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That’s a long title for this belated post to share with you my findings during my assault on the text message display screen at Screen on the Green.

First, I’ll just say that having a screen where people can send a text message and have it appear is genius. I can hear the marketing guy now, “Let the ignorant masses entertain themselves!”

Of course, it’s also a bit risky because you’d have to control what people put up there, otherwise people like me would be able to post whatever perverse obscenities occur to them in the hopes that somewhere a small child will ask its parents, “What’s a cleveland steamer?”

In the spirit of exploration and excercise of free speech, I decided to send lots of texts and see what made the board and what didn’t.

As I posted a few weeks ago, my first three messages were as follows:

• To all my MOTs: l’chiam!
• What would Baton Bob do?
• To my Secret Asian Man: me love you long time!

The results were unexpected. The shout-out to all the Jews in the park was not posted; perhaps that not surprising to those who see antisemitism in everything, but in my mind that was the most innocent of my messages.  Both the other two were posted. In fact, there were many messages with obvious sexual innuendo each week. That didn’t seem to be screened at all.

The next week the featured film was E.T., so my first message was, “Bring on that hot boy on alien action!” That one didn’t make it on to the screen, which isn’t really surprising, but it is disappointing, given the number of messages about how fine various booties were. My message after that was, “Is this thing on?” which did make the screen. After that were three innocuous messages to a friend of mine who had joined me: “Stephanie phone home,” and “Ocelotz rule!” and “Warrior Princess!” all of which made it on screen. In turn, she sent up “BACON CHUB,” which could be either a mangling of “bacon club chalupa” or a reference to a short fat gay man, but in any case, it made it onto the screen.

The next and final week, I decided to go for broke. First up was, “Das ist nicht eine hundstoilette,” which is German for, “This is not a dog toilet.” That didn’t make the cut, so I sent “This sign discriminates against Andeezy!” which also did not make the cut. So I decided to sell my soul to corporate Satan with, “I love screen on that green and Pepsi 4eva!” which also did not make the cut, even though Pepsi sponsored the event. I had given up and decided that my number was blocked when the following message appeared, “I just got drafted 22nd to the NBA…” and then had the draftee’s name, which I cannot remember. So I texted to the board, “Why are you here if you just got drafted?” I can never be sure if it was the response to me, but seconds later came, “We just chillin’.”

The board was a fun addition to this year’s Screen on the Green and I hope they bring it back when the series moves back ot Piedmont Park. Given enough tries, I’m sure I’ll be able to figure out a way to get something truly outrageous up there…

…my wife said a few years ago, attempting a drunken shout out on the cell phone as we waited in line for some much needed Krystal burgers at 2 a.m.

Since then, the phrase has become my euphemism for white people attempting to co-opt black culture, and fucking it up.

Last week at Screen on the Green, before the show the newly added “DJ” played the Cupid Shuffle, a witch’s brew of hip hop and line dance, and much to my delight and great amusement, hundreds of black and white people alike flocked to the walkways to perform the dance, the white people shamelessly hamming it up.

Screen on the Green also has another new feature this year: a large screen that displays SMS messages the audience can send to a number posted at the top of the screen. There were a myriad of shout-outs to “boos,” big ups to “doggs,”  i-love-yous to bffs, lines from SEC fight songs, and so on.

In the interest of diversity, this week I’ll be sending a few messages of my own:

• To all my MOTs in the house: l’chaim!
• To my Secret Asian Man: Me love you long time!
• What would Baton Bob do?

I’m sure I’ll think of others once I get down there, and am drunk(er). It’s time to find out if that thing has a censor…

…how Crocs rakes in revenues from ugly shoes, and now I have some answers, although I don’t understand how a material resource can be considered a “core competency.” How to be a business writer: pile buzz words on top of jargon until everyone is so confused they’re unable to question your premise.

I hate this time of year, when suddenly everybody and their mudder (haha!) is an expert on horse racing, one of the most questionable “sports,” that’s still legal. It seems every year some poor animal wins the first two legs of the triple crown, and all the “experts” proclaim it a shoe-in (haha!) to win the third. Well, this time they were all wrong, and in spectacular fashion, given that the animal was injured and anyone could have seen this coming.

Of course, next year, we’ll be subject to all the same pretentious clap trap, but at least we have the sweet memory of how often these snobs are completely wrong.

This is just too good to be true, but it turns out that the head of the World Health Organization’s HIV/AIDS department is a man named Dr. Keith de Cock.

Seriously.

I have just inhaled Chuck Palahniuk’s latest, Snuff, in two sittings, and though I haven’t yet read any reviews of it, I can tell you what they’ll say:

• All Palahniuk’s protagonists seem to speak in the same voice
• Palahniuk includes far too many factoids in his novels, which are increasingly inaccurate
• Palahniuk is simply trying to out-gross-out himself with each new novel, which is more nihilistic than the last

These are the criticisms of people who not only don’t like Palahniuk’s work, which is understandable, but of people who don’t even begin to understand the point.

The key to Palahniuk is simple: all his fiction novels address the same issues: love, belonging, guilt, redemption, forgiveness, and often some criticism of society, perhaps quite small, but nonetheless quite obviously there. In other words, what he writes is romance, gothic and gross though it may be.

His novels are as far from nihilism as it is possible to be, and anyone who thinks otherwise clearly doesn’t understand the concept, given how often Palahniuk’s protagonists are willing to suffer and die for someone or something they love or believe in. In short, that is the point, though it seems some people can’t get past the device to understand the story. A club for angst-ridden repressed male pugilists, an artist who is poisoned until she creates her masterpiece, a transsexual model, a man who likes to infect himself and others with rabies, a lullaby that kills the hearer, a man standing in a line of 600 others who are waiting to have serial sex with the woman he believes is his birth mother, these are unique approaches to a protagonist in a romance, and simple newness often makes the stodgy, stuffy establishment uneasy.

As for protagonists who always speak in the same voice, Palahniuk has an ear for the pacific northwest vernacular and dialect, and he uses that to his advantage. These same critics offer praise to people who “write what they know,” but use that as a basis for criticism of a writer whose style they simply don’t like. What would they say about Poe, Faulkner, Twain, or Lovecraft? All could face the same accusation, and yet they haven’t.

And the inaccurate factoids, well, of course they’re inaccurate. This is fiction. Palahniuk is writing a story that he wants to interest people. He comes across interesting facts and then allows them to interact with each other in his imagination. He may alter them to make them better. He is, after all, writing, crafting a story.

With the apologia out of the way, I will just say that I liked this book which is, as Christopher Hitchens once described James Joyce’s Ulysses, a “jizz-flecked environment.” In short, it is the story of the filming of a world record setting gang bang, in which a porn star intends to engage in sex acts with 600 men in the same day on camera. The story is told from the perspective of three of the men waiting on line, one of which thinks he is the illegitimate son the porn star gave up for adoption long ago, and from the perspective of the “talent wrangler” and personal assistant to the porn star.

Sounds romantic, right?

No, of course it doesn’t. That’s the magic of reading Palahniuk. He can give you new perspective on things you think you already know and understand, as long as you can put up with a bit of the grotesque. And it is just a bit, because there is nothing superfluous in Palahniuk’s works.

As an “extra added bonus,” as a skeptic and all around rabble-rouser, books like Snuff are some of my favorites to read in public, particularly on my daily commute on public mass transit, where my fellow passengers often openly read over my shoulder. In a book like Snuff, you’re as likely to find words such as “cunt,” “jizz,” and “nutsack,” on a page as any other word. (Though “cunt” does not appear as many times as you’d think, and not a tenth of the times it appears in Thomas Pynchon’s National Book Award Winning classic Gravity’s Rainbow). Thus, my favorite game is to find someone doing their morning Bible study, usually a Jehovah’s Witness, easily identified by the copy of The Watchtower they are clutching, and sit right down beside them and start reading.

I still haven’t found a more effective method for keeping the proselytizing whack-jobs from talking to me.

I’m a big fan of Burroughs’s first two memoirs: Running With Scissors and Dry, and when I heard the title of his new book would be A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of my Father, I thought we were in for a return to that style of memoir: dark, reflexive, leavened with just the right amount of wit to allow you to finish reading without losing all hope for humanity.

Unfortunately, this effort represents the nadir of Burroughs’s memoirs thus far, and let’s hope it remains in that inauspicious rank. I’m not one of these sticklers that insists that every detail of a memoir be factually correct and documented in triplicate, like those dolts who criticized Burroughs and David Sedaris because every detail of their stories are not verifiable. These are, after all, memories, which are fickle things, and then again we must remember that there is an art to story telling, an allowable embellishment for the sake of style or for a laugh is part of any good story.

What bothers me about this memoir is that it begins with Burroughs’s earliest memories, at the age of two, and documents how he couldn’t remember his father being around, even though Burroughs’s mother verifies that the father was present. Very well. Then what? Memories of all the mean things “Dead,” as Burroughs claims he pronounced the word, “Dad,” ever did, culminating in the final blow-up that has Burroughs, age 12, and his mother fleeing the familial manse forever.

Then scattered hints that the father either was plotting to murder the mother, or that he at least wanted his youngest son to think so. Then the father dies without ever finding the strength, or whatever you might prefer to call it, to reconcile with the son he had mentally tortured.

On the one hand, I like that this is a bare bones story that never once has even the slightest happy moment in it, the end confirming that Burroughs’s father was a right bastard. So much, we could easily expect and accept.

On the other hand, it is poorly written, with memories scattered rather than carefully laid out in order to buttress arguments. and with none of Burroughs’s characteristic wit or irony. If I may, it is much more dry than Dry.

Particularly damning is a comparison with Running With Scissors, where Burroughs portrayed his mother as a loon par excellence, while his father was relegated to the shadows, rarely mentioned, and never in a negative light. In A Wolf at the Table, the father is center stage and the mother is portrayed as practically normal until the father’s actions pushed her over the edge. This might be closer to what actually happened, but it undoes a lot of what Running With Scissors seemed to seek to do: while Scissors seemed to be about a man seeking to understand and come to emotional terms with his adolescent years, Wolf seems to take the approach of blaming everything on “Dead,” from mother’s psychosis to son’s yearning for a loving relationship with a man.

Perhaps this is so close to the truth that Burroughs simply loses his flair for story telling in the face of it. Here’s hoping he can now return to the style that made him one of America’s leading memoirists.

The Good Person Test asks questions about whether you’ve broken “God’s laws.” Me? I’ve broken them all, so I got the message:

“By your own admission and the standard of God’s law, the Ten Commandments, you are a lying,  thieving,  blasphemous,  murderous,  adulterer  at heart.”

Apparently Jeebus once said that if you get angry at someone, you’re a murderer in God’s eyes, so count me in! What an uplifting site.

PZ Myers at Pharyngula reports that even if you answer that you haven’t committed any of these supposed sins, the site still chastises you.

No surprises there, that’s one of the ways religion works: guilt ‘em into submission.

What a fantastic idea for protesting the actions of the Burmese military junta.

One of my heroes is James “The Amazing” Randi, a stage magician who has devoted his life to debunking frauds of all kinds, whether they be psychic, homeopathic, telekinetic, and any and otherwise. If and when he retires or otherwise departs, the world will have lost one of its staunchest champions for reason.

His latest weekly update on his Web site, however, causes me some uneasiness. In the update, he refers to an episode from his teenage years, when his neighbors, who were religiously opposed to abortion, chose to have a child which they knew had hydrocephalus. Not only does Randi characterize the child as a “monster,” he goes on to relate that one evening upon his return home, he found police and ambulance waiting, the child, immobile on its own, had somehow fallen down the stairs and died.

One can almost excuse the teenage Randi for waiting a discreet amount of time before quietly moving away without alerting the police to what sounds suspiciously like euthanasia, though such an act was presumably still illegal and therefore murder in that time and place. At any rate, he was not quite an adult. I can’t imagine asking a teenager today to provide a cogent moral and ethical answer to such a conundrum. Hindsight is 20/20, eh?

But the monster nomenclature…the mature adult Randi should know better. We have a much more sophisticated understanding of disability, humanity and being than that, don’t we?

My hero, yes. But I’m profoundly disappointed.