I know you’ve been looking forward to this big football game all year, but at the end of the day, it really doesn’t matter who wins. As you know and have been well-conditioned, the Slant family only tolerates all that crazy ball playing just to watch the commercials. Don’t disappoint us by showing any excitement for a touchdown, unless it happens on a light beer commercial.

For the love of the game,
Grandpappy Slant

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To Whom It May Concern at The Slant:

We’d like to thank you for keeping us sane after all our years together. As you’ve repeatedly witnessed, we can often range the full spectrum of emotions – sometimes getting carried away with our own fanatical ideas of what is legal in the name of “journalistic” reporting, other times resorting to chronicling the minute details of our boring weekends because of a lack of content for or interest in our own publication. If we ever fail at inserting satire in our own paper ever again, feel free to flog us with a stack of our unread issues sitting out in the hallway.

Please never abandon us.
From Whom It Has Concerned at The Hustler

(504): Such a fitting face, once again. I swear, they must have modeled the emoticons after you.

(504): Awww, so I guess your body doesn’t want me anymore then, huh?
(678): It just invited you to my bed. You tell me.

(419): I told him I’d hire him to be my official Jeopardy expert if he would hire me to be his official rockhound. Job crisis? Solved.
(504): Rockhound sounds like a porn term…

(504): I’m having scrambled eggs and beer for dinner…b/c that’s all I have in my apt.

(504): Is it bad that I am scared to play Words with Friends against you?
(504): Becuz of mah mad werd skillz?
(504): You should lose your English degree for that.

(504): Guess who’s drunk at work???

As eloquently posted by user EntitledAmerican on www.americancensorship.org, “Anyone else who spoke any language other than English still had complete access to all the open-source information he could ever want. It’s not my fault that English is the international language of commerce and everything else and that everyone wants to be like us. How am I supposed to start and complete my 30-page research paper the morning before it’s due without Wiki? Should I be punished because my language and country are the best? No, because Wikipedia is free and should be available always.”

Standing on the other side of the fence, Wikipedia repeatedly claimed that the blackout was only intended to bring the absurdity of SOPA and PIPA into the American public consciousness, assuming that addressing them in their own language would prove most effective. According to the Wikipedia page bearing the “SOPA Initiative” title – the site’s only page available in English during the blackout – “visitors were not able to read the encyclopedia, and instead saw messages about SOPA and PIPA, encouragement to contact their representatives, and links to share information on social media.” What Wikipedia did not expect, however, was the rampant backlash of prejudicial allegations from its user-community.

“Wikipedia hates English[-speaking] people!,” blogged one user who went on to admit that she bought the 2010 hardback edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica off of Amazon for over $1,300 later on that afternoon in protest of Wikipedia’s protest.

“Wikipedia’s run by a bunch of Commies! We’ll all be forced to speak Mandarin or Russian by the end of the year,” said another level-headed blogger.

However, bi-lingual American citizens, registered internationals, and illegal immigrants alike were surprisingly silent about the whole issue. When pushed for a comment, Spanish doctoral candidate Alejandra Marquez tersely stated, “It was really no big deal for me. I just clicked on the Spanish version of Wikipedia and kept searching for resources for my doctoral thesis. What is this SOPA thing again? Did you mean to spell soap? It’s S-O-A-P, mi amigo.”

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, a dot-com-era mogul who first got his hands wet with a male-oriented web portal featuring adult entertainment and content, has fought the censorship beast before and concocted the whole website blackout idea. Said Wales, “Just tell them they can’t have it for a little while, and it only makes them come back wanting it even more, harder, and faster. I just decided to blackout the English-language version because I speak English. No other reason whatsoever.”

Within 72 hours of the 24-hour blackout, the Wikimedia Foundation received approximately $120 million in international donations, mostly from governmental donors in Russia and China.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative/Learn_more)

Participants in the initial rounds of testing were happy to share their trial experiences with the Orgasmatron, but they asked to be given pseudonyms for the sake of avoiding awkwardness at their weekly PTA meetings.

In 2004, a 48-year-old woman from North Carolina was the first person to volunteer her…self… for the new, ecstasy-inducing procedure. The woman, who we’ll call Sally, had experienced prolonged orgasmic dysfunction since menopause and sought to remedy her nether ailment. She signed up as a subject for the initial, 9-day medical study in which Dr. Meloy inserted an electrode implant in the pelvic region of Sally’s lower spine to stimulate orgasmic pleasure.

Dr. Meloy gave Sally a wired, handheld controller that would excite her “orgasm nerve” with an electric impulse and produce orgasm at the literal push of a button. Over the study’s 9-day span, the device was wildly successful for Sally – sometimes even prompting multiple orgasms – as well as for 10 out of the 11 other women who signed up for the study and experienced no side effects.

When the study came to a close, Sally was reluctant to relinquish her Big-O remote control. “When I gave it back, I came in the office and Dr. Meloy took the electrodes out of, you know, out of the back and it was like I was losing my best friend. It was very hard to give it back. It worked so well for me,” she said.

Medical science has seen this sort of fortuitous experimentation with pleasure anatomy before, namely with lab rats, and the behavioral side effects were rather frightening. In 1954, psychologist James Olds unknowingly inserted a probe in the wrong section of a rat’s brain and was surprised to discover that he had accidentally located the brain’s pleasure center.

Dr. Olds found that if the probe was put in the brain’s lateral hypothalamus and the rats were allowed to press a lever to stimulate their own electrodes, they would repeatedly press it until they collapsed. When attempting to see if this phenomenon could be replicated in human brains, ABC’s Good Morning America reported that “later experiments done on humans confirmed that people will neglect almost everything – their personal hygiene, their family commitments – in order to keep getting that buzz.”

When describing his own serendipitous discovery, Dr. Meloy narrated the story of that first patient who unknowingly became his orgasm lab rat, “When I turned on the power, she let out a moan and began hyperventilating…. Once she caught her breath, she said ‘you’re gonna have to teach my husband how to do that!’”

Once approved by the FDA for consumer use in the next 2-3 years, the Orgasmatron device and implantation could cost upwards of $17,000, but many consumers, both male and female, would happily put this priceless device on their MasterCards. Women want it for obvious reasons, and men are always seeking to make life easier by adding just another remote control to their coffee-table collection.

(225): I’m willing to negotiate weekly quotes or suggested shortish poems I should read. Project Keep Marcie Literate,

(440): Congrats on coming up in my interview with the chancellor.

Every then and again, The Slant takes a break from its usual satirical toil, steps out of its cubicle in the Laughter Highrise, and chit-chats with other funny folks around the water cooler while still managing to remain looking industrious. These are the idle talks from which legends are born.

This week, we took a page, quite literally, out of the new book from author Adam Mansbach and told our baby Slants to Go the Fuck to Sleep. We found this mantra to be so effective with our own children that we decided to get to know Mansbach a little bit better, attempting to figure out why he’s the cool guy at the office and we’re still stuck in our small office space filling out those vaguely-relevant TPS reports.

Mansbach’s most recent book, Go the Fuck to Sleep, is a #1 New York Times bestseller and one of the most talked-about books of the decade. A viral sensation that shot to #1 on Amazon.com months before the book was even available for sale, it has been published in more than thirty languages, is forthcoming as a feature film from Fox 2000, and has been graced by the snake-abating voice of Samuel L. Jackson in audio-book form. Other major works by Mansbach include the novels The End of the Jews, Angry Black White Boy, and Shackling Water; the poetry collection genius b-boy cynics getting weeded in the garden of delights; and an anthology of original short stories he co-edited called A Fictional History of the United States With Huge Chunks Missing. Almost all of these works have won literary prizes.

Mansbach is the current New Voices Professor of Fiction at Rutgers University, the founding editor of the pioneering 1990s hip hop journal Elementary, and a frequent lecturer on college campuses across the country. His fiction and essays have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, New York Times Sunday Magazine, Esquire, GQ, The Times of London, The Believer, N+1, The Los Angeles Times, and on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered.

And, the dude’s got his own website in his own name. For more information, check him out at http://www.adammansbach.com. We wish we could be as cool as he is.

INTERVIEW:

1) You’re known for being satirical and obscenely honest, something we highly value here at The Slant. You’ve even been quoted before as saying, “One constant in my career is that I’ve always written the shit I’ve wanted to write,” and we strongly approve of this message. So, as a successful humorist, why do you find satire to be such a useful rhetorical and literary device, both in this “children’s book for adults” and in your other writings?
a. I think satire is useful to me because it allows you to pick up on the larger cues. The only piece of mine that I consider to be satire is Angry Black White Boy, and I’m trying to do a lot of things in that book. It’s a broad piece that deals with race and white privilege in society at large, and to do that, I think it’s useful to have characters who are fully fleshed out and three-dimensional set against the backdrops of people who are types, and satire allows you to do that, to sketch people in a way that sets them up to be taken down and taken apart. And, on the larger level, satire is useful to me because I can use humor to bring people to the table, get them laughing, and disarm them so that I can make my points more strongly. You can sort of lull people in with humor and then do what you need to do. It’s a good way to make serious points while making people laugh, hopefully.

2) Though the general answer may be obvious, what was the specific moment when you felt inspired to write Go the Fuck to Sleep? What exactly were you doing when the idea smacked you in the back of the head?
a. What happened was that I put my daughter to sleep one night and then I came downstairs and jokingly posted on Facebook that folks should be on the lookout for my forthcoming children’s book Go the Fuck to Sleep, and it was upon writing those words, basically, that I knew that I knew what that book was and I knew how to write it. I didn’t write it right away, but I knew as soon as I wrote [that post] that I was going to write [the book]. Seeing those words in print was the push. I guess the fact that I had a forum through which to make the joke helped, but I think it would have been the same thing had I made that joke to a group of friends. It wasn’t like people on Facebook were all like ‘Yeah, write it!,’ it was just that I sort of got my own ideas down on paper.

3) I’m still in college so I don’t have any kids. In fact, my friends and I have implemented a strict “no babies” policy for this stage of our lives. What should I fear about my future children? Were you this kind of kid for your own parents, and how did they handle it?
a. That they turn out to be Republicans. I’m lucky that I come from a family of writers, so my desire to be a writer, which could have been met with a lot of resistance – a lot of my friends who are writers were met with a lot of resistance from their parents – but my parents were like, ‘Yeah, that makes sense,’ and I got a lot of support from them.

4) What’s your daughter’s official opinion on being your muse? Are you paying her her due royalties, and is she investing them wisely?
a. That’s really something for her lawyers and my lawyers to work out.

5) Go the Fuck to Sleep has been so wildly successful that it reached #1 on Amazon’s bestseller list a month before its release and its movie rights have already been snatched up by 20th Century Fox. In the film version, who do you think would be enough of a badass to portray you, and why?
a. I would probably go with Bruce Willis. He’s my alter ego as far as actors are concerned.

6) Go the Fuck to Sleep was also further propelled into popularity because of the release of an audio-book version voiced by the purple light-sabered Jedi, the man who puts more pulp in fiction, Mr. Shaft himself, THE Samuel L. Jackson. How did you land that stroke of awesomeness, and what was it like getting to work with him?
a. It was fantastic. He’s really, really cool and has been really a pleasure the whole time. The audio book company reached out to him and he was already up on the book, he did it right away, and has been great to work with. We worked with him from a distance; he went in and recorded the audio book. I was supposed to go to the [David] Letterman taping where he read the book, but, unfortunately, I had my own gig at that time, so I haven’t yet met him in person. Probably the best email I’ve ever received was one from him. We were trying to use his likeness in the images of the children’s version we’re doing. They wanted to replace the father, who is me sneaking out of the room, with Jules Winnfield [from Pulp Fiction], and he was really into it. And the closing line of the email he sent me was ‘Y’all some cool mothafuckas,’ and I was like, that’s all I need right there. I’m done. Samuel L. Jackson just called me a cool mothafucka; I don’t need to accomplish anything else.

7) Since you’re something of a hip-hop expert, I have to ask, what is your favorite, current, above-ground hip-hop song? Why do you like it? Who made it? Do you think you could take him/her down in a rap battle?
a. Nate Marshall. I like all of Nate Marshall’s songs. I could definitely take him down on a basketball court or a wrestling match and probably also, yes, in an emcee battle as well. Nate was actually very helpful to me in a short story that I wrote about a year ago. He was my consultant on, umm, the effects of marijuana consumption by farm animals. I reached out to him because he’s in college, and I figured he knows stuff about how animals, you know Nate is a smart guy, so he happened to be on Facebook chat at a time when I really need to know what would happen to a goat that ate thirty pounds of marijuana. He was really helpful with that.

If you could give yourself any rap-name/stage-name/nickname, by which your family and friends would be required to call you no matter what, what would you call yourself and why?
a. Well, I have had a series of stage names over the years, and this is not so much hypothetical as a reality. The name that stuck with me the longest is ‘Kodiak Brinks,’ which a lot of my friends do call me by, but I’ve had others over the years as well. I went by ‘The High Plains Drifter’ for a while as an alias. Before that I was ‘Flipside Nefarious’ for many years. The story of why Kodiak Brinks has stuck dates back to the mid ‘90s when everybody, in the aftermath of the Wu-Tang Clan, was giving themselves these sort of monster-like names that sounded sort of quasi-plausible, but at the time it was kind of the thing to do. So, Kodiak Brinks was a name that was supposed to sound like it could possibly be a real name or cooler than most real names; that was kind of the idea.

9) If you could be any kitchen utensil, which one would you be and why?
a. I think I would probably be a chef’s knife. Wait, I’m in the car with my girlfriend and she suggested that I should be a lemon squeezer. Really? One of those two apparently.

10) Any final comments or cautionary tales you’d like to share with our readers and with anyone whom may have not read anything of yours yet? Basically, what would you want to tell our readers about yourself so that they will give you money by buying and either gifting or reading your books?
a. I would encourage Vanderbilt to bring me back to campus sometime very soon. It’s been a couple years since I’ve been there and I think it’s high time that y’all bring me back out. I would be happy to provide a live reading of Go the Fuck to Sleep.

(440): hey, fyi, I have mono. Be careful of the dishes.

(678): I’m not dressed. Can you grab me from Towers at… uh… when I call you?

(678): Lol, or it’s just easier to fake it in a text.

(817): I saved it in my contacts so I can stalk you whenever I want.

(504): Biddies behind me at lunch kept repeating the word “syrup” with different pronunciations. They sounded like the seagulls from Finding Nemo.

(678): Are you a meteorologist, baby, cuz that forecast was SEXY!

(678): Oh, go stick your head in an oven.

(678): Kick some oral ass!

(678): (nuzzle, nuzzle, nuzzle)

It’s pretty damn similar to composing a letter on paper with a pen! I have no idea where all your enigmatic, vague, and un-purposefully formatted bits of text have come from, but you need to stop writing them and begin abusing the backspace button immediately.
Maybe the abbreviated word “electronic” just makes you skittish and forgetful of that composing etiquette you learned back in, I don’t know, the 5th grade. Maybe you have nightmares about keyboards angrily fondling you in retaliation. Maybe you’re just overwhelmingly lazy. Really though, it’s only a few extra keystrokes up front that can save you and me both from hours of textual confusion, slurs spewed at each other’s mothers, and conflict resolution later.
Letter writers the world over have used a pretty standard format for their correspondences for generations, and your emails are no different. Hence, for my layout-challenged readers out there, here’s a simple blueprint that’ll make you appear to be a human composing a literate message rather than a psych-study monkey erratically banging on a keyboard whenever he gets a brain-impulse shock from a sadistic researcher.
First, enter something into the goddamn subject line! It may sound like a stupid idea at first, but maybe you, or perhaps the recipient, might want to find this email once again. Whenever I see a vacant subject line, I know what I instantly think: “Well, this person surely doesn’t give a shit about whatever he just sent me. Delete.”
Second, use an opening greeting. Something as simple as “Hey, Sally,” or something as sophisticated as “Dear Piece of Shit Who Got My Daughter Pregnant,” really makes it clear to whom your message is addressed. Tone is very important in this section; it’s the first impression the recipient will have of you as a literate human. Also, in the event that your email lands in the wrong inbox, the other person may know to whom to forward your message as they may have double-teamed her.
Third, your email should actually have a coherent point contained somewhere within its body. If necessary, employ the “10-second rule” – as you would before speaking aloud – and think of the purpose of your message before you begin to create it. Your rambles not only confuse me, but also anger me, and I am thus inclined to do exactly the opposite of whatever I discerned you were attempting to request of me, simply out of spite and to humor myself.
Fourth, close the email. Like the opening salutation, this can be as quick or as thoughtful as you so desire. For example, “Your best friend forever” is standard fare in sorority girl phony lingo, but “Looking forward to your child support checks for the next 18 years, you bastard,” is equally as memorable.
Fifth, sign your own name. It’s not like you’ve grown familiar with it over the past 18+ years of your existence or anything. If you’re extremely lazy or stupid, Gmail allows you to create a signature that does it for you, but you need to take the initiative and actually make one instead of just expecting it to spontaneously engender itself. Nicknames are also permissible, but only if the recipient is familiar with said nickname. For example, referring to yourself as “The God of Anal Sex” when emailing your mother about returning home for Thanksgiving is risky unless you’re from Arkansas.
There are few exceptions to these guidelines.
My 70-something-year-old granny has an excuse. She still takes dictated notes in secretarial shorthand. She still has an operable ancient-school IBM computer from the first round of personal desktop computers, and she mostly uses it to play floppy-disk versions of Wheel of Fortune and Scrabble. Email still sort of scares her to the point where she won’t write one unless someone else is supervising, and even then it’s just one giant box of text.
But you are not 70-something years old. You grew up surrounded by this shit and suckled the digital tit as soon as you left your mother’s. You have ten agile fingers, a program that can type up your dictation or a sexy secretary named Consuela. So the next time you write an email to your friends, family, or me, remember your email etiquette; it may be your only opportunity to appear to be a respectable human being until you and the recipient finally meet face-to-face. Then you’re just fucked because you have no chance for revising and sugar-coating what you really want to say.

Valediction.

Justin