Tag: Humor

  • Earworm Thursday: Knights of the Round Table, but in Lego, and…

    And for comparison…

    And you know…

  • ODDS and ENDS: Christmas Has to Go, Can You Believe It, Must Win, and Serious

    (It’s a trip… it’s got a FUNKY beat. And I can bug out to it!)

    This is the weekend that we are taking the Christmas decorations down. Normally, we do this on January 1st, as a sort of cleaning the house for the New Year. And I think you can read between the lines there and see that the wife and I have passed the days of staying up late and waking with a hangover. But this year, we didn’t get around to it. We put it off. Not that we had a good reason to do that, other than we wanted to lay around and not doing anything on New Year’s Day. The end result was that we got an extra week of Christmas, which has left me feeling like the holiday has over stayed its welcome. I like Christmas, but I really like it when it lives tightly between Thanksgiving and New Year’s.

     Sometimes I find it hard to believe that we live in a world where the movies Cocktail and Road House exist.

    And I need the Cowboys and Tottenham to win this weekend. Simple as that. If it doesn’t happen I will be heartbroken and disconnected from the universe.

    Some evenings, late at night, when I am alone on the couch while my family sleeps, I start to believe that the core of me is a very serious person. Alone and in the dark, I am confident in this pronouncement. And I say these things to myself when I am normally watching a terrible ninja movie, or something awful by Bert I. Gordon. That is when I know that I am a contradiction at all times. A silly one at that. I like walking funny and talking in goofy voices. I make up songs about doing mundane tasks. And I’d rather laugh than cry. I’d rather make you laugh; Try to make you happy through humor. I still attempt to rob an honest melancholy tear from people… but… I have never felt sure that’s what I’m best at. Yet, honestly, I have never felt sure about anything. And if I think too hard about that, I might start to wonder, worry, and then cry. Which is why I’d rather laugh. Hold it off, at bay, for a little while longer.

  • My Rejected “Mentions” Submission

    On August 31st, I had a flash of inspiration, and quickly jotted out the following four sentences:

    “As Donald Trump’s surrender in Georgia grew closer, many on social media started to joke that the former President might need to hire a bail bondsman.

    On the day of the arrest at the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office, to many people’s surprise, the former President had, in fact, secured Foster Bail Bonds, LLC of Lawrenceville, GA to execute the bond.

    This made CEO Charles Shaw the first person in American history to bail out a former President.

    Mr. Shaw, it is easy to say, might be the most famous bail bondsman in America right now, if you excuse Chico’s Bail Bonds support of the Bad News Bears.”

    I thought it was funny.

    But I wasn’t sure what to do with it. The first thought I had was to put it up on my blog, or maybe Twitter/X. Then I remembered that The Drift has a “Mentions” section, which consists of short humorous pieces, four sentences long. I quickly looked up the email address for submissions, and sent it off. Let me throw my luck into the wind and see what will happen! Odds are they would say no, but maybe today would be different.

    And then I reread the “Mentions” section, and it dawned on me that they are looking more for cultural observations, and not so much current events. Yeah… felt like I popped the bed on this one. I even posted a Tweet about it.

    This morning a received a response to my submission, and they did say no. I don’t disagree with that decision, and their form letter to me was rather pleasant for a rejection.

    As such, I now share this “mention” on my blog. If there is anyone out there who would like my four sentence humorous critiques about whatever pops into my head, my going rate is $25 per post, or best offer.

  • Personal Review: One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories by B.J. Novak

    I had received One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories by B.J. Novak as a Christmas present back when it came out a couple of years ago. Friends had recommended it to me, saying that this is a really funny book that I’d love. So, I have kept it close to me on my night stand over the years. It even moved cross country with me, but I never got past the reading the first few stories. Not because they were bad, or that they weren’t funny. Just, something would come up, I’d put the book down, and then time would pass before I would pick it up and try again.

    I made a promise to myself that this year I would get back to reading as much as I can, and I am up to about a book a month now. (Last year I read two books, and this year I should complete twelve. That number might not be something to brag about, but it is a vast improvement from the year before.) I am also trying to clean out my huge back log of books that I bought or received and never read. Hence how One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories got back in the rotation.

    I read through it pretty fast, and I appreciated that many of the 64 stories were short; two or three pages. The writing was impressively efficient, both in storytelling and humor. There weren’t crap sentences filling the space, everything felt like it was there for a reason. It made me feel that Novak was very seriously not trying to waste my time while making me laugh. That’s not to say that he didn’t have longer stories, or jokes that had huge set ups, but in both cases, they landed.

    There was one minor issue that had had with this book. It was the final story, “J.C. Audetat, Translator of Don Quixote.” There is nothing wrong with the story, so to speak. It’s a longer piece, that isn’t knee slapping hilarious, but it is very witty and which makes a fine point. The issue I have is its placement in the collect, as the last story. (I am aware that “Discussion Questions” is the last piece, but that is more of a running gag, and not a complete story.) For a book that had so many, for lack of a better word, laugh out loud funny stories, I found the choice to end with an “internal acknowledgement of wit” type of story rather than choosing a story that would garner an external involuntary laugh, odd. Maybe the choice was made because “Translator” was the longest story in the collection, and that seems to be the unwritten rule of short story books; you end with the longest one.

    It’s a minor complaint, and I enjoyed the running gags between stories, and the sense that I was being included in a very funny ride.

    With someone as talented as Novak is at writing stories, I wonder is why he hasn’t written more books? I know he did the “Book with No Pictures” as we have that one in our house, and my daughter loves it. And not too long ago he wrote and directed the movie Vengeance, So I guess he’s been busy. It would be nice to see another collection is all.

    (Okay, we all know how this works. I am in need of “likes” and “shares” and “comments” and followers. If you enjoyed what you have read here, then if you could, please, do one of those four things. I appreciate it. Thanks.)