Whiskey Fire is displeased by the insipid mulligan stew they’ve been serving up over at Townhall, and is inclined to send it back to the kitchen:
Nothing illustrates the extent to which “conservatives” have so much absolute nothing going on nowadays is how hard it’s gotten to make fun of them.
Even Townhall is just plain boring nowadays. I mean, here’s Kathleen “I Like Big Fuzzy Balls” Parker talking about… Wimbledon (sigh), straining manfully (or the lexical equivalent) to infuse the proceedings with sufficient priapism
But Kathleen manages to salvage an otherwise disastrous presentation when she rolls out the dessert cart:
Though you have to admire the imagery here:
“Throughout, both men were mesmerizingly fierce and yet imperturbably calm. At crucial points they were like gladiators playing chess.”
Kind of hard to envision anything more disappointing than that, isn’t it? Here you show up at Circus Maximus in your best toga, all ready to watch two beefy, oiled up titans slowly hack each other to death, and instead you get a couple of contemplative, egghead Hercules sitting in the middle of the Coliseum, chins resting on their knuckles like Rodin’s The Thinker, and staring silently at a chessboard for minutes at a time before finally deigning to shift a pawn.
Now maybe it was a lucky accident, maybe it was pure serendipity, but somehow Kathleen managed to construct a simile which not only declined to convey her meaning, it actually rose up and bludgeoned the rest of her sentence to death with a balpeen hammer, then dragged it down to the basement and buried it under that freezer full of trout.
I don’t know about you, but I find that inspiring. So in the spirit of the Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest, I’d like to challenge you, the reader, to craft the most heat-efficient, self-immolating metaphor, simile, comparison, conceit, synecdoche, allegory, or trope you can. Because America needs your worst ideas now more than ever. Look around you; we are currently at the mercy of Townhall, WorldNetDaily, RenewAmerica, and other members of the Wingnut Cartel to supply us with cheap laughs and bargain schadenfreude, and recent events have shown the importance of weaning ourselves from our addiction to foreign (and failed) figures of speech. Write your congressman a really poorly worded letter insisting that we must drill down into our lizard brains now if we ever hope to achieve independence in lamely executed literary devices.
Join us, won’t you? Thank you.
Metaphors are more difficult than similes, so I am going to go with a simile.
I went right to the problem, like a whole bottle of aspirin taped to someone’s forehead.
Left by Monkay on July 9th, 2008