Category Archives: GateHouse

January 3, 2012

White Castle’s beer/wine sales to save customers the trouble of getting drunk and ending up at a White Castle

By Jeff Vrabel

You can find me in da club

GateHouse — I don’t know about you, but I spent New Year’s Eve getting hammered at White Castle. Ha! That’s a joke, of course — as I’ve somehow ended up with children living in my home, what I actually did was nothing! Well, at least nothing that required me to apply pants that aren’t operated by a drawstring.

But if I had gone anywhere, it would have been to The Castle, because according to a newspaper article that has been received by the Vrabel family with something close to the reckless delirium we felt when the Bears won the Super Bowl, The Castle is considering expanding its current roster of menu offerings (Gruel, Gruel On Bun, Gruel On Bun Feat. Chili, etc.) to include beer and/or wine.

Now, first of all, why this is needed is a mystery. White Castle, of course, is a brand that needs no improvement, no upgrading, no bridge to the 21st century. White Castle is built on the idea of shoe closet-sized restaurants that serve construction paper-thick burger-type objects on synthetic breadsubstance, all delivered to you in an environment that would suggest you are eating the food of kings and queens, if your royal subjects were all 400 lb. NASCAR fans or on their way home from the bars and think they’re in a Taco Bell.

Obviously, this is not a negative. This is what White Castle does, and it does it magically. Seriously if they started serving “salads” or “shrimp” or even burgers that were made of burgers I would be the first to lead the nationwide uprising. Ron Paul-college-volunteer style. “BRING BACK OUR WHITE CASTLE!” I would shout into a megaphone I stole from a hippie, “THESE NEW MENU ITEMS ARE DANGEROUSLY CLOSE TO FOOD.”

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5 comments   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Being Slovak, GateHouse, Humor Columns

December 27, 2011

Apparently there are parenting downsides to that “MythBusters” episode about burning Christmas trees

By Jeff Vrabel

This photo is not at all interesting to the average impressionable 7-year-old or anything.

GateHouse — The 7-year-old and I have been watching a lot of “MythBusters” lately. which is, needless to say, a fantastic idea when parenting a second-grade super-absorbent spongeperson who enjoys explosions and fire and large trucks crashing into other trucks to create explosions.

I justify this regular explosion exposure by sitting next to him and occasionally shouting “Science!” like the guy in that Thomas Dolby song. I mean, “MythBusters” isn’t an attention-deficit cartoon designed to overinflate action-figure profit margins or move units of cereal, right? Moreover, thanks to the wonder twins of DVR and Apple TV we get to skip the Commercials For Things, although I would probably feel a little better if Discovery could make with the less advertising of “Weed Wars” and that show about people’s first week in jail). Otherwise, it’s QUALITY TELEVISION. And if quality television so happens to involve endearing humans rocketing themselves down awesomely lengthy makeshift waterslides and crashing backhoes into things, well SCIENCE!

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4 comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Dad Stories / Parenting, GateHouse, Humor Columns

December 13, 2011

You almost certainly have snakes in your Christmas tree. Sorry.

By Jeff Vrabel

Type "Christmas snake" into Google Images. It's fantastic

GateHouse — There are things that are OK, and there are things that are Not OK, and there are things that are Super Not OK, and there are things that are So Not OK That They Make You Slap Your Face And Run To Your Momma, and that is what brings us to the headline “Two Families Find Live Snakes Hiding In Christmas Trees.”

If you needed any more evidence that it’s just wiser to buy a plastic, Taiwanese factory-produced tree at Lowe’s, slap it in a stand and be done in time for the Steelers game, may I present you with the notion that your fancypants Real Tree You Mightily Chopped Down In A Field With The Help Of A Bearded Woodsman Named Fjurg The Sweaty probably contains snakes.

Christmas trees, according to everyone, are the second least-favorable places you can find a snake, the first being, say it with me, the toilet. This is my fourth-greatest fear in life, snakes in the toilet, directly behind clowns, the Fox Business Channel and having my picture taken while scuba diving in the ocean but then having the photographer start gesturing wildly and flailing around because there’s a whale swimming up behind me. That scene in “Finding Nemo” where the whale fades into view and eats the neurotic fish and Ellen? YEAH, WORST FEAR OF LIFE. Most of my more acute fears in life end up in Pixar movies. Weirdest thing.

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10 comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in GateHouse, Holidays, Humor Columns, Vicious Animals

December 5, 2011

I for one welcome our new walking octopus / monstrous insect overlords

By Jeff Vrabel

Abject horror from Gizmodo

GateHouse – The good news: The world will officially not end as a result of the disastrous tsunami of semi-coherent pepperoni-mouthed idiocy that would have defined The Herman Cain Presidency! The bad news: It will probably end as a result of one of the following:

  1. Octopi that walk among us, or
  2. Giant Air Jordan-sized insects that eat carrots and look like they could punch people in the face.

There are two horrendous animals you should check out on the Internet right now, which is weird, because the Internet is mostly used only for cute animals, such as puppies and kitties and squirrels playing harmonicas.

But in this case the Internet has given us a video in which an octopus at a marine reserve is seen swimming around in the water, which is where octopus usually go. The water is where octopi do octopi-like things, such as admire their own arms and destroy Captain Nemo’s submarine and make fun of those commercials where wankers buy each other Lexuses for Christmas. But in the video, after a few seconds, the octopus WALKS OUT OF THE WATER ONTO THE LAND, while onlookers gape and holler and burst into tears and riot and rightfully flee into nearby mountain terrain, WHICH IS EXACTLY WHAT THEY SHOULD BE DOING because octopi DO NOT WALK ON LAND, which you know already if you attended school, even ones in Kentucky.

(Incidentally I’ve just been told that it was actually a giant squid that destroyed Captain Nemo’s submarine, but I can’t think of anything unusually evil that an octopus has done in movies  so I’m leaving it. If anyone knows of some seriously evil octopus shenanigans, email me.)

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8 comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in GateHouse, Humor Columns, Quote-Fingers "Science", Vicious Animals

November 29, 2011

Who cuts down real Christmas trees? REAL MEN, WITH AXES, THAT IS WHO

By Jeff Vrabel

Basically what I looked like, except I had a larger axe

GateHouse — We never cut down our own Christmas trees when I was a kid, mostly because it turned out that they sold objects very similar to Christmas trees at the Target in Marion, Ind. — and get this: You could hardly tell the difference! Well, there were a few giveaways: Instead of dropping crisp needles all over the carpet the fake ones appeared majestic and invincible for what was sometimes months (taking down the Christmas tree is super-boring), and instead of having to be cut down they could be disassembled like Legos and returned to their spot in the attic. That said, instead of smelling like fresh forest pine they smelled like a Target in Marion, Ind.

As such, Christmas was as much about getting out the tree as it was getting out the box the tree spent most of its year in. Being lucky enough to have both a Christmas-loving family and large ceilings (mostly the latter), our tree was a beast, a monstrous army-grade Artifical Douglas Fraser Fir Pine something (OK you got me I cheated my way through horticulture) that came in a box large enough to, if needed, store the car.

When you are a small person, boxes of course are the coolest toys ever, or at least up there with such perennial childhood chestnuts as bubble wrap, pieces of broken cement, packing peanuts and handfuls of gravel. This year marks my 36th of wondering what in the hell we’re all doing departing Thanksgiving dinner to camp under neon signs for off-brand tablet computers when if we give every kid in the country a pile of UPS bubble wrap, packing material and about 30 pounds of dirt kids would all be murderous-eyed with joy (except of course for the selfish materialistic ones, but we could just throw gravel at them).

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10 comments   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Back Home Again In Indiana, Dad Stories / Parenting, GateHouse, Holidays, Humor Columns

November 21, 2011

Veggie Tales: Why Congress wishes to beplumpen your children, and 9% of you are totally OK with that

By Jeff Vrabel

GateHouse — Last week a Washington Post poll revealed that the United States Congress currently enjoys a nationwide approval rating of 9%. That is nine percent, as in one integer, as in Very Close To Zero, as in if you asked “Do you approve of the job Congress is doing?” to a group of zinfandel-sipping monkeys with typewriters in a warehouse in Des Moines, they would all say “Dear God no not at all are you NUTS?,” because monkeys are actually pretty smart.

Needless to say this 9% statistic is shocking, mostly because I would have guessed somewhere between 9 to 40 percentage points lower. NINE percent approval? Are you sure you didn’t mean nine people? Where do you thumbs-up smiley-faced keep-up-the-good-work types LIVE I wonder? Do you live in Congress? Are you all Boehners? Do you know what the Gallup people meant by “Congress?” Do you think they meant “Con-Air?” Do you think you were approving of Nicolas Cage? Because if so that’s still a dismayingly high number.

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Trailer approval rating: 16%

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5 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Awful Political Things, GateHouse, Humor Columns, Terrible Things People Eat

November 17, 2011

Hooray! My iMac broke for good this time!

By Jeff Vrabel

GateHouse — Oh my God you guys the best thing just happened: my Mac finally broke! For good! It’s totally useless! THIS IS AMAZING!

Wow, this, I don’t need to tell you, is fantastic news if you are 1. a dippy Mac nerd and 2. a Vrabel, because the regular replacement of even sleek sexy Apple objects, whose very existence demands expensive upgrades at regular intervals, does not come easy to Vrabels.

Which is not to say that we eschew technology. My 80-year-old Uncle Jim, for instance, last year brought home a forehead-slappingly monstrous new iMac, one whose screen was easily large enough to humiliate most of the movie theaters in my hometown. It was terrifying, not just because my family wouldn’t have been more surprised if he came home and announced he had just purchased a previously undiscovered Jackson Pollock from an auction in Amsterdam, but whatever, it was way cooler than anything we had.

And what did he do with this glorious piece of sleek gorgeousness? He literally set it up on a desk that has been around since before I was, next to a computer called a Commodore Amiga that he literally purchased in 1989, on which we literally spent spent visits there playing hours of “Zac McCracken and the Alien Mindbenders” and which is literally STILL SITTING WHERE IT SAT IN 1989. I haven’t the foggiest notion if it functions or even turns on or has been totally gutted and is housing a family of vagabond gerbils, but it is there, this wonderful metaphor or progress, of the inexorable march of technological improvement, of my family’s still-lively inability to even remotely begin considering to throw things out if there is any chance it can serve some vague purpose down the road, or, failing that, if they can sell them to people for Bears-ticket money.

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14 comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in GateHouse, Humor Columns, Technology (Probably Apple)

November 14, 2011

Well there goes a perfectly lucrative career in the field of cheese sculpture

By Jeff Vrabel

Note: Actual artist not pictured, or a mouse

GateHouse — So I had this AMAZING idea to be a person who sculpts things out of cheese for a living.

Genius, right? Think of it: All the rewarding creativity of a life spent in art, coupled with the incredible opportunity to feast on raw hunks of tastiness without even having to take off the welder’s mask, coupled with years of increasingly confused looks from the FedEx guy. It would have been grand. Also, as a person whose work experience has been primarily in the newspaper/magazine fields, it would have been nice to have some job security for a change.

(Plus it actually made a lot more sense than my other idea, which was cheese painting, which turns out to be a total mess, is murder on the carpeting and basically makes the whole room smell like a long-expired otter, which reminds me: If the kids even ask you for an otter as a pet YOUR ANSWER IS NO.)

Oh, what a glorious future it would have been, my cheese sculptures and me, traveling the globe in privacy (turns out the TSA frowns on flying with massive cheese blocks, whether they fit in their precious “carry-on dimensions” or not), enjoying orange-tie openings at galleries and farms worldwide. I was going to be a STAR, at least in the shadowy realm where cheese meets art, which, let me tell you, isn’t a realm that generally produces a lot of 1%-ers, if you catch my drift.

So imagine the crushing disappointment in learning this weekend that someone has totally beat me to the cheese game. (No, not Mousetrap. The other one. Mousetrap I knew about already.)

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19 comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in GateHouse, Humor Columns, Terrible Things People Eat

November 1, 2011

The Daddy Shower: “THE LATEST TREND IN BABY SHOWERS!” according to this press release, which lies

By Jeff Vrabel

OMG this looks so amazing.

GateHouse — If you have ever been a parent and/or subjected to one on Facebook, you know that child-rearing is filled with people doing strange and terrible things, such as affixing leashes to their children in theme parks, motoring to a Walmart at 10:45 p.m. on a Tuesday to purchase Harry Potter costume components or posting six-minute videos of sled rides on the Internet, and trust me when I say I have only done two of those things so I CAN CLAIM MORAL SUPERIORITY HA HA HA oh my God why aren’t more people liking this picture of my son’s Harry Potter costume.

(It also, according to the coffee shop at which I am currently quote-fingers working, makes grandparents do things like attempt to facilitate a conversation with a 6-year-old on a speakerphone in the out-of-doors because it’s not like anything could remotely not work in that scenario, which reminds me: If you take someone else’s iPhone and then throw it in a parking lot and then drive over it and back over it and then then drive over it again until it is dead is that still illegal?)

Anyway, because parenting is filled with strange and terrible things it is ripe for people selling stranger and terrible things, which brings me to the idea of the “Daddy Shower,” which I learned of via one of those caffeinated press releases  (“THE LATEST TREND IN BABY SHOWERS!” it lies) that indicates that Brooklyn, Paris and Dubai have been secretly hosting underground Daddy Showers for months and is written in such a way as to indicate the author had been viewing adult human males for years with binoculars from behind trees but had yet to risk approaching one.

“Think baby showers are just for moms?,” it continues, addressing a problem that no one has ever complained about ever. “Not anymore!” And it is here that I offer ALLELUIA because seriously you guys I had just gotten through telling my friends “I mean it’s nice that we make more money and never deliver babies and have totally invented a way to wield phrases like ‘Strategic Content Financial Control Analyst’ as though they have any meaning at all, but dammit why do all the gurlz get to sit around rooms full of matching centerpieces opening presents for three hours at a time? INEQUITY!” And then I pounded my table importantly and sipped Scotch and I think harumphed? I can’t be sure, that was a really long sentence to remember.

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Springsteen’s father’s baby shower gifts: disapproval and detachment, and maybe a rattle forged from human pain.

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18 comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Culture And / Or News, Dad Stories / Parenting, GateHouse, Humor Columns

October 11, 2011

I can’t help but notice that no one is fleeing in terror from the hairy crazy ants

By Jeff Vrabel

GateHouse— Before the hairy crazy ants came, everything was going pretty well: Ohio State was losing, the AL East was being proficiently escorted out of the playoffs, I dropped a 98-point monster on my friend Matt in Words With Friends (“QUAILS” — holla!) Michelle Bachmann’s candidacy was fading into that permafrost netherworld and the only people still paying attention were lunatic nonagenarians from Iowa. Oh, and get this I FIXED A TOILET, by myself, USING TOOLS, sort of, and it stayed fixed until the next day when it was clearly still broken, but man, that was a deeply satisfying 12 hours.

And then, with everything swimming along swimmingly, I learned that the South — one of America’s largest, most buttery regions — was being invaded by hairy crazy ants.

This is their actual name: “hairy crazy ants.” This is their actual name because coming up with any other name for them would be pointless; you could call them “formicidae inferi” or “streptococcus abugslifei” or “Stuart” and it wouldn’t matter because everyone would just say “SWEET CHILD OF HOSANNA WHAT ARE THESE HAIRY CRAZY ANTS DOING IN MY SCRAMBLED EGGS?” (Or I guess I should say “WHAT ARE THEY DOING ALL OVER MY NASCAR FUNNEL CAKES AND TAYLOR SWIFT MUDFLAPS” because, again, American South. On the plus side if they’re invading the South and least this isn’t one of those plagues sent to wipe out gay people trying to get married.)

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7 comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in GateHouse, Humor Columns, Vicious Animals

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