The Medieval World Was Much More Dangerous than Ours

I blame NM for introducing me to Got Medieval, which almost killed me today.  I’m sitting there reading, snickering about the medieval personals and following links where I discovered this post about medieval beavers, who were believed to rip their own testicles off and throw them in the face of hunters.  I almost choked on my cereal.

Let me repeat that: White folks, your ancestors believed that beavers would rip their own testicles off and fling them in your faces.

I’m not suggesting that modern hunters are soft, with their guns and their deer stands and their duck calls.  I’m just saying that no hunter in America ever regularly hunted an animal he thought was going to fling testicles at his face.

That takes balls.

Bwah-ha-ha-ha-ha.

I want to make a Dick Cheney joke here, but I can’t quite think of one.  Insert your own.

NSFW, If You Work At One of Those Places that Frowns on Surfing the Net

Because you will get caught when you laugh out loud at the police dog trying to bite the other cop.

Also, It’s Important to Ask Your Partner if She’s Allergic to Strawberries

Before you put them in her vagina.

Once You Bring Dairy Queen Into It…

Okay, so maybe i has a hotdog is slowly finding its own voice.  I laughed at this anyway.

When I lived in North Carolina there was a billboard for Dairy Queen that said, “Kids, Holler ’til your Dad stops!”  Which, in retrospect, seems a little nefarious, but at the time, I thought it was very cute.

Did I ever tell you about the vacation we took where, for three days at the end of it, we stopped at every Dairy Queen we saw?  You’d think a person might never want to see a Dairy Queen again (it was years before the Butcher could eat Oreos again after the weekend he ate 40 pounds of them), but you’d be wrong.

If you have to ask yourself how a person such as the Butcher eats 40 pounds of Oreos in a weekend, you haven’t been reading this blog very closely, that’s all I’ll say.  Now, if you excuse me, I think the Butcher left his Bob Marley record playing…

Is There a Word for a Person who Disproves His Own Work through His Work?

William Saletan, who has spent the larger part of two months “bravely” pondering what it might mean if white people were inherently smarter than black people admits he neglected to do the very basic work it would have taken to discover that one of the scientists he relies most heavily on is a racist.

They Say that Analyzing a Joke Kills It. We Can Only Hope.

Here’s a joke Mack has told in my presence 157 times (give or take 150 times).

Some tourists have been sight-seeing in a quaint Mexican village, but they soon have to get back to their tour bus, and so they approach the one person they can find, a little old man sitting in the village square with his burro.  A man from the group goes up to him and asks him, “Excuse me sir.  Do you know what time it is?”  Well, the villager reaches over, lifts up his burro’s balls and announces, “It’s two o’clock.”

Well, of course, this is the darnedest thing the tourist has ever seen, so he goes and grabs his wife and sends her over.  She asks the villager, “What time is it?” and the villager sighs, but lifts the burro’s balls, scrutinizes a little, and announces, “It’s two o-five.”

She’s amazed and runs back and now the whole group comes over and another person asks the villager what time it is and again with the ball lifting and the scrutinizing and the announcing of time.  And so they demand to know how he’s telling the time by feeling his burro’s balls.  And he says, “Stupid gringos, I’m just moving them out of the way so that I can see the clock on the church over there.”

Okay, it’s funny enough.  You have the stupid tourists.  The seemingly mystical Other who, it turns out, is doing something very ordinary, but unrecognized by the tourists because of their expectation that he is magic.

But I am convinced that the joke would be even funnier with a talking burro.  See if I’m right:

So, some tourists have been sight-seeing in a quaint Mexican village, but soon have to get back to their tour bus.  They are unsure, however, what time it is locally.  One member of the group spots a man standing in the village square with a very young burro.  He goes over to the villager and asks, “Do you know what time it is?” and the burro nudges between the villager’s legs and announces, “It’s two o’clock, sir.”

Well, of course, this is the darnedest thing the tourist has ever seen, so he goes and grabs his wife and sends her over.  She, of course, is incredulous, but asks, “Okay, what time is it?” and the burro sighs, nudges between the man’s legs a little, and says, “It’s two oh five.”

She’s amazed and runs back and now the whole group comes over to see this amazing sight.  They ask what time it is and again with the nuzzling and the scrutinizing and the announcing of time.  And so they demand to know how the burro is capable of this and the burro says, “Stupid gringos, I’m just moving his balls out of the way so that I can see the clock on the church over there.”

See? Folks, I have been laughing now for about 24 hours at the idea of a talking burro and a joke that never explains it.

That‘s really funny.

Friday Afternoon Laughs

1.  I find the LOL cats more miss than hit, but when they hit, I about can’t stop laughing.  Check out the Tiger and the Mortgage.

2.   The lesser-known Johnson at the crossroads.

3.  I can’t decide if this is Sarcastro as a child or what Sarcastro has to look forward to when the little guy turns five.

I Keep Waiting for these Women Who Have Left Feminism to Put the Butcher on their Checking Accounts, but They Never Do

Y’all, I’ve been giggling about this all morning.

Two things really strike me.  Let’s start with the lesser funny and move on to the greater funny.

1.  “Newsflash. The Internets can be mean. Actually, feminists are some of the meanest ones out there, but whatever. (I broke with the sisterhood, so I should be virtually beat up.) ”

Y’all, thank god that Adrienne thinks I’m one of the meanest feminists out there because I’m about to say something very mean and I would hate to think she felt caught off-guard by it.  But who is even remotely surprised that a conservative woman who was in a sorority but has only mostly male friends doesn’t find feminism has much to offer her (you’re still welcome for your college education, though, of course)?

Well, pluck my feathers and call me a chicken, of course she doesn’t.

Yet.

Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.

Also, let’s give a little “ha” to the idea that saying, “this is a woman who thinks that Cosmo is a main vehicle for the transmittal of feminist values, so, really, there’s no hope,” constitutes “virtually” beating her up and another little “ha” to her trying to pass “Mean Girls” off as a documentary.

2.  “Perhaps many of leading lefty blogs are men, but on the right, there are powerful women. We don’t make a big deal out of it because the right operates by merit while the left focuses on quotas. ”

Do we have instant replay in blogging?  Let’s institute it.  Can we get an instant replay?

“the right operates by merit”

Oh really?

Oh really, really?

I have but one question (and yes, I believe you could ask the same thing of the Democratic candidates, but no one’s claiming the Democratic party is a meritocracy): When you look at the Republican presidental candidates, do you really believe that those are the Republicans most capable of leading this country?  That they, out of all of the Republicans in this fair land, are the few that are the best for the job?

I’m going to be laughing about that  for a long, long time.

Funny

The couple in front of me is making out so loudly that even though they’re two rows up I can hear their lips smacking together.

The couple behind me is giving a running commentary of the make-out session.  “Come on baby, let’s neck.”  “I can’t tell you like me unless you make loud slurping noises.”

“Treatment Effects”

I can add nothing more to this hilarious take-down of alli, except to add that the publicity department that is able to gloss over the fact that this drug is going to make you shit your pants should win some kind of prize.  I mean, they tell you that this drug will make you shit yourself and yet people are still buying it like it’s going out of style.  That’s some marketing right there.

———–

On a completely unrelated note, one thing I hate about living with a hippie is that sometimes you pick up something, not sure what it is, and you look at it, still not sure what it is, and then–still not understanding what it is–you put it down because you feel like you’ve made a terrible mistake by leaving your fingerprints on it.

Let’s Just Be Honest

If I caught that ball in my mouth and then dropped it into my hands, folks would be writing blog posts about it right now like it was the most amazing thing they ever saw

But let me trap it between my arm and a tit before I get a hold of it and somehow I’m “cheating.”

That’s not right.

The Recalcitrant Brother Saves Me From Making a Fool of Myself

Too bad for Springfield, Illinois.  I was just getting ready to get on here and apologize to you for regularly making fun of the fact that you were terrorized by a pack of feral pigs in the 1800s.

Seriously, my thinking has been, you didn’t have fifty guys with guns in your town who could shoot at the pigs all at once?  You might not kill them all, but you’d kill a lot and scare the other ones off to, hell, I don’t know Taylorville.  You don’t every hear about Taylorville’s feral pig problem, do you?

But then I saw this story and this photo and was like, damn, well, if you’re talking fifty to a hundred feral pigs some of which are <i>this</i> size?

Who could blame you for letting those fuckers roam free unchallenged through the streets of your town?

But then I called the recalcitrant brother, who has been working over in that part of Alabama recently, who informed me that no one in West Georgia/East Alabama is taking this seriously as a story and certainly no one thinks this is some serious competition to Hogzilla.

Why?

Well, gather ’round folks, and listen to what the recalcitrant brother told me.

1.  These folks didn’t find that pig out in the wild.  Unlike Hogzilla, this pig was raised on a private game preserve.  The same game preserve the kid’s dad paid to get him the right to shoot at said giant pig.  In other words, they knew the pig was there and it didn’t have any place to go.  That’s where it was raised and fed and taken care of and there are high fences all around the place so the pig couldn’t leave if it wanted to.

2.  The kid shot the pig with a revolver only in the literal sense of the word.  Yes, it was a revolver.  No, it wasn’t a revolver like most of us non-gun nuts think of a revolver.  Again, he didn’t wander into the woods armed only with his trusty revolver and happen upon a wild hog.  He knew what he was going to shoot, approximately where it would be, what boundaries it could not leave, and what equipment to bring to kill it.  Hell, he even had trackers armed with high powered rifles if anything went wrong.  In other words, this was a controlled hunt in every sense of the word.

Shoot, I’ll say it.  This wasn’t a “hunt” this was a “go find.”  How is this not cheating in every sense of the word?

Explain this to me, hunters.

“But I Drive Down Jefferson Street!”

Y’all, this is the kind of story that careers get ruined over, but it is so funny to me that I cannot refrain from telling it to you anyway.  True story that I heard last night, but stripped of all revealing information.

Let’s say that there’s a large corporation here in town and upper management is taking a close look at why there’s very little diversity among middle management and why middle management seems to do more business, better, with other mostly white corporations, even though there are some well-known, diverse corporations here in town that would seem to logically be the first choice for such business needs.

So, one of the upper managers calls a team captain in and asks him why they aren’t taking advantage of the local resources.

And the middle manager is all “Are you insinuating that I’m racist?  But I drive down Jefferson Street!”

Y’all…

Hold on.

Even now it’s so funny to me that it takes me a moment.

Jefferson Street, for those of you unfamiliar with Nashville, was Main Street for black Nashvillians until the twin forces of desegregation and the interstate radically changed the landscape.  Even now, still, it runs through a predominately black part of town, from the river, past Fisk University and on out to the west.

And so, this dude is attempting to argue that he can’t possibly be racist, because he’s willing to drive down a street in a black part of town.

I just love this.  Let’s use where we drive not just as a marker for how open we are, but as the standard.  Are you willing to drive in a black neighborhood?  Well, then, I guess you can’t be racist. 

Gosh, that’s so much easier than actually acting in a non-racist manner!

I’m going to use that excuse whenever Sarcastro or Exador insinuates I have a problem with capitalism.

“Are you saying I’m a commie?  But I drive down West End, past all kinds of capitalist enterprises, every day!”

The Mysterious “Other Butt”

Maybe it’s too early in the week for cooter humor, but this post from Gone Feral has me laughing so hard tears are running down my cheek.

I should back up here and explain that there were certain, errr, anatomical misapprehensions regarding the status of the ‘gina as a bona fide second ass until we introduced the, well, CONCEPT of the ‘gina. How do you know it’s time? When you’re changing a diaper and are commanded to "Wipe butt, mama" and when you do so are corrected with "OTHER Butt, Mama."

How the Butcher Almost Killed Us On My Way To Work

Yes, I was just the girl talking about how awesome chunks of endometrial lining are.  So, why hearing the Butcher sneeze, then say, "Oh, gross" and then looking over and seeing the most humongous snot hanging out of his nose and down onto his arm should cause me to start uncontrollably screaming and shuddering, I don’t know.

But I did, scream and shudder uncontrollably.  Especially when he was like "I don’t have anything to wipe it on."

Blah.  It’s giving me the heebie jeebies right now.

"Put it on this bag!  Put it on this bag!" I insisted, pulling a huge bag from between the seats.  "Argh!  I looked at it.  Oh, my god!  I touched it.  It touched me.  I think it touched me."

"How could it have touched you?  It’s way over on this side of the car.  And my nose points down."

"I don’t know.  I just know it touched me.  I can feel it on me.  Oh, god.  Pull over."

"I’m going to have to, because you’re making me laugh so hard I can’t drive."

—–

Funny Things

1.  Elias sent me the link to this cartoon.  “I’ve got a friend on the team.”–What more can I say about the Patriarchy?

2.  Brittney gets me back on Nashville is Talking just as I start talking about menstruation.  I really should just change the name of this blog to “All Cooter Talk.  All the Time.” to give folks more warning. 

Hello, Tennessee!  Welcome back.  Don’t mind the mess!

3.  Speaking of WKRN, I’m totally digging Kleinheider’s new gig and I have a suggestion so brilliant that I can’t believe they haven’t already thought of it–The Volunteer Voters soundtrack!  Kleinheider has awesome taste in music and he’s already hard at work exposing his readers to rap lyrics.  Think of how Grand Theft Auto revolutionized the intersection of gaming and music.  Kleinheider could do that for political blogging.

Edited to add 4.  Ceeelcee is totally surreptitiously taking over Tiny Cat Pants.  Yes, I’m about to post about that motherfucker again!  But there are sex toys and misunderstandings.  How can I resist?

 

The Mint Pooper

Someone in my building at work has shit that smells like mint. 

The only explanation I can come up with is that she must just be chowing down on Altoids all day.

In our other building, we had some rancid pooper whose identity I finally discovered, but my desk had a line of sight right to the women’s bathroom.  Now, I’m in an actual office tucked in an actual suite clear down the hall and around the corner.  If I want to unmask the mint pooper, I’m going to have to make frequent trips to the bathroom.

Bottoms up, Diet Dr Pepper! We have work to do.