...We salute you!

By Adam Greene

If you're new to The First Man, over here on your right are two links to other sections of the site. Words and Pictures is where I find photos on the internet (mostly from the news cycle) and add what are, hopefully, funny captions to them. I have a new Super-Sized edition served up for you today.

The First Man Archive is older things I’ve written for other websites in the past that I can’t figure out how to recycle. For instance, this article about the XFL I wrote for NFLScoop.com four years ago that I’ve put on the archive today. No way to pretend that it’s new.

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A few things...



In case you haven’t heard, Michael Jackson has been found innocent of all charges in his sexual molestation trial. Whew, that was a close one. For a minute there I thought Mike’s Boy Scout troop was going to have to search for a new Scout Master. Now, at last, he can get back to his main passion of counseling at a Cancer Surviving Pre-Teens sleepover camp. From what I hear all the jurors’ male children get half off the admission price and, if they bring their own pajama bottoms, free liquor.



Stupidity powered MoveOn.org got a fresh new energy charge last week when 20 of its members showed up at Michigan Republican U.S. Representative Mike Rogers’s office to protest his contribution to Tom Delay’s defense fund.


I'm from Michigan!

All well and good, except, you see, they had the wrong Mike Rogers. The Mike Rogers they meant to protest was Alabama Republican Representative Mike Rogers, who at the time of the protest, was only 900 or so miles away.


I'm not from Michigan!

Being nearly a thousand miles off-target is nothing new for MorOn.org, and, seeing as how both guys were named Mike Rogers, you have to admit they are getting a lot better at what they do. Democrat Bob Alexander, who ran against Michigan’s Mike Rogers in 2004, was a leader of the protest, again, let me be clear, of the wrong Mike Rogers. You’d think that the democratic nominee for a Michigan U.S. House seat might actually be able to identify his own state on a map.


Michigan!


Not Michigan!

You’d also think that, as the democratic nominee from Michigan for a U.S. House seat, that he could tell the difference between the letters “MI” and “AL”. You would, in addition, be perfectly within your rights to think that the democratic nominee for a Michigan U.S. House seat could tell the difference between the Great Lakes and, say, the Gulf of Mexico. You, of course, would be wrong. When Bob Alexander runs against Mike Rogers again in 2006 for a Michigan US House seat and schedules a campaign rally in Montgomery Alabama, just, you know, try to humor him.

Fox News commentator and nipple loofa-ing enthusiast Bill O'Reilly was forced to cancel a seven day Caribbean cruise entitled "The Battle for American Values" due to lack of interest and public fear of being trapped at sea with the cable host's fabled "Suitcase O’ Dildos". O'Reilly has, so far, been without comment after the disappointing ticket sales. Friends report that he's so despondent, he can hardly ride his Jizzmaster 8000 barbed, ejaculating anal-spelunker without bursting into heaving uncontrollable sobs.

Sean Penn has decided to do his part to save another peaceful Middle Eastern utopia by journeying to Iran to cover their "elections" for The San Francisco Chronicle. At a rally for Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, Penn could hear shouts of “Death to America” as the Ayatollah urged his followers to vote just to “make America angry”. Sean was seen scribbling in his Blue’s Clue’s Handy Dandy “reporter’s” notebook, “It’s just like Susan Surandon was telling me the other day. They really aren’t that different from us.” Afterwards, Penn accidentally happened upon some real news as over a hundred Iranian women protested their lack of basic human rights when his camera was peacefully confiscated by Iran’s Happy Joy Super Fun Good Guy Police force.

John Eff Kerry’s college records were finally released half a year too late. They show him to be pretty much the same slack ass rich guy that Al Gore’s and George W. Bush’s college grades showed them to be. According to the article, Kerry’s “freshman-year average was 71. He scored a 61 in geology, a 63 and 68 in two history classes, and a 69 in political science. His top score was a 79, in another political science course. Another of his strongest efforts, a 77, came in French class.”

French class?? Strongest efforts in French class?? I can’t imagine why Kerry waited almost 7 months after the election to release these.



And finally, in the continuing saga of "the UN found no WMDs in Iraq", the UN announced that they’re afraid material might be missing from 109 separate sites that could be used to make WMDs in, here’s the shocker, Iraq. Now, I know what you’re thinking, “Adam, just because Saddam was stockpiling all the materials he would need to make WMDs and had used those same materials in the past to make the WMDs he used on Iran and the Kurds, there’s no reason to believe that he had 109 separate locations filled with these materials because he wanted to make WMDs. That would be crazy.”

And, you’d be right. How could any sane person think that Saddam Hussein might use stockpiles of WMD materials at 109 separate locations across Iraq to make chemical and biological weapons? It’s obvious to me that his real goal here was to find an all new way to combine chocolate, peanuts and caramel. These weren’t WMD production facilities ready to spring to life, creating some of the deadliest weapons known to man the minute UN sanctions were loosened or the US stopped its scrutiny. They were all subsections of Uncle Saddam’s Funtabulous World of Nougaty Wonders. Your flesh will slough off with deliciousness!



Be sure to tip your Oompa Loompas on the way out.

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You, Sir, Are Jim Lampley

By Adam Greene

Sometimes, as you go through life reading various things posted on the internet, you will occasionally come across something so profoundly stupid and insane that it causes you intense physical pain. I experienced such an event last week when I happened upon articles on The Huffington Post written by HBO Boxing announcer, Jim Lampley. I can’t be certain, but after reading them I’m pretty sure my face melted.

Most of my time visiting The Huffington Post is spent trying to figure out who the fuck most of the bloggers are and why I should give a damn about what they say. I had hoped that it would be the repository of celebrity political thought it was originally billed as. For someone who wants to write comedy for his website, hearing that I could have consistent access to the political writings of Sean Penn, Tim Robbins and Sharon Stone, needless to say, had me pretty pumped.

Sadly, that’s not been the case. I’ve not been this disappointed in celebrities since CHiPs’ Larry Wilcox blew the kayak relay race for Team NBC on Battle of the Network Stars.



So far we’ve had John Cusack’s "Dude, I totally went to Hunter S. Thompson’s funeral" piece. We saw Rob Reiner write a commercial for his parenting website and videos. We learned that Christine Lahti thinks you can defeat thousands of years of African religious superstition with a condom and tri-fold pamphlet. And finally, we witnessed Tim Robbins, in whom I laid all my hopes, skim quickly past any ridiculous political banter and go straight to plugging his DVD. Et Tu Tim?

Until last week, the only thing I thought I had to work with was Walter Cronkite walking into the room, shitting his Depends, saying "And that’s the way it smells" before passing out, face-down into a plate of apple sauce and mashed potatoes at his local Shoney’s.

In the tiny article Walter is able to type out before returning to his normal daily routine of chasing an imaginary bat around his house while waving a wooden tennis racket, he shows pretty plainly that he has no idea who Arianna Huffington actually is. He seems to think that he’s part of some journalistic endeavor and not some mad grab at a sixteenth minute of fame by a woman who talks just like Dracula.

Walter begins his contribution by falling madly in love with the word "interesting" and making it his mission to make sure Arianna has its precise definition. His prescriptions wearing off and the invisible bat just inches from his head, Walter threatens a future of post after post of "exceedingly interesting pieces" that have thankfully never materialized. Walter was, evidently, distracted by a shiny object or frightened by the ghostly robot noises coming out of a passing child's Gameboy or something because he hasn’t been seen or heard from since. Hell, maybe the bat finally got him.



Arianna herself graces the site every day with a little nugget of something special like plugging her book, this one time she watched Oprah, or discussing the Yoga exercises she does during Tim Russert’s Meet the Press. I’d like to personally thank Arianna for the vicious nightmare fodder she planted in each and every one of our heads at the end of the Russert/Yoga article. The cruel visual of her in a skin-tight unitard in the "Downward Facing Dog" position should end all speculation once and for all on why her husband Michael turned gay.


I had, after my first day disappointment, only checked The Huffington Post periodically. Clicking on it last week changed all that. Which brings us back to HBO Sports talking face Jim Lampley...



It seems that Jim, between reading A-Team slash fiction and buying Precious Moments Figurines off Ebay on November 2nd, made his way to an off shore betting site to check the odds for the 2004 presidential election and learned that, at that point, John Kerry was a 2 to 1 favorite to win. Because of this, Lampley believes that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove stole the 2004 presidential election that Bush won by over 3 million popular votes and 34 electoral votes.

Yes. A sports betting website has convinced Jim Lampley of massive voter fraud. His graduate school degree springing to life, Jim harnesses all the energy he usually uses to tell you which fighter is wearing the purple trunks, fires up his Google search engine, blows past obvious pro Bush websites like The Washington Post and the Official Website of the Ohio Democratic Party, and instead zeros in on impartial, unbiased websites like Democratic Underground and Commondreams.org to back his claim. Brilliant.

Jim’s investigative reporting not done, he then links to a crazy-eyed bald guy’s home page,gives us some Democratic Underground message board posts we should totally read, and finishes off with a link to a Geocities site to put the final nail in the stolen election coffin. With a "mountain of evidence" like that, how could anyone refute it?

Actual journalist and author Byron York made an attempt here and here, but come on. His argument is inherently flawed. A link to a Washington Post article? A transcript from C-Span? The explanation of the flawed exit polling from the actual people who did the exit polling? What kind of amateur dog and pony show is York running here? Where are the message board posts? The geocities sites? The explanation of which man is wearing the purple trunks?

This isn’t the first big story that Jim Lampley’s graduate degree has broken. This whole "describing someone getting punched in the throat for HBO" thing is just a side gig. Lampley’s main passion in life is blowing the lid off of things no rational person believes in.

Do you know who snuck his way onto a UFO and found perfect amphibious clones of Elvis Pressley, John Lennon and Kurt Cobain?



It was Jim Lampley, my friend.

Who separated his shoulder and broke three of his own ribs wrestling a Sasquatch to the ground so scientists could tag its ear and take detailed photos?



Mister Jim Lampley.

Who discovered Jimmy Hoffa’s remains by following a holographic map projected from a 4,000 year-old crystal skull?



Jim... Lampley...

Who saddled and rode the Loch Ness Monster for 8 and a half minutes before assisting it in the birth of its breached baby?



Jim mother fucking Lampley. That’s who.

And now, with only the power of his web browser and internet connection Jim has unearthed the biggest election fraud in the history of the universe. Astounding.

If I could take a moment and explain to Jim Lampley that though he is very adept at describing men hitting each other with their fists, people striking tennis balls with rackets, and has, in the past, deftly spoken of speedy cars driving in a giant circle, he is in fact, still Jim Lampley, and has only managed to uncover the breadth and depth of his own mental instability. And there’s nothing a graduate degree or internet access can do to change that.

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