All Entries in the "Lifestyles at Risk" Category
WARNING LABELS HARMFUL TO GENE POOL
EDITORIAL
When was the last time you stood in a bucket of water while repairing an electrical appliance? Do you often climb extension ladders while blindfolded? Can you successfully operate a child proof cigarette lighter? How much cotton is too much cotton when one peers into an aspirin bottle? Buckle up for safety — We wouldn’t want the insurance companies to lose money if you are injured.
The multitude of warning labels that has graced the 21st Century is severely depleting the gene pool by promoting the survival of people who would perish on their own. If we are to follow the theories of natural selection we must put a stop to this neurotic reminder machine that society has found growing like a boil on its posterior. If this insanity continues our off-spring will be no more than a pile of ignorant robots waiting for the next command.
Stop this mad intersession now before it’s too late. The only warning label we need is one that says: Welcome to the planet Earth. Maximum capacity limited. Quality of life fragile. Please do your own thinking.
Time Flies in the Tropics
I have tapped into an incredible reader audience here in my Hoi An hammock. My stumbling scribe act goes over great since none of my neighbors can string an English sentence together and my Vietnamese is still at a childlike murmur. It’s the perfect readership. They scan and smile. No critics. Being a grandfather (ang noi) as well as a journalist (nha boa) is working well in a culture where older people and creativity are cherished.
View from my house
I even did well during the recent flood as no less than 4 neighbors brought me food. Now there is no room in my refrigerator. How can one gain weight on rice and vegetables? Down them with three beers and follow that up with a dessert of a delicious Vietnamese ice cream. I will wait another day to traverse the water. Would you like some chicken and rice? How about a hunk of pickled papaya?
Cua Dai (pronounced good eye) is a bustling street that takes one to Cua Dai Beach.
The Lights are on but no one’s home. Coffee houses seem always empty but blaring, mindless digital bass music blasts into the streets anyway.
Ba Le Market is fun. The lady vendors laugh at my bad Vietnamese but I usually get a lower price because I try to speak to them in their own language.
Sunshine! (Nang!) Even the crabby lady at the mini mart smiled at me.
Finally I get to go to the beach, a 4 km ride on my bicycle.
Toi or I, me…was not used much in Vietnam until the 40s. For 1000 years the strict concept of the individual yielded to the concept of village. It is used today but people still try to get around it when talking abut themselves.
The traffic is absurd. My bicycle is great for long stretches, back streets, beach lanes and after 9 pm when everyone goes home. Often riding in the Old Town or along busy roadways is like negotiating Red Mountain Pass in July or August.
In this vein I neglected to add that the rebar-wielding grandmother from the Use Your Noodle article was texting her son and humming April in Paris when she narrowly (in my Western estimation) missed running into me on Li Thai Do Street.
A palmetto bug runs across the floor. My machete is upstairs. I hope he doesn’t see me. He looks like he lifts cockroach weights. Look at those biceps.
Today I will pay a visit to my Friend Anh Ming over on Tran Nhon Tong Street. He is always trying to show me rooms for rent in his homestay even though he has been to my house. Mr Ming is the nosiest person in Central Vietnam and Western Laos. I fully enjoy making faces of disapproval when he interrogates me. If he persists I start drinking my beer fast in preparation to leave and he settles down.
Vietnamese cuisine some of the best in the world
Sample Dialogue:
Mr Ming: You send people here to stay at my guesthouse.
Me: Well if the opportunity presents itself I will.
Mr Ming: You send to Mr. Ming
Me: I grasp your concept Mr. Ming.
Mr Ming: Air conditioning, Wi-FI, breakfast.
Mr Ming is a gardener/cook/a virtual walking multi-media salesman. Mrs Ming runs the front desk and all the cash. She is extremely pleasant to me and generally ignores Mr Ming. She has offered to take me to the market so I get a Vietnamese price on such things as eggs and toilet paper. She is quite sincere in her offer, but quite nosey too.
Their son, Dung, fixes baby motorcycles. He never asks me anything which is much preferable to the Ming grilling. Mrs. Ting smiles all the time and brings me noodles while rolling her eyes at her husband. Next time I will bring her a rose.
Well then…I’ve been a few spots on several continents but I have never been treated so well as on a little front porch bar on the river. I am the only foreignor that goes there. The only pretense there is that the patrons stare at you if you drink beer from the bottle and not from a glass. “Who brought you up? The dog?”
An Bang Beach palapas
I ask for a glass. Squid salad and beers in this populist’s Vietnamese language school. Smiles and pigeon English are flying all over my table. I started out solo near the street but now I’m set back in a more profound spot against the wall, chatting away to who knows what end. After three weeks I have three adopted grandmothers, two daughters, several good male acquaintances and a host of women mothering me.
My local was flooded recently and from the mud that hangs along the riverbank I think they got a heavy dose of what kept me inside my house for two days. I see people cleaning debris from the river just because they feel a need to do so. Just a little. Everyone does just a bit of pulling and collecting and bagging the trash that was absconded by the bad ol’ river. Sounds almost communal, even tribal.
– Melvin O’Toole
O’Hare Airport to become Obama International
The international airport in the Windy City named for WW II flying ace Butch O’Hare (a non-politician) back in the Fifties will be known as Barack Obama International Airport come May 2017.
According to supporters it couldn’t have come at a better time what with the Cubs running away with the Central Division and Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s desperate attempts to quell violence in the city.
Obama adopted Chicago and taught Constitutional Law at the esteemed University of Chicago before his campaign and election to the Presidency. The flip-flopping action comes just weeks after Congress pledged to restructure its patterns and avoid naming airports after ex-presidents such as George H. Bush and Ronald Reagan.
We’d rather name our functioning infrastructure after cultural and entertainment icons which represent the real American spirit,” said Selma Gantry, who has spent tome in over 4000 airports worldwide. “Why name an institution after a politician on either side of the aisle?”
The Illinois Department of Public Safety, thrown together recently to bring some sense of normalcy to airport name restructuring, recommended that Bush International in Houston be named for the late Mickey Mantle and Reagan Airport be named for Bob Marley, even though the latter was born in Jamaica.
“Anybody is better than the present power broker namesakes,” she continued. “Anything will do. Please show some taste and get rid of the Reagan statue at the entrance to the nation’s most prominent landing zone. It’s almost as bad as the provincial Bronco near Denver International. Traveling Europeans are laughing at us. It’s an embarrassment. Please!”
In a related undertaking, a well-received plan to rename Dulles Airport Katherine H. Hepburn International Flyway, appears to be making strides and will most likely be undressed again after Trump is impeachment. The Dulles Brothers were instrumental in setting the nation back some 50 years with reactionary foreign policies that torment us even today. Their black and white missionary zeal is blamed for failure upon failure and has left the American people with an all but insurmountable legacy that is in no way comprehended by most of the populace.
– Attila Diggins
Ham Radio Geek Brings Home the Cosmic Bacon
(Stellar 17 – Quadrant 555 – January 5, 2017)
Ham radio enthusiast, Melvin “Breakfast Meat” Toole claims to have made contact with “like-minded” beings on Uranus and Pluto. Insisting that he has conversed with alien beings since the 70s, the self-taught, continuous ultra-wave technician spends his evenings chatting in primitive code.
Despite efforts by the FCC and other government agencies to discredit him, Toole has repeatedly offered taped conversations, and select coordinates from unexplored regions of the Universe.
Melvin “Breakfast Meat” Toole taking a break from taking a break at his favorite beach bar.
“Our conversations basically come down to small talk. We are careful not to get too political or elitist in out quest to improve intergalactic communication,” he said. Last night I discussed the increase in Black Holes with an amateur radio operator from an unnamed star near Neptune and although the reception was poor we managed to exchange some pretty heavy information.”
Toole said his alien friends were most interested in muscle cars, genetic agricultural breakthroughs, governmental charades and whether or not Michael Jackson would be producing another LP after Thriller.
“I guess they didn’t know he was deceased and I wasn’t about to be the one to break the news,” he frowned.
– Gabby Haze
“Crossing the International Date Line single can be a lonesome, yet relaxed endeavor.” – Small Mouth Bess
Y2K JELLY SALES SKYROCKET
18 years ago in the Horseshoe
(Computerland — New Market Products Press — January 1, 1999)
Data collected from the fourth quarter of 1998 shows Y2K jelly selling abnormally well according to lubricant brokers and store managers nationwide.
“We have people coming in here everyday with a generator under one arm and canned goods taped to their foreheads,” said Melvin Toolula, exotic lotions fellow at Lewinsky’s Hardware here. “It’s gotten so bad in our strip mall that we’ve considered paving a couple more acres of pasture for parking.”
Although it’s eleven plus months until D-Day when computers all across this great land will supposedly take a memory powder, people are already panicked. Most are frightened of being without electricity, food and water.
“Have you ever seen a dog that doesn’t have an itch to scratch?” asked Dr. Efram Pennywhistle of the Laudanum Institute in nearby Reaganville. “He is driven half mad. It’s the same with these daily reminders of what happens when blind reliance on technology takes the upper hand. Who cares if the whole system breaks down? Viva la Anarchy! Maybe it’s our chance to start again. It’s clear,” he spat, “that we haven’t done a very good job to date.”
Social scientists liken the Y2K fears to the bomb shelter phenomenon of the 50s where affluent Americans attempted to thwart the devastation of nuclear warfare by building well-stocked bunkers underground. At the time, the accepted theory was that the inhabitants of these insulated prisons would survive effects of radiation poisoning and general contamination, only to emerge in an undisclosed period of time and continue the human saga.
“The probability of nuclear warfare is greater today than in the 50s,” chimed in Toolulu from his perch in information potions, “but the fallout shelter fad is gone, pretty much. Suffer the fools, my brave Portia…”
Toolulu went on to describe people running out into the streets looking up at something bright in the sky, then he fell asleep.
Meanwhile Pennywhistle continues to live in a limestone cave near Spar City, said to be populated by hordes of stalactites and stalagmites.
“They don’t bother me if I take my medicine and fumigate regularly,” said Pennywhistle.
According to other unrelible sources in all likelihood there is a far greater chance that a rogue meteor will hit the earth before 2020. In addition many astronomers expect the sun to explode on December 31, 2016, causing chronic global warming, virtually bringing the igloo industry to its knees.
Then, as if out of a bad Japanese horror movie, polar bears will begin the long migration south in search of food, which, according to the present food chain is defined as you.
“It’s all conceivable,” stressed Pennywhistle. “Why just back in November the Cubs won the Series.”
