Having been a lifeguard, I learned many strategies to ward off boredom during those rainy shore weekdays when all the swimmers were at the boardwalk or playing Monopoly at the beach house. Ah, but no experience in life need be wasted: Those anti-ennui lifeguard strategies are transferable to that iconic American family experience: The long automobile trip. [Read more →]
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I have been declared Emperor of the World. Let us not waste time explaining why or how; let’s all simply accept the fact that we are better off, as a result; hence, my next decree:
Emperor’s Decree No. 222-sde/23x: With the proliferation of video and audio media, the Emperor is noticing an ever-growing increase in affected speech patterns and in the parroting of words and phrases. He has already pointed out the use of the word “ameezing” (really, “amazing”) as an adjective for everything from tasty french fries to good sex to religious epiphanies. He won’t even get into the idea of “vocal fry” — that intensely annoying tendency of (mostly) young women to insert creaky vibrations into their voices for…effect. (For what effect, other than making people want to throw punches, we don’t know. Maybe they think it makes them sound like Leonard Nimoy or something.) The reason he will not get into “vocal fry” yet is that the linguistic jury is still out. Some researchers claim it is not a new phenomenon, though the Emperor’s Imperial Department of Linguistic Domination believes it is more widespread than ever. Nevertheless, it will no doubt be outlawed, soon. Anyhoo, let’s take one thing at a time: the word “sure.” Open. Your. Mouth. It is “shooor.” It’s not “sherrr.” Say it right.
The Punishment: Violators of this decree will be placed into a closet with a weed-whacker and they will be forced to listen to its incessant, grating whine for three days, straight, in order for them learn how overwhelmingly annoying they are to everyone within earshot.
Now, go forth and obey.
The Emperor will grace the world with a new decree each Tuesday morning.
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The big news in the sports world this week involved a racist comment made by Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver Riley Cooper during a Kenny Chesney concert last month. The comments were caught on someone’s phone, and came to light this week when a local sports-gossip site, Crossing Broad, got a hold of the video and made it public. There are a lot of layers to this story, and they all qualify as Bad Sports. [Read more →]
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10. “It’s so hot, Michael Bloomberg was spotted drinking a Big Gulp.”
9. “It’s so hot, the Statue of Liberty has pit stains.”
8. “It’s so hot, Richard Simmons just came out with Heat-Stroking to the Oldies.”
7. “It’s so hot, nuns are wearing Daisy Dukes.”
6. “It’s so hot, the fish are sweating.”
5. “It’s so hot, George Zimmerman says he kinda wishes he’d been thrown in the ‘cooler’.”
4. “It’s so hot, Martha Stewart has started dating both Ben and Jerry.”
3. “It’s so hot, Chris Christie is making his own gravy.”
2. “It’s so hot, today I fried an egg…at room temperature.”
1. “It’s so hot, Paula Deen attended an NAACP meeting just for the chilly reception.”
Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.
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#91
Look long enough and Seurat’s pointillism
Seems letters and punctuation, not dots,
Becomes a narrative, a verbal prism,
Written in a language that can’t be taught.
The hook of cane, umbrella, monkey’s tail,
A stone with a white and orange bonnet,
The pinch of waists and a billowing sail,
All forestall the waning of the day.
Only a running girl, a blown trumpet,
A leaping pup, having anything to say.
The rest is stillness, and while the shadows
Avoid the giantess, elsewhere they grow.
Emotion is atoms frozen and bound,
Letters to paper, and can’t make a sound.
Note: This is one of more than 125 poems after paintings or images, which can be viewed at the blog, Zealotry of Guerin.
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When not reading about boy wizards and bondage, some berserk jihadis like to relax by thinking about how they can improve on the work of James Dyson. Pic: Wikipedia.
Yesterday I learned an interesting fact: When it comes to books, the bearded inmates of Guantanamo Bay are totally hot for “Fifty Shades of Grey,” the first novel of a popular trilogy about the erotic adventures of a young female graduate named Anastasia Steele and an international businessman named Christian Grey. No, really – a US congressman said it, so it must be true.
I have been declared Emperor of the World. Let us not waste time explaining why or how; let’s all simply accept the fact that we are better off, as a result; hence, my next decree:
Emperor’s Decree, No. -345.34Q: The Emperor has said it before, and he will say it again: A smattering of education is a dangerous thing. Take your average college graduate. He fancies himself educated because he holds a four-year degree. This fancy is very debatable, since the Emperor recently heard a university student say to a police officer: “We haven’t drank nothing. Is that chill?” But that is neither here nor there. These “educated” folk, somewhere along the line, wind up learning how to say, “Dave and I went to the dance,” instead of “Dave and me went to the dance.” And they like this. “Dave and I” sounds educated; proper; downright suave. This is, they think, the way educated people speak. Because they are so enamored of this linguistic savoir faire, they decide to apply it in other situations, albeit the wrong ones: “Lucius went with Dave and I to the dance.” This is wrong. Because this is wrong and because it vexes the Emperor, it is now a crime. To save one’s self from prosecution at the hands of the Imperial Powers, one need only perform an experiment before speaking: simply take out the “Dave.” In the aformentioned sentence, it becomes: “Lucius went with I to the dance.” Not so suave anymore, eh Professor? The Emperor’s not going to graph the sentence for you; figure it out or suffer.
The Punishment: Speakers of the pretentious and misplaced “I” will be forced to eat a bucket of sheep’s eyes until they vomit, thereby getting a visual lesson as to what they are doing on a daily basis with the verbal homophone, as they vomit forth “eyes.” Get it? Huh? (The Emperor is pleased with his Dante-esque brilliance on this one, if he does say so himself. )
Now, go forth and obey.
The Emperor will grace the world with a new decree each Tuesday morning.
TweetOh, Ryan Braun. We tried so hard to believe in you. We allowed ourselves to consider that maybe the mishandling of your positive test for PEDs last year led to a positive test when you were not actually guilty of taking anything illicit. I, for one, feel really dopey here. For those of you not in the know, Braun, the slugger and former league MVP who roams the outfield for the Milwaukee Brewers, was suspended for the rest of the season this week as part of a deal he struck with Major League Baseball for violations of the league’s policy on performance enhancing drugs. [Read more →]
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10. “Look, if people were willing to give me a second chance, why not a third?”
9. “I’m very proud of the staff I have under me.”
8. “I thought the name Carlos Danger would win me the Latino vote.”
7. “I’m an unrepentant horndog.”
6. “To prove I’m a good Democrat, I wanted to demonstrate that I lean a bit to the left.”
5. “The first time, my wife forgave me, and that wasn’t my plan.”
4. “I got confused about the term ‘junk mail’.”
3. “I had some new camera angles I wanted to try out.”
2. “I thought I could get some acting work, playing Carlos Danger on one of Telemundo’s telenovelas.”
1. “I wanted to show that, no matter how hard things get, I’m willing to stick it out.”
Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.
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#111
They moved the river to build the water wheel,
Then built a wooden race to divert the current.
Sluice opened, stones ground raw grain into meal
For a hundred years, until the old mill was spent.
River turning wheel turning gears turning stone,
A devolution of mechanics all to crush a seed.
The sun burns for years to dry an animal’s bones,
And countless gallons of water won’t break a reed.
I’m reluctant to approach the mill too closely
(Its ancient timbers are desiccated, ghostly),
Hear its stoppage rasped by the river’s relentless
Passage over the shattered race’s detritus.
Away from the wreck, a little waterfall churns
Spray, wrack, and spume, and, like time, it burns.
Note: This is one of more than 125 poems after paintings or images, which can be viewed at the blog, Zealotry of Guerin.
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Is there such thing as too much news? It seems that if there are enough distractions, like a bankrupt Detroit or a royal baby, people will forget or grow bored of other issues in our world that are more serious and still unresolved. [Read more →]
TweetI have been writing this column every week for nearly four and a half years, and I have become quite accustomed to scouring the sports world for stories, with much of my focus being on the bad ones. This focus on the negative may have made me jaded, I suppose, as some stories that should leave me outraged merely make me laugh. When I start to give my take on them, I will sometimes find that maybe some of these actions are more revolting than they are funny, and my text will often reflect that disgust. Still, I think most of these things don’t seem very real to me, because most of the people involved are unlike anyone that I actually encounter in my own life. An example of this would be Antonio Morrison, a soon-to-be-Sophomore linebacker for the University of Florida football team, who was arrested on Sunday for barking at a police dog.
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10. Every time you lie on the beach, concerned citizens try to push you back into the water
9. Due to your busy schedule as governor, you only had your lap-band surgery last February
8. When asked to name your favorite health drink, you reply, “Maple syrup.”
7. Whenever you leave the beach, everybody shouts, “The coast is clear!”
6. Policemen keep coming up to you and ordering you to disperse
5. The last time you went to the beach, you were the only one who got a tan
4. Your swimsuit uses more material than a Ringling Brothers tent
3. In your building, they’ve changed the elevator’s maximum occupancy to one
2. Your nickname at work is ‘Are You Gonna Finish That?’
1. People don’t want you anywhere near the beach, because you always affect the tides
Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.
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#40
I am not the amalgam of my parts.
Not the knuckles, the joints, the palms.
These are merely the hands of my heart.
I am always hot. I’ve never been calm.
Sometimes I am nothing but an eye.
Seen through the circle of sight,
The darkness is all I need to know why.
My grinning makes my knuckles white.
My thoughts are like wiggling fingers
And my emotions are clenched fists.
I am my own twisted harbinger.
Look at me. You can’t resist.
But we’re all skin, sinew and bone,
Running from each other, alone.
Note: This is one of more than 125 poems after paintings or images, which can be viewed at the blog, Zealotry of Guerin.
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When I was a kid, someone pointed out that the shape of the inside of your ear was similar to the shape of how you looked as a fetus. At the time, I chalked it up to one of those fantastical things kids say to exaggerate a correlation. But years later in advertising school, one of my professors had us gather the leaves from a lemon tree and then look at how it compared to the shape of the tree itself. Amazingly, the veins of the leaf seemed to match the branches of the tree, and the leaf’s shape was similar to the tree’s overall shape. Could it be possible that the parts of a living object represent the whole? And if so, how far back could we go to see similarities of ourselves as a society—to the lines in our palms, the DNA in our genes, or even the atoms in our bodies? [Read more →]
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I have been declared Emperor of the World. Let us not waste time explaining why or how; let’s all simply accept the fact that we are better off, as a result; hence, my next decree:
Emperor’s Decree No. 3-4-33-56: People don’t dance while they eat. They simply don’t. They don’t bop from side to side and smile conspiritorially at each other as they wipe the corners of their mouths and carefully display the advertised product with fingers carefully arranged to give the camera full view. And they don’t gather in impromptu, multicolored mobs on hot city streets and jet joyously through makeshift slip-and-slides in shirts and ties. Parties never are, never have been and never will be that outlandishly fun. (Or that racially and socially harmonious. [That will be the day when a surgeon is on a slip-and slide with the hot dog cart guy.]) In fact, when real parties approach the outlandishly fun level, they usually degenerate in to something much more messy and debauched; they don’t erupt in to Target commercials with beer. Truth in advertising, people. Truth in advertising.
(Side note: And, that African American chap with the crazy hair who is in every commercial made within the past five years…will someone please give him a role in movies or something so the Emperor doesn’t have to see him eating another scrap of snack food or grilling on a grill anymore?)
The Punishment: Guilty directors will be chained in the Imperial dungeon among seductive dancers clad in various tasty foods. The dancers will move just close enough to entice the directors to reach out for a treat and then move away, for the span of a week. The violators will then be released with instructions to amend their ridiculous visions.
The Emperor will grace the world with a new decree each Tuesday morning.
TweetProfessional athletes are inherently risk-takers. They have to be, right? They put themselves out on a field and put their bodies at risks, especially football players. It makes perfect sense that some of them would have off-the-field interests that would explore that side of their personalities as well, although I have to bet their teams would wish that were not the case. Every July, we hear about some NFL player who goes to Spain to run with the bulls in Pamplona. This year, Russell Okung of the Seattle Seahawks was the guy, but he was not alone among his football brethren. New York Jets head coach Rex Ryan was there as well. In my opinion, they are a couple of idiots. [Read more →]
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10. Edward Snowden’s travel agent
9. Print journalist
8. Door-to-door Furby salesman
7. NBC advertising salesman
6. Donald Trump’s ego wrangler
5. Amish refrigerator repairman
4. Public pool pee monitor
3. Chris Christie’s lotion boy
2. Mall Santa
1. Paula Deen’s image consultant
Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.
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Last night George Zimmerman, America’s most hated night watchman, was found not guilty in front of a jury of his peers. Soon afterwards, the level headed “pick your battles” Reverend Sharpton was already scheming for a civil conviction and federal civil rights investigation. Deep into the night there was a protest in San Francisco. And this morning the talking heads on MSLSD went back and forth about racial injustice in America.
Even looking at Facebook and Twitter, you would have thought that a gang of Klansmen were just acquitted for killing an 18 year-old black girl in a voting booth on election day with the deciding vote in Obama’s reelection. But if you quell all the emotion, you would see that this case was not a landmark racial injustice, but rather a compelling focal point, precedent, and lesson in political pressure, self-defense, and the burden of guilt. [Read more →]
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#48
For Ruth
Is there just one universe?
There the stars and here the cafe.
Hidden lights illuminate the tables.
The various darknesses immerse
Men and stars in dissolving clay.
Are both god and science fables?
The universes are infinite,
They say, and time does not exist.
But here we are and there the stars.
The air is full of perfume and wit,
And a wine too ancient to resist.
All else is beyond, late and far.
Let’s nibble galaxies and swallow suns.
I’ll count my hours with you by ones.
Note: This is one of more than 120 poems after paintings or images, which can be viewed at the blog, Zealotry of Guerin.
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