This Week in Jesus-Related Advertising

It seems like every other day, some quaint and cuddly, blasphemy-themed chain restaurant from New Zealand is messing with Texas. And by Texas, I mean Jesus. This time it's Hell Pizza, which is running a billboard campaign that, at first glance, only appears mouth-watering. It's only when you look a little closer that you start to see all the offensive, Jesus-related things going on here.

Keep looking if it doesn't jump out at you right away, everybuzzy. It took me a few hours to figure it out, too.

Limited time??!?! Earth to Hell Pizza: Jesus is with us always and everywhere. And his buns, unlike yours, totally rule.

Honestly, I think I'm getting quaint-and-cuddly,-blasphemy-themed-chain-restaurant-from-New-Zealand-messing-with-Texas-and-by-Texas-I-mean-Jesus fatigue. And apparently, I'm not the only one. Church peeple are getting seriously peeved about all this meanness directed at Our Lord and Savior. For realsies!

Anglican Church media officer Lloyd Ashton said the campaign was disrespectful to many religions and the people who followed them.

"They [the billboards] join a long line of advertising that's in questionable taste that slings off [at] things that lots of people hold precious.

"It's disrespectful to what a lot of people hold very dear."

- New Zealand Herald

I've always been an admirer of Anglican Church media officer Lloyd Ashton's work, but I have to say, I really don't get how this campaign would be disrespectful to many religions. Since when is there more than one religion? I thought there was just Christianity and then 6.4 billion people who are totally wrong about everything.

Whatever the case may be, though, it's worth pointing out that for as long as We've been Buddies, Mister Jesus has pretty much always been able to handle His own fights. I mean, no offense to Anglican Church media officer Lloyd Ashton or anything (if that's even his real name), but The Dude can walk on water and turn three fishes into enough food for like six hundred frillion peeple. Plus, He literally IS the only way to get into heaven!

I think if Jesus's Feelings are hurt, He's probably capable of letting Hell Pizza know where they can stick their buns. In fact, I have so much faith* in Him that I'm not even going to mention the Hell Pizza thing in this letter I'm about to write to Him.

Dear Jesus,

What's up, Dude? How's It hanging these days? Things are pretty good down here, I guess. There was a weird smell in the break room the other day, but I don't think it's worth wasting a prayer on. Probably it's just a dead aminal or something. (I hope it's a unicorn!)

Hey, how about those Cincinnati Reds? 5-0 to start the season, huh? I know that was totally You, and not just because Joey Votto and Drew Stubbs keep looking up at you every time they cross home plate, either.

Hope You're having an awesome Thursday!

Piece,

Smokey.

The Re-Return of Smokey Robinson

Ah, spring. The season of life renewing. Or, if you work in the Canning Operations division at the Dole Fruit Plant (still unaffiliated with Dole Foods, Inc.), the season when Rebecca "The Token Jew" Goldman starts bragging about how good her son is at Tee Ball, which is pretty much the most complicated sport of all of the sports. I'm guessing that's why she named him Tiger Woods Goldman.

I bet she regrets that now, though.

Personally, I've never been a big fan of spring myself. I don't go to work every day in a massive, eleven-story underground fruit canning complex because I'm the outdoors-E-type. (If you're curious, I go to work every day in a massive, eleven-story underground fruit canning complex because I'm under contract to go to work every day in a massive, eleven-story underground fruit canning complex. And also, because sometimes there's free pie. Although, come to think of it, it's not very often. In fact, I think it's been about three years since the last time we had free pie, but there's still one or two slices left that look almost as fresh as they day the pie arrived in the break room.)

But I'll tell you what I am a fan of: turtles eating mushrooms.

Oops, wait. That's a tortoise. My bad.

Welcome back to the internets, everybuzzy.

Bananaphone Down!

Usually, getting my attention during the morning commute to the Dole Fruit Plant (still not affiliated with Dole Food Company, in spite of some serious efforts on the part of Plant management) is the province of peeple with fashion sense that is SO NOT FASHION as to endanger the eyes of both me and my fellow subway riders. Someone has to stand up for the little guy and tell those peeple just how NOT FASHION they are.

But not today.

Today's subway crisis began, simply enough, with a traditional male-female couple that boarded the A train at 175th Street. I didn't look at their faces, I just got a sense of them as the woman sat down next to me in the middle seat of a bank of three, and her dude stood in front of her holding onto the railing. Somewhere just before 168th Street, he reached into some pocket or pouch and handed her a banana, which I presume she ate. We were between 145th and 125th Streets when I noticed her out of the corner of my eye brandishing the limp, empty banana peel at him. The two of them then had the following exchange:

Girl: My bananaphone isn't working.

Guy: What?

Girl: My bananaphone isn't working. It collapsed.

Guy: It has no dial tone.

Girl: It's not working.

Guy: Mine is ringing.

Girl: Brrring! Brring!

Guy: Hahaha.

Girl: Hello? It's still not working.

She ended up tucking the collapsed bananaphone into his belt or a strap on his backpack somewhere in the 70s or 80s, and when we pulled into 59th Street, she got up and walked past him with what appeared to be little more than a friendly tap on his shoulder.

By then, I was already blaming Barack Obama. This is what happens when an Orwellian socialist Muslim takes over the USA: people become so afraid of the government and public services that they literally let their bananaphones go to waste, or even stupidly attempt self-repair, instead calling up the bananaphone company and getting the help they require. This, in turn, leads to the bananaphone companies not having enough work to merit paying full salaries, which then puts all kinds of talented, qualified bananaphone operators and technicians out of work when the companies outsource their jobs to China and the Philippines and Peru and stuff.

This country is the worst.

Hello from Beyond

Hey, everybuzzy. Please forgive me for the frowny-facedness of this here blurg post here, but the thing is that I, Smokey Robinson, am now dead.

I'm kind of ashamed to admit it. It's not the kind of thing you proudly show up at home one day and you're like, "hey, guys, guess what? I'm dead! Hello? Guys?" It's mostly like in the movies, where you're either a zombie and some "vigilante hero" is trying to hack you to bits with a chainsaw, or else you're invisible and inaudible to everybuzzy who isn't Whoopi Goldberg (who, by the by, makes really amazing oatmeal raisin cookies.)

The actual dying part is kind of a gruesome story. I was sitting in the Cannery one day at Dole Fruit, reading The Loving Bones, which is this book by Alex Sebold about a teenage kid who is actually dead for the entire book, which they tell you on page 1 without even writing SPOILER ALERT. (Speaking of which, spoiler alert: I die at the end of this paragraph. See how easy it is?) Anyway, Rebecca Goodman (our token Jew) must have overheard me saying "I wish I could know what it was like to be dead," because when I stood up, my shoelaces had been tied together, but in a very Jewish way. Next thing I knew, I fell over the railing and then tumbled ass-over-elbows into a very inconveniently placed pineapple slicer.

Those pineapple slicers are a real bitch to clean, especially when the guy who regularly cleans them is beginning to ooze out of one of them. Rex "The Supervisor" Hymen kept yelling and yelling, "Smokey! Where the [censored] is Smokey [censored] Robinson, god[censored]?!" I would gladly have told him where I was, except that one of my lips was, at that very moment, about to drip onto his right shoe. Also, the living can't hear the dead without the aid of the aforementioned Ms. Goldberg. But at the time, I didn't know that.

Anyway, hi!

This whole dead thing really isn't that bad. Did you know that in heaven, Bill Clinton is still president, and the Democrats enjoy sizeable majorities in both the House and Senate? And that ALL the bears are named Lollipop the Bear and drive around on Vespa Scooters with skull-and-crossbone stickers and holsters for their AK-47s? Also, the only meal is Kraft Cheese and Macaroni too, because it's the cheesiest. This place is gratest. It really is!

(Psych! It isn't really. This place is the worst - not "the wurst," like a hot dog, which would really go great with all the mac-and-cheese, but the WORST, as in the most miserable place I've ever been. Every time someone calls up Dole to complain about finding one of my eyeballs or a tooth or a fingernail fragment, I have to sit there while Patrick Swayze and the guy who originally played Dumbledore laugh at me for like three hours, which feels like eternity. Also, it takes like four minutes to press a single key. I have been writing this blog post since December 30!)

By the way, I was wrong: there is a God. He wears a turban and He doesn't speak English, so nobody up here understands what He's saying, and most people think He's a Terrorist. He is also in no way affiliated with My Buddy (and Friend of the blog) Jesus Christ. God is actually the Assistant Night Manager at a convenience store called Seventh Heaven, which is supposed to be a clever reference to "Seven Eleven," but nobody gets that without having it explained to them. Some say He really is all-powerful. I say He pours a mean cherry Icee - easily the third-best I've ever tasted.

Anyway.

I recently met Dan Fogelberg, who was quite touched by the flattering obituary I wrote him. We were sipping cherry Icees around Christmas with Carol Channing, and the two of them told me that there's actually a way for me to come back. Are you ready to learn what it is? All that has to happen is that a single cell from my former body has to be ingested by a human male, get metabolized, undergo meiosis, get broken down into amino acids (they're the building blocks of protein!), and finally, be converted into a sperm cell. Assuming I don't then end up in a sock or a drainpipe, it's a simple matter of racing the other sperm cells to an egg cell, become a zygote, then an embryo, then a fetus, then get born in Detroit, have a successful career as an R&B singer, and move to New York City at 68 years old to work for a middling fruit concern.

Piece of cake.

So here's what I need from you, dear readers: eat Dole Fruit Factory brand pineapple.

I'm sure the slicer where I met my end was probably very thoroughly scrubbed before the next batch of pineapple went in. Dole Fruit Factory has very exacting standards of hygiene, after all. But even the most exacting standards must have left a cell or two of mine behind, right? (Don't think about that too long, or else you won't want to eat the pineapple anymore.) Presto. We're halfway home already.

This, obviously, only applies to my male readers. Ladies, for once, this isn't about you. (Until I get back to the top of the charts, that is!) Let's get eatin', dudes! We're just 70 short years from being able to start this whole bloggerizing operation up again!

And just to be on the safe side:

Dear Jesus,

A little halp, (Son of) Man?

Thanx,
Smokey

P.S. Can You catch me up on what I missed on YouTube?

Is Athletic Success the New Black?

Fruit workers, particularly those in the various canning divisions of your major fruit conglomerates are a shifty bunch, full of testiness and simmering currents of rich, creamy, bacon-and-cherry-flavored, race-based bias and resentment. And nothing brings that bias and resentment bubbling to the surface like beisbol.

When Jackie Robinson broke the Collar Barrier in 1947, there were riots and looting throughout the fruit canning world, and the entire operation of the Dole Fruit Plant here in midtown Manhattan had to be suspended for almost thirty years before the furor could be calmed. It took a surprise appearance and impromptu concert by a dashing young black man named Kenny Loggins to get things stable.

Those were the days.

Needless to say, my friendship with Alex Rodriguez (the baseball player Alex Rodriguez, not the nuclear physicist Alex Rodriguez, that punk ass) has therefore been somewhat problematic for me at the old Fruit Plant. It's not because he's a widely despised public figure. Dole-mites love widely despised public figures as a general rule. It's because he's black.

Welcome to post-modern America, and thank you very much, Barack Obama.

There used to be a time when men were real men, women were real women, transvestites were neither real men nor real women, and Americans could comfortably use race as a reason to dislike other Americans. Remember the politics of hate and all that? I miss the 80s so much sometimes.

See, because now, it's the opposite of that. The peeple I work with don't dislike I-Can't-Believe-Clay-Aiken-is-Gay-Rod because of his race. They dislike him because of his repeated postseason failures, his admission of steroid usage, and the fact that he loves to pull down his pants and run screaming through midtown Manhattan with fermented wheels of Gouda cheese. And because they dislike him, they therefore assume he must be black. QED, quid pro quo, summa cum laude, lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, Amen.

On the handful of occasions when my pal has stopped by to visit, his reception at the hands of the various members of Canning Operations staff has run the gamut from nasty, sustained peltings with full cans of bacon-wrapped cherries to much more friendly peltings with half-eaten cans of bacon-wrapped cherries with the tops removed, because the edges of those tops could really hurt somebody. (That's how you can tell the C-Ops staff are in a forgiving mood.)

Of course, discerning cultural anthropologists, as well as anyone with a pair of eyes and a rudimentary understanding of Spanish names, would dispute the notion of Tina-Fey-Rod's blackness. Then again, he is dating Kate Hudson, goes the counter-argument. Also not helping matters: all this postseason success and glory and clutch performance, the kind of performance reminiscent of notable black men like Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan and the aforementioned Kenny Loggins, who rushed for a then-record 282 yards and 7 touchdowns in a game between Georgia and LSU in 1982.

It's getting so you can't be good at anything in this country without peeple assuming that you're black and hating you for your success, although not necessarily in that order. Thanks again, Democratic Party.

And thanks also to fine folks in the C-Ops division at Dole, who are throwing those cans of bacon-wrapped cherries at me for no readily discernible reason. They couldn't possibly think ol' Smokey Robinson here is black, could they?

I've-Been-Workin'-On-The-Railroad-All-The-Livelong-Day-Rod, take me away-Rod!

The Facts Are In!

Allow me to kick a scenario your way:

Imagine that you are Adolf Hitler.

Heaven knows (heavenos?) that some of y’all have zero problem imagining that you are Adolf Hitler, particularly if you want public healthcare or are named Barack Obama. Shame on y’all. Hitler was like the Abominable Snowman, but of people. Stop imagining that you are Adolf Hitler RIGHT NOW, sickos!

Now. Where was I?

Right.

So imagine that you are Adolf Hitler.

Just, you know, free your mind and conceptualize yourself managing a two-front global war and orchestrating the death of millions of human beings, all while speaking German and scratching at your itchy vagina.

“Wait, what?” you are probably saying. “Hitler had a vagina?” you are hypothetically adding. “Wouldn’t a man that powerful have access to some kind of topical cream or ointment to alleviate the itching?”

Well the joke’s on you because no, he wouldn’t have, because Germany had (dramatic music) the Public Option.

Okay, that’s not true. Germany never had (dramatic music) the Public Option, because that was invented by Barack Hussein Obama, whose name, roughly translated from its Swahili origins, means “Adolf Hitler, but reincarnated, and this time with (dramatic music) the Public Option, muhuhahahahaaa!”

All right, that’s not true either (I think).

But what is true is that Adolf Hitler, it turns out, was a girl.

US archaeologist Nick Bellantoni found fragments from the skull believed to be Hitler's were too thin to be from a male, and suspected it was the remains of a much younger woman, The Sun reports.

"The bone seemed very thin - male bone tends to be more robust. It corresponds to a woman between the ages of 20 and 40," Dr Bellantoni said.

-news.com.au

Well that explains the fake mustache, eh? Chuckle chuckle chuckle poop my pants.

The experts, of course, have all wrongly concluded that the remains must belong to someone else other than Adolf Hitler. Stupid experts. When are they EVER right? Obviously, it's the right skull, we just got the other facts about Adolf Hitler wrong. Duh.

But you’re probably still wondering how a man with cooties and menstruations and such managed to almost take over Europe, and also whether there were ever any naked pictures of him on the internets. Well, you’re right to wonder. We’re all right to wonder.

By the way, remember before when you imagined you were Adolf Hitler? Hahahahahahaha, I win. I just sort of made you teh gay. Take that, Kirk "Teh Gay" Cameron!

Smokey Robinson, Artiste!!

Hey, everybuzzy! It's happy times today! Fun and goodness and Skittles are in the air! And Cheerios, which are heart healthy, but also better for your teeth than Skittles!

Also safer, since there are no Cheerios-fueled riots. You have not known fear until you've been walking down the streets of midtown Manhattan munching on a falafel sandwich only to be set upon by crazed hordes of sugar-saturated business people trailing rivulets of rainbow-colored Skittle spit (or "Spittle") down their neckties and shirts. That's fear. And as I said, you have not yet been properly introduced to fear. Fear? This is my audience. Audience? This is fear. Come to New York and visit us today, because in addition to facing fear in person, Skittles are in the air, as I believe I mentioned a couple times already. PAY ATTENTION. Free Skittles for anybuzzy who wants them!

And WHY are Skittles in the air? Along with fun and goodness and happy times and smiley-faced balloons (not pictured)? I'll tell you why.

Really.

But not yet.

Okay, I lied. I'm about to tell you now.

Ready?

Wait, seriously, are you ready? I mean, it's not like you need to strap yourself in or anything, which would be ridiculous, but are you prepared for this kind of good news - the kind that will make you click your heels and pop your gum and fart "The Star-Spangled Banner?" Because that's the level of goodness of the news about which I am rhapsodizing. Skittles are in the air. Fucking SKITTLES, everybuzzy.

And do you want to know why?

It's because canning is making a comeback. BOO-YA.

Obviously, some of the harder-bitten existentialists here at Dole (I'm talking to you, Rex "The Supervisor" Hymen) don't really care, and have been trying to burst the rest of our bubbles all the livelong day. "Canning never went anywhere," they said, "we've been doing it for years. Now quit farting 'The Star-Spangled Banner,' dammit, and get back to work!" But to the doubting Rex "The Supervisor" Hymens of the world, all I have to say is this:

Nanner nanner.

Because yes, it's true, we haven't stopped canning for years now (not counting coffee breaks and national holidays). But only rarely - like maybe once every six months - has our work been favorably compared in the mainstream media to Baroque painting and Renaissance sculpture.

Check this out (emphasis added, but only slightly):

When tough times hit, it's said that people "go back to what they know." Across the country, some people are trying to find out what their grandparents knew. Old and young alike are trying to pick up a new skill and save a little money by learning the art of canning food.

-Jennifer Moore
National Public Radio (!)
June 20, 2009

I AM AN ARTIST! YES, I CAN! JENNIFER MORE FROM NPR SAID SO!

So stick that in Your Stigmata and smoke it, Jesus. You're dealing with Smokey Robinson the artist now! I'm so freaking stoked I could fart "The Star-Spangled Banner!"

But if you'll excuse me, first I have to do some work. Those bacon-wrapped cherries aren't going to make art out of themselves...

A Brief, But Still Panoramic History of the Dole Fruit Plant, Part I

The Dole Fruit Plant is not associated with the Dole Food Company, Dole Food Company, Inc. or Castle & Cooke, Inc, currently headquartered in Westlake, California. Neither is the Dole Fruit Plant affiliated with the Hawaiian Pineapple Company, the historical forebear of Dole Fruit. This much needs must be made clear right at the start of things; despite appearances which were designed to fool the public into believing the contrary, the fine people at the Dole Food Company have done absolutely nothing to deserve having their names and reputations besmirched by any association with the scandalous and unsavory history of the Dole Fruit Plant in New York City. At various times though the years, Dole Food Company has attempted to sue the Dole Fruit Plant for trademark infringement and various other things (i.e. a 1978 nuisance suit over a particular Dole Fruit Plant employee’s bad breath), but the Fruit Plant has two distinct advantages in this regard: first, its internal legal staff has had surgical alterations to their brains to allow them to be extra-vicious and need less sleep than ordinary human beings; and second, said legal staff enjoys a close relationship with the governments of the United States, Canada, the Philippines, Vatican City, the Principality of Monaco, France, and an endive salad made in 1982 that rules most of northern Africa and the Middle East.

In short, they are not to be trifled with.

The Dole Fruit Plant was founded in New York City in 1921, at the height of a trend of fashionable political discord that the Fruit Plant’s Founder, Dr. Joseph Dmitri, wanted desperately to get in on. Dr. Dmitri was raised by his proto-fascist godparents in an obscure Greek corner of the Tyrolean Mountains, and he had always dreamed of being able to freely libel and slander anyone he chose for the express purpose of establishing them as villains in what he liked to think of as “The Great Comic Book of Life.” Given the state of world politics in the early 20th century and the seeming obsession with ideology-based “scares,” Dr. Dmitri perceived the time was right to create his own. So he set sail for America – America, the Home of the Brave And Also of the Highly Susceptible to Paranoia; America, the Land of Opportunity for Extreme Political Fear-Mongering. Dr. Dmitri saw America as a melting pot, but also as a seething cauldron of anxiousness and unrest ready to boil over if heat could simply be applied. And he saw himself as just the man to apply that heat. “America is a melting pot,” he wrote in his journal in 1919, “but also a seething cauldron of anxiousness and unrest ready to boil over if heat can simply be applied. And I am just the man to apply that heat.”

America was full of opportunity for scores of tens of dozens of hundreds of millions of thousands of pounds of immigrants in those days – and not just for extreme political fear-mongering, either. The American economy was festooned with plum, high-paying jobs in fields as diverse and satisfying as 18-hours-a-day-sewing and rock-breaking-from-sunrise-to-sunset. Some immigrant laborers earned entire, luxurious pennies every day.

Dr. Dmitri, however, did not need to seek his fortune. His family was already wealthy. His journey to America and his quest to capitalize on the “scare” phenomenon were predicated largely on boredom, the sort of deep malaise that had led so many other great men (such as Einstein and Hemingway) to lives of decadence and sloth and murder. So Dr. Dmitri spent some of his considerable family fortune purchasing a zeppelin, which he flew to America and then detonated for no better reason than it was simpler than paying for hangar space. Also, because it really impressed a girl he had picked up in Paris whose name he failed to learn before she perished in the zeppelin’s fiery explosion.

Dr. Dmitri was not a man who sensibly dispensed his considerable sums of money. It was well known in Tyrol that Josef Dmitri could get a bit slack in his guard on the old purse strings, particularly if you fed him enough feta cheese. Also, he had terrible luck with women. his combustible companion from Paris was neither the first nor last woman who would explode at his hands.

Dr. Dmitri quickly discovered that there was no money to be made from scares in the private sector. Government funding seemed to be the way to go. And in order to secure said funding, Dr. Dmitri quite sensibly approached the venture under the guise of research. “Far easier,” he wrote “to convince the American government to study the ill effects of a major social movement than to simply vilify and eradicate them, though extermination is obviously still the objective here. Muhuhahahaha.”

How Dr. Dmitri settled on existentialists as his choice of scare targets is, at this point, a mystery lost for the ages, a mere pebble dropped into a vast ocean of time and meatball parmesan sandwiches from one of the finer Italian restaurants on the eastern side of midtown Manhattan. Why someone would need to drop a pebble into such a ridiculous and confusing metaphorical ocean is beyond the power of scholars to understand because scholars are really nowhere near as smart as they’re always rumored to be. Also, it’s irrelevant, because the metaphor is really weak. An ocean of time and (really, really good) sandwiches? Even really good sandwiches have limits to their usefulness at some level, and this is that level.

The point is that Dr. Dmitri chose, as his scare victims, existentialists. That jerk.

Coming in part 2: Dr. Dmitri gets an enemy.

Meet the new Jesus (this time with really awesome boobs)

Move over, Oprah Whimfree. Now there's something leaner, whiter, and more descended-from-the-loins-of-Jon Voight on top of the Hollywood Reporter's list of the 100 most powerful celebrities in celebrity-dom. That's right, it's Angelina Jolie. Yes, that Angelina. Yes, that Jolie. The coup has been staged, and thanks to the laser-guided incendiary missiles (not pictured) she had installed in her massive lips (yes pictured), Jolie is now more powerful than you, Oprah!


It's true, too. How else do you explain the fact that she's even on the list after the release of that piece of trash Wanted? (Which, for those of you keeping score at home, also starred the dude who played the half-goat in Narnia, the Witch, and the Kids in the Armoire - what was his name? Right, Morgan Freeman.) I'm no film expert, but I would think attaching yourself to that kind of box office poison would be enough to strangle the life out of most people's movie careers. But what does Jolie do? She maneuvers it into sequel talks. And her character died at the end! Spoiler alert!

In and of itself, that's not really enought to make Jolie more powerful that Oprah, with the book club, and the ability to induce poultry-related riots on a whim, and her daily strangle-hold over the consciousness of millions of suburban women that make up the backbone of this recession. You have to add in the lip missiles (not pictured). Then it's power. A sword would be cool too; just something to think about.

So no more letters to Jesus, because that dude's act is getting way old at this point. (Seriously, Son of Man, get some Band-Aids and put on some Your-Dad-damnned Nikes and a pair of jeans already.) And no more letters to Oprah either, because you're not number one anymore, Oprah, and also because the touchy Chicago courts are really, really narrow-minded when it comes to the definitions of "harassment" and "violating a restraining order." From now on, it's Jolie for me.

Dear Jolie,

Smite them. Smite them all. Unleash teh fury.

A sword would be cool too; just something to think about.

Yours in number-one-ness,
Smokey F. Robinson

P.S. Can you make it so we don't have to wait till January for the next episode of Lost? I NEED TO GO BACK TO THE ISLAND.

Finally!

There is no fight left to fight anymore, people. Satan has been killed. In Mississippi. Take a look:

Sort of an ignominious end for the Prince of Evil, isn't it? To be killed in Mississippi? I mean, shouldn't he at least have gotten gunned down while he was on Spring Break in Daytona Beach, passed out from drinking $2 "you call it" shots? This is actually sort of pathetic.

And frankly, if that chalk outline is to be believed, he's not quite as svelte as I would've thought either. I wonder how he charmed generations worth of people into sinning with a figure like that? He must've had a great personality or something, I guess.

Oh well. He's gone now, so I suppose we'll never know.

Thanks again, Jesus!

SPOILER ALERT

[Thanks, bits and pieces.]

Dude, the Day After Easter is Painful Enough As It Is

I don't know about anybuzzy else, but the day after Easter is not a happy day for me AT ALL. First of all, there's the realization that good ol' Jesus C. (Friend of the blog) has gone back to His spaceship with Elvis Presley and the Tooth Fairy until His birthday party in December, or at least until one of those fake "Christmas in July" promotions where retail stores give huge discounts on vacuum cleaners and Michael Bolton CDs (Jesus's two favorite gifts!).

And second of all, I'm always a little bit sluggish the day after Easter because of the massive amount of labor involved in obtaining my favorite Easter delicacy, chocolate-covered rabbits (not pictured). Because as any connosieur of chocolate-covered rabbits knows, it is really hard to catch a rabbit. And it is even harder to convince the rabbit to sit still while you dip it in a pot of molten chocolate. There may be more than one way to skin a cat, but that's cats, and that's skinning, and we're talking catching rabbits and dipping them in molten chocolate, which is quite the holiday undertaking, let me tell you.

I remember the days when Cadbury Creme Eggs used to be enough for me. But then I discovered that not only are they not real eggs, they're not laid by a real bunny either. Fakers! And I am all about the authenticity, folks, as you probably already know from a cursory critical examination of the lyrics to my hit song, "Tears of a Clown."

Anyway.

I always try and make a few extra chocolate-covered rabbits, sometimes to give out as gifts, and sometimes just for me. But these are lean times. The Great Repression is in full effect. So this year, I not only had to compete with the speed and caginess of my leporine prey, but also with the dozens of hungry Wall Street bankers who prowl the streets of New York nowadays in search of pigeons, rodents, and small game animals for sustenance. I'm not a competitive person by nature. I just want to collect my coneys and be left in peace, not harrassed and held at Blackberry-point by some down-and-out Lehman Brothers layoff-ee who rifles through my pockets and then laughs at me for carrying around Goonies trading cards. They're just there to give me luck with the hunting, you jerk.

God damn, was that woman mean.

And of course, that's all not to mention the disappointment that comes when you bite into the head of a chocolate-covered bunny and discover that the rabbit you worked so hard to catch and dip has somehow managed to disappear from its chocolate tomb, leaving you with nothing but a hollow, hare-shaped piece of chocolate. I know it's very thematic and Easter-appropriate and all, and I strongly suspect that Jesus somehow magicks them out of there as a prank on me (very funny, Jesus), but honest to Christ: if I wanted hollow chocolate, I'd buy it from a fucking store.

My point is that the post-Easter Monday is already fraught with enough exhaustion and heartache. So the last thing I needed to see when I looked at my Internet first thing this morning was this:


The Peekaru? Seriously? W.T. Fuck, America? Who's responsible for this? I want names. When Jesus comes back next year*, I'm totally ratting you guys out.

*That's assuming Barack Obama doesn't blow up the world before then, which is a pretty generous assumption considering how he's doing so far.

How Cheerios' Heart-Healthiness Was Put to Complete Shame

Looks like Lucky has a new marshmallow buddy:


This is not your breakfast cereal. This is like Jesus's breakfast cereal and Superman's breakfast cereal combined, only on steroids and methamphetamines and crack, and with surprisingly low nutritional value. Your breakfast cereal can't even keep you from getting hungry again before noon, though, because all it has are seven healthy grains, and not marshmallows with the power to manipulate time-space.

I hate to say it, Kix. You may be kid-tested and mother-approved, but we're talking about the ability to violate Einstein's laws here. Lucky Charms wins in a landslide.

The problem is that it's a gateway physics-defying cereal. I already have one friend who got looped on time-controlling Lucky Charms and gravity-defying Captain Crunch, and is now in suspended animation 300 feet above Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, just hanging there in mid-air with this horrified look on his face. It's pretty gruesome. But it's also a very visible cautionary tale for the children.

Gasp! Oh my Zod, I think I just figured out how they're going to end the hit ABC documentary Lost! With a cartoon leprechaun!

You're welcome, America, for once again doing your homework for you.

A Sandwich Board of the Times

An old, grizzled man with a sour look wanders up to the counter of a pawn shop, lustily tugging at something in his coat pocket, and nursing a mouth dryer than a British sitcom. The man is desperate for liquor. He's desperate for food too, but a man's gotta have priorities, and that bottle of Old Granddad next door isn't likely to drink itself, because even a bottle of Old Granddad finds Old Granddad disgusting.

The man's clothes are a vision of decrepitude and dereliction, the uniform of a veteran of the war for survival on the cruel streets. It's a war that no one is winning, since the sides and the battle lines haven't ever been made clear. Nor, for that matter, have the opposing forces who are supposed to be squaring off. Is anyone fighting against survival on the cruel streets? Because if so, I'd like to meet them. Please contact the blog.

For now, though, let's get back to the story of the old man with the sour look and the as-yet-unrevealed object in his pocket, which I will tell you right now is a Blackberry.

The cashier raises an eyebrow at the approaching "customer." He looks bored and unimpressed. Between the sob stories and the outright frauds, this man has had more of his time wasted than all of the time wasted on the internet by all of Generation X put together. He barely looks up from his e-paper, although this is in part because the opacity setting on the e-paper is low enough that he can see through it, since the pawn shop is roughly as likely to look after itself as the Old Granddad is to drink itself. If these analogies and metaphors aren't clear enough for you, please contact the blog.

"Yeah?" says the nonplussed cashier.

"I wanna sell this," says the old sourpuss. And he whips out a Blackberry Curve, which once retailed for the unthinkable sum of $349.99 without a contract from AT&T Wireless.

Sorry, that sentence was wrong. It should say, "And he whips out a FUCKING Blackberry Curve, which once retailed for the unthinkable sum of $349.99 without a contract from AT&T Wireless." I changed it at the last second because I was worried that people might freak out about the profanity if I didn't mention it first and give them a chance to look away. Spoiler alert.

Anyway.

The cashier says, "fuck off," and then adds something in Spanish to the effect that he wishes he had a boot long enough to kick that gavron in the mantequillas while the old man hustles to grab his prize and shuffles backward to the door, the look on his face grown even sourer. This is the fourth FUCKING pawn shop that turned him down! (Spoiler alert: more swearing.)

He emerges onto the cruel streets and with his arms outstretched, casts a hideous curse at the heavens above. Just a few short years ago, the Blackberry was a status symbol, a veritable declaration that the person carrying it was too much of a self-important asshole to leave his email behind for like an hour and a half while we grab dinner with his friends. It used to be like, diamond shoes? Check. Pockets stuffed with $50 and $60 bills? Check. Blackberry Curve? Check. But now, this bedraggled, poopyheaded old man can't even scrape together enough cash from the resale value to buy a bottle of cheap, disgusting booze.

"Why?" the old man yells, anguished, at the God who has forsaken him every bit as much as He forsook Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord and Savior, that day on the Cross a couple thousand years or so ago. The old man's inadvertent sobs divide his subsequent bellowing calls into syllables: "Why-hy-hy-hy? Wah-hah-hah-hah-ha-ha-haaaaaaaeeeeee?" And as he rears back and hurls the worthless hunk of really sophisticated electronic equipment downward at the oddly anachronistic cobblestones of the road, the old man gets struck by lightning and dies, because I couldn't think of a reasonable way to end this paragraph without killing him.

People, the story you've just read is true. Except that it hasn't happened yet. But it will. Oh yes, it will. These economic crisis times are worse than I ever conceived, even in the wild safari that is my imagination. Because while it's true that homeless men aren't actually selling Blackberries for crack or alcohol or ice skating money (yet), you can tell we're headed in that direction. I discovered the proof from a sandwich board I saw outside of Whole Foods earlier this evening.

Take a look, world:

That's right. BLACKBERRIES ARE 2 FOR $4 AT WHOLE FOODS. I double-checked with three store clerks, a manager, eighteen other customers, the cops who dragged me out of the store, and the old homeless man with the sour face who was lying on the sidewalk about four feet from where this picture was taken.

You can't see him because I had to stand astride him in order to get a good angle on the sign. But his face was really sour, let me tell you. I wish I had a Blackberry to donate to him, but I don't really carry loose change in my pocket anymore, because I'm a grown-up now.

Oh, and FYI: this picture was taken by my pal Knickers, who is a FUCKING iPhone.

[SPOILER ALERT: There is plentiful swearing contained in this post.]

How I Imagine the Inaugural Ball Will Go: A Play in Less Than One Act

[SMOKEY slides up to SCARLETT JOHANSSON]

SMOKEY: Hey, Scar-Yo. Wasssaaaaaaaaa...? Are you enjoying the Inaugural Ball? Hey, remember just before I asked if you were enjoying the Inaugural Ball when I said, wassaaaaaaa...?

SCARLETT JOHANSSON: Ew. Who are you?

SMOKEY: I'm Smokey Robinson, baby. [sings "ONE HEARTBEAT - THE JESUS VERSION"]

SCARLETT JOHANSSON: Sorry, Smokebag or whatever, I only like guys with vaguely Middle Eastern middle names. 

[SMOKEY stares blankly.]

SCARLETT JOHANSSON: Middle name, Middle East. Middle, middle. It's about the symmetry.

SMOKEY: Do you have someone writing your dialogue or something?

SCARLETT JOHANSSON: Yes. You, stupid.

SMOKEY: Right.

SCARLETT JOHANSSON: I gotta go.

SMOKEY: No, wait. 

SCARLETT JOHANSSON: No, you wait, Mister... what did you say your name was?

SMOKEY: Smokey Falafel Robinson.

SCARLETT JOHANSSON: Oh. [This next one should be read VERY SWEETLY.] Oh! Hiya, Smokey. Wanna come back to my place?

SMOKEY: You mean, ditch out of the Inaugural Ball to go have sex with Scarlett Johannson?

SCARLETT JOHANSSON: Hey, back off, pal, who said anything about sex? I just wanted to snort cocaine off your ass and break some shit in my hotel room.

SMOKEY: You know, you really are a lot more freaky than you seem like you would be, Scarlett Johansson.

SCARLETT JOHANSSON: A girl's gotta eat.

SMOKEY: Fair point. Although I don't really see how that's related to anything we just talked about. 

[Enter JESUS CHRIST, Our Lord and Savior.]

JESUS: [interrupting] Excuse me, have either of you seen a Yellow Lab puppy? Looks like Old Yeller, only smaller? Like two months old maybe?

SCARLETT JOHANSSON: I saw a Golden Retriever once.

[JESUS and SMOKEY stare at her.]

JESUS: Man, the Obamas are gonna kill Me. I was supposed to be puppysitting but then I saw Kate Moss over by the ice sculpture, talking to Bill Ayers and some dude in a turban. I mean, Kate Moss. I had to try and tap that, man, she's a supermodel. I'm only human. Plus, I'm like Her Hugest Fan. Now what the fuck am I gonna do about the Obamas' dog?

SMOKEY: You know, Jesus, You seem like a lot more of a Douchebag Fuckup than I thought You would be.

JESUS: Dude, not now, okay? Like I don't have enough to fucking deal with just from the Parental disappointment. You think your dad is a ballbuster? Fuck, I gotta find that dog. Sparkles!

[JESUS exits.]

SMOKEY: Did Jesus just say the Obamas were going to kill Him?

SCARLETT JOHANSSON: Do you have any cocaine, Falafel?

SMOKEY: Indeed I do. [SMOKEY winks at audience and smiles expansively, that liar.]

[SMOKEY and SCARLETT JOHANSSON exit. Later, SCARLETT JOHANSSON finds out that SMOKEY doesn't have an exotic middle name, and that the song "ONE HEARTBEAT" is cheesy as hell, and also that SMOKEY has a pretty obvious crush on JESUS. Meanwhile, Jesus flees the country when He's unable to find the OBAMAS' NEW DOG, which they were going to take with them to the WHITE HOUSE.]

Just When You Thought You Were Safe from Rush Limbaugh...

In addition to having a token Jew here in the Canning Ops Division at Dole(I'm talking about Rebecca Goodman, who hasn't stopped yammering about her kid's effing Jedi costume like it's the most original fucking idea in the world, which it maybe was THIRTY YEARS AGO), we also have a token black guy, who has been here all along and was not just invented for the sake of this blog post, I swear to Zod.

His name, by a freak coincidence, is Rush Limbaugh. That's right - Rush Limbaugh is a big, husky black dude who likes to make off-color jokes about having sex with Rebecca Goodman's kids - the boy and the girl - which we all tolerate because it's the only thing that shuts Rebecca Goldman up. You have NO IDEA how hard it is to fall asleep on the job while Rebecca Goodman keeps yammering on about her kid's effing Jedi costume, which I am mentioning again because that's what Rebecca Goodman does, and I want to share the misery with you. Smokey equals spite for the win!

Anywhoop, here is what I just said to Rush Limbaugh The Black a few minutes ago, during the annual Hallowe'en jokey-joke fest that will be occurring in front of the coffee machine in the break room all the livelong day today: I said, "hey, Rush - isn't that the same costume you had on last year, or is it just that all your outfits look the same to me?" Chuckle chuckle chuckle gum disease.

Human Resources - or Human Re-SNORE-ces, as I call them, ha ha ha - just called me up for a meeting. Not sure what it's about, but I'm guessing that despite the rough economic circumstances, and despite the constant calls for budget restrictions and the threat of layoffs due to a sharp decrease in the consumption of canned goods*, they're probably going to give me a raise.

Fingers crossed, everybuzzy!

P.S. I came dressed as Rachel from Friends today. Weird coincidence that it happened to be Hallowe'en.

*This is actually not true. Because of their durability and their long association with camping, fallout shelters and other forms of apocalypse survival, the canned goods industry thrives in the worst economic climates. Canned goods are like the roaches of the food world, which is why, for a brief time during the 1970s, Dole experimented with adding a roach to its logo.

No, no, MY Fellow Prisoners!

Damn you, John McCain! "My Fellow Prisoners" was going to be the name of my hit Broadway musical comedy about living in a police state masquerading as a democracy. But now, all anyone will think is that I'm alluding to you.

It was also going to be the title of a chapter in my eventually forthcoming novel, The Brass Ring. Thanks for spoiling that too, you jerk.

JERK!

[SMOKEY runs off, sobbing.]

Dr. Ahab

Hi, everybuzzy. Smokey L. Robinson here, and I'm tellin' you the truth today. Starting with this: the L is for Love. Smokey Love Robinson. I'll give the ladies a minute to recover before I continue.



Okay.

We're taking a short trip back in time now, to a little over a month ago, the day that I sauntered past "The Future." As I mentioned, I was coming out of an early-morning medical procedure when I saw The Future. It wasn't hard to imagine I'd be seeing something, since, also as I mentioned, I was on some absolutely awesome anesthetic (hereinafter, the "AAA").

I got a call this week from my gastrointerologist, with what seemed like good news. "Your biopsy came back negative," meaning, in this case, that I don't have Celiac Sprue. I know, thank Zod, right? So I can go on eating anything I want, but the mysterious stomach pains which sometimes plague me will evidently go on unexplained. This is why I say it seemed like good news.

The doctor told me to watch out for spicy foods and dairy, which is exactly what I told him was my problem in our first meeting in June or July. But the thing is, we already knew that. Everyone knows the perils of eating spicy food. It's why Indian people and country singers make such great masochists: you can overdo it with the cumin, but you run the social risk of committing the massive party foul of crapping your pants.

But I am neither Indian nor a country singer. I'm just your average bloggerizer with a trick digestive tract.

It's a month since my visit to the [redacted] Center, and I'm finally finishing coming down from the AAA, or perhaps it's the roofie I got slipped last night at the bar when I accidentally drank that chick's cosmopolitan instead of mine. It's three months since my first visit to Dr. [redacted], whom I had really hoped would be a better criminologist. This is what I was thinking last night, when it occurred to me that maybe he was a better criminologist than that. Maybe I was the one unsolvable case that was torturing him and keeping him up nights. Maybe he was tuning in to reruns of House, or ER, or Grey's Anatomy, or Scrubs (Zod, I hope it wasn't Scrubs), trying to find some clue as to what was wrong with me.

Audible gasp! Maybe I was his white whale! I read Moby-Dick once! (Once!) I am therefore qualified to make this analogy! Maybe he was up nights, sitting at the kitchen table in front of a stack of books and a six-year-old laptop trailing wires to the wall because its battery was dead, searching the realm of available knowledge (including WebMD) for an answer. Maybe he was back to the late-night drinking, smoking again too, rubbing his jowls or the freshly waxed top of his head and muttering sweet nothings into his stethoscope. I mean, maybe the mysterious ailment that was eating me up inside was eating him up inside too!

Now, I realize that strays a little bit from more traditional representations of Ahab and Moby Dick, that maybe my gut was really more like Sir Gawaine's green dragon. I also understand that my "Dr. [redacted]'s Office as Pequod" allegory completely neglects the role of Starbuck, who may have been represented by the stern and stentorian, yet somehow warm and welcoming German woman who manned the actual office at the Dr. [redacted]'s office. I'm not really sure how, though. And the thing is, I don't really know Sir Gawaine. I read Moby-Dick once (once!), and Ahab went crazy trying to catch that whale, much like I hope Dr. [redacted] goes trying to solve my stomach issue.

I would love to read the story of that doctor's slow descent into madness. Three months till Christmas, everybuzzy. Let's get busy on this one.

Smokey wonders...

...if churches ever donate their organs.

Some Advice on Being an Out-Of-Work Quasi-Dictator

If you live in Pakistan and you don't live under a rock, chances are pretty good that you've already heard the news about my good buddy Pervez Musharraf. That's right, he bought a dog.

Unfortunately, that news was eclipsed today with the announcement of his resignation as the President of Pakistan. Needless to say, he's pretty distraught, not only because it means he has to file for unemployment - and those Pakistani unemployment forms are about three miles long and read like they're written in a foreign language - but also because Mr. Fluffles (that's the dog's name) wasn't even properly housebroken yet. And now he needs to start the whole breaking process over again in a new house.

Still, at least he'll have a house in which to break Mr. Fluffles, unlike the millions of Pakistanis who live under rocks.

Pervez can be a pretty emotional guy when things aren't going his way. Last year, for instance, during Game 2 of the American League Divisional Series between New York and Cleveland, Pervez was literally tearing his hair out when Joba Chamberlain pitched through a storm cloud of Lake Erie midges in the 8th inning instead of calling a timeout. "What the hell is he doing?" Pervez kept screaming. "Why does he persevere? Why doesn't Torre pull him off the mound and refuse to continue? He is fucking blind from these gnats!"

"They're midges," I said.

"Fuck you! I'm calling A-Rod!" Pervez screamed back at me, the veins in his forehead and neck pressing to escape the surface of his creamy brown skin. "What the hell is he doing?"

"A-Rod's on the field right now, dude," I said. "You need to relax."

"Shit! I got his fucking voicemail!"

"Alex is on the field right now," I said plaintively, in my best voicemail system voice. "He can't take your call."

"Alex! It's Pervez! Call me right away, it's very important!" He hung up and waited, staring alternately at the television screen and the phone, absently fingering a merit medal near the lapel of his jacket. "Fuck this, I'll send him a text message."

"Dude, you need to chill out. Maybe you should get a dog or something," I sagely, and somewhat contrivedly advised him.

"Fuck you!" he crowed. "Don't fucking tell me what to do, you buzzard!"

In the spirit of that comment, and out of my desire not to be called a buzzard again, I am not going to offer Pervez any advice on what to do with his life now that the whole President of Pakistan thing didn't pan out. I know he's always entertained the fanciful notion of taking eight months to backpack through Europe till he got to Amsterdam, where he would load up on weed and have sex with as many hookers as his considerable personal wealth would allow. But I also know he's something of an ice cream connosieur, and that he has a longstanding wish to tour the Ben & Jerry's factory in Waterbury, Vermont.

They give you free samples on that factory tour, which, in my opinion, makes it totally worthwhile. I couldn't care less what temperature the milk is reduced to, or how they add a ripple of fudge to their fudge ripple. The movie they show about the personal history of Ben and Jerry might as well be called "nap time." But bring on the free scoop of Chubby Hubby, you know what I'm saying?

They also give you free samples at the Guinness factory in Dublin, Ireland. Anyone else smell a theme trip idea? Not for Pervez Musharraf necessarily - it's an idea that anyone could use, whether he happens to be a recently deposed leader of a semi-authoritarian regime in southwest Asia, or, say, a 22-year-old with a freshly minted diploma from Brown.

Unrelated: I'm looking for some assistance with the Oscar '08 campaign, just in case there's any former Asian heads of state who suddenly have a lot of free time on their hands. No dogs allowed, though. Sorry, Mr. F.