Join the Prune Party!

I've been scrambling to meet a deadline, so I missed Keith's birthday last week, but that's no reason we can't make it up to him now with a bacchanal of prunes! Yes, prunes...The desiccated, rectum-relaxing, mummified corpse of a plum, recognized the world over as the Birthday Fruit! Biting into one will magically transport you to those first screaming, slimy, bloody moments of life, when you were yanked from a maternal orifice or incision and slapped by a rubber-clad hand as fair warning of what to expect from the next three score and ten years of life, just as Proust, lying in his bed in a cork-lined room was suddenly transported through lost time by the taste and fragrance of a madeleine, with the minor difference that Proust didn't immediately have to call for a bedpan.

This plump, meaty fruit "cooks up" fast.

Del Monte: it's the meth of dried fruits!

Stuff cooked Del Monte prunes with cottage cheese, nuts, sliced celery.

No need to shit your pants like Ted Nugent. Behavior like this is more than enough to excuse you from the draft (but if not, the prunes are an essential ingredient of the Nugent Method).

Easy eating--

Which is why they spoon it into Grandpa's slack jaw at the nursing home every day!

--Because Del Monte's "Natural Flavor" process protects both flavor and delicate fruit tissues while it "plumps" the prunes with moist, sterile heat.

People laud George R.R. Martin's gift for writing vivid, sensual descriptions of food, but if you ask me he's met his match in the copywriter who penned this ode to soggy, sterilized prune tissue.

But we come here not to praise prunes, or even to eat the nasty bastards, but to wish a Happy Birthday to Keith, who's both a contributor to the blog and a longtime member of the Crapper community. So when I say I searched high and low, far and wide, to find just the perfect Sexy Birthday Lizard, well...check out this reptilian diva:

"It's time to lip-sync for your life!"

Okay, not actually a lizard -- it's an endangered Mary River Turtle -- but it's just so fabulous I had to bend the rules this once.

We leave you know with this Classic Slice of Hollywood Cheesecake, silent film heartthrob Ramon Navarro, working out nude on the rowing machine, like you do, in preparation for his star-making role in the 1925 Ben-Hur.

Happy birthday, Keith!