Life In These United States

Death’s Record First Quarter Profits Raise Eyebrows

cemetery.jpgAt a time when most sectors of the economy are suffering, Death reported record profits for the first quarter of 2010, prompting surprise from the world of finance and resentment from the general public.

“I think we all knew this was  a good year for Death, but no one dared dream it was this good,” said Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein. “The smart investor who bet on Death this year is now reaping the rewards.”

“I believe if you look at it in aggregate, Death’s profits aren’t that much larger than this time last year,” said Harold Long, economics professor at Columbia University, upon hearing the news. “But a few high profile acquisitions paint Death as this greedy, heartless entity. Even I was taken aback when Death acquired Teddy Pendergrass, Alex Chilton, and Jay Reatard all within the span of two months. It just comes across as overkill.”

Death’s diversified holdings have expanded to acquiring assets in all fields. Its film department was enlarged by the addition of Erich Rohmer, and its literary department by J.D. Salinger. The arrival of Bea Arthur added to Death’s already considerable actress and gay icon divisions.

While this embarrassment of riches has delighted Wall Street, it has led to resentment on Main Street. Such excess seems especially galling to unemployed workers like Frank Renfro of Detroit, recently laid off from his job at a decorative candle manufacturing company.

“Enough is never enough with these people,” Renfro said. “All they do is take, take, take. It’s not good enough they got one former child star when they picked up Boner from Growing Pains. No, they gotta grab Corey Haim, too. And to top it off, they gobble up Art Clokey! I didn’t even know he was still around! What are they even gonna do with the guy who created Gumby? Put him on a pile over at the big ol’ Death mansion, I guess. Makes me sick.”

In response to the criticism, Death called a press conference, where CEO Grim Reaper pointed a bony finger at the assembled host, as the faint but unmistakable sound of scythes being ground against enormous wheels screeched in the distance.

Oirland

The Ghost of St. Patrick’s Days Past

gaelic_football.jpgLast year, I declared a truce with St. Patrick’s Day. So you won’t be reading any new screeds against the holiday on this site. No, instead, you will read recycled screeds.

I wrote a post several years ago on a now-defunct sports site about the Venn intersection of this holiday, Gaelic football, and my paternal grandfather. A year later, I expanded said post for this site, because that old site was completely dismantled by its owners. (You can still find Geocities pages about Mother Theresa eating someone’s balls from 12 years ago, but this sports site I labored on for 2+ years has vanished. Go figure.)

I like this post a lot (if I’m allowed to like stuff I wrote), and if you’re newish to this site, you may not have seen it before. So I present to you now “The Calvinball of the Emerald Isle. (Original post here.)
Continue reading The Ghost of St. Patrick’s Days Past →

Pointless Nostalgia

Of Shopping Carts, and the Best Thing I’ve Ever Seen

shoppingcartsmash.jpgThis last Saturday, The Wife and I volunteered at WFMU for their annual pledge marathon. (You may have seen me write about it a few thousand times.) I did some phone answering and assisted her as she cooked dinner for the DJs and volunteers. It was great and fun and rewarding and I got to hang out with lots of amazing people. But earlier in the day, I saw something that made the day even more special.

We needed a few more items for dinner prep, so we drove to a nearby Shop Rite. If you live in the NYC area, you may remember that on Saturday, we were basically hit by a hurricane. I could literally feel my tiny little car getting pushed by the wind as we chugged along to the store. About a block away from the Shop Rite’s entrance, as we waited at a red light, I saw a rogue shopping cart bolt from the confines of the parking lot and make a run at freedom, straight across an extremely busy, four-lane street.

Unfortunately, this shopping cart jailbreak coincided with the light turning green. As the traffic began to move again, most of the cars managed to avoid it with some judicious swerving and braking, except for one completely oblivious Mercedes SUV. There’s no way the driver of this car could have missed the thing, unless they were facing backwards with their eyes closed. Still, they drove on, making no attempt at evasive action, and so hit the shopping cart head on with a big, rattly WHAM.

Not only was this awesome and hilarious, but it also brought back a fantastic memory. This blast from the past also involved cars, and shopping carts, and the best thing I’ve ever seen.

I was about 11 or 12 years old. My mom had to make a quick run to the Grand Union in town. So my two younger brothers, my cousin, and I piled into her car and went along for the trip, probably so we could finagle a trip to the local video store and rent a Nintendo game right after the groceries were done. I only note the headcount to prove this story can be verified by other sources. What I’m about to tell you actually happened.

As my mom went inside the Grand Union, we stayed in the car and probably listened to a Weird Al tape or something. But we were about to witness something far more mind-blowing than “Like a Surgeon” (no offense, Al). My mom’s car was parked at the edge of the parking lot, facing a small hill that led down to a creek. There was no guardrail or fence or anything else to separate this hill from the parking lot.

Suddenly, we heard an engine racing off in the distance. An angry, growling engine. As the sound got closer, we saw it was attached to an avocado green American car of 70s vintage. Something low and sloped, almost El Camino like. And it was going very fast down the main drag of our small town, in an area where 30 mph speed limits were generally adhered to.

As he neared the Grand Union, he suddenly swerved toward the parking lot without slowing down much, if at all. He peeled into the lot with a horrifying screech, burning rubber and making a dangerously wide arc on his way in. Once he regained control of his vehicle, he aimed it at a parking spot a few slots to our left. The fact that this parking spot had two idle shopping carts in it did not concern him. Or, more likely, he had no time to worry about it, as he spent most of his concentration on driving like a maniac.

The two shopping carts each took a different approach to this assault. One of them was defiant and flipped up in the air, landing upside down on his hood. The other one was more submissive. It launched off of the car’s grill, as if it had been drop kicked, and tumbled down the hill into the creek below.

Somehow, the driver managed to stop his car before it too careened down the ravine. With rubber mist hanging in the air and a shopping cart still clinging to the hood of his car, the driver got out. And this is the craziest part of the story: he walked over to the Grand Union as calmly as I’ve ever seen anyone do anything. Whatever sense of urgency compelled him to drive like a maniac and defy common sense, the self preservation instinct, and the well-being of his vehicle had completely vanished.

It was like something out of the best action movie ever made, but not even the craziest, Jason Statham-iest thriller would have a scene like this in it, because it would stretch the bounds of suspension of disbelief far beyond their limits.

The only bad thing about witnessing this? Even at age 11-or-12, I knew I would NEVER see anything better.

A potentially explosive collection of verbal irritants