The other evening I came upon this very troubling two-page print advertisement:

It’s an innocent enough question, but one that would dominate my thoughts well into the night: “Why is this top model giving her friend Pravda Vodka?” My first thoughts were, “Well how the fuck should I know? Is it his birthday?” But then I began to truly study the photo, and that was my mistake. What kind of friends are these, exactly? Why are we being so coy here? The disconnect between the text and the photograph, coupled with the enigmatic headline, gave me what has become a very serious depression.

Here is the second page:

Oh, the top model is giving her friend Pravda vodka because she is knowledgeable about the 2004 World Beverage Championship, OK. Well that makes sense. Except for one small unresolved issue: Why the fuck is she giving her friend a present? I understand that she selected Pravda vodka as opposed to other vodkas—I think it’s a bullshit reason, but at least there’s some sort of logic behind it. But that’s not that question you’ve asked, Pravda, and you know that. You may as well say, “The top model is giving her friend a gift of Pravda vodka because he is too old to receive an electric train set.”

It’s possible that the answer is some kind of joke, that Pravda finds it amusing to sidestep their question with their peculiar, highly-affected text, but I for one am not laughing. Oh, I’ll purchase the occasional bottle of Pravda Vodka because of this advertisement—you’ve won that round, Pravda, if me buying your product was in fact your intent. But if earning my respect was your intent, I would please like to know what this little jerk did to deserve his gift of delicious, world-class vodka—indeed the very best vodka of all.

It’s been almost three years, so here is a new edition of Letters, in which we discuss everything from the California state flag to Mitch Hedberg. I might produce a fourth edition in the next few weeks, since I have stockpiled many crazy emails which I need to address.

Also, eagle-eyed readers might note that there is now a collapsible archive menu located in the sidebar. In celebration of this, I have opened up commenting on all those ancient entries. If for some reason you want to make fun of me for something dumb I wrote seven years ago, I’ll know all about it thanks to the magical properties of the Comments RSS feed.

Whenever I hear that Rolling Stones song about how “wild, wild horses couldn’t drag me away,” I get really skeptical. Um, have you ever seen a wild horse? Wild horses drag things away—that’s what they were born for. Wild horses could drag away a school bus with its emergency break engaged and other, smaller wild horses pulling in the opposite direction. I know this song is metaphorical, but it’s still a preposterous declaration—especially when you consider that it’s being sung by Mick Jagger, who a domesticated goat could probably drag away. The only thing a wild horse can’t drag away is another wild horse of equal size. If you rigged up some rope between two wild horses and they took off in opposite directions, they would rip each other in half.

When I was younger, me and my playmates would often need inspiration for how to occupy our time, so we would pretend to put on thinking caps. These thinking caps were meant to stimulate our brainwaves and make us temporarily smart enough to come up with an engaging activity, but one key fact they never helped us grasp was that pretending to wear a thinking cap is among the most ridiculous things imaginable. These days I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing a thinking cap anywhere but the privacy of my bedroom.

To me there is something highly amusing about any kind of hat. I am known for randomly placing an object such as a bottle cap on somebody’s head and then reprimanding them, “Come on, take off that silly hat.” I also enjoy attempting to set my drinks on other peoples’ heads, and if people actually have the audacity to wear a real hat in my vicinity, I like to flick it off high into the air. If you’re wearing a hat, it sends a signal to me that says, “Please invade my personal space,” and if you’re not wearing a hat it sends a signal to me that says, “Please attempt to balance an object on my head.” Unfortunately, nobody else shares these kind of amusements. My findings are that if you keep pestering people in this way, eventually they simply stop calling.