Fifty Things You Should Never Do.

1. Disobey a direct order.
2. Make a milkshake out of ice cream and dead snakes.
3. Allow the enemy admiral to cross the ‘T.’
4. Create special yogurt from your wife’s breast milk.
5. Write poetry.
6. Compose atonal music for the orchestra.
7. Turn a normal piece upside down to try and pass if off as the blank piece in Scrabble™.
8. Sell black market light bulbs.
9. Stalk Jeri Ryan.
10. Write your book report after watching the movie instead of reading the book.
11. Dishonor your ancestors.
12. Cover the Governor in gravy.
13. Try to become an astronaut by hanging around the NASA offices while wearing your home-made space suit.
14. Use an #3 (H) pencil on the standardized test.
15. Let the government tell you what’s cool.
16. Barter nuclear weapons for candy corn.
17. Impersonate an industrial robot at a trial lawyers’ convention.
18. Put an aircraft carrier in the Black Sea.
19. Show up to a gunfight with a giant electromagnet.
20. Pronounce anesthetize like Australians.
21. Fire rubber bullets in the forest.
22. Take more than one wife if you cannot provide equally for each one.
23. Assume the curling iron is unplugged and turned off when using it as a dildo.
24. Organize your record collection by the last name of the author of the liner notes.
25. Stuff a car radiator full of toasted ravioli “to make it cook quicker.”
26. Be a monster and fight a giant robot made up of five smaller robots in the form of lions, cars or various animals.
27. Terminate with extreme prejudice whilst operating a train.
28. Keep a cookie sheet under your poncho.
29. Exorcise demons the Eastern Orthodox Way™.
30. Know what you had until it’s gone.
31. Create a 5000 year plan.
32. Drink three 40s on an empty stomach and expect not to fall on your face.
33. Call it “crack-cocaine.”
34. Change junior’s diapers on the roof of a speeding bus.
35. Mistake a can of CS Teargas for a can of silly string.
36. Say “Yes officer, you may search my vehicle.”
37. Raise infants on a vegan diet.
38. Allow a stranger to sever, cook and serve your own penis to you.
39. Use public lubricant.
40. Launch a nuclear missile from a submarine under the polar icecap.
41. Argue with God over the 37 cents he owes you.
42. Imagine hairdressers on Mars.
43. Bet on a horse named Lame Duck ridden by a jockey called Shifty.
44. Exhort Dennis Farina to cut his mustache.
45. Go anywhere near Ellen Ripley.
46. Rely on a group of more than three people to make intelligent decisions.
47. Deign to make peaches the official state fruit when you’re Alabama.
48. Purchase the AmWay toast cozy.
49. Expect quality when buying in Chinatown.
50. Cheat Death at Chutes and Ladders.

From the Desk of Raymond Ryles

Sanitation Comptroller

truck

Let’s face it, the world is full of trash. Everything you buy or don’t eat eventually becomes trash. Without garbage men our cities would be waist deep in filth. And without trucks, the garbage men couldn’t do their job. It follows that without maintenance, those trucks wouldn’t work. Yep, and without an allotment in the annual budget there wouldn’t be any truck maintenance. And of course, there’s the last part of it, the keystone of the whole operation; me. I’m the Sanitation Comptroller.

It’s my job to oversee the filing of the paperwork submitted by the Sanitation Department’s Vehicle Maintenance Division, the V.M.D. as we call it in shorthand. There’s the pink form first, that’s the BM108, the Outgoing Expenditures Report. It’s pink because the white copy goes to the Office of Budget Management, that’s under the City Manager whose name is Tom Roland. There’s another pink form which has no official number, it’s just the Allocation and Resources form. Last but not least is the all important Operations Report, which I get the white copy of. That one gets filed away, but not before I review it.

All of these forms need to be stamped with a date when they are received. The BM108 is always delivered to our office in the City Hall, via the inter-office mail. Reggie, the mail guy, brings that one by because the V.M.D. has their offices on the fourth floor. My office is on the fifth floor, near the handicap restroom. Now, the forms sometimes get mailed via the postal service, but the Operations Report can be mailed or emailed, once it was even faxed. Those get sent over from all the garages where they do the maintenance. There’s one for each of the districts.

Here in the Sanitation Department, we have our own way of dividing up the town. There are six districts, named so for their locations. Each has its own maintenance crews and depots, even though the V.M.D.’s main office is in City Hall, on the fourth floor, remember. It’s a damn fine job and let’s face it, I do a damn fine job. I think that maybe, in a past life, I must have been a Viking, because I really enjoy filing paperwork. Yep, I’m the Sanitation Comptroller.

You know where to find me; Fifth floor, near the handicap bathroom.

dave

“I’m the Sanitation Comptroller. It’s my job to oversee the filing of the paper work.”

Ask Montezuma: Fabuly 2006

Answers from the Dead

Montezuma II

Montezuma II has been offering advice
to the needy as part of his Ask-Mont, a
prominent NGO in Montsylvania.

Dearest Montezuma,
I attended a luncheon function recently without wearing a cummerbund. This upset my dinner partners to no great end. They all had cummerbunds, but I did not. They were jealous as cummerbunds are notoriously uncomfortable to wear and, doubly, are silly looking articles of clothing. Furthermore, they felt that I breached the rules of formal etiquette with my faux pas. Why is a salad fork smaller than a dinner fork?
Yours truly,
Mike Feeman
New York, NY

Dear Mr. Feeman,
Did you know that tempered steel melts at a temperature of approximately 2000 degrees Fahrenheit? I’m not ashamed to admit that I didn’t either until I looked it up in my handy pocketbook of scientific tables. I suggest that you carry one of these pocketbooks in your pocket. That’s what they were designed for, after all. Incidentally, were you wearing suspenders or a belt at your meal? This may affect which soup spoon you were supposed to use.

Montezuma,
I’m greatly afeared. I just learned that the Dutch may be false, completely made up. Is this true? Could the Dutch have never existed? What about that Dutchland over in Europe?
Sincerely,
Don’t Understand These Conspiracy Hunches

My friend DUTCH,
It was the great future philosopher Karalyn Evans who once said “Filthy Dutch.” And she was right. At least if she was discussing being covered in the finest chocolates in the world. The Netherlands are home to some of the best chocolatieers who bravely set out with sword and pistol to create milk chocolate, dark chocolate, semi-sweet chocolate, unsweetened baking chocolate and other forms of chocolate. From Zeeland to Holland and over to Groningen, The Netherlands make some, colloquially, damn fine chocolate. Also, never call The Netherlands “Holland.” Holland is simply a province of the country wherein its capital is seated. Don’t quit reading. Finish the column before you book your flight.

grass

Hi Montezuma,
Where do babies come from?
Randy
Telarc, WD

Randy’s letter may just push this old imperialist firmly into the Internet Age. “Where do babies come from?” is one of those questions I receive again and again. I may soon have to institute an Often Inquired About section (you “netizens” may know it as an OIA) where I can deposit such queries. Suffice it to say, I suggest you order one of my books or consult a back-issue of Axes & Alleys.

Dear Montezuma,
In the current issue of Axes & Alleys in the seventh and apparently last installment of “Scooter Memories,” Scooter uses a dictaphone while he’s in a room trying to discover how to solve Javier’s puzzle. I’m curious. What’s a dictaphone?
Yours,
By Jove! Old Romans Killed!

Dear BJORK,
It took some heavy research to suss out the meaning of Dictaphone, but I think I’ve deduced its meaning quite well. Dicta is the plural of dictum. A dictum is a pronouncement of a formal nature coming from the Latin dicere. Such dicta are commonly found in judicial precedents and codes of laws. Phone comes from the Greek phone which means to say and is commonly used in relation to sound. I have determined that a Dictaphone is the sound that laws make.

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