Aaron R. Davis

I must not have been a very good boy last year, because right after Christmas, my computer finally melted down. It’s melted down before, don’t get me wrong — you’ve seen the breaks I take — but I’ve always been able to reboot, clear out virus problems, fix the registry or, worst case scenario, reformat. But when your computer crashes in safe mode, it’s pretty clearly time to get rid of the damn thing.

I had a Dell from something like 2003. It was still running Windows XP, so at least I got to bypass Vista entirely. It had a frustrating slow processor (for 2011, not for 2003), and I was getting more and more tired of that giant desktop. I had always wanted to get a new computer. I just wanted to wait until I could actually afford one.

But this, no, this had to become a giant paperweight over the holiday break. Of course.

Of course it had to happen when the local library was closed and I couldn’t get to the public computers.

Of course it had to happen when my wife’s Toshiba laptop was in the shop after suffering its second massive crash in the six months we’ve owned it, just before Toshiba mailed it back completely unsecured in its box — a box that showed up with a hole in it, so, you know, thanks for the care and attention to detail, Toshiba.

And of course this has to happen when we’re poor — and we’re always poor, which is why we both can only work part-time/freelance on jobs we find on the freaking computer!

So this was a fun situation to find ourselves in.

The first thing we did was go to some rental places to see if we could float enough money to rent a computer until our tax refund came in with, hopefully, enough to just pay the damn thing off. We were a bit leery of this option, not just because of the hit to our incredibly meager finances, but because we really only had the option of pre-leased machines. Granted, the warranty options were surprisingly generous, but I was just wary of paying for a computer with the possibility of preloaded problems. Was it worth it, or could we hold out until the wife’s laptop came back maybe with its issues resolved?

My mother entered the stage then and tried to help, and I want you all to remember that I appreciate that she had good intentions while I continue to rant here.

My mom dropped off an older Mac she had laying around.

And frankly, in all honesty, I would rather have no computer at all than deal with a Mac.

I know this is an insane point of contention with a lot of people online. There are a whole lot of Mac zombies out there who don’t mind spending the money to constantly upgrade their OS for the wonderful sense of elitism that being a Mac user and part of the whole Apple community apparently provides. And you know what? Fine. That’s cool. Whatever makes life seem worthwhile in this terrible economy and idiotic political climate. I get that. But even with an unlimited amount of cash, you could not pay me to be a Mac user.

Here’s my problem: I need to access my email and a specific website in order to accept and carry out paid work assignments. It’s the same for my wife. And here I was, stuck with a Mac that was running an older OS and that could only be upgraded so far without just springing for a completely different overpriced machine. So out of three browsers loaded on the damn thing, exactly none of them could access my email. IE? Couldn’t access freaking Yahoo Mail, much less either of our work websites, without upgrading to a newer version of IE … which we couldn’t do without upgrading the OS. Ditto for Safari. And Firefox wouldn’t open at all. Chrome? Opera? Couldn’t even download those on the OS this old thing was running. So while we had a computer that was very pretty, it wouldn’t work for literally the only things we desperately needed it to do: access email and our job websites.

This was incredibly frustrating. I managed to find access to a newer OS through a friend of mine, which would’ve given me the minimum of what I needed, but I couldn’t load it from a USB device. I needed a disc. When I searched the web for advice, I found chat room after chat room full of total assholes whose most helpful comment was “If you don’t have a disc, you must have stolen it, so fuck you, we’re not going to help you.” The archons of Apple, jealously guarding their holier-than-thou status by refusing to open the curtains to show you the inner workings of their church. So thanks for nothing, Appleholes.

My experience with the Mac zombies, and the noise of their moaning Wozniak’s name while copulating with their servers, drove me away from the Internet for a few days. I experienced a wider world … well, a wider of world of Star Trek and Saturday Night Live reruns streamed from Netflix through my Wii. But still, it was nice decompressing from the annoyances online of political commentary, snobbery, fanboyishness and the aforementioned Appleholes. I read, I played games, I did some puzzles … I lived. Remember living? It used to be nice, back before we started letting in so much of the damn noise. It was a fun break. Frankly, I think it’s the kind of vacation I need to take more often.

What ended up happening — since I’m obviously online again — is that I scraped together some holiday money and just bought myself a new laptop (not a Toshiba, that’s never going to happen). I don’t need a tower or an all-in-one; I just need something that gives me word processing and that can access my email and jobs. Frankly, this little laptop is faster and has more space than my old Dell did, so I’m set as long as this thing wants to keep working. I’ve long since lost my fear of losing anything important — I don’t place importance on a lot of things anymore, since it’s just destined to be lost — and now that I’ve reconnected with silence and turning the white noise from the Internet vacuum off, I feel a lot better about the world than I did last week.

Oh, and sorry for the Appleholes crack. People just pissed me off. In the end, it’s not important.

The real lesson of this week: not a lot about the Internet is.

Aaron R. Davis lives in a cave at the bottom of the ocean with his eyes shut tight and his fingers in his ears. You can contact him at samuraifrog@yahoo.com

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Aaron R. Davis

The Late December Holiday Mash-Up is nearly upon us, and the orgy of corporate-mandated Good Cheer that comes with it, and I want to wish you all a safe and happy season of whatever the season means to you personally and will offend you the least.

I wish you good tidings and a pause to ill news. I wish you a lack of long lines and a decent parking space. I wish you less awkwardness than ever when dealing with your families, especially if you’re interesting enough to have found your own identity in spite of how you were raised.

May all of your technology work the way it’s supposed to for a change. If you have to contact a call center, I wish you help instead of belligerence, and an actual human voice instead of a goddamn recording.

I hope we all learn to drive for a change in 2012. No more of the dozens of daily car accidents we take for granted because we assume people are too stupid to pay attention when cars are trying to merge during rush hour. Seriously, people, pay attention to where you’re going. Oh, and people in Mini Coopers, I know you have a tiny little car, but that doesn’t give you license to weave in and out of traffic constantly like you’re zipping around in a goddamn Vespa. Seriously, what is wrong with you people? You still have to obey the rules of the road. And why the hell are you driving a Mini Cooper, anyway? Look at your life, look at your choices.

Um … I mean … may we all learn to forgive others, and ourselves.

I wish more Muppets for the world in 2012.

I wish us actual good movies again.

May Steven Spielberg finally make a movie that isn’t about penis or how creepily magical little boys are, may Pixar make a movie that isn’t a giant allegory for sexual dysfunction and may Hollywood finally relent and finance some Terry Gilliam movies, since almost every popular movie ever has just been ripping the man off. Alright, maybe I’m too hard on everyone; it’s mostly joking, guys. Except for the boy thing, Spielberg, what the hell? AI was like a damn NAMBLA ad.

May Michael Bay never make another movie again and instead travel the world making explosions that help mankind somehow.

I wish some kind of happiness for the people who lost Community only to get a freaking Chelsea Handler sitcom instead. I wish some serious perspective for NBC. I hope Kate Beckett and Richard Castle finally get together, already; seriously, you’re running out of excuses to keep them apart that aren’t just straight trolling the audience. May all of our sweeps weeks contain something worth watching that isn’t all gimmicky.

May Kat Dennings get everything she wants forever until the end of time, because she is perfect and I love her.

May we each win $20,000 in contests we didn’t even know we entered and that don’t turn out to be scams. May all scammers and people who create viruses drop dead from massive coronary episodes that create immense pain. And may they be revived, only to feel every artery harden, then feel their brains shut down and then finally die once again as the people they victimized kick them repeatedly. And this isn’t a one-day thing, oh no, this goes on for like a week, with one artery hardening at a time, and one synapse in the brain shorting out. Yeah, yeah, and then they have to relive all of their most painful moments, like when their dogs died or that creepy guy with the shed next door touched them inappropriately, and then they overload on the pain, but they can’t even become unconscious or numb to it, they just have to sit there and take it all in, just feel all of that pain and sorrow, they can’t filter that shit out.

Oh. Um …where was I? I mean, of course, may we all find inner peace and enlightenment.

May we all understand the value of other people, or, failing that, may we all somehow find ways to work from home and get paid for, I don’t know, entering data or something. Man, that’d be sweet.

May we all get the exercise we need and eat more fruit.

I wish jobs for the people who need them. May corruption be weeded out of our institutions and may cops stop pepper-spraying people in the face for exercising their rights of free assembly. May anyone who says that pepper spray, hotter than the hottest pepper known to man, is merely a food product, get pepper-sprayed in the face so they can see what they’ve been missing. I wish for a Congress that isn’t filled with traitors, who want to do the best for the people of this country and the Constitution of the United States instead of putting a promise made to Grover fucking Norquist above their oaths of office.

I hope the Republican debates get more interesting. Like, instead of the same idiots saying the same stupid garbage over and over again, they have to make it through the final round of American Gladiators or something. Or the games in Tron. Something to make it exciting instead of an exchange of non-ideas. It’s like watching a Model UN made up of D students. Seriously, you know you’d rather watch Rick Perry have to try to be a cowboy instead of just dressing like one and blathering on about prayer in schools. I bet he gets stomped to death by a bronco, which would just make the world a better place, anyway. And who doesn’t want to see Newt Gingrich crying his eyes out while trying to wrestle a bear?

Oh, and let’s tax the rich in 2012. Fuck the one percent for always asking the rest of us to contribute more and more while they contribute nothing to the economy AT ALL. You can’t take it with you, chumps. (Oh, and before you get all pissy in the comments about “job creators” and other buzz-lies, take a deep breath, realize you aren’t rich and you never will be, that you will never be in the one percent ever at all, and that they in fact laugh at you for defending them while they steal your pensions and your 401(k), and go play with your kids or volunteer at a shelter or just read a book or something. If you’re in the one percent, you’re certainly not reading this.)

Oh, and no more corporate personhood. Give me a fucking break with that.

I wish you no racism in 2012. No sexism. Actual compassion for all people. An end to the irrational fear that because someone is a different religion, they want to kill you.

I wish Pat Roberston a quick and very, very quiet retirement.

No more hate. No more war. No more disparity. No more demonizing other people and bombing them because we don’t want to fix problems at home. Economic recovery. Hell, economic prosperity.

Peace and all that. Live long and prosper. May the force be with you.

See you in 2012. I hope it all works out, but maybe bring a helmet just in case. Ooh, and some sandwiches.

Aaron R. Davis lives in a cave at the bottom of the ocean with his eyes shut tight and his fingers in his ears. You can contact him at samuraifrog@yahoo.com

Aaron R. Davis

I’ve been reading a lot of online news lately about the upcoming sequel to JJ Abrams’ Star Trek reboot, and despite the fact that the movie itself isn’t even supposed to appear until 2013, I’m already fatigued by it.

I know, I know. I’m doing that thing I’m always excoriating the Internet for and pre-judging an unfinished product. But what can I tell you? I’m a mass of contradictions, like every actor who thinks they’re fascinating says in every Playboy interview. Or I’m a lazy hypocrite, which is probably more accurate.

It’s not that I didn’t like the first movie (or eleventh movie, if you like), because I did. I’ve caught it on a cable a few times in the past couple of years, and I always enjoy the hell out of it. I know you can make the case that it’s a poorly-written movie, and I can’t really defend it on that level (Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci seem to make their livings writing poorly — I mean, they did write those awful Transformers flicks), but there’s such a fun spirit to the movie that I enjoy it despite its many flaws.

No, my ever-growing disinterest in the sequel is that it’s feeling awfully … re-hashy to me.

It’s this Khan business. Why the hell would you make the decision to do Khan over again?

Here’s what was so great about the reboot: it set the characters up to go in literally any direction the filmmakers could think to send them.

They spent the first movie giving Star Trek this sort of cool, thundering urgency that was, in some ways, an infusion of Star Wars (down to a number of plot elements), but in many other ways made the characters feel more immediate. By trying to combine science fiction elements with space opera grandiosity, they took a trope audiences have long taken for granted — space exploration — and gave it a dark edge, made it dangerous and thrilling again, re-imagined it for a world that was even more laden with faster technology than the world was in the 1960s. Sure, the bridge of the Enterprise may have looked like the inside of an Apple Store, but the filmmakers actually took the time to make the signature Trek technologies — phasers, hand communicators, transporters — seem not only plausible, but new and dangerous.

At the same time, they’d also spent the entire first movie justifying what they were doing to longtime Trek fans that couldn’t get past the first level of being offended that someone was remaking the adventures of Kirk, Spock and company with different actors. So they plugged Leonard Nimoy into the movie and created an explanation as to why things were happening differently: this was an alternate universe created by accident. So the original series, et al, aren’t being overwritten by new data, this is simply happening in, basically, another dimension or something. Since my sensible explanation that everything you ever saw in Star Trek still exists and can be enjoyed on DVD anytime you actually feel like it never seems to actually make sense to people who seem to think that remakes and reboots somehow erase from history all the joy Star Trek has ever given them in the past, it’s as good an explanation as any.

So, after making a cool, fun movie that bends over backwards to justify its existence by swearing up and down that this is an alternate reality and can go in literally any direction, I was really looking forward to a second movie where the filmmakers, no longer bound by creating the set-up, could do anything they wanted to do.

And apparently that’s to remake an episode of the original series.

I don’t know; am I judging them too harshly for this? Am I overreacting? Don’t tell me it’s not going to be Khan in the sequel, because it so obviously is. Back in 2009, when Star Trek was still playing in cinemas, Abrams was already talking about Khan as the villain, with some theoretical bullshit about “people who are always destined to meet.” They’re so hot on trying to cast a Hispanic actor as the villain; the original Khan, Ricardo Montalban, was from Mexico. (It would be nice to see the Indian Khan Noonien Singh played by an Indian actor this time, if they have to do it again. Jimi Mistry would be pretty awesome in the role, just sayin’.)

Hell, even Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman have let it slip, after a fashion. IDW just started publishing its Star Trek series, based on their film, and have said it could serve as a prelude to the sequel.

(Actually, they said prequel, in yet another all-too-common misuse of the word; man, that’s become a pet peeve for me lately. Look, gentlemen, a “prequel” is something that comes after something else, but takes place before it. The only way the comic book series would be a prequel to Star Trek 2 is if it came out after the movie, but detailed events taking place before the events of the film. Seriously, guys, you’re writers!)

All that’s happening in the comic books right now is the rehashing of old episodes. The first two issues were the second pilot, “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” with the new versions of the crew plugged in. The second two issues have been “The Galileo Seven.” Literally all they’re doing is retelling episodes of the original series with a slightly harder edge to fit the new characterizations. It’s really disappointing, because, as I keep saying, you could go in literally any direction you wanted after creating a feature length explanation for why this Star Trek is different from that Star Trek … and instead you just want to rehash old episodes?

So I expect this attitude of “the exact same thing, but kind of different,” so thoroughly endorsed by the screenwriters, is the prevailing one when it comes to current Star Trek projects. And I just find that disappointing. They spent an entire movie partitioning this universe off from the old one just to justify doing whatever they wanted … and what they want to do is rehash “Space Seed,” an episode that was well-done the first time and led to the best Trek film ever made.

There’s that Hollywood originality we always expect.

(Oh, and incidentally, the major reason I think it’s obvious Khan is going to be the villain in the sequel? JJ Abrams says it’s not. That tends to be the extent of his ability to shroud his projects in mystery.)

Aaron R. Davis lives in a cave at the bottom of the ocean with his eyes shut tight and his fingers in his ears. You can contact him at samuraifrog@yahoo.com

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Aaron R. Davis

Nostalgia is a weird force; it overlooks flaws and romanticizes failings. Growing up is also a weird force; it tends to make people cynical and, in a reflexive way, suspicious of anything new, especially new versions of things that make us nostalgic.

It’s the meeting of these two forces that, at age eight, can make someone gleefully delight when Indiana Jones survives a fall out of a plane, down a mountainside and over a cliff in an inflatable raft, but, at age 32, seethe with anger when Indiana Jones survives a nuclear blast by hiding himself in a lead-lined fridge. Both silly, both implausible, both in the same sense of fun, but, to hear the Internet tell it, one a joy to behold and the other an offense by history’s greatest monster.

November saw the financial success of The Muppets, for all intents and purposes Kermit the Frog’s comeback film. Of course, the Muppets haven’t really gone anywhere, they’ve just been doing Disney Channel specials and TV movies — their last major production, Letters to Santa, is only three years old. But since Jim Henson died in 1990, they have been off the mainstream radar in entertainment.

Now they’re back, with a feature film and a Disney-fueled marketing push behind them, and I couldn’t be happier. I loved the movie, and I appreciate the way it tried to make the audience look at the Muppets nostalgically on purpose, and then wonder why the Muppets seemed to disappear in the first place.

The obvious answer is, of course, that Jim Henson died much too early. The movie’s fictional answer is that entertainment got too cynical and hard-edged and the Muppets didn’t really seem to fit anymore. But I think the answer is somewhere in the middle of that.

Yes, Jim Henson died, and then Muppeteer Richard Hunt died a year later, also far too young. After that, I think there was a bit of a struggle over who was going to be in charge of the Muppets from then on. Who was the heir apparent? Was it Frank Oz, one of Jim’s longest collaborators, the genius behind Fozzie Bear and Bert, one-half of puppetry’s greatest double-act? Or was it Jim Henson’s son, Brian, himself a talented puppeteer who was probably feeling the pressure to carry on the family business, but who often expressed doubts about whether he could do anything with the Muppets, or even wanted to?

It took a decade, but the conflict seems to have simmered and then come to a head during the filming of the 1999 flick Muppets from Space. After that, Frank Oz left the Muppets to focus full-time on his successful directing career, and a few years later, Brian Henson sold the Muppets to Disney to concentrate on other opportunities for the Jim Henson Company. During that decade, the Muppets tried TV again with the unsuccessful (but charming) Muppets Tonight, which was pushed into syndication in its second season and will probably never see the inside of a DVD player, which is a damn shame. It also seems to have been a time when everyone involved with the Muppets had a hard time figuring out who was in charge, and just what to do with the characters.

What I hear now — and what I’ve especially been hearing in response to the new film — is that there should be a new version of The Muppet Show. That tends to be a trigger for me, because I am firmly of the belief that if there were such a show, no one would watch it, and those who did watch it wouldn’t like it. People don’t really want a new Muppet Show; they want to be little kids again and they want Jim Henson to still be alive.

When it comes to something remembered through nostalgia, people are very unwilling to accept that time moves on or that things change. People forget or were always unaware of factors that made the original what it was — factors that can’t be repeated.

Here’s what those factors were for The Muppet Show.

First, American networks rejected the idea of a series featuring the Muppets. Jim Henson had to go to Britain to get the show made for syndication, and in the beginning the concept was so out there that they couldn’t even get guest stars. Most of the original guest stars were actors who had the same agent as Jim Henson. It didn’t really gel until the second season, when people like Rudolf Nureyev legitimized The Muppet Show as a showcase of artistry as well as laughter. A lot of people praise — quite rightly — the anarchic spirit and bizarre non sequitors of the series, but how much of that was born out of the environment of what was essentially an independent British comedy production? The show might have been quite different if it was made in America, and maybe not as long-remembered.

Second, the late 70s were a time when variety shows and specials were much more common on television than they are now. Saturday Night Live was still brand new, and if you watch those early episodes, the sketch comedy is only part of the package. There were variety series full of guest stars, musical numbers, dance showcases, artistic depictions. For The Muppet Show, having Rudolf Nureyev dance ballet or having Mummenschanz perform one of their bizarre, beautiful routines or having Shields & Yarnell do mime and magic wasn’t out of character with other shows of the time.

Today, the variety format only barely exists. Talk shows follow rigid routines that have turned them into pointless commercial platforms for upcoming movies, albums and TV shows. If you have a show with people dancing or singing, it’s most likely a reality competition show with arrogant judges dissecting people who have overestimated their talents. The Muppet Show format doesn’t really exist anymore; back then, they were following an already-established and familiar TV idiom. What would they do today that would both parody and follow the established rhythm of today? Scream at fat people until they cried?

The third thing we can’t overlook: Jim Henson is dead. Richard Hunt, too. Muppets head writer Jerry Juhl passed on a few years ago. Frank Oz no longer works with the Muppets, and neither does Jerry Nelson. From the original group of Muppeteers, only Dave Goelz and Steve Whitmire remain with the team, trying to shepherd the Muppets from project to project, and doing it very well, I think. They don’t get enough credit for keeping the Muppets alive and entertaining after everyone predicted that Kermit the Frog would fall by the wayside of entertainment history over a decade ago. And though the current group of Muppeteers is doing a damn good job with the characters now, I run into people who just can’t overlook the fact that it’s not the same people anymore, even if those people have died or moved on. Sorry, it’s just reality. Things change, and if they’re malleable enough, as I think the Muppets are, the necessary differences are woven in organically. If people resent those differences and can’t get over it, well, they don’t need a new Muppet Show.

And the final consideration is, really, Disney. Disney’s great at cross-promotion and marketing, but not much else. Not to disrespect some of their entertainment products, which I quite enjoy, but they’re much better at short term gain than they are at long term planning or growing their brands. If Disney decided it was time to do The Muppet Show again, the best case scenario is that it would be very safe and charming; and it would air in a shitty family time slot on ABC, before being dumped onto Disney Channel. And it would feature a lot of stars from Disney Channel or ABC as a way of promoting other projects (much the same reason that Disney Channel’s Selena Gomez and Modern Family’s Rico Rodriguez cameo in the new movie).

I don’t really know where The Muppet Show would fit in with today’s demographics. Disney would want to aim it at children and families, but what always worked so well about the Muppets is that they weren’t aimed at children and families. Yeah, they were clean and they weren’t cynical, but The Muppet Show was a comedy show with an old-fashioned sensibility, timeless gags and modern jokes. It was free and zany and silly, but it had heart and wit. They aren’t a toy commercial; they’re comedy.

I don’t know … maybe if you put them on Adult Swim and get real comedy writers to do it and worry about the comedy first and the branding second (or fifth or something), and acknowledge that the people who most want to see it are guys in their thirties, you might have something. But does anyone really think that’s going to happen?

All I know is, whatever the future of the Muppets, I’ll be there watching it. And maybe listening to the Internet complain about it, because that’s what the Internet does. And hoping that The Muppets isn’t the last time I ever see Zach Galifianakis as Hobo Joe, because the world really does need more Hobo Joe.

Aaron R. Davis lives in a cave at the bottom of the ocean with his eyes shut tight and his fingers in his ears. You can contact him at samuraifrog@yahoo.com

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Aaron R. Davis

Black Friday really has become the most American holiday, because only in America would people gleefully create a storm of materialistic violence mere hours after giving thanks for what they already have. “But what’s really important is family … now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to put on my spiked climber’s boots in case I need to step on someone on the way to the discounted wafflemaker.”

Yes, Black Friday has come and gone. The day that is supposedly America’s busiest, most discount-friendly shopping day of the year, even though it’s generally neither. The one day of the year that it’s supposedly normal for people to line up for miles outside of department stores in the middle of the night, because apparently if they don’t the shelves at Target will be completely bare by 9 a.m. The day the news media, suffering from the slow holiday season news cycle, plays up what used to be a stereotype — that Black Friday is a day of shopping so competitive that things get violent — and thus creates a charged, violence-friendly atmosphere.

This is the kind of thing that some civilization is going to look back on a couple of hundred years from now and say: “Well, no wonder they wiped themselves out.” They’re going to look back at Thanksgiving and think it was the warm-up meal to some messed up version of the Hunger Games with slightly discounted flatscreen televisions.

Still, it’s easy for me to overlook this kind of ridiculousness. Who am I to do anything but roll my eyes when I see people lining up to be taken advantage of? The stereotype of the Black Friday shopper — typified by those horrendous Target commercials with the crazy woman in the red jogging suit, which says an awful lot about what Target thinks of its holiday shoppers, doesn’t it? — is pretty silly, and if people want to aspire to that, well, that’s between them, their victimized families and their eventual court-ordered psychiatrist.

Where I get bothered is in two places. First is in the way stores are opening earlier and earlier and earlier. Every year, they test the waters more and more to see how much Thanksgiving space they can encroach on. This year there were stores opening on the evening of Thanksgiving itself, which probably marks the beginning of the end of Thanksgiving as a holiday most people traditionally get off of work. (I’m sure there are movie theater and video store employees scoffing and saying “Hey, welcome to the club,” and having worked on Thanksgiving in both capacities, I do not blame them one scintilla.)

Can you imagine working at Walmart and coming in to find that your schedule includes evening shift hours on Thanksgiving? Doesn’t sound like fun to me. Then again, neither does working at Walmart, but in this economy, if you actually have a job, more power to you.

The second place where I get bothered is, of course, the violence.

Stampedes for $2 wafflemakers? Really, America? This is what we’ve come to now?

These people who get so crazy over deals and discounts and cheap gimmicks … yeah, they exist. We’ve all known people like this, somehow. Maybe our mother is friends with them, or maybe they’re related to us somehow, but we’ve all run across them. Those people who buy everything because they’re getting such a good deal. Never mind the fact that not spending money on these things at all will save you 100 percent on the list price; that concept is wholly foreign to these people. My mother is friends with a woman who was so thrilled when her sons moved away for college because she could fill up their rooms with appliances — many of which never even come out of the shopping bags — that she got incredible deals on. It’s like hunting, but for crazy people.

Yes, I said crazy people, because if you’re trampling another human being just to buy a $2 wafflemaker, there is something wrong with you.

Then there’s this insanity of the woman who fired pepper spray into a crowd of people just to get her hands on a cheap Xbox. Okay, I get how frustration can lead someone to think of casually hurting people — we all have those thoughts, admit it — but to actually do it takes some kind of uncanny leap from reality. It’s like the poor judgment equivalent of getting bitten by a radioactive spider, turning bad decisions into really dangerous ones. I know, I know, Fox News tells us that pepper spray is a food product (which happens to be banned for use in war by the Chemical Weapons Convention), but that thing is hotter than the hottest pepper known to man.

On the one hand, temporarily blinding someone and cutting off their ability to breathe just to get an Xbox is the most insane thing I’ve ever heard. On the other hand, it’s kind of the most American thing I’ve ever heard. We should knock down the Statue of Liberty at this point and just put up a statue of that UC Davis campus cop spraying pure capsaicin into the eyes of the less fortunate while standing on a pile of Xboxes.

(Also, as an aside, I think we just got an insight into the kind of home atmosphere that makes those screaming adolescent homophobes that thrive on Xbox Live.)

The final bit of bad news is that sales were up seven percent this Black Friday, so look for things to only get worse next year when people brave the biting cold to shop, spend, deal, save, shove, trample, maim and kill their way into proving how much more they love their families than you do. Me, I’ll be in my Black Friday bunker.

Aaron R. Davis lives in a cave at the bottom of the ocean with his eyes shut tight and his fingers in his ears. You can contact him at samuraifrog@yahoo.com

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