Category Archives: Comic silliness

Comics: The Fox and the Books

I thought I’d posted this comic when I wrote it a few years back, but I can’t seem to find it on here. Anyway, “Eat, Pray, Smurf” still makes me laugh. See this earlier comic.

‘Live like you’re already dead’: Exquisite Corpse poems, August 2016

Here are this fall’s Creative Writing classes’ poems written in the Exquisite Corpse method. See here for previous semesters’ poems.

Why even go to the extreme of doing absolutely nothing.

Pretty girls are not nice guys.

Nice guys don’t get wemen [sic].

The small dog slept quietly but the small words speak truth.

My only weapon of mass destruction hurt like a dislocated kneecap.

Cows eat grass like nothing is fun to do.

Everything I ate today was walking down the street I live on.

Aren’t you going to help, cried the helpless boy.

Do you like to read the title and wonder all the time?

Skunks — I don’t even know what they are saying.

You’re never going to be who you want to ask her to dance.

Invisible people would like to be or not be.

Go at the green, light the cigarette, and pass out next to fire.

Say absolutely nothing until a giant panda just took my hand in marriage.

Towards the end he liked that girl but he never knew why.

To me love is like the ice cream is melted the chocolate into bars.

We clapped to the music inside a penguin.

Backwards people are like books.

Milk tastes bad when warm like a fresh fart.  

Expensive dogs were cuddling aggressively.

This is my life story of how grandpa got rid of all my best friend.

My best friend came over to pick the nose of the future and past.

She gave birth quickly. She ran home.

Surprise, it’s me, the money-hungry son of a huge turkey leg.

A lot of things are yet to come and eat our babies.

Go iron pancakes.

High School Musical was disappointing me by killing Harambe.

You never really need to go through puberty.

Insane boys are not something Santa didn’t get me.

Butts are all different sizes. So are things that we all think about.

A lot of things are confusing like a donkey at the fair across town.

She told him to leave, but she is naturally pretty.

She should go die in a big hole with love and affection.

I help to build the dog that hid the dog.

Live like you’re already dead.

Peas are little green balls of fury in China.

Ear holes are where sound goes.

She dumped a big fat black book in the library’s cracked shelf of total complete shame.

The funeral pyres are very green today.

Very cute guys lie like a dog on my mother’s grave.

Sweet corn tastes like sour candy.

Your dad spent time with my life choices.

Poison her drink so she will die today and live in heaven while in the kitchen, mom makes nasty friggin’ meatloaf.

Pancakes are very soft like a baby’s foot.

My dear horse was riding a monkey swung from a tree.

The girl is lonely far away among Walmart’s towels twisted like tongues kissing in a tree slowly falling to her death.

Applies cry at apple cider festivals.

Dumb like a broken skunk.

Peacefully they agreed on stuff, like Hercules and Andromeda.

Never eat the red jellybeans shoved up hard in her no-no parts.

Do you ever want to watch your slow cat eat a dead body?

Rats like to bathe in sugar and blood.

I know how to fly a cat.

My stomach is in your abdomen.

Very very good pie is good three years old.

My knee has a baby.

Dude, Imma take advantage of having a knife.

The sun is big and round with plum sides.

Junior is your year of solace and solstice.

Fleek is my eyebrows’ jelly time.

Blue donut powder is like Heroine.

She loves to go to be or not.

Night is jealous of her best friends.

Baby aliens are insanely great to take pills with.

Baby aliens are insanely great to take pills with the bottles of the time we went to the store to the end of time.

No patatoes [sic] taste god.

You are a wonderful person that is sitting.

Mayo goes on ham sandwiches made of mayo and then a cat got told I was adopted.

Dirt doesn’t love you.

Round table knights were delusional.

Delusionally, this mouse got stuck.

Bro, I love me some people.

The pleasure of the pig ran into the dog.

The dog ate the cheese cake and lots of the boot and two children playing alone.

Bees’ knees get ACL surgeries.

‘Trump’s an asshole,’ sings Denis Leary, 2016 asshole update

Since this post of Denis Leary’s song seems popular and pertinent, I’ll add the updated, 2016 version, done by Denis Leary and James Corden:

Here’s the original:

Ogle County Cultural Achievement Parade

Oregon, Illinois, 23 June 2015, about 9:42 a.m., on Madison street, just east of Fourth Street.

Oregon, Illinois, 23 June 2015, about 9:42 a.m., on Madison street, just east of Fourth Street.

I’m not sure, but the beard may be real.

This was my view this morning as I sat inside Oregon’s McDonald’s. I took the picture because last week, I saw this same rig headed westbound on Madison with a load of mulch spilling out of some garbage cans in back of the wagon, and the dog running unleashed alongside. Today I saw either the homebound leg of a four-day outing, or an additional cross-town lawn-mower venture.

‘Dose ahr not liess’: The week in quotes

iHotel, Champaign, Ill., 14 April 2015

iHotel, Champaign, Ill., 14 April 2015

“You are [from] Illinois, right? Why would you consider anywhere else?” said a University of Illinois dean, not facetiously, at a WYSE state competition. Also, she said in her German-accented English, that we may have heard UI is one of the best engineering schools in the nation. “Dose ahr not liess,” she said, terrifyingly.

An honors student said she was once sent out of class for being rude to her teacher. “Of course I get in trouble for complaining that my class isn’t hard enough,” she said. Another honors student commented, “that’s a nerd in-school suspension.”

Earlier, she had said, “Yak, yak, yak: nerds like to yak,” before the introductions to a state-level engineering competition.

“I haven’t shaved since I was born,” said a girl in my English class, apropos of very little.

A girl who is a high school junior said she’s too busy to be “a ho.” “I’m not a ho. If I had time, I still wouldn’t be a ho,” she explained.

My wife said of our cat: “Why so bitchy-witchy, kitty?”

At the diner, Sunday morning: A 50-ish man paying his bill said to a 20-ish waitress: “Did you go to Stillman [high school]? You were a cheerleader.”

“Getting job applications with Michael,” snipped a girl wearing black shorts and a white Illinois State-logo sweatshirt into a cellphone at a local grocery store, about 4:20 p.m. Wednesday.

iHotel, Champaign, Ill., 14 April 2015. The pretension of naming an "Excellence Room."

iHotel, Champaign, Ill., 14 April 2015. The pretension of naming an “Excellence Room.”

After a sophomore asked if we could have fun in my English class Friday, I declined his offer, and he answered, “You hate fun.” “I get paid to hate fun,” I confirmed.

After a student said on Facebook that she couldn’t tell the difference between “affect” and “effect.” I responded that there is no difference between “affect” and “effect”; that’s just something we English teachers tell students in order to keep them busy with worksheets.

Kim Waitress, at the diner, Saturday, 18 April 2015

Kim Waitress, at the diner, Saturday, 18 April 2015

Lit fan license plate

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I like to mispronounce those vanity plates that try to abbreviate messages in novel ways. But this plate’s attempt at “giddyup” — maybe? — seems much closer to a shout-out to French author Andre Gide, which might not be strange in a civilized city, but isn’t likely here in rural Illinois.

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A cell phone’s selfie

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‘Beowulf at Breakfast’: A poem

This famous poem-story, written in about 850 A.D. in the Old English/Anglo-Saxon language (and translated into modern English below by Seamus Heaney), is about a Nordic warrior tribe’s battle against the monster Grendel. This poem uses a solid, stolid language – lots of one-syllable words, concrete words (rather than abstract), and consonant-prominent words often repeated within the line.  For example, in translation:

Lines 442 to 455:

If Grendel wins, it will be a gruesome day;

he will glut himself on the Geats in the war-hall,

swoop without fear on that flower of manhood

as on others before. Then my face won’t be there

to be covered in death: he will carry me away

as he goes to ground, gorged and bloodied;

he will run gloating with my raw corpse

and feed on it alone, in a cruel frenzy

fouling his moor-nest. No need then

to lament for long or lay out my body:

if the battle takes me, send back

this breast-webbing that Weland fashioned

and Hrethel gave me, to Lord Hygelac.

Fate goes ever as fate must.

The assignment I gave myself (and, later, my students) was to write in the word-style of “Beowulf,” but in an everyday (not military) situation. I wanted to use Beowulf’s forceful language but not his subject matter. Here, then, is my poem “Beowulf At Breakfast”:

Back at my house-lair, I go to food-room

and gather eat-stuffs to break my night-fast.

Steel pot clangs hard on steel stove grate.

Flames cast blue light ‘neath flat pan-side.

Still-water soon leaps with boil-chaos; a song

of water-splash and fire-sputter dances away.

Whence I hear this ear-noise, I click knob

to off and pour steam-stuff into tea cups

and pour more soak-stuff onto flat oat-grains

in clay bowl. Also, there is syrup of maple

(or black-strap molasses) and raisin of grape

and butter of cow-milk and dust of red-bark

to boost my tongue’s taste-lust for else-dry oat parts.

Two Mute Girls: TV shows better without the sound

Dateline: A few minutes ago this evening.

Am currently watching “Two Broke Girls” with my TV’s sound on mute. Am enjoying this show far more as a series of absurd mime-tableaux than I ever liked it as dialogued sitcom. My wife said she’d like to know what’s going on, but there’s no way that knowing what these clichéd characters are doing would be more fun than my guesses of what they’re doing.

“It’s worse than being naked; I’m wearing polyester,” said the tall actress. My wife has turned on the sound and now the weirdest thing is the fake laffing at the nonjoke jokes.

TV show ratings in my house tonight

I’ve never been asked to be one of those TV viewers whose preferences are magnified to represent a section of the viewing public. Well, about 30 years ago, I did watch my mom fill in the TV-watching diary she was sent (which diary was fairy easy to keep when we had no remote control and thus kept watching the same channel unless some human was motivated enough to walk across the room to change it).

But I’ve watched a heck of a lot of TV since then and I’d really like to be able to report it to somebody so I don’t have to keep remembering it all.

What follows are my family’s TV viewing for Tuesday, 10 February 2015. Programmers and advertisers, make use of this what you will.

6:00 p.m. Central Standard Time. How It’s Made rerun, Science channel. This show earned a 100/100 (rating points within my household/share of household TVs currently on that were tuned to this show).

6:30 p.m. How It’s Made rerun, Science channel. I think I stopped watching how steel wool gets made, or maybe it was after watching how the stove got put together.

6:45 to 7:00 p.m. The data gets a little hazy here, as the data storage was fallibly human.

7:00 to 7:35 p.m. On VH1, watched a rerun of Saturday Night Live from 1986 (Season 12, Episode 08), with host William Shatner. I also got out my smartphone to see if Season 12 cast member Nora Dunn was still alive and acting. According to Wikipedia, she is.

7:35 to 7:50 p.m. Got bored with 29-year-old SNL rerun, and started noticing on some news sites both that Jon Stewart had some funny comments about the Brian Williams anecdote-fiasco and also I read that Stewart announced today he’s quitting as host of  The Daily Show, and so I watched last night’s The Daily Show via on-demand feature from my cable company. (Also, my wife came home from work about this time and watched this with me, so the viewing audience for The Daily Show in my household doubled over the size of the audience watching old SNL rerun.) We fast-forwarded through commercials and stopped watching before the interview segment.

7:50 to 8:00 p.m. I think I was checking Slate.com on my smartphone during this time.

8:00 to 8:30 p.m. Watched new (I think) episode of our local FOX station’s broadcast of New Girl, where Nick Miller hosts a bar crawl and loses his shoes after throwing them at a squirrel, he thinks.

After 8:30, realized that I’m old and tired and wanted to blog more than I wanted to watch anything else on the telly.

So, here it is: raw data of a very particular, highly unrepresentative viewer’s habits.