In other news:

Did any of you hear about that guy who, while diving in Australia, was stung by a tiny jellyfish no bigger than a peanut and was rushed to intensive care?  He was wearing a special wetsuit meant to keep the skin from contact with the venomous jellyfish known to be abundant during Australian summers.  The suits cover everything but the head, feet and hands.  So this dude dives into the water face-first, right into the most venemous jellyfish alive.  Seriously.  This is the stuff that would happen to me.

I have noticed a real uptick in the number of people finding supposed holy images.  Is it because we’re getting closer to Christmas and people are feeling more and more fucking crazy?  I don’t know.  Some people found an egg with a cross in it and I don’t know what the hell kind of egg that is, but there is more wrong with it than he fact that it has a cross on it.  What is it all yellow and shriveled?  They claim it is a message from God and I’m here to tell you that’s God’s message is DO NOT EAT THAT ROTTEN EGG. Then some lady found a Virgin Mary on her pancake.  I also heard someone found Jesus on her iron. Here are some other places people have claimed to see Jesus (I promise you, I did not make these up): marmite lid, a cheeto, Kit Kat, toilet seat, car window, curtain, burger grease and a dog’s ass.

To finish up, some jackass in prison shoved a weapon – a shiv – into his ass.  After a few weeks it started to chafe and I guess he couldn’t take it anymore so he told the guards and it had to be surgically removed.

I’m categorizing this post in WTHHI1950 (Would This Have Happened In 1950) because I want to know what you think – in 1950 would we have heard stories about finding Jesus in a toilet or some inmate concealing a shiv in his ass for three weeks?  Hit me with your thoughts on this.

Iran is in shambles. The people want freedom! And what do they get? 16 men with beards sitting around a conference table talking about God’s will and how Ahmadinejad won that election fair and square, especially if fair and square means we totally cheated and rigged that shit. Then anarchy. The people are angry and then they’re getting shot through the heart on the street by governmental gun-toting assholes with no self-control, but wait a minute! Now those 16 clerics are blaming the CIA, because the CIA wants Iran to fail and we’re bad and they’re going to have to teach everyone a lesson and eventually they’ll probably nuke themselves because if the 16 clerics can’t have Iran, no one can! What the hell? I want to cuddle those Iranians to my bosom and tell them it’s going to be okay. I want to feed them cookies and put them to bed knowing that they’ll be safe tomorrow. But no, instead they get beaten and hacked with an ax in the streets and the rest of the world watches via twitter and you tube. I know that the US has a lot of fucked up shit going on from time to time, and I get angry and I want to break out every few months, but I am really, truly and profoundly grateful to live in a country where I can speak my mind and say that President Obama is being a real dick about DOMA and other gay issues and, also, got an ugly dog.  There.  I said it.  I don’t think that dog is cute.

So then Michael Jackson up and dies on us and I’m not sure what to believe with all these breaking developments coming out.  He died, or did he just go into a coma?  No, he’s dead.  But wait, maybe he’s just hiking the Appalachian Trail?  No, he’s dead now, officially dead.  But what about the children?  And did he overdose or was it anorexia?  Why is Joseph Jackson pimping his new record company at the BET awards when his son just died of a overdheartattorexia?  Look, now we hear that he’s not the real father of any of those kids and Debbie Rowe, the mother, isn’t really the biological mother.  And maybe the real father is Michael’s dermatologist?  What the hell?  And now we hear he’s never actually legally adopted them so whose kids are they, really?  This is not even to mention any of the weird shit Michael Jackson did in this thing we call his life.  Does anyone know what the hell MJ was up to, ever?  It’s like a fucking puzzle, those big ones with a thousand pieces but worse, some of them are ripped in half and partially gnawed in the edges but you still need to put it all together to make sense of any of this.  Worse yet, no one has heard a peep from Ja Rule.  It’s ugly and fascinating all at once, like, well, Michael Jackson.  Then Lisa Marie Presley is blogging about their real but unconventional marriage and spilling secrets and it has me thinking about my life, my marriage which is also unusual but not a sham, and I realize one simple truth in all of this:  I must outlive Janie because I can’t have her ruining my reputation with the truth when I die.

God bless Michael Jackson, I guess, if there is such a thing.  That man was a walking tragedy and, let us not forget, a pedophile.  While Dave Chappelle would have us believe that letting kids spend time in your fantasyland ranch riding rides and eating candy and then being plied with pills and booze before getting a blow job is only being a good host, let us not forget that it is not normal to shell out $20 million because you’re innocent.  Seriously, folks.  That man molested young boys and that’s wrong.  He could moonwalk, sing and dance like a motherfucker and we can appreciate that, but we have to look at the entire Michael and realize that there was shit happening that was ugly and unnatural and wrong. I’m talking about his face.  That is not normal.

And what the hell is going on in South Carolina where a governor who criticizes gay marriage as unnatural and whatever else people like to throw out there about us disgusting perverts who have the audacity to ask that we be allowed to enter into a legal contract with the one person we want so spend the rest of our lives with is lying to his staff about taking a hiking trip while he really goes to Argentina to bang his mistress, only to come clean when he is totally busted by a reporter when he returns a week later, after no one knows where the hell he has been except for being pretty fucking sure he isn’t in the one place he said he would be?  I understand that was a grammatically poor and totally reckless sentence up above but what else can I do to express my complete and total outrage?  Why are the “family values” conservatives always shitting on our parade and then going out and having diaper sex with prostitutes?  WHY DO REPUBLICANS NOT FIND THIS HYPOCRITICAL BEHAVIOR REALLY FUCKING DISGUSTING? It blows my mind. But in all of this, even when caught red handed, Governor Mark Sanford still lied and said he’d only had these special mistress meetings something like two times in eight years of knowing her, but then he broke down and said maybe it was a few more than that, then maybe a few more and also he might have smooched on some other ladies and for all we know, next week he’ll be telling us that he gave Michael Jackson a blowjob while drunk on Jesus Juice.

Todd Purdum has a Vanity Fair article on Sarah Palin that is damn-near 10,000 words about what an incompetent and egomaniacal asshole she is. I’ve saved you the trouble and read it so that you don’t have to.  The only thing you need to know that you didn’t already is this:  “When Trig was born, Palin wrote an e-mail letter to friends and relatives, describing the belated news of her pregnancy and detailing Trig’s condition; she wrote the e-mail not in her own name but in God’s, and signed it “Trig’s Creator, Your Heavenly Father.”

To wrap things up on a positive note, follow this link to The New Yorker and enjoy a short story by Lorrie Moore, one of the greatest short fiction writers of all time.  When you’re done, come back and watch this squirrel pop out from between a woman’s boobies while she’s being questionsed about a murder:

I like how she just pushes it back in all nonchalant, like it’s totally normal that this squirrel just crawled out from her shirt and no one seemed to ask her what the hell she was doing with a squirrel in her titties.  Good God, what is the world coming to? Every time I hear or see this stuff I can’t help but wonder, would this have happened in 1950? Is the world declining so rapidly that it’s now normal for a woman to sprout a squirrel from her chest on a weekday afternoon? I’m going to start a new category here called “would this have happened in 1950?” (but I have to shorten it to WTHHI1950? because otherwise it screws up my category drop down menu and we can’t have that) and we’ll debate whether or not shit like this was normal back in the days of black and white TV, when my dad was a member of a gang called the Dudes and they fought over girls with rocks and lit cigarettes.