Postcards from Panama, Part 3

Dear Friends,

The Hard Taco song for April is called, “Spinneret.” It is so energizing that after you listen to it, you will be able to go to your middle school gymnasium and beat your best time at the shuttle run. 

With warmest regards,

Zach

Postcards from Panama City, Part 3

(You may enjoy re-reading Part 1 and Part 2 beforehand)

3/11/2011

Dear Karen,

I have great news. I hired a secretary to take dictations for me. He is bilingual and does secretarial work full-time for only $300 a month! I will have him sign his name after mine at the bottom so you can see how different our handwriting is. 

I’m very excited about this, because now I can finally get some exercise while I write! As you know, there are three forms of exercise: strength training, toning and cardio. With my body type and long term goals, I have decided to focus 100% of my efforts on toning. I have a "toning diary," which is a piece of graph paper where I will log objective and subjective observations about my muscle tone. 

With warmest regards,

Michael 

y Hector

Numerators of the Lost Ark

Dear Friends,

Your name is Carmencita Calderón. It is 1930, and you are the dance partner of Cachafáz, the most notorious tango dancer in Buenos Aires. His pock-marked face and slick choreography are legendary, but you do not love him. No, your heart belongs to a man they call El Vasco, another professional tango dancer who left Argentina ten years ago to seek his fortunes in the smoky nightclubs of Paris.

After sending you not so much as a letter for years, your lover returns unexpectedly and sweeps you up in a particularly fiery tango. But Cachafáz is a jealous man. He challenges El Vasco to a high stakes dance-off, to the death. You know this is a battle your love cannot win. You must beg him to flee, flee the country this very night and never return!

This, dear friends, is the story of “El Vasco,” the Hard Taco song for March that will break your heart into mil piezas de dolor, a thousand aching splinters.

Numerators of the Lost Ark

The so-called Golden Ratio, (a+b)/a = a/b, has been used as far back as Euclid to make the world’s most beautifully proportioned rectangles. In his seminal textbook Elements (~300 B.C.), Euclid describes an incident in which King Ptolemy spends a whole Saturday working on a new rectangle and neglects to use the Golden Ratio to choose its proportions. Ptolemy invites Euclid to brunch at the palace to show off the rectangle, and all Euclid can do is smile politely and comment about what a nice personality it has. And you know what’s also nice, Your Highness? (a+b)/a = a/b.

Dry Heaves for the Packers

The evolution of a Packers fan between 1997 and 2011.

Dear friends,

This month's Hard Taco release is a (nearly) 7 minute opus called, "The Pottage Point Centennial Band." I realize that only unemployed people have enough free time to listen to something that long, which is why I waited until this year to release it.

But before I can write another word about it, let's talk football, because I have a hard time talking about anything else these days.

Nicholas Dodman is an an animal psychologist who wrote a book entitled, "The Dog Who Loved too Much." I haven't read it, but the first chapter was described to me as follows: The author has a patient, a dog, who loves her owner too much. When the owner leaves the house each morning, she becomes so worried that he won't return that she loses control of her bladder. She paces around the house peeing on everything. When he finally comes home at 5 pm, she is so overjoyed to see him that she throws up. The joy is so pervasive that she vomits constantly until he leaves again the next morning, at which point the bladder problem kicks in again.

That is how I feel about the Green Bay Packers. It is a special kind of staggering love that only emotionally disturbed dogs and true sports devotees can experience. We soar, we suffer, and we soar again, and all of it is unhealthy.

Insert not Make Dangerous in Flammable Substance

Dear Friends,

     The Hard Taco song for January, “A Man and His Jeweler” contains no less than three explicit lyrics. This is a bit of a departure for me, because in real life, the dirtiest words I use are zounds, poppycock, criminy, and during Michael Jackson impersonation contests, smooth criminy.

     This song goes out to my late Grandma Shirley, who would have loved cash-money-bling-bling rap if she had lived to see its heyday.

     This being the 104^th Hard Taco Digest, I humbly accept my place among the pantheon of the world’s most successful writers of unwanted emails. Today, I’d like to honor the men and women whose shoulders I stand on with a tribute to some of my favorite writers of indecipherable spam.

   Spoiler alert: the unifying feature of all great spam is the liberal use of the double exclamation point!!

“Electronics and Other Goods”

by m439sfd@nouuunns.com

Friend, are you doing? Honest, Does you approve online purchasing? I often shop goods store in a network, and mainly electronic products, even refrigerators ,yacht!! All products are sold regular discount, so see if you must need commodities at this website. Click and please make a talk!!

Sacred Blood Pact or Profane Phlegm-oath?

Dear Friends,

I. You're going to need this: ( )

It's an electronic representation of an opposing thumb and index finger, ready to pinch you. Why do you need electronic pinching? Because there is a glistening new Hard Taco album, “Approach Approach Conflict," and nothing could be dreamier.

The President of the United States has already released this statement:

"Holla, fellow Americans. At this time I wish I was in a deep coma, so I could finally listen to Hard Taco's Approach Approach Conflict 24 hours a day without missing state dinners. I only regret that strangling all nine Supreme Court justices won't free up enough seats to appoint all the marvelous musicians who played on this album. Somebody e-pinch me!"

Get some Hard Taco CDs today, because otherwise I’ll stop bugging you.

II. What is up? Therefore, up is what. Q.E.D.

Remember 17 years ago, when I guaranteed one new Hard Taco song a month, even though I despise doing it with all my heart? I was hoping you’d forget by now, but a promise is a promise. (A = A. Q.E.D.) Whether it was a sacred blood pact or merely a profane phlegm-oath, I suppose I’ll have to make good.

The Hard Taco song for December is called, "Secret Chaver." Unless you're that guy at the soup kitchen who actually ladles the soup, there is no better use of your next four minutes than listening to this song. (Yes, I'm talking to you, guy who buses trays at the soup kitchen.) 

Mud: It's for Slinging

Dear Friends,

The Hard Taco song for November is called, “The Penny Seats Are Nothing But Trouble.” These Penny Seats apparently are a theatre company in Ann Arbor, and let me tell you something… they are bad news. If you look up “Up to no good” in the dictionary, you will find that it’s not there, because it’s more of a phrase than a word. If you squint, however, you can imagine a picture of those Penny Seats crammed in the tiny space between “uptight” and “uptown.”

Listen to “The Penny Seats Are Nothing But Trouble,” because Merriam and Webster agree: these lovely Hard Taco songs are the very definition of the word, “Up to Some Good.”

Poll-ish Mustard: How to Forget Not to Vote Tomorrow

This may be the last thing you read before mid-term elections, so I feel obligated to volunteer my endorsements for the Michigan gubernatorial race. I am in a unique position to provide coverage of this race, because I have access to my answering machine. The rest of the year, when I pick up the phone and there’s a long pause, it is usually followed by heavy breathing. But come October of an even-numbered year, that pause is invariably precedes an attack ad against one of the candidates (or if they really want my vote, heavy breathing followed by an attack ad.) Here is what my answering machine has to say about our gubernatorial candidates, Virg Bernero (D) and Rick Snyder (R).

Virg Bernero wants to write a blank check to the same career politicians who spent the last four years trimming the thumbnails of Big Insurance.

Rick Snyder wants the tears of the hard-working working class and occasionally-hard-working upper middle class families to smear the mascara of his right wing agenda all over the dirty hands of the Lansing mandatory abortion lobby.

It's More of a Science UNfair, if You Ask Me

Dear Friends,

Last weekend, I was driving around Boca Raton in a rental car, flipping through the Miami radio stations. Normally, I would be the last person to belittle the artistic value of pop music, but I was feeling inexplicably cantankerous. The ubiquitous octogenarians must excrete some kind of pheromone that makes passersby disparaging and close-minded. Every time a new song came on that I didn’t recognize, I said to myself, “Pffff. This could have been written by a 5 year-old.” By time we reached our destination, my eyes were sore from rolling so much.

On the plane ride home I took a few deep breaths and began to think clearly again. (Thanks, Delta Airlines geriatric miasma-removing air filters!) The reason great songs sound like they were written by 5-year-olds is that 5-year olds write great songs. With that premise, I immediately set Scarlett to work.

The result is “I’m on a Plane,” the first Hard Taco song in over a decade with co-authored lyrics. I think you will agree that it contains intangibles.

The Making of an Evil Scientist

I was one of a few students in my 9^th grade class chosen to represent our school at the regional science fair. My project, entitled “Up and Add ‘Em,” offered groundbreaking evidence that subjects could complete more math problems in 60 seconds if they were standing up rather than sitting down. Upon closer inspection, I actually proved that standing subjects could do more math problems in 70 seconds than sitting subjects could do in 60 seconds. Also, the smarter kids were placed in the standing group. These were just details, though, and there wasn’t enough room on the poster for details.

To this day, I believe I could have beaten Katrina Sopkovich in the Behavioral Science category if I hadn’t muddled the oral presentation. After I elegantly expounded on the mind-blowing significance of my fraudulent conclusions, a tiny white-haired judge asked me, “What are your dependent and independent variables?”

My what? Seconds ticked by. I heard myself mumbling something like, “Well, it depends. It varies, it’s all variable, actually.”

Ladies and gentlemen, the blue ribbon goes to Ms. Sopkovich for her study on smell memory!

I vowed that I would never make that mistake again. When the time came to devise a 10th grade biology project, I was an authority on scientific methodology, and I was ready to get back to what I did best… fudging data. Ms. Kolb surprised us by announcing that we would each have a $30 budget to cover supplies. (Yes, this was a public school, for those of you feeling nostalgic for the days of adequate educational funding.)

She passed around a 500 page catalog of biological supplies, and it was all in there. Petri dishes with blood agar, Petri dishes with chocolate agar, live fruit flies with different colored eyes, ether for sedating them and cover slips for squishing them. And what do you know? They sell dissection specimens. Fetal pig... $22. Sheep brain... $6. Monkey heart… $11.

Oh my God Monkey vagina… $4 for one or $20 for six.

There wasn’t a picture. Why wasn’t there a picture? They had a picture of the fetal pig. And did that say $20 for six? It was baffling beyond reason that this unusual commodity was in the catalog at all, let alone with an incentive discount. I imagined that somewhere in Germany, a bearded man in a lab coat was ripping the page out of the catalog and shouting to a roomful of collaborators, "True, we only need one to complete our study, but a deal like this can not… must not be ignored!"

I tried very hard to think of an experiment that would justify this purchase, but I just wasn’t that creative. More to the point, I wasn’t that brave. I couldn’t see myself standing by my poster, telling the judge, “Well, Ma’am, for starters I randomized the monkey vaginas into two groups of three.”

“And before I go further, let me just point out that the independent variable is which of these two groups a given monkey vagina is in.”

 
No, in the end I spent my $30 on milkweed bugs and sulfuric acid. The project is not worth explaining, but I will tell you this: many bugs died, and my improbable hypothesis was overwhelmingly supported by pages and pages of made up numbers. I’m sure Ms. Kolb was on to me, but she, like every other teacher, was a sucker for neat handwriting and a clear plastic binder.

With warmest regards,

Zach