Late last night, I was yanked away from the season finale of “The Desperate Lives of Atlanta Housewives” by an urgent knock on the door. It was Ping. Ping recently emigrated from Thailand and is boning up for his citizenship examination by taking English lessons. Taking pity on anyone having to learn English as an adult, I graciously volunteered to help tutor him with the nuances they never teach you in language school. “If you really want to fit into the fabric of American society,” I told Ping, “You’ll have to learn American slang and the thousands of grunts, hand signs, gestures and sounds we Americans use to take the…
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Chasing the Elu$ive American Dream What ever happened to my white picket fence?
When I was 10, my father took me by the shoulder and said, “Son, we need to talk.” To this day, whenever someone (particularly my boss), tells me that we need to talk, it sends shivers down my spine. I had no idea it was going to be about the American dream. My mother was away doing whatever mothers do on a Saturday afternoon, so he knew he held me captive for at least an hour. He led me into the garage and told me to slide across the front seat of his car. Sitting in the front seat of my father’s Oldsmobile had become our own little cone of…
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Sticky Bomb Threat Foiled How the TSA thwarts bombs made from Diet Coke and Mentos mints
Los Angeles, California – American authorities announced yesterday that they had successfully thwarted an attempt by terrorists to detonate a sticky bomb made from a 1-liter bottle of Diet Coke and Mentos candy mints, preventing what could have been the messiest attack on U.S. air carriers in aviation history. The Transportation Security Administration first became aware of the threat after observing a number of men of Middle Eastern descent carrying cases of the popular drink onto six different planes. “At first, we were focused on what was in their carry-on luggage,” said Henry Wilkinson, TSA’s Chief of Domestic Terrorism. “We were looking for mainstream explosives like jelled nitroparafin, metal perchlorate…
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Disneyland… The Happiest Summit on Earth Greetings and salutations from the highest peak in Anaheim, California
By the time the kids were let out for summer vacation, the climbing window for summiting Mt. Everest had already come and gone. I promised Shimmel that I would take him and his 8-year-old sister Toiba to the top of Mt. Everest to celebrate his circumcision, but none of the guide companies would have anything to do with a middle-aged, sedentary writer and his two irascible children. So, we shifted gears and made plans to climb The Happiest Peak on Earth – the Matterhorn. Not the legendary mountain in Zermatt, but the steel and cement behemoth located in the center of Disneyland. At 147 feet, the Matterhorn towers high over…
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Last Chance Underwear Skidmarks and the smell of kids... everything you ever wanted to know about rectal hygience
When I was a kid growing up in southern California, I’d try to escape the blistering summer heat by playing in the sprinklers on the front lawn or floating submerged in a public swimming pool until my fingers turned to prunes. I counted those hours under water as part of my daily hygienic practices. My mother didn’t. At that age I didn’t know that the reason they chlorinated the water so heavily was because my classmates were peeing or Hershey squirting in the water. It looked clean to me. The way I looked at it, as long as I spent every day under water, I could go the entire summer…