postcards from the pug bus

WEST GOSHEN TWP, Pa.—Pascal was on to something when he wrote in Pensées, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” That was 349 years ago, Gentle Reader, and people weren’t good at the sitting-quietly thing. Indeed, wrote The Guardian recently, “. . . they’d do

WEST GOSHEN, Pa—If a nation can be judged by what it celebrates, the United States is fucked six ways to Sunday and back. To point a crooked finger at just one of a frightening shitload of days we observe, today is National Gingerbread House Day, according to the wizards at National

WEST GOSHEN, Pa.—Those fucking soccer moms and their limp-dick, male-pattern-baldness, girly-man, yes-ma’am allies are at it again. Their tiresome crusade to reduce our vibrant, often fractious, melting-pot society to a white-bread, missionary-position-only blandness has resulted in a ban on Four Loko, Cuban cigars, radar detectors, cigarettes, candy cigarettes, foie gras, free speech, lawn

WEST GOSHEN TOWNSHIP, Pa.—The impact of Friedrich Nietzsche on our times ist überwältigend, so overwhelming, in fact, that it often seems as if there is more than one Nietzsche; and according to The New Yorker, which never settles for one when many will do, there are neun Nietzsche: French, American, pragmatic, analytic, feminist,

WEST GOSHEN TWP, Pa.–Today we celebrate National Poisoned Cha-Cha Day in memory of that time when the war between the sexes took a turn for the grim. No man worth his Bushy Beavers subscription can forget where he was when he learned that a woman in Sao de Jose Rio Preto, Brazil,

In 2009 when Barack Obama was less happy and way less rich, he warned that “a critical shortfall of gravity brought on by the failed gravitational policies of the past” was the greatest existential threat facing this country. “The United States, which is home to 5 percent of the world’s population, consumes

Baltimore, MD—Mayor Bernard “Jack” Young urged citizens not to park near white vans because “evil, evil people in white vans” are trolling the city searching for young women to enslave, force into prostitution, and murder, before selling their body parts, the ones that haven’t been worn out by prostitution, to

Few activities enrage feminists more than side-saddle riding. We’re talking horses, now, not some perverse spin on scissoring. Feminists of every sort—classic, non-binary, echo [sic], inter sectional, intercollegiate, separatist, and beard wearing—lose their shit at the sight of a female sitting side saddle on a horse, even though The Spectator has declared

The Romans had an expression for it . . . “it” being a foul, snot-flinging, food-showing, ass-kicking mood that envelops a person for no reason. The expression was In lectulo surgens sinistram: He got up on the wrong side of the bed. (When Roman women were in a foul mood, it

Small Town America, who doesn’t love it … or at least the idea of it? Tree-lined streets with a church on every third corner; impish, tow-headed children on loan from a Norman Rockwell painting; no need to lock the doors at night or at any other time. Bliss, for sure,

The Ten Commandments are a clusterfuck, badly in need of prioritizing. Does skipping church on Sunday really deserve to be on the same list as killing somebody? Should muttering the occasional “Jesus H. Christ” be mentioned in the same breath as stealing? We say no, goddammit, but let us not

It’s a 1970s game show, a 1932 movie, and a late 1920s marketing ploy designed to bait people into using more matches. It’s three on a match, that’s what it is, Skippy, and today is its national celebration day. The three-on-a-match superstition—if three soldiers lit their cigarettes from the same