SomaCow

You might think that because I am a “comedy writer” and a co-host of “The Greatest Internet Radio Show,  EVER!” that my gift of gab would extend into the bedroom.

Well, don’t YOU look foolish now.

For some reason, I could never quite get the hang of talking dirty during sex. While some guys can be quite comfortable ordering their sexual partners to “Take it like a dirty whore! I’m gonna rip you to shreds!”, the nastiest thing I have ever managed to say to the Mrs. was “I hope this is equally unpleasant for YOU!”.

Once, when she was out of town on business, we decided to try having cyber-sex chat on our computers. I sucked at it, because of my tendency to always crack jokes at exactly the wrong moments:

[SomaCowJ]: Oh, baby…yes, baby…do it just like that…a Priest and a Rabbi walk into a bar…
[MrsSomaCowJ]: gah

So, I turned to my good, good friends Geoff and Mickey for some guidance on this topic, and asked them for their best dirty-talk lines.

(You know how, in cheesy horror movies, everybody in the WORLD except for the stupid person on-screen knows that it would be a terrible idea to open that closet door, because there will undoubtedly be an axe-weilding homicidal maniac inside? I was like that stupid person.)

Geoff, having control issues, is very demanding in his budoir babble: “You dirty girl, I’m going to f…why is there no coffee ready?! I’m risking a heart attack to give you mediocre sex, and you can’t even have a pot of WaWa brewing for afterward? Put a dollar in the jar! UHHNNNGH! Whew! Ok, I’m done. That was GREAT!”

Mickey was little help, since the only time he talks to people is while we’re recording the show: “Oh, baby, you are like a cascading style sheet that functions perfectly across multiple websites without debugging”. Yeah, I wish I could help him.

On a related note, I was recently researching my family tree, and was quite surprised to discover that several of my great-great grandparents had been porn stars in the late 1800s and early 1900s. I was able to track down some of the “dialog” from these early attempts at silent moving-pictures which CLEARLY demonstrate that my dirty-talk deficiency is genetic. Keep in mind that the language in these films was considered a vile and filthy obscenity in its day:

Yeah. That explains THAT.

If you have any ideas to help me improve my pillow talk, please let me know.

Until then I’ll be boning up on my Priest and Rabbi jokes, as it were.

Florida is widely known for having the most streamlined voting process in the nation.

By “streamlined” I mean that we don’t actually bother to count a lot of the votes, resulting in fewer tax dollars being wasted on luxuries such as accurate election results. I am certainly no political pundit, but I suspect that part of the problem with the voting system here in Florida may be due to the fact that most of our election officials, as well as election day volunteers, appear to be employed by bait shops during the rest of the year.

So, today I joined the ranks of Americans who gather, once every four years, to engage in that uniquely American pastime of voting on important government offices and issues that we know nothing about.

Fortunately, the media, and crowds of overzealous patriots at the voting locations, are quite happy to educate you on the issues under consideration, via the techniques of mindless speculation and blatant lies.

You can easily spot the McCain propagandists by the dollar sign insignias on their chauffeurs and the filigreed chains on their eelskin wallets. They also frequently wear t-shirts printed with pictures of themselves. They quickly informed me that I should vote for Senator John McCain for President, rather than a candidate who, they say, is known to enjoy poking babies in the eye and pushing old people down stairs, due to lack of political experience. How they say this with a straight face is beyond me, although I suspect that their faces have been pretty much straight since birth. I decided to test this hypothesis by seeing how one of these wild-eyed morality-dictators responded to a simple joke:

Me: Do you know the difference between Sarah Palin and an auto mechanic?
Rich, white McCain supporter: I’ll make sure you are never allowed to wear a thong in the privacy of your own back yard ever again. Or have sex in your bedroom with the lights on.
Me: No! It’s “dipstick”!

Well, so much for that.

The Obama supporters were just as fervent, if a little less stodgy. They merely accused McCain of having harvested the organs for his last five personal transplants from unborn fetuses, ripped from the wombs of middle-class mothers. Then they sang a medley of Barbara Streisand songs. Badly.

But, armed with my driver’s license, since my voter registration card is probably tied up in some kind of bureaucratic bait shop red tape, I strode confidently up to the “Our Lady of Iniquity Catholic Church and Spa” (the voting location for my precinct) and proceeded about the task set forth by our founding fathers: finding out where the refreshments were located. After failing to locate any orange juice, fruit punch or cookies, it occurred to me that I MIGHT have confused voting with giving blood. The two processes are similar in that when you’re finished with either, you’re a little bit pale, sort of dizzy and you try to get out of work for the rest of the day.

But I got through it. I cast my secret and sacred ballot for the individuals and issues of my choice. I even voted for one constitutional amendment that was particularly trickily worded:

“Do you support the reversal of restrictions preventing the legislature from lifting the ban on allowing the negation of existing prohibitions of re-instating the policy of not allowing the State to decline recognition of currently rescinded vetos of the law supporting the denial of applications for coastal easements?”

Knowing me, do you think I voted for or against this amendment?

Yeah, I couldn’t tell, either.

You’ve probably already heard that the SomaCow clan is all up in Kingdom of Loathing (KoL). We now spend more time playing this online game than we spend getting our collective pants let out, if you can believe that.

How to describe Kingdom of Loathing? It’s an adventure game, to be sure, but it is a “minimalist” adventure game. No sounds. No animation. No “Gore Level” settings. No warning that it might induce an epileptic seizure from flashy-lights. You just click on things to do, or places to go, and you are presented with a description of the results, along with a picture of what happened. Well, “picture” is not exactly the right word. More like “sketch”. No. More like “Etch-a-Sketch”.

“ZOMG, J, that sounds more boring than that time you blogged about your trip to Mitten World!”, you may be saying. But, as usual, you would be wrong.

Don’t let the simplicity fool you. This is probably the most clever and creative game since “Victoria’s Secret: The Stubborn Understains”. The characters are funny. The weapons and armor are funny. The places are funny. I guarantee that you, the player, will be the only possible unfunny aspect of the whole experience.

Let me give you an example of how a mighty battle might take place.

Let’s say that you have combined your “Fortune 500 Cookie” with a “Glorioski” in order to create the “Fortune and Glory”, an object which allows you to pass through the “Glory Hole” into the “Unsanitary Toilet Stall”. You are armed with the mighty sword “Formercalibur” and wish to engage in combat with the “Flagrant Homosexual”:

“A garishly-clad man with a hypnotic ascot leaps guiltily up at your approach. He draws his Meat Sword, but you counter with your Sly Wink spell. You have vanquished the fairy, but the aroma from the toilet does not promise treasure. It promises a prescription for antibiotics in your immediate future. You gain 2 GayBashiness.”

What could be more fun than that?!

I was a little frustrated, at first, that I played and played and played and could not progress above level three. But, then Mickey pointed out that what I was playing was actuallythe instructions for the game, so that was my fault, really.

Try KoL out for yourself. I promise you’ll love it.

And if not, you can kiss my “Glistening Mushroom Cap of Swollenness”.