Sad Day in the Comic World

NOTE: News reports are saying 45 years old, Richard Jeni's web site lists his age as 49 with his 50th birthday coming up in a month. I do not know which is correct. --Liam

There is nothing funny I can say about this. One of the true greats of the stand-up world, one of my favorite comics, has died.

Richard Jeni never failed to make me laugh. Apparently, behind it, he battled his own demons, demons with which I, too, am all too familiar.

Richard Jeni took his own life. Details are sketchy, but from what I've been able to determine, he suffered from depression. In a very real sense, this disease took his life.

I'm sorry to put such a bummer piece on an otherwise humor dedicated blog, but in my mind, anyway, Richard Jeni was one of the greats who never got the recognition or the fame he deserved.

Richard Jeni was 45 years old.

He will be missed.

Mmmmmm. Spicy!

Friday night. The week of business meetings in Belgium is over and so five of my colleagues and I have decided to wander the streets of Amsterdam, looking to see if we can get into trouble.

Actually I, being the complete weenie that I am, nearly missed out on this particular evening’s activities, having had about as much energy as my primary laptop battery (see last week), but less apt to power anything like intelligence. Cajoling by my coworkers didn’t do the trick, hunger for something healthier than the McDonald’s across the street didn’t do it, in the end I was done in by my own auto-pilot.

I’d decided to accompany my companions only as far as the airport, taking the hotel shuttle, they to pick up the train in the basement and I to find something a little bit more to my liking (and at the sort of bargain prices only the frequent business traveler can truly understand). So as we walked into the airport, just in front of us was the bank of automated machines for buying train tickets. Each of my co-workers (Alan, Laurie, Roark, Jerome and Troy) chose one and filed up to it. Half asleep and with insufficient conscious thought to direct my own activities, I simply followed their lead and it wasn’t until I was standing with one foot on the railroad platform, the other on the first step of the train and a ticket in my hand that I remembered that I wasn’t planning on going to Amsterdam.

But, the users of public transportation being the same in every city in the world, I could no more have swum up the stream of my fellow travelers than I could have won the Iditarod without dogs, and so resignedly I boarded the train and found a seat.

The seats on the trains in the Netherlands (or at least the trains I’ve been on) are arranged with each pair facing each other, so that on either side of the car there will be a two-seat bench facing forwards and directly in front of it a two seat bench facing backwards, because there’s no joy quite so sweet as playing “footsy” with some random person you’ve never met, who is clearly thinking “We Europeans may not bathe as frequently as our American counterparts, and we may turn up our noses at perfectly good food (such as “Cheez-Its” (*)), but at least we have the good sense not to go out in public with our long Sunday legs on.”

We found two adjacent such spaces in which one was empty and the other contained a single occupant, so four of us sat down on one side, two on the other, and (this is true) the gentleman who had previously been sitting there got up and left the area. Not merely the seat or the section in question, but actually departed the car entirely, as though Americans are so loud and obnoxious there was no way he’d have been able to think in the same car. It’s this sort of biased anti-American sentiment that really annoys me. To think we’re so loud that another car was necessary. He should have waited for another train, did he REALLY think we couldn’t be heard a couple of cars back?

So, anyway, we finally reached Amsterdam and departed the train. My first impression was that this was pretty much like any other city I’d ever been in but with a higher percentage of marijuana smoke in the air. I’m not saying it was pervasive, but I really hope there are no random drug tests at my office in the next few months. Here it is almost 24 hours later and I’ve still got the munchies. Then again, having fully covered my weight issues in previous columns, regular readers may be thinking this is entirely unrelated.

Our goal on this evening (as I believe I mentioned before, although for some reason my short term memory isn’t working terribly well) was to find dinner, and so we began wandering the streets in no particular direction. We passed numerous little shops from which the bulk of the sickly sweet smoke was emanating. We passed a number of bars selling Guinness on tap, and while I probably won’t go into it, later in the evening I tried one and can now clearly understand the difference between the imported American Guinness and the native variety. How many in my audience are old enough to remember those ads for Hunt’s tomato sauce in which a model playing a housewife (but smiling so much that she’d clearly either been lobotomized or had freshly returned from Amsterdam) tested Hunt’s against the Other Leading Brand with the “Hunt’s Spoon Test”? Well, trust me, European Guinness beats Hunts. Hands down. I’ve seen thinner molasses.

We passed a lot of interesting places hawking interesting items and services and eventually found a building with several bright red lights, which as seasoned travelers will know, is the international symbol for “Indian Restaurant”, and so in we went and had a seat.

For the benefit of readers who happen to be technically married to any of the six of us, let me stress that this is a joke. We did not go into the building with the red lights on it. Technically, we entered the one building on the whole block which did NOT have red lights and various displays of nudity in the windows. And by the way, I am assured by others that this was not the “bad” part of town, nor the “red light” district. I’m sure the young ladies whose barely clad assets were on display in the window were simply trying to tempt unwary tourists in so that they (the women) could sell them (the tourists) large amounts of Amway products. Or timeshares. Or perhaps even (I shudder just to think it) life insurance.

Nevertheless, I should say the Indian restaurant was quite good, possibly the best meal I’ve had during my entire week in Europe, and that’s saying something. The nice Indian gentleman who served us warned me when I ordered the Chicken Vindaloo that it was quite spicy, using the term “very” significantly more times in that one sentence than in the first line of “Our House” by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. When I assured him that I was familiar with Vindaloo and would still like to order it, he looked at me with a look of barely contained amusement, clearly thinking I was going to be an entertaining highlight of the evening. Sadly, I disappointed him.

It’s not that the Vindaloo wasn’t hot, per se, it just wasn’t any hotter than I was prepared to take, nor any hotter than I’d been expecting, and I will continue to swear to that even as one of the other five people present points out that I bought and consumed an entire liter-and-a-half bottle of water during the meal. I was dehydrated, that’s all.

That pretty much concludes my adventures in Amsterdam. We did stop for the aforementioned beer on the way back to the train station, and three of our number (who shall remain nameless on the grounds that I’d like to imply that their activities were a whole lot more prurient than they probably were, and I don’t want their divorces on my conscience) chose to remain behind and tour the city some more as Alan and Laurie and I got back on the train and headed back to the hotel.

The morning is only worth mentioning because I’d like to point out, delicately and without specificity, that this morning was when I learned just how hot the vindaloo had actually been.




(* This reminds me of a joke written by two of my professional songwriter friends, Paul & Storm of http://www.paulandstorm.com, who sometimes write fake jingles for various products. They did one for “Cheetos” which has to be heard to be believed. You can find it on their songs page here. Check them out sometime.)

Copyright © January 13, 2007 by Liam Johnson. http://liam-humor.blogspot.com

Across the Atlantic... on half a battery

[I’ve had several essays partially or completely written for a while now, some as much as a month, but I’ve managed to convince myself that I’m not as good, nor as funny, a writer as I’d believed, and so it’s been hard to put the finishing touches on and actually post any of them. Nevertheless, this one (it’s actually one of two that were previously one longer essay) has been sitting awaiting posting since Jan. 13, and good or ill, I owe it two the two people who have joined the mailing list since that time to actually post SOMETHING. So here goes.

It details the final days, including the trip home and airline travails, of my most recent trip to Gent, Belgium. One of the other essays which is less complete details earlier in the week, but if I wait until I actually finish that one to post any of these, it may be quite a long time yet. – Liam]

Before I start this week’s essay, I should apologize if I have to finish this later. I’m on the airline flight heading back to the U.S. and have had a bit of trouble getting my laptop to work. I first pulled out the laptop from overhead storage about 45 minutes ago. I opened the overhead container, moved my jacket, got down three other suitcases, so that I was able to get to my laptop which had worked its way further back into the compartment than I had thought possible, kind of like when you look for the registration in your car’s glove box and find yourself buried up to your shoulder and scrabbling with your fingers trying to grasp that sucker, taunting you from just out of reach.

So, of course, you’ll understand why I was a little bit miffed to turn on my computer and find out that it had not shut itself down properly. Understand that my laptop grasps tenaciously to its life like a drowning man with some random flotsam, but less likely to attract sharks. Sometimes I’ll open the laptop in prep for booting it up, only to find it already on and laughing at me. “You can’t kill me,” it’s saying, “you can’t even slow me down.”

But of course, it’s all false bravado, because if the cord is not plugged into the wall, that defiant attitude only lasts for about 3 hours and then, like my children on New Years Eve, no matter how late it swears its going to stay up, it finds itself unable to keep its eyes open and then it’s out like a light.

My laptop battery was dead. So I spent 10 minutes wedging it back into the laptop case, overstuffed with all of the things I didn’t wish to check, such as several books (which I won’t read during the flight), my DVD and MP3 players (which I won’t watch or listen to), a large box of chocolates for my wife (which I won’t be eating) and about seven miles of random cabling, much of which I never actually use but have to carry with me or the laptop police will confiscate my machine and I’ll be charged with computer neglect. I get it all packed away, get down the three suitcases, wedge my laptop back up in there behind everything, put away the suitcases, close the compartment and start working my way into the seat… only then to notice the outlet, right there in the armrest. I kid you not. The flight attendant assures me it will work.

So it’s back out to the aisle, past the three suitcases again, get the laptop, put the suitcases back, get the laptop out of the case, find the power cable, untangle it from the headphones of my MP3 player, the network cable and an eel that has somehow managed to find its way in there, and finally get the laptop plugged into the power outlet. Unnoticed by me, the green light goes red. The laptop will not boot. Done in again by my compulsive need for the biggest and best laptop, apparently my own personal laptop consumes electricity at a rate that requires its own dedicated nuclear power station, and the average “Business Class” power outlet will at most power one of those “3 cents per month” nightlights, if you only turn it on to half brightness. And so, of course, it’s wedge, stuff, zip, grab three suitcases, stow, return suitcases, start to close overhead bin… and remember that I generally carry a secondary laptop battery.

There are certain words which are not supposed to be uttered in public. The child in the seat behind me learned most of them. Unpack it all again, and thus am I typing this essay on a backup battery that hasn’t been charged in months. I’m amazed it has power. I’m saving frequently.

I mention all of that to you, so that you understand how much I go through just to bring you these mediocre essays filled with stale jokes and an odd odor which I’ve not been able to track down, but probably means I left a sandwich at the bottom of my laptop bag again. All so that I can tell you about Amsterdam. Or, for the benefit of the child repeatedly kicking my seat back, Amsterdarn, which I will get to next week.

Or the week after. Or more likely, sometime after my next trip to Belgium, during which I will be taking the prudent fiscal step of flying to Brussels instead of Amsterdam, because (this is true), it’s $200 cheaper.

Why do I mention this? Because I’ll be flying on the same airline, out of the same airport of origin, and the way to get to Brussels is (I swear I am not making this up) to take the very same flight to Amsterdam and then take another plane to connect to Brussels. Really. I’m thinking of scheduling several extra round-trips between Amsterdam and Brussels during my time there. I figure if they’re essentially willing to pay me $200 to take this Amsterdam to Brussels flight, if I do one round trip each night after work, I should be able to pay for my entire trip.

And maybe even buy another spare laptop battery, this one i…

Copyright © January 13, 2007 and February 28, 2007 by Liam Johnson. http://liam-humor.blogspot.com

Only the Fifth Day of Christmas? I Can't Take All Twelve!

December 29th. Another Christmas season quickly wanes, another mess of torn wrapping paper and broken toys strewn about the living room, standing in silent testament to the avarice of days so recently past and to the traditional holiday virus which has made its way through our family and made our holiday vacation festive in the way that only multi-colored bodily effluent can.

Never again. Why do we do this every year? We make such big plans, only to bargain them away one after another, like what remains of our ethics when, in a tired haze of shopping, we find the one remaining "Must Have" toy in the store and decide that knocking over the grandmother currently reaching for it is not too large a price to pay to make our own children's holiday a festive, magical experience that they'll remember until lunch time, when all of the chocolate Santas will kick in and each of them will dissolve into an inconsolable pile of tears and tantrums.

How much magic did the Holiday Season hold for us this year? Well, to start with, we didn't actually get our Christmas Tree up until about 7 days before Christmas. Now, I'm well aware that December 25th is the first of the much vaunted "Twelve Days of Christmas" ("a Partridge in a Pear-shaped Dad"), but clearly I'm not a proper warrior defending against the War on Christmas, since I didn't have my tree up by the end of October.

So far, this Christmas (and this essay) have been a bit of a bummer, and I can only chalk that up to the fact that Janet is, as we speak, lying in bed moaning, putting off enough heat to start nuclear fusion. I had to make sure all of the elemental hydrogen was out of the room. On the plus side, our heating bill will definitely go down this month.

Now, don't get me wrong, I don't begrudge my wife the chance to be sick occasionally. It's just that I'm also sick, just not as sick as she is. I have a fever, but she's got a fever and a sore throat. I'm achy, but she's achy and can't stop sneezing. I'm really tired, but she's exhausted and sounds like she's trying to expel at least one major organ simply by coughing. And so there's no one to feel sorry for me in my aches and take care of me in my illness, and to add insult to injury, she seems to feel that I should take care of Liam based solely on the facts that:

• She's too sick to move without waves of nausea.
• I'm home on vacation this week.
• He's genetically my son.

And apparently the little monster has to be fed. And I don't just mean occasionally, I mean three times a day! Who ever heard of such a thing? And why do I have to feed him again and again? Because the LAST food I gave him has leaked out of him, and of course I'm supposed to clean that up TOO.

Now understand, I love my son, I really do. I love ALL of my children. It's just that Andrew & Katie and Dagny & Darby had the extremely good manners to all spend much of the "Illiday" Week with their other biological parent, such that they weren't underfoot and expecting us to be parents. Liam on the other hand, well, apparently he's too young yet to grasp the concept that he should go see his mo... his fath... hmmmm. Well, he should darn well go see SOMEONE when Mommy and Daddy are feeling ill.

Christmas morning, we almost canceled the whole affair. Due to the global warming that isn't conclusively proven yet, there wasn't anything even vaguely approaching icy white powder on the ground outside (unless you count the bottle of baby powder Liam spilled in the driveway), and so in order to have a proper "White Christmas", Janet woke up a color normally reserved for brand new sheets. Lying next to her, I could see just how dingy my t-shirt was getting to be and vowed that this would be the week that I change it. Really, though, I was glad we have curtains, because the daylight reflecting off of her perfect ashen whiteness would likely have blinded me.

Are you getting the sense that this illness in our household isn't new in the last couple of days?

Anyway, we had invited several people over to share our Christmas Dinner, those people being Ray (Dagny & Darby's father) and Mark & Lorena, our friends whom regular readers will have met before, who like us have the great good fortune to have a paucity of nearby relatives that would otherwise expect visits for the season, and so they were free to be strong armed by us into visiting for the season.

Taking a good look at Janet and realizing that she looked even less likely to spring out of bed and begin preparing the roast beef than I was, I had just picked up the telephone to call our guests and wish them a Merry Bah, Humbug, find your own damn Christmas dinner, when Janet decided, in that way only a mother can, that Christmas must go on. And so somehow the meal got prepared, the day got celebrated and the guests got fed, hampered only by the fact that in lieu of a single, store-bought Christmas gift, we provided Ray, Mark and Lorena with millions upon millions of little gifts which they are sure to remember later.

That was Monday. Tuesday we pretty much stayed in bed all day. Wednesday too. On Thursday, Janet pointed out that the girls would be returning home the next day, and we'd pretty much wasted the three days we'd planned to spend either in Washington DC or further exploring Boston, and if we wanted to do anything even remotely sociable, we really should make some effort. A gallon or so of Nyquil later, and we were in the car heading down to visit George and Rachel, another married couple who are friends of ours, but who have had the very good sense up until this point to avoid doing anything I felt compelled to mention in one of these essays. I don't have much to say about the trip except this: It is a measure of how addled our fevered brains were that it never occurred to us, not for a single second, that as sick as we'd been (and but for the grace of Nyquil, would be at that moment), that going out for Indian food was perhaps not the most prudent choice.

And so this morning, to round out the week and celebrate the Fifth day of Christmas ("Five Toilet Rings") I made the traditional post-Christmas trip to the District Courthouse of my county to challenge a ticket for failing to come to a stop at a stop sign back in late July. I had planned to offer the excellent and generally successful "But your honor, the officer is mistaken. I distinctly came to a complete stop!" defense that has led so many before me to such success, as measured in fines paid, but unfortunately for me I was thwarted by the local prosecutor, who wished me a Merry Christmas, commented on my lack of priors, and told the Judge he did not wish to press the charges.

Still to come of course, is the traditional New Year's Eve celebration on day Seven ("Swine-flus a-Swarming"), a day on which Janet and I pull out all the stops and really go wild, spiking our egg-nog with a fiber supplement and staying up well past our normal bedtime to collapse fully partied-out around 9:30, only to wake up in the morning like zombies, swearing never to "over-do it" again.

December 29th. Christmas ebbs. The New Year draws nigh. And the Nyquil still tastes just as hideous as ever.

Copyright © December 29, 2006 by Liam Johnson. http://liam-humor.blogspot.com

Blog Index

For a quick introduction to the blog, click here. If you would like to have entries in the blog mailed to you, click here to learn more. I have also begun posting these as audio "podcasts", for those who like all humor squeezed out of their humor essays by hearing them read in a droning monotone, the feed is at:

http://www.switchpod.com/users/liam-humor/feed.xml

Index of prior posts, by type. Items marked "NEW" are new within one week of the date this index was last published. (NEW INDEX POLICY: I will try to keep the blog index as the SECOND post, so that a new reader's first introduction to the blog is a column, not the index.)

New This Week:

Only the Fifth Day of Christmas? I Can't Take All Twelve! (11/17/2006)

Essays Only Available On-Line:

Oracle User Conference series:

It's A Small World, But an Expensive One (intro) (5/6/2005, only in the book)

IOUG-A Live! 2005 (Day One) (5/2/2005)

IOUG-A Live! 2005 (Day One, Continued) (5/2/2005)

IOUG-A Live! 2005 (Day Two, Morning) (5/3/2005)

IOUG-A Live! 2005 (Day Two, Afternoon) (5/3/2005)

IOUG-A Live! 2005 (Day Two, Evening) (5/3/2005)

IOUG-A Live! 2005 (Day Three, Morning) (5/4/2005)

IOUG-A Live! 2005 (Day Three, Afternoon) (5/4/2005)

IOUG-A Live! 2005 (Final Thoughts) (5/4/2005)

Hoist the Sales Matey! 'Tis Black Friday! (12/2/2006)
But Soft, What Brick Through Yonder Window Breaks? (12/9/2006)
Only the Fifth Day of Christmas? I Can't Take All Twelve! (12/29/2006)

Essays Available in my book, "Cue Ball City":

Sleep Study Trilogy:

Modern Medicine: Takes My Breath Away (2/17/2005)

Mr. Vader... Paging Mr. Vader (2/19/2005)

Who Was That Masked Man? (2/22/2005)

Tragedy Strikes Musicians (2/27/2005)
More Harmony, Less Hardware (3/4/2005)
Guilty? Me? (3/11/2005)
Cue Ball City (3/18/2005)
Prius? You Don't Even Know Us (3/25/2005)
We're All Going To Play Bruise Cruise (4/1/2005)
Ahhh!!! I'm Bleeding! (4/8/2005)

Van from South Carolina series:

Vanward Ho! (4/15/2005)

Leave the Driving to Us. (4/29/2005)

There's No Place Like Home. (5/13/2005)

Atonal, Arrhythmic, Aaaaaaaaa! (4/22/2005)

It's A Small World, But an Expensive One (intro) (5/6/2005)
Building a Baby. (5/20/2005)
Not the Compact Disk I Was Looking For. (5/27/2005)
Cell Phone? Or a bottle of Thunderbird. (6/3/2005)
What Do You Get For Their Anniversary? Depends... (6/10/2005)
Got a Sticky Situation? Buy Something Useless! (6/17/2005)
Sure as Death and Taxes. (6/24/2005)
A Snowball's Chance in... New Hampshire? (7/1/2005)
The Bonds of Holy...MOLY, is that guy HUGE! (7/8/2005)
The Plaquo-Terrorist Threat. (7/15/2005)
No, Officer. She's just a little Tipsy. (7/22/2005)
How Can I Get That Prescription? (7/29/2005)
Hairy Situations. (8/5/2005)
Liam: Mountain Man (8/12/2005)
Caution: Terrorist on Board (8/19/2005)
Sleep? It's Overrated (8/26/2005)
Labor Day (9/5/2005 (Posted late due to hurricane Katrina))
Business Travel Ranting (9/13/2005 (Posted late because I'm a forgetful bonehead))
Fashion Plate Barbie and Homeless Ken (9/16/2005)
Momma, He's Lazy! (9/30/2005)
Field Trips: Not Just For Students Anymore (10/9/2005)
Hamming It Up (11/27/2005)
Globally Warm This (3/4/2006)
Beans Beans... woot (3/10/2006)
Underpants and Stolen Jokes (3/29/2006)
Ah Uh Goo (4/25/2006)
One of Those Days (5/31/2006)
1/4 of July, You Can Keep The Other 3 (7/2/2006)
So THAT'S Why They Call It 'The Old Country' (11/8/2006)
Payback is Hell (11/17/2006)
Musing Unconsciously (11/25/2006)



"Cue Ball City (and other bald musings)" can be purchased directly from the publisher at:

http://stores.lulu.com/liam-humor

It will also be available (after mid-January 2007) from Amazon.com, BN.com, Borders.com and other national booksellers.

There's Something Different...

"Wait,", you say, "don't tell me. I'll figure it out. Something's different about your blog."

Yep, it's much shorter.

"I ASKED you not to tell me..."

Sorry.

Ladies and Gentlemen (or at least those of you who actually visit the blog, as opposed to just getting new essays e-mailed via subscription), as I mentioned recently, I have collected most of my essays up through about a month ago into a book.

So far, this blog has been wildly successful as a place for me to express my creative side, moderately successful at making readers laugh, not at all successful at heaping fame and glory upon my name and generating a huge readership, and an abject failure at making me any money at all.

Now, I didn't enter in to writing for the money, in much the same way I didn't enter into a technical career for the babes. But inasmuch as I now have enough essays together to actually publish a book, I'm sort of hoping I sell a few copies, and the best way to do that is not to have the entire contents of the book also available free of charge on the Internet.

If you're one of my loyal regular readers (and unfortunately you are so few in number that I know you all) and would particularly like a copy of one of the older columns that you've already read, I'll be happy to e-mail you a copy. But if I can manage to generate any "buzz" about the book, I'd rather not be giving away free milk and wondering why no one will buy my cow.

If you or anyone you know would be interested in a copy of the book, you can buy it at http://stores.lulu.com/liam-humor, and soon (probably January or February) on Amazon and other online book sellers.

And thanks for your continued support!

Liam.

(NOTE: I did not mean to imply that there are no "babes" in science. I meant to imply that, growing up at least, on the list of careers expected to generate wild female interest, science rated somewhere between "door-to-door belly-button-lint salesman" and "Bill Clinton at an NRA meeting". So what I'm saying is, I got into science for the money. I got into writing for the fun. Having found the love of my life, I don't do anything for the babes. My story, and I'm sticking to it.)

But Soft, What Brick Through Yonder Window Breaks?

This morning, I had occasion to be at Boston's Logan Airport. The reason was that I was dropping my kids off for another of their regular visits with my ex-wife (visits that last generally months at a time, in between the infrequent week long stays at home with me). And the reason for that is that, although this is to be posted somewhat later, I am writing this on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Oh, and the reason I specify that this was Boston's Logan Airport is that at the other end of my kids' journey, they would arrive in Billings Montana at an airport the entirety of which (including runways) could fit inside one of the larger baggage return carousels in Concourse A in Boston, but which for some reason shares the name “Logan”, such that my kids spent many hours today enacting their own version of the 70s movie “The Logans Run”.

I have to say, by the way, that there is almost nothing I enjoy about going to airports, and Logan is one of the worst. From the logical “bowl-of-spaghetti” layout of the various airport roadways to the curt “This job would be really awesome if you idiots wouldn't insist on actually TRAVELING” attitude of the people at the ticket counters, enjoyment-wise the entire experience is comparable to booking your next family vacation to sunny Iraq, but without the pretty fireworks. Plus, dropping off “unaccompanied minors” takes over an hour, meaning that I had to take out a second mortgage on my home to pay the parking fees. Oh, and did I mention that the airport is conveniently separated from all other land area by various different waterways such that you can't get there without taking a bridge or tunnel, packed with traffic and charging yet more money for the privilege of sitting and watching the guy in the next car over pick his nose while talking on his cell phone and (if you're really lucky) engaging in some highly personal grooming activities normally reserved for the privacy of the bedroom, preferably a bedroom in a locked bunker a mile below a mountain in a retired ICBM silo.

But what made this particular trip truly memorable was this: As anyone who has ever been to a modern airport large enough to have its own weather system knows, they have these ingenious little moving walkways (for those who think "Y'know, I'd really like to ride one of those fancy escalator things, but the change in altitude always makes my ears pop painfully!"). These generally have a handrail that no one holds on to, because for some reason that no one can adequately explain, the handrail is always moving at a slight but distinct difference in speed from the one the belt you're standing on is moving, such that if you don't pay attention and shift either your feet or your grip on the railing, by the time you reach the end of the walkway, you are tipped at a 45 degree angle to the ground.

Additionally, these railings are generally held up by large panels of industrial strength glass which looks like it could stop any bullet of caliber smaller than a cannon ball, the same kind of stuff the attendants in city subway systems sit behind, because clearly everyone knows that the true wealth of the nation is stored in masses of $1.25 tokens in those booths.

Anyway, the glass is very strong. It has to be, because there are literally thousands of people lugging tons of luggage across them daily, and statistically some of that luggage has to occasionally get bumped, jostled, dropped or thrown into the railing from time to time. Which is why I simply cannot fathom what might have shattered a pane of this stuff, but that's exactly what had happened, to not just one, but TWO adjacent panes. In the “passenger walkway” between the parking garage and Terminal E (a suspended hallway roughly as long as the Boston Marathon, but without Gatorade breaks), one of the moving walkways OUT of the terminal was shut down. As we passed the end of it, we saw a pile of something we would in hindsight recognize as shards of glass piled up at the end of the currently stationary walkway belt. A bit further on, we could see that the handrail was at a somewhat less horizontal and linear orientation than we were used to, and as we got closer, we noticed that the glass was missing. Just gone.

My theory is that someone's been smuggling wild animals again. You know how every few months you hear one of those “stories of the weird” of someone getting caught trying to smuggle rare birds in their suitcases or exotic lizards in their underpants? (Not the lizards' underpants, they tend to wear thongs and you couldn't really smuggle anything in them). Well, from the shattered glass and the way that the heavy-duty metal on which the moving handrail runs was now bowed significantly towards the floor, I can only assume that someone decided to let their illegally carried rhinoceros out for a moments break, only to have it decide to sit upon the nearest railing. (Believe me, if you'd been smuggling a rhino in your underpants all day, you'd need a break too. Or, um, so I would imagine.)

So, to sum up, not only did we get out of bed at 4am to drive several hours, brave the traffic, risk getting lost in the airport roadways, pay large tolls and the gross national product of a small nation in parking fees, walk enough distance to erode holes in the bottoms of our shoes, and by the way have to say goodbye to two of our children for the foreseeable future, but we had to WALK back to the garage from the terminal because someone, somewhere, had found a way to break a pane of glass that had withstood literally hundreds of thousands of other travelers passing by with nary a scratch. And so you'll never guess what Janet and I thought was just the perfect thing do on our way home.

Really, you'll never guess, because although I know you've read most of my adventures in the past and have heard me tell you the extent to which I am a moron (and the patience with which Janet puts up with my ideas, knowing how they generally turn out), I know you're also very nice people, both too polite and too believing of the good in people to honestly realize how stupid one man can be, and so I will just tell you: We stopped at the Manchester, NH airport.

There is, of course, a good reason for this, beyond the fact that I am clinically insane with a legal mandate to register with my community as a compulsive masochist. No, the reason was that my parents were going to be in the airport for an hour and a half, and we thought it'd be nice to stop in and visit with them and have a cup of coffee or something, before they got onto their flight and we finished our trip back home.

But of course those of you who live in or near New Hampshire realize that Manchester Airport is small enough not to have most of the problems of Boston's Logan Airport, meaning of course that there aren't terribly many flights that connect through there. So how did my parents, who live in North Carolina, come to be in the Manchester Airport? Well, they were there because THEY'D JUST SPENT MOST OF THE PRECEDING WEEK INCLUDING THANKSGIVING DAY WITH US. That's right, I'm apparently such a Momma's boy that spending a week with my parents isn't good enough. No, I have to spend MORE money on parking and wander through yet ANOTHER airport, just so that I can spend another few minutes with my Mommy and Daddy before they leave and go back to their home, secure in the knowledge that they've fulfilled their familial obligation to their obsessive son for at least another 6 months and can return to North Carolina where there is very little chance they'll have to deal with me in any form more threatening than e-mail for the foreseeable future.

Which means that in the process of writing this, I've learned several things. First, that my life is not an easy one. Second, that the difficulties in my life are largely of my own making. And third, there's GOT to be a better place to hold this rhinoceros, or at least some way to keep it from chafing.

Copyright © November 25, 2006 by Liam Johnson. http://liam-humor.blogspot.com

Hoist the Sales Matey! 'Tis Black Friday!

I'm sure we're all quite familiar with the Thanksgiving holiday, and if we aren't, we can all go back and read last year's Thanksgiving essay. I don't want to re-tread old ground (although don't think I won't, if you push me! Don't make me stop this essay, kids!).

Of course, things are different, year upon year. For example, after last year's ham proved to us that this whole global warming fiasco could have been avoided if we'd just aerosolized smoked pork products and replaced the Freon in our air conditioning units, this year we returned to the traditional turkey dinner, complete with stuffing.

On a side note, for all of you who call it “dressing”, please take a good look at your turkey. Does it look even REMOTELY dressed? Not only are we not content with the poor bird's naked body on display for all to see, we feel obliged to strip off it's natural covering. It's like if you went to a funeral, and not only was the deceased starkers, but someone had felt it necessary to shave off all of their bodily hair. Perhaps not such a bad thing for certain corpses (here I'm thinking of Angelina Jolie), but for every one of those, there are hundreds of Roseannes, Rosie O'Donnells and, frankly, people like me, people who have clearly already made several too many trips back to dine on the poor embarrassed turkey and should not now be viewed (living or dead) in less material than is used in your average corporate summer picnic tent. And who, come to think of it, contain enough bodily hair to entirely consume what meager estate we may have paying for depilatory service.

However, I didn't start this to talk about bald, dead fat people. That's just a perk. What I wanted to talk about this year is something that's become something of a new tradition for me: The Black Friday early morning sales.

Black Friday, for those who don't obsessively keep up on the latest media nomenclature for events we've all known about since we heard mom swearing about them through her uterine wall, is what popular culture has taken to referring to the day after Thanksgiving as, on the grounds it is the heaviest shopping day of the year. Recent studies have indicated that it is not actually true, but the problem is that the studies based their findings on numbers of transactions and volumes of sales receipts. You must understand that when they say “heaviest shopping day of the year”, they mean in metric tonnage of patrons, still digesting truly enormous quantities consumed the day before and out shopping (between picking up initial Christmas presents) for a new wardrobe, or at least some underwear in a size large enough not to be completely lost in the various cracks and crevices in what we tell ourselves were our formerly svelte bodies.

In recent years, however, the various retail outlets have decided that if they can get a significant fraction of that tonnage through their doors on Friday, using crowbars, they can guarantee a prosperous holiday season. And you only think I'm kidding about the crowbars. Take a good look at the door of your favorite retail establishment as you go shopping over the next few weeks and you'll find a white, greasy residue. That's not the result of someone over zealously lubing the electric sliding doors nor some freak accident involving a jar of Crisco, a fire cracker and a very surprised night watchman. No, that is the unfortunate mixture of residual lard liberally spread to help ease the passage of customers mixed with copious amounts of turkey fat and gravy exuding from the pores of the most portly among us. Really. It's a horribly disgusting display of our avarice in this country, plus it tastes really great on crackers. Don't ask me how I learned this.

But here's the deal: Each year, the stores open earlier and earlier in the morning, the sale items get more and more extreme, and the shoppers start lining up more and more ahead of opening time. Things like entire computer systems for pocket lint and a wad of freshly chewed Dentine Classic, for which people begin lining up in the sub freezing air at midnight the night before in preparation for a 5am opening. One day I fully expect to read that someone is offering an entire sub-continent to the first shopper willing to part with a few molecules of belly-button lint, and people will start lining up for a 3am opening as early as 1950.

Not the military time, the year.

B.C.

The reason people line up so early is that you may have noticed that most sales at most stores involve what is known as “profitable” items offered at heavily marked down prices, but not as heavily as they were previously marked UP, so the customers walk away feeling like they've gotten a heck of a bargain, the retailer snickers all the way to the bank, and everyone is happy. In these instances, generally when the retailer runs out of the item in question, he or she is willing to put on an act about how selling things at this price is killing his business and, with much faux-bellyaching, write out a “rain check” good for the sale price on the item, handing it to the customer knowing full well that 9 out of 10 customers will forget they have said rain-check until the day after it expires.

Not so with Black Friday sales. Black Friday sale items consist largely of what is called in the retail world “loss leaders”, which means that “The retailer is going to lose record amounts of money this season, and the losses they take on these items will lead the way for continued losses later”. As a result, you've probably noticed the tiny print in the sale ads that say “While supplies last” or “Limited to stock on hand” or “Good luck finding any in stock, sucker!” and the even smaller print that says “Guaranteed to have a minimum of two available in your timezone, unless for some reason you don't live in Alaska”.

That's right, the retailers of America have decided that the best way to get us all to purchase the majority of our holiday gifts at their establishments is to lie to us, recognizing that in the stupor of turkey-induced near coma, we'll get to the store, be momentarily annoyed to find that the advertised full central air conditioning unit (including installation) for $7.95 has sold out, and then immediately say “Oh well, it was nice of them to cheer me up with the ad implying that I could actually purchase such a thing, I think I shall reward them by buying large quantities of expensive electronics at exorbitant prices for every person on my list plus a few random politicians to thank them for spending ever more of my tax dollars on important travel to the Caribbean. Plus 'Franking', whatever that is.”

I don't know why they think we're so stupid that we won't through see their game. I certainly was not fooled, I only went over to get on line an hour early for opening time because I'd been unable to sleep the night before, because I'd spent the night being afraid I wouldn't wake up in time to be an hour early to get on line for opening.

This was, I should point out, really smart of me. My children from my first marriage only come out to visit me on those rare occasions during the school year when they have sufficient vacation time from school to make the trip worthwhile, and so the day after Thanksgiving is usually my last day with them before they fly back to their mother's house, and some years this represents the last time I'll see them until they've grown at least another two inches, or the start of summer, whichever comes first. (Don't ask about Christmas. My divorce lawyer apparently got his legal training via smoke signals on a windy day and never thought to include Christmas in the official list of vacations during which I should get to see the children). And so, of course, after spending well over a thousand dollars to fly them out for 7 days time, there's no better way to spend the last of those 7 days than dozing off every 15 minutes or so due to not having any any appreciable sleep in about 36 hours.

At least there's a good reason for it. The computer system I'd seen advertised sold out a mere 30 people ahead of me in line (I was 35th).

Copyright © November 25, 2006 by Liam Johnson. http://liam-humor.blogspot.com

Musing Unconsciously

I wish I lived in an alternate reality, the one in which our dreams make sense. If I did, I'd be a much better humor writer. As I write this, it is about 6:45am, and I just woke up after a long series of dreams in which I had a GREAT idea for this weeks' essay. In the dream I'd woken up at 2am inspired by my muse. The ancient Greeks had muses for the various different art forms, such as “Erato”, the muse of correcting typos, and “Calliope”, the muse of musical instruments only heard on old fashioned children's carnival rides. My own muse in charge of waking me up repeatedly with really bad humor ideas is “Bladder”, assisted by another ancient Greek, “Urania”. But I digress.

In my case, so many of my best ideas come at night and in forms which, once I wake up, somehow no longer seem to hold vast comedic vistas, in as much as they no longer bear any particular resemblance to reality. For example, this morning as I woke up, I was just (in the dream) putting the final touches on a hysterical article about how the food vending machine at work had suddenly begun behaving like an electronic version of “match.com” in the sense that it was dispensing dating advice in lieu of various forms of what we're supposed to believe is “food”. Now, I think we can all agree that this is an amusing premise, except in so far as our own “Food Simulator” at work has never behaved in a fashion even REMOTELY similar, and many of the funnier elements of the essay relied on odd quirks of co-workers with whom I do not actually work.

Plus there's the fact that, given the quality of product usually associated with this particular machine, I can only assume it would have fixed me up with a cut rate, stale date somewhat older than I'd prefer and lacking in “freshness”. Also, and if you don't work there you'll have to trust me on this, my own co-workers are not a particularly “hip” or “swinging” lot. Most of us are old, married, and unattractive in the way that only long periods of inactivity bathed in the healthy glow of a CRT monitor can really be. Or perhaps I'm projecting.

This has happened to me before, like the time I awoke brimming full of ideas and ready to sprint to my “Laptop” and unleash the torrent of “humor” into the “bowl” before “flushing”, because the entire premise of the article was that I was one of the stars of the television show “MythBusters,” which I quite clearly am not. MythBusters, for those who have not run into it before, is a wonderful program on the Discovery Channel in which two gentlemen named Jamie and Adam test various popular myths and old wives tales to determine the truth (if any) behind them, generally culminating in an explosion and a large pile of scrap metal where the object they were testing had been only moments before. Jamie and Adam once inflated enough helium balloons to lift a 6 year old child off of the ground, while I successfully inflated... my bladder.

And that, apparently, is the root of the problem. It seems that my unconscious brain confuses “urine” with “humor” and finds great comic potential in base natural urges that DON'T involve asking someone to pull your finger. Really, we guys know a funny bodily function when we see it, and the frequent urge to visit the loo due to what is likely a prostate the size of a Buick with a blocked exhaust line isn't one of them. To us guys, in order for a bodily function to invoke humor, it has to contain at least two of the three classic humor elements:

1. Odor
2. Embarrassingly loud noise
3. A look of disgust and utter disbelief on the face of our partner at the thought that she could have been so terribly wrong about us as she wonders whether it's too late to go back and marry someone mature, like Homer Simpson.

Interestingly, although many forms of humor do involve repetition ad absurdum, somehow repeating the act of waking up containing what is clearly at least a gallon of abdomen-squeezing waste product, dragging our sorry sleeping butts out of bed and across the mine field of dirty clothing that some evil sadist has seen fit to strew across the bedroom floor the night before as we were getting undressed, only to release what can only be described as “about a teaspoon, but somehow less impressive”does not evoke the same peals of laughter as a second audible belch in church or a third unfortunate gastric event blamed falsely on the dog.

And while I'm here, let me add as a piece of advice to my fellow guy readers out there: If you, like us, do not have a dog, do not try the last. It took me quite some time before I figured out how my brilliant wife was so quickly deducing that I was the source of the cloud of odious perfume gently scenting our air. And forget blaming the cat. It is a sad fact of life that while dogs will routinely emit large green clouds foul enough to kill any rodents which happen to have taken up residence within your house, cats have no such tool, which is why they have had to develop over the years the skill of actually catching the mice, killing them, and then leaving them in silent offering to the masters of the house, lovingly laid across our pillows or in the clean laundry basket. Besides, we also don't have a cat. Don't even get me started on hermit crabs.

But we weren't talking about house pets. We were talking about dreams. Or unconscious humor ideas. Or urine. I forget which. It doesn't really matter, inasmuch as by now you've determined that there's nothing even remotely funny here and have probably pointed your browser to a more reliably funny site, one that features Family Circus, the Lockhorns or the Uniform Code of Military Justice. And yet for me, it's been a successful and productive morning, seeing as I now have this column (such as it is) written for posting next week, and I wasn't reduced to writing yet another in the embarrassing series “Stupid Ways in which Liam can injure himself”. Yes, I have another one, it'll probably be the subject of NEXT week's column.

But for now, there are just three things you need to take away from this week's entry. First, if you want to REALLY appreciate my humor, apparently you need to sleep with me. Er, I mean, dream with me. Second, it really is marginally better to starve than to eat food from the “Wheel of Death” at my company. And the third one I can't think of right now. I'm too distracted by an urgent call of nature.

Copyright © November 20, 2006 by Liam Johnson. http://liam-humor.blogspot.com

Liam Humor Book Now Available!!!

For anyone whose ever read these columns and said "I wish I could get these columns professionally bound into book form", now you can. I've set up an account with Lulu.com, and shortly I'll be adding a "Buy my book" button to the blog page. I'm still tweaking things like book title, design of cover, and I may fix a few formatting issues. Heck, if I can find someone with the talent and the interest to draw a few cartoons to go with a few of the columns, I may add that as well.

But the initial version of the book is already available, for anyone who REALLY wants one. It costs $9.95 plus shipping. Once I have a final version available, it'll be listed on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and may cost a few dollars more.

For now, if you really want an early copy, you're welcome to click through to:

http://stores.lulu.com/liam-humor

(Yeah, I know, I should have waited to announce this until I was happy with the final product, but I'm just so excited that there's a version available!)

Liam.

Payback IS Hell

["Wow, Liam," I'm sure you're saying, "two columns in a row!" Well, yeah. This one was written almost a year ago, largely for the benefit of my sister (because posting it would clearly have been to her detriment), and the one thing I asked of her was that she let me know after she either got the job in question or decided not to pursue it any more, so I could share it with my adoring public. That happened a few months back, and I'd forgotten I'd written this, which shows just how much I adore my public back. Ah well, better late than never. I hope you enjoy it! --Liam]

So, tonight I got a telephone call from my sister. She is considering a change in employment, and has in her sights a major secret government agency.

Now, anyone who knows anything about the government knows that secret agencies require background checks on employees and their families. And anyone who knows anything about my political blog may know that I’m not entirely in favor of the current crop of Federal leaders. Perhaps not, I’m generally a very subtle and discreet person, so you may not have picked up on it, but I’m pretty certain that agents of our government, so adept at finding WMDs which don’t even exist, will be able to spot without much difficulty my personal leanings.

And hence, the call from my sister, letting me know that if I’m not ALREADY under scrutiny, that I probably will be (at least cursorily) and asking that I please, for her sake, not write anything blatantly anti-government for a few weeks.

Let’s review a few facts about my sister. First, of the three siblings in my family, she is by far the most personally successful. She’s also the youngest, most attractive, most female and has the largest breasts. Well, since I lost a few pounds, anyway. But being the oldest, least attractive, one of the two most male and having the second largest breasts, to say nothing of being arguably the least successful (although this is only by comparison to the other two), I have some reasons to feel some jealousy towards my little sis.

Now, let’s add in here a quick story. Part of what makes her so successful is that she’s a major grand Poobah Muckity-muck with a large children’s entertainment corporation whose logo is a large rodent. One of the few things that makes ME successful is that I’ve got a steel trap mind for any piece of useless trivia that will never matter to anyone, under any circumstance. Really. Ask me the origin of the phrase “Mind your P’s and Q’s” and I’m all over it. Ask me to list off the ages, genders, grades and even names of my children and I’ll stare at you blankly and say “Um... there are four of them, right?” (My wife, on proof reading, tells me I’m off by one. I forgot the youngest one. Lonny, or something...)

So a few years back, the television show “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?” hit it big, and suddenly my useless trivia wasn’t so useless after all. Here was a chance (albeit(*) a small one) for me to go on to some level of success, personal fortune, and the priceless opportunity for which our Founding Fathers fought and died: The chance to make a complete fool out of myself on national television.

I don’t know if you ever watched the show, but the way you auditioned was to call up a toll free number and answer a few questions. If you were successful and under a certain time, someone called you back, screened you, and then invited you down to the next level of contestant vetting.

I made it that far. I got through to the very busy telephone number, answered the questions, and received a call back from a nice older-sounding lady who asked me a few questions. By now I’ve given you all of the information that you need to see where this is going, but in case you haven’t connected the dots...

The Millionaire show was on a network which shares it’s name with an early scholastic subject. Said network was owned by the rodent and his corporate backers, who also employed my sister. So when the kindly lady asked me if any of my immediate family, including parents, spouses, children or siblings worked for the show, the network, or any large companies which might own that network, I found myself disqualified faster than I could say “The most magical place on earth!”

So you see, far from helping out, now is my chance to FINALLY get back at my sister for stealing this lifelong dream from me. (Well, OK, I’d been dreaming about it for the hour or so I tried calling the number, but still...)

I’ve been dreaming of my revenge since that day. The problem is, I don’t get many opportunities. I mean, I don’t work for a large entertainment company from which she might want something. I work for a company which makes digital maps. What was I going to do, delete her street from the map? Change one of the streets on her way to work to reverse the one-way information so that her in-car navigation system would consistently give her routes she couldn’t use? Yeah, that’d get her.

So now, of course, I finally have my opportunity. All I have to do is risk greater governmental scrutiny to the point that eventually I’m declared an enemy combatant and thrown into Guantanamo Bay detention center without benefit of council or charges being filed, away from my entire family and secretly looking forward to the next time the battery terminals are attached to my nether regions just for the human contact, and I can get her back! I can ruin her chance of getting a job which for all I know she’s not really interested in anyway. (I don’t know that she’s NOT interested, but how great would that be, to spend the rest of my life having government agents play punching bag with my major organs, far from the family that I love, only to find out she didn’t really want that job anyway).

So at this point, I’m torn. I could say “OK, Sis, what’s it worth to you?” and try to get some of the fruits of her success showered upon me as payment for my silence. Or I could just go the revenge route and write some article or other in support of terrorist forces which I otherwise find abhorrent, evil and worthy of total destruction.

Or I can say: Sue, good luck. In all seriousness, if this is a job you want, you deserve it and good luck.

There, that’ll show her.

(* See what I mean? Who knows what albeit means? And who, really, cares?)


Copyright (c) January 4, 2006 by Liam Johnson. http://liam-humor.blogspot.com

So THAT'S Why They Call It “The Old Country”

About a month ago, I took my first trip ever off of the North American continent, not including the time when I was six and the undertow of the New Jersey shore pulled me out to sea roughly 75 miles before my Mom got to me and brought me back to shore, having learned three valuable lessons:

1)Undertow can kill you
2)Mom talks really funny when she's panicked
3)Some water isn't worth drinking no matter HOW thirsty you are.

I mention this last point because it will tie in nicely later, and I'm still at that amateur stage of writing where I think my essay is just spiffy if I get to use a “callback” later in the piece.

My trip was a business trip to Europe. Specifically Belgium, although you can't get directly there from here, and so to make the trip requires a car, an airplane, two different trains, a taxi plus assorted moving walkways in the airports. Well, I thought they were moving walkways. Apparently only luggage is supposed to go by that route. On the plus side, though, they were able to give me a clean bill of health, x-ray-wise.

Not being able to get directly from point A to point B turned out to be a major feature of this trip, because it is apparently some sort of condition of joining the European Union that no matter how many times you take a cab from your hotel to your place of business, no two of them may ever take the same route. I was in Belgium for five business days, and by the last day, I'm pretty sure I spotted the Acropolis and the Grand Canyon from my zooming taxicab window.

And by the way, I do mean zooming. As an American citizen, let me tell you, you only THINK you know how to drive. There are several features of Belgian automobile transportation which are fresh and exciting (as measured in heartbeats per minute).

First, the cars are all tiny. The smallest compact car in the U.S. has more space in its trunk than in an entire Belgian vehicle. Really, they talk about how fat Americans have gotten, I just never realized they were talking about the cars.

Second, there does not seem to be any standard speed limit, so everyone zips around at what I can only assume is the top possible speed for a car whose engine compartment can only possibly have room for a tightly wound rubber band driving the wheels.

Third, I'm pretty sure the cars can shrink and expand at will. At least, that's the only way I can explain how we managed to fit into some of the spaces our cab driver neatly squeezed us into. We'd be hurtling along at top speed and we'd come to an intersection with a busier street, where in any sane country there would be a stop sign, and there would be bumper to bumper traffic on the cross street (all traveling mere inches apart at the same too-fast-to-read-the-license-plates speed) and without stopping or even noticeably slowing, the cab driver has neatly turned the corner and inserted the car into a space which, had I been jogging, I would have been concerned about trying to fit my big toe into.

And finally, although the cars are tiny, the streets are tinier. I'm assuming most readers have, at some point, visited a large metropolis. You have thus seen large avenues, small streets and are acquainted with sidewalks. In Belgium, the sidewalks are pretty much part of the street. They have to be, the entire street is less wide than the entire sidewalk on a moderately sized NYC street. Really, we walked around quite a bit in the evenings, finding restaurants to dine in. We'd get directions from the concierge at the hotel and we'd set out walking, and we'd have to backtrack three or four times until we identified that the cross street we were looking for was that gap between the buildings which in any American city would be the space left over when the builders accidentally mis-measured their building materials and didn't quite manage to make two adjacent buildings touch. I've seen rolls of duct tape in the U.S. that were wider than these streets. And with no signage what so ever, I can only assume these are two-way streets, although heaven help the poor pedestrian walking down this tightrope if even one car (to say nothing of two in opposite directions) comes barreling along.

But here's the really odd thing: There aren't many cars with visible damage. I'm not kidding. With all of the close quarters, high speed, no signs and zigging and zagging in places where I would be holding, white knuckled on to my steering wheel and hoping against hope that something I was interested in was straight ahead because there was no way I was ever going to turn my vehicle again, somehow the people manage to stay out of each other's way enough to almost never get into accidents. I don't know how they do it.

So finally, down a long narrow street about the width of an index card, we'd find the restaurant we were looking for, which brings its own adventure. You see, I was rather concerned going on this trip, because I do not speak any languages but English, and I leave it to the reader to determine if I speak even my native tongue passably. However, most Belgians speak English, some with a greater fluency than certain U.S. Presidents I could name, and so it's reasonably easy to get by.

You can almost forget that you're in a foreign country (if you could find anywhere in the U.S. that has an honest to goodness Castle right in the middle of the city, buildings which were apparently built before Columbus even made his journey to America, and co-ed bathrooms (more on them later)) once you get used to everyone else speaking English with an accent, until the restaurant hands you a menu. Belgium still has a king (largely ceremonial, I gather), who has apparently in one of his last actual decrees declared that his people might all speak English, but he was going to be damned if his restaurants were going to spend extra money printing out menus for lazy Americans who don't bother to learn the local language before visiting a place. And amazingly, the wait staff is all in on the joke. A man or woman who could speak nearly flawless English while arranging to seat us all at a table suddenly didn't know any of the right words to translate the menu items, meaning that on the nights that none of our Belgian co-workers dined with us, there was always at least one of us gesturing at the menu and indicating that we'd like the “We Proudly Accept Visa and Mastercard”. And make it snappy.

And here's where we get to water. The tap water in Belgium isn't BAD, per se, but it's also not particularly... pure. Perhaps not Jersey shore Atlantic ocean impure, but bad enough. No one orders tap water to drink; if you want water, you buy water. Bottles of water are about three euros (around $4) and contain plenty of water to refill your glass at least twice... if by glass you mean a decorative crystal thimble you happen to be carrying with you for some completely inexplicable reason. Sodas are not much better, size and cost wise.

And yet beer is cheap. On the first day there, I was told by a co-worker that if I was charged more than about a euro and a half for a beer, I was being ripped off, and that seemed to bear out (the only place I paid more was in the bar at the hotel). And each beer, while perhaps not quite a pint in size, was still plentiful to drink. And what beer. I could write an entire column extolling the virtues of Belgian beer. We have beers as good here in the U.S., but generally they're all imported from Belgium. So yes, I really am saying that some of the best beer I've had in my life was significantly cheaper to consume with meals than water. What a country!

And so of course I had to consume several beers with each meal (by the way, watch out: bottled Belgian water has more alcohol in it than most American beers. The beer could give an equal amount of Jack Daniels a run for its money), and I can report to you that Belgian beer requests exit just as quickly and with the same urgency as its watery American cousin, and boy is it odd to use the rest rooms in Belgium. First off, many of them are co-ed. Each individual toilet (for those whose bathroom business is going to involve creating a lap) has its own little closet room, but the urinals are right out in the middle for people of every conceivable gender to view while washing their hands. But if you think that's bad, they actually have at various places along the streets public urinals, which are about as private as an old American phone booth, if you made it with frosted glass. Not big on body modesty, the Belgians.

There's so much more I could tell you about, like how the average tip at a restaurant is less than you'd leave in America for a waiter who visibly spit in your food as he was delivering it, or how odd it was to realize that many of the buildings (indeed much of the older section of the city) probably looked nearly the same 500 years ago, except with less neon signs. I could tell you how the mind sprains trying to wrap itself around a digital display indicating an ATM in a building which looks like it was constructed around the same time Christianity was splitting off from Judaism. I could tell you how impressive the Castle and the main Cathedral were, when you stopped to think that both buildings were that huge, entirely out of stone, and built at a time when there were no power equipment, trucks or cranes.

I could tell you about all of that, but I need to put my energy into figuring out a callback with which to end this essay.

Copyright © November 8, 2006 by Liam Johnson. http://liam-humor.blogspot.com

Another Humor Podcast

Folks,

I've found another gentleman doing humor essay podcasts. His name is Kevin Cummings, and he calls his podcast ShortCummings Audio.

It's not quite the same as mine, the audio is a bit more professionally done, the humor a little less immature (a bit more in the style of "A Prairie Home Companion" than "Dave Barry without all that, whachamacallit... talent").

However, he's still endeavoring to post a new podcast each week, while I, as loyal readers will have seen, have been reduced to posting with about the frequency of Haley's Comet, but with less regularity.

Anyway, I enjoyed his first podcast, and so if you want to check out someone else for a change, check him out.

Liam.

1/4 of July, You Can Keep The Other 3

July Fourth weekend. A time when we, as Americans, stop for a few days to ponder the great questions of life, like "Aren't we awesome?" and "No, but really, don't we rule?".

Each year, we spend this most patriotic of days celebrating in just the same way our founding fathers did, by piling the kids into a massive, road hogging SUV and hauling them off to visit relatives they'd just as soon not remember, going to fairs and consuming far too much sugar and poorly cooked meat, and topping it all off by breathing in second hand sulfurous smoke and wondering just how long it's going to take to get out of our parking space after the fireworks are over.

This year, the Fourth occurs on a Tuesday and thus represents for most people the culmination of a four day weekend (Wednesday represents the day we all crawl back in to work bleary eyed and, somewhat the worse for wear, recognize that we simply can not be trusted with that much free time and patriotism, as measured in pints of beer).

Today was day one. My dear wife Janet and I decided to pack up the children (all 27 of them, based on the cost of the day and the amount of sound emanating from behind me as I drove the van) and head over to one of our local New Hampshire towns for their Fourth festivities.

These were not your average urban area's celebrations. To say that I found the whole day underwhelming is to say that Ben Affleck found Gigli "mildly embarrassing". To give you an idea, the most exciting part of the day was our trip to one of those monolithic chain stores with "Mart" in the name which have been accused of destroying small business, underpaying the poor, kidnapping the Lindberg baby, widening the hole in the ozone layer and introducing errors into my 2003 Federal Schedule C.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Coming up with the proper description for the events of the first part of the day calls upon all of my skills as a writer, working to come up with this subtle and yet highly descriptive image of the "Faire": it was a garage sale. Really, this whole town's Fourth of July celebration consisted of three large tents on the church lawn, and with the exception of a hot dog vendor, a lemonade stand, someone selling strawberry shortcake and (why not!) a large wheel of cheese, the space was entirely taken up with people selling items which, by the look of them, had only comparatively recently been freed from long captivity within cardboard boxes in the attics and basements of town residents.

They didn't even have fireworks, although to return to a recurring theme in these little whimsical flights of fancy (specifically, the "Liam is really old" theme), somehow I managed to get tinitis in my right ear anyway. (Tinitis, for those who haven't been on the planet since vaguely the time man first walked erect, is when one or both of your ears decides that the soundtrack to life needs a bit of enhancement, and that what is really called for is to mute everything down to a barely audible level and then overlay everything with a subtle whistling tone at just the right frequency and volume to make your fillings melt. This is often referred to as "ringing in the ears" because it's just too depressing to come right out and say "the sound of your highly pressurized brain slowly leaking out a small hole in your eardrum".)

So, half an hour and four overcooked oatmeal cookies later, we were back in the car and trying to figure out what to do to salvage the day, when my son said “Dad, I'd really like to go pick out a birthday gift for my sister”. My son Andrew will be 13 in about two months, and because I realize that these moments of selfless concern for, or even awareness of, others will soon go the way of the Betamax and actual “service” at service stations, I feel I should indulge them while they last, and so we all headed to the aforementioned source of all that is evil and unholy in the world so that my older son could spend his money on a gift for his sister.

As you may know, the type of store to which I refer seems to regard it as a personal challenge to try to remove any need for anyone to ever see sunshine again. Really, if they just had apartments, the people who work in the store could buy anything they could ever conceivably need (cheaply made and cheaply sold) in the same place they worked and lived and could turn the art of anti-tanning into the true ashen whiteness that can only come from never exposing your body to any form of light that did not begin its existence in a florescent tube. This particular store has a bank, an eye doctor, a cell phone provider, a franchise of a popular chain of donut restaurant and a photo studio in it, and as we were paying for our packages and trying to distract my daughter from trying to get a peek at her presents a few weeks early, my wife said "Hey, let's get portraits of the kids!"

Now, really, she could just as easily have said "Hey! Let's see how far up our noses we can shove a #2 pencil eraser end first!" or "Hey! Let's translate the entire case history of the United States Supreme Court into pig Latin!" for all the enthusiasm I had for her suggestion, but apparently she'd forgotten how much fun it is to get four children's hair brushed and keep them from punching each other while simultaneously trying to make the baby, who has been nothing but an absolute joy all day but who has suddenly decided that THIS is the moment that he's been waiting for to begin wailing as though he'd just learned his entire future 401(k) was invested in Enron, smile.

Nevertheless, as men throughout the ages have learned, it is best not to stand between a woman and properly staged photographic memories of her children, and so in we tromped and sat down with all the subtlety and decorum of a prison riot and made life hell for the poor photo technician on duty today. Miraculously, the pictures all came out really well on the computerized preview screen, which just means that this is the roll of film that the studio will accidentally expose to light while attempting the development process.

And then it was time, with the aid of a crowbar, to wedge all of the children back into the van for the long trip back home and the prospect of trying to get children who have been hyped up by the thrill ride that is shopping calm enough so that they can get to sleep.

And thus ended day one of the four day Independence Day weekend. If the rest of the weekend is this exciting, my heart may burst! I'm pretty sure my eardrum already did.

Copyright © July 1, 2006 by Liam Johnson. http://liam-humor.blogspot.com

One Of Those Days

I have four breasts, and it's a matter of some concern to me. Nevertheless, I'm actually not having the worst day I've heard about so far today.

This has not, on the whole, been a great day for anyone as far as I can tell. My morning began, as most workday mornings do, with my drive in to work. Quiet morning, generally nice weather, traffic wasn't too bad. Trees are starting to really green up, flowers are starting to bloom. I made my way into the business park in which my company offices are located, passing the same things I pass nearly every day. Turn this corner, there's the local co-operative grocery market. Turn that corner, down around that way, there's the Mexican restaurant, the hotel and the court house building. Make this side turn and there's my building, up on that hill over there, with the trees, the lawn, the retaining wall made of large boulders with a Subaru Outback leaning almost perpendicularly up against them.

Into the driveway, park the car, trudge into my office, and would you believe one of my co-workers had to point my attention to the Subaru before I noticed it? My office, as I mentioned, is on something of a hillside. My company has it's own building and rents space in two adjacent buildings. I'm in one of those, buildings which contain our space and several other places of business. One of those other places of business employs a gentleman who is most definitely not happy today, in as much I'm reasonably certain he didn't CHOOSE that particular parking space.

His morning, up until this point, was apparently much like mine but unbeknownst to him, after he trudged into his office, his car decided it was too nice a day not to go for a joy ride, and if he wasn't going to join it, well it was just going to strike out on its own to enjoy the countryside.

It got as far as the edge of the parking lot, threading the needle between two trees and over the fifteen foot rock retaining wall and onto the lawn below where it remained like one of those concoctions of scrap metal that some overpaid person with "vision" (which I assume is code for "drugs") calls modern art, but which the rest of us think of as something which should have been hauled away after the building demolition.

Needless to say, much of the morning was not particularly productive as people from virtually every business in the building had to make their way out to look over the situation, nod sagely to themselves and concoct their personal guess as to how this had happened. Personally, mine involved college students and an unpaid wager on Barry Bonds. Or, possibly, terrorists had hijacked that car and tried to fly it into our building, but missed.

But here's the most amazing part. When the tow truck pulled up to winch this car into a personal orientation with the earth generally considered more advantageous to the operation of an automobile, I heard smatterings of conversations among the various groups standing about hoping to see an "America's Funniest Home Videos" moment, and it seemed in each group, there was at least one story of how something very like this had happened to the teller. And in every case that I heard, the car at the heart of the story was a Subaru.

Now, I would never in a million years suggest some causal link, because I am a fairly successful computer programmer and would hate to have to hand over years of my hard earned pay because the Subaru corporation can afford better lawyers than I can, but I'm just saying that if you have a Subaru, and you live anywhere within 50 miles of any kind of hill, mountain, incline, stiff breeze, or have any distinct political slant you might want to move.

My favorite story was told by one of my own co-workers, who mentioned the day that someone in his department walked into his office and asked him why he'd parked on the volleyball court, and could he move his car so that they could play. He was quite sure that he hadn't, but as I'm sure you can guess right now, the volleyball court was at the bottom of a hill, and the parking lot was not, and his car (yes, a Subaru) had chosen to fully comply with all rules and regulations concerning gravity.

Today was clearly not a good day for owners of Subarus.

As the day progressed, I was listening to the local NPR station. They were discussing the situation in Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan, and I heard probably the most unfortunate name I have heard in a long time. The Arab spokesman whom they were interviewing was named several times, and while I have yet to figure out the correct spelling, they kept referring to this comment or that from "Mr. Farty-n-fart". Really. I started hoping someone would come up with a nickname for him, like perhaps "Jumpin' Jack Flash" (it's a gas gas gas).

Today was clearly not a good day for owners of Arabic names rarely uttered in English context.

And finally, back to the four breasts which are so concerning me. This weekend, on Saturday, my wife and I noticed that my oldest step daughter was starting to develop... curves. The last time we'd looked at her, she'd been built like a boy, a telephone pole, a Romanian gymnast, or basically anything that Sigmund Freud would have called a phallic symbol (more or less longer than it is wide and with a pretty consistent width). A "tall boy" beer can.

Now she was starting to resemble an old fashioned coke bottle, all ins and outs and curves, no linearity at all.

Dear Lord in heaven, we have our first adolescent girl in the house. And all of my friends and family members who have been through this particular phase with a daughter shake their heads sadly with a look of pity I'd previously only expected ever to see on my deathbed, as people tsk'd and shook their heads and sadly whispered how young I was and how tragic a case and how I should have known better than to french kiss Asian fowl.

Apparently we're in for one heck of a fun summer... and fall, and winter, and spring, repeat until my few remaining strands of hair are silvery white and the face staring back at me in the mirror sags and wrinkles worse than my laundry did before my wife taught me the benefits of drying and folding.

So now, as an exercise to the reader, what could I possibly do to double my pleasure, double my fun that doesn't involve Double Mint gum? What could it be, knowing that I have a daughter about a year older than my step daughter, and that I started this out complaining of four breasts? That's right, today my wife was talking with my ex-wife, trying to coordinate my son and daughter's trip out to live with us for the summer, and what news did we learn? Why, my darling little girl, my Katie, is apparently several weeks ahead of Dagny on the same perilous slide towards adulthood.

My son Andrew is nearing 13. I think he's probably still a year or two away, but he is two years older than Katie and three and a half older than Dagny, and once they get here for the summer, I fully expect that any morning he may come upstairs to breakfast sporting a full beard and a set of muscles that I once had but am unsure whether I still do given the heavy layer of protective fat I've conscientiously built up over the years to guard against the unfortunate possibility that any woman, anywhere in the world, might find me the least bit attractive.

Heck, at this rate I expect Liam (who you will recall was born last December) to be in full on puberty by the end of the summer.

So it's going to be a fun summer, as measured in moodiness and clouds of aerosolized teen hormones. If you happen to be driving through New Hampshire, and you see a pudgy, balding man sitting by the side of the road in a Toyota Prius whimpering, be kind. Comfort me. Say something nice.

Something like "At least you're not driving a Subaru!"

Copyright © May 31, 2006 by Liam Johnson. http://liam-humor.blogspot.com

Music, in Small Packages

Every once in a while, it's important to step back and look at the really important things in life.

Today, that is Liam. (Not me, the younger one).

Tomorrow, Liam turns 13 weeks old. Today, he gave me a great present. Those who know me know I am an avid singer. I love singing to/with the kids and all four of the older ones generally enjoy my singing and often like to sing with me.

Liam... isn't really making much noise yet. Not surprising, he is only just reaching three months old. He's only just starting to learn that he can make noises through his mouth instead of back in his throat through his nose.

So, I came home, and he was in a happy mood. He looked at me and grinned, which is a present in itself, all the more so because he's been a bit wary of me since Sunday, when I shaved my winter beard into my rest-of-the-year van dyke (what most people mistakenly call a goatee), and this is the first time since then that he's looked directly at me and smiled. (The first time he saw me on Sunday, he cried. Since then, he'll smile but not look at me, or look at me but get a concerned look on his face.)

So anyway, since he was in such a good mood, I sat down with him and started singing to him. The Alphabet song, Where Have All the Flowers Gone, Londonderry Aire (Danny Boy) and Puff the Magic Dragon. Shortly into the first song, he started cooing along with me. As I continued to sing, he continued cooing, clearly trying to move his mouth with mine and attempting as best he could to modulate his tone.

He's a baby, of course, so it takes quite a leap of faith to call what he was doing "singing", and yet I'm going to take that leap. I could see in his eyes that he was watching me, enjoying me, trying to do everything I did, and just as pleased as pie that he was making noise. I'm not sure he knows that there was any difference between his singing and mine.

Time will pass, this moment will fade, and I'll go back to using this blog for the humor essays I intend it for. But for right now, I'm going to revel in the memory of the first time my baby boy ever sang with me.

Liam, the elder.