Sixteen years ago, I was a lonely bachelor living with two ferrets and a cat. Part of my routine at that time was to explore the internet, read blogs, and participate in selected chat rooms. It was about that same time I serious became interested in blogging but was really unsure just how to get started. One of my favorite blogs at the time was called gutrumbles.com. The gentleman that ran that blog was Rob Acid-Man Smith. He captured my imagination immediately because he was brutally honest, totally outspoken with absolutely no filters, and had a great sense of humor. I exchanged emails with him for a time, learned a lot, and I was hooked. That day he became my blog-father. To say he upset a large number of people over the years was an understatement, but he did it with humor and a whole lot of truth. After reading his blog for almost two years I decided to give it a try myself.
My four years of blogging on my first blog were eye opening. I was brutally honest and voiced my opinions loudly and crassly. I spent most of my time complaining about politics, religion, and any other topic that piqued my interest. It was great fun, and the responses were more than just a little interesting. I actually received a number of death threats from idiots around the globe. That was enough to convince me I had more to say and to hell with the critics.
But as with all things age tends to mellow a person. I decided to discontinue that first blog and then created Every-Useless-Thing. Hoping against hope that I could mellow my opinions down a little and make the blog something more than a bitch session. I’ve been doing Every-Useless-Thing now for approximately eleven and a half years and ten months ago I felt myself slipping and losing my edge. A lot of it had to do with my medical issues but it was more than just that. Anytime I felt myself slipping in the past I returned to gutrumbles.com to reinvigorate me. Gut Rumbles continues today at Rob’s request even though Rob passed away in 2006. It was and will always be my “Happy Place”.
Today after that lengthy and boring explanation I’m going to repost an article from Acid-Man’s blog. Hopefully you’ll read his thoughts and then understand where I’m trying to come from. I hope you enjoy a little of Acid Man, because I always have. If you want some good reading, go to his blog and read some of his archives. Here he is!
I have a Southern accent. I drop the “g” off the end of gerunds, so I say talkin,’ climbin,’ smokin,’ and runnin’ instead of speaking standard American English the way Dan Rather does as he lies his ass off on the CBS Evening News.
I say y’all. I have ‘druthers. I know how far yonder is. I know how to see ’bout that. Whatchadoon is a real word to me.
That’s the reason I don’t like to talk on the phone. I sound like a goddam hick. I AM a goddam hick, but I am educated and I can communicate well when I want to. Where I live, everybody understands me just fine when I say, “Whatchadoon? I’d ‘druther ya not go ’bout it that way. Lemme show ya sumpin. Thadded be better, doncha think?” That’s Southern English and it works well in person-to-person communication.
Try that shit over the phone when you’re talking to a yankee. I doesn’t work. The yankee gets all nasal, I talk Southern and the next thing you know, we may as well be from foreign countries. That’s why I would prefer to write to someone I don’t know. I can appear to be halfway intelligent on paper.
I’ve done a lot of thinking about this communication gap. I COULD be like the BC and talk like a yankee at work and sound like the biggest hayseed on the farm at Quinton’s football games, but I’m not a chameleon, able to change my skin color and blend into the scenery the way she can. Everything that woman does is an act and she wears many masks. I’m not built that way. Like Popeye, I am what I am and that’s all that I am.
Sometimes, that’s not the right way to be. Honesty is not always the best policy.
For most of my life I’ve been an aspiring artist with my share of successes and failures. It’s really not about being successful or being a failure, it’s having the ability to create something that others find interesting. Regardless of a person’s ability, be it good or bad, there’s always a bevy of critics to look at your work, and then spend a great deal of time and effort cutting it to pieces with little or no concern about the work itself, or the effort and concentration you spent during its creation. I’m not really complaining about the critics because they’re a fact of life no matter what you do artistically or otherwise. Today I’ll offer up some blurbs made by some relatively famous critics about other artists and their work. They’re a bit sarcastic and a little nasty at times but that’s life. Here they are. . .
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
‘Still life with the Bulls Head’ “My little granddaughter of six could do as well.” Norman Rockwell
“If I met Picasso in the street, I would kick him in the pants.” Sir Alfred Munnings 1949
“Picasso finding new ways of avoiding maturity.” Clive James 1984
Michelangelo (1475-1564)
“If Michelangelo had been a heterosexual, the Sistine Chapel would have been painted basic white and with a roller.” Rita Mae Brown 1988
“He was a good man, but he did not know how to paint.” El Greco
Salvador Dali(1904-1989)
“Faced with a virtual complete record of the old phony’s unswerving bathos, it was impossible not to burst out in yawning . . . the uproar of banality numbed the mind.” Clive James 1984
“Senor Dali, more than delirious, considers it folly to be serious.” Phyllis McGinley 1960
“The naked truth about me is to the naked truth about Salvador Dali as an old ukulele in the attic is to a piano in a tree, and I mean piano with breasts.” James Thurber 1945
Andy Warhol (1930-1980)
“The most famous living artist in America is Andrew Warhol, unfortunately.” John Heilpern 1979
“Warhol’s art belongs less to the history of painting than to the history of publicity.” Hilton Kramer
“The only genius with an IQ of 60.” Gore Vidal
As you can see, even the most famous artists have people lined up to ridicule their art and everything else about them. I guess if you want to be famous, this is the price you must pay, listening to a bunch of jealous and envious critics. Even a chump like me has been criticized for virtually everything I’ve ever done artistically and truthfully that’s part of the fun for me.
Marion Shepilov Barry was an American politician who served as the second and fourth mayor of the District of Columbia from 1979 to 1991 and 1995 to 1999.
Who is the dumbest? This might be the stupidest question ever asked by anyone including myself. There is so much dumb going around in recent years, it would take me forever to put a coherent list together of the worst of them. I’ve been alive a long time and I’ve seen dumb, heard dumb, and on occasion spoke dumb myself. It’s only right that I’ve chosen to honor former mayor Marion Barry of Washington D.C. fame. He had problems putting together an eight-word sentence and if you don’t believe me, read on. His dumbness was also all too obvious when it came to hookers and crack cocaine. Someone at his level of stupid deserves to be memorialized by me, today and here are his tidbits of wisdom . . .
“I am providing you with a copulation of answers to several questions raised . . .”
“What we have here is an egregemous miscarriagement of taxitude.”
“The contagious people of Washington have stood firm against adversity during this long period of increment weather.”
“I promise you a police car on every sidewalk.”
“I am making this trip to Africa because Washington is an international city, just like Tokyo, Nigeria, or Israel. As mayor, I am an international symbol, can you deny that Africa?”
“What right does Congress have to go around making laws just because they deem it necessary?”
“Outside of the killings, Washington has one of the lowest crime rates in the country.”
“People blame me because these water mains break, but I ask you, if the water mains didn’t break, would it be my responsibility to fix them than? Would it?”
“There are two kinds of truth. There are real truths, and there are made up truths.”
“I am a great mayor, I am an upstanding Christian man, I am an intelligent man, I am a deeply educated man, and I’m a humble man.”
How could we possibly go wrong when this is the standard someone has to meet to be elected in the nation’s capitol. Is it any wonder Washington D.C. and Congress are eternally screwed up? Instead of firing and prosecuting Mayor Barry, we should have elected him President, it worked so well for Bill Clinton, so why not. I shouldn’t complain, I guess. If all politicians were actually what they claimed to be I wouldn’t have anything to write about.
IT’S TOO BAD ABOUT BARRY, BUT HE WAS NO DAN QUAYLE
Mae West (August 17, 1893 – November 22, 1980) was an American actress who worked in vaudeville and later in movies. She is best remembered for her dirty jokes and comedy movies. Her name when she was born was Mary Jane West. She was born in Brooklyn, New York City, and died in Hollywood, California.
Frederick Adolphus Sawyer (December 12, 1822 – July 31, 1891) was a United States Senator from South Carolina. Born in Bolton, Massachusetts. He graduated from Harvard University in 1844. On the night of April 14, 1865, Sawyer was at Ford’s Theater in Washington D.C. and witnessed the assassination of President Lincoln.
Being a former police officer, I still maintain interest in all things criminal, crime related,and punishment. I’m also a big fan of almost any book, fiction or nonfiction, about investigations concerning any crime you can think of. That makes today Crime and PunishmentTrivia Day and I’ll pass along a few tidbits you may find interesting.
Let’s go back in history a few hundred years to examine methods of punishment for murderers, rapists, and traitors. From what I can see they were a little harsher with punishment than we seem to be these days.
First on the list is the wheel. Criminals were lashed to a wagon wheel and their limbs bludgeoned or broken by brute force. Ugly but effective.
Next, we have boiling. The criminals were immersed in boiling water, oil, or hot tar and fried to death. Yuck!Soups on.
Another favorite was flaying. That involves the removal of a person’s skin which could keep the criminal alive for a day or two until he died from shock. I’d say this is really cruel and really unusualpunishment.
This is a Chinese favorite called “The Death of a Thousand Cuts”. It is where the criminal was lashed to a frame and over a period of days pieces of their body were severed and removed with a knife. Had to be the Mongolians who started this trend.
This crowd-pleaser is called disembowelment. The criminal’s abdomen was opened while alive with a knife, and his organs were individually removed, particularly the bowels. No comment on this disgusting method since I had it done to me but with an anesthesia.
Impalement involves driving a pointed stake through the victim’s body from the rectum up through the breast and shoulder. Ouch!!!!!
Stoning is when a large group of people were gathered together to throw stones at the criminal. The point here is that no single person is responsible for the death, it’s a group act. What a Sharia loving group.
Decapitation is the removal of the victims’ head by knife, sword, ax, or guillotine. One way to keep ahead of the criminals.
Burning at the stake involves exposing the criminal to direct flames or heat until death occurs. Barbecues had to start somewhere.
Hanging, drawn, and quartering requires criminals to be dragged behind a horse to a platform where they were then hanged, removed just before the moment of death, and then castrated, disemboweled, beheaded, and quartered. That’s like killing the criminal three times over.
And last but not least an unusual punishment popular in Southeast Asia from the 11th – 18th centuries. The criminal is tied up, placed under the foot of an elephant, and then crushed. No more circus visits for me, I’ll have nightmares.
I think all of the criminals living in this country should count their blessings and except Life Imprisonment Without Chance of Parole as being mighty generous and merciful. It’s hard to imagine how many of these methods were used often and without hesitation. It’s also hard to imagine how they had any crime rate whatsoever when the criminals knew these kinds of punishments were being handed out. But to quote an expert, “Stupid is as Stupid Does”.
Let me start off by saying that I’m not a beer drinker. I haven’t had much use for drinking beer since my early years of college and even then, I mixed it with Seven-Up because I couldn’t stand the taste. Also, most of the girls wanted it sweetened and who was I to argue? And now I’m living with one of the greatest beer drinkers I’ve ever seen, my better-half. I would easily consider her a professional beer drinker. She knows all the brands, flavors, the history of the breweries, and that makes her an expert in my eyes.
Many years ago, I worked with a man who made her look like an amateur. This guy could sit and drink a half a case of beer, leave the bar, and drive home. I never saw him intoxicated regardless of how many beers he slugged down in the course of the evening. I consistently ragged on him about drinking too much beer because even then I didn’t have much use for it. Finally, he decided to respond to my constant badgering and gave me the list you’re about to read. He felt that I spent most of my time chasing women and that in his opinion beer was way better than women. Here we go, his list of reasons that beer is better than women.
You can enjoy beer all month long.
You don’t have to wine and dine a beer.
A beer will wait patiently for you in the car when you play sports.
Beer is never late.
Hangovers go away, beer never does.
When you go to a bar, you can always pick up a beer.
Beer never has a headache.
A beer won’t get upset if you come home with beer on your breath.
If you pour a beer just right, you’ll always get good head.
A beer always goes down easy.
You always know if you’re the first one to pop a beer.
Beer is always wet.
Beer doesn’t demand equality.
The beer doesn’t care when you come.
You don’t have to wash a beer before it tastes good.
As I was typing this list, I had a small but equally important epiphany. While I dislike beer immensely, I absolutely love bourbon. If I replace the word beer in this list with the word bourbon, it still makes perfectly good sense. I guess it’s true what they say.
Just what you’ve all been clamoring for – more limericks. I made a lucky discovery a few weeks ago when I purchased a book containing 1700 limericks dated between 1810 and 1950. Instead of printing a few here and there I decided to pick a few selections from each decade. They’ll give us a good flavor of the times in which they were written. Many are crass and bawdy and there’s a host of them from the war years in the 1940’s. Just a warning . . . some of these are not for children or anyone whose overly religious or just plain naive. Let’s get to it . . .
There was a young girl in Berlin
Who was fucked by an elderly Finn.
Though he diddled his best,
And fucked her with zest,
She kept asking, “Hey, Pop, is it in?” 1927
Winter is here with his grouch,
The time when you sneeze and you slouch.
You can’t take you’re women
Canoe’in or swimm’in,
But a lot can be done on a couch. 1927
There was a young man named Hughs
Who swore off all kinds of booze,
He said,”When I’m muddled
My senses get fuddled,
And I pass up too many screws.” 1926
There was a young plumber of Leigh
Who was plumbing a girl by the sea.
She said,”Stop your plumbing,
There’s somebody coming!”
Said the plumber, still plumbing, “It’s me.” 1923
There was a young lady named May
Who strolled in a park by the way,
And she met a young man
Who fucked her and ran,
Now she goes to the park every day. 1924
What do you think? It seems the same sense of humor required to write limericks doesn’t change much from one generation to another.
