A recent study of men and women found that the percentage of humans claiming a gender is steadily dropping, as it has for nearly 200 years (with the exception of years 1862, 1919-1923, and 1962). Studies determining the causes of the drop are still in progress, but some paid-off scientists predict the main cause to be artificial baby formula. Many researchers from the South have arrived at a different reason for the consistent drop: the change in name of the popular game “smear the queer” to “smother your brother’s wifeankeeds.” Sales of plastic grocery bags in the South subsequently have also skyrocketed the past two centuries. Many of the teenagers interviewed agree that another thing the “smear” name change did was make family reunions a whole heck of lot more appealing.

Foundational evidence was unearthed recently that overwhelmingly suggested absolutely nothing new concerning the differences between males and females. Ladies and gentlemen, may I present to you the findings of the 19th Annual Scientific Meeting of the American Pain Society:

1) Women “treat” pain more than men
2) Men complain more about pain (over time)
3) Women show a “greater response” to cold based on a saliva sample
4) Women are “more vigilant toward bodily symptoms than males”
5) Men are more likely to let pain put them in a bad mood

This is real you idiots! I’m not sitting here inventing all of this as I go along. These are real findings by the accredited American Pain Society. Who even knew such a society existed? Their meetings consist of people running around stapling hands together and giving full-body paper cuts to each other. The logo is an anvil, and the president is Alice Armstrong. Here are some concurrent findings, as released today in a study by yours truly:

1) Women treat pain worse than they treated your cousin Harold
2) Do you know how many women will complain about this post (over time)?
3) Men have a “greater response” to listening to complaints that it’s cold
4) “A Woman’s Guide to Worrying About Nothing” sells millions of copies a year
5) Women don’t get in bad moods. They’re angels.

Well, I just don’t know anymore. I’m out like the idiotic generalizations of this post.

Today I introduce to you, my ineffectual and pusillanimous followers, a new feature here at Dank. A new weekly (read: once in a lifetime) affair I like to call: Indie-Rock Genre of the Week! It seemed only fitting that I introduce in this first (an possibly only) installment the genre that is most near and dear to my heart, the one most associated with me, and the one most likely to describe the lives of Dank staffers. I give you Emo-core. Emo-core or “Emo” is short for emotive hardcore. This isn’t at all actually related to hard core, it’s more like melodic punk than anything else.

Typically, the songs follow a soft-loud-soft pattern, with the loud part exemplifying the emotional climax. Common subject matter for emo songs range from loss of love to pain from loss to the futility of love to Cherry Coke. That’s right, Cherry Coke. Not Coke II, not Diet, Caffeine-free Coke, Cherry Coke. Cherry Coke is emo. So are sweaters. As are too-tight t-shirts. So is crying in a corner. Denver is emo. St. Louis in not. Chicago and Champaign-Urbana are the most emo places on this green planet, Tibet isn’t. I’ve determined that the root of all emo is girls. Emo boys are a bit anti-social and slightly effeminate, making dating difficult, with all the rap-metal jocks and DMB-loving frat boys. ALL emo songs are about the girl the singer likes, and how she doesn’t even know that he exists, or how he dated her, but she dumped him, or how he’s probably gay, and she noticed and left, but he still hasn’t figured it out. This is all very depressing, and most of the music reflects this. However, some of this music sounds poppy and happy. This results from the band trying to put up a facade to mask their depressing music, or the less likely, that it really is happy because the singer has a girlfriend. Not to worry, however, as the girl will leave, producing several albums worth of material. Emo bands quite often break up and reform with members of other recently broken up emo bands. Being in an emo band is like switching bridge partners at the retirement home, every one plays with everyone else eventually. It’s quite the incestuous little scene. I have a “family tree” if anyone is interested. I’m not very emo lately; I’m more straightforward indie-rock. We can blame my girlfriend. But for those of you interested in pursuing this lifestyle, I give you a few simple directions:

1. Lifestyle: Quit eating. Wear sweaters, collared shirts, backpacks and t-shirts that are way too small for you. Get a weird haircut (Beatles mops and the spock cut are very popular). Be depressed all of the time.
2. Buy crappy guitars like Danelectros and Fender Jags. Use barely any distortion. But have nice amps and drums.
3. Writing songs: Just steal riffs from Smashing Pumpkins and Goo Goo Dolls songs. No one will know. Change the arrangements a little and write your own lyrics.
4. Singing: You don’t have to actually be saying anything. Just whine a lot and stretch the words for a long time.
5. Album art: For your album cover, just put your band name in tiny print somewhere and then use a few squares.

I hope this helps shed a little light on all that is “emo” for all of the uninitiated of you out there. I’ll be back next week with a new installment sure to whet your whistle. Until then, make mine Marvel!

[Unrelated side-note: I lost all my updatin' fingers long ago. I've been forced to rely strictly on my knees and elbows.]
[Even less related: I'm sure that only Jerome, if anyone, understands where I obtained the vocabulary words I used at the begining of this post. I watched 12 Monkeys.]

Current Dank 5 status: 31% complete

While you’re waiting, you can now watch me play spider solitaire with lou’s lethal cam right here.

Some of the Dank staff went to Glenwood High School in Chatham, IL. There, the schoolboard has just voted to change our “offensive” nickname from “Redskins” to something else.

Now, I don’t even really care one way or the other, but as my brother would tell you, they went about it the wrong way. Why did the schoolboard vote? They just raised taxes so we could buy them a $50 Million football field which is cleverly disguised as a high school. They at least should have let the taxpayers vote on this as a referendum in November. But apparently all the American Indian students at Glenwood have been too embarassed to go to the Scholastic Bowl meets lately. And all of the rich white kids are still trying to figure out if this means they aren’t allowed to smoke American Sprits anymore.

It’s not even American Indians, Indian Indians or GHS students that care. Practically every upperclassman signed a petition not to change it. You know who wants it changed? The adults. Schoolboard members and Village Trustees who are up for re-election soon. It’s all about the small town politics.. which is really just a hobby for them anyway, isn’t it? I mean what do they really do.. decide how many days a week to water the flowers in the town square?

My two suggestions for the new nickname are The Glenwood Native Americans or else the Glenwood Upper-Middle Class Caucasians. I’m trying to think of something funnier, but I can’t. Obviously.

And if you ever have the misfortune to be in Chatham, be sure to participate in some of our other time honored traditions, such as throwing cow feces and losing baskeball games (not at the same time). Or you may opt to take your sister to your prom. Spatch.

I’m going to go look for my other finger, and in the meantime I have another finger that I would like to show to the schoolboard, and to any Dank staffer who mentions this “debate” in another post.

P.S. I just found the worst website ever. No, it isn’t yours, Q-Ball.. stop being obnoxitating.

YOURMOMSAYS, Idaho - June 19, 2000 - In a sad display of ineptitude and lust for nine (9) fingers Dank’s own prodigal son, Sneetch, severed his beloved “updatin’ finger” early this morning around 5 o’clock Eastern time. Deeply moved bystanders stood in amazement as the master they know simply as “master” was reduced to a nine-fingered man-child-nine-fingered-man. The bystanders then requested chairs and sat down to watch the rest of the action. Some even put their feet up on extra chairs that accidently had been brought to the scene. Sources close to the story say that this is the fourth severed updatin’ finger among Dank contributors this week, with one Dank contributer left out on account of his demographic.

The action leading up to the discovery of a severed updatin’ finger began around 5:15 a.m. ET when Sneetch stepped outside for a brisk walk. Sneetch had walked about two blocks when in the midst of an attempt to scratch his left arm he realized that he lacked the finger with which to ease the burning, reason-less itch. Heard nearly 2 houses away, several mothers awake for no Godly reason, including Nancy Weathers, claim to have heard a faint voice whispering “the horror, the horror.” After muting the white 9 inch G.E. Spacemaker TV that is fastened just below her kitchen cabinets, Weathers claims to have heard two yelps spaced apart by about 3 seconds. Then the smell of dish-soap and the sound of running water reminded Weathers of the task at hand and she forgot all about her broken dreams of becoming an astronaut and the oversized ketchup packets she would never be allowed to create and devour inside the shuttle.

Still at this hour there has been no word on how the updatin’ finger became permanently unattached, nor word on if an alternate finger can be found for Sneetch to replace any scars/infection the injury may very well leave in its path. In the meantime, since this story is nearly cut off from humor (ha!), some comments have been assembled regarding today’s news.

“Uh oh. Look likes my site is only four-fifths as good as before. I guess that means it still sucks (more gently, though).” - Jerome

“So it appears there’s a problem with Sneetch’s updatin’ finger. Or rather should I say there was a problem. Picture if you will Sneetch…dude, just get a hook…how many missing fingers is it going to take for you to get a hook?” - Borg

“Neeeyahh!” - Takey

If you have any information regarding the whereabouts of Sneetch’s updatin’ finger, or if you’d like to know new updates regarding this story, please send all correspondence here. Additional resources may be accessed by reading the “Make and Do” book from the Childcraft series.

I don’t know if I have made this clear to everyone yet, so I’ll reiterate it one last time. Right now, as you can see, everything but the main news page of Dank is unlinked. Still up, just not easy to get to. This is because I want the freedom of changing and testing the new design and content without worrying about people other than me getting confused. Dank 5 is coming along, and with it will arrive the portal, the store, and, as it stands now, a complete redesign. Hopefully everything will turn out as I want it to, and Jamaal and I will be working on it on and off everyday now. If all goes according to my plan (or lack thereof), look for the relaunch July 1st. If the page is at a state of near completion at that point, I’ll probably go ahead and put it up. In the meantime, the news section will hopefully still be updated on a regular basis, so keep coming back to waste your time and make your friends sad to have met you.

Random Link to make this post less boring, but no more worth your time:
A Typical Day in the Life of Link: I have no idea what exactly is going on with this shockwave movie, only that, like many other works on the internet, it seems to have taken too much time to produce.

Well, a few minutes ago I opened up Napster for the first time in several months. I thought to myself, “I sure would like to look for a song or two by a couple artists I enjoy”, then I proceeded to launch good ol’ Napster and began a few searches. “Joseph Arthur” returned no results. Neither did any other word or string of words that I looked for. In fact, Napster was telling me that there were no results found for my search criteria before I myself was even able to register what I was searching for.

There was no way Napster was even looking for my words. Napster was treating me like a fool. Napster thought I wouldn’t notice if Napster played me for every cent I was worth. Napster was my sister when she told me the reason she didn’t rent Wizards & Warriors III from the video store was because it wasn’t in. Like her, Napster had not even looked, for I know that no one but me rented Wizards & Warriors III. Ironsword it was not. Napster sucks, and if I had even the slightest bit more of an inclination, Napster would already be deleted from my hard drive. As it is, Napster will be the bane of my computer; the vice that keeps me from stumbling down this wretched path of no return.

I’ve been saving this one for some time mostly because I couldn’t find a suitable image to accompany present post. But now that I have it, we shall proceed. I know it’s not the norm to post about something you really care about, unless you’re Lou, so I thought I’d share a little something which extends a bit beyond worshippers of the Partridge Family and underwear snafus at Disney World.

The first time I read about St. James Hampton, I was knocked on my proverbial heels. The story goes that this guy, St. James, who pretty much lived in poverty, spent his days cleaning up after government slobs in the General Services Administration and every other minute he devoted to a project of his called, “The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly.” Sounds like something from a L. Ron Hubbard novel. However, it was in fact, a throne with 177 other accompanying pieces to sort of augment the grandeur of the centerpiece. The truly amazing part of the story is that he constructed it, throne and all, from discarded trash.

I can hear Bunker snickering right now. But he was not in search of dinner. No, instead he was collecting silver and gold foil from old cigarette packs and wine bottles. Why you ask? Well, to cover pieces of wood and cardboard he’d stapled, tacked and glued together to form this.

…amazing isn’t it?

Never once was he concerned with recognition or profit, he just made it because he had to. About the only “thing” I feel I have to do is eat, sleep and shit. Not once have I been blessed with a vision to create something so elaborate and beautiful. Maybe I just haven’t been looking in the right dumpsters. Anyway, next time you huck a sack of garbage out the window, you very well may be assisting in the completion of a religious vision. End of sermon.

Well, as it turns out, I’m making this update by hand in notepad because our news script has suddenly opted to return several errors, and in conjunction, destroy forever the very long post I just wrote out. I know I’ve been relatively scarce recently, but my lack of posts and upkeep can be attributed to the number of trips to Super Wal-mart necessary to correctly color coordinate a bathroom. I’ve been meaning to post some shots of the new pad that Jamaal and I currently chill at, but that idea has been thrown on the giant creative heap that is forming in our living room (which recently spilled over onto the Sega Saturn, preventing us from playing any more Virtual On).

Yeah, I know I’m starting to lose coherency as usual, so I better throw in some of the things I need to mention before I bust up out. Most importantly, I’m going to try to make some of the intended changes around here at Dank, and while I’m doing so, I’ll try to keep the main news page up at all times. Meanwhile, you will likely have problems accessing the archives, galleries, and other sections for a bit. Also, the Dank store should be finished as early as tomorrow, but we may not release it until some main page work is finished. Either way, I’ll let you know, and meanwhile I’ll try to sort through the millions of things Jamaal and I have to post about.

This is the second and presumably final installment in a series of posts concerning Timothy McVeigh’s plight, the idiocy of the death penalty, and other random debate material. Since this article that I’m drawing from probably won’t be online for more than a week, I suggest you suck from it anything you can during that time. The background for all this of course is that today 300 some odd Ruffles-munching confederates cheered at closed-circuit TVs that showed them Timothy McVeigh being lethally injected. If that’s not sick enough without knowing any details, please realize that local news cameras have footage of families with small children cheering the execution. That’s just great, isn’t it?

Things like this astonish me to the point that I think someone else will post about it so I don’t feel like I want to. We’ve been raised to completely agree with the quote displayed a couple lines down…it even sounds right. But look deeper. Maybe the press only quotes stupid people:

“What McVeigh did against the federal government and the American people is absolutely a crime worth putting him to death for,” said Linda Gilmore, a tourist in Rome from Bush’s home town of Midland, Texas.

Say Linda, everytime you make a stupid quote to the press, can I cut off one of your mouths? Because if you want to discuss it being WORTH it, the argument slides heavy on my side of the scale. 8 to 1 this woman is a Republican by where she lives alone. 100 to 1 from her quote. I have a very strong feeling she is pro-life when it comes to abortion…no of course I can’t just assume, but for the sake of the odds, let’s do.

I will never come to terms with a person that is pro-life abortion and pro-death penalty. And for all the fools and idiots out there, pro-choice doesn’t equal pro-death. Pro-choice simply let’s the mother decide, not the government. I hate abortion as much as any pro-lifer, but I’m starting to realize that I’m not pro-life. This all ties into the last point I’m going to make, then I’ll leave you alone.

McVeigh isn’t a martyr. He didn’t ever come across as dying for something he believed in anymore than he came across as being killed for something he did. But one thing McVeigh believed was that his actions were only controlled by himself, and if he was trying to say that through his final words (a poem by a British author-see article), he did so rather well. Go on as you will, step out onto the street, blend, and ignore. And in a few months we can all forget what it felt like today. Weather and all.