Category: funny

All The Holiday Cheer

Oh the weather outside is…

Wow! Really nice. Quite sunny actually. Gotta love California.

And the fire is…

So bloody hot I’m pitting out over here. Would someone open a window?

And since there’s no place to go…

Damn tootin’, traffic out there is an obscenity. I’ll gladly stay home in my yoga pants with the hole in the leg and my battered Louisville Slugger Museum tee shirt. Sipping spiked eggnog (with a Lactaid chaser).

Let it snow, let it snow, let it…

Whoa. If by “snow” you mean cookies and if by “let it” you mean me eating, then yes. Let it cookie all over the place.

Otherwise keep those soggy flakes to yourself.

Chestnuts roasting on an open fire…

Again with the fire? I am going to have to get a fan out, this is redonkulous. And chestnuts? Ew, no. I saw a package of those things at Trader Joe’s. They look like something I want no part of.

More cookies please.

Jack Frost nipping at your nose…

That is assault and battery. Back off Jack.

Yuletide carols being sung by a choir…

Ok, that might not be so bad. Can I watch them streaming on my iPad so I can pause when I need to head to the little girl’s room after all that nog?

And folks dressed up like Eskimos…

Lord, I hate wearing a coat. Thank goodness I live somewhere that is mostly warm.

Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way…

Now you look here…Mommy has had a little too much spiked eggnog and she’s in no mood for your shenanigans. You shake those gall damn bells one more time and I’m going to shove them so far up your [censored] the light from Rudolf’s nose won’t be bright enough to help you find them.

Got it?

Come, they call him pah rumpa pum pum…

You too drummer boy.

Go tell it on the mountain…

Yes. Go. Quickly. Mountain. Far, far away. Move it!

Hark! The herald angels sing…

Did you ever wonder who this Harold Angel guy is and why we sing about him every year? That’s a good gig. You think he gets residuals?

Wait I’m out of eggnog.

Now I have some place to go. Good thing the store is just across the street. Food stained yoga pants and flip flops are acceptable outside attire, right?

You all just be a good little silent night until I back. Keep your joy to the world to your own selves.

And someone get that damn partridge down from the pear tree. He’s scared up there.






Image found all over the place on the net. This one found here.




What I Don’t Have

On Sunday, driving home from a late breakfast with a dear friend where we had talked at length about a lot of deep and powerful topics, I flicked on the radio in my car to find distraction. Something a little more cheery.

The last time I had been in the car was Friday night as I drove home from work, and I had listed to NPR. So when I turned on the radio on Sunday, what I found waiting for me was the unmistakable voice of Garrison Keillor and his show “A Prairie Home Companion“.

Oh lord, really? That show gives me the hives. To be honest, NPR kind of does too. I do like All Things Considered on an evening commute, though.

That said, the sonorous voice of Mr. Keillor managed to lure me in and I listened to him tell a long, drawn out story (can he tell any other kind?) the point of which is that a penny given by a poor man has more value than a dollar given by a rich man because the penny means so much more. The poor man is giving what he doesn’t have.

Which then lead to a life lesson of giving what you don’t have to the world.

A short Google search led me to discover this is all a riff on a Wayne Dyer speech, which lead me to break out in even more hives. Lots and lots of itchy hives.

So for as much as I wanted to forget this little parable, somehow I have not been able to.

This idea of digging deep and giving what you don’t have, not just in terms of money, but of yourself, has somehow found a home inside of me.

Today as I contemplated the blank page and watched the cursor blink at me, awaiting my command, I went inside my head and asked what I wanted to write about. What am I feeling? What’s on my mind?

What’s on my mind are very dark, angry thoughts. I thought of writing about these dark blotches on my psyche, spewing my venom out onto the page, which, truly, can be very uplifting and releasing.

But is that good fodder to publish to the world on a blog page?

Maybe not.

That’s when the phrase came to me again. Give what you don’t have.

What I don’t have right now is peace, joy, happiness, calm and ease within my own skin.

How possibly can I give what I really don’t have? What about the old phrase “you can’t feed someone from an empty vessel”?

Hmph. Determined to see this through, I set out to write a blog post giving cheer and optimism to the world because both are in rather short supply for me right now.

Um. Yeah.

Where to start?

Google, of course.

And so here’s what I found. I share it because it made me smile. Gave me a little hope. Brought the light back on in my eyes, if only for a moment.

Now I give that to you.

The gift of optimism:








Image from Babble.com



There’s No Curiosity About It

To end the week, I bring you something that was posted on Facebook several days ago, but was so damn brilliant that I keep going back to it for a laugh.

I think you gotta be a New Mexican to really appreciate it. Mars ain’t got nuthin’ we haven’t already seen flying by at the family picnic.






To read more from the brilliant Mr. Sharp, check out his regular contributions to Desert Exposure under the pen name Henry Lightcap.



Screen shot used with permission and gratitude. Image from NASA.



And That’s All She Had to Say About That

The scene: Tuesday evening in Opelika, Alabama at a delicious little restaurant called the Warehouse Bistro.

The people: Several of my coworkers, a large group of folks from the supplier we were visiting, and me.

The situation: We’d had a day long business meeting. It had been a full marathon session that was mostly good and occasionally heated. We ended the work day on a good note and headed off for drinks and good eats. We’d all started with a few mixed drinks, then beers and wine bottles were ordered, and delicious food was served. Near the end of the night as the servers cleared dessert plates the whole group was feeling quite convivial, there was a lot of good natured ribbing going back and forth.

I got a fair bit of grief for being from California. Things like “you buncha wine sniffing weirdos” and “You damn Californians!” I’m used to it, I get it back home in New Mexico too, so I know how to hold my own.

At the table were three guys who had driven over to Alabama from Daytona, Florida. It’s about a seven hour drive and they had seen the entire span of Georgia along the way. This one ol’ boy from Florida was the one leading the charge on giving people grief. He was dishing it out pretty hard to everyone at the table. Didn’t matter who you were or where you were from, you were gonna get your share. Even the guy from Australia.

So at one point he was talking about the drive over and saying, “geez, what is it with Georgia? All along the road all we saw were adult shops and fireworks stands. I mean all along I-10 that’s all there was. I couldn’t find a damn McDonalds but I could find all that crazy stuff. There’s gotta be something wrong with Georgia.”

Then he got an evil look in his eye.

He turned to the sweetest, quietest girl in the room who was sitting at the end of the table.

“Hey Cathy*, you’re from Georgia. What’s up with that? I mean, I thought this was the Bible Belt!”

She paused, took a sip of sweet tea, then said, very clearly so all could hear….”That’s because here in Georgia, we’re so good, when we’re done having a little fun we don’t smoke a cigarette, we light off a Roman candle.”

The room was quiet for one, two three beats….then came thunderous applause and laughter.

In the vernacular of our times, that ol’ boy from Florida just got served. In the most quiet, gentle and polite Southern way.

Loved it!






Image found at AnimalCapshunz.com


* Not her real name



Important Distinctions

My British education continues. This time, the lesson arrived over what my coworkers call “a curry and a pint.”

At a local Indian restaurant, I tucked into some buttery Tikka Masala and we discussed the day’s events.

I’ve been watching a lot of morning television, particularly the news shows, and so I had a lot of questions.

One question burned uppermost in my mind.

Thus:

“Is the Mayor of London insane? Because I’ve been seeing various video clips on the news and he seems…well…batshit crazy.”

“Boris Johnson, you mean? What leads you to that conclusion?” asked a wise coworker.

I told them of the video I’d seen that morning of Mr. Johnson, filmed just after London won the Olympic games. In the video, the honorable yet wild haired Mr. Johnson goes on at some length about how people in England used to play lawn tennis on their dining room table and it was called wiff waff. He kept saying “wiff waff” and rambling along that England originated table tennis and is the center of the sporting world and so on.

The man standing behind him is doing all he can to not laugh hysterically as an elected official natters on. (You can watch the video here, or Google Boris Johnson and wiff waff)

This video was played to set the stage for the next video, a clip that had been filmed earlier that day. In this video, they showed a large set of Olympic rings being hoisted and put in place under the London Bridge. When interviewed, Mr. Johnson went off on a repetitive rant that this adornment of the well known landmark was a wakeup call to London and an invitation to the world. His hair was surprisingly calm this day considering the wind.

So that, I told my curry crew, was the basis for my question.

Here was the reply and my lesson:

“Oh, make no mistake, he’s barking mad. However, his father was a member of Parliament and he is from a very posh family. He attended some of the best schools in the country. He was an MP of a small town for a while and then made his way to Mayor of London. The people love him.”

She went on to say, “You see, the difference between bonkers and eccentric is money. Boris Johnson is merely eccentric.”

Oh I see.

I took a sip of my beer.

Then another.

I nodded thoughtfully.

“Fair enough,” was the extent of my reply.






Image found here