If it doesn’t start raining frogs on Tuesday, I’m going to be very disappointed.
And the apocalypse will be especially depressing given how happy and unified our country is today.
Who invented pumpkin spice latte? Gonna tear that mother****er’s statue down.
So I’ve been ransacking the cooler at my local Dunkin’ Donuts a lot lately, looking for just the right novelty bottle. Because I am an emotionally disturbed 44-year-old man, with too much time on my hands, and not much in the way of an actual agenda.
This is what my search efforts recently labored to produce. I plopped it down, looked the girl at the counter directly in the eye, and belted out, “LEEROOOOOOOOOOOOY JENKINS!!!”
She looked at me as though I had just demonstrated severe mental illness, like maybe I had addressed her as “Mom,” or tried to pay for my soda with cotton swabs or something.
Is the joke that old? Is the reference too obscure?
I feel certain she knew I was not simply crooning my own real name. I look and sound so much like a New Yorker that I cannot possibly pass for a “Leroy.” Probably not even a “Jenkins.”
Oh, well. YOU people get me.
Except when a cheesy marketing gimmick causes a grown man to ransack the Dunkin’ Donuts cooler in search of a novelty plastic bottle. Then a man has a name.
Soooooo, I finally gained a true appreciation earlier tonight of how bad a skunk could smell. I’ve smelled them before … I’ve been in Virginia for a while now, and I actually spotted my first skunk in upstate New York when I was a kid. (They’re not pretty.) But this is the first time I’ve encountered a full dose from an animal that was evidently nearby.
Dear Lord.
This was the olfactory equivalent of Dante Alighieri’s worst visions of hell. The odor was at once strangely metallic, horribly organic and chemically toxic. If one of Michael Bay’s “Transformers” were possessed by the demon from William Peter Blatty’s “The Exorcist,” and it wielded flatulence to punish the damned, this would be it. If the three Kryptonian villains from 1980’s “Superman II” had been poisoned by chili laced with spoiled pork and Ex-Lax, this would be it.
Skunks might now top my list of hated animals, were it not for my enduring abhorrence of alligators.
Earwigs are moving up on that list, too — at least since I spotted one at 7:15 tonight in my kitchen. Earwigs look like God tried to make a proper beetle while on acid.
STOP putting pressure on the President to let people “be in the room” when he meets with Putin.
It’s sick. Just let them make love in private.
If you haven’t read Daniel Keyes’ outstanding novella, then check out Cliff Robertson in its excellent film treatment, “Ricky.”
Justin Trudeau forgets to mention Alberta in his Canada Day speech?
I pity Canadians. I can’t imagine what its like to have a head of state who publicly embarrasses an entire country like that.
You know what he should do if the Canucks keep grumbling? Just GRAB Alberta by the Canada Day speech.
Somewhere, Eddy Grant is crying right now.
I expected better of you, Roanoke.
That sounds like a 70-pound cricket, hopped up on steroids, with cybernetic enhancements that electronically distort its voice.
That is NOT one of God’s creatures.
Why must you harbor such strange fauna, Roanoke?
I gotta get audio of this.
[Update: Internet user Jen M. helpfully provided me with the below image to assuage my apprehension. (Thanks, Jen.) Some trivia — Jen tells me that’s actually a still from “The Beginning of the End,” the film that MST3K expertly lampoons with Crow’s Peter Graves impression.]
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 