Truly Scary Halloween Costumes

Well Sass-fans, it’s that time of year again.  Yes, once more we’ll be confronted with a horde of ever-increasing pudgy children, faces smeared with goo and one hand already on their trusty toilet-paper roll for when you fail to give up the goods (read: MOTHERFUCKING CANDY).  As my crack dealer is always telling me, you can’t have too much of a good thing, so I’m totally behind the acquisition of candy with little regard for human life.  For those of you who don’t keep these printed out for easy reference, here’s my helpful Halloween Rules. 

You’re welcome. 

Also, for more Halloween fun, I suggest you visit HumorBloggers and enjoy their carnival of hilarity. 

Costumes that I presume will be popular this year, for sheer WTF value are as follows:

1.  Carlos Mencia (I mean, what’s scarier than someone so un-funny who got paid more than Jesus last year?)

2.  Dane Cook (see “Carlos Mencia, White Version.”  At least this is a cheap costume, though.  Just borrow a douchey t-shirt from your older brother and spray your hair with Aquanet the second you roll out of bed.)

3.  Sarah Palin (where DOES one buy a hair bump these days, in time for the holidays?) 

4.  Amy Winehouse (Know what’s scarier than this leaky bag of chemicals and broken teeth?  A child-sized version.  Complete with beehive and needle tracks.)

5.  Miley Cyrus (No explanation needed.  Her life already serves as a warning to others.)

6.  Kanye West (No outfit is complete without bottle of Hennessy and mouthful of crazy!)

7.  Lady Gaga (hell, it looks like she dresses herself from the floor of a child’s closet already, so that’s gotta be a no-brainer.) 

Why the fuck does this even exist?!

And what shall I, your beloved Sorcia, be doing this Halloween?  I am so glad you asked! 

This Halloween, I will be in a wedding. 

Wearing a black bridemaids’ dress, surrounded by guests who have been instructed to wear costumes, and who have bowls of candy on their tables. 

The wedding is going to be held at the Zoo. 

No.  Not kidding.  I feel like I’m going to be appearing on a Sesame Street Special.  Though on the plus side, if any of the groomsmen gets all Heeeey, Lady, I can always toss the fucker into the bear pit.

Fuck Stick: Arts and Crafts Edition

A few days ago, I noticed that someone had jammed a brambly tree limb, its tip thoughtfully wrapped in what appeared to be a used condom, into my neighbor’s mailbox.  Actually, they thrust the prehistoric dildo down the back of the mailbox’s post, so it stood proudly aloft, announcing to the world, perhaps, that this was the house where lumberjacks came for a good old fashioned raping.  And by God, they were going to rape you SAFELY. 

Homemade Hillbilly's Sexy Time

Tampering with the mail? I wondered.  Federal offense be damned!  Or at least screwed with a wood pile’s reject!  Then yesterday, I noticed that the limb, condom still quivering and attached, had moved a few houses down, now serving as a warning to others, maybe?  Anyone’s house/shed/corn crib could be used as some terrifying backwoods fuck stick paradise?  Or could the stick have developed AI? 

 

Jude Law WILL fuck you with a stick

Maybe there are just roving gangs of Fuck Stick craftspeople, I thought, shrugging it off, since this isn’t hardly the scariest thing to happen to me in my neck of Bumblefuck Nowhere.

Aaaaand, then this morning.  SOMEONE was decidedly displeased to find the Hippy’s Happy Maker on their mailbox, so they did the only sane, reasonable thing:  They left the Fuck Stick Arts Council Coalition [FSACC, pronounced, "F-Sack"] a note:

Pictured above: the definition of "awesome sauce"

 

Pictured above: the definition of "Passive Aggression" (condom optional)

I think the more pant-staining hilarity of this moment really comes from the fact that these well-meaning folks wrote the note on their lawyer’s complimentary notepad.  I generously photo shopped out the details, but look close at the above pic and you can see their tag line, “A Full Service Law Firm”…  Though in the context of this wood craft, such delicate wording brings new innuendo to the term, “full service.”  But moreover, is the reference to the lawyer part of a veiled threat?  More bizarre, I think, is that now I’m wondering how long they’re going to leave it in their front lawn. 

And all this time, I thought “Fuck Stick” was just a nickname for this guy:

Seen here with the saddest monkey in the world

Live and learn!

Making Bad Decisions

We all make them

I guess this post is timely in that this weekend is our local college’s Homecoming Game, a festivity that coincides with the local Fair, two new bars opening, and a party that requires local buses to offer transportation.  Now, this being a predominantly white, upper-middle class school, it’s not like Homecoming is going to be as hot a mess as, oh, say, Dollar Beers on Thugged-Out Thursday Night in Compton.  But, you know, there will still be some srsly bad decisions happening.  One would hope. 

 My own college years resemble nothing quite so much as a rom-com version of Barfly.  Me and Tequila?  Yeah, we’re no longer friends.  Me and Vodka?  Still on speaking terms.  Me and lying on the concrete at 2 AM?  Well, we all have those friends that we just can’t ignore, right? 

This is why I was horrified when one of my students announced that the sport’s team she is on is having a “dry season.”  She naturally announced this with the dour face one would expect to accompany the words, “we’re having an AIDS season” or “we’re having a Charlie Sheen Fan-club season.”  One poor teammate’s parents had the shitty foresight to birth her, 21 years ago, in the midst of this season of tears, and so her 21st birthday was spent watching Red Box movies and going to the Fair.  Not that eating fried things and watching a Demolition Derby is anything to sneeze at, as far as birthdays go, but you have to admit that both these activities are improved exponentially with the imbibing of, say, a litre of gin.  As my student put it, with eyes that looked like she was discussing dead kittens, “You know what I do on Friday nights?  I DO MY HOMEWORK.  AND THEN SLEEP.”  I suggested that perhaps she volunteer to read to the elderly.  She suggested that I kindly eat a hot dick.  I laughed and said that at least I could wash down aforesaid dick with a tumbler of vodka.  She looked on the verge of dead-kitten tears again, so I swiftly changed the subject.

Here’s the thing:  There is nothing else to do in our college town except get wasted.  There are no clubs (well, there’s one, but we don’t talk about it — it’s half hip-hop club, half transvestite drag show.  No.  Not kidding…), and the nearest town WITH clubs is a 30 minute drive.  Which means every weekend, the stakes for deciding the miserable designated driver get scarier and scarier (“Ok, the first one to get his pubes set on fire totally doesn’t have to be the DD!”).  Our next-door neighbors said that they once found a sorority girl passed out in her car at 5 AM on their front lawn, car still running.  When they woke her up, she asked a) if the party was still raging and b) if she could crash at their place.  My neighbors are in their 50’s.  They like Dale Earnhardt and Puritanical bed-times.  Of course, they also love to top off an evening with multiple boxes of wine, so her drunkenness was seen as only a mild irritation, something rather understandable.

Happy Saturday, loyal readers.  Go make some bad decisions.  And if you see my old pal Tequila, will you tell that son of a bitch that he owes me about 412 hours of my life back?  Thanks.

Jodi Fucking Picoult

Look, I am happy for anyone who reads for fun.  You know, reading novels, for pleasure, instead of for work or to sporadically google new ways to get rid of that genital rash.  But Jodi Fucking Picoult (JFP) is just really a bit too much. 

For those of you who remain blissfully unaware, JFP writes books (can’t bring myself to call them “novels”) that are usually fictionalized accounts of modern hot-button issues.  She’s like Nancy Grace’s therapist and ghost writer.  She wrote 19 Minutes, about school shootings, and recently they made one of her 300 page nightmares into a movie, My Sister’s Keeper(about sibling cell harvesting, apparently.  And assistive dogs that can sense epilepsy).   However, whether she’s scrutinizing the Amish, witches, little girls who talk to Jesus, child molestations (a resurring theme) or wives of cops (another recurring theme), I want to save you the trouble of ever having to actually read one of these horrors.  She is so laughably formulaic that you pee a little each time you crack a spine.  Here is the basic synopsis of ALL JFP books:

1.  There will be an ironic title to the book, whose full meaning will not be revealed until the middle of the book.  It will be a double meaning.  It will be deep.  And Ironic.  Did we mention Ironic?  Then, introduce sappy heroine who is likely redheaded [see: pictures of Jodi Picoult] and probably a mother.  She will have ISSUES.

2.  Some giant fucking tragedy will strike (past tragedies run the gamut from teen suicide pacts to singular infidelity to child rape, so you never know).  This will, naturally, upset the sappy heroine.  She will be given at least one introspective chapter in which she gazes at a leaf or a child’s toy or some bullshit and gets weepy.  This will be the part that the people at Lifetime start masturbating and listening to Taylor Swift songs to use in the movie soundtrack.   

3.  THEN THERE’S A TRIAL.  We will be introduced to a plucky lawyer who will inevitably save the day with some “innovative” way of looking at it.  We will be taught that JUSTICE is all a matter of PERSPECTIVE.  So suck it, law-abiding citizens, ’cause that death row criminal?  He saves BABY BIRDS!  You monsters, for putting him on death row for raping a child and killing her dad. 

4.  The sappy heroine and her plucky lawyer will have LEARNED A LESSON.  If they are members of the opposite sex, and the sappy heroine’s husband has been conveniently been offed, they will hook up.  And then JFP will RE-USE these characters in a later book because she arrogantly assumes her readers still give a shit about one of her previously retch-worthy little tomes. 

5.  The World Will Be a Better Place.  For NOW.  There will be another introspective chapter, perhaps from a different character’s viewpoint, and the reader will be left with a little glow of pleasure, feeling that as long as JFP is involved in our justice system, surely the world will improve. 

I usually read these books on vacation (read: DRUNK), so I have actually worked my way through quite a hefty pile of her wordy prose and manically expressed hysteria and emoting.  Just recently I tried to read one sober and it nearly fucking killed me [Change of Heart].  It was like she viciously raped The Green Mile with a giant Lifetime Original Movie dildo, then threw in a wonky priest and a resurrected dog just for kicks.  

In fact, here are some of the more glaring thefts from The Green Mile that JFP shamelessly lifted:

1.  Magic Negro character is a Magic Retard in Change of Heart     

2.  Instead of the innately good Tom Hanks character, who feels guilty over the death penalty, we have an innately good priest, who feels guilty over the death penalty …  because he was on the trial that convicted the Magic Retard!  *gasp of ironic shock*

3.  The Magic Negro is wrongfully accused of raping and killing little girls…  The Magic Retard is wrongfully accused of raping and killing a little girl

4.  The Magic Negro uses his Christ-like powers to rescue a friend from a manly yeast infection, save a dead mouse, and cure cancer…  The Magic Retard uses his Christ-like powers to rescue a friend from being shanked, save a dead bird, and cure AIDS

5.  Both men die despite proving their innocence to the main protagonist (who are each convinced based on the word of mentally unbalanced, illiterate convicts alone), but they leave the world a BETTER PLACE. 

6.  The Magic Negro passes some of his Magic onto the sweet, barely developed-as-a-character Mr. Jinxes (a mouse) …  The Magic Retard  passes some of his Magic onto the sweet, barely developed-as-a-character Claire (a mousey little girl with a bad heart). 

You’re welcome, Stephen King.  I just helped you win a lawsuit.

JFP also clearly thinks she has a pretty good handle on inspirational twist endings, though most are so hysterically heavy-handed that it makes Degrassi Junior High look like serious drama.  Sometimes the “twist” is revealed at the INEVITABLE GODDAMN TRIAL, so the ending will be a wistful reflection on all they’ve all learned.  In The Pact, for example, you discover via flashback that the main female lead desires suicide because she was once diddled in a Burger King bathroom by a janitor.  Or in Plain Truth, you find out that the nice Amish girl didn’t kill her baby — it was the unpasteurized milk to blame!  Or in The Tenth Circle, Eskimos help a young girl come to terms with her nasty habit of calling rape on boys she gives blowjobs to at Rainbow parties (I am not kidding).       

The Magic Retard book ends with a little girl resurrecting her dead goddamn dog.  I could not even make that shit up.   

So, kindly go fuck yourself in a verdant green field full of tragedy and supposed symbolism, JFP.  And please, for the love of all that’s holy, develop Parkinson’s or something to keep your talons effectively away from a keyboard.*

"Researching" her next novel on donkey rape

 

*If JFP developed Parkinson’s, she’d just write a fucking book about it.  Utilizing the help of some neighbor kid.  Whom she’d become attached to.  Who would then be hit by a car and killed.  THEN THERE’S A TRIAL.  And we’d all learn another goddamn lesson.

My Teaching Career: Now with MORE Racism!

For probably some of the same sad reasons that young girls turn to being whores and shooting heroin into their eye balls, or decide to work for Hardee’s, I have lately been pursuing a career as an online instructor.*  Since half the online colleges have drawn their collegiate names clearly from either a broken Latin dictionary or the T9 function of the provost’s cell phone, and since I believe heartily in my own anonymity, I am not about to tell you where I am actually working — suffice to say that I am employed by two online colleges, both of them interchangeable so far as the student demographics (unemployed single mothers, many with names spelled so phonetically as to baffle anyone unfamiliar with the south side of Detroit or the locker room of a local Wendy’s) and bland, mind-numbingly simple course content.  I feel like the late Billy Mays could have sold this shit.  For about what it’s priced at now.  And thrown in a free Sham-Wow (which would be, possibly, be more valuable than the actual “education” these folks are receiving). 

On my first day moderating the online discussion, one student said that they planned on writing an enthusiastic paper about all the brown people who had invaded her great state of Texas and were refusing to learn English just to spite her.  This naturally upset everyone else in the class of Latino background, starting an online Alamo showdown.  The racist student in question thought she was smoothing things over when she stated, “it’s not that I think those people are all hatful and ignorant [sic].  Just the ones in Texas.  Especially in the grocery stores.” 

Also, people who are going back to school tend to be either completely computer ignorant (since the last time they were in an office, they tended lovingly to their pet Smith Corona and their secretary was probably still allowed to smoke at her desk), and thus send me a barrage of wailing, hopeless questions about basic things like checking their “electronic mailings,” OR they are the sassy new generation of text-addicts who respond to my intellectual, grave postings (i.e. “STOP BEING RACISTS!” and “The Pros of Learning to Use Spell Check!”) with content identical to that which is found at Texts From Last Night – equal parts unintelligible, abbreviated and startling in content. 

Meanwhile, I have to read personal emails from them, detailing the soul-sucking nature of their poverty, their multitude of angry teenagers, their usually useless or absent significant others and the inevitable substance abuse problems.  Some of these students are twice my age and have a lifetime more experience in seeing how the world can shit on them.  Some are only 17 and still furious at a youth spent in anger, waste or impoverished humiliation.  No one, apparently, knows how to use or access birth control any longer.  When you’re 23 and have 5 kids, surely you might have thought a good, sound condom investment to be more beneficial than, say, going for the shiny gold promises of an Amway sales manager. 

In totally other news, we are getting close to being done with the house.  It has electricity!  It has plumbing (though no functioning toilets or faucets yet)!  There are walls where once there was plastic sheeting!  A man is putting tile in the bathrooms today!  There are even industrious hedgehogs already at work destroying the garden!  Of course, we still have to refinish the hardwood floors, put our beadboard ceilings up and refinish a pile of re-usable wood that is be-tarped and awaiting my incompetent ministrations in the front yard. 

I will put pictures up when I am feeling less abused by racists, and my muscles have recovered from endless hours of manual labor, my legs toned from relentless hedgehog pursuit. 

 

*  Reasons being, I am poor and have no remaining dignity.

Diet Pill Horror Redux

So, good news: I have a new fan with a hilarious site, making fun of some shit I hate the most — terrible fucking ads.  In honor of his shout-out, I’m reposting this little ditty from my old blog, a tragic little livespace on MSN that just clicking on is like going to visit grandma at the home…  As soon as you’re there, you’re just depressed at all the old things lying around, the slow speed of the place, the overpowering scent of urine. 

Anyway.  This is as true now as it was then:  Diet Pills are bad news, children.  Everyone say it with me. 

“Go take yourself, diet pills!”

I deeply hate the Lipozene commercials.  They make me physically growl at the tv when they come on.  They feature a condescending-as-fuck woman who warmly assures the audience that it’s not their fault if they’re fat — they just need to take a pill which makes you lose pounds and pounds of body fat.  Her hand gestures indicate that she may be related by blood or semen to Sarah Palin. 

 

Nevermind the subtext that this country’s obesity is tied to our bizarre lack of personal accountability for anything we do.  Nevermind that the woman is a complete cunt.  And thin.  Nevermind the obnoxious timer in the corner which gives the audience 20 minutes to call in to take advantage of the $29.95 “special” pricing.  Hell, nevermind, even, the exploitive fact-manipulation, small print and other pre-requisite bullshit one finds on most diet pill commercials.  I mean, that’s all just par for the course in modern American advertising.  Where are you, Don Draper?!  WHERE?!

 

What annoys me the MOST, that makes me just grind my teeth until my husband asks me if I’m gnawing on bamboo shoots, is this:  The fucking animated graphic they show of a pill capsule opening, then spraying it’s dietic goodness onto the obese belly of some animated hog of a human being, then the belly dissappearing as the pill spray hits it, reducing said animated belly into a perfect size six.  It’s not just patronizing, it’s laughably insane.  What horrifies me is that someone in advertising likely got PAID to do the stupid thing on powerpoint.  And it’s just such a perfect little allegory for America’s conception of pill power.  Tired and sad?  Take a pill.  It’s delicious.  Fat and ugly?  Take two!  Impotent?  Hell yes we have a pill for you!  And look — the little capsule just opens and takes all your cares away… WHEEE!!! 

 

Ugh.  As the Husband said last night (while I ground my teeth into powder), “Why don’t they just say, ‘Look!  God gave us Magic! ‘? “ 

 

Which is why I married him. 

 

Magic Pills!*

 

Appendix:

I actually took diet pills once.  I’d just frantically lost my Freshman Fifte…er, THIRTY, with good old diet and exercise, and I was going on a 20-Day road trip with then-fiance, now Husband.  Where we’d have to eat at diners and from our box of food (read:  gallons of peanut butter, cheese doodles and jars of reconstituted butter… greatest. box. ever.).  Where I knew I was gonna put on the poundage again.  So, like a fool, I ordered Phentermine from Canada.  I had to fudge the details on the order form a bit…  To make myself morbidly obese, I put that I was 4″1′ and weighed 345 lbs.  I was actually 5″5′ and weighed 110.  Yeah.  I am just one big ol’ pack of lies.  Sooo, I get the phentermine (which is now illegal, as it causes one’s heart to explode), and I don’t want to tell my man I’m taking the shit, so I tell him that I ordered vitamins, that I’m taking an “Energy Boost 3000″ (because my creativity wanes, clearly, the thinner I get) every 8 hours.  Mind you, the dosage they sent me was calculated for a hefty dwarf.  Think Danny Devito’s prom date.  So I am literally and physically bouncing off the walls.  In a confined space — his truck.  For 20 days.  On the road.  No escape for either of us. 

 

On the plus side, I don’t need much sleep.  Actually I CANNOT sleep, so I do a lot of the night driving.  The culmination of the trip was my 21st birthday in Las Vegas.  We were up for 24 hours.  As I desperately tried to drown the high of the diet pills in alcohol so that I could sleep for the first time in 16 days. 

 

Then it was time to drive all the way from California to Orlando in 3 days. 

 

He nearly killed me. 

 

Lesson Learned:  Diet pills are bad.  Yes, I gained not one pound of the weight back (I think I actually lost a few more pounds), but I sent my heart rate sky-rocketing and my blood pressure has been sketchy since then.  And to this day, driving at night brings some seriously wacky flashbacks from being high as shit on phentermine and tooling across the country in a stick shift truck that I had just learned how to drive.

*  This site does not endorse magic.  Well.  Not in pill form, anyway.

LOL Inglourious Basterds

In the spirit of such previous posts mocking the film industry (see Man Hanistons and  Lol Gran Torino), I bring you more movie stills from a popular flick that is just dying for a little dry captioning.  Enjoy!

**  Spoiler Alert!  **

If you have not yet seen this hilarious Nazi caper, do so immediately.  Then come back here and enjoy these LOL stills from such a madcap romp. 

LOL Inglourious Basterds!

 

 

Madly, Truly, Deeply

ZOMG, ya’ll, I can’t even talk about how happy I am that MadMen is back on the air.  I have been irritating my husband for months, begging him to talk to me about possible plot points, which he refuses to do on principle.  But now, after long last, I can get back to the important business of plunking my ass down every Sunday night to religiously pour myself a martini and watch an hour of blessedly badass television. 

Of course, that means I have another 6 days, in between, to bite my fingernails and grumble about how the damn thing isn’t back on yet.  Which is another 6 days of calling my husband at work in a fretful panic, begging him to talk to me about how much we hate Pete this season.  To which he tells me to get myself a goddamn facebook group and leave him alone, woman.  Which is SOOOO Don Draper of him!  LOVE IT.

Anyway, in lieu of getting me a hobby, part-time job or a life, I instead found this to occupy myself with!

MadMen Yourself!

It’s awesome.  Hours of fun for the MadMen loving family.  See below for details of awesomeness.    

 

I love me as a cartoon!

Life is a Beach

Well, hi kids.  Sorry I’ve been remiss in postings lately, but summer school had just been ending and I was swamped with unpleasant realities like grading and yelling at errent scolars. 

Next week, I’ll be on “sabbatical”…  I’m going to the beach.  We found a place where we can take the dog, so off we shall go in pursuit of sun, fun, and a damned fine margarita. 

Wish me luck!  I’ll be back in fine, post-tan form in just a week or so.  See you then!!

Bearly Warned

I was trying fruitlessly to drag my dog out of poison oak while listening to The All-American Rejects merrily singing, “Gives You Hell”* when the neighbor lady came streaking out of her house and down the driveway.  I stared at her for a moment as she frantically waved her arms and mouthed “Stop!” repetitively.  Because my dog chose this precise moment to take an elephantine crap in the middle of her thoughtfully tended patch of poison oak, I assumed I was about to be shamed, publicly, for not tending to my animal’s defecation. 

“You be careful!”  She bellowed as soon as my ipod bud fell from my ear canal.  I blinked.  Careful… of the poison oak?  Could it spread up my dog’s rectum?  Because if so, I’d be damned if I was going to rub fucking calomine lotion on her callused corn hole. 

“Did you watch the news this morning?”  She demanded.  Clearly, she had me confused with someone who wore a helmet indoors and who did not hold the local news in utter contempt for their ridiculously named, FUTURE Doppler Radar, a cringe-inducing cooking segment with a legally retarded person, and a crew of newscasters fucksticks who had been renamed all with double names, i.e. “Randy McRandall” and “Neill McNeill.”   

“Er, sorry?”  I sputtered, looking deliberately away from my gleefully unrepentant dog who was taking her potty break as reverently and slowly as if she’d just been informed of the “good news.” 

“Didn’t you hear about the BEAR?”  The neighbor lady exclaimed, hands on hips, furious at me, I was relieved to note, for my lack of bear awareness, vs. being irate with my loathsome creature companion, who was now back-pedalling the woman’s petunia bed in a spastic effort to cover up her shit pile in the poison oak patch. 

“The… what?!”  I finally tuned in.  “Did you say, ‘BEAR’?”  The woman nodded emphatically, more excited than worried, which frankly worried me. 

“Yes!  There is a 100 lb. bear roaming up and down this road!  And you know, just down the street is that big pond with all those woods.  I bet that’s where he’s hanging out.  Didn’t you see the news?”  I bit back my critique of our tragedy of a local news station and began looking about me furtively…. you know… for the FUCKING BEAR.  She finally seemed to notice my dog, who had considerately laid down in the morning heat, crushing a hesitantly blooming nest of impatiens with her 20 lbs of doggy obliviousness.  “The bear will eat that little dog of yours,” she added, judgmentally, I thought.  Lizzy just rolled over and wagged her tail happily at this news, utterly unconcerned about a) her dignity, b) the poor flowers, and c) the goddamn BEAR that would devour her. 

“Have they called animal control?”  I asked weakly.  The woman nodded, delighted to be a source of information, so rapt in her new authority that she would continue to fail to notice the steaming heap of excrement on her lawn, or so I fervently hoped. 

“Oh yes.  They shot the otherbear last night.  But there is still one at large,” She said, raising a single index finger at me significantly.  We both contemplated this for a long, leery moment, and then she brightened.  “Ok, well, you be careful now.  See you later — if the bear doesn’t see you first!”  She chortled jokily before traipsing off back into the relative safety of her house, leaving me to the long, deserted stretch of road that probably contained bear tracks just up ahead and around the bend.

"Oh Hai! I will totally fuck up your day!"

 

*  Perhaps the greatest video of our generation: