But what is probably the most interesting thing about it is that not a single human being over the age of twelve will ever watch the commercial without immediately thinking the same thing.  Here, you can watch the commercial yourself.

You just thought the same thing everybody else did, which was “wow, it’s the Handjob Trainer!”

Well, now they are coming out with a Shake weight for men.  Or maybe they already have.  I don’t know.  What I do know is that they missed an opportunity to have the corporate partnership, cross-branding enterprise of the century. 

Think about what you just watched, and what product should be combined with this:

Why, of course it could be nothing other than this:

Oh, but I’m not done with you yet. You see, while looking for that second image I found out more about the Fleshlight than I really wanted to know.  Sure, I already knew that you could replace the “insert” (get it?) with one that has facial lips, is shaped like an anus, or even has labia cast from famous porn starts.  (But only porn stars it seems.  So, no, you cannot, as yet, fulfill your Dame Judy Dench fantasies.)  But there are even more replacement inserts you can get.  Ones that cater to a more… discriminating (?) breed of consumer. Because I like my readers, I shall let you choose whether you wish to scar yourself with this unhallowed knowledge.

Behold, the Avatar Fleshlight.

Okay, sure, I suspect that one is a joke.  But I am fairly certain this one is absolutely serious. And seriously wrong.

I don’t know what’s the wort part about that!  Is it the idea that somebody would want to stick his dick in a mouth with fangs?  That’s a really disturbing vagina dentata fetish you gotta have going on to want that.  But what might be worse is that you know, you absolutely know that that half of these are ordered by adult adolescent women with Twilight fantasies so they can make out with it. 

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Man, that’s the last time I try eating a pomogranate. 

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Why I am not a homosexual. 
By Dan Meltz.
(Quite possibly Grade 5)

There are those who will tell you that I’m not gay because I’m attracted to women, not because of anything to do with musical theater.  Bah!  Superstitious nonsense I say– beliefs held by people who clearly aren’t scienticians.  Let me scientifically demonstrate to you the reasons why I am not gay.  There are two reasons, scientifically valid and, though a bit difficult and math-intensive for the layperson, I believe my audience has the sufficient education and intellectual capacity to grasp the concepts involved. 

Reason #1:
I hate musical theater. Musical theater is gay; gay is musical theater.  Musicals are the center of all that is gay.  If you get out your gayger counter and walk around detecting queerks, you can prove this to yourself.  Go to a giant gay orgy.  Put on your hip waders and walk to the middle of that teeming, writhing mass of a hundred or more sweaty, naked, undulating gay men thrashing in gay, sexual lust, with more gay asses getting fucked than on a gay donkey gay sex farm.  If you’re getting turned on right now, it’s okay; I’m a sexy writer.  Stand in the middle and check the readings.  Assuming you’re not at some kind of lemon party (I am not going to link to that) you’ll find you’re reading about 100-300 milligarlands (that’s 100-300 quadrillion queerks per second per centimeter squared).  Now saunter on up to Broadway.  Don’t even go inside, just stand anywhere near “Promises, Promises”.  You’ll read over 150 million milligarlands just standing on the sidewalk.  That’s 15 megagarlands!  If those were gamma rays, you’d be fifteen feet tall, green, and smashing the living shit out of everything in sight.  If they were gaymma rays, you’d be fifteen feet tall, a fetching dark shade of lavender, and redecorating the shit out of everything in sight.  Musical theater is more central to being gay that having gay sex with gay men in a gay fashion, and I don’t like musical theater.  Clearly, gay is not for me.  

Reason #2:
Chicks have 50% more holes to fuck.

Quod erat demonstrandum, y’all!

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Turns out that prisons can be rather Orwellian even for the staff.  A few months ago the doctors were given strict instructions that they had to give full checkups on all prisoners returning from any outside sojourn that involved any medical care whatsoever.  Office consultation with a specialist?  Yup.  CAT scan?  Definitely.  You name it, if it was medical, they had to do a full checkup upon the prisoner’s return.  Two months later, they had a meeting.  This is my screenplay for the movie adaptation that will never happen.  Nor, I suspect, should it.

Doctor in Charge:
You are giving full checkups to all returning prisoners. You shouldn’t.

Doctor Not in Charge #1:
We were told to do that.

Doctor in Charge:
No you weren’t.

Doctor Not in Charge #1:
Yes, we were. Two months ago. You, yourself told us we had to give full checkups to all returning prisoners.

Doctor Not in Charge #2:
We even asked about prisoners returning from things like non-invasive diagnostics such as MRIs.  You said we had to give everybody full check ups if they left the prison for any medical reason.

[The other staff in the meeting make general of agreement]

Doctor in Charge:
You were never told that, and I definitely never said it.

[Silent pause]

Ashley:
So… we’ve always been at war with Eastasia?

She got mostly blank stares. But the two doctors who cracked up, she knew their worth!

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Man:  If we’re being completely honest here, I have to say I am a pretty good lover.  Right honey?
Woman: [Noncommittally] Yeah.
Man:  [Trying to convince himself of something he knows isn’t true] I’m the man.
Woman:  [Placatingly]  Absolutely.
[Pause]
Woman:  [Blatantly trying to get him out of the room]  Will you, um, go make sure the front door is locked?
Man: [Cluelessly]  I will do that.
Woman:  Thank you.  KY Intense:  it’s this gel that stimulates arousal so that big moment is like nothing I’ve ever felt.
[There are fireworks demonstrating what her orgasms are like.  With KY Intense.  Without her husband.]

Am I the only one who thinks that this commercial misses the mark by a small but rather important amount? It seems to me that the message this commercial wants to convey would be one (or both) of the following:

1) You love your woman and want her to enjoy sex with you as much as possible. Use this product.
2) You love your man and want to enjoy sex with him as much as possible. Use this product.
3) You love your man and want him to know you love and enjoy sex with him. Use this product.

Well how does it fare at these goals?

Item #1. Fail Utter fail. It doesn’t even make anything approaching an honest try at this. All we have is a guy desperately trying to delude himself into believing he can satisfy his wife’s most basic sexual needs. And everything about his wife, from her tone to her body language to how she treat him tells us that he is failing at both the satisfying and the self-delusion. You can’t watch this commercial and not know, with absolute certainty that, after most of their twice-weekly (“at least in theory, but, to tell the truth, something usually comes up so it’s more like once a week”), once he’s rolled over and fallen asleep, she goes into the bathroom and silently, guiltily, resentfully finishes what he should have.

Item #2. Marginal success. We get the feeling that, by this point, he’s been such a disappointment that she barely cares. She’s got a Hitachi Magic Wand, a clueless husband, and an hour between the time she gets home and he gets home.

Item #3. Impressive failure. Nothing says love and respect like saying “honey, go run a make-work errand so I can tell the audience you don’t satisfy me in bed.”

At first I wondered if maybe I was just channeling male insecurity by raising an eyebrow at this. But if I were married and my wife wanted to try this stuff out, I’d be perfectly happy to give it a shot.

So maybe it’s just that I’m too much of an idealist.  That’s a frightening thought.  Maybe I’m the one deluded thinking that they should do two things differently.

First:  market this to men. “All the hot guys do it!” Take a page from Axe body spray. Have the husband pull out the bottle and have her get excited about it. Hell, you could even make a joke of it and have both of them “confide” to the camera that it’s the KY that’s the real sex machine in their marriage. They could both turn to the little bottle that they are jointly holding and say “Thanks, little buddy” or something equally ridiculous.

Second:  market it to women as something other than a bottle of Liquid Cuckold. At least the guy in the commercial seems to have some enthusiasm about the conjugal bed.  She sounds like the quintessential “I love my husband but he doesn’t excite me in bed” woman from Clichéd Fiction Publishing, Inc.  Show her being enthusiastic about sex with him because of the product, not about the product itself. 

I don’t know.  Maybe the commercial is exactly what they want.  Maybe the disaffected spouse angle is the way to go.  That just sounds so sad to me. 

Alternately, they could just make the slogan “KY Intense:  it’s like Altoids in lube form… yeah, you know exactly what we’re talking about!” 

Fuck, I’d buy it.

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I do need to point something out.  This American says he’s used to driving on the left side of the road in the U.S.  Clearly a typo. But if this were Woman Atlas, I expect it would attract “women drivers” comments.

I had no idea that black people needed or wanted their own travel site.  I’ll pass over the obvious jokes like “do they get their own section on the plane?  In the back?” and “is the in-flight snack collard greens cooked by a heavyset, middle-aged black lady?” (You see what I did there?  I said them by “not” saying them.  That’s called “praeteritio”!  Rhetorical devices are fun!)  But I will ask some marginally less stupid questions.  Do black people want their own travel site?  I have no idea.  Maybe this is freakin’ great for American Airlines, black travelers and the black community as a whole.  I don’t know.  I assume they aren’t against it.  I don’t see any demographic objecting too strongly to having their own travel site.  But I do have to ask:  are Asians allowed to use this “Passport to the Black Experience”?  Latinos?  Jews?  Indians?  White people?  What about Canadians?  Can Canadians use this passport to the black experience?

For me, it also brings up the age-old question (if, you define “age-old” as “like since the 1960’s, man”) of:  what are the differences between catering, pandering, and exploiting?  That’s why I’m leery of things like this—they run the risk of falling into, if not stereotypes per se, then into all-too-clichéd thinking.  “Black Atlas” isn’t going to serve only friend chicken, obviously.  And, if they existed, “Jew Atlas” wouldn’t nickel-and-dime your for everything from seat-belts to magazine, nor would “AARP Atlas” cruise at a measly 240 miles per hour with only the left wing lights blinking.  That’s not what I’m talking about.

(You just know that if Black Atlas had its own planes, the FAA would order them to put two-fifths more people on the plane.  How do you like your Fourteenth Amendment facial, antebellum south?)

What I’m talking about is that focusing on a specific demographic means you need to consider the desires of people across that demographic.  If you’re selling to middle-class families, you have to sell to all races of middle-class families.  If you’re selling to black people, then you have to sell to all social and economic strata of black people.  And that makes it easy to start pandering; that’s when Latino Atlas visits only Catholic churches in Jerusalem and AARP Atlas skips all locales that aren’t 100% wheelchair accessible.  Everybody I know who left their college’s version of “The [insert minority] Students’ Organization” (whether the minority was based on race, gender, or sexuality) left it at least in part because they felt the people in the group   I’m not saying that this is what’s happened.  Sure, there are plenty of “obvious” destinations on Black Atlas’s list:  Chicago, Philly, St. Louis, New Orleans, etc., places that have large black populations or big roles in black history.  But there some far less predictable destinations, too.  Milan, Paris, Seattle…

…and Toronto.  I guess Canadians are welcome!

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Mom:    I’ve told you to keep your hands to yourself. You want a smack?
Kid:    No. [The kid starts taking things off the shelf]
Mom:    I told you, keep your hands to yourself of you’ll get a smack!
Kid:    [Noise of exasperation.]
Mom:    You want pasta for dinner?
Kid:    I want dinner for dinner. [The kid tries to play with the
        stuff in my cart.]
Mom:    If you don’t keep your hands to yourself, you’ll get a smack!
Me:     …for dinner!

If she heard me, she made no indication.  But, fuck it, I giggled.

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The first item on this list is Ronnie James Dio.

Now, if you’re reading my writing, there is a decent chance you know who this man is. In fact, a lot of people have no idea who this guy is. Ronnie James Dio, or Dio as he is more often known, was a heavy metal singer for more than forty years. Seriously, the dude was born before my dad. It has long been my assertion that, should Lemmy Kilmister ever somehow be destroyed (Lemmy cannot die) Ronnie James Dio would then shoulder the title of Ugliest Man in Metal.

Why he shouldn’t be even the slightest bit awesome:

Ronnie James Dio was a short, ugly troll-man. Seriously, look at this guy.

To be fair, he’s sixty four years old in this picture. And, unlike Paul McCartney, who is only a month older, he doesn’t look like a surprised, aging lesbian.

Ronnie James Dio was born in New Hampshire. There is nothing cool about New Hampsire.

Ronnie James Dio had a fascination with rainbows the likes of which even god has never seen. Seriously, if you were to take Judy Garland, Nathan Lane, Elton John, Miley Cyrus, My Little Pony, The Care Bears, and every Trapper Keeper ever marketed to sixth grade girls, bake them all into a big, girly quiche, you still wouldn’t have as much rainbows. Hell, you could stick fucking Rainbow Brite on top of it, waving the Gay Flag (Gaysylvania. Motto: “Gay sex and rainbows über alles!”) you would still not have the same fascination for rainbows as Ronnie James Dio.

Ronnie James Dio may never have played Dungeons and Dragons in his life, but you sure would never guess it from all the dragons and swords and wizards in his ouvre.

Yet he is totally fucking awesome. Here’s why:

You know the hand sign for metal? “The horns”, “the goat”, “devil hand”? Yeah, you have him to thank for that. Like BASF, he didn’t invent he, he just made it better. Because he indelibly connected in our brain “take your fist, extend your pinky and index finger, and put it over your head” with “Holy shit! I am so fucking pumped full of hard-rockin’ awesomeness! Ahh, I can’t even fathom how awesome this music is!”

Somehow all that rainbow loving isn’t gay. I know!! It doesn’t make sense, but it’s true. It’s like how going faster than the speed of light makes you go back in time. Or how Stalin and Hitler we so ideologically opposed, but most Americans can barely tell them apart. Or, perhaps most appropriately, that guy who talks about how much he loves bangin’ chicks and gettin’ him some ‘tang that you just know every night is his night in the barrel back at the frat house.

Did you miss that part about being older than my motherfuckin’ dad?  And was still touring until about six months ago.  Have you seen my dad?  Or heard him sing.  I love my dad, and I have a certain filial fondness for when he sings along with certain songs (“The Lion Sleeps Tonight” comes to mind) but, let’s face it, my dad couldn’t ever belt shit out like Ronnie James Dio, and he’d be tuckered out and ready for a nap after one attempt at a Dio song onstage. Could your dad put on a full-length Dio concert at the age of sixty-four?  Could you?  No.  Only Ronnie James Dio could do that!

When Rock God Ozzy Osbourne left Black Sabbath, the band that, for all intents and purposes, invented heavy metal, who did they get to replace him? I’ll tell you who, Ronnie James Dio. Yes, when the all-father of all that is metal died from the loss of their singer, how did it resurrect itself? How did it rise from it’s own ashes like a phoenix, or like Jean Grey coming back as Phoenix, or like Megatron coming back as Galvatron? Did they get Eric Bloom, Robert Plant, David Coverdale, Ted Nugent, Sammy Hagar, or even Bruce Dickenson? No, they got Ronnie James Dio. Because nothing else would be sufficient.

Henry Rollins loves Ronnie James Dio, because Dio is there when Henry’s heart is broken. No, you didn’t misread that. When Henry “I must be tougher than all I encounter” Rollins, the guy who fronted the influential punk band Black Flag and got into more fistfights in one tour than you probably will in your life, gets depressed because a girl hurt him, he turns to Dio:

“Whenever I get dumped, I nail the door shut so that no one can come inside, get a towel and clip it around my neck so it’s like a Superman cape, take off my shoes so I can slide across the room, and…get a fake mic, like a celery stick or a pen, and I play any record that features the vocalist Ronnie James Dio. And you can just pretend you’re Dio, because on every album he does, he has minimum one, usually three, “evil woman look out” songs. And if you wanna point like Dio, it’s a three-finger point. ‘The exit is that way. Evil lurks! Evil lurks in twilight! Dances in the dark! Evil woman! Just walk away!’’”

Sure, it could be that I’m still 14 years old, and that there is something in his music that still speaks me.  And, sure, you could say his music is insanely bombastic.  But you could just as honestly say it’s operatic.  And you know what?  For all the rainbows in his music, it has balls. Sure, it’s cool these days to like post-whatever, hipster bands with skinny, pretty-boys that mostly sing about hipster relationships and whatever else they sing about.  Stuff that, admittedly, happens in real life, not gods and devils, heaven and hell, angels and demons, and all that.  But in the end Ronnie James Dio’s music is still about all those things that make music speak to a person on a deeper level: his music talks about alienation, regret, confusion, redemption, accusation, recrimination, pressure, familial dysfunction, resignation, freedom, love, frustration, pain, and so many other things.  Maybe the music itself isn’t as sophisticated (I’m not a musician) and sure the lyrics are,   So be it.  The Duomo in Milan is ludicrously overdone, yet Mark Twain’s comment was “What a wonder it is! So grand, so solemn, so vast!”  Operatic, indeed.

So, yeah, Ronnie James Dio might not be your cup of tea.  But someday, if you’re feeling adventurous, take off your prejudices, put away your pretenses at being an adult, and listen to some of his songs.  Because, in the end, for all the talk of Hell and all the devils in his iconography, Ronnie James Dio was, in his own way, a bit of a sentimentalist, an idealist, an optimist, and a humanist.

I’ve been meaning to write this piece for about two months.  At 7:45am today, May 16th, 2010, Ronnie James Dio died of stomach cancer.  I realize he never would have seen it.  Still, I’m sorry I didn’t write it while he was still alive.  Today is a sad day.

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Apparently “practice” is no longer the correct answer.  Bruce “The Boss” Springsteen, Elton “Sir Elton John” John, Deborah “Blondie” Harry, Gordon “Sting” Sumner and Stefani “Gaga” Germanotta performed at some benefit there.  For some reason, and I have to assume that reason was “because it is still rocks your balls off”, they decided to “sing” that most awesome of songs, Don’t Stop Believin’.  The problem?  They don’t know it.  Oh, of course Bruce knows it.  And, surprisingly-yet-not-surprisingly-if-you-think-about-it, Ms. Gaga does too.  (As with Messrs Dre, and Feelgood, I refuse to acknowledge unearned honourific titles.  Sir Mix-a-lot’s title is entirely earned)

But really, the song goes “hold on to that feeeeeelin’” and most assuredly does not go “hold on to that feeeeeelin’”.  Inflection, people!!!!  As my lovely and usually brilliant friend Sabrina (who sent this to my hung-over self this morning) pointed out, at first it’s hard to determine where this lies on the awesome<—–|—–>trainwreck spectrum.  Yet, by the end there is no doubt that it falls solidly on the trainwreck side.  Even without the gay dudes half-dancing in their boy-short swim trunks.  Which, incidentally, shouldn’t have happened.  At all.

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1)  Give a bunch of way-too-awesomely smart folks (not necessarily Mexicans) access to lots of high-tech equipment
2)  Pour tequila into them
3)  Stand back and prepare to have your mind blown with awesometacularity!

I like to imagine one of them even diamond-coated a diamond, just to be meta as fuck.

This is going to change the world!  Sadly, the the most noticeable changes will be the lamest.  “I’m cuttin’ carrots with freakin’ diamonds!”  Is going to be the new overused catchphrase.  And, yes, it will immediately be bastardized into “I’m cutting [whatever] with freakin’ diamonds!” with people substitution all kinds out nouns in there.  And it will be only hours from that moment until it shows up on the interspank on a picture of a can and some hilariously (read “painfully unfunny”) misspelled caption.  “Saturday Night Live” will probably be instrumental in making absolutely goddamned certain you hear this phrase waaaaaay too often at work.

I can also see the commercials, too.  They’ll be some unholy union between those smarmy liquor commercials and those haughty, pretentious überbranding commercials that practically come right out and say “if you’re not using our product, you’re an utter plebe.”  They’ll start making a quality issue over the brand of tequila used to make the diamond.  People in commercials, and consequently people in real life, will actually have conversations like this:
“I’ve got Henckel Tequilamond^TM knives.”
“Which tequila?”
“Cuervo.”
“[derisive snort] Have fun hacking through butter with those!  Wustoff Patrón Platinum are the only way to go.”

I love living in The Future!  I can’t wait to yell “I’m cutting my thumb with freakin’ dia–oh shit!!”

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