Fall TV lineup that will punch you in the soul

Most TV shows suck nowadays. I still watch many, because I like to exercise my pupils,  but they are ususally pretty terrible. I recently wrote to NBC to suggest an entire overhaul of their programming schedule, to which I have received no reply. I take that as unmistakable evidence that they are going to run with it.

Dear NBC,

Your shows suck. Especially the ones with that one guy (I forget his name, but he was in that one show about waffles). Here are some new shows to use this fall in place of the other ones, which you should get rid of.

Remember “Leave it to Beaver”? It was a classic. Let’s bring it back but adjust it to modern times. We’ll call it “The Wiccans of Southern Idaho.” It will follow a husband and wife and their two children, all of whom belong to a wiccan commune that gets into all sorts of delightful tomfoolery.

Reality TV has the right idea, but all the wrong baselines. Who cares about people that fish or some stupid rich person and his wife? “Ipecac Jokester Chronicles” will show the true stories of people that dump high levels of ipecac into the food, drinks, and batches of toothpaste of unsuspecting victims. Together, the audience will laugh and cry with the show’s key people.

I have one for those that like their stories, too. “Bowling league of desire” is about a bowling league and all of the drama that occurs between the bowlers.

Game show? I’ve got one: “What’s that smell?” will reward contestants for their ability to figure out whatever smell we present. The lightning round will involve the contestants trying to outsniff my bloodhound, ‘Cmere You’.

 For some reason, there are hundreds of crime mystery shows. We can capitalize on that with “CSI: Repeated Parking Violaton Offenders”

For the children, you can present a cartoon worth waking up for: “Honkey and Wheezy” (about two people that cough a lot). Also, a show like Sesame Street, “Uncle Billy’s Moonshine Shed,” will both teach and entertain the little buckets of joy.

Any holes in your schedule should be filled with reruns of Cop Rock, Mr T and Tina, and segments of improv comedy with Glenn Beck.

Sincerely,

Skubert Barleysworth

Be prepared for a new breed of entertainment.

Why I'm not a doctor

As a young man growing up down the street from Hubert’s Foot Perfume Palace, I was known for my expert, though unlicensed and often uneducated and inventive, medical care on my friends. Whenever my friends and I would suffer injuries from our headbutting competitions, fall from trees, or get the butt squirts, they would defer to my quick thinking to make things right.

I think my crowning moment, and the moment that convinced me to become a doctor, came when Hank-Jim-Frank-Theobold (his dad wanted to name him after his uncles, but couldn’t choose just one) was unexpectedly bitten on the nose by a deer. Not wanting my good friend to loose his nose, and growing tired of his yelling, I reopened the nasal passages with sticks, applied pressure with moss and a rock, and suppressed his cries with my sock, which was still on my left foot. Then, because I once learned that people breathe, I tried to perform a traceodomy with my thumb, which caused the sticks to shoot out, thus healing him.

From this pivotal moment, I faced many hardships. First, I dropped out of school in 5^th grade. This may surprise you, but doctor schools prefer people that finished high school.  I took the admissions tests anyway, with the knowledge that I would get everything right. To my dismay, there were relatively few questions of how to treat shattered toes, poison ivy rashes, or lazy eyes, and many more on what ‘x’ is in some dumb math questions and what the definitions were to big words. Needless to say, I only placed in the 98^th percentile.

Unfortunately, Johns Hopkins (more like ‘Nons Accept-kins’) didn’t think that the trivia quiz on a Denny’s menu a valid placement test. So there was another road block. I decided to show up on the first day anyway, which I later learned wasn’t March 17^th. After sitting in on a couple of classes, I was kindly asked to leave by the security guards (note: replace “to leave” with “kicked in the jaw” and “kindly” with “repeatedly”).  As it turns out, you have to pay a lot of money to go to school there and they don’t take kindly to people that don’t wear shirts and play bagpipes.

Without these roadblocks, I would have definitely graduated with high honors and would have made an amazing doctor. Maybe I don’t have a “degree,”  but I will still be the guy everybody calls when they get their armpit hair stuck in the lawnmower.

Diet plans are for rich people

I don’t need constant reassurance from onlookers to know that I am a man of extremely well maintained physical fitness. My usual attire of Daisy Duke shorts and a tank top that always smells like fried chicken does nothing to hide my masculine physique. How, I know many people ask themselves constantly, can I look like Skubert?

I will tell you.

1.       Don’t pay any attention to what you eat. You think cavemen and other people back then looked up the number of calories of their food? Of course not. They ate what they found or hunted. I too, eat anything I find or hunt, especially when I hunt burger king.

2.       Strut often. By ‘strut,’ I of course mean to deep-step everywhere you go, which builds leg muscle while simultaneously scratching your nether-regions, which, if you’re like me, are usually a bit itchy. This helps if you throw the occasional excitement kick into your stride.

**Be warned about your kick, because I one time kicked a guy on the street for 7 minutes until I realized that I was kicking him, and it took an additional 2 minutes to stop kicking him. I only made that mistake once, after those other times I made that mistake.**

3.       Do a lot of situps each day. You can make this a game by timing your dookies just right so that your sit up also clenches the right muscles to make the final push and your reward will be felt all over.

4.       Chase things. This can be as simple as pursuing a fly or as purpose driven as chasing mailmen, a hobby I picked up from my dog, Ruffer. Mailmen can usually scamper quickly, so your efforts will get in some nice cardio.

5.       Push people. Know what the difference is between bench press and shoving people on the sidewalks? I don’t.

6.       Whistle. Trust me on this one.

7.       Scratch any bodily itches (minus the nether regions. See #2 for that one) with your feet. Flexibility is important and an excuse to bend your legs to scratch your arm or remove food from between your teeth will keep you as limber as a koala. The more you practice this, the more you can do. I clean my ears exclusively with old right pinky toe.

8.       Hold your farts when possible. WHEN POSSIBLE.

9.       Don’t shave or wax body hair. Instead, let the hair rub away naturally by crawling through grass and on the street. A plus to this is that grass smells good and there is sometimes gum on the street or sidewalk.

10.   Dance like you are stuck in a sandbox with crabs. As you advance, dance in a sandbox with crabs.

11.   Frown and grunt often. It takes 3 muscles to smile and 42 to frown, so the choice is clear. Also, grunting works the core. Also, grunting is musical.

While my workout routine is far off the beaten path, it is how I got to where I am today, which is somewhere between Dan Aykroyd and fitness celebrity John McCain.

Stop Waltzing, Matilda

Being a man rich in travel and cultural distinctions, I feel justified in pointing out stupid things that unamerican weirdos do. While this may not be the most “politically correct” entry I have ever written, and will “cross a few lines” in its blunt assessment, I “don’t care.”

Australia         - Why do they sing through tubes, or didgeridoos? Learn to use a kazoo like the rest of us, Dundee.

                        - Can anyone tell me what a wallaby is? No.

                        -Apparently their toilets go the opposite way. This is the dumbest thing I have ever heard of. Though I am a man of purity and graceful cleanliness, I wouldn’t ever want my pony leg sized turds shooting out of the toilet when I flush. Those things should only go in one direction – down.

Spain              - Slow down your words

                        - You haven’t slowed down yet, fast talker

                        - Why are you running from bulls instead of eating them with a side of hot dogs and beer? When I was a little boy, I would never let uncle Bungy’s chickens tell me what’s new before I killed them with a monopoly board and prepared them for dinner. Mom always told me not to let your food play with you and that is the way it should be.

Canada            - I too like pancakes and syrup. Get on with your life and take the maple leaf off your flag. You don’t see us adorning our flag with a bag of cheetos or spam, so why constantly seek to remind everyone that Aunt Jemima flew through Montreal once?

                        - Spread out more. If you went to a friend’s house for grilled turtle and all of his neighbors were crowded along his fence, wouldn’t you tell them to explore the rest of their yard? They might respond with something useless like “it’s cold over there,” but that is when you can remind them that fire exists, and set fire to the fence.

Turkey            - I know nothing about you except that you named your country after an old bird that looks like my great aunt Gert with her floppy neck skin, and that we eat turkeys huge numbers every year. If you have to name it after a food, why not name it something with a bit more spunk, like “Chinese Food”

North Korea   - No complaints, you’re doing great

Mexico            - Does anything from your country not make me poop myself uncontrollably? I will answer for you – no

                        - How did trumpets become a norm for you? Guitars, sombreros, Shakira – I got it – but trumpets?

As there are close to 3.7 million countries in the world, I cannot name them all at this time. I will continue this list at another time, though, as the truth must be heard.

If you don’t like my yodeling, you can shut up

More than my enthusiasm for slapping people’s thighs at the local pool, I have always been an avid fan of yodeling. Everyone near and far knows when I win a game of guess who, successfully find waldo, or take my weekly dookie by the forceful diaphragm projected notes passing gracefully through my ever relaxed lips.

I realized my talent for these melodies of truth and beauty (which I generally shorten to “Bruthe”) when I was 8 and my mom accidentaly set fire to my belly button lint collection, which was nested deep within my belly button. As I used my already developed vocal chords to direct her attention to the raging torrent of flames happening on my front middle, I naturally fell into arpeggios climaxing in falsetto glory.

My first yodel.

Years went by before I learned how to captivate others with my yodeling without having to set fire to myself, but the patience of my slowly building fanbase was greatly rewarded with the release of my first cassette album “Hey! I’m yodeling.” The album, though well received, was dwarfed by my second, third, and fourth releases: “Stop yappin while I’m clappin,” “You can’t spell Doyle without Yodel,” and “The Soul’s Whisper,” where I actually harmonized with a chainsaw on one of the songs.

Though I don’t write much anymore, I still yodel my every emotion from my porch for the benefit of friends, well-wishers, and Bert’s hotdog stand customers, who line up outside his stand to hear me across the street. Needless to say, I am a respected bucket of talent.

So why did it annoy you, Mindy, when I joined in the celebration of your father’s life with a special tune I wrote on the spot called “Yoda-yay-a-yoda-lay-a-yoda-lay”? If you ask me, the funeral was a hit.

No, where were you?

I recently got an email from an enraged reader wondering where I have been for the past 19 months. Apparently, the articles I had written in the past have not kept this reader entertained. Perhaps he had forgotten my call to a run across the country like Forrest Gump. I have been trying to run around the US for a while like he did in his movie, The Forrest Gump Movie. After reviewing my last three articles, I realize that I meant to invite my readers to this, but any die-hard fan would have known my plans anyway and would have joined me. To answer the burning question of the moment, I never did make it across the country. Being unable to run more than 2 minutes at a time, I was at a disadvantage. Truth be told, I never made it farther than Cousin Geech's mailbox, which is next door to the Karaoke Whistling Bar. I blame my failure on multiple factors, the first being my need for running shoes. As it stands, I only have the one pair of sneakers, and they aren't as much sneakers as they are an old pair of tap dance shoes from my early days as a street juggler. The second point of failure must have been my tendancy of being distracted by almost anything. Just as I was getting into a good groove in my Barleysworth shuffle, I became fixated on the rotating cup of a gas station convenience store. I watched in a trance for several hours. This brings me to my third point of failure, an arrest for loitering. While my arrest was technically the result of my repeatedly headbutting the policeman that asked me to move along and not for standing there, I know the underlying reason. Calling for backup and having three tasers simultaneously go off in my left nipple was a bit over the line if you ask me. My jail time would not have lasted 19 months had it not been for my repeated escape attempts (I also watched "The Shawshank Redemption" prior to my attempted cross-country run). I almost successfully escaped on my third try, but the guard wouldn't give me his keys. Now that I am back, I intend on providing you, my loyal readers, with the socially and politically charged investigative reporting that won your hearts in the first place. That or I will fill you in on cousin Noser's latest inventions. More to come.

You can coast through life with 3 shirts, one pair of pants, and a change of underwear if you plan on farting a lot

So Wendy-Tina, my annoying wife who gets preggers too much, said something yesterday that annoyed me so much I could only calm down my kicking myself in the face. She told me that Roofer, one of my sons, needed a new set of clothes because his shirt tore too much and his pants don't fit anymore. She was about to go to the store with him to pick out his next set. What angered me is that she thought I cared enough to hear about it.

I will never understand why people go shopping for clothes. On the rare occasion that a new pair of socks is vital to my survival, I shoot down to Merl's Gas and Socks Mart to get a new pair. My secret to ensuring a long life of your socks is to leave them on always, including the weekly shower, and simply put the new pair over top of the old pair once they are too squishy and worn out to make it on their own.

So Wendy-Tina proceeded to spend 12 minutes and $4.67 on clothes. Sweet squirrel vomit, you just bought him clothes back in March. What do we need to be spending all our money on clothes for? The answer - none.