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Archive for April, 2020

We asked 28 Socially Distant Grandchildren, “What name do you call your grandmother when she’s not around?” Their responses and explanations proved startling:

  1. 130 is the new 75. Former Fine Arts professor Agatha Cranston studied Cezanne – in person.

    Nana with the See-thru Hands – She’s the best, but at this point she’s like looking at an X-ray

  2. Insta-Gram – It’s what I called my new grandma when I was first adopted into the family
  3. My Inheritance – I love her and everything but c’mon, daddy needs a new Honda
  4. Crystal Methuselah – She’s very old and she used to have a little drug problem
  5. Prunella – Oh my sweet and shriveled Nana. Why must you age?
  6. Grammykins – My cuddly name for her. Especially if the Grammys are on that night.
  7. Glam-Ma – She’s still very good-looking. Some friends even tell me she’s a GMILF. Whatever that is.
  8. Milky-Eyed Matriarch – I mean whoa…”Got Grandma?”
  9. Smells like Geriatric Spirit – Just applying the Nirvana classic to Granny’s unique aroma
  10. Runs with Depends – What I call my active Navajo Indian grandmother who likes to jog
  11. GrAnnie Oakley – She’s a big 2nd amendment supporter. It’s like “Granny get your gun.”
  12. Still Life with a Heartbeat – She’s a former Fine Arts professor who once studied Cezanne – in person!
  13. Gramnesia – She sometimes forgets who I am.
  14. Grandmummy – It’s what I call my Egyptian grandma
  15. Make Nonni Great Again – She’s losing it and she loves Trump.
  16. Nonni Nonni Luftballoons – My German grandma’s whose last name is actually Luftballoon
  17. Gram Cracker – Grandma is from the deep South and she holds certain antiquated prejudices
  18. Ba-Nana – Her first name Barbara, and she’s a grandma…you do the math.
  19. Grandpa – You know how Grandmas tend to grow those chin hairs with age?
  20. Kombucha Babushka – My Russian Grandma who drinks healthy beverages
  21. ♫Hold Your Head Up, Woman♫ – What can I say? The dear woman’s head lolls to one side.
  22. Catena with the Flaring Nostrils – I wish it were different, but she ain’t exactly ♫Nancy with the Laughing Face♫
  23. Baba Ganoush – Well, her last name is actually Ganoush, and she likes the eggplant spread too.
  24. Drama Grama – She used to teach acting classes so I thought the name fitting
  25. My Favorite Neanderthal – She’s really old. Anthropologically old. She still calls the continents Pangea; and Jesus as, “That nice boy from Nazareth.”
  26. That musty old woman who once stuck her tongue down my throat – Thank God she was only a Step-Grandmother and not blood.
  27. Candy Dish of Interconnected Sweets – So what if she kept an old, dusty dish of hard candy around that, over the years, metastasized into one benign aggregate mass of candy. When she grew up, the woman had no candy.
  28. Blue Hair with Feathers – My Cherokee Indian grandmother after the beauty parlor

Are You a Genius?

Look at the jumble of letters below and see if you can find the hidden phrase so important in this age of the Coronavirus. Takes most people 10 minutes:

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

AAAAAANETFLIXISYOURFRIENDAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

It’s Getting a Little Crazy Out There (actually “in here”)

“Somehow I just cant get it through my head that today is Tuesday.”

It’s called Stir Crazy.
The following is based on surreal events:
So I called 9-1-1.
A machine answered and said, “If this is a medical emergency please hang-up and dial 9-1-1.”
What the…?
This went on for hours.
I mean, this went on 4 hours.

***Coronavirus Update*** Notes from Around the Globe

1. This whole social spacing thing is nothing new to me. People are always telling me to keep my distance.
2. Banks to relax “shoot to kill” order when people enter banks wearing masks
3. Some people have been cocooning so long they’ve emerged from their homes as butterflies
4. Most in demand job: Epitaph writers. And that’s my last word on the subject.
5. Andrew Cuomo has never been sexier – and that’s not an easy thing to do
6. Shortage of embalming fluid allows bottlers to finally empty warehouses of all that unsold Zima
7. Kissing Booth industry devastated by Coronavirus. Now using wax lips.
8. Dogs are Confused and Weary: “Even I don’t need this much attention,” growled Rover. “C’mon people. You’re walking me 6 times a day. Enough already I’m dry. I’m empty. I have no more contributions to offer the little sapling near the swing set. And another thing, take a lesson from me. Have you ever noticed how much toilet paper I use?”
9. Number 9 quarantined by the CDC
10. Cardiac Monitor industry is suffering. It’s now on life support. If it gets any worse they’ll flat line. But they won’t ever know it because there aren’t enough Cardiac Monitors to go around.
11. Rod Belcher of Overland Park, Kansas summarizes the enter Coronavirus pandemic from its genesis to its current state: “Some shopkeeper in an open air market in Wuhan, China decides to expand his unrefrigerated meat case to include wombat cutlets. The next thing you know I’m down to using 1 square of toilet paper per flush. Why can’t they just buy cellophane wrapped meat like the rest of us?”
12. Shortage of long johns creates longing for slim Jims. Makes no sense. Neither does our enforced incarceration. I mean at some point we’re going to be released from house arrest – and we won’t even have a prison record. Crazy.
13. At first they all laughed when I said I wanted to study in Antarctica. Now who’s laughing (and really, really cold)?
14. Hermits everywhere agree: “Welcome to our world. Where, what you call Social Distancing, we call Tuesday.”
15. Trump awards 2 Congressional Medals of Honor to Netflix. “They’re doing tremendous, tremendous work. Twice as good as I hoped and that’s why I’m giving them 2 medals.”
16. This just in: Jimmy Osmond, the youngest Osmond brother, has marked himself as safe even though he says, “Marie keeps bugging me.”
17. Business as Usual: Against federal orders XFL restarts season. Same amount of fans attending as before – none.
18. Adult Film Industry making little progress in trying to find ways of eroticizing people poking each other with 6 foot poles.
19. Comic Con convention suddenly doesn’t seem that important. And it wasn’t that important to begin with.
20. Even with all this time on my hands, I still can’t seem to get through “The Irishman”
21. This UFC Statement Went Viral: “Coronavirus thinks it’s so tough. Nah man. In a cage match, Spanish Influenza would kick Coronaviruses ass.”
22. Somehow Kellogg’s 23th new flavor formulation of the Cheez-It just doesn’t excite me right now. Who cares about Calvin Coolidge Ranch Cheez-Itz?
23. Not interested in seeing an Instagram of Vanilla Ice singing “Ice Ice Baby” to raise awareness of Vanilla Ice. Mango Ice Yes. Vanilla Ice, meh. Cardi B is the only one that speaks for me (when I have the Closed Captions on) otherwise I can’t understand her at all.
24. And finally, because you don’t waste things (even half-baked ideas like these) during these unnerving times, I’ve included the following: In a poll of Polish Pole Dancers most wanted to remain in Romania disguised as hungry Hungarians eating Greece-y Turkey on Laos-y China. Just Brazilliant!
25. Stay Safe. Much Love and Support to you all. If you think the Coronavirus connects us all, just wait till you/we experience the rapturous connectivity pervading the Cosmos – ineffable and just momentarily forgotten. Sounds good, but maybe that’s the hydroxychloroquine talking.

 

◊◊◊ Obituaries We’d Like to See ◊◊◊

1. Walt Disney – 65, Died peaceably and was cryogenically frozen thus making him a permanent member of Disney on Ice. In a cross-promo of epic proportions, Disney execs say they’ll thaw him out to coincide with the opening of Frozen 3, proving once again that Disney is no Mickey Mouse organization.
2. Giovanni Pietro – 54, designer of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, which at that time was simply known as the Tower of Pisa. Always a favorite with the powerful Borgia and Medici families, he leaned slightly towards the Borgias. Mr. Pietro died from a fall at a job site in Verona. Doctors attended to him immediately, but it was too late. One eye was fixed and dilated and the other one read: TILT.
3. Detective John Shaft – 70, Beloved and respected fictional African-American detective. In Isaac Hayes theme song from the movie “Shaft,” he described Detective Shaft as ♫a complicated man♫. In fact Mr. Shaft died from complications of complications. His manager blamed the hospital for substandard care, saying, “He got Shafted.”
4. Jesus Christ – 33, Jewish preacher who developed quite a following in the Middle East (which at the time of his death was simply known as The East). Although paternity tests were inconclusive, his father is believed to be God. His mother Mary, while not quite as accomplished as his father, was no slouch herself and was considered immaculate by contemporaries. Jesus cause of death: Other people’s sins. Apparently he loved his flock so much, he chose to die for them in order to ease their burdens. Just like Shaft, Jesus was also a complicated man. Calling hours every Sunday, forever.
5. Jesus Christ – 33 and a few days. Well, we all thought he was dead the first time, but 3 days later he resurrects himself – like it was a miracle or something. Somehow he opens his tomb from the inside and rises straight up into the sky. It was a risk flying into the sky unmonitored and untracked, but fortunately there weren’t any airplanes back then so the only thing he had to worry about was a bird strike. The consensus was that if he can come back to life and ascend into heaven, bird avoidance might not be much of an issue. His obituary is open-ended pending a promised second tour.
6. Johnny Garza – 62, President of Garza Cement Products died, appropriately enough, from hardening of the arteries. His cardiologist said his arteries were soft and pliant when he came in, but by the time he got on the operating table they had hardened into rock. Attending Dr. Joe Gannon said, “I couldn’t even carve my initials in them – not that I was trying or anything.”
7. Adolph Hitler – 56, From self-inflicted wounds (mostly stupidity). His quaint attempt at sporting a little Charlie Chaplain moustache won him few friends. The decidedly non-Aryan looking and underachieving little corporal from Austria promised the Fatherland a restoration of national pride after his people were ravaged by hyperinflation and all those soft, smelly cheeses from France. He proposed a great network of roads for “People carriages” or “Volks Wagens” as he called them. Hitler also expanded the military as a bulwark against whatever it is you need “bulwarks” for.” All these malefactors were a recipe for calamity. And sure enough his other recipes included such favorites as Polish Blitzkrieg with Pogroms and Russian Blunder à la Napoleon. Not a complicated man – more a misanthropic loser who consolidated power by promising “2 bratwursts in every pot and a Volkswagen in every garage.” The potato farmers and beer-swilling peasants ate it up and the ruling class just couldn’t say no to this latter day charismatic Napoleon. In short order he established the invincible 1000 year Reich, whose invincibility lasted a full 12 years. He was also responsible for Germany’s second catastrophic defeat on the world stage in less than 27 years. As punishment for their bad behavior, the Allies told Germany, “You’re grounded” and sent it to 2 separate rooms for 44 years to reflect on just what they did. Eventually the bedroom Wall came a tumblin’ down and they were ♫reunited and it feels so good♫. Sure he built the autobahns, but Dr. Sigmund Freud believed his road-building scheme was really more Rage-paving than creating productive infrastructure. Dr. Freud thought the whole goose-stepping, Seig Heil thing was just his inner-Nazi acting out. He noted that the only healthy relationship the Fuhrer ever had with a female was with Brunhilde, his German Shepherd. Legend has it Hitler’s last words were, “I’d trade it all for just one more bite of mama’s spoon bread.” Years later Hogan’s Heroes and Mel Brooks would get their revenge on him and we’d all have a good laugh at this evil incarnate. Part of his legacy is that the least popular baby name for the last 80 years has been Adolph. And when was the last time you’ve seen a Hitler in the phone book? In fact when was the last time you’ve seen a phone book?
8. Phillip Seymour Hoffman – 46, Loved his life. Loved his wife. Loved heroin more. Heroin was his heroine. It happens. He’s not alone. Fans who miss him can still feel his presence by staring at his doppelgänger: Jim Gaffigan.
9. Thomas Sheldrake – 35, Died from complications of a bad business plan – owned and operated the Kissing Booth concessions at New Jersey nursing homes.
10. Kate Billups – 32, Pharmacist who enjoyed emptying prescriptions more than she enjoyed filling them. Only person ever to die from an overdose of Lipitor. Her blood became so thin, a paper cut caused her to bleed out. Never really liked her job stating she found, “all those little vials vile.” Strangely she enjoyed the music of Kurt Weill.
11. Wilma Parsons – 71, Ms. Parsons experienced serial gender dysphoria to such a degree, she underwent 4 gender reassignment surgeries. It died a Hermaphrodite attracted mostly to talk shows.
12. Chuck Norris – 80 and counting, Not gonna happen. Death is for mortals.
13. Generalissimo Francisco Franco – 82, Pompous ass. Being called Frank wasn’t good enough for him. Had to be called Generalissimo. Even by his wife while in bed. Well, this was before Viagra, so whatever hardens your arteries is your business. Led the conservative faction to victory in the Spanish Civil War in which thousands were killed including a guy who would’ve perfected Cold Fusion and another who would’ve made bickering obsolete. Thanks Frank.
14. Corey Blaine – 55, A COVID survivor. Ironically he died from suffocation when, after recovery, he put on his thickly protective breathing mask too snugly.
15. Harry Houdini – 52, Died from an overdose of semantics:
Who did?
Houdini did?
Who?
The guy in the trunk?
Harry?
I don’t know if he’s hairy or not, I just call him Houdini.
Who?
The guy in the trunk.
Oh, that’s Dini.
Who Dini?
Exactly.
What?
No, What’s the second baseman.
Well then who’s the guy that drew pictures of people extricating themselves from dangerous situations?
Oh, that’s the Escape Artist.
Who is?
Houdini is.
And I didn’t even know he could draw.