It's easy to be jaded these days. I've got to admit that (so far) I find that having a Nazi Pope is more amusing than alarming. I pity the Enquirer - they are getting squeezed between the truth bending of FoxNews on one side and the comedy of The Onion on the other. The recent Enquirer headline "Terrorists Hijack U.F.O." is a truly inspired piece of comedy more worthy of The Daly Show. Signs of the end of the American Empire seem to be all around us, but you can only say "Orwellian" and "It can't possibly get any worse" so many times before it starts to lose it's impact. Yet, on a recent road trip I came across a couple of especially awful things.

I was in Vegas for the first time, hanging out with an old friend. Vegas was as you'd expect - nothing more, nothing less. In fact it was kind of nice to see that tits, gambling and magic, after all these thousands of years, are still the biggest draws. What shocked me so much was that my friend, who has children, told me that the Cookie Monster has changed. Cookies are now a "sometimes treat". This has got to be the stupidest moment in T.V. since The Fonz got his library card. And the worst part (as happened with the Fonz's library card) is that it'll probably actually work! Fat little children everywhere are going to shed pounds because the cookie monster eats bananas. Good fucking grief. I've got an idea, what if we banned handguns so that kids could go the playground and get some exercise without getting capped in the ass? Let's call that plan B if the whole healthy Cookie Monster thing falls through.
Okay, part two. I was visiting a friend in NYC who has a pre-teen daughter. The daughter had a collection of those rubber "Livestrong" cancer bracelets that Lance Armstrong started wearing and selling in last year's Tour du France. Only the ones she had were knock off "Awareness Bracelets". The one I picked up, (and eventually begged my friend to let me keep) is purple and says "SPIRITUALITY". This really is pure evil.

"I'm spiritual! I'm so spiritual that I wear this bracelet. It speaks to my level of spirituality visa-vi other people (read: more spiritual). It highlights that Spirituality can be quantified and measured and that I have more than enough of it to warrant this purple bracelet. Kind of like a black belt of spirituality. Also, fuck cancer research. No money made from this bracelet goes to a disease or cause, (but does cash in on the good will that those crappy rubber status symbols strive to achieve). So to recap: I'm very very spiritual (probably more than you), and fuck cancer research"

It used to be so easy to draw attention to shocking crass American crap, throw in a couple of big words ("verisimilitude" would work) and "poof" you've got yourself a masters thesis or book of short essays or god bless you, both. Heck, in the eighties you could take one trip to Disneyland and you had a years worth of inspiration right there. But you can't step in the Epcot Center's fountain twice, and moments of truly original depravity are hard to come by anymore.