Art Kumbalek
I’m Art Kumbalek and man oh manischewitz what a world, ain’a? Listen, no essay for you’s again this week. I got to meet up with the fellas so’s we can make our Polish Fest plans, and truthfully, I wouldn’t be too disappointed if the guy who guesses your age and weight isn’t there this year. When the only guess for the weight category is “too fat for me,” how entertaining is that really?
So I’m off to the Uptowner tavern/charm school where today is always at least a day before tomorrow and yesterday may very well be today. Come along if you feel like it, but you buy the first round. Let’s get going.
Ray: Sure, I heard about the driverless car. Now, if Google could come up with the boss-less workplace, I might even think of looking for a job someday.
Ernie: Any you’s guys know if Poland’s in that Cup’s World soccer shebang this time?
Little Jimmy Iodine: Not this year. Last time they qualified was 2006 when they took it on the chin-ski from Ecuador. The Pole squad got confused and thought the object was to have the lowest score, like golf; so they tried their damnedest not to score.
Emil: Ecuador. That’s in Mexico, ain’a?
Julius: Yeah, that’s right Emil. And if IQ was like a golf score, you’d be world-champion genius.
Herbie: Ecuador’s down there by your Tierra del focking Fuego, you focking idiot. You’re like these high school graduates that the National Geographic took a survey of where half of them couldn’t identify the New York or Ohio states on a map—you don’t know your Assyria from a hole in the ground, either.
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Emil: Fock you. Who cares where Ecuador is anyways? Soccer sucks. They ought to use more balls than just one, like maybe four or five; then maybe they’d have a focking score you could write home about.
Julius: If they want the American viewer to watch the TV soccer, they ought to add a little mystery and danger, say, before every match they plant a landmine somewheres on the field. Now maybe somebody’d step on it, and maybe not. But they’d sure have my attention, I kid you not.
Little Jimmy Iodine: Hey, Artie! Over here. Put a load on your keister.
Art: Hey gents. What do you hear, what do you know.
Ray: I know for Father’s Day ’cause I’ve been in the doghouse for so long, the kids’ll probably get me a new flea collar again this year.
Ernie: I heard about those young kids out in Waukesha who stabbed their friend ’cause the Internet told them to, and they got to go to adult court, what the fock? Like they say, “Truth is stranger than fiction.”
Little Jimmy: That’s a misquote, Ernie. What “they” should really say is this: ’Tis strange—but true; for truth is always strange; Stranger than fiction.
Herbie: Lord Byron, ain’a? Dead as a doornail at 36 back in 1824, I believe. People could get away with writing that kind of idea 190 years ago ’cause factually, yes, truth and facts would seem a strange thing to them back then when there were still so many yet to be invented. Hell, even the notion of daily bathing was strange and new, so what the fock.
Julius: Wasn’t it one of those ancient Greeks who asked: “What is truth?” And I say, hey buddy, c’mon—if you have to ask… And yet to this day, many still think those guys were so focking smart.
Little Jimmy: Byron, we know, answered that with “truth is always strange,” and to prove his point, although he was a chubby short guy with a club foot, went out and got croaked in Greece whilst in the fight to regain their independence and restore to the Greeks the freedom to pose pointless questions.
Emil: Fiction is just a lot of made-up bullshit but without it there’d be no TV. Truth is more boring than fiction, that’s why they got to spice it up.
Art: When I was a kid, I learned that truth is more trouble than fiction, especially in the principal’s office.
Herbie: But even more trouble yet is when you can’t tell truth from fiction like you can’t tell your ass from a hole in the ground. Witness those Republicans out in Honkysha who think climate change is Communist fiction, and truth is massive Democrat voter fraud; the more guns the better; and that the dinosaurs lived right alongside Adam and what’s-her-name and the reason they got extinct is ’cause they drowned in Noah’s Flood ’cause they were too damn big too fit on the knucklehead’s focking dink Ark. Now that’s what I call scary.
(Hey, it’s getting late and I know you got to go, but thanks for letting us bend your ear, ’cause I’m Art Kumbalek and I told you so.)
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