A Refresher on How to Not Be a Huge Pile of Festering Shit

Today, it came to my attention that a friend of mine from high school and her wife received a piece of hate mail. Or at least I think it was hate mail; it was only semi-literate. Apparently, the authors of this letter are in possession of a computer application wherein the end user chooses a bunch of religious words and then watches as the computer vomits a random assemblage of these words onto a piece of paper. (This application is also used to draft Tea Party speeches.) So the letter went something like this:

"God is watching satan praying for you blah blah blah"

And then, perhaps coincidentally, a collection of words resembling a sentence:

"God wants you to listen to this dvd, satan doesn't want you to."

Accompanying this letter was a DVD entitled, "Satanism and the Homosexual Agenda: A 1-Part Teaching by Pastor Joe Schimmel."

One thing I will say about the author(s) of this letter: They make my job easier. Low-hanging fruit, so to speak.

This will not be one of those columns you see where people list out all the other stuff in the Bible that modern religious extremists have chosen to ignore despite their steadfast grip on the one liner anti-gay clause in the Old Testament. This argument never works. "The Bible advocates [something ridiculous, like eating babies]! Do you do that?" LGBT advocates will say in response to the Bible-thumping homophobes. You can't go down this path. It's not helpful. Because the answer is probably yes. Bible-thumping homophobes probably do eat babies. These fuckers have some skeletons in their closets that would make Ted Bundy look like Big Bird, and no one needs to see that.

Normally I wouldn't address the authors of this letter. People who write hate mail like this and then go out of their way to obtain a DVD featuring a pastor whose name makes him sound suspiciously like a Nazi war criminal are beyond my help. They won't (can't?) read this column, and even if they did, they would denounce it as Satan's influence and send me hate mail that would probably offend me if I could muddle through all the grammatical errors.

But say that you do own nine copies of Heinrich Himmler's Joe Schimmel's one part series on Satanism and the Homosexual Agenda. And say also that you can read this (a suspicious claim at best, but fine). Here is my advice to you.

It's 2013. Get over it. Mentally, you're stuck in 1837, though honestly, for everyone's sake, I wish you were there physically, too.

Catalog, Bill, Catalog, Catalog, Postcard, Catalog, Nazi Memorabilia, Catalog - Wait. What?

A little while ago, your Aunt Slugger discussed the fact that she receives a great deal of junk mail due to the fact that she purchased a glow-in-the-dark dinosaur coin last year. The vast majority of this junk mail is comprised of advertisements for places that sell extremely weird but otherwise benign shit. Oddly enough, the coin people rarely send me junk mail and instead focus their energies on calling me, apparently on the grounds that one $35 glow-in-the-dark dinosaur coin makes me a whale in the coin collecting community.

So I was actually somewhat surprised when I opened my mailbox to discover that not only do I need a Budweiser Majestic Clydesdale Sculpture With Leather Bridle RIGHT NOW, but also that the coin people had sent me a full color glossy catalog. And I won't lie when I say the offer of the free mystery gift caught my eye.

So I start looking through this catalog, and I will admit that the blue whale titanium coin did pique my interest. And then the mystery gift on top of that? I mean - we're talking about an investment, really.

And then I turned a few pages to find this:

First - of course it was found in Texas.

And second, don't you think, if you were in the coin business, that maybe you would make your Nazi Currency Department a little less public? Like maybe you wouldn't include that set in your full color glossy catalog? Maybe you'd limit the ability to find this set on your website, perhaps by only having it pop up when people type "I heart Hitler" in the search bar? I really couldn't believe that the coin people were trying to sell me their extra-fine German Reichsmarks. I am not surprised that people collect them, because there are enough crazy people out there to make this a plausible reality. But I was surprised that the coin people were so brazen about it.

So I decided to google this phenomenon, and found myself plumbing the depths of the internet. It turns out that a lot of people collect Nazi coins and see nothing wrong with it. I think this is weird and will not hesitate to judge these people. You've also got your armchair philosophers who say things like, "Do not ponder the path that the metal content has taken since being plucked from the earth. It is not the metals fault." Or my personal favorite, "I was intrigued when I discovered that the Boy Scouts of America used the swastika symbol on many of their tokens and badges in the early 1900's. Back then it was a good luck symbol before the Nazi party adopted the same."

That makes perfect sense right there. Airtight logic. "The swastika on those WWII-era Reichsmarks with von Hindenburg's face all over them is really just a good luck symbol! You shouldn't associate it with the mass murder of millions of people! I mean, why would you? It's just a good luck symbol!"

New York Mint: Stop trying to sell me your wares, and fuck you. You lure me in with blue whales and promises of mystery gifts and then BOOM! Holocaust! A must-have for anyone who loves glow-in-the-dark dinosaur coins!

Somehow, New York Mint, you are even creepier than the Bradford Exchange.