at Wholefoods kinda make me uncomfortable anyway. Stop taking Eastern thought and forcing it down my throat with your Western approach of indoctrinating everyone around you.

This, however, again brings me all the way back to the point I was working to.

I’m a New Yorker. I’m amazingly proud of it. We are an aggressive, mean spirited, and cutthroat people who live (in the metropolitan area, anyway) in one of the wealthiest, most intelligent (average IQ here is the second highest in the world – and I hear living in Tokyo is hell) places on earth. Despite this, our local economy is in the gutter and now we’re taxing the living hell out of cigarettes, with a 20% increase that rolled around on July that will be impacting the entire state (not just the civilized part) and there’s word that Nassau county will be pushing another raise shortly, and further word that there’ll be a beer tax soon. Happy 4th of July: it’s $14 a pack in Manhattan if you wanna celebrate liberty in flavor country.

Now in one of the wealthiest states in the union, certainly we’re the only one with our own central bank, I find it impossible that it is a lack of proper funds responsible as much as an overt mismanagement of finance, and a nurturing attention to pork fat spending. So that, let us just assume, it isn’t so much that we don’t have enough money to run the county, as much as  the elected officials need to eat vegetarian meals with their long-term monogamous sexual counterparts, and not smoke cigarettes after sex, only to later ensure the county pays for the new story on their home, and corporations can jump through a tax loophole and not distribute their wealth. This, my dear readers, is some overt taxation without representation. Meanwhile there was a near-miss vote to close a school in the local district? Call me silly, but education seems kinda important to me. Undereducated people is how you get a standard for education lowered in a region: poorer performance becomes acceptable in colleges, and dumber (or socially ignorant, and therefore morally complacent) people getting business degrees, running the economy into the ground and causing a need for a bailout.

BA-ZING!!! How does he do it?

Now I get that the whole Tea Party thing is a primarily Midwestern thing and all, so would someone mind if I borrowed a small army of unemployment-beneficiary rednecks that are anti-socialism so that I can host either a protest or riot (whatever happens, right?) to get my cigars (sorry, if I’m putting a phallus in my mouth, lighting it on fire and nurturingly puffing on it, it’s gonna be HUGE) back down to a reasonable price? New York’s governor is black and blind too! So that should be all the motivation they need to really get going.

Well, they certainly did warn us, and now it’s all over. The most impenetrable fortress of good and light in the entire world, the epicenter of spirituality since it’s owners said so, the Vatican itself has been infiltrated by none other than the Father of Lies and the Son of Perdition, the Great Deceiver, Apollyon himself.

What has 2 thumbs and more aliases than a cross-dressing old west outlaw on stilts?

Or so says the Vatican’s chief exorcist Father Gabriele Amorth. Usually they have cooler titles for the big positions in Rome, but they probably figured that a surname that could easily have been a Tolkien mega-baddy was enough badass for one man.

Father Gabriele Amorth, 85, who has been the Vatican’s chief exorcist for 25 years [was ordained in 1954 and became an official exorcist in 1986] and says he has dealt with 70,000 cases of demonic possession, said… “When one speaks of ‘the smoke of Satan’ in the holy rooms, it is all true – including these latest stories of violence and paedophilia.”

For those of you not playing with your home Catholic Calumny Calculator, that’s a whopping 823 exorcisms a year, assuming Captain Saniclean Soul started in his infancy.  And since he was made a priest, which is when one is technically allowed to perform exorcisms, he would have had to perform 1,250 a year, roughly two a day, every day for 56 years. Sonofabitch was working on the Sabbath! Either that or he doubled up on Mondays, which breaks one of the 6 Davis Directives (”Thou shalt not do Mondays”). Either way, I believe a stoning is in order.

Still, you’ve got the Vatican’s chief Hellblazer soiling his soutane, seeing Satan everywhere he turns. In choirists, slap-happy relatives of the Pope that hit kids even though “they don’t like to,” priests with tiny oral fixations, American dioceses that cut off charity work for political gain (wait, that one’s me). See, in every other country, this is the stage of treatment called, “Not even close to ready for group therapy,” otherwise known as, “Crazy old knucklehead.” But this guy has been trained, he’s a global VIP (let that sink in, Catholics), and we should probably trust him because he’s an expert that has been doing this for years. He witnessed Hitler, Stalin, and some rando from the Swiss Guard who killed his commander and his wife because he didn’t get a medal… and because he was banging his commander. All possessed by the Devil, as were the attempts on the last two Pope’s lives, and

He said it sometimes took six or seven of his assistants to to hold down a possessed person. Those possessed often yelled and screamed and spat out nails or pieces of glass [because you were holding them down?], which he kept in a bag [por que?]… He was among Vatican officials who warned that J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels made a “false distinction between black and white magic”.

God damned fiction and it’s lack of truth about magic! Also, those damned kids who keep losing their Nerf footballs in his yard were definitely possessed by Satan. And the Nerf company, come to mention it. What motherfucking era do we live in? Wait, before we do this, let me buy a shitload of indulgences in advance, because this whole room is going to need some industrial strength spiritual TP.

He approves, however, of the 1973 film The Exorcist, which although “exaggerated” offered a “substantially exact” picture of possession.

Stop! No more! Jesus, we’ve heard enough to convert to Scientology just to tone down the crackass a couple notches. Demons? Possessions? Falsities about magic? Magic, I ask you. This isn’t some crusty fossil back from the early bird, harmlessly yelling inanities from his front porch. This is one of the guys you Catholics call one of your honchos, one of the men you trust to lead you through life safely and sanely to your final reward. That makes him a crusty fossil yelling inanities from a pulpit, and you‘re still a member of the organization that makes him the chief of anything but Cream of Wheat and bird feeding. (The punchline of this paragraph has been bolded).

It doesn’t matter whether you believe him or if you think he’s a nut. No, the pedophile priests are not possessed by Satan, they are at best confused by the complete lack of sexual outlet provided in your closed-minded culture, at worst sick deviants who demand swift chemical castration. The priests and nuns who hit kids are not possessed by Satan, they are incompetent care-givers that should not be trusted with children just because they wear a funny hat. The priests and Cardinals buying male hookers are not possessed by Satan, they want their nut without having to deal with your insane bullshit. Why? Because Satan doesn’t exist, but what do exist are scandals that are ripping away the absolute power you’ve enjoyed since you instituted the Dark Ages, and the Church needs a scape goat. What do exist are the sick fucks in your employ that don’t disappear when you play musical dildo-chairs with them, no matter how good Italians are supposed to be at making that happen. And those around the world that still call themselves Catholics are as guilty as if they boinked a choir boy themselves, because there is no good goddamned reason you shouldn’t bail and worship how you see fit. You can still make yourself a nuisance to the rest of us without literally, 100% being an accessory to hundreds or thousands of vile crimes and the outright lunacy evidenced in the psychotic babbling we just witnessed from the still-employed Father. And don’t give me that, “I’m not the one who blew little boys, I just love jesus and my neighbor” bullshit. That’s the same kind of misleading statement as “I was just following orders.” You’re still wearing the swastika. Let me leave you with some fun…

Were I Father Amorth, I’d check my GPS of Evil, and then crap my cassock (I had one more) over the Devil doing his work Down Under, with the release of AussieBum’s Bannana Skivvies for Men.

Left: The God-intended use for Bananas. Right: Satan's Shit Streak

Hunky AND Banana flavored? The Church needs to know about this. I’ve held your hand long enough, I think you can manufacture your own slew of jokes about underwear made from bananas. Otherwise, I have failed you.

This video is… NSFW? I guess it depends if the rotund chick with the personality disorder in the next cubicle over mistakes the subject of the video for her hermaphroditic cousin and decides to narc. There’s always one. Am I right?

The first walrus to be displayed in captivity, like in a public aquarium situation, was in London in 1608, according to this weird ass encyclopedia of zoos I found. The editor of that thing must be on some serious uppers to be comfortable with the culmination of his life’s work, the purpose of which seems to be to give me some contextual historical information with which to frame an article about  a walrus that can blow himself.

Still, this means it has taken about 400 years of having idiot children poke, punch, and lick the reinforced glass of their tanks to finally say, “You know what? Fuck it. You want to watch me so badly, check out what I can do,” immediately making the dude holding the camera fume with jealousy. You can hear it in his voice, as he trembles like Michael J Fox playing Operation trying to sound calm. “I bet you like that,” the cameraman says to his female companion, which makes no god damned sense until you consider that he’s probably projecting.

What’s truly remarkable about this is the restraint of the species as a whole. How long do you think Human males would last at a zoo with a super power like that without bending over and gumming a root for the benefit of the ice-cream wielding offspring of their slavers? A couple of hours? It took these guys 400 years of suppressing the ability that is most men’s answer to the hypothetical “which super power would you choose?” question before they got comfortable enough to lay themselves some lip in front of paying customers. I’m sure the information is not new, that walruses have performed their shame in front of care-takers and scientists they really trust several times over. I’m sure these people have known of the animal’s ability, and that knowledge is buried in some scholarly paper they would never show to people like me out of fear the subject would be treated with less respect than it deserves (what, me?). But this is the first time I’ve seen a layman capture an autophilatic mammal (yeah, I made it up, call Webster’s, I’m Shakespeare, bitch) go all slobbery knob on itself on film, making the walrus’ blessing from Satan a matter of public record.

As mentioned before, as a matter of evolution, Humans are losing speed to lowlier creatures daily. Dolphins are teaching each other stunts, ants collectively get smarter the larger their swarm is. And now walruses are performing feats some men try once or twice a year like they have Anterograde Amnesia of the dick, just to make sure they haven’t developed the ability since last they tried. Really, who’s fooling who? The captive walrus who is fed daily and has people thrill to his goop gobbling, or the people paying to keep them and see them?

(To the uninitiated, I introduce Steel Panther, and this is what they think of your intelligence. I am not allowed to show the picture displaying what they think of your confusion concerning your sexuality.)

Scumbag Style recommends you stock your useless bomb shelter with as much Aqua Net as your local CVS carries, because there’s about to be a run on the hairspray banks. What we as Americans dig is dictated by heads of corporations, and they are running out of marketable material. Since they won’t be advocating free will any time soon, repackaging one of the most embarrassing eras of rock and roll seems to be the best option. Since the American consciousness has a weird combination of ADD and OCD that makes it fall romantically for anything it is told to, and the guido fascination has maybe a year left on it (Jersey Shore will still run for 7 seasons), look for big hair, leopard leggings, and Irocs to come back in a big way.

That’s right, Hair Metal is making the rounds again, and noone is safe. Especially Tawny Kitaen, whose death would take the phenomenon from mild ironic fascination to full blown Twilight. A couple of examples have hit the news in the past week, the temporal proximity of which guarantees that this thing will snowball out of control by the new year, and we’ll all spend 2010 in eyeliner and skinny scarves.

First of all, Def Leppard, which is to metal (even Hair Metal) what Jon Secada is to Oi! Punk. They’re looking to make their own comeback by shifting publishing rights to Primary Wave in order to unload useless video games and cell phone apps on consumers with enough cash leftover after buying B.U.M. sweatshirts and bicycle shorts to wear under their mini-skirts. But the best plan in the works is a cartoon television series based on the band. One can only pray it will a Hanna Barbera tour de force, and engender a sort of combination of Scooby Doo and The Monkees. “Hey hey, we’re Def Leppard, and people say we prance around like girls!” Only instead of playing doofus tag with fake ghosts, viewers will be treated to the resoundingly hilarious shame of the boys opening for Billy Squire, and the hysterical losing of a member to alcoholism. And just imagining the physics-defying chase scene comedy version of Rick getting his arm ripped off in a car accident makes me go an offensively huge rubbery one. Mayhap it will also have the hidden message for children of cynicism in the face of fear-mongering, assuring the kids that Def Leppard never really existed at all, and they’re all just ornery old farmers in white chick masks.

In related news, contemporary (?) Hair Metal and testical-strainingly awesomely named act Steel Panther are moving up in the world. And not a moment too soon. A glorified house band for years at the Key Club in Hollywood, their home venue has just been moved to the House of Blues on Sunset Strip. No word yet on what the news will mean for their regular appearances (well) off the Vegas strip at Green Valley Ranch, though their European tour (seriously?) has already seen several of those dates canceled. Reports are that they started out as a parody metal band (also as Danger Kitty, Metal Shop, and Metal Skool, successively), but all of that changed when girls and metal icons alike did not get point at all and started showing up at their shows. Now we have a bonified, younger generation “legitimate” Hair Metal act on our hands, and we all know that when you get one going, you can’t stop it til it blows its blue eyeshadowed load all over everyone’s denim jacket.

In the meantime, the man who brought Hair Metal to the college chicks who didn’t think it was gay enough, Mr. Jon Bonjovi, survives to fight off obscurity once more, at least metaphorically. Seems Satan came to claim his endof Bon Jovi’s inexplicably successful rock star deal and take the lead singer’s son. No dice, Satan! The kid was rushed to hospital for an undisclosed illness (soulrapevictimitis), but was released so quickly it was a wonder it even made the news. Just kidding. Everybody knows celebrity children are more important than war, famine, genocide, female circumcision (illegal today in Uganda, bitches!),  The press wouldn’t say which son, because if it was revealed that it was his first born, the less clinically retarded half of his fan base might have started to catch on.

One thing Hair Metal did right was try to put sex back into a genre (metal) that would eventually become the

The very obvious exception to the "hair metal sucks" rule of thumb.

avatar of the nerd. The high female attendance of Steel Panther’s concerts even today shows that femininity and uninventive riffs are libidinously preferable to the more legitimate metal (whatever that means) of Megadeth and Scar Symmetry. Mentioning to a chick at a party that your favorite band is Lamb of God will earn you more Posehn points than going on a half hour tirade about who shot first, but say you dig Motley Crue and for some reason the panties fly like Jello at the special school. Also, the big hair looks phenomenal on chicks, especially the dark haired ones. When we came down from all the coke binges and neon of the 80s and 86ed the entire culture of the decade, losing the big hair was like throwing away the baby with the Crystal Pepsi. Oh, and androgyny fetishists, prepare to spend the next few years of your life beating off to MTV 5, the one that actually shows music videos.

But in this new Hair Metal revival that’s sure to take this country by storm like Sarah Palin on speed, we’re sure to see far more of our past regrets than actual benefits. Prepare for your exxxxtreme rock station to adopt girlish wails on its promo bumps, and Hot Topic to continue “ironically” carrying what every little girl wants to wear anyway. Add to this the need for everyone to already cite Hair Metal apologists and genuine women Journey as ”one of their favorite bands” and Bon Jovi to simply not die, this brave new world of slap bracelets and head bands promises to be one confuddled mass of misunderstanding and annoyance. Though it may be the silver bullet that finally puts Nickelback out of its misery. If so, I can live through another decade of the post-apocalyptic, artless void that was the 80s.

(Hit up Steel Panther’s official site, if you have a steel sense of humor. The best part is that every vowel has an umlaut over it. This is some extreme. ass. umlauting. If you had any doubts that Steel Panther is not fucking around, this should comfort you.)