100% what?

I saw a bumper sticker on an oversized black pickup truck that said "100% Jesus." That was it.

100% Jesus? Is Jesus, like, an ingredient in cereal now? "Fortified with vitamins C, D, and 100% RDA of Jesus!" What cereal would that be? Christ Crispies? ("One bowl and you're ready for the day before the cock crows three times!") Does Ivory soap now contain 99.44% Jesus?

Maybe the truck has a new type of fuel system that runs entirely on Jesus? Instead of keeping Jesus on the dashboard, now one could put Jesus in the gas tank? Would that have environmental consequences? Would there be a byproduct produced or health hazards? In 20 years would we hear reports like "Over the last two decades, we've seen a 70% increase in stigmata, yet the Republicans still insist that this is not caused by Jesus fuel systems, but is a natural phase the earth goes through every so often."

You think gasoline costs a lot per gallon, wait'll you see how much a gallon of Jesus costs. I mean, there's only so much Jesus to go around, and he's already being used daily in communion wafers and wine. When you put it in your car, would you be allowed to say you were "pumping Jesus?" If your battery died, would you be able to revive it with a few sprinkles of gas? Or would you have to wait until judgment day, when all cars would return to life at once?  Wouldn't Jesus have enough to do without having to propel the world's vehicles, too.  "Aw come on," he'd complain, "what's wrong with solar or hydrogen? Can't you people do anything for yourselves?"  It'd be a pretty thorny issue.

(c) 2010 Scott Tel.  All rights reserved.

Mmmm...me...

Know what I just realized? If I could develop a chocolate-scented cologne, I’d have the womenfolk all over me like white on rice. Don’t women love chocolate?  Isn’t that the stereotype? You don’t think a guy smelling like an “O-Henry” bar would draw the women like moths to a lightbulb?

What the heck is wrong with moths anyway, that they keep clamoring around light? They don’t clamor to the moon when there’s no light, do they? What do the moths way out in the woods do? Maybe when you die you actually become a moth, and that’s why people report being drawn to a bright light. There’s really no heaven, it’s just a GE soft-white 40-watt porch light that we all flap towards.



Note: I looked into it and moths apparently use the moon's light as a navigation aid, and since they don't know there's such a thing as a Sylvania candelabra bulb, they assume any light must be the moon.  But the moon is far away, and always in the sameish spot to them, while a light bulb is nearby; they can see it on their left, then their right, then their above, all within seconds.  They keep thinking it's the moon and that they must need to correct their position to it...which changes again a second later...requiring an adjustment...etc.  It confuses them and they end up flying in little circles around the light, bonking into it.  Bonk bonk.

That's fine.  But since the scientists who developed that idea aren't moths, and neither am I, I would hold that my theory is just as valid and feasible, so be nice to those annoying, spinning moths; you don't want to smash someone's grandma and ruin her eternal reward.  Well, you shouldn't want to.

(c) 2010 Scott Teel.  All rights reserved.

Presidents' Day

Can it be Presidents' Day again already? Seems like we just celebrated it and took our decorations down last week! Of course, the stores had their Presidents' Day decorations up for sale in October as usual, so it seems like it's a longer Presidents' Day Season than it really is.  They put that stuff out earlier and earlier every year.

I wonder if, for former presidents who are still alive, it's like having another father's day or something. Do you get a tie or a new drill maybe? What if you know a former president? What do you get him? A t-shirt that says "World's Best Former President?"  Finding a card must be hard. You can't just go to the President's Cards section of Hallmark.

Maybe you get a more traditional gift if you're a former Prez, like your kids run into the room and jump on your bed and wake you up and give you breakfast in bed that they made for you, even though they're in their sixties. Sure, Jeb burned the toast again, and George W. put prune juice in the cereal instead of milk, but they're your kids and they tried their best.

(c)2010 Scott Teel.  All rights reserved.

New! The Toyota Guano!

'God save thee, ancient Mariner,

From the fiends that plague thee thus!—

Why look'st thou so?'—"With my crossbow

I shot the Albatross."

                                                               --Samuel Taylor Coleridge
                                                                  The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

As the owner of a Toyota Matrix, I’ve been paying attention to all of the recent recall news on Toyota’s brands. I have always praised Toyota, never had anything but good to say about my car or the company, until these latest revelations hit the fan. It’s bad enough that basically all of their top lines needed a recall fix for accelerator-sticking, and the Prius has been recalled for brake problems, but recent news about the company knowing for years of the problems, being warned by All-State insurance of issues, and the slow way they handled actually addressing the problem once it was already public, not to mention the CEO’s lack of much remorse or caring when he finally did get around to it has really gotten Toyota’s reputation a good reaming.

How bad is it? I was in the parking lot at the mall yesterday, finishing a phone conversation in the car, when another Toyota pulled in next to me. I was gobsmacked at the sight of this vehicle, and said loudly into the phone, “Oh my God, I’ve never seen to much bird poo in my life!” I was so absolutely stunned that I said it again, “That’s a lot of bird poo!” The young woman getting out of the car’s passenger side glanced at me as I yelped that.  She heard me.

But I don’t think I had anything to apologize for, I was simply agog (“gobsmacked” and “agog” in one blog, hooray!) and to prove it, I took the photo below.

That is one poo-ass covered car, as they say in London’s Royal Society. And the picture doesn’t even do it justice. I mean, the darker splotches kind of vanish into the paint job in this image, in person it showed about a third more bird splatterings than appear here.

Of course, I immediately started trying to piece together what had happened here. Even nature seemed angry that Toyota had failed us, and was letting the company know, passing judgment by passing excrement. But my Toyota hadn’t been targeted, so maybe there was more to it. Was this car in a Hitchcock movie? What would make a flock of birds so angrily target one specific vehicle?  Maybe it ran over a seagull named “Gotti?” How do you so utterly piss off a flock of birds?

A family curse, was my best guess and secret hope. The owner’s ancestor had been the guy who killed the last passenger pigeon in the wild 120 years ago. The passenger pigeon, that once darkened skies for hours or days, blotting out the sun from horizon to horizon – a nighttime composed of fast-flying eight-inch birds in such unbelievable numbers they at one point made up an incredible forty percent of all birds in America, with some flocks numbering in the billions. One single flock could be over a mile wide and 300 miles long! There were so many, it couldn’t be possible for man to kill them all off, ever, and we did it in only 100 years.

And they say we don’t have ambition.

We knew they were vanishing, and we knew it was our fault. But even knowing it was the last flock, people thought only of making money right now, for themselves, not thinking about a species or even themselves next year, when they’d have nothing left to catch, and in 1900 the last wild passenger pigeons were wiped out. It makes me wonder about today’s fishing industry, which seems to be doing the same exact thing to itself. My recommendation to fishermen is: start training for your new job now! Some of you are down to fishing slime eels, with nothing else left to catch, and once they’re gone, you’ll be all ready to start your new job (I suggest logging, ‘cause there’s like totally no way we could cut down every tree in the world).

We don’t know who it was that actually killed the very last wild passenger pigeon, but like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, who is cursed for killing the albatross, this fellow and his offspring were smited with…smited?...smitten with…no, I like smited…smited with a hex! Henceforth, always would they be crappethed upon by the birds of the sky, and also penguins and ostriches if they managed to get beneath them. The curse had followed his descendents for 110 years and would keep following for a hundred hundred hundred more. I kinda didn’t want my car parked so close to theirs.

I made my way into Target, keeping my eyes out for the girl I’d seen, her red sweater and straight, blonde hair and remarkably, she and two other girls walked right past me.  College girls, buying a pole lamp. Finally I couldn’t take it any more. “Excuse me,” I said. “I was parked next to you when you pulled in…yours is the car that’s got all the…”

Oh --I hadn’t thought this far ahead and now I was stuck. How do you say “That’s your car plastered with bird shit, isn’t it?” without sounding rude? Is there a nice way to ask someone that question and not seem snarky or judgmental? Still, the sentence was already in play. I couldn’t just say “bird stuff on it” or I’d sound like an idiot.

“…bird stuff on it, right?”  Idiot.

“Yah.” The girls nodded.

“That’s amazing!” I gushed. “Do you mind if I ask how it happened?”

And they told me. And it was so boring. “Crows,” the car’s owner said. “Where I park there are a lot of crows that sit there.”

I thanked them and moved on, realizing that this was likely not one massive bird attack, but the accumulation of a couple weeks, most likely. She just hadn’t cared to get the car washed, or hadn’t driven it in some time. It was just crows, sitting in a tree over her car. That was it. I wanted more, some spectacular story of an attack, with splattering thuds raining down. Nope. Crows in a tree. Girl to cheap to have the car washed or too rich to care about the paint damage. I sighed in disappointment, but there’s hope, because if life has taught me anything, it’s this one thing: people are liars. And I know there are no more passenger pigeons and it’s her fucking fault.

And I had done a hellish thing,

And it would work 'em woe:

For all averred, I had killed the bird

That made the breeze to blow.

The very deep did rot: O Christ!

That ever this should be!

Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs

Upon the slimy sea.

(c) 2010 Scott Teel.  All rights reserved.

Y-sexual

The letter "Y" -- the bisexual of the alphabet. It can be a consonant, it can be a vowel, it goes both ways. They kept it quiet on The Letter People, but someday you'll see "Y is bi" on Sesame Street. Might be a while, but you will. And Y not?

Whoever really really really smelt it...

I read in a little factoid book that a German Shepherd’s sense of smell is more than 30,000 times more acute than a human’s. I knew dogs had a great sense of smell and all, but Christ, that’s not even a competition! We suck at smelling! I can’t even imagine smelling certain things 30,000 times more acutely than I do now. A skunk sprayed something near my house one night and it actually woke me up. An odor actually was so unbearable that my brain got frightened enough to wake me about it.

The only other time I was awakened by a smell was when I was pet-sitting two wonderful dogs for a friend of mine. I was staying at their house while the family was away, and the dogs were used to sleeping in the bed. One night, I woke up to a strong odor; there was a gas leak. And it was coming from the ass of Jake, the basset/beagle mix. Worse, I awoke with my head turned, staring into…I didn’t know. It was familiar, but my brain needed a second to figure it out, since I’d never seen an anus so closely before.

Dog farts have a distinct stink, but this one was an award-winner. I gasped and tried to sit up, but I gagged on the funky pong hanging in the air and needed to roll sideways off the bed before I could take in enough oxygen to yelp, “Jake! Out! Out of the room! You wanna to go outside?” I turned on the ceiling fan and let Jake and Mabel outside for a couple minutes, in case Jake was having issues. It took a while to clear the room enough for life to survive inside it, when we could all go back to bed. I wondered what I’d fed Jake that had led to a gas attack unlike any since the trenches of World War One.

It brings me back to dogs’ noses. Why, since they have such a spectacularly acute sense of smell, were Jake and Mabel not giving a hoot about something that my simple sense of smell found so repugnant it actually awoke me as if a potential emergency might be afoot? My brain wakes me up at night when I have to pee or when something seems terribly wrong that I might need to deal with or flee. Two dogs with me act as if they’re breathing air from the Swiss Alps. Humans have evolved over time to be repulsed by the smell of poo, rotten food, corpses, Rush Limbaugh, because those things are dangerous to us and can make us sick or dead. But dogs routinely put their noses right up to a fresh turd, will gladly eat a rotting squirrel or a piece of old cheese. These things just don’t seem to be a danger to them, so the smell isn’t considered so horrendous, perhaps.

Not that the smells are exactly pleasant to them, either. And dogs are not above pranks, as our dog Tiffany showed when I was a teen. Tiffany would walk into a room, look at us, and then leave. And then the stink would hit us. Tiffany had felt a fart coming, gotten up, walked over to the room we were in, cut one, and walked away. It happened enough times to rule out chance. She knew what she was doing. She didn’t feel like sitting in the pewey cloud, but why waste it, so she crop-dusted us, and I think she got a kick out of it.

I was maybe 10 feet down the aisle from my sister, in a toy store not too long ago, when a nasty shitty smell assaulted me. I crunched my nose and said, “Oh, KIM, Jesus! What the hell?”

Kim’s eyes widened almost fearfully, as if she’d seen the ghost of a Bigfoot. “How did you smell that so fast?” she stuttered. “I just did it…you smelled it all the way over there just as it came out, it couldn’t even have gotten to you that fast!”

“That’s how bad it was,” I said. “It was so awful it warped time. You farted into the future.”

We still remember that and laugh about it, the time my sister farted into the future. I wonder, knowing my primitive nose smelled it before it was even created, how soon Jake or Mabel or Tiffany would have noticed that nasty in the toy store aisle. They might not even have come into the store with us with their sniffers. All three of those dogs are gone now, including Mabel, who ended up being my dog and almost never cut the cheese. I’d happily spend the rest of my life breathing a Jake-Level-Five haze to have them back.

(c) 2010 Scott Teel.  All rights reserved.

Today's Ponderables: Bananas

When someone goes crazy, we say they "went bananas." Why are bananas the fruit standard for craziness? How come no one ever "goes figs" or "went grapes?" "I told my dad I got an F in wood shop and he went pomegranites, man." It's always bananas. How did bananas become the insanity fruit?
Alternately, you could say someone went "ape shit," which is also slang for went "mad," or "crazy," so, you might surmise, it's not always a banana reference. But think! What do apes stereotypically eat? Bananas! Therefore, ape shit is made up primarily of bananas, so when someone went "ape shit," it's just another indirect reference to going bananas! Aha! And I believe apes eat nuts, too, so "going nuts" is also under the ape shit umbrella and connected to bananas!
I'm sensing conspiracy here...I don't know what this all means, but it'll make The DaVinci Code look like an episode of Dora the Explorer.
(c) 2010 Scott Teel. All rights reserved.

Not typical results

It troubles me at times to see “success examples.” For example, diet and weight-loss commercials always show people who had success with their system, or food, and it may be true. They usually have to quickly flash small print on the screen saying that the results of the person in the ad are “not typical,” that “results may vary,” and that the weight was lost by not only by using the advertised product or diet but also by exercising moderately 21 times per week, reducing total calories eaten normally by 2/3, making the 1/3 of calories eaten only the calories that come from water (I know…that’s the joke, get it?), being under the hourly care of a trainer, nutritionist, and physician, always eating while standing on a sensitive scale they’re forced to watch during meals, having gastric bypass surgery, and vomiting after each meal while undergoing therapy so as not to let it become a habit.


I don’t understand why we let companies get away with small print flicked for a quarter of a second onscreen and act as though that makes the whole advertisement honest. It’s misleading at least, since no one ever gets to read all those tiny words in that short time. The exception, for some reason, is ads for drugs, which spend 15 seconds telling you what the drug does and 45 seconds speedily listing the possible problems and side effects before telling you to ask your doctor about Zopretzyl.


I can’t figure that one out either. Tell my doctor what to prescribe for me? That’s his fucking job. Why are the drug companies advertising to me now? I can’t get the drugs without a prescription from the doctor anyway. I suppose they think I’ll watch a minute of stock-footage of people smiling, laughing, riding bikes, fishing, reading comfortably, enjoying life’s every drop while I hear “maycauseblurredvisioninsomniatiredness
excessiveurinationheartstoppagebloatinglossofheighteyediscolorationwhichmaybecomepermanentprematureagingimmatureaginglossofbreathing
hairytonguehypertensionhighbloodpressuredetachedpatellashollowedbonescancerdandruffhallucinationsdepressionattemptedsuicidesuccessfulsuicide
hairlosstoothlooseningsorethroatdisplasiaunbornparasitictwinvomitingweightgainorlossorneutralityamnesiapoorgrammarandinsomerarecases
death.  Pregnant women, children, or the elderly should not take Zopretzyl” and I’ll go up to my doctor’s office and tell him, “Doc, is Zopretzyl right for me?”

“No, you have a splinter,” he’d reply. “Why would you even ask about that? That’s a very risky drug that caused Psychotic Monkey Disease in the test animals. Which, as the name suggests, had never been seen in rabbits before. Not to mention the spontaneous limb detachment or the rectal reversal that trideathyl phoxycaloric fratricidol, which is what the company renamed Zopretzyl --”

“That’s the stuff, I want it,” I’d say.


Unfortunately, people probably actually do this. And insist. It doesn’t make sense; the doctor should be the one bringing up drugs, he’s the one who’s supposed to know the data on them and what might be best. Also unfortunately, I made up the name Zopretzyl since it sorta has the word “pretzel” in it, and sounds silly yet like a real drug (which must have at least one Z,Q, Y, or some combination), but now that I think about it, there might actually be one out there with that stupid name and I’ll probably get sued.

But I’m reading a book right now that gives “success stories” like those diet ads, yet doesn’t offer even any small type. According to the author, following her practices were successful for her and her family, and similar methods have succeeded for, so far, four or five people, three of whom are friends or relatives of hers. There are more throughout the book, so the number will go up to maybe 12 or 15, and sure, her methods might actually work. But we only hear about the success stories, not the failures. Few Hollywood megastars ever get to tell us what failed for them because whatever they did, it succeeded. I don’t usually get to see interviews in Entertainment Weekly with the 59-year-old Pharmacy cashier who wanted to make it at acting but didn’t. “I tried the same practices as I hear Meryl Streep say she used, every day, faithfully, and I failed at all of it.”

So how do I know if this author’s methods will work for me? I hear her success stories, but for each of those, how many failures are there who also tried similar methods? 1,000? 150? Maybe even none and everyone who tries it succeeds? The point is, there’s no way for me to know that, so giving me success stories makes it seem like the methods work, but it’s a tad misleading. “Hey, wow! It worked for these 14 people, so it must work!” Well…there are 6.5 billion people alive right now, so what percentage of those people who try it have success?

Obviously that’s harder to answer for an author of a system she’s promoting that has been used for decades before she even decided to try it herself. But non-information, info that is left out of statements, is used all the time for things and often sounds impressive if we don’t take a second to think about it. I’ve seen candy bars that say things like “Chocosaurus has 20% More Chocolate!” Sounds great to me…until I think, “20% more than what? Than it used to have? Than a competitor? Which competitor?” ‘Cause if it’s a carrot, that’s not all that impressive.

Oh Henri

Hang on...you change the letter "y" from the name "Henry" to an "i" and it changes the pronunciation, but NOT in the letter you changed. You go from "Hen-ree" to "On-ree." You change the "ree" part but the pronunciation changes in the "Hen" part. That's just stupid.

Lobster Launch with a Lobster Quote

“It is in the forgotten or neglected place that you will find the lobster.”
                                                                       
                                                           --Irish Expression