Porocrom’s Crappaper

This started as a post blasting those Politically Correct morons who are trying to get the word “Christmas” removed from public lexicon since it is supposedly offensive to groups that do not celebrate Christmas or believe in Christ. However, protesting these cliche “Happy Holidays” and “Seasons Greetings” non-salutations has become equally cliche.

So what to write about? The world is still messed up. A meaningless war is being fought on page 7, and somewhere in the back pages, the destruction of thousands of lives goes on in Africa. Burma (a.k.a. Myanmar) is the last bastion of unchecked governmental craziness. The Chinese are poised to take over the world and spread their trademark human rights violations over the entire globe. Day by day the American government lies to its people who sit blindly and believe everything they hear from spin magazines, while the corporate sponsors line their pockets with the blood of their children.

So what to write about? For people in New Orleans there won’t be a Christmas this year. The best present they might get is not dying of the plague, while 500 km away, their “neighbours” gorge themselves on turkey, stuffing, and network football. For people in Sri Lanka after all the aid groups have left because the shine is off the apple, there seems to be little cause to rejoice. In Subsaharan Africa, AIDS continues almost unchecked because the religious body says that condoms are sinful; said with a poorly-translated bible in one hand and a little boy in the other.

So what to write about?

Maybe what this post is supposed to be about is that this seems to be the one time of year when people at least pretend to think more about each other than their own short-term happiness, unless you could the tramplings that go on in the mall for the last-minute shoppers. If we can strip away the rampant consumerism that seems to wrap the Christmas presence, take down the shoddy plastic trees and lights and crappy music and useless toys, if we can somehow kill Santa Claus for a minute and silence his army of elven slaves, is there a meaning behind the day?

Perhaps Christmas, at its essence, is this: a love for those who you don’t even know. We talk a big game about being a global community, but maybe this is the one time of year when we begin to show caring. Christmas to me, religious history aside, is about celebrating the importance and fragility of our tenure on this planet. The religious part makes a good story to add to it, but is that really what is meant by “Christmas” anymore?

This post is starting to ramble, without really arriving at a solid point. I will close with this. If you can look past the wrapping paper, and even look past the gift, and examine why the gift was given; look past the star and the tinsel and see why on Earth someone would cut down an innocent tree; look past the fat man in the red jumpsuit and see why children put out milk and cookies; maybe then you can understand what is really, albiet covertly, being said when I wish you

Merry Christmas

- Porocrom’s Crappaper

It’s that time of year again… when there’s a crisp chill in the air, and a spring in your step. Where the only force stronger than the love that unites all of mankind is the force urging shoppers to trample each other in order to save 50 cents on a dented DVD player. It’s that magical time of year that we tell children to follow in the example of the baby Jesus and DEMAND another fucking Furby doll from parents too kid-whipped to stop and think what long-term damage mindless commercialism could do to their progeny. It’s the one time of year that the voices in your head telling you to pull out an AK and spray death all over your local mall are drowned out by the sickening pablum of

Christmas Music.

In true Porocrom style, I’m here to take a closer look at the songs that warm our hearts as we empty our pockets. Maybe some of the insanity that accompanies this season can be explained by the drivel that we play ad nauseam year in and out.

White Christmas

I’m dreaming of a white Christmas
Just like the ones I used to know
Where the treetops glisten and children listen
To hear sleighbells in the snow…

Now I am not sure when this song was written, but I would have to guess it was some time in the 18th century, when it was still fashionable to own and operate a sleigh. This song doesn’t get a lot of air-time in places south of the Canadian border, since snow to most non-Canucks is either a crappy white rapper or a slang for cocaine. Maybe the latter definition would explain why the treetops are glistening. To my memory, the only time I’ve ever seen treetops ‘glisten’ is during the Quebec ice storm of 2000, and I really doubt that’s the kind of nostalgia we really want.

Winter Wonderland

Sleighbells ring, are you listening?
In the lane snow is glistening.
A beatiful sight, we’re happy tonight
Walking in a winter wonderland.

Seems harmless enough, doesn’t it? That’s how the blasted Ruskies infiltrate your mind. Before too long, you’re getting a common-law marriage presided by a snowman that you built yourself in the lane. Then, if the laudanum-induced winter “wonderland” isn’t enough for you, you and your comrades will “conspire” indoors to overthrow the snowperson empire, facing your evil designs “unafraid”. It’s always the nice Christmas songs that end up going so terribly wrong.

The Little Drummer Boy

Come they told me, pa-rumpupum-pum
A newborn king to see, pa-rumpupum-pum
Our finest gifts we bring, pa-rumpupum-pum
To lay before the king, pa-rumpupum-pum, rumpupum-pum, rumpupum-pum
So to honour him, pa-rumpupum-pum, when we come.

I tried this with my baby cousin. Free piece of advice: babies do NOT like drum solos at close proximity. I tried to throw in some Neil Peart with a Travis Barker twist and all I got for my trouble was loud wailing and a ticket for noise violation. To top it all off, my aunt threatened to break her foot off in my rumpupum-pum…

The 12 Days of Christmas

On the twelfth day of Christmas my true love gave to me:
12 drummers drumming, 11 pipers piping
10 lords a-leaping, 9 ladies dancing
8 maids a-milking, 7 swans a-swimming
6 geese a-laying…
5 GOLDEN RINGS (pause for emphasis)
4 colly (calling? nobody seems to agree on this one) birds
3 French hens, 2 turtledoves
And a patridge in a pear tree.

It must be nice to have a true love whose portfolio includes both forays into animal husbandry and the slave trade. It’s a good thing there are only 12 days of Christmas (although last time I checked, it was only the one…) otherwise the narrator in this story would have to request a warehouse to store all this shit. If it were me in this story, I’d tell my true love to skip the drummers, pipers and leaping lords (why the HELL would anyone want a bunch of riverdancers?), leave me the 17 bitches and the bling, and trade the livestock in for a decent-looking car. Then again, I’m a man of much more refined tastes.

Also it would be funny if you served your true love a dish of partridge with pear stuffing…

I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus

I saw mommy kissing Santa Claus
Underneath the mistletoe last night
They didn’t hear me creep downstairs to have a peep
They thought that I was tucked up in my bedroom fast asleep.

It’s a good thing that the kid didn’t walk in on the second half of the performance when mommy begins pumping on Santa’s North Pole, trying to get some presents out of his sack. It makes me wonder why this perverted song still gets played every year. The lost verses include mommy tying up Santa and making him beg her in German not to take a dookie in his mouth. Heart-warming stuff.

Santa Claus is coming to town

You’d better watch out, you’d better not cry
You’d better not pout I’m telling you why:
Santa Claus is coming to town
…
He sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake
He knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness’ sake!

Wow… just wow. If any child wasn’t already petrified by the prospect of a fat white dude dressed in blood red and leather who enters the house by the chimney, they can now talk to their therapists about the fact that he sees them when they’re sleeping. One wonders where he finds time to monitor every child in the world in between sexually molesting his army of elves and whipping the crap out of his eight tiny reindeer.

So if you’re flummoxed trying to pinpoint the origin of the holiday madness, look no further than your friendly Christmas songbook. Our team of songwriters is working around the clock to come up with some less intimidating holiday hits such as

- I’m Dreaming of a non-race-specific Holiday gathering – All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth… and a PSP – Silent Night, holy shit buy me a Tickle Me Elmo NOW – It’s Beginning to Look a lot like another crappy sweater from grandma

And many other instant Christmas favourites. If you don’t buy them, the baby Jesus will come down your chimney and burn your fucking house down.

So I’m not nearly as smart as I’ve been telling people, because there are STILL things out there that baffle me beyond all comprehension. So here’s my latest list of imponderables…

1 – The crosswalk button pushers

It rarely fails that I see someone at an intersection beating on the crosswalk button like it’s their wife and it didn’t get dinner on the table. Apparently classical conditioning is wrong, because these lab rats are too stupid to realize that the button doesn’t care how many times it is pushed. No matter how frenetically you mash that thing, it sends the message to the computer that regulates the light on the FIRST push – subsequent pushes only make you look like a hamster beating on the feeder bar, praying for a food pellet.

2 – Homophobia

Those of you who know me well know of the two rules by which I live my life:

Rule #1: No dudes
Rule #2: NO DUDES

That having been said, there is nothing inherently wrong with two dudes who like dudes having naughtybadfun with each other… provided a) I’m not involved in any way, and b) I don’t have to watch. What I don’t get is guys who are HYPER-sensitive to homosexuality. I can understand having an aversion to guys kissing each other (to the gay community: it looks weird. I’m not saying you can’t do it, I’m just saying it looks weird. To lesbians: go for it!). What I CANNOT understand is guys who actively persecute and harass gay guys. Fellas, these guys are doing you an evolutionary favour. As everyone knows, gay guys are better-looking and take better care of themselves than straight guys do. However, they are no threat to your womenfolk… they’re actually a negative threat because they are taking other well-groomed hotties out of commission! Why anyone would look a gift horse in the mouth just because it’s got a cock in it is beyond me…

3 – Men with long hair

Now, when I say long, I don’t mean the Sloan haircut, or the Chad Kreuger mop-top… I mean long. 1980’s-refugee long. Metallica-tribute-band long. Lady Godiva hallowe’en costume long. I don’t know why these men didn’t get the memo, but it stopped being okay to have hair that long when the Bee Gee’s star fell. I don’t even know how anyone could justify having hair that long… it’s like walking around with a family of dead possums nailed to your head. Those girls aren’t staring at you because they think you’re cute, they’re filing away your image as bulimic inspiration.

4 – Guys who go on daytime TV and are surprised by the shit they hear

I could understand if Jerry Springer did a few “World’s Greatest Husband” shows or something, but every single guest they bring on there is a total freak. If you’ve EVER seen or heard of the show, and your wife/girlfriend/transvestite midget lover says that she wants you to appear on the show, it might just be best to move out and save yourself the embarassment of having to look like a jackass as your best friend beats you up with a chair. I seriously can’t understand how you can make the trip out to California, get to the hotel, go to the studio, make it backstage, and NEVER have it occur to you that some bad shit is about to happen to you. Then again, they are American…

Human behaviour continues to befoozle me. Anyone with any insightful reasons behind any of these unexplained phenomena, please feel free to post comments. If you’re a dumbass, don’t be surprised when I mock you openly.

As many of you know, but some of you don’t, I am proudly a student at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Canada. I am enrolled in the faculty of Applied Health Sciences which is, as you may have guessed, a sciences program. Most of my friends are in AHS as well, just by virtue of the fact that it is a very small faculty and we tend to clump together for protection against our natural predators: Engineers. Anyway, some of us occasionally venture outside our faculty to take courses that are not offered within. It is in this manner that I found myself sitting in a psychology lecture. I was looking forward to getting a chance to learn some things of personal, if not professional interest to me. The prof began and I was all set for a fast-paced class with lots of new ideas to think over…

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Then the hands went up.

If you have never had the extreme pleasure of taking a psych course at university, DON’T. You would be better off spending your time reading an Archie comic and putting a live wolverine in your underwear. This method roughly approximates the intellectual challenge and unbelievable pain of sitting in a class with a collective IQ of “no”. The problem isn’t that the material is difficult to follow. Quite the contrary; much of it is rather intuitive. The problem lies in the fact that the students who have made psychology their chosen academic focus are too bloody stupid to follow a simple lecture. Faced with new information, their brains shut down and their hands shoot up. Most of the time, the questions are of a normal variety: asking for further specifics and whatnot. However, they quickly progress to the land of the idiotic. Questions like “Would a person who is blind in one eye be able to eat an entire pie, or would they only eat half of it?” (I really wish I was making this question up. To the moron who asked this, I pose a question in reply: WHO EATS A WHOLE PIE?”).

Once precedent for moronic questions is set, it’s like a dam bursts and all the idiocy flows out unabated. “If you keep breathing in, will your chest get bigger?” “Has anyone seen my pants?” “Uuuuuuungha?” They are the kind of questions you would expect an 8 year-old to ask in that tender age before they learn that not all questions need to be asked or answered. Despite the fact that information has never been more readily available and people are supposedly more educated now than ever before, it seems as though these arts students have an innate fear of learning things on their own.

I can’t lay all the blame on the knuckle-draggers in the seats however. If I were a professor (and I’m sure everyone is glad I’m not) I would have a “question quota”. Once the number of moronic questions has exceeded the quota, I would just refuse to answer any more. Not so for psych profs however. They treat even the most thoughtless question as though it was of utmost importance. As a result, fully half of the class time is wasted answering people’s dubious inquiries, while the sciences students languish (if you are thinking of taking a psych course, bring a newspaper or a GameBoy).

But at least it all stays confined to the 3 hours of class per week, right? Wrong, bucko. Thanks to the magic of the internet, anyone in the class is capable of sending e-mail notices to everyone enrolled in the course. This is when arts students reveal themselves to be far beyond the bounds of ordinary idiocy. If you’re stupid, so be it. There are many stupid people in the world. However, it takes a special class of idiot to advertise to an entire classroom of people that you are completely incapable of independent thought. As we approached the first term test, I received about 10 e-mails asking Dubya-quality questions about the exam. Keep in mind, all these questions had already been answered in class several times. It is also possible to send these questions to JUST the prof or the TAs. Not so for these geniuses: the whole class gets a bulletin. Because it’s not enough that only some people know how brain-damaged you are, EVERYONE must know!

The worst part of it all is that there is no escape from these people if you are at all interested in the field of psychology. I can’t speak for other universities, but I would imagine that this problem is endemic in the field of psychology… which makes me fearful for the future. These are the people who are going to be building our rocket ships and doing our heart transplants…

Oh wait, they’re ARTS students… never mind then. Let’s just hope the guy pumping the gas doesn’t put up his hand to ask a question and spill gas all over my BMW.

Any of you who have had the extreme privilege of seeing me in person know that I am not what you would call a “fashion plate”. I prefer to stick to the simple things that work: t-shirt and jeans and things of that variety. Therefore I cannot claim to be an expert in men’s fashion. However, over the past few months I have seen some fashion trends that have, to be perfectly frank, bamboozled me.

Pink shirts on men

I don’t know who decided it was acceptable for men to start wearing pink, but my suspicion is that this whole fashion trend started as a pot-smoking session turned into an elaborate practical joke.

Designer #1: (Taking a deep pull from his Gucci bong) Dude… you know what would be HILARIOUS?
Designer #2: What?
#1: What what?
#2: What would be hilarious?
#1: I dunno… what?
#2: Dude… you’re fucked!
#1: Yeah… I’m starting to see shit.
#2: Like what? Guys in pink shirts?
#1: Hahaha, yeah… (Long pause) OH MY GOD, you know what would be HILARIOUS?

And then two weeks later, we see a bunch of guys walking around wearing pink. The first time I saw a guy in a pink shirt, I thought someone had played a mean trick on a blind guy and had switched his regular-coloured shirts for something embarassing. Then someone told me that it was the new ‘in’ thing…

Apparently the reasoning behind this fashion crime is that men who are secure in their sexuality can wear any colour they want, so pink is the ultimate expression of heterosexuality. I say, why stop there? If you’re so secure, wear assless chaps and a handlebar moustache… then buy a chihuahua and dress him in leather and call him “Butch”.

I will say this one time: unless you’ve accidentally washed your reds with your whites, there is NO excuse for wearing pink. You don’t look manly, you just look confused.

Mutton chops

ALF look”. If you wear sideburns, you’d best complete the outfit by wearing britches, a waistcoat and a monocle, because those are all JUST as fashionable as looking like you’ve got two toupees on your cheeks.

Some psychoanalysts would say that I am frustrated by my own inability to grow facial hair, and thus I lash out at those who are able to grow prodigious follicular tumours. To these people I say, “I had sex with your mother”.

5XL T-shirts

Why?

Like seriously… what the HELL were you thinking?

XXL. However, the newest “urban fashion” is to wear shirts that are like… 5 or 6 XL (i.e. XXXXXL). Apparently you’re not a thug unless you’re dressed like a goddamn hot air balloon.

My theory is that if you are truly from the ghetto, you can only afford one T-shirt for your entire life, so your mom buys you an XL when you are a toddler, and then you have to grow into it. So in order to appear poor, and therefore TOUGH, one must wear a shirt that does not fit.

I’m sure there are women’s fashions out there that are equally stupid (i.e. blue eyeliner – unless you are that blueberry bitch from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or a Japanese cartoon character, nobody thinks your eyelids are actually that colour), but I don’t really care. Ladies, we don’t notice what you’re wearing… we’re picturing you not wearing it.

P.S. this is what a month of non-posting looks like.