A list of things that I just don't understand.

• Why people like the movie Marley and Me... I saw it 20 years ago when it was called Turner and Hooch. Only difference is that Turner and Hooch had Tom Hanks and sweet buddy cop sequences, which make it the far superior work.
• People who think parrots are good pets.
  
• How I never knew plow trains existed until a few weeks ago.
• How people other than me don't think plow trains are the most awesome thing ever.
• The Society for Creative Anachronism.
• Tim and Eric.
• Why FedEx still delivers on MLK Day when the Post Office doesn't. Does FedEx hate black people?
• Gin in forms other than "and tonic"/"and juice."
  
• How Kelly Clarkson can do a song like "Since You've Been Gone" that talks about how much better her life is now that she is out of a bad relationship but then go and do a song like her new single "My Life Would Suck Without You." With lyrics like "Being with you is so dysfunctional, I really shouldn’t miss you, but I can’t let go," and "I know that I’ve got issues, But you’re pretty messed up too, Anyway, I found out I’m nothing without you," Ms. Clarkson is clearly in a destructive, co-dependent relationship. That's backsliding, Kelly, for shame.

You used to be so strong, Kelly.

• Twitter.
• The fact that people in Madison aren't scared of the end of the Bush administration. The drop off in sales of Anti-Bush buttons and bumper stickers is going to kill off 10% of the stores in town.
• How Jesus jokes can still be considered edgy.
  
• People who still use Hotmail accounts.
• Why Michael Cera won't sign on for the Arrested Development movie.
  
• What makes pomegranates so amazing.
  
• How the economy works.
  
• How Battlestar Galactica can get so much press coverage when, like, 5 people watch it.
  
• Why it's so damn difficult for me to come up with a name for my one-person "production company."
  
• That I didn't realize that we could have ended racism years ago, all we needed to do was have Wisconsin State Journal editoral cartoonist Phil Hands do a strip about it.

Phil Hands: 1, Racism: 0.

Wait, I haven’t had my scandal yet!

Guest Blog by: Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Steve Preston

Hi, everybody, call me Steve, I’m the HUD Secretary for the United States and I can’t wait to get started on my scandal. Sure, almost everyone in the cabinet has had some sort of scandal but 2009 is Secretary Preston’s time to shine. And by shine, I mean 'disgrace the country.'

Hold up, you are saying the Bush Administration is over? But I haven’t had my scandal yet, it’s why I went into politics. When I was a kid, I grew up watching all the scandals of the Nixon years with Agnew and the rest getting involved in all sorts of shady deals. All of America knew who those men were and what crimes they had committed… and that’s just the point, all of America knew who these scandal artists were. That’s when I, a little boy growing up in Janesville, Wisconsin, figured out that real fame isn’t just getting power, it’s abusing it. Nothing gets your name in the papers like a scandal!

I spent my time waiting to get into a position where I could have a scandal, working as an investment banker at Lehman Brothers (if only I had stayed there, what a fame-making scandal I could have been involved in there) up to Executive Vice President of cleaning conglomerate ServiceMaster. I thought of cooking the books at ServiceMaster but I figured that wouldn’t make news past page 5 of the Chicago Tribune so I continued to hold out for that brass ring: the Bush Administration.

In 2006, I did get a job working as for Bush as the head of Small Business Association but I have to admit I was a little intimidated to make my scandal right then. With Brownie at FEMA bungling Katrina as the flavor of the month and continual superstar Rumsfield continuing to piss off the troops in Iraq, I didn’t know how to compete with those heavy hitters. I mean Margaret Spellings was using the Department of Education to wage a culture war and that wasn't even being picked up on NPR, what chance did I have to make a scandal as a rookie? But since this June, I’ve finally had my chance. HUD, baby! That’s cabinet level shit!

And what have I done with this position? Nothing. Due to the housing crisis, I was so busy fulfilling the duties of my job that I never got around to completely ignoring those duties for my own personal gain. Oh, don’t give me the excuse that I haven’t been in office long enough, Schafer in Agriculture managed to get a scandal going in less than 100 hours as Secretary of Agriculture as he defended the practice of feeding America cows that might be carrying disease. But now I’ve wasted my time in the cabinet and haven’t even been involved with as much as a travel scandal.

I should have used housing funds to help build Homeland Security Chief Chertoff's illegal border fence idea. Ugh, you always think of the best ideas after the face.

Now when history looks back at the Bush administration, they will list this entire cabinet as horrible failures, there will be remembered for generations as some of the worst people to serve in any of these positions. But what about old Stevie Preston, I’ll just be noted as doing a serviceable job with a difficult situation that I inherited. Sigh, no one remembers those who are just serviceable. Maybe I can still go get a car out of the HUD motor pool, as long as security will still let me in, and knock over a 7/11. Oh what’s the use, the media’s already onto the Obama cabinet’s corruption. Sigh, I’ll never be famous.

Wait, I’ve got it, maybe I’ll run for governor in my adopted home state of Illinois! I’m sure to do something morally corrupt in that job!

Comedy Writing: The Misses

I have spent a lot of time writing comedy over the years, mostly in a series of spiral notebooks that I frequently lose. During the holidays, I looked around and found a lot of these old notebooks and it was fun to see the origins of a lot of the funnier ideas I’ve had. But along with seeing the good stuff, I also had to read some of my other ideas, the terrible ones. You see out of twenty ideas I write down, maybe 1 or 2 are actually funny and have potential. Here are some examples of those 18 to 19 not-so-funny ideas that I had completely forgotten about.

Here are some ideas that were forgotten almost as quickly as they were written down:

• Ghostbusters, the musical.
• Where are they now: The Noid (rejected only because of the difficulty in creating/finding a proper Noid costume)
  
• Going to the DMV and Having an Absolutely Wonderful Time (I had a similar idea witb Who’s On First where both people clearly understand that the names of the players on base are “Who” “What” and “I Don’t Know” without any confusion whatsoever)
• The Rotten Urban Core of the North Pole (Ha ha! Thug Elves!)
• The world’s first bar (What would the tip be? Whooaaah! I bet it would be something wacky!)
• Dan Po-wacky, in-home clownery (I might still use this one)
• Dildo Warehouse, factory-direct dildos.
  
• Nudist Colony Secedes From Nudist Empire
• Blackwater Home Security, the Brand America Trusts! (Basically a Brinks ad but anytime there was a break-in, they would come and cause huge amounts of collateral damage. Not a terrible skit idea but would cost way too much to do on my budget of $6.12)
• People who reenact Civil War Battles reenacting Battle of the Network Stars.
• Allergic to Dinosaurs (What does that even mean?)

Somehow this idea sounded funny to me for at least 5 seconds.

Beyond the one-sentence concepts , there were several ideas that I spent more time working on and actually fleshed out into scripts.

Tailgating for a play.

• Casey and I came up with the ideas of decidated fans tailgate outside of Death of a Salesman like they are tailgating outside of a major sporting event. In line, they mock the ‘opposing fans’ i.e. people going to see Our Town. I actually still really like this skit idea.
  
• Selected Excerpt: “Thorton Wilder, more like Thorton MILD-er!”

311 was an inside job.

• You know 9/11 Conspiracies, that same thing, except for the band 311.
• Selected Excerpt: “Come Original skyrocketed up the charts through the path of most resistence. No guitar rock becomes a hit like that naturally.”

Increased Risk Assassin

• The premise of this skit is that the assassin would do his dirty work by raising different health risks for the people he was hired to kill. I.E. changing the target’s milk from 1% to 2%, inserting cigarette ads into the target’s copy of People magazine, lobbying Congress to raise the speed limit in the target’s neighborhood. I think this skit eventually become Freelance Assassin, one of the worst Public Drunkards videos. In retrospect, this original idea was a lot funnier than the finished video skit.

Cellie the Cell Phone gets PTSD after being the cell phone that recorded Saddam Hussein’s assassination.

• Jon, Casey and I came very close to making this one, where our giant cardboard cellphone would have gone all Deer Hunter and almost killed himself. The only reason we didn’t make it is that the costume got thrown away and the Saddam-hanging reference would have been way too dated by the time we made it (and by ‘we,’ I mean, by the time Jon made it while Casey and I sat around and played Wii).

Wii Bulemia

• After Wii Fit, a Wii game that would give you an eating disorder. I was going to make little graphics of a stickfigure putting a Wii Remote down a throat.
• Selected Excerpt:Mario: (on tv screen) Oh, look at you, you flabby sack of fat. What’s that Pikachu? (holds up Pikachu doll to his ear) Pikachu says he’s disgusted by all of your rolls of lard.
  

Ron Paul 2014

• When the ‘Ron Paul Revolution’ was tearing up the internet, I wrote a script about what American would be like if Ron Paul got elected. It was mostly a long rant about how I hate libertarians.
• Selected Excerpt:Future Guy and Ron Paul Fan appear in 2014.
  Future Guy: Welcome to 2014, buddy.
  Ron Paul Fan: I’m so cold.
  Future Guy: Yeah, here in the future, Americans have learned to be energy independent.
  Ron Paul Fan: Finally, free from foreign oil. But why is it so cold?
  Future Guy: You don’t understand me. Now that oil, natural gas and other stuff is all controlled solely by the free market with some fairly rampant deregulated price gouging, average Americans have learned to be independent of needing energy.
  Ron Paul Fan: Wait, you’ve still got my clothes. Give me those back, I’m cold.
  Future Guy: Sorry, man, you fell for the clothes-not-surviving-the-time-stream scam. That’s the oldest time travel grift in the book. These are my clothes now.
  Ron Paul Fan: You stole them from me, give them back or else I’m calling the cops.
  Future Guy: Okay, police department has been privatized so you better be prepared to pay up.
  Ron Paul Fan: Of course, limited government. Without high federal taxes, we should be able to afford private alternatives, yes, I’ll pay to have the cops come. (whips out some cash)
  Future Guy: Heh, that money’s not really going to help you. When Ron Paul banned the IRS, that kinda took out the treasury and federal bank that backed the dollar making your old currency worthless. Do you want some crack though? (lifts up some crack) No war on drugs, so we’ve got plenty of crack. No government interference to stop you there.
  Ron Paul Fan: We’ve got to get out there, make some change. We’ve got to get a leader elected who will fix these problems.
  Future Guy: Dude, it’s 2014, we already had another election in 2012 and Paul was reelected.
  Ron Paul Fan: Why the Hell did people reelect Ron Paul?
  Future Guy: Well, any candidate who wanted to restore the government needed at least some form of tax in order to pay for bringing back basic order and who is going to vote for a candidate who wants to raise taxes?

Dan Potacke's Party Planning Tips

Guest Blog by: Dan Potacke

Hi, I’m Dan Potacke. You might remember me as Dan Potacke of Dan Potacke Travel. Or perhaps you know me as Dan Potacke of Dan Potacke-bay. Or maybe you’ve never heard of me until right now, which is great, it’s always nice to make new friends. Hi, new blog buddy.

But today I’m here as Dan Potacke, guest blogger, and I’m going to give you some tips to throw a holiday party. Now, I was going to put this up a couple weeks ago, back before most people had their X-Mas shindigs, but I wasn’t able to get on the internet on account of my 56k being on the fritz. Anywho, this guide should still be helpful for those who are still going to throw a holiday party in the next two days and the rest of you can just save this in your bookmarks until next December. There this blog entry will sit, safe and dependable, just like me.

Anywho, here are some helpful tips so you can have a successful holiday party, Dan Potacke-style!

1. Invite People
He he, of course, silly, you need to invite people to share your party with. Otherwise you’ll just end up setting at home by yourself with an empty table with placemats set out for 12. And trust me, that gets less fun after you do that every day for a few months.

I’d suggest inviting at least 4 to 5 times as many people than you can hold in your apartment, even if they all say they are coming, you should still invite more. The reason you should invite so many is that some people are sure to get sick as December is the heart of sniffles season. Last year, a lot of my guests had to drop out on the night of the party due to a variety of illnesses: cold, flu, even smallpox! I thought that disease had been eradicated so I was surprised it didn’t make the news when my brother, his wife and 4 children all came down with smallpox in the same afternoon. But what can you expect from the mainstream media?

2. Plan a menu
Yum yum yum! This is one of the funnest and most stressful parts of throwing the party, getting the grub. You don’t want to get anything too complicated, like the one year my ex-wife planned a really elaborate menu and I spent the entire party in the kitchen and never even saw my guests. Though Tom, my former employee from the short-lived Dan Potacke Dry Cleaning, said that the year where I was away the whole time was the best holiday party I ever had, he must have really appreciated the extra work I put into the food.

You also need to plan for any kind of guest, as you could have someone from any culture or walk of life thanks to the great melting pot that is America. Don’t get caught off-guard and plan something for any vegetarian guests. One time when my cousin brought her boyfriend over who was something called a vegan and I tried to wrap a leaf of romaine lettuce around a hot dog, that didn’t turn out so well. But I did get compliments for my nice plating.

3. Have a leisure activity
After the meal, you don’t want people getting up and leaving. That’s why you need a fun activity to keep everyone happy. Some people love to gather around the piano and sing. Though, for me this has a few drawbacks because I’m still getting over my divorce. I tear up when I hear any song from our wedding, or any song from our honeymoon to beautiful Peoria, Illinois, or any song sung by a female singer as it reminds me of my ex-wife’s voice. So I usually don’t go for the piano.

Instead, I bust out the old game of Life. At my parties, I used to say, “I don’t know why they call them ‘bored’ games, they are always fun for me. I think they should call them ‘excitement’ games.” At least until the time when one of my guests told me that they are called board games because they are played on a game board but I think my statement is still valid… and funny to boot!

4. Cocktail hour
At this point, your guests might be getting a little wiped out from the fun of the ‘excitement’ games so you need something to perk them up, so I serve up some cocktails. I usually serve up non-alcoholic drinks, you can serve up some ‘spirits’ if you want but I’d advise against it if you are still married. If your wife is anything like mine, she will get a little loopy and start berating you for all of your faults. As your family and friends sit there, she will go into incredible detail about your inadequacies in bed, you know, the usual drunk talk.

If you still have wives, you should try to prevent this from happening.

God, I still miss her so.

5. Clean up
Finally, once the guests leave, it’s time to clean up. I don’t have many tips for this one. One of my relatives keeps on stealing all of my forks and spoons which makes clean-up a breeze for me!

But once clean up is done, sit back and reflect on another successful holiday party. Those recollections will be invaluable if you are like me and spend Christmas alone. But you are never alone if you can hang out with your friends… in your memories!


Happy Holidays,
Dan Potacke

Helping people out on WikiAnswers

In the spirit of the holiday season, my good friend Jon and I wanted to show goodwill towards those who are less fortunate. But instead of ringing some bell like suckers, we decided to help out our fellow man by answering questions on WikiAnswers. WikiAnswers, in case you haven't stumbled upon it, is a wiki where people can ask any question and have the collective wisdom of the online community provide them with an answer. That's right, when you are too lazy to read through an entire Wikipedia article in order to solve your middle school homework, ask the internet to do it for you.

It started off pretty innocent.

It got worse.

Mr. Smith wouldn't get elected today without support from the religious right.

Oh Jon.

I think they could have figured this one out themselves.
Happy Hanukkah, everyone!

This is why I miss having Jon around.

My feelings on carp are well known.

Good grammar.

*Insert funny caption 10*

I hope this display of holiday giving has inspired you. Hopefully, you can continue where we left off and show your own kindness on WikiAnswers during this most special of seasons.

Have you heard about my novel?

Guest Blog by: That Guy You Know Who Always Talks About His Novel

Hi!

How have you been?

Happy holidays, of course.

As for me, I’ve been working the 9-5 but it’s been more like the 8-7 lately. Am I right? Of course, it just pays the bills so I can keep up on my writing. Yeah, I don’t know if anyone has told you, have you run into Sally yet, but I’ve been writing a novel. I showed Sally a little of what I’ve been working on, she didn’t really ‘get’ it, but you know Sally.

So I’ve been working on the novel, more like the novel’s been working on me. Am I right? By that, I mean that writing has made me a bit more introspective, that I’ve had to reevaluate myself in order to be able to evaluate characters. It’s not like the novel is literally working on me, some anthropomorphized book rebuilding me from the bottom up. Though that would be a good literary device. Maybe I can use that in the dream sequence in chapter 5, that would really help my protagonist deal with his ennui, you see, he’s a writer too.

The novel’s been coming along, chapter 3 is just about finished, at least I hope so! You know artists like myself, we always want to put on one more brush stroke. In chapter 3, I was really struggling to find a proper metaphor to match my protagonist’s dissatisfaction with his day job. I mean, I could have just played it literally and had him say, “I don’t like my job,” but I don’t do literally, I do literature-ally. If I just went literal, my novel wouldn’t be much better than a mere screenplay, like the people in my writer's circle are working on! We meet every Thursday at Barriques, usually their critiques are terrible but it's nice to have someone to bounce ideas off of.

But getting back to my novel, I found my perfect metaphor when I decided to have my protagonist look into a fish tank. See, he looks into the eye of one of the fish and, for a brief moment, they identify with each other. They are both trapped but should be free, one in a glass tank filled with water, the other in a glass tank filled with cubicles. I even wrote that in the margins so publishers will understand, you know how dumb suits are.

So what are your plans for the holidays? Going to visit the family?

Ooh, sorry to hear about your sister. I know what you are going through, I’m writing about how one of my secondary characters has to deal with her mother going to Alzheimer’s. No, I know that it’s a different terminal illness than what your family is dealing with but I just wanted to tell you, I’m there for you. And the topic of terminal illness just made me think of the old novel.

Speaking of the novel, I hope to spend my vacation week hammering down on chapter 1. It’s my first impression to the reader and I only get one shot at it! Originally, I was going to open with a flashback to ’96 when my protagonist briefly meets his romantic interest at a college kegger but he’s too shy to make a move, then we’d come to the present where they would meet again for the first time in 12 years. But my writer’s circle felt that I was a bit cliched so instead I’m going to flashback even further and have them run into each other on the subway at the age of 8, when my protagonist’s family is on a vacation to New York City. The hustle and bustle of Gotham through the eyes of a young Midwestern boy should give me some strong prose.

But I’m so glad I ran into you. Most of the conversations I have during the day are just with my co-workers. All they can talk about is their babies. God, you can’t believe how annoying it is to deal with people who keep bringing up the same inane topic, shoehorning it into every conversation so they can talk about their little creation. Though, it does make for a humorous interlude in chapter 4, when my protagonist is trapped on an elevator with his boss and he has to hear his boss talk about his kids.

Satan Testifies Before Congress, Seeks Emergency Bailout For Hell

WASHINGTON – Satan, the Prince of Darkness and CEO of Hell, came before the Senate today to again ask for a 43 billion-dollar bridge loan for his struggling underworld domain. For his second attempt to get a bailout for Hell, Satan arrived on Capitol Hill in a humble Prius after his previous mode of transport, bursting forth in a cloud of sulfur from the belly of a stillborn pig, was criticized as being too flashy.

Satan immediately spoke with an uncharacteristically dire tone, “Without sufficient liquid capital to keep the Inferno running, all Hell operations may be forced to shut down by the beginning of 2009.”

The Prince of Darkness blames a variety of factors for Hell’s current cash crunch. The deceiver blamed the economic recession for turning people away from decadence and greed, two of Hell’s financial pillars. Satan also blamed the staggering legacy costs of eternally tormenting the billions of souls that make up Hell’s ever increasing population, stating that it costs millions “just to bulk buy all of the maggots needed to feed on the sinners’ flesh.” Satan himself admitted that he did not think about the ongoing costs of torturing all of these souls when he signed the contracts to buy millons of baby boomers' souls during the 1980’s.

Several Senators quickly spoke up for the troubled netherworld, saying that as one of the big 3 afterlives, along with Limbo and privately owned Heaven, Hell was “too big to fail.” Other Senators brought up the hundreds of thousands of jobs in Hell-related industries that would be threatened by the Hell’s closure.

“If the Dark Lord’s temptations to gamble, drink, and commit adultery go away,” said Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nevada), “The job losses to my constituents in Las Vegas and Reno will be staggering.”

Other Senators were quick to pounce on the devil, saying that Hell’s crisis was it’s own fault and that it was undeserving of a federal bailout. Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Florida) brought up Satan’s well-known reputation as “a man of wealth and taste," as Martinez blamed Satan’s extravagant excesses for Hell’s financial troubles. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-California) then listed off a number of Satan’s business failures including his loss of a 3.7 million-dollar gold fiddle in a fiddling contest that turned into a PR-damaging fiasco.

“It says here that the boy you challenged was carrying a fiddle at the time, shouldn’t you have figured out that he probably practiced fiddling and might be a challenge?” asked Boxer, “He was from the great state of Georgia, why didn’t you challenge him to something he was going to suck at, like reading?”

Boxer went on to add, “What does Hell get out of owning any of these souls anyway?”

Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Michigan) shows several examples of Hell's multi-million dollar campaigns to promote evil that she critiques as, "wasteful and needless spending."

Satan meanwhile tried to point out bright spots in Hell’s investment portfolio, such as Hell’s rights to 15 percent of the syndication revenue of popular television sitcom Two and a Half Men. The CEO uncomfortably shifted on his cloven hooves as he proposed drastic steps he was willing to take to keep his dark domain afloat with the help of a Federal loan. Satan presented plans to sell off one of the outer-levels for Hell for condo development and pending sponsorship deals on the seven deadly sins such as “Wrath: Powered By Google” or “KFC’s Gluttony.”

The Prince of Darkness began to win over a few skeptical Democratic leaders in the Senate as he argued that the continued existence of Hell as vital for getting American consumers to make eco-friendly choices.

“Have you seen how proud people are when they carry around their reusable green grocery tote bags? Let us not forget that Pride is one of the seven deadly sins,” said Satan, “Hell will play a crucial role in restructuring the American economy for green-collar jobs.”

Even with his environmental plea, the bailout for Hades still looked like it was set to fail until Satan reminded Evangelical Senators that without Hell there would be no Anti-Christ, a prerequisite for the End Times.

“As you can see here, in our long-term financial forecast, I will impregnate an unclean jackal and my brood, the anti-Christ, shall be born. It shall bring about the End of Days,” said Lucifer. Satan went on to apologize for forgetting to mention that earlier. He said he was used to his previous Congressional testimonies, where former-Senator Bill Frist would bring up the need for the coming Apocalypse before Satan even had a chance to get to it.

With Democrats convinced that Satan had a feasible green business plan and Republicans eager to bring about the glorious return of Jesus Christ, the bailout of Hell overwhelmingly passed the Senate.

“It is now clear that the taxpayers need to help out Satan,” said Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kansas), “After all, it’s not like he is as bad as Citigroup.”

The cards show me you've got a bright future and by cards, I mean greeting cards!

Guest Blog by: Scott DeLillo

Alright, I know things have been tough recently in America but let’s get the energy back up.

I know the economy is terrible…
banks and the big 3 auto collapsin’…
your 401k is so far into the crapper it’s cloging the drain…
but I’ve got the solution for your problems… say it with me…

Greeting Cards!


That’s right, I’m Scott DeLillo and 3 years ago, I was just like you. I was living on the streets, getting by on nothing but ramen noodles and a little hope. But that's when I found my calling and became a freelance greeting card writer. Now I’m renting a house that my landlord tells me is valued at 120 thousand dollars. That’s thousand with a t. And now I’m going help some of you get a slice of the delicious pie that’s writing greeting cards. Like you. And you, sir. Yes, ma'am, you too. Not you. But you.

For thousands of years, greeting cards have served an important purpose for every holiday and occasion that we kinda care about. Cards express the feelings we don’t feel enough to express ourselves but are willing to pay to have someone else express them for us. And that someone else is you.

Now, starting off the biz, you are going to be a freelance writer, if you want a staff writing gig at one of the big card companies you better be prepared to do a lot of sexual favors. I know a guy who orally pleasured the entire board of directors at American Greetings and all he got was Flag Day cards, that’s the Detroit Lions of greeting card accounts. You don’t want to know what you’ve got to do to make it into the ornament racket.

I won’t lie, this ain’t an easy business. In the last 8 years, there’s been in a bit of a downturn in the G.C.B. (Greeting Card Business, that’s industry speak) as young people have moved to sending out their greetings over the Facebook.. Are you happy when somebody writess you a happy birthday message on your Facebook wall that cost them nothing at all to send? Well, you shouldn’t be. In the G.C.B. we have a saying, “If they aren’t willing to spend, they aren’t really your friend.”

Let me throw some stats at ya. Since Facebook came to the UW in 2004, armed robberies in the downtown Madison area have gone up 7%. Coincidence? Of course not.

But thanks to the now-officialp recession, greeting cards are poised to make the biggest comeback since Jesus Christ (fyi, inspirational cards are huge this year. Throw in a Bible Verse and you are moving mondo card stock. I call it, Paul amongst the Cashrithians).

Cha-ching!

But because of the economy, the average person can’t afford to go home so they are sending cards instead. Sure, you’d like to spend some quality time with dear old Dad but it’s just as good to mail him a card that says, “Dads are like a large pizza. They are the big cheese.”. In fact, it’s even better because that great pizza-dad copy(mine) is better than anything Sally Q. Envelope Licker is going to say around the table and she won’t have to deal with the awkward situation when her brother gets too drunk off of the egg nog and has a PTSD episode from his time in Iraq. WHAT ARE THEY DOING TO OUR BOYS?

In fact, this Christmas, I’m still sending my Grandma a present along with her card. But that present, just a big empty box with another card inside. That’s right, two cards, that’s double the commission.

Nobody buys this artsy crap anymore.

Now what kind of cards should you write, well, pretty much any kind imaginable: weddings, divorces, got a job, got laid off, cards that look like they are going to be erotic but then you open them up and it’s really a picture of a really fat women, and retirements. But what you have to remember is that most cards are bought by women. It makes sense, cards are emotional and they are the ones who feel emotions. So for us guys, we’ve got to put ourselves into the mind of a woman.

Women love pugs.

Now to write for the female audience your card has to include one of the two following fields that are universal for all women, at least according to the best data the G.C.B. has to offer. First of all, all women love shopping. They live for the accumulation of expensive flashy material goods, they are like rappers with vaginas. When you are backed into a hard card topic like cancer, pet dying or pet dying of cancer, you can always throw in a punch line about buying more shoes. It’s not rocket science here folks. Secondly, all women are constantly trying to lose weight. They are fighting an ever-present battle with their mortal nemesis and secret lover, chocolate. I swear the only reason Eve ate that apple is because the serpent musta coated it in chocolate. Hot crap, that’s a good greeting card. None of you can use that, it’s mine. I see that on an Shoebox card and I will sue your ass.

Alright, so those are some basic tips to get you started. I’ll be seeing you all later… on the greeting card racks!