Monthly Archives: June 2018

* Welcome to The Big Jewel, the literary humor site that brings lonely people together with people they should probably avoid as if their life depended on it. At least that seems to be what Dan Fiorella thinks we do.

Missed Connection

By: Dan Fiorella

Posted on by
Reply

I would never normally try posting on Craigslist Missed Connections, but what the heck — here goes!

I saw you on the 1 Train. You were wearing a red woolen coat and a multi-colored wool hat. I noticed surgical leggings. You were reading your iPhone. You wore those fancy gloves that let you swipe on your phone. Our eyes met a few times and I smiled at you. You had deep, dark eyes. Twin pools of India ink. Is that even politically correct to say anymore? You tilted your head in such a way that your shock of black hair, which contrasted against your light porcelain skin, cascaded over your left eye, brushing up against your classic Grecian nose. You evoked the spirit of a Mediterranean goddess. After a moment, you gathered up your things and got off at the next stop, even though it was obviously not your stop. I returned to my seat.

It would be four or five days before I’d see you on the train again. Fortunately I have the unlimited MetroCard pass. This time I didn’t try to catch your eye or approach you, so you would be more comfortable and get off at your proper station.

Soho. I know it well. It’s a neighborhood in flux. I noticed you in that little vegetable shop on Broome. Then in the Duane Reade buying that laxative. It pains me to think of you in discomfort like that. But I was just too shy to come over and say so! But maybe you should cut back on all that cheese you bought. Just sayin’!

Anyway, after the drug store and the grocer, the hardware store, and the dress shop that apparently has a back entrance, I lost you in the crowd. But luck was with me: I stood across the street from that very same grocer until our paths crossed once again a scant week later! Kismet!

Your doorman seems like the suspicious type and treated me like I had no business coming into your building. First, what’s his problem? And, really, a doorman in Soho? Cheapen the bohemian atmosphere much? Later, much to my surprise, I learned that locksmiths will not simply make keys based on a description of the lock and the address. I cannot believe the ways in which the laws actively court “restraint of trade” lawsuits.

But I haven’t told you anything about myself. I enjoy cooking, deep sea fishing and spelunking, and people tend to forget how much climbing is actually involved in cave exploring, so, really, getting on the roof of your building was no big deal. I will note here that your building security is very impressive and the locks on the rooftop entrances are top notch! It puts my mind at ease to know that you can afford such stellar security. Also, I like a challenge. But I have since decided that a lighter, defter touch may be called for.

Anyway, it appears I’m reaching Craigslist maximum word limit. So, FYI, I’m standing outside your apartment now. Email me. Tell me what color hat I’m wearing so I know it’s really you.

XOXO

The Guy Outside Your Building

 

Share
* Welcome to The Big Jewel, where correcting the omissions of history is one of our passions. That and reading anything new from Candy Schulman.

Overlooked

By: Candy Schulman

Posted on by
1

Revisiting 167 years of New York Times history to provide obituaries for female pets who never got them.

 

LASSIE

This Rough Collie could play with equal ease a farm dog saving members of the human race and a loving master to orphaned children. Lassie’s loyalty inspired the term “woman’s best friend.” When she co-starred with Elizabeth Taylor in Lassie Come Home, she “accidentally” knocked over Liz’s cocktails, a futile effort to keep her mentor from addiction. The first feminist canine thespian barked incessantly, demanding equal pay for female Collies. Only after her death was it revealed that Lassie was played mostly by male dogs because their coats were plusher. She and multiple he’s died peacefully in their masters’ beds in 1953, 1962, 1971 and well into the ’80s.

 

TOTO

Born as Terry, she was abandoned by a childless couple who grew impatient with her rug wetting. Adopted by a show business dog trainer, this Cairn Terrier made 13 films, retiring as the wealthiest dog in history. In her twilight years, she founded SAGD, the Screen Actors Guild for Dogs. She suffered from PTSD after her trauma watching Dorothy kill the Wicked Witch of the West. Halloween trick-or-treaters made her freak out in spite of her cocktail of meds. Relentlessly, she entered rehab, attempting to cure her addiction to Milk Bones and recover from her fear of water. Living to 64 in human years, she died by her own paw in 1945, spared from facing humiliating replacement by the Beethovens and Benjis of Hollywood. Her will stipulated that she be buried on a farm, as far as possible from tornadoes and the grave of Margaret Hamilton.

 

DON CORLEONE’S CAT

This stray never imagined she’d be rescued from homelessness on the Paramount lot by Francis Ford Coppola, catapulted into fame in one of the most iconic movies of all time. Coppola wrote her into the script at the last minute, but Tabby hissed when Brando improvised his way back into the spotlight. During filming her raucous purring stifled Brando’s words. He kept reprimanding her, “Quiet down, you stupid slut!” Her ancestors from 15 litters posthumously filed a harassment claim, but it was beyond the statute of limitations. Tabby succumbed to nonstop postpartum depression. Coppola bought a $10,000 Cirpriano urn from Venice to store her ashes. He is determined to leave it to Sofia in his will — even though she’s made it clear that she doesn’t want her old man’s stuff.

 

THOMASINA

Disney created a cat with three lives, beginning as Thomas in 1912. She was renamed Thomasina when her family realized she was a girl. Thomasina was the first transgender feline, which she confessed to Bastet, the Egyptian goddess, on her first trip to the afterlife. The novel from which this overlooked film was inspired, The Cat Who Thought She Was God, had a sequel called The Cat Who Thought He Was A Woman. Unsurprisingly, Thomasina died after her nine lives expired. Her family never accepted her gender identity, but pounced back after her death when they contested her will, cat-fighting for a piece of the royalty pie.

 

DORY

She was probably born on a coral reef across the Indo-Pacific, fertilized among 40,000 spawned eggs. Her parents immediately swam off, and she was raised by a school of surgeonfish. The first blue tang to star in a billion-dollar-grossing animated movie, Dory couldn’t recall being abandoned. Nor when she was born. Therefore it’s unclear how old she was when she died in 2012 of Alzheimer’s. Fishy theories abound that she was replaced by a lookalike from Petco in her custom-built tank in the Pixar studio. Thanks to Ellen DeGeneres, Dory’s strong belief that the ocean is half full rather than half empty will live on, enduring eternally in multiple sequels. Asked once to describe herself, Dory said, “I already forgot your question.”

 

NANNY

President Lincoln’s pet goat was a feisty piece of chêvre, pulling Lincoln’s sons through the Oval Office on kitchen chairs. Nanny and sibling Nanko gnawed everything from the furniture in the Lincoln Bedroom to priceless Civil War maps adorning the President’s office. Her antics caused such friction between Abraham and Mary Ann Todd that the couple had a brief, but highly secret, stint in marriage counseling — abruptly halted due to his assassination in 1865. Mrs. Lincoln got rid of the goats before she even donated her husband’s clothes to Goodwill, according to their head cook Cornelia Mitchell. No one really knows what became of the whimsical duo, and for all we know they ended up braised and stewed. Thank goodness the Emancipation Proclamation was unscathed.

 

GIDGET

The Taco Bell spokesdog stroked out in 2009 at the age of 15 after a lucrative career pushing unhealthy fake-Mexican fast food to inner city teenagers. The talented Chihuahua spent her free time sun worshipping in Cancun. Her career rebounded when she partnered with Gecko, Geico’s advertising icon, who is still alive, wealthy, and feasting on freshly fried crickets. Gecko is currently spearheading the movement opposing the construction of the Border Wall, creating a Go-Fund-Me in Gidget’s honor. At the funeral, the pastor, decked out in a serape and sombrero, opined, “¡Yo quiero Taco Bell!,” insisting that Gidget was not a cultural stereotype.

 

SAMMIE STREISAND

Barbra Streisand defended cloning her euthanized Coton de Tulear Sammie, née Samantha, into Miss Violet and Miss Scarlet. People — especially with $50,000 to burn — are truly the luckiest pee-pull in the world! Streisand’s DNA is currently being stored in an undisclosed location in Flatbush to eventually clone the next Funny Girl. Sammie lives on perpetually and digitally, with a whopping three Instagram followers. Show your love! #samanthastreisand.

 

Share
* Welcome to The Big Jewel, where every week is a reenactment of our love for you, the reader. This week it's deja vu all over again, thanks to R.D. Ronstad.

The Reenactor

By: R.D. Ronstad

Posted on by
Reply

I am a reenactor. Not a Revolutionary War or Civil War or World War I or II reenactor. Not a Colonial America or American frontier reenactor. Not a medieval times or ancient Greece or Roman times reenactor. Just a reenactor — not limiting myself to any time, any place, or any person. Everything that happens is history, right? (Remember the butterfly effect?) It’s sheer arrogance to say only a miniscule number of events and times and people are historical reenactment-worthy.

Taking this approach, I must admit, does lead to some difficulties. For example, when I follow some guy off a bus, am I just another guy getting off a bus, or am I reenacting the guy in front of me getting off a bus? I’m never quite sure myself. Also, by reenacting things that normally don’t get reenacted, could I be messing with the timeline? Doubtful, but who knows? I consider these types of questions only minor annoyances though. I refuse to let them bog me down. The real problem is dealing with people who willfully or in their ignorance fail to recognize my reenactor status.

* * * * * * *

Take what happened during the last baseball season when one fall day I traveled from my home in Chicago to Appleton, WI hoping to reenact a home run (his first of the season) hit by a nondescript Wisconsin Timber Rattlers player the day before. (The Rattlers were having a rough year and I figured they and their fans could use the pick-me-up.) I took carefully considered precautions to avoid trouble. I would not interrupt play, but would perform my reenactment at the sixth inning, while the grounds crew did their stamping and raking and dragging. I wore a Rattlers jersey with the nondescript player’s number on it but with REENACTOR stitched on it* where the players name would normally go. I brought along a yellow plastic wiffle-ball bat of my nephew’s instead of a wooden bat (so no one would feel threatened as I trotted towards home plate carrying it), which I stuffed in my sweatpants so no one, including security, would ask questions. (I wanted my reenactment to be a surprise for everyone.). And when the moment came and I hopped the fence and headed toward the plate while removing the wiffle-ball bat from my pants, I kept shouting: “Living history! Living history! Living history!” so that anyone within earshot would know my intentions were commendable.

Well, just as I was digging in at home plate, I noticed a couple of angry-faced security guys racing toward me from the third base dugout area. I didn’t even have time to raise the bat over my shoulders. So I dropped it immediately and hightailed it toward first base (which further distorted the reenactment, because no real baseball player hightails it after hitting a home run), at which time I noticed two more security guys starting to take off after me from the first base dugout. I did manage to round first base, all the while continuing to shout over my shoulder: “Living history! Living history! Living history!” But all for naught. Apparently the first base security guys had no qualms about tackling living history.

* * * * * * *

Then a couple of weeks after that, one afternoon after watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail for the third or fourth time that day, I decided to walk through my neighborhood reenacting the medieval practice of pushing a cart around collecting dead bodies during a plague epidemic.

I figured my neighbors would play along, because most of them by then would have been clued in to my reenactor status, since I had already made numerous reenactment forays into local business establishments (coffee houses, bars, bakeries, laundromats, etc.) and public buildings (library, senior center), and in addition, there had been scurrilous local media accounts** of the unfortunate incident at the Rattlers game.

So I dragged a wheelbarrow out of my tool shed to substitute for a dead-body cart (good enough, since I didn’t anticipate collecting any actual dead bodies), outfitted myself with a drab sweatsuit I picked up on the cheap at Goodwill and then promptly shredded, fashioned a buff-colored kerchief into limp headgear, smeared dirt on my clothes and all my visible body parts, and started off around the neighborhood chanting: “Bring out your dead!” “Bring out your dead!” “Bring out your dead!”

Everything went as planned for about a half hour. People played along, as I had anticipated. No rude remarks. Some sly smiles. Even some faux weeping and moaning. And a number of “dead bodies” were deposited into my wheelbarrow in the form of cracked portable radios, smashed remote controls, and waterlogged cell phones.

Then I came upon the McJerk*** residence. As I walked wearily and morosely past the McJerks, chanting my dead-body chant, they hauled out their perpetually drunken uncle, whose animate status, I must admit, has always been in question, and insisted I haul him away on my “cart” with all the electronic corpses. I didn’t want to point out the obvious, which I’m sure they knew anyway — that I was, in fact, not a dead-body collector, but a dead-body collector reenactor. I didn’t want to break character. Instead, I got into a heated dispute with them as to whether Uncle McJerk was, in fact, dead (yes, just like in the Python movie!). Well, I don’t want to go into all the sordid details, but I just want to point this out for the record: No matter what the McJerks might claim in the upcoming court proceedings, I DID NOT at any time — I repeat, DID NOT — hit any McJerk on the head with my cudgel****.

* * * * * * *

As I mentioned, I frequently do my reenacting at neighborhood establishments. This is, in fact, my favored form of reenacting — on the spot, “you are there,” spontaneous reenacting in honor of “ordinary” people.

This might involve stealthily following some random subject at the supermarket, mentally noting down all his/her movements and selections, and repeating them as precisely as possible once they’ve left the premises. (Resulting, unfortunately, in frequent unnecessary purchases, since half the items I check out — dog food, baby diapers, radishes, Cap’n Crunch’s OOPS! and so forth — I have no use for.) Or listening attentively to cell phone conversations at my local Starbucks and repeating the half of the conversation I heard into my phone word-for-word (short conversations only, obviously) once the person has left. (Sometimes, although this, strictly speaking, does not qualify as reenactment, I even make up imagined responses on the other end, which can be quite entertaining.) Or, at the library, repeating questions to the reference librarian I just heard someone else ask. (Once, a librarian repeated the question word for word back to me. I high-fived him — twice!)

During these pursuits, I usually meet with little resistance, outside of the occasional quizzical look or icy glare. Partly because I always remain as unobtrusive as possible, and partly, I think, because I always take care to wear my REENACTOR baseball cap and t-shirt — hand-embroidered by yours truly.

But something untoward did happen once on a visit to my favorite watering hole–The Shot and A Tear Lounge. I was sitting at the bar, wearing my REENACTOR gear, having just finished my first attempt at street reenacting, which went quite smoothly, if I do say so myself, except for a minor flare-up with the driver of a beat-up Buick LeSabre. Anyway, I had just finished my second rum and coke when I got it in my head to attempt a reenactment of Ricardo the regular bartender’s bottle-flipping routine.

So, when Ricardo was safely down at the far end, I hopped the bar, grabbed a bottle of Seagram’s in my left hand, and proceeded to flip it over my right shoulder from behind my back. Unfortunately, as I tried to grasp the spinning, airborne bottle with my right hand, I closed my fingers too quickly and knocked the Seagram’s into a row of liquor bottles lining the shelf in front of a large mirror facing the bar, shattering several of them (but, thankfully, not the mirror) in the process.

As he hustled me out of the bar and into the street, I kept protesting to Gerald the bouncer that I had not had “way too much,” as he claimed, but that I was simply a reenactor doing what reenactor’s do. And when I finally stood up and regained some dignity after being deposited like a sack of unwanted diapers on the sidewalk, I looked Gerald in the eye, pointed at the lettering on my t-shirt, and said: “Can’t you tell the difference between a reenactor and someone who has had ‘way too much’?” “No!” said Gerald. “And if you ever show up around here again, I’m gonna reenact the bombing of Dresden all over your face!”

* * * * * * *

You might think that two impending court cases (the Rattlers have me up for criminal trespass) and a lifetime ban from The Shot and A Tear would dissuade me from carrying on with my reenacting activities. But you would be wrong. History is constantly happening — every day, every minute, everywhere. And wherever history is, it is calling out to be reenacted. I will be there to answer that call. Even in jail, if it comes to that. Because that’s what I am. The reenactor.

*$15.95 ($5 overnight shipping) at notripoffs.com

**The media proved to be totally unsympathetic to my cause also. But what can you expect from a crowd of ink-stained troglodytes?

***Not their real name. Not Scots, either

****Meat tenderizing mallet

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Share
* Welcome to The Big Jewel, where we proudly join our good friend David Martin in trying to eliminate all writers from the world. Starting with your own household. Once you've finished reading his newest piece of absurdity, click on the link below to check out his humor blog.

How To Eliminate Writers From Your Home

By: David Martin

Posted on by
Reply

Any time of year is a good time to pest-proof your home. Whether you’ve got ants, mice or squirrels, it’s best to take action to keep these critters at bay.

 

There are plenty of websites to help you identify common rodents and varmints and take the necessary steps to bid them good riddance. Despite several Google searches and minutes of offline research, however, I was unable to find any advice on spotting and eliminating a very common household irritant: the writer.

 

But fear not — I have taken it upon myself to fill this void and present you with everything you need to know to identify and eliminate this most persistent of pests from your abode.

 

First of all, you need to determine if there are, in fact, any writers in your house. You may already suspect that you have been infested with one or more of these creatures by such telltale signs as frequent keyboarding clicks and clacks, late night scribbling beneath bedside lamps or the repeated sound of a head banging against the wall.

 

To be sure if writers are about, however, you have to do some simple sleuthing. If, for example, many of the coats and jackets in your closets have two or more pens in their inside pockets together with numerous pieces of scrap paper, you can be pretty sure you have an infestation of at least one writer.

 

Another sign that an unwanted scribbler may be about is the placement of notebooks and notepads next to every phone, desk, bed and toilet. Open them and look for outlines, reminders and half-written articles, which are sure signs that a writer is nearby.

 

Half-read books piled up on nightstands and tables may signal a writer about. But be careful, since such evidence may simply point to the presence of an obsessive yet inefficient and generally harmless creature known as a reader.

 

Similarly, magazines strewn about the house may mean that a writer has invaded your space. Check, though, for the type of magazines to ensure that you’re not simply on the trail of an inoffensive periodical enthusiast. However, if many of the magazines have the words “Writer,” “Writing” or “Publishing” in the title, there’s definitely cause for concern.

 

Once you’ve established that you have a writer, the next step is to trap him. In line with today’s more modern and sensitive approach to pest control, we strongly advise against using any deadly traps. Instead, we suggest you opt for a live capture and release method.

 

Any one of a number of humane cages will serve the purpose. The key element in using such traps is the proper selection of bait. Many folks opt for traditional items like pens, paper or a keyboard. Still others choose old standbys like writers’ books and magazines.

 

The trouble with using such bait is that if your writer falls for it and still manages to avoid the trap, he will be wise to your ways and likely then to avoid the cage. If that happens, you have to resort to more sophisticated items to lure the crafty wordsmith.

 

In my experience, such things as faux reviews and articles featuring the writer’s name (assuming you’ve discovered his name in his various leavings around the house) make excellent enticements. If all else fails, however, the one tried, true and no-fail bait is a phony letter of acceptance from any major publication. No writer can resist such a tempting trap.

 

Now that you’ve caught your nuisance writer, what do you do with him? Some people have made the mistake of attempting to talk the critter out of writing, but that seldom works. Others have tried driving the writer to the country and releasing him into the wild. Although he will sometimes take refuge in a cabin or a lakeside writers’ retreat for a few weeks, he will almost always return to your home.

 

After years of experimentation, I’ve found what I think is the best solution to this difficult problem: give your writer his own room and insist that he do his writing there. You’ll get more peace and quiet and, who knows, with any luck your writer may even start producing an income.

Share