Newsday Tuesday #2

If you're anything like me, you're probably a carbon based life form working 40-60 hours a week and releasing your aggression by yelling not particularly helpful comments at the characters in popular television shows (Seriously Don Draper, another whiskey!? It's 6:45 in the morning you impeccably groomed degenerate!). Also, you've most likely heard about this whole Venus eclipse thing.

There seems to be a lot of excitement over the fact that Venus will pass between the Earth and the sun sometime this evening, causing that most amazing of visual occurrences, the appearance of a small black dot moving across our nearest star. Despite the fact that one could achieve the exact same effect by simply finding a small black dot and holding it up to the sun, scientists are loudly insisting that this is a ONCE IN A LIFETIME EVENT, much like, say, getting run over by a garbage truck or hearing a Taylor Swift song that doesn't make you wish she had been eaten by tigers in utero. Yep, there's excitement, wonder, and joy just spilling out of every scientific orifice available.

But where is the outrage?

Just who does this Venus think she is? That's our freaking sunlight! Does this carbon dioxide clad, volcano covered bitch really think she can just orbit through the middle of our only damn source of light and heat whenever she feels the urge? That shit may fly over at Alpha Centauri, but not in this solar system. We did NOT spend four and a half billion years slowly cooling from molten rock and gradually evolving a complex ecosystem teeming with life just to have our sunlight poached by a half-assed excuse for a planet that can't even be bothered to develop a planetary magnetic field.

So this is what I have to say to Venus: Step the fuck off. You do not want to mess with us. Nobody is going to stand for this crap. Mercury may not care, but Mercury is a marble compared to our boy Mars. You think they named Mars after the God of War just for kicks? Hell no. Mars will fuck you up. Jupiter has our back too. JUPITER. Jupiter has hurricanes bigger than your entire damn planet.

You have been warned, you filthy celestial whore. You and your absurdly dense atmosphere better check yourself.

Sincerely,
Adam Burns
Self-Appointed Planetary Spokesman 

First of all, I should probably apologize. The more observant among you may have noted that I haven't posted anything in more than two years. And I can only assume you've been saying to yourself, "Oh thank God, now I can go about my day to day life without having to worry about constantly being subjected to that pile of brain-rotting drivel that pops up in my Facebook stream every damn thirty seconds or so". To this I can only respond by saying that:

 A) The more observant among you are kind of a bunch of jerks. And:

 B) I would have posted more, but I ate a particularly large lunch in mid-March of 2010, and I've been waiting for it to properly digest before diving back into this crap.

As it turns out, the thing I was waiting to be digested may or may not have been an enormous tumor (it wasn't, but one cannot overstate the importance of gaining sympathy points) and so I have decided to risk certain death and/or indigestion by returning to this blog.

As we're now halfway through the year, I thought an appropriate return would be to analyze how I have so far fared with my 2012 New Years resolutions.

HOW I HAVE SO FAR FARED WITH MY NEW YEARS RESOLUTIONS

Not well.

What's that? Not specific enough for you? Well aren't you needy? Fine, let's analyze more specifically how I have so far fared with my New Years Resolutions.

MORE SPECIFICALLY HOW I HAVE SO FAR FARED WITH MY NEW YEARS RESOLUTIONS

RESOLUTION 1: Do Not Use Large Unnecessary Title Headings In My Blog Posts

Damn it! Well, that's what I get for not doing any research before writing this idiocy.

RESOLUTION 2: Get Out More

To be entirely honest, for the first five months of the year I misread this as "get off more", which is why if you've tried to contact me you may have reached a pre-recorded message informing you that I was busy in my basement renewing my subscription to MatureNecrophiliacBestiality.com (a site on the internet that features ACTUAL senior citizens having sex with ACTUAL horses that are ACTUALLY deceased, unlike those charlatans at GranniesRidingDeadSheepDick.net).  

RESOLUTION 3: Try To Be More Discreet About My Weird Sexual Proclivities

You know what, I give up. If God wanted me to make resolutions, he would have said so. Or, knowing God, he would have used an obscure Judaic carpenter's random babbling about being an incarnate deity to inspire people to write an unbearably long book with explicit details as to who begat who, a nice little fantasy chapter about a giant being killed by a sling, and an epilogue that features (NOTE: SPOILER ALERT) the complete destruction of everybody by some horseback riding ninnies throwing plagues back and forth like a beach ball at a concert I can't remember cause I was shrooming pretty heavily, to inspire me to realize that I should make resolutions. Also it would apparently inspire me to make loud proclamations about gays not marrying each other as if it was any of my business (which let me be clear, it isn't).

More to come later this week, with the triumphant return of Newsday Tuesday, unless, of course, I find something better to do.

-A. Burns

Poetry Series: Volume 1

THE ADAM BURNS POETRY SERIES PRESENTS:
THREE HAIKUS WRITTEN ACCIDENTALLY
BY A GRUMPY OLD MAN


Hey you fucking kids
What do you think you're doing
Get off of my lawn

When I was your age
Walked six miles through snow to school
All uphill both ways

Get Grandpa a beer
I don't care what that Doc said
Heart attack my ass

Say Goodbye to Your Guitar Heroes

I have bad news. Seriously bad news. Not something small and insignificant like "the toast burned a little" or "your liver has failed", but seriously, heart-wrenchingly awful news. The sort of news that inspires you to toss your newspaper out the front door, shouting "I'll never read the news again!", prompting your neighbor to shout, "It's four o'clock in the fucking morning asshole. My damn kids are trying to sleep! And who the hell reads a paper these days anyway? Why can't you get your news from the internet like a normal human being?", prompting you to throw a garden implement through your neighbor's front window (you may have had a scotch or two this evening), prompting him to come out on the lawn in his underwear waving a handgun, prompting you to, the following day, raise the height of your fence, in protest, to well above the height for which it's legally zoned, prompting numerous complaints from the Homeowner's Association, despite the fact that Mrs. Lurdle down the street painted her house bright pink, for Christ's sake, and not one of them bothered to say a thing about it. It's that kind of news.

And here it is: Musicians have been lying to you.

Take a deep breath. I realize this is a lot to absorb. But you've got to face facts. It's not your fault. They duped all of us. I know I wanted to believe Sammy Hagar when he said "I can't drive 55", but in the end you've got to accept that there's no possible way that he ever managed to parallel park at a hundred and twenty-five miles an hour. It simply doesn't make any sense. And so, it is with a heavy heart (it's not lazy, it has a glandular disorder, thank you very much), that I expose some of the darkest manipulations of the music that we once so revered, in a segment we title: Top Ten Lies Perpetrated By The Music Industry

10) "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" - Poison

Sure, on the surface it seems to be a well observed metaphor about the nature of joy and sorrow and the inevitable co-mingling of the two, but underneath it's nothing more than a filthy unrepentant lie. Common knowledge is that the name "Poison" was chosen after the band saw "Spinal Tap", but close insiders revealed (after several weeks of torture in an underground prison camp outside Dayton, OH) that the name was actually chosen to scare off anxiety-ridden botanists, any one of whom, had they ever mustered up the guts to listen to the song, would have pointed out in a nerdy, self-righteous tone, that the Rosa "Zephirine Drouhin", though prone to black spot, rust, and assorted types of mildew, is thoroughly thornless. They then would have smiled smugly and gotten back to the business of botany, which primarily consists of not getting laid for decades at a time.


9) "Everybody's Working For the Weekend" - Loverboy

You play it on the jukebox every Saturday night while you're bussing tables at Denny's, but in your heart you have to know that it's just not true. I mean, if everybody's working, why the hell are there so many people in Denny's at 2:30 am wearing club clothes wrinkled up in that special way that says "I just got lucky in a bar bathroom with some guy who I'm pretty sure had a speaking role on Law and Order last season". No, the accurate statement is that you, yourself, are working for the weekend while more successful people are out enjoying themselves. You think the members of Loverboy are working for the weekend? No, they're sitting poolside with a martini getting a hand job from your girlfriend who's "visiting her sick aunt in Pawtucket".

8) "The Love You Take is Equal To The Love You Make" - The Beatles

A nice sentiment, but federal income tax laws dictate that you really only get to keep about two-thirds of the love you make, despite the fact that you spend a good portion of your life slaving away making it while some lazy assholes sit around popping out countless children and shooting heroin and occasionally getting their act together long enough to go down to the welfare office and claim their chunk of of your hard-earned love. Fucking socialist bullshit.

All records of lies 7-3 were tragically lost due to irreversible water damage after Garth Brooks' #1 country hit "The River" overflowed its banks and flooded my home office.

2) "Everything's Gonna Be Alright" - Bob Marley

I don't care how stoned you are, you've got to realize that this is a load of crap.

1) "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" - The Beatles

The Beatles make a second appearance on our countdown, and it's no surprise. We could deconstruct countless Beatles songs and examine their falsehoods (Back in the USSR? It doesn't even exist anymore you duplicitous bastards!), but this song at least gave us a testable hypothesis. And though, it ranks #1 on our countdown, the results were a bit mixed. They were heavily influenced by my attempts to hold hands with Paul McCartney. Initial tries at rushing him with outstretched hands resulted in my arms, head, and genital region being held by Paul's bodyguards as they tossed me out into the street. I tried a subtler tactic of politely explaining my position at the top of my lungs, stating "HEY PAUL!!!! OVER HERE!!! REMEMBER IN 1963 WHEN YOU INDICATED A DESIRE TO BLACHEGGGEAACH*" (*This last part of the statement represents the approximate point at which Paul sprayed me with the mace). So Paul was definitely a liar. Ringo, however, not only held my hand willingly, but also invited me back to his place for oral sex. So at this point it was a tie. The final decision on the veracity of this music came down to John and George, and while they both finally consented to holding my hand, I can't help but think that if they really wanted to, I wouldn't have had to dig through six feet of dirt and pry open their coffins with a crowbar.

This blog is brought to you by the letter "J", which I rolled up and smoked half of prior to writing this nonsense.

News Day Tuesday #1

That's right, kiddies, it's your lucky day. Every Tuesday I'll be bringing you commentary on the most important and scintillating news stories of the week. And by every Tuesday, of course, I mean every Tuesday that I actually feel like doing it.

Today's piece of frightful and disturbing news comes to us from Denver, Colorado. The headline reads as such: "Jury Finds Gay Porn Actor Guilty of Murder". The story revolves around former porn actor and gay male escort Timothy John Boham who murdered a wealthy businessman who had hired him for sex.

As far as I'm concerned, this officially marks the death of civilized society as we know it. Look, anyone who has watched an episode of CSI, CSI: Miami, CSI: New York, CSI: Small Abandoned Mining Community In The Mountains Somewhere, etc., is aware that virtually every police officer, public official, doctor, lawyer, architect, or other seemingly upstanding citizen is most likely a depraved murdering psycho*. But until now we have always been able to rely on our gay escorts to provide us with a danger-free anal reaming and the occasional light spooning afterwards (for an additional fee, of course). Now, suddenly, we find that hiring an anonymous stranger for sex is no longer the wholesome family activity we've come to know and love. This is saddening, no doubt, but the truly devastating effects of this story are even more depressing.

*With the exception of David Caruso, of course, who has earned our unquestioned trust via a constant well-timed application and removal of sunglasses.

It would be one thing for us to be forced to reconcile the heinous actions of Timothy Boham with our previously held beliefs regarding the adult entertainment industry, but the reporting body in this case has infinitely widened the scope of the danger by including Timothy's middle name. I, for one, tend to scan a story like this before reading it in full, and upon my first glance I misread the name as being Timothy John BONHAM. Could it be? John Bonham? I mean, it's bad enough to know that I'll be forever looking over my shoulder (or sometimes up at a mirrored ceiling) wondering if my escort is going to unceremoniously end my existence, but to think that I could be gunned down by the long-deceased drummer of one of the most influential rock bands in history is a whole different ballgame. Will we ever again be able to hear the lyrics "Oh, oh, child, way you shake that thing, gonna make you burn, gonna make you sting" without wondering if John Bonham intends to actually, literally, light us on fire? Where once we could innocently listen to "Kashmir" and wonder only "Does anybody know what the fuck this song is supposed to be about?", we now must sit huddled in a corner with a chill running down our spines, praying that we survive the night. And, perhaps most tragically of all, "Stairway to Heaven" will now be a tool used to inspire fear, instead of a tool used by moderately talented amateur guitar players to get laid.

So thanks for nothing, Timothy John Boham. Enjoy prison, which as I understand it pretty much just pro-bono** gay escort work anyway.

**Not to be confused with pro-Bono gay escort work, which is gay escort work provided for free to the members of U2.

What's In a Name? Not Exploding.

"Hold on just one gosh darn minute", some of the whinier among you are probably saying. "This blog does not appear in any way to be the eagerly anticipated second part of 'You Can Read it, But You're Not Going to Like It'". That is correct. My thoughts are of a transitory and mercurial nature, and at the moment they have strayed from that topic onto other things. You probably feel cheated, but if you had read the fine print* you'd know that "To Be Continued" should not construed as a guarantee, or, quite frankly, even as an indication that there will actually be any continuance.

*Technically speaking, I haven't actually written the fine print yet, but if you travel forward a few months, it should be available for your viewing. Those of you not currently utilizing time travel should know that your inability to effectively manipulate the space-time continuum is a personal problem, and thus is not my responsibility at all.

Moving on, what I'd like to discuss today is the fact that on the way home from work last night I was held up in traffic for a good while because a Volkswagen Beetle had apparently burst into flames. Now, there are many possible explanations for this occurrence. Perhaps there was a massive engine malfunction, or maybe the driver was smoking a cigarette while simultaneously filling vials with volatile chemicals. But I suspect neither of these is accurate. Occam's Razor, in addition to handily disposing of unwanted stubble, tells us that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. Which is why I'm convinced that the Beetle caught fire because a giant nine year old space creature lit it up with some sort of sophisticated space magnifying glass. Why? Because that is what young boys do to beetles.

And who is at fault? Volkswagen, of course. One cannot blame the alien. Boys will be boys, after all, even if they are green, tentacled space boys the size of France. But why in the world would the people at VW name their car after bug? How did they not anticipate these horrifying consequences? And why are we purchasing such absurdly named products? One might as well drive around in a Chevy Bulls-Eye, or a Toyota Unescorted Group of Isreali Diplomats Wandering Through The Gaza Strip. Honestly, the Beetle? They were asking for it. And frankly, the Beatles, despite their truly exceptional musical abilities, put themselves in pretty much the same boat. I have long believed that Mark David Chapman was not, in fact, an assassin, but an overzealous exterminator with poor eyesight.

The point is that we should all write angry letters to Volkswagen demanding that they create a vehicle called the VW Move Along, Nothing To See Here. It's the only way to guarantee the safety of ourselves and our children.

You Can Read It, But You're Not Going To Like It (Part 1)

It has often been said that what is right is not always popular, and what is popular is not always right. I have consistently been neither popular nor right for the better part of twenty-seven years now, which is a fact that I am enormously proud of. So be prepared to call me a jackass as I'm getting ready to go off on Hate Crime laws, which tend to be pretty well-received among your standard non-bigoted individuals, a category in which I include myself. On the plus side, the racists and homophobes are going to think I'm brilliant, so I can count on many an invitation to parties populated with nothing but straight white people, which considerably increases my chances of not being the worst dancer in the room.

First off, let me stock up brownie points that I'm likely to need later by saying that I unequivocally support gay marriage. Why? Because I believe in equal rights. This is not to say that I believe in equality, because I don't. I believe it is the responsibility of our government to make sure that we all have the same rights under the law, but I also think we have to be careful not to push the politically correct bullshit too far. For example, a blind man should be guaranteed the right to get married, to collect unemployment, to have full access to all public facilities, to receive help from the police or fire department in an emergency, etc. If, however, I'm organizing a softball team, I shouldn't have to worry about a discrimination suit if I fail to invite the blind guy to join the team. Cause here's the thing: People who can't see make really shitty softball players. I wish it wasn't the case, but it is. Honest to God, you'd probably be more successful if you just put a bucket out in right field because at least a bucket won't end up facing the wrong direction. And I don't want to hear any of that bullshit about how the loss of one sense heightens the others because it doesn't heighten them enough to play softball. Period. Never in the history of mankind has a blind man stood at home plate and thought:

"That ball sounds like it's a 65 mile an hour change up heading for the lower inside corner. Jackpot! Here comes a round-tripper, baby!"

No. Does not happen. Most likely he'd be thinking:

"Hmm. I sure hope a small spherical object that may or may not be headed in this direction doesn't collide with my head in an incredibly forceful manner. How the fuck did I let these politically correct jerk-offs talk me into playing softball?"

TO BE CONTINUED...