My several years in the word game have learnt me several rules:
Avoid alliteration. Always.
Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
Avoid cliches like the plague. (They’re old hat.)
Employ the vernacular.
Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
Despite local married couple Jim and Nancy McFadden’s recent decision to seek new romantic partners while still staying together, sources reported Monday that the rest of the world’s population is not exactly jumping at the chance to partake in the open relationship. “No thanks, we’re good,” 7.1 billion global inhabitants of every age, race, and sexual orientation reportedly said “no thanks, we’re good”…
Heh–Read it all.
Check it out (Hat tip:TF).
Watch it all from Jimmy Fallon.
Tenuous connection to reality or not, Harmon says he is excited about combining exercise with his diet. “Now that I won’t be spending nine, ten, eleven hours a day parked in front of a computer working on this stupid blog, I can spend more time on my pilates.” Neighbors even claim they have been awakened in pre-dawn hours by the sound of Tae-Bo tapes, coming from Harmon’s residence.
“He used to be such a nice boy,” said Mrs. Mildred Kratz, an across-the-street neighbor of Harmon’s. “Always blogging. I’d see him in the yard and say, ”˜Now Kendall, you need to get back in there and blog. That blog’s not going to write itself!’ And we’d just laugh and laugh. Nowadays, the only time I see him is when he walks down the driveway to get the mail, and even then, he doesn’t speak”¦ just makes a big point to flex his glutes as he walks back inside.”
When it comes to April Fools’ Day, human ingenuity seems to know no limits. Let me list a few of my favourite hoaxes and pranks from April the 1st:
”¢ The full-page advertisement by Burger King announcing the arrival of the Left-Handed Whopper burger, ”˜especially designed for the 32 million left-handed Americans’.
Ӣ The statement that the next Popemobile would be pulled by a donkey.
Ӣ The announcement from Virgin Atlantic that they would launch an Airbus with a transparent viewing strip on the bottom, so that passengers could look straight down onto clouds.
1976 At precisely 9:47 am on April 1, Pluto will pass behind Jupiter, causing a brief reduction in Earth’s gravitational pull. Astronomer Patrick Moore urges his BBC Radio audience to jump into the air at that exact moment to experience a floating sensation. At 9:48, dozens of light-headed listeners begin calling the station to report their success.
A special undercover investigation has revealed that Justin’s Welby’s Father, who is well-known now to have been a sort of Walter Mitty character, not only reinvented himself numerous times but changed his name on multiple occasions. His real family name was in fact Thyme.
There are possibilities, also, that Justin Thyme has a secret and unknown half-brother Steppen Thyme but these are as yet uncorroborated.
RNS: You describe the ways Christians try to work harder to please God. Is this the same challenge the Pharisees faced?
LS: The church today says the same thing the Pharisees did: “Come unto me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you . .. . more work.” Actually, these are Jesus’ words, but he promised tranquility, not toil. To become a disciple of Jesus in today’s church is almost to be sentenced to hard labor, so far are we removed from the Hebrew understanding of life as Shabbat Shalom. It’s time to trade in our hard hats or pin stripes for a pinata ”¦ with some confetti thrown in.
In the earliest creation story, the first time we meet God, God is down and dirty”“playing in the dirt, making mud pies, getting God’s hands dirty and wet, fashioning us in the divine image for the sheer pleasure of our company. Creation is not God at work, but God at play. Labor enters the story with the fall, and we prefer work to play because there is an out-of-control and surprise element to play.
We need to learn to play at life again. All beauty, artistry, excellence comes out of a play paradigm, not a work paradigm. When you work at something, whether it be life or relationships, sports or art, you’re forcing something to be rigid and mechanical that should be natural and pleasurable. We make it harder than it needs to be. Being the church doesn’t require us to earn God’s favor through deeds and acts. All we need to do is worship God in joy and pleasure. This is our nature. This is who we were meant to be.
Please watch it all from Jimmy Kimmel–very funny.
In 2004, The New Yorker magazine quoted the screenwriter Dennis Klein as saying that Mr. Ramis rescued comedies from “their smooth, polite perfection” by offering a new, rough-hewn originality. The writer of the article, Tad Friend, compared Mr. Ramis’s impact on comedy to that of Elvis Presley on rock and Eminem on rap.
“More than anyone else,” Paul Weingarten wrote in The Chicago Tribune Magazine in 1983, “Harold Ramis has shaped this generation’s ideas of what is funny.”
CITY UNSURE WHY THE SEWER SMELLS
AT LAST SINGER ETTA JAMES DIES
CASE OF INNOCENT MAN FREED AFTER SPENDING 18 YEARS IN PRISON PROVES THE TEXAS SYSTEM WORKS
BRITISH LEFT WAFFLES ON FALKLANDS
Reader’s Digest, March 2014 edition, page 23
Claiming that the mere thought is an “absolute nightmare,” WR 67c, a terrestrial planet from the distant Gamma Velorum star system, expressed its profound terror Wednesday at the possibility of one day gaining the capacity to sustain human life.
The 5.2-billion-year-old celestial body, which is located roughly 1,100 light years from Earth, said that for both its own sake and that of its entire solar system, it can only hope to never possess the necessary planetary characteristics and chemical elements needed to support either a deep-space human outpost or, more gravely, an entire human colony.
Watch and listen to it all. “Overcheering”–LOL.
Enjoy the whole thing.
”¦ when Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos buys The Washington Post with his own personal money, thereby ensuring that one of the nation’s most important newspapers will be able to continue producing in-depth, hard-hitting journalism, including an estimated 400 stories and columns in August alone about what a genuinely brilliant yet humanitarian genius Jeff Bezos is. Bezos says he does not plan to make any major changes, other than to deliver the paper in cardboard boxes and replace the stories with reader reviews of news events, using a five-star rating system.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, signaling a major change in the federal government’s policy regarding the War on Drugs, tells a meeting of the American Bar Association that he has a family of tiny invisible harmonica-playing giraffes living inside his nose.
In sports, New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez is indicted for murder; if convicted, under the strict new NFL rules aimed at reducing violence, he will have to sit out at least two games.
Noted blogger and conservative Anglican theologian The Rev. Canon Kendall S. Harmon, who runs the highly-trafficked weblog TitusOneNine, announced today that he is giving up blogging. Dr. Harmon, an Oxford-educated theologian, explained the sudden change as an inevitable move that was long overdue.
“No matter how you look at it, the Anglican blogosphere has been an abject failure,” Harmon said in a telephone interview from his home in Summerville, South Carolina. “What has it done? Has it exposed the spiritual depravity of the Episcopal Church’s leadership? No. Has it been a key source of information for tens of thousands of Anglicans in America, who up to now depended entirely on the mainstream media and diocesan newsletters? Please! Has it brought together orthodox Episcopalians from all over the country, and helped position them for a renewal of Anglicanism in North America? Yeah”¦” he huffed, “Right.”
Some of Harmon’s colleagues were stunned at his announcement. “I just saw him at a Starbucks in Plano a few days ago,” said The Rev. Canon David Roseberry. “He had his laptop open and his cell phone to his ear….
“Speaking of Pope Francis, obviously as an observant Catholic, I believe the pope is infallible. But he’s also wrong about a lot of things.”
“By the way, is the pope here? Pope Francis, are you here? Because if you were we probably wouldn’t know because His Humbleness would be out washing the feet of the coat check guy or something. We get it, you’re modest.”
“If Pope Francis were throwing tonight’s party we wouldn’t be in white tie at the Waldorf. We’d be in sweat pants crammed into a corner booth at the IHOP.”
Tom Leopold is a comedy writer who has written and produced for classic shows including “Seinfeld” and “Cheers,” as well as for the shows honoring Tina Fey and Will Ferrell for the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. Three years ago Leopold converted from Judaism to Catholicism. He chronicled that spiritual journey in a one-man show, “A Comedy Writer Finds God.” The show also explores how his family coped with his daughter’s struggle with an eating disorder. Tom can also be found cohosting the radio show “Entertaining Truth” with Fr. Leo Patalinghug on SiriusXM’s The Catholic Channel. Here he talks with Managing Editor Kerry Weber.
Watch it all until the end–it may not be what you think. LOL.
Listen to the whole thing–I stumbled onto this by accident this week and I just love it–give it a couple of seconds at the beginning because it does not start cleanly; KSH.
We don’t just laugh at funny things, the reason we chuckle is that it serves an important purpose in our lives, as James May explains.
If you young folks will take advice from anyone, after all, I don’t know if you’ve seen it ”” this week’s Time Magazine called you “lazy, entitled narcissists,” who are part of the “Me, Me, Me” generation. So self-obsessed – tweeting your Vines, hashtagging your Spotifys and Snapchatting your YOLOs – your generation needs everything to be about you. And that’s very upsetting to us baby boomers because self-absorption is kind of our thing. We’re the original “Me Generation,” we made the last 50 years all about us. We took all the money. We soaked up all the government services. And we’ve deep-fried nearly everything in the ocean. It may seem that all that’s left for you is unpaid internships, Monday to Tuesday mail delivery, and thanks to global warming, soon Semester at Sea will mean sailing the coast of Ohio.
Now, in our defense, in my generation’s defense ”“ how were we supposed to know that you were coming? We thought it went like this: every successive generation of mankind ”“ and then us! Ta-dah ”“ roll credits.