What Kind of Handle is Buckeye Ho Tep Even Anyway?

I mean?

Friends, Romans, Hobos...

The Hoboburger hiatus is over. Until it no longer isn't, of course.

The good news is that you haven't really missed much. As the lone voice of the hobo culture, I can tell you that pretty much everything is the same with hobos as it was when I last posted in 2011.

Seriously.

Same clothes, same bindles. Literally. The exact same clothes and bindles.

Obviously socks and shoes have changed because it's rare to keep footwear for more than a year due to wear and tear. And theft. And sometimes accidental consumption. (Socks are a great soup flavoring.) ("Soup" meaning "water over a fire".)

But everything else is the exact same. And really, what new discoveries in the stabbing sciences are even possible in this day and age of advanced stabbing knowledge?

Do you think Banjo Fred Mississippi is going to come bursting out of his box car lab screaming, "Eureka, I have discovered a new neck stab!"

It's not happening. There hasn't been a place on the body that a hobo ain't stabbed or been stabbed. These guys are like the NASA of stabbing.

So anyway, let this be the announcement that Hoboburger is back, and there are no plans to go anywhere. Though there were also no plans to come back.

For the future, be thinking about who would win in a fight between a hobo and a ninja in his 70s, because we're gonna be talking about that in the very near future.

(The near future being somewhere between tomorrow and never.)

Mailbag!

Yes, I've been silent for almost a year, but that wasn't really the plan.  I've been wanting to do a mailbag post, and I finally got my first letter today!

"Hey Tony, do hobos have surprise parties?  Thanks.  PS - I love the blog.  I check it every day.  Keep up the great work!  Nick L."

First off, thanks for the letter, Nick.  Let me answer your question with a question--what do you think would happen if you were to surprise a hobo?  That's right, you'd get stabbed in the neck before you even got to "--PRISE!"

So no, hobos definitely do not have surprise parties.  In fact, they go out of their way to make sure that everybody knows when a party is going to happen, just so nobody accidentally happens upon it.

If you think about it, it's probably good that hobos don't have phones or alarm clocks, because I'm betting both of those would be cause for concern.  Every time their phone or alarm would go off, they'd just start stabbing.

I can't imagine there's many things worse than sleeping next to a hobo knowing that you have to wake up before he does or else you'll be stabbed repeatedly as said hobo thinks you're the snooze corpus.

I'm guessing bunking in a boxcar doesn't lend itself to getting good sleep anyway, let alone having to worry about Snuffy Bob rising and shining 46 times in your chest, neck, face and abdomen.

Thanks for the letter, Nick.  Please send more!

Mister Stabby Goes To Washington

Yes, I've been gone for about 23 months now. Or, as the hobo calls it, "a Railsman's Weekend".

But I'm not going to explain my absence, or my return, because it's just understood that anything hobo-related comes and goes like a corn-mash-soaked breeze over the coal-strewn hills of this once great land.

And I say "once great land" because I hate just sitting back and watching the way the Hobo-American is treated by his fellow citizens.

Of course, when you look at the people who comprise Washington, is it any wonder that Hobo Rights falls somewhere between "Battery Disposal" and "Weird Sunday State Ice Cream Laws" in order of importance?

The utter lack of adequate representation makes me wonder why there aren't any hobo politicians.

Is there some law against running for office out of a PO Boxcar?

Imagine the possibilities of hobos in politics.  Debates would always be settled with an "Oh yeah?! I'll show you!", followed by repeated stabs of the opponent until their time was up.

And then when the other candidate is allotted his 30 seconds for rebuttal, he would just bleed out.

Clearly, if a hobo had ever run for public office, he would have won.

Or, more likely, he would have just run unopposed because the other candidates would have been afraid of being stabbed until they die.

Cowards.

And these are the people running our country. They aren't even man enough to get into a debate that has a high rate of eventual stabbing.

And the thing that they don't even realize is that if their argument is sound, there's really no danger of being stabbed a lot.

However, if your logic fails you in a debate against a hobo, the shiv can be the cruelest of all fact-checkers.

No, we'll never see a hobo president.

Of course, I don't know if it would be safe to have a hobo president with his finger on the button. After all, a stolen biscuit at a summit could bring about World War III.

But then, if you think about it, who's gonna steal from a hobo president?

Nobody likes getting stabbed with a screwdriver featuring the Presidential Seal.

Especially world leaders.

This is the End?

RIP Hoboburger

[Jan '08-Apr '08]

Poll Results Are In -- Hobo Beats Badger!

I must admit, I was very surprised--pleasantly--by these results.

First off, let's display the poll and subsequent results. The poll this time around was:

Who would win a fight between a hobo, a large bobcat, a small bear, an angry python and a protective mama badger?

45% said Hobo
36% said Protective Mama Badger
9% said Small Bear
9% said Large Bobcat
0% said Angry Python

Let me first admit that I initially had voted Large Bobcat, thinking that the combination of being large, having claws, having teeth, and being mean as hell would be a combination worth reckoning with.

But then I began thinking about the hobo--backed up against his boxcar wall, protecting his bindle and extra shoe, while a large bobcat stared him down. For not the first time, I put myself in the hobo's shoes at this moment. There is no way I'm going to lose a fight to a cat of any kind--other than a mountain lion, tiger, lion, liger, tigon, jaguar, leopard, black panther, white panther, pink panther, or hefty ocelot. Other than that, no chance. That bobcat would be going down! So I changed my vote to hobo.

That was my thought process, but I don't know what anybody else's was. Perhaps the most amazing thing was that I didn't have to give a qualifier to the hobo, like "Starving Hobo" or "Tuberculosis Hobo" or "Furious Hobo", and he still garnered the most votes. I guess what the poll says is that in a fight, people expect the hobo to come out on top, regardless of the competitor.

Could there have been better competitors in this poll? Perhaps, but I only went with animals that a hobo is likely to come into contact with, hence no Bitter King Cobras (the snake) or Rabid Kangaroos.

I think the poll also showed a great deal of respect for the mother badger. Everybody knows that badgers are mean sons'a'guns, so I wasn't too surprised to see 36% of America think an angry mama badger could take a hobo down. However, what I think most of those who voted for the badger forget about is that a mama badger's main concern is to her kids, so she's not gonna be in a sustained fight with a hobo, and once the hobo backed off a bit, she would leave to tend to her kids. Which, in turn, would force a count-out and the hobo would win.

America was equally unimpressed by Small Bear and Large Bobcat. I've always been of the opinion that I can take a small bear or a black bear, and I don't even have an extra shoe to protect, so there was no way I wasn't taking a hobo in that fight.

I've already given you my thoughts on the large bobcat, so I'll not go into that again.

Surprisingly, America has no fighting respect for the Angry Python. But against a hobo, I can't blame them. Knife versus nonpoisonous snake isn't exactly a battle reserved for pay-per-view.

So those are the results from this poll. Please feel free to comment on why you voted how you did, so that my research won't be so incomplete.

Thanks to the 100% of you who voted!

(That's a little bit of polling humor.)

Hobo Or Not A Hobo: Revealed!

Answer: Hobo!

The hat was a ruse! This is actually a painting of famous Hobo King Pennsylvania Kid Wilson, who being from Pennsylvania, was brought up wearing stupid hats.

I know I've told you before about tell-tale signs and that a large-brimmed hat usually means it's not a hobo, but here's the exception to the rule.

And to be honest, the brim isn't really as pronounced as the last Hobo Or Not A Hobo, it just looks like it. This type of hat is used as much to gather wind against the forehead as it is to keep the sun out of the eyes. With this type of hat, you catch even the slightest breeze and dry the ironhouse-of-freedom-born beads of sweat

So given that bit of trickery, how were you supposed to know that this was a hobo? Well, if you'll notice, Pennsylvania Kid Wilson isn't looking at the artist, he's looking behind him. Presumably because he's looking at a sculpture that he is going to use to smash over the artist's head when the artist lets his guard down.

The second big clue was all of the buttons on the overalls. Hobos love flair! And not just on the overalls, check out the zazz-laden hat full of clothespins.

This one really shouldn't have been that difficult.

But I do thank you all for your terrific guesses and dances with logic--even if they left you standing by the punch bowl.

Better luck next time!