UNIVERSAL DONOR: MA VIE EN CROUTE
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Universal Donor
We can ill afford another Klendathu  feed it up!
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You are just a number to me! And that number is: PAGES UD MADE: My Books Page My Reviews Page My Reference Page My Music Page My Pictures My Store UD-RELATED PAGES: My LiveJournal My MySpace music page My Flickr page My del.icio.us page My Last.fm page My Amazon Wishlist HEAVY ROTATION TV on the Radio: Dear Science Walkmen: You & Me Fleet Foxes: Fleet Foxes Ratatat: LP3 Beach House: Devotion BLOGS ETC claude le monde nuncstans rock 'em stock 'em tomato nation postmodern drunkard tuckova 22 ghastly mess constintina total virility fuzzysquid drunken bee stacey nightmare elyse from ANTM stereolabrat dark side points jf_franklin 123 i love you READ NOW brotherhood 2.0 NOT BLOGS ETC qwantz (dinosaur comix) go fug yourself the burg cat and girl book of ratings married to the sea icanhascheezburger fire joe morgan fivethirtyeight.com READ NOW hospitality on parade WEIRD LOVE dead amusement pks craters! all content © 2002-2008 Jeremy Broomfield 
Hosted by: HostRocket.Com Comments by: YACCS PRAISE & REVIEWS "[UD] is a genius." --Christian Oates "[Claudia] is fucking awesome, and [UD] is a genius. And vice versa. You should all buy Fear Not." --Tricia Howey MOTTO egeo huic vigorum MY WRESTLING NAME Titan Gently MY PUNK NAME Razor Ection 
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Friday, September 23, 2005
So I'm moving. I haven't moved in over seven years, partly because my rent was low and I liked my place, but also because I've always known that moving is an awful experience. Yeah, everybody knows moving is hell, but don't you know people who've moved like eight times in five years? They always give the impression that it's beyond their control, but that's a load of bullhonkeys; sitting still is the easiest thing in the world. If you move once a year, it's your own itchy feet and your own damn fault. Army brats have to move. You don't. I don't.
But I am, now. From Park Slope to Greenpoint. No biggie. Just a hop, skip, and a smile. Except that I've inherited a particularly virulent strain of packratism from my parents, both of whom are congenital sufferers of the same affliction. It took 25 boxes just to pack all my books. Now it's time to get serious. I'm cancelling or name-switching bills; I'm starting to enter my new address when websites demand my personal information for registration. My lower back is starting to cinch up in anticipation of the big lift, and my credit card is trying to cut itself in half before I hand it to Moishe's Movers, because they are going to bend me over a wardrobe box and give me a proper Israeli rogering. I'm'a spend a LOT on this move. It's gonna hurt -- but presumably it will hurt less than having spine replacement surgery. I just successfully navigated the sharky waters of TimeWarner Cable's account-changing process, and after a long string of clueless assholes, this last customer service drone was a chirpy Canuck named Sarah, and she was so good that I asked to speak to her supervisor so I could praise her. Her office was outside Toronto, which probably explains why she was all helpful and knowledgeable (i.e., because she's Canadian (i.e. not American)); I think my previous dealings were with convicts from New Mexico or some other place that is very hot right now. They were mean and they didn't want me to be happy. (And who could blame them? I think I'd rather break rocks with a sledgehammer than get press-ganged into phonebanking by a cruel and unusual penal system. Goddamn! Can you imagine? You've got to be super friendly to the people you talk to, even if they say shit that in the yard would get them shanked in a nanoscond. I'm picturing guards patrolling a room like hell's own pit bosses, eagle-eyeing the head-setted cons shackled to dirty cubicles, slapping their nightsticks into their palms as a reminder of the consequences of telephonic impoliteness. And the chairs aren't ergonomic, either.) But so I spoke to her supervisor, compared her favorably to the Christ, and as a result I think they're gonna let her have the leftover donuts after the hockey game, eh? And now a completely unrelated thing. Here's a product called Just a Drop, which has a distinct whiff of hoax about it, but seems to be for real. And I know some people who would buy it in an instant. What it is: a bottle of a magic solution, just a drop of which will mask, hide, eliminate, or destroy the odors created when you poop. Like while you're pooping, say in a public bathroom, you drop a drop into the bowl, and you need not have a fear of offending any current or future visitors to the same bathroom with your poop's odor. I hate this product, and I hate the society that makes people think they should ever need or buy or use something like this. Having grown up in a pragmatic and body-positive environment, I understand that a) everybody shits; b) bathrooms are meant for people to shit in; and c) shit sometimes has an odor. I accept these things, and I always have. In fact, I had never even heard the term "courtesy flush" until I heard Tom Arnold's character request one in Austin Powers when he hears Austin being strangled in an adjacent stall and assumes it's the sound of labored poopage. Courtesy Flush? What's this bizarre creature? I later found through informal polling that, especially in public restrooms, certain folks are so worried about other people smelling their poop that they will reach back and flush the toilet multiple times during a bowel movement. While they're sitting there, just flushitty-flush. A couple of people even suggested that it was appropriate to use the courtesy flush to cover up the farty sound of excretion. Unbefuckinglievable. Am I crazy? I poop til I'm done and only flush once. The culture that teaches poop-shame causes irreparable damage from the get-go. This model on The Surreal Life 5 (Caprice, not Janice Dickinson) described the most extreme version of the "courtesy flush" that I'd ever heard of. Explaining shared-bathroom etiquette to Pepa (of Salt 'n' --) she said "Oh, yeah, if you're pooping? As soon as the poop hits the water, you have to flush. So there's no chance of smell." Pepa was understandably horrified. The look on her face was like "this blond fool flushes the toilet every time a single doot leaves her pooper? Wow." Now okay, Caprice is a model, and has been surrounded by idiocy and shallowness her entire career, and maybe models are expected to live up to a superhuman standard, an ideal that does not have to perform all the base functions of life that the rest of us do. They certainly don't eat. BUT WHATEVER. They do eat, and they do poop. This fucked-up syndrome creates people like the character Paul "Shitbreak" Finch in American Pie, who couldn't or wouldn't defecate in the bathrooms at school, requiring the quick midday dashes to his fucking house that gave him his nickname. This is seriously pathological, but I bet you know somebody who has this problem to a similar degree, if not in the exact form. I know this girl who would only poop at home, and she got so used to holding it in that she'd get constipated for days at a time. Once she didn't shit for a week. That's hot. No, wait, I mean: that's fucked. (I will grudgingly admit that there is a legitimate use for this product: somebody who uses the men's room on my floor at work has something very very wrong with his gastrointestinal tract, and if you enter the bathroom after he's been there, it smells like a truck full of week-old corpsemeat. It's a knock-you-on-your-ass powerfully bad smell. He can use this product. In fact, I may buy a bottle and leave it in the bathroom, chained to the stall wall like a pen at the bank.) So tell me, people. Tell me your stories. When did you first hear about bathroom courtesy, and what are the rules as you understand them? Are you a shy shitter? What's the most extreme scatological anecdote you've got? Do you let people hear you poop or smell your shit? I NEED TO KNOW. ---------------------------------- P.S. -- This has got to be a purely American obsession, right? Obviously in societies without running water, the smell of poop is permanent a fact of life, like air or cockroaches (In some places, rivers of poop run down the middle of the streets! How festive!). Outhouses or squat-johns allow no flushing of any kind. But even in first world nations with flush toilets, people aren't this freaky. And it's a totally bourgeois concern, too. Because poor people? Waaaay to poor to worry about poop smell.Wednesday, September 14, 2005
• Don't ask me to solve your computer problems before I've had my coffee. This is not a warning, a threat, or a prima donna act -- it's purely practical, the office equivalent of a washing-instructions tag of an article of clothing. What? I saying that I'm as likely to damage your computer as fix it, pre-Colombian. Knaamean? Word, son. Don't do it. Do I know the email accounts are administered via a web interface that connects to our ISP? Usually I do. But before the coffee seeps through my stomach lining to saturate my "know cells," I think the email is administered by three women with old-fashioned handlooms in a small village in Gambia. By a triumvirate of tigers or whatever. Let me drink my coffee first, bitches. Then I know how shit is administered.
• Alan Dershowitz's obit of William Rhenquist reminds me, deliciously, of Hunter S. Thompson's obit of Richard Nixon. What I wanna know is who wrote the definitive warts-and-all obit of Ronald Reagan? And where is it? • I almost assaulted my coworker the other day because he did this thing -- this thing that he does all the time. Have I complained about him before? He's a great guy, but this one thing drives me absolutely batty. Put simply: he acts like he has made a joke or said something witty when he has not. I sense that he has a reputation as a "card" or whatever in his social circle (about which I know nothing; this is an assumption, and an ungenerous one at that. But what else is new?), or at least that he thinks of himself as a funny guy, a jokester, a wit. But I propose that you must actually make a joke to be considered a jokester. Is that so unreasonable an expectation? What my co-worker does instead, while kinda postmodern, is not joking. So here's how he does it: LADY: So I told the delivery guy to put his package wherever it would fit. JOKESTER: Tee hee! A ha ha ha. Fine. So this is equivalent of Beavis and Butthead acknowledging that a word with a double meaning has been uttered. I have great respect for B&B, but they are fictional characters through whom Mike Judge mocked people who are easily amused by double entendres. They're like people who are amused by someone tripping on the sidewalk, except less honest -- at least those schadenfreude motherfuckers aren't acting like they made a joke. These "entendre-observers" are, like, anti-witty. LADY: Life is so hard sometimes. Don't you think? Isn't it hard sometimes? JOKESTER: Hee hee! I'm not even gonna say what I'm thinking! Why not, dude? If it's so fucking funny, why not share it with us? I'm ready for a well-phrased dick joke! Lay it on us! Stick it to us! Let us have it! What's that? You got nothing? Oh! So that's why you're not gonna say what you're thinking. Because what you're thinking is "I can't think of anything funny to say after that natural dick-joke setup!" LADY: The mechanic didn't know what was wrong with my car, but my brother thought maybe I blew a rod. JOKESTER: Tee hee! Oh my god, I'm so evil! Ugh. Let's not get into how weird it is that people think it's cool to refer to themselves as "evil" -- why would you do that? Okay, putting that aside. So you're evil: prove it! Say the evil thing! Damn yourself to hell with your naughty thought, voiced aloud for the titillation of your coworkers! No? No! You got nothing? AARGH! Maybe this is Oscar Wilde's fault. Maybe he made a certain percentage of gay men think that they are witty just by virtue of being gay. But Oscar was fucking funny, for fucking real! Note to co-worker: "Oh my god, don't even go there!" is NOT a punchline! The classic actual punchline "that's what she said!", even though it's the most pathetic fratboy reflex, still requires a little bit (a very little bit) of thought to apply judiciously. And honestly I think the most dedicated practitioners of "that's what she said" use all of their available wattage to do so. You're smarter than this. So please. Make a joke if you're going to. But you can't giggle as if you've made a joke without making a joke, at least not when I'm around. That may fly with your pals at your local watering hole (hole!! har har! I'm not even gonna say it!), but you're not at the Algonquin, and your round table is just an ellipse. Yarf. Oh and I must point out that this co-worker is the same one who led me to post the final item on the "disallowed forevermore" list on the right hand side of this blog. Because he actually does that. Co-worker, I hope you never read this, but if you do, understand that I come from love. I'm just in an unforgiving mood this... um... year. |
OTHER REVIEWS: John from Cincinnati Menomena LATEST BOOK REVIEWS: The Game Moneyball One-Upsmanship Siddhartha You need the Fear Not Guide to Life. Buy it already. ($4) Now available! The Broomfield Variations CD ($10) or go to The UD Store 
MY IMAGINARY GIRLFRIENDS Chan Marshall Rotem of the IDF Eleanor Friedberger Amy Goodman Bernardine Dohrn ('69) Maya Rudolph Joanna Newsom Imogen Heap Caroline Dhavernas Shana Rae Ray DISALLOWED FOREVER "I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you!" - "from whence" - "...the exception that proves the rule" - any use of the question "spit or swallow?" - the phrase "drop trou" - fake-o reviewer verbs: "penned" for wrote "helmed" for directed "lensed" for whatever - "expat" - the euphemism "passed away" - pronouncing merci beaucoup as "mercy buckets!" (see also: "grassy-ass!") PET PEEVES "confinscated" - trying children "as adults" - "drownded" |