GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1107: DEKALB CRIME

 I took today off so I could drive to Elmhurst and let a doctor stick needles into my spine. My back feels better already, and it was nice to have a sort-of three day weekend, so why not write a Goodnight, Fuckers?

I've been making a few jokes on social media about whether or not I live in a dangerous neighborhood, and the answer might actually be, in all seriousness, yes. There are two Flock cameras across the street from my apartment complex, if that gives you any indication. More on that in a moment.

I'm from Elmhurst, and while Elmhurst has crime, it's not like DeKalb's crime. Shootings in Elmhurst, for instance, are rare. And when violence happens there, it's usually from out of towners robbing a gas station or what have you.

DeKalb crime is in your face, though. For example, I recently had to give up eating at one of the best pizza places here because I learned that the co-owner was a pedophile. It doesn't say what he did, but the sex crimes registry mentioned that the victim was twelve years old. So fuck that place.

A few years ago, someone robbed one of their delivery drivers at gunpoint, if you want the example to continue. Every once in a while we get a drunken act of violence, like where they say the NIU student who stabbed a guy outside a bar on Lincoln Hwy (which, if you keep driving east, turns into Roosevelt Rd for those of you closer to Elmhurst.)

And then there's the guy who . . . hell, just read the article. Warning, you probably don't want to read that. And if you wonder how it could have started at the library, then you've never worked at a library.

Which brings us to my neighborhood. There were three recent bouts of violence. Two were shootings that happened a couple of blocks away from me, and the other was a stabbing that happened at the apartment complex next to mine. From what I understand, that stabbing happened RIGHT IN FRONT OF ONE OF THOSE FLOCK CAMERAS. And there still hasn't been an arrest. I kind of doubt these things are good at what they're supposed to be good at: catching criminals. They're really good at extracting our data against our will, though. Why do we have so many of these fucking things, again?

As far as I'm concerned, the jury's out. I've never been afraid to go outside. Nothing has ever happened to me here. Then again, I'm a pretty big dude, so not many people want to fuck with me. So what do you think? Do I live in a dangerous neighborhood?

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1106: THE GRAMPS EQUATION

 How many of these things have I written? And how many have been about Gramps? A lot, and a lot, and I have the nagging feeling that I may have done this before. I searched key words on this blog to check, but nothing came back, so I'm only about 80-20 that I've never done this topic.

Gramps had a lot of sayings. My favorite was, "'Balls,' said the queen. 'If I had two I'd be king!'" But whenever he was frustrated, he had a good one: "Shit and two is eight." I took to saying it whenever I got annoyed with something.

When I got to high school, I took my first big boy math class, and I realized that Gramps was essentially cursing in Algebra. Hence his saying became: Shit + 2 = 8. Algebra tells us that to solve this equation, we have to subtract two from both sides of the equals sign, which will tell us: Shit = 4. The twos cancel each other out on the left side of the equation, leaving shit, which means the right side is eight divided by two, which is four.

So I'm not entirely useless when it comes to math. Just mostly useless.

The next time you listen to Slipknot, please keep in mind that they're really singing is that People = 4.

This GF has been brought to you by weed.

But not so much weed that I've forgotten I'm running a contest. If you want to win a Nightmare on Elm Street Hawthorne Village house, complete with working light and two Freddy figurines, then check this out here, and good luck!

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1105: VOICE OF A BOT

 I have a pleasant voice, so if you follow me on social media, then you know I post about how often a customer at my square job will ask during a call, "Are you a real person?" I laugh as if they're the first person to have asked me that, and I tell them I get that often. It's annoying, but I don't get upset about it.

Yet earlier this week I did get angry about it. I'm not sure why, and I've been thinking about it since. This customer did not ask if I was a person. Instead he demanded to talk to a human being. In the middle of a sales pitch in which he did not like the price, he specifically said, "I want to talk to a human being."

I said, "I am a human being." I heard an edge in my voice, which surprised me a little, so I fell back on the old ha-ha routine. I'm not sure why that pissed me off, though.

This voice didn't come from nowhere. When I was young, I listened to a lot of old radio horror shows like Quiet, Please and The Hermit's Cave, and I loved the way people's voices were back then. I started imitating them so I can do a good impression, in particular of the commercials. "Try Ironized Yeast. They're the ones with the IY on the bottle and on each tablet." "Four out of five doctors recommend Camel cigarettes." In addition to that, when I was a parts driver for the City of Elmhurst and had to drive a lot of places, I listened to a ton of morning radio shows. As such, I kind of wanted to be a radio personality for a while, so I would imitate people I heard on the radio. "It's the top of the hour, and we've got traffic coming up in ten minutes." "This is John Bruni, coming atcha LIVE from such and such arena, where Megadeth is about to take to the stage." And so on.

Which was perfect training for when I got the job at Conference Plus as a conference operator, ie. the guy who introduces calls, runs Q&A and polling sessions, etc. So a lot of training went into this voice, almost all of it nonformal.

I have only myself to blame whenever someone thinks I'm AI on the phone. So why did I get pissed at this one guy?

I have no idea. I can't afford therapy, hence me writing Goodnight, Fuckers, so do you have any suggestions? Also, if you're looking for a voice actor to pay tons of money to, drop me a line.

DO YOU WANT TO WIN A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET HAWTHORNE VILLAGE HOUSE?

 It's Halloween, so I'm having a giveaway. For more details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5j9zGGa0QU

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1104: AN ANOMALY IN THE MATRIX

 "Every accusation is a confession." It's a phrase that has become popular with people criticizing Donald Trump. It seems like every time he opens his mouth to accuse someone of doing something, it turns out that he was the one doing it the whole time. Is it misdirection? Or one of those, if-they-can-do-it-so-can-I situations? Who knows? But it's a thing. For example, every time protests are organized against him, he accuses the attendees of being paid protestors. And then this happened, leading up to the January 6 insurrection.

That makes me think about his constant claims of the 2020 election being stolen, because it is my considered opinion that he stole the 2024 election. There is no hard evidence for this, and I'm sure if there was, he wouldn't be punished for it. He never gets punished for anything despite being the human equivalent of dogshit squished between the treads of a sneaker.

But there is some circumstantial evidence. A while back I read about Ashley St. Clair's claims regarding text messages between her and her then-boyfriend, Elon Musk. Any story you read about this is going to make a big deal out of him using his "space lasers" to hack voting machines, thus getting 2024's election results before anyone else on the planet, but I think there's more to it than that.

She said that before the election, he texted her that he felt positive about Trump winning a second term because "tomorrow we unleash the anomaly in the matrix." When she asked for clarification, he advised that he had ten thousand lasers in space, and he was going to use them to activate that anomaly, whatever that means. He adds that "this is not a piece they'll see on the chessboard." She says she doesn't want to know any more than that because she doesn't want to be interrogated about it later, and he texts back that it's a good idea.

There is a documentary about this, and Musk is currently threatening to sue the director over it. There is video of St. Clair's claims, and in the news story showing the video, the reporters confirm that they have validated these texts as real. So Musk, a self-proclaimed free speech absolutist, is threatening to sue someone to abridge their freedom of speech.

Then, on Election Night, it is known that Musk left Mar-a-Lago early because, according to a text he sent to St. Clair, "Yeah, I knew hours ago that Trump won. My team has the best real-time data anywhere." So the news stories are all running with that part, suggesting that Musk might have been using Starlink to keep tabs on the voting machines, just so he'll have up-to-date info to work with.

Those same stories, and you'll see if you read any of those links, do mention the possibility that he used Starlink to hack those machines to change votes. They don't pursue that line very far, I imagine because that's a Pandora's box just waiting to be opened, but I believe that is exactly what Musk did.

Look at the way he said these things. You don't "unleash" anything when you simply use tech to take a peek at how everyone is voting. If you're reading a book, do you "unleash" your eyes on it? If you're just looking at those things, there is no need to refer to it as an unexpected piece on the chessboard. It sounds to me like he was bragging about his ability use Starlink to steal an election for Donald Trump.

A lot of people voted for Trump. I don't imagine Musk used Starlink to steal, say, Texas or Florida or some such. I imagine he only used it in swing states to clinch uncertain victory in those places. So I believe his lawyer when he says:

"Starlink was not connected to vote tabulation. Election officials in multiple states, independent cybersecurity researchers, and fact-checkers publicly refuted the Starlink vote-rigging claim in November 2024, and nothing since has revived it."

So I'm assuming he consulted election officials in multiple states, like Alaska, Idaho, Montana, etc.

Will this ever go to court? Probably not. If Musk goes through with his threats to litigate, discovery could reveal a lot of stuff he'd rather the world didn't know about, so no, I don't think it will. We may never know for sure. But it is something to think about as we head into next month's mid-terms . . .

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1103: [REDACTED]

 I don't usually go with content warnings for these, but if you're squeamish, or if you don't want to hear anything about my dick*, you might want to skip this one. This is your last chance, because the actual title of this one is . . .

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1103: DICK CHARCUTERIE

Not long ago I received two sausage, cheese and crackers packages from a couple of friends. It came from a place called Farmers Market, I think? I'm usually a Wisconsin Cheeseman man, but I love cheese and crackers. And sausage. And it also came with fancy mustard.

Not to be confused with this.

When I first opened the sausage and got ready to slice it up, I noticed something very strange. This sausage was the exact thickness of my cock, and it was three-quarters the length.

I had a crazy thought as I held a knife to that sausage. What if I'm not in my kitchen? What if I'm in a psych ward somewhere? What if this is really my dick, and I'm about to cut it off? And then slice it up and eat it? Oh, and I'll be eating it with cheese and fancy mustard. I'll bet my penis tastes really good on those crackers.

Is that insane? On the face of it, I imagine you believe I'm crazy, but I don't think it's all that far afield from sanity. How many times have drunk people gone into the closet to piss, thinking they were in the bathroom? I don't drink anymore, but it's the same principle. When you do something like that, you're dead certain you're doing something else. Can our senses be believed?

How much of reality is augmented by perception? All of it? And how faulty is perception? What color is the sky? No, it's every color except for blue, but blue is the color it reflects back to our eyes.

How many people do you come into physical contact with on a weekly basis? No one? Our skin never touches someone else's. What we feel is the force of the space between us pushing away.

Think about all the optical illusions you've ever teased your brain with. I scoured Google looking for the specific one I had in mind and couldn't find it. I had a He-Man activity book when I was a kid. One of the things they had you do is stare at a black dot for a bit. Then you were supposed to look at a black silhouette of Stratos with a white dot in the middle. The white dot vanishes, and the silhouette is complete.

As a philosophy major in college, I'm all too familiar with quandaries about how real our lives actually are. What if we don't even exist? You can ask Descartes about that one. There's a reason he had to invent the phrase "cogito ergo sum."**

So who's to say I'm not back on the psych ward, slicing my cock into thin sausage wafers?

It worries me, but I cut it up, anyway. The sausage, not my dick. (I think.) Later, as I eat everything, I grab myself through my pajama bottoms, just to confirm I'm still intact. I mean, the sausage didn't taste like dick, but I've never had dick before, so how would I know?

Whatever I ate?

It was pretty good.

___________________________________

*I realize this is funny coming from me, a guy who used to have a picture of his dick on his website, but here we are.

**Don't come at me with the "well, actually" stuff. I heard you think it. Don't.

***What do you mean, there isn't a third asterisk above? Anyway, yes, I'm high. It's been a rough [checks watch] couple of decades.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1102: THE FUCKERS

 Okay, I've heard the rumors. I've been trying to ignore them, but they're persistent, so I feel I need to address them so we can all move on with our lives.

I've known Bill--his friends get to call him that--ever since I guested on his show when I was a child actor in the late 'Sixties. I haven't seen him in a while (we got together again for the film, Spplat Attack, a couple of decades ago), but I know he's a loyal fan of Goodnight, Fuckers. He joshes me about the title all the time. It's good natured ribbing, all in fun. But the media circus around this controversy has to stop.

So please believe me when I say the fuckers I write these for are not the same as Bill's band, the Fuckers.

There's a lot of crossover, sure, but quite frankly Bill is tired of being asked about stuff like "corporate overlords" and "techbros" and my catchphrase, "History is never far behind." He's asked me as a personal favor to publicly announce this so we can put the rumors to rest. Please respect his time in this manner.

Goodnight, fuckers. And Fuckers. Just in case.

I haven't forgotten you, either. Goodnight, Bill.