He's played a kindly convict, Nelson Mandela and even a mop-pushing God. On the other hand, the world was obliterated by a comet under his presidency. Yes, Morgan Freeman's record is decidedly mixed, yet we still look to him for comfort and authority in a topsy-turvy world.

But for his latest movie, we should bury Grandpa Gravitas' film career like the directions to Zihuatanejo that Tim Robbins left him in the sex orchard.

"Dolphin Tale" is a blatant piece of propaganda designed to brainwash the impressionable masses into believing that history's greatest sea monsters are not only their BFFs, but also inspiring cripples.

Dolphins have never lacked for savvy PR, making high-priced lobbying shops on K Street look as bloated, ineffective and glitter-strewn as Newt Gingrich. From Flipper, "the aquatic Lassie," to overblowholed stories about dolphins saving stranded sailors, these warm-blooded wankers have captured the imaginations and consciences of Americans too dumb to realize that permanent smiles are creepy, not cute. Slight chance that your tuna sandwich has bits of dolphin in it? Just convince the tuna industry to adopt a much more destructive fishing method!

Far from paragons of virtue, dolphins are closer to your average Oakland Raiders fan.  The motherflippers are known to gang rape both male and female dolphins and have "perfected the art to a degree unseen in any other species." They beat up porpoises, allegedly because they're "sexually frustrated," and according to a documentary about the social structure of dolphins, they would challenge humanity if their more charismatic leaders were freed from captivity. Any animal that arouses Harry Connick Jr. or fits R. Kelly's requirements for a wingman should immediately be placed on an FBI watch list.

Westerners need to get over their boner for hyper-intelligent animals, from the Ted Bundys of the ocean to Andy Serkis. The latest Science Loser Who Doomed Us All is even trying to establish "real-time two-way communication" with dolphins, to tempt the blubbery buggers into squeaking their sick fantasies at us. Here's a suggestion on getting a dolphin's interest: Log into MySpace as TweenageDream and post a request to meet "open-minded grownups."

If we're going to indulge our whitebread fetish for something, let's make it multiculturalism and go dolphishing in Taiji, Japan. I'm sure Dick Cheney is available.

The world is changing around us, but you can always count on one thing to stay the same: Americans of a certain age suck at reading the Bible out loud. They tend to be the ones who know the Bible.

You’d think the nation founded by a bunch of prudes fleeing their less-prudish rulers, creator of the First Amendment equally beloved of pornographers and cults, would excel at speaking God's Word in public, mellifluous as a Bieber ballad.  Scripture is full of references to prophets, Jesus and even Satan quoting Scripture, unrolling scrolls and eating scrolls. Reading the Bible aloud in the days before G-berg, like my favorite waste of White House space in his Grammy-winning spoken word album, used to be your ticket out of sharecropping or refereeing a WNBA game.

Add 20 years of the information revolution and you have an entire generation that talks faster than Andy Dick and sounds about as coherent. This deficiency shows up most glaringly in Bible studies.

I don't doubt the sincerity of my fellow religionizers when they struggle to make it through two verses of a Gospel translated into English as understood in 1978.  They talk in vague but heartfelt terms about God’s provision in their lives, care for each other and show more tolerance of others than most pagans I know.  But hand them a book they’ve spent years reading on a near-daily basis and watch them butcher it worse than Christina at the Super Bowl.

“Now a man of the tribe of...Levee married a Leveet woman and ... oh wait … she became pregnant and gabirtoason when she. Saw that he was a fine child. She hid him for thirty months. Do I keep reading? Oh, OK. I got lost. (hee hee) But when she could hit him no longer, she got a paperous basket for him and coated it with tar … uh … tar and (squinting) oh, pitch! (hee hee).”

How the hallelujah did you make it through college?  Are you a University of Phoenix grad?

As the Apostle Paul said, a man who can speak in the tongues of angels, but has not love, is a resounding gong.  I would rather spend two hours with Rip Taylor, a gong and a decibel-activated confetti cannon aimed at my tuchus than listen to you speed-gurgle through Corinthians 13.

You are God's representative on earth, young, hipster Christian.  And when you don't bother to learn how to speechify 10-point font in a medium devoid of Megan Fox pictorials, it reflects poorly on those of us who bring skeptics to our gatherings to see God’s people without the media filter.

I'm not asking for a Toastmasterization of the pews -- just some basic coordination between eyes, brain and mouth.  Like your mother last night.

Ever since the first man listened to his ditzy wife and chomped some fruit from Clint Eastwood’s tree, dooming the human race to be clothed in public and wear ridiculous pajamas to bed, we’ve been wearing dead animals in some form.  Despite the efforts of groups trying to make these corpses more fashionable by sprinkling them with paint, Western society has recoiled of late from the “natural” look, preferring to wear synthetic or even psychedelic furs.

Nothing captures the post-Christian, Lemonish desire to “have it all,” though, quite like the panda hat.

I don’t know when these adorable emblems of laziness got their cultural cachet - they seemed to spring up all around me, like a group of 12-year-old boys around Megan Fox, as soon as the weather dipped into the 30s.  A cast member on last season’s  “The Real World,” source of the do-nothing celebrity, became known as “Panda” for his panda hat, but MTV long ago shuffleboarded its influence from the “Gossip Girl” demographic to the AARP set.  Personally I blame Japan, though my Los Angeles-based co-writer Jeremiah, married to an anime freak, claims to be unaware of any such bamboo-chewing bandwagon in balmy Tinseltown.

Whatever the cause, this pandamonium has gotten out of control, and it’s time to clearcut the cultural thicket surrounding the hattification of Ailuropoda melanoleuca.

Sure, it starts cute, as a few quirky teens and administrative assistants don the black-and-white babushkas to signify that racial harmony is always “on their mind.”  Next, the hats get adopted by unpopular girls who are too timid to post a rambling YouTube video proclaiming their indelible cuteness despite a low-nutrition diet, mascara-lacquered eyes and sedentary lifestyle.  Before we know it, professional women are wearing the noggin nuzzlies to board meetings, court hearings and Unitarian ordinations.

What do we see in these harlequinned heavies anyway? Despite their knowledge of sexual harassment law and ability to prick the conscience of the rapacious ChiComs, pandas are really just welfare bears.  They can’t move beyond a narrow geographical area and they have no energy to do anything more than eat stomach-wrenching comfort food all day.  And thanks to enterprising labor policies, these welbears are nearly extinct.  As a coldhearted conservationist lamented, “people always have this rather peculiar affinity with the big blubbery things.”

This desire to look cute and forsake all responsibility is what underlies America’s social decline.  Like a dexterous rat marionetting a clueless chef, panda hats ass-ride their human drones to Pandorrah.

Women of liberty, throw off the accountrements of the ursinine!  Unbear your soul!  Ooh, is that a Hello Kitty hat?

False pockets, like false doors, documents, and Christs, are an abomination from Satan and must be stopped. When you need a space to hold business cards, pens, singles for the ladies at Live! Nude! Girls!, or just a lonely hand when the requirements of low temperatures force you to protect your digits from the cold or prying creeps who are only interested in your body, pockets are the protectors and keepers of our collective fates.

We place value in the hidden, like Paul's secret shame or a nerd's Nirvana; the promise of a pocket is the promise of protection and preservation. Even lacking possessions, a man's pocket is his own, and is sacrosanct. One feels pockets are needed, even if one has nothing to put in them.

That is why false pockets are so hatefully and morally corrupt. Like the Obama adminstration, false pockets deceive with the promise of openness, but the veneer is painfully and obviously that: a door that opens into a brick wall, a mythical lamp with no genie, an LA street with no drainage.

What is worse is when false pockets aren't actually false at all, but are sown shut. What the hell are we supposed to do with a pocket that's been sown shut? Manufacturers insist the pockets themselves are not false at all, but are merely sown shut for sale to retain shape. I call shenanigans. What shape? It's a pocket, not a balloon animal. A pocket's shape has nothing to do with its opening being shuttered. And in the layman's defense, what other item of clothing requires the systematic destruction of tailoring to enable functionality? It's like requiring the mirror on the Hubble to be scrubbed free of black paint off the facing before using, or putting legal notices in emails.

I suppose the sown pocket prevents wily customers from placing items in the jacket pockets, such as fecal matter or used tissues, but then again, the kind of customers who shop at suit stores aren't typically the kind who also play middle school pranks on suit shop owners.

Cheap suits that feature a Gob (that is, a Poof! cover, AKA a disgraceful illusion) are responsible for thousands of hopeful Turks' diminished hopes and dreams as they dress to impress on a budget, but are met with the futile fingering of a Planned Parenthood Pocket--a foetal fold snuffed shut before it was given a chance to hold something, anything.

Beware the false pockets in your midst, and don't be entrapped by the appearance of a good slot of fabric, lest you be consumed by the Tailor of Justice, the Sew-er and Reaper of Men's Souls.

The purpose of unions being to protect people with no skills from competition, grocery workers in the Seattle area nearly went on strike before Thanksgiving to protest pay and benefit cuts.  Holidays without sushi and wine by the glass at QFC?  Bereft of broccolini at Safeway? My pale-skinned brethren, tote bags in hand and Nissan Leafs on backorder, shuddered in their ugly sweaters at the thought.

Me? I couldn't care less. Having paddled the yellow river for years now, I've learned that Asian grocery stores invariably have better prices than super- and other markets catering to the vanity and neuroses of whites.

Western civilization invented the psychological markup, and it makes me hate whites.

Perusing the aisles at the HT Oaktree Market, I can feel my blood start to boil, realizing how many Jacksons I've wasted at stores owned by The (Melanin-Deficient) Man over the years when I could have tossed off Hamiltons. Thick leafy greens for $1.30 a pound instead of $3? Red bell peppers by the pound at all, and only $1.50 at that?  Even a giant bag of tortilla chips for $1.50, and big tortillas half the price of where you get your “ingredients for life” - more like "ingenious for lies" - this place with roasted ducks hanging in the window has a great selection of ethnic foods in general. Since my little lotus flower started bribing me to take her here on a regular basis, I've been eating not only healthier but cheaper.

If the whites kept their stores to themselves, I'd be fine with this bifurcated bilking. But look no further than Seattle's best-known Asian grocery store to see the neoconservative, colonizing impulse of whites at its worst.

Freshman year at any local university isn't complete without a trip to Uwajimaya, the closest thing to a Whole Foods in the euphemised International District south of downtown.  Not only ducks in the window but pho at the counter and enough varieties of sake to stock the karaoke suite at a Toyota-Suzuki merger gala, Uwajimaya draws a Smörgåsbord of SUVs every weekend.  Imagine the shopping frenzy in the opening scene of “Jingle All the Way,” that wonderfully rich Schwarzenegger-Sinbad joint, with smelly durian fruit instead of scented dolls.

Uwajimaya's owners understand that Asian culture is nearly as popular as “snuggie sex” in the pantheon of white fetishes. To make whites feel comfortable, though, the store has to look as white as possible. This means putting ritzy apartments on top, selling organic produce, and jacking up prices on everything.  It pays for the general scentlessness of the store, in contrast to its lowbrow cousins, and suggests to lawyer-doctor couples that their purchases have gone through more inspections than mail from Yemen.

If you want cheap Asian groceries, or even decent Chinese food, you have to trek to the nether border regions, like Taliban fleeing the marauding forces of the West. Congratulations, White Metropolis - you've turned me into a pale, full-beard version of Khalid Sheik Mohammed.

Image courtesy of Giavasan

Standing ovations are basically an orgy of mutual masturbation, but due to public decency laws have taken the form of, well, standing and clapping. Think about it. Everyone stands at attention, stroking the artists'... egos. It makes you feel good. It makes the performer feel good. Everyone is privy to the happiness and elation of everyone around them, and each also has a private sensation of pleasure, and unless you're doing it wrong, the payoff at the end is a climax of clapping that results in the orgasmic encore...

Okay, so the metaphor is a bit stretched. So try this on for size.

Standing ovations suck. They sap the event of its spontaneity, since they are now the par dessert of any social evening; they are expected and even anticipated, and thus disingenuous. What once was a signal that the audience recognized and rewarded the impressive talents of the evening has become passé, empty of meaning and divorced of all original intent.

It is the stillborn fetus of the evening; yes, it comes out, but it is pretty bloody useless as well as tragic.

The theory goes, standing ovations are the mark of respect by the audience on behalf of the performer for an unusually brilliant performance. But in this age of Twitter and dwindling newspaper revenues and burst housing bubbles, the fact that anyone even came to the performance should be a mark of respect and admiration. When ticket sales for philharmonics, operas, and theatrical performances have plummeted and funding for the arts has dwindled into a wasted uranium slag stream, it would seem the occasion for standing ovation should be the audience actually showing up, and if anyone should stand, it would be the performers, and they should do so as the audience enters the auditorium. The correct accolade should be, "Thanks for showing up and subsidizing us!"

But that's pretending there's worth in the audience, a sad myth entrapping both sides. There is no worth in the people filling the seatholes of the latest rendering of Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 4 or the laughing hoi polloi at Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.

Standing ovations tax the already burdened audience member, who must contend with his own cultural ignorance as he tries to ascertain whether the performance was A) actually good; and B) that he understood it. On top of that, the ignoramus is now faced with the frightening prospect: Do I stand with the rest of the sheeple or should I sit and proffer my disdain for outmoded social conventions and earn the ire of my fellow attendees? It is a quandary that would vex even the most cultured patron of the arts, much less the brainless masses who dress to impress and show the world they are aware because they read the Calendar section of the Los Angeles Times.

What's even worse is the ovation grudgingly given by an audience too dumb or too bored but also too cowardly not to shut the hell up and just leave. When the performance is not the greatest thing since that threesome in Cancun you had in college, then half-heartedly clapping a few times isn't doing anyone any favors.

Ovations should be returned to the place of ancient but outdated traditions, alongside the sacrificial virgins and Masses spoken only in Latin. Stand up to this stupid custom by staying in your seat. Unless you just don't know what the hell is going on.