Ohioan Separatist Extremists Hijack Suburban Fixer-Upper! Please Help!

We received an email with this grainy image, and thought it was a joke.

Time revealed that we had indeed been the target of an extremist cell, and our fixer-upper had been hijacked. These Buckeye freaks want to secede from The Union and set up a new nation state right here between Indiana and Pennsylvania. They want to call it Ohighough. They are angry and dangerous, and they hold the misperception that we hold some sway with the federal government. We received a second email shortly after the first, with this disturbing image and a list of demands.

Do-it-yourself fools! You will use your considerable influence with the Ohio legislature, Condawhatever Rice, Stone Phillips, and Jared the Subway-used-to-be-fat-and-is-now-just-slack-skinned-and-un-charismatic dude to enact this list of demands. You have 2 days or we will sand this money sink into powder!

1. We can’t take the green! We need to pave over the last 20% of Ohio with strip after strip of glorious parking and shopping. We are tired of these Mom-and-Pop stores hanging on in the downtowns amid the closed up shops. Wal-Mart. More Wal-mart. Kills the annoying family businesses, 40 acres of parking helping to eradicate the blinding Devil’s green of unpaved earth, and just for good measure, you stand a good chance of being sexually assaulted in the parking lot. We are unsympathetic–you dressed provacatively.

2. Enough with the family farms. Call ConAgra and run the remaining few out. We hate that folksy, get-up-at-5, hayseed crap.

3. Our recon team has reported a disturbing increase in hybrid cars here. I believe 6 was the number. We demand a Hummer in every garage. We will succeed.

4. Unacceptable! Only 142 Ohioans have become casualties in Iraq. Unacceptable. We will not rest until every young person in this state has been fed into that meatgrinder of cleansing violence.

And so you see, we need your help. Anyone who can help meet these demands in any way should act. If only to hold together our Nation Under God. We need you. For the love of money, help us!

On The Road Again

Hatbox Louie and I are at it again. We have hit the road as we wait for the closing on Collingwolde. We are in Toronto where I spent much time in the past. I spent a semester at the University of Toronto, then a year before med school.

We are trying to figure out where to settle, and we just had to check out Canada. They actually collect taxes up here. Ok. Now here’s the wacky part. They use those collected funds to–get this–take care of their citizens. It is madness. Why don’t they just do what we do south of the border: collect our money, then funnel it to rich corporate interests via illegal and immoral foreign military adventures?

So anyway we are checking it out. Toronto is a fantastic city and we have had a great albeit very cold time. Today we are headed east towards Montreal. I think we will stop midway in Kingston, Ontario to break up the trip. Then we will dip back into New England and check out some possibilities there.

If you can’t figure your life out, just keep moving. What a plan!

Fourth Meal–The Ad Campaign Between Irresponsible and Pure Evil

Taco Bell. It is hard to even work up the energy to comment on this fat-lubed corporate death purveying denizen of the strip mall. It is such crap. OK. But this new ad campaign: Fourth Meal–The meal between dinner and breakfast–is so heinous and wrong, I just can’t stand it.

I don’t know the exact statistics but isn’t our country fat as hell? I think the percentage of obese Americans approaches about 99.999% in the red states. Trying to manufacture from thin air the idea that force feeding yourself a couple of lard wraps at midnight is OK–that in fact you need four square meals a day, is just the absolute height of irresponsibility.

Now I have no false illusions. Corporations only recognize responsibility to their shareholders and do the right thing or at least the not egregiously wrong thing exclusively for PR or legal reasons. But this is particularly unsubtle, and a public health affront to a country with a childhood obesity crisis.

And of course the children are the real targets. The fourthmeal.com website is all video gamey and adolescent boyish if you press male gender and girlish if you choose that portal. It is that demographic whose long-term habits these wicked chilito slingers would hope to change.

For shame! Shame on Taco Bell. And shame on all of us for allowing our society to be hijacked by immoral corporate fiends who not only would sacrifice the health and welfare of our young people to maximize short-term profit, but don’t even seem to feel the need to be subtle about it.

Fouth meal? How about Dante’s fourth circle of Hell? Feh!