Tuna Princess will not meet you in heaven.

The sun is shining and the weather is perfect and I have some sort of dreadful throat ailment. It kind of feels like there’s a little monkey claw embedded in my throat, pinching things at random. Scratchy. You know.

I've been holding this position in hopes of garnering sympathy.

Anyway, Throat Ache has canceled my weekend plans, and so I am now free to read the news. Because, per usual, there is lots of news. And now would be a good time for not having a monkey claw in my throat news analysis.

Item One: Terrorists Who Own and Love Cats With Silly Names

Mohamed Alessa is, by all accounts, a bad person. The most recent evidence of this was him being arrested June 6 at Kennedy Airport, where he and his BFF Carlos Almonte were about to board a plane. At the end of that plane lay Egypt, and then Somalia and Al Shabab, where Alessa and Almonte imagined they would get to do fun stuff like behead people and leave American service members “sliced up in 1,000 pieces.”

Just doin' guy stuff! No big deal!

Alessa’s assholery was, in fact, exhibited in other ways beyond wanting to cut people’s heads off or whatever. Let’s listen to the New York Times:

Family friends watched Mohamed scream at his mother, smash up his father’s car and, in anger, knock the food off a shelf in the deli. When his shaken parents tried to take him to therapists, he screamed, “I’m not crazy.” At times he took medication for anger management, but about three years ago, his mother said, he stopped taking it and stopped seeing therapists.

… and then he got all into this Islamist thing and railed against non-subservient women and blah blah blah and decided to head for Somalia. But there was something holding Alessa back, namely his love for his kitty, Tuna Princess. Alessa reportedly argued with his parents about taking Tuna Princess with him for training, but they vetoed it.

Awwww!

So he’s not a very nice person, but he does have a hilariously named cat that he seems to care a good bit about, which endears him to me in a teeny way.

Analysis:There will be no 72 Tuna Princesses waiting for you in heaven, Alessa, so quit this jihad-ing and, if you ever get out of jail, enjoy the time you have with Tuna Princess in the here and now.

MOVING ON.

Item 2: The World Cup is Here, And So Are The Attractive Men Is The International Excitement

Every time the World Cup rolls around, I get really excited for two reasons:

1. Soccer players are unfairly hot.
2. I always think that I will enjoy watching soccer until it’s actually on. Because soccer is boring.

I do not really have any theories on point one except to say that they spend all their time running and kicking. They are tall and lanky and … I … I don’t know. They all have dynamic hair. They drink a lot. Swarthy. All good things.

Get in my vagina.

A ex-boyfriend was a soccer player, and he lived up to all hopes on the lanky/swarthy/tall/good hair front. And he was talented, too, but then he would invite me to come watch him play and I would accept because it seemed like a very sexy proposition, but …

Point Two: Soccer is boring.

Pass … pass … pass … pass … bump on chest … hover for a minute, looking at other players … pass … pass … pass … … … … … … … pass.

Then just repeat that sequence for two hours and you’ve got a game. Maybe — maybe — if you’re lucky someone actually scores a goal. I always am excited to watch soccer, and then a minute and a half in, I realize what I’m in for. If this were a high-scoring game like basketball it would probably hold my attention much better. BUT. I will say that on the rare occasion when anyone actually does do something in a soccer game, you will absolutely want your television turned to Telemundo.

I know they do competitions to see who can hold the “¡GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL!” longest, but this man is quite impressive. 14 seconds, a quarter second breath,  and then right back at it.

Analysis: It is better to sleep with soccer players than watch them in action. Telemundo is very enthusiastic about goals. Or, as they would say, gols.

News Item Three: BP Is Enthusiastically Invited To Go Fuck Itself. All Y’all. You And Your Mommas, Too, You Greasy, Oily Motherfuckers

I cannot add anything to this news story that has not already been said. This story is just too fucking heartbreaking to even discuss, and I get angry every time I think about it.

Tony Hayward, I would like to coat you in oil.Via Big Picture; Win McNamee/Getty Images

Why is no one going to jail for this? Why is it OK for a company with a hideously spotty record on safety and operations to keep working in the US? Why can BP blow up 11 people, ruin an ocean for the foreseeable future, kill countless animals, restrict media access and still not have fixed the problem?

Seriously, real talk. Y’all are the fourth largest corporation in the world. Plug the fucking hole, and if you can’t fix or at least stop what you’ve messed up (newsflash: clearly you can’t) then you are not ready to be doing deep sea drilling. Exxon, Royal Dutch and Chevron have all managed to keep safety violations minimal, so it can be done. Just not by you.

And you, Louisiana. You home state of mine that breaks my heart again and again. This is so familiar, is it not? Why do you do things like this, let oil companies dredge and cut canals into and ruin the wetlands, let industry fuck you and not call back in the morning? Stop it.

Analysis: Some things can’t be undone, and some things aren’t OK in the end.

Show stoppin’.

Sometimes, even though it’s not good for me, I think about the clothes I would buy if I had so much money that I didn’t even notice that I had money.

Like this, for example.

I think, were it at all feasible, I would want almost everything I own to be from the late ’50s and early ’60s. It’s just all so perfect and, in the case of women’s clothing, hinges on the presence of a chest, smallish waist and boxy hips. Done, done, done.

When she step, her ass bounce two times.

One of my favorite places to go and remind myself of the things I will never have is Xtabay, an insanely expensive store in Portland. You know how, when you’re watching Mad Men or something and you wonder if those dresses ever existed? Well, they did, and they do, and they’re at Xtabay, and you can’t afford them.

It kind of makes me want to cry.

For awhile now, I’ve been looking for a wiggle dress that fits well. The secret, of course, is to find one that exactly fits both hips and waist, which in my case is hard.

But someday it will happen for me.

Anyway. Is there a point to this entry, you might be asking? Nope. Negative. None. The takeaway here:

• I wish I had money.
• I wish I could smoke inside all the time.
• I wish I typed things on a typewriter.
• I wish I was a little bit taller, I wish I was a baller, I wish I had a girl who looked good — I would call her.

That last wish is actually from Skee-Lo, not me, but I think you get the idea. Anyway. As long as I am wishing, here are some other things I would like.

Yes please.

And from the back, even more heartbreaking.

Why aren't any of my coats this coat?

Mostly the suit on the right, but hey, if someone wanted to give me lefty, too, that would be OK.

Finally, and, if it’s not too much trouble, this. I will find an occasion.

I will even make this face.

I know exactly how you feel, Skee-Lo.

Jam of the Day.

It’s times like this that I wish I could actually do the robot, as opposed to my sad imitation thereof. I would also settle for talk box proficiency.

Freestyle, “Don’t Stop the Rock,” 1985.

Bang, bang — we’re beautiful and DIRTY RICH.

Similarities between Lady Gaga and myself:

1. We are both in the 24-25 age range.
2. We both smoke.
3. We both spend our time singing and dancing to Lady Gaga songs.
4. When we were invited on Larry King, we both dressed up as him.
   

   My outfit was better, but hers was pretty good too.

I can’t with this.

All two of my readers know that if there is something that I just can’t even for one second tolerate, it’s hippies.

Thank you, but no.

First, both Mother and Father Bean were dirty, icky, Woodstock-attending hippies in their day, so whenever I see two flower children erotically swaying on each other while tripping, I have to think of my parents doing the same, and it bothers me.

Secondly, hippies are empirically annoying. You can care about the earth (even though I don’t) and be progressive while giving the whole patchouli thing a miss. Their aesthetic is just so very incorrect. Everyone has to construct their identities, and that’s fine, but what are you expressing when you wear corduroy cargo shorts and a Guatemalan hoodie?

Nothing I want any part of.

So it was with great loathing that I read this Sunday’s NYT Magazine article about freegans, who really manage to take the sanctimonious up a notch, especially considering that their entire lifestyle is made possibly by the very thing they claim to hate. I read the entire thing, shuddering quietly to myself.

I suppose everyone is entitled to do what they like, and this obviously makes them happy, so who am I to judge? That being said, any time my life seems like it’s going poorly, from here on out I will remind myself that at least I am not squatting in Buffalo. Also, the entire article was worth the price of admission for this one quote:

The line between this help-yourself mentality and a more freewheeling spirit of communal property isn’t always so clear. One resident, Brianna, remarked to me that her stuff often goes missing and that “everyone just thinks everything that’s here is up for grabs.”

One morning, after I had been hanging out at the mansion for a few days, we were about to have breakfast when someone noticed that all the forks and spoons were missing.

“What happened to all the silverware?” someone asked.

“They got turned into a wind chime,” someone replied nonchalantly. Sure enough, moments later, we could all hear the sound of forks clanging in the breeze.

If there is one thing I dislike nearly as much as hippies, it’s wind chimes. This place is my personal hell.

ting ... tingtingtingtingTINGTINGTING ... ... ... ting.

She poppin’, she rockin’, she rollin’. She climbin’ that pole.

Chris Rock famously noted that if you are a father and you have a daughter, your only goal — your only job — is to keep her off the pole. If you’ve successfully maintained a distance between your little one and the world of lucite heels, g-strings and endless loops of Warrant’s “Cherry Pie,” then congratulations! You win!

This is what you want to avoid, dads.

I will say before I begin this entry that Father Bean, for all his quirks and foibles has, in this way, completely fulfilled his fatherly duties. There was never one time that I have considered stripping.

But. But. It does seem like it’d be kinda fun, if only for a night or two.

When I worked in a certain well-known entertainment zone in my college years, I knew a lot of strippers. And I really adored them! At least the ones that weren’t constantly coked up. They’re no-bullshit, mercenary chicks. They have giant fake tits. They make thousands of dollars in a weekend, then fly first-class back to whatever Florida city they live in on the weekdays. They were fun to party with. They wear sparkly body glitter. What’s not to like?

Pretty.

Plus, I love dancing and yet am a terrible dancer, so in my fantasy two-day stripping career, I’m really, really good at it. Especially the gyrating. Strippers always have a certain panache with their moves, especially that loudly clapping of the lucite heels together over the head one. I wonder if they have a little coaching sessions for the newbies? Probably not, because if there’s one thing strippers hate more than their customers, it’s each other.

I’ve heard from more than one source that the best stripping song, ever, period, is R. Kelly’s Remix to Ignition, which is also one of my favorite songs. “Mamma rollin’ that body, got every man in here wiiiishin’.” Indeed! Later in the song, R. Kelly notes that he’s been “sippin’ on coke and rum,” and then he’s like, “So what? I’m drunk,” which is another sentiment I relate to. I think this could work.

These are the shoes I would wear. I would pair them with a slutty business woman-themed outfit. My stripper name would be "Contessa." As in, "and now, weeeeeelcome to the center stage — CONTESSSSSSSSSSSA!"

In the course of writing this entry and looking for good stripper images to put in, I noticed that, hilariously enough, the costumes that they sell on StripperZone.com are really no different than your run-of-the-mill skanky Halloween outfit. Granted, I don’t wear those, but I have friends that do. None of you, of course.

Anyway, of course I won’t actually do this. BUT, all of this has been leading up to a truly impressive video: the 2010 Pole Dancing Championship highlight reel. All of these ladies have on outfits that are, for the most part, less revealing than a bikini, so no worries. And they are so goddamned impressive. Seriously, I cannot imagine the ab/upper body strength that goes into these sorts of acrobatics. A lot of these moves I don’t even fully understand the physics of.

It reminded me of one of the more famous strippers on Bourbon Street, who worked at the Hustler Club. She was not particularly beautiful, nor ever that sexual in her moves. She did not do lapdances. But the pole in her club was three stories high, and so over the course of three minutes, she would climb all the way to the top using this loping, seal-like motion. She would then turn upside down and whirl around down the pole, only stopping about six inches before her head smashed into the ground. This process would then repeat five or six times, except each time it was scarier and scarier — wait, is she only hooking her high heel around the pole? How does this work?

She got mad tips. I wonder what she’s up to these days.

Discussion question: If you were going to be a stripper, what would your stripper name be?

Big hair, full of secrets … and dimes.

So yesterday, I had a dime. This is kind of rare, because I never, ever have cash, and therefore never have change.

This particular coin was the result of a vending machine transaction that left me with a Diet Coke (my nectar of life) and a dime. Originally, I was thinking about stepping a few machines over to grab Doritos, maybe, or perhaps some Rold Golds, until I saw that some shadowy snack corporation had yet again jacked the price on chips up, this time from the reasonable 85 cents to the outrageous 90 cents.

“Highway robbery!,” I whispered to myself just as a coworker walked up. For some reason, sometimes I say things out loud that I don’t mean to, if I am especially offended.

So. Had the dime. Didn’t have pockets. Wasn’t going to let that dime go. No sir. And so, I tucked it into my  hair. There it stayed throughout the day, until later when I felt a flat hard thing in my hair. Lo and behold … it was Dime!

I'll bet this chick stores stuff in her hair all the time.

It really got me thinking about what other things I could store in my hair. For some reason, the idea of stuff in our hair creeps us out, when maybe it shouldn’t. No, we don’t want anything living in there, but this dime experience made me realize that for 25 years, I have been totally wasting valuable top-of-my-head real estate. Well, fuck that! No more. And to figure out what I’m going to put in there, I’m going to consult my best friend Internet.

So it turns out that the most popular storage item, so far as I can tell, is animal heads. I am partial to the cocker spaniel, though they all have a special brand of what-the-fuckery about them:

Hair dog doesn't approve of your boyfriend.

Maybe a dog is too pedestrian for you; doesn’t express your wild side enough. It’s not your spirit, or hair, animal. May I suggest for you a lion?

Sure!

“But,” you say. “But. While that may be ugly as sin and confusing as love, at least you can tell what it is. I don’t like that. When I wrap my hair around an animal head, what I want is ambiguity. Let the viewer interpret my hairy art.”

Well, lucky for you, you could also store a pig?/armadillo?/boar? head in there.

It's not about what it means to me. It's about what it means to you.

Anyway. Here’s some more suggestions, if you’re still on the fence about what would be best to hide in your hair.

A St. Lucia wreath!

The kind of glass trophy they give out at the Municipal Employee Awards (the 'Munies')

A t-t-telephone!

Anyway. This is just a few ideas. It’s amazing what you can achieve when you set your mind, and hair, to it.

Play on, playette.

Today has been a dope day. A red lipstick kinda day. A wearing high heels and not even giving a fuck when your toes do that creepy curl later kinda day.

Just now, I did a Google image search for “dope day,” and this was my favorite result. This is definitely close to expressing my feelings.

Life would also be dope if you were The Game.

My big damned deal actually acting like a real journalist story came out today. Front page. Well received. Compliments from the editors, nods from the different sides of the story that I’d done a really fair job. This pleased me greatly. It’s an issue that I do have strong feelings about, but of course when you write a story, those feelings don’t matter. What counts is fairly and accurately describing what happened, giving people all the relevant info, cutting out the details that only matter to you, and voila! Two weeks later, you’ve got a story.

Case in point: one person on one side of this story was just a total troutmouthed bitch. Motherfucker threatened to sue me, sue the government, sue the person on the other side of the issue. When he wasn’t announcing his legal intentions, he was busy coming out with the Mr. Burnsiest quotes available. He wasn’t cooperative, and, because he has a good bit of money and power, thought he could bully me into not telling the story.

So many times I was tempted to really live out that Mark Twain aphorism about not picking fights with people who buy ink by the barrel. Which, uh, we do. I’ve seen them, and they smell like a smoky Elmer’s glue. And they could easily be used to get back at a person who brought me to tears twice (not that I let him know … thank God for phone interviews).

You see this? This is what I bring to the table.

But I didn’t. I did my very best to represent his side, and even picked his less assholish quotes, though they were few and far between. Because at the end of the day, it totally doesn’t matter what I think about this guy. The facts speak for themselves.

Anyway, how I’m feeling right now is about 180 degrees from how I was feeling last night. As a generally anxious person, it unnerves me to no end that when I am done with something, it’s printed up, put in the permanent record and delivered before the sun comes up to thousands of people, many of whom feel that they could do my job much better than I could.

After working for weeks, last night I sent the last of nine revisions to my editor. It was a beast, full of names and facts and contentiousness. Did I switch the i and the e in that dude’s name? Did I get that month in 2007 right? Was it June or July?! FUCK!, and so on. But it was done. It was being put on a page and printed onto a plates that load onto giant rollers that are taller than me. And those rollers were going and clattering, vibrating the whole building. A thick river of pages were spewing down their mechanical channels and being loaded onto trucks bound for the coast and small towns and the city center. And it was done, and even if I had made some sort of terrible mistake, well, that’s too fucking bad. I tossed and turned all night.

But that was last night. And this is today. And I feel good.

T-Pain supports single mothers, and I support T-Pain.

I have shitty taste in music, and I don’t even care who knows.

Every song from The Shins or Neko Case I own is buttressed by a good 14 T-Pain remixes of rap songs that were bad to start with and needed some autotune to push them over into entirely shameful territory.

That's why they call him Teddy Penderherassdown.

My love for Tallahassee Pain began with 2006’s “I’m in Luv (Wit A Stripper),” which was the skanky dancin’ at the bar song my senior year and will forever remind me of a phenomenally slutty sorority sister of mine. Believe me, there is little better than an account of a three-way with two frat guys delivered in a thick Mississippi accent.

Owwwkay, so theyn, we heahded to thuh rich-oo-al room ...

Things really solidified with 2007’s “I’m a Flirt”, though it must be said that the best line of the song — “Now the moral of this story is cuff yo bitch, cause hey! I’m black, handsome, rich, and I sing, plus I’m a flirt,” — belongs to R. Kelly, but he is another blog entry entirely.

But the moment when I really and truly knew I would never be able to quit Pain was “Shawty.” Even though T-Pain’s not my man, I’m not his girl, he’sa call me his shaaaaaaawty. Sing it to him, girl! This is one of those songs that I listened to over and over and over and over, and then maybe one more time, and again tomorrow.Also, Rick Ro$$’s corpulent ass shows up in the video for no good reason. BAWSE!

I think my favorite T-Pain phase to date has been the top hats. I was really, really sad to see this go, because for awhile, every time he showed up he would be in a ridiculous, yet thematic, top hat. For example, if it was the Country Music Awards, which he had been invited to for whatever reason, it’d be a cowboy top hat. Or, for a nice Wednesday on the town, a purple top hat with a subdued floral pattern.

Because, why not?

The peak of my T-Pain obsession came with “On A Boat,” which not only once again reinforced his rappa-ternt-sanga chops but also demonstrated his tremendous sense of humor.

Never thought he'd be on a boat. It's a big blue watery rooooooad.

You can’t tell, but this picture demonstrates this herky-jerky knee-centric dance that he does right at the end of the video. Please believe that this is now, like, my signature move.

Is there a point to this, you might ask? No, other than the very important point that T-Pain occupies a special place in my heart. I’ve been jamming out to his new song, “Zoosk Girl,” which is doubly shameful in that I think it’s an advertisement for an online dating site called “Zoosk.” T-Pain, surely someone with the game-ending chain seen below doesn’t need to be trawling the internet for ladies.

Just what it says it is.

Before I leave you with the video for Zoosk, here are some T-Painisms for you to ponder:

• “Ooooh, she made us drinks — to drink. We drunk ’em. Got drunk!”
— On how why he likes the bartender, besides the fact that besides her, there’s 200 bitches in the club and ain’t none of them hot

• “She looked me dead in the eye, then my pants got bigger, she already knew what to figure, had her lookin’ at her boyfriend, like, fuck that (n-word)!”
— T. Pain, on the dangers of combining your lady, him and alcohol

• “Cause I support the naked hustle. One cheek at a time, show me that booty muscle!”
— T. Pain on his support of single mothers, later adding that strippers may consider him their unofficial baby’s daddy

• “Oh, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday! Till the sun comes up! Till the Feds roll up!”
— T. Pain on his busy thuggery schedule. At least he observes the sabbath

Anyway, if all this hasn’t whet your proverbial whistle for T-Pain, then I can’t imagine what would. Here is my new club banger:

We can work it night by night.

So here is today’s video of the day, presented for my darling little sister E’s enjoyment.

Before we get to it, I’ll take a moment to editorialize. Dave 1, I cannot even deal with your scorching hotness. I cannot believe that when you aren’t making this music, you are an English professor. It isn’t even fair. I do not know what it is about you and your tall, skinny, swarthy ilk, that is so devastating. But I will gladly pay cash money to do silly yet sexy dances with you in a warehouse, Dave 1. Name the place.

Chromeo, “Night by Night”