Postcards from The Pug Bus

Lifting a satirical leg on popular culture

Persons in the Ether

Question of the Week

Passion or stability?

MD

Mavis Drouk, emotional escrow officer

Believed to be near Harrisburg, PA

Stability. Passion is what people choose when they still believe a staircase can be made entirely of sparks. Stability may not sing outside your window, but it does remember where the insurance cards are.

RC

Rufus Clenn, freelance thunder consultant

Last reported west of Tulsa, OK

Passion, obviously. Stability is just boredom wearing shoes with arch support. I want life to arrive late, smell faintly of lightning, and explain nothing until several lamps have been broken.

NV

Nora Vell, deputy curator of small regrets

Possibly sheltering in Eugene, OR

Passion is useful for beginnings, stability for the paperwork afterward. I prefer both in moderation, which is another way of saying I would like to be ruined briefly and then driven home safely.

XXX Domains Sent to Digital Time-Out

21 years philmaggitti

CORNISH FLATS, N.H. — The Internet Police approved a bold new scheme yesterday that would carve out a digital “red-light district” in cyberspace. Known by the charming code name Hooterville, the plan introduces a brand-new class of web addresses, .xxx, specially designated for sites of a certain extracurricular enthusiasm.

According to the proposal, a site currently known as something like www.entirely-too-frisky.com could rebrand itself as www.entirely-too-frisky.xxx, thereby placing a large, helpful neon sign over its own head.

“This is positively brilliant,” said Tim Berners-Lee, who co-created (and famously misspelled) the ‘World Wide’ Web. “When Al Gore and I kicked this thing off, we never imagined it would become the flea market of chaos and questionable taste it is today. It is high time we labeled things clearly—like a pantry, but with fewer cookies.”

Berners-Lee’s remarks came during his keynote address at the annual Internet Police convention. Despite his enthusiasm, the Hooterville plan still looks about as convincing as a celebrity couch-dance on daytime television. For starters, registering for a .xxx address is strictly voluntary. If a site prefers its current label, nothing compels it to move down the street.

And the incentives to stay put are plentiful. First, why create a new address when doing so requires notifying thousands of subscribers that you’ve changed apartments? Second, switching to .xxx branding almost guarantees that the site will be blocked by every firewall from here to Tucumcari. Why volunteer for life behind a velvet rope?

Then there is the matter of cost. A .xxx address runs nearly ten times the going rate of a standard .com domain. Even the Internet Police admitted this seemed steep, though they added, “Well, it is a boutique neighborhood.”

In related news, the Internet Police also approved the following new domain categories: .gwb, .pitt, .jlo, and .idk. The last one is strictly for satire sites and comes pre-installed with a tiny shrug emoji.

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 arranged as poetry may induce brief clarity, misplaced certainty, and the sense that something has already been decided without your approval ...

By seventy you know which doors you walked past without opening,
can name the rooms you never entered,
hear the echoes anyway.

Read It All

By seventy you know which doors you walked past without opening,
can name the rooms you never entered,
hear the echoes anyway.

The years do not accuse.
They simply pile up like newspapers you meant to read,
each one carrying news that is no longer news.

You think: I should have said that differently.
I should have stayed. I should have gone.
The mind is efficient this way,
filing the same cases under the same wrong headings,
finding them again at 3 a.m. in perfect order.

What surprises is not the weight of it
but the patience —
how regret waits,
how it has nowhere else to be,
how it sits across from you at breakfast
and asks for nothing,
knowing you will offer it everything
on your own.

The body slows.
The catalog does not.
You carry the unlived lives
the way old houses carry
the smell of people who are gone —
not haunting exactly,
just present,
just there,
just refusing
the simple courtesy
of leaving.