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Last Week's Funniest Captions

Best Caption:

"I had the Surf and Turf, and she had the Scarf and Barf."

— ­ Posted by Karlo

Runners-up:

”Yeah, he’s nice enough. A sailor. Huge forearms. Anchor tattoo. Screwy laugh. Always winking at me. He insisted I have seafood while he nails a whole plateful of spinach, then starts a fight in the bar. Frightening. Sexy. I’m kind of turned on by it."

— Posted by J. Eaton

”Now where the heck did he go? How rude. As I was saying, Sally. …

— Posted by Scarlett

When Harry walked out on Sally.

— Posted by Bo

COLUMN: Optimism at the Top of the Year

Image via Wikipedia

By Tobin Barnes
Tis the season of optimism.

After all, the days are getting longer—minutely so, but longer nonetheless. The painful process of gradually lightening skies keeps our heads up, tentatively looking forward to spring.

There’s progress in the lengthening day, even if it’s barely detectable amidst the overwhelming darkness, kind of like the difference between ten below zero and nine below zero. Nine below is scientifically warmer, certainly, but who can tell the difference?

Well, an optimist can. It’s a glass that’s a little fuller.

And optimism is absolutely essential for survival this time of the year.

Admit it or not, optimism is etched in our DNA. We wouldn’t have evolved this far otherwise. The caveman would have thrown down his crude mallet and willingly sacrificed himself to the sabertooth tiger without it, would have tried to step into every random stampede of wooly mammoths just to get it over with.

Without the optimism that cave life wasn’t as bad as it seemed and maybe could even get a little better, sabertooths, not us, would now dominate the landscape, this very moment scanning the horizon for another species of disgruntled, mopey prey like the sullen humans he consumed so long ago.

Take my old man for instance. He was a begrudging optimist despite the fact that his joys seemed to come from seeing his predicted turns for the worse pan out. Way too often, he practiced pessimism like a devout monk. “The writing’s on the wall,” was his mantra of impending doom.

Like many children of the Depression, any glimmer of prosperity made him nervous. Unfortunately, I think it was his absolute, all-encompassing childhood poverty and the yoke of defeated parents that seemed to have permanently grayed his outlook.

I’ve never really blamed him for that hardened exterior, knowing what I know of his youth. But I pride myself in not generationally succumbing to such a bleak perspective.

He always seemed to believe that any uptick just couldn’t last.

Yup, “We’re going to hell in a hand basket,” he’d predict. (Despite the gloominess of our supposed fate, I always found that to be a picturesque metaphor. Would we have to get smaller or would the hand basket have to get bigger?)

Even Christmas inspired little merriment in him unless it were his opportunities to say, “Bah, humbug!” with his own practiced brand of twisted glee.

His parsimony seemed to rub off on me sometimes. As a little kid, I naively gave him two packs of cigarettes from his own carton, wrapped and bowed in the holiday spirit. (He was a three-pack-a-day man. I’m lucky to still be alive, growing up in that miasma of carcinogens.)

But when he unwrapped his package of self-owned smokes, a smile and small laugh creased his face. Maybe he was proud to have raised a chintzy son.

I tried giving him a better present another year, but, man, he could suck the fun out of giving a Christmas gift like Grinch himself: “Take it back,” he grumpily responded. So that’s what I did with the Lawrence Welk album I had given him (Could it have been my gift choices?)

After that, I gave up trying to give him anything, and that seemed to make him happier—albeit that’s an exceedingly relative description.

But even my curmudgeon of a dad—as pessimistic and cynical as he could be—even he clung to optimism this time of the year in the face of three more months of winter. “The days are getting longer,” he’d frequently say, no matter what kind of funk of the moment was eating at him.

And when the last snow was melting down to the last surviving patches of stubborn ice, he’d be out there with an ice chopper to break it up into more easily meltable bits to send it on its way just a little bit quicker, totally optimistic that that was the last he’d see of it for months and months. Whether it was or wasn’t.

Of course, in his world, spring always brought its problems, too.

Well Worth 15 Minutes of Your Time

Too Much Time on Their Hands

It's Become a Cliche

Image via Wikipedia

Monologue | Thursday night on CBS: Senior New York Senator Chuck Schumer was on an airplane, and they were flying someplace. And they landed. He called one of the flight attendants a “bitch.” Apparently, there was some ugliness. There were words exchanged. And it got heated and at one point the argument was so loud, it actually woke up the pilot.

Well, here’s good news, I think. The Democrats down in Washington believe they have 60 votes to pass a health care bill. That’s 58 Democrats and the Salahis. They’re going to go in there and vote.

But they don’t think that the health care bill will get passed before Christmas, unless they switch to the Mayan calendar.
Read more…

Monologue | Thursday night on NBC: Well, according to MSNBC, President Obama’s approval rating has now dipped below 50 percent. To tell you how bad it is, people are now finding ways to sneak out of the White House.

Remember the phrase, “hope and change”? They amended it today. Now it’s “don’t give up hope, nothing is going to change.”

Oh, and listen to this. It happened yet again last month. A Georgia couple showed up a day early for a tour at the White House — you know, just regular folks. Showed up to tour the White House, somehow wound up in an invitation-only breakfast with President Obama and the First Lady. Isn’t that amazing? The only two people that couldn’t get in the White House this year were John McCain and Sarah Palin.
Read more…

Where aboot...A?

(Sent by Roy Wilson)

New Yorker Cartoon

Monologue | Thursday night on “The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson” on CBS: Not such a great day for the health care reform. The so-called public option died on the Senate floor today. It could have survived, but apparently it had a pre-existing condition. Read more…

Monologue | Monday night on CBS: President Obama is sending troops to Afghanistan. Well, hell, he ought to be sending them to Tiger Wood’s house. Read more…

COLUMN: Say It Ain't So, Joe

Image via Wikipedia

By Tobin Barnes
“Tiger Admits Transgressions.”

Well…that’s it. It’s time to call in the dogs.

Even Tiger Woods?

I give up. This is the last straw.

Say it ain’t so, Joe. Shoeless Joe Jackson maybe, but Tiger?

I feel like I’m “Losing My Religion.” You know, as in one of R.E.M.’s hit songs?

That’s right. My long-held, but well over-stretched faith in my fellow man has now fallen to an all-time low. Yeah, it’s currently scraping bottom. There’s sparks coming up from the pavement.

We’ve all read, heard, and seen the painful stories.

Heck, how could we avoid them? Since the Tiger Woods brouhaha broke with that crash and the golf club, et al., the story has sometimes even led off the national news programs, which, gees louise, is in itself a farce, for crying out loud. All the things going on in the world, and the Tiger Woods mess is the top story?

Other scandals have surprised me, but I always thought Tiger Woods had too much integrity and had far too much innate discipline to succumb to cheap temptation the way so many others have.

Need I tell you this has created a seismic shift in my outlook.

Ronald Reagan had it right when he said, “Trust your neighbor, but don’t pull down your hedge.” Of course, he was talking about the Soviets then, but now I realize there’s untrustworthy “Soviets” all over the place.

I’ll admit that I used to be a babe in the woods, a naïve innocent (maybe as late as yesterday). But, alas, the Mary Sunshine in me has been sand-blasted away—a casualty of one-too-many revelations, one-too-many sleazy shots over the bow.

The old saw, “Trust everybody, but cut the cards,” has now become my mantra to the extent that I not only want to cut the cards several times, but I want to bring my own deck.

I think I just may have converted into full-fledged cynic. (Where do I get my official membership card? I’m ready to carry it.)

I’m beginning to realize that being a cynic has its advantages. I believe it was the conservative columnist George Will who said, “The nice thing about being a cynic is that you are either right or pleasantly surprised.”

The curmudgeon H. L. Mencken said, “A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.”

Author J. G. Cozzens said, “A cynic is just a man who found out when he was ten that there wasn’t any Santa Claus, and he’s still upset.”

But do I really want to go there?

Do I really want to be that kind of person?

It sounds a little old and hoary, a little decrepit.

One of my literary favorites Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “A cynic can chill and dishearten with a single word.”

Carolyn Wells, prolific writer of more than 170 books, said, “A cynic is a man who looks at the world with a monocle in his mind’s eye.”

The famed 19th century minister Henry Ward Beecher said, “The cynic is one who never sees a good quality in a man, and never fails to see a bad one. He is the human owl, vigilant in darkness and blind to light, mousing for vermin, and never seeing noble game.”

Do I want to be a mouser for vermin?

Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of War during WWII, said, “The only deadly sin I know is cynicism.”

American novelist Fannie Hurst said, “It takes a clever man to turn cynic and a wise man to be clever enough not to.”

And as sometime cynic himself Oscar Wilde said, “A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.”

Okay, okay.

Maybe I’ll hold off on my complete descent into cynicism, but I’m not pulling down my hedge. And, hey, cut those cards!

Recent Picture of Tiger and Elin

(Sent by Roy Wilson)