An Open Letter to the Songwriters of "Save the Best For Last"

My goal for 2013 is to get something published at McSweeney's. I've been getting tired of satire writing for a while, which is why I barely do those types of pieces anymore. My plan is that if I get a piece rejected, I'm going to post it here, so at least a few people will read it. This is not meant in any way to be bitter at their rejection; I hold them in very high regard and expect to have most, if not all, submissions rejected. Please to enjoy:

An Open Letter to the Songwriters of “Save the Best for Last”

Dear songwriters:

First of all, I realize that I am a bit late in lodging my complaint about your song. I also realize that song lyrics cannot be taken literally. For example, Ke$ha’s song lyrics assert that one would enjoy having casual sexual intercourse with her even though I think I have contracted several sexually transmitted diseases simply by viewing her videos on my computer.

Even so, I have very serious problems with the lyrics to your song, as sung by Vanessa Williams in 1989.

The very first lyric is problematic: “Sometimes the snow comes down in June.” Sure, you’ve bought yourself some wiggle room by using the qualifier “sometimes,” but even with the effects of climate change more and more visible as time passes, how often has snow fell during the month of June? Need I remind you that when the song was written nobody knew who Al Gore was, and all our truths were convenient?

I decided to research this, turning to the world’s most reliable source for accurate information, Yahoo! Answers. According to the experts who frequent this site, it does sometimes snow in June. In fact, I’m told it “snows in the mountains all the time.” If we’re including mountains, however, I suppose a line like “Sometimes a plane full of soccer players crashes, and they have to eat each other” would be plausible as well.

So I’ll let the first line go.

Onto the second line: “Sometimes the sun goes ‘round the moon.”

Now, wait just a goddamned second.

The sun has never once in recorded history “gone ‘round the moon,” let alone “sometimes.” I’m not a scientist, but I’m pretty sure that if it did, some parts of Earth would get the shit burned out of them. If I had to guess, I’d think the parts of Earth affected would be “all of them.” There certainly wouldn’t be snow on the mountains in June, that’s for sure.

I mean, people who believe the Earth is six-thousand years old know that the sun hasn’t ever “gone ‘round the moon.” That’s right, the same people who think that Jesus rode a dinosaur know better. True, they probably believe that because “the Bible never said the sun went ‘round the moon” as opposed to basic physics, but still.

I’ve been told I should never complain about a problem without offering a solution, so I will offer a few suggestions for your song’s upcoming 25^th anniversary re-release. They are offered in descending order of similarity to the original line.

“Sometimes old satellites go ‘round the moon”

“Sometimes Alice Kramden goes to the moon”

“Sometimes a movie character played by Michael J. Fox howls at the moon.”

“Sometimes Mel Gibson calls a grip a ‘coon’”

Sincerely,

Jim Wellington

P.S. The rest of the song’s great. Good job.

Cash Business

I submitted this story to NPR's Three Minute Fiction, but it did not win. So, I'm sharing it with you. The prompt was to write a story in the form of a voice mail message.

Cash Business

Hi, so I’m just returning your phone call about the ad in Craigslist. I should probably tell you a little bit about my services. You asked a lot of questions about what I can offer you, so I hope I can answer all of them before the message ends. We’ll see. I don’t put much information in the ad because it’s a cash business, and I don’t want the wrong people asking questions, you know what I mean? For some reason, some in society still frown on what I do, but I think I provide a valuable service to people in need. At least that’s what I tell myself.

I typically do one client at a time, although sometimes people want group sessions. Group sessions cost more, as it’s pretty challenging to provide adequate service to more than one person at a time. I do have some experience with groups, so I can offer you better service than someone just starting out. As you can probably guess, someone in my line of work learns new techniques for providing clients relief. I am constantly searching for new tips, especially from Asia. You know their reputation, right?

I charge $100 an hour, and if you don’t need the entire hour, you still have to pay me for the time. Clients usually ask me to come to their house or apartment, although hotels work well too if you don’t want your neighbors to know that you’re hiring me. I guess some people still think that what I do is help you cheat.

What if PBS' ratings go down?

New TV Show Pitches

If Here Comes Honey Boo Boo can be a show, I can create a show too. Here are some ideas.

Because, come on. Everyone wants to get sex advice from the Dowager Countess.

From the creators of Lost comes a time-travel romantic comedy where if you don't fit in, just jump to a different time! Just watch for nosebleeds.

Even AIG wouldn't insure this show.

The stamp that every teacher wants for grading papers

Your Primer for the 2nd Presidential Debate

Tonight, two candidates chosen by millionaires will meet at Hofstra University in an attempt to convince undecided voters to choose them on November 6th. As a valuable public service, here is a primer on what to expect.

Barack Obama:

- Following Joe Biden's successful turn in the debate spotlight, the President will attempt to steal some of that "Biden magic" by wearing Biden's dentures.

- The President will wait until after the debate to take his Ambien.

- Obama is taking a page from Romney's book and has been practicing some "zingers." These include: "That might fly on Planet Kolob, but on Earth we rely on facts." "Bipartisanship is not when you promise both sides what they want." and "I told my daughter Malia about your job plan. Oh, how she laughed."

Mitt Romney

- Expect Romney to announce he is now running as a Democrat.

- Will give thanks to his favorite god, Janus, in his opening statement.

- In an attempt to avoid looking like he is rude, will say "excuse me" while talking over the moderator.

Pilot pitches for next season

Pilot pitches for next season:

Cupcake Whores: When their business fails, how can they make money when all they know is baking and fondant?

The Red Badge of Narcissism: Bob telecommutes, and after a particularly bad date, decides to only communicate with the outside world through Facebook.

Minaj a Trois: Nicki Minaj plays all three roommates in a sitcom that takes place inside her head.

Why isn't "conservative comedy" funny?

With rare exception (I despise Rush Limbaugh as a person, but some of the parody songs he plays on his show are hilarious), "Conservative comedy" just isn't funny. I think I've figured out why, so here goes.

Ultimately, comedy is based in truth. Comedians see the truth in a way that "normal" people don't. Comedy reveals the underlying truth to people, helping them to accept it by making it funny. A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, if you will. Carlin, Hicks, Louis CK, these people expose the dark underbelly of society in a way that is uncomfortable, which is why they need to make it funny. They're not lecturing us, they're letting us in on the secret, making the implicit explicit.

Today's conservative movement is deluded. By conservative movement, I mean the modern GOP, not individual conservatives, many of whom disagree with today's GOP. Look at the number of bald-faced lies made in RNC convention speeches. Several cases can be made for showing Obama the door (although I think they are all invalid if the replacement is the current GOP). If actual arguments exist for their side, why does the GOP continue to invent arguments?

I have theories, but I'll save them for another time.

The reason "conservative comedy" doesn't work is because it's not based on the truth. Hurr Hurr Teleprompter! Any reasonably intelligent person who thinks about a teleprompter joke for a moment sees the lie. Would someone who relies on a teleprompter do well at a debate? Oh, he wouldn't? Then how come Obama outperformed McCain at the debates? Oh...it's bullshit, isn't it?

So, if you want to know why conservative comedy doesn't work, remember that last week, a national party built a convention on an out-of-context statement that anyone with half a brain can see through. A convention built on lies? Congratulations, Republicans. You DID build that.

Letters from the Editor - To Rebecca Black

Other news organizations print letters to the editor. How boring. The Fake News will instead write letters from the editor. Sometimes these will be to famous people, other times to random normal, unimportant people.

An Open Letter to Rebecca Black

[caption id="attachment_974" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="By P. Tony Garry - Guest Editor"][/caption]

Rebecca,

Is it ok if I call you Rebecca? It seems a little bit personal, but, if you recall, I have already seen you in bed, in formalwear, dancing awkwardly both inside and outside of moving cars – It’s almost like we’ve been married for years.

I awaited the “dropping” of your new video with hopeful trepidation. Would I be treated to another three-and-a-half minutes of a glorious trainwreck in which the conductor is gleefully oblivious of the impending crash, more concerned with how much fun it is to be speeding on a quickly coddled together train on tracks hastily constructed out of hubris and duct tape?

Sadly, no.

It seems, Rebecca, that you have forgotten the reason your first video was so popular. The lyrics were not bad. They were so bad that they made J.K. Rowling look like Charles Dickens. Therein lies the secret. Nobody watches bad creative endeavors. They only watch creations that are very good or so awfully bad that they offset the scale of goodness so far that they push Gigli several steps closer to “mediocre.”

Then there was the video. Ah, the video that launched a thousand parodies. Of course the artistic director of the video was a bit hamstrung by the previously mentioned lyrics. That doesn’t entirely let him or her off the hook. If you were wondering which seat you should take, why was there someone in the front seat? As every first year law student knows, one cannot kick someone out of the front seat once said person has already established a claim to said territory.

Top Ten Things That Made Me Want to Stick My Head in an Oven in 2009 - Complete List

Editor's Note: I decided to break up the list into one item per day so I could provide more content for each item. Now that the list is complete, here is the complete list on one page for your reading pleasure.

At years end, everyone and their brother (and their sister in non-Islamic countries) write some kind of top ten list. To maintain that tradition, I decided to write a year-end top ten list. Rather than counting down my top ten movies or top ten varieties of cheese, here is my list of ten things that really sucked this year.

10. Annoying Facebook Behavior

Facebook has allowed people to reconnect with people with whom they have lost contact over the years. In some cases, it only takes a day or two to remember why we lost contact with them. While Facebook is a social networking tool with great potential, it also has a tremendous capacity to annoy. Here are some Facebook behaviors that your friends find annoying, even if they won't tell you. If you do these things, you're likely not a bad person, but you are unnecessarily annoying people.

Ten Things That Made Me Want to Stick My Head in an Oven This Year - Honorable Mentions

Honorable Mentions: Here are a few of the things that nearly made the list.

Twi-hards – Aside from being responsible for the explosion in vampire movies, television shows, children's toys, and breakfast cereals, Twilight has spawned a legion of obsessed women. Being a Lost fan, I know what it's like to be obsessed over something that other people find foolish. However, there is a bit of a disturbing issue with Twilight that I did not see reported in any major media outlet that covered the phenomenon. Taylor Lautner is seventeen years old. Grown men counting down the days until an attractive female celebrity turns eighteen? Pedophiles. Forty-year-old women screaming when Taylor Lautner takes his shirt of in the movie? Completely acceptable.

Ten Things That Made Me Want to Stick My Head in an Oven - #1. Jersey Shore

1. Jersey Shore – On my list of things that made me want to give up on humanity, this was far and away the greatest. This show represents the second horseman of the apocalypse (Tyra Banks is the first), which you will be able to discern by its artificially orange skin and copious amount of gel in its mane. The hoof-pumping is also a dead giveaway.

Italian groups are outraged over the portrayal of Italian-Americans in the MTV show, but anyone who lives anywhere near the Jersey shore knows that there is no exaggeration here, these people really exist. The only positive part of this show is watching the public ridicule these douchebags. If you could go back in time ten years and describe this show to people, nobody would believe it. "Wait, so people who look like oompa-loompas are going to be on television acting like whores and drunken douchebags? And people are going to watch this?" Our country lost its collective shit over Janet Jackson's nipple. A nipple, which any child can see by going to their bathroom mirror and taking off their shirt. Come on, America. Use your capacity to make entirely too much out of any situation for good, for once. Won't someone think of the children?

Ten Things That Made Me Want to Stick My Head in an Oven This Year - #2. Jon and Kate

2. Jon and Kate – As I mentioned in #4, I hate reality television. Nobody cares about the people involved in the shows; the only concern is ratings. It is not often that child abuse is shown on national television, but TLC decided to bravely forge ahead with a new era of exploitation. For starters, there is a reason that humans very rarely have a large number of children at one time. Before having a large number of children at one time meant getting your own reality show, there was no way to financially support such a suddenly large family unless you were very wealthy. It is irresponsible and completely unfair to the children to choose to have such a large number of children at one time.

According to all sources I could find, the couple used an artificial fertility method because of a fertility problem with one of them. They didn't plan on having six children, but when they found out that's what was going to happen, the reportedly said, "no way!" to reduction. This is hypocrisy at its finest. Going against God, nature, or whatever you want to call it to become pregnant: Completely acceptable. Limiting the number of children: Completely unacceptable. You don't get to have it both ways; you're playing God.

Ten Things That Made Me Want to Stick My Head in an Oven This Year - #3. Sarah Palin

3. Sarah Palin – Ah, the only question regarding Mrs. Palin was what spot she would take up on the list. She is truly a remarkable person, as many people whom I consider intelligent have tried to convince me that she really is smart and the media is out to get her. You see the problem that I have with believing that is that I have this thing called a memory, and I can recall prior events and incorporate them into my understanding of current events. Take for instance the infamous Katie Couric interview, which for many was the first major clue that there was something seriously wrong with Palin as a Vice-Presidential candidate. Some gave her the benefit of the doubt in the Charles Gibson interview, in which she could not comment coherently on the Bush Doctrine. I am far from a political expert, but I knew exactly to what Gibson was referring, simply by reading several political articles each day from a variety of viewpoints. Political white knights sprang to her rescue, arguing that there were several Bush Doctrines, and pretending that if they were asked the same question, they would answer with the same level of incompetence.

Ten Things That Made Me Want to Stick My Head in an Oven This Year - #4. I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant

4. I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant – Anyone who knows me knows that I hate reality television. The original concept was intriguing, but it quickly became apparent that "reality" television was just improv using untrained actors who moonlight as horrible human beings. Most shows have devolved into a game of constant one-upmanship: How many douchebags can we fit in a house, and how much prodding do they need to act like assholes? I'm not interested in that, as I can just go down to a club at the Jersey Shore if I want to see that.  Oh wait…

In addition to the tried-and-true method of confined douchebag assembly, a newer variation of reality shows have emerged, focused on extreme situations. In the same way that paterntiy suit participants on the Maury Povich Show have increased the reliability of their claims (I think the current standard is "I am 10,000% sure that ain't my baby!"), these shows have become more and more ridiculous. This year's "Ow! My Balls!" award for most ridiculous reality show goes to our number four entry: "I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant."

Ten Things That Made Me Want to Stick My Head in an Oven This Year - #5. Teabaggers

5. Teabaggers – Sure, now they want to be called the Tea Partiers or Tea Party Patriots, but in the beginning they were calling themselves Teabaggers. I will continue to honor their original wishes, mainly because their choice of name illustrates their amazing lack of common sense.

Sure, many of these people claim that they were just as upset under Bush, but let's take a look at the abbreviated timeline:

Patriot Act, October 26, 2001. Teabagger response: "Fourth Amendment? What Fourth Amendment?"

Invasion of Iraq, March 20, 2003. Teabagger response: "Go get those WMDs!" later amended to "Saddam is a bad man" later amended to "You'll take our democracy if you know what's good for you!"

Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse photos, torture memos, extreme rendition, warrantless wiretapping, all fine.

Health Care Reform, Teabagger response: "Oh, hell no!"

Ten Things That Made Me Want to Stick My Head in an Oven This Year - #6. Glenn Beck

6. Glenn Beck – I'm becoming increasingly convinced that Glenn Beck is Stephen Colbert without the winking nod, an Andy Kaufman for our time. It is becoming increasingly more difficult to pretend that he believes what he says, and is either out to make money off of dupes or is the greatest IRL troll of our generation.

For the time being, I'm going to go along with the notion that he's serious. His inclusion on the list represents not only him, but other talk radio and Fox News personalities, like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter – The Axis of Idiocy.

A problem arises because it's difficult to put these people into the same category. For example, I think Sean Hannity truly believes what he says. He has had brain surgery to turn off the part of his brain that stops your mouth from moving when you know you're saying something that makes no sense. Ann Coulter, however, says whatever she feels will cause the most controversy and make her the most money. The level of idiocy is comparable, but the intent is different. But, even with all this competition, Glenn Beck has emerged as the group's Cryer-in-Chief.

Ten Things That Made Me Want to Stick My Head in an Oven This Year - #7. Balloon Boy

7. Balloon Boy – This story had everything I hate about our society. Parents who give their children ridiculous names (Did you name your kid after a Midwest state? You might as well install a pole in her bedroom so she can get some practice for her future career), the twenty-four hour news cycle that values exclusive "information" over verified facts, and reality television, which will appear in future installments of this list.

Of course, it's not every day that you get to watch a bag of Jiffy Pop soar majestically through the air like some kind of large bird like an eagle or something. It's right on the tip of my tongue. Oh yeah, Falcon. That was my first clue that the kid wasn't really in the balloon. Well, that and the use of my eyes to visually acquire information about the size and shape of the balloon, which then sent the information to my brain to process and send a signal to my mouth to say "WTFuck?! You're seriously trying to tell me there's a kid riding in that? Where? Does he have Saddam's WMDs with him? Is he riding on an invisible unicorn under the balloon?"

Ten Things That Made Me Want to Stick My Head in an Oven This Year - #8 Jennifer Aniston

8. Jennifer Aniston – This one is tough. I want to like Jennifer Aniston. I liked her in Friends. She seems like a likeable person. Yet, there's a problem. She's on at least one magazine cover every time I go to the supermarket. But, it's not just that. It's always a variation of "Jen: True Love, Finally!" and "Jen: Heartbroken After xxxxxx Dumps Her!" This repeats anew every so often, typically when she has a movie coming out. This leads me to believe that I have successfully mapped the Jennifer Aniston dating cycle.

1. Jennifer Aniston meets a guy and he decides to go out on a date with her, which is completely natural, because she is, after all, very attractive and seems to be a nice person.

2. They go out on one date. The guy has a very nice time and plans to see her again.

3. Her publicist calls every magazine and tells them all about the date, providing exclusive information to each magazine.

Ten Things That Made Me Want to Stick My Head in an Oven This Year - #9. The Snuggie

9. The Snuggie - On the one hand, I have to hand it to the person who invented the Snuggie. Not since the Pet Rock has someone made so much money selling something so ridiculous.

It Looks Ridiculous – There's a reason that people hadn't made wearable blankets before. It's one of those ideas that sounds great in theory, but looks ridiculous in actuality. "Wouldn't it be great if I could experience the warmth of a blanket, without having to worry about it falling off when I move about?" Yeah, I guess it would. I also wish I could experience that level of warmth throughout daily life, but it would look ludicrous for me to drive around with a blanket on. It looks no less ridiculous walking around your house.