What’s that you say!?

Extremely time-consuming job for a writer!?

Focused on the North Idaho Organized Crime scene!?

Wait. Hold the phone for real this time.

No, I mean it. Put the phone down. Put it on hold or promise to call back and hang up.

Ummmm….

Is there a North Idaho in Sicily?

You’re talking about Idaho? Like in the United States?

Okay. If you say so.

Federales is spelled wrong, but whatever. Apparently you were tangling with them and not pen-palling with them. And you’re looking for a ghost writer, so I guess it isn’t fair that I pick on you for not being able to spell (uniagnosed ADHD, extrodinary, succesfull, isnt, right writer. Just sayin’…)

However, lest I continue to discuss this outstanding example of Craigslist without letting everyone else in on the moment, let me cut and paste your ad here:

Writer Wanted For Ex North Idaho Drug Kingpin:

Looking for someone to write life story, unique story, unique Individual. Story consists of dealings with Colombians,Cubans, Mexican Federallies, 16 years in prison hanging out with mafia members from the Phildelphia Scarfo gang, Charlie Iannache, Anthony Pungitore, Gene Gotti-brother of John Gotti of the New York Mafia, being successful jail house lawyer. Story begins with the consequences for a boy with a gifted IQ who deals with uniagnosed ADHD and the path he takes in life through taking over the underbelly of the drug world,prison,self inflicted extrodinary rehabilitation efforts to his succesfull entrance back into society. This isnt some run of the mill drug dealer story! I SHOULD BE DEAD A HUNDRED TIMES OVER. GOD HAD HIS HAND ON MY SHOULDER TO GET THROUGH IT. ps: All Statue of Limitations are finished and all prison time completed. The story just needs to be told by a gifted writer. If interested, please submit writing proposal/compensation plans. I would prefer to give the writer a portion of proceeds, but would pay the right writer to do the story. Follow up to the book would be self help videos/books for children-parents-educators-inmates to not go down the path I took, or to change an inmates life around through education.

• Location: SEATTLE
• Compensation: writer to submit required compensation/or proceeds from book
• OK to highlight this job opening for persons with disabilities
• Principals only. Recruiters, please don’t contact this job poster.
• Please, no phone calls about this job!
• Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests.

Be still my heart.

I love you, Craigslist.

I too had a high IQ and undiagnosed…wonderfulness? Adorable Human Syndrome? (AHS. Don’t laugh. It has its down side. Such as being stalked. Twice.) Possible wheat intolerance (perhaps more on that one day. From my toilet.)

I too have known Colombians and Cubans and been to Philadelphia!!!

I have no idea who the rest of those people are, but I love the colorful names. The only thing missing are the fun nicknames like Charlie ‘The Tuna’ Iannache, Anthony Pungent Pungitore, and Pee Wee Herman.

If you ask me, this is both ridiculous…and strangely compelling.

Really.

A non-paying questionable gangsta scene playa gig that PAYS NOTHING.

And yet…

I’m compelled. Tell me why I SHOULDN’T write him. Because I kind of want to.

p.s.

My favorite part is the self-help videos for high-IQ kids considering mafia activity in poor, remote areas of rural America. The forgotten Appalachia. I get it. I’m into it. I’m on it.

p.p.s.

I know the blog still looks, well, like crap, but I wasn’t kidding when I said this was totally over my head. Thank you, Chad, for your feedback. I passed it onto to someone who may (god willing) be willing and able to fix this (totally innocent, and I cannot even believe my bad luck, and I’m not willing to focus on it. Cleansing karma, cleansing karma, cleansing karma…!!!!!) snafu.

This is an important question worthy of exploration.

Canada – a large, cold, and often unnoticed country to the north of us (and which many stupid Americans apparently believe is a state) – has a lot of people. But are those people funny?

Preliminary evidence suggests no, they are not.

Exhibit A: The Canadian Comedy station on XM/Sirius radio (I don’t know which is the proper name any more). With XM, the best station by far was channel 150, but now that they are combined, there are about 10 different comedy stations, all weak in their own way (e.g. old school, filthy, blue collar/redneck, and the weakest of all, Canadian Comedy).

I don’t have a specific example of why it’s not funny. It’s just not funny. In the same way that those two sentences aren’t particularly funny. They aren’t particularly anything, but we both know they’re not funny. Ergo, Canadian comedy.

Nope. Not funny.

Exhibit B – Jim Carrey. Not funny. I don’t care what you say, making faces and acting like an orangutan isn’t funny. The only time I can tolerate the man is when he’s NOT trying to be funny (i.e. in the recent movie Yes Man, where he was mostly ‘normal’ except for a brief plot line where he drank too much Red Bull. I recommended this movie to someone and had to promise them that there was only this one derivation into the annoying, manic, rubber face stuff so that they would even consider watching a film he stars in. That’s how not funny Jim Carrey is.)

Exhibit C – Leslie Nielson. Need I say more?

Between the goatee and the two earrings, he looks like some kind of Marvel Comics villain.

Exhibit D – Howie Mandel. Gag.

Exhibit E – Bob and Doug Mackenzie, a.k.a. The Mackenzie brothers (of ‘shut up, you hoser’ and Strange Brew fame). I admit I once found this funny – and I even named a poor, helpless Himalayan cat Hosehead – but in my defense, I was 17 years old at the time and not particularly wise. And the cat was Canadian and thought the name was rather hilarious.

Exhibit F – Tom Green. Need I say more?

The defense rests.

On a related note, who’s that awful comedian in the Hawaiian shirts who has the bit about being ‘fluffy’ (a.k.a. fat)? Can we blame Canada for him? Gabriel Iglesias (thank you, Google). I can’t stand that guy, but sadly, he’s our problem.

Although he sounds to me like he speaks with an ESL accent, apparently he was born in San Diego. Tomorrow’s topic: Are Mexican Americans funny?

Sometimes.

Cheech and Chong – funny

Carlos Mencia – not even

(Unless, of course, I get distracted and go off on a totally unrelated tangent instead…)

Okay, bear with me here.

Okay, trying that again. I had a brief moment of panic that I had used the wrong bear. I hadn’t, but you just can’t be too careful. I would hate to suggest to you loyal blog followers that we get naked. Party naked! Read blogs naked! Boo-rah! 

 Bare with me! Bare it all! Bloggers gone wild!

***Chastely brushing down my petticoat and fourteen layers of bloomers and aprons and chastity belts and all other appropriate chastely stuff***

All together on the same poster. The confusion intensifies. WTF?

So anyway, I have this  conundrum which has recently resurfaced in my mind and I struggle to articulate in a way that doesn’t sound simultaneously manic  and retarded, and yet still drives me nuts.

 

It goes like this: When I was a kid, I was aware of  (but did not enjoy) the Pink Panther cartoons. The Pink Panther, at least as far as I understood/understand it, was a cartoon about a panther that was tall and lean and pink and walked like a man and perhaps solved mysteries and hung around with an actual human being (albeit a cartoon. You know what I meant.) who was a solid foot shorter than him and suspicious-looking and possibly Russian or citizen of another  Cold War nation and wore a tightly wrapped trenchcoat (which is perhaps redundant?)

At the same time, I was aware of a movie of the same name featuring actual (non-cartoon) human beings who talked funny (a.k.a. British accent)  and a theme song that went something like “Da-dum, da-dum, da dum da dum da dum da dum da DAAAAAA da-da-da-dum….” (I could go on, but I realize the da dums aren’t really hacking it nor nearly so compelling as me singing for you. Speaking of which, it occurs to me: What a terrible way to venture onto YouTube. Imagine [to our mutual horror],  me singing the Pink Panther theme while staring blankly at the camera imbedded in my laptop. Perhaps while a barely perceptible but still present stream of drool trickles out of my mouth? And as I think about Elvis and why he loved fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches and whether or not that would actually taste good.)

So to get to the point: What WAS this!?!?

How can two distinct and separate Pink Panthers exist in the same time-space continuum? Doesn’t that violate some kind of law of physics?

Or were they related?

Or the same thing?

And if so, what does a cartoon panther have to do with two guys solving crimes or whatever it was/ is the Pink Panther movies are about?

And why release them at the same time?

Was this meant to confuse young, impressionable children such as myself, forever tainting their understanding of panthers and private dicks and insulation and the color pink? (And re-reading this, I recognize that it could be taken out of context and if you are doing that, then shame on you, you filthy pervert.)

 And in a related note, today I realized that the guy who played Young Frankenstein in (you guessed it) Young Frankenstein is the exact, same actor who played the dad on Everybody Loves Raymond. I, personally, do not and did not love Raymond, but I am somehow astounded by this strange and unexpected coincidence (is this the right word? Probrably not. How about revelation?) Wow.

Color me stupefied.

Last but not least, a not so private message to Geico: Isn’t it time to give up the Cave Man thing?
Is there anyone on earth who isn’t over it?

Word on the street is that newborn babies arrive with an innate sense of ‘anti-Geico caveman gimmick.’

Not judging, just sayin’…

I’m staying with my friend in DC, and I walked over to the National Zoo – a few blocks from her home – today.

En route, no less than five men screamed at me from their car windows (varying versions of ‘Hey baby’ or ‘How YOU doin’?), while another seven or eight did so from the sidewalk. Sometimes I would quietly say, “Hey,” back, but mostly I pretended to be deaf.

It’s a funny thing about unwanted attention: there’s a fine line between flattery and harassment.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m as capricious as the next woman. Sometimes I go for a six or seven mile run and not one car honks at me and absolutely no one behaves inappropriately and – let’s me frank here – it’s a little bit discouraging. Am I losing it? Is it something I ate?

Chinese restaurant. I love the Peking Peeps.

On the other hand, when I stop into a grocery store for two minutes in order to quickly procure a cake for my friend’s birthday (ultimately settling on an Entenmann’s cheese coffee cake when it they don’t have much of a bakery section. Coffee cake is still cake. It has the word ‘cake’ in it, thus making it cake, albeit not a traditional birthday cake) and hear an unfamiliar booming voice announce, “I love white girls. I’m going to take care of you tonight. I love you, White Girl,” I wish I had lost some of it. 

The same man recommended I look some stuff up on the internet (the names of which I promptly forgot, but by and large suspect was porn) and return the next day to the Safeway in order to be ‘taken care of”, and I considered pretending I didn’t speak English. In the end, I was able to wriggle free without too much trouble and – glancing behind me to make sure I wasn’t being followed – I headed back through the maze of leering and commenting strangers to the apartment.

Tee hee.

Unrelated – or maybe it is related? – it is so humid out here, and my hair has gone absolutely nuts. It’s like a frizzy cross between Howard Stern and a Standard Poodle, and it makes me crazy. I invest a lot of time, energy, and money into fighting my naturally curly hair and seeing it break free of my efforts and shake its groove thing is neither desired nor appreciated (nor attractive).  On the other hand, perhaps this is somehow related to my sudden popularity on the streets of Washington D.C.? Lecherous men love frizzy curly hair?

(Note to self: Possible PhD candidacy thesis idea…)

The grand prize winner. As it should be. Super cool.

In closing, it turns out that every year the Washington Post holds a Peeps diorama contest, and you can see the finalists and winners at Artomatic. If somehow you’ve been living or a cave, or a country that doesn’t celebrate Easter, or a country that doesn’t celebrate Easter with the consumption of gross quantities of packaged sugar products, Peeps are marshmallow candies in the shape of little ducks (or sometimes rabbits and other stuff) and covered with colored sugar. In other words, complete junk.

Anyway, as  part of the annual contest, people arrange the peeps in varying dioramas (kind of like a project you’d do in elementary school) and the best ones – as previously mentioned, the best as judged by the Washington Post – win. Having examined the offerings in this year’s collection I was impressed, but I also struck upon a common trend – come up with a clever idea, execute it enough to be recognizable, and you’ll probably win.

Since I do not live in D.C. and will probably not be participating any time soon, I offer up some of my own thoughts, yours for the taking:

American Gothic  (maybe call it ‘American Peepic’ or ‘APeepican Gothic’?) – Take two Peeps and stretch them long and thin. Outfit them in a farmer outfit and long dress, respectively; make sure the man has a pitchfork, and provide a bucolic background.

Jabba the Peep – Smoosh an entire package of yellow Peeps together into a singular ‘Jabba the Hutt’ shape. Consider involving a blow torch or glue – whatever it takes.  Next to him, place a shapely Peep wearing a gold bikini with a chain around her neck. Watch the movie and provide whatever background is appropriate. Voila! You have recreated an iconic piece of American filmmaking 

Land of the Peeps (the TV show, not the movie. The movie looks awful. Actually, the show was awful, but the damage is already done – I’ve seen it – so I may as well work with it) – Take three Peeps and outfit them in plaid shirts and jeans. If you can, stick some yellow braids on one of them. Take a fourth Peep, lick it all over, and roll it around in dog hair or bark or whatever you can find. Set them in a spartan and poorly rendered cave home and provide a poorly written script for context, and you’re a shoo-in!

You’re welcome, and good luck.

Apologies for the short disappearance.

I was at a friend’s cabin retreat for the weekend, fighting for my very life against deadly water vipers. Technically, that’s an extreme exaggeration, but it didn’t feel that way when we first spotted the thing winding across the surface of the lake a mere five feet from where we sat.

In a word, ew.

Ew.

The day got off to a late start, the way late nights often cause. My friend first tried to wake me at 10am, but I was in one of those thick, hazy sleeps that are hard to shake off.

So rather than get up, I DREAMT I got up and continued sleeping.  During that time, I had a dream that I was lying on my stomach in the bed eating really messy corn on the cob slathered in BBQ sauce when she walked in the room and caught me. Thus, considering the options, it’s probably better I stayed asleep.

Anyway, it took some time and a trip to the grocery store, but we eventually got to the lake. Right away, things were unnecessarily outdoorsy.

Giant flies kept landing on me, and at first I thought I might have been transformed into some kind of ninja because I was able to swat and kill them with my bare hands (essentially impossible with regular houseflies), but it turned out that they were biting horseflies that LOOK like giant versions of regular flies, but are actually evil bloodsucking relatives. So, for simplicities sake, I killed them with prejudice. Land on me? Die.

Simple rules of the jungle.

Anyway, first came the biting flies and then came the red ants and the creepy-looking spiders (one of which is running across the leg of my dad’s outdoor table right now. It looks like a mini-tarantula, mini only in the sense that it’s more like 3/4″ across rather than 3″. It’s still big and horrifying in its own right).

Then, there was some mysterious liquid that kept landing on me, which at first I decided was the dog’s slobber, but then later had to admit to myself was not coming from the dog when the dog went back to the car with my friend and the liquid kept landing on me.

However, all that paled in comparison to the water snake, who glided by all slinky and evil-like, and then raised his head out of the water to look directly at us, and then continued this pattern every 30 minutes as if on some kind of patrol or quest for a juicy thigh.

Did I mention the original plan had been to put rafts into Lake Snake and float around as veritable bait? And I had the saggy raft that rendered all but my head a foot underwater so basically I was in a non-relaxing and completely submerged and panicked snake watch the whole time I was in?

At some point the ranger came by (on the hunt for apparently illegal rope swings), and I asked him

“Do the snake things bite?”

“What?”

“Do the snake things bite?”

“Snake things?”

“The WATER SNAKES? The snakes in the water? Do they bite?”

“They shouldn’t.”

They shouldn’t!? 

Damn straight, they SHOULDN’T…but do they? Will they?

I didn’t even ask if they were poisonous (I assumed not), just will they bite period?

Thus, if somehow Mr. Lake Ranger you’re out there and run across this blog, let me respectfully inform you that YES. Yes, they shouldn’t, but they DO bite.

In fact, take a look at this excerpt borrowed verbatim from ‘Bogs of the Northeast’ by Charles W. Johnson and Ian A. Worley: Unlike the small and placid redbelly or the gentle garter snake, the northern water snake has a generally deserved reputation for being big (2 to 3 1/2 feet long) and aggressive. Although lacking venom, they defend themselves by delivering a series of authoritative rapid bites while smearing feces and musk onto anyone attempting to catch them.

Holy hell.

I had no desire to capture one, but I’m also not confident that something with an entire cranium the size of my big toe knows the difference between ‘friendly and harmless water invader’ and ‘human trying to capture me that must be passionately and aggressively stopped.’ And I’m not about to find out.

This is not the right kind, unless it was lost. Or raised by a Silence of the Lambs-type guy in a basement.

Naturally, the day wouldn’t have been complete without an unwarranted and bizarre interaction with some kind of Grass Skipper (Hesperiinae) that I have been unable to exactly identify. It looks like a Taxiles Skipper, but apparently those are only west of the Rockies, so I guess not.

Anyway, as I am now a junior entymologist, allow me to catch you up a bit: Grass Skippers are considered butterflies, but are actually looked at as some kind of ‘missing link’ between butterflies and moths. The violator in question was a bright yellow fellow with four wings and a furry body.

He landed on me, and I informed him that unlike the bugs before him, he was welcome…UNLESS he started to act weird.

What do you know?
He promptly began to push my limits.

After spending no less than three minutes examining my thigh with his proboscis (I couldn’t feel it, but I was watching), he squatted down and squirted some kind of clear liquid onto my leg and began rubbing it in with his proboscis.

Um….yuck.

So I give him verbal warning #2…and he did it again.

After the third time, I flicked him off, checked for the presence of vipers, and washed my leg off in the lake.

What the hell was that?

I wasted a solid two hours searching on Google and have determined that he was either

a) Trying to get nectar out of me

b) Hoping to lay eggs on me

c) Hoping to mate with me utilizing some kind of insect form of Astroglide. 

Then I got back in the water and lost my sunglasses in a weedy creepy section I dubbed “Snake Hollow”, so there was no way I was diving under to look for them. I was hoping these three dorky guys in a rowboat (isn’t there a nursery rhyme about that or something like that? The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker?) would come back, and I could convince one of them to go looking…but no such luck.

So onward and upward and next time I’m going to submit a ‘suitability questionnaire’ (“Should I bring a anti-venom kit? Is it necessary that I know how to outsmart a grizzly bear? How many people are drowned by the mysterious monster living in the bottom of the lake each year? Are you certified in CPR? Is it the floaty kind of salt lake where if I accidentally drop something in, it won’t immediately sink?”) before agreeing to participate in outdoor fun involving unfamiliar large bodies of water and creepy crawlies.

Meanwhile, I’m hoping to outsmart or outwait my dad’s previously wild but now tame cat. I’m not supposed to let it out, but all it wants is to go out, and in order to get back in, I (who am out) must open the door. Thus, I’m stuck out and he’s stuck in, and everyone loses.

Nature is a bitch.