Entries Tagged as 'ends & odd'

ends & oddtravel & foreign lands

Learn Japanese the World War II way!

Recently I was browsing in a used book store when I stumbled upon a soldier’s Japanese phrasebook from World War II. Between faded orange covers I found a treasure trove of fascinating words and phrases- certainly it’s the most useful text published by the U.S. War Department I’ve encountered since that pamphlet on sexual hygiene for GIs I found in a Texas ghost town a few years back. It does lack for detailed diagrams of human genitalia, however.

Like most phrasebooks it contains all the standard terminology related to greetings, asking for directions and finding lodgings, but the structure and at least half of the language is strictly determined by the context of war. Thus it begins not with “Hello” and “My name is…” but rather a set of “Emergency Expressions” the very first of which is: [Read more →]

Bob Sullivan's top ten everythingends & odd

My top ten new year’s resolutions

10. I resolve to finish that pro-Catholic pornographic musical I’ve been working on

9. I resolve to eat my weight in marzipan

8. I resolve to finally find Waldo

7. I resolve to keep my ambitions within reach

6. I resolve to solve world hunger

5. I resolve to e-mail back that Nigerian prince who keeps trying to contact me

4. I resolve to think of another password for my computer besides ‘password’

3. I resolve to drive by a gym at least three times a week

2. I resolve to keep all my resolutions to myself this year

1. I resolve to limit my number of resolutions to nine
 

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

Bob Sullivan's top ten everythingends & odd

Top ten signs Santa is mad at you

10. Instead of ‘Naughty’ or ‘Nice’ you’re on his ‘Asshole’ list

9. He leaves a note saying, “You better watch out! You better not cry! You better not shout while I’m torturing you!”

8. He smears reindeer poop all over your drapes

7. Your biggest gift is Newt Gingrich’s To Save America

6. He pours eggnog into your Christmas stocking

5. You’re constantly being tripped by sinister-looking elves

4. As he drives out of sight, he exclaims, “Happy Christmas to all and to all a good night…except you, you bastard!”

3. All the candy canes he leaves you contain fish hooks

2. Instead of ‘jolly’ you’d have to describe his demeanor as ‘malevolent’

1. When you try to sit on his lap, he jumps out of the way
 

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

drugs & alcoholends & odd

The inevitable, impending tragedy of the asparagus pee crisis that will claim our children if we don’t do something about it now

INTELLIGENCE ALERT
PINKARSKY COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT

The Pinkarsky County Sheriff’s Department was recently made aware of a potentially dangerous threat to our children, in the form of music that mimics the feeling of euphoria that comes from taking drugs. Sheriff’s Department officials would like to warn parents about this troubling development, and encourages all parents to be vigilant and make sure and monitor any music that your children listen to, to ensure that they’re not “getting high” off it.

“Of course, we’re concerned about what the children of Pinkarsky County are listening to,” said Sheriff Waldo Heiny, at a press conference called specifically to announce this troubling development. “We want to make sure that the parents, who already have their hands full with their jobs, or unemployment worries, or whatever, understand that the Sheriff’s Department will do everything it can to help them to deal with this dangerous threat targeting our youth, by making random stops of children who exhibit odd behavior in public, and by making random searches of the CD and MP3 collections of the county’s children.”

The Sheriff added that the silence from some neighboring counties on this potentially devastating problem has been deafening.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
DONAR COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT

The Sheriff’s Department of Donar County recently learned that some parents had become alarmed by the idea that some kids might be trying to get high by listening to music. Donar County Sheriff Whitty Crain wishes to assure parents that there is little threat of children getting high from music. The real threat is from girls dipping their tampons in vodka, and then putting the tampons in their vaginas, where the vodka is absorbed through the soft, tender tissue of the girl’s vagina. [Read more →]

ends & oddpolitics & government

The most dangerous class is our Crusader Class

I’m so sick of our nation’s focus on this ridiculous rich vs. poor scuffle.  We all know that there will always be a distinction between rich and poor, even in Communist Utopias, because the rich and the poor have always been opposing one another and have, over the millennia, reached a sort of natural equilibrium which prevents one from eliminating the other.  Thus, over the course of thousands of years, the poor’s standards of living have increased dramatically, with a similar increase realized by the elites.  Neither of those groups is likely to be the instrument of oppression in the United States of America.

For that dubious distinction we need to look to our Crusader Class.

[Read more →]

ends & oddrace & culture

The plague of truths

The sun shines. People forget. There is an eminence front for all people and therefore all candidates. For candidates it must be especially thick and durable as it is liable to come under meticulous attack, if not by the people then by the press and the other candidates. Herman Cain has learned this simple truth. Does his need to learn this lesson the hard way indict him? According to the gunslingers not on the Cain payroll, the gunslingers that are have ham-handed this one. What actually happened or was said is immaterial on this reckoning. It’s all about the optics: how it looks and Cain looks like a desperate fugitive. [Read more →]

diatribesends & odd

Chasing My Father

Lately I’ve been chasing my father all over Hell – figuratively speaking. I don’t expect to catch him; he died seven years ago, taking with him some secrets I wish I could have asked him about, and others that I know I couldn’t have. He left behind some intriguing clues about himself, but remained something of a mystery to the end. [Read more →]

art & entertainmentends & odd

Excerpts from the Zombie Kama Sutra— a Halloween exclusive

In honor of Halloween, below is an excerpt from the Zombie Kama Sutra, which is sort of like the regular Kama Sutra that we living people all know and love, except that it’s aimed at the Undead. This excerpt features some highly disturbing and erotic images of zombie sexual positions. Please stop reading if the thought of such matter disturbs you.

IN the beginning, the Lord of Beings created men and women, and prescribed therefore about one million rules by which those men and women must necessarily regulate their living existence. Yet, these rules have not applied to the undead. For too long have these wayward, shambling, unholy creatures attempted to engage the acts of courtship, embracing, unions, seduction, and etc.

Death should not be used as an excuse for chaos.

To that end are written these more than one thousand chapters, intended as a guide to those who have risen from the grave by whatever means, be it metaphysical, mystical, biological, or extraterrestrial. These important “rules to be dead by” shall provide to the Zombie the proper knowledge in regards to conducting oneself in all manner of intimate relations. [Read more →]

ends & oddreligion & philosophy

Choosing Happiness.

Holy shit. Apparently, summer is over.

As some of you may have noticed,  I’ve been rather MIA from blogging during the past few months, although I assure you it’s not for lack of trying.

In fact, I just went through and browsed the many drafts that had been started — and  left unfinished — trying to get an idea of what’s been going on/what my mindset’s been as I sit to write this prodigal son blog after months of silence.

And it seems all these drafts seem to center around a common theme, or at least a common emotion: melancholy. [Read more →]

ends & oddfamily & parenting

A day to remember

The day began for me in the oddest of ways. As is my habit, I worked late into the night of Monday Sept. 10th 2001, writing in my study, and slept in the morning of the 11th. At exactly 10 a.m. I was awoken by the doorbell, and suddenly remembered the appointment I had with some sound engineers. So I hurriedly dressed and rushed to the front door. I opened the door to a bright, perfect-looking day, but it struck me as odd that one of the two men had some blood on his face and shirt.   [Read more →]

ends & odd

The Company I Keep

Among those born on this day are Queen Elizabeth the First (1558), painter Grandma Moses (1860), financier John Pierpont Morgan, Jr. (1837), novelist Taylor Caldwell (1900), heart surgeon Dr. Michael DeBakey (1908), astronomer/space scientist James Alfred Van Allen (1914), football coach/owner Paul Brown (1908), film director/producer Elia Kazan (1909), jazz musician Sonny Rollins (1930), singer Gloria Gaynor (1949), and West Texas’ very own rock legend, Charles Hardin “Buddy” Holly (1936) …..
….. oh, yeah ….. and me (1957).

diatribesends & odd

My revenge scenario

I am a fairly laid-back, low-key person. It takes a lot to get me riled up. This attitude has generally served me well. It’s only on very rare occasions that I become angry; only twice in my adult life have I ever actually been angry enough to yell at someone (yelling at sporting events, rooting on my favorite athletic performers, does not count). Generally, if I’ve been wronged – and it does happen occasionally – I forget it pretty quickly and move on with my life.

It’s not something I spend a lot of time on, but I do concoct revenge scenarios. [Read more →]

ends & oddreligion & philosophy

My local mega-mosque

Georgetown is a small-ish town north of Austin located in  a notoriously conservative county that – until recently – did not permit the sale of alcohol in restaurants. The judges there are very fond of inflicting harsh punishments on criminals; social life centers on the church, the golf club and the high school; the average age of residents is 45; and so on.

Anyway, I lived there for a few months after I first arrived in Texas and quickly started to lose my mind. After all, I had just spent 10 years living in Moscow, that mega city of beauty, evil and horror, and now, here I was in small-town America, in a place so perfect it shimmered like a mirage. The boredom was intense. Is this how I shall spend the rest of my life? I wondered, scarcely able to suppress my panic.  [Read more →]
adviceends & odd

How I almost went to jail for five years

Recently a friend of mine decided to sell the antique Indian headdress she kept in a Perspex box in her house. I was baffled by this decision as it was a thing of great beauty and she did not need the cash. But she had made up her mind: she was moving house and the headdress had to go.

I asked how she had acquired it in the first place:

“My grandparents picked it up at a train station in the 1930s,” she said. “They used to travel around the South West and the Indians would come to the platforms to sell things. So they bought the headdress. They probably didn’t pay much for it, either.”

It was, apparently, a Navajo war bonnet, a headdress of great symbolic power. [Read more →]

adviceBob Sullivan's top ten everything

Top ten signs your home is way past due a spring cleaning

10. The rats have gnawed through your garden hose, making it impossible to hose down the hallway

9. Your living room’s leaf pile dates from three autumns ago

8. The producers of Hoarders thought your place was just a little too much

7. Your heating vents are clogged with Frito crumbs

6. Even Jehovah’s Witnesses won’t come inside

5. The Health Department has you on speed dial

4. When you go in the kitchen, your spouse uses Raid to provide cover fire

3. You have so many dust bunnies, the legs of your bed no longer touch the floor

2. You’ve misplaced two of your children

1. Your refrigerator has a wet hacking cough
 

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

Bob Sullivan's top ten everythingends & odd

Top ten things you don’t want to hear at today’s Fourth of July barbecue

10. “I knew it was a bad idea to leave the fireworks in the trunk on a day this hot!”

9. “That’s not mayonnaise; you’re standing under a tree.”

8. “I think Grandma lost her dentures in the coleslaw again.”

7. “I told Phil a thousand times: either lose some weight or don’t stand directly over the septic tank.”

6. “Weird Uncle Frank wants to play his DVD that certainly sounds patriotic; it’s called The British Are Coming! The British Are Coming!

5. “Why does my hot dog have an engagement ring on it?”

4. “Which is the burger and which is the charcoal?”

3. “I hope nobody minds, but today’s barbecue is completely vegan.”

2. “To give it that little something extra, I put lighter fluid in the punch.”

1. “It’s deer meat! Couldn’t have been in the road more than a day or two.”

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

Bob Sullivan's top ten everythingends & odd

Top ten surprises for Osama bin Laden when he got to Hell

10. Instead of 72 virgins, he was greeted by 12 goats

9. Hell’s only movie theater is showing The Love Guru on a continuous loop

8. The constant whine of smoke alarms really gets on your nerves

7. The road there was actually paved with bad intentions

6. Evidently, none of the suicide bombers made it to Heaven

5. Hitler knows some great ethnic jokes

4. While it’s unbearably hot, there’s no humidity!

3. Hell TV airs nothing but reality shows 24–7

2. They’re expecting a cold snap if Sarah Palin gets elected President

1. It turns out “the Great Satan” isn’t the United States after all

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

educationends & odd

a civil war journey

I recently returned from a four-day road-trip (with my nephew Noah and his parents, traveling separately) to some of the Civil War battlefields. It’s a pilgrimage I’ve made more than once over the years, a way of embracing both nature and history. (Those blood-drenched meadows look terrific in the spring.) Done right, it can almost feel like time-travel.

Confederate cemetery at Appomattox

[Read more →]

ends & oddpolitics & government

Extremities

What’s the Hillary Special at Popeye’s? Two large thighs, two small breasts and a left wing. If that doesn’t take you back, brother, you were never there. Yes, the grizzled Secretary of State now enamored of Assad Jr as a “reformer” as well as the spontaneous human combustion of anonymous goatherds in Afghanistan (and Pakistan, too!) was once far more true to the politics of her loopy commencement address at Wellesley that received a Stalin-esque ovation from that crowd lasting seven minutes. The crowning glory of her political career (before she was elected to shit) was to be Hillarycare; a massive overhaul and expansion of Medicare/Medicaid that would inundate medical delivery systems as we knew them in the barbaric days of 1993, leaving that segment of our economy socialized in all but name. Sound familiar? But Hillary became the Centrist once a certain Senator from Illinois maneuvered into that sliver of atmosphere existing between her Left and the outright commies. Hillary had sought total control through the doctors: the practice of medicine outside the embrace of Hillarycare was to be a criminal offense. Obama stole a march by making criminals out of any patients escaping, however fitfully, the smothering grasp of Obamacare. Of such distinctions are great careers made. [Read more →]

adviceBob Sullivan's top ten everything

Top ten suggested wedding gifts for Prince William of Wales and Kate Middleton

10. A gift certificate to Scepters R Us

9. The latest CD from Prince

8. Gold bricks

7. An English-American dictionary

6. An athletic cup to protect the crown jewels

5. The illusion that their family still has some power

4. A nightie from Queen Victoria’s Secret

3. A sobriety test for the future Princess Kate’s personal driver

2. Something to read on the throne

1. Nothing (what could you possibly get them that they don’t already have?)
 

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

« Previous PageNext Page »