Archive for January, 2022

Applying Pig Latin to Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is a waste of time.
I mean you can say, “upercalifragilisticexpialidocious-Sa” but you can’t really disguise the fact that it’s still Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious you’re trying to camouflage.

Cold War spies are dead because they failed to heed this truism.

A moving van pulls up to a psychologist’s house and the Dr. says, “There’s a lot to unpack here.”

It was a very emotional moment because it was a very moving van.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Activities/Destinations/Excursions for the Cancun tourist to consider:

1. Swim with the Prawns – You’ve seen them swimming in garlic sauce, now it’s your turn to swim with these grungy little bottom feeders in a debris-strewn backwater
2. Ride on an Inflatable Banana While Being Pulled By a Jet Ski Doing 55 mph – Hard pass. There are more creative ways to “ride the banana.”
3. The Jolly Rancher – A kids’ oriented pirate party ship. It’s the sister ship to the adults’ more debauched Jolly Roger. The Jolly Rancher serves shots of Sunny D on the quarterdeck, plays Recess Monkeys music on the spar deck and, as expected has all the bathrooms on the poop deck. Every night at 7 pm, little Kaitlyn Penrose walks the plank right into the kiddie pool.
   

   There’s a “can-do” attitude in Cancun.
   I canned.
   I cuned.
   I conquered.

4. Bed Bug Bite Connect-a-Dot Constellation Game – No matter how opulent the resort, they all have bed bugs. In this creative game you connect the dot-bites on your partners body to form a sign of the zodiac or a car logo
5. Take the Ferry to the Island of “The Love that Dare Not Speak its Name” – A fairy ride you’ll never forget featuring female impersonators so real they’d fool Ellen Degeneres. Talk about “Man, overboard” – everything is over the top on this ferry.
6. The Museum of Waiters Who, When You Go to the Bathroom, Refold Your Napkin into a Swan – They’re all there in wax: Roberto Vazquez, Raoul Juarez and, for reasons still unclear to me, the Jackson 5.
7. Ripley’s You’ll Never, Ever Believe This Museum – (unless you’re a Republican) Visit Ripley’s Hall of outrageous, bald-faced lies that some people believe are actually true just because others are telling them it’s true.
8. Excursion to the Mayan Ruins of Chechen Itza – A big disappointment. They actually took me to visit a ruined chicken pizza and not Chichen Itza. When I complained to the operator he said “Oh so sorry Senor, if you want to visit Chichen Itza it will cost you more. Too bad you signed up for chicken pizza.”
9. The Ocean is My Urinal – Don’t “Ewwww!” me. Oh, like you haven’t.
10. These Mexicans Have a Different Word for Everything – Alright already. I get it. I’m not in America anymore.

The circumstances of my early life afforded me opportunities a wellborn boy might never have had. Not that I was poorly-born, but I certainly wasn’t wellborn either. Let’s put it this way, I was just…well…born – without being wellborn. My strained syntax has led some to label me a White Semanticist, but I consider myself more of a Grammar Cracker.  And I always thought a syntax was something you paid to the devil for having a little fun.

 

More to the point, when I was a teenager working at my family’s glass shop, I was privy to a cast of colorful characters we employed from time to time. They ranged in temperament from the rowdy rascal to the lovable lug to the bastard biker. This clutch of inexpert glaziers were usually from the Italian Northside enclave of Syracuse. They all knew each other from high school and they also knew that Eastwood Glass was a quick way to transform themselves from hungover on a Sunday to gainfully employed on a Monday. This employment makeover usually was the result of receiving a call from one of their network of friends alerting them that Eastwood Glass needed a couple of guys for some jobs that Monday.

 

One of these bevy of factotums was Vinnie Fanucci. Mr. Fanucci…nah, that doesn’t sound right. No matter how many times you say “Mr. Fanucci” it just doesn’t ring true – it sounds like some kind of Italian undersea character featured on Sponge Bob SquarePants. You simply cannot have a “Mr.” before Fanucci and not think in terms of a cartoon character. While he wasn’t exactly a Mr. Fanucci, he was definitely a Vinnie – through and through.

 

Vinnie and his motley band of cohorts (Johnny Ventresca, Mike Procopio, Stewart Vendetti, Nicky the boxer, a fat guy named Tiny et al) all somehow made it through high school – probably because Principal Spadafora couldn’t stand the thought of having them back for another year and ushered them through the system. And since they weren’t in jail and were able to blink their eyes in unison, they qualified easily as potential Eastwood Glass Shop employees. Vinnie worked on and off for us in the late 70s and early 80s and enjoyed the casual barrier to entry into the workforce that Eastwood Glass afforded him. He was amateurish yet dogged in performing the skills of a glazier.

 

Vinnie was a streetwise guy, combining equal parts kindness and rowdiness. He suffered from strabismus – a misalignment of the eye whereby he’d be looking at you straight in the face, but he’d be describing something happening 30 feet down the street. His affliction is more commonly referred to as being wall-eyed. His visual defect wasn’t a problem, but it could’ve been. I mean it’s not like we were working with large and dangerously brittle panes of glass that could sever an artery or something.

 

Vinnie’s friendly Roman face possessed warm, endearing puppy dog features – like if Robert DeNiro had been born a Beagle. He learned his roughhewn ways on the street where I’m sure he also learned any Japanese tea ceremony etiquette he may have picked up.     Read the rest of this entry »