Pinkerton's Weblog

Genius Lights Self on Fire with Own Smartness

So you’re fifteen years old, hanging out with a friend, and you’re bored. You’ve spent the afternoon shooting fireworks at each other, but now the fireworks are all gone and all you’re both still tragically unexploded. What do you do?

If you answered “translate Wittgenstein from its original German” or “learn calculus,” you’re real close. What fifteen-year-old Thomas Jefferson did, in loving tribute to the ingenuity and legacy of his namesake, was — and I honestly need you to sit down for this — took his shirt off, poured gasoline all over it (or as Thomas knows it, ‘rainbow fun-water’), put the shirt back on, and (this next part’s the sit-down part) lit himself on fire. That intense heat you’re feeling on your skin right now is actually coming from Jefferson’s parents, who are no doubt beaming with pride.

Covering himself with gasoline, it turns out, was only step one of Thomas Jefferson’s genius-level plan—step two was getting his friend to do the same so that they could light each other on fire. Sadly, Jefferson was unable to carry out the plan to its conclusion, as it turns out burning at the center of a towering flesh-melting inferno leaves you with little time to help your buddy soak his Pennywise shirt in gas.

A fifteen-year-old did this, keep in mind. Not a six-year-old. A fifteen-year-old, who had seen fire before and —this is the essential part—knew what fire does. He didn't do it because of Jackass. Not because of Eminem. Not because of Doom or Marilyn Manson. He did it because his friend had run out of fireworks to shoot at him. According to the article, local authorities are calling it a “horrible lesson about the dangers of fire,” that lesson apparently being that it’s hot. If so, A+ to Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson’s friends are being charged with felony arson, aggravated assault and criminal wrecklessness, if only because lighting morons on fire who ask you to doesn’t tend to come up often enough to be a crime. Common sense might dictate that if someone rolls around in gas for ten minutes before getting you to throw matches at them, they might actually be as much to blame for the ensuing mushroom-cloud hilarity as you are. At the same time, until legislation is finally passed to allow us to light fifteen year olds on fire, it’s sort of assumed that when the police show up to talk to you and your friends, and one of you is a charcoal briquette giving a “devil” sign, someone’s gonna have to get charged with something.

Jefferson is expected to remain in a drug-induced coma for the next couple of weeks. Doctors say his condition is stupid, but may stabilize to merely hilarious by week’s end.

The Wrong Assholes

I was at a family reunion a while ago, standing outside and smoking a cigarette, when my little cousin Janie walked up to me and tore up all my cigarettes. While I stood there watching the little gremlin do it, her father came up and lightly admonished her for it-- but lightly, like: "Say, any time you wanted to stop ripping up that gentleman's property is okay. But take your time."

AFter my cigarettes were completely in tatters the father explained to me--with a hearty, 'isn't she adorable?' chuckle--that Janie had been taught to do this at Sunday school. She’d actually been specifically told to do this by her teacher, on the grounds that I’d thank her later, once her destroying a ten dollar pack of smokes magically cured me of smoking forever.

Is nobody else worried about the people who worry about our children, and the preposterous shit they’re brainwashing them into thinking? It’s bad enough we’re sanitizing our kids’ TV shows so they don’t know about violence, photoshopping pictures of happy Mexican children playing with black businesswomen on Wall Street so they don’t think race inequity exists, and rewriting their curriculums so they don’t even know about sex. I don’t know about you, but as far as I’m concerned, learning how to fuck Mexican hookers was the most useful thing I learned in the third grade.

I’d hate to think the children of tomorrow are being taught not to punch each other or breed. What’s left? Smoking. And they’re ripping up all the cigarettes like retards. Someone needs to step in before they start pouring all my beer down the sink, thus giving me no choice but to actually physically murder them.

Janie’s justification for ripping up my smokes was a pretty righteous-sounding “because they give you cancer.” It’s hard to refute her teacher’s logic here, since they probably are giving me cancer, and technically Janie’s got my best interests at heart in her brainwashed one-girl quest to destroy all my things. However, using Janie's teacher's own logic--physically forcing people to do what's best is justified--I can now walk up to the teacher and take a crap on her Bible, with the justification that “this makes you turn kids into drooling idiots.”

What bothered me most was that Janie’s parents even called her “Janie’s teacher,” like teaching kids to agree with whatever Jesus said is the same as teaching them actual useful things. It wouldn’t bother me so much if these weren’t the same people complaining about how we need to destroy rap lyrics and violent TV shows so children don’t know what black people and cop dramas are. Half of everything they do is running around putting padding on everything because apparently our kids are all retarded; and the other half is spent trying to make them retarded enough to need the padding.

If she’s going to teach about how bad cancer is, it ‘d be nice if she at least gave the kids the whole story. Yes, cigarettes give you cancer. As it turns out, though, fucking everything gives you cancer. According to the American Cancer society, of the millions of people who’ve contracted cancer so far in 2004, 13% of males and 12% of females contracted lung cancer. (It actually would have been 14% and 13% if it hadn’t been for a surprising new trend of ripped-up cigarette packages – thanks, kids!)

But of the number of new cancer victims, 33% of those were men with prostate cancer and 32% were women with breast cancer. So technically, if Janie’s Sunday School teacher was really interested in curing cancer through the unstoppable power of impressionable children, we’d have kids running around tearing off every dick and pair of tits they can get their little hands on.

Neck in neck with lung cancer for both sexes were colon and rectum cancer, with 11% for both sexes. So while 12% of all new cancer victims owe their impending deaths to smoking, 11% can blame pooping. Even the pancreas managed to take out 2% of all new cancer victims in 2004. Pick a body part at random, and you’ll find it’s just itching to betray you suddenly. Look closely at that pinky finger of yours – stare it right in its pale little cuticle. You think it wouldn’t give you cancer as soon as raise daintily in the air? Think again.

So yes. Smoking’s bad. Bad enough that I’ve since quit, anyway. Just because I might get cancer from picking up a dirty pen, that doesn’t mean it’s okay to get lung cancer. That’s like hearing there’s a good chance you’ll be murdered no matter where you are, and deciding from this that it’s wisest to parachute into a murderer convention at the local knife museum.

But the thing is, I don’t think this woman was honestly teaching kids to be Smoking Nazis because she wanted to keep my lungs pink. I think she did it because she doesn’t like smoking. You can wrap up an agenda with all the noble causes you like—at the end of the day, you’re still hypnotizing children into destroying all my shit because Jesus said so, and I won't be grateful. Any new cancer-free time you've just blessed me with will only be spent plotting to give you cancer.

For me, the best proof I can think of that God doesn’t exist is that we can get cancer of the anus, but that something incredibly useful like idiot cancer or frothing zealot cancer doesn’t exist. If there really is a God, I’d love to tell him: you’re punishing the wrong assholes.