Too Much Too Soon

As a parent & a geek & a former teenage boy, today’s Penny Arcade perfectly sums up my thinking on the ready availability of nudity that the internet has graced young teens with.  This next story is kinda gross, but 100% true.  As a 14 year old, if I wanted to see a naked woman, my best (only?) option was to ride my skateboard past the UCLA fraternity houses on the outskirts of Westwood & hope that they had thrown out a used copy of Hustler that I could sneak into the house.  I probably only found two or three during my entire early adolesence, but they were like sacred relics, to be guarded & treasured & hidden & studied like the Rosetta Stone of vaginas, answering so many questions (”hey, a six is a like an upsidedown nine.  I wonder if that’s why they call it that?”) while posing still others (”why are these pages stuck together?”). 

When I was in 8th grade in England, the paper ran an article about the dancers at the Moulin Rouge in Paris, and actually printed a photo of the ladies all showering after a show, with as many as 5 (FIVE!!!) visible boobies all soaped up.  I swear to you that I’m not joking when I tell you I stole that page of the paper & hid it in my room for the entire 8th grade year.

I adore my daughter & wouldn’t change a thing, but sometimes it’s not just that I’m happy I had a girl as much as that I’m relieved that I didn’t have a boy.

Disney.cx

Consider yourself lucky if you don’t know what this Camera looks like to me.  Found @ The Disney Store, it’s “Mickey’s Digital Camera” and it retails for $59.99.  Bowling pin not included.

Funny Queer or Funny Ha Ha?

A growing chorus of Jonsonblog readers are raising the issue that recent posts are landing in a rareified “not so much funny as ‘disturbing/gross’” territory.  A smattering:

“If the jonsonblog had existed before you two were married, I’m not sure I’d have introduced you” - a friend’s email to the missus.

“It seems like lately you’re working through some issues” - work colleague

“you can’t strike comedy gold every time” - long time commenter

The truth of the matter is, it’s a tricky position, writing when you’re aware of an audience.  I can’t write about work, or family, or friends, and writing about quirky items in the news or wacky products I find on the internet isn’t something I like doing very much.

The whole point of the blog was to have a place to write down things that amused me, and along the way a handful of people started reading it.  Fine, in as much as I love making people laugh, but eventually knowing who was reading (or that anyone at all was reading) started to color the things I wrote about.  I certainly don’t want people I care about thinking worse of me because of some (seemingly) innocuous jokes I’ve told online.

Perhaps it’s time to slow things down a bit on the jonsonblog. I’m not saying “quit” per se, but maybe just take a break until something strikes me as so funny I can’t stand to not write about it.

Do you mind if I masturbate on your pancakes?

My friends & I have developed such a disturbing conversational shorthand that sometimes it takes seeing it in writing to really get some perspective on it.  This exchange from lunch today sums it up nicely:

Me: I wish I had ordered bacon on my grilled cheese sandwich.  Hey, can I just have some of your bacon that comes with your pancakes?

Friend: No.

Me: Just a little?

Friend: No.  I need my protein.

Me: I will give you replacement protein.

Friend: I reject your offer completely.

Me: Really? You don’t find my offer to sprinkle my man-juice on your lunch an acceptable trade for the side plate of bacon?

This is such an absolutely typical example of our daily conversation that it’s surprising neither of us has been pepper sprayed by random people within earshot.

Thanks John McCain

I’ve decided to start excusing myself from any undesirable activity by citing McCain’s time in prison.  For example:

The Missus: Honey, the garbage trucks come tomorrow.

Me: Sweetheart, John McCain did not spend five years in a Vietnamese hellhole so that I would have to take out the trash.

It works; it’s universally applicable, and if you parse the meaning of the words, it’s 100% true.  I look forward to the McCain candidacy, and I anticipate poor jonson behavior not seen since 1996 (”Officer, Bob Dole did not have his right hand paralyzed by the krauts so that I would have to wear pants in public”).

My dog is a gay ninja

For years now, I’ve mocked my Pug Oscar, on all kinds of fronts, from his tiny walnut sized brain to his effeminate mannerisms, going so far as to emasculate him on camera repeatedly:

Well, he may be stupid, and he may be effeminate, but no one can say he isn’t sneaky.  Yesterday as I was getting ready for work, he snuck out of the house, and wandered our neighborhood for hours.  Some friendly neighbors found him pawing at the fence that borders the not very developed government land at the border of our neighborhood, thankfully, and called us when they saw the flyers we put up.

What’s troubling is that I can’t understand why he would want to run away.  Oh wait, maybe it’s because of photos like this:

Hah!  Sucks to be you, gay dog.  Now you have to wear a collar every day!!

This Post May Not Be Safe For Work

Back in high school, I was looking through the dirty magazine section of some liquor store when I ran across a magazine called Shaved Orientails (not a spelling error, it really did say “tails”).  I was too young to legally purchase a copy, but in furtively thumbing through it I saw literally an entire periodical full of the same picture over & over again, with a different model on each page.

Upon thinking about the magazine later, I realized what a large world it was, because there’s apparently enough people who are specifically turned on by:

• Pornography
• Via still images
• Of Asian women
• Facing backwards
• With their genitals shaved

…to support a monthly publication.  Of course, now in the internet era, print/paper/distribution costs are nil, and in fan sites, model costs & photography are donated by creepy lunatics hobbyists who all too willingly donate time & effort to their causes.

Which brings me to this.  If Wishe(r)s were Horses is a site for people who wish they were human/horse hybrids.  Not so that they could run really fast, or survive on a diet of hay, or add more prancing to their daily rituals, but for pretty much entirely sexual reasons.  I could spend the rest of my blogging life writing about this site, so I will force myself to cut it short, but I wholeheartedly encourage each & every one of you to check out the art gallery.

Ah, Rule 34 (”If you can imagine it, there is porn of it”), you remain as true today as ever.  Amusing sidenote: in Googling “Rule 34″, I found “rule34.paheal.net,” a site that in roughly one year has set about trying to prove the legitimacy of Rule 34 by having members upload the most unlikely & oddly inspired pornographic images ever.  So far there are over six thousand four hundred pages with a dozen or more pictures per page.  Favorites in the couple of minutes I spent clicking “random” include this image of the Pringles mascot getting intimate, this drawing of a guy having oral sex with Gizmo from the movie Gremlins (note the time on the clock!), and  this picture of Mr T sodomizing Santa Claus. 

It’s a big world, all right.  A big, terrifying world.

Let me explain why I have a picture of a dude’s vagina

So, I’m sure this has happened to all of you at one point or another, but here’s an amusing anecdote from earlier today:

I’m on a client conference call, and I’m using my iPhone to show an email to one of the people from my office.  At that moment, a co-worker (not seeing that the phone wasn’t on mute) asked “what are you showing him, a picture of some dude’s vagina?”

I guess I have a reputation for showing people pictures of things like that. 

So, that comment made me google Buck Angel, the female(ish) porn star who had a double mastectomy, pec implants, hormones & steroids and can now truly be said to have a “dude’s vagina.”

Which is why, later in the day, when someone mentioned the topic of women who sound like men over the phone, I had, already up on my iPhone, this photo.

You know, upon reading this back I’m forced to admit that explaining why I have a picture of a dude’s vagina already queue’d up on my iPhone doesn’t really make me seem less creepy.

Soviet Cialis

My Spam intake at work has progressively gotten more & more Russian, to the point where nearly 20% of the emails I receive are in a cyrillic alphabet.  I don’t usually read my spam, but I’m actually mildly disappointed that I can’t see what my comrades are selling. 

In my imagination, which is fueled entirely by 1980’s cold-war propaganda like Rocky IV & Red Dawn, I suspect most of the products being shilled are cheap communist variants of western products.  Like, instead of discount viagra, it’s probably some sort of beet-based concotion that promises to “increase sexy powers” in borat-esque pidgin English. 

The weird thing is, I’ve checked with a few co-workers, and none of them are getting Russian spam.  I’m pretty sure this is related to some suspicious shopping I may have done on a certain Russian mp3 site a while back.  In retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have used my primary email address, but in truth, a 20% increase in the amount of spam I get is like a 20% increase in the amount of awesome I am.  The baseline is so high that the overall difference is not noticeable.

Divorce Via YouTube - Exhibit A

Dora the Explorer’s best friend is Boots the Monkey. Her nemesis is Swiper, the Sneaky Fox. By the time you finish watching this video I will be living in a box by the L.A. River.