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Things that make you laugh...

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My dad cracked me up yesterday.

His phone, a basic phone only model, was on silent and he couldn't work out how to get it off silent. So I got him to hand it to me and I sorted it out for him. While I am doing it he calmly announces that he thinks he would like an iphone.

My response: Dad, tell you what, learn how to drive your phone and your kindle and we will see. Till then, no!
 
So I’m reading about Thomas Lake Harris, a 19th century medium. TLH was in contact with angels. He in fact married an angel named Lily, who lived in Lilistan, his term for Heavan. He taught that everyone is bisexual, including angels and God. But what got my attention was Arthur Doyle’s attention to him. Doyle, for some reason, liked Harris’ mediocre poetry, but not Harris’ belief that the spiritualism movement was born of Satanism.
Doyle couldn’t decide if Harris was a “megalomaniac ranter endowed with considerable worldly cunning, or one who really had a breath of the divine afflatus.”
I thought Doyle was making a joke, there, but ‘afflatus’ refers to divine revelation, or a divinely inspired creative impulse. Not to be confused with flatus, or gas in the intestinal tract. And here I thought Doyle was being clever...
 
I was on playground duty today with 6 year olds and this kid comes up to most distressed because 'he keeps catching me!'. So I ask him if he was playing chasey or tag to which he said yes he was... so I said 'That's what he's supposed to do! Now YOU run after him till you catch him!'. He smiled, yelled 'OK!' and ran off..
 
Metaphor's 'Everything's Racist' thread reminded me of a bit of culture shock. The line about appearing 'worldly' by eating ethnic foods that someone, somewhere, considers a staple.

Some time ago, one of my great-aunts took a 'trip of a lifetime' to Africa. When she came back, she had oodles of pictures of the natives. She was fond of the phrase 'in their native garb.' She was really effusive about all her trips to Market, showing pictures of how the vendors displayed their produce, and pictures of women 'in their native garb' doing the shopping for the daily meals, including the just-slaughtered chickens and the exotic vegetables.

A year or two after the trip, she mentioned an odd thing at the supermarket. Two Japanese men had taken her picture at the supermarket. She didn't consider herself especially beautiful, plus that morning she had her hair in curlers, a scarf over the top, wearing flip-flops, shorts, and a t-shirt. But as she was selecting a watermelon for the 4th of July party, they took her picture.
RIGHT as she was describing it to us, she let out a hoot of laughter. She laughed for quite a while, before she could gasp out: "The indigenous woman, in her native garb, selects an exotic fruit for her tribal celebration..."
 
Lately I have been reading The Christian Delusion, which spends a fair amount of time picking apart the arguments of Christian theologians and Bible scholars, when I came across this gem:

Dale Allison said:
"Consistency is the hobgoblin of non-apocalyptic minds."
Click to expand...

I just about fell out of my chair.
 
A mother and father take their 6-year old son to a family nude beach...

As the boy walks along the sand, he notices that many of the women have boobs bigger

than his mother's, so he goes back to ask her why.

She tells her son, 'The bigger they are, the sillier the lady is.'

The boy, pleased with the answer, goes to play in the ocean but returns to tell his mother

that many of the men have larger things than his dad does.

She replies, 'The bigger they are, the dumber the man is'

Again satisfied with her answer, the boy goes back to the ocean to play

Shortly thereafter, the boy returns and promptly tells his mother:

'Daddy is talking to the
silliest lady on the beach, and the longer he talks, the dumber he gets.
 
A couple of years ago, we had a family vacation in Orlando and my sister brought her GPS. It was named Basil and every time we missed a turnoff, it shouted 'Recalculating.' That became something of a catchphrase for the vacation. A store we went to was closed, half the crowd shouted 'recalculating,' that sort of thing.

So, years later, last night my wife was making dinner. The recipe called for crushed basil ,but there wasn't any in the spice cabinet. Wife decided to use 'Italian Seasoning,' instead. I started laughing.
'What?' she asked, in that dangerous tone.
'You need basil?'
'Yes....?'
'And, haha, you're....recalculating!'

Nothing she threw at me penetrated the skin, but some of it did start to sting. The more she threw, the harder I laughed, the harder she threw....
 
The charitable drive here at work, United Way, reminds me of the military efforts, the Combined Federal Campaign. Someone stepped on their dick every year.

A division officer would not order us to donate to the Catholics, but he would say that the Catholic charities spent their money on the poor, not like those Baptist ministers driving their Cadillacs... So i'd turn to the Baptist minister's son next to me and ask, loudly, "Larry, does your dad drive a Cadillac?"

Or someone would talk about how Catholic charities spent the money on the big beautiful churches, not the charities like the Baptists did. And it would turn out that 50% of the division he was talking to was Catholic.

One year the CO had gone on and on about how this fund drive was our chance to 'make America great again,' without specifically identifying the forces of evil arranged against this once-great nation. In the end, there were 8 of us that donated sufficient funds that the Commanding Officer had us up on the stage for an award. He went down the line and asked us who we'd donated so heavily to.
The first guy had given straight to the local community, where it was spread around various participating charities. The CO stopped and gave a speech about how this showed the military's involvement with and support of the community.
The second guy had given everything to a child protection agency, the CO took the mike back and talked about how evil pedophiles were everywhere and even some parents shouldn't be parents, and so on.
I was third. I had given to five different charities. I started to list them. I got as far as 'The National Abortion Rights Act-' and he yanked the microphone away from me, stormed to the podium, dismissed the command and marched off.

In the stunned silence, I turned to the guy next to me. "Should I have started with the Wiccan charity?"
"No," he said. "I think you did it just about perfect."
 
I work for a government contractor. We handle some seriously classified materials from time to time, so we're subject to some extra-extra inspections on a regular basis.
A guy who inherited responsibility for some of the Seriously Classified stuff when the last guy up and died without a turnover, has been sweating the inspection.
So today he asked me if "Belize is, like, the French word for Belgium?"
"Um, no, I think the French word for Belgium is Belgium."
"Well, is Belize anywhere near Belgium? They don't have an extradition treaty."
I stared at him for a moment. "Why, Yes, Belize is the country next to Belgium. I remember how interesting it was that Europe is in alphabetical order. Why? You thinking of skipping the country? What have you done?"
"Nothing, i'm just sure I missed something or other on the inventory and this inspection'll crucify me."
"Naw, if it looks bad for you, it looks bad for the company, so just ask (Classified Supervisor for The Whole Damned Company) to help you get everything together."
"I think i'd rather be drinking espresso and eating croissants in Belize."
"Uh huh... Okay. You MIGHT want to look that up, though. See if the State Department has a list of countries that have no extradition treaty."
"But in that bank robber movie they said-"
"I'd still look it up. People run around being all diplomatic all the time. It may have changed."

I looked it up. Belize signed a treaty with us in 2000. I don't know if he knows that, yet. The subject of his internet searches was to come ask me why they spoke Spanish in Belize.

"It's on the border between France and Spain, of course." He nodded sagely and went off happily.

I suppose i'll feel guilty if he ends up as a chalk outline in a café in a seedy Basque neighborhood, but maybe not.
 
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