Build Date: Sat Feb 22 14:50:45 2025 UTC
Wine is but a single broth, ale is meat, drink and cloth.
-- Pigdog Proverb
Ave Cletus! We Who Hoedown Salute You!
2000-02-21 16:40:07
The appalling state of education in this country never ceases to amaze me. Only recently in an informal office poll did I learn that NO ONE has heard of the greatest of rulers: Cletus Porcinus, the Slack-Jawed Emperor of Rome.
Noted primarily for the accident involving the misfiring of a Welsh longbow into his own foot, Cletus the Slack-Jawed brought many technological innovations to the empire including moonshine, grits, ringworm, moon pies, and outhouses.
The populace took the better part of Cletus's astounding four-week reign to grow accustomed to these advances in science. The extensive sewer tunnels that had once carried away the great city of Rome's sewage and detritus were used instead for "critter huntin'", and use of moonshine in the vomitoria eventually became the norm.
The bane of Cletus's reign (and, many say, the problem that drove him to his death) were a rowdy group of Gauls known as the "Fratres Hazardi". These men were the finest charioteers on the entire continent, and they often left Cletus's own imperial steed inverted in a ditch as they blew past the border into the safety of their homeland.
Cletus's death, which took place in a duck blind along the Tiber, is often disputed; but it is widely believed that he died from a gangrene infection he received while opening a tin of mustard sardines. Known across the land for regularly taking the auspices with the companionship of his hound dog, Enos, Cletus could often be found outside the palace walls.
Most of the cletian inventions were subsequently purged by Cletus's successor, Plautus the Polymath. Cletus's many barefoot and pregnant cousins were sent into a rigorous regime of "readin', scribin', and hirin' arabs to do 'rithmetic", from which only a precious few emerged.
Plautus spent the majority of his treasury converting the coliseum from a racetrack for dogs and cock fights back to more traditional roman entertainment. The conversion process was so long and costly that demolition derbies had to be staged in nearby farmland in order to keep the masses occupied. The resulting debris was later harvested by the locals for parts, and many a villa could be found with three or four half-built chariots up on marble blocks.
To this day, the buck-toothed deathmask of Cletus has not been found, though documents have proven that it remained as the lid of Plautus's rennovated latrine for several decades.
T O P S T O R I E S
The Future Ain't What It Used To Be
Ideas have taken horrifying shape and rooted into our modern reality. (More...)
The Once & Future King of Dust
Only The Onion could have acquired Infowarts. (More...)
Another Nobel Prize-Winning Author Describes Drunkenness
This book won a Pulitzer Prize. Here's its famous paragraph on getting drunk... (More...)
Why I'm pretty sure JD Vance had sex with a couch
True or false? The answers await us in that magical land where all truths are revealed -- the internet. (More...)
In 2010 Dr. Cheng-Huai Ruan discovered a way to cause a patient with an abnormal heartbeat to get back into a normal rhythm by sticking a finger up the patient's ass. (More...)
WKRP in Cincinnati aired from 1978 through 1982. Howard Hesseman played Dr. Johnny Fever, a DJ from Los Angeles who was fired from his previous job for saying the word "booger" on the air. In the show Hesseman would do some dialogue, introduce a song, and start the song. You'd hear a few notes, but never the whole song. (More...)
C L A S S I C P I G D O G
Songs Of Love And Special Things
Well, dear reader, there's no denying it: Spring has sprung. The air is pungent with the fertile aroma of Romance. And you know what goes with Romance, don't you? That's right, Lover, porn. And not just any porn, but the kind you can sing along to. (More...)
Poor Metallica. All they want is to continue to put out the same weak "Heavy Metal" they've been churning out since the "And Justice For All" days? and make gooey wads of cash in the process. The problem is, people aren't buying their bound for the heavy metal scrap heap, over-produced, uninspired, tired crap. And let's face it, their various commercial endorsements won't pay for the lifestyle they've become comfortably accustomed to. Resorting to lawsuits makes perfect sense, when you need spending money. But just one lawsuit isn't going to pay their bills. So, to aid Metallica, I've composed an open letter to the boys in the band, with suggestions as to whom else they might sic their lapdog lawyers on... (More...)
Johnnie Royale's Guide to Wakes
Wakes can present problems for Bad People of the Future. (If you don't know what a BPotF is, you need to read more of the PDJ.) Sure, your friend is gone and you miss him and that really sucks; it does, I know. But all Bad People of the Future are gonna die, and they have all accepted that fact. They do deserve, however, to have one final kickass party to celebrate all the bad things they've done in the past, present and future. And you, as a friend, have to make sure that their desire for a final send off is well executed (sorry for the pun). That's just the way of BPotFdom. (More...)
Patient Joab's scientifick editorial discusses aspect of the space-time-beer continuum never before processed by sub-bush-robot minds!!! Too fabulantastic to contempulate! (More...)
All this talk about death, wakes and Moloch recently has, frankly, got me a little worried. What if I'm next to go? I could slip on a wet banana peel and slam my head against an enormous brass statue at almost any time. I'm not planning well enough for this sort of thing. Who will talk for me when this terrible day comes? (More...)
The Ancient and Correct Sake Ceremony
Many Americans have learned to appreciate the delicate, sophisticated flavors of Japanese food and drink, along with the beautifully refined rituals of Japanese dining. San Francisco, as a gateway between East and West, has especially benefited from the flowering of Eastern consciousness in America. It is hardly possible to walk down the street without stepping on somebody's sushi. (More...)
