The Bottom Ten, April 2007

10.) 107 Wives- Click here. A 74-year-old man from Indonesia was recently put in jail for beating up his wife because he suspected her of infidelity in the marriage. I can't figure out why the fuck any woman would want to be unfaithful to a husband who has 106 other wives. That's not a typo. He has 107 wives in total. From those 107 wives he has 41 children and a small city's worth of grandchildren. This man has made polygamy an extreme sport. But why would a woman even dream of cheating on a husband who has 107 women to try to keep up with. Give the guy a break! Fuck. Imagine, you come home from work and all you want to do is put your feet up and relax, but nooooooo, 30 or 40 of your wives want you to do some menial chores, another 10 or so want to have sex, 50 of them want to argue with you over the fact that there are about 104 shades of lipstick on your collar, and the rest want you watch your 41 kids while they go out shopping with their friends. I mean how bad could a 74-year-old man beat a woman? A 74-year-old man who has had 107 wives for who knows how many years. Women sap men of their will to live. This man must have the physical strength of an anemic kitten with some manner of degenerative bone disease. I bet that when somebody opens a window in his house the breeze that comes through pins him against the wall. If you're getting attacked by this man all you have to do is blow him a kiss and he'll get a concussion. I almost think this man should get some kind of award for having the balls to marry that many nagging women.

9.) "Progressive Uniforms"- After reading my earlier rant on the topic of uniforms the bigwigs at McDonald's changed their signage to read that with employment at one of their fine "restaurants" comes "progressive uniforms." Progressive? Progressive? How the fuck can a shirt and pants be "progressive." Does that mean the uniform isn't even a shirt and pants at all, but forward-thinking leather chaps and pasties? Maybe a beanie with a motorized propeller on the top? A cleverly inserted banana? You fuckers should really do away with the corporate bullshit jargon nonsense and just say what you mean: employees will wear clothes to work that we tell them to wear. How difficult is that?

8.) The Magic Word- Okay, you ask somebody to do something and you carelessly, or maybe even carefully, omit the word "please" when you ask them. Six times out of ten people you ask to do whatever will just do it as long as you're not sounding rude or asking the impossible. Those other four people will stop to ask you, "What's the magic word?" Those four people can kiss my ass! The magic word is "You're wasting precious time between me and my goal with your cutesy etiquette games, you inefficient, ineffectual fuck-ass!" Besides, everybody knows the magic word is and always has been "Alla Kazaam" which has no bearing on your concept of politeness and common courtesy. If you're so desperate to hear somebody say a monosyllabic word because it's "polite" you are too easily satisfied by minutia and you keep the lowest common denominators in our culture on top. Politeness is something that can easily be implied without a fucking monosyllabic word. Example? When people do something that I ask them without fuss I'll give them oral sex. Sure, "please" might satisfy some people when it comes to etiquette, but oral sex will please everybody if it's done right.

7.) Cigarette Pack Warning Labels- Does any smoker ever look at a warning label on a pack of cigarettes and actually say, "Holy fuck, I should really quit smoking these things! Look at that cancer-ridden lung!" No, they don't! Why? They've lost their shock value. You can walk into a whole group of smokers, hardcore smokers, and not a one of them will even notice a warning label. The warning labels, then, only serve the purpose of nauseating non-smokers who were already smart enough to not start smoking in the first place. So what then? Two options, really. One, do away with the stupid warning labels entirely because nobody gives a shit. Or two, make the pictures on the labels even more graphic to re-establish the shock value of them. Instead of a mouth full of rotting yellow teeth or a black lung, why not a picture of a fetus with two cigarette butts mashed into the little hollows where it might one day have eyes and perhaps being sodomized by a lighter? Oooo Oooo...and you can have some rusty syringes being poked into its scalp for good measure! Syringes have nothing to do with smoking really, but if you're going to go for shock value you might as well go hog wild. If that doesn't stop a smoker from smoking, well then, that smoker is fucked beyond salvation.

6.) You Mean It's This Easy?- Click here. So if I ever really need to get laid all I have to do is make up a story about needing to apply medicative cream to my shlong and some woman will be gullible enough to believe it means I have to have sex with her, that it's all part of the treatment for whatever the cream is meant to do? Clinical or not, ladies, what would possess you to even be able to get stimulated enough by a guy who has to have ointment put on his penis to have sex with him? I hate to pry, but, guh, if a woman approached me saying that she had to have ointment applied to her vagina and then I was medically responsible to have sex with her I just don't think I could physically do it. Ointments are bad news. There just aren't any sexy ointments out there. The word "ointment" itself is proably enough to keep me soft for a week. Guh! But to think that all these years I was investing all that time into being a cool guy, a good guy, a romantic guy so that I might fool some woman into having sex with me and no success. But some guy can talk about a "condition" with his penis that require the application of "ointment" and he's knee-deep in nookie. Wow!

5.) WOW! This easy?- Click here. So instead of ointment and venereal diseases I can just save up a bunch of fake gold in a computer game and I can get laid? Dammit! What the fuck am I doing wrong in life?

4.) Jack Thompson- In the early hours of the CNN media blitz surrounding the massacre at Virgina Tech Jack Thompason was thoughtful enough to call in and give his two cents on the topic of the motives of the killer. His summation was that it was video games. Bravo, Mr. Thompson. Bravo. I wish there was an emoticon for sarcastic applause. You've done a bang-up job of placing the blame solely on electronic entertainment. For a while there I was worried that it was the guy with the gun, but I'm so glad, and enlightened, to learn it was the video game designers who were the real culprits behind the attack all along. Whew! Okay, if I can be serious for a second here, the psychological make-up of 99.9% of people is a lot more complex than "video games did it" will allow. If video games were really to blame then how does a multibillion dollar industry not churn out more killers? I'm willing to wager that a vast, vast, vast majority of people who play video games have never killed a person. A slight case of over-simplification? Oh hell yeah!

3.) The Disappearance Of Adults Only Rooms From Video Stores- As a kid growing up I was always fascinated by the room that I was forbidden to enter every time we went to the video store for movies. Then I grew up and there's nothing that could hold me back from entering the Adults Only room except the fact that there aren't any Adults Only rooms left in most video stores. And that's a shame. Not because I want to rent porn. I have the internet after all. It's just great to have a room in the video store where children and their crying to get the latest Pokemon movie can't disturb me. If there were more Adults Only rooms in video stores I would have more places to take the boxes of Pauly Shore movies to read up on their intricate plotlines. Those fucking movies are too damn complicated!

2.) Shoe Lace Nibs- Fuck. How old would you say shoe lace technology is? At least 12 years. 12 years ago some guy invented shoe laces (probably) and the shoe lace nib (most likely) and how far has the technology progressed since then. Velcro? Fuck velcro. But, seriously, shoe lace nibs are always cracking and falling off and then lacing your shoes becomes next to impossible. Why the fuck can't we create shoe lace nibs that don't crack and fall off? We have fucking titanium razor blades, why not titanium shoe lace nibs?

1.) Titanium Razor Blades- And since I'm on the subject of titanium razor blades... If you're a man and you need to use titanium razor blades to shave because the steel variety just aren't strong enough I don't think you're shaving right. You're trying to cut off the hair growing out of your face, not skin yourself down to your fucking skull? Note to the razor industry: who the fuck needs to shave so close that you can see their skull? That's not hot. That's not even in the same vicinity of smooth. That's a Halloween costume. Your efforts in pushing razor technology forward are misguided. Make a razor that just sits in my medicine cabinet and shoots at my facial hair with a laser cannon. That's an advance! Skinning me down to my cheekbones won't get me laid, not even for all the fake gold and penis ointments in the world.

Classic Michael Appleby

Tonight I'm posting a rerun. Many of you out there probably haven't read this one so it might not actually be a rerun for you. Some of you have read or heard it before so I welcome you to amuse yourself in the archives somewhere. Actually, I was going to post my Bottom Ten for April, but my browser crashed as I was drafting it and I'm too frustrated to start drafting it all over again tonight. I'll get the Bottom Ten up soon, though.

The poem is inspired by Alex Grey's artwork actually. I wanted to create something that was very focused on the human body and to just stick with that.

Knot Garden
Bodies interlocked in grapple.

Start at the fingertips.
Feel the ridges of prints
like skin tumblers
and rolling into the knots
that knuckles make
before palms are pressed
to palms
and the long chutes of digits
lock to form skinny, bony gates.
Fleshy webs
that transcend,
become intricate vines at wrists,
become intersecting channels,
become, become, become.
And the crossovers at elbows
that aspire to blushing,
freckled x’s
with the narrowest of hinges,
flexing and reflexing apexes,
where four biceps
sinew this pair.

This is more than
the gesture of a kiss.

This exceeds the limits
of any embrace.

This isn’t sex
and it isn’t war.

Shoulders conspire
and the proximity of faces
practically makes them
the mirror folded in on itself.
Hair sweeps from one head to another.
Where ribs are,
they make for calcium rich walls,
walls of marrow:
anastomosis of bones,
perfect pearly xylophones.
Pumping hearts attain synchronicity;
melodies ebb
in the laying back and rolling.
Neck becomes neck.
One skin hybridizes another,
reaches to be a chameleon.
Legs wrap around a waist
or a waist falls into the hold
and feet dive between knees.
Body odors absorb each other,
become more than the sum of their parts.

When we twist,
we maintain this tightening knot,
it’s fibres kept in tact.
The act of tying
isn’t so much of an act of aggression
as it is
an act of compression.
What we learn from Greco-Roman wrestlers
are more than ways in which to brutalize each other.
We find ways to merge.

I discover new nearnesses to you.
You find ways to become a part of me.

-Michael Appleby
May, 2004