As if you haven’t already noticed, dear reader, the mice have finally let loose the hounds and revolted. Stormed the castle, as it were.
We will dive – here – momentarily, into the ongoing shallow debate that is electrifying grammarians everywhere: is it “meece” or “mices” or “more mice” (which leads us to Well, is it “Micerer” or possibly “Micerest”) (but then we are reminded that Mice is already two mouses and we are somewhat clarified momentarily)
Alas, long time readers will recognize this clarification as a mirage: it is not real and it will not last.
Let us give you a brief run-down on how this all began.
We were born – here in the PB&Jroom - approximately 633 miles apart, or roughly a nine hour drive depending on your interpretation of “speed” and “limits.” Some stuff happened, we got somewhat bigger and a little brighter and then we met.
After we met we let our pooters
• (native term for the abominable creature colloquially known as the Computer, the CPU, the Soon-to-Need-to-be-Upgraded Mclinux (sold right next to the all new McSalsaBurrito and the McSueyChopSoup) alternative which only a technogeek can love no matter what Wallyworld thinks, the Pock (almost anagram for Piece O’Crap) in the Corner, the ugly red-headed stepchild)
• (we know not of what we speak)
play together in the same room, even though we were warned and even though we had been told that allowing them the freedom to plot against us while we slept was most likely dangerous if not certainly potentially fatal, and moreover
• (we cannot right now rightly recall who exactly issued this foreboding but we are sure that the source of said warning is most likely as paranoid if not more so than we ourselves are)
• (PforP #1) you may not get to touch the Master but you can tickle His creatures),
we left them to their own devices.
Said devices including (but not limited to):
1. extraneous hard drives,
2. dongles,
3. dongle receptacles,
4. printers,
5. keyboards,
6. monitors,
7. docking stations,
8. cooling pads,
9. infrared sensors,
10. alarums,
11. bells,
12. whistles,
13. spiffy Chuck Taylors,
14. cords,
15. plugs,
16. back-up cords,
17. back-up plugs,
18. back-up extraneous hard drives,
19. gel pads,
20. pet alpacas,
21. wind chimes,
22. Tibetan monks,
23. this really cool Marvin the Martian Acme K-11 Rehygromenator PaperClip De-atomizer not to mention the rather neato-squeato Daffy Duck Acme K-T86 Hyregromenating RubberBand Re-Atomizer,
24. Gumby dammit!,
25. Pokey bent in an impossibly awkward potentially fatal position
26. and, finally, mice.
So, since you are wondering, dear reader, here is what occurs, the way we see it: our pooters are triggered by the flick of the light switch, their clear indication that the room is about to go dormant for the evening; they are equipped with a time-delay device that ensures that their activity occurs only when the room is clear of their pets (us, dear readers, us!).
(Think about it: while yes, the television device has enslaved a fairly terrible amount of peeps, at least you can change the channel on the cotton-pickin’ thing if you can find the remote and if the batteries are good and if the satellite is lined up just so with Neptune’s Isocoletic position in the southwestern portion of the northeastern sky; on the other hadn, with any given pooter on any given day you only have these rather simple-minded manipulative control devices: you have a keyboard and if you are lucky, a wireless mouse. Other than these two now completely archaically ancient technologies (think: steam engine-era control devices), you have barely a wing and if you are lucky maybe a prayer. You can hardly dictate what goes out of your pooter and cannot at all control what gets into your pooter. You can only hope to be given the opportunity to neuter your pooter before the infiltration spreads, lopping off a portion of the hard drive to save the integrity of the motherboard. The center gets itself broken, it cannot hold, and the spire goes vortexing out into the stratosphere, looking for newly minted non-spayed pooters to infest.)
Which does not actually touch too much on the theory that we (and this we includes you, dear reader) are beholden and behest to the mice (meeces) running sidecar with our pooters. The way we see it, mice need only a few creature comforts –
• to be stroked,
• to be handled,
• to be scrolled,
• to be shaken,
• to be hammered against the nearest hard object repeatedly and rhythmically as though the mice will chop down the cherry tree if it is not stopped,
• to be massaged,
• to be the object of great indecisiveness,
• to click the Maximize when the Close is the intended object,
• to click the Close when the Minimize is the intended object and the document/spreadsheet/hours-long project is not saved,
• and to have its tires or batteries rotated every so often.
Given these few creature comforts, it is our reckoning that our mice (meeces) have us almost right where they want us, as we do, religiously, all of the above and will – if the stars are lined up just so – even throw the cotton-pickin’ booger-eatin’ device against the first available wall that springs up in our mice-infested, bull mad red eyes’ line of vision. And we throw in the throw as an added bonus to the mice’s expected comforts, not necessarily as a necessity.
O, how we do strive to please, dear reader, o, how we do.
Which might as well be a question (how we do?) (we do fine, thankee) as far as our meece are concerned.
Here is what has proscribed this latest diatribe: an ugly confluence of FreeCell, SpyWare, short battery life, low battery threshold, and what seems to be an overwhelming desire on our meeces’ part to go to work for the enlightened fruity-smelling line of pooters. Which, said enlightened fruity-smelling line of pooters, we (PB&Jroomers) have promised to inter ourselves in, when the time is right, that right time being when our Windows-sodden beasts finally breathe their last unexpected update and their 4.5 lbs of plastic and metal become junk food for the antiquarians out there who work with antique artifacts of a time long gone (and this at the ripe old age of two or so) (which, according to the soft-cotton-pickin’-ware company which determines when the right time to upgrade should be for the hard-booger-eatin’-ware companies (who, it should be added, sycophantly Benjamin Dover themselves hourly to the darned software company when indeed it should – if the laws of physics worked out right and Moore’s law was adhered to, properly – be so much so the other way around), is about right for keeping the wheels of consumerism clicking).
So it is the “right time” thingamajig that is throwing the meece off their game, as, it has been noticed, the meece and their pets have a different idea of what constitutes pooter death therefore resulting in “the right time.”
Here is what our meece do seem to know:
• we (PB&Jroomers) are mightily frustrated with our meece performance;
• said frustration has lead to more hammering and meece-tossing of late than afore;
• we are saying “oh, dear” and “dang” and “drats” with much more frequency than saying things like, for instance, “excellent” and “yay!” and “yippee!” when it comes to analyzing our pooters’ recent performances;
• current pooters’ performance will lead to a new fruity-smelling pooter with which to perform sooner rather than the hoped-for later;
• we are tired of losing at Tetris and FreeCell due to erratic meece behaviour.
By the way, what next: lorries? hoovers? kerbs?
Here is what our meece do not seem to be aware of:
• we will hunt them down and replace them in the blink of a bull mad red eye if they continue this non-performative performance;
• we have already considered, evaluated and prepared potential replacement meece for the much anticipated current meece failure;
• when we do get shiny new fruity smelling pooters, we will eventually want shiny new fruity-smelling meece to accompany our pooters wherever they may roam over their promised-to-be interminably long lifetime;
• we adhere faithfully as would a chemically enhanced adhesive product to the Proverbs for Paranoids;
• PforP #3) if they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.
We love our former selves with the devotion rightfully reserved for humanity but an errant, misguided meece does not deserve the same accommodation. No trip to Fruity-Smelling Land, no parade down Integrated Function Avenue, no casual hand-in-hand stroll around Wireless Connectivity Park for these meece, no; nothing but the indignity of the masking tape price tag at the next Please Buy Our Unwanted Crap Sale (aka, the ubiquitous garage sale) with a marked through $1 writ in purple marker, highlighting a red “1/2 off” in the corner, somewhere on the back left corner of the clapboard table featuring other Really Unwanted Crap such as phone cords that is positioned in front of the melamine covered patio table that features Not As Unwanted Crap such as sweaters and caps.
That is the ultimate dread of implacably obdurate meece.
Personal density is inexorably correlative to one’s temporal bandwidth just as meece stubbornness is directly proportional to its possible future as decorative wall art if it is not purchased during the waning Pretty Much Everything Is Free moments of the Please Buy Our Unwanted Crap Sale.
Good meece should take heed.
Now. Where were we? Oh, yes, it is 1982 and we have closed the gap to 80 miles or so, depending on personal preferences regarding the niceties of the MS state troopers patrolling I-55 rather than the tingle of excitement that comes from waking a trooper on highway 78, or roughly an hour and a half apart unless some of 78’s hills are taken with both axles off the road.
Then you might get there faster.
Or you might never arrive, depending on how well you stick the landing.
This is, of course, the ephemeral “you” we reference.
O, kudzu, kudzu, how once we longed for you.
11/15/07
The Post about Giving Green a Chance
Who knew?, we ask. Who knew?
Bleach – yes, common household bleach – is all-of-a-sudden the “original Green” cleaner.
Green, not as you might imagine, as in “it’s not easy being…” but Green, as in the color of grass which is supposedly a good metaphor for things that are good for the environment.
Bleach. Seriously. Because what the world needs now is more sodium hypochlorite and less aloe. We are so far away from Desert Solitaire and Silent Spring, not to mention Walden.
It may be that it’s us, that in our movement from the light green into the shades of darker green, we are noticing more and more the outright hypocrisy and banality of the latest advertising trends. It seems rather sudden, but recently everything has become 100% natural or organic.
• Tide detergent: all natural.
• Drano: safe for groundwater.
• Ford: didn’t think they had to mention being Green. (NOTE: Ford has been claiming to be the Green car company ever since it accidentally introduced it’s first “hybrid” Pinto in the 70’s (Runs on a combination of fuel and an ignition spark! – A Minor Bump’ll Do You!): frankly, you’re not green if you are the 7th largest corporate air polluter (2002), releasing 9.67 million lbs of toxic air, including some good healthy chromium, formaldehyde and sulfuric acid. Let’s not mention the 54 Superfund toxic waste sites the EPA linked Ford to.
‘Tis a shame to see the environmental movement linked to celebrity names, and now being pandered by Madison Avenue in a classic case of zeitgeist/bandwagon-jumping.
• (We’re Kraft: America’s First Green Food Company.)
• (But then see also, We’re Kellogg’s: America’s First Green Food Company.)
• (But then see also, We’re del Monte: America’s First Green Food Company.)
• (But wait, because there’s, We’re Green Giant: Get it? Greeeeeeennnnn Giant.)
• (And last, as if this hasn’t been enough, We’re Bush: Where America Turns Green for Beans.)
All of these, oh by the way, are very real advertising campaigns. Or at least they will be one day.
In Abbey’s Monkey Wrench Gang, the good doctor is willing to chain himself to a bulldozer to prevent the building of the bridge across the river (not Kwai) whose name we cannot currently think of (but it’s probably the Colorado as Abbey was so very massively opposed to the Glen Canyon damming for the creation of Lake Powell).
Wouldn’t it be nice to see Gore chain himself to waste drainage pipe until it’s muck is cleaned up, and we mean completely cleaned up not just EPA standard 23% cleaned up?
Wouldn’t it be nice to see Bono move to Africa and live with the starving children instead of taking their pictures from the helicopter and co-op-ing their images to sell what is essentially his own line of merchandise? Well, his and the Gap’s. A portion of the proceeds??? Go to BuyLessCrap.com to see how this can work where it is all of the cotton-pickin’ proceeds that go to their destination (unless of course the Red Cross is involved: then it is considerably less than all, it might even turn out to be practically none equaling zero) instead of to a retail outlet enjoying it’s feel-good (good PR, good bandwagon-jumping) moment in the sun.
It is no secret, we are sure, that peanut butter and jelly are both (or should be) one-hundred percent natural products so it cuts us to the quick to see Kraft (proud owners, oh by the way, of Phillip Morris Tobacco Company, otherwise known as the company that killed the Marlboro Man) proclaim that their ubiquitous Macaroni and Cheese can be not only one hundred percent natural but organic to boot. Really? With that fly fluorescent orange cheese powder by-product they use? Really???? And don’t misunderstand, we do love the occasional of stomach problems that accompany eating a box of the “can be” natural Mac & Cheese. (Okay, no we don’t but we have some for back up purposes in case the lights go out: we can use the cheese by-product powder as an artificial light until we find some candles). (Failing finding a candle, we can always light the cheese by-product powder, as it is most likely flammable considering the all-natural (can be organic) chemical contents).
So, anyway, don’t get us started.
Because while we’re at it, does a spoonful of sugar really make the medicine go down? Huh? Does it? No, no it does not. Gravity makes the medicine go down, the simple force of gravity. Gravity, mind you, unadorned with sugar. Sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen for one Ms. Mary Poppins (who is, as we know, practically perfect in practically every way), is what it sounds like. Here’s something else: nannies do not fly, bankers do not cavort and sing, and sweeps do not fly – Santa Claus like – up the cotton-pickin’ chimneys. You most definitely can NOT NOT NOT NOT jump into a chalk picture painted on the sidewalk, and this one, as you can probably tell, is sort of a sticking point with us because we tried. To jump, we mean. Into a chalk picture painted on the sidewalk, as it were. (‘Twere actually a driveway.) Here’s what it got us, here’s where we landed: it – our jump – got us to the driveway/sidewalk, fairly, we might add, flat-footed.
Posh and nonsense, it is.
Balderdash.
Poppycock.
Spit-spot.
As our six-yr-old nephew would say, You want a piece of us?
That’s posh and nonsense, we say, not Posh the Spice Girl (probably making a comeback as the Original Green All-Girl Group). Green before Green was hip, they will say they were.
Bleach – yes, common household bleach – is all-of-a-sudden the “original Green” cleaner.
Green, not as you might imagine, as in “it’s not easy being…” but Green, as in the color of grass which is supposedly a good metaphor for things that are good for the environment.
Bleach. Seriously. Because what the world needs now is more sodium hypochlorite and less aloe. We are so far away from Desert Solitaire and Silent Spring, not to mention Walden.
It may be that it’s us, that in our movement from the light green into the shades of darker green, we are noticing more and more the outright hypocrisy and banality of the latest advertising trends. It seems rather sudden, but recently everything has become 100% natural or organic.
• Tide detergent: all natural.
• Drano: safe for groundwater.
• Ford: didn’t think they had to mention being Green. (NOTE: Ford has been claiming to be the Green car company ever since it accidentally introduced it’s first “hybrid” Pinto in the 70’s (Runs on a combination of fuel and an ignition spark! – A Minor Bump’ll Do You!): frankly, you’re not green if you are the 7th largest corporate air polluter (2002), releasing 9.67 million lbs of toxic air, including some good healthy chromium, formaldehyde and sulfuric acid. Let’s not mention the 54 Superfund toxic waste sites the EPA linked Ford to.
‘Tis a shame to see the environmental movement linked to celebrity names, and now being pandered by Madison Avenue in a classic case of zeitgeist/bandwagon-jumping.
• (We’re Kraft: America’s First Green Food Company.)
• (But then see also, We’re Kellogg’s: America’s First Green Food Company.)
• (But then see also, We’re del Monte: America’s First Green Food Company.)
• (But wait, because there’s, We’re Green Giant: Get it? Greeeeeeennnnn Giant.)
• (And last, as if this hasn’t been enough, We’re Bush: Where America Turns Green for Beans.)
All of these, oh by the way, are very real advertising campaigns. Or at least they will be one day.
In Abbey’s Monkey Wrench Gang, the good doctor is willing to chain himself to a bulldozer to prevent the building of the bridge across the river (not Kwai) whose name we cannot currently think of (but it’s probably the Colorado as Abbey was so very massively opposed to the Glen Canyon damming for the creation of Lake Powell).
Wouldn’t it be nice to see Gore chain himself to waste drainage pipe until it’s muck is cleaned up, and we mean completely cleaned up not just EPA standard 23% cleaned up?
Wouldn’t it be nice to see Bono move to Africa and live with the starving children instead of taking their pictures from the helicopter and co-op-ing their images to sell what is essentially his own line of merchandise? Well, his and the Gap’s. A portion of the proceeds??? Go to BuyLessCrap.com to see how this can work where it is all of the cotton-pickin’ proceeds that go to their destination (unless of course the Red Cross is involved: then it is considerably less than all, it might even turn out to be practically none equaling zero) instead of to a retail outlet enjoying it’s feel-good (good PR, good bandwagon-jumping) moment in the sun.
It is no secret, we are sure, that peanut butter and jelly are both (or should be) one-hundred percent natural products so it cuts us to the quick to see Kraft (proud owners, oh by the way, of Phillip Morris Tobacco Company, otherwise known as the company that killed the Marlboro Man) proclaim that their ubiquitous Macaroni and Cheese can be not only one hundred percent natural but organic to boot. Really? With that fly fluorescent orange cheese powder by-product they use? Really???? And don’t misunderstand, we do love the occasional of stomach problems that accompany eating a box of the “can be” natural Mac & Cheese. (Okay, no we don’t but we have some for back up purposes in case the lights go out: we can use the cheese by-product powder as an artificial light until we find some candles). (Failing finding a candle, we can always light the cheese by-product powder, as it is most likely flammable considering the all-natural (can be organic) chemical contents).
So, anyway, don’t get us started.
Because while we’re at it, does a spoonful of sugar really make the medicine go down? Huh? Does it? No, no it does not. Gravity makes the medicine go down, the simple force of gravity. Gravity, mind you, unadorned with sugar. Sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen for one Ms. Mary Poppins (who is, as we know, practically perfect in practically every way), is what it sounds like. Here’s something else: nannies do not fly, bankers do not cavort and sing, and sweeps do not fly – Santa Claus like – up the cotton-pickin’ chimneys. You most definitely can NOT NOT NOT NOT jump into a chalk picture painted on the sidewalk, and this one, as you can probably tell, is sort of a sticking point with us because we tried. To jump, we mean. Into a chalk picture painted on the sidewalk, as it were. (‘Twere actually a driveway.) Here’s what it got us, here’s where we landed: it – our jump – got us to the driveway/sidewalk, fairly, we might add, flat-footed.
Posh and nonsense, it is.
Balderdash.
Poppycock.
Spit-spot.
As our six-yr-old nephew would say, You want a piece of us?
That’s posh and nonsense, we say, not Posh the Spice Girl (probably making a comeback as the Original Green All-Girl Group). Green before Green was hip, they will say they were.
11/14/07
The Post about Why We Don't Like Wearing Suits
We here in the PB&J room are very concerned as of late by a growing number of phenomena occurring in our world (as we know and create it), things like RFID chips and the pervasiveness of surveillance and the demise of Mayberry RFD, but nothing has captured us quite like the lawsuit against TEEN POP SENSATION (hereafter knows as TPS) Miley Cyrus, aka, Hannah Montana.
Briefly, in case you do not feel like googling for an article: her fan club is being sued because fan club members were not fast enough to buy tickets for her concerts, living under the false assumption that fandom membership equaled guaranteed tickets when she comes around to the aforementioned fan’s locality.
Allow us to enumerate our concerns:
1) Is the TPS’s Daddy’s Heart still achy breaky considering the TPS’s cumbersomely rampant success (and bulging coffers) as a Disney Channel diva?
2) Guaranteed tickets? To the hottest concert ticket this year? (Seriously, read the article.) When there is, apparently, an infinite number of fools willing to part with $29.95 a year to be a part of a TPS’s fan club, and a definitely finite number of seats for (and ergo, tickets to) the hottest, fastest-selling concert ticket this year?
3) Miley?
4) Why not Peppermint Patti (new) York? Or Arapaho Idaho? Or Soda Dakota? Or Mina Carolina? Or Emily Tennessee? Or Heidi Mississippi? Or Lorna California? Or make up your own for Kentucky.
5) Does this report have a cover sheet?
6) How is going to play in the homes of the wonder-struck children who, on the one hand have their TPS idol’s face on their lunch pails and on their backpacks and on their barrettes and on their Croc buttons and on their too-pretty-to-wear underwear, and on the other hand have their parent(s), ostensibly acting as “role models,” ostensibly acting at the behest of their child(ren), ostensibly capable of reproducing again (be oh so afraid and remember that there is no immunization from the capabilities of our fellow planeteers’ (In the spirit of Disney’s mousekateers…) stupidity), and ostensibly not suing on any grounds other than their rock-steady principles.
7) Our enumerations are too long, longer than we planned (this is often the way it goes with our enumerations we have discovered, our discovery being that our enumerations go on longer than we had originally planned or allotted for) or allotted for, and we are woefully unclear as to why this occurs but as we have not been challenged with this post to “keep it short” we should maybe spend less time worrying about our enumerations (which we have attempted to type as “enumberations” so far every single cotton-pickin’ time we have typed said “enumerations”) and begin to spend some time worrying about A) our vexing problem with typing something as plain-jane as enumberations and B) our overwhelmingly strong desire to use “cotton-pickin’” as an adjective at least five times during this post.
8) #6 is a long-winded way of saying that we bet the dinner tables in certain parts of Jersey and Tennessee are very quite for a while.
9) Or Heffer (new) Jersey? Because what child wouldn’t want, in big bold script, “Heffer” writ large on their underwear?
10) Why can’t we just not quit but not show up either?
That, oh by the way if you are counting at home, only counts as once as one is a reference to the other not an actual adjective, per se, so there are three other adjectivial instances to which you can look forward.
But as we were saying, what is truly disturbing about the lawsuit(s) facing the TPS formerly known as Hannah is her fictional nature, that is, the fact that the TPS does not actually exist, as it were, in the world as we know and create it. Yes, yes, you say, it is actually the Miley Smiley fan club that is the recipient of the summons for the suit, but the suit’s nature is still regarding unavailable tickets to a concert by a – technically speaking – non-existent TPS where, theoretically, existent fans in sold-out seating will stomp and cheer for a mirage on stage.
(WE PAUSE FOR A DIGRESSIVE TPS NOTE: If a TPS falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it – technically speaking – make a sound? Even if said TPS is, ostensibly, a singing TPS? Technically speaking, no. If a TPS falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, even if it is a singing TPS, the TPS’s fall will not register as a sound as sound is actually produced in the ear of the beholder, not in the event of falling TPS-falling noise production. According to noted neuroscientists everywhere. END PAUSE.)
Anyhoo, we think this opens a whole ‘nother new realm of potential litigiousness, and we here in the PB&J room would like to pass along to our readers some - considering the Hannah Montana lawsuit – theoretically possible class-action suits to jump in on while the jumping is jive, given that we feel the courts will be au courant (we know what you are thinking and you are thinking, French? to which we reply, Yes, French) and sympathetic in light of what we will now begin calling the TPS Ordeal.
Given the courts’ disposition, let there first be the Zimmerman/Dylan suit, and the suit will consist of a hydra-headed three-pronged attack:
• first, there is the implication that “three chords and the truth” (an early Zimmerman/Dylan proclamation from the stage, mainly said while he was still only proficient, if that’s the right word, with two chords and the half-truths) are all you need which lead to many ill-thought-out campus-level mini-revolutions during the Sixties (which lead to everyone realizing the indisputable power of bathing during longish ill-prepared-for sit-ins) but, more disturbingly, to many more untalented singer/songwriters who can’t play above the level of winsome beginner and who wouldn’t know the truth if it slapped it them stupid and called them “HoneyBabyPie;”
• second, the is the misguided notion that blowing into a harmonica will lend an air of “authenticity” (whatever that means) to your “three chords and the truth” coupled with the endearing quality of writing gibberish that is supposed to pass for meaningful but only when not stealing like a badger from the mystical poets of 16th Century England who are no longer around to protest the lifting of their lines and themes;
• last, for giving the impression that an ostensible “voice of a generation” can essentially imitate the squawk-slash-honk of the rare Male Blue Flamingo (during mating season, no less) for his entire career, thereby engendering countless descendant Squawkers-slash-Honkers who call themselves singers, leading to countless salon-style argument/conversations regarding what is talent and what is simply catching a momentary whim of the buying public’s fancy (cf., James Blunt, Jewel, Mr. Mister, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Donovan, Joan Baez (who does frankly imitate more the not-as-rare Female Blue Flamingo (who never thinks it is mating season)), and most famously, Bruce Springsteen).
If we can sue Zimmerman for imposing Dylan on the world, let us then also sue the Grateful Dead for engendering the Deadheads.
If we can sue the Deadheads, why not sue any number of comic-book characters?
• Let’s get Spiderman for letting us believe we can crawl up walls and not need a net beneath us.
• Let’s get Superman for A) leading us to believe that we can leap over tall buildings (without mentioning that even if you are only attempting to leap a cotton-pickin’ doghouse, it will hurt like the dickens if you do not clear at least the first ledge of the front eave resulting in a bit of a splatter against what are probably hot shingles as one does not attempt a tall-building leap when it is cold outside), B) letting us think that we can take a bullet in the chest and it will bounce off without causing harm when heretofore not even rubber bands shot across the fourth-grade classroom did not leave a lasting bruise, and C) that unless you are Light or Sound personified, there is no such thing as being faster than a speeding bullet, no matter how fast you think you are when the Boxer that lives behind you gets out of his pen and starts to chase you around the neighborhood because you are not smart enough (at age seven and a half) to think to run back into the Boxer’s pen and close him in.
• Let’s get Wonder Woman for those goofy gold bracelets.
• Let’s get Sgt. Rock for glamorizing combat.
• Let’s go after Daredevil for misleading the blind and the Flash for misleading the slow.
• And let’s get the entire pantheon of characters created by Marvel and DC for never ever, no matter the façade they create, having to lift a finger to make a dime or two to afford their off-the-clock hobbies of saving the world, righting wrongs, and wearing tights. Never have so many, gathered in one place, under one heading, been so independently wealthy. Something to do with capes, we imagine.
Is anyone actually keeping track of how many times the adjective “cotton-pickin’” has been so used so far?
We are also, by the way, now free to go after all characters, some from fiction and literature, some from the supposed real world:
• Huckleberry Finn for covert and overt racism.
• Snoopy for making us think beagles can fly.
• Moby Dick for his various attacks on humanity (of which we consider ourselves a part).
• Holden Caufield for defiling youth.
• Calvin for showing us how we should have acted when we were six.
• Hobbes for providing the friendship and comfort to an otherwise pathological Calvin that our dog could never hope to provide for us during the same trying years.
• Tiny Tim for blessing us, one and all, when maybe all of us didn’t warrant blessing and by blessing all, the lame little urchin willfully diluted the blessing for the one.
• The Other Tiny Tim for tiptoeing through the cotton-pickin’ tulips.
• Elvis (the Presley not the Costello) for making us think a white boy from Tupelo can have rhythm.
• Wham! for misleading an entire generation of star-struck, teeny-bopping adolescent-slash-teenage girls, while at the same time vindicating every single pimple-faced, Van Halen-listening adolescent-slash-teenage boy who said, “Wham!?!?! They’re Gay!” when asked what they think of the early to mid-eighties music(if that’s what you want to call it)-fashioning of the hairmodels known as Andrew and George (NOTE: some of us were one of those boys - just one PB&Jroomer talkin’ out loud.).
We think that what we are saying is that the possibilities are endless now that the tiresome notion of reality vs. make-believe has been broached and broadsided in the fun, festive, frolicsome world of judiciary findings.
We can barely contain our delight.
In fact, to test our reality theory, we might, after this sees the light of day, sue ourselves to see if we exist; it is our thinking that if we win our suit, we exist, whereas if we lose our suit, we do not exist. One’s notion of one’s own existence is challenged, nay, waylaid by the existential possibilities.
Anyway, where were we?
Oh, yes, somewhere between the grey flannel and the zoot, somewhere between the penguin and the double-breasted, which we don't like wearing.
You had to know it was coming to that, that we'd get around to it, you just had to cotton-pickin’ know.
Where’s Peterson when you need him?
Briefly, in case you do not feel like googling for an article: her fan club is being sued because fan club members were not fast enough to buy tickets for her concerts, living under the false assumption that fandom membership equaled guaranteed tickets when she comes around to the aforementioned fan’s locality.
Allow us to enumerate our concerns:
1) Is the TPS’s Daddy’s Heart still achy breaky considering the TPS’s cumbersomely rampant success (and bulging coffers) as a Disney Channel diva?
2) Guaranteed tickets? To the hottest concert ticket this year? (Seriously, read the article.) When there is, apparently, an infinite number of fools willing to part with $29.95 a year to be a part of a TPS’s fan club, and a definitely finite number of seats for (and ergo, tickets to) the hottest, fastest-selling concert ticket this year?
3) Miley?
4) Why not Peppermint Patti (new) York? Or Arapaho Idaho? Or Soda Dakota? Or Mina Carolina? Or Emily Tennessee? Or Heidi Mississippi? Or Lorna California? Or make up your own for Kentucky.
5) Does this report have a cover sheet?
6) How is going to play in the homes of the wonder-struck children who, on the one hand have their TPS idol’s face on their lunch pails and on their backpacks and on their barrettes and on their Croc buttons and on their too-pretty-to-wear underwear, and on the other hand have their parent(s), ostensibly acting as “role models,” ostensibly acting at the behest of their child(ren), ostensibly capable of reproducing again (be oh so afraid and remember that there is no immunization from the capabilities of our fellow planeteers’ (In the spirit of Disney’s mousekateers…) stupidity), and ostensibly not suing on any grounds other than their rock-steady principles.
7) Our enumerations are too long, longer than we planned (this is often the way it goes with our enumerations we have discovered, our discovery being that our enumerations go on longer than we had originally planned or allotted for) or allotted for, and we are woefully unclear as to why this occurs but as we have not been challenged with this post to “keep it short” we should maybe spend less time worrying about our enumerations (which we have attempted to type as “enumberations” so far every single cotton-pickin’ time we have typed said “enumerations”) and begin to spend some time worrying about A) our vexing problem with typing something as plain-jane as enumberations and B) our overwhelmingly strong desire to use “cotton-pickin’” as an adjective at least five times during this post.
8) #6 is a long-winded way of saying that we bet the dinner tables in certain parts of Jersey and Tennessee are very quite for a while.
9) Or Heffer (new) Jersey? Because what child wouldn’t want, in big bold script, “Heffer” writ large on their underwear?
10) Why can’t we just not quit but not show up either?
That, oh by the way if you are counting at home, only counts as once as one is a reference to the other not an actual adjective, per se, so there are three other adjectivial instances to which you can look forward.
But as we were saying, what is truly disturbing about the lawsuit(s) facing the TPS formerly known as Hannah is her fictional nature, that is, the fact that the TPS does not actually exist, as it were, in the world as we know and create it. Yes, yes, you say, it is actually the Miley Smiley fan club that is the recipient of the summons for the suit, but the suit’s nature is still regarding unavailable tickets to a concert by a – technically speaking – non-existent TPS where, theoretically, existent fans in sold-out seating will stomp and cheer for a mirage on stage.
(WE PAUSE FOR A DIGRESSIVE TPS NOTE: If a TPS falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it – technically speaking – make a sound? Even if said TPS is, ostensibly, a singing TPS? Technically speaking, no. If a TPS falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, even if it is a singing TPS, the TPS’s fall will not register as a sound as sound is actually produced in the ear of the beholder, not in the event of falling TPS-falling noise production. According to noted neuroscientists everywhere. END PAUSE.)
Anyhoo, we think this opens a whole ‘nother new realm of potential litigiousness, and we here in the PB&J room would like to pass along to our readers some - considering the Hannah Montana lawsuit – theoretically possible class-action suits to jump in on while the jumping is jive, given that we feel the courts will be au courant (we know what you are thinking and you are thinking, French? to which we reply, Yes, French) and sympathetic in light of what we will now begin calling the TPS Ordeal.
Given the courts’ disposition, let there first be the Zimmerman/Dylan suit, and the suit will consist of a hydra-headed three-pronged attack:
• first, there is the implication that “three chords and the truth” (an early Zimmerman/Dylan proclamation from the stage, mainly said while he was still only proficient, if that’s the right word, with two chords and the half-truths) are all you need which lead to many ill-thought-out campus-level mini-revolutions during the Sixties (which lead to everyone realizing the indisputable power of bathing during longish ill-prepared-for sit-ins) but, more disturbingly, to many more untalented singer/songwriters who can’t play above the level of winsome beginner and who wouldn’t know the truth if it slapped it them stupid and called them “HoneyBabyPie;”
• second, the is the misguided notion that blowing into a harmonica will lend an air of “authenticity” (whatever that means) to your “three chords and the truth” coupled with the endearing quality of writing gibberish that is supposed to pass for meaningful but only when not stealing like a badger from the mystical poets of 16th Century England who are no longer around to protest the lifting of their lines and themes;
• last, for giving the impression that an ostensible “voice of a generation” can essentially imitate the squawk-slash-honk of the rare Male Blue Flamingo (during mating season, no less) for his entire career, thereby engendering countless descendant Squawkers-slash-Honkers who call themselves singers, leading to countless salon-style argument/conversations regarding what is talent and what is simply catching a momentary whim of the buying public’s fancy (cf., James Blunt, Jewel, Mr. Mister, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Donovan, Joan Baez (who does frankly imitate more the not-as-rare Female Blue Flamingo (who never thinks it is mating season)), and most famously, Bruce Springsteen).
If we can sue Zimmerman for imposing Dylan on the world, let us then also sue the Grateful Dead for engendering the Deadheads.
If we can sue the Deadheads, why not sue any number of comic-book characters?
• Let’s get Spiderman for letting us believe we can crawl up walls and not need a net beneath us.
• Let’s get Superman for A) leading us to believe that we can leap over tall buildings (without mentioning that even if you are only attempting to leap a cotton-pickin’ doghouse, it will hurt like the dickens if you do not clear at least the first ledge of the front eave resulting in a bit of a splatter against what are probably hot shingles as one does not attempt a tall-building leap when it is cold outside), B) letting us think that we can take a bullet in the chest and it will bounce off without causing harm when heretofore not even rubber bands shot across the fourth-grade classroom did not leave a lasting bruise, and C) that unless you are Light or Sound personified, there is no such thing as being faster than a speeding bullet, no matter how fast you think you are when the Boxer that lives behind you gets out of his pen and starts to chase you around the neighborhood because you are not smart enough (at age seven and a half) to think to run back into the Boxer’s pen and close him in.
• Let’s get Wonder Woman for those goofy gold bracelets.
• Let’s get Sgt. Rock for glamorizing combat.
• Let’s go after Daredevil for misleading the blind and the Flash for misleading the slow.
• And let’s get the entire pantheon of characters created by Marvel and DC for never ever, no matter the façade they create, having to lift a finger to make a dime or two to afford their off-the-clock hobbies of saving the world, righting wrongs, and wearing tights. Never have so many, gathered in one place, under one heading, been so independently wealthy. Something to do with capes, we imagine.
Is anyone actually keeping track of how many times the adjective “cotton-pickin’” has been so used so far?
We are also, by the way, now free to go after all characters, some from fiction and literature, some from the supposed real world:
• Huckleberry Finn for covert and overt racism.
• Snoopy for making us think beagles can fly.
• Moby Dick for his various attacks on humanity (of which we consider ourselves a part).
• Holden Caufield for defiling youth.
• Calvin for showing us how we should have acted when we were six.
• Hobbes for providing the friendship and comfort to an otherwise pathological Calvin that our dog could never hope to provide for us during the same trying years.
• Tiny Tim for blessing us, one and all, when maybe all of us didn’t warrant blessing and by blessing all, the lame little urchin willfully diluted the blessing for the one.
• The Other Tiny Tim for tiptoeing through the cotton-pickin’ tulips.
• Elvis (the Presley not the Costello) for making us think a white boy from Tupelo can have rhythm.
• Wham! for misleading an entire generation of star-struck, teeny-bopping adolescent-slash-teenage girls, while at the same time vindicating every single pimple-faced, Van Halen-listening adolescent-slash-teenage boy who said, “Wham!?!?! They’re Gay!” when asked what they think of the early to mid-eighties music(if that’s what you want to call it)-fashioning of the hairmodels known as Andrew and George (NOTE: some of us were one of those boys - just one PB&Jroomer talkin’ out loud.).
We think that what we are saying is that the possibilities are endless now that the tiresome notion of reality vs. make-believe has been broached and broadsided in the fun, festive, frolicsome world of judiciary findings.
We can barely contain our delight.
In fact, to test our reality theory, we might, after this sees the light of day, sue ourselves to see if we exist; it is our thinking that if we win our suit, we exist, whereas if we lose our suit, we do not exist. One’s notion of one’s own existence is challenged, nay, waylaid by the existential possibilities.
Anyway, where were we?
Oh, yes, somewhere between the grey flannel and the zoot, somewhere between the penguin and the double-breasted, which we don't like wearing.
You had to know it was coming to that, that we'd get around to it, you just had to cotton-pickin’ know.
Where’s Peterson when you need him?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)