Category Archives: Day-to-Day

Meat-A-Mucil: The Ailment for What Cures You

Meat-A-Mucil: The Ailment for what cures you


Magical Cures

Watching international darts the other night while I procrastinated heavily with regards to my other work (taxes, filing, laundry, child-harassing, dish washer-filling), I was amazed and mesmerized at how Chisnell skillfully and deftly defeated Whitlock in a duel between overweight, sweaty, tattooed, proletariat, brush-cut, high functioning alcoholic, white males in the O2 arena in Dublin, Ireland. The call of “One hundred and eighty” (three treble 20’s for the uninitiated) rang out repeatedly throw after throw, as litres, gallons, pints, and no doubt kegs of beer were inhaled by the dart tossers. More amazingly, thousands upon thousands of people, all –including children– under the influence of vats of booze, with pickled livers, and at best possessing double-digit IQs had piled into an arena to watch what the commentators called “true sport.” All I could think was this fermented yeast bread-and-circuses diversion cures the daily misery that is the life of those who are dart-obsessed.

I won’t get into the slippery slope of an argument about darts being ‘sport’ any more than poker is, but for reasons unbeknownst to me, they are both are frequently broadcast on sports channels across the globe. How competitive knitting hasn’t made it on to the roster of programming still eludes me.

Ever More Slippery Slope

How did we get from the topic of darts to the idea of “Meat-A-Mucil”? Well, truth be told, it’s an idea I borrowed from my friend Lars, who will no doubt sue me at some point for mentioning his name, or more likely for having electronically acknowledged our friendship in a public forum that no one reads, except for the mentally ill, the socially outcast and the genetically corrupt. But I digress.

As I was watching the aforementioned dart spectacle, there was a commercial for yet another miracle cream that will make your joints healthy, free you of pain instantly, give you a longer life, make you handsomer, taller, etc. As always it was pitched by some guy who claims to be a doctor, but looks like he was recently released from medium security prison for something akin to selling stolen goods. Trustworthy he was not, but people seeking a cure for anything, be it baldness, bladder control, belligerence, or birthmarks shaped like a South Pacific atoll, will give into the pain and lay out cash for something of dubious origin usually in a tube. Heck, if some company made a tube of Oreos or my mother’s lemon squares, and its side effects included instantaneous human combustion, I’d lay out cash for a tube now.

New Products

With that millimeter-deep thought in mind, I thought that the world could use a new kind of product to counter all the bad press vexatious vegans and vile vegetarians give meat-eaters. Hence Meat-A-Mucil. Sounds vile? Sure it does. But so does “processed cheese spread” and that stuff sells by the boatload among people with broken tastebuds and 22 chromosomes. Look, meat-eaters can’t help themselves. Their incisors need honing and chewing on a steak bone, or a bacon cheeseburger, or an ostrich steak with fries. And maybe a little cheese cake as chaser. It has been clinically proven in a remote lab with little or no peer review, or actual scientific equipment, that carnivorous activity answers a need as primordial and ancient as watching TV to avoid talking to your spouse.

Sure, carnivores could rationally give up ingesting huge quantities of flesh-based protein in an effort to save their bowels, or maybe reduce the effects of run-off from industrial cow factories. Or to impress that free-loving vegetarian honey with low standards. But why start now? I’d have to write about something else.

It’s late and I am cranky.

Heretically yours,

The Swami of Salami, the Guru of Goulash, the Maven of Meat

The Internet Of Things Will Kill Us

Internet Of Things and Sex Toys


The Internet Of Things Strikes Again

I think it was a frigid Tuesday, the temperature ricocheting around between -18ºC and -25ºC (mind-numbingly cold even in Fahrenheit), the ice and snow pelting me by the evil, arctic winds it was carried upon, when someone asked me how I felt. Truth be told, I felt old. Old and creaky. Like a wooden chair, all finely carved and poorly assembled, and somewhat squeaky. And when weight is applied in any measure, quite creaky and a little unstable. This led me to think, ‘how should we really calculate our age?”

I am sure there is some Internet site that can tell me my age just by the shows I watch. Or by the expressions I use. Or by my fondness for sugary, mass produced confectionaries that were banned after the Vietnam war, yet appear regularly in my supermarket with misleading nutritional information (like 3 essential vitamins and minerals). But it can’t tell me how old I feel.

You see, while there are brilliant algorithms to determine much of what life is, how we will behave, what shoes we’ll buy, how we will not clean our toe nail clippers properly before giving them to our loved ones, etc., I don’t think those crafty mathematicians and scientists have come up with a method to determine the age you actually feel. That particular day, with the remnants of kidney stones tearing their way through my lower innards and an achy back from exerting myself too much on the ski hill, I certainly felt older than my current age would dictate.

My Smart House

If the Internet Of Things came to my house, and made my low IQ house even a little “smart” as the great minds of today promise it will, it could detect what kind of mood I am in, or how much pain I am working through after having schlepped the laundry upstairs while trying to balance an iPad, a glass of water and maybe some dry, sugary cereal I claim as my dessert. All the sensors would talk to each other, scan me, record and break down the decibels of my grunts and frequency of my “oys”, cobble together some kind of mathematcial result and spit a response on a screen with a synthetic yet soothing female voice saying “Mr. Druker, after deep data analysis and excruciating calculations our sensors and flawless programming believe that you should really update your will in the next hour because the statistical likelihood of you making it down the stairs without smashing your head is 0.0002%.”

My Internet-enabled house would begin to offer me a cane when I try to get off the toilet or have 9-1-1 on speed dial just in case I can’t open my various and sundry pill bottles and wind up losing my temper in a fit of rage. Again. It would probably have a flashing sign out front saying “Old fart lives here.”

Do the Math

Still that wouldn’t answer my question of how old I feel. To be honest, there is a simple way to calculate age that has nothing to do with what’s printed on your birth certificate or driver’s license. Currently, I have the  kidneys of a 70-year old boxer who has taken more than body blow. Add to that the knees of someone who has skied recklessly for decades, so let’s put those joints at 86 years of age. Bowels and the digestive system are well into the 60’s if you count the frequency of antacid pills I have begun to take with every coffee or remotely spicy food (say goodbye to Tabasco). The excess of body hair in places where it shouldn’t be, and the desert-like dearth of where body hair should be would indicate my telomeres and other assorted genetic material have begun unwinding like poorly tied French braids, or a cheap shoe lace with a crappy aglet. Let’s say that puts my general physique at 67 going on 90.

However, we have forgotten to account for my near OCD fondness for cartoons, comics, just about anything animated and detached from reality, which would put my viewing tastes at 11 years of age. Add to that my fondness for fart jokes and other sophomoric toilet humor and maybe I have the maturity level of a 14 year old boy just as his voice is cracking. Cap that off with my industrial-sized addiction to sugary foods and keen eye for the crappiest cereal in the breakfast aisle at the supermarket, and my dietary direction is that of a 13 year old.

If we also account for solar flares, the gravitational pull of various back holes, and my dangerous exposure to lead-based paints my parents painted my toys with when I was but an infant to see if I would turn out “low normal” then we could reasonably conclude that I am in 40’s.

But Sex Toys?

So what does any of this have to do with comic that has sunk a thousand ships and let to the creation of various moral bodies dedicated to condemning me on the Internet and radio shows? In frame 4 there is mention of some sex toys. It’s there for shock value and I wanted to work it into the story line because I am sleep deprived. It also got me to thinking, if EVERYTHING becomes a smart device, and is Internet-enabled with sensors and chips, that means no one can trust anything, not even their sex toys. You’ll need to worry if they have been talking to each other about your, uh, habits. No more privacy. Even your sex toys know how awful you are — and worse, they’ll talk to each other about how frequently you use them (you filthy pervert) and with whom, and why insufficient use of alcohol wipes is still an issue.

Well, on that note, let’s try and relax, go to sleep knowing that iPad or smart thingy next to you probably knows more about you than your significant other. Chances are your play with it more often that your significant other too. You all make me sick.

Exuberantly achy and parsimonious in handing out wisdom,

White Plum Asanga, Buddhist Rebel Druker

Happy New Year – 2015

Happy New Year - 2015
Happy New Year – 2015

Happy New Year – 2015

I could spend paragraphs and paragraphs opining about the nature of the New Year’s celebration, or how I managed to play on my iPad during the clock striking 12, or the colossal nap I just took this afternoon to celebrate the hibernation phase of the winter.

I could spend many minutes away from family in the basement tapping away at the key board, trying to entertain you with thoughts of a moronic or comic nature.

I could take the hard, arduous, painful route of self-betterment and self-discovery to show you that 2015 will be different from every anno gone before it, with 2015 being the break from routine that will set me free to explore my mental, emotional, physical and iPad addiction limits.

However, all that would detract from the fact that there is some kind of sports on TV that I will use as an excuse to nap.

Happy New Year, Happy 2015 to all of you who dare to have the government follow them by actually reading this comic/blog, now into its 6th year of insulting the intelligence of its readers, and generally lowering the level of discussion to a notch below the sewers.

Filthy, unshowered and unshaven,

Jonny The Yeti Druker

Holiday Laziness and The Internet Of Things

Stanko & Tibor: Holidays and The Internet of Things


Dateline December 26th, perilously close the freezing toilet, 
despite temperatures upsettingly close to global warming theoretical models

Internet of Things = Holiday Laziness

So if you dared to read the previous previous episode of this epistemological equivalent of recycled toilet paper from a Third World Communist-era country with high dysentery, you know full well that my thoughts of winter and cold led me to explain to you the prevalence of technology, our addiction to it, the impending tsunami of the Internet of Things. And, if you read between the lines, you know I’m not a very good hair stylist or theoretical physicist. But you really had to be paying attention for that one.

So as you can see, the holiday spirit has made me lazy too and I crapped out and came up with this easy to make and even easier to read episode of the comic that should be banned by authorities. But that has given me time to spend with my kids, my family and most importantly, myself. Mostly unconscious and on a couch, warmly cuddling my iPad like the child I always wanted. (It has an off switch. Just saying.)

So with the holiday season in full swing, and ever more ways for the marketers who control the Internet of Things to tell us what to buy, and why we need it, and subsequent ads custom tailored to trigger our deepest, darkest, most perverted desires and convert them into purchases, we have not only become grand and gross consumers, but lazy ones as well. One click, and it’s purchased and delivered to you by a human, a drone, or a drone human. This my friends, my Romans, my fellow slack-jawed readers is progress! (By the way, I got new ski boots, thus satisfying a four year desire/need that ranks close to food and sex.)

Not Progress

However, in this age of ease, laziness and three-toed sloth, technology has brought some dangerously unintended consequences, and I’m not talking about North Korea and China hacking my Twitter feed so that I am accused of calling the President of the United States a “running dog lackey of the cesspool of narco-porno-terrorism” — again. I am, however, talking about the technological scourge of our visual world known as High Definition TV, and the even more perilous and insidious 4K TV. That’s right, I said it, ultra-high definition TV is a bad thing because it allows us viewers to see the world as it is, and not as how it could be with gauze sheathed glasses.

Why such a scourge you ask? (Actually, since no one reads this comic/rant, no one sane is really asking. I am really the one asking. Besides most of my unwilling readers are actually bound and restrained, like Hannibal Lecter.)   Well, there are certain combinations that shouldn’t occur in nature, and one of them is pornography and high-definition TV. I know the imprisoned among you think this would be a good thing, but why would you want to see all those appendages, scars, tattoos, entry and exit points in such graphic detail? Don’t you have a hard enough time looking at yourself in the mirror in the morning, up close, to know that humans look pretty damn hideous in detail?

Not The Face and Definitely Not the Logic

Let’s skip the sexual appendages and areas for a minute and concentrate on the human face. Unless layers of makeup are applied, hairs are plucked just so, sleep has been had in adequate time increments, the lighting is just right, and the alcoholic content of the wine you guzzled is just short of jet fuel, it turns out that human faces aren’t as nice as we think they are. In fact, the human brain adapts to survive by deceiving itself so we believe that perfect he or she across the room is beautiful. Our brains shield us from the reality of the crooked nose, the pitted skin, the greasy patina on the nose, the uneven eye placement, the gummy smile, even the thin lips so we don’t have to deal with the reality that 4K and HD TV grant us.

So, if we logically extrapolate this hideous face architecture coupled with our inherent brain deception, and drop a couple of quadrants to the human private parts, and now think of those “bits” in super-mega-quintuple high-definition, not counting the aforementioned tattoos and scars, why the hell would you want to see “the piston scene” in ultra-high definition? Porn stars really aren’t that good-looking, because if they were they’d be in Hollywood.

Technology has given us too much, I say. I really don’t want to see a monkey’s hairy butt in that much detail, so why would I want to see a woman’s woo-hoo being invaded like Poland by some guy’s obscenely large wing-wang (yes, I always feel inferior) with a mind-boggling, vomit-inducing detail revealing “things” the human mind makes a dedicated effort to conceal, smudge, gloss over and otherwise make palatable through neural deception? We need the gauzy filters and lighting effects. We need special effects and makeup artists and regular definition TV so as not to see the high definition horrors of low production values that could lead to procreation. The logic of visual hyper-reality has no place in the bedrooms of the nation or the porno sets of Hollywood, Prague and Tokyo.

It almost makes me want to give up gettin’ funky with my significant other. That would be incomprehensible.

Incomprehensible Logic

Which brings me to the next thing beyond comprehension. Child-rearing. You see, my thoughts of the cold snow and ice reminded me that my car needs to have its winter tires put on, and thus I realized I would be sliding, swerving and slipping sideways and forward to my destination hoping I don’t crash and/or incur more costs or penalties. Traction control be damned, it is dicey out there.

Just like parenting. If I may use an automotive analogy (translation: this author is not a deep thinker), your offspring are kind of like an adrenaline junkie lead-footed driver in a car with bald tires, while you, the stupid, impetuous parents, are like stability and traction control, airbags and anti-lock brakes, doing everything you can to prevent or at least reduce the likelihood of massive fish-tailing, skidding, crashing, hydroplaning, uncontrolled sliding, rollovers and unintended off-road misadventures with drug-addled, tattooed people of the opposite or same-sex.

Your job, quite simply, is to get your children — legitimate, illegitimate, adopted or kidnapped, natural birth or from a test tube or as otherwise defined by the law and social conventions — to their destinations in life, somewhat safe and sound with as few scratches, replacement parts as possible, no blown gaskets, and most of their critical fluids intact.

Leaky Fluids

Sure, there will be episodes where “fluids” will leak, the airbags will figuratively deploy and the dashboard warning lights will light up the instrument pinnacle like a baboons behind in heat (usually after the child has experimented with acid in said parents’ basement, or gotten a tattoo with the name “Midge” in an all too prominent place). But what would a journey be if it didn’t include inclement weather, roadside assistance, more than a few blind curves, pot holes and running up on the sidewalk of life?

The biggest problem isn’t even so much keeping your kid on the road to adulthood despite the likelihood of he or she winding up in jail for public nudity. Rather, it’s that you as the equivalent of the automotive safety net also need to be a mechanic. As we know many are crooked, few are competent and most are high on paint and gasoline fumes. Which isn’t such an awful thing, it just makes social engagements and job interviews more difficult to complete without graphic profanity and dropping your pants for sheer shock effect (dad).

Being poor mechanics on top of being a safety net means we often cheap out on maintenance and replacement parts to ensure we have some profit margin to be able to save for retirement. The result usually is parenting that involves quick fixes (e.g. “go ask your mother, I’m watching cartoons”) or psycho- and electro-convulsive therapy.

Last and Least

Penultimately, your offspring, as represented by the vehicle in this story, slows down, wears itself out, kills the battery every so often, gets into an accident or gets a flat tire, and sometimes admits maybe a paint job is a good way to hide the damage. (Unless of course, said vehicle and driver are turning 50, have a collective midlife crisis, get a paint job and fender extensions, and modified parts, and then leave home to have an affair with another “dealer” so to speak.) But I digress.

Ultimately for the parent, you want to steer the vehicle and its occupants so that at some foolish point they can err fatally, not use birth control and then wind up being the safety net/mechanic to their own (un)planned adrenaline junkie lead-footed driver in a car with bald tires.

So it is with these random words, these unstructured, tangentially and loosely linked thoughts, these bumper car-like mental occurrences translated into key strokes that I bid you, the mentally degenerate readers of this chronicle a happy holiday season. Spend some time with the ones you love, or if you can’t do that because of the restraining order, buy more crap as a means to short-term happiness and self-fulfillment. It does work, I know from experience.

Subtly stubbly and monkeyishly hairy,

Guido the Christmas Mechanic

It’s the Internet Of Things, Stupid

 

Internet Of Things


Dateline: December 10th, 2014, 9:21 PM, sitting too close to an uninsulated bathroom with an arctic cold toilet seat. Feh.   

It’s the Internet Of Things, Stupid

Why is it that when the winter starts to descend upon the Third World roads I walk, drive and trip over every day that my thoughts turn to what’s wrong with the world? Is it a genetic deficiency on my part? (Likely) Is it the world wide scourge of marketing agencies lulling me into buying even more crap I don’t need? And quite successfully I might add? (Even more likely)

More technology than you can shake a stick at, that’s what the world needs, apparently. Not want, but need, t’would seem. If you look at the 2014 updated version of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, it’s right beside food, shelter and sex. And climbing higher. Why do we need it? Largely as a distraction from the things really ail us like crime, racism, processed foods, Russian and corporate egomaniacs, poor body hygiene, ebola, general body hairiness, sloth, more hairiness, my reliance on sugar, and people who use the word “dynamic” to describe food.

How do I know this to be true? While walking through the underground passageways in my fair and fairly awful city, I noticed a phenomena that actually reminded me of a scene I was once saw in a movie with Middle Age monks, walking with their robes on, through 15th century European filth and muck, all with their hoods up and all with heads slightly bowed. Hunched even. It was the standard religious posture with which they all held themselves. I couldn’t help wondering if those poor monk schmucks would suffer from a lifetime of bad posture and physiotherapy sessions, not really knowing if the local monastery had a decent health plan or an in-house masseur.

The Internet of Idiots

So it was with some bewilderment and amusement that I observed the very same behavior when I was on the metro. Just about everyone under the age of 65 in the metro station had their heads slightly bowed, leaning forward, shoulders slightly hunched, some folks with hats, given it’s winter, some tempting mother nature and leaving their heads exposed. And almost all of them with a smartphone (me included) playing some kind of game or surfing the Web, or just ignoring reality. All hunched, all with eyes down. Not unlike those monks of yore, these people were worshiping their new god — the smartphone. Or the Internet it is connected to.

With wireless connections and microchips everywhere, the marriage of smartphones and Internet, it appears that the computer gods have enslaved and outsmarted us. It is a case of technology ruling us and we are happy to be ruled (unless you’re my uncle). Happy that is, until we drop the phone in the toilet, or we have to deal with a company screwing us over for fraudulent billing charges. Bastards. Or when we have to switch smartphones or Internet providers, which is akin in some cases to switching religions for some, but I think is more like switching from heroin to morphine. Both are addictive and socially accepted as forms of passive recreation.

Worse, the resulting poor posture, bulging vertebrae and bent necks this devotion is causing across the globe will not only enrich the evil cabal of mobile phone makers, Internet providers and physiotherapists, all in cahoots to profit from our neck-craning, data-hoarding devices. It will have irreparable consequences when the aliens come to take over our planet. We’ll be too enamored, arthritic, bug-eyed and weak-willed due to our addiction to our smartphones and Internet connections to notice we’re about to become alien dog food. And even if we wanted to rise up against our new overlords (all hail them), we wouldn’t be able to look up at our enemy attackers due to said bent necks. How can we fire bullets or throw spears, rocks, bombs and fire rockets if we’re only able to stare at our feet? Ok, so maybe the alien invasion is a little far-fetched.

Sensors Everywhere

Some clarification is needed for the older generation. The Internet of Things is the stuff of dreams. Shakespeare even mentioned it in one his plays. Somewhere near the back of Othello, I think. With the Internet of Things, there will be sensors and software absolutely everywhere. In your fridge telling your phone that your mayonnaise’s best before date passed 2 years ago, and then alerting your local medical establishment and your place of work you’ll be calling in with food poisoning again after you decide to serve that horrible potato salad at Thanksgiving against the protests of your significant other, who says it gives you awful gas.

There will be chips in your toilet bowl sending info to your proctologist who will then call you at home and leave a message for your next appointment, and then subsequently take bets on what lame excuse you will use to postpone your next rectal invasion.

Cars will be able to talk to each other like never before. And not just to avoid crashing into each other. I can just envision two SUVs start trading gossip about their respective owners having affairs in the backseats of their cars. Then they threaten to extort their owners with all the collected data unless they get a lube job with full synthetic and a fresh air filter.

The Coup de Grace, Sucker

Perhaps most plausible Internet of Things scenario will be the chip implanted in your brain by the evil, secret collective of electronics and software makers, together with their twisted sisters in the fashion industry, subconsciously sending you messages while standing in the shower or in front of the mirror informing you that you’re too a) hairy, b) short, c) uncool, d) trampy, e) flatulent, f) vainglorious, g) skinny, h) fat, i) bald, j) cross-eyed, or k) all of the aforementioned to be acceptable in mixed company. Therefore you must buy the latest, outrageously priced wearable device that has already been mailed to your house and billed to your credit card.

So on that note, I wish you a peaceful sleep as you fall into slumber and oblivion over your respective devices that have replaced your sex lives with silicon (or is that silicone?) that wasn’t used for faulty breast implants.

Optimistically yours and impishly pimpled,

Latrine Cleaner 4th class, Semi-Private Druker

PS – if you choose to leave a comment, make sure to select your gender. Hint, hint.

The Mangling & The Battle of Kidney Stone Ridge


20141104_BearUnion


Inappropriate Pain

I recently described to a friend in a text message that my most recent battle with my kidney stones was something akin to the German army marching on Poland, except in this case, the march of destruction trampled barely impeded though Gonad City, followed by the laying waste of Urethraville. Safe to say there was much teeth gnashing and tear shedding, but the survivors are all that much stronger for it. Or mildly addicted to Dilaudid. The jury is still out on that one.

After suffering through what I could only describe as an extended period of painful living punctuated by involuntary spasms when a blade-like stone decided to slash its way a millimeter or so down the canal, it dawned on me that comparing the passage of my kidney stones to a WWII nightmare was a bit callous. Then again, I am one of – if not two of – the worst people I know. Such a reckless use of language is certainly a sign of splintered chromosomes and missing moral centrality. Or, again, the aforementioned mild addiction to Dilaudid.

So to survive the battle of Kidney Stone Ridge, I was forced to consume vats of water, juice, coffee and soup. This gave me time to stop and think, due to peeing frequently, which led to some reading of car magazines while dashing to or hanging around the commode.

Painful Realizations

One particular passing was rather eventful as the pain killers hadn’t kicked in yet. After clenching the door frame in the bathroom as a method of pain transference, I came to realize that there may well be sufficient words in the English vocabulary to describe my levels of pain and discomfort, not to mention the frequent body twitching these stones cause, but I don’t possess them. I do possess Ninja-like skills in the application of the F-word since this whole episode started.

Since expressing myself would bore the crap out of all of you, I’ll just tell you what other realizations I came to while doing some bathroom reading and peeing.

First of all, the history of automobile marketing says a lot about what an impatient society we have become. Back in the 1920’s and 30’s cars had really long names, like the Bugatti Type 57 S Atlantique, or the Talbot-Lago Drophead Coupe Elegance, or the Alfa Romeo Stradale Tipo 33. They were full, long, elegant names that required a degree to read. Or glasses. They sounded like expensive meals with appetizers. Either way, it’s clear a long name meant prestige. However, along the way, car model names began to shorten. The Cadillac Eldorado, the Ford Granada, the Honda Civic, the VW Golf. It seems shorter was better for marketing, I’m guessing because we had become too impatient to read.

After that, some genius, a German I think, decided it was way easier for the rich and powerful to just use alpha-numeric names. A6, G35, F12 and so on. Or the 3-letter acronyms are popular, like TSX, GTI and GLK. It seems we have so little attention span and such an inability to express ourselves with actual words, we have resorted to calling our creations by the shortest names possible. Does this connote prestige and mystery? Or is it way cheaper because you use less ink on the expensive glossy brochures?

I wonder if we’ll start naming things based on the fewest number of syllables, like laundry detergent. You know, Tide, Gain, Cheer, etc. Or will it just be reduced to naming products with grunts. Maybe the GMC Grunt. The Cadillac Oy. The BMW Nein. The Ford Qué? The Nissan D’oh. The Dodge Feh. The Volvo Snø. The single syllable possibilities are virtually endless. Any idiot could market a car. Like me.

The Mangling Continues

However, this wave of abbreviations is nothing like the language mangling I hear at work every day. How many times have I heard about being “on the bleeding edge” of technology. Sure, the aeronautically derived “being on the leading edge” wasn’t good enough. No, we had to be on the bleeding edge to show just how far we are at the forefront of whatever. Blood loss and leakage means progress, it seems.

Topping the bleeding is the other linguistic train wreck that I hear daily. Describing a concept that is not completely worked out in detail, the resulting action is to “flush things out.” No, not “flesh out” but flush out. I could recommend a session at the proctologist office to complete  this flushing, but I can’t see how that would really make a person work out the details of a concept. It would make you all weak and dizzy I think. And why are we flushing things out anyway? Aren’t the literal and metaphorical toilets of our lives already clogged with enough refuse and excretions that we now have to add this? I think we should do less flushing and more fleshing. Or eating flesh.

Which is nothing compared to the wonderfully mangled “see what’s coming down the pipe”, to refer to future occurrences. The proper expression is “coming down the pike” (short for “trunpike, a highway of sorts). When I hear people say that — educated people, no less — all I can do is think to myself “You know what comes down my pipe? Well it ain’t those damn kidney stones, I’ll tell ya!”

I’m not here to list the millions of malapropisms people say. That will be a different episode and my uncle has a list longer than his hairy arm. It’s really all about a cheap idea to steal from someone way more literate than I could ever be, apply a dash of twisted humor, and then beg you readers to not report me to the authorities.

What does this pain-racked rant have to do with this installment of Stanko & Tibor, once described by Aung San Suu Kyi as “a reason to abandon pacifism in favor of taking up arms with a fully loaded Uzi” and by the Pope as “indisputable proof the Devil exists”? Well, if you are too thick to get the blatant Shakespeare rip-off in the comic, then maybe you should do us all a favor and “shuffle off your mortal coil” — or is that “shuttle off your mortal boil?”

I can never get that right.

Achingly handsome in very poorly lit rooms,

Jon von Jon

The Devil’s Food

The Devi'ls Food

Devil Wins Latest Round

Dear Readers of chronically incorrect and incorrectly chronicled,

Some two long weeks ago, I read the latest article about genetically modified organisms (GMO) that claimed they are definitely safe. Tested, tried, true and having no effect on us humans. Of course there are those who stridently oppose this fact, saying these GMOs are the devil incarnate and creations of mad, money hungry mega-corporations, out to find yet another way to make a buck off buckwheat, barley and most likely the junk food I so religiously eat largely because I am so horribly addicted to the mega-refined sugar that tickles my taste buds and singes my synapses with each bite.

Which Side Are You On, Boy?

So if you’re asking me which side of the divide do I fall on, either the anti-GMO, firmly-entrenched-with-spikes camp, bearing teeth, fangs, gums and dyspepsia, or the pro-GMO, white-lab-coat-wearing, intellectually-superior-finger-waving science types, the answer is I don’t care. Not because I don’t want to. I do, I really do. Oddly, my not-caring is NOT the result — as many of you dissenters suggest on public forums and on placards left on my front lawn — of sugary foods, deliciously smoked pork products, or excessive butter intake.

My apathy (or devil-may-care attitude) toward making an informed choice on the GMO matter is the result of a fair number of pills taken to ease the symptoms of a cold that invaded all my sinus cavities, put down roots and then marched like the Chinese army down to my chest where the siege of Lung Ridge took place. If that wasn’t enough, a recent bout with ninja-blade-like kidney stones shredding their way through my dilapidated man-plumbing forced me to resort to pain killers that normally are reserved for people who just had something amputated with a rusty saw in a war zone.

A fog has settled that still hasn’t completely cleared, the stones, neither. So I can’t really care too much about matters of a worldly nature when my focus is just trying to get to the fridge to pour a glass of orange juice so I can try and float away my troubles down the yellow stream.

Sugar & Meds

All that orange juice led to a lovely sugar high, whereupon I read yet another fascinating article about the rampant use of genuine pharmacological mood-altering substances used on zoo animals to help them deal with their stress and depression issues. It seems they have many, chiefmost among them is the quality of their living quarters, being trapped an all, go figure.

It’s amazing what they have been fed to deal with their filthy animalistic ways. It’s a veritable Glaxo-Smith-Kline-Eli-Lily-Roche-Novartis cocktail the likes of which you’d have to go to a dozen different crooked or morally compromised and financially indebted doctors to get this many tranquilizers. I don’t think there are heroin junkies with this many psychotropic chemicals racing through their veins and brains.

And of course, after the juice, I ingested a coffee (to follow up my fruit danish extravaganza I neglected to mention). It got me to thinking what a horrible bunch of animals we are to treat animals that way.

The gist of the article is, these normally wild animals are freaking out over being trapped in cages for so damn long, contrary to their genetic urges to be wild animals. Most humiliating is that they are gawked at by slack-jawed city slickers and filthy, snot-ridden children who torment the animals by sticking their hands in the cages, like an appetizer, only to be yanked away at the last moment by a semi-sentient parent. You’d need a few liters /pounds /vats /gallons of Zoloft, too if you tormented thusly. It’s not far off from being stuck in a job where you sit at a desk all day pleasing your overlords, with the only difference being you have to leave one metaphorical cage to go back to the other metaphorical cage every day, except for weekend, vacations, holidays and those sick days you call in when you know full well you are just sitting at home eating bonbons.

Moneys and iPads

The gross irony in all of this is that we are nothing more than slightly less hairy monkeys with lawyers and cars and iPads.

In fact, many humans are just one missed body hair waxing appointment away from devolving back into the forests we once crawled out of and keep keep decimating. I won’t go into detail about all the wars and conflicts going on to prove of my point about us humans being animals. Nor will I dwell on some people’s eating habits at fast food restaurants and other sit down establishments that border on hunter-gatherer-slaughterer in cargo pants and a t-shirt with a printed slogan to announce one’s feelings toward alcohol, sex, cats or political leaders. Just watching some people eat confirms my theory that we just aren’t as evolved as we like to think we are, even with space travel and Star Wars, the movie.

(However, if you’re going by hairiness to determine our animalistic quotient, the Nordic countries are an anomaly. But I believe I heard somewhere from a guy at a bar, who knows a disgraced scientist with a gambling problem and a limp or a lisp that all that heavy alcohol consumption by the Nordic folks has killed off the body hair growth genes from all those distilled toxins. But I digress.)

Furthermore, that we feel the need to drug our caged animals is a sign that we want them to be more like us to some degree. Less violent, less emotional, hooked on the Internet and pharmaceuticals. It’s actually a meeting of the minds. (Or the mimes. I can never tell those apart.) Yet, I am troubled by neurotic polar bears hooked on phenobarbital and Paxil.

The Solution

Perhaps the answer lies before us. Put the animals back in the wild where they are meant to be. Where we can kill them, ruin their populations and their environments — naturally — and not in some gilded prison with a drug drip. Those drugs should be reserved for animals who need them, like high-strung, cocaine-addicted personal injury lawyers or investors. Or butt-heads who drive aggressively in trucks because they are deficient in their reproductive parts. Either way, leave the drugs to us humans and let’s give GMOs to the animals, because chances are they have a nasty hangover and need to come down gently.

I need some sugar.

Mirthfully merciless
Vlad the Inhaler Druker

The Half-Truth About People

Stanko & Tibor: Bin Laden Diaries 4

 


Half-Truths, People and Insane Ramblings

Carl Jung, the noted psychotherapists (or was it psychiatrist?or psychoanalyst? I can never remember, but I just know one of them can get me mood-altering substances in bulk if I just use that tried-and-true line “What, you don’t hear the squirrels telling you to burn down the forest and rid ourselves of the gopher menace?” Come to think, that squirrel did make a lot of sense, and he was right about the housing market crash… but I digress) once said these famous words:

“Why are there never any crackers or Saltines on the table when I order the damn tomato bisque, seeing as I come to this diner at least 3 times a week since my wife Emilie can’t make a bisque worth crap??!!”

After much forethought, some back thought and a lot of sideways thinking, I understand what Jung was trying to tell us in that cryptic message. I have come to the conclusion that you can categorize the world into groups.

Smart people who are nice

This category is indeed a rare breed, but I have plenty of family members, friends and even some colleagues who fit into that category. What qualifies them as smart? Mostly they can figure out the tip on a restaurant bill in a split second, even when the bill is split between like 6 people. Furthermore, it isn’t only education that makes them smart, because I know many people who were or are filled with life smarts and were too damn smart for a school system that couldn’t teach them anything, so off they went on their own to be happy and wildly successful. How do I know they are nice? Apart from petting me on the forehead in a benevolent, pet-like way, they aren’t hesitant to take me out to lunch or order Chinese food and pick up the tab despite my boorish behavior, poor table manners and irregular shaving habits. And they I begrudge the most since I wish they would include me in their wills, but they won’t because they are smart. Bunch of jerks.

Smart people who are mean

I was going to start with Hitler or the Quebec tax collectors being good examples, but that would be too obvious. Politicians sometimes fall into this category, but they also fall into the Dumb people who are mean group more often than not. I also thought of a few evil professors I had who thoroughly enjoyed belittling their students largely because they were unable to get an erection (or orgasm) as the younger students at the college wouldn’t pay them the time of day. Or they had a spouse that no longer loved them and had begun sleeping with the international student staying at their house for a semester and let everyone and his brother know about it. We also see examples of smart and mean people in business, the clergy, spiteful postal workers whose livelihood will soon be taken from them and crafty yet nasty grannies at Wal-Mart or other shopping institutions who have somehow outfoxed you at the checkout line, cut in front of you and managed to crush one of your toes doing it. May they rot in hell.

Smart people who are opportunistic

This group can run the gamut between nice and mean, it all depends on how they were raised and usually how hungry they are for food or sex. You see, smart people know when to capitalize on an opportunity, like snagging a free meal at a wedding they weren’t invited to, or someone who isn’t watching their case of beer at frat party. Or they know how to have drunken sex with someone at that frat party not really caring what the long-term outcome is especially if she’s in a different faculty and has herself issues with controlling her alcohol consumption at these events, which really covers up a home life where the parents were lushes themselves.

But it isn’t always about food or sex. It’s sometimes about seeing a good deal and seizing the opportunity, like when you’re shopping for that electronic gift that your spouse wishes you wouldn’t buy, but it’s on sale and your impulse control is weak at best, not unlike that of a heroin addict. Or perhaps saving someone from being run over by a car because you know that person you save will be grateful and give back to society having been given a second chance at life. Unless that person was a serial killer, so then you indirectly led to the deaths of others thinking you’d be smart and save a life. Dummy.

Smart people who are nice but dumb

So, how can you have a category that’s an oxymoron? Well, I think the very definition of ‘oxymoron‘ (adjectival compound noun, singular, consisting of the abbreviated word for oxygen (‘oxy‘), an omnipresent gas across the globe, and morons, an omnipresent amorphous blob of idiots scattered across the globe in great numbers) shows quite clearly how you can have people who are smart in one discipline, like biology, computer engineering or gambling, and are also sometime nice, but you know they can’t walk and chew gum at the same time. Like that brilliant colleague you know who can’t figure out which side of the escalator to stand on (the right, dummy) when others are trying to rush up the escalator instead of taking the stairs so they can get to their places of work or the proctologist appointment post-haste (also morons). There are a good deal of these smart, nice but dumb people in modern society. Sometimes they are made managers by other smart/dumb people thinking that gleaming success in one category, say rebuilding an engine block or calculating the trajectory of missile, must apply to others areas. Idiots. Nice idiots, well-intentioned, but smart idiots. They should be sent to a re-education camp or remedial school with whips. Just because.

Dumb people who are nice

You know you’ve met people in this category everywhere you have traveled across this earth, save maybe France (that’s the next category). We have encountered them in all walks of life, be it any societal sphere, any country, any age. Sure, sometimes it’s hard to suffer fools, but nice fools, well, they aren’t actively making the world a worse place for kicks. In some cases, they are making it a better one by not getting into fights at supermarkets, or giving freely of their tax money by playing state-sponsored lotteries so my school system and health care system have some extra funding while the rest of the world goes to rot. Now, I know many of you readers think “Hey, the dumb-but-nice category watch too much reality TV, which is in and of itself a crime.” Reality TV is a crime, but watching isn’t; it merely should be used as a marker of sorts when the aliens land and separate out the useful people from the soon to become alien dog food. Dumb but kind. These are people who everyone should be nice to largely because you don’t want them to become the next category as there are WAY too many of those on this earth.

Dumb people who are mean

Wow, where do I start? With the bureaucrats in my city who deserve life in the electric chair? Or the taxi driver whose manliness comes into question when others pass him and then likes to believe I cut him off in some alternate universe where taxi drivers are even-tempered, kind and respected, and then proceeds to scream at me through his driver’s window in a language that has yet to be deciphered and decrypted by modern linguists and computers? Or is it the policeman who arrested a citizen who pointed out to said cop that he shot through a red light in a school zone without his siren blaring and lights flashing just because he felt like it? Or the woman the policeman pepper-sprayed because said low-IQ and anger-filled, petty constable was upset had his idiocy brought to light and proceeded to violently twist the arm of the poor shuck who pointed out the fuzz’s flagrant disregard for motoring laws? (Actually, you NEVER point out anything to a cop in this city because they will arrest you, thus making you a member of the dumb by nice category. Idiots.)

There are countless, millions of examples of dumb and mean. Religious zealots of all stripes who kill for a cause. Why think critically when you can kill others for glory? Much simpler. Why think critically? Let’s not forget politicians who are caught with their pants down, both literally and figuratively, and then blame the press and subsequently find religion. Or BNP for getting caught and then not being too contrite and paying a $9 billion fine. Or that ass counsellor at summer camp who was just overjoyed at being a petty dictator so he could ruin the self-confidence of 8-year-old boys. I won’t got into snooty restaurants who apparently don’t want my money just because I made a rude gesture toward the waiter that resembled kneading dough with two fingers, while I waited impatiently for a table. (I have low blood sugar issues, what do you want from me?)

Dumb people who are opportunistic but don’t know what the word ‘opportunistic’ means and get taken advantage of by smart mean people

This is small category, but it usually involves people who don’t dress well, but think they do so they buy that horizontally striped shirt with orange accents when they really shouldn’t have. Often, they walk down a corridor where lots of other people are, and their gait is wide, their arms flail, they check their phone for email thus slowing everyone else up, and if they are carrying a backpack or purse, they have it hanging just so thus forcing you to deke and slide past them in such a way that causes you to twist a muscle in your back or arthritic hip. Their other flailing arm I just mentioned? It’s already clocked someone else in the head because dumb-dumb has no concept of personal space but just bought a smart phone sold to them by some evil smart person. This section also covers the ones who rush into a super store to get a deal on those crazy shopping days where it’s supposedly 90% off list price, and thereby causing injuries to others and themselves to glorify the gods of Mammon and greed, yet they desperately NEED a 400-inch TV set that is somewhere on Maslow’s hierarchy of basic needs next to sex and shelter and bacon. At least, that is what the smart but mean marketers with a big bonus target told them. (It’s called the Internet people. Just order, click and ship.)

So there you have it, the world sorted it out for you. Now go take this jewel of information and do with it as you will. Just make you sure when you get arrested that you forget conveniently that I was the one who told you THE TRUTH.

Lovingly pudgy, haltingly hairy, and addicted to sugar,

Pope Gregarious the XXIII

Backward Reading & Forward Looking

 

Stanko & Tibor: Reading Diaries

 


These Thoughts Fuelled by C12H22O11 and C8H10N4O

After a very strong, brain stem-rattling, intestinal-clearing espresso, I decided to eat what medical practitioners and health & nutrition experts commonly refer to in technical jargon as “baked death”, a.k.a. a gooey chocolate danish. Then after ingesting this, I couldn’t help but begin think about things — largely as a result of the consumption of the aforementioned sugar-drenched confection spawned by Satan’s best bakers that kicked my brain into overdrive, giving synapse impulses free reign to fire wildly and circumvent the the IQ-suppressing and dullard-enhancing lead I absorbed as a child through toys, leaded gasoline in the early 70’s and no doubt Chinese food cooked in woks from the Ming dynasty.

I came to the conclusion rather quickly that you can divide the world broadly into two categories: Based on the premise if you could actually travel through time, there would be those who would travel to the future, and those who travel to the past. Two groups. That’s it. Let me explain before I digress into a nap in the fetal position in front of the TV.

Future People – Forward Thinking

I strongly believe that those people who would travel to the future are by nature explorers, people who like uncertainty, adventure, are curious, open-minded and who want to know about wild new cool technologies, what new buildings we will design, what will the world look like, see if we conquered space travel and inhabited another plant. Or if fashion followed all those Hollywood movies that predicted we would be wearing a lot of spandex jump suits, and if we would be having sex with aliens that so many pimply geeks — bunkered away in their basements, terminally on the Internet with sticky keyboards and tied to their computers — long dreamed about.

I also think the other sort of future traveler would be the type of person who is trying to flee something dark in their past (probably something sordid in a bathroom stall at a fast food restaurant). By launching forward, in time the general public will have likely forgotten what made them so heinous to begin with. This group probably has some mass murderers on a good behavior break.

Wouldn’t it be cool to see if science has found a cure for stupidity and maybe try new mixed drinks that 23rd century bartenders have come up with? Also you would be treated like royalty just for being an ancient artifact in the future world, and you would be studied (and possibly dissected) and fêted by others so that is a plus for future travel. You could actually tell people how it really was in the olden days when times were simpler and we only had 1400 TV channels.

A negative of future travel may be, however, that humans will have physically evolved to such a point that everyone will have seven fingers on each hand and giant, powerful brains performing telepathic feats and be seven feet tall, and you would be a shrimpy, bakward, unevolved little mental reprobate who would be laughed at and bullied by society at large and on the cover of a major magazine and what would pass for social media.

Past People – Reading Backwards

After numerous scientific experiments involving shaved monkeys, a bottle or three of cough syrup, a blow torch, some cleaning solvents, some strawberries, and a case of malt liquor, I woke a few days later having had time to think about this. I am scientifically convinced that people who would desire to travel back in time are sissies and control freaks. Why? Because you already know the outcome of world events. You could bet on sporting events or political assassinations and Hollywood couple divorces with absolute certainty as a get rich quick scheme. You know what’s coming.

Think how many bets with that annoying relative or that know-it-all jerk at the office you could win with stuff like “I’ll bet you a million bucks that the dumbest human alive is elected to the office of US President by the year 2000.” You’d clean up. Bring a history book with you and spend every evening reading, and you’d be the Jeopardy champ. What fun is knowing everything ahead of time? Control-freak sissy time traveler.

And don’t give me that garbage about traveling back in time and assassinating Hitler or Osama Bin Laden. You’d be too distracted by the cheap beer and hot dogs and glossy “adult” magazines that you now have to fork over a credit card for when you’re online. I am told by a doctor. Also don’t forget the fact that taking a gun back in time would violate travel safety rules at the time port. There is a pat down before you going the time machine, you know, so dischargeable weapons are a no-no.

Sex & Money – That’s All They Ever Think About

A potential positive of travelling back in time would be that you could sleep with people who looked good a long, long time ago in photos or old movies, but are now either dead or wrinkly and on oxygen. If you chose to return to the mid to late 1960s and early 1970s, however, when there was still a lot of free love, you could sleep around and do dope and be a rebel. The lazy time travelers among you could submit patents for things you know were invented by someone else so you could submit the patent and then sue them later when they actually invent it and make some easy money.

I am sure there are those who would happily travel back in time just so they could make all kinds of racist and politically incorrect jokes that were accepted back then that you can’t say now without being pillaged in the press and social media. My guess is the folks who want to travel back in time believe “in the good ole times” largely because they can’t handle modern day complexity. Like the television remote or getting your computer printer to work.

You could go back and marry that other person you dated to see how poorly your life would have turned out anyway. Or maybe go back and redo your 9th grade chemistry exam and just barely pass it again to prove either you or the teacher were deficient in doing their jobs. Or both.

Then And Then

Let’s face it, humans have always thought it was simpler “back then” whenever “then” was. What did cavemen and cavewomen really have to figure out apart from eating, not being eaten, and pleasing the angry gods who thundered every so often? Not much. What did our relatives of ancient Africa ever have to figure out? Pretty much eating, not being eaten, leaving Africa (it was a dump then too, I heard) and running the other way when a lion or tiger or bear came looking for an appetizer.

Same goes for our only slightly more advanced relatives in China, India, Europe and elsewhere as humans began working with metals and killing each other with spears, swords, knives, and other stuff. None of them has it as complicated as I do, what with a dozen loyalty coffee cards in my wallet, and Costco tempting me all the time with special offers on crap I am told I need to be socially accepted, and, of course, my father’s iPhone that needs constant updating because he patently refuses to update ANY of his software. If he had to start reading the instruction manual, I could see his aversion. Just press the damn button and agree to the terms of use and be done with it!

I can see why you’d want to travel back in time, just to avoid being the family help desk 24/7.

What About Me?

What does this insightful rant have to do with the latest episode of the comic that was recently branded by the Oprah book club and Lady’s Home Knitting Journal, May Edition, as “sub-mental” and “proof of society’s inability to stitch together a coherent thought, let alone a sweater “? Not much, to be honest, but it does tell us to live in the present because you can’t control the past or the future. Unless you have a lot of money.

Unsure of the time of day,

Randy “Winner-Winner Chicken Dinner” McSnowden

Truthfully Lying Inaccurately

Bin LAden Diaries II

 

Fractious and Foolish, Not Factual

Upon cleaning the house and removing debris, junk, garbage, refuse, detritus, jetsam AND flotsam, not to mention papers from the kids’ school year that could serve as proof they are intelligent if we were ever to sell them on the black market, I decided to do something foolish, childish, immature even. I asked my wife why she’s keeping empty, massed produced canisters that once held tea. Painful, disdainful and solitary confinement-treatment silence reigned for intolerable minutes, with no discernible peep from the significant other, who, for reasons still inexplicable some 15 years later after agreeing to sign the contract that bound us in unholy matrimony, decided to fulfill her end of the bargain and marry me, I can only assume, on a dare from I’m guessing someone she once called a friend and now sticks needles into via a voodoo doll.

Why foolish, you ask? What stupid spouse of the male variety would ever do such a thing as to question his significant other on matters of emotional nature when he knows pursuing this to a logical (read: NOT an emotional) end would/could/should, nay, will with absolute death-and-taxes certainty lead to elevated blood pressures, voices and no doubt to a withholding tax on acts of a sexual nature for an indeterminate period of time? (Think in terms if business quarters — like “Q2 and Q3 were barren with transactions evaporating south of the Mason Dixon line, and principal shareholders sorely disappointed ready to revolt and appoint a new board” — and you’ll get the idea.)

This marked difference is not so much the Mariana Trench depth of division between the male and the female. I am sure gay couples are this stupidly, erratically emotional too. I’d say rather it’s the difference between being single and married, or at least single and shacked up with another inmate under the auspices of “for better, for worse, in sickness and in health.”

Rampant Single Stupidity

You see when I was single I would do stupid things galore from keeping pre-historic underwear and old beer bottles to ancient car magazines and punk rock albums I no longer listened to just because I couldn’t bare the thought of cleaning up, let alone tidying anything, as that would have detracted from my  cartoon-watching time. But now the wheel has turned and the shoe is on the other glove (I told you, logic has nothing to do with this rant). I am cleaning up after my kids and need help logically keeping things in order, including it would seem, empty tea canisters with no monetary value, but high clutter value. When I was single, logic and order played no role in anything I did. No one questioned me except my parents who were legally forced to admit they loved me and provide shelter, clothing and food once the court order became effective. In fact, the word logic wasn’t even in my vocabulary (I was a very poor student).

Yet somehow, the lessons of life stuck, and my university major in “space optimization so I don’t trip going down the bloody stairs” is paying dividends but is upsetting those who I require help from when asking why we should even keep a freaking tea canister when we have enough crap lying around the house. I could try and apply abductive reasoning to gain that moment of clarity, but that will piss off someone who just sighs in misery and thinks of melting down her wedding band to fund a trip back to the old country.

The World Goes Around, But How?

Speaking of scientific theory and fact-based decision-making, I may have discovered what makes the world spin around, and I don’t think Sir Issac Newton’s theory of gravity or the sun’s magnetic pull are correct. You see, applying logic to places where I am allowed (note: NOT to cleaning up the house to rid it of excess tea canisters) I realized that when half the world is awake, standing up and moving around, the other half is lying down, sometimes sleeping, sometimes doing bad things on their iPads, mostly horizontal, and without the help of Viagra or Cialis, not terribly erect. So the theory goes, those that are lying down, or at least having sex in boring positions, have lowered their center of gravity sufficiently to allow those on the other side of the globe to sway the earth with their higher centre of gravity, kind of like a ball filled with liquid, as it rolls around.

The sleepers and the “having boring sex lying downers” aren’t putting any momentum into the earth, while those moving about vigorously, particularly proctologists on call, truckers high on caffeine pills, lecherous politicians, sweaty plumbers and strippers dancing at clubs (not all mutually exclusive groups by the way) are making the earth swing about on its wobbly axis. Hence I have solved what makes the earth go around, in perfect imbalance, if you discount years of science and sex and money as other explanations.

Sure, I know what you’re thinking — he’s totally lost the plot this time, but let’s be honest. If I am prevented from throwing out legitimate crap from the house and left to think about these things because of the aforementioned withholding tax, I can’t be held accountable for these scientifically steadfast theories that will be borne out after I am dead or when I bribe the Nobel counsel with strippers and chocolate.

Lastly, what does any of this have to do with the latest and greatest posting of the Stanko & Tibor comic, frequently cited in criminal testimony as a decisive factor that led to mass fruit fondling incidents at supermarkets across the globe? Well, like the outlandish plot line and dialog you no doubt read in the comic and then forwarded it to publishers all over the globe in the hopes of helping me get discovered (or incarcerated), we humans are interested in the lives of others, no matter how ridiculously untrue or bizarre those stories may be, because our daily lives of tea canister shifting and arranging have robbed us the will to think for ourselves.

Wishing you many sleepless nights
Sir Issac Einstein von dem Hinterland Druker