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"?

100515- A joke

.....Not having grown up in the American South, I find the appeal of the Confederate flag extremely confusing.

[For any readers not from this country, the U.S. began as British colonies on the Atlantic coast. They reacted to exploitation and abuse of power by the then-current regime by breaking their ties to England, but they did it without any specific plans. Even with the snail's pace of communications back then it took less than ten years for everyone to realize that having no standard currency, legal code or even language made them a prime target for invasion by foreign powers. So, after a few years of heated arguments representatives of the former colonies compromised on a basic foundation with provisions built into it to make alterations as the needs arose. It was the Constitution that turned loosely affiliated confederates into a united republic. However, in order to get the cooperation of states that permitted slavery, the states that didn't promised to allow them to count a large fraction of their slave population when calculating their proportionate representation in legislature. Eventually they all had to deal with the obvious 'elephant in the living room': the additional representatives earned by the slaves' numbers weren't really representing the interests of the slaves, and inadequate representation in legislature was the whole reason for breaking away from England in the first place. Those who refused to allow slaves to vote planned to revert to a less structured confederacy. Unfortunately for them, the U.S. had been a single country for decades by that point and the republic had grown to include additional states and territories, complicating matters.]

.....For one thing, "strength through disorganization" isn't an inspiring motto for most of the human race. For another thing, what most people refer to as the Confederate flag was never "the" flag, it was just the last one in a long line of flags and most of the member states in the Confederacy flew their own state flags instead. Some of those states would incorporate small versions of it within their flags, but not all did. (Again, disorganization was a sacred creed for them.) You'd think that anybody in that much of a rush to look like a Caribbean island would be nicer to black people.

.....It doesn't even make sense in terms of underdog appeal. Someone walking around wearing a cap or sweatshirt from a high school team that never made the play-offs can at least imagine next year's team going all the way. There's no 'next year' for the Confederacy. The last possible 'next year' was fifty years before that flag was created. They didn't lose the Civil War because of anyone "cheating" or "being sneaky" or "shameful conduct" of their enemies; they lost for the same reason that they didn't start out as colonies of a druid empire. There was no way England could have become an international power since the Middle Ages without changing its political structure to manage that growth. The same was true for the U.S. It had grown too much since the revolution to throw all semblance of organization out the window. The Confederacy lost because there wasn't anything to win. If the Confederacy had got what they wanted and became a collection of Luxembourgs and Monacos they would have eventually been picked off one by one by European countries looking for sugar and cotton. How is that winning?

.....Variations of the U.S. flag were used when changing the course of two European wars, a Pacific war, winning two gulf wars and claiming the moon. It's also used when delivering foreign aid and participating in disarmament talks. What exactly does the Confederate flag commemorate? If you already have a flag that says "this is what 'E Pluribus Unum' can do for you", why would you knowingly choose one that says, "Oh, yeah? Well we lost. Take that, suckers!" It's like showing up in a stadium with a giant foam rubber hand that has two fingers raised and chanting, "We're Number Two! We're Number Two!... In a field of two!... We're Number Two!..."

.....Maybe I'm completely wrong about this. Maybe the Confederate flag has been around so long because it isn't a relic of history. After all, it wasn't even used that much until the secession attempt escalated to warfare. Maybe it's popular because each generation projects their own meaning onto it. For some it may mean warm memories of entrenched local power strangling employment opportunities, for others the comfort of glaring illiteracy rates and for still others epidemic teen pregnancy and the abstinence-only education policies that caused it. It's just that whenever I notice it flapping in the company of a 70's model Chevy blaring Lynyrd Skynyrd through mono speakers, I don't think of the Center For Disease Control. Well, not at first. I also don't think of the Tuskegee Airmen or Audie Murphy or R.E.M. or Truman Capote or peanut butter or Andy Griffith or gospel choirs or anything remotely commendable or decent or admirable. Well, maybe fritters. Still, if you're going to tip those scales, you're talking about an awful lot of fritters. And then we're back to pulmonary disorders.

.....I can just imagine sometime hundreds of years in the future when the human race is colonizing space. A teacher will be showing a room full of children the symbols of the home world and asking them to identify what part of the culture each symbol represents:

• A caduceus? "Medicine."
• A cross? "Christianity"
• A euro sign? "Money"
• A Confederate flag? "Umm... Wal-Mart?"

The teacher just stares blankly at the holographic image. "Yeah, sure. Sounds good."

100514- A joke

.....When I was a kid, prescription medications were never advertised on television. They were created to treat debilitating conditions and often produced mildly annoying side effects. Now that the invisible hand of market forces have set things right, prescription drugs are created to treat mildly annoying conditions and often produce debilitating side effects.

.....Seriously, as I'm typing this I'm listening to a television commercial for a prescription drug to treat symptoms as vague as "confusion" and lists potential side effects such as "an increased risk of death" or "impaired motor skills". If the drug is meant to treat confusion, maybe the real purpose of the ad is to expand the market.

100510- A joke

.....Hello? I'm calling about the aptitude test I took, the one for job placement? Yeah, that's the one. Anyway, I haven't taken anything like this since high school, so I'm probably a little behind on the terminology. I just got the results back with my... let's see, it says, "Optimal potential occupational field determination" whatever that is. Anyway, under that it just says, "Cautionary tale". I was wondering... is that hourly or salary?

100508- A joke

.....Here's one for long rides: which is larger, the percentage of twenty-somethings who know and use the phrase "dial-tone" without ever having used (or even seen) a rotary phone, or the percentage of forty-somethings who think they understand the subtleties of constitutional law without ever having opened a legal dictionary?

100504- A joke

.....True story: about 20+ years ago I was watching the US broadcast television premiere of the movie "Godzilla: 1985". No, that's not the joke. It was broadcast TV, so there were paid advertisements. One of the ads was for a device that promised to shield your telephone conversations from electronic surveillance. It came complete with actors playing people who seemed to have serious anxieties about people listening in on their conversations, then expressed appropriately melodramatic relief and confidence once the device was attached to the receiver. I sat there watching that ad and thinking to myself, "Somebody paid money to run that ad. Somebody paid more money than I'm going to earn this year to run that ad. For what? How many people who could conceivably need this product are likely to see that ad? What are the odds that Henry Kissinger was sitting around snarfing cheese doodles and watching "Godzilla: 1985" that night? "He-e-e-ey, dot vould gome in quvite handy, I tink." The whole point of ads like that is that they rely on a certain percentage of the viewers being extremely stupid, or at least too stupid to understand the basics of cost effectiveness analysis. Wiretaps aren't magic. With the technology that existed at the time there would be the cost of the hardware to consider, plus the cost of the installation, plus the cost in man-hours of monitoring any recordings. Now, the only reason someone would fund all of those expenses up front would be if they anticipated that the information culled from the phone conversations would be worth more than the money they invested.

.....All I knew was that if I was holding onto information that valuable, I sure as hell wouldn't be spending my evenings sitting around watching edited Godzilla movies. I'd be watching them uncut and subtitled on VHS.

100502- A joke

.....Thank you for participating in our Online Psychic Aptitude Test. If you've received this e-mail it means that your check has cleared. Please allot yourself 60 seconds to answer each of the following questions:

1. How many fingers am I holding up? ___________
2. What is my favorite color? ___________
3. On what floor is our office located? ___________
4. In what city is our office located? ___________
5. What is the name of our CEO? ___________
6. Under what US statutes is this business considered fraudulent? __________, _________, _________, and _________

.....For those of you who know whether your answers are correct, congratulations! You are psychics. For those of you who can not ascertain if your answers are correct, please send another check to the same address.

100429- A joke

.....You may occasionally hear or read warnings about identity theft. I think that if someone stole my identity that the most appropriate punishment would be to force them to keep it.

100423- A joke

.....I enjoy puns and you may see some occasionally on this blog. I understand that not everyone appreciates them as I do. Alexander Pope once said that the pun is the lowest form of humor. I don't know if anyone ever pointed this out to him, but somebody who had to go through junior high school with the last name "Pope" probably isn't going to be the most objective voice in this matter. Having to put up with "How'd you do on the test, Mr. Infallible?" and "Hey, I got a ring you can kiss!" is bound to influence your opinions. I'm just saying.

100420- A joke

.....Okay, I'll admit it, I'm stuck for a snarky one-liner again. If nobody minds, I'm going to retell a favorite old joke of mine instead:

.....Three men wake up surrounded by clouds. There's a long line of people stretching out on either side of them. As ridiculous as it appears to them, every indication is that they've died and gone to heaven. Everything around them conforms to every corny movie and comic strip cliche they've ever seen. Cherubs are floating around, there's harp music coming from somewhere and off in the distance they can see walls of precious jewels and gates of pearl. "If we're really in heaven," said the first man, "that means we must have died". "Yeah," said the second man, "that makes sense. But I don't remember dying. In fact, I can't remember how I got here at all." The third man shrugged and said, "I can't remember either. But that would kind of make sense. None of us look as old as the people just before and after us. If we died at our age it was probably due to some accident. The mind has a way of protecting itself from traumas. Whatever's too hard to deal with, it just blanks out." "Hey, yeah," said the first man. "I heard about stuff like that. Multiple personalities and obsessions and junk. You don't think we got any of that?" The second man rolled his eyes. "I wouldn't worry about any of that. I mean, I've never met either of you guys, but we all seem to be pretty lucid, considering the circumstances... whatever they were."

.....The third man brightened up. "You know, we could probably help each other. If we're all here together, that may mean that we died within moments of each other. If our deaths were related in any way, we might only be blocking out our own deaths. We might still remember something about each other's." "That's kind of a longshot," said the second man, "since we could have died in different cities." "Well, we'll never know if we don't try.' said the first. " I don't mind going first. Even if it doesn't work, we've got nothing else to do while we're waiting in line."

.....The first man tries to recall: "I don't remember just which day I died, but for a couple of weeks, I had been suspecting that my wife was cheating on me. There were all kinds of hints, but nothing that was really proof, you know? Somebody else's shirt comes back from the dry cleaner, food missing from the fridge, dumb stuff like that. There could have been a bunch of reasons. Then one day I come home and notice an ashtray with a crushed cigarette in the living room. We don't smoke. I ask my wife about it and she said her friend Helen was over that day. She was really defensive about it. But, see, I know Helen and she's been over a lot and that wasn't her brand. And there wasn't any lipstick on this cigarette. I didn't say anything. I just let it go. But it was eating at me, every day. I kept wondering who it could be; was it somebody I knew? did she go looking for somebody? It was driving me nuts. One day, I couldn't stand it. I left work early and went home. When I got to the apartment, I took the stairs up and used my key on the door. The chain was on, but through the door I could hear voices suddenly stop. I called out that it was me, that she left the chain on and I needed her to open the door. Suddenly I heard a lot of scuffling and clattering. I asked her if she was alright, if there was somebody in there. She told me she'd be right there but it must have been at least another five minutes before she opened the door, wearing a towel and looking really guilty. 'What d'you want? I was taking a shower.' she said. I told her her hair wasn't wet and asked her if I checked the bathtub if that would be dry too? She looked pretty shocked. I guess she thought I was pretty stupid just because she'd been getting away with this so far. I demanded to know where he was. She kept pretending she didn't know what I was talking about. That's when I really lost it. I started tearing through the apartment checking every room, every closet, pulling out drawers, raving like a maniac. I kept screaming, 'Where is he? Where is he?' Then I noticed the sliding glass door that leads to the fire escape was open. It's right between the kitchen area and the living room. I rushed to it and looked down and sure enough, there was a guy sneaking down the stairs! I freaked out! The nearest thing to me was the refrigerator, so I grabbed it and started pushing. I was just burning adrenaline, my wife was screaming at me but I couldn't hear anything... and then... and then... I must have blacked out. I don't think you can die from a hernia, but pushing that fridge onto the fire escape must have given me a heart attack. Hey, I figured out how I died!"

.....The first man was so happy to have worked out the mystery he forgot how angry he had gotten remembering his wife's infidelity. The second man, however, looked angry enough for both of them. "What's wrong with you?" asked the first man. "Oh, I'll tell you what's wrong" said the second man. "I used to work as a meter reader. I used to hate reading meters in the city because you're supposed to be able to go into a building's basement and read every unit's meter at once. That would make it easy, but there's always someone tapping a line, trying to get free juice. So I gotta go up and down the fire escapes looking for illegal splices. One day, I hear some idiot screaming so I stop and look up. The next thing I know, a giant black rectangle comes zooming at me and... bang! Nothing. That's the last thing I remember before I wound up here. With you."

.....The first man looked furious. "You mean it was you?!?" The second man screamed back, "Me? You're the one who--" and the two began throwing punches and clawing at each other. An angel came swooping in from somewhere nearby and pleaded, "Oooh, stop! You must stop at once!" but the two men were absorbed in their scuffle. "You simply can't do this! There's no fighting in Heaven! It isn't allowed." The third man looked back and forth between the angel and the brawl until the angel sighed and pulled a lever only it could see. The clouds dropped out from under the fighting men and they plummeted downward and downward, their yelling gradually fading for what seemed like several minutes, punctuated by a tiny pinhole of flame below. "Oh, I so wished that wouldn't be necessary." pined the angel. "I tried to warn them. What a senseless, needless waste. They were even within sight of the gates! What could possibly make someone throw all that away?" The third man cleared his throat. "Well, we were all trying to recall the events that led us here. It must have brought up some bad memories for them. They didn't even get to hear how I died." "I've heard so many over the ages," said the angel, "I can't imagine how one more would surprise me." The third man chuckled, "Well, this is going to sound weird, but the last thing I remember is, I was hiding in a refrigerator."

100415- A joke

.....Today the Tea Party Express (a private company created to siphon resources off from Ron Paul's group) ends its tour in Washington, D.C. They traveled around the country recently, making speeches about how they support "the troops" (paid for, fed, clothed, housed, armed, transported and hospitalized with tax dollars), how they want want the federal government to "keep their hands off our Medicare" (paid for, administrated and distributed with tax dollars), how they want to strengthen national borders (supervised with tax dollars) and how much they love Scott Brown (recently elected in an off-season special election requiring extra tax dollars and salaried with tax dollars) as they roll their large trucks over the nation's highways (surveyed, built and regularly maintained and policed with tax dollars) by burning cheap American gas (subsidized by tax dollars) to tell everyone how bad taxes are.

.....Because it's the rest of us who "just don't get it", and other meaningful phrases.

100401- Menu Options

.....Thank you for calling You're Welcome. If you're receiving this message it means that you have called on April Fool's Day, our only recognized holiday, and have been forwarded to voice mail. We would be happy to fulfill your low-rent humor needs during regular business hours, which are every day. As a service to our valued bipolar and emotionally stunted customers we offer the following menu in lieu of today's joke:

• For English, press one.
• For Spanish, press dos.
• For Danish, press three.
• For coffee with that Danish, press four.
• For the hell of it, press five. I always wanted to see what happens.
• If you're just waiting for a chance to give strangers personal information, press six.
• If you wanted to know why Paul McCartney stopped smoking pot, "Press To Play".
• If the first thing that comes to mind when you want to reassure someone that you don't look like Carl from "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" is that "my head is a completely different shape from his", press seven.
• If you forgot to take your medication, press eight.
• If you le-ee-eave me now, press nine.
• If you wish to hear this menu again, take two aspirin and press zero.
• If you wish to speak to a human operator, hang up and call the same number again. It will save you the time spent on hold until we did it to you anyway.

100305- A joke

.....The strange thing about babies and cars (#3) is that after seven years you feel like trading them in.

100216- A joke

.....You've probably heard of the "Chicken Soup" franchise of books, the ones filled with wistful anecdotes and obviously fabricated "true" stories with fascistic spiritual overtones. They have titles like: "Chicken Soup for the Skier's Soul" and "Chicken Soup for the Dentist's Soul" and "Chicken Soup for the [fill-in-the-blank]'s Soul". I've always contended that those titles were all misnomers. The people who read those books don't have souls.

100130- A joke

.....Have you noticed the inverse proportion of the speed at which people feel compelled to drive and the number of people waiting for them to get there?

100119- A joke

.....When people ask me why I'm so cynical and bitter and pessimistic and nihilistic and misanthropic, I just hold my head up and look them straight in the eye and say, "I believe the children are our future."

100115- A joke

.....I don't see the insides of churches much these days except for weddings and funerals. I've managed to avoid one of them myself, and I suspect that's helped me to avoid the other.

100104- A joke

I think it's terrible nowadays how people go around just shooting each other for no reason at all. That's not necessary. They should have come to me. I could have given them plenty of reasons.