Tag Archives: extortion

Crime, Day-to-Day, Frustration & Complaint, Meaning of Life

Manny The Mender

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Stanko & Tibor - Manny the MenderCrime is like tomato sauce – there are many types, versions and kinds, and getting it just right takes patience and practice. The timing has to be just right and you can’t just use any tomatoes to get the job done. And sometimes you have to improvise with gun powder.

Now, those of you who actually deign to read Stanko & Tibor — probably in private, in the dark or in a closet with a flash light, lest you be outed as a deviant fan of this handcrafted, visual gem that once was called by the National Board of Psychologists, Psychotherapists, Physiotherapists and Psychiatrists as “messed up” — are wondering to yourselves, “how could he credibly compare crime and tomato sauce in the same breath?”

Quite simple, actually. Allergy medication, two large, sugary chocolate danishes for breakfast and an insurmountable deficit of sleep have all come together over the past week and conspired to give you this installment of Stanko & Tibor and the theme of crime and incompetence.

And these two deeply intertwined topics are present every day that I walk past the multiple construction sites that surround my place of work, knowing full well they are being done with shoddy workmanship and half the “proceeds” going to the Fund for Overfed Mafiosi and probably a slice to the mayor and the party in power too. Don’t even get me started on the extortionist approach of the protesting students while they tweet on their iPhones. But I digress as the evening progresses.

Now with the start of June here, the green grasses grow quickly(when it isn’t so dang cold in the evenings), the trimmers and mowers work their magic and the kids run about til late in the evening, shouting and coming into the house with filthy feet and subsequently filthifying the bathtub when we force a shower on them. And it is with these summery thoughts and images in your head that I bid you adieu for another week or two until I get around to the last installment on this topic of crime and self-punishment.

Enjoy the weather, eat some non-criminal tomato sauce, and eat a lot of fiber. A recipe for happiness if there ever was one.

Truly and deeply yours,

Gustavo del Fuego Drukero

Frustration & Complaint, Meaning of Life

Hostage 2 Big Oil

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Hostage to Big Oil

It’s with a heavy heart and crusty eyes due to a lack of sleep and some kind of pollutant in the air that I say to all and sundry, we have to get rid of big oil. And replace it with lots of little small oils, so I can choose between any number of gasoline-producing and refining joints that will actually compete on price and and not bend each and every one of us over harder than a forced colonoscopy administered by a brusque colo-rectal surgeon.

Which is what filling up at the gas station is nowadays.

But there are those of you who says this will spur innovation and invention to rid us of the fossil fuels that pollute our lungs, our air, our rivers and countless other things I am too tired to think about without a good night’s sleep. And I say to you, stop smoking that bad weed, you hippie. Let’s face it, petroleum products, be they gasoline, jet fuel or fast food from McDonald’s disguised as a hash brown is necessary for our way of life. If we didn’t depend on it, what would the US foreign policy be apart from “attack Canada, those socialist bastards!” How many military industrial complex jobs would be threatened if they didn’t kick off wars on countries for the black gold where the US army doesn’t really like the local cuisine? The US economy would grind to a halt.

No, being a hostage to oil is like being a hostage to chocolate or beer or greasy burgers or freshly baked danishes with some kind of cinnamon sugary goo that could have only been invented in a lab with an evil scientist and massive R&D budget. It’s something we like being held hostage to, it gives us a reason to complain to moan and to bleat, so we can distract ourselves from the real problems facing all great nations, all great civilization since the dawn of time – namely, why are there never enough cashiers at the checkout counter when I want to just buy a damn carton of OJ, and some high fat yogurt when the idiot in front of me is arguing  over a 2-day old zucchini that isn’t scanning through at 99¢?!!