Garbage Pail – Things That Disturb Me – Column

Garbage Pail

Things That Disturb Me

by William Ham

  1. The fact that the Spice Girls never actually got around to telling us what they want, what they really, really want… and now that Geri’s gone, we may never know.
  2. People who use the words “guesstimate” and “anyhoo.”
  3. That I have yet to be called for jury duty in the court of public opinion.
  4. How porno movies are usually ninety minutes long. I mean, don’t they outlive their usefulness within ten minutes of the credit sequence? Sure, I can spend the remaining eighty minutes admiring the mock-cinema verité approach and how that pas de deux between the bored parochial school girl and the industrial plunger compares favorably with that similar set piece in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, but otherwise, it seems like such a waste of some of our most precious natural resources.
  5. What a gyp that “all-purpose cleanser” is. It did a lousy job balancing my checkbook, its conversational Mandarin translation abilities are well below par, and that shepherd’s pie it cooked me last night was way too watery. Caveat emptor.
  6. The length of time my friends strung me along while I boasted of constantly “striking out” with women. So it wasn’t a bowling metaphor after all.
  7. How I foolishly began my stand-up comedy career at that gay S&M bar. Turns out that “Open Mike Night” had a completely different connotation.
  8. My growing suspicion that the letters in Penthouse Forum are real, but the ones I’ve been getting from my mother aren’t.
  9. That damned Flintstones Chewable Viagra.
  10. Why paintings by dead artists are worth so much money except when you kill them yourself. Now I can’t even sell those abstract-expressionist renderings of Tyne Daly to pay my legal fees.