Tag Archives: holidays

The Funny

Stew Leonard’s Red Legged Mountain Turkeys

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Last summer, I attempted to relaunch my on-again, off-again podcast, Holy Goddamn! I only managed to get through two full episodes before time, tide, and the affairs of man intervened to make it impossible to do the show with any regularity. However, I did construct a bunch of dumb audio bitlets for it that made me laugh, and I didn’t want much more out of the whole thing than that.

Thanksgiving’s imminent arrival brought to mind a thread that ran through one of these episodes. If you live in the tri-state area, this is the time of year when you hear radio ads for Stew Leonard’s. These commercials feature the store’s namesake on site at the farm where he’s acquired some wonderful items for his stores just in time for this holiday season. More often than not, these items are some kind of poultry that cluck and gobble loudly, seemingly unaware of their fate.

In my version, Stew has imported tons of rare poultry (“red legged mountain turkeys”) from high atop the Colorado Rockies, just in time for the holidays! Unfortunately, Stew gets much more than he bargained for, as each subsequent commercial demonstrates.

Now you can hear all the ads strung together as one brief saga, so that they might live anew. Enjoy!

[audio:http://scratchbomb.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/stew.mp3|titles=Stew Leonard’s Red Legged Mountain Turkeys]

Download here.

Pointless Nostalgia

Pledging

I experienced an awkward moment at a PTA meeting I attended recently. This was something above and beyond the normal awkwardness I feel in a room full of people I do not know and whose only connection to me is having children who attend the same school as my child, as I struggle to form some cruel parody of conversation. “So, I hear your kid likes Justin Bieber?”

The moment came at the beginning of the meeting, when the PTA president insisted we all rise and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Once I heard this, I was gripped by a childlike but very real panic. I hadn’t been asked to do this seriously* since high school, and for a terrifying split second I wasn’t sure what I should do with myself.

*I include the adverb seriously here because the live Pee-Wee Herman Show I saw with my daughter opened with Pee-Wee reciting the Pledge along with the audience, which I don’t think counts, really.

The reason I wasn’t sure what to do is because I spent a good chunk of my childhood as a Jehovah’s Witness. Witnesses refuse the say the Pledge of Allegiance. They don’t do a lot of things, due to their selectively literal interpretation of the Bible (or their translation thereof; it’s a very long story, the more you hear of the less you truly know). Being a Witness is almost like keeping kosher, but instead of worrying about what you eat, you have to worry about everything else.

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