5-19-2004 Intemperate musings


Devout believers of any sort are idiots who shouldn't hold public office.--George Soros, from his book "The Bubble of American Supremacy."

Guess what happened to me today. It hasn't happened in a while, but I was standing on line at a Turkey Hill on the west side when the chickie standing beside me, who looked as if she had just wandered away from a commune chirped, "You're the Wilkes-Barre Online guy." "Yup," I replied. Then she proceeded to set my life straight: "You need to chill out and enjoy life. Life's too short. Screw the government. Forget what they've told you all these years. Expand your knowledge and enjoy."

That's just about a word-for-word recounting of her positive advise.

Man, oh man! And you good folks thought I was fargin' whacked-out! Granted, I do have reason to believe that my horribly mutated penis was once exposed to a healthy dose of LSD. Don't ask. When I ejaculate, I have Maureen McCormick flashbacks but, that's sort of normal for corn dogs my age. Or is it? And I will admit that I'm waiting for Charlie Manson to be paroled so he can lead us to the promised land (?), but if this chick thinks I'm going to start eating organic (a bowl of wheat germ and a sprinkling of fresh soil), she had better inject some more peanut butter oil into her veins, head back to Bethel, New York, and sing, dance, and strum with all of her imaginary rent-a-mob friends. Or maybe sex with someone other than her liberal arts type professor would help.

Sh*t, man. I thought all of the well-meaning but confused commies were getting real close to eternal retirement age, i.e., Hitlery Clintonista. Don't tell me we've got another generation of these fully indoctrinated, yet unsuspecting Soviet youth to survive. How 'bout if I dedicate the remainder of my life to protecting trees, move to Taxachusetts, marry a U.P.S. guy, join the Green Party (frustrated Marxists and socialists) and smoke an awful lot of something organic with a chemical chaser.

Thank God I quit college before the intelligensia ganged-banged my impressionable mind. Well, they did force me to learn the metric system well in advance of the one world government takeover that the Republicans are still resisting to this day. And they made us study the rapidly approaching ice age, but it was officially cancelled when the global warming junk science became overly politicized. And they did teach us that we should try to understand why the Vietnamese had every right to kill our troops. You know, the invading capitalist hordes. No, I didn't take the life drawing class. Sketching naked, ugly girls seemed like a waste even bigger than what I was being taught. Whatever.

I mean, it wasn't a total waste of time. I learned how to play quarters and how not to make a total ass of myself after consuming enough trendy agricultural amusement aides to down a freakin' rhino and it's entire family. I did join the Circle K Club and gave plenty back to my community after I learned that the membership of the club was 99% female. Oh, yeah, and that they drank more often than they held Easter egg hunts for under-privileged kids. Yowza!

I think the most important lesson I learned was that I didn't need to go $50,000 in debt to one day earn $50,000 a year. Oh, and that most of the professors reeked of vaseline. It's not that they couldn't reach my mind, my mind simply didn't want to be reached by their ilk.

Expand your knowledge and enjoy? That depends on who's doing the expanding and exactly what is it that they want to expand in addition to my demented mind.

Alfred E. Neuman out!


Gee whiz! The Braves game...

... was a freakin' blast last night. NOT! A 40 year-old pitcher throws a perfect game? More often than not, when a pitcher throws a gem like that it involves a certain measure of good fortune. That was not the case on TBS last night. Randy Johnson was dominating from start to finish. You don't suppose he's hanging around with Barry "You're not getting older, you're becoming Superman" Bonds lately, do ya? Sharing a syringe maybe? Maybe not. I do know this. Randy Johnson is the ugliest pitcher ever to throw a perfect game. Cripes! He makes Johnny Damon look like a cover boy.

I scooped even Matt Drudge with this preview. The new McDonalds ad soon to grace your video advertising box. You deserve a break today. So throw up then crawl away from... McDonalds, mo-f**ker.

I'd bet that the paramedics employed by this city get this a lot. They respond to a two car MVA and find one of the drivers slumped over a distorted steering wheel. They peer into his now mangled Ford Ranger king cab for a second and ask the driver what it is that ails him. He then slowly lifts his blood-stained head and blurts out "Bitch hit my truck!" I'll betcha.

SO! We need to...

...restructure our massive debts yet again. Those of us that lamented the loss of our beloved city calendars over and over again should be feeling pretty stupid right about now. And let's not forget the couch potato goofs that raged against any form of volunteerism because they pay taxes. What is it about being not only broke, but being millions upon millions in debt that some folks just can't seem to grasp?

I, unlike the dim-witted among us, trust Mayor Leighton to do the financially responsible thing here. No one, I mean no politico wants to stretch any debts out over ten years, but in this case, we simply gotta do what we gotta do to not only stay afloat financially, but to also rebuild our poor deflicted city.

The one thing I would do different is I WOULD raise taxes, but I also understand that Mayor Leighton is a politician who has been forced to make the really tough monetary decisions and raising taxes at this time might be tantamount to stringing up his own rope. He's barely five months into his reign, but there are already rumors making the rounds about his likely challenger come reelection time.

While reading the papers this morning...

...I had this overwhelming urge to commit a grisly quasi-homicide and then break the news to wifey that we were moving to the Noxen suburbs.

There was nothing new, just the usual list of expensive albatrosses. The empty call center. The rejuvenated Redevelopment Authority. The Classic Bride lawsuit. Restructuring $14 million in debts carried over from you know who. It was when I arrived on Page 3 of the Leader and read It's a long commute for McGroarty when I first began to see red.

...his passion for public service...???????

Let's be serious, shall we. The lure of bloated salaries and premature if not unearned pension benefits sounds more like it. A pension after five years of service? What a joke. If he really wanted to passionately serve the public, he should earmark a rather hefty percentage of his paychecks to paying off the unpaid debts he created all by his lonesome. Oh, yeah, and learn how to zip his lip.

This just in...

...via the dreaded e-mail inbox. This one is for Kevin Lynn and Joe Snedeker, the co-hosts of "The NEPA Man Show" every morning from 6-9 am on WILK:

Subject: Safety Warning

Police are warning all men who frequent clubs, parties and local pubs to be alert and stay cautious when offered a drink from any woman. Many females use a date rape drug on the market called "Beer" to target unsuspecting men. The drug is generally found in liquid form and is now available almost anywhere. It comes in bottles, cans, from taps, and in large "kegs”. “Beer” is used by female sexual predators at parties and bars to persuade their male victims to go home and have sex with them.

Typically, a woman needs only to persuade a guy to consume a few units of “Beer” and then simply ask him home for no strings attached sex. Men are rendered helpless against this approach. After several “Beers”, men will often succumb to desires to perform sexual acts on horrific looking women to whom they would never normally be attracted.*

After drinking “Beer” men often awaken with only hazy memories of exactly what happened to them the night before, often with just a vague feeling that something "bad" occurred. At other times these unfortunate men are swindled out of their life's savings, in a familiar scam known as "a relationship”. It has been reported that in extreme cases, the female may even be shrewd enough to entrap the unsuspecting male into a longer-term form of servitude and punishment referred to as "marriage”.

Apparently, men are much more susceptible to this scam after “Beer” is administered and sex is offered by the predatory females. Please forward this warning to every male you know. If you fall victim to this insidious “Beer” and the predatory women administering it, there are male support groups with venues in every town where you can discuss the details of your shocking encounter in an open and frank manner with similarly affected, like-minded guys. For the support group nearest you, just look up "Golf Courses" in the yellow pages

*one is reminded of the boast "I never went to bed with an ugly woman....." and the woeful added observation, "woke up with a few, though."

********


During the past couple of days...

... I read the papers accounts of how two arrest warrants were issued in the case of the structure fire to end all structure fires here in the Nord End.

There sure does seem to be a heaping pile of circumstantial evidence stacked up against the two guys accused of torching that rather large North Main Street building that used to cast a shadow over Oh Yes. What has me scratching my head is why would it take five years to file charges against them, and even more curiously, why wait until the statute of limitations was set to expire on this entire episode? If the evidence against these two would be arsonists is just so overwhelmingly compelling, why weren't they brought to trial years ago?

There is one other question that dwarfs the aforementioned queries. Does charcoal starter fluid really do a bang-bang job of cleaning floor tiles?

Some of us may hate to hear it, but unless something goes seriously awry with this case, a few apologies might be in order. We shall see.


From the e-mail inbox...

...this one may be deemed to be "racial" in nature in a country seemingly obsessed with wishy-washy political correctness, but there is always some small modicum of truth in nearly all humor. It is what it is.

*******Four guys walking on the beach, one Mexican, one muslim, one African American (black) and one regular American. They all see a bottle sticking up from the sand, and all four dive to grab it. All four touch the bottle at the same time, and a geni appears. He is perplexed that he now has to grant one wish to each of them.

The Mexican wishes that all Mexicans be returned to their homeland to live in peace and prosperity. The geni complies.

The muslim wishes all muslims be returned to their respective home countries to live in peace and harmony. The geni complies.

The black dude wishes that all people of color are returned to their native land to live as they once did. The geni complies.

The regular American asks the geni if all those people have indeed been returned to the lands of their ancestors and geni says ablolutely, they are all gone! The geni then asks the regular American for his wish.

The guy thinks for a minute then says, "I'll have a diet coke".*******

Yikes! The Thought Police just went over the adobe in a black helicopter.

Take note of the phrase "regular American." In my deluded mind, every American is a "regular American" provided that they first pledge their undying alliegence to this country. I don't care what anyone looks like or what they sound like, as long as they are productive, law-abiding folks. Then, and only then, are they "regular Americans" in my tattered book.

I gotta go. Some young dudes are on their way over here to remove some furniture from the adobe. Once that's done, I'll have my own playroom devoted exclusively to music, guitars and all things Wilkes-Barre.

You know, it's not so bad being crazy.

Later