Laugh Out Loud, I Dare You

I confess to having LOLcat fever, despite my mixed feelings on the phenomenon. On the one hand, these pictures usually play up a cat’s alleged cuteness, and as a member of the avian community (often exploited for “hunting practice” by sociopathic felines), I can’t condone any sympathetic portrayal of said monsters. Stand together, flying V!

At the same time, I love the intimation that cats can’t spell correctly and can only string the most retarded of sentences together. I guess that’s what keeps me looking for new pics pretty much any chance I get at my temp job—this perpetually sweaty guy on the other side of the office is the only one with a computer, and when he gets up, for any reason, everyone starts bickering over whose turn it is for Internet. Usually a lot of honking and biting on my part is enough to put the rest of the underpaid white-collar mob in their place.

Well today I snagged a 3-minute block when Sweats (we don’t know his real name) was in the can. And I saw something on MySpace I never would have expected.

Too soon.

I guess the honeymoon is over … doesn’t feel too good when the shoe is on the other foot. Or drumstick. Thanks, world wide web users, for the LOLgoose. One more pointless diversion I can no longer enjoy.

You just had to take it too far.

Caligula’s Dreamlog #3: The Ritzy Underbelly

How quaint! I dreamed I was a man of moderately less power and stature, which is to say, some obscenely wealthy and naïve fauxhemian metro with a Gucci axe to grind. It was an odyssey of Homeric—er, maybe Spielbergian—uh, small quirky Sundance film proportions. Who knew how perfectly ridiculous it was to see the world through the reductive psyche of the modern aristocrat wannabe?

The Dream:

Steve Forbes had lodged one too many hasty wagers at the Hampton Classic, and I grew altogether weary of his delinquency in tendering the final—and rightfully beloved—Fabergé egg. This was no slight tiff: my Segway had been sitting sans worthwhile hood ornament in my spare closet since I first finagled a prototype of the awkward thing, waiting patiently in a cocoon for the embellishment that would transform it from gauche scooter into chariot-fit-for-Apollo.

The price of Forbes’ weakness for long-odds horses

Setting out towards Steve’s on that gyroscopic claptrap, my valet Bernard driving, I gripping his pelvis for dear life, I was suddenly struck with a profound craving for vitals, i.e., bourbon, in some unfamiliar ghetto or other. A Xanadu of Oriental delights awaited: We wandered into an establishment staffed by the largest and most muscled women one could care to gaze upon, who, after plying us with saccharine libations and cuisine apparently fused in Asia, went about joshing and lightly embarrassing various patrons in the middle of their meals, occasionally bursting into inspired song. All this was executed with a wit so barbed and bawdy Oscar Wilde’s pallid cheeks would burn. I assumed these mercurial hosts had absorbed rumors that suggested this tastemaker’s penchant for entertainment of the decadent and bacchanalian sort until one turned to Bernard and inquired whether I was his boyfriend, sending my poor manservant into a dreadful stutter, which only served to magnify his discomfiture and mine. The rest of the ride to Steve’s and all the pelvic contact there entailed came bundled with a silent tension I won’t soon forget.

Analysis:

Apparently my nocturnal alter-ego had never been to a drag restaurant. Oh! The innocence of it all! Which reminds me, I haven’t been to Lucky Cheng’s in ages.

Hank the Yank

Those of you presumptuous mammals that thought Hank the secretly insecure hawk was not your problem, take note: no longer is Manhattan’s biggest red-tailed bully limiting himself to a singular abhorrent brand of bird-on-bird violence.

Weirder and wilder still, he’s upping the ante on New York pride. But you wouldn’t know that from the biased Boston Globe account…

A certain New York Yankee slugger should beware: A student taking a tour of Fenway Park today was attacked by a red-tailed hawk that [drew] blood from the girl’s scalp.

Her name: Alexa Rodriguez. Her age: 13, the same jersey number the Yankee third baseman wears.

“She’s fine, a little shaken, but OK,” said Vince Jennetta, a teacher who chaperoned Rodriguez’s class trip from Memorial Boulevard Middle School in Bristol, Conn.

As a goose that knows Hank well, I think I can shed a little light on this incident. Hank, like most assholes in the area, is actually a die-hard Yankee supporter. It’s so like him to fly all the way to Beantown just to talon up a New England girl who dared to have a name and age vaguely linking her to his beloved third baseman. This is what I’m saying people, the guy is disturbed. He’s a menace. And as glad as I am to see humans getting picked on, I’m too scared to wear my Mets cap.

On Immunodeficiency

What’s all this about poor people having allergies too? Last I checked, such elitist immune systems were the pride of the nobler class; they made your body a gated community unto itself, setting off all sorts of biological alarms when an outsider grazed the perimeter fence. Why, everyone knows that the Qing dynasty in China had the first peanut-related death on record, and that Imhotep of ancient Egypt would sooner free the slaves than think of wearing a latex condom.

Emperor Maximillian I of Mexico was famously allergic to firing squads.

The point is, the underclass isn’t supposed to resist infection, but quickly succumb, decreasing the surplus population. That’s the point of A Christmas Carol, as Dickens was at pains to argue. But the sneezing, the watery eyes, it all signals an intent to fight back! Sure, today it’s only pollen and cat dander—soon they’ll be rebelling against visible matter, a designation even I (unfortunately) fall under. For now.

Proof of how we see the average 21st century allergy sufferer?

Oh my god.

Are you telling me I have to wait in line, at a pharmacy, behind a bald person wearing part of a common toolbench on his head, all for a $20 box of Claritin or the generic equivalent? I’d have to already be high on NyQuil. Which I am.

Worked Stiff

So it’s come to this.

It took defaulting on student loan payments for Flight Academy for me to seek gainful employment, if you can call it that. The temp agency sent me to what has to be the dumpiest PR firm in midtown—we’re in the basement of T.G.I.Friday’s (not a client, by the way). Forget about natural light.

Thus far nobody’s even told me what I’m supposed to be doing. All I can glean from my workspace is that I’m expected to sit and produce copious amounts of garbage:

And because they refuse to give me a building ID, the front desk security guard/T.G.I.Friday’s hostess tried to shoo me away when I came back from lunch break.

Also, it turns out I don’t get a lunch break.

On top of that, my boss, Arnie or Ernie, whatever, got up in my beak about getting feathers on the water cooler nozzle. That buttwipe can’t prove anything. He probably doesn’t even know that I lost my last job by blogging about my buttwipe boss.

—Nero

Small Government, Big Checks

Call me what you will, but Caligula is no tax cheat.  I know perfectly well that I’m welcome to wallow in my moral degeneracy in this country only so long as I tremble before the IRS.  Try telling that to Wesley Snipes!  I bet he wishes he’d listened to me now.

So this nonsense of mailing my economic stimulus check out a month later because I used the “fund transfer” option when direct depositing my rebate on TurboTax…oh, this really is too boring.  Just give me the damn blood money now, you swine!

It was bad enough they raised an eyebrow at the input of fourteen dependents on my return.  If a supple young slave boy doesn’t count as dependent, what does?  It’s not like they have a part-time job on top of that, and if they did, you could be sure they’d be getting beaten more often, making them frailer and thus all the more dependent on me.  Or haven’t you heard of the circle of life?

I’m not gonna lie.  I need the money to get a gift for myself.  The whole household, really.  I saw one demonstrated at a convention in Las Vegas this past winter, and really, how is a man of taste to resist—

If I didn’t know better, I’d swear it was designed with the hedonist Roman emperor in mind.       

—Caligula

AW HELL NO

O NO YOU DID NOT DO THAT SUMNER MISSOURI TELL ME YOU DID NOT CONSTRUCT A HUGE FIBERGLASS STATUE OF MY MORTAL ENEMY FROM HIGH SCHOOL AND DECLARE IT THE WORLD’S BIGGEST GOOSE I WILL SO RAIN DEATH UPON YOUR DUMB MIDWESTERN ASSES IF YOU KNEW WHAT THIS BITCH PUT ME THROUGH IN ONE SINGLE DAY OF ADOLESCENCE YOU WOULD SHIT YOURSELVES OUT OF PITY AND YOU KNOW WHAT START SHITTING YOURSELVES ANYWAY CAUSE I’M COMING FOR YOU

—Nero

Hooligans!

To the regrettably talented hooligan-sculptor who practiced his craft on my image last night:

There are few things more important to a man than his bust. I can think of no more comforting image than one’s own, and when the horrors of rampant tooth decay or an unyielding zit make looking in a mirror an exercise in vanquishing vanity, the carved representation of oneself provides an untarnished ideal—something to strive for. That is why my favorite bust adorns the front entrance of my luxury condominium complex: so that after a trying day, when people were barely intimidated by my psychotic gaze and I just couldn’t seem to find the right seedless grape, I may be reminded of the power and glory that is Caesar. But no, you couldn’t let an old tyrant have that simple pleasure, could you.

BEFORE ………………………. AFTER

Just so you know, I’m holding on to the mangled thing; it should break your jaw nicely when I attempt to shove it down your throat.

Not kidding,

Caligula

Yeah. I Can Fly.

I was hoping against hope that the Iron Man movie would fizzle and short circuit like one of Tony Stark’s prototype armored flight suits, but fate has a funny way of screwing over me specifically.

Let me back up. This flash-and-grab brouhaha everyone is paying $11.25 to sit through was supposed to feature yours truly. John Favreau approached me early on, but it wasn’t until Robert Downey personally took me out to lunch at Sardi’s that I was swayed to play a part that I had grave concerns about: a goose. You know how in movies where something that shouldn’t be able to fly—a killer whale, an Oriental rug carrying a monkey wearing a fez, Robin Williams—is flying? And then they fly past, say, a flying V of geese? And one of the geese maybe does a double take and makes a face like BRAWWWK?! I THOUGHT GEESE WERE THE ONLY THING THAT COULD FLY BOY WOW AM I SURPRISED TO SEE YOU UP HERE WTF?

The only thing America can agree on: punching the ground is awesome.

Well, I was supposed to be that goose for Iron Man. He would fire up and go careening through some CGI’d clouds, and I would be there to feign shock, thereby degrading my species, when he did. We did fourteen takes despite having a keeper on the third. I always say there are no small actors, only small wingspans, and I left everything on the table. I became my role, forsaking my responsibility to defy the stereotype that geese are small-minded and easily bewildered.

And I paid dearly. Didn’t even make the final cut. “A little cartoony,” Favreau said as my shot at the big-time landed on the cutting-room floor, I guess to save time for his cameo.

—Nero

The Decline and Collapse of Manhattan

Taking a stroll from Broadway to Central Park West yesterday afternoon, I was struck by something out of a clear spring sky. I mean that quite literally: a heavy green chunk of something landed on and promptly broke my collarbone. I wondered, in that stumbling, shambling state of shock, whether the policemen shouting to me from the street had indeed been trying to warn me off this obviously treacherous path rather than ridiculing my gold toga, as is their custom. More greenish stone rained down, sending the cops scrambling for cover—why, I can’t imagine. It was just the cornice of an apartment building falling off. I would think New Yorkers had gotten used to such a routine inconvenience!

Local firefighters argue over whose turn it is to be brave

I suppose when one has lived among the crumbling infrastructure of ancient Rome as I have, these crane accidents and bridge collapses barely excite the senses anymore. Still, you people have no excuse for such rampant fear-mongering: do you really think your shoddy engineering standards are what’s bringing these structures down? As anyone who’s read Gibbon’s masterly “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” knows, a disintegrating infrastructure is but one symptom of the loss of the “civic virtue” (a.k.a. “manliness”) that keeps imperial regimes airborne. Amend your effeminate lifestyles, and maybe your tenement will stand the test of time.

Also, what are you, too good for paganism?

—Caligula