 |
|
Jonny's Top 10 Enemies of 2017
*This is a classic running gag of the original Enemies List that fans of Star Trek: The Original Series will find hysterical. For those of you unfamiliar with this treasured tradition, the top 10 enemies of past years can be seen here: 2009 • 2010 • 2011 • 2012 • 2013 • 2014 • 2015 • 2016 For the rest of you, anxious to get this nonsense over with so you can get back to nursing your New Year's Day hangover, here are my top 10 enemies of 2017. Enjoy. 
And with that piece of housekeeping done, we can finally flush the turd of a year that 2017 was down the cosmic toilet and look afresh to 2018. If you're annoyed that you were included on this list, you have 364 days to redeem yourself before I have to put myself through this nonsense again. If you're pissed that you weren't listed, you have the same amount of time to up your game.
|
 |
And we thought 2016 was bad! This year has been a nightmare of natural disasters, political disasters, societal disasters, humanitarian disasters and racial disasters. How is it possible that a scant ten years ago we had a guy in the Oval Office who I thought was the worst president in history, yet the moron who's in there now makes him look like Abraham Lincoln by comparison? It got so bad that I resurrected my long-dormant Enemies List in January, only to get so depressed that I stopped publishing it again in June. But lest you people think that I had given up keeping track on you, you're in for a rude awakening. My operatives (some of whom are Vulcan)* have continued to compile a database of the nimrods who have gotten on my bad side throughout the year, and the results aren't pretty. So, as a public service, I have determined it necessary to continue the beloved tradition of putting out a year-end list of the ten people or things that have annoyed me the most in 2017. It wasn't easy to whittle it down but I accomplished it, as usual, with my trademark wit and panache.
10. The great Frances Fisher, who came in at #6 on last year's list. In this year of the #metoo movement, I came in for a lot of heat for my delightful habit of sexually objectifying my female Facebook friends (who in real life wouldn't touch me with a ten-foot pole that was encased in four Durex condoms) on my signature faux pulp fiction novel covers. Perhaps my most controversial subject was Ms. Fisher, an outspoken supporter of #metoo who is, nevertheless, my preferred celebrity crush and therefore found herself depicted as being slobbered on by yours truly on more of my masterpieces than anyone else. But the eloquent protestations of the #metoo movement have forced me to rethink my ways and I hereby vow that I wall stop making images of ladies such as Ms. Fisher (regardless of how hot they are) being hit on by a grotesque human being like myself, and will instead only depict images that have them coming onto me. It will be a bitter pill to swallow but it's the only way I'll learn.
9. Lisa Glass, who was my #8 enemy last year and slipped a notch only because she gradually gave up confronting me in the flesh towards the end of the summer as she disappeared more and more into her real career of attacking Donald Trump's presidency on social media. Therefore, the delight I took in not seeing Ms. Glass in person was quickly supplanted by my irritation at being inundated with her bleeding heart, Hillary-worshipping agenda every time I open Twitter to see what's doing with my beloved Internet porn stars. It's not that I take issue with anything she tweets; it's just that I find the fact that pearls of wisdom that I actually agree with are coming out of Ms. Glass to be even more annoying. If there's one thing more irksome than a deranged, egomanical lunatic tweeting out misspelled inanities that he doesn't realize represent official U.S. policy as soon as he clicks the "Tweet" button, it's an army of chain-smoking yentas led by Ms. Glass prepared to jump down his orange throat the second his idiocy appears on their Twitter feed. If there's anything worse than a yammering yenta let loose in cyberspace, it's a yenta who's got righteousness on her side. It's extremely rare but when it happens, it's a nightmare.
8. Lacie Harmon and Robin Greenspan, who just managed to make the list at #10 last year and have been gradually crawling up my ass ever since. Labin rose to fame as the stars of the "Lacie and Robin" 
7. My longtime irritant Glenn "Piece of Shit" Simon, who skipped town this year, moving his Trump-sized ass to picturesque Seattle, Washington. I had always assumed that when Mr. Simon ultimately went on the lam, it would be with some branch of the federal government hot of his heels. Instead, he skipped town with his implausibly hot girlfriend with the idea of settling down in marital bliss. It's not they I never thought of Mr. Simon as the marrying kind (this won't be the first time he's walked down the aisle, and the smart money says it won't be his last). But I was expecting the woman Mr. Simon settled down with at this stage in his life to have bio-mass of a similar ratio to Jack Black (and with even more facial hair) and a vocabulary that was limited to the Smolensk dialect of Southern Russia. The fact that he's entering his Golden Years with a chick straight out of Perfect 10 Magazine convinces me that either A) there is no God or B) there is a God and He is squarely in the corner of Mr. Simon. Either eventuality scares the living hell out of me and makes me dislike Mr. Simon even more than I did before, which is a bold statement.
6. Most of my fans know David Pinion from my descriptions of the grotesque tattoo of a scrotum carved into his forehead. That alone should be enough for him to be placed on his list, but you people don't know a tenth of the disturbing reality that I shield you from. I have the misfortune to brunch with Mr. Pinion regularly, and I never know what to expect when he plops his lumpy ass across from me as I'm trying to enjoy my vegetarian omelet. For example, one time Mr. Pinion – who lists "actor" among the many shady occupations he engages in to fund his various nefarious projects – arrived at the restaurant with each of his fingers wrapped in electrical tape. I had naturally assumed he was trying out some kinky trend that increased the thrill of masturbation, but he explained that he was taking a break filming a web series that morning (the latest entertainment craze that allows performers to work for no money) playing a drug dealer, and would return to the set after he finished with us. The tape, apparently, was a peccadillo of the trade he was adopting to give his character authenticity. When we suggested he take off the goddamned tape so he could eat his breakfast burrito, he reacted as if we'd asked John Hurt to scrape off his Elephant Man makeup and steadfastly refused, negotiating his food with the dexterity of a man who'd just been fitted with prosthetic hooks. I could go on, but there's really no point – much like there's no point to Mr. Pinion.
5. Bro Joe, who enhanced his outdoorsman image by embracing an institution known as The Junior Rangers, a gimmick created by the US Park Services for small children in which the tykes fill out a questionnaire and then perform some nature-related task like climb a nearby rock or wrestle a grizzly bear to the death, for which they receive a nifty plastic badge. It's meant for the kiddies to develop a healthy interest in the parks system but Joe has become one of the three or four adults in the world obsessed with collecting the medallion, even going so far as to track down a badge given by the New Zealand park system during a recent trip down under and insisting that they mail him the insignia after he completed the assigned tasks and no one manning the visitors bureau desk knew what he was talking about when he asked for it. This string of embarrassments led to my creating a series of "Junior Ranger" pulp fiction covers in which Ranger Joe is placed in an array of life-threatening adventures, all of which he is sadly able to worm his way out of. Joe frequently bitches that my illustrations are not accurate depictions of the Junior Ranger creed and lifestyle, but I don't care. If I have to see a man in his late middle age walking around wearing plastic merit badges, it lowers my blood pressure a little to imagine that he had to wrestle a man-eating tiger to the death to get it.
4. My beloved pug Winston, who screwed me over by dying on me on October 17th. I've always known that getting a pet was a tragedy in the making and Winston's demise was no surprise, with the last months of his life marked by a major operation and a gradual decline in his motor abilities that left him unable to walk (it was a real thrill carrying him from tree to tree in the final weeks of his life in the slender hope that he would deposit some urine on it and not my wall-to-wall shag). But I (along with the rest of his legion of fans) was crushed when the Grim Reaper finally claimed him, especially when I realized that my entire social universe orbited around Winston and when he shed this mortal coil, so did any human contact I might hope for to make my cold and lonely nights bearable. I have no doubt that Winston is somewhere in Doggy Heaven dancing a conga line as I write this but that doesn't do me any good when I'm forced to troll the dog parks carrying a plush Snoopy doll to make it look like I belong there. Winston was a one-of-a-kind miracle from heaven but my understanding with him was that he was going to live forever and when he failed to live up to his part of the deal, he was dead to me (figuratively and literally). Be that as it may, on particularly stressful days you might find me hiding under a pillow fort cuddling with the urn that contains his ashes. That's nobody's business but mine.
3. Donald Trump. I know a lot of you were expecting to see this asshole in the number one spot but I just couldn't give him the satisfaction of being on top, even though he hasn't made a move this year that I didn't find appalling. From placing nothing but corrupt incompetents on his cabinet, to championing a terrible tax plan that benefits only himself and a tiny fraction of ultra-rich donors while the rest of the nation goes in hock, to blithely claiming that he would repeal and replace ObamaCare with "something terrific" only to have nothing when it actually came time to put up or shut up, to putting on a show of incompetence in assisting Puerto Rico following the devastation of Hurricane Irma and then having the audacity to grade himself a "10 out of 10" for his ineptitude, to making everyone afraid to look at their Twitter feed because of his knack of topping one embarrassing tweet with another, this idiot has made a career of chipping away at whatever national pride the citizens of the United States once felt for their country. When I was a little boy, the presidency was thought of as a institution that was regarded with respect even if you didn't care for the person who was currently filling it. Nixon irreparably damaged that that perception but Trump (who is pictured here by the hilariously ugly automaton that represents him in Disney's Hall of Presidents) has dragged it through the mud and left it in tatters in less than a year. I'm not sure what the idiots who voted for him expected by casting the ballots to the highest office in the land for the guy who founded Trump Steaks and shattered the record held by George W. Bush of Most Businesses Fucked Up Prior to taking the Presidency, but I do remember being at a party with one guy last September who told me he was voting for Trump "because it will be so entertaining." I hope the asshole is amused as hell when the Menace in Chief drops a nuclear bomb on North Korea.
2. God, who was my number one enemy in 2016 but slipped to the second spot this year. I hold Jehovah accountable not only for the eight nightmares that preceded him on this list, but on all the natural disasters that kept me awake at night throughout the year. If it wasn't an earthquake in Mexico, it was a monsoon in Bangladesh. There were mudslides in Colombia, flooding in Sierra Leone, and Hurricanes Irma and Harvey in the USA and Caribbean, all of which happened on God's watch. I'm starting to think that the loving, benevolent deity of the New Testament was just a temp worker and the angry God of the Old Testament is finally back from vacation and more pissed off than ever after he found out what we were up to while he was getting his groove back at a Sandals resort. If one of Trump's more asinine tweets is followed by a plague of locusts, you might want to start dragging your first-born sons up a mountaintop to perform some ritual sacrifices. This has all been played out before and it wasn't pretty the first time.
1. The FCC who – led by their appallingly obnoxious chairman Ajit Pai – voted to eliminate net neutrality, the principle that Internet service providers should enable access to all content and applications regardless of the source, and without favoring or blocking particular products or websites. The absence of net neutrality means that the greatest bandwidth will go to the websites with the deepest pockets, and for someone like me who spends 16-20 hours a day looking at free Internet porn, that's going to be a disaster. I access literally hundreds of free porn websites on a weekly basis to satisfy my insatiable cyber-mojo, and if I have to start shilling out thirty-five to fifty bucks for monthly membership fees so so I can download a German Scheisse video in less than half an hour, I'll soon be as financially solvent as Wesley Snipes. Mr. Pai tries to downplay his Darth Vader-like personality with corny props like an oversized Reese's Peanut Butter Cup coffee mug, but it's pretty obvious that he represent the interests of the Dark Side of The Force and he'd damned well better keep his alt-right mitts off of our free Internet porn if he knows what's good for him. For a political party that claims the less government, the better, they sure are going out of their way to make Trump's enormous ass a roadblock of my YouTube searches for the word "lesbian."