Archive for October, 2021
Become a Crematorium Operator. It’s the Undertaking of a Lifetime.
October 27th, 2021 | 
Author: If you have a burning desire to relieve the anguish of bereaved families, consider a career as an Ignition Mortician. If you value hefty profits, nifty puns and lethal clichés explore a career where your goal is to fire people every day.
These days crematoriums are hip and cool-ish for the ghoulish who wish to perish anguish.
Crematorium Franchise Bullet Points
- Experience the job satisfaction of watching your best work go up in smoke
- Job Burnout? Not a problem. In fact, it’s encouraged.
- Job Security? Not a problem. In fact, you get to fire people regularly.
- Urn while you Burn
- Enjoy killer benefits and clients with smokin’ hot bodies
- Did you know you’re not supposed to cremate bodies in months that have “embers” in them?
- Job interviews are very thorough, but don’t worry, you won’t be grilled
Crematoriums – They’re the toast of the town.
Consider the Crematorium Franchise that’s Your Best Match
- Return to Cinder – Is there a better way to say, “Elvis has left the building?” Than to say ♫Return to Cinder♫
- Bereaved, Bothered and Bewildered – Helps families to grieve against a backdrop of Cole Porter music. Reviewers say ♫It’s De-Lovely, It’s De-lightful♫
- Dust in the Wind Crematorium – Very popular in Kansas
- Good Humor Ice Crematorium – Maybe it’s in bad humor, but the cone-shaped urns are available in waffle or wafer
- Burning Man – Go out in a blaze of artistic self-expression in this final bonfire of the vanities. Ensure your funeral rite doesn’t go wrong by designing your own signifying pyre.
- Next of Kin-dling – Popular with kinfolk in Appalachia
- Don’t Ash, Don’t Tell – Have yourself anonymously cremated. What happens at Don’t Ash, Don’t Tell, stays at Don’t Ash, Don’t Tell.
- Char Ming – Dynastic Chinese families crematorium of choice. Cremains returned in a little to-go urn.
- Cremains of the Day – Designed to meet the funerary needs of literary aficionados
- Blackened Blue Fish – Designed to meet the funerary needs of fish afishionados who’ve lost a tropical pet fish
- The Uranus Society – Competes with the more established Neptune Society. As one might expect, the Uranus Society is a pain in the ash.
Don’t delay. Your future cremains to be seen.
If you’ve been carrying a torch for crematoriums, rekindle that old flame with a hot, new franchise. Again, in the words of Elvis: Crematoriums are ♫Just a hunk-a-hunk-a burning love♫
Cremation: Think of it as a different kind of Tinder
We look forward to hearing from you (even though we haven’t mentioned how to get in touch with us).
We’ll keep a candle burning for you in the window.
Posted in 
Tags: 
An Excerpt from My Inner Dialogue
Pandora’s Box. Go ahead and open it. You know you want to.
It is often said that to lead a happy life you should, “Dance like nobody’s watching.” I get that. But with a twist. What brings me joy is to, “Write like nobody’s reading.” And based upon my Google Analytics of late, that statement has never been truer. There’s no denying what brings us joy. The heart wants what the heart wants.
So as I bathe myself in literary pixie dust in preparation for a writer’s journey into rapture, I find myself in my element. I’ve got my backlit keyboard, my predatory imagination and I’ve just cracked open a fresh ginger-hibiscus kombucha. I’m not only in my element, I’ve become an element: Hardimanium – a rare psychoactive literary element consisting of Higgs bosons and a knowing smirk.
Now as I gently loosen the tethers mooring me to conventional and unspectacular wisdom, I feel the motivating presence of a million eyes not reading this. Such exquisite freedom. My gatekeepers have been put on administrative leave and in their absence no bureaucratic censor exists to burden my thoughts. The swirling excesses of my cerebral vortices are tamed only by the limits of the English language.
Yes, it’s the perfect literary storm and the NWS (No, not the National Weather Service, but the Narcotized Writers’ Sanctuary) is calling for a lacerating Category 5 hurricane once the literary storm travels up your optic nerve and saturates your consciousness. But please don’t evacuate yourself just yet. I promise to keep you securely within the eye of Hurricane David, at an observationally safe distance from its high-velocity humor and killer premises. You might get a little wet, but that’s only in keeping with the words of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow who mused so eloquently: “Into each life some rain must fall.”
So let us open a Pandora’s Box of temptations. Pearls of Wisdom from a cultured oyster. English expressions of ephemeral ideas. A disgorgement of mental freneticism. A Hobson’s Choice to be sure.
- The Communist: Pinko
- The Master Mason: Stucco
- The Cowboy: Gaucho
- The Mexican: Taco
- The Snack Eater: Nabisco
- The African-American: Oprah…OK not quite, but Oprah backwards is Harpo. So there’s that.
Having Your Archaic and Eating It Too (Berry Good)
I’m Just Another Grammar Cracker. If Oliver Cromwell was the Lord Protector of England, I am the Lord Enabler of English.
Not your average Joe…Namath.
The DI then walks up to Broadway Joe and asks him, “Nameth?”
***All Hallows’ Eve Approaches and I Celebrate It in All Its Ghoulishness***
The offspring of a Smiley Face, a Pumpkin and a Kool-Aid pitcher participating in a ménage a trois.
1. Pumpkin Spice – The most seasonal of the Spice Girls
Thus Spake Zarathustra
Stan the Man. Spakes to me in 2001 ways.
1. Through cell regeneration, 99% of my body’s cells are 10 years old or less. But somehow I’m 60. Not happy.
2. Real Vegans don’t vacuum Dust Bunnies
3. If Love is Love, then Gees is Christ
4. Yo-Yo Ma’s Mother’s day Message: Yo Mama, Love, Yo-Yo Ma
5. Feeling sic (sic).
6. Conversation held in total darkness: “We’re gonna be OK. I’ve got a handle on it now.” “No you don’t. And that’s not a handle.”
7. Years after her death a son sent his mother’s ashes back to the crematorium with a cryptic note reading “Return to Cinder.”
8. Montessori Schools have apologized for marketing a discount school called Montesorry
9. Somehow I confused Easter with Passover and celebrated the season by buying little chocolate rabbis. Oy vey.
Peter Boyle, John Lennon and Joe?
♫Puttin’ on the Ritz♫
Most of us are familiar with actor Peter Boyle, either as grandfatherly Frank Barone in Everybody Loves Raymond or as Gene Wilder’s clunkily dancing monster in Young Frankenstein. Prior to his death in 2006, Peter Boyle was always a welcomed presence in films and TV. He was a valued and respected B-list background guy. He was the kind of guy about whom a Hollywood agent might knowingly remark, “Peter Boyle will always make a beautiful dollar in this business.”
There are however 2 highly dispensable facts to know about him. And I present these superfluous oddities so I may keep my little corner of the world tidy and in doing so relieve my OCD. One bit of choice minutia deals with John Lennon and the other petty detail is a connect-the-dots cerebral feat of utterly inconsequential coincidences. So fasten your seatbelt everybody. Not for this tame piece, but just in general. I mean it’s a good idea to fasten your seat belt and that’s why I like to place a little Public Service Announcement in all my stories.
John Lennon was the Best Man at Peter Boyle’s wedding. Imagine, John Lennon. Could Peter Boyle somehow be the 5th Beatle? – Hardly. And if you ever heard him sing Puttin’ on the Ritz in Young Frankenstein you understand he couldn’t even be the 5th Season for Frankie Valli. But as it was Peter Boyle became friends with John Lennon through his fiancé Loraine Alterman who was a writer for the Rolling Stone. She had befriended Yoko Ono. And when Peter Boyle married Ms. Alterman, he asked John Lennon to be his Best Man. Legend has it that Mr. Boyle also considered Leonid Brezhnev as Best Man, but the Soviet leader decided to remain Back in the USSR. As it was Peter Boyle chose well and the former Beatle won out.
OK so far? Good. Now savor that celebrity morsel while we move on to the entrée where I present a wholly unneeded examination of a string of insignificant theatrical coincidences in the career of Peter Boyle. The fact that John Lennon was the Best Man at his wedding is evidence enough that Peter Boyle was not your average Joe – Joe being the operative word here. It is infinitesimally fascinating to note that in no fewer than four movies/TV shows Peter Boyle starred in, the name “Joe” appeared in the title. See below:
Joe – As a world weary misfit 1970
Crazy Joe – As crazy mobster Joey Gallo 1974
Tail Gunner Joe – As overly zealous commie-fighter Senator Joe McCarthy 1977
Joe Bash – As a jaded NYC cop 1986
For the love of Pete that’s a lot of Joe’s. Even for the love of Pete Boyle that’s a lot of Joes. There may be more Joe’s in his career that I’m unaware of. For example I don’t know what they called Dr. Frankenstein’s monster in Young Frankenstein – coulda been Joe Monster. I heard Peter Boyle refused the roll of Joe in Joe vs the Volcano for fear of being typecast.
In the short-lived (alright, barely-lived) TV series Joe Bash, the promotional tagline was hardly something to rally around or render it as must-see TV. It read: He steals donuts. He dates a hooker. He’s one of New York’s finest. He’s Joe Bash. Really? Yes, really.
Epilogue
Well, what have we learned after reading 135 pages on Peter Boyle and the uncanny recurrence of Joe roles in his career? Fortunately for you, I edited-down the original 135 pages to these 2, must-read pages. Think of it as the Cliff Notes to this story: Peter Boyle, John Lennon and Joe? I think condensing those less to-the-point, 133 pages into just 2 pages makes this piece more essence-y.
Highlighting the happenstance of the many Peter Boyle “Joe” roles is how I role. It’s my cup of tea. No, that’s not quite right. It’s actually my cup of Joe.