Category: Nonsense
“West, it seemed, didn’t have it nearly as bad as Burt Ward. In his 1995 autobiography ‘Boy Wonder: My Life in Tights,’ Ward admitted that his Robin trunks left little to the imagination. Because of Ward’s amply sized genitals, the producers gave him unusual ‘shrinking’ pills, and equipped him with usual underclothing appliances to make him less pronounced. Ward wisely stopped taking the unnamed pills, fearing for his fertility. It’s a good thing he did. Ward’s first daughter was born in 1966.”
Many of you have pointed out that you’re not into Kindle and asked me if there is a paperback version.
There is: Here.
It is also available in most countries through your local version of Amazon (all the major English-speaking countries, plus many more).
(Please note that the darned thing is free if you have Kindle Unlimited.)
Oddly enough, “Thor the Masturbating Walrus” was also the name of my college roommate.
“A meandering — and masturbating — walrus named Thor has popped up in Iceland, two months after eagle-eyed Brits spotted him visiting the UK.”
When I made my trip to Russia in 2013, I wrote a novel. Yes, that was a very stupid way to pass my time when I had traveled to St. Petersburg with a beautiful young woman, but I had to deal with a severe moral crisis, and I did it in the way I know how.
My indecision about that relationship led me to examine the first 23 years of my life, and I suppose I learned a lot about why and how I trapped myself in a terrible situation. I had an unusual life between ages 3 and 23, I would say it was completely unique (as far as I know), and I suppose all of that may explain why I am always so timid about so many things. My mom and dad are gone, and I have never shared the details of my early childhood with anyone, not my best friends, not my ex-wives, not my children, so before I wrote this novella, none of the incidents existed except in my memory. Now at least they are on the record.
I will not claim to be James Joyce, but I can spin a yarn purty fair, and I have some pretty good ones to spin. I finished the work off in this week of illness by adding an epilogue.
There’s no Uncle Scoopy material except for my customary tip o’ the hat to Romy Schneider, so don’t expect any discussions of sex and nudity. It’s really kind of a sad story. There are also some laughs and there was a lot of fun in my life, but I always ended up getting humiliated in some way – physically, sexually, financially. After a few anecdotes, you’ll get the idea that they never seem to have a happy ending. I was like the Moll Flanders of Howdy Doody fans.
Anyway, those of you who basically know me because we’ve been sharing these blogs for decades may be interested to see what I was like in my years growing up in Catholic schools, which I never wanted to go to and my parents never wanted to send me to. I think you can guess that I have few kind words for the Catholic Church or its representatives.
Here is the link. (Blaise Sparrow is me.)
Or not.
“Have you ever wanted to role-play as Jesus Christ, performing miracles, fighting Satan, dying horrifically on the cross and then somehow getting resurrected and ascending to heaven? Perform amazing miracles, interact with a cast of biblical figures and travel around the Holy Land!”
“In a bizarre set of photos, Diaz can be seen wearing the sheep wool jacket and dark trousers while appearing to trail through the grass”
“Pooh wades into far darker territory than even Eeyore could have ever imagined. Now feral and bloodthirsty, Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet terrorize Christopher Robin and a group of young women at a remote house.
Though made for less than $100,000, ‘Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey’ will open Friday on some 1,500 screens in North America, an unusually wide release for such a little-funded ‘movie.'”
“King Henry Vlll’s footwear looked suspiciously similar to Greggs’s steak bakes, which could provide proof of time travel from the 16th century“
“Because nobody would have come if I yelled ‘chocolate'”!
(I fell into a vat of chocolate)
… La day do dum la day do dum day
No big deal. I mean, who among us hasn’t send a few obscene pictures to a corporate mascot? I often send dick-pics to the green M&M, 99-year-old Henry Kissinger frequently Tweets pics of his asshole to Mr. Clean, and I know for a fact that Golda Meir used to send open beaver shots to Mayor McCheese.
It is said of many men that they have some big balls. That is normally a figurative expression, but not in Tommy’s case.
True dat, but phrases like this don’t help: “legitimate resort fees.” There is no such thing.
It is not fare to lump these fees in with airline add-ons, because airline add-ons are actually for something, and if you don’t use that something, there’s no fee. You don’t pay baggage fees, for example, if you have no baggage.
Resort fees are not an add-on, but simply part of the room rate that they want to hide from you for one reason or another. You can’t avoid them they way you can avoid baggage fees. The hotels pretty much created the concept to hide the true cost of the room, and then turned it into a complete scam to get the top search results on places like Priceline and Booking.com.
Here’s the most radical scam I have seen personally:
I searched for a hotel room in a southern town, and I set the options for ranking from cheapest to most expensive. Normally I would choose the cheapest one that has a high score for customer satisfaction with a large number of votes. Miraculously, one of the highest-rated was only $39.95 a night. I figured that’s because it was off-season and they don’t want empty rooms.
I figured wrong.
They just listed that rate to get the top position in the search. When I went to pay, I found that my bill would be more than $200 per night. There’s forty bucks for the room, about twenty bucks for local taxes, and 150 bucks for resort fees.
I ended up staying down the road at a place that was honest about its prices. That place listed a base price twice as high as the scammers, but I ended up paying about half as much – and it’s actually a much nicer place.
By the way, I think they are probably hurting local governments as well as cheating their customers. Many localities place a sales tax on hotels. If the hotel charges me $190 for the room in an area with a 10% tax on hotels, I presume they have to collect $19 tax. If they charge me $40 plus a $150 resort fee, I’m guessing that they only collect $4. (But that’s just me guessing. Coming up with dodges like that used to be a part of my job, so I’m always suspicious.)
My girlfriend has zero tolerance for resort fees and goes full Karen on the poor clerks and assistant managers, insisting that the hotel reveal precisely what the fees are for, then says “OK, we don’t want any of that, so just charge us the base rate.” We have actually run into one honest business that agreed to that, but mostly they just offer some mealy-mouthed crap about how “it doesn’t work that way,” whereupon she forces them to admit out loud that it’s not really a “fee” of any kind, but just part of the base rate.
I don’t have the patience or inclination for such confrontational tactics, but she reminds me that by doing it in front of all the other customers, she’s educating the public to the scam. (I always point out that they would gladly trade that education for checking in ten minutes faster, which they would do if the person ahead of them was not complaining.)
SIDEBAR:
If you are out there and influence the policies of some company like Priceline, I would very much like you to sort by true cost instead of the posted rate. That’s easy to do. Your software already makes that calculation when we click on “choose,” so there is no excuse for your failure to offer that sorting option. The way it is now, I have to click on each individual hotel to get that number, then write it down with my low-tech BIC pen, then repeat as many times as I can until I get weary of the process.
“Oh, um, it’s literally, like, in my butt crack … He probably threw it away.”
“Speculations have been made in the local area that the McCrispy billboard will be replaced with one for Burger King’s flame-grilled Whopper, however, these claims have not been confirmed.”
He actually has a great sense of humor, and some pretty good comedy chops.