Archive for May, 2019

What’s in a name? Well, usually letters, arranged to motivate.

As the housing market continues to fragment into ever-narrower segments, the housing industry has responded with creative communities designed to address underserved markets. The following is a sample of these new communities reflecting the unique lifestyle of their target market:

1. Habitat for Profanity – A sweat-equity community built for poor people who like to swear.
2. Heaven – As you might expect, it’s a gated community. Background checks are mandatory and only those without sin are allowed to enter (entry also helped by knowing Felicity Huffman).
3. Almost Heaven – West Virginia community popular with John Denver fans
4. Uncommon Commons – An exceptionally ordinary development noted for its outrageous normality. If you’re especially mundane, have we got a home for you.
5. Birch Crossing – Although built in a serenely sylvan setting, be advised that crossing that birch too often could get you birch-slapped
6. The Necropolis at Forest Lawn – Available only to people 6 feet and under. This is a below-ground community for the permanently retired. Tagline: “Sorry I can’t come to the door right now. I’m buried.
7. Bayou Perish – Louisiana version of The Necropolis. Due to the Mississippi flooding, it’s an above-ground community for the permanently retired. Available only to people 6 feet and over. Tagline: “Y’all do realize we’re still part of the United States?”
8. Crestfallen Heights – As the contradictory name evidences, it’s very popular with the bipolar crowd
9. Infarction Junction – A heartfelt community were homeowners are called patients and, just like their vascular system, are encouraged to circulate freely. Be forewarned, speeding hearts racing down the Main Artery are not tolerated and are placed under cardiac arrest. Most homes are 4-chambered. You get the picture. Brochure promises “2 EMTs on every corner and a defibrillator in every garage.”
10. My Happy Place – Finally you can go to your happy place. If you lived here you’d be smiling already. A giddy development where all meals are happy meals and all insulation is pink cotton candy. Many homes are made of gingerbread.
11. The Barracks at Andersonville – Taking its cues from the Civil War prison, this lavish reimagining of a dismal POW camp is weirdly popular with guys who still watch Hogan’s Heroes…and the women who love them.
12. Honey Bucket Meadows – An upscale mobile home park (if such a thing is even possible) with an occasional blue splash of elegance
13. Iodine Estates at 3 Mile Island – The only development where both the homeowner and the home have a half-life. No need for a microwave. Just take your food out of the refrigerator and it will spontaneously warm. A healthy thyroid gland is a must.
14. Chair Noble – Not a housing development. I just wanted you to say “Chernobyl” without realizing it.
15. Fallen Manors – A rude development recently zoned for spitting, jaywalking and graffiti.
16. Isn’t it funny how we don’t really understand what we’re doing here and yet we carry on like we do? This is not a housing development, it’s just me making a mid-list observation as a humble acknowledgement of something much greater than our little ego selves. The doors of perception are open for business, now if we could just find the key. We now return to our analgesic entertainment already in progress…
17. English Spellings at Ye Olde Apothecary’s Shoppe – Experience thatched roofs, warm beer and bubonic plague – and that’s just on Drury Lane! Move here and you’ll learn to set your watch just by glancing at Stonehenge.
18. Bunny Hutch Corners – For the hare-raising experience of a lifetime
19. The Sands at Iwo Jima – For the flag-raising experience of a lifetime
20. Yeast of Eden – For the bread-raising experience of a lifetime
21. Lazarus Estates – For the dead-raising experience of a lifetime
22. Sugar Plantation at Chattel Village – For the cane-raising experience of a lifetime
23. Adam & Eve’s Garden of Earthly Delights – For the Cain-raising experience of a lifetime
24. Noah’s Park – For the rain-rising experience of a lifetime
25. Echo Chambers at Walla Walla – Double your pleasure in Walla Walla. The town so great they named it twice. Partial list of homeowners: Yo Yo Ma, Honey Boo Boo, Richie Rich, JJ Abrams and Chi Chi Rodriguez
26. Fresh Dressings at Wounded Knee – Not really a housing development, but I worked on this one too long to just delete it. Ummm, buy now and receive a free walker with the purchase of any teepee
27. The Cribs at Interscope Ranch – Hip hop living was never so bulletproof. Free rap or scratch classes at the Dr. Dre Community Center.
28. The Crabs at Mustang Ranch – Available in soft shell or STDs
29. The Heights at Acrophobia – Each home features a 30-story atrium with loft bedrooms accessed by ladders. Only the Navajo or steeplejacks need apply.
30. The Heights of Impropriety – OMG, voyeurs and exhibitionists living side by side. I mean it’s see and be seen in this fetishistic paradise. Weirdest VFR you’ll ever experience. Please note, during ground fog it’s IFR.
31. Fresh Kills – An actual city and landfill in NY. I’m not making this up: Fresh Kills, Worst Name Ever

Thank God these newly discovered books of the Bible weren’t included in the New Testament. Its hard enough reconciling the original ones.

In an unprecedented discovery, never-before-seen books of the Bible (scrolls actually) have been unearthed at an excavation site near Jerusalem. They were discovered by a team of archaeologists from UC Berkeley who were astonished by their outrageous fortune remarking, “Can you believe we finagled a grant to dig around the Middle East for 6 months? Unbelievable – oh yeah and stumbling upon these Bible books was pretty cool too.”

The scrolls, written in ancient Aramaic, were found in an amphora (large 2-handled clay vase) marked “Burn these when it gets cold – looks like King Solomon’s son is at it again with his heresies. What a waste of good papyrus.”

Fortunately for posterity, these written ruminations weren’t reduced to warming embers. UC Berkeley Press has collected and curated these strange and wonderful writings that give us a window onto the ancient world and has published them in a bracingly numinous compendium called “The New Testament for Dummies.”

It’s apparent from the tenor of these writings that this early version of the Bible was intended more as a Self-Help Guide Book to assist newly minted hominids in navigating the unhygienic world of ancient Babylonia without contracting typhoid. It was a time without organized religions. When spirituality was a personal experience practiced, not through intermediaries, but from direct personal interface with what today is called consciousness, but back then was called “that thing that makes me feel guilty when I covet my neighbor’s ta-tas”

But before acolytes realized what was happening, well-intentioned malefactors tricked worthy men into organizing the inexplicable cosmos into defined religions, and now religion has become this external thing you pay homage to rather than the deeply felt presence of immediate experience ~ UC Berkeley Press

Irrespective of man’s codification of the spiritual experience, the following is a list of the Bible scrolls recovered at the site, along with a brief summary of their contents. They are attributed to King Solomon’s son, Prince Kanye:

1. The One Commandment: This was simply the Golden Rule whereby you treat others as you would like to be treated. And it worked beautifully…until it was sent to committee, where they kept adding amendment after amendment.
2. Do Unto Deuteronomy as You Would Do Unto Mitt Romney: How someone from antiquity could foretell the existence of Mitt Romney is startlingly prescient.
3. 50 Shades of Truth: The less said about this book the better. Way too much focus on spanking.
4. Numbers: Not numbers but numbers. Let me explain. This long forgotten book was once a helpful list of 5-star dentists (middle eastern barbers really) in the greater Judea area who knew how to effectively use Novocain. Therefore, because of their anesthetic abilities, they were numbers (silent “b”) not numbers (audible “b”).
5. King Herod Deals with Hemorrhoids: The Great One tries to reconcile God’s Majesty with a prolapsed rectum.
6. Laminations: A precursor to Lamentations. This rather pedestrian scroll deals more with medieval flooring than the Human Condition. In Laminations, the prophet Linoleum speaks grandiloquently of scuff-resistant, non-permeable surfaces as a foundation for hygienic living. It is believed this is the first mention of cleanliness being next to Godliness.   
7. How to Avoid Getting Stoned: Not the “far out” kind of stoned. This book deals with avoiding the kind of stoning where suffocating rocks are pressed down upon one’s chest to encourage behavior modification. This method of negative reinforcement was really just a medieval reminder to not take the Lord’s name in vain, or to take narcotics in vein.  
8. Burning Taint: STDs to avoid while visiting Sodom
9. Up From Animals: We we’re barely more than livestock when this scroll was written. At that time humans were lucky to eat spelt or alfalfa sprouts. Most food was absolutely offal, or those awful falafels. Even more worrying was people’s fear that if they beheld heathens in the act of fornication, they would fall from grace and instead of being a pillar of the community, they’d become a pillar of salt.  
10. Flatulence of a Lesser God: To quote that prophet Bob Dylan “The answer my friend is-a blowin’ in the wind.” Yes, even in ancient Masada they had street food featuring taco carts. Most found it long-winded.
11. Goliath’s Kidney Stones: Why do you think he was always so ill-tempered? Spoiler Alert: It’s the stone David used to slay him.
12. Hummusphobia: Fear of Hummus afflicted many Anti-legumers who were uncomfortable with these same sex ground beans. Favored by the LGBTQ crowd – Legumes, Grapes, Beets, Turnips and Quince eaters.
13. The Book of Termination: An apposite companion piece to the book of Genesis, this apocalyptic End of Days quatrain presages the coming Social Security time bomb.
14. OMG, Guess What I Can Do?: Really a defense of God’s perfect justice. It explains how orgasm is God’s way of making up for Smallpox
15. Deuteronomy to Me One More Time: This tuneful verse somehow prefigures the Captain and Tennille’s “Do That to Me One More Time.”
16. Love Will Keep Us Together: Somehow, once again, the Captain and Tennille divined.
17. Muskrat Lust: Downright scary. This is where the Captain and Tennille divination should’ve stopped.
18. Book of Antiverbs: A response to the Book of Proverbs
19. Weights and Measures: Keeping things in Biblical Proportion. Scroll goes to great lengths in discussing cubits, stadions and reeds. I couldn’t fathom it.
20. Ob-la-di Obidiah: Jaunty little book proves that life goes on…brahhh. La la la la life goes on. So if you want some fun, sing Ob-la-di Obidiah.

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