Month: January 2019

A Loaded Red Hat

/ rickeydobbs / 6 Comments

High school boys in 2019 wear “Make America Great Again” hats for the same reason high school boys in 1992 wore Slayer t-shirts: contrarianism and attention seeking. Well, it’s almost the same, except the members of Slayer are actually good at their jobs and worthy of fandom.

It’s the reason we saw University of South Carolina baseball caps around the University of Houston during my tenure. South Carolina is a thousand miles from Houston, and most of us had never been there. But you see, Carolina’s mascot is the gamecock, and their 90’s era hats said “COCKS” across the front. To quote myself and every dude I knew circa 1998 (and 2019, to be fair), “Uh…huh huh…huh huh…he said cocks.” “Cocks” has a much more je ne sais quai than “Cougars,” no?

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You Never Even Called Me By My Name

/ rickeydobbs / 9 Comments

My given name is Rickey. Not Richard. Rickey. In fact, I am Rickey, Junior, as I am named after my father. Among family, I’m sometimes referred to as “Little Rickey,” though I am 42 years old and 3” taller than my dad. I’ve stopped growing, but he’s bound to start shrinking any day now, so I fully expect that height differential to keep expanding.

People spell my name incorrectly all the time – Ricky is the most common, followed by Rickie. Sometimes people mispronounce it, sounding more like “hey asshole” than the phonics would otherwise indicate. I always respond, though, so I guess it works.

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Nobody Gets Out Alive

/ rickeydobbs / 10 Comments

We live in a dangerous country. Would it surprise you to learn that the United States has a whopping 100% mortality rate? And it’s projected to remain the same for the foreseeable future. Sad!

According to anecdotes relayed by the President of the United States on national television this week, the scariest source of our countrymen’s fate is undocumented immigrants. From what I can glean from memes posted by racist senior citizens on “the Facebook,” more Americans are killed by immigrants than by every other cause of death combined.

Okay, that seems unlikely, I’ll admit it. But when has your Aunt Gertrude, an angry 80-year-old woman who hasn’t worked outside the home nor left her Midwestern hometown in the last 20 years, ever steered us wrong? Remember 9/11? Well, Gertie said on 9/12 that she’d “always been suspicious of the Moslems,” and I’ll be damned if she didn’t hit the mark with that shotgun spray of post-hoc accusation.

This just in: Aunt Gertrude never said anything about it at the time, but she never liked that guy you just broke up with, either.

Given our President’s inference that we should fear people from other countries, I decided to investigate all of the ways that people in our country find themselves taking long naps on the underside of the terrain. Imagine my confusion when I discovered that, at best guess, only 456 people per year die at the hands of undocumented immigrants!

Now before you go saying, “any murder is a tragedy, and the murderers shouldn’t have even been here!” keep in mind that the overall number of homicides in the US is about 18,624 per year. In other words, if you’re going to get whacked, you’re 40 times more likely to get whacked by a fellow American. That’s why I avoid each of you at all costs, just to be safe. USA! USA!

I was also shocked to learn how many ways to die are more common than “gittin’ kilt by a got-dang furriner whilst on mah way down to the Piggleh Wiggleh.”

And because I cherry picked the hell out of this list for maximum shock value, you should prepare to be shocked, too!

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Come Join My Wild Pigeon Chase

/ rickeydobbs / 11 Comments

I own a restaurant in Washington, DC. We’re situated near the Smithsonian museums, the FBI headquarters, and lots of other federal office buildings. As you might imagine, we’ve been a little slower than ideal lately.

Why is it slower than usual?

I told my team that neither their service nor their food was at fault for the slowdown. It’s not competition from other restaurants or food trucks. It can’t be the weather, nearby construction, or the homeless people who ask our customers for money at the front door. While any and all of those issues would be worth an in-depth, intellectual investigation, I told my team that none of those are important.

We’re only slower than normal because of pigeons.

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