







I got that stunning image at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab website. Once or twice a month, an unsuspecting co-worker will say something like, "Gee whiz, that's a nice picture. What is it?"
That's when I get to say, "It's a photo of your anus." Then, depending on who the visitor is, Steve (the guy who sits in the cubicle next to me) and I either laugh uproariously for the umpteenth time or struggle to not laugh (for the umpteenth time).
Of course there are endless riffs you can play. When Joe, the 50 year old manager from Accounting, responds with "Uranus, looks like that? Well, I never."
You can follow up with,
"Your anus never looked so good!"
or
"Your anus was always my favorite when I was a kid."
or the ever popular
"Not my anus, your anus!"
When that cute P.R. person says, "I never knew Uranus was so beautiful."
You can counter with, "If you think my anus is beautiful, stick around. I use a photo of my dick as a screensaver." Don't really do that. Keep the shop talk centered on your anus.
Trust Steve and me. It never gets old. It's also fun to watch their reaction when the lights in their heads finally go on. Where I work, these lights usually take a long time and are exceedingly dim. Your results may vary.
Who knew Uranus could be so good for workplace morale?





Funny thing is that a crappy travel website reposted my bit and treated it like it was a real guide. Their automated robot even slapped some actual photos of Croatia under it.
The big cathedral is not called the Cathedral of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary on the Rocks
I was cleaning off my desk at home when I found an old copy of the Russia Journal. I appeared in an article with Maureen Dowd about the funniness of freedom fries. It's the second time I have crossed paths with Ms. Dowd. Remember when I bitched about the time at National Lampoon when her lame Santa Claus bit bumped my killer Bush bit ruining Christmas for everyone expecting a present from me. No? That post is called Maureen Dowd's cameltoe.
The best part of the article is that when they referred to my site they got the name wrong. They called it unclemelon.org. Everyone knows that my site is called unclemelon.com. UncleMelon.org is the website for an organization that raises money for old guys with gigantism of the testes.
When they used the wrong name, I lost out on all the traffic I would have gotten from the massive readership of the Russia Journal. Think of all the oligarch hating Russians that prefer their news in English that I missed out on. One of those guys was a fan that actually e-mailed me about the article which is how I found about it. 
Last week, when the editors at George Magazine came to me with this assignment, I jumped on it. What the heck, I mean Zagreb is 873rd on my list of cities I sort of want to visit.When I travel to a weird, former Soviet satellite place, I like to get my feet firmly on the ground by acquainting myself with the local history. I told the Croat cabbie to take me to the famous Nazi and he punched me in the face. Croat is one of those words that's incredibly fun to say but when you typ it out it looks like its got to be missing some letters. "Croat." Cool sounding but a little touchy with a quick right hand. I finally found a Serb cabbie that took me on a tour of Upper Town and left me off at the Cathedral of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary on the Rocks. Try getting that on the front of a CYO basketball jersey!
The cathedral houses the well preserved remains of Blessed Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac. You remember him. The Nazi sympathizer with a soft spot for Jews but an extremely hard spot for the Eastern Orthodox and Serbs. I believe he's the Patron Saint of Closemindedness and Hatred which makes him pretty damn popular. The nausea you get from seeing him in his elaborate tomb will make any dinner unpalatable so it's time to start drinking.
Friday 8 P.M.
At Cafe Jazz order a Fuzzy Liverwurst (157 kunas). It's a mix of Croatian vodka and a delightful local liqueur called Kümmel that can only be described as sweet, liquid caraway. The drink comes garnished with a dill pickle and a slice of liverwurst. Place those in your ears because Croatian Jazz makes Bulgarian Jazz seem as good as Estonian Jazz.
Saturday 2 P.M.
Get your Kümmel induced hangover to Jelacic Square for some coffee and the saturday morning ritual called "SpiXXXa." Watch the intricate dance of the French, Russian and Californian porn producers as they recruit the leggy, high-heeled blondes inhabiting every patio chair in the piazza. Purchase a vente cafe americano with an extra shot at Starbücks (43 kunas), sit your fat ass down and enjoy the spectacle.
Saturday 4 P.M.
For a late lunch, eschew the overpriced restaurants and walk to Zagreb's best open air market, Dolac. Under the red umbrellas, choose from the amazing spread of seasonal nuts, cheeses, fruits and vegetables. Below is a local Croatian fruitmonger with a slice of a local delicacy called watermelon. Try it. You didn't pay $5,000 and travel halfway across the world to eat at McDonalds, did you?

Saturday 8 P.M.
With the exotic taste of watermelon still on your lips, visit Luigi's, a Dalamation-style tavern, and order the frog and eel stew (84 kunas). If you ask the waiter nicely, he will flip the floating frogs over because sometimes their beady little eyes looking up at you can be down right unappetizing.
Saturday 11 P.M.
Go clubbing in Jaregrub within the warren of hotspots found in the shadow of that scary neo-gigantic cathedral. To get up the courage to hit on those extremely attractive blondes that were too smart to fall for those porn producers practiced lines, try a Tesla Coil (212 kunas), an alternating set of 3 dozen liquor shots served in actual vacuum tubes designed by Nikola Tesla.
Saturday 12:15 P.M.
Pass out.
Sunday 10 A.M.
At Runa's, a Weimaraner-style cafe, order the traditional snail and snot omelet with a side of smoky pickled slugs (40 kunas) or you could eat toast and jam (57 kunas).

Sunday 1 P.M.
Purge last night's demons with a modest walk through the Croatian Museum of Naive Art (adult, 20 kunas; children, 10 kunas). Marvel that all those plump hard-working women with those bodies so well evolved to dig potatoes with a stick have produced all those leggy, high-heeled blondes. Before catching your plane, grab lunch at one of the many pushcarts found outside the museum. Get a Coca Cola and Stalin Burger (243 kunas). The juicy burger is 95% ground Serbian infant with 5% Albanian filler and was a personal favorite of the former Cardinal. Muy delicioso!
Note: File this under An Unfuckingbelievable Coincidence. I post this bit and I immediately go check my e-mail and British FHM has sent an article about the hot women of Croatia called, Croatians, Not All Completely Useless.
Also unbelievable, tho not the unfucking kind, the British FHM used to love UncleMelon and I had a semi-working arrangement with them. For some reason, my humor goes over well in England, Australia, Canada and Iceland. Croatia? Not so good.



While on vacation, I forgot to put deodorant on. Given that I hadn't showered in 5 days because the campground had no shower, I was as ripe as a late August tomato falling from the vine, but that's not the story. If I sweat without antiperspirant coating the delicate skin of my armpit, I get this angry, raw rash as red as a late August tomato falling from the vine.

May the Schwartz be with you, young Wrightwalker...
I'm back from a week in Maine. I was happy to discover that all three of my readers hung in there and did not abandon me. A personal thanks to Rob, Muriel and Patsy.
I started with a short story called One and a Half Jews in a Canoe that Dave Eggers called lyrical and laugh out loud funny. I told him to use lol next time cause then the kids will think he's cool.
The short story became a screenplay. The first scene I wrote for Lobster Cop was a fishing scene. Our hero, Jake Marino is fishing in a rowboat with our villian, Commodore Dudley Saltonstall III. For Jake, think a skinnier Vince Vaughn with a slight New York accent. For the Commodore, think Ted Knight in Caddyshack.
One hundred and fourteen pages later, I'm four pages over and because of the whole story arc, three act structure, and pushing the plot forward crap, I'm forced to cut the fishing scene -- the original, first-written scene that got the whole thing started in the first place.
No screenplay this time, but I plan on a mess of Maine posts.

Here's a TEX message to you Yankee fans. The mouth-breathing first baseman with the scrunched up face is your best shot.
As a former catcher, I'm voting for Joe Mauer.

Brett Favre made 890 million dollars playing football. This makes him the richest man in Hattiesburg by $889.5 million. The next richest guy has a lot of pigs. He doesn't even bother to turn it into dollars. He just sends the IRS a couple of piglets every year.
I did some exhaustive research for a few minutes and learned a thing or two about Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Two things actually, because that's all there is to know about Hattiesburg. First, it was named after a wife named Hattie who was born without an edge to her face.
Combine it with a photo of a dog with a grotesquely long tongue that was probably photoshopped by somebody else.
I used this image in How to Eat Pussy*or Everything You Need to Know About Cunnilingus But You Were Too Busy Picking the Hairs Out of Your Teeth to Ask.
Afterword
The only downside to this Great Moment is that everyone seems to think that the guy is me. That guy is not me, and that photo up there on the right of the blog is not me either. It's Yankee GM Brian Cashman with a NY Met hat photoshopped on his head (btw, not a great moment). The day my actual photo shows up on the internet I will be sure to notify you.
It was old, real old. The kind that popped off the can. The kind that littered our highways and cut our feet open at Jones Beach. Finally, I owned something that I could bring to the Antiques Roadshow. I slipped it in my pocket while my mom was busy weeding the azaleas and kept on digging.
The next artifact was plastic. No analysis of the teeth marks was necessary. My old man went through a longer than normal tiparillos phase. He was a White Owl man, though despite the claims in the television ads, this never resulted in him getting groped by Joey Heatherton. There was nothing he didn't smoke, sequentially, cigarettes, cigars, a ridiculous Hugh Hefner pipe, skinny cigars with plastic mouthpieces, *INSIDE JOKE WARNING*
I had reached what we amateur archeologists call a landscape within my dig. A landscape, or horizon if you will, that most probably carbon dated back to the 1970's. I asked my mother to fetch a brush so that I could more carefully reveal my next find. She ignored me. I asked for a lemonade. She just continued weeding. My hole was now big enough for the ball of the yew. Stop snickering. The ball of the yew was the burlap wrapped roots of the bush not it's external genitalia. The yew, being a vascular plant, used pistols and stamens for sexual reproduction not balls and stems.
The sweat on my brow felt good and so I pushed on. A few inches deeper and I found this.
An abandoned bayonet from a little plastic M1. GI Joe. A 12 inch GI Joe. Sweet merciful crap! The Olduvai Man of action figures. My dream of owning a Wii was within my grasp. I dug quicker.
A Russian anti-tank grenade! How did I know this was a Russian anti-tank grenade? Well, it wasn't an American "pineapple" grenade and me and my brother were sort of Jewish, so playing with dolls dressed up like Nazis was considered verboten back in the day. But a nice, Cold War Ruskie caught sneaking across the Czechoslovakian border was considered the perfect enemy.Now I was excited. Screw the accessories! I knew that there had to be dozens of GI Joes scattered throughout the rolling hills of Dix. My shovel flew -- and than I saw the pale flesh of a Joe rising up out of the soil. A trigger hand! An articulated arm with outrageously complicated metal hinges -- clearly first generation action figure design.
And nothing else. No torso. No legs. No head. No left arm. What horrors had befallen this Joe? The Viet Cong, the dog, the girl next door, me? I dug holes like Sigourney Weaver and nothing. The End.Come on, if I had cashed in a 12 inch GI Joe for a Wii would I be wasting my time blogging? If you got the Sigourney Weaver reference, I'm buying. If you want more GI Joe humor with MUCH LESS REQUIRED READING, go to CafterD.
President Obama is funny, edgy, dark and pretty damn funny. Who knew? I found this in the New York Times Magazine on Sunday, Funny Obama.
That's the top of my dresser and that's a fallen Little David Ortiz -- and I refuse to pick him up and stick him back into his base. I've picked Little David Ortiz up about a million times since the summer of 2004 but not today, not anymore.
That's a bar stool with the faces of many of the perfectly tooled cogs of the Machine. Bill Simmons found it at a convention. Lots of great stuff. Go!
Later in 1978, I was in a room at a party, wearing my red, Red Sox hat adrift in a sea of angry, dark blue Yankee fans, watching TV, when Bucky Dent did what he did and, even more memorably, Yaz ( a fellow Long Islander) didn't do what he might have.
That's why I bought Little David Ortiz back in the late summer of 2004 and set him up in the kitchen. When the Sox lost a game, everyone who cared found something to put on Little David Ortiz before the next game. When the Sox won, there was much rejoicing and our Little David Ortiz shrine got partial credit. When the Sox won it all, well, Little David Ortiz became a legend.
Now, its a late summer tradition, moving Little David Ortiz from my dresser to the kitchen, dusting him off and removing last seasons collection of talismans. The kids looked forward to it. It was like getting to bring down the big box of Christmas stuff in August.
It's getting to be that time of year and I don't know what to do.
John Hughes had a major influence on me. Not through his movies, although I liked a bunch of them, but with his writing at National Lampoon.
