Boozled, Bam- and Bean-
by Nathan Walpow
So much crap going on today. So much to bug me. So much to write about in our dear FourStory blog, even though I hate blogs (another thing to bug me) and don’t care about what’s said in most of them and really don’t think what I have to say, at least non-fiction-wise, is all that interesting. (Once, when my novel-writing career was more, uh, active, I started a blog on my website, and canned it after one entry because even I was bored by what was there.)
But I digress ...
I’ve already spouted about The Whittier Breeder, but the older the babies get the more I despise their mother. It’s come out that she’s unmarried and on welfare, and that the doctor who implanted eight, count ’em, eight embryos doesn’t have a very good fertility-inducing record, and that most of what he does have is The Breeder’s earlier spawn. And now we’re forced to watch her on TV, acting as if it’s her right to bring fourteen kids into this world for the state to pay for, and that no one better say otherwise because they’re a bunch of big meanies if they do. And she’s got this damned holier-than-thou attitude that makes me want to puke (by the way, more on puke a little further on); she’s a model of sanctimony, and of course the media are enabling her by publicizing her every idiotic utterance. And she’s named five of the boys with biblical names, then thrown in a random Makai so she can be African or something, and managed to give the girls names that are bibli-sounding and Afro-ish. Ugh. What a societal sinkhole.
Then we have the Republicans ...
It’s hard to poke fun at them when Jon Stewart does it better than I could ever hope to. Though, really, all he’s doing is letting them dig their own pits, like the one telling us how high the dough from the stimulus bill would be if we stacked it in hundred-dollar bills, or how many times it would go around the equator, like a damned Volvo or something. But am I supposed to believe that only three GOP senators really think this is something that needs to be done? I’m sure some of those assholes want to vote for the bill, but won’t because it would sully their Republican-ness or something. Feh.
And speaking of Sully ...
I’m not going to dispute the wonderfulness of what Flight 1549’s crew pulled off, though, as Patrick Smith points out on Salon, they were only doing their job. But do we really need wall-to-wall coverage? Do they need to be paraded out on every news and talk show, resplendent in their uniforms (except the flight attendant who got hers shredded during the evacuation and isn’t up to putting another on yet)? I know ... things are bad, we need happy stories. But there’s something tawdry about the whole thing, something Elephant Man-like, as if a whiff of the media fumes from the octuplets story drifted over and contaminated this one. I don’t mind the crew being celebrated; I’d just like it done with a little more dignity.
Oh, and what about that A-Rod ...
He juiced up, media. Get over it. Stop going on drearily about how the national pastime’s been screwed over and how every child in the country is ruined forever because their hero’s been, uh, sullied, and why didn’t he admit it to Katie Couric. (If I had a secret, Katie Couric would be the last person I’d admit it to.) I’m sick of reading about steroids.
Finally ...
My sister and her husband came to visit this past weekend. They visited Northern California first, and they stopped in at Jelly Belly headquarters, and they brought me a pack of a product called BeanBoozled. Here’s the setup: there are twenty kinds of jellybeans inside, but it looks like there are only ten. Because for each yummy flavor, there’s a bean that looks identical but tastes like something bad. Try that licorice one ... Oops! It tastes like skunk spray. The coconut? Better hope it’s not baby-wipe-flavored. And then there’s my favorite ... the one that looks like the peach one, only it tastes like vomit.
There are so many questions here. How do you go about duplicating the taste of, say, booger? Why would you even want to do such a thing? When someone came up with the idea, why weren’t they locked in a closet, with a filing cabinet pushed in front of the door? And why does something like this exist in my world?
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