Category Archives: Funny Stuff

Mia, Mia, Mia

This morning I received the following email from my lovely wife Celeste.  It was sent after she'd already dealt with an outrageous billing issue with our former insurance company and had left our dog Mia to her own devices for two hours this morning.  Luckily Mia was confined to the family room, sun room and kitchen or who knows what she might have done. Here's the text of the email:

Subject: Mia. Mia. Mia.
 
On top of the Blue Cross thing now there's the Mia thing. Or should I say THINGS?
 
1. Pee on the kitchen floor.
2. Notebook paper chewed up like a shredder on the family room floor.
3. An entire bag of tortilla strips in a pile in the sunroom (a rather neat and tidy pile by the way).
4. My knitting. Oh yes this is wonderful. The once neatly wound ball of yarn is now a bird's nest.
5. Did I mention that my knitting needles are now toothpicks and splinters?
6. Who knew a baseball was made of so many little white strings?
7. She obviously doesn't like the taste of the English muffins because they made it from the butcher block in the kitchen to the back door of the sunroom unscathed.
8. Erin's celestial orb (the pretty silver thing with colorful beads that can be made into various shapes) is not in working order any more.
9. And the crowning glory? A big pile of poop.

Celeste


I dare not laugh lest I be forced to live the rest of my life sans one limb or another.

School Pride

Over the years I've not been shy about declaring my pride as an alum of mighty George Mason University.  You know, the school that knocked the Heels out of the 2006 NCAA tournament?  My alma mater was so unaccustomed to the spotlight that they had to scramble to write a fight song for the run to the Final Four. Well, Mason's been busy building its national reputation for years by hiring big name faculty and going on a building spree that has turned it into one of the best campuses in the mid-Atlantic region, if not the east coast.  Now Mason is set to make the national scene again for a reason I don't think anyone could have anticipated: last week the student body elected a drag queen as homecoming queen.  From The Washington Post:

Spend time with George Mason University senior Ryan Allen and it's clear why he's a Big Man on Campus. He wears size 12 pumps.

Allen, who is gay and performs as a popular drag queen at local clubs, assumed the title of Ms. Mason. He was wearing a green-and-gold bow, sewn for him by the theater department costume's shop, that was visible even from the cheap seats, a sequined top, a black skirt and heels. Ricky Malebranche, a junior from Woodbridge, was named Mr. Mason…

Allen said he decided to enter the Ms. Mason contest this year as a joke, a last hurrah for his senior year. Soon he had donned a silver bra and zebra-print pants and was lip-syncing to Britney Spears's "Womanizer" at the qualifying pageant Feb. 9, overseen by Miss Virginia 2009. Competitors included a government and politics major from Chesapeake and a Chi Omega sorority member who told the school newspaper she should win because "I have pride in Mason to the point where my towels are green and gold."

Allen's drag name?  Reann Ballslee. 

Honestly you can't make this stuff up.  Here's a fun thought for you: what would happen if a drag queen tried to run for homecoming queen at Wake?  What would happen if he won?

Random News: W Offered Job as Greeter; Laid Off Wall Streeters Offered Lifeguard Jobs; Mom Assaults Son’s Middle School Coach; More Stories

I figured we could all use a little Random News today.  The following items came from various feeds in my Google Reader:

That's it for this edition of Random News.

How to Be a Ripped Daddy

AMR, Winston-Salem's stay at home uber-blogger, is sharing a video called Stay at Home Daddy Workout that is hysterical. The video's all about a guy using his kids as weights, but the real humor is in his pseudo-fitness-guru lingo.  Sadly this kind of hit home with me because the first time I ever threw out my back was 15 years ago when our oldest was a toddler and I was doing leg lifts with him on my feet (don't ask). 

From XBox to Atari

Remember when George W. Bush's staff moved into the White House in 2001 and found that the Clinton staffers had acted like a bunch of boobs and done things like remove all the "w"s from the computer keyboards and glued desk drawers shut?  Bush staffers didn't do anything like that, at least not that I've heard of, but Obama's staff is discovering that being on the government payroll doesn't guarantee that you'll get to work with cutting edge or even adequate technology.  From a Washington Post story:

One member of the White House new-media team came to work on Tuesday, right after the swearing-in ceremony, only to discover that it was impossible to know which programs could be updated, or even which computers could be used for which purposes. The team members, accustomed to working on Macintoshes, found computers outfitted with six-year-old versions of Microsoft software. Laptops were scarce, assigned to only a few people in the West Wing. The team was left struggling to put closed captions on online videos…

"It is kind of like going from an Xbox to an Atari," Obama spokesman Bill Burton said of his new digs.

Honestly I'm surprised they inherited Atari and not Pong.

Businessman Uses His Sign to Call City Leaders Names

Since joining my town's Zoning Board of Adjustment I've heard a few complaints from people about various zoning rules, but I have to say that none of those people have ever taken to calling our town leaders names on their business' signs.  In Polk City, Iowa one businessman has taken his frustration out with town leaders by using the sign in front of his business to call them names.  If you click through to the article you'll see two pictures of his sign.  On one he wrote "Our Mayor and Council Sure Are Ass—-" and on the other he wrote "Our Mayor Sure is a Lieing Little Nazi Turd."  That's what I call freedom of expression, bad spelling and all.

Holiday Smile

This really is a rough Christmas for many people so it's great when you see something unexpected that just brings a smile to your face.  My thanks to Brian Leon for pointing to the video below, which features a guy doing what I'll call "The Happy Dance" at places all around the world.  BTW, the last I checked the video had been viewed more than 14 million times. (Update: The folks at College Humor did a spoof on this called Where the Hell is Matt's Girlfriend that's a tad on the raunchy side, but I mention it because one of the locations that the fake Matt is dancing is Winston-Salem. Go figure.)

If the Wall Street Geniuses Created a National Health Insurance System

A sadly realistic take on how to finance a national health insurance program:

1. Set up a large, well capitalized hedge fund. About $5B should do it.

2. The prospectus of the fund should note its purpose is to “Seek
out profit opportunities via arbitraging inefficiencies in the markets
and health care system of the United States.”  Include standard
“Socially Conscious” fund language in clauses such as Do well by doing good.

3. Launch the fund — and promptly max out your leverage. Today’s
environment makes it difficult to go 50 to 1, but getting 10 or 20 to 1
should not be much problem.

4. Use the money to write Credit Default Swaps with a notational
value of $3 trillion dollars. The premia on these CDS should be about
10-15% or so.

5. Rollover the cash premiums — about $350 billion dollars worth —
into a national fund. Use it to buy health care insurance for all US
citizens.

6. Declare that due to current credit conditions, your unfortunately
must announce to your counter-parties that you will be defaulting on
these CDS. Note that significant amounts of this paper are held by JP
Morgan and Citi. Another trillion is held by China and Japan, with
Sovereign Wealth Funds owning the rest.

7. Send out a press release announcing “systemic risk.” Tell the
Treasury Secretary and the Federal Reserve Chief that your imminent
collapse will wreak global havoc. Apply for bailout.

The author then says just repeat the process to pay for things like global warming, school vouchers, missile defense, etc.

Wassup Redux

Not sure how I missed this until now, but it's still funny. The video below is a riff on the old Budweiser Wassup ad campaigns.  Pretty funny even if you don't like the end. Spoiler alert, it's a "vote for change/Obama" thing.