Modern discourse is fuckin wack, yo.

OK, maybe I’m a dork, but in recent months I’ve become increasingly concerned with the misuse of language. The straw the broke the camel’s back came last night when I passed a night club with a neon sign over the entrance which read “Ghetto Tea Party.” What the hell? While the image of Tupac dabbing his mouth daintily with his doo-rag while Method Man says “Yo these scones is off the fuckin tizzy god. Hook a brutha up with the recipe” is a faintly amusing one, this is just a gross misuse of language. So in response, I developed a few rules of language that I would like everyone to follow from here on out.

Rule #1 – Some adjectives should never ever, ever, fuckin ever, be paired with certain nouns. The combination of “rectal” and “thermometer” comes to mind as a good example. This is obviously just wrong. “Ghetto Tea Party” clearly falls into this category.

Rule #2 – Some verbs should never take certain objects. This is a lot like rule #1 I know but it seems necessary. There’s a sign in the men’s room of my old hakwon (a language school) that reads “please love our bathroom.” and a friend of mine told me the cafeteria in his office has one that reads “no dumping in the sink.” Both of these are better than the ghetto tea party thing, but still.

Rule #3 – Only apply words to their related fields please. Too many words are applied to concepts they have absolutely nothing to do with just because they have a relatively positive connotation. There’s a craze over here for “well being” products. Originally, this related to health products, particularly those with green tea in them, which is supposed to be pretty good for you. Now it’s used for everything. I saw a grammar book in the bookstore titled “Well Being English.” I’m sorry, but unless the pages of that book are somehow made out of pressed green tea leaves and edible, this is just bullshit.

Rule #4 – There’s way too much coining of new terms and phrases going on these days, especially in the political arena. I mean really, what’s the point in calling Cheney and Rumsfeld “neo-conservative hawks”? Didn’t we have a perfectly usable and accurate term for this already in “fascist shitheads”? I just don’t see the point in having two words for the same damn thing.

So if everyone could please try to follow these for simple rules I would greatly appreciate it. Thank you.

Nothing says "Good Fortune" like a box of Spam

Ah it’s that magical holiday season again here in my little corner of the world. Next week is the Lunar New Year. The exact significance is a bit lost on me but I know it involves Spam. I know this because sometime next week my boss will smilingly present me with a nicely wrapped Spam gift pack (yeah that’s what I said) and wish me good fortune in the New Year. Why Spam should possess any extraordinarily auspicious symbolism is beyond me but apparently it does. When asked, my Korean friends will tell a heart warming little story about how after the Korean War food was scarce and the Spam dispersed by the US army helped families make it through those lean times. But hey, quaint history aside people, its still fuckin Spam. So anyway I’ll smile, thank my boss, maybe do a little bow, and go off to enjoy a three day holiday (well not actually cause two of those days are a Saturday and a Sunday this year and you can bet your sweet ass we don’t get jack shit for that). Furthermore, “enjoy” would not be the correct word for this particular holiday. Nearly everything is Seoul is closed (presumably the store owners are all busy scarfing down Spamish delights with their families), and travel is basically impossible. No joke, get on any major road during these three days and the only movement you’ll experience will be due to tectonic drift. This means my boredom level will rise to something roughly equivalent to what you would experience if you were entered in a three day scrabble tournament with a sub-average monkey, a junior White House staffer, and a spastic clown who only spoke in haiku. So most likely I’ll spend this holiday contemplating the virtues of processed meat products, guzzling large amounts of Soju (a Korean alcohol that doubles as a fine industrial cleaner), and subjecting the rest of you to my questionable comedic abilities. I can only hope you start this New Year as profitably as I’m going to.

Game Theory Applied in Pentagon Washroom

Game theory apparently has found a new application in the washrooms of the Pentagon. Isolated in their individual stalls, the military’s leading strategists are presented with a two choices: to flush or not to flush. Obviously, the best possible solution would be for all the generals to flush. However, a problem crops up because none of the generals know the true intentions of the others. If one general flushes and another doesn’t, then the general who flushed may be presented with a rank, shitty toilet seat on his next trip to the can, while the general who didn’t flush may be rewarded with a clean, sanitary toilet fit to eat off of despite his previous disgusting behavior. Under this situation, all the generals conclude that their most logical course of action is not to flush. While this dooms them to an increasingly vile bathroom, it also ensures that the other generals share their fate. Use of game theory has also been reported in the White House, where both Vice President Cheney and Secretary of State Rice have secretly chosen to take the last doughnut for themselves after the national security briefing rather than share it.