Duckspeak

Posted on April 6, 2016 by PMcG

We were en route to nowhere on one interstate or another, lost in disparate musings about Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers, mulching the garden, how one might get out of mulching the garden, how many Oreos are left at home and who will get the most.

We came upon an electronic message board, the kind that typically warns that up ahead you soon will be in the goulash because of a lane closure. Maybe it’s your lane, maybe it isn’t. The message never says, though I usually ask, as politely and loudly as possible “Well which lane is it, you rat bastard?”

[An aside: Given the gross proliferation and anti-intellectual nature of rats, there are probably more rat bastards out there than any other kind of bastard, with the possible exception of those rat bastard bastards in the vote wheedling business—not to be confused with good old Wheedling, West Virginia.]

“Don’t be shouting at the signs,” K-Mac typically advises in her soft, angelic put-the-gun-down-you’re-scaring-the-bastard” voice.

On this occasion, however, the electronic sign was not warning about a blocked lane, a washed-out bridge or washing up before goulash. It’s message was simple and straight out of the “newspeak” in George Orwell’s dystopian classic, 1984.

It might have said “Big Brother is watching you.”

It might have said “We’re onto you, pal. Yes, you. And we use the term pal very loosely.”

What it did say, in Orwellian doubleplusgood duckspeak:

“If you see something, say something.”

I turned to K-Mac and said “I see something the color of orc flesh.”

She said “I don’t think that’s what they mean. By the way I think we need 38 bags of mulch.”

You see, the message presumes we are smart enough to know that once we see something we know who we should go to and say something. And, as much as I love her, we now know that someone is not K-Mac.

But I’ll tell you who that someone is. The guy next door. Think about it. He looks solid. He drives a truck. With a trailer hitch. He’d certainly know what to do about something.

Caution: if he does something about the something you told him about and you see him doing it, then you’d have to say something again. Most likely to someone else, because the guy next door has a lot on his plate at the moment.

Ah, but that is why God made another guy who lives next door on the other side of your house.

So, what happens when we go to someone and say we saw something and the someone says that’s not something, that’s nothing? And you know he wants to say “you idiot,” but, because he is your neighbor, he stops at nothing.

You know what I think? We need more information on our electronic signs. They could easily flash a clarifying follow-up message. For example:

If you see something, say something…

You know, something strange. Think weird.

No. Banjo playing is not something strange.

Well, strange, yes. But not, like, scary strange.

Okay, sometimes a little scary, but not like president The Donald

Come on, you know what we mean.

Who are we? That’s classified. Trust us, though.

Suggestion: see anybody with beards, funny hats, swinging deadly weapons?

No. Not baseball players.

How about somebody driving a truck with a trailer hitch but no trailer? Eh?

Or someone hauling a suspiciously large number of bags of mulch?

You see that, give us a call. Ask for The Ministry of Truth (mintrue.)

Oh yes, our number is unlisted. For your safety, naturally.

©Patrick A. McGuire and A Hint of Light 2013-2016, all rights reserved.

Posted in Mockery and derision, News You Can Use (Sort of), The human comedy | Tagged , , , , , , | 4 Comments

The Parsippany cutoff

Posted on March 30, 2016 by PMcG

One of the hazards of staffing a Frequently Asked Questions booth is that all too frequently the questions come with such lack of (i.e., im) becility that many of our volunteers suffer breakdowns, some of them automotive in nature, others of the dreaded Foggy Mountain variety.

For example:

  • I notice that Winnie the Pooh is always pictured wearing a red shirt, but he never wears any pants. Why?
  • How long do you have to be dead before paleontologists start digging up your bones?
  • Excuse me, is this seat taken?
  • Is it true that E=MC2 means “Einstein: one medium w/double cheese?”
  • What is Raw Data? Can you get it with Remoulade?
  • Is it true that Schroedinger did time for animal cruelty?
  • Where can I find gloves for a snake (and, please, I don’t mean mittens.)
  • Really, what is the strike zone?
  • Why did Julius Caesar allow anchovies in his salad?
  • Excuse me, is this bag of gold taken?
  • Did the first astronaut to take his dog for a space walk have little plastic bags with him? A follow-up: Are those bags now floating around in space?
  • Is it true that the only word in the English language that rhymes with orange is burnt sienna?
  • Are “Why is everything so hard?” and “Why is nothing easy?” the same question? Follow up: What’s the answer?
  • If an idle mind is the devil’s workshop, is an idle elbow the devil’s china cabinet?
  • If one thing leads to another, that means you’ve now got two things. Do those two things lead to four things? What about eight things? What about sixteen things? What about thirty-two things? What about…
  • Excuse me, is this gawumpie taken?
  • Motivational speakers make a big deal out of saying “The early bird gets the worm.” They neglect to say, however, that the early worm doesn’t get the bird. Shouldn’t someone be telling worms “Better late than ate?”
  • The law says that if I’m a beggar I can’t be a chooser. What if I beg for one thing but somebody gives me another thing. The next guy comes along, I beg for this other thing, but he gives me the first thing I begged for. Now I’ve got two different things. You see where I’m coming from? Not only must I choose, but aren’t those two things going to lead to another? Another what? Is it just me or is this world cracked?

In the meantime, our volunteers left behind some perfectly good answers to questions that haven’t been asked yet.

  • Because.
  • Romulus and Remus, aka The Rome Brothers
  • The term trapezoid originated with Edmund A. Zoid, a Trappist monk who liked to bite the heads off of triangle-shaped cookies that his mother, Cookie Zoid, sent each month to the monk house, hoping he would share with the other trapped monks. He also popularized the term “point taken” which actually first appeared in his memoirs as “point eaten.” Trapezoid, by the way, is the only word in the English language that rhymes with crappazoid (although, oddly, the pazoid is silent).
  • A real banjo has exactly five strings.
  • Heavy traffic on the road to Mandalay. Better take the Parsippany cutoff. Stop the car. Get out. Cut off your Parsippany. Get back in the car. Drive like the wind, grasshopper.
  • I said because.
  • A real banjo player has exactly five cents to his name
  • I get it, I just don’t want it.
  • Bix Beiderbecke did it with a cornet.
  • No, the dead man was not dead before the sixteen men stood on his chest.
  • The tardy bird gets the gawumpie.

©Patrick A. McGuire and A Hint of Light 2013-2016, all rights reserved.

Posted in Absurd and/or zany, Mockery and derision, News You Can Use (Sort of) | Tagged , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

Blown dead

Posted on March 25, 2016 by PMcG

Who can deny that we live in an age of gizmotic marvels? You sir? (Security, table three,  guy in the chicken suit). The cell phone, the computer, the internet, the cloud, the penile implant, the driverless car, the waterless state, the humorless situation comedy, the clueless dick, that woman’s voice coming out of your phone, telling you how to find a lawyer to sue your brainless urologist for mistakenly installing a penile eggplant—the list of impressive, life changing hardware goes on and on.

But there are modern gizmo fails, or at least one that I‘m aware of. With the arrival of spring, and the miraculous appearance of head-phoned lawn crews everywhere, I am more aware than ever of this failure. Especially in mid afternoon at siesta time.

Yesterday, jolted from dreamy bliss by the sound of a North Korean missile exploding in the neighbor’s back yard, I was so aware of this damnable doodadery, that I resorted to something I swore to my support group that I would never use again.

Yes, that’s right. Poetry. Look, nobody’s perfect.

The Dinosaurs Died For Our Sins

Canto I

T. Rex dies,
time goes by
mountains move, ice retreats
we dig a hole and
black gold pools at our feet.
We wash it, dry it,
towel it down,
find out it makes the world go round.
We refine it, redesign it,
pour it in tanks.
It powers our cars, our boats,
even our banks
and one odd machine
that sucks gasoline
both loud and unheard of,
it beggars belief:
a contraption invented
for moving a leaf

Canto II

Wearing no shirt,
but hideous shorts,
his man-breasts ajoggle,
he cavorts without shame
with a gizmo devised
for the sluggish and slow:
a portable cyclone,
the Mom of all blow.

Canto II.V

With one savage tug
he rips it to life
with a noise
I SAID A NOISE
THAT CUTS LIKE A KNIFE.
He walks down his driveway
pushing a leaf
just one little leaf
into the byway,
beneath a blue skyway.
Take that
you dead little turd
and all ye nap takers
whose peace I’ve disturbed.
Pretty in life, pity in death
the leaf had it coming,
I’ll waste no more breath.
Just stick to your raking,
your fat belly aching
your pathetic back-breaking
and stay out of my yard
lest ye be blewn
into June
by a mighty blowhard

I Canto hear myself think anymore.

©Patrick A. McGuire and A Hint of Light 2013-2016, all rights reserved.

Posted in Absurd and/or zany, Mockery and derision, News You Can Use (Sort of) | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Tweetholes

Posted on March 17, 2016 by PMcG

Sigh. Almost daily some celebrity tweets something reprehensible and the media jumps on it like Mr. Hippo on a mudpie.

Typically, the celeb botches the mandatory faux apology, tarnishing the silver tea service of his reputation and punching up a full frontal lobotomy to his storybook self-image as a beloved, impishly ticking time bomb of racial, ethnic and LGBTI tolerance.

We’ve read the reports of a certain self-aggrandizing, oaf-bigot viciously condemning the LGBTI community right in their community center. Afterwards, instead of consulting a professional media manipulator or a priest, he phoned Mel Gibson. He then said:

“Oops, my bad. I thought LGBTI stood for ‘Let’s get barbacoa tacos, immediately,’ and it made me mad, as everyone knows I hate tacos because they are communists and unnatural and in the Scriptures, when The Carpenter saw there were only five loaves, two fishes and six tacos to feed the crowd, he said ‘Those things will just crumble in your hands after one bite,’ and when his disciple, Johnny, said ‘But these are soft shell tacos,’ The Carpenter said ‘Are you a Mexican?’”

Such offensive screeds have curdled the 2 per-cent milk of human kindness. Meanwhile, public relations types have jumped on them like Mr. Hippo pouncing on his muddy Missus Hippy. Having failed to convince us there isn’t that much sawdust or parmesan cheese in shake-on parmesan flavored sawdust, the PR peeps have discovered the lucrative business of screed repair.

For megabucks, they coach despicable tweet-holes on things like when to shutup (now and forever) and how to deliver an apology as if you mean it. (Delivered with a straight face? Add 20 per cent.)

Here are their Ten Principles of Apologizing to Save Your Ass.

1. Evaluate whether you really need to apologize, i.e., did anyone see or hear you? Is there YouTube evidence? An arrest report? A tweet trail?

2. Will an amount of money make this go away? Do you have an amount of money? (If not, go away.)

3. Always consider sincerity — tinged with just a pinch of humility. Always reject sincerity and humility. And if you pinch my tinge again, I’m calling the cops.

4. Dishonesty is the best policy. When George Washington chopped down the cherry tree, he offered his father a sincere apology. In return, his father offered him a sincere knuckle sandwich, after which George was fitted with wooden teeth—carved from the branches of a certain late cherry tree.

5. Never miss a chance to shift the blame, no matter how farfetched. “Father I am heartsick that your cherry tree was chopped down with my axe. While it was in my hands. While I was swinging it at the tree. Yelling Tim-BERRRRRRRRRINO. But an escaped bluegrass musician held a banjo to my ear and threatened to play Peach Pickin’ Time in Georgia, if I didn’t chop chop.”

6. You can never go wrong by saying “The person who said that is the me who lives in an alternate universe.” Wait one beat and then add “Really.”

7. If cornered, use the apology hedge “In case I offended anyone.” This implies that only a wuss would be “offended” by what you said. A real man would have blown your head off.

8. Take a page from the script of our friend the hippopotamus: “It’s only mud, dude.” (Although you might want to pre-treat with triple-acting gork remover.)

9. Deny your despicableosity with a simple “Nunt unh.”

10. Try not to invoke the name of The Carpenter. After the Holy Poohbahs behind the Pearly Gates saw the way he drove the money changers out of the temple, giving Him the lightning smite concession was a no-brainer.

©Patrick A. McGuire and A Hint of Light 2013-2016, all rights reserved.

Posted in Absurd and/or zany, News You Can Use (Sort of) | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Rump roast

Posted on March 9, 2016 by PMcG

I am often stopped on the street by people of a certain age who ask “Please, do you have any spare tires? If not, could you at least explain what is a meme?”

Talk about your teachable moments. I am asked this question so often that I now carry with me a portable podium, a foldout bleacher section, a small usher and a packet containing general liability release forms, a four-page evaluation tool and a guide to what will be on the final.

The term meme derives from a very short song sung to loosen the vocal chords. Known as “Me Me Me,” its wildly popular narcissism supplanted the old standards “Doh Doh Doh,” and “Ray Ray Ray.”¹

Now, in pre-internet days, people learned lyrics to songs like “Me Me Me” through sheet music. (The term was corrupted by bitter critics at the dawn of rock and roll as well as the rap, punk and hip hop pandemics into “You call that sheet music?”)

But early sheet music contained a typo, changing “Me Me Me” to “MeMeMe.” People were confused, so a committee of experts decided one of the me’s had to go. Unfortunately, it was me. Soon after, one of the first modern memes sprang forth: “Me meme, you meme we all meme for ice crememe.”

Memes go way back. In early Greece, the standard greeting meme was “How’s your potato, Plato?” In Shakespeare’s time, losers heard “Sorry Hamlet, it just wasn’t meant to be.”2 In the Old West the favored cowboy-meets-Indian meme was “What up prairie dog?”

In the fifties a goateed hipster would say “Slip me some skin, Daddy-O.” In the sixties it was the enigmatic “Oh wow, man.” By the 2000s, we were hearing “Dood!” and “Homes!” (or the less formal “Homey”) At jobsites today you hear the annual-review-meme “While not our biggest asset, you’re certainly our biggest asshat.”

Don’t ask me why3, but baby boomers became known as the meme generation. Rogue, offshore copy editors abbreviated it to “the me generation.” This killed off a comeback staged by the once powerful Ray Ray Ray lobby — which had already copyrighted “Ray generation,” and had distributed press kits with photos of important Rays including Link Wray and the Ray Men, Ray, North Dakota, and Ray the Flying Squirrel.

My least favorite meme begins “Unless you’ve been living in a cave, or on Mars, or under a rock, or in the deli case next to the German Potato salad…” It then proceeds to say something that supposedly everyone already knows.

For instance, in 1653 in England,4 someone might have said “unless you’ve been living in a nunnery or under the tower of London, you know that the Rump Parliament has been criticized by Oliver Cromwell for making rump-like noises…”

What I’ve never liked about this particular meme is that sometimes I have been living under a rock and may have missed one or two big-whoop, social rump bites.

So? There’s no law against living in a cave on Mars—Matt Damon did it and you didn’t hear Oliver Cromwell bad mouthing him. Chill, people. As the late jingle writer Leon Carr5 once memed “Sometimes you feel like a nut; sometimes you don’t.”

1. Officially “Doe(a deer)” and “Ray (Bans).” Other notes never caught on. For example, “Fa” sounds too much like a Boston Brahmin estimating the distance between Worcester and New Haven. “So” was already linked by tabloids to “What.” Smog worked against “La” and “Ti” just wanted to party and/or ruin Congress.
2. Get it? To be? Eh?
3. What part of don’t don’t you understand? (No, it’s not a contraction for donut.)
4. I kid thee not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rump_Parliament
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Carr.

©Patrick A. McGuire and A Hint of Light 2013-2016, all rights reserved.

Posted in Absurd and/or zany, The human comedy | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

A matter of fact

Posted on March 2, 2016 by PMcG

Three facts walk into a bar. One is Cold-Hard Fact, a completely ripped body builder with six-pack abs and a light sheen of Mazola oil.

The second is Political Fact, wearing a completely ripped-off shark skin suit with a fin velcroed to the back. Also, a Charlie Sheen of integrity.

The third is a Fact of Life, wearing nothing but a freshly scrubbed birthday suit and a bit of spinach between his teeth.

At the bar, sit the Antz brothers. The one to the right of the facts is the unshaven regular known as Ignorantz. On the other side is his effete snob brother, Arrogantz. He is so insufferably superior and smug that someone has surreptitiously slapped a “Hi, My Name is…” convention sticker on his back. They have penciled in “DICK.”

The barkeep, Your Average Joe, says “What’ll it be, boys?”

Cold-Hard Fact says “A glass of ice on the rocks.”

The barkeep replies “Sorry, but our daily rock shipment has been delayed.”

“Yeah,” laughs Ignorantz, “the driver got stoned. Haw!”

“In that case,” says Cold-Hard Fact. “I’ll have a gin and ironic.”

Meanwhile, Political Fact says “Gimme a Republican.”

Says Your Average Joe “You mean Old Grand Dad with a twist?”

“A twist of what?” asks Ignorantz.

“Fate,” says the Political Fact.

“We’re all out of twisted fate,” says the barkeep. “There’s been a high demand for it lately. How about a T Party?”

“What’s that?”

“That’s tequila and sympathy, but all we have left is diet sympathy. It’s made with artificial intelligence which has been labeled a carcinogen by the government — as if anyone cares what the government says. But just in case, the tequila makes you nasty and unconscionable.”

“Gimme one of those. Make it a double.”

“You want a lime with that?”

“Will it make my lips pucker?”

“You’re thinking of a mime.”

The Fact of Life interrupts to ask for a swizzle stick, extra swizzle, hold the stick.

Your Average Joe regards him suspiciously “You got I.D.? ”

Just then the door slams open and in barges a fat man holding a badge. “Fact Check!” shouts the chubby checker. “Everybody get your facts out where I can see ‘em.”

He looks hard at Political Fact. “You’re not a fact,” he says. “You’re a lying rumor.” He tears the velcro fin from his back, takes out an ink pad and stamps “Unconfirmed rubbish” on the specious fact’s hand.

Next he confronts Cold Hard Fact. “You’ve got the cold look,” says the fact checker, “but the question is, how hard are you?”

The fact throws him such a hard look that the checker immediately develops a six-pack ablative absolute. “Harder than a New York Times crossword puzzle,” he says coldly. “In ink. In Latin. In italics. In corduroy.”

The fact checker seems impressed. “Let’s say you’re a countertop. Would you be granite, wood or laminate?”

“Laminate,” says the Cold Hard Fact without blinking an eye.

“What?” The fact checker falls back a step. “Why would Cold Hard Fact choose soft, crappy laminate?”

The Cold Hard Fact chuckles. “It’s too hard to explain.”

The fact checker’s jaw drops. He picks it up, brushes it off, reconnects it and tries to grin but it comes out crooked. There’s a date with an oral surgeon in his future. (He’s thinking Taco Bell and a night of bowling.)

The checker then faces the Fact of Life and points rudely. “You call that a fact?”

Arrogantz bursts out laughing: “Looks more like a factoid.”

The humiliated Fact of Life turns to the barkeep. “Gimme a herringbone suit and a pair of brown Florsheims.”

Your Average Joe has seen and heard it all before.

“You want undies with that?”

©Patrick A. McGuire and A Hint of Light 2013-2016, all rights reserved.

Posted in Absurd and/or zany, Mockery and derision | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Probing the proboscis

Posted on February 25, 2016 by PMcG

Somewhere out there, the dreaded sirens of “They” are “calling for” flurries. You can almost hear their sing-song “Flurries! Oh flurries! Where are you, flurries?”

The skies are somber, the clouds cheeky and contemptuous, the panic of the people palpable, predictable, preposterous and pronounced. In other P words Peter Piper picked the pepperoni off his pickled pepper pizza.

Inside the supermarket, people are fighting over toilet paper, milk and the last tubs of Cherry Garcia. Ineptly maneuvering their shopping carts, they form long, fidgety lines at checkout. How long? So long they could be seen from outer space if not for the shortsighted defunding of the space program and, of course, the roof overhead.

Trapped in one of these snaking lines, an off-duty blogger searches for something to divert his attention from the horror of a 15 minute wait. He can’t help noticing the door marked “Manager” opposite the checkout counters. (He has tried, really tried, but even after years of therapy, he still can’t help it.)

Taped to the door is a warning in boldface Tempus Fugit Non-Comebackibus, Sans Serif

“This door must remain locked at all times.”

Hardened by life’s barren braggadocio, Mr. Bloghair instantly bets himself one million dollars that the door is not locked right now. After all, this is the same store with a sign in its parking lot reserving space for “Expected Mothers.”

The warning suggests that this door has been left unlocked many times in the past. By…let’s see…the manager? The assistant manager? A mother complaining that some unexpected crab cake is parked in her spot?

The bloggist taps the shoulder of the old lady in front of him. Her cart contains 18 heads of iceberg lettuce and a bottle of Ken’s Ranch Dressing Lite.

“Why go to the trouble and expense of posting a sign on the door,” he asks her, “unless there’s something behind the door that the manager wants to keep secret?”

The old lady looks anxiously for her guardian angel. The blog dude adds “I’m betting that behind that door you’ll find either money, sex or a tanning bed. Maybe even a sex-for-frozen-edamame-beans conspiracy. Or a money-for-melanoma scheme.”

The drooling zombie behind him, his cart overflowing with tubes of Burt’s Bees skin cream, says “Yes, but why post a sign if the door is to be always locked, forever and ever, amen?”

“Point taken,” says the generous blogman. “If you try to open the door and you don’t have a key, you just move on to friendlier doors – hopefully, without boldface fonts.”

“And if you do have a key,” says the old lady, hefting a head of lettuce menacingly, “well, why do you have a key if the door is to remain locked at all times?”

Which means, they realize simultaneously, that the manager locked inside the office has fatally outsmarted himself.

A word to the unwise: When your frozen foods begin thawing near electrical appliances, someone is bound to end up frying. To wit: a naked, unexpectedly electrocuted store manager and somebody’s mother covered in melted edamame beans. Although, appropriately, with a tan to die for.

Note: some of the people in the preceding dramatization of a random strike by an insanity drone, were paid a promotional fee by the American Powder Room Institute. They urge all of us to stock up now on “powder” to avoid future shortages with their collateral damage.

In other words, a pickled Peter Piper predictably picked up a piccolo to probe the proboscis of a passing pachyderm who promptly parked his prodigious posterior on Peter and pressed him like a pancake. (Repeat 50 times without stopping and then go about your business.)

©Patrick A. McGuire and A Hint of Light 2013-2016, all rights reserved.

Posted in Absurd and/or zany, Mockery and derision, The human comedy | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment