An Open Letter to Pepsi-Cola Regarding the Creation of Pepsi Lime

Dear Pepsi,

It doesn’t taste like limes, you know.

It sort of tastes like hearing the song “Broken Wings” on the radio and not quite realizing why it makes you so sad but when you think about it, you realize that that song was playing when you were at the seventh-grade dance and you were just getting over the flu and you thought you had to fart, but actually you shit your pants so you threw your underwear away in the boys’ locker room but then some eighth graders found them and brought them into the auditorium where the dance was and asked whose they were and you said you didn’t know, but they weren’t yours, and they said well who else here has the initials “N.T.” and you saw that they were one of the pairs of underwear that your mother had written your initials into for 4-H camp and all the kids called you “Turdo” pretty much until graduation, as in “try not to get any turds on our Quarter Pounders, Turdo, or we’ll tell your manager to fire you.”

So you should probably change the name of it, because it’s kind of deceptive to name something after a pleasant-tasting flavor like limes, when in reality it tastes very very bad. Instead of Pepsi Lime, maybe you could call it Pepsi Soul-Wrenching Despair. That way, at least people would know what they were getting themselves into.

Sincerely,

(name withheld)

Dogs of War

I can't believe that there's no such thing as a gun that shoots hot dogs at people.

I defy you to think of something more awesome (and if you're going to say a gun that shoots hammers at people or a gun that shoots little tiny guns at people, you're wrong, buddy. It's hot dogs. Hot dogs is better.)

Here's a couple of reasons why:
1. Hot dogs are awesome in every single way.
2. There's no way that getting shot with a hot dog could hurt you, unless possibly you get shot in the swimsuit area.
3. And even if it did hurt some, you'd probably be laughing so hard that you wouldn't mind. Because, come on! A gun that shoots hot dogs?
4. For protection, you could wear a vest made of hot dog buns.

Product Name, Possible Taglines and Supplemental Copy:

The Shot Dog(tm): The Gun That Shoots Hot Dogs At People.

- Launch a Meat Missile!
- Join the Hebrew National Rifle Association!
- First Came the Tommy Gun. Now, Introducing the Frank Gun.
- They Say An Army Fights On Its Stomach, So Why Not Fight With Something That A Person Would Normally Put In His Stomach? In This Case, A Hot Dog! Shot Out Of A Gun That Shoots Hot Dogs! Get It?
- This House Protected by Smith, Wesson, and Kahn's.
- Hot Dogs Are Made with Pork, Beef, Turkey and Chicken. And Now, Duck.
- And Remember, Never Shoot Someone In The Swimsuit Area. That Ain't Kosher!

So if anybody out there is good at making things, or building things, or putting things together, or constructing things, or taking two seemingly disparate items and combining them in hilarious and unexpected ways, please get to work on this idea. I've pretty much taken care of the hard part.

If You Could Have Any Superpower

If you could have any superpower, I think that the ability to change the color of your urine at will would be a dumb choice. Because what could you do with it? You could show it off to your friends, if you don’t mind letting them see your penis. But if a buddy of mine said, “hey, check this out” and then took out his wiener and started peeing, I don’t know if I’d stick around long enough to see what color it was. I guess maybe you could tell your boss your weren’t feeling well and tell him you had blood in your urine and then show him your blood-red pee. But you could only do that once, maybe. And it’s just as likely you’d get fired as get the afternoon off. Really, the only practical use would be to trick people into drinking your pee. Which is kind of selfish, because how would you fight crime with that?

Way to blow it, dude. You could have been able to fly or something.

How To Tie A Bowline Hitch

I've removed this piece because it's going to be published in the Fall Duck and Herring Pocket Field Guide. Buy a big stack of them.

Dirtiest-Sounding "Masters of the Universe" Character Names

Extendar

Fisto

Clamp Champ

Tung Lashor

Snout Spout

Ram Man

Thunder Punch He-Man

Mantenna

High five me, you son of a bitch!

I have done so many high-five-worthy things this week that if somebody doesn’t get over here and high five me, I’m going to start fucking people up.

1) I told a fat guy, “If it gets any colder in this office, I’m going to slice your belly open and get inside you, like Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back.” High five!

2) I took a leak, and then kept stepping farther and farther back from the urinal until my back was against the god damn wall, without spilling a drop. High five!

3) Upon hearing the Michael Jackson verdict, I said, “Looks like he got off’ like he was when he ‘beat it’ when he was with those little boys.” Or something like that. High five!

4) I went out to dinner with my wife and ran into one of my old buddies from high school. He was like, “Is that your wife?” and I was like, “Fuck no!” then I grabbed my wife, put her in a headlock and farted in her face. High five!

5) I spent like three days writing the letter to my father that I have been meaning to write ever since I was a child. I finally told him how I felt about him, and how I felt that he always unfairly compared me to my brother. That maybe I wasn’t an athlete, maybe I wasn’t a conservative Republican, maybe I wasn’t some big shot doctor or something, but I still loved him. And that if he couldn’t see what a great person I had become, that it was his loss. He called me and asked, “Did you write this faggy letter, faggot?” and although I was holding back the tears on the inside; on the outside, I was like, “Huh? I don’t even know what you’re talking about.” High five!

6) I went to Old Country Buffet and took one drink of their crappy coffee, spit it out onto the sneeze guard, then poured the rest into the macaroni and cheese. Fuck ‘em for not having better coffee, right? High five!

What’s up Chipotle’s ass?

Chipotle (the burrito place) loves to promote itself as a “customer-friendly” sort of place where the customer can have whatever he wants. “You call the shots, my main man,” they say. “Why don’t you climb up on Chipotle’s lap and tell him all about what you want on your burrito. Have you been a good boy all year? Ho ho ho!”
What a crock of mierda. I have never once told the burrito-barista people, “Hey, make it so the first three or four bites are entirely rice,” or “I only want sour cream on the last mouthful,” or “Make it so I can barely tell that there’s cheese on my burrito, because its placement makes it indistinguishable from the tortilla.”

Come on, Chipotle. Would it kill you get off your high horse and just mix all the stuff together, for crying out loud? It’s not hard, you know. It’s not like you don’t have bowls. Because, I mean, get real! Man alive, you guys. Get over yourselves.

Gone.

Baked Potato Toppings Awards Ceremony 2005 (check your local listings for showtimes)

Sour Cream - Gold Medal
Butter - Silver Medal
Cheddar Cheese - Bronze Medal
Chili - Defensive Award
Salt - Team Spirit Award
Aunt Jane's Crazy Mixed Up Salt - Outstanding Freshman
Bacon - Good Hustle Award
Chives - Participation Pin

Thanks to everybody for making this another great year.

E-Mail Hoax Alert!

Keep your eye on your inboxes, folks! There are some unscrupulous people out there who are just dying to play you for a fool. Here’s this week’s e-mail hoax alert:

The hoax:
The body of the e-mail reads, “Fierce Melon Gatorade is more fierce than you’d think. The USDA is issuing a warning that this new flavor, although delicious and thirst-quenching, can be deadly. Flavor agents in the drink have been linked to cancer, ringworm, and legionnaire’s disease. Also, many bottles of this beverage were found to contain the eggs of the brown recluse spider, one of nature’s deadliest assassins. Additionally, many depraved persons have been discovered placing HIV-infected needles on specially-marked caps in such a way that they stick you when you open them and you get AIDS and die. Plus this one kid that my cousin knows drank some of that new Gatorade after eating Cool Ranch Doritos and he vomited blood for like a week until he just died. They said his stomach literally exploded in his body. I swear to God. Also there is a recent report, I think I saw it on CNN about how a woman contracted this crazy bad disease because there was dried rat urine on the Gatorade bottle. And, Gatorade has tons of sodium.”

The truth:
Far from being “delicious”, Gatorade actually tastes like ass.

Screaming - A Fiction

Once the screaming stopped, Ron noticed that it hadn’t. The screaming of the audience had dwindled away until the theater was completely silent with the exception of the crescendo continuing to issue from his own mouth. The remainder of the audience allowed him his horror for a moment or two longer, in empathy. After all, hadn’t they all screamed together? Hadn’t it felt good? Why stop sharing this feeling? Outrage, disgust, shock, what better reaction was there than a universe-challenging scream culled from the center of Ron’s better judgment? Scream, and scream louder in the face of all the uncomfortable stares. Stare on, audience. See how a scream is made. The scream of many is but a hollow echo of a scream of one. A shared scream brings lives together. A lone scream sets one apart. Stare on, audience. When all screams end, this one will continue. This scream has two parts: a beginning and a continuation. This scream screams. This scream says, "I am super allergic to bees." So you can sort of understand why it was such a big deal.

The National Spelling Bee Has Jumped the Shark

Well, it’s that time of year again. It seems the whole nation’s got Spelling Bee fever. Can you feel that, baby? That’s what I’m talking about! Unh!

What is it that makes this annual event so popular? Is it the age-old spirit of competition, the emphasis on brains over brawn, or the chance to match one’s own wits against a seventh-grader? Nope. The reason people love the Spelling Bee is they love to see little kids break down and cry. And this year, it looks like the producers of the Bee have figured that out, and personally, I think they’ve gone too far. They’ve written the example sentences in such a way to wring maximum emotional impact from these fragile little intellects.

Take a look at these actual, genuine example sentences that appeared on this week’s National Spelling Bee. These are real, and I haven’t changed, altered, or made them up in any way whatsoever. These appeared verbatim, on national television. If you don’t believe me, why don’t you come over to my house? I have the whole thing on tape and I’ll show it to you. Then we’ll see who’s the liar, liar. Yeah, that’s what I thought.*

*not really, these are all made up

Key
K = Kid
P = Spelling Bee Word Pronouncer

P: “Bellipotent.”
K: “Could you use it in a sentence?”
P: “I wouldn’t want to miss an easy first-round word like 'bellipotent'; they’d never let me live that one down when I got back to school on Monday.”

P: “Scalar.”
K: “Could you use it in a sentence?”
P: “The girl who misspelled ‘bellipotent’ is much cuter than the girl who’s about to misspell ‘scalar’.”

P: “Noyau.”
K: “Could you use it in a sentence?”
P: “In a viewer survey following the nationally televised spelling bee, the most popular response to the question, ‘What was the highpoint of the broadcast?’ was ‘When the kid misspelled ‘noyau’ and totally spazzed out and lost it.'”

P: “Lixiviate.”
K: “Could you use it in a sentence?”
P: “If you misspell ‘lixiviate’, you’re pretty much ensuring yourself a one-way ticket to running down those stairs on the left side of the stage and spending the rest of the afternoon crying into your mom’s boobs.”

P: “Chechia.”
K: “Could you use it in a sentence?”
P: “I can’t tell if this kid’s about to spell 'chechia' or piss himself.”

P: “Phaechrous.”
K: “Could you use it in a sentence?”
P: “The old man said to his wife, ‘So help me God, Judith, if it ever gets to the point where I can’t spell a simple word like ‘phaechrous’, just go ahead and put me out of my misery.'”

P: “Epopt.”
K: “Could you use it in a sentence?”
P: “When asked to spell ‘epopt,’ the kid replied, ‘Could you use it in a sentence?’ in this totally gay voice.”