Blogcritics Author: Timothy Moriarty

Announcement: Short-content feeds

Phillip Winn — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT

Sunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding.

Pranks at a Summer Camp (Part Two)

Timothy Moriarty — Wed, 7 Feb 2007 05:41:58 EST

Good morning, campers! Picking up where we left off yesterday, I am pleased to share with you the remaining two of the Five Greatest Pranks We Ever Pulled. Numba' Two: Before we went to camp, we had plans. Mission objectives, if you will. We had pranks already picked out. We had backup pranks if we had to abort the main prank. We had specific targets that we assigned code names. We had GPS, suitcase nukes, Humvees. We were at war, people.There was a kid on youth staff for a while named Matt. Matt was extremely strange. Part of it was the way he looked. He was "Jeff-sized," despite being only 15-years-old. Part of it was the way he talked. Imagine Michael Jackson, Mike Tyson, and Diane Rehm all rolled into one. It caught most people off guard for the first time to hear this slow, mousy, lispy voice come from this man the size of a Ford Festiva. A big part of it was the crippling social effects of being that fat. He was always crying at the mildest slight. He often ate his food in private because he was embarrassed about the size of the portion and he was constantly paranoid about what people were saying about him, his voice, and his size behind his back.As cruel as teenagers can be, especially boys, we actually never ripped on Matt about his size. In fact, we never ripped on anyone in any meaningful way, for that matter. That's part of the spirit of American youth camps. It's a safe place where you can go and be yourself, far away from the judgment of your family, your teachers, and your classmates. Sure, you would get a good-natured ribbing if we found a New Kids on the Block tape in your Walkman, or if someone recognized your feet under the stall door while you were taking a big, noisy, smelly deuce, or if they caught you holding hands with some girl with braces, but that was about the extent of it. No one got it for being fat, poor, ugly, tall, short, smart, or stupid.Matt, for all of his oddities that made him a miserable sod in real life, came to camp and was treated with a deference that he likely never received anywhere else. And then he threw it all away.One camp in particular we lost a lot of ground in the prank war. The staff seemed to know all of our plans. They kept their rooms locked during the day. The night watch kept an unusually close eye on the back door of the boys' dorm. They peered cautiously from the windows of the lodge during their nightly meeting. They knew everything we had planned. We were disheartened, baffled, and frustrated.On a Saturday afternoon, a few of us were having a chat with Spiber Man. He was the Switzerland of the war, taking neither side, but he was at least sympathetic to ours. He told us something that explained how the staff had been able to so easily thwart our every scheme. On Thursday night, the staff -- damn their oily hides -- bribed Matt with junk food in exchange for a detailed account of our plans for the weekend.All bets were off. I know what I'm about to write is a paradox, but we took our fun seriously. Matt had become a liability. We had to send a message that we wouldn't tolerate this type of treachery - and it was gonna be smelly.Matt was known for striking off to the boys' dorm between activities to "snack." That is, he would shove unimaginable amounts of junk food down his throat over the course of a few minutes, wash it all down with a few greedy gulps of soda, and return to the fray. He would always try to inconspicuously slip back into the flow of things, but trying to convince people that you stepped outside for some fresh air ain't so easy when you return with your face covered in Doritos residue, a gummy bear stuck to your neck, and your hands glistening and sticky.Knowing this habit of his, we thought it prudent to add a very healthy dose of castor oil to his beverage of choice -- we had to account for his overwhelming girth by quadrupling said dose -- and simply waited for him to retire to the dorm for his post-dinner/pre-lights out snack. We hoofed it to the dorm once we saw him leave and saw that he had polished off the remaining swigs of the two-liter of Mountain Dew we had tainted. Point, set, match.About four hours later the fireworks began, as we were engaged in the nightly lights-out camper wrangle. It was one of the great traditions of camp. While the staff was at their nightly meeting, it was the youth staff's responsibility to make their way through the dorm and get the campers in bed. This mainly consisted of us sticking our heads in the bathroom and showers and yelling, "All right! Let's go! Lights out! Let's hurry it up! C'mon! Lights out! Hurry it up in there! Let's move it!" as well as walking up and down the aisles with that big-fish-in-a-small-pond-mall-security-guard swagger, shouting, "All right! Lights out! Let's get in bed and get those lights out, people! Quiet! Lights out!" and swinging our arms waaaay out behind us and clapping our hands in front of us.Occasionally we would pop into the rooms and begin rooting around the campers' personal effects for candy even though we all had copious amounts of our own. They would object and begin to get out of bed to defend the plunder of their sweet, sweet booty, which we would answer with threats of calling their parents right nowto say, "We are sending your son home because of his bad behavior. We need to send him home right away, so you're going to have to come pick him up at midnight on a Saturday, way out here in the lower east side of nowhere," to which most kids promptly shut the hell up and just helplessly watched us eat their coveted confectionaries. We were such jerks.If they didn't have any good candy, we would ask if anyone in the room had "scored" so far that weekend. "Scored" means "given or received an awkward peck or sloppy tongue-kiss from a girl." The responses were inevitably laced with gross exaggerations and/or flat-out lies. We would usually respond with hilariously lame and equally mendacious stories to put the campers in their place, replete with our own gross exaggerations and embellishments. "Yeah, well, last camp there was this girl on staff, her name was Veronica, and she was like 24 or something, and she was all like 'Meet me behind the girls' dorm at midnight', and so I went out there, and she was all like, 'I have a boyfriend and all, but I just can't resist you,' and then we french-kissed until, like, dawn or something, and I got to touch her boobs, and they were, like, humongous, and now she's going to homecoming with me." Then we would pat the campers on the head like the amateurs they were, as if to suggest, "I am a black belt at scoring with chicks. You're so young and naive. Just you wait until you're my age. You're still not going to get as many chicks as me."Anyway, Matt. The rest of the story won't surprise you. As we were on patrol, he started complaining about a sour stomach and then he disappeared into the bathroom for several hours. All we could hear were bursts of sound - painful moaning, flatulence like thunder, and the dull roar of a stream of liquified waste hitting the toilet water so heavily and steadily that it sounded like Niagra Falls. There was a lot of Matt, so one could only surmise that there was a lot of Matt to clean out.We told Matt the next morning that we caused his gastrointestinal distress. We explained that we had finished exacting our revenge and we were all good. He could have played it cool, but instead he ratted us out to the staff. Matt never came back to camp after that. I think he knew the next step in the escalation process quite naturally would have forced us to disembowel and hang him Hannibal Lecter-style, but he was wrong. We were just gonna do the castor oil thing again. Except next time, we were going to lock him in the girls' dorm afterwards.Numba' One: The best prank we ever pulled qualifies as such because it was a) so very simple, and b) utterly spontaneous.There was an enemy faction on the staff of young men and women who we duked it out with one weekend in particular. It consisted of a guy (Jody), a girl (Sherry), Spiber Man, and some other people who were obviously pretty forgettable, because I can't remember them. The penultimate prank in this particular match-up was of their doing, but the final blow was ours, and it was glorious.Remember the order of things each night? Staff goes to meeting, youth staff puts campers to bed, staff returns. Each Saturday night after the staff returned, the youth staff went to another building on campus for the "youth staff party." This will blow your mind - it was unsupervised. Yes, eight teenage boys and eight teenage girls, away from home, filled with a sense of independence and adventure, allowed to cavort in a huge, dark, empty building far away from intervention of adults. If any of us had ever had the gall to do what we all wanted do to with each other, we would have had our own "little campers" the following year. Instead, it was just a lot of making out and groping in dark corners (or crying about how the person you wanted to make out with and grope was making out with and groping someone else), eating junk food, making prank phone calls, and a whole lot of that emo, Breakfast Club-esque dialog about how everything we do is a cry for help and our parents just don't understand us, and at least if we cut ourselves we can feel something.One of those magical nights, locked away in our fortress of debauchery and/or misery, the enemy struck. We returned from our party to find that every single item in our dorm room was gone. The whole room was empty.The entire dorm was quiet - we couldn't go on a rampage. We quietly skulked about the dorm, flashlights in hand, wondering where the hell they could have stashed our belongings. Then it occurred to one of us to check the courtyard between the two boys' dorms. It was all there, laid out very neatly on the grass; and like the grass, it was all covered in frost.We hustled to get everything back inside, our faces red with anger and embarrassment. How could we not have seen this coming? We began to chide ourselves for our foolishness, but quickly resolved that the past was the past and we were getting nowhere by rehashing it. We had to strike back.We didn't know where the enemy was sleeping, but it wasn't hard to figure out. There were two boys' dorms and two girls' dorms. Each one was connected to the other, hence the courtyard, but only one dorm of each gender was used during any given camp. A lot of the staff couldn't bear the thought of sharing a room with a bunch of smelly teenagers, so they would congregate in one of the unoccupied dorms, and their sleeping arrangements were often co-ed. We struck off into the empty dorm next door and found a room with a bunch of Abercrombie & Fitch clothes strewn about, a lot of hair care products, and about ten pairs of women's shoes littering the floor. Boom. This must have been Jody & Sherry's room - and they were on night watch.What to do, what to do? We packed the two suitcases, took them outside, and chucked each item individually onto the roof of the dorm. As we rifled through their belongings one piece at a time, we found some very, shall we say, personal items that belonged to Sherry, including some very "special" underwear, lacy bras, and some tampons.The following morning, as the boys preened and prepared to head to the dining hall for breakfast, we held a public auction of sorts for each of the pilfered items. I think we made a little over $30, and that wasn't including the bartered candy and food that we accepted as legal tender.Boys this age (ages 12-14, remember?) have all the subtlety of Tsar Bomba. By noon, they were wearing the bras and panties on their heads or over their own clothes, letting the tampons hang out of the corner of their mouths like cigars, or dipping them in soda to see how much liquid they would absorb. The best part was that Sherry was like a ghost that day. She was nowhere to be seen. She didn't have the huevos to go and collect her belongings. I would have at least tried for the underwear. They looked expensive.Ahhh, yes. The glory days of my youth. Pranks that I am involved in today tend to be about as exciting as an oil change. They usually involve farting in bed and fluffing the covers towards my wife. Still, I had a good run. I wish I had done that panty thing more often, though. That was boss, man.Please comment and share your most cherished pranks, at summer camp or otherwise.

By day, Timothy Moriarty asks rich people to give their money to nonprofits. By night, he is the proprietor of the blog hurling invective dot com.

Pranks at a Summer Camp (Part One)

Timothy Moriarty — Tue, 6 Feb 2007 06:35:54 EST

There is a direct correlation between (and sometimes, but very rarely, betwixt) your age and the appropriateness of pulling a prank. You are born with great privilege and wide latitude with regard to what you can get away with. Taking a whiz while some unsuspecting victim is changing your diaper, bricking in the bathtub, scribbling in crayon on the wall (this is so overdone it's downright cliché, but try telling a toddler that; insolent little curs) or playing with Daddy's lighter - there are, it seems, no boundaries when you're that young.It's all downhill from there. The frequency and severity of this behavior is expected to decrease as time marches on. By the time you're my age, you can't even strategically plant a whoopee cushion without being regarded by your peers forever afterward as some kind of Faulknerian Idiot Man-Child. The decline in tolerance is steady until you get to high school graduation, at which point a crossroads is reached. If you attend college, you buy yourself a solid four-year pass to continue pulling pranks unabated, although Old Man Jenkins Down the Street Who Always Yells at You To Stay the Hell Out of His Yard, Even If Only Your Freakin' Shadow is Moving Across His Grass is now strictly off limits. Your victims must be chosen from the ranks of your classmates and the slow-moving members of the faculty and administration, and even then, only on campus. Once you've either graduated or dropped out, or if you don't even bother to attend college, Game Over.Thankfully, during my capricious youth I managed to squeeze in a healthy amount of pranks before my number was called. Most were your garden-variety pranks, including: -the "Sugar in Your Gas Tank" prank -the "Whiz in Your Gas Tank" prank -the "Flash Paper in Place of Your Rolling Paper" prank -the "Have Ten Big Dudes Move Your Car a Couple Hundred Feet" prank -the "Pull Someone's Pants Down While They're Giving a Presentation on Ponce De Leon in Sixth Grade Social Studies, Who You Cannot For the Life of You Now Remember What He Did That Made Him So Important" prank -and many more.However, there was a glorious time in my young life during which, it seemed to me, I committed some of the most epic and awe-inspiring pranks to ever have been executed during the span of human history: Camp.Camp for us American youth comes in all shapes and sizes. Mine was a weekend camp that happened five times a year, and the campers were 6th, 7th, and 8th graders. The hierarchy, from top to bottom, was as follows: the camp coordinators (who ran the show), the adult staff (who did the heavy lifting), the youth staff (high school kids who mostly ignored everyone and tried to find empty rooms in which they could make out with each other), and the campers. I attended this camp as a member of the youth staff for many years.No one remembers how it even came to be, but during one of those fateful weekends we found ourselves deep in the opening salvo of a diabolical prank war. It was between the adult staff and the youth staff. For the youth staff, it rapidly became the lone reason to attend camp - to devise and execute increasingly wicked pranks and crush the adult staff with our mischievous malice aforethought.And so, I present to you, without a whole lot of embellishment, and in classic David Letterman last-to-first style, the Five Greatest Pranks We Ever Pulled. I'll share tin, copper, and bronze with you today, and the silver and gold medal winners tomorrow. Deal? Numba' Five: Each night after "lights out", the adult staff would have their nightly meeting in the staff lounge. The staff lounge was in a lodge on the far south side of camp and the dorms were on the north side. The staff parking lot was directly in front of the lodge.We would often strike out into the chilly, moist spring night, sprinting through the inky darkness towards the lodge and the parking lot. All that could be heard was the squish of tennis shoes into the soft, wet earth, choked-back giggling, and murmurs about "how awesome this is going to be."While a good deal of our pranks were carefully planned and executed with spectacular precision, sometimes it was quite fulfilling to treat any given scenario as a blank canvas. Artistes that we were, on these expeditions we would bring along a backpack full of our puckish paints: toilet paper, plastic wrap, various condiments in easy-squeeze bottles, rotten eggs and other spoiled foodstuffs, a crossbow, sodium pentathol, etc.One night, full of verve and caffeinated soda, we embarked on one of these "anything goes” jaunts to the parking lot. Was it an "egg bombardment on the witless staff leaving the meeting" sorta night? A "fill an entire car with pea gravel" sorta night? Personally, I think the stroke of genius we settled for was vastly more fiendish than either of those. We found one of the camp coordinator's cars and smeared Vaseline over every square inch of her windows: Windshield, rear and side windows, and side-view mirrors. We plied it on thick, too. Do you know how hard it is to wipe Vaseline off a smooth surface?Numba' Fo': We embarked on another of those infamous late-night excursions to the parking lot, but this time we had a very specific plot in mind. We took one of the cartons of rotten eggs we had so dutifully been allowing to fester, whipped them into one of the most fetid mixtures I have ever seen or smelt, and delivered the payload on the roof of the victim's car.You may well be thinking this is far from inventive. Anthropologists, I am sure, have solid proof of Australopithecus throwing reptile eggs at the caves of rival monkey-men. Carl Jung egged Sigmund Freud's Austrian villa after Freud referred to him as "that thumb-sucking Communist twit" in one of his papers.However, we were like the Wes Anderson of the practice - we had our own signature style and flair. So, following our stinky baptism of the poor horseless carriage, we very tightly wrapped the entire vehicle in plastic wrap.We were later told by our hapless victim (who was dyslexic and whose last name was Webb -- we called him Mr. Wedd, and Spiber Man -- this is true) that the resulting pressure forced the foul smelling yoke into the window seals where it remained forever. He told us at the next camp that he had to sell the car - as he put it, "if [he] ever wanted to take a girl out on a date again." We felt a little bad about this. It was never our intention to cause any lasting harm or damage, but later, upon further reflection, we all agreed that given the utter hilarity of it, we were glad to bend the rules a bit.Numba' Three: Even casual acquaintances of mine can comment on my views on plastic wrap. "Oh yes," they will tell you. "I was on the main concourse trying to get to my gate before my final boarding call, and out of nowhere this bedraggled, bearded freak wearing a grey wool robe with mustard stains on it runs up to me, shakes my hand, hands me a pamphlet called "The Moriarty Plastic Wrap Manifesto: Plastiwrapifesto!" and then disappears in a puff of greasy white smoke."Plastic wrap became something of a weapon of choice for our little faction during the Great Prank Wars, but we did not merely unleash its power on cars. We found it also acted as a powerful paralytic agent. We plastic-wrapped a good dozen or so campers to their beds in the night if we felt they were unruly, or if we felt, well, just felt like it. But that's like shooting fish in a barrel. Yearning for a greater challenge, we sought out an upright and mobile target.Most of the pranks we pulled were truly in the spirit of fun, competition, and creativity. We had a ball pulling them off, we looked forward to (usually with a slight undercurrent of dread) seeing what our enemies would cook up in retaliation, and we had a blast scheming up our next naughty pursuit.But not this one.There was a member of the staff named Jeff. Jeff was what we called in camp-speak a "big fat stupid a-hole." C'mon, we were teenagers. Of course, now I would call him something very Churchill-esque, like "a corpulent, obtuse nincompoop," but I would still be tempted to drop several dozen four-letter words in there somewhere.Jeff was a staff member of the nonprofit organization that hosted the camp. We are pretty sure he was forced to volunteer at camp as a staff member as some type of punishment because he spent most of the weekend heaping abuse and criticism upon the campers, youth staffers, and his fellow staff members. Jeff had wiry brown hair, a patchy unkempt beard, and glasses with lenses so thick that, by all rights, they should have set his eyeballs on fire on a sunny day. He weighed, I am guessing, around 500 pounds. I will admit I often exaggerate certain facts and figures when I relate these real-life stories, but I assure you that in this instance I am probably right on the money, if not a little low. The mere sight of Jeff boggled the mind and his presence in this plane of existence strained the very laws of physics. The only explanation for Jeff's ability to stand or move would be that his bones were actually made of titanium.After suffering through Jeff's misanthropy and morbidly obese malaise for many a camp weekend, Jeff announced one weekend that it would be his last. No one remembers if he offered an explanation as to why, and if he did, no one cared. All we knew is that fat, smelly, wretched Jeff would be gone forever. No longer would we have to fear the sight of his grotesque inhuman form in the showers or the smell of his hideous ass in the latrine. No longer would we have to endure his constant browbeating or stupid rants about, well, everything. No longer would we have to witness him inhale inhuman amounts of sloppy joe, canned peaches, and other assorted camp "foods." Oh happy, happy day.From a prankster's point of view, Jeff was now just as impotent from a retaliation standpoint as he surely was in the more traditional sense of the word, owing to his veins being crushed under mountains of fat and clogged with the unholy grease of a million fistfuls of various fried meats and cheeses, rendering him wholly unable to deliver even a drop of blood to Jeff Junior, if you know what I mean. I am operating under the bold assumption that Jeff even had a Jeff Junior. There's a great line in Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk that reads: "On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero." Well, at camp, on a long enough timeline, your chances of avoiding seeing any given person naked in the shower (in our case, and sadly, only males) drops to zero. Hence, I can assure you with great veracity, that Jeff's member, if present, was invisible. Back to the scheme. The plan was to waylay Jeff after he disrobed and prepared to enter the shower (see Figure 1.1). Figure 1.1: A diagram of how we totally punked Jeff's fat assWe wore our bath shoes so we wouldn't slip on the slimy shower floor. He was sleepy and a little confused at first, but after the third revolution of teenage bastards orbiting his monstrous ass like two twisted, cackling satellites, he started to hurl invective. Loudly. His lung capacity was surprisingly robust given that he had enough fat crushing his pipes that he might as well have had a bag of concrete strapped to his chest. His breath smelt of sewage and battery acid.We knew we had to get a solid five layers of plastic wrap around him before he started trying to pin us against a wall with his girth. We only wrapped his torso, not his legs. We wanted him to have to walk around to find help. A few whirls later and we were through. We met the remainder of the youth staff (the boys only, of course, as we were in the boys' dorm) in the hallway. They were in various forms of seemingly impossible contortions of laughter. Their faces were blue. Some of them looked a little panicked. I think this is because blood vessels were bursting in their heads. Luckily, as the sound of Jeff's rant and thunderous footfalls rapidly grew closer, they managed to get their wits about them. My accomplice and I led the charge to the door. We exploded through the doorway as though we were being chased by the shockwave of an explosion in some action movie. Jeff stopped there at the threshold, shaking his fist and gnashing his teeth. We did it! And we emerged on the other side, unscathed, living to tell the tale.There were consequences, of course, which I won't go into here. We had decided, however, we were all willing to be put in front of the firing squad, or quite likely the Jeff-sitting-on-our-chest-squad, for love of the game. Tomorrow:-Spiber Man tells a tale of betrayal and treachery, which brings us to the most flatulent plot yet; and, -Poor planning, spontaneity, and gaiety form an unholy union that turns pranksters into panty auctioneers.Tomorrow, Part Two!

By day, Timothy Moriarty asks rich people to give their money to nonprofits. By night, he is the proprietor of the blog hurling invective dot com.

Dark Messiah: Might and Magic Multiplayer Mania

Timothy Moriarty — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 22:29:21 EST

Having no job has been surprisingly good to me. You may well expect an intellectual giant like me to be doing really intense things with my free time -finishing my novel, reading Proust's In Search of Lost Time, trying to get the intermix ratio just right on my particle accelerator, etc. Alas, I must disappoint yet again. In reality, I've been applying for a handful of jobs, gutting my bathroom, consuming unhealthy quantities of caffeine, and playing the newest Ubisoft title, Dark Messiah: Might and Magic. I won't go into a lengthy review. Suffice to say, everything you've heard about the single player mode is true: the cutscenes are stupid, the voice acting is terrible, the story is abysmally weak and predictable, and the ending is an utter copout. The multiplayer mode, however, is extraordinarily challenging, stylish, and cool.I know it's unfair to make generalizations like the one I'm about to make, but I don't care, because they're far more fun than they are unfair. Here goes: only dudes play any type of online multiplayer game. If you ever see anything wearing a skirt in a game that takes place online, you can rest assured that the player behind the character has stubble, a wang, an Adam's apple, a catalogue of Godsmack CDs, an opinion on the Lord of the Rings movies, or some combination of the five.However, most fellas -- barring those looking for some extremely dubious sexual thrills -- play fellas in these games. These guys would rather their character look like Jar-Jar Binks than a girl. Typically, your choice of chain mail or chiffon makes little difference, as most fantasy worlds are surprisingly equal opportunity. In Dark Messiah, however, this isn't true.Here are the game's five player classes, and my amateur psychiatric assessment of those who play them:The Warrior, who carries a big sword, the precursor to the fast car and/or .44 Magnum that the player will buy in later life; The Archer, for those who are too emotionally distant to really ever get close to anyone; The Mage, the favorite of those who enjoy running around endlessly fondling balls (of fire and lightning); The Assassin, who can make himself invisible, the preferred character of those who are deeply ashamed of something (probably acne) and are trying to hide; and The Priestess, for those manly men who are completely comfortable with their sexuality, and/or pretend to be girls in internet chat rooms. The Priestess is a comely girl in a first season Star Trek: The Next Generation Counselor Troi outfit. I seem to be the only person in the entire universe of DM:M&M players who plays the Priestess. That being the case, I have learned two things. First, the Priestess is the single most lethal character in the whole game, and second, no one has any clue how to defend against her attacks. Consequently, I have managed to infuriate young, sexless men in dozens of countries by humiliating them in front of their digital peers via serving them their digital asses on a platter. Never underestimate how much joy you can derive from mildly irritating people you will never meet in a manner that is ultimately meaningless. It's a lot more fun than it sounds.

By day, Timothy Moriarty asks rich people to give their money to nonprofits. By night, he is the proprietor of the blog hurling invective dot com.

Nutmeg Psychosis

Timothy Moriarty — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 18:55:26 EST

When I was a youth, back in the Mesozoic Era (or as we used to say, "back in the Zoeys"), I was a card-carrying member of a small band of miscreants. We referred to ourselves as the "Original Cast." There were five of us: myself, Jake, Al, Harry, and Brian. Our interests included: smoking cigarettes, driving around in cars while smoking cigarettes, riding around in cars while smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes at a franchise diner in our neighborhood called Country Kitchen, stealing sundry youth-oriented groceries from the Shell gas station that Al worked at (mainly beef jerky, batteries, and cigarettes) and smoking cigarettes in one of several moist, cold basements or hot, dry attics. One day, one of us -- no one remembers exactly who, although I can tell you for damn sure it wasn't me -- discovered girls. That miscreant told the other miscreants, and we spent the remainder of our youth faithfully and often tragically looking for ones that would let us stick parts of us into parts of them. We admitted a few dishy gals into our ranks. Clearly, they were batshit insane to hang out with us. We were ugly and smelly, with a penchant for flannel and an aversion to personal hygiene. Still, they saw enough redeeming qualities within us to offset those two boondoggles to our sexual exploits. We were grateful. And lucky.One of those silly, silly girls was Jaime. Brian, being the most devastatingly handsome of all of us, wooed Jaime in short order. Expressed in AD&D terms, Brian had an 18 Charisma, a Flannel Jacket of Charming, and a Velvety Voice of Persuasion +5. No girl could make the saving throw necessary to resist him. He also had a car. To the teenage female of the species, in much the same way that strong birthing hips on a woman indicate fertility to the male, the car intimated that Brian could take her down the street to get cigarettes to get her through the long winter.In any case, while Jaime and Brian were still in the beginning stages of their ballet of courtship, Jaime and I got high.It's not what you think. A little healthy underage binge drinking was the extent of our mood or mild-altering substance use back in those days. Cheap beer and cigarettes were our poisons. No weed, no X, no crack rock. We were just old fashioned, I guess. Nope, it wasn't that at all. Jaime had heard, from a source that I don't think that either one of us can pinpoint today, that you could get high from nutmeg.You have to remember the times we were living in back then. Times were tough. The factory had just shut down. Midterms were coming up. The drought had dried up all the crops. Momma had been real sick. Winter was setting in. Could you blame us for searching for something to take the pain away, just for a little while?The last bit about winter was true. It was late November, and Jaime and I had a date with destiny. I struck out from my house, trusty blue flannel on my back and Marlboro Lights in my chest pocket, through the friscillating dusklight and the cold drizzle, over the glassy, flattened, dead leaves that paved the uneven sidewalks of North Hill, to Jaime's. To get high. On nutmeg. Seriously.Jaime's mom was gone. It was just the two of us. There, in the dim light of her kitchen, we both probably managed to consume about half a teaspoon of nutmeg each. First, we tried just eating it off of a spoon, which was like trying to eat dense volcanic ash. Next we tried mixing it in milk, but it all just sank to the bottom of the glass before we could down it. After a few more failed attempts, we figured that what we had surely managed to ingest enough to take us on a wonderful journey.What ensued next was a series of "I think I feel something" exchanges. Anyone who has experimented with substances of dubious origin, potency or effect knows exactly what I'm talking about. The conversation goes something like this:Hopeful stoner #1: "Wait a minute... I think I feel something."Hopeful stoner #2: "Yeah, I feel kinda <vague adjective>."HS1: "Do you also feel sorta <other vague adjective>?"HS2: "A little bit, yeah."HS1: "Oh man, this stuff is totally kicking in now. I think."HS2: "Yeah, I think I feel it now too, a little bit. Yeah."Our great nutmeg experiment, as you might have guessed, turned out to be a dismal failure. After about half an hour, we gave up on hoping for an altered state to overtake us and put the nutmeg back on the spice rack. How we thought we could ever get high on something so wimpy that it came off of a spice rack, I'll never know.The truth of the matter is this -- neither of us really knew if you could get high off of nutmeg. It's the same as in grade school, when some kid on the playground tells you that babies come from women's belly buttons. You're young, you're gullible, and it sounds reasonable. You just roll with it.Now we have the Internet. When recess is over, you can Google "babies + belly button" and learn the truth. Well, I Googled "nutmeg + belly button," then just "nutmeg," and guess what? You can get high off of nutmeg. Here are its effects at certain doses:1 gram: mild to medium hallucinogenic effects, visual distortions, mild euphoria3 grams: toxic effects become present, including dry mouth, fast pulse, fever, and flushing; possibly fatal7.5 grams: convulsions, palpitations, nausea, dehydration, and generalized body painAnd get this: any large quantity ingestion of nutmeg can lead to Nutmeg Psychosis. In the words of Dave Barry, I must point out -- I am not making this up.The symptoms of Nutmeg Psychosis are -- and these are just the neurological, or "fun" ones, mind you -- severe headaches, drowsiness, fitful sleep, convulsions, hallucinations, delirium, unconsciousness, coma, agitation, disorientation, incoherence, euphoria, florid paranoia, vertigo, and a feeling of impending doom.Oh, and here's a good one too, according to one Web source: "Sometimes unusual behaviour occurs during intoxication such as hysteria and wild thrashing of limbs, and behaviour resembling that of a snarling dog."In the end, I guess we just didn't want it bad enough to eat what might as well have been heaping spoonfuls of sand. It would have been a letdown anyway, I bet. I'm disoriented, incoherent, agitated and drowsy most of the time anyway. And I always have a feeling of impending doom. I'm going to go grab a beer.

By day, Timothy Moriarty asks rich people to give their money to nonprofits. By night, he is the proprietor of the blog hurling invective dot com.

The Great Disappearing Act of Centralia, Pennsylvania

Timothy Moriarty — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 11:32:11 EST

One of my favorite themes in art is entropy: drawing, paintings, architecture, and photography. I find beauty in the concept that time and decay are inseparable, and for some strange reason I just like seeing what time does to all the things in this world.This means I was the kid in high school who, in photography class, took really lame pictures of crap like tattered vinyl chairs in abandoned warehouses. Then, cooped up in my bedroom that smelled of socks and Marlboro Lights, I would look at my photographs while listening to Metallica and wondering why more girls (read: any girls) didn't want to sleep with me. You'll be relieved to know I did grow out of that phase, mainly because I figured out why girls didn't want to sleep with me. I'm a freakin' ogre, that's why.Of course, entropy touches more than just vinyl chairs, and on much bigger scales, too.One could argue that the town of Centralia, Pennsylvania wasn't so much the victim of entropy as it was the victim of a terrible accident that just took several decades to reach its conclusion. Decay happens naturally and isn't sparked by human intervention. Centralia was set on fire, in a manner of speaking. Somewhere out there is the guy who started that fire. And he must feel like a real loser.By the 1960's, Centralia had become quite a happenin' little coal miner's town, like a lot of those in the hills of Pennsylvania. It had a general store, a nickelodeon, some nice Catholic schools (with seven churches to match), and more than a few saloons -- twenty-seven to be exact -- but even an idyllic little town produces its fair share of trash. By 1962 the glorious, patriotic heap of red-blooded American garbage in the town's dump started to offend the olfactory palate of even the hardiest townsfolk. Someone devised what was arguably the best solution at the time - to burn the heap of trash to the ground and have the volunteer fire brigade hose down whatever was left. This was before us liberals invented "the environment," so it was perfectly acceptable at the time.The ingenious Centralians, never ones to waste, turned an anthracite coal strip mine (an above ground mine, what we commonly think of as a "quarry") into the garbage dump in question after it had exhausted the mine's capacity - or so they thought.The good news is that they did get rid of all that nasty trash. It was a pyrrhic victory, however. The conflagration ignited a vein of coal. That coal vein led to the mines that we more often associate with mining - the underground ones. A sign on State Route 61 leading into Centralia, warning travelers to stay the hell away.Simply put, it has been burning ever since.It burned, in fact, for nearly two decades without terribly remarkable consequence. There were occasional, sporadic complaints of carbon monoxide poisoning from some of the residents, but nothing more. Despite the fact that it seemed to manifest itself very little in the lives of Centralians, local firefighters made constant efforts to stop the fire. They flooded the mines and sealed them. They dug up the burning coal and replaced it with earth. And they prayed their asses off at those seven churches.At some point in the 1970's, legend has it that a gas station owner dropped a dipstick into an underground gasoline tank to check the level. He noticed it felt warm when he retrieved it, so he dropped a thermometer in next. His gasoline was a balmy 180 degrees Fahrenheit.The term you're looking for is, "Oh shit."That was generally considered the beginning of the end. The ground began to rend. If you were lucky, it would just split a street in half and spew noxious gas and smoke. Sometimes it would open its maw in the woods and the temperatures would kill the vegetation, dry it out, and set it on fire. If you weren't so lucky, it would just split your house or business in half. The mine fire cut a quaint little swath of destruction through this quaint little burg.The townsfolk held out hope that the fire would be extinguished. "Bah!" old miners would cackle to each other in one of the remaining saloons, seated on either side of a smoking chasm. "You call this a smoking chasm? When I was growing up, we used to play stickball in chasms smokier than this! Deeper too!"Soon thereafter, the ground nearly swallowed up 12-year old Todd Domboski. He was out playing, most likely stickball, when the ground beneath his feet just sorta, well, opened up. The hole beneath him was 80 feet deep and, by all accounts, hot and smoldering. He deftly clung to some tree roots and clumps of earth and was promptly pulled to safety. He later recounted his first reaction was that he was being sucked into Hell, as Father Patrick had warned him about, for having "impure thoughts."Some fled the rapidly (and literally) crumbling town, but most held out. By 1983 various authorities had spent more than $40 million to battle the subterranean blaze to no avail. Congress had a better idea in 1984. They allocated another $42 million to Centralia, but not to fight the fire; rather, to relocate its victims.And so the great exodus began. The population rapidly declined. Homes and businesses split in half, collapsed, burned, or all three. Roads became impassable and superheated cracks in the ground made the landscape look more and more like Sodom. Or Gomorrah. Route 61: Uneven pavement, indeed.Then in 1992 the state of Pennsylvania invoked the power of eminent domain. It dissolved the town and ordered all of the former town's buildings condemned. Many residents, now squatters in their own homes, continued their strangely admirable and altogether obstinate defense to continue their lives there. By 2002 the United States Postal Service had cruelly revoked Centralia's beloved zip code, 17927. Fate and flame, it seemed, weren't the only forces determined to wipe Centralia off the map.Sadly, there's not much left to tell of the story. Centralia is destined to go out with a whimper. According to the 2000 census, 21 people still lived in the town, and that number is surely smaller today. The state actively demolishes the condemned houses of each resident that leaves, ensuring no one could reassume their perch.Geologists estimate the fire will continue for another 250 years.I find the Centralia story fascinating and I've been trying to pinpoint exactly why. Humanity is no stranger to seeing its settlements and habitations obliterated by nature. There are dozens of examples that we can all cite without hesitation, but three things almost always characterize those catastrophes. First, the circumstances are almost always swift and brutal, as in earthquakes, hurricanes, or wildfires. Second, there's always something substantial left behind, even if it's pretty beaten up. You could stand in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, look around, and still tell you're in New Orleans. Third, these places can come back. San Francisco is back to normal after the 1989 Loma Prietta quake. Indonesia, even after the mind-shearing devastation of the tsunami a couple of years ago, is still there, and Indonesians are getting on with life. Downtown Centralia today.Centralia, however died a slow death. There's nearly -- and soon to be exactly -- nothing left. And it's not coming back. What a wretched fate.

By day, Timothy Moriarty asks rich people to give their money to nonprofits. By night, he is the proprietor of the blog hurling invective dot com.

PC Game Review: Just Cause

Timothy Moriarty — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 15:28:28 EST

When I saw that Eidos Interactive, who simultaneously cured my Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion addiction and sparked my Tomb Raider: Legend addiction, was taking a crack at a sandbox-style shoot-em-up called Just Cause, I got a little tingle in my bottom. I usually find that if I like one game by a particular publisher, I tend to like most of them. So I plunged headlong into the life and times of our hero Rico Rodriguez, a smooth-talking and damn-near-indestructible CIA black ops agent. In this first installment of Rico’s exploits, he’s busting up the corrupt regime of Salvador Mendoza (sorta like Manuel Noriega, a demagogue of a country sorta like Panama, in a game whose name sorta sounds like Operation Just Cause, the United States’ invasion of Panama - does anyone see a connection here?)Let me start by saying - this game isn't for everyone. Those who fiercely love the beautiful aesthetic of Half-Life 2 and its ilk will be disappointed in these fairly low-res textures and inferior (but still respectable) polygon counts. Those who adore the ultra-realism of game engines like Doom 3 and Source will shudder at the ridiculous ways that objects move in this game. And those who long for epic storylines of grand proportion will go hungry.But those who want to shoot and punch people, drive fast cars, fly cool planes and choppers and blow a bunch of shit up - welcome to paradise. Things to-do: Just Cause offers a fairly limited to-do list, which can get a little repetitive, especially if you’re not enjoying the shoot/drive/fly/blow up formula as much as I do. They consist of:Completing the main storyline, which consists of 21 segments that weigh in at a light 8-10 total game hoursWresting control of cities, villages and crude settlements from the hands of the regime, which involves alternate rounds of killing soldiers and destroying roadblocks, followed by a mad dash to capture the village flag.Wresting control of remote settlements from the hands of the Montano drug cartel and into the hands of the Rioja drug cartel, in a similar fashion outlined above.Completing simple side missions for either the guerillas or Rioja.Completing "collection" missions which involve many, many hours piloting a helicopter.But with the variety of fun, albeit utterly unrealistic tools at your disposal, how you complete each mission is often more compelling than the mission itself. A single village takeover might involve a skydive into the heart of town, blowing up some propane tanks to take out a few dozen troops, hijacking a tank to blow up a roadblock, and hopping out to mow down soldiers in the street with a machine gun, and jumping into a nearby jeep to speed towards the flag capture.Innovations: The game uses procedural synthesis to create the game’s island environment, which creates a stunningly vast area to explore and traverse. If San Esperito were real, it would be approximately 250,000 acres - just a skosh smaller than Hong Kong. The skydiving component, whether from an aircraft or from a BASE structure, is a remarkable facsimile of an experience that is difficult to duplicate in any fashion, let alone in a video game. And the ability to drive or otherwise operate everything from a dirt bike to a naval warship opens up hundreds of possibilities to get around and complete missions. What went wrong: As I mentioned above, the game sacrifices realism for some very jarring, gut-wrenching violence… but sometimes the silliness of it will take you aback. Being able to jump through a helicopter’s spinning blades into the cockpit while simultaneously ejecting the pilot, or being able to take nearly one hundred bullet wounds before succumbing - these can take their toll on even the most thoroughly suspended disbelief. Additionally, it’s tough to get past your enemy’s inability to take the simplest cover during an all-out firefight, while the same morons can pull off spectacular and very frustrating offensive driving maneuvers which put your vehicle in a tree 90 percent of the time. Such a monstrous disparity in AI leaves you wondering if they didn’t dump this bun on the market when it still needed a few more weeks in the oven.Additionally, voice acting is merely acceptable, the soundtrack is fairly repetitive (you have one boating song, one driving song, one safe house song, etc.), and unless you’re completely anal like me, you might give up on completing the “entire” game once you’ve completed the main story line because of the repetitive nature of the side missions. Not me, though. I’m going to own that friggin’ country, you hear me?In a nutshell: Ernest Hemingway once described critics as men who watch a battle from a high place, then come down and shoot the survivors. I don’t want to be that kind of critic, so I only review games that I like. That being said, I think that even the most elitist gamer will find Just Cause to be a guilty pleasure of the highest order. How can you carpet bomb a village from a helicopter and not fall in love? Just Cause is rated M (Mature) by the ESRB for Content Descriptors. This game can also be found on: PS2, Xbox, and Xbox 360.

By day, Timothy Moriarty asks rich people to give their money to nonprofits. By night, he is the proprietor of the blog hurling invective dot com.

Rodney Crowell Repells Obnoxious Concertgoers

Timothy Moriarty — Tue, 7 Nov 2006 12:48:45 EST

I just got back from a weekend in Vienna, Virginia. The missus and I went with my folks to see the legendary and impossible to classify Rodney Crowell at Wolf Trap. He brought along Will Kimbrough, who I began to hail as a god of all stringed instruments the moment I heard him play with Todd Snider.It was a particularly amazing show, due in large part to the demeanor of the crowd. They were utterly attentive and still like the dead. But I found myself occasionally wondering: Where's the maniac spilling cheap beer down my back from dual plastic cups, one in each hand, as tries to squeeze past me and my guest like a calf exiting the birth canal? Where is the moron that sits directly in front of me, bobbing his head and pumping his fist in a fashion that suggests this is the first time he has ever heard music, and boy is it swell? Where is the comedian who bellows the immortal "Play some Skynard!"Where, I ask myself, is my FOC? A FOC is a Frickin' Obnoxious Concertgoer. This particular performance seemed to violate all the natural laws of rock concerts that I've ever known, as I've endured a FOC at every other show I had ever seen.FOCs come in all shapes and sizes, including:"The Validator" - the FOC standing in front of you who, every 30 seconds, turns around and looks at you with a face that says, "Wow, you guys! Isn't this the best concert ever?!" This is usually augmented with wild gesticulation."The Requester" - the FOC that shouts out the title of some obscure B-side by the performing act 5-10 times between each song, as if (a) the band could actually discern their shout over the rest of the crowd noise, and (b) they actually give a shit. This FOC is unaware of the existence of set lists."The Drinker" - this FOC leaves their seat or standing position every 15 minutes to get another beer. They take no joy in watching and listening to the band perform, but instead in paying $50 to drink $9 beer."The Rocker" - the FOC who pumps his fist so hard to each tune that his entire frame jerks forward, and nearly knocks himself over. Almost always male. Fist often augmented with the devil sign."The Singer" - the FOC who clearly only knows the words to the band's few hit singles and sings them with much gusto - Often in a different key, but typically in no key at all."The Screamer" - the FOC who lets loose a horrendous "WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" every time a song gets soft or ends, delivered with enough intensity and duration to suggest their body actually contains no other organs besides lungs and one giant larynx. "The Talker" - the FOC who gives not one wit about the opening act, which you happen to really like, and is insistent on carrying on a conversation at maximum required volume with their concert going friend."The Scholar" - always male, overweight, and balding. Almost always pays for sex. This FOC can tell you the twelve countries that the drummer lived in while growing up with his single military father. He can tell you the names of the four songs on the band's or performer's first demo, and who did the artwork for it. He can explain, in great detail, the juxtaposition of ironies and the interplay of Dorian and Phrygian modes on their latest EP. And he will tell you these things, and everything else he knows, at any time when the band is not playing.The worst (or best) FOC I have ever seen was at a John Hiatt concert at The Odeon in 2001. I was sitting next to an EFOC - that is, "Extraordinarily Frickin' Obnoxious Concertgoer." They can also be dubbed "multidisciplinary FOCs" as they possess ALL of the aforementioned abilities. This EFOC wanted to hear an obscure John Hiatt song called "I Have a Gun", so, like it says in the EFOC textbook, he took to belting it out all night. Just that one song title. So, red-blooded, terrorism-fearing American that I am, I went to the door and told security, in alarmed tones, that some guy sitting next to me in the balcony kept shouting at John Hiatt that he had a gun. How was I to know?Okay, fine, that's not what happened. I just suffered through the bastard all night. It was a great show, regardless. Who are some of your most hated FOCs?

By day, Timothy Moriarty asks rich people to give their money to nonprofits. By night, he is the proprietor of the blog hurling invective dot com.

The AD&D Make-A-Silly-Wish Foundation

Timothy Moriarty — Thu, 2 Nov 2006 15:39:12 EST

The other day, I was drinking cheap beer in a smelly basement at a card table with a half dozen sexless friends of mine. Unsurprisingly, I was reminded of old AD&D playing days. For you squares, that stands for "Advanced Dungeons and Dragons." I'm sure you're wondering how much more "advanced" you can get when you're already rolling 20-sided dice, pretending you're an elf, and saying shit like, "If I fail my saving throw, I'm going to try to escape these orcs by casting Mordenkainen's Magnificent Mansion - no wait, Charm Monster! CHARM MONSTER!!!" But trust me, AD&D was heads and shoulders above regular D&D. Truth is, it was just the same as regular D&D with a different set of rules and some new math formulas to memorize; nothing more than really confusing arithmetic. A couple of days ago, I was browsing a website with palm pilot software and I found a program that could calculate all that dice-rolling and THAC0 equations (if you don't know what THAC0 is, don't ask) on your PDA. This would have been awfully handy back in my day. Only half of the time playing AD&D consisted of actual roleplaying; the other half was made up entirely of rolling dice, scribbling utterly illegible figures down onto pieces of scrap paper, trying a quick stab at addition, subtraction, or multiplication (rarely division), giving up, and taking your best guess at the answer.In AD&D, there is a 9th level spell (the highest attainable, thus making its spells the most powerful) simply called "Wish." It worked exactly as you would guess - you cast the spell and make a wish.Despite its Ockham's Razor-esque simplicity, sadly enough, the spell had several drawbacks. 1) Being a very powerful spell, it took a very powerful wizard to cast it, which meant it took lots and lots and lots of time rolling dice, pretending to add numbers, and killing orcs.2) The practical effect of the wish was determined by a terrible person called the "Dungeon Master" or "DM" for short. The DM was the person who sort of "steered" the game as the others played it. He decided when it was time to enter a dungeon, fight a bunch of orcs, drink lots of mead, etc. The DM also decided various outcomes of events and actions taken by the game's players. Because of him, the wording of the wish would inevitably come back to bite the wizard in the ass. Let's say you wish for world peace. The resulting effect might be that every living thing in the world 'peacefully' fell into a coma and 'peacefully' died of starvation. Or maybe you wish for a million gold pieces: they might appear right in the air above your head, crushing you. Nine times out of ten, no matter how carefully worded the wish, the DM would use it as an opportunity to screw you. Only the most carefully worded legalese would keep you from getting skewered by the DM. It was a challenge for all concerned - yours in making the wish foolproof, and the DM's in finding the loophole which might cause your penis to shrivel up and fall off, either in the game or real life.3) It drained the wizard almost completely. After casting the spell -- no matter the DM-chosen outcome -- a stiff breeze could kill him, another stiff breeze could resurrect him, and then another stiff breeze could kill him again.So, ultimately, making a wish was almost always a losing proposition, but it kept things interesting.A while ago, I thought about the classic genie-in-a-bottle scenario. You're in your recently deceased Great Uncle Arthur Von Autumnbottom's creepy attic where he kept all of his ancient artifacts from his time as an archaeologist/bounty hunter/ladykiller, and you stumble across a brass lamp. You rub the lamp because, let's face it, if the lamp didn't want to be rubbed, it wouldn't be dancing like that in a short skirt. Out pops a genie. And what happens next, kiddies? The genie grants you three wishes, but you have to pick up his dry cleaning first.Now, I don't know a damn thing about genies, but something tells me they're a bunch of sons of bitches. I know that's a totally unfair assessment, but I'm sort of an asshole, so there you have it. I just have a feeling genies have a bit of DM in them. I bet if you wished for something, the genie would delight in twisting your words and distorting your purpose. I'm fuming about these genie bastards. But there's bound to be some hip, laid back genie who wouldn't pull that shit, right? So, how about you're in your recently deceased Great Uncle Franky Gertrude Wienersteiger's creepy attic where he kept all of his carnival game winnings from his time as a beat poet/eccentric dandy/schizophrenic funhouse operator. You stumble across a brass lamp shaped like a hula-dancing lady. You rub the lamp and out pops a very peculiar genie. He's wearing a Hawaiian shirt and drinking tequila. The genie grants you three silly wishes. First, he explains to you the parameters of the so-called silly wish:1) It must have a comedic effect.2) It can't be useful. 3) In can't harm or hinder anyone or provide you with any great benefit.Now this is my kind of genie. The question is: what would you wish for? Here are some of my ideas, in no particular order. If I had to narrow it down to three, I don't know which I'd pick.1) To be able to make a person fart or belch with one smouldering stare. How hilarious would this be? How many riotous uses would this have? The mousy librarian with her nose buried in a book. The President delivering the State of the Union. Your boss leading a staff meeting. Your father-in-law saying grace at Thanksgiving dinner. You assault them with one burning glance and, suddenly, their ass is on fire. I would develop incontinence fairly quickly with this one, pissing myself during fits of hideous, uncontrollable laughter. The best part would be the stare -- they would know somehow, it was you who made them cut the cheese. But they would never, ever be able to prove it.2) To have the song of my choice play out of nowhere when I enter a room. I'm mad. I enter the room. Darth Vader's theme from Star Wars rings out spontaneously -- no one messes with me. I'm in a great mood. I bounce into the room to the sound of James Browns' "Sex Machine". My young son just got busted shoplifting a rifle from Walmart and I have to have a stern yet loving talk with him. I walk into his bedroom and one of those corny instrumental tunes from Full House begins to waft through the air. The applications are seemingly endless.3) To be able to insert myself into the background of any photograph or movie. This one requires some qualification. It could only be in the background of the photo or movie (as an extra) and my appearance would suit the occasion or theme of the photo/movie. Some instances: a photo of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie at the Oscars, and I'm in the background, in a tux, sipping a martini. An old photo of someone's family renunion from 1974 - there I am, sitting in a lawn chair, talking to your cousin, and drinking a beer. You're watching the immortal Vietnam classic Platoon, and there I am, one of the soldier extras getting mown down by the Viet Cong, right before Chuck Sheen steps into the frame. This would be hilarious simply because nearly every instance would be so totally inexplicable. 4) To turn any moment into a Bollywood song and dance. If you're a fan of Indian cinema, you know what I'm talking about. The name Bollywood is a marriage of Bombay (now Mumbai), the film center of India, and Nashville, the home of country music. Sorry, that's Bashville. Hollywood, that's what I meant. Bollywood movies are characterized by numerous song and dance routines (called "filmi," from Hindi, meaning "of films") by the actors and actresses themselves, which move the plot along. In this way, Bollywood movies aren't entirely unlike musicals, besides being diabolically twisted and strange. They're so strange, in fact, I have a hard time actually believing most Bollywood movies were actually filmed in my own dimension of reality. I could stand to participate in, say, a dozen or so of these a day.5) To have my own laugh track. You know the look Mr. Furley gave to the camera every time that crazy Jack Tripper give him a swift comedic kick in the nuts? (See figure 1.1) Figure 1.1: Don Knizzots, bizotchDamn, they're both dead. That's sad. Anyway, remember how he used to get that big rise out of the studio audience? Yeah, I want that. In real life.6) To have a coterie of dark-suited men wearing dark glasses and earpieces enter a room, whisper in my ear, and escort me away at any moment. This clearly violates the 'useful' rule, as it could be used in dozens of situations like staff meetings, blind dates, long stretches of yardwork, the first thirty seconds of a Jerry Bruckheimer film, etc. However, it would still be, how would you say it, awesome.In closing: yes, this is how my mind works. Yes, I know I have issues. Now tell me what your silly wishes would be.

By day, Timothy Moriarty asks rich people to give their money to nonprofits. By night, he is the proprietor of the blog hurling invective dot com.