*** Scam Email ************
Dear Beloved,

Here writes Madam Rita Osborne wife of late Sir Williams Osborne, suffering from cancerous ailment without a child. My late husband deposited the sum of 10 million derived from his vast estates and investment in capital market with his bank here in UK. Recently, my doctor told me that I have limited days to live due to the cancerous problems I am suffering from.

With this hard reality that has befallen my family, and me I have decided to donate this fund to you and want you to help me use this gift which comes from my husbands effort to fund the upkeep of widows, orphans, and needy financially.

I have decided to donate this fund to you, I do hope you would be able to utilize this money for the said purpose just as I’m going to instruct herein. I want you to utilize the funds by creating a charity foundation called ‘WILLIAM OSBORNE FOUNDATION’ to assist widows and help accident victims worldwide. This deposit is known by me, our family lawyer and now you.

Contact our family lawyer with this specified email address.

Barrister Timothy Martins (ESQ) Email: office_timartins@yahoo.de

Tell him that I have WILLED £10,000,000 to you by quoting my personal reference number Law/chamber/solicitors/rt/osb/WILL/9834520012 and I have also notified him that I am WILLING that amount to you for a specific and good work.

Remain blessed.

Your Sister,
Madam. Rita Osborne

*** My Response ************
Blessed are ye, Madam Rita Osborne, betrothed of the late Sir William(s?) Osborne of Camelot. Suffering cancerous ailments is nary a sound practice without child.

I am honored to accept your 10 million derived, though, familiar with this currency, I am not.

This unyielding reality, you speak of, is truly that of callous nature; its rigidity, surely, a test of the noble Osborne family of Camelot… led by his Grace, Sir Ozzy. As a young man, Sir Ozzy braved the trials of fate, slaying mighty beasts to earn the title Great King of Camelot; and surely he will endure the tumultuous hour, at hand, to once again prove why he is the Great King of Camelot!

I trust your limited days will be spent at the kingdom, resting in thine chamber.

Prepare ye, fairest maiden, for the journey ahead.

I shall ready my steed and make haste for Camelot at dawn. Please do not expire until my arrival… you must be brave, so that all the widows of the William(s?) Osborne Foundation can, one day, suffer through cancerous ailments… with child! I will see to it that every widow, with limited days to live, will mother at least 3 small children in her final hour.

Rest now, my fairest maiden, Rita… I shall see you on the eve of your ascent to glory!

Recap:
Madam Rita was fortunate enough to have £10 million lying around;
Madam Rita was unfortunate enough to suffer cancerous ailments without a child;
I was fortunate enough to have £10 million donated to me;
I was unfortunate enough to never receive the aforementioned £10 million;
I like stupid email messages.

Tell your friends that they should donate money to the William(s?) Osborne Foundation.

If broccoli is the vegetable-worlds surfer… does that make cauliflower the vegetable skateboarder or snowboarder? I’d imagine cauliflower to be one of the two, but I’ve always felt too awkward to actually ask cauliflower if it prefers skateboarding or snowboarding. I’m pretty sure cauliflower would just look at me, with those eyes of judgment, like “what kind of stupid question is that?” and then I’d feel like less of a man. The absolute last thing I want is to look like a fool in the eyes of the cauliflower.

I bet lettuce is the mayor of vegetable-land. Lettuce always seems to be in charge. Either that, or lettuce is just like the vegetable stalker… who always finds himself around the action. For some reason, celery seems like more of a stalker to me though. I’m not really sure. What I am pretty certain of, is that tomato is the vegetable fruit… you can take that to bank (though I’m not sure what the bank will do with that information).

But back to sharks… I wonder if sharks can tell the difference between broccoli, the vegetable, and broccoli, the human surfer. I’m pretty sure, if I were a shark, I’d be able to tell the difference, what with all the meat associated with surfer broccoli. I think I’m a lot saltier than vegetable broccoli, but it could just be that my brain is misinterpreting my flavor. Maybe vegetable broccoli feels he is saltier than I am? How do I know? I tried to have this conversation with broccoli once, but it was a pretty one-sided affair, cuz the fucker wouldn’t shut up. Have you ever tried to have a civilized conversation with broccoli? It can’t be done. Carrots, maybe, but broccoli won’t let you get three words in, before he starts rambling about the economy, or how itchy wool pants are. I honestly feel like I can’t even talk to broccoli anymore. Sad… that it’s come to this… we used to be so close, what with our mutual interest in surfing.

You know what I really don’t understand? If broccoli is the vegetable surfer, and cauliflower is the vegetable snowboarder/skateboarder… who the hell is the vegetable tree? I bet it’s someone ridiculous, like Mr. Potato Head. I always figured Mr. Potato Head was like the vegetable celebrity. Always starring in his TV commercials, playing all those different roles and what not. But everything in veggie-land is upside down. It’s totally like those jackasses to appoint their resident celebrity the position of tree. Nothing in vegetable world makes any sense. That’s why I’m glad I don’t live there.

Recap:
A surfer is really just shark broccoli;
Vegetables live in a messed up world, where rules don’t apply;
Mr. Potato Head may actually be a bonsai tree.

Tell your friends to tell broccoli to shut the fuck up!

I’m not making up any rules, where a bunch of people have to fill out one of these thingies… cuz I don’t like asking people to do things.

Anyway, here’s some stuff you may/probably don’t really care to know about me:

1. I live more in an imaginary world, in my head, than I do in real life.

2. If I ever develop a flux capacitor, and get enough weapons-grade plutonium to travel back in time, I’ll revisit high school… and I’ll fit in swimmingly.

3. Friends, who know me best, all agree that I fit the profile of someone with bipolar disorder. Other friends prefer to label me, just plain, mentally sick.

4. When I was a little kid I created a game called “Oh Henry,” which was just tag… but the person who was it, was called Oh Henry. I was a pretty clever son of a bitch back then.

5. Music is my passion. I’ll play any instrument I can get my hands on, but am most comfortable with guitar, which I started playing when I was 14 or 15 years old.

6. I think people need to compare apples to oranges a little more often.

7. I used to drop-kick the shit out of things. How I wish I still had the video footage. It was like the definition of poetry in motion (I’ve been told).

8. I’m taller than I look (if I look shorter than 5’6”).

9. I found a monkey, in the bushes in front of my house once… I’m pretty sure it was just my imagination though… at least I hope so… otherwise that monkey is long-dead.

10. I wish I were the same person I was 10 years ago… he was much cooler than me… he legitimately could have done anything he wanted to do.

11. I buy women’s jeans… I like the way they fit. I also buy children’s shirts, at vintage stores, on occasion.

12. I wish I could grow a beard… not because I really want to grow a beard; I just want to be able to grow a beard.

13. I have a tendency to fall out of touch with people. It’s not because I don’t like them, it’s because I have far too easy a time entertaining myself.

14. I don’t deal well with vulnerability. Writing/drawing/painting/whatever is how I cope with things… opening up to people is something I avoid like the plague (that’s such a dated phrase… they should change the plague to… fuck I don’t know… something else).

15. I like to try selling things to telemarketers. Maybe the dude, who’s trying to sell me a vacuum cleaner, needs a lawnmower… I can’t know without asking.

16. I make too many obscure pop-culture references, from my childhood. Anyone born in the mid-80s or later has no idea what the hell I’m talking about… ever.

17. I still play Nintendo. Not Wii… Nintendo… as in the NES from 1985. Duck Hunt and Super Mario Bros combine for some of the most drunken fun anyone could have.

18. A number of years ago, a painting I did was on display in the Art Gallery of Hamilton for about a month. At the time, I didn’t really care, as it was selected as part of a Hamilton area high school art show… but I now consider it one of my few accomplishments in life.

19. To a whole community of people, I’m known as Tim, or Timmy, or Timson… or some spin off of that nature. The name was assigned to me because I look like a little kid.

20. I suck at remembering peoples names. I don’t know what it is about me, but it’s like every time I get introduced to someone, I completely space out just as the person’s name is being announced. So if I’ve forgotten your name, at some point, it’s nothing personal… I’m just a tool.

21. If I were a slushy, I’d be people-flavored. I would be the least popular slushy of all time.

22. I chew on guitar picks too often. My death will likely be a result of me choking on a guitar pick.

23. I photograph worse than any other person, to have ever lived… either that, or I’m just a lot uglier than my mom led me to believe.

24. One of my goals in life is to disappear completely and become a fairy-tale-type character like Jesus or El Chupacabra. Erasing all record of my existence may be tricky, but I like to think that I’m up to the challenge.

25. I ramble way too much. For someone who has, probably, nothing of actual value to say, I spend a lot of time speaking (or writing).

Recap:
I caved and filled out one of those lists that people sometimes fill out.

Tell your friends you once knew a guy who… (and then insert one of the 25 things above here).

But I digress. I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that fast food restaurants, that have recently decided to open their doors 24 hours (‘recently’ being relative to my high school days, when a lot of late hours were logged over the years, searching for open restaurants at ridiculous hours), have done so in an attempt to make money by catering to college students/alcoholics, who are cranked, and hungry after a night of binge drinking. Good plan. Hungry people, with impaired judgment, make for easy robbery victims. If you’re particularly drunk, and want a hamburger, by the time you get your hands on said hamburger, your mind is probably a little too preoccupied to remember if the bill was paid using a ten, or a twenty… and good luck figuring out if the change is right anyway.

Here’s what I don’t understand: if you’re a fast food joint; why on earth, are you targeting drunken customers at 3am, by closing down your restaurant, and offering your services through the drive-thru window? Either the people who came up with this plan are promoting drunk-driving, or they’re just incredibly stupid. How is a responsible drunkard (again… relative term) supposed to blow his money? Even if the dude walks through the drive-thru and gets served… where is he supposed to eat? Is the guy going to sit on the curb, in the freezing cold, and eat his Big Mac, while staring into the vacant restaurant across the parking lot? Whoever came up with the idea to have a 24 hour drive-thru: you sir, are a sadistic son of a bitch!

Here’s my plan. Next time I get, off-my-rocker, drunk, I’m going to break into the local hardware store, to find something that I can use, to break into McDonald’s with. Hardware stores are chalked full of crowbars and sledgehammers and riding lawnmowers that could effortlessly smash, break, and plow their way through the front door (or window if you want to be a little more dramatic) of any fast food restaurant. I feel bad, having to break into a hardware store that has done no wrong by closing at a reasonable hour and not leaving a drive-thru window open, to taunt my inebriated ass, but it’s the only way I could ever dream of attaining the necessary tools, with which to break into a fast food restaurant, at four in the morning. I’m sure if I explained the situation to the owner of the hardware store, he’d have no problem with the incident. Maybe, because I’m a nice guy, I’d steal an extra riding lawnmower and drive into a bank so I can steal some funds to pay for all of the tools that I’d stolen from the hardware store.

The bank had it coming… they too have a 24 hour drive-thru… jackasses.

Recap:
Wearing a flammable blanket, when it’s raining brimstone, is a bad idea;
Economic Crises are best solved by hiring workers to build a city constructed of blankets, then hiring archers to set the city aflame, then hiring firemen to put out the fire, then opening bars, where the townspeople can celebrate;
The 24 hour drive-thru window needs to be replaced by the 24 hour walk-in door;
Where 24 hour walk-in doors are not available, there are hardware stores.

Tell your friends to put their fingers on your crowbar.

I also don’t get why every electronic product on the market has to make use of a touch screen. Are touch screens cool? Absolutely. Are touch screens optimal for every possible application? Not a chance in China (I’m really not sure what that means exactly… but rolls off the tongue nicely)! Seriously, does anyone actually enjoy trying to type on a mini touch screen keyboard (like the one you might find on the iPhone)? I have thin, girly fingers and even I find hitting the right keys, on a microscopic touch screen, difficult to pull off. I can only imagine how much trouble some woolly mammoth of a man, with big sausage fingers, the size of my arm, is going to have, texting someone on an iPhone.

I think it’s time for the makers of all these flashy, new, technological gadgets to take a step back, and examine what it is that makes shit cool. If they only want to take half a step back, I will offer some advice… because if there’s anything I know, it’s that I know what it is I’m talking about… at least some of the time.

Video Game Designers
If I wanted to play a realistic game of football, I’d go outside. I want to squash cubic mushrooms, under the guise of an equally cubic plumber who is trying to save an imaginary princess that was kidnapped by some kind of giant bad-ass turtle. I don’t live in cube land, I’m not a plumber, I don’t know any princesses, or talking hoodlum turtles, I can’t jump on flags, and I can’t run forward, while towing an invisible wall, that won’t let me go back, behind me. If I could, I wouldn’t need video games.

Cell Phone Designers
Two words for you: rotary dial. Mobile phones have been around for… I don’t know, a while now, and I’ve yet to see a single model that employs the old rotary dial. Rotary dial phones were bad ass. Sure, it would probably be an epic pain in the ass to navigate menus; and sending text messages would take a little bit longer than shipping envelopes full of mail, but no one cares about those things. We want wicked-looking, old school rotary phones that we can strap to our backs. They could have backpack-like straps on the base of the phone, and maybe a phonebook, hanging on a chain, so we can look up our friend’s numbers.

Surface Computer Designers
That’s a pretty cool idea. Start putting those things in restaurants and bars.

HD TV Designers
Focus on making appealing, light weight, television frames that can be mounted in front of our faces so that we can just walk around watching real life. If you ever create a product that can produce higher definition picture than that, then feel free to start manufacturing that shit instead.

Let’s all help bring technology to its golden age of 1985!

Recap:
Innovation is better when it’s not too innovative;
Super Mario, and his brother Luigi, along with Little Mac, Link, the Ninja Turtles, the Dude from River City Ransom, Megaman and Kid Icarus can kick any new video-game-star’s ass;
Rotary Dial > Touch Screen;
Phonebook > Sim Card;
Reality > Digital Video;
Imaginary World > Reality.

Tell your friends to touch each other through the TV screen… and then adjust the contrast, ever so slightly.

Growing up with an older sister, I’ve always had a female figure in my life, offering me advice and teaching me the ways of the woman. That female was not my sister, but her diminutive, inanimate friend Barbie. At the time, I didn’t realize I was actually learning anything about life. I was too busy wondering why the hell an individual would rather spend her time brushing the hair of a pink-Corvette-driving, Miss America modeled, piece of plastic instead of transforming little humanoid robots into vehicles, or wielding the power of Grayskull to bust up Skeletor and his cronies… but subconsciously, it’s as if I had been attending the school of life (not to be confused with the game of Life, which you can be a winner at… according to the old commercials).

Lesson 1: Money is all important.
Even Barbie, the embodiment of the model American woman; a chick that stars in countless movies, TV shows, and commercials, whose face is plastered on billboards, worldwide (that list could probably go on a lot longer, for dramatic effect, but it’s not going to) has to buy everything in her life… from cars, to houses, to clothes, to friends. Yeah, how many friends does Barbie have, following her around, when their services aren’t paid for? Hm? I believe the answer is zero. Friends cost money (almost as much money as cars and houses).

Lesson 2: Women (hell probably men too) are high maintenance.
If a plastic woman, with no real friends, needs to have her hair combed fourteen times a day, while trying on a wide assortment of clothes for all sorts of occasions, that she can’t actually attend (accompanied by little plastic shoes to cover her feet, that do no walking whatsoever) and her own sports car to boot; just imagine what a live, functional woman would require, to operate at an acceptable level.

Lesson 3: Men, lacking junk, are whipped.
How many arguments, with Barbie (or even one of her non-celebrity friends), do you suppose Ken has won, over the course of his existence? Was it Ken’s idea to paint the Corvette pink? Did Ken get to speak with the architect who designed “Barbie’s Dream House?” Did Ken even get to throw suggestions into the Dream-House-naming-hat? If you answered yes to any of those questions, you’re either horribly full of shit, or very out of touch with reality.

Lesson 4: Women won’t give it all away, up front… or ever.
This lesson has had me scratching my head for years. I could never figure out if Barbie was a prude, or if the lack of anatomical correctness, in the Barbie universe, attributed to the lack of action Ken saw. With plastic underwear, factory, grafted to his genitals, I probably shouldn’t entirely fault Barbie for Ken’s inability to get things past… which base would come before first?

Lesson 5: No matter how important you are, there’s always someone telling you what to do.
Even Barbie, the star of her whole, intricate, miniature universe, can’t accomplish the simplest of tasks without some little kid telling her what to do. Barbie is like the Goddess of her world, and some girl, from Dayton Ohio, is running her entire life. That doesn’t bode particularly well for the rest of us.

Anyway, the list of life lessons can probably go on and on, but it’s 3:30am and I don’t feel like writing anymore.

Recap:
Life is a learning experience;
Barbie is the most qualified teacher I can think of;
What if God is just some little kid and we’re all a part of his Barbie universe?

Tell your friends to ask Barbie if she agrees with whatever it is you’re telling them.

But back to Advair… this Advair commercial ends like a lot of drug commercials, where a deep-talking guy reads a bunch of legal, fine-print style jargon, over a motivating albeit subtle musical score. I found this particular legal blurb to be a bit curious though. When deep-voiced narrator man gets to the part where, most, drug-commercial-narrators usually say “Side effects may include…” this dude says “Advair may increase the risk asthma related death.” Yeah… what?! Let me get this straight, Advair is a drug designed to help treat asthma, and instead of having the usual cast of potential side effects, such as nausea, drowsiness, blurred vision, vertigo (okay maybe not vertigo) it has one potentially fatal side effect: asthma related death. If there were one side effect… just one… that I would want Advair to avoid, it would be death due to asthma. If the narrator read a line of legal that stated “Side effects may include: drowsiness, dizziness, nausea, blurred vision, diarrhea and insomnia. Serious side effects may include: stroke, heart attack, aneurysm, loss of hearing, permanent blindness, death and/or loss of limbs” I’d still, potentially, have a reason to consider using the product. Who the hell is running Advair? Jack Kevorkian? How stupid are the scientists who created a drug, that does the exact opposite of what it’s supposed to do, and then packaged it up and put it on shelves anyway? Scrap that… how stupid are the people who are buying this product? (Clearly the scientists are incredibly smart to market the product, and line their pockets anyway).

I think someone should create a drug that’s sole purpose is to combat the side effects of other drugs. I don’t mean there should be a drug that fights nausea or drowsiness – those already exist. But let’s say you’re taking some medication called Killington’s 7 (which is clearly an imaginary product), which combats depression but has side effects that may include: insomnia, nausea and drowsiness (don’t ask me how the side effects manage to include both insomnia and drowsiness… I’m no doctor, though I may play one, from time to time). Well there should be a drug called Livington’s 8, which combats insomnia, nausea and drowsiness. Livington’s 8’s has just one potential side effect: depression. You might read this and wonder why someone would take Livington’s 8 to treat against the side effects of Killington’s 7, when its own side effect reverses the one effect that you’re taking Killington’s 7 for in the first place. Well that’s easy to answer. Wouldn’t you want to get all doped up without having to worry about side effects?

I need to hook up with some chemists who will make a drug called Killington’s 7. Its purpose will be to cure stupidity. I’ll suck back the Killington’s like it’s going out of style.

Recap:
Drug companies need to specify what their drugs are for;
Side effects that counter the actual effects, of drugs, make taking drugs, in the first place, kind of pointless;
Needlessly getting doped up on asthma (or any other) medication, is never pointless;
I can contradict myself however many times I want.

Tell your friends, in a soothing voice, your side effects may include acid reflux, muscle ache, fatigue and death. That should cover a lot of legal ground, should anything unexpected happen.

If some woman buys a fireman at an auction, takes him home, gets a box of cheap Australian wine circulating through his system, and has her way with him, is it considered prostitution? Technically she did pay for the whole transaction. Does that mean firemen are prostitutes… and charities are pimps? In that scenario, the firemen are really getting screwed over… doubly screwed over, some might say. Someone needs to tell the Calendar-Modeling-Firefighter’s-Association (The CMFA) that legitimate street pimps, though more crass than charitable organizations, offer better rates to “employees.” Who the hell is the guy running the Firefighter’s Union (The FU) anyway? Cuz I’m really not impressed with his work.

But where do we draw the line on prostitution? Is there some unwritten rule that deems prostitution a legal act, if conducted by a charitable corporation during a dinner gala? Does being a fireman, or policeman, or mild-mannered reporter by day give one the right to legally sell his or her body, during peak prostitution hours, without the threat of legal consequence? Someone, who has a more extensive understanding of this situation, needs to better explain the rules to me. If I were to go on a dinner-date with a pleasant woman, where I pick up the tab, escort her home and stay for a coffee… then things were to escalate… would that make her a prostitute… or at least some kind of entry-level prostitute? If that were, in fact the case, is the restaurant, where we ate, a pimpery? Why must this be so confusing?

Can I, legally, form a charity that unites underprivileged men with harlots who don’t want to work for a living? Basically, the charity accepts donations, with which it pays slutty women to supply hapless men with… well… slutty women. Naturally, as all charitable organizations do, my charity would take, say, a 20% cut of donated funds to, you know, keep the charity going. After all, it costs money to run these types of things. I could run infomercials featuring Geraldo Rivera, Betty White, or that old white haired dude who does commercials for the Christian Children’s Fund (The CCF). In these infomercials, one of those dudes, or Betty White, walks around an office full of really nervous-looking computer programmers and feeds you some spiel about how, for pennies a day, you could sponsor your own programmer. Each month we’d supply you with information on what kind of progress your programmer is making, and will include a detailed list of how many dirty women he has plowed, and how many STDs he’s contracted. For less than the cost of a cup of coffee, you can change someone’s life!

Seriously, how is this charity any different from any of those other charities? And how are any of those other charities different from prostitution rings? And how are prostitution rings different from onion rings? Wait… scrap that last one. I know the answer to that.

Recap:
Charitable organizations should start auctioning off scientists;
Either that, or puppets who play scientists on children’s television programs;
Or failed-scientists turned puppeteers;
Charities are really no different than pimps;
The Pimp Union (The PU) needs to get in touch with the heads of the CMFA, FU, and CCF, and show them how pimping/charity work is really done.

Tell your friends they’re worth, at least, one meal and possibly an alcoholic beverage… but only if you’re supplied with monthly progress reports.

Some strange foreigner, walking by, won’t be intrigued by my party… but he isn’t invited anyway cuz he’s a snooty, anti-social asshead. If he tries to sneak into the soiree, to see what all the ruckus is about, he won’t make it two steps past Maurice. Maurice is like two or three cardboard cutout people in one. Maurice isn’t even a cardboard cutout… he’s just a box, that once held a fridge. As if that’s not intimidating enough, Maurice has black aviator sunglasses drawn on his face, and he isn’t smiling. His mouth is just a basic, straight line… and his eyebrows are slightly slanted inward to suggest that he’s kind of mean and angry. Maurice means business.

Maurice is a cool guy though. If you show up to my house with a case of beer and some friends, looking to have a good time, Maurice will totally let you in; assuming you meet the dress-code, of course. Though I’m not sure if newcomers, to the party, should dress in casual attire, or business casual, or possibly black tie… perhaps the evening will dictate the trend.

Like next Friday, I’ll be having a party for co-workers, so it’ll be like a business casual dress code… cuz people are just going to swing by after work. You should definitely make an appearance. It’s going to be the day where all the office workers learn that Roger from sales (he’s the dude with the mustache who has one arm bent upward… so it looks like he’s always waving) is plowing Sally from accounting (she’s the cute chick with the triangular body that makes it look as though she’s wearing a dress). This discovery isn’t going to sit well with Jerry of the management team. Jerry has always had a bit of a thing for Sally, and he’s never been, much, a fan of Roger’s… so Jerry is going to end up making a scene. He’ll likely break a couple bottles and take a swing at Roger… Roger will block the punch though, cuz his arm is always pointed upward, so it will shield his face. Then Maurice will come in and break Jerry in half… the music will stop, everyone will stand around motionless, then someone will yell “cannonball” and jump into the pool (I don’t really have a pool inside my house… it’s just a blue rectangle in the middle of the room) and the party will be back in full swing!

Don’t worry about Jerry though. He’ll get himself taped up, with some of the duct tape that’s in the drawer next to the fridge (the fridge that used to occupy the, empty, cardboard box now known as Maurice), and he’ll stop by on Saturday to apologize for his drunken tirade. Then he’ll give Roger and Sally his blessing, only to learn that Sally was whoring it up, with Felix the Janitor, the night before, so Roger tossed her ass out on the curb. Jerry and Roger will have the token “bro’s before ho’s” moment (despite the fact they were never really friends to begin with) and they’ll go crack open a beer at the local pub.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Recap:
Cardboard people are just as fun, when you get to know them, as regular people;
Maurice is a very fun name to say;
Maurice is also a top notch bouncer;
Roger and Sally were never really going to work… good for Felix though!

Tell your friends it’s black-tie Thursday at my place next week.

If umbrellas did start falling, from the sky one day, it would probably mean hard times for umbrella salesmen worldwide. If you’re a certified umbrella salesman, who has been selling umbrellas his whole life… got the sales pitch down, learned the ins and outs of the umbrella industry, have a respectable client base… what do you do when God opens up the Wal-Mart of umbrella super-stores and puts your sorry umbrella-selling ass out of business? Is there some sort of umbrella-salesmen’s union? Would the USU intervene, take God to some human/god version of the Supreme Court and get some mammoth settlement out of the whole deal? Would God appeal the decision? Would any of it even matter?

I wonder if the dude who wrote Marry Poppins really intended for it to be a movie about some half god/half nanny-housekeeper, well versed in the art of fencing, who rode a drop of umbrella-rain, down to earth, to locate the mother-stash of buried treasure and claim it in the name of Earth CEO, God. For the sake of humanity, I really hope the exec’s at Disney didn’t take that (potentially original) version of Marry Poppins and turn into the timeless classic that won a bunch of awards (both Academy and otherwise). They probably did though… damn network executives.

Maybe they should make a Marry Poppins 2, where a seventy-some-odd-year-old Julie Andrews rides her umbrella down to earth, calls up Dick Van Dyke and those kids she had to babysit in the original film, and just starts kicking ass, left and right! Maybe this time she was hired to “take care” of an orphanage-ful of crazy sword-fighting zombie midgets… and the spoonful of sugar, that once helped the medicine go down, is now a suppository-ful of boot that serves no medicinal purpose… it just takes care of business. Dick Van Dyke’s character could be a retired chimney sweep(er?) (Chimney sweep, straight up sounds cooler) that has set his sights on cleaning clocks instead of chimneys. I’m not sure how useful the children would be (the now fifty-plus year old children), but who cares about them? I’m pretty sure the kids would just be tagging along to briefly relive the old glory days and possibly learn a few more things, from Marry Poppins, before hobbling off into relative obscurity.

I wonder who cleans up the trail of midget-zombie carcasses left by Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke… probably the same guy that gets hired to clean up all the umbrellas after it rains. I wonder if the people cleaning up the umbrellas, after it rains, are just out of work umbrella salesmen. I guess the world really does have a way of bringing things around, full circle.

Recap:
It would be really weird if it, one day, rained umbrellas;
Umbrella rainfall, both, gives pirates an opportunity to shine and puts umbrella salesmen out of business;
If God opened a Wal-Mart-like store, that rained its products onto Earth, would he call it Sky-Mart… or possibly Ground-Mart?
Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke need to team up, and start filming Marry Poppins 2, immediately.

Tell your friends to stay inside when it gets cloudy… or to take a few fencing classes.