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Deodorant!
Like you, I strive to maintain a reasonable personal hygiene regimen, and on many days that will include the application of a deodorant to my underarms – that is, my armpits.
About three months ago I was in my local Target, trying to choose just which deodorant was right for me. (There sure are a lot of them!) A coupon and a sale helped the decision process along, and I settled on something called “Right Guard Total Defense Power Deo 5 Fast Break Deodorant.” Unfortunately, despite “Fast Break” in its name and the package’s orange and blue color scheme, it was not scented like the slightly obscure – but still on the market – Reese’s candy bar. No, it had a pleasant sort of aftershave fragrance to it.
“Right Guard Total Defense Power Deo 5 Fast Break Deodorant” sounds like a mouthful for something you smear under your arms and maybe discretely nibble at if you secretly suffer from pica, but bear in mind it’s got a lot going for it, according to the label:
1 – cologne inspired
2 – time-released
3 – targets bacteria
4- neutralizes odor
5 – 24 hr. powerLike I said, it was on sale and I had a coupon, so I bought it. Also, the label has this basketball design on it, and I figured that’d impress the fellas in the locker room.
So I haven’t had any problems with it, but over the last few weeks, as it was getting down to the nub, you know what I noticed? It started smelling like hay. Like hay! Look, I grew up around horses, brother, so I know what hay smells like.
I wonder if it’s the deodorant, or if the stink glands in my armpits are somehow synthesizing it and my perspiration to make it smell like hay. I don’t know. I just don’t know. Maybe this is why there’s all those PSAs reminding us to switch deodorants every so often. But I’m telling you, it smelled like hay.
Anyway, I can’t wait until it’s on sale again!
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Tuck Into!
You know, there’s certain overused words and phrases that just annoy the hell out of me. So much that a pal and I, we compiled a list, but as the licensing rights to that list are tied up in litigation that has been compared to the various lawsuits preventing the 60s “Batman” TV series to be released on DVD, I’m unable to reproduce it here. (Meanwhile, both of our attorneys are getting richer.)
But I’ve another pal, and she’s annoyed by some other words and phrases, and the only one I can think of right now is “chops,” most often following not “pork” (which wouldn’t annoy anyone) but “acting.” It’s such a lazy way of writing. Show off one’s acting chops, display her acting chops, demonstrates his acting chops, etc., etc.! Dear God, stop it! Stop it you lazy writers! Right now, as I type this, there’s 217 matches in Google News for articles using the phrase “acting chops” each one more awful than the last.
In fact, I want you on board with this, too, and what better way than to list the first 9 examples from that first page of results from the aforementioned Google News search? (And this is just Google News, by the way! Can you imagine if I had just done it in regular Google? Christ!)
• Craig Price helps students find and hone their acting chops
• Forest Ridge Academy students show off their acting chops
• Looking like the aging Callas at first one wonders where are the acting chops that Daly has shown in the past
• Leo Howard shows off martial arts skills, acting chops, in Kickin’ It
• Justin Bieber Nabs 2011 Teen Choice Nod For His Acting Chops!
• By the year 2000 Renee Zellweger had proven her acting chops in both drama and comedy
• Jeff Gordon gets to show off his acting chops in “Road Trip to the Race Track” a new video campaign for his sponsor
• Liz had hoped to exercise her villainous acting chops on the updated version of Wonder Woman
• However, the British model showed off her acting chops and contributed to important phases of the Transformer’s plotSee? Now you’re as irritated about that as I am. Good. Good. And you’re right to be angry about that.
Now I need you on board for the latest stupid cliché:
“Tucks Into.”
God, how I hate it. Have you heard it? Instead of just eating something, they’re now “tucking into” it. These days, you don’t justeat a Hot Pocket, oh no, God forbid, no – you “tuck into” a Hot Pocket. (Or in some cases, a three-for-a-dollar Tina’s Burrito.) Is this the most idiotic thing you’ve heard? Yes!
Some examples to boil your blood:
• Michelle Obama tucks into fat cakes and French fries on trip to Botswana
• Danny Wallace tucks into breakfast
• Pull up a wharf-side table, or a sleek bar stool, and tuck into some classy bistro food on the waterfront
• Tuck into some blood pudding. [This example is doubly offensive.]
• The average British family lives in a semi-detached house, owns a silver Ford Focus and tucks into spaghetti bolognese once a week.
• Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Kim Richards tucks into French fries on bikini break in Hawaii
• Back off – this is my dinner! Praying mantis tucks into a lizard twice its size!
• Hannah tucks into fresh fruit at Orchard Grove Primary School in Blackburn South
• Olympic kayak champ Adam Van Koeverden tucks into a hearty breakfast after a long morning on the water in Toronto
• Shane D Gage Te Huia tucks into his toast at the Kawhia Primary School breakfast club
• Helen Wood tucks into a full Irish breakfastNow you might be saying, “Well, Ted, those examples all sound very British, and what do you have against the British? Why, just yesterday, you went after recently knighted graffiti artist Sir Banksy!”
Well, the internet has made the whole world so much smaller that your hackneyed little British phrases are starting to be embraced over here in the goddamn US of A, and we are not going to stand for it. It’s enough that Wikipedia insists on using the ridiculous British spelling for everything when we all know it’s loser Americans with too much time on their hands who are doing most of the writing and editing on that site.
And speaking of Wikipedia, I need to go change a few hundred “colours,” “neighbours,” “honours,” and “labours,” and by Christ, this time they better stay changed!
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Banksy Visits Woodland Hills!
Everyone’s favorite British graffiti artist Banksy has left dreary, merry olde, rain-soaked, proper-opper England and high-tailed it for tony Woodland Hills, the nicer part of the toilet that is the Valley, of the toilet that is Los Angeles. Of the toilet that is Southern California! I looove LA! We love it!
Where was I? British graffiti guy, Banksy, Woodland Hills – ah yes! Everyone’s favorite British graffiti artist Banksy has left merry olde England and high-tailed it for tony Woodland Hills where he’s left his mark – and, brother, I have proof! Irrequivutable proof!
Feast your peepers on this!
It’s on this…I don’t know what it is, some sort of electrical box. Or telephone switchbox, like with all the wires in it. I don’t know what they’re called. Anyway, it’s on one of those – and I saw another just like it on the opposite corner!
So that’s totally Banksy’s stuff, right? I think so. I knew you’d want a closeup so I took a closeup, too. Here:
Now I know some of you are going to say, “Oh, sure, Ted, to the untrained eye, it may look like Banksy’s work, but it’s not his. It’s not his work, I tell you.” Some of you are going to say that. So I took a super-closeup and got this:
How’s that for proof! It’s on one of the dog’s front legs, sure. You can’t really see it in the other photos, because it’s really small.
Anyway, there you go, Banksy fans!
As to what he’s trying to say with this piece, I think it’s obvious: Something about crass commercialism, and corporate England, or in this case corporate America, and the government, and probably the military, and maybe the media, too, right? Oh! Oh! And Mickey Mouse! And also to please be considerate and clean up after your dog. No one wants to step in a big pile of dog crap you just left on the sidewalk, am I right?
Thanks, Banksy!
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Off to Comic-Con!
You’ll forgive me for not posting more these last few days, but it’s been a busy week as I get ready for an even busier weekend, July 29, 30, 31, down south at – yes! – the San Diego Comic-Con!
I really didn’t think I was going to make it this year because like always, I dragged my feet so by the time I started making arrangements, all the hotels were booked. Or so it would seem!Then the other day, out of the blue, I got an email offer from a Groupon-like outfit (that I don’t even remember signing up for!) and for just $600, I scored $1,400 worth of Comic-Con fun:
• A three-day all-access pass to the Con.
• A freakin’ suite at the world famous Hotel del Coronello.
• An intimate champagne brunch followed by Turkish bath with Jack Kirby, Carl Barks, and Samm Schwartz.
• And a food voucher for two hot dogs, two pretzels, and two Cokes good at any concession in the convention center.Plus they’ve arranged for Norm Prescott to personally review my portfolio at the Filmation booth. Thank you KewlDealz4U!
If you see me there, be sure to say hello – I’ll be the fellow in the Hot Stuff the Tough Little Devil costume. (If you can call a diaper a “costume.”)
Now to finish shaving a few things, apply the red latex body paint, throw an old chenille bedspread over the front seat of the car and hop on the 5!
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Sears!
As you know, this past weekend a lot of folks were hoping to get an iPad from Sears for $69.
And while you may be heartened to know that public opinion is largely on Sears’ side rather than on that of those who ordered the item in question (and who most have labeled as “greedy” or “stupid,” or “incredibly greedy and enormously stupid”) I’d like to offer some evidence that may in fact change your mind:
Sears pulled this little stunt once before! Oh yes!
Back at the turn of the century – the real turn of the century, not that lame one we just had less than a dozen years ago, my Great Great Grand Uncle – oh, let’s say, Zebediah—sure, it’s a little cliché but why not? – Great Great Grand Uncle Zebediah Parsnips was fascinated by the latest in state-of-the-art moving-picture technology. Sure, he had a Magic Lantern, but those were so 1890s. So when he’d seen a crazy good deal in the Sears, Roebuck and Co. Fall 1900 catalog – $34.00 for an Optigraph – he of course jumped at it:
Now, bear in mind, this price wasn’t for the already outdated 1899 model, oh no. For thirty-four bucks, Sears was promising you the next generation Optigraph. Too good to be true? Uncle, eh, what was it?, Zeke? Zeb!, he didn’t wait around to find out:
As you can well imagine, there was no way Sears was going to actually let the 1900 Optigraph go for that price. Turns out $34.00 was a so-called “typo.” The real price? A significantly steeper thirty-four and a quarter.
Well, Uncle What’s-His-Name was pissed, especially since Sears refused to honor their advertised price. Instead they sent him a couple upright parlor grand pianos, a pump organ, a houseful of furniture, a four-seater enclosed surrey, six bushels of oysters and a credit for the balance, $18.35, which they put on his Discover Card.
Just so you know, I spent a goddamn hour and a half in the garage looking for that stupid retro catalog.
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Slap Tags: The Gateway Graffiti!
In an ongoing effort to “completely ruin my knees” before I’m even 35 (as my more zaftig pals insist I’m doing), I go running thrice weekly. (And I say “thrice” because I’m really trying to ramp up the pretension on the blog this month.) I need to exercise now because once I hit fifty, I plan on not caring any more, really start packing on the pounds, and rest on my laurels that at one point, years ago, for a month or so, I ran thrice weekly.
That way, at the buffet at Circus Circus (or whichever buffet), Mrs. P and I can chat with an attractive, trim, younger couple at the next table, and as I dig into my third plate of all-I-can-eat fried shrimp, I’ll remark, “Oh, yeah, I used to run, too – just like you. Worst thing I ever did. Blew out both my knees.”
But that’s all in the future.
These days I run in one of my community’s more affluent neighborhoods, because it’s fun to pretend I live there, and because occasionally someone leaves their garage open and this is an excellent way to score power tools. (You’d be surprised how few people look twice at a half-naked man lurching down the sidewalk carrying a bright red plastic Sawzall case that’s loudly slapping against his left thigh. In fact, most tend to look away.) Also I figure it’s only a matter of time before I have some sort of impromptu rendezvous with one of the comely housewives on my route though so far the only luck I’ve had has been an awkward tryst in the pricker bushes with a gardener here or there and these fellas always – and I mean always – fall in love with me. And afterwards, it’s difficult – they don’t speak English and I don’t speak…you know, whatever. Gardenese.
For a little more than a month, as I passed this one stretch of houses that border a park, I saw these things in the leaves and dirt on the curb:
And, well, you know me, I’m like a five year old – always picking crap up out of the gutter (and then putting my fingers in my mouth). So a couple of weeks ago I gathered all of these that I could find, tucked them into the waistband of my sheer running shorts – with the liner intentionally cut out and the legs slit way up the sides to give me plenty of freedom of movement – with the intention of writing an insightful post on taggers.
Well, I never did. But some of the points you would have enjoyed reading might have included:
• How delightfully amusing it is to find evidence of tagging in wealthy neighborhoods by the kids who live there and should know better. Because they’re not poor. (In addition to pretension, I’m also trying to increase the overt elitism here on the ol’ blog.)
• Some over-the-top rant about how dumbasses like this are solely responsible for USPS rate increases since his monicker was scrawled on free Priority Mail labels – which now are used more by taggers than by law-abiding postal customers like you and me who stimulate the economy by selling, on eBay, ashtrays stolen from long-defunct hotels and then shipping them across the country.
• And some little zinger like, “Isn’t this fellow’s little monicker missing a letter? Specifically S? Shouldn’t it read LOSER?” Yeah, I went there. Or, rather, I was going to.But I never wrote any of that, instead deciding to focus on more pressing matters over the previous weeks, like cartoon birds and French fries.
And then two days ago I was driving down the street, a few miles from where I found these slap tags, and I see this billboard:
Hm! Recognize the name?
Anyway, CBS Media, owner of the billboard: I can’t guarantee it, but I bet – I just bet! – I can pinpoint to within maybe three or four houses where the young man who’s vandalizing your signs lives. Ooh, and his family’s rich so it’ll be fun to make an example out of him. Especially if you offer any kind of reward to me, and by God, I’m putting my life on the line here, so you’d better make it worth my while. Hell, let’s get Warner Bros. and J. K. Rowling in on this thing, too. They’d be happy to throw some cash my way to nail the little bastard, right?
As to the mother and father of this miscreant: Dad, you pony up a new cordless drill, a small table saw, and one of those big red metal tool chests on wheels – namebrand, none of that crap from Harbor Freight! – and we’ll forget the whole thing. (Unless CBS, et al., offers a better deal. Jesus, I could have a bidding war on my hands!). Or Mom…? I need you to go outside and pick up the paper in your bathrobe after hubby’s left for work when I run by tomorrow morning and, eh, we’ll take it from there. And, ooh, wear fuzzy pink slippers, too – I have this thing for them.
Look, Mr. & Mrs. Where-Did-We-Go-Wrong, it’s up to you, but Junior can kiss his chances of getting into Pepperdine goodbye and LOER his college expectations if I blow the whistle.
And that’s not a threat. That’s a…well, that’s a vague hope that I can something more out of this whole thing than the dog doo under my fingernails I got from picking up trash from the side of the road.
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Taint Funny, McGee!
Okay, come on.
Come on!
As though the headline wasn’t enough, they run a picture of a kid splashing in some water beneath it? Oh, like they didn’t know exactly what they were doing! Slow news day – even for the silly season – at the end of a shortened holiday week. Plus the regular editor’s on vacation probably. He won’t find out until a few weeks from now when Leno holds this up on “The Tonight Show” and says something like, “Gee, honey, is it me or does the iced tea you made taste vaguely like bologna?”
I guarantee you’d never see something like this on the front page of the LA Times.
And this is precisely why the Daily News gets my business!
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Cartoon Birds!
You’re probably wondering what happened to Fred “Herb” Herbert, Don “Dink” Dietrich, Jack Cannon, “Spence” Irving, Hank Jacobs, “Foof” Fredericks, Joe L. Quimby, “Chick” Dixon, Lou and Morty Schwartz, Frank “Hobe” Hobart, and all the rest of the creative team that worked for Jay Ward Productions after the studio closed up shop in, I think it was 1984, probably.
Now these weren’t the same fellas that drew “The Rocky & Bullwinkle Show,” or “Rocky and Friends,” or “Rocky and His Friends,” or “The Bullwinkle Show,” or “Bullwinkle, RFD,” or whatever you may have known it as in syndication when you were too old to be watching cartoons and it pissed off your father every time he walked in the room.
No, that show was animated in Mexico – because animating a moose and squirrel was a job that Americans wouldn’t do!
But those animators, Dink and Hank and Foof and Herb and Ed and Ted and Slim and Melvin and all the rest – they came on board for “George of the Jungle” in the 60s, and by God, they stayed til the bitter end. Anyway, they’re every single one of them all still working today, in 2011, those who aren’t dead that is, and guess what they’re doing! Go ahead, guess!
Well, you’re wrong!
Here’s what they’re doing:
They’re painting pictures of cartoon birds on store windows in the Valley.
Oh, and on the permanent sign on top of the store:
Heh heh…”Discount Birds.”
Okay, okay, settle down, I’m just pulling your leg. My point is that these particular cartoon birds look exactly like something out of “George of the Jungle,” don’t they? It’s like whoever did character design on “George of the Jungle” back in 1967 painted these birds, right?
Of course I’m right – why wouldn’t I be? So, look, every time I pass this store I see these goddamn birds and I think “It can’t be just me that thinks they look like something out of a Jay Ward cartoon; Jesus, no, it can’t just be me! Others surely must think the same thing! They just need to see them! They need only to see them and then they’ll think the same thing! I have to get the word out!”
So I’ve done my part.
You won’t find content like this on Cartoon Brew.
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Rappin’ Kyra!
The other day I read a news story right here on the internet about bratty kids and their permissive parents. No problem with the content of the story at all; this fellow LZ Granderson who wrote the piece (and is interviewed in the accompanying video) is, of course, right: Most people with young children today are lousy, irresponsible parents who should have never reproduced – and yes, sorry but this includes you, probably, if you have kids. Your children are little monsters and I hate them. Those (few) of you who this doesn’t apply to – well, you know who you are.
Okay, maybe that wasn’t exactly what he was trying to convey but it’s what I took away from it.
But, Jesus, don’t get your panties in a bunch over that – it’s really beside the point. Your kids suck. What I’m getting at is, in the video, we have a CNN anchor, who a little Ted Parsnips-patented Internet Research tells me is one Kyra Phillips. A pleasant enough gal, to be sure. Attractive, well-spoken, dresses real nice, a regular delight, sure.
If you watch the video, and I’d like you to, thank you, at about the 1:30 mark and continuing for about ten seconds, she suddenly starts gesturing like she’s in some sort of gangsta hip-hop rap-music video.
Well, my point is she looks ridiculous is all.
Now I’d like one of you to do one of those mash-ups with this video of her and audio from one of those rap songs, you know the kind, so it looks like she’s singing a rap song. I’d do it myself but I don’t know how to.
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Happy 4th of July!
As with every American family, the Parsnips are no different when it comes to having a host of traditions – some just for fun, others steeped in reverence, and all unique to our household – surrounding the Fourth of July. But just as in your home, this most important day, the anniversary of the signing of the Constitution, begins with a breakfast of frosted blueberry Lady Liberty brand toaster pastries. Sure, you’ll hear some grouse that they seem to remember them being covered with more blue and red sprinkles when they were a child, that the foil wrappers in which they’re packaged used to have funnier riddles on them (or riddles at all), or that they just know they used to be a lot bigger. But is it the toaster pastries that have gotten smaller (I mention, merely as a devil’s advocate, that toaster slots have measured an industry-standard 1″ x 4-7/8″ since 1938) or have our expectations of America’s promise outgrown our hopes?
Whether you call it Independence Day, the Fourth, or Flag Day as our grandparents did (or even “Armistice Day” as their grandfolk knew it), today is a celebration of the American spirit across the globe. That’s something JoAnn and I reminded Jaden and Caitlyn this morning as the toaster rang out its promise of freedom, a double-helping of liberty with plenty of sprinkles for all, red and blue both representing various things, like patriotism, strewn across a field of white – a living, breathing, edible Old Glory.
Have a wonderful and safe holiday.
Ted Parsnips
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