My Junk, My Junk, My Lovely Gentleman Junk

Untouched - The Veronicas (mp3)

Today's post is about my junk, in two parts. My junk isn't in two parts. That's a possum. But the post is in two parts.

The TSA Can Blow Me... Metaphorically Speaking

For every bit of undeserved attention "Don't Tase Me Bro" received, John "Don't Touch My Junk" Tyner deserves triple. The first loser was a nuisance and a punk whose entitled attitude deserved precisely the voltage it received. The latter took a stand about something that potentially affects all of us and our legal rights. There is no comparison on the coolness or relevance scale.

If you want a very amusing yet spot-on take of the new TSA rules -- and the column that in my opinion started the avalanche of deserved attention this has received -- read Jeffrey Goldberg's "The TSA Meets Resistance." It's time well spent.

Make no mistake about it: The TSA's new body scanners and increasingly intimate pat-down measures are the opiate of the flying masses. They will not prevent a terrorist attack, and everyone knows this. The sole purpose of these new measures is marketing, to sell you, the stupid American, on the notion that you're safe.

Not only have some preliminary studies suggested that the odds of getting cancer from the radiation are right on par with the odds of you dying on an airplane from a terrorist attack. (Both of which, by the way, are "slim as shit." It's an industry term.) Read more about "the hidden costs of extra security" here!

In short, not only are they feeling you up in a very non-exciting way and making people feel more and more like cattle, but all of it serves no substantial purpose.

Junk Through Your Wires

A female friend recently attended a party where she and her drunk female pals sat around sharing all of the junk pictures they'd been sent by their male friends and lovers. A female co-worker said she has received numerous pictures of male junk by friends who just wanted her opinion. (On what? The photo quality? The framing? The fleshtones?)

Clearly, sexting isn't just a teen problem, nor is its use limited to rich idiots in professional sports. No, we Americans -- particularly the ones of us with penises -- are constantly fighting and looking for new ways to expose ourselves to as many people as possible. Chatroulette may be dead, but the key motive behind most people being on there is still very much alive and kicking.

I can't help but ask myself, were men in King Arthur's time constantly looking for ways to expose their privates to unsuspecting or innocent ladies? Were the men in Braveheart, who lifted their kilts to insult the Brits on the battlefield, merely repeating a show they constantly offered the women of their clans on a regular basis? If Jesus' disciples had access to a Droid, would they be taking "up-robe" pictures of Jesus' junk and sharing it with their neighborhood pals back home?

When Junk Collides... On An Airplane

Clearly we Americans -- particularly men, who comprise almost 60% of airline travelers -- can't be too troubled by the notion of having our junk exposed in a computer picture. In fact, I daresay American men will be most bothered that they can't purchase a copy for themselves or post it to some kind of IsMyScannedJunkHotOrNot.com site. Men love nothing more than the opportunity to, under the safe distance of semi-anonymity, dangle their junk and compare it to other men.

So we shouldn't be bothered by the prurient issues surrounding these scanners. The problem lies squarely in how easily and lackadaisically we give up our privacy and our reasonable rights to it.

As a friend said at lunch on Friday, "We're all like frogs in boiling water. We know the temperature has gone up five degrees, but we keep waiting for something more extreme before we act. By then, won't it be too late?"

In the meantime, put it back in your pants, John Holmes, and remember the sagely immortal advice of Tom Jones: It's not the lead, it's how you swing it.

They call it "your privates" for a reason.

Meanwhile, the TSA can rename itself the TnA. It'll make Chertoff more money and more accurately reflect the group's new core mission.

"...But I Don't Like You Like You"

Tell 'Em - Sleigh Bells (mp3)
Falling Out of Love - Ivan Neville (mp3)

"I like you, but I don't like you like you."

Between fifth grade and my engagement in 1996, I heard these words or some variation, from the mouths of a dozen of girls and young women, approximately 2,454 times. (This is a rough estimate culled from my many journals over the years.) Another few hundred thought these words but never said them aloud. What these wonderful, adorable females were trying to tell me, without breaking my poor and fragile heart, was that they didn't really see much need for us to kiss or bump fuzzies. When it came to them and Billy, the Platonic notion of "like" was plenty. Plentonic, I guess.

The value of Facebook is and has always been right in that area of "like."

It's most useful in keeping up with the people you like but don't necessarily like like, and definitely not with the ones you love. It is, and has always been, to cultivate lazy friendships.

This isn't meant as an insult to Facebook. This quality is precisely what made the service so perfect, because it's an easy, harmless, lazy way to reach out to hundreds of people you don't particularly dislike. And, occasionally, it can do even more.

Guys, for example, can go looking around in the picture galleries of their female friends and jerk off, or so The Daily Beast would have you believe. If you haven't properly adjusted your privacy settings, guys you've never met and don't know can stare at you, jerk off, and then send you a private message telling you how hot you look. (Let's face it. Porn is now so easily-accessible and ubiquitous that it's blase. Men in 2010 are in a Reality-Based world! Better a clothed real normal person who lives near them than some skanky surgical oddity somewhere in the bowels of Los Angeles!)

One of the parts of my job that is both fun and a little sad is when the students who get to know me well, as they approach their final days as a student, come up to me and say, "I get to Friend you after graduation, right?" And I say, "Yup." And they say, "Oh that's so cool. Can't wait, Uncle Billy!" (Yes, that's one of my nicknames. I promise I don't let them sit on my lap or anything.)

It's fun to see that they Like me, to see their excitement of venturing into uncharted adult waters. It's depressing because they're gonna Friend me and realize that I'm not really all that entertaining in the Facebook world. And, lately, college guys don't much give a flip about Facebook.

But here's what I started to realize in the last month, as Facebook has continued to prove that it doesn't much give a shit about its users, their privacy, or the never-ending learning curve of adjusting to what seems like major changes in how they do things every other friggin' month. Here's the quick summary:

• Facebook will be fine because we don't really care about our privacy.
• You can quit Facebook without quitting.
• The Great Facebook Exodus will occur May 31.
• Another option on quitting Facebook without quitting.
• Facebook's 313th realization that its customers care more about privacy than Facebook does, followed by its 313th apology, followed by secret meetings to arrange the next unannounced expansion into your privacy.
• And don't even get me started on this "Community Page" crap, otherwise known as "more work and more headaches for school marketing idiots like me.

And you know what I'm thinking this whole time?

Facebook? I like you. You're a nice guy. But I don't like like you. And when you keep trying to stick your grimy thumb up my ass? I don't really need to put up with that. I don't care how drunk you are when you try. I'm not Arnold Babar (with two B's... just not together), and you're not my proctologist. It's not appropriate, and I haven't allowed it since that huge suppository I took when I was 24.

I'm good enough. I'm smart enough. And gosh darn it, people in the real world can like me without you.

May 31.

Think about it.

The new Sleigh Bells album Treats is the most refreshingly awesome uncategorizable new album I've heard since The Go! Team's debut album first hit my ears in 2004. It's a sonic distortion assault and utter nonsense and absolutely delicious.

The Video Version of Valdemort

She's Out of Sync - Devo (mp3)
Two Times - The Blakes (mp3)*

Didja ever do those "What's Grosser than Gross" jokes as a kid? Just wonderin'.

I first heard of "The Video That Shall Not Be Named" last fall. A number of young alumni were back in town, and I stopped by early into their evening, before their mental state was in any way altered. During the conversation, someone brought up TVTSNBN. Immediately, the rest of the young guys reacted viscerally, with beloved fake-retch sounds and other such reactions of discomfort or disgust.

Now, this caught my attention because 19-year-old males are, in general, disgusted by very few things in the 21st Century. They've seen everything. Terrorists beheading hostages. Dogs having sex with cats. Laguna Beach. Trying to disgust or shock a present-day male in the 16-22 demographic is like trying to make Dick Cheney cry. It's virtually impossible.

So, I can't deny being a little curious when they reacted with such collective and universal disgust about TVTSNBN. They then started talking about videos on YouTube where people recorded their friends or relatives watching this. One dude recorded his grandmother watching it, they explained, and it's the funniest thing they've ever seen.

As with many conversations where one is the outsider on an insider joke and one doesn't much care, I quickly tuned out and forgot about it.

Then, a few weeks ago, TVTSNBN reemerged in my conscience. One of my favorite female rockers has her own blog, and I visit it every month or two to catch up on her -- I'm kind of like a stalker who can't afford to actually stalk -- and her latest entry was about her experience watching TVTSNBN with two of her friends. The entry was only a couple of sentences, but she basically said watching it made her feel alive. (Picture at left stolen from Steven via Kay's blog.)

Well hell, I thought, if this supercool badass chick can handle it, what's the big deal?? This, my friends, is what's known as faulty logic. Yes, I watched TVTSNBN. I hunted it down, and I watched it.*

Several years ago, I got so far as to click PLAY on one of those terrorist beheading videos but stopped it and closed it before ever getting anywhere near the actual beheading part. That I allowed myself the curiosity to click PLAY in the first place left me with a hollow feeling in my gut for several days, and I still squirm a little when I recall that I even went as far as I did. (NOTE: To those who've seen it, bully for you. I ain't judging. I'm just sayin' that my physical and emotional innards objected powerfully to my curiosity.)

Because there was no death or mutilation involved in TVTSNBN, I never reached that level of self-revulsion. I mostly looked at the subjects involved as I imagine Ming the Merciless looks at the stupid Earthlings at the beginning of the Gawd-awful guilty pleasure of the 80s known as Flash Gordon. I'm pretty sure if Ming had seen TVTSNBN, he would have destroyed Earth quickly rather than screwing around with it for the better part of two hours while Timothy Dalton wondered how the f*#k he got himself into green leotards for what had to be a career low even in the infancy of his career. (And yes, I watch that movie every time I see it playing on TV, 'cuz it's one of the world's penultimate guilty pleasures.)

The morning after my TVTSNBN viewing, I was still bothered. Not haunted; nothing quite so serious. Just bothered. Bothered that people did this. Bothered that people filmed it. Bothered that millions have watched it. Bothered that I jumped on board. Bothered that I have witnessed something that could not have ever conceivably reached my eyes at any time in any other decade prior to the 21st Century.

We're not talking Susan Boyle singing Les Miz here. We're talking a video of Susan Boyle degrading herself in ways that, if I told you the readers to "Think of the most horrific and disgusting non-violence-related act you could film Susan Boyle doing," you'd fall shy of TVTSNBN more often than not.

We are in a virulent age. Everything hits us sooner, faster, harder, and with less mercy, and what used to require men on ponies or Morse Code now requires a

Less than 48 hours after witnessing TVTSNBN, I found out about some heavy rumors involving some folks I know. Rumors of an extreme and sexual nature. Rumors involving kids and police and arrests. Ugly stuff. So naturally the rumors spread like wildfire around me. Along with the talk of what did or might have occurred between two kids whose lives will never again be normal came conclusions we yearn to draw. The #1 comment with a bullet: Surely the alleged predator was at one point also a victim of similar acts. Otherwise, how would he know how to engage in such skin-crawling acts? 

I thought this. Others thought this. It's the natural conclusion of people born before 1980.

But I have crossed to the other side. I've seen TVTSNBN.

It is now possible for a kid to watch stuff on an unsupervised computer that would make even deviant adults shudder. What used to be described simply as "pornography" now needs to be separated into categories like a record store, and any kid with some alone time and an Internet connection can basically witness pornography's version of death metal.

Or, put another way, I'm pretty sure teens don't engage in "rainbow parties" because they witnessed their parents do it.

Is TVTSNBN a sign of the end-times? Will it corrupt even the incorruptible? Part of me hopes so. I'd like to think this is about as low as our species can go, taste-wise. But then I remember that scene in Braveheart where bloodthirsty parents are holding their children on their shoulders so the kids can get a better view as that mean old rebel Scotsman gets disemboweled. Best I can tell, in previous eras and centuries, kids witnessed executions of all kinds, from crucifixions to disembowelments to lynchings to firing squads. If our species can survive all that, then surely TVTSNBN ain't the end of the world.

When I made an equally-obscure reference to TVTSNBN on Facebook, I got a personal record of 13 comments. Seems lots of folks have decided to bring the apocalypse one step closer by witnessing this for themselves. And nothing brings people together like a shared experience of extreme disgust.

And, as best I can tell, none of the people I know who have seen TVTSNBN have done things terribly deviant after the fact. Well, not anymore deviant than the shit they were doing prior to watching. So even something as off the charts as TVTSNBN can't seem to shake my belief that all our hand-wringing over the Evils of Technology is 95% misguided.

* -- I've since been informed that the version I watched isn't the "original." The original is supposedly even worse than the version I watched. That this is possible boggles my feeble mind.

P.S. If you're reading this and find yourself seeking TVTSNBN, and if you end up watching it, please just leave a comment to that nature as a reminder that when someone tells you not to look at something, it's only human nature to want desperately to do so.

P.P.S. Those of you who knew what I was talking about and have seen it, please feel free to tally your experience. Those who know but avoided watching, kudos to you!

The original choice for second song was "Nobody Drinks Alone" by Keith Urban, but I bought it on iTunes before we could convert them, so I went with the backup. All of these songs can be found and purchased through Amazon.com or iTunes.

What Evil Lurks, Part 2

Fat Tulips--"My Secret Place" (mp3)
Fleet Foxes--"Drops In The River" (mp3)

And while we're on the subject of toilets.....

I know this for a fact: there is a toilet in the main building at school. It is the most coveted toilet on campus. Why? Because it is a solo toilet, most certainly a rarity at an all-boys school. Even if you are a woman at this school, you can fully expect that because there aren't many options for you on this male-oriented campus, they are going to cram as many female stalls in one location as they can. But for you, too, there is that most coveted, private, female toilet down on the first floor of the main building. Next to the male one.

So here's what happened: my boss, who pretty much runs the show, meets an appointment with a faculty member. At this time of year, he has every right to expect that this is a difficult salary talk, especially since there are no raises and because this guy should actually have his salary cut. So my boss welcomes him into his office, expecting the worst. What does the faculty member want to talk about? That most coveted, first floor toilet!

It seems that, unilaterally, the staff members who work on that floor, especially the technology people, have put signs on the doors of the toilets in question implying that they don't work. What the users of that toilet don't know is that a) because of a broken pipe, whatever smells you create are going to drift into the tech office and b) at least one person in the tech office is keeping track of how long you are in your "private" stall and what you have probably been doing in there. So much for privacy.

So, the faculty member is outraged. So outraged that he accuses those staff members of lying! He wants them to get, in effect, a faculty "honor offense" for not telling the truth and lying about the functioning ability of said toilet. You probably think he works in the building. You would be wrong. In fact, he walks from at least two building away to "make his toilet" in this building. Ah, the luxury of that private, one-man gastrointestinal facility. In some countries, people would kill for it. In civilized America, instead, you expect your boss to do something about it.

As for the rest of us, well, we have apparently become resigned to public toilet use. My bathroom is two doors down, has three stalls and eight urinals and is the main stopping point for students in the entire building.

Now, don't get me wrong, I can be a pretty private guy, but I don't have any problem with a public place. I guess I think, from years of school locker rooms and college, even coed, bathrooms, from years of amusement parks and shopping malls, that if I can just get into a stall and lock the door, that's all of the privacy I'm ever going to get or need. I think most of us, if we can just get a little space and four walls, can create the illusion that we are alone. I, for one, cannot imagine travelling across campus just to get to my "special" bathroom. Heck, even my colleague with a colostomy bag uses the public bathroom!

In the age of technology, I find that most males get into their stall and break out their cell phone or their Ipod or whatever and just make a pleasant time of it. Me, I play "Zuma" on my Ipod. But those students, they get in there and start texting like crazy. Sometimes, more troubling, I hear the rattling of papers--as in notes for quzzes that they are taking, etc.

Just like most every other aspect of modern life, the toilet outside of your own home calls into question issues of privacy and space and separation. But I think for most of us, perhaps Larry Craig excepted, the bathroom isn't a major cause celebre for privacy; it's just a place you make accomodations for when you need to use it. I mean, it isn't Camp Poop, where you pitch a tent and hang out. Cause if you play that "Zuma" too long, I mean, really get on a roll, your legs start to go numb and then when you stand up, by the time you wash your hands, your legs are so full of painful pins and needles from the returning circulation that you can barely walk back to your office without looking like you are 80+ years old taking painful, tentative step after painful, tentative step.

I haven't done that, of course, but I've heard that's what it's like.