UNREMITTING FAILURE

When Coyotes Go Bad

Coyotes have been in the news lately.  First they ate Jessica Simpson's dog.  Then they ate a Canadian folk singer.  If celebrity deaths truly do come in threes, Scott Baiao had better be listening for the pitter patter of little paws.

Don't get us wrong.  We have nothing against coyotes.  But obviously they're letting their food issues get out of hand.

Perhaps it's time they turned to Rabbi Shmuley.

"Rabbi Shmuley, help! First we ate Jessica Simpson's dog.  Then we ate a folk singer.  And now we want to eat Scott Baiao!"

We saw a coyote once.  He was walking along the road in Estes Park, Colorado.  Maybe he was hitchhiking.  It was hard to tell since he didn't have thumbs.  Anyway, he looked pretty inoffensive. But who's to say?  For all we know he was walking off a hearty meal of John Denver. 

Our sister informs us that coyotes have been spotted around her place in York, Pennsylvania.  Can you imagine?  Coyotes in Pennsylvania Dutch Country!  They're probably already debating the merits of eating the Amish.  "Sure. Go ahead.  But don't eat the cute black hat."

We're glad we live in the city.  There are no coyotes here.  There are no alligators or bears either.  Basically, if we're going to get eaten by something, it's going to be a cannibal.   This is why people in the city are so suspicious of one another.  We've narrowed down the list of our natural predators to everybody who uses a fork and a spoon.   

This Just In!

Jon Gosselin has turned to Rabbi Shmuley for help!  That's how bad things have gotten for the former Jon and Kate Plus 8 star!  Like, we knew things were bad, but turn to Rabbi Shmuley bad?  That's real bad.  You don't turn to Rabbi Shmuley unless, like, you've tried everything else.  You've tried sex and fame and AA and crystal meth and Jesus and Haagen Daz ice cream and none of it, not a damn thing, has helped. 

Take us.  We turned to Rabbi Shmuley for help last year.  And we're glad we did.  But we didn't turn to Rabbi Shmuley until we were bankrupt, wanted for war crimes by the Hague, bottoming out on crack cocaine, and leaking anally.  That's how bad things had to be before we turned to Rabbi Shmuley.

We said, "Rabbi Shmuley, help!"

And he helped.  Because that's the kind of guy Rabbi Shmuley is.  He's a helper.  He's there to help.  Call out to him for help and he will hear your call for help with his doglike sense of hearing and he will help, because that's Rabbi Shmuley for you.  He's a helper.

He was there when Michael Jackson needed help overcoming his touching little kids addiction.  He was there when we needed help overcoming our crack cocaine addiction.  And he was there when Adolf Hitler needed help overcoming his gambling addiction, because Rabbi Shmuley, who could have easily held the Holocaust against Adolf Hitler, said "Holocaust, Schmolocaust, Adolf, let's get you some help!"

Because that's the kind of guy Rabbi Shmuley is. 

We remember as if it were yesterday how, when Rabbi Shmuley was finished helping us to overcome our various problems, we said "Thank you, Rabbi Shmuley!"  And do you know what he said?  He said, "Don't mention it!"  Then, "Hold on, I think I've got Adolf Hitler on the other line!" 

So all we can say, Jon Gosselin, is that things must be bad for you.  But you're doing exactly the right thing.  You're at rock bottom, and you've put yourself in the hands of Rabbi Shmuley.  And he won't let you down. 

You're in good hands with Rabbi Shmuley.  Helping hands.  Just ask Michael Jackson.  Except we guess you can't. 

Dante Never Would Have Made It Through Hell

Without his Burberry Poncho.  It's totally Devil-repellent.  Plus it's very smart looking. 

"Frisky little devils, aren't they?"

Who's More Annoying, Bono or Sting?

Bono of course.  But Sting got a leg up in the ratings yesterday when he came out and said he thought Barack Obama has been "sent from God."  This is the kind of crazy talk that makes us wish more musicians would get devoured by coyotes.  Obama has his good points--the biggest being that he's not some nutjob Republican dedicated to seeing America torture its way to greatness--but like every other politician in the world, he's no creation of the Divine.  He's of the Devil's Party.  True, he doesn't carry the whiff of sulphur the way, say, Dick Cheney does.  But that's what makes him so dangerous.  At least with Dick Cheney, whom nobody's going to mistake for an angel, you know where you stand.  Not so Obama.  He speaks well.  He seems sane.  He doesn't go around shooting his friends in the face.  But still.  His job is to help keep the infernal gears moving, never mind who gets hurt.  He's almost bound to dig us even deeper into Afghanistan.  So far his talk about ending the human rights abuses that have made America a world pariah has been just that, talk.  And he's done nothing so far to throw Sarah Palin into an illegal prison where she would be held, without access to legal counsel, for the remainder of her natural life.

So what has he done for us, anyway? 

Today's Totally in Poor Taste Post

Far be it for us to jape at the news that a folk singer has been killed by coyotes.  Because when push comes to shove there is absolutely nothing funny about a folk singer being killed by coyotes.  It's tragic, is what it is.  It's tragic when a folk singer is killed by coyotes.  It's tragic when anyone is killed by coyotes.  But it's even more tragic, ironic perhaps even, when a folk singer, especially a folk singer who is an avid lover of nature, is killed by coyotes.  

There is nothing risible in the fact that a folk singer has been killed by coyotes.  It's simply regrettable.  She had a long life ahead of her.  She had family who will miss her.

We're sorry it happened.

We hope they also ate her guitar. 

coyotes are obviously not aficionados of folk music, as can be seen by their sparse attendance at popular folk festivals  

Here in the Temperature-Controlled Cellars of Unremitting Failure

We have the world's largest collection of vintage pizzas. You want a Papa John's 1998?  We have it.  An extremely rare 1958 Pizza Hut pizza with both sausage and pepperoni?  Check.  A slice of the pie that Joe DiMaggio shared with Marilyn Monroe following their elopement at San Francisco City Hall on January 14, 1954?  Ditto.  Our licensed pizza archivists vouchsafe the provenance and authenticity of each and every pie using the latest gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, carbon dating, and nibbling techniques.  Here comes one of our archivists now.  My God, she's weeping.  Turns out our 1967 Domino's from the chain's first franchise in Ypsilanti, Michigan is a clever fraud!

My God, $18,000 down the drain.

The Lost Outfielder

We remember watching this episode of The Twilight Zone called The Lost Outfielder.  In it a professional baseball player, played by the guy who played Hoss Cartwright on Bonanza, charges around second base and slides, spikes first, into the Third Reich.  There he's a businessman in love with a decadent actress, who just happens to also be Joseph Goebbels' sister.

We don't know anybody else who remembers this episode, which is odd because we've actually seen it twice.  To make things even stranger, the two times we watched it featured different endings.  In one Hoss Cartwright (or Dan Blocker, that's his real name, he died young) ends up being arrested by the Gestapo.  In the other his relationship with Goebbels' sister corrupts him absolutely, and he ends up being the evillest Nazi in the bunch. 

The first time we watched it we were spending the night in our oldest brother David's apartment in Gettysburg Pa.  We don't know where David was.  But we do know that we were at a pivotal moment in our life, because our first girlfriend Lee Ann wanted us to join the Army and we were actually thinking about going through with it.

We remember sitting on his sofa watching The Twilight Zone and thinking, "Be.  Be all that you can be."  This was definitely a couple of bongloads into the evening.  Our brother had this ugly brown ceramic bong, it was a total shit brown this bong, actually it was the same color as his Volkswagen Rabbit which we assume was just a coincidence, as nobody sets out (we don't think) to buy a matching car and bong.   

Anyway, we watched The Lost Outfielder and as Dan Blocker (who took to wearing a toupee partway into his tenure as Hoss on Bonanza, which meant that he was hairier one season than he was the season before) was led away by the Gestapo we thought that might as well be us, being led away to do hard time in the Army, which is how (ironically enough) an episode of The Twilight Zone saved us from joining the armed services. 

The second time we saw The Lost Outfielder was shortly after the breakup of our first marriage.  This would have been around the time of Bush I and Gulf War I, or what--1991? Sometime around then.  Anyway we were newly sober and sitting in our brand new freezing efficiency apartment on Locust Street in Philadelphia and when the episode ended differently from the first time we saw it we were like, Huh? 

Since then of course we've brought up The Lost Outfielder with dozens of people, friends in most cases although also with this guy we had a head-on collision with on the East River Drive and ended up talking to while waiting for the ambulance to arrive, and not a single one has ever seen or heard of it.  Most of them tell us the episode doesn't exist, although we did run into one person who claimed to have seen a variant of our episode involving a lost middle linebacker.  And it's hard to say they're crazy, because we can't find any evidence of it online either.  According to Wikipedia, Blocker never did a Twilight Zone; he did, however, appear in a Three Stooges short entitled Outer Space Jitters. 

We've never seen it.

The Punishments Meted Out

On Dante's Seven Terraces of Purgatory are as follows:

1. Lukewarm navy bean soup
2. Damp knit hat
3. Uncomfortable chair
4. The same episode of Scrubs shown over and over again
5. Waiting room with nothing to read but copies of Women's Health
6. "Artsy craftsy" girlfriend
7. Forced to wear fanny pack

The Argyle Mine

We all worked in the argyle mine.  It was backbreaking labor, but we took pride in it.  We knew how important our work was.  Without us, there would be no argyle socks.

Occasionally there would be a cave-in.  Dozens might be trapped in colorful argyle.  Imagine being suffocated by a huge sweater. 

Actually it isn't like that at all.  Raw argyle is nothing like the stuff you pull onto your feet.  It's a brittle and oily stone, with a smell like black olives.  

The argyle industry does not like to discuss the rough origins of argyle.  Argyle mining is the argyle industry's dirty little secret.  It doesn't want to be associated with pit mining that defaces the scenery and leaves a stain on the environment.  It doesn't want to be associated with the dirty likes of us.

But there it is.  We go down into the earth with our picks and we chip, chip, chip out your argyle socks.  We live and we die to put argyle on your back.  We breathe in fatal argyle dust, and at the end of the day we cough up phlegm in a pattern of diamonds in a diagonal checkerboard arrangement. 

It's the most pleasant-looking phlegm in the world. 

But don't let it fool you.  It's deadly. 

We're working on the old argyle pile

College

We spent our college years attending to drinking matters.  As a result, some of the focus we might have otherwise placed on our course work was instead dedicated to trying to figure out where we were when we woke up.

One time, no shit, we woke up in the woods. 

This is not as bad as the story told to us by our friend John.  He came to on the median strip of a major highway.

Anyway, college.  We remember this one night we decided to stay sober.  How long the hours of a drinkless evening!  With nothing to do but crack a book!

It was a mistake we didn't repeat.

We're thinking about college, we suspect, because we're listening to a Dead concert.  The sound of the Dead always resurrects memories of ancient debauch, of us staggering and singing and vomiting in hats and the like. 

We've said it before, we'll say it again, we lived in a house that was falling down around us.  The ceiling in the next bedroom collapsed.  Our friend Brad returned home to find a ceiling beam snuggled up in his bed.  He fled.   Not us.  Our ceiling had already fallen in, metaphorically speaking, and we had no energy to expend on worrying about minor architectural matters.

Our friend Steds, greatest waste product of his generation, a genius at finding the ways and means of getting and staying high, lived there too.  One day the two of us, in the midst of a bout of afternoon drinking, decided to make a great stew.

We threw in meat and beans and tomatoes and onion and green pepper and potatoes and carrots and chili powder and pot and a couple of Bill Harrison's fake quaaludes and a valium or two.  And as it boiled away we added beer, lots of beer, and then whisky, a significant amount of whisky.  Then we threw in some cough syrup and a can of black olives and a lot of black pepper and presto, we had ourselves a feast. 

That stew wasn't particularly delicious, but it could have eased the pain of terminal cancer.

How we survived those years, we'll never know.  We were bloated and had a big biker beard and often slept with our contacts in, as a result of which our eyes would swell shut.  We were a bona fide mess.

16 North Washington Street, Shippensburg PA.  In our memory, the whole house is tilting precipitously to the left.  Fortunately we're tilting precipitously to the left as well, or the effect would be dizzying.