With Democratic leaders calling for indicted Illinois Governor Rod Blagovich to resign, it seems clear that a runoff election will soon be coming to the Land of Lincoln. As such, numerous would-be Governors are flooding the state with applications to make sure that they can get a shot at being governor of the incoming president's home state.
The current leading candidate is former NFL star OJ Simpson, who hopes his experience outrunning federal prosecutors will allow him to avoid the fate of the last two governors.
Also expressing interest is longtime Democratic standard-bearer Al Gore, who feels that the state's proximity to the water and several fine all-you-can-eat buffets makes it the optimum location to continue hectoring citizens about the coming global apocalypse.
A popular dark horse candidate is California Governor and Republican Arnold Swartzenegger, although he would like to churn out a few more wretched movies before driving another state into the ground.
Bill Clinton has been mentioned as a possible successor, but politely declined, saying he's holding out for something more prestigious than a mere governorship, perhaps working with young, ambitious men and women, helping them learn vital skills that will help them succeed in business and politics in the future.
Most surprising of all, though, is that former Illinois senator Barack Obama has tossed his hat into the ring, saying that not only does he love campaigning, but he also hopes to burnish his meager credentials with some executive experience before trying to make the jump "to prime time."
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Plebian and the Mysterious Missing Classmate
I received the strangest call the other day. It was round about 7, and I was drying my daughter's hair, when the phone rang. Like a good homeowner, I answered it, and for my troubles I was met by static.
After a few moments, I was able to discern just a few things:
*The person on the other line knew me (they did, after all, refer to me by name).
*They were calling from the International Space Station, evidently deep within the Van Allen belt, because all I could hear was massive static.
So I instructed them to wait and call me back in a few minutes, to see if that would alleviate the problem. They did indeed call back a few minuets later, and I was able to figure out a few more things:
*They had gone to high school with me (they did, I think, refer to the proper high school)
*Their name was either Tom Simpson, Pete Krugerand, or Funky Winkerbean, I'm not sure which, and I couldn't understand through the scratching when I asked him to spell it out for me what the name should be.
At this point, and despite my protestations, Funky insisted on asking "So…SCRATCH-HISS-SCRATCH…do you…SCRATCH…ember…HISS…me?...SCRATCH"
"No, but I might if I knew who you were!" I insisted. The first two I'd never heard of, and I never cared for Funky Winkerbean anyways. Stupid band geek.
"Oh," the dude sounded really disappointed. "Oh, I see...SCRATCH! HISS!"
"HEY!" I yelled. "I'd probably know who you were if I could understand you! You've gotta call me back on a different line so I can understand you!"
And at this point, the line went dead.
Great. Just great. This is going to bother me for the rest of my life, you know?
And I can just see the headlines now:
"Beloved local businessman Funky Winkerbean committed suicide this evening, leaving a note behind saying that he's tired of going unnoticed in this faceless society. Funky was despondent because his dearest childhood friend forgot all about him and hung up on him earlier in the evening."
The funny thing is, Wifey has gone certifiably around the bend over this. Listen, it's no real hair off my ass if I reconnect with Funky one way or the other. Sure, it'd be nice to know who it was that called me, but he probably was just trying to trap me into buying him dinner so he could have me drugged and extract my liver to sell it to an organ trafficking ring.
Because that happens to me all the time.
But for Wifey this has become a quest. She's hunted down all the people we still keep in touch with from high school and asked both of them if they'd handed our number out. Which they hotly deny, but I swear one of them has beady eyes and I never trusted her anyways and she probably put us up on the bathroom wall under the line "for a good time call…"
So, on the off chance that one of my 40 readers is either my old friend Pete Simpson or Tom Krugerand, please be sure to call me back, because I'd really like to talk to you and catch up about old times, and I'm sure I'll fake remembering you better once we get off of a terribly staticy line.
If it's Funky, though, well; lose my number. And don't bother asking why, you know the answer!
After a few moments, I was able to discern just a few things:
*The person on the other line knew me (they did, after all, refer to me by name).
*They were calling from the International Space Station, evidently deep within the Van Allen belt, because all I could hear was massive static.
So I instructed them to wait and call me back in a few minutes, to see if that would alleviate the problem. They did indeed call back a few minuets later, and I was able to figure out a few more things:
*They had gone to high school with me (they did, I think, refer to the proper high school)
*Their name was either Tom Simpson, Pete Krugerand, or Funky Winkerbean, I'm not sure which, and I couldn't understand through the scratching when I asked him to spell it out for me what the name should be.
At this point, and despite my protestations, Funky insisted on asking "So…SCRATCH-HISS-SCRATCH…do you…SCRATCH…ember…HISS…me?...SCRATCH"
"No, but I might if I knew who you were!" I insisted. The first two I'd never heard of, and I never cared for Funky Winkerbean anyways. Stupid band geek.
"Oh," the dude sounded really disappointed. "Oh, I see...SCRATCH! HISS!"
"HEY!" I yelled. "I'd probably know who you were if I could understand you! You've gotta call me back on a different line so I can understand you!"
And at this point, the line went dead.
Great. Just great. This is going to bother me for the rest of my life, you know?
And I can just see the headlines now:
"Beloved local businessman Funky Winkerbean committed suicide this evening, leaving a note behind saying that he's tired of going unnoticed in this faceless society. Funky was despondent because his dearest childhood friend forgot all about him and hung up on him earlier in the evening."
The funny thing is, Wifey has gone certifiably around the bend over this. Listen, it's no real hair off my ass if I reconnect with Funky one way or the other. Sure, it'd be nice to know who it was that called me, but he probably was just trying to trap me into buying him dinner so he could have me drugged and extract my liver to sell it to an organ trafficking ring.
Because that happens to me all the time.
But for Wifey this has become a quest. She's hunted down all the people we still keep in touch with from high school and asked both of them if they'd handed our number out. Which they hotly deny, but I swear one of them has beady eyes and I never trusted her anyways and she probably put us up on the bathroom wall under the line "for a good time call…"
So, on the off chance that one of my 40 readers is either my old friend Pete Simpson or Tom Krugerand, please be sure to call me back, because I'd really like to talk to you and catch up about old times, and I'm sure I'll fake remembering you better once we get off of a terribly staticy line.
If it's Funky, though, well; lose my number. And don't bother asking why, you know the answer!
Monday, December 1, 2008
On Teenage Values
Over the past forty years, some groups have gone to great pains to “liberate” women and convince them that they are equal to men in every way, most importantly by freeing them from ancient constraints on having liberal amounts of sex with any toothy metrosexual of their choosing.
Naturally, this liberated attitude has spread from the 20-something set, and now we are not only suffering from the stories of saggy-breasted swingin’ grandmas going to key parties, but more and more we learn that there is a veritable army of trampy bimbos in high schools across the land eager to outdo each other in proving that they are eager to bed any jagoff with an earring and pants whose seat drags the ground.
This is wrong, and it threatens to destroy the very fabric of society.
It used to be that, if you wanted to get a polite kiss on the cheek, you had to take a girl out to dinner, then some sort of amusement, such as a movie, paying spectacle, or any number of fine miniature golf/bowling establishments. After you’d done this every other week for 3 to 6 months, you could arrange to have “car trouble” and, after a heavy petting session, perhaps convince her to have negotiations with your “silent partner.”
As you can imagine, this did not come cheap: there was food to buy, gas to purchase, diversions to arrange and pay for, and angry parents to dodge. And we won’t even begin to discuss the investment necessary to “go all the way”, up to and including purchasing the plastic diving bell for your little Nemo before he goes twenty thousand leagues under the girl, one of the more humiliating life experiences for a seventeen-year-old.
However, as the grainy health film they’d shown us in sixth grade drove home, the next time you had unprotected sex a bacteria known as Penus Falloffus would infest your testicles causing, among other things, jock itch and erectile dysfunction.
And having no penis will be difficult to explain in a locker room of wiser boys, all of whom spend an inordinate amount of time staring at each other’s genitals and going “how did you get that festering welt in your Johnson area?”
In order to meet the economic needs of high-class ladies (the ones that didn’t smoke nor go with boys much larger than you), you needed to make money. And since time immemorial, during the fall teenage boys have made money via the most noble of professions: leaf raking.
Here’s how it works: you pick a big house owned by an elderly widow, you take your rake, and you show up one morning and offer to rake the entire yard for ten bucks. She agrees, and an hour or two later you’re ten bucks richer, you’ve eaten some cookies and lemonade, and if she’s a particularly desperate widow you’ve received an offer which you politely declined but which you wonder about during dark nights of the soul for the rest of your life.
[If you accepted the offer, you’ll spend the rest of your life regretting it, unless you enjoyed it, in which case you’ve just discovered your true calling: gigolo.]
Of course, ten bucks isn’t much, so you have to do this over and over. And eventually you run out of widows, so you move down to the elderly, then simply the lazy, and eventually (if there are enough teenagers in town) you’ll rake leaves for anybody who pays you ten bucks.
This does not happen, of course, if there are sluttily-writhing teenage girls under every other section of bleachers. In this case every zit-farmer just goes dragging his tool kit through the dirt, and eventually he finds some girl who’s just desperate to look cool, and that’s it. And what with “hip” parents and these giveaway clinics, you don’t even have to buy the latex spacesuit before you send Buck Rogers down to check out Planet Hooch.
And this is wrong.
Worse, this irresponsible behavior is responsible for hundreds of deaths in the North and Midwest every year, because these same teenage boys used to fill up their Nookie Fund in the winter by shoveling driveways.
But without them, fat old men are dying by the droves as they try, desperately, to get the driveway cleared so they can make their weekly run down to the VFW to complain about kids nowadays. And the complaints aren’t going to make themselves, you know.
So I implore all teenage girls out there to just cross their legs and hold out for dinner and a show. Really, it’s not too much to ask.
If you won’t do it for the elderly widows who need their yard raked, then at least do it for the fat, old men who are keeling over just because you couldn’t hold out for dinner and a show before you turned into Sharon Stone, minus the icepick, but probably plus better acting skills, because let’s face it, your paramours don’t have the benefits of being trained by an elderly widow.
In the end, you’ll be getting something, too. Trust me.
Naturally, this liberated attitude has spread from the 20-something set, and now we are not only suffering from the stories of saggy-breasted swingin’ grandmas going to key parties, but more and more we learn that there is a veritable army of trampy bimbos in high schools across the land eager to outdo each other in proving that they are eager to bed any jagoff with an earring and pants whose seat drags the ground.
This is wrong, and it threatens to destroy the very fabric of society.
It used to be that, if you wanted to get a polite kiss on the cheek, you had to take a girl out to dinner, then some sort of amusement, such as a movie, paying spectacle, or any number of fine miniature golf/bowling establishments. After you’d done this every other week for 3 to 6 months, you could arrange to have “car trouble” and, after a heavy petting session, perhaps convince her to have negotiations with your “silent partner.”
As you can imagine, this did not come cheap: there was food to buy, gas to purchase, diversions to arrange and pay for, and angry parents to dodge. And we won’t even begin to discuss the investment necessary to “go all the way”, up to and including purchasing the plastic diving bell for your little Nemo before he goes twenty thousand leagues under the girl, one of the more humiliating life experiences for a seventeen-year-old.
However, as the grainy health film they’d shown us in sixth grade drove home, the next time you had unprotected sex a bacteria known as Penus Falloffus would infest your testicles causing, among other things, jock itch and erectile dysfunction.
And having no penis will be difficult to explain in a locker room of wiser boys, all of whom spend an inordinate amount of time staring at each other’s genitals and going “how did you get that festering welt in your Johnson area?”
In order to meet the economic needs of high-class ladies (the ones that didn’t smoke nor go with boys much larger than you), you needed to make money. And since time immemorial, during the fall teenage boys have made money via the most noble of professions: leaf raking.
Here’s how it works: you pick a big house owned by an elderly widow, you take your rake, and you show up one morning and offer to rake the entire yard for ten bucks. She agrees, and an hour or two later you’re ten bucks richer, you’ve eaten some cookies and lemonade, and if she’s a particularly desperate widow you’ve received an offer which you politely declined but which you wonder about during dark nights of the soul for the rest of your life.
[If you accepted the offer, you’ll spend the rest of your life regretting it, unless you enjoyed it, in which case you’ve just discovered your true calling: gigolo.]
Of course, ten bucks isn’t much, so you have to do this over and over. And eventually you run out of widows, so you move down to the elderly, then simply the lazy, and eventually (if there are enough teenagers in town) you’ll rake leaves for anybody who pays you ten bucks.
This does not happen, of course, if there are sluttily-writhing teenage girls under every other section of bleachers. In this case every zit-farmer just goes dragging his tool kit through the dirt, and eventually he finds some girl who’s just desperate to look cool, and that’s it. And what with “hip” parents and these giveaway clinics, you don’t even have to buy the latex spacesuit before you send Buck Rogers down to check out Planet Hooch.
And this is wrong.
Worse, this irresponsible behavior is responsible for hundreds of deaths in the North and Midwest every year, because these same teenage boys used to fill up their Nookie Fund in the winter by shoveling driveways.
But without them, fat old men are dying by the droves as they try, desperately, to get the driveway cleared so they can make their weekly run down to the VFW to complain about kids nowadays. And the complaints aren’t going to make themselves, you know.
So I implore all teenage girls out there to just cross their legs and hold out for dinner and a show. Really, it’s not too much to ask.
If you won’t do it for the elderly widows who need their yard raked, then at least do it for the fat, old men who are keeling over just because you couldn’t hold out for dinner and a show before you turned into Sharon Stone, minus the icepick, but probably plus better acting skills, because let’s face it, your paramours don’t have the benefits of being trained by an elderly widow.
In the end, you’ll be getting something, too. Trust me.
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