Postcards from The Pug Bus

Lifting a satirical leg on popular culture

Persons in the Ether

Question of the Week

Heartbreaker or heartbroken?

GL

Gert Lampley, retired apology archivist

Currently avoiding Dayton, OH

Heartbroken. Heartbreak gives a person depth, posture problems, and one drawer full of things that should have been thrown away during the Clinton administration. Heartbreak is not pleasant, but at least it comes with receipts.

VC

Vance Cribble, certified exit strategist

Last seen near a bus station in Reno, NV

Heartbreaker. Not proudly, but efficiently. Some people end relationships with long talks and herbal tea. I prefer a clean emotional incision, followed by relocation and a new email address no one deserves.

SL

Shonda Leek, municipal tenderness inspector

Allegedly stationed outside Utica, NY

Both, obviously. First you break someone’s heart by being honest, then your own breaks because honesty turns out to be less freeing than advertised. Love is just a minor clerical error with candles.

Book of Daze: Wishbone Day, the Woke Thanksgiving℠

6 years philmaggitti bookof-daze

What we casually refer to as Thanksgiving should properly be called You’re on Indian Land Day; but who wants to put up with drunken relatives, tryptophan poisoning, holiday traffic, football, and severe gastric distress to celebrate a land grab that doesn’t merit celebrating? Let’s talk about wishbones instead. Their story is less freighted.

There’s a wishbone offense in football, a Wishbone salad dressing, a 1990s Wishbone television series, Wish Bone the rapper, a Wishbone app that “lets you compare and vote on tons of cool stuff,” the wishbone position in amour, the Wishbone Bus in some computers, and the most famous wishbone of all . . .

. . . the forked chest bone found in any bird, situated between the neck and chest. Its odd shape results from the fusion of the bird’s two clavicles, commonly known as collarbones, at the base of its sternum.

The wishbone is also called the furcula, which means “little fork” in Latin. It expands and contracts according to the movement of a bird’s thorax. Until the mid-1800s, the street name for furcula was merrythought, which had sexual connotations in English. It was then changed to the more family-friendly wishbone, although its communicants still probably wished for the same thing after the name change.

The tradition of breaking the wishbone did not originate in the United States. An ancient Italian civilization called the Etruscans preserved the furcula of chickens because they (the Etruscans) believed that birds possessed divine powers and that rubbing a wishbone was a way of sharing in those powers.

The Romans adopted this custom, but when their factory farms couldn’t produce sufficient wishbones to satisfy all the people who wanted to stroke them for luck, the Romans came up with the idea of breaking chicken wishbones in two, granting the person with the larger portion his wish, feeding the other person to the lions.

Browse the full Book of Daze

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The preceding is satire. Straight up, Skippy. No warranties are expressed or implied. For life advice, try a professional. For investment tips, try a dart board. For salvation, the gentleman in the robe has been handling that portfolio for 2,000 years.

The Pug Bus Breaking News

The Pug Bus Breaking News requires no email address, no mother's maiden name, no first pet's nickname, and no DNA sample. You simply mash the link below and read.

Deliver It

⚡ Scholars at the Royal Institute for the Advancement of Obvious Things have concluded, after eleven years of exhaustive inquiry, that people who speak at great length in meetings do not thereby become more correct. The findings have been submitted to a committee for review.

⚡ It has been determined by authorities in several jurisdictions that the phrase "I just want to be honest with you" reliably precedes the portion of the conversation one would most prefer not to have. Legislation is pending.

⚡ The Bureau of Perpetual Reassessment has announced that this is not, in fact, the most divided the nation has ever been, a distinction that continues to belong to a prior era when the disagreements concerned rather more consequential matters and people occasionally died over them.

Adverse Effects

The following lines of prose cleverly disguised as poetry may induce brief clarity, misplaced certainty, and the sense that something has already been decided without your approval.

There is a moment, just before sleep,
when the mind loosens its tie
and admits what it spent all day denying.

Read It All

There is a moment, just before sleep,
when the mind loosens its tie
and admits what it spent all day denying.

You remember the thing you said—
not the words,
but the angle of them,
how they leaned slightly wrong
and stayed there.

A life is not ruined in grand gestures.
It goes soft at the edges first.
Corners round off. Standards blur.
You start calling things “fine”
that would have once kept you awake.

Which is the problem.

Because now you do sleep.

Beautifully. Efficiently.
Like someone who has made a series of
very small, very reasonable surrenders
and arranged them into a pillow.