For some reason, my election recap was recently linked on collegehumor.com, buried in a November 9th list labeled “Hot Links! Hot Links!” between–I swear I’m not making this up–a site hocking beer pong t-shirts and a link simply called “crazy girl on girl catfight.” Somehow, my link managed to be the least highbrow of the three. I’m not even sure why it was linked on College Humor, as I have graduated from college and haven’t been humorous since the seventh grade, when my math teacher made an error on the chalkboard and said, “Boy, I sure feel stupid,” to which I quipped, “You look it, sir,” which I have regretted to this day.

After the recap was posted on College Humor, it was then passed around like a joint at a Ja Rule album release party, accumulating over 20,000 unique hits in a two-day span. While this might not seem like much for fancier websites that offer “content” and “reasons for visiting,” it’s an unprecedented sum for eKarjala. Most surprising is that the recap in question is simply an uncouth stream of invective, the joke being that I use nothing more than derivates of the word “fuck” to express my view on the Presidential Election. As can be expected, response to the recap was pretty divisive. For example, political maven FlutyMagic@aol.com wrote:

You’re pretty trashy.  Thats about all I can say to you!  You’re trash!

If you’ve never been at the receiving end of one of FlutyMagic’s cunning affronts, let me just say that they can be pretty brutal. Notice how the only thing FlutyMagic deigns to tell me is that I’m nothing but trash—common, everyday garbage, to be picked up on Tuesday morning in some nondescript Hefty bag. His peremptory exclamation points carry a poignant, debilitating weight that leave me dizzy, while his merciless observation that I am both trash and trashy is a terrifying redundancy I wish I could erase from my woebegone memory. Not since LittlePrincessPony wrote me have I been picked apart so ruthlessly.

There is a malfunctioning shower drain in the house I live in that allows water to leak into the space under the floor. Since this bathroom is on the second story, it is only a matter of time before the rotting floor gives way, causing whoever is taking a shower at the time to come crashing through to the first floor kitchen in a manner I anticipate will be reminiscent of Veruca Salt being sent down the bad egg chute in Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. If I’m the one in the shower at the time, I will try to raise my arms into the air and say, “I want it nowwwww!” as I fall to my death. If somebody could please quip, “Now that was a bad egg” à la Willy Wonka at this point, it would be greatly appreciated.

Colleges are always appalled when students riot or get into huge fights after a major sporting victory, but this is kind of a mixed message when you consider that during games students are coerced into chanting so-called “fight songs.” These are spirited songs that sound exactly alike from college to college, and they’re job is to provoke fans into a state of high emotion necessary for properly rooting for their team and then rioting for their team after the game. God bless my alma mater, but the Michigan State fight song is a little ridiculous. Included in this lyrical masterpiece are the following lines:

On the banks of the Red Cedar/There’s a school that’s known to all
It’s specialty is winning/And those Spartans play good ball
I kind of wish Michigan State’s specialty was providing a quality education, but no. Our specialty is winning sporting events. That’s fantastic. This should go over well at my next job interview.

Spartan teams are never beaten/All through the game they’ll fight
Fight for the only colors: Green and White
Right. Spartan teams are never beaten. OK, but if we’re never beaten, how do you explain the fact that our football team is 4-5 right now? To me that means we’ve been beaten five times this year. But perhaps the song is merely suggesting that our team is never mentally beaten, that at heart we’re always winners, like when our quarterback got suspended for cocaine addiction two years ago.

Rah! Rah! Rah! See their team is weakening/We’re going to win this game
Fight! Fight! Rah! Team, Fight!/Victory for MSU
Rah! Rah! Fight! Rah! Fight! Rah! Rah! Fight! Fight! Fight! Kill! Kill! Start fires! Somehow MSU expects people to sing this song but also refrain from fighting or rioting after the game. This is kind of like making somebody sing a drinking song and then telling them to stay completely sober. I just flipped over my chair and set it on fire, and I didn’t even sing the song out loud.

If you have a small child, I recommend forcing them to complete dot-to-dot activities. There was nothing I enjoyed more as a child than drawing lines between consecutive numbers to determine the true identity of an object that looked precisely like a snowman missing an outline. When the picture turned out to in fact be a snowman, I’d be shocked and amazed–and delighted that I’d invested fifteen seconds into solving such a fantastic mystery. Here is a typical dot-to-dot:

What is this enchanting picture? Is it a bear with a predilection for mathematics or some other, non-bear object that somehow nevertheless has a bear head, bear claws, and bear feet? I ran the picture through an advanced computer simulator scholars call Microsoft Paint and came up with this:

It appears to be a bear after all, but there were a few surprises. First of all, it turns out he’s wearing a one-piece rectangular outfit that looks even shittier than I anticipated. Also, notice how he actually hates math. If your first exposure to math was an inane exercise in connecting dots in numerical order, you wouldn’t like it either.

Some people are under the impression that by tracing the etymology of their first name, they can infer traits about their personality. For example, according to this website, my name Eric is derived from ei meaning “ever” and rikr meaning “ruler,” hence signifying a mighty ruler. While it is true that I am going to become a mighty ruler, that is a happy coincidence rather than the result of being named Eric. In reality my parents were just uncreative and could think of nothing else–they probably picked up a book of baby names from the gas station on the way to the hospital and indiscriminately flipped to the E page. “OK, here’s a name that means ‘mighty ruler,’” they said. “That means he’ll grow up to be successful, and we won’t have to give him any attention during the course of his entire childhood.”

The flaw in my parents’ plan is that a person’s first name guarantees nothing. I know this because almost every name denotes a very flattering thing, like “powerful leader” or “spectacular lay,” but how many people that you know actually fit these descriptions? Despite what baby-naming guides would have you believe, every Eric cannot grow up to become a mighty ruler. If it were so, the world would be a chaotic place in which a million rulers ran around with the exact same name. Everybody not named Eric would have to listen to all the Erics’ confusing rules, and it would be impossible to keep track of anything. Eric would say, “Joseph, I told you to tend to the sheep! Who told you to pick berries?” And Joseph would say, “Eric told me to pick berries. He requested we make him a pie. I’m so confused right now. How come everybody named Eric gets to boss us around? This fucking sucks.” Then everybody would start naming their children Eric, and soon we’d be living in a bizarre fantasy world in which everybody was somehow simultaneously a mighty ruler named Eric. Nice try, baby-naming books, but that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.

Did we ever figure out what the hell those farm animals were doing on the old Garfield cartoon? It was called “Garfield & Friends,” but Garfield would never make friends with such tedious retards. Everybody I knew hated those farm animals. It was like, “Oh ha ha, that duck is wearing an inner tube all the time. He’s afraid of everything. That’s terrific. I’m so glad I’m being dicked around by these farm animals instead of watching Garfield.” I liked that cartoon better when it was a novel by George Orwell called Animal Farm.

Here’s a very short recap of the 2004 election.

The disorientated octogenarians supervising my polling place had set up two lines according to the first letter of voters’ last names: one for letters A through O and the other for letters P through Z. Please note that this is not an equal division of the alphabet. That might seem like a subtle detail, but it effectively forced me to wait in the backlogged A through O line for 50 minutes while the second line was brisk and frequently empty. As a final insult, when I’d at last advanced to within three spots of receiving my ballot, the woman operating the second line suddenly had a revelation and summoned over everybody with the last names K through Z. This allowed me to move up two spots, but it made me not want to vote so much as to kill.

I voted on everything, whether it was for a state senator or for the pathetic state treasurer. This is despite the fact that I have no idea what a state treasurer does, let alone the actually identity of the people vying for the position. In my mind they’re tasked with guarding a giant treasure chest filled with gold coins and bejeweled lamps, and they frequently take Scrooge McDuck-like dives into the chest to swim a few laps, but that can’t be right. How do you vote for a treasurer when you couldn’t possibly care who wins? I could have left that part of my ballot empty, but I wanted maximum value for waiting in such a needlessly long line. Eventually I just decided to use the strategy I’d devised in 2000, which is to pick candidates for supplementary positions based on my overall opinion of their names. I think most people would admit to doing this. If somebody named Gonzo McBoolin ran for state treasurer, he would win in a landslide. He could be a convicted bank robberer, and I wouldn’t care. I would trust somebody like Gonzo McBoolin to guard Michigan’s bountiful treasure.

And how about the results of the presidential election, hey guys? Go USA, am I right? OK, well, I’ve got to go. I think I just choked on some of my own blood.

I miss when I was more apathetic. Now I have opinions on things I don’t even care about. With one day to go before the election, this puts me the position of treating the Presidential race as though it were the biggest sporting event in the history of time. For months now I’ve been watching the CNN pre-game show, keeping tack of daily poll numbers as if they were Vegas betting lines, and reading newspaper article upon newspaper article in preparation for tomorrow. Everybody’s made up their mind by now, and nobody wants to hear me whining about politics anyway, so I won’t. But this website does endorse Senator Kerry for President of the United States, which should help Kerry secure the critical “fourteen people who accidentally ended up at some random guy’s website while searching Google for old Nickelodeon game shows” demographic.

Now that that’s out of the way, here’s a short article about baseball cards, just in time for missing the entire baseball season.