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.

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.

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.

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)