MCJ Advent Calendar - Day Nineteen - Squinchy

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This may be the quintessential interaction between my Magic Circle Jerk blog and the people I would write about. The way it would work is that I would find something dumb that person had written online, then I would post what they wrote on my site as if I enthusiastically agreed with them, then they would get mad at ME for posting their own dumb ideas on my site. 

Now, this kid was a teenager at the time, and I'm sure he'd be the first to tell us that he was a genuine fucking idiot. I originally just mentioned him in passing on a longer post (that I've edited below), and then he did the moronic thing of going back to the Cafe to talk shit about me. And the Cafe -- as if to prove their ineptness -- went back to edit his post made many weeks before so he looked less like a creep. (Around this point in time I was the most powerful editor on the Cafe. I would end up finding some racist, sexist, or otherwise inappropriate post, link to it on my site months after the post had been made, and immediately the Cafe would try and delete the post as if it had never been there.)

And that's precisely what happened with the story of Kyle The Great, Foo-Ling-Yu, and the Squinchy-Eyed Chinese.

Monday, August 01, 2005

Making the Band(wagon) [UPDATED] 

Steve Brooks doesn't jump on a bandwagon so much as he swings one leg up on to the side of the bandwagon then pays some kids a dollar to push their little hands into his doughy flesh and try and heave his wheezing body up on to the bandwagon, then once he flops up onto the bandwagon somebody on the bandwagon will turn to someone else and say, "Did both axels just break? And what the fuck is that smell?" So yes, Steve Brooks is on the bandwagon, there just wasn't any jumping involved.

If you go to the Café you'll see some new sections under the heading of "The Buffet." Looks like Steve has decided to have some blogs within the Café itself. What a great idea. (That's me challenging the notion that sarcasm doesn't come through in text.) You asked for it, you said, "I want to read blogs but within the shitty structure of a message board. In fact, let's remove the one redeeming aspect of a message board – the free exchange of ideas – by making it so people can't reply to these posts." Well friends, your wish has been granted. I have little to no interest in the people writing these, least of all Brooks himself. The fact that he thought this new section was a good idea shows exactly how out of touch he is. If you have something worthwhile to write why can't you just put it in the section that it's relevant to? Were people really clamoring for a separate section where Bill Palmer can lecture us about shit? No. Nobody was. Oh, who am I kidding, we're all very much looking forward to reading Brooks and Company's completely uncandid, sponsor-approved messages.

Who knows, maybe I will check in frequently. I found a lot of great stuff on the Café today because I haven't been there in a while.

[...] in the section that I call "Boring Stories and Lies" there is this great story and great line (spelling and punctuation come courtesy of the original poster and, I can only assume, the grammar hosts at the Café.)

"I was doing a magic show at a chinese restaraunt. Now of course chinese people work there. So I am performing and I have this one trick where I use a box and a huge dice which dissappears in the box and reappears somewhere else. The patter goes something like this: 

'This trick is wonderful and old. As a matter of fact it was taught to me by the ancient chinese magician Foo-Ling-Yu (a pun Foo-Ling-Yu=Fooling you in case you did not get that).'

and from this point on I usually present the whole trick with a bad chinese accent. Well... It just so happens that I had forgotton that I was in a chinese restaraunt. I begin the trick and I get to Foo-Ling-Yu... Suddenly it dawns on me. OH CRAP I am in a chinese restaraunt full of chinese people!!! I start looking around and I felt like horizontal squinchy eyes were burning through me."

Hahahaha. Man, those chinks and their horizontal squinchy eyes, I hear you. That reminds of this time I was performing at a soul-food restaurant and I was doing my patter for a sandwich effect where the two black jacks capture the queen of diamonds and I say, "We gotta lynch the niggers for messing with our women!" Man, I could almost feel the grease from their jheri curl as their heads whipped around toward me. I felt like I was being poked and prodded by their wide noses and huge cocks. Fortunately I was able to break the tension by saying, "Oh don't worry about it, it's a redheaded girl which probably means she's Irish and drunk. Get the garden-shears and filet this cunt."

[...]

[UPDATE 8/1/2005: The "squinchy eyes" thread above has been cleaned up by one of the Cafe's staff members and that part of it has been deleted. Way to stay on top of things Magic Cafe, you cleaned it up a mere 6 weeks after the post was made. You're doing a real bang-up job there. You're a beacon of decency. Might as well put me on staff, I find all the good stuff anyway. There's been a spike of action on that thread since my post yesterday and the original poster is now having to defend himself. Good. If you visit his website you'll see that he needs some serious self-examination anyway. 

The thread starter wrote me an e-mail saying "Ah so, me so sorry. Me love you long time." No, I'm kidding. He did write me an e-mail asking me to remove this post because his "internet reputation among magicians is at stake." The thing is, I don't care about my internet reputation among magicians, so I sure as shit don't care about his. It's not my job to protect people from stuff they wrote. And for what it's worth, I don't even have the guy's name on my site so it's not like it will show up in a search.

I'm not Chinese, as far as you Occidentals know, but I can see someone being offended by his post. Not because it's not true that, in general, Europeans have eyes that appear more round than a Chinese person's. But maybe they might feel it would be nice if they weren't defined by something so fucking inconsequential as their "squinchy eyes." Squinchy? It would be like if I talked about a conversation I had with the guy who started that thread and said, "His eyes bore at me out of that zit-riddled face." See how that might be offensive?

And I'll state here that I don't think he is a racist or a bigot, I just think he's an idiot and he doesn't think about what he writes or the way he thinks and how that might be offensive to someone. Well, now is his chance to think about it.]

[2015 - And that's where things stood for a little while until he decided to go back to that thread and go off on me. He could have left things like this, with no mention of his name anywhere, instead he wanted to keep things going. So I helped him out by giving his apology a larger audience and attached his username to it so no one would miss it.]

Wednesday, August 03, 2005

Kyle the Great Apologizes 

This is one of those subjects that I never thought I'd be making multiple posts on and I'd be more than happy to drop if the discussion wasn't being continued outside of this site.

Kyle the Great made a post in that same thread on the Café and I don't know how long it will stay up because it mentions me, but he wanted to make some points, so I'll reiterate them here.

1. He is sorry.
2. He needs support in taking down MCJ.
3. I (meaning me) have a small penis and no decency.

Kyle is very upset with me. He thinks I'm trying to take him down and ruin his reputation. I find this strange considering the only value judgment I've ever made about him is that I think he is probably not a racist and a bigot.

This all springs from me publishing Kyle's own words and then relating a similarly amusing anecdote that happened to myself. That seems a relatively benign way of trying to destroy someone's career. "Oh heavens, he published my own words, completely in context, and now I'm catching shit for them!" Accountability for your own words sucks.

Kyle claims to be getting hate messages from people based on this issue. I never want anyone to get involved in any of the disagreements that this site might generate. I appreciate the sentiment, but I don't need help and I don't need back-up. However, if someone is motivated to get involved based on the issue itself (and not my relationship to it) then I can't begrudge someone their right to continue on their own to pursue this issue.

Kyle is now on the Café over-apologizing about this. That's not a bad tactic. Now that the offensive parts of his post have been deleted it makes it look more like people are being overly-sensitive to the issue (which perhaps they are). I think he should just let it drop. I'd be happy to.

[That's pretty much where things ended, until hurricane Katrina struck and Kyle graced us with this bit of wisdom...]

Saturday, September 10, 2005

Apologies to Kyle the Great 

You all remember a while ago when we had the incident with Kyle the Great and his insensitivity towards Asian people. At that time I really got on Kyle's case and had a little fun at his expense. I feel bad about that now because I think Kyle might actually be retarded.

This comes from a recent post of his on the Cafe about Hurricane Katrina:

"This is a rough and dangerous situation we are in. Some people think it is the end of the world...I do not think so...I believe this is just God's way of saying "slow down and think for a second!". You notice that the area (new orleans) mostly knocked out is full of casinos and home of the mardi gra.[sic] Some have nicknamed it 'Baby Vegas'. I am beginning to believe that God hit it on purpose as a sign...similar to Soddom [sic]and Gamora [sic]. But this is just some things I have been thinking about...maybe [sic] or may not be true... "

Kyle, nobody thinks it's the end of the worlds except inbred fundamentalist idiots. If god wanted to send a message, why didn't he have a hurricane knock out Vegas? That would have been a miracle. You're such a total fucking dork. I envy the kids who you go to school with who get to make fun of you every day. So god wanted to send a message that Mardi Gras is evil so he sent a hurricane that killed and displaced a bunch of people who live in the same state or a neighboring state? Way to go, God! Kyle, it's interesting that you choose to believe in a god who is a complete bumbling fucking idiot. This, I think, is probably another instance where it's not so much about god making us in his image, but you making him in yours.

[2015 - If you miss Kyle's brand of dull comedy based on broad stereotypes, you can catch him now as the Hillbilly Hypnotist.]