Breakfast To Death

One cereal box sports a manic bee offering honey-flavored oat holes.
Bees sting. If you’re allergic, that shit kills.
Another box displays a chocolate-crazed vampire.
Vampires bite and suck your blood. Disgusting and deadly!
Then there’s the deranged sun with two scoops of raisins cradled in his sunbeams.
The sun causes skin cancer. And heat-stroke. And retina damage.
Didn’t Wheaties feature OJ Simpson once?
Man, that guy was a bloodthirsty bastard.
What is it with cereal companies using murderous characters to sell their overpriced boxes full of sugar and corn byproducts?
Fuck that. I’m going to have yogurt and bacon.

Misnaming Rights

The baseball team threatened to move to another city, so the city agreed to give the team more tax breaks and financed a new stadium.
A national insurance company headquartered in the city bought the naming rights of the stadium, but the team went with another insurance company.
Sure enough, the team cut corners when they constructed the new stadium, and a deck collapsed during a game.
Even though the insurance company on the stadium wasn’t involved, they got the bad publicity when the lawsuits piled up and victims complained about the settlement.
The team moved to another city anyway.

Hey Vern

I know that Jim Varney died of lung cancer a few years ago. He’s the guy who played Ernest in those movies and commercials. You know, the ones where the hillbilly pokes in the window and shouts HEY VERN!
If you think about it, we’re all Vern. Ernest is shouting all this stupid crap at us, over and over.
But if we were Vern, wouldn’t we lock our doors? Or latch the windows shut?
Sure, Ernest was an idiot, but letting him back in over and over, what does that say about us.
Maybe Vern left out packs of cigarettes?

Mr. Rogers Urban Blight

Do you remember Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood?
Whatever happened to it?
No, not the show. The neighborhood.
He lived near so many interesting people and places.
I guess they all moved away or closed down when Mr. Rogers died.
The local economy went into decline, and the tax base shrunk.
Trolley service had to be cut, which cut off The Land Of Make Believe.
King Friday drained the royal treasury, but to no avail.
Their factory was shut down, and the museum was closed.
I heard there was some kind of revolution there.
But who gives a crap about stupid puppets?

Science Ball

Shattered bats are a common occurrence in baseball, but once, I was in a game where the ball shattered.
The pitcher was experimenting with substances to doctor the ball, and for one game he was trying liquid nitrogen.
How he managed to conceal the tank, let alone soak the ball in the misty hypercooled solution, nobody ever figured it out.
But he somehow got it cooled, threw it, and when the batter hit the ball, it shattered into tiny splinters and wispy smoke.
The umpire threw out the pitcher and called it a ground rule double.
I call it Science.

Twix

These Left Twix vs. Right Twix commercials are annoyingly stupid.
There is no Left and Right Twix.
The packaging opens from the left and right, but the two pieces are Top and Bottom.
And I don’t think a candy bar company would ask:
“Are you a Top or Bottom?”
While the Twix assholes work their shit out.
I’ll be eating Kit Kat.
Because it’s not Left, Right, Top and Bottom.
it’s all one bar.
Although their commercials are wrong, too.
I never break off a piece of a Kit Kat bar for anybody.
I just give them their own bar.

Super Bowl Party

I bought beer, sodas, chips, dips, and wings.
Cleaned the place up. Hired a maid service to do it right.
Even bought the biggest TV in the store. Wiring up the surround system took two engineering grad students.
Went so far as to rent some portapotties. Because three bathrooms might not be enough.
And nobody came. Not a single person.
I watched the game alone.
That’s okay. The Super Bowl was a blowout. And boring.
I took all the food to a local homeless shelter. Played some cards with those folks, too.
Next year, I’ll just go to the shelter.

Skyscraping the bottom of the barrel

I used to work for a television station.
They were in the network’s ownership group. Big markets got new equipment and they’d get cut-rate junk.
They’d only buy new equipment if there wasn’t any way to repair the old.
The station needed a new transmitter, but the network made them run on backup until another station needed a new one. Then they’d get their clunker.
After the World Trade Center fell, I wondered if they were going to salvage WABC’s transmitter from the wreckage, hose off the dead bodies, and refurbish the twisted hunk of metal.
I’m surprised they didn’t.

The Phone Book

They say that Jackson Bart’s voice is so smooth and deep, people would pay to hear him read the phone book.
So, he did. He toured the country, reading the phone book.
He filled coffeehouses, bookstores, and Hard Rock Cafes. Pretty soon, he booked arenas and stadiums, and he sold those out, too.
That’s when the phone company stopped printing the book. Instead of recycling unused books, they didn’t print at all.
Jackson tried to read online listings and his iPhone contacts list, but it never was the same.
Now, he reads numbers in bathroom stalls as he cleans toilets.

Bob Dows

The man in the white wig and blue glasses was famous.
But not for being an ungrateful monster.
No, the city loved him. For all the wonderful things he did for people.
Except for his cameraman and producer, who he depended on for everything.
When the famous man died, the television station got rid of the producer, but they couldn’t shake the old cameraman.
This was all he truly cared for.
He shot whatever needed shooting. Edited anything needed editing.
They wore him out. He had one knee replaced. Then the other.
But they never brought him to his knees.