You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.

In case you missed it, a couple weeks ago, the Texas state legislature almost passed the Barefoot Pregnant Women Act, but the bill died as the special session expired at midnight after a heroic filibuster by Senator Wendy Davis. The very next day, one of the biggest pricks in the history of ever the governor called another special session and told them to pass the exact same bill, which made it out of committee pretty quickly after the chairman cut off testimony and refused to recognize anyone opposing the bill, because democracy.

When the Butthurt Session began last Monday, thousands of people stood outside to register opinions and wait to testify. Those in favor of the bill wore blue, while those opposed wore orange:

It's like "Where's Waldo," except in this case, Waldo is actually a raging misogynistic dinosaur.

But wait—that shape looks awfully familiar:

"It's just the rebels, sir. They're here."
"My god, man! Do they want tea?"
"No, I think they're after something more than that. I don't know what it is, but they've brought a flag."

It's not exactly a stretch, given that, although something like 80% of the people in Texas don't want this bill to pass, protesters have been called "terrorists" and "an unruly mob," and the Governor himself said that "the louder they scream, the more we know we are getting something done." Why not just come right out and call them "rebel scum?" It's no more than you'd expect from people that essentially derive their mandate from an organization that was led by this guy:

"Your feeble filibusters are no match for the power of the Dark Side."

Anyway, it already passed the House earlier this week, so this afternoon the Senate will begin discussing Death Star HB 2. Since nearly three weeks remain in the special session, a filibuster is all but impossible, so it's unfortunately very likely to pass.

"There will be no one to stop us this time."

I'd like to think that a group of representatives who refuse to actually represent the people who elected them will eventually be thrown out of office, but even if that's true, what good will it be to all the women whose health—or lives—will be put at risk by this ignorant, misogynist, cock-driven farce of a pretense of giving a shit about women? It seriously makes me ashamed to have a penis.

'MURICA!

Today's news according to Good Morning America at our hotel breakfast:

• David Hasselhoff is advertising some convenience store and singing about coffee.
• Jay-Z and Beyonce's kid is some number of months old.
• One Direction is on fire, apparently.
• Some lady dry-rubbed a cock chicken yesterday and is putting it on the grill today to heat it up.
• Egypt is still a country, I think? They breezed over that as fast as they could to get to the bullshit about famous people spawning last year.

Anyway, Happy Get Drunk and Blow Shit Up Day, Americans! May you have as many fingers tomorrow as you did this morning.

Just like your fireworks.

This is why we can't have nice things. (Spoiler Alert: My wife is pretty much the most awesome person ever.)

Last year, I took my wife to New Mexico for her birthday. It was awesome, and you should be like nine kinds of jealous. On the last day we were there, we went to the Rattlesnake Museum in Albuquerque.

Look how cute she is! I am also in this picture.

They have more types of rattlesnakes there than you probably knew existed, unless you're some kind of herpetologist. A lot of them are actually snakes that they've rescued from different horrible fates at the hands of hordes of people who think that they're evil and terrifying just because Salazar Slytherin was kind of a dick. Thanks a lot, J.K. Rowling.

Anyway, the whole place is awesome, and they also have a gift shop where you can get the Single Greatest Mug in the History of Ceramic Beverage-Holding Devices (As Seen on TV!):

Not only does it hold 16 gallons of your preferred beverage, it scares most of your coworkers enough to keep them from ever stealing your drink. Or basically anything you set it on top of.

She came to work with me all the time, and drew compliments nearly every day for most of a year, because she was made from pure awesome that was mined from the earth and forged in the fires of Mount Some Kiln in New Mexico, Probably. She even dressed up for Halloween.

She went as Nagini. The finger belonged to Charity Burbage.

Last Friday was a horrific day. It was my seventh consecutive day of work, because I'd worked the previous weekend. It's summer, which means the exact opposite for libraries as it does for most other places because when school lets out for the summer, guess where everybody drags their hordes of hellspawn children... One patron came up to me at the desk and demanded that I open the plastic case her gas station sandwich came in, because MLS now stands for "Master of Liberating Sandwiches." Another called to complain that she couldn't figure out how to get an ebook because the catalog said "borrow" instead of "check out." Someone tore the "Property of Local Public Library" label off of the latest issue of Guideposts because this apparently wasn't the issue where they discussed the Seventh (or Eighth, depending on your particular version of the Decalogue) Polite Suggestion.

That afternoon, she posed for a picture titled "Installing Java Update."

Version 2.0

On Fridays, I usually take her home so I can give her a proper bath. This week, after I pulled out of the parking garage and was heading down the street, I heard this horrible thumping along the top of my car. At the exact moment my exhausted brain finally figured out what was happening, my eyes shot to the rearview mirror, and the world went into slow motion as I saw her falling forever before shattering on the ground.

The whole way home, I kept telling myself "you're 31. It's just a mug, it's ok," but it wasn't, really (it's possible that this was also exacerbated by depression). I called my wife, practically on the verge of tears, and told her what had happened. She understood completely, because she's awesome. By the time I actually got home, she had already called the museum and had them ship another one, because she's seriously amazing.

We'll probably see her sometime next week. I'm thinking of calling her Daenerys.

What the Fuck Just Happened in Texas: TL;DR Edition.

You may have noticed that the interwebs have been blowing up over the past 24 hours or so with stuff about the Texas Senate and hashtags like #standwithwendy. Amidst all the tweeting and tumbling, I've noticed that there have been a few people who have no idea what's going on, probably because they couldn't seem to find anything about it on the news. I know that a lot of people don't have the time to wade through hundreds of posts on multiple sites  to piece together the whole story, so I've compiled a quick tl;dr guide to get you up to speed. You're welcome.

So, it basically started when Governor Dick Perry called a special legislative session and gave them last-minute instructions to pass an anti-abortion bill that would shut down all but five clinics in a state that's close to 800 miles across in both directions.

Here's what the bill looked like:

So Senator Wendy Davis announced that she intended to filibuster:

They told her that meant that she had to speak—without stopping—for 13 hours, and couldn't sit, lean, eat, take a drink of water, go to the bathroom, or stray from the topic:

She was eventually told to sit down after 11 hours because talking about sonograms (which are required to have an abortion in Texas) wasn't "germane to the discussion":

Every major news outlet while all this was happening:

Except CNN, who were all:

MUFFINS!

Then Senator Van De Putte called out the President of the Senate for ignoring parliamentary procedure and refusing to recognize her because he was trying to force the vote and didn't want to:

"At what point must a female senator raise her hand or her voice to be recognized over her male colleagues?"

The President impotently tried to quiet the cheering crowd after that burn:

But the entire gallery was like:

They tried to vote on it anyway:

The vote was too late to be legal, so they tried to change the journal to say it happened before midnight:

Just kidding. Those assholes aren't nearly cool enough to be the Doctor.

But the entire Internet already had screenshots:

So they had to concede:

The End.

P.S. I'm sorry for all of this.

Apparently my day wasn't exciting enough for the Gamemakers.

I don't actually keep a written list of all the things that I don't expect to happen to me on any given day because it seems like a really weird waste of time, even for me, but if I did, I'm pretty sure that "getting hit in the face with a giant fireball" would probably be way the fuck up at the top of it every single day. Today, though, I would have been wrong.

The whole thing started when I was like "hey, I should grill stuff tonight because food tastes like awesome when you cook it with fire." When my wife got home from work, I had already started the grill, and was inside getting everything ready to go on while it heated up. Normally, the next thing that happens here is you open the lid, put stuff on the grill, and then take it off and eat it once it reaches the desired level of fiery deliciousness. Today, however, something went awry.

It could be some freak coincidence relating to the foil that I put on the grill to keep the asparagus from falling into the fire, but probably the NSA agents who are assigned to watch my life got bored and wanted to make things a little more interesting. One of them pushed a big red button somewhere, and when I lifted the lid, this happened:

I really wish this were an exaggeration.

By some kind of miracle, the casualty list only includes a little bit of hair and the ends of some eyelashes. My glasses stopped it from hitting my eyes, and somehow I got to keep both of my eyebrows. It did manage to burn out pretty much all the cilia in my nose as well, which means that, for just a second, there was fire INSIDE MY HEAD. It also means that I'm pretty much constantly smelling burnt hair, which is fucking fabulous. I've showered twice already, but I can't get the smell to go away because it's literally in my nose. Somebody get me a silver parachute.

How to love a Yankee Candle.

I bought a Yankee candle for my mom a little while ago, and they put these little instruction cards in the bag because apparently they don't understand that the type of people who need a six-step set of instructions on how to use a candle are exactly the people who shouldn't be allowed to use them in the first place.

Today I found one of the cards at my desk at work, and actually bothered to read it, and then I just broke down in a fit of hilarious what-the-fuckery because I'm still twelve years old. The title is "How to love a Yankee Candle." It only gets worse when you read the instructions.

Keep going until you've tried them all!

Anyway, this isn't a real post. I should probably start putting these warnings closer to the top of the post (*snicker*...yep, still twelve). You should probably just forget this ever happened and try back tomorrow. Sorry.

The following is a true story. The names have not been changed. Fuck the innocent.

I promised a while ago that I'd tell the story about the time my friend and I were accused of running an actual mafia at school. This is that story. [Law & Order clang]

"Introduction"

It was probably 6 months after Columbine, in a school of about 330—that's K-12. If you've ever lived in a small town, you already understand that the primary form of entertainment is talking about other people because there's shit-all to do there. It's sort of like TMZ, but with people you've never heard of. Basically, what happened was that some asshat kid said something to his girlfriend about my friend and I being "crazy," and "like those Columbine kids." She told her mom, who worked at the elementary school. Her mom then told the high school counselor, who told EVERYONE HE ENCOUNTERED. Seriously, this douchecanoe ran around like some asshat Chicken Little warning everybody about the Richland Mafia, because two 17-year-olds in rural North Dakota (yes, that is redundant) somehow constitute an organized crime family.

"Because of reasons"

The whole thing somehow blew up into this grandiose story about how the two of us were plotting to show up with an arsenal and carry out a hit on...well, everybody, apparently. Nobody actually talked to us about it, but suddenly all but maybe three of the teachers were adding their own observations to the heap of bullshit collection of totally credible evidence, such as:

Exhibit A: "They dress in black a lot."
This was actually half true. My friend dressed in black a lot. I dressed in white a lot. This was mainly because my friend owned a lot of black shirts, and I owned a lot of white ones. I also dressed in orange fairly frequently, which was mainly because no one had ever explained to me that the fact that you really like a color does not necessarily mean that you should wear it. Ever.

As long as you're wearing bright, cheery colors, the world is a playground of fucking happiness.

Wearing black makes you summon Satan to shoot drugs up your asshole and murder everyone forever.

Exhibit 2: "They write in 'gang symbols.'"
If "gang symbols" means "anything other than the Latin alphabet," then this is true. Otherwise, it's just a bunch of douchenozzles running around inciting moral panic because they don't know that there are other languages, but the TV told them about these "gangs" in big cities where you have to kill people just to get in, and they identify themselves by writing weird. Actually, we were both very into language, and experimented a lot with creating languages and alphabets, which is exactly the kind of thing you do before you go out and murder everyone. By that logic, Tolkien was the fucking Godfather.

Yes, I know it's actually called "Quenya." You're missing the point.

Exhibit The Third: "They're not in any sports."

Anymore. We were in all the sports, but we were never popular enough to be given any playing time, so we said "fuck this shit" and quit wasting our time. Instead, we joined other activities where our talents would be appreciated. [Note: in small towns, this is how team tryouts work: years before you are born, when your parents are still in high school, everyone is divided into cliques. They all finish or quit school, move nowhere, and start having babies who, to save time, are divided into the same cliques. If you're in the popular clique, you get to be on the team and actually play.]

Exhibit Fuck You: "They get bullied, just like those Columbine kids."
Who the actual fuck looks at this situation and goes: "Wow, quite a few of our students are inexcusable pricks. We'd better consider suspending the people they're bullying in order to protect their God-given right to be assholes."?

Exhibit I Don't I Can't Even: "They locked everyone in the computer lab, turned out all the lights, and walked from person to person pointing a gun at everybody's heads, apparently as some kind of 'preview' of what they were planning to do later."
OK, so this one actually sounds pretty fucking serious because of the locking people in a room and, y'know, the bringing fucking weaponry into the school. Except that a) that room only locked from the outside, b) neither of us even owned a fucking gun of any kind, much less brought them to school and pointed them at people, c) what kind of fucking moron brings a gun to school and points it at people in order to tell them that they're planning to bring a gun to school and point it at people sometime in the future, and d) of the probably twelve or so people who were actually present at the time this allegedly occurred, not fucking one of them had the slightest clue what the hell anyone was talking about when asked about it later on.

Fortunately for us, the principal was not an asshat, douchenozzle, or any other form of dumb motherfucker. He had actually lent me his book on Norwegian runes after seeing some similarities in my invented scripts, so he was disinclined to acquiesce to anybody's request to suspend us for no fucking reason. Apparently, he believed that students maintain some level of actual rights at school. Pretty much, he asked us one time, for the sake of ritual, if any of this was remotely true. We, of course, said "no." He replied (paraphrased): "no shit." Then he told us that it probably wouldn't be a good idea to be seen wearing a trenchcoat to school any time soon, and let us go.

"Aftermath" (You can insert a curriculum-based pun here if you want)

During the course of this ridiculous drama, my mom (who worked at the school at the time) of course asked me what the hell this was all about and why somebody would just make up some story like this. When she saw how close I was to an aneurysm of confusion, she also called several of the people who were there at the time. When they had the exact same reaction, she wrote an open letter to the entire staff, which basically said "what the actual fuck is wrong with all of you? You owe my son and his friend a huge fucking apology."

I never got one. The closest thing I got was the day the counselor walked into my study hall on a day where I happened to be the only student in the room. He sat down backwards in the desk in front of me and started spouting some bullshit about responsibilities and safety or something. I'm not actually sure, because I wasn't fucking listening. I didn't even look at him; I just waited until he stopped talking, then waited a couple more minutes until I could tell he was getting really uncomfortable that I hadn't kissed his ass and forgiven everything yet. Then I just said "are we done here? I'm kind of busy," and he got up and left. I'm pretty sure I never talked to him again.

That's pretty much the end of the story. I don't know if there's a moral or anything. I think this is the part where the screen just fades to "DICK WOLF," and you have to decide for yourself what the fuck it all means. The best I've got is that some people are assholes, so fuck 'em. Leave. Do awesome shit. Don't look back, until it somehow comes up that you were once accused of running a mafia, and everybody in the room is like "you have to tell that story!"