Little Italian Man's Blog
Pooding
It was a warm and relaxing Friday evening when, ice cream cone in hand, I left the safety of my favorite local ice cream shop, and glanced upon the display window of the adjacent delicatessen:
But after a moment, something else caught my eye:
Read on:
Hobby Craft
| My Favorite Pastime | John Denver’s Favorite Pastime |
| 1. Easy to start. | 1. Requires extensive training. |
| 2. Each coin has been on a unique journey through time. | 2. Even with extensive training, some accidents are unavoidable. |
| 3. Collecting old coins is a unique way to learn history. | 3. If the engine stops you crash and die. |
| 4. You can often find interesting coins in general circulation. It’s as easy as looking through your pocket change. | 4. The plane is traveling so fast that when you crash your body will fragment into multiple pieces. |
| 5. Proof sets and commemorative coins make for great gifts for many occasions. | 5. Even if you survive the crash, you will wish you hadn’t. Your crippled and broken body will be bedridden and you will eventually die anyway. |
| 6. Coins come in all shapes and sizes. Some even have holes in the center! | 6. Has been associated with decapitation. |
| 7. Almost never associated with decapitation. | 7. If your head is removed, it may not be found. |
| 8. Coins made of rare metals often increase in value over time. | 8. His head! They couldn’t find his fucking head!! |
A Santa For Thanksgiving
It is with immense pride that I present to you the brand new, legendary, storied and soon-to-be iconic figure of Thanksgiving day: Gary Gobble.
Perhaps the best way to get to know the legend of Gary Gobble is by directly comparing him to the most well-known holiday figure of all, Santa Claus, the beloved patriarch of Christmas:
As Santa’s red sleigh approaches, sleigh bells jingle. When Gary Gobble’s dull grey 1990 Chrysler Imperial approaches your driveway, one hears and sees the exhaust belching through the large rust hole in its muffler.
Santa Claus is jolly, with a long silver beard and a big fat belly. Similarly, Gary Gobble is also unshaven and dangerously unfit, but…in a different sort of way.
Santa Claus lives at the north pole. Gary Gobble showers at the Y ever since the trailer infestation.
Santa Claus is benevolent and achieves his goals through positive reinforcement. Gary Gobble is vindictive and prefers correction through pain aversion.
Santa Claus slides down the chimney and asks if the children were naughty or nice. Gary Gobble pulls up to your curb at the end of your meal and raps his hairy knuckles on the front door.
Santa Claus bellows Ho-Ho-Ho in a jolly voice. Gary Gobble’s blank lifeless demeanor belies the true extent of his brokenness. A half-spent cigarette dangles from his ashen face, precluding a verbal greeting.
Santa Claus rewards the good children with presents which he scatters around the Christmas tree, then looks for cookies and milk. Gary Gobble pushes into the doorway and spot-checks all the dinner plates to ensure that no leftovers remain (Gary Gobble is angered by wasted food). If he discovers said uneaten food on anyone’s plate, he pulls a long string and the following noise is heard: GOBBLE, GOBBLE, GOBBLE, GOBBLE, GOBBLE!!!! This noise originates not from Gary Gobble but from a dangerously energetic, cross-eyed wild turkey affectionately named Goofy Pete, who’s just been sprung from a cage in the backseat of Gary Gobble’s car.
Sometimes Santa catches the spying eyes of an excited child, as he sips his glass of milk by the fireplace. The soft voices of carolers might be heard in the distance. Gary Gobble scans around the house with a mild prideful smirk, savoring the irony of the moment, as the wall-eyed turkey embarks on a violent, indiscriminate rampage, darting from room to room like a pinball rolled in crack,. From the cassette player in the Imperial, Led Zeppelin’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’ blares over the grumbling of the idling engine and the cries of the wounded dinner guests.
When Santa is finished with his milk and cookies, he calls to Rudolf and the other reindeer, hops back onto his sleigh and wishes all a Merry Christmas and a good night. After five minutes, just as a blood-spattered Goofy Pete is about to pluck the second eye out of grandpa’s head, Gary Gobble draws a shotgun and blows the turkey’s head off (Don’t worry, everyone, there plenty of extra Goofy Petes to fill his place back in Gobble-Land). Amidst the moans of the wounded, and the smoke rising from his shotgun, Gary Gobble flicks his cigarette onto the carpet, and with a look of stoic self-disgust, mumbles his classic catch-phrase, “That shit’ll kill ya”.
Here’s where you can help. I need to spread this concept to as many people as will listen. For that matter, feel free to create your own version of this Thanksgiving legend (hopefully more venerable and less disgusting than mine), send it to me and we’ll discuss. Whichever version we choose, I’d like to start a White-House petition to make Gary Gobble the national folkloric figure of Thanksgiving. Apparently, it takes 100,000 signatures for it to reach the president’s desk. Put another way, if this works, the President of the Untied States of America is required by law to review a petition to make a broken sociopath named Gary Gobble the national folk-hero of Thanksgiving. That my friends, is democracy. Now get moving, Thanksgiving is right around the corner.
Happy Thanksgiving to all, and to all a good gobble.
Hersheypark
Recently, while visiting Hersheypark, this happened:
At first I was quite taken aback by this conflicting message. But after reviewing my photos from earlier in the day, it became clear to me that I had missed some obvious warning signs:
Greeting Cards For Assorted Occasions
The M&Ms That Died In Vain
This M&M vending machine was located outside the exit door of a local car wash on Long Island, on a hot summer’s day. Personally, I found the disclaimer at the top of the 25 cents sticker to be less than reassuring. If you are ever at this car wash and find yourself in the position to purchase these M&Ms, I recommend following the flow chart below to assist in the decision-making process:
Lessons Learned on Day #1
of my Website Launch
1) As expected, I’m the talk of the town in Alaska and the Russian Federation:
2) Clicking on #owlsculpture on Instagram opens up a portal to an abjectly horrifying universe:
3) Having a twitter account with no followers is akin to when I was seven years old and hosted a one-man talent show in a room full of my stuffed animals.
4) Searching for ‘Google Analytics’ by the first four syllables reveals a wonderful array of meaningful life suggestions.
5) In retrospect, pre-ordering and hand-signing one-thousand 8 x 10 inch glossy head-shots of myself was ill-conceived.
Fortuitously, most of these events line up perfectly with my life bucket-list:
One Man's Junk
is Another Man's Art
One my family members is in grade school. Last week her art teacher hosted scultpure day and the winning student, picked by the school administrators, got to submit their sculpture to a local arts fair. Her sculpture of an owl took first place:
As you can see, she’s got quite an eye for sculpture. Note how the warm color palate of the head contrasts with the more earthy forest green hue of the body. The arms and ears provide a playfully unbalanced symmetry while the torso takes on the exotic symbolism of a pineapple. She carved the feathermark pattern all by herself, by the way.
Oh, I almost forgot - the face looks like two testicles and a penis. Here it is from the side:
And here it is enhanced for dramatic effect:
The viewer will appreciate the shadowed edge, so as to draw one’s eyes to the center of the subject. Look deep enough into its jaundiced eye-‘balls’ and you’ll unlock the mysteries of the cosmos. Joking aside, I’m very proud of this particular member of my family. Wiener-faced sculpture not withstanding, she really does have an artistic eye, and by no means did she actually intend to sculpt male genitalia into the head of an owl. But it does strike me as odd how, not one single adult at her school, at any step in its genesis, tried to halt, or even slightly modify, the penis-and-testicles owl. They let her mold it, dry it, bake it in the kiln, glaze and cure it, then win the contest, without any revisions.
How could this be? My first thought was that the competition was slim, but further investigation revealed this not to be the case. Perhaps the white and tan clay was packaged in such a way that it could only be applied as spheres or sausages. But that seemed unlikely. This brought me to the only logical conclusion; they never saw a man’s genitalia at all – instead they saw Beeker from the Muppets with a noseful of coke, which, as everyone knows, is a guaranteed shoe-in at art competitions. Coke-nosed Beeker, junk-faced owl, whatever, the bottom line is she won and that’s all that matters in the end.