As a syndicated blogger, I provide a service to the online community. The very fabric of our society is cut and measured based on the qualified opinions of the few of us that signed up for WordPress, cross-stitched with captioned pictures of boobs.
This is a responsibility I do not take lightly. So, when it turns out that we (you, the readers, and me, the only part of “we” that actually matters) are winning the good fight, I want to make sure you know it. So, whenever you think the world can’t be changed, that the little guy will always lose out to the bigger guy with all the money, sometimes … sometimes … I’m proven right.
LOLSmokers, eh?
You may recall the way I tastefully covered the news of the United States getting very graphically serious about smoking with disturbing imagery on cigarette packs. I took kind of a jaded stance against them because Americans are exceptional, in that — if 85 percent of lung cancer cases are caused by tobacco — we’re positive we’re in that 15 percent that got it by exceptional means like radon or blood transfusions, but certainly not from smoking.
Unfortunately, I’ll never be incorrect because they may never see the light of day. Technically, this makes me both right and wrong, like Schrödinger’s cat in a box full of lit Newports. (The cat exists in simultaneous burned alive and minty-fresh states.)
In fact, it would take nothing short of a second Cold War to get these labels on pa — Wait, what’s that? Canada, our French socialist neighbor to the north has not only been using graphic warnings on tobacco products since 2001, but has just unveiled larger, more disgusting warnings? Oh, now this I’ve got to see.
Holy shit. Cigarettes burned a hole into Canadian Dick Butkus’s throat.
But, surely all of their new labels can’t be this accessibly terrifying …
Well, that just looks like the Halloween display from any Party Ci —
Jesus fucking Christ. This is exactly why I’ve never eaten a desiccant silica gel packet, and you’re telling me that smoking does this? Even to American mouths?
I don’t know what the 17 percent of Canadians who still smoke did to your government that brought them to this, but I hope they go to the same Hell as people who put the toilet paper on the roll so that it unrolls from underneath.
Spielberg gets it
Last week, I regaled you with highlights from my latest jaunt through time and space, where I exposed myself to the second most annoying affliction to lunar herpes, which are curable, but only by confession. No, I mean yet another revision of the Star Wars movies.
If Quantum Leap taught me two things, it’s that
1. You can figure out which women know karate by their messed-up makeup and Scott Bakula-walk.
2. If you must time travel, try to impart a positive lesson to everyone or risk never going home.
And guess what? Steven Spielberg agrees with me. Kinda. (He passive-aggressively said that Lucas can do whatever he wants with his movies, but Spielberg will personally never again rob “the people who loved E.T. of their memories of E.T.,” something he “lived to regret.” But, you know, if George can live with himself for what he’s done, good for him.)
Now, if only somebody would place Ridley Scott under house arrest until he agrees to stop working on Blade Runner. Or, if he finally agrees to stop letting Legend exist as a warning to directors who “really get into Tolkien” and polish a real turd up.