Tag Archives: humor

Mar 26 2012
43 Comments
Fiction, Humorous, Modern Life, Social Media, Two minute read

YouCave: An Unsocial Media Website

Leave. Me. Alone. -YouCave

Do you struggle with finding enough alone time? Do you secretly resent your friends for all those hours you wasted hanging out with them playing Settlers of Catan?

Have you ever fled to a beach resort, excited for uninterrupted internet usage in the lobby? Were you then dismayed to find your friends’ intrusion continued through the devilish devices of social media? Are you frustrated with how your computer has been transformed from a haven of solitude into a communal nightmare, where even your self-diagnosis for back pain at WebMD can be shared?

Your FaceFriends have the potential to know everything you’re doing online, and soon full disclosure will become mandatory, forced upon us by advertisers and facebook overlords. We will be too busy sharing our favorite brand of toothpaste to realize our white shirts have turned to yellow from body oil because we have sat in our own filth for months. This is the future we face.

Welcome to YouCave, an unsocial media website. Think of YouCave as the ultimate form of online solitude, the antidote to social media.  No YouCave profile can ever be connected. The friend requests that are made will be responded to with an automatic “Leave. Me. Alone.” accompanied by a picture of this cat. This response is simultaneously tweeted, facebooked, instagramed, and foursquared to all of the unfortunate user’s applications to keep them from making the same mistake again. They will learn to love the quiet.

You can post whatever you want to your YouCave wall, e.g. Yahoo News Articles, kitty pictures, memes, etc. because no one will ever see it, not even you. After posting something to your wall, it automatically begins sinking into the depths of the YouCave Lake. Through the use of expensive animation, you can even watch as your newly posted information slowly descends into the inky blackness, disappearing forever.

Each user is only allowed to upload one picture. All other uploaded pictures will instantly sink into the depth. This picture will sit in the middle of the screen, surrounded by dark colors and a texture that connotes a cave like environment. In addition, all YouCavers have the choice of turning on sound effects, such as the cavern water drip and an occasional furtive scurry. After being welcomed into the cave environment, most of our users simply stare at the screen, breathing in the solitude like a sweet elixir. At least, this is what I do. I have no idea about anyone else because YouCavers do not share information.

If you’re tired of your life becoming one giant show for the comment and criticism of others, join YouCave and get back the life you deserve, one of complete isolation and darkness. Enjoy.

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Mar 23 2012
38 Comments
Three minute read

Five Blogs and One Website You Must Read

VERY EXCITED!

Not too long ago a certain lady at Life in the Boomer Lane was featured on Freshly Pressed for her piping hot word cakes that flew off the griddle and were gobbled up by hungry bloggers. I, a mere blog-troller, came along and posted a comment that was just bizarre enough to lure her to my blogging den, where—wonder of wonders—she liked what she saw and said this to me (paraphrased): “By golly kid, you got some kinda spark and I’m a gonna feature you in my neck o’ the woods sometime pretty soon now.”

And I thought that was just swell. Feature me (and others) she did, and my smile beamed a little brighter that day.

Fast forward some amount of time. The trees are slightly leafier. Children have eaten after school snacks and burned holes in their clothes while playing with matches. Gas tanks have been refilled, credit cards maxed out, light bulbs replaced, and Snotting Black was—wonders of wonders—freshly pressed, my hungover mug gracing the cover of wordpress.com for the longest 3 days of my life (they keep the Friday ones up until Monday.)

Apparently people liked the tasty blog pudding I mixed up that day and customers came in by the dozen and left lots of nice comments and some lies like “Your hangover picture isn’t that bad” and “You  shouldn’t drink.”

Then I remembered the day not too long ago when a certain blogger  burned her spotlight on the rest of us. Now it’s my turn. Check out these blogs I’ve found and one website that I have to promote because I love it.

The Rumpus: If you like to read or write, you need to be exploring The Rumpus like you don’t have a day job. This website is one of the best things I have found on the internet. If you want to cry, go here. If you want to laugh, go here. If you want to listen to good music, go here. If you want good advice, go here. It’s all on The Rumpus. And sign up for emails from Stephen Elliott because they will touch your heart.

Cosmic Revolutions: A blog dedicated to exploring the fascinating world of the future. Beware. You might learn something while reading here.

A Rebel with a Cause: Come for the beautiful photography, stay for the interesting prose and the worthy cause of SAVING THE ENTIRE EARTH.

Red Herring Online: Read his essay on how the English language is a sandwich. I was impressed and you will be too. A friendly and well spoken socialist, because we’re all comrades.

Dashtodine: Finally, a unique food blog concept with great writing to boot. This dude likes to dine, and makes time to appreciate food. I’m tearing out a page of his book and using it to wipe hot dog grease off my hands after I read it. Implementation of the philosophy comes later.

Girl in the Hat: It starts out as an attractive blog layout and gravatar image, but it doesn’t stop there. Read something! You’ll like it! You don’t even have to read all of a post—just the beginning is enough to enrich your day.

And thanks to all of you who read my blog, even just once. That’s time you’ll never get back and you gave it to reading, skimming, and/or commenting on my blog. For that I am grateful.

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Mar 22 2012
27 Comments
Humorous, One minute read

How to Be Funny With Words

I have a friend. He is real and his name is Joe. He is a novelist who co-runs a website called The Write Practice. One day I was in the bathtub playing with rubber ducky and suddenly I was like “DAMN! I need to write a guest post for this blog and tell everyone how to be funny with their words.”

I put on a towel and was teleported at that instant into his living room, scaring him, his wife, and his dog as I demanded he let me guest post on his blog. There was no knife in my hands. He acquiesced.

Later that night, I, the humorist, drank alone and wrote a post with my own blood mingled with the four humors of three cats. It was a Friday.

Weeks pass, and we arrive at today. While millions of showers are being taken, my guest post “How to be Funny with Words” will bloop onto the screen of The Write Practice, startling thousands and making hundreds more cringe as they pick their noses.

Please go to The Write Practice, and for God’s sakes, write something funny for once in your life. Do it! WRITE ABOUT THE SPOOOOOOOOOONS!

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Mar 21 2012
30 Comments
Anecdotes, Egypt, Three minute read

Jam Quest

All the sweetness of sugar, with a hint of fruit

What started as a quest for 70% fruit jam ended with me hopelessly lost and asking a gas station attendant for directions to the Nile.

When I first came to Egypt, I had a peasant’s understanding of the world and was content eating jam that was merely tasty and cheap. To me, jam was just a colder and more gelatinous form of candy that happened to contain the occasional hunk of fruit. However, here in Cairo I encountered people who subscribed to a different jam-philosophy. Oddly, they believed that jam should taste like fruit, not sugar. I heard the term “fruit percentage” for the first time as they sneered at jams that consisted mostly of artificial coloring and sugar.

Because of them, I was forced to try a jam that contained 60% fruit. It was a strange experience. My taste buds, accustomed to being blasted and then numbed by the sweetness, instead found themselves underwhelmed.

I enjoyed it on an intellectual level, but my ignorance had not yet been beaten out of me and I  wanted my sugar jelly back. However, something strange had happened to me. I had been afflicted with the sugar-guilt. Now when I went to the supermarket, I secretly craved the cheap, facemeltingly sweet jams, but the sugar guilt haunted me and I purchased the sixty percent instead. I thought maybe the reason I didn’t love it as much as my friends was that there wasn’t enough fruit. Perhaps if I tried a jam with more fruit, I would see the wisdom of jam snobbery.

I had heard rumors of Mom’s jam: a 70% wonder found only at a place called Dina Farms. Months ago I had seen this store, and after spending too much time inside one day I decided to go on a jam hunt, relying only on my memory and my innate directional instinct. I set out confidently and within ten minutes found myself completely lost on the edge of what seemed to be a forest in the middle of Cairo. “Where did this come from?” I wondered.

Then I thought to myself, “The Nile. I must make towards the Nile. I will use its mother banks to as a great trail of breadcrumbs.”  I happened upon a gas station attendant and asked him where the Nile was. Confused at my apparent confusion, he asked me where I was trying to go and I said resolutely:  “I want to go towards the Nile” He pointed me in the right direction and soon I saw the glimmering waters in front of me. I was happy to be on my way home, albeit jamless.

Later on, I considered how ridiculous it was that I had just used a 4130 mile long river as a landmark to find my 2 person apartment. I imagined my reaction if a bedraggled tourist in downtown Oklahoma City asked me where the Rocky Mountains are and decided sometime’s it’s better just to leave such matters be.

P.S. Vote for Belle at Educlaytion’s March Movie Madness. She’s up against Atticus Finch, and let’s be honest here…she deserves to beat that sucker.

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Mar 20 2012
53 Comments
Fiction, Humorous, Stories

Prophecies in the Bathroom

Speak and we listen, oh wise oracle

My roommate’s loofah is an oracle.

As it sits unassumingly on the bathtub’s rim in all its rough, spongy banality, it communicates with the gods and is our mediator, though I do not presume to call it our friend.

Its strange shape– the mysterious internal chambers, the bizarre woven texture, the evenly regulated rippling of its exterior—is designed to absorb the gods’ will and disperse it throughout the bathroom as if in a fine prophetical mist. How many times have I been in the bathroom when I am visited by intense revelations: insights into my future after I return from Egypt, novel birthday gift ideas, meals I should eat later on in the day, the appropriate length to which I should cut my bangs?

Before I knew the truth, I thought these moments of brilliance were the result of my own cognitions. Now I know they came from the sponge.

The oracle is ancient. Before this apartment building, before the city of Cairo had even been conceived of in thought or deed, the oracle quietly existed. In the time of the ancient Greeks, sandaled men and women would journey on foot for days with baskets and pots on their heads just to seek the oracle’s presence, and if they were lucky, its prophecies. It was revered by all, though they feared to worship it because of the gods’ anger.

The oracle itself did not want their worship; it wanted quiet. It longed to cease answering the absurd petitions of man and meld its consciousness completely with that of the gods. Daily and nightly it was pulled out of its reverie to a brash existence, greedy humans grubbing after what was not theirs to know. Who could ever truly understand the will of the gods?

The Greeks came and went, as did countless other civilizations, the piles of rubble growing and shrinking with the ages, until Cairo came, and the sponge was once again lifted up, into our bathroom, onto the bathtub’s rim where it now sits enigmatically, an endless stream of communication flowing between it and heaven.

I now realize I misspoke. The loofah could not belong to my roommate any more than the Rocky Mountains could belong to the United States. These kinds of things are not simply owned. Indeed, because the loofah oracle did not belong to me, I assumed it was my roommate’s and she likely assumes the same.

This is the wisdom of the oracle. It quietly leads us down paths of assumption, all the while safeguarding its own peace. It does not even pay the price of having to scrub elbows and backs and instead gently perfumes the air with knowledge, leading us to greater insights.

And today is the last day it gets a free ride. As far as I’m concerned, things are about to get exfoliated up in here. Just wait until the weather gets warm enough for everyday sandal wearing—I don’t care much for prophecies but I do need something to sand down the horns that grow on my feet. Thanks oracle!

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