The Grass is always Greener When You Spray Green Schmutz All Over It

A Honk if You Like Honking Original:*

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thWBSUSSDkI


*"Original" is a relative term.  Everything is derivative.  

The Well-Mannered Nosey Garçon

"Are you still enjoying that?"

KIM JONG UN RESPONDS TO THE INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE

Dear Editor:

I am not a subscriber or even casual reader of your so-called “newspaper.”  For one thing – no good comics. For another thing, who can afford the villas in Cinque Terre listed for sale in the Real Estate Classifieds? Thirdly, the Trib is banned in my country. But one of our “agricultural attachés” brought a copy back from Paris yesterday and showed me an article you had published about me.

It was all about how I am threatening the world with nuclear missiles, and how my people are starving, and how I am mercurial and a Class-A nut job, and blah blah blah.  The usual stuff.  Then, mid-way through the third paragraph, I read this:  “The baby-faced dictator remains jealous of his older exiled paternal half-brother Kim Jong-Nam.”

Ok, like, for starters, “Baby-Faced?” Excuse me?

Had your intrepid reporter bothered to do his homework, he would have learned that I am, hands down, the biggest heartthrob north of the Demilitarized Zone. I so much as step foot in the Pyongyang People’s Pleasure Place & Pâtisserie and the whole place falls into a swoon. All the girls want to dance the “Hustle” with me. (The PPPP&P is a swanky little disco we have here. Thursday is Mandelbrot night, hence “Pâtisserie”).

Why do you think that one of my official titles is “Number 1 Handsome Man?” Every Korean of the female persuasion dreams of having a date with me. Whose photo do you think is taped to all the vanities in the country?  The Pope’s? Jerry Lewis’? Guess again, Sparky! It is me, myself, and Mois! (Jerry Lewis is number 3 on the male pinup hit parade, just so you know).

Can you guess what Pop (“Dear Leader”  not to be confused with “Dear Abbey”) use to call me?  “Macho Macho Man.”  Pop was the World’s Number 1 Dad. Don’t take my word for it; he had the coffee mug to prove it.  He used to sing “Macho Macho Man” in the shower all the time. Do you know it?  “I want to be a macho, macho man.”  Those are the lyrics.  He’d say “American Adventurists!  I’m going to bomb the shit out of them as soon as we get one of these ferkakta rockets to work!”  Right after that, he’d jump in the shower and sing “Macho Macho Man.”

In case you were wondering, I also like to sing in the shower. Here’s a little song that I sing in the shower to perk me up right before I meet with our supreme military brass to map out our top secret strategy for the surprise attack on America planned for next Tuesday. It goes like this:

I’m going to Pyongyang

Pyongyang here I come

They got North Korean women  there

And I’m gonna get me one.

By the way, did you know that the first time Pop ever played a game of golf, he shot 11 holes-in-one?  EEEELEVEN!  Read ‘em and weep! Once I went bowling with him, and I scored a perfect 300.  He scored a 360, which is like a 300, plus 60! Can the horse’s ass at the Trib who called me “baby-faced” say that? I didn’t think so.

Now I’m going to clue you in on a little secret about my brother, Kim, who you seem to think I’m so jealous of. Are you ready?  Here it is.

He’s a moron.

I’m sure you’ve heard the kooky stories about him. Well, take it from me: the stories are true. When we were kids, I shared a bunk bed with my brother.  Being the younger (albeit, the handsomer, by far) I had to sleep in the bottom bunk.  My brother used to keep me up nights babbling on  about how much he wanted to go to Tokyo Disneyland and how he was going to fight off coyotes and savages in Frontierland and learn everything there was to know about the future in Tomorrowland. It was like a fetish.  I’d say: “Kim.  Give it up already.  It aint gonna happen, bro.”

But he would have none of that. He had a portable record player under his covers that played little 45s. And all he ever wanted to listen to was “It’s a Small World After All.” He played it non-stop. Sometimes he would play it at 78 speed so that everybody in the chorus sounded like they had just sucked down a bathtub full of helium. He would hum along with it like Donald Duck in heat. That’s what I had to go to sleep to every night.  I wanted to shove that little record player down his throat. Instead, these years of psychological torture conditioned me for my role as Great Successor to Dear Leader.

Then, one day, when the rest of us were distracted by some bogus threat from the lackeys in the South engineered by the Yankee imperialists, my idiot-sans-savant brother bribes some minor palace functionary to get him a fake passport and to help him slip out of the country undetected at dawn. Then he finally makes his way to the fantasy land of his childish dreams, and what does he do there?  Can you guess? Spends the whole day riding around and around on the  Alice in Wonderland Teacups, squealing like a piglet in doody, that’s what!

His whole life, he fantasizes about his big day at the amusement park where giddy capitalists go to wait on never-ending lines like Soviets of old trying to buy toilet paper. How many times did I suffer through his breathless descriptions of his hoped-for exploits?  He had planned every detail.   He was going to venture into new horizons.  He was going to have once-in-a-lifetime thrills.  Who knows?  Maybe he was even going to flash his man boobs for the cameras at the bottom of the Space Mountain water slide. But, no!  When the big moment finally arrives, all he wants to do is go on the girly teacup ride until closing time.  

Ha!  Can you believe they were grooming this troglodyte to be the heir to our Dear Leader?

Still, in a perverse kind of way, Tokyo Disneyland is the greatest thing that ever happened, because it got my half-wit half-brother out of the country for good.  Can you imagine what an unmitigated disaster if my brother were in charge around here!?  I shudder to even think of it.

In conclusion, I have demonstrated to you that:  (1)  I am not baby-faced.  Just the opposite: I am the Number 1 Handsome Man. (2) Saying that I am jealous of my brother is the stupidest thing I ever heard. It is the other way around. I know he is kicking himself in his fat ass every day wishing he was me.  But he isn’t me. I am me. Number 1 Handsome Man. (3)  There is no number 3.

Well, that’s all for now.  Hope this sets the record straight.

Sincerely,

Kim Jong Un

Anatomy of a Gag

Click on the link.  It's all in the delivery.

Or maybe, it's all in the wrist:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06k95ThnJwM

I'm Just a Ramblin' Rambler, Ramblin' On and On Incoherently

Being an Idiot for Dummies

Another original (except for the parts plagiarized shamelessly) HIYLH animated morality play:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDuqWtk_ODk

Wanna See Some Pics of What I'm Eating Right this Second?

We, here at HIYLH, always used to be annoyed by people whipping out camera phones at restaurants, snapping photos of their haricot verts, and posting the images on the Internet so that their friends and Linkedin connections could be enthralled in real time by the stunning displays of virtual green beans. For the longest time (this is just a figure of speech; the longest time is actually the eta of the D Train), we could not understand why this insipid practice was so popular amongst the madding crowd of a certain age. 

Even more mysterious to us was why anyone could care less what somebody else was eating while dining out last week, or why they would bother breathlessly to peruse a slideshow about it, especially if the photographer were not standing right there next to them, peering giddily over their shoulder, on the verge of crying a river lest the audience (presumably with nothing better to do with his or her life) pretend that studying a digitized reproduction of some half-eaten entre was the most fascinating thing to come along since daylight savings time was pushed up a few weeks.

When we consulted the dictionary, we half-expected this phenomenon to be cited as one of the many examples of the word “stupid.”  We were, notably, unable to test this theory, as we do not consult dictionaries, preferring, instead, to just go with our instinct on spellings. And Definitions.  And facts. Etc.

We bucked the trend as long as we could. (Taking pictures of our food, that is, not consulting dictionaries.  We’re still proudly bucking that trend).

But when it became evident that we would no loner be able to escape the taunts of our peers, accusing us of harboring luddite-sensibilities and worse, we went from bucking to buckling. Accordingly, now whenever we frequent the many victuallers scattered hither and yon throughout the shire, we come equipped with a fully-charged device, a keen eye, and the perspective of a seasoned auteur, prepared to record the day’s repast for posterity, and also to give the Library of Congress reassurance that it won’t run out of stuff to archive.

Will we admit to a smidgen of guilty pleasure in succumbing to this moronic pastime? Absolutely not!  We hate it. We do it only as a public service, and only grudgingly. If it were up to us, we would only do take-out from the Hunan Kosher Happy Fun Time Eating Place, and what we scarfed down would be nobody’s business but our own. But as we are programmed by our societal caste to conduct ourselves in the spirit of noblesse oblige (not given over to wasting time confirming the definitions of haughty-sounding phrases by cracking open a dictionary, as you will recall, we are guessing that this term applies to us), we do our duty, and we do so without complaint.  Kvetching a bit, but without complaint.

The recent results of our mix of gastronomic and photographic escapades are offered below free of charge. We will caution you, Dear Reader (we trust you are the only reader) just this once, so pay attention: Do not gaze overlong at these images. Their hypnotic qualities have the power to transport you to realms best left to the terrifying recesses of the subconscious. Should you be foolish enough not to heed this warning, we cannot be responsible for the sad results.  

The cornbeefed omelette at Grumpy's Breakfast Nook is to stub your toe for. Not that great, but the coffee refills are free if you ask 26 times. As you can tell from this shot, the portions are huge. Looks scrumptious, no?

Elegance is the catchword at Chez Che's. The soft lighting in the dining room nicely contrasts with the posters of Che Guevara plastered all over the walls. It's a kind of culinary marriage of socialism and capitalism.  Here, for example, is a spartan yet tasty arrangement of Walnuts One Way (basically raw nuts dumped on a plate), accompanied by a stunning Riesling.

Soupçon was featuring a melted bullion cube the day we visited. I think it was beef.  But it might have been chicken.  Or fish.  Not really sure if truth be told.  But doesn't it look good?

At Claudio's Jiggy Fish, they take presentation very seriously. The caviar in this Fish Eggs and Egg Eggs dish had turned by the time it reached our table, but the artistic design of a sturgeon choking on an egg in the center was quite ingenious and well worth preserving with the use of an iPad, nerdiness be damned!

The lighting at Daffy's is crappy. And so is the duck.

Hopefully, the masterful treatment of the baked, stuffed scrod  at the tiny purveyor of the day's catch, Any Port in a Storm, is readily evident from this scene.  The fish is totally skinned. Then the skin is glazed and stuffed inside.  Then the whole thing is baked.  Then the skin is taken out of the interior of the fish and glued back on the outside.  Then the whole thing is fried.  Then the skin is taken off and discarded. Then the fish is sprinkled with almond flakes, or whatever happens to be lying around. Then the whole thing is served on a plate together with a napkin, a plate, a fork, and a knife. Then the whole thing is eaten.  Then the bill comes.  Amazing experience.  Also, expensive.

At Mario's, photography in the dining room is strictly prohibited. We were tossed out into the snow for violating the rule.  As the maître d’ was shoving us out the door, we happened to snap this shot of the headless statue out front.  The legend at the base reads:  "Pincus 'Ming' Mandelbaum, Victoria et Gloria, eh!" We have no idea what it means.

The fare at the Cat House verges on the inedible.  We know a certain someone who refuses to eat it no matter how many times "florentine" is used in the name of the dish. There are no English words that can adequately describe the chazzerai they foisted on us the day we came. The big joke there is that they have daily "specials," but it's the same thing every single day.  No wonder the patrons are sick of it.

This is our favorite picture. It really captures the flavor of the slow-roasted brew ladled with care into wax-coated paper cups by the crotchety retirees at Ye Olde Hoity Toity Cafe Franchise. Look at the size of that plastic lid! Big enough for 4 or 5 Cups On the Run (TM). Can't you just smell the aroma? Doesn't it make you want to get some this instant?  You won't have to go far. There's a YOHTC on practically every corner.  But please don't take pictures of the products there.  How would it be  if everybody did it?