The Six Million Dollar Tooth

“We can rebuild it, we have the technology.” That’s what the dentist said.  What she didn’t say was how many times the tooth in question would need to be built and rebuilt, but what do you expect from a bionic tooth?  It’s going to need some upkeep.  What do you think, you just throw six mill at the tooth and it’s over?  The maintanance IS the real cost.

“It will be stronger, tougher, and chew faster than any tooth in history,” she promised.

Cut to the Bionic Man music.  My generation can attest to the power Steve Austin had over our young minds.  That’s why I have named my tooth Steve.  Any tooth willing to undergo that many procedures for his country is my kind of tooth!

Seven Habits of Highly-Effective Hitlers

Not every Hitler gets to take-over his own country.  Most have to be satisfied with dominating only the people they know and come into contact with everyday.  But that doesn’t stop you from becoming the most-effective Hitler you can be , if you just believe in yourself to the exclusion of all others! 

Here’s a plan to keep even the most-self-conscious facist on track:

Habit One: Maintain Your Power:  You have to keep power to get power, if you know what I mean.  You must never doubt yourself.  Critics aren’t just wrong, they’re Satan!  Never waiver on your path to total domination.  If you hear a little voice in your head questioning Habit One, clobber it.

Habit Two: Find Your Subjects:  Whether you plan to take-over your native country and spread your evil genicidal rot from there, or if you just want to rule your own little nuclear family with an iron fist, forming your children into messed-up and highly-ineffective adults — or something in between –  whatever your plan is, you need someone to dominate right now.  If a coup is out of the question, consider starting a family, or even getting a job in management.

Habit Three: Stay in Your Insanity Zone: We all know, a little crazy goes a long way.   A little crazy is charismatic, a bit more is convenient as well, at times when your subjects attempt to use reason on you.  But when you go too far into crazy, we’ve all seen what happens.  You lose it, and become a Highly-Ineffective Hitler.   This is a big no-no.  You must find the proper level of insanity and stick with it!

Habit Four: Locate Your Leni Riefenstahl:  A great Hitler needs to pair up with someone who can make him feel and look like a god.  Whether this be your presidential spokesperson or your tan-salon specialist, I cannot stress how important it is to locate top talent to keep your legend lookin’ good. 

Well, that’s enough for today.  Perhaps you have a Habit to share that you have gleaned from the most-effective Hitlers in your midst.  You might be surprised how much you know and are willing to share about how to be an effective Hitler.

Comatose for the Holidays

About sometime yesterday, my spirits began to lift inexplicably as if a dark cloud was dissipating.  Then I realized my improved mood wasn’t inexplicable at all — I was experiencing post-holiday season euphoria.  Soon I’d be back at work without so much as a Santa Claus or a Christmas tree to remind me of the darkest days of the year.

This year, I decided that the next best thing to spending Christmas in a Muslim country is to spend it working and making oodles of money without even enough time to think about the holidays and their brain-sucking processes.  But even two weeks in Morocco can’t compete with my best holiday-escewing idea ever: spending latter December in a nice, restful coma. With a little support from the public, I believe Comatose for the Holidays is a dream we can realize in this lifetime.

Imagine giving the gift of no-gifts, no parties, no memories: Give the gift of a temporary coma to your holiday-hating loved ones or even treat yourself!  Imagine slipping away from the world sometime in late November and rejoining us in early January thinner, totally rested, and without having spent a mint on senseless junk.

Forget about pesky New Years plans – the pressure to have fun, fun, fun.  There is nothing more fun than sleeping through the worst time of the year and waking up a million times better off than everyone facing the new year ravaged by holiday expectations. 

So what do you say folks?  Do I have any takers for Comatose for the Holidays?  We can make it a time share, and offer services for other unpleasant times.  Imagine the convenience of being able to tell your boss/judge/spouse: “But I was in a coma.”

I highly recommend you get in on the bottom floor of this up and coming enterprise in the brand new Good Excuse Industry.

Warning: Annual Retrospective Season Looms

It’s that time of year when everyone (in the media) takes a quick glimpse back at the last 12 months before jumping blind into the next 12 months.  Time to revive for one last moment all the folks who croaked, the famous ones I mean, and all the big disasters (especially the ones they have pictures for). They always include a few of the good things that folks might have done, crazy heroic acts and heartfelt philanthropy for some total heartbreak case, not to mention all the year’s developments in the big news stories and in the latest teen idol’s complete disintegration.  

Hard to give a crap about the geopolitical quagmire, but damn I need my latest teen-idol disintegration news just to get me out of bed in the morning, how about you?

Bad Apple also feels a certain retrospective impulse coming on, because I’m celebrating the one year birthday of the Bad Apple Blog on December 6.  It’s been a year of discovery, invention, and strangeness at Bad Apple, and I’m going try to ruminate on the high points, exorcise the garbage, and generally get a handle on where all this rot is headed heading into the great 20 ot eight.

For example, I’m going to take a hard look at potatoes vs. tomatoes.  In 2008, I predict all-out war between the potato and the tomato stories here at Bad Apple. Such vegetable rivalries never end up pretty.

Also, what about the cannibal chickens?  Will they remain misunderstood freaks or will they become the new It-chickens of tomorrow?  Stranger things have happened, folks, so don’t be laughing at my predictions’ predictor, now. 

Well, this is just a preview of the kind of deep bad apple pie-style thinking I’ll be serving up in December.  As a friend, I strongly discourage you from facing the annual retrospective season without regular, inoculating visits to this site.

When Branding Burns

When oh when did the language shift, people? When did “selling out” change to “buying in”???  When did people start to sit still for getting branded?  I for one am outta here at the first whiff of burning flesh wafting down the hall, folks.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for turning the Golden Gate Bridge into a giant underground shopping mall. Hell, paint it yellow and turn it into the Golden Arches McDonaldland Play Emporium Bridge if it means we can keep our local Bohemian Club open for the poor ultra rich to send their ruined psyches to summer-camp.  Hey, I’m not a heartless anarchist here.  I believe the children of the ultra privileged deserve just as many Taco Shack tattoos as anyone.

Actually, the problem with corporations is that they haven’t completely taken over yet, so naturally we are all suffering in a state of pre-corperatization.  No wonder no one knows who the hell they are – we have yet to fully embrace our soul brands and  place them at the center of our existence.  Right now, we remain confused as a species about things like God and democracy, but one day soon all that confusion will be cleared away.

Actually, we secretly replaced the world’s democracies with Folder Crystals coffee a few months back, and no one noticed the difference!  Citizens the world round are delighted by Folders Crystals instant coffee in place of the usual, slow-brewed democracy, and in polls people prefer it 20 to one.

Bad Marketing Ideas, Potato Category:

Winner of the week: Mr. Potato Crotch, submitted by the Urban Potato Council.

Winner’s Statement: “At the Urban Potato Council, not every boardmember lays a guaranteed golden egg. In an effort to seem warm, imperfect and approachable, we want — or rather, our PR consultant tells us – to share some of the stinkers we’ve laid over the years.  Okay, that we can do!  This one here’s one the Board president would like to forget.  He only gave it up after a fight – he really liked this idea, which the rest of the board shied away from, for some reason.”

A Numbers Story: Today’s Learn to Write From Spam Lesson

Some say spam is worse than worthless, but you can learn how to write real good from spam, I swear.  Today we examine one spammer’s statistics.  So let’s go ahead and take a look at the Spam of the Day, a perky little invite from someone named Blanche who writes:

 Good day,

Want to find a f*ckbuddy who lives near you?
92% of our members already got laid with the help of our dating system.

What else? it doesn’t cost a dime!

Bad Apple responds:

Dear Blanche,
Thanks for contacting me regarding finding a f*ckbuddy in my town — that’s quite tempting!  Your pitch gets points in the “short and sweet” category, but you could use some work on working those statistics, girl!

First off I gotta ask how you come by your numbers here, Ms. Chiquita Bonita?  What, you been exit polling the dates to determine your laid-to-unlaid ratio?  That’ll make you real popular, I bet. Or maybe you send a survey for folks to fill out after the date.  If so, try to get a few more details, okay?

Here’s an example of the type of more qualitative-style question you could be asking:

On a scale of one to ten, how laid would you say you got? One being “not real laid,” ten being “extremely laid.” So what is it, buddy?

Blanche, another point just between you me and the Viagra post: I have a trickling suspicion that what we are seeing here is a bit of “over reporting” on the male side of the equation, if you know what I mean.  A little wishful thinking by the fella’s – that’s what I’m guessing.  Here’s one way to check:  If the eight percent of folk who failed to find f*ckbuddy’s are ALL women, then probably that 92 percent figure is about as reliable as a story overheard in the middle-school boys’ locker room. 

(This assumes of course that your f*ckbuddy-finding service is mostly hetero.  If it isn’t, then, well, never mind.)

Oh, another lesson we could all learn from Blanche: Always proofread you spams, and also, try to sign your spam, even if it’s just a pseudonym.  Unsigned spam is so impersonal.

Blanche, nice try on this one!  I don’t buy your numbers, not for one minute.  But don’t change and never, never give up!  Thanks for thinking of me, and next time, remember to work those statistics, girl! 

Spambuddies forever, 

Bad Apple

Sorry for the Misplaced Poop Piece

Oh bloody hell buckets, did I actually post my cat poop item over here at Bad Apple? Trust me, that was not some kind of clever pimplicity stunt to promote my Self Help for Cats site, I promise you. Rather it was a toggle problem with the user on my Blogdesk software, or in other words an Error Occurred Between Seat and Keyboard (EOBSK), or however my snarky IT friends like to put it.  (At which point, I want to announce Bad Apple’s official site motto, stolen from the pirate furniture-movers code: “It’s not my fault.”)

Should you be dying to read the piece “Think Outside the Box, Don’t Poop Outside the Box,” far be it from me to stand in your way.  But you’ll have to go over the Self Help for Cats.

Wow, I’m incredibly good at this!

People I Have Nothing in Common With, Part One

At the risk of hurting the feelings of gamers everywhere, I have to say I feel a need to compare DNA with the author of the following sentence, from one of those devil-gadget worshipping sites, to ensure we are indeed of the same species:

Our meeting with Sierra yesterday highlighted perfectly why you’ll need to be very careful in cutting through the hype surrounding the next-gen PC gaming graphics.

Oh yeah, I’m going to need to be real careful of the potential treachery and pain involved in that, thanks friend.  Like that’s a real concern for the world. Here’s another brilliant thing to worry about from the same writer: 

First we sat down for a showing of World in Conflict, a real time strategy game that asks “What if the Cold War ran hot?”

Yeah, what if?  What if that happened?  Well, probably you would be blasted off your gamer ass, that’s what. 

Even though in my youth I wasted hours on such games, I will never understand how folks can spend all their time sitting around gaming.  Not when they can spend hours sitting around blogging, which is so very much better. 

Jesus: “I’m Coming Back as the iPhone”

iHave a confession to make. iCould care less about the iPhone.  Actually, caring any less about the iPhone would require me to care about not caring, so actually, as it turns out I couldn’t care less after all.

iKnow I’m a loser for it because iKnow the iPhone is really great. iKnow it’s going to bring about world peace and nirvana for the masses and a round of top-shelf screaming orgasms for all, but iStill can’t bring myself to care about the iPhone.  I’m just a selfish ass trying to pay my rent. If iReally cared, I’d pay twice the asking price for my iPhone and if it didn’t work, I’d get on my knees and thank God and King Jobs for my broken iPhone, which is so many worlds better than no iPhone at all.

Then I’d go back to scavenging the toxic waste dump for dinner.  Life is good, business is freaking fantastic, and iPhones are really the second coming of Christ. 

What, you didn’t know about the missing page in The Bible where Jesus says: “I’m coming back as the iPhone”?  What backward Luddite version of The Bible you been reading, sister?