Good 'Late Night' Jokes: Christie

Chris Christie - Caricature (Photo credit: DonkeyHotey)

Jimmy Fallon

• Chris Christie won a second term as New Jersey governor last night. We like him. He’s a good guy. Christie said he couldn't have done it without his biggest supporter — and then his belt said, "Happy to help, man."
• Chris Christie won a second term as New Jersey governor. And in honor of his big win, I promise no more fat jokes about him tonight. But seriously, the margin of victory was so big, even he could walk through it.

Conan

• The new mayor of New York City is a progressive Democrat with an African-American wife who used to be a lesbian. Or as Fox News reported, the apocalypse is upon us.

Jay Leno

• New Jersey Governor Chris Christie was re-elected by a huge margin. He gave a great speech last night. He said he learned a lot in the last four years — for example, that lap-band surgery doesn't always work.
• Chris Christie won by such a wide margin that pundits say this will give him the impetus he needs to run for president. And he's got a new slogan: "Put the oval in the Oval Office."

Pictue of Mountain Lion Taken by Neighbor Near Our Place

Stupid Travelers Complaints

-- "It took us nine hours to fly home from Jamaica to England. It took the Americans only three hours to get home. This seems unfair."

-- "There were too many Spanish people there. The receptionist spoke Spanish, the food was Spanish. No one told us that there would be so many foreigners."

-- "My fiance and I booked a twin-bedded room but we were placed in a double-bedded room. We now hold you responsible for the fact that I find myself pregnant. This would not have happened if you had put us in the room that we booked."

--- "No one told us there would be fish in the water. The children were scared."

-- "I was bitten by a mosquito. The brochure did not mention mosquitoes."

-- "They should not allow topless sunbathing on the beach. It was very distracting for my husband who just wanted to relax."

-- "I'm sure I've stayed in this hotel room in a previous life. I cannot stay here again."

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GAIL COLLINS: Shutdown Ted Cruz

English: Ted Cruz at the Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Important Halloween note: When you’re thinking about party costumes, forget going as Senator Ted Cruz.Everybody will be going as Ted Cruz. (Consider going as Representative Ted Yoho. You would need a name tag, but “Ted Yoho” would be so worth it.)

Even in defeat, Cruz was in the limelight on Wednesday. “It is heartbreaking to the American people that Senate Republicans divided as they did,” he told his colleagues, demonstrating an unshakable confidence in his capacity to peer into the national mind.

Earlier, in a press conference, Cruz announced: “Unfortunately, once again, it appears the Washington establishment is refusing to listen to the American people.” There have been about nine million polls taken since the government shutdown, all of which showed the American people shrieking do not shut down the government! Where do you think Ted Cruz gets his information about public opinion? Twitter, that’s where. There is nothing so dangerous to national well-being as an extremist with a smartphone.

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• Let's Make a Deal

COLUMN: Tattoo You, Not Me

By Tobin Barnes

            Sorry, I don’t get tattoos…as in, I don’t understand them and so I don’t have any. Never have, never will.

Go ahead, call me an old fogey. I can take it.

Just like with soccer, my generation was never much into tattoos. To us, they were exotic things we’d occasionally see as kids on the arms of WWII Navy veterans and at freak shows.

For us baby boomers growing up in the 50s and 60s, many of the adult males in our lives were war vets, some of whom had probably served intensely in battle, while the rest had done their bit well back of the front lines.

Unfortunately, we didn’t think much about their service at the time. Most vets didn’t talk about it. Only later did we appreciate being hollered at by people who had grown up during a depression and gone on to win a world war.

About the only evidence of all this, as far as we could tell, were adults who we thought were pretty tight with a buck, some World War II movies, and the random tattoo on a hairy arm.

As for the tattoos, the usual story was that the guy was drunk one night in port when he was pressured into having one done.

Even then, I didn’t understand tattoos. Other than the anchors on Popeye, most “body art” that I saw were just navy blue smudges on some guy’s forearm or biceps. It was almost always tough to tell what the original picture or inscription had been. Time had done a number on them.

I don’t know, maybe the World War II tattoo “artists” or techniques weren’t as good then as they are now—isn’t a needle still a needle?—but who would want a smudge on your arm that no one could make out?

It all didn’t seem to hold much attraction for the baby boomers that I grew up with, not even for those of us who became hippies. Of course, they’d draw things on their bodies, too, but they could always wash them off the next day.

And all this held true, until a few of us boomers became bikers, then it was Katy bar the door for those types.

But I still don’t get it.

I’ve never seen a drawing or picture of anything, dazzling as my first impression of it might have been—some great piece of art, maybe—that I’d want to have on my body for the rest of my life, let alone a skull, a snake, or a butterfly.

Even the most intense infatuations eventually fade away to “Ho hum, what’s next?” That’s why it’s so easy to change the screen saver on your computer. Whatever picture you had on there that you once thought was so neat, it’s not long before you get tired of it, if not sick of it. It’s always time for something new for human beings.

Most pictures you have up in your house, you stopped looking at them long ago. Even if you had the Mona Lisa on your living room wall, you wouldn’t notice it after a few weeks.

And all that doesn’t even take into account sagging. Everybody’s skin sags. Man, look at me—have I ever sagged. Past forty, everything starts to droop, especially the things that don’t look so good when they droop. You start looking like a construction of bean bags with a lot of the beans missing.

So what’s it going to look like when the younger generation gets to be the baby boomers’ age? Well, unless they finally come up with an anti-aging cream that really works, all their tattoos are going to look like abstract art on moldy canvases. Salvador Dali results wouldn’t be so bad, but these are going to be Jackson Pollock-type “What the heck is that?” stuff.

And don’t even get me started on the dart boards that some are making themselves into with all the piercings, and the nose sparklers that look like pimples, and God forbid the black wheely-things in the earlobes that will never heal back.

Yeah, I don’t get it.

And yeah, I’m an old fogey—and a crotchety one at that. 

Good Dilbert Cartoon: Problems Are Opportunities

Highest Paid Public Employees by State: Uh huh

The Daily Show: Rockin' Shutdown Eve

Good Pat Oliphant Cartoon: Shut Down

A New Mural by Natalia Rak

Street Art that adds and doesn't detract...

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Yeah, you've seen them...

Barneses in Europe, Part 2, Ghent and Damme

THE BOROWITZ REPORT: House Republicans Line Up for Free Annual Physicals Before Defunding Obamacare

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Saying that they needed to be in peak physical condition for their looming effort to defund Obamacare, over a hundred House Republicans lined up for their free annual physicals today.

The physicals, part of Congress’s government-subsidized health-care package, yielded good news for many of the House G.O.P., who learned that they were strong and healthy enough for the demanding task of defunding Obamacare.

“My blood pressure was lower than I thought it would be,” said Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio). “That’s amazing, because it goes through the roof whenever I think about how Obamacare would destroy America.”

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COLUMN: It Should Be All Fun

By Tobin Barnes

            We went to Europe last summer. It was our third time.

And like the other two, it was fun.

            But it’s not all fun.

            They should make trips to Europe, amongst other things, all fun. That would be a big improvement. Life would be better that way. Yeah, more enjoyable.

            They could start with the flights over and back. There’s no way you can call those fun.

            Matter of fact, they’re a major pain in the butt, literally and figuratively.

            It starts off with the price.

You spend about as much for the flight as what you end up spending in Europe. They need to fix that. The relative value is really skewed. Same price for each but really different perceptions toward the two things you’re getting: buyer’s remorse on one hand, glee on the other. Sure, you’re getting transportation, but come on.

            Then there’s the subject of comfort during these eight-to-nine hour flights. The sense of comfort in those seats lasts…oh…about fifteen minutes.

After fifteen minutes, you realize that the initial impression of actual foam was an illusion. And even during that first fifteen minutes you were suspicious.

            What they call seats should instead be loosely called seats. They should tell you that you’re renting the approximation of a seat. Now that would be truth in advertising.

            You can sit in these airline seats and that’s about it. Any other usual attributes of seats are completely missing from them.

            In regular real-life seats you don’t scrunch your seat right up against a wall of another seat. You don’t have your nose stuck in the back of a bunch of plastic.

No way. You’d move your seat back to allow a sense of space, a feeling of perspective, and an aura of well-being. You wouldn’t care to insert yourself into the impression of being in an ancient Roman rowing galley.

            Such is not the case with airline seats. You allow yourself to become a virtual sardine.

And those seatbelts are redundant. With or without them, you are going nowhere once shoehorned into your so-called seat, especially since you also have to deal with the placement of headphones, a pillow, and a blanket that they supposedly provide you to enhance your experience.

            Along with all the other accoutrements you brought to while away the time, you are now no longer a traveler, but rather a heaped-up stash.

            Add to all this an eight-hour layover in Chicago on the way back and you’ve got a couple of whimpering puppies protesting about the cruelty of life.

            So, no, it’s not all fun.

            But then I guess you’ve got to consider what inter-continental travel used to be like. Not only did trips take weeks, but there was seasickness, disease, shipwrecks, piracy, and the strong possibility that you might not even make it to your destination alive.

            People were tougher then than they are now.

            We’re wimps now. We whine when even the least little thing isn’t hunky-dory and all fun.

So, hey, there’s only one solution. They need to continue working on things so everything, like trips to Europe, are all fun and nothing but the fun.

GOOD LATE NIGHT: Jaguars and Donuts

Jacksonville Jaguars logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Jay Leno

• The face value of tickets to this year's Super Bowl will be as high as $2,600. So that's what it will cost the Jacksonville Jaguars if they want to go to the Super Bowl — $2,600.
• Cher has turned down an invitation to sing at the 2014 Olympics in Russia because of Russia's anti-gay laws. Their anti-gay laws are so strict, men can be arrested just for showing up at a Cher concert.

Conan

• Starbucks announced they don't want customers bringing guns into their stores. Meanwhile, Dunkin' Donuts said there is nothing you can bring in here that's more dangerous than what we serve.
• It turns out that a man who had been struggling with unexplained drunkenness actually had microbes in his stomach that produced alcohol that made him drunk. I don't have a joke for this, but I just want to let everyone know that this excuse does exist, seriously.

Jimmy Kimmel

• Researchers at Ohio State say the number of pedestrians who have been injured while using smartphones while walking has more than doubled since 2005. They also confirmed that those injuries are hilarious to watch.

Jimmy Fallon

• North Korea says it's ready to resume nuclear talks with the U.S. for the first time in five years. But President Obama said it's going to be pretty awkward — not talking to North Korea, but having to thank Dennis Rodman.
• Let’s see what else is going on in Washington. Senate leaders Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell admitted they have no Plan B if the House doesn’t avoid a government shutdown. Of course this raised a lot of questions, like, "Since when did they have a Plan A?"

THE ONION: Depraved Masochist Enjoys Following The News

CALDWELL, ID—Calling it a vital part of his daily routine, local man and utterly depraved masochist Richard Petrillo revealed to reporters Friday that he enjoys keeping up with the news.

The sick man, who confirmed that he makes a concerted effort to follow all manner of current events, evidently derives pleasure from torturing himself in this way, saying he likes to know as much as possible about the world in which he lives.

Barneses in Europe, Part 1, Brussels and Bruges

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Sex Scandals in the Sun

By Gail Collins

...The nation is always going to have political sex crises, but, in a perfect world, we would confine them to Congress. The only thing you really need members of Congress to do is vote the way you want them to. They can be a day away from indictment or as crazy as a loon and it doesn’t make a whole lot of difference.

For instance, you may be totally unaware that this week we got a new chapter in the story of the private life of Representative Steve Cohen of Tennessee. His saga went like this:

■ Congressman gets caught sending a lovey-dovey text to an aspiring swimsuit model.

■ In defense, congressman announces that the woman in question is actually his recently uncovered love child.

■ Congressman and surprise daughter take DNA tests for CNN. There’s no relationship.

■ Asked for further comment, congressman tells a female reporter: “You’re very attractive, but I’m not talking about it.”....

COLUMN: A Smaller Slice of Action, Please

By Tobin Barnes
This is going to sound un-American. NASCAR fans aren't going to be happy with me. The NRA is going to think I'm a Pinko. Mixed martial arts guys are going to think I'm light in the loafers.

But here goes, anyway.

Look, I'm not a fan of "action" movies.

Yeah, I agree. That's a pretty bold statement. Makes me an instant suspect.

Despite all the action in "action" movies--and, oh my goodness, there's plenty to go around--I'm almost always bored by it all. I usually have a hard time even finishing a typical "action" movie, let alone liking it.

But I do have to admit those movies are true to their billing. Unlike a "comedy," which often isn't funny, an action movie always has plenty of action.

But, whoa, you say. How can I be bored by "plenty of action"?

Cars are crashing in bigger numbers than they've ever crashed before and in more exotic, unusual places, and, not only that, but in new and unique ways....

Bullets are spraying in their millions, blood is spurting by the buckets, and people are dying in the hundreds....

Gimcrack gizmos, special effects, and computer generated shebangs are zipping and zapping all over the place....

And you say you're bored?

Yep, bored to tears; that is, when I'm not being repulsed by all the mass-market-pleasing violence.

Take Django Unchained, for example. Infinite shooting via western six-guns with hundred-round clips, white honkies dying in piles, and blood, blood, blood.

Well, to me, that's just violence porn.

When too much violence is happening, it can't be absorbed. It's a video game, not a movie. It all becomes meaningless.

Maybe that's the point, but then what's the point?

So much is going on in these so-called blockbusters that none of it is remarkable, let alone memorable, despite all the perpetual whizz bang. Action isn't in the script, it is the script.

There's so much there, there, there isn't anything there anymore. It's become vacuous movement, signifying nothing.

It didn't always used to be this way. Storytelling had deaths, violence, and destruction, sure, but it was ladled out as the plot required, not exaggerated as an end in itself.

That all started back in the late 60's with Bullitt, the Steve McQueen "vehicle" where he and his green

Mustang terrorize the streets of San Francisco tearing after two middle-aged gangsters in a black Dodge.

No doubt it was thrilling stuff at the time because such eye-popping stunt work was relatively new.

Then came The French Connection with a similarly apprehend-or-die obsessed cop careening through New York City streets with many times more dodge ball citizen-contestants at risk from someone sworn "To protect and to serve." He was trying to save us from drugs, but who was saving us from him?

And ever since the geometric inflation of crashes, shootings, deaths, maiming, destruction, and mayhem have mushroomed on our movie screens.

Almost universally, those involved in real-life violent situations, even bystanders, suffer from post traumatic stress syndrome, oftentimes for the rest of their lives, but we sure don't seem to mind experiencing violence at its goriest as our entertainment.

Weird.

People seem to want to be tough guys until the rubber hits the road, then they don't think so much about being a tough guy anymore.

As for me, put a hold on the "action," please. Instead, give me artfully rendered story and character development and put in the action only where it belongs to believably serve the plot.

Keep the horse in front of the cart.

Good Pat Oliphant Cartoon: Proposal

COLUMN: It's not what I Intended

By Tobin Barnes

I try to have the best intentions.

It's one of the easiest things to do...yeah, going around having good intentions, like little Miss Mary Sunshine. I do it all the time.

Unless you're an evil and demented Jeffrey Dahmer-type sucker, intending to do good is a walk in the park.

So that's me, Mr. Good Intentions. That's probably you, too.

But, as they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Supposedly, that thought originated with Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, who, I'm assuming,

was a tortured cleric suspicious of anything that smacked of the least bit of fun. His original thoughts were actually more like this: "Hell is full of good wishes and desires."

In other words, if wishes and buts were candy and nuts, it'd be Christmas every day.

Saint Bernard may have been inspired in his morbid musings by the Roman writer Virgil,

who said, "It is easy to go to hell."

And I agree. Amen, brother. Especially when we're talking about waist size. As in "Man,

he really went to hell, didn't he?" Chest of drawers disease can happen to anybody in their 30's or 40's when a guy's chest starts falling into his drawers.

Can happen to women, too. "Man, did she ever go to hell." Death by chocolate.

Uh huh, we fall far short of our intentions. We never intended to get fat, ugly and lazy--

just the opposite--but, yup, there we are. At least 10,000 times along the way of life, we've said, "Oh...what the hell!" to everything from another piece of pizza to another evening on the couch.

(Hell has evidently become central to this analysis, hasn't it?)

Nevertheless, despite all evidence to the contrary, past experience doesn't stop us from

continuing to have good intentions.

I'm as guilty as the next guy--you maybe. I'm still at my age chock-a-block full of wistful

thinking. Experience has done nothing for me. I haven't aged a bit in this singular respect. I'm still a babe in the woods.

My worst domain of unfulfilled intentions comes when I've got free time coming up on

the horizon. While I'm still busy with the chores of the workaday world, I can weave an amazing magic carpet illusion made up of all kinds of productive uses for those upcoming, long-wished-for idle hours, days, or maybe even weeks.

Oh, it will be glorious!

I'll read volumes by great masters, I'll start writing the great South Dakota novel, I'll

perfect my French, I'll lower my handicap by five strokes, I'll slim down to my high school belt size, I'll build great social relationships that will spread my bumptious personality all over town by changing overnight from an introvert to an extrovert.

I'll...I'll...oh, I can come up with dozens of things I'll do with that spare time. The list of

good intentions becomes infinite like a manic-depressive on the upswing.

And, of course, at the end of that beneficent bout of free time, I've accomplished hardly

anything. Then I'm like a drunk with a hangover, a druggy in withdrawal. With just a few hours of that precious free time left, the high grinds into a low. Little is left of my intentions but sad, sorrowful regrets.

Yes, woe is me.

But I've thought of a remedy. Hey, I'm going to turn this cycle around. From now on, I'm

going to expect absolutely nothing of my idle hours. Instead, I'm going to sit on my butt all day, stuff my face, zone out, and try to accomplish a totality of zilch--let myself morph into a gigantic, parasitic pustule of dependency.

Then if I do anything whatsoever during that period...anything, I say...even the least bit of

anything, and I'm bound to do a some little something of value here and there--even if by

accident--then that'll be a great positive good, because nothing good was ever intended.

What a turnaround! What a revelation! No more hangover, no more withdrawal, no more hell. It will now be a matter of "Look what can happen when I don't set my mind to it."

PAST PERSONAL FAVORITE: Days of the Living Dead

By Tobin Barnes
My father-in-law was a mortician.

Said he’d be the last one to let me down. Har!

Didn’t work out that way, but the image has stuck. I see him pushing the button, the motor kicks in, and soon I’m six feet under.

A goner.

But sometimes, even while we’re alive, we have to die a little to stay vital.

You’ve been there.

Every once in a while—to merely survive the day-to-day rat race—a guy’s got to turn into a zombie.

Know what I mean?

Yeah...that’s right...kinda become undead.

Doesn’t mean he’s got to stop functioning, just that he has to take it down a couple notches from maybe prime operating performance.

Ironically enough, it’s actually a survival technique.

Oh, the guy’s still functioning when he’s in his zombie mode, still going through the motions—just not completely there. Numb might be a better description.

And numb can be good.

That way, in the undead state, time passes during unpleasant periods without the pain of being truly present.

You’ve seen the movies about the undead. We guys get just like them sometimes.

The zombies stumble and bumble and mumble across the screen. They grab at things, but miss. They chase after things, but stagger along, stumble and fall. They try to communicate, but it’s just stupid cave man talk. Aargh! Urpp!

And who can blame them? Heck, they just climbed out of a grave, for crying out loud. It’s been a bad couple decades. They aren’t what they used to be. They can’t even put their arms down.

But, after a fashion, zombies still go about their business, though admittedly not very effectively—only victims they ever catch are their cousins, the brain dead—but nonetheless their awkward gallumphiness has a certain impact on others.

After all, zombies are hard to miss. They meander into the local bar or stop-and-rob, people are bound to scream.

And so we guys do the zombie routine during our rough patches, like during a rainy weekend with no golf or midway through an endless project at work. Or like Dilbert during a meeting.

Also helps when a guy’s short on cash. Turns into a zombie, he doesn’t care. (After all, real zombies don’t carry around much cash. Heck, the undertaker took it.)

Like I said, a guy feels less pain when he’s like a zombie—makes things more bearable, if not necessarily pleasant.

Time enters a fog, and when he resurrects, he’s on the other side of an obligation.

I was in zombie mode for a time last week. Uh huh, I was undead.

I was in the nether state of there and not there.

Oh, I was breathing. I was talking, kinda. And I was functioning at a minimal level, I suppose.

But people probably looked at me and thought, “Guy’s a zombie!”

Didn’t bother me, though.

Nice thing about being a zombie, you don’t care what people think.

Besides, now I feel a lot better. Almost alive.

COLUMN: Just Give Me the Good Stuff

By Tobin Barnes

            “I don't need to know how long your newborn is. I'm not a baby tailor.”

            Har!

            And here’s another one:

            “I know making good time is important, but if Indiana Jones is beating people up on your vehicle, I say slow down and pull over.”

            Again Har!

            Those are a couple of Tweets by Tim Siedell @badbanana that I have “favorited” at one time or another and thereby saved for I don’t know how long. No one will tell you that, but they will tell you that bad stuff about you on the Internet will last for eternity. But then again, maybe things on the Internet have a half-life like nuclear waste.

Here’s another one I favorited by Molly McAleer @Molls: “I would buy you a clue if they made them in your size.”

Yeah, another good one; that is, if you are me. But maybe this kind of wit isn’t up your alley. And that’s the thing about social websites. Most of the stuff you run into on sites like Twitter is, to put it bluntly, complete crap.

Same goes for the other social websites—mostly chaff without many kernels of wheat. A guy’s got to wade through a lot of sludge to find the occasional thing of interest.

Take Twitter, for instance…as long as we started there. I bet I scroll through at least thirty Tweets before I get a Har! or even a Huh!

I should have better things to do than wasting my time on such an unprofitable slog. Or anyway, you’d think so, but I guess I don’t.

So what’s with the other twenty-nine Tweets that contained absolutely nothing for me? People obviously wrote them thinking at least one someone else, somewhere would find them interesting.

And, well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? That’s the Internet in a nutshell. There’s something for everyone, just not necessarily where you’re looking at any given particular moment.

Same thing can be said for the mega-beast of social sites, Facebook. Sorry to say, despite the fact that the entries on Facebook are put there by my “friends,” most of them—again being blunt—aren’t of much interest to me.

Of course, my “friends” who are doing the posting have many friends other than me, oftentimes hundreds of them. (By the way, how many “friends” is too many?) And maybe those uninteresting posts, from my perspective anyway, were actually meant for some of their many other friends and not me.

So, okay. I get it. The majority of what’s on my social sites isn’t meant for me in particular, given my stodgy, less-than-all-encompassing nature.

But why shouldn’t it be? What with all the algorithms (I had to look up that spelling) and whatnots and scientific digital gobbledygook, something amazing should be out there eliminating all that chaff-like stuff from my online horizon. Yeah, please spare me the snoozers. Just give me the info only I want.

And the Internet should certainly know what I want by now.

Through cookies, spiders, and I-don’t-know-what-all, cyberspace has been watching my every digital move like a celebrity stalker for decades now, and I’m no celebrity. It knows my sites, my “likes,” my favorites, my smiley faces, and heck, who knows? It might even be looking at me through that little camera on the computer whenever it wants, although I can’t imagine when and why that might be.

As we’ve just learned in the news, the government can do amazing things with so-called metadata like this. With relatively insignificant bits like phone numbers and time spans it can supposedly stop 9/11 knockoffs and other nefarious deeds planned by evildoers.

So why can’t all this metadata be used to perfectly customize my content? Why can’t it be used to give me ONLY stuff like this on Twitter:  

“When my phone says ‘searching,’ I hold it to my heart & whisper ‘Me too, phone, me too,’ then burst into tears.” lauren caltagirone @MrsRupertPupkin

 “Millions of people firmly believe that I wrote every word of the Bible... yet they still haven't bothered to read it all.” almighty god @almighty god

“Art Thief Will Not Have To Return 125 Clown Paintings” and “Watchdog Group Says Mailmen Pose Biggest Threat.” CabbageNews @CabbageNews

“It's not that I don't like you. I mean, it's not that I DO like you, but....” Le Ms. @debihope

Good New Yorker Cartoon: Lives Lost

COLUMN: Death by Speaker

By Tobin Barnes
    “Stop! You’re killing me here!”
    Have you ever wanted to get up, in the middle of everybody--you know, you’re at a meeting or presentation or workshop or something, and heck, you’ve got to attend this darned thing--there’s no choice--but you’d dearly love to get up in front of this whole organized confabulation and say exactly those words?
    Yeah, I have, too. Many’s the time. Everybody belongs to this club.
    The speaker is so mind-numbingly dull or the subject matter is so dessicatingly dry or your interest level is so minimal or a combination of all the above that you would scream if every civilized bone in your body weren’t telling you that you just can’t do that sort of thing.
    Yes, you’ve got to sit there and take it. Suffer, you poor bastard.
    One of my favorite cartoons has Dilbert giving a slide presentation and his audience is either asleep or suffering suicidal mental anguish brought on by boredom. One woman says, “You’ve stolen an hour of my life. Something inside me died. I will never have another good day.”
    In the final panel a disheartened and defeated Dilbert says to Wally, “I went in with low expectations.”  And Wally says, “They can’t hurt you if you’re already dead.”
    In these captive/torture situations where I am the tortured, there’s admittedly a little Stockholm Syndrome going on. I always suffer a certain amount of sympathy for my torturer. Uh huh, I feel for them.
    How can I sympathize with someone who is ripping my soul out of my body and replacing it with dust?
    Well, they, unwittingly, are victims as well.
    They, he or she, probably didn’t want to be doing the presentation themselves. They hate talking about this subject as much as we detest pretending to listen to it. Or, worse, they are so self-deluded they think they have the God-given talent to turn chicken crap into chicken salad. They think they’re so charming or incisive or funny that they can still win the crowd over despite the fact that they are talking about drain sludge.
    And so, for any or all of these reasons, I feel sorry for them.
    Nevertheless, despite this softy oozing sympathy, I still want to get up and violently yell, “Stop this travesty! Our lives are limited, and we can’t waste our precious time listening to this.”
    Oh yes, certainly such an outburst would be bold, brash, and, of course, outlandishly rude, but in a larger sense, it would be a service to humanity to put a quietus not only to this current presentation, but maybe also to all such presentations wherever human beings are subjected to them. That’s right, maybe my abrupt, totally unexpected actions in that workshop or whatever would light a fire, and begin a trend that would spread to somnolent presentations all over the world.
    So inspired, here, there, and everywhere, tortured, brain-schmoozed listeners would rise up, yell out, and put a stop to relentless, boring presenters and mental fatigue would generally subside under a general outlook that “Yes, there is a possibility of a fresh, new morning without the all-encompassing shadow of a lethal dumb-foundedness.”
    Of course, this all being said, I would like to caution some restraint when it comes to my own presentations as an English and U.S. history teacher. At times like these, I strongly feel that student boredom comes mostly from within and much less often from without, as when I’m enthrallingly relating the interesting details of the Wilmot Proviso in the pre-Civil War slavery agitation.
    

Kimbra: "Settle Down"

'Off the Wall' is back, but not all that much

By Tobin Barnes

Haven’t done this for a while.

            Write a column, that is.

            Few years back, I used to do it all the time…about once a week and that for about fourteen years. The column was called “Off the Wall.”

            It was about anything and everything and nothing in particular.

Believe it or not, newspapers used to pay me, too. Not much, of course—just peanuts really.

And what does a guy do with peanuts?

Things I’m able to do have never had much monetary value—teaching, for instance. So I’ve gotten used to living on peanuts.

            Then things gummed up with the writing.

The newspapers I submitted to either shut down or stopped paying me regularly. Newspapers are going the way of the wooly mammoth: Internet and climate change can be lethal.

After I quit a couple of them, I was down to one faithful and true column publisher.

            But when it came to just one newspaper…man, I was really writing for peanuts. So I sent that newspaper my regrets and stopped working on columns.

            Can’t really say I missed it until I started missing it. And that was just recently.

            I still don’t miss trying to come up with something to write about. And I still don’t miss starting with a nothing and trying to end up with a something.

But I do miss having finished a new column that some people wouldn’t mind reading, especially if I like reading it, too. Yes, foremost, I write for myself.

What I do is like a musician noodling around with jazz licks. And a lot of people don’t care for jazz.

And that’s okay. I don’t mind. (I’m an acquired taste that most people don’t bother to acquire.)

 So I’ll just post this stuff on the Internet and leave it at that. No schedule, no money and no agendas, other than pleasing myself all the time and maybe the isolated reader here and there some of the time.

If you’ve got a rainy day and nothing better to do, you can go back a couple years in my blog and look up some of my columns from past years. I plan on re-posting a few of them every once in a while.

I also post a lot of other stuff I like on my blog. All you got to do is scroll down and see Oliphant cartoons, New Yorker cartoons, Late Night jokes, and other detritus with the life span of a fruit fly but preserved in amber on my Google blog…at least until they discontinue that service as well. (Things move quickly out here on the fringe.)

But whatever, be forewarned, it doesn’t and won’t get any better than this.

RSA Animate: Dishonesty

Entertaining and informative:

Good 'Late Night' Jokes

David Letterman

• There's a new HBO movie this weekend — the Liberace story, "Behind the Candelabra." Liberace claimed that he was not gay. Well, that's good enough for me.
• I've seen a little of the film. Meryl Streep is fantastic as Liberace.






• We're learning more and more about Liberace. He was addicted to plastic surgery. He had a collection of wigs. And he would change clothing about 10 times a day. Wow, it's like I have a twin!

Jimmy Fallon

• These scandals at the White House are just getting worse. It turns out that President Obama’s chief of staff knew about the scandal at the IRS three weeks before the president found out. Obama was like, "Anything else you guys aren't telling me?" And Joe Biden was like, "Uh . . . I broke the copier."

Conan

• A lot of people are criticizing President Obama, including Michelle Obama. She recently said she could take a whole afternoon and talk about Barack's failures. She was immediately hired by Fox News.
• A college student in Georgia was worried that his parents would be mad at him for flunking English. So he tried to fake his own kidnapping. The parents figured it out when the ransom note said, "We has your son."