Satire Archives - Page 4 of 5

Listening to Limbaugh

October 21, 2008

Colin Powell has endorsed Barack Obama. Of course, Rush Limbaugh couldn’t keep his stupid mouth shut about it. He wrote the following to Politico’s Jonathan Martin:

Secretary Powell says his endorsement is not about race… OK, fine. I am now researching his past endorsements to see if I can find all the inexperienced, very liberal, white candidates he has endorsed. I’ll let you know what I come up with.

How about this, Rush? An open mind might think that Powell sincerely believes that Obama will be a better president. Perhaps his experience with the Bush administration makes him more informed and thus more wary of a McCain win. If you want to get nasty about it, maybe he’s trying to wash off the stink of failure that’s all but ended his own political career; maybe he regrets his unearned loyalty to Dubya.

Perhaps it was Powell’s last flexing of political muscle, an eloquent endorsement of change or at least its possibility. Here’s a short excerpt:

…I’m also troubled by…what members of the party say, and is permitted to be said, such things as, ‘Well you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.’ Well, the correct answer is, ‘He is not a Muslim, he’s a Christian, he’s always been a Christian.’

But the really right answer is, ‘What if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country?’

The answer’s ‘No, that’s not America.’

Is there something wrong with some 7-year-old Muslim American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion he’s a Muslim and he might be associated with terrorists. This is not the way we should be doing it in America.

Then here comes this ham-fisted dickhead to throw his weight around. Should it matter? No. But it does. He opens the door for people like Pat Buchanan or George Will, who works hard to sound erudite and objective as he sinks like a stone, invoking Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.

Well, I’ve been doing a little research of my own, Rush. Your most memorable quote, in my opinion, is this:

The most beautiful thing about a tree is what you do with it after you cut it down.

And the most amusing thing I’ve ever seen you do is your jittery impersonation of Michael J. Fox, set to Herbie Hancock’s Rockit by The Colbert Report.

Comedy Central’s online version cuts it off, possibly due to problems with recording rights or an abundance of good taste. You can see part of it at the end of Colbert’s “The Word” segment. (The word is “shameless” and it is right on target.)

One last thing, Rush. I’d like to suggest an endorsement of your very own.

Rush Limbaugh Oxycontin Ad

I think it’s right up your alley!

The Stupid Baby Name Generator or Zuma Nesta Rock Paper Scissors: Home Edition

August 25, 2008

Remember back in 1987, when everybody gave Woody Allen crap for naming his kid Satchel? What a difference a couple of decades make. In homage to the latest Hollywood couple upping the ante of sadistic baby names, I have come up with a very unscientific method of naming your next living, breathing fashion accessory.

(By the way, Woody’s son was named after Satchel Paige, the legendary ballplayer. He legally changed his name to Ronan Seamus Farrow, and I’m not going to make fun of that because he seems like a great guy from his bio on Wikipedia.)

#1. Pick a place where you had a moment of clarity that put your whole life in perspective.

According to US Weekly‘s baby name expert, Pamela Redmond Satran, Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale named their son after a beach in California where Rossdale had a life-altering epiphany.

“He was standing on Zuma Beach in the early morning after working all night as a production assistant on a music video and was quoted as saying he realized he was wasting his time,” Satran says. “He drove up the coast, slept in his car, and started making the moves that would launch his career.”

It’s a good thing for little Zuma that his daddy didn’t figure this out while he was on the john—or maybe he would’ve just named him John, which would’ve been okay. Or Stool. Yup, still better than Zuma.

#2. Choose your favorite famous person.

Nesta was supposedly Bob Marley‘s name before it was changed to Robert by some immigration jackboot who really did us all a favor since Nesta would’ve been harder to read on a blacklight poster and might have provoked subliminal cravings for chocolate syrup or tea in a can.

Of course, it would be most cool to use a name that symbolizes your fight against the Man. For our purposes, let’s include anyone who has used a different name at some point. Do you prefer Cherilyn Sarkisian LaPiere to Cher or Arnold George to Engelbert?

Naming your kid should be fun. I can’t think of anything less fun than spending as much time as I just did to find out that Humperdinck was the real name of a 19th-century composer who adapted Hansel and Gretel for opera. Please, don’t waste your time. Make it up; no one’s looking. One love, indeed.

#3. Name your profession or favorite purported homosexual.

The name Rock “needs no explanation,” given that the baby’s parents are rock stars, Satran says, and the fact that we’re “long overdue for Rock Hudson-inspired revival.”

Let’s face it, Satran is blowing sunshine up our asses with this one. She has no frigging idea what it means. If it means rock star, how could it apply to these bozos? They wouldn’t know rock if it hit them in the face. (Note to self: hit them in the face with a rock.)

If it’s an ode to Rock Hudson, then many closeted performers come to mind. Legal disclaimer: I don’t know why it brings them to mind or if they are indeed in a closet of any kind. I make no claims as to anyone’s sexual preference and no judgments thereof. After all, look at how badly these stupid breeders are screwing up!

So…… I’ve come up with a few choices:

Daytona Cougar Receptionist

Produce Aisle Cassius Mario Lopez

Crack Den Geddy Salad Bar Manager

Did this help you come up with a baby name? Please do share it with me. (Cher/share pun, ha ha, oh no, need more meds). And while you’re at it, I have another question for you all: who the hell is Gavin Rossdale?

3 Uses for September Vogue

August 20, 2008

Like all good citizens, you are grateful to all the trees who gave their lives to create your fabulous Fall Fashion issue of Vogue. You want to do your part to make the world a more beautiful place. Go beyond the boring dictates of “reduce, reuse, recycle” with these super new ways to give back:

1) Weapon

Create a real fashion emergency when you swing this 798-page tome at a poorly dressed person. Why send fashion faux pas to Stacy and Clinton at What Not to Wear when you can send them directly to the hospital?

(Tip: Grip the magazine in both hands, above your head, and bring the bound edge down hard to work your triceps and incur maximal head trauma.)

2) Insulation

Show your concern for your fellow man by giving your copy to a homeless man, who can crumple the pages and stuff them inside his clothes for warmth. You’re helping mankind while finding the only way anyone will actually wear those crazy, astronomically expensive outfits. Way to keep him in vogue, girlfriend!

3) Sustenance

Are you hoping for a lucrative career in modeling? Once you’re done reading about that fat pig Keira Knightley, you can stave off your hunger by eating her photos. Remember to chew them slowly, though, with lots of diet soda, so they won’t scratch on the way back up. (Save one to tape in the toilet bowl for extra incentive.) And since fall fashion is all about color, your laxative-induced ass gruel will look pretty, too. Good luck!

5 Lessons from Customer Service

August 1, 2008

To give you a little background on my expertise, I can tell you that during my professional career, I’ve made sandwiches, cleaned toilets, sold health food and hawked plastic surgery.

Amazingly enough, the plastic surgery patient has much in common with the health food store customer—one wants to stay young forever from the inside out, the other from the outside in. Both are pretty crabby as a result.

As for the lesson to take from being a sandwich maker and toilet cleaner? Since it was the same job, I can tell you this: disgruntled minimum-wage earners rarely wash their hands.

That said, let’s dive into today’s lessons, shall we?

1. Keep a straight face.

I learned this my first day of training in customer service at Kinney Drugs when I was 16 years old. An impossibly wizened old man appeared, slapped a pack of condoms on the counter and gave me a sly grin that still held a mossy tooth or two.

The woman training me actually dropped to her knees under the counter, shaking with laughter. I rang him up and got him “a pack of them Pell Mells,” as he put it. I never cracked a smile, but I did correct his pronunciation. I don’t think he cared.

2. Anticipate stupid questions.

Patient before plastic surgery: “Will I sleep until I wake up?”
Answer: “Yes, what will happen is you’re sleeping, you’re sleeping, then, boom, you’re awake.”

Customer at health food store: “Do you sell organic chicken?”
Answer: “Actually, all chicken is organic. We don’t sell cyborg chickens here.”
(Hah! That one was a trap. Were you paying attention? The correct answer is “yes.”)

3. Be prepared with helpful advice.

At the health food store’s vitamin counter, customers came to me with questions regarding their digestive health. Apparently, this had become an issue requiring attention although colons had been chugging along with no need for heroic measures for quite a long time.

One of these concerns had to do with toxins accumulating if a person’s bowels were not evacuating at a healthy rate. I mulled this over and found the perfect answer for those wanting to observe their own ‘intestinal transit time’: “Eat some corn.”

This always stopped customers in their tracks, perhaps because it reminded them of exactly what they were seriously discussing with a relative stranger, or perhaps because it was an ingenious idea. Either way, I think I helped a lot of people.

4. Remain professional at all times.

At the store, I interviewed an applicant for a promising career in the produce section. At first, I was put off by his t-shirt depicting a naked woman bound and stretched over a large wheel. Perhaps he hadn’t planned his wardrobe and had just spontaneously walked in to apply. Then I saw the button pinned to the shirt: “I wouldn’t fuck her with your dick.”

It seemed imprudent of this young man not to survey himself prior to entering the store and realize that it might be a good idea to take the button off and put it in his pocket for the duration of his interview. I’m all for freedom of expression, so I finished speaking with him and ushered him out the door telling him we would call if he got the job.

A few days later, he showed up yelling that he couldn’t understand why we still had an ad in the paper. As customers gathered, I tried to explain, “This is how interviews work. Some people get the job and some people don’t. It’s not automatic.” Our security guard helped him exit as he called me some names.

I consider this a failure on my part. I was unable to educate him about the process. The story does have a happy ending; a few weeks later, I saw him handing out flyers. I was gratified that he’d found a job and I quickly crossed the street.

5. Know when it’s time to leave.

At some point, it will dawn on you that now might be the time to look for another line of work.

At the plastic surgeon’s office, it came when I collected payment from a man scheduled to have liposuction. As he left, he said, “I feel lighter already!” to which I responded, “That’s just your wallet!”

At the health food store, it came when I toyed with the idea of creating a T-shirt that summed up my feelings quite nicely: Get laid and eat a cheeseburger, you pasty-faced maggots! It has a certain ring to it, don’t you think?

Class dismissed.

Great Gifts for Depressed Friends!

July 9, 2008

Hey, everybody! Have you been struggling with what to get for those desperately unhappy people in your life? Why wait for an official holiday? (After all, they could be dead by then.) Sad, lonely people are grateful for the smallest gesture and may even feel a flicker of hope before their inexorable fall back into the bottomless pit of despair. Kudos to you, gift-giver!The “I Wish I Were Dead” mug from theonion.com makes a lovely gift for a disillusioned co-worker. And it’s grammatically correct, so it’s also a great gift for your insufferable ex-English major friends who’ll probably live to a ripe old age because they can’t finish editing their suicide notes.

What about a gift for that friend who is teetering on the edge, who hasn’t fully submitted to dejection? The folks at despair.com can help. They have a whole range of products that drive home the laughable futility of hope.

Finally, here’s an honest fashion statement from our pal Archie McPhee. Every time your loved one looks at his pristine wrist, he will be reminded of your generosity and his true outlook on life. Hopefully, he will at least take off that yellow One-Balled Bicyclist band for good! Just make sure it’s taken off before cremation—burning rubber is bad for the environment! Have a great day!

Twitter Tragedy: A Cry for Help Unheard

June 20, 2008

Cleveland, OH — The body of a young woman who will perhaps forever be known simply as sadgirl1188 was found early Tuesday morning in her apartment, dead of an apparent suicide. Was she a victim of the phenomenon of social networking?

Suzie Gernsall, who spoke on condition of complete lack of anonymity, said she had learned of her friend’s demise through a mutual acquaintance. “She Twittered ‘killing myself’ and a little later,’dying’. But, honestly, I wasn’t following her anymore. She’d turned into a real bummer. She stopped Stumbling stuff, her MySpace bulletins were out-of-date and her Facebook page went on and on about some girl named Sylvia Plath, who isn’t even in our network—I checked. After that, I deleted her and told everybody else to, too. But she never knew. It’s nice that you can do it like that now, so you don’t hurt anybody’s feelings.”

The local pizza delivery person was shocked and saddened by the news. “She always ordered online because she didn’t like to talk,” he recalled. “I noticed it was taking her longer and longer to answer the door lately. Also, she was tipping a lot better.”

Her brother, who lives in a nearby gated community, was devastated. “I hadn’t seen her in a while but she’d installed a GPS tracker in her cellphone, so I always felt like I could keep an eye on her. She started wearing those adult diapers after we all heard about that crazy astronaut lady. She said it was just in case she got too depressed to get up from the couch when she had to go. But she seemed really into her new marketing blog, so I thought she was okay.”

Although she had left out extra food and water and had died only hours earlier, the victim had been substantially gnawed on the areas of her body not covered by her filthy bathrobe. Police, shaken by the gruesome discovery, alerted Animal Control personnel, who removed her two cats, Dieter and Scooby, from the premises.

Within hours, images of their adorable bloodied maws began circulating the Internet with a petition to “Save the kitties. Send this to 7 people within the next 10 minutes and you won’t believe what comes up on your screen. I don’t know how, but this really works!!!” PETA is rumored to be mounting a vigorous defense of the felines, citing, among other things, “the irresistible succulence of human soft parts.”

A search of the dead woman’s email revealed thousands of unanswered Digg shouts and several “Is it time to reorder?” queries from Vitamin Shoppe.

A source inside Twitter remarked that the site sometimes goes down for maintenance, causing a member’s lifestream to be briefly interrupted without warning. An upgraded suicide filter is said to be in the offing.

A neighbor of the dead young woman waxed philosophical when informed of the loss. “I don’t know if you could call it a tragedy, really. I mean, the girl didn’t really have any friends.”

June 13 is National Pigeon Day – Ask Your Boss for the Day Off

June 12, 2008

June 13 is National Pigeon Day in Central Park. I found this announcement in New York magazine:

“We’re trying to promote a positive image,” says New York Bird Club founder Anna Dove….“There’s such negativity for no reason. They’re harmless, defenseless. They can’t attack; their beak is very soft.”

It’s great that these disease-carrying merde machines that crowd out other bird species are having their day in the sun. I would like to submit a few more unsung heroes that I believe deserve to be honored.

The Asian longhorned beetle immigrated from China in cargo containers and feeds on maples and elms in New York City, helping us reduce our bothersome tree population since the only remedy is to chop an infested tree down.

Then there’s the Chinese emerald ash borer that’s helped rid us of over six million ash trees in the Midwest. To paraphrase Springsteen (or Edwin Starr, if you’re a purist), “Trees—what are they good for?”

Possibly the most overachieving of these heroes is a plant. Kudzu came here from Japan in 1876 as a decorative plant. It grows an amazing one foot per day, smothering native plants and killing trees with its vines. Like something out of the X-Files, it has taken over many southern states and is on its way north. Then we can have National Kudzu Day when it’s overgrown everything else in Central Park. Hey, at least it won’t hurt our precious pigeons.

Getting back to the invasive species at hand:

Kids will learn cool pigeon facts…as they nibble on pigeon-shape cookies, view pigeon-inspired children’s art, and take part in a candlelight prayer service. (Dove worries there might not even be urban pigeons in five years.)

Hey, here’s a cool pigeon fact. They eat meat. I remember one munching on my KFC like some happy cannibal reenactment on the Discovery Channel.

Meanwhile, she urges all New York families to “carry a bit of bread crumbs in your bag, a few seeds to show kindness and respect. The pigeon isn’t a threat or an enemy. It goes along with quality of life to show kindness and compassion to all living things.” That’s a lovely lesson for the children.

Yes, littering—what a great lesson. Here’s another one. Have your kids wait until after dark to see who feasts on the castoff pigeon cookie crumbs and detritus you’ve left in your thoughtless wake. That’s right, folks: our friend the Norway rat. He lives on unintentional handouts like those yummy crumbs dropped from the pudgy little fingers of adorable children who want to feed the pretty birdies.

But let us not forget what is perhaps the greatest lesson of all. Make sure your kids toss those crumbs right next to the feet of a homeless man. This is a great way to teach your children about irony. He might’ve enjoyed that pastry you crumbled up before you came to the park. He’d definitely drop some crumbs around him to feed the pigeons. You know, those homeless have no manners.

And the Circle of Life continues.

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