The “Best of Foolish Times, Volume 1″ hits the stands today. Thanks to all the writers and staff over the years who helped make it possible! (I’d love to name them all, but I can’t even remember what I had for lunch.) A special thanks to the advertisers who stuck with us and to the new ones coming on board, realizing finally that you, our readers, are loyal, educated, wealthy beyond belief, good-looking, vivacious, full of life, cheerful. Okay, enough. Some of our advertisers like the Monterey Symphony and Sardine Factory have extended special offers just for Foolish Times readers. Check them out.

Don’t forget the advertisers!

Mike Miele
The Head Fool
mike@foolishtimes.net

I feel a little like Charlton Heston in “Soylent Green” here writing this article, but I feel it’s warranted, considering the lies we’ve been fed so many years now as to the origins of a certain golden sweet substance we’ve become accustomed to and so very fond of.

Our fondness of it is so great, in fact, that to those we love, whether they are our children, grandchildren, spouses, boyfriends, or girlfriends, we bestow upon them the affectionate title, “Honey.”

You may begin to reconsider this term of endearment we so readily use, once you discover, such as I, the true origins of this blatantly misrepresented substance.

As most of us are aware, honey comes from bees, and usually that is where the advertisers and marketers who have sold us on the idea of consuming the product stop. But indeed, there is certainly a whole lot more to the story.

But first, let me warn you. Those of you who are sensitive to graphic language, I would encourage you to discontinue reading this article now, as it could be very upsetting to you. For the extremely sensitive, this could potentially necessitate you seeking professional help through a licensed therapist. Therefore, reading the rest of this article is certainly not advised. If you do choose to continue reading from this point, I am not responsible for any psychological trauma you may incur. You have been forewarned.

And now the truth.

A hive is made up of several classes of Apis Mellifera, or Honey Bees-the queen, her attendant bees, the warriors, the workers, and the drones. All of which are female, with the exception of the lazy male drone, who is incapable of feeding himself. His sole purpose is to inseminate the queen. Once that is accomplished, most drones are executed because they are considered worthless and a drain on the hive economy.

Male sex discrimination is not the focus of this article. For our purposes, it is this worker class that we will focus on here.

Within the worker bee structure there are two types of bees: Field Bees and House Bees.

The first step in honey production begins with the Field Bee.

The Field Bee travels from flower to flower, slurping up as much nectar as she can from each flower with her long, nimble tongue. In fact, she gorges herself like some debauched first-century Roman emperor at a gluttonous pagan feast.

As if that picture were not disturbing enough, at the point of bursting, this not-so-ladylike worker lumbers back to the hive, where overly eager House Bees anticipate her arrival.

Upon arriving, she disgorges her contents (pukes) into the open mouth of the nearest House Bee.

You were warned. No, it isn’t pretty. And sayings such as “The truth hurts” and “Truth is often stranger than fiction” apply here.

Once the House Bee receives her allotment of “nectar spew,” she immediately goes to work on it. The process involves about fifty chew-swallow-regurgitate cycles (kind of like a cow chewing its cud). This process is guaranteed to dry out even the watery-est “nectar puke.”

Once she feels the “hurl nectar” thicken inside her to the right consistency, she then secretes an enzyme called “invertase” into it (the invertase enzyme converts sucrose into smaller, simpler, and sweeter sugars). She then ralphs into a hexagonal wax puke-holding tank where this “bumble barf” ripens over the course of a few weeks.

This twice “cookie tossed concoction” is then collected, packaged, and labeled as wholesome.

You then buy it, slap it on your cornbread or plop it into your tea or coffee, and INGEST IT!

I bring you this truth not to destroy your world but to enlighten you.

What you now do with this information is up to you. Do not kill the messenger.

As Mahatma Gandhi said: “What is Truth? A difficult question; but I have solved it for myself by saying that it is what the ‘voice within’ tells you.”

And as I said at the start of this article, I do feel a bit like Police Detective Thorn played by Charlton Heston at the end of “Soylent Green.”

“It’s vomit! Honey is made from bee vomit!”

by Helene Constant

“What’s that smell?” asked my little darling, wrinkling up her nose as we lay in her teeny tiny bed reading a bed-time story.
“It’s raccoon,” I said, holding up her stuffed raccoon, who was listening to the story with us. “He ate beans for dinner.”
“Oooh, Mom,” she said, holding her nose and inching over toward the wall. “You’re ruining my new sheets.”
As a single Mom, I’ve made many substitutes for missing forms of bodily pleasure. In a few short years my daughter will be carried away from me on a tide of sexual hormones. Then there will be plenty of time to rub furniture polish on my mummified body and advertise in the personals for an archeologist.
If she can see beyond her loss of sex, nice restaurants, dancing, intoxication, and sex, a single Mom can really get into a lot of things. Talking raccoons, bunnies, unicorns, we’ve got ‘em. We’ve got a bear with a pompadour; he looks like Elvis. Our bear tells us that he works as a nurse at the rock and roll hospital playing music to soothe and heal all wounds. There’s nothing wrong with talking to imaginary friends. Most of the men in my life were imaginary friends. Temp agencies do a better job of screening applicants than I used to use for a person with whom I was ready to share the innermost chambers of my, ah, soul.
I’m single again, a euphemism. Other single women answer personal ads. They think love is like a quarter slot machine; they yank the handle all night long, crank, crank. There’s an old Yiddish saying: if you want fresh fish, don’t look in a herring barrel. Here I am, a 50-year-old Dorothy Lamour, my sarong getting a little worn, my tummy jutting out, my breasts dripping like melted ice cream. My friends are worried that I’ll never find my way back to the Holy Land again, where a dove descends, or maybe it’s a duck, and a golden aura surrounds some guy I’ve just met, knighting him and his fleshy sword. Some of my friends have the attitude that if the bus stops you better get on it, even if it’s going nowhere.
But I haven’t given up! I’m going to renew my subscription to happiness; the latest woman’s magazine tells me how easy it is: How To Buy Your Way To Happiness. How To Surgically Alter Your Body into An Object of Value. Famous People Who Aren’t Any Happier.
My girlfriend isn’t happy either but she hasn’t noticed. She’s got the Mercedes, the private school for the kids, and the stable marriage. You go over there to visit and her husband is feverishly applying for their twelfth or thirteenth charge card. She drinks coffee like some people shoot heroin. She says her husband doesn’t respect her, her mother-in-law treats her like dirt, and her church tells her that her inner voices are demonic. For some people a mid-life crisis would be an improvement.
Life takes place largely in the mind. When I was dating my future husband I thought we were writing a love story across eternity. A few years later I realized it wasn’t eternity we were writing on, it was only bedroom sheets and it was a short story. He was a voicemail box for my fantasies.
Now that I’m divorced, I have a real voicemail box, a modem, and a coupon for a free month of email on the world wide web. Men used to be afraid of webs until they wove one of their own where you can use an alias and duck out whenever you want. Like male societies everywhere, the web is more attuned to hunting than to planting seeds.
Men I meet are excited because it’s instant communication, like popping a frozen cube into the microwave and calling it a home-cooked meal. “We could exchange messages three times a day, isn’t that better than writing letters?” demanded one guy I know who hasn’t had three things to say since we met.
Email allows me to avoid being touched by my caller’s voice; talk about safe sex! Computer communication is not about making contact, it’s about fast ejaculation of data. My kind of web would hold me like a hammock, spread out in the sunshine, swinging back and forth slowly with a lemonade and a friend.
I was in Macy’s the other day, gripping my daughter’s hand so she wouldn’t do gymnastics on the escalator. As we descended through the floor I noticed those big wooden blocks that hold the displays. For example, I’m walking past a Superbra display, and am immediately lost in a fantasy of breathless men following me with their hungry eyes, and I never notice that basically I’m seeing a few square inches of elastic, displayed on a large wooden block. I had a euphoric vision. I was sitting in lotus position on one of these big blocks wearing a Superbra. I was the Maidenform woman dreaming that I was enlightened. I had a little smile on my perfect bow-shaped lips and a beam of golden light was coming out of the top of my head. The escalators were radiating around me like spokes of a big wheel, going up to heaven and descending down into hell.
In my vision I knew that the world was an illusion, a play of light and darkness, just like a computer screen. It’s all in letting the data go by. A smile spread over my face as I opened my eyes and stepped down off the escalator.
“Race you to the car,” said my daughter, gaining an unfair advantage in her brand-new sneakers. Puffing, I slid into the car only seconds after she did. “I won,” my daughter announced with authority. I farted sweetly.

By Wrongway Sam

Monterey is a poster child for cities with confusing street systems. Meanwhile, the other Peninsula cities help to add to the confusion.
Santa Maria of 30 years ago before new development threw a monkey wrench into the works had the closest thing to a perfect grid street system. The city was bisected north and south and east and west by two major streets that met in the center of town. Moving out from the center, there was a significant street every quarter mile out to the outskirts of the city. It was breeze to drive around Santa Maria.
The bad news is why you would want to drive around Santa Maria, which is located in Santa Barbara County, is only known by a few people on the planet, and is among the most boring places in the Universe, ranking right up there with Timbuktu, Fresno, and Cleveland.
Now, Monterey and its environs are where you want to be, but alas the street system is a challenge for visitors and even residents until they have lived here awhile.
North and south and east and west are problematical. The Highway Department got it right. The freeway is the closest thing we have to north and south. Highway 1 North really is north and Highway 1 South is actually south. And Pine Avenue in Pacific Grove is exactly east and west. After that north-south and east-west get a little thin.
North Fremont in Monterey is more North-East Fremont than North Fremont.
Then there are the streets that suddenly change names on you when you are trying to find the right address. You start out on Washington Street and a few blocks later it becomes Abrego Street, and just when you get used to Abrego, the darn thing changes to Munras Avenue.
Munras is a piece of work all by itself. The street doglegs like one of those golf fairways at Pebble Beach. The City Fathers will tell you they did that so the landmark Casa Munras Garden Hotel would actually front on Munras Avenue and not some street named Hollywood Boulevard, Market Street, or some other name.
Meanwhile, back at Washington Street, which is two-way except for one lousy block between Franklin Street and Del Monte Avenue. That one-block, one-way is enough to mess you up if you want to make a logical left or right turn from Del Monte onto Washington en route to someplace important, like the Del Monte Center.
The Del Monte Center, of course, is not on Del Monte. That would make it too easy to find. No challenge there. If you are on Del Monte, it’s some trick to find Munras so you can actually get to the Del Monte Center.
If you are driving from Seaside on Del Monte Avenue and you get to the tunnel, you probably think the tunnel is Del Monte Avenue. That would make sense. No, Del Monte goes straight ahead into the downtown, and the tunnel is officially a no-name street. It’s just Custom House Tunnel.
If you look around for the Custom House as you drive though the tunnel, you won’t see it. That’s because it’s over by Fisherman’s Wharf, which goes by enough names to confuse you if you are trying to drive there: Fisherman’s Wharf, Old Fisherman’s Wharf, Fisherman’s Wharf No. 1, and Municipal Wharf No. 1. Not to be confused with Fisherman’s Wharf No. 2, Municipal Wharf No. 2, Commercial Wharf, or the Brooklyn Bridge.
Imagine the poor sap driving up to the wrong wharf and wanderingly aimlessly trying in vain to find something that’s on the other wharf.
In a burst of provincialism way back when, City Fathers in Monterey and Pacific Grove in their infinite wisdom decided not to line up the two Lighthouse Avenues. The two major thoroughfares change names when they cross city limits. Monterey’s Lighthouse becomes Central Avenue in Pacific Grove and Pacific Grove’s Lighthouse turns into Hawthorne Street in Monterey. Try explaining that to some visitor from Fresno.
To pour salt into the wound, Monterey’s Pine Street and Pacific Grove’s Pine Avenue don’t line up either. They are one street off. At least they don’t change names. Must have been a slip-up. They probably fired the guys who failed to follow the Lighthouse/Washington-Abrego-Munras Model for Confusing Drivers.
I wonder which came first: the famed 17 Mile Drive in the Del Monte Forest or the street named 17 Mile Drive in Pacific Grove. At least they line up. But it’s confusing for the uninitiated who find themselves on the 17 Mile Drive in Pacific Grove and wonder where all the mansions are and how come nobody is collecting a toll.
Memo to the Pacific Grove City Council: Put up false mansion fronts along your 17 Mile Drive and start collecting $10 a car to help balance the city budget. The visitors will never figure out they have been fleeced, and the local folks will laugh their heads off.
Cannery Row, meanwhile, is both a street name and a state of mind. The Sardine Factory and Whaling Station, Cannery Row’s landmark restaurants, are both located on Wave Street. Actually Cannery Row is not the street’s original name, which was Ocean View, and was linked up, but not lined up, with Pacific Grove’s Ocean View Boulevard. Ocean View actually is lined up with Wave. Why are you surprised?
The Cannery Row name, of course, is a rip-off from John Steinbeck’s books and amounts to crass commercialism. So tricky-tacking touristy. But it’s Hall of Fame Tricky-Tacking Touristy.
One way to help the movement of traffic in Monterey would be to punch Fremont Street through to Pacific Street. That makes sense from a traffic-engineering standpoint, but forget it. If you did that, you would have to bulldoze the aforementioned landmark Casa Munras Garden Hotel and the former Monterey Hospital that is now the Hartnell Professional Building across from the Monterey Post Office.
That brings us to the Post Office, which is tucked away on Hartnell Street, guarded by narrow streets in a pattern that is a challenge to figure out for the visitor and newly arrived resident.
Even Lewis and Clark would have a hard time finding it. Just try giving somebody directions to the Post Office. If you do make it to the Post Office, you face an even bigger challenge: where to park!
The historic San Carlos Cathedral is on Church Street, which makes sense, except you have to find Church Street, a street so short that it barely covers the cathedral and its environs. If you find it before time for the sermon, you are in line for sainthood.
The City Fathers in Seaside like to super-size Monterey streets when they enter the Seaside City Limits. Del Monte Avenue becomes Del Monte Boulevard and North Fremont Street changes to Fremont Avenue. Monterey put the North in front of Fremont because business owners were afraid that their customers might think, heaven forbid, that they were in Seaside. That in and of itself is prima fascia evidence that the street system causes confusion.
Pacific Grove has a Del Monte Boulevard, which is a two-lane street in a residential area that doesn’t line up with any of the Del Monte Avenues/Boulevards and is more than three miles away from the nearest other Del Monte. That’s all right. You don’t have to drive very long on it before it crosses Lighthouse Avenue and changes name to Alder Street.
In Seaside, the official name for one of the city’s broadest streets is Broadway Avenue, which is like saying Street Street. Broadway is a way and can’t also be an avenue. Look it up in your Funk & Wagnals. New York City got it right. They call it simply Broadway, the Great White Way.
The good news is that Carmel’s streets are relatively well laid out compared to its neighbors. The bad news is once you get to where you going in Carmel, you can’t find a place to park, so you might as well just drive back to Monterey and get lost.
Del Rey Oaks has a novel way to avoid confusion. They just block off the streets so that they go nowhere. You are trapped in Del Rey Oaks. Call the Coast Guard.
The last straw in causing confusion is the frequent absence of large signs to mark the street ahead on major thoroughfares. It’s done right in some places but not in others. They mark a lot of streets you don’t care about but skip some of the most important ones. There is a big overhead sign for English Avenue but not for streets that actually matter.
In a weak moment, somebody actually put up a big sign on Lighthouse Avenue to mark David Avenue. They probably fired him. Along with the guy who put up the big monument sign to mark the entrance to Old Fisherman’s Wharf and Monterey Harbor.
As a final thought, Western Avenue in Los Angeles is said to be the longest, straightest street in the world, 30 miles long, from the hills to the sea. You can’t get lost on Western Avenue. But on second thought, I would rather get lost in Monterey than found in Los Angeles.

The effeminate nature of men watching sports.

By James Stevens Black

A man crouches in his chair and watches a simple football game. Before him on his oversized television are displayed 300+-pound sweaty men in tight spandex bent over and wrestling one another. They dive and flop around in a strange ballet, all focused on a large hard ball-trying to achieve victory. He sits wide-eyed, stuffing Pork Rinds and chilidogs into his maw like an animal, squeals when his favorite guys do well, and screams in mortal agony when they fail. His wife all the while sits in the kitchen or reads a steamy romance novel about men who don’t watch sports.
Men, if you can call them that, take hours out of their daily routine to watch while other men run around on a big green field; other men (called Referees) dominate their will to achieve with sicko rules and evaluations that will then be contested by other sweaty men (called Coaches) in swanky jackets.
The fact is-these roles need reversing on a grand scale.
His wife should trade places with him. More women should be staring at the back end of a guy(s)-per team/depending on sport-and lusting after their ability. The men should be microwaving burritos in the kitchen with a television or at the computer alone having a grand old time rerunning the Women’s Volleyball Championship or some spicier fair meant for men, real men, made as men love it.
The Laker Girls are the only reason to watch a basketball game, much as the Dallas Cowboys cheerleading squad is the only reason to watch a football game! The networks need to be more representative of their audience and focus on this very artful and elegant part of sports.
Really, it is sick and smells of lollipops.
As it is, millions of guys swarm around television sets like gnats every week, staring wide-eyed as other men do things they only wish they could do-it becomes a strange paradox of the natural order. If the same male energy was expended watching Women’s Tennis and/or Women’s Volleyball, then we could honestly understand the need for men to be zealously devoted to sports.
Playing a sport is a whole hell of a lot different than watching it, by the way. Ask some Major League Baseball player how easy the game is and he’ll laugh at you-because he does it and he doesn’t have to watch it. Like a Chippendale dancer he prances onto the field and does his job for money plus tip, and that is it. He isn’t thinking about the honor…no… no… no…he is thinking about the chicks. All three of them in the entire universe that were allowed to watch the game by our own twisted moral fabric! Hear me, my fellow Americans!
Studying the statistics of a player of Major League Baseball, Men’s Tournament Golf, the NFL, or National Hockey League becomes a sick game akin to comparing strippers at the local Strip Club. (Of which, sadly, there are no programs showing that, you FCC bastards.)
“Barry Bonds is the greatest player in baseball,” one rather esteemed man said.
How sick is this? How steamy; how horribly lustful.
Sitting at a Sports Bar filled with guys and maybe a small contingent of women can be quite revealing. The men sit around exchanging stats, poring over scores, and arguing over trades and players at a deeply personal level.
One newcomer from New York commented on how his father took him to Yankee Stadium as a kid, stood him up at the top level, and pointed out across the wide expanse of New York to where the Mets play ball, Shea Stadium.
“Son,” he said, “never go there.”
Every man should point at every stadium across the world and say those same mentoring lines to their sons. Pointing instead to such dignified places as Hooters, and Wild Bill’s Mud Wrestling Palace. The fine establishments represent everything that is wholesome and right in America, and beyond.
That is all the time worth devoting to this sad state of affairs. Besides, I have to see what the Seattle Sonics are up to-but for what you think, you rats. On their NBA website you can vote for what girl you want to see twirling for next season’s Dance Team. Besides…they’re going to crush the Clippers on November 3rd. Oh hell, did I really say that?
Understand it or walk away and cry, you bastards. There is a reason my initials fall in line with the finest liquid nepenthe this side of Iceland.

By Aaron S. Birk

There is a Light Brown Apple Moth humping my shoulder. No, really, the little bugger just crawled right up there and started working away at my eloquent yellow Tommy Bahama shirt like Paris Hilton on a Saturday night. My first instinct…squash the little Aussie bastard and feed him to my python named Monty. However, now my under-developed Buddhist sympathy for all living creatures has kicked in at the last moment, and all I feel is remorse.

In the spring of 2007 the Australian-born Light Brown Apple Moth (Epiphyas postvittana) invaded the continental United States and Canada. Listed as a noxious insect by many agriculturists, the result were quarantines, bad mouthing, and finally the aerial spraying of a chemical romantically called Checkmate-OFM-F throughout the Monterey Peninsula in early September, right smack dab in the middle of their orgy season.

Female Light Brown Apple Moths excrete what we pesky humans like to romantically call a pheromone but which are of course actually two compounds, (E)-11-tetradedecen-1-yl acetate and (E,E)-9,11-tetradecadien-1-yl acetate. These luscious chemicals make up the entirety of the pheromone excreted by the female Apple Moth and acts like magical hump juice to male Apple Moths. It gets the little bastards savagely horny, helps them seek out the females for a good time, and if you’ve ever been a male or female scratching at the walls for a good time you can only guess at what other primal instincts the Apple Moth has banging against its skull due to this old cocktail of Love Potion #9.

Pesky Humans

So we sprayed the entire Monterey Peninsula with the compound CheckMate-OFM-F, a slightly toxic mixture of the very same acetates excreted by horny Apple Moth chicks everywhere. The 1,700 pounds of it covered cars, books, small children, and specifically my Tommy Bahama in a sexy cocktail of pheromones all aimed at a brief attempt to stave off another random wild orgy of nature. It’d be like trying to stop hundreds of thousands of frat boys from unleashing themselves on a city by covering the entire place in cheap beer.

So this little bugger on my shirt humps away. His tiny mind filled with nature’s one primal sex law: to have his cake, eat it, and try for every cake there ever was in the miniscule brief moments left of his existence on this world. Many wonder whether meddling humans are any different, but recent studies have shown that chicks in little shirts attract little men in big shirts, begging further study of our likenesses to other creatures of nature…like the lemming.

Attacked

It could be my shirt, an outdoor ashtray glistening with soggy cigarette butts in the early morning sun, small children, small dogs, and very possibly your wife, but now that we all smell like hot, sexy female Apple Moths we will be unable to defend against the masculine nature of these fat, horny bugs. They’ll hump our cars like tiny mice to an elephant, savagely tearing at nothing. We’ll have no choice as millions of these horny male Light Brown Apple Moths come swooping out of the sky in eager intent to procreate. We should all thank The California Department of Food and Agriculture for this opportunity to be humped like crazy. It is quite possibly all the action some of us will see for a very long time.

Help, Peter Pan (aka Randy Constan)-I’m a Lost Boy!

A couple years ago I did a story on a musician named Randy Constan who is in reality Peter Pan. Hey, if he isn’t the real Peter Pan, he wouldn’t have a website that draws millions of visitors and that helps children in need with donations, and he wouldn’t be a guest on TV talk shows.
Looking at my life as I have, and all the past disasters I’ve experienced, I’ve come to the firm conclusion:
I’M ONE OF THE LOST BOYS. In the Peter Pan story.
I’ve got to be. What kind of person would forget that a female acquaintance had gone to Hawaii for the funeral of her father and then ask her, “How was Hawaii?”
I did that.
On the subject of Hawaii, what kind of person would accidentally set off 500 fire crackers all at once in a small hotel room fifty floors up above the ground in Waikiki? The entire building shook.
I did that.
What kind of person would see a kid dressed in a sheet on Halloween and walk up and playfully feel the kid’s fat midsection, joking around, thinking the kid was a kid, and then be slugged hard in the stomach by the kid, because the kid was in reality a grown woman wearing a sheet-looking dress? A woman who could punch hard.
I did that.
Who would choose to work at a place the police raided (they took away our computers) because the boss turned out to be a crook?
I did that.
I’m a disaster.
Randy, or I mean Peter, are you out there? Take me with you to Never-Never Land. I gotta’ get outta’ here. I’m a catastrophe.
Just because I’m a hulking 260-pound muscle-bound grey-haired man with the body of a Greek God doesn’t mean I’m not a boy.
I never advanced. I never grew up. That’s why I don’t make any money. I’m not clever enough, dishonest enough.
MY WIFE DIDN’T MARRY A MAN. SHE MARRIED A BOY!
I can prove it, Peter. I still watch the Three Stooges.
I still wear dirty underwear if I’m out of clean underwear, though I’ll say I wear my cleanest dirty pair of underwear.
I still hate to fill out taxes (I make my wife do it), pay bills (I ignore creditors because I never answer the phone), do financial planning of any kind, take responsibility of any kind.
What kind of person has contempt for money and those who are good at making it? I do. They’re a bunch of fools. I have nothing but disgust for the world and its scheming, lying, money-grubbing, two-faced, egotistical, un-idealistic, conniving, back-stabbing, con-artist, ruthless, steal-from-their-mother, petty, greedy, two-bit punk politicians and businessmen in their pin-striped suits and carrying their briefcases. The world is the way it is because of them.
Peter, you and I know it.
Peter, I heard you’re engaged to get married.
That doesn’t mean you’re not going back to Never-Never Land, does it?
I’m a boy, Peter (Randy). I’m a lost boy. Could you take me with you to Never-Never Land? I’ll be better off there. The world here will be better off. We can play games and fight the pirates. We can fly around.
C’mon. What-ya-say?
Copyright 2009 by SammonSays.com

by Claire Voyant

May birthdays:

May is Older Americans Month, which you will be officially joining as you blow out how many candles on your birthday cake?!? On a related note, National Preservation Month becomes more meaningful to you…

ARIES (3/21-4/19): In Japan, there is a so-called “May sickness,” in which students or workers tire of their schoolwork or jobs. But May sickness can’t touch you, Aries! You are incapable of procrastination or laziness! You always jump into your work with passion and excitement, which gives your fellow students or workers a so-called “Aries sickness.”

TAURUS (4/20-5/20): Your May flowers will make people green with envy. But never tell them your secret composting ingredient: bullsh*t.

GEMINI (5/21-6/21): Don’t beat yourself up this month if you behave in a silly, unreasonable way, or if you love on one hand and dislike on the other. A lot of people feel conflicted about enjoying National Dance Like A Chicken Day.

CANCER (6/22-7/22): You should guard against your tendency to mother others this month. Although friends know they can count on your sensitivity and compassionate nature in the face of difficulty, they might not appreciate your attempts to educate them on Fungal Infection Awareness Month.

LEO (7/23-8/22): In Germany, an old custom exists of planting a “tree of May” to honor someone special. Often young admirers would display a decorated birch tree in front of a loved one’s home. Honey, if you had as many trees displayed in your yard as you have admirers, California would have to declare your property a State Park.

VIRGO (8/23-9/22): Your obsession with cleanliness and order may be distracting you from the important issues and opportunities that this month offers. Like the celebration of No Pants Day on the first Friday in May. So stop your spring cleaning and put on your boxers or bloomers because “When large groups of people parade around in public without their pants, amazing things are bound to happen.”

LIBRA (9/23-10/22): Love and relationships are at the heart of all you do. Once you find your soul mate, your most important mission, your life will be extremely satisfying. That’s why May, Date Your Mate Month, will be so much more rewarding to you than last month, Date Someone Else’s Mate Month.

SCORPIO (10/23-11/21): May 9th is Lost Sock Memorial Day, or in the case of the Scorpio, Revenge on the Dryer With A Baseball Bat Day.

SAGITTARIUS (11/22-12/21): This month, your high level of energy seems to be continually on tap, as does Dos Equis Dark on Cinco de Mayo. You’re able to tap this energy (from Dos Equis?) to achieve this month’s goals of mass consumption of salsa, guacamole, and chips.

CAPRICORN (12/22-1/19): Because you are resourceful and practical, you can truly appreciate the importance of Towel Day, which is celebrated in May as a tribute to Douglas Adams. Towels can be used for warmth, to lie on, as a sail a mini raft, or to wave in emergencies as a distress signal, or, for those less imaginative, to dry off with.

AQUARIUS (1/20-2/18): May 4th (May the 4th be with you) is Star Wars day as “Star Wars” was originally released in May 1977. Like Luke Skywalker, this month your ability to embrace new technologies will not be appreciated by family members whose calls are repeatedly dropped by your cell phone. And Jedi mind tricks like “You will give me an extra week of paid vacation and a huge bonus” will not work on your boss, confirming that he is more droid than human.

PISCES (2/19-3/20): Your compassion and sensitivity, your instinctive willingness to help others, and your desire to alleviate suffering makes you sought out by those in distress on May 30th, My Bucket’s Got A Hole In It Day.

by Aunt Woo

The mysterious lure of The Orient Express… Do you feel a spine-tingling thrill just thinking about it? The fantasy of The Orient Express throws my thoughts into an intriguing time warp, a romantic fantasy that leaves me breathless. My senses are alive! “All Aboard!” The melodious voice of the conductor rings down the line and hangs in a cloud of imaginary steam. Like Ravel’s Bolero, the harmony of the whistle, wheels turning on track, the repetitive, mesmerizing rhythm join the sensual symphony with the urgency of climax.

The powerful lead engine pulls away from the station and, like a timid dancer, the following car tentatively steps on stage. This first movement, a moment of fame, exhilarating and brief. The troupe of clumsy dancers bump into each other in an attempt to take the lead, each railcar steps en point. The cars sway with the rhythm of the symphony, but will not dance gracefully until kissing, like conjoined twins they embrace in the freedom of the ballet.

Relaxing in the sounds and sensation of my thoughts, I entice myself with visual fantasies. The dinner hour is announced by the chime of a glockenspiel in the hands of a white-gloved attendant passing through each car. Formally attired, the gentlemen in tux and tails and bejeweled ladies in dazzling evening gowns make their way toward the much anticipated social event of the evening. The air in the parlour car tenable, with the thick smoke of fine tobacco and aperitifs. The bubbles of the champagne cocktail tickle my nose.

Chateaubriand, espionage, murder, mistresses, contraband, lovers, jewels, thieves, courtesans, gigolos, and heroes are offered like choices on a Menu Prix Fixe.

Mmmmm…. The Orient Express!

…. But before you book a Reservation to Ryde, I would like to offer a few “train traveling” suggestions based on my recent experience. The Amtrak journey from Los Angeles to Seattle known as The Coast Starlight Express is not The Orient Express. You want to book a trip on the Starlight Express? The following excerpts are from my book Ha-Ha H’all Aboard, soon to be in print, and a must-have guide for traveling by rail.

If you choose Amtrak for economical considerations rather than The Orient Express, check the rate for round-trip luxury accommodations to and from anywhere. Convert the price quote into pennies and throw the money on the tracks in front of the approaching train without boarding. This is referred to as “throwing your money away” or “the flat rate.” Purchasing an Amtrak ticket and getting aboard the train is called “throwing good money after bad” or “hoisting yourself by your own petard.”

Knowing the regulations prior to traveling by rail is essential to survival.

The Coast Starlight Express prohibits carrying alcoholic beverages aboard. You may purchase beer, wine, and spirits in the club car from 9am until 11pm. During these hours of operation the club car will be closed to allow the attendant 2 two-hour meal breaks and no more than 6 (no less than 6) regulated 40-minute union breaks, not to include time out to use the restroom facilities or to deliver snacks, beverages, and three square meals to the conductor or other crew members.

Attendants on duty for lengthy or overnight trips (which include all Amtrak routes other than the brief 4-hour, non-stop journey between Gilroy and Morgan Hill) are required to take an 8-hour “sleep break” after every 2-hour duty shift. Amtrak does have a designated driver; however, there are no white-gloved attendants serving cocktails.

If you plan on having a “spirited” trip, it is imperative to have a creative cocktailing plan in place before boarding. Pack a cooler filled with Evian, Ice Tea, Snapple, Frappiccino, Arizona Green Tea, V-8, and Frutopia. Why? If you’re too stupid to figure this one out, you might as well fly to Seattle.

Ignoring the prohibition to carry alcoholic beverages aboard, fill the bottles accordingly:

Evian=Absolute

Ice Tea=Jack Daniel’s

Arizona Green Tea=Jose Quervo

Snapple (raspberry)=Cosmopolitans

Frappuccino=Bailey’s

V-8=I could have had a Bloody Mary!

Frutopia=Buy my book if you want to know

For your added enjoyment, add lemon or lime wedges, olives, onions, peppercini, or other garnishes to your ice cube tray. Pop your ice cube garnishes into a ziplock bag and you’re all set for creative cocktailing hours.

If you are a “strictly by the rules” type and you choose to purchase cocktails, plan on traveling with at least one arm and a leg plus cash. In the club car, a minimum of $200 plus an arm and a leg will buy you a slight buzz…..after 11:00 p.m. (club care closes) you’re SOL. Purchase whatever you plan to drink as early as possible since club car supply is limited and the only little tiny bottles left for purchase after 10a.m. are disgusting things: negroni. Wine selection is limited to something white or red and beer is Bud.

Don’t buy anything to eat! If you drink AND eat…bring a “sugar daddy” or plan on spending a few nights in a hostel at the end of the line and forget about room service and hotels. A small bag of potato chips (about 3 whole chips and some crumbs) will set you back $1.75…you’ll need deep pockets to buy a three-day-old turkey sandwich. (They don’t accept credit cards in the club car.)

Pack more than you think you’ll need. The flimsy, one-ounce paper cups available at the water coolers are best used for origami.

Travel alone or with a deaf-mute traveling companion.

Refill prescriptions for Prozac, Paxil, Ambien, Valium, Haldol, Percodan, Sonata, Librium, Ativan, Thorazine, Quaaludes (you get the idea?), and Beano.

Practice random acts of kindness. Buy an ass a drink. A Mickey Finn can make the most obnoxious passenger your new best friend.

Smoking is prohibited on the train. Passengers wishing to smoke must the stand on the platform at the designated smoking stops. There are two designated stops between here and the afterlife. Any person caught smoking in the lavatories, restricted areas, or on any part of the train will be removed at the next stop.

I have several suggestions for travelers who might experience “nic-fits.” Chewing nicorette, or other nicotine-laced gum, might help; however, “the patch” is by far the most effective first aid for smokers. At the first sign of an anxiety attack, place the patch firmly over your mouth and nose and breathe deeply until you reach the next designated smoking stop… or the afterlife.

Need I say more???? Sure I do, and you can read it all in Ha-Ha H’all Aboard.

Ever since the Boys of Enron slipped their greedy hands into our pockets and stole our lunch money, I’ve been on a mad mission to conserve energy. 

My favorite energy-saving trick is to dry my clothes outdoors on a dryer rack which I purchased from Target and set up on my deck. I’ve never once found bird poop on my clothes. I hadn’t even thought of that possibility until my sweetheart, Steve, moved in with me six years ago.
When I first saw him put his freshly washed clothes into the dryer on a sunny day, I tapped him on the shoulder and said, sweetly, “Oh, honey, I’ve found a great way to dry clothes and cheat PG&E at the same time!” I pulled out the dryer rack and demonstrated.
“Nope,” he said. “Not gonna do it.”
“But-but, why not,” I asked, mystified.
“Bird poop. I don’t want bird poop on my clothes.”
“But, I’ve never-”
He waved me away and started the dryer.
“OK,” I said. “Give up a month’s pay to PG&E, see if I care!” He ignored my remark and walked away. I cringed at the sound of the dryer’s every energy-sucking tumble. Maybe I should have reconsidered the whole moving-in thing, but love does stagger on and, besides, there’s always make-up sex.
Around the same time I learned about what I (lovingly) call his “bird-poop phobia,” I was made aware of some of my own shortcomings. Who knew (or cared) that I seldom dry my hands thoroughly after washing?
I went to hug him one day and he backed up, saying, “Ewww, your hands are wet.”
“What?” I said, feeling ever-so-sensitive at this hint of rejection.
“Your hands-they’re wet.”
I looked down at them. “So?”
“I love you, but I don’t like wet stuff, especially your wet hands all over me.”
“But,” I said, rising to my defense, “that’s what air is for.” I quickly wiped my hands up and down my legs. “That and sweatpants.” I held them up for inspection. “See? All dry!”
I hadn’t lived with anyone for nineteen years before Steve moved in, and I was unused to negotiating day-to-day domestic differences with anyone but my cat. I decided to consider this as a training opportunity in case the U.N. ever asked me to help with that pesky squabble among warlords in Somalia.
In addition to the hand-wiping thing, I had to promise Steve that I would no longer turn off the circuit breaker for our dishwasher right after it finished, or rather seemed to finish, its cycle. With my old Whirlpool, it was easy to tell when the cycle was over-all its lights went out. But, with our new Maytag, even when the cycle appears to be completed, some of its panel lights stay on for awhile-forever, in my opinion.
Since I hated wasting electricity, my habit had become to turn off the circuit breakers when I finished using my appliances-a money-saving tip I got from The San Francisco Chronicle. But one day Steve informed me that by turning off the circuit breaker too early I screwed up the entire wash/dry cycle and would I please just let it turn itself off when it darn well wanted to. Oh, all right, I thought, if it makes him happy, why not?
It’s taken us awhile, but we’ve finally settled into a domestic routine that works about 80% of the time. I no longer borrow his tooth-whitening strips without asking; he, in turn, now tells me when he’s eaten the last of the oatmeal; and, despite his dislike of anything wet or “gommy” he voluntarily cleans the carpet after our kitty, Turtleman, has vomited. Also, I keep my wet mitts off his copy machine and buy most of his shirts; he, in turn, unloads the dishwasher without being asked.
My biggest struggle has been to learn when to keep my mouth shut. Instead of blurting out, “My God, you ate the whole jar of cashew butter? What are you, nuts?” I now clamp my lips together and walk away.
And, I suspect that on more than one occasion, Steve has refrained from saying, “Was that bird poop I saw on your shirt out there on the deck?”
There’s more than one way to conserve energy.
***
Rosie Sorenson’s work has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Contra Costa Times, and the Berkeley Daily Planet. Her essays have also been broadcast on KQED-FM as part of its Perspectives series. Her essay “Safe Haven” was named Listener Favorite for 2006. She won Honorable Mention in the Erma Bombeck International Writing Contest. Her work also appears in the upcoming 25th Anniversary edition of Mobius, the Poetry Journal. Readers can read more of her work at www.damngoodwriters.com/.

(And Special Answers to Questionable Questions)
By Will…I WILL GO FAR!!!…Fargo

Dear Will,
How come you never see pepperoni on anything but pizza? Doesn’t that seem strange to you? I don’t know why, Will, but I worry about stuff like this all the time. My intuition tells me something really weird is going on here. Has cheese got something to do with this?
You’re the only one I can turn to, Will. I’m counting on you. Please help me!

Signed,

Thinking about stuff…and worrying a little (too much maybe?)… in Santa Cruz

Dear Thinking about stuff…and worrying (too much?… no, not really)… in Santa Cruz,

Wow, are you reading my mind or something, Santa Cruz? What, are you one of these unwitting psychic types, finding yourself spontaneously drawn to others with the same burning metaphysical questions as you? That’s amazing.

You see, I too have been stewing, kneading, grating, and baking over this pepperoni and cheese pizza question for a long, long time. It’s been dogging me, Santa Cruz! More than you could possibly imagine.

So tell me, Santa Cruz, what do you think would happen if someday pizza wanted to get away from pepperoni for awhile? Where would pepperoni go? Have you ever seen it anywhere else? Oh sure, hanging on the rack in the deli section, yeah, right… Don’t be coy, Santa Cruz, you’ll piss me off!

The fact is, Santa Cruz, pizza hasn’t got the heart to dump pepperoni. No one else will take it in. I mean, think about it! Have you ever really seen just a plain cheese pizza with your own eyes? I don’t think so, Santa Cruz. Cheese pizza isn’t real. It’s never been real. It’s a figment of the collective imagination of the Great Unwashed.

Oh c’mon, Santa Cruz, you know who I’m talking about. The Great Unwashed is anyone who doesn’t drive a BMW or a Mercedes. Or an old Ford Fairlane with one bad shock.

So anyway, just how did that happen, Santa Cruz? How did so many people start believing in cheese pizza even though it doesn’t really exist? Well, the human mind is a very strange phenomenon, Santa Cruz. It plays tricks on itself all the time.

Follow me here, Santa Cruz. We’re gonna go far now.

You see, centuries ago cheese pizza was merely a myth, Santa Cruz. Just a simple metaphor meant to tell a story with a message. But for some reason the Great Unwashed began to lose sight of that.

What happened was, they started believing in cheese pizza literally, Santa Cruz. Millions and millions of them. And they passed that belief down generation after generation until eventually even the Great Washed started believing in it! And that’s when a very strange thing began to happen, Santa Cruz.

Just take a look at cheese pizza on the menu to see what I’m talking about. You’ll notice that the letters never stay still, Santa Cruz. They’re always moving slightly, wavy like a mirage in the Italian desert. Cheese Pizza … Cheese Pizza…

It’s an inherited hallucination, Santa Cruz. And by now a fixed delusion so ancient and vast it’s locked into the genetic code. Some call it “The DiGiornio Code.” And it’s in the DNA of nearly everyone now!

But not quite everyone. There is one exception. I’m talking about a very small and esoteric group of extremely powerful people, Santa Cruz. They’re members of an ancient secret society called the Peproni of Scalion.

The Peproni’s membership history stretches back nearly two thousand years and is comprised of several famous Italian luminaries including Dante, Michelangelo, and Madonna, to name a few.

Their whole purpose for nearly two millennia has been to keep the truth alive about the relationship between pepperoni and cheese, and to not reveal it to anyone outside the Peproni until just the right time.

Wow, I’m afraid I may have told you too much, Santa Cruz. I think I got a little carried away there. But I can’t help it! Like I told you, this issue about pepperoni and cheese pizza has been really dogging me! I don’t think I can hold it in any longer!

You see, my name really isn’t Will Fargo, Santa Cruz. It’s Linguini Macaroni! And I’m not just some loser who drives an old Ford Fairlane with two bad shocks.

OK, I lied before about only one shock being bad. But I had to, don’t you see? I’m too proud to admit that I’m flat broke, Santa Cruz!

But I can’t afford to work! I’m very busy with something extremely important but that doesn’t pay crap! Don’t you wonder how I know about the Peproni of Scalion if it’s such a big secret? It’s because I am a member, Santa Cruz. In fact, I’m the only member left!

But I can’t go on like this, working so hard every day just to keep myself from blurting out the big secret. I feel like I’m gonna collapse from all the centuries and centuries of weight from this powerful secret on my back!

So I’ve made a decision, Santa Cruz. Since you asked about it, in all your innocence with the psychic wavelength and all that crap… I must take this as a sign that the time has finally come.

And I now must fulfill my duty as the Grand Master of the Peproni of Scalion and reveal the truth that’s been hidden behind this false belief in cheese pizza for nearly two thousand years!!

So here goes, Santa Cruz. Have you got your Pepsi in hand, because I’m gonna let it fly!

Santa Cruz, pepperoni and cheese aren’t just friends that hang out together telling stories with tomato sauce and crust all day long. They’re inseparable, Santa Cruz. And they’ve been together for centuries as…. are you ready?… domestic partners with children!!

Santa Cruz…. Sausage and Mushrooms are the children of Pepperoni and Cheese!!!

There, I said it. It’s out. But what’s going to happen now? The pizza industry will be thrown into turmoil! Who could possibly have the heart now to order anything but a pizza with everything? They’d be tearing apart a whole family, Santa Cruz!!

And where will it stop? Soon we may only have one choice of salad dressing… only one breakfast combo… or… oh no!…or… only one flavor of ice cream!!

Oh my God, what have I done?! WHAT HAVE I DONE!?!?

We’ve been planning our “Blast from the Past” issue for some time now, but it’s taken awhile to put together. As we worked our way through the archives, we began to get a sort of “Uh-oh” feeling. As in, “Uh-oh, we have WAY too many favorite stories, cartoons, limericks, photos, etc. than we can possibly feature in a single ‘best of’ issue.” Which is why you see “Vol. 1″ on the cover. Truth is, we have enough material to fill at least three issues, and we’re still digging around in the vault. So if your favorite writer or story isn’t represented in these particular pages, sit tight-this is your classic case of a work-in-progress, the key word being “classic.” If you have any favorites you’d like to see honored in a future issue, feel free to shoot me an email. Or just shoot me. It’s too hard making these types of decisions.

by Jason Love,
Syndicated Humor Columnist

The Wide, Wide World of Competitive Eating

Ever since curling found its way into the Olympics, our concept of sport has so devolved that ESPN is now televising darts. Call me old-fashioned, but when I turn on ESPN and people are throwing darts, they had better be aiming at each other.
Where could they possibly go from here? Steam room endurance? Tiddlywinks? …
Answer: competitive eating.
In 2007 ESPN will broadcast four eating contests, including Nathan’s International Hot Dog Eating Contest, which this year I watched with keen interest … beside my barf bag.
Nathan’s is sanctioned by the International Federation of Competitive Eating, which also handles, among other foods, crab cake, baked beans, butter (just butter), spam, tiramisu, and-brace yourself, PETA-cow brains.
At least with cow brains you know what you’re getting. Scientists still don’t understand what holds a hot dog together. Right now they are focusing on a reaction between shoe polish and tripe.
Of course, one cannot talk hot dogs without mentioning undisputed champion of the world, Japan’s greatest pride outside of Mount Fuji, Takeru “The Tsunami” … Kobayashi.
In terms of consecutive world titles, you’ve got Lance Armstrong, Martina Navratilova, the ‘59-’66 Boston Celtics, and Takeru Kobayashi, who not only wins every year but often laps the competition (and by that I mean lifts them up with his tongue).
Yet Koby could pass as a wrestler: stony biceps, trim waist, that orange-blonde hair that looks so natural on Japanese men. Certainly this wasn’t the record-holder for hot dogs, lobster rolls, hamburgers, bratwurst, rice balls, and cow brains.
IFOCE president George Shea, who promotes his events the old-fashioned way-in a straw hat-stomached my questions.
“We’re seeing a changing of the guard,” he said. “The older, heavier eater is being replaced by athletes like Koby.”
Enter femme phenom Sonya Thomas, who, for her Tinkerbell physique, can eat ten percent of her body weight in a sitting. Sonya has outgorged 300-pound men to win titles in tacos, ravioli, chicken nuggets, jambalaya, and pulled pork sandwiches.
Having seen frankfurter sludge ooze out of eaters’ nostrils, I can only shudder at the thought of pulled pork sandwich.
I had to get closer, but not so close that I lost a finger.
“Crazy Legs” Conti received me like a professor … wearing dreadlocks. Conti has gobbled his way onto The Today Show, CNN, The Sopranos, Emeril, Good Morning America; and he even beat David Letterman in an oyster-eating challenge (459 to 3).
Stay tuned for the 2007 documentary, “Crazy Legs Conti: Zen and the Art of Competitive Eating.”
“So how does one eat 459 oysters without spewing on national TV?”
“The stomach can fill up,” said Legs, “but the mind never can.”
I could just see Crazy Legs training in a swamp next to Yoda: “Hmm, the bile strong with this one is.”
Tim “Eater X” Janus, who competes in face paint to intimidate the others, actually sees a sport psychologist. Sure, you laugh, but do you hold the world record for cannoli and tiramisu?
Sonya Thomas takes a more bare-bones approach: “I just focus, focus, focus.”
Needless to say, none of these people are welcome at Home Town Buffet.
Every food poses it own challenge (example: butter is made of butter), but hot dogs are eaten in one of three ways: 1. The Solomon Method, breaking the dogs in half; 2. Tokyo Style, eating wiener and bun separately; and 3. Dunk ‘n Dip, soaking the meat in what appears to be sewer water.
I’m not sure which method is favored by Miss Manners.
By IFOCE policy, regurgitation-”remnants”-amounts to disqualification. Koby’s 2005 victory was stained by controversy over remnants, a clear-cut cry for instant replay.
“And here, Bob, you can see the projectile splooging out of Koby’s ear and-stop the tape-yes, bouncing on the table.”
Some say that Koby lines his intestines with aloe; others suggest that his stomach was surgically altered by the Japanese government, still sore for losing ground in car production.
Koby’s translator just acts like he doesn’t understand the questions. So it goes.
The only American to keep up with Takeru Kobayashi is Joey “Jaws” Chestnut from San Jose, California. Joey actually led Nathan’s 2006 hot dog contest by two links until, in the tenth minute, he got the “nitrate sweats” and convulsed in a way that made you look around for an ambulance.
Koby, in contrast, found his rhythm, at which point you just had to sit back and let the man do what the good Lord intended him to do. But with 30,000 people chanting his name, Joey pushed to the end, clinging faithfully to advice from a friend … “The stomach can fill up, but the mind never can.”
By the twelfth minute, Joey could only shake the meat down seagull-like, falling short by 1¾ franks. And as hard as it must be to finish second, Joey could take comfort in the fact that he was not the guy measuring the ¼ hot dogs.
My favorite part was the six-foot mascot Frankster, who kept massaging the backs of the eaters. Can you imagine eating 30 hot dogs and then, in a swoon, turning around to find a giant hot dog rubbing your shoulders? Bad trip, man.
When the horn sounded, Koby and Joey raised their fingers in the universal vomit gesture before Kobe wiped his nostril sludge and lifted his shirt for the belly shot. It looked like he had a bun in the oven. 53¾ buns, to be exact.
Frankster waved goodbye to the scattering crowd, which would never eat again. The contestants were free to slink back to their tents and discharge bodily gases. Koby would let go a belch, Joey would burp a little louder, Sonya would break wind, and before you knew it ESPN would be there with television cameras.

By Nicole Kidding

You know him simply as Carmel artist McAllister “Mickey” Whiney, manufacturing customized masterpieces from his charming cottage-like production studio (i.e., a Volvo) parked quietly next to the Jiffy Lube. But like most artists, his story is anything but simple.
His humble beginnings took place in a modest, million-dollar bungalow in Carmel, where he was forced to set up shop in the garage between his parents’ Porsche and Jaguar, his creativity stifled with his parents’ cries of “Don’t you dare get paint on those cars!”
He often went hungry, his parents limiting him to five meals a day, with caviar restricted to weekends only. While begging for French fries, he became a self-proclaimed graphic designer for McDonald’s at age 4. But his talents were not appreciated and his parents were sued by the fast-food franchise after he ate his first art show, “What’s for Lunch?,” a brilliant abstract sculpture of fries colored red and gold (with ketchup and mustard).
Never one to be discouraged by a total lack of talent, he was always outspoken about his genius. He recalls that at the age of 5, he threw crayons at his teacher, screaming “I told you I need the 65 box, imbecile, and this crayon sharpener is complete crap-what do my parents pay you for, anyway?” At age 10, he was expelled for using these very same crayons to create his “Mural of Turds,” an anti-academic statement ahead of its time.
Sent to the elite boarding school “Our Children of Sorrows” at age 16, he sat in a vineyard contemplating his life: “These peasants have nothing to teach me!” was one epiphany. A period of creative constipation ended with the creation of his obscure piece of mixed media, “Turds on a Canvas,” made from happy cows of California. But the world was not yet ready to receive his art, perhaps due to its abstract nature, as onlookers often said, “This is nothing but crap!” To which he proudly corrected them: “It is not crap. It is turds.’”
His struggles for respect continued. When his parents refused to give him the house when he turned 21, he became homeless, and attempted to commit suicide by sniffing permanent markers. (The effects were temporary.) He spiraled downward, at last hitting rock bottom: accountancy. But his book-keeping career was short-lived due to an inability to add.
His passion for art once again began to dominate, taking him from a life free of financial worry to an unsteady existence as an avant-garde artist with an antipathy for “the norm.” His signature style, free-form use of bold, unrealistic colors arranged with seemingly no thought of composition, perspective, or subject matter whatsoever, was hailed as “disturbing” and “oddly ape-like.”
As with Van Gogh, people questioned his sanity: “You must be crazy to call this art,” wrote one critic. “Never have such frenzied colors produced such comatose works,” wrote another. But the more people doubted, the more he pushed the envelope to express himself creatively; in his painting entitled “#10,” a giant business envelope is addressed, “My gift to the universe.”
When his banker father cut off his allowance at age 30, in an act of angry rebellion he pierced his left nipple, which became infected and led to hospitalization. It was during this dark time that he developed the concept of “Nipplework,” using his healthy right nipple to create the smudges that led one critic to hail him as “one of the more disturbing painters of November, 1987.” “The smudges may not form actual ‘pictures,’ but they speak volumes,” he said to his detractors. “At least, they do to me.”
Like most master artists, he suffered from depression and mania (often at the same time), delusions of grandeur, alcoholism (he preferred Shirley Temples), drug addiction (it was said he was one of the first to take a Bayer aspirin daily, although this has been disputed), gambling (he often bets others that he will become famous after he dies, but acknowledges that if he wins, he can’t collect), sea sickness, and the desire to be taller.
In addition to being short, he was declared legally blind after a two-week binge of admiring his own works. Like vision, love also eluded him, but he seemed to realize that it was one of the personal sacrifices he must endure for the love of his craft; on the lonely road to fame, he must walk alone. “No one can love me like I do,” he was fond of saying. One of only two existing self-portraits, entitled “My Future,” consists of a blank canvas.
And his masochistic self-publicity didn’t stop there: he began experimenting in a friend’s recording studio after none of the local bars would allow him to perform simply because he didn’t know how to play an instrument or carry a tune (rumor has it he was even kicked out of a bar on karaoke night).
“The problem is, people’s vision and hearing is limited to convention,” he argued as part of his method of stressing subliminal messages over reality in art. “Often times,” he said, “the creation is a complete mystery, especially to me, but there’s a much deeper hidden meaning that no one will ever know, especially me, and that’s true art. Or something.”
This belief explains why he lets himself go, and explores painting, sculpture (his lost PlayDough pieces he predicts will someday be worth millions), writing, singing, and even acting. Recently, being the free spirit that he is, he spontaneously interrupted a play, leapt on stage, and began “air painting” in the nude while singing “Zippidee Doo Da.” Critics labeled his impromptu and unwelcomed performance “disturbing” and “oddly ape-like.”
In the second of his two attempts at a self-portrait, entitled “Complete Mental Nervous Breakdown,” he broke into the San Diego Zoo at night, and sat in the chimpanzee cage until the exhibit opened that morning. When asked upon his arrest to explain what prompted him to do this, he responded simply but honestly, “When I look in the mirror, I see a monkey.”

By David Filmore

Let me explain why I assaulted 437 people at the School for the Pregnant, Elderly, and Utterly Defenseless: I’m a victim.
I grew up with nothing-no swimming pool, no cable, only the most primitive of touch-tone phones. (The cord only reached six feet.) I suffered a lot of mental abuse from my parents, who were always telling me no. “Don’t bite your cousin.” “Stop burning things.” “Put down that pistol.”
When I was eight, they didn’t give me my own color television set, which I had specifically told them I wanted for Christmas. On my ninth birthday they didn’t buy me the Nintendo game system I had been dreaming of. My friends at the surprise party had to make do with party hats and streamers and Pin the Tail on the-I can barely choke out the word-Donkey.
Of course I was traumatized. My mother took me to the doctor, an HMO man named Butcher, whose first response to any complaint was leeches. When that didn’t work, he sent me to a Depression man who asked a series of questions. Did I get frustrated when things didn’t go my way? (Yes.) Did it irritate me when people didn’t cater to my every whim? (Yes.) Did I take secret joy in the suffering of others? (Of course.)
He diagnosed HM (Human Malaise). I can still hear his pen scratching on the pad, still see the Cyrillic-looking prescription we tendered to the pharmacist. This pill was called Kaleidozac, and though it would slow the disease, it could not halt it.
Thus began an addiction to an evolving assortment of pills as the years, and my disease, progressed. You name it, I took it: Muddleloft, Psychoscrew, Scramblemill, Brainyzap. To my parents’ credit, they grasped at any hope, not caring how many times we had to third-party the expense.
The pills granted some relief. But the basic problem-what I can only describe as “not being born into a ruling monarchy”-remained.
In school, the kids made fun of my J.C. Penney tennis shoes and alligatorless shirts. In gym I was always the last one picked. They ganged up on me in dodgeball. I remember clearly thinking, as everyone laughed and hurled balls at my head really hard, “I want to hurl a ball at somebody’s head, really hard.”
As the years passed, my disease took on the surreality of nightmare. I began fixating on girls, for example. Nonsense words came out of my mouth when I tried to talk to them. My sanity was clearly coming to an end, a heavy burden for any 22-year-old to bear.
The pharmaceutical industry tried to come to my rescue, but promising new pills delivered only disappointment. Work was out of the question: My mind was too clotted with my obsessions-Why can’t I win the lottery? Why don’t the Publishers Clearinghouse people visit me? Why is that Pamela Anderson swimsuit picture stuck in my head?-to permit anything like concentration.
The doctor said one of the side effects of the latest pill was ASP (Acute Self-Pity), and it was a humdinger. I found myself incapacitated, paralyzed on the couch in front of our pitiful little Magnavox television from, like, 1990.
My world shrank to the size of the four-bedroom McMansion I laughingly called “home.” Every week I suffered cable outages, misplaced cell phones, shortages on filet mignon at the grocer. The monthly check I received from the government was barely enough to cover the payments on my new Mitsubishi Eclipse.
This ticking time bomb had to explode, and one day it did. My parents ordered me to get off my butt and get a job. I had only one thought: to hit somebody in the head with a ball, really hard. However, no dodgeballs were handy, so I decided to drive to Wal-Mart to get some.
I climbed into my Eclipse. When I turned on the stereo, one of the speakers sputtered and cut out. How much more could I take? As I limped to the nearest Stereophonicworld for repairs, an ambulance came up behind me, beckoning me, with flashing lights and blaring sirens, to pull over to the side of the road so it could get to some emergency or something. “Why me?” I screamed to the inside of my car. “Why always me?”
After getting the speaker looked at-they couldn’t repair it then, they needed to order a part-I remember cackling hysterically-I went to Wal-Mart to purchase the balls. I understood that the world as I knew it was gone forever when, upon exiting the store, the greeter told me “good-bye.” Good-bye from a greeter. That was it. I could handle no more, and blacked out.
When I came to, they said I had smacked 437 people at the School for the Pregnant, Elderly, and Utterly Defenseless upside the head with an assortment of dodgeballs. However, my lawyer-the best lawyer my parents’ life savings can buy-says the real victim here is me, and I think he’s right.
I’m a victim of Mom and Dad. I’m a victim of HM and ASP. I’m a victim of Kaleidozac, Muddleloft, and a zillion other drugs they pumped into me and which have been shown to induce violent thoughts in nearly .00001 percent of users. I’m a victim of the Twinkies, Mountain Dew, and Red Bull in my system at the time of the dodgeballing. I’m a victim of society, which somehow or other allowed all of this to happen.
I’m a victim in so many ways I can’t even name them all, so I’ll just leave that to my lawyer. If he doesn’t victimize me too. I mean, I told him to get me out of here by Thursday. What’s the deal? It’s really ticking me off. Whatever happens, it’s on his head.

My daughter pulled a videotape from a box in the basement.
“New Kids on the Block?” she asked, looking at a faded VHS tape cover featuring five kids who looked like they needed better parents.
“It’s not mine,” I said, sounding strangely defensive. “I’d rather own ‘ABBA Sings the Blues.’”
“Whatever,” she said in the way 17-year-olds do to show they own the planet. “I bet you danced to this.”
Yeah, and I sing “I Write the Songs” while drinking beer with the guys.
“No, dear,” I said. “There are only two people in this house who were alive during the five-minute New Kids reign, and I was the only one too busy listening to actual music to notice.”
“Sure, Dad,” she said, patting my shoulder. “I’ll just keep digging. I’m sure I’ll find Hanson.”
Oh, or maybe even Nelson.
The lesson here? Go through your video/DVD/audio collection before someone finds something you’re embarrassed to own. Well, unless you have “New Kids on the Block: Hangin’ Tough.” My wife was actually excited to see it again while I was trying to make fun of her.
But if someone finds your copy of Ratt’s “Out of the Cellar,” don’t worry, you’re not alone.
I’m sure Ice-T has “Ice Ice Baby” on his iPod. Dick Cheney probably has Richard Simmons’ “Sweatin’ to the Oldies” on Air Force Two. And I suspect Chuck Norris hops into his jammies and cuddles with a bowl of buttered popcorn to watch “Grease” at least once a month, but I can’t be completely sure because anyone who’s seen him do it is most certainly dead.
My embarrassing recording doesn’t include episodes of the original “Star Trek.” It’s not the last episode of “Cheers” and it’s not the first episode of “The Lone Gunmen.”
I own a copy of “Footloose.”
I don’t know how I got it. I don’t know if I’ve watched it more than once-and if I did it was probably because of a date, a dare, or too much cough syrup. And I don’t recognize anyone in the movie except Kevin Bacon, that bald guy from “Third Rock from the Sun,” and some blond girl.
My crime is the fact that I’ve never thrown it away.
“What else do you have in here, Dad?” my daughter asked, poking around tapes full of “The Simpsons” episodes and 10-year-old NFL games I’ll never watch again. “Something in black and white with ladies water dancing?”
“No,” I said. “All you’ll find in there are movies with Clint Eastwood, ‘Terminator I, II and III’ and maybe something with talking chimps.”
She stopped searching through the sea of out-of-date VHS tapes and pulled out a black plastic rectangle of blackmail.
“‘Footloose,’ Dad?” she said, grinning like … well, grinning like she’d just found a copy of ‘Footloose’ in my VHS tapes. “You’ve got ‘Spice World’ in here, too, right?”
I can change the oil in my car, I can fix a toilet, and I can belch like a cartoon rabbit, but none of that manly stuff matters when you’ve got “Footloose” in your video collection.
I hang my head, and please, don’t tell Chuck Norris.

VALENTINE’S FOR MILLIE

“Rex, it’s time to think about a Valentine’s gift for Millie. She’s your main squeeze, so we have to get an appropriate gift for her. Last year’s Valentine was a dud, if you recall. We got her a cow bone to gnaw on, remember? Half a femur, I believe. She felt the ‘cow’ implication was a comment on her size. Females don’t like any gift with the word ‘cow’ involved, Rex. The fact that she’s an English sheepdog and is ‘big boned’ didn’t help, either.”
My canine companion sat next to me on the couch as our conversation progressed.
“I imagine clothing is a bad idea, too. Anything she could squeeze into would have to be a Large or XLarge, and you would just lose more yardage with that, as well.”
Rex looked as if he was pondering the possibilities, but in fact, he was probably wondering how long it was until dinnertime.
“Now Rex, I’ve had my share of Valentine’s with women over the years. It can be a treacherous slope, pal. I once bought a girl a book on Proper Tire Rotation and a set of crescent wrenches. She seemed ungrateful. I was hurt. One word led to another and before I knew it, she kicked me out of her trailer. Lived in my truck until I met Dakota. I wised up and got Dakota a matching can opener-toaster set. She LOVED it. She let me use them to make dinner for her every night I lived with her. Both nights. I guess she could only stand so much canned Dinty Moore Beef Stew and Pop Tarts.”
Rex seemed to take interest in this leg of my marathon, but I realized he was just stretching.
“See, the thing to remember Rex, is . . .” Rex had nodded off. A tactic he frequently uses as hint for me to shut up and feed him. I ignored him. “See, the thing you have to remember is to get a gift that truly reflects your feelings for Millie. Do you want a gift that says, ‘I will love your forever,’ or maybe something less committal, such as ‘Want to look for cat turds together?’ or maybe something more casual, such as, ‘Want to sniff each other’s butts?’”
Rex had rolled over onto his back, wagging his tail, indicating I should interrupt the riveting conversation and scratch his belly.
“No, Rex. Listen, we’ve got to get this Valentine’s thing off your To Do list and not wait until midnight of February 13th, like I did for my girlfriends. The good cards are gone by then. Once I had to alter the last card in the drugstore-a Get Well card-into a Valentine’s card. It was in Spanish, too.”
Rex had put his paws over his eyes-a feeble attempt to close me out of his world.
“Knock it off, Rex. We’ve got to get a gift for Millie. My God, she has everything a guy could want! Silky hair, bright eyes, pleasant disposition. Shoot, if she wasn’t a dog, I’d ask her out myself!”
Rex uncovered his eyes and stared at me. I think I had crossed a line with him I shouldn’t have.
“Well, you know. I was just speaking figuratively. Don’t get your hackles up. How about a nice dog tag? ‘With Love from Rex?’ ‘Rex and Millie Forever?’ ‘You’re a Fine Canine?’ Hmmm?”
Rex was hanging his head upside down over the edge of the couch. His chops hung open in total abandonment. He half-closed his eyes and was making choking noises.
“Forget it, Rex. I know you’re faking it. You’re not choking and I’m not going to give you the Heimlich maneuver like I did in the McDonald’s parking lot. Behave yourself. I’m trying to help you. Oh, forget it.”
I got up and left him to his silly diversions. He could get his own gift for Millie. I’ve got to hand it to him, though-at least he has a girlfriend. Me? Maybe next year