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The Hillbilly Saves the Economy

18 Aug

August 18, 2011

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you, The Hillbilly.


With all the talk about the economy and all the trouble on Wall Street I thought I’d give you some advice on how to increase your personal wealth. If everybody would follow some simple rules then we’d have this economy running like a tractor in no time.

1- No need to buy that expensive store-bought pig slop. Good hearty pig slop can be made out of left over parts, gullets, necks, feet, and gizzards and can go straight from your dinner plate to the trough.

2- Why buy a new set of clothes when you start a new job or third grade? A good pair of overalls can last you for years with a little patching in the seat, and it is easy to “accessorize,” like they say in the movie magazines. Change your rope belt for a length of wire and you’ve got a new wardrobe.

3- Who needs high-priced fur coats? Musk rat makes a fine weather keeper-outer, and if you shoot it yourself you can get a meal out of it too. Don’t forget to keep the scent glands, that’s good musk.

4- Making your own mattress isn’t just easy, it can be fun too. Get Granny to form a sewing circle, and the young ones can stuff it with hay from the barn. Just make sure you make it big enough to sleep all your cousins.

5- Schooling? Anyone still in school over age 12 is just putting on airs, I say. The sooner they get to working the sooner the children can pitch in and buy barbed wire.

6- I don’t know what the debt ceiling is or why it so long to raise it, but you and your friends can raise a barn or patch your own ceiling in a day and you only need a couple of jugs of moonshine and some hog ears for lunch.

7- Taxes only get paid if they can find you to pay them.

8- Old cans and jugs never get thrown away. Cans are good for target practice and shooting at them instead of your neighbors keeps you out of trouble. Jugs are good to keep homemade molasses in. And moonshine. A good can should last forever, and who buys canned goods anyway? Waste of money. Like some big green ogre can grow better peas than I have growing behind the outhouse.

9- Never pay a repair man to fix your radio. If you can’t get Ozark Pete on it that set isn’t worth fixing anyway.

10- Going in to town is always a waste of money, especially on a Saturday night. Town-girls are nothing but trouble and always looking for money. If you have to get a woman, look no further than your cousins. You know who they’ve been with and the money you spend on them stays in the family.

You all come back now!

“Your entree, Sir. His name was George.”

19 Jul

July 19, 2011

Hrrm. I don’t know about this. On the one hand I can see the advantages to knowing where your dinner came from. On the other hand there are hot dogs, and some things we are better off not knowing.

I love steak but all I really need to know is that it came from a cow and not a giraffe or an okapi. (Endangered species meat is tough and stringy.) I suppose if you pin me down I’d like to know that my meal came from a cow that grazed on grass as opposed to manure. Of course, with all the steroids, hormones, and bizarre chemical cocktails that go into animal feed the manure might be preferable. Unless it came from a cow fed on steroids, hormones, and bizarre chemical cocktails so the point is really moot. I guess the bottom line is that you never really know what goes into your food unless you grow your own. And since I live in apartment I am not raising my own cattle. I tried that with bacon and it didn’t work.

Unless your name is Watson or Crick (google ’em) what do you know about DNA? “Say, that cow has a mighty nice double helix to its molecular DNA structure.” There is a point, and this is it, where you are a pretentious dwad if you need to know something as esoteric as your dinner’s chromosomal history. Right now there are people who insist on knowing what herd the cow came from, what county, what it ate, if it was left out in the rain, and really, why? Look I get that some cows eat better than others and that affects what goes into your body. Fine. But do I really need to know the genetic pedigree of my cheeseburger? The cholesterol will kill me first.

I prefer my steaks medium-well and anonymous. All this madness about knowing your meat’s pedigree, combined with the further and continued use of genetic modifications to cattle can only end badly. Sure, those cows are content now, but what happens when Aldo the cow says “no”? I have seen Planet of the Apes. Soon we may all be mute lab rats to a race of talking, horse riding, human-enslaving cows. Life will be one big Gary Larsen Far Side gag. I only pray that none of this comes about before next week. I have a reservation at Peter Luger’s.

I think Chick-Fil-A knows something...