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Obama Defies the Constitution Again!
Article XXVII, Section 8 clearly states, “The President shall, at his pleasure, throw his political enemies into an active volcano.”
It says nothing about cannibalism!
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Merry Christmas and Good Evening.
Look, it’s Christmas (again!) – yes, yes, Merry Christmas and all that! – but you’ve just found out Aunt Judy’s all alone again today – just like last year! – and she’d really like to see you and the kids again. Sure it’s a pain in the ass, but she still has the first dollar she ever earned so it can’t hurt to spend another few minutes with her – after all, she’s not going to live forever (although it’s starting to seem that way) and she’s got to leave that money to someone…!
Dare you drop by without a gift?
No sir! What to do, what to do?
Jons Grocery stores to the rescue! Not open today (Why, it’s Christmas, after all!), but since when did that ever stop you (and that brick you carry in the trunk)?
Around the corner from the produce section (you may have to feel your way a bit what with the lights off and all), on a display made of their own shipping cartons, you’ll find these seasonal delights:
What could be more Christmas-y than chestnuts?
You’ll just need one pack, but take two to be safe. They’re 4 for $5, but go ahead and leave a $20 bill on one of the checkouts on your way out – after all, it is the season of giving and your generosity will pay off in spades in just a little while.
Once at Aunt Judy’s, grab a few of her Good Housekeepings and Family Circles, set them ablaze in her candy dish on the coffee table, and voila, you’ve got the requisite open fire that goes famously with your present! Brother, you’re all set!
Good heavens! What’s this on the back of the package?
…And Aunt Judy, she’s…what is she now, 87…? 88…? Yeah, there’s no way those choppers are going to be able to negotiate these holiday treats. They’re going down her gullet whole! At least part-way!
So here’s what you do: While you and the missus are roasting them with Aunt J., send whichever of the kids took the CPR class (with the unit on the Heimlich maneuver) out of the room. In fact, send em all – Barney & Ben, Janice & Jen – out back with a monkey wrench and have them turn off the water to the house.
This way there’s no pesky glasses of water available for a frantic attempt to clear the esophagus, no okay-everyone-let’s-get-our-story-straight (kids are terrible at this!), and best of all, no worries about the pipes freezing up over the next few months since the place will be empty at least until spring when everything goes through probate and you can unload this dilapidated dog of a charming 2 bedroom, 1-1/2 bath charming mid-century fixer-upper that smells from spoiled cottage cheese and old lady. (Or is that redundant?)
Merry Christmas!
Note: Today’s entry was perhaps a bit darker than the season warrants for you see I’ve been watching a lot of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” there on the ol’ Netflix lately. So let’s presume that after the merry little scenario described above plays out, Hitch (or in this case, me – our profiles are quite similar, especially with all this holiday binging) comes back to tie things up and announce you all got caught and went to the electric chair (including little Janice & Jen), even though we all know he’s (rather, I’m) only saying that because the network and his sponsors (or my attorney) are making him. Or me. Feel better now? Good night.
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Irony, Walmart-Style
LIKE YOU, I have no ethical problem shopping at Walmart. As long as they keep me distracted by low prices, really, how am I supposed to worry about anything else?
Well, let me tell you, brother, I was jarred right back into reality- right back into reality! – the other day when I saw a display of these on an endcap (industry term):
So for five dollars American, you can get a little Walmart shopping basket filled with toy groceries. And who wouldn’t want such an item? No one, that’s who! Look at it, it’s adorable!
Sounds good, huh? You’d like one, right?
Not so fast, pal!
Here’s the thing: This particular location – West Hills Walmart, at 6433 Fallbrook Avenue – famously (or should I say infamously) has no actual, regular-sized baskets in the store! None! Zero! Not! A! One!
You get that? The actual item on which this toy is based is not available for customer use in the very store where these are sold!
If that’s not irony, well… Well, let’s just consider it irony because it’s late and I don’t have the time to look up whatever term might better describe this phenomenon. If such a term exists.
The idea behind West Hills Walmart intentionally not offering baskets is so that, presumably, customers will instead just grab a shopping cart – a vessel much larger, and in turn with a much larger capacity than a standard hand-held basket – and then they’ll fill that up with all those great Walmart values!
Which actually came in handy, because I got one of these babies for each of you.
Look under your seats!
I got one for you, and I got one for you, and for you, and for you and you and you! Yep, you got it – it’s the annual Ted’s Favorite Things post! You came to the blog on the right day, gang!
Now to head over to Twitter and see if there’s any possible way to edit all this brilliance down to 140 characters, keeping all the wit intact. And if anyone can do it, it’s me!
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Overpriced Goodwill Item of the Week: Comedy Album from 1963!
Would you pay $2.99 for a record album – an LP! – in this day and age, when we’ve long ago transcended such antiquated audio technology and moved on to
compact discs?…MP3s?…MP4s…?…some other sort of digital format the specific name of which none of us are quite sure of anymore?
You would?!
Okay okay okay – but what if it’s this album:
…and you have to go up and pay for it eating a Jell-O Pudding Pop and humming the ‘Fat Albert’ theme and wearing a colorful sweater and and and the cashier is a laaady?!
Awright then!
Like I said, overpriced!
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Who Are These [Ugly Christmas Sweater-Buying] People?!
LIKE you, I’m not a joiner.
But even though I have never worn one myself, I guess I once sort of vaguely liked the concept of ugly Christmas sweaters – before it became an actual thing. But once it became a thing, brother, with more and more people throwing Ugly Christmas Sweater parties and more radio stations and bars and the fun-loving gang in the event planning department at Human Resources holding Ugly Christmas Sweater contests, I was over it. Last year I read an article about a seasonal store (in Brooklyn, maybe…?) that sold nothing but second-hand ugly sweaters.
Others picked up on it, presumably got to work scouring thrift stores far and wide, and now we’ve got at least three online retailers selling hideous holiday apparel (based on a cursory “ugly christmas sweater store” Google search):
So I’ll grudgingly concede their savvy business acumen: They saw a potential market and exploited the hell out of it.
However, if I was going to enter such a contest or attend such a party, I’d either raid my grandmother’s closet (in vain, I can assure you – the woman had taste and did not go in for kitsch. Also, she’s long dead.) or pick through the racks of my local Goodwills and Salvation Armys myself. Because, really, what fun is it to simply log onto a website and pick a used sweater from a gallery of hundreds that was specifically snatched up from a secondhand outlet based on its cheesiness – knowing full well you’re just one of countless others (including, perhaps, your very competition in the contest at next week’s Christmas party down at the bingo hall) doing the same thing? Where’s the thrill of the hunt, man? You’re sitting at your desk scrolling through a webpage!
Then, last night, I see Groupon (remember them?) has further homogenized the whole seasonal craze by offering these mass-produced pullovers:
Not sweaters, mind you – but cotton sweatshirts – with the “ugly Christmas” motif printed on the front to resemble a knit design.
“Ideal for holiday parties and ugly-sweater-themed events” reads the Groupon description. But how? They’re not sweaters!
But it gets worse! They also offer these:
Call me a prude, or maybe I’ve just inherited Grandmater’s patrician demeanor, but I don’t think “fugly” on holiday apparel is appropriate. (Or really, anything you wear out in public, unless it’s to one of those fetish events, where you’re intentionally misbehaving, using bad language, wearing inappropriate clothes and wanting to give the person in charge a reason for paddling your bare bottom with a modified Wiffle Ball bat- I mean, after all, why else would you pay $600 in addition to booking a room on the same floor at the Golden Nugget for the weekend? By the way, Susan and Larry – we’ll see you in February! Should be a good turnout this year. Vera says she’s in, too, if her hemorrhoids aren’t acting up too bad.)
You know what’s also not appropriate? Announcing your sweater is ugly on the sweater itself. If you have to tell people your sweater is ugly, what’s the point? Oh, and yes, there’s still the niggling problem that these things aren’t even sweaters in the first place! They’re sweatshirts! Sweat! Shirts!
And just when you thought we’ve reached the nadir of this ugly Christmas (non)-sweater craze, we see that also available are these:
So here we’ve got ugly Christmas sweaters that 1) again, aren’t sweaters but sweatshirts, 2) again, have the knit design printed on, and 3) really, just completely destroy any rapidly waning illusion that maybe from a few feet away, they could possibly be mistaken for sweaters – by having a very obvious screened design printed on top of the fake knit pattern!
You know the message you’re sending out to the world with these sweatshirts? You’re telling the world, ‘I give up. I can’t compete in normal Ugly Christmas Sweater contests. I’m miserable, so I might as well be comfortable.'”
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The Man Boy Who Cried Wolf Spider!
MANY of you have chided me for misrepresenting lovely Virginia, USA, as an arachnophobe’s nightmare.
“Ted,” you chide, “Ted, every time you go there, you whine like a little girl about the spiders supposedly therein.
“And then how you do go on about the stink bugs and centipedes and those so-called ‘enormous’ hornets and all other manner of creepy-crawlers, and so why wouldn’t we chide you, man?” you continue to chide.
Anyway, you have my schedule, you know I’ve been visiting the family, but what you didn’t know was the first day I’m there, as I’m bringing my luggage into Dad’s guest room, as a welcome, what comes charging out at me down the hall is a wolf spider. Had the leg-span the diameter of a manhole cover, it did – and the pedipalps on this thing…! As long and thick as those inflatable noise-maker sticks people in the South bring to their sporting events, but even more insidious!
…Okay, so maybe they weren’t as big as those, and perhaps the entire creature wasn’t quite manhole-cover-sized. Still, the damn thing was big.
Father directed me to “Just step on it,” and I did as I was told, but brother, something that size I was bound to feel, regardless of how tall the soles of my vinyl platform boots were. Crrrunch.
After I scraped it off my shoe into the toilet, attempted flushing in vain, and then used a plunger to help send the profusion of hairy legs sticking out of the now-clogged commode back down to the depths of hell from whence the beast came, Dad noted that “Oh, that little thing, that’s nothing.”
Yeah, well to me – to me, it was something. Something out of a nightmare I’m going to have every night for months now, where I’ll wake up screaming each time and probably begin peeing the bed again, and after all those years of hypnotherapy…!
“That’s nothing,” Dad continued, or reiterated, or something, regardless that he didn’t actually repeat himself yet I’ve written it that way for dramatic effect. “A few months ago I had a mouse in here so I put down a couple of glue traps.”
Then he made his way to a bookshelf and pulled a flat board off of it.
“This is what I caught instead.”
“It was actually quite a bit bigger before it died and the legs curled in a bit.”
Okay, then! Just get me my cell phone so I can book my flight back out of here right now, today, five minutes after I’ve arrived, and hand me that baseball bat, too, just in case any more appear while we wait for the airport shuttle to rescue me and I contemplate why Dad’s starting a trophy room for vanquished arachnids.
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Seen Poppin’ Up in the Local Cereal Aisle!
HERE’S something that the one-post-every-eight-months cereal blogs are too lazy to cover, but not me, brother! Not me! You’ll find new content here (such as it is) that you can set your watch by, on schedule, right on time, precisely every once in a while!
So I was in my local discount grocery store…? You know the kind – the produce is cheaper (and more mottled with blemishes and fæces from the hands of whoever picked it)…and all the other stuff is the exact same price if not higher, but they give you the illusion of it being a bargain by displaying everything in the cardboard cartons they were shipped in with the front cut off…?
Anyway, that’s when I saw this – a new member of Post’s Pebbles family of cereals:
And like you, I thought it ridiculous!
Why, these “Poppin’ Pieces” that “fizz in your mouth with burstin’ berry flavor” are nothing but glorified Pop Rocks! Over-sweetened candy commingling with nourishing rice cereal – someone thought this was a good idea?!
No thank you, I’ll stick with my healthy breakfast ritual.
A great big bowl of Cap’n Crunch’s Oops! All Circus Peanuts.
It’s a delicious part of a balanced breakfast.
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Equal Time for Bobby Shriver!
RECENTLY, I gave candidate for LA County Supervisor (and inveterate clotheshorse) Sheila Kuehl some free publicity via one of the 1,800 or so flyers she’s arranged to have crammed into my mailbox over the last month.
In the interest of fairness, here’s one of the 1,200 or so from her opponent in the race, Bobby Shriver.
“Isn’t it Time We Invested In Our Infrastructure?”
Well, maybe…
…But only if it doesn’t cut funding for that Superhuman Fireman program they’ve evidently been having some success with.
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From Sheila Kuehl to Sheila Chic!
DOES there exist anyone less politically aware yet who enjoys election season more than me?
Well, of course – why, we’re a nation of uninformed voters! – but I do enjoy the flyers I get. At least when they’re not clogging my p.o. box to the extent that the good stuff – i.e., postcards, letters and provocative photos in various states of undress from (and of) you, my readers – ends up getting mangled and folded and bent.
Why, here’s one now:
[–A flyer, that is, not a nude photograph of one of you folks you’ve graciously submitted by US Mail, hang the decency laws! No, those go on my other site – TedParsnipsAfterDark ]
Anyway: Why, here’s one now:
For those equally politically clueless, and/or not living in Southern California, Sheila Kuehl is a politician who spent fourteen years in the California State Legislature – eight years in the senate and six years in the assembly – before being termed out. She’s currently running for LA County Supervisor.
However, like me, you remember her as Zelda Gilroy from the, ahem, classic series “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis” which you saw when it aired on Nick at Nite between 1990 and 1993 – and despite really hoping to appreciate the show, never being able to get into it.
…We all tried liking it – didn’t we? The fact that some aspect of the show always comes up in trivia games – the Thinker statue, pre-Gilligan Bob Denver as beatnik Maynard G. Krebs, the kids on “Scooby-Doo” being modeled on the cast – means there really was something magical there at CBS, from 1959 to 1963, right? Well, maybe not so much.
Anyway, that’s not why we’re here today. We’re here because of this:
Maybe we need some closeups. Yes, I’m thinking a few closeups – that’ll do, right?
Whether you’re busy authoring yet another law producing innovations in education or just out for a midday stroll, you’ll look smart n’ stylish in this navy blue number with mandarin collar and deep breast pockets for tucking in sunscreen or a notebook where you’ll jot down ideas about safeguarding our drinking water. Buttons that go on for days let you customize your look from serious to sassy.
Button, button, who’s got the button? You do, with plenty to spare in this fabulous yellow top, equally apropos for tirelessly working to reduce congestion in the 101 corridor, legislating to prohibit gender and disability based job discrimination, or heading out for a fun & fancy-free night on the town. You’ll turn heads with deep, pleated breast pockets – both fun & functional! – offset by a daring mandarin collar.
This dream in light blue is just the thing for a casual jaunt to the seashore, or even a day at the office looking up important briefs as managing attorney of the California Women’s Law Center. Mandarin collar celebrates exotic fashions from afar while playful breast pockets evoke a youthful whimsy. And oh those buttons!
Oh, settle down, Kuehl supporters – judging by the number of flyers she’s been sending out (two different ones came today – and there’ve been about half a dozen others before that), she’s already won her election.
And she’s certainly got my vote – I respect the fact that she’s extremely practical and doesn’t have a lot of time to waste shopping for different outfits. Sheila Kuehl finds something she likes, and orders the same thing in multiple colors.
It’s like me and those thongs I keep buying. I just wish they actually came in my size.
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NBC News Now Reporting The Future!
The headline and lede from a news story posted at 2 pm on Sunday:
Now, I’m hopeful that these four dozen people are all healthy and Ebola-free, and will continue to be so tomorrow, but if the “three-week watch period” ends on Monday, shouldn’t this article start with “Four dozen people who had contact with the original Ebola patient in Dallas will complete a three-week watch period on Monday presuming they continue to show no signs of having contracted the virus”…?
Or maybe just wait until tomorrow when they’re all given clean bills of health to file the story?
But perhaps I’m wrong. Maybe the NBC News Department now employ seers & fortune tellers – and the ubiquitous little reporters’ notepads, digital recorders and little press cards stuck in the hat bands of fedoras have been replaced with crystal balls, ouija boards and gypsy head scarves.
Yes, yes, I know it’s nit-picky, but frankly, if it’s not bad journalism it’s at least solppy writign.
Ted Parsnips
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