Archive for the ‘Ditties’ Category

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.

 

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

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”

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

From the “Too Soon” Dept.

An open letter to the Burning People that run Burning Man,

As I formulate this letter on further merchandising Burning Man, my concerns are twofold: 1. Can I properly convey my business plan to expand the Burning Man franchise? And 2. Can I do so without it being a study in clichés? The answer is a resounding Yes (on the business plan) and a definite No (on the cliché avoidance plan).

Burning Man is a very popular anarchical event of infinite self-expression. Its counterculture ethos speaks to the spiritual vagabond in all of us and despite its subversively-tinged sensibility, it has become an ever present fixture in the Mystical-Astrological Complex. And I believe we should tap into that vast reservoir of new-age good-will to decant a new demographic. Not only do we want to grow our natural constituency, i.e., those who dance like no one’s watching. But we also want to target market those who dance like there’s a stick up their ass? Read the rest of this entry »

I always knew my memory foam mattress would have a memory; what I didn’t realize is that it would have a consciousness too.

It was time for a new mattress. The old one had taken on the characteristics of its owner and had also begun to sag in the middle. It was spent from being flipped and rotated 9 ways from Sunday – the mattress and not the owner. The battered cushion had accumulated a decade’s worth of stains making it look like a bad tattoo that was slowly dissolving. So, the wife unit and I (wife unit being an old British colonial measurement of a female helpmate) visited The Illusion of a Bargain mattress store conveniently located at www.HappyMattress.com. Happy Mattress was a Chinese conglomerate affiliated with Sparkle Cleaners and Tasty Restaurant. BTW, be prepared for images unrelated to mattresses if you Google “happy” and “mattress.”

 

Because we didn’t care much for soft mattresses, we opted for a firm California King instead of a forgiving Martin Luther King. And because our bed was delivered during National Mattress Awareness Month (another Hallmark holiday I guess), they threw in some contour sheets and shams. I was beginning to believe the entire transaction was a sham until I laid down on the mattress. Holy Back-to-the-Womb Batman: it was like mother nature was caressing me in her arms.  Read the rest of this entry »

If I have any superpowers at all it’s in being a sober arbiter of esoterica. And it is in keeping with my need for precision in these peripheral netherworlds that I take exception to the gross hyperbole contained in Irving Berlin’s scantily-researched claim that ♫There’s No Business Like Show Business ♫. For Moses’s sake Mr. Berlin – we all know full well there are many businesses like show business. How dare this little refugee from Russia emigrate to our shores and tell us what our business is – such chutzpah. However innocuous the observation There’s No Business Like Show Business may seem, I’d like to see Mr. Immigrant Composer make that same claim in Mother Russia – he’d get a one-way ticket on the trans-Siberian express to a reeducation camp where his once-jaunty song would be repurposed into “There’s no Gulag like our Gulag.”   

I believe I can fairly sum up my bewilderment at Berlin’s lyrical impudence by paraphrasing Fredo Corleone when he warned his brother Michael about disrespecting Moe Green: “Irving, you don’t just walk into America’s Jazz Age and start yelling, ‘There’s no business like show business’ without attribution, sources or citations. It’s just not done.” Read the rest of this entry »

 

No issue too trivial, no remedy too irrelevant in structuring my universe.

♫ She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes 
She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes
She’ll be coming round the mountain, she’ll be coming round the mountain,
She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes

She’ll be riding six white horses when she comes (Hee Haw) 
She’ll be riding six white horses when she comes (Hee Haw)
She’ll be riding six white horses, she’ll be riding six white horses,
She’ll be riding six white horses when she comes (Hee Haw) ♫ 

Most of us feel a mystic kinship to Early American folk songs: case in point, the jaunty call and response song She’ll be Coming ‘Round the Mountain. Traditional ditties like these from the Early American songbook convey a sense of unbridled optimism stretching out over a robust country ripe with opportunity. And yet for all its nationalist fervor and manifest destiny the song fairly bristles with an inexcusable lack of time-space coordinates. More specifically, once the listener realizes an unnamed and otherwise phantom “she” will be coming ‘round the mountain, our first reaction is to wonder when she’ll arrive – when will “she” be coming ‘round the mountain? Our reptilian logic centers are primed for processing the precise locus of this event. And despite our anticipatory curiosity, all we are told is that she’ll be coming ‘round that mountain, “When she comes.” I’m afraid this simply will not do. Although I loathe words that have a “b” followed by an “h”, I nonetheless abhor songs whose feel good, sunny lyrics betray an appalling lack of time and place. Read the rest of this entry »