Tea Hee Haw Sing Along (VVV)

A companion sing along and hootenanny for “Tea Hee Haw”.

A 'Vice Versa Verses’ parody to be sung to the tune of “The Ballad of Jed Clampett” (written by Paul Henning) AKA the theme song from “The Beverly Hillbillies”.

"HILLBILLY HIGH TEA"
Come and join a party Jed-Dubya once led,
A simpleton pappy had silver spoon fed,
Shootin’ for some way to ease his aimless mood,
While steepin’ in the ground rich Texas tea brewed.

Oil that is. Black gold. Texas tea party.

Well, JethRush’s arm rasslin’ made Jed a billionaire,
And Drysdale said “time to party in our lair”,
Said “the Oval Office is the place you oughtta be”
So they packed up the truck and moved to Wash D.C.

N.O. that is. Beauty queens. FOX knows news.

Well scrap all yer plans, let the grassroots march begin
Do the hokey pokey with yer pickets and Palin,
Moby gets a handshake from the folks who come to tea,
And serves a heapin’ helpin’ of more fear and panicky.

O.K. that is. Bottomless pit. Come stub yer toes on the 'turf.

Y’all come back for tea now, ya hear?

To derive the greatest possible enjoyment from this theme song, first read our ‘Dream Sequence’ May 20, 2010 posting “Tee Hee Haw”.

Tea Hee Haw (DS)

We had a dream……and in that dream we found ourselves standing in the middle of a vast Texas wasteland next to a large cluster of sagebrush that was still dripping from the recent rain storm. The cracked earth that had previously lined the nearby creek bed was now engorged as the rain waters rushed by in a hurry to fill the scrubby pond down yonder.

That was where we first saw Jed-Dubya hunkered down with his locked and loaded rifle, fully poised to pick off the croaking frogs just as fast as they could leap out of the flooding pond.

It looked as if Jed-Dubya’s short attention span was about to accidentally be the making of him, for our dream then showed him getting easily distracted by an unidentified shiny object across the pond, and his first reaction, of course, was to shoot at it. He missed, but hit pay dirt for up from the ground came a bubbling crude. Oil, that is. Black gold. Time to throw a Texas Tea Party.

With the help of one Mr. Drysdale of the Red Shield Bank, Jed-Dubya eventually got around to selling his new oil field to the president of the OK Oil Company, Mr. Dick. Mr. Dick had always considered himself to be the biggest fish in a little pond, and rarely failed to stand a bit taller when afforded the opportunity to introduce himself to big clients with his favorite nickname ‘Moby’.

Dubya naturally saw no need to jump into the middle of the funding fetch with Moby Dick when all the price beatin’ could be left in the robust hands of his nephew JethRush. Heck, before Jed could whittle a whale out of a piece of driftwood, JethRush had strong-armed a deal that saw Moby Dick’s right forearm smacked down on the table backward after JethRush had arm rassled it flat like a carnie at the county fair. This is what the kinfolks call “doin’ business on a handshake”.

During the weeks that passed between shootin' and sellin', Dubya’s velvety oil spewed from the earth unchecked, and the waters of that scrubby pond turned black and toxic with crude oil. Any frog that had been lucky enough to survive Jed’s shooting party was now thickly coated in heavy crude and washed up along the shoreline never to hop again.

Now Jed’s ole Granny Armstrong was a rootin’ tootin’ Texan to the core, and she’d taken an unusual liking to OK Oil’s Moby Dick. Granny Armstrong offered Mr. Dick a rare invitation to do some big game huntin’ on the ranch before it was all packed up. Good thing Granny was an M.D. too cuz it sure came in handy when Moby Dick unwittingly took a pot shot at the Texas law man who’d only joined the hunt to flush out Jed's baby girl and the county’s hottest looker, Elly May Palin, from behind the bushes where she was busy winkin' at all them critters running for their lives.

As soon as Jed-Dubya had securely deposited his copious bounty in the Red Shield Bank, it was time to load up the truck and move to Washington D.C. Thanks once more to the tacit manipulation of Mr. Drysdale, Jed-Dubya was able to buy up the biggest White House that Pennsylvania Avenue had to offer. When the seller couldn’t afford to pay its underwater mortgage to China, let alone the back taxes, it was without a doubt the best deal the new century had to offer.

Dubya was thrilled. He had the whittling porch of his dreams. But poor Granny Armstrong. She just wasn’t sure what to do about that huge steeple facing the long cement pond that was taking up too much space on her green grassroots backyard so richly enhanced with astroturf.

As far as Moby Dick was concerned, JethRush had found his calling. Whenever Mr. Dick would throw one of those regular White House Tea Parties he was wont to have for our friendly neighborhood OPEC drillers, the party would invariably conclude in the parlor with a little JethRush price fixin' ‘handshake’. And every once in a while, M. D. would even secretly arrange for JethRush to do some pharma-rassling with his good buddies over at the OxyContin dispensary, just because he could. No pain, no gain.

JethRush’s kissin’ cuzin, Elly May, had her own common sense solution for growing Pa’s oil empire, and family values would firmly govern her grand plan which was steamrolling forward nicely under the rally cry, “Drill, baby, drill!”. Elly May couldn’t wait to grab her Uzi and jump on board the Exxon Valdez for a tanker cruise along the pipeline to Alaska. What she didn’t expect to see on the expedition were all of those trees. A tree’s a tree. How many more do you need to look at? Oh - oh - oh!! Maybe the family should think about expanding into the lumber business. **wink*~*wink** 

And then we woke up and realized that even when the body appears to be running around without a head, it always seems to get where it’s headed. We can only wonder now where the Tea Party is headed next.

Y'all come back for tea now, ya hear?

Yabba, dabba, D.C. Take your shoes off and let the dirt gather under your toenails in our Stone Age ‘Dream Sequence’ November 14, 2008 posting “Washingstone B.C.”

MOMs The Word

"To the world you might be one person,

but to one person you might be the world."

- Anonymous

Happy Mother's Day!

“Mother’s Day Flower”. Original oil on canvas (5” x 7”). Beautifully presented in a gold-washed frame with a finished dimension of 10” x 12”. © Copyright by Artist, KA Collins. To purchase this exquisite original work of art, contact KA directly ("Author Links").

Who's your mama? Celebrate, then invest in your favorite nurturer with our ‘In The Rear View Mirror’ May 4, 2009 posting “New Century Nurturing”.

Trolling For Transparency

We’re not sure what’s worse – having to learn about something we never thought we needed to know, or coming to grips with the verifiable truth that our private pursuits are being systematically archived for future use against us.

As corporate America continues to tighten its chokehold on the nation’s workforce by installing a battalion of Trolls on every Bridge (see definition), we’re getting a crash course in what publicists have known all along; namely, managing our public image is a full time job.

In the rear view mirror we saw a time, not very long ago, when an impressive resume’, written referral letters and a great personal interview would reward those in search of suitable employment with a hired position commensurate with education and experience. The times, however, are clearly a’changin’, because what we see now are invasive corporate Trolls making damaging judgment calls based solely upon an applicant’s on-line social life … and oftentimes without even confirming that the screened profile under review actually belongs to the applicant, and not to some random unknown who just happens to have a similar name.

While contemporary society works hard to exonerate its dark side by pretending the shadow doesn’t exist, corporate America is busy working in the shadows trying to sustain a hypocritical double standard of 'full transparency'. This shady approach has not only created a unilateral opportunity for the corporations making all of the rules to micro-manage every worker’s life under the pretense of smart business, it has also given its Trolls the power to kick off of the bridge any poor wretch who has the misfortune of being virtually connected to the wrong “friend”.

Now that we know that we need good credit in order to get the very job that we need to get the good credit, and that we’ll be indiscriminately judged guilty by association for connections with the wrong “friends” (as may be arbitrarily determined by any Troll working the Bridge), we now know that it’s time we take charge of our virtual, and very public, persona.

Well, “WhoIs” may claim to provide an identity for everyone, but the new beta “WhoIsMiniMe” has set its user-friendly platform up to provide the perfect virtual image for everyone.

“WhoIsMiniMe” heralds itself to be the foolproof virtual PR platform from which to launch your own personal publicity campaign. "WhoIsMiniMe" allows its users to seamlessly manage and manipulate their alter egos from one simple phone app. False first impressions are effortlessly minimized with the one-dimensional perfect career avatar called the “Soigne’ Self”. The “Soigne’ Self” never sees its shadow (and it never lets anyone else see it either) because all users are directed to deposit their secret, private selves into the avatar aptly called the “Shadow Self”. And ne’er the two shall meet within the matrix.

Frankly, there appears to be no difference between the strategic actions of a private individual who elects to transfer any detractive character traits off of the public records and onto a self-created “Shadow Self”; and the actions of a Lehman Brothers who premeditatively transfers all of its risky assets off the public books and onto the records of its shady alter ego, Hudson Castle.

Word on the street is that necessity is the mother of invention, and it certainly looks as if the survival of personal privacy in today’s voyeuristic climate has necessitated a creative approach to playing the corporate game. So will your virtual, “Soigne’ Self”, be playing the game to win?

Put your best face forward, twice, in our ‘In The Rear View Mirror’ February 24, 2010 posting "Seeing Double”.

Joe McPain, TROLL