Category Archives: Jeremy Rosen

Ask Montezuma

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It’s the Anwer Man from Tenochtitlan

Montezuma

Montezuma is an F-22 Raptor currently stationed at Wright-Patterson AFB.

Dear Montezuma,
My cat knocked over our “Nuts to You Hitler” commemorative Rebo and Zootie plates.
The plates fell from the wall in the living room and onto my husband, who let out a surprisingly cattish yowl. This yowl scared the neighbours who called the police. When they arrived, they attempted to enter the wrong house and were fired upon by the tax protesters down the street, wounding one officer in the leg. This officer was to be the fifth generation of his family running in the Sligo Creek marathon at age 27, the very next week. In his anger, he beat his wife and shot himself using a Luger his grandfather collected in World War II. Incidentally, that grandfather ran the marathon with a gunshot wound to the chest and sold us our cat. Who came up with the idea of the proof of purchase you can send in to get “free” stuff idea?
Mary Herschel
Larry, Armpit, UK

Ms. Herschel, I think that the “Moon Madness” and “The Third Man Never Rings at the Cuckoo’s Nest” Rebo & Zootie commemorative coffee decanter and barbecue lighting apparatus are certainly my favourite collectible Rebo & Zootie memorabilia. I also enjoy
the rare and fun Rebo & Zootie india ink orange fruit stamp. It is positively lovely to have Zootie’s whiskered visage look upon me from the safety of my lunch time orange rind.

Hey Monty,
Why are silhouettes so dark?
Daimly Pattesron
Wayne Shorter, MI

I must admit, Daimly, that I’m terribly vexed. Which Wayne Shorter, Michigan do you come from? There’s the Wayne Shorter, Michigan founded in 1888 by Bantu herders. It’s located in the meta-carpal area of Michigan, is centrally planned, and contains a lovely horticultural park and history of the goat museum. The Wayne Shorter, Michigan founded by Steve Boilerplate in 1997 and located in the thumb area of Michigan has a run-down miniature sawmill statuette in the city center and a reflective paint factory. I do hope you come from the former.

Dear Montezuma,
There are always leftovers. No matter how much food I buy, nor how much I prepare, the damn stuff always has a bit left over. What gives! I just want the right amount of food!
Sami Westwood
London, UK

I find it mildly distressing that your name differs little comparatively from that of Clint Eastwood, a super-star of American cinema in both an acting and directorial capacity. Your surname, Westwood, is merely the opposite of Mr. Eastwood’s, implying that your family comes from dark and depressing roots. People who only look to the sunset. Mr. Eastwood faces a bright future and is ready for the coming days. Your given name, Sami, is only one letter shorter than Clint. Whereas Clint starts with a voiceless velar plosive, a strong sound, Sami begins with a voiceless coronal sibilant. Yuck!

Monto!
My friend is a lot of fun to be around most of the time. He’s interesting, engaging, good to talk to. That is, of course, until he starts drinking. It only takes a few, but once they’re in him he gets weird. He’ll insist none of us is having a good time, it’s making him unhappy, we should go other places, even when that’s clearly untrue. I love hanging out with him, but only for the couple of hours before it gets like this. None of us seems to be able to say anything about it. Why does Pabst Blue Ribbon have a light aftertaste of peaches?
Marina Ferrer
West Hollywood, CA

MF, alcohol contains a taste molecule called a peachome. With a greater concentration of peachomes comes a greater taste of peaches. For instance, peach schnapps has a peachome concentration rating on the Kurasawa-McClatchy Scale of 4000. Stolichnaya Vodka, the mother of vodkas from the motherland of vodkas, has a KM rating of only 3. Pabst Blue Ribbon rates a 50 on the KM scale. Now, obviously that rating is low, so you would wonder why there’s such a strong taste. I am glad you asked! You see, Pabst’s in-house chemists have worked hard to contain the beverage’s peachome content within a carbon bucky-ball reorganizing of the beer’s carbon content. It’s fairly ingenious. You should see the syringe they use!

Dear Montezuma,
Do you have any tips for me to start my penny collection? I don’t have any pennies yet.
Billy, Age 47
Montauk, NY

I would begin by collecting pennies. Perhaps in a jar. Definitely not in cattle.

Dear Montezuma,
Recently, I was reading a collection of C.S. Lewis’s essays concerning the concept of a Moral Law; the idea that humans everywhere, even if they disagree about specifics, still agree that there are such things as right and wrong. Does this argument of the Moral Law constitute proof for the existance of God?
Florence Henderson
Hollywood, CA

Flo, while written about by C.S. Lewis and others, it should be noted that the Moral Law was never passed by Congress nor signed by the President. Thus it is still only, at this point, just the Moral Bill and not yet an actual Moral Law.

Dear Monteuzuma,
When was the cup holder born?
Al Consequence
Peoria, IL

Al, I am not helping you win the video trivia game at the bar. That’s not my mandate.

Dear Montezuma,
How long does it take for people to get infected with the French disease?
Blemish Plucky
Sordid, Canada

Ish, ennui can take effect in as little as five minutes. A heightened metabolism combined with an increase in cigarette and wine consumption will follow close behind with an oxymoronic arrogant malaise. Productivity will decrease, with the average ability to work barely topping 30 hours a week. Less during the summer months. The desire to work for something will vanish within two hours followed by an increased sense of entitlement. Also, if you happen to own any nuclear powered aircraft carriers, they will become leaky from poor maintenance and the funding will not be available to operate them.

montys hints

Pickle ranching in the home can sometimes be difficult. There are the space considerations, of course, but also feeding and care. I like to use an old closet to house my herd. First, construct a hexagonal lattice arrangement of cubbyholes in your closet. Fill with synthetic sushi garnish to make the pickles feel at home. Once you’ve brought them home from the grocery store, transfer the pickles from the jar to the cubby holes using a spoon. Never use a fork or tongs. These damage the pickles. Once ensconced in their cubbies, make sure to spray the pickles from a mister filled with a 70%/30% saline solution every three hours. Keep the door closed. Pickles hate light. Make sure to exercise your pickles at least two times a week using a standard pickle maze. They love to solve these puzzles.

Buying Tips for Children

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buying tips 1

A friend told me recently that he felt obligated to take his mother out to dinner. He had increased his salary since last seeing her through a higher-status job, moved to a nicer apartment, and generally felt the burnished brass button glow of the newly-minted “successful” son. I disagreed with him strongly, saying “Your parents should have to keep buying you dinner until you can afford to buy them a house.” The same goes for plane tickets.

You might think that Mom has done so much for you and that Dad couldn’t have been more supportive. This is not true. They can do more for you and support you more. For instance: by purchasing nutrients for you well into adulthood whenever you or they come for a visit. (This is of course not true if your parents weren’t there for you. In this case, feel free to stock up on free motel toiletries and give them to your parents as a gift.)

As a productive, self-supporting adult, it’s only natural for you to think you owe your parents dinner. After all your mother went through the pain of birthing you (double points if cesarean section) and your Dad had to deal with figuring out whatever it is Dads are supposed to do after ejaculation. They fed you (most obviously) and gave you clothes. Probably even sent you to school for an education. Sounds like they did a good job right?

But it wasn’t altruism. At the other end of life there’s an expectation that you will take care of them. You’ll have to feed them and clothe them, wipe their bottoms; generally pass through all the indignities of life as a reverse parent. Of course the analogy to childhood isn’t lock tight. Right off the bat they probably weigh at least six or seven times what you did as a baby, slightly less as a toddler.

On top of that, if there’s something wrong with their brains, its usually not learning, it’s forgetting. If there isn’t that big, stinky, baby of yours is embarrassed by defecating uncontrollably, and will tell you so. Probably in good English. At least you could be considered cute while learning to use the potty. Not so funny now that Mom can’t remember how.

When it gets to this point, there’s a huge investment in money, too. If they were good, your parents probably planned for retirement, but like a lot of people they probably didn’t plan on becoming senile pod people who only resemble the parents you knew. Think you don’t recognize them? They certainly no longer even recognize you. I’d guess they couldn’t remember what peas were, whether they were tasty, or why in general they shouldn’t be thrown against the wall.

Let’s be reasonable, most people (myself included) don’t or can’t conceive of their own death. This even truer of their own decrepitude. In which case, they just don’t plan for it. Medical science will get them through it, or it will never happen to them, they think. Meanwhile they’ve boarded the express train to foggy fogey town with no hotel reservations or baggage.

buying tips2

You might make the argument that your parents should spend all of that dinner money on money market accounts and mutual funds, but it’s never going to amount to a lot of dough on their part. Certainly not enough to offset the cost of 24-hour in-home nursing care or an end-of-life run in a retirement community. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, two thirds of Americans aged 18-34 live more than 500 miles away from their parents. For the same demographic, parents see their children an average of twice a year.

Let’s assume you have modest taste and the reunited family of three goes out for steaks at a reasonably-priced chop house. A blooming onion, three porterhouse steaks with the trimmings, and a bottle of pinot noir (a cheap one from Uncle Louie’s Winery) will run you roughly $135 with tip. With the other scenario, you shell out that change and your parents put that money in a basic savings account for twenty years.

What do they end up with at the end? Slightly more than $8000. That’s certainly a nice chunk of money, but when you compare it to the annual cost of nursing home care ($70,000 according to the American Association of Retired Persons), it’s pretty much a given that spending that money on a good meal with you is a better investment.

When it comes down to it, they’ll need that investment of good memories to stack up against all the bad ones they’ll make as incontinent imbeciles for the last ten years of their lives. I’m not sure what the interest rate is on family dinners these days, but they definitely bring in a better return than the alternative: lonely, desperate, uncared-for old people going quietly insane as the prison of their decrepitude decays around them.

I’ll have a side of steamed broccoli.

The March of Progress: Organic Food

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scientists discover new york women are idiots

New York, NY– The Institute for Freaking Out New York Women has released its 2008 report, forcing over 3 million vaguely informed and neurotically worrisome female New Yorkers to adjust their purchasing habits. Coupled with recent studies proving once and for all that astrology is utter nonsense, dames of the Big Apple sure are in a tizzy.

In a shocking revelation, the report reveals that shimmery lipstick contains fish scales, chewing gum is made with milk protein and that lotion is filled with ground up titanium dioxide.

“There are chemicals in everything. It’s all chemicals,” stated thirty year old Bethany Page of Park Slope, Brooklyn.

New York Women were recently left wondering what to do when confronted with the explosive fact that organic foods contained carbon. Ms. Page was particularly violent when told this while consuming an organic, gluten-free, smoothie, after which she shoved the container away, yelling “Evil!”

Even clothing didn’t pass safely through the IPNYW’s report this year. So-called fair trade items, New York women were told, are still made by poor people who would love to drink Pepsi and worry about whether they’re too fat. Some of those workers use their fair trade earnings to buy meat.

The problem was compounded further when the IPNYW’s semi-annual bar study found that over 90% of mixed drinks at bars, including the vaunted cosmopolitan, mojito, and Alabama slammer, were not made with “eco-friendly” ingredients. A statistically insignificant fraction less than 100% of bar limes were grown using pesticides in order to provide a nice shine and juicy interior.

While not as shocking as last year’s IPNYW report, which announced that gummy bears contain corn syrup and are made out of crushed sheep bones, many New York women have vowed to try and purchase more over-priced “organic” and “natural” products. At least until next year, when the IPNYW helps them learn that “natural” products contain ground up spiders and that “organic” vegetables are grown in cow shit.

Race to the Finish Line!

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When the Free-American party was founded in the wake of the Crisis of 1883 and the 1884 interference by U.S. Marines in Cosa Nostra on the orders of President Horace B. Borden, it attracted many disaffected Union Labor Party and Federal Party supporters. This motley group, who could no longer stand shoulder-to-shoulder in the face of such graft and colonial enterprise, helped to offset the Republican Party off-shoot engendered by the American Freedom Party.

In 1888 the Free-American and American Freedom parties went head-to-head in a presidential election for the first time. While neither party won (Republican tailor’s dummy Benjamin Harrison took the prize), the nation split noticeably along each party’s political lines.

The wake of division flowed throughout the campaign, eventually splitting the nation along the route of the Montsylvania-Pacific Railway which had precipitated the Crisis of 1883 to begin with. Snaking its way from Southwest to Northeast, the railway separated regions politically as well as physically, creating what Teddy Roosevelt christened in 1904 as “The Great Diagonal Divide.” The Divide has had major bearing on every U.S. presidential election and national issue for the past 120 years.

The Free-American Party (The Greens), as the new children in the sub-division, planned to exploit every regional factor they could in an attempt to gain a huge electoral bloc. From the project representing the inchoate plans for what would become the Hoover Dam, through the speculative land crisis that would last decades and leave fallow the region which eventually formed Platha, into the Ohio Religious Persecutions, and all the way to immigration problems in the industrial and urban New England, the Free American Party stabbed at everything.

The American Freedom Party (The Purples), by contrast, was never able to gain the initiative in this first contest of wills. Fumbling the key issue of the St. Lawrence Seaway Blockade, they never recovered. Cut off at the knees for their support of Ku Klux Klan in Kentucky leader Arthur Phillips-Smoot, and having no appropriate response to the Great Blizzard of 1888, the American Freedom Party would barely have made it to election day if not for their vociferous embrace of Ernest Thayer’s poem “Casey at the Bat” as their convention keynote.

While neither party would make headway in presidential politics until the election of 1898, the Free-American Party and the American Freedom Party have essentially each taken turns in the leadership role and for the most part the geographic blocs created through their competition have remained static. And so every four years it becomes another battle of Green versus Purple, with the winner taking the White House.

Green and Purple, always diametrically opposed, continue to battle to this day. In 2008, the nation will see who will triumph; Dick Armstrong, who proudly wears the Green sash and golden starburst, or the eventual Purple-sashed contender. It is an exercise as old as 120 years and as fresh each time as the newborn calves of the field. And it is our choice, our vote, our will which decides if this year Green or Purple shall triumph.

Present History

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Dick Armstrong

Never one to shy away from controversy or to worry about the polls, President Dick Armstrong has been steadfastly ignoring the upcoming election and the frenzied campaigning of his would-be opponents. Instead, Armstrong has focused on running the nation, playing daily games of marco polo with his five sons and three daughters, and fruitlessly hunting the White House lawn moles with a frogging gig. Some insiders, however, think he’s not quite ready for next November and the fight to the finish.

“We must not forget,” said amateur blogging pundit Lucy Coverage of Firedoglake.com “that Armstrong’s first term was anything but a breeze. Between the War, the Reptile Crisis, the short-lived video camera revolt, the Nullification Confrontation and the situation in Belgium, Armstrong’s had his hands full. Still, he has handled every situation with his usual wit and aplomb. Also, get a load of those suits!”

When asked about the election, Armstrong has developed an interesting new habit. Instead of answering he will smile coyly and then perform several yo-yo tricks. His most common is the “walk the dog,” though he has been known, on occasion, to do the “around the world,” or the highly difficult “Chinese loop the loop.”

Insiders have leaked reports that the president’s scale models have become “sloppy and careless,” troubling since Armstrong is well known for his breathtakingly detailed 1:48 scale replicas of his favorite airplane: the A-10 Warthog.

“It was troubling, because the cockpit glass was all fogged up and the landing gear wouldn’t retract because of a careless glue application. Half the decals were ripped or placed crooked,” stated White House Model Describer Mary Hargrove. “He even sanded the rudders in a sloppy fashion. Can you believe that?”

While the President is no doubt preoccupied by the upcoming election and the ongoing needle shortage, he seems upbeat as evidenced by a recent Daughters of the Agricultural Conflagration luncheon where the President displayed his charismatic wit and humor by recounting his third favorite joke:

In a tiny village on the Irish coast lived an old lady, a virgin and very proud of it. Sensing that her final days were rapidly approaching, and desiring to make sure everything was in proper order when she dies, she went to the town’s undertaker (who also happened to be the local postal clerk) to make the proper “final” arrangements. As a last wish, she informed the undertaker that she wanted the following inscription engraved on her tombstone: “BORN A VIRGIN, LIVED AS A VIRGIN, DIED A VIRGIN.” Not long after, the old maid died peacefully. A few days after the funeral, as the undertaker/postal clerk went to prepare the tombstone that the lady had requested, it became quite apparent that the tombstone that she had selected was much too small for the wording that she had chosen. He thought long and hard about how he could fulfill the old maid’s final request, considering the very limited space available on the small piece of stone. For days, he agonized over the dilemma. But finally his experience as a postal worker allowed him to come up with what he thought was the appropriate solution to the problem. The virgin’s tombstone was finally completed and duly engraved, and it read as follows: “RETURNED UNOPENED”

Despite the best efforts of the FA challengers, Armstrong seems more-or-less ready for the election and for another term. Polling asking whether Armstrong was preferred over any generic Free America candidate found the President ahead by a 5-to-1 margin. Against specific candidates, he led by as much as 90 points. As several taxidermists shouted at a recent speech, it seems that both Armstrong and the nation are ready for “Two hundred and eight more weeks.”