by Neel Shah

In her Huffington Post primer “How to Date an Indian (Advice for a Non-Indian),” Andrea Miller, the CEO of trusted relationship advice website YourTango, lays out a multitude of reasons as to why Indian folks-”innately gracious, social creatures”-make perfect spouses. Miller, you see, is married to a perfect hunk of brown male straight out of New Dehli, which thus gives her “pretty good perspective on the desirability of the people from the world’s largest democracy-and how to woo them.”

As an Indian person myself-one who has had the misfortune of stepping foot on the wretched land mass known as the Subcontinent on more than one occasion-I couldn’t help but chuckle. Has Miller ever interacted with an Indian before? We are fucking terrible. Our females tend to have mustaches. Many males, sadly, are endowed with comically small penises. (Hopefully Sanjay, Miller’s husband, is the exception!) Both genders tend to sweat profusely, and emit a most unpleasant odor. It was almost as if Miller hadn’t met more than, oh, a few dozen of the more than 1 billion Indians on this planet before writing her article!

No, as every Indian knows, we’re hardly the cream of the dating crop. I’ll tell you who is, though: White bitches.

I know what you’re thinking: White bitches-so rare. So exotic! Where/how can you snag one yourself, for experimental love-making purposes? Luckily, I have more than a decade of experience interacting with these pasty unicorns, and am somewhat of an expert on the subject. Allow me, for a moment, to expound on the peculiar wants and desires of white bitches-and in turn enlighten you, fellow brown man, on how you can capture one of your own.

WHITE BITCHES LOVE BOOZE
This is very important. After a couple of white wine spritzers, you basically have to taze white bitches to keep ’em from jumping you in public. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever NOT sexed a sexy white bitch after plying her with alcohol. As you’re getting hammered, remember to regale her with stories about how back in India you drink “fermented coconut juice served by tiny monkey waiters riding elephants,” too. White bitches love that shit. (Note: Some white bitches only drink vodka sodas because they’re worried about “getting fat,” even though they’ll get drunk and proceed to wolf down like three slices of pepperoni pizza as if they’re storing up for hibernation. White bitches are often dumb.)

WHITE BITCHES LOVE IT WHEN YOU TAKE THEM PLACES
Pack a picnic basket with some grapes and crackers (LOL) and Brie and go to Central Park or the Cloisters or some shit. White bitches love eating stupid foods like Brie in stupid places like Central Park. Do you know how many vanilla wafers I’ve banged at the Cloisters? A lot. Obviously it sucks up there but it’s totally worth it. “He’s so great!” she’ll tell her stupid white friends at some stupid brunch. “He took me to the CLOISTERS and told me about the delicious rotis his tiny Indian grandmother used to make with her tiny hands.” The other white bitches will be impressed, which means you can probably sleep with them too, because most white bitches secretly hate their friends and enjoy spiting them.

WHITE BITCHES LOVE IT WHEN YOU BUY THEM SHIT
White bitches are superficial as shit. Buy them flowers or chocolates or designer handbags and you will totally get laid. White bitches are basically contractually obligated to give you a handjob if you spend more than $50 on a present, so make sure you “accidentally” leave the price tag on so they know just how much money you spent. When she sees the tag, sigh and sound embarrassed because “$50 could provide six months worth of food and malaria medicine for the village where my cousins Mukesh and Vijay live.” Add that you wish you could call them but they don’t have electricity there, which breaks your heart, but you still pray to multiple deities every day for their well-being. If you actually spent less than $50, just switch the price tag. At this point, most white bitches will be so ready to bone you they won’t even notice your trickery.

WHITE BITCHES LOVE IT WHEN YOU TELL THEM YOU LOVE THEM
Oh, God, telling a white bitch you love her is basically cheating. There isn’t anything on the planet white bitches want more than to get married before they turn 30, at which point they basically morph into hideous spinsters. If you tell a white bitch you love her, she will do anything you say, forever, the end. If she’s over 30, you don’t even need to tell her you love her. Just send her the occasional SMS message and maybe take her out in public a few times and she is YOURS.

There you have it, brown dudes. Go forth and conquer!

As for all you white ladies out there: Mai tumse pyar karta hoo. I’m single. Call me.

Neel Shah actually smells pretty great.

by saythatscool

A long weekend with refreshments restores the refined spirit and intellect. We returned to a shortened work week, full of dreadful creativity and wonderment. We had questions-and commenters were going to ask those questions, answers be damned.

We wondered how many kitchen utensils we really needed. And why our dogs were so stupid. We wondered: how many coconuts we could get for a fish? Actually, we answered that. My significant other wondered: does this swimsuit make my ass look big? It doesn’t Clarence, you are as beautiful as the day I married you.

All that time with our loved ones made us question our relationships. We questioned our sexual preferences and why we get divorced. We wondered how badly we screwed it up and what we missed in the process.

Others queried what they were doing in the first place? We wondered how to make amends and move on.

The youngs asked: how old is too old? The olds wondered how to make themselves attractive again to the youngs. The olds then asked: why are we attracted to the youngs in the first place? Then we all wondered about that leery stranger. Then we wondered when they were going to play our song.

We wondered where we could gas up cheaply and about that nearby disappeared sex prison. We asked what kind of man likes what kind of superhero and if we missed the summer sequel.

I started to wonder if sorry your heinous was Lee Marvin or Toshiro Mifune and why anyone would ever compliment an Albanian.

We came back to our work and demanded to know whatever happened to Electric Six and Abe. We wondered about our futures and what we were really doing.Â

References were made that I don’t get, but apparently everyone else does. Others around us just seemed very lost.

My conclusion? Love is a literal battlefield. (All apologies for messing with a Pat Benatar classic.)

No but seriously folks. Most importantly? I Shirley Templed a bro and now he can tap dance. And on and on and on.

Don’t forget to email me your suggestions if you see something you like: awlcomments@gmail.com.

Horror Chick: The Awfulness of “Splice” Cannot Be Solved by Adrien Brody and Monster Sex

It’s hard out there for a genetic engineer these days. How are you supposed to synthesize your eukaryotic poly-glucose, or whatever the hell you do all day, without getting sucked into the fecund pit of political debate? Cloning, gene manipulation, synthetic life-none of them exist free of partisan precepts and ideological dogma. Movies that take on this modern scientific dilemma have a perfect opportunity to depict science’s brilliant minds as they actually are: human beings, as jam-packed with flaws and biases and BS as the rest of us. Of course, you could also take a step further, and make scientists the DUMBEST motherf#ckers on the planet. Which is what Splice director Vincenzo Natali has chosen to do.

In fact, not only are the supposedly-brilliant super-scientists of Splice ungodly stupid, they’re loathsome to the point of movie ruination. The goal of an effective monster film is to have at least one moment that truly works-in other words, a scene in which viewers wonder if the humans fighting the beast are in fact the bigger monsters. Plenty of films have accomplished this: Jaws, 28 Days Later, The Gay Bed and Breakfast of Terror (yes, the obsession continues). The best way to sabotage your “The humans are evil too!” moment is to make it a SLAM DUNK- your characters are clearly so much worse than the monster that moviegoers are literally sacrificing sheep in the theater aisles, smearing their faces with blood and begging you to kill those assholes off already.

Luckily, no one at this screening had any sheep. But by about 40 minutes in, we were ready to at least slash some veins. Let’s see, we’ve got Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley (both actors who should know better-I mean come on, you’ve got Oscars and shit, you’re smart enough to know a garbage script when you see one) playing lovers/superstar geneticists who combine the DNA of multiple animals to create some magical new species: an animal that looks like the contents of a Biological Waste container after 12 hours of liposuction. Flush with their apparently-genius-level discovery, our couple decides-well, scratch that, the CRAZY WOMAN (‘cause Lord knows women are SO crazy) decides to splice some human DNA into this homeostatic hodgepodge of animal genes. Cue the “birth” of the monster, and the forehead-slappery that ensues.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when a movie this bad first hits the point of no return. Is it the moment when Polley presents the monster with her very own Surfin’ Safari Barbie? Or the scene where the scientific wunder-couple get it on in a lab basement, while the creature watches? In a script this awful, the idiocy piles on, asphyxiating you with its crushing stupidity, until finally you can’t even summon the breath to yell obscenities when Adrien Brody starts banging the monster on the floor of a barn.

Yes, the former Best Actor winner is reduced to sex scenes with fish/bird/mammal creatures modeled after Sinead O’Connor. Because, not only are our hero and heroine raging amoral jerkstores, they’re also big fat oozing gender clichés. Let’s see, there’s the crazy-in-the-head Polley, who’s oblivious to rational thought, sexually rigid, and obsessed with motherhood beyond all reason. Then there’s Joe Horndog Brody, who wins the award for “most emasculated character ever to appear onscreen” (even beating Willem Dafoe in Antichrist-no small feat). Between bouts of humiliation by his woman, he waltzes through morally-ambiguous situations with practiced oblivion, sticking his PhD-earning wang into any female that shows interest.

In fact, the only semi-coherent character in this movie is the creature herself, a somewhat realistic portrayal of what would happen if you crocheted together fish, birds, possums, marmosets, and Lord knows what other DNA, and then tossed some human genes in for good measure. Played by French ingénue Delphine Chanéac, the monster provides the one sympathetic and semi-rational being to cling to. And she looks amazing-which is why all monster-movie-lovers should genuflect before Howard Berger and his team of makeup and creature effects demi-gods. These guys can create the truly remarkable onscreen… though not even they can salvage dreck like this. Bad monster effects can tank your movie, but even the best prosthetics and makeup can’t drag a total shitshow from the depths of putrescence.

Melissa Lafsky came to your movie with an open mind and your script spit on her!

To show that they have a sense of humor about their government’s killing people, Jerusalem Post columnist Caroline Glick and some fellow defenders of the Israel’s stance on the flotilla fiasco have made a spoof of the “We Are the World” video. It is the opposite of funny.

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

Today in the poetry section; two new poems by Timothy Donnelly.

His Future as Attila the Hun

But when I try to envision what it might be like to live
detached from the circuitry that suffers me to crave

what I know I’ll never need, or what I need but have
in abundance already, I feel the cloud of food-court

breakfast loosen its embrace, I feel the shopping center
drop as its escalator tenders me up to the story

intended for conference space. I feel my doubt diminish, my debt
diminish; I feel a snow that falls on public statuary

doesn’t do so sadly because it does so without profit.
I feel less toxic. I feel the thought my only prospect

lies under a train for the coverage stop. Don’t think I never
thought that way because I have and do, all through

blank October a dollar in my pocket back and forth
to university. Let the record not not show. I have

deserted me for what I lack and am not worth. All of this
unfolds through episodes that pale as fast as others

gain from my inertia: I have watched, I’ll keep watching
out from under blankets as the days trip over the

days before out cold on the gold linoleum behind them
where we make the others rich with sick persistence.

But when I try to envision what it might be like to change,
I see three doors in front of me, and by implication

opportunity, rooms full of it as the mind itself is full
thinking of a time before time was, or of the infinite

couch from which none part, and while the first two doors
have their appeal, it’s the third I like best, the one

behind which opens a meadow, vast, and in it, grazing
on buttercups, an errant heifer with a wounded foot,

its bloody hoofprints followed by a curious shepherd back
to something sharp in the grass, the point of a long

sword which, unearthed, the shepherd now polishes with
his rodent-skin tunic, letting the Eurasian sun play

upon it for effect, a gift for me, a task, an instrument to lay
waste to the empire now placed before me at my feet.

Antepenultimate Conflict with Self

1
The times the thought of being pulled apart from
you comes as a relief have come now to outnumber
those it startles me like light from a hurricane
lamp left burning unattended dangerously near
the curtains of the theater we both attend and are.

The fire of it spasms up the tall glass chimney
like little air pockets we’ve watched trudge down
loops in hospital tubing-disarmed, but quietly.
When I have made in our manhood some large noise
to spook off harm, harm has only found us faster.

Saying one should distract it as the other escapes
to an agreed-on spot where we can reconnoiter
after, like under the alder where the jackdaw builds
its nest of surplus playbills. They shred them up
like that as a matter of procedure. They intend no

particular disrespect to you or your production.
None taken. Glad to hear it. Because I thought I saw
a darkness drift across your face that I associate
with umbrage. Not even close. If I were you I wouldn’t
flatter myself. And yet, turning things around, this

darkness you speak of, it must have drifted across
your own face at least as much as mine. Admittedly, yes.
So why not leave me out of it? I’ve been trying to do
just that. Looks to me like you haven’t been going
about it right. That makes two of us, then. Not quite.

Leaving the burning theater behind one begins to
ease into a new perspective. The stairway leads to
a doorway, the doorway to an alleyway, the alleyway
to another door, more stairs, another amber room
where one can forget again, its window overlooking

a car lot emptied of its cars. The stark lines recall
what was and will be there, but isn’t now or anymore.
The scent of juniper or cat piss. A knock at the door.
A look around the room before opening to confirm this
isn’t the one we’ve been, only half in fear, dreaming.

2
After calculation, I’ve let you in. Seated at the table
in cold beneath the window, we try to remember each
example of the condition we’re after, namely that of
a multitude at work in unison. You say alder branches
blown in the wind. I say the warp and weft of waves

on an open bay. You say activity near beehives. I say
heavy snowfall. You say a flock of birds tilting mid-flight
and I say some performances we turn to long enough
to forget what we can never have, not without shedding
either or both of us. As if one had to clear out room

for a discovery that doesn’t come so much as splinter
into the shag. We are down on our hands and knees
trawling gold acrylic pile. We are old here already.
To have rehearsed this almost infinitely hasn’t helped
move things along. On the contrary. The whole idea

of perfection, evidently our aim, seems to have done
less to guide us away from missteps than to make them
even sharper, more palpable, and in several respects
downright impossible to avoid. (All the pressing in of
what we’ll never have reminds us of how thoroughly

bereft we are, even of a hope of one day not wanting.)
You ought to put an end to this. (What pierces my hand
pierces yours, stops us into focus strong enough only
to drive off gauzy voices urging more harm for the quiet
that comes after.) You ought to have put an end to it

first. Shown a little courtesy. (Light dim as light can be
and still be thought light flosses the cleft between poorly
drawn curtains.) You shouldn’t have followed me here.
You made it impossible not to. Took you long enough
to say it though. Some things go without. Without? Without

saying altogether. They sit unsaid in a lost auditorium,
muttering into night. I think they should be heard. I think
I can hear them now. As from behind a wall, or within it.
We have that gift. Yes, and each other. Also sticktoitiveness.
But it’s gifts like these that always get one into trouble.

Timothy Donnelly’s first book of poems, Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebensziet, was published by Grove Press in 2003, and his second, The Cloud Corporation, will be published by Wave Books this fall. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly,

Fence, Gulf Coast, Harper’s, The Iowa Review, jubilat, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for Boston Review and teaches in the Writing Program of Columbia University’s School of the Arts.

It’s hard to get a sense of what’s going on in America with foreclosure filings, the number of homes being foreclosed on and the actual number of houses being taken back by banks. The newspapers are confusing! Are they “down”? Are they “up”? So we dug up the actual numbers for each year since 2005, up to the projected numbers for 2010. A “foreclosure filing” can be a number of things, including notice of default, auction or seizure-which is why the actual number of houses receiving these notices is a useful number to know.

Want to watch a rocket blast off? Just come back to my apartment with me. No, you don’t have to. Thanks to this live feed from Cape Canaveral, you can see a massive cluster of nine Merlin 1C engines launch the 141-foot-tall, 333 ton Falcon 9 rocket with it’s Dragon freighter nose capsule (man, the aerospace industry must employ more former D&D; players than any other profession) 155 miles into the atmosphere right from the comfort of your own workplace. The Falcon is built to delivery cargo and one day even astronauts to the International Space Station, but today’s mission is just to collect data on the ascent. “We’re on track to go to T-Zero at 11am eastern time,” says Elon Musk, the CEO and chief designer at SpaceX, the company that made the rocket. “We’re all systems green.” Psyched!

So Denver’s airport put up a statue of Anubis, the Egyptian god of the dead, as a promotion for the traveling Tutankhamun exhibition which will visit that city shortly. This comes after last year’s installation of “Mustang,” a giant, frightening horse which fell on its sculptor during the creation process, killing him. Up next for art lovers in Denver, the multimedia piece “Study in Shattered Fuselage and Bone,” which will greet travelers as they arrive at check-in. Fun times!

“He is most famous for playing Italian lothario Joey Tribbiani in hit U.S. sitcom Friends. And despite sporting a new grey-haired looked, it seems Matt LeBlanc hasn’t lost any of his charm as he was spotted flirting with two pretty female fans in London earlier this week. The 42-year-old actor may even have used Tribbiani’s famous pick-up line ‘How you doin’?’ as he chatted and posed for photographs with the women.”

“We can ask: Are there any scenarios where the oil stays in the Gulf? The answer seems to be no.”
–Synte Peacock, oceanographer, National Center for Atmospheric Research.