I believe it’s every American’s duty to do their small part to make our country a better place to live. That’s why I’m calling on President Obama to take immediate executive action to DEPORT MY NEIGHBOR BERT ZABLINSKI NOW! Have you seen his lawn? The last time his grass was less than a foot high, dinosaurs roamed the earth. And don’t get me started about his front yard collection of 47 plastic African garden gnomes or his 14-foot tall sculpture of Elvis giving the finger which he made using only Budweiser cans and Cheez Whiz. 

Someone has to take action. Why not the President? I discovered this great web site called We the People, which lets you directly petition the White House. It gets over 300 petitions a day, many from people able to construct nearly complete sentences with nouns and verbs. 

The We the People Petition-the-White-House web site was launched in September 2011, and has since received more than 142,000 petitions and 9.2 million signatures. The volume of petitions has spiked since Obama’s re-election in November 2012, mostly from disaffected white southerners furious about Obama’s apparent plans to take away everyone’s guns and require us all to convert to Islam. I must have missed that news story. 

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[This message brought to you by the Greater Seattle Tourist Information Bureau.] 

Greetings, visitor. Welcome to Seattle. If this is your first time to the Emerald City, we’d like to share some fun facts about our great city to help you plan your trip. 

Hey, did you ever wonder why they call it the Emerald City? It’s because everything here is always green. And that’s because it rains in Seattle 342 days a year. Isn’t that fascinating? So bring your bumbershoot and get ready for some fun out of the sun! 

When packing for a trip to Seattle, don’t worry about packing your sunglasses – because you won’t need ‘em! 

FUN FACT: Many Seattle residents live their entire lives without ever seeing the sun. 

Some Seattleites believe the existence of the sun is a myth, sort of like Mount Olympus of ancient Greek legend. (Ironically, there actually is a Mount Olympus in Washington State – but thanks to the clouds no one from Seattle has ever seen it.) 

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This Sunday is the biggest single day of the year in sports: No, I’m not talking about the Fresno Kennel Club Annual Dog Show taking place this coming Sunday – although granted, that is a very big sporting event. No, I’m talking about this Sunday’s Super Bowl between the Baltimore Ravens and the San Francisco 49ers. I believe it’s Super Bowl MCLXXXVIIIVX, but I could be off by a couple I’s.

This week I am donning my wife’s BBQ apron to share my secrets to throwing a winning Super Bowl party. A Super Bowl party is a great opportunity for men to bond with their buddies over the world’s greatest spectator sport (after female mud wrestling) and for the ladies to bond with other wives in the kitchen while checking on the status of our Meat Lovers’ pizza and replenishing our salsa dip – I noticed it’s getting a bit low, honey. 

Fellows, when hosting a Super Bowl party, there are three parts to consider: preparations BEFOREHAND, what to do DURING the party, and finally, clean-up activities AFTER the party. Of course, most of you guys can skip Parts I and III, as those parts can easily be handled by your wife.  Just put her in charge of the food and stay out of her way. She loves being in charge of something. 

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[Tim Jones, noted humor writer and the driving force behind the humor blog View from the Bleachers, in a shocking press conference, admits to using banned performance-enhancing substances to help him write his column. Below are excerpts from that press conference.] 

“This is not easy for me to admit. But the time has come for me to finally come clean. Rumors have been swirling about my behavior in recent months. And I simply could not live a lie any longer. For the first time anywhere, I need to make a public confession to all eleven of my readers: 

For years I have been using banned performance-enhancing substances to help me produce my blog. And in the process, I’ve repeatedly lied to my readers, friends and family. 

About the time people started wondering about Lance Armstrong, insiders started suspecting that I too might be using performance-enhancing substances to give me a competitive edge. They started noticing that my blog posts were getting increasingly unhinged. When I claimed in one post that I was a direct descendant of Jesus, it raised a lot of eyebrows. When I later wrote that I was contemplating switching my vote to Romney, my close friends and family members became deeply concerned about my mental state. But it was when I finally presented in last week’s post my solution to America’s gun problem – arming every American with bullet-proof vests – that authorities could tell I had gone completely off the rails. 

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You might think living in America’s friendliest town must be a fairy tale. Au contraire. It’s a living Hell. Forbes Magazine just came out with its ranking of the Friendliest Towns in America. Coming in at the #1 spot on their list? Sammamish, Washington, (true) my town for the past 22 years.

Sammamish beat out fierce rivals like Westerville, Ohio, Fishers, Indiana, Lake Wobegon, Hooterville, and the Merry Old Land of Oz for top honors. Forbes’s study ranked towns based on criteria such as crime rate, level of charitable giving, level of civic engagement, and the size of the check the town was willing to pay to Forbes Magazine to get listed as one of America’s friendliest towns.

Sammamish, a nice town of roughly 47,000 nice people, is nestled in the nice foothills of the Cascade Mountains – a convenient 20 minutes east of Seattle (or 2 hours and 40 minutes during rush hour). Thanks to its close proximity to Microsoft, Sammamish is an upscale community with low unemployment (5%), low crime (90% below the national average) and the nation’s highest level of double tall mocha addicts (97%).

Don’t get me wrong. The people of Sammamish are some of the nicest people you’ll ever want to meet. And that’s exactly the problem. They are really nice. Annoyingly, obnoxiously nice. By comparison, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood looks like the set of Real Housewives of New Jersey. 

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In my younger years, I used to jog five miles a day, do 50 sit-ups each morning, and row 15 miles to work. I was a nationally recognized fitness expert and author of the best seller, Earlobes of Steel. But now that I am older, I know better. At best, all that exercise will add less than 30 years to my life.

Not long ago, I tried out a fitness class called sports yoga. I stuck with it for what seemed like forever, by which I mean nearly four sessions. There was just one small problem: yoga was really hard. Try as I may, I could never get my left foot to wrap around the back of my neck. I never got the knack for how to balance my body off the ground using just my thumbs.

I even wrote about my nightmarish yoga experience previously in a post called The World’s Least Flexible Man – the 100% true retelling of my very first yoga class. So I hung up my yoga mat. I’m simply not that young anymore. My body is no longer capable of contorting like a human pretzel. And before you know it, I’ll be celebrating my 80^th birthday. (Okay, technically not for another 23 years, but in geologic terms, that’s a blink of an eye).

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I am a staunch advocate of women’s rights to equal treatment and nearly equal pay. I’ve even watched Oprah and Ellen on occasion. (But please don’t tell my golfing buddies. They would never understand.) There is no denying that women have been victims of social injustices and hardships men have rarely had to endure. I’m talking, of course, about cellulite primarily.

The tables, however, have recently turned. I’m delighted to report that women have made amazing strides in the past 40 years – in the battle against cellulite. And even more than that. In fact, in the past ten years alone, for reasons unfathomable to me, two different women have received promotions I totally deserved simply because they were more qualified than I. Discrimination against men is real – and it’s everywhere.

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Introducing Placebolax® – from SCAMCO – the company that brought you the (not-quite-FDA-approved) sleep interrupter device Miracle Snore and Eye Can See, the popular battery-operated do-it-yourself laser eye surgery kit.

Try Placebolax today and you’ll be amazed at how much you’ll lose.

With Placebolax, weight loss has never been simpler. What’s our secret? Baby polar bear liver oil. That’s right! We discovered that baby polar bear liver oil burns up fat, sugar, and your intestines and converts them into pure profit, er, muscle. Made from lovingly farm-raised Siberian baby polar bear livers, harvested on our polar bear farm in a secret undisclosed location in the Arctic Circle, we mix it with powder of seal pup brains and ground-up beluga whale dorsal fins to produce our unique patented weight loss formula.

[Our attorneys told us we need to include some additional “disclosures” in the very remote chance someone might not use our product as intended, accidentally resulting in permanent blindness – not that this would ever happen (we don’t think) – and try to sue us.]

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From all of us loving husbands,

Dear Sweetie, Honey, Darling, Angel, Punkin, Cutie Pie, Snuggle Bunny, Sweet Cakes, or in the case of Mrs. Eunice McCutchen of Big Butte, South Dakota, You Old Ball & Chain,

We guys just wanted to take this opportunity to give you  ladies some helpful suggestions for what to get us this Father’s Day. It’s not too late to surprise us on our special day with something that would truly show us how much you love us.

You want to know what we guys really want for Father’s Day? It’s very little. We just want to spend a day with our whole family, taking a leisurely hike in the woods, holding hands with our lovely wife, telling her how much we love her, and later on, snuggling together, taking a nice long nap on the couch.

Ah, we’re just messing with you. That’s not even remotely close to what we want for Father’s Day – although the part about a long nap on the couch sounds good – so long as you leave us alone.

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[Note from the staff of VFTB: This week Tim Jones waxes nostalgic with fond memories of his high school senior prom. However, in the interest of editorial integrity, the staff felt obligated to set the record straight where Tim's memory veers slightly from how the evening’s events actually transpired. – VFTB Staff]

It’s high school prom season. I am always cheered to see so many handsome young men dressed to the nines in their formal tuxedo and cummerbund with matching Nirvana t-shirt, high top sneakers and untied laces, escorting their lovely female companions to the big dance. It brings back memories of my own high school prom, one of the most magical evenings of my life.

I attended an all-boys’ private military academy. The prom tradition at our school was preceded by a formal military parade and competition, pitting drill teams from five companies in our school’s battalion against each other to see which company could create and execute the most original precision drill team performance without accidently shooting any of the guests.

I was Captain of Company B. My company only took out one onlooker but he didn’t actually have tickets to the competition, so it was partially his own fault. [Staff: Turned out to be Tim’s grandfather. He was old anyway.] The drill competition went off without a hitch, with almost no popular students impaled by a rifle bayonet.

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