I was walking. Toward what, I don't know, but I didn't think I was going the right way. I skeptically walked toward this thicket of birch trees, when suddenly a raven swept down to my right and landed in mid air — as though it were standing on some kind of invisible plane. It had a chestnut, its shell intact, in its mouth. It bit down hard, and the nut shattered into fine crumbs. As the crumbs settled on the invisible plane, they formed the shape of a bird's foot, with the back talon pointing forward.

The raven took a few pecks at the crumbs and then flew in the direction the talon was pointing. When I turned back to the trees, they were all dead, grouped together and slanted away from me, forming a steep walkway. The raven landed facing away from me on a stump at the high edge. I walked and climbed toward it. When I was close enough, I reached out to touch its back, but it fell to the side, dead, and its cloudy eyes stared at me.

I looked up, and there was a leafy canopy with a few very thin weeping willow tendrils hanging down. I grabbed one to test its strength, as I often did when I was a child, and surprisingly, it was strong enough to support me. I climbed up just a few inches, twirling in front of the dead raven when its eyes switched on, soft like dim light bulbs.

Odin's voice spoke through the dead raven — not through its mouth, but vibrating through the corpse. He condemned me to live the lifetime of a bird. I didn't know the reason I was being condemned, but I thought of saṃsāra. I closed my eyes and nodded in acceptance, then woke up.

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Hello nuTang and all of its inhabitants. Congratulations for surviving the harsh seasonal storms on the Island of Ishbu. This is what I've been up to in the past three years:

• Wrote a collection of poetry for my senior thesis
• Graduated university with a 3.785 GPA and a B.A. in English
• Worked for nine months as a busboy at an Italian restaurant, promoted briefly to runner and then waiter
• Released an EP called Helicobbler
• Secured a job as a copyeditor at an NYC ad agency
• Moved to an apartment in Sunnyside, Queens, NYC
• Released a full-length album called Impaled Peach

I want to say that I'll be more active on here and keep up with people's blogs, but there's a very good chance I won't! But I'll look around at people's blogs a bit.

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So "intellectually disabled" people everywhere are up in arms about Ben Stiller's new movie, Tropic Thunder.

I saw the film yesterday. It was incredibly vulgar, gory, awkward, and repulsive in many ways, so much so that even a self-proclaimed desensitized person like myself felt uncomfortable during some scenes. It exploits these moral sensitivities to strengthen its satire and larger moral lesson. Literature of the Restoration period and early 18th century, of which I've read much this summer, uses the same tactics toward the same goals. Jonathan Swift's fantastical satire Gulliver's Travels, Delarivier Manley's thinly-veiled royal exposé The New Atlantis, and Daniel Defoe's immoral criminal account Moll Flanders are just three examples of the long tradition of shocking social commentary. While it's somewhat upsetting that culture still suffers from much of the same obvious flaws of the 17th and 18th centuries, it's equally troubling that certain groups still so frequently miss the point of satire and misinterpret criticisms as the views of the authors.

So when the headline news tells me that disability groups are boycotting and even protesting Ben Stiller's film for demeaning "retards," my Facepalm Advisory System is heightened to orange: "High Risk of Facepalm Devastation."


There's not much of an argument to make here; Ben Stiller is clearly mocking the notion that taking half-retarded roles will win you an Oscar, not poking fun at retards just to aggravate and alienate a group of people. If you're too intellectually challenged to discern this sort of thing, then of course Tropic Thunder probably isn't your box of wine. What I find more ridiculous, though, is the idea of making the "R" word taboo.

The "N" word was used to objectify black slaves. The main logical reason why the word is offensive now is because it no longer served a purpose after slavery was abolished; no purpose other than to open old wounds, to objectify black people in a demeaning way, or as an attempt to instill the arbitrary racial hierarchies that were proven incorrect and offensive.

Treating words like "retard" or "midget" in the same way is ludicrous because they are words with a singular, practical meaning. They are words, like any others, with roots and suffixes that invariably describe what they mean. Furthermore, replacing them with words like "handicapped" and "dwarf" solves nothing, because they, like their predecessors, are susceptible to the same negative connotations that the banned words accrued. "Fat" and "obese" mean the same thing; likewise, they share the same risk of developing negative connotations.

Why didn't the anti-intellectualism of the first half of the 20th century lead to the banning of the word "intellectual," or the "I" word? Probably because intelligent people realize that despite their smart-aleckism, they still have good qualities regardless of what anyone says about them. Like midgets and fat people, retarded individuals also possess good qualities (although deductive reasoning is clearly not their strength). So what's next, douchebags upset over people using the "D" word? Assholes and the "A" word?

Words don't offend people; well, they do, but it's the people's fault. I still want to say "Words don't offend people, people offend people," though.

Then again, a satire that doesn't offend anyone is a failed satire. Tropic Thunder is, to those who can understand and appreciate the lampoons, a certain achievement of contemporary culture. It proves, along with other recent films like WALL-E, that it's still possible for non-documentaries to make an argument. Literature can be used for much more than simple entertainment; culture is about more than just enjoyment; and Ben Stiller is the Jonathan Swift of our time.

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Let me tell you about chocolate. Chocolate rests atop the peak of human achievement, next to blow-darts, confetti, and snow because it's cold up there. But it's not cold enough for the chocolate to stay solid in your hand. It never is. Every time I hold a chocolate bar, it melts all up ins. This is due to the low melting point of mercury, which, we often forget, is a chief constituent of chocolate.

Chocolate is also made of beans, which puts it in the same category as tofu, burritos, and beanbag chairs. Only one of those is inedible (tofu). Beans were previously used as currency by the Anglo-Saxon tribes, which later they converted into chocolate, then chocolate bars, then gold-wrapped chocolate coins, and then, of course, gold coins. The rest is history. But where did the chocolate go, you ask?

Keen/Quing Pat, the only transgendered monarch in England's otherwise anatomically-correct history, ordered that all chocolate be dispatched from English shores after having caused The Black Death (a.k.a. Death by Chocolate). It also caused Communism, the Holocaust, and the Vietnam War, during which American troops sought cocoa in the dangerous jungles of a mysterious, nameless, forgotten land.

But hooah! they found it! And now, every year, millions chocolate bunnies fall victim to senseless hoarding, brutality, and, ultimately, slaughter at the ravenous, jagged teeth of the babies those very soldiers tried so hard to kill.

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To celebrate Cinco de Mayo, I figured I'd criticize a segment of the Mexican food industry. Taco Bell has no idea what it's doing. With its uncompromising marketing ploys, Taco Bell is soiling what I assume are thousands of years of Mexican cultural history.

The taquito is a mainstay of Mexican cuisine. Usually bagged and frozen to be sold in bulk at supermarkets, the taquito represents true Mexican entrepreneurship. These small, greasy, but crunchy delights are yet another repackaging of the tried and true Mexican recipe: beef and tortilla. Taquitos naturally fall under the Taco phylum of the Mexican culinary taxonomy, featuring meat contained within a hard tortilla shell (albeit rolled tight like a Cuban cigar and not left open like a border gate).



So where did Taco Bell go wrong? A relatively recent special item of theirs was the so called "taquito" combo, in which two small burritos were marketed under the name of the famous, traditional Mexican food item.



What's wrong, Taco Bell? Ordered too many burritos from your sweatshops and had trouble selling them all? Taco Bell's theft of the "taquito" name for their greedy purposes is a testament to the damage that capitalism inflicts on tradition, honor, and decency. Even worse is the fact that uneducated consumer whores now think that what Taco Bell sold were actually taquitos, when in reality they were nothing more than miniature burritos. Based on my educated understanding of the Mexican language, if a taquito is a miniature taco, then these can only be dubbed "burrito-itos." The resemblance is unmistakable:



Taco Bell, I demand that you remove this fraudulent product from your menu, or face the facts and rename it the "burrito-ito."

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