110524- A joke

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

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.

100512- A joke

.....If you are uncomfortable or having difficulty discussing erectile dysfunction with your doctor, gently remind him that his problems really aren't your responsibility and you just want to get that toe looked at.

100505- A joke

.....Politically, you can divide people into groups according to how they watch nature documentaries. There are those who are willing to sit through the hunt-and-kill segments in order to get to the courtship-and-mating segments (on the left), those who sit through the courtship-and-mating in order to get to the hunt-and-kill (on the right) and those who make a point of reading the credits (Ralph Nader).

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.

100428- A joke

.....Tomorrow it will have been a week since Earth Day. I don't know about you, but I still hear a little bit every day about ecological efforts, unlike previous years where you got one day of lip service and then it was back to the bad old habits the next day. Everybody seems to be touting 'green' programs. For instance, Comcast seems to be putting all of its efforts into discouraging people from using electricity in any capacity whatsoever.

100414- A joke

.....This month's book selection will be "A Porpoise Driven Life: The Porter Ricks Story".

100409- A joke

.....I can't believe news outlets are ignoring genuine issues in order to squander airtime babbling about the new television ad from Nike with Tiger Woods. If you haven't seen it, the visuals are a single 30-second shot of Woods in an extremely slow zoom-in but the audio is a clip of his late father's voice taken from an interview. His father seems to be answering a question about what he would ask his son. The last thing we hear him say is, "have you learned anything?" and then the visuals cut to a white Nike symbol in the middle of a solid black background. I'll tell you what I've learned from all this: "Just Do It" is just as idiotic a lifestyle model as it is advice for buying shoes.

100403- A joke

.....The upcoming edition of The Chicago Manual of Style will include a revision requiring any use of the phrase "when hell freezes over" to be replaced with the phrase "when Nancy Grace blinks".

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.

100222- A joke

.....In the 1960's, when a television show ran the credits at the end they looked like they were printed on title cards; they were often in large block letters and would list four to six names at a time, and after one set of names had been on screen for a few seconds it would either switch to the next or quickly fade out as the next one faded in. Twenty years later television production became more complicated technologically and legally. In the 1980's you were more likely to see names scroll up the screen continuously as in a movie, but faster to get through quickly. Twenty years on they no longer bother having closing theme music. In the last decade it became standard procedure to shrink the credits down to the size of a bottle cap and shove them into one corner of the screen so that the rest of the screen can be used for advertising more shows. What names they do show zip by quicker than anyone could possibly read them. And I think I've finally figured out why: after shoveling crap at us for sixty years they've finally become too afraid to admit who's responsible.

100220- A joke

.....Ten days ago I implied that people complaining about sex in movies were prudes. Someone once asked me, "Aren't you upset by sex on the television?" and I have to admit, I can't stand it myself. I keep falling off.

100213- A joke

.....Japan's greatest strength has always been to improve rather than to innovate. For centuries it has taken the creative works of others (the Chinese, the Americans) in arts and technology and fine tuned them to perfection. For that reason many in the entertainment industry are anxiously awaiting news of Japan's greatest film star, Godzilla, following the much tinier footsteps of American movie actors who have left the high stakes silver screen for the regular work of television sitcoms. At the moment he's still reviewing scripts and nothing has been decided yet, but some contenders are:

• "How I Met Your Mothra"
• "Everybody Loves Radioactivity"
• "Accidently On Tokyo"
• "Mash" (It's not what you're thinking; it's not the acronym. It's kind of... well, it worked better as a pilot than it would as a series.)

100212- A joke

.....I don't think Glen Beck actually says anything during his broadcasts. I think the voices in his head are so loud that they get picked up by the microphones.

100210- A joke

.....The next time some prude asks rhetorically, "Why is there so much sex in the movies and television these days?", you should just tell them the truth: it's because you can't smell the movies. That simple, often overlooked fact is a very large part of maintaining fantasy. You may not notice your own scent, but if you ever had to smell another couple having sex, you'd just get up and leave. If you could smell movies, the only sex scenes would occur in serious, uncompromising art films. All the crap at the multiplex would have gratuitous, cloyingly edited footage of freshly cooked meals.

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.

100116- A joke

.....Just once I'd like to see one of those cable news channels run a subscroll that says, "If you're reading this, then why are you watching a channel that bores you?"