Why Is It That ... ?

One of my favorite publications, the old Mad Magazine, featured great satire, wonderful sight gags, great puns, and lots of features like "Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions." Someone sent this to me, and I don't know if it was ever in Mad Magazine, but it should have been ...

Why is it that ...

When your hands are covered in grease, your nose will itch and you'll need to pee.

Whenever you drop anything, it will roll to the least accessible place possible.

The probability that you're being watched is directly proportional to the stupidity of your act.

Wrong numbers are never busy; someone always answers.

Whichever traffic lane you change to will always move slower than the one you left.

If you pick the shortest checkout line in any store, it will stop moving.

Whenever your body is fully wet, the phone will ring.

The chance of meeting someone you know increases dramatically when you are with someone you don't want to be seen with.

When you try to show that something doesn't work, it will.

The people whose seats are furthest from the aisle arrive last and will leave during the performance.

As soon as you sit down with a cup of hot coffee, your boss will want you to do something which will take until your coffee is cold.

If there are only two people in a locker room, they will have adjacent lockers.

The chance of messy food falling is directly correlated to the newness and price of the carpet beneath it.

If the clothes fit, they're ugly.

As soon as you find a product you really like, they'll stop making it.

If you don't feel well, make a doctor's appointment; by the time you get in, you'll feel better; if you don't make an appointment, you'll stay sick.

Got any more? Leave a comment.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

Poetry Sunday

The beautiful imagery of autumn and of life ...

Before Dawn in October 

by Julia Kasdorf 

The window frame catches a draft
that smells of dead leaves and wet street,
and I wrap arms around my knees,
look down on these small breasts,
so my spine forms a curve as perfect
as the rim of the moon. I want to tell
the man sleeping curled as a child beside me
that this futon is a raft. The moon
and tiny star we call sun are the parents
who at last approve of us. For once,
we haven’t borrowed more than we can return.
Stars above our cement backyard are as sharp
as those that shine far from Brooklyn,
and we are not bound for anything worse
than we can imagine, as long as we turn
on the kitchen lamp and light a flame
under the pot, as long as we sip coffee
from beautiful China-blue cups and love
the steam of the shower and thrusting
our feet into trousers. As long as we walk
down our street in sun that ignites
red leaves on the maple, we will see
faces on the subway and know we may take
our places somewhere among them.


Have a good day, and enjoy the rest of your weekend. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

Cartoon Saturday

As we continue to lurch and reel drunkenly toward November 6th ...

Hurricane Matthew continued its slow and destructive march up the East Coast of the United States; Carl Ferrer, CEO of Backpage, a website that has been accused of allowing ads for child sex trafficking, was arrested Thursday in Texas on charges which included pimping children; more than 40 Afghan security force members training in the US have deserted their training and disappeared since last year, according to US military sources; the Russian Defense Ministry threatened to shoot down US aircraft attacking forces of President Asad in Syria; and Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos received this year's Nobel Peace Prize for his attempts to broker peace between the leftist FARC militia and the Colombian government, even as Colombian voters rejected the proposed peace accord.

Although clowns have been much in the news lately (both the scary and threatening traditional ones and the scary and threatening political ones), we haven't featured cartoons about clowns since back in July. Let's correct that now ...

It probably is how they see us ...

Doctors can be such spoil-sports ...

Sometimes you just can't phone it in ...

After seeing this one, I think maybe I should revise my will ...

Clowning is not just a business for politicians ...

True. Sad, but true ...

I think I would confess ...

I wonder if he calls himself Bo-zola ...

McDonalds in Genesis? ...

The untold story of The Flood ...

We're less than a month out from the presidential election ... I hope you've had a few good laughs this morning to take your mind off the miserable campaign.

There are three more Saturdays before Halloween, and so the next three iterations of Cartoon Saturday will feature scary topics ... coming up next Saturday, October 15th, we'll have a collection of cartoons about vampires. And I promise they won't suck.

Have a good day and a great weekend. See you tomorrow for Poetry Sunday. More thoughts then.

Bilbo

The Right-Cheek Ass Clown for October, 2016

It's the first full week of October, and since it's the proper alternate Friday, it's time to announce

The Right-Cheek Ass Clown

for

October, 2016

And the award goes to

Former New York City Mayor

Rudy Giuliani

Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani was the man known as "America's Mayor" for the inspiring leadership he demonstrated in a time of great crisis during and after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. He was named Time Magazine's "Person of the Year" for 2001, largely because of this image.

Now, however, 15 years later, Mr Giuliani has shown a different and less commendable form of leadership as he shills for GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump*. Mr Giuliani has defended Mr Trump's avoidance of income taxes as "genius ... absolute genius," and claimed Trump's leadership would be better for the US economy "than a woman." He described Mr Trump’s appeal in a speech in Milwaukee for black people to abandon the Democratic Party as “the best speech that any Republican, at the least, has ever given,” and defended Mr Trump's various marital infidelities by observing that “everyone” does it**. And he claimed that “Under those eight years, before Obama came along, we didn’t have any successful radical Islamic terrorist attack in the United States” ... somehow forgetting that the events of September 11, 2001 took place not on President Obama's watch, but that of former President George W. Bush.

For his shameless, fact-challenged, hyperbolic, and history-ignoring shilling for the most unfit person ever to run for president, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani is named as our Right-Cheek Ass Clown for October, 2016.

And consider the possibility of him as Attorney General or Homeland Security Director in a Trump administration. The mind boggles.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow, when Cartoon Saturday returns.

Bilbo

* A six-time winner of this award in his own right.

** Perhaps everyone who is not married to a German redhead. Infidelity can be fatal.

It's About Time ...

... and how we calculate it at Chez Bilbo ...

I haven't found a similar chart yet for ink-on-paper books or crossword puzzles, but I'm sure they're out there ... and would apply.

Have a good day. Come back tomorrow for the announcement of October's Right-Cheek Ass Clown. More thoughts then.

Bilbo

After the Vice-Presidential Debate

Yesterday was the much-anticipated (and only) Vice Presidential candidates debate. It was moderately entertaining, but did nothing to illuminate the two candidates or help their campaigns. For what they're worth (and in this overheated political environment, not much), here are my observations ...

Democrat Tim Kaine offered more policy detail, but undermined his command of the issues with his nearly constant, impolite, and unprofessional interruptions of Mr Pence. Republican Mike Pence for his part remained calm and unflappable as he neatly dodged nearly every question and brushed Mr Kaine's attacks aside as if they were annoying gnats. Both men exhibited an annoying tendency to talk over each other, often making it impossible to understand what they were talking about ... as moderator Elaine Quijano said at one point, "Gentlemen, the people at home cannot understand either one of you."

Each man's focus was clear: for Mr Kaine, it was beating the drum of Donald Trump's tax returns; for Mr Pence, it was the "war on coal."

Mr Pence, for the most part, spoke only in the broad, black-and-white generalities that are the hallmarks of the Trump campaign. He proved himself to be a far better debater than Mr Trump, but did not clearly articulate policy positions and did not defend Mr Trump's more egregious statements ... in fact, in the fashion of the Trump campaign, he denied that most of them actually occurred. As comedian Paula Poundstone noted in tweets during the debate, "When Kaine simply quotes Trump, Pence says Kaine is slinging insults," and "Pence shakes his head when he hears Trump quotes. Have they met?"

As an adopted Virginian, I expected more of Mr Kaine than what he delivered. I think he had a great deal more to offer in terms of policy prescriptions - whether you agree with them or not - than did Mr Pence, but came across as hectoring and annoying rather than (vice) presidential.

Fact Checking. Look for yourself here, here, and here. Or at whichever politically-shaded fact-checking website you prefer.

Bottom line: I know nothing more now than I did last night. Ninety minutes of my life I'll never get back again. I can only wonder what will happen in the next Clinton-Trump "debate," coming up on Sunday. Oy.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

Send in the Clowns ... On Second Thought, Just Keep Them, Thanks

When I was a teenager back in the 1960's, my favorite musical group was Gary Lewis and the Playboys, and my favorite of their songs was "Everybody Loves a Clown." In my senior year of high school, I was awarded the class prize for "Best Sense of Humor" (a plastic outhouse with a figure inside that, when the door was opened, turned around and sprayed you). I grew up with Emmett Kelly and his beloved clown Weary Willie ...

and enjoyed clownish characters like Red Skelton's Freddie the Freeloader ...

Clowns and I go way back.

Today, though, clowns are not very well received.

Clowns are no longer figures of joy and innocent happiness, but of sinister threat. Many characters in popular media are noted for their aversion to clowns - for instance, FBI agent Seely Booth in the TV series Bones and otherwise fearless former Navy Seal-turned-NCIS-agent Sam Hanna in the series NCIS: Los Angeles. In the real world, police around the country are fielding calls about dangerous, knife-wielding clowns threatening children and attacking women. The murderous clown Pennywise was a central figure in Stephen King's novel It ...

There's even a formal designation for the fear of clowns: coulrophobia.

What's going on? When did jolly, happy clowns become evil figures?

Scholarly papers have been written and serious studies performed to answer the question. In March of this year, Francis T. McAndrew and Sara S. Koehnke published a paper titled "On the nature of creepiness" that didn't specifically address the clown issue, but which provided some insights into why clowns can be perceived as evil or threatening. There were four key takeaway in the paper:

People perceived as creepy are more likely to be male than female. Most clown figures are male - check.

Females are more likely than males to perceive sexual threat from a creepy person. This makes sense, in that females have more at stake in a sexual encounter. Would a clown be perceived as sexually creepier than, say, a politician?

Unpredictability is an important component of creepiness. Clowns derive much of their entertainment value from being unpredictable. Most of the time, this unpredictability is innocuous or funny, as when he does a pratfall or reacts in a funny way to some object or action. A clown's unpredictability is less funny when it is expressed in a way perceived as threatening ... such as a Donald Trump meltdown.

and,

Some occupations and hobbies are more strongly linked with creepiness than others. Some occupations are perceived as being inherently "strange" or "threatening." For instance, funeral directors, taxidermists, clowns - and clergy - all scored high "creepiness quotients." Politicians, interestingly enough, did not appear on the list.

Well, that's probably all true, but why are evil clowns such an issue right now?

Perhaps it's because of ...

But no matter how the election turns out, there's no need to send in the clowns, for as Judi Collins reminds us musically ...

Clowns: funny or frightening, or context dependent? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

Catching Up on the Junk

I've written several times in this space about the amazing amount of junk e-mail I receive (for instance, here and here), and how its nature has been evolving over time. But it's a subject that never seems to grow old (at least for me) ... I'm always amazed at how my e-mail address keeps getting added to some of the most weirdly inappropriate spam. Here - along with my commentary (in italics) - are a few examples of subject lines culled from my spam e-mail file over the past week (all spelling, capitalization, and punctuation are exactly as in the original):

Each year we encounter situations that simply require money - Other than eating and living indoors?

Get treatment options for overactive bladder - What a piss-poor come-on!

Release of Your Payment($5,000,000.00 - This was from "James F. Entwhistle," which is an odd name for a Nigerian prince.

You too can have sex longer than 5 minutes! Free Sample - If someone wants to send me a free sample of sex, it needs to be longer than that.

Simple Brain Fix - I'm afraid it's too late to help anyone this election season.

Give Hope to Newly Diagnosed Men - Were they diagnosed as women before?

Forget Fish Oil Forever! - I'm glad someone has finally invented a fish that doesn't squeak.

Get your eLoan here! - If I need an e, I'll just buy one from Pat Sajak on Wheel of Fortune.

This African Herb Can Increase Intimacy FAST! - I think that Nigerian prince has finally given up on the funds transfer scams.

Special offer! Over $150 value just $39.95 including 2 free beauty gifts! - Too late; that train sailed long ago.

Need help conquering addiction? - If it works with addiction to Twitter, I'll buy a case for Mr Trump.

Put an End to Premature Ejaculation - Now, let's not be hasty ...


Spam - an unlikely, yet interesting source of opportunities to shake your head in amazement. Do you have a good one from your spam trap? Leave a comment, along with your comments on it.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

Musical Sunday

One of my favorite singers is Charlie Dore, ever since I heard her hit song "Pilot of the Airwaves"* many years ago. She's had a long career, and her sound has mellowed as her lyrics have become deeper and more nuanced. This is the title cut from her latest album ...

Playing Milk Roulette with Charlie Dore is much better than playing Russian Roulette with the upcoming election. I'd write in Ms Dore, but I enjoy her music too much to do that to her.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

* I used it as the theme song for the radio program I used to host on WEBR.

Cartoon Saturday

Welcome to October ...

Both houses of Congress actually agreed to do something this week - override President Obama's veto of the law which permits the families of persons killed on 9/11 to sue the government of Saudi Arabia, from where most of the 9/11 hijackers came ... then realized it was a stupid move and blamed President Obama for it; Donald Trump burnished his presidential stature by telling the New York Times in an interview that "(Hillary Clinton)'s nasty, but I can be nastier than she ever can be;" Israeli elder statesman Shimon Peres, one of the last surviving members of the country's founding generation, passed away after suffering a massive stroke; a baby boy born in Mexico earlier this year from a controversial method of conception has three parents - two mothers and a father; and in Colombia, the government and the notorious Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia - FARC - signed a treaty to end more than 50 years of savage fighting in which more than 200,000 people were killed and millions more displaced.

Because stupid people in this country are predicting civil war if their preferred candidate* doesn't win the election, we need to take a deep breath and have an occasional good laugh. Cartoon Saturday is here to do its part, and this week, let's take a look at a somewhat unusual topic - memory foam mattresses ...

They don't necessarily make bedrolls that are easy to carry, but ...

Never forgetting that one ... uh ... nightstand ...

It might be difficult to get the right linens ...

I think I'll go for the upgraded model ...

I can see where it might be a problem ...

Busted! ...

Can you subpoena a mattress? If so, a lot of people are probably screwed** ...

Different models for different customers ...

I can relate to this one ...

And then there's the budget version ...

And that's it for your first Cartoon Saturday of October. We're just over a month away from the election, and I'll be working hard to keep you laughing as you get ready to cast your vote. You are registered to vote, aren't you? If not, shame on you ... you have no right to complain about the next four years.

After a few days of much-needed and often torrential rain, it looks as if we're in for a cool and damp weekend here in NoVa ... the "cool" part is much nicer for my daily power walks than the miserable heat and humidity of the past few months, I can tell you. And it's time to start getting in the Halloween mood and enjoying being frightened by ghosts and goblins, vampires and mummies instead of Donald Trump. Reality can be very scary.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow with the return of Musical Sunday. See you then.

Bilbo

* That would be Donald Trump, who has said that the only way he can lose the election is if it's stolen from him. And he's got a lot of people who believe his fantasy.

** In more ways than one.