Let's All Head Over to Sir Chuggington's

The other day I wrote about how people everywhere are stealing the awesome, awesome, awesome ideas that I regularly run in this here blog. Today I'm sad to report that this thievery now extends into ideas that I have in my brain that I haven't even articulated yet on the global interwebs. Matt Damon appeared on The Daily Show the other night to promote his latest film, The Talented Mr. Bournely. During the interview, he commented that he and Paul Greengrass (the film's director) had been joking that if the Bourne series continues, they might call the next one "The Bourne Redundancy." Dudes and dudettes, I tell you in all honesty: I myself have been making that joke repeatedly in the months leading up to the release of this film, only to see Matt Damon using it on TV and getting credit for it, snagging it from me before I've even had time to post it. WHAT A LOAD OF SHIT. Matt Damon has money, talent, chiseled good looks, and a nice car (I don't know this for a fact, but I presume it to be true, because a movie star without a sweet ride is like a giraffe without a long neck or a Red Hot Chili Peppers song that's not about Anthony Keidis' dong, i.e., confusing and weird)--he can't just let me have this one joke? THANKS A LOT, JERK. Now, it's certainly possible that this whole "redundancy" joke is really obvious and that's why multiple people have thought of it, but I don't think that this is the case, because I thought of it, which means that it's original and creatively amazing by definition. No, it seems much more plausible to assume that Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass have invented some sort of laser-based device that is able to see into the minds of people over great distances, and they've pointed it at me at some point recently and raided my gray matter in an attempt to harvest as many ideas as they could. Ever heard of Occam's Razor? If you have, you know that this theory is probably true. The bottom line: I'm now worried about what other ideas germinating in my head are going to be exploited by the diabolical Matt Damon. All I know is this: if a movie comes out in which Matt Damon fights a giant octopus that is trying to destroy Madison Square Garden, and then after he defeats the octopus Kiss plays and he makes out with Jessica Biel while simultaneously inheriting $7 billion and spontaneously becoming six feet tall, we'll know that he's truly ripping stuff off from my mind wholesale.

Well, since everyone is stealing my ideas, I'm going to follow suit and steal an idea from someone else. The other night I was at a bar called Tryst with my friend Seth, and I had something called a "Dufrain", which was a Guinness with a shot of espresso in it. Having savored this delicious beverage, I thereby declared the Dufrain to be the BEST DRINK EVER. More importantly, as compensation for all the ideas that have been taken from me, I'm going to go ahead and take credit for the invention of the Dufrain. So, yeah, I invented the Dufrain. It's a funny story. Actually it's not so much funny as it is long--I actually came up with the idea for the drink when I was living in a Banut village in Gabon. One day, after smoking a herculean amount of Kief and watching several episodes of Disney's Adventures of the Gummi Bears on my laptop, I realized that I needed to urinate. Stumbling out of the burlap tent that was my home, I tripped on Oodobwe, the midget who served as my guide (in hindsight, I should have seen this coming--I had been warned that Oodobwe's name loosely translated to "he who trips the gum watcher"); falling, I hit my head on the foot of Martin, a rhinoceros who was staying with us for a few days while he waited for the weekly bus to Cameroon to arrive. As I lay in the muck, hoping that the feeling in my legs would return, I had a vision of a shot of espresso being poured into a pint of Guinness. Oodobwe began to chant "dufrain, dufrain, cheney, dufrain!" (a local phrase that Oodobwe uttered every time he saw an American injure him/herself, but whose meaning I never ascertained), and the delicious beverage was born. When I returned to the States several months later, I opened a bar named "Sir Chuggington's Old Timey Beer Haus and Sports Bär" in Des Moines' fabled neighborhood Greenwich Village: The Sequel. With Martin serving as Sir Chuggington's brew master, our specialty was the Dufrain, and we became popular on the local bar scene, winning several awards and eating lots of jalapeno poppers along the way. Everything was gravy until Martin took offense at a joke about the aphrodisiacal properties of rhinoceros horn made by a patron and gored an entire group of Japanese tourists, causing our operation to be shut down by the Des Moines health inspector. While Sir Chuggington's was no more, the drink that was its specialty lived on. So there you go: that's how I invented the Dufrain. Anyone who says that I'm lying is him/herself a liar. Ironic, eh?