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The Agony of De-Arm!
AS MOST patriotic Americans know, today the Olympics begin, and I for one couldn’t be more excited!
My God, just think about all that hot, sweaty flesh…!
But enough about me in only a pair of dingy, threadbare briefs, stuck to my leather recliner, eating one microwave chimichanga after another while watching TV during one of our nation’s hottest summers on record!
What you’re here for is one of my most popular features – The Overpriced Goodwill Item of the Week!
This week’s item (heh – “week” – as though I post one of these with the regularity that this feature’s title implies!) will set you back $3.99 – as you can see here in this closeup of the price tag:
“Why, $3.99 isn’t a terrible price for anything – especially an imported curio from mysterious and exotic Korea,” you say, having noticed the gold sticker on the bottom of this item – whatever it is!
Oh no? You’ll pay $3.99 for this, will you?!
“Again,” you insist, “$3.99 seems perfectly reasonable for a ceramic figurine of belovedly forgotten Sam the Olympic Eagle – the visually uninteresting Disneyfied mascot of the 1984 Summer Olympics held in the filthy toilet that is Los Angeles.”
Oh, I’d tend to agree with you, probably, until the figure was turned around, that is – and we all saw this!
Gasp! His right arm-wing has been snapped off! Broken! Gone! Shattered and destroyed like the Olympic dreams of a Greek athlete found guilty of tweeting pictures of herself marrying gay West Nile Virus-carrying illegal immigrant mosquitos to each other at Chick-Fil-A, if my grasp of this week’s headlines is accurate.
A missing appendage – the glaring imperfection that will render an already practically worthless collectible ceramic figure even more practically worthless in the practically worthless collectible ceramic figure collector’s market! The judges aren’t going to like that!
But you want to pay four bucks for this thing, there, Mr. (or Ms.) Moneybags, be my guest. Be my guest!
“Oh, for God’s sake you jackass, give Goodwill a break!” you argue. “Clearly the dirty, poorly-behaved, unsupervised child of some annoying and pushy customer broke this after it was priced.”
No! No! You do not insult the dirty, poorly-behaved, unsupervised children of annoying and pushy customers from my local Goodwills. Not on my watch, pal! You do not do that!
No, as a matter of fact, I happened to be there when this little beauty was brought out of the back on a cart laden with all kinds of overpriced secondhand crap and put on a shelf on the sales floor (industry term). Troublemaker that I am, I even made a point to tell the woman who was putting out the merchandise “This thing’s broken” and show it to her.
Her response? A shrug and then, as she walked away, “Someone will want it.”
Give that Goodwill employee a gold medal!
Ted Parsnips
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