Obama to Model 2nd Term on Cormac McCarthy's "The Road"

Once we weed out those wheezing geriatrics and take their Medicare dollars for spry young commies, that's when the real fun begins. Jobless Mexican welfare cheats and black cannibals will be given priority at the Social Security administration, and of course Islam will be mandatory, except of course for the atheists who are pulling the real strings. Toothpaste will be in short supply, available only to the elites in academia. The dental suffering alone will be mind-boggling. All the voices of dissent that once rang free on our airwaves, from Vincent David Jericho to the great Michael Savage, will be long silenced and entombed, crushed for their disgusting honesty, unable to fight the onslaught of the trial lawyers because they never made enough money to protect themselves. Health care? HA! Internment camps for those Jesus-loving capitalist swine. Our great leader rewards only his mindless minions with emergency room privileges. Also, horses and anyone caught wearing cowboy hats will be sent to Mexico to be tortured with long knives and cooked over piles of burning copies of Sarah Palin's book. Get ready to eat stewed abortions with your new same-sex spouse, which you'll be whipped for eating because you're supposed to be vegan now, queer.

How, you may ask, can Obama achieve all this occult upheaval in his first term and expect to be re-elected? Clever verbal tricks such as complete sentences, Harlem-Globetrotter-like sleight of hand, and of course The Power of Oprah. Also, American-flag diapers.

Tune in to my radio show on KWTO am, where I'll tell you how to cure cancer with emu oil and get you stocking up on Christmas trees and Bibles, because next year they're all being replaced with 100-gallon Piss-Christ displays and Korans as thick as OEDs.

Red Rogue at Olan Mills

Some bits of my face were used as ingredients for this fine portrait.

'Tis Penis Claus

We remember you fondle-y.

—er, fondly.

Highlights from the Ash Grove Christmas parade

For some reason, my wife loves parades. She would go to parades all the time if possible. She recently realized she might want her ashy mortal remains spread at a parade, so now I'll REALLY feel guilty if I don't go with her at parade time. At least there are some good photo ops.

Drunkish Yulebilly

Evil incarnate

Mobile Tree Display

Family dog hates impostor

Parade finale

A Very Special Norma and Patty Thanksgiving

For Thanksgiving, Norma hears something from Patty that sounds lonely, so she tries to invite her over.
“Patty, I have some nice thin-sliced ham, why don’t you come over for a sandwich or something?”
“Oh, no, I could never do that, I don’t want to impose.”
“Oh, Patty.”
Then Patty’s family stops over, punches her in the stomach and takes her wallet.
By nightfall, Norma has one end of the kennel clean.

Tragic Immigrants vs. Ravenous Rodents

China Max, my favorite source for Chinese food, constantly struggles to survive: Just one Chinese family with marginal English in a battle to make ends meet. They close for one hour a day to pick up their kids from school, then come back to continue their 12-hour day of working for less than minimum wage. They’ve tried many strategies to raise profits, including menu changes (at one point buying a $1000 grill to make American burgers and ribs, which no one ordered), being open 7 days a week, lucky Chinese decorations, etc. Their kids stay in a little storage zone in the back doing their homework, playing with the same pile of toys and watching the same 2 or 3 videos on a tiny TV. They’ve hired register girls a few times, but never for long, because they can barely pay them.

They have a garden at home, and the wife (“Maxine,” let’s say) has shared a few vegetables with me, and I have given her some seeds and plants. This year, a groundhog set up shop there, eating well from their garden bounty. They said they bought a little gun and were trying to shoot it, but he’s “too fast and smart.” So I said I would loan them a trap, which I already had. I brought it over the next day.

For a week or two, they had it set up wrong. They said nothing would go in the trap, and I could tell from their description that they didn’t put it together right. “Max” brought it back and, on the back step of the restaurant, I reviewed the instructions and showed him how to set it. I kept thinking, “Great, now everybody who sees us thinks we’re trapping cats or something for the restaurant, as in the local “cashew kitty” joke. That turned out to be the wrong problem to anticipate.

Within a week or so, they caught a possum. At first they didn’t know what to call it, nor did they know what to do with it. I said, “Just pull it out and throw it in the ditch somewhere--it will act dead, so it’s not dangerous.” Then it was back to never catching the groundhog, who just polished off the freshly sprouted snow peas Maxine planted, among other things. “Groundhog is very smart,” they said more than once. My new advice was to cover the trap with some sticks and leaves to camouflage it, which they did.

Finally, after two more weeks, another beast was captured. Max went over to check the trap before taking his kids to school. He kicked the branches aside and received a full-frontal blast of skunk spunk. Staggering back to the car, he opened the door and the kids went running out, yelling, “It stinks, it stinks!” He changed his clothes but still smelled like skunk for a couple of days. I think he ended up letting the skunk starve to death in the cage, because there was no way to get it out without being sprayed again.

My wife said, “God, when is he going to just give up and die?” China Max, when will the tide of woe turn away from that shore where you have been buried up to the neck? Like Leslie Nielson in Creepshow, you will have to hold your breath for a long, long time.

An Open Letter to Tootsie Roll Industries

above: the author suppresses his "cough nubbin"
re: Junior Mints

In response to the terribly unsatisfying “story” on the back panel of the Junior Mints package:

Over fifty years ago a new “Star” was born. Given Junior Mints’ popularity at the movies it comes as no surprise that the brand was named after a top Broadway play in 1949: “Junior Miss”!

My contempt for this story can scarcely be conveyed—from its capitalization of the word “star” to its utter failure to impress me with anything resembling irony, verbal wit or even mere surprise. For starters, I see negligible connection between Broadway and “the movies” in the contemporary world. Perhaps if I’m seeing “Chicago,” this tale reeks less of utter senselessness.

I have also discovered that your product, if devoured in a time of illness, can stimulate the “cough nubbin” region of the throat during those most sensitive moments of movie-seat tension. Perhaps if you printed a warning on the box, vulnerable consumers would not be caught unawares, thus reducing these disastrously inopportune occurrences of “tickle throat” and subsequent coughing fits. Something like "Junior Mints may aggravate the human body" would cover most situations.

Let there be no confusion: this in no way subtracts from the immense pleasure I derive from the mints themselves. You have engineered a chocolaty capsule fully capable of delivering its flowing minty payload—it’s a rampaging taste sensation, there’s no denying that. However, numerous mints do not survive their journey to my theater seat intact. Many a box has bottomed out in a disappointment of mashed, merged, bleeding, wrecked and otherwise compromised treats, a phenomenon I refer to as “Manure Mints.” It is my wish that, for everyone’s sake, you will rectify this snacking catastrophe with some kind of space-age wisdom or system of recompense.

Mr. "Woody"

Proper Use of Large Gourd

Team Life Force Update—Armageddon!

“Team Life Force” (not their real name) provided me, their building supervisor, numerous time-wasting diversions. When the keys to their building were lost by our realtor, I had to get all the door locks changed. “Team Life Force,” of course, was never around when I had the locksmith there for two whole days, so I didn’t change their office door, opting instead to just change the entry to the building containing their office. After two days of lock changing, I saw their cars there, so I went to give them a new key and decided to keep the story simple, saying something like, “Here’s a new key to the building--we had to change the locks because some keys were lost.” I figured this would be enough, since the building is locked at night, and people are there in the daytime. Mistake.

A week later, having settled into the comfort of a theft-free key-loss aftermath, I got a call from “John Three Eagles” (not real name) saying they’d had a TV and a table stolen. He’d talked to the secretary next door, who said she actually saw a couple taking the TV and table the day before. She’d already given a description to the police when they made a theft report. Now he wanted to know what had happened with the locks, and why their lock hadn’t been changed. Shit.

I apologized and said I thought I’d changed all the locks necessary to secure the building, but I could come over now and change theirs. He said he had to go do his radio show in 2 hours and didn’t want to leave the office unsecured. “I’ll come over now, “ I said, “and I’ll take your door handle over to the locksmith. With any luck they can get it done while I wait, and get back before you have to leave.” That’s what I did. While I was there removing the handle, I overheard him on the phone to a guy: “You need at least $2 million from Pizza Hut,” he was saying, something about a settlement I guess. “And listen to my radio show today at 2:00. I’ll be talking to Dr. Razzmatazz (not real name). He has a 92% cure rate for cancer, but the government and the media have everyone so brainwashed, they don’t believe him.” Now I was getting the good shit. I looked up at their coat rack and saw a black jacket with yellow block letters (in the style of jackets saying POLICE or FBI) that said TYRANNY RESPONSE TEAM. I had the handle off and told them again where I was going, and that I’d be back soon with new keys. John and his “old lady” (his wife, I assume) looked at me. She made a bad face and said, “It’s about time.”

I got that done, but couldn’t remove the deadbolt, so I called the locksmith for the next day. While meeting the locksmith, I saw the guy who actually leased the space occupied by Team Life Force--he wasn’t part of their team, but went to church with John Three Eagles. I told him what was going on, and he said he hadn’t heard about the theft, but said that Team Life Force was way behind on their rent, so he was getting behind paying the landlord. I said, “Hey, if they don’t find the TV or table, I have some tables in my shop I’m trying to get rid of, and maybe a TV that will work, too, so call me if they would settle for substitutes.” He said he might need a table himself, and would like to come over later to look at my stuff. A few hours later he called me, but instead of coming over, he said he had to tell me something: “Chad, that TV and table were not stolen—one of my partners from my business owned that table, and he went to get it back. When he took it he just put the TV in the closet.” I just about shit my pants in relief, said, “Oh god, that’s good news.” Then I started laughing a laugh that came back hourly for about two days, where I’d say, “GodDAMN those fucking guys!” while laughing. Can’t they get their shit together? I lost 2-3 hours of sleep the night before, thinking they blamed me for their stolen stuff.

A couple weeks later, one of their guys called saying his key was stuck in the door. He asked if I could come over to help, adding, “Do you have a lot of trouble with this here?” I said No. He sounded old and squirrelly, and like he was in their office even though his key was stuck in the lock. I asked, “So, you did get into the office?” “Yes, I’m in the office.” So I knew he had the right key, which shot down my first theory that he’d jammed the wrong key into the lock. I went over and found his whole keychain hanging from the lock. I reached up, turned his key straight vertical, and pulled it right out. Stepping in the door, I handed it to him: “Here ya go.” A short round elderly man with a similar wife were both blown away that it was out, and he said, “I have a pretty high IQ, but it just didn’t work for me. I ended up demonstrating the unlocking process twice, refraining from saying, “It’s pretty much the standard operation of all locks, dummy.”

A month or so later, they carried all their stuff out to the sidewalk and loaded it into a truck, including the bed that the lawyers’ secretary had been so horrified at some weeks earlier: “They have a BED in there,” she’d bleated when we shared stories of their madness. “Do you think they sleep over there?” I asked. “I . . . don’t . . . know,” she said as if imagining satanic rites.

At last their time in my world has come to an end. I googled some of their products and practices and came up with lots of results saying “snake oil” and “scam.” Goodbye, Team Life Force!

Freshly Battered

This mouse shows all the classic signs of domestic abuse, and for good reason: it spent at least an hour being pummeled, swatted, romped on, batted, carried to and fro with pride, lightly masticated and rolled up at the paws of two power-mad cats, then finally scooped into an empty snack bag: Guaranteed Fresh.

Kitty=Emotional Terrorist

There's a stray cat where I work that I have fed a few times, so now he thinks I am his target for lots of desperate cries for attention. He's very black, bony, and vocal. I've made it a rule to feed him only found items, so as to keep his hunting instincts intact, and not become a pet owner. I'm stopping at "associate" or maybe "sponsor." So far I've given him:

• the name "Dummy"
• strawberry yogurt
• tidbits of cheese and lunchmeat
• a bowl of beef ramen
• a plum-sized wad of raw hamburger meat
• nachos

Larva Buddy

This guy was totally messin around in my yard, so I picked him up to show him who's the boss. I was like, "Hey softy, your constant small wiggles don't impress me." He made mean eyebrows on his pseudo-eye, which did scare me A LITTLE, but then my wife gave him a bit of a squeeze and he froze in his tracks. If you haven't even pupated yet, don't waste my time, motherfucker!

Just kidding--he was neat.

When Your Evil Opposite Calls

My phone rang, showing a phone number just one digit different from mine, so I thought, "Hey, this person will say she gets my calls sometimes," or something like that. Instead, she was just complaining that the giant clock in Chesterfield Village had the wrong time.

"Is this the Chesterfield Village Association?" the lady asked.

"Well, this is Chesterfield Maintenance," I said.

"Okay, I live in an apartment facing the clock tower, and that clock is an hour off, and it's also not lighting up at night."

"Oh, okay, I'll check it out." I knew the time was off, because the day before it reset itself back to standard time, a month too soon. I always just figure I'll leave it till Halloween, at which point it will be right again, but I'd just seen it lit up two nights earlier, so that part was news to me.

"So whose responsibility is it to take care of the clock?" she asked in an accusatory tone.

"Oh, it's mine," I said, "I'll take care of it."

"Well, I just want it taken care of, because it's not lighting up, and now it doesn't even keep the right time anymore," as if I'd just pulled a bottle of wine out of my pants, belched, and wiped my face with greasy pages of kiddie porn. I should have said, "Who do you think has fixed that clock for the last nine years? I've changed the motor and the gears, unjammed one of the hour hands FROM THE OUTSIDE (45 feet off the ground), pulled Christmas lights off of it after ice storms, not to mention adjusting the time every spring and fall AND changing the lights when they burn out."

Then she wanted to know my name, I suppose so she could "get me in trouble" if I failed to fix the clock. I told her my name, then I went over, climbed up into the clock, set it one hour ahead, found all the lights to be working fine, and said, "God, bitch."

Triple Bitch-time

Problem: Lately people have been wasting my time by standing me up. They say they’ll call or come over. Last Friday two people said they would probably come by where I work to help me move furniture, and both said they would take some stuff off my hands, stuff I’ve been saving for them. I stayed at work until almost 8pm until I gave up. No one came or called. Solution 1: Don’t let someone think you’re coming, or that you’re going to call, if you’re not going to. This is what is known as a big fucking waste of everybody’s time. Solution 2: I should just throw all this shit in the fucking dumpster. If somebody shows up wanting it, I’ll just say, “It’s in the fucking trash if you want it.”

Problem: The TV screens in restaurants and bars always show sports, usually football. What if some of us don’t like fucking football? When did sports become the default thing we all have to look at? I’d rather see the fucking weather channel, bastards. Solution 1: Just turn the damn thing off. Solution 2: Bugs Bunny cartoons. Everybody likes them. Solution 3: My new intro for Monday Night Football, “Always too much,” Instead of Hank Williams Junior or Faith Hill singing while American flags, fireworks and shit fly, we’ll see monster trucks riding massive bombs down to the city, blasting out a huge crater which is now the stadium, and the players crawl from the rubble belching fire and shitting grenades, which they throw as footballs, blasting the shit out of fans who catch them--their skulls pile up and the players eat the skulls like popcorn.

Problem: Lots of people are complaining about being broke, and whining that food is expensive.
Solution: Broke? Eat some oatmeal, fucker. Ramen, baked potatoes, macaroni and cheese…. Lipton noodle pack come in about ten flavors. Fla-vor-aid is like ten packs for a dollar, and tapwater is like a penny per gallon. For most of my life I made less than ten grand a year, and I never went hungry. I mean, if you’re starving, you gotta go to the food bank; otherwise, shut the fuck up and eat cheap stuff.

This Fellow

Hozo arose from a stain on a filthy bathroom floor, distantly channeling Soy Sauce Man, primordial proto-buddy. Moving rapidly to the civilized outskirts, he promptly built a reputation for scatological humor and clever lawn care. Birds and lizards appreciate his fertile environmental tinkering; he subsidizes their livelihoods with small gifts and pleasantries. However, he secretly harbors a niggardly resentment for their carefree days.

His knuckleheaded outlook will eventually wither into a dreary form of defeat, but in the meantime he extends cheerful hospitality to even the lowliest of lunkers.

Embarrassing Dunderheading

When the baby went to the town hall meeting to learn things, a ruckus arose and all sense was mangled. "What the cod waddle?" said the baby. "This doomsday clock says America ends tomorrow!"

Funny Jokes of Yore

Back when my wife was finishing school, she came home from one of her first chemistry classes. I told her she should raise her hand in the next class and ask in a childish voice, "Are we gonna learn the difference between turkey and ham?"

Youngster Unknowingly Spouts Immortal Quote

On the rim trail of the Grand Canyon, these two kids, a boy and a girl, trotted alongside their parents. The boy, maybe ten years old and precocious, led the little girl to a yucca plant that was losing some leaves. They each had some of the long pointy leaves in their fists. The dad's exasperated face seemed to say "why can't my kid just like football?" as the boy said, "It's like a sword-gathering mini-game!"

For two or three days after that, I repeated this line, wondering what constitutes a mini-game, and creating other versions: "It's like a gas-pumping mini-game," etc. Genius dummy.

"Not On My Watch"

Roswell, New Mexico, broke-ass heart of the Land of Enchantment.

As we came into town from the west, we were greeted by a string of seedy motels identical enough to simulate a looped background in a Hanna-Barberra cartoon. We were looking for a place to stay, and decided that a creepy place would be in fitting with the whole idea of Roswell. Maybe the fourth motel we passed had a sign below the main sign showing a green alien with his head on a pillow, saying, “I feel at home here.” I said, “Yes! Let’s stay there, that’s sweet!” But when we went back, no one would come to the window. It was about 10:30 PM. After I pushed the buzzer a third time, my wife, still in the car, said, “Let’s get out of here, it’s creepy. Someone’s getting sodomized against their will here.” As we drove away, a guy in a wifebeater was finally coming to the window. Maybe he’d just been on the toilet.

So we went to the Crane Motel. It had a sweet, fifties-style neon sign. I checked in at a barred window with a plump guy who looked Pakistani, and I think maybe his son was back there with him. There were little spiritual items around the window, in Arabic, but some of them seemed more new-agey than strictly Islamic, especially a big poster of a unicorn running in a dark void. Our room was fifty bucks. As I left the check-in lobby, I saw that the pool had been filled in with dirt and a half-grown vegetable garden was popping up. My favorite touch, which I found while searching for a pop machine (there wasn’t one) was the five-gallon buckets used as planters for tomato plants, placed around by some of the doors to the rooms.

Our room had dark red carpet, a velvet landscape painting of a sylvan river valley, lots of cracks and maintenance errors—mainly a door-sized rectangle that had been crudely spackled over and painted without a good match in color or texture—a crusty black-brown stain debatably either blood-based or feces-based (Heather said poop, I said blood) on the edge of the box-spring, and dresser-top mirror with a magical, speculation-sparking sticker on it. It was the size of an 8-inch strip of masking tape, made with the silvery, reflective prism backing that makes me think of stickers you might have pulled out of the Skill Cranes at the fairground in the 1980s—stickers you’d expect to say DOKKEN or WHITESNAKE or maybe HARLEY DAVIDSON, but in this case it said something in Arabic, so it had to come from management. One corner was peeling off badly. Maybe the peel just started when the cleaning ladies wiped off the mirror, but we imagined a post-9-11 Real American checking in, setting his cowboy hat on the dresser, looking in the mirror, seeing the sticker and declaring, “Not on my watch!” before picking the corner of the sticker off two inches and then getting distracted by some other threat. There was, after all, an S-10 pickup parked next door with 2 mini American flags flying off the back of the bed.

Heather stayed in her clothes to sleep in the bed. Before falling asleep, we watched what appeared to be a special pedophilia episode of Land of the Lost: A lone ship’s captain corralled the young girl (Holly?) into domestic chores on his galleon, then drugged her unconscious, stroked her hair, and bemoaned how lonely it gets sailing alone. Then our heroes accomplished the tripping of many Sleestaks with a bolo that a toddler could have dodged.

We kicked off the next morning with a stop at McDonald’s, eating some kind of Cinni-Mini rolls. When I took the tray to the trash, a retarded employee stopped his chore—wiping a table, I think—and reached in to help me. His finger touched my hand under the swinging “THANK YOU” flap on the trash at the same moment that I thought, “this guy smells like poop.” As if reading the trash door, I said, “Thank you.”

Of course the most important stop in Roswell, for anyone who ever watched TV or lived in America, will be the UFO Museum. It's not a great museum when compared to the likes of the Smithsonian, or The British Museum, or The Field Museum. All in all, it's rather half-ass, with production values similar to the Ozark Empire Fair crafts pavilion. But if you have to get the skinny on aliens, illustrated by some decent models, some ok samples, some semi-legit-looking documentation, and some lousy artists' conceptions, this is the place. The gift shop is disappointingly golden. Most of all and better than I could have ever hoped for, somewhere in the building was this sheet of paper, greatest of all alien summaries:

"HUMANIOD" (sic) may be the strangest of all...

Introducing "Life Force" Team

At my maintenance-man job I got a call from a new tenant who needed a key to get in their office. Once I figured out who and where they were, I ran over with keys to open the door. They’d already moved in, but I guess the boss was gone and the key they had wasn’t working. No big deal.

But then I got a big tour of their operation, and a primer on who they were. I was meeting a tall, old guy named Bill and a short beefy guy I’ll call Gus. They were really friendly guys, but I could sense immediately their crackpot nature. Bill offered me water to drink, but this was no ordinary water. He took me to a machine hooked into the faucet, saying, “Now this is some good water for you. It’s got a PH of 2, and it’ll cure what ails you. Helps your blood pressure, clears up your skin, keeps you from getting constipated if you ever get constipated, which is more of a problem with women.” I was thirsty, so I took the cup he was handing me, and he dispensed me some water. I thanked him and expected to leave, but then he wanted to show me more. The first water dispenser was 1200 dollars, but they had another that was 3100 or so, and both of them could raise or lower the PH by a few points. “You can make it acid water and use it for cleaning, which they do in Japan, save you a lot on soap, plus all the health benefits, but the government here just isn’t ready to approve it.” Then he pointed to a pile of fruit on a counter and said, “Our boss is a vegetarian—there’s a picture of him,” and he was pointing to a middle-aged shirtless guy flexing in a photo on a foamboard sign. “He was run over by a truck, but now he’s better, and he owes it all to eating right and drinking healing water.” Above the picture of “John Three Eagles” it said FEEL LIKE A MILLOINAIR (sic) and I realized there were misspellings everywhere in that place, along with lots of American flag imagery and pictures of eagles. Bill told me twice that I could come in and get water any time I wanted to, just use my key. I said thanks, but I try not to intrude on tenants’ spaces unless necessary. He kept insisting that I needed that water. Then he handed me a flyer titled “BODY ANALYZER,” packed with many typos. He said, “We can also check your body for health problems. The machine’s not here today, but come back and we can put you on it. We hook electrodes to your acupressure points, and it gives numbers for your readings. If it says “0,” you’re dead. If it says “100,” you’re about to have a nervous breakdown.” This made me laugh a little. “It can tell you about health problems before they happen. It saved my wife’s life.” I said, “Huh, wow, well, I think I’m in pretty good health. I’ve only had to go to the hospital once in about 20 years, so I guess I’m doing okay.”

“Let me go get you those keys,” I said after some other stuff about postwar Asia, where Bill had been in the military and had missed a chance to bring early VCR technology to America from the “Orientals.” On my way back to my office, I confirmed on the Body Analyzer flyer that it did indeed “save Gloria life” (sic). In a few minutes, I was back with the keys. Bill and Gus didn’t hear me come in from the hall, and I heard one of them grumble, “I don’t feel too good today.”

The next day I saw papers in the dumpster near their office that said LIFE FORCE. Then I found out that someone named Tor from their office had already followed the next-door legal secretary to her car enough times that she was carrying a stun gun and considering a restraining order. Go team LIFE FORCE!

Woody's Witnesses

Apparently you can’t shake a Jehovah’s Witness by being polite. This guy keeps coming to see me two or three times a year, and I want to mash a pie in his face, but he’s kind of a smiling dope, and last time he brought a buddy in a suit and his pretty daughter, who stayed in the minivan. I just don’t have the heart/balls to say, “Look, dummies, your beliefs are lame. You keep holding up the Bible and saying it’s God’s word, but every single time you’ve said the world is nearing its end YOU’VE BEEN WRONG. If God made the Earth AND wrote the Bible, which is the more authoritative text? I say the Earth. It’s a fucking PLANET, and it speaks in many ways, saying that it’s billions of years old, saying that evolution happened and is still happening. Science is right every time, because it rewrites itself constantly. Read the planet. The Bible is an antique.”

Last episode, they read me some Bible and kept justifying its truth by pointing out how popular it is, and how long it’s been around. POPULAR: “It’s sold more copies than any other book!” I said, “Yeah, except for the year that Hitler put out Mien Kampf—that was the only time a book outsold the Bible,” but they didn’t seem discouraged from using popularity as a gage for truth, even after I pointed out that there are probably more copies of the Koran on the other side of the planet. Then it was on to the longevity of the Bible: “It’s been around for 2000 years!” Well, there are hieroglyphs in Egypt much older, maybe they are the real truth... but again, science wins: fossils are up to a billion years old, telling the true story. Some meteorites are even older, not to mention light from quasars, etc.

Since they always leave me with copies of The Watchtower and Awake!, I should take those door-to-door and explain to people why they’re such bunk: “Hey, look at this bullshit! Isn’t it a hoot? Even the pictures are dumb.” If you’d like to become one of Woody’s Witnesses, I’ll get you a Bible and some Watchtowers, and we’ll spread the good news.

Wacky Astronauts (A Party Game?)

My nominations for the crew of a Mars mission, where astronauts will be cooped up together for over 100 days each way:

In the command module:
Ann Coulter, Sean Penn, and Flavor Flav

but then in the landing party:
Hillary Clinton, Gene Simmons, and Kim Jong Il

and in cryogenic capsules for colonizing the surface:
Ted Nugent, Richard Simmons, and George Will

plus mission control:
John McLaughlin, Bill O'Reilley, and Hunter S. Thompson

Shitass from the Past

Some guy (not the guy above--that's my neighbor who yells instead of talking and bellows instead of yelling) came down the sidewalk here in the "Nichols Splendor" neighborhood and saw me mowing my yard. What caught his eye was my motorless lawnmower, the "reel mower" which is the mower of choice for treehuggers, masochists, and of course The Little Rascals. After I gave my mower a quick review (cuts good, but not for crabgrass or twigs, etc) this guy says something like, "You know that thing they did a while back, where they made it aginst the law to own a coupla niggers? Well, after that, one of our neighbors had to get rid a her niggers, and she hired me and my brother to run a mower like this, and now that was a lot of work."

I just grinned and said "yeah," hoping my wife was eavesdropping from one of our windows, but he just went on and on. I wanted to say, "What are you, a hundred and thirty years old?" and "Did you notice the Obama sticker on my wife's car?"

He also accused one of the trees in my back yard of being a "piss elm"! What the fuck?

Big Dreams Dan

It is funny to me that there is a guy I know through work that my wife and I call "Big Dreams Dan," and he'll never know that he's called that because it's really kind of a sardonic sort of insult meant to point out how he's an investment guy who has acted like he could buy and sell the world, and considering the buckling economy, his dreams have probably become much runtier and more realistic lately. Well, here's to Big Dreams Dan, and all the other people/animals with code names in the Chad Woody and Heather Johansen universe: ResponsiBilly, Hohn-Zone, Gran-Man, Captain Shannon, Catie Hulk-Legs, Purr-Baby, Squishy, Applehead Doll, Oreo Speedwagon, Harley Man, T-Hole, Sex Chicken Meth Mouth, Thor/Awkward Questions Kid, Schatzee, Marvonasaurus, Dr. Thunder and many more, in the land of Nichols Splendor and beyond. "God bless us, every one."

Funny Sufferings

While searching websites to diagnose my sore throat and swollen lymph node, I found a guy's postings that built up to a funny climax, where he was fed up with the medical world's failure to cure him... so fed up that basic punctuation and syntax were dissolving--or maybe that's one of his symptoms:

that sounds hell similar to the shit i've got like almost exactly the same. Do the doctors still say to you that it just must be a viral infection? cause thats what they tell me but im like bullshit a viral infection don't last this long & im takin hella vitamins & eating right & all that shit aswell. We gotta try get better dog we can't let this shit consume our lives. Lifes way to short to be sick!

Red Rogue Choose-Your-Own-Adventure On the Drawing Board

Featuring gags, gagging, time travel, savage beatings, sophisticated social drama engendering the themes of Henry James, and the behavioral dangers of a childless existence, this Red Rogue epic will plaster your balls to your face if you ever happen to read it, and if I ever happen to finish it.

Black Clouds of Standard Expectation

When a headache goes too far,
the cuttlefish of emotion pulsates
into radioactive splendor, dismantling
your basic sea-monkey worldview.
Bolster your pissant log-flume crew,
lift your saggy belly-dough to the skies
and butter your ass with applesauce
because the going around just came
around. The cat's pajamas been
riding up hard. The corn-cob game.
Nodules upon nodules. Nubbin time.
Beat your meat to goddamn ribbons
in the name of Palin Babies by the ton,
by the goddamn cubic mile, Pigtwat.

I'm talking to you, Rush Limbaugh.
Actually, I'm talking to myself,
but silently, not bugshit loudly
like the dude at the post office
who kept doing verbal mathematics
four feet away while I was trying to
weigh some shit on a robo-scale.
What an embarrassing citizen.

Fish With A Gun in Technicolor

Sex Toy

Who put this sexualized mammal in my breakfast cereal?

It slides lasciviously around in a reclined and lewd pose.

My wife and I both find it revolting...

Matt Wittmer Action Figure

I think the pirate toy looks like Matt Wittmer, but Matt says no, no way. If you know Matt, tell him he looks like the toy version of him. He won't know what the hell you're talking about by then, but tell him anyway.