Most People Just Celebrate Halloween for the Boos

It won’t be long now and the neighbor kids will be running across my lawn and, under the approving eye of their loving parents, practice extortion.  They call it trick-or-treating, but everyone knows it’s just a huge shakedown.  Here I am a grown man and I have to shell out a Jujube so some little six-year old brat doesn’t unload the leftover tomatoes from his grandpa’s garden on my screen door?  What kind of sick tradition is this?  I don’t even know what a Jujube is.

It turns out that the tradition of Halloween is one of those Christian origin things that people prefer to ignore the origin of…like science, or equality, or torturing people to get them to recant—oh wait; everybody remembers that last one.  It’s true, though.  Halloween is a religious observance; something about remembering all the saints and martyrs who died of hypoglycemia.  But don’t tell the politically correct secular police or they might get all hissyfitted into a new pair of whinypants and we’d have to start calling it Holidayween and kids would no longer be allowed to ‘cross’ the street to trick-or-treat. Continue reading

I Would Have Driven Boston’s Freedom Trail, but I Lost My Khakis

Boston CommonIf you are familiar with Boston, you know that it is famous for its garden, its baked beans, and its 2013 baseball team resembling the cast of Duck Dynasty.  It is also arguably the educational capitol of the U.S. with such respected universities as BU, MIT and Harvard, where you can get a prestigious degree in Ancient Greek or Women’s Studies that is sure to jumpstart your career as a barista.

I had a day off there this week and I was going to follow the typical American crowd and go to Cheers, but nobody there knows my name.  So instead I ventured down Boston’s famous Freedom Trail and its many sites dedicated to the distortion of America’s founding.  And of course, I took copious notes so that upon my return I could save my readers from spending upwards of $3 on an official infomap and offer up this,

The Official conTIMplating Guide to The Freedom Trail for Those too Cheap to Shell Out $3 for the Official Infomap Continue reading

Redskins’ Name Is Siouxper Offensive

The Washington Redskins are in the news over their name again.  The word on the social media street is that there is pressure to change it because of embarrassment over the term ‘Washington,’  hahajklol;).  The manufactured outrage is actually over the term ‘Redskin’ as it is perceived as disparaging toward Native Americans and psoriasis sufferers by implying that they are competitive and fierce.

Other teams are under the tomahawk over this, including the Atlanta Braves, the Cleveland Indians, the Kansas City Chiefs, the Florida State Seminoles, the Chicago Blackhawks, the Cincinnati Reds, and the Birmingham Whites Only. Continue reading

In the Words of Lionel Richie: Still

You have probably heard by now that the US Government is still pretending to be shutdown.  It’s kind of like a three-year-old who pulls a blanket over her head and thus concludes that because she cannot see anyone else, she also cannot be seen.

It turns out that only about 17% of the government is actually shutdown; and if my math is correct, that is really stupid.   That means 83% of the government is still hard at work making sure it looks like they are not working, which they really do anyway.  So it’s not so much of a shutting off of government workflow as much as it is like an enlarged prostate where there is reduced flow that comes out in shorter streams and won’t let you get a good night’s sleep. Continue reading

Understanding the Impending Ongoing Government Shutdown

This may come as a surprise to my regular readers, but it turns out that I am finally conscious.  For the past three (plus) days I have been asleep under the spell of some nasty virus that would have MacAfee, Norton, and Avira all virtually running for their lives.  But alas, as my sickened stupor wears away I am again “with it” (as the hip youngsters like to say) and am able to momentarily return to wasting everyone’s time by blathering idiotically for no particular reason as if I were a human 24-hour news channel.

Wanting to catch everyone up on the latest events of the day, ever since my NyQuil has worn off I have been tirelessly investigating exactly what is going on with this big government shut-down thingy that everyone is talking about.  And based on the ten minutes or so I have just spent on Google, here is what we know so far in no particular order and in very impressive bullet form: Continue reading