All aboard the funmarine, we're watching a MOVIE

This is a word-picture I had made by a local artist. I gave him the text of every buyer review I could find for the DVD of "The Sweetest Thing," starring Cameron Diaz (and several other talented, beautiful women), and told him to make something with those words that represented the film.

I was expecting something like a heart, or a pair of traveling pants, but what I got was, in his words, "a penis with a nail sticking out of it."

Crude? Insulting? Yes and yes, and he wouldn't know a good movie if it knocked him over and hammered a nail into his you-know-what. If I had ever been planning on paying him, I would have changed those plans there and then. (I'm more of a dine-and-dash art patron in any case, but the sentiment was still there.)

My solution, at first, was to just hang the illustration backwards. Then I realized that it was, after all, mine, and it could be whatever I wanted it to be.

So what we have here is no longer a nailed wiener, it's a funmarine! ("Funmarine" is just a contraction of submarine and fun. Funmarines were also featured in Down Periscope, and Das Boot.)

On this funmarine girls do... whatever they want, just as long as they follow their hearts and stay true to their friends! Now that's what I call art!

All aboard!

Just going through my old notes

And I found this one:

"Instead of describing things as 'phallic,' use the word 'penile.'"

Say what you will about the perils of youth, but I was a smart guy in 2008. If I could only talk to that kid today...

What's on your mind, Dandy? How do you come up with this shit? Where were you going with that "penile" thing? Do you know how special that was? How are you doing with the ladies?

Yes sir, that was one sharp, mysterious young man. I fucked that up pretty seriously, though. I don't mean to imply that I ruined myself with drugs—I don't do drugs, I drink. And I only drink what I make myself in the garage. I'm not an idiot.

No, I killed young Dandy up here (I'm pointing to my head). Did you think that such a clever, innocent psyche could survive six months of thinking through the lens of what I would do if I were forced to take up Frodo's burden? I feel lucky that the attraction to under-four-foot men lasted as briefly as it did. Everything beyond that was a freebie, and the youthful inventiveness wasn't part of it. After thrusting my digit into The One Ring, there was no going back. (And I'm sorry if that sounds penile to you, but it's the truth.)

I'm not down about it, though; it's not all bad. Being less creative has led to me getting arrested way less often. I mean, the very next item in my notes was "See what my neighbor's neck skin smells like." That's an experience I would happily forget, and the aftermath wasn't a great way to spend my birthday.

If I didn't publish this, no one would have.

RC Cola, soda royalty and the self-styled King of Pop, died today at 105.

RC’s fame ate away at the essentially private Cola. Its initially minor eccentricities escalated into grotesque changes to its packaging and flavor, ultimately leading to accusations of pedophilia. RC maintained that its relations with kids were healthy—it was simply attracted by their "purity and innocence."

The same qualities were attributed to it by its loyal fans, believing RC Cola to be a beverage whose fine flavor was distorted by a malicious press. But as its packaging changed, rumors about RC grew. It began to appear in public wearing a koozie, and seemed to be asexual.

RC was due for a grand re-release next month, but there were still wild stories: one claimed that RC was suffering from fecal contamination. Like so much else about it, the rumor may have been true, but it was probably just razzle-dazzle. It is survived by its parent companies, Cadbury Schweppes and Dr. Pepper/Seven Up.

From the mouth of Ben Franklin

"If life gives you lemons, make lemonade. If life gives you ticks, make lemonade. But not before pulling all of your ticks off, taking care to fully remove any embedded mouth-parts."

That Franklin was some sort of genius-philosopher. And, keep in mind, this lil' sweet-mouth wasn't pulled from the racist, xenophobic rantings of "Poor Richard"—this is pure, unfiltered Franklin. That shit can give you cancer, but it's so smooth. Savor it.

The Chesterton Review. Clever... all the time!

Bon mot. Literally, it translates to “sweet mouth.”

Don’t worry about it—I didn’t know what it meant either. But I had some free time this afternoon between lunch and 5:00, and I did a little etymological research.

The phrase is French, and it dates back to the days before the most recent French revolution. France was totally going to pot back then. The emperors and their ladies were super rich, and they started the fashion of eating only little candies all day. The rest of the country was super poor, though, shit poor, but they still wanted to act like rich people and eat little candies all day. The poor people couldn’t afford candy, and there sure as shit weren’t little candies lying all over the place. But there was something else lying all over the place: goose poop.

See, one of the main reasons for all of France’s revolutions (besides all the rich people making everybody else feel ugly) was the periodic goose infestations. They were everywhere! And nothing drives a poor person crazy like geese getting up in their huts and stuff. The kings always promised to keep the goose population down, but geese are cyclical, and there’s not a lot you can do about it. So now and again the poor people would revolt because of all the geese, and kill some richies.

In this last goose-infested, pre-revolutionary period, the poor people were feeling jealous over the rich people’s constant candy-eating, and they were driven to desperate measures. They ate the only plentiful, approximately candy-sized objects they had (goose poop). It’s sort of like poor people today who wear pieces of car tires instead of Crocs, or snort salt instead of cocaine. It’s all about image.

So they ate the goose poop, because it was practically free, and it made them feel fancy. But obviously they couldn’t call it “goose poop” unless that’s what the rich people called their candies (it wasn’t), so they thought up a term that sounded—to them—cute and classy: bon bon (literally “sweet-sweet”).

But as much as the poor people liked the cultural cachet that came with being seen eating goose poop, the pastime was not without drawbacks. The main issue was a certain rankness of the mouth that accompanied a day of lying in the shade and eating “bon bons.” It made lengthy discussions between habitual bon bon eaters excruciatingly unpleasant, in fact, and so many people limited their conversations to as few words as possible. In another attempt at classing up a behavior by calling it the exact opposite of what it was, these outbursts were dubbed “bon mots.” And yet, for whatever reason, the expression stuck. We still use it today to describe the clever expressions of rich people, or what someone smart enough to have a twitter account wants to say at any given time. Bon mot.

What I’m getting at is that I now have a twitter account. It wasn’t easy, and it’s not cheap, but I was thinking about how it can sometimes literally be months between my diary entries, and how that’s too long for most people to wait for my “sweet mouths.” And so: twitter.com/DandyChesterton

PS—My cell phone is rotary, so please forgive the typos. They’re a small tradeoff for updates from my bathroom. (Or any bathroom!!)