Fortune Cookie Humor

A fortune cookie

If your friend wants to learn to drive, don’t stand in the way.

For the first time in a long, long time, I got a funny fortune cookie.

Dream About Missing the Old Office

Zombie image source: Fun Lover What doesn’t kill you
often makes you wish it had.

I am posting this much later than it is dated while going through some old journals. I list the souces as a dream about one of my least favorite parts of the corporate world. Apparently, it left lasting scars.

SELF
I’m going down to the crapateria to grab a bite.

OTHER
That won’t…

SELF
Kill me?

OTHER
No, but it will make you suffer.

SELF
That will have to do.

Moving to Canada?

Photo by Suna

Suna blogged this campaign on the Hermit Haus blog on 2016-10-06, but I helped come up with the concept. And I wanted the graphic to show up in my feed when I scroll back through this blog to remember what I have done in life. Maybe.

Both sides are so divided and hate each other so much that Canada has actually been talking about their immigration offices being overrun with inquiries. We got to thinking, “If so many people want to leave the country, they must want to sell their houses. Right? Let’s see if we can buy some of them.”

Suna found the clip art and put the sign together. We all put them out. One of them is in front of our Cameron office. Let’s see if it works.

Potty Humor

Look how Mail abbreviated “Association.”

Funny is where you find it.

 

Visual Irony

Who will save your soul when it comes to the flowers now

Huh huh who will save your soul after all the lies that you told, boy

And who will save your souls if you won't save your own?

—Jewel Kilcher

It’s no secret I’m an HP Lovecraft fan—the mythos so many writers play in much more than his bloviated text. I even named a series of phones the NecronomiPhone [variable here] in honor of the fictional text that underlies the mythos, The Necronomicon. So I had to share this lovely photo when the song came up randomly in my music rotation.

 

It’s Not a Thin Lizzy Song

“If you can read this, roll me over”
This Jeep is bluffing!

Roll me over and turn me around.

Let me keep spinning ’til I hit the ground.

—Phil Lynott and Brian Downey

I saw this Jeep parked at Costco. Given the amount of spit and polish it evidences, I think the owners are daydreaming. Their concept of offroading must include a heavy dew on pavement.

Till There Was You

Talk about a smiling pile of shit... Photo by: Linda Tanner

This parody just came to me in the shower this morning—no particular inspiration.

There was shit in the field

But I never noticed its stinking

No I never smelled it reeking

Till there was you

       —Apologies to Meredith Willson

What a thought to start the new year! Luckily, Linda Tanner’s inspirational photo-art plopped right out of the Googles when I was looking for a suitable illustration.

Overheard at Work: Fortress of Solitude

Superman in his Fortress of Solitude
Photo source: Bill Christensen. “Superman’s Fortress of Solitude Found.” technovelgy.com

Him: You can’t just stay there in your Fortress of Solitude all by yourself!
 

Her: Why else would you have a Fortress of Solitude?

Overheard at Work

This does’t actually have anything to do with anything, but it’s cool. Source: Stan Winston School of Character Art

Male coworker: “Can we start having these meetings in the shower?”

Female coworker: “What?!”

Male coworker: “Well, that’s the only place I have time to be creative.”

Made me think of that series of ads where business people loved their new bathtubs so much, they never wanted to leave—even holding meeting in the bathroom while they luxuriated in lather.

Thrall School

I’ve always wondered what they teach
at the Thrall School.

While I’m sure the kids who have to attend take more than their fair share of abuse over the name of their high school, you just can’t help but wonder, “What were they thinking?”

No, People Toast Bullets

Toasters Toasting People Photo by: This Blog Rules

From the "Overheard at Work" files:

So if “guns don’t kill people; people kill people.” Does that mean that “toasters don’t toast toast; toast toasts people?”

I think he got his tang toungled.

Zombies at Work

Who wouldn’t want to dance with either of these two lovelies? Photo source: Djordje Zlatanovic Photography Blog

From the “Overheard at Work” file, appropriate for the Halloween season:

“I’ve been invited to a Zombie Ball, but I don’t know if I’m going.”

“It’s a no-brainer. Go!”

Fur Coat Anyone?

I guess there are two sides to every issue. The photographer agrees. Photo source: Berkley Magazine

From the "Overheard at Work" file, two guys were looking at a photograph:

“Dude! Is that a fur coat? It makes you look like a pimp.”

[immediate response] “I did have a job before this one.”

A Mama’s Boy Remembers

Mom and me somewhere I don’t recognize

Here is another of my speeches for Toastmasters. It is Speech Six from the Competent Communicators manual, Vocal Variety. I delivered it today.

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I’ll warn you up front, this is a bit of a ramble. Memories tend to be. They all blend together over time, especially the important ones, forming a gentle patina.

Even though she had to quit high school and go to work when her parents died within six months of each other, my mom was one of the smartest people I’ve ever known. She was also one of the funniest, but you’d never know that by the jokes she told. Let me give an example:

Two painters were going though the countryside painting churches. Even though it was the Depression and they didn’t have a lot other than each other’s company, the never went hungry. But being people, they wanted more.

One day one of them said to his partner, “You know. If we thinned the paint, we could paint twice as many churches for the same cost. We’d make a lot more money.”

“We sure would,” Partner said. “Let’s do it.”

So the next church they painted, they thinned the paint. They were just finishing up and thinking about how much money they’d make when a thunderstorm blew up. The thunder crashed, the wind blew the rain sideways, and the storm washed all of the thinned paint off the building.

Looking at the havoc the storm had wrought on their work, they were devastated. “What are we gonna do now?” they moaned.

A voice from the clouds advised, “Repaint and thin no more.”

Mom’s sense of humor was gentle and consistent.

• I remember her trying to cheer up the ICU staff—telling jokes and pretending to dance while she was dying strapped to a ventilator.
• I remember her worrying that I would have to drive home after dark the night before she had open heart surgery.
• I remember her making my girlfriends in high school laugh by making fun of her own outlandish garage sale jewelry.

She had this one necklace that had these two huge gold-painted balls dangling from a string of plastic pearls. I heard her cry out from the kitchen one day. I rushed to see what was wrong. “Oh, it’s nothing,” she said. “I just closed the oven door on my balls.”

Now there’s a visual that will give a teenage boy nightmares.

How do I know she was smart? Other than my dad, I admired two men who respected her.

Mr. Morrison, ran a construction company and owned several banks.¹ He helped convince Lloyd Bentsen, the senator for whom much of US-59 is named, to go into politics. When the salt dome in Louisiana caught fire in the mid 1970s, Mr. Morrison called Senator Benson. “Lloyd,” he said. “It’s just like our goddamn government. First, they buy up all the oil, driving up the price so nobody can afford to drive.² Then they put in back in the ground where we’ll never get all back out. And now they’ve set the sonuvabitch on fire,” he exclaimed slamming the phone back on the hook. We used to take bets on how many times it would bounce before it fell off his desk. That time it bounced three times before crashing onto the worn linoleum floor.

Mr. Morrison didn’t mince words. He fired his building superintendent three times one day. Then called him up the next morning and cussed him out for not showing up for work.

Mom was his sales manager. She was the person he consulted when buying or selling houses for more than a decade.

That’s one way I know she was smart. The way I know was my grandfather.

Granddaddy was a typical early-20th century German farmer. He defined chauvinism. When he was ready to retire, he called the family together to get advice on what to do with the farm. My dad and uncle Carole started to say something, but Granddaddy cut them off with a flick of his hand. “I don’t care vat you say. I vant to know vat Kay sinks I should do.”

This August marked the 10th anniversary of her death.

I still miss you, Mom.

But rather than closing on a down note, here’s another one of her favorites:

A cop pulled a man over for not signaling a left turn.

“But I did signal,” the man protested.

“No, you didn’t.”

“Yes, I did,” the man insisted. “Just ask my wife. She was sitting right here beside me. She saw me signal.”

“Well, ma’am” the cop said. “Did he signal?”

“Well, officer. If I’ve learned anything in 40 years of being married to that man, it’s never to argue with him when he’s drunk.”

Notes

1. I really don’t know the extent of Mr. Morrison’s wealth. He lived in a really nice house, but his faded Olds was at least a decade old. That’s 10 years in the salt and chemical fallout of Brazosport, Texas. I remember him griping about the amount of taxes he had to pay on the sale of a bank. Mom told him, “I just wish I made as much as you pay in taxes.” I think he kept her around for perspective, too.
2. As I recall, gas prices were astronomical—around a dollar a gallon, but that was when you could find it.

Fifth Picture Meme

“Elect John Oliver for ‘Your Commissioner’”

I already did a version of this meme on Facebook, but Dragonfly tagged me with a slightly different variant—sorta like having two different types of flu, I guess.

Anyway: fifth folder, fifth picture. Since I have many, many folders, I just kept recursing the fifth folder portion of the instructions until I found pictures. Then I took the fifth picture I hadn’t already posted, which turned out to be the sixth one. So in my math, (3 • 5) + 5 = 6.

Suna and I had gone to see my Dad last year. We stopped for gas or something and I started laughing as soon as I got out of the car. John Oliver is one of my favorite commentators on The Daily Show, and there he was running for commissioner in DeWitt County, Texas.

I love the fact that he has “Elect John Oliver For” professionally printed, and then he hand writes “Your Commissioner.” It’s like he can run for anything on a moment’s notice.

Friday’s Feast Remembered and Honored

There used to be a blog called Friday’s Feast. Each Friday, it asked five questions and asked its readers to answer them. The questions were presented as a menu, and five questions was just about right—enough to be interesting, not enough to tire the reader.

Many chose to answer in the comments section of the blog, but I always posted my responses in my own blog. Friday’s Feast was so successful that it left Blogger and went out on its own. After awhile, it stopped appearing. Finally, the new URL stopped working. Friday’s Feast was no more.

Well, I always enjoyed answering the questions and reading the answers my friends posted in their blogs. So I’m going to try on the mantle of Inquisitor, breaking out the dreaded Comfy Chair and Soft Cushion.

I’m calling this new initiative, “Food for Thought.” Each post will contain five questions presented as a menu, as did Friday’s Feast. Just below the questions, I will answer as honestly as I can. I don’t think it’s fair to ask questions you wouldn’t yourself. The first comment will contain the code for the questions so that you can post them in your blog.

If you want to answer in the comments, feel free. If you want to answer in your own blog, please post a link to it in the comments.

Food for Thought

Without further ado, here is the first menu:

Appetizer: Who is the person physically nearest you right now? What is that person doing?

Suna is sitting on the other side of the bed and knitting as I type. She is waiting for a phone call. (I am typing this blog ahead of time.)

Soup: Hit Shuffle on your mp3 player. What do you like most about the song came up? (If you don’t have an mp3 player, use the song currently on your favorite radio station.)

The song that came up is “Body Is a Car” by Four Bitchin’ Babes. They are one of the most innovative groups of the last decade. Four singer-songwriters who sing well together, their music is both musically interesting and lyrically funny. Although at times, as in this song, they show a deeper nature. “My body is a car driving my soul around.” The song then pushes the metaphor to in several directions. That said, it is not my favorite Bitchin’ song.

Salad: What is your favorite restaurant?

I guess it wouldn’t surprise any of my faithful reader if I said, ”Mesa Rosa.” But I think eating there is helping me put back on some of the weight I fought so hard to get rid of.

Entré: What are you most looking forward to in the Obama administration? What do you most fear? (Even Republicans has something to hope for, and even Democrats have something that they fear.)

I am most looking forward to have a leader with moral integrity instead of situational ethics. I am so tired of the “torture is wrong when they do it to us but OK when we do it to them” mentality.

What I am most fearful of is that some bigot with a telescopic sight will bring this presidency to an early end. I’m not sure the country could survive that.

Dessert: What made you laugh hardest in the last 24 hours?

My head has been too stopped up to do much laughing over the last few days. I do remember laughing really hard at something on the Daily Show last night. Unfortunately, I the Nyquil keeps me from remembering what it was.

Marketing Geniuses

This innocent looking device is the evil autodialer. It’s what enables marketeers to call thousands of people a day. It can also hijack calls you make at a pay phone and place them on a more expensive carrier. I know of no legitimate use.

Photo source: Lakewood Conferences

Who thought of combining an autodialer and a voice recorder for marketing?

Who ever it was is one intellectually damaged subhuman. I don’t care what the actual message is, all I hear is, “As a valued TermiTroll customer, we wanted to let you know that we don’t care enough about you to call you ourselves.”

That really makes me want to buy their product—about as much as the sound of multiple police sirens outside my hotel makes me feel safe in a strange city.

And while I’m on this rant, who thought of having an autodialer call you up and ask you to hold for a sales representative? I mean, really! Has anyone ever done that?

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17 January Update: This morning I stayed on the line with that Auto Warranty Scam just to cost them some additional money for the call. Even if they’re using VoIP, there is some cost associated with the duration of the call.

I spoke with a polite guy who said his name was John and had a Midwestern accent. He claimed that the scam is run by General Motors. He also claimed to be unable to remove my number from their autodialer. How convenient for him.

So here’s what I recommend. Every time you get one of these calls, stay on the line to drive up their costs. When you get a sales agent on the phone, be polite or rude as you choose, but tie them up as long as possible. The longer they’re on the phone, the less likely they are to hoodwink some weak-willed person with scare tactics.

The only way to fight this kind of telephone abuse is to cost them money. And time is money.

The New Religion

Somehow, it’s fitting.

I don’t usually blog YouTube stuff. I don’t even usually go to YouTube. But when I found this video through Whedonesque, I couldn’t help myself.

I Have SES

Another victim of sordiseuus

Photo source: Glassrope

Suna often makes fun of my ability to eat (or inability to eat neatly). “Poor Lee,” she says. “He can’t eat right.” At first, I thought it was funny. Then I realized that she isn’t the only one who thinks this way. All my life, people have commented on how I eat. I have come to realize that I have a serious eating disorder, namely sordiseuus—more commonly referred to as Sloppy Eater Syndrome (SES).

Stop laughing! I’m serious. I have SES. This is a difficult admission for me.

SES is a traumatic ailment with serious social and economic effects. Besides the embarrassment, there’s the cost of clothing for one. I can’t eat Mexican food without needing to replace a shirt. The chips break on the way to my mouth, inundating me with salsa. No, that’s not a cilantro cologne I’ve been wearing lately.

Then there’s pizza. Why do the slices always bend half-way to my mouth, dropping anchovies in my lap? I had a meatball sub the other day that squirted marinara. Luckily I was wearing my glasses or I might have been blinded.

Now I’m still looking for work, so I can’t get treatment under a medical plan. I’m not even sure if insurance would cover this disorder were I still at ALE. So, I am forced to humble myself and ask for help. For just a hundred dollars a day, you could help me overcome SES, preserve my health, and replace my stained shirts. Please send what you can.

Why Punctuation Is Important

I have seen a disturbing tend in writing lately: ignoring or omitting punctuation. I think it started with newspapers dropping the comma before the conjunction in lists, but modernist writers have taken it to extreme. Some, like ee cummings, even do away with case. Lyrics in album librettos are seldom punctuated beyond line breaks. We seem to have forgotten how important those lovely little unspoken marks are in communication. Here’s an example:

As I was waiting for a traffic light to turn, I noticed the truck beside me. Printed just beneath the store logo was:

THIS TRUCK IS BEING DRIVEN UNSAFELY CALL (512)###-####

Actually, the truck was not being driven unsafely; it was motionless—waiting for the light to change, just as I was. But the first time I parsed the sign, I saw two distinct sentences, “This truck is being driven unsafely. Call…” I’m sure the lack of case affected how I interpreted the symbols. I’m sure that the funiture company meant to say, “If this truck is being driven unsafely, call …” But someone decided it was too expensive to pay for punctuation.

So I want to call and let them know that their truck is telling everyone it is being driven unsafely and asking for help.