BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

If you are a regular around here, you know that for the most part, Brainpan Leakage is a satire blog. If you aren’t a regular around here, you need only read the description of the blog, and you should be able to figure it out. However, in this day and age of instant gratification and lack of fact checking, something of which I am occasionally guilty myself, there are often kneejerk reactions to my ramblings here.

Of course, most of you are also well aware that like the proverbial morning cup of coffee and a healthy magazine read in the porcelain room, my day simply is not complete until I have offended someone. The earlier the better, IMHO. That way I can knock off work early and relax. And, as we’ve seen in the past, Wednesdays and Sundays whenever a new blog deploys are the most likely days for early dismissal from the salt mines.

That said, let’s get down to something good and offensive.

“What might that be?” you wonder.

“Well, I’ll tell you,” I say. “Blog comments.”

You see, while I do screen the blog comments for the purpose of keeping spam/blam from making it through, I have no problem approving just about anything, even if you disagree with me. Knock yourself out. If we all had the same opinion then the world would be a very boring place.

However, if you elect to do so, you need to bear in mind that I am just like a comic on stage. If you heckle me, I will heckle you right back.

Case in point… Several months ago I posted a blog that offended a young lady. I say lady because she’s female. For all I know she isn’t a lady at all, but I digress. At any rate, she posted a ridiculously pedantic diatribe on the public comment portion of the blog, taking me to task for being a closed-minded idiot, more or less. While she didn’t actually use the word idiot, as I recall, her intent was clear.

So, good on her. No problem. She took me to task in public, so I heckled her in public. Still, being the nice guy that I really and truly am, I heckled an “anonymous” individual. I didn’t name names, nor provide a link to her FB page, or any of the other things I could have done.

And what do you think happened? Yeah, that’s right. She worked herself up a big ol’ mad and sent me a scathing, nasty email. Now, not only was I a closed minded idiot, I was also a big doody-head for having the unmitigated gall to heckle her.

Do I care? No. I don’t. She obviously needs both an anger management class, and to, as my dear friend Doc Witt says, “shop for a sense of humor on eBay.”

So, the moral of the story?

Simple. You don’t get to call me names with impunity. You don’t get to “yell” at me because I posted something you don’t like on MY blog with impunity.

Just in case you don’t know the word impunity, I’ll save you the trip to dictionary.com – it means, “exempt from the detrimental effects, as of actions.”

So, what I’m saying is, if you feel the absolute need to do any of the above, more power to you. Just don’t act so damned surprised, hurt, put-out, emotionally scarred, and otherwise umbraged when I bite back.

In fact, you’d best be glad it’s me and not E K. She does way more than just bite…

More to come…

Murv

…Even if you don’t follow them.

A classic line from a classic bit of spoken word, that being Baz Lurhmann’s “Wear Sunscreen.” (To give credit where due, it was written by Chicago Trib Columnist Mary Schmich, actually, and performed by Lee Perry… Produced by Baz, so he tends to get  all of the kudos…)

Now that we’ve set that record straight, suffice it to say, the advice is sound. Of course, as the song also says, advice is a form of nostalgia. A way of fishing the past from the disposal, painting over the ugly parts, and recycling it for more than it’s worth.

Problem is, when the recycling center isn’t open, all you can do is lob it over the fence and wait to see if they send you a check. By that I mean, teenagers aren’t all that good at reading directions. Maybe some are, but I can only speak from my own experiences. Hey, even I will admit that as a teen I often experienced DADD – Drooling Attention Deficit Disorder – by the time I reached the third sentence in any given set of directions.

It’s probably a hormonal thing, who knows… (Now that I’ve said that, someone with SDD – Satire Deficit Disorder – will be sure to explain it to me.)

The thing about teens afflicted with DADD is that they will do stuff that you just can’t make up. And, in their defense, I’m more than willing to believe that the advances in technology have contributed to this problem.

Case in point, my niece.

Yes, the one who paid someone to stab a carpet needle through the side of her nose and then plug it with a bejeweled booger cork.

Now, the incident in question occurred a few years before the age of Proboscis Piercing arrived, therefore I know it simply had to be a case of DADD, and not brains accidentally escaping through the third nostril. And, I will give her kudos for actually READING the directions. The problem is, she comes from a different time.

Allow me to explain…

It was Christmas as I recall. But then, I’m old, so maybe I don’t recall properly. What I can say for certain was that the family was all gathered at my mother & father-in-law’s house for some sort of all day celebration. Although we had consumed mass quantities of food at some point during this process, the niece was hungry again and wanted something different than the leftovers. In particular she wanted some manner of carb. My mother-in-law rummaged around and pointed her toward a bag of those frozen biscuit pucks.

All good. A biscuit puck or two should certainly fit the bill where carbs are concerned.

Niece read the directions and then set about puck preparation while the rest of us gathered around the table and talked about the various things that non-teenage folks talk about, which is to say, stuff that bores the living daylights out of the teenage folks. Yeah. Grown ups are mean like that.

Four or five minutes into the conversation an odd smell began wafting over the half-wall from the kitchen and into the dining room. I looked up just in time to see the interior of the microwave burst into flames.

Scrambling occurred, and I don’t mean eggs. In a matter of a few seconds the fire was extinguished before it could spread beyond the confines of the newfangled coffee re-heater. Once the crisis was over and the investigation into the origin of the fire began, we didn’t have to look far. There, smoldering in the center of the Pyrex turntable was a charred disc. Truth is, it looked far more like an actual puck at this point than a biscuit.

As one cohesive unit, the entire forensic investigation team turned to the niece (daughter, granddaughter).

“Wow…” she mumbled. “I wonder why it did that…”

We were dumbfounded. “What do you mean you wonder why it did that?” one of us asked.

She shrugged. “The directions said to cook it for ten minutes. It shouldn’t even be done yet.”

The moral of the story? We need to bring back Home Ec in schools. If for no other reason than to teach these kids the difference between an REGULAR  oven, a TOASTER oven, and a MICROWAVE oven before they burn the planet to a cinder. (We’ll save Infra Red and Convection for the advanced class…)

Just think, it could even count as a History credit…

More to come…

Murv