Postcards from The Pug Bus

Lifting a satirical leg on popular culture

Persons in the Ether

Question of the Week

Salad dressing on the side or on the top?

MB

Marlowe Brint, artisnal jewelry designer

Reportedly outside Santa Fe, NM

On the side, obviously. A salad should retain the illusion of free will until the very last moment. Once dressed, it has chosen a direction and can never go back.

EV

Evelyn Voss, lobster fisher person

May once have lived in Bangor, ME

I prefer it on top, but only in a thin ceremonial line, as priests once applied oils to objects they feared and respected. A salad without dressing is just yard work in a bowl.

CK

Clyde Ketter, attack dog trainer

Unverified, but emphatically from Akron, OH

Neither. The correct approach is to keep the dressing nearby in a separate vessel and let the salad absorb its presence psychologically. That is how my father did it, and his lettuce feared him.

Pope Francis OK with Miley Cyrus Remark

13 years philmaggitti religion

an image

VATICAN CITY–Pope Francis told the website Hunger TV that people should not be so quick to condemn Miley Cyrus for saying she didn’t want some “seventy-year-old Jewish man that doesn’t leave his desk all day, telling me what the clubs want to hear.”

Speaking via Skype, his holiness said, “The young people I follow on Twitter are seeking their own path through their own experience. I was like that when I was twenty. I didn’t want some old man in a white dress in the Vatican telling me there was only one path to salvation. Now that I am an old man in a white dress in the Vatican, I try to practice understanding.”

After pausing to check his text messages, Pope Francis chuckled, ” Render unto Miley the things that are Miley’s. If I were going to a club, I’d probably call Miley Cyrus for advice instead of a seventy-year-old Jewish man..”

The Digital Pope also said he was not offended by Ms. Cyrus’ antics on or off stage.

“Believe me, she’s got nothing on Mary Magdalen, and Jesus did not find Mary’s company objectionable. Though I wouldn’t go so far as to say they ever hooked up.”

One size fits all religions and the gods in charge of those religions. Visit Religion.

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

⚡ The FDA has approved the first prescription-strength silence, available in 30-day supplies for patients whose doctors have determined they are talking too much. Side effects include clarity, improved listening, and a brief period of being liked.

⚡ A bipartisan congressional caucus has formed to study the feasibility of doing nothing faster. Early results suggest the group is ahead of schedule.

⚡ Netflix has announced a new content category called Shows You Will Start But Not Finish, to be featured prominently alongside Things You Have Already Seen Twice and Movies You Forgot You Watched. Subscribers describe the experience as having a lot of options.

Adverse Effects

The following lines of prose cleverly arranged 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.