Happy LOL Day!

I don’t know that I made anyone laugh out loud, but I did get a lot of smiles today when people saw the bunny hat I was wearing. I sit at the front desk, so lots of people got to smile as they walked past. And to visitors who asked, I explained that today was LOL Day in Iowa.

Our company wants to promote healthy habits, and laughter is healthy. So we were invited to wear silly shirts, hats, and/or socks today. My fish shirt isn’t quite “silly” but it’s not exactly normal work attire. It didn’t get nearly as much attention as my hat did, though.

We were also invited to play games in one of the conference rooms during lunch, but apparently no one felt an urge to play Connect 4, Operation, or Jenga. I played Bop-It for a few minutes (after checking to see that no one seemed to be in the CIO’s office next door – there’s no volume control on the Bop-It). I’m not really good with games that require speed, but after several tries I managed a score of 46.

It was a reasonably good day at work. But if you really want to laugh out loud, silly clothes are nothing compared to what you can find at the Damn You Auto Correct website. If off-color language really bothers you, don’t go there. But the fact that people don’t mean to say those things, and it’s the autocorrect feature of their phones that make them “say” such embarrassing things, is what makes them so funny. I don’t laugh out loud at much, but after reading these for a while it’s pretty hard not to.

The latest in canine fashion

I don’t think Kyra cares what she looks like, considering her sleeping positions sometimes. (See candid shot at right.)

But if your dog is more fashion-conscious, you might want to check out the all-new Warby Barker website. They have the latest in canine eyewear, and even a blog where readers may contribute photos of their dogs modeling various styles.

I especially like the FAQ section, as well as all the cute photos (be sure to check out the Man’s Best Friend page). The Dogocle is also most impressive.

 

Defense against the dark

I was typing up some Bible study notes for my husband the other day, and one phrase jumped out at me: “the best defense against the dark.” That would make for an interesting series of blog posts, I decided. Not a Bible study, or even necessarily religious in nature (though no doubt I will sometimes make references to faith and Scripture) – just thinking about what defenses we have against the “dark” things that come into our lives.

• Depression
• Doubt
• Discouragement
• Death
• Deceit
• Fear

I’ll start with the last one on that list, because fear is an element in just about all the others. Fear of the (unknown) future, fear of what others will think, and fear of failure are a large part of what makes it difficult to face those other kinds of “darkness.”

Games: Quelf

I found Quelf on clearance at Walmart and decided it was worth buying based on one thing I read on the box. Among the contents listed (game board, game pieces, cards, etc.) is “1 giant invisible harpoon (it’s invisible for a reason, use it wisely).” I decided that any game maker with that kind of sense of humor was bound to have made a fun game.

My guess was confirmed when we started reading the rules. The objective of the game? “To have fun. Duh!” Unfortunately it is made for at least three players, and my husband is not into board games. So Al and I had to wait for Zach to get home from college. (Having played it now, I don’t recall anything that actually required three players, so Al and I may try playing it by ourselves.)

As a number of reviews at amazon.com indicate, it is similar to Cranium, “but edgier.” I haven’t played the game Cranium, but we have some of the other games made by Cranium, Inc. Al and I both enjoy the wackiness of the games, and the variety of mixing stunts, trivia questions, word puzzles, and more. Quelf takes the wackiness even further.

Enjoying ComPost

The Washington Post isn’t one of the newspapers I normally read online (mostly I stick to the Muscatine Journal and the Wall Street Journal), but I think I’ll be visiting their site more often in the future. Not for the news – though I might read that too – but to read ComPost by Alexandra Petri, who “puts the ‘pun’ in punditry” according to the blog heading.

I found it to begin with by clicking on Google’s Doodle today, honoring Gregor Mendel’s 189th birthday. I had nothing in particular in mind to blog about this evening, and figured that something worthy of a Google Doodle probably also merited a blog post. But I was pretty sure I remembered having done that a previous July 20.

(Oddly enough, it turns out that I wrote that post July 22, 2008, based on what I found at infoplease.com. I checked tonight, and infoplease.com still shows that Gregor Mendel’s birthday is July 22. From wikipedia, I found out that his birthday is July 20; July 22 is often cited, but it is the date of his baptism, not his birth.)

Anyway, the first hit I saw was “Gregor Mendel’s naughty peas and our GM future.” I had no idea what could have been naughty about Mendel’s peas but I decided to find out. I was hooked with the first line: “It started off innocuously, in a garden. These things often do.” I admit I had to stop and think a moment to understand the allusion. Then I smiled, knowing I was going to enjoy reading the rest of the post. And I did.

I can’t say I enjoyed all Petri’s posts as much as the first one I read. Part of it, I suppose, is that they tend to deal with topics at the forefront of many people’s attention, but that I have little or no knowledge of. I had seen headlines about phone hacking recently, but hadn’t read any articles. I heard other people’s opinions about Casey Anthony, but chose not to learn details of the case. I’m not sure I had even heard of Charlie Sheen. (Is he an actor? A musician? A politician?)

But “Save the Oxford Comma! A Grammar Nazi’s Plea” is definitely worth reading. I didn’t even know what an Oxford comma was, at least not by name. But grammar is something I know and appreciate, unlike news about celebrities. Plus it’s just plain well-written. How often do you see punctuation compared to endangered species? Or the economy?

Good writing is probably an endangered species also. But I’m glad to find some of it at ComPost.

It’s against the law

I wonder how many times my husband has broken the law since we moved to Iowa. According to dumblaws.com, in this state it is against the law for a man with a mustache to kiss a woman in public. I doubt we kiss in public all that often (what is the definition of “in public”?), but I’m sure we do occasionally. And he does wear a mustache for about half the year (October through March).

I suppose it’s just as well we will probably never move back to Connecticut, where I grew up. (In the more populated areas, there is too much traffic and too much noise, which neither of us want to go back to after living in the rural midwest. In the less populated areas, there is too much green growing stuff, which I would love but it would set off his allergies and trigger his asthma.) There it would be illegal for him to kiss me on Sundays (whether he had the mustache or not). 

He lived in Nebraska for a good deal of his childhood (separated into five different periods, as his father was in the Air Force). I wonder how often he risked getting his mother arrested by burping while in church. (And since they lived in or around Omaha, he might also have violated the law against sneezing in church.)

We only lived in Illinois about ten months, but I’m sure I could have been arrested for vagrancy on many occasions, for not having at least one dollar bill on my person. I never contacted the police before entering the city in an automobile. And I spoke English every single day!

The website does include a disclaimer that ”many of the laws on this site have been verified, but many have been taken from sources which do not include law citations.” It points out that it is an entertainment site, not a legal resource. So maybe  it isn’t really illegal to go whale fishing in Nebraska – though I cannot imagine where one might conceivably expect to catch a whale in that landlocked state. (In Ohio, where I went to college, the law is less restrictive – whale fishing is only illegal on Sundays.)

But I still don’t think I’d want to go back to New Jersey. I don’t slurp my soup on purpose, but I wouldn’t want to risk arrest for unintentional slurping.

 

Books: Inside Gilligan’s Island

I have often gone browsing through libraries or bookstores when I want to read something but don’t know what. Usually, though, I stick to the fiction section for browsing. If I browse in non-fiction, I at least generally know the topic I’m interested in, most often religion, occasionally cooking.

Last weekend, though, I found myself browsing the non-fiction section of the library, with no idea at all what I wanted to read except that I wanted to learn something. I briefly considering something about gardening, or crafts, but I really didn’t want to learn how to do something. I wanted to learn something just by sitting in a chair and reading.

Then I came to the section on movies and TV. There were books on the making of Jurassic Park and of The Wizard of Oz. Neither of those really interested me, but then I saw exactly what I was looking for: Inside Gilligan’s Island.

I remember clearly the first time I saw the show on TV. Not when it was, but what I saw and what I thought of it. I had overheard some children talking about Gilligan’s Island during recess at school, and I was intrigued. There were some girls stuck on an island, and it was Gilligan who kept them from leaving.

That afternoon I checked the TV schedule, and turned the TV to the right channel at the right time. What I saw was someone relaxing on the beach, and someone else serving him drinks. Huh? What kind of kids’ show was that? Where were the girls, and where was the giant named Gilligan who kept them imprisoned on the island? I figured someone must have made a mistake in the TV schedule, or made a last-minute programming change.

I don’t remember how long after that it was that I actually started watching Gilligan’s Island, and discovered that the “girls” were grown women, and Gilligan was responsible for keeping them on the island not by force but by sheer ineptitude. From then on, I watched it pretty much every day after school, and I’m sure that over the years I must have seen at least every one of the 98 episodes at least once, most of them over and over again.

Humor in music

I’ve had songs going through my head yesterday and today, but I don’t mind at all, because they’re fun songs. Today’s is one that my sister Margaret will recognize, and maybe Karen O., if her family used to listen to Bob Steele’s radio program on WTIC.

This morning the question on worldmagblog’s Whirled Views was “Did you read/watch/listen to the news growing up?” I didn’t, for the most part, but my father always listened to Bob Steele in the morning. In a small house, that meant that we all heard his program, which I mostly ignored – except when he played the buffalo song.

Trying to find the correct name of the song to identify it in my post, I googled Bob Steele and buffalo. I quickly found a thread where someone was wondering who else remembered the song. Evidently quite a number of us who grew up in Connecticut do. Fortunately someone provided the full lyrics for us (scroll down a ways), which I immediately copied and printed out. I sang it for Al this evening, and he laughed so hard I knew it wasn’t just childhood nostalgia that made me still love that song.

Yesterday it was Mary Had a Little Lamb. Yes, the children’s song, but arranged by Eric Lane Barnes. Each verse of the song is set in the style of a different period from music history. The first is Gregorian chant – we sing in Latin (Maria agnellum habuit) and a capella. The second is even better, in the style of Handel (it bears a definite resemblance to a very famous choral piece by the composer). That’s the one that was going through my head yesterday, because we had been practicing it in Civic Chorale Tuesday evening.

I’m less familiar with Schubert or Verdi, but the third and fourth verses are just as fun to sing. If you’d like to hear the whole thing, check out this youtube video. Or, if you happen to live anywhere near Muscatine, Iowa, you can come hear our concert on April Fools Day. (I don’t know if the concert date was picked first or the music, but it’s a great fit, not just Barnes’ Lambscapes but the whole concert.)

Lambscapes reminds me of a couple of my favorite audio CDs, Bibbidi Bobbidi Bach and Heigh-Ho! Mozart. I got them when our son Zach was young, and we were amazed how quickly he could identify the Disney songs, even transformed by arrangement in the styles of classical composers. We would be trying identify that somewhat familiar melody, and Zach could not only name the song, he knew exactly where it appeared in whatever movie it was from.

I found myself wondering whether music is especially well suited to combining with humor. Danny Kaye and Victor Borge did wonderful things with music and humor, as has P.D.Q. Bach (aka Peter Schickele) more recently. I tried doing a google search, and didn’t find any profound thoughts on the subject, but I did find this great page of music humor.

Old TV: Mister Ed

When I used to watch episodes of Mister Ed on TV as a girl, I had no idea they had originally been broadcast back when I was a small child or even a baby – and earlier.

This afternoon, I was looking online to find out what events had taken place the day I was born. Apparently, not very much – in the East–West Pro Bowl, the West won 31–30; and the Council of ministers of the European Common Market agreed to organize common farm markets and to move to the second stage of the community.

Among the items my search turned up was the name of an episode of the second season of Mister Ed, “Ed’s Bed,” which aired on Sunday, January 14, 1962. Curious, I looked for more information about it, and found myself watching a preview of the episode (for $1.99 I could have watched the entire episode).

I had forgotten just how much I enjoyed the show, and how wonderfully the voice for Mister Ed fit the character. I found out that the episodes were available on Hulu, and thought watching the one that aired the day I was born would be a fitting and fun way to celebrate my birthday.

Once I mentioned the idea of watching it on Hulu to my husband (over a delicious Chinese dinner), he brought it up on his computer – starting more sensibly with the first episode. I didn’t recognize it at all, and didn’t remember Wilbur ever having tried to convince anyone else he had a talking horse. It was fun to see how the Posts met both Mister Ed and their neighbors the Addisons.

I also noticed things that I had never noticed as a child – for instance, how much more formally people were dressed, Wilbur in a suit and Carol in a dress, even when there was no special occasion. There was the expectation that Carol would do all the shopping and cooking and cleaning, and Wilbur would simply sit down for breakfast in the morning assuming Carol would have it ready for him. The wives would want to spend money, and the husbands would have the final say on the matter (unless they could be manipulated into letting their wives have their own way).

At least on the last point, I imagine the show exaggerated for comic effect. But such things wouldn’t have been funny unless they represented reality to a significant extent. I knew that such things had changed over the course of my lifetime, but seeing those fifty-year-old episodes made such a stark contrast to the attitudes and behavior I am used to today.

Al enjoyed watching the episodes as much as I did, and it was fun to share them with him. After four episodes I insisted it was bedtime, but I look forward to watching more with him this weekend.

A Comedian I might like

I never heard of Doogie Horner before this evening, but after reading his flowchart designed to ”Explain the Internet to a 19th Century British Street Urchin,” I’m going to have to find some more of his flowcharts. Just looking at his website is almost enough to persuade me to buy Everything Explained through Flowcharts.

I don’t generally care for the brand of humor used by standup comics, and it could be that when I’ve read far enough I’ll decide I don’t like Doogie Horner all that well either. (I have to admit that the title of his book Dirty Jokes Every Man Should Know does not exactly win me over.) But if I don’t, probably my husband will. (By that I do not mean that what I don’t like he will and vice versa – rather that his taste in humor is much broader than mine and I suspect this would appeal to him whether it does to me or not.)

Too bad the book isn’t yet available in Nook format. (My husband just got a Nook, and while I haven’t read anything on it yet, I’ve seen the screen enough to be amazed at the incredible clarity of the text.) Though I suppose large graphics such as flowcharts do not lend themselves well to the e-reader format.

Which makes me wonder, how would you explain the Nook or the Kindle to a 19th century British street urchin?