BY ARTHUR LIPSTEIN

I just have to ask, in the past several days, have any of you people taken even a minute away from discussing Miley Cyrus’s outrageous performance at Sunday’s MTV Video Music Awards and Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons against his own people, to think about my, Arthur Lipstein’s, upcoming 32nd birthday?

Yeah, and I’ll tell you what, I’m not sorry for bringing it up either; it is literally beyond me to understand, with all this talk of ‘twerking’ and ‘Miley Cyrus’s ass’ and ‘whether Miley Cyrus is a good role model’ and ‘does Disney exploit child performers’ and ‘what is wrong with Taylor Swift’ and ‘are we turning a blind eye to massive human rights violations in Syria’, how there has been not even a mention of how you’re planning to help me celebrate my birthday.

Nothing from my friends. Nothing from my family. Nothing from my colleagues at Applebee’s. Just nonstop, uninterrupted ‘Miley’, and ‘Taylor’, and ‘Harry Styles’, and ‘Lady Gaga’, and ‘Will Smith’, and ‘can America once again stand as a beacon of freedom for oppressed people around the world’.

So listen up everyone, I’m only going to say this once: I expect a birthday party on my birthday, and I expect it to be really, really fun. I want there to be balloons, I want there to be hamburgers, I want there to be cake, and so help me God if one of you even mentions the current diplomatic quagmire of whether the US should act unilaterally in Syria, given both China and Russia would almost certainly veto any multilateral UN Security Council resolution, well, I think it’s safe to assume you won’t be invited to any more of my birthdays.

– Arthur Lipstein

Do you even realize my birthday’s coming up? – (AP Photo)

(L&B)

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