Court-ordered stretches

I started following comedians Trae Crowder and Corey Ryan Forrester on Twitter because I love the cognitive dissonance of literate anti-RWNJ rants in their southern accents. (Crowder is from Tennessee and Forrester’s a Georgian.) They travel the comedy club circuit with Drew Morgan as the Liberal Rednecks; tickets at WellRED Comedy.

I also subscribe to Crowder’s and Forrester’s podcasts and posts, even though I don’t like podcasts. Listening to Forrester’s “This Week in Southern History” drops alone is worth the $60 a year. And Crowder’s “Help Reviews”, in which he rips apart political scandals are cherce. (The Valentine’s Day one on political sex scandals could have gone on for hours, given all the material; he didn’t even hit Warren G. Harding, the bull in the herd.) And his "Learn Us Something" drops are also edifying, which seems like it's the point.

I confess I’ve not gone down the Morgan rabbit hole yet; but I suppose that’s inevitable. The three are such an antidote to the MAGA crowd.

Well, evidently Crowder is now living in California, so here’s a sketch they did, which lampoons both rednecks and Left Coasties. 

You're welcome.

 

 

 

Upsoaring wings: Ants and purple weasels

Woops—here we are in April again. So you know what that means. Thirty days of poems because it’s National Poetry Month.

It’s also April Fools’ Day, when tricks are played and jokes are made, typically at someone else’s expense. That someone else is supposed to forgive all at the shout of “April Fool!” Look for silly hoaxy headlines and something silly from Google.

Then back to work with you.

My theme this month—upsoaring wings—comes from Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Aus einem April”, which I’ll get to tomorrow. I think in 2019 we can really use a bit of lifting; I know I do. In honor of my use-it-or-lose-it trip last year, I’ll through in more than the usual number of French and German poets, plus some Czech efforts.

Although he was an all-around creative dynamo (cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter, song writer), we probably know Shel Silverstein best for his children’s books. He came to that genre via his friend Tomi Ungerer, and one of his big hits was the poetry collection Where the Sidewalk Ends, which includes “Oh Have You Heard”, about April Fools, er, well, jokes and stuff.

I equivocate because on rereading it, what was hilarious because unthinkable in 1974 is not nearly as funny in 2019. We got anti-vaxxers waving the Bible; outbreaks of entirely preventable diseases like measles; an occupant of the white house whose brain is pocked and blistered with hate, fear and cruelty; the “principal” of the federal schools agency is in the midst of torching our entire education system; the Labor Department is cutting back on all kinds of worker protections, so you can kiss goodbye the thought of any sort of vacations; and Florida is in fact sinking into the ocean, thanks to climate change deniers and Chamber of Commerce boosters.

At this point, I wouldn’t even be surprised by scalp infestations of ants and purple weasels. Although I’d be mildly amused.

 “Oh Have You Heard”

Oh have you heard it’s time for vaccinations?

I think someone put salt in your tea.

They’re giving us eleven-month vacations.

And Florida has sunk into the sea.

Oh have you heard the President has measles?

The principal has just burned down the school.

Your hair is full of ants and purple weasels—

APRIL FOOL!

Welcome to April, folks. Buckle up.

Planetary alignment

As we get closer to the total eclipse of the sun on Monday, things are getting increasingly weird.

As you’d expect, tbh.

If you’d like a for example, here’s an advert (probably from Craigslist) for a, well, take a look:

The woman who posted it on Twitter was wondering whether she should toss her, erm, hat into the ring:

But it turns that she doesn’t meet the cats requirement, which appears to be a deal-breaker.

But here’s what I was wondering on my Metro ride home: what, exactly, is the feline involvement meant to be in this act of cosmic whatever? Is this something PETA should be aware of? And how does the nitrous oxide figure into it?

Well, I wonder, but I’m not going to inquire. Not sure I want to see the response.

Don't call me...

Sorry folks, but yesterday I was in full-on pitch panic mode, so this is all you get today.

I just thought it was funny.

Perhaps by tomorrow I’ll be capable of being amusing on my own. But perhaps not.

Brain STEM

I’m feeling kinda geeky today, so here are a couple of STEM visual jokes.

You’re welcome.

Ram raid

Let’s take a break from the sad events at the DC office building, where workers were shocked and saddened to discover Steve, their K5 security robot, had drowned his sorrows (and himself) in the building water feature.

Let’s instead go to Colorado, where another office building was the scene of activities that were first assumed to be criminal—vandalism, if not theft. But then security camera footage revealed that the smashed-in glass door was the work of what NPR refers to as a “rogue goat”.

Well, really—I don’t know how “rogue” a goat is for ramming…well, pretty much anything, tbh. I mean, that’s entirely within male goat behavior patterns.

It’s interesting that Billy (if the robot is Steve, surely this goat can be Billy, no?) seemed surprised at the first shattering, but then went back to finish off the second door. And yet…having smashed both of them, he just kind of drifted away.

Can this behavior be mere coincidence in a state that’s legalized marijuana? Hmm.

However, this occurred to me: is there something unique to male goats’ head-structure (and possibly rams as well) that enables them to engage in this sort of activity all the time without them suffering TBI? (Although, maybe their brains are liquefied jelly, and no one notices; I suppose that’s possible.)

But if there is something that protects their crania, can some lessons be applied to the prevention and treatment of TBI in humans? Man—I’d sure like to see our soldiers protected from this kind of thing out in the field, and it would be great if both soldiers and civilians could be given post-trauma medical treatment that reduced brain swelling and other aftereffects.

I for one ain't too proud to learn from goats, rogue or no.

Unpresidented perspective

Okay, back to my theme of the week: the best way to deal publicly with the Kleptocrat.

Yes, that’s to take the piss. He reacts to ridicule the same way fellow chaos monkeys Erdoğan, Putin and Kim do. I imagine he’s hunkered down for hours each day on his Twitter throne trying to come up with ways he can terminate with extreme prejudice Alec Baldwin, Andy Borowitz and every comic in the world who points out how laughable he is.

The latest (at least as of a day or so ago) were the gifs and memes circulating that pretty much eviscerate the Kleptocrat’s pathetic penchant for dramatically signing his imperial ukases and then grimly showing them to the frankly sick-making obsequious cameras. Viz:

There are about a gazillion of them out there, but I’ll just share a sampling. 

And this guy appears to be behind many of them, so go visit his page.

 

Flipping the bird

And here’s another traditional Thanksgiving story, courtesy of Stan Freburg.

I swear I can never think of that First Thanksgiving gathering without picturing them having to go forward with the meal eating the wrong bird, on account of by the time they found out about the mistake, the guests had “already started on their little nut cups.”

Nordic raids

I caught a kind of a range war on Twitter as it was whizzing past my feed, when one of the people I follow volunteered to be part of a Viking sperm bank. Ish.

So I clicked on the conversation and discovered a war of wits between Sweden and Denmark, with both combatants equally well armed.

You might have thought that the official Twitter accounts of two upright and responsible modern nations would limit themselves to touting tourism and engaging in the occasional damage control for pols going off the rails.

But take a look at Sweden’s account:

You know something’s up.

(Well, I do wonder how the moose masters a keyboard with hoofs, especially if it’s using a smartphone. But perhaps it just dictates its bons mots? After all, Bronx Zoo's Cobra manages pretty well without any appendages at all.)

At any rate, here are a couple of my favorite points in the exchange:

And the one that brought in the berserker I follow:

I definitely have to go to these countries. As long as they don’t make me eat lutefisk.

Gratitude Monday: Almost accurate

I got a surprise Friday morning—aside from that Brexit thing, which was unpleasantly gobsmacking in its shortsightedness. Friends had tickets for a performance by Second City at the Kennedy Center for that night’s performance. One of the had to work; did I want to go see it?

Well, I’m not the world’s biggest fan of improv, but opportunities like that don’t ordinarily drop out of the sky. So I said sure. It made for kind of a long day, since I get into work extra early during periods when the Metro’s Blue Line is buggered. But it was great catching up with my friend, and the performance, “Second City’s Almost Accurate Guide to America”, turned out to be exceptionally funny.

Well—I was a teensy bit surprised that the political skewering vastly favored the liberal viewpoint, but perhaps conservatives don’t go to the Kennedy Center? (The other performance was Kinky Boots; I’m guessing that the butts in those seats weren’t Republican ones, either.) Or perhaps they dislike improv more than I do?

I’m also not sure that the fiberglass wig worn by the guy playing Trump isn’t a fire hazard. But the fiberglass wig worn by the real guy playing Trump looks like a fire hazard, and he gets all kinds of gigs, so that may not be an issue with OSHA.

But as it turns out, the improv bits were minimal, and not at all painful to me. And, as I said, it was very, very funny, with one interlude that captured the battlefield experience of America’s wars for the past 50 years. That was not at all funny, because it was so accurate.

I also loved the consciousness-raising of Dolly Madison.

So today I’m grateful for a lovely evening to finish out the week, a very nice surprise, and friends who roped me into it.

Design creep

Well, isn’t this interesting—just one day after I happened to be discussing annoying web practices, I was doing some research on events management and came across something else that I’m seeing more frequently: online stalking.

I’m referring to the practice of having invitations to chat (or take some other action) not only pop up when you’re trying to ingest their content (in fact, before you’ve had a chance to read it), but also stalk you as you scroll down the page. Viz.:

And

I do not know what designers and companies are thinking with this, but I wish to hell they’d stop.

Yeah, okay—I do know what they’re thinking: they’re so eager for you to engage with a sales rep that they don’t care if you read their content; perhaps they don’t even want you to read it. I mean does anything shout “We want to sell you something NOW before you even know what it is” more clearly than blocking your access to the content, and continuing to block it as you try to move away from the damned box?

Not only that, it’s downright creepy to have that thing follow you about. It’s the online equivalent of Alex Forrest, and it does not encourage me to stick around your website, much less buy anything from you.

Kiitos, Suomi

Here’s what I know about the Finns: they were the only nation to pay us back for debts incurred during the World War I era, and reindeer.

Well, okay—mobile phones, saunas and kicking the crap out of the Soviets. Hurrah for the Finns!

But here’s something new that is entirely to their credit as well. They absolutely nailed the Republicans, who henceforth shall be known as Elephant Cowboys, as well as Mr. Business Wig, the Cuban Robot and the Greasy Rat.

Finnish News Team Reports On U.S. Elections from Funny Or Die

Making connectivity suck

You know that scene in Casablanca in the marketplace where Rick is trying to make nice with Ilsa, who’s pretending to look at some textiles so she doesn’t have to talk with him? And the cloth vendor keeps holding up new, lower, prices as it becomes clear to him during the conversation that she’s in the “special friends of Rick” category?

Well, dealing with ISPs is like that, except that they start out with their “special friends of Rick” pricing on their website, and you end up paying much, much more and geting much, much less than that when the installer and the bill arrive.

Case in point: because I’ve been in the dark realm of Comcast for the past 15 years, I thought that this time around I’d try Fios from Verizon. Leaving aside the issue that their website is a very miracle of obfuscation and endless loops that take you from screen to screen without giving you information that’s of any help in making a, you know, informed decision, so that you’re driven to speak with a telephone rep or enter into one of those dreaded chat sessions, it doesn’t matter which way you go at it: you’re screwed.

 Here was my starting point: bundled phone, Internet and TV at $69.99 per month, no two-year contract.

 

Note the “100 Mbps Internet”. That seems pretty clear, no?

But even after spending 20 minutes on the phone with one of their fast talkers, here’s the price point I ended up with: $106.36, for a bundle that includes Internet at 20/5 Mbps. (Oh—and this actually is a two-year contract. Imagine that!)

The extra $40 is for the equipment that’s necessary to deliver these services (the modem, router and set-top box). Meaning: the $69.99 is for Verizon to push the services to your walls. If you actually want to use them, you have to cough up the extra dosh.

In fact, there is no option for purchasing the set-top box; you’re completely stuffed. So the $69.99 “deal” is…at a minimum, bait-and-switch.

 

 

(Kind of like airfares, when you come to think of it. You know—they advertise one-way tickets between SFO and JFK for $229, but when time comes to give them your credit card details, you’re on the hook for $474.)

But the Internet speed is another stab in the side. When I called their sales line to ask what’s up with the promised 100 Mbps but stipulated delivery of 20 Mbps download, I was told that the offer is “up to 100 Mbps” (which, as you’ll note, is not what they actually say on the website), and that I’m only getting 20 Mbps because we’re talking about a multi-unit building, and that’s all they can do.

(They don’t even qualify that 100 Mbps in the fine print, which you have to scroll down to the bottom of the page to find.)

 

Well, they could muster up 30 Mbps, but that costs another $20 per month.

But wait—there’s more. For some reason I looked at the delivery order and didn’t see any mention of DVR capability, so I spent another 20 minutes on a chat with “Destiny”, one of their agents. That’s an extra service, too. To the tune of $12 per month.

See how quickly it adds up? I’m not even watching any premium channels. I’m getting very basic TV, phone and much slower Internet than I’d been led to believe, and I’m paying 65% more than the come-on price.

Seriously—if this isn’t bait and switch, it’s just plain demanding money with menaces. Verizon is moving its way down to Comcast status before they’ve even stepped foot in my house.

This is not the beginning of a beautiful relationship.

 

About that word...

This came to me from a friend. If you don’t know Tim Minchin, you really should become acquainted with him. He’s a brilliant actor, comedian and musician/composer, mostly Australian, with that antipodean ability to find exactly the right part of the balloon to prick.

Here he takes on prejudice, focusing on that word—you know, the one with two Gs, an ER and an I and an N…

Oh, yeah? You what?

Nope—I can legitimately use it, since I am one. And, as Minchin points out, that entitles me.

And remember—“It’s a homophone!”

Ah, romance

As we approach Valentine’s Day an opportunity to reach a new market in the machinery of love this holiday has evolved into has come to my attention: candy hearts such as men would produce.

You know—those little sugar hearts with less-than-Twitter-sized snippets of sentiments stamped on them?

Someone has reimagined them to capture genuine male feelings around the whole courtship ritual:

The only thing I find astonishing about this is that I’m unable to locate anywhere on the web where you can actually buy these things. I’d have thought that, in a marketplace where an Australian guy makes a killing by sending your enemies an envelope full of glitter, roMANce candy would at least be worth a flutter. But evidently I would be wrong.

Perhaps one of my readers will take it up. 

Not even the Amighty escapes

If you haven’t worked in the arena of gathering requirements from customers—or, really, dealing with clients in any capacity—you may not find this as hysterical as I do. It’s “Client Feedback on the Creation of the Earth”, from a San Francisco-based humor site.

The language is so…”communications-y”. The sort of thing you’d get from focus group facilitators or anyone in any marketing department anywhere. Actually, from anyone with an MBA.

Viz. point 4: “Right now we’re only seeing two great lights in the sky… a greater one for day and a lesser one for night? Thinking that maybe we weren’t clear in the original briefing. Definitely need more than just two great lights. Need to make this a memorable, high-value experience for our users. Please revisit slides thirteen and fourteen in the deck. Shout with questions.”

And then there’s the “Please consider the environment before printing this email”.

Well—have a look (especially at slides 18 and 27; there may be showstoppers.

Thoughts?

Where in the world is Nico Sandiego?

Dear Lord, former French president Nicolas Sarkozy totally lost the Interwebs. On Sunday he’d joined the unity march in Paris somewhere in the scrum behind the leaders.

But as the procession moved, he maneuvered his way into the front line with the actual heads of state and miscellaneous dignitaries.

I wonder if his cleverness was worth it, though, because people noticed and social media lit up like a Grateful Dead concert. The hashtag #JeSuisNico exploded and everyone with a graphics package and a Tumblr account started churning out “where’s Nico” shots at a rate of knots.

I mean—Nico takes a twerk for the team:

Nico joins the Beatles:

Nico, Nixon and Elvis:

Nico takes down the Wall:

Nico and Ike see off the D-Day troops:

And two appearances at the Tehran Conference:

It’s a wonder to me that any work at all gets done with this sort of thing going on. It’s also a wonder to me how pols all over the world pull this kind of crap repeatedly, when there’s ample evidence what social media can do to them.

It's like they don't know Twitter exists.

Perhaps that’s what our own leaders were concerned about when they decided to take a pass on sending anyone of consequence to represent us at that march?

International affairs

I don’t often devote an entire post to a joke. Although I suppose it could be said that many of my posts are jokes…

However, this came from my friend Joyce, Wisconsinite born and bred, so it's got, like, a pedigree.

* * * *

Sven, a furniture dealer from Wisconsin, decided to expand the line of furniture in his store, so he decided to go to Paris to see what he could find. 
           

After arriving in Paris, he visited with some manufacturers and selected a line that he thought would sell well back home. To celebrate the new acquisition, he decided to visit a small bistro and have a glass of wine.

As he sat enjoying his wine, he noticed that the small place was  quite crowded, and that the other chair at his table was the only vacant seat in the house.

Before long, a very beautiful young Parisian girl came to his table, asked him something in French (which Sven could not understand), so he motioned to the vacant chair and invited her to sit down.

He tried to speak to her in English, but she did not speak his language. After a couple of minutes of trying to communicate with her, he took a napkin and drew a picture of a wine glass and showed it to her. She nodded, so he ordered a glass of wine for her.

After sitting together at the table for a while, he took another napkin, and drew a picture of a plate with food on it, and she nodded. They left the bistro and found a quiet cafe that featured a small group playing romantic music.

They ordered dinner, after which he took another napkin and drew a picture of a couple dancing. She nodded, and they got up to dance. They danced until the cafe was about to close and the band was packing up.

Back at their table, the young lady took a napkin and drew a picture of a four-poster bed. To this day, Sven has no idea how she figured out he was in the furniture business.

* * * *

I’m sure it’s indicative of some defect in my mental processes, but I swear I did not see that ending coming. I did not. So there I was, projectile-snorting latte onto my keyboard at the Korean café, when I got to it.

Fortunately, they’re quite used to me doing stuff like that.

Sliding Sisyphus

Okay, yeah, I know—this may get up PETA’s nose, but I think it’s the perfect illustration of the Myth of Sisyphus, and by posting it I’ve spared you from having to read the essay about that by Albert Camus:

Plus—it’s, you know, really funny. Which I assure you, you will not get from Camus.

You’re welcome. 

The saint of Sienna

This came across my Facebook feed from a friend, and it gave me a chuckle:

On account of, although the picture correctly spells Saint Catherine’s home town with only one N, the Church of the Holy Comforter twice spelled it with two in their original post.

Although I can see why they might do that: Holy Comforter is located in Vienna, Va.

But then yesterday I was at a stoplight behind one of those mom-mobiles and realized that there is something that spells it with two Ns, the Toyota mini-van.

And then—you know me—I started wondering what the woman who brought the papacy back to Rome, and brokered peace between the warring cities of Italy might have done if she’d actually been Catherine of Sienna? You know—if she’d had one of these fully-loaded vans to take her places instead of a donkey. 

I mean, instead of saving the pope she might have become the pope.

Well, that one’s going to keep me going for a while.