Archive for March, 2017

12 Uplifting Internet Headlines

1. Trump to Nation: I was just doing this to get attention. Now I’m stuck being President. Be careful what you wince for. 

1. Elon Musk to Provide Free Flying Electric Umbrellas to First 100 “Mary Poppins” movie-goers.

1. Flint, Michigan Getting its Spark Back

1. Even if You Forgot the Question, Love is Still the Answer

1. Bend, Oregon Getting Things Straightened Out

1. Costco Surrenders to Popular Demand: “Alright already. We’ll remain in Christmas mode all year round now. We’ll be like a charming little Christmas village…in a big ugly warehouse,” says Mr. Costco

1. Moscow, Idaho to Change Name to Trump, Idaho

1. Shirley MacLaine to be Reincarnated as a Spunky Actress in Next Life: Wait Till You See What She Looks Like Then!

1. Philadelphia, PA admits Mistake: Will Now be Known as Filadelfia. No word yet on Worcestershire, MA.

1. Confused Internet Users Admit: So Much Time to Waste. So Little Time to Do It In.

1. Grilled Cheese Better for the Heart than Once Thought, says Kraft Cardiologist Group

1. Dogs are Really Just Saying Thank You When They Sniff Your Crotch. So are Husbands.

Top 10 Signs You May Have Alzheimer’s Disease

1. You don’t think you have it
2. You start a joke: “A rabbi, a priest and an atheist walk into a room”…and then you forget why they went in there.
3. You thought the Ice Bucket Challenge would’ve cured it by now
4. Sppeling detriorates
5. You feel you’re in New Jersey all the time because you fuggedaboutit.
6. You know it’s important to observe the first rule of Fight Club, but you just can’t remember it.
7. You think you can make fun of it in a stupid little list
8. You can only think of 8 reasons why you may have Alzheimer’s when you said you’d list 10.

Ursine-toppling Mania Grips Region as Hillbillies Invoke Unknown Constitutional Amendment: “The right to bear tips.”

Fifteen miles east of Dollywood Theme Park, in the backwater hamlet of Intelligence Gap, Tennessee, Purvis Cooter is excited about Hickam County’s upcoming bear-tipping festival. Early on the rural community was in a quandary over whether to fund the festival or spend the money on electrifying the town. They chose the festival and now the annual jamboree is the town’s major source of revenue – especially since the Fotomat closed. As the sister city of Pamplona, Spain, Intelligence Gap has reformulated Pamplona’s annual Running of the Bulls and calls its version The Tipping of the Bears. In 2012 Chuck Norris kindly refused their request to be Grand Marshall. Chuck Norris doesn’t tip bears. He just points, and they go down. Read the rest of this entry »

With the recent discovery of Adolf Hitler’s Berlin bunker diary, scholars and skinheads alike have been combing the pages for insights into why the charismatic German Chancellor and spawn of Satan unleashed such evil. His diary was unearthed quite inadvertently when Disney broke ground for a new theme park in Berlin called “Maus Haus”. The handwritten journal catalogues how Hitler’s formerly unshakable belief in Aryan supremacy, miraculously transforms itself into a muddle of anxiety, so that ironically, by the end of the diary he sounds less like the ruler of the Master Race and more like a kvetching Jew. The same accounting firm that supervised the Oscar voting process (PricewaterhouseCooper) authenticated the diary, so we know it’s legit. Of course verification was made easier because of Hitler’s telltale handwriting – he dotted all his i’s with little swastikas.

Historians wonder what motivated Hitler. They speculate on Hitler this, and Hitler that. What I wonder is why Hitler is always referred to simply as “Hitler” and never as “Mr. Hitler”, as in, “Mr. Hitler then decided to invade his neighbor Poland.” Wait! Oh I see why. Mr. Hitler humanizes Hitler. Historians want to eliminate the possibility of a buoyant and fatherly “Mr. Hitler” rallying his nation to find their greatness after the humiliation of WWI. But one can easily imagine a title-less “Hitler” fanatically leading Germany down an inglorious path of self-destruction. Maybe that’s why there’s no Mr. Genghis Khan or Mr. Vlad the Impaler. Read the rest of this entry »

John Jacob Astor (1763-1848) was America’s first multimillionaire. He made his fortune in the fur business, which at that time, was an honorable and necessary profession. In those mean, frigid times before the invention of Gore-Tex and Holofill, fur didn’t mean murder; it meant survival. Astor was a renowned furrier and his witty wife Sarah would often quip, “Oh you’re a furrier alright. In fact you’re furrier than anyone I’ve ever seen.”

Astor was born in Germany and emigrated to the United States after the Revolutionary War. He settled in New-York City, which at the time was just Manhattan and not yet the 5 boroughs we’re so familiar with today. Astor’s monopolistic fur trading empire stretched from the Great Lakes into Canada and all the way to the West Coast, which at that time was not yet part of the United States. That concludes the book report aspect of his life, which at this point has not yet become interesting. Read the rest of this entry »

Fellow Romantics and Normal People,

In life there are happy little things that appeal universally to everyone – like getting the crunchy, brown corner piece of macaroni & cheese or firing-up your Netflix cue on a rainy day. And then there are more esoteric things that appeal to a small clutch of peculiarly curated humans (yours truly among them) that make our hearts soar and our dreams toggle from wishful thinking to sweet reality. The experience I’m about to describe definitely falls into the latter category. It was my “macaroni & cheese moment” for the eccentrically endowed.

I have an extravagant interest in presidential history, so you’d not find it surprising I’ve grown especially enamored of the few extant presidential daguerreotypes taken at the dawn of photography (1839-1849). I’ve breathlessly examined these precious early daguerreotypes like a sculptor minutely studies the contours of his model to understand the interior superstructure supporting the external surface. I’ve pored over these images with wistful reverence, ardently projecting myself into the static black and white scenes to animate and colorize them while dreaming of meeting the personalities and experiencing the tenor of their times. And in all the time I’ve been doing this there has only been a finite number of images to enliven because (to paraphrase Will Rogers reason on why it’s a good bet to buy land) “They ain’t makin’ anymore.” Read the rest of this entry »