Thanks, all.

If you are not one of the people listed in this ongoing segment, but think you might know one of them, please let them know my intention to hunt them for sport in the near future. Thanks. I owe you one!

Additionally: given the internet access and literacy you'd logically need to get this far, I'm assuming you're from America here — the country in which I've so far met the people I've decided to kill, thus making you a potential witness to the events instigating their future demise. If on the off-chance you're from a non-American country, feel free to disregard this warning and go back to... building a hut out of mud or whatnot. (It looks fantastic, by the way.)

Ugh. Look, you must be able to barter a mule or something for a plane ticket or a bullet by now. Pick one and make yourself happier.

And now, without further adieu: #46 on the People I Have Decided To Kill If I See Them Again List... Woman Who's Somehow Convinced Herself She's the Linchpin in Ushering Me, and a Subway Full of Other Strangers, Into the Waiting Embrace of Jesus.

#46: Woman Who's Somehow Convinced Herself She's the Linchpin in Ushering Me, and a Subway Full of Other Strangers, Into the Waiting Embrace of Jesus

Time of Offense: 8:33am, May 16th, 2006

Particulars:

If you've ever taken the subway regularly for a few months, you've probably gotten familiar with the phenomenon I like to call the Suspiciously Empty Subway Car, or SESC. Much like the Suspiciously Empty Freeway Lane (with the stalled car fifty yards ahead), or the Suspiciously Empty Grocery Store Line (with the old lady paying in pennies and asking for a price check on every third item), How an SESC works is that you only ever see one when, logically, you shouldn't. It's rush hour; your subway stop is crushingly packed as far as you can see in either direction; every other car on the train looks like a sardine can of irritated shoulder-to-shoulder commuters; but somehow you're lucky enough to walk into an a completely or half vacant car, thinking, "Man, is this ever too good to be true."

And, natch, it is. It's usually after you and about fifteen other hopeful souls have piled into the SESC that you'll notice A) the dank, foul-smelling pool of homeless man's urine covering the floor; B) the impossibly large pile of homeless guy poop left on a seat; or, if you're really unlucky, C) the homeless man himself, smelling like dank urine and a large poop combined, and spread out over three seats, fast asleep, while forty people cram themselves into the far side of the car with their coats over their noses. Believe me when I tell you that I don't care how aggressively liberal you consider yourself with regards to the homeless — the day you spend a forty-minute commute in an airtight car discovering what a man smells like passed out drunk in a pantload of unpleasantness, you will hate the homeless, passionately, with every atom of your being.

So it was last Wednesday that, as soon as I stepped into a mostly-empty car during morning rush hour, a slow inward groan built up inside me as I looked around for poops, puddles or a pile of sleeping hobo. Oddly, though, I couldn’t find a thing. It’d seemed I’d actually managed to find an SESC in New York City, in the busiest hour of the day, with nothing actually wrong with it. Pow-zoom, yo! I mentally high-fived myself as I sat down with my New York Post and coffee, in a window seat, no less, for my 30 minute commute. With all the seats free I wouldn’t feel guilted into having to give mine up for an old person or pregnant woman; plus, not having anybody crammed into the seats next to mine meant a day I wouldn’t have to spend playing How One Earth Is It That The Person Next To Me Smells Like That, And How Can They Not Know?, or the ever-popular I’m Being Forced To Listen To Your Bland, High-Decibel Conversation, And It Turns Out You’re an Idiot. I was actually going to get a quiet and spacious ride to work – a pleasantly unexpected embarrassment of riches. The fifteen of us settle into our seats, the train pulls off, I take a contented sip of coffee, and a small Pakistani woman stands up and starts yelling at us about Her Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

This, then, was the reason for the SESC. I did have to give the woman credit. She clearly knew her audience — more specifically, she knew we were an audience that, Christians or no, had no interest at all in her shrieking at us about the Lord. To compensate, she'd decided to quietly wait for the car to fill up before pouncing on us. You have to admire someone who’s that honest about how undesirable what they're trying to sell you, and the way they're trying to sell it, truly is. She’s making no bones about it here. “I’m freely aware you have no interest in hearing this, because really, who would. So I’m going to wait patiently until you’re trapped before springing this on you.”

It’s insidious really, and it grates me on a politeness level as a Canadian. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that there are people out there who are evidently so eager to convince to believe the same things they do that they’ll actively take to the streets to find me. Fine. I don’t agree with it, and to be honest I’d sort of like to slap them, but I can say “No thank you” as well as the next person, and after a decade of practice at living in a big city, I’m a seasoned veteran of the 50-Yard Ignoring Stare.

As illustrated above, the 50-Yard Ignoring Stare tends to work best for those living in big cities, and works thusly: that when encountering someone outside of your home that is clearly, vocally and perhaps even dangerously insane, one picks a point on the horizon some 50 yards away that has for some reason become immediately interesting. One holds contact with this point until safely away from the person who might otherwise have, without provocation, decided to dive at one’s neck for reasons known only to your assailant, and possibly the mind-reading psi-angels warning them that the government thinks they know too much.

And so I used the 50-Yard Ignoring Stare for four stops, during which Crazy Jesus Woman expounded her various and – I’m sorry if you’re reading this, Crazy Jesus Woman, but it’s true – totally made-up-sounding, off-the-cuff diatribes throughout. Whenever the train was in motion, it sounded like this:

AND JESUS CHRIST IS THE WAY FOR HE IS THE LAMB AND THE SKY FOR WHICH NOT WE WANT CAN YOU SAY TO ME THAT YOUR POSSESSIONS ARE THE WAY OR YOUR JOB IS THE WAY YOU HATE BLACK PEOPLE YOU SIT THERE AND YOU HATE THE INDIANS AND THE AFGHANI BUT THEY ARE THE WAY YOU ASSHOLES YOU MOTHERFUCKING ASSHOLES AND YOU CANNOT SEE THE FUCKING LIGHT OF THEIR GLORY THAT IS THE POSSESSIONS YOU MUST FORSAKE UPON THE LAP OF THE LORD OUR SAVIOR HE IS WAITING FOR YOU HE IS IN LOVE WITH YOU AND IT IS GOOD THAT IT IS SO

And so on and so on, until you’re sort of waiting for the moment where they’ll pull out the gun and start plugging away. Whenever the subway hits a stop, she shuts up and sits down, in order to let another gullible batch of commuters into the train. Once the doors shut and we’re off, sure enough she’s up again and yelling at us.

What’s probably saddest about all of this is the fact that Crazy Jesus Woman isn’t even quoting from the New Testament. That, at least, I could understand if not condone. the Bible’s full of wisdom, after all; and even though I might not be interested in hearing it at that particular moment on the subway, I could at least sympathize with someone being devoted enough to the text to want to share it.

But Crazy Jesus Woman wasn’t quoting from any religious text that I ever heard of – bitch was freestyling. You have to admire the balls on someone who has hundreds of pages of text freely available that religious experts testify is the Word of God Himself, and she’s thinking, “You know what, it’s cool and all that Jesus has a few speeches written out or whatever, but let me just do my own thing here. I hate memorizing shit.”

St. Peter, what the fuck is that woman talking about down there?

Her? That’s a frothing lunatic, My Lord. She’s on a subway screaming at people that they should worship your son.

Ugh. Again with the son. I so regret that now. Is it working, then? Do humans like the subway screaming thing?

Oh, my word, no.

Then why is she doing it? And why isn’t she quoting the fucking Bible?

Apparently she felt she had some points to add, Sir.

Right. Right. Because, no, totally, I took the fucking time to transcribe MY WILL through the voices of divinely appointed prophets – but yeah, fuck it, let’s peg the fucking Gospel of Janice on in there, I’m sure she has some really cool points.

What, for reals?

NO, NOT MOTHERFUCKING FOR REALS! KILL HER NOW!

I got to the point where I was getting so fed up with her screaming, I was considering leaving the train and waiting for another one. Hell, I admit I might have even briefly daydreamed about walking over and beaning her head off one of the subway poles (followed, perhaps, by lots of shocked stares and me saying "What?") Luckily for me, just as I was getting ready to storm out, she suddenly bowed, thanked us all as if we were giving her a standing ovation, and walked off herself. All of this leading me to the most salient take-away point from all this that I was hoping Christians across America could pay attention to: what a complete turn-off this is for your religion in the eyes of potential Christians-in-waiting.

I was half-hoping Crazy Jesus Woman might open up the floor for questions, since after listening to her for a half hour, I was burning to ask: "Um, about this Heaven place you keep mentioning. Will you be there? Because I'm trying to imagine an eternity spent listening to this, and Hell's sounding pretty good right now." Seriously, guys: religion is, at the end of the day, a lifestyle choice. If this is the absolute best you can do, I’m terribly sorry, but no.

Think about it: Scientology’s got every A-list Hollywood star you can think of; even Satanism managed to land a few rock stars to bolster its credibility. You don't see Zoroastrians hollering tumor-motivated nonsense at me until I give enough change or solemn nods for them to stop. Say what you will about these religions: at least they know who to turn away. Why is it that any time I’m forced to walk past a shit-smelling lunatic with a divot in his skull, two wandering eyes and a burning drive to tell me about a deity, nine times out of ten it’s about Jesus? What sort of campaign are you people running where you think it’s a good idea to have shitheads like this on the frontlines?

Kirk Cameron, Christians. Kirk Cameron. He’s a pretty famous Christian. He’s relatively good-looking. I’m sure he cleans up nice. And he strikes me as polite and generally well-spoken. Put his dumb ass on the fucking subway if you’re that hard up for followers. I can deal with a suit-and-tied Kirk Cameron spouting Jesus-fueled nonsense at me and trying to hand me pamphlets. Motherfucker was on Growing Pains, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. Keep the cleft-lipped illiterate bottom feeders making breadsticks in the kitchen for the next fundraising dinner.

It’s not rocket science, Christians – if you’re that desperate for my business, put your best foot forward. Put the gimpy, gangrenous foot that smells like poop under a blanket. That’s called MARKETING.

The first third of Men's Health, it turns out, is helpfully devoted to every single minor irk, itch or irritation you’ve experienced today, and why it’s cancer and is excited about killing you. Having trouble sleeping at night? Depression, and also probably diabetes. OR cancer. Heartburn? It’s making you less productive at work, studies show, which in turn might cause you to lose your job. Got enough vitamin D in your diet? You’d better hope so, or your teeth’ll fall out. Chat online? Don’t – it leads to depression, studies show. Don’t get depressed about all this, though, since depression is a trigger for cancer. Also remember to dust, or you’ll get asthma, then lung cancer. Mistake avian flu for regular flu? This will be the deadliest mistake you’ve ever made. Also: studies show that women would rather fuck a guy with an STD than someone who’s overweight, so good luck with that while avoiding contracting illnesses when picking up a toothbrush, tubby.

Up next, an article about battling depression, since the editors must have felt I’d need one after making it through the previous section. The thrust of it concerns people around the world and, statistically, why they’re all happier and having far more sex than I am. They must all have STDs, which as mentioned is an incredible turn-on in women if you're skinny.

Up next: an article by women, for men, detailing all of the ways that I should work harder to not appear fruitish and ineffectual in their eyes – their unforgiving, all-seeing eyes. Here I learned that of the sex I’m not having enough of, I’m also not taking long enough to finish, statistically. (Most women, according to Men’s Health, would prefer 44 minutes of tender, energetic sex, followed by 60 minutes of cuddling. I hope I speak for any right-thinking man when I say ladies, I appreciate the tip, but that's insane. How much time do you assume we have? I like pizza, but I don't take two hours to eat a slice.)

Next I learned that, given the innate psychic mind control all women evidently possess, any woman I’ve ever liked has known that I’ve liked her, due to the unconscious “tells” I’ve been giving off with my body movements, facial expressions and hand gestures. The article is helpful in telling me how to suppress them, though the effort would be fruitless, as another article explains that studies show women may be able to smell dominance and weakness innately. Not that it matters, of course, since even if I’d managed to bed them, it’s clear I wouldn’t have come close to pleasing them anyway, what with my lung cancer, diabetes and avian flu. The article then helpfully provides six or seven intercourse positions, including the Shoulder Holder, which involves my partner wrapping her legs around my face and – assuming the depression brought on by sleep loss that instigates my tumor doesn’t do it first – looks dangerous enough to kill me.

The magazine caps things off with a ranking of every city in America, and why the one I’m living in is the worst (the stress levels of New York City contribute to early death, it seems). Then an interview with Eric Bana, and some 45 different top secret articles about getting hard abs fast.

To summarize: absolutely everything I’m doing, from sitting to sleeping to eating to walking to talking, is killing me. Everything I do, say, or think about saying to women is wrong, and one of 25 distinct reasons why I’m statistically less than a man in the bedroom. And depression will kill you.

All of this leading me to ask: Who reads this garbage on a monthly basis, and why do you hate yourself so much?

____________

Edit, May 17, 2006:
Blogger Ilyka Damen kindly links back to this article, and adds a lot of intelligent stuff about how men's magazines are making guys feel as bad about themselves as women's magazines traditionally do. This was a point I didn't want to overtly make – "It's one thing if the ladies feel like crap, but making guys have low self-worth is going too far!" doesn't exactly paint me in a flattering light – but I'm glad someone bothered to mention the symmetry.

I also frankly love this line, about why I was even reading Men's Health: "I assume it was an accident, because the only way I could accept Pinkerton reading Men's Health on purpose is if Batman were on the cover."

My parents are back in Canada now; thanks to everyone who wrote in with touristy suggestions. Yesterday was their last night in town, so we rented a movie and ordered in some Chinese food. We settled on The Chronicles of Narnia, since it seemed like neutral ground: nobody'd seen it yet or felt terribly passionate about the subject matter. Karla “sorta” remembered the books from her childhood; I think I'd gotten a few chapters in and lost interest. We were all pretty much blank slates. That said, please keep in mind that I have no innate bias for or against the works of C.S. Lewis when I ask: what the fuck was that?

Seriously, what a mess. I don’t remember the original book being that long, but it must have been phonebook-sized, since the film sprints along from scene to scene like it needs to namedrop 40 characters by the ten-minute mark or get sued by the Lewis estate. Here’s Lucy! Peter! Edmund! The bland one! Here’s their mother! Whoop, now she’s gone! Here’s a maid and an old man! Now Lucy’s meeting a fawn! Now Edmund’s meeting a Queen! Now Peter and Blandy chat it up with some badgers! Wolves chase them! Santa Claus shows up and arms them with weapons! There’s a lion! Now he’s dead! Now he's alive again! Okay!

And on and on with these fucking talking animals and minotaurs and unicorns and witches and apparently one of the animals is Jesus and how god-shitting drunk was C.S. Lewis when he wrote this? I say this as a guy who dug Lord of the Rings, a trilogy many would argue is pretty much the same deal as Narnia with slightly different pointed ears. At least Tolkein rooted his nonsense in Norse mythology – there’s elves and dwarves, who are good, and orcs, who are bad, and it might be a little silly, sure, but at least it all seems to make perfect sense to everyone in Middle Earth.

Narnia, on the other hand, is like the K-Mart discount bin of mythology. Every monster or creature you've ever heard of is incoherently tossed in with the animal kingdom, and now they all talk. I like fantasy as much as the next sixth level cleric, but the bare minimum for me is knowing the author gave his ridiculous shit more thought than I'll have to. Narnia comes off like a shitty Trapper-Keeper drawing by a twelve-year-old who plays Dungeons & Dragons and really likes the zoo. In one scene a pair of badgers have a conversation with Santa Claus, and in another a human on a talking horse does battle with the White Witch of the North while griffins divebomb centaurs, and your head’s just spinning from the random senselessness of it.

Let me break this down for Harry Potter fans, since there seem to be a lot of you: it'd be like if someone rewrote the Harry Potter books, and instead of having a clearly defined world populated by a hierarchy of wizards and witches where everything makes consistent sense within the reality of that world, Harry Potter was suddenly teaming up with Merlin, Robin Hood and Zeus to fight the Easter Bunny and a talking elephant that's also Ganesha. I hope your reaction would be "What the fuck?"

(Also, does everything talk in Narnia? What would you eat, if everything’s sentient? Apparently fish, if the talking gophers in the film are to be believed. So that’s one mystery solved. Everything in Narnia talks, except the fish, which are evidently retarded.)

I barely understood anything that was happening, and thanks to the film’s decision to abandon characterization for a cast of thousands, I barely cared either. In Lord of the Rings, they at least tried to make us give a dicktoss who the heroes were and explain how the world worked. When the blond-haired caped elves show up to fight the black, slavering, marauding orc hordes, you can sort of guess who to root for. Narnia, meanwhile, has a talking rhino run through the middle of a battlefield skewering centaurs and bears, and I’m sitting there wondering if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Hooray! The brave rhino killed the evil centaurs! Or… boo! The dastardly rhino killed the noble centaurs! Or… something.

For Christ’s sake, Santa Claus shows up in this film to give throwing knives to a seven-year-old. After you see something like that, the Jolly Green Giant could have arm wrestled the Trix Rabbit for a bowl of cookies and it’d wash right over you.

Anyway, four children end up defeating an army of unspeakable evil, which would strike you as the plot of a kid's film until you actually see it. It's dark, man. Animals are dying left and right; there's evidently a political backstory between the White Queen and Aslan, the Happy Good-Time Lion; woodchucks discuss the Coming Darkness with fairies in hushed, frightened tones. You're sitting there watching a movie that's about ten times too stupid for adults, but ten times too violent and dark for kids, and wondering who the hell the core audience is for a movie like this. Then it makes five hundred billion dollars at the theater, so what do I know, obviously.

So: our child heroes defeat the evil army (though what they specifically do, what with the animals providing most of the strategy and hard work, is left ambiguous). After this, everyone rejoices and the four children are made kings and queens of Narnia. I'd love to see four foreigners stumbling through a closet into America try and establish a monarchy, but that's neither here nor there. Nobody seems to find it at all alarming that an eight-year-old is now sovereign ruler of an entire country, so again, what do I know. Then some creepy shirtless fawn named Mister Tubbins or similar hits on pre-pubescent Lucy...

The Delectable Mister Tubbins

...and the movie's over, with many adventures to follow, assuming the first-week domestic gross was favorable.

So that's Chronicles of Narnia. What a huge pile of shit. I think my favorite scene was the one where Peter and siblings, trapped on an iced-over river on all sides by wolves, decide the best way to escape the situation would be to smash through the ice with a sword, sending everyone -- wolves, children and all -- into the near-freezing waters below. Seconds later the children are dusting themselves off as they walk out of the water, Peter's plan apparently successful, and you're left staring at the television screen like it just drooled all over the carpet. The one saving grace: if a movie this popular is convincing kids that it's entirely harmless to jump into a nearly-freezing lake, clearly things will have sorted themselves out by next generation and we'll be getting non-stupid movies by the time I'm a senior.

I spent the better part of January trying to talk him into flying here instead, but no dice. He's a retired high school English teacher, and many years ago suffered an evidently life-scarring incident involving one of his students giving him a ride in a Cessna, then subjecting him to a half-hour of engine-killing dives. He abandoned our modern flight science after that, opting for the relative safety of transport that doesn't involve lift/drag ratios and the omnipresent threat of plummeting.

T'any rate, they'll be here by Friday. I've gotten us tickets to a Rangers-Sens game at Madison Square Garden Tuesday, which all signs point to being awesome. That still leaves a good four days, however, in which to entertain. Karla and I, it should be noted, have seen little of New York City ourselves since moving here in December or, for that matter, done little of leaving our apartment. It's the Yellow-Face, you see. It burns us.

In fact, you could say "Jay and Karla have pretty much exclusively sat in their apartment watching DVDs and getting shitfaced for three months" and not be too far off the mark. While this lifestyle choice comes highly recommended from us both, it does present problems on the entertaining front: namely, that we have no idea how to show out-of-towners a good time. I've heard good things about New York's famous Libertarian statue, for instance, but can't imagine there's much to it besides "Arriving at statue" and "Looking at it." That's 30 seconds chalked up nicely, but still leaves me with a rather large chunk of time to fill.

Museums? Parks? Cock fights? Leg shows? What's worth seeing in New York City (keeping in mind I'm not taking my parents clubbing)? Write me at the email below this post if you've got any suggestions.

_{* A co-worker informs me that John Madden has a similar no-fly policy to B.A. Barracus. So if it helps, you could picture my father as the white John Madden.}

I lie, of course. Filing your taxes is boring and painful, which is why no one I know bothers to do them. For some reason, though, I get harassed on a yearly basis by an editor to write something "hilarious" about tax season. Let's forget for the moment that this is like asking someone to write a touching poem about long division; as a writer, it's all about those paychecks. When an editor asks you for a funny article about doing your taxes, your answer should be "That's a savvy play, sir! I'll get right on it!"

So it's not the tax articles themselves bothering me. It's the fact that I've now been asked to write one two years in a row, and I'm genuinely concerned about what I'm going to do next year. How long can I keep this shit up?

Anyway, here's this year's entry, entitled How To Do Your Taxes, and up over at Cracked.com. You can get to it by clicking on the WWF Superstar IRS action figure below, with Real Wrestling Action (in this case, his patented "Write-off Slam"):

Last year's entry can be found over at the website of my previous employer, and goes by the original-sounding name Tax Primer. Hope you've got your pop-up blockers on for this one, since NL.com seems to think you'll enjoy three highly intrusive pop-up ads along with your comedy. At least they seem to have abandoned their previous strategy, which was, I shit you not, to have their own site appear as a pop-up while redirecting the main page to an advertising site. If there's a better way to illustrate your open contempt for your own audience, I'd like to hear about it. Possibly giving you a virus that replaces the contents of your hard drive with email spam for cialis every time you try to click the index page.

Anyway. Happy Tax Time, everybody! And a Happy Death of Christ Our Lord Day to everyone whom that applies to. I hope I'm not spoiling anything when I tell you not to get too down about it. You're in for a pleasant surprise come Monday!

By now I’ve made it past the good ones (i.e. the ones with tits), and was forced to reach deep into the pile for periodicals I wouldn’t have bought otherwise. This resulted in me reading the fruity-toot McSweeney’s literary review Believer on the subway this morning, on the grounds that it had a Harold Ramis interview, who is awesome.

Problem was, I finished the Ramis interview in ten minutes; and with another six stops to go before I got to work, sheer boredom forced me towards the other pieces in the magazine. One article by Jeff Fort, for instance, is titled “The Man Who Could Not Disappear” and spends 8000 words wondering why people desperately want to know the details of Kafka’s life — a problem I wasn’t aware existed, though the answer that leapt immediately to mind was “Maybe they wouldn’t if you stopped writing 8000-word essays about him.”

I skipped over to a “manifesto” by David Shields about why the lyric essay is better than fiction. Several pages in, it occurred to me that I honestly didn’t care one way or another which David Shields preferred, and skipped onto something else.

I tried to read an interview with a painter named Ed Ruscha who, according to the article, paints art that offers vivid commentary on the state of America. Ruscha spends the majority of the interview complaining about how people gleaned the impression that his art is about what it's about, and harps that “there is no single correct interpretation. Try many. Try forty.” Something to keep in mind the next time you’re enjoying the work of Ed Ruscha: he'd prefer it if you interpreted it forty times.

This one killed me. Titled "The Partisan Review", the essay is entirely composed of thoughts the author had while reading another literary review published in 1949. (Alternate title: “Help Me! My Head is Buried... in my Own Ass!”) Why someone would engage in a post-modern exercise so pointless as to review a review of nineteenth-century French artist Eugene Fromentin’s work from a 60-year-old magazine is baffling. Who has this kind of time? If you're that out of ideas for things to do, my bathroom needs to be cleaned. (Of course, I’m now reviewing the review of the review myself, and it fills me with a need to never read books again and just go watch The Sopranos instead — quite possibly social commentary of a far more meaningful caliber than anything I’d have been able to come up with on paper.)

And so on and so on from there, until I finally reached my stop. All of this dense literary criticism, aside from making me realize I'm far too much of an idiot to read literary criticism, caused a jolting epiphany, which is that I actually used to read this stuff all the time. I was suddenly reminded of Death in Venice, a novella by German pederast Thomas Mann that, through the use of complex metaphors, is essentially a rigid, damp love letter to a small half-naked boy the narrator leers at throughout.

It’s thoroughly creepy business, in other words, and I’m ashamed to admit I actually recommended the damn thing to several of my non-college friends at the time. Evidently, though I didn’t realize it while I was in college, I used to be quite a pretentious ass. I even recall, to increasing embarrassment, my non-college friend returning the book to me with the complaint that it was “sort of perverted” and “really really gay” – a criticism I pish-toshed on the grounds that the author’s love of the boy was clearly a platonic love of beauty itself, and observe the Dionysian symbolism at play here with the tiger in the forest, and blah blah blah I feel like kicking my younger self in the face.

This led to a further epiphany, which is that I certainly don’t feel that way about Death in Venice now. The heavy-handed metaphors and story construction haven’t stayed with me through the many years since I last read it; I’m left only with the imagery of a boy-hungry pervert licking his lips on a beach while he checks out the wet buttocks of a young lad building sand castles nearby, and the fact that this came up an awful lot in Thomas Mann’s books. ‘Unreliable narrator’ my ass: Thomas Mann’s a sick motherfucker.

This led to a third — and, luckily, the last — epiphany of the morning: since that brief period of time where I was forced to read great works of literature–by way of being told which ones to read and then graded on my ability to parrot back the professors’ understanding of them—I haven’t read much since. I think in the few years after college I picked up one or two books out of habit, but it wasn’t long after that I got a job and my Reading List tapered off to a Renting the Film Based on the Book List, digressing from there to an “I suppose I could rent Lolita, but on the other hand I could also rent Charlton Heston cold-cocking zombies in The Omega Man” list. You can sort of see the progression.

Second Hypothesis
My capacity to enjoy provocative entertainment has simply, and through no fault of my own, diminished as I get older. Fiction that struck me as unbelievably in-my-damn-face at age 20 has since been trumped by far more shocking real-life events, which weren’t really all that illuminating or entertaining so much as sad. This is also plausible; but I think it cuts me too much slack, which brings me to my...

Third Hypothesis
I’m getting dumber.

I’m leaning towards the third one, and not just because I stood yawning in my living room for eight minutes this morning with a sock in my hand and a bare foot, wondering what I’d intended to do next. And not because I was also running late for work, and so didn’t go the bathroom before running out of my apartment (a move that would have delayed me all of five minutes), leading to a long wait on a subway platform for a late train while trying not to shit my pants. No, I think I’m getting dumber simply because the time where I would have given a crap about any of the high-minded literary posing in Believer are long since past. Nowadays, the closest I come to the written word are the dialogue balloons in Captain America comics, which I’ll read on the couch between commercials.

Here’s a quote from the Harold Ramis interview: "I can’t tell you how many people have told me, 'When I go to the movies, I don’t want to think.' It offends me as a human being. Why wouldn’t you want to think? What does that mean? Why not just shoot yourself in the fucking head?"

The irony here — that the only article I actually liked in a literary review is basically castigating me for being the sort of retard who didn’t like the others — is not lost on me. What’s worse is that I think I even said “I don’t want to think” verbatim a few weeks ago, after coming home from work exhausted and getting badgered by my girlfriend to watch Hotel Rwanda, a thoughtful, critically lauded film about a hotel manager who, Schindler-like, saves thousands of Tutsi refugees from being massacred by the Hutu militia.

“Isn’t that about Tutsi refugees getting massacred by Hutu?” I asked, groaning. After being told it was, I groaned further and rubbed my temples. “Let’s watch that Scrubs DVD instead.” Unlike Harold Ramis, there are times when I’d rather not be challenged intellectually by my diversions. Alarmingly, those times seem to increase exponentially with the passage of time.

Therein lies the problem — not with The Believer, but with The Believer’s intended audience, and the fact that I seem to be getting further away from being part of this audience the older I get. I used to go out of my way to watch complex independent films and read provocative young authors. Now I go out of my way to avoid them. (The critically applauded Hotel Rwanda is, as of this writing, still in its cellophane package under the TV, where it’s been since it was given to us this past Christmas. I’ve watched Batman Begins like four times since then — a depressing thought to contemplate under normal circumstances, when one isn’t talking about a film where a guy dresses up like a bat and beats up ninja terrorists because his parents died.)

It turns out the passage of time is turning me into a moron — one who's not only forgone learning new things, but seems to be forgetting the things he already learned. (For instance: when cooking bagels, after they’re cooked, they’re hot and will burn your fingers. Apparently my brain erased this fact to make room for fond remembrances of a Mop ‘N’ Glo ad and a room-clearing brawl between Captain America and his brainwashed ex-sidekick Bucky.)

Luckily there's no dark cloud without its silver lining, and I’m taking my ongoing descent into full-blown mental incompetence in stride. On the plus side, for instance, I’ll never have to watch another depressing film by Todd Solondz, and that’s undoubtedly a timesaver. Another perk: less poetry, more Spider-Man. That’s fantastic no matter how smart you are.

Most importantly: less defending of literary pederasts. The dumber you get, the more cut and dry it strikes you that it doesn’t matter how flowery you’re able to say “I’d like to fuck a boy in the ass” in prose. No amount of Pulitzers are letting you babysit my kids.

An early Christian manuscript, including the only known text of what is known as the Gospel of Judas, has surfaced after 1,700 years. The text gives new insights into the relationship of Jesus and the disciple who betrayed him, scholars reported today.

According to this expert, however, the thing's been around for decades and isn't even uncommon -- there are evidently more than a few dubious "gospels" floating around out there, various scrolls and papyrus leaflets and whatnot, which are all genuinely antique but are also copies of copies of interpretations of original works and of little value, theological or otherwise.

At any rate, National Geographic is releasing a special on it soon. I don't know if this is a "wag the dog" scenario where this is the Real Damn Deal, but National Geographic decided to wait for Da Vinci Code's release campaign before hyping their similarly-themed special; or if money changed hands, it's all horseshit, and Sony Pictures is simply getting a little extra publicity with some real-life Jesus-rummaging.

I will, say, however, that if it is for real, that's gotta be the most cynical news I've heard in months: that a lost Bible chapter written by Christ's betrayer has been unearthed and translated, and the only way National Geographic thought anyone'd be interested is if they rode it in on the coattails of the new Tom Hanks movie.

Did you hear the good news?

Tom Hanks is risen. Blessed be Tom Hanks.

If they are aware—if when filming the movie, they couldn't stop saying things like "Holy shit, is this ridiculous"—it's entirely possible Snakes on a Plane will achieve a level of retarded awesomeness not seen since Peter Jackson's Dead Alive. If they aren't aware, conversely, this could very well be the most punishingly stupid two hours you've spent since Jon Voight reminded you why nobody casts him in films much in the thin ass-treacle Anaconda.

I leave it to you to watch the trailer below and judge for yourself. The dialogue's scarce and offers few clues, as the trailer is more focused on demonstrating to you, the casual viewer, that you can apparently fit a shitload of snakes onto a plane. In this they succeed.

Of the few lines of dialogue present, I think my favorite is Samuel L. frustratedly stating, "I am getting sick of all the snakes on this plane!" or something similar. Hey, who wouldn't be? I speak from experience as to how aggravating that can be, especially if you're trying to get some things done.

I also feel the need to point out the 10-foot boa constrictor, which at one point drops out of a light fixture onto unsuspecting flight enthusiasts. I won't comment on the fright value of the spectacle, since I freely admit something like that would make me poop my pants.

However, the logistics involved in a 10-foot boa constrictor getting into a light fixture somewhat confounds. Logically speaking, there should have been a 10-foot florescent light already occupying this space.

The only reasonable conclusion I'm left with is that one of the maintenance personnel at the airport installed the boa constrictor into the fixture, thinking it was a florescent light. Regardless of how good or bad the movie ends up being, I sincerely hope they include this scene.

Click to view. Something a bit smarter coming next week.

The fictional know-it-all even won a recent CBC poll that crowned him the most annoying person in the country, beating out Celine Dion, Alanis Morrisette and real-life know-it-all John Ralston Saul for the dubious honor. (How the entire cast of the Royal Canadian Air Farce wasn't nominated, whose show is like a half-hour of nails screeching down a chalkboard, is beyond me; though I'm not above starting a rumor in this very sentence that they all sucked off CBC Chairman Guy Fournier to dodge the bullet.)

Happily — or perhaps sadly, depending on whether you liked having him around as an easy target for your disdain — Canadian Tire's retired Canadian Tire Guy, who's gone to the TV Spokesman Sound Stage in the Sky. No doubt to irritate God about using an inferior brand of brad remover or belt sander while renovating His basement.

God always takes the good ones first. The good ones, and the desexualized social irritants with the immaculately trimmed beards.

Karla and I recently co-wrote a massive eight-page article over at Cracked.com, running through all the Oscar nominations and guessing the winners. It will probably surprise you not at all that I manage to name-drop Batman Begins on practically every page, despite a shockingly inadequate number of nominations on the part of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (or, as I like to call them, Morons Who Wouldn't Know Quality Cinema if it Drove Over Them in a Batmobile).

Hope this gets you in shape in time for the Oscars, folks. I won't be watching it myself. This year's nomination of Brokeback Mountain means I can finally watch gay pornography guilt-free, and I intend to be forwarding through it a single frozen frame at a time.

Click the gratuitously enormous-donged Oscar below to read.

Edit: Sharp-eyed forumgoer Mr. Gale wrote me to point out that the links don't actually point to the article. It's fixed and they do now.

Jay 'n' Karla's 2006 Oscar Rundown (Off-Site)