TV News LIES

For anyone driving through the American countryside before 1963 there was a good chance they'd see a series of six signs spaced along the side of the road written to entertain and promote the sale of Burma Shave “brushless” shaving cream.

Here's one of the last set of signs from 53 years ago:

We don't

Know how

To split an atom

But as to whiskers

Let us at 'em

Burma Shave

The Burma-Vita company's original product was a liniment made of ingredients described as having come from "The Malay Peninsula and Burma." Sales were poor until the company hit upon the road sign advertising gimmick, and at its peak, Burma-Shave was the second-highest-selling brushless shaving cream in the United States. But now those quaint little signs of Americana are as dead as Dodo Birds.

Shock. Sadness. Grief for the families and victims. These are my first reactions to reports of yet another mass shooting in the US. My second reaction is to scan the reports for a particular sentence. And I always find it.

‘The gunman was armed with an assault rifle, an AR-15.’ It’s a phrase that seems to follow mass shootings in the US in recent times. Legally purchased military style assault weapons are widely proliferated throughout the suburbs of many states in America.

47 years ago I bailed out of a Medieval English Literature class just in time and took a Modern Satire class instead. I knew I'd get an easy “A” because how hard could it be? Read a couple of books, answer questions about the books I'd just read, and then I'd maintain a high grade average.

Guys that didn't keep their grades up were destined to become soldiers instead of students. Without a high enough grade point average it could get pretty drafty going to college in those days.

The best book I've read in quite a while is a nonexistent one called Scorched-Earth Realpolitik Cookbook:  Cajun-Style Political Elexting and Black-Eyed Peace for the Rest of Us, by Pfisher Pranx, a renowned, well-respected, award-winning author whom I made up only a few seconds ago, while typing this sentence.

The alternate title of the book, I just now realized, is:  Or: 183,429 Better Ways to Elect a President.

This fictitious book is from Keisterville Publishing, a company which fails to pass the real-company sniff test.

You can find just about anything on The Internet. I was looking for the right words to describe a state of mind so I clicked on Google, typed in “anxiety dream”, and in point 39 seconds Google served up over 58 million entries. I didn't need to look any further than the first one:

An anxiety dream is an unpleasant dream which is less disturbing than a nightmare. Anxiety dreams are characterized by the feelings of unease, distress, or apprehension in the dreamer upon waking.

That's exactly what I was looking for. Ain't technology grand?

It's been threatening to get out of hand for some decades, and it's finally happened: Every news report -- global, national, local, and personal -- is competing for that rarest of all awards, the Golden MacArthur Oscar Genius Emmy Grant Globe Prize in Massive Surreality.

Life is now like being overdosed on an iffy batch of blotter paper acid, spending the day in a Salvador Dali exhibition featuring peyote hors d'oeuvres and really good wine, then moving right on into a Federico Fellini film fest boasting magic mushroom tapas and too many flavors of seat-side, delivered tequilas and mandatory, last-shot worm-eating ultimatums.  With curry.  And that really hot, yellow Chinese-dragon-mustard that attacks every moist membrane in, on, and around your body.