Highlights from Billings Parade and Fair

"Why'd we come out here again, Tightpants?"

If your kids fall off the float, these bottles will help drag their bodies off the road.

Another questionable marketing strategy.

The Mormon Uprising!

Some kind of pit stop in front of a classic riding-mower OSHA violation.

I did it for the ditch candy.

These unpretentious tubers rose to the top of their category by way of masterful presentation.

Best in Show!


Ride the Paratrooper for aerial vomit opportunities over tractor-pull staging area! Plus, constant threat of instant death by metal fatigue.

(No photo available of me heckling the Roy Blunt promotional car, yelling, "Boooo! Throw the bums out!" until the old man in the car (not Roy Blunt, unfortunately) looked at me thumbing angrily over my shoulder and he frowned. HA HA, Blunt Flunky, you can't speed away when you're stuck in a parade! Even in Billings, MO, dissatisfied justice will find you.)

RIP Great One

I heard today that Bill “Great One” Gould died this week of cancer at age 66. I told my wife, and she asked, “Who is that again?” That made me realize I’ve been remiss in spreading the good word.

“You may call me Sir, or Your Highness, or Great One,” he stated on the first day of class. “I will call you maggot.”

I used to say that if you went to Willard schools and never had one of Gould’s classes, you pretty much missed the Willard experience. You missed out, probably on getting your ass kicked by the champ. “Great One?” would be answered, “Yes, maggot?” with lightning speed and just the right touch of imperiousness.

Surfing the pimply tide of smartass teenagers with golf club in hand, playing Whack-A-Mole with any heads that poked up too high, the Great One jabbed us with Rickles-esque mockery and made sure he scheduled his conference hour in period 7 so he could scram an hour early—to the Brown Derby down the road in his greenish El Camino.

If you had fortitude, Gould was one of your first shots at having an anti-hero. He proudly revealed his closet full of the same history tests he’d been giving for 20 years. “There are no tricks here,” he’d say. “I’ll write the questions on the board Monday through Thursday. Every Friday there’ll be a test. There’s no reason everyone can’t get ‘A’s. But most of you will blow it.” You knew it was all true, because the tests were all in purple mimeo ink even though the school had switched to photocopiers a decade earlier. Amazingly, some people managed to flunk those tests.

He practiced his golf swing at the front of the room. If you fell asleep, he’d hit your desk with it. God help you if you woke up drooling. He knew no fear or mercy. He skewered the kids of the School Board members, the Superintendent, anyone. He once signed a petition that called for the firing of… Bill Gould. He saved chalk dust and erasers long after blackboards were replaced with dry erase whiteboards, just so he could dust the cheerleaders’ black outfits on game days.

He thumped his liquor gut like a melon and said it was almost ripe.

Great One had funny nicknames for many students. Some were recycled year after year— “Zulu,” for instance, was used on my sister, and later on another tan blonde girl. Was it about the tan? Some were appropriated from the student lexicon, like Eric “The Juice” Poland, which Great One probably assumed was some ironic play on Eric’s being a pale antithesis of OJ Simpson. No, it was because Jimmy Barnes and I decided once that Eric’s big boxy noggin resembled a juice box. Maybe he’d call you J.J. or Bubba or Stairmaster. He didn’t have to explain.

If he lacked a nickname for you, he just said your name in a snide tone to tarnish it a bit. Great One knew that one’s own name could be the most cutting and original smear.

In Gould’s World History, I learned about Willardites. In Contemporary Issues, I learned about Rocks. In the end, Great One used the academic situation as a trojan horse to deliver his true curriculum: horrors of the social mirror. He tried to force our heads up through the low ceiling of our small-town youthful ignorance so we could see our own foolishness, and maybe see past it. He was also teaching us to wake up, to watch out, to be ready when it came time “to thin the herd.” Long after the facts about ancient Pharoahs faded, Great One’s core lessons remained relevant. I have never been more honored to be called maggot.

Maybe I liked Great One because I came off pretty well in his hierarchy of rhetorical beatings. Because I was academically mighty, he joked that I was “sitting back there in [my] ivory tower looking down on all you peasants” and that someday the others in the class would be working for me. Well, he blew that prediction. He kept a sharp lookout: he noticed when I’d written a letter to the Willard paper saying how stupid it was that some locals were hostile to Wiccans opening a church there. He read my letter and said he should give me an ‘A’ for the course because of it, but he wasn’t going to bother because I’d get an ‘A’ anyway. Well, he nailed that one.

A year after high school I was helping my dad at some land in Willard that he rented for his cattle. I had two big rocks in my hands when I looked up at the road, and who should I see, but Bill Gould in his El Camino. “Having fun, Mr. Woody?” he said jeeringly. Busted! Rocks were people caught hanging around in Willard—whatever hometown—after they should have achieved escape velocity. I think that was the last time I saw the Great One.

Now there’s really no one left qualified to judge us all so harshly.

Quincy Me, Quincy You

Tonight I learned that in childhood my wife, just like me, often watched the intro to the TV show Quincy M.E. but never watched the show. It must have had something good on before it. I always watched it at least until the part where Quincy challenged the new-meat medical interns to a hideous corpse by pulling back the sheet. They gagged and doubled over and I think one fell down. Awesome!

But was I ever tempted to watch the whole show? Fuck no! My wife thought it was about a doctor who got a lot of dates with attractive women. As far as I could tell, it was about an old guy with a strong stomach. I also always wondered what the M.E. stood for. That was the only thing I was curious about. I wouldn't be interested in watching a show about an old guy until The Equalizer, unless My Favorite Martian in syndication counts.

I'm going to see if the Quincy intro is on Youtube. The intro is all I want.

Now that I've seen it, she's right—Quincy appears to score more than his share of hot ass.

TV Show Proposal

A blog is a good format for ideas that will never be developed further. Here is an idea for a TV show that is as good as any in development, but because I have no clout or capability in the realm of broadcasting, this is as far as it will ever go.

"Ten-Dollar Haircut! and The Handbag Violator"

This is a two-part show. For starters, there is a hand-painted sign on Kearney Street here in Springfield. It is poorly painted on a little sign like you normally see for garage sales. It says "$10 Haircut" with an arrow pointing back into a crappy neighborhood. This is where you start. Each "contestant" drives here and has to get said haircut. Of course the obvious glee comes when we subject upper-class women to the Ten Dollar Haircut, but actually it will be nice to see people from all walks of life enter this experience. Maybe our hearts will be warmed when a homeless man is shorn of his scraggle and he feels social pride again. Maybe we'll laugh when some rich bitch protests her new do. Then again, maybe the Ten Dollar hairstylist will prove to be masterful and hip to current fashion. If this haircutter turns out to be a bland character, maybe we find a place with $5 haircuts.

As time allows, the people getting haircuts will turn their handbags and/or wallets over to the Handbag Violator, a guy named David Hohner. I recently saw him sort through the contents of a girl's purse at a restaurant. She watched as he verbalized lots of assumptions about her, drawn from whatever came out of her purse. Some of it was true, some not, but it was all pretty amusing just because he fearlessly jumped to conclusions about a person he'd just met. It was presented with confidence, like, "Here's a ziploc baggie with some Tylenol and napkins in it, so you're organized and like to keep things clean." He could tell if someone had kids or not, if they had pets, how wealthy they were, etc. At the time I called it Purse Rape, but now I prefer Handbag Violator, and David had a talent for it.

So there you have two handy ways to make low-budget reality TV with minimal cast, crew, or resources.

World's Fattest Ferret

Just trying to find out if people's factual outrage over the claim that this is a ferret will outweigh the automatic pleasure of looking at a picture of a kitty on the internet.

Spotlight on Reuben

What is Reuben?

A wacky beast.

A stinky powerhouse.

A beefy monsta.

Mirth made flesh.

Eternal canine baby.

Gaze into his face for a dollop of brain-mayonnaise.

It looks like he has a little tear on his face.

Maybe because he can't breathe right.

Reuben's tear means love.

The Fall Guy in Colombia

At a flea market last weekend, I saw this Fall Guy lunchbox and almost bought it for this guy I know, Antonio Martinez from Bogota, Colombia. I worked with him for a few months around 2006. We had many conversations about Latin America and whatnot. One of the nuttier surprises about growing up in Colombia is that, according to Antonio, Colombian children worshiped The Fall Guy. BUT, in their country that's not what the show was called. Apparently the title was changed to something in Spanish that translates roughly as "Dangerous Professions!" I remember it took about half a day to piece all this together because, without the same titles, I didn't know what the fuck he was talking about.

Antonio said the Fall Guy's tough pickup was the dream vehicle of every Colombian boy. Colt Sievers's truck maybe had some kung-fu grip on their imaginations because it apparently resembled the hefty old trucks they use to harvest coffee in the mountains around Bogota.

Here's a Youtube where we learn how big are the balls on Colt's truck!

HOLY SHIT!

What's the Secret to My New Look?

Luckily, it's frosting.

Plus, a new story from Uncle Clown's Toothless Tales:


The Towers of Bologna

There was a baboon who lived in Italy on a very nice chair. He sat in his chair all day long, picking nits out of his fur and keeping an eye on his neighbors. Needless to say, his chair was rather grimy, even smelly.

One day a bunch of workmen built a bologna factory right next to his chair. They didn’t ask him or anything. “Rude!” said the baboon, but the workmen kept right on going because they had to have immense bologna ready by mid-October.

When the first slices of bologna came out, the baboon requested a sample. The Foreman said he would look into it, but in fact he never did. Big trucks started hauling bologna out to the hungry Italians, honking their horns at the baboon, who was writing a letter to his mother. (WTF, Ma? Love, Randy) When his birthday came, a package arrived for him, from his mom. She’d sent him a lasso and a book about big trucks.

He practiced with the lasso for a long time, until his lasso skills were unearthly. He could lasso a praying mantis off a dandelion. He could lasso a low-flying goose. He could even lasso two human heads and conk them together. He knew he was ready.

When mid-October came, so much bologna was done that it was stacked in towers around the factory. All the trucks were loaded and still there were stacks of delicious bologna 50 feet tall steaming in the sun. Just when he was about to lasso one of the bologna towers, he overheard the Foreman yelling for more ingredients.

“Gross!” said the baboon when he heard what the bologna was made of. He decided bologna was not what he wanted after all, so he lassoed his chair and dragged it down to the apple orchard, where he could sit in the shade and lasso apples for every meal.

Memories of Demon Dogs

YouTube makes it all too easy to recapture one's distant memories effortlessly. Although many moments in Thundarr are super-stupid, the intro sequence is still awesome—Doomsday came in 1994, busted the moon in half and made the world into pretty much the coolest D&D/Star Wars hybrid ever. All the bickering bozos on the internet seem to agree on just one thing: cartoons today are lame compared to Thundarr, one of the ballsiest, most mom-repulsing, glue-sniffingly deranged badass odes to psycho-chaotic survivalism ever served up to children. Hanna-Barbera drew some cheapo bilgewater crapola animation (just watched a scene where Thundarr and Ariel mount their horses... I've seen smoother animation in grade-school flip-books), but in this case, they made up for it with sweet conceptual vengeance.

Now I can watch all the Thundarr I want, but it's mostly better to just recall. One time there was a Deathrace 2000-like episode where Thundarr had to race bad guys in some sort of Big-Wheel Death Machines. One was a giant gyroscopic wheel with spikes for treads. Most of all, I was scared semi-shitless by the episode where the evil witch switched bodies with the hot princess, Ariel. Thundarr almost killed Ariel himself while she was trapped. The princess's soul narrowly escaped eternal imprisonment in the old crone's body as it turned to stone. I thought a lot about how easily that situation could have ended up in the toilet.

I'm sure it helped all us 1980s children learn the valuable lesson that hot sexy women have beautiful souls, and ugly old crones conversely have evil, barbed-wire bitch souls that are sure to mount astral attacks on our girlfriends.

Spider Outwits Lion

It's one of the more inspirational toys in the topsy-turvy post-apocalyptic MutatioNation line from "Pray for Death" Toys! Watch out Thundarr and Mad Max! This wacky arachnid sucked the marrow from the A-Team's bones and lashed his feline buddy-slave to this fine chariot lickety split. When the sun goes down they scamper around the irradiated landscape in search of edible tidbits, melted shinies and glowing steamies left by the searing atomic heat. In post-EMP Alabama they're the fastest team on Satan's Doomway, ripping around like a 12-legged Charles Bronson that's never even smelled common sense. We feel confident you'll shed a tear when you learn how their lives end in a friend-eats-friend misery tantrum.