Category: Humor

Hell-o Spring

Spring
View of my street

Okay, Spring! Winter and I have been living together for months now; don’t think you can come along and just break us up.  I’ll always love Winter: we’re cuddling and cozy, and she’s my soulmate.  You think you’re something special, but you’re still only the third best season.  You might be better than Summer, but that ain’t sayin’ much.

It’s common knowledge that, ever since our Cro-Magnon ancestors decided to take up home decorating in the south of France, Spring has been working overtime to convince us that she is the best season on the calendar.  Crap!  I like Spring as well as the next guy, but here are a couple of little items that prove she’s wrong.

First of all, Spring is sneaky.  She tempts us with sunshine and warm weather, saying things like, “Come out and play!” and “You don’t need a jacket.”  Then, the minute we get 10 metres out the door, she hits us with rain, wind, hail — that’s big enough to hurt — and that frozen sleety stuff that can actually tear your clothes.  How many times have you gone to work on a gorgeous spring morning and come home that night, soaked through to your underwear with your shoes full of mud?  In my country, I’ve seen beautiful April days turn into debilitating snowstorms in less than hour and more than a few crops of innocent little vegetables murdered overnight by a killer frost in May.  Spring is the original Femme Fatale.

Second, Spring means work.  Yeah!  Yeah!  Yeah!  Spring’s always talking about what a wonderful time she has with love and sex and “The Birds And The Bees.”  But good luck with that.  Once things start blooming, the only al fresco activity anybody with a back garden ever gets is “Work Your Ass Off!”  And we better do it, too, or Spring will turn our homes into overgrown holiday camps for badgers, wolves and crack addicts.  So, we plant, we water, we weed, we water some more — oh, yeah, and cut the grass.  Then there’s more weeding.  Cut the grass, again.  And WTF, it’s time to repaint the fence or rebuild the garden wall.  By the time there is a moonlight evening worth sitting under, most of us are too exhausted to do anything but snore.  Spring could give lessons to Lady Macbeth.

And finally …. Wait a minute!  What’s that smell?  OMG, that’s incredible!  I didn’t know air could smell that good.  And listen to the birds!  It’s like a symphony.  And there’s daffodils!  Crocuses!  I don’t even know what those pretty little pink things are.  Fantastic!  Feel that sun!  My God, it’s great to be alive!

“Well, hi there Spring.  How ya doin?  No, Winter and I’ve decided to give each other some space.  Uh — ya think maybe you and I could hang out for a while….?”

Phone Apps We Actually Need


telephoneApple Unveils 4-inch Phone

Sweet Jesus!  If you have any mercy in your soul, please save us from yet another piece of useless electronic crap.  How many different phones do we need?  Enough is enough already!  Look, it doesn’t matter whether the iPhone SuperGalaxy S9 is two millimetres shorter than the SuperGalaxy S iPhone 17 or not.  It’s the same damn phone!  It runs the same Apps, streams the same brain-chewing videos and posts the same stupid bathroom mirror selfie to Instagram.  Newsflash!  Size doesn’t matter: it’s the same technology!  It’s time the scientific community pulled their thumbs out of their collective orifices and developed some Phone Apps that we, the people, actually need.

For example:

We need a Phone App that automatically calculates the calories in the Double Mountain Chocolate Mocha-Mocha Cake-a-Thon we just ordered for lunch.  It needs to sound an alarm, flash, buzz and in the voice of our hottest ex-girlfriend shout, “Put the fork down, you fat bastard!  No wonder I left you!” over and over again — until we leave the restaurant.

Or an App that remembers how many drinks we’ve had and, somewhere in the middle of four, automatically telephones our mother, our sister, both our grandmothers, our boss, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Alcoholics Anonymous — not necessarily in that order.

Or perhaps an App that measures the ass groove we’re binge-watching into the sofa and automatically shuts down Netflix until either the groove or our asses lose a couple of centimetres.

Or maybe an App that can analyze the guest lists of dinner and cocktail parties, calculate the exact moment we’re going to be bored out of our minds, and automatically phone the police to report a kidnapping.

And finally, the very best for last:

What about a Fitbit bracelet that not only programs our daily “Fitness Goals” but monitors our progress and, when we don’t achieve them, activates a Taser that zaps the shit out of us until we do?

These are things the world needs — not more pixels on itty bitty screens.

St. Patrick’s Day 2016

Oscar_WildeI love St. Patrick’s Day, and, in two more sleeps, we’re going to be practically bathing in everything Irish.  However, before I write another word I have to tell you I’ve got so much Irish in my gene pool that the deep end is bright green.  Half my family came from the Land of Blarney, so on St. Paddy’s Day, I’ve got a ton more right to have a howl and a dance than most people singing “Whiskey in the Jar” and sucking on the Bushmills.  And, truth be told, I’ve done my share of singing and sucking over the years.  With that in mind, here is some interesting stuff about Ireland.

The reason they call it “The Emerald Isle” is it rains in Ireland — a lot.  In any given 24 hour period — summer or winter — it will rain for 12 of them.  However, it’s a little known fact that the rainstorms in Ireland last exactly the amount of time it takes to drink a Guinness (2 Carlsbergs.)  So as the Irish go about their business, every day when it starts to rain, they nip into a pub, order a pint and wait it out.  This is why the Irish have a reputation for drinking — they’re smart enough to come in out of the rain.

James Joyce is a wonderful writer — a Nobel Prize winner.  He wrote The Dubliners, The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses — all worthy efforts.  However, in the English-speaking world James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake is the international symbol for Bullshit!  If you meet someone who has read/is reading/is thinking about reading or even owns a copy of Finnegan’s Wake, stop — don’t make eye contact, and back away slowly.  You have encountered A Pompous Ass.  The fact is Finnegan’s Wake is unreadable — anybody who tells you any different is an off-the-charts intellectual git.  And I can’t prove it, but I think the only reason Joyce wrote Finnegan’s Wake is so the world would have an easy way to recognize this brand of Academic Nincompoopery.

There are no female leprechauns.  This is yet another example of the Irish constantly getting screwed.  Simple biology aside, what other culture has an all-male mythology?  Hell, even the Smurfs got a girl — eventually.

“The Luck Of The Irish” is a total misnomer.  Think about it!  The history of Ireland is a litany of war, conquest, rebellion, oppression, famine, another rebellion — oh yeah, a little more famine — oppression again, one more rebellion, even more oppression, civil war, soul-eating poverty, a couple of economic tsunamis and yet another civil war.  Plus, on the days the Irish weren’t shooting at each other or slowly starving to death, they were leaving Ireland in a Diaspora of biblical proportion.  LUCK?  I don’t think so!  But the weird thing is even after a millennia of catastrophe and calamity, the Irish are still the friendliest people on this planet.  They’re worse than Texans!  Show up in Ireland with a smile on your face and you’ll think you landed in Celtic Disneyland.  The locals simply can’t do enough for you.

And that’s Ireland’s gift to the world.  If they can still live, love, laugh and be happy after all the crap they’ve been through, there’s hope for the rest of us.  So, on March 17th, go out and have a grand time.

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day.