Sausageboobies!

When you’re hungry and you don’t have the brainjuice to magic up complicated dishes in the kitchen, then hot dogs is a simple and tasty alternative. At least that’s what Mr Chooch and I decided on the other day. We picked up a bunch of sausages and those funny French hot dog breads. But… well…. We opened the hot dog bag (they come in a bag here, they do) and saw that they weren’t sausages. They were SAUSAGEBOOBIES!

Not sure what else to say, really.

We still ate them. There are people starving in this world, after all. But we did remove the nipple ends and feed them to Pooch. She didn’t think they were creepy at all.

Rockstar Walkies and itchy toes

Throughout her life, Pooch has fine-tuned a theory. Actually, Pooch has a wide variety of theories. Such as that if she places her head on your left knee, treats pop out of you. Or that if she throws her toys at your head, treats pop out of you. Or that if she sits and stares at you for hours without blinking, treats pop out of you.

The theory I’m refering to at the moment, is a different kind of theory. It claims that walks are more pleasurable if they involve autoasphyxiation. She’s like a small, furry David Carradine. Most doggies can be tought leash manners fairly easily, since they’re pulling to get you from A to B faster. Pooch is different, though. She pulls for the joy of pulling. Them arctic breed types can be funny that way.

I have a confession to make. I was definitly going somewhere with this, but I completely forget where. I got distracted by an itch on my big toe. No matter how much I scratch it, it won’t go away or lessen at all. This leads me to believe that it’s not really located on my toe at all, but somewhere completely different. Ever had that happen to you? You know, when you have an itch on your foot, say, and you scratch your calf and it goes away. Your calf as in your leg, not livestock. That would be taking neurology way to far.

Maybe that’s why people do the autoasphyxiation thingy and die in embarrasing situations. The pressure around their necks affects other areas of the b…. uhm…. Yeah, I decided not to wrap this up after all. I’ll just leave it hanging there.

Pun intended.

Napoleon or whatever

Added: And then, once I woke up properly, I realized that I've written Haiti half of the time and then Tahiti the other half. See, this is why I don't get up early. Sometimes I kinda feel like I should. It's a bit like having breakfast - I don't want to, really, but I feel obligated to from time to time because that's what society seems to expect. But I don't like it and it makes me do strange things. But hey, if Tahiti ever has an earthquake or makes a deal with the devil (whatever happens first), I'll just change it back to Tahiti and re-post. And I promise to never again wake up at 5am, think to myself: "Oh my, I can't sleep. What shall I do? I know! I'll blog some!" Anyways, do read. It should be perfectly safe now.

I was determined NOT to write anything about Haiti, because that’s what everyone’s been doing lately, and I want to be unique, dammit.

But I can’t seem to restrain myself any longer. By now we all know how reverend Pat Robertson has been buzzing around in the media, talking about how Haiti brought this earthquake upon themselves because back in the day they had all gotten together and made a deal with the devil. See, they wanted to get out from under the heel of the French (“Napoleon the third, or whatever.”) They all all got together and asked Satan to get the French off their backs and Satan said “Yeah, okay.” Then the Haitians revolted and kicked the French out, all because Satan believed in them.

I’m curious, though… How did they all “get together,” exactly? I mean, it’s hard enough to set up a lunch appointment with the girls. Our boss has been trying to arrange a staff meeting for weeks, with no luck what so ever. And we’re only five people working there. There’s around 200000 people in Haiti. Not sure how many they were under French occupation, but I’m pretty sure there were more then five. Did they have unusually large football stadiums back then? How did they plan this extraordinary meeting? It’s not like they could fire off a txt message to everyone saying: “Meeting with that Satan dude at the freakishly big football stadium at 8:00pm, Tuesday. Be there or be a Frenchman's pony!”

I believe in keeping an open mind when it comes to philosophy and religion and mathematics and stuff, but not to the point where your brain falls out of your head and goes rolling down the street. Just sayin’

Curse of the plastic bags. Or whatever.

Today I had an adventure. Grocery shopping does qualify as an adventure when judged by The Hellholian Scale of Excitement. Besides, when you’re living with Pooch, who has a habit of licking things that should not be licked and developing farts that smell just like the circus, a change of air might not be such a bad idea.

There I was, puttering around between the isles, my little, blue plastic shopping basket in one hand and my shopping list in the other. Ten minutes later, I had worked up quite an impressive selection of items, some of which I needed but most of which I simply wanted. And deserved, dammit.

“Would you like a bag?” the cashiere with the dead eyes asked me, after she’d finished the laborious task of ringing up all my groceries.

“No, hidden inside the dark bowels of my coat, I have more arms than an army of octopuses and would have no problem carrying a million things home,” I thought. I didn’t say that, of course, because I am a polite and civilized sort of person. In stead I simply smiled and said “yes, please.”

So the woman yanked out a plastic bag from underneath the registery, where it lived with its family and friends inside a little cardboard box, dumped it on top of my small mountain of groceries and then she quickly got up and disappeared through the plastic doors in the back of the store, labelled “staff only!!!”

That’s right: three exclamation marks.

I’m not entirely sure what sort of math went on inside her head to make her think that said mountain was going to fit inside a single plastic bag. It is, after all, exactly as big on the inside as it appears to be from the outside. It’s a typical, run-of-the-mill plastic bag – not the bloody starship Enterprise.

The thing is, they always give you one -1- plastic bag, regardless of how much crap you’re hauling with you. If you want more, you have to specifically ask and carefully outline how many you think you’ll need. I momentarily forgot this, and ended up standing there with 80 bucks worth of groceries, a tiny plastic bag and the distinct feeling of just having screwed myself over.   

I bet they all just sit in their little staff-only area, stuffing their faces with chips and watching the little surveillance screens to see how the customers try to work out this little equation. Well, I wasn’t going to be their lunch entertainment. I stole a plastic bag, I did. Hell, I stole TWO.

Thus my life of crime has started. You gonna do something about it, mate? I have a pooch with flatulence and I’m not afraid to use it.

 

What not to do. Unless you're bored.

There are some very strange laws in the world. And when I say strange, I don’t mean strange as in a toaster sitting in a tree. I mean strange as in the combined bird trap and cat feeder.

Too lazy to feed the cat? Here is the perfect solution which will provide your cat with all the food it needs and at the same time depopulate your whole neighbourhood of those pesky robins, wrens and sparrows. The device works by enticing little song birds into a welcoming, homely, birdhouse. Once inside they step onto the pivoted stand and are ejected down the shoot into the lower section where they remain trapped until puss is ready for his lunch. You will never need to open a can of cat food again in your life.

You telling me that’s not strange?

For example, there’s a law in Alaska that says you can’t look at a moose from an airplane. In Miami, it is forbidden to imitate an animal. California law prohibits a woman from driving a car while dressed in a housecoat. Actually, there probably should be a law against wearing a housecoat in the first place, and there certainly will be, when I take over the world.

In Tennessee, a woman is not to drive a car unless a man warns approaching motorists or pedestrians by walking in front of her car. You also can’t drive a car in Tennessee while you’re sleeping. In New York, you can’t drive a car if you’re blind. But I guess hitting the road while you’re asleep is okay.

In Rochester, Michigan, the law is that anyone bathing in public must have the bathing suit inspected by a police officer. I wonder what would happen if I were to travel to Rochester, put on a bathing suit and ask a police officer to inspect it. In Kentucky, it’s the law that a person must take a bath once a year.

In Utah, birds have the right of way on any public highway. In Ohio, one must have a license to keep a bear. I wonder what the punishment is for bear-keeping without a license.

In North Carolina, it is against the law for dogs and cats to fight. In Singapore, it is illegal to chew gum. In Cleveland, Ohio, it is only illegal to chew gum in public places. Otherwise, it can be your dirty little secret. Maybe you could get down with your bad self and go to dodgy gum-dens.

I never knew the kind of pressure chickens were under, either. In Virginia, chickens cannot lay eggs before 8:00 a.m. and must be done before 4:00 p.m.

In Massachusetts, it is against the law to put tomatoes in clam chowder.

In Washington State, you can’t carry a concealed weapon that is over 6 feet in length. In San Francisco, there is an ordinance, which bans the picking up and throwing of used confetti. In the state of Colorado, a pet cat, if loose, must have a tail-light.

In California, a law created in 1925 makes it illegal to wiggle while dancing. In Utah, daylight must be visible between dancing couples. In Michigan, it is against the law for a lady to lift her skirts more than 6 inches while walking through a mud puddle. What if you stand next to the puddle with your skirt above your head? Can they get you for that? In Missouri a man must have a permit to shave. There’s also a law stating that more than 3000 sheep cannot be herded down Hollywood Blvd at any one time.

Some of these I would really like to try out.

There are a lot of things in this world that I just don’t understand. Stuff that truly boggles the mind. For instance, what would possess Pamela Anderson to say she envied flat-chested girls because they looked so slim? Why would someone invent a motorized picnic table? But the greatest mystery of them all, is why so many people don’t have the sense to eat.

A girl I once worked with was a devoted follower of most insane diets. “Last night I forgot to eat, all together,” she told me once, while munching away at a lettuce leaf. “I just had a piece of toast for breakfast and a bowl of cereal before bed.”

But if your brain is so numb it actually forgets that you should eat, wouldn’t your stomach remind you? My stomach is so full of suggestions, reminders and demands, it is practically an entity upon itself. If it gets any more pushy, I will have to name it. I can’t even go to the frozen food section without it giving a lengthy speech about how any ice cream with the word “pie” or “cheese cake” in its name, has a natural place in our freezer.

Still, a great many people don’t seem to be on speaking terms with their middle bits. I’ve hardly ever been to a class, meeting or any gathering of people, where at least one persons stomach didn’t make noises that you’d normally only hear deep in the woods at night.

So why don’t intelligent (supposedly) adults just frikkin eat, already?

Can someone please tell me that?

pic by proscilas for http://www.flickr.com/

I recently watched a documentary on plastic surgery among the hopeful wannabes in Los Angeles, because there’s nothing like the madness of others to make you feel good about your own life.

I doubt that I’m in any danger of ever feeling the urge to live in La-La Land, but I still had to do some philosophising on the issue, cause I’m… well… me. And I can never resist a little good old-fashioned philosophising. You know that by now if you’ve been paying attention.

LA is probably the worlds biggest chop shop. Only it’s got a twist. In stead of the cars going out with all new parts, their drivers do. A great, big masquerade where the masks don’t even come off at midnight. It’s got to be strange living in a city where you have no idea what anyone really looks like.

Just imagine: Miss Perfect Barbie meets Mr Buff Hunk. They fall in love, have their fairy-tale wedding. Nine months later, everyone’s shocked when Princess Plastic starts popping out babies who look like a cross between Bert and Ernie.

I doubt that I’m in any danger of feeling the urge to move to the city of angels, but if I did, I suspect I’d be to creeped out to ever date anyone ever again. My love life would be deader (if that's a word) than it ever was back in Little Hellhole. And I actually declared it dead and buried it there. Tombstone and all.

To go deaf or not to go deaf

Since I am going down the coast for a couple of weeks, this will be the last fascinating and terribly intelligent thing I'm going to share with you until I get back. Enjoy!

That's an order.

People can be divided into many categories. Two such categories are mumblers and non-mumblers. For some inexplicable reason, a great deal of the people that I hang out with here in Bigger Hellhole, are members of the first category. Over the past three weeks, this fact had me seriously wondering whether or not my hearing might be going.

I had started to become a bit worried, actually, always asking people to repeat what they’d just said. I thought I might need to get myself a hearing aid. I would cringe when I thought of the ones the old folks at the home, where I worked last summer, would wear. The kind that would slither around the back of their ears like some waxy leech. Half the time, the apparatus would make a high-pitched noise that everyone but the owner would hear. I pictured myself wearing one of those, and I didn’t like the idea. Besides, they’re all either grey or beige, both of which are colours that make my complexion look like death warmed over. Which is so not the look I usually go for.

Then luck intervened, and threw a couple of non-mumbler in my path last week. Rarely have I felt so relieved. In the future I am going to have to become friends with more typical non-mumblers, so that I can seek them out if I ever start to doubt my abilities to hear properly again.

How does a mumbler become a mumbler, though? Hasn’t anyone ever told these people to speak up? And shouldn’t it be a hint to maybe turn up the volume just a little, when the most common reply you get whenever you speak to someone is “huh?” I have noticed something interesting, though – A mumbler never seems to have any trouble deciphering what another of his/her kind is saying. This leads me to think that these creatures have hearing like bats, and might not be entirely human.

This time of the year, people also start wearing gigantic scarves, which aggravate an already difficult situation. Trendy, fun and colourful as a scarf may be, the already miniscule voice of a mumbler finds it very hard to fight its way through such a large, woolly barrier. This leaves perfectly normal people, such as myself, to wonder if they’re going deaf.

There should be a law against these things. And violators should be forced to take a course in how to speak so that non-batpeople can hear stuff that comes out of your mouth. All in favour, say AI!

You can’t go out wearing that!

Rain, rain, rain and more rain. And after that, it’ll probably start raining again. My house is right next to a great big parking lot. Nobody ever uses it, so the clever politicians decided that there’s no point in maintaining it anymore, and it’s since been reduced to a collection of very impressive cracks and holes.

Before it started raining, it snowed for a while. Then the rain turned the snow into ice and the parking lot into a skating range, basically. A skating range with large pools built into it. As I walked across it to get to the bus stop, I tried my very best not to slip’n slide directly into one of them. I haven’t bathed in a puddle since I was a kid, and I can’t quite remember what it was about getting my pants full of muddy water that was so hysterically funny.

The morning bus was bursting with teenagers on their way to school, as usual. I don’t get that trend where guys wear pants that only cover the bottom half of their ass. And I really don’t understand wearing half-ass pants with white underwear in the rain, especially if you’re planning on doing a lot of bending over. I’m not interested in looking at either one of these guys' bums for at least another ten years, and probably not even then.

That’s not to say that I don’t have some strange things sitting in my closet, also. I have this huge belt, for instance. It’s got a bunch of gold plates on it. Someone gave it to me as a present once, and I’ve never worn it, because every time I look at it, all I can think is “heavyweight champion of the world.”

Then there was that period in the mid nineties, when I had the animal print outfits and ridiculous plateau shoes. Not to mention men’s shirts and big hats.

I’m hoping that in another ten years, I’ll be able to look back on myself without blushing from shame.

Hat pic by brndnprkns for www.Flickr.com

Dead slugs and the thing that barfed itself to death

I spent an hour on the phone with a good friend of mine, Mariè, on Wednesday. We used to hang out all the time, back when I lived in the city (Ah! Civilization – I remember it, vaguely, in the back of my mind along with the red wagon I had when I was three), but there aren’t a lot of opportunities for us to get together these days. The girl, Parisian by birth, is one of those chefs who love to cook even after she goes off work, and used to have friends over for dinner all the time. Mostly, this was terrific, but for a while it became almost bloodcurdling.

I know what you’re thinking. “Listen to her! She’s got a real, live chef cooking for her, and this is how she shows her gratitude. What a spoiled *****” Well, you know what you’re words were. And yes, at first it was brilliant. Absolutely, completely and totally superb. But then it changed. She started cooking some seriously weird stuff.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; slugs weren’t meant to be eaten. Those of my friends who are French either by birth or in spirit, will object now, of course. Jazz once said that the idea of eating snails was less daunting if you called the dish “Escargot”, like they do in France. This didn’t help me when I was sitting by Marie’s round kitchen table with three friends, staring the content our round dinner plates.

“Don’t look so sceptical. They really don’t taste like anything at all. The seasoning provides all of the flavour,” she said to me, as she was cooking the revolting little things. We were all supposed to turn up at her flat just after she finished cooking (I’m guessing that she was going to feed her Escargots to us poor, unsuspecting victims, and then let us know what we’d just eaten once it had started working its way through our digestive systems), but she gave me the wrong time, so I came early enough to see what she was up to.
“Well, then you eat those and I’ll lick the frying pan,” I said.
Mariè laughed. I wasn’t joking.

Just as I had stuck my fork in one of the little nightmares, my cellphone rang.
“Hello. I’m calling on behalf of The Really Wonderful Newspaper. Would you like to hear about our subscription services?” chirped a woman’s voice in my ear.
“Okay, I’ll be right over,” I said. Then I put on my regretful face and told my friends that I had to go. To this day, I’ve never eaten a snail.

The week after that, Mariè served her last scary meal - a fish. It had been baked whole in the oven and now it lay on an elegant serving platter, surrounded by various accessories, with stuffing coming out of its open mouth. It looked a bit as if it had barfed itself to death.

After that, things returned to normal.

Eye pic by Fazen for www.Flickr.com

Snail pic by Giamil for www.sxc.hu