An unreported quote

In 2002 the Complete and Total Loser worked in a branch of a major news agency. Some months after September 11 of the previous year, there was a

Andreas Lubitz

minor incident at the international airport in the Loser's home city. A pilot, angry at the then overly stringent, since relaxed, rules about what you can take on airplanes, was angry at having an object that meant something to him confiscated by airport security.
The story that ran said he had said something threatening and been taken into custody because of it, the flight delayed for several hours as a substitute was found. 
What the pilot said was never reported, but the reporter who covered the incident told the Loser what it was and it was this: "I could crash this plane in my underwear."
That is, as we've all been painfully reminded, to true. 

Old snow globe

The Complete and Total Loser bought this snow globe in 1973 while in New York City with a friend. The twin towers of the World Trade Center were completed in April of that year and, as everyone knows, destroyed in an attack by Saudi Arabian terrorists on this date in 2001.
In this forty-year-old snow globe, they remain standing.

The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City.

Iraq + 10

No one ever listens to the Complete and Total Loser, but if they had in 2003 thousands more Americans and Iraqis would be alive today.
He knew there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that Saddam Hussein had no intention or desire to attack the west. The Loser also knew that the September 11 terrorist were not Iraqi but, for the most part, Saudis, and that the two nations are discrete entities. He could tell from the overheated rhetoric ("we don't want the smoking gun to come in the form of a mushroom cloud"), motivation (the son finishes what his father didn't by capturing Hussein), and the timing (well positioned for the '04 election campaign) were all suspect. 

You look at this man's face for two seconds and know he's clueless about everything.

The Loser also wasn't surprised that the press, as much as they disliked G.W. Bush, played cheerleader for the Iraq invasion. The internet had begun to nibble at print journalism's fatty flanks, and nothing sells newspapers better than bold headlines of war news. And what young reporter who's never experienced war doesn't see himself (they're still usually a he) as a dashing war correspondent, making his bones filing reports wearing body armor? A war, they think, will snap me out of this deadline-driven complacency. It'll give me a chance to be another Norman Mailer, Tim O'brien, Mark Bowden, Karl Marlantes or even -- dare he say it aloud? -- Hemingway ...
The whole thing was ginned up, fake, and lots of people who had access to rafters they should have been shouting it from failed to utter a peep.
The Loser knew it right away. But as he said, no one ever listens to the Complete and Total Loser.

My Favorite 9/11 Joke

Hundreds have asked The Complete and Total Loser for his favorite joke about September 11, 2001. 
He doesn't have one. Even though he knew no one killed or even injured in the attacks, despite his living just two hours from New York City, even though his sense of humor often leans toward the shocking, even though most of his few friends would forgive such a joke, and even though he finds most of the measures and opinions that have come up since worthy of derision, the Loser can't find anything comic in the day and he never will.
P.S.: Have you noticed that the moronic conspiracy buffs are quieter than usual this year? Perhaps they realize that their page has turned ...

A dog practices sniffing for bomb material at a big-city train station. Looking for bombs. At a train station.

It's 9/11

Unsuccessful in everything, the Complete and Total Loser was an unsuccessful journalist from the mid 1990s to 2002, when he pulled the plug on his career, having reached as his highest level the position of editorial assistant for a wire service. 

On 9/11/01, the Loser was hard at work, doing his menial tasks like cutting his bettors's stories from regional newspapers to put in their mail boxes, a morale-building duty. One of the bureau's four televisions was tuned to CNN, which carried early footage of the first plane's hit. (Over the next 20 minutes the other televisions would carry the same feed.) The bureau chief was on the phone talking to the service's headquarters, which is in New York.

"Amazing, this plan hitting the World Trade Center, isn't it?" he said to a head news editor on the phone he called daily to touch base with regarding stories they may take from the Loser's branch. The woman hadn't heard. She stuttered and hung up.

Not long after the second plane hit, the Loser's superiors told him to go to the airport and phone in quotes from stranded passengers and airport PR. The Loser boarded a train, rode it for fifteen minutes, and spent the next twelve hours at the airport, wandering the long corridors until his feet ached. He got no information of any value, but he was not called back to the branch. The staffers were probably glad to be rid of him for the day.

A few hours into his stint, a woman pushing a cart bearing bottled water and snacks came by. She was handing them out to trapped travelers. The Loser asked her about her task and she told him such things were done by the airport when planes were stalled due to bad weather. 

Reporters are not to take gifts, even small ones, from anyone involved in something they're covering. The Loser was good about this, but he did accept a small bottle of water from the woman. He put it in his jacket pocket in case he got thirsty later. He didn't, and he ended up taking it home, where he put it in his cupboard. The events of that awful day tainted the water, and the Loser never drank it or disposed of it. 

What happens to bottled water over a decade? The water escapes through osmosis and the container begins to collapse. 

A ten-year-old bottle of Poland Spring bottled water on a windowsill much older than it is.

Conspiracy Buffs (Poem)

Area 51 is home
Of aliens quite outrageous.
Half the nation worked alone
To make Kennedy uncontagious.
Dollar bills and secret shakes
Are how Freemasons talk
About making sure Hostess cakes
Control minds (thanks, Jonas Salk!).
We buffs know that eleven, September
Was a planned out plot.
The motive’s something we can’t remember,
But that don’t matter a lot.
We know what we know, we’re smarter than you,
We know the means and ends.
But though smart we need a clue
On getting girlfriends.