They say that “truth is stranger than fiction…” Well, sometimes truth is funnier than fiction too!
Category Archives: Writing Humor
In The Beginning Was The Internet…
I wish I could claim authorship of this, but I can’t. Second best would be if I could identify the author, but like so much that comes via forwarded email or social media posts, any original claims have disappeared… and, of course, I mean no disrespect of religion by posting here, I just thought it was extremely creative and pretty darn funny!
In ancient Israel, it came to pass that a trader by the name of Abraham Com did take unto himself a healthy young wife by the name of Dorothy.
And Dot Com was a comely woman, large of breast, broad of shoulder and long of leg. Indeed, she was often called Amazon Dot Com.
And she said unto Abraham, her husband, “Why dost thou travel so far from town to town with thy goods when thou canst trade without ever leaving thy tent?”
And Abraham did look at her as though she were several saddle bags short of a camel load, but simply said, “How, dear?”
And Dot replied, “I will place drums in all the towns and drums in between to send messages saying what you have for sale, and they will reply telling you who hath the best price. The sale can be made on the drums and delivery made by Uriah’s Pony Stable (UPS).”
Abraham thought long and decided he would let Dot have her way with the drums.
And the drums rang out and were an immediate success. Abraham sold all the goods he had at the top price, without ever having to move from his tent.
To prevent neighboring countries from overhearing what the drums were saying, Dot devised a system that only she and the drummers knew. It was known as Must Send Drum Over Sound (MSDOS), and she also developed a language to transmit ideas and pictures – Hebrew To The People (HTTP).
And the young men did take to Dot Com’s trading as doth the greedy horsefly take to camel dung. They were called Nomadic Ecclesiastical Rich Dominican Sybarites, or NERDS.
And lo, the land was so feverish with joy at the new riches and the deafening sound of drums that no one noticed that the real riches were going to that enterprising drum dealer, Brother William of Gates, who bought off every drum maker in the land. Indeed he did insist on drums to be made that would work only with Brother Gates’ drumheads and drumsticks.
And Dot did say, “Oh, Abraham, what we have started is being taken over by others.”
And Abraham looked out over the Bay of Ezekiel, or eBay as it came to be known…
Don’t Do It!
Chuckle Your Way To Better Grammar
As one who often deals with the writing of others I’m fond of humor as a way to avoid becoming depressed over the profound lack of good grammar in America. The discovery of a website called “The Oatmeal” has not only improved my state of mind, it also has improved my understanding of semi-colons: “The most feared punctuation on earth.” The comic is available as a poster; one that should probably be on the walls of high school classrooms around the country. (Note use of semi-colon in that sentence.)
Additonal comics/posters include an explanation of the word literally. “This comic will LITERALLY make butterflies explode out of your underpants.” (It did not; that appears to be the point.) Ditto the comic/poster containing ten words you really need to stop mispelling.
The site is not just about grammar; (another semicolon) there are comics about technology, cats, food, and animals. Some is admittedly a bit absurd. If you do click this link, lock the door and silence your phone–you will be busy for a while:
Should I be on Facebook?
I’m not a big fan of forwarded emails… I can probably count on one hand the number of emails I forward each month. And even then, I don’t just send it to everybody in my address book. What follows is one I recently received that seemed to have some merit, particularly for the “over 50” crowd.
Unfortunately, the Internet is a bit of a conundrum. On the one hand, privacy ceases to exist if your’re not careful. Oddly, the identity of original authors also seems to disappear. So we’ll attribute this to “anonymous” which is unfortunate because I bet a lot of people will adopt his or her answer to the “paper or plastic” question. Anonymous writes,
When I bought my Blackberry, I thought about the thirty-year business I ran with 1800 employees, all without a cell phone that plays music, takes videos, pictures, and communicates with Facebook and Twitter. I signed up under duress for Twitter and Facebook, so my seven kids, their spouses, 13 grandkids and 2 great-grand kids could communicate with me in the modern way. I figured I could handle something as simple as Twitter with only 140 characters of space.
That was before one of my grandkids hooked me up for Tweeter, Tweetree, Twhirl, Twitterfon, Tweetie and Twittererific Tweetdeck, Twitpix and something that sends every message to my cell phone and every other program within the texting world.
My phone was beeping every three minutes with the details of everything except the bowel movements of the entire next generation. I am not ready to live like this. I keep my cell phone in the garage in my golf bag.
The kids bought me a GPS for my last birthday because they say I get lost every now and then going over to the grocery store or library. I keep that in a box under my tool bench with the Blue Tooth [it’s red] phone I am supposed to use when I drive. I wore it once and was standing in line at Barnes and Noble talking to my wife and everyone in the nearest 50 yards was glaring at me. I had to take my hearing aid out to use it, and I got a little loud.
The GPS looked pretty smart on my dash board, but the lady inside that gadget was the most annoying, rudest person I had run into in a long time. Every 10 minutes, she would sarcastically say, “Re-calc-u-lating.” You would think that she could be nicer. It was like she could barely tolerate me. She would let go with a deep sigh and then tell me to make a U-turn at the next light. Then if I made a right turn instead… Well, it was not a good relationship.
When I get really lost now, I call my wife and Continue reading Should I be on Facebook?