NAMBLA Applauds CPS’s Achievement in Screwing Kids

CHICAGO-Pandemonium reigned today when a meeting between Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and officials from Chicago Public Schools was interrupted by a group of supporters from the National Man Boy Love Association (NAMBLA).

“Yeah!” The assembled 37 ‘Lovers of Young Men’ shouted. “Give it to those kids!”

The NAMBLAites reported that they were at the meeting to express their support for the Mayor’s decision to recently close 50 Chicago schools. Local Chicago NAMBLA spokesman Joseph Fridbaker stated: “I’ve never seen anybody fuck so many kids at once. I mean, we’re talking thousands. It really is a remarkable achievement.”

5 Things Sun Tzu Can Teach You About Freshman Year

1. Deception and Supplies

“All warfare is based on deception.” – Sun Tzu, Ancient Chinese General, 502 BC

Hey, quick – do you want to know how much a gallon of milk costs? About $5 dollars. And I’m sorry I told you that, because it’s something you shouldn’t have had to learn yet. The truth is this: 

Clubs that Should Exist at Northwestern

There are a lot of clubs at Northwestern. That’s no news. You’re interested in global health? Good for you, man, we’ve got a club for that. Like to pretend you play wizard sports? Well damn, homey, we got that too. You like to raise money and then dance for 30 hours for… some… reason? We do that too?

But there are a lot of unexplored frontiers people.

And because I’m a good friend, I’m going to open these frontiers to you. I’d start them myself, but when I decided to write for a blog where a fellow author has the word “Vandernips” in his title, I permanently barred myself from the realm of respectable employment. So I figure the leadership experience will pad your resume more than mine. Without further ado, here are some clubs that should exist at NU.

1) Snack Club

Want to know why I go to clubs? Snacks. I’ll just snack all day. Fruit snacks, granola snacks, candy snacks – man, I don’t give a fuck. I just want to eat something that exists outside of the traditional food pyramid. I figure this club would cut out the middle man. We wouldn’t have to pretend to care about global issues, or, for that matter local ones. We don’t have to pretend that we share a common interest, and, best of all, we sure as shit don’t have to do any paperwork. I have literally zero doubt that this would be the most popular club on campus.

NSFW:  Fruit snacks, baby, you got no idea what you’re doing to me

2) Disagreement Club

First off, let me clarify: disagreement club is designed to be unpleasant. No one will ever leave this place in a good mood. But if Facebook has taught me anything, it’s that people love to yell at other people more than they hate to be yelled at and realized that they can’t change anyone’s mind. My idea for disagreement club is simple. You’ll have a bunch of people show up in a room. And then you’ll have the club president (who was elected in one hell of a contested election) shout something about abortion, or taxes. Then you just let people go CRAZY. It’ll be like Fight Club, except everyone gets to be an unreliable narrator.

3) White Protestant Heritage Club

Wait. This is a country club. Whoops. Everyone to Deering.

Seen here dressed in their traditional garb, performing a classic ritual to please their dark God “Romney”

4) National Association of Academic Excellence

This is a club that will have one meeting. In that meeting everyone will be elected president and added to the snack club listserv.

An Open Letter to Ann Coulter

Dear Ann Coulter,

Fuck you.

Cordially,

Sherman Ave

Three Things No One Tells You About College

Alright incoming freshman, it’s college time. And I know what you’re thinking — you’re ready. Your scholastic aptitude is only outmatched by your alcohol tolerance, you understand that sleep is going to alternate between either a disgustingly abundant or insultingly scarce resource in the coming year and you are fully prepared to disregard everything doctors have ever said to anyone about alcohol.

Thesis: BraveStarr is Awesome

Entertainment is subjective.  There’s no set rule about what people are going to like. I like Breaking Bad, you may not; it doesn’t make you wrong, it just makes me hate you. But still, everyone is entitled to their opinion.  Because of this, I always supposed that there couldn’t be any “best” television show or movie.  There wasn’t an “end” of entertainment.

I was wrong.

Welcome to “Bravestarr” ladies and gentleman, the best thing you can find on Netflix, or, for that matter, anywhere.

Pictured here…. shitting? I don’t know. It wouldn’t be the most useless thing he’s ever done.

Bravestarr is a cartoon show from the 1980’s featuring the single-greatest cast of characters ever assembled. It’s like the Justice League, only nobody is dragging down the team awesomeness level by being Aquaman. Our protagonist, Bravestarr, is a space Marshall on the planet of New Texas, and sets the bar pretty high for coolness and college applications in the universe by being both a space cowboy AND a space Indian.

Bravestarr fights the minions of the evil “Tex Hex,” a space outlaw who operates under the orders of “Stampede,” who is a demonic-looking Broncosaur skeleton. Reread that. You got it? No you don’t. Read it again. Now you got it. Holy shit, that’s awesome.

This is every game I played as a child manifested as one man

And here’s the thing about the show. You’d think that the awesomeness would have to taper off at some point, but it never does. Does Bravestarr ride a horse? No. He rides his deputy, who is a horse that can talk, stand up on his hind legs, and fire a rifle. Why can he do all these things? Because fuck you, that’s why. But seriously, the real reason is because it’s awesome. This show isn’t impeccably written, paced, or directed, but it is completely and unapologetically committed to being cool, or selling toys, either way it works. Don’t believe me? You’re saying, “sure, this show has a cool hero and villain, but what 80’s show doesn’t? You expect me to be impressed? You’re pathetic.” Fair point hypothetical person who has the same voice as my Dad. So lets look at even the minor characters that make up Bravestarr’s universe.

This is the description, provided by wikipedia, of the Bartender, named Handlebar. Now,

Standard reaction to Bravestarr

being a bartender in a Western is literally about as much of a secondary character as you

can be — it’s one of the only roles that fits the category of “scenery” more than character. So let’s take a look at Bravestarr’s approach to this background character: “A hulking, 14-ton, green-skinned bartender and former space pirate from the Rigel star system, with a bright orange handlebar mustache and a Brooklyn accent. He mostly serves BraveStarr and Thirty Thirty a drink called “sweetwater” in his bar, as they sit and discuss the moral lesson learned in that day’s episode, although he does engage in a fight with a mechanical steer named Rampage in one episode and wins. If faced with trouble in his bar he uses the serving trays as throwing weapons.”

And we haven’t even talked about his outfit

You can literally read any single sentence of that description, and have enough coolness to completely fill a characters “awesomeness” quota. Then they put it all together. The pitch meeting for Bravestarr characters must have literally been a room full of men shouting adjectives that gave them erections.

Next time I tell a girl that I’m gonna “rock her world*,” I’m just going to take her back to my place and show her an episode of Bravestarr. We’ll both have more fun than if we had sex.

So there you go reader. There’s a lot of ways to procrastinate in college, but there is none cooler then watching Bravestarr. I understand my praise may seem hyperbolic to you, but you have to understand, that as a writer for Sherman Ave, I’m a journalist. I wouldn’t write this unless every word I said was true. That would show a lack of integrity, and I learned about integrity from an Indian space-marshal, so you know I learned it right.

*The only time I’ve rocked a girls world is when I ran over my ex-girlfriends cat. She cried. A lot.

Fucked Up Children’s Shows

College is this weird time where everyone seems to take a decade-long step back in terms of maturity.  Everyone quotes Disney movies like it makes them cool, everyone watches Arthur, and everyone’s ability to control their bodily functions suffers major deterioration.  It’s a time of nostalgia.

But there’s something dark that lurks beneath the surface of some of the touchstones that defined our childhoods.  Something I’ve only noticed when applying a more mature perspective to the shows we all love.  So without further adieu, I present to you the most disturbing realizations I’ve had about the popular shows of our childhood.

Oh Clifford…

1. What the fuck is up with Clifford the Big Red Dog?
Have you guys seen Clifford? He’s the size of a house! A house. Wanna know what else is the size of a house? Houses. That’s like the only fucking thing because houses are huge.

And yet no one seems concerned. Do you know how dangerous that is? He’s a goddamn dog. Dogs: The animals that have such a limited presence of mind that they sometimes literally eat their own shit. Speaking of which, where does Clifford shit? It must be the size of a car. That dog is disgusting.

What’s stopping Clifford from seeing a squirrel and just tearing across town, inflicting the greatest instance of domestic damage since Hurricane Katrina? Clifford is a big red menace. If I could put down any cartoon dog, it would be Scrappy Doo. But Clifford would be a close second.

Funny, that walk suddenly looks a lot like a plantation owners stroll.

2. Arthur: Owns a dog
Now, I love Arthur. Without him I wouldn’t know that it was a wonderful kind of day, where we could learn to laugh and play and get along with each other. However, upon revisiting it in college (top-tier education, what?) I’ve realized that there is a seriously fucked up wrinkle in the Arthur world. I’ll break it down for you like this:

1) Everyone in Arthur is an animal.
2) All those animals are intelligent, like people
3) Therefore, animals are like people
4) Arthur owns a pet dog
5) Arthur owns a dog
6) Arthur owns a person
7) Arthur is a slave owner, of some mentally-stunted creature named “Pal”

So what we’re left with is basically this: Arthur owns a mentally-handicapped slave. I… I think I need to go lie down.

3. Recess is a caste system
When I watched Recess, I thought that the way the show divided the classes was funny. I was a mature, clever fifth grader — I was totally in on this joke. But re-watching the show, the world of recess is screwed up, in a serious way.

You guys remember the kindergarten class? The one that’s full of tiny, brutal savages? That speak in broken English and hunt older kids for sport?

What the hell happens to them when they graduate?

I don’t know where their teacher is, sometimes I think you see her exhausted and frazzled, but it’s more fun and equally applicable to pretend that the kids killed and ate her. Nothing is being done to prepare these children for the rest of their lives; they aren’t even learning to speak, much less how to read. Wanna know something that does really poorly in the United States? Tribal societies. Those kids are fucked.

“What do you mean I’m five minutes late?”

4. Thomas the Train: Sir Toppham Hat is a psycopath
Thomas the train is a simple show. It’s about a bunch of trains coming together on an island to work together and learn the meaning of friendship. That is, until you realize that the man who runs the Island of Sodor has absolutely no problem oppressing his train minions.

Now, a common catchphrase on the show is “you are a very useful engine!” This is all fine I guess, we want people to be useful. But then you realize that even though the Trains in the world of Thomas the Train can talk, and think, and feel, they’re still treated like trains. For example:

In the episode “Donald and Douglas” two trains have to compete against each other to see who is more efficient, and the train who doesn’t win will be destroyed. Holy shit. That’d be like if Morty made you compete with the kid who sits next to you for midterm grades, and then if you lost SENT YOU TO SCOTLAND TO BE TAKEN APART.

Sure, sure, but that’s just one episode. WAIT. NO IT’S NOT. Here’s the episode “The Sad Story of Henry.” This episode is about a train that’s afraid of the rain, so on a rainy day he refuses to come out of a tunnel because he’s scared that the rain will ruin his paint. The townspeople try to push and pull him out, but are ultimately unable too. So the Fat Controller (Sir Toppham Hat) orders him BRICKED INTO THE TUNNEL.

Forever. The train who not only can think, but has developed enough mentally to have a well-formed phobia.

This is how the Thomas the Train Wiki summary of the episode ends: “Henry is left in the tunnel cold, dirty, and lonely. He now wonders if he will ever be let out to pull trains again.”

Run on schedule, or be locked in a tunnel forever. Sweet dreams kids!

Horses are Dicks

Until campus Jesus lovers started exhibiting their support for a McCormick Senior, the ASG elections were the biggest event on campus. Candidates’ names were bandied about, sidewalks were chalked, and some people got really self-righteous about whether or not I should vote.

I voted for Batman, so I guess it turns out I shouldn’t.

I’m afraid to say that I simply couldn’t muster the will to care about the elections. Sure, expression and campus-wide improvements are important, but none of the candidates touched on the issue I really care about: Horses.

Way to mess up the photo, fuckface

That’s right. Horses. Specifically how much I fucking hate horses. I want a politician who can step up and do something about this equine menace, and since it doesn’t look like anyone else is going to do it, the burden falls to me. I am taking this moment to formally announce my candidacy for next year’s ASG presidential election.

My platform is simple, fuck horses. Now, I’m sure a lot of you out there are thinking, “Sad Bones, this is crazy, why do you hate horses so much?” A valid question, hypothetical reader. Let me break it down for you.

1. Horses are Lazy
Did you know that horses have four legs? That’s twice as many legs as people have. And yet, horses make up 0% of the United States’ GDP. Talk about a waste of legs, am I right? Horses are lazy assholes. Which brings me to my second point.

2. Horses are Assholes
Did you know that the Mongol Horde couldn’t have existed without horses? It’s true. Ghenghis Khan would have stopped his terrifying death march a few weeks in because his legs would be “tired as shit.” Wow horses, way to enable atrocities. You guys are dicks.

And did you know that horses kill more people per year than any other thing on Earth?  It’s true, according to the lie I just told.  But horses aren’t content with simple murder; they’ll stoop to even more subtle levels of fuckery.  When I was a kid I tried to ride a horse once. I fell off its back and the asshole just kept trotting along, like I wasn’t even there.  On a personal note, if you’re out there reading this Chestnut, I hate you and every time I use glue I hope it’s you.

Nice job, genius

3. Horses are stupid and take our jobs
Pound-for-Pound, horses are some of the worst students in the United States. They have the lowest standardized test scores of any demographic group outside of Arizona. Yet due to powerful pro-equine lobbyists (thanks OBAMA) millions of equally qualified human haulers and laborers will be put out of work by horses this year. Horses take our jobs, then don’t even pay taxes. There are currently 5.3 million horses living in the United States. Also the economy is bad. Coincidence? Probably. But still, fuck horses.

4. Horses are fat, and shit everywhere
An average horse weighs between 900 and 1100 pounds. Jesus, talk about letting themselves go. I wouldn’t hang out with a person who weighed that much, mostly because I’d be afraid they’d roll over and crush me.

Additionally, horses shit everywhere. Now, when I shit everywhere, it’s a problem and things like “the police” and “the law” and “charges for public indecency” get involved. But when horses do it, it’s no problem. I don’t know why. Horses poop way more than I do. If anything, horses should get a way stricter punishment for shitting in random places than people receive. I guess its just another way horses have subverted our legal systems.

5. Horses think they’re people
Horses live in stables, which are like special houses for horses, and they wear shoes. Next thing we know horses are going to be getting married and serving in the military (an especially likely outcome, with Blockbuster propaganda like Warhorse). We let this spiral out of control and we’ll have horses raising our kids, and fucking our wives (something our wives will allow, since by definition their equine-paramours will be hung like horses). We can’t allow horses to be put on the same plane, much less bed, as people.

“Dave, I’m leaving you for Chestnut. We’re running away together. You can run after us, but you’ll never catch us, because Chestnut is a goddamn horse.”

Listen, I could literally talk to you all day about the reasons why horses are terrible. Like the fact that their kids are called foals, which kind of sounds like “foul,” which is apt, because that’s exactly what they are. Or I could talk about how horses are racist. Huge fucking racists. When was the last time you saw a black person on a horse? Like never. You think that’s an accident? Fuck no. Horses just hate black people. That’s classic horses.

So we’ve established that horses are terrible. We’ve established that they’re a threat to our very way of life, and we’ve established that I’m a candidate who won’t stand for horse’s horseshit. Will I provide more outdoor lighting for the school? Hell no. Will I decrease safe ride wait times? No. Will I make sure that horses stay the hell out of Northwestern and encourage the University to use as much glue as possible? Yes. That much I can do.

So remember next election day, a vote for me is a vote against horses. And a vote against horses is a vote for a better tomorrow.