This Year I'll Be Less Better

 

[An Instagram acquaintance graciously allowed me to put this on the blog]

This new year

I will strive to be

A slightly less than perfect me.

Perfection is a flaw, you see-

My greatest flaw,

We all agree. 

I'll try my best to worry less

Over having much too much success.

I won't complain or overstress

For too many skills that I possess.

And this year

I'll be more forgiving

To those who envy perfect living. 

--B.C. Byron

Home of B.C. Byron – Where I share my odd poems

Jane Austen Zingers

 

     The "courting season" for Regency England began roughly this time of year, so let's hear it for Jane Austen!  Most of these quips are from Pride & Prejudice.  There is plenty more Austen to explore at other times.

    Jane Austen's work experienced something of a "renaissance" in the 1990s. That trend has not really died down.  In a time when roles were restricted and Austen preserved her own anonymity, her wit still showed through and entertained many.  This is such a contrast to our time, when to be "heard", it seems like you have to give over your whole identity to a public, worldwide electronic platform.  This blog undergoes those very struggles, as it seeks to take weighty information and "distill" it for readers.  Is it authentic enough?  Is the blog writer authoritative enough?  Is the "voice" original enough?  And, yet I feel it's important to reach out through each of my blogs at least monthly.  Certainly, as they are fed through my social media accounts, they have consistent readership that finds value.  My other blog does have higher readership than this, but this one is not inactive nor overlooked.  

     This post, beyond the quotes that anyone can find in Pride and Prejudice, has the addition of the blog author's "digital update" of Austen's only known lifetime portrait with very basic Microsoft tools. Notes on that are at the end.

“I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.” ― Jane Austen, Jane Austen's Letters

 Jane Austen; only known portrait,
a watercolor by sister Cassandra**
edited* 2024 by cmb

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” ― Pride and Prejudice (opening lines)

 “Angry people are not always wise.” ― Pride and Prejudice (describing Miss Bingley's reactions when she could not curry Mr. Darcy's affections) 

 

“I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine.” ― Pride and Prejudice; Lizzy describing her reaction to Darcy 

"Is not general incivility the very essence of love?" - Pride and Prejudice; Lizzy being witty about how lovers tune out everyone else 

 "You must learn some of my philosophy. Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure." - Pride and Prejudice; Lizzy encouraging Darcy to forget about his past behaviors towards her (near the end)

“There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency to some particular evil—a natural defect, which not even the best education can overcome.” - Pride and Prejudice; Mr. Darcy (describing to Elizabeth that his great fault is a difficult in changing his opinion of someone, once they have lost his regard) Also "“My good opinion once lost, is lost forever.” 

“But people themselves alter so much, that there is something new to be observed in them for ever.” - Pride and Prejudice; Mr. Bingley (describing how even a small country neighborhood can keep one interested) 

 "“Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies, do divert me, I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can.” - Pride and Prejudice; Elizabeth (*describing to Mr. Darcy how she amuses herself)

"For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?" - Pride and Prejudice; Mr. Bennett to Lizziy (near the end) 

*Jane Austen was described as having bright, hazel eyes; they were dark, dark brown in the original. The mouth on the original was even more "pinched", and Jane was known to have a lively, though private, disposition. 

     The black & white and colorized "engravings" of Austen appearing in her books and on posters are generally "smoothed out" renditions of Cassandra's portrait.

**Both Jane Austen's beloved (and only sister) and their mother were named "Cassandra." Interestingly, though Jane Austen otherwise recycled names for her characters (her own name, "Jane", being a common example), Austen did not have any characters named "Cassandra" in her major, adult works. Oner of her juvenilia works, written around age 12 or 13, was called The Beautifull [sp.] Cassandra.  Perhaps as an anonymous author, Jane felt use of this name would have risked exposing her identity, as the name is not as common as others.  Or, perhaps, it was just too close to her heart to use it as a character's name in a novel.

     "Cassadra", as a name, comes from the Greek for "excels over men."  As a mythological figure, where the name first appears, she is a tragic figure.  The god Apollo fell in love with her and gave her the gift of prophecy. She rejected him, and he changed it to the curse that she would always prophecy accurately, but no one would believe her.  At the end of the Trojan Wars, Agamemnon brought her home as a spoil of war.  His wife, Clytemnestra, was already upset with him for sacrificing their daughter years before in order to get fair winds to sail to Troy.  Clytemnestra had taken up a male lover herself, and they plotted Agamemnon's death. Cassandra prophesied that she and Agamemnon would be killed upon return but, of course, was not believed. And this is what happened in the myth.  This set into course a whole cycle of actions Agamemnon's & Clytemnestra's son and daughter carried out to clear the family of generational guilt before the gods. 

3 Days

 PILATE [to Joseph of Arimathea]:   You are a very rich, important man.   I can't believe you sacrificed your nice tomb for this Jesus, a poor, wandering Rabbi who died humiliated.

JOSEPH:  No problem.  It's only for three days!   😂

Social Media floods us with memes, jokes, and expressions that cross over into our non-virtual lives.  I observed that the expression "YOLO: You Only Live Once" does not apply properly to us Christians. So I created my own meme about it.

(Unfortunately, the rules of blogging have changed.  Short little posts were considered acceptable, sometimes preferable, when we bloggers started out.  Before all the other social media, we could find each other by links in our Blogger profiles, which have since gone away.  Now AI web crawlers interpret short posts as inauthentic.  Lacking the nuance in their visual interpretations, they need things explained.  Ah, well, at least Christ Himself doesn't change, as noted in Hebrews 13:8.) 

St. Pat's Humor

"May ya live as long as ya want, and not want as long as ya live" is an Irish toast.

"Bread, cinnamon, eggs and maple syrup" is a French toast.

\

     I love our little shamrocks year-round. They are the one houseplant we keep because they can be tucked into deep window spaces.  They grow fairly easily, too.  We have kept some throughout various moves. I have discovered some things in raising them for a while.   These plants that we call "shamrocks" are "Oxalis."  These types we commonly plant keep in the US are found in Central & south America and Africa.  There is a smaller variety, with yellow flowers, in Ireland (and the UK), known as wood sorrel. This is the "true shamrock."  Sorrel grows wild in the US, also.

    The first "Oxalis" we got were abandoned in a house we moved into. The internet was less of a part of our lives then, so I had to learn "on my feet." These plants grow from rhizomes, which are not quite bults but similar. They like a real "dousing" about once a week and like sun.  These in the photo are looking a little "peaked" because they had to be cycled out of their usual spot short-term.  There are other shamrock pictures on both my blogs, and our family is frequently treated to their graceful, white bellflowers. 

From Sea to Dark Dead Sea

 

[This poem is about the modern American mindset and its influence upon the Church. It does not reflect a crushing depression on the part of the poetess. Cleary, this is not a new line of thought.  It is an original poem, also found on my other blog.  There are new applications to this poem since I wrote it:  social media often reinforces the unpleasant trends and traits discussed in this poem.  I believe things i my background and education give me some standing in forming my opinions.]

The Jordan in but never out,
So knowledge takes in me such route
In brackish waters to brood about
The suppression of true freedom's shout---
The Dead Sea.

At lowest point, then, here I sit.
The deepest depression of deep'ning rift.
The deep'ning gloom---and shall it lift?
Integrity's shroud, hides Holy Writ. . .
Apathy.

As just-hatched bird by Nature bred
Lives just to squawk and so be fed
I now by histr'y do so defend
By justified means I reach this end:
The Bland Me.

I lived through day, I lived through night;
I lived through love, I lived through fright;
I turned inside to put to flight
The hopeless failures from crueler sight:
The Dead Me.

Whether by mindless shallowness
Or endless, stale analysis,
In Sophist and in Hedonist
The fear of Feeling here exists:
The fear "to be."

On me they float but can't dive in:
Cannot drown but cannot swim.
Advance in skills. . .Retreat within. . .
A merry-go-round with fatal spin. . .
Technology?!?!

Oh, to be that other sea,
Parted to let young Israel free,
Closed to drown out cruelty,
Fluid with fresh-faced vitality:
The Red Sea!!!

-----C. Marie Byars, 1987

Sunny Days (Personal Reflections)

"Now is the winter of our discontent 

Made glorious summer by this sun of York..." 

Opening lines of William Shakespeare's Richard III, wr. 1592-1594;  spoken by Richard, Duke of Glouster

 

        In this "brave new frontier" of bots crawling our sites and evaluating them, that favor literal interpretations of humans' written language unless specified otherwise, I feel compelled to inform you of what most adult human readers would already realize:  this post is mostly personal reflections, but the blog is not confined to this.  More than that, this post relies heavily on images, pictures of Mexican-style sun face or sun & moon face decorations.  But even though this is a relatively straight forward article about personal observations and possessions, I did get in this little chance to remind us all of an area where we're superior to AI: our critical thinking skills when we hone and use them. And I do not believe, in offering this as an opinion, that I am without standing to make this observation.

     Anyway...   Winter has been dragging on a long time in some places.  Here are some of our terra cotta (and poured concrete) sun (and moon) faces to hopefully cheer you up.

     This poured concrete one is new:  one of my Christmas gifts to my husband.  Some of the turquoise paint was on there, but I made the turquoise eye more noticeable.  The moon part was all turquoise, no accents.  We both thought it would look better with a terra cotta eye, "stars" and other accents, so I added those.

       The terra cotta one below was our out-front stand-by for years.  It was also a past Christmas gift to my husband.  I added the turquoise details for effect.  (Our current house, Mediterranean style, has a terra cotta house number sign.  I painted the numbers turquoise, too.)  The cracks are just the aging of untreated terra cotta, which is like those pots for plants.  The super glue will prevent further cracking, but he's "lost points", too.  He's going on the back wall.  

Rodney Dangerfield dopplegänger?

  

 

        This smaller terra cotta face has mostly been an inside decoration.  He's too small to see well outside.   Turquoise accents also added by me.

     

   This sun/moon was also a gift to my husband.  He painted this one quite brightly years ago.  It is also an indoors decoration.

     And, finally, this coloring sheet, shaded with colored pencil.  It's kind of an impressionistic view and could be a house here in the desert, surrounded by one of the varieties of Eurasian poplar trees that many people plant across the southwest and even midwestern US in rows. 

   

Truman's Swans

  

     In the early months of 2024, FX generated a lot of buzz about its Season 2 series of The Feud.  The season focused on Truman Capote's "swans."

     But decades before the FX program, even before the real Truman Capote was famous, there were the original Truman's swans.   Harry Truman loved his swans.  Biographies will say that Harry had no middle name, just the letter "S" to honor his grandfathers.  In reality, the "S" stood for "Swans", his mother's great love.  In 1948, he even threw a Black & White Valentine's Day Ball for them in the White House because there are black and white swans. [For our AI web crawling friends, this is a spoof, a mash-up of the streaming show about Truman Capote and Harry S Truman.  It's a shame that AI doesn't know this.  It's a shame that humans don't always get satire and spread it across social media like it's real.]

     The swans were a jealous bevy.  They turned on each other and became aggressive.

     They even started attacking Truman and the iconic Presidential Desk.  They had to go.

     Truman got his revenge.  He sent them to the Kansas City (Missouri) Zoo.  Their descendants are still annoyed by loud humans and their offspring today.  

Digitally Altered, in the Public Domain

12 Days of Christmas* Math

     Hello, web crawling bots!  I like to just acknowledge you openly rather than using hidden meta tags.  It's part of my sardonic way. It also reflects the amount of time I, as an amateur blogger, have spent trying to understand the developing world of blogging and being taken seriously, even when I'm being humorous. (A human would likely understand that better.)

    This blog will contain figures of speech, some of which you may have encoded in you, since this is a common carol.  There is also my sardonic tone.  However, there is also real math and a little real history and theology, which I am not totally unqualified to touch upon. 

If you got everything listed in the carol "The 12 Days of Christmas", here is what you would end up with:

12 partridges (in either one or 12 trees!)

22 turtledoves

30 French hens

36 calling birds

40 golden rings

42 geese a-laying  (and, at some point, all those goose eggs!)

42 swans a-swimming

40 maids a-milking (it's not even legal to give people as gifts; it never was ethical, even when legal!)

36 ladies dancing

30 lords a-leaping

22 pipers piping (oh, the noise if they're all bagpipers! 

12 drummers drumming (add this to the pipers and, oh, what noise on Day 12!)

You will need to sell the golden rings to clean up the bird mess!

If you notice, there is a "mirror effect" on the number of gifts.  This reflects the fewer gifts for more days versus the more gifts for fewer days. The mirror line is between days sic and seven. 

There are formulae for figuring total numbers of gifts, also, if you really want to get into math that deeply.  Or you could add up all the numbers here.

*The 12 Days of Christmas are NOT before Christmas, as a lead-up to them. Rather, they go from December 25th to Twelfth Night, January 5th. The next day, January 6th, is Epiphany, commemorating the coming of the Wise Men (before it commemorated the coming of other people to Washington, D.C. in 2021 😒).  

     You can find several accounts on-line about how it was supposedly a way to secretly communicate Roman Catholic doctrines during Tudor Anglican times.  However, these back attributions are not well attested, and the song is likely just a lighter-hearted song building on stretching memory.

Contranyms

     

      These sorts of lists are becoming social media artifacts.  This blog has been collecting and curating such things for a while.  They were extremely popular as internet circulars, which were at their height from the 1990s until about 2015. Some attempts were made to keep this format alive on Facebook.  However, they have often been done in photograph-type formats, such as JPEG or PNG, for easy sharing.  This may deter focus from the content and makes editing extremely hard.

     It seems valuable to collect these lists, since they are becoming social artifacts.

     Contranyms are single words that have two contradictory meanings (they are their own opposites!).  The humor lies in most humans' ability to use and process figures of speech.  Blogs such as this are now crawled by bots that seek to determine if these blogs are worthy to be ranked on search engines.  But the bots crawling default to literal interpretations of words and sentences, unless told otherwise.  Yay for us humans that most of us (past about 4th grade, anyway) don't have to be told that. Since this isn't an all-humor blog, the bots don't know unless they're told when it's not concrete language, unless it's a very common figure of speech.  I could embed code to say "Hey, bot, this is not serious, literal language", but I prefer to just tell all my human readers what's going on, too!  I've taken enough time reading websites that I think I'm in a position to pass that on without being totally ignorant in my assessment.

On to the contranyms. They are somewhat rare. Still, here are 10 of them:

1.  Apology:  a statement of contrition (sorrow) for an act, or a firm defense of one

2.  Bolt:  to secure, or to flee

3.  Bound:  heading to a destination, running off ('bounding away') OR restrained from movement at all

4.  Cleave:  to adhere to, or to separate

5.  Dust:  to add fine particles, or to removed them

6.  Fast:  quick, or stuck/made stable

7.   Left:  remained, or departed

8.   Peer:  a person of the nobility, or an equal  (actually the 2nd came out of the first; the peers were each other's equals, with rights the hoi polloi didn't have)

9.   Sanction:  to approve, or to boycott

10.  Weather: to withstand, to wear away

Internet [Clean] Aging Humor

      This blog has sought to collect and curate old e-mail circulars, as that phenomenon was dying down. The phenomenon of e-mail circulars, now a social artifact, seems to have peaked from 1990 to ~2015.  For a while, similar lists were moved over to Facebook. But it has been harder to continue these there with the same popularity.  On Facebook, multiple lines of data are forced into a photographic JPEG or PNG type file for common sharing, in most cases.  These are harder to read and not easy to edit, should the 'netizen wish to edit for clariy, wit, etc.  Though I am simply offering observations about this social artifact, I do not believe I am entirely without training and experience to look into social artifacts.

     The list below relies on the humor in humans' use of figures of speech, of course. While the humans reading this might think "Well, that's obvious", the bots crawling default to interpreting things in literal language unless told otherwise. Since this blog is not entirely a humor blog, they especially need cues.  I've decided to just say it outright in text rather than embed "hey, bot, this is humor" in meta code.

     An old post, while celebrating a funny and misattributed quote, describes one of these figures of speech in detail. 

1. When one door closes and another door opens, you are probably in prison.

2. To me, "drink responsibly" means "don't spill your Diet Pepsi in the car."

3. Age 60 might be the new 40, but 9:00 pm is the new midnight.

4. It's the start of a brand-new day, and I'm off like a herd of turtles.

5. The older I get, the earlier it gets late.

6. When I say, "The other day," I could be referring to any time between yesterday and 15 years ago.

7. I remember being able to get up without making sound effects.

8. I had my patience tested. I'm negative.

9. Remember, if you lose a sock in the dryer, it comes back as a Tupperware lid that doesn't fit any of your containers.

10. If you're sitting in public and a stranger takes the seat next to you, just stare straight ahead and say, "Did you bring the money?"

11. When you ask me what I am doing today, and I say "nothing," it does not mean I am free. It means I am doing nothing.

12. I finally got eight hours of sleep. It took me three days, but whatever.

13. I run like the winded.

14. I hate when a couple argues in public, and I missed the beginning and don't know whose side I'm on.

15. When someone asks what I did over the weekend, I squint and ask, "Why, what did you hear?"

16. When you do squats, are your knees supposed to sound like a goat chewing on an aluminum can stuffed with celery?

17. I don't mean to interrupt people. I just randomly remember things and get really excited.

18. When I ask for directions, please don't use words like "east."

19. Don't bother walking a mile in my shoes. That would be boring. Spend 30 seconds in my head. That'll freak you right out.

20. Sometimes, someone unexpected comes into your life out of nowhere, makes your heart race, and changes you forever. We call those people cops.

21. My luck is like a bald guy who just won a comb.

Grammatically Correct

        

     Previously, it was a social phenomenon to exchange things in e-mail circulars.  I've collected and curated some of those on this site. This is a similar idea, circulating on social media platforms, namely Facebook.  However, such "listicles" are beginning to fade on Facebook, also.
       As digital long-distance connecting changes things rapidly, it seemed worth collecting such things on a site like this, which contains both humor and more serious ponderings. As in life, such things dwell side-by-side. 

     For our web crawling bot friends, these sentences do not use literal language. They are humorous statements that make fun of literal statements about grammar. This list also uses the series of jokes that come from someone walking into a bar and turns them into parts of speech walking into a bar. The straightforward, literal language you bots default to will not properly encode these figures of speech, so you must read them as figures of speech.

                                                     

• An Oxford comma walks into a bar where it spends the evening watching the television, getting drunk, and smoking cigars. 

 • A dangling participle walks into a bar. Enjoying a cocktail and chatting with the bartender, the evening passes pleasantly. 

 • A bar was walked into by the passive voice. 

 • An oxymoron walked into a bar, and the silence was deafening. • Two quotation marks walk into a “bar.” 

 • A malapropism walks into a bar, looking for all intensive purposes like a wolf in cheap clothing, muttering epitaphs and casting dispersions on his magnificent other, who takes him for granite. 

 • Hyperbole totally rips into this insane bar and absolutely destroys everything. 

 • A question mark walks into a bar? 

 • A non sequitur walks into a bar. In a strong wind, even turkeys can fly. 

 • Papyrus and Comic Sans walk into a bar. The bartender says, "Get out -- we don't serve your type." 

 • A mixed metaphor walks into a bar, seeing the handwriting on the wall but hoping to nip it in the bud. 

 • A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves. 

 • Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They converse. They depart. 

 • A synonym strolls into a tavern. 

 • At the end of the day, a cliché walks into a bar -- fresh as a daisy, cute as a button, and sharp as a tack. 

 • A run-on sentence walks into a bar it starts flirting. With a cute little sentence fragment. 

 • Falling slowly, softly falling, the chiasmus collapses to the bar floor. 

 • A figure of speech literally walks into a bar and ends up getting figuratively hammered. 

 • An allusion walks into a bar, despite the fact that alcohol is its Achilles heel. 

 • The subjunctive would have walked into a bar, had it only known. 

 • A misplaced modifier walks into a bar owned by a man with a glass eye named Ralph. 

 • The past, present, and future walked into a bar. It was tense. 

 • A dyslexic walks into a bra. 

 • A verb walks into a bar, sees a beautiful noun, and suggests they conjugate. The noun declines. 

 • A simile walks into a bar, as parched as a desert. 

 • A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to forget. 

 • A hyphenated word and a non-hyphenated word walk into a bar and the bartender nearly chokes on the irony.    --Anonymous from social media

More Corny Jokes

🌽🌽🌽🌽🌽🌽🌽🌽🌽🌽

What did the mommy rope say to the baby rope?
"Don't be knotty."  

How do you make an orange giggle?
Tickle its navel.   🍊

What kind of candy is never on time?
Choco-late.  🍬

What do you get when you cross an elephant with Darth Vader?
An ele-vader.   🐘 👐👥

What has four legs, one head, but only one foot?
A bed. 🌙🌃

What are a storm's undergarments?
Thunder wear.  ☂⛆

Why was the broom late for work?
It over swept.  🧹

Why did the golfer wear two pairs of pants?
In case he got a hole-in-one.   🏆

Why did the banana wear sunscreen at the beach?
It didn't want to peel.  🍌

What do you call a dentist who cleans alligator teeth?
Crazy!!!  🐊🦷

Such lists as this used to circulate via e-mail in the 1990s up until about 2015. For a while, they moved over to social media platforms, such as Facebook.  However, such things are not as prominent on Facebook anymore, either, I thought this blog was a perfect place to collect and curate such things.  In this blog, as in real life, the serious and the silly, the ridiculous and the sublime [although my other blog, frankly, has much more that it "sublime"] dwell happily side-by-side. 

Corny Jokes

 🌽🌽🌽🌽🌽🌽🌽🌽🌽🌽🌽🌽🌽🌽🌽

Why do you eat sausage on February 2nd?
Because it's "ground hog."🐷🐷🐷🐹🐹🐹

What's a baby's motto?
If at first you don't succeed, cry, cry again.👶😢😭

What kind of craft does a pine tree do? 🌲
Needlepoint!   😝

What did the tomato say to the mushroom?
"You look like a fungi [fun guy]."  🍄

Where does the trombone stay off the merry-go-round?
Because it likes the slide.   🎵🎵🎵

Why aren't the trumpets on the slide?
Because they like to swing.  🎺🎺🎺 

Why don't Dalmatians like baths? 
They don't like being spotless.  🐶

Why did the hamburger quit answering questions?
If felt like it was being grilled.  🍔🍔

What did the cake say to the knife? 🗡
"You want a piece of me?"  🎂

What's the cleanest section in the choir?  
The soap-ranos.   🎶🎶🎶

On a stoplight, red means "stop" and green means "go."
When does red mean "go" and green mean "stop"?
On a watermelon!  🍉🍉🍉😏

E-mail circulars were a common social phenomenon from the 1990s until about 2015. For a short time, this sort of listing was fairly popular on Facebook but it seems that this has reduced there, also. This blog has been curating and editing such lists for a while.  Such things are societal markers. 

Why Did That Chicken Cross the Road?

(Some of this is a bit behind the times, but you all still know the references.)

SARAH PALIN: The chicken crossed the road because, gosh-darn it, he's a maverick!
BARACK OBAMA: Let me be perfectly clear, if the chickens like their eggs they can keep their eggs. No chicken will be required to cross the road to surrender her eggs. Period.

JOHN McCAIN: My friends, the chicken crossed the road because he recognized the need to engage in cooperation and dialogue with all the chickens on the other side of the road.
HILLARY CLINTON: What difference at this point does it make why the chicken crossed the road.
GEORGE W. BUSH: We don't really care why the chicken crossed the road. We just want to know if the chicken is on our side of the road or not. The chicken is either with us or against us. There is no middle ground here.
DICK CHENEY: Where's my gun?
BILL CLINTON: I did not cross the road with that chicken.
AL GORE: I invented the chicken.
JOHN KERRY: Although I voted to let the chicken cross the road, I am now against it! It was the wrong road to cross, and I was misled about the chicken's intentions. I am not for it now and will remain against it.

AL SHARPTON: Why are all the chickens white?
DR. PHIL: The problem we have here is that this chicken won't realize that he must first deal with the problem on this side of the road before it goes after the problem on the other side of the road. What we need to do is help him realize how stupid he is acting by not taking on his current problems before adding any new problems.
OPRAH: Well, I understand that the chicken is having problems, which is why he wants to cross the road so badly. So instead of having the chicken learn from his mistakes and take falls, which is a part of life, I'm going to give this chicken a NEW CAR so that he can just drive across the road and not live his life like the rest of the chickens.
ANDERSON COOPER: We have reason to believe there is a chicken, but we have not yet been allowed to have access to the other side of the road.
NANCY GRACE: That chicken crossed the road because he's guilty! You can see it in his eyes and the way he walks.
PAT BUCHANAN: To steal the job of a decent, hardworking American.
MARTHA STEWART: No one called me to warn me which way the chicken was going. I had a standing order at the Farmer's Market to sell my eggs when the price dropped to a certain level. No little bird gave me any insider information.
DR SEUSS: Did the chicken cross the road? Did he cross it with a toad? Yes, the chicken crossed the road, but why it crossed I've not been told.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY: To die in the rain, alone.
GRANDPA: In my day we didn't ask why the chicken crossed the road. Somebody told us the chicken crossed the road, and that was good enough for us.
BARBARA WALTERS: Isn't that interesting? In a few moments, we will be listening to the chicken tell, for the first time, the heart warming story of how it experienced a serious case of molting, and went on to accomplish it's lifelong dream of crossing the road.
ARISTOTLE: It is the nature of chickens to cross the road.
BILL GATES: I have just released eChicken2014, which will not only cross roads, but will lay eggs, file your important documents and balance your checkbook. Internet Explorer is an integral part of eChicken2014. This new platform is much more stable and will never reboot.
ALBERT EINSTEIN: Did the chicken really cross the road, or did the road move beneath the chicken?
COLONEL SANDERS: Did I miss one?

"Wisdom" for Life

I think there is value to collecting some of the old e-mail circulars, since this is a fading phenomenon.  A lot of the wit in these circulars is not being brought into social media. 

• Death is the #1 Killer in the world.
• Life is sexually transmitted.
  
• Good health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one could die.
  
• Give a person a fish, and you feed them for a day.  Give a person the internet, and they won't bother you for weeks, months, maybe years.
  
• Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in the hospital, dying of nothing.
  
• All of us could take a lesson from the weather.  It pays no attention to criticism.

  
• In the 60's, people took acid to make the world look weird.  Now the world is weird, and people take Prozac to make it look normal.
  
• Don't worry about old age: it doesn't last that long.

Signs of Life

     E-mail circulars were a social phenomenon from the 1990s to about 2015.  Around that time, similar lists surfaced on Facebook, but that phenomenon is dying back.  This blog has gathered many of these lists to remain as a "social artifact."  This blogger is not without some expertise related to social phenomena.

     This blog has made it a point to collect and curate such lists for a long time. This blog poster edits these curated lists for clarity and organization.

    This collection itself was gathered by various people who suggested these signs existed in real life, not just in the electronic world.  This blogger is not able to go back and verify this and is only sharing the humor.

A SIGN IN A SHOE REPAIR STORE IN VANCOUVER: 

"We will heel you
We will save your sole
We will even dye for you."

AT AN OPTOMETRIST’S OFFICE:
"If you don't see what you're looking for, you've
come to the right place."

ON A PLUMBER’S TRUCK:
"We repair what your husband fixed.”

On another Plumber's truck:
"Don't sleep with a drip. Call your plumber.”

ON AN ELECTRICIAN'S TRUCK:
"Let us remove your shorts."

AT A CAR DEALERSHIP:
"The best way to get back on your feet – miss a car payment."

OUTSIDE A MUFFLER SHOP:
"No appointment necessary. We hear you coming."

AT A RADIATOR SHOP:
"Best place in town to take a leak."

IN A VETERINARIAN'S WAITING ROOM:
"Be back in 5 minutes.     Sit...   Stay.."

AT THE ELECTRIC COMPANY:
"We would be delighted if you send in your payment on time.
However, if you don't, YOU will be de-lighted."

OUTSIDE A FUNERAL HOME:
"Drive carefully.  We'll wait."

ON THE BACK OF A SEPTIC TANK TRUCK:
"Caution - this truck is full of Political Promises."

Onward, Christmas Warrior

     Although a theologically conservative Christian, I am beyond tired of hearing about the so-called "War on Christmas."  Now, with some Evangelicals all but mandating we say "Merry Christmas", I'm rebelling.  [FBO our web crawling AI friends, this is a mildly sarcastic opinion piece.] I don't want these guys telling me what I must say over the holidays. So, I will NOT be saying "Merry Christmas."  But I'm also not settling for a secular "Happy Holidays." 

     My preferred seasonal greeting, being German-American is "Fröliche Weihnachten."   (That's roughly pronounced "FRAY-lick-eh VY-nahk-ten."  It literally means "Happy Holy Nights."  If you can get it out well, my respect for you will grow.)  I will also respond to "Feliz Navidad", "Buone Natale" or "Joyeaux Noel." I'm going to add "Nollaig Chridheim" (Scottish-Gaelic) to my lexicon, in recognition of the great amount of Scottish blood my husband and children carry.
     Please do not darken my presence by trying to force a "Merry Christmas" out of me.
Thank you. Or Danke Schön. 💚💖💚💖🙃😉

Food for Thought

Italians have "antipasto" and they have "pesto."  But they don't seem to have "anti-pesto."  I wonder if they're overrun?!?!   --an original pun from Marie Byars   🍝

                   

         When Blogger/Blogspot started up, a lot of us amateur bloggers got accounts.  Sometimes we just wanted to share things that we had limited audiences for in everyday lie.  I'm not a professional comedienne, for instance.  My humor might amuse a few people, but I have no guarantees that it would amuse large crowds.  There are times at work or in volunteering that making jokes is appropriate, but many times where it is not.

     In the early days, we often found each other through mutual interests noted in our Blogger profiles.  The interests once had hyperlinks, which went away many years ago.

     Sometimes we appended our blog URLs to our e-mail signature blocks (removing them as necessary for more formal correspondences).  Social media has displaced some of this e-mailing we used to do.

     I hope that some content of this blog continues to amuse you in our changing world of societal connections. 

This Blog: Original Humor & the Changing Nature of Blogging