Until recently I had been blissfully unaware of the fact that Mattel had released a Barbie doll that comes replete with tattoos.
Assuming that we have now finally and firmly driven a stake through the heart of common decency, and given that the holiday season is upon us, the old folks at Donco are pleased to pick up where Mattel left off and introduce our new and updated line of classic children’s toys.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder G.I. Joe
Now with scars that you can’t see!
Warning: Fragile
The hotly anticipated P.T.S.D. G.I. Joe will get a hero’s welcome when your young son finds him waiting under the Christmas tree this year.
This all plastic, combat-seasoned G.I. Joe comes complete with a kung fu grip, debilitating flashbacks, repetitive night terrors and a replica Bowie knife.
Your children will have hours of fun and learn valuable problem-solving skills as they help a real American hero reintegrate into civilian life and navigate an indifferent health care system in search of treatment for his substance abuse, occupational instability and generalized anxiety.
Monopoly (Occupy Version)
Forget building houses, amassing wealth and constructing hotels – in this special edition version of the classic board game you simply plonk your token down on Boardwalk, wave a placard and then wait patiently for someone to change the rules of the game.
A popular time-waster that is 99% guaranteed to provide months of non-stop, polarizing entertainment.
Mr. Heavily Pierced-Potato Head
Adorn this spud with studs!
In addition to the standard eyes and ears, this lovable classic comes complete with a wide assortment of hoops, bolts, flesh tunnels, barbells and plugs. Create countless variations and endless atrocities as you adorn your favourite starchy tuber with genital piercings, nose studs and good old fashioned nipple rings.
(Coming soon; Mrs. Pot Head and the always amusing Mr. Couch Potato Head)
Easy Bake Meth Lab
Crank out the Ice!
Say goodbye to cookies and cakes. The cool girls know that the real money is in home-based drug production.
Ephedrine and light bulb not included.
View Master 3-D (Now with Porn)
It’s a peepshow for the pre-pubescent.
An entry level depravity for young people who aren’t quite ready to have their google security settings changed to “deviant,” the View Master 3-D is guaranteed to desensitize even the most naive sprog in your household.
Using brightly colored stereograms, the View Master provides a guided introduction to the world of mainstream pornography through of the adventures of sexually curious cartoon chipmunks Jose and Charlene.
Nicotine Patch Kids
It’s never too early to teach youngsters how to kick the addictions they’re bound to pick up once high school rolls around and these novelty dolls are the perfect gateway to adulthood.
Made of coarse yellow burlap, these interactive play things gain weight, grow irritable and cough up phlegm when patted gently on the back. Each comes complete with a 6 month supply of decreasing dosage intradermal nicotine patches, carrot sticks and one menthol cigarette in a sealed glass case to assist with an inevitable relapse.
Also in this line: “Jack-Daniels-in-the-Box” and “Bennie Babies.”
Hoarder Ken Doll
The perfect companion to tramp stamp Barbie, this Ken is a modern man with a decent job, a dirty secret and OCD.
Now living in the dilapidated Camper Van, Hoarder Ken comes complete with 600 pounds of old newspaper, countless boxes of active swim wear, a wide range of animal feces and enough inner shame to keep your young ones enthralled and appalled for weeks at a time.
Coming next from Donco: “Haggardy Ann” (the gin-swilling housewife), “The Real Game of Life” and “Barrel of Monkeys on my Back.”
Old people keep lists. It’s what we do.
Lists keep us organized, productive and help us to remember things when our memory starts to fade. They also keep us organized.
In addition to the standard “grocery list”, “to-do list” and “neighbors that may be communist sympathizers list” that you’d find in any decent American household, I maintain over 200 other active lists at any given time.
Here are a few samples:
List of Formal and Informal Grudges
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a wonderful conversation with a dear old friend only to remember an hour and a half later that I hate their damned guts.
Sometimes it’s difficult to keep track of eight decades worth of historical slights, family transgressions and trivial personal vendettas. So, in order to keep my enemies straight and my grudges straighter – I make sure to write them all down.
Words I Need to Look Up List
I get a fair amount of moronic email from damned young people and most are full of words I’ve never heard of. So, in an effort to determine if these pups are being polite, disrespectful or just chowder-headed shortstacks* I like to look them all up. (Besides, I’m a wordophile or lingophile or whatever the damned term is for someone who enjoys words.)
Tonight I need to look up “pornocchio”, “doppelbangers” and the very offensive sounding “demi lovato.”
*See list of derogatory terms for young people
Signs of the Apocalypse List
I like to stay one trot ahead of the four horsemen so I keep a detailed list of signs that the world is about to come crashing to an end. Based on my current list of portents: “global economic crisis”, “wide scale artificial hip recalls” and “Piers Morgan five nights a week on CNN”, I’m confident we should be meeting our maker sometime before next Arbor Day.
List of Symptoms to Review with My Physician
At my age keeping track of all your aches, pains and suspicious moles can be a damned grind. But with this list, I simply jot down any unexplained bout of vertigo or unusual gland swelling and hand it to my family doctor for review and diagnosis at my next scheduled check-up.
(I’m anxious to see what he makes of my current list which includes: sunken eyes, enlarged spleen, swollen breasts, violent nose bleeds and rice-water stools. Based my research, I believe I may have either cholera, endometriosis or a dinopeptic germ.)
Don’s Bucket List
This has nothing to do with asinine dreams of climbing Everest, playing professional Jai Alai or trading smooches with Angela Lansbury – I’m referring to a list of actual buckets I would be interested in purchasing. At the moment, I have my eye on a rather dandy yellow Rubbermaid Mop Bucket with detachable wheels and a 3-gallon water capacity.
List of Relatives Currently out of Favor
(I’m actually scrapping this one for a list of relatives currently in favour. It should be significantly shorter and much easier to maintain.)
List of People I have Outlived
Nothing gives an old man more pleasure that outliving his closest friends and contemporaries. Sitting down with a glass of ovaltine, a red pen and the obituary page is one of the highlights of my day.
It’s also a form of validation. I may not have been as successful as Seymour Hodge or been able to beat him on the golf course – but on the back nine of life I have him by six strokes (and one massive coronary).
This is one part of my “death triology” which comprises the “list of people I have outlived,” the “list of people I intend to outlive” and the “list of teen pop stars whose careers I intend to outlive.”
List of Suspicious Licence Plates
I’m convinced that the house across the street is either an Al Qaeda terror cell, a grow op, an unlicensed day care centre or a combination of the three. In an effort to assist law enforcement I’ve placed binoculars by my front window and recorded the licence plates of over 600 vehicles that I don’t recognize and which have no damned business being on my street.
Derogatory Terms for Young People List
Just because I can’t call them “damned young people” all of the time.
Current terms include “chowder-headed shortstacks”, “slack-jawed nincompoops”, “gormless peckerheads”, “panty-waisted dimwits”, “braying jackasses”, “tweet-farting morons”, “drug-addled poindexters”, “pinheaded dullards”, “Fubsy layabouts”, “whinging sandbaggers”, “baggy-panted miscreants”, “incorrigible whippersnappers” and the always popular “feral assclowns.”
I rotate the last list fairly regularly, so if you have any recommendations, please feel free to pass them on.
Few things chap my ass more than damned teenagers who don’t know when to hang up the pillowcase and stop trolling for free candy on Halloween.
Don’t get me wrong, I have no objection to doling out some boxed raisins or wintergreen lozenges to a 3-year old in a Ronald Reagan costume but I get pretty incensed when some pock-marked 17-year old smelling of bong water and sloth shows up at my door with an insolent scowl and a demand for free food.
In my day, teenagers didn’t harass their neighbors for unearned sweets – they were too busy holding down jobs, harvesting crops or serving in the armed forces overseas. But nowadays it seems young people trick or treat into their mid-twenties. Half the damned “kids” that bang on my door are over six feet tall, have five o’clock shadow and voices deeper than Elaine Stritch for Christ’s sake.
And, honestly, if you insist on coming to my door looking to scrounge some hard candy at least put some effort into it. These damned teens refuse to say “trick or treat,” won’t make eye contact and sure as hell don’t bother with costumes. They just roll their eyes and stick a sack under your nose while text messaging their location to other scurrilous moochers in search of easy prey. If they intend to carry on with this shameless behavior the least they could do is dress like hobos or – perhaps more accurately – petty thieves.
And to add insult to indignity, they’re pounding on my door at 9 o’clock when I’m already in my nightshirt and well past the time that most legitimate trick or treaters have already gone home, gorged themselves senseless and thrown up on the area rug.
I’d send them running with their tails between their legs but they always have an air of violence about them. Rebuke their snivelling demands and you’re likely to find your pumpkins violated, your rose bushes covered in toilet paper and your windows spattered with eggs.
Well, threat or no threat, this year I’m saying “No”.
Be advised that any damned teenager who shows up at my door this Halloween won’t be getting anything but a copy of the want ads, directions to the local military recruitment centre and a cane to the side of the head.
Happy Halloween. Now get the Hell off my lawn.
(Originally posted in 2009 but since it seems young people have failed to get the message, I thought I’d give them one more warning)
I’m pleased to present the latest release in my series of instructional guides for damned young people.
My previous instructional guide, on how to interact with seniors, can be located here.
I recently sat down with a group of my contemporaries at the Pleasantville Seniors Center to discuss the state of the damned nation. Overall, we’re not impressed.
In an effort to help any politician who might be interested in turning this country around and snatching the coveted senior vote in 2012, I am pleased to provide a brief summary of our concerns, insights, suggestions and thoughts on the burning political issues of the day.
This topic generated a lively discussion and is without doubt the number one issue among the seniors I spoke with.
We all understand there is a crisis in the sector but if you cut through the bluster and political rhetoric you’ll come to understand that there’s plenty of damned health care to go around – we’re just not dishing it out wisely.
The major problem, of course, is that there are too many young people clogging up the hospitals. You can’t get wheeled into an ER these days without running over some layabout teen moaning on about his infected nose ring, venereal warts or skateboard injury. If we weeded out the nuisance cases and self-inflicted idiocy I’m quite confident there’d be ample to time to scope my colon, tune up my pacemaker and conduct further research into the development of bionic hips.
What we need to do is issue every American citizen a $1000 health care gift card each January and advise them to budget their illnesses wisely. If one of these damned young people goes on a “bender” in the first week and ends up needing emergency surgery, anal suturing and a gross of Tetracycline, they’ll either have to suck up the discomfort until next year or pony up the dough and pay for it themselves.
Seems to us seniors that if we really want to reduce our “carbon footprint” we might want to stop churning out young people that have size 17 feet before they’re out of puberty. I can lay down in their footprints for Christ’s sake.
Their damned t-shirts require more cotton than you’d find in the sails of your average merchant clipper and every time one of these lumbering giants sits down to a meal they decimate 3 per cent of the worlds food supply.
If we’re serious about cleaning up the environment let’s forget about smokestacks and try producing smaller people – they consume less, use less energy and create less waste. If we take the hormones out of the milk supply, bind their feet and get them smoking before 6th grade we can get this planet cleaned up lickity-split.
In general, we seniors are all for it.
In fact, some of us would go so far as to suggest that poverty be mandatory for every American under the age of 30. It’s a proven fact that being down on your luck builds character and deters waste. Just look at the men that came out of the great depression – they may have been surly bastards but there’s no denying they understood the value of a dollar and a hard day’s work.
A little financial desperation would do young people a world of good – and also introduce them to valuable skills like pigeon trapping, sock darning and the ABCs of Shantytown construction.
Once we teach damned young people that there is no shame in poverty, perhaps they’ll stop trying to buy their way out of it with money they don’t have.
The old boys at the seniors center were running out of steam by the time we hit this topic but the general consensus is we’re not overly concerned.
Like politicians, we don’t tend to worry about things that might occur outside of a 4-year window and are confident that when we finally give up the damned ghost there should still be enough crude oil floating around to fire up the crematoriums and power our escalator rides to heaven.
So go ahead and drill, mine or tilt at windmills all you like. As long as we have our sweaters and long-johns in the interim, we old folks will be just fine.
Next week, part two of the senior policy platform including issues of National Security, Economic Reform, Education and Seniors’ Rights.
The Problem with Young People Today Is... 