Category: Curios & Humor

This e-mail virus warning had me staggering around the room clutching pieces of furniture to keep from sinking to the ground with laughter when I first read it. It’s still funny (though not that funny).

Beware Of The Friday 13th Virus

It will recalibrate your refrigerator’s coolness setting so all your ice cream goes melty.

It will demagnetize the strips on all your credit cards, screw up the tracking on your television and use subspace field harmonics to scratch any CDs you try to play.

It will give your ex-girlfriend your new phone number.

It will mix Kool-aid into your fishtank.

It will drink all your beer and leave dirty socks on the coffee table when company comes over.

It will put a dead aardvark in the back pocket of your good suit pants and hide your car keys when you are late for work.

Friday 13th Virus will make you fall in love with a penguin.

It will give you nightmares about circus midgets.

It will pour sugar in your gas tank and shave off both your eyebrows while dating your girlfriend behind your back and billing the dinner and hotel room to your Discover card.

It moves your car randomly around parking lots so you can’t find it.

It will leave libidinous messages on your boss’s voice mail in your voice!

It is insidious and subtle. It is dangerous and terrifying to behold. It is also a rather interesting shade of mauve.

Friday 13th Virus will give you Dutch Elm disease.

It will leave the toilet seat up.

It will leave bacon cooking on the stove while it goes out to chase gradeschoolers with your new snowblower.

Friday 13th Virus will cause your cakes to fall and your blood pressure to rise.

It will increase the ability of your radio to pick up reactionary talk stations at the expense of others.

It prevents scurvy, but it gives you mega garlic breath as it does so, which makes the net results negative.

It cheats at Scrabble.

It can forge your signature.

It plays the bagpipes in your basement.

It shaves over your bathroom sink and then leaves the hair to clog your drain.

It does bad celebrity impersonations in front of your friends.

The next few days are Classics Of Internet Humor time here at JimmyAkin.Org (e-mail me your suggestions for inclusion in the celebration), so let’s get things off on an ecumenical note by flashing back to the Clinton era. Here’s a fictitious news story from back when were here helping out all those Bosnians:

Operation Vowel Drop

CLINTON DEPLOYS VOWELS TO BOSNIA

Cities of Sjlbvdnzv, Grzny to Be First Recipients

Before an emergency joint session of Congress yesterday, President Clinton announced US plans to deploy over 75,000 vowels to the war-torn region of Bosnia. The deployment, the largest of its kind in American history, will provide the region with the critically needed letters A,E,I,O and U, and is hoped to render countless Bosnian names more pronounceable.

"For six years, we have stood by while names like Ygrjvslhv and Tzlynhr and Glrm have been horribly butchered by millions around the world," Clinton said. "Today, the United States must finally stand up and say `Enough.’ It is time the people of Bosnia finally had some vowels in their incomprehensible words. The US is proud to lead the crusade in this noble endeavour."

The deployment, dubbed Operation Vowel Movement by the State Department, is set for early next week, with the Adriatic port cities of Sjlbvdnzv and Grzny slated to be the first recipients. Two C-130 transport planes, each carrying over 500 24-count boxes of "E’s," will fly from Andrews Air Force Base across the Atlantic and airdrop the letters over the cities.

Citizens of Grzny and Sjlbvdnzv eagerly await the arrival of the vowels.

"My God, I do not think we can last another day," Trszg Grzdnjkln, 44, said. "I have six children and none of them has a name that is understandable to me or to anyone else. Mr. Clinton, please send my poor, wretched family just one `E.’ Please."

Said Sjlbvdnzv resident Grg Hmphrs, 67: "With just a few key letters, I could be George Humphries. This is my dream."

The airdrop represents the largest deployment of any letter to a foreign country since 1984. During the summer of that year, the US shipped 92,000 consonants to Ethiopia, providing cities like Ouaouoaua, Eaoiiuae, and Aao with vital, life-giving supplies of L’s, S’s and T’s.

STARTING CAPTIONS:

1) You Will Bow Down Before Me, Jor-El!

2) Yield!–Or I Unleash My Legions Of Terror!

3) I Am So A Sunflower!

4) One Of These Things Is Not Like The Others

5) The Flowers Made Me Do It

I’m sure the cast of the old Monty Python show could appreciate the absurdity of turning their old gags into a Broadway extravaganza. Why not? I first caught wind of the musical Spamalot on NPR. I was driving home and caught part of an interview with some British actor who is also known for animation voice work. OK, mildly interesting… and then I suddenly heard the voice of Nigel Thornberry issuing from my dilapidated car speakers and thought "Oh, it’s Tim Curry!". He was on the program Fresh Air plugging his latest project: A musical stage adaptation of the best bits of Monty Python.

The play is based on a book by Eric Idle and stars Curry, David Hyde Pierce and Hank Azaria. I have read no reviews, as yet, but the cast is certainly top-drawer. I fear that I would miss the original guys, though.

Find out more at www.montypythonsspamalot.com

Now, if only I can get someone to read this screenplay I worked out for a major motion picture based on Flay Otters, Warty Towels, (oops!sorry…)- Fawlty Towers.

It’s true!

GET THE STORY.

(Cowboy hat tip to the reader who sent it!)

It’s true!

GET THE STORY.

(Cowboy hat tip to the reader who sent it!)

The dapper gentleman on the left is Abrose Bierce (1842-19??).

As you can tell, something’s not quite right with his name.

My theory is that his parents didn’t understand English phonology.

Having stuck their kid with the name Ambrose, which was crime enough to begin with, they didn’t understand that if you say his two names together you get an /s/ sound right up against a /b/ sound  (ambrosbierce). That’s a sound combination that doesn’t occur in English, so it makes it hard for people to say or understand his name. I’m sure people were always trying to turn his name into "Ambrose Pierce," and as a life-long victim of name confusion, I know how scarring that can be.

You’ve also got some echo going on between the /b/ in Ambrose and the /b/ in Beirce.

And we won’t even go into his middle name, which was probably the horror that drove him to become a satirist and horror author. (SPOILER SWIPE FOR THE BRAVE OF HEART: His middle name was Gwinnet).

PierceBeirce was an interesting guy. You may notice that his death date has a couple of question marks in it. That’s because we don’t really know when he died.

He vanished.

In his seventies he went on a tour of Civil War battlefields and after touring Lousiana and Texas he went into Mexico which was undergoing a revolution at the time and Bierce hitched up with Pancho Villa’s army as an observer.

The day after Christmas, 1913, he wrote a friend:

Good-by — if you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags please know that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico — ah, that is euthanasia!

Nobody ever heard from him again! No news of his getting stod up against a wall or anything! Searchers failed to turn up hide or hair of him (literally!). So we don’t really know when he died. Probably late 1913 or early 1914.

A fitting end for a horror author.

Expecially one with such a horrifying name.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE MAN WHOSE NAME WASN’T QUITE RIGHT.

READ HIS WORKS.

OBTW, the reason I mention Beirce is that I’m going to be excerpting one of his works, The Devil’s Dictionary, which is a dictionary with humorously subversive and often revealing definitions.

F’rinstance:

DICTIONARY, n.  A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic.  This dictionary, however, is a most useful work.

Amen, Brother Bierce! Amen!

The dapper gentleman on the left is Abrose Bierce (1842-19??).

As you can tell, something’s not quite right with his name.

My theory is that his parents didn’t understand English phonology.

Having stuck their kid with the name Ambrose, which was crime enough to begin with, they didn’t understand that if you say his two names together you get an /s/ sound right up against a /b/ sound  (ambrosbierce). That’s a sound combination that doesn’t occur in English, so it makes it hard for people to say or understand his name. I’m sure people were always trying to turn his name into "Ambrose Pierce," and as a life-long victim of name confusion, I know how scarring that can be.

You’ve also got some echo going on between the /b/ in Ambrose and the /b/ in Beirce.

And we won’t even go into his middle name, which was probably the horror that drove him to become a satirist and horror author. (SPOILER SWIPE FOR THE BRAVE OF HEART: His middle name was Gwinnet).

PierceBeirce was an interesting guy. You may notice that his death date has a couple of question marks in it. That’s because we don’t really know when he died.

He vanished.

In his seventies he went on a tour of Civil War battlefields and after touring Lousiana and Texas he went into Mexico which was undergoing a revolution at the time and Bierce hitched up with Pancho Villa’s army as an observer.

The day after Christmas, 1913, he wrote a friend:

Good-by — if you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags please know that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico — ah, that is euthanasia!

Nobody ever heard from him again! No news of his getting stod up against a wall or anything! Searchers failed to turn up hide or hair of him (literally!). So we don’t really know when he died. Probably late 1913 or early 1914.

A fitting end for a horror author.

Expecially one with such a horrifying name.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE MAN WHOSE NAME WASN’T QUITE RIGHT.

READ HIS WORKS.

OBTW, the reason I mention Beirce is that I’m going to be excerpting one of his works, The Devil’s Dictionary, which is a dictionary with humorously subversive and often revealing definitions.

F’rinstance:

DICTIONARY, n.  A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic.  This dictionary, however, is a most useful work.

Amen, Brother Bierce! Amen!

TOO FUNNY!

Starts slow but gets ROFLOL as it continues.

(Cowboy hat tip to the reader who sent it!)

What I’m wondering is: If I can go down to my friendly neighborhood Wal-Mart and buy ammo, why can’t you buy it on eBay?

It’s a numerical day!

Or one with a special (if trivial) numerical significance.

I just had to sign a dead tree form (something I rarely do these days), and needed to fill in the date. I realized that, numerically, today is 3/4/05 (at least here in the U.S.).

3 . . . 4 . . . 5 . . .

A moment’s reflection revealed that only one such day would occur each year, and only in the first twelve years of a century.

So: Cherish these meaningless numerical days while you can! They won’t last!