110530- 150th post

.....It's been fun getting back to joking around for the past two weeks, but between the heat, other commitments and the possibility of traveling this month I'm going to have to go on hiatus again. Sorry, but the quality would definitely suffer if I tried to do this while distracted and under duress. While I'm busy I'll try to jot down jokes as they occur and maybe later this year (or at this time next year) I can provide a few more weeks of daily posts. Frankly, after a year I'd have to go back and reread the first ones. For now, this is a nice round number to end with.

110529- A joke

.....Today's joke is brought to you in the original theatrical perspective, fully restored to the director's cut.

110528- A joke

.....Is it true that the traffic lights in New Orleans say "Saunter" and "Don't Saunter"?

110527- A joke

.....Just out of curiosity, how long do you have to talk to someone before you start thinking to yourself, "If they gave this person a CAT scan, they'd find an actual cat"?

110526- A joke

.....I don't know why pundits keep speculating about the possibility of Sarah Palin running for president. Even the voices in her head have started to pretend that they can only speak Spanish just to avoid having conversations with her.

110525- A joke

.....I don't know why pundits keep speculating about the possibility of Sarah Palin running for president. In her new self-aggrandizing documentary, one of the few people singing her praises is Andrew Breitbart. That's like saying, "Friends? Sure, I've got friends! Charles Manson still answers my letters..."

110524- A joke

.....The conclusion of the Oprah Winfrey Show will be marked by a limited edition commemorative dildo known as the Insteadman.

110523- A joke

.....I was driving around today and noticed something I've seen hundreds of times but never thought about: many people fly American flags next to their front doors. I don't fly one myself. Respectful observance of flag etiquette requires raising it in the morning, lowering it at night and not leaving it in the rain. That's a lot of work and I don't know how many of those people simply leave theirs outdoors 24 hours a day. However, I'm thinking that flying one might not be a bad idea. For one thing, when someone's wandering around outside your house unaware of what country they're in that person really needs all the help they can get.

110522- Thanks and You're Welcome

.....Last week I began posting again exactly a year to the date after I had stopped. If you've read the new posts you may have noticed that they contain contemporary topics and news stories. That was on purpose, so that it will be obvious that they weren't merely leftovers or that they were written over the course of months. I actually had no plans to return to this blog, even late last year when I was exploring the logistics and ethics of possibly monetizing my other blogs. I was comparing their page view statistics to those for this blog, which I hadn't bothered check since I discontinued posting. There were two page views a week attributed to Japan, which I assumed were either mistakes or someone learning English looking for brief statements to translate as exercises. I expected that a blog that had no registered followers and had been inactive for months would provide a baseline reference for minimal activity. Occasional follow-ups showed the views settle into a regular pattern of one view every two days. I put off making a decision on monetizing and forgot about the stats for awhile.

.....About two months ago a tsunami hitting Japan caused shocked reactions in the rest of the world as we all watched massive amounts of water alter topography as easily as it did human lives. Many people were still in the planning stages of offering aid when the real bad news came in: the many buildings effected by the flooding included nuclear power plants and their contingency plans didn't cover impacts of that unprecedented magnitude. Boiling, radioactive water was pouring out of the plants and power outages were widespread and long lasting. I felt horrible at being helpless to do anything about it and wondered how much worse it would feel if I knew anyone in Japan, or had any connection to them.

.....And then I remembered that I did have one, tenuous connection.

.....When I sat down to work on my other blogs and signed in, before starting as planned I first checked the stats for this blog and there they were: two page views this week. I checked the audience: both were from Japan. I started checking every other day and the views continued for a few weeks, every other day and from nowhere else on Earth. Obviously whoever that blip represented was in the side of the country that didn't bear the brunt of the physical impact of the tsunami, but considering the scope and scale of the damage, I can't imagine that anyone in Japan didn't experience an adverse repercussion in some aspect of their lives. Yet during the worst of it they didn't break their routine of checking this blog. I started feeling guilty that I hadn't at least provided them some new material. Then after a few weeks, they stopped. Sometime later, they started up again, this time in the U.S. every forty-two hours, which led me to suspect it was something automated (try arranging a sleep schedule that would allow you to check a blog manually every forty-two hours and you'll see what I mean). After a recent health problem (behind me, I hope) I set out to return my other blogs to regular schedules. Since I was online every day again it seemed fitting to mark last week's "anniversary" with something-- anything-- new. It actually garnered a slight reaction. I wish I had the time/energy/creativity to return to daily jokes, but I only had one badly neglected blog when I started this and now I have three besides this. I can't maintain a daily schedule, but rather than abandon it completely I'm going to try to post weekly. If you're human, check in once a week, starting after next Sunday.

110521- A joke

.....I've heard the news out of Cannes recently. Director Lars Von Trier was banned for comments that he understood Hitler. Von Trier apologized and said he meant it as a joke. Considering what an ass he's always been, I actually find it more believable that he would find that funny than that he would empathize with anyone. Still, the festival organizers aren't letting him back in. There has to be a more direct way of saying "Ten years ago we sat through your excruciatingly painful movies because you showed a lot of promise and thought you were finding your voice. It took us this long to figure out that was your voice."

110520- A joke

.....If you live in the U.S. you may have heard about the fundamentalist Christian who predicted that Armageddon begins tomorrow. (Can you believe he's a self-taught biblical scholar?) According to his interpretation of scripture, the devout will be taken to heaven in the Rapture and the rest of us will stand in the corner and think about what we've done until we all burst into flames in October. You see, one of the problems with self-taught scholars is that they're not always aware of the idiosyncrasies of ancient languages. The books of the Bible have gone through multiple translations, after all, and not everyone is familiar with all of the "i-before-e" type exceptions to the rules in Aramaic and Babylonian. I suspect the whole thing is just a matter of misspelling. Considering how many people in the Bible Belt are overweight, it's more likely that they'll experience the Rupture.

110519- A joke

.....My hair doesn't look good today. When that happens I usually assume that I've slept on it the wrong way, but in this case I think I'm just standing under it incorrectly.

110518- A joke

.....In today's headlines the head of the IMF has been arrested for the sexual assault of a native African working in a New York hotel. It says he's on a suicide watch. Considering what the IMF has done to Africa, they shouldn't have too much difficulty finding volunteers to watch that.