humor

Giveaway: “Tundra” comics collection.

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Many years ago, cartoonist Chad Carpenter had just a few syndicated clients. One of them was my then-employer, the Anchorage Daily News, so I actually know the guy. (Well, if “know” is the same as “I used to bug the crap out of him every chance I got.”) These days his daily strip is syndicated in just over 500 newspapers and other publications, mostly in the United States and Canada but in some other countries as well.

At first I wondered how some of the humor would translate to, say, a Norwegian or Jamaican audience. Then again, I guess jokes about outhouses, snowmen and the Grim Reaper are pretty universal.

Which is why I’m putting another Carpenter collection up for grabs — who wouldn’t snicker at a drawing of  people being forced to wear life jackets while heading across the River Styx?

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Blog roundup: Attack of the choleliths edition.

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A few nights ago I had what I thought was a really bad case of indigestion and nausea. Zantac couldn’t touch it. It got worse. I tried to make myself vomit and couldn’t.

Eventually I realized that (a) indigestion shouldn’t feel like this and (b) I had eaten a fairly healthy dinner. A doctor’s visit and an ultrasound determined that it was a gall-bladder attack.

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8 personal finance lessons from “Gotterdammerung.”

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I spent six butt-numbing hours at the movies on Saturday, watching the Metropolitan Opera’s live broadcast of “Gotterdammerung.” Spectacle, pageantry, a buff and bitchin’ Siegfried who turned out to have a down-home Texas accent – it was a very successful day.

The only thing better than opera is frugal opera. In fact, the show didn’t cost me anything:

 

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To men everywhere, from a woman who’s got your number.

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Who here is sick of receiving e-mail forwards like “To women everywhere from a man who’s had enough”?

Normally I have at least a nodding tolerance for such stereotypical humor. Not this time. Maybe it was the wrong time of the month for me to be reading it.

I kid! In fact, I just thought it demanded an answer – especially if it would give me a chance to be just as sexist and condescending as the original author, whoever he is.

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Want to survive “Blue Monday”? Maybe a Chicken Chucker would help.

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Each year a mid-January day is designated “Blue Monday” — allegedly the most depressing day out of the  365 or 366, according to a formula concocted by a guy named Cliff Arnall.

A former tutor at the University of Cardiff, Arnall seems to have created Blue Monday as a publicity stunt for a travel agency. Still, the reasoning seems pretty sound to me: A combination of consumer debt from holiday spending, post-holiday letdown, crappy weather and failed New Year’s resolutions make us feel like hell.

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Tweets from Talkeetna.

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The 2011 Talkeetna Bachelors Auction and Wilderness Woman Competition has come and gone in its usual whirlwind of oddity. Funny how it all seemed so normal at the time.

Last year I wrote about the auction in extensive detail. This year I decided to deliver scenes from the weekend as a series of tweets. I’m doing this because I need to get in the habit of posting more often on Twitter.

Note: This doesn’t change my conviction that no one should use the verb “tweet” unless he is, in fact, a bird.

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Black Friday and sex.

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My unconventionally coiffed friend J. Money is nothing if not a realist. He figured that “about a bazillion” Black Friday posts would go up in the PF blogosphere right before the big day.

So he decided to make his own post about sex. Pretty much what you might expect from a guy whose site is called Budgets Are Sexy.

Of his “10 ways Black Friday is like sex,” my favorites were:

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The hottest news in yogurt making.

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I’ve been meaning to write an update to “Lactobacillus love: Is it wrong?” Making yogurt in the slow cooker was pretty easy in the summer, but autumn brought several fails in a row – and I never could get the process right while up in Alaska last summer. So I went online to research what I might be doing wrong.

Turns out I should have been making sure the milk was heated to 180 degrees and then cooled to between 105 and 110 degrees, and also making sure of a guaranteed, long-lasting source of warmth. The latter isn’t easy in a cooler or downright cold season.

One writer suggested heating the oven to 100 degrees, then shutting it off (but leaving the oven light on), then putting the covered bowl of milk and starter in to “cook.” Despite the current cold snap in Anchorage, this worked great.

That is, until I set my friend’s oven on fire.

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