PunkKittyDiddy

Racy Shoes for Fast Women

Everyone knows that huge brand names sometimes get greedy and attempt to affix their logos upon everything under the sun, including goods that are incompatible with the general vibe of the brand name in question.  Case in point:  R.W. and I were browsing through a shoe store yesterday and made the most unfortunate discovery that NASCAR now designs and sells ladies shoes.

Mind you, these shoes don't have rad hot rod designs on them, or make a cool "Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrmm!" sound when you walk, or help you run any faster. 

Maybe a pit crew jumps on you every time you complete a mile?

Otherwise - huh??!?!?!?!  What's the appeal of a woman's shoe that is neither attractive nor inexpensive? 

Maybe the Fonz Had Some Sort of Passive-Aggressive Grudge Against the Cunninghams and their Bourgeois Sense of Entitlement?

There is a kind of interesting story on Yahoo today which provides a brief history of the "thumbs up" sign.   Turns out it used to carry a far more negative connotation in ancient Rome, when the gesture meant "get him out of here" and was used to indicate that a gladiator ought to be thrown to the lions. 

Admittedly I myself have been to known to use the thumbs up gesture copiously, if somewhat indiscriminately.  At least it's nice to now have the option of infusing this otherwise benign and mundane hand gesture with a little subversive sarcasm if the occasion calls for it.  So with a mere flick of my thumb, I can either be saying, "Cool, man!" or "You're so lame, I wish I had the option of chucking your useless carcass to some pointy-toothed predator!" - with the latter being conveyed in a much classier manner than if one were to merely deploy the highly overexposed and utterly predictable middle finger.

Good to know.

A Wright-Thinking Individual

Stephen Wright is the bomb......a veritable one-man factory of pithy patter, and seeing as how a particulary clever turn of phrase nearly always renders me rapturous, he's one of my all-time favorites.   

But why is this relevant? 

Because, as usual, at least of late, I'm having a little trouble warming up this morning (night owl, here), so I thought I'd temporarily distract you by grabbing a handful of Wright-isms and scattering 'em in your face........check back for original content perhaps later on today.  (Eh, who am I fooling?  Maybe tomorrow....)

And, in the interim, enjoy these:

"All those who believe in psychokinesis, raise my hand."

"How do you tell when you're out of invisible ink?"

"When everything is coming your way, you're in the wrong lane."

"Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines."

"What happens if you get scared half to death twice?"

"If at first you don't succeed, then skydiving definitely isn't for you."

"If you think nobody cares about you, try missing a couple of payments."

"I'd kill for a Nobel Peace Prize."

"Borrow money from pessimists - they don't expect it back."

"Officer, I know I was going faster than 55 MPH, but I wasn't going to be on the
road an hour. "

"I have two very rare photographs.  One is a picture of Houdini locking his keys in his car.  The other is a rare photograph of Norman Rockwell beating up a child."

"What's another word for Thesaurus?"

"If a word in the dictionary were misspelled, how would we know?"

"If you were going to shoot a mime, would you use a silencer?"

"I brought a mirror to Lover's Lane.  I told everybody I'm Narcissus."

"Sponges grow in the ocean. That just kills me. I wonder how much deeper the
ocean would be if that didn't happen."

"I wish my first word was 'quote', so when I died I could say 'un-quote'."

And finally:

"I intend to live forever - so far, so good....."

Geoffrey Chaucer Hath A Blog.....

...and he's kickin' it olde schoole.  Read it.

(Not bad for a fellow who's 665 years old, give or take.)

Screw You, Pluto! I'm Not Buyin' What You're Sellin' Anymore! Tell Your Story Walkin'!

I know this isn't exactly new news, but last night we started watching this show on the Science Channel about Pluto's demotion as a planet, and they sure as hell made it sound like this one astronomer basically decided all by himself to give Pluto the pink slip.  They interviewed him for the show, and he was actually chuckling about all the schoolchildren he'd upset in the process.  Turns out Pluto's environment is not the only thing that's ice cold.

But more importantly........ what's it like to wield that kind of power?  Hell, I can't even jump the line at Starbucks.  How do you reach a point where you can roll out of bed one morning and proceed to demote an entire planet?  I'm freakin' impressed.

(P.S.  OK, I was just doing a bit of fact checking, and it wasn't technically the one guy who decided all this........ although the decision was arrived at by a consensus of less than five percent of all professional astronomers, which not surprisingly caused a bit of an uproar. 

I still think the mustache-twirling, child-hating, planet-paddling evil genius from the Science Channel show probably spearheaded the whole thing..........let's just blame him.  He was enjoying himself way too much.)

Fishing: Once the Exclusive Domain of the Leisure-Minded; Now Accessible to the A.D.D.-Stricken Masses!

Over the weekend, I saw a commercial touting the miraculous fish pen!  Hey, look, it's a ballpoint pen!  Wait, I misspoke....hang on just a goshdarn minute.......why, it's a FISHING ROD THAT FITS NEATLY INSIDE YOUR POCKET! 

And here I'd been wondering what the next leap of technological evolution was going to yield.

Mind you, I don't fish, so maybe I need a seasoned professional in the field to explain to me the appeal of this particular product.  Since when was fishing an impulse activity?  At least to the extent that you have to carry your equipment on you at every moment just in case......well, in case what?  In case you're having lunch at a trendy Japanese restaurant, and you walk by the koi pond, and are struck by an overwhelming urge to fish right there that very second, and you don't want to waste five valuable minutes walking back to your car to retrieve a real-sized fishing rod from the trunk, lest you be distracted by a bird flying by overhead, and then find yourself struck by the urge to hunt instead?  I mean, there are only so many hours in a day.  Carpe diem, for godssakes!

Has fishing ever been a sport for the time-pressed?  Even if you do have the foresight to carry the amazing Fishpen in your pocket all the time, barring the accessibility of trendy Japanese restaurants in your neighborhood, don't you otherwise generally have to drive somewhere - to, say, a pond or lake - where your oxygen-adverse scaly nemesis resides?  And what about all that sitting around, waiting for them to take the bait?  I've heard that hours, days....hell, even entire weekends....are devoted to this particular phase.

Gunmakers might want to contemplate courting this niche market of harried fisherpersons.  Because who has time to wait for the damn fish to bite, anyways?  In fact, screw all this manual labor crap altogether! Just hit the freezer section of your local grocer.....Gordon's has kindly minced the suckers up into mush (scales, eyeballs and all), squeezed this concoction into a rectangular mold, and coated them with a delicious, golden batter! 

Mmmmm, the taste of progress is sweet indeed!

If It Walks Like A Duck And Quacks Like A Duck...It's Still Probably A Really Profound and Intricate Metaphor I'm Overlooking

Once upon a time, eons ago in a former life, when I lived in a really cold northern state, I attended a party.  Oh yes - once upon a time, I used to socialize.  Although that's not point here....

So, at this party, I developed a mad crush on this smooth-talking smarty pants guy because he was able to convince me that the Scooby Doo gang was in fact no mere morsel of animated fun, but rather an allegory for the revolutionary counterculture movement of the 60's.  Whoa!  Heavy. 

The memory of Smarty Pants Party Guy and his compelling theory came flooding back to me when I was channel surfing the other day and came across Scooby and the gang.  Long time no see type of scenario, that was.  I probably can't begin to do justice to the theory that Smarty Pants Party Guy floated on that night long ago, but here's what I do recall:

Not surprisingly, Shaggy represents the hippies and, more specifically, the drug addicted ones.  (Wait - is there such a thing as a clean and sober living hippie, anyway?  Hmmm....but I digress.....)  Now, at the very least, Shaggy was a stoner, given the copious amount of Scooby snacks being consumed in an effort to quell his nearly permanent case of the munchies, but more to the point, LSD was likely being ingested too, seeing as how Shaggy's best friend was.....well, a talking dog.  Then you have Fred, the homosexual who in a broader sense also represented the entire alternative lifestyle contingency - now, Smarty Pants Party Guy offered up far more compelling evidence of Fred's homosexuality beyond the stereotypical benchmarks like the fabulous hair, the scarf, and the effeminate mannerisms, only sadly, I can't recall what the more compelling evidence consisted of.  It's not my intention to perpetuate shallow stereotypes - I just have a really crappy memory.  Moving on....Thelma was representin' for the Marxist/leftist/beatnik/intellectual set.  And Daphne?  She was, in the words of Smarty Pants Party Guy, "a bourgeois parent's worst nightmare" - the fresh-faced, all-American girl who falls in and runs away with the "wrong" crowd, driving away in a groovy van with all those leftists and hippies and hey, maybe she'll even join a cult or something.

See, for my entire childhood, and a rather large chunk of my adulthood, I honestly just thought it was a cartoon about some wacky kids and their dog.  The universe is perpetually substantiating that I'm not half as smart as I think I am.  But the path to enlightenment is nearly always humbling, I suppose.

Regardless, I'm striving to keep a sharper eye out for deeper meaning from this point forward!  Yes!  This is the all-new, more pensive and ruminative PunkKittyDiddy!  Lemme have a go:

Say......... maybe SpongeBob is really a paradigm or an archetype or a parable of.......uh.....something...more complicated.  (Look, I'm new to this.  This could take a bit of practice.)

Then again, eh...........maybe he's just a talking sponge.

The Height of Venice Beach Fashion

The t-shirts emblazoned with one-liners on display along the Venice Beach boardwalk can very rarely be described as witty (and don't get me started on the apparently eternal appeal of those fake tuxedo and fake bikini t-shirts, which first appeared on white trash Cro-Magnons around the dawn of time), but this one (spotted this afternoon) truly did amuse me...and with St. Patrick's Day fast approaching, it's timely, too:   

Mothra vs. J. Crew

I know the politically correct, National Geographic sanctioned perspective on insects is that they are a vital part of the ecosystem and that, while not furry or cute or deceptively cuddly-looking in the manner of, say, a monkey (never mind that an adult chimp possess both the physical strength and proclivity to rip an adult human's arm out of the socket and beat him or her to death with it), insects nonetheless perform crucial roles in maintaining balance within our environment, blah blah blah blah blah..........

I get that.  But personally I still find some bugs to be nothing more than tiny little assholes.

I'm still holding a grudge against the massive flea army that infiltrated our apartment about a year and a half ago.  That skirmish bore a strong resemblance to the final battle scene in Lord of the Rings:  The Return of the King, at least if the Orc army had been microscopic.   Yeah, picture Viggo Mortensen and Gandolf and the Hobbits swatting themselves silly....not as epic an image, maybe, but nonetheless, that was us, in our apartment, not so long ago.  And it took nothing short of wizardry to rid ourselves of the tiny terrors.

Now it's moths.

Sure, I'd noticed a few of my cotton tank tops were sprouting extra armholes.  But I chalked it up to my thrifty ways (paying $5 for a tank at Old Navy doesn't buy you a wardrobe with much staying power), plus normal wear and tear.  Only about the same time I'd noticed that my clothes were suddenly disintegrating, I.G. complained of the same phenomenon. After comparing notes, we soon suspected foul play.  I.G. went digging in his drawer and emerged with a suspect, one caught in the act, at that - a wee little moth attached to one of his sweaters, with a napkin still tied smugly around its neck, fork and knife suspended in mid-air.......

(Please enjoy the re-creation of the scene that I have rendered in particularly lifelike and artistic fashion, above right....)

Now our place reeks of moth balls.  It's a conundrum, allrighty......walk around in hole-ridden shame, fashion victims caught in a Flashdance-centric-like time warp, or preserve the wardrobes whilst annihilating our nasal passages and dignity (because fewer scents conjure a more immediate association with old folks homes than Eau de Moth Balls). 

What's next?  I didn't pay very close attention in bible study........does Revelations make any mention of moths or fleas as precursors to that whole locust plague scenario?  Maybe we should invest less in moth balls and more in one of those televangelical pledge drives instead....in the interim, the get-rich-quick lobe of my brain is wondering if we can at least sell tickets or movie rights to the mini-apocalypse going on right in our own apartment.

Phewwwwww!  And adieu till next time, at which point I'll probably be relaying how we're now rallying against badgers or fruit bats......

This Round's On Me! (That's Tap Water You're Drinking, Right?)

Made our annual sojourn to the tax peeps.  Taxes done.  I'm getting a $12.00 refund.  No, the decimal point has not wandered off in the wrong direction, confused and disoriented.....that's T-W-E-L-V-E dollars.  Double digits.  $12.00!!  Don't be hatin' on me or anything. 

Oh, hell................why shouldn't I rub it in? 

What an awesome view from such a dizzying height!  What is this place, if not the pinnacle of success?!  TWELVE DOLLARS!  YES!  TREMBLE IN THE SHADOW OF MY INCALCULABLE PROSPERITY!

Or not.