1. Embarrassing News Gaffe of the Day!

    Smithsonian.com filed this baby under “SmartNews”…

    smartnews

    …and curiously, it includes the phrase “Social Media Buzz.”  Whoops!

    Posted by on January 26, 2015, 11:13 AM.

  2. Dig We Must!

    SO I WAS IN my local Walmart and I passed an endcap [industry term] of this stuff:

    catspride

    Oh, sure, I’d seen it before, but this time, I don’t know why, it just really got me thinking: “Cat’s Pride”…?  Really? Really?

    Shouldn’t it be “Cat’s Shame”?

    They use this stuff to bury their business [euphemism], like they don’t anyone to know about it. Like they’re embarrassed – ashamed.

    All covered up! Kitty’s dirty little secret! So where’s the “pride” in that?

    And as for our beloved Mr. Whiskers, I’m telling you, I could fill a pit ten feet deep with it, and he’d dig to the goddamn bottom before he was ready to let loose whatever he’s been brewing and/or distilling. Believe me, I know – I’m the one who has to go in there and excavate – and brother, it’s a process. 

    freakiescar

    Dig, dig, dig – sometimes I try to make a game of it and pretend it’s 1974 and the litter pan is a box of Freakies cereal and I’m trying to get in there and pull out the free toy car before Mom gets home. Which one will it be this time? Boss Moss? Snorkledorf?

    Ah, but the fantasy evaporates suddenly as the air fills with a choking, acrid stench and I’ve hit the motherlode – a big, moist clump of concentrated ammonia.

    Not only is my quarry always on the very bottom, ol’ Mr. W. always manages to get it on the side, too – he’s very particular about going up against a damn edge – forcing me to scrape clean two distinct planes. Often he’ll go for the trifecta when he manages to unload in a corner. Thank God I have long fingernails.

    “Cat’s Pride,” indeed! –Unless the cat takes some sort of special joy in watching me clean that damn box, dutifully, as a good pet owner should, every three months or so.

    By the way, when did you say you’d be visiting?

    Posted by on , 3:31 AM.

  3. Obama Defies the Constitution Again!

    fed3

    Article XXVII, Section 8 clearly states, “The President shall, at his pleasure, throw his political enemies into an active volcano.”

    It says nothing about cannibalism!

    Posted by on January 7, 2015, 12:15 PM.

  4. Irony, Walmart-Style

    LIKE YOU, I have no ethical problem shopping at Walmart. As long as they keep me distracted by low prices, really, how am I supposed to worry about anything else?

    Well, let me tell you, brother, I was jarred right back into reality- right back into reality! – the other day when I saw a display of these on an endcap (industry term):

    walmartbasket

    So for five dollars American, you can get a little Walmart shopping basket filled with toy groceries. And who wouldn’t want such an item? No one, that’s who! Look at it, it’s adorable!

    Sounds good, huh? You’d like one, right?

    Not so fast, pal!

    Here’s the thing: This particular location – West Hills Walmart, at 6433 Fallbrook Avenue – famously (or should I say infamously) has no actual, regular-sized baskets in the store! None! Zero! Not! A! One!

    You get that? The actual item on which this toy is based is not available for customer use in the very store where these are sold!

    If that’s not irony, well…  Well, let’s just consider it irony because it’s late and I don’t have the time to look up whatever term might better describe this phenomenon. If such a term exists.

    The idea behind West Hills Walmart intentionally not offering baskets is so that, presumably, customers will instead just grab a shopping cart – a vessel much larger, and in turn with a much larger capacity than a standard hand-held basket – and then they’ll fill that up with all those great Walmart values!

    Which actually came in handy, because I got one of these babies for each of you.

    Look under your seats!

    I got one for you, and I got one for you, and for you, and for you and you and you!  Yep, you got it – it’s the annual Ted’s Favorite Things post!  You came to the blog on the right day, gang!

    Now to head over to Twitter and see if there’s any possible way to edit all this brilliance down to 140 characters, keeping all the wit intact. And if anyone can do it, it’s me!

    Posted by on December 23, 2014, 3:43 AM.

  5. Who Are These [Ugly Christmas Sweater-Buying] People?!

    LIKE you, I’m not a joiner.

    But even though I have never worn one myself, I guess I once sort of vaguely liked the concept of ugly Christmas sweaters – before it became an actual thing. But once it became a thing, brother, with more and more people throwing Ugly Christmas Sweater parties and more radio stations and bars and the fun-loving gang in the event planning department at Human Resources holding Ugly Christmas Sweater contests,  I was over it. Last year I read an article about a seasonal store (in Brooklyn, maybe…?) that sold nothing but second-hand ugly sweaters.

    Others picked up on it, presumably got to work scouring thrift stores far and wide, and now we’ve got at least three online retailers selling hideous holiday apparel (based on a cursory “ugly christmas sweater store” Google search):

    • Ugly Sweater Store

    • Ultimate Ugly Christmas

    • Butt Ugly Sweaters

    So I’ll grudgingly concede their savvy business acumen: They saw a potential market and exploited the hell out of it.

    However, if I was going to enter such a contest or attend such a party, I’d either raid my grandmother’s closet (in vain, I can assure you – the woman had taste and did not go in for kitsch. Also, she’s long dead.) or pick through the racks of my local Goodwills and Salvation Armys myself. Because, really, what fun is it to simply log onto a website and pick a used sweater from a gallery of hundreds that was specifically snatched up from a secondhand outlet based on its cheesiness – knowing full well you’re just one of countless others (including, perhaps, your very competition in the contest at next week’s Christmas party down at the bingo hall) doing the same thing? Where’s the thrill of the hunt, man? You’re sitting at your desk scrolling through a webpage!

    Then, last night, I see Groupon (remember them?) has further homogenized the whole seasonal craze by offering these mass-produced pullovers:

    uglysweat1

    Not sweaters, mind you – but cotton sweatshirts – with the “ugly Christmas” motif printed on the front to resemble a knit design.

    “Ideal for holiday parties and ugly-sweater-themed events” reads the Groupon description.  But how? They’re not sweaters!

    But it gets worse! They also offer these:

    uglysweats3

    Call me a prude, or maybe I’ve just inherited Grandmater’s patrician demeanor, but I don’t think “fugly” on holiday apparel is appropriate. (Or really, anything you wear out in public, unless it’s to one of those fetish events, where you’re intentionally misbehaving, using bad language, wearing inappropriate clothes and wanting to give the person in charge a reason for paddling your bare bottom with a modified Wiffle Ball bat- I mean, after all, why else would you pay $600 in addition to booking a room on the same floor at the Golden Nugget for the weekend?  By the way, Susan and Larry – we’ll see you in February! Should be a good turnout this year. Vera says she’s in, too, if her hemorrhoids aren’t acting up too bad.)

    You know what’s also not appropriate? Announcing your sweater is ugly on the sweater itself. If you have to tell people your sweater is ugly, what’s the point?  Oh, and yes, there’s still the niggling problem that these things aren’t even sweaters in the first place!  They’re sweatshirts! Sweat! Shirts!  

    And just when you thought we’ve reached the nadir of this ugly Christmas (non)-sweater craze, we see that also available are these:

    charactersweat

    So here we’ve got ugly Christmas sweaters that 1) again, aren’t sweaters but sweatshirts, 2) again, have the knit design printed on, and 3) really, just completely destroy any rapidly waning illusion that maybe from a few feet away, they could possibly be mistaken for sweaters – by having a very obvious screened design printed on top of the fake knit pattern!

    goldjerry4

    You know the message you’re sending out to the world with these sweatshirts? You’re telling the world, ‘I give up. I can’t compete in normal Ugly Christmas Sweater contests. I’m miserable, so I might as well be comfortable.'”

    Posted by on November 20, 2014, 12:07 PM.

  6. The Man Boy Who Cried Wolf Spider!

    MANY of you have chided me for misrepresenting lovely Virginia, USA, as an arachnophobe’s nightmare.

    “Ted,” you chide, “Ted, every time you go there, you whine like a little girl about the spiders supposedly therein.

    “And then how you do go on about the stink bugs and centipedes and those so-called ‘enormous’ hornets and all other manner of creepy-crawlers, and so why wouldn’t we chide you, man?” you continue to chide.

    Virginia Is For Spiders!

    Anyway, you have my schedule, you know I’ve been visiting the family, but what you didn’t know was the first day I’m there, as I’m bringing my luggage into Dad’s guest room, as a welcome, what comes charging out at me down the hall is a wolf spider. Had the leg-span the diameter of a manhole cover, it did – and the pedipalps on this thing…!  As long and thick as those inflatable noise-maker sticks people in the South bring to their sporting events, but even more insidious!

    noisemakers

    …Okay, so maybe they weren’t as big as those, and perhaps the entire creature wasn’t quite manhole-cover-sized. Still, the damn thing was big.

    Father directed me to “Just step on it,” and I did as I was told, but brother, something that size I was bound to feel, regardless of how tall the soles of my vinyl platform boots were. Crrrunch. 

    After I scraped it off my shoe into the toilet, attempted flushing in vain, and then used a plunger to help send the profusion of hairy legs sticking out of the now-clogged commode back down to the depths of hell from whence the beast came, Dad noted that “Oh, that little thing, that’s nothing.”

    Yeah, well to me – to me, it was something. Something out of a nightmare I’m going to have every night for months now, where I’ll wake up screaming each time and probably begin peeing the bed again, and after all those years of hypnotherapy…!

    “That’s nothing,” Dad continued, or reiterated, or something, regardless that he didn’t actually repeat himself yet I’ve written it that way for dramatic effect. “A few months ago I had a mouse in here so I put down a couple of glue traps.”

    Then he made his way to a bookshelf and pulled a flat board off of it.

    “This is what I caught instead.”

    hellspider

    “It was actually quite a bit bigger before it died and the legs curled in a bit.”

    Okay, then! Just get me my cell phone so I can book my flight back out of here right now, today, five minutes after I’ve arrived, and hand me that baseball bat, too, just in case any more appear while we wait for the airport shuttle to rescue me and I contemplate why Dad’s starting a trophy room for vanquished arachnids.

    Posted by on November 17, 2014, 12:14 PM.

  7. Equal Time for Bobby Shriver!

    RECENTLY, I gave candidate for LA County Supervisor (and inveterate clotheshorse) Sheila Kuehl some free publicity via one of the 1,800 or so flyers she’s arranged to have crammed into my mailbox over the last month.

    In the interest of fairness, here’s one of the 1,200 or so from her opponent in the race, Bobby Shriver.

    infraz

    “Isn’t it Time We Invested In Our Infrastructure?”

    infra4

    Well, maybe…

    lifteroo

    …But only if it doesn’t cut funding for that Superhuman Fireman program they’ve evidently been having some success with.

    Posted by on October 26, 2014, 10:55 AM.

  8. Is That A Chicken In Your Pants…?

    …Or do you just need them taken in a bit?

    pantshen1

    Well, it’s a two-sided sign. I’m sure they got it right on the other side!

    pantshen2

    Whoops! Nevermind.

    All kidding aside, this place does great work. All the local baseba teams bring their uniforms here to get cleaned.

    Posted by on October 8, 2014, 1:18 AM.

  9. Take The Confusion Out Of Your Wedding Planning!

    Seen in the door of a bridal boutique down the street:

    appt

    “Hello, Dorie…? I know it’s three a.m. on a Sunday…no, I don’t need a wedding dress. I just can’t sleep until you explain that sign to me.”

    Posted by on September 17, 2014, 11:58 PM.

  10. So I Was Shoplifting From Target The Other Day…

    …or rather, I was about to.

    I mean, a fellow could go broke buying razor blades otherwise!

    razr1

    Forty-two bucks?!  And you only get a dozen!

    Let’s remember, folks, I’m Slovak – a dozen razors only keeps my neck, shoulders and about a third of my back reasonably smooth for about four days, if that.

    So I’m heading towards the exit with these – and, sure, I’m aware that these security disks start emitting a loud, high-pitched screech when you try to get past those posts at the doors. But I had my earplugs in and my running shoes on – I wasn’t too worried.

    Thank God, though, I turned it over before I went through with it!

    razr2

    Apparently now they also release live spiders!  No thank you!

    Posted by on July 23, 2014, 4:33 PM.

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