Harnessing the healing power of snark
Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net.
My Dentist: “Hm, you have one cavity that needs to be filled, three fillings that need to be replaced, and a tooth that needs a crown. Also, you need to stop drinking soda (What?! Has he been talking with my trainer?) because it’s eating away at your teeth.”
Me: “OK, but I’m gonna need a lot of drugs.”
Because today, I broke my website. And you know what did me in? Pride.
Last week I took a quiz to determine just exactly where I fell among all of the deadly sins, and here were my results:
| Greed: | High | |
| Gluttony: | High | |
| Wrath: | Medium | |
| Sloth: | Medium | |
| Envy: | Medium | |
| Lust: | Very Low | |
| Pride: | Very High |
Take the Seven Deadly Sins Quiz
This will of course come as no surprise to anyone who is married to me, is related to me, went to school with me, is friends with me, was friends with me, has ever worked with me, or has ever passed by me on the street.
And if there is anything about which I am prideful, it is the correct use of grammar, and my own personal correct-grammar-using-abilities. In other words, I am a Grammar Snob.
Just two weeks ago on vacation (VACATION!) I declared to my husband that I could not bring myself to eat at the Western Sizzlin’ because its name is composed entirely of adjectives and contains no nouns. (Fortunately for him, he packed lots of tequila.)
So today I asked him to install a new plug in on my blog that would change the way that the comments appear on each post. He did, and everything was fine until I saw that for some reason, it generated the following sentences: “[x] and [y] have already leave comments. Why don’ you?”
Well, there’s not enough tequila in the world to make that acceptable to a grammar snob, so I took it upon myself to just go in and “correct” the grammar written in the HTML code. Because everyone knows that having a Master’s Degree in Spanish and being able to write beautiful, densely packed, grammatically correct paragraphs in two languages means that you are also an expert in computer code.
Not.
Fortunately my husband, the person who actually knows how to write computer code and who has pretty much built this entire website for me, was able to fix it, with only a minimum of eye-rolling, whistling, and use of the phrase “screwed the pooch.”
And because he loves me very very much, and because there is some tequila left over from vacation, he also fixed the grammar for me too.
Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net.
Today I participated in a humorous speech competition (and won second place, thank you very much!)
To keep the crowd entertained while the judges tallied the ballots, the moderator brought up all the contestants to be interviewed one by one.
He got to a woman who had given a speech about her life as an American in Greece, and with his questions the moderator invited her to give the audience some more information about Greek words, phrases, and gestures.
“Well in Greece you never do this,” she told us, as she made the hand gesture that in America means “bye-bye”.
“Why not?” asked the moderator.
“Because in Greece that means, ‘I crap on your next five generations.”
Me, on the phone with my husband.
Me: “Say, hypothetically speaking, you went to the store and bought a “26” printer cartridge because you thought that was the right one, but then you got home and you discovered that you actually need a “56” printer cartridge. Could you just go ahead and use the “26” anyway?”
My husband: “Uh, n-o-o-o. They put those numbers there for a reason!”
Thirteen Funny Quotes From The Media1. “I think I know that one. Is it Jewish?”
-quiz show contestant when asked for the Pope’s religion.2. “If it weren’t for electricity, we’d all be watching television by candlelight.”
-George Gobel, television personality.
3. “An end is in sight to the severe weather shortage.”
-Ian Macaskill, BBC weather
4. “Tuesday Night at the Movies will be seen on Saturday this week instead of Monday.”
-unidentified television announcer.
5. “Red squirrels…you don’t see many of them since they became extinct.”
-Michael Aspel on British Radio 2
6. “The telephone company is urging people not to use the telephone unless it is absolutely necessary, in order to keep the lines open for emergency calls. We’ll be right back after this break to give away a pair of Phil Collins concert tickets to caller number 95.”
-unidentified radio disc jockey after the 1990 Los Angeles earthquake.
7. “Retraction: The ‘Greek Special’ is a huge, 18-inch pizza and not a huge, 18-inch penis, as described in an ad. Blondie’s Pizza would like to apologize for any confusion Friday’s ad may have caused.”
-correction in The Daily Californian
8. “We will now hear, ‘Deck Your Balls with Halls of Helly’…’Deck Your Bells with Balls of Holly’…er…a Christmas selection.”
-BBC radio announcer
9. “The crime bill passed by the senate would reinstate the federal death penalty for certain violent crimes: assassinating the President; hijacking an airliner; and murdering a government poultry inspector.”
-Knight Ridder News Service dispatch
10. “As a prize-a beautiful riding mower with optional ass scratcher!”
-announcer on television who meant to say “grass catcher”
11. “Then you add two forkfuls of cooking oil…”
-recipie given on television’s The French Chef
12. “Shergar.”
-contestant on the television quiz show, The Weakest Link, when asked which famous racehorse’s name was the word “murder” spelled backwards
13. “The farmers in Annapolis Valley are pleased to announce that this year there will be an abundance of apples. This is particularly good news because most of the farmers haven’t had a good crap in years.”
-unidentified Maryland television news broadcaster
From 1001 Dumbest Things Ever Said, ed. by Steven D. Price
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Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net.
Today I had a session with my coach and we had the following conversation.
My coach: “OK, I want you to try something. I’m going to teach you an exercise where you will learn how to generate feelings of love from inside yourself, rather than trying to ‘get’ love from somewhere outside yourself.”
Me: “OK, that sounds cool.”
My coach: “Pick something that’s easy to love.”
Me: “I’ll pick my cats.”
My coach: “OK, now focus on your cats. Feel the love start to flow out from your heart chakra. Feel it filling your whole body, down to your cells. Now let it expand, and grow, and start to flow toward your cats.”
Silence, as I practice.
My coach: “Aw, was that a purr?”
Me: “Um, no.”
My coach: “Oh, I thought it would have been so cool if you were doing this exercise and one of your cats came up to you and started purring.”
Me: “Yeah, that would’ve been really cool. Unfortunately, that was just the sound of me burping into the phone.”
We are back from having spent almost a week at the beach, where we only roused ourselves from our ocean-induced stupor to occasionally apply more sunscreen and order more hush puppies.
So I’m a little low on funny stories this weekend, but fortunately I do have many funny signs to share with you.
Like this one
and this one,
both of which livened up our drive to the Outer Banks considerably.
Then once we arrived at the beach we discovered this one, which was intriguing and a little bit scary at the same time.
Then today as we were driving home we saw a sign that said,
“Unlawful
to feed bears
along highway.”
“Hm. Unlawful and stupid,” was my husband’s comment.
I agreed. But my version of the sign would have gone a little more like this:
“Unlawful and REALLY F*&%#@$-ING STUPID to feed bears along highway. Although if you are driving down the highway, and notice a 500-pound behemoth with claws lumbering towards you, and your first reaction is to try and lure it closer to you with food, then in all likelihood you probably deserve to be mauled.”
Here’s your sign.
(Thank you, Bill Engvall.)
Last weekend after visiting my brother and sister-in-law, we went up to Virginia to visit my aunt, uncle, and cousins. We were there through the day after Labor Day, which meant that we were there when all of the kids returned from vacation to the daycare that my aunt runs.
As I am used to spending my days either alone, with cats, or with grownups, it was quite a different experience for me to be surrounded by a group of one and two-year-olds, especially when I overheard the kinds of conversations that routinely took place.
Like the time that my aunt had to yell out, “[Name of not-quite-two-year-old child], will you please STOP licking my chair!”
Or the time that I heard her helping another child to practice subject-verb agreement.
“Yes, she has,” I heard her say to the child. “She has poo.”
13 Conversations I Had As A Bookseller
1. Me: Hi, how may I help you?
The Customer: I’m looking for a book on war. The cover is red and the letters in the title are white.
Me: Um, there’s no search field in our data base for colors.
2. 9:00 am: the store opens
9:01 am: an outrageously incensed gentleman approaches the info desk, where I, of course, am on duty.
Customer: Last night I was reading a book, and I left it on that table over there. Now it’s gone. What happened to it?!
Me: Um, at night after we close we put all the books back on the shelves.
Me (silently): looking slowly around the store to convey the subtle message that we, in fact, keep all our books on shelves and not in piles on the furniture.
3. December, in the middle of the holiday shopping madness
A customer corners me in the back of the store where I am unsuccessfully trying to blend into the romance section.
Customer: Where is your luggage?
Me: (stunned into silence)
Me: Excuse me?
Customer: Your luggage. My son was just up at your other store, and he told me all about the great luggage he saw there.
Me: (struggling so hard to keep a straight face that I’m sure my eyeballs are going to pop right out of my head and drop onto the floor).
Me: (searching desperately for a tone that does not at all suggest that I am in any way mocking the customer).
Me: We don’t have any luggage.
4. Customer: I’m looking for a book. The author’s first name is John.
Me: I’m sorry, but there’s no way we can look up authors on the computer using only their first name.
Customer: (makes random noises of protest and disbelief.)
I enter “John” into the data base.
I turn the computer around to face the customer.
Me: OK, there are 485,972 possibilities that came up for “John”.
Customer: Oh.
5. Customer: Hi, I’d like to check out.
Me: I’m sorry, but you can’t check out here.
Customer: Why not? The lines up there are S-O-O-O long.
Me: Well, because see how there are no actual CASH REGISTERS here? That’s because this is the INFORMATION DESK, not the checkout counter.
6. Customer: Hi. I found this book I was looking for, but I only want this one page. What do I do?
7. Customer: Um, I’m sitting over there in the cafe trying to study, but I can’t, because the people behind the counter are being REALLY loud.
Me: Well, this is a store, not a library, so there’s nothing I can do about it.
Customer: (stunned that I am not leaping into any kind of action that confirms that she is, in fact, the center of the Universe.)
Customer: Well, they’re being really loud.
The customer stomps off in indignation.
Me: (silently) Ooh, good comeback. You really told me!
8. Customer: Hi, I need a Bible. But I really need the easy version.
9. Me: I ring up a purchase.
Me: That will be $27.95.
The customer writes a check.
Me: May I please see your driver’s license?
Customer: Angrily. Why? Are you profiling?
Me: No, we’re just like every place else that needs to see some ID when you pay with a check.
Me: (What I wanted to say: Yes, we are profiling for short, bald, ugly, angry old men.)
10. A customer approaches the information desk, clearly trying to impress me with her important “business woman” persona.
Customer: I’m on my way to give a presentation, and I need this book.
We don’t have it.
I call all of our other stores.
They don’t have it either.
Me: I’m sorry, but none of our stores have this book in stock right now.
Customer: That is unacceptable.
Customer: Gives me her “intimidating” stare to try and spur me into some kind of action.
Me: I think to myself, “Lady, I make $6.00 an hour working at a bookstore. There’s nothing you can do to me.
I just smile back at her and wait her out.
Customer: Flounces off. I guess I’ll just have to go to [our competitor].
Me: Would you like me to call them for you?
11+. Customer: Where is your/Where are your…
-xerox machine
-fax machine
-stamps
-highlighters
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