A list of jobs that didn’t exist before the 21st century:
Green building specialist
Reality TV show score composer
Director of homeland security
Amateur Professional Blogger
Identity Thief
Millennium Survivor
XFL Football Player
Ipod commercial silhouette model
President of Montenegro
Designer Dog Breeder
As usual feel free to drop your funnier/more accurate suggestions into the comment box. Best comment wins its author a one hour consultation with his/her choice of life coach.
I don’t want to bone-a-parte of you. I want to bone all of you.
Is your dad a baker? Because seriously, I haven’t eaten for days.
Hello mademoiselle, just so you know, I’ve still got my head –both of them.
Hungry? Let me show you my baguette
I want to storm your Bastille
Did it hurt? (Girl answers huh?) When you fell from the aristocracy?
Come on baby, everyone knows that the tenets of the enlightenment are best taught in the dark
It’s not the size of the dictator that matters; it’s the execution of the revolution.
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite, Orgasme
The bourgeoisie isn’t the only thing rising right now
There’s a dissatisfied political party in my pants, and you’re invited.
Have you seen Elba in the summer? It’s so beautiful. You just can’t leave.
Off with her pants!
*As usual, feel free to add to and improve on these in the comments. Bonus points if you can work tripartite hats in there.
The guitar legend gives us inside look at his outside, giving Mudville a wrinkle by wrinkle tour of his famously battered countenance.
1. This’n ain’t actually a wrinkle. It’s a scar from ’68. I was freebasing in some basement in Greenwich Village and I missed me arm with the bloody needle. Managed to stick myself right in the bloody chin.
2. Sometime in the 80s I had this gipsy woman read my face. She was a palm reader normally but I offered her a hundred pounds and the hag said she’d do it. Told her just be honest with me. This was my lifeline she said. I’m gonna live to be a bloody hundred.
3. Well that’s a big fuckin’ wrinkle ain’t it? Where the ‘ell did that come from? Me mum used to say that wrinkles are just the leftovers of smiles. That’s what that one is. Just a big fuckin’ smile, that’s what.
4. I was over at Clapton’s flat in SoHo and I was tryin’ to keep up with the sonuvabitch on me Gibson and he had me playing so fuckin’ hard a bloody string broke and hit me in the eye. Clapton said I ought to go get it looked up but fuck it, I know that wanker was just trying to show me up. I wasn’t going to let him outplay me. But I was injured and without me eye he outplayed me, yes he did.
5. That’s just one of me dimples. Gorgeous ain’t it? It’s what all the girlies say they love about me most.
6. Had me a quarrel with Mick in the 80s, his pansy days when he was running around like a bloody fairy with Bowie and he fuckin’ scratched me in the face. Charlie had to break the bloody thing up. Honestly though I didn’t feel a thing at the time.
7. I got me braids done by an Indian medicine man. The different beads mean different things. Said they’d give me spiritual wisdom. Some fuckin’ good that’s done me. Spiritual wisdom my arse. I just keep ‘em ‘cause they make me look like a bloody outlaw and I don’t got to wash ‘em.
Alan Shephard
Was something of a leper
He went into space
To hide his spotted face.
John Glenn
Astronaut, senator, friend
But his presidential chances
Were spoiled by alien romances.
Aldrin, Buzz
Legally changed his name because
Edwin Aldrin Junior
Wasn’t sufficiently lunar.
Yeager, Chuck
Drove a plane not a truck
He could not have been merrier
Than when he broke the sound barrier.
Neil Armstrong,
His fans come in throngs
And that flag he unfurled?
It was out of this world.
Hare some movie titles I made up. But I don’t know anything about them. This is an exercise in getting people to comment. So please share your ideas for the genres, plots, directors, and casts of these future films. Maybe in the future I’ll do some more detailed treatments or short screenplays for them.
The Ghost of Van Buren: Attack of the Sideburns
Subprime Meats
Hot Ice: Reykjavik Rising
First Cutz
The Great Punjab Hand Job
She Wore a Yellow Wristband
Soulville
Cannery Woe
Thanks to my friend Ben for this idea. Maybe, if it works, we can try it the other way too, where I provide cast and stuff and you all title it in the comment.
*It just came to my attention that many of these look like porn movies. Well two of them at least. Maybe more. I didn’t do this on purpose. Blame Freud.
These couplets were written by Johnny, an honors student in the seventh grade. They were given a B+ by his teacher Mr. Clark, and have never before been published. They appear here, for the first time in unabridged form, and annotated by his mother, who is active in the PTA and once read a poetry book.
*
*
Last Summer
Last summer I got the chicken pox
So I studied the French city Bordeaux.[1]
I also learned tree anatomy from root to bough
(Of forestry I cannot get enough).[2]
I arranged toy soldiers on the march
For me, their poetically inclined monarch.[3]
*
*
[2] When he was little Johnny used to try and climb trees. He was never very athletic though, and if the branches were more than a foot or two up on the trunks, he would just give up. Stumps are more his thing. And couches. Anyways, maybe that’s why he never figured out how to pronounce the word bough. Hell, he’s probably never heard it said. This is America. We say branch in this household. Plus Bough and Enough look a lot alike. I bet foreigners mess that up all the time.
[3] Okay there’s no real excuse for this one, but maybe he’s not even going for rhyme. Did you know that poems don’t even have to rhyme anyways? I bet he heard a teacher say that at school. Like William Carlos Williams. That guy doesn’t rhyme at all. He’s a genius, I think. We have a real genius on our hands. We didn’t name him Jonathon after Keats (Wayne actually), but it still works right? He’s a prodigy damnit. I need some more wine.
Today, as any self-respecting college student knows, is earth day. I know earth day should be capitalized, but I refuse to do it. Marginal holidays don’t deserve uppercase letters. Especially if what that guy speaking in front of the student union building proposed comes true. He said every day should be Earth Day (he definitely intended to capitalize it). I just don’t think any secular holiday that doesn’t result in a day off should be a proper noun. That’s all.
In honor of earth day today, I got a tree. Yes, I got a tree. I was walking across campus and there was a guy at a table distributing little saplings in bags. He handed me one, and I said thanks. It took me an hour or so of carrying the tree to realize how senseless a waste of trees that was. How many college students are actually going to carry a tree around all day and then go plant it? How many college students have yards in which to plant trees? I don’t. So I passed mine off to a friend who lives at home and may or may not decide to plant it there.
How many trees, I wonder, will wind up in trash cans, or tossed into shrubs on campus where nobody can see them (plants are a great place to hide plants). They would have been smart to hand out seeds instead. Seeds are cheaper, more portable, and just as easy to plant.
Next to the earth day people was a booth protesting the Israeli treatment of Palestinians in the Gaza. The protesters had a bunch of signs with slogans like “Israeli Army Targets Children” and other unfriendly literature. Their presence, the free trees, and the fact that when I bought that massive case of matzo yesterday, a tree was planted in Israel (it said so on the box) inspired in me this idea:
Why not take a bunch of the free saplings and plant them side by side in a box formation around the Palestinian protest booth? Assuming the protesters don’t move (and really, where can they go without a homeland), the trees would grow high and create something of a barrier fence, effectively trapping the protesters in their little protesting territory and muffling their cries to the outside world.
Such a fence would benefit everybody: Passing college students, environmentalists, and Zionists . It would even improve the aesthetics of the campus. This is the kind of in-the-box problem solving our government needs.
Jews:
Matzo on sale at QFC, 2.50 for one box or 3.99 for a bulk package of five. I only want two boxes, but its cheaper to buy five than two. Seems obvious, right? But I don’t have much space in my apartment. What the hell am I going to do with three extra boxes of matzo? Eat it? Probably not. Money or matzo? Talk about a Jewish mindfuck. There’s probably entire passages of the Talmud devoted to such quandaries.
So I’m standing there, in the kosher aisle, glancing back and forth between the individual boxes and the bulk packages, and I don’t know what to do. I run into a couple friends and explain the situation. Neither of them is Jewish, so although they don’t totally understand, they find the situation highly amusing. Luckily, a member of the tribe is nearby –a good hearted woman who has the same problem I do. Let’s split the case she says. And in the words of The Who, we have a remedy; a solution as stereotypically Jewish as the dilemma.
Goths*:
Are they unattractive because they dress like that? Or do they dress like that because they are unattractive?
*And I don’t just mean any old kid who wears a black t shirt every day or dark trench coat. I’m talking about the folks who put on the full “scene” regalia. And this applies to any scene, I suppose. Punk or goth or emo or indie or whatever trend taken to such an extreme that it looks like a costume.
Mexican Cowboys
I learned Spanish at an early age. I also watched cartoons. So it seems to follow logically that I would have liked “The Three Caballeros,” a cartoon from 1944 that features Donald Duck and two Latino birds wearing sombreros and sharing a bunch of random information about Latin America. The movie is something of a collage, with live action and animation, and as I remember, it is very funny.
Anyways, the title, “The Three Caballeros” caused in me a great deal of confusion. As a kid, the sombreros worn by the animated birds caused me to assume that a caballero was some sort of Mexican cowboy. Nothing happened in my life to change that perception. In Mexico, I figured, John Wayne would have been called a caballero. As it turns out, I was wrong.
What first led me to suspect the error was the fact that at Mexican restaurants I would see “caballero” posted on the door of the men’s room. “Must be some novelty thing,” I told myself, “to set the mood.” Then I saw the same thing in Spain.
There are no cowboys in Spain, and never were. I was very sure of that (although Sergio Leon did shoot some westerns in the southeast part of the country.) So why did the doors of the bathrooms in restaurants keep saying “caballeros?” Anyways, until yesterday I never bothered to find out.
I mistakenly walked into the women’s restroom at a coffee shop, and for some reason that jogged my memory. Today, I have googled the word “caballero.”
Turns out “caballero” can mean a few different things. A caballero can be a gentleman or a horseman or even a cavalier. Time to re-watch that movie with the title in consideration. Maybe that changes everything. Sombreros are so misleading. And cowboys in Mexico? They are called vaqueros. How could I have missed that?
Haircuts
Growing up, every time I got a haircut, my dad would make the same joke. “No,” he would say, “you got a mall cut.” This made no sense to me as a child. What the hell was a mall cut? Did I want a mall cut? Is that some style I don’t understand? Why is he laughing at me? No matter, I told myself, just play along. So sometimes, after he got a haircut, I would say “no, you got a mall cut.” And he would laugh. Things continued this way for years. My brothers were suffered through this too. Even my mom suffered through the haircut joke (though she got it, and had the sense to roll her eyes).
Finally, one day, towards the end of high school, I was sitting on the little bench in front of our house with my dad right after I got a haircut. He told the joke. And finally, I got it. It wasn’t “you got a mall cut,” that he was saying all these years. It was “you got ‘em all cut.” As in, instead of just cutting one of your hairs, you cut all of them.
Sometimes it’s better not to know.
Please share your stupid misunderstandings and most rewarding but insignificant epiphanies.
The other morning, flipping channels, I came across Family Feud. To my dismay I found that Richard Karn (Al Borland and UW Alum) is no longer the host. The torch has been once again passed. From Louie Anderson to Richard Karn, and now to John O’Hurley, better known as Peterman from Seinfeld.
Why is that Family Feud, which I imagine very few people watch, has become a graveyard for actors and comics? Shows like Deal or No Deal have left putzes like Howie Mandel on primetime, and VH1 will put anything with botox and a pulse on The Surreal Life.
Family Feud has become a sort of sanctuary for washed up stars not shiny enough for primetime, or trashy enough for VH1. With that in mind, here are some people you might soon see grabbing the baton from John O’Hurley and staggering to the sad finish line of their celebrity:
Paul Hogan (Crocodile Dundee)
Tara Reid
David Schwimmer
Mr. Met
Disappeared ESPN Anchor Rich Eisen
David Alan Grier
Colin Mochrie*
Bob Dole
Random Wayans Brother
Kenny Rogers
*Quick Note: When I googled Colin Mochrie the related search suggestion at the top of the page was Ryan Stiles. For some reason it saddens me that those two are so attached. Oh well. Better to be attached than to be Greg Proops I guess.
Feel free to add any suggestions
