Right Here, Right Meow

Rap Cat (below) is far too long and it's kind of retarded, but ever since Henrietta Pussycat referenced herself in "meow" first person, it has made me laugh like crazy person. This has only been exacerbated by the fact that Jerrett and I have taken to speaking on behalf of Kabuki, my 1,200 year-old cat, in a voice that is somewhere between Henreitta Pussycat, a French whore and Andrew Dice Clay. Yep, two grown men sitting around the house giving narrative commentary in a slightly falsetto voice filled with lots of meows and swearing. Highlights include: "Fuck meow" and "Fill meow's food bowl already - bitches." It's hysterical and yet humiliating. There, our dirty laundry is now on the world wide interweb (sorry Jerrett). So remember, when it comes to sordid secrets, click no further than Tingley All Over!

Love, Love

Love as delightful, I mean shameful, as Rap Cat

Love Meow, er uh, Jef

What's Black & White & Redheaded All Over?

It's me, reporting on the O.C.(that's the Oak Cliff, not the now defunct FOX TV Program about teen angst and beach parties).

Here's my first freelance piece for Oak Cliff People:

Neighborhood Questions Tree Trimming

Love, Love

Love as "scoopy" as a trip to Baskin-Robbins

Love Jef

Yolk Better Work!

I totally understand the whole Joan of Arc driven by visions thing, except mine are usually related to crafting and costumes and not orders from God. Take for example our wild and crazy Friday night of egg dying with Pam and Anisha.

Anisha is known for her culinary expertise, and I am known for my love of the Easter treat hot cross buns (side note: yes, they really do exist outside of the cryptic childhood song), so I arranged a little barter system wherein Anisha and Pam would bring over hot cross buns and in exchange Jerrett and I would provide dinner, egg dying and all the accoutrement. Good times abounded. It was fun to see how everyone's mind worked when it came to decorating the egg with their own special flair.

Saturday morning, I took the crafting extravaganza one step further by styling tiny sets for each of the eggs. I liked to think of it as Americas Next Top Eggy Model. Naturally, I played the role of Tyra Banks explaining to the bowl full of dyed chicken embryo that only 12 of them would continue on with the hopes winning a trip to the PAAS factory, a year supply of peeps and a contract as the spokesman for the American Egg Board. Your vote can be cast in the comments section below, although I cannot guarantee that your favorite egg has not been eaten or given away.

Here are the resulting shots:

Group shot of the "girls" before eliminations began

They call me "Red"

Wrong Holiday (AKA the Bat Eggs - get it!)

Blurry Trindad Egg

Salam NamastEGG

Garish Ganesh

Rhine Stones Are an Egg's Best Friend

Little Orphan Eggy

And because I'm that guy who thinks that the dogs really want to be involved in holidays, I made sure to incorporate them in the festivities as well. Here we see the fat dog adding her own special twist to hiding eggs or perhaps the term "Easter Basket." The skinny dog was less compliant and insisted upon using her giraffe tongue to investigate Jerrett's 505 Egg (a shout out to our NM roots).

As I type this, South Park reveals the "Secret of Easter" in the style of the Da Vinci Code on my Tivo. Genius. Here's a review.

Love, Love

Love as "frills upon it" as my Easter Bonnet

Love, Jef

P.S.
Since I have driven my car right off the edge of crafter's cliff, here are a few pics of my latest projects. This is a painting I did that allowed me to melt wax with my heat gun. I'm thinking of calling it "Sexy Waxy." This is a tiny statue of Ganesh I made in preparation for the Bollywood Party we are throwing in May. Stay tuned for more on this, or you'll be "sari" you missed out - nyuck nyuck.

P.P.S.
If you are one of the few who hasn't seen the Alanis Morrisette torch song tribute to Fergie's "My Humps," I'm posting it below 'cause no one loves lovely lady lumps more than Tingley All Over:

Ha Ha Heredity

I have a theory that sense of humor is a total genetic trait, like a silly chromosome slipping from banana peel to banana peel down the DNA ladder to the next unwitting generation. To illustrate this point, I will use myself and my father (Big Jeff with two f's) as a case study. Now 2-F Jeff is a delightful guy and a joy to be around, but he is genetically incapable of avoiding bad puns or corny jokes.

His best material goes a little something like this:

2-F: What kind of Fish has two knees?

Unsuspecting
Pun Recipient: I dunno, what kind?

2-F: A Tuneee fish (followed by pride-filled, uproarious laughter at his own wit)

Unsuspecting Pun Recipient: [tongue out and raspberry noise and/or an audible sigh]

As a child, I shared in his giggles over "Laffy Taffy" wrapper jokes and blonde-joke gems he had picked up from guys at work, but other humor snobs sat still faced to his delivery. And today as a 31-year-old, I still find myself smiling about the classic Tuneee Fish material or chuckling at an appalling low-brow e-mail he sends my way. In fact, I believe that it is this steady diet of grade D funny that helped me choose my vocation as a copywriter.

As fate would have it, I too have had to suffer the slings and arrows of the bad-joke deprived. Recently, I helped a friend brainstorm ideas for a wine tasting event. I was so pleased with myself when I came up with the headline You Had Me at Bordeaux. So you can imagine my horror when the March issue of D Magazine wrote, "Before we knew a thing about this event, we wanted to attend just because the pun is that bad." Wait until I call them up with the Tuneee Fish bit! Better yet, I'm sending in 2-F with his entire repertoire of nyuck nyucks!

And speaking of 2-F material, here's one of his latest and greatest:

The Auburn Veterinarian School had a very rare species of gorilla. Within a few weeks the gorilla, a female, became very difficult to handle. Upon examination, the veterinarian determined the problem. The gorilla was in season. To make matters worse, there was no male gorilla available.

Thinking about their problem, the veterinarian thought of Bobby Lee Smith, an Auburn fan and part-time worker responsible for cleaning the animal cages. Bobby Lee, like most rednecks, had little sense but possessed ample ability to satisfy a female of any species. The School Veterinarian thought they might have a solution.

Bobby Lee was approached with a proposition. Would he be willing to mate with the gorilla for $500.00? Bobby Lee showed some interest, but said he would have to think the matter over carefully.

The following day, he announced that he would accept their offer, but only under four conditions.

"First," Bobby Lee said, "I ain't gonna kiss her on the lips."
The Keeper quickly agreed to this condition.

"Second," he said, "You can't never tell no one about this."
The Keeper again readily agreed to this condition.

"Third," Bobby Lee said, "I want all the childrun raised Southern Baptist."
Once again it was agreed.

"And last of all," Bobby Lee stated, "You gotta give me another week to come up with the $500.00."

Love Love

Love as Knock Knock as a Who's There

Love Jef

C'mon and Shake a Tail Feather

Despite the brisk weather, I bundled up Wednesday afternoon and took my stir crazy, shut-in dogs for a stroll around the park. This is an activity we usually do in the morning, so I was a little taken back by the waterfowl scuffle waiting for us as we approached the pond.

Before I could even see what was going on, I heard a cacophony of clucks and honks from the resident ducks and geese. And there in the middle of the pond was a large brown goose flapping about madly, her feathers slapping against the water while her peers went on about their business of nibbling bread crumbs and crapping aimlessly.

"She's drowning," I thought to myself, "I must save her." Then the reality set in that geese are pretty adept at the whole water/swimming thing, and she most likely was not on her way to a watery grave. Then my second clue emerged in the form of a large lust-filled white male goose in hot pursuit of the aforementioned brown goose.

I suddenly realized that I wasn't watching a goose death, I was a bystander to a goosey sexual assault. The poor brown goose didn't stand a chance. Ol' whitey goose was relentless in his pursuit craning his neck, honkin' like angry mom drivin' carpool and pushing his victim to the bottom of the pond in his coitus pursuitus.

When Jerrett came home I told him all about the shocking crime scene. He suggested I contact the lesser-known crime drama show Law & Order: Waterfowl Victims Unit. We think that either the AFLAC Duck or the Goose from Willy Wonka could play the lead role. Hmm, I wonder which one-line actor they will get to play the role of "startled dog walker?"

Love, Love

Love as fowl as pond-side sexual harassment

Love,

Jef

P.S. And speaking of Mother Nature, here's one of my fav new You Tube pics:

I Bet You Think This BLOG Is About You...Don't You?

New year, new adventures, new blogs - right? And that dear Tingley All Over reader is my pledge to you. I resolve to fill 2007 with more blogs about my comings, goings, passing fancies and day-to-day obsessions. With that said, er uh typed, I thought I would kick off this entry with a year-in-preview of sorts.

WHAT I'M WATCHING
Is there really such a thing as too much TV or too many ass-swelling hours watching movies?I say hell-to-the-NO, which is why I'm wasting precious brain cells on shows like The Girls Next Door. For those of you unfamiliar with this grade A piece of reality trash, Girls follows the lives of Playboy overlord Hugh Hefner's THREE girlfriends: Bridget, Holly & Kendra. What fascinates me most is a) the ultra white trash decor of the playboy mansion (really, pink canopy beds loaded with nappy stuffed animals) and b) the supreme delusions of these girls thinking that ol' Hef isn't going to trade them in for a younger model before you can say season two. I'm a bit of a Girls late bloomer as it came out like a year ago, but it is still totally worth the Tivo if you are looking for some very good badness.

WHAT I'M READING
Always on the lookout for the next Auguston Burroughs or David Sedaris, I saw David Rakoff on "The Daily Show" and decided to give his novel Don't Get Too Comfortable a scan across the peepers. Although it didn't make me laugh out loud (usually a trait reserved for reading in a public setting that makes me look crazy), I did find it interesting. More than anything, I totally self identified with his chapter about crafting and the zen-like focus that comes from a mound of modge podge or a hot glue gun. He also shed some light on the fact that when one gives a home crafted present to someone, "it might appear very generous on the surface, but in another sense it's an act of bullying...it's an attempt to curate someone else's tastes." How do I plead to such an offense? Guilty as bedazzlingly charged!

Side note on the David Rakoff book - he's a bit of a word nerd. I found myself underlining words that I had to look up later in the dictionary. The two that I've adopted for my own vocab are "effluvial," meaning emanating odor (e.g. My dog Fatsy Cline has an effluvial mouth) and lugubrious meaning boring (e.g. defining words in one's blog could be considered lugubrious by some).

WHAT I'M OBSESSED WITH
I have seen the future and it is an $8 toy game from Wal-mart called the 20Q. Take the innocence of the car-trip-staple twenty questions and fuse it with the heart and robotic soul of a cyborg, and you have the 20Q. Jerrett and I have spent hours trying to stump it only to have it guess even the most random things 9 out of 10 times. And even when it's wrong, it's still eerily close to the answer. For example, I figured I would throw it for a loop with "vagina," but it guessed "sphincter" then "womb." For a small piece of circuit boards and plastic, I gotta say, sphincter womb ain't just whistling dixie.

WHAT I'M LISTENING TO
(AKA WHAT I'M CREATING DANCE NUMBERS TO IN MY HEAD)
Dreamgirls. I know, I know, show tunes, how shocking? But what you don't know is that underneath my pasty hide beats the heart of a soulful Jennifer Hudson and upon hearing a soaring ballad such as "And I am Telling You," the JHud within is released. With a flip of the hand, a toss of the head and a quiver of the lip, I can convince even the most harsh critic that I too have my rightful place next to Dina and Lorell... and I'm not goin' nowhere. So if you pull up next to me on the street and see me twitching and convulsing, or you catch me strutting about the house doing my best turkey neck - I'm not having a seizure. I'm just feeling the dream girl deep inside!

Love, Love

Love as disco-riffic as my rendition of "One Night Only"

Love, Jef

Six Degrees of Number Two

Spoiler alert: If you want to be surprised by Jackass: Number Two, read no more!
Don't you just love it when people name drop their connection to celebrities? Like when a friend tells of a cousin's sister who knows the mechanic of some A-list actress, or of an awkward one-time handshake with some Oscar-winner in an airport bathroom. Well, dear Tingley All Over reader, I am here to be that guy and boast about my one-degree of separation to the cast of Jackass: Number Two.

Not only is my dear friend Sarah the costume designer for the film, she even shows up on screen. Yep, for those of you who have seen it, that is my sweet Sarahbelle spirit gumming copious amounts of the cast's pubic hair to some guy's face who thinks he's getting a beard applied for another physical-comedy-meets-poop-humor prank. Ah, it seems like only yesterday Sarah was practicing gluing pubic hair to her Ken doll's face.

No, all kidding aside, I'm so thrilled to see my friend all famous and on the big screen. And, her costumes for the closing finale are fabulous (I'll not spoil that part just in case you haven't seen it yet). But, I like to think that my years of forcing her to listen to showtunes helped guide her vision. Oh, and while I'm bragging about fancy-pants S, you should also check out her other movie, Sleeping Dogs Lie, coming out this fall. I'm going to the premiere in October and will be blogging all about it.

Ship of Fulanitos

I know I've been a negligent blogger, but I had one other story to tell. So, our friends Michael and Adrid came to visit about a month ago. Michael is a New Yorker by birth with Puerto Rican heritage. Adrid grew up in Cuba and moved to the states about three years ago. Needless to say, we embraced all things tacky and Texasy for their amusement taking them big belt buckle shopping and, of course, to the Round Up. Afterall, it was our duty to show them the Dallas version of Brokeback Mountain.

One night, after boot scootin' and a rousing game of Loteria (Mexican bingo), we started talking about the little differences between the New Mexican Spanish Jerrett and I grew up with, the Puerto Rican Spanish Michael knew and loved, and the Cuban Spanish Adrid deemed superior to all the rest.

Michael revealed that for months he had heard Adrid's mom talk about "Fulanito," who he assumed was an uncle or cousin. But after a while this Fulanito character seemed to be in every story, so Michael finally asked Adrid when he would meet this mystery relative. Well, turns out that Fulanito is the Cuban version of Joe Schmoe, hence his being omnipresent. I was so delighted by this that I claimed Fulanito as my ethnicity right then and there. Next time someone asks me about my lineage, I'll say that my mother was Irish and my father is 100 percent Fulanito.

The other language comedy of errors came about when we started talking childhood cartoons. I learned that in Cuba, the Smurfs are the Pitufas. Kind of makes you giggle, doesn't it! It gets better. Papa Smurf is Papa Pitufa and Smurfette is Pitufina. But the best was the translations of the names of the Flintstones. In Cuba, Fred Flinstone is Piedro PicaPiedras (aka Peter Picks-Up-Rocks) and Barney Rubble is Pablo Marbol (aka Paul Marble). I have know idea if you will find this amusing, but it killed me dead. And I can't close this little Tingley All Over language lesson without sharing another favorite - Pato Lucas (that's Cuban Spanish for Daffy Duck).

Love, Love

Love as flying proud as my Fulanito flag

Love Jef