“When taking Oracea, stay out of direct and artificial sunlight.”

In other words, just stay in the dark all of the time. Since Oracea treats “adult acne” (Rosacea)  sitting in the dark all the time will relieve your acne embarrassment  and save you money — by not paying to take Oracea.  You also avoid the “occasional side effects” of massive diaherra, runny nose, and tocophobia.

I have Rosacea. You will notice that I did not say that I “suffer” from Rosacea. I don’t. Suffer that is.

Rosacea gives me rosy cheeks and an occasional red nose. Back in my thirties it gave me some acne but a massively stiff dose of tetracycline killed it. Just shaking hands with me would have killed your common bacteria and given you fresher breath.  My girl friend claimed that I cleared her plaque and cured her gingivitis, too.

All without giving her medicine breath.

But I digress, or progress, or just hallucinate.

What was I talking about?   Oh look, a squirrel!

When I was a disk jockey, my fellow DJ’s and I were often creating alternative realities because our own reality was living on little money and all the Dairy Queen free hamburger passes we could steal.

In those days, there was a thing called the Associated Press teletype.  This was essentially a typewriter that was hooked up to a nationwide network and would clack out news stories 24 hours a day.  The teletype was fed by a continuous roll of newsprint.

I faked a story using teletype paper and an old manual typewriter. I used authentic AP “slug” number codes and I added the usual typos, missed letters and garbles.   AP member stations could and did contribute news stories to the wire.  I made this one look like it had been filed by our station.

There was a board we used to tack the day’s interesting stories so that the late night guy would have stuff for the newscasts he would tape at the beginning of his shift.  I put this story on the board for him.

The late night jock was just out of high school, very, very paranoid, and into dark things. This story was tailor made for his pyche.

RN

(STATIONS–PLEASE NOTE NATURE OF FOLLOWING)

(AP)  -  GBI HELP REQUESTED

(W-L-G-A)

(VALDOSTA) – LOWNDES CIRCUIT DISTRICT ATTORNEY LAMAR COLE SAY H  HAS REQUESTED  HELP FROM THE GEORGIA BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION IN THE SEARCH FOR AN “ANIMAL RAPIST” OPERATING IN LOWNDES AND BROOKS COUNTIES. ACCORDING TO COLE, A “SICK AND PERVERTED” INDIVIDUAL HAS BEEN SEXUALLY ASSAULTING POULTRY AND LIVESTOCK IN FREEZER COOLERS AND SLAUGHTER HOUSES.
AN EYEWITNESS IS TO MEET WITH A G-B-I CRIMINAL ARTIST TODAY TO RECONSTRUCT A PERSON HE SAW ACTING SUSPICIOUSLY AROUND A FREEZER HOUSE IN BROOKS COUNTY. THE PERSON IS BEING DESCRIBED AS A WHITE MALE IN HIS LATE TEENS WHO LOOKED “LIKE A BOWLING BALL WITH A HEAD” AND TALKED
XKXKXKXKXKXNGKS
ASHED UP RADIO ANNOUNCER FROM THE 50′S”
“THANKFULLY,” SAYS COLE, “NO ONE HAS EATEN ANY OF THE RAVAGED MEAT”. COLE SAID THAT SHOPPERS ARE BEING WARNED THROUGH THE MEDIA TO CHECK ALL THE MEAT THEY PURCHASE, “ESPECIALLY LIVER”.

AP-AX-09-09-83    1443EDT

B928

RN

(AP)  -  GEORGIA  A – P DRIVE-TIME NEWS

GEORGIA RADAR WEATHER

Our target was so freaked when he found this in his stack of news items to read that he called the AP night desk in Atlanta to check on it.  He was sure that someone was trying to frame him for this terrible crime.

This of course, meant that he self-identified himself as being round as a bowling ball and sounding like a washed-up radio announcer from the 50’s.

While the AP man allowed that he would have heard about such a story if it had actually moved on the wires, he was able to confirm that the codes on the story were for the Hog Prices. A nice touch, I thought.

I attended a redneck wine-tasting with an oenophile.

That’s not as dirty as it sounds. Oenophiles suffer from guilt by association with the suffix of the word Pedophile. An Oenophile is a wine lover.  Oeno is from the Greek “oinos” for wine. Phile is from the Greek “Philos” which means love.

A Pedophile strictly means a “child lover”, so you could call your wife a Pedophile and be correct. And also be sleeping on the couch with a big angry welt slashed across your face.

Enough of sex with dictionaries, back to wine tasting with rednecks.

I did not intentionally attend a redneck wine tasting. The advertisement for the San Sebastian Winery in Saint Augustine, FL offered a free walking tour of the facility and a free wine tasting.

My brother-in-law, the oenophile, suspected that this would be a farce, but was too polite to douse my enthusiasm.  I cannot help it. I am a sucker for tourist traps in Saint Augustine.  I pictured a cultured crowd tasting small samples of wine while cleansing their palates with water and an unsalted cracker between vintages.

That illusion lasted until I saw the red fake choo-choo tourist train disgorge a sweaty crowd of thirty into the parking lot. It was a mixture of Yankees, red necks, and some red neck bikers that were festooned with tattoos and piercings.

The tour guide made his opening announcement: “We will watch a short video, take a look around, and then have a wine tasting where you get to sample six kinds of wine.”  He gave a smirk over that last part and the crowd giggled.

From the video I learned that San Sebastian wine is made from muscadine grapes. Ding dong! Bells went off in my head.  Unless you are from the south, you may have never heard of muscadine grapes.

Muscadine is a very sweet white grape that loves the semi-tropical conditions of the underbelly of the south along the Gulf coast. My grandfather had a grape arbor that was used as a source for muscadine jelly. My cousin still makes it and sends me jars. It tastes like candy.

From the video, we walked across a catwalk above the winery and took a cursory look down at some stainless steel vats.  We then entered the climate controlled barrel room that was set up with plank tables for the wine tasting. Not much foreplay in this seduction.

Before the first pouring, our guide admonished us to hold off from drinking until he had shown us the proper way to taste wine. He proceeded to pour a generous two ounces of chilled “Reserva” white wine into everyone’s glass. This was followed with a short class on looking, swirling, and smelling the wine prior to making three sips for the three stages of taste. Then he toasted us and allowed us to drink.

Behind his back the rednecks had their own method for the three stages of taste: swirl it around, stick your nose in it, and then knock it back like a shot of peppermint schnapps.

Here now is my review of the first bottle: the nose revealed the smell of Muscadine jelly in the morning. In the mouth, a slight astringency fought fruitlessly against a barrage of sugar.  It was drinkable like Hawaiian Punch spiked with 190 proof Golden Grain is drinkable. My oenophile-in-law rolled his eyes.

Now it was time for the second tasting. No water to cleanse the palate, no cracker, no new wine glass. Just hold out your glass out for your next two ounces please.  This time a hybrid of muscadine and something else that was supposed to make it mimic red wine that tasted like hell.

One sip and I switched to red neck wine tasting mode. I couldn’t just pour it out because the guide made it clear that once the glass touched your lips the wine was yours and couldn’t be spit or poured out.  You come here to drink and you are going to drink, dammit!

Our tour mates loved it. The room was filled with happy laughter.  Suddenly the door opened and another tour group entered and made a sharp turn to another tasting area that was set up behind a screen of barrels of aging port.

“Fourth of July weekend is busy around here,” noted our tour guide. I later learned that six(!) tasting rooms were rolling at once. Doing the math, that is 180 people swilling wine per hour.  There are bars in my hometown that would kill for that kind of business.

I passed on the cream sherry.  Even good cream sherry tastes bad.  I went for the port. One sip and I started looking for a place to hide my glass. I was afraid that if I knocked it down redneck style it might gurgle up and bring all its friends along.

Six two ounces glasses of wine in thirty minutes adds up to 12 ounces of wine. The cheap drunks were very, very happy and I have to admit I had the makings of a buzz myself.

We now continued the tour by walking back over the same catwalk but now we looked over at the other wall for a moment and admired the bottling machine.  Then it was down to the gift shop.

The tour guide said that the winery sold 300,000 bottles of wine a year. Now I know how they manage this – happy tourists with a buzz on hitting the gift shop. Some guy from Ohio ordered an entire case to be shipped home. Everyone had two, three, four, and more bottles in their arms.

I am glad I was not on the tourist train when the rednecks decided to crack open a bottle and give their buzz a pick me up.

In fairness, the people at the San Sebastian Winery were very nice and I am sure their wine has earned its 300 medals competing against other muscadine wines. Some people like really sweet wine – unlike most regular wine drinkers.  The winery did not spring their high end $11.95 bottles on our tour group and those might have been good.

Right.

Goose’s Note: This originally appeared on the pre-blog Goose’s Nest in July of 1998. I will be porting them over from time to time for those who would like to read them; I hope you enjoy reading them and reminiscing – I mean, we all play foxy bingo (www.foxybingo.com) and watch old re-runs for the nostalgia, so why not blog posts?

The faded and poorly lettered sign out front proclaims that this building on Williams Street in St Augustine, Florida is the “Tragedy in American History Museum”. The writer in me automatically smoothed that crudely constructed name into “The Museum of American Tragedy” while my cynical side translated it as “Tourist Trap! Grab Your Wallet”.

As was obvious from the first steps inside, the museum is the story of one acne-scarred man, his quest to build a shrine to morbid curiosity, and his forlorn hopes of making a killing off of the Kennedy assassination. Prominently posted in the foyer are newspaper articles detailing his numerous battles with City Hall over the original zoning permit. Irony rears when The St. Augustine City Council terms the proposed museum to be in bad taste – this in a city that houses such monuments to high culture as Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, The Fountain of Youth, and the completely fake Zayorda Castle.

Believe It or Not, a judge had to rule that bad taste was not against the law in St. Augustine.

In the front room is an old white ambulance that has several notarized and framed documents hanging in the windows to assure you that what you are looking at is indeed the vehicle that transported the dying Lee Harvey Oswald from the basement of the Dallas City Jail to Parkland Memorial Hospital.

The second vehicle in that room belonged at one time to a man who used it to drive Oswald to his house to pick up some “curtain rods” and take them to the Texas School Book Depository. This valuable car (“used to carry the death weapon!”) was sold to the owner of the museum for the princely sum of $10 in 1964.

At this point, I believe that our man’s money ran out. The next room holds a Lincoln Limousine from the White House that is the “same model that was favored by President Kennedy when he participated in parades”. Kennedy may have sat in the car at one time, but the hard facts are lost to history — what an American tragedy. I hope he did not pay much more than $10 for this car, too.

There is a jacket that might have been worn by James Dean, but the original owner who sold it to our man is not sure. Just so it looks authentic, the original mailing carton used to ship the jacket to the museum is included in the display. Yes, we are pulling out the “Tragedy Helper” from the pantry here at the History of American Tragedy Museum.

We also have run out of things to see inside. In the backyard are several plaster cows. Maybe the eating of beef is a tragedy of the American Diet, maybe the owner is really a Hindu sickened by the daily bovine slaughter in America, or maybe, just maybe, he got them cheaply at a yard sale. In any case, the cows are looking stupider than their live cousins.

Jane Mansfield’s death car is next to the cows — an udderly unintentional visual pun. Before she was brutally killed in an auto accident, as the accompanying newspaper articles point out, Miss Mansfield was a Hollywood sexpot famous for titillation — she never bared her voluptuous breasts in public. If you are reading this, Lindsey Lohan, please pay attention.

There is also a car just like the one that Bonnie and Clyde were in when they were killed. To make things more authentic, the owner had the car shot full of holes — that must have been fun. He did resist the temptation to pour ketchup on the interior. Why he resisted I do not know – that is obviously a story reserved for the History of American Mystery Museum.

Credit Where Credit is Due: The picture of the museum comes to you courtesy of the Whatahoot blog where you will find many, many pictures of the museum in its hey day. A hat tip to them for preserving a vital part of well, something or the other.

Really ironic: As releases of CIA documents in the late 1990’s show, Oswald wasn’t the assassin of JFK. He was just a patsy manuvered into place to take the blame and be killed.

Enough has happened in the past few weeks to keep the tabloids happy for months and months and months. I am posting the most obvious ones now so that I can collect the royalties later.

	Micheal Jackson’s Face Appears on Tortilla Made in Mendocino Chiconahui Jimenez found more than tortillas in her skillet Friday night
	Karl Malden’s Penis is Missing Police think that a vengeful visitor snitched the wang during wake. Macabre market exists for celebrity body parts.  Part described as “remarkably resembling his nose”.
	Aliens Abducted Billy Mays Wait, there’s more!
	Micheal Jackson and Elephant Man to Tour Calling it the “Snuffed and Stuffed” Tour, mummified remains to go around the world. Special guest appearance in Moscow at Lenin’s Tomb.
	Batboy – I was Ed McMahon’s Love Child In an emotional and sometimes incomprehensible press conference, Bat Boy finally revealed the secret of his origins.
	Billy Mays Didn’t Have to Die – Vince If he had just used my Slap Chop® to eat healthy snacks and salads he would be with us today.