Tag: humour

St. Andrew’s Day

andrew1Today is the feast day of St Andrew, the patron saint of Scotland.  It’s a day when Scotsmen (and women) all over the world …do nothing by way of celebration!  Of course, in Scotland, it’s a Bank Holiday, except the Scots, being a pragmatic people, have said the banks don’t have to close if they don’t want to and employers don’t have to give you the day off.  (“Ya’ll no waste an honest da’s work fer the likes a tha’ muck!”)  St. Andrew is also the patron saint of Greece, Romania, Russia, Prussia, the Ukraine and parts of Italy and Malta.  Busy boy, our Andrew!  He is also the brother of St. Peter the keeper of the Gates of Heaven.  My great uncles used to say that just as St. Peter greets the dead at the Pearly Gates, his brother is right there beside him, collecting the pennies.  (“Ya’ll no be needin’ tha’ where yar goin’ laddie.”) And if you don’t get that joke, you’re not a true Scotsman (or woman.)

We Scots have always been proud of our heritage, and unlike the Irish with their overblown St. Paddy’s Day (more booze and less brag, say I) keep a low profile.  It took an American Swede, Arthur L. Herman, to tell everybody that the Scots actually invented the modern world – which we did.  In that same vein, here are a list of prominent Scots and their contribution to civilization.

John Dunlop – who invented the rubber tire, although for years he spelled it with a y, as in “tyre.”

Sir Walter Scott – who invented chivalry with his novel Ivanhoe.  Before that, knights were just smelly old men with swords — who dressed up in tin cans.

James Dewar (not Jimmy Dewar, the bass player) – who invented the thermosandrew to keep hot things hot and cold things cold long before those interlopers the McDonalds, ever thought about it.

James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell – who invented Stockholm Syndrome when he kidnapped Mary Queen of Scots (see below) who eventually got to like the idea and married him.

Alexander Graham Bell – who invented the telephone, although wouldn’t you know it, every time a Scotsman gets something,  there’s a Englishman hiding in the bushes waiting to take it away from him.  (I’m looking at you, Elisha Gray.)

Robert Louis Stevenson –who invented adventure stories which were great for kids until the Baby Boomers came along with their stupid “Awareness” and spoiled everybody’s fun.

James Watt – who invented “spin doctors” when he didn’t actually invent the steam engine but made it look like he did.

andrew2John Knox – who invented the Puritans and religious intolerance.

Adam Smith – who invented “Every man for himself” economics.

Sean Connery – who invented the derogatory cinematic comparison.  After he played James Bond, no other actor has ever been able to measure up.

John Baird – who invented television and is currently burning in Hell.

Arthur Conan Doyle – who invented the smug know-it-all detective.

Mary Queen of Scots – who invented the stupid political leader by continually getting out-manoeuvred by Scotland’s aristocracy and Elizabeth I.

Bonnie Prince Charlie – who continued the incompetent tradition of his great-great, great grandmother by sending his Highland followers charging into Lord Cumberland’s cannons with nothing to protect them but their tartans.

Rob Roy MacGregor – who invented the heroic outlaw and did it way betterandrew3 than that flighty Englishman, Robin Hood.  Here’s proof.  Kevin Costner, who portrayed Robin Hood in the movies, was also a baseball player, a corn farmer, a postal worker and a fish: Liam Neeson, who played Rob Roy was Zeus, Aslan and Michael Collins, all gods in their respective kingdoms.  He trained Batman, Obi Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader.  He also single-handedly wiped out an international gang of kidnappers and kicked the crap out of a pack of wolves. (You do the math.)

Joseph Lister – who didn’t invent Listerine but was so psychotically clean the guy who did named it after him.

David Livingstone – who invented converting the heathen — whether they liked it or not — but is most famous for getting lost.

Alan Pinkerton – who invented the private detective which accounts for over half of America’s cultural legacy.

Robbie Burns – who invented the New Year ’s Eve party, but otherwise wrote nothing but gibberish.

James Barrie – who invented Peter Pan the prototypical “non-threatening” boy, whom fathers have wished their daughters would lust after ever since.

William McGonagall – who invented bad poetry and is still considered the worst poet ever to touch pen to paper.  Don’t believe me?  Read “The Tay Bridge Disaster.”

And finally

Billy Connolly – who invent Scottish humour and gave every Scotsman (and woman) the inherent ability to laugh at themselves.

Top Ten Jokes of 2011

There’s enough going wrong in the world this week that even we optimists are getting the Windex out to clean our rose-coloured glasses.  Just when we thought things couldn’t get any worse – they did.  People are starting to read Kafka for laughs and Cormac McCarthy is beginning to look downright light hearted.  However, rather than dwell on the obvious let’s stop for a moment, pour a beverage and relax.

Remember, August is that time of year when the local folks of Edinburgh rent their houses out for mucho dinero and bugger off to Spain; chased out of their town by the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.  For those of you who’ve never heard of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, that’s too bad because it’s the greatest mish-mash of all-things-considered in the world.  The Edinburgh Fringe is actually several coexisting arts festivals that run amok, day and night, through the streets of Edinburgh for the entire month of August.  It was started in the late 1940s by some university students, and even though it’s become internationally huge, it still maintains its undergraduate Alphagetti-for-breakfast air.

One of the biggest parts of The Fringe is comedy; some good, some bad, some awful.  And for the last few years, it has produced a Top Ten list of the funniest jokes of the Festival.  This is this year’s offering.  So, as the world continues to spin, tune out for a second and remember we’re still the funniest species on the planet.

10) DeAnne Smith: “My friend died doing what he loved … Heroin.”

9) Andrew Lawrence: “I admire these phone hackers. I think they have a lot of patience. I can’t even be bothered to check my OWN voicemails.”

8) Mark Watson: “Someone asked me recently – what would I rather give up, food or sex. Neither! I’m not falling for that one again, wife.”

7) Alan Sharp: “I was in a band which we called The Prevention, because we hoped people would say we were better than The Cure.”

6) Sarah Millican: “My mother told me you don’t have to put anything in your mouth you don’t want to. Then she made me eat broccoli, which felt like double standards.”

5) Matt Kirshen: “I was playing chess with my friend and he said, ‘Let’s make this interesting’. So we stopped playing chess.”

4) Tim Key: “Drive-Thru McDonalds was more expensive than I thought… once you’ve hired the car…”

3) Hannibal Buress: “People say ‘I’m taking it one day at a time’. You know what? So is everybody. That’s how time works.”

2) Tim Vine: “Crime in multi-storey car parks. That is wrong on so many different levels.”

And the Number One funniest joke of the 2011 Edinburgh Fringe Festival is:

1)      Nick Helm: “I needed a password eight characters long, so I picked Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.”

Okay, back to our regular programming!

Unexplained Laws of the Universe

Certain laws govern our universe: nature abhors a vacuum, two bodies can’t occupy the same space at the same time, and, of course, the most famous, Murphy’s Law: anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.  These are physical truths that simply can’t be changed by our modern science.  In other words, we have to live with them.  However, there are also a whole pile of things whose sole purpose is to frustrate us and drive us crazy.  These are the things that work the way they do, even though there’s no reason why they should.  I’m not talking about all those funny things that kids wonder about on a stoned Thursday afternoon.  Why doesn’t glue stick to the inside of the bottle?  How come they make cars that can go twice as fast as the legal limit?  Why don’t psychics ever win the lottery?  I mean real stuff that always seems to happen for no apparent reason — what I call The Laws of Consistency.

For example, there is the Law of the Line.  When you go to McDonald’s (or any other fast food place, for that matter) the menu is always above the counter, right there in front of you.  It’s big, it’s bold, it’s backlit and it’s got pictures.  It’s been there since the first McDonald’s opened in Illinois in 1955. Yet, somehow, when you’re standing there waiting, the guy in front of you acts like he’s never seen it before in his life.  Of the billions and billions served at McDonald’s in the last half century, he’s not one of them – nor are any of his friends.  It’s like they’ve all come from an Amish Colony in darkest Sumatra and this is the first time they haven’t had to grow their own food.  They’re overwhelmed with the possibility of meat and absolutely baffled by pickles.

The Law of the Line is a constant.  The same thing happens at the ATM.  The day you have 12 cents in your pocket and 30 minutes for lunch, the woman in front of you is trying to teach her four year old how to electronically renegotiate the mortgage.  Again, at the grocery store, the person ahead of you always argues about the price of beans or better still, buys two items, neither of which has the barcode.  At Starbucks, the person at the counter wants the strangest concoction known to humans — which usually involves double grinding the beans and airlifting vanilla in from the wilds of Jalisco, Mexico.  And don’t even worry about government offices or Motor Vehicles because every single person standing there has at least two DUI’s and is about to license some home-made contraption held together entirely by duct tape.  The only time the Law of the Line doesn’t work is when you’ve got a four-and-a-half-hour layover on a Sunday afternoon at the airport in Provo, Utah.  The one day there’s nothing to do and you couldn’t kill time with a shotgun.

Then, we have the Law of the Price.  The Law of the Price is insidious and constant only by virtue of its inconsistency.  It works like this.  The thing you want to buy never goes on sale.  The thing that is on sale is kinda close, but not really.  It’s the wrong colour, or the wrong height, or doesn’t quite match or doesn’t really do the thing you want it to do – but it’s cheap.  So you’re standing in the store with the thing you don’t want to buy, that’s cheap, and looking at the thing you do want to buy, which costs twice as much. Now, you’re screwed.  If you buy the thing you don’t want — on sale — you’ve spent the money, you’ve got something you don’t really want and you’re never coming back to buy the thing you really wanted in the first place.  On the other hand, if you buy the thing you really want, you’re going to spend a potful of money you don’t want to spend.  Either way, you’re not going to get the thing you want for the price you want to pay.  It just doesn’t happen that way.

Even if, by some miracle, the thing you want to buy actually does go on sale, it’s never a good sale.  The sale price is still more than you want to spend — but not by much – just enough to make you think about it.  Then, when you finally decide to bite the bullet and buy the thing you want to buy, there’s always some little extra crap you need to make it work properly — things like cables or covers or batteries, or gloves or a scarf.  These things never cost that much individually and you need them, so you buy them.  Suddenly, a relatively expensive but affordable purchase is, with tax, 200 bucks over budget, the store guy’s writing it up and you’re looking at Kraft Dinner for the next month. 

There are all kinds of other Laws of Consistency.  There’s the Law of Las Vegas: everybody wins money in Vegas but you.  There’s the Law of the Second-Hand Deal:  anything you buy second-hand breaks within three weeks – guaranteed.  The Law of the Computer Triumph: the computer you just bought yesterday is magically obsolete the minute it comes out of the box.  It goes on and on, and I don’t think I even have to mention the Law of Auto Repair.

These are consistent laws of the universe, and there’s no reason they exist; science can’t explain them, religion can’t ease their pain and no human institution can stand up against their unholy power.  They have no basis in physical reality, but we’ve all been there/done that.  So the next time you lose a filling and discover that your dentist is having a baby and her replacement looks like the villain from a Nazi movie, remember it’s not your fault; it’s just a law of the universe.