Life isn't about finding yourself, it's about creating yourself.
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I’ve known this for a while intuitively (I think most of us do) and I had it confirmed by passages in the book The Science of Happiness. But here it is in a video…
…which hopefully makes up for the fact that I’ve been a slacker about writing it up.
Bonus: John Cleese of Monty Python fame reports on the same thing…
Communism, cold-war paranoia, and a missing high school (Morse Science High has disappeared!) add up to the strangest, funniest, and most bizarre comedy recording ever made.
“The Howl of the Wolf Movie! Presenting honest stories of working people portrayed by rich, Hollywood stars!”
It’s on UTV … “For YOU, the viewer!”
And don’t forget…
“…you can believe me, because I never lie … and I’m always right.”
What the hell does all this mean?
Well, your guess is as good as mine. But if you’re an intelligent person with a strong affinity for the bizarre, you’ll enjoy it. Immensely.
“Stop calling me Fred. My name’s Adolf!”
This tidbit from the legendary Newt X sums it up perfectly: “Don’t Crush That Dwarf is unusual for comedy, in that, rather than focusing on live monologues or studio gags, it’s a unified concept album that encompasses the full space of an album (both sides of the original vinyl) and comes together more like a novel than a joke. The story that unifies the piece features George Leroy Tirebiter, who is handed some food physically THROUGH his TV and finds himself involved in an unfolding story of a life in hell.”
To really try to explain the story and its ramifications is almost impossible. You simply have to listen to it. Better yet, listen to it with a bunch of friends. Then sit around for hours analyzing it like the best and more interesting deep piece of philosophical literature you’ve ever heard performed on tape. This is Shakespeare from the drug-addled 1970’s. This is Goethe’s Faust filtered through Thorton Wilder’s Skin of Our Teeth. This is, as mentioned in the album itself, “Parallel Hell.”
“I’m going to cut off the soles of my shoes, sit in a tree, and learn to play the flute!”
Here’s the strangest thing – and I would take advantage of it if I were you, quick, before it gets corrected: On Amazon.com they sell the album as a digital download for $9.99. Right? But it only has two tracks on it, both over 20 minutes long, and if you buy them singly you get the whole album for $1.98 (99 cents a track). Ooops, somebody goofed!
This is my favorite of the Firesign Theater Albums, closely followed by The Giant Rat of Sumatra.
Knock Knock Books brings you the much needed, How To Procrastinate.
From their website: “Are you punctual, productive, and conscientious? Now there’s help. Because work expands to fit the time available, it’s never been easier to do the minimum amount of work in the maximum amount of time. Whether you’re naturally organized, cursed with achievement, or simply obsessive-compulsive, we’ll show you how to stop performing and start procrastinating today. Or tomorrow.”
I wish I’d discovered this book sooner. It would have been on my Christmas wish list.
Serves three, or one bachelor for three days.
Ingredients:
Bring water and margarine to a boil in medium saucepan.
Add package of Chicken Flavor Pasta & Sauce.
Add the frozen onion/pepper mix because, oh, what the heck. Onions and peppers are good.
Continue boiling over medium heat for seven minutes, stirring occasionally and wondering if it is supported to look so soupy.
Realize you used a 2 cup measure instead of a 1 cup measure, which means there is twice the water that’s supported to be in there.
Panic and search the cupboard for more pasta.
Finding none, throw in the stuffing mix, because — what the heck — it’s been in the cupboard for at least two years now.
Determine that it still looks too soupy to eat, so search for something else you can throw in to soak up the water.
Discover the package of Idahoan Four Cheese Mashed Potatoes and wonder how long that’s been up there.
Stir in the entire package.
Describe over the phone how disgusting it looks to your fiancée. Wince as she laughs hysterically at you.
Take it off the heat and let it congeal as you look up the phone number of the local pizza delivery place.
Right before you dial the pizza number, you take an experimental taste.
Surprise! It’s delicious!
Wash it down with a bottle of Lagunitas Hairy Eyeball Ale.
Life is good.
A linguistics professor was lecturing his class.
“In English,” he explained, “a double negative forms a positive. In some languages, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative. However,” the professor continued, “there is no language wherein a double positive can form a negative.”
A voice from the back of the room piped up. “Yeah, right.”
- From our big dusty archive of funny email
(Authors Unknown)
A girl asks her boyfriend to come over Friday night and have dinner with her parents. Since this is such a big event, the girl announces to her boyfriend that after dinner, she would like to go out and make love for the first time. Well, the boy is ecstatic, but he has never had sex before, so he takes a trip to the pharmacist to get some condoms.
The pharmacist helps the boy for about an hour. He tells the boy everything there is to know about condoms and sex. At the register, the pharmacist asks the boy how many condoms he’d like to buy, a 3-pack, 10-pack or family pack. The boy insists on the familypack because he thinks he will be rather busy, it being his first time and all.
That night, the boy shows up at the girls parents house and meets his girlfriend at the door. “Oh I’m so excited for you to meet my parents, come on in!”
The boy goes inside and is taken to the dinner table where the girl’s parents are seated. The boy quickly offers to say grace and bows his head. A minute passes, and the boy is still deep in prayer, with his head down. Four minutes pass, and still no movement from the boy. Finally, after nearly ten minutes with his head down, the girlfriend finally leans over and whispers to the boyfriend, “I had no idea you were this religious.”
The boy turns, and whispers back, “I had no idea your father was a pharmacist.”
- From our big dusty archive of funny email
(Authors Unknown)
Snopes.com just penned a funny article about unintentional Internet name gaffes, where a company puts two words together, adds a dotcom at the end, but ends up with a surprise. “Powergen Italia” becomes Power Genitalia and “Pen Island” becomes Penis Land. They mention one I had discovered myself, and had written about in my personal blog a few months back: “Experts Exchange” becomes Expert Sexchange. A few years ago I, too, had a brush with this: My site “Writers Cam” unintentionally turned into Writer Scam. Needless to say, I dropped the “s” altogether, making WriterCAM.com.
If Monty Python had access to the University of British Columbia’s online English-Latin Dictionary, they would have known the name “Biggus Dickus” isn’t correct (it’s Maximus Erectum).
This Java based translator was written by Djun M. Kim, of the University’s Mathematics Department, and features a slick, fast, and uncomplicated interface.
Anyone who has a love for language will have fun looking up Latin terms, and then discovering the basis for many contemporary words.
Optimus oraculum, baby.
A burglar broke into a house one night. He shined his flashlight around, looking for valuables, and when he picked up a CD player to place in his sack, a strange, disembodied voice echoed from the dark saying, “Jesus is watching you.”
He nearly jumped out of his skin, clicked his flashlight out and froze. When he heard nothing more after a bit, he shook his head, promised himself a vacation after the next big score, then clicked the light back on and began searching for more valuables. Just as he pulled the stereo out so he could disconnect the wires, clear as a bell he heard, “Jesus is watching you.”
Freaked out, he shined his light around frantically, looking for the source of the voice. Finally, in the corner of the room, his flashlight beam came to rest on a parrot. “Did you say that?” he hissed at the parrot.
“Yep,” the parrot confessed, then squawked, “I’m just trying to warn you.”
The burglar relaxed. “Warn me, huh? Who the heck are you?”
“Moses,” replied the bird.
“Moses?” the burglar laughed. “What kind of stupid people would name a parrot Moses?”
The bird promptly answered, “The same stupid people who gave the name ‘Jesus’ to their Rottweiler.”
- From our big dusty archive of funny email
(Author Unknown)
In the past, most couples married in June because they took their yearly bath in May and were still smelling pretty good by June. However, they were starting to smell, so brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide their body odor.
Baths equaled a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and men, then the women and finally the children. Last of all the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually loose someone in it. Hence the saying, “Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.”
Houses once had thatched roofs, which was thick straw piled high, with no wood underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the pets … dogs, cats and other small animals, mice, rats, bugs, etc., lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof. Hence the saying, “It’s raining cats and dogs.”
There was nothing to stop things from falling into the house. This posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings could really mess up your nice clean bed. So, they found if they made beds with big posts and hung a sheet over the top, it addressed that problem. Hence those beautiful big 4 poster beds with canopies.
The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt! Hence the saying “dirt poor.” The wealthy had slate floors which would get slippery in the winter when wet. So they spread thresh on the floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on they kept adding more thresh until when you opened the door it would all start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed at the entry way, hence a “thresh hold.”
They cooked in the kitchen in a big kettle that always hung over the fire. Every day they lit the fire and added things to the pot. They mostly ate vegetables and didn’t get much meat. They would eat the stew for dinner leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight and then start over the next day. Sometimes the stew had food in it that had been in there for a month. Hence the rhyme: peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old.”
Sometimes they could obtain pork and would feel really special when that happened. When company came over, they would bring out some bacon and hang it to show it off. It was a sign of wealth and that a man “could really bring home the bacon.” They would cut off a little to share with guests and would all sit around and “chew the fat.”
Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with a high acid content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food. This happened most often with tomatoes, so they stopped eating tomatoes … for 400 years. Most people didn’t have pewter plates, but had trenchers — a piece of wood with the middle scooped out like a bowl. Trenchers were never washed and a lot of times worms got into the wood. After eating off wormy trenchers, they would get “trench mouth.”
Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, or the “upper crust”.
Lead cups were used to drink ale or whiskey. The combination would sometimes knock them out for a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial. They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wakeup. Hence the custom of holding a “wake.”
England is old and small and they started running out of places to bury people. So, they would dig up coffins and would take their bones to a house and reuse the grave. In reopening these coffins, one out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive. So they thought they would tie a string on their wrist and lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night to listen for the bell. Hence on the “graveyard shift” they would know that someone was “saved by the bell” or he was a “dead ringer.”
- From our big dusty box of classic funny emails