El Guapo Returns….again

I took a break from writing for almost two years because I’d been producing a column a week for over a decade and it was starting to feel like work. Anyone who knows me will tell you that work just isn’t my strong suit and taking breaks is something I do well…so I took a break. 

I never considered my little humor column or this blog to be all that important to the fabric of modern life but given world events during my sabbatical I’m starting to reconsider that notion.  I’m not saying that the world has gone to shit because I stopped writing but you’ve got to admit the coincidence is pretty compelling. Let’s examine evidence, shall we?

Since my last posting signs of the eminent collapse of global civilization are everywhere. Sure, there’s a worldwide pandemic, riots in the streets and widespread economic collapse but I’m talking about events so bizarre that they can only be legitimate signs of the imminent end of the world as we know it. 

Take, for example, a short lived but tragic fad that spread shortly after I quit writing last year. After a part time nudist and full time whacko named Meagan posted a series of photos of herself participating in what she described as “perineum sunning.” For those of you who don’t have a dictionary handy, let me just say that perineum sunning could also be called “taint tanning.” Meagan claimed that this new morning ritual gave her so much energy that she completely gave up coffee. Sadly this fad resulted in some very unfortunate sunburns and way too many people stumbling across their neighbors trying it and seeing things that just can’t be unseen.  I’m hoping that Meagan and her disciples can return to a morning ritual of reading El Guapo over a nice cup of joe.

In the absence of my weekly posting competitive slapping became a thing in Russian pubs.  While amateur slapping for fun and cultural enrichment has long been a tradition in pubs around the world, last year the Russians elevated it to an organized professional event. Hundreds on onlookers cheered as large half naked Russians took turns slapping the shit out of each other until one was either knocked out, ducked to avoid the slap or was deemed unable to continue by the referee, who doubled as the bartender. A massive 370-pound slapping machine named Vasily “The Dumpling” Kamotsky was the last man standing and won the grand prize of $470. While I congratulate The Dumpling, slapping for dollars is a legit sign of impending doom.

Another sure indicator of the apocalypse is a police report out of Pennsylvania that two Amish men were pulled over for diving their buggy while intoxicated. Officers came upon the horse drawn buggy moving erratically down the road with loud polka music blaring from the last operational boom box know to exist. When the patrolmen attempted to pull them over both men jumped from the moving buggy (estimated to be traveling at speeds up to 6 MPH) and disappeared into the nearby woods. The horse continued to stroll erratically down the lane until the police courageously walked up and grabbed the reins. Officers decided not to chase the fleeing men after discovering a 12 pack of Michelob Ultra in the buggy that they determined couldn’t possibly render anyone legally drunk. The horse passed a field sobriety test but was held for questioning.

Earlier this year the state of Missouri sued televangelist Jim Bakker for selling something called “Silver Solution” on his TV show claiming it would cure COVID-19. While never really explaining what was in Silver Solution, Bakker’s spokesperson claimed that when tested on COVID it “Totally eliminates it.  Kills it. Deactivates it.” The state of Missouri filed suit after another washed up reality TV personality had already shown that malaria pills and injected bleach was the preferred treatment for the Coronavirus. Silver Solution…..sheesh!

I can’t make a prima facie (that’s Latin for something I heard on Law and Order) case that the world is circling the drain because I quit sharing my almost clever ranting, the circumstantial evidence was clear enough for thousands of my fans to ask me to start writing again and save the world.

OK, maybe that’s not exactly the way it went down but one guy did ask, “Hey, when are we gonna hear from that El Guano dude again?” How can I say no to that?

Now, I realize some of you might have expected some sort of biting social commentary on the insane state of current events but, like I always tell the TSA agents, that’s not my bag man! That said, there is so much material these days for a semi-pro smartass to write about that there’s hardly any work required….and that is just my bag!

The Return of El Guapo

I’ve been silent for over a year now because I really it felt like my columns had transformed from being almost clever to just barely clever. It made sense to me that when you find yourself without anything relevant or mildly amusing to say that it was probably time to shut the hell up. That kind of thinking along with a very small dose of self-respect are the reasons I have never gone into politics…but we’ll get back to that.

As a wise ass and a semi-pro humorist it’s been difficult to observe the buffoonery of human endeavor for the last year without making public comments every week. There’s been more than enough material but the shenanigans all seemed so obvious that writing about it would have been like writing a food review saying cottage cheese sucks; everyone knows that so there’s no humor in repeatedly pointing it out…maybe that’s a bad example.

Well, I’ve always sucked at keeping my mouth shut and I simply can’t do it anymore! To quote a great American and personal role model, Popeye the Sailor, “I’ve had all I can stands, I can’t stands no more!” I’ve got a year’s worth classic El Guapo pseudo-wisdom to unleash so let’s skip the foreplay (I always do) and get right to it!

The 2016 election is over. I wrote that as a public service because it seems that way too many people are still spouting campaign rhetoric….the same old stale crap that started around the summer of 2014. Stop campaigning and govern already!

Just a generation ago Ronnie Lott pulled off the broken tip of his broken finger to finish a football game and now grown men with man-buns are playing professional competitive tag. Just stop it! Take the bobby pins out of your hair; grab a bat and step up to the plate boys because I’m getting old and you’re up.

Farmers Only.com is a thing….what the hell?

A recent study shows that 98% of college graduates in the United States have a social media page, 48% have a blog but less than 8% know how to calculate a percentage. Of course that study was done at a university so the numbers are suspect.

There is a federal law against selling weed but it’s perfectly legal to sell ultra-lite beer, canned “cheese food products” that don’t contain cheese, genetically altered radiated produce and fat free non-dairy ice cream. The Feds don’t seem to realize that we need to be stoned to eat that crap!

When was the last time you heard of any medical condition being cured? Doctors don’t cure you they treat you…forever. I’m still taking prescriptions I was started on 15 years ago and none of them are the fun kind…damn it! Hell I don’t even remember why I take this stuff anymore, but I’m afraid if I stop taking it I’ll lose my youthful vitality and Greek god-like body…wait…

There is a famous picture taken during a victory celebration at the end of World War II of a sailor kissing a young lady who seemed passionate about thanking him for his service. Today that same photo would surely result in the sailor getting disciplined for inappropriate behavior and the young lady receiving some sort of mandatory victim counseling. If they were the “Greatest Generation” what does that make us?

We need some leadership in this country, real old fashioned “The buck stops here” kind of leadership because we’ve headed down a very dangerous path.  We elected a president who is a caricature of a leader because we’ve become a caricature of the nation the Greatest Generation left to us.

General Patton famously said, ”Lead me, follow me or get the Hell out of my way.” Now that’s the kind of leadership I’m talking about. Real leaders serve the people not their own egos because they don’t forget that it’s a privilege to serve in America. Unlike kings or dictators, American Presidents are nothing more than temporary employees who serve at our pleasure.

I’d run for office myself and straighten all this crap out but I’m honest enough to admit that, like General Patton, I’m not a man born for this generation. He was born to be a 12^th century knight and I was born to be a 19^th century pirate and there is far too much pillaging in my recent past to be an acceptable candidate!

Seriously, I can sit here and write smart-assed quips (or Tweets), but that doesn’t qualify me to lead. Groucho Marx once said “I refuse to join a club that would have me as a member.” I say I refuse to lead a country that would elect an immature slacker like me…if only all immature slackers felt that way.

Living in Bonus Time!

A few months ago I celebrated my 60^th birthday, well to be honest, I didn’t really celebrate. The truth is after so many birthdays you don’t celebrate your birthday as much as you kind of notice that it’s your birthday.  Since then I’ve started noticing that there’s a difference in the way you see the world.

Slowly over the past few months I’ve realized that the world looks a bit different over the top of my reading glasses. I see things differently and, more importantly, I feel differently about what I see these days. It has occurred to me that, at long last I honestly don’t care what anyone else thinks about me and I have never felt better!

I’ve often claimed that I didn’t care what other people thought of me, but I realize now that there has always been some measure of concern for being nice, or being perceived as the international man of mystery that I am…or thought I was. There’s just something about realizing that you’ve already lived longer that you expected to that’s quite liberating.

Never in my wildest dreams did I figure I’d be alive and making choices in my sixties. I’m living on bonus time and the rules are different in bonus time! I’m new at this phase of life and every week I push the boundaries a little bit further, it’s amazing what you can get away with when you truly don’t care anymore!

The other day I was channel surfing and came across a Barbara Streisand movie on the old movie channel. I paused in shock and awe as her gigantic “schnoz” filled my TV screen and wondered aloud why anyone ever thought she should be the leading lady in a movie.

I hereby publicly acknowledge that, though I have sat through many of her movies over the years, I cannot tell you the plot of a single one. I admit that I only watched her movies in because I was coerced to by a wife or a date and I spent the entire time trying to decide if she was cross eyed or if her giant nose just made her seem to be. I’m 60 years old now and I can finally say that out loud.

I’m free now to confess that, while I’d rather take a beating that to go dancing, I have been known to break out a free style dance move in the grocery store when no one is around. That’s what happens when you reach the age that you recognize the grocery store music from your high school days and you just don’t give a damn that your impression of Kevin Bacon dancing in Footloose might scare small children. It’s a whole new kind of freedom.

I went through my closet the other day and threw out over half of my stuff because I’m finally willing to admit that I’m never going to wear any of it again. Most of it’s so old that there’s no use in donating it because nobody else would wear it either. Now I’ve got room in my closet to stash all of my new stuff that I’ll never use!

Now that I’m 60 I’m free to say with a certain degree of authority that the world is going to hell in a handcart! I was alive in the days of Eisenhower, Kennedy, King and the Beatles so I’m feel very comfortable saying these days of Clinton, Trump, Pelosi and Kanye West are a freak show in comparison. It’s OK, I’m old and nobody’s listening anyway so I can say it.

Ike was the Supreme Allied Commander and won the war in Europe before being elected as our president; Mr. Trump was a reality TV star and in the Pro Wresting Hall of Fame. Ike warned us about the raise military industrial complex, president Trump whines about fake news on Twitter. I like Ike.

I’m old enough to have raised my kids, met my grandkids and outlived my life expectancy but I’m still young stir things up and blow my hair back from time to time….and I still have hair! I’m going to go ride my bike now because I can and then have some ice cream because I want to. It turns out that living in bonus time is a lot like being a kid again…except there’s no curfew and there’s beer! I like bonus time!

Another look through my lens

Between bad news, natural disasters and political stories I have no idea why anybody would turn on the news or open a newspaper these days. When viewed through the lens of the regular media, the world looks like a pretty depressing and scary place.

As luck would have it, I haven’t been regular for years now…..wait a minute…that didn’t come out right…..wait, neither did that….what I mean to say is that I live a pretty irregular life and the lens I use to watch the world is a little bit more fun.

There’s always a different way to look at things, let me give you a quick look at things happening around the world as seen through my lens. A scan of recent acts of skullduggery and buffoonery from around the world shows that not everything is an evil plot to destroy the American way of life, some of it’s just plain funny.

Let me lead off with a bit of tabloid news that I noticed in the checkout line yesterday.  It was a look back at the tragic divorce of Al and Tipper Gore, after over 40 years of marriage from Tipper’s point of view…of course.

I normally don’t dabble in tabloid news because they employ humor writers that are way out of my league. Honestly, a headline reading, “Loch Ness Monster’s affair with Bigfoot produces a hairy long-necked lovechild that is quite frugal and speaks with an accent” is pretty funny stuff. I know my limits; I can’t compete with that!

It’s always sad when a 40-year marriage fails and I’ve been biting my tongue for years since their divorce but there’re just too many punch lines for me to leave it alone. Seriously, Al spent so much time warning the world about global warming that he never noticed how frigid things were getting in his own house! Ba-Da-Boom!

My own theory is that Al Gore is just too much of a soft-spoken nice guy to keep a woman’s temperature rising for the long haul (do you see what I did there?). This dude is so wimpy that even with the majority of the votes he couldn’t manage to get into the oval office and be the ultimate alpha male. I’ve got a million of them.

That’s right, the history books show that Gore won the election in 2000 but George W Bush took the oval office from him like he was taking his lunch money. After being punked like that even winning a Noble Peace Prize and an Oscar weren’t enough to warm Tipper’s globe. These are the jokes, folks!

Rumor has it that Al pays alimony in green credits. OK, I’ll stop, that’s enough picking on Mr. Gore….for now.

From the world of science, researchers for Men’s Health magazine have determined that the PB&C (peanut butter and chocolate) milkshake from the Stone Cold Creamery is nutritionally the worst drink on the market today. I say this is clearly junk science.

Further, I suggest that Men’s Health magazine is meant for metro-sexuals and waiting rooms in cardiologist’s office where real men read it to know what to tell the doctor that they haven’t been eating.

They say that drinking one of those shakes is the equivalent of eating 68 strips of bacon; I say if a guy wants to cut down to 68 pieces of bacon or drink a milkshake, that’s his business. They say that skipping bacon and drinking a whey smoothie instead of a milkshake will make you live longer; I doubt that, I suspect life just seem longer without bacon or milkshakes.

Finally, some European research outfit suggested this week that British women look better at the beginning of the week because they take four times longer to get ready for work on Monday than they do on Friday.

Seriously, their study revealed that working women spent an average of 76 minutes to shower groom and dress for work on Monday and by Friday these same women averaged just 19 minutes to get out the door.

This either proves that the 40 hour work week sucks the life out of us all, that all of the good men are gone by Friday or that these researchers, like the ones whining about milkshakes, are full of crap.

There’s more but I’m out of space. So go fry up some bacon, drink a milkshake and don’t listen to researchers. Al Gore listened to them and look what good it did him!

The American Space Ninja

Do you know who Peggy Whitson is and if not, why not? Seriously, Peggy Whitson is a real American hero and really should be a household name but I’m betting more people can identify Anthony Wiener, or at least parts of Anthony Wiener, than could pick Peggy Whitson out of a police line up.

For the record Peggy Whitson is an astronaut. In fact, Peggy Whitson is an astronaut the way Joe Montana was a quarterback or Humphrey Bogart was actor. Peggy Whitson has spent more time in space than any other American, has walked in space ten times (more than any other woman) and has been commander of the International Space Station…twice.

There is something fundamentally wrong with our priorities when Madonna got more press this week for talking about moving to Portugal than Peggy Whitson got for returning to earth after breaking the American space flight record. Now that I think about it the fact that we even know who Madonna is reflects poorly on our national priorities.

 To be honest until last week if you asked me to name an American astronaut I would have probably mentioned John Glenn, Alan Shepard or Neil Armstrong. If you asked me t same a woman astronaut I would have said Sally Ride or…well… I would have said Sally Ride.

When Sally Ride went to space she was the first American woman and the youngest American astronaut of any gender to do so. Dr. Ride spent about two weeks in space, was a trailblazer and an over all gutsy broad.  

John Glenn made space history in just over four hours then later orbiting the earth in a capsule with less technology than the average microwave oven has these days, then when he was 77 years old he spent another week in space aboard the shuttle.  When Alan Shepard became the first American in space he was basically strapped to the top of a rocket for a flight lasted about 15 minutes and that most of the scientist thought would probably work….probably.  Shepard and Glenn didn’t just the right stuff, they had balls like church bells and were real American heroes.  

Peggy Whitson belongs in that same league because she was is space for an impressive 665 days, that works out to….let’s see…carry the two…a long freakin’ time. According to my handy calculator that means she was in space for 95 weeks, almost 22 months and two NFL seasons!

Peggy Whitson, who is known as the American Space Ninja, returned to earth on after a 3 hour ride in a Russian re-entry capsule that plummeted through the atmosphere and landed under a giant parachute on a grassy plain in rural Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan is, to quote Forrest Gump (and you should always quote Forrest Gump), “…this whole other country” that is a former Soviet Republic and not a factor in other historic American space events.

I don’t care if you’re a man or a woman if you spend 22 months in space, command the International Space Station then crash-landed in Kazakhstan you’ve got balls like church bells. If you look up “ballsy broad” in the dictionary it should say “see also Peggy Whitson.” I doubt it actually says that but it should.

All week following her epic return to earth after what is almost certainly her last trip to space the American Space Ninja’s story was worth 90 seconds on the evening news on Monday with no guest appearances on late night talk shows and she certainly didn’t get the tickertape parade that John Glenn received after his record breaking flight of less than five hours.

Sadly, Miley Cyrus appeared on my TV dozens of time this week advertising her return as a judge on a popular TV show. Cyrus, a former Disney TV star turned twerking pansexual malcontent, has racked up over an hour of major network screen time in commercials since the last mention of our the American Space Ninja. That’s a serious indictment of our news media and, sadly of us.

A 57-year-old woman who also happens to be a renowned biochemist, commander of the International Space Station, a veteran of ten space walks and 665 days in space returns to earth in a controlled crash of a Russian space capsule and she gets a quick mention on the evening news. If a 57-year-old John Elway were to strap on his shoulder pads and play one down as the quarterback in this weekend’s game they’d probably make a movie about him.

I’m not trying to say that the NFL is less important that NASA, I’m no commie jihadist, I love football. My point is that the media is robbing us of actual news, not because they pamper or pick on my favorite politician, that’s all part of the show, but because they yammer on about meaningless gibberish instead of reporting landmark historical events with the proper time and attention they deserve.

When I was a kid they stopped everything in school so we could watch every “blast-off” and “splashdown” on the network news because it was historic and newsworthy. For too long we’ve been fed supermarket tabloid junk relabeled as news and, like the frog being slowly boiled, we’ve come to accept it as real news.

Fake news has nothing to do with politics, it’s all about ratings and money. They give us opinionated tabloid crap instead of telling us about the American Space Ninja because they think its what we want. Peggy Whitson is a modern day American hero and that’s real news.