Tuesday, December 28, 2004

Welcome to my World

Let's say you are filling out a legal document that asks for your E-Mail address.

Let's also say that your E-Mail address isn't simply YOURNAME@WHATEVER.COM or some variation like FIRSTNAMELASTINITIALDATEOFBIRTH@WHATEVER.COM.

Let's say it's something like...oh...I dunno...HOTBARTENDER@WHATEVER.COM.

Do you fill in the blank with HOTBARTENDER@WHATEVER.COM or do you do the 'wise' thing (considering that this application, afterall, is a LEGAL DOCUMENT!!!) and leave that line blank?

Well?

What would you do?

If it's the latter (not listing it) than you are NOTHING like the fellow I met with today.

T

Monday, December 27, 2004

Not Necessarily the Response I expected from my Mother after she received THE COMPLETE PEANUTS Volumes One and Two from Me for Christmas

"Ooo. Good thing they're so heavy. That way no one will steal them."

That's right, mother dear...the heaviest tomes are the least likely to be pinched. And the Great Pumpkin knows that one of the first things a home intruder keys in on for booty is works of the late great Charles Schulz.

If only my copy of HAPPINESS IS A WARM PUPPY had weighed in at a couple hundred pounds I might still have it...

T


Wednesday, December 22, 2004

The Next Time Someone Inquires as to Why it is you Smell of Swine...

Inform said person that while driving back to work from your lunch break you were rearended by a Hormel semi and NOT that you've recently joined a bacon-puppet brigade.


And INSIST that, regardless of the truth of the matter, that Neither are a euphemism...at least in our culture.

T

Monday, December 20, 2004

The Unexpected Question of the Day

"Have you ever been attacked by a possum? They're fierce. I used to live in a mobile home and one chewed through the wall..."

If Walt Kelly was still with us, he'd need to upgrade Pogo's disposition. Albert beware.

T

Sunday, December 19, 2004

A Sure Sign you MAY Need to see an Eye Doctor

An exchange from last night between myself and a friend (who shall remain nameless):

Nameless Friend: Hey, look! That's ABBA on the television.
Me (looks up at one of the bar's numerous tv's): Uhm, that's not ABBA, dude...that's the Oakridge Boys.
NF: Are you sure?
Me: You really need to get some cheaters.

Mistaking the Oakridge Boys for ABBA is like misidentifying Joe Cocker for Ashley Simpson or even Meatloaf for Clay Aiken. When something like this happens one should immediately schedule a date with your Peepers Examiner.

T

Friday, December 17, 2004

The Laments of a Fellow with Dumb Ass Mutant Powers

I was about 13 or 14 when the family physician informs my parents that I've got a mutant gene (it manifested itself at the same time I was hitting puberty) and, at first, I thought it'd be pretty cool to see what special abilities and/or powers I was going to get due to this mutation. Unfortunately, they were not evident right away. This gave me a lot of time to dream up my Wish List of superheroic powers and what I'd do with them. Like flight, super strength or maybe even some kick ass eye beams of some sort; be a sorta small-town X-Man or something. But NOOO. Not in the cards for me. As I learned in short order I had the ability to make people want to have sexual congress with wigs (first discovered this trait at an area Sears...my mom was looking for a hairpiece for my father's shiney pate...the afflicted clerk, when he entered by sphere of influence, was caught on the security camera balls deep in a Mae West-like faux-coif). Not very useful in fighting crime, let me tell you, but I did have a short-lived career in Adult Entertainment...people used to call me Afro-Disiac...sad but true.

T

Monday, December 13, 2004

Laughing at Another's Pain

Ran across the following post out there in Message Board land:

"The hardest part of breaking up is knowing you already bought her her christmas present. Plus you threw away the reciept because you thought it would last forever."

Which, at face value, is pretty sad. Hell, we've all probably been there at one time or another (Lordy knows I have).

After this initial post, there's a slew of responses like:

"Sorry to hear that."

"Fuck."

and so on.

Even I, after seeing the first post, felt sympathy towards the lil' fellow. That is, until he revealed WHAT the gift in question was in the following post:

"actually it(sic) a Elvis action figure but still."

At which point I just barely averted a Spit-Take/Soda-through-the-Nose combo.

Sure, it's the thought that counts (in gift selection) but...but...COME ON!!!

T
(still guffawing)



Sunday, December 12, 2004

Things Learned from a House Party I Attended Last Night

If you work for an automotive-related business, you can get a bitchin' custom paint job that normally costs $20,000 for free. I was left wondering why anyone would want a flame motif on their Suburban and EIGHT tvs installed in the interior.

I look like I belong in a boy band. It was never clarified if they meant some musical act or a band of street urchins; I'm leaning towards the latter.

There used to be a Kroft Superstar show called LIDSVILLE. Apparently it had little to do with LID being a drug reference but, in fact, that many of the charcters were human-sized HATS and the bad guy (portrayed by Charles Nelson Reilly) flew around in an upside-down chapeau. Why this was never rerun with the likes of Wonder Bug, The Bugaloos, HR Pufnstuff, Land of the Lost, Doctor Shrinker, Sigmund the Sea Monster, et cetera also left me baffled. However, it was more than likely concocted while hopped up on some narcotic.

You can euthanize an ailing hamster for $13.10.

T

Friday, December 10, 2004

Cafeteria Justice

There are many folk out there that may recall being placed in the corner when acting up during grade school lunch hour by the ever-vigilant monitor (usually an older woman or a school custodian pulling double-duty between his daily rounds of sprinkling that Janitor Dust* on freshly spewed vomit from the seemingly endless kiddies with timid tummies; perhaps said puke-age a result of the cafeteria's culinary wizardry...but that may be a tale for another time) whether for talking too loud, flaunting your cuss word lexicon to the table's token eternally picked upon geek, a well-aimed bread roll projectile, or any other host of pre-teen shenanigans. Heck, the rabble rousers at my grade school would have LOVED to spend thirty minutes staring into a corner (and picking strips of caulk out to wile away the time...a universally embraced corner-standing past time if there ever was one...although these days it may be accompanied with some light rapping to work out the kinks in your lyrical flow skills...a cute lil' soundtrack to break up the monotony of ripping sealant out of the wall seams...who doesn't love these kid-ly troubadours?) compared to the punishment meted out by our monitor.

Misbehave during lunch at our grade school?

Then you were guaranteed a donning of the bologna vest.

A pinkish waistcoat (several of which were made weekly by the school's resident meat tailor/lunch lady of, quite obviously, very specialized skills) that the punishee would be expected to wear for the remainder of the lunch hour.

Oh, the shame...the smell...the cacophany of your peers' snortling giggles.

Not allowed to finish your own lunch, clad in meat product, your own body heat warming it and releasing it's fetid aromatic stink lines, alarming your olfactory senses whilst also taunting your stomach to remind you (in it's own gurgling calls for nourishment) that the S'Mores Pop Tart you had for breakfast wasn't going to be adequate to get you through the rest of the day.

Purgatory of a sort.

There was only one child that ever ended up in the bologna vest twice...and his infamy carried over well-past college and beyond (and even landed him a brief stint on the killing floor of the area's Hormel plant). The rest of us learned our lesson and never again acted up during the remaining years of our grade school education.

Bologna Vest as deterent.

Spread the word.

T





*copyright TIPTONE PRESENTS 2004

Monday, December 06, 2004

New Addition to my IT'LL MAKE ME GAG List

Joining the likes of bananas, fish sticks, and ogrish folk that favor bed linen as clothing I give you the latest item I can now add to Things that make me Audibly Gag:

Any televised news item involving the phrase, "DNA sample from Michael Jackson."

Thanks go out to MSNBC for making my lunch today so very entertaining to my fellow dining patrons and assembled waitstaff (uncertain if the kitchen staff caught a peep of my gutteral heave but, judging by the reactions of people on the other side of the restaurant, it is a strong possibility that they DID, in fact, hear me over, say, the sizzlin' bacon of a forthcoming BLT or early afternoon brunchish platter).

Not once, but TWICE did this aforementioned phrase raise a lil' Grunt from my gullet (with accompanying torso shudder of such magnitude that I found my spectacles slightly dislodged from their normal resting place).

Fortunately, typing out the phrase has no effect on me whatsoever...for now.

T

Wednesday, December 01, 2004

When Good Gifts go Bad
A Cautionary Tale

"Dad, you remember that time I dropped a pork chop in my lap over at Aunt Eunice's?"

"Yeah, boy, that was a shame seeing good meat go to waste like that."

"Uhm, yeah...when it hit my pants it tickled. Does that mean I'm into bestiality?"

"Er...not necessarily. But if you married it it'd be a type of animal husbandry...WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?!? Now where in the HELL did you learn that word."

"The World Books I got for my birthday."

"Dammit...I told your mother nothing good would come of that gift...now's it's turned you into some bookish pervert that's tantalized by warmed over pig. Wonderful."

"Uhm...then it might be a good idea to get rid of my copies of Charlotte's Web AND Babe..."

T