What a Fool Believes

T.G.I.F. because it’s time for Fun Facts!

• If you purchase a five euro Flanders red ale with a ten from a bar in Brussels whose walls are papered with posters of Jean-Claude Van Damme films and the bartender hands you back two-and-a-half syrupy waffles, yes, that’s your change.  In Belgium, though the euro is accepted, the common form of currency is the waffle.  So when you get those two-and-a-half syrupy waffles, don’t think they’re a complimentary snack to go with your Belgian ale.  Instead, hold on to them so that you can use them to buy a t-shirt that reads “I Went to Belgium and Bought This T-Shirt with Two-and-a-Half Waffles!  And It Even Has a Picture of Jean-Claude Van Damme on the Back!”
• You’re not going to turn those recycled Game Boys into a robot.  Please, just throw them out already.  Don’t get me wrong: I admire your ambition.  A Game Boy Robot would be “super-sick” and, if not a “giant leap for humanity”, certainly an intriguing stutter-step.  But your girlfriend is going nuts over the piles and piles of Game Boys that “seem to be breeding” throughout her apartment.  And if I, her co-worker, can’t lighten things up with a golden Tribbles joke, you’re just out of luck, pal.
• When planning a visit to the local credit union for your banking needs this March, make sure and try to visit on the 6th.  Every March 6th, credit unions across the country remove the contents of all unclaimed safe deposit boxes and offer them up as the winnings for the victor of the Credit Union Safe Deposit Box Psychological Abuse Marathon.  Any mentally robust and/or viciously misanthropic credit union members who are willing and able can enter the contest.  For the member who isn’t wheeled out emotionally annihilated but the last one standing, they will win all of the safe deposit box contents.  Last year, JoAnn Maysles of Forest Lawn Community Credit Union went home after thirty-four hours with such prizes as $300 worth of treasury bonds, two wedding rings, a worn black and white photo of a woman on a beach, seven keys, unceasing maniacal laughter and a thousand-yard stare.
• This year’s Academy Awards will not be hosted by James Franco and Anne Hathaway, as previously announced, but by “Janne Francaway”, a sort of Frankenstein’s monster of one half of each actor sewn together, which James Franco claims to be his “greatest piece since my performance as ‘Franco James’, a James Franco-like graduate student at an Ivy League school who puts on a one-man show called, ‘James Franco in a Romantic Poets Class’.”
• Next time you’re on Oboe Row, the New York City neighborhood populated by nothing but establishments featuring the double-reeded woodwind, biting into that deep-fried oboe and collard greens entrée at one of its many restaurants, dazzle your date with this little-known bit of oboe lore: Antonio Vivaldi, composer of fifteen oboe concertos, was the first person to use the instrument as a drink garnish and, thus, responsible for that Sloboe Gin Fizz that they’re enjoying.  When your date raises the glass and exclams, “Thank you, Vivaldi!”, don’t be such a humble 333-year old.  Say, “You’re welcome,” Vivaldi.

From “Paranoia-Free Parking” in today’s Wall Street Journal:

“I’m not sure I entirely understand the nuts and blots [sic] of the operation, no pun intended,”

Hello Ralph Gardner Jr. of the Wall Street Journal.  I’ve never read your “Urban Gardner” column and I didn’t read today’s.  I did, however, use Google to find an example of the abusage of “no pun intended” and guess whose I chose?  (You don’t really have to guess, Mr. Gardner, but I’m glad that you were ready to burst forth with an answer.)

Questions: Was I born into some kind of 1984-like, anti-paronomasian society?  When I was but a doughy babe, did some type of task force stop at my home to knead me with the laws of word play?  Couldn’t they tell that all I was interested in at that moment was: a) The shine of their badges and b) What the hell this squishiness was on my ass?  Was there a refresher course when I was in high school?  And was that the day I skipped to sit around a friend’s patio and drink Miller High Life because it seemed far more social, studious and refreshing?

I ask because I am sick of the proliferation of “no pun intended.”  Even if Big Brother says one cannot use puns without guilt or renouncement.

To all I say: You used word play!  Pwn that pun!

Or, if you didn’t intend for the pun: Change the fucking sentence you wrote so that it’s no longer there.  Because, really, that’s the same idea as me slapping you in the face and then apologizing for it when I could have just not slapped you in the face.

If I’m not the only one out there (and, believe me, I’m often the only one ranting about a particular subject), I ask that you join the clause for word play!

Puns Always Intended!

The western sky looked like burst blueberries.  I tried to imagine their scent but couldn’t get past the hundreds of dead and rotting minnows the lake was spitting out onto the beach.  I held your hand tightly in mine.  I turned my head to gag so I wouldn’t spoil our stroll.

Fifty feet from us was a pontoon boat stuck in the sand.
—I wanna hear a tale from some salty ol’ sea dog!
You rushed for it.  Once you got onto something, you hung on until the end.  I couldn’t have stopped you if I tried.  Nor could the fact that only the back half of the boat’s aluminum hull was on the beach.

You kicked over the minnows who’d sacrificed themselves before the algae-covered altar.  At the helm was a slithering mass of garter snakes.
—Where’s the fisherman?
I wanted to say, Maybe you’re looking at them.  Who’s to say they didn’t twist themselves up into a hissing Ahab for a little adventure on the high seas?  Of course I didn’t say that.  You were already shaky.  And my theory as to their wreck would’ve ended the night right then and there.
—I imagine he’s having himself some dinner.  Which is a good idea for ourselves, don’t you think?

A pair of gulls were parked on the spoiler, the same minnow clutched in their beaks.  I’ve seen the look they were giving me a hundred times and I wasn’t liking the hundred and first.  But this was my ride.

The restaurant was empty.  You put the gull feather back in your hair and posed.  Despite everything, yes, I did have room for dessert.

The films of 2010 that knocked me out were either head trips—the neon tendril hallucinations of a DMT trip in Enter the Void; ballerina Nina’s paranoia and/or psychosis in Black Swan—crime tales—the alleged theft of intellectual property in The Social Network; the drugs, beatings and killings of Winter’s Bone—or both—Inception’s heists that take place not in banks but in dreams (within dreams, within dreams…).  B & E my brain for WaFB’s Favorite Films of 2010.

10. True Grit

I started with impressions of Jeff Bridges as “Rooster” Cogburn.  “Shot…rrr klld?” and “IMEENTAKLLYANNONEMINNNIT!”  My friends ate it up.  A week later, it wasn’t bringing anymore laughs.  So I donned an eyepatch and soiled long underwear, didn’t shave and slugged whiskey.  I busted out other lines: “FLLYRHAANDYASONNOFABTTCH!”, “Wmmin ain’t allowwed in tha saloon!”, “Ya Tehxas brrush-popper!”, etc.  I was killing again.  But days later, the laughter dried up—plus my friends got a little disturbed when it was revealed that I had actually popped out an eye.  Undeterred, I switched characters.  Now I was going to be “Bear Man”.  I bought a couple of horses, borrowed a body and showed up with the bear’s head on at a friend’s birthday party.  It got an epic response.  People’ll talk about that night until they die.  And my friends don’t stop laughing anymore.  I guess surgically switching my head out for a bear’s is the perfect joke, proof that my humor’s got true grit.

9. Winter’s Bone

From a recent meeting of the Ozark Mountains Department of Tourism:

—We have got to do something about this Winter’s Bone.  With these Oscar nominations it is not going to go away.  Even more people are going to watch this film and say, “Jesus Jumped-up Christ, Pam, what a shithole!”
—I agree.  It makes it seem like it’s Cormac McCarthy’s The Road out here!
(Mass rabbling.)
—Everybody?  Guys?!  Calm down for a sec.  I’ve got an idea.  What if we play up Winter’s Bone?
—What?  You’ve got to be joking.
—Now just hear me out.  We go all out with the Ouroboros insularity.
—“Ouroboros insularity”?
—We add more dilapidated shacks, destitute kids and meth-fueled creeps.  We cover all the trees and grass with ash and mud.  We turn it into an extreme playground, a modernized Grimm’s Fairy Tale.  We make the Ozarks into “Winter’s Bone World”.
—Go on.
—Think about it.  It’ll bring in that extreme sports crowd, those Type-A personalities, the ones with a ridiculous disposable income.
—I think you’re onto something, Franklin.  What do you think something like this would cost to set up?
—It would be cheap.  Dirt-cheap.  Here are some preliminary figures I’ve worked out…

8. Animal Kingdom

Jacki Weaver was finding it harder and harder to be kind.  Ever since the release of Animal Kingdom, the Australian actress found herself being treated in a much different way.  She expected different treatment—she had been nominated for an Oscar, after all—but it wasn’t gifts and endless praise like, “Smashing job, Jacki!” or “Brilliant performance, love!”  What she got was, “Oh God!  She’s gonna kill me!”  And that was just for smiling and saying, “Thank you,” to a strapping young man who brought the groceries out to her car!  Or, while browsing at Prada, she’d hear the staff repeatedly singing the line “They smile in your face” from the O’Jays’ “Back Stabbers”.  Didn’t they understand that the character of “Smurf” Cody, matriarch of a family of armed robbers, was not her in real life?  Apparently not, because this behavior wasn’t going away.  She realized she was going to have to get another role.  Something light, something G-rated.  She called her agent and, in the sweetest voice she could muster, asked about any upcoming roles for a kindly woman in a kids movie.  Her agent responded, “I’ve got a kids movie but you’ll have to play a witch.”  She sighed.  Jacki Weaver was finding it harder and harder to be kind.

7. Enter the Void

My twin sister Jenny had an out-of-body/near-death experience in the summer of 1996:

“I was partying on this boat in Lake Winnebago with all my friends.  The wine coolers had all run out so some of us girls started drinking what the boys were drinking, which was forty-ouncers of Busch.  I was dancing on the boat when we hit a rough patch.  I slipped and fell.  The forty hit me in the front of the head and the boat in the back.  Everything went black and I splashed into the lake.  I thought I woke up, but, I guess I hadn’t, because all of a sudden I was floating above the water, without a body—because my body was floating face-down in the lake.  I hovered over my friends in the boat for a few seconds until I saw this little whirlpool.  I don’t know why but there was something so comforting, so welcoming about that little whirlpool.  So I went into it.  Instead of cold, murky lake water, the whirlpool was technicolor and warm.  It was like diving into a rainbow or something.  When I came out of it, I was floating over our house.  I went inside—through the roof and walls—and into your room.  You were at your desk, dorking out, drawing a picture of Beck.  I wanted to make fun of you but I couldn’t because I became mesmerized by your lava lamp.  I floated to it and, just like with the whirlpool, I flew into the lava and into that rainbow.  It was technicolor for a few seconds but then went black.  Then I really woke up: alive, back in my body, spitting lake water into a paramedic’s face on the dirty beach of Menominee Park.”

6. Toy Story 3

Late 1974, Aerosmith’s Rehearsal Space

Singer Steven Tyler apologizes to his bandmates.  It seems he can’t come up with a vocal melody or lyrics for the song they’re working on.  He goes up to the building’s attic to think, which he often does in situations like these.
In a rocking chair by the window, Steven sits smoking, occasionally singing something out loud but not liking what he’s hearing.  With nothing, he gets up to head back down and wing it.  As he grabs the door knob, rope goes flying around him.  “What the…?”  He thinks he sees G.I. Joes surrounding him—moving—when the rope tightens and he’s brought down. 
Like Gulliver he lies on the attic floor.  It gets wilder for Steven Tyler when a G.I. Joe, an action figure, approaches with a sheet of paper in his hand.
“Listen up, you thick-lipped, scarf-loving sonofabitch!  We wrote a song.  It’s called ‘Toys in the Attic’ and it goes perfectly with the song that you ain’t got shit for.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, man.  You talk?”
“No!  We don’t talk, we don’t move, we don’t write kick-ass rock and roll songs!  You got me?!”
“Yeah, man, sure.  Just let me up and I’ll do the song.”
Steven thinks the new weed is way stronger than last time as the G.I. Joes release him.  Before he exits, the lead Joe has one final warning.
“I’ll make this crystal-clear for you, Tyler: If you ever tell anyone about what’s happened, we will make your life a living hell.  How about singing shitty ballads for shitty action movies?  Or judging shitty talent shows?  We can make that happen.”
“Alright, man.  But what about Joe?  We’re twins; we share everything.”
“No!  You tell no one!  Let Joe play riffs and dream about his own line of hot sauce, got it?!”

And with that, “Toys in the Attic” was born.

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