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.

Observe National Side Saddle Day, Enrage a Feminist℠

6 years philmaggitti bookof-daze

Today is National Side Saddle Day, that noble observance in which we honor the brave riders—almost exclusively women—who once believed that dignity, modesty, and personal safety could all coexist on the back of a moving horse. History would later clarify: it could not.

Side saddle, for the uninitiated, is the riding style in which a woman perches sideways atop a horse, hands gripping the reins, feet arranged like a folded lawn chair, knees functioning as the world’s first seat belt. The idea was that this allowed a lady to ride without straddling the horse, thus preserving propriety, posture, and any chance of walking comfortably afterward.

The practice reached its cultural peak during the era when long skirts, high collars, and fainting couches roamed the Earth. Aristocrats promoted the technique as “perfectly safe,” which was true provided that the horse did not move, breathe, or think independently. In actual use, however, side-saddle riders often found themselves slipping, dangling, or performing involuntary cartwheels into the shrubbery—activities collectively known as “Edwardian Pilates.”

Today’s holiday encourages the rest of us to appreciate the grit of those early riders. Imagine maintaining elegance while riding sideways at a trot, adjusting your hat, avoiding tree branches, and desperately hoping your mount didn’t have opinions about anything. These riders were the original multitaskers, the forerunners of modern commuters who apply makeup in traffic or hold conference calls during dental cleanings.

Modern equestrians occasionally attempt side saddle for sport, spectacle, or the thrill of tempting gravity, but it remains a historical curiosity—an elegant solution to a problem nobody has anymore.

So raise a toast to the side-saddle pioneers. They sat tall, they rode sideways, and they reminded us that fashion has always demanded sacrifice—especially from anyone unlucky enough to ride it into battle.

Browse the full Book of Daze

Find Us Elsewhere
Instagram
X (Twitter)

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.