Who… keeps pinching me?
What… is a Blarney Stone?
Where… do leprechauns sleep?
When… is the appropriate time to barf green eggs and ham?
Why…. is Steve Miller Band playing?
Archive | comedy
Who, What, Where, When, Why: Cruise Ship Edition
Who… gave me these coconuts?
What… happened on the poop deck?
Where… are my sea legs?
When… did we get married?
Why… is Kathie Lee Gifford winking at me?
On smelling like peppers
Earlier today I took a shower because I’m a go-getter and as soon as the water hit my skin, which is nubile and supple, by the way, everything began smelling intensely of bell peppers and my fear —that I’ve been walking around smelling like a pepper—was confirmed. “This is as I feared!” I yelled into the drain, as the heady and intoxicating elixir slid off my skin like so many burritos.
As I sit here typing this, smelling not of peppers but of the vacuum left behind when one’s peppery perfume is robbed of them by a cold blast of ruthless water, I feel naked. I also feel like I have a headache. I do in fact have a headache, probably because I have my hair in rollers atop my head and the weight of the rollers is putting strain on my already overburdened brain.
But rollers aren’t very heavy, you are likely thinking.
But see, I’m not using rollers, I’m using turnips.
Bet you thought I was going to say I was using peppers? You don’t know me at all!
So how am I cooking these stinky fruits? And they are fruits technically according to wikipedia. If you’re imagining that I’m preparing some kind of fancy thing with rice and beef and tomatoes and egg and bread crumbs and sesame seeds and basil and brown sugar and marjoram and margarine and sunflower seeds and figs and dates and oysters and tomato juice and stewed prunes and avocados and abogados (Spanish lawyers) and albodingas (Spanish soup) and elbows (elbows) and elbow macaroni and Terrytown, Pennsylvania (it just seemed to fit there) and Dracula (because Terrytown made me think of Transylvania) and lightbulbs (because Transylvania made me think of Sylvania) and the New York dolls (because Sylvania made me think of Sylvain Sylvain) and Patty Hearst (I’m no longer going to say what’s making me think of what and you see if you can figure it out) and NewsCorp and uh oh, nothing else is coming to me.
Anyway, you’re wrong so just hold it right there, Charley.
In fact, I just cut up the peppers and get rid of the seeds (I like to plant them in a trash can) and then microwave them. If what you’re looking for is soft, mushy peppers that will stay on your skin for weeks, that’s what you’ll get. Then I eat them with ketchup, have sex with a blood relative and call it a night.
Myers-Briggs Creepy Index
In social situations you tend to:
a) rock back and forth
b) eat hand
c) pet own face while staring intently at strangers and mouthing “you”
d) STOP YELLING AT ME
Your friends describe you as
a) mute
b) human-like at times
c) creepy
d) friends?
You get energy from
a) dead animals
b) avoiding people
c) I SAID STOP YELLING AT ME!
d) helmets and/or robots
Your first thought in the morning is typically
a) Guess they had the LD50 wrong. AGAIN.
c) Time to wear someone else’s skin!
b) I would like to do something weird with pantyhose
d) Same shit, different jail cell
Your binoculars are
a) Something you keep on your bedside table
b) Useful for birding
c) And by birding you mean hiding in bushes and staring at people with binoculars
d) out to get you
After prolonged socializing you feel the need to
a) lick your lips repeatedly
b) pick at your scabs
c) touch yourself in public
d) grow dreadlocks (white people only)
If a candy bar was named after you it would be
a) Baby Ruth Won’t Stop Crying!
b) Nuts And Chocolate Minus Chocolate!
c) DSMmmm!
d) Kit Skat
Books, shows and movies as imagined by Nadya Suleman
Are we as a culture over Octo Mom? Or is it just me because I talked about it on Geraldo on Oscars night? (Oh, did I mention that already?) Anyway, I made this list even though it feels kind of like a yesterday thing to do. Maybe I’m just moving too fast? Probably. I’m very ahead of my time. In fact I’ve already enjoyed this weekend. I’d tell you what I did but don’t want to cause a tear in the space time continuum. I’m sure you understand. [oh, and cheesy request here but if you like this list please use the Share This button at the bottom to digg it or technorati it or make it delicious or put lip gloss on it or call it Trudie or whatever it is that people do when they do that stuff.]
Books, shows and movies as imagined by Nadya Suleman
What to Expect When You’re Expecting Octuplets
With Eight You Get Eggroll… And Gov’t Assistance
Eight Isn’t Enough
Three Men and a Baby, Plus Seven More Babies, Minus Three Men
He’s Just Not That Into Eight Babies
The Audacity of Hoping No One Notices You’re a Crazy Bitch With Fourteen Children
The Seven Habits of Highly Fertile Women
I Hope They Serve Huggies In Hell
Like Breast Milk For Chocolate
The Unbearable Lightness of Micro-Preemies
101 Things To Do In A Sh*tty Economy, 1-11
Bad finances got you down? Try one of the following penny-pinching solutions.
1. Never can get the last bits of lipstick out of your near empty tubes? Don’t fret, pet. Wait until you’ve got a bunch (at least 5) and then head to your nearest MAC store where you can use them to beat the cashier until she hands over all the money in the register.
2. Weather is your friend. Capture light wintry mix in a bowl. Add dirt from your garden (No garden? Scrape the bottom of your shoe!) and serve at your next cocktail party!
3. Don’t throw out those last pieces of soap. Put them in a pot, boil them down and make soup!
4. Shave your head. The money you save on shampoo alone will be enough to buy food for your egg-laying chicken. (see #5)
5. Buy an egg-laying chicken. The money you save on eggs alone will be more than enough to pay for a wig. (see #4)
6. Egg-laying chicken turned out to be a rooster? Look on the bright side. Now you’ll never miss another sunrise. Nor will any of your neighbors!
7. OK so it looks like you’ll be needing a lawyer as your neighbors weren’t able to look on the bright side. Whip up a bowl of your best soap soup and offer to trade services. (Soap soup in exchange for legal representation.)
8. So you got evicted. Grab your rooster and hit the road. Think of it as an adventure! Fuck conformity, hobo chic style!
9. Instead of spending your hard earned money at a laundromat, wash clothes in shower (just get in shower fully clothed) and then dry them in the microwave. Make sure there’s no metal in your clothing. Consider a browning sleeve if you like your shirts crispy.
10. Old cook’s secret: In a pinch, eye makeup remover can double for olive oil in your recipes.
11. Baking a cake but unsure whether the oven is the right temperature and can’t afford an accurate thermometer? Stick hand in oven. When skin is light and flaky, cake is done.
[do I even need to say that you shouldn’t actually try any of these at home and this list is just a joke?]
We Professional Humorists, part 23
We professional humorists never forget where we were when we said something which tickled our own funny bone. Par example (and don’t be put off by my suddenly lapsing into French, I spent four days there on a teen tour and so you can understand why I don’t even notice anymore when I use the French instead of English)… Um, where was I?
Oh yes. What I was saying is that for the professional humorist, a conversation with a fellow human being can be a wondrous chance to say something funny, which then you will never forget, even if you forget the context, which might have been something grave or dire to the other person. Or you might forget the other person. For example (wait, did I do it again? Mais non, I didn’t. Phew!), they might be talking about the death of their mother, and you might make a hilarious Whistler’s Mother joke. Or they might be discussing a break up and you might use that opportunity to check your voice mail. Or they might be talking about ducks and you would make a joke about orange juice. And then you would remember the orange juice, but not what ducks are.
Allow me to tell you about last night. Are you sitting down? You’ll want to be standing up for this.
So a friend was talking about the idea of a theater which served soup. Naturally I asked what kind. “Broth,” was the answer. “Bouillon?” I asked, proud of my extensive knowledge of clear soups. “Probably some water with a couple chicken bones thrown in,” he quipped. “OK so what you’re really talking about is stock,” I parried, coolly. And then it hit me: “You should serve the soup in the summer!” I shrieked, also coolly. “You could call it… SUMMER STOCK!”
“That’s terrible,” he said, as if deliberately dodging my speeding humor bullet. No worries though, I was armed with a humor fusillade (a fusillade is when you shoot someone with a continuous spray of fusilli).
“You could call it… SUMMER STOCK!” I announced again, in between cartwheels. “Oh, come on!” I intoned, balancing one foot on the head of a sea lion. “SUMMER STOCK!” I yelled, shooting myself out of a cannon. “You know, because it’s summer and you’re serving stock, and it’s a theater!” I explained, because sometimes the little people need your help and also I had extra time while waiting for the trapeze swing to return to me.
“You know… like… SUMMER STOCK!” I yodeled, coolly, from inside the snapping jaws of a crocodile.
“Oh yeah, because what people want in the summer is hot soup,” he offered.
“Fine, then just serve gazpacho and don’t use the clever theater pun,” I said ruefully, mounting a tortoise and heading offstage.
Anyway though, I’ll always have “SUMMER STOCK!” which comes in a can and a handy snack pack and features macaroni thespians (chicken and “stars”… get it?) and also tiny comedy and drama masks made out of farina. It’s Broadway in a bowl, which might be the slogan, although it’s also The Catskills in a bowl and Peoria in a bowl and Branson in a giant bowl.
How it's going to work on my sustainable farm
When I grow up and earn untold millions of dollars I will use my vast wealth to hire someone whose entire job will be to make sure my TV doesn’t sit idle while some shitty show comes on. Apparently I’m too busy to handle this responsibility all by my lonesome, because quite frequently I’ll find myself in some other end of the apartment thinking “Why the fuck is that on and more importantly why has it been on for 20 minutes?” Hence: the hire.
But I won’t just be doing it because I hate Wheel of Fortune. I’ll be doing it as a way to stimulate the economy. If I can give some poor lost wayward soul a job, a salary and a place to sleep at night then it will be as if I’m giving something back. Granted I won’t be offering a place to sleep and I won’t be paying this person in actual money, but my heart’s in the right place.
Vegetables. Tubers, peppers, root vegetables. I’m thinking I’ll pay him or her in yams or bell peppers depending on how the crops come up that year.
Oh, did I not mention I’ll be running my own sustainable farm? Sometimes I neglect to mention it because I find it makes for better conversation when I refer to it as if you already knew and then ask if I neglected to mention it. Silly me!
Because I’ll be so busy getting my photo snapped for the money I’ll be appearing on, I won’t actually have time to manage the person I hire to manage the television and for that reason I’ll be hiring someone to manage that person. And then, because you can never be too safe, I’ll be hiring another person to micromanage the manager of the TV manager. Should that prove insufficient, I’ll add another person to the team. “So great to have you on our team!” I’ll say with a big smile before slamming myself in my office and never exchanging another word with him except for the occasional dissatisfied grunt. You really can’t coddle people, you know? It’s a very tough lesson I learned but I’m glad I learned it.
“You can coddle eggs and you can crack people, but you can’t crack coddled eggs,” my governess used to say to me in between chapters of The Trumpet of the Swan. I figured it was the alcohol talking, but I think I’m beginning to see her words in a new light.
I should probably tell you that I won’t be doing any of the actual farming myself either as I’ll be too busy training my lipizzaner stallions. I’m be farming out the farming —pun intended— to a team of interns. They’ll be unpaid but will receive college credit. Naturally I’ll have to hire someone else though to pat them down when they go on break and at the end of the day because so help me, if I find that any of those ungrateful bastards have helped themselves to a five finger potato discount, well, there’s going to be hell to pay.
I know it sounds harsh but it’s just that I’ve learned that it pays to be distrustful. In fact, that’s what I’ll be paying my team for.
Confessions of a Shoporexic
I’m not a big shopper. I know it goes against my chromosomal makeup however I’m just not. There are plenty of other things I can do to make myself feel feminine, such as talk about people behind their backs and scream when I see spiders. Also, I make my own potpourri.
I like to make this directly after douching and before taking Advil for cramps
In fact, there’s only been one time in my whole life that I’ve gone shopping with the express purpose of lifting my spirits and that was in college when I found out one of my friends had spent the night in a sleeping bag with a guy I had a crush on. “That’s great, I have to go,” I sniffled into the phone before jumping into my sensible Honda and driving to the world’s worst mall. “Who needs them!” I thought as I passed The Athlete’s Foot, which is a great name for a store that sells fungus but a terrible one for a store that doesn’t.
Doesn’t sell fungus. Incidentally, don’t ever blithely google “athlete’s foot” looking for an image of the store because you’ll get this instead. WARNING: disgusting ahead.
“Not me!” I announced as I passed a kiosks selling sunglasses, hair extensions and all manner of ergonomic miscellany. But the images of camping and betrayal hit me hard as I wended my way past Spencers For Gifts, Auntie Em’s Pretzels and Hot Topic. Was there love amongst the canteens? Furtive fleece-on-fleece frottage? Hot pine tree sex? How I loathed that tent of ill-repute!
If this tent’s a-rockin‘…Eventually I made my way to the Gap and bought, I think, a black pea coat with goldtone buttons. Did it make me feel better? Sort of, until months later a friend asked if she could borrow it for a couple minutes to go outside at a party and I begrudgingly agreed, thinking what could possibly happen to a coat in two minutes?
I’ll tell you what can happen: Barf can happen. Not a lot. Just a fist sized puddle on the lapel. Repeated attempts at spot cleaning didn’t really get out the smell so I did what anyone would do, sprayed the fuck out of that spot with gross perfume and then went to class. I’m sure I smelled like a perfumey barf factory, but, um, what was I saying?
Oh yeah, I’m not a big shopper, I’m not often given to impulse purchases and even bulk discounts leave me cold. For example, though I buy toilet paper, as a courtesy to my guests since what use would I have for such a prosaic and crude household item, I always just buy four rolls instead of the gigantic 24 pack, which is surely more economical.
Seemed like I needed another photo here and I got tired of finding ones that correlate.
Also, when I used to smoke, way back in the 1950s when everyone smoked and they didn’t know yet that it was bad for you, I never ever bought cartons. I mean, I think once I did and as punishment I made sure to spend the money I saved on hard alcohol, which I also bought in bulk. As I sat there, one foot on my pony keg, four cigarettes in my mouth, I began to feel empty. Rich, but empty. Surely there was more to life than sausage? (I also bought an economy pack of breakfast links.) I dabbed at a tear with an adult diaper, which was on sale in a jumbo sized carton and then downed a fistful of sweet relish. I glanced at my compass, it was still pointing due north, and I pulled a pen from my pack of 12 and jotted a little note to myself on one of my 35 neon colored post it notepads. Then I taped the notes to my shoe tree with scotch tape, because I was now the proud owner of 12 rolls, well, 11 if you count the one I ate earlier, dipped in seafood salad. I was lonely and lost. Not literally, since I had three Thomas Bros Guides and mapping software for a PC, plus a desk reference set with collector’s globe, but just more in a spiritual sense.
Which brings me to today and CVS and their one dollar bargains. I am powerless to resist! The other day I bought this!
And then I bought this!
And then today I bought this!
I have no intention of dusting with the duster or watching this movie, or dusting with the duckling or watching the duck watch the movie, even though I know its lush cinematography will spring to life in super high def VHS format.
Anyway, I guess what I’m trying to say is multi-colored drawer organizers in an array of party colors? YOU WILL BE MINE!
More Things He's Just Not That Into
Eucalyptus
Euphemisms (he’s a straight shooter)
Units of measurement (he prefers to shoot from the hip)
Yucaipa, California
Yosemite, pronounced wrong
Ujubes which are boxes of Jujubes but the J is torn off
Huge things pronounced in that way that some people pronounce it where the H is a Y and you’re like “why are you saying that?”
Uvulas
Eunice Mary Kennedy Shriver, a member of the Kennedy family who helped found the Special Olympics
Unique baubles (he prefers his baubles to be commonplace, bordering on mundane)
Yule Brenner
Yule logs (he’s Jewish. but you know, like super into it)
You Be The Judge! (he’s super bossy and always wants to be the judge)
Yoo-hoo (he’s allergic to “chocolatey”)
Yahoo Sirius (reminds him of Yoo-hoo)
Yahoo (he prefers google)
Universities (he’s opposed to the Ivory Tower and academics in general. Don’t even get him started!)
University Presses (he prefers desktop publishing)
You Know It! (hates sassy catchphrases)
You Bet Your Sweet Bippy! (see above)
UNESCO (he’s sort of an anarchist)