Somewhere, a punctuation bank sits empty because people keep adding another and another and another to otherwise perfectly questionable questions.  Each superfluous squiggle sends me to the end of my sanity.  Why?  Why? Why three?  One is enough, two is superfluous. Three is ruinous.  Four and you oughta be arrested. 

The problem here is a lack of repercussions.  They keep abusing punctuation with impunity.  There is no punctuation prison, or even punctuation stockades.  Punctuation abuse may be utterly annoying, but it’s nothing a little good old-fashioned humiliation wouldn ‘t cure.

Well kids, now is just like then, and everything is still going to be okay all over again.

Just a little hiccup, and it’s time to proceed with life as usual on planet beautiful.

Remember this, for posterity: In the Great Depression we bailed out the people, in the Great Recession we bailed out the banks.

Who’d have thought all this mortage mess would lead to a proposal to demolish a whole city’s library system?  Sheesh.  What’s next, Orwell?  Cameras everywhere?  Check. Big Bro watching your every click? Check.  Media/Power conglomeration? Check.  Anti-Democratic forces affecting structural changes? Check.

Keeping one’s passport in order isn’t a bad idea.  Call me paranoid, but ever since college I’ve had this semi-irrational fear of surfboy paramilitary robots coming through and mowing down every last Greenpeace member in the state.

“Please, I swear, I only gave them $25 a year!  I never even read their newsletter, please!  I only paid them to leave me alone!”

Admittedly, this type of thing isn’t usually committed but South of the Border, which is why I had to make them California blond and wearing sunglasses over their dumb red-robot eyes.

We humans apparently still have a little time to fight this fate between now and June 21, at saveoaklandlibrary.org

It was the sound, I assumed, of a tooth snoring.  Not just any tooth. It was Steve, the six million dollar tooth, snoozing back behind my bicuspid.

No, six million dollars is not what I personally spent on the tooth – that figure I prefer to forget.  Naturally, with an idea like a six-million dollar tooth you know the government is behind it, spending a whole lot more than even that.

Because Steve, you see, is a Bionic tooth, better faster stronger (or was it farther?). They’d placed it in my jaw before lunch, and already the thing had tried to kill me twice.

Now I was simply trying not to wake it.  Of all the nasty, mean teeth they could have implanted, I had to get one with a bionically bad attitude.

I considered a return to the dentist, but couldn’t. I recall the look on their faces when they denied any government program, any bionic teeth.  I couldn’t go back there.  I can’t believe how hard it is to find a good dentist.  Find one with any skills at all and they have to have some shadow-government secret nasty bionic tooth experiment planned for you.

Think, Badette, Think! Soon the tooth would wake and it would be too late to get any thinking done at all.

I ducked into a corner store and bought some chewing gum.  Maybe I could smother Steve, or at least muffle him.

***

(For more episodes of Steve the bionic six million dollar tooth, see here.)

Hank’s still here, too. Holding on by his nippers. Only, we’ve taken the whole schtick on the road with the Roadkill Show. Anyway, if we ever get it on the actual road, I promise to let you know next time, since now I’ve worked out all the kinks, ehem.

Well, I just love my bad apple blog. It amuses me to peruse old cannibal chicken stories, tales of tomatofornia, etc. I ought to try to maintain a flow, but so many figurative kidney stones lately in my creative processes. I’ll try, though, if you can make it back for a visit, my fellow word-freaks.

I sure am not, but I am ready to start talking like Captain Kirk of the USS Enterprise.  He was so dramatic, you just can’t help feel like it’s way in the future when you say everything like him.

Even simple communications take on a new futuristic drama filtered through your own version of Kirk-speak:

“Scotty, are you able to you pass the dilithium crystals for my coffee? (No, Jim, we’re breaking up.)

“Spock, did you fuel up the earth vehicle after running your space errands? (Sorry, Jim, I had difficulty finding a docking station at the space mall, and spending further time in the earth vehicle did not seem… rational.)

“Uhura, we have guests beaming in at Oh 400 hours. We need the crew to square the decks.” (Well, Jim, I’m getting my hair done, and I’m getting waxed. Does that count?)

**

In the future, there will be a hair salon on every block but no place to get a bite to eat for miles and miles. 

Wait a minute — that’s not the future. That’s now! Let me try this again…

In the future, all the hair salons will have little snack shops in them, for all the hungry people who wander the neighborhoods and would otherwise starve.  This is my humble dream.

I really had no idea.  I had no idea that  stumbling instructionless through cyberspace could turn-up so many lost friends and relatives.  Here is where they’ve all been and why none of them will ever return an email or pick up their phones.  

Why bother with obsolete one-on-one communications when you can just as easily “share” it on your wall and enjoy the group mind at work?  Nevermind that not everyone on the planet is on myface.  Some are on spacebook.  And some aren’t even on that, although this is hard for some people to believe.

 And oh the shame, the shame of my late entrance to the party.  Not to mention the irritation.  Couldn’t those who had arrived earlier have left a little crumb trail or provided any warning?  

They could have warned, for example, that maybe signing up all your friends before trying out the software isn’t the smartest.  But that’s exactly what fb has you do: get’s you linked in to your entire network without so much as a single instruction as to who is receiving what.   Then you get to publically fumble around trying to learn the inane ways of their crabby little website.  Since helpful explanations aren’t exactly jumping off the page to bite you on the ass, it’s a hit or miss prospect - with an audience.  That is so messed up.

The good news is, starting facebook inspired me to come post a Bad Apple for the first time in way too long.  Apparently, one colossal “use” of cybertime can lead to another.

That’s right.  It turns out chicken cannibalism has been known about and written about for years, at least since 2002, when Jay Rossier wrote in Living with Chickens that:   “…grown chickens will sometimes peck on their coopmates under certain circumstances, and the results can be bloodily disastrous in a very short time.”

Jay devotes more than one disturbing page to describing the age-old practice of chicken cannibalism.  Why those cannibal chickens don’t even wait till their meal dies to start a’dining!  Just get too close under “certain circumstances” and that chicken’s liable to take a’pecking on you (if you’re a chicken, that is).  That’s taking this whole ”living food” thing just way too far. 

When I was a small child, I had a chicken that liked to peck on me.  We named it “Pecky.”  And now I know that mean little pecker was really trying to filler-up on Me meat!  No thank you, I’ll take chickens who eat chicken over chickens who eat me any day of the year.

Of course, letting your chickens out to smoke and drink at the local cannibal chicken saloon is the quickest and surest way to stop this bloody disaster of live feeding.

“Yum–mmm–foood!  Mmm- Wait!  Where’s it going?  Where’d it go!  Where it go!!!???” Steve demanded.

“I swallowed it.”

“Why’d you DO that?”

“Listen, Steve.  We have to come to some kind of understanding.”

“Food! Food! I want want food!”

“Steve, Do I have your attention?”

“Foo-oood!”

“Steve, I didn’t get a bionic tooth so I can have some whiny six million dollar baby on my hands.”

“Oh.  So why did you get a six million dollar tooth, then?”

“As far as I can tell, Steve, this is a secret government experiment to find out if the Six Million Dollar Tooth program is worthwhile or not.”

“Well, it it? Is it worthwhile?”

“I have no idea, Steve. That’s what we are going to find out. You and me.”

“So what is the govenment secret and why are you part of it and what do you expect from me and does it involve something a little more exciting than this interminable dialogue???”

That’s when I shoved another fork full of Lucky Creation Chow Mein in my mouth and shut that freaken tooth up. Man, does that tooth ever sleep?

I refrained from hopping into the oncoming Hummer’s pretty silver grill, but just barely.  What was going on here?   ”Who the hell just told me to jump,” I asked the contents of my head.

“That was me,” said Steve, my bionic tooth.  ”I just wanted to see how much influence I have on you.”

“Steve,” I said, “Dude, try not to kill me, okay? If I die, they probably will bury you in my mouth.”

“No way,” he said.  “I’m worth six million dollars.  They are not leaving me to rot in your mouth.”

“Listen Steve,” I said, casting about for a better argument. “Maybe you won’t be buried in my mouth, but you are there now, so we should try to get along.”

“Whatever.  Are you always this boring?  I need more action. Can’t you run out in traffic or something?  I like the taste of blood.”

“Oh Steve, this is going to be a long…” and my thoughts trailed off.  A long what?  A long lifetime, that’s what. Steve had been placed in my head for the rest of my days on earth.  My living days on earth, that is.

“JUMP!” he said, as a bus approached.  I considered returning to the dentist that moment, but decided to give it time.  Maybe we just got off on the wrong foot.