Spit it out.

To all my friends, colleagues and acquaintances casual, formal and sport:

To do my part for global warming and to help reduce overhead costs I will no longer be operating the portion of my brain which processes hints, clues, allusions, insinuations or implications. I will no longer be accepting conversations requiring I read between the lines, catch your drift, glean your intent or otherwise gain some inkling of your inner mental workings without prior arrangement.

Mind reading services are still available upon request, however I regret they will now attract a $29 processing fee and/or a further extrapolation fee depending on the vagueness level and metaphor count.

Please note: due to sanity regulations we are no longer able to accept clichés or double entendres at this facility. In all cases please allow ten (10) working days for me to “get it”.

SJ

Now I'll have to wear the black one

Here’s a shot of where I work. That’s Jimmy on the left, he’s got polio in one eye, and that’s Bruno on the right. Bruno is very proud of his big leather belt. And up the back there, that’s young Thomas the sausage boy. He fetches the sausages at lunchtime. Sometimes he helps Bruno polish his belt. And that’s me in the middle, looking a little chagrined. I got my dates mixed up and thought it was Dress Like A Victorian Spinster Day.

Look at that smug bastard Jimmy. He knew all along it was Bow Tie Day but he didn’t say a damn thing.

Oh what fun they had

Here's what you do: Go to Naples, Italy in Italy, Europe and find a museum or op-shop that has an original copy of Dante’s Inferno in the window. Obtain this copy by whatever means, perhaps you might use snorkels in some way, and take this rare and valuable book into a deep dark Starbucks. With your shitty airline pen carefully cross out the phrase “sycophantic brethren” wherever it appears and replace it with the words “fluffy buddies” and you’ll find you have a bittersweet coming of age story about a little blind girl who befriends a deaf hooker. Oh what adventures they had, the little sluts.

Here is a recipe for cookies*:

1) Ask someone to make you cookies.
2) Get over the fact nobody loves you then go out and steal some cookies, as is your right.
3) Pay your debt to society then write a tell-all book about the cookie underground and the illegal trade in chocolate chips.
4) Buy some cookies.
5) Give them to me.

I never said they were for you.

If I was in a crashing airliner and had time to scrawl one last note to loved ones this is what I’d write:

Dear Wife, you have been a good wife with sturdy hips and I have loved you so. Before boarding the plane I swallowed the 400 untraceable stolen diamonds that we stole. After the funeral please dig me up and get them back. Give them to Jimmy Ho. Oh yeah, there’s a spare key for the lawnmower in there too.

I’d stick that note in my pocket then I’d swallow this note:

To whom it may concern, please give this key to my wife.

I call it old black-and-whitey

I had my old guitar shipped over from Canada. Had it since I was 16, it replaced my first guitar, which was lost in a fire. Been taken apart and soldered on and bashed and abused and painted several times, most recently back to its original black and white, a la Eric Clapton. The amplifier was pawned one too many times, in one tough time or another, but I kept hold of the guitar all these years. Sure is good to have it back with me. I really should learn to play it someday.

Wait, don't tell me

“If you don’t know, I’m not telling you”

The correct response to that is “Thank you.”

Why the fuck would you want to know anything other than what not to eat, where not to shit and how to roll over now and then to avoid pressure sores? Knowledge is not power, it is a pain in the elbow which is worse than a pain in the ass (arse in some places) as the elbow is higher than the ass and receives more, um, peptides.

I wish I didn’t know how to operate a lawnmower. I wish I didn’t know how to save mankind. The pressure is enormous. The less anybody knows the better. There’d be no terrorism if the terrorists didn’t know they were terrorists, but instead thought they were Parisian showgirls – exploding ones. You wouldn’t have to know your job because your boss wouldn’t know either and neither would the customer.

“Is this what you ordered?”
“I don’t know.”
“Me neither.”
“Ok. Well thanks then.”
“Bye now.”
“Can I…have a kiss?”
“I don’t think so.”

You see? What a wonderful world it would be.

ahhhhhh, that's so true

Hey I wrote one of those funny fake notices people fax around and stick up on the bulletin board at work.

Due to inflation, effort has been devalued. Employees will now be expected to give an average of 110%. As this is not possible in a base 10 numerical system, we are switching to a base 11 system. Please see Doug for your handout and new calculator. If you feel you can only give the previous level of 100% please see your supervisor who will arrange a way to fire you (don’t type that part).

A reminder to all employees we have a big month ahead and everyone is asked to pull together and give it 160%!

Copy that and stick it up at work. Tell everyone there's a secret funny code based on replacing every 12th letter with alternating 7th and 5ths unless they are both vowels in which case substitute the 6th. That's the sixth. Tell them it predicts the future and names the names of men destined to marry them. Tell them it will help them lose weight in places and grow rock hard in others. Tell them it cures heartburn and gout and dry wasting sickness. Tell them it repairs fucking outboard motors. Just tell them something. I can’t tell you how much this means because I don’t know. But it must mean a lot if I took the time to write it down.

You’re not going to do it are you. Is it because I ate your yogurt cause I didn’t eat your yogurt. I fucking hate yogurt, it’s alive you know. I may have used your yogurt but that’s entirely different, it was an emergency. The power was out.

It took you 500 years to find the end of Africa, what the hell do you people do on that boat?

I’ve been thinking, when time travel becomes more affordable, I might move to the middle ages. I could make a good living inventing things. Nothing too radical, don’t want to be burned at the stake, no Polaroid cameras or liquid-metal fast-breeder nuclear reactors, just little things like the leap year or margarine. Or Ritz crackers, they’re not bad. Good with tomato soup.

No good. The Europeans didn’t have tomatoes until the renaissance. And even then they thought they were poisonous. “Skookum’s Cheese Flavoured Crackers, great with poison soup!” – nah, just wouldn’t sell.

“Hark there, have ye some soup.”

“Ok sounds verily goode, hey wait yon cheese flavoured cracker foretells Lucifer’s hand in the brew. Thou woudst do me in! Thou art surely an asshole, sir. ”

It could get ugly. No better stick to inventing something innocuous. Something useful yet inconspicuous, not too likely to upset things, like rubber bands or shotguns or crystal meth. I could get that Robin Hood guy to distribute it, he has contacts with a lot of people. Just think, they’d get more done – the crusades would be a weekend road trip, the Spanish Inquisition would be drive-thru – and the more they got done back then the better off we’d be now. Lazy bastards.

Does this hat go with my machine gun?

If you want to run a military dictatorship you need the right look. All the really paranoid countries have military uniforms with huge flat-topped peaked hats, giant epaulettes with gold braid and medals held out, like the American flag on the moon, with a bit of wire. And you need a crazy march designed to ruin the soldiers’ knees. The goose-step is the standard but some countries like North Korea have added a slide-slide-step thing to it which makes them appear, if not more formidable, at least coordinated. It is the leader’s way of saying “My forces will attack your tanks with their bare teeth, look how I make them do the silly walk.”

Western countries on the other hand have soft hats. British and American special forces wear berets, the Aussies have their slouch hat and the Canadians brightly coloured toques with pom-poms. The Scottish would be the least paranoid, wearing bonnets and skirts into battle. Instead of the crazy knee-busting marches western forces jog along singing bawdy songs which build fellowship and cause their newly shaved genitalia to itch just the right amount to make them dangerous yet compliant.

On yet another hand, which I happen to have in a box, there are the terrorists and war-lords, the red-necks of war, who go for a more individual look. Uniforms are a mix of JC Penny camouflage stretch pants and Hawaii ’82 t-shirts. A troop carrier consists of a Mercedes bus with 110 people on the roof and a tank is a Toyota Tercel with a .50 calibre machine gun mounted in the sunroof. There is no organised marching style which is why these armies tend to fight locally, usually with each other.

You have searched well, pirate.

The IT department informs me we've had a run of hits from people searching for video of monkeys mating. Not monkeys fucking, or monkeys fornicating or monkeys doing it people-style, just monkeys mating. Monkeys mating, that's what they want to see. Perhaps they are anthropologists or professional monkey breeders looking to improve their monkey mating techniques and the monkey mating techniques of their friends. But most likely they are degenerate monkey mating ass pirates looking to re-live fond memories of monkey mating and the finer points of ass piracy. By far monkey mating is the most common Google search that brings people to SJ. Looking for monkey mating videos, that’s what they’re after. Monkeys mating.

Instead they got this post about how baboon X-2 was learning chess and was mated by his instructor. Simple game of baboon chess, that’s all. You sick bastards, what did you think it was? Oh, I see. Fine then. Against our better judgement, SJ has uncovered this most horrible and vile example of.... you know what.

life is like a box of chopsticks

Sticks and stones will break your bones if they are of sufficient mass and applied with sufficient force, but names will never hurt you physically and therefore may be ignored in this context.

If you word it the usual way Australians will argue with you. Every time.

Every fucking time.

“Meet you this afternoon about 5-o-clock”
“Five is evening.”
“Fine, meet you this evening.”
“Nah, evening’s too late for me.”
“How about 4:45?”
“This afternoon?”
“Uh... sure.”
“No worries, see you then."

That’s what they do. I watch them and study them and sleep with one of them and pay to feed a couple others, I know. Fucking wear you down, that’s their caper, wear you down from the inside. Bastards.

I've been shot!

This explains all the dudes in camo gear lurking in my rose garden.

The Smell Of Victory

You know that famous picture from Iwo Jima? The one where the American soldiers are raising the flag after winning the battle? Dude on TV just now said “the next day that picture ran in almost every newspaper in the US”.

How the fuck could they have done that in 1944? They would have had to print copies non-stop and fly them directly from Iwo Jima to each newspaper in the US before each newspaper’s print deadline.

The answer is simple and confirms a theory I have long held. The soldiers found the secret Japanese teleportation machine buried under the dormant volcano in a laboratory with shiny floors and, oddly enough, no clocks. You never see a clock in an evil under-volcano laboratory. The soldiers used the machine to transport copies of the now famous photo to the folks back home to let them know all that tin and copper they donated came in handy.

Then they all farted in it and teleported the result over to Company B with their damned bugle boy, think they’re sooo good. Unfortunately one poor lad had not fully withdrawn before activation and lost part of his left buttock in the process and was awarded the Purple Heart. The buttock was promoted and later went on to serve 3 terms in the senate.

And the secret teleportation device, what became of that? Well, its work now done, the machine quietly slipped away in search of its next adventure. It never found one, however, and died in 1958 from syphilis.

worms

There’s a lot of different kinds of worms.

What’s the most common device used by law enforcement agencies to see through suspects’ walls?

Somebody should have a job where they have to try out all the stunts Wile E. Coyote tried in the Road Runner cartoons to see if they work. Kind of Jackass meets Mythbusters. Violence is ok if it’s scientific violence.

The Scientists have been studying worms, the ones that live in your intestines. They want to figure out how they got there, how that particular sub-set ended up attached to a gut lining, blind, bored and fully dependent on the flow of shit passing them by. The worms also wonder this.

Hilarity isn't funny

My train of thought has come off the rails. Haha, I should get that on a T-shirt or a coffee mug or a wacky calendar with a cartoon train crashing into a startled cow on the tracks. Haha, except it’s not funny. People were hurt.

keep moving please

People say aliens come here. Aliens come here and pick up people and stick things up them and implant things in them and then set them free, like at gay bars. People say the aliens are inter-breeding with us because their planet is dying like Krypton did. People say when they finish inter-breeding they’re going to move here and eat us deep-fried on sticks like corn dogs. Somebody said that.

Aliens wouldn’t stop here. The solar system is a pretty crappy attraction.

Dad can we stop here? say the alien child units. No says the dad alien, this place sucks. All they have is that stupid Great Red Spot, all the rest of the planets are closed down. What about the blue one? cry the alien child units, what about the blue one? The lights are on. That’s Earth says the mother alien, it’s tacky and over-priced and I saw humans crawling all over the place. Waaa-waaa say the child units and the parent units eat them up, as is normal for aliens. If they ate them deep fried on sticks it would be ironic, but they don’t. They just sort of slurp them up.

But I don’t mind living here. It’s convenient. All my stuff is here. Living on the moon would be inconvenient. You wouldn’t be able to get pizza or breathe. Also if you go outside you explode, which is hard to recover from.

"This ain't the friggin express!" - KA-POW

I watch that Cops show sometimes. I used to hate the theme song but then I realized it was reggae music and you have to like reggae music, and by extension shows that use reggae music in some part, because otherwise it means you hate Bob Marley, who pulled reggae music right out of his ass one day, and from what I hear he was a nice man. Had funny hair though.

Did you know Bob Marley was going to name his kid Ziggy Stardust Marley but David Bowie pulled a knife on him and said “No way man, it’s not cool” and then he took off for Sulphur Jet City (as he could easily get tickets) like a glittery floating glittery sort of flying man. Glitter and float, that was his secret.

Those cops on that Cops show are sort of pricks, though. They also have funny hair. Cop hair. Cop hair is like soap operas. When you’re flicking through the channels restlessly, because you just realized you haven’t gone to work for four days and you're thinking it might take some explaining OR are high on meth and furniture polish, and you come across a soap opera you KNOW it’s a soap opera instantly. Something drab and gloomy about them that you can’t put your finger on. If you could that would be weird because they are on TV and you would have somehow reverse-transmitted part of your anatomy with no previous quantum physics degree and only standard home ingredients.

Well cop hair is like that. Sure it’s short. I got short hair, I don’t look like a cop. Tidy sideburns? Lots of dudes got lots of sideburns but don’t look like power-mad infantile sooky-mother’s-boys with a chip on their shoulder. Many have moustaches, but so do gay cowboys and men who live in the nineteenth century. Nope, nothing you can put your, well in this case you could but you'd wind up with a guy kneeling on your head, but when you see cop hair, man you know it’s a cop. Or a bus driver. Bus drivers are power mad too.

(They didn’t have reggae music in the nineteenth century, so I probably wouldn’t have watched Cops back then. But it’s still a good thing bus drivers don’t have guns.)

People now too stupid to create decent analogy.

As heavy as 3 jumbo jets, enough water to fill 4000 Olympic swimming pools, as long as 6 space shuttles end to end. What happened to pounds, kilograms, gallons, litres, feet and metres…or rods and leagues for that matter…what happened to units of measure?

How long is a space shuttle? 149.6 feet. I looked it up. So six of the bastards is about 900 feet. Why not just say that. I know what 900 feet looks like.

I assumed, for their size, jumbo jets would be very light actually, I mean they’re made of thin aluminum and can, you know, fly. If you can’t just say 361,276 lbs, or better yet 180 tons, why not at least use freight trains (diesel-electric engine 80-90 tons) or something else one assumes is heavy? May as well just say 481,230 cans of hairspray or 1/538 of an aircraft carrier for all the good it does you.

Wanted: Joe, Skookum
Height: 28 cane toads, stacked.
Weight: 109 hats full of shit, dog.
Attitude: Poor, not even trying.

That last part’s true.

exodus

Well we had quite a time rescuing the Dr from the chipper clutches of the impostor army at their secret headquarters which, it turns out, is in the corner booth of a Denny’s in Lac Du Flambeau, Wisconsin. Lac Du Flambeau, sheesh, what’s wrong with plain old Fire Lake? Figures the bloody French have got their clutches into those poor dullards. I notice a town called Rhinelander just to the east. Just like in real Europe. That would explain all the tanks massing on the Wisconsin River and why the southern half of the state is calling itself Viche Wisconsin.

Anyway once we realized we were dealing with frenchish Wisconsinites, P4 and I knew we’d have little trouble. They had the Dr squeezed right in at the back of the booth, so at least two people would have to move to let her out and normally this would be a tough extrication but P4 had it covered. She strolled up to the table and in her best, most coquettish voice began to sing the French national anthem for them. While the table of French-Wisconsinite impostor army kidnappers were jeering at P4 on her lack of snootiness and the non-nasal tone of her voice, the Dr was able to climb up over the back of the seat (after leaving $2.99 for her ham and eggs) and we were away.

Here is an artist’s depiction of the incident. Of course it wasn’t exactly like that as most of the French-Wisconsinite impostor army kidnappers were clean shaven and wore John Deere hats but you get the idea. The Dr has since gone back to work on her secret island and P4 and I are bracing for a counter attack. I think I hear tractors...

Evidence mounts

More evidence of Wisconsin's debauchery can be found here at Dan Tarrant's blog.

Better bring all purpose werewolf/vampire/mummy spray.

Entering The Dairy Wasteland

While P4 makes the sandwiches I’ll explain a little more about our proposed route to rescue the Dr, at the impostor army’s den of deadly cheer in the state of Wisconsin, which is similar to the state of catatonia.



As you can see, the really tough part is going to be crossing the Sea of Wisconsin which is, apparently, an entirely black void and where, possibly, the laws of physics are twisted beyond our recognition and super models are hunted for sport. Super sport.

I have equipped the FUC-U with inflatable pontoons which I plan to sell at the dock in order to pay passage across the sea and P4 is bringing her gameboy she got on ebay for 12 cents in case we need to distract the Wisconsinites. Deke ‘em out with some Tetris. Hang-on….message coming in….

WISCONSIN IS TRAP STOP
REAL SECRET HQ LOCATED YAWN

Gadzooks either they’ve drugged her or are making her watch the W. channel and she fell asleep before finishing the message. Or is it more code? Or a trick by the impostor army to throw me off the scent, the pungent scent of green grass gone through a cow? No sir, she’s still in the bowels of Wisconsin. They must be trying to get out her secret Dr secrets which are not like regular secrets as they involve stethoscopes, and wacky ties for the men and lesbians.

Right P4 load up the dogs and put your rubber boots on, we’re going into the maw of the beast…

44418

Quick and easy, that’s the way. You ever need to pop out your own eyeball, you got to do it real quick. Sort of trick yourself, you know, pretend you’re gonna rip it out so you flinch -but then don’t really do it so, phew, you sigh in relief and THEN you pop that sucker out with the back of a teaspoon before you even know you’ve done it.

Then apologise to yourself for tricking yourself. And for popping yourself’s eyeball out just because you read somewhere you could. Read it with that very eyeball which makes later using the information to defile that eye akin to homo-auto-treachery, which is akin to other made-up words from The Scientists like anti-coagulant and cows. (Animals that eat grass and turn it into a nourishing beverage and important source of calcium which they line up to dispense twice daily in return for simple food and lodging…indeed.)

Milk is produced in the skull and dispensed from the eye. If you …can …get …the …damn thing….OUT!

SJ: Look at that, a new pencil just lying on the floor.

P4: That’s mine.

SJ: Ahhh, I hope it’s an HB. It is! Cool I need one of those.

P4: That’s my pencil.

SJ: Nah, you’d have put yours away. This one was just lying there. I’m going to use it at work for when I need to write or draw something in pencil. I have a mechanical pencil but it’s too hard and faint for writing. I need a softer one like this nice red one here that I found on the floor.

P4: (disgusted at my obtuseness) Uh, I keep telling you that’s MY pencil. I need it for my homework.

SJ: Nope. You always put your stuff away, couldn’t be yours therefore and so forth and so on - so it's mine.


When I was twelve my father gave me a pocket knife and later caught me throwing it assassin-style, trying to get it to stick in a tree. Twenty-seven years later and that pocket knife is still in the top drawer of my father’s tool box.

P4 however, got her pencil back shortly after I got bored tormenting her and calling it a life lesson.

The Cabinets To The Shadowline To The Bulkhead That The Builder Built

1. Bulkhead over cabinets by builder.
2. Shadowline to bulkhead by builder.

The first sentence is clear enough. Since our company manufactures cabinets not bulkheads, it must be the bulkhead they refer to as ‘by builder’ (means his job, not ours). Yup, that makes sense.

What does the second sentence mean? Is the shadowline ALSO by the builder, or is it one we are making which goes up to the bulkhead which, as we already know, is by the builder?

Since my boss, who wrote these notes, is never in the office and never answers his phone I may as well ask you people.

What does it mean?

Details