Unremmiting failure's words of wisdom and wonder

Maybe Instead of Becoming a Vegetarian which we've been wrestling with, we'll just steal a cow and bring it home and let it live with us as a member of our family. We suspect that this is what vegetarians should be doing, rustling cattle, instead of refusing to eat meat which let's face it is sitting on the supermarket shelf and won't reassemble itself back into a live cow if everybody refuses to buy it.

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You know who got us troubled?

Paul the real-estate novelist in Billy Joel's "Piano Man." What kind of a career is "real-estate novelist"? We'll be damned if we know. Perhaps that's what he's talking about with Davy who's still in the Navy. Davy's like, "Real-estate novelist? Have you written any books I'd have heard of?" And Paul's like, "Have you ever read Moby Duplex?"

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We've also been taking fondue lessons. People think fondue is a simple matter of impaling something and lowering it into a crock pot full of melted cheese. They could not be more wrong. Competitive, Olympics-level fonduing is an art form, which world-class fonduer Bob Chank described as "Akin to macrameing while skiing." We don't get the comparison ourselves, but then we're hardly at the Bob Chank level.

As for the allegations that Chank's guilty of doping, we don't believe them. Sure he's doing things with melted Gouda no man has done before. But that's genius, not steroids.

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Life Is So Horrible

But there's no Complaints Department. No place where you can go and say, "This life. It sucks. I want a refund." Basically you're thrust into the world without your permission and without any say in where, when and how you'll be living. You can't negotiate the conditions of your existence. You can't say, "I demand a transfer to the Italian Renaissance."

No, you're stuck and there's not one damn person you can complain to. And it's set up this way for a reason. Just think of the crowd there would be at the Complaints Department. It would be a mob scene. One guy would be like, "I have to wear one of those big shoes!" Another guy would be like, "I share a hovel with large rats!" Yet a third guy would be like, "I want to disco professionally!"

Occasionally you run into a person who is genuinely contented with the circumstances of their existence. They're rarer than naked mole rats, but they're out there. They make things worse for everybody, because they're the ones preaching about how you should be content with your lot in life. Life looks good to them, so it should look good to everybody. You could be neck deep in dirty water and all one of these people would say is, "Looks like great swimming!"