Respect Authority

I’ll be the first to admit I do a lot of stupid things when I’m high. Why, just last night I paused reality television to satisfy a sudden and very strong urge to watch at least five YouTube videos of animals doing silly things - like running into walls, or attacking babies. Oh how I laughed, and laughed.

But this is something I’ve never done. A Nebraska man who was trying to calm down his over-hyper cat stuffed the poor thing into a boxlike homemade bong, and proceeded to smoke up with her inside. 

The 20-year-old faces animal cruelty charges, to say nothing of good old fashioned drug charges. Moreover I think someone should consider sending this genius to engineering school, because if this was somehow an effective bong construction, then we all have a thing or two to learn.

The thing is though, and it pains me to say this since nothing would give me greater pleasure than getting my own furry friend high, cats don’t seem particularly fond of weed. It’s sort of like dogs and peanut butter: they’re curious about it, primarily because it makes that significant journey from humans’ hands to their mouths, but when given the opportunity to partake it’s mostly confusion and slight distaste. In fact, when Godzilla - my own cat - is demolishing my expensive Pottery Barn loveseat with his talons, it’s not harsh words or the threat of beatings that deters him, but rather a well-aimed plume of smoke between the eyes. That or a squirt gun. 

So word to the wise. If your cat starts acting up, let him. I personally take great pleasure watching Godzilla tear ass from one of the apartment to the other, or chase imaginary bugs, or entertain himself with a sock full of catnip. In fact, having a cat when you’re a pothead is sort of like a 24-hour America’s Funniest Home Videos, in your own home. A stoned cat, on the other hand, would probably just eat a ton of food, throw it up on your carpet, and then go to sleep.

On Saturday I offered a few tongue-in-cheek complaints on how the slowly climbing temperature has made me feel guilty for not being more active on the weekends. This was my 6 a.m. Monday morning karmic retribution. 

Fuck you, Mother Nature.

So the big story this morning - which I couldn’t make up if I tried - is that of a 200-pound pet chimpanzee that authorities were forced to shoot to death after he mauled Charla Nash, a woman he had known for years, leaving her critically injured and lacking significant pieces of her face. 

The woman was a friend of the chimp’s Connecticut owner, 70-year-old Sandra Herold, who’s had 14-year-old Travis for years. The monkey has appeared in television commercials and often poses for photos with the locals. He also has many a claim to domestic fame: among Travis’ skills were drinking wine, bathing and dressing himself, and using the computer. 

I’m as much of an animal lover as the next person - those ASPCA commercials with Sarah McLachlan and probably-not-her-real-dog make me cry every time - but I also have a very clear understanding of the difference between “pet” and “wild animal.” Pets include dogs, cats, fish, turtles, even the occasional pot-bellied pig. Wild animals, as we’ve seen through countless in-home maulings, include alligators, tigers, oversized snakes — and chimpanzees. 

Yes, they’re cute, and they seem smart. But the ability to react to speech, wear pants with suspenders, or smoke cigarettes does not a creature of higher intelligence make. And either way, a good rule of thumb is to keep no pet that weighs more than you do. Especially at age 70, since I’m fairly certain Medicare doesn’t cover monkey maulings.

Hold on to your butts.

Nope, that’s not a well-placed Samuel L. Jackson Jurassic Park reference, but rather a legitimate warning to all of the young boys out there in the Big Apple. Police are currently looking for a man who keeps walking up behind boys in the city, and “squeezing their buttocks.” He’s grabbed the bums of boys between the ages of 11 and 15, and kissed one of them on the neck, something I’m pretty sure I could drop-kick someone before they’d get close enough to achieve with me. 

The attacks have been going on since September, with the most recent incident taking place Thursday. 

Let me say this: My bum has been touched, whether “accidentally” or in an outright way, probably five or six times in New York. Never have I reported the incident to police in the interest of contributing to the discovery of a broader butt-grabbing trend. Because the creeps of New York City are in and of themselves a butt-grabbing trend. When you walk around in the Big Apple, be you boy, girl, 11 or 23, you watch your ass. 

But if someone kisses your neck, you mace them.

Illustrator Christoph Niemann has a blog on the New York Times’ website (don’t we all) called Abstract City, where he, more or less, gets paid to upload his doodles. And frankly, in a culture where people get paid to show up at PR events, where they drink top shelf liquor for free and leave with a gift bag costing in the thousands of dollars range, that’s a pretty fucking terrible job. So kudos, Mr. Niemann, for deigning to press that “scan” button on your Lexmark scanner/copier/printer/espresso machine.

Now, because I’ll be killing Christoph tonight and stealing his job, I thought it’d be a nice tribute to share some of his brilliant New York lego sculptures. Of course, you could also just visit his blog to view them the entire collection, but then what would be the point of stealing content at all?

Despite an egregious omission of a lego junkie taking a midday nap with his head in a trash can, overall these constructions represent the “real” New York much more accurately than any laborious recreation of the skyline, that ultimately, nobody except six-year-olds and really fucking pathetic 35-year-olds (Lego Magazine’s two primary demographics) will appreciate. Read More ›

Sexism aside, there are times when it’s totally okay to be a little embarrassed by your gender. The same way my dad’s high-socks-with-shorts combo used to make me cringe, there are plenty of females in the world that induce in me a longing for more masculine concerns, like obscure sports statistics, or deciding between Axe and Tag.

Today is one of those days. In a feat of “Let’s get people to make themselves look bad on the record,” the New York Times profiled a group of young women known as DABA – Dating a Bankers Anonymous – who gather in various Sex-and-the-City-esque locations to discuss Wall Street’s collapse. But not in terms of its effect on their 401Ks, job prospects or ability to pay rent; rather, how the disintegrating banking sector is taking a toll on their relationships with one-time titans of finance. Read More ›

The assault has started. 

Hundreds of dead birds fell onto homes and cars in parts of a Somerset County, N.J. town this weekend, ostensibly part of a Department of Agriculture program to reduce the European starling population. Frankin Township resident Andrea Kipec told reporters she’d counted more than 150 birds on her property, a haul local authorities told her she is responsible for cleaning up. 

Health department officials say the dead birds - whose cause of death remains a secret (poison, obvi) - pose no hazard to people or pets, outside of their presence being a tad unsightly for the area. And residents remain confused about the bird-culling operation, about which USDA officials informed some local authorities and not others, and certainly not people whose homes would actually be littered with bird carcasses. 

Given the two-pronged avian attack on US Airways flight 1549 earlier this month, and a subsequent outcry against birds as malicious sky assailants, it should come as no surprise that local officials are taking measures to murder thousands of potential plane destroyers. The Port Authority is calling for the use of bird-radar at all New York area airports and City Council member Hiram Monserrate is waiting with bated breath for the OK on wanton bird assassination. David Weprin, another member of the City Council (which apparently has no real problems to deal with these days), is calling for various other measures to cull the goose population, including oiling unhatched eggs and pouring gravel over fields.

Oh yeah, and shooting. Because bullets flying around airports are certainly better than airborn Canada geese.

Now that Barack Obama’s presence in the Oval Office is sure to keep his Middle Eastern pals from blowing up any more American buildings, it’s high time we as a nation turned to the next group of wanton terrorists, hell bent on unpatriotic destruction. Yes, I’m talking about birds.

Ever since a flock of rebel suicide-bomber geese took down a US Airways commercial jet last week, safety investigators have been going back over radar data to see if readings indicate the presence of birds in and around the area when the flight took off. Indeed, what authorities are anticipating will be a year-long probe into the plane’s emergency landing is kicking off by searching for answers to the most difficult question first: At 3:45 p.m. on Friday January 16, were there birds in the sky?

There’s certainly a facet to this answer that I haven’t seen explored to full capacity – namely that the geese in question were not “in the sky” so much as “in the jet engines.” Or that newspapers and authorities alike are calling Flight 1549 pilot Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger a hero at the same time as a national safety board investigates his claim of a “double bird strike.” A claim that’s fairly un-investigatable considering birds register as mere “blips” on radar, if that.

But worry not. In-depth probes into the presence, or lack thereof, of birds in the airways will be a moot point once state Sen. Hiram Monserrate has his way. The Queens Democrat, who practiced his anti-bird aggression by hitting his girlfriend with a bottle (New York swore him in anyway, what’s a little domestic violence among friends?) is calling on the Port Authority to “eradicate the threat of geese at area airports.”

Along with Sen. Eric Adams, Monserrate plans to introduce legislation to force the Port Authority into action, that is, if the agency doesn’t want to go duck huntin’ voluntarily. And since it’s not yet clear what exactly Monserrate plans to do to keep birds at bay, he’s commissioning his own senate committee to undertake a study to “determine the options and potential costs of bird migration.” Because New York state has so much extra money laying around for useless studies.

So hear that, geese. In America, no one flies nothing into anything.

This weekend’s release of Biggie Smalls epic Notorious had at least 50% of Brooklyn in a frenzy — the 50% that doesn’t get in a frenzy over quirky Sundance picks or Woody Allen’s latest self-serving feature film. Which is to say everyone in my neighborhood was abuzz — and I don’t mean high, though probably that too — over what seemed to be the first movie to take rap seriously since Hustle and Flow.

And boy does Brooklyn know how to celebrate. Four young men in a Flatbush nightclub were stabbed over the weekend — one seriously wounded — during a party the club had advertised as a celebration of the film’s release. Although Fox Searchlight was quick to clarify the party was not officially affiliated with Notorious, the club advertised it as the “official afterparty.” After all, no better way to celebrate the cultural contributions of one of Brooklyn’s own — who was, by the by, murdered — than with random acts of unnecessary violence. 

Which isn’t to say that there aren’t plenty of bar fights, or shotgun accidents, at the nation’s various country western bars — of which Americans should probably be equally ashamed. The thing is, the day they make a movie touting the musical impact of someone like Garth Brooks (Walk the Line doesn’t count, Johnny Cash was legit), I’m moving to Canada anyway.

Here’s a 9/11 aftermath we hadn’t considered: tragedy ain’t fun unless everyone dies.

Wolf Blitzer sounded downright disappointed this afternoon after reports surfaced that Flight 1549’s emergency landing in the Hudson River yielded no casualties. In fact, rescue efforts appeared to go smoothly, with everyone from local water taxis to overtime-inclined hospital employees pitching in to help get the plane’s 148 passengers back to safety.

Wolf practically begged a survivor to give him all the gory details – blood, guts, trampling – but things went off without a hitch. And since even this administration can’t logically claim a flock of geese has anything to do with vicious terrorist organizations, it would seem the biggest news story of the week — outside of Steve Jobs’ “J/K, I do have cancer” — is kind of a dud. Unless you’re a goose.

And with the plane itself sinking peacefully to the bottom of the river, it seems that by tomorrow we can all turn back to what’s important: the more figurative crash of our entire economy.

"Bitch don't act right? Well yeah, hell yeah, I'm gonna drop that ass."

Suicide jokes are surprisingly hard to craft without being patently offensive, revealing a uniquely sick sense of humor more than actually evoking laughter. It’s treacherous territory — veer too callous and a writer risks appealing to literally only those deranged subhuman wraiths that inhabit faraway Internet message boards/parents’ converted basements, the same slithering masses responsible for those fucking stupid “every time you masturbate God kills a kitten” images and pretty much every other overtired blog meme that was funny for only the first five seconds.

At the same time, other readers, who pride themselves on things like being a functioning member of society, seeing daylight from time to time, and not masturbating to amateurish drawings of cartoon cats, will bid you farewell with replies in the comments section to the tune of “wow you’re an awful human being… why don’t you just go kill yourself?”

This quandary occurred to me after seeing the news that a woman plunged to her death yesterday afternoon after jumping from a 39th floor window of the Empire State Building. More horrifying is the fact that the loose change falling from her pocket could have killed any number of innocent bystanders on the sidewalk below. Bah, suicide is just so selfish.

Early reports speculated that King Kong may have been responsible for dropping the woman from the astounding height, but, to his credit, Mr. Kong has since been cleared of any implication in her death. Read More ›

Fucking finally.

After years of making me look little more than lazy, now the subway is throwing me a bone. According to the Associated Press, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority will verify tardy notices for students and employees who are late because of the subway system. Which means I have a new stop to make every fucking morning - somewhere between picking up coffee and the newspapers.

In actuality, passengers request “delay verification letters” over the phone, and NYC Transit verifies them in one to two weeks, by which point any logical employer or teacher has long since forgotten the incident. As though shelling out some 34,000 tardy notices a year makes it okay to operate a festering shithole of public transportation that probably hasn’t gotten me anywhere on time since 2004.

NYC Transit is reportedly working on a system that would allow letter requests and verifications to be pursued online and via e-mail. Maybe after that they can do something actually productive.