I LOVE TEXAS! - The Ultimate Travel Guide to Texas!

Texans are a hearty folk, not welcoming of the seemingly frivolous lifestyle and “fandangles” of this century. The indomitable Texas spirit can be found within the frontiersmen, wranglers, trappers, leaders of the pack, and every other anachronisms from America’s Manifest Destiny. Texans may never surrender and never say die, but when they do it is usually during cardiac arrest at a startling young age. Texas is home to shockingly high rates of obesity, teen pregnancy, and death from violent crimes and accidents; as a result, life expectancy and childhood mortality rates in Texas rival Europe during the peak of the Black Death. With such a clear disdain for their own lives and the lives of their fellow Texans, it is not surprising that Texas has the highest proportion of uninsured in the United States (for those of you who do not live in the US, health insurance is something that the richest nation in the world makes its citizens pay to have a happy, healthy life because it spent the budget on Smart Bombs and Halliburton kick-backs).  Deep in the heart of Texas you will find that the stars at night are big and bright, but you will also find a healthy dose of cholesterol and carcinogens. So, strap on your cowboy boots, deep fry a stick of butter, and unlearn math because we’re going to Texas! Yee-haw!

Owing almost entirely to its suspicion of medicine, elitist doctors, and basic hygiene, Texas is a veritable museum for deadly diseases extinct in the industrialized world. It’s as if the CDC dropped the biosafety level 4 freezer in Texas just to “see what would happen.” The bubonic plague, rickets, smallpox, scrofula, polio, dysentery, typhoid, and many more ailments typically found along the Oregon Trail (if you don’t get that joke, ask your mom) are common in Texas. Not content to have only what everyone else has, or had centuries ago, Texas wouldn’t be Texas if it didn’t do everything bigger and better than all of history. In addition to known deadly diseases, Texas invented a number of new ones, which includes: the “Texas frenzy,” the “Texas froth,” the “Texas sweat,” the “bloody tuffet,” and “evils.” 

It should be no surprise then that the death rate for Texas infants is nearly 2 out of 3; however, the alarming ratio is counteracted by the fact that Texas doesn’t allow any form birth control other than obesity. Abortions are not permitted in Texas since “life” is considered to start at arousal and any sexual arousal that is not consummated in unprotected sex is tantamount to murder. As a result, 90% of women have their first child before their 20^th birthday—the remaining 10% is divided evenly between witches and nuns. 

Even more apprehensive about having someone's hands in their mouth than they are about modern medicine, Texans view dentistry as a form of witchcraft and those caught practicing it are sentenced to drowning.  Minor dental procedures, such as tooth removals, are typically handled by shepherds, but any person engaged in animal husbandry could perform the duties.

All Texans enjoy a healthy portion of sugar, so much so that it is not uncommon for teeth to turn black and rot out. While in the rest of the world this would be seen as sign of addiction to crystal meth, in Texas it is a sign of prestige. Any Texan with a black and rotting maw of stinky tooth nubs is sure to have eaten his weight in sugar over the past week—which is a costly habit. The lower classes, unable to afford the requisite amount of sugar for ruining one’s mouth, will sometimes black out and/or knockout their teeth to give the appearance that they enjoy copious amounts of the sweet granules. Those Texans with a full mouth of pearly white teeth are looked at with disdain and treated with the typical derision reserved for any sub-class of people.

Unfortunately, Texas is unable to improve its situation because there is no centralized government and the state is divided up into little autonomous kingdoms lorded over by  local cattle or oil barons. In this baronic system, common Texan folk are bound to a plot of land owned by a baron in return for protection and the right to work on the fields. Also, unless God appears and speaks directly to the whole state, threatening floods and locusts, shit just doesn't get done in Texas. 

So, that’s Texas—a caustic blend of cow pies and oil wells all wrapped in smoked bacon. We may never understand what makes Texas such a desperately backwards hovel of a state, and we never have to because there are plenty of roads that will take us around it. What we should hope for is that they finally build a solid wall along the border of Texas and Mexico, but enjoy the idea so much that they just keep building until the wall goes all the way around the whole state. Sure, walls keep things out, but they also keep things in. Fingers crossed. Just like with any infection, if you can’t get rid of it, quarantine the shit out it.

In Texas, cowboy hats are an erogenous zone.

FUN FACTS about Texas:

• Capitol: Waco

• Language: Country Strong

• First governor: David Koresh

• Main export: Beef

• Main import: Beef

• Favorite condiment: Ranch

• Favorite vegetable: Ribs

• State bird: Longhorn cattle

• State animal: Walker, Texas Ranger

• Best selling vehicle: Covered wagon with four oxen

• Favorite lute music: Ricercare by Francesco da Milano (1497)

• Fine for non-Christians: $11 per day

• Fine for not wearing a cowboy hat: $18 (men) $5 (women).

• Fine for messing with Texas: Trust me, just don't mess with Texas...

SERIOUSLY, DO NOT MESS WITH TEXAS!

I LOVE PEACHES! - The Ultimate Travel Guide To The Land Of Peaches

Your soft curves tantalize my eyes and your pink fuzzy flesh tempts my tongue. I'm drawn into your sweet juices like a suckling babe. Your ripe goodness, so bountiful, is nurture for my natural appetites. I want to bite so deep into you, your wetness dribbles down my chin. I no longer care. I'm lost, abandoned in your sweetness.

And so my love affair with peaches has begun. Now I finally understand what Nicolas Cage meant when he said: I can eat a peach for hours. Yum.

If you haven't guessed, it's peach season. Peach season doesn't mean much to you city folk with your supermarkets and your everything-all-the-time attitudes and your fancy restaurants and your iPhones and your running water and your indoor toilets. Truth be told, before this summer peach season never meant anything to me either and I could not have told you when the season started (I always imagined it would be sometime around prom though . . . ), but living out in this country-ass town has some serious benefits - the principle being intimate knowledge of the most delicious peaches on earth.

I totally underestimated the transformative power of peaches. My first local peach was nothing short of life changing paradigm shift. Suddenly, there was chance for peace in the Middle East, America could solve its debt crisis without harming the poor and underprivileged, my life wasn't a downward spiral of regret and shattered illusions, but most importantly, I could finally forgive George W. Bush. That is a powerful peach. If there is something so unquestionably good on this earth, then maybe this isn't such a bad place after all.

The downside to eating the best peaches on earth is that I can never go back or have anything less than perfection. I can never buy a supermarket peach and think, "eh, close enough." I can’t eat a peach that has been shipped from another hemisphere. I can’t eat a peach out of can. I can't even play Super Mario Brothers because saving Princess Peach seems like such a waste of time compared to enjoying the real thing. After eating delicious, local peaches it angers me that food manufacturers make food products that "taste like" peach or have "peach flavoring." NOTHING is better than the real thing. This blatant fakery is offensive to my heart, body, and mind - nay! It is offensive to my very existence. This simply cannot stand and I am fully prepared to write a strongly worded letter to my representative on this matter.

You love peaches too? That's great. It's certainly not a contest, but if it were I'd be winning. So, if you love peaches let me give you a couple pointers on how to be a better peach lover.

 First, you have to serenade it:

Then, you have to make sweet love to it:

To top 10 reason why I am No. 1 Handsome Über CacoPeach Lover:

1. Wrote a 121 page account of the inaccuracies contained in Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach.
2.  I adopted a baby girl to name her Fay Elberta, then didn't let her have any of my peaches.
3.  Bathed in peach juice, then made love to myself.
4.  I gave up nectarines because they made peaches jealous.
5.  I ate a peach pit so that it would grow inside of me and I could be pregnant with baby peaches.
6.  I listen and I ask questions. I really do want to know how peaches are feeling. Open up to me.
7.  I stopped hanging around with my friends so I could spend more time with peaches. They made me act immature anyway.
8. I went back to school to get my accounting degree. I don't really like accounting, but there are a lot good opportunities out there and the money is pretty good to. I think it will give us the kind of stable lifestyle that can support where we want to get to, you know, family, car, and the picket fence. I'll just make writing and art a hobby, you know, that's what it really is anyway. You can't build a stable life on the arts.
9. I keep my hair cleaned up. Peaches bought me a new electric razor because she said it would be a lot easier for me to not look like a hobo. Peaches also got me a nose hair trimmer, which was pretty thoughtful. Next week we're going to the mall to get a new wardrobe; we're going to Structure and Gap. Peaches says my style is too "bohemian." It kinda is. I've made a lot of changes and it feels pretty good. Peaches says I clean up really well.
10. I killed my soul for peaches.

I LOVE MALAYSIA! - The Ultimate Travel Guide to Malaysia

A quick glance at Google analytics has proven to me what I've always suspected, Malaysia loves me. There are depressingly few people that visit this blog, and for depressingly good reasons, but I am ecstatic that a majority of my guests are from what I now consider to be my adopted nation, Malaysia. Yes, Malaysia, you have welcomed me with open arms, you've peered deep into the vacant spot where my soul should be and you filled it up with your humid, tropical love. Someday I hope to visit you and share my love with you in a much more intimate fashion in as many places as I can get at.

When I  am finally able to visit my new nation I will wear my finest baju and put on my favorite songkok in all of the kampung I can see. I can't wait to share stories of our many similarities over keropok lekor and nasi melak. It will be like coming home again, for the first time.

To honor the love and respect paid to me by the people of Malaysia, I will show my appreciation in the only way that my stunted emotional growth will allow - with derision and sarcasm.

These two buildings (their name  roughly translates to "Giant H") are the worlds largest sweat shop. 95 percent of all cloths for sale at your local mall were made in these towers. These towers are literally a nightmare within. The horrors and degradations that occur upon the helpless workers inside are beyond what you silly westerners were able to dream up in you 7 terraces of purgatory. The local people's name for this roughly translates to: "Palace of Lost Souls." It is a cruel fate that awaits those desperate enough to find themselves trapped within.

This is the Malaysian Prime Minister. He was on heavy sedatives when this picture was taken because that is a traditional pastime of the Malaysian elite. Much like the Victorian upper-class adoration for pale, white skin (which connotes a level of wealth that allowed one to purchase expensive sunblock made from beluga fat), the Malaysian upper-class takes a near fatal cocktail of painkillers and sedatives to indicate that they have the level of wealth that will allow them to sit around in a bleary eyed stupor all day then pay for medical bills and rehab when they start foaming at the mouth and pass out.

This is Malaysian food! It's made with a specific blend of fresh spices developed over centuries to give white people diarrhea - and it's worth every agonizing minute.

Fun Facts About Malaysia!

• Likelihood of U.S. invasion: 18%
   
• Percent of Malaysians named "Rick": 4%
   
• Favorite Beatle: Ringo
   
• Capitol City: Detroit
   
• Official Language: Malaysian and Romulan
   
• Largest Export: Malaysians
   
• National Bird: Cocoa Beware
   
• National Pastime: Recovering from dysentery
   
• National Anthem: Gold Dust Woman by Fleetwood Mac
   
• National Currency: Beads and animal pelts
   
• Least favorite Beatle: John Lennon

Malaysia holds the world record for the least populated building, which is 1.

Malaysia gained its independence from the Banana Republic January 4th, 1982, in what later became known as the Coconut Revolution. An uneasy truce exists to this day.

Malaysia's largest and, by far, most successful tourism marketing campaign is being mistaken for the country that was in The Hangover 2.