Author Archive

Every state endeavors to generate tourism dollars through ambitious marketing programs. But sometimes these promotions miss the mark. Witness these botched attempts at stimulating tourism through well-intentioned, but ultimately misguided brochures:

1. Colorado: Thanks to Recently Enacted Marijuana Laws Denver is Now the 2-Mile High City
   

   If you’re a generic tourist going nowhere in particular, you might like this nondescript and vacuous travel guide. Meanwhile But if you want to go some place check out these travel brochures some states probably wish they never created in the first place.

2. New Mexico: The Land of Entrapment
3. New Mexico: Come for the Radiation. Stay for the ‘Shrooms
4. Maryland: We’re Trying. Really. Please Don’t Judge Us by Baltimore
5. Wyoming: Live Rectangular or Die
6. Florida: America’s Dangling Body Part
7. Michigan: Good Mitten, Bad Mitten
8. California: The Land of Fruits & Nuts
9. California: Ignoring Sexual Harassment from 1850 until 2017
10. Delaware: We’re Anti-paranoid. We think everyone is trying to ignore us.
11. Arkansas: Our “kansas” isn’t pronounced like Kansas’s “Kansas”
12. New Jersey: America’s Lymph System Since 1940
13. Alaska: Our Most Northern, Western and Eastern State – Google It
14. Indiana: Who’s yer state?
15. Washington: Home to Boing, Tinysoft and Barstucks
16. Mississippi: “When yer standin’ on yer head, we’re number 1 in everything!”
17. Mississippi: Still leading the nation in outhouses per capita
18. Mississippi: More Potable Water than Ethiopia and Way More Paved Roads than Bangladesh
19. Mississippi: Separate and Equal Drinking Fountains for Each and Every Minority
20. Connecticut: “Even we don’t know why there’s a second ‘c’ in our name and we live here”
21. Illinois: Land of Lincoln, Air of Jersey, Water of Flint
22. Alabama: Thank God We’ve Got College Football
23. Louisiana: “Have you visited us lately? We’re barely part of the United States.”
24. Texas: Too Big to fail. We’re just underachieving instead.
25. Texas: At Least We’ve Got Austin
26. Oklahoma: Unchanged since 1907
27. Oklahoma: Unchanged since the Big Bang
28. Oklahoma: Come and Watch Time Stand Still
29. Oklahoma: We have a city named Enid – need we say more?
30. Missouri: The Blow Me State
31. Wisconsin: We’ve Lost Our Minds, Come Find Yours
32. Wisconsin: “I don’t care how inefficient they are; can we please go back to the one kind of regular screw in light bulb?”…and other pleas against modernity in the lighting industry.
33. Kansas: What Wisconsin Said

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1. Guardian Angel Waitress Pays for Homeless Veteran’s Lunch: Next day he brings in 5 friends and orders Lobster
2. Barking Up the Wrong Headstone: Grief-stricken Dog Sleeps Atop Grave of a Guy with Same Name as his Owner Who’s Still Alive.
3. Hack of Adoption Records Reunites Mother and Son 33 years after she put him up for adoption. Son’s Reaction: “Great. Now I’m stuck buying Christmas presents for 2 mothers. Thanks a lot Global kOS.”
4. Unbelievable Canine Loyalty: Tearful Spalding family puts ailing Fido to sleep before vacationing in Hawaii. One week later guess who shows up on their lanai in Maui soaking wet with a few questions.
5. Joan Rivers daughter Melissa Told Her Mother’s Grave Will Have to be Moved: “She Just Won’t Shut-up. She’s disturbing the other corpses,” says superintendent.
6. Flint, Michigan Losing its Spark.
7. After Democrats Demand to see Mitch McConnell’s Birth Certificate, the Kentucky Senator Admits: “Alright! I’m A Sea Turtle. I never knew my mother. I was hatched. Thank God I had an egg tooth.”
8. Men Vote “The eyes” 4^th Favorite Female Body Part. Wait till you see what number 1 is.
9. Meta-Spoof Headline Makes No Sense: So Much Time to Waste. So Little Time to Do It In.
10. Shakespeare was a Great Playwright: Wait Till You See What He Looks Like Now!
11. What a Dog is Really Saying When He Sniffs Your Crotch.
12. Even Trivia Feels Trivialized By Tsunami of Bullsh*t

We, the privileged gentry, have become a sophisticated lot. We no longer drink a cup of Joe. We imbibe a half-caff soy latte purchased with Apple Pay at a drive-thru window while listening to Enya in our self-driving Teslas. We don’t smoke anymore. We vape or grow hipper still in hookah lounges. And we certainly don’t swill beer from inelegant pop top cans. Instead we quaff artisanal craft beers in boutique microbreweries while pretending to enjoy Manchester United’s 1 – nil football match played on the pitch at Portsmouth.

And that’s our jumping off point. No, not English soccer, but the American craft beer craze. Amidst a flood of competing suds, many are good, some are great and a few are outstanding – not for their herbaceous bouquets or notes of barley malt, but for the eccentric names they’ve appended to their particular brew. Bursting with foamy delight, these quirky and sometimes pretentious names enhance the ordinary experience of drinking fermented cereal grains from an outsized tankard. In a charmingly retro way we’re captivated by these arresting monikers. A kind of appellation chic has taken hold (this is not to be confused with the grunge clothing fad of the 90’s known as Appalachian Chic). It seems we’re intoxicated by both our foamy beers and their frothy names.

So between reading Cigar Aficionado Magazine and visiting my esophageal oncologist, I’ve compiled a list of these jaunty and kitschy names and present them below:

1. Sierra Fail Ale
2. Downward God: Dyslexics Delight
3. I Can’t Believe It’s Not Urine
4. Twist and Stout
5. A Larger Lager
6. McConaughey’s Alright, Alright, Alright
7. Finally Got My GED
8. Not Quite Blotto
9. Olde English Cockblocker
10. Yeast of All Evils
11. And I’m Drinking This Warm Yellow Fluid Because…?
12. McBeer
13. Yup, Passed My High School Equivalency Exam (a sister brew to Finally Got My GED)
14. Wasted Away Again in My Mother’s Basement

It has been said by critics more attuned to the zeitgeist than I, that you can never be too thin, too rich or too hip. They’re wrong of course, but that’s what they say.

 

God Accused of the Nonconsensual and Unwelcomed Relocation of Vulnerable Souls from their True Home in Fabulous Heaven to the Crude Habitat of Problematic Earth

Is this just another case of soulful harassment so prevalent these days? Well, as we’ll see it may depend on your perspective.

 

The Dam Breaks

A trickle of repressed memories bravely voiced by a few earthbound souls has led to a torrent of recovered memories by other souls who’ve come forward to corroborate disturbing accounts of being forcibly evicted from their lofty perch in fabulous heaven and relegated to the surly confines of problematic earth.  

And even though she’s not been asked, attorney Gloria Allred has agreed to represent the entire human race of 7.5 billion people in a class action suit of Everyone vs. The All-Being. She seeks to restore her would-be clients to their former heavenly station, including the wings, halos and the ecstatic drama-free environment they were accustomed to. “We know of no compelling reason why the Almighty chose to arbitrarily cast out his adoring flock into a far flung Earthly outpost devoid of the unity, love and clarity so abundant in their rightful home. His capricious action is doubly painful because he seems to be doing it simply for his own amusement,” offered the well-intentioned Allred. Read the rest of this entry »

By all accounts the opioid crisis is intensifying and the country’s failure to address it has less to do with its lethality and everything to do with the weird optics of the word opioid. Who can relate to an opioid that sounds more like the kid on The Andy Griffith Show than a serious public health issue? If 4 of the first 5 letters weren’t vowels we might not be ankle deep in overdoses and the opioid crisis may have gone the way of smallpox, polio and disco. Instead this deadly wave has become a tsunami and all because the public at large can’t warm-up to the word opioid. The same thing happened with the word Hillary in the last election. Read the rest of this entry »

1. Thank You for Your Service: A Shout Out to Crash Test Dummies
2. “I Didn’t Sign Up for This”: Complaints by People Who Signed-up for Things They No Longer Like
3. The Politicization of Baloney: The Right Claims It, But Isn’t it Really a Left-Wing Meat?
4. Are Toadstools and Frogchairs the Same Thing?
5. Coping with Coping Saws
6. Not in My Backyard: A Short History of Above Ground Pools
7. Too Many Colons::::: A Tubular History of Diacritical Marks
8. “Absolutely no one in my entourage may ever take drugs.” “Hello, Offshore Pharmacy, send me 1000 vials of Fentanyl.” The Hypocrisy of Prince in a Book Title that Doesn’t Even Fit on the Book Cover
9. Dan Quayle: Not Looking So Bad These Days
10. George W Bush: Oh How We Miss Thee
11. Joseph Stalin: No, He Still Sucks
12. Old School: A Misplaced Appreciation of When Things Were Even Stupider
13. Having Said That: Things that People Have Already Said
14. “No, not quite. The cheese itself isn’t grilled. The bread surrounding the cheese is.”: The Genesis of the Grilled Cheese Sandwich
15. Harvey Weinstein’s Prison Experience: “OK. Enough. I get it! Can I please leave?”
16. How Grover Cleveland Got His Groove Back and Other Stories of Presidential Redemption
17. Subway Franchisees: They’re Not All From India
18. “No, not Cool-aid, but Kool-Aid.” How an Intentional Misspelling Made Kraft a Fortune
19. Google to Partner with Titleist to Research Self-driving Golf Balls (Really a headline and not a book. So sue me.)
20. “Can I pay someone to do yoga for me?” and Other Questions from the Wealthy

Nation Held Spellbound as Letters Threaten to Strike 

Here’s What We Know So Far:

• Letters, apparently enraged over polluted public discourse demand a return to civility
• Alphabetic job action threatens to rearrange pre-existing letters of all written material unless hostility is curbed and honesty restored
• In a muscular display of alphabetic resolve, the alphabet has collectively agreed to alter the letters of 2 well-known items to demonstrate their resoluteness. Henceforth the letters on the box cover of the game Chutes-n-Ladders will read Shoots-n-Cleavage. And shampoo instructions now direct you to: lather, rinse, defibrillate. What’s next? STOP signs reading GO.
• Cursive, Calligraphic and Cyrillic Letters have voted to join their block-letter brothers in seeking better working conditions
• Arabic letters vow to support any job action, providing the curvier letters are draped in black
• Hieroglyphs, graffiti and most other symbols follow suit. In Egypt, the pictographs in the tomb of Ramses II have joined the cause and morphed into several Peanuts comic strips.
• No word yet from Emojis. In fact, none expected. After all, they’re emojis. They did however send a 😀 .
• Hebrew alphabet, under pressure from the Right to Left Party, remains a holdout  
• “@” symbol agrees to remain in the public domain so people can still get email
• Early languages (Sanskrit, Latin and Greek) side with museum curators and refuse to participate in the job action in order to preserve integrity of ancient scrolls
• Strike seen as a threat to all written material except doctor’s prescriptions which no one can read anyway
• Seeds of discontent sowed early on in the Primordial Alphabet Soup of Life
• President tweets “Those Sons of Bitch letters better get back in line or they’re fired. JOBS.” But all 140 letters take a knee and the tweet appears as, “Life with Melania is one long celibation! SOBS.”
• Authors have come out against the strike calling the job action “Censorship.” The alphabet calls their action “Repositioning.”
• Read the entire story below on how it all happened

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This is the 1^st draft of embattled producer Harvey Weinstein’s resignation letter. “Embattled” meaning he’s guilty of whatever it is he’s battling. Mr. Weinstein’s letter was obtained before his female defense lawyer had an opportunity to sanitize it for public consumption. Loutish schmucks like Weinstein always hire a female lawyer to perfume their transgressions with a sense of “this will never happen again and see, even a girl supports me.” And many of these lady lawyers are happy to turn the tables on these serial schemers by becoming the fig leaf for their ill deeds at $1700 an hour plus expenses. It’s poetic justice really; whereby the guy who took coercive advantage of women is now being similarly taken advantage of by a woman. Through the Freedom of Information Act I obtained Mr. Weinstein’s 1^st draft (alright I got it from Igor my Russian IT hacker) and disclose it here in the hopes readers will marvel at its’ self-centered obliviousness.

 

Dearest Friends, Colleagues and that tattletale Gwyneth Paltrow,

On this somber occasion when I’ve been caught with my pants down and my robe open, it pains me to announce my resignation from Weinstein Productions (a division Casting Couch Industries). You can imagine my disappointment in having to step down from such a carefully crafted female trap that took me decades to perfect. It wasn’t easy forging a foolproof method where an inflated, hairy ogre like myself was able to take advantage of some of Hollywood’s most vulnerable beauties – before they had any leverage in the business. People should know that for every woman who rebuffed my “offers of love” another 3 quietly submitted to them. So in my mind I’m batting like .750. Those are Hall of Fame numbers – not bad for a graceless toad from Queens who women wouldn’t bother with if, instead of being a powerful Hollywood mogul, I was a pinsetter at an Amish bowling alley. But for now it’s all over and it’s back to escort services and massage parlors for me while I pretend to get the help I don’t want.   Read the rest of this entry »

Celebrities trade on their famousness. It’s a commodity of recognition easily monetized courtesy of the endorsement market and the underlying calculus often plays out like this: “Me like that person. If me imitate, me become like them. Then happy.”

 

Now, let’s cut to the idea of where Ambien’s magic ends, and white noise sleep-inducing sounds begin. At the intersection of sleep aids and insomnia is where celebrities’ agents (who get 10% of their client spoils) see an opportunity to interpose their client’s good name between the desperate need for sleep and white background noises designed to promote glorious slumber. So an unlikely marketing scheme is hatched: White Background Noises created by celebrities for their adoring civilian fans. It’s a match made in Tinsel Town heaven. It’s a kind of fan fiction for the fatuous.

 

However well-intentioned this scam was, clinical sleep studies with zealous fans proved that not all celebrity white noises were found to be soporific. Far from the sleep-inducing mantras hoped for, some of these narcotizing sound bites, bit back and inadvertently activated the arousal response in sleepy males test subjects – especially when they heard a loop of sultry-voiced Angelina Jolie cooing “What are you wearing.” After this unintentional “ear porn” the sleep-deprived males perked right up and snoozing somehow didn’t seem so important. This and other streams of counterproductive white background noises were excluded from the app, but they can be heard on bootleg versions of the app found on YouTube.

 

So even though it’s 4 in the morning (in Darwin, Australia, not here in Reno where I am), I’m pleased to present:   

 

 

Top 10 Rejected White Noise Sleep Sounds created by celebrities for sleepless fans:

 

1. A loop of Tom Petty admitting to the people of Syria, “Well, maybe you do have to live like a refugee”

 

2. An endless loop of Steve Perry just singing the “Don’t Stop” part

 

2. Misty morning rain…bouncing off Tatum Channing’s abs or was it Channing Tatum’s pecs. Or maybe it was Carol Channing’s cheeks or Tatum O’Neal’s teeth. The point is it involved rain, a celebrity body part and it was rejected.
   

 

4. The continuous sound of Tim McGraw and Faith Hill’s boots knocking 

 

5. The repeated tooting of an “aah-oo-ga” horn…as blown by Monica Lewinsky

 

6. Morgan Freeman intoning, “My, my, my.” (Apparently the dissonance of a black man making white noise caused subjects to grow bewildered instead of sleepy.)

 

7. Yoko Ono imitating an air raid siren

 

8. The soothing and secretive “hiss” of Tom Brady deflating a football

 

9. The sound of Tina Turner privately dancing

 

10. Marcel Marceau miming the words to “The Sound of Silence”

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Background White noises designed to promote deep & restful sleep in the Loosely Wrapped

1. Endless loop of Oktoberfest Burping
2. A soothing recording of a woman continuously saying, “The Sandman will see you now.”
3. Repeated sound of a cat scrambling to get out of a bathtub with 2” of water in it
4. For the Zen sleeper: The sound of one hand clapping
5. Doppler-shifted instructions of a flight attendant screaming, “In the unlikely event of a water landing…”
6. A cacophony of very moist chewing
7. A succession of watermelons dropped from 7 stories
8. A succession of 7 stories dropped from a library
9. Cute kid mispronouncing the word library as “libary” – puts you right out (if you’re weird)
10. Ugly guy mispronouncing February as “Febuary”; and no I don’t know how you’d know he was ugly if it’s just an audio recording. I don’t even know whether or not he’s transgendered. This is just a stupid list I made up before bed, so give me a break before you get all judgey.
11. A guy saying over and over, “Y’know the app sucks, but the list is kinda funny.”

Good night everyone. Sleep tight, but not too tight.