Have you ever tried to pay for a twelve-pack at the Stop-n-Rob convenience store using your mama’s gold tooth? If yes, did you take it while she was passed out or ask her nice-like for it?
Have you ever stayed up all night building a beer bong for your little sister’s eighth birthday present?
Have you ever heard yourself say, “While I admire the lilting oboe duet in Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 5 in D Minor, I have to say that the andante of the final movement is what truly stirs my soul”?
Have you ever attended a cockfight? With a date? That wasn’t your sister?
Have you ever gone to the bank and applied for a loan so you could get spinners and nekkid-lady mudflaps put on your Gremlin?
Have you ever complained to a waiter that, while bleu might be an acceptable substitute for gorgonzola crumbles in his universe, it most assuredly is not in yours?
Have you openly mourned the fading popularity of the mullet hairstyle?
If you answered “Yes” to all but questions six and nine, you will find your mate at redneckharmony.com. I had to add those two weird questions to weed out the riff-raff, you know.
Happy redneck couples, don’t thank me now; just thank me by promising to get all the young’uns vaccinated, you hear?
Services like eHarmony could’ve saved Sir Paul McCartney a lot of heartache.
While I’m not exactly ready to sponsor a telethon for Paul, I do feel sorry for him. If you took away the billions of dollars, the song royalties in perpetuity, and the still-irrationally-cute-at-sixty-something looks, you’d have just another old guy that got hoo-doo’ed by a one-legged heifer.
Happens all the time.
I predicted this breakup a long time ago, of course. You could see that marrying a woman that Paul’s relatives early-on dubbed “an opportunistic cow” was doomed.
It’s almost too easy to track poor Paul’s marital woes the second time around via his greatest hits.
Some people see the Virgin Mary’s face in a puddle of grits; I see that the songs foretold the whole sorry story. And, yes, it is a gift.
It was a remarkably brief journey from “I Want to Hold Your Hand” to “Help!” in Paul’s case.
Asked how things are going, Paul says “I Feel Fine” but there’s no longer any hope that “We Can Work It Out.” Paul has discovered that while it’s true that “All You Need Is Love,” if your wife doesn’t feel the same way, you’re in for “A Hard Day’s Night.”
“Maybe I’m Amazed” that Paul couldn’t just “Let It Be” and cherish the memory of his true soulmate, Linda. But he wanted “No More Lonely Nights” and so he penned a few more “Silly Love Songs” for Heather and proclaimed her to be “My (New) Love.”
It is, after all, “Another Day,” and when someone knocks on the door of your tattered heart, sometimes you just have to “Let ’Em In.”
The British need their very own on-line dating services just for the Royal Family because, clearly, they have no idea how to pick the right spouse.
Look at poor ol’ Camilla Parker Bowles. It took her years to drag Chuck to the church.
When Prince Charles finally agreed to marry his longtime shackmate, he decided the wedding would take place at Windsor Castle, but then he found out that if they got married there, they’d have to open up the ceremony to “commoners,” which is the delightfully infuriating name the monarchy has for everybody else.
Charles and Camilla had a fallback plan and decided to move the wedding to Windsor Guildhall, described by Brits as “a quite handsome building.” Sadly, they discovered they’d have to pare the royal guest list from 700 to just 100 because the Guildhall, while handsome, was too small. Rather like the late Dudley Moore.
Not only that, but the Guildhall, a public building, couldn’t legally be closed to those pesky commoners either. So, it was entirely possible that the Duke and Duchess of Upper Monrovia and Lower Intestine would be seated beside some scurvy bloke eating salted mutton from a grease-spotted paper sack and staring at the royal nuptials like they were hotel porn.
As if that wasn’t a big enough hassle, Chuck and Camilla couldn’t legally marry until the Prime Minister passed a bill saying it was OK. And you thought it was a big deal when you had trouble matching the reception punch to your bridesmaids’ dresses?
While Chuck and Camilla fretted about seating charts (should Lord and Lady Aspic be seated beside sour stick figure “Posh” Spice?), the Queen took a pass on the whole ceremony in favor of attending a private “blessing” ceremony.
I didn’t blame her a bit.
“Y’all know me,” she told the BBC while stabbing at her gums with a toothpick. “With me, it’s all about the cake. Besides, I’d really rather stay home, soak my achin’ dogs, and watch the race cuz Dale Junior rocks!”
Oh, no, she did-unt.
Well, of course not. But my redneckharmony.com clients would be able to relate to that little scenario.
I see a world of possibilities for franchising my idea of highly specialized matrimony Web sites. Even the animal world could benefit.
After seeing the fabulous March of the Penguins a while back, I was struck by the parallels between human and penguin relationships.
When the female penguin seems to be a little late returning from a food-finding mission while the males have been keeping the egg warm for four months (despite forty-seven-degrees-below-zero temperatures) the mood is, shall we say tense?
Rather like when we’ve gone to the mall and they’re left with three kids and the cable’s out.
In the movie, the males huddle, and although I’m not fluent in penguin, I’m fairly certain that after multiple home viewings of this movie I can interpret some of the chirps and screeches thusly:
1st male penguin: “Where are the girls? We’ve gotta go get some food soon!”
2nd male penguin: “Dude, I feel ya. Women have no freaking concept of time. I sure could go for some nachos about now.”
1st male penguin: “What are nachos?”
2nd male penguin: “I dunno, but I saw Morgan Freeman eating some with the crew the other day. Wait. I hear something! It’s the girls! They’re back! Here they come! Sweetheart! Where have you been for four months? Long time, no see. Here’s the kid. I’m outta here. Love ya, mean it.”
Female penguin: “Oh, so it’s like that? I get back after walking and sliding on my belly for four months just so I can eat enough to get back here and throw up into Junior’s gullet so he will live and all I get from my (makes little quote marks in the air with her flippers) lifetime mate, is this? That is just so typical of you.”
2nd male penguin: “Okay, let me get this straight. I’m out here for four months freezing my mukluks off, protecting our kid, surrounded by a bunch of guys that look exactly alike and you act like it’s been a party.”
Female penguin: “By the way, that whole penguins-always-mate-for-life thing that you fed me and I swallowed like regurgitated cod, turns out, isn’t true. The girls and I were talking about that while we were walking seventy miles back from trying to find food.”
2nd male penguin: “Doris, honey, I never said ‘for life.’ Everbody knows we penguins are mates for a year, two at the most. Life goes on.”
Female penguin: “MY NAME’S NOT DORIS!”
2nd male penguin: “Uhhh, Mabel?”
Female penguin: “Wrong again, tuxedo-face.”
2nd male penguin: “C’mon, I’ve kept the kid warm but he’s hungry. So instead of giving me grief, let’s think about his needs first, shall we?”
Female penguin: “Why you sanctimonious squid-sucker! I oughta…”
Over the years, I’ve heard other women joke that what they really need isn’t a husband at all. What they really need is a wife.
Now that I’ve watched HBO’s Big Love series about a Utah polygamist, I get it.
Three women share this very ordinary-looking and bizarrely earnest owner of a home-improvement store and they happily live in a suburban “complex”
with a shared backyard.
Although there are three wives, it’s the first one who has the “biggest love” so to speak. She’s the alpha-wife, just like I would be. The “sister-wives,” as the second and third are called, share second-place affections.
But back to why I need a wife.
On Big Love, having extra wives makes for a lot less housework. You cook only every third night, if at all. Some of the wives seem to be conveniently absent during much of the meal preparation. There are so many kids that you always have built-in baby-sitters hanging around wearing those ghastly ’80s hair combs and beatific smiles.
Plus, two nights out of three, there’s virtually no chance that you’ll be forced to switch from The Daily Show to Sports-Center.
Perks, perks, everywhere!
So I asked duh-hubby how he’d feel about having an extra wife or two around here and he lit up like the time I told him MacGyver had finally come out on DVD.
“No, no, no, don’t get the wrong idea,” I said. “Just some extra wives to help with chores and tend the Princess.”
“Where’s MacGyver?” he asked sulkily.
Mormons hate Big Love because they’re scared it’s going to get us riled up about the image of eighty-year-old pervs marrying fourteen-year-old girls, but I don’t think they should worry.
We know Mormons don’t do that stuff anymore, except for a few inbred nut-jobs that splintered off to cult-land and live in caves without cable or Starbuck’s so we know they’re all crazy.
Much to the frustration of the Mormons, polygamists tend to hang out in Utah. You won’t ever hear about any polygamists in the South because Southern women don’t share anything.
You honestly believe a Southern woman is going to share her duh-hubby in the sack when she won’t even share her recipe for chicken salad? Oh, hell no.
Billy Bob will never have five mommies. Southern women are notoriously territorial when it comes to circling and spraying around our men. He might be the sorriest excuse for a husband that God ever created, but he’s “our’n” and just cause he wears a paper hat at work and drives a drunk bike, it doesn’t make any never-mind. If another woman so much as looks at our husband, we will tighten our grip on his arm like a python squeezing a live chicken.
Truthfully, I couldn’t be one of many wives because I prefer to nag and belittle one man at a time. Besides, I’d look like shit in a prairie skirt.
22
Don’t Bug Me, I’m Reading “The Little Red Hen”
Every time somebody introduces a new study that reveals something about men, I’m all in. Anything that can shed even a tiny ray of light on how men think is fascinating to me.
That’s why I was so excited to read the results of a new study revealing cavemen preferred blondes.
According to the British science journal Evolution and Human Behavior, ground-breaking research now proves that, during the Ice Age, Northern European cavewomen so outnumbered cavemen that the men could have their pick of mates. And they picked blondes!
You see, cavemen were responsible for hunting for food and often they didn’t survive the hunt. So, as their numbers began to seriously dwindle, the cavewomen who had been left behind to tend the cave and carp about their insensitive spouses found themselves on the horns of a wooly mammoth, I mean, dilemma.
Obviously, if the cavewoman didn’t have a man, there would be no mastodon casserole that night and, eventually, these mate-less cavewomen would die alone, hungry and, worst of all, brunette.
So nature and evolution combined to give some of the more fortunate cavewomen a caveman-attracting make over: A new look of blond hair and blue eyes began to emerge and four out of five cavemen polled by Fox News (still the favorite of cavemen everywhere) apparently said, “Me likey.”
Before too long, the journal reports, the dark-haired cavewomen, the unevolved you might say, began to hiss and snipe behind the blond cavewoman’s back calling her “Jessica Simpson” and other insulting names.
Scientists explained that when an individual is faced with potential mates of equal value, each carrying identical quantities of twelve-packs and hot wings, he will tend to select the one that stands out in a crowd.
The British study was backed up by a Japanese science journal that reported the gene responsible for blond hair appeared for the first time about 11,000 years ago or, I like to think, when cavewoman finally discovered Preference by L’Oréal because she was worth it.
I’m guessing it didn’t take long before the first blonde jokes began to surface, most likely at book club meetings organized by the smarty-pants brunette cavewomen.
Brunette cavewoman to blond cavewoman: “This month’s selection is Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. But, since this might prove a bit challenging for you, Blondie, you can start with, let’s see, yes, here it is, The Little Red Hen. I hear it’s fascinating!”
While researching all of this I discovered an article quoting the World Health Organization (motto: “Smoke ’em if you got ’em”), saying that natural blondes are likely to be extinct within 200 years because fewer people are carrying the blond gene. In fact, the WHO has predicted the last natural blonde will probably be born in Finland in 2202. And she will be really stacked.
Kidding! That WHO thing turned out to not even be true! Oh, those WHO cutups and their hoaxes! Maybe they’re just jerking our chains over the whole Bird Flu pandemic thing, too. If so, I believe I speak for all good rednecks when I say, “I call gizzard!”
Hey, don’t judge. Gizzards rock!
The thing I’ve noticed lately is that it’s the brunettes who are doing the really nutty stuff most of the time. Two examples: Jennifer Wilbanks, (see: “Fifteen minutes of fame, comma, outlived”) the bug-eyed “runaway bride” from Georgia who faked her own kidnapping just to get out of her wedding. I think she probably came undone when it dawned on her that she would have to greet 600 wedding guests in a receiving line without so much as a Jordan almond to munch on. And being a Southern girl, she knew she’d have to write hundreds of thank-you notes within two months of the wedding or die trying. Southern brides who are tardy in their thank-you notes are in grave danger of being labeled “tacky” by their Southern sisters, a dreaded adjective that is to be avoided as surely and swiftly as men who wear Birkenstocks and socks.
At first, I was blown away by the runaway bride’s loyal fiancé who, even after seeing his beloved hiding beneath a striped beach towel and being led through a New Mexico airport on national TV, vowed to stick by her side. Stoic and devoted, he seemed to understand there are just some times in this life when that which is bitten off must also be chewed. Fortunately, he came to his senses eventually and dumped her scrawny ass. Now that was a man I could understand. That made sense.
Example two of brunettes gone psycho would have to be the poor lovesick space-lady Lisa Nowak. And while the rest of the world was aghast at her puzzling behavior, pepper-spraying her old boyfriend’s new girlfriend in an airport parking lot after driving halfway across the country, I was more aghast that this woman, raised in the South, would ever drive fourteen hours straight anywhere.
It’s true. The disguise, the pepper spray, the knife, the pills, the porn and, yes, even the fabulous space diapers, just made me sad. But the notion that she had renounced her Southern upbringing to the point of driving without so much as one night in a HoJo Express let me know right away she’d gone crazy. Southerners just don’t do this. Not even the men.
A Southerner considers it a sacrifice to sit in a car longer than four hours. In contrast, everyone I’ve ever met from the North believes that stopping overnight is a sign of weakness. To hear my friend from Long Island talk, “all’s you need to get to California is a couple of pee breaks and then just ’cause the kids are whining.”
While both of those brunettes lost their men, maybe there’s something to the notion that men, perhaps channeling the preferences of their caveman ancestors, will fight harder to get the blonde.
It
’s a fact: Men are easily manipulated by blondes and by their other great love, fast food.
The Hardee’s/Carl’s Jr. burger chain has made it clear that they’re not interested in women or children as customers. Not only does Hardee’s not offer a happy meal, they don’t even offer a “merely content” or “borderline depression” meal for tots. Fair enough, but why alienate me? I’ve got spending power and bowel control.
Through an unapologetically misogynistic advertising campaign that is clearly geared to the “inner caveman,” Hardee’s has made it clear that they are interested in selling food to the manly man who can simultaneously change the tire on a big rig and scratch his naughties. As a modern-day woman, I can just take my mood swings and “salad-with-dressing-on-the-side” habit elsewhere. Please.
For a couple of years now, I’ve watched Hardee’s commercials and print campaigns make one thing very clear: Real men who work on big engines in tight T-shirts and eat steroidal cheeseburgers believe that women are only good for looking pouty and handing them a wrench now and then. In one commercial, a gorgeous leggy blonde sighs meaningfully when her beau shows more interest in the burger than her.
If you ask me, dude needs a visit from the Cialis fairy if he actually prefers the “monster thickburger,” a two-fisted meat-fest, to what is clearly presented as “a sure thing.”
Size matters…to cavemen. Why else would we see Burger King telling men that what they really need is The Enormous Omelet.
Morgan Spurlock, who skewered McDonald’s in Super Size Me, suggests the omelet sandwich should come with a five-bucks-off coupon for your first angioplasty.
Not to worry, men. I’ll bet it will be a really big angioplasty.
And with any luck at all, your surgeon will be a blonde.
23
Brownies and Men
They Both Have Nuts on ’Em
It amazes me that the very same duh-hubby who spends hours analyzing the earned run averages of long-dead baseball pitchers and comparing the ratios of pixels of whatever TV screen he’s considering buying can come completely unglued at the prospect of ordering fast food for his family.
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