In yet another exception of those good ol’ Red State family values, parents in Nebraska are rushing to abandon their children, some as old as 17, at hospitals before the state legislature has the chance to close the loophole in the state’s recently passed Safe Haven law that allows kids of any age to be abandoned legally:

To the state’s surprise and embarrassment, more than half of the 33 children legally abandoned under the safe-haven law since it took effect in mid-July have been teenagers.

But state officials may have inadvertently made things worse with their hesitant response to the problem: The number of drop-offs has almost tripled to about three a week since Gov. Dave Heineman announced on Oct. 29 that lawmakers would rewrite the law.

With legislators set to convene on Friday, weary parents like the Lincoln mother have been racing to drop off their children while they still can.

On Thursday, authorities searched for a 17-year-old girl who fled an Omaha hospital as her mother tried to abandon her. Her 14-year-old brother was taken into state custody, health officials said.

But hey, at least they aren’t letting those fucking faggots marry each other and fuck up the sacred sanctity of family!

Video Matt was on the grind this weekend, meeting up with Hawthorne Heights and one of our favorite bands ever, Emery, in San Francisco for some sit-down interview footage as well as some live shit. Check out Emery playing “Walls” above and Hawthorne Heights chopping it up with Video Matt below, then go to our YouTube channel and watch all 427 of our other videos*

*If you actually do this, you are either (one of) Video Matt’s stalker or the most bored person in the universe

With the possible exception of taking a taking a boat across the ocean, riding a train from city to city is probably the mode of transportation most conducive to churning out overly dramatic, narcissistic writing. Something about the slow passage of the countryside synchronized with the mechanical whining of steel on steel makes even the most mundane of journeys, in this case from Portland to Chico on a rainy weeknight aboard the southbound Coast Starlight, seem like a weighty, almost Hemingway-esque American moment. However, one thing the train is definitely not conducive to is excessive flatulence: it makes it hard to enjoy the gravity of the moment when all you really want to do is let out a tremendous, explosive fart. So instead penning an epic travel column, I spent the first few hours of the trip sneaking in between cars to expel the most vile sorts of internal gases in the gaps between. In the interim, I would haunt the observation deck, slowly bleeding the pressure in my bowels with (mostly) silent, but certainly deadly emanations, moving constantly to avoid being detected. Finally, we rolled into the station at Klamath Falls for a smoke stop, and I exited the premises and skulked to the far corner of the platform to unleash the accumulation. There were a few near sharts, but I thankfully made it through relatively unscathed. Soon after, back aboard the train, the culprit behind these odious exhalations, an angry shit baby conceived over five nights of excessive drinking, Portland vegan cuisine and overall lack of welcoming restrooms was finally borne into this world, and sucked down in the murky abyss of the lounge car shitter, I’m sure much to the amusement of the college kids seated directly without the door, which was sorely lacking in acoustic soundproofing.

This ordeal had, of course, left me with a profound hunger. Thankfully I had earlier made dinner reservations (for one, as I was traveling quite alone) and was looking forward to enjoying a quiet repast with my headphones and my book. However, upon being beckoned to the dinner car, I learned, much to my chagrin, that the seating was “community seating, to encourage passengers to get to know one another.” As far my reasons for taking the train as opposed to flying or driving, getting to know the passengers was definitely not one of them. But who knows, perhaps I would get seated with some of those college kids who had recently heard my stirring performance on the lounge car shitter, or one of the meek, twenty-something literary-type girls on the observation deck. Maybe “getting to know my fellow passengers” would be an engaging exercise in sociability, and we could run through a few bottles of wine and pass the hours in joyous conversation while the dark, anonymous wilderness of Southern Oregon limped past our windows! Yeah, how about no? I was seated with a pair of seventy-something older women, who explained that they were tour guides, who took the train twice a month to Eugene and explained, en route, the topography and history of the passing countryside. Well, at least I could get a free history lesson out of the deal. But then, our fourth diner arrived, a real square-jawed piece of work who, curiously enough, had made me shudder when I him spotted earlier passing through the observation deck. He immediately took the initiative to inform us that he was “in the hospitality industry” and on his way back to San Francisco, a boast he soon qualified by the fact that he was in fact a bell hop, but not just any bell hop. But the HEAD Bell Hop. It was perhaps his destination and my outfit, a bright yellow V-neck, stupid little hat and stupid little beard that immediately prompted one of the old ladies, apropos of nothing as I had not yet said more than a few half-hearted pleasantries, to relay a story that recently on one of her tour guide trips she had dined with a pair of men from San Francisco, one of whom was a gown designer for the Oscars. “They were a COUPLE” she felt obligated to add, just to make sure that we knew that she, despite her rurality and elderly appearance, was totally alright with that. So now that I was apparently gay for Mr. Head Bell Hop, who for his part continued onward unfettered with various well-worn anecdotes, giving the tour guides a taste of their own medicine as he walked them through his illustrious life, I resigned myself to eat my lukewarm $12 raviolis as fast as possible, and escape back to my seat to read in peace. We pulled into Chico a scant seven hours later, a little past 4:30 AM and I still hadn’t written a goddamn word. I had finished my book though. And taken another shit. So I guess it wasn’t a total waste.

This would be far less funny if this wasn’t the realistic expectations of some people I know (thankfully, not that well) for the impending Barack Obama presidency .

The sad tale of 15 year old Brandon Crisp, who ran away from home after his parents took away his XBOX gaming system, believing he had become addicted to the game Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, has apparently ended today with the discovery of a body police believe to be Crisp’s:

The nearly month-long search for a teen who went missing after arguing with his parents over a video game ended in apparent tragedy Wednesday.

Hunters in an area northeast of Barrie found a body “pretty well believed” to be that of Crisp on Wednesday morning, within kilometres of his central Ontario home, police said.

No word if Crisp was An Hero, but the internet has already of course made that assumption. Either way, shit sucks for his folks, especially now that the internet hate machine is all over this story. On a semi-related note though, it kind of makes me want to try out Call of Duty 4. Must be a pretty badass game.

In the first of what may or may not be a continuing series (depending on how motivated I get and how long I can stomach beating the dead horse that is the 2008 election) I bring you one of the more salient, yet so far underreported lessons learned from this election: that people in Alaskan are either totally in denial or completely batshit insane.

First, we got to meet their Governor, who was supposedly “the most popular governor in America” according to her constituents. However, the rest of the country didn’t take long to figure out that she a filthy liar, a political ignoramus, and an embarrassment to both her party and her running mate John McCain. Wow, great governor you got there, Alaska! You can have her back thanks!

Then of course, we learned that their senior Senator Ted Stevens was guilty of felony corruption (actually seven felonies in all). Sucks for him that his political career is over right? WRONG! Alaskans apparently don’t care about their politicians being bought and sold by energy interests because they re-elected Stevens as their Senator, as well as his crony Don Young. I guess being corrupt isn’t nearly as bad as being A SOCIALIST!

After all, Alaska is so hardline Republican that they vote the party line no matter what! They must then, of course live by their small government creed, fighting the good fight against the socialist policies of their liberal adversaries in the lower 48…oh wait, that’s right, every Alaskan, despite paying no state income tax or sales tax, receives thousands of dollars from the government for just, being Alaskan. This money comes from, you guessed it, taxes on business, specifically the oil business, taxes that Commie Killer Sarah Palin raised last year, saying “collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.” BUT WHAT ABOUT THOSE WHO WORKED SO HARD FOR IT!!111111

tl;dr Alaskans enjoy their $3600 government welfare check while voting overwhelmingly against anyone who would dare try to give ordinary Americans even a taste of such goverment-funded economic relief. Wow, thanks guys!