The Angry Czeck

Thanksgiving borders on awesome because it requires very little effort to celebrate. All you have to do is eat, and unless you’re Kate Moss, you should have little trouble filling that obligation.

Thanksgiving also offers people the opportunity to be annoyingly self-righteous. I doubt that the Huron have much to be thankful for, you might announce as your family slides into a turkey coma. Come on! Without the Pilgrims, Native American’s would never know the pleasure of pants, booze, and tax exemptions. If the Huron have anything to be thankful for, it’s Whitey.

My lineage more likely came from a prison boat than from the Mayflower, but I still have tons to be thankful for. Tons. And rather than keep them private, I’m doing something that you can be thankful for: I’m listing them right here on these mighty pages!

Things The Angry Czeck is Furiously Thankful For on Thanksgiving

1. Gratuitous Nudity in 1980s Movies. Today, a nude scene has to have some deep, symbolic purpose that is closely related to the plot of the movie. But in the 1980s, nudity was something that happened for no reason at all. When the plot got slow, the boobs popped out. We didn’t think about it. We just let it happen.

2. Microwavable Sausage Biscuits. O, heat-able, lovable Sausage Biscuit / A treasure worthy of King Tut! / ‘Tis a miracle that you stay so hot / on my plate as out my butt!

3. George W. Bush. This quality of this blog has taken a huge hit since Obama arrived to office. Let’s face it: George made blogging easier. Like tragic Icarus, I flew too close to the sun upon wings of ineptitude, and now I’ve come hurtling back to Earth, his wax of clueless-ness melted into the atmosphere. (See? I told you the quality has taken a hit.)

4. Finding A Dildo on a Public Golf Course in Memphis. Every time I’m in need of an inappropriate anecdote that  will surely silence a dinner party, Finding a Dildo on a Public Golf Course in Memphis always fits the bill. The awkward stammering that follows is the best. “Uh…well…uh…SO, what did you do with it? Heh heh?” Answer? Stuck it in the dishwasher and sold it on eBay of course! What would you do?

5. Olive Garden Commercials. I really hate these sonsuvbitches. Somewhere, some bone-head advertising executive is saying, “We’ve really created a unique tone with these Olive Garden commercials.” You sure have. A tone that doubles as a hypnotic mnemonic implant that will eventually lead to me assassinating the Vice President of the United States. But other than that, your insipid marketing scheme is brilliant. So thanks.

6. People that prefer to call Christmas “Holiday.” Everybody needs somebody to feel superior to, and my somebody is the heartless bozo that insists on referring to Christmas as “Holiday.” I’m not a religious nut. I just know that making something generic never makes anything better. God, you sound like characters from 1984. “Starting now, December 25th will be known as Double Plus Good Day!” We don’t call “Thanksgiving” Holiday.

7. Diet Rite Cola. Shit is the bomb. Comes in orange, too.

8. Sarah Palin. (1) She’s hot, and (2) She may single-handedly give Obama another four years in office. For Democrats, she’s like a guided missile fired from a nice set of gams. Just point and watch the GOP’s destruction unfold! I love this woman! Tell me more about Levi! Explain your qualms about evolution! Show me how to skin a moose! (3) She’s hot.

9. Facebook™ Scrabble™. Thanks! Not only am I spending hours of billable time trying desperately to get rid of two lousy”Vs,” I’ve also learned that Qi, Xi, and Mu are real words. I keep trying to drop them into headlines at work: “Campbell’s Soup is good for you qi!”

10. Mrs. Angry Not Murdering Me In My Sleep. I have yet to wake up in the middle of a night to find a crazed Mrs. Angry hovering above my body, pointing a rusty Civil War-era bayonet at my forehead. It’s been more than ten years, and this hasn’t happened. I’d be doubly thankful for ten more. I’d deserve it, too. You know how many times I’ve have taken the last can of Diet Rite Cola?

That’s the stuff I’m thankful for. Some of these items are a stretch, but since nobody every thanks me for these fantastic free content, you’re just going to have to suffer this mediocre post.

Kneel before the freshly Rancorized™ Angry Czeck! Tremble before its furious might! Pay handsome tribute to it’s fury and rage. Check out the big honking Fury Fist on the right – It’s your new master now!

A big fat and angry thanks to designer Kyle Floyd and Web Maestros Scott Ladue and John Susek.

At some point, you got to see what is in front of your face.

Abraham Lincoln once said that if ten people make a comment about your tail, then you might want to take a look behind you. That’s good advice. The Angry Czeck beseeches you, crazy Gun Advocates, to take a look behind you. You won’t have to look far; only a few days.

What will it take before you concede that the policies you continue to champion, strengthen and defend are really fucked up?

There will be many debates that arise from the carnage at Fort Hood. I suspect that many gun advocates will declare some kind of “Muslim threat,” an obvious deflection of responsibility. They will point out that that the murderer, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, was brought down by armed security (a 5′ 2″ woman with extensive firearms training). They will refuse to connect the too-easy acquisition of handguns (or the legality of handguns) as a contributing factor to the massacre at Fort Hood.

The issue that will be ignored is that Husan – a man who so clearly exhibited disturbing mental issues that local media uncovered examples of his questionable conduct mere hours after the shootings – was able to buy a FN Herstal 5.7 mm handgun in the first place. According to The Dallas News.com and Newsweek, Hasan also purchased several “ high-capacity gun magazines from a Killeen gun shop when he bought the gun.”

The weapon of choice for nuts.

Congress is already launching an investigation. Senator Joe Lieberman wants to know how the Army dropped the ball on red-flagging Hasan. I want to know why a mentally disturbed, suicide-bombing supporting, Islamic extremist was allowed to purchase a powerful handgun with high-capacity gun magazines that enabled him to reload quick enough to kill 12 people on an army base.

How do you even justify the gun clips? How many times to you need to rapidly-reload while repelling home marauders? How many rounds do you intend to fire at kids toilet-papering your yard? Unless you’re Mad Max, I don’t see why these clips are even for sale to individuals without first being subjected to a stringent FBI check. I’m not talking about a credit report, or a list of how many parking tickets you failed to pay. I’m talking about a goddamned FBI report that would unearth at least as much as a kid working for a failing news medium could find.

Before you go even more nuts, Gun Advocates, let me remind you that the Second Amendment is shit. It is total shit. You find an instance where a man armed with a musket killed 12 people on a military base, and I’ll reconsider my position. Otherwise, the Second Amendment is a flawed, antiquated piece of shit that needs to be reexamined and rewritten for modern times. (I’m insulting shit, but you can’t write a post without hurting feelings.)

It would take about a week for a guy with a musket
to murder 12 soldiers.

As usual, the National Rifle Association is noticeably silent. (They always are after some nut starts shooting people.) You’d think that the world’s mightiest lobby for firearms would have something to say about Fort Hood. Nope. There’s not a word about Fort Hood on the NRA web page, though the fact that a homeowner took a couple shots at a robber is considered top news.

There is nothing said because there is nothing to say. There was nothing to say after Virgina Tech. There was nothing to say after Columbine. The product the NRA fanatically endorses is a health threat on par with cigarettes. It is a security threat that is far more likely to kill my children than Muslims. You have nothing to say, NRA. because you know that once again your position on gun control contributed to unnecessary deaths. Take a few days off and let Fort Hood blow over.

You know what? Keep your rifles. I just want the handguns.

Or, or, you can take the lead in generating real change, NRA. Why not announce that you’re advocating for tighter gun laws? Or hey, try something radical (sane) and endorse a ban on handguns? Yes. A total ban. You’ll lose some members, sure, but you’ll gain a substantial amount of guilt-free sleep in return.

For once, use your considerable influence for the betterment of our country rather than romanticizing a weird idea of freedom. It’s okay. You never were the National Handgun Association anyway. Deep down, subconsciously, you understood that rapid-fire handguns are tools for crime, not defense.

I’m not holding my breath. In this country, a freak automobile accident may lead to a total redesign of child safety seats, but a lone gunman murdering 12 people on a military base with handguns will result in absolutely nothing. After Columbine, the reaction wasn’t to strengthen restrictive gun laws. It was to ban trench coats. Trench coats! Guns don’t kill people, trench coats do. I supposed we’ll be barring Muslims from the military now.

So what will it take, Gun Advocates? What will it take before you realize that the biggest threat to our security is a nut with gun. What will it take? This is an earnest question. Are twelve bodies not enough? What number would impress you? After all, in the scheme of things, a dozen deaths isn’t that many. Not when more than 10,000 murders were committed with handguns in the year 2000 alone (according to a report for the Center of Disease Control). Give me a number. Make it big. They always are. Just give me a number so I can have some hope that, at least in theory, you have some capacity to recognize reason.

You don’t have a tail behind you, NRA. Just bodies.

++++++++++++

Recently, the ad agency I work for conducted a focus group comprised of teenagers. The topic centered around a website geared to their demographic. The comments made were enlightening.

Many said that the site featured “too much copy.” More expressed a preference for added video. One respondent suggested that we should incorporate a video that would “read aloud the copy on the website.”

That rusty, creaking sound you hear is the curtain being drawn on the Angry Czeck’s final act.

Too bad, I’m not pulling the plug on The Czeck. It’s not written for you, let alone knuckle-headed teenagers. But still, the research underscores what I have longed suspected.

The Age of Long-Copy Blogging is dead.

Like poetry before it, long-copy blogging will become a fondly remembered but little-practiced art form. We’ll continue to pretend to enjoy long-format sites, but privately we’ll ditch them in favor of reader-provided content blogs like People of Walmart, Fail Blog and Awkward Family Photos.

The sad thing is, it’s not that we can’t make time for Mabel’s House or Notes to Self. We just don’t. Why bother? Why wade through paragraphs of penetrating insight when Fail Blog offers guffaws with a single image (and word)?

I’m not an old man screaming “get off my grass.” Times change. I wish I had thought of a “Collect-Wacky-Photos/Write-Funny-Caption” gimmick too. Advertising dollars ahoy! And to be fair, not all short-format blogs are that lazy. The Sloganeerist* and Labmonkie are short-format, original-content blogs that liberally sprinkle wit and wisdom. But boy, think of the hits they’d receive if they only had readers sending them snap shots of people getting punched in the apple sack.

A long time ago, writers wrote stuff that rhymed.
More amazing, people actually read it.

Talk to any Web head, and they will tell you that video is the not just the future of the Internet, but the present as well. As Web users, we like to sit and take it. Pressing play is a hell of a lot easier than moving our eyes from left to right, diligently processing words into entertainment. Does it make us idiots? We didn’t return to our caves after abandoning poetry. The world will move on without The Angry Czeck and long-copy blogs.

I’ll have to be content** with writing for nobody.

*It is noteworthy to mention that the Sloganeerist, perhaps seeing the writing on the wall, has created a more condensed version of his already succinct content here.

** By “content” I mean “furious”

Two nice teenagers – a boy and a girl – were on their way to the lake. The boy was behind the wheel, carefully navigating the winding country road. Rather bluntly, the girl vocally regrets that she had failed to attend church earlier that morning.

“Gosh, I did,” said the boy, not accusingly. Just stating a fact.

“Well, at least I’m saved,” said the girl, but she seemed uneasy. The boy sensed his friend’s distress.

“How about this,” he offered. “When we get to the lake, we’ll fall to our knees and pray for God’s forgiveness.”

This idea delighted the girl. “Really? That would be so awesome! Thanks for-”

Suddenly, the car spins out of control, a mighty crash quickly follows, and there is darkness. But soon, there is a peaceful light. And the strum of a harp! And the boy’s voice is heard (though his body is not seen). “Wow! I must be in Heaven! This is great! I wonder what happened to my friend?”

Then it is dark again. Flames rise. We see the shadow of a female form writhing in agony, accompanied by a scream that sounds like this: “Aieeeeeeeeeeee! I’m sorry I didn’t go to church! Aieeeeeeeee!“

This isn’t a true story. This was part of an infomercial I caught late one summer evening when I was a teenager (The Sexually Frustrated Czeck). I couldn’t believe what I was looking at. How did this get on TV?

My astonishment tripled when I discovered that a local weatherman was hosting the infomercial. The weatherman! And he was talking about Hell!

Lots of interesting variety in Hell.

And that’s why the infomercial stays so ripe in my mind lo these many years: Hell. Hades. The Underworld. The weatherman claimed to know something about it. Surprising, considering he couldn’t even accurately predict the arrival of a cold front.

Aside from the weatherman, I’ve never come across a confident description of Hell. The closest thing to it was something I read out of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In it, Stephen Dedalus has a conversation with a Catholic priest, who vaguely describes the torments of hell. But he is more descriptive in his visualization of eternity.

The Priest invites Dedalus to imagine a tiny stone dropped onto one place once every 100 years. Even when the stones have grown to a pile the size of the largest mountain, not even a fraction of eternity would have been spent! Egads! Dedalus and I both lost sleep over that one.

Hell is kind of naked and gross.

Having had much experience with the Catholic Church, I can assure you that while many topics are discussed in great detail, Hell is not one of them. Nobody has the heart to bring it up. Even purgatory is avoided. I asked a churchy co-worker if Hell was a common discussion topic at her worship service.

“Well, yeah,” she said. As if! I asked her if she could give me a description.

“Hot. Nothing to eat. Nothing to drink. Why are you asking me this?”

Just call me curious. I’ve heard Hell described as a place of everlasting torment. I’ve read Dante’s famous depiction, and I’ve known people who have adopted this fantastic fiction as fact. Hell has been described as both fiery and frozen. I rented and watched a couple of those Hellrazer movies. I’ve seen oil paintings depicting Hell as a kind of cavern where funky pitchfork-wielding demons chop you into bits or disembowel you. In what seems like a more pleasant alternative, I’ve heard Hell described as a place where one is “refused God’s love.” r />
“You know, it’s described in the Bible,” my co-worker told me. Ah ha! I checked it out.

Dante’s Hell often confused with Actual Hell.

Mathew describes Hell as “the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” That sounds terrible, but it also sounds like the time I watched The Horse Whisperer in the movie theater.

Mark opts for the creepy and the crawly: “…hell, where their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched.” Worms? Holy crap! At least it’s not spiders.

Revelations offers us crisper clues. “The lake of fire is the second death. If anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.” Okay, so you gotta get a shout-out in the Book of Life to avoid the lake of fire. (No, look in the index again! It’s under “Czeck, Angry.”) Got it.

To add to the confusion, Hell goes by a variety of names. Ancient Jews referred to Hell as Gehenna, which was literally a burning trash dump from which both souls and recyclables never return. Early in the Bible, Peter refers to a place called Tartarus (derived from the Ford Taurus), which was a shifty realm for demons to wave their pitchforks and stir bubbling cauldrons of blood and flesh.

Meanwhile, a guy named Maalik guards the gates of Jahannam, the Islamic Hell. (No virgins there!) For Buhdists, Naraka is the lowest level of rebirth, which is kind of like Hell, I guess. Short Bus hell. For the Mayans, the most horrible realm of the underworld was called Metnal, and it was ruled by the surly Ah Puch.

The only thing most people agree on is that Hell in any form sucks rocks.

The thing about Hell, for a place for which so few details are available, people can certainly tell you how to get there. According to many, homosexual sex is like taking a rocket-powered Greyhound Bus to Hell, but that sounds like hate talking to me, and hate will send you to Hell, too. Murder, of course, gets you to Hell, unless you’re killing somebody God wants you to kill, and then it gets kind of murky. Stealing is a ticket to Hell, too, although many book dealers will tell you that the tome most shoplifted is The Bible. According to the weatherman, going to the lake instead of church will lead you to Hell. This seems more like a fund-raising tactic than real direction.

Tom & Jerry Hell

Good intentions are said to pave the Road to Hell, but I find that difficult to believe. Pat Benatar claims that “Hell is for children,” but I doubt if she has the science to prove it. I have been told to “go to hell” on many occasions, though I have yet to take any one up on the invitation. I haven’t really raised any hell since I had kids. More than once I have heard that New Jersey is Hell. I’ve never been to New Jersey, so this could be true.

Face it: nobody knows what Hell is. If you’re a cynic, you might come to the conclusion that the concept of Hell is a manifestation of mankind’s innate desire to see their tormentor’s punished. I’m not a theologian, but accepting Hell is like trying to complete a jigsaw puzzle for which pieces of a second puzzle have been added to the mix. Hell doesn’t seem to fit, not when God is supposed to be all loving. No matter what kind of jerk Angry Junior becomes, I wouldn’t send him to Metnal to be Ah Puch’s plaything. But that’s just me. Maybe God has yet to read Dr.
Spock.

So far, the only known man who has escaped Hell is Meatloaf

For all of Hell’s vague conjecture, the specifics of Heaven are concealed beneath an even thicker shroud of mystery. It’s paradise! It’s bliss! It’s peace! Visual depictions of Heaven – the Christian version, anyway – generally center on golden gates, tiny harps, dead toddlers with wings, and some bearded guy stroking a lamb. All that is missing is the Amy Grant soundtrack piped in from speakers shaped like a plastic cloud.

Looks a little like Hell to me.

*I stole this quote from my Uncle Bob many years ago and claimed it as my own. Normally, I’d go to Hell for that, but I gave the quote back to Bob, so now everything is cool.

***