Quirkee.com

GOOD MORNING, FELLOW AMERICANS!!! DANG IT ALL, I AM SO PROUD TO BE AN AMURIKAN. I AM. CUZ WE ARE THE BEST. EVER. IN THE WORLD. AND UNIVERSE. AND COSMOS.

Whew, I am whipped up, amped up, stoked to the gills with patriotic fever from the Republican convention. I’m on a red, white and blue high! GOL DURN, aren't you PROUD to be an AMURIKAN? HUH? AREN'T YOU... Hey, I'm gonna interrupt myself to cheer! I'm gonna give a big ole shout-out to the red, white and blue. I'm gonna break into YOU-ES-A, YOU-ES-A. Yah, baby, get a load of Sarah "Hot Lips" Palin! Beats the hell out of Dick Cheney, don't it?? YOU-ES-A!

Americans love holidays. Look at the Fourth of July. Everyone merrily stocks up on beer and firecrackers, one of the most ill-conceived partnerships imaginable in holiday celebrations. (Drink beer, set off incendiary devices, visit hospital, learn to write with prosthetic fingers.) But while the 4thclaims to be a day that's all about America, we are overlooking a holiday that celebrates what's truly American: our obsession with our bodies, our devotion to our pets (particularly cats in this instance), our love of science (as long as it's gross), and our compulsion to send greeting cards for the most obscure occasions. Yes, I am talking about National Hairball Awareness Day!

This important holiday is on April 27. What?, you're exclaiming, I missed it again? That's because those snobs at Hallmark just can't bring themselves to do what every cat can do (and usually does under the table in the middle of a dinner party)-cough up something to commemorate National Hairball Awareness Day.

My brothers grew up in a shed. A stable, actually. It didn't still have cows and goats in it. It wasn't like they were the baby Jesus, lying in a manger, surrounded by various cud-chewing animals. And speaking of Jesus: along with being holy, did He have no sense of smell? Because a barn would be a mighty odiferous environment to be born in. Maybe only superior, non-pooping brands of animals were allowed in for Jesus' birth. Christmas nativity sets have little ceramic cows and lambs and a hay-filled manger but no piles of itsy-bitsy ceramic manure or teeny-tiny ceramic flies buzzing around the cow's eyes and butts. In real life, giving birth in a barn had to be pretty low on Mary's list of where - I'd - like - to - have - the - Son - of - God locations. I've never heard of a woman in the throes of labor shouting, "Honey, I'd give anything to give birth in a stall right now, preferably one chock-full of livestock!" because talk about your germs. If Mary had been a spoiled yuppie, she would have had that stable hosed down, the animals booted out, and the whole structure doused in disinfectants before any baby came out of her. Needless to say, Christmas would not be celebrated on the 25th because that barn would not have been up to code until at least the 26th or more likely, the morning of the 27th.

The devil is about to get his butt kicked in Poland. Coming soon is the grand opening of Europe’s first center dedicated to performing exorcisms. No more priests making house calls to cast out Satan. From now on, you got a problem with a demon, you check into the exorcism center and let its trained staff do the rest.

I can’t wait to see what the exorcism center will be called. Will it be the big box store of satanic ass-kicking? Exorcisms ‘R Us? Hell Depot? Satan, Lucifer and Beyond? Or will it be named after a sponsoring company, like “Fed Ex Field?” Who gets naming rights for an exorcism center? The Toyota Center for Casting Out Demons? The Bill and Melinda Gates (to Hell)?

The exorcism center is the brainchild of a priest from the town of Szczecin, the Rev. Andrzej Trojanowski. (Maybe after he’s finished ministering to the bedeviled, the good reverend can ask God to cast out a few consonants from the Polish language and welcome in a couple more vowels.) The Rev. is being backed by none other than Lucifer’s Number One Sparring Partner, the Big V. The Vatican itself is giving the center a pontifical thumb’s up.

Are the Japanese stealing America’s inventiveness? For more than a hundred thousand years, America has led the way with its inventions. When Henry T. Ford first realized that our great nation needed a reliable form of transportation, he invented the horse. Then he invented the buggy. Then he smashed the buggy and ran over the horse with an SUV, which he also invented and then sold to overseas production companies. And that, my friend, is just one example of American ingenuity.

It was an American who invented the Great Lakes, which used to be just so-so lakes.

It was an American who cracked the genetic code of Starbucks and cloned the first one in a laboratory which, unfortunately, did not have proper security fencing. This allowed the infant Starbucks (“Li’l Bucky”) to escape and colonize America, resulting in Starbucks popping up in the middle of dinner parties, in airplane bathrooms, or on street corners where they now hang out in menacing groups intimidating pedestrians into buying skinny, no-whip frappaccinos even when they don’t want one.

Everybody talks about how coddled today's children are. Even parents complain about how other kids are nothing but sniveling brats-while their own dear offspring whine that their Play Station Game Boy X Box I Pod Cell Phone Nuclear Trigger Device toy is so booorrrrriiiinnnngggg.

There are kids with perfectly straight teeth who are getting braces. I don't know why, maybe it's a preventive thing. In the unlikely event that junior's upper bicuspid suddenly decides to grow sideways, that brace will be there, sort of like a mouth policeman patrolling the teeth beat.

I had braces as a kid but that's because my dentist looked at my teeth and said, "Sweet Mother of God, what's the matter with this kid?" Evidently, I'd had the unfortunate habit of sucking my thumb upside down-that is to say, my thumb was upside down, not my body. My thumb hooked itself on my lower teeth and every night as I snoozed away, the weight of it pulled my lower jaw into a protruding under-bite typically found on an English bulldog. Since I had rather short legs as well, the overall resemblance to a pugnacious, squatty canine prompted my parents to have sixteen pounds of silver soddered onto my teeth. I also had rubber bands zig-zagging across the back of my mouth, so every time I laughed, one would break with a loud "snap," which stung like a bee and caused everyone within hearing distance to murmur, what the hell is in that kid's mouth? It goes without saying that the phrase "what a cute little girl!" was not often addressed to me.

At some point in our lives, we face "the question." Often, it is posed by a loved one or a good friend. It's not something that's easy to answer, even after hours of painful introspection. The question is this: if you could invite anyone in the world to dinner, living or dead, who would it be?

That's right. It's the "hypothetical dinner party guest list" question.

C'mon, quit rolling your eyes and think about it. The entire world's human population, living and dead, available for dinner--who would you choose? But be careful--your answer reveals a lot about your character.

Have you had your vote pledged for you yet? You may have and just not know it. I know the election is a year away, and nobody with anything going on in their lives gives a rat's ass about how Iowa or New Hampshire is going to vote, despite the nine million articles about it in the newspapers. How did it come to the point that two teeny and - I hate to be caustic, but I must - completely irrelevant states get to vote first anyway?

Most Americans can't find New Hampshire on a map. I daresay that most New Hampshirites can't find it on a map, and there's a reason for that - it's dinky! And Iowa? It's one of those "somewhere in the middle" states. Maybe it's next to the Dakotas and then again, maybe it isn't. Its population is what - 17 farmers? 117? Does it matter? Because really, who cares who Iowa and New Hampshire likes? Here's a news flash: the majority of Americans - I hope you're sitting down for this - don't live in Iowa or New Hampshire (which a secretary I once knew consistently called "New Hampster," which I'm sure she believed was right next to the great states of New Guinea Pig and New Bunny).

As anyone knows who has done it, moving is one of life's painful experiences, right behind giving birth or being set up on a blind date with a tractor salesman. Moving involves lifting boxes that weigh at least a trillion pounds, and climbing flights of stairs that go on and on like an M.C. Escher painting. At the end of the experience, you put all your old crap into the new place, making it look identical to the place you just spent weeks moving out of. It's like breaking up with one twin in order to date the other. Painful and ultimately pointless.

That is why so many people turn to moving companies to help them through this difficult passage. Moving companies have become the mobile person's mortician. You expect them to show up on time, take care of the nasty details, make sure everything goes smoothly, and then go away when the job is done. You don't want to get to know them; you don't want their number on your speed dial. You want to pay them and then never see them, or any of their kind, again.

I chose a company called Easy Does It to move from Washington, D.C. to Boulder, Colorado, but I discovered that Easy Does It was a clever fake name masking the real identity, which was Big Fat Liars. The company's estimate for our move was half the price of every other company's. Hmmmmm. Could there be a reason for that? Some people might call that "a warning sign" and others of a less kind nature might say that only a person with jello for brains would sign up with a company half the price of its competitors. I admit, I should have been a more savvy shopper, particularly in light of the fact that the contact person at EDI had an unsettling habit of changing her name. Not in mid-sentence, but close enough.