Friday, April 28, 2006

Stay Tuned...

I have had a drought of article ideas of late, but about a half hour ago, I did something while trying to overcome a case of writer's block that may just result in my best article EVER!
In the process of my experiment, I may have broken my nose and my right pinky finger. The kids were jolted out of bed terrified but I have since gotten them calmed down and back in their rooms. I have no idea where the dog is but I'm hoping he made it. The cops are riding around the neighborhood trying to figure out what happened as are a couple of the neighbors. Now, I need to to lay low for the rest of the night, take a bath to get all this gunk off of me, come up with something to tell the doctor if I have to go to the hospital tomorrow and make up something to explain all of this to the wife if she finds out about it. I also have to figure out how to write it all down.
I think this could turn out to be my major opus! I think this is going to be a case of spectacular stupidity resulting in pure genius!

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

An Ode to Cyn McKinney

Here's a little ditty about the politician I just love to hate these days, Cynthia McKinney. I've been suffering a huge case of writer's block (as well as time defecit) of late and figured I need to post something soon.

When the devil went down to Georgia,
He was looking for a soul to catch,
But while seeking this, things went amiss,
And he nearly met his match.

It was Cynthia McKinney,
He ran into by some chance.
And on seeing her he gagged and choked,
And nearly wet his pants.

Her hair sprang far out from her head,
Like an angry clownish fool,
Who’d been punked and dunked then finally flunked,
From electrician school.

Her eyes shown bright and evil
With great malice they were dancin’
Possessed with animosity,
Like those of Charlie Manson.

Her mouth was always open,
Quiet only for to eat,
Or when she needed somewhere wet and warm,
To stick her putrid feet.

Her words were filled with vitriol,
A propaganda feast,
Her breath was rank and often stank,
Of rancid wildebeest.
Then Satan felt some pity,
For this creature and her pains,
Forced to walk the earth disfigured,
And devoid of any brains.
So he took a step right towards her,
Just to give a pity hug,
But before he’d moved four inches,
She had punched him in the mug.
He got beaten ‘bove his shoulders,
In the chest and on both butts,
She cracked his teeth then stomped his feet,
And kicked him in the nuts.
Immobile and quite paralyzed,
The devil could not scat,
He screamed, “Sister stop your beating!”
“I’m a freakin’ Democrat!”
With that McKinney up and froze,
Bells in her head then rung,
She then leaned down,
kissed Satan’s crown,
And tried to slip him tongue.
This far worse than any beating,
Satan jumped right up and fled,
Back home to retch and gargle,
With the blood of rotting dead.

Monday, April 10, 2006

French Government Caves to Student Protests

After several weeks of rioting by students over a controversial law that would make it easier for French companies to fire young employees, France’s president, Jacques Chirac has reversed his stance and withdrawn the legislation at the center of the controversy.

“Victory is ours!” proclaimed Sophie Mestre, one of the activists that had spent days in the streets protesting the proposed law. “The government really had no choice. We were about to unleash the nuclear option. Beginning next Wednesday, we were about to start egging the police.”

An egging attack would no doubt have been devastating to police and military units in the area, who have been routed into humiliating retreat by less. “Of course we would not have asked our officers to advance in the face of an egg barrage, “ stated a local gendarme commander, Louis Hommelet. “Have you people not heard of the bird flu?”

Jacques Chirac could not be reached for comment on the reversal and little has been heard of the president except for occasional appearances at his office window to yell at protesting students to get off of the lawn. Rumors that have been floating around Paris declaring that the French president has been hiding beneath his desk were unofficially confirmed when one of the cleaning ladies leaving Chirac’s office was overheard telling another, “Yez, he eez steel een there and zee offeece has become quite deesgusteeng. Next time, I am voteeng for a prezeedent who ees at least housebroken.”

The protests and rioting sparked by the controversial measure have taxed France’s police and gendarme units, entities that are not used to open confrontation and are still stung by their devastating defeat by seven rioting Muslim women last year. Responding to criticism about the police being unable to step up to security challenges, one local commander quipped, “You have no idea what we were up against out there! Let me tell you something about the French. You can invade us, and we will blow you kisses. You can force us to convert to Islam and we will do so joyfully as long as we can get a waiver from the caliphate to keep drinking wine. Molest our women and we will making a fortune selling the movies on the internet. Threaten us with getting fired for not doing our jobs though and we’ll burn your f****** tents down. Look at the casualties we sustained!”

Police casualties were indeed high. Four officers were hospitalized for various broken bones, three for concussions, two for respiratory trauma sustained by standing too close to college student that had not bathed for several weeks and one had a heart attack after being set upon by three kindergarten girls who attacked him with their “Hello Kitty” back packs. The original casualty count was three but was corrected after discovering that the missing officers, all male, had left the scene of the melee and checked into the hospital not because of injuries sustained while carrying out their duties, but because they did not want to miss their previously scheduled pap smear appointments.

Wednesday, April 05, 2006

On A Serious Note


The father of the three children killed in Venezuela was a good friend of a work buddy of mine. The devastation this unfolding event brought upon him, and no doubt the family of the victims, is immeasurable. It was heartbreaking to witness him getting the news. This post is really out of character, but my thoughts and prayers go out to the Faddoul family along with the hope that the animals that committed this horrible act receive the grisly punishment they so truly deserve.

Monday, April 03, 2006

Amphibious Assault

After Sacto Ritch left my new house following a brief visit last fall, he asked me what was up with all the frogs. Apparently, as he and his son were making their way back to the Detroit area, a fierce storm opened up on him and before he knew it, the road was covered by a herd of frogs that appeared to be fleeing the commotion. Now, I would never doubt Ritch’s word but it is not like he (nor I for that matter) is immune to paranoid hallucinations brought on in large part to certain chemical liberties taken with his mental makeup during his libertine youth. This morning though, I discovered that either the area I moved to was prone to unnatural amphibian invasions or my psyche is uncomfortably akin to Sacto Ritch’s, making me prone to the exact same hallucinations.

It started as I was filling up my car on the way to work. I was at a gas station across the street from a wooded depression that fills with water after large rainstorms. Though normally devoid of sound except for that of passing traffic, this morning the wood was full of noise. It was so loud that I could barely hear the noise of cars coming in from the street. At first I thought it was kind of cool. Being a child of an urban environment, it was not something I was very familiar with. Sure, I had heard frogs before in the springtime but never anything on this scale.

As I pulled away and started making my way towards the expressway, I glanced at the ditches on the side of the road and sure enough, spotted a couple of frogs jumping around on the shoulder. I then thought of how spring was just around the corner and grinned as I thought about the reptilian orgy that was probably going to be taking place in the area’s wetlands over the next couple of weeks. When my eyes returned to the road however, I saw that a couple of the critters had strayed into the highway. I swerved to miss them, then saw that there were a few more up ahead, followed by even more further up, and a bit further than that, a virtual swarm of the savage bastards.

Now, seeing one frog is kind of amusing. Seeing five together is kind of cool. Seeing ten together reminds me of dinner in my favorite seafood restaurant. Seeing fifty together fills me with the feeling that I am witnessing some freak wonder of nature. Seeing one hundred together is a little disconcerting. Seeing a thousand together, well, that’s just the fifth friggin’ plague of Egypt and your first reaction is to turn tail and flee lest the four horsemen of the apocalypse swoop down out of the sky to put the smack down on your ass. Unfortunately, there was a long line of cars behind me so throwing the car in reverse was not really an option if I wanted to keep my automotive insurance rates manageable.

All I could do was drive through the poor bastards and try to imagine what expression was on all those hapless frog faces as they caught sight of several hundred pounds of Pontiac Vibe bearing down on them. I tried to ease my conscience by imagining that they were all militant vegan, pint-sized PETA activists, reincarnated into suicidal pond life and sentenced to a lifetime of eating bugs as punishment for denying their rightful place on the planet’s food chain. This only worked for a couple of seconds worth of entertainment though before the carnage beneath my tires started to become depressing. When it was over, I had sent at least fifty fellow vertebrates to frog heaven which, Sacto Ritch pointed out to me once during a particularly deep philosophical conversation, was probably located somewhere near fly hell, an observation worthy of Socrates had he not been too snobbish to contemplate the spirituality of lower life forms.

The massacre seemed such a waste but it got me thinking about the purpose of life. Not so much the purpose of my life, but of the amphibians’. I wondered what it would be like to exist in a state with no higher calling, no mission or purpose. You just hatch, try to avoid becoming an appetizer until you can grow legs and gorge yourself on mosquitoes until you get pureed by a Pontiac while trying to cross the street to get your froggy freak on with some hot mama on the other side. Then I got to wondering just really how far removed we are from the lower species, mainly because I remembered how I almost got myself pulverized in high school because I had not bothered to look both ways before crossing the street on my way to a smokin’ hot date. I’m sure there are probably thousands of other men out there that almost did the same thing. I guess the main difference between us and the frogs was that we didn’t all do it at the exact same time in the exact same place. I would also think that if we had, traffic would most likely have stopped for us, unless we were in New York City or something.

I really would have liked to have stopped for those frogs though, and all morning I wondered how many mosquitoes were spared their rightful and deserved doom on the end of an amphibian’s tongue because I did not want to be late for work. I then tried to think of something the state could do to divert the frogs away from or around main commuter thoroughfares. I had heard of places putting tunnels beneath roadways to give the frogs a safer route to their mating areas but I thought that would probably be a gargantuan waste of money. After all, how would they find the tunnels? Seeing as how I do not hear the amphibian community bragging much about their stellar literacy rate, I can not imagine road signs would be of much use. The only other thing I could think of would be to line the roads with something resembling their natural enemies, such as herons, pike, college students in search of cheap hallucinogens or garlic and butter to scare them away from traffic.

Regardless, something must be done to combat this menace. This migration is a huge risk to the physical, mental and economic health of the community and must be controlled somehow. Now I am not implying that anyone is in danger of being mauled by a horny herd of bull frogs, but I could see how someone could kill themselves after their car skids on a slippery sheen of frog guts and into the path of an oncoming tanker truck. Seeing so many mutilated animals littering the road can not be good for anyone’s emotional well being either and economically speaking, I can not fathom anyone’s boss buying an excuse for being late to work that involves a couple thousand frogs meeting an untimely end at the hands of a set of Firestone All-Weather tires.

God knows mine didn’t.

Saturday, April 01, 2006

My Apologies

...I'm sorry I haven't post much lately. I'm also sorry I haven't had time to answer comments. And I am REALLY sorry for posting this:


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