Filed Under: Phrases That Need to Die

The real reason why we can't have nice things is because people keep saying, "This is why we can't have nice things."

I rank this right up there with "foody" as a word or phrase that would best serve the world by being savaged by a pack of dogs.

The real reason we can't have nice things is because wages are stagnant. Stagnant, of course, is a euphemism for swirling down the drain. I suspect the only reason wages have gone up at all is due to the enormous inverse gravity well of the top wage earners, whose monetary density is swiftly reaching an event horizon past which even the crumbs from their table cannot escape.

Your average CEO is deeply concerned by this graph. I don't know if you noticed, but right at the very end, productivity has leveled out. This is why, they say, we can't have nice things.

Another Schnitzengruben?

"Mornin', ma'am. And isn't it a lovely mornin'?"

The people have spoken - in authentic frontier jibberish.

But let's not get angry, just because some guy in Colorado said, "No sidewindin' bushwackin', hornswagglin' cracker croaker is gonna rouin me bishen cutter." Or some other guy in Colorado is going to lay off 50 employees because Obama was reelected. He was going to do that anyway, but now he gets to blame it on the durn shurf.

But as the Waco Kid said, "You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know... morons."

King Kong

It's strange. Over the last few weeks, I have found myself much less interested in the outcome of the next election than in whether there is a large, bipedal ape living in North American forests.

Part of me wants to see conclusive, undeniable evidence. However, this isn't it. This is a bear.

But another part of me knows that if someone did finally shoot a clear video of a Bigfoot, or find one dead on the side of the road, that we (the human species of North America) would swiftly descend upon these creatures in mass and destroy their way of life and pretty soon the last surviving hominid species on the planet other than ourselves would become extinct. I would rather never know than see them King Konged.

Wake Up, Sleepy Dead

Last night I had the perfect Halloween/All Saints dream. In it, I found a group of mourners in a field. People were burying their dead, while others were waiting their turn, surrounded by open and closed caskets. As I stood watching the festivities, the elderly woman in the coffin beside me opened her eyes and struggled to breath. I happened to have a CPAP handy (remember, this was a dream), so I strapped it to her face and she was able to recover and sit up. She complained of being extremely stiff, and I reminded her that she had just been dead long enough to almost be buried, so a little stiffness was to be expected.