humor

My minor celebrity moment. What’s yours?

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Photo courtesy of Free Images (pachd.com)
Photo courtesy of Free Images (pachd.com)

During its musical revues the old Fly By Night Club sometimes included a “Minor Celebrities” bit, inviting audience members to write down their furthest-removed brushes with fame. During intermission the cast would pick what they thought were the best – and again, the more tenuous, the better.

Thus we’d hear things like:

“I take dance class with Michael Jackson’s plastic surgeon’s wife.

“My great-uncle invented Cheez Whiz.”

“I once heard Brian Keith belch when I walked past his house in Hawaii to go surfing.”

“I used to carpool a kid whose mother’s father embalmed Babe Ruth.”

All these snippets led, naturally, to a book. The title: “Elvis Presley’s Pharmacist Was My Sunday-School Teacher.” 

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What’s the weirdest thing you ever charged?

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th-1The folks at CardRatings.com recently commissioned a survey about offbeat credit card purchases. Some 57 percent of those surveyed copped to a bit of buyer’s remorse, i.e., “What was I thinking?”

“Adult entertainment” was the top culprit, with 6.7 percent admitting to have purchased temporary jollies. Men are “about four times more likely than women to use a credit card for this purpose,” according to the CardRatings blog post.  

You don’t say.

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In which I am flagged as a potential terrorist.

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thI’m writing this from Sky Harbor in Phoenix, which touts itself as the “friendliest” airport. Certainly this is true of its TSA agents, one of whom got to second base with me without even buying me dinner.

Of course, she was just doing her job. An alarm sounded when I went through security. A quick glance at the monitor showed the word “explosives.”

A couple of agents moved in with a gait that was both casual and swift, if that makes any sense. It was a “hey, everything’s fine” crossed with “holy crap, that woman might be packing.”

Hint: I wasn’t.

But rules are rules, so I had to go through several levels of safety checks.

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21 uses for a dead gift card.

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thIn the past week I’ve gone through several discounted gift cards, i.e., used them up and asked the cashier to “recycle” them. Wonder if they ended up in the circular file rather than the “clean this up and reload it” bin?

Probably the latter, since the ones in the typical “gift card mall” look utterly pristine. You can’t really say that about the cards I use and toss – not only were they secondhand when I bought them, they’ve suffered tremendous indignities in my wallet and purse. (Hint: In both those locations I also carry keys, paper-clipped items, a comb and the occasional gleaned My Coke Rewards.)

Maybe you, too, buy from the secondary market and thus aren’t interested in reloading them. Or maybe you get gift cards to places you don’t generally frequent and thus have no interest in adding more dollars to the scrip once it’s depleted.

What do we do with all these plastic rectangles, especially since the impending holidays probably mean even more gift cards coming our way?

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Coming up: The Talkeetna Bachelors Auction and Wilderness Woman Competition.

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IMG_3567I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Come up and join us at the Talkeetna Bachelors Auction and Wilderness Woman Competition and you’ll dine out on those stories for years.

True, it’ll be winter* — Dec. 7, to be exact — and that means it’ll probably be cold. But that’s the whole point! You’ll be in Alaska in the winter.

You’ll survive. I promise. There’s a bonfire at which to warm yourself during the competition, and the auction and after-party are actually pretty warm due to the hootin’, hollerin’ and dancin’.

Besides, Talkeetna has a doctor.

I wanted to link to my first-ever article about Talkeetna, published in 2010, but my site was migrated to a new server and that first piece doesn’t seem to have made the jump from hyperspace. So I’m excerpting from that piece to explain the absolute hilarity of the event:

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Let your geek flag fly.

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thMy friend Linda B. is a major genre fangirl. There was a time when she could be spotted at MediaWest conferences, dressed as a middle-aged Corellian spice trader* and participating in blaster battles all over the conference hotels.

She and other fellow geeks would see plays and skits, admire others’ costumes, buy fan fiction (including some rather startling “slash” fiction) and, yeah, shoot at one another.

She and several other middle-aged women would share hotel rooms and at some point conduct readings of abysmally written fan fiction. A particular “Star Wars” story always brought the house down with the line, “Han spurted into the room.”

Good times, despite the expense of traveling from Alaska to Lansing and the “con crud” that she always seemed to catch.

These days she’s staying closer to home – working, writing plays, making jewelry and doing free-form bead weaving – but she’s still a geek. Or maybe she’s a nerd. Probably both.

Either way she’s a fangirl, which is how she came to send me the link to this Wil Wheaton video, “Why it’s awesome to be a nerd.” This is the kind of thing that slips over her transom on a regular basis, along with things like song parodies based on characters from “The X-Files” or news about the latest Doctor to play “Dr. Who.”

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Silliness to be savored.

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thEvery so often I get an e-mail about the “Mensa Invitational,” a word game hosted by The Washington Post. It asks readers to make up new words by adding or subtracting a letter from an existing word.

A few examples:

Foreploy: Misrepresenting yourself for the purposes of obtaining sex.

Intaxication: The euphoria that accompanies an income tax rebate (which lasts only until you realize that this was your money to begin with).

Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic humor and the person who doesn’t get it.

Glibido: All talk, no action.

Pretty clever, huh? The only problem with the Mensa Invitational is that it doesn’t exist. (Yet another reason to stop blindly forwarding every e-mail you get.)

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Fish, fossils and really awful puns.

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image-1If loving Ray Troll is wrong, I don’t want to be right. The Ketchikan-based artist is best known (up here, anyway) for his fish T-shirts, prints, pins and such. But he’s branched out to sharks, fossils, dinosaurs and evolution, all of it imbued with unmistakeable graphics and some truly atrocious puns.

Three of those mini-masterpieces, in the form of fridge magnets, make up this week’s giveaway.

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Beat the heat with “Tundra.”

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tundra 100It’s high summer. The heat and humidity are racing each other to the century mark. Your shirt is sticking to your back like a sweaty decal. The air is so thick you could drink it.

Here’s one solution: Look at a cartoon that involves polar bears, snowmen or dog mushers. You’ll get a vicarious chill and the laughter-induced endorphins will distract you from the fact that you’ve got a few more months of this kind of weather.

Yep, it’s another “Tundra” giveaway. This will be the third time I’ve featured a collection of Chad Carpenter’s comics, and the reaction is always tremendous. Why? Because he’s freakin’ funny, that’s why.

Carpenter’s strip is syndicated all over the U.S. and also in other countries. If you’d like to know more, read this post from last year, which contains a link to a profile of the artist.

Or just take my word for it: Chad is a sick and twisted man, which makes for awesome (and occasionally wince-inducing) cartooning.

Beat the heat with “Tundra.”

by

tundra 100It’s high summer. The heat and humidity are racing each other to the century mark. Your shirt is sticking to your back like a sweaty decal. The air is so thick you could drink it.

Here’s one solution: Look at a cartoon that involves polar bears, snowmen or dog mushers. You’ll get a vicarious chill and the laughter-induced endorphins will distract you from the fact that you’ve got a few more months of this kind of weather.

Yep, it’s another “Tundra” giveaway. This will be the third time I’ve featured a collection of Chad Carpenter’s comics, and the reaction is always tremendous. Why? Because he’s freakin’ funny, that’s why.

Carpenter’s strip is syndicated all over the U.S. and also in other countries. If you’d like to know more, read this post from last year, which contains a link to a profile of the artist.

Or just take my word for it: Chad is a sick and twisted man, which makes for awesome (and occasionally wince-inducing) cartooning.