1- Unless you’re very sure that there are no geeky type guys around and you’re at least a mile away from any comic book store  never mention that you think “Howard The Duck” was the best work George Lucas ever did.

2- If you ever find yourself in a sanity hearing, never EVER mention the  Illuminati.  Don’t mention it. Don’t refer to it.  Don’t even joke about it.  Try to look like you’re  not even thinking about it.  At all. Ever. Mentioning the Illuminati In a sanity hearing is like talking about bombs while you’re boarding a plane.  It’s not the time nor place for it.  In fact,  if there is anything  you first learned about while you were listening  to late night talk radio consider that topic taboo. 

If you have a webpage, apparently there is some sort of obligation that you have to write something about the election.   I don’t care much about politics and I think people who vote are silly and childish.  But it’s mandatory to write about it,  so here are four  short observations…

For the next four years, at least, racist jokes will be considered political satire.

I didn’t think America would elect a black man - too many rednecks. In fact around here when the Obama supporters called voters they started their pitch with “Will you be voting for Barack Obama, and if not would you at least please consider not taking a shot at him if you see his motorcade go by?”.  So, I was wrong about that.  I think I must have forgot how many rednecks are convicted felons who can’t vote anyway.  About 12 years ago I predicted that the Internet would be a fad that would die out like CB radio did. I probably should stop trying to predict stuff.

It will be very nice to have a president who doesn’t speak with a lisp for a change.  You would have thought that back when Bush first decided to run for elected office someone at the GOP headquarters would have suggested that he might give speech therapy a try. His lisp has annoyed me for eight years now.  When he tries to  say the word “terrorist” it comes out ” terraced”, which might not be such a big deal if he didn’t try to work the word “terrorist” into every third sentence.

One nice thing about Bush’s presidency is how much better it made his father seem by comparison.  George H. Bush might have been a kinda bland president, but at least he could speak on television without causing the entire nation to  cringe  in embarrassment.  He seems like a real statesman now, by comparison.  I feel like we somehow owe him an apology because we didn’t know how much worse things could get.

This is Anthony Myers.  He died in 1905.  I didn’t.  In fact, as of November 14, 2008 at 4:30 am,  I haven’t died at all.  Also, his middle initial is “T”.  Mine is “E”.   What does the “E” stand for, you ask?  The “E” stands for “Everyone”!  Or maybe it stands for “Eugene”. I forget which.  I probably should check on that someday.   I think it’s on my social security card.  Regardless, this man is not me.  I’m not Tobitha Myers either, but I think  ”Tobitha” is a pretty cool old-timey sounding name.

This happy character is Anthony Myers. Off the top of my head I can think of about five thousand reasons why this is not me.  This man is NOT me.  In fact I’m considering taking legal action to force him to change his name to something else. Tobitha, maybe.

They have this workshop here for retarded people.  Different companies send them simple jobs to do like stuffing envelopes of simple assembly work - stuff like that. I think the companies that hire  them get a tax credit.

I think it’s a good program for several reasons. It helps them earn some spending money.  it helps their sense of self worth. And,  maybe most importantly, it keeps them off the street during the say so they don’t end up starting mentally retarded street gangs.  I mean it’s bad enough we have to put up with the Jehovah’s Witnesses, we certainly don’t want packs of retarded people roaming the neighborhood too . That would be kinda creepy and it would drive down property values in a hurry.

So it’s a good idea.

But every so often the workshop has a fundraiser. I’m not sure what they need the fundraiser for, but I guess that doesn’t matter. Its none of my business, so more power to them.

This year, however, they chose to run a haunted house. I can’t explain why exactly, but a haunted house ran and staffed by retarded people just seems like a really, really bad idea.  The experience is much more awkward than scary.

When a retarded guy in a Frankenstein mask jumps out at you and makes these weird groaning noises, your fist response isn’t fear.  You first response is something more like - “Is he doing that on purpose, or does he need help?  Surely the mask has air holes, right? Did he swallow his tongue? Is his obvious erection supposed to be part of the act - who dresses up as like a  horny Frankenstein?”  Stuff like that.  

They did have one really scary room. As soon and you walked in,  a retarded kid would run up to you with open arms screaming “DADDY!!!” That probably will give me nightmares for years.

So, I guess their heart was in the right place, but they really should have put more thought into the fundraiser. Even better - they should have had SOMEONE ELSE put more thought into it.

I signed up for this advertising service for this webpage.  It’s done automatically.  You tell them how much you want to spend and they post your ads to a whole bunch of different sites - you don’t actually have to pick the sites your ad will appear on.

Here’s one of the banner ads I used.

One of the webpages they put this on automatically  is an arts and crafts trading page so old ladies can trade their knitting or their post card collections.  Stuff like that.   On the message board all their avatars are either kitties or puppies.  The page is for people like that.

One thing is certain - old ladies who are into arts and crafts are NOT the target audience for my wepbage.  The ad didn’t go over too well with them.

Just some of the comments they wrote about it on their page -

“mm, delightful. Not.”

” could do without that for certain”

“I had to do a screen shot of it just so that I would know that I wasn’t imagining it!”

“just the heading put me off”

” I don’t think it would have made you very happy to have read it!”

“Honest to God Pat, I did look at it and thought that someone was hacking my profile”

“that makes me SO …. not happy. :(”

“You can choose to go to the website but the banner is there whether you like it or not”

“Yes, I certainly must agree with you, RachelB. That banner is right in your face and you have no choice.”

And all these were written within ONE HOUR of the ad showing up!

I don’t get what they were so bothered about anyway.  If I made an ad asking for people  to sodomize me, I could see how people could get upset.  But the ad makes it very clear that I didn’t want anything like that.

But what could possiblly be  offensive about NOT wanting to to be sodomized?   Being sodomized would be so awful that I was just being pro-active about preventing something like that from ever happening to me.

I was even being polite about the request.  You just cant please some people.

UPDATE: Well, I woke up this afternoon to find about eight e-mails  from the pro-sodomy knitting group.   Apparently, I got some things wrong. So corrections -

Some of the old ladies don’t feel like they’re old ladies at all.  So I should have made it clear that they only SEEM like old ladies.

Not all of the avatars are puppies or kitties. You also get some butterflies, pixies and fairy princesses.

Many of these old ladies want it known that they are not prudes with no sense of humor.  Since they quote from the sassy comic strip Cathy and draw little faces with punctuation, it’s obvious that they are all fun lovin’ gals.

Knitting, crochet and needlepoint are all very different things and I was foolish to lump them all together.

So, I deeply regret the errors and as a way of making it up to them I’ve forwarded all their e-mail addresses to discussion groups for people who enjoy being sodomized since my anti-sodomy ad upset them so.

Plus - It’s quicker and easier since you don’t have to actually draw anything

Minus - It looks kinda crappy

Little know fact: Barack Hussein Obama’s name is an anagram of “Kill the infidels, praise be to Allah” if you misspell his first, middle and last names.

My great grandfather was an entertainment pioneer. He’s considered to be one of the founding fathers of the snuff film. Of course this was before movie cameras were affordable so he had to stick to making snuff etchings and snuff Sunday comics, but he laid the ground work for all the snuff multi-media we all enjoy today. According to family lore in 1936 he was the one who talked Chic Young into brutally murdering Penny Singleton, the actress who played Blondie Bumstead in the movies, so they could make it into a gory cliffhanger for the next weeks Sunday funnies.

Two good things about being a big loser. 1) You save a lot of money by not needing to pay to have business cards made up. 2) If someone hacks into your computer and steals your identity it doesn’t really matter very much.

Due to education cutbacks and shortening of the school year , in the children’s song the dog’s name is now just “Bing”.

Jimmy Carter is 84 years old, but you still see him on television all the time building houses. It’s sad - the man was a former president and now he’s reduced to working day labor construction jobs like a common Mexican just to make ends meet! Can’t we get the man some sort of pension?

I don’t think judges should use hyperbole - There is no way I’m really “an affront to all things decent”. “Most things“, maybe. But not all.

I used to try to eat every meal like it was my last. I gained 20 pounds before I realized I got the saying wrong.

Consumer advice: Never pay over face value for a quarter. And make sure you don’t have to pay for shipping and handling. That’s how they get you.

I don’t care one way or the other if they test ballplayers for drugs or not, but we really need to have mandatory drug testing for barbers. If you go ballgame and Barry Bonds is high as a kite you still won’t end up leaving the stadium with only one sideburn and a pair of scissors stuck into the back of your neck.

At the used book store the other day  I found an diary of a guy who was a drummer boy in the Revolutionary war.  Some excerpts - Day 1 - I sure wish they would give me a gun.  Day 2- I bet we could sneak up on the redcoats a lot easier if it wasn’t for all the drumming they make me do. It seems to tip them off to our location. Day 3 - The generals all have big egos - they’ll never stop the battle for even fifteen minutes so I can do a solo. It always has to be about them. Day 4 - I wish people would stop requesting that I play “The battle Hymn Of The Republic”. How many times do I have to tell them that that damn song won’t be written for another 87 years?  Day 5 - I’m sick and tired of Yoko always hanging around the battles. If the colonies break up it’s going to be her fault.  She always keeps trying to get Vermont to  break off and go solo.

I think It’s important that parents try  not to live thru  their children.  Someday they may need those stem-cells themselves.

It’s so sad how Ed McMahan lost all his money and that someone that old might be forced into going back to his old job of sitting on sofas.

I wonder how Pac Man first decided to start trying to eat ghosts. On the face of it,  ghosts don’t seem like a very obvious choice for a new potential food source.  If I were him, I’d probably would have just keept trying to get by on the fruit people sometimes leave in the middle of the maze.

After high school I joined the Peace and Quiet Corps. Like the normal Peace Corps we would go to third world countries, but once we got there we just kept a low profile and tried to pretty much just keep to ourselves.

Someone ought to take that New Years baby to the endocrinologist. He seems to have aged an awful lot in just twelve months. Something must be wrong with his glands.

Another reason baseball is much better than football - Baseball players don’t do faggy little dances every time they score a run.

A guy in the letters to the editor wrote that the terrorists will strike us again when we least expect it.  I’ve been trying to figure out when exactly we  would be expecting it the least. If he’s right, I predict that they will attack sometime around 5 billion years from now after the sun had burned itself out. Nobody would expect them to try anything then.  Well, except me I guess…. That’s a problem with trying to pin down when something is least expected.  Once you pin down a good date, it’s no longer a very good choice.

Bumper sticker idea: If this van’s a rockin’ the springs are shot and I need to get the tires balanced”. It may be a little long for one bumper sticker. It might need to be a two-parter.

You know who really has a lot of determination? Margi Noferror.  Every year she keeps running for office even though she never gets more that two percent of the vote in any of the polls.

I was watching wrestling and they had this really big guy and the announcer said “No one has ever been able to bodyslam this giant of a man”. That sounded pretty impressive until it occurred to me that I’ve  never been body slammed either. And I’m not even a wrestler!

I was an English major, and back then I dreamed of writing the Great American novel. I’m older now, and I know I won’t. I still have dreams, but over the years I’ve lowered them quite a bit so they might one day be within my reach. Now I dream of one day making the great American bookmark

I was at the library reading about old Indian lore today and I learned of  an old Indian curse. This is in English, so it loses some of it’s beauty  in the  translation,  but it goes something like this: Go Fuck yourself, you Goddamn old Indians!

At first my interest in Native American studies came about by accident, springing from my desire to find a new route to Asia so I can get rich off of the spice trade. And I also thought maybe they could teach me how to grow corn.  Both turned out to be a waste of time

Nowadays most large supermarkets have a section of their store devoted  to all the different kinds of spices.   So, it’s quicker and easier to just get them there. The chances of running into pirates is a lot lower in the Piggly Wiggly than it is on the open seas, so that’s a plus too.  After sampling some of the different spices, I learned that I prefer plain old Mrs. Dash anyway.

The only spice I had any interest in, even briefly, was nutmeg.  And that’s only because I heard you can get high off it. You can’t. I don’t care what you’ve heard or what some friend told you - it just doesn’t work. Eat or smoke a pound of nutmeg and all you’ll feel is foolish and nauseous. Not “drug trip”  nauseous either - it’s more of a “I just ate a pound of nutmeg I found setting behind a dumpster” nauseous.

Then I noticed that  they tell you right on the back of the seed packet how you should plant corn.  They suggested that I would get better results if I planted them outside, which I think was probably what I was doing wrong the whole time.

So, on that level my interest in Indians was a waste of time, but  I have picked up quite a bit of incidental wisdom from studying the ways of the  Native American cultures.  Mostly they are about binge drinking and how it is never a good idea to double down if the dealer up card is 10, or a face card.

But that’s not all. I also learned that If put my ear to the ground and stay very still I can tell if there are any ants crawling inside my ear trying to get to my brain to lay their eggs.

I learned that it was a mistake to trade CC Sabathia, the man had a 1.65 ERA after the trade! And the Indians traded him to the Brewers of all teams  - have they learned nothing from their history of one sided deals made with the white men for fire water?

I’ve learned to read and understand some of the more basic smoke signals like, “house on fire” and “dinner ruined”.

I’ve also learned of a legend prophesied by the great Indian Shaman Paul Revere & the Raiders that one day the “Cherokee nation will return.”  But I suspect that if they do it will be like those Beach Boys or Lynyrd Skynyrd concerts where most of the original guys are dead already,  so the whole thing  will probably just seem kinda sad.

I’ve learned the importance of using every part of the buffalo wing.

Of all the Indians I’ve read about Geronimo is my favourite.  If I could go back in time the first place I’d go would be back to the 1880’s and talk to Geronimo. I’d tell him “About 20 years from now two bicycle makers from North Carolina will create a machine that will be able to fly through the air under it’s own power. These machines will improve over the decades to the point where people will be able to fly anywhere in the world. Then some people will train and practice jumping out of these machines while they are flying through the air. Sometimes they jump out because the flying machine has became unsafe. Other times they will jump out to attack their enemies on the ground by surprise. Most of the time, however, they’ll jump out of the machines miles in the air just for the sport of it. They think it’s fun. And here’s the best part, Geronimo - just before they jump out they call out your name!” I bet he’d find that interesting.

ps - I already posted the Geronimo paragraph here almost two years ago, but it fits here too. And if you actually remembered it from back then you’re probably paying too close attention to stuff like this.