UNREMITTING FAILURE

The Interrogation

Rick cut his nose shaving and the bleeding wouldn't stop for three hours.  He tried tissues, toilet paper, newspaper, paper towels, and the corner of a page of a paperback.  Nothing worked.  Then the FBI arrived.  They said, "Shaving cut, huh?  Very suspicious."  They collected all the bloody scraps of paper and took them away for examining.  The funny thing is, the minute they arrived, his nose stopped bleeding. 

Agent Richardson took him aside for questioning.  He said, "Are you a skier? Do you slide down mountains on thin pieces of wood? Are you Norwegian? Do you have a ski rack on the roof of your automobile?  Are you or have you ever been Nordic?  Do you or have you ever owned a sweater with reindeer on it?  Do you skulk about, attracting attention to yourself with your Swedish meatballs?  Are you or have you ever been related to Dag Hammarskjold?  Are you a mealy mouthed apologist for fondue? Do you make love in the Swiss position?  When Rick answered yes to all these questions, they took him away in handcuffs.

Twenty Lines

There were many things they wanted to know about him before they would let him sleep.  They wanted to know the address of his ex-father-in-law, for instance.  They also wanted him to describe his fingerprints.  They wanted him to makes faces: monkey, angry man, cobra, giraffe.  They asked him to drink a cup of coffee.  Then they asked him if he thought there was too much sugar in it.  When he answered yes, they pounded his pillow and screamed "No!"  They requested that he try on a pair of clam diggers, in white, and he felt like a fool.  They asked if they could give him a Dutch rub, and when he said no, they sulked.  So much for the torture portion of the proceedings. They made him stand at the window and identify the many different types of classical columns standing in the garden.  He kept saying "Doric."  This displeased them to the point where they tore at their clothing.  They asked him to empty his pockets, and found his pocket lint highly suspicious.  They sent it out for testing.  They drummed their fingers on the table, and said, "You're not telling us all you know." He asked them what they wanted to know.  They said, "Why you're here."  He said, "You brought me here."  "Yes," they said, "but we rely on you to tell us why." 

Fatherland or Bust!

Tomorrow we leave for Germany.  Hence we won't be posting for a while.  We'll miss you all while we travel from Hamburg to Tessin to rest up in the boring environs of Mrs. UF's hometown of Tessin.  Hopefully we'll return with some stories that are more exciting than the stories we usually bring back. But probably not. 

Should our aircraft go down, please remember that we did our best to fail here on a daily basis. That we failed to fail up to our own standards will not, we hope, sully us in your memory.  If the aircraft doesn't crash, we'll do our best to conduct ourselves as an American citizen in a foreign land.  We will shout "Speak english!" at every opportunity, and carry around a little American flag and wave it wherever we go.

The flight over promises to be traumatic.  We can't smoke, and airline seats have been shown to cure narcolepsy.  If you can sleep on an airline seat, you're dead.  Which means we'll have to entertain ourselves.  We have a book on our Kindle, and there are always the airline movies, but all we want to see when we're on an airplane are movies about air disasters.  For understandable reasons, they're thin on the ground. 

Anyway, we're rambling.  We look forward to walking through many Christmas fairs, and to throwing axes and shooting crossbows at the Rostock Christmas fair, and to eating many wurst and much Mutzen.  The Rostock fair also has a shooting gallery where we never fail to display the adept rifle work of a Charles Whitman or Lee Harvey Oswald.  There is much fun to be had in Germany, so long as you steer clear of the concentration camps.  We've visited one or two, and they're bummers.  We can't handle that much concentrated sadness.  All we want to do is wander around and listen to Kraftwerk, because man is a machine and this machine is looking for laughs.    

Singing Destroys Marriage, Personal Experience Shows

"I want to kiss you all over/I want to kiss you all up/I want to kiss you all over/I want to stick my dick in a Dixie Cup"

The above is a song we sang to Mrs. UF last night.  No wonder our marriage is on the rocks.  Inappropriate song lyrics.  We're always making up songs and singing them to Mrs. UF, and her response generally runs along the lines of burying her head under the covers.  Actually we think the above song could be a monster hit, in a country that doesn't speak English.  The melody's good, we sound like Bobby Darin, everything's there to make it a chartbuster.  Of course we'd have to add more lyrics, blah blah blah, but that would be no problem so long as "penis" continues to rhyme with "Venus."

We're Declaring December National Test Mascara on Lab Monkeys Month

We hope you will join us in saluting the brave men and women who do animal testing.  They are truly the unsung Mengeles of our time.  They have what it takes to do the unthinkable to the defenseless, and all in the name of beauty products.  Sure, they have opprobrium heaped upon them by ignorant animal rights activists.  But they don't let it stop them, because they know that theirs is a higher calling, and what's more it's a natural extension of their childhood spent torturing cats.  So hug an animal tester today.  Hug him so hard he stops breathing.    

Arbeit Macht Fries

We love french fries.  This is the most important thing to know about us.  Throw some sliced potatoes in boiling lard and serve them to us and we will follow you slavishly all our days like a faithful dog.  This is one of the reasons we hate it when people slander McDonalds.  Sure they serve tainted meat and have brought obesity to the lower classes.  They are, after all, the Devil.  But their fries!  We will gladly serve the Devil who can make fries like theirs.  We will kowtow to Micky D, and do his evil bidding. 

There are lots of fries that are better even than McDonald's fries, and to the makers of these fries we say bless you.  You nourish us with your wholesome saturated fats.  The chain Five Guys uses unsaturated fats from peanut oil, and we love their fries, but we can't help but think we're missing something.  We like our fats saturated.  We like lard.  We only wish our cigarettes contained saturated fats, then they would be doubly dangerous. 

Some people call french fries junk food.  Bah, we say.  The golden fry is a sublime addition to any diet, and one of the few indicators we have ever discovered that there is a God.  Because Man could not come up with something so good on his own.  Man created the tofu dog, most likely with his butt.  The french fry is the most perfect side dish in the universe, better even than conch fritters, which are harder to find but worth looking for.  Should aliens from space ever invade our world it will be our french fries they want, you can count on it.  Forget anal probing.  They will gather up every McDonalds restaurant in the world and then return from whence they came, just like in Styx's Come Sail Away. 

Asp-irations

It's been a long week, characterized by squabbles at work, fatigue at home, and last night, a fight with a guy over the desirability of having aspirations.  I took the Buddhist line, and basically pointed out that people with aspirations are just as likely to have dangerous aspirations as good ones.  Newt Gingrich aspires to be President. Surely no one will argue that's a good thing.  It would be better for the world at large that he aspired to nothing at all. 

We have aspirations, and they've brought us nothing but pain.  It would be better if we had a boil on our ass.  Love your children and your pets, laugh a lot at the absurdity of the world, and in general keep your aspirations to yourself.  Right now there are people out there who aspire to be cops.  That is certainly not the kind of aspiration that will benefit anybody.  There are enough cops already.  There are so many cops that just about everybody we know has been either hassled for no reason or arrested by one. 

Arbeit Macht Frei, Said the Fish (Twenty Lines)

Was one of those fake fish on a placque that, upon pushing a button, turns its head and sings a song, while its tailfin keeps the beat.  We didn't know what to do with it, so we put it on the wall of our partially furnished basement.  One day, after not pushing the button for about a year, we decided to push the button, and the fish turned its head and said, "I'm sick of that damned song.  I'm sick of being a gag gift.  I can see the contempt in your eyes.  I was in Dachau for three years, did you know that? Of course you didn't. The Nazis nailed me to the wall in a prisoners' barracks. Push the button and I said, 'Arbeit macht Frei.' Push it again, and I sang a verse of The Horst Wessel Song.  You think I liked that work?  I hated that work.  But at least I had options.  Now it's one song, all the time. Those prisoners pushed the button a lot, I'll tell you that much. It was amazing to me. They were so starved for entertainment, they chose to hear a fish mock their predicament in song.  I actually made them smile, some of them.  That's how terrible life is, that they smiled.  They smiled."

We Chopped Down the Trees

That were blocking our view of the forest.  Now we have a great view of the Pope shitting in a parking lot.

Be Unprepared

At the entrance to the Metro, on rainy days, there stands a guy selling five dollar umbrellas.  They're the shoddiest merchandise imaginable--one good gust of wind and they invert and go sailing from your hand into the sky, never to be seen again.  He does a brisk business.  It's a wonder we've never purchased one.   People who cater to the unprepared are familiar with our face. 

We've always been unprepared, ever since birth.  We emerged from the womb without so much as a single set of clothing.  Be prepared, say the Boy Scouts.  We say fuck that pack of ready for lifers.  We've never been ready for anything. 

Our idea of proper preparation is drinking lots of coffee.  If you can't be ready, be wired.  It aids in the manufacture of instant excuses.  We start every day with a redeye (a large coffee with two shots of expresso dropped in), move on to several Starbucks double shots, and then top it off with another large coffee and another Starbucks double shot.  This is the liquid equivalent of a crystal meth high.  We're a caffeine tweaker. 

Expect the unexpected, they say.  We can't even expect the expected, how are we supposed to foresee the unforeseeable?  Man may be a complex animal, but we're a simpleton; we're lucky we can put on our pants without an instruction manual.  We stagger, blindfolded, from one disaster to another.  So how is it we manage to bring an umbrella on rainy days?  It's one of those miracles they talk about in the Bible.  Except most of those miracles were faked.  Take the burning bush.  Just out of the frame of Moses' vision, there stood a guy with a can of petrol and a zippo.