CleverDonkey.com …Musings, Commentary, Opinions, and Drivel

Where to begin with this one. First of all, I was a faithful viewer of The Gong Show, created by Chuck Barris. I thought it was hilarious. For those of you who don’t know the show, the shtick was that rather ordinary people of (usually) limited talent would come onstage and perform their act, which could be anything from eating a popsicle in a lascivious manner to performing some (quite good) jug band music, and anything in between (and beyond) that you can think of. Picture Letterman’s Stupid Human Tricks extended to a half-hour show (coincidentally Letterman was a Gong Show judge at one point). Chuck Barris (Chuckie Baby) was the emcee, and there was a panel of three minor celebrities who would either a) “gong” the contestant, which indicated that their act was no longer bearable or b) give the act a score. At the end of the show

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Taste Like Dirt!

I am not a freak.  I am not picky.  I am not hard to please, inflexible, or timid.  I am…a supertaster.  The scientific validation of what I have always known has set me free.  Foods like coffee and mustard literally make me gag.  Raw tomato tastes like acidic dirt (or what I imagine acidic dirt would taste like) to me.  Almost all beans, with the exception of green beans, are un-choke-down-able.  Peanuts are disgusting.

I am not a timid or picky eater.  I am always willing to try new foods, and I eat all sorts of strange things (snails, calamari, oysters, pop tarts, kipper snacks).  I love different ethnic foods (Chinese, Italian, Lebanese, Greece-y) and am not a restaurant snob.  However, there have always been certain foods that I cannot eat.  Not ‘will not’ eat…cannot eat,

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Over the last couple of weeks I have seen two television commercials which startled me with their inhumanity.  The first was from Quizno’s Subs, and featured their chef who was so focused on his job that he was shown walking by the cage of his pet bird, and the bird was apparently dead on the floor of the cage.  The message I got from this commercial is that he was so dedicated to his job that he ignored and neglected his pet to the point that it starved, dehydrated, and died while trapped in its cage.

The second commercial was for Altoids, the Curiously Inhumane Peppermint ©, which depicted a young student in science class feeding one of the new, strong Altoid products to the class guinea pig.  The mint is so strong that the guinea pig literally explodes on the screen.  I almost couldn’t believe what I saw.

I have been

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I am currently watching CNN and seeing video of the disintegration of the Space Shuttle Columbia, replayed over and over again. There are many eyewitness accounts, speculation, and denial that it was sabotage or terrorism. I’m also hearing that, upon take-off, debris had struck the left wing of Columbia and small pieces of insulation had broken loose. I am beginning to wonder if this ultimate fate was known to be more probable because of the damage. I wonder if the ground and flight crews had gnawing trepidation during the mission, worried that there might be problems on re-entry. I wonder if they explored options, such as docking with the space station, or launching another shuttle for rescue, but found those options to be unrealistic. I wonder if NASA made sure the crewmembers spoke with their families one last time with the knowledge of the

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