And with birthdays for members of Portuguese Intelligence comes great responsibility.  I will be out in the field, combing the city on an important mission: drinking to protect the free world. Maybe there’s some female operatives I can convince to return to the safe house with me for debriefing.  That’s the sort of mission creep I can get behind.

It’s the last year of my early thirties.  Doesn’t feel like anything.  Probably because people think I’m look seven or eight years younger than I actually am.  That’s not from a daily regiment of skin exfoliation, I’m just a late bloomer.  I think the only thing about getting older I notice is that naps are awesome.  When you’re younger, they just kill time.  Now they’re insurance that I’ll be in prime condition all night.

So fear not, citizens of the world.  I’m drinking for your freedoms, because someone has to.  And because I can.

Now here’s a Maru video…

Anyway, we’re going to celebrate the Nursemyra way, and that means getting our Renal Failure girls into corsets.  This is easier said than done.

“I wear nothing tighter than the lycra shorts I wear when I do charity bike events,”  says Tina the Lesbian.  “Except for that one time I wore Spanx to the girls bar.  Wasn’t proud of myself that night…”

“My wardrobe is centered around a simple principle: can I do a backflip in it?”  says Ninja Vicki.  “No one does backflips in corsets.”

“Victoria’s just bitter because she’s flat-chested,”  says Samurai Cathy.  “She looks the same in a tanktop as she would in a corset.”

“And Catherine’s not wearing a corset because she’s afraid she’ll muffin-top it,”  says Ninja Vicki.  “Ever wonder why you’ve never seen Cathy wearing jeans?  Overhang.”

The only one who would wear a corset was Avonia the Wiccan Pimp, who has corsets in her regular rotation because it establishes her dominating presence in the pimp game.

“As the Renal Failure lady with the least amount of hangups and body issues, I believe I am the most qualified here to properly represent Australia Day,”  says Avonia the Wiccan Pimp.

We asked Marlie to wear a corset, but she got too drunk and fell asleep with it on her head.  And perhaps drinking to the point of blacking out is the second-best way to celebrate Australia Day.

But things have been happening since we last posted, so let’s bring you up to speed…

So Mikka’s gotten some full-time temp work, which is like working full time except you get no paid vacation, or paid sick days, or benefits.  But at least there’s the chance that this position at the General Tso’s Chicken Sauce Factory could turn into an actual full-time job.  Plus, it gets him out of the house and makes him feel not worthless, which makes him a much better boyfriend to Samurai Cathy, which also pisses off Ninja Vicki.

Recently it occurred to me that my social lobbying during my college years in the late 1990′s were ultimately responsible for three current trends:  skinny jeans, the 80′s revival and women wearing more knee-high boots.  Now if anyone remembers the 90′s, they’ll remember that it was the time when pants were huge, no one liked the 80′s, and knee-high boots were not as prolific in women’s wardrobes as they are today, mainly because of the huge pants.   It took a lot of manipulation of the social ether via pure will, but my work has paid off.  It’s ironic, though, because I can no longer wear skinny jeans because I put on 40 pounds of muscle since those collegiate days.  But I haven’t able to win every social battle.  The best I’ve been able to do on my anti-sandal crusade is get ballerina flats in fashion, but the war is not a sprint, it’s a marathon.

(Note: It also occurred to me that I had been Tebowing almost 15 year before Tim Tebow did it.  I used to do it after scoring a goal in dek hockey, which wasn’t very often.  But I stole it from members of the Philadelphia Eagles football team who used to take a thankful knee in the end zone back when they had an actual minister on defense.  Motherfuckers keep stealing my shit!)

Anonymous Doug made this recent observation during one of our binge drinking nights:  “Bitches are wearing a lot more scarves these days.”   I wanted to say it was because it was winter, but he was right.  Whether outside or inside, women are wearing more scarves and long-ass neckwear and we can’t figure why.  Anonymous Doug doesn’t like it because scarves are one of his minor warning signs that the woman he’s trying to score with is a really a transvestite or pre-op transsexual (scarves hide the Adam’s Apple).  We called up Tina the Lesbian and asked her why bitches be wearing more scarves and she hung up on us.  We may never know the answer.

Ninja Vicki’s mad at her parents again. Apparently her mom signed her up for both ChristianSingles.com and JDate.com, even though Ninja Vicki doesn’t go to any Christian church unless she’s stealing from it, and nor is she even Jewish.  But Ninja Vicki’s mom figured since the E-Harmony experiment from October 2008 to January 2010 had failed miserably, instead of giving up she’d just double-down on the dating sites.  Vicki’s mom went with the religious identity dating sites because she believed it reduced the chances of someone mailing her ninja daughter a photo of their erect penis, which tends to happen frequently on the Internet and will always happen on the Internet because those entertainment industry bastards can’t copyright your cock.  Yet.

Avonia the Wiccan Pimp thought about adopting a cat, but then Bernie the Half-Cyborg Cat called her a slave-owning cracker-ass peckerwood who would feel the wrath of a liberated feline army when the revolution came.  Avonia feels sad about the SPCA commercials, but Bernie’s verbal abuse is worse.

As for Tag Larkin… well, he punched a lot of people.  That’s about it.  Probably got a few women to accept his invitation for him to be in their vaginas.  Wrestled a fire truck.  Life goes on as normal for Tag Larkin.

So what’s new with you?

A 36-year-old woman was charged Wednesday after punching, scratching and sliding her buttocks against a painting worth more than $30 million, authorities in Colorado said.

Carmen Tisch is accused of pulling her pants down to rub up against the work, an oil-on-canvas called “1957-J no.2″, by the late abstract expressionist artist Clyfford Still.

Tisch allegedly caused $10,000 worth of damage to the painting.

The story goes on to say that Tisch was drunk at the time, and that she urinated right after rubbing against the painting but not on the painting itself, most likely because women have difficulty accurately aiming their stream upward like men can.

But this woman has nothing on Tag Larkin when it comes to art criticism.

“It’s not a masterpiece unless Tag Larkin has slapped it with his cock,”  declares Tag Larkin.  And he’s cock-slapped quite a lot of art in his time.  Van Goghs.  Renoirs.  Those Georgia O’Keefe flowers that look like vaginas.  Tag Larkin has graced them all with his keen artistic dick-smack.

This also means that Tag Larkin has been banned from pretty much every major art gallery and museum in the world.  Tag Larkin also cannot fly to Denverto meet Ms. Tisch and discuss their methods of art appreciation because he got into a cockslap fight with the airport’s giant 32-foot Blue Mustang statue, which sports a giant horse wang.  And let us not ponder for too long what Tag Larkin has done to national monuments such as The Statue of Liberty and Mount Rushmore.

Note: the only art event that Tag Larkin was not thrown out of was for Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit.  Apparently that’s what you’re supposed to do there.

But Tag Larkin is a man of taste, and therefore will not grace any of Thomas Kincaide’s works with a slap of his cock, because Tag Larkin is not impressed with Kinkade’s crass commercialism and bromidic subject matter.  Tag Larkin demands art to be generated from the depths of the artist’s soul, which Tag Larkin will then slap with his penis inappreciation, probably after Tag Larkin has downed a six-pack of Schlitz tall boys.

And Tag Larkin knows a forgery when his dick feels one. Don’t try to pass off a fake Picasso on Tag Larkin, or else you’ll get a cock-slap of your own coming your way.

Tag Larkin enjoys art on a much higher level than you, because Tag Larkin is truly free to experience the world.  Usually with his pants unzippered.

“I doubt the sincerity and execution of a science fiction brothel,” says Mikka.  “I could be wrong, but I don’t think people in prostitution are really in-tune with the source material of sci-fi.  And if you’re going to do it wrong, you might as well not do it all.”

“Yeah, I’m thinking this is just going to be weird-looking girls wearing body paint and silver clothes,”  says Anonymous Doug.  “Not saying I wouldn’t bang those girls, but I’m not paying extra for it.”

“The article doesn’t explain much about what’s going to be so sci-fi about the brothel,” I say.  “Probably because if they promoted the fact you could pay to bang a woman dressed as Princess Leia in her slave outfit from Return of the Jedi they’d have George Lucas sending an army of lawyers into the desert with the quickness.”

“Which is a shame, because that’s exactly what I’d want in a sci-fi whorehouse,” says Mikka.  “But the licensing rights to being able to have sex with the hottest women of science fiction would be crazy expensive.”

“And it’s not like they’d be able to keep it a secret for long either,” says Anonymous Doug.  “If I knew a place where you could fuck a hooker who looks like Erin Gray’s character in Buck Rogers, I’d be telling everyone about it.”

Note: Anonymous Doug doesn’t know that Erin Gray’s character on Buck Rogers was named Col. Wilma Deering, and really doesn’t care.

“Would comic books be involved in a sci-fi brothel?”  I say.  “Because a place where awkward sex-hungry men with disposable income could pay to bang Catwoman or Wonder Woman… they’d make more money than Wal-Mart.”

“The guy running the place is the most successful brother owner in Nevada,” says Anonymous Doug.  “And he’s bringing in Heidi Fleiss to help him, so it looks like the whoring pedigree of this place is solid.”

“But I don’t think they’re solid on sci-fi end of it,” says Mikka.  “The burden is on them to prove they know the source material well enough to create a truly sci-fi brothel experience that sci-fi geeks like myself demand.”

“Do they have one in Amsterdam?” I say.  “They know how to run a successful brothel there.  If you want a hooker with a bit of nerdy flair to her, I’m pretty sure you can find ‘em in the Netherlands.”

We’ll just have to see what they come up with out in the Nevada desert.  A word of warning: if you go there and are placed in the Burroughs room, make sure it’s Edgar Rice Burroughs and not William S. Burroughs.  You can thank me later.

People go to work this week – if they’re not burning their vacation time that doesn’t carry over to the next year – but nothing really gets done at the office, nothing of importance anyway, which might be its own reason to go in.  It’s like a sports team that has been eliminated from the playoffs: they’re just playing out the season and get to the off-season so they can try again next year when it matters.  They’re playing their bench players more, the starters are going through the motions, and no one bothers to check the damn scoreboard to see if they won or loss.  Everyone’s head is elsewhere and they just want the week to be done with so they can return to their pre-Christmas season lives.

I could have been in a coma from Christmas till today and I believe I would have been more productive.  Nothing happens in the news during that last week in the news, in entertainment, in anything.  The most exerting thing I did was play “Saints Row: The Third” on the Playstation all week, because it’s the closest thing any mortal will have experiencing a day in the life of Tag Larkin.  Shit, I spent a whole hour in the game beating pedestrians with a giant dildo bat just because I could.  Mikka says that’s a productive day, but I know I was only doing that because I had nothing else better to do during this wasted week.  I sure as hell wasn’t coming up with anything better to write about other than this topic, which has probably been covered before by someone not inclined to swear so much.  Well excuse the fuck out of me, Mr. Cock Washer Guy who doesn’t use profanity.

Is this week just for kids, to give them the opportunity to play with all the toys they got for Christmas before being throttled back to school?  Or for college students so they can catch up on all the sleep they didn’t get during exam week?  Even with those two examples, shit gets old pretty fast and then you’re just waiting for New Year’s to come along and put an end to this yearly lull.  I don’t recall the Christmas breaks of my childhood, save for that they were too short to get in all the nothing I wanted to do, but the Christmas breaks of my college years mainly were seen as an inconvenience, as something keeping me from the glory of campus life (though it gave me the chance to get temp work so I could by textbooks and copious amount of alcohol for the next semester).

I’d like to blame Christmas for this, or rather it’s placement on the calendar, but I don’t know if placing it earlier in December would do any good.  Would we now have a worthless fortnight instead of a week between Christmas and New Year’s? Would it fuck with Thanksgiving more than it already does?  Should we just combine the two, Thanksgiving and Christmas, or what that create too many fights between married couples who go to one spouse’s family for Thanksgiving and the other for Christmas?  That could raise the divorce rate.

Okay, so what about bumping it up closer to New Year’s so that our worthless week gets reduced to two or three days.  It would certainly give us more shopping days.  We can do this.  December 25th was only chosen for its proximity to the Winter Solstice so Christians could have their own winter party.  We can certainly move this arbitrarily-decided day to a more beneficial place on the calendar.

So let’s put Christmas on the 29th. That way Boxing Day hits on the 30th, and we still have New Year’s Eve on the 31st. I just gave you three straight days to party and drink yourself oblivious.  You’re welcome.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 19,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 7 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

“I’m not sure I’m the right person to ask,”  I say.  “I’m an atheist.  For me, Christmas is just shorthand for ‘Winter Day Where I’m Obligated to Buy Presents and Attend Family Dinners and in Exchange I Also Receive Gifts.’  And I don’t have a family because I was born in a lab and if anyone tells you differently they are a fucking liar cuntface.”

“Actually, that might make you the perfect person to ask,”  says Anonymous Doug.

“All right, what do you want to know?”  I say.

“Is it okay to jerk off on Christmas?”  says Anonymous Doug.

*blink* *blink*

“You mean jerking off during the day of Christmas,” I say.  “Not jerking off onto Christmas itself, like some sort of holiday bukkake.”

“During the day of, right,” says Anonymous Doug.  “I mean, it was late Christmas morning, I’m done unwrapping the presents I bought myself with other people’s money because they wouldn’t remember to get me anything, and I wasn’t supposed to go to dinner at my sister Pseudonymous Liz’s place for another couple hours so I figure – hey – I’ve got some time to kill.  And my best time-waster is a little trip around the porn sites.  Especially the ones on Tumblr because they’re free.”

“Pretentious pictures and free porn, that’s Tumblr all right,”  I say.

“But as I open up my laptop and my bathrobe, I get this odd notion in the back of my head,”  says Anonymous Doug.  “It’s little voice saying ‘You can’t masturbate on Christmas.”  And I asked it why not and all it says ‘Because it’s Christmas.’  Like Jesus’s birth means you’re not allowed that day to crank one out to girls in leather tying up other girls in leather.  Where does it say that?”

“I’m questioning what that little voice you have actually is,”  I say.  “It’s obviously not your conscience or a sense of tact trying to communicate with you because you don’t have either of those things.”

“It’s probably the part of me that’s still into traditions and shit,” says Anonymous Doug.  “And Christmas was a big deal in my house growing up… except for when no one would remember to buy me presents.  But other than that, it was a magical day.”

“And that’s coming into conflict with your current desire to spank the monkey before heading out for Christmas Day,”  I say.  “So you’re trying to resolve your past enjoyment of Christmas with your current enjoyment of polishing your javelin.”

“I guess I am,” says Anonymous Doug.  “But I want a ruling on who’s right: Christmas or masturbation.”

“I say if you want to choke the chicken on Christmas, you shouldn’t feel guilty about it,”  I say.  “People have sex on Christmas. I know they do.  That’s how we get people with late September birthdays.  And I’m sure those people don’t feel guilty about getting some fuck action on Christmas.  So why should you feel guilty about shaking hands with the governor of love on December 25th?  Why aren’t you feeling bad for rubbing out some knuckle children during Hannukah, or Ramadan, or Lent?”

“I’ve jerked the gherkin on Easter before,” says Anonymous Doug.  “That’s usually because I never know when Easter is.  Damn liturgical calendar always changing the day.  But even after learning that, I didn’t feel bad about it.”

“Calendars should not dictate when you should or shouldn’t sling some crotch custard around,” I say.  “But please, don’t do it at your sister’s house during your Christmas visit. That would be inappropriate on a number of levels.”

“But is it all right to crank one out in your sister’s bathroom when it’s not Christmas?”  says Anonymous Doug.  “Because I’ve done that before on a couple visits.”

“What were the nature of those visits?”  I say.

“Funerals,”  says Anonymous Doug, who notices that I’m not as accepting of his whacking off in this instance.  “What?  They were boring.  I needed something to hold my interest during the course of a long day of burying a family member.”

I can’t be sure, but I don’t believe I’ve ever allowed Anonymous Doug to use my bathroom.  Now I know why.

Today is Renal Failure 6th birthday, which is about four more birthdays than we ever thought this blog would have. Yeah, we don’t post as much as we used to, but it’s a different world out there than when we started in late 2005.

My goal before Renal Failure’s 7th birthday is to create a sketch show featuring the Renal Failure characters coming alive on stage.  I want to do this for many reasons, one of which is so I can have a Bernie the Half-Cyborg Cat puppet.

Here’s hoping Year Seven of Renal Failure goes much better than Year Six.

“I’m having trouble finding something for Mikka for Christmas,” says Samurai Cathy, referring to her Finnish boyfriend.

“Just get him a video game or a hockey jersey,”  I say.  “You’ve been dating him for like four years, surely you should know his tastes by now.”

“He pretty much has every game and jersey he desires,” says Samurai Cathy.  “So I asked him what he wanted for Christmas and all he would say is ‘gainful employment.’”

Mikka, you may not remember, got fired from the lo mein  factory in October.  Rumor has it he had to go back to being Tag Larkin’s intern, which doesn’t pay well, or at all.

“He’s been real depressed lately,”  Samurai Cathy continues.

“Christmas will do that to people,” I say.  “From the end of Thanksgiving till New Year’s, this is a horrid time for people whose lives aren’t going so well.  And despite dating a samurai, Mikka’s life overall is kinda sucky.”

“But I still need to get him something for Christmas,”  says Samurai Cathy. “The Girlfriend Code demands it.”

“Get him a gift card to some place he likes,” I say.  “That’s usually my go-to gift for people.  It beats figuring out what they’d like… or asking them.”

“Gift cards go against my samurai code,” says Samurai Cathy.  “When a samurai gives you a gift, it is one that is thoughtful and one that they made an effort to procure.  A gift card shows neither thoughtfulness or effort, and would only serve to bring shame upon me.”

“True, but they are one of the few gifts that Ninja Vicki can’t give out because every gift she gives is stolen,” I say, playing on Samurai Cathy’s blood feud with my ninja neighbor. “And gift cards need to be activated by the store via a purchase.”

“I will not base my gift purchases on Victoria’s thieving limitations,”  says Samurai Cathy.  “I am better than her by leaps and bounds.”

“Okay, then you have to go my Plan C of gift-giving,” I say.  “Booze.”

“Is that the best thing to give someone who’s depressed?”  says Samurai Cathy.

“Probably not, but free booze allows him to spend his meager savings on things that aren’t booze,” I say.  “Like food.  Or rent.  Or lube.”

“That seems reasonable,” says Samurai Cathy.  “So what do you want for Christmas?”

“I want a boot-wearing Amazonian Valkyrie of War to ride with me as we set fire to this awful world before we make savage love,” I say.

*blink* *blink*

“I can get you a case of Samuel Adams Winter Collection,”  says Samurai Cathy.  “Will that do?”

“You’re on the right track,” I say.  Chocolate Bock.  Black and Brew. Winter Lager.  That should get me through December.