Latin for Losers

At long last, it is finally Brutus’ turn to be victimized.  He runs a blog that need not be named and uses a blavatar that comes from Roman sculpture.    When he signed up to be featured here, he contemplated whether he could inspire much “bile.”  And on his blog, he ran an article on me before he had anything to fight back against.  Since he seems rather dopey, I’ll battle him on his terms and use his own language against him.  That’s right!  It’s time to discuss a few of my favorite Latin phrases:

Ejaculatio praecox (premature ejaculation): Brutus’ inability to keep stuff from flowing before the action starts shows that he obviously suffers from this.  It might also explain why he lost his last several girlfriends.

Dulce bellum inexpertis (war is sweet to the inexperienced): I’ve already shown that he enjoys battling when he admittedly has little experience or skill with it.  I’m also thinking that he loves tacky 80’s hits like “Love is a Battlefield” and enjoys the war because he is inexperienced.  As we learned from the ejaculatio praecox entry, it’s pretty clear that his partners aren’t as happy, which adds more to the explanation of why he lost his last several girlfriends.

Aegri somnia (a sick man’s dreams): Just take a look at the pictures accompanying his most recent posts and tell me if you think Brutus hasn’t gotten over his lack of access to the Roman bathhouses.

Virile agitur (the manly thing is being done): I’m sorry… just kidding!  There’s nothing manly about Mr. Brutus.

Deus ex machina (god from a machine): For the dramaturgically unsophisticated among you, this term refers to an outlandish plot twist that resolves a seemingly unresolvable situation in a play, much like a god coming out of a machine from the sky to make everything okay again.  And I love how cultural critics like Brutus seem to think that their writing transforms them into some sort of deus ex machina for the world’s ills.  (All the world’s a stage, right?)  He seems to think that cultural criticism from a little-read blog may have some impact.  How insane!  It’s not like he’s doing any whistleblowing or something else productive.  (And I happen to be better than that.  Sooner or later, my criticism will cause someone some deep emotional distress.  How’s that for impact?)

Horror vacui (nature abhors a vacuum): And naturally, we abhor a vacuum of sufficient Classical content.  If you’re going to go Roman, why call your blog “The Spiral Staircase?”

Here are some suggestions for names that might fit the blog better:

Nemo Saltat Sobrius (nobody dances sober): But, be sure to mention that you’re a teetotaler

Quidquid Latine Dictum Sit Altum Videtur (anything that is said in Latin sounds profound) : Let’s face it… the whole faux Roman theme Brutus has going on is a way to make his blog look more profound.  This line would fit right in.

Ad Astra Per Alas Porci (To the stars on the wings of a pig): Someone important may have told Brutus that he’d become a writer when pigs fly, and now pork is going off into space.  Unfortunately, the whole situation is kind of a letdown.  We were expecting Porky to go airborne but the best thing we got was bacon on the space shuttle.  So I guess The Spriral Staircase will have to do.

Ejaculatio Praecox: Maybe he’ll get more women if they know his weak points in advance…

Victimizing a Blogger and Sigmund Freud

(I promise that I will get to the penis jokes soon…)

You may have seen me express my disapproval with the continued use of Sigmund Freud’s outdated theories.   You may even have been shocked to hear that people still quote those theories as though they were a definitive source of knowledge.  But now I have something new for you, my dear readers.  I am going to add a stage to Freud’s incomplete theories of psychosexual development.

Freud claimed that there were five stages of psychosexual development: oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital.   You may also notice that four of these five stages are named for body parts that can be used in sexual acts.  Unfortunately, Freud failed to capture the full range of psychosexual development because I’ve found someone who is in a different stage.

Meet Theflashion.  If you visit his blog, you’ll find a lot of headless photos that have people’s bellybutton region in the center of the photo; some entries focus exclusively on people’s guts or bellybutton shots.  The blog doesn’t really focus much on other parts of the body, so I think we’ve discovered a new obsession: the bellybutton stage.

But you may object: That can’t be possible! If there’s another stage of development that Freud missed, shouldn’t it also be something people can use during a sex act?  If you asked that, you would be wrong again… and you would be showing your true lack of imagination.  There’s an obvious reason why Theflashion doesn’t reveal his gender on his blog: he must have a tiny penis and the bellybutton is the one hole on other people’s bodies he can use for his own pleasure.  (@ Theflashion: I apologize if I am using the wrong gender pronoun.  Maybe you’re a she who has a tiny penis.)

And I’ll close with a trivia question for everyone: which of the bellybuttons on Theflashion’s blog do you think he has had relations with?

(See, everyone?  I promised that you’d get your dose of penis humor.)

Man vs. Food?

Ladies and Gentleman, I am humbled to announce that I have a celebrity victim today.  Please welcome Adam Richman to Victimizing Other Bloggers!

Oh… wait.  That’s not Adam Richman?  Darn.  It sure looked like him.

Despite that huge disappointment, we do have an exciting victim who happens to be an Adam Richman lookalike.  His name is Josh Sterner and he hates working in retail.   He gives a lot of reasons (and visits the topic elsewhere on his blog) but a lot of these probably apply to people in other lines of work as well.  Before he complains about these things again, I’d like to ask him a few hard-hitting questions about his job:

1: Are you required to transport old, moldy meat and produce out of the store.  I did not see that on your list and that worries me.  I’ve seen the occasional green loaf of bread and fuzzy sirloin on the shelves but it worries me that your employer is not forcing you to do these unpleasant tasks.  By not complaining about your employer making you do this, you are opening your paycheck-giver to litigation and that would be bad for your professional future.

2: Does your store rent out those fancy vacuum cleaners?  When you’re stuck doing a night shift with no customers around, have you ever tried giving your dog a bath with one of those things?

3: Have you ever tried giving a coworker a bath with one of those things?

4: Did you start dating that coworker soon after that night?

5: How many crushed insects can the customer expect to find in the average loaf of bread?

6: How many crushed insects can the customer expect not to notice in the average loaf of bread?

7: Why did your store stop carrying my favorite product?

8: Why do you always get 500 people asking you that question AFTER the product is discontinued when there were only 20 people who ever bought it in the first place?

9: Is there anything in that yellow frosting other than sugar and water?  Or: do you have less nauseating ways to release your stress?

10: Do you realize that you named your employer in an earlier post?

Appropriate Things to Do When You’re 16

Awwww.  How precious!  A cute little 16-year-old girl wants to be a victim.  That’s just so sweet!  And because I’m such a generous person, I am going to humor her.

So let’s look at some of the things she wants to do this summer:

Get a tan

With British weather?  Good luck…

Complete a 5k run without dying

It’s easier than she thinks, so this isn’t very ambitious.  If she does a little every day, her total will eventually come out to 5k.

Meet some new people

Go shopping and say hi to the cashier.  That counts.

Have a proper picnic

Bring on those wild and crazy times!

See someone famous

They’re on TV all the time.  What’s the problem?

Draw/Paint something/someone

May I recommend a stick figure?  It’s easy to do and she’d get it right on her first try.

Tie Dye!

The dawning of the Age of Aquarius is a long time past.

Revamp some old clothing

I hope “revamp” doesn’t mean “tear it enough to make me look like a prostitute”  She’s too young.

But she’s missing the most important item of all: Don’t get pregnant.  Her most recent blog post is called “Why sensible kids don’t get pregnant at 16” but she’s not striving to do what the sensible kids do.  Children really shouldn’t be allowed to reveal how insensible they are online.  Her parents should be watching over her internet activity more closely.  Maybe they could take her on a proper picnic.  That might keep her out of trouble.  And then they can build a dollhouse together; that sounds like a nice, healthy new hobby… and she’s looking for one of those too.  But no Ken dolls for our little victim; even though I doubt he’s anatomically correct, the little lady could get some bad ideas into her head by taking off his clothes.

Or her parents could just buy her a chastity belt.  That ought to keep her from becoming pregnant…

Testicular Deformations and Why Sex Ed is Important

Not too long ago, I wrote a post where I assumed the role of a kindergarten student.  Today, I am going to assume the role of a kindergarten teacher because today’s victim has barely progressed beyond these immortal words from the movie Kindergarten Cop:

Boys have a penis.  Girls have a vagina.

That’s right!  And today’s Mr. Ignorant is Maxim.  Maxim, who probably owns a set of male genitals, seems completely clueless about what that biology looks like.  Here’s an x-ray from his blog:

Oh where to begin?  I’ll start at the top.  Even though we use the word as popular slang, there is no bone in the penis.  And if Maxim’s fits through the hole in the top of that x-ray, I feel very very sorry for him.

That must be why his balls look so sad.  It’s a shame too because some part of Maxim’s anatomy needs to be called Mr Happy.  Maybe his belly button is bigger.

And if we look more closely at his balls, we’ll notice that there’s foreskin on both sides.  I think his mohel missed something.  Or: maybe the mohel decided to have mercy and let that little deformation pass by.  That looks like it would be painful to remove.

On the other hand, Maxim’s little deformation gives new meaning to the phrase “getting some head.”

And for someone who is obviously so clueless about standard male anatomy and sex in general, I find it astonishing that he has a picture on his blog of how he was conceived.  Maybe this explains the deformations:

And then there’s a photo of his birth:

Unfortunately, Maxim seems to think that these pictures are:

1: a monster in a child’s bedroom
2: a monster called the Blob 

He must have led a sheltered childhood if he can look at those images and not realize what they are.

And he says he’s a teacher.  Just think of the things he could be unwittingly traumatizing those kids with.  Before you can be an educator, you ought to be educated; Maxim is a shining example of that.