Sorry, Wrong Address

I went to breakfast with Carter, Stephanie and Bink this morning. I was staring at my favorite breakfast sandwich when Stephanie asked the waitress for hot sauce.

"Yes, Ma'am."

After the waitress left, I asked Stephanie, "What do you think of Ma'am?"

"Ma'am?"

"Most men," I said, "don't mind Sir, and some even like it, but I don't know any woman that likes Ma'am."

"Ma'am used to bother me when I was a little younger," said Stephanie, "but it doesn't bother me too much now."

"What would you use instead?" said Carter: "Madam?"

"Same thing," said Bink, rudely, "unless you're at a cat house."

Bink believed that if the people around him weren't offended, he wasn't properly speaking his mind. I wondered which one of us invited him.

"How about just, Woman?" I asked.

Bink snickered and Stephanie politely shook her head.

"Some people use Honey, or Sweetie," said Stephanie. "It works depending on who's saying it."

"Yeah?" said Bink. "If it only works for some people, it doesn't solve the problem, does it?"

"Ms was big forty years ago," I said, "but it didn't seem to stay."

"Too political," said Bink.

"Or southern," said Stephanie.

"Yeah," said Bink. "You mix the libbies of the sixties and seventies with the Daughters of the Confederacy and you end up with something everyone's going to hate."

I focused on finishing the last of my BLT, an under-rated breakfast food that's done superbly at Mary's Gourmet Diner.

 I wondered if it would taste better without Bink beside me. "You'd think we'd be able to find a word that women like."

"How about Madame?" asked Carter, pronouncing it like the French do?

"I don't know," said Bink. "Americans trying to sound French are like dogs walking on their hind legs. They can do it for a few steps, but they can't do it all the time, and they're just asking people to laugh at them."

"I don't know," said Carter, who seemed to be as annoyed with Bink as I was.

"Yeah," I said. "How about concierge and rendezvous?"

"There's no English word for concierge or rendezvous," said Bink, "and no Frenchman would say we pronounce them properly."

"Alright, Mister Wise Guy," I said. "Why don't you come up with a word to replace Ma'am that women would like?"

"That's easy," said Bink.

"Easy!?!"

"Yeah, Goddess."

Stephanie nodded her head. "Goddess."

I gotta stop having breakfast with Bink.

Speaking of breakfast, this song has been in my head all week.  Make it stop!

(Insert Clever Pun Title Here)

A few weeks ago I planned to do another pun pictoral and I had this terrible title (which to punsters is a good thing.) Of course I can't remember it.

So here are some puns that my misnamed friends have been posting on FB.

There are animal-based puns

 Slaughtering them to near extinction wasn't enough

It took me a while to get this one

Dogs accept puns as part of the price they pay for kibble

Wildlife isn't so forgiving

And there are human based puns

If this infant is making puns now - how much evil will she do later?

That's how this guy got started.

I always thought these guys belonged together

Can it, Wanna-be.

Then there are food based puns

Why Atlantis will never win a land war

 This might be the oldest pun in the English language

 Not sure if it's a pun, but I want to see someone order Chocolate on a pine cone

Alright - this one actually made me chuckle

And the inanimate puns

 For all you English majors on break at Burger King

 Notice that the landscape requires more real estate?

 This should scotch those ET rumors

I always wondered why crafts in school made me feel...

Here's one my friend Cral laid on us at a restaurant last week (thankfully we were finished eating.)

At the table was a guy from IBM. He told us that working conditions were getting crappy. Cral said, "it makes sense. The company's name is I... BM."

Okay - I might as well embarass myself by including a couple of my own.

A woman walks into a music store and asks the clerk, "I want to learn to play the harp, do you give harp lessons here?"

"Not usually," says the clerk, "but maybe I can pull a few strings."

Here's one for the scientifically minded.

As the light police said to Beam. "If you stay on this bent, it's off to prism you will go."

But here's the best one posted by a friend on FB - I think it was SB.

Get it?

He wrote above it - "Sorry for the cheesy pick-up line."

I chose this obligatory pun vid because it was the shortest.  (You think I'm going to preview 8 minute pun videos?)

Horatio

Horatio is my big brother. He was nearly man-sized by the time I turned four, so sometimes it felt like there were three adults in my family.

He was also smarter than me. When we played with army men, all of his guys had super weapons and flying packs. They looked just like my guys, but Horatio insisted that his were different. I held up one of my guys that looked the same as the guy Horatio had just flown from under the bed to a sniper position on his desk.

"Can this guy fly too?" I asked.

He compared the two identical army men, shook his head and handed mine back to me.

"No," he said, "your guy has a regular gun and can't fly."

So it was Horatio that taught me about lying, a lesson I've been grateful for ever since.

Of course not all his lies were intentional. One day before I was born he looked up at the dull February sky, and then across a blinding patch of icy snow and told our sister with great authority, "The only light in winter is the snow."

But I always believed him. When I was seven, a neighbor kid started bragging about how tough his sister, Kathy was. "Horatio could beat her up," I bragged.

"No, he couldn't," said the neighbor. "How old is your brother?"

"Fifteen!"

"Yeah, well Kathy is SIXTEEN!"

That night I asked my brother to prove how tough he was by beating up a sixteen-year-old girl. He refused, although he insisted it wasn't because he was scared. "He won't fight, but it's not because he's yellow," I told Kathy's kid brother the next day.

"Then why won't he fight?"

"I don't know, but I'm pretty sure Horatio has a good reason. I just can't figure out what it might be."

Years later, Horatio went off to Perversity University. They still wore gym uniforms back then and I stole his shirt first chance I got. I wore it constantly - so often I never found time to wash it. "Pee Yeww!" said Gilderfroom Hockinfielder as I walked into 8th grade English class.

"Yes," I said, "PU rocks!"

It also rocked because when I wore the shirt into the local package store, I could buy whatever I wanted. I'm not sure if they thought I went to Perversity University, or they just wanted me to buy my stuff and leave. Dozens of us at the Foster Brooks Middle School got our college-prep credits in binge drinking because of Horatio and his PU gym shirt.

But none of us could drink like Horatio's best friend, Tippy. Two days before Horatio got married; Tippy led a group of us out for my brother's bachelor party. The party consisted of eight hours of bar hopping. We had to go to several because I think Tippy drank each bar dry - at least of all the Budweiser. At 2 AM we ended up at Horatio's house and watched amazed as Tippy urinated on the hedge non-stop until 2:25.

"What kind of shrubs are those?" I asked my brother.

"When I planted them, they were boxwood." he said, "but now I guess they're Anheuser bushes."

Horatio is a Grandfather now and very pleased about it. His grandson is just getting the hang of walking and talking. I wonder if Horatio has already bought an army men video game so he can play with the little guy - with two identical armies...

Except that Grandpa's guys will have super weapons and flying packs.

Horatio and I are both getting more like Grandpa Simpson.  Won't this blog be great then?

Aunt Kate

Here’s another story I can’t seem to finish. Maybe that’s all there is.

Aunt Kate

by Headley Hauser

I've always adored my Aunt Kate. She was my Mom’s youngest sibling – the youngest are usually the most fun. When Mom told me that she couldn’t drive me down to Stephenson College, I asked her if Aunt Kate could.

Mom hesitated and I pretended that I didn’t know why.

Stephenson was a Christian school – my parents insisted. Both my folks and the school were stuck in the nineteen-fifties – or maybe it was the eighteen-fifties – I’ve never been that good in history.

Aunt Kate drove us up to the brick arch at the entrance and two upperclassmen girls stopped us. They motioned for us to roll down the window.

“Are you a new student?” asked the blonde.

“Yes,” I answered tentatively.

“Welcome to Stephenson freshman orientation week!” she bubbled. She handed me a packet of papers with a map of the school on top. It wasn’t a very complicated map – Stephenson had less than a thousand students.

“May I get your name?” asked the blonde.

“Charles Manson,” I responded. The blond looked at her three page print-out and frowned.

“Brenda,” she asked the brunette, “do you have a C. Manson on your print-out?”

“No,” said the brunette who may, or may not have been named Brenda. She didn’t elaborate.

“That’s my nickname,” I said. “My legal name is Dylan Fogler.”

The blonde jumped happily. “Yes, I have you here, Dylan – or Charles. You’re in Shepherd house, third floor.” She pointed to a small rectangle on my map labeled, Shepherd House. “Dinner is in Serenity.” she pointed to another rectangle. “You’ll meet your orientation leaders there. Your mother is welcome to eat with us tonight.”

“Thank you,” said Aunt Kate, jumping in her seat in an excellent imitation of the blonde who still had not given us her name.

“Brenda,” said the blonde, holding out her hand. Brenda placed into the blonde’s hand a garish short-billed baseball cap, orange, blue, purple, and yellow, with the pink letters, SC sewn on the front.

“Here is your dink,” said the blonde.

“My what?”

“Your dink.”

“No,” said Aunt Kate, “I haven’t seen it since he was potty-trained, but I’m pretty certain that’s not his dink.”

The brunette smirked. The blonde looked puzzled.

“Where I come from,” I explained, “a dink is a part of the male anatomy.”

“And not part of the female,” Aunt Kate elaborated.

I handed the hat back to the blonde. “I’ll pass.”

“Oh, no – you can’t!” exclaimed the blonde. “All the freshmen wear them for the first week.”

“All the female freshmen must wear a dink their first week?” my Aunt asked.

“Yes,” said the blonde.

“Kinky school.”

“No!” said the blonde, blushing. “I mean this kind of dink – not… the other kind.”

“I think,” said Aunt Kate, “You should let Charlie Manson be exempt from wearing a second dink. You wouldn’t want an incident.”

“What?” sputtered the blonde.

“Mom,” I said to Aunt Kate. “You know I promised not to do anything like that here.”

“But last time you weren’t provoked nearly so badly – funny hats?”

“I was never convicted!”

“That’s true, Dear. Your Uncle Carl is an excellent attorney. And of course all the witnesses were unable to testify.”

I turned to the blonde and watched as a fly flew into her open mouth. “I’ll pass on the second dink.”

“It’s for the best, blonde co-ed without a name,” said Aunt Kate. “His Uncle Carl is in the Bahamas right now avoiding extradition.”

Shepherd House might just as well be called Generic House. The walls were beige cinder block, and all the furniture was made of the same bland wood you see in every dormitory. Except for the lack of crushed beer cans and the complementary bible with the cheery note, “Don’t forget your sword!” I might have been at State.

“Have a blessed year,” said the head resident as he poked his head in each room.

“Cheer up,” said Aunt Kate, reading my mood. “Maybe you can get time off for bad behavior.”

Here's a vid of our favorite left-handed, evangelical, animated character.

Apply Yourself!

I smelled a rat.

Of course you don't tell your mother you smell a rat when she tells you to do something. I was in sixth grade; I had an English composition due. Mom had cleared the dining room table where I wouldn't be disturbed. She'd laid out a blotter, my composition paper and a pen. She sat me down in front of that scariest of inanimate objects - the blank page, and said.

"Now just apply yourself. Get something down on paper."

She left me alone in that room, renowned for Thanksgiving dinners and birthday cakes. It was a happy room - until it became a prison.

I grabbed the pen and stared at the paper. My brother was upstairs listening to the Moody Blues. I waved the pen, directing the orchestra bits.

"No," I said. "I have to apply myself!"

I started wondering where that phrase came from. Did it have anything to do with job applications?

"No!" I said audibly. "I have to apply myself."

The chair wobbled. I got up to look at it. The little nub on the bottom of one of the legs was missing. I checked all the other chairs in the room. Each one had all its nubs. How do you lose a chair nub? Did the factory forget to put it on, or were there insects that ate chair nubs? Maybe chair nubs were actually tiny space ships that docked on the bottom of dining room chairs because they knew they wouldn't be noticed coming or going... except on Thanksgiving or birthdays.

"What are you doing?"

"Huh?"

Mom stood there holding a glass of Hi C, a drink I couldn't stand, but it was what I was supposed to like, so I drank it.

"Why are you looking under the table?"

I considered answering, but I didn't think that alien chair nubs was going to sound like I was working on my school essay.

"Let's see what you have," said Mom. She stepped over to my paper. "Headley! You haven't even started!"

"I was thinking."

"Think on paper," said Mom. "Sit down. Don't move until you have half a page. Apply yourself!"

I sat down. Mom put the Hi C on a coaster next to me and kissed the top of my head.

And I sat there, tapping my pen on the blotter and drinking a fruit drink that tasted like plastic sweetened by salty beet juice.

My essay was supposed to be 100 words. It ended up being 78, including the title: I Really, Really, Really, Really Have Nothing To Write About, by Headley Hauser.

The teacher gave me a D. At least it didn't hurt my average.

Now I write all the time. I might write about Thanksgiving dinners and birthday cakes, conducting the Moody Blues with a ball point pen, the origins of the word, 'apply yourself,' insects that eat furniture, tiny aliens that fly around in the nubs of dining room chairs, or crappy foods that Madison Avenue convinces kids they should like.

When I get stuck, I stand up. I wander around the room. I listen to what's going on around me, and I look at stuff.

If anyone asks me what I'm doing, I tell them I'm writing.

But I never, never, never, never say that I'm applying myself.

This would have worked much better on my last post

Domestic Animals Are Not So Scary

But they can be funny too.

On Friday I did the first of two posts to clear out animal pictures from my 'borrowed from others' file. Friday's post was Wild Animals, and of course there was some contriversy. I included among my wild animals a hen, a chick and some other beast they domesticate in South America, South Asia, or South Alabama.

Yes, chickens are farm animals, and I guess the strange looking southern fella is too, but to the best of my knowledge, chickens are rarely fond of humans. Chickens stick around for the food, not the company. Dogs, cats, horses, and stuffed animals usually have an attachment to their people. But the terms Wild and Domestic are more easily understood than Misanthropic and Philanthropic so I used them.

This blog is called, Just Plain Stupid, you know. Roll with it!

Let's start with Dogs.

Dogs are loving and sharing

.Always happy to play along

They're motivated

Willing to make sacrifices

And Never ask for anything in return

Cats

Cats are patient

Long-suffering even

Sometimes really long-suffering

But mostly they are cute

But they'd never use that against you

But sometimes it's their best defense.

Equines

Equines don't judge

Even when cows laugh at them

They just want to be cared for

How can we get that guy's stall?

You want more equines?  Here's a video.