By: Kurt Luchs

“What a piece of work is a man!” said Shakespeare; and while it’s possible he was merely gazing into the mirror and feeling his own biceps, he was probably referring to the human mind. A mysterious thing, the mind. One man discovers the principle of electromagnetic anti-gravitational polarity, and wins a Nobel Prize. Another one owns and operates a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise. Perhaps it is the same man wearing a different suit, but in that case he is moonlighting and should declare his second source of income (the Nobel Committee).

The point is, few students of the mind have any inkling of its innermost workings, particularly at the subconscious, or street-level. One who did during the first half of the 20th century was Dr. Aloysius Gilbert, dream researcher and founder of the Gilbert Institute for Advanced and Gruesome Studies, which has given hope to so many. Dr. Gilbert was originally a follower of Freud, till one day Freud noticed he was being followed, and spun around suddenly to confront him.

“Just what are you looking at, eh?”

“The back of your head,” replied Gilbert, with the candor that was his genius. Freud was so moved by his frankness that he immediately rubbed out a lit cigar on the young man’s bald spot. The two became fast friends, remaining inseparable throughout the next 30 minutes, until they broke intellectually over who would pay for the cigar. Afterward, Gilbert credited Freud with teaching him “everything there is to know about eczema, and then some,” and how to get big laughs at parties by impersonating a meerkat.

He soon had a flourishing psychoanalytic practice in Vienna — one so lucrative, in fact, that his wife Grimelda could never comprehend why he persisted in renting himself out as a cuspidor on weekends (poverty had been his close companion during childhood, although when the two met later at a class reunion they hardly recognized each other).

But in treating thousands of refried psyches he sometimes resorted to methods that were, like those of Colonel Kurtz, “unsound.” One former patient charged that, under hypnosis, he had made her don a little sailor suit to “do the hokey pokey.” Worse, none of the respectable journals would publish his papers on dreams, forcing him to send his feverish theories to the only outlet open to him, Scatology Today, where the following cases and comments by Dr. Gilbert first appeared. These are the pivotal works which, in their collective unconsciousness and their intuitive grasp of dream symbology, Carl Jung declared “every bit as profound as the lyrics to ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat.’” Read the full story

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(Note: The mnemonics listed below first appeared on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and are now part of a bi-weekly series called “Non-essential Mnemonics.  You can view them in all their resplendent glory at http://mcsweeneys.net/links/mnemonics/.)

Even if we can’t spell the word, we’re all familiar with mnemonics.  Anyone who’s been to grade school has learned about the light spectrum with the help of The Right Rev. Roy G Biv.  Anyone studying North American geography has learned that HOMES is an acronym for the Great Lakes.  Anyone who has seen the movie Johnny Mnemonic knows that Keanu Reeves sucks at life.

Mnemonics are devious little tools employed by teachers to ensure their pupils will remember insignificant bits of information that their brains would otherwise discard to make room for more Miley Cyrus lyrics.  It is because of these insidious devices that adults are still able to recall the order of operations (My Dear Aunt Sally), the notes on the lines of the treble clef (Every Good Boy Does Fine), and the proper spelling of “because” (Big Elephants Can Always Understand Small Elephants) decades after this information was relevant. Read the full story

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Gaze upon my beauty and tremble, oh fallen humanity! Look down on my naked form writhing in this sink you call a bathtub and ponder my immeasurable capacity for good or evil. I am all that you are not, all that you once were, and all that you most fear. I am the beatific, unspoiled future of the human race, and you are rightly terrified in my presence. I realize you don’t often encounter a pure potentiality that has yet to be actualized by education and sensory stimuli, and your offerings of many-colored rattles, things to suck on, and scented wipes for my unmentionable areas are received with gratitude. However, your attempts to equip me with empirical familiarity with the objects of this world are not appreciated and I ask that you cease and desist posthaste…

Read the rest of this article at: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2009/5/20woodyard.html

Popularity: 36% [?]

By: Frank Ferri

THE “HICCUP DEFENSE”
Show me someone who has had the hiccups, and I’ll show you a person who asked — no, demanded — that someone scare the hiccups out of them. The facts show that my client is the real victim, guilty of being a devoted wife, wanting only to please her husband. Upon his request, she attempted to scare his hiccups away. She did what any of us would do — she grabbed the nearest flamethrower and unleashed a scare-inducing blast of fire. But my client didn’t fully understand how to operate the flamethrower. You know how obfuscating instructions can be. Have you ever tried to assemble something from IKEA? So yes, my client accidentally turned her husband into something resembling a marshmallow that fell into a campfire. But the fact is, he never hiccupped again. As for my client, she lost a husband. Let’s not forget that.

THE “I’M JUST NOT A MORNING PERSON DEFENSE”
My client is much like my nephew. If he doesn’t get his sleep, he — like any of us — gets cranky, irritable and, if we’re being honest, homicidal. He simply isn’t a morning person and shouldn’t be held responsible for any actions before noon. The gentleman from the phone company knocked on my client’s door sometime between 9:45 a.m. and 10:10 a.m. This may not seem like an ungodly hour, but my client is jobless.  He is the victim of a plummeting economy and a bruised ego that won’t even allow him to seek employment. Mornings are hard for him. That fateful early morning knock — a knock we can all agree was a mistake — is the reason a man was dismembered, placed in several trash bags, weighted down and tossed into the East River. Or was it? The prosecution failed to mention that the “victim” was single, in his mid-thirties, never married and had no kids. Makes you wonder. Was he a violent man? A drug-addled miscreant posing as a phone technician? Was he an aspiring gang member whose final stage of initiation was to kill my client? Who am I to say? But then again, who am I to deny any of that? The prosecution certainly didn’t address those possibilities. Regardless, may the “victim” rest in peace even though he disturbed my client’s rest before noon. Read the full story

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There has been another minor victory in my ongoing war to increase TTM’s interests in foreign lands.  McSweeney’s has published another of my moderately humorous pieces.  Some see this as a shameful betrayal of my matrimonial vows to The Talking Mirror.  I see it as one step closer to TTM conquering and colonizing McSweeney’s.  Either way, I hope you enjoy…

A Performance Review From My Boss, The Inebriate

I would also like to offer my most sincere thanks to Joel Bobbett for his significant thematic and humorous contributions.

Popularity: 46% [?]

"Hello, we're from the Mahdi Babysitting Service. Enjoy your date night!"

“Anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr — long a thorn in the side of the US military and Iraqi government — intends to disarm his once-dominant Mahdi Army militia and remake it as a social-services organization.” — Wall Street Journal, August 5, 2008

We renounce and deplore every form of partisanship. It is time for all Iraqis to put aside their differences and come together to rebuild our ravaged land. Here’s how we in the Mahdi Army pledge to help:

EDUCATION — Universal education is a goal that men and women of good will from all nations can enthusiastically support. Though should the women support it too enthusiastically, we may have the regrettable duty of setting them on fire. The basic curriculum consists of the writings of al-Sadr, the writings of Marx, and just a smattering of “Everything I Need to Know I Learned in the Madrassa.”

HOUSING — Every Iraqi citizen should own his (or her!) own home, if only to have a convenient window from which to aim a Kalashnikov. We are working with Habitat for Humanity to provide safe, inexpensive dwellings for our people, and with Habitat for Subhumanity to provide free-range, chicken-wire lean-tos for Sunnis. Read the full story

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The kind people at McSweeney’s have finally allowed their editorial standards to sink low enough to consider my writing.  They have consented to publish one of my articles on their website.  Check it out here:

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2009/1/14woodyard.html

It’s not much, but at this point, publication on the website of an obscure, underfunded publisher is enough to get me pretty excited.

Popularity: 26% [?]