Thursday, June 05, 2008

 

Long Range Planning and Dead Ends

I like to think that I take the long view of life, I see the big picture. I try not to let the splendor of the moment interfere with my obsession with eternal nothingness and death—whichever of those comes first. I think that enjoying the present gets in the way of my far-sighted goal of building a pyramid to honor my legacy when I am gone. I'm making it out of plastic water bottles so it won't erode like those low-rent pyramids made of stone.

I was worrisome even as a first grader. I remember my first trip to the school nurse after I cut my knee sliding after a ball on the asphalt playground. Most kids may have been concerned that the injury I received may have needed stitches. I asked the nurse to answer a simple question for me and not sugar-coat it: Even with this rather unsightly gash on my knee, would I still be able to have an open casket at my funeral, whenever that might be? If my injury would require that I be cremated, I don't know how I would be able to break this disappointing news to my parents. They just wanted the best for me and now another dream of theirs was shattered.

I just read a science article about how the universe is going to end. How am I supposed to act out this charade of a life even when we know that so little time is left? Scientists say we only have something like 15-20 billions years. I'm a realist so this probably means 15 billion years, tops. The Pollyanna's predicting 20 billion years just seem like hippie dreamers to me. I may as well max out a couple more credit cards; I won't be around to worry about paying them off thanks to this whole reverse big bang thing. I'll get a couple of pay movie channels while I'm at it. Fuck it, what's the difference?.

I was supposed to get a haircut today but why bother? I'll bet that even those plucky band members on the Titanic didn't bother getting a haircut after the shit hit the fan. Between sets the musicians probably took advantage of the Titanic's little-known post-iceberg-collision, open bar policy (as sad and depressing as it is to consider the fate of those valiant performers, I take comfort in the fact that since this was in 1912, at least they didn't have to play Hotel California). If there was any sort of decency in the world we'd have an open bar here on earth while we're sitting around waiting for the universe to come crashing in on us like a galactic tsunami. Instead, I'll cash in my retirement and just settle for happy hour somewhere. I hope there's a game on while I'm waiting.

I hate it that you have to buy 10-15 minute blocks of time at most parking meters. 10-15 minutes? Don't they know about the collapsing universe? Why can't you buy parking in increments of 10-15 seconds? What kind of person can plan ahead 15 minutes in these times of uncertainty and rapid change? I would feel like such a fucking idiot if I put 15 minutes worth of change in the meter and then an asteroid crashed into me at Starbucks. If I come back to my car and there is time left I will sit and listen to the radio until the meter expires. If I paid for it I'm going to use it.

For lack of a better metaphor let's just say that when the meter runs out for us in the universe you can be sure that tickets will be issued, there will be a fines to pay—at least if you believe in religion. I suppose that being an atheist is the moral equivalent of not paying for parking and gambling that there isn't a meter maid on duty.

Labels: Humor

9:18 AM

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Thursday, May 01, 2008

 

What Would John Gotti Do?
(After garroting them with piano wire and stuffing the body in a wood chipper)

All of us have our moments of indecision and self doubt, times when we feel lacking in the clarity of vision necessary to carry out important tasks. Asking for divine guidance always has seemed to be a complete waste of time and rarely offered the type of solutions you really thought the situation warranted. What would Jesus do? Turn the other cheek? Love thy neighbor? Dude, you are killing me with this passive-aggressive shit. What the hell kind of advice is that when you have a business to run? Jesus would be laughed out of every boardroom in the country. No, if you are like me you are looking for advice that is a little more practical for the modern world. Things are a lot tougher now than back when Jesus was a self-help guru. I feel that for the 21st century we need a new iconic figure to give us counsel in our times of need.

John Gotti lived a life every bit as humble as that of Jesus, at least when he was confined to a 7 X 8 cell at the United States Penitentiary at Marion, Illinois. Humility is a bit over-rated, in my opinion, and humility isn´t going to make your “little problem” with the Cali Cartel go away, not unless “Humility” is the name of a new, semi-automatic assault rifle. What Gotti has that Jesus lacks is authority—authority and pinky rings. Gotti is just the man to turn to for advice on everything from business tactics to gardening secrets (just don´t dig down too deep in that part of the garden unless you´re looking for some teeth).

Even if you aren´t holding the reigns of a violent criminal empire, you stand to benefit from our radio call-in show, What would John Gotti do? (after garroting them with piano wire and throwing the body in a wood chipper). His step-by-step formulas could be the answer to all of your problems. Here are a few questions taken directly from callers just like you:

One of my top lieutenants is going to rat me out to the FBI. How should I handle this?

What would John Gotti do? (after garroting them with piano wire and throwing the body in a wood chipper)
First of all, take a deep breath and count to ten. Remember, never act out of anger. Next, be sure to wash out the wood chipper with bleach so as to destroy any traces of your lieutenant´s DNA.

I think that one of my employees is stealing office supplies but I can´t prove it. It isn´t much, a stapler here, a printer cartridge there, but it´s starting to add up. What should I do?

What would John Gotti do? (after beating them to death with a tire iron and throwing the body in a shallow grave)
Make sure that you are in Florida when it goes down. Keep all of your receipts so you can prove it to the feds when they come sniffing around, fucking pricks.

My neighbor´s dog always takes a dump in my yard and he never cleans up after it. How can I get this to stop?

What would John Gotti do? (after throwing them down an open elevator shaft and dumping the body in a trash compactor)
Volunteer to help him look for his dog when it goes missing. He won´t suspect nothin´.

Stop whining and start acting like a goombah. Your troubles aren´t going to just disappear, but throwing things in a wood chipper almost makes them disappear.

Labels: Humor

12:05 PM

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Friday, April 25, 2008

 

Gym Teachers in the Mist: A Zoological Exploration of One of Mankind´s Closest Relatives

08:20 First Period. We must be very quiet so as not to disturb our sleeping subject. Studies indicate that this particular primate sub-species is dormant for about 80% of the traditional high school work day. He looks so peaceful in repose even though it is a fairly awkward position: leaning back in a folding chair with one hand down the front of his shorts and a newspaper in his lap. But on the far end of the gym floor savannah trouble is brewing. Another lower primate species, called stoners, are planning an attack on gym teacher. A basketball is launched through the air. Violence may ensue so we abandon the observation area and move farther away from the subject.

Even at this distance we are able to document the crude verbal communication system employed by gym teacher: A primitive dialect consisting almost entirely of vulgarities and sports aphorisms. Gym teacher screeches at the other primates on the savannah and threatens to castrate the guilty parties but is unable to identify his attackers. Because of the gym teacher´s extremely basic level of intelligence, he is unable to deduct that those laughing the loudest at this prank are probably responsible. After a minute of angry howling and breast-beating, the gym teacher returns to his lair in the corner and picks up his newspaper which has been scattered in the attack. He turns to the sports section and if you didn´t know that they lack the intelligence for it, it almost seems like he is reading. Why are his lips moving? Fascinating.

09:05 Second Period. We have followed gym teacher down the hall to the Sex Education class he is assigned. Why anyone feels that gym teacher is qualified for this role remains a mystery to this group of scientists. From his obscene, politically incorrect ramblings on the subject of human sexuality—not to mention his pending trial on charges of indecency—this choice seems about as wise as hiring a lynch mob to teach a class on criminal justice. However, if you look in his briefcase he has several magazines with glossy photos of humans in various stages of intercourse, so perhaps he takes this subject more seriously than we think.

11:30 Fourth Period. Gym teacher is more at home here in his native habitat, the gym. In the classroom he was uncomfortable and out of his element, what with all of those books, pens, and papers lying around. Although he cannot seem to correctly grasp a writing instrument, he is able to employ certain tools. He has mastered the use of the whistle, another primitive form of communication that our studies indicate has only a single message: “Shut the fuck up, you bunch a pansies! I mean it!” He also carries around a clipboard he uses to scream out the names of some of the lesser primates on the gym floor. If these names are of foreign origin, gym teacher mispronounces them so badly that they become ethnic slurs.

12:20 Feeding Time. One of the downsides of studying this animal at close quarters is being forced to watch it eat. Even as far as lower primates go, this isn´t a pretty sight. At what we felt was a relatively safe distance of three meters, we are still sprayed with bits of bologna sandwich, fruit cup, and Pringles. At least we are not forced to share the same table with gym teacher like the unfortunate female substitute teacher that he is sexually harassing. To further demonstrate his sexual authority, gym teacher playfully pats the ass of the 60 year old lunch lady. We theorize that his belching and flatulence are also part of this peculiar mating ritual.

1:18 Fifth Period. He is sheltered from the attacks of the lower primates while he is in his den, or office as he calls it. He seems to have nodded off while studying one of his magazines on human reproduction. The fact that two of the models in the magazine are dressed as cheerleaders, violating at least a half a dozen school board regulations, doesn´t seem to affect the tranquility of his sleep in any way. Perhaps the three cans of warm beer he consumed have aided his rest. When it is time for gym teacher to attend his next class, a singing bass alarm clock violently erupts. Startled, gym teacher comically falls backwards in his chair and strikes his head against a file cabinet. A 30 second aria of profanity follows.

2:45 Sixth Period. We are observing the grooming habits of the gym teacher at disturbingly close range. Although he spends a good part of his day watching the lower animals in the showers, he himself doesn´t appear to bath. We note instead a vast array of techniques that include nose picking, crotch grabbing, ear digging, and butt scratching. We have named a certain nose-clearing technique after him wherein he uses a finger to plug one nostril and blows violently through the other, shooting a stream of mucus across his desk. We call it the "gym teacher´s handkerchief."

After the end of the work day we are able to follow gym teacher´s whereabouts by means of a tracking device we implanted inside of his Members Only® jacket. On his way home he makes stops at a strip club, an adult video rental outlet, his sports bookie, a liquor store, a tavern, and a massage parlor called "Ham Yankees." In the spirit of scientific inquiry we look through his mail before he arrives at his home to find a stack of nasty invoices from legitimate collection agencies as well as death threats from Mafia bookies, child support reminders, and a handful of restraining orders. We attempt to observe gym teacher through the window in his kitchen. We are able to remain hidden from gym teacher until one of our scientists bursts out laughing when, in the course of a phone call with one of his collection agencies, gym teacher gives his occupation as "educator."

Labels: Humor

8:26 AM

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Tuesday, April 15, 2008

 

Death with Dignity, Inc.

There has been a lot of talk recently about euthanasia, living wills, dying, assisted suicide, death, deceased people, and other stuff that may interfere with you concentrating on the new Girls Gone Wild DVD. Most of us would rather watch videos of college girls making out than contemplate the grim realities of dying, especially if we are involved in any way. The issues that go hand-in-hand with death can be at least as messy as changing the oil in your car and you don´t do that yourself. Now there is a new company that can take care of the details of when you are chosen to go to the big Jiffy Lube in the sky.

Death with Dignity, Inc. is a subscription service that will ease any anxieties you may be harboring about the day you are picked to meet your maker. Death with Dignity, Inc. will help you preserve your image when you are in your most vulnerable and possibly most compromising position: death.

Here’s how it works. We install a tiny microchip in your head that automatically monitors all of your bodily functions. Well, not all of them because a few are just flat-out gross. When we receive indications that your vital signs have flat-lined, our team of professionals will jump into action. We guarantee that our people will be the first on the scene. Our associates will arrive in a discreet van disguised as a cleaning crew. They will immediately begin to sanitize the area by removing anything that may cause embarrassment for your loved ones. We will basically be doing what you would do yourself if you were about to have company over, but were prevented from doing it because you just croaked. Sometimes company comes at an awkward time.

We will clean your apartment so others won’t see that you have been living like an animal. Our technical experts will delete all of the files on your computer that would lead people to believe that you were some sort of expert studying human reproduction techniques, if you know what we mean. On second thought, maybe we will just take that laptop of yours out into the country and burn it. After our workers take off their HAZMAT suits they will probably want to take a long, hot shower.
We will return your overdue videos so family and friends won’t know that you were on a Ben Affleck movie marathon. We´ll replace your vulgar video choices with a copy of some boring foreign film you wouldn´t watch if you lived to be 200 but will make it look like you were smart. We will take out your trash that is filled with vodka bottles and empty cheese doodle bags. From the looks of your diet it´s a miracle you didn´t kick the bucket ten years ago.

Chances are pretty good that when you pass away, you will be in a less than flattering position, if you get my drift (RIP Elvis Presley). We will pull you off the pot, dress you up in your best clothes (clean underwear just like mom always harped on), and sit you in a reading chair with a copy of the Riverside Shakespeare in your lap. A fine glass of port sits on the table beside you. We will supply the port, because let’s face it; you couldn’t keep a bottle of half-way decent booze around for more than 12 hours. Let me remind you of the time you received a bottle of expensive scotch at the Christmas party and then drank 1/3 of it driving home that night.

Perhaps you’d like to leave behind a notebook filled with pictures of the fictitious children you sponsored from Save the Children. That is something you often thought about doing, but you could never afford it because instead you were sponsoring five movie channels on cable.

If you subscribe to our premium service, a Las Vegas showgirl will testify, under oath, that you passed away while trying to nail a difficult dismount while in flagrante delicto with the aforementioned 21 year old dancer (only 15% more to make them twins!). This service is extremely popular with our senior citizen clients who are still trying to impress high school classmates. As far as your lifetime ambitions go, the sky is the limit when you’re dead, so start living without worries. Leave it to us to lead others to believe that in life you were living a remotely interesting existence. We do such a good job that friends and relatives are often saddened by the untimely demise of slackers like you.

You spend a lot of time, money, and effort to create a false image of yourself that you present to the world while you are living. In death we can help you create an even more flattering image of you. It will be easier to do this after you pass away because we won’t have to deal with you screwing it up for us. Call it post mortem PR.

Labels: Humor

9:01 AM

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Monday, March 31, 2008

 

Don´t listen to him.

Preparation F: Failure Counseling Strategies

The self-help section of the bookstore is bursting with books on success. All of the self-proclaimed, self-help gurus offer to help you become some sort of enormous triumph. They claim that they can teach you to cope with being a winner. I’m no Tony Robbins but I don’t think people need to be prepared for victory. We dream about it all our lives. Maybe we need to prepare for losing? Any of these gurus who say that, “Failure is not an option,” didn’t see my NCAA Tournament picks. Failure is almost always a very, very viable option.

Everyone remembers the drill. You are ten years old. You’re standing out on the court all by yourself fantasizing about hitting the final free throw to win March Madness. As a little kid I never remember standing at the free throw line imagining missing the last shot in the big game. I never remember even being nervous about all the pressure that you are supposed to feel in this situation. I had ice water flowing through my skinny little veins. I didn’t even get flustered when the first barrage of shots I threw up were total bricks; I would always sink one before it got dark and win the big game. Like every other normal, red-blooded American kid, I also fantasized that after the game I’d do a line of coke off of a cheerleader’s butt, then after a night of drunken revelry, I’d get arrested on a DUI charge. I was preparing myself for success.

If there is a little kid out there who day-dreams about screwing up the big game, a kid who stands at the line and dreams of tanking the final shot, I want to meet him. I wasn’t that original growing up. If there ever was a kid who dreamed about fucking up the final shot, he’s probably a pretty well-adjusted adult by now who has moved on to adult issues while the rest of us still think we have a shot of pitching a no-hitter in the World Series, hitting a hole-in-one at the Masters, or winning the Tour de France.

Everyone can handle success. As much as people think that Britney Spears is a waste of space, could you imagine how fucked up her life would be if she didn’t have a thick pad of American currency to break her falls? Teaching people to fail takes real talent. That’s why I have developed Failure Counseling Strategies. Not only can I help assuage your grief about totally blowing that last shot, I can make all of the losers like me feel better about not even making the team in the first place (What team did Tony Robbins take to the NCAA Championship?). Find comfort in these words of wisdom:

“Hey, at least you tried…a little.”

“You need to make more money? That´s crazy talk, man. You´ll just have to pay more taxes. Have a beer.”

“Fuck it. Just quit. You’ve got nothing to prove.”

“She must be a lesbian if she doesn’t want to go out with you. What other reason could there possibly be?”

“A winner never quits and a quitter can get a partial refund on that gym membership you never use.”

“You gotta die of something. Am I right? Care for a cigarette?”

“Sure, you could stop drinking or you could finally accept yourself for the drunk that you are. Don’t be so judgmental about yourself.”

Believe it or not, there are a lot of advantages to coming in last. For one, it makes it a lot easier to improve yourself the next time around. I mean, if losing is good enough for the Seattle Mariners, it should be good enough for me, right? I wouldn’t want the team to feel uncomfortable because I decided to become some kind of big shot success story. I just want to be, like, you know, one of the guys.

I don’t know about you but I feel better about myself already. I think that I’ll knock off for the rest of the day, hit the free happy hour buffet, and watch Sports Center. The best thing about preparing to fail is that, once you get the hang of it, it’s really easy.

Labels: Humor

9:17 AM

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Friday, March 28, 2008

 

“Furries” Threaten Sanctity of Bestiality

Have you ever seen or read something that you just know that you were better off not knowing? Something that you can file in that over-sized “too much information” file. If you are a regular reader of Dan Savage’s sex advice column, Savage Love, too much information is a weekly by-product of his question and answer column format and where I learned about a most disturbing trend in sexuality. If you want to do yourself a favor, leave the room while the rest of us discuss the revolting topic of furries: people who dress up like animals for sexual role playing.

As a life-long liberal and civil libertarian, I think that what consenting adults do behind closed doors is their business and no one has the right to interfere in any way. In the case of furries I must make an exception to my tolerant outlook for one important reason: furries threaten the very sanctity of bestiality. The relationship between a man, or woman, and an animal—both domestic and otherwise—is a bond reaching back to the very dawn of human history. Now that bond is under attack by men or women in vulgar costumes pretending to be some sort of critter, thus excluding one half of the precise formula that has made bestiality such a resounding triumph over the millennia.

Just this past weekend I settled back on the couch to enjoy what I thought was a video of some good, old-fashioned bestiality that I had borrowed from my pastor. To my abject horror, what I thought was the utter depths of depravity turned out to be nothing more than a strung-out, teenage runaway and two guys wearing a moose suit. The furries had struck again, this time in my own home. In my home! All that I can say is that I’m glad that the wife took the kids to see her mother and they weren’t subjected to this filth. The reverend has a lot of explaining to do. After all, we’re supposed to be a fundamentalist congregation and here he loans me this twisted excuse for porn. What is our world coming to?

Before all of you freaks who prefer human-on-human pornography start complaining (yawn, same species sex is so 20th century) and say “not our problem,” ask yourselves this question: What if your adult viewing habits were suddenly compromised? What if you discovered that instead of what you thought was a teenage nymphomaniac getting her brains screwed out, you had just got hot and heavy watching a pair of woodchucks dolled up in a Catholic school girl’s uniform? How would you feel if during the height of ecstasy you discovered that instead of ogling a sweaty hunk you just tossed off to a scene with an armadillo disguised as a swimming pool maintenance man? Still think it’s “not your problem?” By the way, even aficionados of bestiality find this sort of thing repulsive—it’s the equivalent of cross-dressing and it’s just plain wrong.

If this sort of thinking makes me old fashioned or conservative, then so be it. I’d rather be branded as a prude than stand by and watch as some dudes dressed up as sea otters destroy the centuries of trust and caring that have developed between humans and the rest of god’s creatures.

Labels: Humor

5:39 AM

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Thursday, March 27, 2008

 

Cool Hollywood Lines I Never Got To Use

Dudes in movies always get to say cool things that regular slobs like me can only dream about springing on people. Oh how I regret that day back in the high school guidance counselor’s office when I chose “regular slob” instead of “movie star.” How was I to know in 10th grade all of the things I was going to miss? All I knew back then was that signing up for “regular slob” on career day meant less time in the guidance counselor’s office and ours was a fat lady who smelled like sweat and aerosol cheese. If only I had endured her long enough to put myself on the film star route I could be saying cool stuff like they do on The Sopranos. Instead I just get to say stuff like, “I’ll take the #3 with a diet soda,” and “Are you sure this will just say ‘Executive Phone Service’ on my VISA bill?”

Then I started thinking that just because I was too busy beating up the kids who took drama in high school to go into movies, this didn’t have to mean that I would never get to use cool lines from films. I recently discovered that we have a little thing called “free speech” in America and I decided to use it. By the way, don’t yell “fire” in a crowded movie theater, they have a law against it that I learned about the hard way. You can say almost anything else though, even if it doesn’t make any sense in the context. It will still sound cool. Here are a few of my favorites.

“Would you care to make this more interesting?”

Picture James Bond in an immaculate tuxedo at the casino in Monte Carlo. He’s playing baccarat at a few grand each roll, or spin, or however the hell you play baccarat. The evil bazillionaire guy comes to the table and Bond lays this line on him as cool as a cucumber. I don’t have a tuxedo; I don’t know how to gamble; I sure as shit couldn’t be cool about the prospect of losing a bet any bigger that the tab at the drive up window; so this line isn’t for me, right? Wrong. I just use it whenever I feel like it and it almost never makes sense. Try it some time. The next time you are using a public urinal I dare you to say to the perfect stranger next to you, “Care to make this more interesting?” I guarantee that he will be more uncomfortable than the James Bond villain who is about to lose a fortune.

“You are dead to me now.”

This is one of those cool, cold-blooded lines they use in gangster movies that I never had a chance to use until I stopped caring whether or not it made sense. It implies that you are writing them off forever. I’m not enough of a bad-ass to say this to someone and besides, I may need them to help me move some day. So I just say it to stuff that is actually dead, like to every house plant I’ve ever had. If I order something in a restaurant and if whatever it is on my plate looks like they animal it once was, I will use this line. This generally applies to fish or small poultry, like quail. Do not use this line if you are on a first date because no matter how many times in the emails she said that she likes a guy with a sense of humor, she won’t fucking understand. In girl-speak “sense of humor” really means “nice ass” or “good job.”

"Would you like to come up and take a look at my etchings?"

This is always movie code for, “Let’s have sex, OK?” I can’t even do one of those hand-traced turkey drawings. I don’t even like art but this doesn’t keep me from using this cool line. I figure that whoever I bring up to my place will probably be more pissed off about the other stuff I lied about to get too upset over the fact that I’m not an artist.

"Let’s get you out of those wet things."

The less you know the person you say it to, the more humor potential it has.

"The hunter has become the hunted."

Say this in your best Jacques Cousteau accent as you club a baby seal-clubber or as you shoot the guy in the hat with ear muffs who shot Bambi’s mom.

"This is going to hurt me a lot more than it’s going to hurt you."

This is great to use when whatever it is you are going to do is going to hurt the other guy a lot and all you are going to get out of it is a bent five iron.

"We have ways of making you talk."

This is a cool line but I’d be more interested in ways to make someone shut the fuck up.

Labels: Humor

9:40 AM

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Wednesday, March 12, 2008

 

The next step is paying for the privilege.

The Asshole Tax

I think everyone will agree that freedom is a good thing. We should have lots and lots of freedom. However, you can’t always get away with doing anything you want if it bothers someone else. It’s like the old saying goes, your freedom to play the accordion ends where I am in range to hit you with a pillow case filled with pool balls. Just because we like freedom doesn’t mean that everything people do in the name of freedom should be free.

No one said that pissing off your neighbors by revving your Harley Davidson was going to be free; first you have to buy an over-priced motorcycle and an assortment of official Harley Davidson accessories which make you look like a stunt double for one of the Village People. Dew rag, wallet with chain, leather vest; it's hard to tell if you are trying to look threatening or going to a Halloween party. You can get away with unbelievably obnoxious conduct if you are willing to pay to have things ironed out for you after you finish. Just ask OJ. If you have the money you can have a three-egg bald eagle omelet for breakfast, kill someone in a drunken driving incident after lunch, and then top off the day at the Netherland Ranch doing some things that would make a Catholic priest blush. No one said that living in the sewer was going to be cheap; that's why we have lawyers.

There are all sorts of things that fall into the category of bad behavior which are still free of charge. With America’s infrastructure crumbling down beneath us, I think it’s time to start generating a little revenue from a lot of anti-social behavior that has been free thus far. We’ll call it the asshole tax. You can keep on being you, no one wants to impinge on your freedoms, but from now on a lot of what you think is normal conduct is going to cost you. Being an asshole isn’t a right, it’s a privilege. It’s time people paid for that privilege.

We’ll start off by putting a meter on car horns. Wanna blow your damn horn? Go right ahead, but it’s going to cost you $5 every time you touch it. You get fined for speeding and other obnoxious acts while driving, so why shouldn’t people have to pay to honk? Blow your brains out, big guy. We need to rebuild a bridge in Minnesota. Feel like blasting the stereo in your little Fast and the Furious-mobile? It’s going to cost you $20 for every decibel over 90. Flashing lights and deafening dance beats seem more suited for a gay nightclub than a vehicle, but that’s just my opinion. It’s a free country as they say, and from now on you need to pay to keep it that way.

Have the need to talk on your cell phone in a movie theater? No problem, the phone companies can tack on a surcharge of $1 for every syllable that comes out of your fat, pop corn-stuffed gob. The phone companies are already the masters of taxes and extra fees. If there is one thing the phone companies are good at it's charging for shit. They will be able to figure out the logistics of this add-on before you finish reading this essay. Are you going to finish? Is anyone still reading?

We could charge people for writing offensive and not-very-funny essays on the internet. That seems fair to me, but then we’ll also have to charge anonymous trolls for leaving comments completely lacking in wit. I think that there is enough asshole-ish behavior going on that if taxed properly America can be completely rebuilt and looking like something out of the Jetsons. Lord knows that taxes won't reduce the number or severity of assholes but we may as well make some money from our collective incivility. The Internal Revenue Service is America’s most ruthless and powerful organization. I think it’s time we introduce the IRS to America’s lone gunmen, Al Qaeda terrorists, HOV lane violators, and passengers who insist on using the front overhead bins for their luggage even though they are sitting in the back of the plane. If we can’t stop’em we may as well charge’em.

Labels: Humor

9:53 AM

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Friday, January 11, 2008

 

Christopher Bowman, RIP

There But for the Grace of God, Skate I

Just about all of us have had our moments of self-doubt when we question the course our lives have taken. Let’s face it, what teenager doesn’t believe that he/she will one day be rich and famous? Most of the time we fall short of our naïve and unrealistic goals we set for ourselves back in adolescence. I think we should all take great comfort in the fact that at least we didn’t overdose on drugs in a cheap San Fernando Valley hotel room at the age of 40 while performing as a member of the Ice Capades, like Christopher Bowman. At least we won’t be remembered as the bad boy of figure skating. If the words “figure skating” are found anywhere on your obituary, you’d better pray there is no afterlife because you are going to get beat up as soon as you check in. Double down on that for “ice dancing.”

Besides swelling up my self-esteem, I have also learned a valuable lesson from Bowman’s tragic demise: never die in a cheap hotel room—for any fucking reason. I don’t care if you threw yourself on a grenade to save a bunch of children; dying in a cheap hotel room is going to leave a stink on your good name no matter what—even if you don’t have a good name. Just throw one of the kiddies on the grenade instead. In fact, you’d better throw a couple of kids on the grenade because children are small and can’t absorb shrapnel like adults. What a bunch of kids are doing in your cheap hotel room is the subject for another essay.

If you are staying in a really nice hotel then feel free to participate in all of the high-risk activities you want: Overdose on drugs, cook up a batch of meth, or try to do some sort of Cirque du Soleil sex act. Put a rodent up your butt if for no other reason than to give the guys doing the autopsy something to talk about. If rich people do it, it’s called eccentric, but if you are poor it’s just creepy. If you are on a budget and are staying in a crappy hotel, don’t fucking die, man. It’s just too tacky. You have to be extremely careful if you are staying in a fleabag motel. Staying in shitty hotels is sort of like masturbation: Everyone does it, just don’t get caught.

There may actually be some benefits in being a member of the Ice Capades, but I’m not going to sit around and try to think of any. Are you kidding me? If you are down on your luck, or if you are just itching to perform in an ice skating show, do it under an assumed name and try not to croak while you are in their employ. Try to think about how your poor family will be embarrassed.

I think overdosing on drugs is pretty gross but if that’s how you want to check out, I won’t talk you out of it. A lot of supposedly cool people died that way. Just do your reputation a favor and spring for a decent room for once in your life.

Labels: Humor

4:30 PM

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Friday, December 21, 2007

 

Sorry, kid, we'll get you a new one.

War on Christmas Update

This is the last in our series The War on Christmas in which we here at the Discover It Institute in Seattle, Washington have examined the godless attack against America’s biggest shopping holiday and birthday of our savior.

This is part of our The Science of Christmas initiative in which we attempt to prove through scientific method that Christmas is real. We felt that we could provide more conclusive evidence than the 10,000 letters addressed to Santa Claus that vindicated Saint Nick in Miracle on 34th Street. We think that only through scientific methods could we coerce retailers into returning to the good old days when clerks could greet shoppers with “Merry Christmas” instead of the hyper politically-correct “Happy Holidays” now currently in vogue and something we feel is the root of all of America’s problems.

We began with a list of Christmas truisms and exposed them to the cruel scrutiny of scientific investigation.

For most of you, apocryphal accounts of flying reindeer and popular ballads of the exploits of Santa’s sleigh drivers are all the proof you need, but we wanted to establish this fact scientifically. We traveled to the Lapland region of Finland to find a herd of reindeer. We transported fifteen of the sturdiest examples of the breed to our testing center at the Space Needle in Seattle. Working closely with a team of aerodynamic engineers from Boeing Aircraft we joyfully launched the reindeer, one by one, from the top of this 184 meter Seattle icon.

Can reindeer fly?

The short answer is “Hell no.” The Boeing people actually said that what they saw was the exact opposite of flying, but many of the test subjects certainly displayed characteristics of a species that desperately wanted to fly, and that is good enough for us. On a side note, reindeer meat is quite flavorful and tender, although the tenderness may have been the result of dropping the animals from 605 feet.

For our next experiment we enlisted the help of 65 year old Armando Escovedo. We lowered the retired Seattle fireman into a chimney and waited to see how long it would take him to make it into the living room.

Could Santa Claus slide down a chimney?

Although paramedics pronounced Mr. Escovedo dead at the scene after spending nearly three hours extracting him from his sooty grave, we feel that our test subject may have had other health issues that contributed to his demise and to the failure of our experiment. We are experiencing some difficulty in finding another old, gray-haired, and overweight volunteer for further investigation into this matter.

Although they refused to identify themselves as elves, we employed a group of midgets to work under harsh artic conditions fro our next experiment.

Could a group of elves make toys for every child on the planet?

Yes! Yes! Yes! This experiment was a resounding success and we proved, without a doubt, that working a small group of “elves” 20 hours a day, seven days a week our team was able to crank out a hell of a lot of toys. Granted, the toys were kind of crappy, and thanks to an Amnesty International report we’re not exactly going to win any awards for being employee-friendly, but given the right incentive, it certainly is possible to have a small group of height-challenged workers produce a prodigious amount of toys. The trick is to keep them properly motivated at all times. We recommend keeping family members hostage, frequent beatings, and providing an open bar at all company functions.

We could have gone on with our tireless inquiry but let us remind you that our sister institute here in Seattle, the Discovery Institute, had even less of a factual basis behind their highly-successful Intelligent Design initiative which has cost the United States government millions of dollars in legal fees to keep out of public schools.

Labels: Humor

1:32 PM

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Tuesday, October 02, 2007

 

Hot LDS on LDS Action!

Sexy, Sex-filled Sexfest

The following essay contains material not suited for younger readers. On the other hand, if your emotional age is over 17, this will probably seem childish. Comedy truly is the razor’s edge.

Get ready people, you are about to embark on one of the most erotic adventures of your life. Very soon you will be coming across passages with words like “zipper,” “undergarments,” and even “crotch.” Draw the curtains, turn off the phone, lock the door, and grab a mop and bucket for the clean-up because you are in for the ride of your life. This essay is going to make all of that internet porn you’ve been downloading look as boring and as mild as a visit from a couple of Mormon missionaries. All you have to do is drop your pants, sit back, and keep reading. Please ask the Mormon kids to leave at this time unless they are wearing approved safety goggles.

What makes my essay so radically different is that I’m not afraid to go out on a limb, to swim upstream, to take the path not taken, to explore virgin territory, if you’ll pardon the pun. Because of my unfashionable stance on this issue I have been the target of violent demonstrations around the world. I know that I am a rebel, an anarchist, and a lone wolf, but I have never sought popularity. I don’t care if I am criticized for taking this position but here it is: I happen to like women’s breasts. There, I said it. And furthermore, I am also a fan of the larger variety of these female organs. Go ahead and insult me for taking this heroic and daring position; I’m sure that I have been called worse things by better men. Not only do I enjoy boobs on a physical level but I plan on writing about them in this essay. If you are sickened by the prospect of reading an article which may contain two, or even three female breasts, then perhaps this isn’t the essay for you.

I cannot yet go into explicit detail as to the content of this essay; we must first weed out all of the minors and adults who aren’t ready for such raunchy, no-holds-barred depictions of human desire. Without offending the kids and the prudes who have not clicked off this page thus far, let me just say that I will be using a lot of obscene vocabulary in my descriptions, a lot of words that rhyme with “icky,” if you know what I mean, and I know that you do.

This essay will contain young girls, girls so young that they are “barely legal” as they say. In fact, not only am I employing girls who only just turned 18 today, but I am writing this essay on an airplane that is racing towards the international dateline, which, if we cross it, will render these birthday girls illegal. Give back the party favors, girls, I may be going to jail. In the top left corner of this page there is a Global Positioning System link to my private jet. Legal? Illegal? It’s too close to call at this stage. Perhaps we will cross the dateline and then go back. Legal territory, illegal territory, in, out, in, out, in, out, all day long. Would that still be some sort of crime? Even over international waters? If it isn’t, it should be. Use the GPS tracking icon provided as a further visual aid in your quest for a partner-free orgasm.

This is difficult to appreciate over the internet, but I didn’t write this essay on a computer. I used a tube of lipstick and a well-worn, silk G-string—a girl’s G-string, wise-ass. Granted, I had to retype the thing on my computer because my handwriting is terrible and the panties were really, really small, but that shouldn’t lessen the heat for the readers.

As a matter of fact, you won’t even have to read the essay. It will be read to you by a woman whose voice is so sexy that she makes Mae West’s signature, “Why don’t you come on up and see me sometime,” sound like a squawking parrot. You will practically be able to feel her breathing on you. We mean on a medically-approved erogenous zone, not there. What is wrong with you, you sick fuck? But hey, whatever works for you, I suppose. There are no inhibitions contained in this essay. Anything goes, and when I say anything, I mean anything! Except whatever the hell it is you are doing right now. Please stop that.

Notice: This essay has been discontinued per order of the Morals and Decency Division of Interpol. The author has been placed under arrest after a spirited chase through the red light district of Amsterdam in which the suspect was clad in only a towel and high heels.

Readers are advised to remove all traces of this essay from their computers. And wipe off your monitor; once that stuff dries it's impossible to get off.

Labels: Humor

11:02 AM

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Wednesday, May 23, 2007

 

Things Money Can’t Buy

• No matter how rich you are you can’t insulate yourself from hearing Hotel California at least another 1,000 times before you die. I am living on another continent under an assumed name and that horrible song comes on over the Muzak in the book store where I am shopping. What is a guy in self-imposed exile supposed to do? How could being fabulously wealthy help me in this situation? It doesn’t cost anything to stick my fingers in my ears and say, “ Na na na…I can’t hear this, na na na…I’m not listening.” Do you remember that bar scene in the first Star Wars movie? Hotel California was playing on the juke box. You can’t escape it anywhere.

• Money can’t buy you knowledge of a foreign language; for that you need lots of hard work and apparently a larger brain than the one I was issued.

• Money can’t free you from the utter vulgarity and offensiveness of the human body. We are all the same. I don’t care if you are Bill Gates, the sultan of Brunei, or a guy who cleans public toilets in Calcutta (Calcutta was voted as having the dirtiest public toilets in the northern hemisphere…or is Calcutta in the southern hemisphere? Are there only two hemispheres? It seems like there should be four. Whatever, Calcutta has gross public toilets. I think that even geography professors can agree on that.). No matter what tax bracket you occupy, your body is an inventory of foul noises, discharges, growths, oozings, drippings, odors, and leaks—and those are all above the waist. What goes on inside your pants is too disgusting to discuss on the internet. I’m trying to keep this clean.

• I don’t care if you are James Bond drinking French wine at $250 a glass; drink enough of it and you will wake up the next day feeling like shit. Hangovers are mercilessly democratic.

• Money can buy love, sex, hand jobs, blow jobs, erections, fake boobs, inflatable dolls, dildos, butt plugs, cock rings, ben-wa balls, pocket rockets, French ticklers, nut busters, colon extenders, prostate clamps, urethra enhancers, testicle tighteners, and rectum high-lighters (OK, some of that shit is made up. Can you name them?). What money can’t buy are the things you need to say to a woman during sex if she likes the talkative kind of sex. Talking dirty isn’t just about laying out a bunch of four letter words, it’s an art form, you moron. Maybe your lover is as much of a slob as you but I doubt it. You can start by reading some poetry, and unless your mate is also your prison bitch you aren’t getting any sexier by listening to that hip hop crap.

• I think that we can all agree on one thing, even the Palestinians and the Israelis, even the Sunnis and the Shiites. We all know that nothing tastes better than well-cooked bacon, and it isn’t expensive at all. Forget about lobster and caviar; bacon has those beat hands down. Bacon tastes better than a lobster and caviar soufflé, so skip the fancy French restaurant and order a BLT.

So why do we kill ourselves trying to make money when it can’t buy the important things in life? All that I need is some well-cooked bacon, cheap Spanish wine, and a Paz Vega look-alike and I’m a happy, farting, burping guy who can talk dirty with the best of them. Hotel California is a curse that the entire universe must endure.

Labels: Humor

8:27 AM

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Thursday, March 08, 2007

 

Addicted to Beer?


Are you in an awkward position of having a friend with a serious problem and you don’t know whether or not to confront this person? I have a very close friend who I believe is addicted to beer. It’s not like he can drink a beer and then go for several weeks or months without beer. He will drink a beer and sometimes he will drink another beer the very next day. He will buy six, twelve, and sometimes even 24 beers at a time. Think about that for a minute. 24 beers at a time? That’s just crazy. It appears painfully obvious to me that my friend is addicted and we may soon find him face-down in his own filth if he doesn’t seek counseling.

I know a lot of you out there think that being addicted to beer is “no big deal,” or that drinking beer every day is “cool.” You probably think that beer is not the least bit dangerous but I am here to tell you that there are serious health risks associated with beer. Did you know that beer is the main cause of death in people who try to ride a wheelie down a steep flight of steps on their motorcycles? Beer was also involved last year in the deaths of over 38 men who were struck down in the prime of life when they thought that the swimming pool at their hotel was deep enough for them to jump from their fourth floor balconies. Actually the pools were deep enough, just not on that end.

Studies have shown there is a direct correlation between beer and someone getting the living shit kicked out of them in a bar after they scream out, “I can kick all a yer asses, buncha wussies.” Perhaps you have seen this happen to a friend of yours. Perhaps this has happened to you. Beer doesn’t seem so harmless now, does it?

I could go on and on about the dangers inherent in drinking beer. I won’t point any fingers at the people who need help but we all know who we are. Some of you may even be drinking a beer as you read this. Don’t try to hide it between your legs and “shot gunning” the rest of your 20 oz. Miller Genuine Draft just seems like a desperate cry for help.

It’s sad, more than anything, to see how your life seems to be ruled by beer. I’ll bet you couldn’t even make it through nine innings of a baseball game without a beer. “I can quit whenever I want, I just don’t want to.” Who do you think you are kidding with that load of garbage? You can kid yourself, mister, but you can’t kid the lord. That’s right; it’s about time that Jesus got involved in your little crisis.

I will spare you the lecture about how you are using beer as a pathetic substitute for religion. Because I go to church every Sunday (plus all sacred holidays and to pray after I buy a lottery ticket) I don’t need beer, or I can drink just a little bit every once in a while. I may not even finish that one beer, while you almost got into a fistfight with a bartender because he tried to take your bottle of beer with half a swig of luke-warm backwash still in it.

What did you ask? Do I want to go have a beer? Do you mean “a single beer” because the indefinite article “a” is only used with a noun in the singular? Be honest with yourself, when have you ever gone out and had only one beer? I think that we both know that the answer to that is “never.” I can’t even imagine what sort of biblical holocaust would need to transpire to prevent you from moving on from “a” beer to two beers, or even three.

Labels: Humor

12:14 PM

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Monday, January 29, 2007

 

Sunni Family Disappointed Suicide Bomber Son Forgotten So Soon After Car Bombing

Bagdad - The family of Ahmed al Basur told a local reporter that they couldn’t believe that everyone had already forgotten about their son only a day after he sacrificed himself to Allah in a car bombing at a Shiite market. The blast only killed three other people beside Ahmed al Basur, a recent barber school drop out. The news of his attack was soon overshadowed by reports of a bigger and more deadly car bombing the next day carried out by Khalid Ras al Teez, valedictorian of his high school class.

“We can’t believe that butthead Khalid had to go and steal our son’s thunder. We think it was in very poor taste,” Ahmed’s parents confessed. “He should have let Ahmed milk the headlines for at least a couple days before his attack. He just lucked out with the higher body count because that pre-school bus just happened to be driving by. We had barely put Ahmed’s big toe and part of his ear in the ground and Khalid goes and blows himself to hell. He always was a little show off.”

When questioned, Khalid’s parents said that their son was always highly goal-oriented and it wasn't his fault if the al Basur’s son was an under-achiever.

Valentine’s Day Poem From Husband Creeps Out Wife Of 23 Years

Bill Ocher, fired from three different employers because of sexual harassment complaints from coworkers, decided that he wanted to do something special for Valentine’s Day for his wife of twenty-three years. He wrote her a love poem.

“I guess that he was trying to be romantic for once in his life but he must be so out of practice that he’s completely alien to the concept. I’ve been living with the man for most of my life but I have to tell you, I was about ready to get a restraining order. Since we are saving up for a new clothes dryer I decided to go the more economical route so I bought some pepper spray. If he tries to spring any of the acts on me that he wrote about in his “love poem,” he’s going to get two eyes full of hurt,” said his wife, Agnes.

Labels: Humor

2:12 PM

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Thursday, December 07, 2006

 

Strung-Out Runaway Loses Eye in Orgy Mishap

Did you see that headline in today’s newspaper? It’s not all fun and games after all. The group sex thing isn’t quite so appealing now is it, Mr. Hot Rocks? Eye gougings happen a lot more often than the people who make porn flicks want you to believe. As far as they are concerned, it’s just endless amounts of joyous hole stuffing. The last thing they want you to know is that, with alarming frequency, one of the orifices being serviced is someone’s eye socket, and it doesn’t end there.

Face facts, orgies are extraordinarily dangerous. It’s hot and sweaty, and there’s a lot of lube—both natural and man-made. Slippery kills; or at least slippery can be uncomfortable and hugely embarrassing. I don’t care how many Playmates are attending your orgy, it ain’t worth it if you are bent over sticking your tongue in Miss Novemeber’s ear and you get bent over accidentally by some clumsy hillbilly who only got invited because of the size of his penis. It’s dark. Did I mention that? You are running a lot of risks in your quest to cop the perfect nut. The nut being copped could be right in your own blow hole, my friend.

Your insurance probably doesn’t even cover traumatic eye injury due to wayward intercourse. Forget about Blue Shield paying for your therapy after Lester inadvertently plows you like a wheat field in spring. If your employer even thought that you were engaging in group sex, they would drop you from their health plan faster than you can drop your pants around your ankles.

Even a threesome presents a variety of safety issues that you may want to consider, even after you have poured a half dozen cosmopolitans into your girlfriend and her old college roommate. Let’s be honest here, you are no Olympic gymnast at this point in your life. You could screw your back up trying to nail a perfect dismount. Leave that stuff for the experts.

Sexual relations with just a single partner can also lead to you being hauled away in an ambulance speeding towards the emergency ward. Perhaps you should just tone down your kinky sexual fantasies and consider the safety benefits of masturbation.

Better yet, just put that thing away. Unless you are wearing goggles and a fluorescent vest you could still do yourself some irrevocable harm. And I’m just talking about old-school jerking off. That new thing with the belt around your neck that all the kids are doing these days opens up a whole new can of safety worms. Do you need me to spell it out for you? You may think that an eye patch is a sexy accessory, but the loss of depth perception due to mono-vision will destroy your Grand Theft Auto score. As awful as it may seem, thinking about Whoopi Goldberg in a thong could be the safest thing you could possibly do.

Labels: Humor

10:40 AM

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Thursday, October 26, 2006

 

Kill 

Gnaw: Coming to a Theater Near You

They are all around us. You may have one living in your own yard. We tend to think of them as fury, woodland creatures that scamper to and fro. Scamper is a verb we have reserved for only the most harmless, the most benign of God’s creatures, and we only say things like “to and fro” when describing the most unthreatening of animals. You probably think that squirrels and others in the Rodentia order pose no threat to humans. That’s right, squirrels are rodents and every bit as vicious as other members of their clan, filthy beasts like rats and the terrifying capybara which can weigh more than 25 kilograms—that’s more than 55 pounds of man-eating beast for you hicks who aren’t yet hip to the metric system. While you are trying to convert kilos into pounds a full-grown capybara will eat your entire family. If you are lucky you have a few overweight children and it will spare you…this time.

What characterize these killers are their four incisor teeth that they must constantly file down by chewing. Sure, sometimes they may grind down innocently on acorns or seeds that they steal from the bird feeder in your yard, but what happens if these resources are not readily available? I’ll tell you what happens; they turn their fangs on humans. There are few things more sickening than seeing a squirrel bury its teeth into a man’s arm, ripping through flesh like shit through a goose. After making a pitiful mockery of the epidermis, a rodent will tear through muscle and tendon; from there it will devour vital internal organs until it finally finds its dessert: bone. A family of squirrels can completely devour an adult human in less then three minutes.

There was a time when people thought that sharks were no threat to our way of life. They did their thing and we did ours, or so we thought in our blissful ignorance. It took the movie Jaws to instruct the American public about the true nature of sharks. Finally a movie has come along to warn us of the frightful reality of squirrels. Gnaw tells the story of a peaceful Chicago suburb that learns the hard way about these cruel and heartless carnivores. After you see Gnaw you will never again let your children play in the yard without an armed escort.


That's all I got.

Labels: Humor

9:11 PM

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I don't know if I published this before or not. I found it while cleaning up my Word files. Rush is almost always saying something retarded so I just had to make a slight update to fit the current news cycle.

Why Rush Limbaugh Hates Us

Rush Limbaugh is a very angry man. He hates liberals. He detests liberals. Rush thinks that liberals are the worst scum to ever have walked the face of the earth. Can you blame him? When he was a boy he was sexually molested by a liberal. Although the police report doesn’t specify, young Rush may have been debauched by a hippie, possibly hippies, quite possibly many, many, MANY hippies*. Please think about that the next time you judge Rush harshly over his moronic views on national politics or his jingoistic opinions on foreign policy.

I know what you are all saying, being the hyper-liberal, ultra-politically correct, do-gooders that you all are. You are saying that there is nothing funny about a child being molested. It isn’t funny unless it happens to a know-nothing, draft-dodging, proto-fascist sack of shit like Rush Limbaugh who mocks someone with Parkinson’s Disease.

As a matter of fact, Rush was an adult at the time of the hippie gang rape. Does that make you happy? Does that assuage the guilt you experienced over the rush of pleasure you felt about hearing of young Rush’s misfortune? He just looked younger than his 18 years because he was such a corpulent, little red-faced cherub. He was so plump and cute back then that you would never have guessed that he would turn out to be the grotesque caricature of a capitalist pig that he is today.

Think about that story the next time you hear one of his radio rants against liberals. Through his angry words it is impossible not to hear his desperate cries for help. With every slanderous word he hurls at liberals you can almost hear him pining for the time he spent an entire three-day weekend working a port-a-potty glory hole at a Grateful Dead concert. The only way poor Rush can perform marital relations with his sixth wife is if he fantasizes about a psychedelic school bus filled with long-haired Viet Nam War protesters.

Every angry word that Rush utters against welfare cheats and environmentalists is simply the work of a man in complete denial. It’s sad to think that in order for Mr. Limbaugh to fulfill his true sexual orientation he has to wear a disguise consisting of a tasteful floral sun dress and a hat with flowers and fruit on the brim. Then he cruises bars frequented by union workers or PETA volunteers. His fetish for liberals has gotten so bad that he actually carries around a picture of Fidel Castro wearing a Speedo® in his wallet. He spends thousands of dollars every week calling an 800 number that charges $5.95 a minute to tell you personal things about Noam Chomsky.

*I thought about that last ‘many’ for a while and I just felt it added immensely to the humor value of that particular sentence. Any humorist worth his salt knows that three of anything makes it funnier.

Labels: Humor

2:12 PM

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Friday, August 18, 2006

 

Ready, aim...wait a second. 

A Firing Squad Gone Horribly Wrong

As I stand before the firing squad, smoking my last cigarette, I look back over the events that led up to this fateful, sunny afternoon in a country far from my own, and this fucking heat; are you kidding me with this shit? It’s like a sauna, but a sauna is a dry heat and it’s humid as hell, so I mean the other kind…a steam bath…or is that what a Turkish bath is? This cigarette is stale; I don’t smoke, anyway, never have. Nope, I’m kind of a health nut, but I don’t know what the hell else you are supposed to do while you’re standing in front of a firing squad, so I took a cigarette, and now I wish that I wouldn’t have, except I thought that if I didn’t they would just shoot me sooner.

Why are you guys cocking your guns? I just lit this thing. The very least that you could do is let me finish. Do I have to remind you how badly you screwed up my last meal? Is it really asking too much to have a bit of fresh tuna in the Niçoise salad? I don’t mind some canned tuna but there should be a little freshly grilled tuna as well. And what’s with the no wine policy as far as last meals go? What are we? Are we animals? I asked for a glass of Chateau Neuf du Pape to go with my boeuf bourguignon and you give me grape juice and Salisbury steak. Just shoot me now.

Ouch. Which one of you shot me in the foot? I was speaking figuratively out of frustration over my botched last meal when I said to shoot me. Now I have to stand here and bleed through my last cigarette. Can I switch this for a menthol? Ouch! Very clever shooting me in the other foot—a real stroke of genius. I’m glad you guys have such a great sense of humor. This was supposed to be my last few minutes on this earth wherein I look back over the course of my life in blissful reflection and now that prospect is pretty much out the window because I got fucking holes in both of my feet. You guys are complete idiots.

How badly do you have to fuck up in the army before they demote you to firing squad detail? That has to be about five steps lower than cleaning latrines. Is that it? Please don’t tell me that you guys fucked up latrine detail? Your folks must be so proud of you. I hope to god that there is no afterlife because I don’t want the last thing that I remember from this life to be six morons pointing rifles at me. This is the thanks I get for surviving two years of torture and sitting in a dank cell? As if I need another reason to be an atheist.

I need a light. No, rules are rules. I get a last smoke and I dropped this one and it fell in my blood and went out so give me a light or I’m going to write a very sternly-worded letter to your superiors. ‘Your superiors.’ What a laugh that is, huh? Like there is anything in the plant or animal kingdom that isn’t superior to you six invertebrates.

Ouch! Great, now I have to hold my last cigarette with my other hand. I don’t think that I can smoke left handed. You know what? Fuck you guys. Just go ahead and get it over with. Fire away, retards.

Ouch. You're fucking kidding me, right? How many of you guys missed? Besides the shots I already took in the feet and hand, I only have one more hole in my stomach. This could be the most incompetent execution in the entire history of capital punishment. Well don’t just stand there. Somebody finish me off, for Christ sakes. What? You don’t have any more bullets? I’d say, “Shoot me,” but I think I’ve had enough irony for one fucking day. Just do me a favor and get out of my sight.

Labels: Humor

4:39 PM

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Thursday, August 17, 2006

 

Build Your Own Joke

Not to disparage the sophistication of the average reader at this web address, but what seems to work best around here is some sort of variation of the ultra-vulgar Aristocrats joke. Any attempt at a more high-minded humor generally meets with confusion and resentment. How about this for the beginning of a joke?

This gay, black, French guy walks into a bar and takes a dump on a whore who is blowing a midget with no arms or legs.

You can see how I skillfully touched on homophobia, racism, xenophobia, scatology, misogyny, sex, and a nugget midget. I will let the reader determine which of the three characters is passing wind. What was that? Have all three people farting? Why didn’t I think of that? You people are geniuses. I learn so much from you.

Perhaps the writers here should work in tandem with the readers to develop a more democratic comedy style. Instead of having readers merely voting on the humor essays they find the most appealing, we will have them actually build their own jokes from a do-it-yourself menu. Jokes generally have three elements: characters, a situation, and a punch-line. We will supply the building blocks and the readers can make their own jokes. Here are your choices.

1) The Characters
a. A toothless nun with a very flat head
b. A well-hung, transvestite, midget, pizza delivery boy
c. An ageing Eskimo prostitute
d. A fat pedophile with a monkey’s head stuck in his butt
e. A priest chasing an alter boy hobbled by his pants around his ankles

2) The Situation
a. walks into a gay amputee bar
b. is lying on an emergency room gurney surrounded by a Mexican family wearing clown suits but no pants
c. is attacked by a gang of Olympic figure skating judges armed with an assortment of marital aids
d. runs barefoot across a blisteringly hot adult video store parking lot in front of a stalled church bus
e. is thrown into a prison cell with a 6’4,” 285 pound Aryan Nation leader who is dressed in a Little Mermaid outfit


3) The Punch-line
a. “You’re scared? After I sodomize and kill you I have to walk back by myself.”
b. “Hey shut up, you asshole; that’s how my dad died.”
c. “I can’t kill him yet: I need the feces.”
d. “He’s been dead for a week but we don’t have the heart to tell her to get off of him.”
e. “Rectum? It damn near killed him.”

As you can see, there lacks a bit of elucidation between parts two and three to tie it all together, but I’m sure that our readers can fill this void with their own wonderful imaginations. Instead of using the comment section to tell us how much we suck, the readers can construct their own jokes from the menu that changes daily, thus taking charge of their own humor destiny.

Labels: Humor

5:59 PM

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Monday, August 14, 2006

 

Television Disaster Grief Index: American Edition

I don’t think that I am giving out any new information when I say that we live in a world rife with terror, disease, famine, war, and crime, as well as a host of natural disasters that can strike without warning. In fact, I found examples of each of those calamities in today’s newspaper—and all I read is the sports section and the comics. Tragedy seems to be a by-product of civilization. Some catastrophes are as naturally-occurring as the air we breathe, but most are man-made. Although I pride myself on being almost completely desensitized to the pain and suffering of others, there are occasions when I come across a news report of some horrific event about which I think I should probably feel bad. That’s almost like caring, isn’t it?

Over the years I have developed something I call the Disaster Grief Index to help me gauge the degree to which I should feign anguish when I read about the misery of others. The model for my index was taken from how television news covers these events. I figure if CNN deems something to be important, then I should, too. Let me walk you through this.

First of all, you should primarily only care about bad things happening to Americans. The way that television news explains it, if tragedy strikes non-Americans then they probably have it coming. Maybe they should try being more careful. If TV is somehow coerced into covering a disaster in some far-off land it is only because the event is of biblical proportions. CNN uses a sliding scale formula in order to calculate when deaths are reported. They have made a computation as to how viewers should regard the deaths of total strangers.

1 American life =
10 English-speaking non-Americans
50 Europeans who speak a language other than English
1,000 Latin Americans
10,000 Asians
1,000,000 Africans (except white, English-speaking Africans)

The way this works is if one American dies then that is news, but it takes ten British people to die to warrant the same coverage as the lone American death. Let’s be honest with ourselves, do any of us have time to hear a story about 5,000 Chinese people whose bus went off a cliff? Anything less than one million Africans perishing will be relegated to a small segment that airs somewhere between celebrity news and a funny security video of someone accidentally being sprayed by a shook-up can of soda. It is called proportionality and it is how we make it through the day without being crippled by anxiety.

Before you accuse television reporters of being heartless pricks, let me remind you that people die every day, or almost every day (I have a birthday coming up so I would appreciate it if everyone whose time is almost out to die either the day before or the day after). You can’t get worked up every time a tidal wave slams into some country you can’t even pronounce, let alone find on a map. According to CNN, what completely shatters the Disaster Grief Index, what you should really get hysterical about is the disappearance of cute white girls. From CNN’s bloated coverage it is apparent that if one cute white girl goes missing that is worth at least five thousand people dying in a volcano eruption in Bolivia. For the value of a dead, ugly American girl you can revert back to the original index.

Just this morning I read that there was an earthquake in Pakistan a few months ago that killed 73,000 people. I don’t even remember hearing about it when it happened, probably because there weren’t any cute American girls among the victims for CNN to report. Foreign disasters please take note: If you want to capture the attention of the American audience, be sure to include a few American victims—preferably cute white girls.

Labels: Humor

5:37 PM

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Sunday, August 06, 2006

 

Cleaning Up Our Act

Anticipating more stringent guidelines on the internet, the Leftbanker staff, in an act of self-regulation, will be providing more family-oriented comedy. A perfunctory survey of the past few months will show that the quality of humor around here seems to have taken a turn for the worse. It seems you can’t read a single article here that isn’t some sort of instruction manual about how to apply a Dirty Sanchez or play a rusty trombone; or someone extolling the finer points of taking a dump, laying cable, or dropping the kids off at the pool; or an author penning a veritable treatise on getting your knob polished, or flogging the bishop; or a how-to guide for trimming the beard off the old goat. I don’t even know what the fuck that last one means but, knowing you people the way that I do, I’m pretty sure it is something completely filthy. I’m sorry to inform you that things are going to change.

Nothing in this essay is going to go anywhere near the human intestinal track. I plan on avoiding everything concerning the stomach, the large and small intestines, the rectum, and the anus. By this I mean the vitals themselves and all material found within aforementioned organs, whether its form is solid, liquid, or gas. This essay will certainly float above any attempt at humor which comes at the expense of the release of gaseous material from the human digestive system, whether it be as loud as a thunder clap, or of the silent variety that is usually quite a bit more offensive, olfactorily speaking—although I think that describing these hushed emissions as ‘lethal’ or ‘deadly’ is a bit hyperbolic, and in this era of heightened concern for terrorism there is no need to sow unwarranted panic.

The penis is another vein this essay will not mine, although if you look at the archives of this web site, that appendage seems to contain the mother lode of comedy. As they say on Oprah, I’m just not going to go there. Female genitalia—be they shaved, trimmed, manicured like something out of Edward Scissorhands, or as overgrown as a vacant lot—represent another forbidden fruit that I will not eat, metaphorically, figuratively, or stylistically speaking. Even if I were to eat this forbidden fruit, it would be the height of bad form to talk about it with my mouth full anyway. We aren’t savages here at the Leftbanker staff.

I am quite sure that this next item will make me very unpopular with the regular readership here, but in some ways I feel that the current supporters at Leftbanker are part of the problem, and not part of the solution in our battle to establish decency. I will quickly become the Osama bin Laden of contributors because I am refusing to discuss mammary glands, both surgically enhanced and as the lord meant them to be. I will not pander to the prurient and salacious interests of readers by making light of boobs as big as your head or those that are just perfect little handfuls. I haven’t checked it out for myself yet, but I have been told that there are other sites on the internet where you can look at somewhat suggestive pictures of women. Find another destination for your animalistic urges, readers; you will no longer find cheap gratification here.

We hope that you will enjoy the new family-friendly format here at Leftbanker. Go ahead, bring the kids along to read the new sanitized material. We can promise you that there won’t be a single mention of bodily injury, bodily functions, dead bodies, hot bodies, anything discharged—both painfully or otherwise—scabs, crabs, blow holes, a-holes, chancres, cankers, wankers, and spankers. Instead of making references to things more suited to men’s room graffiti, we will be shooting above the waist in our attempts at humor. We will avoid themes of scatology, sodomy*, and violence in favor of wholesome subjects like those addressed in the comic strip Family Circus or a rerun of Eight is Enough.

*Microsoft Word offers no synonyms for sodomy; if they did I was going to include them all in that sentence—just another example that humor cannot be fabricated by machines.

Labels: Humor

12:09 AM

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Monday, July 31, 2006

 

Famous Moments in Drunk Driving


Too much "humanity?" 

With Mel Gibson’s arrest for drunken driving making headlines, I thought I would take this opportunity to point out a few highlights in the history of boozing and cruising. Although Mel apparently made a complete ass out of himself that night, his tequila-fueled outrage of drunkenness, speeding, anti-Semitism, and belligerency hardly ranks up there with some of the more infamous cocktails of man, machine, and alcohol. Please let me know if I’ve overlooked any truly epic cases.

To make this a little more interesting I’m going to enter this essay on my palm pilot as I drive. Let me just pull over at this convenience store for a six pack. That didn’t take long. The 16 oz. cans are a better deal—I got a twelve pack. Where was I?

3,500 B.C.- Beer was first made in Mesopotamia around 5,000 B.C. and the wheel was also invented there around 3,500 B.C. I’m guessing that within 24 hours after the invention of the wheel someone in Mesopotamia decided it would be a good idea to mix these two hallmarks of civilization, with disastrous consequences.

April 14, 1912- Captain Edward John Smith wrecks the Titanic with the subsequent loss of 1,516 passengers. I have no evidence that he was shit-faced but it happened at 11:40 p.m. You be the judge and jury. The ship had an excellent selection of tequila. When in 1985 a joint American-French expedition located the wreck using a video camera, they discovered a salt shaker and limes near the steering wheel.

May 6, 1937- The Hindenburg Airship explodes in a fireball over New Jersey. Radio reporter Herbert Morrison’s cry of, “Oh the humanity!” makes more sense when you learn that the pilot of the Hindenburg was partial to a flaming shot called The Humanity (equals part Bacardi 151 rum, Goldschlager, and Rumpleminz set ablaze). History shouldn’t be so hard on the captain. Have you ever tried to parallel park a zeppelin?

I’m making good time, even in this traffic. I’m on my fourth beer and I’m only about 4 miles from home.

September 30, 1955- James Dean hits a tree in the middle of nowhere while driving his roadster. Police investigators theorize that he was just trying to pull over to take a leak behind the one tree on Highway 46.

1980-2006- This represents Robert Downey Jr.’s entire driving career to the present. When he first registered for driver’s education as a sophomore his blood/alcohol was found to be more than twice the legal limit. He never looked back. His custom-made Maserati Quattroporte has a martini holder in the driver’s console.

I haven’t tried to “shotgun” a beer in a long time. I bet that would be fun.

March 24, 1989- Captain Hazelwood of the Exxon Valdez slams his oil tanker into a reef while he is trying to make another batch of frozen margaritas. The lesson here is that friends don’t let friends drink and drive ships carrying 11,000,000 gallons of crude oil which, when dumped into the ocean, can destroy 470 miles of pristine Alaskan coastline.

August 31, 1997- Henri Paul, Princess Di’s driver, slams her car into a wall in a Paris tunnel. Turns out he was shit-house drunk—even for French standards. A world-wide wave of grieving is unleashed along with a good joke:

Did you hear about the princess who stayed out past midnight?
She turned into a concrete wall.

This joke is incredibly insensitive, but not nearly as callous and insensitive as allowing your chauffer to drive 120 mph down a busy urban thoroughfare. Her car was being chased by photographers, not Al Qaeda assassins.

I’ve never noticed that stop sign before. The good news is that I won’t have to worry about it tomorrow unless someone comes out and puts it back up.

July 16, 1999- JFK Jr. crashes a plane that he wasn’t really qualified to fly. There was no indication that he had been drinking, although his flight pattern was incredibly erratic. Your honor, I would like to call to the stand my first witness, Mister, or should I say Señor José Cuervo.

Good evening, O-ci-fer. Or is it morning? What time’s it? Is’t after last call? Shit. You sure? You want me to touch my what with my what? Why you big…

It was pretty bad after that, at least what I can remember. I sent this off this morning to my publicist.

"I want to apologize specifically to everyone in the New York Yankees community for the vitriolic and harmful words that I said to a law enforcement officer the night I was arrested on a DUI charge. I believe that Yankee fans are very similar to normal human beings and have the right to coexist and be protected by most of the laws set aside for people. When I say something, either articulated and thought out, or blurted out in a moment of insanity, my words carry weight in the public arena. I don’t really think the Yankees suck. That’s just a figure of speech we use in Seattle."

Labels: Humor

8:48 PM

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Friday, July 28, 2006

 

My Life-Long Dream Revised


Do I look like Rudy? 

Ever since I can remember, ever since I saw my first game on a grainy black and white television, all I have ever wanted was to play football for Notre Dame. Play football for Notre Dame and have a threesome, although I think that if I was playing football at Notre Dame having threesomes probably just comes with the territory—not that I’m saying the only reason I want to play football for Notre Dame is to nail some nice FFM action, or perhaps some FNM if one of them happens to be a nun—which is totally believable if I played football at a Catholic university. I don’t know why I never considered throwing a nun into the mix before, and I mean a hot teenage nun (but legal, of course) and not an old hag nun with a hairy wart on her upper lip. Do they have nun cheerleaders? Talk about killing two deep-rooted sexual fantasies with one stone.

Now that I think about it, you can scratch the whole ‘playing football’ shit—just sign me up for the threesomes' part of my dream. Going to practice would definitely screw up my sex life if I was nailing a cheerleader nun and one of her bi-curious teenage (18-19 only please) playmate-worthy friends.

Going to Notre Dame University was only contingent upon my place on the varsity football squad so if I get cut for missing practice I definitely have better things to do than go to class. Things like exploring each and every lurid fantasy of a voluptuous teenager who, although she looks quite young, is nevertheless a consenting adult. And who am I to judge if she and her friends have a rather surprisingly large collection of adult toys that require complicated instructions, not to mention dozens of D cell batteries? Now that I’m off the team I can show what a good sport I am by consenting to make videos with the nun and her friends even though I feel that I’m really not that photogenic.

As a young boy, playing football in the vacant lot with Billy Bob, Jimbo, and Billy Ray I, like all young boys, would inhabit my world of fantasy. I would think to myself, “If I make this touchdown pass it means that I’m destined to go to Notre Dame.” I would take the snap and fall back into the pocket. I could almost hear the crowd cheering wildly as I looked for a receiver downfield. And then I’d picture the teenage nun with oral skills honed in the Catholic school system which actually encourages fellatio, and I would spot the intended receiver. In this case it was a kid we used to call “Stone Hands” McIntyre. It is almost impossible to throw a football while trying to disguise the fact that you have a raging hard-on. Stone Hands would have dropped it anyway. I threw a perfect spiral right through the back window of the auto body shop run by some surly-looking Puerto Ricans which meant that our football days were over until someone got a new ball for their birthday or Christmas.

I think the moral of this story is that you should never give up on your dreams. Unless constantly thinking about your dreams is seriously impeding the blood flow to some of your vital organs not connected with the reproductive system. If this is the case then perhaps you should just go to a costume store and buy a goddamn nun outfit and a cheerleader uniform and try to get these twisted notions out of your head for a few hours a day so you can function like a normal person.



Hot FNM Action 

Labels: Humor

6:35 PM

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Wednesday, May 17, 2006

 

NASCAR: "Drunk Slobs" Spelled Backwards


Trouble just waiting to happen. 

A recent Wall Street Journal article reported on the drunken rowdiness at Nascar events. "You get that many people together and naturally you're going to have some who get over-beveraged and get into trouble," said the chief deputy at a sheriff's office near a racing facility. I love that one; "over-beveraged" used as a euphemism for a shit-faced slob who has pounded about two cases of Pabst in the past ten hours, puked his guts out all over an infield port-a-potty, rallied by drinking another case of shitty beer, and then challenged an entire section of the grandstand to a fight because someone stole his half-bag of cheese doodles.

I may not be the smartest guy in the world, I may not have won any Nobel prizes in literature, I may have failed the written part of the Washington state driving exam and had to cheat off the 15 year old kid next to me when I took the retest, I may not be able to read without moving my lip...OK, you get the point. I am smart enough to know that when you mix hicks and liquor someone is going to get a few teeth knocked out--usually an innocent bystander.

Even smart people do stupid things under the influence of alcohol, but when a hick gets liquored up you can expect acts of unbridled stupidity. The problem is so out of control that Nascar officials have begun constructing their own jails at racetracks. The Nascar holding pens have a concrete floor enclosed with a chain-link fence. There is also a beer concession inside the jails, but you can't buy beer one hour before your arraignment. I'm just kidding about that last part but I really want it to be true.

I have been asking Seattle guys what the acronym Nascar stands for, exactly. Every guy I asked started off confidently: "North Americ...," or, "North American Stock C...," and "North American Stock...American." As their voices trailed off, they usually try to change the subject. Yeah, guys, I already know that you think Bush is a lousy president, but I want to know what Nascar means. I seriously doubt that there is a male over the age of seven in North Carolina--who isn't a choreographer--who doesn't know what Nascar means. Of course, there probably isn't a male over the age of seven in that state who doesn't have a ring imprinted on his back pocket from his chew can. Whether or not North Carolina choreographers chew tobacco is the subject for another essay.

Everyone knows what Nascar represents: gas-guzzling cars driving way too fast (even for hicks) around a big oval lined with hicks. I began this survey after reading about the possible construction of a Nascar track in the Seattle area. Maybe race officials should reconsider the demographic they are working with here in America's hippie, upper left-hand corner.

After interviewing about 30-40 pansies, my friend, Curtis, finally came up with the answer, but he doesn't count because he's just a geek who could probably name the Deputy Secretary of Agriculture or the exact latitude and longitude of the Solomon Islands. Just like we would all get beat up in a bar in North Carolina for not knowing what Nascar means, Curtis would get beat up for naming all of the vice presidents without being asked.

I'm now seven paragraphs into this essay and I finally know what it is about: We are all a bunch of effete liberals. Sure, we probably could all change our own oil, but then we'd agonize for hours over how to get rid of it. We'd argue over whether or not synthetic oil is ultimately better for the environment. I guess that I'm just a big, fat, effete, sack of liberal manure. It makes me want to drink a beer, watch a car race, and take a swing at someone.



Define "too much to drink.". 

Labels: Humor

5:07 PM

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Saturday, May 13, 2006

 

Terrorist Leader Touts Suicide Bombing as Miracle Cure


I was born without a penis. 

Abdul Rahmani, leader of an Islamic terrorist organization, has announced that he is no longer taking applications for suicide bombers. In recent weeks the organization has in fact turned down hundreds of requests for young people willing to blow themselves up along with the odd innocent bystander. “We were running a little low on volunteers until someone in our marketing division struck upon an ingenious new campaign,” said Rahmani in an interview from his estate in Cannes, France. “Ever since we started selling suicide bombing as a miracle cure our phones have been ringing off the hook.”

In a culture in which abortion is strictly forbidden, suicide bombing is the only answer to an unwanted pregnancy among teen women in Islamic countries. Young boys who impregnate their sisters are also using suicide bombing as an escape from their shame. “Yes, blowing yourself to kingdom come really does solve all of life’s little problems,” announced Rahmani as he lounged near his swimming pool next to a bikini-clad Scandinavian Air stewardess. “Homosexuality, impotence, incontinence, piles, venereal diseases, you name it and suicide bombing cures it. With health care costs rising so much in recent years, this is really a simple solution.”

When asked why the terrorist leader himself hasn’t yet volunteered for a suicide mission he said that it was in Allah’s hands. “As you can see, I am in perfect health. I would not hesitate to carry out an attack against the infidels, but right now I’m trying to lose a few pounds on the Atkins so I look better in my Speedo.” Rahmani also explained that by locating his headquarters on the stunning French Riviera he is posed to do the most damage against American and Zionist targets. “With the snap of a finger I can strike against the hated enemy. Tel Aviv is only a two hour flight, New York is nine, and I have enough first class frequent flyer miles accumulated so the flights won’t cost the organization a thing—that’s if God calls me. I am prepared, but tonight isn’t good for me because some Al Qaeda people are coming by with some hookers for an orgy. In this business it’s important to keep morale high.”

Labels: Humor

6:02 PM

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Monday, May 08, 2006

 

An Open Letter To Starbucks

The unrelenting forced politeness of modern-day American corporate retail is enough to make me want to commit acts of such savage incivility that I would make the Mongols look like hordes of Mister Rogers on horseback. I know that the directives from your corporate headquarters dictate that you mouth at least five fucking greetings to every customer—excuse me, make that guest—but I’m too hung-over and it’s too early for me to even talk, let alone be remotely chatty. So just take my money, hand over my cup of over-priced coffee, accept my grunt as communication, and we can go our separate ways. I don’t mean to be a downer but the fact that you exhort others to “have a great day” will not lighten the oppressive burden of human existence.

Maybe if I got up at 5 a.m., after eight hours of uninterrupted sleep, and had downed seven double espressos I would be as cheery as everyone who works here. I didn’t get up at 5 a.m., I haven’t had any coffee, and I sure as shit didn’t get anywhere near eight hours of sleep—not for the entire week. So can we just leave out about 99% of the painfully-forced pleasantries and get on with the business transaction? And by the way, I’m not a “guest.” If I were a guest you would give me the coffee instead of charging me the equivalent of the suggested monthly donation to Save the Children for my cappuccino.

Labels: Humor

7:25 PM

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Tuesday, April 25, 2006

 

A Gentleman's Guide To Baseball


Play by the rules! 

Baseball games are one of the few occasions for adult males to act like assholes with complete impunity. When they announce the equipment manager before the game I like to screech like a 13 year old girl at a Backstreet Boys concert. Is there a better excuse to have a beer before noon than at a day game? At a recent pre-game show in Seattle they had some 9 year old cancer survivor run the bases. While most of the crowd was teary-eyed and cheering, everyone in my cheap-seat section was screaming at the kid to show some hustle. OK, replace “everyone in my section” with “me” but I think they were all thinking it. And would it have killed the kid to slide into home? It’s not like he just hit a walk-off home run.

Like a complex jazz improvisation, enjoying a baseball game is open to a high degree of personal interpretation; however, like staying on key in jazz, baseball does have certain standards. It’s what separates us from the animals…and hockey. The rules for watching baseball at the park are few and uncomplicated yet people continue to behave badly. It’s time to put down the rules for fandom in writing.

Pre-Game Ritual

Baseball is a game with more traditions than the Catholic Church so it is important to develop your own set of rituals when you go to the game. It is essential to have at least one beer at a neighboring bar before you enter the ball park. I pity the people who drive to the stadium, park, enter, and immediately start paying $9 for crappy beer in a plastic cups.

The street leading to Seattle’s baseball park is lined with a gauntlet of hot dog stands and food concessions. Aside from the cholera epidemic of the 2003 season, this isn’t a bad place to buy some cheap eats before you enter. If your tradition is to eat sunflower seeds and spit the shells all over the people in the two rows in front of you, save some money by buying the seeds at one of the concessions outside the park.

What’s That In Your Hand?

There are only a few acceptable items that you can have in your hands while the game is in play.

I guess it goes without saying that beer is one of the suitable items you can grip with your hand. Ditto soft drinks. If you are in a luxury suite I suppose things like mimosas or wine are allowed. Rich people have their own rules. They aren’t watching the game, anyway.

Food is another on