The One-ness of Beard

The placement of facial hair is the most telling feature when detecting personality. The mustache is a prominent symbol of authority, whereas the Van Dyke goatee is the badge of a roguish independent.

The person who dons a mustache has instant control of the task at hand, the know-how necessary to overcome sticky situations. He is the alpha male.

A goatee marks the individual. He might help you, he might not. He definitely won’t follow orders, but if you work with him, he just might cooperate quid pro quo. He is the beta male. (Omegas don’t have facial hair, because they’re females. I went to college.)

Police officers are only allowed to grow mustaches, to send a subliminal message of paternity to possible culprits and make them behave. Bongo players, on the other hand, use their goatees to send a subliminal message that they want to have a wicked jam session.

Walter Cronkite’s facial hair was in the correct place. Salvador Dali’s, however, sprouted 2 1/2 inches too high, which made it all the funnier.

Muttonchops are too complex a topic to get into right now. Suffice it to say that muttonchop is to personality what Sikhism is to spirituality.

In “The Big Lebowski,” The Dude has a shaped beard, with emphasis on the chin, or goatee segment, whereas the cowboy-type guy has a prominent mustache.

The Dude is like a hippie, and the cowboy is like a cowboy, and they like each other. And when the cowboy says something that is obviously a cowboy parable, The Dude says with an air of admiration, “That some kind of Eastern thing?” which shows us that they both agree on what is being said, but relate to the message through different paths.

The ego of The Dude assumes that the cowboy’s wisdom must have roots in The Dude’s ilk.

And they both compliment each other on style, which is an obvious reference to goatees and mustaches, and the attitudes that go along with each one.

It’s Yin and Yang. We need the balance of both personalities to keep a harmonious Earth, which is why it makes sense that the wisest of men have big, unshaped beards. They realize the One-ness of the cosmos.

Thank you for your time, and we urge you to please donate whatever is comfortable.

Regards,
Martin O’Darius, President
Americans Uniting to Free Ted Kaczynski and Charles Manson (but not Khalid Sheikh Mohammed)

“What a Cat is,” a Dissertation by T.F. Grundle

A housecat is a tiny, domesticated lion that we keep in our homes. It’s not mean like a lion, and it won’t try to eat you, but it definitely has a lion-like walk and a lionish face. If you ever see a cat, you just might start busting up laughing right there on the spot, screaming very loudly, “It’s so tiny!”

Much too tiny to be a lion. That’s when you know you’ve found a housecat, which typically looks like this or this.

Most varieties of cat were bred in the UK, which makes sense because Britons like silly things. They like to drink hot stuff that doesn’t have very much caffeine or alcohol in it, and they only laugh when men dress as ladies. Otherwise, they are quite composed, perceptive and intuitive, affectionate and docile, occasionally shedding their fur and bathing themselves with their own tongues, and… Say! If a Briton is not unlike a cat!

Because of cat’s composed nature, people are often quick to assume he would not be a valuable asset during wartime, but in actuality the cat was bred specifically for its strength and courage, so it could rid people’s homes of mice.

In fact, a dental surgeon named Lytle S. Adams submitted a plan to the U.S. government in the ’40s to use cats as effective explosive devices against the Japanese. His ingenious plan was to attach tiny bombs to the cats and drop them on villages in the night, where they would stealthily prowl among the enemy, undetected. When the sun would come up, the nocturnal cats would naturally fly over to the nearest attic to hibernate, thus placing themselves in the perfect position for the time bombs to be detonated and… Oh, wait, I’m misreading this. It seems Dr. Adams actually used bats in these experiments.

Oh well, I feel too lazy to go back and change that last paragraph. Haha! Why, if I haven’t a bit of the old feline lethargy in myself! Well then, so be it: Cheerio, gov’na!

Explanation.

“Doc, I have a serious problem.”
“Yeah? What’s the matter?”
“I think I’m a hypochondriac.”
“Pffft! Sure…”
“No, for real. All the symptoms are there, the paranoia, the freak-outs… I’m wasting all my money on salves and pills.”
“What are you paranoid about?”
“Lots of stuff. For instance, I couldn’t even sleep last night because I was obsessing over this pimple on the back of my head.”
“That’s a tumor. You should have had that checked out months ago.”
“What?! No, it’s not a tumor, I just think it is. I’m a hypochondriac!”
“A hypochondriac with 6 to 8 weeks to live.”
“You bastard! I’ll slit your throat with that tiny mirror!”

And that’s why doctors don’t wear tiny mirrors on their heads anymore.

Denny’s Biomechanical Wiener

Many were impressed when news broke of an Italian man’s robotic hand, as it was the first time anybody had been given one that could be controlled with thought.

Yeah, OK, but obviously they’ve never heard of my friend Denny’s biomechanical wiener.

Denny lost his wiener during a field trip at a pillow factory (he’s very clumsy). When he told me he could get a prosthetic replacement that could be controlled with his mind, I became awestricken at how far science had brought us.

“So, like, your mind will be able to tell it when to pee and get erect?” I asked.
“No, the memory card isn’t good enough to hold all that data. I’m just going to empty my urine manually and become celibate.”
“What? That’s lame. Then what will your mind control? What else can wieners do? Why even have one?”
“Well, I mean, the memory card could technically do those things, if it weren’t used up completely by “Hit ‘Em Up Style.”
“Your wiener is going to store music?”
“No, it’s going to sing Hit ’Em Up Style.”
“What?!”
“It’s a song.”
“I know it’s a song!”
“You don’t like Blu Cantrell?”
“I… sure. Why are you doing this?”
“To get famous. Gonna take this show on the road. People like to see inanimate objects sing in funny voices. In Lamb Chop’s Play-Along —”
“Shari didn’t ventriloquise with her vagina.”
“— Yeah, but the horse’s name was Charlie Horse, and that’s an area near your wiener.”
“That’s a good point. You should be a lawyer.”
“I know, but right now I’m concentrating on my singing career.”

“Claire”

Outraged

My buddy Gertrude did not get a Pulitzer this year, and we are both furious.

She literally spends all day speculating as to the whereabouts of famous men’s penises. “Could it be over here? Perhaps in this place?” she ponders constantly.

Sometimes I ask her, “What about that guy over by the bus stop, do you care where his penis will end up?”

“Pfft! No. He’s not famous.”

She sends me weekly reports on her thoughts about famous men’s penises, and where they are. It’s basically a journal of her entire week sitting on a couch, eating candy and thinking about how famous men’s penises directly affect her life and the stability of the nation.

We are outraged that her work has not been recognized.

How to be a Patron of the Arts

The Legendary Shack Shakers, a band I heard for the first time Monday, raises important thoughts about adrenal glands and why we should give money to crazy people.

OK, so, potheads and caffeine addicts have been working their adrenal glands so hard that they find it difficult to get a rush without increasing their intake of substance every so often. (Disclaimer: I don’t really know what I’m talking about. Just guess work.) A cup of coffee in the morning turns into two cups by noon and an espresso after work, and so on.

Abstainers have very healthy adrenal glands, which is why they’re insane. They retain a childlike wonder about everything and have a lot of fun doing boring stuff. They’re not as insane as a high person, but they are much more insane than a person who gets high but isn’t high right now. They usually have a couple of strange hobbies and they make lots of things.

People who don’t listen to music very often don’t need the Legendary Shack Shakers in order to enjoy sound, because they haven’t been working the music parts of their brains (auditory cortex, amygdala, some other stuff) very hard.

But a lot of people are tired of regular music because they’ve heard so much of it, and they need a band that sounds like being punched. The Legendary Shack Shakers play rockabilly-ish tunes that sometimes hit death-metal speeds, causing your brain to say, “Oooooohhhh nooo!!! What is this GREAT THING?!?!?”

A lot of people need art that jumpstarts their minds, and the best way to get it is to give instruments, money, and free time to ego-tripping nutjobs.

I’m not talking about government grants, I’m talking about you, personally, buying a trumpet and giving it to someone rambling to himself on the street, taking out your recording device and saying, “You, sir or madam, are a genius! I need to record you!”

Take Captain Beefheart, for example. From what I can tell, he was basically a spoiled kid who received a lot of encouragement at an early age, eventually using his high opinion of himself to get a record deal from Frank Zappa that allowed him to do whatever he wanted in the studio. And it was fantastic for everyone who realized The Doors suck.

The Captain Beefheart phenomenon could have happened to anybody. He’s a lot like the Dalai Lama, who was told ever since he popped out of the womb that he was a divine messenger of peace – and hey, look! He got the Nobel Peace Prize. We can force big, bold weirdness into existence.

If we want good art, we have to stop turning to artists. They’ll only disappoint. Maybe they were cool before we built up our tolerance for aesthetics, but they just aren’t enough of a fix anymore.