Why I Go Out (HINT: It's Bill Maher's Fault)

This post is going to take the form of the traditional two pronged attack... On your mind. It's going to seem like a single prong attack. You are going to be like, hey, that guy is in my bean and he's got a prong. But there's two prongs. Trust me. So here's the timeline. I was just waiting for Bill Maher because there is fuckass on at 11:00pm on Saturday night, and I'm in relaxing mode, but waiting for Bill Maher is hardly helping the relaxing. He's cool and all. But he's always seemed like sort of a low rent Dennis Miller. Except now Dennis Miller is cloaked, and you can't fire when you're cloaked. Let's just say I feel betrayed, Dennis. And Bill Maher doesn't cover that wound.

He just says stuff nobody else will say, and waits for the audience to either scream with joy, or occasionally boo when he goes too far. Well first of all, can you go too far? Fuck, South Park just had Jesus crapping on the American flag and George Bush. And that's only because Viacom was afraid that the Arab world would explode. Hopefully, in a hundred years you'll be able to walk through Soho when the dykes aren't leaking and see caricatures of Muhammed drawn on Karen Finley's mummified, cryogenigally preserved ass cheek (it's what she would have wanted). But for now, construction paper Mohammed is too offensive.

As somebody who could give a rat's ass about religion in general and expect change, I gotta figure our Christian friends are amazed. Talk about the enemy of our enemy being our friend. "Look, they blew up KFC because the Danish Bill Waterson drew Calvin pissing on Mohammed instead of a Ford logo. Man, they should go see a cross in real piss." Never has a whole culture lost more credibility with me, a liberal, relatively informed cat, than when some schmo shopkeeper said that he hoped Al-Quaida should attack Denmark. He didn't have a gun. He didn't have a bomb. He was wearing an apron. That's Islamic Joe Blow.

I can't trust anybody without a sense of humor. Which is why Dennis Miller hurt me, and Bill Maher has failed to cure me. Sure, I got the Daily and Colbert, but that's different. Or maybe it isn't. I guess somehow Jon Stewart, smug with his lack of an 'h,' is the new voice of reason. Or my reason, at least. But that isn't helping me on Saturday night before I go out.

Which leads us to prong number two. This is straight up hit and run prong. Nothing to it, really. Just, if you are bored one night and the Bruce Willis movie Hostage is on, you should watch the first fifteen minutes. Or if you can get a hold of the DVD, or better yet, the bootleg, because sometimes, MPAA, bootlegs are the only reasons people even see your shit movies, scroll up to the part where Kevin Pollack is driving through the gate into his house. It might even be a chapter title, "The House." Who names DVD chapter titles?

Anyway, crank up the stereo. It's the least appropriate, most overblown soundtrack cue ever. I'm not kidding. This guy is driving into his house in the mountains, and the music is straight up James Bond makes the first act visit to the enemy lair. "Your submersible water fortress is quite impressive, Stromberg. Of course I am just a marine biologist..." But it's just a guy's' house. Don't buy the DVD for this. Just find a way to watch it. It absolutely rocks.

It made me forget about Bill Maher, and then that was a rerun anyway.