In the Headlights

Halloween Countdown: What's your Dog Wearing, Hm?

Sandy's got dogs, so I guess she would be concerned that their costumes are up to par with the other trick or treatin' pooches.  Here are some costumes to choose from.  Wonder if her pups are putting on the dog.

 

 

 

I think my favorite is the second from the last.

Countdown to Halloween

Gooey bars are in the oven.  I'm going to the Halloween party at the dance studio tonight.  Hopefully, they'll all be eaten.

Speaking of which, L.C. sent us a Halloween joke.

A couple is invited to a costume ball.  The evening of the party, she gets a bad headache and begs off going to the party.  Her husband is going to stay home with her, but she insists that he go:  she is just going to take some aspirin and go to bed.  Reluctantly, he agrees.

Her husband took his costume and left for the party.  She went to bed, and woke up about an hour later feeling much better, and decided to go to the party.

Her husband didn't know what her costume was, so she decided to mess with his head a bit, and to see how he acted when she wasn't with him.

When she got there, her husband was the life of the party.  He was dancing with every shapely woman there, stealing a kiss now and then, copping a feel when he could.  The woman decided to test him.  She sidled up to him, and since she was a hottie herself, he soon shed his dance partner and devoted his attention to her.  She pretended to be charmed, and he pressed his luck further and further.

Finally, he whispered a suggestion in her ear, and they went outside to a car and made love.  He was, after all, her husband.  Before unmasking, she slipped away and went home.  She took off her costume and went to bed, wondering what excuse her husband would have when he got home.

She was reading in bed when he got home, and asked him how the party had been. 

"Oh, the same old thing.  You know I never have a good time when you're not with me."

"Did you dance much?" she asked.

"Not once.  When I got there, I met Bill, Jim and some of the guys.  We went into the den and played poker all evening.  But you'll never believe what happened to the guy I loaned my costume to."

(Hmmm.  You'd think she'd have noticed.  Still, if L.C. says it happened...)

A Joke- Not Real P.C.

Compliments of Connie.

One day in the future, O.J. Simpson has a heart attack and dies.  Maybe it's not a heart attack, but whatever he dies from, he goes straight to hell, where the devil awaits him.

"I don't know what to do here" says the devil.  "We're above the numbers for the fire marshall.  You are on my list, but there's no room.  You definitely have to stay, so I'll tell you what I'm going to do.  I have a couple of folks here who weren't quite as bad as you.  I'll let one of them go, but you have to take their place.  I'll even let YOU decide who you leaves."

For some reason, O.J. fell for it and decided it sounded pretty good.  The devil opened the door to the first room.  In it was Ted Kennedy and a large pool of water.  Ted kept diving in, and surfacing, empty handed.  Over, and over, and over, he dove in and surfaced with nothing.  Such was his fate in hell.

"No," O.J. said.  "I don't think so.  I'm not a good swimmer, and I don't think I could do that all day long."

The devil led him to the door of the next room.  In it was Al Gore with a sledgehammer and a room full of rocks.  All he did was swing that hammer, time after time, after time.

"No, this is no good.  I've got this problem with my shoulder.  I would be in constant agony if all I could do was break rocks all day," commented O.J.

The devil opened a third door.  Through it, O.J. saw Bill Clinton, lying nude on a bed, his arms tied over his head, and his legs restrained in a spread-eagle pose.  Bent over him was Monica Lewinsky, doing what she does best.

O.J. looked at this in shocked disbelief, and finally said "Yeah, man, I can handle this."

The devil smiled and said:

"Okay, Monica, you're free to go."

[Image via South Park X]

So True.

Dee Ray sent us this about Age Activated Attention Deficit Disorder.  I do this sort of stuff every day.

Like this morning, I was going to sort the laundry, but my coffee cup was empty.  I refilled the coffee cup and washed a few dishes while I was out there.  Came back through the living room and saw a dumbell lying there, so did a few curls, while sorting out some of last week's stack of mail lying on the sideboard.  Ate a piece of gooey cake left from last night (goes so good with the coffee, don'tcha know) and then realized I probably needed to get to work on a post for my self-imposed 1 PM deadline.  The laundry, apparently, has been abandoned.

Here's Dee's version of AAADD:

I decide to water my garden.

As I turn on the hose in the driveway, I look over at my car and decide it needs washing.

As I start over to the garage, I notice mail on the porch table that I brought up from the mailbox earlier.  I decide to go through the mail before I wash the car.

I lay my car keys on the table, put the junk mail in the garbage can, and notice that that can is full.

So I put the bills back on the table, and decide to take out the garbage first.

But then I think that since I'll be near the mailbox when I take out the garbage anyway, I may as well pay the bills first and put them in the mailbox when I take out the garbage.

I take my checkbook out and notice that there is only one check left.

My extra checks are in the study, so I go inside the house to my desk where I find the can of Coke I had started earlier.

In looking for my checks, I move the Coke aside so that I don't knock it over, and notice that it has gotten warm.  I decide to put it in the refrigerator.

As I head for the kitchen with the Coke, a vase of flowers catches my eye.  The flowers need water.

I put the Coke on the counter and discover my reading glasses, which I'd been searching for all morning.

I decide I'd better put them back on my desk, but first, I'm going to water the flowers.

I set the glasses on the counter, fill a pitcher with water, and notice the TV remote which has been left on a kitchen counter.  I know we'll be looking for it tonight when we decide to watch TV.  I decide to put it back in the den, but first I'll water the flowers.

I pour some water on the flowers, but quite a bit of it spills.  I put the remote on the counter, get some paper towels and wipe up the spill.

Then I head down the hall trying to remember what I was going to do.

At the end of the day:

The car isn't washed.
The bills aren't paid.
There's a warm can of Coke sitting on the counter.
The flowers don't have enough water.
There's only one check  in my checkbook.
I can't find the remote.
I can't find my glasses.
I don't remember what I did with my car keys.

Then, when I try to figure out why nothing got done today, I'm really baffled, because I know I was busy all day, and I'm really tired.

I'll try to get some help with this.  But first, I think I'll water the garden.

And of course, it's not just a product of getting older.  Bil Keane's Billy does it all the time:

Worst Case Scenario

I got an email from Mike Taylor of Radar Online that included this: "We all hope to live our last moments with quiet dignity, surrounded by loved ones.  But it doesn't always work out that way."

This piqued my interest, so I went to the site, and found their list of the 100 worst ways to die.  I think we all enjoy the schadenfreude of reading about someone kicking the bucket in a particularly embarrassing way.  Their list made up, but pretty good all the same.  Some worst case scenarios:

-The back of the Hallmark Store, clutching a Precious Moments figurine.

-Reclining in a purple box, after volunteering to be a magician's assistant.

-The cougar pen at the Bronx Zoo, gingerly retrieving your Swatch.

-The handicapped stall at work, trying out that "autoerotic asphyxiation" thing you read about on Wikipedia.

-Just outside a Mexican "farmacia" with a bag of "la Viagra" in your hand.

-Next to a giant boulder, just after amputating your left arm, much closer to civilization than you thought.

-The Scientology Center, clutching an E-Meter.

That was just the beginning.  Wandering around the site, I found great stories and links to other sites with great stories.  It had the potential of consuming my whole day.  I learned:

-It's tough to be a supermodel.  Really.

-Celebrities can be pushed too far! 25 celebs flippin' the bird at paparazzi.

-The timeline of the decline of robin Williams.

And, well, much, much more.

[Image via Secrets of Scientology]

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night

Mark your calendars!  The winners of the the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest will be announced July 30.  If you want to try your hand at next year's contest, you have until April 15 (a date associated with painful submissions and made-up stories) to submit. The official rules are here.

   Entrants are invited "to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels".  In addition to an overall winner, there are winners in subcategories like detective fiction, romance novels, Western novels and purple prose.

The contest is named for English novelist and playwright Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, whose name is synonymous with bad writing.  He was the first to use the line "It was a dark and stormy night."  Here's the bar that must be topped:

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

Bulwer-Lytton wrote in the 1800's, and apparently was quite popular.  In addition to "it was a dark and stormy night", he was responsible for "the great unwashed,"  "pursuit of the almighty dollar"  and "the pen is mightier than the sword."  Here are more quotations.

A hallmark of this type of writing is its purple prose, in which the floridity of the writing overshadows any factual content that may exist in the sentence. 

Last year's overall winner was Jim Guigli, with this:

"Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said you've had your last burrito for a while, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave, and lick the shovel clean."

I particularly like this one, the overall winner from 2005, by Dan McKay.

"As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire, highly functional yet pleasingly formed, perched prominently on top of the intake manifold, aching for experienced hands, the small knurled caps of the oil dampeners begging to be inspected and adjusted as described in chapter seven of the shop manual."

If you think that you, too, can write this badly, then you, too, can be recognized for it.  Start sending in those submissions.

[Image via Wikipedia]

Ze Silly Joke

It was late at night.  The Parisian thief had planned his crime carefully.  He broke into the Louvre,  stole his carefully selected paintings, got past security, and made it safely to his van.

(This is not as simple as it sounds.  Those of you who read The DaVinci Code know that.)

Unfortunately, his careful planning did not include the aftermath.  He was captured after going a mere two blocks when his van ran out of gas.

When asked how he could mastermind such a brilliant heist and then make such a rookie mistake.

His response:

"Monsieur, zat is ze reason I stole ze paintings.  I had no Monet to buy Degas to make ze Van Gogh."

You probably thought I wouldn't have De Gaulle to share this.  You were wrong.

After all, I have nothing Toulouse.

[Groan.  Thanks, L.C.]

[The Starry Night via  Wikipedia]

W.O.T.D.

Today's word of the day is "wowser".

I would have thought it was some sort of party animal or daredevil. 

Instead, it means just the opposite. 

A wowser is an is an obnoxiously puritanical person.

I found the word in a description of the book The Gilded Tongue:  Overly Eloquent Words for Everyday Things by Rod L. Evans. 

Comments about the book from Amazon, which has it on sale for $3.40 (and where I just ordered it) lead me to think that you don't have to be a pysmatic logomaniac to enjoy its sesquipedalian eloquence.

Reading this book might cause your friends to shun you as an insufferable verbophile, but if you are, then you are, and you may as well run with it.

[Image via Star500]

I Like You

But not very much.

I seem to have a love-hate relationship with Amy Sedaris.

I first read about her in one of her brother, David's books.  He described her wearing a fat suit home for the holidays, so successfully that she horrified their father, who had always been so taken by her beauty.  He spent the whole holiday trying to get her to diet.  She is a beauty who delights in making herself look repulsive.  Not only is she fascinated by physical ugliness, she has invented a  boyfriend, Ricky, and made herself up with bruises and black eyes to look like a battered woman.

I find her fascinating.  Her portrayal of the over-the-top bizarro Jerri Blank in Strangers with Candy only added to her legend. 

So on the one hand, we have an obviously good-looking, intelligent, funny woman with a pet rabbit, neighbor of Sarah Jessica Parker and cupcake franchisee, whose alter-ego is ugly, psychotic or at least unbalanced, and brutish.

Most people have two sides, they just seem a bit more polarized in Ms. Sedaris who seems to careen between extremes approaching those of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

So it was with great anticipation that I ordered I Like You, Hospitality Under the Influence (and sent it to several friends as a Christmas present.) The down side is that the book so gripped me that it has taken me six months to finish it. 

The book is a disorganized mess.  Reading it is like watching a small child act out.  Entertaining for a short while, then pretty boring.  The book features a lot of trampy photos of Ms. Sedaris in 1960's hairstyles, posing in pantyhose.  The kind with the reinforced crotch and toes, to boot.  Others show her  looking very wholesome (in 1960's clothing, God knows why).  Others before her have invented a different public personna, and so I suspect these are polarized extremes of the real Amy.  At least I hope so. 

I Like You is a book of mostly cheesy entertainment tips:  Making your own invitations and  decorations from construction paper, papier mache or bits of cloth and string.  Putting out a tip jar (the money jar)when friends come over, and getting them to contribute.   Drink and drug tips.

The recipes are the best part.  Most sound good, and there are many I'd like to try, so this book will wind up in the cookbook collection.  Unfortunately, even this best part is as if she took years of recipe file cards and clippings, dumped them in a pile, and said to her editor "here, just stick them in there."  Some measurements are in grams, some in cups and teaspoons.  Some sound delicious, others just weird.

After a while, it becomes heavy slogging.  Some sections are charming, some are tedious, and they are all thrown together.  You have to do the work of mining the gems.

And hardest to forgive for me are the sloppy spelling or grammatical errors.  I was pulled up short a few times reading this book by what I can only think of as sloppy editing.  One example is "Mix together 1 can of award-winning tuna, drained and rung out,".  It happened a number of times as I read the book.  I can only cite the last example because it took me so long to read the book that I have forgotten the others.

Maybe all this means I am too anal retentive to appreciate the genius of this book (I felt that might be the case about Jerri Blank as well).  If so, too bad, that's just the way I am.  In fact, I suspect that Ms. Sedaris is a hilarious person, and I just don't quite get her.

But I'm interested enough that I'll follow her career with bemused fascination.

I like you, Jerri.  I mean, Amy.

[Top image from Eonline.  Second from tribe.net]

Cats and Dogs, How they Differ

It's subtle, sometimes you can't tell them apart.  

Jan sent this story, which is an elaboration on one I've posted before.  In fact, it combines elements of a couple of well-circulated jokes.  I'm not sure they're jokes, since I seem to have done all of these things at one time or another.  But since I like them both, and this one too made me laugh, It seems only fit that I'll share it with you.

How to give a cat a pill:

1.  Pick up the cat and cradle it gently in your left arm as if holding a baby.  Position right forefinger and thumb on either side of the cat's mouth, and gently apply pressure to the cheeks, while holding the pill in your right hand (this is how MY vet told me to pill my cats.  Ha.)  As the cat opens its mouth, pop the pill into the mouth, then allow it to close its mouth and swallow.

2.  Retrieve the pill from the floor and the cat from behind the sofa.  Repeat process. 

3.  Retrieve the cat from under the bed and throw the soggy pill away.

4.  Take a new pill from the foil wrap and cradle the cat in your left arm, holding firmly to the back paws with your left hand.  Force jaws open and push the pill to the back of the cats throat with your finger.  Hold the cat's jaws closed for ten seconds. 

5.  Retrieve the pill from the goldfish bowl and the cat from the top of the wardrobe.  Call your spouse in from the garden.

6.  Kneel on the floor with the cat wedged firmly between your knees.  Hold front and rear paws.  Ignore low growls emitted by cat. Get spouse to hold head firmly while forcing a wooden ruler into the cat's mouth.  Slide pill down ruler and rub cat's throat vigorously.

7.  Retrieve cat from the curtain rail and get another pill.  Make a note to buy a new ruler and have curtains repaired.  Sweep up shards of shattered figurine and set aside to be glued together later.

8.  Wrap cat in a large towel and get spouse to lie on cat with its head just visibly poking from under his or her armpit.  Put the pill in a drinking straw.  Open the cat's mouth with the pencil, insert straw and blow down drinking straw. 

9.  Make sure pill is not harmful to humans, and drink a beer to take the taste of the pill away.  Apply bandage to spouse's forearm, and remove blood from the carpet with cold water and soap.

10. Retrieve cat from neighbor's shed.  Get another pill.  Put cat in cupboard and close the door on its neck leaving it's head showing (note:  no cats were harmed in making this joke.  Quite the contrary, in fact.)  Force cat's mouth open with a dessert spoon and flick the pill into mouth with an elastic band.

11. Fetch screwdriver from garage and put cupboard door back on its hinges.  Drink beer.  Fetch bottle of Scotch.  Drink shot.  Apply cold compress to cheek and check vaccination records for date of last tetanus shot.  Apply whiskey compress to cheek to disinfect.  Toss back another shot.  Throw T-shirt away and fetch a clean one from closet.

12. Call fire department to retrieve the cat from the tree across the road.  Apologize to the woman who ran her car into a fence swerving to avoid the cat. Take last pill from foil wrap.

13. Tie the little bastard's front paws to rear paws with garden twine  and bind tightly to a leg of the dining room table.  Get heavy-duty garden gloves from the shed.  Push the pill into cat's mouth followed by a large piece of filet steak.  Be rough about it.  Hold head vertically and pour about 2 pints of water down its throat to wash the pill down. 

14.  Consume remainder of Scotch.  Get spouse to drive you to the emergency room to get the pill shards removed from your eye.  Sit quietly while the doctor rinses and patches your eye, and cleans and stitches your fingers and forearm.  Call a furniture shop on the way home and order a new dining room table.

15.  Call SPCA to collect mutant cat from hell, and call local pet shop to see if they have any hamsters.

How to give a dog a pill:

1.  Wrap it in bacon.

2.  Toss it in the air.

*****************************

This is not intended to condone cruelty to animals, merely to indicate how difficult it is to get a cat to swallow anything it doesn't want to.  My husband and I used to use the variant of one of us wrapping the cat in a large towel, and the other using the cross-finger technique.  It was quite difficult, didn't always work, and is impossible now that it's just me vs. the cat from hell. 

Fortunately for me, while Dandy had to take methioform, he mistook it for a treat, and all I had to do was toss it in his food bowl.  Maybe he is more dog than cat.

I've also found that putting the pill in the center of a blog of cream cheese works, at least for small pills and hungry cats.

I dread the next time a vet tells me I have to give one of my cats regular medication.

And finally, how do vets pill cats and make it look so darned easy?

[Cat brain from Index of Webdoc Humor]

[Image of cat from Washington State University School of Veterinary Medicine site, which includes other pictures and real instructions on hwo to pill a cat, which may or may not work.]