Surf Our Site
Home ... Misfits . Rafferty .. . S1019 .. . Star Crossed....
. . Ginger & Shadow. ..Writer's Block.. ..Cool Links . ..More Cool Links
.
Oddities
..Link
To Us... Guest
Comics .. ..Books
for Sale . Online
Store..
.In The Zone
. .Emotional Chaos
. ..Number 9.
. .September 11
b
Emotional
Chaos
Weekly
Column by Brian Codagnone
December
5, 2005
SWINDLER'S LIST
When we highly trained professional humor columnists need to kill space, or as we say in the biz "fill column inches" we compile lists. Not just random lists, of course. Lists that will be of great value to our readers. That way we can fill column inches (see? You're learning already!), entertain and inform our readers and, most importantly, keep that tax deduction on the computer.
For example, here are some categories of fad diets:
A location: The Skowhegan Diet, The Newark Diet.
A foreign location: The Swedish Diet, The Ethiopian Diet, The Andes Plane Crash Diet.
A single food or food group: The Cantaloupe Diet, The All Egg Diet, The Condiment Diet
An unusual food combination: The Salmon and Popcorn Diet; The Fruit and Fungus Diet
Avoiding an unusual food combination:
The No Eggs, No Watermelon, No Protein Diet; The Skip the Fiber and Frozen Foods Diet; The No Grains, Meat, Dairy, Fiber, Fish, Protein, Fruit, Carbohydrates, Vegetables or Liquids Diet.
Diets of the Rich and Famous: The Hollywood Truffle and Cocaine Diet; Lose Weight the Ernest Borgnine Way.
Targeting something like carbs or fat: The No Electrolytes, No Weight Gain Diet; All Fiber, No Fat!; Drop the Protein, Drop the Pounds.
Random: Convulse Yourself Thin; One Big Meal, One Big Weight Loss; Fried, Fried, Fried!
The same can be said of exercise regimens. You don't have to be a body builder or a genetic aberration like Richard Simmons to be a fitness guru, all you have to be is famous.
For example there's:
Sweatin' With Karl Rove.
Martha Stewart's tasteful prison workout.
The Ashton Kutcher "I'd Better Have Something to Fall Back On" Workout.
Stephen Hawking's Bending Time and Space Workout.
The Marquis De Sade Workout.
Hardening any body part (except ones that will get you thrown out of a family paper), such as the famous "Steel" series, Buns of Steel, Arms and Abs of Steel, Hair Follicles of Steel... you get the point. We recommend:
Iron Abs
Platinum Pecs
Titanium Toes
Breasts of Boron
And if just hardening selective body parts isn't your thing, There are exercise regimens taken from the military:
The Foreign Legion Desert Death March Workout.
The Swiss Navy Workout.
Trench Warfare Toe Touching: Fitness Tips from The Battle Of Verdun.
Raise Your Arms The French Army Way!
Just Deserters: Get in Shape by Running Away.
For those hipsters who are into "surfing the net" on your "laptops" while drinking "lattes" and listening to your "i-Pods" (as opposed to "trying to write a column" on your "Honeywell Word Processor", with "Carter era transistor technology", not that I'm bitter or anything), you know that there's a site out there for every interest, pursuit or perversion. Here are some of the lesser known web sites:
Oven Mitts Illustrated
People with Cabbages
The "My Mother the Car" Shrine
Ask Gary Coleman
The Chopin Liszt: Everything you wanted to know about composers
Doorknobs of Dayton, Ohio
My Helmut Kohl Page
Dancing Roadkill
The Mustard Packet Collector
The Calzone Fanzone
The Clamato Juice Recipe Exchange
From Soap to Nuts: Grocery Lists I have Compiled
Have you ever looked at someone's bumper sticker and said to yourself "What kind of nimrod would put THAT on his car? Is it covering a rust spot, or maybe a "Dukakis for President" sticker?They range from the political:"Bush-Cheney", "Kerry-Edwards", "Nader: Why Bother?", "Larouche in 2000", etc.To the self promoting: "My child is an honor student at St. Elmo's High School"
To the humorous: "My Child Beat up your Honor Student"
To the esoteric: "My Karma Ran Over my Dogma"
To the sports related "Yankees Suck"
To the indecipherable. I once saw a bumper sticker that read "Put it Back,
Thief, Now!" If anyone knows what that means, please drop me a line. That way I can write off the e-mail, too.We know that a lot of our readers are history buffs, so we've compiled some Colonial bumper stickers that might have appeared on hay wagons, carriages or the buttocks of a horse (see
"Dukakis for President"):
"Proud parent of a powder monkey"
"My child is an indentured servant at the Hawthorne Plantation"
"I'd rather be playing at ninepins"
"Have you whipped your slaves today?"
"I saw the whites of their eyes at Bunker Hill"
"I'd rather be shooting Indians"
"My other horse is a stallion"
"I got flogged on the USS Constitution"
"John Adams for Prefident"
"Coopers do it with barrel staves"
"Yankees suck"
See? You've learned something valuable while being entertained. Try THAT with the average supermarket tabloid. And if the IRS is reading this, forget what I said about the Honeywell Word Processor. The $53,212.54 that I claimed for work related computer expenses was perfectly legitimate.
Brian's column
is available for your publication.
Call us at
978.459.1636
Or e-mail Brian directly
©2003 Brian Codagnone
All rights reserved. Redistribution in whole or in part prohibited.
2 Courthouse Lane, Chelmsford,
MA, USA 01824
978-459-1636
Surf Our Site
Home ... Misfits . Rafferty
.. . S1019
.. . Star
Crossed....
. . Ginger
& Shadow. ..Writer's
Block.. ..Cool
Links . ..More
Cool Links .
Oddities ..Link
To Us... Guest
Comics . Online
Store..
In
The Zone. ..Number
9. . .September
11