We must never forget those who died in media spectacles

Today marks the anniversary of countless innocents losing their lives at the villainous hand of death. As with every other day, I will engage in a minute of silence to commemorate the tragedies that have occurred on this date over the course of human history.

But today is especially significant. For a round number of years ago, a series of maliciously caused explosions in important buildings caused a sizeable number of those deaths to happen simultaneously.

Now, yes, it would be horrible to die in a plane crash or building collapse. But to do so in a manner dramatic enough to attract the attention of millions? Words cannot describe the scale of the tragedy.

That's why I'm altering my commemoration today. A mere minute's silence would not do justice. In recognition of this, I will increase the length of the period of silence so that the victims of the explosions are given twice as much of a weighting as normal deaths.

It is time. Let us all bow our heads and have a minute and 0.0007 seconds of silence.

I would so do that girl if I were a pedophile

Now, just to make myself clear, I am a not a pedophile. I like adult females. This is plain to see from my criminal record. But let me tell you this: if I were a pedophile (and once again, I assure you I’m not), today I would have encountered the hottest girl I’d ever seen.

It was about four o’clock in the afternoon. I was sitting on a park bench, reading my newspaper and there she was - a rosy-faced blonde girl, no more than five years old, having a picnic with her parents. Since I have perfectly normal sexual preferences, I thought she was a cute little girl but thought little more of her.

If I were a pedophile, though, I would have paid her much more attention. I would have only pretended to be reading my newspaper while I constantly tried to catch glimpses of her. I would have appreciated the subtle signs of beauty that few other observers would catch. For instance, she had many missing teeth. Most people (myself included) would consider it an endearing mark of childhood, but nothing more. But if I were a pedophile, my head would swim with dirty thoughts about how her mouth would feel. Or her eyes. Anyone would find them pretty, but as a pedophile, they would have appeared to me as having a smoky, unmistakably slutty look. But in spite of that, she seemed quite shy. While shyness is appealing in any girl, it is especially so when I want to avoid her being too chatty about her experiences, or being prone to screaming.

After half an hour of engrossed reading that would have been torturous acting had I really been a pedophile, the girl got up and hopped on a swing all by herself. Had I not caught it by chance out of the corner of my eye, I would not have noticed her. But if I were a pedophile, I would have been fixated by her every move. I would have been hypnotized by her back and forth swinging movements, and fantasized that her widely parted legs meant she was presenting herself to me. Her broad smile would seem to my lustful mind to be a means of beckoning me.

I often have trouble plucking up the courage to talk to a girl, especially if there are a lot of people close by. They make me uncomfortable. As a pedophile, I would be no different, especially when those people are her parents. But knowing I could not let this opportunity pass me by, I would have taken a deep breath and approached the girl. I would feel a sudden surge of confidence as I did so, allowing me to effortlessly proceed to seduce her with my wit, charm and chloroform. She would fall into my arms, evidently so enamored with me that she could not wait for our immense passion to be consummated. I would duly oblige, whisking her away to a secret, secluded spot of mine. There, under the warm glow of the fluorescent lights, we would make sweet, bloody love.

Of course, I did none of that. In reality, once I had finished reading the newspaper, I went for a brisk walk, took in the sunshine and sympathized with the parents of the now-missing girl like everyone else did.

So why, do you ask, did I bother regaling you with this purely hypothetical recounting? Well, I am passionate that beauty must be cherished wherever it may arise. And if that beauty comes in a form best appreciated by a fictional alter-ego, I will assume that guise. And if that alter-ego must diverge into extended fantasises that the prudish may find repugnant, I will not repent. To criticize me for this is to criticize beauty itself.

You are romantically discriminating against bald people

This is a verbatim reproduction of what I believe will be my final letter to Holly.

Dear Holly,

When you told me that you weren't interested in me, I assumed that this was because you had felt the position of “boyfriend” was redundant and better filled through a combination of existing social contacts. But then I caught a glimpse of you and a dark-haired male sitting together at a Starbucks. Although my busy agenda precluded extensive observations, I did see unmistakable signs of a budding romantic relationship. From my distant vantage point, I could tell that you were holding hands, that you acted affectionately towards one another, and that you had arranged a dinner date for the only night that week that fitted your respective schedules.

Curious, I wasted no time in getting online and soon discovered not only your online dating profile, but with some intuition, the profile of one “Mark Harrison” as well. But it was not until I had analyzed your listed prerequisites and Mark’s fulfillment of them that I began to feel truly incensed. For in every single category, I was undoubtedly at least as proficient as he was. But in spite of that, you still turned me down for him.

Now, I don't need to hear your excuses, because I already know what's going on. You bigots are all the same. You can't see past your irrational prejudice against bald people. I'm sorry, it's not as if I can change to suit your whims. It was not my fault that I was genetically predisposed to male pattern baldness, nor was it my fault that I needed to burn my hair in order to remove bugging devices.

No doubt you’re currently trying to avoid confronting this discomforting truth by attempting to convince yourself that I do in fact have sufficiently disqualifying character defects. But I’m afraid you’re wrong, as I shall show you.

Firstly, you said that you wanted a man who could make you laugh. Well, I’m pretty sure that I would fulfill that criterion, for humor is my main strength. I get laughed at all the time, even when I'm not trying in the slightest to be funny. Sure, most of it is by children whose parents quickly apologize. (I wave it off because their noise doesn't bother me). But since you also mentioned being a "child at heart", I believe this makes me very suitable.

Secondly, you mentioned a fondness for candlelit dinners. This is another area in which I am very capable. I'm confident that few people have as much experience with candlelit dinners as I do. Granted, most of those occasions did arise as a consequence of my power being cut off. Still, from a purely technical standpoint, it's just as good. You need to be able to have confidence that your dining companion isn't going to spill wax all over your beef-flavored sausages or worse, set fire to the tablecloth that was needed for the bed. Which reminds me – on a related note, hair is a notorious fire hazard and my lack of it helps me abide by your presumed safety standards.

Finally, you stated that the most important trait of all in a potential partner is "having a keen sense of adventure". Now, others might claim to be adventurous, but how do you know they’re not just all talk? I, for one, have physical evidence supporting my assertion. If you were to look through my video game collection, you'd come across numerous instances of the word. The Adventures of Batman & Robin. Adventure Island. Snoopy's Erotic Adventures. Do these sound like indicators of someone who is unadventurous?!

You might not think that this is such a big deal. But what you are in fact doing is helping to enforce a cycle of intolerance that has continued for centuries, if not longer. I think back to my grandfather, who was rejected by all females he applied to until he resigned himself to settling for a tramp. Further back still, I have ancestors who were forced into unpaid work in the kitchen for decades until they were finally freed by wives. You just can't understand what it feels like unless you're bald yourself.

Don’t get me wrong. If you don’t want to make me happy, that’s fine. Treat me with contempt so long as you treat everyone else with contempt. What I’m really against is you making someone else happy.

Yours,
Daniel Tarmac

P.S. Mark seems to be a bit of a loser anyway.

I was only parodying a stalker

This is my response to Holly’s most recent letter.

Dear Holly,

Your request that I cease and desist from contacting you under the guise that I have been (and I quote) “stalking” you, implies that you have thoroughly misinterpreted my actions. I would never engage in such a reprehensible activity as stalking. In fact, it is precisely because I am so against the practice that I decided to satirize it by creating the stalker character that you have experienced. What seemed to you to be the disturbing actions of a psychopath were actually a mix of pop culture references and comically inferior intimidation techniques.

The messages I left on your answering machine, while spoken in a menacing-sounding voice, were plainly farcical. “I’d like to caress your furniture”, although suggestive in tone, literally implied the mundane desire to touch the comfortable looking chairs you have. “I’d like to spin you a new cocoon” on the other hand, was a pure non sequitur. Finally, the gibberish message that worried was “Satanic” was merely a backmasked recipe for lentil soup.

I can understand how you may have misinterpreted the photograph of your toilet that I sent you as a representation that I had managed to break into your house. But that’s only a minor aspect of it. If you look closely, you’ll see how the photograph pays homage to Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain. Instead of a urinal, we have a flush toilet with the seat down, contrasting the masculine with the feminine. Like Fountain, I consider it a form of “found art” (albeit “found” in a somewhat unorthodox manner). I even signed the toilet as Duchamp did for Fountain, although in retrospect I probably shouldn't have signed it in blood due to being unable to find a pen.

You didn’t really believe me when I told you that I had constructed an anatomically accurate blow-up doll of you, did you? It would have been far too complicated to measure you accurately. I merely found a doll that shared your cup size (32B, if that bra was yours) and taped your face to it. And no, I didn’t do anything sexual with it; I just posed with it for the photo before selling it on eBay.

While I did follow you home wearing a hockey mask and brandishing a machete a number of times, this was nothing more than an allusion to Jason Vorhees of the Friday the 13th horror film franchise. And while it may have seemed as if I was attempting to frighten to you by circling your house while swinging the machete, I was actually being helpful by pruning branches.

Okay, the “horse’s head” you found in your bed might have been a little scary. But come on, have you never seen The Godfather? Or any of the numerous references to that scene in other media? Besides, it wasn’t even a real horse’s head anyway – it was a donkey’s head. Also, there was no reason to scream and jump about in panic when you saw it. There was nothing to worry about - the head was completely sanitary, as I had made sure to thoroughly sterilize it.

So to sum up, I am afraid that you have no legal case against me. The First Amendment protects the right to parody. Any court that convicted me would be infringing upon the rights of all Americans to freedom of expression. Now that includes expression that we not be that comfortable with: whether it is someone expressing unpopular political views, burning the US flag or swinging axes on public property.

And on a personal note: if you don’t appreciate my sense of humor, that’s fine. But you don’t have to get so worked up about it.

Yours,
Daniel Tarmac

You are my soul mate given my constraints

This is a love letter I posted yesterday. Please commend me on my mastery of the form.

Dear Holly,

When I first laid my eyes upon you, on that fateful winter night in Burger King, I felt that I could not avert my gaze even if I tried. For out of all the women in the room at that particular time, you were the most beautiful of all. (Also, it beat looking at any of the grease-drenched whales obscuring every other angle of my vision.)

Although I was only onto my third Whopper, I found my attention drawn away from it for the first time in my life when you strolled through the door with all the grace of a limousine. Your long, bottle blonde hair flowed from your head like wheat in a breeze as you rolled up to the counter and placed your order in a voice as sweet as a blueberry. I prayed that you would sit beside me – and as if unseen spirits had guided you, you sat only one table over. My heart hopped with joy. At this distance, I could see your face in all its detail: skin as smooth as nylon and eyes that sparkled like rhinestones. I watched intently (and hungrily) as you unwrapped your burger, and as you opened your mouth to take a bite, I caught a glimpse of your teeth. They were as white as eggshells. And in contrast to the gluttonous trolls who shoveled their food into their mouths without any regards to dignity, you managed to shovel eloquently.

I can’t believe how lucky I was to have found you. You’re a one in a thousand discovery. (Given the number of women I have ever seen, that’s especially notable). If I traveled to every corner of the Earth, searching far and wide for the perfect woman, there would only be three or four million that would be greater or equal to you in beauty and probable low standards.

Over these past few months, my passion for you only increased. Perhaps you cast a spell on me that first night. Or maybe it was due to my dwindling alternatives. Whatever it was, I am now convinced that I truly love you – that is, the expected net benefits of continued search are negative.

Now, if you’re looking for someone who can shower you with gifts, I’m not your man. But I can offer you something that money can’t buy: the credibility that comes with the fact that I can’t afford to look for anyone better. If you accept me into your life, you can do so with the confidence that I’m unlikely to leave you. It would only occur in the event that I stumbled upon an even more desirable, yet still attainable female. I believe honesty is a virtue: I concede that I would desert you in an instant if that happened. Though rest assured, hope is not lost. All you will need to do to optimize our chances of a happy life together is make it expensive for me to leave.

I hope we get married and have children someday.

Yours,
Daniel Tarmac

My roommate's girlfriend is a hoax

When my roommate, Sam, proudly announced to me that he had achieved something long considered impossible – land a girlfriend – I was enthralled. He shared with me captivating photos that revealed a whole new, wonderful world to me. It was the first time I had seen the surface of a female in such detail. But perhaps the best thing about it was the substantial increase in morale it gave me. For it made me believe that if we can conquer females, we can achieve anything. Perhaps, someday, I’d be able to get a job or even learn to iron. The possibilities seemed limitless!

Yet, as with all things that seem like they might be too good to be true, I couldn’t stop those nagging feelings of suspicion. It was such a monumental task, after all, with so much at stake. Could I really consider the unthinkable – that Sam had purposely faked the existence of a girlfriend? As much as the idea horrified me, the evidence slowly became insurmountable.

Motive

Sam and I had developed an intense rivalry over the many years we had known each other. We had each found it imperative to prove our superiority to the other in every way possible. For example, we would frequently undertake endurance tests, such as seeing how long we could go without showering (still running as I write this).

However, as the most difficult task we could imagine, landing a girlfriend was consequently the most prestigious. Thus, there would be correspondingly large status gains from perpetrating a hoax. No doubt Sam also felt a sense of urgency from the fact that my own eventual success was undoubtedly imminent. The very high cost of attempting to land a real girlfriend would also have deterred him (after all, it takes real effort to come up with pick-up lines).


Evidence

#1 The time taken

Sam announced his goal of landing a girlfriend slightly more than eight years ago. Now, at first this time frame may not seem unreasonable. However, when one considers the enormous logistical problems associated with the task, one may begin to wonder. What about the planning? The blueprints? The trial runs? The funding? The list goes on and on.

It is especially suspicious given that at the time of that announcement, Sam did not appear to have made any progress in the realms of courtship. I, on the other hand, had by that point already approached several females and had even managed to get my first dignified rejection . You would expect, then, that with my large head start I would logically have been the first to land a girlfriend.

#2 The implausible meeting place

Sam told me that he had met “Katie” in a club. I find this highly implausible, for I have been to many clubs and I can tell you that there were no females in any of them. Most of the patrons were middle-aged men with anime T-shirts. Some of them may have been females (such distinctions were hard to make) but certainly, if any were, none were as physically attractive as “Katie” appears to be. If Sam were less naïve about common places to meet females, he could have constructed a more plausible alibi. If, say, he had claimed that he met “Katie” outside a women’s changing room or in the park at night, I might have believed him.

#3 Sam’s refusal to send me his photographs

As my unease grew, I decided that I would request Sam send me all the photographs of his alleged girlfriend so I could do an in-depth analysis of them. What happened? He instantly refused. Now, what sort of person would decline there except if he had something to hide? When pressed, he said he was concerned about what I might do with the photographs. Okay, I was planning to zoom in on “Katie” up to 100x, but I assured him that it was solely for the purposes of detecting manipulation. He still declined.

Luckily though, Sam *did* allow me to examine the photos while keeping them on his computer. Thanks to many hours of dedicated focus, I now have them vividly implanted in my brain.

#4 The faked photographs

The photographs may have been pleasing to look at, but such a factor should not get in the way of scientific inquiry. Indeed, this made them even more suspicious, for their aesthetic appeal may have been designed specifically to distract the viewer from the subterfuge.

• The photographs mostly show the alleged couple smiling at various spots in a large park. However, the background does not change at all in spite of the clear distances between each location. This leads credence to my theory that the photographs were not taken outdoors at all, and instead were produced with a studio backdrop.

• There are no clouds in any of the photographs, despite the fact that the sky is well known for having clouds in it. This lends further support to the “studio” thesis, for it is not possible to create a backdrop with clouds on it.
  

• In most of the photographs, “Katie’s” long blonde hair appeared to be waving. This is in spite of there being no visible fans, nor obvious places for fans to be plugged in. Therefore, it seemed likely that Sam had simply taken pictures of himself and modified each of them with Photoshop to include an attractive female.

#5 I had never seen the alleged girlfriend

For a girlfriend that Sam claimed had been around for nearly a month thus far, you would think that I would have been given an opportunity to meet her. However, I am still waiting.

Sam had an initially appealing but ultimately unsatisfactory explanation. He claimed that he had invited “Katie” to our house a number of times and would have willingly introduced her if it were not for the fact that I have a tendency to lock myself in my room for 23 hours a day. While I do not dispute the latter part of his statement, I find this to be an awfully convenient excuse. For why does “Katie” only come at night? I would have been more than happy to meet her between the hours of 1 and 2pm, when I have breakfast. But in spite of her supposedly frequent visits, I have yet to see her once.

#6 Supposed sounds of girlfriend were obviously inaccurate

Sam contended that I should have at least heard sounds that strongly suggested the presence of a female in the house. While I did hear a feminine-sounding voice, its authenticity was questionable. How could I know that Sam wasn’t merely imitating a female voice? That had been a key part, after all, in some of the games we'd played together. Or alternatively, it could have been a recording, perhaps a looped vocal sample from a TV show - note that I had seen Sam watching what appeared to be numerous streams of TV shows on his computer. Why would he do this when we had a perfectly working television up until recently? Might the fact that it allowed him to more easily isolate the audio track have something to do with it?

Now, I did hear some other noises. To most people's ears, they have might seemed to have had a superficial resemblance to the sounds of sexual intercourse. But Sam, ever the careless fraudster, undid himself with his comic ignorance of how the act sounds. He wasn’t counting on the fact that I had a large amount of sexual knowledge from the many years I spent involuntarily listening in to my own parents (and occasionally, my aunt and uncle). And I must say, Sam did not even come close. Here is just some of what was wrong with his attempt:

• All sexual encounters should begin with the sound of bottles breaking. I believe there are two potential purposes of this. One is that the physical action of breaking a bottle increases blood flow, consequently increasing arousal. The second is that the shards of the bottle may be used as a form of sex toy.
• The female should scream and plead hysterically. This motivates the male to muffle the sound by physical contact, which is sometimes very rough but nonetheless eventually results in coitus.
• For the next half an hour or so afterward, the female should weep softly. The biological purpose of this remains a mystery.

Truly pitiful. See, that’s the trouble with attempting fraud: all the pieces have to fit together but if there’s a single one missing, it’s easily spotted when an expert examines it.

Conclusion

I was disappointed but not entirely surprised. I had long believed that Sam was untrustworthy, and so further evidence to that extent was to be expected.

Predictably, Sam’s response to my allegations was deny, deny, deny. His refusal to even read my detailed investigation exemplified the arrogance I had long found so distasteful in him. I can only hope that others will stop blindly following the "mainstream consensus" that they unquestioningly receive from biased sources and help me expose this fraudster.

I do hope he’ll still do the laundry tomorrow, though.

The females rejecting me are blatant obstructionists

It’s happened again. After months of carefully constructing a pick-up line (“Hey babe, wanna try my stimulus package?”) that if successful would provide free benefits to as many as two unattached people, the final result from all the females I asked was a unanimous “No!”

If this were a one-off event, it might be understandable. But as I can show you, it was part of a consistent pattern of lockstep, stubborn opposition to my agenda. I asked twelve females “Wanna create a job, if you know what I mean?” and what was the tally? 0-12 against. “Can we foreclose in your house?” also failed to elicit a single “Yes.” No matter how much I tried to reach out to them by modifying my proposals to include female-friendly features such as my offering of free candy out of my pocket, it was still “No!” “No!” and “No!”

Now, I’m not unreasonable. I can understand that some females may have reservations with parts of my plans for them. That’s why I was willing to sit down with each and every resistant female in a personal, one-on-one discussion. We would, as adults, calmly and rationally discuss exactly what she found so objectionable about my proposal. Then by constructively determining our common ground, we would see if we could work out a compromise.

Unfortunately though, not one female took up my offer. I haven’t seen bad faith negotiators like these ever since my parents refused to let me play with matches. Not only did I get barraged with “No!” after “No!” - some females were so immature that they also threatened to call the police if I didn’t stop trying to arrange meetings in the parking lots of their workplaces.

I have now decided that females simply lack the mental capacity to come up with more coherent arguments. They are only to see that I am behind a proposal before they instantly reject it irrespective of its merits. (I have actually measured the average speed of rejection and I assure you it is far below the necessary time to adequately process such an important decision). More importantly, I have not once heard a single female suggest an alternative vision for our future. They simply don’t have one other than “No!” In fact, the sheer uniformity of their responses has made me suspect that they actually want me to fail and so have been coordinating for just that purpose.

I remain confident, however, that this insolent behavior will not go unnoticed. These females will have to face the consequences of their “No” choices to unsympathetic ears. For one, a number of them hail from rather unattractive stock. I envision that they will have a pretty difficult time explaining to their parents why they turned down a prospect so beneficial for extending the family line. And secondly, even the females in relatively good shape may face the ostracism of their peers as a result of their simple lack of constructiveness. I, on the other hand, will surely be vindicated, for even those skeptical of my plans will appreciate the fact that I took a principled stand in the name of progress. These do-nothing females deserve all the contempt they will undoubtedly soon receive.