Author Archive

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 »

For those unfamiliar with the life and times of Jesus of Nazareth, I’ve provided some FAQs to help people reacquaint themself with the great Savior:

1. Did Jesus ever get stoned? No, but many times he came close to getting stoned when he ran afoul of the Romans.
2. Did Jesus write anything? Nope. All his gospels are “as told by.” Think of them as being ghost written – by the Holy Ghost.
3. Did Jesus have dates? Yes. Hundreds of them. He loved dates and they were a very abundant and cheap food source in the greater Judea area.
4. Did Jesus’s brother James, suffer from an inferiority complex? Yup. How could he not? His older brother was a light unto the world, whereas James once lit a manger on fire. Surprisingly though, James could change water into ice, but only if the temperature dropped below 32°.
5. Does Jesus have the ability to integrate the content of all your applications into one seamless platform? Child please!
6. Why doesn’t Jesus just return and shower the world in beatific love? He has. Several times, but most people are antagonistic toward this itinerant, long-haired hippie spouting off about doing unto others and loving thy neighbor. He’s had poor management of late – like Elvis did in the 1970s. Where’s an apostle when you need one.
7. How dark was Jesus’ skin? Let’s put it this way – he wouldn’t exactly be welcomed in some of his churches today.
8. If Jesus had a residency in Las Vegas, what would he perform? Well, he’d probably kickoff the show with Sermon on the Mount and maybe follow that up with a version of “Crocodile Rock.” He’d blow away illusionist David Copperfield’s disappearing spectacles. Instead of making an elephant vanish, Jesus would do the same with hate and anger. Great stuff. At the end of the show I’d envision a mic drop and then an ascension up through the proscenium arch.
9. Did Jesus have any tattoos? Yes. One. It read: WWMD – What Would Moses Do.
10. Did he throw a ball like a girl? No way. Not JC. In fact he could slingshot a rock better than David (not me, but the Biblical David,).
11. Was Jesus musical? Kinda. He could play air versions of all the popular instruments back in the day: air drums, air flute and a mean air harp. And yet he was scrupulous about never putting on any airs.
12. Who cut Jesus’s hair? A very young Barbara Walters.
13. Was Jesus at Woodstock? Inconclusive. He would’ve blended in so well with the rest of the hippies, nobody would’ve noticed except maybe Crosby, Stills and Nash who referred to him in their song Woodstock, “Well I came upon the child of God, he was walking along the road…”
14. Was Jesus aware of the dangers of asbestos? No…asbestos we can tell anyway.
15. Did Jesus get along with his father? Yes, although he thought his dad was kind of an absentee father, who was there in spirit only.
16. Do people still love Jesus today? Well yes, but people seem to love the “idea” of Jesus more than actually practicing his message of non-judgment, self-reflection, forgiveness and the Golden Rule. Many use his good name to fleece their flock of donations to buy mansions on the ground, instead of mansions in the sky.

 

“Holy holiday on ice, Batman,” exclaimed 9-year old David Hardiman, upon hearing the jolliest words of the holiday season. It was 6:30 in the morning and I’d waited breathlessly in paralytic anticipation next to the radio for what seemed like an eternity, but was probably about the time it takes for a snowflake to fall lazily to earth. This unexpected Snow Day electrified my body with ripples of sheer joy, causing me to shimmy down the hallway in a funky celebratory gyration – like the way Steph Curry does after swishing a spectacular trey.

 

Ode to Joy for this Snow Day – Well at Least Owed to Somebody I Suppose

For my snow day good fortune I felt a great debt of gratitude to somebody or something. This bonus day, this meteorological windfall, this unexpected gift of the Magi was way better than frankincense, myrrh or gold. It was the pinnacle of pre-pubescent happiness. And when I think of the small world I inhabited in the early 1970’s, I’m surprised I even fit into it. But fit I did, and some experiences were tailor made for me. Case in point: a sweet and dearly unearned school “snow day” – or as we called them back in the days of the Ice Capades, a “Holiday on Ice.”

 

When those cheery words “All Syracuse public schools are closed” were broadcast over the airwaves from on high, all public school pupils were elated, and all the pupils’ pupils were dilated. This eye-opening experience allowed us to see our way clear to a sensuous morning of deep, cozy hibernation nestled in our beds, followed by a strenuous afternoon of deep, snowy celebration sledding with our friends.

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As it was, we were already knee-deep in juvenile joy because the brawny forces of nature had defeated the bureaucratic powers of mandatory school attendance. Truant officers would have to find someone else to hassle today, because when afternoon came we’d be chest deep in snow drifts – and that’s no drift. I mean, and that snow drift was huge.

 

In my little 9-year-old way I realized that when mounds of the white stuff triggered a school closing, it was a kind of “white privilege” that everyone could share in equally. Snow: the equal opportunity precipitate.

 

My early Christmas present was given me by WNDR’s “Dandy” Dan Leonard – 1260 AM on your radio dial. His unctuous radio inflections are imprinted on me like a tattoo I can’t remove. The larger point however, was that there’d be no school on this fiercely-snowing, traffic-snarling Tuesday in the arctic tundra masquerading as the city of Syracuse, NY, and I couldn’t have been any happier if Marcia Brady had asked me to a sleepover. Read the rest of this entry »

Those are the words of Dr. Gershwin Fassbender, Director of the SIA (Slumber Institute of America). Like most of the employees at the Slumber Institute, Dr. Fassbender is woke. In fact maybe a little too woke and that’s what accounts for the insomnia.

 

The Problem: Nocturnal Adrenalizing

We will survey the career of Dr. Fassbender in due course, but first let us examine the disorder of insomnia. Insomnia is a pervasive national calamity responsible for grievous errors in judgment including leaving a tip at McDonald’s, watching Hee Haw or sending money to a Nigerian prince. Chronic insomnia dumbs us down, jitters us up and can leave us in a state of trivial speculation whereby one wonders if the employees at Yahoo! drink Yoo-hoo. I do. Do you?

 

The vicious circle of sleeplessness presents its ironic geometry when you lie awake all night worried that you won’t fall asleep. This self-fulfilling prophecy of not getting to sleep keeps you up at night, so during the day you shuffle about somnambulistically. And if we’ve learned anything from somnambulism (sleep-walking) is that it’s very hard to pronounce and even harder to spell.

 

The need for regular, replenishing sleep is a metabolic requirement providing normative homeostasis to an otherwise unregulated body. Despite what Big Pharma might have you think, there is no substitute for restorative, deep REM sleep. Big Pharma offers nothing but Ambien. Little Pharma has come up short on the matter and Medium Pharma has just stayed home on the Pharm. Let me illustrate this disconnect in another way; Ambien is to sleep as drinking ocean water is to thirst – it may solve your problem in the short run, but there’s hell to pay in the long run. And hell, I’m told, extends credit to no one.   Read the rest of this entry »

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.

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

 

1. Return to Cinder – Is there a better way to say, “Elvis has left the building?” Than to say ♫Return to Cinder♫
2. 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♫
3. Dust in the Wind Crematorium – Very popular in Kansas
4. Good Humor Ice Crematorium – Maybe it’s in bad humor, but the cone-shaped urns are available in waffle or wafer
5. 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.
6. Next of Kin-dling – Popular with kinfolk in Appalachia
7. 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.
8. Char Ming – Dynastic Chinese families crematorium of choice. Cremains returned in a little to-go urn.
9. Cremains of the Day – Designed to meet the funerary needs of literary aficionados
10. Blackened Blue Fish – Designed to meet the funerary needs of fish afishionados who’ve lost a tropical pet fish
11. 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.