55 In the News

I'll go ahead and do a Flash 55 today. Let’s focus on hot topics in the news…

Seems Tiger Woods has a drive bigger than his golf drive…his sex drive!

Funny, I never knew Adam Lambert was on Survivor but apparently he just got voted off ABC island…

Should the bid to buy out NBC finalize, rumor has it Comcast will be putting in a bid for the rest of the world

Who’s Your Real Best Friend?

Today’s Theme Thursday and the theme is FRIEND.

That got me curious. Who is man’s best friend?

For some, it’s their wheels...

For others it might be some goofy gadget like this beer robot…

But we all know that man’s best friend is supposed to be his dog. Or should it be his wifey-poo? It’s so confusing.

Maybe if the dog could cook the answer would be easier…

But then again, a dog will always go with you when you want to go somewhere. They don’t need two hours of ‘prep’ time…

Still, sex with the wife-poo is way up there on the list (and don’t go there on the comparisons…)

No, I’ve constructed a simple little “scenario” test to help you decide…

G is for GADGET

For the letter G, let’s focus on....

Gadget

This was an easy one. I’m fascinated with gadgets but I’m also peculiar with regard to them. I don’t care for endless phone and music gadgets. There are far too many variations on a theme when it comes to gadgets. Sure, ipods and iphones were revolutionary but I don’t need a thousand variations of the theme.

Sure, we can go pure funny on the focus of gadgets. What parent wouldn’t want this one…
And what teenager wouldn’t want one of these shoes (of course, the updated version needs an ipod docking station too)…

And then there are always the stupid-but-funny-still gadgets people try and sell…

But I’m for gadgets that are cool and different. I make up gadgets all the time and have featured many of them on here: Soda Filter, Camel-back Pez dispenser, Smart Windows (car window messaging system), driving feedbag, spiral bowling lane, popup resumes, etc. etc.

I’ve got other future gadgets in mind too. How about a mannequin that you put a shirt or pants on and then push a button to inflate and automatically apply steam to iron? One button and the entire shirt is done in seconds. Or how about a watch that fills in around your wrist size and shape? Or how about glasses or even contacts that are a computer monitor display? Or how about…yeah, my ideas keep going…

Let’s look at some interesting gadgets, shall we?

Stick on watches. They’re like a functional bandaid!

A portable DVD player with a fold out screen would be cool

This toaster is the way to go…no more guessing as to whether its burning to a crisp or not

Ever go out from work or with friends and nobody has cash but everyone is splitting the check? This allows everyone to pay!

Also, I’m an exercise and sport gadget junkie. I’ve featured many ridiculous gadgets on here such as the rowing bike, the sideways bike, various variations of inline skates, a water skimmer, etc. etc.

Here’s my latest favorite. It’s run on an electric motor and rides like a snowboard or skateboard across any manner of terrain from offroad to snow to sand to pavement. It’ll even go 35mph and last an hour on one charge.

Sweet…I’ve got a few bones left that I haven’t broken…

F is for FRANCE

For the letter F, let’s focus on....

France

For those of you that are scared to take the bus or subway outside of your little neighborhood, France is this whole other country…

There are lots of thing to love and hate about France. You might agree or disagree with me on these things.

Things I love about France…

Statue of Liberty. What a cool gift to the USA! Sure, vineyard real estate would have been better but this was the next best thing. Plus, they didn’t expose her hairy pit to the world either…cause you know she’s got them!

Wine. Come on, we have lots of great wine and so do many other countries but France is still considered THE place for wine. Besides, you’ve got to envy how they serve all the kids wine at every dinnertime and yet few of them become raging alcoholics like they would in the USA had we considered doing this…

Pink Panther. Whether you like the originals or the remakes, it’s all good stupid fun.

Food (French Fries, French Toast, Omlette) Admit it, stacked up against our own cuisine, we’ve got some catching up to do in this area. The “hot dog” just ain’t competing on the same level…

Work Ethic. This one is my personal favorite. The French don’t live to work, they work to live. They all get 30 days of vacation and nobody works overtime in France. It’s like being on island time without having to be stuck on an island paying $12.50 for a burger because it had to be shipped there…

Things I hate about France…

Mimes. I mean really…what’s not to hate?

Jerry Lewis. They still think this guy is funny! The only thing I find funny is his jet black hair at the age of 80!

Plumbing. Sure, it’s not just a French thing but I’ll add it to the list anyway and make them the martyr for all of Europe and their medieval plumbing. Maybe they should make all the bike racers lay pipe while that Tour de France is going on. That would be a win-win…

Oh, and that leads us inevitably to our next one…

Hygiene. Yep, imagine that. No hot water, no showers! No showers, no shaving the pits. It’s been known for years that the French are not much into hygiene…perhaps that’s why they make so many perfumes there.

Fashion. Let’s have a look…

Need I say more?

Autos. It’s gotta be well known by now not to buy a car made in France. I think the rule is just under not buying swamp land in Florida. Peugeot is probably French for “lucky it goes” and Renault is French for “should have renegotiated”

Finally, I’m neutral on language. Sure, they are rude to Americans and refuse to acknowledge our attempts at French but then again, we’re arrogant into thinking everyone must learn our language because we’re number one! Puleez…

E is for ELVIS

For the letter E, let’s focus on....

Elvis

Why not? We can do a Pronoun for these too!

And what’s not to like about Elvis. We’ve got a lot of different Elvis we can cover too. There’s the “king” and then there’s Costello. We should probably start with the King. Do you realize that if Elvis were still alive he’d only be 74 years old? I had no idea that Zha Zha Gabor was old enough to be his mother and she’s still alive and slapping policeman…

Of course, were Elvis to be still alive I’m sure he’d look like…

But then again, he might have changed his ways…

That’s the thing about Elvis; you’ve got several versions of him. It’s like the Batman movies where they keep changing the actor but it’s the same character.

There’s the skinny rock pioneer Elvis.

There’s the soldier Elvis

There’s the movie star Elvis

And finally there’s the fat Vegas Elvis.

And then you have all of the conspiracy theories where people don’t believe he actually died. Instead, he’s playing poker on some island with JFK, Marilyn Monroe, Jimmy Hoffa and Michael Jackson.

But his disappearance from life (or the limelight) has left us with a hole in the Vegas universe and fortunately for us, a whole host of impersonators have filled our Elvis void.

Never-the-less, you’ve still got ways to communicate with the King…

D is for DOUGHNUT

For the letter D, let’s focus on....

DOUGHNUT

Oh sure, you can’t resist a doughnut. But let’s take a closer look.

First of all, the name…

How DO you spell it? I see it as doughnut, donut and doenut (ok, only in Arkansas). I don’t think foods should have multiple ways to spell them. It confuses us and we feel uneducated…

Second of all, there are no nuts in a doughnut. If I went around ordering PUDDINGFIGS people would think I’m nuts (don’t go there…and don’t point out the pun…).

Thirdly, nuts aren’t made of dough. Not that nuts are made of walls or peas either but that’s not our focus here.

No, the doughnut needs a new name. How about “cellulite wheel?” I mean, the government is always screaming for more truth in advertising….how much truer can you get. Ok, perhaps wheel isn’t fair either because I’m sure if I put them on my car I wouldn’t get out of my rain soaked driveway without disaster!

The other problem I have with doughnuts is the hole…or lack thereof. What’s the point? Is this one of those ruses to rip us off on our extra doughnut bite? You know, sort of like the wine industry does by curving the bottle upward to you don’t get at much wine as the bottle looks like it holds. They’re always looking for some way to trick you in paying the same for less.

But those silly Canadians…they’ve been fooled the most. They seek out and buy the missing doughnut holes! Whole doughnut or doughnut hole? Hmmmm…tough decision. Sort of like asking ranch house in Flint, MI or villa in Tuscany…

Oh and like everything else in this world…there’s no end to the types of doughnuts you can eat either…

And finally…

C is for CHICKEN

For the letter C, let’s focus on....

CHICKEN

You have to wonder about evolution (I’d go with creation but Adam was apparently a vegetarian and went for the apple instead). What predetermines that one evolutionary path would yield us our meal time? Take the chicken, for example. What if you went back to when everything was an amoeba and told one of them they’d end up as a delicious picnic entrée or breakfast item? They’d laugh in your face if they weren’t just a simple single cell organism, of course.

The chicken has to be right up at the top of the most used for jokes and sayings.

Why did the chicken cross the road?
Chicken…the only thing you eat before its born and after its dead
Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
Are you calling me chicken?
Yeah, but it tastes like chicken…
Chicken…the reason pork has to add an extra “other” to their slogan

Ever wonder about chicken like I wonder about chicken? I mean, take the choices you have at dinner time: Do you want dark meat or white meat?

First of all, neither of these is even correct.

White meat? Doesn’t look very white to me. Perhaps if you slathered mayonnaise over it.

Dark meat? Dark isn’t even a color. The definition of dark is: Lacking very little light; in the shadows. Huh? You mean if I have enough dark meat I could slip by unseen? Perhaps that is standard spy knowledge I haven’t been privy to.

In fact this overuse is so bad we even have diseases like chicken pox named after them.

Now most of us associate chicken with Kentucky Fried Chicken. But something isn’t right with KFC. I’ve had my gnomes checking them out for some time now. I suspect that not all of their chicken is actually fried in Kentucky! I know…shocking.

Oh…and they’ve been slowly cracking the secret ingredients too…

B is for BABY

For the letter B, let’s focus on....

BABY

The great thing about this subject is that we’ve all been one! Some still are…

There are two kinds of people in this world: those that want kids and those that do not. Don’t you love how I can subjectively divide the six plus billion people into two convenient groupings? But I digress…

Those that do not want kids usually dread the thought of babies around. They scream, they drool, they burp, they fart and they need constant attention. Funny, now that I write this I seem to recall many a wife saying the same thing about their husband. I wonder if there is a correlation there. But I digress…

Having lived through all the trials and tribulations of a parent, I can empathize with their arguments for sure unfortunately parenting has left me too tired to actually debate or argue with them.

First of all, if the human is at the top of the mammal food change and so superior because of our opposable thumbs and cognizance then why do our newborns require so much damn attention? You don’t see mammals in the wild needing a year to learn to walk. The predators would LOVE that!

Lion1: Look, a human baby…it’s like a buffet waiting for me to come along!
Lion2: Yeah, look, the parents are asleep exhausted and the rest of the human herd is running away from all the screaming…

A year to learn to walk? Come on! So then we have to invest in these damn strollers.

And then you need a bigger car to haul the strollers around in. And you need a bigger garage to store them in. The list goes on. If it’s not twenty bazillion toys to cart over to visit the grandparents it’s locking them into the baby seat that is welded into the back seat because you couldn’t figure out how to get it secure using the instructions…

Of course once you’re done having kids, you can either

a. Giveaway your old baby items like you would a fruitcake
b. Sell them on Ebay or Craigs List (it helps keep them and the post office in business)

And those are just the bigger items. You also have a plethora of smaller items to deal with: pacifiers, bibs, diapers, wipes, baby lotion, baby food, etc. etc. etc.

The only benefit of having babies is that they finally grow up and can support you when you get older. Only problem with that is they won’t…they’ll be the first to throw you into some old persons home and convince you its better there. Ah, parenting…

A is for ALBUM

I think its time to start something new here at Fantastical Nonsense. No, I’m not changing format or replacing the gnomes for pixies for something stupid like that.

In honor of Sesame Street's 40th anniversary, let’s just do nonsense from A to Z. Not every day…mind you, but I’ll continue the series. These won't be whimpy posts either. These will be VE posts like only VE could do them.

Oh, and the comments might be slow in coming…we’re off to Vegas for some hiking and people watching (I’m not a gambler) this week but the gnomes have things covered here at FN and I might have connectivity. Feel free to run amok in the comments either way…

For the letter A, let’s focus on....

ALBUM

For those of you born after the 1980s, an album was a big record that contained music, not something your mother made you look at containing embarrassing photos of yourself.

I have fond memories of albums. First of all…the artwork on the covers was so much more meaningful than those on CDs because you could ACTUALLY SEE THEM! Ok, perhaps my eyesight isn’t what it was back then, but still…


Albums came after the older 78rpm record players unionized, went on strike and got the industry to spin at 33 1/3 rpm. Seriously, WTF? Couldn’t they have at least rounded that to 34? At least the inventors of albums had the intelligence to make the hole the same size as the 78rpm records so the record players could still play them. But then along comes the 45rpm single. Again, WTF?

You can hear the discussion at the record company that first put out 45 records…

Executive: “Damn it…who designed these singles records?”
Idiot: “I did, sir”
Executive: “And where on Earth did you come up with a HUGE HOLE for them?”
Idiot: “Well…I had this half dollar in my pocket and…”

Thank God we were all saved by the “As seen on TV” folks…

But not all things were good about the album. Sure, it had a softer sound and better cover art and generally most albums put out early on contained a lot of songs that were good. But then something started happening. They figured out they could get just one hit and compose CRAP for the rest of the songs and we’d still have to buy it.

Also, records didn’t exactly hold up. They constantly skipped and popped if you weren’t obsessive about taking care of them (and what teenager ever did that). Also, they weren’t very mobile. Ever leave them in your car by accident?

And it wasn’t like you could take all your favorites on that road trip anyway. Unless you had this, of course…

What he doesn’t know is that he’ll have to actually bring his albums with him to play them and they’ll all end up warped like the earlier photo (which is probably why you’ve never seen this particular invention).

Really, there wasn’t anything easy about albums though. They took up an incredible amount of space.

They were also heavy as a collection. Ask anyone that ever had to move and had a lot of albums in their collection. Plus, they’d break cheap shelving if you tried to stack too many together.

Yes, in many ways albums were the equivalent of saying “why when I was your age, I had to walk 7 miles in the snow to school. Barefoot…”

VE will save you money on your water habit

You know what I have a problem with? A 12oz bottled water sells for $1.25 and a 12oz soda can be bought for as little as 40 cents if you buy it on sale. You mean I have to pay extra for the bad crap?

So I decided to do something about it. Introducing VE’s soda can filter. Yes, now you too can buy soda at a much reduced price and just slap on my filter and enjoy clean filtered water at half the price.

The great part is you can buy the crappiest brand of soda out there. Get the store brand that nobody buys; they’re practically giving it away!

Sure…it’s stupid to pay for water but face it, we’re all too lazy to actually prepare before we do something and so nobody wants to lug around water all day. Instead, just slip the filter into your pocket and when you want some water, grab a can of soda, slap on the filter and enjoy!

Plus, you don’t have to get cancer from the leeching plastic water bottle anymore! Bonus.