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Welcome back to "Ask Alex", where I answer all of your stupid questions with even dumber answers. Have a question you need answered? Tweet it, email it or submit it here and I will get to it (maybe) next week.
-------------------------------- Welcome to this week’s Ask Alex! We’re going to take a look at H. P. Lovecraft’s laziness and moral failings, my own completely rational fear of jaguars, Rascal’s problems at Applebee’s and a criticism of know-it-all-college students. In the interim, you will learn about cinema’s greatest fight scene and why the main character of a little-remembered 1990’s TV Show was a colossal idiot. I am also going to tease you all by telling you that there is another Misfit Baby on the way!!! But since I am kind of a bitch, I am not telling you who it belongs to;-). You’ll have to wait and see! Submitted by: Kaiju Which is the best elder god? I had to give myself a little crash course in the world of H.P. Lovecraft here, since I really had no idea what this was about when Kaiju sent the question on Monday. Thankfully, there is a handy dandy “Which Elder God Should You Worship” quiz available on the Interwebz to help me out! I answered the 10 questions and got “Shub-Niggurath” which, in addition to sounding like a racial slur, also seems to be some kind of porn goddess. “The path of Shub-Niggurath is the way of sensual experience and sexual arousal sustained and heightened to such a degree that it alters consciousness. To walk the path is to create an environment of sensual pleasure that functions through all five senses, and spans the spectrum of sensation from the most grossly physical acts of sexual release to the most sublime heights of artistic enjoyment. The seeker must submerge himself in sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations that give various levels of pleasure.” I mean, I don’t want to sell my inherent sexpot-ness short, but that seems a little bit excessive. It sounds a lot like Shib-Niggurath is the goddess of 9 ½ Weeks and late night Cinemax. If I am reading that last sentence right, to worship Shub-Niggurath, you have to more or less be willing to have sex in a tub full of chocolate pudding. You probably also have to hang out with Sting. The best elder god, though? That is obviously a thoroughly subjective question, but it is hard to argue against Cthulhu. They did name the whole freaking universe after him...that kind of makes him the alpha dog in this world, no? Lovecraft is an interesting story...his family managed to go from rags to riches to rags in a pretty short time, and he died penniless, alone and unknown before achieving great acclaim posthumously. His Grandfather was orphaned at 14, made a small fortune by inventing a fringe-trimming machine, and then a very large fortune in mining and land management. He lost a lot of it when a dam that his company built on the Snake River (pre-Evel Knievel jump) failed, but still managed to die with a substantial fortune. From there, the family fell victim to a pretty common affliction of American wealth: a lot of people spending the fortune and no one adding to it. H.P., indicative of the rest, finished school and then set about writing poetry in his mother’s basement without making any effort to seek employment. If that sounds like some someone you know, I would note that, had Twitter had been invented, we would probably all have known him pretty well… He did at least have the good sense to marry well, landing himself a wealthy Brooklyn widow who supported him financially while he churned out enormous quantities of material for which he was rarely paid {editor’s note: Alex writes several thousand words a week without getting paid...hmmm...}. Even that turned sour though, as she lost her assets in a bank failure, leaving them broke, save for his dwindling inheritance. It should be noted that, in this relationship, the woman traveled the country seeking work and making a concerted effort to provide for the family, sending a weekly allowance back to the useless man that sat in his shitty apartment being angry at immigrants and minorities for stealing the jobs of white people. So, I guess it turns out that Lovecraft was far ahead of his time on more than one thing…#MAGA Eventually, he moved back to Providence because he had no money left and very little initiative to actually make any. He and his wife finally divorced (sort of: asshole never signed the decree, which made her 1936 re-marriage illegal) and he died broke and alone before his work went on to inspire the science fiction genre for nearly 100 years. To most people, this reads as a tragic story of unrecognized genius, un-diagnosed mental health disorders and wasted potential. I, however, am not nearly that sappy, and I am going to chalk most of it up to a guy who was simply too scared to fail and too lazy to do the non-glamorous portions of his chosen profession like selling his work, returning requests and seeking employment. Basically, he was unwilling to engage in even the slightest bit of hustle to better himself. Creative genius? Sure, but the real lesson here is simple: success comes to those who work for it. Submitted by: CDP You’ve lived your entire life in Chicago, IL and Boston, MA. Other than rats, pigeons and seagulls, I doubt that you ever come into contact with any actual wildlife. For some reason, you seem to be terrified of jaguars. Otherwise, you seem to be a basically rational person. Please explain this. First of all, I see squirrels pretty much on the daily, and I live in a home with a chameleon...I am basically just a cuter, trendier Jack Hanna. You wanna know why I am scared of jaguars? Because a jaguar will FUCK YOU UP. Lions and tigers will kill you just as dead, and they are both substantially bigger, obviously, but you’ll at least see them coming and know that you have a couple of seconds to either throw your slower friend in front of the hungry cat or shoot it. A jaguar is 250 pounds of hot death that will drop out of a tree on top of you and bite through your skull before you have time to ask yourself why you thought it was a good idea to walk through the Amazon rainforest. Perhaps I should re-state that point...they generally kill things by biting through their skulls. I think my fear of jaguars stems mostly from River of Doubt, which is a really interesting book about an expedition led by Teddy Roosevelt after he left the Presidency. Roosevelt, a fairly seasoned explorer and hunter, assembled a team of similarly capable people to chart an unexplored tributary of the Amazon (well, technically a tributary of the Aripuana, which is a tributary of Madeira, which is a tributary of the Amazon) called the Rio da Duvida. While the participants were experienced outdoorsmen who had done similar things in Africa, they were woefully under-prepared for the Amazon and very nearly all died. Part of the intrigue in this is that this man was a former President of the United States. Imagine if George W. Bush put together a team and literally disappeared into a rainforest somewhere not to be seen for a couple of months, then showed up in a random fishing village hallucinating with fever and with several members of the party already dead. Teddy may have been a big-government elitist at heart, but he wasn’t afraid of a little adventure now and again...he knew what it meant to be the man in the arena. A huge part of the book is about the ruthless ecologic efficiency of the Amazon basin. There are plenty of jungles in the world, and plenty of harsh environs, but there is no place quite like the Amazon. Everything that lives there is evolved to be just a little faster, or deadlier, or quieter, or stronger or just generally scarier than animals and plants that live in other places. The expeditioners assumed that they would be able to hunt for food while traveling, because they had been able to do so on previous expeditions in Africa and North America. What they found is that you can’t hunt in the Amazon because there is no spare food. It’s not just that there are boas and anacondas hiding under logs that will swallow you whole, it is that there is very little that humans could reasonably expect to just find and eat. Shooting a rhino or a lion will feed a large party for days and is a pretty manageable task for a skilled hunter. There are no animals in the Amazon that even a seasoned hunter can reliably find and kill...the wildlife is equipped to survive in the world’s most punitive environment, so avoiding hunters is pretty easy. Shit, the fish will eat you!!! As a result, Roosevelt and his party nearly starved to death. On the plus side, they did name the river after him, so he at least had something to show for it. Once you’ve accepted that the hyper-competitive food chain in the Amazon is more or less the SEC West of ecosystems, you meet the uncontested ruler of that food chain: the Western Hemisphere’s biggest cat, the jaguar. Lurking in trees, submerging underwater or silently padding through the forest, it is a 200+ pound model of hunting perfection. Smaller than lions or tigers, their jaws are substantially stronger, allowing for their noted ability to kill prey by literally biting into its brain. This allows them to hunt things that are much bigger and stronger and seemingly scarier. They eat crocodiles. THEY EAT CROCODILES!!! Not only is it an impressive feat to kill and eat a crocodile, it is even more impressive to think that jaguars are hard-wired to look at a 12-foot armored, jagged-toothed monster and think “Yum. Lunch!” Jaguars are currently classified as “near-threatened” and have suffered from all of the afflictions that have impacted other species like them: environmental degradation, poaching, encroachment of human development. Conservation efforts have made some progress, and there have been increasing reports of jaguars returning to their long-ago native territories in Arizona, which has entirely changed my opinion on Trump’s border wall. Who cares if it won’t slow illegal immigration, it will keep this bringers of nightmares in Mexico, as far away from me as possible!!! Side note: this coat is gorgeous - 12/10, would wear enthusiastically. Submitted by: Andrew Lynch There is someone who threatens me every time I show up at Applebee’s and he’s there. He thinks I am messing with his wife (incidentally, he also thinks the waitress is his wife - she most decidedly is not). What’s the best way to respond and/or dispose of his body? It’s been my experience that, when someone at Applebee’s thinks that someone else is messing with his wife, he’s usually right, but that is neither here nor there. First of all, you are asking the wrong person...standing right in front of you is a legitimate, certified, highly-trained Applebee’s bartender. Not to diminish my own abilities, but this should be a question for Rev. Dr. Galileo vanNewton Einstein, PhD, Esq. who is currently pouring your pre-mixed and measured Perfect Margarita (spoiler alert: it’s not perfect, it is thoroughly ordinary). Do you have any idea how hard it is to get behind the bar at an Applebee’s?!?! My source tells me (or, he implied, at least) that it takes years of technical training, rigorous physical evaluation and a complete psychological work-up just to get near the bartender trainee program. It’s, more or less, like becoming an astronaut! Either that or it’s all politics...my source wasn’t maybe the most reliable… I guess I won’t ask why you are hanging out in an Applebee’s when you could be, well, anywhere else...and I will just note how spectacularly funny I find this whole thing. For the benefit of readers who missed the whole story, Rascal occasionally goes to Applebee’s for some food and a beer and gets super dirty looks from some ruined old guy across the bar. When said loser shuffles his broken-dreamed self to the bathroom, he makes a point to mumble dire warnings and threats under his breath as he walks past...starting with “dumbass” and then progressing to “fuck you” and “I’m going to get you” and eventually “My wife is a server here. Don’t ever speak to her again.” Here it gets a little fuzzy. What we know is that the guy has Rascal mistaken for another person, a regular customer with whom he shares an apparently uncanny resemblance. What is also clear is that the waitress is absolutely not this guy's wife...and in fact his real wife might be deceased and also may or may not have run off on him before she died. It is less clear whether or not he has any sort of a relationship with the actual living server that he just described as his wife, but it seems like he does not. Also unconfirmed whether the waitress is or is not involved in any sort of a relationship with the non-Rascal customer in question, but he seems to be “one of her boyfriends”. Objectively, this is a pretty sad tale of a lonely old drunk mourning his lost wife by drinking his Social Security check in a reasonably-priced, charmless family chain restaurant. He almost certainly has some kind of clinical mental issue and has created a fictional world in his head where the server is either his new wife, or just a projection of his old wife. Frankly, it is quite depressing. And since I don’t do depressing very well, I am just going to continue to make fun of him and his delusions, which I assume are fed by bottomless Applebee’s Bahama Mamas (only 240 calories!) and the lament of having no one with whom to split a 2 for $20 meal… Rex suggested sneaking up behind him in the bathroom and smashing his head into the wall before he knows you are there. I might suggest following up on that by cracking a toilet tank lid over his head (h/t Patricia Arquette from the best fight scene ever made, don’t bother to @ me, although it may only be the fourth best scene in that movie, which is an absolute masterpiece, save for rewriting Tarantino’s original ending). That, however, seems to be a little excessive, and you don’t really strike me as “beat a man to death in the bathroom at an Applebee’s” kinda violent, so I would offer three possible courses of action.
Definitely 1 or 2...3 seems really stupid. Submitted by: Anonymous You seem to hate old people a lot but you have to admit they aren’t half as bad as know-it-all college students, right? You know how old people are terrible drivers and have a habit of driving into buildings at an alarming rate? And how sometimes people propose that every driver should have to retake their driving test periodically after some undetermined age (70 or so) to get some drivers off the road? And how usually in response to that, the olds get on their high horse about persecution and tell us that teenagers are, statistically, more dangerous drivers than old people? And how the reasonable people note that we let the teenagers keep driving because they are getting better as drivers while the crones are continually getting worse? Well, I feel like some of that is happening here, too. Yea, college kids can try to punch a little above their intellectual weight and just come off as being a little out of their depth. And yes, they absolutely have a habit of thinking that one seemingly clever insight from an adjunct professor at Podunk State U at Nowheresville makes them an expert in pretty much anything, but I am willing to cut them some slack on account it being a part of their intellectual development. I’m just happy that they are thinking about politics and public policy issues...it is important that they be engaged and interested. If good judgement comes from experience, then experience comes from bad judgement. I have a number of college students or recent college graduates in my Twitter Feed that I like a great deal. Last night I had dinner (and several too many vodka tonics) with four girls who had just finished their very last class of their last undergraduate semester. Frankly, these kids are a lot smarter and a whole lot more prepared for the world than I was at that age. I have to feel like an awful lot of people criticizing people like them do so knowing that, given the chance, they would gladly trade places with them. I’m not sure that I will chalk up the college-hate entirely to jealousy, but I am not going to rule it out, either. But insufferable old people are just useless, and they have no excuse for being so fucking stupid. They’re not getting better, and in fact are probably getting worse. I am, however, going to relay my very favorite college student story, by way of a guy that I work with. He was working at a company, and they placed the marketing intern in the cube next to him. Nice girl, junior at Holy Cross on a soccer scholarship and this was her first non-cash paying job. On her first Friday, her manager made a point of bringing her paycheck directly to her with great excitement. About a minute later, the marketing manager was gone and the girl was angrily shouting into the phone “Dad, are you fucking kidding me, they are gonna take out this much every week?!?!” Submitted by: Timothy E. Miller If you were a Sith Lord governing this realm in the name of the Darkside, what would your first act be upon investiture? I’m not sure how I became the Star Wars authority around here, but I’ll just continue to go with it. As I think I have made clear, I feel like the practitioners of the force have this all wrong. If youth is wasted on the young, and wealth is wasted on the old (Alex’s corollary), then super-powers are wasted on the purely evil or virtuous (Alex’s second corollary). They’re all devoted to some totally irrational desire to either accumulate power to no actual end or to just kinda wander about seeking justice. You know, like Caine in Kung Fu (lot of Tarantino today!!!) What the hell is the fun in that? If I had any kind of mega-super powers, I would use it to get obscenely rich and then live the rest of my life like a rapper on a weekend bender in Las Vegas. There are a lot of ways to do that, I suppose. I could just kinda order everyone to give me a bunch of money, Scientology-style. Or maybe just use the force to physically move a pallet full of cash from the Federal Reserve into my living room...maybe I will just clip one of the ones Obama sent to some oppressive dictatorship. Whatever it is, though, my first act is going to be something to make me the richest chick on Earth (this is alarmingly similar to the way Vladimir Putin runs Russia, btw). Then I’m buying a Gulfstream, assembling an entourage and ordering cocaine by the pound. Wheels up, bitches, the party's just starting. This reminds me of a dream I once had where I got the newspaper three days early and knew the winning Powerball numbers (which, I have discovered, was the plot of an ABC Series called Early Edition in the 1990’s which featured some total fucking moron who didn’t bother to use this to make himself rich...dude, you can still save the world full-time and just spend four minutes a day trading commodities futures...live a little!!!) Unfortunately, I also knew that like four other people also had winning tickets, so I was going to have to split the jackpot five ways. The next morning, though, I was ecstatic to have solved this problem. If you bought like 20 of the same tickets, then there would be 24 winners, only you would hold 20 and would therefore take down over 80% of the jackpot. I was briefly very proud of myself, until I realized that I had just solved a problem that first required me to learn to time travel… Back to the drawing board.
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MisfitsJust a gaggle of people from all over who have similar interests and loud opinions mixed with a dose of humor. We met on Twitter. Archives
January 2024
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