If Wile E. Coyote could afford all those rockets, anvils, skates, skis and cannons from the Acme Co., why didn’t he just order dinner? What would the speed of lightning be if it didn’t zigzag? By the way, what’s the speed of dark? How did that “Keep off the grass” sign get ...
Oh, those crazy, hazy days of October silliness. Allow me to be the first to wish you a happy Mad Hatter Day! Now go do something silly. Mad Hatter Day isn’t marked on your calendar? You need a new calendar. The year is jammed full of weird, odd, unusual and otherwise quirky celebrations and commemorations not listed on normal calendars. Among them, Oct. 6 is Mad Hatter Day. In the original “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” author Lewis Carroll describes the Mad Hatter as having tucked into the headband of his hat a card that reads “In this style 10/6.” It’s the ...
When it comes to sports, I possess tons of competitive drive. But I misplaced my only ounce of athletic ability. In an elementary school football game, I was wide open for a touchdown pass. I ducked. On my junior high basketball team, I charged the lane and leaped. But I’d lost the ball somewhere around mid-court. I landed in a skittering heap of arms and legs about 20 feet out of bounds. It’s how I became a humor writer. People didn’t think anyone could be that clumsy without doing it on purpose. I resorted to finding competitions wherever I could to satisfy my ...
It’s been decades since I last ran away from home. I was 3. I wriggled through the tunnel my beagle burrowed under the backyard fence and set out to celebrate freedom with my cousins Dale and Gary. My career as a runaway thumped to an abrupt halt when my dad caught up to me on the tractor. I have no recollection of any of this, but I’m told I was paddled all the way back home. Timeouts hadn’t been invented yet. It must have worked. I never ran away again. But I’ve been tempted. The thing about running away from home when you’re in your 60s is that it’s far too ...
People pay up to $300 to calm their nerves by cuddling with a cow just like that one over — LOOK OUT! Sorry. I’ve been a bit jittery around bovines since one jumped on me. It was at our farm, and teenage me bent over the watering trough to clean out floating bits of hay — cows are ...
Among the greatest pestilences, plagues and pesky problems known to mankind — to womankind, too — is the earworm. An earworm is created when a bouncy song with lots of rhythmic repetition floats on the airwaves, gains too much altitude, freezes, and a chunk of the tune breaks off. Iced-over song snippets plummet to earth all the time. Every once in a while, a person — you, for example — accidentally steps into the path of a falling frosted flake of a melody, and it whaps your ear. That frozen snippet gets up, dusts itself off, then slithers down the ear canal and wriggles ...
