kill a man with your bare hands

The National Evil is devoted to constant, gut-wrenching self-improvement. Take this blog; what began as an emotional landfill for one man’s zombie zeitgeist fantasies has rapidly morphed into a one-stop mecca for entertainment, education and propaganda.

Frankly, if you’re not making yourself smarter, healthier, stealthier, or more nubile every day, the National Evil doesn’t want you as a reader. But it is a confusing world, granted, and the path to radical self-reinvention quite often gives the appearance of forking infinitely into dark, scary woods.

Those woods aren’t so scary, though, if you’re equipped with an emotional chainsaw of righteousness. To that end, the National Evil offers the self-help guide for those who have the nerve to make themselves the kind of readers this blog can be proud of . . . and fear:

Kill A Man With Your Bare Hands: An On-the-Go Guide For Achieving Nietzchian Supermanhood.

testosterone and you: bad news for wormy, desperately shy shut-in types. good news for not-hotties?

Note Snoop’s upright posture and squared shoulders . . .

The National Evil likes him some science. So much so that he appends a spasmodic ! to its category tag. (OK, it’s actually an homage to Thomas Dolby. Shaddup.) When he spies an interesting nugget chipped off from man’s quest to understand the mysteries of nature, the Evil is pleased to present to you, dear reader, these findings. (Real or imagined.) He does this even though many of these nuggets are almost maddeningly dull. For example: here’s an article about the purpose of testosterone that could use some. Read it if you’d like . . . to feel the testosterone draining from you. Or! Let Evil be your guide.

Looooong story short: when talking to a woman, a man’s testosterone rises by the same amount whether she looks like a supermodel or a C.H.U.D. Relevant line:

The study’s authors believe the rise in testosterone may be an automatic and unconscious reaction that has evolved in man when faced with a woman, to prepare him for possible mating opportunities.

See? See? For Chrissakes, the article is entitled “Male lust is blind, research suggests.” And “lust” gots nothing to do with anything as dry as “mating opportunities.” Seriously: “mating opportunities?” Not “shagging opportunities?” Not “boots-knocking”? Not “tappin that ass?”

This is why robot sex will take decades to get good—because scientists have to invent our sex-slave-droids. Until Hef gets his hands on them, they’re going to be about as exciting as having sex with the publishers of this research.

the thrilling detective drama continues: kong and the police detectives

To read Chapter Two, Part 2, click here.

Chapter Two, Part 3

Before I’d gotten my head around the implications of what my nose was telling me, light dribbled into the alley up to my knees. “What the—?” barked a familiar voice. I stepped over the body and turned as a flashlight’s beam rose to look me in the eye. “Oh, it’s you, Kong.”

“Want to get that out of my face, McNeely?” The beam dropped, hovered at my stomach. Detective McNeely entered the alley behind a stout number wearing a frown that could wring a confession from the steeliest perp. “Lieutenant.”

The Lieutenant snorted. “Should’ve expected to find you here, Kong. Seems every time someone drops a body in this town, you turn up.”

“You know I hate to miss a show.”

“Watch it, then.” He spat in the general direction of my feet. The Lieutenant’d loathed me since I stepped on his brother in ’33. “One day I’m going to catch you putting on the show. Then you’re finished.”

mcdonalds and cultural imperialism: better than haggis and the other kind of imperialism

Miss Belgium and Miss Luxembourg moments before the swimsuit competition.

Says here sales at European McDonalds (McDonaldses? McDoni?) have surpassed those of the U.S. market. Sure, the euro/dollar exhange rate has something to do with it, but note that the Old World is outspending America while patronizing half as many locations.

The greatest beneficiary of this news, of course (other than McDonalds shareholders), would be Morgan Spurlock, who can now extend his career another 18 months or so by making the National Lampoon’s European Vacation of binge-eating documentary sequels. As we speak, he must be busy storyboarding scenes of his enormously engorged self struggling to pedal a bicycle up the winding cobblestone alleys of Nice. Or yakking over the side of a gondola in Venice.

sweet perversity 1, wankers 0. huzzah!

I’ve heard of sex with furries. But blurries . . . ?

Here’s a good one from Time concerning Max Mosley, the head of Formula One racing. Last March a video emerged online of him engaged in a spirited round of S&M with five ladies, none of whom happened to be his wife. The tabloid News of the World dubbed it “a depraved Nazi-style orgy in a torture dungeon.” (What is a “Nazi-style” orgy, exactly? This is one area of German history the Evil never encountered. Mosley denies the Nazi connotations. You can watch the video here and judge for yourself.)

Anyway, the meat of this very amusing article is that this Mosley chap isn’t apologizing for his bondage party, hasn’t gone into hiding—no. Quite the opposite. Says Time:

The British multi-millionaire and Formula One boss insists there’s no shame in a little hanky-spanky, and he has sued the tabloid News of the World for suggesting otherwise.

i’m the national evil, and i approve of these 30-minute albums

Beck’s hair is longer than his new album.

An interesting phenomenon seems to be occurring among the bands the National Evil cares about: the drastic reduction of album lengths to a lean half hour. He wonders if any of you, dear readers, have noticed this happening to your record collections.

This really kicked off with Everything All the Time by Band of Horses, though that probably shouldn’t count because it was their first album. For all the Evil knew, BOH might just not have had any more good music in them. (Their second album was just as short and equally good.)

Then Spoon released Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. Evil dutifully picked up the disc, slipped it into his car stereo, and had almost finished the album by the time he got to work the next morning. When he realized it was only 30 minutes long, he was taken aback. Confused. A muddle of emotions. On the one hand, the album was really good—near great—and its length (or lack of) made the Evil want to immediately start it over at track 1.

On the other hand—hey, they could have fit the entire album on the same CD again. Had Spoon just ripped the Evil off?

the national evil vs. the sun

“Since the beginning of time, man has yearned to destroy the sun.”

Admitted: Evil is on the pasty side—the fires of his hellish abode may be hot, but in terms of UV, they gots nothing on the sun. Over the years, he has occasionally wondered how his equally-if-not-more pale ancestors found their way to the American South and its relentless beating sunshine. He imagines them standing at the harbor in Dublin as two lines formed, one to board ships bound for Ellis Island, the other for Charleston, South Carolina. And Evil’s ancestors, possibly being illiterate, having no idea. Just wanting to get the hell out of Ireland.

Or maybe they just moved here in the winter and thought nothing of it. Either way, here there be Evil. And his unending war against the sun.

Like most people of northern European ancestry, the Evil didn’t start this fight with the sun. He wants nothing to do with a battle against an effectively immortal antagonist who can’t be reached by any conventional weapon. But still it’s there, rising to pick on him every day of Georgia’s six-month summer.

the thrilling detective drama continues: one man down. the first of many?

To read Chapter Two, Part 1, click here.

Chapter Two, Part 2

When he wasn’t out terrorizing the good people of the Five Burroughs—and plenty of the not-so-good people—Wormsy Scarpini could be found swilling rye at the 21 Club off Broadway. He and the rest of the Lucero boys occupied a few rooms on the third floor. On the infrequent occasions when the coppers worked up the nerve to raid the joint—usually when the bribes hadn’t been paid in a timely manner—the boys would simply climb out the fire escape and hop over into the next building. By the time the law’d busted down the doors, they’d peeled off.

Flopping upstairs doesn’t make much difference, though, if you happen to be three stories tall. I’d spent many a night crammed into the alley behind the 21 Club, my ear to the window, listening to Wormsy and company rattle off details of enough sordid affairs to send them permanently up the river—the one that empties into the Lake of Fire. This being the stinking peak of a New York summer, they’d even have the windows open. Considerate lads, this lot, so long as they didn’t know they were doing you a favor.

ALERT! banished songs are escaping from the phantom zone!

They have more in common than you might think . . .

As stated previously, the Evil gets the muzak at work. You might imagine most of the songs selected for a work-safe, repeating-daily playlist are calculatedly putrescent. You would be correct. (And possessed of a severely flaccid imagination; when the Evil imagines things, we’re talking about a horde of lascivious harlots cavorting on the beaches ringing the Lake of Fire—now that’s imagination!) Lots of Carrie Underwood, John Mayer, that kind of dreck. Evil recalls an era when a “safe” playlist was comprised of last decade’s easy listening/soul music, piped along the grocery store aisles as he rolled along in a shopping cart. Alas, no more.

And yet there are some lines the Sirius muzak playlist-maker won’t cross. The Evil wouldn’t have believed that until he wandered into Target a few days ago and began to seize up—unexpectedly, uncontrollably.

They were playing “My Heart Will Go On.”

Why? How? Didn’t we as a nation, as a culture, as a species, ban that song sometime around the turn of the millennium? Evil’s not talking about one of those VH1ish “Top 100 Worst Songs Ever” countdowns. (Though he does remember MTV pulling just this stunt—officially banning one video from its programming forever. Unfortunately, MTV corporate liked the idea so much they banished all videos forever.)

iphone + top secret app store = spyphone. insert villainous laugh here.

5, 4, 3, 2, 1 . . . BOOM!

Along with the pending release of the 3G iPhone comes the App Store, in which over 4,000 programs for that “sexy” gadget (sarcasm alert; the gadget is another thing that is NOT sexy) will supposedly sprout, waiting to be harvested by eager consumers. We’ve heard rumors of apps that will help you find your friends in da club in da club in da club. The press is rife with tales describing how Apple plans to infiltrate the business world by offering “enterprise solutions”, one of those unnecessary euphemisms that strikes the Evil as so stupid it should make any adult blush to say it.

Among the apps already demoed are a medical scanning program and a game called “Super Monkey Ball.” First question that springs to the Evil’s mind: Why not combine the two?

Second question: What if, instead of filling the App Store with business gewgaws, games, and social networking tools, the iPhone offered a suite of applications suitable for the modern spy/spy hunter/assassin for hire? If Apple wants to keep its place at the cutting edge of technology, shouldn’t Jobs and co. be servicing this demographic first? (Of course, there’s always the possibility that this demo has been served in a top-secret way since the Cold War.) Here are five apps—all of them plausible, mind you; no invisible cars here—the Evil would like to see in the SpyPhone.

1. Retinal Scanner: Only two people can access the heart of the secret military installation: the supervillain and his insanely hot girlfriend wearing the cocktail dress slit up to the ying-yang . . . with whom you’re tangoing at the Embassy. Why would the would-be world-conqueror allow this beauty access to his inner sanctum? Quid pro quo, my friend, quid pro quo. After charming her off her feet, you “show” her a picture on your iPhone. As she peers at the screen, it discreetly scans her retinal pattern. This will come in handy at the security door.