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?)





Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Would You Like A Fortune, Cookie?


Hail, hail rock n' roll.

(Always wanted to start one of my posts with that.)

Your Pope (that would be me, John The Tall of the All John All The Time World Church and Massage Parlor; the history of my meteoric rise to Papal stardom appears above), recently moved from the sunny climes of Southern California, specifically the San Fernando Valley area of LA (pronounced "LAH"), back to my roots here on the frigid plains of Northern Illinois ("Illinois" in the Hulahoop Indian tongue means "flat as a table and up to your butt in icicles"); a number of my more sane friends questioned the timing of this move, coming as it did in November, which, while still relatively warm in SoCal, is considered winter, i.e, effing cold, in table/butt-icicle land.

"Why are you moving back there in winter?" asked my erstwhile ex-neighbor Susie, better known (to me) as TL, which is short for TennLamb, her email handle, TennLamb being a contraction of Tennessee Lamb, as in "If you'll be my Dixie chicken, I'll be your Tennessee lamb," from the great Lowell George/Little Feat song "Dixie Chicken".

The answer to her question was, hell, I don't know; like the guy that jumped naked into a cactus patch, it just seemed like a good idea at the time. (Actually, I wanted to be home with my family for the holidays; I've come back to visit every year for the last several, so, I figured, why make it a round-trip?)

Honestly, the cold and snow really didn't concern me when I was considering the move; I lived here for many years previously, still had my long underwear, hats, scarves and gloves and knew how to drive in winter ("steer into the slide"), so I knew the gig. Besides, as I told Susie, and everyone else who questioned my sanity, now that I'm mostly retired, having no day-job to get up in the mornings and go to, hell, what did I care what Ma Nature was inflicting upon the world outside; I don't have to go out in it if I don't choose to.

Not calculated into this plan was a certain amount of time for my body/physiology to adjust from daily 70-80 degree Valley weather to, are you kidding me, the wind chill is WHAT?

I hadn't been here three weeks when I got the flu; sickest I think I have ever been in my, using the term guardedly, adult life. Spent a week in bed miserable, figuring that I would have to get better to die.

Got back on my feet and, within a week, promptly caught a cold; lacking bad luck, I wouldn't have any at all.

It was during my second stint in bed sick (this time for 5 days), that I learned of a phenomena of which I had previously been blissfully ignorant.

The company that makes those Halls "triple soothing action, mentho-lyptus" cough drops puts pithy little sayings on the wrappers.

Word.

And I quote:

            "Don't waste a precious minute."
            "Get through it."
            "Put your game face on." (Which begs the question, "On whom?")
            "Take charge and mean it."

I love this one:

            "A pep talk in every drop." (That one was trade marked.)

Now I don't mean to sound like a curmudgeon here, but after spending half of the first six weeks subsequent to my triumphant return to the Land Of Lincoln in bed, hoping to die, my appreciation for these gems of wisdom was limited.

I have never really liked or appreciated the little slips of paper with the brief Oriental philosophies contained in fortune cookies either; frankly, although I like the cookie part, I've always thought most of the sayings were trite or, in a lot of cases, rather stupid. No slam to Confucius, but I mean, is there a point to these?

My all-time favorite fortune cookie messages:

            "You just ate cat."
            "Never tease an armed midget with a high-five."

And of course, at the end of a dinner with friends in a Chinese restaurant, some too-clever-for-words-genius will invariably comment to his/her (usually her) fellow diners, "Oh, read your fortune and add the words 'in bed' at the end", which, in my mind, typically only makes the message sound even more inane.

"You will inherit a potato farm and make a killing in tubers." Yeah, Einstein, add "in bed" to that.

I'm going to lobby someone to try my cough drop/fortune cookie sayings as alternatives to what they're using currently.

To wit:

            "The last thing I want to do is hurt you, but it's still on my list."
            "If I agreed with you, we'd both be wrong."
            "I didn't say it was your fault, I said I was blaming you."
            "Since light travels faster than sound, some people appear bright until they speak."
            "You do not need a parachute to skydive; you only need one to skydive twice."
            "Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car."
            "You only live once, if you're lucky."

Besides being infinitely more clever than the ones on the cough-drop wrappers and in the fortune cookies these companies are boring us with currently, mine are a lot funnier.

(FYI, for those of you unaware of this, my sayings actually have a name...they're called "paraprosdokians", which in the Hulahoop Indian tongue means "potato farm".

Okay, I lied about that; here's what the word really means, per WikiPedia:

"A paraprosdokian is a figure of speech in which the latter part of a sentence or phrase is surprising or unexpected in a way that causes the reader or listener to reframe or reinterpret the first part. It is frequently used for humorous or dramatic effect, sometimes producing an anticlimax. For this reason, it is extremely popular among comedians and satirists. Some paraprosdokians not only change the meaning of an early phrase, but they also play on the double meaning of a particular word, creating a form of syllepsis."

Is it possible to have an "anticlimax"? I mean, you either do or you don't, right?

So on top of being in bed, sick and miserable with my cold, I had to endure Kraft Foods' (the maker of Halls Cough Drops) idea of uplifting messages on the wrappers of their product. (Yeah, I know, I didn't have to read them, but once I knew they were there, oh well.) Somehow, this must rise to the level of "cruel and unusual punishment".

"That wasn't moo goo gai pan, it was sweet and sour raccoon testicles."

Love and chop suey,

PJTT

copyright 2014 Krissongs Inc.

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