VOTE EARLY, BUT ONLY ONCE

It has come to my attention that this blog is up for MKE Online’s “Blog of the Week” award. I’d like to welcome those of you who have come here from MKE’s website. If this is your first visit to The Bemusement Park (and let’s face it, it is), I invite you to start off by reading “The Best of TBP” to get a feel for some of the content posted here. You can also check out the author bio to learn more about me.

Obviously, the only reason I’m doing this is to butter you up so you will go and vote for me. But simple pandering just won’t do; after all, what’s a Milwaukee election without some sort of cringe-inducing weirdness? So here’s the deal: I can’t promise you, the individual voter, anything. After all, I don’t know who some of you are, but based on my search engine hits, I’m fairly certain that most of you are more than slightly unbalanced, the sort of people around whom one should not make sudden moves. So I ain’t offerin’ any of you squat. But I will make you this promise: if I win, I’ll double my stepdaughter’s allowance for a week. Thus, if you vote for TBP, one little girl will have twice as much money to spend on ice cream bars. How can you tell her no? Huh?

Anyway, thanks for visiting, and please come back often, because otherwise, what’s the point of spending $10 a month to do this?

EVERYTHING I NEED TO KNOW, I LEARNED FROM SCOOBY-DOO

• Like Shaggy and Scooby, we are all perpetually trapped by fears of our own creation. These fears are so overpowering that they can blind us to the ease with which we can escape. If Shaggy and Scooby had simply quit trying to solve mysteries, they might never see another monster ever again. Of course, that just raises the question of whether they secretly longed to be scared out of their wits; perhaps, without the fear, they didn’t truly feel alive. Thus man is caught on the horns of an existential dilemma: it is possible to live without fear, but to do so makes one less than truly human.
• Beauty without purpose, as personified by Daphne, accomplishes little and eventually fades into the background, leaving one as a less-than-fully developed character.
• The world is not actually haunted by spirits, ghosts, monsters, and the like; rather, the love of money (or at least the inability to be satisfied with one’s own wealth) is the true root of all evil.
• Real estate is the only thing worth fighting for.
• Contra Ecclesiastes, not everything in the universe is cyclical: it will never again be acceptable for men to wear bright red kerchiefs around their necks. On the other hand, every man wishes he could dress like Shaggy, forever.
• A hungry man will eat the dog’s dinner. Thus, the key to keeping people controllable is to always keep them hungry and to control what and when they eat. If Shaggy had carried the Scooby Snacks, he would have had no need to associate himself with the others. Machiavelli understood this, but failed to put it in an animatable form.
• Knowledge without perspective is blind, viz. Velma without her glasses. One must have a lens of some sort with which to frame and focus reality; otherwise, the universe is merely a collection of meaningless, amorphous blobs, the contemplation of which leaves one pathetically vulnerable.
• Driving the van and pointing out the obvious is enough to justify one’s existence.
• Some people will watch anything if it has a talking dog in it.