WELCOME TO THE BLOG OF POPE JOHN THE TALL, LEADER OF THE ALL JOHN ALL THE TIME WORLD CHURCH


******PLEASE NOTE******

(Notice I said please.)

To those of you who are new to "the Pope" and the "AJATTWC", the following various posts are the official communications of yours truly, Pope John The Tall, or as I'm known in many circles, PJTT.

I aspired to the position of Pope of the AJATTWC several years ago, after the Roman Catholics elected Joseph Ratzinger, a German Cardinal, as their Pope; I figured if he could do it, so could I.

Despite what would seem to be a "religious" theme, I try not to play favorites: I'm satirical/irreverent about everything, in an attempt to give my readers a few yucks; that is the goal. If I haven't made you laugh, well, I tried, and I hope I'm given an "A" for the effort. (Or at least a really solid "C".)

I further hope that my faithful readers (all several of them) and any of you who wander in from the cold of the Internet, will derive much solace and spiritual awakening from my timeless prose, and, as I so often refer to it, the "soothing balm of Johnism"; if you don't, how sad for you, because I'm a pretty funny guy. (My daughter tells me, regularly, that I'm "silly"; I suspect that she's right.)

Please note that everything on my blog is meant to be fun, and in no way insulting to anyone, unless of course you're a politician, then you can assume I intended to insult you. (Hey, it goes with the job, guys; if you can't take the heat, then the harder they fall.)

Never mind.

Anyway, welcome and thanks for stopping by; please feel free to peruse to your heart's content (there is a large archive of my past posts, going back several hundred years, in the right-hand column), and please be sure to make a large donation at the door as you leave. (It's tax-deductible.)

Speaking of leaving, as I make my exit, and probably none too soon, here's something from the Book of Excretions, Apollo 13: Dodgers 6...

"Blessed are the lazy, for although they don't accomplish much, they're well rested."

Enjoy. (Or don't, it's still a free country. It is still a free country, isn't it? They haven't changed that as far as I know, have they?)





Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Party Time At The Zoo

Go ahead: I dare you.

I was "surfing the Web" the other day (does anybody else ever use that term anymore?), which is part of my duties as your Pope Dude, when I stumbled onto this headline:

"Holliday leaves after moth gets stuck in ear".

Since I saw this little blurb in the "Sports" section of MSN.com, I quickly realized that the "Holliday" the headline referred to was Matt Holliday, the left fielder for the St. Louis Cardinals. So I clicked on the link to find out how a moth got stuck in Matt Holliday's ear. (I mean, wouldn't you?) On the surface of it, you know it had to be a strange story, even without having all the particulars.

Without getting into all the gory details, suffice to say that Matt, who seems to be a decent human being and is outstanding in his field, was standing out in left field the other evening in a game against my L.A. Dodgers, pretty much minding his own business, doing his left field gig...

...when a moth flew in his ear.

Lemme' run that by you again, in case you missed it.

He was standing in left field when a moth flew in his right ear (Matt bats right-handed). You could see something was wrong with him; they stopped the game and the trainer came out, looked in Matt's ear, and then they took him out. But there was no explanation as to why he had to come out.

So after witnessing this, I immediately called Dr. Bill O'Lading, the director of the All John All The Time World Church-sponsored think tank, the Center For The Serious Consideration Of Weighty Matters, and the resident "science guy" here at the AJATTWC, to calculate the odds of having a moth fly in your ear when you're playing left field for a major league baseball team. (I think the odds change when you're playing for a minor league team.)

Dr. O'Lading called me back a few minutes later, after I had explained what I wanted, and after he questioned if I was crazy, which of course I assured him I was, but that my sanity had nothing whatsoever to do with having a flying insect becoming stuck in a ballplayer's ear.

According to the good doctor, the odds of having a moth fly into your ear while standing in left field at Busch Stadium, in the first game of a three-game series, are...

...about 800 bagillion to one, give or take a few zeros. (I'm not sure what to make of this, or whether it has any relevance, but on the Dodger's current road-trip, they've played in Miller Field (Milwaukee), Coors Field (Denver) and Busch Stadium (St. Louis). Is there a message in that somewhere?)

And this wasn't one of those little wussy moths, you know, the dinky kind that get into your house when you leave the door open for the one minute it takes to let the dog out, and then they fly all around the lamp until you get disgusted and you smack the little bastard, just so he'll stop flying in those crazy circles like he just fell into a bottle of Jack and swam his way to the top. No, this was one of those "industrial strength" moths; they showed a picture of the villain in a plastic bag after the Cardinal training staff pulled it out of Holliday's ear with a tweezers. (According to the Dodger's announcer, Steve Lyons, they first took Holliday into a completely dark room and tried to coax the moth out by shining a flashlight in his ear, (Holliday's, not the moth's) but the moth, figuring he had stumbled into a good thing, didn't take the bait; true story.) The damn thing was about an 1-1/2" long, weighed about 15 pounds and had a tattoo on his left wing that said, "Newt For President". Nasty damn thing.

Matt was able to return to play in the second game of the series last night, when the Dodgers beat the crap out of the Cards, 13-2. There were no further reported incidents of insect infestation.

You guys ever see "Mothra", the sci-fi flick about the giant moth that attacks Japan? If you're a fan of 1950's monster movies, you know that the island of Japan was regularly visited by evil, giant, radioactive mutant animals, (have you ever noticed how often my ex- manages to sneak into my posts?), like Mothra, Godzilla, Ghidora, Biollante, Oprah Winfrey and the Pillsbury Dough Boy. Mothra was, by the way, a giant lepidopteran, which in Latin means "one big effing moth".

I personally thought Matt Holliday was damn lucky the radioactive mutant monster genre of films is mostly defunct these days; you're sure as hell not pulling Mothra out of someone's ear with a pair of tweezers. Or Godzilla, for that matter. (I've never understood that term, a "pair" of tweezers; wouldn't that be two? And apropos of nothing, I once had a friend that used to say "Godzilla" to people when they sneezed.)

So Matt was fine, and I thought things were getting back to normal, although "normal" at my house probably isn't the same as "normal" at your house, when my eyes were assaulted by this headline:

"Hawk swoops inside NYC apartment building".

Run that back, please.

"Hawk swoops inside NYC apartment building".

According to this article, again on MSN.com, and aren't they just full of interesting news and stories, amongst other things, a red-tailed hawk recently flew into an open 5th-floor window of an upscale apartment building in New York. The hawk, being brighter than the average Tea Party Republican, immediately realized that the unit he had  flown into was not "rent-controlled", and flew right back out, after leaving a small deposit on the resident's shoulder.

Has Mother Nature slipped a gear or two here? Are the animals finally disgusted with humans to the point that they're thinking of taking over?

Yeah, you guys think I'm crazy, but what was one of the top-grossing movies from last weekend (8/19 through 8/21)?

That's right, opera lovers, "Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes". You gettin' the chills yet?

So I called Dr. O'Lading back, to ask him to speculate on whether or not, based on the strange happenings of the last few days in the "Animal Kingdom", it was possible that a REAL "Rise" of the animals was taking place. (Okay, I was just screwin' with him, but you know how snooty these "science" types can be. I once emailed Doc to ask him to calculate how much wood a woodchuck could chuck, if in fact a woodchuck could chuck wood; just bustin' his chops again, right? Then I got his answer: 56.3. Not cords, or tons, or pomegranates, just "56.3". Smart ass.)

Dr. O'Lading, understanding my proclivity for tasteless humor, declined to comment.

And in the meantime, while I'm trying desperately to get a handle on this whole "animal uprising" thing, guess who walks in the room with his leash in his mouth and a look of need in his eye?

That's correct, children of the corn, it was my roommate, sidekick, BFF and occasional sparring partner, the Harley Dog. (Harley has more titles than Moamar Ghaddafi, or however you spell his name, and a quick aside to the Libyan rebels who are currently working feverishly to throw that douche-bag piece of crap into the Mediterranean Sea: nice job, guys; how about when you're done in Libya you head to Iran and see what you can do about that bunch of happy assholes.)

And I thought to myself, self, I thought, any time Harley needs to go out, I jump. Any time Harley needs to be fed, I jump. Any time Harley needs to go to the vet, I jump. Any time Harley needs anything, I jump.

(And that isn't a complaint, by the way; anyone with a companion like Harley doesn't mind the aggravation, but it is a reality of having a pet. Actually, women are WAY harder to maintain.)

Harley's activities, on the other hand, where he wears a glove, are confined to going out, eating, lying on the floor, sleeping on the floor, bugging me for Girl Scout cookies, chasing an occasional squirrel or cat and not much else. Certainly no jumping, of any kind.

Uprising in the animal kingdom? Animals making an attempt to take over the world?

Shit, they already run things around my house.

Love and June bugs,

PJTT

copyright 2011 Krissongs Inc.

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