The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? Really?

I was going through the various websites from which I get my news this morning and saw an interesting footnote, apparently Neil Diamond and Alice Cooper will be inducted into the Rock and Roll hall of Fame. Whist I mentally envisioned some ultra mellow uptempo performances of "Feed My Frankenstein" and "Hey Stupid" and metal versions of "Sweet Caroline" and "Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show" I asked myself the big question. Do I care? Sadly the answer was a resounding "meh."
I grew up in the period BEFORE completely formatted radio. It was not uncommon to hear several different types of music on one station. You could literally go from Issac Hayes "Shaft" to Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven." Suffice it to say "I Love Rock and Roll" is more than just the title of a Joan Jett and the Blackhearts song, it's a way of life. If you look at the history of Rock and Roll in the early 50s, it was hated for it's primal almost sexual beats and lyrics which if not blatantly sexual were ripe with double entendre. In it's infancy it's audience was young and black and gradually became white teens and at that point it's harshest critics labeled it "devil music", "Jungle music" and just plain "nigger music" which had to be kept away from white teens at all costs.
In some parts of the south there were protests and in and in some cases riots against rock and roll as some communist plot whose ultimate goal was the corruption of American culture by getting white youth to mix with Negroes. Simply listening to rock and roll was a form of rebellion the likes of which upset a middle America who wanted all kids to grow up to be like Perry Como, Dorris Day and Pat Boone.
Big Joe Turner, Little Richard and Chuck Berry were the last people middle class white America wished for their children to emulate. With each successive generation the voices of dissent against Rock and Roll seemed to change but they always seemed to say the same things. Those who hated Elvis Presley's gyrating hips in 1954 sounded eerily similar to those who loathed Jimmi Hendrix's Afro in the 60's and Robert Plant's flowing locks in the 70s.

Rock and Roll has long been the music of non conformity and rebellion, what sense then does it make for the anthems of non conformity and rebellion (and their authors) to be enshrined in a "hall of fame"? On the contrary, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame seems to be the ANTITHESIS of EVERYTHING Rock and Roll has ever represented.
When Jerry Lee Lewis was learning to play piano and eventually setting them on fire I'm relatively sure the thought of someday being a bronze bust sitting next to a similar statuette of J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson. When Bo Diddly learned his first chord he was not thinking of being accepted as "popular" music and when James Marshall Hendrix first took the stage fusing blues guitar back into rock and roll his thought was NOT to transform the way a generation would listen to music.

Neil Diamond and Alice Cooper said neither of them were sitting back awaiting the call from Cleveland to inform them of their induction into something they've achieved long ago. Both men earned the respect and accolades that made them both legends and to that end being given a bust in some hall somewhere next to a television playing a loop of their music seems a pointless honor. The REAL Rock and Roll Hall of fame exist where ever lovers of music congregate. It exist in music stores all over the planet where people buy the music that great artist produced as recently as last week and as long ago as several decades. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame exists online whenever someone downloads a song or a video of an artist whom they've never heard of and is mesmerized by it.
But most of all the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame exist where ever someone is holding a pair of drumsticks, a horn, bass or guitar and is desperately attempting to learn the chords of a song they simply can't get out of their heads. Rock and Roll like ALL great music can not be confined. Just as Beethoven and Mozart didn't need a "Hall of Fame" neither do Hendrix and Slash.

Have you ever smoked crack?

I haven't, but I've seen it done more than once. The first time was in 1992. I was in a strange transitional place in my life and for some reason hanging out with a big hooker named Rita. Believe it or not, our relationship wasn't a sexual one. Each of us found the other attractive, but we never acted on it. For my part I wouldn't risk becoming emotionally attached to someone who I knew would be sleeping with other people for money moments after saying how much she cared about me. In so far as she was concerned, she had a preference for short Latinos with thick moustaches.

We were drinking buddies. I met her in a sleazy bar on Main Street back when the now bustling part of downtown Houston was still pretty skanky. We had a few drinks and seemed to enjoy one an other's company. She was a big, six foot, brunette from Arkansas, with big blue eyes, heavy over sized breasts, and a trailer park twang that was as comical as it was rustic and charming in a backwoods kind of way. After we talked for an hour we discovered that our birthdays were exactly eight days and one year apart and we both drank vodka. At the time we hung out I was working a dead end job, which involved lifting heavy objects and she was hustling the streets. By hustling I meant she was begging, picking pockets, breaking into cars and turning the occasional trick. She would do virtually anything to keep a roof over her head. She'd left Arkansas when she was 17 and had spent the previous five years drinking hard, snorting coke and doing smack and her face showed it. At 23 she looked 35. When I met her she drank mostly. She only did drugs when either she had the money or when someone else provided them. She lived in a miserable downtown hotel that seemed to be a haven for prostitutes.

The owners were reprehensible recent immigrants with thick accents of unknown Eastern European origin. They knew most of their mostly female residents were working girls and turned tricks in their rooms so as not to be left out they charged the girls a $10.00 visitors fee for each "visitor" who came in so as to get their "cut" of the action. One day Rita and I had a cheap bottle of vodka and went up to her room to get drunk beyond belief. She drank to escape the problems she'd created for herself, and I drank to escape the minuscule demons of my own making which paled in comparison to what she saw each day on the cruel streets. As we sat drinking warm vodka from cheap thin plastic glasses there was a frantic knock on her door. When she got up to answer it a skinny redhead with a black eye entered.

"Girl. You aint gonna believe this shit." She said as she entered without fanfare.

"What's wrong?" Rita asked

"That bitch Chloe." The redhead said "That skank is saying I'm going on $10.00 dates."

"You're shittin' me?" Rita said in disbelief. The nameless redhead was a sight. She was wiry to the point of being what many would consider anorexic. Her skin was pale and blotchy and she wore too much foundation. Her hair was a peculiar shade of brownish red and her eyes were a placid blue. The problem however was the fact that when she entered while she looked in the general direction of Rita and me she seemed to be looking straight through us. She had what soldiers and Marines call a thousand yard stare. Her eyes were filled with fear. It looked almost as if she were staring down the barrel of a gun. "I ran into her outside" she continued "and kicked her fuckin' ass."

Funny thing about those who sell sex for a living. We call what they do 'picking up Johns' or 'turning tricks.' The simply call it going on dates. I guess in their mind it sanitizes that which they do and makes it a bit more mentally palatable to them. What could be more harmless or NORMAL than going on a date? While being a whore amongst whores isn't a bad thing, being a CHEAP whore was considered to be unacceptable. One girl claiming another was doing 'dates' for anything but the going rate was an affront worthy of getting cut.

"She do that to your eye?" Rita asked

"Fuck yeah." The redhead countered. "But don't worry, I got her." She said. "I got that bitch good." She sat down on a beaten wooden chair as Rita returned to the couch where I sat with a generic bottle of god awful vodka. The redhead poked around in her purse. "I mean seriously." She continued "Who the fuck does that bitch think I am?" From the worn black handbag that looked as if it had been fished from a dumpster she fished out an odd looking bent piece of glass tubing.

"I don't blame you." Rita said as she obliviously snatched the bottle from me and filled the scratchy, thin, plastic cup to it's rim. "She needs ta mind her own fuckin' business." The redhead reached into her pocket and pulled out a piece of tissue and carefully unfolded it. In it was a tiny clump of something that looked like baking soda. She gently placed it into the piece of glass tubing then began to fish around in the dirty, faded jeans that hung from her boney frame and pulled out a beaten, purple, plastic lighter.

"What's fucked up" The redhead continued as she desperately flicked the old lighter until it finally produced a flame. "Is that I fuckin' trusted her! I mean she even crashed with my ass a couple of days when she couldn't make her rent. Fuckin' bitch!" Once she had a flame she greedily placed the other end of the tube into her mouth and puffed it as tiny billows of white smoke came from her face.

I tried not to stare, but don't think it really mattered. She was in another world. She closed her eyes and the fear that had been on her face seconds earlier seemed to become a distant memory. She was in an odd state of euphoria. The fight she'd been in minutes earlier had become irrelevant, for the moment her problems had all disappeared. The rock she was smoking had been a small one or else she might have shared it with Rita.

Rita and I let the conversation end as the redhead seemed content to silence herself. Rita and I resumed drinking amid the chemical smell produced by her friend's quickly inhaled crack rock. Neither Rita nor I could sit in judgement. Rita over the time that I knew her slowly ruined her life with the same drug. She wound up doing a lengthy prison term for possession of it and some of the crimes she committed in order to get it. I was drinking at the time and couldn't pretend that my own vice was a harmless one.

It was the first time I'd ever seen anyone freebase cocaine, and I wish I could say it was the last. Unfortunately for me over the years that followed I witnessed entirely too many members of my generation destroying their brains and lives with that poison. Some would ultimately wind up dying as a result of it. Mine was not the first generation to lose a good portion of it's better minds to drugs. I guess it's part of an odd cycle of stupidity. With age comes a certain degree of wisdom, but in retrospect I can't help but wonder where Rita, her red headed friend and various other members of my generation are now and where they would be had they better used their common sense.

Oh My GOD! There are BULLIES IN SCHOOL!

Recently in a handful of unrelated incidents American teens have committed suicide out of sheer embarrassment because either someone started a hurtful (and unlikely rumor about them) or either attacked them or outed them for being homosexual. In typical knee-jerk fashion, lawmakers are in a tizzy and are scrambling to enact ANY sort of anti-bully legislation to protect our children. While it shouldn't matter those bullied who would up taking their own lives were white kids from suburbia. Do I have issues with white kids from Suburbia of course not. Do I think someone should do something about bullies in America's schools? Of course. Should we pass strict "anti bullying" laws?
Before I answer that question let me pose one. Is bullying a new and recent phenomena or have bullies been around since the dawn of mankind? Everyone who went to school falls into one of three categories they either were bullied, were bullies or know someone who fell into one of the aforementioned categories. When I was in elementary I was unfortunate enough to have sat in front of someone who would today be called bi-polar. Back then we just called them crazy. A student who I'll call Phil used to go into violent rages and hit the person closest to him and as we sat alphabetically and I sat directly in front of him he would periodically punch me in the back of the head. Once he got up in the middle of a class, knocked me off my desk and pummelled me. We were both sent to the Principal's office where we were ordered to say "I'm sorry & shake hands" and go back to class. I looked at the principal with disbelief and told her I wasn't going to apologize for being attacked for no reason. Regardless she told me I'd get paddled (as they weren't stingy with the paddle back then) if I didn't. I reached out to shake his hand and he stood up and punched me full on in the face...IN our principals office.
I was given an ice pack for my eye and for some reason they gave both me AND my bully Popsicles and sent us back to class. Phil would occasionally wait for me after school with two other idiots and they would jump me for sport. When I reported it I was told my teacher (whom I sincerely hope is dead and roasting in hell by now) that "No one likes a tattle tale." By the time I made it to high school bullies hadn't changed I was being picked on in the 10th grade by some idiot. When I defended myself against him he attacked me with five of his friends and gave me a concussion by hitting me in the back of the head with a 55 gallon metal trash can. I told an assistant principal and was told "We'll do what we can." The next time I saw my bully he didn't have his five friends in tow. He was walking down a hall with his girlfriend. I ran at him at full speed and turned his face into my own personal punching bag.
As it was the late 80s and every jerk and his dog had a HUGE Run DMC looking gold chain, I wrapped my hands in his and used it as a crude weapon to repeatedly ram his head into a locker as hard as I could to the point of denting it. Before I knew it, Mr. Henry my assistant principal (who stood a good five foot four) had tackled me at the knees and was dragging me to the office by my left heel with one hand. I was suspended as was my bully for the previous confrontation and I was never bullied again. Funny thing. Four years ago I was in a convenience store and ran into the bully from my second story. The fight came up and we had a good laugh about it.
My point? There have always been and will always be bullies how we react to it defines us in a way. Was my way the best way? Most certainly it wasn't, and I don't' advocate being a vigilante. The bullied in the 90s responded to their bullies by bringing guns to school and apparently the bullied in this generation respond by killing themselves. In the 90s principals responded by getting more counselors to talk to kids when they felt "stressed". The downside to this was anytime a kid didn't want to be in a class he/she would simply say "Uh...I got a problem and need to talk to my counselor" which lead to rampant abuse.
The solution to bullies isn't passing laws to hold some bully accountable if the bullied kills him/herself. The solution is simpler than that. Teachers, principals and parents should simply DO THEIR FUCKING JOBS and come down on bullies like a ton of bricks. What about Phil the bully from my first story? I ran into him in the old neighborhood at a gas station. He was incoherent and rambling talking about how people were out to get him. I mentioned a former classmate of ours and Phil made some sort of veiled threat against him. I let him leave first and while he was outside someone approached him and he drew a 9 millimeter pistol on them prompting them to flee. Passing "feel good" anti-bully laws won't solve this age old problem, the framework has long been in place to handle it, but rather than disciplining those who bully we coddle them and ignore the kids BEING bullied until something goes horrifically wrong and until we start telling kids at an early age that bullying is wrong the problem will persist.

ME FIRST!

The other day I was talking to a co-worker when a student came up and interrupted us.

"Mr. Nemo I need your signature on XYZ." My co-worker and I simply stood there looking at the student as if there were a foot coming out of her forehead. She signed the document and we continued our conversation. The other day after church I was standing around talking to an usher. In the midst of our chat a boy who couldn't have been more than 12 came up and interrupted "You want to buy so me cookies." I looked at him oddly and politely said no. "It's for a good cause" the kid interrupted. I again said no thank you. "Please." the young person pleaded again. I stood there and said:

"Young man HERE are the mistakes you made. #1 you didn't say excuse me. This gentleman and I were talking and you just interrupted us as if what we were discussing was of no importance. #2 You didn't introduce yourself. My name is Joe Blow or something would have gotten our attention. #3. You didn't tell us what you were selling this stuff FOR! #4. You're not telling me what kind of cookies. It's like you don't know what you're selling. You're rude and you act like we should buy from you simply because you're telling us to." The young man's expression didn't change as he looked me straight in the eye as if I hadn't uttered a word and he asked me:

"So you want to buy some cookies or not?" When did common courtesy and civility become the exception and not the RULE in these United States? My generation was occasionally smacked upside the head by our parents. Was it right? Of course not, but unfortunately it made my generation the WORST parents the world has ever seen. When I played pop Warner football you either won or lost. If you won you got a trophy if you lost you got a lecture on it not being about winning but rather about sportsmanship which you later discarded because you wanted to win.
Now unfortunately everyone on every team gets a HUGE trophy simply for playing. Children who swear at parents and teachers are no longer paddled, they get "time outs" where they get to think about what they've done OR they sit and talk about their feelings. When I was coming up if you cursed out a teacher you were expelled. If you cursed out one of your parents you said "time out" as they attacked you with a worn leather belt or some kind of hickory switch.
My generation has given their children every computer, video game, phone and electronic device that the mass media tells them they should have and the end result is a group of fat, lazy complacent young people with no imagination whatsoever who only go outside on their way to pick up fast food or more games.

As we don't require them to work for anything, we ask schools to relax standards so that their grades are artificially bolstered. Reading anything other than garbled text messages is considered "nerdy" or a waste of time. When they receive a bad grade we blame their teachers as our children can't possibly be at fault. The end result of this coddling is an entire generation which can't write in cursive, thinks that cell phones have always existed, feels that there wasn't a time when we were never on the moon or flying shuttle missions and can't name either the allies or axis powers of the second world war.

We can't blindly blame "society" because as many of our parents have passed on or retired WE have become the society which we rebelled against in the midst of the late 80s and 90s. Our lack of foresight will soon come to disturbing fruition when the children who can barely read, become adults who can't hold jobs because they insist on treating bosses and co workers as if they owe them something. The collapse of social security is inevitable and the generation of slackers and idiots whom we're counting on to pay for it all will be too busy trying to figure out how to get bigger televisions to care or to even fathom that their kids and grand kids will be far dumber than they are.

Pedophile! Pedophile!....man of God?

I was raised in the Roman Catholic church, and while in my youth I viewed it as simply parental obligation as I've grown older I've found solace in the church. Over the past decade or so, it's come to light that there have been some Catholic priest who've abused their position and sexually abused young children in the church. This is both reprehensible and inexcusable. What angers people far more than the fact that these things occurred is the fact that a good number of these things were covered up.
Has this been going on in the church for some time? Obviously it has as people who've survived this come forward all the time and tell their stories. Should we ignore these stories? If so it would be at our peril. Should we act as if these occurrences are the exclusive domain of the Roman Catholic church? We'd be stupid if we did. Every so often I turn on my television and hear of some small town preacher or a local one for that matter accused of taking sexual liberties with the youth of his church, but more often than not as they are not Catholic it rarely warrants the big press and follow up stories that it would get if the clergyman were a Catholic priest.
In the song "Ode to Billy Joe" a young man leaps off a bridge to his death because he's tortured by having been molested by a church elder. Literature and popular culture are smattered with stories of the young and naive being taken advantage of by some in positions of authority in the religious bodies to which they belonged. Is it justified? Of course it isn't.
In the midst of the Catholic sex scandal I grew weary of non Catholic holier than thou types saying disparaging things about ALL priest because of the actions of a few. In the time that I've spent in the Catholic church as a child and as an adult I've never been privy to ANY behavior from my priest which I'd consider inappropriate. I wager that most clergy regardless of their faith are honest men who have dedicated their lives to the practice of their faith.
Recently the head of a mega-church was accused of bribing young men (with church funds) into sexual relationships with him. Do I believe there is any truth to the allegations? Honestly I've not seen enough evidence one way or another to either assume he's guilty or innocent of the charges. If it is true I'm upset that a clergyman would do something so reprehensible while preaching God's word, but what truly bothers me is that the same people who would incinerate every Catholic priest on earth simply because of a few sick men are coming to the defense of the accused minister. I even heard Reverend Al Sharpton asking if we as a people should even scrutinize the "private lives" of our clergy. I found this a tad odious. Men of the cloth are supposedly carrying the mantle of God. When one is a standard bearer for his God he IS held to a considerably higher standard than some politician or public figure. There are those who would say that the Late Reverend Martin Luther King engaged in activities that were quite unbecoming a minister. I don't know if those allegations are true or not, but as Reverend King was attempting to get a good portion of America to give basic human dignity to another portion of it and he was NOT attempting to get donations to give to mistresses on some church payroll, comparing MLK to some of todays wanton clergy is like comparing apples and water mellons.

I won't openly attack someone else's faith, or what I perceive to be "cult of personality" ministries, but I have to say I have a hard time reconciling those who would lambast my faith (from which the MAJORITY of Christian religions are derived with the exception of Coptic, Greek & Eastern Orthodox) while acting as if somehow theirs exist in a vacuum. We live in a country that is supposed to be devoid of religious litmus tests, yet I guess that only applies if one belongs to the "right" religion.

EVERYBODY...but me.

If oft been told that as an American I live in "The Greatest country in the World". Despite not having the world's highest literacy rate, (That would be Japan) not living the longest (that would be where the Japanese barely edge out the Swedes). Perhaps it's the ratios of doctors per hundred thousand people? Well if it were we'd lose out to China big time. What makes the U.S. so great? Well, THEORETICALLY you can be born dirt poor in the U.S and become a wealthy man or woman through hard work. Most DON'T live out that Horatio Alger story, but in theory it's possible (given you kiss up to the right people or make the right "connections.")
Let's face it greatness is like "sexy" you simply are because you CHOOSE to be. America became a superstar in the 1940s and 50s simply because we weren't in either Europe OR Asia. World War Two saw massive bombing in Europe and Asia saw the infrastructure of countries utterly collapse. The U.S lost no factories so we helped friend and foe alike rebuild their economy while building our military. Translation we got rich and strong helping everyone else out.
Now the rest of the world is on equal footing with us and economically while we're still the big kid on the block we've competition from some of the kids we used to bully like Germany, Japan, China and India. We barely manufacture ANYTHING but we excel in ONE area...blaming EVERYONE for everything.
The great thing ABOUT being an American is simply that NOTHING which ever goes wrong is EVER your fault. Face it through out our illustrious history we've ALWAYS had convenient scapegoats for EVERYTHING! In the early days of this country it was the Native Americans, then the slaves, then the immigrants, then various religious groups, people of color, communist. We as Americans while we can no longer derive a sense of pride from having more missiles and thermonuclear devices than what WAS the Soviet Union can at least say we blame others for our problems MUCH better than anyone else in the entire world.
Blaming other countries for your woes may be xenophobic...but damn it, it's the American way. But why stop at that. The blame game works in practical everyday situations.

In real life if your kid's an idiot, why blame YOURSELF for not paying enough attention to his education or making him/her read when he/she was coming up? Do you pause and think that maybe you shouldn't have given him the electronics store that IS his room and should have encouraged him to pay closer attention in school? NO You blame his overworked underpaid teachers and every musician and television personality whom he or she listens to.
Don't blame yourself for never changing the oil in your car, blame whomever BUILT what your driving when your engine falls apart. Low wages are not the fault of either a society which tolerates them OR the cheap a-holes who pay them they are the fault of people who sneak into this country because the a-holes in THEIR countries pay even LESS!
If you're over weight it's not because you've never eaten any form of vegetation, it's the fault of fast food conglomerates for being on every corner. Never mind the fact that no one has ever been forced into a burger joint at gun point and force fed a metric ton of french fries or a quintuple decker bacon cheese burger. They ran commercials (which you also weren't forced to watch or respond to) which made you want to become a morbidly obese diabetic.
If you can't get a good job, blame someone from a foreign country or of another ethnic group because an imaginary or insignificant government quota gave THEM a job rather than you. So what if that person was considerably more educated and qualified than you. Everyone is to blame...but US!
In the greatest nation in the world NONE of your problems can POSSIBLY be YOUR FAULT! The key to success in ANY large organization is having a scapegoat and the TRULY great (like we Americans) are infallible.

Stupid...just plain stupid.

I've never had much faith in mankind. I'll be the first to admit that the human condition saddens me to some degree. It's one of those things in which there SHOULD be some degree of hope but sadly again and again it serves to disappoint. Ben Franklin once said "The only things we can be sure of are death and taxes." Well, I contend that our good friend and canabis smoking founding father forgot human stupidity. Let's face it, courts are FILLED with people who did something STUPID who are suing someone else rather than simply admit they were at fault and incredibly stupid. While I'll admit I can be a bit of a misanthrope I have my softer moments when I simply can no longer watch people doing stupid crap without at least TRYING to warn them. So here goes, a list of just plain stupid things one should avoid.

1. Smoking or playing with your cell phone at gas stations: Okay there are signs two feet high with bold red letters and little pictugraphs telling you that if you're smoking near gasoline fumes OR carrying a small electronic device which CAN create a spark you MIGHT burst into flames. IF you ignore this and turn into the human torch...don't look for an invisible girl, elastic guy or a dude made of brick, stop drop and roll and be prepared to be the dumbest multicelled organism in the burn center.

2. Picking a fight with ANYONE with the word KILL emblazoned on any part of his/her body OR on any article of clothing they're wearing: This is ESPECIALLY stupid if he or she towers over you and outweighs you by 100 pounds. There is a good chance he or she...might not be right in the head.

3. Busting yourself on Twitter/Facebook. You call in sick and catch the Astros and Dodgers playing a double header. You have a $7.00 hotdog and $10.00 nachos and take lots of pictures. You then post on FACEBOOK how you got out of work by pretending to hack up a lung then post PHOTOS of yourself AT the GAME getting a noogie for former President George Herbert Walker Bush. You return to work the following day and find yourself unemployed. Were you fired for lying to the boss? No FOR BEING STUPID!

4. Dissin either your job OR your boss/boss' family on FB/Twitter. Your boss' wife looks like some kind of walrus and if he had less hair and lost 100 pounds would vaguely resemble some sort of orangutan. And the spawn and byproduct of these two heinous looking people doing the humpty dance looks like a cross between pound puppies and swamp rats. These things are ALL true, but by posting them you're saying "Cram it with wallnuts ugly" (Yes I stole that from the Simpsons) and please fire me...cuz I'm a MOE-RAHN!

5. Attempting to get drugs OUT of a foreign country: Your trip to Holland,Turkey, Thailand or Usukistan was GREAT! You met lots of Fantastic people and smoked something the name of which you couldn't pronounce. MAN! YOU GOTTA BRING SOME OF THIS HOME! No you don't you imbecile that's called smuggling and the penalties for it range from country to country. Most of the time it results in a lengthy prison sentence and in some places like Singapore it's an automatic DEATH (as in rubbin' your ass out) sentence. Even if drugs ARE legal, chances are leaving the country in question with ced narcotic is ALWAYS considered SMUGGLING and is as stupid as it is illegal.


6. ANY sexual activity which involves a member of the animal kingdom: Okay rather its gerbil play, making a SHEEP squeal like a pig or letting a dog lick peanut butter off your junk. Okay, spend a split second to ponder the BRILLIANCE of giving something with claws, pointy teeth and a strong jaw access to your genitals. Unless it's a 40ish divorcee named Sylvia...abort!

7. Imitating ANYTHING you've ever seen on Max-X or JackAss: Johnny Knoxville and Stevo should be coated in gasoline soaked rags and fired from a cannon into an active volcano and if you're compelled to set youself ablaze and jump into a pool because you saw THEM do it then you should wrap a flanksteak around your testicles and go play with a tiger.

8. Answer "Oh definitely" when any woman ask if another woman is prettier than she is or if she looks "fat.": It's just a good way to die.

9. Texting while driving past a police station: Run into a cop car you'll have a story you'll be able to tell your GRANDCHILDREN!

10. Tell your significant other about your affair: Yeah. You cheated on your wife only YOU and the homeless chick you picked up while volunteering at the soup kitchen and brought to that Sleazy Motel know about it...but the guilt won't let sleep so tell her to ease your conscience. Now you can sleeep...WITH ONE EYE OPEN FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE! Yeah you made yourself feel better by making another person feel worse and that is just plain stupid. What's worse is that there will be repercussions. No who are we kidding, women are known for letting things go and not making a big deal of things right? They never bring up stuff you did in 1974 which they told you they'd forgiven.

Okay stupidity is part of human nature and always will be. Ultimately we can't stop it but we can collectively appreciate it's entertainment value.