Can I get a Pack of Crusty Lung Light Menthol 100 Extra Slims Please?

Good news everybody! It’s still legal to suck disease straight down your throat, and it just got a whole lot sexier!

Word came down today that the smooth, rich flavor that just makes life worth living is now going to come in new, “edgier” goth doom packaging. Adorned in “labels that depict in graphic detail the negative health effects of tobacco use… the corpse of a smoker, diseased lungs, and a mother holding her baby with smoke swirling around them” and hip new catch phrases like “Smoking can kill you” and “Cigarettes cause cancer”… Hooray?

No shit...

This will of course do very little to curb smoking, likely as much as, say, distributing servings of heroin (that’s how they’re doled out, right? Serving sizes with nutritional information on the side? I haven’t caught up on my DVRed episodes of “The Oxycontin Express”, please, no spoilers) in mylar party balloons with the words “Don’t” scribbled on the side in the blood of your own children. See, we as Americans often do stupid shit, that’s kind of our thing. Not that smoking is strictly an American past time, ’cause it ain’t, but we know how to put our own particular child lock brand of insulting stupidity on it. It’s the American way.

There’s nothing in this latest move by the FDA about banning the sale of cigarettes or tobacco products. Nothing to remove from the shelves a product that is responsible for approximately 443,000 deaths a year. Their solution is simply to make the packs hard to look at and hope to scare smokers straight. By making half the pack look like a snuff film, telling them that “Eating poison will surely assassinate you” and giving them the 1-800 number to a stop smoking hot line, the FDA has done its job and made the world safe again. Smokers today are allowed to smoke legally only in a two foot square cabinet under their bathroom sink which upon moving must be shipped to a special cigarette nook disposal facility in North Dakota where it is then buried three miles deep under a thick protective layer of E.T. Atari 2600 game cartridges until Jesus can safely exorcise all of the inky black cancer vapors or the sun expands to the point of devouring the solar system and all life as we know it… Which ever comes first. Making the packs scary ain’t gonna stop smokers from smoking their smoke making smokes.

Debating whether or not cigarettes should be made illegal is pointless. They never will be. They’ll be $60 a pack and sold wrapped in photographs of the grandchildren that cancer will prevent you from ever meeting before they’re made illegal. Should they be? Well, the way I see it, the key to whether something should be illegal or not should be whether or not that something’s sale would be approved if it were presented as a brand new product today.

Chainsaw... it's what your face wants!

I personally have a product that has been proven to, if used properly, fucking murder you. When can I start selling this thing to children while telling anyone trying to arrest me that I am in no way trying to sell them to children? My new product is called “Chainsaw to the Face”. And just as the name suggests, it is the rich, refreshing taste of chainsaw, delivered conveniently and comfortably, directly to the god damned face. Chainsaws are legal, faces are most certainly still legal, despite all of big anti-face’s efforts to make them otherwise. Why couldn’t I sell boxes of “Chainsaw to the Face” in every gas station and drug store across God’s own free land. Go ahead FDA, slather it in warning labels if it’ll make you feel like you’re doing your job. Dip our boxes in pictures of the results of the use of our product: old people with their faces chainsawed off. “Chainsaw to the Face” is just too addictive, that’s why we secretly try to hook our customers when they’re young, to get the most possible “Chainsaw to the Face” years out of them before, inevitably, they are killed by the proper, clinical, only possible use of “Chainsaw to the Face”: a chainsaw to the face…

The only thing the FDA can think to do, or will be allowed to do, to a product that kills 1 in every 693 people in this country is to make half of the pack look like what will happen if you use what’s inside as directed. Nobody at this point in human history doesn’t know that cigarettes are bad for you. The last person born before packs of cigarette had to legally start telling people that they wanted to murder you for buying them, turned 56 this year. Seeing exactly how cigarettes plan on doing it every time you pick up your pack isn’t going to make many people suddenly realize that their sucking a dozen kinds of poison into their face might not be the best thing for them… They could start packaging cigarettes in people recently murdered by cigarettes and it would have little effect on their purchase power.

By the estimates of this article and of new studies 20% of Americans smoke: about 46 million Smokey-Americans. By implementing this new horrific labeling, the FDA, BY THEIR OWN ESTIMATES, believe they will reduce the number of smokers by 213,000 in 2013 “with smaller additional reductions through 2031″. So their big victory against tobacco is that by making half of the pack look like a cereal killer’s frigidaire, they are going to reduce the number of smokers in the United States by… wait for it… 0.46%! Twice as many people will still die in 2013 from smoking, as their new horror porn warning labels will save over the next 18 years…

The tobacco companies are laughing their tar covered balls off at you FDA. 

Cigarettes got in on the ground floor of murdering Americans with their products. tobacco products have been killing Americans as long as there’ve been Americans. And if one of our nation’s original biggest exports had been cocaine of heroin or Chainsaws to the Face, then they would be just as inexorably entrenched in American commerce as the tobacco industry.

So good for you tobacco, you made yourself too important to have to give a shit that you’re murdering your customers and too big to be stopped. Good for you.

Anarchgay in the USA

Every time a gay thinks about marrying, God gets punched in the taint by the Devil and a kitten sucks a dick.

Footballman Tyree, famous for holding ball to his head doesn't want two men to legally do same under God.

A same-sex marriage bill is currently working its way through the New York state legislature which can only mean one thing, Jesus is warming up his wave machine while solemnly shaking his head in disappointment with us all. How do I know this? Because the Wide Receiver of the Apocalypse has deliver unto us our one and only warning.

You see, in a video released Wednesday by the National Organization for Marriage, former super bowling footballist David Tyree pleads for our continued discrimination against a people solely because we think the way they touch parts is icky, not just because God says so, but because God says so and, you know, for the children.

“You can’t teach something that you don’t have,” Tyree said in the video. “So two men will never be able to teach a woman how to be a woman.”

To say the statement by this ball hugging man in tight, tight knee pants is ignorant on the surface of it would be a disservice to the additional ignorance below the surface. The obvious implication here not only slights the ability of same-sex couples to raise a child, which as I’ve chronicled recently is nigh biologically impossible, but it also automatically implies that single parents raising a child of the opposite sex of them are doing it wrong. UNLESS of course, this statement is only meant to say that two parents of the same gender automatically negate any teaching they are attempting to pass on to their child, simply by the power of their reproductive organs not interlocking like Voltron limbs in the manner in which this ex-group man showerer deems Biblically correct. Because unless that’s the case he’s making, all children of divorce or any other single parentage should automatically be taken from their homes the second it is not populated by two alternately gendered parental figures, you know, for their own well being.

But the other bit of ignorance about the statement that probably bothers me more is a more stereotype based bit of observation. Two gay men would likely raise a better woman than a hundred straight women and two lesbian women would undoubtedly raise a better man than a dozen dozen hetro blokes. Or maybe that’s my ignorance clouding his ignorance in a hot, steamy ignorance sauna, so foggy from the drippy steam, just groping for answers, hands, grasping things that they might not normally if they could see clearly, it may be wrong elsewhere, but right here, right now, there’s nothing more right in this entire world!

…

What was I saying?

Ah, right, former professional sweaty man who was paid millions of dollars to run from the grasp of larger, heaving sweaty men and his hatred of amateur sweaty men’s want to be sweaty together…

“Marriage is the only relationship that actually mirrors the relationship with God,” he said.

Our Father, who art a total Top...

Which, if you really wanted to be a dick, you could say SOUNDS a lot like him saying that as a believer, he is married to God, as generally depicted as a large, burly, bearded man in all artistic representations, which makes his statement sound kind of hypocritical. Feetball catchman Tyree can be married to what the community would call a “bear” but other mortal men can’t marry similarly mortal men. That’s kinda unfair really.

Let’s also just gloss over the ignorant hypocrisy of another statement of his objection in the article that:

it is not justifiable to alter a long-standing institution “because a minority — an influential minority — has … an agenda,”

Says the millionaire man of non-caucasian ancestry whom without the agenda of an influential minority not sixty years ago couldn’t buy a sandwich in many establishments owned by proprietors who hated his ancestors simply because of how they were born and the lifestyle they lived.

But the main thrust of his argument is that allowing dude one to buy a piece of paper that says he and dude two are going to be able to put each other on their health insurance and allow them to visit one another while in the hospital, that it could only signal for this great, man on woman bonded nation:

“the beginning of our country sliding toward … anarchy,” he said

Now, “anarchy” as defined by Susan Merriam and Alouicious Webster is:

1

a : absence of government
b : a state of lawlessness or political disorder due to the absence of governmental authority
c : a utopian society of individuals who enjoy complete freedom without government

2

a: absence or denial of any authority or established order
b: absence of order

Anarchy is so gay...

It’s probably safe to say that Mr. Tyree didn’t mean it in the “utopian society” sense of the word, so I can only assume ”catchy runny yay” believes that allowing two ladies to scissor the night away as legally recognized wife and wife will somehow bring about the total collapse of the United States government. I’m not sure if he thinks this will come about by gays sucking up the steps of the capital building and ousting our elected leaders by force, or if he thinks that knowing fellahs would be out there sword fighting with their two married dongs would drive all of our countries legislators to mass suicide, leaving no one left to not pass laws out of petty childish gamesmanship or blind incompetence and or intolerance.

Why what two people do in the comfort of their own home bothers so many people is beyond me. If you think two hunky slabs of beef getting married on court house steps somehow delegitimizes your own legal bonding, it seems like you’ve got insecurity issues that have nothing to do with who sticks what in which where. Nobody is screaming at you about the failed experiment that is heterosexual marriage where more than half of these holy unions end up in do overs. So how about we just give marriage to the gays for a while, see if they have any better luck with it?

 

“We’re doing God an injustice by not making his heart known to our country. ”

The bible’s a big book, how about we focus on more than just your favorite sentence or two and try living more in line with the teachings on the whole, you know, peace, love and forgiveness. I’m no theologizisit, but I’m pretty sure it’s what Jesus would do.

Defenders of Sexy Teachers

I'm a little affraid of a teacher named "Miss Johnson"s potential "pop quiz".

It’s no secret that Van Full of Candy is a supporter of hot teachers.  It’s a brave, bold stance that we have long taken when ever a poor, misunderstood educator is arrested for doing things that we wish had been done to us in school. Of course we couldn’t possibly defend EVERY apple polishing head mistress every time we heard about another one getting carted away. That would become a full time job, a naughty, dirty, naughty, sexy, naughty full time job. Don’t get us wrong now, we fully understand that people being charged with the task of learnin’ yer kids should not be engaging in the befouling of the under aged. That’s wrong in almost every state, and to varying degrees depending on posted age limits in the other blue, orange and green shaded globe blobs that we are told are “other countries”. Which is why today’s attack on sexy teachers has us in such a tizzy.

Brittni Nicole Colleps is a small town Texas girl, a first year English teacher and coach of the Freshman girls’ basketball team– Hey! No silly, pull those pants back up, I didn’t just read that out of a letter to Penthouse, this is fer realzies. Not to imply that Penthouse letters’ authenticity should ever be questioned, I’m not saying that. Each and ever account of steamy escapades reported in that fine publication of note is rigorously fact checked by hand. That is my guarantee to you, the reader.

So Mrs. Colleps teaches Englishes and Basketballery at Kennedale High, a suburban North Texas school near Arlington. She is a mother of three and is married to a no doubt very brave fighting man serving over seas. And when she’s not stressing verb conjugation or an ankle crackin’ cross over, she likes to have as many students as she can count on one hand over for a nice, fun and informative “after school special”. Now before you get all indignant and finger pointy at us and our condoning of this horrible crime against children, let me tell YOU a little something. Each of these five students with which Mrs. Colleps is alleged to have simultaneously banged were all 18 years of age. So there, don’t you feel silly for assuming the worst in this story of teacher student group sexcapades!

Unfortunately her facebook profile seems to be down, otherwise we'd be besties.

So then the natural question is, “Crime wha huh?” That’s certainly what came to MY mind somewhere deep in the list of things that came to mind when first hearing about this story. Usually it goes without saying that a teacher/student romance is bound to somehow involve underagedy. But it seems that proper carding was done in this case and no harm no foul, you’re free to go Mrs. Colleps, we’ll just keep these texted pictures and the camera phone video footage we found on one of the boy’s pocket telephonic devices, you know, for safe keeping and we apologize for any misunderstanding. There was no crime committed here. This was simply good natured hi-jinx between six consenting adults. This is only a crime because the law says it’s a crime. Which I guess makes it a crime…

It seems in Texas, as well as probably a few other places that I’m too lazy to research, even if your students are all sumptuous and otherwise legal in the eyes of god and whom ever, if you’re teaching them either the fundamentals of the English language or of a sound bounce pass, you are not allowed to also guide them in the ways of love and the making thereof. So while I’m sure Mrs. Colleps thought she had all her bases covered, making extra special sure that all of her starting lineup of hot senior studs was all of legal humping age so as not to run into any potential snags that might result in her soldier husband or their three offspring learning of her need for a pentagon of dong, unfortunately Texas forbids teachers from taking home school supplies.

But let’s be fair to the lovely Mrs. Colleps, she’s teaching in a school in Kennedale, a town of 7300. The school itself has a sexy, orgy worthy student body of 3200. She’s new in a town where almost 40% of the population goes to where she works and her husband is off selfishly fighting in some kind of war or another. She has needs, she apparently has LOTS of needs. What is this poor woman supposed to do!?

Sadly, it seems that this love story ends as most do, in jealousy. You see, when you exchange dirty text messages and swap digital photography of your genitalia with another individual, you expect that you have a special connection with those genitals. That’s what Mrs. Colleps’ first boy seemed to believe. After what history books would no doubt declare the most romantic courtship in the history of recorded time, Mrs. Colleps allegedly invited her young, BUT NOT TOO YOUNG, suitor to her home where they got to see first hand, what the small screens of their phones had only hinted at. They made love, mad, passionate love, which in another text Brittni (I feel she would want me to call her Brittni, even if I hate that she spells it with an “i” at the end which, for an English teacher I feel hurts her credibility just a little) said they “had fun” and invited him back for another round of hide the ruler. But when her one and only shower up this time, he found that he was going to be waiting in line and apparently that hurt his little feelings. So rather than sharing, which all of us should have learned at some point in our lives, this sobbing little baby had to ruin it for everybody!

I feel like at this point I need to reiterate that I am in no way condoning anyone’s actions in this act of love, I am merely discondoning the selfish actions of one individual. And now this caring, GIVING, young lady is being charged with five counts of having an inappropriate relationship between a student and teacher, a second degree felony and is facing between two to twenty years per count! Is this really a punishment befitting this “crime”. Especially when this supposed crime is, in the opinion of this non-lawyer, fucking bullshit. The only crime here is loving too much, and if that’s a crime then you can lock me up in a cell with Mrs. Colleps, a camera phone and four of our best friends who have a better working understanding of what a good thing they’ve got and we can be criminals together.

The defense rests, in between sessions of committing more of these heinous “crimes”!

Beware: Exploding Babies

I don’t do a lot of flying, I have my reasons. One of them, certainly, is the fact that I don’t do a lot of traveling. I don’t think they have a lot of destinationless flights, and if they did, why would they? But when I do go somewhere, which as I’ve stated, I don’t, I usually don’t fly. And when ever someone asks me, trying and failing to mask their contempt and disgust like I just told them I don’t own a TV or that I’m literate, “Why don’t you fly?” I like to first joke with them “Because I wasn’t born on Krypton, a dying planet whose inhabitants my desperate father tried to warn of its impending doom. But in their arrogance they cursed him a fool and refused to listen to his pleas. Then, in defiance of the planetary council, he built an escape craft, large enough only for a tiny infant, I, their third choice for occupants, to be rocketed to the safety of a distant planet, this planet, this Earth. Though if I had been born there and had been sent here, my alien physiology would surely be fantastically affected by the radiation of this planet’s yellow sun, imbuing me with great powers, not the least of which could quite possibly be the gift of unaided personal flight.” And we laugh. And by we I usually mean me, because most of the time the people I tell that joke to will wander off midway through. Undeterred I always finish the joke, because it’s so whimsical and outrageous, it gets me every time. Krypton… where do I come up with these things?

The other reason I don’t fly is because of the ever-present threat of exploding babies.

Now you may say “Well, how big of a threat could exploding babies be? I’ve never been exploded by a baby.” To which I would say, that makes you one of the lucky ones. A statistic that I just now made up shows that three in every two people in America have been exploded by a baby. That is a true made up fact!

So when I hear of the “uproar” stemming from a photo taken by a busy body priest in Kansas City over the weekend, of brave air port security personnel putting their very lives on the line for the air faring general public by thoroughly patting down a suspicious, potentially explosive packed 8 month old, I just want to say “You shut up, you shut right the hell up before you set off that ticking baby!”

Did someone make a boom boom?

You see, Saturday the right Reverend Jacob Jester took a dirty picture of a felt up baby after he passed through security in the Kansas City International airport. The first question one might ask of course is, “Why the fuck was it any of this asshole’s god damned business in the first fucking place?” Which, despite the somewhat excessive use of vulgarity considering we’re speaking of a man of the cloth, I think is a fair question. This wasn’t the parents having a problem with it like the six-year-old from a little while back. This was a literally holier than thou air traveler who decided it was his job to make sure the world knew how he felt about baby security.

But moving past the obvious problems of a Reverend taking snap shots of child touching, we arrive at the question of “Is this TSA screening gone overboard?” An excellent question. Wait, did I say excellent? I meant dumb. A dumb, stupid question. The reason this toddler-erroist was being given the smooth hand was because it’s stroller set off an alarm during a screening for explosives (or so says the TSA). Now, the world that we currently live in necessitates us screening things like strollers for explosives. Whether or not that’s a world any of us ever imagined we’d be living in or not is another question for another day, but that’s the cold hard fact of where we are. And in this world, where people are tucking C4 under their balls and trying to light it with a Bic between peanuts and beverage service, if something sets of a “Go Boom Boom” siren, that something gets wiped with a rubber glove, no matter how adorable it might have been before we thought it could explode.

The parents, who were either trying to smuggle explosives onto a plane through very clever baby based means, or simply accidentally bought a strolled constructed from bomb, were said to be “very cooperative and the process was completely without incident” and apparently didn’t have a problem with the proceedings. They did what they had to do, which then included allowing their infant to get a little bit of the “‘ol rub ‘n tug” and then they went on their way, being transported in mid-air from where they were to where they went. End of story for them. They had no idea that footage of their child’s federal massage had become a Twitter sensation. So then the next question becomes, if the family didn’t have a problem with it, and they weren’t taking cupcake snaps of their off spring getting digitally manipulated by the deft fingers of justice, then why the fuck is it any one else’s business?

Reverend @JacobJester wants YOUR plane to be filled with exploding babies!

The TSA, whom everyone seems to have no problem beating up for trying to do what they’re tasked to do in what may largely be a system of mostly symbolic gestures but is still designed to protect people as best they can, said that while children are not excluded from security screenings, that they are reviewing ways to improve its procedures for “low-risk populations.” But Reverend Your Business is My Business told the Kansas City Star that “An 8-month-old doesn’t pose a threat to airplane or national security. I am grateful for TSA’s willingness and desire to protect, but I believe in this instance that was extreme,”

But I for one couldn’t disagree with Acting Home Land Security Chief Jester more on this point. Any parent will tell you that a small child is just one squirming bag of biological explosions, barely contained by thin layers of disposable absorbent pull ups. Most home-made explosives use bags of fertilizer, essentially ”doodies”. You stuff a fuse up the pooper of one of these things, wire it up just right, you’ve got a craptastrophe on your hands. And then where will your moral authority be Reverend? Plummeting 40,000 feet in a Pampers packed ball of smelly flames! That’s where!

So I say keep feelin’ up those babies air port security personnel. I’ll not fly better knowing that the skies are being protected from the clear and present, imminent threat, of air traffic’s new public enemy number one: exploding babies!

Happy Secretary’s Day : Who Says Sexism Is Dead?

“Thank you for calling ACME typewriter company, this is Betty, how can I direct your call?” … How about you be a good girl and fetch me a nice hot cup of jo sweetie, and this time do it the way I like it … two sugars!! Thanks doll. Oh, and if Mr. Smith calls tell him I’m in a meeting! Can you handle all that?

Ahhh yes, the good ‘ol days when you could swat your secretary on her firm, plump, luscious ass and everybody would think you were a powerful man with great baby-making power and tabs at all the finest restaurants in town. A time when men were men and women knew their damn place, in the kitchen or answering the goddamn phone whilst transcribing my dictation to typewritten

I hope someday I'M pretty enough to have a private meeting in Mr. Brown's office

glorious’ness on my extremely expensive company letterhead. The days when coming home meant a warm meal cooking in the oven, a wife to take off your coat and hat, hand you your pipe and scotch (neat), and assist you with your slippers as the tension of a hard day at man’s-work eased off your shoulders as you sat in your handsome leather reading chair and packed in your favorite tobacco. Where have those days gone? Nowadays if a hard-working man even so much as keeps his hands in his pockets too long next thing you know he’s slapped with a sexual harassment suit for fondling himself in front of a subordinate and is taken for everything he and the team of men before him worked so hard to build. Well this women’s lib nonsense has just got to come to a halt, and we mean now! How can we make it look like we actually respect what they do in the workplace? Make them feel that their strides for

They sure don't make 'em like THAT anymore

equality have actually worked? I’VE GOT IT!! We’ll give them a new “respectful” holiday by’golly! We’ll let them feel like they’ve smashed the chains of inequality and have finally made it in our world, the man’s world. And we’ll call it … “Administrative Professional’s Day”! Yes! That’s it, and we will buy them flowers, perhaps a cake and take them out for a nice lunch and make them feel all pretty like. That’ll do it, that’ll make it all nice, see? Us men will still look like heroes, they’ll get the credit that they so deeply seek from us, and it’ll all be wrapped in a nice sexist package that nobody will even see coming.

What? You only used one sugar again? Well … don’t you worry your pretty little head about it, come on over here and sit on my lap and I’ll tell you just how I like it you pretty little gal.

What TIME is it!? No, seriously, what time is it really?

This Sunday is our bi-annual celebration of humanity’s unquestioned mastery over time and space. Daylight Savings Time begins at 2am Sunday morning, so when you’re late for something important, know that it’s not my fault.

I am Meow Meow Time King, lord of tick tock!

But when you think about it, the fact that you make it anywhere on “time” is really an every day modern fucking miracle. And that we have Daylight Savings Time and Leap Years and all of the other nonsense just shows clearly how our entire system of time, like many of the other things that hold up our loosely assembled society, is based solely on the honor system. Take a look around your house. You’ve probably got a half dozen clocks and each of them has a different time on it. Which one’s right? Which ever one you think will most closely match whoever else you need to see around a specifically agreed upon time and place. But that cat with the crazy eyes is no more the end all be all of when it is in the universe than those god damned, over hyped Mayans. You heard me Mayans, eat one. They didn’t predict the end of the world, they just got lazy and died. Suck it Mayans! Suck it two times!

We live our entire lives on a wet rock almost 13,000 kilometers across, hurtling through the vast, unknowable void of space at 108,000 kilometers an hour. Most of the time we don’t think about the insane reality of the world that we live on because if we really took the time to think about it we would never be able to stop screaming, the knowledge of how incredibly impossible our entire existence is being far too much for our tiny minds to even begin to comprehend. We’d be like Juggalos at a science fair. And between the face paint and the incomprehensible shrieking, when would we ever get anything done?

A day isn’t 24 hours long and a year isn’t 365 days, but because you have to know when a train is supposed to show up, we need to give everyone a standardized system of measurement otherwise shit wouldn’t get anywhere, or when it got there, no one would be waiting for it. Every four years we get an extra day tacked on to the calendar. They just throw on an extra day and we just take it because what the hell else would we do, and we go on silently agreeing that right now it’s basically 3:24 pm on, what we’ll call Friday, for all intents and purposes March 11th of what is generally accepted in this part of the world as 2011. So if I need to see you in 45 minutes, we’ll both have to accept these as true or we can both go fuck ourselves.

Oh, it's so uncategorized, I will call you 6:42 pm DST!

The idea of dicking around with our made up system of time measurement has apparently been around for quite a while. But it was a selfish bug watching Kiwi who championed modern Daylight Savings Time because apparently he wanted some daylight to do human things with other humans after spending his 19th century days nosing around the grass looking for insects. While over in England around a similar time, an uppety Brit thought it was just a damned shame that too many people didn’t get to see the sun rise and that he didn’t like ending his rounds of golf when the sun went down. So now I get to lose an hour of sleep every spring because some funny talking busy bodies made it their mission in life to impose their long dead will on me because they couldn’t properly organize their fucking lives properly? That’s some bullshit and I don’t mind saying so.

So with everything else we have to worry about, between the planet we live on constantly screaming through the night sky at unimaginable speeds or our making up the rules of how we measure how long that takes, how can we honestly ever be expected to know what the hell is going on, or really care that much if someone gets to where ever you are a couple minutes after they said they’d be. With all of these things and so many more going against our every waking moment, the fact that any two people ever purposely wind up in the exact same place at the relatively same time is one of the single greatest feats of human ingenuity, right behind sun guided navigation and the hand job. So if anyone decides to give you shit for ever being late, not just this Sunday or Monday but any time, I give you full permission to punch them square in the dick and tell them to their face that they were right on time for being punched directly in the cock. See what they have to say about that bit of how do you do!

Terrorific!

The Department of Homeland Security, the guys responsible for you having to mail yourself your own deoderant and the reason you have an entire hall closet dedicated to your plastic sheeting and duct tape storage, announced this week that they will begin phasing out their color coded terror alert system, and doing away with it completely by April of this year.

Safety rainbow.

This proud, noble system, that has for so long kept us safe and sound, secure in the knowledge that we must remain ever elevated or risk some flag hating desert bastard blowing up our freedom! Because never in it’s long history did this advisory ever dip into the guarded blue or low green. If we were to perform our duty as fear abiding Americans we needed to know at all times that there was at best always the significant risk of an attack any where, at any time. Boo! Mother fucker! BOO! So simplistic in design that even the most American of us could understand it, the color coded advisory system became the very symbol of our global war on terrorism and it’s resounding success.

So, with our total and unquestioned victory over terror and the agents thereof it is time now to retire this glorious symbol of American fear. But what then will fill the fear void? Where will we look to next to know exactly how affraid we should be and what color, shape or symbol will most accurately encapsulate that ever present low level hum of fear in the back of our heads that we couldn’t possibly live without?

Well, Van Full of Candy is proud to announce that we have been contracted by the Unites States Government to devise a new replacement system of terrorfying you, the general public.

We take this contract very seriously. We thought what better way to get the word out than with daytime television and the stay at home moms, retired ladies, and the unfortunately unemployed women who watch them. With the vast amount of play dates, and the networking of moms everywhere, this was the only rational solution we could come up with based on the few hours of scientific research and blindfolded dart throwing we did at our facilities. VFoC presents the Kitchen Utensil Daytime TV Advisory System with Commercials:

Terror Threat 5: Slightly annoyed to be interrupted (Very Low Threat)

This threat will be shown to housewives who are watching the PBS hit-show “Quilt In a Day”. The threat will be verified by flashing a wire wisk in the lower right hand corner for 20 seconds and playing “Happy Days are Here Again” by Barbra Streisand.

Terror Threat 4: A bit agitated, enough to sigh out loud (Just a Regular Everyday Risk of Threat)

If a stay at home mom is at home for the afternoon enjoying Cindy Crawford’s “Meaningful Beauty” infomercial and a KitchenAid Mixer appears in the top left hand corner, then she is to understand that the everyday normal schmormal terror risk is in effect. Nothing to do, just be aware and possibly call her mother in law to inform her.

Terror Threat 3: Really starting to get irked, standing with hands on hips (Terror is starting to get serious now)

When a soccer mom gets interrupted from her show “She’s Crafty”, you know things are getting serious. A turkey baster spins in the center of the screen and Savage Garden’s “Truly Madly Deeply” begins to play at a louder volume than in Terror Threat 5.

Terror Threat 2: Full Blown Pissed Off Now (Terror is right down the street)

When unemployed haus frau’s get interrupted from their Judge Joe Brown show, you know that shit is starting to go down. Corn cob holders quickly fly across the screen, Judge Brown hides under his desk, “I Will Survive” by Gloria Gainer blasts as loudly as a commercial’s volume, and car’s alarm systems begin to blare. This is when things start to get ugly.

Terror Threat 1: Mad as hell and rolling her neck (Terrorists are calling your phone from inside the house)

Oh lawrd Jesus, mama just got severed from her Days of Our Lives show and the image of a bottle of wine appears on the screen. No music, no flashing, no nothing. All hell has broke loose and she’s fittin’ to rip somebody’s neck out. Everyone will be alerted of the terror by her screaming out the open window “OH NO THEY DIH’INT!!”  God speed terrorists, God speed!

Then, with this new threat level system in place, we decided to tackle what we thought the previous system was dangerously lacking. You see, when the inevitable does happens (and it will, don’t you forget it, oh, and Boo!) and we are powerless to stop the very fear we’ve been conditioning you to wet yourselves at the thought of, you need to be informed, and at the same time, calmed. Fear is alright when there’s really nothing to actually be afraid of, but when something scary does finally happen, you need to be soothed and distracted or in your panic you might finally realize that we have only successfully kept you on edge and afraid while having no real ability or desire to actually prevent that which we were frightening you with.

To that end, Van Full of Candy presents:

Cat-astrophe Pals!

Cuddly, adorable, easy to recognize and understand, these furry little indicators will help you instantly recognize exactly which apocalyptic event has struck our shores. Who’ll have time to worry about the billion strong, red Chinese army that’s marching through the streets of downtown when these precious little things break the news?

A long forcasted, slow moving storm has come ashore, destroying much of a beloved national treasure. Steps that could have been easily taken to avoid this tragedy were ignored and the potential for this level of devastation was scoffed at by all who could have done something. The city is now populated exclusively by the drowned and the drowning. Help may or may not arrive in approximately 12-16 business days.

Kitteh Says: I don’t doggy paddle, I KITTY paddle!

A commercial jet has been detonated in the sky over a major metropolitan city by the explosives rigged religious garment of a passenger who, while having been placed on the no fly list eight years ago was not subjected to an invasive pat down for fear of the appearance of and subsequent lawsuit for racial profiling. All of the passengers and crew have been immediately lost, with the flaming debris raining down on the city below likely to claim countless others.

Kitteh Says: It’s okay, let’s snuggle!

During a hugely attended celebration, a mid sized passenger van explodes. The vehicle is packed with highly sophisticated home made explosives, nuclear waste material and a highly virulent biological agent. Those within the immediate blast radius are killed instantly and will later be referred to as “the luckiest people ever”. Over the next several months as the radiation and virus are carried through the atmosphere the death toll will be comically astronomical with each infected man woman and child begging for death to finally take them.

Kitteh Says: We heart you!

Racial tensions have finally come to a head with the wholesale slaughter of minority children by the “Soldiers of Purity”. The natural, understandable retaliation has sent the nation into an unending spiral of race warfare that after centuries of silent seething, now has no intention of being sated by anything short of the final drop of mongrel blood. Only when the land is pure, when none but the single victor race remains, then and only then, will there be momentary peace before we immediately find something else to hate about each other.

Kitteh Says: Good thing we’re both dolphins, huh?

The skies have opened and He has return to His Earth, and the followers whom He Himself promised He would someday deliver to their final reward, simply for accepting Him as their one true Lord, rejoice. Unfortunately some of the translations from the original scripture seem to have been less than entirely accurate as the Lord of Lords commands all of those that believed to rise from their graves, unleashing his undead army on the unclean non-believers. The Lamb’s grisly legion are impossibly fast and strong, easily tearing through the living flesh of those who have turned their eye from Him. The horrors cover the globe, with the pleas of the victims only being drowned out by the mirthless cackling of those believers slowly rising into the heavens in a softly glowing beam of light.

Kitteh Says: I have not forsaken you oh Lord! I am your staff of light! The heads of the heathens shall be cleaved from their wretched bodies!

And there you have it, fear is saved, you’re welcome. We at Van Full of Candy look forward to keeping you updated on exactly what you should fear next, as soon as we can make it up. Keep watching the skies!

You call THAT parenting? “F-”

Wake up sleepy head, time to crush your soul.

You wake up every morning at 4:30 am. Creeping quietly through your small, leaky two bedroom apartment, you put together lunches for your two children, girl child, age six and male boy kid, age 8, both students at the same central Florida elementary school. Packing them into the family hand me down station wagon which now runs solely on your prayers that today isn’t the day it breaks down, you hurry them to Humid Elder Gator Elementary (Go Fighting Sweat!) just in time for them to participate in the free breakfast program for low-income families (assuming those even exist any more) and rush off to your first job of the day.

After putting in your eight hours washing dishes at Admiral Tasty’s Sea Food Eatery (where Admiral Tasty likes his fish like he likes his women, battered!) you rush back to Humid Elder Gator (Sweat it out! Sweat it out! WAAAY OUT!) to be just in time for your kids to have only had to wait a little over a half hour after their last class in the principal’s office for your arrival. Absorbing a disdainful look of contempt you then hurry your family to your second job, a four hour shift at the snack bar in Splitz Lanes Bowling Center (home of the “Splitz Coup”: convert any split and you get a 25 cents off coupon for a Junior Banana Split at Lickity Splitz, the ice creamery attached to the arcade) which sits conveniently only two counties away. The kids keep themselves entertained and maybe do some homework in the daycare center next to the pro shop while you try not to suffocate on the shoe spray fumes from the up wind front desk.

Sneaking a couple of hot dogs that’ve been spinning on the rollers since before you came in for your shift and a rubbery soft pretzel for dinner on the road you haul the kids back home just in time to put them to bed and collapse into yours, all ready to get right back to it again tomorrow morning, a sweet, luxurious six whole hours from now.

And if you’re lucky, your kids’ might bring home a “needs improvement” parent grade from their teacher on their next report card.

Right now, on it’s way through the Florida legislature is a bill that may require public school teachers to grade parents of Kindergarten through third grade students, adding a parent’s grade of “satisfactory”, “unsatisfactory” or “needs improvement” to the child’s report card. The criteria that these grossly negligent monsters will be graded on will be –

– “a child should be at school on time, prepared to learn after a good night’s sleep and have eaten a meal”

– “a child should have the homework done and prepared for examination”

– “there should be regular communication between the parent and teacher”

Again, as stated before I’m not yet a parent, (that any court in the world can prove!)  but I did do my time in the government minimum security juvenile detention system known as “public school” for the entirety of my schooling years. I’ve seen over stuffed classrooms, thirty plus kids to a class in temporary portable buildings that have since become permanent fixtures. Portables that you were so happy to find out you were going to be in for any time because they actually had working heat or air. And here’s a secret for you. Do you know why most children are in public schools? Because their parents can’t afford to send them to private schools.

"That's right, your mother doesn't love you enough."

And now Florida is planning to saddle public school teachers (a paradoxical profession that is simultaneously touted as one of the most important in our society, while at the same time being one of the more commonly acceptably shit upon and neglected professions), with the additional responsibility of telling parents, just shy of total collapse, that they just don’t want it enough? The only thing this will do is shame those who are struggling most to do their best.

Most of those who will be graded superbly will puff up their chests at what a spectacular parent they really are, momentarily hiding their disdain for the nanny that raises their child for them. While many of those graded poorly will either not see it because they don’t give a shit and even if they did are well beyond the point of being shamed by an afterthought addition to an elementary school report card. Or they will in still many other cases, take it as a welcome opportunity to indignantly question if you’re trying to tell them how to raise their child. It’s the working poor who bust their ass every day that will be the most effected and they really don’t need one more outlet telling them how they’re failing their children by making sure they’re not homeless.

Just to be clear, I completely agree that parents have some responsibility for their child’s education. And until we can have algebra and regionally stilted versions of history injected directly into our face by sexy robot school nurses, it’s up to parents to help children temporarily retain enough facts and figures for them to be let loose on the adult world whether or not they’ve actually learned anything applicable to said world or not. Public schools are less a place of education now a days than a holding pen to keep our wild off spring from running rough shot through our food courts and amusement centers for the day with the after effect of begrudgingly teaching them the basics grunts and clicks of their local language, you know, since they’re there any way.

I blame child labor laws.

But in the end, the only person benefitting in any way from something like this will be the legislator who introduced it in the first place. She gets to say that she’s an education candidate, a champion for the little children and that she cares more about you and your family and the future of the human race than her opponent. Ultimately, that’s exactly all that is going to come out of something as hollow and pointless as this idea is. Class dismissed.