Friday Good News

Now when I am aging fast (and glad of it because I got both my Covid shots), I often lose or at least misplace things. This morning I realized I have lost my sense of humor. After looking all over the house in the places I usually misplace my glasses and/or keys, I finally did the most sensible thing. I looked on the internet to find out why it’s gone, and where I might have left it.

Fortunately, I found a website for the International Society for Humor Studies. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find anything humorous on the website, unless you consider as funny several extremely serious studies of humor which apparently preclude the researchers from being funny.

I also found several sites on Sigmund Freud and humor. I am not making this up. When you are going back to the old Comedy-Meister himself, you know you are in for real hilarity. In 1905 Freud wrote a book called Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. (My synopsis of the book: If people are unconscious when you finish the joke, the punchline was too long or the punch was spiked too hard.)

Humor is tough to pin down because we don’t all have the same taste. Some people might think this is funny: Stressing the importance of a good vocabulary, the teacher told her young charges, “Use a word ten times, and it shall be yours for life.” From somewhere in the back of the room came a small male voice chanting, “Amanda, Amanda, Amanda, Amanda, Amanda, Amanda, Amanda, Amanda, Amanda, Amanda.” OK, not many people think it’s funny, and especially not Amanda, so perhaps that proves my point, whatever it was.

Oh I remember, the point is that school provides a setting where our sense of humor was shaped, so I am revisiting school jokes in my search for my lost or misplaced humor.

The little boy wasn’t getting good marks in school, even though he really liked the young woman who was his teacher. One day he tapped his teacher on the shoulder and said, “I don’t want to scare you, Miss Kneffelcamp, but my daddy says if I don’t get better grades, somebody is going to get a spanking.” There, was that funnier? No? Not for teachers, I suppose. OK, not for me either.

Could I have left my sense of humor someplace that I no longer want to go because of the Covid restrictions? The airlines! That could be it. Maybe I left it in the overhead rack the last time I got off a flight.

Before the pandemic, a man got on a plane in first class. The flight attendant brought in a parrot and put it on the seat next to him. The man asked the parrot, “What are you doing here?” The parrot said, “My owners are billionaires. They let me go wherever I want as long as I am back by Saturday night to entertain their guests.“

After the plane got into the air, the flight attendant started serving drinks. “Hey you, dumb and ugly,” the parrot shouted at the flight attendant, “what’s the matter with you? Can’t you see I need a drink here?” She hurried over to bring a drink to the parrot. The man said, “Pardon me, ma’am, I need a drink,” but she turned away and started serving others.

The parrot shouted at the woman again, “You with the huge thighs, don’t you know I need peanuts to go with my drink?” Once again, the attendant stopped what she was doing and hurried to bring the parrot a packet of peanuts. “Pardon me, ma’am,” the man started, but she rushed back down the aisle where she had been serving before.

“I get it,” exclaimed the man to the parrot. “The squeaky wheel gets the grease. I can do this.” The man shouted toward the busy flight attendant, “Hey you, hippo lady, waddle on up here and give me a drink and do it right now.” The flight attendant nearly ran up to the cockpit. A second later, the enormous co-pilot came out. With one hand he grabbed the parrot, and with the other he yanked the man out of his seat. The co-pilot hauled them down the aisle, opened the exit door of the plane, and threw them both out.

On the way down, the parrot said to the man, You’ve got a pretty bad mouth for a guy who can’t fly.“

Was that funnier? Not really? Hoo boy, I really have lost it. Dont worry. I’ll keep looking. Did I leave it at my last doctor’s appointment? That was my urologist. No, Pat will never approve of me finding urologist jokes. Sorry, no humor in this Friday Good News.

I can be downright intolerant toward people like climate deniers and anti-vaxxers who don’t believe in science; but if I stop to think, I can understand them. Many of their ridiculous beliefs are just common sense, sort of.

Will vaccine protect me from Covid? Not necessarily. Even with two Pfizer shots, I am only 95% protected, according to scientific studies. So why would a person get a shot that won’t provide absolute protection, and will probably hurt, when that person is 100% certain that he or she might not get the virus without the shot and might get the virus even with the shot? That is common sense. I didn’t say common sense is always smart.

Think about the folks who don’t believe in evolution, despite the scientists saying that all the covid variations are evolution at work. As far as common sense goes, I can’t see any difference in viruses. If evolution were real, humans would be getting smarter. Scientific observation will confirm that’s not the case, or we would all believe in evolution. See there?

A few still believe the earth is flat. Common sense is completely on their side. Well, not completely. In Iowa the earth is flat, but in Montana it is bumpy. But if the earth were round, people on the bottom would obviously fall off. If the earth were spinning around at roughly 1000 miles an hour, we would fly off into space. Common sense.

Common sense says the sun goes around the earth, not the other way around. The Bible is very clear about that. The writer of Ecclesiastes in chapter 1, verse 5, says, “The sun rises and the sun goes down, and hurries to the place where it rises.” Well, duh. Anyone can see that. What you can’t see is the earth turning.

So far I’m being facetious about not believing science, but there are some “scientific facts” I don’t believe. Scientific classification says that a tomato is a fruit rather than a vegetable. Because of scientists, Merriam Webster defines it this way: “Any thing that grows on a plant and is the means by which that plant gets its seeds out into the world is a fruit.”

By the scientific classification method, tomatoes, bell peppers, string beans, pea pods (but not the peas “they are seeds”), jalapaῆo peppers, corn, and olives are all fruit.

Of course I don’t believe that. Tomatoes and all that other stuff except jalapaῆos taste like vegetables. Jalapaῆos must be a spice. Not facts, but common sense.

Scientific classification says Old World buffalo (Cape buffalo and water buffalo) are native to Africa and Asia. Bison are found in North America and Europe. Both bison and buffalo are in the bovidae family, but the two are not closely related.

No one in Montana believes that. I have seen buffalo in Yellowstone Park with my own eyes. I have seen buffalo on the National Bison Range near Charlo. OK, I am slipping into Trump-land where something is true if lots of other non-scientific people believe it. Face it, on some topics we are all in this together where we don’t know everything and wouldn’t much care if we did.

Of course, it doesn’t make much difference to our lives whether we think a tomato is a vegetable, or the sun goes around the earth, or bison are buffalo.

It doesn’t make any difference to our daily lives if we believe vaccines are more dangerous than non-vaccines. Unless of course we get the virus and die. Or worse, get a mild case and pass it on to kill someone’s grandparents. Then it’s deadly dumb.

Not believing that we need to do something to address climate change won’t make any difference in our lives. We could even join Montanans for Climate Change, hoping that winters for us old Montana people will get so warm we won’t even think about Arizona, and we will have beach front property on the other side of the Big Belt Mountains. Of course, hundreds of millions will die all over the world in the future if nothing is done, but we will be gone by then, so who cares?

What are we having for dessert tonight, Pat? Tomatoes? Really? Don’t try to confuse me with facts. Judging by my lack of action on doing my part pushing for action on climate change and overcoming anti-vax fears, I’m not that different from the science deniers. I have met the enemy and he is me.

Yesterday was National Grammar Day, which probably explains all the fireworks and horn honking last night. It is the day when we say hooray for Martha Brockenbrough. She was the founder of SPOGG (the Society for the Promotion Of Good Grammar). To be literal, the acronym should have been TSFTPOGG, but that doesn’t roll off the tongue as easily.

Martha and SPOGG got National Grammar Day established in 2008. President George W. Bush sent out a letter extolling the day, which is a little bit funny, given his tenuous connection to the language. A laugh riot would have been ex-President Trump doing the same. He wouldn’t know his grammar if she slapped him in the face.

I celebrated at our house yesterday by correcting Pat’s grammar once, which didn’t get us in a very festive mood. How can a guy be right and still be terribly wrong at the same time? That should have been in the dumb questions blog.

Grammar used to be part of one of my jobs. I was a Deputy Secretary of State in charge of Administrative Rules and Notaries Public. I can visualize you turning green with envy.

Debra was the Rules Queen and Cinda was the Rules Princess back then. I was their nominal supervisor. They would have wonderful arguments with each other about grammar and would occasionally include me since I am an English major. One of my daughters gave me a t-shirt that read “I’m silently correcting your grammar..” I couldn’t wear it at work, because the job of Administrative Rules was to correct the grammar of every other state agency proposing rules, and we weren’t silent about it. We should have had t-shirts reading “Administrative Rules Rules.” Sometimes Debra and Cinda would correct the posters that others put up at work.

I don’t think they ever explicitly told agencies “Whenever you make a plural by using an apostrophe, a puppy dies,” but they talked about doing it.

You may not think I know grammar because the Friday Good News contains so many grammatical mistakes. Especially sentence fragments. Or beginning a sentence with “or.” It’s on purpose, I tell you, in order to sound like speech rather than writing. (The speech of a person who doesn’t know grammar.)

It’s not that I don’t know better. My mother corrected us children frequently and taught us all the correct use of the tenses of “lie” and “lay,” and to not split infinitives. Oops.  I still try to observe the “Oxford comma,” which is the second comma in a series of three items. The comma after puppies in the sentence “The bag held bunnies, puppies, and alligators.” is the Oxford comma. Don’t tell me you didn’t know that. You’re just pulling my leg now.

On Grammar Day, grade-schoolers chant, “Let’s eat, grandma. Grammar saves lives.” The higher grades chant, “A simile is like a metaphor.”

My mother would approve of elevating the discourse. My father’s grammar was fair, because it had to be. Granted, he talked about the boy in his geometry class studying the area of a circle. When asked to explain what A=πr ² means (for us English types, that’s pronounced “A equals pie r squared”), the boy replied, “That means the equation is wrong. Pie are round. Cake are squared.” That joke is as old as pie, cake, and grammar. Did you notice the proper use of the Oxford comma in that last sentence? No? Do I have to send my mother to your house?

That takes us far afield from the main point. The erosion of good grammar is responsible for accelerating hard drug use, the refusal to wear masks, climate change, and the erosion of democracy in the US. By the way, the comma after the Oxford comma in that previous sentence is called the Rocky Mountain College comma. See, you’ve learned something already.

Grammar is a set of conventions on which all the educated speakers of a language agree. It governs our linguistic endeavors, which in turn control our ability to think. Once the grammatical structures of a society start slipping, anything goes. If we the people can’t use the various tenses of “lie” and “lay” properly, is it any wonder that falsehoods and sexual innuendo pervade every part of the media. You may need to read that last sentence again.

Did you know that good grammarians believe that Donald Trump’s inability to speak or write correctly presaged all the other ills of the last four years? I just made that up, but it’s probably true.

Now that we know whom to blame and why, I hope you won’t be asking me to sign a good-grammar pledge to keep me from trashing up the Friday Good News in my vain attempt to appear to be one of the masses. Ain’t gonna happen. The only people who really appreciate bad grammar are those of us who know most of the rules and can relish when we violate them. Not to mention my mother, who will not like being included in this sentence fragment, nor in the implication that she ever deliberately used bad grammar unless she were acting in a play. She would do it, but she wouldn’t like it.

But, you can’t blame me for everything from climate change to apathy about defeating lying politicians because of my shady grammar. I know what’s right. Mostly, but just don’t do it. Oops. I suppose that’s what most of us say about everything wrong with our country.

As we age, we change the dumb questions that we ask.  As children, we asked questions like “Why is the sky blue?” and “Why is there war?” and “Why don’t the rich people just share with the poor people so nobody would be hungry?”  They are dumb questions only because adults don’t know a good answer. 

 As children get older, their dumb questions get harder, so we parents resort to tried-and-true answers like “Because I said so.”  This is usually every bit as satisfactory as the answers we gave to “Why is there war?”

In an attempt to get children and youth to ask questions, teachers often maintain that there is no such thing as a dumb question. Asking is essential for learning.

Of course, the teachers are not completely correct. These are dumb questions we ask at a later age:

Do Roman paramedics refer to IV’s as “4’s”?

What do people in China call their good plates?

Why do people tell you when they are speechless?

What happens if you’re half-scared to death, twice?

Do television evangelists do more than laypeople?

We used to live in a science-based world in which questions had actual answers based on what we used to call “facts.” This led to college science students chanting, “What do we want? Facts. When do we want them? After peer review.”

Now in America, facts are no longer facts. If you don’t like the concept of climate change, you simply say, “I don’t believe it.” If you don’t like the outcome of an election, “I don’t believe it.” This is much easier then trying to ascertain what corresponds to reality.

If there are no more actual answers that apply to everyone, then are there any dumb question anymore? Yes, that was one.

The wrong dumb question can bring even dumber answers.

For instance, one really dumb question is “If people in bars consume alcohol that makes many people both dumber and more violent, how can we make bars safer?”

That is a particularly dumb question to ask when a Republican-controlled legislature is in town, because they gave the answer and our Republican governor agreed. Make them safer by allowing everyone to carry a concealed weapon into any bar (or bank or college campus or government building) without any training or licensing of any kind.

That was the story on the front page of the Helena IR today. Democrats voted no. Republican proponents of the bill really said everyplace would be safer. Really dumb questions can lead to deadly dumb answers from people untethered from facts.

Don’t you long for the good old days when we had dumb questions like

“Should I tell my parents I’m adopted?”

Or, if you are a member of QAnon, “Did NASA invent thunderstorms to cover up the sound of space battles?”

We live in a time when the former President accomplished what no other nation has done since the British took over our Capitol building in the War of 1812. It is amazing what a person with a bully pulpit can do if he repeats lies over and over.

We also live in a time when that same person and his minions did what no other nation could do. The nation with the best medical research and the most money in the world became the clear world leader in deaths from Covid19. Lies were once again essential for gaining the top spot.

I won’t lie to you. I long for a simpler time when on Valentine’s Day you tried to come up with silly love poems to put all depressing thoughts out of your head.

I haven’t written poetry in quite a long time, but I assume it’s like riding a bicycle. If you do it in traffic, you can be seriously injured. When writing, you have to wait until the words well up from your subconscious source of creativity. That’s my excuse for the following:

Complaint of the Suitor Who Doesn’t Know When to Keep His Hands to Himself

I love your eyes, they shine like stars.
I love your mouth like chocolate bars.
I love your ears like ocean shells.
I love your nose, the way it smells.

I love your heart, it beats ba-boom,
I love your curves, say va-va-voom.
I love your charm, your style, your grace,
But not your hands that slap my face.

Two points: 1. That isn’t autobiographical. 2. The amazing Amanda Gorman is not worried that I will be appointed the first geezer poet laureate.

Hey, it is -15 outside right now, and it takes a little time to warm up your subconscious creativity center. I relaxed and my subconscious coughed up another hairball.

Beware of Cupid
On Valentine’s Day near our house you might see
A short naked dude with a bow and some arrows.
Just give him a wave, for he surely must be
The drunk two blocks down who’s out hunting for sparrows.

Will Pat love me more than she already does if I give her these poems? I didn’t think so. Maybe I’m too old for this sort of thing. I’ll have to dust off one I wrote a couple of years ago when I was much younger. It’s worth a try.

When Patty Smiles
When Patty smiles, the chickadees
All giggle and they slap their knees.
Bird snickers fill the morning breeze,
When Patty smiles.

When Patty laughs, the flowers bloom,
The sun breaks through the clouds of gloom,
And joy plays tag from room to room,
When Patty laughs.

When Patty hugs, I’m near to tears
Of gratitude. My heart still cheers —
She loves me after all these years!
When Patty hugs.

Maybe she’ll still be my valentine, even though I’m going to lose my poetic license.

Don’t you long for the good old days? I mean the wonderful years of, say, ten or twelve years ago. The only talk of virus was “Did you get your flu shot?” If some individual attacked school children because they spoke out as survivors of mass murder at their school, and if that individual called them actors who made it all up, then such a sick individual was called “wacko” or “deeply disturbed,” rather than “Representative.”

Those were good times when the loser of the electoral college vote, whether Republican or Democrat, graciously conceded to the winner, even if the loser had obtained more total popular votes in the nation. Those were times when protecting the constitution meant abiding by the constitution and the laws of the land, rather than using lies to stir up millions of domestic terrorists to try to overturn the election by killing the opposition.

As I was deleting ancient computer files yesterday, I ran across a Friday Good News I wrote back in July of 2008. It has nothing to do with national or international problems. What a simple column from a simpleton writer in simpler times. Here it is.

July 27, 2008 Friday Good News

Good news doesn’t have to be good. It can just be “not bad.” With that in mind, consider how much better you are doing than:

Phillip Boucher, who gunned his Buick LeSabre to try to cross the rising drawbridge in St. Catherine’s, Ontario, and he almost made it.

Mara Ranger of Gorham, Maine, who can be seen on the CNN front web page as an eight-foot python is pulled from her washing machine.

James Kevin Pope, of Weatherford, Texas, who was convicted on 40 counts of sexual assault on three teenage girls and sentenced to 40 consecutive life sentences or 4060 years. He will be eligible for parole in 3209.

An unidentified Mesa, Arizona man, picked up by the police when neighbors called in about a violent domestic dispute. Police found only the one man, arguing with himself and changing his voice from high to low as he switched parts, all the while breaking windows and furniture in the apartment.

David Gebhart of Manchester, Connecticut, while wearing a thong, a wig and a brassiere was picked up by police because pedestrians are not allowed on the interstate.

Carol Greta, lawyer for the Iowa Department of Education, who had to defend publicly the department’s decision to throw out applications from 30 districts for preschool grants because “they weren’t double-spaced,” as stated in the instructions. Among the discarded applications was one from Danville which the superintendent claimed was double-spaced in Apple Works, which appears smaller when viewed with Microsoft Word.

Unless some of these are your relatives, you can relax, knowing that you’ve got it good this Friday. Rusty

February 5, 2021: Wouldn’t it be fine if those were the only shocking news headlines now?

Good news? We survived the pandemic so far, except for 400,000+ of us and about 3000 more every day. We live in the nation with perhaps the most advanced medical and research facilities in the world, but when you choose bad leaders, you get to be the worst nation in the world for handling the COVID. It is our own fault.

As a bonus, those same leadership qualities in the people we elected caused America to cease being the leader of the free world. We demeaned our allies, cozied up to dictators, and became the laughingstock of the whole world — democracies and authoritarian countries alike. Our bad.

Good news? Comedians all over the world came up with some great routines. Here is comedy from the Netherlands. I hope this link works.

Good news? As stupid as we are as a nation, we had enough sense to elect somebody better. We still came within an eyelash of having a loser of a president take over the country by lies and encouraging violence. If he and his followers had been smarter, they could have killed everyone in Congress (and maybe the Supreme Court as well) and tried to establish a perpetual president. We pulled through, by the skin of our teeth, although democracy is still hanging in the balance when nearly half the nation doesn’t trust the free press, the courts, or the electoral system.

Really good news? Now we have a president who believes in science and in the advice of smart people instead of incompetent fools. We have a spectacular multiple-glass-ceiling-breaking vice-president. And, if the link below works, you can hear the kind of inspirational songs comedians are now doing:

What’s the best day of the week?

Before the pandemic, Monday would have gotten the most votes for worst day of the week. Saturday night would have won for best night. Churchgoers might have claimed Sunday for best day, although now that many churches are virtual only, you can watch services online any day.

For most people, Friday would have been best day, as in the religiously tinged “Thank God It’s Friday.” But now, with people working from home, or out of work, or retired, one day is pretty much the same as another.

Even before the pandemic, every Friday wasn’t TGIF. Friday the 13th is the second scariest day of the year, following only Halloween in terrifying movies bearing its name.

Not in our house. Pat and I got married on Friday the 13th so that I would remember it. I can’t remember the month, but I know we get 1 and 5/7 extra anniversaries per year, on average.

Wow, that means I forgot to get…

(Later) Back from the store. It means I have that many more chances to forget anniversaries.

We have mixed feelings on this Happy Friday the 13th.

On the one hand, the most narcissistic and lying president of all time was defeated. (He is not the most racist ever — some presidents owned slaves.)

On the other hand, that same president is actively trying to commit treason by getting Americans to support his lies in order to retain power through fraud. He is being actively abetted in this crime by most Republican office holders so far. Even if they don’t succeed, they are poisoning the body politic.

On the one hand, in 3 months we will have leadership that believes in science, listens to intelligent and competent people, and actually cares about saving American lives.

On the other, we will still be in a pandemic with a nation of people, many of whom willingly spread the virus through rallies for “freedom.” Their freedom means only one thing — the freedom to be completely free of personal responsibility for sickening or killing others by refusing to wear a mask and acting like an adult. If they all were young teenage boys with this level of immaturity, we would say they will grow out of it. They aren’t.

On the one hand, I and most of my family and friends have avoided COVID-19 so far, and are still working if they are not retired.

On the other hand, the bar for being a good person has been set so low, that this is the wisdom now making the rounds on an internet meme: “Live your life so that the whole world doesn’t dance with joy when you lose your job.”

Nevertheless, we are having a Happy Friday the 13th in this house today. Hope your 13th is closer to Happy than to a horror movie where people are dying by the ones and twos. Wait a minute, that would still be better than…

Happy Friday the 13th anyway.

Now that the members of the defunct Montana Logging and Ballet
Company are old, we figure we are supposed to turn into conservative
Republicans, but it’s hard. Don’t say we didn’t try.

Ever since the Montana Logging and Ballet Company officially passed away, kicked the bucket, and lost our poetic license, we zombie members sometimes zoom through the ether to enjoy a weird laugh “together.” Since we are no longer corporately corporeal, we can do things we never did as a group, such as “walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.”

          We had a few laughs at our own expense while walking in the Republicans shoes in order to plan a voting strategy. We never thought they would take our advice. If we were a group, we would issue a group apology.

This might lead to the MLBC facebook page. Scroll down and click on “MLBC Designs GOP Voting.”

https://www.facebook.com/MLandBC/