Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

To highlight the futitily of party politics, a retired Britisher is running for office as a Jedi Knight. His platform:

“There really is no place for the posture politics of Westminster at this very local level of government…If it is a job for council to cut grass, the question should not be whether to paint the lawnmower New Labour red, Conservative blue or Liberal Democrat gold but rather how often and how short do the people of Thornbury want their grass cut.”

(Thanks to Hetty W for the link.)

rubber duckies–and now there’s a $100 reward if you can find one.

Do you think they would give me maybe $5 for my old “Interactive Ducky animation” I made when I was learning Flash?

No, I don’t think so either. Oh well, tough duck, er, I mean luck.

The Concord NH Meet-Up for Howard Dean was awesome–for example:

1. I loved hearing people explain why they were there, many at their first meet-up. Several talked about ways the Bush team has damaged international cooperation. A lot were upset about the bad economy. One man talked about civil liberties. Another (a disgruntled Republican) talked about Bush’s big deficits. This was politics at a very local level, about 30 strangers, none of us experienced public speakers, trying to give a coherent account of what we wanted to change.
2. I met some interesting people there, including a Concord hairdresser and a graphic designer who gave me a pin she’d designed herself. The pin has a Union label and says:
   

   GIVE ‘EM HELL, HOWARD!

   I also ran into a couple of friends of friends, including my brother Mark’s fourth grade teacher. (She talked about how much fun he was in class, and how you could hear his voice even when there were 30 other kids singing the same exact tune. *)

3. Meet-Up was at the Green Martini (just across Pleasant St. Extension from local Dean for President headquarters.) I really enjoyed reading their list of drinks, including the Green Martini, and if I live to be 100 and go there every summer and try one, I will maybe eventually try them all. And they even serve breakfast (midnight to 2 a.m.)

* In 1998, a big melanoma killed my brother. If you ever have had a cancer removed, please be sure to keep going back to get regular checkups. Otherwise people who love you may end up missing you forever, and being grateful for a chance to talk about how nice it was to have you still in the world.

Woo hoo! I just got email from Joe Trippi at Dean for America It seems like just yesterday everyone I told I was working for Dean said “Who?”

Don’t forget Meetup, August 6!

xxx

Roger Rosenblatt Anything can Happen

Einstein is famous for figuring out how to space into time–but the joke was on him, because joke writers already knew how.

Scott McCloud (Understanding Comics) details a million tricks comic artists use to translate a series of still photos into a story with action, suspense, and pacing. And, for those of us with our minds in the gutter, in McCloud’s world that’s just the space between 2 panels, and just the place your mind does its best work.

Stand-up comics live or die by their timing. One of the space-time tricks of written humor is making the reader wait for a riddle’s answer. That’s because the wait, the pause, the time the reader spends trying to guess how it turns out, is as important to making the riddle funny as the quality of the joke itself.

But you know that trick–you’ve seen it a million times. And to figure it out, you don’t have to be Einstein….

Bush cabinet officials are hitting the campaign trail to praise his tax cuts. Out in Wisconsin, the tour ran into trouble–one laid-off software guy with his own Economic Reality Tour. It’s a great (and ongoing) story, so check out www.JobForJohn.com!

The back of my mind is buzzing — am I about to have an accidental conversation with Secretary John Snow in the drive-thru of a Culvers in Wausau, Wisconsin?! Is this happenning completely by luck and because the drive-thru cashier knows me on a first name basis?

“What’s your story?” Snow says.

I tell him I was laid off last week & saw that he was coming & I thought it was important to come here and let him see the reality of what’s going on in today’s economy.

“What industry were you in?”

“Most recently the software industry.”

“That’s a particularly vulnerable part of the economy.”

“Yes, well, I need a new job & it doesn’t look good.”

“Just wait,” he said. “The first tax cuts haven’t really taken effect. So just wait… the second tax cut… well, it’ won’t hit the economy for several months, but I’m sure you’ll get a job.”

“But, but… we’ve already lost over 900,000 jobs just since March first… a job at Wall-Mart just won’t support my family.”

“Just wait, I’m sure you’ll find a job.”

At that moment the car in front of me pulled ahead for their order and John stepped back from my window. The SS agents signalled for me to pull ahead.

“Just wait?!” I’ve got a $350 payment for this minivan, a morgage and two kids! Here’s a guy who drives a few hundred miles to see you, four days after he’s been laid off, and you tell him to “just wait?”

Boy I’d like to see those words on a PR banner behind Snow at the podium: Jobs and Growth: Just Wait.

Thanks to TAPPED for the link. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 486,000 jobs have disappeared since January, 44,000 of those disappeared during July.

My neighbor Mr. Jackson just brought me a battered brown paper bag full of corn from his yard.

Even the bag looked just like a bag from my childhood.

The four of us, shooed out of the kitchen into the cooling twilight, with a big lumpy bag of corn to shuck.

The corn silk, withered and brown outside the leaves, silky and pale within the tassel. (The silky part felt sooo good, you wanted to keep it and use it for something, but if you did, and if you remembered you did, when you found it again it was shriveled up and dry.)

Slapping mosquitoes, slapping each other’s mosquitoes,

The slick little beads of the corn.

The occasional corn worm, yucky but interesting. (We’d save them from the pot by hiding them under some bushes. I don’t think even then we thought they’d survive very long, but a philosophical death under a rose bush seemed better than being popped into boiling water.)

My mom added milk to corn water, which makes it foam, and makes the corn sweeter. I still do. And I still love the look and feel and smell of corn silk.

If the intellect is a skinny stick figure standing on the side of a narrow road, the subconscious is a 16-wheel semi-truck barreling down the road at 90 miles per hour. Think of the stick figure waving and signalling, “Slow down slow down,” and the truck keeps on going as if nothing were happening (nothing is happening).

Dave Winer, Davenet essay “On Beauty in Women”.

Here is a one-question quiz with no cgi:

Do you remember “your” golden paper stars on the fifth-grade bulletin board?

o Ewwww. No, you cornball elitist, I do not.
o Yes, yes, yes, I admit it, I longed to push my line of golden stars until it was double the length of Jerry Rovner’s!

I’m solidly in the yes, yes, yes category. Well, Miss Marchand’s bulletin board is gone, but online quizzes still feed my inner nerd.

I no longer answer intelligent questions like “What is the scientific name of the Loch Ness monster?”

Instead, I love quizzes that help me figure out if I’m Gryffindor or Ravenclaw–with important questions like “Do you prefer a broadsword to a longbow?” or “Who do you think is sexier, Kirk or Spock?”

Here are a few of my favorite online quizzes:

• “My Little Pony” names and names of porn stars–can you tell which is which? (I got only 2 right out of 12 answers.)
• The Simpsons’ character test by Lexi (I’m Homer, who are you?)
• The Geek Test at fuali.com (I’m only 33% Geek, but I still claim to be 99 and 44/100% nerd.)

Happy quizzing, and if you end up with more golden stars than I did–pulleeeeez don’t tell Miss Marchand!

*Nessiteras rhombopteryx

I love the once-official iconography for scenes of Mary on her deathbed. Her son stands before her in two different bodies. The grown-up son is there, and so is the baby.

After 1950, such icons (called “Dormitions”) stopped being good Catholic devotions and became heretical, because the Assumption of Mary became official Catholic dogma.  (Translation: she flew up to Heaven instead of dying.) But I digress.

My point is that we see the people we love through kaleidoscope eyes. (Good old Beatles.) That barefoot sleepy guy who just made coffee this morning is the young husband who stood up to armed guards in an Italian airport rather than let a door close between you. He’s the distinguished professor giving a learned talk in a suit you had to bug him for days to get him to buy. He is the funny funky grad student you fell in love with while watching Bobby Fischer. And he is the dirty rat who just ate the bagel I was going to eat.

And for our children, that seeing-double thing goes double. Put them into our dreams and the seeing-double goes triple. My two twenty-something daughters inhabit my dreams with at least ten years age lag. Mickey, the grad student, sometimes manages to be 14, but Mira, now almost a senior in college, hasn’t yet made it past 7. Yes, of course I respect them as adults–at least, when my eyes are open. The truth is, I kind of enjoy having the best of both worlds–grown-up daughters making their own decisions in the real world, little kids I can play with in my dreams.

When I get to my deathbed (not yet, thank you very much), I hope that like the traditional Virgin Mary I get to be surrounded by a kaleidoscope of my memories.

Thanks always to Teresa Nielsen Hayden for talking about such interesting stuff.