speakingill Archives - Postcards from The Pug Bus

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?

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.

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.

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.

Adverse Effects

The following lines 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.

A satirical cartoon of Ozzie Nelson captures him in a sanitized 1950s living room. He wears his signature brown cardigan with a tie, displaying an unctuous grin that suggests a man holding his family in a polite hostage situation. The illustration is framed like a television set. Since a drawing cannot sue for libel, this image accurately reflects the control freak who engineered a fictional reality while dictating the unscripted lives of his family.

A man who spent fourteen seasons doing nothing on camera so he could spend twenty-four hours a day controlling everything off camera.

Speaking Ill of the Dead

Speaking Ill of the Dead: Because They Cannot Sue for Libel

philmaggitti speakingill 2 months

This is the first installment of Speaking Ill of the Dead, a column born of the belief that just because someone has taken the long… Read More

The Pug Bus Instant Newsletter

The Pug Bus Instant Newsletter 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. The internet worked this way once, before someone realized your attention was worth more to them than it was to you.

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.