The Brief and Unfortunate Career of Top Chat

Either this is the road not taken or I'm just dialing it in today.

So a few years back I flirted with the idea of doing a celebrity-oriented humor site. I was inspired by the old Smart Set column in the National Lampoon. (I almost wrote, "back when the National Lampoon wasn't a joke.") Not to mention Spy magazine, thanks to whom I will always self-identify as a thick-fingered vulgarian.

Well, it sucked. It was me doing someone else's schtick. Honestly? Celebrities aren't my thing. Kinda wish there was a way I could set them all on fire at the same time. In my defense, at that time the missus subscribed to a number of gossip rags and they were sitting near our chamber of excremeditation, so I wound up leafing through them. Drove me fucking nuts; it was self-torture, plain and simple. This was my simpleminded attempt at striking back.

But there are a few decent lines lurking in the lameness, a couple of giggles. So let's get nostalgic for those golden days of yore when Paris Hilton's contretemps took our minds off that nasty old Iraq War.

(Oh -- just for the record? My soul is for sale -- if someone paid me for this crap I could spool it out by the yard.)

Top Chat

Five Fun Facts About Your Favorite Celebrities!

1) Aspiring yard man George W. Bush has been trained to ride a bicycle – the big boy kind with just two wheels!

2) Beautiful precious Britney Spears has had her recent difficulties linked to a rare medical condition that causes her IQ to match the temperature of her immediate environment. In degrees Fahrenheit, natch, and the poor kid just can’t keep her hands off the air conditioner. Likes to keep things at a level seventy-two. Britney, Top Chat has two words for you – Death Valley!

3) Speaking of medicine, the busy little elves of the pharmaceutical industry have discovered a new anti-coagulant in the saliva of former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling. Turns out that when he’s sucking blood his spit keeps it from clotting, allowing him to feed at his leisure. When he’s done the blood just keeps on flowing but that’s somebody else’s problem, now isn’t it?

4) Is Eddie Murphy still alive? Sure seems that way!

5) Vicious addled pundit Ann Coulter is America’s first holographic neocon! Created by the dazzlingly talented imagineers at Pixar Studios, her jaw-droppingly insane drivel was originally intended to poke satiric fun at the current right. Pixar bull goose John Lassiter grimaces painfully and shrugs his shoulders – “We’re trying as hard as we can but she still sounds about like the rest of them!”

When There’s No More Room In Hell – The Cheney/Hilton Sex Tape

“I don’t know why I have to add bleach to the Visine myself, it should just come this way,” was Top Chat’s initial response to viewing the much-heralded video footage of the distressing tryst between stinky Veep Dick “Lil’ Sure-Shot” Cheney (Ever noticed how his name really is Dick? Truth in advertising!) and repulsive celebutard trollop Paris Hilton. Not since the Nixon/Arafat sex tape (those flaccid stubbly jowls clinging to one another as though made of Velcro, two men whose physiques appeared to have been composed of pure scrotum – double ick!) has publicly distributed celebrity sex gone so wrong.

You’ve seen it by now of course. What was your favorite part? The sight of Hilton’s pathetically meager flesh withering when exposed to Cheney’s famed (and actually visible) halitosis? The way a bored frustrated Hilton washed down a rainbow-colored quarter-pound of pills with a pint of Everclear while Cheney gave his extended speech of justification? The thing they did with her nostrils? Top Chat favors Cheney’s heartbreaking post-coital bleat – “I thought you were supposed to be good at this!” Poor old guy… If you haven’t seen it, well, spoiler alert! He doesn’t shoot her in the face.

The Laws Of The Lizard

The average American woman weighs a hundred and forty pounds, more than twice the weight of the average celebrity. Top Chat is saddened by this. Worse, Top Chat speaks for the vast majority of people who are sexually attracted to women – where are the movie stars for us?

It was during a viewing of Ocean’s Eleven that Top Chat was horrified by the sight of Julia Robert’s face blown up to brobdingnagian proportions. That gleaming death’s-head rictus stretched back convulsively until her earlobes brushed her molars, the massive bone-crushing jaws and huge gleaming eyes filled with desperate hunger… then the camera would pull back to reveal the finely honed physique of a predatory insect.

Julia Roberts was not pretty. She was not attractive. She was, however, fabulous in the most oppressive sense of the word. Top Chat realized that the standards for female beauty in our culture are now being determined by the segments of our society with the least interest in and most loathing for the female body – gay men and straight women, respectively. Echoing from the hills of Hollywood, Top Chat heard a chorus of the phrase that has sucked all the fun out of watching scantily-clad movie stars – “You could get a lot more work if you just lost weight.”

Top Chat has reflected on this. Top Chat has discussed this at length with a variety of concerned parties. Top Chat has ruminated on the fact that only someone who is sexually attracted to women is going to be able to tell if a woman is actually sexy – the rest of you are just guessing. Top Chat has a solution. From now on all female sex symbols will be selected using the same criteria that apply to the purchase of pet lizards. Perhaps you’ve never purchased a lizard or an actress. Don’t worry. The rules are simple and easy to remember and will pretty much guarantee that you’ve got a physically attractive specimen. You’re looking for…

Clear, bright eyes. A high level of activity and responsiveness. No visible signs of injury or disease. A vigorous eater. And a moderate plumpness at the base of the tail indicating a healthy proportion of body fat.

Top Chat would like to point out that these rules do not apply to the Olsen Twins. They are not lizards; they seem to be some kind of salamander. Caveat emptor.

Celebrity Redundancy

Top Chat has reached a decision – no more celebrity redundancy is to be permitted. Every time you duplicate a star you reduce their value. Soon it will take an entire wheelbarrow full of Baldwins to buy a loaf of bread. This must be stopped.

When one movie star does work that could be adequately done by another, the two are to be compared. The superior gets all appropriate roles. The loser is returned to the wild, a la Marlin Perkins – Top Chat has always wanted one of those tranquilizer guns. You may point out that many celebrities are incapable of surviving in an unsupervised environment. Top Chat recognizes the truth in what you say and nods sadly – nature is cruel.

Is there really any difference between Julia Roberts, Gina Davis, and Andy McDowell? Top Chat says no! In this case Gina Davis gets the nod because of Beetlejuice and because she isn’t Julia Roberts. Who is Andy McDowell anyway? Has she ever been in anything aside from People?

Kevin Bacon and Christian Slater. Do you need to ask? Top Chat compulsively watches dinosaur documentaries and Christian Slater’s voiceover for Dinosaur Planet is insufferable. Since he’s named Christian maybe he could be fed to a nice lion. Next!

As for Willem Dafoe and Christopher Walken, well. Willem Dafoe has had more opportunities to show his versatility as an actor and Christopher Walken kissed Top Chat’s wife when they were both teenagers in Queens. Walken is going down hard.

Keanu Reaves and… We don’t need anyone else, do we? Fuck it. He’s redundant!

I Can't Possibly Be The Only One Thinking This...

Okay. With luck -- or rather, draftsmanship -- on my side I'll be posting a sketch of Anomalocaris canadensis later today. But just in case, here's a little political raving to keep things from slowing down too badly. Please feel free to ignore this; and remember, these are the opinions of a raving nutbar.

Right now the economy is a central issue in all our lives. Exactly why is America's economy in the shitter? We're conducting a war -- to conduct a war and ruin an economy at the same time seems like some sort of magic trick.

I'm no economist, I'm woefully ignorant of politics. But it seems to me that when you run a war you have to fucking well run a war. That means paying for the war, not just sending people off to battle.

It means victory gardens, scrap metal drives, war bonds. It means that the civilian population has to throw its support behind the military.

The current administration paid for the Iraq war (or, currently, occupation) with credit cards.

Your credit cards.

To conduct a war and cut taxes at the same time means that the war has to be paid for by going into debt. This is profoundly foolish.

Worse than that much of the money funneled into both the war and anti-terrorism efforts turned out to be straight-up pork. "No-bid contracts?" Wiretapping? Give me a break -- these were excuses to move money from public to private pockets. And given the administration's connections with companies like Halliburton it is difficult not to read this as a case of a bunch of war criminals plundering one nation while bombing another.

If this government had actually conducted the war on a fiscally responsible basis they would have needed cooperation from the nation as a whole. Which means they would have had to justify the whole shebang. Which they could not do.

So they ran the country into debt while a handful of private interests almost choked themselves to death on the flood of dollars cascaded down their throats -- and that money had to come from somewhere.

Whoever comes into office next is going to be reaping the harvest of the last eight years -- or rather, the accumulated harvest of every administration from Reagan on. That's when the deregulazation of the financial industry began and things have been going downhill ever since.

Of course the American people are also responsible for this. By allowing ourselves to be controlled by fear, by listening to the Big Lie over and over again, by simply being selfish and short-sighted we have helped to bring this situation to pass. Shame on us.

Interesting that the bill is coming due just as Bush is on his way out of the White House. I really, really hope there is some legal recourse we can take to bring him, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the rest of that bloody-snouted herd of anthropophagous swine to some kind of justice.

But I doubt it.