Category Archives: satire

August 8, 2018 · 8:37 pm

Computerrific Discombobbula

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Technology is supposed to be your friend.   But the last few days have proved repeatedly that computers are definitely not Mickey’s friends.  They don’t seem to like him even a little bit.

The problem seems to stem from making the mistake of taking my beloved old laptop to Iowa.  My daughter was the only family member who could go along on the vacation to see Grampa and Gramma.  And her laptop now consists of a broken laptop body with no keyboard linked to a wifi-linkable keyboard and wifi-linkable used-television monitor.  That computer was not exactly in a portable condition.  I suggested she could replace the sticky-used-chewing-gum connections when she got to Iowa, but she wouldn’t risk it.

So the decision was made to take both my old laptop with the barely living battery and my backup cheap Walmart laptop for her to use.  We made it to Iowa with my beloved old laptop still able to boot up on the barely living battery.  I had tried to replace the battery by purchasing a new one directly from HP online.  But it was delayed enough that we couldn’t get it before leaving.  Still, the car trip didn’t completely kill the dying battery I had.  So I used it to save and edit pictures from the Wright County Fair and write my daily posts while visiting in Iowa.  A successful trip by internet-addicted idiots according to the uninformed standards I was apparently judging it by.

But on returning home to Texas, disaster struck totally by laptop.

First of all, the dying battery expired as soon as I tried to fire up Old Beloved on our return home.  And then I learned that the battery I had bought to revive it was an out-of-stock discontinued item at the HP factory.  My order had been canceled.  They gave me a line on a company that provided discontinued parts, but I did not have the money to swing that at the end of the month.  So that went on hold.

My backup laptop had now become my new Old Beloved.  But for the life of me, I couldn’t remember any of my old passwords for practically everything on the internet.  So, I spent a week recovering online accounts on my new Old Beloved.  That was hectic and un-swell.  But I reached a point where most of my August bills were paid or scheduled to be paid, and I was settling into my old routine again when I discovered the terrible mistake I had made.  My daughter had keyed everything on the new Old Beloved to her Google account.  I had been saving all my new passwords to her account rather than my own.  Oh, beehoofadoo!  Whoever would’ve thought that such world-rattling consequences could befall me because of such an innocent mistake?  There was a point at which I had no way back into my email account because it was no longer tied to my cell phone or current computer, and there were no means for recovering it, not even by using voodoo.  Then I happened to remember an account I had set up solely to get back into Pinterest in 2016.  I was able to log back into that and use it to get recovery codes for everything that either I or my daughter had destroyed or deleted because of the Google mix-up.

Last night my beloved daughter wanted the old password for our Hulu account to put it on her Frankencomputer, and after all I have been through in my own personal cyberwar, I nearly lost it.  Fear not.  My daughter still lives with her eardrums intact.  And no damage remains from the top of my head blowing off that couldn’t be fixed with duck tape and super glue.

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Filed under angry rant, feeling sorry for myself, goofy thoughts, humor, Paffooney, satire

August 1, 2018 · 3:58 pm

A Poem Written on an Envelope

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Yes, I actually did it.  I woke up with a poem-thought in my stupid old head.  I frantically searched for a pen and something to write on.  I found an envelope with a blank backside.  And I committed an act of spontaneous bad poetry.

Here is a readable copy of the insidious verse;

Bad poem # 347

 

So after I had created this awful, spontaneous, and possibly evil bit of poetry, I began to seriously wonder what the purpose of this particular unfortunate act of creativity really was.  Could it be used for anything constructive?  Anything at all?

And then I had a thought…

But that was actually not a thought but a sudden need to pass gas.

And then I had another thought.  And even though the second one was authentically a real thought created in my allegedly real brain, it was not quite as useful and stress-relieving as the first.

“I could use this piece of poetic  abominationhood to rob a bank,” I thought stupidly.  “If I walk into a bank lobby and read this poem aloud to everyone, then they will all become suddenly violently ill, and I could clean out the tellers’ cash drawers while they were violently wretching and projectile vomiting.”

But then I had another, far more useful thought, when I realized that reading it aloud might make me ill also, rendering me susceptible to wretching and projectile vomiting myself, and rendering me completely unable to nefariously profit from my bad poetry.

(**Note** Please don’t try reading this aloud to see if it really has the above-mentioned effect on yourself.  No amount of smug I-told-you-so’s is worth the risk of not being able to prove me wrong.)

So, what else could I do?  I had one more spurious and possibly vile thought on the matter.  It is possible to interpret this awful, horrible, smelly snippet of truly bad poetry as a sort of metaphorical pornography.  I could use it to appeal to the prurient interests of geometrically-shaped people.   I am told there is money to be made in pornography if you are the right kind of person (meaning, of course, people who are definitely not me).  But nowhere on the internet could I find a country populated by people who are geometrical in nature.  Not a county, city, town, villa, shopping mall, or gas station either, for that matter.  It is as if such people don’t actually exist in real life.

Oh, well…  I managed to fill up a post with words in it anyway.  That has to count for something, doesn’t it?

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Filed under humor, poetry, satire

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July 15, 2018 · 1:23 am

Impossibly Positive

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Impossibly Positive

(a poem about positive people)

Oakie Doak was a positive man,

Who smiled as much as any man can,

And said nice things to girls and boys,

And sour-faced men he often annoys.

The whole Doak family always feel fine,

At tables all made with both oak and pine.

But scammers from Nigeria

Took every dime anywhere near ya,

And the IRS did charge him double

In fines they argued were for the trouble

He caused accountants in adding for

The many dollars he had no more,

Doak told his wife, “No problem, Honey,

We still have love, and it’s only money.”

And when the people he loved had died,

He simply said, “I’ve always tried

To make the best of the time we had,

And the memories will always make me glad.”

Oakie Doak is disgustingly happy

And decidedly stupid and also sappy.

But he lives his life on a positive whim,

And, of course, I really wish I was him.

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Filed under happiness, humor, poem, poetry, satire

July 6, 2018 · 3:54 pm

In Defense of Corny Jokes

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It will probably be clear that I am writing this post because I am currently reading 1941 daily strips from Al Capp’s Li’l Abner.

But I am definitely going to talk about corny jokes, not cheesy jokes, because I grew up in Iowa, not Wisconsin.

And, yes, that is example number one.

There is a certain way of telling a joke or tall tale that is unique to the farmyard.   And it does not contain chicken poop, but rather, corn.

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Of course, as you can see by this corn-colored definition of what corny means according to Collins Online Dictionary, the word is supposed to be an insult to corniness in jokery.  That doesn’t sit well with the people of Iowa, where the tall corn grows.  We are also obvious, sentimental, and not at all original.  And we are proud of it.  Corny360_2017-06-19-17-17-44-339

To tell a corny joke right, you have to set a simple scene, and make it clear what happened, and give the audience a simple cue for when to laugh.

For instance, there was the time that Cudgel Murphy had a cat problem with his car, the 1954 Austin Hereford that he has driven since dinosaurs walked the earth.  It seems there was this time in 1988 when he kept having engine trouble.  The engine would sputter and cough and die, and when Cudgel opened it, he would find a half-eaten dead pigeon or other random bird carcass gumming up the works.  He couldn’t for the life of him figure out how dead birds were getting into his car engine.  But his grandson Danny happened to see the neighbor’s big tabby tomcat carrying a pigeon he had killed under the front of Grampy’s car, apparently enjoying a fowl meal in the dark with a nice warm engine to lay the food on.  Sure enough, when they checked the engine later, there was the half-eaten dead bird laying across one end of the fan belt.

So Cudgel set up a vigil, assigning times for himself, Danny, and his younger grandson Mike to watch for signs of that damned cat taking another bird under the hood of the Austin. With only two day’s worth of watching under their belts, Mike came running into the Murphy kitchen with the news.

“Grampy!  I seen that damned cat taking a dead bird under your car!  He’s in there right now!”

So Cudgel rushed out, turned the engine on, and stomped on the gas.

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There were some worrisome thumps and bangs under the hood, and then the cat shot out from under the front of the car spewing howls and cat curses all the way up the nearest tree.

Cudgel laughed hard and finally caught his breath to say, “How about that, Mike?  I’ll bet James Bond doesn’t have a car that can shoot angry cats out the front!”

Now, before you chastise me for enjoying cruelty to cats, I hope you will remember that Cudgel Murphy is a fictional character, and I am merely illustrating the idea behind corny jokes.  And, besides, that cat really had it coming to him.

 

 

 

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Filed under goofy thoughts, humor, Iowa, Paffooney, satire, Uncategorized, writing humor

May 10, 2018 · 4:10 pm

Mickey is 561 & 1/2 Years Old

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Notice the white beard?  No, it is not really made of yarn and paste.  It means Mickey is old.

I was born in November of 1456.  That year Vlad the Impaler (yes, the guy who inspired Dracula) killed the Prince of Wallachia  and took over his throne, ruling the part of Eastern Europe that includes Transylvania.

Halley’s Comet made an appearance that year, just as it did the year Mark Twain was born, and well before Donald Trump became President of the United States.  Before even the comet itself was named by the Astronomer Halley.  So if it was truly an omen of the end of the world, it came more than 500 years too early.  Maybe that’s why it has to keep coming back around

The Ottoman Empire tried to march into Albania and take it over, but the outnumbered forces of Skanderbeg defeated them at the Battle of Oronichea, proving that bullies don’t always win.

And codpieces were in fashion, proving that men lack any sort of fashion-sense whether it was back then or even now, more than 500 years later.

 

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But, of course, you knew all of that without me telling you.  It was an eventful year.

So Mickey is now 561 and 1/2 years old.  You’d think by that age he’d have learned not to tell lies or exaggerate things by 500.  No such luck.  But perhaps I can explain how this particular purple hoo-haw came to be.

You see it began in a classroom back when I was about 40 years of age.  That’s right, in 1496.  I was lecturing young Will Shakespeare about not putting his name on other people’s writing (which was doubly ironic, because the plagiaristic lad would not be born himself until 1564).

Young Will responded, “You are old, Schoolmaster Mickey. Shouldn’t you have retired already?”

“Just how old do you think I am?” I responded.

“I dunno, seventy or eighty maybe.”

I practically wet myself from shock.  I have long looked older than my actual years.  But I never let a chance for a good comeback with a slow burning sizzle added to it.

“Well, actually, I am 540 years old.  I have been considering retirement for quite some time.”

“Really?” He looked shocked.  So, either he really believed me, as thirteen-year-old English students readily will, or he was a much better actor than he was an original author of school essays.

And ever since that fateful day, I have always exaggerated my age to sound truly impressive.  I even went back in time and did the math, figuring out what my birthday had to have been to make what I said to the class sound true.

Now, be warned, this is a story full of lies.  But as with any work of fiction, it does bear significant relationships to the truth.  I will leave it to you to try to discern what those relationships are.

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Filed under autobiography, conspiracy theory, goofiness, humor, lying, old art, satire, surrealism, telling lies

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March 30, 2018 · 3:18 pm

The Secret Meaning of “Donuts”

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I am diabetic. I am not supposed to have donuts for breakfast any more.  Hence the obsession with donuts.  I am only guessing here, but I think it may have something to do with the fact that the very name of donuts tells you what to do.

“What?!” you say.  “What goofiness are you talking about now, Mickey?”

Well, I’ll tell you.  I had a donut for breakfast this morning… with nuts.

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The name “donuts” is literally a command.  It tells you to “Do nuts”.  So I had nuts with my donut this morning.  Peanuts to be precise.  Of course that’s what is wrong with the whole scenario.  It doesn’t mean “peanuts”.  It is commanding you to do something nutty.  Maybe more like eating a donut when you have diabetes.  No matter how good that particular donut tastes when you eat it, an hour later you are going to suffer.

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So here’s the result of my being nuts this morning.  I have come to the conclusion that the root of all evils in the modern world is “donuts”.  Especially when it is pronounced “doo nutz”.  Yes, eating a donut subjects you to the command, “Do nuts!”

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And we all know how bad Trump’s diet is.  Could he be imbibing donuts?  Horrors!  That explains Twitter, cabinet firings, tariffs for the fun of it, random protestations of “No collusion!”, and even “Covfefe”.  Although Betsy DeVos as Education Secretary is an evil beyond even the power of donuts.

And how did Trump even get elected?  Do people in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan glory in eating donuts before voting?  How about disgruntled Bernie Bros?  And one also suspects that middle-aged white women can’t resist a good donut… or an evil one either.

Could it be that I am down on donuts because I ate one and now I am writing this with a pounding high-blood-sugar headache?  Well, yes.  Eating one inspired this post.  It was a chocolate donut with green, mint-flavored frosting.  And it was evil.  It is taking out its evil revenge on the blood vessels in my brain.

So, I implore you if you are reading this… no, I’m not going to tell you not to “Do nuts”… I am going to tell you, “Please, for the love of God, keep donuts away from me!  Eat them yourself if you have to.  But be warned!  They have a secret meaning.”

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March 28, 2018 · 3:34 pm

How Computers Actually Work

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This is how computers actually work.  I swear that it is true.  I know, I know… I have on occasion stretched the truth just a bit… like down the block and around the corner where I tied it around a lamp post.  But in my defense, I write fiction.  This is not fiction.  This is a narrative of actual experiences that I managed to live through and learn from.

You see, as I was working on my writing, I underwent a plethora of computer malfunctions that made me really, really mad.  I took my rubber stress ball and threw it at the far wall.  It bounced back directly into my left temple, making me see stars, and then, apparently, summoning a genii.  He was standing there grinning at me.

“How can I be of service, master?” he said with magical sparkles in his white teeth.

“Oh, I just wish I could see inside the computer to know why it does these terrible things to me every time I press a key.”

“Your wish is my command, master.”  He poofed me in a pink and blue cloud of genii magic, and suddenly I was tiny and digital, able to walk inside my computer and take a look.”

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“What makes you the most mad, master?” the genii, whose name I learned was Computus, asked me.

“When it deletes stuff for no apparent reason…” I began.

“Ahh!  You need to see the Desert of the Deletion Dervishes.”

So he took me to a digital field of file flowers, where all the files that contained my best saved work were growing peacefully.  There were all the maniacal digital dervishes on digital horses, busy slashing the stems of my file flowers with their digital scimitars.

“Aagh!  No!” I cried.  “Why are they deleting my stuff?”

“Oh, do not worry.  They are focusing on the files you use most and deleting only those.  They are very efficient in carrying out their orders.”

“And who gives them these orders?”

“Why you do, sir.  When you give the computer orders from a drop down menu, you are rarely clicking on the order you intended to.  And “Save” is close enough to “Delete” to make our work simple.”

“And why do I keep having new windows opening up randomly where I don’t want them to?”

“Ah, the Public Pool of Pop-up Peris!  Let us go see that too!”

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So he poofed me into a pit of electrical fire filled with electrical fire beings who were busy crafting evil pop-up windows to plague me.

“So, these creatures are filling my screen with ads for hemorrhoid creams and Asian dating sites?”

“Yes, and surveys about why you love President Trump and thought Obama was terrible.”

“And why when I click on the X’s to get rid of them, do two more appear?”

“Oh that’s simple.  They purposefully make the X’s so tiny and the surrounding area so sensitive that if you don’t hit the exact center of the X precisely, then it knows you want to see two more ads chosen specifically for you by the mind-reading genii.”

“But the ads are always the opposite of what I actually want to see!”

“Well, of course they are.  Computer genii are the kind made entirely of fire.  We call them Efrits, and they are the most powerful evil jinn we have available.”

So then I awoke with a painful knot on my forehead and a new understanding of why this post was so difficult to write.   The computer treats me so evilly because that is precisely what it was designed to do.

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