Categories
Silliness

Enough comedy… jokes!

It’s been quiet on my blog for a while, so I’ll fill in some space with my favorite jokes, and you can decide whether or not I am worth reading again in the future, or, if you know me personally, whether or not you actually want to speak to me again.

I like jokes that set the listener up for something and then fail to deliver. My favorite:

What do you call a boomerang that doesn’t come back?
A stick.

How easy is that? It’s not necessarily laugh out-loud funny, but I like the set up and ease of delivery. In the same vein:

Why don’t cannibals eat clowns?
They taste funny.

And a light-bulb joke I learned from Cheers:

How many Surrealists does it take to change a light bulb?
Fish

Oh, so dry. They’re all fine examples of the ironic, post-modern wit that I find myself drawn to. I understand if they’re not your cup of tea.

Don’t get me wrong. With the exception of not finding flatulence jokes funny, I find humor in most dumb comedies. Whenever I see Will Ferrell, I begin to snicker. His very presence is enough to get me to start laughing. I laugh at pratfalls and broad humor, but twists and failed expectations are bits that I relish. I may not laugh out loud at them, but I feel satisfied being in on the joke. Of course, I think, a stick! They taste funny! Fish! It all makes sense in a devious way, but we were set up for something different.

Which leads me to my all time favorite joke, the White Elephant. There are a lot of variations to this one, but this is how I first heard it (from my father, no less). By the way, before you read, there are no white elephants in this particular version, but it is still a White Elephant joke:

A son graduates from high school as a Valedictorian of his class. His father is extremely proud of him, and offers to get him a graduation gift that he’ll never forget.

The father says, “Son, you were Valedictorian, you were top in track, and you’ve earned a four-year scholarship to Yale. I am so proud. What can I get you for your graduation? A car? Top of the line computer system? What? Anything you want.”

The son considers this for a bit, and says, “Dad. Thank you. What I really want is a truck full of ping pong balls.”

“What?” the father asks.

“Yeah, Dad. You said anything. And what I want is a truck full of ping pong balls.”

The father doesn’t know what to make of this, but a promise is a promise, so he gets his son a truck full of ping pong balls. Four years later, the son is graduating Magna cum Laude at Yale and has signed up for Harvard Medical School. Again, his father couldn’t be more proud, and tells his son, “Son, I want to get you anything you want. New car. Down payment on a new house. A boat. Anything. What do you want?”

“Well, Dad. I’ve been thinking about this, and I want a truck full of ping pong balls.”

“Again?” his father screams. “What do you…? Okay. Okay. I said anything you want, and you want a truck full of ping pong balls again. Why mess with success?” So the father gets him another truck full of ping pong balls.

The son does his internship at a very prestigious hospital and opens his new practice. He serves his patience with care and quality. He becomes an asset to his neighborhood and is written about in the local paper. His father beams with pride whenever he talks about his hard-working, compassionate son. Again, the father offers to buy his son anything he wants, this time for his thirtieth birthday. When his son asks him once again to buy him a truck full of ping pong balls, the father sighs, but makes no complaints.

One day, the father and son are out walking around his son’s quiet suburban neighborhood when they hear the screech of a car braking right behind them. In a split second, the out-of-control car hops the curb and hits the son, hurtling him thirty feet in the air. The father, unscratched, rushes to his son’s side, and can tell he is very injured. The son is bleeding from his mouth and is pale and shivering. “Dad,” he says weakly, “I’m sorry.”

The father has tears streaming down his face. “Hang on, son. Hang on. Help is on the way,” he says.

“No, Dad. I’m not going to make it.”

Weird thoughts pop up in times of stress, and the father can’t think of anything else right now but one question. “Son, I don’t know why, but I have to ask you. What was with those trucks full of ping pong balls?”

The son smiles weakly and says, “It’s okay, Dad. I’ll tell you. The ping pong balls were for… urk!” And his tongue rolls out, his eyes cross, and he dies.

And that, my friends, is my favorite joke of all time.

Categories
Rant

The Problem with Western Civilization

Offered as Peoples’ Exhibit A, your Honor. Upon visiting China for the 2003 Miss World Contest, Miss United States, 20-year old, Kim Harlan, had this to say, “I thought everyone would be wearing, you know, little Asian outfits, but they’re perfectly normal, you know, just the way we dress up.”

Emphasis added. Quote from Marketplace on NPR.

Categories
Short Subjects

Language as a weapon, pt 1

This CNN article notes that the City of Los Angeles has decided that the terms, “Master” and “Slave,” are inappropriate and insensitive labels on computer and electronic equipment. For those of you unskilled in Geek-speak, a master drive in a computer is the primary drive, while a slave drive is secondary. It doesn’t really mean anything other than the master drive is where your computer will first look for booting instructions.

But we are now too sensitive to use the word “slave” anymore, unless you’re into bondage, in which case you’ve got a lot more to hide from polite society anyway. I’m not a big fan of this type of soft censorship. It leads rise to charges of racism when someone uses perfectly appropriate words that sound a bit like the verboten words. It changes the way language is used, and it makes people believe that Liberals have run amok.

Except Political Correctness is not a liberal disease. Even though many people on the left blanch at insulting words, the idea that we shouldn’t offend anyone ever is a very conservative trait. I try not to use words that are offensive or insulting because, as a writer, I want to get my thoughts across to the reader, and throwing a big, bad word in the middle of something is like a traffic light on the Autobahn. I use any word as a tool, and most of the time a racial or sexual incentive isn’t needed… you jerk.

Back to the issue. Calling a computer peripheral “slave” doesn’t diminish or make light of the horrible history that America had with slavery. It isn’t a racial slur. It isn’t even meant to be provocative. It is simply one more sexual euphemism that computer scientists labeled every part of the computer with. Do you want your disk hard or floppy? How much RAM do you have? Have you upgraded your firmware? Attach that dongle or the software will not load. Please, show me the racist engineer that decided that a slave drive was a sneaky way of sticking it to African-Americans, and I’ll show you a thousand engineers that snicker every time the computer prompts them to insert their disk into any drive.

I am sometimes surprised at what society picks next to be the dread word. English is loaded with words that don’t have the noblest roots. So we still “hysterical,” despite its extremely sexist origins. If “slave” is indeed going to be a false target for White guilt, what will we call that group of people in our history books? The shackled class? It’s too silly to even joke about it. But it is one more example of how we can’t seem to focus our attention on the things that make racism and sexism prevalent in any society.

Categories
Essays

The Kingdom

They call it “The Kingdom.” It sits behind the building where you’d go and get your food. You’d never even know it was there, but it’s larger and vaster than the main building. It is where they store their dry goods, like flour and corn meal. They also have a huge, two-story freezer in the Kingdom, which they turn on during the holidays.

I think it’s ironic, perhaps, that you’re in the front, buying your chicken that’s been disemboweled, split-through with a spear, and slow roasted, or you’re buying your chicken that’s been torn apart, tendon from bone, and batter-dipped for frying. I think it’s ironic that the front is dedicated to humanity’s position on the food chain, but the Kingdom, in back, is run by the birds.

Starling and chickadee and sparrow and crow and sea gull, at any time, you’ll see more of them than there are people in the Kingdom. And when I walked into the vastness of it, I could hear the smaller ones, the stowaways from Great Britain, chirping and flittering around in the rafters in the near darkness. They quieted down when I reached the shelves that held cans and bags and sacks. One such sack was in the wrong place, sitting upon a square pack of 16 cans. The sack, once protected by plastic, was eviscerated, spilling its guts of bleached flour onto the cans beneath it, and the floor below. There were little peace-signs imprinted in the fine powder at random intervals. These were bird tracks. The birds found a way to get into the flour.

Oh, I thought, the processed, bleached flour must be like crack cocaine to these little birds. They probably get no real nutrition from this, just energy.

And so, I didn’t think it was the best thing to have the flour exposed. I covered up the ripped part of the sack with a large piece of the torn plastic, and held it down with a large can. Then I walked away.

In the empty vastness of the Kingdom, I could hear the echo of beating wings. Far enough away to not spook the birds, I turned around to see seven small brown and black birds looking at the plastic cover and the can holding it down. A few of the birds flew at the can, to frighten it I suppose. They were all twittering and chattering, and the frustration in the noises they made was evident and growing, until I heard, “TWEEET!”

It was loud and echoed through the Kingdom. It was a high, shrill noise that could not have come from a bird any larger than my hand, but it demanded attention be paid. The other birds and I froze for a moment, and they flew back into the rafters.

“TWEEEET!” knocked around the walls and vaulted ceiling again. I couldn’t make out the source of the sound. It shook all around me. There was more flapping in the rafters, and little tricks of shadow and light made it look like there were several dozen birds up there. Then there was silence.

Slowly, deliberately, I walked towards the exit, towards daylight and open air, until I was stopped in my tracks by,

“TWEEEEET!”

The sound surrounded me and was nowhere in particular. It was an angry chirp, a desperate whistle. Just steps away from the doorway, it stopped me. Thinking for just a moment, I turned around again, and quickened my pace back towards the shelves. I threw down the can and ripped away the plastic. Flour dust danced all around me. I swiveled and made for the exit again, pausing only briefly, once out the door, to peek back into the darkness of the Kingdom, where the birds ruled. Two or three little birds pecked and scratched in the white flour, flittering in excitement, content, for now.

Categories
Short Subjects

What I witnessed on Sunrise Highway

A couple of weeks ago, I saw a kid on bike get hit by a car on Sunrise Highway. I thought for sure the kid was going to be seriously, seriously injured, but he actually got up and limped to the median before anyone could reach him and tell him not to move. The impact sounded bad… horn, screech, dull thud, shattered glass; although, that was just the headlight smashed by the petal of the bike. It was a sporty car with a low front, so he slid right up the hood. I was in a parking lot when I heard the horn and screeching. I saw the actual impact, and dialed 911 after shouting “Holy Shit!” about four times.

Another guy, who apparently saw the car run a red light, had also called the police and reached an ambulance dispatcher before me, so, by the time I had hung up with the police, we could hear an ambulance siren down the road. I told the police what I saw, which was just the accident itself, not the causes, and they told me they didn’t need my statement. The other guy, meanwhile, filled out a form. The kid who got hit was obviously dazed, possibly in shock, but didn’t seem seriously wounded. As I left, they were checking out his legs, which has some abrasions, but that was about it. He was very lucky.

It bothered the hell out of me, though, for the next couple of hours. My empathy was not only for the kid, but for the driver of the car, who did pull over, did the right thing, and waited for the police to arrive. But she was getting yelled at by people as soon as she got out of the car, and she broke down crying as soon as a cop went over to talk to her. She was just a kid, too. It would not be something I would want to have in my memory, the day I hit someone.

The witness guy said to me, “Man, when I was that young,” gesturing over to the young driver of the car, “I did things that I’m ashamed of now. But I never hurt anyone but myself. You don’t realize that running a red light can kill someone.”

Categories
Metablogs

For further discussion

I mentioned this in passing to Katherine, but I think it is something that I want to write upon more: Strange that the common enemy of the religious right in America and the religious fundamentalist in the Mid East is the urban, liberal East Coasters.

Categories
Short Subjects

Call it even

Baseball’s post-season, especially when the Yankees are involved, always gets the oxygen flowing in my red-blooded American lungs. Autumn nights in the ballpark evoke the same emotions in me as summer nights watching fireworks while listening to some Aaron Copland; I get all patriotic and proud of my country and our freedoms and our pastimes.

And then there is the election of Arnold the Barbarian in California. As little as it affects me as a New Yorker, whenever I think about it, I get a sour taste in the back of my throat. I imagine that several Italians had the same feeling when the granddaughter of Mussolini was elected to their parliament a decade ago. It isn’t so much that Guv’ner Arnie won’t be a good politician, or that any damage has been done to the system, but I have to wonder where this might take us ten or twenty years.

So yesterday had me both proud about and embarrassed by my country. I’d like to think that is uniquely American, too, but it may just be me equivocating, again.

Categories
Metablogs

Big Wheels

If you’re an obsessed liberal like me, you’re already up on the BIG news within the lefty-blogosphere, but for the rest, I have a couple of predictions to make:

  • Cheney is off the Bush ticket in 04, citing health concerns, of course.
  • Condi Rice is out, um, let’s say by next January. This will be a “need rest and relaxation” resignation, but we’ll know that’s not true.
  • Karl Rove is brought before Congress, possibly brought up on charges, but definitely cannot help the reelection campaign for Georgie-boy next year.

And here is why: There is a story that you probably haven’t heard much about yet, unless you read the Washington Post (requires a simple, one-time registration). The long and short of it is two people in the White House exposed the wife of former ambassador Joseph Wilson as an undercover operative for the CIA. Last July, these two shopped around a story about Wilson’s wife to at least six reporters before they got Robert Novak to break the story.

Joseph Wilson, for those who may not recognize the name, went to Niger last year to find out information on the supposed sale of Yellowcake Uranium from Niger to Iraq. The documents Wilson was given were poor forgeries and fakes; there was no sale. Wilson let the Administration back in Washington know this, but the Bushies still felt it would sound good in the State of the Union Address, last January. These are the infamous “sixteen words.” Wilson, sick of hearing the faked documents used as proof of Saddam’s WMD program, told the press in July his findings.

A week later, Novak runs with the story about Wilson’s wife. It was pure revenge from the White House, trying to send a chilling-effect to anyone else who may have the bright idea of exposing the Adminstration’s lies. And it was also highly illegal, a felony that can cost $50,000 in fines and 10 years in prison.

Boys and girls, this is it. This is the big one. This is going to shake up the Bush White House like only one other event in recent history. I’ll leave it up to you to guess which Nixon scandal I am comparing this to.

For MUCH MUCH more coverage of this, read the above linked article in the Washington Post, this article from the Nation (from July when the story was new), and check out ongoing blog coverage from Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo, including an interview with Wilson, and Atrios.

There have been a thousand cuts that should have had this Administration bleeding to death and on life-support, but this one has the CIA looking for an arrest from the Justice Department. This cut may have hit an artery.

Edited: Wilson went to Niger not Iraq… duh.

Categories
Essays

Twenty Seconds

Katherine, Chris, and I went into the City on Sunday morning to see Neil Gaiman. Every year there is a big baker’s-dozen-blocks-down-5th-Avenue event called New York Is Book Country. Neil was signing books for an hour, from 11:30 am to 12:30 pm. Those of you who know me personally would be proud to know I woke up in time to make an 8:40 train into the City, with tremendous help from Katherine.

Once we were in the City, we walked about twenty blocks uptown. The weather was beautiful, and being Sunday, there was very little traffic, pedestrian or otherwise. If I wasn’t so grumpy from waking up early and having no sugar or caffeine, I really would have been enjoying myself. As it was, I was begrudgingly grateful that nothing had gone wrong. It was quite a treat to see 5th Avenue closed off from 42st (where the New York Public Library building sits, clever, no?) all the way up to 55th Street. Neil was going to be signing at 49th, where DC Comics had set up a booth in the Graphic Novel section of the fair. We got there by 10:30, and found just a few people ahead of us, milling about by the platform where Neil would sign.

Now I had to get a book.

Or, in other words, I’m an ass. I’ve been a semi-rabid Gaiman fan for years. I have quite the collection of Sandman-branded merchandise, and I have a half-a-dozen special collectors’ edition books, not Sandman-related, written by Neil. I have the Warning: Contains Language CD. I have a 1000-run edition of Murder Mysteries, hand-bound, published by Biting Dog Press. Sure, I have the Hugo-winning Sandman comic, “Midsummer’s Night Dream,” the only comic ever, and forever, to win. At least 50 things I could have signed by Neil? Yes, a conservative estimate.

So here, I’ve gone into the city without anything, and will have to buy a book. But this was no big deal, really, because I wanted to get a copy of Sandman Endless Nights, the first Sandman-related thing Neil has written in years. I (correctly) assumed that I’d be able to get a copy there, even though I wasn’t sure it had officially come out, yet.
At the DC booth, they had four copies on display, two hardcover, two soft. Of course, I was going to get the hardcover, but, no, DC wasn’t actually selling them. I’d have to go to the Borders down the road, I was told. I set off, leaving Katherine and Chris to wait on line. I walk down to the end of the fair, 55th Street, without seeing a Borders book store. Sweaty and concerned, I saw an information booth and asked the nice woman there where the nearest B. Dalton was.

I don’t know why I do this. B. Dalton hasn’t existed in New York in ten years, I think, and yet ask me to name a book store, and I’ll say B. Dalton without pause.
At any rate, the nice woman at the kiosk was old enough to know that B. Dalton was a book store and directed me to the Borders on 49th Street, where I had just come from. I blinked, thanked her, and then headed back down the road. When I got to 49th Street, doubting-Thomas that I am, I scoffed at the idea that I’d miss the book store. There was no Borders building here, I said to myself. See? It’s not here at all… oh, look, it’s a booth right next to the DC Comics booth. Oh. Right.

I got on line to buy the book, and called over about five feet away from me where Katherine and Chris were still waiting. “Hey, look,” I said, “the book is being sold right here.” I gave a sheepish smile.

Then with book firmly in hand, and paper bracelet, used to guarantee those waiting on line a signature from Neil, firmly on wrist, I waited for another twenty minutes or so for Neil, who arrived and started signing early. What a guy. We were given yellow Post-Its™ to write our name on, so Neil wouldn’t have to guess spellings and such, so when I got up to him, he asked, “Jonathan, is it?”

“Mmm hmm,” I said.

And I wanted to say a thousand things to him! Do you want to go get sushi after this, Neil? Murder Mysteries is my favorite short story, but did you know I never got that one detail about the newspaper story until I read the illustrated version? “Ramadan” was my favorite Sandman story, and I think it perfectly highlighted your amazing ability to join real myths with those you’ve made up yourself and pull them together in one hell of an entertaining story. That’s called pastiche, right? I’m envious that you can write so well, so often, and still have the will and energy to update your online journal. You really connect with your audience. Oh, and Daniel, and Delirium, and Mervyn Pumpkinhead, and Door, and Low-Key, and Wednesday, and Shadow, and Snow, Glass, and Apples….

But what I said, after he drew a really cool, really funky Sandman in silver ink on the inside of Sandman Endless Nights, was, “Thank you, very, very much.”

“Oh, you’re quite welcome,” he said, and I moved aside.

Twenty seconds. Twenty seconds with a man of genius, a man who has entertained and educated me, and countless others, for over ten years. And then I moved aside.

Chris gave him a copy of Good Omens to sign, and he wrote, “Burn this book!” We’re not sure why.

We trekked down to Little Italy afterwards, for the last day of the Feast of San Gennero, and I had a stuffed artichoke, Katherine had a cannoli, and Chris had chicken shish-kabob. Yeah, Chris is a real lover of the Italian food. The crowd was thick, and the sun on our backs got us too hot and too tired too quickly, so we left the City shortly afterwards. But I got my book and my twenty seconds.
Hope to see you next year, Neil.

Categories
As seen on cars Short Subjects

That’ll sock it to them libruls

Recently seen bumper sticker:
The #1 Endangered Species?
The Pre-Born CHILD!
It’s a CHILD …Not a CHOICE!