Des: Welcome to another
edition of the Chicago Bears football pre-game show. The Bears face off against
the Minnesota Vikings as Chicago sports fans slowly trickle back to watching
televised sports with fear and trepidation after the Cubs disappointing loss in
the National League Championship Series. Will the Bears use a strong showing to
draw viewers away from the juggernaut that is the Chicago Blackhawks? Or, given
that the Blackhawks aren’t actually playing today, will Jay Cutler’s lack of
first downs cause fans to drift away to watch professional bowling, or an
informercial from the 1980s?
To answer these and similar questions is our panel of
experts: Concord Wainwright Peabody, Captain Silas Charles “Estado Nova” Red-beard,
Modre- the trans-Western guru, the Prissy Minion, Doctor Sally McChesty, Ellie
Mae MacGillicutty, and the Keystone Light mascot, Drunky McDumbAss
Redbeard: ARRRH, mateys! I’ve
been asked to make to references to Portuguese dictator Salazar in my opening
remarks because, apparently, our site meter indicates that this blog is popular
in Portugal, and what better way, I guess, to build an audience than to remind
it of a dark chapter in its national history? I shudder to see what happens if
this Internet journal ever becomes popular in Paraguay. But I digress; here
goes, mateys: The Bears loss to Detroit reminds one of Operation Vijay, the
1961 battle in which India took the Portuguese colony of Goa—I’m only reminded
of this after reading Salazar’s Wikipedia page—until today, I didn’t know that
Portugal even had a colony in India
that they kept until the early 1960s. My ignorance of this is a bit of
surprise, given that, in my countless centuries of drunken maraudings, I
thought I had “dropped anchor”, if ye will, at every colonial port in India.
Speaking of Salazar, if ye be lookin’ for an excellent job of whitewashing,
look nae further than whoever wrote Salazar’s biography. Here be my favorite
quote: “In July 1940,Life magazine called Salazar ‘a benevolent
ruler’, described him as ‘by far the world's best dictator, he [Salazar] is
also the greatest Portuguese since Prince Henry the Navigator’,
and added that ‘the dictator has built the nation’.” What do you think,
Des, did I do a good job of maintaining our Portuguese audience?
Des: Huh? Oh, yeah, sure,
Captain. Here’s something from friend-of-the-show Agent Screamin’, who shared on
my Facebook page a Roz Chast cartoon entitled “Blog Breakdown” with a
delightful pie chart indicating that 1/3 of blogs are stories about crap
somebody cooked, knitted, or sewed, 1/3 are conspiracy theories, and the
remaining 1/3rd are self-promotion. We need to do a lot more about
cooking, knitting, and sewing.
Captain: ARRRH, mateys! Ye
can’t spell “conspiracy” without “piracy”. Think about that, won’t you?
Prissy: Des, all of my comments
about your body of work refer to your output as a “tapestry” of something: a tapestry
of thought-crimes, a tapestry of comedy scraps stitched together to hold in the
heat of your blazing wisdom…
Des: Drunky McDumbAss, I
would imagine that your gourmet skills would be limited to driving through White
Castle at three in the morning in a feeble attempt to absorb the gallons of
alcohol you drank during last night’s Halloween festivities. But, hey, at least
you have an extra hour to sleep it off, thanks to Daylight Stealing Time.
Drunky: Yeah, you’d think so,
Des, but I’ve been spending the last nine hours driving around various DUI/DWI
checkpoints
Des: DUI and DWI
checkpoints? How many states have you had to drive through?
Drunky: That’s between me and
my court-ordered tracking bracelet. I’m driving a rental car. Well, it’s “rental”
in the sense that it’s not mine.
Des: I assume that the cell
phone you’re using to phone this in isn’t yours either, given that my caller ID
lists you as “Bjorn Stangerland.”
Drunky: Yeah, both my car and
my phone have a booze-breath lock on them, so I have to “borrow” other people’s.
Des: Modre, if anyone can
stretch out an overused joke until it’s thinner than hillbilly stew…
Ellie Mae: I resent that
remark!
Des: ...it would be you. Do
what the demons inside your brain compel you to.
Modre: The quilt covered
question mavens of quin-itious quintessence will quietly quake in a quinine
stew of gurgling subterfuge-ling masonry, freely quest-dancing in a
shadow-foxing under-landau cabriolet chasms under a man-mage whose magic
gestures and smooth conversational tone fail to make manifest a destiny that
should never be unbound, lest it rolls under a rug that not even the greatest,
most gilded broom could sweep everlasting, ever-fasting from a meal that, once
cooked, cannot be unmade like last night’s bed upon which…
Des: And that’s all the time you have, Modre. Since there was
probably a Donald Trump reference buried in there somewhere, let’s go now to
Concord Peabody, who has a terrible Jeb Bush joke that needs to get out while
he’s still a presidential candidate.
Concord: Jeb Bush is the only
person I’ve beaten in fantasy football.
Des: Sally, since we’ve given
up talking about the Bears or even football a long time ago, just say whatever’s
on your mind.
Sally: Des, have you seen
those disturbing car commercials with the safety engineer imagining himself and
his family as crash test dummies? Then there’s the even more disturbing sequel
when he starts imagining his co-workers and their families in the crash test
car… And then it turns out that the part about him being a safety inspector was
also a fantasy.
Des: I think we finally have
an awesome direction to take your character. Sit back and watch, sports fans,
as the Bears face off in a game in which both team may manage to play at least
one quarter of compelling football.
