This is the time of year when I feel the crush of wanting what I can’t have.  Not what I want for myself, but for others.  The need to buy good gifts puts a great deal of pressure on me.  In the stores I become very focused and intense; cheery clerks smile and say “Hello” to me and I look at them blankly, like a drug-addled actor on the WB, and wonder why they’re distracting me when I have work to get done.

The worst things always happen to me when I’m shopping.  (I can tell the following story because my sister-in-law doesn’t read this site.) My sister-in-law likes Williams Sonoma cookbooks, but I’ve already bought her, like, 50 of them in previous years. She said, “Just get me the ones that were produced this year. I don’t have any of the new ones.” So I went to Williams Sonoma and picked up an armload of them, and the clerk said “Are you finding what you’re looking for?”

And I said “Sure!  I need all the recent cookbooks that were produced in 2004.”

She said, “But some of them are very old, and the company just updates them a little.”

My face fell like a Williams Sonoma souffle that’s been subjected to a 9.8 earthquake. “Update?”

“Yes, they sometimes alter the recipes slightly and then change the copyright date.”

“You mean...like, the recipe says to add a pinch of goat cheese to a salad, but this is actually wrong, and so the company gets subjected to tons of angry letters from amateur cooks who tell them to edit the recipe immediately or they’ll never buy waffle mix or no-stick cooking pans from Williams Sonoma again?”

“Yes, that happens, and sometimes they just put a different salad on the cover.”

So then I’m stuck, because I no longer know which cookbooks are the new ones.

The only person on my list that’ll be easy to buy for is my baby niece.  Having watched her very closely, I’ve realized that she likes plasticky things that make shrill noises.  So I’m either getting her a Fisher-Price toy, or Joan Rivers.

December, then, becomes my month for a strange, consumer-driven form of longing.  And I become very attuned to longing when I see it in other places. For example, the subway stations in San Francisco are currently plastered with posters for a personals hotline.  It shows a scantily dressed girl holding the phone receiver to her ear while arching her back and staring at the camera. This isn’t a kind of longing I associate with lonelyhearts--who puts on makeup to answer the phone, and who contorts their body into such a ridiculous position just to talk to someone?  No, I recognize the longing of the model, who is begging to be able to relax the pose, put on a warm coat, and go practice her bulimia in peace.

One of my greatest accomplishments is to place this web site on page #2 or #3 under a Google search for “Naked Girls.” I started the site long after Al Gore invented the Internet, but I still managed to elbow past scads of commercial porn pages with nothing but the frequent repetition of a key search string. Normally I get a kick from the constant stream of young intellectuals who come here looking for airbrushed flesh, only to find an inane story about grown-up men trying to drink in Florida during spring break; but lately I’m feeing more sympathetic than sardonic, because I know what it’s like to look for something and not find it.

Blog Explosion is addicting in a strange, unsettling way, much like the first few seasons of Saved by the Bell.

But in surfing all these new blogs, I’m amazed how many are about knitting and pets.  I’ve realized that 51% of America is composed of people who knit and who like pets.

Moral values?  Please.  The Democrats lost the election because of their weak stance on knitting and pets.

I think we all remember that one moment in the Presidential debate:

---
MODERATOR: So what do you think of blogs about knitting and pets?

BUSH: I’m in favor of blogs about knitting and pets.  Knitting and pets make our country great.  If I’m elected, I’ll start more blogs about knitting and pets.

KERRY: I’m glad you asked that question.  I have very strong convictions about knitting and pets, many of which have been misconstrued by my opponent.  My family often knitted, and sometimes we had pets. When I think about knitting and pets, many strong thoughts come to my mind--

(goes on for ten more minutes, everyone falls asleep)
----

It seems clear to me that the Democrats will have a chance in 2008 if they cater to the knitting and pets majority.  I only wonder if they can do so without compromising their core values.

This weekend, a bartender said something ridiculous to my friend and he winked at me beforehand.  He didn’t know me.  But in that quick, subtle gesture he let me in on the joke. I felt a brief thrill of pleasure.  I laughed at the joke when he said it.  I felt that if the bartender and I were hunched in a trench and a grenade went sailing in behind us, I’d jump on it.  I’d sacrifice my life for his.  I’d take a face full of shrapnel.

I realized that this is a big secret of people who are successful and charismatic: they have mastered the art of the wink.  They know how to use it at key moments that bring others into their confidence and confer a sense of intimacy.

I’ve tried winking a little bit myself. I’m not very good at it.  To help me, I’ve developed some rules that, I believe, help govern one’s use of the wink:

1. Get the gesture right.  It’s just a brief, barely perceptible flicker.  You shouldn’t put the entire side of your facial muscles into play. If you do, it won’t look like a subtle gesture of good natured intimacy; it will look like someone squirted lemon in your eye.

2. Only wink before you say or do something that’s meant to be funny or ironic or otherwise notable. If you wink at someone and say “Here, look at this Excel spreadsheet,” people will be confused.

3. Winking is intimate, and it’s also a quiet gesture.  So don’t employ it with other more flashy gestures of intimacy.  For example, it’s incorrect to wink at people if you’re not wearing pants.

If you learn how to do it right, use the skill with caution.  You have a special power over people, and with power comes responsibility. If you’re trying to be prom queen, don’t use it to stuff the ballot box. If you’re a criminal, don’t use it to rob people. If you’re a Republican, don’t use it to become President.  And if you’re hanging around me, be nice.  I’ll be just as cool and charismatic as you--as soon as I get this lemon out of my eye.

I was talking to my CFO and had to scratch my shoulder, but I forgot I was holding a cup of coffee.  It hit my shirt with a stain the size of Liberia and the rest of it splashed on the carpet.

Fortunately, I’ve worked at this company so long that no one even blinks an eye at my idiocy; the CFO simply remarked, “That’s why we have dark carpets.”

I recently saw my first Bollywood production, which is a movie made in India with lots of singing and dancing.  It was great. It was called Mujhse Dosti Karoge!, which apparently means “Be My Friend” but for all I know translates to “Me So Horny.” The story was a riff on Some Kind of Wonderful with the guy not realizing that his bookish, shy girl-pal is a better match for him than the hot party girl, but it was great because the shy girl-pal was ten times hotter than the hot party girl.  It was a glorious disregard for reality.  In an American movie, they would have at least slapped some glasses on her or something, but this movie just offered up a Bizarro world where the pretty girls read books and the party girls look vaguely like bald eagles.

I also loved that, along with the singing and dancing, there was a wedding every five seconds.  A wedding ceremony would suddenly appear out of nowhere, and I’m all, “Wait a minute--the characters don’t even know each other.  Why are they getting married?  And the movie was all, “Hey, they exchanged five words to each other.  That’s reason enough for them to get hitched.” You only see that kind of thing in Bollywood movies, and maybe Kentucky.

Everyone dressed in amazing outfits.  You’re thinking, whatever, everyone dresses well in movies.  But this flick made the characters in a Meg Ryan comedy look like bums under a bridge.  I went home and decided that I, too, would like to be always color coordinated with my background, but after walking to the kitchen and having to change my shirt three times on the way, I decided it was more trouble than it was worth.

Then I started vacuuming my living room and felt the urge to burst into a musical number, complete with badly translated, unrhymed subtitles:

You are thief of my heart
If my heart was like a piece of cheese
You would be the rat getting the cheese
I am now chasing dust bunnies with aplomb

On a completely unrelated note, I was walking through San Francisco and one of the street performers was a very large opera singer. She had a beautiful voice that nearly drowned out the jackhammer on the opposite side of the curb.  But, as previously mentioned, she wasn?t a small woman.  Maybe you shouldn’t bother going to work or school today--because if it’s not over until the fat lady sings, I think we’re all pretty much done.

An old post from the archives is now up at McSweeneys.net.  But although its old, I added two new lines to it--and since it’s only a five line list, that means it now boasts more than fifty percent new content.  That’s the kind of value we’re committed to bringing you here at “Geese Aplenty.” Check it.

Vice President Dick Cheney has been the subject of media scrutiny recently after being part of a brief hospital visit. However, an adviser has assured the press that Cheney isn’t suffering from anything more serious than the common cold.

Mary Matalin, a former top White House aide to the 63-year-old vice president, took particular pains to assure everyone that Cheney wasn’t being punished by God for his sins.

“That’s just a ludicrous rumor,” Matalin said.  “There is absolutely no theological evidence to suggest that Mr. Cheney is ill as a result of transgressing against God.  We have looked into it, and virtually no one believes that to be the case.”

Cheney has often taken the high ground with his opponents, despite the shady dealings of his former company, Haliburton, and his own support for the current war in Iraq. Some political observers have suggested that God is tired of Cheney positioning himself as a good and moral person, and His direct intervention has resulted in Cheney’s failing health.

“The liberal press has been quick to say ‘God did this’ and “God did that,’” Matalin continued. “But we are firm in our belief that Mr. Cheney’s troubles are the result of the common cold and have absolutely nothing to do with balancing the scales of justice as determined by an angry and omniscient deity.”

In regards to the alleged crucifix that appeared in a fiery red blaze on Cheney’s forehead before mysteriously disappearing, Matalin replied, “That’s just an old scar.  It’s visible when he’s under stress and then it goes away.  It’s not a symbol or portent of anything.”

Cheney has also reportedly been mumbling to himself in Latin while in the grips of his current fever, although he never studied the language in school.

“I dunno,” Matalin said.  “Maybe he picked it up from the back of dollar bills or whatever. It could happen.  We don’t think it’s a big deal.”

I am not amused by Sorry Everybody.

No, my candidate didn’t win the election.  No, I’m not happy that the next Supreme Court justices will likely be enemies of Roe versus Wade. No, I don’t think that attacking Iraq makes the U.S. safer. 

But this is still a representative democracy, and I’m not apologizing for the fact that the best chimpanzee won. 

Is France apologizing for having recently banned Muslim headscarves in classrooms?

Is Germany apologizing for having overburdened their economy with an ungainly system of social benefits?

Is Australia apologizing for Paul Hogan?

All countries have something to be ashamed of.  It’s just that our shame is highly visible, highly destructive, and can’t form an English sentence to save his life.  But he won the vote in a land that created the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer seasons 1-5.  America may be a lot of things, but we’re not Myanmar and we’re not the Ivory Coast.

Seriously, liberals, could you have any less pride? 

I say this even though some of my little online friends are active participants in this travesty.  Halsted, I love you because you write posts like this one, but this is not a good idea.

Liberals are already seen as tremendous weenies, and this isn’t helping.  And it’s not like we have time to kill.  We have four years to revisit our message, communicate it, and displace the idea that the reds have some sort of bizarre monopoly on the concept of moral values.  But I’m apologizing for two things: Jack and Squat.

By 2008, I want the left wing to be seen as tough. I mean The Rock tough.  Dick Cheney chewing on babies before the VP debate?  Was that the commonly circulated joke?  Screw that.  We should all chew on babies.  (Although my niece is off limits.) And we need to hold our ground, speak the truth, and be feared.  If people are willing to swallow an oxymoron like compassionate conservatism, we can damn well serve up our own: kick-ass liberalism.

Now shut up and stop wasting webcam pixels on this nonsense.  At the very least, use them for something more important and patriotic--like revenue-generating nudity.

The good thing about being part of the Sales & Marketing department is that you can abbreviate to S&M, but the downside is that no one is amused by the idea of having an internal slogan/rallying cry along the lines of “Taste the pain.”

I slowly gathered, through the process of pop culture osmosis that begins as soon as I wake up each morrning, that Britney Spears’s new single was called “My Prerogative.” I didn’t realize until I heard it that she was actually covering the old Bobby Brown song.  It was bad enough when lame pop singers were covering decent songs--Samantha Fox doing “Satisfaction,” and Spears herself doing “I Love Rock and Roll"--but what’s up with lame singers covering lame songs from over a decade ago?  And the lame songs sound even worse the second time around.

Fifteen years from now, the hot new singer Young Eve X MC Fresh will cover Spears covering Brown’s “My Prerogative” and it will basically sound like someone coughing up a phlegmball.

In other Spears news, I read an article in which she claimed she’s taking two years off and then will return with a “new, shocking image.” I’m not sure what that could be: her makeout partner Madonna has already used all the shocking image reinventions.  Here’s some thoughts about what she might return as:

A garbanzo bean
A blue state
A high school graduate
Condoleeza Rice’s long-lost sister
A line of human embryonic stem cells
The wife of that Federline guy, high on two years of monogamous, married bliss
Mandy Moore’s personal assistant
A singer/songwriter

- Okay, Mr. Howard, so I think you know why weve brought you in here today.  We’re rounding up the last of the liberals and depositing them in special internment camps so they can’t do any more damage to the rest of the country.  It’s been a long, slow process--with highlights that include the Reaganization of America in the ‘80s, the Republicans taking back congress in 1994, W. Bush’s re-election, and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist creating a genetically engineered army of super clones--but America is now almost entirely conservative.  Except for a few hold outs.  We hadn’t noticed you up until now, but you’ve been identified as one of the last liberals and you’ll have to go the internment camp.

- I had been so good about keeping a low profile.  I shouldn’t have been laughing so loud at that bootlegged copy of The Daily Show--one of my neighbors heard me and turned me in.

- Those neighbors are patriots.

- I’m not entirely liberal, you know.

- Really?

- Sure.  I have lots of non-liberal ideas.

- Tell us about them, Mr. Howard.

- Well, for example, I?m not all that big on centralized health care.  I hate hospitals--they all smell like antiseptic and medicine. I figure if we have centralized health care, the whole country will smell like one big hospital.

- Well, uh, that’s an interesting political position, but--

- And then there’s welfare.  I’m in favor of some kind of social safety net, but I’m in favor of aggressive policies that get people off the rolls quickly and back into the labor market.  That’s why I think all welfare recipients should get an alarm clock.

- An alarm clock?

- Sure.  The only reason to be on welfare is to sleep in, so if you give everyone an alarm clock and force them to wake up, they’ll be back at a job before you know it.

- Isn’t that kind of a simplistic solution to a complex problem?  What about single mothers?

- Oh, give the kids an alarm clock too. They need to go to school.

- Well, now, that’s--

- And although I’m against a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, I am in favor of an amendment that says we don’t have to buy presents for gay couples.  Or straight couples. In fact, I’m in favor of a constitutional amendment that says couples have to buy presents for single people for a change.  I could use a nice crystal gravy boat.

- Mr. Howard, despite the conservative views you’ve just espoused, you are clearly still a bleeding-heart liberal.  Your sentence is unchanged.  You’re going to the internment camps immediately.

- Damn it.  Well, please, just tell me I have a decent roommate.  A lot of my fellow liberals annoy the living spit out of me.

- I’m afraid in one bunk it’s Ben Affleck--

- What?

- --and in the other, it’s the Indigo Girls.

- DEAR GOD.  Listen...did I mention that I think supply-side economics is just...swell?

My brother sent me a gift.  It was given for canceling weekend plans a while back to perform emergency babysitting duties while he was called out of town on business--

(--although it wasn’t actually babysitting; it was more of a clash of metaphors, the kind that you don’t usually see outside of a badly done creative writing exercise.  I had Cameron in her high chair and I brought out all these jars of funny colored goopy food, and I scooped some up with a spoon and said “Open wide!  Here comes the airplane!” And Cameron laughed and grabbed the spoon and threw food around and said “So which one are you, Orville or Wilbur?  The airplane analogy may have worked for your pathetic generation, but I’m more interested in a new one--painting.  Let me have that green stuff! I am spraying it around the kitchen!  The entire, newly remodeled room will look like the aftermath of Day of the Triffids!  Let me have that yellow stuff.  Perfect! Do you have any blue?  WHAT, NO BLUE?  Listen, Red Baron, I’m Jackson Goddamn Pollock and I’m creating a WORK OF ART.  Also, what’s for dessert?")

--and although the gift was completely unnecessary because emergency babysitting is part of the Uncle thing, it was a really nice gift--a Connoisseur’s Wine Opener Set.  I have actually had some trouble with this in the past.  At one point, in the middle of a social occasion where I needed the wine to pour in fairly short order, I think I may have jumped on top of the bottle and stomped the cork with my feet until it dislodged from the neck and shot down into the crimson waves of cabernet, quickly popping up to float like a buoy.  I’m suave.  I also use gadgets from Q Branch.

So I was excited about this gift, which is this gigantic silver thing with a huge handle, until I started reading the instructions. It said:

“Good for opening 1,000 bottles of wine.”

And I thought--jeez.  What happens after the thousandth bottle?  Does the opener explode? Does that huge, shiny, silver handle fly up and impale itself on your forehead?

“Hey Greg, what’s up with the silver thing sticking out of your forehead?”

“It’s my Connoisseur’s Wine Opener Set.  I opened up my thousandth bottle of wine.”

“Wow. Does it hurt?”

“No, it’s jammed into the part of my brain that registers pain.  It also helps me pick up radio waves.  On the downside, though, I’ve been struck by lightning five times this week.”

So this sort of bummed me out, until I realized that none of this would happen until I opened one thousand bottles of wine. And isn’t that a cool concept?  Knowing that there’s a thousand bottles of wine in your future?*

So, Internets, you’re officially invited over to my place to help me drink one thousand bottles of wine.** I need to get started on this.  It’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it.

*Actually, 999 bottles of wine, because I had to go home and test out the opener. But c’mon, 999 bottles of wine still makes for a pretty serious party.

**Not just wine, either, because I bought some Halloween candy for the kids but then I wasn’t home so now I have two bags of Butterfingers.  So please come over and help me drink wine and eat Butterfingers.

The thing I hate about buying any sort of tech gadget is that you begin to be painfully aware of its almost immediate obsolescence.  I bought a digital camera for my trip a while back, and now I read these ads and articles about the next generation of digital cameras that will be five megapixels, and six megapixels, and in late 2005 an eight megapixel camera with 10x optical zoom that also captures a piece of its subject’s soul—which can be handy if you snap a picture of your grandmother and later want to know the secret of that pot roast she made, so you just ask the camera and a disembodied voice answers “It’s all in the paprika, sweetheart.”

The part I like best about Halloween is that people will get together and watch horror movies.  Try suggesting this on another holiday, and you’ll be met with indifference (Arbor Day) or downright indignation (Easter).

Watching Candyman reminded me why I never succeeded in becoming a screenwriter.  I had been told that my dialogue was good but my scripts weren’t visual or cinematic enough.  Candyman is a dude who appears if you speak his name five times into a mirror, at which point he guts you with a hook.  My idea for a horror movie, The Snorer, about someone who snores five times and then steals all your covers, at which point you leave in a huff and take all your CDs with you.  To me, this is pretty scary if you’ve lived through it, but okay, the hook bit is kind of cool.

The Omen is even scarier than I remembered.  It reminded me that the Anti-Christ first appears as a screaming baby covered in blood.  As do all babies.  They all look evil: how are you supposed to know the Anti-Christ from just a run-of-the-mill baby?  You’ll be all, “Eh, I’m sure it’s not the Devil’s spawn; he’ll look better after he’s cleaned up and chilled out a bit.” And that’s just what the Anti-Christ is counting on.  You take him home and the next thing you know, nannies start dropping like flies.

On the up side, the whole “Anti” concept is a good way to get people off their high horse.  People may think they’re cool, but did the Devil bother to make a whole opposite number named after them?  For example, you’ve got a boastful guy at work who did great on a project and is about to be promoted. Just remind him that there’s still no theological concept for the Anti-Fred, so shut the hell up already.