I was visiting a co-worker at her home, and I was leery of her five-year-old boy, a blonde little boy, because I knew he had a reputation for being difficult. I’d even heard him scream in the past, though from a distance.

I was talking with my host. The kid came up and demanded that his step-dad stop talking to me and do something for him, find one of his toys. The step-dad evidently didn’t move quick enough.

The blonde cherub made an evil scowl like Damien in one of those devil movies. He sucked in air. His fat little face exploded in a scream, an unearthly, piercing, horrendous yell.

It loses a lot on the printed page, but the scream sounded something like, “Urrrrrrghemorppfhhhhhhllllact!” Then, for effect, the little blonde boy wound up like a steam engine, huffed, puffed, and shrieked a series of banshee wails.

His mother came running from the kitchen, begging the child not to misbehave. “That’s not nice, Joey,” she said nervously. “Look at what a spectacle you’re making of yourself. Didn’t you promise you’d be nice to company? Do you want to see your mother sad?”

The kid hollered louder. The windows rattled.

I knew the child was fond of model airplanes, because the toys were scattered in nooks about the living room. I rose from the sofa, reached for one of the diminutive aircraft, and knelt down next to the youngster, intending to quiet him with my charm.

I leaned close to the boy.

“I had a great uncle who flew one of these in the First World War,” I said, smiling. “Let me tell you about the time I ……….”

The kid clenched a fist, reached back, and hit me right in the mouth.

“That isn’t nice, Joey.” The step-dad smiled, chuckled, as though half-teasing, like it was all just good-natured fun. “For that, no bedtime Nintendo.”

“Spirited boy,” I said, rising, rubbing my lip.

In that moment, I envisioned going for a field goal with the little bastard. I pictured his chubby little blonde body, curled up, turning end over end, as it soared between the uprights, 60 yards away.

It’s not nice to think such thoughts. I felt bad thinking them. Nevertheless, I also felt my lip throb.

Before I left, I decided to accidentally step on one of the kid’s models.

I don’t want to be anywhere in the same state when that punk turns into a teenager.

Copyright 2010 Sammonsays.com

Since nobody uses it, why do we have the word “ouch,” the sound you make when you hurt yourself?

Where did this word come from? There is no doubt, back in the mists of time, when small men with giant reproductive organs walked the earth looking for women and wearing animal skins, they made up the first words by making similar sounds to the thought they wanted to express, or the danger they wanted to communicate.

It was mostly about danger back then. There was little incentive to go to all the trouble to make up a word to say, “Pass me the saber-tooth.”

Thus, if you were a caveman and saw a dangerous snake, you told your partner “Hiss!” In other words, look out, there’s a freakin’ snake. Then, if you wanted your partner to hit the freakin’ snake over the head with a rock, you said, “Hiss, smash!”

But if your partner missed, and hit your toe with the rock instead, you said “OW!” Not ouch. That came later, when more sophisticated words were added.

Why OW? Why not “GERSH!” Or “REEP!” Or “FLINKO?”

Why did the caveman say “OW” instead of the above? Do we all have to be slaves to the sudden impulse of one caveman? I for one, resent having to use a word first thought up by a filthy, smelly Cro-Magnon with caked, dried excrement staining his backside, and chunks of un-wiped sleep in his eyes and with breath smelling of last week’s pterodactyl soufflé.

Nobody much uses either word, OW, or ouch, today anyway. When was the last time you heard someone say “ouch”? Interestingly, the word ouch has become a designer word for clever modern people who, when you suffer embarrassment, tease you by saying to you, “Ouch!”

Now, instead of OW, when you smash your toe, you say a bad word with the letter “S” (meaning a bowel movement). Or the “F” word. Hurt has been upgraded to a more vicious connotation, proving that modern man has a lower threshold of pain. He is no longer content to just say OW! Use of the F word seems to indicate a sexual link with pain, which is a fascinating topic all its own and which I will touch on later in a separate piece.

There is little doubt that back in the real old days when they used to, as we currently put it, “slay guys,” there was much more pain in daily life than today.

In the Middle Ages, your teeth were rotting out of your head and they pulled them with rusty horse-shoeing pliers. You screamed OW! You had a gangrenous leg so they hacked it off with a dull axe, plus your other arms and legs for safety, and cauterized the wounds with the fire of a branding iron, leaving you a legless, armless, bobbing torso. OW! If you had an ear plugged with wax, they thought it was the devil and tied a chain to your ear and the other end to a horse and had the horse bolt and rip your ear off, without anesthetic. OW!

There was no Tylenol. Life was very painful back when things were rotten.

Because of that caveman who smashed his toe, sound words are more interesting than word words. But if people had not assigned more complex wording, we would have to rely today on strictly sound-based communication.

For example, the caveman wants to tell his wife, “You did not cook the musk-ox the way I like it, singed with the hair intact for crunchiness. Go over to that festering pool of excrement and stand on your head in it until further notice.”

He wouldn’t say it that way. No. Instead, he would say, “Yuk, sizzle, pee-yoo, who-whee, gurgle-gurgle!”

Thus, if we were on strictly sound-based wording today, we might be able to get rid of insurance salesmen and politicians. Scientifically then, language is a timeless conflict between what we mean to say, and what we say to mean.

Copyright 2009 SammonSays.com

What is golf? You take a metal rod with a head on it, and hit a little white ball towards a hole in the ground.

Golf symbolizes for a lot of pot-bellied, balding middle-aged men success. Why? They can traipse around the clubhouse and act the big guy in their expensive golf clothes and say to themselves, “I’m a success. You have to work. But I can hang around the golf club.”

Golf is the most un-sport of all sports, the reason why pot-bellied bald men with heart murmurs can play it.

You don’t have to do anything, except walk short distances, and swing at a little white ball. Supposedly, if you’re doing it right, the ball gets closer to the hole with each swing. After you swing, you get back into a toy car powered by a battery and drive to where you hit the ball. Then you get out and do it again. Get back in the toy car, and drive again.

This is a sport?

It involves neither courage nor stamina.

Sometimes, people who are recognized as being the best at swinging at the little ball, are followed around the course by hordes of strangers whose lives are so meaningless, they have nothing better to do than follow someone who is hitting a tiny ball closer to a hole in the ground and driving a toy car.

Sometimes television broadcasts it so you can see them hit the ball at a hole. Millions of dollars are awarded to the one who gets the ball in the hole in fewer tries than the other guy.

He says, “Oh look at me, I’m getting the ball closer to the hole. Aren’t I great? Oh I’m important. I sent the ball right at the hole that time.”

Everybody whispers in the crowd, as though something really important is going on. At boxing matches and baseball games they scream. But not golf. A sport that has no noise except the whirring of the toy cars?

Most who play golf are neither famous for it, nor particularly good at it, nor successful, though they want to pretend they are. After spending very little energy swinging perhaps an average 93 times at a tiny ball and then driving a toy car, they come back to the clubhouse and have a calorie-laden steak and a double scotch on the rocks.

Not only do they fanaticize that they’re rich in their overpriced golf clothes, made by a slave laborer in China, but they also think of themselves as sportsmen. Golf, with the possible remote exception of bowling, is the only sport you can play if you’re an out-of-shape slob.

You see, if you were to climb into a boxing ring and box, everybody would see you’re out of shape and laugh at you when you clumsily collapsed into a corner from exhaustion after only the first round. That wouldn’t stroke your ego, would it?

No. Mainly, golf is to take erratic swings at a tiny white ball, drive a toy car after it, then come back and parade around and act the big guy. Despite the fact that your house, your car, and your boat, are not owned by you, but by a bank from which you borrowed money to acquire those things, and to which you now make payments that you probably can’t meet.

Like borrowing, golf is somehow psychologically a way a person can deceive themselves. Look at me. I’m important. I’ve made it. What “it” is we don’t know, but that’s beside the point for our purposes.

Millions of gallons of water are expended each year on watering golf courses that produce neither crops nor oxygen-giving trees.

But you can tell yourself, Oh look at me, that was a good shot, I’m closer now to the hole than I was before. Oh boy! Let’s get in the toy car and drive over there. See? My ball almost rolled onto that really thin grass (the green), where that minimum-wage immigrant worker mowed it real, real close.

Fore!

Why do you yell “Fore” when you hit the ball at someone’s head? Why not yell “Five,” or “Twenty-five?” Why not yell, “Hey, look out, there’s a ball speeding toward your head?” Golf would be more interesting and more of a sport if the person whose head you almost took off with your errant shot and then yelled “Fore” at, as part of the game, the rules, was then allowed to come over and engage you in bare-knuckle fisticuffs.

Beat the crap out of you. The fight winner gets 20 strokes taken off their score.

You wouldn’t come back to the clubhouse to show off with a bloody nose. The overpriced steak at the clubhouse you’d have to put over your eye instead of ingesting it and swelling your already dangerously bulging waistline.

Then fewer people might play the ridiculous game of golf.

Copyright 2009 SammonSays.com

(Sung to the tune of Monty Python’s “I’m a lumberjack, but it’s okay.”)

“I’m a narcissist, but it’s okay.”

I got called a narcissist.

Am I a narcissist?

I’m not a narcissist.

What is a narcissist?

A person who has grandiose feelings about their own self-importance.

Oh, yeah! That’s me! C’mon! You think I’m going to go through life conceding that I’m just like everybody else? I don’t have any right to feel special? Oh, sure! It’s okay for Paris Hilton to have a fun life and be the center of attention, but not me. I’m just a nobody and should be content to be so.

Right!

I’m the greatest psychic genius in a hundred years. Give me a break.

The definition of narcissist also says the person takes criticism personally, feels rage, shame, and humiliation, and thinks people are out to get him.

What a bunch of bull! People are just too stupid to see the brilliance of my writings. That’s what you have to put up with when you work in a world of dullards, yahoos.

All they want to do is put me in my place as an underling, because I’m innocent and pure and easy to take advantage of. Well, screw ‘em!

They’ll never let me in the inner circle of fame because they can’t stand someone who’s brighter than they are, and who knows it, and who know I know it, and whom they can’t control.

Is that being a narcissist?

Narcissism is also defined as having recurrent fantasies of unlimited wealth and power.

I’m a down-to-earth guy. All I want, and this is all I ever really expected, is a million dollars in the bank, the ability to smack somebody in the nose and pay the fine for it, and a tropical island of my own in the South Pacific. With a cabana to the open sea air, and flowing white curtains.

Why not me? Some jerk has that. Donald Trump has that. It’s okay for him, right? But not me. A two-bit thieving punk in a pin-striped suit. That’s Donald Trump.

And that makes me a narcissist?

Craving constant attention and admiration. This makes me a narcissist?

I don’t ask people to salute when I walk into a room… just be properly respectful and reverent. That’s all. Is that too much to ask? I’m a genius. I should be treated like one.

I just want what’s coming to me. And I’ll get it even if I have to step on a few people. It’s dog eat dog.

A narcissist believes they have a right to exploit others. Yeah! Right!

Did Napoleon whine and cry and say, “I can’t take over France because then I’d be a narcissist?”

I give everybody a fair chance. But don’t get in the way of what’s mine.

Another supposed symptom of narcissism is that the person is a poor loser.

I have a right to be a poor loser. I’ll bet none of my columns ever wins a literary award, because the judge is probably some effete New York snob who’s against me because I live in a small seaside town. He’s jealous because I can hear the surf crashing from my window when he hears screams in the night and police sirens. So if I enter a contest, he’ll throw my submission in the garbage. But if I was a gay guy who’d been mugged in Manhattan. Oh! That’s different. Then! Then! He’d read it. He’d give me an award.

The most talented people never win anything.

Supposedly, a narcissist is a person who disregards rules because he feels he is somehow special.

I’ve got news for you. I am special! I refuse to wait near the cash register at a crowded restaurant without any available tables and stare stupidly and hungrily at people eating food while I wait for a free table. I’ll go to my car and sulk while my wife waits inside at the cash register.

That’s only fair.

A narcissist thinks everybody loves or hates him.

Nobody loves me. Everybody hates me because they’re jealous of my ability.

Oh, yeah! Shallowness in emotional responses and inability to sympathize with others.

I’m not my brother’s keeper, man. A keeper is what a zoo animal has.

Copyright 2009 SammonSays.com

Here we go again.

I predicted the swine flu epidemic four months before it happened, and once again, I have to explain to a dull world that doesn’t recognize talent.

The kind of uncomprehending world that makes Lady GaGa a star.

I wrote a list of predictions for the year 2009 back on New Year’s Day. One of the predictions listed was that I saw a “catastrophe coming out of the Southwest.”

“A catastrophe coming out of the Southwest.”

“A CATASTROPHE COMING OUT OF THE SOUTHWEST.”

Mexico is the Southwest.

Do any of you further doubt? I also predicted Hurricane Katrina a week before that happened (read my column about people drowning called Doomsday Five-Katrina was a Force Five Hurricane).

This is getting really tiresome. I clearly have psychic ability and I have to take the tedious step and tell you about it because you didn’t read my column or make the connection back then.

I am able to tell the future.

I can do it.

I have always known that I could feel things others can’t. That I was more attuned to some kind of vision than others. It doesn’t have anything to do with crap about looking at a crystal ball.

It just comes to you. You can feel it.

Clairvoyance is not about feeling superior to others. It’s not about being infallible. A clairvoyant can have a bad day like anyone else. It’s about windows, portals into the beyond. Some of us have it. Remember Alice in the looking glass. Alice was a clairvoyant.

It’s flashes. Having flashes. Visions. Vision flashes. Something that you can see coming, when the portal (the looking glass) is open.

It has nothing to do with mumbling mumbo-jumbo strange words over somebody’s head, or burning incense, acting weird, using ouija boards or banging a gong. This is not a fortune-telling machine with a figure of a swami behind glass at the county fair.

I’ve always been the kind of person who is super sensitive. I’m not joking about any of this. Let me put it another way. I’m the kind of person who if you kick a dog around the corner, I can feel it.

Oh, by the way. I also predicted (in January) that Vice President Joe Biden would get in trouble for saying something. As I write this, word comes to me that Biden is in hot water for making statements about airline travel amid the swine flu threat.

Two great clairvoyants of the past were Rasputin, who convinced the empress of Russia that he was a holy man who could see the other side and he was proven right most of the time, and Crazy Horse, an Ogallala visionary who clearly had the gift.

Then there’s me.

That’s all I need to say.

Copyright 2009 Sammonsays

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

I’m talking to this guy and he has a huge Adam’s apple. I can’t help it. I can’t look in his eyes. I have to watch his Adam’s apple, as it bobs up and down.
What’s up with that?
The Adam’s apple is the only part of the body directly tied to the Biblical story of creation. As the story goes, when Eve gave Adam the apple, he choked on a piece of it, and this became his Adam’s apple.
See? There’s a rational scientific explanation for everything.
That’s why men have bigger Adam’s apples than women do.
A doctor will tell you the Adam’s apple regulates the deeper pitch men have to their voices. That’s all it does?
Women have higher-octave voices because their Adams’ apples are smaller. If only there was a body part that caused women to talk less.
But that’s a different matter.
Some of us have big ears, big noses, and big chins. These can be cured by surgical procedures-in the case of the nose, something called a rhinoplasty.
I’ve never known any man who had an obscene Adam’s apple to have it taken care of, like you would a nose. If he did, would he then have a voice like Barbara Streisand?
It’s only conjecture at this point.
I’ll tell you what, though. It’s wrong to have an ugly Adam’s apple.
It’s wrong to blame it on Adam.
How would you like to have a cancer-like growth named after you? According to what you see in the movies, Adam is always a good-looking hunk. Like Michael Parks. Remember him in the show “Then Came Bronson,” about the motorcycle loner who flouted society’s conventions?
Oh! I’m getting off subject.
I’m going to place a sticker on my car that reads, “Unlike skate boarding, it is a crime to have a big, ugly Adam’s apple.”
I was lucky. I was born with a barely discernible Adam’s apple. Does that mean I have feminine characteristics?
I’m a big believer, what with the cost of medicine and doctors these days, in home surgery. In the past, I’ve taken steak knives and carved off offending lumps that I didn’t like, lumps that wouldn’t go away of their own accord… performed without anesthetic.
Why not the Adam’s apple? Hey, if it’s too big… that baby has to go. Simply insert blade, and slice downward for about two inches. Keep a cork handy as a temporary plug.
After all, who in their right mind would want the elegant upward sweep of their regal god-like neck ruined with a bump that makes it look like you partially swallowed a hamster?
The Adam’s apple is the only physiology that readily, involuntarily, moves up and down, except for the eyelids, and the mouth, and the male organ, if you’ve got one.
In fact, if you could synchronize your Adam’s apple to bob up and down in unison with your male organ… you might be able to sell this skill to the television producers of American Idol.
Poor Adam. First he goes gaga for this newly minted chick, who behind his back fools around with a snake. Then, to please her, he takes a bite of forbidden fruit which results in a giant cyst in his throat that looks like a huge, unpopped zit.
Men who have hideous Adam’s apples should wear turtleneck sweaters. Even in the summer.
Copyright 2009 by SammonSays.com

They’re coming. They’re taking over. The economy is the least of your worries.
There is a gigantic swirling vortex in outer space scientists are not aware of, that is funneling alien organisms that will ultimately rob the food chain of its life-giving nutrients, as well as spread impotency among people. Read the rest of this article »

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.
Read the rest of this article »

A bizarre event I covered as a reporter a few years back was a big-game-hunting convention in Reno, Nevada. Two celebrities were there, former president George Bush (senior), and General Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of Desert Storm.

Held every year, the convention promotes the hunting of exotic game, animals you may never of heard of, because they’re so rare. I’m not necessarily against hunting, the dinner table of the frontier, pioneer American heritage and all that. Read the rest of this article »

You’re a bunch of sickos.

Talk about sick. Look at some of these phobias we have today. I’m not talking about common phobias like Claustrophobia (fear of confined spaces) or Acrophobia (fear of heights). Everybody’s afraid of those.

I’m talking about really strange ones, like Arrhenphobia (fear of men). I dated a girl who had that.

I don’t have any myself. Weird ones, I mean…I wouldn’t call Alfalfaphobia…fear of the late Carl Dean Alfalfa Switzer, the kid with the cowlick on the “Little Rascals.” I just have a touch of it now, mind you. But I wouldn’t call that odd.

What about Celttophobia (fear of Celts)? An ancient tribe of hairy red-headed Micks in bear skins. How many Celts have you run into lately? This is a real phobia. I’m not kidding you. Read the rest of this article »

Two men who habitually engage in the mind poop of using non sequiturs have a discussion. For those of you who seldom read, a non sequitur is a remark, a nonsensical aside, that has no relation to the preceding comments made during a discussion.

I think it’s just a case that fat people have a lower sense of self esteem. Of course, I wouldn’t know personally. Read the rest of this article »

You did this to me!Me! The king of the jungle.

The ultimate muscle-bound stud. Adonis! God’s gift to women.

I’m going extinct!

I hope you women out there with your equal rights are happy. You better enjoy me while you can. The Y chromosome, the fingerprint of maleness, is weakening, being stripped of the genes defending it.

When it goes, men will no longer exist. Read the rest of this article »

Where have all the kid’s TV shows gone? Captain Kangaroo, Howdy Doody, Mister Rogers, Soupy Sales, Sheriff John?Okay. There’s Barney, some guy in a lizard suit. But that’s PBS.

Why don’t kids have kiddie shows anymore? Look at what they’re missing. When we were kids, we grew up with these crazy people.

I volunteer to become the new kiddie show MC, Captain Muppie (Middle Aged, Upwardly Mobile). A show updated to reflect today’s world, today’s values, and the street smarts and intelligence of today’s kids. These modern kids know more about sex than I did when I was twenty years old. Read the rest of this article »

I have been an extra sensory person for several years now, and I believe firmly that a regularly applied program of pressure point or suggestive or downright mental or physical psychosexual stimulation can add years to your youth, darken your gray hair, and erase wrinkle lines.What, then, is “Auto Esoteric Erotic Stimulation?”

The happiness of the inner being is a glow that must be applied. Read the rest of this article »

Schizophrenia is much more than just being a screwed-up psychopathic basket nutcase. There are positive aspects too. What are the pros and cons?

First of all, if you’re schizophrenic, you have paranoid delusions of “persecution.” In other words, you think everybody is out to get you. Let me reassure you if you think this. I can tell you, there really are people out to get you. Your boss probably. And maybe your wife. When you earn money, your wife takes it and spends it, right? Read the rest of this article »

(A client gets a call from Bob Later.)

My name is Later, Bob. Just make it Later.

Okay, Bob.

I said to call me Later.

Okay, Bob.

Call me Later.

Okay. Bob.

I said to call me Later. Read the rest of this article »