ISSUE 09-02

My taste in music – Hipster Doofus sans irony, saddled with a sad yearning to be cool
The Random 10



What It’s All About – Girl Talk
Sun In An Empty Room – The Weakerthans
Time Left For Love – Shout Out Louds
Goodnight, Good Guy – Collective Soul
I’m Old Fashioned – John Coltrane
Leave Me Alone – The Veronicas
Stranger Things Have Happened – Foo Fighters
Living In Exile – Sleater-Kinney
It Serves You Right To Suffer – John Lee Hooker
Broken Arrow – Robbie Robertson


It’s new, it’s pointless, it’s…
Excerpts from my Twitter feed!



If you have an 8 y. o. child who loves to read, do NOT take them to see The Reader. /shudder
Posted 14 minutes ago

I’m only out of pickles when the stores are closed. Sux...
Posted 26 minutes ago

Whoa, look @ those smoosha- eh, it probably won’t catch on.
Posted 28 minutes ago

Nice smooshabooms!
Posted 31 minutes ago

Smooshabooms….
Posted 33 minutes ago

I’ve got a new word 4 breasts – smooshabooms :-)
Posted 35 minutes ago

OMG, why won’t these laces stay tied up?
Posted 46 minutes ago

Just stopped 2 tie my shoe…
Posted 48 minutes ago

I like Feist, but I’m not sure if I like the concept of Feist, u know?
Posted 54 minutes ago



Oh, how I missed me!
Of Ghosts, Toxins, Mammaries

Thanks for your patience, dear readers. Rehab stint # 14 was a real pain, but not quite as bad as actually having the addiction to melamine smoothies I acquired while touring Chinese sweatshops last autumn, looking for ways to eliminate staff discover efficiencies at the Joey.

Now that I’m out, slightly brain-damaged, liverless, and shopping a tell-all memoir, I feel rejuvenated – and the old edge is back!

No, it wasn’t rehab. Really, I took on a simple winter project, cataloguing and cross-referencing my taped episodes and collectible figures from the iconic television series Ghost Whisperer. What started out so simple, soon became complex, then all-consuming, then stroke-inducing. But such is the vision, indeed, the drive of a genius. And now I can tell you exactly, scene by scene, when Jennifer Love Hewitt’s, ahem, “smooshabooms” :-) are most prominent, in each and every episode, then I can costume her action figure and place it in a diorama to illustrate and enhance the scenes from each episode. Exhausting work, but so rewarding.


Brutal, nasty - like contestants in the Miss Transcona Beauty Pageant!
Great Moments In Nature, Caught On Tape And Uploaded to YouTube

Eagles dragging goats off cliffs! Yup, you read that right.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VklTs-Tid_I

If you have a gentle heart and hate to see baby goats turned into eagle prey, skip this video, it could ruin your day. If you want to watch a real life exercise in “survival of the fittest”, click away! If you’re short on time, the best “drag ‘n drop” moments happen at 0:35, 5:00, and 6:30. Enjoy!


* * *



* * *


Running with someone else’s idea
Who I would add to my PunchYouInTheFacebook



OctoMom
Geoff Currier
Sarah Palin
Amy Winehouse
David Caruso
The red Teletubbie
Stephen Harper
Jack Layton
Michael Ignatieff
Elizabeth May
The touring cast of Mama Mia!
Jimmy Fallon
Those people from The Hills
Gwyneth Paltrow
The Jonas Brothers, twice


She’s not on my PunchYouInTheFacebook… yet…
Mother of Joey!

Now, how about a quick Mother of Joey update – she’s maintaining the “snarkus quo”, exploring the “snark space” as it were, having transitioned from an Angry Holiday Season right into a Miserable Winter Vacation. She cut their planned five-week vacation down to two, somehow compelling Dad to drive 8,000 kilometres in that time, without making any stops to enjoy the scenery.

Literally, they went from Point A (Winnipeg), to Point B (Palm Springs), and back, stopping only for sleep in truck stop towns. But hey, when you’re that close to Los Angeles, San Diego, Las Vegas, the GRAND F**KING CANYON, the Sierra Nevada mountains, Joshua Tree National Park, the PACIFIC F**KING OCEAN, etc., why would you visit any of those places? That would involve deviating from (cue Darth Vader voice) The Plan, and I was told, in no uncertain terms, that only fools (!) deviate from The Plan.

So now they’re back, having concluded that California is really overrated. It does rain there, even though they had “heard” (from Governor Schwarzenegger?) it is not supposed to. And you know, it’s not as warm as you’ve heard either.

“Wouldn’t give ya a nickel for it,” clucked Mom, arms folded across her chest, pastel sweatpants climbing to mid-shin.

I couldn’t resist checking, and from what I could gather, it rained all of two times while they were there, and the temperature hovered between 21 and 25 degrees – in February.

Overrated, indeed.


Nah, keep driving. I've got some NCIS repeats I need to watch...

NEXT ISSUE: Mother of Joey casts her pall upon Easter Dinner 2009! Who will survive? Stay tuned!


Name that crappy song!
Your only hint: it’s from a tv show…

Some people stand in the darkness
Afraid to step into the light
Some people need to help somebody
When the edge of surrender's in sight
Don't you worry
It's gonna be alright
Cause I'm always ready
I won't let you out of my sight.
I'll be ready
I'll be ready
Never you fear
No don't you fear
I'll be ready
Forever and always
I'm always here.
In us we all have the power
But sometimes it's so hard to see
And instinct is stronger than reason
It's just human nature to me
Don't you worry
Its gonna be alright
Cause I'm always ready
I won't let you out of my sight.
I'll be ready
I'll be ready
Never you fear
No don’t you fear
I'll be ready
Forever and always
I'm always here.


And finally!
This picture begs for a caption…

ISSUE 2009-01

Name that band!
HAIR METAL MEMORIES, #1



***

I do solemnly swear...

All you haters suck my balls!


***

SPOILER ALERT: If you have not seen No Country For Old Men, the latter portion of this post might diminish the viewing experience for you. If you have seen it, reading this post may diminish your experience in general. So you are warned. And I’m talking about mommy again… good thing it’s not an Oedipal complex.

Now with 50% more cathartic bile!
No Babies, Nor Coen Brothers Movies For Old Women

Regular readers know Mother of Joey is, well, odd. She presents a beaming, congenial façade to the outside world, and offers a petty, oft mean-spirited demeanour to her loved ones.

Perhaps out concern that her quota was down, Mother of Joey made sure that 2008 ended with a bang.

Mrs. Joey, Li’l Joey, my parents and I journeyed to Saskatchewan to visit my sister, and see her new baby. The round-trip is over 2,200 kilometres, and can require even more than 20 hours of driving if the winter weather turns nasty.

We travelled in separate cars (thank God, in hindsight), and how long did my parents stay at my sister’s house? Two days. With barely 48 hours logged, they set off for home in the early a.m. darkness, on roads so treacherous that my brother-in-law (who plows snow for a living) said “whoa - why would they do that?”

But it was time for mom to go. In that 48-hour period, she really knocked it out of the park…

*She told her four-year-old grandson that he is fat. He is not fat. Mom says this because she thinks her son-in-law is fat, so logically (to her) the grandson will be fat. Her son-in-law is not fat either. In a cruel but humorous twist, there is only one truly fat person in my family – mom;
*She avoided her new granddaughter for nearly the entire visit. Good idea, since three-week-old babies have been known to attack and viciously gum the elderly. I’d turn my back on a shark before I would turn my back on a seemingly helpless newborn. Better safe than sorry;
*She did not say one kind word to my dad in the entire visit. Instead she alternated between calling him “lardass” and “asshole”, currently her favoured terms of endearment;
*She did not say one kind word to Mrs. Joey. That’s a long story we won’t get into, but trust me when I say that my mother holds grudges like hungry babies latch onto breasts;
*She told my sister and Mrs. Joey that raising babies “back in the day” was way harder. Sister and wife batted that pitch right back at her, we all had a good laugh, and mom shut up for a few hours, steam coming out of her ears. Dysfunctionally, it was the highlight of the visit;
*I can’t prove this, but I think if my mom could get away with it, she would call her four-year-old grandson an “asshole”. She has an active dislike for the little guy. As happens with kids his age, one day he played too hard, got sick and had to throw up, and my mom was nearest to him. Instead of helping him, she went into the kitchen and said “well, your boy is all wound up, and now he’s sick”. My sister said “and so… who’s looking after him right now?” and headed to the bathroom, where my mother had left him, crying and puking.

So that is how we ended the year. Yours truly took a good long break from speaking to his mother, and used the time to reflect on all the great gifts I got for Christmas. I’ll bet you thought I was going to reflect on my mom’s behavior. Heh, unlikely.

A while ago, I figured out this much: in the game of life, my mom got what we all want by the time we reach retirement – she won. She successfully raised a family, owned a home, enjoyed the company of a spouse, family, and friends, had some reasonably interesting life experiences, and arrived at retirement with good health, decent income, capable children and cute grandkids. She suffered disappointments along the way that most of us endure. However, on the whole, she won.

But you would never know this. Nobody in this world is more dissatisfied than she, and nobody is more determined to bring down everyone around her. She is a Killjoy-Emeritus.

I phoned her last weekend, anticipating another whiny monologue.

She told me about her experience renting the movie No Country For Old Men. Of course, like everything else in her retirement life, it proved unsatisfactory.

I grimaced when she mentioned the title, because my mom only likes tv shows and movies where all events and ideas are literally depicted on the screen. There’s no way this went well.

It started out especially bad, because she accidentally brought home the Blu-Ray version of the movie.

“How in the hell are you supposed to know the goddamn difference?” she says.

“At the top of the box, it says Blu-Ray Version,” I offer up.

“Oh,” she grunts. “Well, it didn’t say that on my box, I can damn well tell ya that!”

People make mistakes, but not my mother. It’s impossible she overlooked that on the box. More plausible - the video stores scramble up the Blu-Rays with the regular DVDs. They want to anger the customers and minimize their revenue. That is what they set out to do, every day.

And did you like the movie, I asked, not really wanting to know, unable to resist asking.

“Well, it was good up to a point,” she says. “I mean, I didn’t see them killing off Josh Brolin. Did not see that one coming at all. Then it got stupid when the creep –“

“Chigurh?”

“-yeah yeah, that Sugar guy, went to that girl’s house. He flips a coin and de-da-de-da-de-da, next thing you know he’s leaving the house! Did he kill the girl or not? And why was his hair combed like that?”

So we know that most, if not all of the underlying themes depicted in the movie were not even noticed by my mom. Those damn namby-pamby ideas - chance, fate, inevitability, the “evil that men do” - are for the birds anyway. Give her a good car chase. Have Tom Selleck take off his shirt.

I must have wanted a headache, because I delved deeper, and asked her what she thought of the accident that happened to Chigurh right after he left the girl’s house.


His head won't hurt any worse than mine...

“Accident? What accident? There was no accident,” she said, entirely confused.

I told her about the car accident, its aftermath, and the monologue the Sheriff gives in the last scene. She insists that these scenes were not in her version. I told her they are in every version, because they are, well, part of the movie.

“Well, you can have these artsy-fartsy films as far as I’m concerned,” said the woman who has seen every Ashley Judd and Halle Berry “woman in peril” movie, and wonders why these films and performances are always overlooked at Oscar time.

Yes, I can have these films, mom. And you go back to your sneering contempt for neighbors, family, friends, immigrants, aboriginals, welfare recipients, politicians, store clerks, drivers, news readers, weather forecasters, boy scouts, babies, toddlers, Javier Bardem, and people you just haven’t met yet. It appears that has become your driving passion these days. And remind me to return your copy of Perfect Strangers, starring Halle Berry, unwatched. Blergh.


And finally!
This picture begs for a caption...