Tag Archives: humor

Radio Without Money Episode 8: Everybody Hates Donald and Why Roy Moore Will Win (Oops! and Hooray!)

everybody hates trump

In a break from the radio silence from Writers Without Money, we return with our first content in over a month, and that’s the first new episode of Radio Without Money, the official WritersWithoutMoney.com podcast, in nearly nine months, fittingly recorded eight weeks ago (ugh). And, if we’re lucky, perhaps even the missing seventh episode will turn up one of these days! In a meeting more rare than a believable Donald Trump lie, Ross Snider, Daniel Levine, and Aloysius VI assemble once again, as Voltron or the Avengers might, to discuss Trump, the Russia investigation, incompetence and the DNC, the Franken resignation, NIMBYism, privacy, rifle madness, Nazis, the Forever War, public impact on policy, and the then-forthcoming Roy Moore/Doug Jones election.

Podcast recorded Sunday, December 10th through Monday, December 11th, 2017.


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Radio Without Money Episode 5: Brevity Is the Soul of Wit

brevity is the soul of wit

In this exceptionally brief (for us!) episode of Radio Without Money, the official WritersWithoutMoney.com podcast, Ross Snider and Aloysius VI try to put lipstick on a pig by discussing Daniel Levine’s disappearance, user analytics, the budget, Wikipedia, propaganda, Facebook’s new fact-check alerts and the conflation of “neutrality” with “objectivity,” journalism in general, the aborted Republican health care legislation, and the conflation of neoliberalism with traditional, progressive liberalism.

Podcast recorded Thursday, March 23rd through Friday, March 24th, 2017.

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Radio Without Money Episode 3: More Jokes About Buildings and Food

women_holding_parts_of_the_first_four_army_computers

Another week, another podcast! Discussion of a whole bunch of stuff. Next episode we’re going to start having more focused discussion, but this week join Aloysius VI and I for a lot of politics and jokes. Great to put on when you’re cleaning your own house or congress!

<-Check out the last episode!

Check out the next episode!->

Radio Without Money Episode 1: Are Chair Shots Still Allowed?


Welcome to Radio Without Money, the official podcast of Writers Without Money! Today on the show, Aloysius VI and I discuss Flynn’s dismissal, memories of proto-Alt-Right-neonazi-whatevertheyrecalledfuckthosedickwipes, the Super Bowl and how pro wrestling relates to labor politics! Stream it below.

Hopefully there will be new episodes of this once a week, possibly even more frequently once I get the mixer working. If you’d like to be on the show or would like to syndicate this to your local community radio station, leave one in the comments.

Check out the next episode!->

The Man Who May Have Been the Gerber Baby

(This is a selection from my as yet-unpublished fictional memoir “The Great Poet of Garbage”. Enjoy.)

There were rumors, millings about, theories, whispers, whispers that he may have been, possibly was, had hidden his past as the Gerber Baby. No one was sure. But no one mentioned him without mentioning that.

Someone in town whose name escapes me said they’d seen him enter the National Bottle Museum, and noted the deferential whispers of the employees and volunteers that turned to an awed hush when he finally walked in. His past sat most comfortably at the threshold of local mysteries; interesting enough to mention but not enough so to ever actually check.

We weren’t sure who’d first said it, where the idea had come from, and if anyone we knew who had spoken to him had asked the story had never come to light. And we’d never seen him at a distance without squinting, without pondering what might have once been, and seeing somewhere in his gruff countenance, his curved posture, some semblance of his possible past.

We never saw him smile. We weren’t sure he did. Not anymore anyway. We suspected it a cautious move, a defensive calculation lest we might see in it somewhere the hungry grin of the Gerber baby.

He lurched tall and bald, but bald the way old men were, bald in ways the Gerber baby wasn’t, but that was a long time ago, if it ever was, wasn’t it. He lurched tall and bald through the days, through the bars and cafes, through the suburban duplexes on Lake Avenue and sometimes we heard him discussing book projects, collections of pictures of the town.

All the antique dealers had him on their shit lists for the times he’d taken photographs of old postcards without permission.

And he always had that small dog on a short leash with him, the dog that had since grown notorious for climbing on tables at soirees and eating whatever blocks of cheese were in the offing.

And the brewery supposedly kicked him out one night when he’d pretended to be part if a reception in order to take food off the catering table. We figured that’s where the dog learned it from.

He didn’t have many friends left. Or so we heard.

On the nights this life seemed especially long he’d hole up in his apartment and on his night stand on either side of his lamp sat a small bottle of whisky and a small bottle of Gerber’s peas and carrot mix. He’d look slowly at each. What was and what could’ve been. He slouched amd hit the power button in the same collapsing notion.

The record picked up where he’d left it.

“Oh how we danced and we swallowed the night,

When streets were all ripe for dreaming,

Oh how we danced and you whispered to me,

We’ll never be going back home…”

Mailbag: My Odyssey In Search of an Article Subject at the Heart of the Death of the Canadian Dream

canadian-mist-1-75__61071-1332448907-1280-1280tide-bottle

I wasn’t really sure what it was. The Canadian Dream. Sounded like cheap liquor. I should back up.

I was at a loss for what to write in today’s article so I asked for reader suggestions. I got several and found others stashed away in our trusty mail bag.

“Make your bed!!”

“jan terri”

“Pancakes”

“And/or cats.”

“Pine scented things that aren’t pine related”

“The decline of the Canadian Dream”

I had several options now but still was unsure. The reader insisting we do a story either about or instructing our other readers to make their beds was most tenacious and as such I took his suggestion into serious consideration. I contacted Stanley.

“Stanley, we should do a series of articles on ‘Make your bed!'”

Stanley has not responded. I’m not sure I would respond to such a message myself.

I am still without an article topic. I texted a close confidante: “Should I just go ahead and do the article on the bed making? And do you know anything about something called ‘The Canadian Dream?'”

I then remembered I had an article I’d written, a fictional portrait loosely based on a neighbor I’d had in Brooklyn. When he moved there, he got into the habit of stapling empty cereal boxes on his wall as he would consume the cereal in them. The wall grew to be entirely covered in cereal boxes, several stapled to two layers. He would tell me that he’d wake up certain mornings lacking confidence, thinking he’d never done anything. He’d then look at the flattened boxes and think “I have done something! Something at least…” He dealt with hazardous materials as an inspector and aspired to someday be certified to inspect for asbestos. Asbestos was the tops. “Someday I’ll get that asbestos gig,” he’d frequently say.

It was a very good article but I seem to have misplaced it somewhere. So I went back to the subject of the Canadian Dream. I wasn’t sure what the Canadian Dream was. When I was younger, my father and uncle would call the strip clubs near Buffalo, NY “the Canadian Ballet”. Were they related?

I asked my sister what the Canadian Dream was. She just replied “I figured they limited their aspirations, out of politeness.”

My knowledge of pancakes limited, my interest in cats scant. Any article I might hope to produce on either would be embarrassing, jejune. Any knowledge combining the two couldn’t fully escape the trappings of the disturbing dietary fantasy genre.  A bind.

Annoyance at the packaging of pine scents together objects unrelated to pine is a well known problem, but I fear too much vitriol has been thrown on the subject for mine to do much now. I believe it best left in the hands of congress and the authorities.

I was stumbling further and further from my object. I heard that my old friend had finally been promoted to handling asbestos. I was still without an article. I wrote this to whittle away the time before inspiration came.

I could never be allowed to know the Canadian Dream, for I was sitting at it’s heart.

pancake-cat