Category Archives: Water Buffalo Intestines

What’s in the gnus

Suspended Over a Pop-Tart? One Cannoli Hope

What with my big family vacation and then coming home to take down all my Cesar Chavez Easter decorations—not to mention getting geared up for National Grilled Cheese Sandwich Month this month—I totally missed the story out of Maryland a while back in which a 7-year old boy was suspended from school after eating his Pop-Tart into a shape kind of maybe resembling a sort of handgun and then, in a fit of imagination imitating media inundation, going “bang bang.”

Supposedly, the second-grader’s intent was to shape the pastry into a mountain; kind of a three-dimensional monochrome post-impressionist landscape piece.  But a slight, rather amateurish design miscalculation resulted in the boy mistakenly creating a fearsome profile resembling a treacherous terroristic armament capable of dropping sprinkles all over the cafeteria floor at up to 9.8 meters per second per second. Continue reading →

Doping Ice Fishermen Is Snow Joke

So I’m cleaning out my birdcage the other day and I ran across an article in the New York Times regarding an event here in my neck of the woods that got me conTIMplating why it’s called ‘neck’ of the woods and not ‘hip’ of the woods or ‘spleen’ of the woods and why it’s even in the woods in the first place.  Said event was the World Ice Fishing Championships held last week on the Big Eau Pleine Reservoir (French for ‘large, old, nondescript body of water’) located in the greater Wausau, Wisconsin Metropolitan Area.

Fishermen from eleven countries (counting newcomers Japan and Mongolia) paid their own considerable fares to get to Northern Central Wisconsin, known as “The Northern Central Wisconsin Capitol of the World” because at no other location can one find so much of Northern Central Wisconsin. Continue reading →

Beauty and the Beast: The Dilemma

I will admit that as this new year begins, my nerves are more frazzled than Gary Busey trying to program a VCR.  The reason for my significant apprehensive trepidation is that I’m pretty sure I’m about to lose my job, which will significantly reduce the opportunities I have to drink free coffee and/or surf the net.  This deduction stems from a couple of recent hard-hitting news stories that lead me to believe I have enough strikes against me to be mistaken for a public school system. Continue reading →

Mission Opossum-able

As the year-end approaches, the internally redundant question that is often asked and repeated by the likes of Johnny Mathis, Harry Connick, and Rod Stewart is: “What are you doing New Year’s…New Year’s Eve?”  A popular New Year’s activity is to watch people drop things.  This is usually done while consuming copious amounts of alcohol and so the most commonly dropped item is one’s inhibitions, but there are any number of more tangible items to watch being dropped all around the world.

Perhaps the best-known dropped item is New York’s Times Square ball.  This is a tradition that started over 100 years ago and has more recently come to symbolize how many times Mayor Michael “Compared To Me Scrooge McDuck Is A Pauper” Bloomberg has himself dropped the ball during his administration.  Continue reading →

Uninformed Because of Holiday Distractions? This May Help…

Here we are in mid-December—the time of year when, amidst our holiday bustle, we begin to pause and somberly reflect on why this is the only time of the year anybody ever uses the word ‘bustle.’  It is also the time of year when we don’t really pay much attention to what is going on in the world in terms of history-making and/or altering news stories because we here in the West are so reverently focused on the birth of the Christ child and all the frantic patriotic consumerism it affords.

Combine that with 93% of all US network coverage being about either Lindsay Lohan or a make-believe crisis wherein Democrats and Republicans are making an hubristic grab for money and power by pretending to be Thelma and Louise, and it creates The Perfect Storm of Notorious movie-title metaphors. Continue reading →