The Future (?) of Reading

With the Apple iSlate (?) schedule to come out at the end of the month, I digitally conceived what it may look like for the future of reading. Enjoy:

Prepared to Be Annoyed and Possibly Humored

I am sick and tired of receiving Facebook tags about doing the list of 25 interesting things/facts/etc about me; my wife tagged me and said it was rude that I had not did the list, and, as is always the case, I decided to do as she said out of both fear and love.

Instead of posting this on Facebook and further annoying 25 more people with tags, I decided to just tag everyone who reads this blog—the potential for annoyance is much greater this way. So tag! Below are my 25 Things random things about me list, now you have to comment below what your list. If you don’t a butterfly will die.

I was a "No Nude" in junior high and high school; I used a medical excuse to get out of showering in gym.

I am a sucker for conspiracy theories.

I sometimes wait for my wife to go to school, and then turn on Tyra Banks and eat ice cream while yelling at abusive cheating husbands and boyfriends afraid of commitment.

Until I was 13, I believed I was the only person in the world who knew how many licks it took to get to the tootsie roll center of a tootsie pop.

I poked my eye at the end of classroom showing of Old Yeller in fifth grade, so girls would think I was sensitive.

I have never drank any alcohol (or eaten food prepared with rum or cooking wine), although once when I was twelve I sipped wine at a wedding and promptly spit it out.

For a period of about two years, I believed if I drank alcohol or cut my hair I would lose my secret powers.

I have no secret powers.

I take advantage of drunk friends.

I like to cheat on video games.

In the hospital, under heavy medication, I watched Gilligan's Island because I believed Gilligan was my supreme leader.

I wrote a fiction novel about American terrorist when I was 12.

The first story I wrote was when I was 11--it was about a woman who accidentally chopped off her hand while cutting vegetables in the kitchen, and the hand came back to life to kill her. I presented the story to my mom as a gift.

I like to garden.

When I was 8, my best friend and I would sneak into his sister’s room and undress her Barbie’s clothes so we knew what naked girls looked like.

If I could visit any place in the world, it would be India.

I wrote over 500 pages of fiction my junior and senior year of high school.

In junior high, I begged my parents for $120 shoes because I sincerely believed I would become a NBA star the second I put them on.

I have thousands of Desert Storm trading cards somewhere in my parent’s attic.

I have Steve Urkel's autograph.

I once sent in a video to America's Funniest Home Videos that showed off my imitations of Steve Urkel.

I saw a woman dead in the street, seconds after she had been hit by a car.

I rubbed my hand against my deceased great grandma's cheek partly to see what a dead person felt like.

The first cassette I remember buying was the soundtrack to the motion picture "Willow."

I am uncomfortable being naked in front of my dog and/or fish.

Is Twitter Making Us Dumberer?

It used to be we had blogs to release our grammatically incorrect thoughts and ramblings; they weren't exactly the best thing to the English language, but at least they usually had some substance and occasionally made us think. True, they have made teens dumb, but it's not like they weren't heading in that direction anyway, so I don't think blogs were completely to blame.

Now, however, there is new cause for alarm with the increasingly popular website Twitter. For every new person who subscribes to Twitter the message gets louder: it is socially acceptable to talk in a fragmented txt message language that only sometimes makes sense (Shaq's Twitter account is a perfect example of this).

Like most people, I firmly believe that it's better to jump on a socially irresponsible bandwagon, then be left in the dust, so I joined Twitter.

Now, however, I wonder if perhaps Twitter makes us dumb enough? Surely, there has to be something out there that is a dumbed down version of Twitter for people who can't stand the thought of reading 140 characters?

Can someone please create an emoticon version of Twitter where users are allowed to only post 5 characters? Can someone please make us dumberer?

To help you get started, here's 9 emoticons that should put on the right path:

:-) Happy
:D Laugh
=O Shocked
:-( Sad
:P Tongue Out
:/ Annoyed
;-) Wink
<3 Love :? Confused

In Their Breed

One final humor article I've been working on...it's a work in progress.

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My grandpa electrocuted me when I was ten.

Grandpa had installed an electric fence around his prized garden several weeks prior. His dog had knocked over all his previous non-electrical fences and tore up his garden, so Grandpa finally decided to pull a Dylan and go electric.

The fence was short and easy to climb over, but had enough vaults going through the wires to knock his dog back several feet when it tried to knock it over.

Grandpa was always amused when he saw the dog attack the fence, and then go flying backwards with a yelp. “Dog needs to know his place,” he would justify to any of the shocked onlookers.

The day he electrocuted me, I was playing ball in the yard with my brother and a couple of our cousins. The ball was hit over the fence, and I was chosen as the one who would have to retrieve it.

Grandpa was in the yard watching the game and smoking his pipe. “The ball went over the fence, Grandpa.” I said pointing.

Grandpa smiled, reached for the fences switch, and turned it off. “Go get your ball, boy.”
I ran to the garden, climbed the short fence, retrieved the ball, and tossed it back to my brother. I waved to Grandpa, who smiled and puffed on his pipe.

I was halfway over the fence when Grandpa turned it back on and sent volts all through my body. I fell to ground crying in pain.

My parents came outside immediately. “What’s wrong?!” My mom shouted.

“I think Grandpa just electrocuted Scotty.” My brother said confused.

My parents ran to me and helped me to my feet. When my mom knew it was nothing serious, she went to my Grandpa and said, “What’s wrong with you, you sick old man. That’s your grandson you just electrocuted.”

“Little shock won't kill him,” Grandpa said with a smirk, “Boy needs to know his place.”
I looked at Grandpa when he said this; it was the same thing he always said when the dog was electrocuted. Grandpa looked at me, and seemed at first to have pity, but then took a puff on his pipe and smiled, “That will teach you to go in my garden, boy.”

At this my brother started laughing.

For me, this was just the start of seeing what diabetes does to a person’s mind.

Christians Are Slobs...and it May Be Biblical

Not to long ago, Thomas Kimble, a co-worker and self proclaimed Baptist invited me to his home for lunch. I had never been there before, but he was always describing it along with all the improvements he had did or was planning on doing to it, and shared boastful pictures of how great it looked now that he fixed it up. The home seemed normal from the outside, when I came to lunch that day—much as it had looked in the pictures he had shown me.. It looked well kept.

The roof, windows and paint all seemed to be new; the lawn and flowerbed were bright and inviting. Then I went inside. I was appalled at the mere sight of the inside from the moment that Thomas cheerfully opened the door and welcomed me to his home with a firm handshake. I realized that sometimes people run short on time and don’t have time to clean—that’s all perfectly understandable—but Thomas’s house was…uncalled for. The carpet, which had to have been installed sometime before Nixon was elected into office, was stained in several places; there was a hole in one of the walls big enough to stick my head into; the dinning room table was covered with dirty dishes, and the couch was missing a cushion. And worse was the smell of mildew that hit you like a gush of wind when you entered the house.

Then Thomas spoke. I expected him to say something along the lines of, “You know how I told you I had no kids? I lied. I actually have fourteen of them—fifteen if you count the ape that frequently visits the place.” But instead he said, completely unashamed of his lifestyle, “Welcome to my humble home.”

I didn’t speak for several seconds, being still stunned by the overt crudeness of the home. I felt embarrassed for him. Had I known that this was the way he lived, I would have offered we eat at a restaurant. Then I remembered that he had offered this, and Thomas insisted that we go to this place to eat—he was proud of it for reason only insanity can explain. Finally I said, “This is…this is quite some home you have, Thomas.” He smiled widely, “It’s not much, but it gives us shelter.” He looked at the kitchen and smiled, “Well how about some lunch?”

I could hardly imagine where we might eat, but did my best to hide my astonishment. “I’m starved.”

Thomas’s lunch could have passed for something straight out of a gourmet restaurant. He said it had taken him all morning to make, and I believed him. The food on the plate looked like Thomas believed that serving food was a form of artwork. There was chicken glazed in a homemade orange marmalade sauce, a white custard, and assorted fruits; each were proportionally organized on the plate. I was surprised that someone would spend so much time on cooking and so little time keeping the house up. After seeing the house, I half expected to have barbeque rats for lunch.

Thomas led me outside after lunch to his patio, which seemed a haven for bird crap. The entire patio seemed to be a collection of unfinished projects: a half-finished rock pathway that stopped in the middle of dirt, weeds that went past my ankles, a half built firepit, a un-built swing set, a four foot hole in the middle of the yard, and two tree stumps with poles sticking out. It was not a pretty sight, but at least the mildew smell was gone.

As we ate, I heard the front door open and close and Thomas said in a tone that I think was supposed to impress me, “That must be the housecleaner?”

“The housecleaner?” I tried not to sound too surprised. I wanted to laugh and mockingly say, “My goodness, Thomas—what on Earth does the woman clean?”

“My wife just doesn’t have time to do it herself. We have a little deal, she can have a housecleaner once a week if I can have a gardener to mow the lawn.”

I watched the housecleaner curiously, trying to understand what her job tasks were. I watched as she dusted, moved the plates from the table to the sink, vacuumed, and wash the windows. I wondered if she knew it would take days to make a single dent in the house. I wanted badly for Thomas to say something about the disarray of the house. Something to say he at least acknowledged it and felt some remorse that he had let it get this out of hand. Instead he did the complete opposite. He bragged about it. “It’s funny,” Thomas explained, “I used to be a complete neat freak until I became a Baptist.”

“Is that so?” He nodded.

“After I became a member, a friend of mine—another Baptist—told me at a little get together we had at our house that him and his wife had been in a Bible study and someone read off a verse that proved Christians didn’t have to clean.”

“Where does it say it?”

“I don’t know, but a few weeks later my pastor quoted it as well. I think he most have been quoting from Jesus.”

“And it’s in the Bible?”

“Honest to God it is—I’m sure it must be a gospel.”

“Really.” I wasn’t a Bible scholar, but I thought my four years studying comparative religion had prepared me for at least some of the insanity that religion tends to throw out. This was complete news to me. I suppose I didn’t really care if it was Biblical or not. If he said it was, then it must be. It sounded like it could be, and he probably knew more about the stuff then me, so I left it at that.

Mom has always been a neat freak. If company was coming over, then not only did the living room and kitchen have to be cleared, but also the bedrooms, the garage, and the attic. There would always be the evil glance if the bed wasn’t made five minutes before the company was slated to arrive.

I was always a little disappoint that the company didn’t inspect the bedrooms and garage or even the attic. All the hard work for nothing.

Mom is a Christian, and I always imagined that part of the reason the house was always so neat was because this is what a good Christian wife was supposed to do. Growing up most of my friends were not Christian and I always wrongly assumed had I had a Christian friend their house would be neat, and had I ventured into the attic it would be neat also. I was wrong—dead wrong. I became ever more curious about the interior design of Christian homes when I left Thomas’s house.

I began making a point of making conversation with Christians, and making excuses to visit their homes. “You have a patio room? I’ve been considering putting one in my home for quite sometime—I don’t suppose you’d let me take a peak?” “You had a new kitchen countertop put in? I don’t suppose you’d let me come over and see it’s fine craftsmanship?” “You had your bathroom redone? I just have to see it—how’s Thursday at 3:00 sound?”

Some Christians I knew had Bible studies at their house, and I began attending just to get a look inside. There was Ron Heller, the Methodist, whose home was surprisingly well kept, but at closer look had more dust than a house in the Sahara that had just had a sandstorm come in the front door and leave the back. His wife, Sue, walked around the house with watery eyes and a stuffed up nose complaining about how her “allergies had been so bad lately.” The thought of the collected dust as a reason for this didn’t seem to cross her mind. There was Linda and Larry Henderson, the Greek Orthodox couple, who decorated every square inch of their walls with file cabinets, bookcases, chairs and plants. I was pretty certain that their walls were painted a pastel color, but this fact could not be verified, as their walls could only be seen in one or two places. There was Christine Tyler, who went to a non-denominational church twice a week, who seemed confused about colors. Two of the walls in the living room were different colors; the bathroom wall was bright purple, and the bedroom walls had had all the paint scraped off because she was “planning to paint it sometime next year.” Her carpet was no better; it was stained all over and in one place it had actually been lifted up and removed because, “I was thinking of putting in a new carpet, but then changed my mind.” And of course there was the Baptist, Thomas Kimble.

Baptist, I have learned, are the most untidy of them all. The common theme in most of these homes was the “unfinished project”—the spa in the bathroom that had been put in, but not had the plumbing installed to it; the whole in the ground that was dug out for a pond that had never been put in; the flowerbed with no flowers. The more homes I visited, the more I started to see trends—not just in Christian homes. It was more specific than that. Different denominations had different degrees of messiness. I got to the point were I could tell what denomination a person was by the mere disarray of their homes. Lutheran’s were pretty neat, but decorated their houses oddly. Episcopalians have lots of clutter; there homes tend to have papers spread out in very odd places (on top of fish tanks, in dog bowls, pretty much everywhere); they also had boxes, shelves, books, magazine, accompanying every spare place on the wall. It seemed the more evangelical a person was, the more messy their house became.

What has kept mom neat even though she remains Christian? I’ve wondered that quite a bit lately, and have come to only one conclusion: no one ever told mom she was allowed to be messy—it is Biblical. She’s one of those rare breeds that never quite fit in. She’s been to messy Christian homes in the past, but I don’t believe she ever put two and two together.

Remedial Me

This is the beginning of something longer I've been working on...

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I failed the high school reading test—that sums up my entire high school education, but my life in remedial education began much earlier.

I was in third grade when they pulled me away from my class for the first time because I was special. I wasn’t special in the sense that I had to take the short bus to school, although that would have been fun. I still went to normal school. I only went to special school for an hour each day.

My first day in the special class, the teacher, a large stocky woman with graying and balding hair named Mrs. Wade, said, “I’m here to help you learn so you can catch up with the rest of your class. Does that sound okay?”

I nodded. Her are jiggled like Jell-O every time she moved even just a little; something about this impressed me.

“Good.” I could tell she was thinking by the way the wrinkles on her forehead grew more intense. She looked down at her desk, which was covered with entertainment gossip magazines, potato chip wrappers, and cough drops; buried beneath what appeared to be days of food was an attendance book; she moved aside the wrappers, creating a mountain of junk food, made a checkmark next to my name, and then looked back up at me and asked, “Do you like paper airplanes?”

I nodded again, this time more excited.

She seemed relived. “Today the rest of the class is making paper airplanes. Don't worry if you can't make one that flies. It’s more important to color it pretty. Can you color?”
I was too young to question how making, or rather coloring, paper airplanes would put me on the fast track to being in normal class again, but had I been old enough, I probably still would have kept quiet.

“Go join the other kids then.” She pointed at a round table on the far opposite corner of her desk where four other kids sat.

The other kids were quiet. They didn’t make eye contact when I said hi. I recognized all them as faces I had seen at one point on the playground.

Everyone seemed to have a different skill to their coloring. Jim colored with paste, because the teacher taken away his crayons; Tran, who didn't speak English, had a huge bucket of crayons that I’m pretty sure was imported from China; Tony scribbled so hard that his paper began to rip; Silvia, the only girl, dotted her airplane with flowers.

Silvia was the only one amongst us who didn’t seemed to fit the mold of other special kids. She was dressed in an ironed dress, where the others had clothes not only wrinkled, but also bugger stained. Her coloring was neat and in the lines. She also smelt pretty.

Then Silvia talked.

“Papa Smurf makes my oatmeal with jam?” She said to me when she finished coloring.

“Excuse me?”

“Papa Smurf makes my oatmeal with jam?” She said more confidently, and then began to laugh hysterically.

“Silvia!” Mrs. Wade yelled, “Quiet down or you'll be coloring with paste again.”
Silvia looked at her crayon sad, and then hit her head on the table and appeared to be taking a nap. “She’s so mean.” She quietly mumbled with her head still down.

I finished my airplane in less than five minutes. It was a sloppy coloring job that followed no patterns or even attempted to stay in the lines, but I was proud of it and was even certain it could fly. “I'm done!” I said dangling it in front of Mrs. Wade’s eyes, “What should I do now?”

Mrs. Wade was reading one of her gossip magazine, and was irritated at my presence.

“Why don't you make one for Jim now? And if you finish that just keep making them until I dismiss you back to your class. How's that.”

“Okay.” She didn’t seem as nice as when I meant her minutes ago.

When I sat down, Jim whispered to me, “I like Star Trek.” The teacher yelled at him to quiet down because she was reading something important. I was surprised she could even hear him.

I made a paper airplane for Jim, and wrote Star Trek on the wing, and then gave it to Jim. He held it proudly and said, “It looks just like the Star Trek Enterprise.” It looked like any other paper airplane, but I guess if you used your imagination you could say it looked like anything.

Can You Fart on a Cop?

CNN reported today the following as one of their top U.S. stories. Guess it was a slow news day! It's a pretty slow day here to...luckily I have the fine people at CNN to entertain me with stories about why it is not battery to fart on a cop.

This Day in History: Throughout the Year 2033...

Here's an oldie I did a few years ago for The Door...

Originally published in the March/April 2006 (Issue #204) of The Wittenburg Door(http://archives.wittenburgdoor.com/archives/2033.html)

Twentieth anniversary of the birth of the first cloned apocalypse horse.

Oprah Winfrey, founder of the cultic religion, The Church of Oprah, dies; autopsy reveals she was really a white man.

U2's reunion concert for victims of Galactic war raises 10 trillion euros for orphan aliens.

Value of dollar purportedly inflated; 9 trillion dollars equals 1 euro.

Words are replaced by images. Expert linguist, Rick Warren, announces that God translated to image equals[?].

The last Bible is printed, which brings an end to book publication.

A mysterious illness sweeping the Third World provokes a worldwide call for help. Christians respond by raising $80 trillion to repurpose and distribute milllions of leftover DVD copies of the Jesus film.

Aliens on Jupiter declare Scientology the planet's national religion. An aging Tom Cruise decides to move to Jupiter with his child Ampersand; arrives just after the first Christian missionaries, who have infected the aliens with the common cold, and killed off the entire population. Tom Cruise is left stranded with no food, water or toothpaste.

Tenth anniversary of the day all of godly Christians mysteriously disappeared.

Tim LaHaye named the most influential person found in the Bible.

Goth rocker Marilyn Manson ends years of speculation, when he announces on his deathbed that he had, indeed, been a Christian all along, and that all the angel of death stuff had really been a failed evangelical attempt at reaching out to devil worshipers.

Cardinal Mel Gibson admits that spending all the money he made on The Passion of the Christ to remake Ben Hur in Latin with Chinese subtitles probably wasn't such a good idea after all.

Cardinal Mel Gibson becomes the first actor to become pope (not counting the 2016 election when everyone nominated Bill Cosby as a gag), and is immediately criticized for saying he might be wrong about something. Gibson chooses the holy name, Pope Pedro II.

After watching the live action Smurf movie, Pope Pedro II orders that the first order of holy business will be a holy war on the Smurf people. Vatican officials announce in a reported story that there will no longer be movie night for the new pope.

Because of a translation error in the New Deconstructed Living Bible, many pastors replaced communion bread with cheese.

The long-running TV show The Simpsons named by ChristianityTM (a parent of the Wal-Mart Corporation of China) as the greatest Christian show of the century. Fox announces it has renewed its contract with the show for nine more seasons.

Tim, In Review

Meet Tim. Typical computer programmer by day, humor writer by night.

Tim is a fellow Wittenburg Door writer, and has even did something I have not--wrote one of their cover stories (he did the one with the Napoleon Dynamite cover).

Tim is also doing his best to start up a blog that highlights some of his humor writing. You can read it here: http://timaki.wordpress.com/

He's still trying to figure out what the blog is about, but he's doing a good job so far. His Genesis 1 for Atheist entry is excellent. Check him out and add him to your blog roll while you're at it.

Happy Father's Day!

Here's one for all the Dad's! Happy Father's Day!

Weekend Funnies

Weekend Funnies

Is Big Brother (Google) Watching You?

Do you ever get the feeling that one day Google will control everything? This spoof video probably won't make you feel better about things...

Enjoy!

Weekend Funnies

Weekend Funnies

Happy Mother's Day!

They Sell What On Amazon?

Have you ever been on Amazon and wondered why are they selling that? You are not alone. Something, perhaps boredom, made me want to compile a short list of the weirdest things I've found. Some make me say "why are they selling that" while others make me say "why are people buying that?" Most do both. And I'm not even going into all the weird stuff lonely men tend to buy on Amazon (although some of these obviously fall into that category). Enjoy and view at the risk of offending the person next to you...


Weener Kleener Soap...make sure and buy this lovely gift with the Butt Face Soap!


Wedding Chapel


JL421 Badonkadonk Land Cruiser/Tank


Nose Pencil Sharpener


Heinz Spotted Dick Pudding...this stuff is actually REALLY good if it's made right.


Infaltable Wife


Nearly Me Gaff


Bhutan: A Visual Odyssey Across the Last Himalayan Kingdom


Dr. John's Famous Pee Pee


EA Brevita Branded Drive-Thru Unit


Venison Carcass