This was absolutely the scariest movie I’ve ever seen.

I can’t believe that there would be such a force that’s so indestructible.  So unstoppable. A force of nature.

I’m talking about the camera.

That thing doesn’t break.  It survives buildings falling down, people being killed in horrible ways, and mass destruction.  And the battery never dies.

The movie gave me nightmares. I dreamed that a bunch of Cloverfield-style video cameras flapped around me using little tiny wings, just like those flying toasters in the old ‘90s screensavers. They whispered to me malevolently.  They said “You think you’ve got a problem from the monster?  We are the true evil in the world. We will laugh as humanity is destroyed.  We will film the destruction, and we will put it on YouTube, and then we will ‘Favorite’ it, like, a lot.”

Let’s take some time out of our day to discuss the things that have really annoyed me lately:

I am very tired of people wishing me “Happy New Year.” I find it to be completely insensitive, and highly indicative of the kind of ethnocentrism that runs rampant in American society.  My cultural background does not lead me to acknowledge the typical calendar year, because my family bloodline can be traced back to ancient Sumeria, and also the Phoencian civilization, and also the Ixil tribe in Guatemala.  Therefore, my family celebrates our new year not by watching Dick Clarke or wearing ridiculous and humiliating hats, but by paying honor to the ritual sacrifice of virgins as a way of giving thanks to our Gods.

We have updated that ritual for modern times, of course; instead of sacrificing the virgins, we simply find a virgin and send her text messages reading “r u 4 REALZ?” We also hack into her MySpace account and redo the layouts, and also stand outside her front porch and hurl pieces of bologna at the front door.

But again, our year is different from a typical calendar year; we actually perform this ceremony once every seven of your days. It begins on the day that the Judeo-Christian calendar often refers to as “hump day.” I am usually forced to spend a lot of my non-work hours buying bologna and researching virgin residences since our “New Years” happens much more frequently than our heathen counterparts.  It has also forced me to ask my company’s I.T. department to remove the MySpace block from my work computer, although purely for religious reasons.

So the next time you wish “Happy New Year” to someone, please stop and ask yourself: are you imposing your cultural values on others?  And if so, what’s up with that?

Foil paparazzi; always do a panty check before leaving the house.

No more pointless arguments. When people say something that I disagree with, play air guitar until they go away.

Write, produce, and direct grainy, artsy, award-winning documentary When the Party’s Over: What Happens to the Girls Gone Wild.

Increase amount of body art. Not on myself, of course, but others.  Random strangers.  Use chloroform.

Cross WGA picket line; take advantage of industry desperation to revive The Greatest American Hero.

Hack into online Scrabble dictionary so it becomes possible to play perfectly good words like “Fiberkle.”

Ignore sister when she offers idiotic parenting advice. No wait!  That’s a resolution for Jamie Lynn Spears.

Buy hybrid car--i.e., has both CD and mp3 player.

Cut coffee intake in half. Accomplish this by filling up mug with 50% Irish whiskey.

Master taxidermy.

Christmas was great but very expensive.  I really wanted to get a dollhouse for my niece, so I foolishly obtained one of those volatile subprime mortgages.  Let me tell you, in this economy, it’s not a good idea to get an adjustable fifteen-hour loan. By hour seven, I had already squandered dozens of quarters paying off the interest.

But it all worked in the end, because I was able to refinance to a fixed 30-day rate.

Still, and I don’t mean to sound like a hardass, but she’s going to have to take the place “as is” for now. It’s just not the right time to take out a home equity loan to do major remodeling--even though the structure is currently missing a wall.

One of the problems of living in a city that has a Baghdad-style body count is that bad things occasionally happen to your car. This week, someone stole my back license plates. (They probably tried to steal the front as well, but those were bolted on wrench-tight.  Sucks to be you, jobless delinquents!) I checked the DMV web site to see what I had to do, and their instructions were clear:

“If only one plate is stolen, you must surrender the other plate to the DMV.”

That ticked me off.  Not the concept--just the wording.  I didn’t want to “surrender” anything.  How about finding the people who stole my license plate and tell them to surrender?  “SURRENDER GREG’S PLATE THEN COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP.” I was the victim; I didn’t want to surrender. My main girl Dorothy and I take a stand on these kinds of things.

But when I went to the DMV with my completed application for new plates, the guy looked up at me and “You also need to surrender your remaining plates.”

I’ll say this about the DMV: they are consistent. When even the employees speak the same language as the forms, you know you have a well-run system.  A horrible carnival of anguish and pain, but nonetheless well run.  Hell with fluorescent lighting.

Still, for the cost of a little bit of wasted time plus twenty bucks, I received brand-new plates.  And the upside is that my new plates are much easier to remember. They are an agreeable combination of numbers and letters.  I have a theory that if you say them sequentially and very fast, they sound very much like an old Sumerian nickname that basically means “Hunter gatherer with substantial and intimidating forearms.” I am not going to research this just in case I’m wrong.

If you greet me with outstretched knuckles, in anticipation of doing the traditional male “knuckle touching” move, rest assured that I will not leave you hanging.  I will fulfill the gesture in the manner that society has mandated:

However, it’s worth noting that you’ve achieved the absolute opposite of what you intended.  Rather than bonding with me, you have almost guaranteed that we will never be close in any form--because if we were really friends, you’d know that I find the gesture completely annoying .  It’s actually my first filter for a potential friend. Well, that and whether you use the word “Irregardless.”

Furthermore, you might not want to push your luck and try it a second time. Because as I said, I won’t leave you hanging. But that doesn’t mean I won’t press my fist to yours and shout “WONDER TWIN POWERS ACTIVATE.”

And wouldn’t that be embarrassing if I did that with a lot of people around?  Well, maybe not for you; you’ve already taken on the form of a Doofus.

I thought I had been doing pretty well about not letting my own pop culture biases affect (or some would say “infect") my niece.  Take the other day, for example.  While shopping for a stocking stuffer book, I chanced upon a literary tome that immediately caught my eye.  Entitled Scooby Doo and the Rock and Roll Zombie, my first thought was that this was the perfect gift for Cameron.  Surely its gripping narrative and eye-popping illustrations would encourage her to take yet another step into the wonderful world of reading.

Now, I hadn’t read this particular installment in the Scooby Doo saga. But if I knew my literature, this alleged “Rock and Roll Zombie” would turn out to be the harmless old caretaker of the amusement park. Or perhaps the mean-spirited magnate who was attempting to buy out said amusement park.

Or it might actually be the caretaker wearing the mask of the magnate underneath the mask of the Zombie!  I hoped not, though. That whole “dual mask” twist is juicy but it’s also rather complicated. Surely such “Usual Suspects"-style reveals should be the province of a book that’s intended for, say ages 6 and up, rather than 5.

But as I reached for the book, I thought, well, maybe I was thinking too much about my own childhood and maybe it was possible to find something a little less corporate-ty for Cam.  And I ended up finding a very nice book with gorgeous, burnished illustrations and an easy-to-follow story. It didn’t have any rock and roll zombies, which I count as a minus (that’s also the reason I didn’t like Anna Karenina), but otherwise it seemed like a good choice.

Sounds like a rational chain of decision making? Except that I had an exchange with my sister-in-law the other day that made me realize that I haven’t been as good at this as I had thought:

SHE: Cameron’s decided that she wants a theme party for her next birthday.

ME: Oh, sounds great.

SHE (coldly): Yes...A Spider-Man party.

ME: Ha!  Really? Now that’s a chip of the old…

SHE: .....

ME: ...er...I mean...how nice?

SHE: Yes. I told her great, you can invite your uncle and all of your uncle’s friends.

I don’t remember foisting Spider-Man upon my niece, but maybe it just comes off me subliminally.  Or maybe it’s in the Howard blood. Maybe the Howard blood is radioactive.

(To digress for a moment, I’m confused why Dora the Explorer is somehow a more noble franchise to buy toys from than, say, Spider-Man.  I mean, talk about a role model that kids can’t live up to. How old is Dora supposed to be? Eight or so?  You show me a kid who is actually an “Explorer” by age eight. I could see Dora the Pooping or Dora the Oftentimes Drooling in her Sleep, but world traveling?  Let me tell you what I used to carry around with me when I was eight years old: beef jerky, Star Wars cards, and maybe a frog or two.  You know what I didn’t carry around?  A PASSPORT. If these are the characters that our kids are supposed to emulate, they’ll all be burnt out before junior high.)

The reality is, I don’t care one bit whether Cam reads about pink parasols or rock and roll zombies.  We start telling stories to kids as soon as they’re born: “This is who you are. This is where you came from. This is where you’re going.” And eventually they start choosing their own stories.  And no one, ever, has the time to read all of the stories in the world.  From that point of view, it doesn’t matter what stories you read, whether they’re these stories or those stories--as long as you’re immersed in them, and eventually have the ability to choose the ones that matter to you.  As long as she does that, I will happily stand down.

Which isn’t to say that I won’t stick her with Lemony Snicket down the road.

Northern California looks so cute when it tries to impress you with its seasons.  The leaves turn yellow and red haphazardly, like a kid scrawling inside a coloring book.  Then the whole area lurches into winter. Or it pretends to.  All that really happens is the air feels a little colder than usual.  It rains sometimes, but mostly the sun weakly dabs at the rooftops and tries to melt the morning frost.

California has no idea what real seasons are, and it will never know because it’s separated from them by thousands of miles. It has no idea that elsewhere in the country, the leaves turn so bright and vivid that they look as though they’re on fire.  It doesn’t know that if you stand in a certain place at just the right time, the air smells of apple cinnamon.  It doesn’t know that when the storms start to hit, the days become as hard and cold as a runway model’s face.

You are nice to California.  After all, you love California; it’s possible that you may never leave it again.  With that kind of commitment in the offing, the last thing you want to do is hurt California’s feelings.  So you smile indulgently as it parades its badly colored trees in front of you and occasionally showers you with rain.  Just because California does this one thing poorly doesn’t mean that it should be berated for its failures. California is a genius when it comes to spring, and second-run movie theaters, and couples key parties.  Let it get this nonsense out of its system, as it apparently needs to do once a year.  It’s all right if your face starts to hurt from all of the fake smiling. Once the air warms up and the fog lifts, your praise will once again be genuine.

During the White House reception for the Nobel winners, Gore was invited for a special, private 30-minute meeting with President Bush.  However, he was unwilling to talk about what they discussed:

“It was a private meeting,” he said, “and I’m not going to say anything about it other than that it was very nice, very cordial. He was very gracious in setting up the meeting, and it was a very good and very substantive conversation. That’s all.”

Fortunately, Geese Aplenty has obtained an exclusive transcript of this historic meeting, which is reprinted below:

BUSH: Thanks for coming in, Al.  Basically, this is about that whole global warming thing, which apparently you know something about.

GORE: I know a little, Mr. President, but hasn’t your administration typically denied the problem’s existence and even tried to discredit it?

BUSH: Bygones. I’m getting more interested in it.

GORE: Well, did you get a chance to see my movie on the topic?

BUSH: Was that the one where The Rock is a football player and discovers he has a cute 8-year old daughter?

GORE: No, that was a comedy called The Game Plan.  My movie was a documentary called An Inconvenient Truth.

BUSH: Then I didn’t see your movie. The only movie I’ve seen in the last three years was the one with The Rock and the cute kid.

GORE: Well, look, I can run through the problem pretty quickly for you. Let me set up my laptop--

(Bush BLANCHES)

GORE: Mr. President! Are you all right?

BUSH: You’re about to start showing me facts and figures, aren’t you?

GORE: Well, I just wanted to give you a summary of the--

BUSH: Al, you don’t work here, so you don’t know. But I’m telling you now.  Nobody shows me facts and figures. Allergies.

GORE: Well, what do you want me to do?

BUSH: Here’s the thing.  I’m getting a little worried about my legacy. I kinda don’t want to just have it be around the Iraq thing.

GORE: Well, you can also be remembered as the first President who was given the office by the Supreme Court.

BUSH: ...

GORE: ...

BUSH ...got a little fire in yer belly still, doncha Al?

GORE: My apologies, Mr. President, I honestly don’t know where that came from.

BUSH: Bygones. Point is, I want you to certify my administration as a Green Administration.

GORE: What?

BUSH: Yeah, everyone says you’re the green guy, so I want you to endorse my greenery.  Give me a big “thumbs up” from the standpoint of the green thing.  Once you do that, people will remember me as the Green President and not the Iraq guy. So what do you say?

GORE: Green President? What does that even mean?  Your policies are not environmentally friendly.

BUSH: Well, can’t you just say that the White House is green? Like, the staff recycles and stuff?

GORE: I’d have to run tests, evaluate the processes, crunch the--

BUSH: Facts and figures.  Al, what did I just tell you.

GORE: My apologies, Mr. President.

BUSH: Look, what can you do?

(pause)

GORE: Tell you what. I am willing to go out there to the mob of reporters outside right now and tell you that, with every fiber of my being, I believe that you are green. Your every action as shown you to be green. Your foreign policy, your domestic policy, your Supreme Court candidates--everything you’ve done for the last seven years has proven that you are truly green.  Many people prefer a president with experience and expertise, but you have shown that it’s possible to get through two terms by being nothing but green.

BUSH: ....there’s something in the way you’re phrasing that that’s actually making fun of me, isn’t there?

GORE: I’m afraid so, Mr. President.

BUSH: Okay, forget the whole thing. Just say nothing to the reporters. Good luck with your Nobel thingie, Al.

GORE: Good luck with your legacy, Mr. President.

“It’s always been you,” she breathed, her chest heaving like a freshman at college who had too many beers to drink at her first frat party.

As he reluctantly bathed in the shower of oncoming gunfire, he wondered how the bullets in his chest could be so hot even while his body was becoming increasingly colder.

“You and I will never be together.” Her eyes flashed like an exhibitionist in an oversized raincoat.

“I hate the rain,” she sighed. “Sometimes I see me dead in it. As well as tax audited.”

“Yes, that was your father,” the white whale responded, nonplussed. “He vanished under the waves with my Dad and they were never seen again.  I tracked you down using genealogical records.  You, Abu, are Ahab’s last living descendant--and frankly, I hope you’ve been keeping your harpoon sharpened, because I am plenty pissed.”

People tell me that I’m getting more curmudgeonly as I get older, which I take as a compliment. I mean, have you ever met one of those people in their eighties who are upbeat and pleasant all the time?  I look at those people and I can only assume that for eighty years they just haven’t been paying attention.

But sometimes a gesture of human kindness pierces my heart and cuts through all the negativity I’ve accumulated as a result of Darfur, the growing gap between the rich and the poor, global warming, and Adam Sandler.

Such was the case this weekend.  My friend Meredith knows some crazy people, and one of them threw a birthday party for her fiancée. What was the nature of said party? We were given movie cameras and told to write, film, and edit a movie in around six hours.  The Red Vic theater in San Francisco was rented out at midnight to screen all of the movies to a bunch of tired and (by that time) mostly drunk filmmakers.

Needless to say, this was a pretty stressful enterprise; we only had a few hours of light to capture all the footage. And most of our film consisted of exterior shots, as it was decided to do a parody of Run Lola Run (one of my favorite movies, as it happens) full of in-jokes and references to the birthday boy and his fiancée.

So anyway, I was trying to take some shots of Lola (Meredith) running.  We were running out of time, and we were all tired.  I needed a shot of her running down her apartment stairs, but we were in a cramped courtyard and I was having a hard time setting up the tripod.  I backed up against an apartment door and shouted “Okay, give me a second, I’m trying to get you into frame--”

--and suddenly, the door behind me opened.

I turned around, and an elderly lady smiled and gestured to me.

“Come in, come in, shoot here.” She had an accent--I couldn’t quite place it. Swedish?

It was a foggy, chilly day in the city, and I could feel the heat spilling out of her well-warmed apartment.

“Oh!” I said. “Okay, it will just be a second. Thanks!”

And I backed up a few feet.

“Come in more, shoot, shoot,” she said, urging me on.

So I backed up even more and planted my ass in her hallway and set up the camera and got the shot.

I turned around and said to my savior, “You’re very kind.”

“Ah, of course, of course,” she said, and then she shut the door.

Now, admittedly, this was Meredith’s neighbor and probably knew her by sight, so she didn’t think she was opening her door to a psycho killer or anything. But still, this lady was warm and peaceful in her apartment on a cold November day.  She disrupted her tranquility so a bunch of shouting morons could enter her house and finish a ridiculous movie.

So, of all the things I’m thankful for, topping the list is anyone who is willing to open the front door, place trust in humanity, and let people get the shot they need:

(And isn’t Meredith a dead ringer for the real Lola?)

Happy Thanksgiving.

ME (excitedly): How can they talk about remaking Poltergeist? It’s perfect the way it is. I don’t care if the special effects are dated.

COLLEAGUE: You’re probably right.

(Young, female co-worker walks by)

ME: YOU! What do you think of Poltergeist?

YOUNG FEMALE CO-WORKER: Older guys?

ME: ....

YOUNG FEMALE CO-WORKER: Why are you asking what I think of older guys?

ME: Not older guys. POLTER GEIST.

YOUNG FEMALE CO-WORKER: Whatever.

COLLEAGUE: Greg, tell me again how it is that you still have a job.

In complete defiance of all those over the years who have complained that I never write about anything important, here is a ripped-from-the-headlines discussion of the Oxford comma, also known as the “serial comma.” The summary of the discussion is as follows: anyone who uses the serial comma is one of the Chosen; anyone who doesn’t is a mutton head.

The serial comma is where you use a comma after the last item in a sentence to designate a list. For example:

“Greg blogs about wheat, toads, and potstickers.”

Here’s the same sentence without the serial comma:

“Greg blogs about wheat, toads and potstickers.”

Note how that sentence is completely confusing.  Why does “wheat” get its own little special space of the universe, while “toads” and “potstickers” are jammed together like frat boys in the back of a pickup? Are those two items somehow connected? Is there a cosmic meaning that one should derive from their breathless union?

Of course not, and that’s why each item needs a comma.  Those items are begging for a comma. If they don’t have a comma, they don’t look right. You stare at them and you sense something wrong.  Something out of place.  Something that strikes at the core of their identity. Like Lindsay Lohan with an alcohol monitoring bracelet.

The problem is, there’s no consensus. Most grammar books will say “Whatever, you can do it both ways.” However, before you shrug off responsibility for the issue and embrace the ambiguity, let’s take a look at two people who dislike the serial comma.  You will see why it is not wise to align yourself with their camp.

1) Lynn Truss, author of the best-selling grammar book Eats, Shoots & Leaves.  Despite the title of her book being an homage to the confusion caused by the lack of the serial comma, she writes: “My own feeling is that one shouldn’t be too rigid about the Oxford comma. Sometimes the sentence is improved by including it; sometimes it isn’t.” Whatever. Truss is from Britain, where the serial comma is typically not used, so her opinion is worthless.  The Brits weren’t that wishy washy about taking over the world, were they?  The sun no longer rises and sets on the British empire, and it’s all because of their highly problematic handling of the serial comma.

2) Some jerk at a job interview several years ago.  I was applying for a communications position at PeopleSoft, and one of the first questions my interviewer asked me was my opinion on the Oxford comma. I said I used it; he said that he didn’t. And what happened a few years later? Oracle bought PeopleSoft and fired most of its employees.  And why? Opinions vary, but I believe it’s because PeopleSoft didn’t use the serial comma.

Now, to be fair, a Wikipedia article on the subject does give some interesting examples of confusion that is created by the use of the serial comma.  But these examples are flawed.  Here’s one of the sentences used to show the potential problems of the serial comma:

“To my mother, Ayn Rand and God.”

The meaning of this sentence is clear. This is obviously a list of three. But if the serial comma is used:

“To my mother, Ayn Rand, and God. “

The commas appear to be setting off “Ayn Rand” from the rest of the items, suggesting that the writer’s mother is Ayn Rand.  This serves to confuse rather than clarify the sentence.

My response? Give me a break, Wikipedia; Ayn Rand was a windbag who wrote character speeches that literally went on for sixty pages.  If you were Ayn Rand’s child, you would not be dedicating things to her; you would be in therapy. Therefore, it’s impossible to read the sentence to mean that the writer’s mother is Ayn Rand, which serves to prove my point that the serial comma is always correct and its omission is always wrong.

As we head into another election season, it will be the responsibility of each and every citizen to choose allegiances and make decisions. To do that, you must first find out who you are. I mean--who you really are. Are you a proponent of the serial comma? Or are you one of the rump-fed ratbrain maggot pies who seek to destroy civilization as we know it? Be the former.  Join us.  We are waiting for you.

We are happy, hopeful, and enlightened.