Why Couldn’t It Be A Sex Tape

Oh, fuck me. This is just my luck. You live your whole life, spend years in flight academy, do the goddamn migrations, eat the moldy bread, preen, kill countless hours drifting on the water, stand around in the rain, flee from cartoonish and badly-camouflaged hunters, molt, go everywhere in a giant V. You do everything expected of a goose.

Maybe then you go through a messy divorce. That’s all too common, man, nobody’s gonna knock you for that. Maybe the rent shot sky high on the one side of the lake you could still afford. Not your fault, buddy. And maybe you finally have no choice but to sleep in someone’s boat for a few nights. Hell, nobody’s used it in months, what’s the big deal?

Then, say you get up in the morning to piss and came back to find some good ol’ boy and his ugly mutt trying to make off with your improvised shelter, the one thing you have left in this world. At a certain point a bird has to spread his wings and say: “Nuh-uh. Not today. Not my crappy makeshift nest.”

Well, what the fuck was he doing with a camera, anyway? “Doggone goose”—wish I’d pecked his bastard amateur filmmaker’s eyes out.

The YouTube comments? “You should have broke its neck.” “I would have ate that goose.” No, you wouldn’t have, you feckin Capri Sun-drinking web-rat virgins. You’d be dead if you tried that. I took these rednecks to school, and that joker would be at the bottom of that lake with his pooch for grabbing me by the neck if I hadn’t been so hungover. Jesus. A guy tries to preserve his dignity and the wired community takes a steaming dump on him. Real classy, Internet.

—Nero

Designated Flyer

Um: hello?  It’s chilling enough that goose-torturers as infamous as the French could take a break from force-feeding their future pâté de foie gras to slap an image of their victims on a brand of vodka that only became popular because it’s overpriced.  But that’s neither here nor there.  Now, do you see anything wrong with this picture?  Hint: it’s fucking obvious.

It could have to do with their use of the respected color “grey” (elitist slang for “gray”)—a color that all we Canadian geese wear with pride—in conjunction with illustrations of no geese of color.  I mean, this is as bad as casting Tom Cruise as Genghis Kahn! Out of the six geese portrayed here, five are the classic WASP-white shitheads, I suppose to match that eyesore bimbotini glass, and the sixth is an improbably large transparent monster.

I’m on to you, France.  If you ask me, Remy from Ratatouille looked suspiciously like a mouse in ratface…  

—Nero

How To Succeed In Birding Without Really Flying (Not Possible)

So yeah, I’ve got something against penguins.  Who doesn’t?  You?  You hate them more than anyone!  You think you’re their friend?  Why? Because you saw that movie where they all march around in circles and are really brave about the cold since when you live in Antarctica (aka the world’s biggest no-fly zone) there’s really nothing else to do?  Because you cried every single time Morgan Freeman changed his voice slightly and went, “at this stage of the journey, many penguins will perish”? Well, I hate to break it to you, nature groupies, but the plane that carried all those reels of penguin footage from gay old France let loose enough greenhouse gases to shrink the radius of their natural habitat another foot.  All so you could watch them fall on their bottoms for an hour and a half.  So good job.

Stop acting like you feel sorry for these dumbass walking disasters while continuing to ridicule them daily:  

   

Tuxedos were bad enough, but a fucking Members Only jacket?!

If you need proof that penguins don’t want your misguided fawning interest or vicious “clumsy” jokes made at their expense, go to the Central Park Zoo exhibit.  They all stand sadly with their backs to the crowd, taking turns shitting on the shit-stained rocks and each other.  That’s it.

Jesus.  I mean, I can’t stand those dirty pengos, but its not like they hide their feelings.  You guys are just in straight-up denial.    

—Nero 

 

 

 

 

 

Ruffled Feathers

Terrible news for Hillary Rodham Clinton today. That’s right: Big Bird has now tainted her candidacy in a way even Reverend Wright must be impressed with.

Just when we were moving past the offensive phrase “flipping the bird”

Tabloid readers will be familiar with this shot of the far-left fringe educationalist saluting the paparazzi after running over a boy crossing the street on foot because he donated his bike-fund money to HRC’s campaign. And my fans will remember me blowing the lid off of the fraternization between this piss-colored monster and Hillary herself back at the height of her cookie-baking powers.

It just keeps getting worse. I mean, Bert and Ernie’s gay marriage in Los Angeles this past week was a beautiful thing, and a long time coming. But no sooner had that holy ceremony taken place than a certain disgrace to the whole avian community was throwing a lavish, key-swapping swingers party on the beach to directly undermine the idea of homosexual monogamy itself.

And if the classical Greek-style nude statues that urinated Stoli vodka are any indication, this party was paid for by money embezzled from PBS. It’s safe to say that if Hillary doesn’t address the Big Bird connection soon, she’ll never clinch this nomination.

—Nero

Hank the Yank

Those of you presumptuous mammals that thought Hank the secretly insecure hawk was not your problem, take note: no longer is Manhattan’s biggest red-tailed bully limiting himself to a singular abhorrent brand of bird-on-bird violence.

Weirder and wilder still, he’s upping the ante on New York pride. But you wouldn’t know that from the biased Boston Globe account…

A certain New York Yankee slugger should beware: A student taking a tour of Fenway Park today was attacked by a red-tailed hawk that [drew] blood from the girl’s scalp.

Her name: Alexa Rodriguez. Her age: 13, the same jersey number the Yankee third baseman wears.

“She’s fine, a little shaken, but OK,” said Vince Jennetta, a teacher who chaperoned Rodriguez’s class trip from Memorial Boulevard Middle School in Bristol, Conn.

As a goose that knows Hank well, I think I can shed a little light on this incident. Hank, like most assholes in the area, is actually a die-hard Yankee supporter. It’s so like him to fly all the way to Beantown just to talon up a New England girl who dared to have a name and age vaguely linking her to his beloved third baseman. This is what I’m saying people, the guy is disturbed. He’s a menace. And as glad as I am to see humans getting picked on, I’m too scared to wear my Mets cap.

Yeah. I Can Fly.

I was hoping against hope that the Iron Man movie would fizzle and short circuit like one of Tony Stark’s prototype armored flight suits, but fate has a funny way of screwing over me specifically.

Let me back up. This flash-and-grab brouhaha everyone is paying $11.25 to sit through was supposed to feature yours truly. John Favreau approached me early on, but it wasn’t until Robert Downey personally took me out to lunch at Sardi’s that I was swayed to play a part that I had grave concerns about: a goose. You know how in movies where something that shouldn’t be able to fly—a killer whale, an Oriental rug carrying a monkey wearing a fez, Robin Williams—is flying? And then they fly past, say, a flying V of geese? And one of the geese maybe does a double take and makes a face like BRAWWWK?! I THOUGHT GEESE WERE THE ONLY THING THAT COULD FLY BOY WOW AM I SURPRISED TO SEE YOU UP HERE WTF?

The only thing America can agree on: punching the ground is awesome.

Well, I was supposed to be that goose for Iron Man. He would fire up and go careening through some CGI’d clouds, and I would be there to feign shock, thereby degrading my species, when he did. We did fourteen takes despite having a keeper on the third. I always say there are no small actors, only small wingspans, and I left everything on the table. I became my role, forsaking my responsibility to defy the stereotype that geese are small-minded and easily bewildered.

And I paid dearly. Didn’t even make the final cut. “A little cartoony,” Favreau said as my shot at the big-time landed on the cutting-room floor, I guess to save time for his cameo.

—Nero

Giving

To say I, Caligula, have never been moved to act charitably is an outsize vilification.  Often, after witnessing a stranger endure injury or a medical emergency on the street, I have done the unimaginable favor of stepping over the invalid rather than kicking said out of my way.  And do I receive thanks for this unsolicited service?

Does a Christian survive ten rounds with a Lion in the Colosseum?

That’s why I’m overjoyed to discover a charity whose coffers I can be proud to line with coin: The Emperor Has No Clothes Fund.  As an emperor who has gone through depositions before (having my throne usurped, being subpoenaed), I know there is nothing harder than having nothing and no one, especially when you used to have everything and everyone.  Vagrancy is one thing to a commoner, perhaps even a vulgar sort of thrill, but another to an erstwhile God-king, it nothing short of pure hell.

Many artists have been inspired by the plight of down-on-their-luck despots.

So won’t you do the right thing, and contribute The Emperor Has No Clothes Fund?  This isn’t some misguided fashion statement those sad crowned men on the street are making—there’s nothing stylish about having to sell your cape for a bite of caviar.

On Stereotypes

As a Canadian goose currently migrating over New England (I update with a MacBook at 20,000 feet), I’m subject to all sorts of discrimination. I know some of you are thinking: hold on a second, Nero, wasn’t your last post basically a prolonged attack on the culture of white geese, whom you seemed to despise categorically? Well, sure, but there are some forms of prejudice all geese need to present a united front against.

I’m talking, of course, about the human practice of jabbing/thrusting fingers into the area of a clothed buttcrack and squeezing whatever you get hold of. Or, as all the frat boys at the countless colleges we’ve recently passed through call it, “goosing.”

Could’ve just as easily been called “horsing.”

Sure, sometimes I have my face in another goose’s ass. But that’s how the flying V fucking works. I follow the goose ass in front of me, he follows the goose ass in front of him, all the way up to the goose that’s trying to understand how he ended up without a goose ass to follow. It doesn’t mean we’re trying to bite each other’s grundles.

Am I mad? Am I hissing in contempt over this bit of juvenalia? You’d like me to confirm that stereotype of a goose, wouldn’t you. But I’m too classy for that. You have fun with your restraining orders and bruised anuses. I’ll be up here in cumulus clouds, with my dignity.