Vine Flies When You're Having Fun

Multiple wars are raging, nuclear sabers are being rattled, Washington is awash in corruption, inflation is out of control, and the "new" Beatles song was a disappointment. But as the old saying goes, "When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping." Or in my case, I go Vine-ing.

As I've mentioned in previous posts, the Amazon Vine program offers a huge array of free items to a select group of people (like me!) in return for our honest online reviews of the products. A lot of them are great products - but not all of them. Some are just bizarre, baffling, or in horrible taste. And since those are the ones I find amusing, those are the ones I'm going to share with you just for fun.

While browsing Vine today, I found too many odd items to cram in here so I've decided to make this a theme week with fresh posts on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday (which I haven't done in quite a while). Should other news be important enough or funny enough, I'll probably throw that in too. But for now, warm up your holiday shopping engines and join me for another edition of "Capitalism Gone Wild!"

Dim Some, Anyone?

Doing its best imitation of Doc Brown from "Back to the Future," our wild-eyed government once again declared that all of our clocks had to accelerate to 88 miles per hour in order to travel backward in time by one hour so that we can experience what it's like for Biff to squeeze us into unconsciousness with a choking headlock.

There is a group of people who claim that the "Fall back" half of the Daylight Saving Time nightmare is the better of the two annual time changes, some of whom actually claim to like this one because they think it gives them an "extra hour of sleep" These are the same people who think they get "extra spending money" every time they move a five-dollar bill from one pocket to another.

Meanwhile, the clock is ticking and - since it's noon when I'm writing this - I only have about five hours of daylight left to try to accomplish anything. It usually takes me that long just to decide what I'd like to try to accomplish. Because once the world turns black outside my windows, I've already dropped that day into a shallow grave, said a few unprintable words as I pat the dirt into a mound, then returned to my house for coffee or liquor or heroin or whatever the hell can sustain me until morning - assuming that morning will ever come again (no sure thing, now that it's in the hands of the bureaucrats).

FROM THE VAULT

Change her mind.

Hollow Weenie

And there was a little something for Ukraine, too

In the interest of journalistic integrity, not that many other news sources find journalistic integrity interesting, I have to admit that this is a file photo of Biden from last Halloween. Because this year even Joe's PR team realizes that he needs to pretend to be more interested in world crises than using candy to lure potential child-sniffing victims.

Not that costumed kids will be missing out on much. Thanks to Bidenomics, nobody can really afford to be handing out candy except in those microscopic cubes oxymoronically called "fun-size" bites. Which may also explain why the White House is encouraging cash-strapped peons to buy "fun-size" houses, cars, and groceries while using only "fun-size" amounts of energy and medical services so as not to deplete their suddenly "fun-size" savings accounts and retirement portfolios.

Here at stately Jarlsberg Manor, I usually like to decorate my yard for Halloween with a bunch of inflatables, lights, sound effects, and a video projector or two. However, we've had rain for days and I haven't been able to set anything up yet. And there's more rain and the first freeze of the season in the forecast for North Texas. So I'm not sure if I'll be able to properly honor the holiday or if I'll be stuck with 300 teeny-tiny fun-size Milky Ways, Snickers, Twix bars, and M&Ms. 

Which my not-so-fun-size waistline definitely doesn't need. In any event, Happy Halloween to all!

FROM THE CRYPT

To help fill out the page, here is one of my very first "Hope n' Change" cartoons from way back in 2009, before I knew what the webcomic would actually be. It seems Halloween-appropriate and I've taken the liberty of colorizing the black & white original because I could use that for an excuse to put off housework a bit longer.