Official Application for Republican Vice Presidential Candidates

Name: _________________________________________________

Date of birth: _____________

Date your political ambition died: ___________________

Race (skip if already white):
__ Black (please turn over and describe how you are non-threatening)
__ Mexican (include copy of birth certificate/green card/audio clip proving you don’t over-annunciate Spanish words when speaking English)
__ Oriental (please turn over and translate this phrase into Chinese: “Can we borrow a trillion dollars, comrade?”)
__ Arab (stay where you are and don’t move, dirtbag)
__ Indian (hi, Bobby!)

Gender
__ Male
__ Female (please attach photo, preferably in bikini or sexy librarian attire)

Age group:
__ 35-45
__ 46-59
__ LX-LXXXIX

Religion:
__ Christian

Marital status:
__ Single (notorious womanizer)
__ Single (notorious wide stancer)
__ Married (will your spouse hug you in public without monetary incentives Y/N)
__ Divorced (will your former spouse be revealing embarrassing sexual preferences in a forthcoming memoir Y/N)

Have you served in the military?
__ Hoo-ah!
__ No, but I’ve played Call of Duty
__ No, but I have no problem sending soldiers to die to keep gas under five bucks a gallon

How would you best describe your brand of conservatism? (Check one)
__ Profit-driven fiscal conservative
__ Prophet-driven social conservative
__ Jingoistic
__ Dittohead-istic
__ 50 shades of white male patriarchy
__ Tinfoil-wrapped
__ Overcompensating for some personal shit you really don’t want to know about
__ 100% pure batshit crazy

How are you qualified to serve as Vice President?
__ Was once told to go fuck myself by Dick Cheney
__ Have watched every episode of Veep twice
__ Can spell “potato”
__ An expert at speaking only when spoken to 

__ Always indicted, never convicted

__ Facebook friends with Koch Brothers

__ Could hit Russia from my house with one of the rocks from my head
__ Is this a trick question?

How would you be willing to serve this administration? (Check all that apply)
__ Sounding board
__ Dartboard
__ Scapegoat
__ Lap dog
__ Lap warmer
__ Whipping boy
__ Punching bag
__ Fall guy
__ Alibi
__ Food tester
__ Drinking buddy
__ Wife-swapper 

__ Body remover
__ Mouthpiece for the president (rhetorical)
__ Mouthpiece for the president (sexual)
__ Making the president look smart by comparison
__ Making the president look attractive by comparison
__ Securing votes of Christians who would normally chase Mormons with pitchforks
__ Securing votes of conservatives who wear American-flag zubaz pants 

__ Being a comforting presence at funerals for B-list heads of state
__ Being a vital member of the president’s cabinet because of ability to make really great sandwiches
__ Sorting President’s Daily Briefs by appearance of words “imminent,” “dire,” “swarthy,” “disastrous for re-election chances,” and “GO BOOM!”
__ Harvesting souls for our Dark Lord
__ Future source of presidential pardon

The president has just been incapacitated, possibly as the first stage of a major terrorist plot. What do you do first? 

__ Shit my pants
__ Cream my jeans
__ Ask to see the president and then poke him with a stick to make sure
__ Spike the nuclear football and do a touchdown dance before attacking Iran
__ Appear on television and reassure the American people that I am in control and fully capable of handling this crisis, all while maintaining a straight face
__ Use the event as a pretext to invade Canada and finish what we started in 1812
__ Put my feet on the Oval Office desk, light a cigar, and ask who’s the worthless, unqualified, moronic afterthought now?
__Start prepping for my impeachment

Do you have any of the following liabilities?
__ Desire to voice your opinion
__ Desire to be taken seriously
__ Use racial slurs as terms of endearment with friends who are minorities
__ Use racial slurs as terms of derision with anyone who is a minority 

__ Believe that military action is a last resort
__ Refuse to take money from lobbyists
__ Refuse to stop spending lobbyist money at sex clubs.
__ Become uncontrollably hungry when handed babies
__ Would be tempted to take advantage of gay marriage if it became legal 

__ Cannot account for all pictures of your junk

__ Enjoy hunting humans for sport

__ Think there could be something to this global warming thing
__ Unable to speak in public without a dose of “confidence juice” from pocket flask
__ Unable to speak in public without providing material for opening bit on Saturday Night Live
__ Have been known to show compassion toward the poor, the unemployed, the employed, women, minorities, immigrants, the sick, the middle class, Wal-Mart greeters, journalists not from News Corp, the gays, and Europeans

Please describe in no more than 50 words how you plan to occupy the ideal vice presidential space between “political albatross” and “makes a strong case for assassinating the president.”

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

I hereby swear that I have answered the preceding questions truthfully and honestly, unless the presidential candidate wants me to change any of the responses. (Sign or make mark)

_____________________________________

Top Ten Wednesdays: What are we telling graduates during our commencement speeches?

10) As you enter the workforce, don’t even think of gunning for our jobs. We’ll fucking cut you.

9) The qualities that make you the best and brightest minds of your generation will also make you the most delicious and attractive brains during a zombie apocalypse.

8) Don’t think of it as a student loan. Think of it as a career mortgage. Or, for those of you in the humanities, a bar tab.

7) In these uncertain times, many of you may have to move back home with your parents. Take a word of advice that your dorm roommates should have already given: you don’t masturbate as quietly as you think you do.

6) Hard work, a positive attitude, and a commitment to honesty are no match for really juicy blackmail.

5) Thank you for joining us for this VirtualGraduation for the University of Phoenix. If you don’t receive your diplomas at the end of this Webcast, please check your spam folders.

4) When that old roommate that you haven’t talked to since graduation is on the news because the company he founded, based on that idea you guys had at three in the morning that you both agreed would never work, just got bought out by Google, resist the urge to kill yourself.

3) If your band didn’t suck, you would be on tour instead of here.

2) Here are the things that scream, “Don’t hire me!” in order of increasing unemployableness: real mustache, irony mustache, mullet, wife-beater, face tattoos, any clothing tight enough to reveal genital piercings, any mention of your number of Twitter followers, a poetry degree, a visible parasitic twin.

1) With your lives in front of you, it seems like there are a million possibilities. Try lowering that estimate to three, maybe five, tops.

Friday Random 11

It’s one more random than 10!

So fish has decided to cut bait on blogging. It is the end of an era, one full of LOLCAT poetry, homoerotic Tom Brady fan fiction, frothing rage at our Coke/Pepsi political system, puns for the whole family, and science. To commemorate his retirement and thank him for his services, we got him a gold watch. He immediately said he had a bus to catch.

It is a shame to see fish go, and to hear others in our little group talking about closing shop. I certainly don’t blog with the same frequency (or entertainment value) that I did in my heyday, when I toured Japanese and European blogs, developed an addiction to comments, and began writing a concept blog about black holes being the glory holes of the gods.

I thought about pulling the plug, but I’d miss it too much. Because what would I do if my wife handed me a Yankee Candle coupon for man candles, with the suggestion that one should be called Testicle Cheese (she’s speaking hypothetically, not from experience, by the way), and I had no blog with which to crap ou-…er, produce two dozen other prospective scents. I have other things vying for my attention and creative energy these days, but I have too many good comments, occasionally funny ideas, and dick jokes to stop now.

Plus, what would I do on Friday afternoons?

1) “Handsome Devil,” The Smiths. This won’t be news to those of you who saw what happened to me on Facebook, but as Jennifer suggested, what I’m about to share demanded cross-posting.

My friend Tom is a Philly sports fan. I am of course a Chicago fan. Over the years, we have had bets when our respective teams meet. This year, the eight-seeded Philly 76ers squared off against the Chicago Bulls in round one of the playoffs. The Bulls were heavily favored, and in the last 30-ish years, an eight has beaten a one seed only three times. So we made a bet: if Philly won, I’d have to wear an NBA jersey of Tom’s choice and make a picture of me wearing it my Facebook profile pic for the remainder of the playoffs. He’d do the same if Philly got swept.

I made this bet before Bulls guard Derrick Rose, by far their best player, blew out his ACL in the waning minutes of the first game. The Bulls won, but it was as bad of an omen as wearing a black cat as a thong. The Bulls went on to lose 4-2. A couple of days later, I received a package. I opened it up and saw white and pink. A women’s jersey. Funny, but no big deal to a man of my gender enlightenment. Except it was a girl’s large. I couldn’t even get it past my neck. After some cutting, I managed to squeeze into it, and this is now what I look like on the hottest stock on the Internet. WARNING: I am about 75 pounds and at least two cup sizes over the maximum inflation pressure for this garment. Some things you can’t unsee.

2) “Madness of an Architect,” High on Fire. Why is it that men insist on humiliating their friends? I don’t think women do that. They may undermine, betray, lie, and give their friends a complex, but they don’t seem as hell bent on making their friends look like a medical glove filled with 50 pounds of custard. Keep in mind, while I was not happy about what I had to wear, I gave Tom a tip of my cap at the creativity behind it and only wish I’d thought of it first.

3) “Gold Guns Girls,” Metric. Also known as the Ron Paul platform.

4) “Private Universe,” Crowded House. I am writing a novel in earnest again. After celebrating the completion of my first-ever novel last spring, I promptly stuck it in the virtual drawer of my hard drive because the main character was all wrong. Two years of isolation, sitting by myself, pounding on a keyboard, only to realize what I was writing wasn’t nearly as good as what I thought. So why not do it again? That sounds perfectly sane, right? Still, I had a very good idea for anpther book. An idea so good, it took nine months of writing to realize what I was doing wrong and figure out how to do it right. This is why writers drink. At the same time, I have dreams of sitting across from Jon Stewart, hearing him talk about my book and realize he actually read at least the first two chapters for reals.

5) “Girl,” Tori Amos. There was a funny joke about Tori Amos and writing in a journal on HBO’s “Girls”—incidentally, I think my book is going to be somewhere between that show and “Veep” in tone. I laughed, but then I realized that it’s probably time to retire Tori Amos jokes. There’s just a point when you have to get new material. Although doing a Butt-Head laugh and saying, “Huh-huh, you said ‘pole’” will never be unfunny for me.

6) “Southern Man,” Neil Young. Forty years later and this song still cuts. I want to stand outside a state courthouse with a boombox over my head blasting this song whenever some dillweed discusses flying the Stars and Bars over a capital building as an homage to Southern heritage. Why not just cut to the chase and hang a noose from the flagpole?

7) “A Chicken With Its Head Cut Off,” The Magnetic Fields. There are plenty of songs about penises in the rock catalog. But how many penis allegories are there?

8) “My Sister,” The Juliana Hatfield Three. Speaking of HBO’s “Girls,” this song always reminds me of when I got out of school and moved to New York. I was lucky and found a job in three weeks. None of this LinkedIn or internship stuff. I just got married to TLB (who already had a job in NYC) and figured I’d find work like the good, naïve, Midwestern hayseed I was. And only someone that dumb would get that lucky. Now there’s no way I’d even relocate to another part of town without an intensive Yelp review vetting of local restaurants. Anyway, we lived in Jersey for the first few months, and I made mixtapes to get me through the commute. I loved cranking this when I was heading home on a Friday.

9) “Subterranean Lovesick Alien,” Radiohead. I’m not sure, but OK Computer may have been the first album I bought because of Pitchfork, back when they could be infuriatingly entertaining instead of infuriatingly boring.

10) “Marry Me,” Drive-By Truckers. TLB and I are approaching eighteen years of matrimonial bliss this month. Yeah, I know, barf, but it’s true. I don’t know the secrets to a successful marriage, because we’re all snowflakes and one person’s Love Potion No. 9 (the magical potion) is another person’s Love Potion No. 9 (the Sandra Bullock movie, which is like having an outbreak of herpes while in divorce court). But there are two things that I think have to be in a marriage for it to work for men. First, you have to want to sleep with your wife. The older I get, the more I’m amazed at how many married men I’ve met who treat their wives’ hoo-hahs like a Christmas stocking that only gets filled once a year. Second, you have to want to talk with your wife. Imagine being on a date, talking with someone who makes you want to look up scores on your phone or shove a breadknife through your ear and not stop until you pull it out the other side. Now imagine seeing that person at happy hour for the rest of your life. It also helps if they buy you a new TV when they sell a book, but that’s not a requirement.

11) “Call Me,” Blondie. Another song introduced to me by Chipmunk Punk. You haven’t lived until you’ve heard Alvin singing about calling a male prostitute. Bet Dave didn’t see that one coming.

Have a good weekend.

Top Ten Wednesdays: What man-candle scents are we buying?

Special extra manly Yankee Candle aromas edition!

25) Masturbation Weekend

24) AXEcentuate

23) Mancave Musk

22) Trophy Wife

21) I Change My Own Oil

20) Apron Strings

19) Dutch Oven

18) Lamborghini Leather

17) Is That Your Feet?

16) She Left This When She Left Me

15) Butter Shave

14) Laundry Pile

13) It’s Saturday Night, Honey

12) Smell You Later

11) Videogame Chair

10) Skinny Jeans

9) Zubaz Pants

8) Late-Night Burrito

7) Light Until the Viagra Kicks In

6) We’ve Got Wood for Paneling

5) Mountain Dew

4) Oh Shit, My Parents Are Back

3) Corner Bar

2) Testicle Cheese

1) Single, Thin, and Neat

Friday Random 11

It’s one more random than 10!

I really need to do this more than once a month.

1) “Ten Crack Commandments,” Notorious B.I.G. I watched some of the Biggie Behind the Music on VH1 the other night. First, as someone who remembers when VH1 was the place to be if you wanted to see Peter Cetera’s “Glory of Love” video on the hour every hour (100% guaranteed to make your testicles recede or your money back), it’s weird to see that channel chronicling the greatest East Coast-West Coast rap beef of all time. Second, I was riveted because I came in just before Biggie got shot. I know exactly what happens. I'm not even a big Biggie fan. And yet I had to stay tuned in so I could watch accounts of how people knew it was coming and how there’s a little Biggie in all of us (although thankfully not the same way there could be a little Uter in all of us). In fact, Behind the Music is my crack, which I guess makes VH1 Biggie in this scenario. Thank God there’s no Behind the Music channel because I would be unemployed and watching reruns of Milli (or is it Vanilli?) tearfully saying how hard it is to have one’s lip-synching mocked.  Bonus video: So much depends/on Adrien Brody/making poets facepalm/beneath a hipster hat/beside the white faculty members.

2) “My Old Cars,” Chris Knight. A few weeks ago, I had the starter in my old car replaced, to the tune of "Better Than a Car Payment (But Not By Much)." The other day I went out to start it and it wouldn’t turn over. I immediately launched into a rant combining outraged consumerism and conspiracy theory (“Those fuckers probably didn’t even replace the starter, because they know I won’t know the difference, the fuckers!”) Jumping the car didn’t help, so I had to tow it out of my driveway, which felt especially embarrassing, like my mechanical ineptitude is being judged by my neighbors instead of random strangers passing me along the side of the road or parking lot. However, I felt a strong possibility that the “new” starter was faulty, which meant it was under warranty, which meant it would get replaced for free AND the shop would have to pay for the tow. I still don’t know why that filled me with such glee, but that’s why they are called feelings and not thinkings. Sure enough, it was not the starter. It was that the gear shift, while in park, was not registering it was in park. What fixed this complex mechanical problem? A little wiggling of the stick (which gets my gearbox out of park—hey-oh!). So I paid $110 to have a mechanic make me feel like a schmuck, and we didn’t even get to discuss my subconscious issues with my father. I hate cars. Love Chris Knight, though, that guy's got a voice more lived in than a VW van that's been parked at a campground for 20 years.

3) “Over and Over,” Neil Young & Crazy Horse. Possibly the only video where a band member is wearing zubaz, There should be a music festival for “and” bands. It could be called Amperbandstand and feature The News, Crazy Horse, The Gang, The Revolution, The (other) Heartbreakers, and a collaboration between Oates & Rakim on a mash-up "You've Lost That Loving Feeling/Paid in Full" that would musically encapsulate the feeling of watching rap documentaries on VH1.

4) “I Want to Know What Love Is,” Foreigner. This is what you sing after being “Hot Blooded” and a “Dirty White Boy” leaves you with herpes. I take this woman to be my wife, for better or for worse, during good times and lip sores.

5) “The Hardest Button to Button,” The White Stripes. I had to work at my company's office this week, which meant wearing pants and a shirt that had buttons, which meant having to button my shirt cuffs. Despite having to do this for more than 20 years, I am like a man with lobster claws whenever I try to button my cuffs. I always tell myself afterward that I should button the cuffs before I put the shirt on, yet always forget to do that, then feel too lazy to actually remove the shirt, instead spending five minutes swearing and wondering why I didn’t pack a polo shirt.

6) “Seven,” Sunny Day Real Estate. A little emo fits my post-Chicago-Bulls-collapse mood. I know it is extremely dumb to get emotionally attached to sports (“but they’re our overpaid millionaires!”), but again, feelings vs. thinkings. I was really crushed by the Bulls getting bounced in the first-round of the playoffs and the knee injury to Derrick Rose. As the game finished last night, I stood in my living room, like I’d just watched the death of a president. I was less upset at hearing JP Morgan's CEO saying that there needs to be less oversight in the banking industry so that banks are free to ignore divisions that have the potential to lose billions of dollars. So, yes, I am definitely part of what is wrong with this country.

7) “The World Has Turned and Left Me Here,” Weezer. It won’t be long before Weezer’s debut gets a 20th anniversary release, which will make me feel even older than seeing Chandler wearing a sweater vest with a banded collar shirt on Friends reruns.

8) “Short Bursts,” We Were Promised Jetpacks. iTunes is apparently upset today, too, and wants to just write in its journal while having a good cry before making a mixtape that SHE will never hear because she’s into HIM now.

9) “Blood on the Motorway,” DJ Shadow. This reminds me of a discussion I had with a friend of mine about Spotify. I am not currently using Spotify. My friend asked me why. I had no real answer—why wouldn’t an obsessive music nerd like myself want to be able to stream ANYTHING straight to my ears? The answer I gave was that I was “old school” and liked to own my music, even though I buy most of my annual music purchases in the form of MP3s. It’s like I can sort of embrace the changing format of music delivery, but can’t let go of past behavior. I need that bridge to the way I've always done things. DJ Shadow was like that for me. He was the first artist I ever bought from a genre that would have “-hop” in it, but he is also very proggy in his construction, especially with this nine-minute epic that features some lighters-in-the-air-at-the-state-fair vocals from someone who is most definitely Caucasian and likely wearing leather pants while sporting feathered hair. So the short answer to why I don’t use Spotify is that I am a wildly inconsistent individual who occasionally displays more nostalgia than a Republican whose concept of family values is Leave It To Beaver because, dag gum it, that's how things were when he was growing up. Unrelated: OH FACK, THIS SONG IS FACKING AMAZING.

10) “If You Leave,” Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. My GOP-level love of the 80s (i.e. Reagan is the greatest president evah because he ended the Cold War with three jellybeans and a half-tube of Brylcreem) also makes me like this song more than it probably merits. At the same time, grooving to this makes it impossible to feel more a level of masculinity higher than "Duckie." I guarantee he wouldn’t have attacked James Spader if this had been playing. Or he would have tickled him instead of throwing a punch.

11) “Love for Long,” Jenny Owen Youngs. I’m not one of those music cobags who needs to like bands no one ever heard of. I will gladly sing “Tom Sawyer” with 10,000 other nerds while air drumming after the guitar solo. If I like something, I don’t care if a billion other people do, too. At the same time, I love running into something under the radar, the unexpected discovery of an album I wind up playing to death. That’s what happened when I happened upon An Unwavering Band of Light from Jenny Owen Youngs. I was browsing around eMusic, engaged in my monthly bargain hunting, and wound up giving this a listen. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard this before—it’s so catchy that it feels like it should be enormous, but good enormous where the collective music intelligence of America rallies around something that is actually good (as opposed to, say, Coldplay). On first listen, I thought this was a little KT Tunstall—which is not bad but not exactly earth shattering. But after a few listens, I noticed that Jenny Owen Youngs sneaks in a lot of black humor into her songs. Even this ostensibly pretty ditty is an ode to a pair of lovers fleeing a murder. It’s good stuff that I never would have found without a lot of curiosity, a little time, and an Internet connection. Sounds like I need to take off the headphones, toss the cassettes aside, and get my ass on Spotify.

Bonus: "Travelin' Band," Creedence Clearwater Revival. This is a great way to head into the weekend in May. I can practically feel the ice cold beer in my hand.

Have a great weekend!

Top Ten Tuesdays: Why are we still blogging?

10) For all the chicks. 

9) Do not get nearly the same level of positive feedback when we post dick jokes in company e-mails.

8) Just when we think we’re finished with cute pictures of cats with humorously misspelled captions, they pull us back in.

7) Fucking novel refuses to write itself.

6)  Comments from virtual friends is a nice change of pace from comments from our imaginary friends.

5) Get much more satisfaction out of writing 1,000 words about how a combination of poor barista service, a parking ticket, a block of Cure songs on Spotify, and a bad sexual experience have made us completely miserable today instead of just posting a picture of a sad clown to Tumblr.

4) Still hoping to take our unpaid talents to the Huffington Post some day.

3) When we said until death us do part, we meant it, and Blogger won't fucking die. 

2) Keyboard still helps us reach that seven-year creative itch. 

1) We’re still blogging?