Hornswaggler | The culture, the humor, a bit of the sports, not so much the politics, and the workplace distraction
Hornswaggle is an alternate spelling of
hornswoggle, an archaic word that means to bamboozle or hoodwink. I take my
pronunciation from the late Harvey Korman in "Blazing Saddles" --
"I want rustlers, cutthroats, murderers,
bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits,
vipers, snipers, conmen, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers,
buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswagglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train
robbers, bank robbers, ass kickers, shit kickers and Methodists!"
In less than an hour at the gym tonight I got overloaded with TV hype about the premiere of "This Is It." Listen up, entertainment industry. This movie is for four sets of people: the stupid, the crazy, the morbidly curious and the willfully blind.* Stop trying to convince the rest of us it's not going be a piece of crap.
Which reminds me. My wife and I took our 4-year-old nephew and 2-year-old niece to see "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs" recently, and there was a preview for "This Is It." Perk your ears one more time, entertainment industry. "Cloudy" is a movie for 8- to 10-year-olds. They don't know who Michael Jackson is, and they shouldn't be made to know. They're perfectly happy as they are. They don't know anything about watching a childhood hero degenerate into a circus freak. Let's preserve their innocence on that score for as long as possible.
Incidentally, the Michael Jackson preview came at the end of 30 minutes of trailers. Thirty minutes. It's hard enough for kids to sit still in a theater for an hour and a half. After they've been bombarded with a half-hour of loud, jarring previews, most of the popcorn is gone and they're already feeling restless. Not good times.
*These people account for four-fifths of the U.S. population, now that I think about it. So yeah, this movie's going to make about a trillion dollars.