2020-04-01 Is This Thing On?

.....I haven't posted in a while, but in my defense I've only just come out of a coma. It was a bad reaction to an experimental drug I was taking to treat obsessive compulsive disorder. They tell me it was touch and go for a while but I'm fine now and the good news is I can finally stop washing my hands constantly.

SO, what's been in the news lately?

2019-01-15 Sometimes the best presents are homemade.

I haven't used this blog in a while because, frankly, there hasn't been much to feel funny about in the last three years. That's not to say that there hasn't been much to laugh at, just that much more to enrage. And it looks increasingly that that's not an accident. The United States, and the world that has invested much in it and its ideals, has been under attack and not by starving Guatemalans.

First of all, the criminal mob running Russia spent a lot of money to...

...in our election .Their puppet still wants to spend all of our money on...

...that he promised others would pay for. And China, who wanted to get..

...have beaten us to...

Much of what made these things possible has been...

...on the part of voters almost three years ago and the...

...they put into office. They wouldn't listen to scientists, intelligence experts, actuaries or anyone with first hand experience or a lifetime devoted to studying the effects of their policies. All they heard was...

...and the...

of well-paid right-wing provocateurs on TV, cable, radio, newspapers and online services (who, without any sense of irony, perpetually complain about the left-wing controlling the media) and their...

...of propaganda disguised (not well) as news.  Facts and even the sense that there is any objective truth became...

...and led anybody who still hadn't lost their mind to ask,...

All of this gave the country little choice but to turn over the House of Representatives to a different political party by voting in young, motivated and vocal legislators last year. Unfortunately, their party is still run by...

...of...

...without a...

It still provides a...

...in the...

...for the next election. There's plenty to indicate that...

...will..

...in...

And...

...if our previous President is reading this by any chance...

160401 No joke

Well, it's been a while but I read a news report that the Chinese government's official news agency released an announcement to the effect that April Fool's day is a distinctly Western tradition at odds with Chinese culture and should be shunned by loyal Chinese citizens. It's reception has generally been that people are assuming that the announcement itself is an April Fool's joke. Could be, although the Chinese government are hardly known for their sense of humor. Still, this means one of two things must be possible: either the report was real and humor is being seriously threatened for a big chunk of the world's population; or the report was a joke and the Chinese government has therefore told more jokes than this blog for the calendar year. In either case, I can not allow this to stand. I've got to return to some semblance of productivity and I've got to do it in the form of a grand gesture. Or a hand gesture. No, no, a grand gesture would be better. What I need to do is unearth the great lost plays of William Shakespeare. I'll release their titles, one every day, for the rest of April. All that remains now is to make up 29 unseen Shakespeare plays.

130104- A joke

So, NRA honcho Wayne LaPierre has stated, pretty forcefully, that the national response to the recent spate of mass killings should not be reinstating the ban on the only weapons that make such multiple murders possible. Instead, he insists, there should be stricter mental health screenings involved. Ohboyohboyohboy... this definitely comes under the heading of "Be careful what you wish for." I'm guessing ol' Wayne hasn't read very much O. Henry or seen too many episodes of "The Twilight Zone". It would be kind of embarrassing for somebody whose job was to speak for a firearms lobby to have to tell people he's not allowed to own a gun just because he's crazier than an outhouse rat.

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..."

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.

100511- A joke

.....Shortly after President Obama announced that his nominee for Supreme Court Justice was King Solomon there was harsh criticism on talk radio and the blogsphere, much of it repeating Rush Limbaugh's accusation that the nominee was "a radical-left activist who once tried to socialize a baby."

100503- A joke

.....Back in the eighties the Reagan administration did everything they could to prevent the FDA from protecting the American public. The argument was that market forces would tell us what was safe to eat, that experimentation and testing was just a waste of tax dollars. To prove their point, they forced the FDA to sit on their hands while a chemical additive called Olestra, on which they had placed restrictions for fifteen years, was used to make fat-free potato chips. After thousands of people spent far more money going to their doctors than the FDA would have spent in taxes, makers of the chips still didn't pull Olestra products from the market but instead announced that they "forgot" to add a warning which, they felt, would absolve them of any legal responsibility.

.....Now here's the kicker: the disclaimer/warning became a news item when it conceded that products cooked in Olestra "may cause spontaneous rectal bleeding". It should be pointed out that the chemical causes diarrhea in nearly everyone, which only leads to hemorrhaging if you're stupid enough to keep eating a product guaranteed to give you diarrhea until you bleed. Still, it's a phrase that turns heads at parties, I'll give you that. More than that, it's a neat condensation of a personality test. In any sufficiently large sampling of people, if you were to ask each one which word in that phrase they find most alarming, I would wager that most would say "bleeding", as though other forms of spontaneous rectal activity were... uh, negotiable? For others, "rectal" would concern them most; I'll leave the Freudian interpretations of that to yourselves. There would even be others for whom "spontaneous" would cause more anxiety, that a negative side effect would seem more manageable if it were more predictable. Me? The one word in that sentence that I home in on has to be "may". It "may cause spontaneous rectal bleeding". It says, "We had some indication that it might cause spontaneous rectal bleeding but we didn't see any pressing need to nail that down before we made food for you out of it."

100319- A joke

.....How many Tea Party protesters does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Three. The first one screws it in, "as the founding fathers would have". The second one smashes it spitefully, "as the founding fathers would have". The third one blames Obama for the broken glass, "as the founding fathers would have".

100313- A joke

.....With baseball season starting up, the professional leagues have finally decided to do a little preventative maintenance regarding steroid abuse. From the perspective of management, the problems don't stem from the abuse but from getting caught when it becomes so comically obvious that even congressmen notice. So, to prevent things getting that far out of hand the owners have opted for the 'theme park' approach. From now on at the doors to each of the locker rooms there will be a die-cut plywood cartoon character with an outstretched hand and a word balloon reading, "You must be this tall and able to scratch your ass with both hands to play this game!"

100308- A joke

.....An aquaintance, J.-- , had been unemployed for so long that he was forced to cut his losses and stop paying his mortgage. Like many these days he would just allow it to default rather than pour money he needed to survive into a home that was no longer worth as much as he owed. He spent the last few months selling furniture and other possessions online and putting the money in the names of solvent friends and relatives. It would pay for gas and food so that he and his wife could live in their SUV and drive until he found work. I was helping him pack what was left into it when I asked him how his wife was taking the news.
....."She's taking it better than I expected," J.-- said. "She really hasn't complained at all. I think she's afraid to." I was stunned. There had never been any signs of violence in their marriage. "Why would she be scared of you?" I asked. "Oh, hell," said J.--, "it's not me she's afraid of. It's just that ever since we got married she's been grousing about how I never take her anywhere. Now that it's the only thing we'll be doing for a while, I'm guessing she's getting extremely particular about what she wishes for."

100306- A joke

.....My friend hasn't come back from the Winter Olympics yet. I heard he saw a billboard that said, "Drink Canada Dry" and took it as a personal challenge.

100223- A joke

.....Today an exasperated George Lucas explained to reporters at a press conference-- for the third time-- that the various toy Yoda figures he has sold over the years are not defective and are not being recalled. "They're perfectly safe. My own kids play with them all the time. I can't understand where these stories are coming from. I never have problems like this in Japan."

100120- A joke

.....If you've ever tried to double-check the facts of statements made on the Fox News channel, it's an experience that can best be described as the "Oh, Really?" factor.

100105- A joke

.....Something that was overlooked in the coverage of the Nigerian Christmas bomber was that this was not the first time someone flew in from Amsterdam with exploding underwear. It's just the first time it was done with malicious intent.