OPINION: I want my homoeroticism completely straight!

We're waiting for someone to try to correlate concussions with homosexuality. Some idiot will try it.

(Las Vegas) - In a sport where we get to watch the beauty of the male form crashing against other male forms (don't get me started on bringing women into the mix) it's disgusting that we keep getting back to identity politics with things like race. Well, now they want to make this about sexuality. Can't we keep sexuality out of a field of testosterone-driven pinnacles of musculature and sweaty endurance? Why do we need to know about Carl Nassib's sexuality when all we want to see are these hulking forms patting butts, scoring, and tackling each other?

It just has no place in this incredibly masculine sport. There's no place for it. I know, I know, all of the left out there is going to say that the attribution of strength and fitness to big manly men implies that gays are all limp about this wrist. Maybe that's not true, but I don't want to think about it when I am thinking about them all showering together after the game enjoying one of America's favorite pastimes. Because if a big, aggressive, powerful football player can be gay, so can I and that would just crush my wife or, really, anything outside of what I've deemed acceptable in my red, white, and blue, anglosaxon, protestant household, then it messes with my Sunday. Sunday is for God and football. Football and God. Do you think God wants to watch the gays out there prancing around in the lycra that he's used to seeing his totally, completely straight teams play in? Do you think Jesus, a man who spent all of his time hanging out with his disciples or apostles or whatever - do you think he wants to know who is gay and who isn't, on Sunday?

When I was in the Navy, we never had to worry about crap like this. We just cleaned the decks, peeled potatoes, ironed our uniforms, and wrestled. We wrestled like crazy. No one talked about gays because we all just knew that we were straight. Maybe all this talk is what's making people crazy about it. We didn't talk about being gay in the eighties, and it was one of the best decades ever for entertainment. You had Queen, Elton John, WWF, Top Gun, Boy George, George Michael, and Rambo.

It's just like all this race talk, if we don't talk about it, I don't have to think about it it doesn't become a problem! There's one race: homo sapiens. There's one sex: hom  People just don't need to think about stuff like this.

- Randy "Straight Shooter" Giardino

Scientists Wrong Again, Says Proud Aries

Aries are known for being a star sign

(Augusta, GA) - At nearly four thousand years-old, the study of constellations and their relationship to our planet's solar and lunar cycles is part of human history and spans a variety of cultures and civilizations. Many people still consult guides and astrological portents with regard to making decisions and categorizing compatibility with others. Critics of the practice have called it everything from superstition to unscientific, pointing out, among other things, that the precession of the Earth over the past several thousand years would actually shift the corresponding dates with respect to the different star signs by about a month.

Brenda Williams, a local mindfulness coach, issued a scathing rebuke to skeptics of the millennia-old practice, explaining that the practice is very much scientific and credible.

"Don't believe in astrology, huh? That sounds like some Gemini stuff to me," said Williams. "Do you think anyone who is in the know about science is going to say that they don't believe that the stars control our fates? We can't see gravity, but we know it's working. It's working right now, and I heard that even the supposed scientists can't really figure out why. Well, you know what has a ton of gravity? Stars do. Constellations are made up of a whole bunch of stars. Bam. Gravity. Star signs. Science. If you say differently, it's probably because you're a Libra and just want to be contrary."

When asked to comment on cognitive biases and how exactly a scientific explanation for astrology would work, Williams had this to say:

"Science schmience. I've read my horoscope every morning for years. I know all of my friends' signs and the correspond almost perfectly with everything that their signs say about them. It influences all of my decisions. Are you just going to say that I'm wrong? Are you going to tell me that it's been telling me how to go about my business wrong? I suppose you're going to say next that I could be living my life better without some supernatural hocus pocus. Well, it gives me an edge on everyone else that doesn't do it. Do you think I could be where I am, making two thousand dollars a month by teaching my class on how to be present in the world as we are right now, if I didn't listen to the signs? Scientists probably just say this stuff because they're jealous of people like me. They used to say that smoking was good for you, and that global warming was going to kill us all. You know who's never wrong? The stars."

We asked several scientists to respond to Williams' claims, but the closest thing that we received to a response was, "You have got to be kidding me." Clearly, this was issued by a Capricorn, the most emotionally distant star sign.

Area English Teacher Fascinated by Real World Symbolism in Horrifying News

 

If you look closely enough, you can annoy anyone!

(Greensboro, NC) - Local high school English teacher and eschatology enthusiast, Sean Bienert, enjoys pointing out parallels in literature, life, and abstract poetic devices, as this is part of his job. This week, however, he exuberantly pointed out the absolutely terrifying metaphorical significance of several headlines from different news sources.

"So, Ellie Kemper was the protagonist in a show about a white girl who was kidnapped and raised in a bunker, unaware of the world outside, which she discovers and maladroitly finds her place in, to comedic effect," pointed out Bienert. "And when she was actually a teenager, she was also placed in a pageant, the paragon of absurd and often unhealthy relationships with the outside world, organized by a group that had ties to racist cultural elites, who didn't reveal their prejudices to a girl who had no knowledge of them, having been raised in a society that discourages its beneficiaries from questioning systemic prejudice?" After a long exhale, he continued. "I mean, are they going to make a show about that, too? It's obviously already been written, but do they have dialogue?"

"Bezos is going to space, huh?" groaned Bienert. "This so perfectly captures the capitalistic nature of our society that any attempt to satirize it is just going to come off as sincere. We literally have space aristocrats - they have to be above us on every level, Musk and Bezos. Jesus, even their names are terrible. Like, yeah guys, just use up all of our resources, screw up our ecosystem, and leave us with whatever scraps we can fight over. See you in the funny papers while we're living out The Sheep Look Up."

"Okay, this is probably a little bit over the top, and I stole it from a scientist friend of mine, but you can't get any more symbolic than this in the real world. Capitalism's relationship to entropy makes a fairly circular Venn Diagram. What's more capitalistic than unregulated currency? What's more capitalistic than producing absurd amounts of heat in a climate that's already heating up to an unsustainable level? Oh, I know! It's doing those things in a related fashion to create something that has no physical presence or applicability in the real world at all. As we use up the rest of the world's natural resources in an impossible attempt to sate our bottomless avarice, let's do it while creating something that goes a step farther than the old Cree adage about not being able to eat money: You can't even touch Bitcoin! While we're at it, let's flavor that whole story with a bit of the old War on Drugs!"

Bienert's friends were unavailable for comment as they had all suffered fatal ocular revolution injuries.

History Nerd Way Too Concerned With “Canon”

Remember when it was just about Hitler?

(Boston, MA) - A local discussion at a Milly's Cup o'Joe got very heated when local history nerd, Brian Taylor, pointed out several historical flaws in a hypothetical counterpoint presented by an acquaintance, Sarah Long. The two had been discussing the 1619 Project, its ramifications, and their personal feelings about it. Taylor supports schools teaching the central place that slavery and its consequences had in terms of entrenched systems and systemic injustice that persist to this day. Long was in the process of pointing out that, as residents of Boston, there really wasn't any any need for kids to learn about slavery anyway. That was when Taylor interrupted.

"Oh my god, so Brian's just this total history nerd. Nobody else cares about the shit this guy talks about. Then, he goes on and on mansplaining the hell out of how slavery was legal in Mass until 1783. Who freakin' knows that shit? Like, really, who?" bemoaned Long. "He thinks just because the facts agree with him it makes other people bad for saying them wrong or something. It's like those Star Wars kids talking all their crap about Jar-Jar Binks."

Taylor apparently implied that Long's thinking on the issue was, itself, a product of misrepresentation by public school history curricula designed to, among other things, foster patriotism in children. He claimed passionately that until the United States public school systems teach history as it happened - rather than how we would like to remember it - issues like systemic poverty cannot be addressed because they cannot even be understood.

"Then he goes off on this tangent," continued Long, "that was, well, I don't like to say this, but it was really kind of racist. He said that if we don't know history, we'll look at minorities and think, 'oh, these people are just lazy.' Can you imagine? Minorities are lazy? Who says shit like that? Racists, that's who."

"That is what I said, but I was using it to point out why some people are racist - what pretexts they use to justify themselves. At no point did I say that that was an accurate assessment of what history or sociology show!" said Taylor. "How can anyone not see that? It's like she's willfully misinterpreting what I said about the issue just to be able to say something negative about the points I was making!"

It should be noted that Long failed both English I and American History in high school, having been the last student to speak to their teacher, Franklin Puck, before he quit teaching after twenty years. Her comment decried the fact that Orwell's 1984 "happened so long ago that no one can remember that."