Archive for the ‘Ditties’ Category

George Grossman died of natural causes at the age of 33 – if you consider being struck by a meteor as “natural.” George’s bewildering demise occurred while he was racing to the hospital to witness the delivery of his second child who would turn out to be a son named Jake. Many years later fatherless Jake (his mother Shirley never remarried) grew up longing for the father he never knew. Upon his death, Jake vowed to seek out his deceased father in the afterworlds. And one day it came to pass that Jake actually did pass, and upon ascending to the vault of heaven was pleased to see his long since deceased sister Kelly, his mother Shirley and a few family pets all waiting for him in a gauzy meadow. But where was dad? He’d waited his entire life for this moment and dad was a no show.

“What gives, Jake exclaimed? “Where’s dad,” he lamented in the ethereal waviness of the afterlife?

Just then a Yoda-ish guardian angel appeared and explained to Jake that when his father George died (meteor to the head), George’s soul was placed in the body of his son Jake Grossman.

“You mean…” Jake gasped.

“Yes, you’ve had sex with your mother. But don’t freak out because she was your loving wife at the time. Oedipal complexes aside, I’m here to tell you that you are your own father. That’s why he didn’t show up in the afterlife despite your life long yearnings. Now Jake, this rarely happens in the reincarnation business I superintend, but consider this from my perspective. You had just been born and you had also just died, and there was no time to implement the usual protocols so we took a short cut and played fast and loose with the code of interdimensional reincarnation birthing procedures and placed your soul in your son’s body. I hope you’re not too upset.

“As a reward for enduring our production snafu, in your next lifetime we’re allowing you to get in line twice when they pass out brains – or any other organ you may want to double in size. You’re also scheduled to inherit the handsome gene from your mother’s side,” explained the Soul Ombudsman. And with that crude gesture of frontier reincarnation justice, the little oracle evanesced into the ethers.

Just before whooshing into his new earth body, the soul of Jake Grossman was advised to: learn his life lessons, recognize his divinity and transcend the wheel of reincarnation. Achieving the first two would allow for the 3^rd item thereby providing him the key to the password protected speakeasy and allow his soul to reassume its rightful place in the rapture more popularly known as God’s After Party.

 

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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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”

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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.

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 »