What the Spock?

×

Expand

Art Kumbalek

I’m Art Kumbalek and man oh manischewitz what a world, ain’a? So listen, here we are past the middle of May already and I’m too depressed to whip out an essay for you’s this week. I’m ready for fall. What with the high heat and stupidity hovering just past the springtime horizon, it’s all I can do to get up over by the Uptowner tavern/charm school, where I can take a good gander at my options and enjoy a nice cocktail. Come along if you’d like, but you buy the first round.

Julius: I heard that the crowd outside the Fiserv Forum last Friday had a higher shooting percentage than the Bucks had inside the forum.

Little Jimmy Iodine: Really? Cripes, that’s no way to win a championship.

Emil: Any of you’s guys hear about Eddie Brzylicki? Age 68. Natural causes. Died. In his sleep.

Ray: Hey, put me down for one of those, what the fock.

Herbie: Yes sir, “natural” is the way to go in each and every way, I hear. Jeez louise, every other goddamn TV ad begs you to buy this or that ’cause it’s “natural”; so this or that has just got to be gosh darn good for you ’cause it’s “natural,” you bet. No artificial substitute, please, like cancer, hit by a bus, gunshot. Got to be “natural.”

Ernie: And I figure that dying in or during your sleep, of natural causes, is also a financially sound way to bid adieu—to say “aloha, all” before a boatload of MRIs, PET scans, CAT scans, X-rays, chemotherapy, lying in a ho$pital bed puking sick for weeks, sends you to bankruptcy and the poor house from the bills from the crappy or nonexistent health insurance bullshit. Yeah, I’ll take the focking “natural” croak in my sleep—cuts costs, I figure. Ha! Take that, you focking HMOs.

Little Jimmy Iodine: I wonder if the public will learn anything from some kind of government House Intelligence subcommittee hearings on UFOs that they got going now for the first time in 50 years.

Emil: You betcha. For starters, I’d like to know if they had torture on the Star Trek Enterprise that we never learned about.

Ernie: You talk like a sausage, Emil. Of course they would’ve had to what-you-call “torture” at some point. Listen, you’re on a five-year mission for the United Federation of Planets to explore strange, new worlds and every time you turn around, all you’re getting is some-kind-of shit from space aliens whose only purpose in the universe is to fock you up; and not in a good way.

Julius: Sounds logical. I can imagine that while the Captain Quirk and that pointy-eared Nimrod what’s-his-name are shoveling their dime-store philosophy in front of the cameras up on the bridge of the ship, deep in the bowels are a couple-three beefy redshirt uncredited crew members kicking the ever-loving crap out of some three-eyed squishy-headed piece-of-work from the planet Upyerz II, ’cause they’re trying to get this pus-bag to fess up to messing with one of those bullshit crystals focking Scotty was always whining about, ain’a?

Little Jimmy Iodine: Hey, Artie! Over here. Put a load on your keister.

Art: Hey gents. What do you hear, what do you know.

Emil: I hear there was torture on the Star Trek Enterprise.

Art: If the Geneva Convention covered acting, I suppose a William Shatner line-reading could be… construed as… ag-… ainst… the rule… s.

Little Jimmy: He always did seem a little wooden, ain’a?

Ray: He was the only actor on that show who didn’t go to make-up before a scene. They used varnish instead.

Ernie: I watched some old Star Trek movies last weekend ’cause it’s been a while, so what the fock. Remember Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan?

Herbie: Fockin’-A. That’s the one where Ricardo Montalban with long hair looks like that Marjorie Taylor Greene with big knockers, ain’a?

Julius: No. I thought he looked more like the other Republican bitch-harpy, Ann Coulter, but with bigger knockers.

Ray: “De ship! De ship!” Yeah, TV’s “Mr. Roarke” with the hair and a set of jugs, por favor, not my kind of fantasy. But I’ll tell you’s, if Trumpel-thinskin decides not to run for president and chief grifter again, maybe he can get cast as the bad guy in a Star Trek movie called “The Wrath of Con.”

Art: I never saw that Khan movie ’cause it’s like Groucho said, he never went to a picture where the leading man’s tits were bigger than the leading lady’s.

Ernie: Doesn’t it always seem like the future’s here before you know it and when it shows up, it’s like “big focking deal”?

Julius: You got a point, Ernie. There was that movie, “2001: Space something-or-another” that was actually made in 1968. So what the fock, it’s 2022 now and we still haven’t stepped on another planet?

Emil: You’re full of a crap. I seem to recall that as a species we’ve been to the moon, have we not, Mr. Einstein?

Ernie: Fock the moon. All those millions and millions of dollars spent so a couple, three flyboys could knock a golf ball around a place that looks just like the middle of Nevada but without all the gambling and legalized prostitution. Like I said: Big focking deal.

Little Jimmy: The future has always been hard to figure for mankind. Again, like Groucho said: “Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.”

Herbie: And don’t forget, about man’s yearning for knowledge of his place in the universe, Groucho said: “Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.”

(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.)