Know your audience!

Before I begin, I wanted to say 'hello' to all of you who visit this site. You may have seen my name in the comment board once in a while. As it turns out, the Angry Midget got tired of my posting there, and tried to ban me from his blog. However, he did not know that I have 1337 Haxxor skills, and cracked the 15,809 bit encryption on his page, so I now can post entire topics here (Cue evil laugh ... muwhahahahaha)! When I feel like ranting, I'm going to hack in and post, and there's nothing Ryan or any of his angry midget pirate army can do about it!

So for my first rant, I want to talk about the woman who got kicked off of a Southwest flight for wearing a t-shirt with a picture of Bush and Cheney on it that said 'Meet the Fuckers.' Message boards are already lighting up about this, but for political reasons, like, "Southwest are a bunch of fascists!" Folks, let's get something straight. This was not done for political reasons. Take the picture of the president and the vice president off of it, and it's just a t-shirt with a swear word. If you're going to go into a public place wearing a shirt with an obscenity on it, you're running the risk of being kicked out of that place. That's a pretty basic fact, but apparently that woman was sick the day they taught common sense in school.

When I was at the Sounds of the Underground tour earlier this summer, a kid who didn't look old enough to vote had the very same shirt on. But since 90 percent of the bands who performed at that festival use swear words in their songs, I'm sure no one cared. The moral of the story? Know your audience. Sounds like common sense, right? Here's another piece of free common sense advice: don't wear a racist shirt to school, especially if people of other races go there. In fact, don't wear the shirt at all, unless you're in a big hurry to get your ass kicked.

Now, having said that, I feel like I have to come clean about something. I like death metal. A lot. Ask the Angry Midget. Most of the music in my collection is even angrier than he is. But some of it is very lyrically positive as well. Some of the bands I like are (GASP!) Christian. Personally, believe what you want. I don't care what you believe, and I'd appreciate it if you didn't bother yourself with what I believe. As long as your music rocks, the lyrics mean very little. But for the sake of full disclosure, I'll share a moment from my life with you. I went to a concert last year where a few Christian metal bands performed, and I wore THIS shirt:

I didn't get kicked out of the venue. In fact, I got major props from a guy there. Granted, he was wearing a Slayer shirt, but that counts, right?

If I wore this shirt on a plane flight, I might get a dirty look or two, but no one could kick me off the plane without getting a call from my lawyer twenty minutes later. I'd have to flip a coin to decide which Constitutional Amendment I wanted to invoke. Technically, there's nothing offensive about the shirt. Don't believe me? If you took it to the MPAA, they'd give it a PG rating. But the main reason I wore it? I like fucking with people, especially if I know they're not going to do anything about it. Unlike our current president, most Christians believe in that whole 'turn the other cheek' thing (even the metalheads), so I wasn't expecting anyone to approach me about it (and I was right, no one did). And even if they did, I'd just take a page from Bill Hicks's book, and say, "Well, you're a Christian. Forgive me." Works every time.

Know your audience.