Tag Archives: Humor

Decolonizing The Moon!

02 Sunday Jan 2022

Posted by in Native American Themes

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In my last post, I wrote about the notion of outer space as an extension of the western frontier in American popular culture. I mentioned in passing the connection to Native Americans and the dispossession of their lands. As a follow up, I thought I might comment on a little story connecting all three themes in one narrative.

Here is the story as it was related on Indian Country Today:

“When NASA was preparing for the Apollo project, they did some astronaut training on a Navajo Indian reservation. One day, a Navajo elder and his son were herding sheep and came across the space crew. The old man, who only spoke Navajo, asked a question, which the son translated: “What are the guys in the big suits doing?” A member of the crew said they were practicing for their trip to the moon.

“The old man got really excited and asked if he could send a message to the moon with the astronauts. Recognizing a promotional opportunity for the spin-doctors, the NASA folks found a tape recorder. After the old man recorded his message, they asked the son to translate. He refused. So the NASA reps brought the tape to the reservation, where the rest of the tribe listened and laughed, but refused to translate the elder’s message to the moon.

“Finally, NASA called in an official government translator. He reported that the moon message said: “Watch out for these guys; they’ve come to steal your land.”

It’s a great story, but if you’re like me, you have to spend a moment or two wondering whether or not it’s true. Turns out, the answer is ‘no.’ According to Snopes, the joke appears to have come from Johnny Carson. It was part of his monologue on July 22, 1969. Of course it is possible, that Carson’s writers picked it up from an earlier source. There just doesn’t seem to be any evidence for it.. In any event, there is no record of this with NASA or any of the other Federal Agencies that might have been involved at the time. So, the story is very unlikely to be true.

That said…

It’s damned telling that the Carson camp thought to put this joke together back during the days of the space race. They clearly got the connection between the western frontier and the space program. They even got the violence implicit in westward expansion. They got all of this in the service of a joke intended for a mainstream American audience.

These weren’t activists; they were comedy writers working on a relatively non-partisan show, and they decided that it would be funny to compare the Apolllo moon landings to the dispossession of Native Americans. Judging by the longevity of this gag, it would appear that they were right.

The thing is, this joke is only funny if people get the connection between exploration and colonization, if they know that someone planting a flag in ‘new’ territory has generally meant someone else gets screwed.

It’s almost as if awareness of systemic racism isn’t limited to critical race theorists.

Shhhh!

Don’t tell the Republicans!

Things You Learn When Dating a Mexican Woman

30 Thursday Dec 2021

Posted by in General

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270296412_10160437607328488_1882011151292854340_n

It’s rather surprising to find out just how often a U.S. citizen can be told to go home or asked about where she (really) comes from.

It’s also infuriating

***

Contrary to popular opinion, a word doesn’t become Spanish by adding an [-o] to it. Using this construction does however make most any word irritating to her.

This can be useful, amusing, or painful to you, depending on the details.

***

Rolling your Rs can be damned difficult.

***

A speedy-Gonzalez voice is not funny. (She told me to add that it’s also kind of racist.)

***

Taking a Mexican girl to a Mexican restaurant is not likely to impress her. You may hear comments such as “rice doesn’t really go with this” or “why would you put lettuce on that?” Also, don’t be surprised if she prefers Italian food, Shabu Shabu, or Korean BBQ.

Date her long enough and you may yourself ruined for an awful lot of Mexican restaurants.

Thanks Moni!

***

It turns out that an awful lot of famous Mexicans are actually Spaniards, and apparently that makes a difference.

***

What a lot of us assume to be Mexican accents are actually northern Mexican accents. And apparently, this too matters.

***

Anything you say about Mexico, Mexicans, or Mexican culture is racist. Anything she says about white people isn’t. This is how girlfriend privilege trumps white privilege.

…and it does.

***

Don’t be surprised if music you think of as Mexican strikes her as redneck country music, or at least the south of the border equivalent thereof.

***

Christmas is celebrated on Christmas Eve.

Because of course it is.

***

Virtually every western you’ve ever loved has some Mexican character vamping up the stereotypes to the point of personal embarrassment.

She will feel that embarrassment first.

Then you will feel it more.

***

You will probably pay dearly for every tongue-in-cheek comment you make in this post.

Poe’s Law, the Civil War Edition

31 Sunday Jan 2021

Posted by in History

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Have you heard of the minie ball pregnancy?

It occurred during the civil war at a battle in Raymond, Mississippi. Apparently, a minie ball (a conical-shaped bullet commonly used in the era) passed through a Confederate soldier’s testicles and then lodged itself in a young woman’s own private parts. Though, still a virgin, she later gave birth to a baby boy, apparently impregnated by the minie ball carrying the young man’s seed along with it.

Okay, but by “apparently,” I of course mean “not at all.”

This did not happen.

Not really!

Photo of Legrand G. Capers found in Wikipedia

The fact that this didn’t happen didn’t stop an army surgeon by the name of L.G. Capers from reporting on the incident as though it really did. He describes in detail coming upon a soldier staggering toward him before collapsing as a woman began screaming from the house in which he planned to conduct field operations. He treated both parties, or so he says. Later, Capers writes that he returned six months later to find the young woman pregnant though her hymen remained intact. A month or so later, he also delivered the baby, still confused about her story. After piecing the events together later, Capers says he found the soldier and explained the child to him. Of course the young man did the honorable thing, and the doctor reported visiting the lovely couple many years later to find them living happily together with 3 children.

All of this was published in a journal known as the American Medical Weekly in 1874. It was later republished in a British Medical Journal, the Lancet, and a few subsequent publications (whose editors should probably have known better) have presented the story as medical facts. Author Tony Horowitz tells us that at least one museum in Vicksburg Virginia related the story without comment as of his research for book, Confederates in the Attic, published in 1999. (The story appears on pages 199-200). Though the American Medical Journal later published a clarification explaining that the whole account had all been a joke, it seems there are always a few folks determined to take it seriously.

Also, aside from the source being a known spoof, apparently, this is a medical impossibility.

This time, by “apparently,” I mean “absolutely.”

What has me thinking about this today is Horowitz’s account. As he put it, the original account was intended as a spoof of other wildly exaggerated stories circulated by medical doctors in the wake of the civil war. If nothing else could have tipped a reader off as to nature of this tall-tale, the fact that Capers reported later removing a mini-ball from the child’s own testicles should probably have been the final “gotcha” moment of the story. Tall tales often have this, a final twist so improbable as to effectively communicate to anyone who might still be wondering that the whole thing was just an elaborate joke. This, if nothing else, ought to have tipped readers off then and now as to the nature of the Capers’ clever little yarn. Note to mention, the correction published published by the same journal.

Apparently, some people would rather believe the story anyway.

And by “apparently,” this time I just mean “apparently.”

***

All of which brings to mind a principle coined by an old net-friend of mine, Nathan Poe. Frustrated with debating young-earth creationists on Christian forums, Poe once quipped; “Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won’t mistake for the genuine article.” In other words, you can’t make a satirical statement sufficiently outrageous to out-absurd the very people he was arguing with. But of course Christian fundamentalists are not the only bunch with a few loose canons in their midst, as others have pointed out. So, the principle has been generalized since its original formulation to apply to a broad range of topics about which satire might be mistaken for the real thing, not the least of reasons being that someone is usually just as extreme as any parody their critics might make-up to poke fun at them.

Apparently, that was also true in 1874.

***

This story was only a couple pages out of Confederates in the Attic, but I highly recommend the book as a whole. Great read! There are some other good sources on the internet. Wiki has a decent page on Capers, and of course that contains many good links in itself. Mark Powell’s write-up is useful and fun to read. Of course, Snopes has a good page on it as well, complete with many of the relevant primary documents.

And …winner!

26 Tuesday Jan 2021

Posted by in General

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Right on this corner, I believe

For a brief period of my life (in the early 90s), I lived on the south side of Chicago. It was an interesting experience, to say the least.

I remember one day seeing a couple young men laughing at one of the local homeless guys. This particular individual was always stoned or drunk, or both. Often, when he approached me, he couldn’t even put the words together to ask for change; he just held his hand out. He was often in bad shape. At least once, I found him passed out on the street, with his own piss flowing out over the curb. This time at least he was up and moving with some purpose as he walked by the young men, both of whom were well dressed.

Laughing, one of the young men shouted back at him; “Hey do you remember me?”

“Yeah.”

“Really? Who am I?’

“You!”

I’m not sure this particular individual knew he won that exchange, but the two men mocking him sure did.

TikTok II

29 Tuesday Dec 2020

Posted by in General

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So, I am still on TikTok. It’s actually kinda fun. In the native language, I guess I am mostly on ‘political TikTok, but I pretty much talk about whatever I feel like at the moment, just like I do here. I don’t dance though; that does not happen.

It’s an interesting challenge, trying to make a point in 1 minute or less.

Ironically, I am experiencing this constraint as a sense that the format is too long. See, I’ve never prepared my speeches or classroom lessons on a word-for-word basis. Some technical points, sure, I spell them out precisely and read them off a note, but most of my public speaking is off the top of my head. I have a general script in mind and improvise my way through the details. If I feel like I flubbed a point, I just take a minute to restate it. That’s what I normally do. With only 1 minute per video, however, that just isn’t an option. So, every word counts. The trouble is that I can’t seem to speak for 1 whole minute without screwing something up. So, the fact that I have only 1 minute means I have to make it through a whole minute. Oh the paradox!

So, Moni comes up wondering what I’m mad about. It’s my own fumbling tongue.

Yes, I know, you can record a TikTok in segments. I still think the better vids are all-in-one takes, and anyhow, I like the challenge. …except when I flubbed it for the umpteenth time in a row.

Anyway, one thing I do not like about TikTok is the lack of any useful curating features. I might be missing something, but at the moment, I don’t see any means of organizing vids and bundling them up into themes, etc. So, I am going to do that here, at least with a few selected vids. Yes, Isome of these may appear in more than one category. I plan add to this page from time to time, unless I wake up one day and say to Hell with all of it.

I am mostly doing this for myself, just to keep track of what’s what, but I sorta hope, someone finds a few of my vids amusing at least. If anyone is curious, I hope you enjoy the content.

Anyway…

Falls under the category of “Well, I thought it was funny” – My Girlfriend Fails at magnets, A Man from Nantucket, Quotidian, Confirmation Bias, Meow Wolf, Covid Hair, Unprovoked Attack on generation X, Euphemisms and Dysphemisms, I Try Not to Do This, Grass is Fluffier, I’m Negative, Trump 2020, Dunning and Kruger, My Last Wish, My Recipe for Scrambled Eggs, Lost in translation, My Hubris,

Alaska Themed Posts – The Beach at 4:30am, Susitna River, Matanuska Glacier, Whittier, Bubble-Net feeding, Sitka Sea Otter, Barter Island Bears, The Duck-In, Ward Lake, So Blue, Polar Midnight, Frozen Ocean,

Animals – The Story of Hippie Cat, Chet, A Birthday Kitten, Intruder, Bubble-Net Feeding, Sitka Sea Otter, Barter Island Bears, Christmas,

Misquotes: A Government Big Enough, A Free People, Trump Didn’t, In matters of Style, The democracy shall cease to exist,

Critical Thinking – Whataboutism, Stupid Questions, Emotions, Authority of the Dictionary, Fixing Trump, Facts and Feelings, Conspiracy Porn, The Race-Card Card,

Education – Cold Reading the Textbook, Study Questions for Winter, Keywords, Debunkitation Failure, Intimidation Check,

RPG Gaming – A Holy Sword, Witchcraft, Witchcraft II, An Evil Paladin, The Story of Bob, A Double Crit, Old School Gamer,

History Happens – Confederate Statues, Study Questions for Winter, Debunkitation Failure, Custer’s Critics, Treaty Rights, The Duck-In, Ward Lake, United Fruit, Unsolicited History Lessons, Religious Freedoms,

Fricking Donald Trump – Trump’s Wall, Euphemisms and Dysphemisms, Whataboutism, Trump’s Lies, Independence Malice, Right Wing Patriotism, Who Told Me to hate Trump, Trump and Truth, Trump Versus the Handicapped, Deplorables on Obama, Trump’s Accomplices, About Megyn Kelly, Trump Didn’t, Trump 2020, Fixing Trump, Socialist Healthcare, Trump’s Healthcare Plan. Damnit Obama, Character Matters (Sometimes), Trump Loves Him Some Stats, The Boy Who Cried Fake News, Until the Fat Man Takes his Hands off the Nuclear Codes, Couch Potato With a Phone, Nathan Poe’s Election, Election Fraud, An Illegitimate President, When Trump Realized He Lost, Jill Biden’s Doctorate,

Other Politics – Flip Wilson, Healthcare Elasticity, Church State Superman, Confederate Statues, Mort’s Cigaerette, A Morbid Thought on Climate Change, Climate Change and Externalities, All Lives Matter, Goddammit Soros, republic versus democracy, Priming for War, Still Your president, Political Christians, Citizenship and Rights, Alibi Buddies, Facts and Feelings, Weaponization of the First Amendment, Rosa Parks and Guns, The Electoral College, Electoral College II, Negligence as Principle, White Privilege Edition, The Race-Card Card, Gun Control Curious, Religious Freedoms,

Religion and the lack thereof – Flip Wilson, Church State Superman, Hating God, Prayer Meme, Belief as a Choice, “atheism”, Political Christians, Prayer of an Atheist, Weaponization of the First Amendment, Happy Holidays, The True Spirit of Christmas, Cartoon Bible,

People seemed to like these ones – Independence Malice, Who Told Me to Hate Trump*, Trump Versus the Handicapped, Deplorables on Obama, Trump’s Accomplices, Trump’s Healthcare Plan,

* This is my most popular video to date.

(Last Updated – 12/29/20)

A Late Night Conversation

01 Sunday Sep 2019

Posted by in General

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Elaborate ScenelMoni: honey if a man shot at me and I died, would you avenge me.

Me: mmmm …maybe.

(Whack!)

Moni: you wouldn’t avenge me?

Me: I’d step in front of the bullet.

Moni: Awe!

…

Moni: But suppose you don’t get there in time, would you avenge me?

Me: What did you do to this guy anyway?

(WHACK!)

A Joke from a Bygone Era

06 Thursday Jun 2019

Posted by in General

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My father served in three wars. He didn’t see action until Korea and Vietnam, but like so many young men from his generation, on graduating from high school, Dad signed up for service in World War II. He  spent the balance of that war as as an airplane mechanic working on Corsairs.

Dad had plenty of war stories to share at the dinner table. He had more stories from boot camp, then anything else, which is saying something, because his actual war stories were pretty amazing. Of course, Dad spared us the worst of it. Being the youngest, I was probably spared more detail than my siblings (though I did know what every one of the weapons in my green soldier pack could do by the age of five).

Sometimes, Dad would just tell jokes. Jokes he and his buddies had swapped over the years. I remember one of them. It seems so corny now, but I used to laugh and laugh. It was definitely my favorite. I’m sure, a lot will be lost in translation here, but I’ll try to convey it as best I can.

***

A young recruit shows up to boot camp late. He goes to get his gun and the man in charge tells him, he’s too late. They are all out. Not knowing what else to do, the man breaks off the end of a broom stick and says; “See here kid, whenever they tell you to shoot, you just point this stick at the target and yell “Bangity-bang-bang!”

Kid says ‘okay’, but what about a bayonet?

Guy takes one straw from the end and ties it to the end of the stick and says; “Okay, so whenever they tell you to stab something, you just point the stick like so and yell “stabbity-stab-stab!”

So the kid goes all the way through boot camp that way. He thinks he might have the idea, but he’s really hoping he’ll get the real thing soon.

Only he doesn’t. The kid’s unit gets rushed out for the invasion, and he gets all the way to Normandy and he’s still got his broom-stick in place of a gun. The kid tries to tell somebody, but they just push him into the landing craft. He actually storms the beach with a broomstick in his hand.

And then he sees a German (Dad, might have used a different word), and he doesn’t know what to do. the German is shooting at him. So, in desperation, the kid points the stick and says; “bangity-bang-bang!”

And the German dies.

Kid can’t believe it! But he’s surrounded by Germans, so he tries it again; “bangity-bang-bang!”

The next one goes right down.

So, the kid just keeps doing it; “bangity-bang-bang! bangity-bang-bang! bangity-bang-bang! bangity-bang-bang!”

…and the German soldiers go down every time.

He storms a German machine gun nest and kills a bunch of them saying “bangity-bang-bang!” Then one charges at him. He doesn’t know what else to do so he points the end of the broom-stick at him and yells; “stabbity-stab-stab!” The guy falls right down.

So the kid just keeps going, all through D-Day; “bangity-bang-bang! bangity-bang-bang! bangity-bang-bang! bangity-bang-bang!”

And the Germans just keep right on falling down.

Except this one big guy.

That one German just keeps coming.

The kid points his stick and shouts; “bangity-bang-bang!”

The German keeps coming.

The kid points the stick at him up close and yells; “stabbity-stab-stab!”

And the German just walks right over him.

And as he does, the kid hears “tankity-tank-tank!”

 

Mothers Can be Mortifying

12 Sunday May 2019

Posted by in Childhood

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DadinuniformwithMomYep, Mothers can be damned embarrassing.

That’s what I was thinking one day, sitting in the back seat as my father drove us about town. I think I was 13 or 14. A couple of teenage girls had cut us off. Apparently, they couldn’t forgive us for being the butt-end of their own butt-hole moment. So, naturally we got a middle finger.

It was shortly after that that I wished I had been raised by someone on the other side of the world.

See, Mom decided to respond in kind. I don’t know if she just didn’t know how it was done or if she just couldn’t bring herself to do it right. Either way, mother proceeded to flip her index finger right at these two.

Dad smirked.

I wanted to crawl into a hole and die. Better yet, I wanted to have never been born in the first place. Oh my God! How on earth can I be expected to endure this?

I could only hope these girls didn’t recognize me. Did we know each other? That would be worse still. I ruled out crawling under the seat as a bit too conspicuous, and anyway, I was still mad at the girls for nearly causing an accident. My anger didn’t outweigh my embarrassment, but the two feelings together were doing battle for control of my soul, leaving me temporarily paralyzed. I could only stare in horror at the scene unfolding in front of me.

…as my mother decided to raise her other index finger at them too.

I think I actually did try to die at that moment. I tried to will myself into oblivion, not that it worked. I just went right on living (dammit anyhow!) and so I had to watch my mother flipping two non-birds at these two teenage girls.

Dad just laughed.

I thought about jumping out of the car.

And that’s when things got really weird!

Somewhere in here Mom became aware of the fact that she was doing something silly. So did she stop? Of course not. Instead she decided to add her feet to the performance. She stuck both of them right up on the dashboard and pushed her fists up over them, each with her index finger still raised at the two impudent little girls. I really didn’t think she was that limber, but she managed!

Dad was beside himself with glee.

Mom began laughing too.

…and somewhere in that moment, I gave up on trying to will myself to die and decided instead to laugh along with them. We kept laughing long after the girls turned off on another road and traveled out of our lives forever. We laughed all the way to my sister’s home, and for some time after explaining it to her.

…and so many times ever since.

So, yeah, Moms can be mortifying.

And sometimes that can be pretty cool.

Memo to Coach Everyman

09 Monday Jul 2018

Posted by in Politics

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To: Coach Everyman

From: Principal Stiffton, Everytown Public High School, USA

Re: Locker Room Talk

I wanted to follow up on our conversation earlier this afternoon and share with you a few of the parental concerns brought to my attention earlier this week. I have already spoken to the parties in question. I have tried to assure them that the conversations occurring in our locker room are much as they would be for any other intermural sports teams in the country. Unfortunately, several parties are simply not satisfied. They seem quite certain that our games have become the site for talk they regard they regard as dangerous and possibly harmful to the moral development of their young children. No. They don’t actually want you to do anything about it. They just want to make sure these conversations are limited to the context of the locker room.

The sexual content, you already know about, but again, I must tell you that none of the parties in question have called for any investigations. We don’t need to know if any of the activities your football players bragged about during the post-homecoming celebrations actually did take place. The parents are actually quite relieved to find that such specific sexual activities were not discussed in the context of Sex Ed classes. Please discontinue any ongoing inquiries regarding specific allegations made about or by your players. What happens in the locker room, according to these parents, should stay in the locker room.

A couple of new concerns have been raised. Mr. and Mrs. Smith are apparently quite convinced that you have been holding seminars on global warming during the pregame briefings. I really tried to assure them that you are only a part-time science teacher and that you would of course reserve such discussions for the classroom. On the contrary, the Smiths insisted that such conversations were fine so long as they occurred only during the weigh-ins for the wrestling team. In fact, they only brought it up to assure me that this was the perfect place for such matters. The other concerned parents all assured me that they were in agreement with the Smiths.

Actually, “agreeance” was the term the parents used, and one of the words in “Climate Change” was consistently replaced with some form of scatological reference. Nevertheless, all the parents in question found the topic quite appropriate for the locker room. They just don’t want you to bring the subject up in any of your actual courses.

Many of the concerned parents had much the same views regarding the subject of evolution. You may answer any of the questions Billy Johnson asks about that subject you like, they assure me, providing you limit your answers to the half-time pep talks occurring during the basketball games. If other students must hear the answers to these questions, our parents parents insist it must not be in any actual classroom. Also, they would prefer that you leave textbooks out of it. If any literature must be consulted, it should be op-ed pieces authored by economist and sundry pundits. You may present all sides of the issue, of course, but our parents would very much prefer that you keep the science out of it, and that you limit these talks to the locker room. We don’t want anymore incidents like the graph you presented in home-room last week.

You needn’t worry yourself about the subjects of genocide, slavery, or imperialism. It is quite all right if the baseball team discuss these things during practice, or more specifically, before and after practice. The group of concerned parents just wanted me to make sure these conversations were not coming up in the history classes. I will speak with Mrs. Jones about this; she has been warned twice already, and I am really getting quite frustrated with her over the whole thing, but that is no concern of yours. To the best of my knowledge, our parents have no concerns regarding your own role in the whole ‘structural racism’ incident. I told them that you would never encourage students to use such words off the field or outside the locker room, and they have accepted my word on the matter.

Asked if they had any concerns about Russian meddling in American elections, the gutting of environmental regulations, understaffing at the state department or the establishment of internment camps on U.S. soil, none of the parents in question seemed to know what I was talking about. I don’t believe any of them have been in a locker room within the last few months, and they do not seem to have encountered the subjects in any of their chosen news sources. Suffice to say that our parents have no concerns about any of these subjects. Your players are free to bring up any of these matters during the course of game preparations. You might ask them not to raise any of these topics in any of their classes, however, and perhaps to avoid discussing them with any of the adults in their families. I think morning calisthenics will offer you the perfect opportunity to warn your players about such matters, but the time and place for that discussion is entirely up to you.

This is really the extent of the matter as far as I understand it. Again, please cease any active investigations into the rumors you have been hearing and do make a point to help the students understand what should and shouldn’t be shared with their parents. Some of the things we talk about in school just isn’t fit for fragile ears. In any event, please remember that what is said in the locker room must stay in the locker room.

That is all.