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Your Stuff Is Shit, But This Shit… Is CRAP!

With all these electrons whizzing around all over the place, shouldn’t we have more umbrellas?

Ah yes, a little bathroom humor in the tagline. Me likey. Nothing but highbrow entertainment around here, boys and gals. Let’s make Sir Alec proud!

Okay, so I thought I’d try introducing a new feature for the blog. (It’s all very exciting, I can assure you.) The feature is called ‘Cutting Room Assorted Pieces’. But, as with most things around here, you can just call it CRAP.

(‘Audience members, this is CRAP.’ ‘CRAP, these are the four people who actually read this demented, ah, crap. No offense.’)

So, let me tell you about CRAP, and what CRAP means to me. As the non-acronymized name (hopefully at least vaguely) implies, CRAP will be a small — and sometimes non-existent! — collection of ravings and rantings and thoughts (oh my!) related to the current topic, but that I just couldn’t finagle into the log entry. So, stuff that just wouldn’t fit, or that would’ve spun the entry in another direction (I know, I know — something that would take things off topic? The horror…), or that just wasn’t very good, but now I can’t sleep at night until I get it out of my head. In a word: CRAP.

“Fat yam. Who the hell would read ‘FatYam’? Sounds like some chubby Korean kid no one wants to play with in kindergarten.”

It seems like something that will vary pretty dramatically from day to day, depending on how caffeinated I happen to be at the time, how rich (and creamy, and nougat-covered) the topic of (non-)interest is, and whether I’m capable of making any damned sense. I’ll stick whatever I have, if anything, at the bottom of each post, just to leave a little extra tangy zing of an aftertaste in your mouth. You know, like a high colonic does. Maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t, I dunno. I’m just flingin’ cats at the wall until something sticks, friends. We’ll see how it goes in the long run.

In the short run, though, there’s this: I figured that before I got too far along — in either the list of topics or my dementia — I should backtrack and purge the remnants from the Story So Far™. So, I’m gonna open up the vaults and dust off the chestnuts that just missed making it into the posts that I’ve written to date. Or the stuff that I thought would get me arrested. Or I’ll make new shit up as I go along — what do you care how it gets there, anyway? Why am I even telling you this? In any case, I’ll list whatever I have below, all jumbled together in its gooey sweet goodness. But be warned, young Jedi — I can guarantee you that this shit will make even less sense than the usual babbling blither. Yes, it’s possible. Trust me.

(Want proof? Spend ten minutes with a Scientologist sometime…)

(Actually, I wanted to index everything by post title to make things a little less schizo, but that didn’t work out. See, to index by titles, you have to have titles. Which I didn’t. So I tried entering some — ‘A Wall to Save Us All’, for instance, for the second-ever post. (Why is it there’s no next-to-first, by the way? ‘Last’ gets a next-to-; who the hell did ‘first’ piss off? Did they just throw ‘last’ a bone ’cause he’s, you know, at the end of the line all the time?) Anyway, I entered the title, and hit ‘Post’. And the BlogGods told me:

Humph. You no good enough for titles. Grocery stores and dog noses and ‘Things Not to Hear’. That no blog, mortal. That a weekend at Grandma’s. No title for you.

And, right on cue, my title did something that looked very much like not showing up. So I edited the post again, and sure enough, no title. I typed it in again; BlogGods say:

Don’t push BlogGods, foolish one. No titles until you write something funny. Like Phyllis Diller. BlogGods like Phyllis Diller. Why can’t you be more like? BlogGods have spoken!

And, again, no title. So, screw it. I’ll drop da beat on the ‘CRAP’ today, but I ain’t down wit da titles. Word. You know — to ya mutha. An’ shit. (How was that? Did I say it right, um, ‘G’? G? G? Hello? Aw, gee…))

(News Flash Update: Apparently throwing in the Phyllis Diller line below was just good enough to redeem me in the eyes of the mighty BlogGods, and I now have titles! So I’m going back now to index all the crap below with said titles. So if you’re reading this post for the first time, then you can disregard the intent of the above few paragraphs. (Feel free, of course, to retain any hilarity that you may have extracted from it. That’s yours to keep, just for listening to our sales pitch today.) And if you’re re-reading this to check for updates like this one — good God, man, get a fuckin’ life!)

So, cruising right along, assuming that there ever will be any new readers, what I’d like to say to them is this: don’t start here. No touchy, soldier boy. If you started with posts later than this one, congratulations! We’re both older than we were when I wrote this post, and at this point, that has to be considered a minor miracle of survival, given what we’re doing with our lives these days. I mean, just look at us! Please!

Anyway, if you started with posts earlier than this one, then some of this — not all, mind you, but a little — might actually make some sense. Or at least sound familiar, though obviously foreign and incomprehensible. Like Spanish to Brazilians, maybe, or plain, simple English to a telemarketer. Or Oprah to men. You get the idea. So, I’m proud to bring you this long-anticipated blog feature debut.

(I’d say eight paragraphs is pretty long, wouldn’t you? I bet it seemed to take an eternity to get here… and man, that’s twenty minutes of your life you’ll never get back, too. Tsk.)

And so, without further ado:

‘Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you — CRAP.’

(Please do hold your applause until the last item has been read and digested. And no flash photography at any time. Thank you.)

CRAP (A Boston Compendium in Three Acts):

The most annoying thing about the winter weather in Boston is the preponderance of cars manufactured where snow is apparently not an issue. Or heard of. Or even believed in. After three winters here, I’m convinced that BMW engineers regard snow as some sort of Christmas-time fable propogated to scare children, or excite them, or depress them, or something.

(Anything to distract the little piddlers away from the bratwurst and milk left for ‘Santa’.)

Anyway, I’ve yet to see a Boston Beemer do anything even remotely useful in the snow, except serve as a convenient — and utterly effective — barricade against actually driving to work, on those days when one of the bastard BMW owners who park in our lot tries to dig out before I do.

CRAP (A Boston Compendium in Three Acts):

Another odd phenomenon that seems to be fairly well quarantined to the Boston area is the funky way that the towns around here are pronounced. Now I made a resolution, long ago and in a saner time and place, to not question these sorts of things, and just ‘go with the flow’. And to a point, I’m able to make good on the promise I made to myself, lo these many years hence. So I’m proud of myself, and usually partake of a reward when I can just ‘let it go’. So I might award myself a beer, say, or a tasty greasy burger, when I don’t question why New Englanders say ‘Quincy‘ with a ‘z’ sound instead of an ‘s’ type of noise. Or maybe I’ll buy myself a new CD when I can manage to forget that some people here live in Peabody — that’s Pea-body, as in Sherman and Mr. Peabody, if you’re old enough to remember the Way-Back Machine — but they think they live in PiBiDee. Or PeBeDe. Or something. Say the word as fast as you humanly can, and you have the basic idea. It’s as though they regret so much their decision to live there that they feel they have to expel the name like a sneeze or something, just to get it the hell out of their mouths. PiBDee. PBD. P. Poor bastards.

But the one instance of this that I simply can’t get over, no matter how lofty the prize I set for myself, is the mysterious case of the often — but not always! — silent consonants. Follow along; I’ll show you. C’mon, it’ll be fun. Hold my hand; I’ll take you there. Here goes:

So we’ve got Worcester, which becomes (you steak fans out there will get this one), of course, ‘Wooster’. Except that’s not really true. Not even close. I’m simplifying for the sake of clarity, but now let me complicatify for the sake of showing how ridiculous this whole thing really is… you need a frickin’ book on tape to ask for directions in this place, ’cause God help you if you get it wrong around here. They’ll look at you like you just sprouted out of the ground with flippers for arms and big testicle ears. It’s that important, like saying ‘Wooster’ — or heaven forbid, ‘War Chester’, would rip the very fabric of space-time around them.

So, anyway, obviously, it’s not ‘Wooster’. R’s have a very tough time making a living in New England, and this city’s name is no exception. The first ‘r’ gets ignored completely, as we’ve already seen, along with a ‘c’, and an ‘e’ that they dragged screaming along with them. There’s only half the word left, for the love of peanuts, but still they kick that last ‘r’ out. And then, just for laughs, they mangle the ‘o’ into some other kind of whispery vowel sound, much like they bully the ones in PBD.

(See? See all those vowels not in there? There aren’t really vowels per se in New England place names, just the empty spaces between consonants. It’s all very Zen, I’m sure.)

Anyway, this ‘o’ gets off easy compared to some. Ever heard of Leominster? Nope? Me, either, but I sure get ‘Le Minster’ a lot. That poor, sorry ‘o’, just singled out and booted right from the pronunciation. Like so much punctuation. What a waste.

All right, where the hell was I? Ah, Worcester, or thereabouts.

So, anyway, it’s not ‘Wooster’. It ends up being a lot like ‘Wistah’, again at 78 rpm speeds or better. But fine. I can cope with ‘Wistah’, as long as there’s some sort of pattern. Show me the way, and I’m there. So I find that there’s precedence for this letter-wasting chicanery: We’ve also got a Gloucester. And what does it become? ‘Glostah’. Fine. We’re on a roll. Whee-frickin’-hee. Next up: Dorchester. So of course it’s: ‘Dorchester’.

(Mommy.)

Not ‘Distah’ or ‘Dooster’ or ‘Dstr’, like they had me convinced it oughta be. No. ‘Door. Chester.’ That’s where they lose me, and I huddle in a corner until it’s safe to come out. So I gave up (again) a long time ago. Now, I just have this local guy that I’ve hired to do all my pronouncing for me when it comes to places, or people’s names, or Hahvahd Yahd. It’s easier that way, and now people don’t look at me like I’m retahded.

(Yes, that last line is a shameless lift of a punchline from an old Steve Sweeney bit. Nothing in the world would work better there, so that’s the hash I’m slingin’. So sue me. Unless your name is Steve Sweeney, or you are affiliated with the non-plantiff — read that again, non-plaintiff — in any way. And if you are Steve Sweeney — ALL HAIL STEVE SWEENEY!!! (Hee — look, everybody! Steve frickin’ Sweeney is readin’ my stuff! Dudes!))

CRAP (“Hey, was that ’30 Seconds to Fame’ just now?”):

Actually, it’s good that we’re kept on our toes by our loved ones (or our lived-with ones, at the very least). These checks and balances are necessary to keep us sane, and whole, and good. (Stay good! Stay good!) Man, if we were left to our own devices, free to wallow unfettered in the filth of the seedy underbelly of cable television, I can’t even begin to think what would become of us. We’d be unshaven, unkempt, illiterate boobs, balancing popcorn kernels on our noses while oohing and aahing at The Osbournes. Or Anna Nicole. Hell, we’d be Anna Nicole — you don’t think she got that way listening to NPR, do you?

CRAP (A Wall to Save Us All):

Don’t forget ‘boinkable’ vs. ‘sleeping’, ‘boinkable’ vs. ‘Jell-o’ and ‘boinkable’ vs. ‘Phyllis Diller’. And great Poseidon save you if you can’t figure out that a sleeping Phyllis Diller is off-limits. Even if she is wearing a Jell-o bikini. *shiver*

CRAP (Boston Bears a Blog):

Of course, my other choice of name for the site, ‘Funnier Than Yo Mamma‘, was absolutely crawling with problems. For one thing, it seems a little unwieldy. Which is sometimes okay — the thing that SCUBA stands for is a mouthful (‘Suffocation Caused by Unreasonable Breathing Anxiety’, I think it is), but they made it work. Scrunch this title down, and what do you have? FTYM. Fat yam. Who the hell would read ‘FatYam’? Sounds like some chubby Korean kid no one wants to play with in kindergarten. Besides, what if it turns out that this isn’t funnier than yo mamma? Or my mamma? Or Mama Cass? Urg. Best to just get offa mommas…. (I’ll leave that one for you to finish. Consider it a gift. I set, you spike. Enjoy.)