Chris Brown: A True Jackass

So Chris Brown is a jackass in two ways. For starters, he beat Rihanna. Who the hell does that? He made a hot girl ugly for Grammy night, and that's inexcusable. It's difficult to be a jackass with out doing something truly asinine, and ruining my Grammy experience certainly counts.

He is my kind of jackass too, though. He is kicking the barn of public apologies. He isn't questioning the true meaning of the word "is." He is not sorry for how people reacted to his words. He is not just sorry he got caught. Most importantly, he did not explain how he would have done it, if he did it. The man is just plain sorry. He screwed up badly, and he knows it. He blamed no one but himself. Sure, it's five months late (he did blame his lawyer for that), but cut him a break, his hand probably still hurts. Rihanna has only released like twelve more albums since getting her face busted up, how could he possibly have had time to apologies?

Really though, I like the sincerity here. YouTube responses are not quite what I expected.

Unreasonable Rockall

See that cute little pebble? I have bigger ones in my backyard. My four year old nephew swallowed one the other day (seagulls and all), and we called Poison Control. He was all better in minutes. 

This rock has a name. It's a creative name, too: Rockall. Rockall is pretty much in the middle of no where, lying in the North Atlantic about 265 miles from Ireland,  285 from Scotland and almost 400 from Iceland. This little place is pretty uninhabitable, especially considering their is a website dedicated to some idiot who wants to sleep on it.

Believe it or not, and I'm sure you do, this hellhole of a location has been the center of a territorial throwdown for years. Thousands of tax dollars have been spent from six different nations on paying lawyers to fight about who owns a rock. 

Okay, so it's not quite that simple. Rockall is located on some hot real estate. Apparently, it's seated on a nice little petroleum deposit that any rational nation would love to have in its pocket. Normally, the location of this petroleum deposit would be located in international waters because hell, you can't own the ocean, can you? 

So this rock provided a lawyer's loophole bigger than Dick Cheney's forehead, and now countries don't want to share, they want to claim this little rock and have all the oil to themselves.

It's the world we live in, I guess.

UPDATE: I just discovered Greenpeace actually camped out there for 42 days. Someone should tell the website guy to cancel his trip.

Hello, Barnmates

No one's quite sure who said it. It was either LBJ, or the Democratic Speaker of the House a decade before LBJ, Sam Rayburn. Either way, one of these powerful Democrats spoke the words that would result in the founding title of this blog: "Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a good carpenter to build one."

I took these very sincere words to heart. I am a jackass to the core. I do dumb shit all the time. And I can kick down a barn? Wow. I didn't know I had the right!

And this got me to thinking. If I had the right to kick down a barn, what other cool stuff can I do? So I opened up the rulebook and nosed around. You know what? There isn't even that much cool stuff that I have the right to do. And I looked around some more, and realized that 5591 American soldiers have died in the last six years to defend these cool things I don't have the right to do. And I also realized that these guys were defending my rights in countries that are a full ocean and a continent away. And they aren't even looking for the right bad guy!

I realized that Lyndon Johnson, despite sending more people even further away to fight for the same not-rights, and increasing taxes to defend the same not-rights in countries where our not-rights aren't at stake, was a pretty smart guy. And he said I could kick down a barn?

It was at this point that I realized he meant a metaphorical barn, because a president talking about kicking down a barn seemed silly.

So I thought something: I thought that maybe all these people dying to protect the not-rights of people and the rights of politicians to raise taxes to do stupid stuff like protect not-rights and send probes to Mars was the barn, and I could be the jackass. Obviously, that's a pretty big barn, so I don't doubt I'll be kicking for a while. But it's one of the few rights I haven't lost, and I might only have a few short years with it before this Indonesian guy running a country he hadn't even heard of until he was 10 takes them away.

So I'm going to kick my little jack-ass off. And I'm going to make sure everyone knows why this barn needs to come down.

And it's not going to make a rat's ass of a difference, but I'm going to do it anyway.

Tune in and watch me kick.