Hey there fooble fans, and welcome to the fun and frilly world of the fantastic foobles! I have a basket bursting with fooble fun today, and so let’s just open it up and let them go… wait…. there’s nothing in here! Oh no, the foobles escaped! Those pesky little things, now what will we do? We can’t go another week without foobles, literally multiples of people would be disappointed and we can’t let that happen! It would be a catastrophe! It would be a cataclysm! It would be a category! It would…. oh wait, here they are.

Silly me, I had the wrong basket. On with the show!

First up, a crudely animated but still pretty darn funny South Park-ish take on what it is that the people of the “birther” movement in the USA actually think happened in order to make Barack Obama the incredibly success socialist oppressor he is today.

I could take issue with the exact content of their satire, and if I wrote it, it would have been a tad longer and a lot more precise, but that’s just me. Overall, it’s quite funny and is definitely done in the spirit of South Park’s “THIS IS WHAT THEY REALLY BELIVE” segments.

Sometimes, when irony is running at an all time low in the world of the stupid and the malign, the best satire in the world is just repeating what they say.

Hence, Daily Show and Colbert. That’s the price you pay for systemically gutting your brains of all ability to feel cognitive dissonance. You lose the ability to know when what you are saying (and thinking, and believing, and desperately defending with every ounce of your fevered and fractured being) is just plain ridiculous on the face of it.

But enough of those morons, they have enough troubles this weekend. Foob on, MacDuff!

But first, a warning : the following video link contains preserved gherkin related imagery and might not be suitable for all viewers who happen to have a birthday today and whom I love very much as the awesome person she is.

(Happy Birthday, Felicity! Love you, dear.)

Without further ado,

Ladies and gentle men, the Yodeling Pickle. Isn’t it a thing of beauty? I especially love how our noble video demonstrator says “yodeling pickle” at the end in such a smooth and melodious baritone. It just makes the whole thing perfect.

And this is a real, actual product, from those marvelous manic madmen over at Archie McPhee. For just $12.95 plus shipping, handling, and applicable tax, you too could hold within your very hand the glory, the majesty, and the wonder of the one, the only, the original Yodeling Pickle.

I heart Archie Macphee very much. They are the last surviving refuge for all the wacky, crazy, goofy, disturbing, or just plain retarded items of the world, the sort of thing you used to be able to order out of big, dense, colorful ads in the back of comic books.

And just look at the quality. That is one realistic looking pickle! And note that the sound is not simply some cheap, off the shelf, generic sound clip of some moron yelling “yowda lay hee hoo” into a microphone. Oh no. That’s a real, genuine yodel. With the proper glottal modulations and everything!

These are people who take being silly seriously, and that is something I respect.

Let’s see, what’s left in the basket here….. hmmm, no, that’s too serious…and that one… wow, I don’t even know what that’s doing in there… ah! Here we are. One last foob to round out the troika!

It’s the Television Tunes archive of TV music, and it will likely swallow my soul.

But in a good way. They have over twenty thousand themes from every imaginable show, as well as tons of other things like bumper music (I just downloaded every single one of those “After these messages…. we’ll be riiiiight back!” bumpers from the ABC Saturday Morning Cartoons of my childhood. Nostalgia score!

I am resisting the pull for now, but a part of me really wants to go through their entire archive and download absolutely everything that appeals to me. In fact, if I could do it, I would download the whole thing and just delete the stuff that does not appeal to me.

It would be a lot faster, and perfectly logical, once you accept certain obsessive givens.

Well, that’s it. The basket’s empty, the foobs have all been released back into the wild, and another Sunday has been foobified.

Tune in next week, when you’ll hear Miss Fooby say, “Pineapples? I thought you said pinochle!”. Can you handle the wackiness?

{This article is somewhat related to this previous post, so if you want to go read that one first, and then read this one, I would be totally cool with that.

Go ahead. Don’t be shy. I want you to!)

I have been thinking a lot about myself, my worth, my place in the world, and whether or not, in the grand scheme of things, there’s enough to me to be considered functional in any sense of the word.

( I know, I know, thinking of it like that probably doesn’t help, but hey, it’s called mental illness, not mental options, know what I mean? )

And as I try to stumble and shin bark my way to some kind of measurable, detectable self-esteem, I find myself increasingly thinking about Einstein’s wife, and what she would have thought of me.

Don’t worry, I’m going to explain that.

See, the world knows Albert Einstein as one of the greatest geniuses who has ever lived. His ability to think about the most fantastic situations and derive the necessary equations in order to describe the universe in a way that transcended Newton and let us unlock the might power with every atom.

But, it is also well known that the man was a slob. His appearance was often disheveled and unkempt, he was notoriously absentminded, and frequently said that if it was not for his wife, he would not remember to get dressed before going out in the morning.

So, one of the greatest geniuses, a man so brilliant that we now use his name when ironically praising someone who has just done something stupid (“Nice move, Einstein!), and yet also in many ways kind of a basket case.

I can relate on that second part. The first, I leave to others to decide.

But what I want to know, and what I keep thinking about is, what did Einstein’s wife really think of it? I mean, she most likely always supported him in public or even in private, because honestly he was a good man and she wanted him to succeed, for himself and for the sake of her family.

But in her heart of hearts, what did she think?

Did she look at his odd combination of genius and incapacity and find it endearing, even charming? Did she think to herself “Oh, my dear Albert. My poor little lost boy. You can show the world all kinds of wonders with just a piece of chalk and a blackboard, and yet you cannot show me where you left the keys to the house or what you did with my good scissors. You are my funny little man, and I adore you for it. ”

Or was she more bitter and sarcastic? “Oh, sure, Mister Big Shot Scientist, travels all the world giving speeches and fighting for peace and an end to The Bomb, and everybody calls him some kind of genius. Well they would not think he is so smart if they had to deal with the state he gets his underwear into ! And his collars, oy. How can he get them so dirty? Does he drag his head through three gutters before he comes home to me? It certainly looks that way when you look at his hair! Genius? Ha!”

In other words, did she respect him? Did she think of him as a great man with a few lovable flaws that just meant he needed her and she got to be part of something much bigger than what the average housewife gets?

Or did she think he was a pathetic, helpless schmuck who scammed the world, including getting her to marry someone so obviously defective?

This question plagues me because in many ways I identify with poor old Albert. I am no world shaking genius, but this brain of mine can do some pretty amazing tricks from time to time, and I might even be able to make a living at it some day if I am willing to eat a lot of ramen (or pot noodles, or chinese noodles, or whatever you call them. )

But is that enough? What kind of a man am I, let alone what kind of a human being, if the only way I can make it through life is if someone else takes on a lot of the business of living for me?

What good is a hothouse flower, anyhow?

So I sit and I wonder whether being a strange and impractical but talented person is enough.