Atomic Dog
The 1st Annual Soy Awards
by TC

America loves award shows. The Oscars, the Emmys, the MTV Music Awards, and the VH-1 Fashion Awards always score high on the Nielsen ratings. There are so many award ceremonies now that before long, every man, woman, and child in the country will have been awarded one type of award or another.

Even the porn industry has an awards ceremony. It's called the AVN awards, and they give little statues for actors and actresses for best oral sex scene, best anal sex scene, etc. It's really quite an honor to be awarded one.

Anyhow, even I won a kind of award a few years back. It was for "Best Science Writer." It was given to me by the Academy of Bodybuilding-something-or-another, and the organization has long since disbanded due to a lack of interest (I think I got three or four votes — two from guys who owed me money — and that was enough to win). There might have been a plaque or statue or even a gift certificate to JC Penney's, but I don't know. I didn't go to the star-studded ceremony. I was afraid that bitch Joan Rivers would be there and she'd make fun of my gold poodle-fur tuxedo and matching top hat.

Given our fascination with awards, I figured it couldn't hurt to start up another one. I've decided to call it the Soy Award in "honor" of the Testosterone-sapping effects of the plant protein that's the award's namesake. The award will be given to the individual or group of individuals who best represent wussy, Testosterone-draining, estrogenic, weak-kneed, pusillanimous, narrow minded, tight-assed values.

And, unlike other awards, there's no single winner — everybody who's nominated is a wiener! Furthermore, the show goes on all year long, so that late nominees can get their share of the glory, too.

So let's tear open those envelopes!

The first Soy Award goes to the Microsoft Corporation for practicing weeniness on such a microscopic level, it makes you wonder why they even bothered. I mean, if you're going to be "politically correct," at least have the balls to do it in a grand sweeping way.

Let me explain. If you go into any version of Microsoft Word other than the most recent, type the word "fool," and then check it against the built-in Thesaurus, you'll get the following meanings and synonyms:

Dunce
Moron
Blockhead
Booby
Dolt
Dunderhead
Idiot
Ignoramus
Cheat (verb)

However, if you check the same word in their most recent edition, the program doesn't display any "offending" synonyms. Instead, it shows words like hoodwink, bamboozle, and pull the wool over someone's eyes.

And this isn't just a case of the program making a distinction between a verb and a noun, either. Some nerdy little group of Microsoft programmers, so fearful of offending some equally pussified user, got rid of all the "offensive" words. As if any idiot, moron, dolt, or ignoramus would see those words in the Thesaurus and deem them derogatory!

"Hey, Tulip, c'mere! Them folks at Microsoft's makin' fun a' me and my kin! Call up the mo-ron anti-defamation league and let's sue the bastards!"

One of the Microsoft head honchos, interviewed about the matter on National Public Radio, did a verbal backspace again and again in an effort to elude, obfuscate, confuse, bewilder, muddle, and perplex the interviewer. He acknowledged the changes, but soy boy wouldn't admit that they were made for political correctness. I guess, after 9-11, we all have to look at morons, dunderheads, and blockheads differently.

Congratulations, Microsoft, on receiving the first Soy Award of 2001!

Another richly deserved Soy Award goes to the parents of a group of Fargo, North Dakota middle school students who's little hearts were thumping in anticipation of going to see the first showing of the Harry Potter movie. Fearing the evil influences of the witchcraft portrayed in the movie, the parents raised a Holy stink and got the outing canceled.

While the parents in question deserve to have the award all to themselves, they're going to have to share it with a Canadian group that's been wallpapering car windshields in Canada with letters denouncing the same film. According to the flier, "Potter" has "dangerous implications," and it's largely responsible for causing 14 million boys and girls to join the Church of Satan.

So congratulations, incredibly stupid Canadian group and incredibly oafish Fargo parents, you've just nabbed yourself a Soy Award!

And in a beautiful little showbiz segue, I'd like to give the kids of American in general a Soy Award for all dressing up for school like little Harry Potter wizards and Muggles or whatever they're called.

You know what we called kids who wore big, round glasses and wore flowing robes and went around talking about wizards when I was in school? We called them nerds and, appropriately, we beat the tar out of them. Yeah, yeah, I'm glad that the books have caused resurgence in reading, but enough is enough. If you're gonna' dress like a fantasy figure, dress like the little feral kid in the Road Warrior, and if someone gives you shit, throw a boomerang into his skull. Anything but waving your wand and trying to turn him into a toad.

The next Soy Award, so richly deserved, goes to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for investigating ABC to see if they violated any indecency regulations for airing The Victoria's Secret Fashion Show. Hey, FCC, open up any Sunday newspaper across the country and there, for the children to see, will be underwear ads! Women with heaving breasts crammed into demi-bras and cute little thongs separating peachfuzz-covered alabaster hemispheres into east and west while the eyes wander back and forth from coast to fleshy coast.

And hey, FCC, walk down to any beach in America during the summer and you'll see more flesh than you saw on that Victoria's Secret catwalk. I can see that you might be worried about young women developing eating disorders after watching the show, but indecency? Since when is a little bit of flesh so bad?

Okay, FCC, repeat after me: Killing bad, hooters gooood. Stealing bad, booty gooood. Got the distinction? Gooood. You've also got a nice fat Soy Award.

The final Soy Award, at least for today, goes to Clear Channel Communications. For those of you who aren't aware of the insidious beast known as Clear Channel, it's a communications conglomerate that owns 1,200 radio stations across the country. They issue play lists to all of their stations, so that these stations, whether they're in Portland, Maine, or Portland, Oregon, play the same, tired old Wonder Bread music that's so tame, so mainstream, the only people who'll be jammin' to it are soccer moms hopped up on estrogen or guys who secretly read their kid's Harry Potter books.

I suspect that there's some new music out there somewhere other than that put out by Britney and Christina and Jessica, but we'll never hear it, not with corporate monsters like Clear Channel controlling the air waves. But that's not why they're getting a Soy Award.

The reason they're so richly deserving of the award is the song list these noodges compiled and distributed to their affiliates after the September 11th attacks. The list was comprised of songs that they were not to play because of "questionable lyrics." Here are some of the songs on the list:

He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother, by the Hollies
Imagine, by John Lennon
Mack the Knife, by Bobby Darin
Travelin' Man, by Ricky Nelson
What a Wonderful World, by Louis Armstrong

I guess I should say that the list also included songs that had strong connotations to the disaster, titles like Crumbling Down by John Mellencamp and Crash and Burn by Savage Garden, but in the case of the songs listed above, the connection was kind of hard to see.

Clear Channel, if you look hard enough, anything can remind you of the 9-11 disaster. Italian restaurants often use tablecloths that look like the turbans worn by members of al-Qaeda. You want all the restaurants shut down? When the girls in the afternoon aerobics class lie down to do their "belly busters," many of the sky-scraping breasts of the healthier girls can't help but remind us of the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Should we ban the aerobics classes?

You know, Clear Channel, for the most part, Americans aren't children who need to be shielded from the boogiemen. Do you really think that we're going to forget about 9-11, and that the only way we'd think about it again is because of some incidental and coincidental title or lyric that somehow ties into the World Trade Center disaster?

Clear Channel, you ain't my daddy, but you still get a nice Soy Award.

If I kept thinking about it, I bet I could give out enough Soy Awards to make a tofu banquet. There's "soy" everywhere, and it's not the domain of just liberals, but conservatives, too. Both political ideologies are guilty of attempting mind control.

Sometimes, I get so frustrated with all of it that I have to go the other way; I have to find something that's in bad taste, irreverent, or just plain raunchy to cleanse my pallet. You know, smother the soybeans with a hunk of bloody steak. Luckily, while channel flipping, I caught something that fit the bill on TNN. It was WWF wrestling. I can normally point out Stone Cold Steve Austin, the Rock, and Vince McMahon, but that's about the extent of my knowledge of the WWF. However, on this particular night, something caught my eye like a miscast fishhook. They were featuring a match between fitness competitor Trish Stratus and some bombshell named Stacy Lynn.

It was billed as a "Bra and Panty Match," and the first "combatant" to strip the other of her shirt and shorts, thus exposing her opponent's underwear, was the winner. It ended, many titillating minutes later, with Trish Stratus, stripped down to her demi-bra, ripping off Stacy Lynn's shorts to reveal the beautiful red thong underneath. Stacy was near mock exhaustion, so she lay on her stomach — ass posed perfectly — for many seconds, thus allowing the camera, and all the tens of thousands, if not millions, of "children" nationwide to feast mightily on her glorious ass.

I could feel a powerful rift in the force as thousands of teenagers across the country whacked off into their baseball caps simultaneously.

The "bloody steak," courtesy of the TNN and the WWF, helped mightily, but even so, I couldn't help thinking that while I don't believe that the FCC should go after anybody, it was just a little bit odd that they'd investigate a network for airing a decidedly tame fashion show when there are plenty of other targets that I'd guess would be more appealing to them, like bra and panty matches.

I guess there's no telling what the soy boys will do.

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