Liam Humor

A Tale of Two Liams

2011-11-16T00:01:00.000-05:00

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. But mostly, it was just the most boneheaded of times.
Regular readers of mine will no doubt recall that the main recurring theme of my oeuvre can best be described as "What stupid thing has Liam done today?" And generally, the Liam in question is I, your humble scribe, and so what makes today's little missive so special to me is that it BEGINS with something stupid Liam did and ENDS with something stupid Liam did, but only one of the Liams is me!
The first Liam tale begins at the end of a morning commute in to work, perhaps three or four weeks ago. Now, I think we can all agree that when we arrive at work, we rarely are thinking "Yahoo! Let me jump right out of my car and race in to my desk, counter, lab or other workspace". Usually it's something more like "coffee... like coffee... must get coffee... coffee good."
Morning is not a good time for Liam, and it's generally best if he doesn't try to do anything complicated or important before he's reduced the amount of excess blood in his caffeine system(*), and on this particular morning if there were any coherent thoughts in his head as he pulled his car into the parking space, they would have been along the lines of how important it was that he get some coffee stat, before having to do anything important or dangerous, like operating heavy machinery.
It is never a good idea to interrupt an established pattern in life. Such as in the evening when one is showering and dressing for bed, being interrupted by a telephone call can lead to one waking in the morning to discover they've slept all night in a pajama shirt and no pants... and drooling toothpaste foam.

On mornings such as the one we are discussing, such interruptions-of-routine can mean the difference between a good, normal, boring work day and a morning spent frantically trying to figure out whether the engine (which is still running) will run out of gas before the locksmith can arrive to free the keys which are now locked inside the car, thus causing the battery to have to power the radio which is blasting loud enough to be legally classified as "demolition equipment" until that battery is reduced to a smoldering pile of battery parts, unable to generate enough spark to power a wristwatch, to say nothing of an internal combustion engine's starter motor.
And so you see where we're going here when, on successfully halting his car more or less evenly between two white lines on pavement (in much the same sense as wealth in this country is more or less evenly distributed), Liam decided to sit in the car for an extra minute and a half to hear the end of a radio news story which had caught what little pre-coffee attention he had on this particular morning.
Now, understand, this Liam owns a car with a key system which does not, technically, involve a key. It involves something called a "fob", which is basically a little rectangular block that somehow knows whether it is inside or outside of the car, a car which will stubbornly refuse to start unless authorized to do so by this little plastic know-it-all. And this "fob" is equally adept at authorizing the car to start from within Liam's pants pocket, so there's really never any need to take it out, nor any risk of its actually being locked in the car.

And actually, when the radio news story was over, Liam did somehow muster the wherewithal to turn off the car, so walking away leaving it running is not where this particular story is headed, either.

No, in this case, the net result of this break-in-the-routine came in the form of Liam learning what it feels like to be the pellet in a sling shot, as he opened the door and began to exit the car, only to be slammed back into his seat with all the grace of a whale on a bungee jump.

And thus did this Liam learn that seat belts can leave vicious seat welts.

Which brings us to the second Liam who, just this evening, concluded bath night and climbed out of the tub to towel off and begin dressing for bed. He was in the bathroom for some time, and when he finally emerged it was with the words "I'm having trouble."

A nearby casual observer looked up to find this Liam had managed to get his underwear so badly messed up that he was grimacing from some small discomfort, and what had ultimately happened was that he had accidentally put both of his legs into the same leg hole of his underpants. And although something had seemed wrong to him, he just couldn't figure out what, so he'd just kept pulling until the whole undergarment was around his waist, squeezing painfully.
One imagines that this casual observer had to work very hard to look concerned and comforting and not burst out laughing at the sight of a Liam, naked but for a pair of underpants twixt his waist like an overly tight belt, saying in all seriousness "Um, Dad, I'm having trouble."
And so now you've heard the tales of the two Liams, and all that remains is for you to figure out which one was me. But if you do figure it out, please don't tell me, I think the embarrassment might kill me... assuming I survive my ordeal.
Now where did I put those scissors?

(* In fairness, I can't claim ownership of this joke. This is a phrase originally given to me by my ex-wife. The first one. And by the way let me tell you, THERE is a differentiation I really never wanted to have to use.)

Copyright © November 15, 2011 by Liam Johnson. http://humor.liamjohnson.net

Blog Index

2011-11-14T19:30:00.000-05:00

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.)

Most Recent New Column:

Wanted: Dead or Alive (5/30/2010)

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)
Across The Atlantic... On Half A Battery (2/28/2007)
Mmmmmm. Spicy! (3/4/2007)
Really? So That’s What a "Tranny" Is? (6/14/2008)
We'll Leave The Light On For Ya... It Makes The Roaches Scatter (6/21/2008)
Diagnosis: Over 40 (6/30/2008)
Senators, Out Standing In Their Field (7/7/2008)
That Surgeon Really Has Gall(bladder) (7/18/2008)
I’m Not Single, But I Sure Am Swingin’ (8/12/2008)
The Rope Wasn't Hemp, But I Got High on It Anyway (8/23/2008)
STUFFED: A Thanksgiving Tale of Weight Loss and Bodily Function (11/28/2008)
Flightmares (4/2/2009)
Positively Liam (4/9/2009)
A Taxing Essay (4/15/2009)
Yule Never Believe What I Did Today (4/23/2009)
Well Now, Isn't He Special (4/28/2009, special extra essay)
When Pigs Fly: Swine Flu (4/30/2009)
Nailed It! (5/7/2009)
It's a Car, Not a Crisis! (10/14/2009)
All Dressed Up and Nowhere to ... Go (10/25/2009)
On Firetrucks, Floods and Other 'F'-Words (10/31/2009)
Vacation Vignettes (1/22/2010)
A Hair of the Dog, or "Take Two WHAT and Call You In The Morning?" (4/12/2010)
Wanted: Dead or Alive (5/30/2010)
On Stereotypes (6/14/2010)
P.S. Daddy, I Love You (6/28/2010)
Cute Story (not humor) (7/8/2010)
My Car Doesn't Corner Well (7/17/2010)
15 Essays in 30 Days (12/6/2010)
15 Essays in 30 Days (12/13/2010)
Drink? Yes, Please, But Something Stronger Than Holiday Cheer (12/20/2010)
Yule Be Happier Staying At Home (12/27/2010)
Hey, Universe, Stop Throwing Things At Me! (1/3/2011)
Shingles? But I Have a Metal Roof! (1/10/2011)
Memory-Rolled (1/17/2011)
The Germ of An Idea (1/24/2011)
Visions of Meconium Dancing in My Head (1/31/2011)
Mr. Love Pickle (2/7/2011)
Open Mouth, Insert Foot (10/15/2011)
A Tale of Two Liams (10/16/2011)

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.

Open Mouth, Insert Foot

2011-10-15T07:57:00.003-04:00

"Liam, open wide for your vitamins."

I've been saying this every morning for years now. Which is odd, because my son is only with me some of the time, and I really wonder what it says about me on a Saturday morning as I say these words into the ether. But in the area of reflexes I can't seem to suppress, this one doesn't even register compared to another one.

Understand, Liam has a few medical issues. Nothing which I need to go into in any graphic detail, but just understand that in order to resolve some of them, he's been prescribed a fairly substantial number of morning supplements. Essentially, each morning Liam has a bowl of vitamin pills with two or three "Kixx" cereal nuggets on the side.

He also takes several liquid supplements. Unlike Daddy's liquid "supplements" that come with a proof rating, these ones don't seem to noticeably do him any good, but I continue to give them to him anyway.

But here's an experiment for the reader. First, obtain a liquid, a spoon, a mirror, and a test human. It doesn't particularly matter to me if the human is your grandmother and the liquid is Geritol, or the human is your buddy and the liquid contains enough alcohol to prep him for surgery, or if the human is your ex-spouse and the liquid came from an un-flushed commode. I really don't want to know.

Pour a reasonable-sized amount of the liquid into the spoon and attempt to feed it to your test subject. JUST as the spoon breaks the plane bounded by their lips, look in the mirror. Your mouth will be open. I promise you that.

Now, knowing that, repeat the experiment. It happened again, didn't it. And so now you are, like me, thinking "Well, this is stupid. I'm a rational human being. I understand that this reflex is borne out of a need to model behaviors for babies, who will mimic our behaviors and thus open their mouths for the incoming food, but this person to whom I am feeding this liquid is neither a baby nor in fact anyone who will respond in any way except possibly with derision to my gaping mouth, and so I should be able to keep my mouth shut", and are now looking around for a new test subject to try this on, your first one having tired of being force-fed some random unsavory substance as though they were unable to feed themselves (a status which, coincidentally, could result FROM this experiment, depending on what liquid you chose).

And here's what you'll find when you try the experiment again: You'll find that you CAN successfully prevent your mouth from opening. You'll find that the experience is oddly discomforting, like the moment you realize, in the dead of night, that the seat of the toilet you've just sat down on was up. You'll also find that your concentration will waver, and so every third or fourth time you try it, you'll be standing there mouth agape and feeling like a fool. And if your frustration level with yourself is similar to mine, on at least one occasion you will find that you concentrate so hard on NOT opening your mouth that you pour a goodly portion of clarified cod liver oil down the front of the shirt of your nearly six year old son. Which will probably surprise you inasmuch as until that moment, most of you won't actually have HAD a nearly six year old son, but you will now, which just goes to show the awesome power of the scientific method.

Now, we can all agree that certain reflexes are important, such as the reflex to close your eyes when you sneeze, so as to prevent having to clean splattered eyeball off of the wall in front of you, or having the oddly disorienting experience of seeing your own face. But I ask you, what biological or evolutionary imperative could POSSIBLY make that open-mouth reflex important? Are we expecting momma bird to show up and regurgitate partially-digested worm directly into our stomachs? Really? This, to you, is a good breakfast?

There are so many reflexes of parenthood that don't make sense beyond a certain point. My friend Kate points out another one...

Liam sleeps in my room as often as not. There's a big empty house, and he's at the age when that house holds secret terrors in any room not within direct eyesight of Daddy, and so he prefers to sleep on the loveseat in my bedroom, a situation I plan to allow only as long as it does not require a saw, a double amputation, or Liam taking up yoga in order to comfortably fit.

But invariably in the night some primitive instinctual urge will awaken me. Rarely, it is the urge to urinate. More frequently, it is the genetic knowledge based on years of human experience that I'm running the very real risk of waking up refreshed and alert in the morning. But when this happens, I nearly always get up, go over to the love seat, and put my hand just below Liam's nose in order to reassure myself that he is still breathing. I learned with my older two children that the urge to do this only stops when sleep breathing begins to have a volume.

Why do I do this? I don't feel the need to count his fingers and toes to make sure he's got ten of each, like I did when he was an infant. I don't pick him up and burp him after a meal (not since he threw up down my back that one time, anyway). So why do I have this paranoid fear that I'm going to find my son not breathing? And what are the odds that if I DID, it would be a recent enough phenomenon that there'd be anything I could do about it, other than appreciate the lovely shade of blue my son had attained?

And one final reflex I sorely wish I could break, the reflex to go right on typing, because I can't think of a good "kicker" joke for the essay until I finally resort to something stupid that doesn't relate to the topic at hand.

Like a nun with no sense of personal hygiene, some habits never change.

Copyright © October 14, 2011 by Liam Johnson. http://humor.liamjohnson.net

Mr. Love Pickle

2011-02-07T22:44:00.005-05:00

Y'know, there are some days that I just feel like giving up as a humorist. Days when something comes along that I would never think up that make me laugh harder than anything I've written, and today I was reminded of one such.

As you all know, I'm a middle-aged bald fat guy. I try to find things that I enjoy in the way of exercise to try to keep the fat part under control, but because I have middle aged knees and am in a weight class that could officially support a satellite (heck, back in college, I had moons on several occasions[*]), my knees don't handle the stress of regular exercises, such as jogging, tennis, walking up a flight of stairs, standing up, etc., and that's why I was really quite happy over the summer to discover a new sport with the absurd sounding name of "Pickleball".

The basic rules of this game are very close to those of tennis, except where they aren't, and the key point seems to be to make the rules easy enough for people to grasp quickly, with just a few things so very different from anything else that anyone experienced in any other racquet sport will lose whatever advantage they might otherwise have had by regularly violating some esoteric rule or other. There's a section of the court you're not allowed to go into, except when you are and then it's mandatory. This section is called "the kitchen" for no reason that I can find. The ball has to bounce once before you can hit it, until it has gone three times over the net, and then you can wail away on the fly. Serving must be done from below the waist, meaning that over-handed serving is considered under-handed.

This game is apparently very big among the retirees in Florida, although whether this is because it's good exercise without being too stressful on the knees, or because only someone in the early stages of dementia could possibly make sense of the rules, I'm not sure.

Either way, though, I'm rather happy that there's a guy in my community who became interested in the game and is trying very hard to get it established locally, and I go out and play regularly. Fred is a wonderful guy with an odd but infectious laugh and a passion for the game, and almost no common-sense, and this is where we come to the "things that I would never think up for an essay" portion of the essay.

As the sport began to take off here in the community, Fred decided that we needed a web-site for local pickleball activities, to help coordinate things, get messages out to people, sign people up for league play, etc, and that makes perfect sense.

Fred also, having invested a fair portion of his own money in getting this started up, decided to register a url for the purpose, and that also makes some sense. But let's face it, this game already has a slightly titillating name. One might be forgiven for wondering if after a long game of pickleball, the group will go out for some twigberry wine, or perhaps just stop at the local deli for a weiner, a Hostess Ding Dong and a bottle of root beer. [**]

I ask you, in the absence of what I've written so far, if I were to ask you what you might find at "LovePickle.com", would you in a million years assume that it would be a site you would have no problem at all showing to your 10 year old child?

Worse than that, how many of you, knowing my sense of humor and predilection for twisting the truth to suit it, just now returned to this essay after firing up another window in your browser to check it out and see if I was making it up... or would have but are afraid that I'm playing some elaborate practical joke designed to infect your computer with spyware and give you an unfortunate new nickname at work, like "Mr. Love Pickle".

Really, this ranks up there with some of the other great URL blunders such as "expertsexchange.com" (Experts Exchange is a chat board for programmers to exchange tips and advice), "powergenitalia.com" (Powergen Italia is an Italian battery company which now uses "batterychargerpowergen.it"), "penisland.net" (Pen Island is a company that sells pens) and the ever popular "molestationnursery.com" (Mole Station Nursery has since given this up in favor of molerivernursery.com, the original domain now points to a porn site).

In looking for the specifics of the previous four, which I had already heard of, I also ran into "therapistfinder.com" (perhaps you need a Therapist?), "whorepresents.com" (Who Represents is a service that will give you the contact info of the representation of most celebrities) and a URL I was sure belonged to my brother when he was a teenager, but which actually belongs to a company providing "IP computer software", "ipanywhere.com".

To sum up, I think we can all agree on several things:

That "pickleball" is a silly name, even if it is named after the inventor's dog "pickles"
That none of us really wants to risk typing "lovepickle.com" into our browser window, and
That "Mr. Love Pickle and the Power Genitalia" would be a pretty good name for an alternative-rock band.

And once you've fully internalized those three things, you'll finally be ready to play pickleball. Or to move to a rest home in Florida. Just please, stay out of the kitchen.

(* <rim shot> )
(** One also wonders if these same people would walk into a vasectomy appointment drinking a Slice.)

[For those keeping track, this was the 10th humor essay, and the 11th total, of the 15 I was trying to write in 30 days. --Liam]

Copyright © Jan 4, 2011 by Liam Johnson. http://humor.liamjohnson.net

Visions of Meconium Dancing in My Head

2011-01-31T18:04:00.001-05:00

[Note: This essay was written over the Christmas break, but as part of the "15 essays in 30 days" didn't get scheduled for posting until nearly the end of January. Just imagine, if it helps, that my children dream visions of sugar plums while waiting for Punxatawny Phil's appearance. There, now we're nice and timely. -- Liam]

This morning, my mother, my children and I engaged in a time honored Christmas tradition: we made Sugar Plums.

We've all heard of them, visions of them dancing in the heads of the children on Christmas night, but few of us could probably pick the sticky confections out in a police line-up (sugar plums being notorious petty criminals), and so it occurred to me that it might be a fun family activity to try making them, especially since my youngest son has significant food allergies which make most traditional Christmas treats off limits to him, while Sugar Plums, containing nothing that anyone of any discerning palate would consider "good", are therefore entirely within the confines of his diet.

We divided the labor in the traditional way. I chopped up the ingredients and mixed them together, my mother got out ingredients for me, mixed some side bits, and generally bustled about keeping her kitchen cleaner while in mid-recipe than mine is after a careful spring-cleaning binge. My children took on the vital task of "going downstairs to the TV room to play Wii", except for my daughter, Caitlyn, who, in typical extremely thoughtful fashion, slept through the entire experience. As a typical teen-aged girl, Katie sleeps later on the average day than Rip Van Winkle bitten by a tsetse fly, with all of the outward signs of animation of a corpse, but somewhat better smelling.

Mom and I decided that since Sugar Plums are such an old fashioned tradition, that we should make them as authentically as possible, which means we used the Cuisinart, but only on "pulse" mode.

Sugar plums comprise an ingredient list which is predominantly dried fruits and nuts. The recipe from which we were working called for dates and dried apricots, but I'd found similar recipes which called for prunes, and it seemed appropriate to include them, inasmuch as, as a humor writer, it's only possible to be this full of, well, "it" by having a constant low-grade constipation, which I thought the prunes might help alleviate. Well, that, and since prunes are dried plums, it did seem that some plum ingredients should exist in sugar plums.

But therein lies the first problem. Dates come chopped. Dried apricots will chop up comparatively nicely in a food processor. Prunes become a thick paste spattered on the walls of the machine, with almost nothing remaining that even partially resembles fruit. It's a lot more like "tar" or the very first poopy diaper a newborn uses to indicate to his first-time parents that although he's cute and generally a blessing, life will also be an endless series of less than savory moments. Prune paste smells about the same, too.

So you take these three fruits, mix them up with a large batch of chopped pecans, and then, because that whole mess isn't quite sticky enough, you pour in a mixture of honey and spices and stir until you have a sticky, gloppy mess which can stick to almost anything. It sticks to the bowl, the spoon, your fingers, the table top if you spill some. It sticks to the wax paper you're supposed to put it on. What it does NOT stick to is itself, so that when you take handfuls of this glop and attempt to form them into balls, you end up with what can only be described as gloves fashioned from fresh road kill, but nothing even remotely "ball" shaped.

Still, in the end, I managed to get them formed into something that approximates spherical (in much the same way that I approximate Brad Pitt), after which I dusted them with powdered sugar and then took them straight out to the trash bin, because it was pretty clear from looking at them that my children would turn up their noses at them, and having visions of sugar plums squishing between my fingers, I didn't think I was particularly likely to want to risk touching them again, if I ever manage to get my hands clean.

Still, I feel rather good about myself, having at least attempted this Yule tradition, good enough that I celebrated afterward by mincing around in a particularly swishy fashion, the traditional the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy. It was easy to do, now that I'm thinking about Brad Pitt.

Copyright © Dec 28, 2010 by Liam Johnson. http://humor.liamjohnson.net

The Germ of An Idea

2011-01-24T20:29:00.000-05:00

So here we are on day eleven of my thirty days of essays, and for the first time, I'm behind. As you probably recall, initially there was a flurry of activity as I wrote four essays in rapid succession, thus taking care of the first eight days of essays and culminating on the day I apparently decided to see if I really needed to see a plastic surgeon, or whether I could manage a "do it yourself" sort of alteration, by attempting to use gravity and poorly placed heavy objects to see if I could rearrange the bones in my face.

All that attempt managed was to knock whatever sense of humor I have completely out of my head.

Actually, the truth is that for much of the ensuing time, I've been sick. And not in the "um, we read your essays, Liam, WE could have told you that" sense, either.

You see, I've been spending a significant amount of time with my 4 year old son, because after tomorrow, I will never see him again. Oh, he's not going anywhere, he just won't be my 4 year old son any more.

But one of the things parents of small children will tell you is that they have an astonishing ability to visit plagues and other pestilences upon our houses. Really, you can visit the infectious disease ward of your local hospital, and there's a good chance that you won't come down with even a sniffle, but have a single-digit aged child in your house, and no matter how liberally you slather yourself down with "Purell", no matter how often you scrub them down in the bath tub, you will spend the vast majority of your time ill.

You can even commission a major prophylactic manufacturer to build a giant, full-body condom and wear it 24x7, breathing through a sophisticated HEPA filter, never allowing even the most basic of human-to-human contact, and somehow you will still end up sick. And looking like a complete dork. Or, um, so I would imagine.

And the most tragic part of the whole thing is that those same children, those "typhoid Mary" toddlers somehow manage to sneeze twice, whine for the better part of an hour and a half, and then bounce back like nobody's business, while their unsuspecting parents, who take such care NOT to shake each other's hands just moments after admiring on one of the fingers of one of those hands a world-record-setting booger carefully extracted from a nostril, their adult bodies react in much the same fashion as one might react to a close encounter with a speeding semi tractor trailer, but with significantly less visible tread damage.

The secret, of course, is that as we age, we become jaded, and as our bodies age, they do as well. When we were children, a germ, bacteria, virus or other big bad nasty would enter our body, and it would immediately snap to attention, marshal all of the various forces and attack the invader, eradicating it from existence in much the same way (and with essentially the same speed) as an anvil dropped onto a common house fly. But as we age, our bodies get tired. "Eh, I'll get it in a minute" they say or "Oh, great, so you went and swam in the sewage treatment vats again, and you expect ME to clean up your mess", and then roll over and return to the nap that, lets face it, we wish we ourselves were taking, such that by the time our bodies get around to marshaling the troops (and let's be honest, we haven't exactly taken good care of those troops, either. Flabby, out of shape, and suffering major attrition, our "immunity army" isn't what it once was), whole sections of the body have been fully taken over by the disease.

As we speak, my son is almost fully over his disease, his symptoms but a dull memory, except for a bad case of conjunctivitis, which does not appear to be bothering him in the slightest. The white part of his eyes are now the sort of blood red which usually indicates a recently turned member of the undead class, or a college student after a three-day-weekend-long bender merely WISHING he was, but since I woke up this morning with no more holes in my neck than I had when I started, and since he's too short to reach the liquor cabinet, I'm pretty sure it's just "pink eye".

Meanwhile, my throat is feeling like it's been carefully sanded with #30 coarse-grit sandpaper to remove any of that pesky lining which usually prevents our blood from attaining the freedom which should be the birth right of every American blood cell. I'm having spasms which aren't so much coughs as violent attempts to expel my appendix without surgery. And my voice is a mere whispered rasp, about as pleasing to listen to as a dental drill, but somehow less soothing.

Day eleven of my thirty days. I've got to write SOMETHING. Just, whatever you do, don't TOUCH it as you read it. I've run out of Purell, and I'm not sure puerile is really an adequate substitute.

Copyright © Dec 20, 2010 by Liam Johnson. http://humor.liamjohnson.net

Memory-Rolled

2011-01-17T20:26:00.000-05:00

I had a fantastic idea for an essay that I was going to write this evening, but now that I'm sitting down to write, it has gone completely out of my head. This is not uncommon, these days, and I'm finding it ever so frustrating.

Of course, there's nothing new about memory loss as we age, better humorists than I have fully exploited the comic depths of the topic, and yet the beauty of having attained this age is that I can't really recall any specifics, and so since it's happening to ME now, clearly that's different and not a topic that's been so thoroughly trodden as to make Times Square seem remote by comparison.

The thing I have the worst trouble recalling is words, which can be a bit of a problem when you're trying to be a whachamacallit... um, oh, yeah, writer. To give you a real example, in the previous paragraph, I'm pretty certain the word 'exploited' was not the word I was looking for. Honestly, there's another word out there that better describes what I was going for (and by the way would have been absolutely hilarious), but I got stuck on it for literally 5 minutes, as I looked in several different on-line thesauruses trying to come up with it before settling on "exploited".

Earlier today, I couldn't think of the word "risotto". Honestly? Snooty Italian rice? That's what my brain decided to occupy itself with for the better part of an hour? And of course, this wasn't in a vacuum, someone mentioned "arborio rice", and I got the words "Oh, you mean like" out of my mouth before I realized that, much like the one and only time I tried to COOK risotto, the word had formed a sticky glob that utterly refused to come out of the brain-pan.

And here's the tragic part of the whole thing: there was a time when I was fantastic at remembering things, and as a result, I sort of become obsessed when I can't come up with something I know that I know. The next line in Hamlet's "To Be or Not To Be" speech. The name of the actor who starred in "Crimson Tide" along with Gene Hackman. The exact names, ages and genders of my children. Where I put my keys.

And so I'll ponder over it, bordering on obsession, until I reach a state of mental vapor-lock, unable to work on anything else or do anything more complicated than blinking until either the item I'm casting about for eventually comes into the forefront of my consciousness or I pass out from extended lack of sleep, and if I'm lucky, in the morning I've forgotten that there was something I'd forgotten.

It's sort of the memory equivalent of a 'song worm', when someone hums just a little bit of, say, that ghastly song by Rick Astley and for the rest of the day you can't stop hearing "Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down, never gonna run around and desert you..." echoing through the dark recesses of your mind.

What I can't figure out is what evolutionary purpose this loss of memory can possibly serve, because it's not as if I ever forget anything that I'd LIKE to forget, like the time in second grade when we were supposed to write down our favorite things, and I wrote "My girlfriends, Anne and Daphne", blissfully ignoring the fact that neither Anne nor Daphne had ever shown even the slightest recognition of my presence in their class and completely mortified a day or two later when, after compiling the list, the teacher had us each read our own "favorite thing" out loud. To everyone. Thus teaching me the valuable lesson that there are worse things than not being noticed by the girls in the class. Being noticed, as one notable example.

I also don't forget things like the fact that I once had a full head of hair, or that there was a time when I could climb a flight of stairs and not worry that I might spend the next day aching after having overextended myself. Or the lyrics to Rick Astley songs.

I suppose it's possible that from an evolutionary standpoint, memory loss might be a good thing, in that at about the same time of life when you stop being a net provider to the tribe and begin being a drain on the family economy, you also can run out on an errand, forget what you were out there for, and then forget where home is, thus removing a burden from your family without them having to resort to something drastic, like replacing your bug repellent with honey or leaving a rabid weasel on your night stand where your reading glasses should be.

But still, it seems kind of cruel that I can remember being young and healthy, but not the name of the cute girl I met at the grocery store who seemed interested in me. I can remember how abysmal I've been at sports my whole life, but not the combination to my bike lock, meaning that my bike has been chained to the wall in my garage for the past four summers waiting for me to remember how to free it. I can remember every blessed lyric to the Gilligan's Island theme song, but consistently screw up the lyrics to the songs my barbershop quartet sings, at least whenever we have an audience.

It's time to finish this up. I know I had something else to do tonight, but even though I can't remember what it is, I can see that you're no longer hearing me over the mental chorus of "...never gonna tell a lie and hurt you", which means my work here is done.

No need to thank me.

[This was the sixth essay in the "15 in 30" series, although I'm posting it before the fifth, because the second, which posted fourth, dealt with the same topic as the fifth, which will now post sixth. And I'm complaining that I can't remember anything important.]

Copyright © Dec 21, 2010 by Liam Johnson. http://humor.liamjohnson.net

Shingles? But I Have a Metal Roof!

2011-01-10T20:18:00.000-05:00

Here's a tip for you aspiring authors out there: the very best time to challenge yourself to write in unprecedented volumes is at times of peak stress with a shortage of available free time and if at all possible, when various viruses and other microscopic beasties have taken advantage of the lowered immunity stress brings.

Sometimes, it feels like the infamous Murphy is sitting, watching, just waiting for me to commit to something so that he can step in and work his mischief. Regular readers are already familiar with the initial postponement of "15 in 30" due to circumstances somewhat beyond my control. For those who somehow missed it, the time-line thus far is this:

Monday Morning, 12/6: Liam decides that Christmas, with all of the associated travel, gift shopping, baking and other extraordinary tasks, is the PERFECT time to saddle himself with extra homework, and further decides that rather than simply entertaining this idea in private, he will further "motivate" himself by announcing to the world his intention to write 15 humor essays in 30 days.

Tuesday Morning, 12/7: Liam's ex-wife announces that for personal family reasons having NOTHING to do with the surplus of warm, sunny weather in Louisiana as compared to Connecticut at this time of year, she must depart and would he (Liam) please come pick up their son on Wednesday evening for the rest of the week. Sons are great. Spending time with them is great. However...

Wednesday Morning, 12/8: Liam realizes that sons are NOT conducive to prolific writing, particularly not when those sons are nearing their 5th birthday and think that the world is just perfect if Daddy will spend every waking hour playing on the Wii with them... and don't understand why the world shouldn't be just perfect. The baser part of Liam's nature also recognizes the value of the moment, in that a few years back, if he'd told anyone he planned to spend the day playing with his son's Wii, it would likely have caused him some legal trouble. So Liam announces to the world that he will be postponing the start of "15 in 30" until Friday morning.

Wednesday Evening, 12/8: Liam drives down to Northampton, MA, where he meets his ex-wife to pick up his son. On the way there, Liam notes a certain painful throbbing in the area of his nasal passages and, not having recently taken up snorting Liquid Plumr, realizes that this is most likely the onset of a winter cold or flu, of the exact sort that will make being the primary care-giver to his son much more of a literal than figurative headache.

This brings us to today, early in the morning on Saturday. My neck is stiff, I'm feverish, I'm coughing up large blobs of what I can only imagine is some industrial wood putty I accidentally inhaled while trying to snort that Liquid Plumr, and oh, yes, my scalp hurts. Not the sinus headache from a few days ago (although if I stop taking ibuprofen in doses large enough to qualify as agriculture, I'm sure that would return as well), but a surface pain which signals the return of yet another blast from the past: shingles.

In my life, I have an appalling record of picking up and retaining minute details while losing sight of the larger picture. I will note a sale on milk and drive 15 miles to buy some, ignoring that with the added gas, the milk could be free and it would not be a bargain. I research the top brands of cleaning products, forgetting that as a bachelor, the last time my house got a thorough cleaning was almost certainly before I purchased it. And in the same vein, I know that one of the best ways to keep winter weather from adversely impacting your life is to put shingles on top... and have apparently forgotten that the end of that sentence is "...of your house" and not "of your skull."

Shingles, for those who are not aware, in a resurgence of the varicella virus that gave us "chicken pox" when we were children. ("Varicella" comes from a Latin root meaning "Yeah, you only THOUGHT you were done with it after you developed that embarrassing pock-mark scar on the tip of your nose in the 3rd grade")

The way it works is like this: a child gets "chicken pox" and his parents are forced to keep him inside and calm, a task which any parent will tell you is about as possible as playing a prolonged game of "fetch" with a rottweiler using a t-bone steak. And so after a day or so, the child still confined to the house, has begun bouncing off of the walls like a ping-pong ball in a lottery machine, and so in order to keep the child occupied and out from under foot, the parents engage him in a game of "hide and seek", hoping that their child will display the same level of savvy that purchasers of the "Sham-wow" show and will not quickly recognize that their parent is not living up to their end of the game, in so much as the only thing they are actively seeking is a bit of peace and quiet. The child, more tired than they realize from their disease, ends up falling asleep in the closet and everyone wins, including the "chicken pox" virus, which will turn out to find "hide and seek" to be the virus equivalent of on-line poker.

And so, as the child begins to regain health, the last few strands of virus decide to start what will now be a life-long edition of this new-found thrilling game, and they hide in the various closets of your body and fall asleep until the parents (antibodies) stop seeking them. Then, just like children, they pop back out at the most inopportune time and want to play with your Wii.

No, actually, they pop back out and start attacking one of your nerve bundles, generally the one closest to where they've been hiding, and which nerve that is decides where your symptoms will show up. Sort of like a microscopic game of "Whac-a-mole", but it isn't prize tickets which emanate from the game console when it's over.

And of course, it is apparent that the nerve in my body which has been thoroughly attacked today is the part of my brain responsible for saying "Hey, y'know, signing myself up for 15 essays in 30 days, when I haven't written 15 essays in the last year and a half probably isn't such a good idea when I have about as much free relaxation time as a tap dancer on a very large griddle.

Mr. Murphy has earned his Christmas bonus this year.

[This was the second essay in the 15 in 30 series, although since it required some significant polish from its original form, it didn't post until after the fourth. Unfortunately, this puts it very close to the fifth, which also consists of my whining about being sick, so perhaps that one will be postponed as well.]

Copyright © Dec 11, 2010 by Liam Johnson. http://humor.liamjohnson.net

15 in 30 Update

2011-01-04T22:39:00.003-05:00

Well, I seem to have failed to consider something: My regular case of post-Christmas blues. The combination of daylight hours of shorter duration than your average sneeze and the departure after an all-too-brief visit by my children always puts me into a funk that can last for days... and which isn't particularly conducive to being funny.

So while I still have 4 more days, I have 5 essays to write in that time, and I'm not sure I'm going to make it.

I'll try to pick up the slack, but we may end up with only 11 or 12 in 30 days.

Hey, Universe! Stop Throwing Things At Me!

2011-01-03T19:56:00.000-05:00

Somewhere, buried deep in the annals of lesser known saints and religious figures, you'll find Saint Claudius the Maladept, patron saint of stupidity and personal embarrassment, more commonly known in recent times as "Saint Clod the Klutz". It is St. Claudius who watches over the clumsy and self-incriminating among us and makes sure that their more embarrassing blunders happen when there are no witnesses, and leaving no permanent scars or other evidence, leaving it as an option to the moron-of-the-moment whether to tell the story (either as a good humorous tale or as the central pillar of a good pity party) or to keep it to themselves and pretend It Never Happened.

St. Claudius protects people like a friend of mine from work, who is forever telling me about the various trips and falls she takes when wearing heels of any height greater than the thickness of a piece of paper, and how pleased she is that most of these falls take place without anyone in sight, so that she can dust herself off, readjust her clothing to make sure any untoward bits are properly covered, and continue on her way with no one the wiser.

St. Claudius should not be confused with St. Saleous the Superior (better known as St. Soupy Sales), who ensures that these sorts of boneheaded moves happen in ways which are most amusing to passers-by, random observers, or fellow drinkers in the bar the next night on retelling. Long time readers will remember the time I threw my back out and wrote an essay about it. No, not that one. No, not that one either. The first one. St. Saleous is responsible for ensuring that the rather mundane act of throwing out my back became a wonderful tale for the retelling, by ensuring that no matter the actual cause, the immediate action I was taking as it went "sproing" was reaching for a remote control in order to avoid watching an absorbent cartoon character who oddly chooses to reside in a tropical fruit somewhere on the sea floor.

It is, however, St. Claudius to whom I apparently have not been making sufficient pleas, as last night, he was nowhere to be found as I dozed off and, too drowsy to reach over to the nightstand NEXT to my bed to put down the book I was reading, sort of half-heartedly put it down, face down on the page I was currently on, on the shelf on my headboard, directly above my head… hanging precariously off of the edge… right next to a large mug of water.

And so as you have, undoubtedly, figured out, in the middle of the night, the book dislodged, dropping itself, the glass and the remaining contents OF the glass hurtling across the great gulf, directly at my sleeping head. Specifically, my left cheek and eye. And by "great gulf", I mean that that based on the rude awakening I had, I'm quite certain that someone in the night played a prank on me and slowly raised the headboard until the shelf was approximately the height of NBA player and noted geological landmark Manute Bol, because this clearly was not an incidental fall of about 6 inches, I can tell you based on my continuing headache that I'm lucky to have survived the experience.

And by the way, to go off on a tangent for a moment, let me point out that this occurred about an hour and a half before I generally get up. So to whatever helpful sprite or spirit wanted to make sure I didn't oversleep, let me just say that as it was unusually early, and as I almost never fail to wake up on time for work, generally waking a few minutes before the alarm goes off, there's really no need for the universe to throw things at me, OK? I promise, I'll get up on my own!

To this point in the story, it kind if sounds like Claudius was on the job, right? This happened in the middle of the night, he'd been working behind the scenes over the last couple of years to systematically erode the underpinnings of my marriage while simultaneously encouraging me to be, well, me, thus ensuring that at the moment this occurred, I would be alone in my bed without a witness nor even the chance of a light sleeper hearing the crash and coming to check on me.

But he missed one important thing: the sharp corner on the book which gave me a severe laceration on my cheek and burst a blood vessel in my eye, making me look for all the world like a first-stage victim in one of those "designer plague" horror movies that were all the rage a few years back, the ones where the members of a tour group to some exotic locale come down with symptoms that begin with blood seeping from the eyes and end up with all of the bones in their bodies dissolving, until each infected tour group member ends up looking pretty much like a large pile of pudding in a Hawaiian shirt. (They had to have the Hawaiian shirt. Otherwise, it would have been tragic.)

And worse, based on the location and extent of the bleeding from the cut on my cheek, almost certainly in the next few days I'm going to develop a nice black eye, just in time for Christmas and the family portrait I have scheduled for me and the three of my children who will be with me. I'm not sure whether to hold it up as future evidence of "elder abuse" if my children do not properly respect me in my dotage, or suggest that it's the last physical symptoms remaining from the abuse I took during my divorce.

But that's a problem for later. Right now, I'm off to petition another Saint. Specifically, Joseph, the patron saint of pain relievers that taste like sweet tarts.

[And again, for those keeping track, this was the fourth essay written in the "15 in 30" series. The picture doesn't fully convey the truly hideous look of my eye, my cheek, and the "black eye" bruise which is now, some 60 hours later, beginning to develop.]

Copyright © Dec 14, 2010 by Liam Johnson. http://humor.liamjohnson.net

Yule Be Happier Staying At Home

2010-12-27T19:59:00.001-05:00

These are the waning hours of Christmas Day, 2010. We are snowed in (unusual for North Carolina), two of my children are sleeping in a Hilton in Chicago, I'm still trying to figure out how to tell my body that no matter how much foreign fluid is in my lungs, there's no sense in trying to eject them wholly from my body, and I am lying in a bed in the main guest room at my parents' house in North Carolina, pondering on how I got here.

Actually, come to think of it, as I am in my PARENTS' house, I should phrase that differently. I don't know about you, but as I have children, I have some sense of how I got here, and I really would prefer not to ponder that deeply into the mechanics of it all, if it's all the same to you.

Our Christmas travels began on the evening of Wednesday the 22nd, Liam's birthday. With the threat of impending snow (an event which, I am told, came to little more than a few inches of snow, which in New England is considered about average for a July afternoon, while (this is true) a similar amount here in North Carolina has shut down the airport), Liam and I drove down to stay overnight at a hotel adjacent to the airport for our morning flight on Thursday. Well, when I say "Liam and I drove", of course HE drove, I was much too drunk after celebrating his fifth birthday.

Our first flight of the day, we sat next to a lovely young college student named Molly, who apparently attends college one town over from the CA town that my Aunt and Uncle live in, and I learned significantly more about her life than I would have thought possible in a two hour flight, largely because she spent the whole trip talking to Liam. Now, it's not that I'm jealous, exactly. As a middle-aged man, I wouldn't really want to have any success with a young woman only a couple of years older than my oldest child. It's just that Liam has only comparatively recently discovered he HAS, er, naughty bits, while mine (being a divorced man) are woefully underutilized, so it is disconcerting to me that, should he turn his mind to it, he could pick up hot babes at the drop of a hat, while for me to accomplish the same thing, I'd have to be babysitting an infant with a fever.

Our flight had a three hour layover in Charlotte, NC. This is not unusual. Virtually every flight that terminates somewhere in the southeast routes through Charlotte, and the layover is generally either short enough that you arrive at your connecting flight smelling like the locker room after a hot August pre-season NFL football game, or long enough to encompass the rest of the season. And as is not uncommon, there were earlier flights going to our same destination, and so we walked to the departure gate for one of these earlier flights to see if we could "stand by" and get there earlier.

Now, let me say right off the bat, there are some very fine airlines out there. Even in these days of trying to make up lost revenue by charging an extra fee for everything (one airline is considering a fee to use the rest room on the flight, although as I understand it, cleaning moistened seats is still an included part of the service. It's really up to you!), some airlines are better than others, and we're flying on one of the others. This particular airline, which rhymes with "U. S. Stairways", seems to have decided that it makes good business sense for them to charge a $50 per person "standby" fee to allow you to change flights. Now, understand, the earlier flight was half empty. We had no checked luggage. And the flight we were on was oversold. If they had merely allowed us to fly on the earlier flight, they would not have had to bump someone to another flight, and pay that person $200 for the privilege, but for want of my paying THEM $100 for the opportunity, they lost money. This is not the Einstein of airlines.

So Liam and I made our way across the terminal (Don't be silly, of course they were at opposite ends of the terminal) to the proper gate for our flight, at which point I committed the first sin of anyone traveling with a small child: I forgot to check every 3.2 seconds to see that the one little bag Liam was carrying (as I hauled the remaining approximately 700lbs of carry on bags behind me) was still, technically, somewhere on his person. It wasn't. Somehow, somewhere, Liam had set down his little cloth lunch box with the blue star on the side of it, carrying his three small toy cars and a snack for the plane, and was now upset with ME because we didn't have it.

Now, in hindsight, I realize my son was just trying to help us get into the "Christmas Spirit" by reenacting the journeys of the "three wise men" in search of one particularly important thing indicated by a star, but at the time I was rather miffed. Nonetheless, in about the same time it took Balthasar, Melchoir and Casper, the Friendly King to reach Bethlehem, Liam and I retraced our steps back and found, in a Christmas Miracle, the bag, just moments before the TSA swooped in and blew it up, in much the same way that the TSA in Bethlehem would have swooped in and blown up Mary's new baby, had he been left unattended in Concourse D of a major American airport.

The rest of our trip was uneventful, except for the various maladies each of us is currently suffering, but I shall not spend too much time on those, as there are at least two other recent essays on those topics, and I'm sure you're getting (ahem) sick of that as a topic.

This is getting longer than I had planned, so I will continue next week with Andrew & Katie's travel travails. This will also give me some time to allow them to come to a full conclusion before I have to write the end of the story. Not that I'm above making something up, I'm just too lazy to do it if I don't have to.

* * *

I just want to throw in one last thing here. Sometimes I have a joke that I'm afraid just won't go over very well, because it relies on a word or phrase that is no longer in common or popular use. Still, there is a particular pun which makes me laugh, even though I'm afraid that about 90% of my readers, being people of fine taste and an admirable lack of pedantry, won't get it. So I'll just include it here. An earlier version of this essay included the phrase "In about the same time it took Balthasar, Melchoir and Caspar to reach Bethlehem, I had an epiphany." If you don't get it and really want to, Google the Christian meaning of the word "Epiphany", but I warn you, it's really not worth the effort!

Copyright © Dec 25, 2010 by Liam Johnson. http://humor.liamjohnson.net

Drink? Yes Please, But Something Stronger Than Holiday Cheer!

2010-12-20T19:47:00.003-05:00

One of the things I like best about this time of year, as the father of a small child, is that the opportunities to entertain said child are myriad. During most of the year, if you suggest "shopping" to a small child, you'd think you'd told the child you were going to read him the entire U.S. Tax code as a bed time story. For the rest of the year, if a stranger has cookies or candy, you tell your child "we don't take food from strangers" or "it will ruin your dinner", not "well, OK, seeing as you're only vibrating at that low frequency, why not. Have one more."

And at other times of year, if you suggest to anyone that you plan to have your child sit appallingly close to a complete stranger with a garish, almost cartoon fashion sense you might get a call from Child Protective Services, but during this time of year as long as the gentleman in question is obese and wearing sufficient false facial hair to ensure that under no circumstances could he ever be identified in a police line-up, you are considered mildly neglectful (or, dare I say it, Jewish) if you refuse your children this ritual.

And so today, dutifully, I bundled Liam up in his warmest clothing and hauled him out to the car to go out in search of the elusive Santa Claus. And it's quite the search, generally at this time of year you can go to five or six shopping centers and not find that the jolly fat man more than five or six times. Really, it does make one start to wonder if Mr. Claus is actually in the employ of the Department of Homeland Security and you have suddenly found yourself on some sort of terrorist watch list, considering how many places to which he seems to follow you.

Still, though, it's worth the effort, there's nothing quite like the joyful tears in the eyes of a child who knows he is going to get to get to tell Santa his deepest desires for Christmas morning. And they express their gratitude to you so sweetly, usually with some variant on the phrase "but Daddy, I want to play Wii!"

Liam and I started the day out with a "hey ride", so named because everyone in the horse-drawn carriage said to each other "Hey! These cold metal seats would be much more comfortable if they had some straw or something to sit on." Horse-drawn carriage rides have a certain nostalgic charm in theory, but we must remember that they were invented in a simpler era. A time when Santa wasn't painfully aware that his every move was being taped by 17 different cell phones, such that the slightest hint of an inappropriate glance on his part will result in the confiscation of his false beard and quite possibly his gonads. A time when the Wii had only four or five games available, and they were all variants on "pong", but that was OK because the TV hadn't been invented yet, so there was really no way to play them. A time when there was so spectacularly little to do that nipping off for a drink or seven and then heading out into the cold night with a dozen similarly inebriated people to torture various homeowners with horrendous renditions of Christmas carols was seen as a good night's entertainment.

Actually, I strongly suspect that Caroling wasn't invented so much a fun activity as it was a self-defense mechanism, because at least if you are drunk and singing at the top of your lungs in 7 different keys you aren't sitting at home, sober and being accosted by the same cacophony often enough that by the time Christmas actually arrives, you can think of no better Christmas gift to find under the tree than a pair of newly sharpened pencils, ready for ramming deep into the ear canal as a protection against any such future assaults.

Next up in our daily agenda was "story time", rendered by the town librarian, and if you can find a woman who's style and demeanor scream "librarian" (but scream it in a respectfully quiet whisper) more than this woman, I'd like to meet her. She first read a well known story in simple verse about a home invasion on Christmas morning, while the inhabitants are all asleep in the naïve belief that their home is secure against just this sort of intrusion, and then for a change of pace she read "How the Grinch Stole Christmas".

I joke about "A Visit from St. Nicholas", better known as "Twas the Night Before Christmas", but in all honesty, can you read this story these days and NOT realize just how different times are today? They clearly had MUCH stronger hooch back in those days, who today would consider going to bed in a kerchief or cap, or be so unabashedly sex-starved as to talk about the "breast" of new fallen snow. And the man of the house, presented with this jolly secretive fellow doesn't whip out a cell phone and begin texting photos of the man to his friends and the National Enquirer, and his children, not lying in bed awake thinking greedily about their "haul" in the morning are peacefully dreaming of "sugar plums" and other Christmas goodies.

Anyway, Liam and I finally made our way down to get on line to see the jolly fat guy, were each handed a miniature candy cane by a different sort of "sugar plum" in an elf costume, and then our afternoon was over and we made our way back home for a good, old-fashioned Yule-tide Saturday afternoon. Dad dozing on the couch dreaming of holiday blog entries, Liam playing the games on the Wii he'd been so cruelly denied all afternoon.

[Note for those playing along at home, this was the third essay written in the "15 in 30" series.]

Copyright © Dec 11, 2010 by Liam Johnson. http://humor.liamjohnson.net

The Realization of Years of Teen Aged Fantasies

2010-12-13T18:12:00.002-05:00

[Hopefully, this does not even need to be said. However, on the off chance that any in my reading public is a sensitive, delicate type, rest assured that this particular essay contains a level of factual accuracy which represents a new low, percentage-wise. I mention this only so that the aforementioned sensitive, delicate individual does not find him or herself overcome with emotion at the opening line of my prose and find him or herself unable to continue on.]

Apparently, my brother was murdered tonight.

Now, you have to understand, this is my younger brother about whom we are speaking, the one human being alone above all others who, but for the least remembered first two and a half years of it, has been my biggest nemesis and the largest thorn in my side for my entire life. One might expect that this would mean that I would feel a certain... relief, perhaps, or spiteful joy at the news, and yet this does not appear to be the case.

Alternately, this is also the only brother that I have and along with my lone sister, make up the population that the phrase 'my siblings' comprises. This might lead one to conclude that my feelings at tonight's news would be more feelings of sorrow and loss and perhaps a haunting sense of the ephemeral nature of life and the fleeting time which human beings enjoy in this world. And yet, again, that doesn't seem to match my current emotions, which can best be described as a wry sort of coincidental amusement.

Of course, there's a very good possibility that part of the reason for my emotions is that the murder did not, technically, occur tonight. In fact, it occurred about a week ago, well before the most recent time that I spoke with him on the phone, although in truth at the time of that phone conversation, neither of us yet realized that he was, in fact, dead, because I had not paid attention the week before, and because the news of his death was still sitting, unwatched until this very evening, on my TiVo. Specifically, this week's episode of the CBS crime drama "The Mentalist".

Understand that even with a last name as common as ours, we don't seem to run across too many people who share my brother's name, and so it was rather unusual to spend an entire hour of episodic television hearing the stars of the show repeatedly invoke my brother's name while looking for clues as to his murder and/or people who might have had motive.

My real brother, of course, is quite alive and currently visiting my mother in North Carolina. I know this, because it was the phone call yesterday morning in which he announced his intention to make that trip to which I referred earlier. And while I do not, actually, honestly wish him dead, there is still a lingering part of me that wishes occasionally for the chance to get him back for some of what he put me through during the years that we were growing up together.

But still, as soon as I learned of the death of his namesake on a television show, I sat down and wrote this essay, and he will not likely learn of it for another several days, after some family member or other reads this essay and shares it with him.

And THAT, I think, is the appropriate level of revenge at this late stage in our lives. My brother was murdered tonight, and I'm not going to bother to tell him about it. That'll show him.

[Note: This represents the first of the "15 in 30" series.]

Copyright © Dec 10, 2010 by Liam Johnson. http://humor.liamjohnson.net

15 In 30 Progress

2010-12-08T23:22:00.016-05:00

This is the progress report on the status of "15 Essays in 30 Days". If I have properly set up the parameters on the mailing list, it shouldn't be e-mailed to everyone every time I update it. If you want to keep track of my writing progress, please check back to the blog.

Because I am starting on 12/10, the first essay is "due" on 12/11. Each entry will take the following form:

Essay # - Due date - Completed date - title

So for instance, if this was one of them, it would look like this:

1 - 12/8/10 - 12/8/10 - 15 In 30 Progress

And so, without further ado, the chart:

1 - 12/11 - 12/10 - The Realization of Years of Teen Aged Fantasies
2 - 12/13 - 12/11 - Something untitled about the Shingles.
3 - 12/15 - 12/11 - Drink? Yes Please, But Something Stronger Than Holiday Cheer!
4 - 12/17 - 12/14 - Hey, Universe! Stop Throwing Things At Me!
5 - 12/19 - 12/20 - A Germ of An Idea
6 - 12/21 - 12/20 - Unnamed essay about my failing memory
7 - 12/23 - 12/22 - Private (not for publication)
8 - 12/25 - 12/25 - Unnamed Christmas Travel Essay, Part 1
9 - 12/27 - 12/26 - Unnamed Christmas Travel Essay, Part 2
10 - 12/29 - 12/28 - Visions of Meconium Dancing in My Head
11 - 12/31 - 1/4 - Mr. Love Pickle
12 - 1/2 -
13 - 1/4 -
14 - 1/6 -
15 - 1/8 -

Notes:

"The Realization of Years of Teen Aged Fantasies" (unless I can come up with a better title) is scheduled to post on 12/13.

The second essay is not currently good enough to post. It's got potential, but I got bogged down in facts and got away from humor, so for now, it's not scheduled. UPDATE: This is now called "Shingles? But I Have a Metal Roof!" and is scheduled to post on ~~1/3~~ 1/10.

"Drink? Yes Please, But Something Stronger Than Holiday Cheer!" (ditto on the title) is scheduled to post on 12/20.

"Hey Universe!..." is currently scheduled to post on ~~12/27~~ 1/3, although I'm thinking of writing something in a Christmas theme, and if so it will make more sense for it to post in the Christmas week and push everything else back a few weeks.

"A Germ..." is being reviewed by someone I trust. I was pretty tired as I wrote it, and I'm not sure if it's worth posting. UPDATE: Because I do not wish to post two essays about being sick in a row, this is now scheduled to post on ~~1/17~~ 1/24.

The one on failing memory is, I think, pretty good, but I need a title. It is currently scheduled to post on ~~1/10~~ 1/17. Update: It is now called "Memory-Rolled". You'll probably understand why when you read it.

The private one is just that. It is not humor, but it is an essay, and since the rules don't TECHNICALLY say they have to be humor essays, I'm going to count it. As with some of the introductory ones, if I can finish all 15 as humor essays, I'll drop this one from counting. But it's an essay and I spent several hours on it today, so I'm going to count it, even if no one outside of immediate family will ever see it.

The Christmas travel essay is now scheduled to post on 12/27, pushing everything back by a week. Likely the second part of it will post on 1/3, pushing everything else back by ANOTHER week, but as it isn't written yet, I don't want to assume part two will turn out good enough to post.

The second half of the Christmas travel essay was... not good. The first half wasn't my best work, so you can imagine. The second half will not post, unless I at some future point do some serious reworking of it and make it post-worthy.

The "Visions Of" essay, although it will be sadly out of date by then, is scheduled to post on 1/31.

"Mr. Love Pickle" is scheduled to post on 2/7.

15 in 30 update

2010-12-08T07:07:00.003-05:00

Ah, the best laid plans of mice and men...

Mice, for example, are forever announcing ambitious plans moments before learning that their lives and schedules are going to be turned upside-down for the next few days, and then forgetting to go in and change the scheduled "post time" on that announcement on their blogs, such that the original announcement goes out well after it's become inconvenient or downright impossible to fulfill in their newly hectic mousy lives.

Not to get too into details, but since I wrote the post early Monday morning and scheduled it to post on Monday evening, I have learned that I am going to be making a 5+ hour round trip to go pick up my son, due to a personal emergency in my ex-wife's life. That's happening today, and I have neither the patience to compose an entire essay using 'text' language typed entirely with my thumbs on a cellular telephone keypad nor the inclination to become intimately familiar with a bridge abutment as I pay particular attention to one tricky turn of phrase and fail to notice the turn of highway.

I knew I wasn't going to get started on it yesterday, because Tuesday is generally my chorus rehearsal night, which runs from right after work until 10pm, and by the time I get home only a moron would delay sleep and make the following day correspondingly horrible just to write an essay, and while I admit, I am just such a moron, I may be gaining a certain amount of common sense in my old age. Or maybe it's just forgetfulness.

Either way, 15-in-30 is still on, but I've decided to delay the start until this Friday, 12/10. It's the only fair way for me not to put myself behind from the very start and then feel the need to put out sub-standard "product" in order to keep up my schedule (and since we've all experienced just exactly where my standards ARE, I think we can all agree sub-standard is not a territory we want to explore).

So 15-in-30 will now run from Friday 12/10 until Saturday, 1/8 (and yes, I actually counted out the days on my fingers to figure out when the 30th day would be. I'd like to see a mouse try THAT!).

--Liam.

15 Essays in 30 Days

2010-12-06T21:11:00.003-05:00

I've often had people ask "How do you come up with your humor essays?"

This is not, strictly speaking, true in the sense that I've never had anyone ask that. But one of the important parts of my process is never letting a little thing like reality get in the way of a good premise, and so, let us begin again.

(Ahem). I've often had people ask "How do you come up with your humor essays?"

The truth is, the process is very much like digestion, in that I begin with a hearty, nutritious germ of an idea, rife with vitamin potential and whole-grain humory goodness. I take that idea and chew it up, swallow it, and in the end process it into a batch of cheap poop jokes. I strive never to have anyone describe one of my essays as "moving", because of the image this conjures up.

Anyway, it appears as though I've been consuming too many cheesy jokes, because my "humor intestines" have become seriously backed up, leading to the distinct paucity of, er, output on this blog in the past several months.

And to resolve this particular problem, I've hit upon what can only be described as "a particularly awful idea". Specifically, I have a number of friends who are songwriters, and several of them in the last year or two have gone through an experiment with various names, but which always boils down to "30 songs in 30 days", and so I've decided "Hey! I should try that with essays!", in much the same way that the owner of a quarry might watch someone do a swan dive and say to himself "Hey, I don't have a pool, but..."

I'm afraid that this is destined for spectacular failure, not the least because that "30 songs in 30 days" far more commonly turns out to be "about 3 songs and 27 things I will later hope never to be reminded about again in 30 days". There is a very good chance that many or most of these essays will not be worth the time it takes to read them. But hopefully I'll get two or three really good ones, and perhaps some of the less worthy will contain something I can later rework into something resembling comedic genius (as in "Luanne, c'mere, the damn dog left some 'comedic genius' on the carpet again!').

So here are the rules.

I'm not sure I can do 30 in 30, so I'm going to do 15 essays in 30 days. For the next 30 days, I will attempt to emit something resembling a humor essay every other day.
In order to be a valid essay, each must be at least half a page long (roughly 25% of the normal length of my essays). They may be longer, of course, but I may not resort to posting a one-liner and claim that's my "essay" of the day.
I will decide whether this one counts as the first one or not based on just how exhausted I am with the idea when I reach 14 essays.
I will post my progress, but possibly not the essays themselves, to the humor blog in an index post I'll keep up to date with dates and titles.
The essays which are good enough to which to subject you, my loyal fans, I will post on a "one per week" basis as I used to post, because it seems like "one every two days" would be too much of a thing.
I won't say "too much of a good thing", because that's just too much hyperbole for one essay.

So that's it. That's my plan. I don't know how it'll turn out, I may decide I'm not coming up with anything worth posting and give up the attempt in a few days. But I promise you this: I will write at least one for each person who has asked how I come up with my humor essays. They deserve nothing less.

Copyright © Dec 6, 2010 by Liam Johnson. http://humor.liamjohnson.net

Bad Jokes

2010-07-27T20:53:00.002-04:00

My daughter is reading a list of riddles and bad jokes, and I'm having fun coming up with better answers.

Of particular joy was "How is a crossword like an argument?"

The "right" answer is "one word always leads to another."

My kids preferred mine: "If you don't have a clue, you can't finish either..."

My Car Doesn't Corner Well

2010-07-17T20:34:00.001-04:00

Our discussion topic, Gentlemen, at today's meeting of the "Men Secretly Meeting To Discuss Their Feelings, Although We'd Rather Be Caught Dead Than Admit We Have Them When Women Are Around" club is coping when our children live down to our lowest expectations.

In particular, last night I loaned my car to my teen aged son.

As a family, we had been out at the tennis courts hitting some balls around, and when we got home, one of my daughters announced that she'd left her sweatshirt at the courts. Now, understand, the courts are less than a mile from our house, on the remotest of NH back roads the whole way, and my son has had his learners permit for over a year now. What could POSSIBLY go wrong? And yes, I know all of us first-time-fathers-of-teenaged-drivers can answer that question with a litany of fears (and the experienced fathers of first time drivers just rolled their eyes and snorted a rueful half-laugh at my naivete), but the truth is that sooner or later the kid's gotta solo, and there are far worse places I could have started him. The autobahn, for instance, or on the Indianapolis Raceway.

Still, in fairness I should report that he made the trip down and back completely safely. He then proceeded to make a decision that was ill advised. My son has never put a car into a garage before. I'd just assumed that he would come back home and park the car in the driveway, where it had been when he started his journey, and then come ask me to put it into the garage, but apparently his brain, addled in a way that only adolescence or severe doses of narcotics can, decided to "do me a favor" and put the car away.

Unfortunately, no one ever explained to my son that the phrase "drive the car into the garage" does not mean "drive into the actual building", and so with the best of intentions, my son did significant damage to my less-than-one-year-old Toyota Prius, to say nothing of the garage, his pride and my blood pressure.

But here's the key, gentlemen: We're fathers. We need to be prepared for certain little bumps in the road, things like pregnant girlfriends and scientific curiosity satisfied by taking apart our brand new iPad to see how it works, leaving us with a pile of random, unidentifiable parts that do not behave in the slightest way as an iPad is advertised to. And the endless series of car repairs we're going to have to shell out for between the time our child becomes old enough to get his or her learners permit and the time, three months later, when they stop driving our car after it gets repossessed to pay our delinquent car repair bills.

In fact, experienced fathers whose younger children reach driving age learn to budget their finances more creatively, as follows:

Mortgage 20% of income
Food 7% of income
Clothing 5% of income
Misc spending cash 2% of income
Utilities 12% of income
Car repair 273% of income
Savings Yeah, right. As if.

Then, by the simple step of making sure you begin earning slightly over three times your current income, you can keep in the black. And here's a tip: Some auto repair shops will give you a discount if you agree to the simple expedient of having your paycheck automatically deposited in their corporate account.

But to be momentarily serious here, here's the truth: My son has probably cost me somewhere on the order of $1,500 and $2,000 with that one little mistake, and if I take the proper fatherly perspective, I'm happy to pay it, because he did not, in the process, lose a limb or a life (his or anyone else's), and if this little mishap causes him to be a more careful driver throughout his life, and never succumb to the standard teen-aged belief that they are bullet proof and a better driver than the morons who actually get into accidents, in short if this accident saves his life later on, then a few thousand dollars will have been a price well worth paying.

You will not, however, catch me admitting that to my son. At present, he's sitting at home wondering what new and creative punishment I'm going to administer when I get home. Images of thumb screws and bamboo shoots are probably going through his head, along with the fear that I may come home and have decided to disown, disinherit, or simply disembowel him. And while it may make me a bit of a sadistic S.O.B., the truth is that this day or two of sweating is a far more effective punishment than any I could dream up.

So, to sum up, what lessons have we learned today? First, that a good father expects these sorts of events and thus doesn't let it divert him from the path of good fatherhood. Second, that sadism can be an important (as well as rewarding) part of good parenting of teen aged children. And third, that finding some excuse, any excuse, to never let any of your children get drivers licenses is perhaps the single most profitable investment choice you can make.

Copyright © July 2, 2010 by Liam Johnson. http://humor.liamjohnson.net

Two Recent Headlines

2010-07-09T06:22:00.003-04:00

I occasionally see humorous headlines, but rarely two really good ones in such a short time period, so I thought I'd share them.

First, when Olympian Walter Dix runs in a race with Tyson Gay and the result is close, you end up with this gem: "Tired Gay succumbs to Dix in 200 meters" (link to article at Reuters for as long as it lasts).

The other one is actually old, but I was only pointed to it two days ago. Back in 2008, in a Colorado State Senate election that seemed more like a competition between breakfast vs. lunch, multiple sources had "Bacon Beats Fries!". Here is a link to one site that has a screen shot of the results.

Both amused me, so I thought I'd share.

Cute Story

2010-07-08T05:53:00.003-04:00

I'll warn you right up front, this one isn't intended as a humor essay, it's just a cut/sad/poignant story about four-year-old Liam, my son. And I'll also warn you, mere text probably does not convey the situation sufficiently, I'm writing it up as much to remind me of the story in future years as to try to convey it to others.

* * *

As many friends and family members know, Liam has a few small medical problems, including a sensitivity to Gluten (a protein found in wheat and some other grains) and Casein (dairy protein), and so we have to keep a strict "CFGF" (Casein-Free, Gluten-Free) diet for him.

In recent months, he's taken to telling people what he can't have. He likes to tell waiters and friends at picnics "I can't have dairy or wheat". In text, it does not convey just how cute this is, coming out of his little mouth, especially since he doesn't really grasp what those things actually ARE and how they make up various foods, just that those are the components he can't have.

Anyway, two nights ago, we were at the local 99 Restaurant, and as so many restaurants do, they now have a gluten-free hamburger bun available. This is approximately equivalent to serving a nice thick juicy filet mignon on a paper plate with plastic utensils, in that the bun doesn't taste quite so much like a hamburger bun as it does like a cross between sawdust (for taste and that subtle dry, sandy feel you just can't fake) and cement (for density).

Nevertheless, Liam likes it when he can get one of those, because it gives him the chance to eat a burger like his siblings do, in hand, in a bun, so when we have the opportunity, we order it for him that way, making sure to emphasize that dairy is also a problem, so to please not put cheese or anything similar on the burger.

So, when the food comes out, Liam's burger has cheese on it. We notice this as they are about to put it down in front of him, so they take it away and Liam barely notices. After all, two of his sisters' entrees had not yet come out, so he was not the only person not yet served.

It took them about 5 minutes to cook another burger, and out it came and they set it in front of Liam and he began to prepare to eat it, having Mommy put ketchup on it, starting to pick it up, but I was suspicious. Understand, taste is not the only way to differentiate gluten-free baked goods, they also have a look that can best be described as "plastic model of food in diner display case". Without gluten, yeast doesn't really make the bun rise so much as kind of anemically swell, with about the same appetizing look as the mumps.

So I asked the waitress, who looked at it, said "I'm not sure, I stepped away and didn't actually watch them make it, but you're right, it doesn't look right, let me go check." And so we had to grab the burger away from Liam as it was literally a second away from his mouth as he was going in for his first bite.

As you might imagine, Liam was not happy about this. He'd been complaining about being hungry (in a very polite way) for a while, and he'd finally received his food, and Mommy & Daddy were taking it away. He started crying, so I got up and picked him up to hold him and try to distract him while the harried waitress (quite as annoyed as we were that the kitchen couldn't get a simple allergy-important order correct) hurried off to rectify the situation and make sure it was done right this time.

So I'm talking to Liam, trying to get his mind off of things, and he's sobbing in that heart-breaking "What did I do? I'm sorry for whatever it was! Can I please have my food?" kind of way, and so to try to make him understand, I explained that the burger had had the wrong bun on it, and that it would make Liam sick, and so they were going to go make him one that wouldn't.

And then, to try to engage him in the conversation, I said "You know why, right? What is it you can't have?"

And in the sort of pathetic, sobbing voice you just can't fake, Liam says "My hamburger?"

Words can not express the mixture of emotions at that moment. A titter swept the table, as everyone else was fully expecting Liam to respond "dairy and wheat", but for me, there was nothing funny about it. All I could see was the anguish in my son's eyes, knowing that he was still hungry, his food had been taken away, and for some reason Mommy & Daddy had cooperated with taking it away. And this little boy, who had been so polite about being hungry, was not throwing a tantrum or demanding his food, but merely sad because for some reason he couldn't fathom, he might have been deemed unworthy of his meal.

The most tragic moment of his life? If so, he'll be a lucky boy. Still, in that moment, a poignant reminder that we can't protect our children from all of the little pains of life. There will always be life's hamburgers.

P.S. Daddy, I Love You

2010-06-28T23:59:00.000-04:00

[This is the second essay posted to http://www.goodmenproject.org.]

It's June, the month of Father's Day, and so I thought I'd spend a little bit of time thinking about what fatherhood has meant to me.

Now, the first thing I know many readers will notice is that in comedy, as in everything, timeliness is everything, and by the time this essay posts, Father's Day will be well past, but I feel that it is still relevant, because if this year is true to form, this essay will still post about a week before my children get around to giving me a card and a gift which they will insist that they've had since well before the day and just kept forgetting to send me, not realizing that one of them will accidentally have left the dated receipt in the card envelope in their hurry to get it in the mail. Father's Day for me isn't so much a day, it's an afterthought. On the complaint letter of life, Father's Day is the "P.S. I love you."

What does fatherhood mean to me... well, for starters, it means a lot of diapers. A LOT of diapers. Good heavens, there are diapers. No one warns you before you have children that the stress will make you incontinent. Oh, and the kids go through a lot of diapers, too.

Diapers come to us from the massive diaper conglomerates (or "Big Poop"), which have somehow managed to train our young children to eliminate waste in whatever pattern and time schedule will make for the highest usage rate. Really, I think they put something in the water. My own son seems to have decided that it isn't proper to poop in a soiled diaper, so he will come to me and say "I need a fresh diaper", which I can plainly see because the one he's currently wearing is hanging nearly to his knees and has developed a color not unlike a golden delicious apple gone a little bit soft and squishy, and so I'll ask him "Liam, do you need to poop?" and he'll say "No, Daddy", and so I will change his diaper, and within minutes (sometimes as I am still fastening the Velcro tabs that keep the new diaper affixed) he begins straining as though he's trying to give birth to a younger sibling, and viola, Big Poop has sold another unit.

Fatherhood also means a lot of yelling, and saying things like "because I'm the Daddy, that's why", and each time these things happen, we die a little bit inside as we think back to when we were young and our fathers would say those same infuriating things to us, and we swore to ourselves when we had kids, we'd never say such things to them. I think we can all clearly remember asking a perfectly reasonable question of Daddy and having him reply "because I'm the Daddy, that's why", and thinking that was a completely unreasonable answer, but knowing that the next answer is going to be "because this is my belt, that's why", and so we walked away.

It is not until we have children of our own that we realize that it isn't the one reasonable question that sets Daddy off, it's the series of 276 of them that it immediately followed. "Daddy, why does it rain?", "Well, son, it's because water evaporates to form clouds and when those clouds get too heavy and full of water, it falls back to Earth.", "But why does water evaporate?", "Well, son, because the sun heats up the water and so little bits of it end up going up into the air.", "But why does the sun heat the water up?", "Well, son, ..", "but why?", "well", "but why?".... "BECAUSE I'M THE DADDY, THAT'S WHY!"

Still, though, it's not all yelling and trite moments of hearing our fathers speaking through our mouths, there are also moments of pure bliss, such as the second time our child successfully urinates without a diaper (the first having been the time he got us squarely in the side of the head as we, new to the changing of diapers, failed to check the pistol to make sure there wasn't a bullet in the chamber, so to speak). Or the first time (this one happened to me several months back) we're out to dinner with friends, and our son says to the people we're with "That's my Daddy. I love him." You'd be surprised how few times you need to make him repeat that phrase before he'll go and repeat it to others, verbatim.

My son Liam is a source of joy and wonder for me, and can turn a crappy day into a glorious one with such a simple act as padding into my room and asking if he can climb into bed with me for the night, or struggling with his little fingers to mimic the sign-language symbol for "I Love You" which I've just made in his direction.

Or (this is true) the time he and I and much of the rest of my family were out having dinner at a restaurant with my parents. The meal drawing to a close, I gestured to the waiter and said "Could I get a box?", intending to wrap up the remainder of my meal for lunch the next day. He asked "Just the one?", and I glanced around the table to see if anyone else would need one, and as I was just about to answer, Liam puts up his fist, index finger high and says "Just the one."

Now, I had determined that one other person at the table needed a box, so I said "I think we need two."

To which Liam replied "No, Daddy, not two, just the one." The humor of this situation does not convey properly until you get the visual. You will recall Liam had his pointer finger up, with the back of his hand towards the waiter. When I replied that we wanted two boxes, I had put up two fingers in something approximating the classic "peace" symbol, and so as Liam said "not two" he lifted up his second finger to mimic my gesture, and as he said "just the one" he put the INDEX finger back down.

Yes, my at that time not-quite-four year old son flipped off the waiter and an entire room full of patrons. This is the kind of class you can't teach.

And I haven't even touched on the joys of fathering older children, such as my 16 year old son who is now driving, and whom, when he asks to borrow my car, I admonish to be extremely careful because I worry that he'll wreck it or himself, but whom I'm secretly more afraid will turn out to be significantly more successful at picking up women than I am, forcing me to confront the fact that it is NOT the dorky Toyota Prius that I drive, but my own balding middle aged body that's hindering my social life.

Or such as my teen aged daughters, who are becoming beautiful young women, which is wonderful, but comes at a price. Nature, in her infinite wisdom, has decreed that every teen aged girl must behave like a narcissistic crack addict, but with more showers. As men, we will never truly understand PMS, which is why the women in our lives get so annoyed at us when we talk about it. But as fathers of teen aged girls, we come to know PMS in a way that makes any previous experience we had with it seem trivial. The truth is that PMS was named by the father of a teen aged girl, and he originally intended it to stand for Please Make it Stop.

Now, don't get me wrong, I love my daughters. They are good girls, all three of them, and they make me happy. They also make the few remaining hairs on my head gray and the needle on my sphygmomanometer red-line. ("sphygmomanometer" is from the latin roots "sphygmo", meaning "let me inflate this tubular balloon" and "manometer" until you lose all feeling from your elbow down"). And just in case my blood pressure wasn't high enough, nature has also seen fit to make teen aged girls the most beautiful creatures on Earth, and so while half of me is crying out for them to leave the house for just a few minutes of peace and quiet, the other half knows the moment they do, some balding, fat middle aged guy will try to pick them up in a Toyota Prius.

Copyright © May 22&30, 2010 by Liam Johnson. http://humor.liamjohnson.net

On Stereotypes

2010-06-14T23:59:00.002-04:00

[This was my first essay for http://www.goodmenproject.org. I hope you like it! I'm sorry for the boring title, I honestly couldn't come up with a good one.]

A friend asked me an interesting philosophical question, recently.

"Are we trending towards a society in which it is not politically correct to admit that there are innate or typical strengths and weaknesses to each of the genders?", she asked. Of course it was a she. A man would never ask such a question. Well, not a REAL man.

I am not such a man, and so I immediately posed the question to a few of my friends, who looked at me with a concerned look, shaking their heads with a rueful sadness that says "After two divorces, he still hasn't realized how much more content he'd be if he'd just admit to himself that he's gay?"

I think the question is an interesting one, because it isn't really about equality, it's about preconceived notions and prejudices, and the assumption that because something is generally true, it will therefore be always true. Consider a game of Russian Roulette. With a standard six-shooter and one bullet in the chamber, it is generally true that pulling the trigger will NOT result in a projectile, but it is foolish (and more than a little bit messy) to assume this is always the case.

Let's take the statement "men are stronger than women". I think we can all agree that this is demonstrably true on average, when speaking of physical strength (as opposed to comparing, say, the stoic "family first" attitude of a woman with the flu and a 104 degree fever, compared to the "bring me some soup, I'm sick!" whining of a man with the sniffles). And yet in college, I (no slouch in the strength department) routinely had my ass kicked in wrestling matches with one of my best friends, who was on the womens' rugby team at her college. And the fact that I kept challenging her to rematches shows the extent of the trouble our preconceived notions can get us into. Also, the lengths to which an awkward, geeky engineering school student will go in order to feel lady-flesh pressed up against him... mmmm, lady-flesh... where was I?

The truth is that there are some things that, as a class, men are better at than woman, such as physical strength and being attractive to members of the musical group "Village People", and there are other things that, as a class, women are better at than men, such as coming up with things women are better at than men, and keeping their egos in check long enough to admit that men might be better at anything than they, themselves are.

The key is in the phrase "as a class". I should point out that this may be the first time in the history of human writing that the word "class" has been used in close conjunction with the word "men", a subset of humanity who, as a rule, think nothing of chewing with their mouths open, telling jokes in mixed company that more cultured genders would consider improper to even admit to having heard, and emitting aromas and other expulsions as loudly as possible from various bodily orifices. I honestly believe the first man who figures out a way to squirt ear-wax with a nauseating squelch will be revered in the annals of guy history, and I also honestly believe that each male reader will have, in his head, just thought "he said 'the anals of guy history' " and laughed the "Beavis & Butt-Head" laugh.

In the end, the point is to accept people on their individual strengths, and not some imputed list of assumed strengths and weaknesses based upon one group or another of which the person is a member. For example, I am a computer programmer by trade, a profession which, as a whole, has demonstrated the raw grammatical and spelling abilities of a lobotomy patient, and yet I have written this entire article on my own. OK, bad example. How about this: I am a guy, and we're generally considered weak in the "attentive lovers" department, and yet... no, that's not a great example either. Well, I'm sure there must be good examples out there.

Consider other stereotypes. If you ask a woman about stereotypes, she will likely expound at great length about how women have been typified in the popular culture over the years, and about "glass ceilings" and "mommy tracks". Ask a guy about stereotypes, and he'll say something like "Mine's a Pioneer, but I hear Sony makes a good system. Just make sure you get a good set of speakers and a kick-ass subwoofer".

And sadly, I'm showing a stereotype of my age group, because these kids these days don't have "stereos" any more, they have their iPods and their MP3s and their youtubes and really, I just wish they'd get off of my lawn.

Is it political correctness? Good heavens, I hope not! But when all is said and done, I prefer to treat people not in terms of the strengths and weaknesses of their gender, but in terms of themselves personally. For every stereotype you can name, I can point you to an example of a member of the target group who does not fit that stereotype. For instance, my Mom is an excellent driver. And I couldn't figure out how to change the oil in my car if my life depended on it.

Then again, I already admitted I'm not such a man.

Copyright © May 5-14, 2010 by Liam Johnson. http://humor.liamjohnson.net

Wanted: Dead or Alive (Blog Exclusive)

2010-05-30T19:48:00.002-04:00

I'm thrilled! I'm finally living life on the edge! I'm finally a "bad boy", the kind of guy women flock to and men all want to be! The kind of guy who has a criminal record!

Let's back up. As some readers may know, I own a pair of apartment buildings which I bought because my wife convinced me that quite apart from every other person who has ever owned an apartment building, I was going to be the one who successfully got rich off of his. Really, you go into the transaction with images of a steady flow of rent income and completely unaware that the average renter believes that, as a landlord, you are independently wealthy and don't really NEED that rental income, and that certainly you will understand if on this particular month, they can't make the rent because they absolutely HAD to have a new flat screen television.

I'm not kidding. December is the worst, half of the tenants won't have the rent on time (more than half of those won't get it to me at all), but you can count on every one of them having $500 worth of new toys for their infant child under the Christmas tree. And we're talking infant here, a child who will derive hours of pleasure crinkling the wrapping paper and playing in the boxes, and their parents will have purchased them a brand new Wii system.

And so you would think that tenants who are less than fastidious about the details of when and how much money actually gets paid to the landlord would not be overly quick to complain, and yet the loudest yelling when the water heater stops working or the propane runs out comes from the apartments which are furthest behind in rent. I'm not kidding. The tenants who pay on time call up and politely say "We don't seem to have any heat, can you get someone out to look at it in the next day or so?" and the ones who are three months behind and refusing to leave until we can have them escorted out via police escort based on a court order call and say "If you don't have heat on in this apartment in 20 minutes, I'm going to sue you for all you're worth."

I bought these buildings because I have had a lifelong goal of never, ever being a landlord. I am fundamentally constitutionally unsuited for the job. But my wife insisted that she was thus suited, and that this was what she wanted to do as a source of income, and so I pulled out most of my savings and handed it over along with signing away my rights to more money than I make in 10 years and purchased two buildings. And now we're getting divorced.

So, back to the new reckless, devil-may-care bad-boy me. My new life of crime. The other morning, as I was preparing to leave for work, there was a knock on my door, and it was a police officer, serving me with a warrant to appear in court on a criminal charge of violating the "Solid Waste Ordinance" in the town in which my buildings stand. Apparently, in spite of being asked several times, one of my tenants has decided that leaving their old, rusty trash can out on the edge of the street all the time is more convenient than, say, bringing it in, filling it up during the week, and then just taking it out to the street on trash day. And since I own the buildings, it is my criminal negligence to bear.

So this is me, Liam the Trash Outlaw. Ladies, I await your calls.

I should get myself a mask.

Copyright © May 30, 2010 by Liam Johnson. http://humor.liamjohnson.net

Humor Blog News

2010-05-22T10:38:00.002-04:00

Folks,

I have begun what will hopefully be a twice monthly humor column with a new on-line web magazine called the "Good Men Project". The premiere "issue" will be out on June 1st and has an essay from me in it, and I'm going to try to write two a month for them.

Now, the terms of our agreement state that they don't pay me, and I don't give them exclusive rights to my writing, which means I can still post them here, but I sort of feel like the fairest thing I can do is to let them have it up on their site for a couple of weeks before I post them here.

Most of the essays now will be on the topic of men and men's issues and what it means to be a good man, good husband and good father (something which after two divorces, it might be argued I'm no expert in), and so I will almost certainly occasionally run into other topics about which I feel the urge to write an essay, and those essays will post here exclusively, and I'll start tagging them with "Blog Exclusive" or something, so you'll know.

Which means, if you want to read my stuff for them as soon as it comes out, you'll want to keep an eye on http://goodmenproject.org/. Otherwise, you can just see them post here, about two to four weeks later.

Liam.

Blog Quickie

2010-04-13T13:55:00.002-04:00

Yesterday, we were driving through my parents' town and I commented to my mother that I didn't realize that they had a strip club in town, and that I thought, based on the advertising, that it must be a very poor example of the genre.

She had no idea what I was talking about, insisting that there were no such establishments in their rural western NC town.

So I pointed to the sign in front of a local shop: "Ladies Skirts and Blouses Half Off".

A Hair of the Dog, or "Take Two WHAT and Call You In The Morning?"

2010-04-12T22:01:00.003-04:00

It is 8:45 on a Monday night, not generally considered your prime "excitement" night of the week. Oh sure, we all know the guy who spends all of Monday at work quietly in his office, pretending he's got some important deadline, when in fact we know that he's looking forward to 8:45, when his hangover from the weekend will finally have subsided to a dull roar.

And on television, by this time on Monday night, the show "Chuck" is usually approaching it's climax, which I gather can be pretty exciting, although I don't partake because my doctor has warned me that my heart can't take such extremes.

But tonight, I'm a party animal. Tonight, I've got something on tap that's going to make the rest of you say "I wanna party with you, cowboy". Not to me, the Village People are performing in your town, and that Cowboy is one wild animal. But I digress.

Tonight, I'm sitting in my mother's house, waiting for her dog to throw up. And as much as that sounds like a whole pile of chunky fun, you don't really know fun until you've had to force a dog to swallow two tablespoons of hydrogen peroxide, because you WANT the dog to throw up. Yes, the dog is going to throw up, almost certainly NOT on the newspapers I've got her currently lying on, and if by some miracle she fails to do so, I need... wait for it... to give her MORE hydrogen peroxide. Apparently the vet wants my Mom's dog to be blonde. On the inside.

So now, of course, you're wondering why. What ever possessed me to think "Y'know, today has been boring, dull, and surprisingly vomit-free. How can I rectify this?"

Well, this afternoon, my son and I went out with Mom to go pick up my Dad and take him out to dinner. Dinner was tasty, but a fairly innocuous affair, after which I dropped Dad off at his home (he lives in an assisted living facility) and dropped Mom off at her choir practice (she'll be getting a ride home from friends) and brought Liam back to the house to put him to bed. As I was getting Liam his cup of almond milk, I thought to myself "That's odd, Mom's usually so good about keeping her house clean, why is that glass plate in the middle of the floor?"

Shortly thereafter, I noticed that a little further on was a little slip of wax paper... and then the metal top of the cake dish of which the glass plate was the bottom half, at which point I realized what had been on that plate: A freshly made entire batch of brownies. Not just brownies, gluten-free brownies, one of the few desserts my son Liam can eat (being allergic to both milk and wheat proteins).

Let's take a side detour here and suggest that perhaps Josie (that's the dog's name) has Celiac disease and is trying to tell us so. Because the last time I was here with Liam, in December, we made him a gluten-free cake for his birthday and promptly went out, coming back to find half of the cake gone. So either Josie is jealous that we go out of our way to make special things for Liam, or more likely she's a dog (I've long suspected as much) and will eat anything with even the vaguest resemblance to food, if left to her own devices.

But that was a yellow cake, while these were brownies, and as any baker will tell you, chocolate (or more specifically, cocoa) is a vital ingredient in brownies, and as any dog lover will tell you, the recommended daily allowance of chocolate for dogs is "none", and the last time I checked my conversion chart, "none" isn't even marginally close to "an entire plate full".

So now here's the really strange part: apparently this is a bad month for those who live too closely to my Mom, vis-a-vis overdoses of toxic substances. The reason Liam and I are down here this week is because my father, who has some significant medical issues that for privacy and medical ethics reasons, I will not go into (I'm not a doctor, but I play one in these essays, and so I don't respect his privacy, but I play as if I do), had a potentially fatal medication mix-up late last week.

So here I am, in North Carolina, because there was some question as to how badly my father was going to be harmed by the mix-up, and in fact, some question initially as to whether he was going to survive it, and just about the time Dad is doing better and seems to be mostly out of the woods, Josie decides to get in on the action.

Actually, though, I suppose the other interesting thing about Mom's house is that poisons apparently don't work here. Dad's fine, Josie looks like she's going to be fine, and the annoying grasshopper-like bugs that infest the lower floor of my Mom's house in spring are doing just fine as well, even though the exterminator was here this morning to treat for them. Which gives me an idea, there's a wonderful recipe I've been anxious to try: a strychnine torte with ptomaine jelly filling, dusted with powdered anthrax that's just to die for(*).

*          *          *

I've been sitting here for a while trying to figure out how to finish this without leaving a, er, bad taste in your mouth, dear reader, and so I think the best choice is to segue to a story of which I was just reminded, based on the discussion of chocolate and dogs and my upcoming (next week) trip to Belgium. To get from Gent, Belgium back to the United States, most commonly you take a train to Amsterdam in the Netherlands and then fly from there. In the train station in Gent, there's a little touristy gift shop, in which I usually stop to get a nice fresh Belgian waffle, because they're yummy. On one wall of this little shop are lots of Belgian chocolates, and up on a high shelf, there are some chocolates of decidedly... anatomical shape. There are breasts as well as genitalia of both the male and female variety.

It's momentarily entertaining to look them over, although I don't know as I've ever seen anyone buy any of them, but I was most amused on one particular trip, the first for one of my co-workers at the time, when he came rushing out and announced not that there was "chocolate shaped" er, lady bits, but instead referred to them as "chocolate covered". Which, I must surmise, would probably have been quite a different store, most likely in Amsterdam.

(*) I want to take this opportunity to apologize profusely for this joke. A professional humorist should be embarrassed to write such an obvious joke. And I promise, the moment even one of you sends me some money for one of these essays, putting me at least technically into the category of "professional", the first thing I will do is blush and hide my head in shame for having made it. Really, you have only yourselves to blame for not monetarily supporting my humor hobby! And before you think there is no low to which I will not sink, you'll note I went with "ptomaine jelly" instead of the comedically more satisfying "ptomaine jam".

Copyright © April 12, 2010 by Liam Johnson. http://humor.liamjohnson.net

Vacation Vignettes

2010-01-22T15:10:00.002-05:00

[This isn't meant to be a humor essay, but it's something I wrote at the end of my Christmas vacation in North Carolina and didn't really have an appropriate place to post it. This morning, while leaving for work, I saw a beautiful sunrise that reminded me of it, so I figured I'd dust it off and post it here, on the theory that it's better to post something not really apropos to the site than to leave it idle for so long. --Liam]

Life is a series of little scenes. These are three such scenes, beginning and ending with moments of rare and surpassing beauty.

Cleveland

"C'mon, Liam, we have to move," I urge, pulling two suitcases, a large laptop bag and a backpack of Liam's, plus a blanket and two jackets along the terminal, trying desperately to make it from one end of the airport to the other in the 20 minutes left of our layover, after our arriving plane had pulled into the gate late, "We really have to go or we're going to miss our flight!"

This was the fourth or fifth such exhortation, and as any parent of a just-shy-of-four year old will tell you, my tone had seriously degraded from "Hey, buddy, whatdya say we run as fast as we can, huh? Won't that be fun?" to "If you don't move your slowpoke little butt, I'm going to seriously consider whether it's time to return to the days when a daddy would take off his belt and blister the bottom of a child." I didn't want to be short with him, but 5 minutes had passed since we'd left our plane and we'd made it perhaps 3% of the total distance we had to cover. If that.

Finally I ended up shouting "Move, Liam. We have to move NOW.", which as those same parents will tell you is a perfect cue for said near-four-year-old to lie down on the floor and start crying, which Liam obligingly did.

And just as I completed my assessment of the situation and determined that there was no possible way that I could pull the luggage, laptop, backpack, blanket, jackets AND carry Liam, and was coming to the realization that we were going to be spending at least one night (and likely, given that most holiday flights were sold out, several) in Cleveland, and am just beginning to consider lying down on the floor next to Liam and bawling myself, I overhear a woman say to her husband, "I'll meet you at the baggage carousel", followed by "If you don't object, I can carry him."

Understand that the place we had to get to was at the other end of the airport, in almost entirely the wrong direction for her trip. Understand also that she'd already been traveling all day, and was just getting set to return home, and, seeing me in distress, she stopped to offer assistance, carrying a crying child through half a mile of airport.

In the grand scheme of things, a very small event, but enough to remind me that there is beauty in the human race.

Just the One

In the waning moments of the evening meal, I catch the attention of the wait staff and request a box for the uneaten portion of my meal. The waiter asks "just the one?" and my son, newly four and trying to increase his interaction with and control over the world, lifts his hand, index finger high and says "Just the one", as I glance around the table and respond "I think we need two".

Liam looks at me and says "No, just the one", still holding his fist aloft, back of his hand to the room, index finger aloft.

"Liam, we need two boxes." I say, demonstrating with the "V for Victory" or "peace" sign.

"No, Daddy, not two," quothe Liam, raising his middle finger to mimic my V, "just the one" and lowering the index finger.

And then sat there, for about 30 seconds, blissfully unaware that most of the nearby diners are now tittering, having watched the whole scene and now seeing my innocent four-year-old son flipping off the waiter and the rest of the restaurant.

Sunset

Sitting next to my snoozing son as our final flight on the way down to North Carolina taxis and begins to prepare to take off. Outside, the last vestiges of gloaming fade to darkness as we taxi on to the runway.

A roar of jet turbines, the giant hand of accelleration pressing me snuggly into the back of my seat, and into the air we go, a giant metal bird with many souls. Racing the sun, we rise into the air and I look out over my son, out the window and see the sunset. Just for a moment, the setting sun in crimson glory, sandwiched between the distant ground's horizon and the equally distant cloud covering, a deep rich red on the bottom and the dark of night on the top.

I have never seen a sunset sandwich before, but this one took my breath away.

On Firetrucks, Floods and other 'F' Words

2009-10-31T06:57:00.007-04:00

Tonight, famous stand up comic Paula Poundstone signed a copy of her book to me with the inscription "Now would be a good time to say 'firetruck(*).'"

For those who are not aware, today was my birthday. If you are not aware, then you must not be someone with whom I have regular contact, because I'm one of those weenies who don't pay much attention to birthdays or endow them with much importance... until my own comes along, and then, starting about a month before, finds subtle excuses to work his own upcoming special day into every conversation, such as "Oh, is today your birthday? Cool! Mine is later this month!" or "I'm kind of trying to diet, but my birthday is coming up, so I'm going to let myself have this to celebrate." or "You support a completely non-interventionist foreign policy? Interesting! My birthday is in two weeks!"

I have long been a fan of Ms. Poundstone, and so when I learned (about 6 months ago) that she would be performing in my area on the actual date of my birthday, I knew that I had to attend, and so I immediately began making plans to do so by not actually buying tickets and completely forgetting that the event was going to happen. This is the same process by which I arduously prepared for my wedding to Janet, which explains the look of bewildered surprise on my face in all of our wedding photos.

I continued this rigorous preparation until about a week ago, when two things happened: First, one week ago today I rode in an elevator with Ms. Poundstone while attending my 25 year high school class reunion, five hours away in New Jersey. Astute readers will probably have picked up on this subtle clue in last week's essay. Second, two days ago I successfully won a pair of tickets to the show, five MINUTES away from my office. In comedy, of course, timing is everything (for example, had I won those tickets tomorrow, I wouldn't have had enough material to write an entire essay), and so interestingly, I won the pair of tickets about 20 minutes after my dear wife Janet phoned me to tell me to keep my birthday evening open, because she'd made plans. Fortunately, it turned out that the plans she'd made had involved purchasing tickets to Ms. Poundstone's show, and so in the process of winning tickets, I also turned my wife into a scalper, thus proving that no good deed goes unpunished.

I am not a particular believer in "fate" or "karma", but when events conspire to thrust Paula Poundstone into my life repeatedly, clearly the Universe is saying "I don't really care what you do with your Saturday evening, inasmuch as I am not actually a sentient being, but you could probably do worse than to use those free tickets and go see some comedy", and I think we can all see that when the Universe says something that powerful, we'd all best listen.

And so at this point in the story, Janet and I donated one of our children to two of our best friends to raise.

This was not actually our intention, of course. Dan and Tristin are two of our best friends in all the world as measured in the number of times we've answered the question "Who do we know who would be willing to (some thankless, boring or inconvenient task for which we are unsuited, unable, or unwilling)?" with "I know! Dan & Tristin!". In this particular case, of course, that task was watching our youngest son, Liam, while we went to the show.

Dan and Tristin have a wonderful rustic house here, in a town in NH that makes my description of OUR home town as "rural" seem hyperbolic in the extreme. Their house is up on a hill, on a wooded lot that can only be accessed by a dirt road right-of-way across another lot. On nice summer days, this driveway runs along beside a lovely little stream. On days which contain any rain at all or even sufficiently high humidity, the driveway runs alongside the raging whitewater torrent of death.

We were not aware of this facet of the stream this afternoon as we dropped off Liam into Dan and Tristin's able care and he displayed his typical separation anxiety by saying "Bye, Mommy! Bye, Daddy!" the moment we arrived, long before we had actually intended on leaving. But we looked at each other and said "the rain is really starting to come down, let's get going" and completely ignored the foreshadowing ominous musical "sting" that rang out of nowhere.

So off we went to have a bit of dinner and go see Paula Poundstone (who was fantastic, by the way. If you get a chance, you really should go see her show!) and then tried to retrieve our child. The stream, which had been politely, almost mockingly calm when we had dropped him off was now a two-foot-deep raging river running perpendicular to its normal course, directly across where Dan and Tristin had previously kept their driveway. We could see the house, safely up on the hill, but there was simply no way to get to it. Dan came out of the house with a flashlight and hip-waders (and really, how much more evidence do you need that this happens a lot when Dan, not a fisherman, actually had hip waders handy!) and came out to chat with us.

We agreed that it was unsafe to try to transport a sleeping Liam across this maelstrom, and so the best solution for all concerned was simply for Dan and Tristin to adopt Liam.

We will miss him.

*          *          *

I began this essay with an amusing tale about an inscription, originally intending to end it with the joke (fully attributed) which led to it, but in the process of writing this, I came to realize that stealing an entire story from Ms. Poundstone's act, even with credit, would make this essay not so much my own as hers with a batch of clumsy comedic fumbling on my part racing to her professionally crafted tale at the end. My exact words, when I realized this, were "Oh firetruck, I can't steal a joke that blatantly. It simply wouldn't be right!"

As such, I have decided that I will omit that story from the essay proper, but will compromise by posting the joke in question (because it's damned funny) in the first comment on the blog. Don't thank me, I'm merely trying to avoid owing some percentage of the vast profits from Liam Humor Enterprises in royalties.

(*)She did not actually say this. As you are no doubt aware, I like to keep these little flights of fancy clean, so that readers who happen to be my children are not exposed to any of the harshness of the world and can continue to believe in rainbows and unicorns and will thus be ripe pickin's for the cruel realities of the world to squash like an overripe tomato once they hit college.

You may also be aware that this is ludicrous, in that in my personal life I've been known to use language so "salty" that it might make a drunken sailor run off to the nearest monastery to dedicate his life to silence and beauty and trying to rid the world of filthy mothe... er, gentlemen, such as myself.

And so, to avoid offending you, gentle reader, I have replaced just such an offensive word with "firetruck." If your constitution cannot handle coarser language, just pretend that I have used that word to be silly. For the rest of you, imagine the firetruck in one of those giant car-sized trash compactors heroes were forever getting trapped in (inside their cars) in bad 1970s era cop shows... if you get my drift.

Copyright © October 25, 2009 by Liam Johnson. http://liam-humor.blogspot.com

All Dressed Up and Nowhere to ... Go

2009-10-25T11:38:00.000-04:00

As I type this, I am dressed in a dress shirt and tie and a pair of suit pants, and sitting on the toilet.

The toilet, I can explain. See, Janet and I have made the arduous journey, at considerable personal expense, through wild terrain (Connecticut) and barren wilderness (New York) to arrive at the very last place on Earth any mortal wishes to be (Bergen County, New Jersey). As many of you may know, I grew up here until leaving for college. Stealing a joke from a comedian whose name I no longer remember, it took me until I was 18 to realize we were actually free to leave. And this weekend is my 25 year high school class reunion, which I am not only attending, but had the odd lack of sense to volunteer to help organize!

So we're staying in a hotel overnight, and as you seasoned travelers are no doubt aware, in many such rooms, the only available outlet is in the bathroom, and then only if you unplug the hair dryer whose volume and temperature are approximately the same as having someone walk up a moderate flight of stairs and then breathe heavily upon your wet hair. It occurs to me that these would be extremely appropriate in Wal*Mart bathrooms, the ones whose sinks drool three anemic streams of water on you. Then again, I don't know why I complain, in my case I'd be perfectly happy if they just gave us a squeegee.

My laptop battery is low, thus the outlet and my current ignominious location. I have a much harder time explaining the suit clothing. The truth is, I'm not a suit guy. I don't wear a tie when we go to church on Sunday. As I recall, I didn't wear a suit or tie to the last funeral I attended. I'm pretty sure I wore one when I got married to Janet, because since I was metaphorically tying a rope around my neck for the rest of my life, I might as well tie something physically there as well. (Just kidding, Janet!)

I've drawn the line at the suit jacket. As I explained to one of my classmates, when she asked what I'd be wearing (so her husband could decide what to wear also), I'm male and heterosexual, I'm not expected to have fashion sense. Plus, I don't own a sport coat.

But here's the thing: this entire reunion is the fault of Facebook. I'm not kidding. A little less than a year ago, I was on Facebook and noticed that there were a lot of "East Bumble High School, Class of 19xx" groups, but none for my graduating class, and with nothing better to do with my time, I created one. A few days later, several people had found it, and I made my big mistake: I asked "Y'know, we're coming up on 25 years since we all graduated. Does anyone know if there's a 25 year reunion coming up?"

You need to understand, I'd never really thought about it. To this point, some part of me had just assumed that there were reunion fairies out there that just randomly pulled together reunions on multiples of 5 and 10 years (5 and 10 being magical numbers ever since the day when "5 and 10" meant the local Woolworth's). So I just figured "someone" was probably putting together the 25 year reunion, and that it would be fun to attend.

Well, of course it turns out that there are no fairies. Well, in some classes there may be, but I already established that I'm heterosexual (bada bum). There are just random people too stupid to answer "er, I'd love to, but I have a thing with a guy" when someone else says "Hey! We should organize one!"

I should say, "we" organized this the way "my 3 year old son and I" go shopping for groceries. I sat comfortably in the shopping cart (aka from the distance of New Hampshire), occasionally pontificating in e-mail my opinions about how the event should go and left virtually all of the real work to people who are less lazy and more organized than I. Very much the small child, asking "Daddy, can we get that?" and being told "no, that menu item would be too expensive" or "no, strippers aren't appropriate for a reunion dinner".

Still, though, apparently no one on the team feels that they did as much work as "everyone else" did, which means that either the division of labor was more equitable than I realize, or we're going to get down there in half an hour to set up and realize we forgot something major, like a band, a caterer, or actually letting the hotel know we'd be using their banquet room.

The planning for this reunion went very smoothly for quite some time, and then four days ago it took and abrupt left turn: Apparently two weeks ago, the hotel which we had booked had a fire in their main banquet room. They hadn't bothered to let us know, because they figured they could just put us in a couple of the smaller banquet rooms with a private hallway between, and no one would notice, apparently on the theory that 25 years out of high school, we'd clearly be too senile to recognize that A) we were not, technically, in a single, large ballroom, and B) hotel ballrooms are not supposed to smell like California during forest fire season.

Well, we (and by "we" I mean Diana, who did most of the local heavy lifting) noticed. On Tuesday morning, when we went to sign the final contract, give final numbers, and pay the bill, we took one look at the proposed solution and immediately we notified the other five members of the planning committee.

Just down the street from the hotel we were supposed to be at is a luxury hotel, the ballroom of which we on the committee had rejected since it was nearly 50% more expensive, but apparently in these economic times we were not the only people who rejected it, because when we made a big stink about the, er, big stink, our original hotel worked out a deal with the new hotel by which A) they would host our reunion, and B) we would pay them the same fee we had originally negotiated with the cheaper hotel. We traded up, big time, but those reports that members of the reunion committee were seen darting furtively through the dark the the moments before the fire are entirely spurious, I promise.

By the way, one other interesting result of being in the nicer hotel is (this is true), I rode up an elevator with noted comic and modern day philosopher Paula Poundstone. Well, technically, this is only sort of true. Running back to my room to get my laptop computer (every successful reunion needs a laptop!), I got into the elevator with a woman who looked incredibly like Ms. Poundstone, and when she pressed my floor (20), I said "That's my floor too!" and she replied in Paula Poundstone's voice "Well that's convenient". I never asked, to be sure. My wife has since said "You should have", but here's my thinking: I'm not very good with faces... or voices... or, really when it gets right down to it, differentiating humans from other primates. By not asking, I get to spend the rest of my life thinking "I might have ridden 20 floors in an elevator with Paula Poundstone" instead of spending the next day of my life saying "I rode 20 floors in a woman who was nothing like Paula Poundstone, but until I asked, I thought it was." A lifetime of "brush with greatness" memories vs. 20 minutes of "wow, that was stupid! How I could have initially thought that gentleman was Paula Poundstone, I have no idea!"

Anyway, this brush with greatness gave me the self-confidence and humility necessary to negotiate an evening with people who had beaten me up so badly in the high school locker room (and with the guys as well), many of whom have since gone on to do things far more successful than writing computer programs, silly humor essays and breeding like the Waltons on Rohypnol.

But I'm not bitter. Very few of them have successfully lost their hair!

Copyright © October 17, 2009 by Liam Johnson. http://liam-humor.blogspot.com

It's A Car, Not A Crisis!

2009-10-14T20:29:00.004-04:00

My birthday is coming up in a couple of weeks, and it's making me take stock of my life. There's something unnerving about realizing that people who graduated college this past year or this next one were just about being born when I graduated college. (Well, OK, no, I went on the "Decelerated Plan", so technically the people who were being born as I graduated college are just getting out of diapers... which is pretty embarrassing, giving the valedictory speech to their high school classes in Depends... but I digress.)

This birthday brings up something that's been eating at me since I turned 40: the midlife crisis. When do I get to have mine? It's not fair, I see so many men my age running around with fast cars and hot women (or hot cars and fast women, which is almost as good) and I want to know when I get my turn! Oh, sure, my wife is incredibly hot, but it's not the same; She's my wife. The whole point of the midlife crisis is NEW hot women. NEW fast cars. NEW applications to AARP arriving in the mail.

Seriously, the stereotype of the midlife crisis has actually always bothered me, and here's why:

If you have a Y chromosome, you're genetically wired towards sports cars. The sportier the better. We grow up seeing them on television and dreaming of the day when we'll own one of our very own. Not a sport-y car, but a no-point-to-it, way-more-gas-guzzling-than-is-justified, take-the-muffler-off-so-everyone-looks-at-you SPORTS car. An it-cost-more-than-I-make-in-a-year-but-damn-it-it's-worth-it car. A Lamborghini Countach or a Ferrari Testarossa.

And we know we'll never get it, but sooner or later we'd like to settle for a Corvette. And so we start dreaming and planning and scheming and more than a little bit of praying when we should have been praying for the wellbeing of our family members, or at the very least, a passing grade on that final we didn't study for. And we're in high school when this starts.

Reality first kicks us in the nethers around the end of junior year in high school, when we finally convince our parents to let us buy a used car. We envision finding an old DeLorean that we can work on for a few weeks over the summer and bring back to tip-top condition, to ride triumphantly back to school in the fall. What we end up finding is that our life savings, the sum financial result of our lives to this point will manage to buy us a used Chevette. And not the good one, either, in order to afford gas and insurance, we have to buy the one with the big dent in the door and an aroma which seems to indicate that the previous owner's goal in life was to see just how many cigarettes it took to make a windshield look "charcoal tinted" without actually paying for tinting.

And just a few days after we learn that, we discover something else: We have the raw ability to repair and restore a car that hurricane Katrina had to repair and restore New Orleans, but with less likelihood of attracting topless drunken women.

So we drive our beater-mobile, eventually coming to grips with the fact that at least every other guy in our graduating class fared about the same in the car department, except for the rich kid who lives on the hill, but everyone pretty much figures he's a jerk and a snob anyway. (This is true, we had one guy in my class whose father bought him a Corvette as a gift. Not for graduating, nor for turning legal age, but because this kid had failed the drivers test twice, and his father offered him the 'vette as an incentive to study and pass the third time. Yes, really.)

High school ends and we head off to college, replacing the Chevette with a 10 year old Honda Civic that our parents had decided to replace. Still not a sexy car, but reliable in the same way our parents are: Never giving us quite everything that we want, but there for us when we really need it. And in much the same way our parents also didn't, this car utterly fails to get us laid. But that's OK, this is college, we've got way too much studying and stuff to do to, and really, we can get to everything we really need with a few minutes walk, so the car mostly just sits parked most of the time.

College ends, and we go out into the world to start our careers, laden with college loan debt and being paid at a rate that we will, one drunken night, make the mistake of calculating that if it doesn't improve, we will make enough money to pay off our student loans just about in time to retire and file for social security. We're no longer thinking about the car, we're thinking about whether after eating Kraft macaroni and cheese every night this week, the box it came in might make a nice change of pace tonight.

But of course our pay does improve, and we begin the slow climb up the corporate ladder, and pretty soon, we've got some disposable income. Not a lot, but a bit, and it is at this moment that SHE walks into our lives. Our future ex-wife, but at the moment we're convinced she's The One, without whom our life is not complete, The One with whom our own genes will combine to form perfect little human specimens, The One who completes us. (The One who will one day run off with a plastic surgeon from L.A., taking our children, half of our stuff and more than 75% of our metaphorical gonads with her, but we don't know that yet).

And so as quickly as it arrived, that "disposable income" goes to feeding another mouth, and then one or two much smaller mouths connected to little butts that have to be covered in diapers whose annual cost makes you look back fondly on the days when all you had to pay was college tuition. You love the kids, they make you happy, almost happy enough to not think about the car you traded away the chance for in order to have them, and so you work extra hard and scrape together the cash to save for a down payment, so you can buy a house and give them some stability.

One day you wake up, and you're in your thirties, with a mortgage and two kids rapidly approaching their teens and now eating piles of food equal to their own body weight each day. On the plus side, you've passed the halfway point in paying off the student loans, but there's still shockingly little in your 401(k), and that car is just as far away as ever, and in a way you hadn't thought possible, gets even further away as you pay the divorce lawyers and sell off most of what you own in order to split it "equitably", a word which in legal circles means "75% to legal fees, 45% to your ex, leaving whatever remains to you."

But as the divorce is finalized, you begin dating again, and with the wisdom of experience, on your 35th birthday, you marry your second wife. This time, you chose well, this one will last, but she's in debt as well, being the one woman in the country, apparently, who decided to treat her ex-husband fairly in the divorce and he screwed her for it. And not in a good way.

Finally, you reach mid-forties. The kids are in college, so there's no more child support payments, and those student loans are finally paid off! You've managed to put together a little bit of a retirement fund and you have a little bit of extra money, and so finally, one day, you announce to your wife that you're going to buy your dream car. Not the Testarossa or the Countach, but the Corvette, and what happens? Everyone looks at you and "tsks" and says ruefully "midlife crisis car".

We finally make it to a point in life where we can achieve one of our lifetime goals, and it's dismissed as a midlife crisis. Just because we bought a sexy car. Just because we wanted something that goes "Vrooom".

Knowing all of this, you can just imagine how much work we put into the trophy wife!

Copyright © October 14, 2009 by Liam Johnson. http://liam-humor.blogspot.com

Thought of the Day (a Blog Quickie)

2009-08-31T07:34:00.002-04:00

If Alcoholics aren't supposed to have alcohol, why don't we worry about Catholics having cats?

**********

UPDATE: Kudos to my friend Deke Sharon, who upon reading this IMMEDIATELY came up with a better follow-up:

At least for the Priests we do, it's called the doctrine of celibacy.

(Think about it. Unless you happen to be my Mom, in which case, don't think too much about it. :-) )

Blog Quickie

2009-07-10T23:26:00.003-04:00

Today, I was discussing my college days with a couple of the people who shared those days with me, and I came up with this observation:

There is something mildly depressing about being in my 40s and realizing that my idea of a successful weekend has morphed from "Got drunk and woke up next to some hot chick in a strange bed without knowing how I got there" to "Ate a few prunes and was successfully able to poop on Saturday morning".

Blog Quickie

2009-05-29T20:18:00.003-04:00

As anyone in the business world knows, "buzz phrases" come and go. Object Oriented. Agile. Paradigm.

One of the ones I'm hearing more and more is "First Time Right", which I understand is also the new motto of the Republican Party, after initiate voters went predominantly to (and by some reports, were the deciding factor for) Barack Obama.

--------------

Also, this weekend, some friends and I have decided to go for dinner and a movie. The movie is Pixar's latest offering, "Up". Which means tomorrow evening, I shall be ... fed up.

--------------

And a third: I invited some friends over for the weekend, and in the invitation, I said "I'd like to have you all over to Chez Johnson", which (for those who are unfamiliar) is a French construction that essentially means "The House of Johnson". Chez is pronouned the same way as Shea stadium, where the Mets used to play their games.

Anyway, whenever I use that construction, I always kind of hope that one day I'll meet a family with the last name "Guevara", so that I can say I'm going over to "Chez Guevara".

Nailed It!

2009-05-07T23:34:00.000-04:00

I am so tempted to write an essay here that will appeal to at most 3% of the population, those whose job consists of working with the same database system that my day job consists of. "Why not?" says the little voice in my head, "You pretty much just write these for your own amusement."

Because the fact is that I spent much of this past weekend doing exactly the same thing that I do for a living, but in a very different manner: I built a table.

Oh, sure, there are differences, such as when I build a table at work, I usually have to build indexes, while this past weekend, I had to build benches. And the tables I build at work very rarely suffer from one leg being a bit longer than the others. But if I were to write the essay to appeal only to people like me (aka "computer professionals" to us, "nerds" most everyone else, and "wedgie prospects" to the guys in my high school gym class), I would spend the time noting that we built it extra-large, leading to tablespace issues, and how because of a few bad angle cuts of wood, we had some table corruption problems. And most of you would have figured I'd lost it and gone off to read something funnier, like "Les Miserables" or the obituaries.

My wife and I have some friends named Dan and Tristin, who have occasionally shown up as characters in these essays before. Dan and Tristin have a baby girl, "E.G.", who will be turning one in about a month, and in the fashion that only first time parents can, they have decided that this is an event which calls for a massive party involving all of their family and friends.

Those of you who, like Janet and I, have a surplus of children realize that by the time you get to the third one, it's a miracle if you even recognize the day. My own youngest son is... and I have to think about this, three years and about four months old. It was about this time a year ago when I finally stopped telling people he was one.

What I don't understand is why we persist in celebrating these things with our babies. Most people do not throw complex, expensive birthday parties for their dogs, and yet for cognitive processing abilities, babies make dogs look like Einstein. Which is OK, it's best that it happen that way, no parent wants their baby sporting that mustache.

Anyway, in order to have the barbecue they have envisioned, Dan and Tristin had decided they vitally needed a picnic table, and they could think of no better way to obtain one than to select four of their friends such that summed between us, the six of us have no more experience assembling trees into furniture than E.G. has, lock us all in a garage with various raw materials and power tools of the sort that we really should not be entrusted with, and refuse to open the door until a picnic table results.

And by the way, when I say "they could think of no better way", I'm not saying that Dan and Tristin are dumb people. I'm saying they're the level of colossal stupidity one can only obtain after the 11 months of sleep deprivation that nature ensures we get while we have a baby. It is this level of exhausted brain dysfunction that allows us to overlook the fact that this small living thing has entirely taken over our lives and our households, destroyed any social life we ever had, left "strained pea" colored splotches on every item of clothing we own, cost us more than the gross national product of certain pacific tropical nations in disposable diapers alone, and by the way filled those diapers with a substance which makes toxic waste seem positively appetizing, and, rather than seeking the quickest way to rid ourselves of this pox, look down upon it and coo and gurgle and count ourselves as blessed.

I had a roommate like that back in college. He was NOT a blessing.

Regardless, we got together and built a table, and I'm happy to report that if the current fiscal "recession" turns into a fiscal "depression" and my company ends up deep in the... contents of disposable diapers... I can always turn to a new career building furniture for blind people: Items which are basically functional, but which could in no way be considered pleasing to the eye.

I could regale you with hyperbolic descriptions of the errors we made, and how if my high school shop teacher had stopped by to watch my technique, he might have chosen to retroactively rescind the "C" I got in his class more than 25 years ago (and let me tell you, receiving a "C" from a man whose most memorable characteristics are his two missing fingers from two DIFFERENT projects gone bad is a sobering prospect), but the truth is, we did a pretty good job.

It was only after we had completed the task that Dan broke the news (no, I'm not kidding) that Janet and I were not actually invited to the event for which the table was built.

Which is OK, I don't particularly enjoy strained peas anyway.

(* As a little extra, I find it amusing that I called this "Nailed It" when there wasn't a single nail used in the construction. But it felt like a better title than "Screwed!" or "Bolt and Run? You Must Be Nuts!")

Copyright © April 28, 2009 by Liam Johnson. http://liam-humor.blogspot.com

Blog Quickie

2009-05-02T21:40:00.002-04:00

My nephew broke an arm bone. It was his radius.

To calm him down, I suggested my sister give him a piece of pi.

---------------

Also, we were shopping for various undergarments and we saw Delta Burke branded bras. For women whose breasts get larger and smaller, I would imagine.

Blog Quickie

2009-05-01T17:49:00.000-04:00

I was reading earlier today that someone has finally done a definitive study proving that there is NO link between Viagra and blindness.

Which is good, because that was really keeping me up at night.

When Pigs Fly, Swine Flu

2009-04-30T23:48:00.003-04:00

[Just a quick note, faithful readers. I am considering trying to get these essays published in some newspapers as a regular column. In order to accomplish that, I need to start writing more frequently, but also somewhat shorter (I'm told that the average essay in a newspaper is 750 words). If I actually manage to get some papers to sign on, I may also have to stop posting the essays on the blog, but one thing at a time. --Liam]

Apparently, the pigs are attacking.

All this time, we've been convinced "Islamic Extremists" were the bane of human existence and the source of all terrorism. Remember when we were concerned about WMDs? Remember how WMDs were defined as "nuclear, radiological, chemical or biological" weapons? Biological weapons!

And now, after years of being told that every white powder was anthrax, every cough tuberculosis, every pock mark smallpox, it turns out our real threat was significantly more porcine in nature (and no, here I am NOT thinking about Rush Limbaugh, but thank you for playing). Swine flu has been detected in New York City.

The thing is, we should have seen this coming. Remember that the previous Presidential administration spent some time warning us of an impending pandemic outbreak of the Avian flu. But these were the same people who insisted yellowcake uranium was coming from Niger, and that Saddam Hussein was a major player in the 9/11 attacks, when they started telling us the birds were "death from the skies", we should have realized two things:

There WAS a major threat from the animal kingdom, and

It was almost certainly not the birds

The thing is, we even kind of brought this on ourselves. Think about it: Have you ever been laid up with a significant injury and, while healing, been unable to move or engage in any activity more strenuous than personal-region scratching? I'm talking about the sort of injury where reaching for the remote control is too much effort, where the first time you get up to use the rest room, you go through the mental calculus of whether walking to the kitchen to get a bottle is more steps than you'd save by only having to get up for the bathroom every third or fourth time.

So now consider that we're coming up on summer time. This relates, trust me. Any day now, those of us in the colder portions of the country will be breaking out our barbecue grills for the first time. Those in more tropical climates (what I like to refer to as "the armpit states") have probably been at this for some time now. Think for a second, what's the first thing you think of when I say the word "barbecue"?

Ribs.

Imagine just how much painful recuperation you'd have to endure if someone stole your ribs. You'd be pretty ticked off, right? Now imagine you don't even have thumbs, so you can't use the remote control, which is fine, because you don't even have a television. All you have is a nice mud puddle, and you can't even roll around in that, because you would damage your internal organs because you have no ribs! I guarantee you'd devote all of your spare time to thinking up ways to get even with those responsible for your predicament.

And so the pigs have come up with this swine flu. It's the perfect weapon. Forget building your house out of straw or sticks or even bricks, a house of swine flu would take out the wolf entirely, the only drawback being that it would also take out everyone who lived therein, but I think we can all agree that's a small price to pay (about $3.49/lb).

Of course now you're asking yourself "How exactly does this affect me?" Experts are beginning to suggest cutting down on unnecessary air travel, because, so they claim, this is how these diseases spread, but I think that's crazy. When was the last time you saw a pig on an airliner? Well, OK, a few of those CEOs in first class, maybe, but I mean back in the "veal pen" seats that you and everyone you've ever known fly in?

The first thing I suggest is that the parents of small children stop playing "this little piggy" with them. Next, if you must watch the muppets, stick with old episodes of Sesame Street, which was 100% Miss Piggy free. And by all means, avoid pigs in blankets, it's summer time, the only reason they'd need blankets is if they've got the flu!

Also, clearly you need to start avoiding the places that pigs frequent. Donut shops for instance (rim shot). Avoid farms. Cancel the family's vacation plans to visit the slaughterhouse. If Rosie O'Donnell gets another show, don't try to get tickets. Replace any American made motorcycles with foreign brands(*).

And for heaven's sake, stop eating the ribs. They won't make you sick, but they've gotten so darn expensive, and I hope to drive the price down to the point that I can afford them again.

(*For those that don't get this one, there's a certain American made brand of motor cycle which is referred to by enthusiasts as a "hog". Yeah, humor is always so much better when you feel the need to explain it.)

Copyright © April 26, 2009 by Liam Johnson. http://liam-humor.blogspot.com

Well Now, Isn't He Special

2009-04-28T00:37:00.002-04:00

[I hope you'll indulge me today. This is still supposed to be a humor essay, but it's also on a topic near and dear to my heart, and so if it ends up being more informative and less funny, please understand that this is my fifth and almost certainly final child we're talking about here. I get a little sentimental. Because it's more serious than humorous, I'm posting it as an "extra". There will still be a normal essay on Thursday. --Liam]

As parents, we have certain aspirations for our children. When we have our first one, we dream that he or she will grow up to be the President who figures out a way to peace in the middle east, or the doctor who cures cancer, or the psychiatrist who figures out how to resolve whatever issues it is that makes Michael Moore think that way.

As we have progressively more children, our hopes and dreams diminish perceptibly, so that the second one we just hope is happy and moderately successful, and by the fourth or fifth child we're merely hoping they can make it through daily life without noticeably soiling their undergarments and maybe, just occasionally, remembering to chew with their mouth closed.

One thing which is NOT high on the list of aspirations for our children is autism. The name "autism" is shortened from a much longer Latin phrase which translates to "Not actually stupid, just really good at ignoring you." Autistic kids have honed the art of sticking their fingers in their ears and loudly saying "LALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU" down to such a science that it no longer requires fingers, or loud singsong voices. Or indeed any recognition that you're even in the room.

Autism is not well understood by doctors in much the same way that the lyrics to most songs from later in Bob Dylan's career are not well understood by the casual listener. And that's probably an apt analogy, because as best we can tell, autism is a "sensory processing" disorder, meaning that to the autistic child, we're all talking like Bob Dylan. Or the parents in a "Peanuts" animated feature. Or the Miss Teen USA pageant's Miss South Carolina 2007.

But here's the thing that no one will tell you, and that I think everyone who has an autistic child should know: In some autistic kids, much of the sensory issues relate to a sensitivity to milk and wheat. Yup, the two ingredients which we'd probably all list near the top of any list of "healthy foods for growing children" cause my son to stare into space and roll his eyes around with a fascination I've not seen since I mistakenly accepted an invitation to a party in the "stoner" house back when I was a freshman in college and knew neither what a stoner was nor why, exactly, they would choose to use so much of that particular sickly sweet air freshener.

Janet happened upon this particular bit of information when she refused to accept the doctor's prognosis that Liam was "mildly autistic" and that there wasn't really much that could be done for it. She decided to get a second opinion from "Dr. Google" and after several days of searching and reading up, we decided to try taking my son off of milk and wheat and saw an immediate improvement. I'm not saying he went from drooling to solving complex quadratic equations; he's more of a political science sort of guy.

But here's the most infuriating part: When we next took him in for a visit with his pediatrician, she was astounded by his progress and asked if we'd done anything that could account for it. We told her, and she nodded and said "Yeah, I've heard stories like that from other parents." I didn't, but I wanted to say "Really, Doctor? And you didn't think to mention that back when there wasn't 'really anything we can do'? Maybe this year your CPA will come back with a tax return saying you owe 35% of your gross wages as income, and if you ask why he didn't claim even the most basic deductions or credits, he'll say 'Yeah, I've heard stories about those from other CPAs'. Maybe then you'll understand just how incompetent a doctor this makes you."

There isn't really any handbook for children like my son. There are lots of books on the progression of autistic kid, such as what to expect and how to handle the special challenges. And heaven knows there are lots of books on raising so-called "normal" children (books which are together worth their weight in, well, logs, but only if you're out of logs and it's cold and you need something to burn). But there's amazingly little on children who were autistic but aren't really any more because they turned out to just have allergies and their parents were conscientious enough to remove those allergens from their diet.

So we're kind of on our own, which is OK, because ultimately no matter who you go to for advice, your child will be different and special. Ours is just a little bit more so.

This really hasn't turned out quite as funny as it should be for the humor blog, but as I said, it's information I really want people to have. Please pass it along to anyone you know who has an autistic child and hasn't yet found out about trying the wheat-and-milk free diet.

And if they want to talk about our experience, I'd be happy to chat with them at liam@liamjohnson.net.

Copyright © April 28, 2009 by Liam Johnson. http://liam-humor.blogspot.com

Blog Quickie...

2009-04-26T22:22:00.002-04:00

Today in the Home Depot, we were walking past some large tank like objects, and my daughter asked "What's a water softener?".

So I spent some time describing the difference between "hard" and "soft" water.

She then asked "Do they also make water hardeners?"

I said "Yep. Back there. They're called 'freezers'."

Yule Never Believe What I Did Today

2009-04-23T23:32:00.000-04:00

[This essay was begun in December, and was intended to follow the "Positively Liam" essay. I never finished it then and have picked it up now to finish and post. And thus we have the odd spectacle of an essay about a Christmas tree being posted after tax day. Truly, there are no rules on this blog. --Liam]

Today, we return to the old standard essay topic, "Isn't Liam a bonehead!", but I'm still extremely aware of the fact that some of you don't like my excessive comedic self-loathing. I am, however, also aware that last week's essay proved that without self-loathing, I really haven't got much in the way of jokes.

And so I have three things to say:

Technically, I only promised to not be negative to myself for that one essay, I never promised to give up an otherwise extremely non-promising writing career.

Technically, this essay is not really about me. The boneheaded events herein DID happen, and knowing me, they very well COULD have happened to me, but for the anonymity of the person who told me the story, I have narcissistically recast the events with myself as the lead character. Having started down this path, I think we can all safely assume that everything in this essay is a lie, especially the word "everything" in this sentence.

Technically, if you really think I'm not that much of a doofus, you should know that "last weeks essay" is correctly named in as much as it was written last week. However, as I write this, I have not yet posted that one, and in fact, I've been hemming and hawing over whether to post it or not, based on my contention that it isn't particularly funny. And so now I'm going to make another attempt at humor, the best possible outcome of which will be that this is funny enough to post, thus forcing my hand and making me post that one as well, which will have the net result of averaging out the two essays to at best a moderate chuckle or maybe a mildly-amused "heh".

That said, I am sitting here in the dark working on battery power, because we currently have a power outage due to a large winter storm which hit the northeast recently(*), and without anything better to do, I've decided to write another essay.

Earlier today, in order to pass some of the time I would normally dedicate to the selfless and vital act of watching television, I decided to put up the Christmas tree.

Janet and I long ago gave up on the idea of having a real tree. I could tell you it was because we don't like the idea of having to cut down and kill a tree just so it can decorate our house for a few weeks. I could tell you that we're concerned about the fire hazard inherent in pine needles dried to a level of aridness rarely found nearer than the surface of Mars sitting up against warm Christmas tree light bulbs. I could tell you that because you have to keep water in the base of the tree to keep down the fire hazard, and with small children in the house, we're afraid that we'd end up with a perpetual puddle in the living room. But the truth is that given past history, there is every likelihood that this tree will be gracing our living room with yule cheer until sometime near tax day, and while there is something depressingly pathetic about noting your Christmas tree still standing there in tribute to the birth of Jesus while outside the birds are chirping and the snow has all melted, this can't compare with the incredible emotional low of seeing that same tree needle bare and beginning to decompose.

And so our tree is an artificial affair made from twisted wires and green plastic by artisans who took great care to make sure that in the end, it perfectly and accurately reflects the look of... twisted wires and green plastic. We buy a new tree every few years when the kids succeed in knocking over the old one and bending the wires to the point that the "branches" no longer point in any direction that can be reasonably considered anything like realistic, even after consuming too much holiday "nog", and we generally buy it from one of those "Mart" stores to which you go when you're willing to sacrifice a few things in order to get a cheaper price, things like quality and safety and (in the case of trees) realism.

So the first step to putting up the tree is to find the box in which the tree resides for 11 months out of the year. Well, 7, but let's just pretend it's the normal 11. It's a large box, you'd think it'd be pretty easy to find, but no, sometimes we've put it in the basement the previous year. Sometimes we've put it in the garage. Sometimes in the attic. This year, I found it by the side of the road, hitchhiking to Baja.

Putting the tree together is a simple affair, no more complex or time consuming than reassembling a Swiss watch that has been carefully disassembled via Cuisinart. To start with, you have to sort out the "branches" by size and make sure the small ones go at the top and the large at the bottom. If you put the ones on the top in first, it becomes top heavy and falls over on you. If you put the ones on the bottom in first, you have trouble reaching in to hook the top ones to the central pole. And if you put the small ones on the bottom and the large ones on the top, so as to create a look of "upside down tree", your wife yells at you and makes you start over again.

I did, however, get the tree built, and so it was time to start sorting through the various decorations. We usually let the children do all of the decorating except for the lights, on the theory that Janet and I have little artistic talent, and so if we let the kids decorate it and it ends up looking like something out of a war zone, we can tell our friends with a knowing nod "Yes, but the children so love decorating the tree" and not have to admit that in fact it's because we have the same level of "tasteful decoration sense" that a cat displays in its litter box. (And lest you think I'm kidding, the last time I decorated the tree, I put all of the decorations on the floor and then got down onto all fours and kicked them at the tree with my feet).

The lights, though, are our responsibility, and so each year we pull out each of the roughly six thousand strands of lights we've accumulated over the course of our lives and begin the arduous task of figuring out which bulbs have blown over the course of the year. Cheap strands of lights (and trust me, if we're willing to put up with a foundation that resembles a tree about as much as I do, do you really think we spend any more on the lights?) have a bad habit of failing to light entirely if any of the individual bulbs are blown, and so each year we have to go through the strands one by one, plugging in new bulbs until they light, and this year was extremely frustrating. I was at this for probably an hour and a half, swearing under my breath as I tried to figure out why no matter how many bulbs I swapped out, I couldn't get the damn strand to light up.

Raise your hands if you've figured it out. Yup. And probably in less than the 90 minutes I was at it. The power was out. Like an idiot, I spent much of my afternoon trying the Christmas light equivalent of performing CPR on a sofa.

I feel so stupid. There's nothing for it but to finish this essay and go break out the nog. Wake me up when it's time to take the tree down.

(* Even this is a lie. I'm not sitting, I'm sort of lying back on my couch. The storm wasn't recent, it was 5 days ago, as were most of the events described. And although I considered writing something like this while the power was out, my battery was quite dead from watching excessive "children's programming" (a euphemism, because I am embarrassed to admit what I actually do with my spare computer time... Club Penguin.), and by the way, it's the afternoon, so even if all of the rest of it was true, it's "pitch light" outside.)

Copyright © December 17, 2008 & April 12, 2009 by Liam Johnson. http://liam-humor.blogspot.com

Blog Quickie

2009-04-16T15:20:00.001-04:00

It is a hard day at my office, a number of people are receiving bad news today, and so I thought I would lighten up the mood with a joke or two.

I began telling a knee slapper about two brothers and one guy in the office insisted I give them names, so I said their names were Ernest and Julio.

Then I apologized, because I realized that on a bad day like that, it wasn't a good day for Gallos humor.

A Taxing Essay

2009-04-15T00:01:00.003-04:00

It's April, which means it's time once again for our annual tax advice column. Annual in the sense that every year at this time, we think to ourselves "We really should write a tax column", and so this column is "annual" in the same sense that earning a million dollars is an annual event for us.

Before we begin, we want to let you all know our qualifications. We are not registered CPAs. Our math skills are passable if you grade on a curve. But our former mother in law is a certified accountant, and we used to sing in an a cappella group led by a man whose day job was tax attorney for the IRS, and so we feel extremely confident that you should all trust our advice implicitly. Confident in a way that only the secure knowledge that anyone who does will be locked away for years and thus be unable to come after us for their just retribution can make us.

Let's begin with a little bit of history. The primary U.S. Tax form is the 1040, named after the year in which Lady Godiva made her famous ride through the streets of Brussels, Belgium throwing truffles at the little children and hitting "Peeping" Tom the tailor in the eye, which was the origin of the phrase "It's all fun and games until someone puts an eye out". This tells us that one of the best ways to ensure a favorable viewing of your tax forms by the IRS is to include with your forms a box of high class chocolates.

"But won't the chocolates melt and get all over my tax forms, rendering them illegible?"

Well, yes, there is that risk, but you should also consider the not widely known fact that the main IRS processing center is located in Dante's ninth circle of hell, the frozen circle, and so really, the only chance of your chocolates melting is if the postal service is not sufficiently speedy in getting your forms there in a timely fashion, and we can all agree that if there are two things the postal service is known for, it is "spindling" and "mutilating".

"But then what happens to me if the IRS can't read my forms?"

Well, first off, that's not your worst problem. Your worst problem will be the hungry denizen of the IRS who is now angry that you have whetted their hunger with the aroma of chocolate while not having provided any that remains in edible condition. But the truth is that the worst thing the IRS will do to you in this case is something called an "audit", which can't be that bad, right? I mean, it's a quiet little word, only five letters; surely if it were something really bad, it would have a more terrifying name, such as "Armageddon" or "Schwarzenegger".

The audit is the process by which the IRS very reasonably and politely crawls up your financial posterior armed with a pickax, a headlamp and a quart of 30 weight motor oil (don't ask why) and attempts to determine where you've hidden all of the riches they're certain you have and have been refusing to declare so as to get out of paying your fair share of taxes.

We can take another hint from Lady Godiva here, too: If you ever do get audited, show up naked. There is one of two very real benefits to showing up naked, depending on who you are. If you happen to be young and beautiful (and here we are thinking of Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie), showing up naked may just put the auditor into such a congenial state (as measured on the Mohs scale) that they let you off with just a warning, or failing that, feel unwilling to get up from behind their desks to chase you if you simply walk out of the audit. If you do not happen to be young or beautiful (and here we are thinking of everyone else in the United States), at least the IRS will not have to tear a hole in your good pants to gain access to the entry point for their examination.

"OK, so I want to avoid the audit. I'm confused about 'tax deductions' and 'tax credits'. Can you tell me the difference?"

Sure. A tax deduction is the final amount of taxes you owe after having calculated your way through all of the forms if you have it checked over by Dr. Watson. You know you have done a good job on filling out the forms if, on looking at the final outcome, Dr. Watson says "Brilliant deduction, Holmes!".

A tax credit sounds like a good thing, but remember that in 2009 in the United States, we're in the middle of a huge credit crisis and nowhere is this more true than in the world of income taxes. Unless you are "too big to fail" (and here we are thinking of noted thespian Ron Jeremy), reporting a tax credit on your tax forms is a risky business and could end up with your net worth plummeting to cents on the dollar until you are divided into pieces and sold off to your neighbors at fire sale prices.

"Wow, that sounds bad! I see in my tax form packet a number of forms called 'schedules'. What are those all about?"

You can ignore those, unless you are a corporate filer who went through a corporate merger in the past 12 months and is filing jointly. Some corporations use a different financial calendar than the rest of us do, and so they have to file these "schedules" to let the IRS know when they plan to pay their taxes, the answer to which is invariably "never, because we have moved our headquarters to the Cayman Islands, thus allowing us to avoid any financial interactions with the federal government that do not come in the form of huge 'bail out' checks written directly to the bonus fund for our top executives."

"I never had any children, but I'm one of those pathetic people who is never invited anywhere because I insist on bringing my six dogs and three cats with me and demand that they are like my children, and should be invited anywhere I am invited. Can I claim them as dependents?"

Yes, but only because your friends will really appreciate the break from dealing with you until you get out, and as an additional bonus, by the time you get released, most of those pets will no longer be with us, and those who are will have evolved language skills and may well understand common manners well enough to explain to you that you are a doofus.

"Fair enough. I have a few medical expenses. Is there any way that I can list them on my tax form, and reduce my tax burden?"

Possibly, but probably not. There are two methods the IRS uses to determine whether your medical expenses were extreme enough in the previous year to qualify for tax relief, the equivalency test and the rule of thumb. The rule of thumb is probably the easiest to quantify. Put simply, it is "if the sum of the medical expenses incurred by the filer was more than a top notch hospital would charge to clone a copy of a human thumb and then successfully attach it after a tragic hitchhiking accident, then the expenses are deductible, but only to the extent that the new thumb is fully functional."

The equivalency test is much harder to accurately calculate, but essentially if you consider the IRS to be like a loan shark, then you consider the sum total of all of the medical expenses you would incur over a year of trying to duck out of paying "Federal Eddie the weasel" and compare that to your own medical expenses, being sure to subtract out of your own a value equivalent to the damage to Eddie's henchmen's knuckles. Then consider that this is not unlike what the IRS will do to you if you DO claim your medical expenses and they consider those claims to be invalid. Now decide whether the amount of money in question is sufficient to be worth that risk.

"I have a personal net worth in excess of one hundred million dollars which I have stashed away in various tax shelters such that I have never had to pay any taxes. This year, through the various congressmen I have in my pocket, I have managed to push through tax changes allowing me to deduct the maintenance costs of my personal helicopter and Lear jet, but since I do not pay any taxes, can I get a refund for the money I paid to buy those congressmen?"

Oh, dear, look at the time. That's it for this year. Be sure to read next year's tax advice column when we will cover the topic of "amortization", the process of having your tax return looked over by your CPA "Mort" before submitting it to the IRS.

Copyright © April 11, 2009 by Liam Johnson. http://liam-humor.blogspot.com

Blog Quickie

2009-04-13T18:47:00.001-04:00

Here at the Institute of the Useless and Bizarre, we have come across a news story about an inventor who has developed a device he calls the "Wii-brator", described as an adult marital aid designed to interface with the popular Wii video game system.

Institute staff, in our neverending quest to avoid doing any work that could in any way benefit anyone in any context, immediately began coming up with ideas for other devices with so-called "open interfaces" which could be made to interface with marital aids.

So far, we have come up with the GPS ("You have reached your destination." "No, not quite, let's drive around the block one or two more times."), the TiVo ("This will not be scheduled as it conflicts with a higher priority show." "That's it, I'm calling the divorce lawyer on his cheating ass!") and of course, the iPhone ("There's an ap for that." "Does it come with an adaptor? That plug is way too small for my hole."(*)).

If you hear of any similarly bizarre items, please let us know.

Thank you.

P.S. Come to think of it, we here at the Institute apologize for the use of the word "Quickie" in the title. It was clearly inappropriate in this context.

(* This is sort of an inside joke. The headphone jack for most devices which include cellphone technology is actually smaller than the headphone jack for most portable audio devices, and I recently spent several hours in an airport trying to find an adapter so that I could make use of headphones from one device with another device.)

Positively Liam

2009-04-09T20:45:00.001-04:00

[I wrote this one last December while traveling, and didn't get around to posting it. I then either forgot about it or decided it wasn't funny enough, and set it aside. Last week, just after posting "Flightmares", I found it and decided it was good enough, so here you go. I mention all of this mostly so that if anyone notices the copyright date and wonders why, that's the story.

I should also make one thing clear for those who do not already know. My wife's name is Janet. My ex-wife is Jane. And if you think THAT hasn't caused some consternation when writing an e-mail to one or the other... --Liam]

Last essay, you may recall, I spent a fair amount of time making fun of myself. This is a common theme in these essays, indeed some would say that my entire oeuvre consists of different amusing ways of saying "Wow, isn't Liam (the senior) a serious bonehead!"

And yet one of my friends complained that I took it a bit too far, and that I really should be nicer to myself. Of course, the truth is that I'm an egotistical son of a gun, and so if I were to give you my honest opinion of myself, not a one of you would ever want to be around me again.

Nevertheless, since this is the third time over the course of my humor essay writing "career" that I've heard this complaint, perhaps it's time to see if I can write an entire essay without saying anything negative about myself while still meeting the three criteria of a successful humor essay:

Enough humor to make you laugh, or at least chuckle appreciatively.
An engaging subject that keeps you reading until the end, and most importantly,
Enough words to form two and a half pages of length.

Tonight, I'm writing this in a Comfort Inn at the Atlanta airport. Atlanta, you see, is conveniently located at the exact center between Minneapolis, MN and Manchester, NH, if you're Delta Airlines or smoke a lot of crack (which I am not prepared to stipulate are necessarily mutually exclusive conditions).

This past week, Janet and Liam (the younger) and I have been in Powell, WY visiting my oldest two children and my ex-wife, because my company requested that I do something about the excess of paid leave days in my "leave bank", and frankly there was little in terms of vacation bliss that either Janet or I could think of that would equal spending a week with a woman who still owns half of the things I once owned and who regularly speaks of me in terms that, quite frankly, I can't repeat in this essay or I will violate it's first tenet.

And to avoid violating that tenet (in letter, if not in spirit) I will point out that this was technically Janet's idea, so I am not saying anything bad about myself when I point out just how completely bone-headedly stupid it was. (And for the benefit of readers who happen to be still married to me, please forgive that. I really don't want to give away ANOTHER half of my stuff!)

Seriously, though, it wasn't really that bad an idea; Andrew & Katie have been asking almost since the moment of conception that we one day bring Liam out to Wyoming so that they could introduce him to the other half of their family, their friends, and the concepts of "big", "flat", "brown" and "boring" so absent in New Hampshire living and yet so prevalent in that particular area of Wyoming in December.

And the truth is, although being married to each other drove each of us crazy, Jane and I can still be civil and even friendly to each other in small doses, into which category (small) "sleeping at her house for a week" does not necessarily fall, but I digress.

We actually had a pretty good trip, and while there are vast comedic depths to be plumbed in the concept of spending a week around ex-wives and ex-in-laws, some of whom can somehow convey the concepts of "technically polite" and "absolute disgust" simultaneously (throw in the concept of "sucking on a lemon since birth" and you have one person I saw this week, although in the interest of not suddenly receiving a court order for an increase in child support, I shan't identify whom), the truth is that with a single exception, everyone was pleasant and warm and sharing (a bit too sharing, if you include that my former mother-in-law had a bit of a stomach flu, but again to be fair, she postponed seeing us for as long as possible to try to avoid passing it on).

And so we shall skip ahead to last night. Less than 24 hours ago. The nearest convenient airport large enough to support commercial aircraft that are not powered by giant rubber bands is nearly two hours away from Powell in Billings, MT, and in order to make all of the connections necessary to get home, you have to start your first flight no later than 9am, so for the less mathematically gifted, that meant we'd planned to get up at 5am and out by 5:30. Which of course meant that getting to sleep was almost impossible, and along about 3 a.m. I finally managed it… only to be woken up less than an hour later by a phone call from Northwest Airlines, notifying us that for various reasons, our first flight was being delayed by an hour and a quarter, which was going to make us miss our connection, and could we possibly get on the 6am flight instead?

Math again. It's almost 4 a.m. Even assuming we can get the car packed up, get Liam up and be on the road in 15 minutes, we can't get to Billings before 6. Add to that returning the rental car, checking our luggage and getting through the security line, there was simply no way we could make it.

Another choice was to be "re-routed", a process nearly as enjoyable as having a surgeon tell you that they've run out of clean scalpels, and so for your exploratory surgery, he plans to have rabid wombats chew open your chest cavity.

The final option was to delay our return trip for a day and be re-booked on the same itinerary the next day, but as I've already said, we'd been in my ex-wife's house for a week, and so the wombats were looking pretty good.

But here's the thing experienced travelers will tell you: Agreeing to be re-routed is kind of like agreeing to take just one hit of heroine: it almost always leads to another… and another… and another… until you're crawling, wild eyed to any supplier trying to get that next "fix" that will eventually get you, well, home.

And that is how we have ended up in a hotel in Atlanta, paid for by a big-time pusher named Delta when Northwest cut us off. Tomorrow morning, if the gods smile on us, we hope to find ourselves connecting home through Anchorage by way of Ganymede.

Wish us luck!

(Please note: While I promised to not say anything negative about myself, and while interpersonal relationships (and truth) prevent me from being particularly negative about my former in-laws, I never promised not to be negative about the airline companies. If you have any objections to how they are portrayed within this essay, then I have three thoughts.

First, what's next, not being allowed to make fun of Chicago politicians, al Qaeda and the Tele-Tubbies (three of the most evil forces the human race has yet devised)?
Second, have you actually BEEN on a commercial flight at any time since Orville Wright stiffed Wilbur a bag with three peanuts in it?
And third, perhaps you need to find a different source for your humor, such as cnn.com or the repair manual for a 1974 AMC Pacer.

)

Copyright © December 9, 2008 by Liam Johnson. http://liam-humor.blogspot.com

And a quickie...

2009-04-02T18:06:00.002-04:00

As the father of two children who have been diagnosed on the autism spectrum, I don't feel overly bad about making this otherwise tasteless joke...

A friend of mine pointed out to me that today is National Autism Awareness Day, which I found odd, in that awareness is not the forte of the autistic.

But I suppose "National Autism Lack-of-Focus Day" probably sends the wrong message.

Flightmares

2009-04-02T16:31:00.003-04:00

OK, so, I'm flying home from North Carolina, where I've been visiting my parents, and here on the last leg of my journey, I have finally found the worst person to share an airplane ride with. I've always known that somewhere out in travel land there had to be a worst, but like bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster and customer service from the Sears "Customer Service" department, I figured I'd spend my whole life without ever running across him.

Not any more. This chupacabra of the travelling set is sitting less than a yard away from me, on the other side of the airline aisle. I weep for the woman in the middle seat on his side of the row, the sort of soul destroying weeping one does for a person who is doomed but not yet dead, such as a deep sea diver with his tanks empty, a skydiver whose chute has failed to deploy or anyone who debates the "liberal" side of any issue with any random one of my in-laws.

To begin with, this wad of humanity is easily 350 lbs. No, that's not fair… to anyone who is 350 lbs. He's really not that fat, but he just carries himself as though he should be, the sort of "I may not actually be overflowing the bounds of my seat, but damn it I can make you wish that's all I was" kind of attitude.

My fellow plane mates and I were already in something of a foul mood. The boarding process had gone as usual, ruthless airline representatives with cattle prods herding us into the plane, border collies nipping at our heels if we got out of line, and a giant hydraulic "trash compactor" running down the length of the "jetway" shoving us into the fuselage door.

We all took our seats and… nothing happened. We sat for about ten minutes, and finally the announcement came "Ladies and Gentlemen, we are waiting for a late connecting flight. We will be holding here for a short while. If you are meeting someone in Manchester, you might want to let them know we'll be a bit late. If you have any children older than 4, we suggest you cancel your plans to attend their high school graduation ceremonies." We sat for a while.

Finally, a few harried looking people began to straggle onto the plane, and when that tide had stemmed, we still sat, waiting with the level of patience normally associated with a DMV but with more miscellaneous fees. Finally, we heard a bellow, more bovine than human. "Dude... I think this is our plane", and on lumbers the yeti and two or three less notable companions.

He makes his way down the aisle and honestly, my eyes began to water. Have you ever gone into a gym locker room and smelled a pile of used towels that have been sitting in a pile for several days, because no one has gotten around to laundering them? That combined smell of days old sweat and mildew that we associate with socks or noted transvestite actor Devine came wafting down the aisle, and for a moment I was glad he hadn't hurried to make the connection. As bad as the wait was, I can only imagine what enhancement a good perspiration would have lent to the ambiance.

Two of the very few remaining empty seats on the plane were the middle seat in my row and the aisle seat across from me. As he walked in, I caught the eye of the gentleman sitting next to me at the window and he nodded, and I could tell we were both having the same thought: "This is the exit row, we're sitting here because we're both capable of opening the exit in an emergency. I'll support you if you want to consider this an emergency!" So, as Putrid Pete walks down the aisle, he predictably stops at my row. The aisle seat on the other side was next to the kindly octogenarian couple, and while I'm not proud of it, the thought "they've had a good, long life, PLEASE let it be them" did pass through my head. Miracle of miracles, I won, they lost. He was going to be across the aisle from me, but at least he wasn't going to be physically touching me for the 150 minute flight.

Final passengers on board, the flight attendants begin closing the doors and preparing for takeoff, and Sasquatch gets up out of his seat and walks (ambles, really) to the bathroom, ignoring the protestations of the flight crew. Really, he didn't go immediately, he'd sat in his seat for a good five minutes, and only when it would further delay our departure did he decide NOW was the time he simply had to void, and clearly he considered this noteworthy, because when he returned to his seat, he took out his phone and began to text someone. Honestly. Everyone else had put away their phones and iPods (the gentleman on the window end next to him had turned off his pacemaker, just in case), and E.T. begins texting away.

And sniffling. About every 10 seconds, a big snorting, braying sniffle. Oh dear lord, is he going to sniffle through the entire flight? Well, no, he paused from sniffling occasionally, to bellow loudly to one of his travelling companions three rows behind him. Throughout the flight. A flight that had been scheduled to depart after 10:30pm, and on which many travelers were going to attempt to sleep, the random firings of his neurons were so important that he was simply incapable of holding in the thoughts, so we were treated to a random sampling of discussions about how he really wished his friend would introduce him to the girl he (the friend) was dating, and how (to the gentleman sitting several rows ahead in combat fatigues, clearly returning from active duty) "ARMY" stood for "Aren’t Really a Marine Yet". Classy.

Snort, bellow, snort, bellow, the pattern repeated itself until suddenly he realized that something was missing, there wasn't enough variety, at which point he began to intersperse in great wracking coughs. Only comparatively rarely, but violent enough that every news story from the past few years of airlines trying to track down the other people on a flight with someone known to have tuberculosis began running through my head as people in the rows ahead of him picked bits of lung out of their hair.

So now you're thinking this is bad enough, this clearly qualifies this gentleman to be in the top 10 worst people of all time to be on an airplane with, what could he possibly do to ice that cake and cement his place at the top spot. One word: Dip.

About 20 minutes into the flight, he begins squirming around in his seat in rippling undulations that eventually produced a tin of chewing tobacco, from which he pulled a plug of... I can't even talk about it. I would rather dip my finger into the vats at a sewage treatment plant and rub the resulting mixture onto my teeth and gums than shove this gooey wad of black yuck into my mouth, but into his it went.

If you've never had the dubious pleasure of being around someone who partakes in this noxious substance, the problem isn't the tobacco itself. It's not even the cloying, sickly sweet odor, which under normal circumstances is nauseating, but in this case actually helped mask the more obnoxious ambient odors. No, it's what they do with the resulting expectorant that having a foreign body in the mouth generates.

Most dippers at least have the decency to use a styrofoam cup or other opaque container, but not Piltdown man. He begins spitting into a clear plastic cup sitting right next to his flight-attendant supplied glass of diet coke, as if the rest of us needed to see this container full of the Devil's tea. (I've now made several attempts to describe it in humorous terms, but each of them turned more sickening than the last, so we'll leave it at that).

And here's the worst of it: Although I'm writing this on April 1st, each and every core detail is true.

Santa Claus may still be a myth. The Tooth Fairy may never cross your path. Zeus may be just a figment. But there is a worst airline traveler in the world. If you see him coming in all his tattooed, stringy haired glory, fake a heart attack. Throw up violently. If all else fails, call the flight attendant and tell them you have a bomb. Anything to get off the plane. Trust me.

Copyright © April 1, 2008 by Liam Johnson. http://liam-humor.blogspot.com

STUFFED: A Thanksgiving Tale of Weight Loss and Bodily Function

2008-11-28T02:29:00.006-05:00

Note: This essay relies upon the use of a particular phrase which is not really fit for polite company, and so we shall need to dance around it to keep this essay "family friendly". Thus, I have chosen to replace the one most odious word in the phrase with the word "rutabaga". I do this for several reasons. First, I needed a word that, in the phrase, would not be the least bit offensive. Second, the word rutabaga is, to me, innately funny. And third, it is Thanksgiving, which means that it is the one time of year when I will again be asked to try rutabaga, and in my considered opinion, it tastes like....

*          *          *

I learned something new about myself today...

As those who know me, who read these columns, or who have ever recognized me from a moderate zoom level on Google Earth already know, I'm not the slimmest odds in the casino. When I'm sitting on a seesaw, the average human male, in order to balance out the toy, must wear a backpack loaded with lead bricks... and sit in a Toyota.

And so I'm on a diet lately, and I've actually been moderately successful, having lost over 20 lbs thus far. This leads to an obsessive reliance on the scale, checking my weight just about any time I have call to be in the bathroom or conveniently near to it, such as in the same zip code. I've learned all of the tribulations of "daily fluctuations" and "water retention" after eating salty foods, and have realized that when one is in the weight class officially labeled by the World Boxing Federation as "livestock", daily fluctuations in weight can involve the full weight of an infant, but with more bawling.

Seriously, though, it is pretty depressing when you step on that scale and see a rise in weight, and this is exactly what happened to me this morning. This being Thanksgiving day, I did not have to go to work, so I rolled out of bed at the crack of 10:30 (early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and someone other than Liam) and as is my wont (yes, I have a wont, although it's threadbare in a few spots and so I may get up really early tomorrow and see if anyone is selling them at "Black Friday" loss leader prices) stumbled into the bathroom to do that most urgent-upon-first-waking task: weighing myself. Up four pounds. Since yesterday morning, I was up four pounds.

Here's how I look at this: To justify being up four pounds, I should have gotten the equivalent pleasure of having wolfed down four pound cakes, and as a fat guy, that's a level of pleasure which is likely to cause extreme cardiac distress. Since I have not experienced extreme cardiac distress, I must conclude I have not had sufficient justification for those extra four pounds.

Clearly I had no choice. I had to swing into action with the only conceivable emergency plan I could think of: I had to start crying. Big, wracking, shuddering sobs setting those extra four pounds quivering mockingly at me.

Well, no, it wasn't really that bad, but I did get rather depressed, and so with a significantly lower level of enthusiasm than I'd had minutes before (and remember, minutes before my enthusiasm level had been "unconscious"), I began my morning rituals and pondering my situation in the way only a neurotic, depressed fat guy can obsess.

First, I brushed my teeth, wondering whether my toothpaste had any significant caloric level, and whether fluoride strength and fresh breath was really worth it. 'I definitely must,' I decided, 'replace my mint dental floss with a lighter, unflavored brand.'

Then I got on the scale again, just in case I had misread the dial the first time. No such luck.

Next, I shaved, and continued pondering those four pounds as though they held the solution to the current national fiscal crisis, if I could only figure out how to apply them. I started wondering just exactly how much of me four pounds really would look like and what a pile of four pounds of body fat would look like if you were to have it in a jar on your desk (and I cannot suggest strongly enough that you not, under any circumstances, keep four pounds of body fat in a jar on your desk. Three pounds is the absolute maximum according to my personal code of ethics, and I think you'll agree there's simply no reason to ever exceed that amount).

Then it was back onto the scale, in the vain hope that perhaps a significant fraction of those four pounds could be explained by beard growth.

I continued pondering as I trimmed the various extraneous hairs that seem to have cropped up in my 40s as a "consolation prize" for no longer having any measurable follicular activity on my scalp. What quirk of evolution or sadistic hand of our creator decided that hair should spring healthy and thick from our ears and noses as we age I can not guess, but I can tell you that I long ago gave up the notion that I could grow it long enough to comb over the top to try to hide the baldness.

Then it was back onto the scale, just in case there'd been a sudden surge of extra gravity for a few minutes that had now righted itself and I'd be back where I should be. Nope.

Next it was into the shower, a task which I do not mind mentioning because a psychiatrist friend once conclusively proved in a double blind study (and believe me, the participants were ever so glad to be double blind) that the human brain has an amazing ability to distract itself from bad or unpleasant visuals such as car accidents, projectile vomiting and me naked in the shower. It is not merely that you will not wish to try to visualize such a thing, it is that your brain will force you to think of more pleasant things until the moment has passed and you are no longer trying to visualize it. Things like doing your taxes or a piece of raw fish you accidentally left in your car on a hot day.

But while in the shower, I obsessed that I could tell that I was four pounds heavier, because it was taking me considerably longer to wash my stomach, and that that must be due to the increased surface area to be scrubbed. (Allow me to digress again just to ask a quick question: Why the heck do I still use shampoo? I have a higher hair-per-square-inch density on the soles of my feet than I do on my scalp, and yet for some reason I'll set down the bar of soap which is perfectly acceptable for every other part of me and grab the shampoo in order to wash the top of my head. Seriously. It makes about as much sense as adding fabric softener to your dishwasher, but I can not seem to break myself of the idea that if I were to use soap on my head, something horrible would happen. Like what, my hair might fall out?)

Drying off carefully, so as not to affect the reading in the wrong direction, it was back onto the scale again, in the hope that perhaps I'd actually sleep-walked into the shower and had merely dreamed the earlier weighings and that I'd find I was actually not four pounds heavier. But... I still was.

Shower finished, there was only one task left to perform, and it is a topic of some sensitivity, so let us just say that it involves a pose not unlike Rodin's "The Thinker" and we shall belabor the point no further.

With my morning ablutions now complete, it was time to jump on the scale one more time and... the four pounds were gone. I was down four pounds. Yes, seriously.

...and thus, today, did I learn that I am full of rutabaga.

Copyright © November 27, 2008 by Liam Johnson. http://liam-humor.blogspot.com

Extreme Apologies

2008-11-27T08:23:00.003-05:00

Those of my readers who receive the FeedBlitz subscription to this blog will have noticed that you received two distinctly NOT humorous posts yesterday.

I tried a new method of posting to my more political (and less funny) blog yesterday and somehow things aimed for that blog got posted here.

I have corrected the problem and it shouldn't happen again.

In the mean time, please accept my sincere apologies and know that I will work extra hard to try to find something funny to say on here in the next several days to make up for it (since it's been about two months).

I'm so very sorry!

Liam.

The Rope Wasn’t Hemp, But I Got High On It Anyway

2008-08-23T16:37:00.009-04:00

Gather round, boys and girls, it's time for Grandpa to tell you more of the adventures of Captain Liam of Bozo Command!

When we last left our hero, he had just completed a "zip line" course, flying through the treetops at high speeds suspended from a thin cable and looking just as agile and dexterous as a manatee washed up on a Florida beach, but with a thicker overall layer of blubber. Not, technically, subcutaneous blubber, but our hero was terrified, so there was definitely blubbering going on.

In the morning, Captain Liam had a scheduled encounter with his arch nemesis, Perky Mo, on the high ropes course of doom, and it is here that we begin today's tale.

To begin with, boys and girls, the name "high ropes course" is a bit like calling yourself an expert at "Super Mario Kart" just because you can beat your Dad, who frankly doesn't understand these new-fangled video game systems and wouldn't know the "turbo boost" button from the "kill-o-zap ray" one. What's that? There is no "kill-o-zap ray" button? Shaddap, ya little pipsqueak, Grandpa is trying to tell a story here.

Anyway, Captain Liam arrived at the "high ropes course" somewhat discouraged to discover that by "high" they meant not more than 15 feet above the ground at any point along the course, and by "ropes" they meant logs and cables and very few actual, honest to goodness ropes. Frankly, the most actual danger Captain Liam and his fellow attendees were in was that Perky Mo would speak a harsh word to them, if they failed to get permission before transferring a safety strap from one cable to the next. Or before climbing across the next obstacle. Or before stopping to scratch one's nose, Perky Mo was big on everyone obtaining permission for anything more complicated than inhaling.

The Earthshine Lodge had warned Captain Liam that he should plan for the ropes course to take at least two hours, and he figured it probably would take that long… if the entire group consisted of snails who, on noticing the perilous ankle-twisting fall below, froze in fear and had to be rescued by Perky Mo or his assistant. As it was, Captain Liam completed the course, waited for all of the other participants, and then completed the course a second time in just about as much time as I've been telling you whippersnappers this story, not including that little argument we had about "Super Mario Kart".

At the end of the course, boys and girls, Captain Liam was led to a "secret surprise", which turns out to be something they call the "leap of doom." This meant that our Captain had to strap on a "belay rope" and climb about 35 feet up a tree and stand on a platform about the size of a standard issue postage stamp. Then, using the same cat-like agility for which Captain Liam is not known, leap off of this precarious perch in the vague direction of a trapeze hanging about eight feet away, with the intention of catching it and hanging for a few moments, before being belayed back to the ground by Perky Mo's assistant. And on a side note, children, if you've never gotten belayed, Grandpa highly suggests you try it. But please don't tell your Mom I said so, or she'll put Grandpa back in the home.

Now, there are two things I have to tell you about Captain Liam's leap. The first is that he was the only one in his group of 10 people or so who successfully grabbed the trapeze and held on. The second is that Captain Liam is not, let's face it, a small man. He is also not exactly a spring chicken. He resembles the small, spry young Perky Mo about as much as Rush Limbaugh resembles any given member of the Chinese Women's Gymnastics Olympic team. And so it was not without some personal injury that he did in fact manage to grab and hold the trapeze, and in truth probably the only reason he was successful is that Perky Mo's assistant was a slip of a woman, and so if Captain Liam had missed in his grab, he feared he would likely have plummeted to the earth at nearly unimpeded speeds while launching this nice young woman holding the other end of the belay rope hundreds of feet into the air.

Here's the way the actual jump went: Captain Liam took a deep breath and momentarily considered whether he could pull this off without looking like a large wad of Jello flung via catapult, said a word that your Mom would wash your mouths out if you said it, and jumped. Across the open space he sailed with all of the aerodynamic grace of a sack of overripe potatoes, scrabbling frantically for the trapeze bar and finally grasping it with both hands… at which moment two shoulders, two wrists and one elbow, with the kind of simultaneous precision Olympic divers can only dream of, dislocated as one and the remaining elbow made a sound like Grandpa’s car did yesterday, when he forgot to use his clutch.

Which is why as of today, our heroic Captain is now "Captain Liam of the NSAID Patrol" and (this is true) this story was written at about half speed, as he keeps having to rest his right arm and type entirely with his left.

*          *          *

This would have been the conclusion of the story, had I finished this essay when I started it, 8 days ago. However, as is my wont (yes, I have a wont, you should get one too, they're ever so helpful, and they don't shed nearly as much as they did in our grandparent's day), I put it aside and let the humor "marinate" (in much the same way that compost "marinates" into soil).

Since that day, my oldest two children and I decided to go kayaking, on the last day of our trip to my parents' house. This was on Friday, the events of the rest of the essay happened on Monday, but I have, as you might imagine from my age, 40+ year old joints, and I'm ashamed to say I haven't kept up with the regular maintenance since the manufacturers warrantee expired, and so Friday was just long enough for the pain in my elbows and shoulders to go away, but not enough for the damage to heal, and so as my daughter and I paddled our way out to the middle of the lake, they began to ache again. And I know I've made a lot of jokes about my aging memory, but the truth is that it is depressing just how long I was thinking "wow, I’m out of shape" before I realized just what, exactly, I was doing to myself.

When I realized it, of course, it was already too late, and so as we turned the kayak around and headed back towards shore, my shoulders and particularly elbows were noticeably stiffening with each successive stroke of the paddle. The shore which, based on the effort required to get out to the middle of the pond seemed to only be about 50 yards away suddenly seemed miles away and by the time we reached the shore we were (this is also true) being outpaced by the octogenarian couple who were also out for a nice kayak.

All of which I mention because there's a certain wry humor in driving back to the house entirely with the left hand because the right arm has become almost entirely immobile, and then realizing just how difficult it is to shift even an automatic into gear when you can't use your right arm.

And lest you think I'm kidding, I honestly and with no exaggeration reached around with my left arm to turn off the car and take the keys out, because the right one simply couldn't produce sufficient torque to turn the blessed car off.

I'm old.

Copyright © August 16 & 22, 2008 by Liam Johnson. http://liam-humor.blogspot.com

Olympic Quickie

2008-08-21T22:53:00.003-04:00

First, I was watching Olympics Women's Gymnastics today (TiVo delayed, I'm still watching from last week while I was on vacation), and I got to thinking, I hope gymnast Liukin doesn't have a sister named "Bette", because with parents with a thick Russian accent, it's bad enough that they constantly remind her that she's "nastia liukin" than the other girls around, but to play favorites by naming a sister "bette liukin" would just be over the top.

(I was going to call this "Two quickies", because my wife made a joke in the car today that I thought might belong on here as well, but neither she nor I can come up with it at the moment, the sad fact of life for two middle aged brains. If we recall it, I'll come back and post it later.)

Liam.

P.S. I can only assume that "Bette" in Russian would be pronounced with two syllables, like the German "bitte".

I’m Not Single, But I Sure Am Swingin’

2008-08-12T08:57:00.003-04:00

Those who know us know that August is the time for our yearly trip to Maine, and has been for the last ten years or so, and so this past week we got all packed up and on Saturday Janet and I and all five kids went to North Carolina, a state which is identical to Maine in every way except for all of them, but which this particular August has the two features most important to every family's yearly vacation: My Mom & Dad.

The reason my parents didn't feel that they wanted to make the long slog up to Maine this year is that my mother has been diagnosed with clinical insanity. Well, I'm not sure she's been officially diagnosed, but she's clearly insane, because one of the first things she offered to Janet and me when we first arrived was the chance to go spend a night at a wilderness lodge alone, just the two of us, leaving the five children with her for over 24 hours.

We tried to warn her. We really did. Please understand, I love my children to death, but there are five of them, consisting of about 7 teenaged egos and about 9 "terrible twos" tantrum-ers, and when they really get going, there's not a power on heaven or earth that can keep me from jamming pencils into my ears (#2 only please!) in order to stop hearing the squabbling.

But she didn't listen, and so as I write this, it is 4 a.m. and I'm lying awake in the lodge, having had a blissful 15 hours away from the kids and a somewhat less than blissful attempt to sleep on a mattress that … well, let's back up for a few seconds. The lodge we're at is called "Earthshine" and it really is a wonderful place. They have beautiful views of the Blue Ridge Mountains all around. The entire lodge is done up in a décor I'll call "wilderness chic", meaning that it all looks like several burly men with beards and flannel shirts came up here with axes, hewed down a batch of trees and assembled them into housing, furnishings, light fixtures, plumbing, etc, but then as soon as they were done another several men wearing the latest fashion and swishing slightly showed up and appointed the place with nice carpeting, ceiling fans and drywall.

Except that I know it could not have been gay interior decorators that took hold, because the ceiling is my old nemesis, stucco.

But anyway, the furniture in our room is largely hand made of rough-hewn logs. The bed posts look like four conveniently co-located saplings growing out of the floor, except that they've been cut off at a level I can best describe as "perfect for hitting me just beneath the ribcage as I walk back from the bathroom in the dark". And the mattress is one rectangular 8-inch thick slab of oak.

Or maybe it just feels that way, because this being a wilderness lodge, it has a number of wilderness activities designed to make the out-of-shape middle aged sloth use muscles he thought had long atrophied into nonexistence, such as hikes and … well, more hikes.

But they also have (and this is a REALLY good idea if you have a 42 year old body prone to aches and bruising) something called a "zip line" course, which of course my 17 year old soul insisted I run right to and try first thing when we got here yesterday.

They take you to the start of the course, and they outfit you in more safety equipment than is normally afforded a construction worker or a coal miner, but here's the key: Every bit of equipment is carefully designed to prevent you from actually dying, while studiously avoiding hindering "the experience", by which I mean the various scrapes, cuts, bumps and bruises that one could possibly obtain.

So they get you all strapped up into this gear, including one large piece of metal and pulley wheels clipped to a large nylon strap and clipped to your harness, the strap being just long enough so that when they first hand it to you, the heavy metal piece swings down and clonks you right in the shin. When it happened, I thought they were just careless with the warnings, but I now realize that this was done intentionally, because they measure how much fun you had by how insignificant the pain in your shin is compared to the other aches at the end.

There's a lot of instruction and (at least if your guide happens to be "Mo", a nice young man with a rapid fire delivery and a level of perkiness not seen since Mary Lou Retton or an accident at the caffeine factory) a whole lot of jokes. Mo is the envy of stand-up comics everywhere: he has a captive audience, because once you begin the course, you are at all times clipped to one of the various and sundry safety lines, because you are also about 7000 feet in the air. While zipping between the trees I distinctly saw private aircraft flying past beneath me.

Zipping, as you've probably guessed by now, involves clipping the large metal thing to a steel cable strung between two trees and gliding gracefully from one to the other and at the last second, performing a little tuck move to land deftly on the small platform at the target tree. Or, at least, that's how most of my fellow "zip heads" did it. For me it involved pushing off from the first tree and immediately spinning around so that I was careening backwards, screaming my fool head off until the platform slammed into my lower back and the guide (who, by the way, also has a body mass about a third of mine) tried desperately to hold onto my harness and keep me from sliding back to the middle of the line, where I'd have hung like bait for the various vultures wheeling around in the sky.

It occurs to me, though, in case I'm starting to sound like "Captain Eugene of the Dork Patrol" here, at least I at no time ended up hanging upside-down, a fate which happened to someone I know of, who shall remain nameless but with whom I at one time had the distinct pleasure of creating two children. This was not on this particular trip (in case you were thinking "wow, what a romantic guy Liam is, bringing his ex-wife along on a romantic get away with his current wife!") but was a story which had been relayed to me earlier.

All in all, though, it's a lot of fun, but it does take its toll on the middle aged body, which brings us back to 5:30 a.m. (yes, it's taken me an hour and a half to write this crap!) lying on a bed which I'm sure under normal circumstances would be "pleasantly firm", but in my current condition feels like "paving cement but with less give".

Later today, if I can manage it, I'm supposed to go on their "high ropes course". The 17 year old soul is ecstatic. The 42 year old body is grumbling warily. And the 13 year old sense of humor is hoping to make some crass, immature jokes about it.

All assuming I don't first become food for the vultures.

Copyright © August 11, 2007 by Liam Johnson. http://liam-humor.blogspot.com

Sheepishly Posting Another Quickie

2008-07-22T19:57:00.003-04:00

According to the news, as of this afternoon, tropical storm Dolly has been upgraded to be the second hurricane of the 2008 season.

That alone doesn't concern me, but we'd best hope she doesn't cause any big problems, because you just know scientists are going to manufacture lots of identical storms just like her.

(And you thought I was going to go with the "I'm afraid it's just one of two really large storms" joke.)

Blog Quickie...

2008-07-20T12:15:00.002-04:00

Y'know, as I slide slowly past "early 40s" and into "mid", every once in a while it's nice to recognize the problems associated with aging that I am not having...

Today, for instance, I've proven that I can still "get wood".

I just have to pay a guy $260 to deliver it.

I was going to say "And have my children around to help stack it", but if you're still stuck on the double entendre, that'd just be creepy.

Liam.

That Surgeon Really Has Gall(bladder)

2008-07-18T07:35:00.005-04:00

[NOTE: It's been a good run of essays, but the well seems to have run dry again. This may be the last one for a while. I hope you've enjoyed them, and hopefully I'll come up with something funny to write again soon. -- Liam]

My wife was at the hospital this week. Yes, we spend a lot of time at hospitals. And doctors offices. And dentists. And, heaven help me, orthodontists. Please, whatever power of the universe there may be, help my book start selling in unprecedented numbers! There have been orthodontists!

But I didn't begin this to talk about orthodontia, and frankly, there's simply nothing funny about finding out that all of my success and all of the money I get paid in the lucrative field of changing the magnetic patterns on a spinning disk can be swallowed up with nothing to spare by four of our five children (yes, heaven help me, four) who all need braces. I think I may cry.

And so it is that my wife is extremely fortunate to be moaning in agony at this moment, for at least she's got something to distract her.

Janet had her gallbladder out this week. She went in to the hospital a more or less healthy woman and came out a broken shell of humanity, able to keep the demon pain at bay only via the use of powerful sorcery called "Percocet".

They perform this removal in what used to be called the "Outpatient surgery" section of the hospital, but is now called "Same Day surgery" in the mistaken belief that we won't notice that she was on the waiting list for her "same day" surgery for about 3 months. They even rub your nose in it: if you call the hospital, they answer "Same day" in the sort of perky voice that tells me my wife isn't the only one dipping into the Percocet.

We started Monday morning off by getting up at an hour which is referred to in scientific circles as "way too F-ing early", because apparently the doctors have figured out that if they get you into the operating room while your organs are still asleep they'll put up a lot less of a fight. And of course, when someone has major surgery and more pain killers than Rush Limbaugh coursing through their veins, it's not a good idea for them to drive home, which meant that it was best if I brought her in before going to work, so that I could retrieve her after the procedure (they always call it a "procedure", because "sucking one of your major organs out of your body via a straw" might attract vampires).

And that's pretty much what they did. Janet had her gallbladder out by a technique called "laparoscopy", from the Latin "lapros" (many tiny holes) and "copus" (in my wife Janet). I'm not exactly sure how this works, except that they said her major discomfort (they always call it "discomfort", because "pain equivalent to rabid wolverines devouring your neck and shoulders" leads people to think they might hurt, and so they refuse surgery, and then the doctors have no choice but to perform their "procedures" on each other) would be caused by left over gas that they blew into her belly. Yes, really, apparently as part of the procedure they inflated my wife, secure in the knowledge that if there's one thing every woman on the planet is looking for, it's an excuse to need a larger size of outfit. I'd complain, but I'm afraid if I did, next time they'd install one of those little plastic beach ball valve things and tell me that in order for her to heal, I had to manually re-inflate her twice a day, and frankly, this is just too family friendly a column for me to finish this joke.

Anyway, as I mentioned, while they were doing that, I spent the day at work, interrupted about every seventy seconds by another phone call from the kids complaining about each other's behavior or asking if they could, just this once, pour the bottle of rubbing alcohol from the medicine cabinet into the sink and light it on fire. Or something... frankly after the third call, I stopped listening. And in this entertaining fashion, I passed the day in roughly the same time it would have taken me to hitchhike the entire length of the Great Wall of China via rickshaw until sometime in the early afternoon, when I received a phone call from the doctor, who told me everything had gone swimmingly and that Janet would be in recovery for "about an hour" after which they'd call me to come pick her up.

They got "about an hour" from the same Bob's Big Book o' Medical Understatements that they pulled "discomfort" and "procedure" from, and so it was that several hours later I got a call from a nice woman who announced she was from "same day" (which reassured me, I live in constant, paranoid fear whenever the phone rings that it's someone from the future) and that Janet was done recovering (if only) and that if I'd come over to the hospital, they'd make sure to have Janet ready to go when I got there. This, as I'm sure you've figured out, also came from the book.

And so I made my way back to the hospital and the first thing they did was they asked me for Janet's pin number. A PIN number! As if the hospital were now some giant, wife-dispensing ATM, which scared me a bit because if you deposit a twenty dollar bill into an ATM and then withdraw a twenty dollar bill, you do not get the same twenty back again. I’ve checked. Don't ask why. What if I didn't get the same wife back? Would my kids still call her "mommy"? And most importantly, would the new one continue to pretend to find these essays amusing?

But the worst of it is, the woman at the front desk was the same woman who had just called to tell me to come pick up Janet. So she knew I was coming, she knew who I was, but she wasn't prepared to even admit that Janet was present or a patient in the hospital unless I recited the correct four digit code to her. Which begs the question what would they have done if I hadn't had it? Would they have kept her? Would she, even now, be lying in a bed in the hospital, wondering why I'd abandoned her? Or would some other husband have come along with the right pin number and withdrawn her? And, most importantly, since they'd already called in the prescription for the Percocet to the pharmacy, could I have filled it anyway and had me a good old fashioned bachelor pad party, complete with five children under foot and a middle-aged body that handles "partying" the way a toilet paper hat handles "rain"?

But fortunately I had the PIN, and so I was able to withdraw my wife (astounding that they were able to feed her out through that little slot!) and bring her back home and keep her doped up so that she can no longer perform any task more complex than drooling without assistance, leaving me, in the evenings, to provide primary care for five children who have been free during the day to consume what I can only assume is 50 cans of "Jolt" brand cola each while under Janet's less than attentive eye.

I'm really proud of Janet, though, because she's not letting it get her down or stop her. She's not letting a little thing like major surgery get in the way of making difficult plans. It's the follow through that's leaving a bit to be desired. For instance, yesterday she decided that what she really wanted to make for dinner was calzones, a fairly labor intensive task. So she put all of the ingredients for the dough into the bread machine, got it going, and then announced, as the dough cycle completed, that she was way too tired. I was thus left with five starving children, a wad of dough roughly the size of "the Blob" from the 50s Italian cooking documentary of the same name and absolutely no interest what so ever in either making or consuming calzones.

But I made them, and even managed to get the kids to stop making disparaging comments about them long enough to actually eat them and ask for seconds (of which there were none).

I just wish I'd had the foresight to slip a Percocet in each one.

[NOTE: As you may have noticed, I don't mind "fictionalizing" (aka "lying about") events that happen in order to make these essays more amusing, but I do feel rather bad about the light in which I have unfairly portrayed my children. On the whole, they behaved admirably, and I can only hope that one day they will grow up to forgive me, if not for this essay, then at least for not saving them each one of the "Percocet" pills.]

Copyright © July 3, 2007 by Liam Johnson. http://liam-humor.blogspot.com

Quickie...

2008-07-13T01:58:00.001-04:00

I just wanted to put in my guess for the name of one of Angelina Jolie & Brad Pitt's twins, now that they're born and before the names are widely publicized.

I'm going with "Shiesoh" (pronounced "Shee-so"). Because we already know how wonderfully cruel they were to their eldest daughter, giving her a name (Shiloh Pitt) which spoonerizes so crudely, why not continue the tradition?

Senators, Out Standing In Their Field

2008-07-07T21:12:00.006-04:00

If you pay any attention at all to the news or politics, you're aware that last Friday there was an event of earth-shattering import to no one in particular except a few people who are still holding grudges among the supporters of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. An event in which the two, who until two weeks ago were treating each other like the single worst thing that could befall the United States (even including the remote chance that Richard Nixon might come back to life and drunkenly admit to the United States that he was its actual father) but who are now suddenly, through the magic of "politics" behaving as though each was a noble opponent and the single best thing (other than themselves) that could possibly ever befall the United States (including the even remoter chance that the United States could one day be offered a "threesome" with Jessica Simpson and Betty White (ok, I've got odd tastes, sue me)) would appear for the first time together on the same stage.

After a long and bitter primary battle (a primary being the process by which a large number of Democratic politicians lie to us while NOT in the direct conduct of the jobs we elected them for, and we are so appreciative that we reward them by choosing one of them to get beaten thoroughly by the Republican candidate in November), it was time to come together, and so for the sake of symbolism, they chose the town of Unity, New Hampshire for their first public event together (apparently "I Can't Stand You But I'll Smile Nicely For The Cameras Because It's My Job, Texas" was already booked for the Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie "Simple Life" reunion). Since the town of Unity is only about 15 minutes away from my home, I thought this was one of those "once in a lifetime" opportunities that come along once in… well, I can't think of a good metaphor, but not very often. Kind of like a "Woodstock" for my generation, but with fewer musical acts and a far smaller number of topless crowd surfers (although Hillary Clinton… no, I can't finish that, I almost threw up in my mouth a little bit just thinking about it).

In the interest of security, or more likely because the town of "Unity" has a total of three parking spaces, two behind the police station and one at the general store, attendees were asked to park in one of two convenient locations about fifty miles from the site and be "shuttled" to the event. It turns out that by "shuttled" they meant "packed onto every yellow bus from every school in a 100 mile radius, driven by people who treat potholes like pac man treats dots, making sure not to miss a single one", because there's nothing that really gets a large political event going like the entire audience one good lurch away from vomiting.

I thus parked my car at in the lot for the Mount Sunapee ski area (which is actually slightly further from my home than Unity is, but in a different direction) and got onto a line of people that stretched all the way back to my house. I thought this was a lot of people… until I arrived at the site of the event.

How to describe this…

My kids and I often play a game when we're on long car trips that we call "the American flag game", in which we count how many American flags we can spot during our trip. This game has many rules designed to minimize fights and keep me safely focusing primarily on avoiding the other cars on the road and only secondarily on verifying that each new flag is actually extant and not, technically, someone's laundry hanging in the back yard. One of these rules is that any single location with more than 5 flags is considered to be 5. This prevents me from having to try to verify a count at high speed or worse yet, having the kids demand that I pull over and count every last flag on every last antenna at the used car lot.

So, in the spirit of that game, you'll understand what I mean when I say that if everyone there (except Mr. Obama, of course) had been wearing a flag lapel pin, there would have been five flags there. A really really BIG five flags. The five-est flags I've seen yet. And none of them would have made it through the metal detector. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

One interesting thing I saw that I hadn't ever seen before was snipers, real honest-to-goodness snipers walking into the woods with nasty looking rifles and camouflage outfits and everything. I couldn't decide whether to feel incredibly safe or to keep checking my chest to make sure there wasn't a tell-tale red spot on it. I'll tell you, though, nothing dampens the urge to make wiseass comments while passing through security like the knowledge that there are high powered rifles trained in your general direction by sharpshooters who could probably shoot the wings off of a fly from half a mile away.

Security was vaguely similar to the TSA screening at the airport, except thorough and they took it really seriously. I have no doubt that I could, if I chose to, smuggle just about anything I chose onto an airplane. These guys found every conceivable possible weapon I was carrying. On the plus side, I don't need to have another prostate exam for another five years.

Nevertheless, apparently I don't look threatening, because they let me through at which point I became aware of several things:

The entire event was outdoors
There wasn't a spot of shade anywhere near where the two Senators would be speaking
I had forgotten my sunscreen
I had brought a bald scalp with me

So I looked around and found, conveniently located just as far away from the dais as humanly possible while still remaining technically at the event, a tiny little structure large enough to comfortably cast shade upon about 4 adults, under which 7 were currently standing, and made really close friends with a largish biker named Steve.

I have been remiss until this point in not giving you the full scope of the day. The busses began running at 10am. We were advised to show up no later than 9:30. Once they got us to the event site, the gates opened there at 11am. Senators Obama and Clinton were not scheduled to begin speaking until 1pm, which left a lot of time for Steve and me to get really close, but also for almost every other member of the crowd to form two lines, one for the food vending, and one for the port-a-potties, and since my little shady oasis was right next to where they were cooking, I'm not sure it wouldn't have been healthier if you’d gotten in the port-a-potty line with either goal in mind. But I digress.

Surrounding a central podium were several large bleachers that had clearly been rented, because the bottom of each was a trailer from which the seats had unfolded. Attached to these heavy steel structures were 30 foot tall metal poles atop which were high intensity lights, which had been brought because there were clouds rolling in and there was a chance it might get too dark to see the Senators, apparently because politicians and physics majors do not mix and no one considered that when it gets storm dark you sometimes get lightning, and when you do, the place you want to be is not the middle of a large open field on steel bleachers attached to large metal poles.

Sometime after one, Senators Clinton and Obama arrived, in much the same way that man arrived "sometime after" the universe formed. At least, I assume they were Senators Clinton and Obama, from my vantage point they could well have been former President Clinton in a wig and Ben Affleck in black face. Honestly at no point did my 42 year old eyes manage to get close enough to confirm that the shapes standing at the podium were, in fact, homo sapiens. But their voices (what I could hear of them) were pretty good approximations of the two I'd expected, so I'm willing to assume it was actually them.

Which, it only now occurs to me, means that I took a day of vacation from work and braved the indignity of school busses and the livestock mentality of repeated lines for an experience I could have completely and successful replicated with a couple of large sacks of potatoes and a boom box across a large field and a large, vaguely smelly man pressed up against me, and the only thing I really got out of it was an essay in which I find three different ways (including this one) to reference "upchuck". Woodstock indeed.

Except no topless potatoes.

Copyright © July 4, 2007 by Liam Johnson. http://liam-humor.blogspot.com

Diagnosis: Over 40

2008-06-30T06:52:00.005-04:00

[As regular readers of this column will recall, in the past, I've written about my residual water skiing injury to my back, and about Emergency Room visits, and about dizziness, and so really, there's nothing about yesterday that's new, so I'm tempted to ask you to all go reread those several essays and extrapolate and hope I can get away with calling that a new essay.

Unfortunately, the ethical part of me (defined as "that part that realizes that it takes column inches to fill up a second book, since the first one was so fabulously successful as measured in money lost publishing it") insists that if I'm going to use that topic, I write a whole NEW batch of stale, unfunny jokes about it, and so here we go. – Liam]

Yesterday started off as a day much like any other, in the sense that I woke up tired, achy and leaning slightly toward the left. It was different in the sense that it wasn’t so much a socio-political-philosophical leaning as an actual, physical, "the human body isn’t supposed to be quite that shape" sort of lean. Yes, my old nemesis the sacral vertebrae had mounted yet another attack on me in the night, so that when I stood up, I looked like a poor photo-shopping of myself, as when someone attempts to put their head on the body of a bodybuilder, but with a whole lot more sag. It was as though someone had replaced my lower spine with a boomerang to my left.

That's all well and good, I've dealt with that before. It generally means that I'm going to move slower than the lines at the bathroom stalls(*) at a cheese eating convention but with more ambient grunting and straining. A few Advil to completely fail to dull the pain and a predominantly seated day in the office, and I'm good to go, and that's pretty much how I proceeded with the day.

When I'd been at work for an hour or more, I decided to make the long, arduous walk to the water cooler, and that was when I discovered that I'd also developed some serious dizziness, and combined with my center of gravity being currently located somewhere in the air just outside of my left hip, this meant that every other step I would nearly stumble into the wall, something I've not experienced since my wild days in college, when I'd spring for that second beer (I was a cheap date in college).

So I made it carefully back to my office and had pretty well had decided that I was going to sit in my office and not move from my chair again, and that I’d deal with the dangerous prospect of driving home when the time came, when my lovely wife Janet called. She had taken one of the children to a dental appointment which was now over, and as she sometimes does, had decided to stop by and give me a hug before heading back home. And since she doesn't have a security badge, that meant I had to go let her in.

I opened the door and promptly fell into the door jamb. I must have looked drunk, because clearly in the time she's known me, she's familiar with my habit of the three-martini lunch starting at 9:30 in the morning, but after three steps back into the office, she said "We need to get you to the emergency room." Apparently I looked less "drunk" and more "stroke victim, but less dexterous". I argued. I lost. We went.

And so we spent the day at the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center chapter of the Marquis de Sade Appreciation Society (DHMC-MSAS), and we carefully divided up the tasks as follows:

Janet: Walking back and forth between my room and the waiting room, where our daughter Darby was playing, occasionally running out of the building to where there was cell coverage in order to update one person or another on my status, and also occasionally running here or there to buy lunch or fetch a magazine.

Me: Lying down, moaning, dressed in a piece of cloth about the size of Malibu Barbie's bikini, with an IV in the back of my hand, an oxygen sensor on my finger, a blood pressure cuff on my arm and about seven different medications in my system. Oh, and let me say, by the way, if you've never had a shot in your stomach, you're missing a rare treat.

I’m not sure I trust the medical establishment, because I was examined by several nurses and at least two different doctors, all of whom did exactly the same tests. I'm not kidding. They all looked in my eyes. They all listened to my heart. They all did the standard neurological tests (reflex tests and left/right sensory and strength tests). And (and this was, I think, completely unnecessary) they all did a DRE(**). What a pain in th… nah, that's just too easy.

In the end, in one of those "no sh** Sherlock" moments which seem surprisingly common in modern medical treatment, I was diagnosed with "vertigo". Really. What was their first clue? I never would have guessed that I had "vertigo" from the fact that when we first walked into the ER, my wife told the admitting nurse that I was experiencing (among other things) vertigo. Vertigo is a symptom, not a diagnosis. It would be as if I took my car in for service and the mechanic returned the car and charged me $1500 to tell me "you have a funny noise that goes 'wrrrrrrrZING' " and didn't even fix it.

And so eventually I was discharged and sent upon my merry way with a prescription for an anti-nausea medication that they said "should help the dizziness if it gets too bad" and a beet red, painfully hot flush I hadn't had when I went in caused by one of the medications, but this leads me to the only part of the experience that actually made me laugh while I was going through it:

On the discharge instructions is the following quote, verbatim:

Take prescription as directed. Follow up with PCP.

I had considered following up my medication with a pint of beer or perhaps a shot of whiskey, but damn, the PCP really does help me forget about the pain, and the bend at the waist is hardly troubling at all, what with my fingers stretching out like rubber bands and my head being made of play-doh.

I wonder why PCP has never been prescribed for me by my primary care physician.

(* Speaking of bathroom stalls and WAY too much information, let me just delicately say that if you’re right handed and bent painfully to the left, it makes for some… trouble in this department.)
(** For those unfamiliar with this test, I'll simply say that the "R" stands for "Rectal" and it involves Vaseline and a finger. Unfortunately, I'm not kidding. Fortunately, I AM kidding about anyone having performed that particular test on me.)

Copyright © June 26, 2007 by Liam Johnson. http://liam-humor.blogspot.com

We'll Leave The Light On For Ya... It Makes The Roaches Scatter

2008-06-21T18:58:00.003-04:00

I have stayed in some truly crappy hotels in my day, so in order to make it onto my list of worst ever, you really have to be something special.

Tonight, we are staying in one such hotel, owned by (but not branded by) a relatively new national chain whose web-site I now must conclude stands for "Lacking Quality" dot com.

What does it take to be on my worst ever list?

Start out with a building of just the right age, old but not too old. Too old and you gain character. Character is one of those indefinite qualities that you have to simply recognize when you see it. Something that allows you to say "Wow, this has some history to it. Why, some ancestors of the bed bugs for whom I was the buffet last night may have once munched upon the restless legs of George Washington." No, the age I'm talking about is the "World War II surplus temporary housing" era building, the sort which was built poorly because it was never intended for use beyond a decade or so, and yet out of so much concrete and rebar that in the end it was simply too expensive a task to demolish, and so was sold off at fire sale prices to people who figured if you priced the rooms low enough, you didn’t really have to worry about pesky little things like repeat customers or minimal human dignity.

Choose a décor scheme which can best be described as "we found a sale on surplus 'stucco', and it was just too good a bargain to pass up!" Stucco everything. Walls. Ceilings. The sink. Fill plastic bottles with stucco and sell them in the vending machine. For that special flare that will really get you talked about, stucco the bill so the customer lacerates his hand when signing out. And have a "no cancellations within 48 hours" policy, so that once the customer actually sees what he or she has purchased, they are truly "stucco".

Now it's time to add the amenities. Indoor plumbing dating from the days before the fall of Rome is a nice touch. Make sure the paint, décor and construction scream "1940s" while the "hot" water replies "Marquis de Sade" and the mattress says "perhaps I should have thought twice about turning down that manger". Make sure that the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, should they ever get the chance to set foot within the walls, come to realize that it isn’t personal, that we treat our own citizens this way as well. Put in the kind of cheap “pressed fiber” furniture which can today be done with some moderate success, but from the days when "pressed fiber" meant "about as sturdy as cardboard, but somehow less classy". But put in a brand, spanking new television, just to throw the whole thing into stark relief. Then wire the building so horribly that all you can see or hear is static. Crystal clear digital high definition static. In stereo.

Next, let the whole thing age and ripen like a fine wine or cheese. Ripen in much the same way raw sewage does in the holding tanks prior to treatment at the plant. Spend the majority of the 60s and 70s, before most people have learned the words "lung cancer" or "second hand carcinogen", renting every room in the place to an unending stream of Tom Snyders, men and women who chain smoke so much they eventually have to have their tracheotomy holes fitted with a special adapter to accommodate a filter tip. Allow decades of customers to bring their non-house-broken pets. Perhaps occasionally find a wino with a weak constitution and really poor aim. Allow the whole thing to marinate until you couldn't scrub out the resulting smell with anything less than a full haz-mat team and enough Lysol brand disinfectant to literally fill the building up and slowly let it drain out over a decade or so.

Never use bleach. It's bad for the environment, right? And it shortens the life span of your sheets (which, incidentally, you should pick up from "Bob's House of Burlap"). Hope that over time customers believe you chose an off-white motif, because it’s just too horrible to contemplate that you could never buy that particular mottled pattern of yellows new. Choose bed spreads that would have been fashionable… ok, let's face it, these things would never have been fashionable. Siberian exiles might well have turned up their noses at these. Homeless people sleeping on subway grates for the occasional warmth of the subway trains passing beneath might say "no thanks, I'm good".

Staffing. As a tip, you can get a good bargain on staffing by calling the National Borderline Personality Disorder hotline and pretending to be a psychologist. Or better yet, go to the nearest office of the Division of Motor Vehicles and ask for the names of applicants who were rejected for insufficient interpersonal skills. Hire staff whose native language is the Neanderthal monosyllabic grunt language and with the same basic personality of spackling compound. Hire one cheerful, bubbly, mildly flirtatious woman and put her in charge of answering the telephone. Give her no instruction what so ever as to what services the hotel does and does not offer, so that when a customer calls and requests a crib for an infant, she happily promises one will be in the room, but then when the customer arrives, the surly desk staff can insist that there isn’t a crib to be had anywhere closer than Tijuana while looking at you as if you’d just requested that they have someone come to your room and floss your teeth. Make sure the desk staff does not understand English well, so that when they give you adjoining rooms, you get two rooms which each adjoin to OTHER rooms, but not to each other. And remember, barely veiled animosity is the key, or your staff will spend far too much of their time listening to complaints and trying to help people, taking away from their vital work of chlorinating the stucco compound in the swimming pool.

Finally, advertise things you barely deliver on, such as "free high speed internet" and "free continental breakfast". Hire a low-cost internet provider who saves money by attaching IP packets to the backs of squirrels and sets them running down the wires to the local Internet backbone, knowing that three out of four of them will touch raw current and spontaneously burst into flame without ever having delivered their message and the ones that do make it will take about as long with their round trip journey as the recent Mars mission, though a lot less likely to return anything interesting. In the morning, put out a toaster and three slices of stale bread and call that a "continental breakfast". Have an orange juice dispensing machine, but have a large "out of order" sign on it and no alternate sources of juice.(*)

Welcome to my world. This should help explain to you why, with 5 hours of driving under my belt today and the prospect of 5 more tomorrow and my eyelids drooping worse than the pressed fiber furniture, I am standing here at this late hour, attempting to minimize my contact with the furniture or even the floor, lest this terminal shabbiness somehow infect me, watching vigilantly as my two year old son sleeps and ready at a moment's notice to do battle with any sort of crawling beastie which might emerge from one of the many cracks and glance hungrily in his direction.

I’d also like to make sure no one comes in and stuccos him in his sleep.

(*In fairness, as I write this I have not yet had the opportunity to sample the bounties of the breakfast, so my description in this case extrapolates from another hotel we stayed at on Thursday night, which was palatial by comparison but pretty bad in raw terms. Maybe I’ll be surprised. Maybe breakfast is where they really make up for the rest of it. And maybe if I took a black-light to these bed coverings, they’d turn out to be absolutely clean and sanitary. In either case, I only wish I was joking about the squirrels.)

Copyright © June 15, 2007 by Liam Johnson. http://liam-humor.blogspot.com

Follow Up

2008-06-14T23:59:00.000-04:00

I just wanted to throw out this follow up to last week's essay. This isn't really funny, I just wanted to give a quick plug to the people that helped us.

The Mechanic we worked with is a gentleman named "Danny" at "Dee's Service Center" in Bloomfield, NJ, in a gas station just a spit in a good wind off of the exit of the Garden State Parkway.

We were absolutely stuck, and I think I've made it clear that they could have told me the "frambulator" was "discombobulated" and that it was going to cost $2500 to fix and I would have bought it, and yet Danny and Dee's charged us a reasonable and fair price, did good work, and generally were kind and helpful.

The thing that made me decide to post this was when we got back, there was a flat tire in addition to everything else. Danny took a break from his work and found the hole and plugged it and didn't add anything to our charge.

When you're driving in a place like NJ (trust me, I grew up there) and you have an auto emergency and go to the kind of little garage we ended up at, you sort of expect to be taken advantage of. It's so very pleasant that we weren't.

So if you ever happen to have a car problem near the "Brookdale South" rest area on the Garden State Parkway, go to Dee's. They're good people.

Liam.

Really? So That’s What a “Tranny” Is?

2008-06-14T00:27:00.003-04:00

[There's been a grammatical error in this essay since I posted it that I have really wanted to update, but I was afraid if I did, the mailing list software would send it out again, so I figured I'd do it at the same time as I posted a new essay, so at least if it does repeat, it doesn't give people the false hope of new humor. However, there's little different here from the one you presumably read when it came out almost a month ago, so if you are receiving this in your e-mail again, you may safely ignore it as substantively the same.

For true purists, there's also one new paragraph. Well, three, if you, like my oldest son Andrew, feel the need to be a wiseass and therefore insist on pointing out that this paragraph you're reading right now is also, technically new, but I mean one in the actual body of the essay, containing a joke I made at the time which came back into my head a day or two ago, and never one to let a joke go to waste, no matter how bad, I had to come back and include it. --Liam]

There are mornings when you wake up and think to yourself “I have just too much money. I should find some poor, hard-working mechanic and give some of it to him.”

Starting yesterday morning, my family has been on the long awaited extended weekend trip to Washington, D.C. to pick up our oldest two children for the summer and show all of the kids around the nation’s capital. Yesterday morning we began our drive, packing Dagny, Darby, Liam and ourselves into the minivan and setting off. A bit over half of the way there, in Bloomfield, NJ, there was a sudden “whoosh” and the van which had until moments before been happily bearing us southward at a rate of speed I will only describe as "vast" (in case any employees of the state of NJ who wear blue uniforms and might happen to notice us passing back through on Monday should happen to read this) was suddenly refusing to provide us much in the way of "oomph", while doing a lot of whining like I’ve not heard since my Dad taught me to drive a “stick” and I took it out on the highway and forgot to shift out of second until well over the legal speed limit. That is to say, a lot of loud whining (come to think of it, his car made a similar sound as well).

Fortunately, this happened literally yards from the entrance to the “South Brookdale” rest area on the Garden State Parkway, and so we were able to pull into the parking lot, pop the hood and stare forlornly at the cloud of slightly-sweet smelling smoke which emerged and the very wet looking surface of the engine that looked as though it had recently undergone a full oil change by a monkey having an epileptic seizure.

I was pretty sure it was the transmission. It will turn out later in the story that I was right, but the truth is I was pretty sure it was the transmission because that’s about the only part of a car engine I could think of at that moment, other than “manifold” and I’ve never been quite sure what a “manifold” does. Therefore, it had to be the transmission, and as I said, it turned out that “whoosh” had been what we would later learn to be that life-blood of the automatic automobile, the transmission fluid, spraying hither and perhaps yon, but no longer spraying at all into the places necessary to allow the car to shift gears or even travel under its own power.

We found a local police officer (the specific one I hope to avoid running into after he takes a guess at what “vast” meant, above) who called us a tow truck, and while we waited, a nice gentleman came up and poked around under the hood for a bit. By “nice gentleman”, I mean “man dressed in leather biker duds with something that looked like used motor-oil in his hair and various and sundry tattoos, including on his knuckles”, but he was very nice about all of it, even if his only real talent was to look under the hood and make a lot more informed sounding guesses about just how screwed we were.

Finally, he said “I don’t think there’s anything I can do for you” and made the sign of a cross in front of the car, saying it was all he could do to bless the car and hope it made for a simpler and cheaper fix. This would not be the sole confluence of religion and mechanical repair the car would experience this day.

Some short while later (in the sense that it was still, technically, the same day) the tow truck driver arrived. He announced to me that he was going to tow us to a nearby garage, and that this was going to cost me $68. This sounded very reasonable to me until he got the van up on his truck and pulled out, driving about 1000 feet down the Parkway to an exit and another 500 feet into the Shell station at the base of the exit ramp. So essentially this works out to a rate of approximately $272/mile, which is still a bargain when I think of how much gas we would later burn in the rental vehicle, but I am getting ahead of myself.

At the garage, they spent several hours looking over the car. There is nothing particularly humorous about this, although I did learn that if it turns out my car is possessed by demonic forces, it is in good hands, because Dan, the friendly mechanic who worked on my car confided in me that on the weekends he’s a pastor at a local church. This being the second instance of Christianity and the art of Van Maintenance, I began to wonder if that had been Holy Smoke issuing from the back of my car, or perhaps whether that puff of white as I opened my hood had signaled the ascension of a new Pope.

I should also say, Dan has quite the sense of humor. When he first looked at the car, he asked what was wrong with it. I described what I’d observed and said “So I’d guess the transmission, but that’s why I brought it to you, because I don’t really understand these things.” “You and me both,” he replied. What a kidder… I hope.

While Dan was performing his maintenance on or baptism of my car, Janet took the kids for a walk a quarter of a mile down the road to a local park, which turned out to be (no, I’m not kidding) the same Brookdale Park my maternal grandfather used to take me to regularly when we’d visit them when I was wee, and in fact the park he used to take my mother to when SHE was. A park I’d not been to since I was in my teens and my grandparents moved away from this neighborhood.

And, for anyone who doubts the power of karma, or Murphy, or just keeping your damn thoughts to yourself, I swear this is true, not two minutes before this all started, I’d seen the sign for the upcoming “Brookdale South Rest Area” and thought to myself “Brookdale Park was fun, it’s too bad I’ll probably never have a chance to show it to Janet or the kids”. No, I’m really not kidding.

Dan was quite chatty while working, at one point telling me we were really lucky that this had happened today (a definition of "lucky" with which I was not previously familiar), because several days earlier there had been record storms which they were still cleaning up from and an extended power outage which had only recently been restored. He also said that a lightning strike near the garage had set the pavement on fire, which had caused quite a problem for the local fire department. Now, having spent many a year in New Jersey, I remember it as being very crowded, vaguely odorous and having a local accent which could not exactly be described as "pleasing to the ear". But I do wonder at what point they added "flammable" to that list of attributes.

Finally, Dan determined that the leak seemed to be coming from something called a “solenoid” and that he was going to have to replace it, which would take a couple of days. Actually, he gave us several options. First, he said it seemed to have been a slow leak, and we might be able to make it to D.C. safely and have it fixed there. As though there were magical transmissions faeries in D.C. that were going to fix it more cheaply and better, to say nothing of the fact that Murphy was already kicking himself that he’d been tricked into making something go wrong in just about the most convenient place it could have, I really didn’t want to give him the chance to blow us out in the middle of the Jersey Pine Barrens or on the middle of the bridge over the Delaware Water Gap.

Dan actually suggested that maybe if we took a couple of quarts of transmission fluid with us, we could “top it off” if we needed to. This turned out to be some kind of practical joke on Dan’s part, when it turned out that the way to fill the transmission fluid normally was through a port you can only open with a special tool and the magical mechanical incantation of the day, which would cause Dan to lose his license if it ever got out that we’d learned it from him. But not to worry, you can also fill the fluid through the dip-stick slot, a hole so small that, in order to accomplish this feat, you essentially have to hollow out a tooth pick and pour a fluid with the same approximate viscosity as paving tar through it and down the slot with the same care and determination as a proper Irish barkeep lovingly pouring a pint o’ Guinness, but with a slightly better taste. (In my opinion there’s nothing like a good beer, but also in my opinion, real British Guinness is exactly that: nothing like a good beer).

In the end, after spending 5 hours in lovely New Jersey (“lovely” said with a level of scorn reserved for those who actually spent 12 or more of their formative years there before realizing that they were actually free to leave any time they chose) and the prospect of several hundred or more dollars in repairs, we decided to spend hundreds of additional dollars to rent a car. This was at 4:45pm on a Thursday afternoon, and our major requirement was that this vehicle had to be capable of hauling all seven members of our family, and the rental car company had just the ticket, something called the “S.S. Land Yacht”.

Actually, it was a Chevrolet Suburban, a vehicle that has the same approximate size, power and gross tonnage as a charging herd of rhinoceri, but with less fuel efficiency. This car seems to be personally responsible for at least 12% of the national daily gasoline consumption. I don’t mean this model of car, I mean this specific individual car that we are now driving around in tourist mode, getting a good 100 or 150 miles per tank load, said tank being about the size of a municipal water supply tower, but without the fun graffiti telling us which long-forgotten high school student loved which other long-forgotten high school student enough to risk life and limb and permanent ostracization by getting seriously drunk and rappelling down the side of the tower to misspell the name of the object of his desire and his undying affection for her.

In the end, we’re probably personally responsible for at least a half a degree of average global temperature rise and the purchase for an oil Sheik of a new small yacht for his servants to use driving around his large main yacht while scrubbing off the barnacles.

But at least we should have the most blessed van this side of the pope-mobile.

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

Medical Misadventures

2008-05-30T12:47:00.002-04:00

I was at my doctor's office today and we were discussing, among other things, the sorts of tests I should start looking forward to now that I'm past 40, and which ones I can safely enjoy putting off until I'm over 50, and the question came down to the dreaded PSA test.

And I can't help imagining that when you go for that test, the doctor comes in and says "I'm not a doctor, I just play one on TV, but remember to talk to your kids about drugs. Before it's too late. The more you know."

Sad Day in the Comic World

2007-03-11T22:26:00.000-04:00

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!

2007-03-04T10:59:00.000-05:00

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

2007-02-28T02:15:00.000-05:00

[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!

2006-12-29T21:56:00.000-05:00

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

There's Something Different...

2006-12-10T09:38:00.000-05:00

"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?

2006-12-09T18:03:00.000-05:00

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!

2006-12-02T00:01:00.000-05:00

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

2006-11-25T16:10:00.000-05:00

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:

Odor
Embarrassingly loud noise
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!!!

2006-11-21T15:30:00.000-05:00

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

2006-11-17T10:13:00.000-05:00

["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”

2006-11-08T22:18:00.000-05:00

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

2006-07-25T23:24:00.000-04:00

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

2006-07-02T01:55:00.000-04:00

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

2006-05-31T00:33:00.000-04:00

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

2006-03-22T19:18:00.000-05:00

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.

Humor Essay News

2006-03-05T03:09:00.000-05:00

Have you ever thought to yourself "Sure, reading these essays is fine, but what I'd REALLY like is to download extremely poor quality recordings of Liam reading them aloud in a bored, tedious monotone, with all of the flair and excitement of an economics lecture, but with less useful content!"

Well if so, you're in luck! One of my friends has convinced me to try creating a semi-regular "podcast" consisting of me, reading my essays with the vocal equivalent of a deer in the headlights.

So far, I've only done the podcast for the first essay I wrote, and I have to say, it came out quite well... if you're a deaf person. Those who can hear, well, not so much.

But if you have iTunes or some other podcast downloading software, you can point it to http://www.switchpod.com/users/liam-humor/feed.xml to hear me in all my droning glory.

If the first podcast gets many hits, I'll upload the second in a week or two. If I continue to get positive feedback on them, I'll keep uploading them perhaps every other week until I catch up with the blog, at which point I'll upload them as often as I write new essays, which means about every other equinox.

I just ask one thing: If you try it out, stop back here at the main blog (http://liam-humor.blogspot.com) and leave me a comment telling me you did. And if you enjoyed it, mention that as well. If you didn't, just tell me you listened to it.

Liam.

A Quick Note About Blog E-mail

2006-03-05T01:49:00.000-05:00

To those out there who read this blog via e-mail updates, my Mom recently discovered that along with losing the formatting, Bloglet (the people that handle the subscription form of my blog) sometimes truncates long paragraphs.

Which means if you're reading the non-formatted e-mailed version, and it suddenly doesn't make any sense, you've probably hit just such an omission, and would be best served (assuming you're enjoying the post) by going to http://liam-humor.blogspot.com and reading the full post in all its formatted glory.

Thanks,

Liam.

Lessons for my Kids

2006-02-08T07:13:00.000-05:00

[Note: This is not humor. It's been a while since I wrote a humor column I could post (although I have one that is awaiting permission from the person it's about before I post it, probably in another month or two). I was thinking last night of the things I want to instill in my children, and decided to write this up. It doesn't really seem to fit the political blog, and I thought maybe the people who read this one might have some thoughts and input on this. Hopefully this will be an evolving document. And of course there's nothing certain in life, and so it's something that can be given to my children as they grow, should something tragic happen to me. -- Liam]

Some things I've learned in 40 years on the planet...

1)It is more important to be informed and thoughtful than to be right.

As you go through life, keeping an open mind and considering your positions carefully is vital. You may, during your lifetime, come to hold beliefs which are different from mine. You may opt for a different set of religious beliefs than mine. You may chose a radically different candidate in a political race than the one I would support. As long as those choices are well considered, as informed as they can be, and are open to change as new information comes to light, you'll be okay.

Over the course of your lifetime, if these were the only two choices, I would far rather we disagreed over most things, but that you had good, thoughtful, reasoned arguments for why you took the side of each issue that you did than that you agreed with me in all things, but without any better reason than “Dad thinks this, and that's good enough for me.” It's flattering if you think enough of me to want to parrot my beliefs, but what if I'm wrong? I'm human, I can be wrong. I can be missing crucial facts or have failed to consider a connection I should have. I'd like to believe that an intelligent, informed person will come to the same conclusions I do most of the time (I tell myself that I'm an intelligent, informed person), but my respect goes to the worthy opponent, willing to listen to my points and refute them with his or her own. The opponent (or ally) who merely spews back dubious talking points they heard somewhere without even a moments consideration as to their veracity does not do anything to further political discourse and should make way for those who actually consider their positions.

Beyond that, understand that sometimes experience teaches that what may initially seem like a good idea actually is not. Wisdom is gained from experience, and the truly wise can gain wisdom from the experience of others. Be open to the wisdom of other people's arguments, try to understand it, and let it affect your opinions appropriately.

2)It is more important to be moral than to be ideological.

In life, you will run into a lot of people who believe that simply holding an ideological belief is sufficient, that living up to it is not terribly important. On the other hand, some of the most moral, most ethically behaved people are those who do not let a membership take the place of proper behavior.

It is, of course, possible to be both, but you should never allow your belief in a religion to substitute for proper behavior. Paradoxically, some of the most un-Christian behaviors are done in the name of Christianity. Jesus taught us to love our neighbors, to treat others with respect and dignity, and that it is in our treatment of the outcasts and downtrodden which counts the most towards our behavior, and yet so many self-described Christians these days seem to find hatred of gays to be central to their religion. Jesus spent time with prostitutes, lepers and poor people yet the Religious Right find their ideological soul-mates in a political party that is forever trying to do away with services to aid the poor in favor of more money to the rich.

I don't mean to pick on one specific religion, it is simply the one I know best, and the one whose followers (and thus, whose hypocrites as well) I've had the most opportunity to come into contact with.

3)The behaviors of the ill behaved do not define the group.

If Christianity can be described as a religion of love, I'm told Islam is a religion of peace. And yet the single worst terrorist attack on our nation was perpetrated in the name of Islam. Too many Americans view this as an immediate and proper reason to hate all Muslims. Some, by association, choose to hate all Arabic people.

The Republican party, as I write this (in early 2006) right now is embroiled in many corruption scandals and the President appears guilty of lying, violating the law and generally poor decisions. This does not mean that all Republicans are corrupt or selfish or evil, and it certainly doesn't taint the value of conservative ideology.

Understand that in any group, there will be those who do not hold to the core values of the group, or do things in the name of the group that most of the group would not support. Sadly, these will often be among the more outspoken members of the group. Don't let the radicals color your impression of the rank and file.

4)It is more important to be independent than to belong. (or “Politics is not a sporting event”)

This is particularly true of any group (such as a political party) the membership of which can become too much like an “us vs. them” situation. There are times when the most pressing needs can be met by one political candidate and other times when someone from a completely different part of the ideological spectrum is what is most needed. Remaining independent makes it much easier to vote with your head instead of your gut.

Politics is not a sporting event. There is no inherent merit in “your team” winning at the cost of “the other team”. Each political candidate comes with a different set of strengths and beliefs. In our predigested, two-party world, sometimes it's difficult to separate out the candidate from their party, but nevertheless, not all situations call for the same thing.

For example, the United States works best when it works slowest. This may seem a paradox, but it is nevertheless true. The problem with a streamlined system is that while it may make it easier to pass legislation for the greater good, it also makes it easier to pass legislation that pulls the country away from what is best. Having effective checks and balances, with all sides of each issue having some level of power in the discussion, prevents the corruption that unchecked power engenders in humans. Always voting for the same team regardless of circumstance is like always getting on the same side of the seesaw on the playground. You aren't getting the best use out of a seesaw if you get on the end that your playmate is already sitting on. You may prefer that end of the seesaw, and so may your friend, but if the sides aren't balanced it won't work very effectively.

As a corollary of this, resist peer pressure. Do not do something you don't support just because “everyone's doing it” or “only dorks are afraid to do this”. Whether the subject is drug use, sexual activity, breaking the law, picking on the underdog or anything else, be strong and do what you believe is right, not what everyone around you tells you to do. “I dare you” is not a valid argument for doing anything.

5)There is nothing wrong with people who are different.

I can't stress this enough. As you go through life, you will find aspects of yourself which are different from most of those around you. Some will be small and insignificant (such as being left handed), some will be larger. It is okay to be different. Those who tell you otherwise, or hate you for your differences, are small minded bigots too wrapped up in their own problems to see that their hatred solves nothing.

Do not hate other races, other genders, other sexual orientations, other political ideologies, other religions. Treat everyone with respect and dignity and expect the same in return. You may not always get it, but recognize that when someone does not treat you with respect and dignity, this is not someone with whom you should be associating. Don't let an abuser convince you that you deserve the abuse, move on to someone who will respect you for you.

And because one never knows what the future holds, I want to make it particularly clear, if as you grow you determine that you were born gay, that's fine with me. It is not a life I would choose for you, but not because there is anything inherently wrong with being born different, only that it is a difficult life in our society, and I would hope for you to avoid that pain. Nonetheless, I do not believe it is a choice, and so if that is who you are, embrace it and move on. Those who can't or won't deal with it are not worth your effort.

6)It is more important to be loving than to be macho.

The Golden Rule is repeated so often it can feel like a cliche, but it is no less true for that. Treat others as you would want to be treated. Try to temper your discipline of your children with love. Reward the good as well as punishing the bad. Treat your spouse with love and honor them as your partner, not your servant. Apologize when you wrong someone. Stand up for the underdog. Be a friend to the friendless.

And do not confuse “macho” with “strength”. It takes far more strength to stand up for the socially outcast than to stand around with the other “macho” fools laughing and pointing. Try to think how you would feel if you were the social outcast.

7)Opposing positions are sometimes both vital sides of the same coin.

This is true of many parts of life. Disagreements do not always have to mean that one side is right and one side is wrong. Certainly you will run into cases where there is a clear right and wrong. But understand that in philosophical discussions, there may be no clear right and wrong. Liberal vs conservative is one example, both in your personal life and in the political realm.

Everyone needs a conservative grounding. With nothing grounding you to reality you can feel lost and worse, you can actually BE lost. Conservative grounding is what keeps us from spending money we can't afford to spend, or throwing away a strong, long-term relationship over one small argument. Conservative thought is what helps us to make the unpleasant decisions, choosing what is best over what is fun.

On the other hand, liberalism is change. Your liberal side is the side that urges you to quit your job and travel the world (generally a bad idea if you aren't independently wealthy), but it is also the side that urges you to change things for the better. Go out and join that club you've wanted to join. Go volunteer some time for a local charity. Try a new ice cream flavor. Take a different route to a common destination. Mix it up.

Your liberal side keeps life fun, your conservative side keeps life safe and secure. You need both, do not reject either out of hand.

8)You can't make your father not love you.

Finally, and most importantly, nothing you ever do will make me stop loving you. You will make some mistakes, you will make some bad choices. And there may even be some choices you make that I simply can't support, although I will try to be as supportive as I can. But whether you make big mistakes or small ones, whether we are friendly or estranged, whether you generally agree with me or generally think I'm the stupidest person ever to successfully tie their shoes in the morning, I will always love you.

Copyright (c) February 8, 2006 by Liam Johnson. http://liam-humor.blogspot.com