Ayn Rand: Late Night.

Another HIYLH short:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjJrQ5CShLk

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaarvark Goes for Gold

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is how many rows away from the emergency exit I was sitting, and what my lousy flight was like, and how my stewardesses acted before they had me confined to my seat for doing jumping jacks in the aisle, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

       The point is, the Aaaaaaaaaaaaaarvark National Team finally made it to the Olympics. Or within the general proximity thereof. At least on paper. Sort of.

       Here's how it all went down.

       Day 1:  Aaaaaaaaaaaaaarvark National Team formed. (tryouts not necessary because country has a population of only 2 (1 of whom refuses to recognize country) plus cat.

       Day 2:  Cat deemed not eligible for National Team and summarily kicked off.

       Day 3:  Cat appeals expulsion order.

       Day 3: (partius secundus):  Expulsion order upheld.

       Day 3: (partius tricundus): Cat defects across the border and seeks political asylum.

        Day 3: (partius quatrain): Cat's application for political asylum denied!

        Day 3: (partius quintius maximus): Cat summarily repatriated by enemy border patrol.

       Day 3: (partius sextuplet): Cat begins sit-in protest.

       Days 4-72:  Casting about for some Olympic event in which to compete.

       Day 73: Hitting upon notion of Olympic Solitaire.  Pros: Can be played with only one person.  Cons:  Can be played with only one person.

       Day 73 (partius secundus) : Olympic Solitaire scratched!!!

       Days 74-79:  In training for Olympic channel surfing. (not to be confused with other surfing events).

       Day 80:  Board plane for London.

       [skipping over various incidents on the plane]

       Day 80: (partius secundus) Arrive London.

       Day 80: (partius ticonderoga)  Ask directions for Olympic Village.

       Day 80: (partius quatrain) No one knows where Olympic Village is.

       Days 80-83: At Courtyard by Marriot®, stewing.

       Day: 83 (partius secundus) Bellhop happens to causally mention that Olympics are not in London, Ontario but, rather, that other London, and what is the Aaaaaaaaaaaaaarvark National Team doing in Canada when the Olympics are in England? Rubbing it in, etc.

       Day 84:  Board plane for London.

       [skipping over various incidents on the plane]

       [skipping over various incidents at customs]

       [skipping over various incidents on the “Tube”]

       Day 85: Conversation with bobby, summarized as follows:

       “You can’t come in here, without credentials mate.”

              “I’m with the Aaaaaaaaaaaaaarvark National Team.”

       “Never ‘eard of you.”

“What do you mean you never heard of us?  Here. Here’s our flag.”

       “You’re not on the list. Put that greasy thing away, and kindly step aside.”

              “But I’ve got to march in the Parade of Nations.”

        “Mate, the Parade of Nations was 6 days ago.  You’re a mite late.”

              “Ho, ho.  Very funny.  The Parade of Nations can’t get started without the first team alphabetically. That would be us by a long shot. Helllo? Aaaaaaaaaaaaaarvark. Also first in the phone book.  Maybe you should look at your little list again.”

       [skipping over various incidents at the magistrate’s court]

[skipping over Aaaaaaaaaaaaaarvark medal count so far, but you can probably guess it.]

Day 86: Consoling self with high tea at the Savoy, watching on the “telly” as various badminton teams deliberately throw their matches.  Even the cat could play better than these buffoons.

Day: 86 (partius secundus) Happen to tell bellhop at the Savoy about the ins and outs of the Aaaaaaaaaaaaaarvark National Team Olympic event. In response, bellhop happens to causally mention that there never was and never will be any such Olympic event.

Why do clueless people and fakers have so many opinions, do you suppose?

-------------------------

Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.

FOR OUR CONVENIENCE, WE'VE AUTOMATED YOUR LEGAL BILL

Check all that apply:

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_____ Getting you out of the weeds----------------- $ Lots

_____ Lifting you out of the tall grass--------------- $ Mucho

_____ Pulling your ass out of the frying pan ------ $ Mondo

_____ Pulling your ass from the fire ----------------$ Mucho-Mondo

_____ Pulling your ass from a sling -----------------$  Mongahela

_____ Snatching you from the Titanic  ------------- $ Wads

_____ Making people forget what you just said ---- $ Scads

_____ Making people forget what you just did ----  $ Gobs

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_____ Stamping out your fires ------------------------ $ Megabucks

_____ Rescuing you from your own stupidity  ------ $ A fortune

The Presidential Grate Debate (it grates on you).

Presented as an election-year service by the machers at Honk if you Like Honking:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2l3NS69dwqI

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

1.              What does FAQ stand for?

Answer

Search us. Why do you ask?  Hopefully it will never come up.

2.              When people say “at the end of the day,” as in: “At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what the government does,” do they mean 5:00 pm, 11:00 pm, midnight, or what?

Answer

What?

3.              How ya doin?

Answer

Alright.  How ya doin?

4.              You gonna finish that?

Answer

No, you can have it.  It wasn’t very good.

5.              How do you know that your dreams aren’t your real life and what you think is your conscious state isn’t really just a dream?

Answer

What?

6.              How come every stupid scandal that comes along has to be nicknamed with the suffix “gate,” as in “fencegate”?

Answer

There was a fence scandal?  Where were we?

7.              When a movie critic uses the phrase “fun for the whole family,” what is the real message?

Answer

Avoid this insufferable piece of fluff like the plague.

8.              Where are you if you are standing at Latitude:[40.749830598227], Longitude:[-73.987841281506]?

Answer

Bloomingdales. But if you cheat a little to the left, you’ll be at the food court.

9.              Has anybody ever really been thrown under the bus?

Answer

Once.  In a movie.  That was fun for the whole family.

10.           Is time-lapse photography just for lazy people?

Answer

No.  Not everybody has the time to sit around all day and watch flower petals open up.  But some people do.  

11.           If the queen shows up at your door unexpectedly, what do you offer her to eat?

Answer

Chitlins.  She can’t get enough of them.  Always have some on standby.

12.           Wouldn’t it be faster to drive all the way to the bank?

Answer

You mean instead of laughing? No. It’s like a parking lot out there.  Nothing’s moving in all directions.  You might as well laugh.

13.           Is it illegal to “oprima numero dos” if you don’t really speak Spanish?

Answer

Yes.  Highly illegal.

14.           Who? or Whom?

Answer

That’s a question?

15.           Have you had about enough of this?

Answer

I’ll say.

Know Your Punctuation Emoticons

A Post-Modern Fable That Made it to the Cutting Room Floor

        There was agitation in the land, and the air was thick with discontent.  Not as thick as our winter, but still, pretty thick. The government no longer trusted the People to do the right thing, and by and large, the feeling was mutual. Anger reigned, and it never seemed to stop raining.

         Under such circumstances, one would have expected there to have arisen from the restive provinces a great hue and cry, but in these sad times, the provinces were suffering a general malaise, and all they could muster was a great hue. Some critics thought it wasn’t even that great and gave it only two stars.

       Whereas before, neighbor would not have hesitated to lend a helping hand to neighbor, and not infrequently, a lawnmower, now the citizenry eyed one another with suspicion and contempt. No small number found themselves at the ophthalmologist’s seeking relief from the nagging eye strain that is the natural by-product of going around looking askance at everybody on a regular basis.

       At the National Assembly, there were the usual fatuous speeches and sitting on hands until the circulation was nearly cut off. The customary accusations of malfeasance leveled at the sovereign were met with the customary silence. Unsurprisingly, this satisfied no one, except the status quo, which was doing a brisk business. 

        The King was nowhere to be seen.  It had been ages since he had last stepped out onto the balcony to wave robotically to the adoring throngs below. The general scuttlebutt was that he had holed up in the inner court surrounded by a coterie of sycophants all competing with one another to see who could grovel more facetiously. The truth was that the King had holed up in the inner court surrounded by a coterie of sycophants all competing with one another to see who could grovel more facetiously.  From time to time, the court jester would stop by to see if he could eke out a smidgen of mirth from the royal highness. But his one joke: "Who died and made you King!?" soon lost its luster. Particularly after the 13th re-telling.      

       In the countryside, even the beasts of burden, underemployed though they had been ever since the mass circulation of the internal combustion engine, were staggering under the weight of the pervasive unhappiness. As they had throughout the ages, the animals exhibited an uncanny ability to express appropriately calibrated anxiety about the national debt. At least, that’s how some of the pundits interpreted the signs. Others thought they were just sick of eating grass for dinner every night.

       “Who will get us out of this mess?” became the catchword of the day. Even though that’s really 8 words, nobody wanted to state the obvious. It had been done so many times before that not a soul would have paid good money for it, even had it been gussied up with a catchy song and some energetic dance steps.  

        Thus, when the shepherd came bounding into the main square exclaiming that he had just seen a wolf, the populace was dumbfounded. “You can still get a job as a shepherd these days?  Who knew?” they were heard to mutter amongst themselves.  So accustomed were they to arbitrage traders losing track of 5 billion dollars bounding into the main square on a regular basis that when a living, breathing shepherd stood before them quivering with fright, they could scarcely believe their eyes, although their ears still commanded a respectable degree of credibility. But no one paid any attention to the shepherd's story. For one thing, it didn't have an ironic plot twist in it.

       Dejected and shy the cab fare, the shepherd began to walk slowly home. "Slink" is a little more like it. Because when your confidence has taken a beating, your gait is one of the first things to be affected. Well, maybe not yours, but it is for most normal people.

         No one who was there that day and witnessed the event remembers it exactly the same way as anyone else who wasn't there but pretended that they were (like the 50 million or so who all claim to have been at Woodstock). Some say that it happened all-of-a-sudden-like; others that it was kind of gradual, like roots growing in a storm drain until the plumber can no longer safely be put off; still others that it was gradually sudden-like.  Id.

        But on this, they all agree.  From Seemingly Nowhere (a district sporting the idiotic license plate motto: “Bumpkins do it with Panache”) emerged a babe out of whose mouth emerged the following words:

       "If we don’t stick together, it’s because we’re using substandard glue.” 

       And then the People began to weep. Not because anybody had the slightest clue what this was supposed to mean, but mostly because they realized for the first time that the tariff wasn’t doing an adequate job of keeping out shoddy, underpriced materials of dubious provenance, thereby depressing wages, imperiling the structural integrity of highway overpasses, further denigrating the popular culture to a level beneath its already vacuous state, and spawning a nationwide grumpiness. 

        So loud was the cry of the People, that even the King on his lofty (but in serious need of re-upholstering) throne heard it. All at once, the King knew exactly what he needed to do.

        He caused to be thrown open the doors of the castle. (What, he was going to do it himself?  No! You delegate!)  From far and near, the People came for a tour to see for themselves with their own eyes or any eyes they could get their hands on that the walls they thought had been separating them from their rulers and from each other, and from each other's walls, were just an illusion, as was every temporal, corporeal thing they had ever known.

         All was illusion.  What was real could not be seen or touched or weighed or horded, and most of all, declared on a tax form.

        And in this one moment, everyone knew -- everyone, from the lowest of the low to the highest of the high and the middlin'est of the middlin'est -- that when all was said and done, and the fat lady had sung, and the chickens had come home to roost (where some of them had sung, but not very well, let's face it), that everything -- everything -- was going to be alright.

        And not only that, but seniors and students with ID got in to the castle for half price.