Contrast In Styles: Witness Prevention Programs

by Knorr the Interpreter

This morning the Jehovah's Witnesses dropped in on my house to save my family's souls. My wife Sally greeted them and pleasantly exhanged ecumenical viewpoints for about three minutes. Assured that our family has indeed heard the word of Jesus and can recount it with some degree of proficiency, the Witnesses left our stoop with a handshake and smiles. I was truly impressed.

You dear readers may be surprised (if not entirely shocked) that the preferred result of each and every encounter I have with other humans is one of such mutual benificence, since I'm a raging smartass by profession. Life has taught me that the more people we can call friends, the easier life becomes to enjoy rather than simply survive. Also, it is infinitely easier to make friends with understanding and a smile than with an insult, no matter how brilliantly creative and insightful or innocent / tough-love bar-buddyish in intent it is. The instant it becomes obvious a new encouter is unwinnable, however, I'll be more than happy to verbally put that goat-porking douchenozzle in his or her place - but until proven otherwise, strangers are just friends I haven't met yet.

In my less wizened days, however, I took a harder-core look at the rest of the race. I firmly held the belief espoused in the Jon Waters classic Pink Flamingoes: "There are two kinds of people in this world... my kind of people and assholes!" My kind of people were few and far between, and the Jehovah's Witnesses fell quite comfortably in the resulting chasms. Below, I will re-enact one particular exchage between myself and some Jehovah's Witnesses who sought to shepherd unto my soul at about 9:30 on a Saturday morning (after I'd gone to bed / passed out around 4:30 am) when I was in my mid-twenties:

Jehovah's Witnesses: Good morning! We've come to share the good news of the return of Jesus with you. May we have a few minutes of your time?

Knorr the Interpreter: Return of who? [Note: This would be a good point to give you the visual - there they stand smartly dressed in collared shirts, ties, pleated pants, and preternaturally shiny shoes against the backdrop of a perfectly mostly sunny 68-degree Saturday morning. I stand before them shirtless in my underpants looking dissheveled to say the least, clutching a five-dollar magnum of Slovenian merlot emptied to its last few ounces. Yeah, I knew it was them...]

JW: Jesus, sir. Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.

KtI: Oh yeah, him. Nice guy. I gotta tell you, this isn't too good a time for me - the Black Mass ran reeeeallly late last night, and I'm flippin' whipped.

JW: Black Ma....

KtI: Yeah - you'd think a group as tight with Satan as we say we are would be able to get its worship-shit together, but last night was a total farce. Dark Lord Drachmar forgot to bring the virgin and he knew it was his turn, so we had to stop and go scrounge one up...

JW: I'm sorry... are you saying that you...

KtI: Yeah, although I may switch temples after worshipping with this group of fumblefucks last night. Come time of the sacrifice, it took Priestess Mordria like ten minutes to tie down the chicken which TOTALLY threw off the chanting groove [wine swig], then to top it all off that thing just would... not... die. I'm sure I don't need to tell you how pissed off His Unholy Darkness gets if he doesn't get his lifeforce offering before the pyre burns out...

JW: Oh. It seems we've caught you at a bad time...

KtI: Yeah, sorry about that - normally I'm glowing with His Demonaic Eminence after a decent mass, but last night sucked. Say, would you guys know the best way to get chicken blood out of a Black Mass robe? [wine swig]

JW: Sorry to have bothered you, Sir. God be with you. [They turn to leave... rather quickly]

KtI: Anytime, guys. [As JW walk away more than briskly] Say Hi to Christ for me... Hail Satan!

Open Letter To The UCAWWW

by Ron R. Clark

I have recently been introduced to what might quite possibly be the most brain-leakingly ludicrous movement in the history of public action groups. Somewhere in the dust-bunny clogged corners of the website petition-online.com resides the Magna Carta of a group referred to only as UCAWWW. Below, bask in the delicious bassackward self-contradictory self-righteousness of the UCAWWW petition (shamelessly copied whole-cloth from therein).

"To: American People
We, the members of UCAWWW, petition that the Internet (World Wide Web) creates nothing but harm in society today. The Internet is a cause for addiction and sin while taking away traditional family values. Our children are being exposed to filth that causes sexual tendencies and drug addiction. We therefore, demand that the internet be permanently banned from American homes. We MUST restore faith in God and steer clear of the devil!"

Beautiful. Ladies, (I'm assuming you're ladies, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong), do you even realize you're trying to ban the net BY USING THE NET? You yourselves are attempting to harness this tool of the devil for your own ends - righteous as those ends may be, you join with the legions of Lucifer nonetheless. Since the net destroys all things good and yields but evil, is not your petition (by your own identification above) wrought forth from the very sphincter of Satan himself?

You do, however, have a point. "A cause for addiction and sin... that causes sexual tendencies and drug addiction" could not be a more accurate portrait of the Demon Web. I know that when I start out to look up sports scores or recipes, I invariably find myself itching for crank and dryhumping anything with a body temperature over 80F. What starts out as a quick glance at I Can Has Cheezburger always ends up with me naked sitting on a power sander and drenched in Wesson oil, desperately trying to score some coke on my Vonage with my one free hand. I'm sure you ladies can relate.

Ridiculously overblown (thus patently false) claims, inherent self-devouring contradiction and God-bothering rabble-rousing aside, your crusade is quite possibly the most hopeless campaign since the 1998 Tampa Bay Devil Rays... or the '99 Rays... or 2000... or 2007... or... anyway. In the three years your petition has been tickling Satan's taint in the bowels of the internet, a grand total of 3348 people have signed the thing - of which roughly three thousand are joke names and/or spambots. And even if ten thousand times that number signed legitimately, there is the basic scientific impossibility of banning access to something which quite literally freely floats in the air around you - you would be better off attempting to ban farts at a Taco Bell. This crusade would require but one glance from the legendary Don Quixote for him to emit the unsolicited assessment "Christ, are you holy-jock-sniffers ever boned!"

Truly, when you of the UCAWWW actually identify just what the heck for which your acronym stands, right-thinking Christians may begin to entertain taking up your cause. Probably not, but that's a starting point. May I suggest a merger to increase the size of your righteous hordes? A union with Methodists United To Herald Almighty Father would undeniably increase the impact of your movement. I am confident that MUTHAF-UCAWWW.org would score a ton more page hits.

Blades: Rocking In America Severely Restricted Under Bush

by Lars Eisenberg

And the hit-jobs just keep on a-comin' for the George W. Bush Administration. Hot on the heels of former White House Spokesman Scott McClellan's expose "What Happenned: Inside The White House and Washington's Culture of Deception", a scathing indictment of the administration's promotion of dogma over truth and loyalty over effectiveness, similar charges from a different quarter charge forth against the Lame Duck from Crawford.

Jack Blades, once and future lead singer and guitarist for successful 1980's rock group Night Ranger has just completed his insider's account of political influence and creative control inside the music and entertainment industries. "Don't Tell Me W Loves Me: Political Suppression of 21st Century Artistic Impression In An America In Which You Can No Longer Rock" details Blades' growing disenchantment with the Bush Administration's heavy-handed efforts to politicize and propagandize popular culture. "Look, I've been a patriotic guy my whole career," Blades begins. "When all the kids in the '80's started trashing President Reagan for his aggressive stance against the Soviet Union and his tightening the reins a bit on government spending, I took it upon myself to defend him the best way I knew how - by rocking." Where Night Ranger's first few attempts at Blades's message failed on tracks like "Domestic Welfare Spending Geometrically Detracts From Macroeconomic Growth Potential, Baby" and "Sister Republican", the message really caught on in the band's magnum opus "You Can Still Rock In America."

"Under Reagan," continues Blades, "as long as you weren't openly, directly and blatantly anti-establishment, the government let you do whatever you wanted. We could tease, sculpt, and/or buttress our hair however we pleased. Our shirts could be at skin-tight and ties as skinny as we saw fit. You could stuff whatever you wanted to down the front of your nigh-shrinkwrapped spandex trousers and nobody from the Reagan Administration said 'Boo!'"

But Blades contends the tenor changed dramatically under the second President Bush - especially after 9/11. "Suddenly, politcal honchos were visiting with our label bosses checking albums for pro-American content, and if you didn't meet their standards, your project was 'on hiatus'." After the invasion of Iraq, pro-American was no longer good enough. "Me and the band were informed in no uncertain terms that our 2003 album 'Although Pre-emptive War Seems Distinctly Un-Christian and Anti-Democratic, We Wholeheartedly Support Our Troops In Their Endeavors, Hot Mama' was to receive no radio airplay whatsoever unless we softened the title to a more Bush-friendly message. We were so infuriated that we left our label right then and there. When nobody else even attempted to pick us up, we knew the fix was in."

From there on out, it has been nothing but county fairs and group-package '80's band reunion tours for Night Ranger, a condition Blades assures us is due to the draconic effort of an overreaching despotic tyranny which currently resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. When asked if Night Ranger's current lack of fortune may be due to them largely being a clueless pack of middle-aged burnouts who really never rocked all that hard to begin with, Blades declined to respond.