All Entries Tagged With: "horseshoe humor"

Reporter Missing After Rum Commercial

(Port-of-Spain, Trinidad—December 12. 2014) Arbitrary tourist and heralded scribe, Mel Toole, is still listed as missing after a three-day filming of a local rum advertisement. The filming, which began Thursday, featured several Americans, including Toole, swilling large quantities of the local hooch under the tropical sun.
“After about thirty takes we noticed the talent was getting a bit weary,” said director Avery “Rock” Parvenu, who claims to have once worked with Oliver Stone. “Then Toole simply vanished.”
The missing subject, 119, still carries a legitimate Colorado driver’s license. It is feared that he may have rented a car and attempted to drive back home. Police are combing all Caribbean ports along the way.
“If he’s on his way home, he’s probably easy enough to detect since he always drives on the wrong side of the road,” said sister Belle Toole, who left her job at a Thornton slaughterhouse to rush to her brother’s relief.
“I don’t know how many times I’ve pleaded with him to stay in his trailer,” she whined.
Toole is a retired circus performer who, among other accomplishments, once ate thirty live chickens in less than an hour and later almost jumped the Black Canyon in a mini van.

Velcro Foods Hit Market

Special to the Ouray Pigeon — December 12, 2014
Move over GMOs. An enterprising food brokerage in Malfunction has successfully produced edible Velcro that will be employed to improve a multitude of products already available to consumers.
Mesa Foods, a division of Carnivore Guru America, has reportedly perfected a long existing biodegradable substance that, when sprayed on burritos, omelets and burgers will help them sty together during the often tedious process that runs full circle from hand to mouth. The yet unnamed and secret material, akin to stickem and other organic adhesives has been tested on mice, monkeys and right-wing Republicans since last March.
“The results were conclusive,” said Efram Pennywhistle a recognized foodophile. “The animals had no trouble keeping their entrees together.”
Appearing at a supermarket opening in Mack Pennywhistle told an attentive audience that the future holds many surprises in mass marketing and bothersome packaging, which will feature lower-grade Velcro as well as artificial flavors, color and aroma.
“The big boys could give a rat’s ass about the comfort and health of the average shopper,” laughed Pennywhistle. “All this showmanship is there to satisfy legalities and protect them from blowback when they kill someone. All the warnings in the world will not bring back common sense. All the safety regulations will not make people safer.”
Mesa intends to delve into the mysterious world of food sculpture embracing troublesome creations such as crepes and onion soup. After initial tests these and other often-troublesome menu leaders will become staples in the American diet thanks to the application of enlightened chemical therapy.
“These foods will do more than stick to your ribs,” said Pennywhistle. “They will help the body grow new ribs.” – Arthur Choke

“Trace” Defined by State Ski Concern

(Monarch Pass— December 12, 2014) The ski industry today has made further commitments to end abuses in daily snow reports by defining the term “trace”. In a bitter internal investigation, both the Brotherhood of Snow Makers and the Utah Defamation League have agreed to set standards for further use of this and other long employed lexicons.
“According to the present jargon, “trace” has been determined to be measurable accumulation over .016588 of an inch,” said Amanda Bumpe, a former French calendar model, turned telemarker after the Bosnian conflict. “That benchmark is easily determined by multiplying the current acceptable blood alcohol level for motorists by the number of skier days in a week. That figure,” she continued, “is then subject to at least eight percent tax and freeze dried according to rigid USDA requirements.”
A ski industry spokesman welcomed the determination, saying that it will help offset the cost of purchasing white gold from the Russian Black Market, which has a reputation for short cords. A major agreement is pending which would send a growing surplus of Colorado realtors to the former Soviet Union in return for snow futures.
“Anyone ignoring our criterion when estimating snowfall is nothing short of a damned liar,” said Bumpe.

Gov’ment warning placed on fast food

(Montrose)—December 12, 2014) The United States Food and Drug Administration has extended a warning as to the consumption of fast food within its sovereign borders. The caution advisement, a major breakthrough according to consumer protection advocates, states simply that eating this type of food will lead to health problems, shortened life span and massive weight gain.
“We may just as well drop the “s” from fast food and call it fat food,” said Melvin Toolini, of the USFDA. “In addition to the health caveat most of us here are also concerned with uniformity and laziness within our population. We see people acting as robots, sliding into drive-throughs, repeating their behavior, feeding their kids this crap,” aid Toolini. “It’s a law that children must wear seat belts because they are deemed too young to make their own decisions with regards to life threatening situations. What do you call eating this product?”
Consumers will soon see printed warnings on cardboard packaging, chicken buckets, and wrappers. If they choose to eat the stuff anyway the gov’ment is off the hook.
“What will we do with all the veteran fast food junkies when they get old and the effects of their diet start coming back on them?” posed Toolini.
It is unlikely that this development will have any immediate affect on the eating habits of the country over the long run social scientists and nutritionists feel it may cut back on health problems associated with poor eating habits. One critic of the plan, a population control advocate, condemned the warnings as another ploy to keep people alive longer.
“We have too many people now,” said a spokesman for Eat Yourself to an Early Grave. “And we have too many warnings out there. What ever happened to the concept of natural selection and the strong surviving the weak. It’s even in the Bible. A greasy taco or a chicken wing from hell are great population control devices.”
Another opponent of the campaign suggests that the gov’ment has embraced the concept of fast food as a method of repression and containment.
“Elements within that framework have been experimenting with mind control for decades,” said another unreliable source. “It only stands to reason that encouraging uniformity and repetition will create a population that can no longer make choices when confronted with the big picture. It’s a bullet-proof concept. Why would the feds abandon this philosophy in favor of public benevolence?”
– Fred Zeppelin

A SOMEWHAT BEAT NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS

‘Twas the night before Christmas
And all through the castle
Not a hep cat was stirring
It was just too much hassle.
(Most of us had been down at Golden Gate Park all day diggin the music and were too wasted .)
The stockings were flung on the floor and the chair
Grab me my pants, there’s a party somewhere.
(Despite chronic fatigue the cat upstairs was making some kind of racket but soon he’ll be cool since his woman gets off work by seven.)
The horn men were nestled with notes in their heads
While visions of reefer waltzed with second hand threads.
(Word of the street has it that the North Beach Good Will has just received a new shipment of duds, the kind afforded by unemployed jazz musicians.)
And momma come home to see all this crap
She settled his brains and I don’t hear no rap.
(As expected the lady upstairs arrived home at the usual time and found her man engaged in extra-curricular diversions with an assortment of new friends. A gunshot. Another.)
When out on the highway there arose Dharma batter
The straights cruised on by engulfed in their chatter.
(Why do you want to show up to work everyday when there are places in this very galaxy that you have never been?)
Away to the window I flew like jack flash
Pulled down the Venetians, securing my stash.
(I wanted to see if the cat upstairs was alive or dead but I thought I’d better hide my stash before the North Beach Gestapo started asking a lot of questions.)
The moon and the rest of the ash-ridden snow
Convinced me that midday was too late to go.
(This place is nowhere. With a little luck and the right boxcar I could be in Mexico City for the New Year.)
When what to my wandering mind should appear
But San Francisco’s finest from the front and the rear.
(Somebody in the building must have called up the heat when they heard the shots. They were everywhere, responding in their noted Zen vigor in this neighborhood infested with home sapiens of the discarded variety.)
At my door an old sergeant, with stick of the night
I can’t wait till morning…it’s exit…stage right!
(My duffel bag lay packed in the corner. Once on my back it was out the door leading me to more tolerant horizons.)
More rapid than accurate I headed uptown
Grabbed a bus for the freight yard and waited around.
(The midnight train ride down the coast to LA would be a cold one but I could sleep on the beach in Santa Monica in the morning.)
A weathered old brakeman called out in the rain
If you’ve got ample dollars you’ll be riding this train.
(The tired, old drunk wanted some bread for letting me ride the boxcar. I promised him some Mexican grass and offered him a hit off my Thunderbird and, cursing, he wandered off.)
As wilted, dry leaves before hurricanes fly
I am one with the boxcar, fused to the Pacific sky.
(Finally headed toward Southern California, I polished off the wine and fell asleep despite the chill and the cold metal floor.)
So up through the mountains cola coursers they flew
With a cargo of nothingness as their time clock punched two.
(We hit the Coastal Range in the middle of the night as the full moon made another cameo appearance.)
And then in a twinkling I heard on the roof
The brakeman, another…resenting my spoof.
(The railroad cops didn’t appreciate my travel arrangements for the evening and when we stopped at Salinas they tossed my ass off the iron beast and into an unlikely Christmas Eve.)
As I brushed my self off and was turning around
Down the tracks dragged a hobo not making a sound.
( I had just seen this bum down in the Tenderloin last week. He was snoring away in a skid row hotel lobby, too drunk to make it up the stairs to his two-dollar flop.)
He was dressed all in rags from his head to his foot
His clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot.
(A bad dream Kris Kringle in the freight yard of America’s last brush with authentic culture?)
His meager belongings he had thrown in a sack
He smelled like a junkie and let out a hack.
(His personal hygiene didn’t improve with closer proximity.)
His face was one wrinkle, all haggard and hairy
He clung to Wild Roses and a jug of sweet sherry.
His droll, little mouth was drawn up like a bow
The fuzz on his chin as gray as winter So-Ho.
He rolled up two skags, “To you I bequeath”
The smoke pouring out from his cave on no teeth.
(The cat had played out his future in baggy pants and shoes force marched through an alcoholic haze.)
His poker face deluded, a bad loser still game
He choked when he spoke but he spoke just the same.
Uncapping his prize he delivered a belt
And I grabbed for the bottle, in spite of myself.
With a wink of his eye and a twist of his head
Out there in hell’s freight yard the hobo dropped dead.
(Time had run out for this earth-bound angel who had never spent Saturday mornings mowing his lawn in the suburbs or driving kids around in a new Ford Station wagon.)
I picked up his dreams, locked tight with no key
Next stop: Potter’s Field for this snarled refugee.
(A watchman helped me cover him and called the cops. There would be no heartbroken relative to identify him, no one to cry at his grave.)
Then catching the time, I watched for a freight
Skillfully boarding, make LA by eight
Back on a boxcar, I slept on my duffel
Agonized at the thought of that wino’s last shuffle.
But desolation’s despots on angles take toll
One long ago Christmas deep deep in my soul.
– Paradise Stolen, 1959

Christmas Eve On Lonesome

Western Colorado – December 12, 2014

It was Christmas Eve on Lonesome one-hundred thirty years ago. But nobody on Lonesome knew that it was Christmas Eve, although a child of the outer world could have guessed it, even out in those wilds where Lonesome slipped from one lone log cabin high up the steeps, down through a stretch of jungled darkness to another lone cabin at the mouth of the stream.

There was the holy hush in the gray twilight that comes only on Christmas Eve. There were the big flakes of snow that fell as they never fall except on Christmas Eve. There was a snowy man on horseback in a big coat, and with saddle pockets that might have been bursting with toys for children in the little cabin at the head of the stream.
But not even he knew that it was Christmas Eve. He was thinking of Christmas Eve, but it was of the Christmas Eve of the year before, when he sat in prison with a hundred other men in stripes, and listened to the chaplain talk of peace and good will to all men upon earth, when he had forgotten all men upon earth but one, and had only hatred in his heart for him.
“Vengeance is mine! saith the Lord.”
That was what the chaplain had thundered at him. And then, as now, he thought of the enemy who had betrayed him to the law, and had sworn away liberty, and had robbed him of everything in life except a fierce longing for the day when he could strike back and strike to kill. And then, while he looked back hard into the chaplain’s eyes, and now, while he splashed through the yellow mud thinking of that Christmas Eve, Buck shook his head; and then, as now, his sullen heart answered:
“Mine!” The big flakes drifted to crotch and twig and limb. They gathered on he brim of Buck’s slouch hat, filled out the wrinkles in his big coat, whitened and his long mustache, and sifted into the yellow, twisting path that guided his horse’s feet.
High above he could see through the whirling snow now and then the gleam of a red star. He knew it was the light from his enemy’s window; but somehow the chaplain’s voice kept ringing in his ears, and every time he saw the light he couldn’t help thinking of the story of the Star that the chaplain told that Christmas Eve, and he dropped his eyes by and by, so as not to see it again, and rode on until the light shone in his face.
Then he led his horse up a little ravine and hitched it among the snowy holly and rhododendrons and slipped toward the light. here was a dog somewhere, of course; and like a thief he climbed over the low rail fence and stole through the snow-wet grass until he leaned against an apple-tree with the sill of the window two feet above the level of his eyes.
Reaching above him, he caught a stout limb and dragged himself up to a crotch of the tree. A mass of snow slipped softly to the earth. The branch creaked above the light wind; around the corner of the house a dog growled and he sat still.
He had waited three long years and he had ridden two hard nights and lain out two cold days in the woods for this.
And presently he reached out very carefully, and noiselessly broke leaf and branch and twig until a passage was cleared for his eye and for the point of the pistol that was gripped in his right hand.
A woman was just disappearing through the kitchen door, and he peered cautiously and saw nothing but darting shadows. From one corner a shadow loomed suddenly out in human shape. Buck saw the shadowed gesture of an arm, and he cocked his pistol. That shadow was his man, and in a moment he would be in a chair in the chimney corner to smoke his pipe, maybe – his last pipe.
Buck smiled – pure hatred made him smile – but it was mean, a mean and sorry thing to shoot this man in the back, dog though he was; and now that the moment had come a wave of sickening shame ran through Buck. No one of his name had ever done that before; but this man and his people had, and with their own lips they had framed palliation for him. What was fair for one was fair for the other they always said. A poor man couldn’t fight money in the courts; and so they had shot from the brush, and that was why they were rich now and Buck was poor – why his enemy was safe at home, and he was out here, homeless, in the apple-tree.
Buck thought of all this, but it was no use. The shadow slouched suddenly and disappeared; and Buck was glad. With a gritting oath between his chattering teeth he pulled his pistol in and thrust one leg down to swing from the tree – he would meet him face to face next day and kill him like a man – and there he hung as rigid as though the cold had suddenly turned him, blood, bones, and marrow, into ice.
The door had opened, and full in the firelight stood the girl who he had heard was dead. He knew now how and why that word was sent to him. And now she who had been his sweetheart stood before him – the wife of the man he meant to kill.
Her lips moved – he thought he could tell what she said: “GI up, Jim it up!” Then she went back.
A flame flared up within him now that must have come straight from the devil’s forge. Again the shadows played over the ceiling. His teeth grated as he cocked his pistol, and pointed it down the beam of light that show into the heart of the apple-tree, and wailed.
The shadow of a head shot along the rafters and over the fireplace. It was a madman clutching the butt of the pistol now, and as his eye caught the glinting sight and his heart thumped, there stepped into the square light of the window – a child!
It was a boy with yellow tumbled hair, and he had a puppy in his arms. In front of the fire the little fellow dropped the dog, and they began to play.
“Yap! Yap! Yap!”
Buck could hear the shrill barking of the fat little dog, and the joyous shrieks of the child as he made his playfellow chase his tail round and round or tumbled him head over heels on the floor. It was the first child Buck had seen for three years; it was his child and hears; and, in the apple-tree, Buck watched fixedly.
They were down on the floor now, rolling over and over together; and he watched them until the child grew tired and turned his face to the fire and lay still – looking into it. Buck could see his eyes close presently, and then the puppy crept closer, put his head on his playmate’s chest, and the two lay thus asleep.
And still Buck looked – his clasp loosening on his pistol and his lips loosening under his stiff mustache – and kept looking until the door opened again and the woman crossed the floor. A flood of light flashed suddenly on the snow, barely touching the snow-hung tips of the apple-tree, and he saw her in the doorway – saw her look anxiously into the darkness – look and listen a long while.
Buck dropped noiselessly to the snow when she closed the door. He wondered what they would think when they saw his tracks in the snow the next morning; and then he realized that they would be covered before the morning.
As he started up the ravine where his horse was he heard the clink of metal down the road and the splash of a horse’s hoofs in the soft mud, and he sank down behind a holly-bush.
Again the light from the cabin flashed out on the snow.
“That you, Jim?”
“Yep!”
And then the child’s voice: “Has oo dot thum tandy?”
“Yep!”
The cheery answer rang out almost at Buck’s ear, and Jim passed death waiting for him behind the bush which was left foot brushed, shaking the snow from the red berries down on the crouching figure beneath.
Once only, far down the dark jungled way, with underlying streak of yellow that was leading him wither, God only knew – once only Buck looked back. There was the red light gleaming faintly through the moonlit flakes of snow. Once more he thought of the Star, and once more the chaplain’s voice came back to him.
“Mine!” said the Lord.
Just how, Buck could not see, with himself in the snow and him back there for life with her and the child, but some strange impulse made him bare his head.
“Yourn,” said Buck grimly.
But nobody on Lonesome – not even Buck – knew that it was Christmas Eve.
Copyright 1901
by Charles Scribner’s Sons