Dubious comparisons XIII

Sonny has come up with the dubious comparison to end all dubious comparisons. Here's Spain's president, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero...

...suspiciously resembling television's Sheldon Cooper.

My future thesis?

A brief guide to Katy Perry metaphors from her latest CD, “Teenage Dreams”, songs 1-12, in order.

1. We drove to Cali and got drunk on the beach

Got a motel and built a floor out of sheets

I finally found you, my missing puzzle piece

I'm complete

(Puzzle piece means penis.)

2. We went streaking in the park

Skinny dipping in the dark

Then had a menage a trois

Last Friday night

(OK, no metaphor here.)

3. California girls, we're unforgettable

Daisy dukes, bikinis on top

Sun-kissed skin, so hot

We'll melt your popsicle

(Popsicle means penis.)

4. 'Cause baby, you're a firework

Come on, show 'em what you're worth

Make 'em go, oh

As you shoot across the sky

(The “oh” part is an orgasm, and what’s shooting across the sky is, well, you can imagine.)

5. I wanna see your peacock, cock, cock, your peacock, cock

Your peacock, cock, cock, your peacock

I wanna see your peacock, cock, cock, your peacock, cock

Your peacock, cock, cock, your peacock

(Yep.)

6. You fall asleep during foreplay

'Cause the pills you take are more your forte

I'm not sticking around

To watch you go down

(In case it’s not clear, what’s going down here is the erection of the fella she’s talking about in this song.)

7. Summer after high school when we first met

We make out in your Mustang to Radiohead

(She uses “Radiohead” to slyly suggest she was giving him head in the Mustang. No one makes out to Radiohead.)

8. Kiss me, ki-ki-kiss me

Infect me with your love and

Fill me with your poison

(Love means penis, poison means jizz. Or viceversa.)

9. I can feel this lightness inside of me

Growing fast into a bolt of lightning

I know one spark will shock the world, yeah yeah

(Lightness means penis, bolt of lightning means erection, spark means orgasm.)

10. She is a pyramid

But with him she's just a grain of sand

This love's too strong like my cement

Squeezing out the life that should be let in

(Cement means vagina, life means penis.)

11. The taste of your honey is so sweet

When you give me that hummingbird heartbeat

(Honey means jizz, hummingbird heartbeat means penis.)

12. He put it on me, I put it on

Like there was nothin' wrong

It didn't fit, it wasn't right

Wasn't just the size

They say you know when you know

I don't know

I didn't feel

The fairy tale feeling, no

Am I a stupid girl

For even dreaming that I could?

(I’m outta here.)

U.B.A.N.

A few months into my tenure as a fratlord, I became aware that the hard-drinking, chinstrap-sporting upperclassmen who were charged with running the local chapter of our frat were butting heads big time with our national authorities. For fraternities, you see, are much like McDonald’s franchises, with a central organ dictating rules of behavior to its numerous satellites. (Also, like McDonald’s, you can always count on a few disgruntled employees discharging bodily fluids atop the double cheeseburgers or teabagging your McFlurry, just because. That, in a nutshell, was our chapter.)

The confrontation came down to one basic disagreement: The national authorities (hereafter referred to as “nationals”) wanted more subdued, well-balanced behavior. We did not. And so this standoff went on for months, then years, with nationals sending in emissaries and supervisors and instructors to imbue a sense of responsibility and honor into our everyday lives. We grudgingly attended these sessions, returning to our beer shotgunning and our youngin hazing as soon as the drones were through with their yammering and out the front door.

Compounding the issue was our relationship with our house mother, Ruby. Actually, I should say their relationship, because I had no real beef with her. She got paid to live in our Southern mansion, downstairs, to make sure things didn’t get too far out of control. As one would expect of anyone with such a job, she spent most of the day locked in her room smoking weed and downing hard liquor. But then she would emerge at extremely inconvenient times, threatening to call the police if we didn’t stop the party or screaming at us for destroying furniture or freaking out over someone (Chotchsky) climbing down from the second-story bathroom window into the yard, just because it was faster that way.

Naturally, the brothers didn’t take kindly to all this opposition.

And so at some point during my sophomore year, an official resistance movement rose out of nowhere. It was called U.B.A.N., which stood for United Brothers Against Nationals. Its founders (and only members) were Fat William and a Spanish kid named Emilio who thought he was Che Guevara reincarnate. They harbored a deep, unshakeable resentment toward Ruby, possibly because the previous year she had confiscated their bongs and harshened their mellows one too many a time.

At first, U.B.A.N.’s activities were limited to carving their initials on people’s furniture and sending out the occasional mass email. Meanwhile, the rest of us were wondering how to pronounce this awkward acronym. Did it sound like “auto-bahn”? Did it sound like “auto-ban”? Who knows.

Ignored and mocked by the rest of us, Fat William and Emilio decided to take their freedom struggle to the next level. One night they (allegedly) relieved themselves on Ruby’s door. I say allegedly because no one actually saw it happen; furthermore, even if it did happen, it would have been a completely ordinary occurrence in our house, where peeing on doors was rarely done with actual malice. It had more to do with the offender not being able to find his way to the bathroom in time.

Ruby took one whiff of her door in the morning and immediately picked up the phone to alert nationals. By this point, nationals were avidly looking for reasons to revoke our charter, Clint Eastwood style, and were more than happy to hear about this.

U.B.A.N. did not stop there, oh no. A few days later, they (allegedly) keyed Ruby’s stupid-looking car, which just about pushed Ruby off the ledge and guaranteed that every little incident from then on would be directly communicated to our overlords. When anything got set on fire, when brothers punched holes in the walls, when pledges were blindfolded and hauled off in unmarked vans, there was Ruby, a fully fledged mole, taking mental notes.

Faced with this new reality, the chinstrap-sporting uperclassmen engaged in a desperate, last-ditch effort to salvage our reputation. One of them had the brilliant idea of naming me the fraternity’s education chair, tasked with bringing up everyone else’s GPA. I don’t think they actually expected me to do anything; rather, they wanted to be able to truthfully tell nationals that we cared about our grades and had named a specialist to spearhead our academic recovery.

I had no clue how to proceed. I began to assemble a cold-test collection. The idea was that brothers would hand over their old tests and I would gather them in a black plastic filing box I found on sale at Wal-Mart.

As weeks went by, slowly but surely the container began getting filled. Sure, it was mostly used as an extra seat when our couch was taken up by one too many a Halo player, but it was there, and I like to think were all slightly proud of it, a symbol of our ability to pool our resources together for the benefit of all. It was like having my own version of U.B.A.N., except with less violence and body fat.

Then one fateful night, Chotchsky and I came back to our room intoxicated. That was normal. We clambered up into each of our lofted beds, the kind that can accomodate a desk underneath, forcing you to sleep with your face inches from the ceiling. So far so good. Until Chotchsky rolled over with such gusto that he found himself in the air, like Wile E. Coyote, and plummeted toward the ground, where he landed, with a great crash, on the cold test file.

Shards of plastic flew all over the room, and by the time it was all over, the black box was completely flattened. “Dude, are you all right?” I asked. “Yeah, yeah,” mumbled Chotchsky, and climbed back into his bed. The next morning we awoke to find that the dream of academic improvement was over, and that a giant welt had taken up residence on Chotchsky’s side.

Predictably, our chapter got shut down at the end of that year.

Dubious comparisons XII

Leigh uncovered this historical dubious comparison: This, my friends, is a portrait of the one and only Paul Revere, a.k.a. "he who warned the British that they weren't gonna be takin' away our arms by ringing those bells, and makin' sure as he's riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be sure and we were going to be free, and we were going to be armed."

By now it is MORE than obvious where this is going. Yes, he is the spitting image of Jack Black. Hollywood studios, take note.

Things people send me

Here's a collection of random shit that appeared in my inbox of late.

Malaria sends along another piece of evidence of my mom's Flanders-like ways. "Dishwasher clean!" reads the little note, and I'm not sure why the exclamation mark was necessary.

I also heard from Christa, who writes, "sometimes I think you are going to grow to look like a young Al Pacino," and attaches the following photo. Well, I am flattered. From this day on, I will do my best to progressively chip away at my American accent until I sound like Tony Montana.

And finally -- this doesn't quite fall under the "things people send me" category, but I figured I'd throw it in here. It's Malaria's birthday today! Happy birthday! In her honor I resurrected the dormant Chickster franchise, in the form of a Chickster limited edition CD case. You know you want one. The strip is referencing Malaria's unfortunate confusion of the terms "narcoleptic" and "necrophiliac".

Didion

"As it happens, I am comfortable with the Michael Laskis of this world, with those who live outside rather than in, those in whom the sense of dread is so acute that they turn to extreme and doomed commitments; I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people manage to fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History."

It was the best of times

When I left for college sometime around the beginning of this millennium, my mom was forced to figure out how e-mail works. (I’m not much for long phone conversations about things that aren’t immediately relevant to my wellbeing.) This being my mom, she went all out: daily reports, stuffed with details, about everything going on back home in Buenos Aires, from current events to my sisters’ day at school to wonderfully naïve questions about what I was up to in the Northern Hemisphere. I’ve saved those e-mails, and might someday return them to my family in edited form as a sort of diary of their lives throughout those years.

What I didn’t know about all this is that my mom was printing out the responses I was sending back to her, about once a week or so. And so the other day I decided to take a trip down memory lane and reread them, handpicking my favorite parts for your benefit and translating them from the Spanish original. Keep in mind that most of these are completely serious statements -- I’m not trying to be funny or messing with my mom -- which makes them all the more amusing.

- “I’ll ride my bike out to the supermarket later to get some essentials, like Snickers bars.”

- “Don’t worry about the beer pong thing; whoever loses has to drink the other team’s beer, and I always win.”

- “It turns out we have to live in the frat house until Friday, we can’t leave unless we’re going to class or have a valid excuse, basically we have to stay there 24 hours…so don’t bother calling me on Wednesday, because I won’t be there.”

- “Chotchsky just interrupted me and ran off with one of my cardboard boxes, so I have to go chase him.”

- “Grandma called me last night, and I was doing my econ homework with Plissy, and on top of that the Domino’s guy showed up, so it got pretty crazy.”

- “I have to wash my sneakers. How the hell do I wash my sneakers? I suppose you I have to take out the insole and the laces, and throw them in the washer, right? Let me know if that’s what I have to do.”

- “Last week I cooked grilled chicken breast, steak, pizza, burgers, chicken tenders, fried egg, etc., and my fridge is filled with good stuff like yogurt, milk and Gatorade. When I come back home I’ll cook something for you guys. You’ll be proud of my chef-like skills.”

- “I paid off my speeding ticket. It was like 130 dollars, but hey, tough luck. For the trip back, at least I already know that the state of Virginia has some goddamn devious cops.”

- “I spent the night in a cheap motel in Wisconsin, where I got a good night’s sleep only because my car is so old that I doubt anyone would want to take it. If I had a real car, I would have been worried.”