Amoeblog

(Wherein Mardi Gras is given an in-depth assessment.)

Posted by Job O Brother, March 7, 2011 05:01pm | Comments (1)
disneyland maps
How it appeared before they annexed Poland.

I’ll give you two guesses as to who was at Disneyland yesterday.

Your first guess was Charles the Bald, Holy Roman Emperor and King of West Francia which makes you sound well-educated – even astute – but because he’s been dead since 877 AD, over one thousand years before the opening of Disneyland, it was ultimately a stupid, stupid guess – even more so when you learn that Charles II thought Donald Duck was “so retarded.”

Your second guess is that I was at Disneyland with my boyfriend, two of my sisters, and some of their children. Now that’s using your noggin’! (Nice, noggin’, BTW.)

It wasn’t long ago that I was at Disneyland with rock superstar Micayla Grace (currently playing with Rachel Fannan) for her first time. I told you about that, right? No? Well, it was super. Micayla and I got high on rainbow-swirled lollipops (if you cut them into a powder and snort it you’ll hallucinate so hard that the blood gushing from your nose looks like juicy, red licorice whips [but will taste awful]) and had our picture taken with Goofy (or someone we thought was Goofy but turned out to be a soft-spoken teenage boy with neuropathic heredofamilial amyloidosis and very grumpy parents) before being given a tour of the infamous Disney "jail" after a botched assassination attempt on the animatronic Abraham Lincoln during the Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln show on Main Street, USA.

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(In which our hero returns from the Caribbean...)

Posted by Job O Brother, February 23, 2009 03:45pm | Post a Comment
titanic
I should've been so lucky...

I’ve just returned from a two week cruise in the Caribbean islands.

Stop right there! Undoubtedly your reaction is one of jealousy, but it’s unfounded – or would be, if the cruise you went on was the same as mine. Not so much a “luxury cruise” as it was… well… a floating Budget Inn. I was confounded gastronomically, degraded socially, and had an overall poopy time. You should be no more jealous of me than you would of some forgettable uncle who attended a dental convention one week in Sacramento. Olé.

One of the many, many awful attributes this cruise had was the piping of pop music in the halls; a convoluted mix that sounded as though it had been compiled by a twelve-year-old schoolgirl using her tape recorder and whatever radio station came in best. Now, even this is an improvement over, say, smooth jazz or Top 40 contemporary country, but they not only re-looped the same music (imagine hearing this every seventh hour!) but kept it playing all through the night! Had the cabins been sound-proof, this would’ve been fine, but they weren’t. So every night, I could hear the muffled beat of Kylie Minogue from the door, the thirty-something, sex-crazed, Italian couple making babies on the forward side, and what sounded like a TB ward on the aft. Olé.

My iPod became an important part of my survival kit, and I found myself gravitating towards easy-listening music; something to soothe the myriad ways in which my humanity was compromised. (Ever been molested by a shower curtain? It happened to me, daily. Ever eat a lasagna that tasted of peppermint candy and WD40? I have, now.)
spray
There's no amount of parmesan cheese that can help this.

I couldn’t get enough of Anita Kerr. For those of you unfamiliar with her, she’s a singer / composer / producer of large success but smaller fame, these days. Her hey-day was the 1960’s, where her talents were lent to many projects beside her own. Anyone who listens to country music from that period has almost certainly enjoyed her handiwork, whether you knew it or not.