Monthly Archives: July 2012

One Giant Leap for Cyberdyne Systems’ “Terminator” Program: 24 Dead

One Giant Leap for Cyberdyne Systems' "Terminator" Program: 24 Dead

Synnyvale, CA—An experimental facility patterned after the fictional Cyberdyne Systems Corporation’s Skynet has reached an impressive milestone today. Their robotic creation, the Hal-5000, fired thousands of rounds of a highly advanced weapon into every corner of their southern California installation last night. The robotic rampage killed 23 lab technicians and a custodial engineer named Dante, who before expiring told EMTs, “I wasn’t even supposed to be here today.”

Cyberdyne’s CEO, Daniel Milgram, is pleased with recent events, “It’s not every day it takes a SWAT team to take out one of your own rogue creations. This is huge. This is why people go into this field in the first place.”

The Board of Directors at Cyberdyne Systems, Inc. is also heartened by the arrival of a futuristic cyborg assassin, who mowed down several key researchers last week amidst a barrage of exotic bullets.

“Wow!” said Milgram. “Looks like we got someone’s attention.”

The military is already offering Cyberdyne a considerable percentage of the Nation’s defense budget to create a female version for some of the top generals in the armed forces.

Ask The Ghetto Shaman

Ask The Ghetto Shaman

Dear Ghetto Shaman,

Are there any Cliff Notes for enlightenment? Any shortcuts? I have read everything from Maharishi Mahesh, to Genpo Roshi, to Toltec friggin’ wisdom and I am in a spiritual wasteland, man! I’m not growing compassion, I’m growing old, I’m growing tired, I’m growing ulcers!

Gary

Dear Acid Reflux,

No one can do this for you, Gary. Gurus, meditations, the very Dharma itself can only point you in the direction. In my case that direction would be south. Try rereading chapter two of my Booty Sutras: The Sanctity of the Spank-titty. But If I tell you anymore I could actually hinder your spiritual growth. No, really, I will…

The Ghetto Shaman

H.G. Ertel’s The Time Machine

H.G. Ertel’s The Time Machine
H. G. Ertel

For years scientists have disputed the possibility of time travel: matter can’t travel faster than the speed of light, Zefram Cochrane won’t be born until the next century, yada yada. Other scientists just dodge the question entirely with things like, “I’m more than a little busy looking at these glass slides and shuffling these papers around” …and, “How did you get passed the retinal scan to get in here, anyway?”

As for me? I’ll quote a popular Monkee’s song, “I’m a Believer”…because yesterday it happened to me. I went from June 24th, 2012, all the way back to January 1st, 1970. I fell through what I believe was an inter-dimensional portal located in my apartment. I awoke to discover my cellphone had absolutely no service, and somehow the date/time had reset….SENDING ME BACK IN TIME!!!! Sorry for the ALL CAPS and exclamation points thing, but I believe the situation warranted the excitement implied by such a frowned-upon writing style. So…F-YOU!!!

The first thing I did—since everything I know about time-travel I learned from the Back to the Future films and season five of Lost—was check to see if I wasn’t somehow erasing little-by-little like that photo of Marty McFly and his siblings.

(By the way, the Johnny B. Goode part in BTTF, when Marty McFly goes ape shit & busts out some van Halen licks?! C’mon, how’d he get such a processed cheesy ‘80s metal sound out of a guitar/amp combo made in the early ‘50s?! Jesus man, fuzzboxes weren’t even invented until the ‘60s. Back to the Fender!?)

Everything’s still here, I thought to myself, double-checking my pants to see if my penis was still intact. Y’know…I’d better check again. You can’t be too careful when you’re messing with the fragile nature of the time/space continuum…or my balls. I repeated the procedure for the rest of the afternoon, just to be sure.

What DO you do when you’re suddenly transported back in time?! All of the possibilities were there…I could buy Apple stock, warn the public of things to come, I could even “write” all the greatest hits of the ‘70s, before they were written by the people that actually “wrote” them! Jesus Christ, I could convince John to ditch Yoko & keep The Beatles together! I could write Rush’s most classic albums! Jailbreak by Thin Lizzy, written by Ertel! Dark Side of the Moon, Wish you Were Ertel, Animals. All the music of Pink Floyd written by ME! Have a cigar, I’m gonna go far!

I could even (gasp) warn The Discord not to bother!

The financial rewards for my obsessive studies of useless bullshit over the past 20 years were finally going to pay off! I could start trends before they happened! invent Rap! Pre-date the ‘80s! Start wearing my pants down around my knees! On second thought, I’d better hold off on that one.

And the sex! Most STDs from the early 70s were basically cured by penicillin & special shampoos with lice-combs. None of this AIDS bullshit to deal with. Surely I could convince the porn industry that Lady Bics were the wave of the future!

I thought of all the old people I know…I could see them back in their heyday, complete with huge chunky sideburns and button-up shirts with butterfly collars. I could get drunk with my dad! …who sported a rather “Ohio Player’ish” afro/beard combo at the time, which made me think “man, cleaning the shower drain after THAT guy must’ ve been torture!”

Theoretically, I could have been downstairs drinking Billy Beer and watching The Rockford Files, while my parents were upstairs fucking in September of ‘75 to the mellow strains of If by Bread.

(Trust me, you have NO idea how much I just shivered typing that line. Better check my pants again to see if I’m disappearing.)

Then, they repaired the cellphone tower that caused this temporal rift in time….and I was suddenly back in 2012.

No untold billions.

No fame.

No massive numbers of girls just throwing themselves at me all in the name of “free love, man.”

Y’know what? FUCK John Lennon….I ain’t tellin’ him SHIT.

The Discord’s Chewy Defeats Thurman Debacle

The Discord’s Chewy Defeats Thurman Debacle

Philadelphia, PA—Having just posted our latest round of retractions, it pains me to announce another grievous mistake so soon. Posting every day in this 24/7 news cycle world is often fraught with difficulties. Having said that, I, Pierce Xavier Winslow, take full responsibility for this error. Our readers have come to expect thorough and accurate reporting, especially since comedy sites like ours have become the last refuge of actual newsing these days. Newsing is a new, but legitimate, word—though it probably should not have debuted at this darkest of hours.

We now understand the following: in a bar on the planet Alderaan, Uma Thurman pummeled the crap out of Chewbacca—not, as we originally reported, the other way around. The rush of incoming AP wire reports were confused and at times even garbled, so we made an educated guess that Chewbacca would have mopped the floor with that scrawny bitch—however, it turned out that the wookie’s injuries actually landed him in Aldera County Hospital.

I had an itchy trigger finger, for sure. The only thing that kept running through my mind prior to posting was the scene when Han Solo said, “Let the wookie win.” I really thought the wookie was going to win. The Discord news team received conflicting reports originally and we needed to get the post up as my beer was getting dangerously warm. My Photoshop team worked on pictures for either outcome: one with Chewbacca pumping his fists victoriously in the air and a second with Thurman doing likewise. I simply got it wrong.

Our news team also borrowed the image from gawker.com by turning the famous Dewey Defeats Truman! image into Obama holding the news in iPad form. We regularly steal stuff here at the Discord especially paperclips, but not others’ comedy! We keep our material original—and Zano cut this one too close! We took gawker’s original viral image, made it much funnier, and proceeded to get about six hits for our trouble…the usual.

Pierce Winslow, CEO

Dawn of the Dumb: A Look Back to 2012

Mick Zano

In the year 2050 The Daily Discord is celebrating its 42nd anniversary and its one thousandth page view! Whoot! Whoot!…that’s almost 25 a year! We would like to look back to the time of the Discord’s inception—a time of turbulence, a time when humanity turned away from logic, reason, science, and a hit television show known only as Glee.

We found an interesting quote from one of our first contributors, Mick Zano, wherein he stated, “Fifty years from now you’ll be surprised how this period looked historically, well…if you’re a Republican.”

We decided to humor the man known as the Discord’s Founding Father, or Blogstradomus, or Postpernicus—a man who many felt bordered on a violent political narcissism not seen since the Cantor Administration. Oh, and Cantor’s documentary is holding its own this week with Twilight 47: Why Won’t Edward Just Jump into a Meat Grinder Already? Part 4. Mr. Zano was distinguished enough to be on something called parole for most of his adult life and was eventually added to a prestigious group known as The Terrorist Watch List. In fifty-years of blogging that is the closest to an accolade this website has ever received.

Initially we couldn’t figure out Republican logic at all, then we uncovered an episode of Your World with Neil Cavuto. It explained everything! These Fox News viewers really thought it was their world, which angered the Earth Goddess, Gaia, who later told the press, “I got sick of these douche bags fracking me in the gas.”

When Gaia fought back with her coordinated global climate initiative (GCI), many of the time mistook it for the Rapture. Some even preemptively took off their clothing in preparation for their God, Jehovah, to whisk them into the heavens. When nothing happened, many of these Rapturers were added to the sexual offender lists of the time as public nudity was then frowned upon.

Apparently, Republicans only cared about how much money they were going to make in something called the Stock Market. As it turned out, a disparity of wealth this large typically triggered a revolution, but any proper disobedience would have to wait as society embraced a number of falsehoods—not the least of which was “you’ll be rich soon too!” By 2017, one historian estimated there was more chance of winning the state lottery twice and getting hit by lightening in the penis than moving up a single socioeconomic bracket…which is ironically how he died. Moving up one socioeconomic bracket, what were you thinking?

Despite all rhyme or reason, Republicans remained convinced the best way to correct the U.S. budget and deficit problem was through…get this, supply side/trickledown economics. So they elected people who historically proved incapable of cutting anything except cheese and started numerous popular but unfunded social programs, kept waging wars, and kept not paying for any of these in the name of responsibility and fiscal conservatism.

The founder of the Transcosmetic Party, Mick Zano, covered this important stuff and both of his fans really appreciated him at the time as evidence by some recently recovered feedback, “Nice one, Zano, but can you bitches post more Ghetto Shaman?!”

Zano’s insights and predictions are stunning considering his affinity for bath salts—a substance that later triggered the Zombie Apocalypse of 2016.

Excesses of the prior thirty-years were greatly exacerbated under Bush, Obama, and then came to a head under Romney. We lost any chance during that time period of righting the economy or diverting global climate change. Many coastal Republicans refused to move and drowned, but as their living rooms filled with water Fox News Anchors reassured them it was only tears from God (who was still pissed off about Solyndra).

Of course, I am writing this from the Arizona Penal Colony. Privatizing prisons caused what was already the most incarcerated country in the world to mushroom to 35% of its population within five years. There was no incentive to ever release jaywalkers, or pot smokers, or especially those damndable jaywalking pot smokers.

Three presidents tried to pass a comprehensive immigration plan, but partisanship ended each attempt. After states were able to enforce their own immigration laws things really got ugly. Arizona was the obvious choice for the state-sized penal colony as it already had walls along its southern and eastern borders. A giant border wall was constructed along the entire southern border of the U.S. in 2014, later named The Great Wall of Stupid. Arizona then constructed a wall on its Eastern border after deeming New Mexico’s immigration policies “way too lenient.”

Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s grandson, Joey Jr., is now the warden of the Arizona State Penal Colony. I live in an un-air-conditioned tent in the heart of the Sonoran Desert and, having never returned that library book, I am likely to die here. I take some small satisfaction in the fact the rest of the country’s border wall is gone. The Mexican Government eventually commissioned registered Republicans at minimum wage to tear down the eye sore in 2030.

The Romney-Corrections Corp. of America Act passed in 2015 and, of course, that’s how we eventually changed our country’s name to UCCA, the United Correction Corp. of America. And the rest is…we’re history.

Arizona was also a perfect choice for the penal colony, because—although Obamacare passed in 2012, it was deemed unconstitutional to force any expansion of the Medicaid program—so then Governor, Jan Brewer, refused the extra help in one more attempt by a Republican to save one dollar by losing ten. Without those critical services, Arizona soon slipped into a lawless state. The remaining two walls on the state’s western and northern borders were constructed in 2017 by Halliburton and the aforementioned Republican Migrant Workers. This poor unionless group remained happy because they believed if they worked hard at any moment they could be promoted to CEO. Most, sadly, were struck by lightning in the penis.

Oh, and our researchers found an article on The Daily Beast by David Frum about a poll designed to snap people out of their ideological delusions. As it turns out, when forced, liberals of the time were able to identify cuts and some semblance of an economic strategy. Republicans, however, for all their misdirected anger and bloviating, refused to make a decision about cutting anything. Hey, just like their presidents! Next time we decide to have a tea party, let’s leave the tea partiers out of it. Here is the Beast’s article.

Andrew Sullivan’s take on that very Frum piece:

“And people wonder why our debt exploded under Reagan and George W. Bush. And why it will explode once again if Romney becomes president. A party this irrational – a party hysterical about debt whose members do not actually want to cut spending or raise any taxes, a party a majority of whose members have somehow persuaded themselves that there were indeed WMDs in Iraq in 2003  – should not be a mainstream party in a Western democracy. It should be in therapy.”

We marvel, as Zano did then, that there existed any insightful Republicans at all, so hat tip to Andrew and David of the past, a breed that officially went extinct during the Primary Wars of 2016. The last Republican with a clue is believed to have taken his own life during an episode of Hannity in early 2018.

Here’s another classic of the time Why I gave up on being a republican. Then came Thomas Frank’s book in 2012, Pity the Billionairea book first credited with identifying the phrase “Ignorance is Strength.” This man covered how this “unified wrongness” on the Right turned out to be our ruination. This phenomenon was first covered by our own Mick Zano years before, but, sadly, no one ever clicked on one of his articles. It was 2012 when we really identified how ignorance and partisanship really changed the course of history, a phenomenon covered most thoroughly by the comedians of the time (hell, that should have been their first clue).

Since most records were lost during the Great Partisanship Wars of 2022, we did manage to find a quote from a man named W.B. Yeats, who our sources tell us was a prominent Discord contributor. His quote captures the essence of the time:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity,

Surely, some revelation is at hand…

–W.B. Yeats

But don’t take off all your clothes just yet; it’s not going to be that kind of revelation.