Category: Out to Lunch

SPOOF, Wisconsin (Wire) — Local pastor Jim Bob Evans, a recent transplant from the Deep South, says he was surprised to learn that the area was not the locus of spiritual revival, as he was led to believe.

“When I first come up here to give my trial preachin’,” said Evans, “I thought some serious rejuvenatin’ was goin’ on. I kept hearin’ all these radio spots talkin’ about this bein’ the Bible-head capital of the world.”

Through a thick accent and many dropped Gs, Evans told how he misread the spiritual landscape.

“I always say you find where the Spirit’s movin’ and join him there, but I hadn’t heard o’ no Bible-heads before. I just figured it musta been sorta like Bible-thumpers and Jesus freaks, as we say down to the farm. When I heard ’em say the biggest Bible-head business was right here, I was so excited I wanted to cannonball into the baptismal pool.”

Evans found his baptismal frequently frozen, and eventually discovered that he had also been the victim of differences in regional vocal inflection.

“After movin’ all my earthly goods and kin up here to start spreadin’ the good news with the rest of the holy-rollers, I learnt that people talk different, and they weren’t sayin’ Bible-heads at all. They were talkin’ ’bout those dolls with the spring-loaded noggins.”

Apparently the Midwest accent detectable in commercials for a local bobble-head maker led to Evans’ confusion. It remains unclear whether Evans’ congregation is able to understand him through the brogue, or if he is able to order successfully at a drive-thru. Evans nevertheless remains hopeful.

“When you think about it, bobble-heads look like they might  be filled with the Spirit, and show more excitement than some church folk.”

From time to time the Yankee capitalist oppressors have attempted to force their useless wares upon Dixie, with occasional success. They get our hard-earned greenbacks, and we end up with things like minivans and Egg Beaters.

Their latest attempt to hoodwink us is the so-called Internet, but this time we will ultimately overcome the oppressor and reject this alleged World Wide Web.

As we all know, Dixie’s people are different culturally and socially. Our collective spirit of independence and rebellion will rise within us until we see through the fog of technical gadgetry and the awe of sophisticated machinery, at which time we will throw off the shackles of computerized communication.

Though temporarily star-struck by the Yankee’s baubles and shiny trinkets, we shall nonetheless prevail.

Continue Reading “Why Dixie will Ditch the Internet”

One of my favorite topics is beeper and cell phone sales.

That there is an almost endless combination of retail establishments offering beepers and cell phones has often been the subject of the withering repartee of the fine honed edge of my rapier wit. Of course, that depends on your perspective, and one might just as well say “He yields his wit like a wooden club: those he cannot induce to laugh voluntarily he bashes about the head with the blunt edge of a medieval mallet he calls redundancy.”

I’m not sure I understand what I just said, but rest assured, it is quite hilarious.

By the way, speaking of beeper sales, Granny Ferguson’s Quilting Service has now become Granny’s Quilting, Beeper and Cell Phone Bee.

I thought I had seen, or imagined, almost every combination of retail business that would reasonably subject itself to ridicule and a column, but in my worldwide travels between Clio and Abbeville I came across one that I have not seen before: Ted’s Famous Cheeseburgers & Tanning Beds.

I would not have thought twice had Ted decided to combine his famous cheeseburgers with beepers or cell phones. The fact that Ted’s is in the middle of nowhere, halfway between Obscureville and Grease-Spot-on-the-Map-Burg, of interest primarily to grazing cattle and location scouts for the nearest moonshiners, would not have diminished my recognition of the synergy between electronic communication devices and grilled, formerly-grazing cattle.

As it were, though, I had been paying some attention to this tanning bed thing, because it has threatened once or twice to overtake beepers and cell phones in sheer volume, and the juxtaposition of sizzling beef and sizzling people caught my eye.

Initially, tanning beds seemed to be limited to salons dedicated solely to tanning, although some spas and beauty parlors also had a bed or two.

(Is “beauty parlor” the correct term? Once again, this demonstrates the truth that women’s things are naturally more complex than men’s. Men get their hair cut at barber shops, where everyone understands that the term “high and tight” does not mean stoned and frugal, and where the combs are kept in huge jars of a mysterious blue liquid. If men’s grooming can’t be done with scissors, electric clippers, and mysterious blue liquid, it shouldn’t be done at all.)

Then, tanning beds began popping up in gyms, health food stores, apartment clubhouses, and finally, remotely located burger joints.

I wonder, incidentally, if Ted’s cheeseburgers were independently famous, or whether fame came to Ted when he combined his formerly mediocre and slightly known burgers with cheese and tanning.

The market, as they say, delivers what the market desires, so we should at least conclude, regardless of how we view fame, that Ted and his neighbors desire to be neither hungry nor pale.

One alarming by-product of the burgeoning lottery industry is that everyone seems to be selling the dream of easy money.

Entrepreneurs of all stripes are jostling to get in on the action. If you had the notion, you could buy lottery tickets at Joe’s Pool Hall & Discount Carpet Emporium.

You can buy Quick Pix at the window tinting place down the street, Powerball 7s at the Piggly Wiggly, and run-of-the-mill Lotto tickets from that guy selling watches out of his trench coat by the side of the road.

This is, if you notice, the same marketing strategy that has caught on in other industries, to wit, personal communications. I must be the only human being left alive who is neither using nor selling a beeper.

By the way, on a metaphysical note, if everyone has a beeper, what use is it to anyone? Similarly, when everyone in the world has a cellular phone, is there any advantage to having one?

Anyhoo, I was down at the court house the other day, negotiating over a pending lawsuit when my worthy adversary interrupted the proceedings and said “By the way, I’ve got beepers in deco colors if you’re interested, and who wouldn’t be interested, right?”

I decided, instead, to purchase my beeper from some guy selling winter squash on the roadside. there are advantages to buying a piece of electronic equipment at the same place that you buy rutabagas, namely, that it makes for good column material.

I filled in the wrong year on my check to Pee Wee’s Fruit Stand (for the beeper). Usually, during the first couple of months during a new year, I fill in the last year when dating things.

To throw myself off track this year, so far my mistake has been to write in the year 1988. Perhaps this is some indication that my subconscious secretly desires a return to a Republican administration, which is no real secret, but what my inner child finds so appealing about my third year of college I’ll never know.

Maybe it was the romantic appeal of always being broke, having to eat cafeteria food, and getting turned down for dates to frat parties. But then, how would that be any different from last week?

Speaking of last week, I finally got my Christmas tree out of the house. The thing was so big, officials at the Department of the Interior accused me of pirating my tree from the Sequoia National Forest. For those of you just now waking up from New Year’s Eve celebrations, that’s where the trees get really big.

The tree was much easier to bring into the house, because it was wearing one of those tree girdles, and could probably have fit in a Size 7. Without the girdle, though, we’re talking Size 42.

Not too long ago, I bought a beeper at a roadside fruit stand. Little did I know what wort of technological mess I had gotten myself into.

The other day I came home from work to find several squirrels frolicking in my front yard. The connection between beepers bought at a produce market and gaily romping squirrels may not be readily apparent, but bear with me, and after reading the entire article you might still be unclear.

If there’s one thing a squirrel is not permitted to do on my property, it’s frolic. They are keenly aware of my No Frolicking Squirrel rule, and when they saw me coming, promptly climbed the side of my house and started chewing on the eaves. In an ex parte ruling based upon my executive fiat power, I immediately decided that eave-chewing is the same as frolicking, and took appropriate action to enforce the rules.

Some may consider this arbitrary judicial activism. Although the law is king, in the Faircloth Compound, I am the law. And no eave-chewing squirrel given to unsupervised and unauthorized frolic is above the law.

The condemned squirrels got a technical reprieve when the sights on my high-powered rifle malfunctioned. The only things I managed to kill that day were my air conditioner and a sub-station power transformer.

I was somewhat concerned, however, when a shot ricocheted off the hard shell of an interloping armadillo and careened straight into the sky, but I thought no more about it once I remembered that Jeopardy! was on.

Halfway through Double Jeopardy I received the following message on my roadside fruit stand beeper:

Igor, Boris wants meeting at Kremlin. Bring Spice Girls record. Victor.

I was a little puzzled, to say the least. I thought surely that Boris Yeltsin would be a Sinatra fan.

Later, during a nutritious meal of sliced pickles and Cheesy Poofs, I received another disturbing message on the aforementioned roadside fruit stand beeper:

Al, the Prime Minister needs more classified military technology. India and Pakistan have the Bomb, and Lithuania has one mean water balloon launcher. Tell Bill to deliver the goods, or we revoke his lifetime supply of kung pao chicken. Call us: 555-NUKE.

It was at this point that I realized I was receiving pages that were not my own. As I usually do when faced with serious technological crises, I turned on X-Files reruns and helped myself to another helping of Cheesy Poofs.

But to my dismay all normal programming had been pre-empted by coverage of that day’s big news: a communication satellite had broken down and was falling out of orbit toward the earth.

I immediately realized that I had pulled a hat trick with my sharpshooting: air condition, power transformer, and, thanks to a crusty varmint, a major satellite.

The satellite’s owner attempted emergency repairs, but it turns out that the AAA, on a technicality, only supplies Emergency Satellite Assistance to a maximum of 10-mile orbits, and the Space Shuttle was busy putting out fires at the MIR Space Station.

Communications, therefore, would be disrupted for quite some time.

I kept my roadside fruit stand beeper on just to see what I would get.

CIA, bullet found in satellite. Tests reveal high-powered rifle slug covered with armadillo blood. Suspect likely in rural Alabama. FBI.”

Er, gotta go…