Category: Humor

Filing anything under “Humor” just seems like a bad idea. I mean, if you have to tell people it’s a joke…

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Lacewing

green lacewing

This lacewing may be experiencing a teachable moment. I know I was: up late dreading poetry, I suddenly realized I was dreading over someone else’s shoulder. It must’ve come in through a hole in the screen door, and perhaps thought — erroneously, of course — that the computer screen was another way out.

Green lacewings are as sensitive as they look. Their hearing is so acute that some species can even pick up bats’ sonar, whereupon they fold their wings and plummet to the ground to avoid capture. They communicate through subtle vibrations of the body, especially during courtship — inaudible “songs” unique to each species.

This was not always such a sensitive being, though. In its wild youth as an aphid-lion it ate any soft-bodied invertebrate in its path, and was even capable of resorting to cannibalism if no other food was handy. It had large sucking jaws with which to grasp its prey and inject stomach acid, turning the other’s insides into a Slurpee.

If you too are up late tonight, you might still have time to confess your poetic sins before “100% Honest Day” is over at Read Write Poem. Here’s what I wrote:

I have a deep-seated fear of unconscious plagiarism, to the point where I even suspect all my best lines and images to be stolen from someone else. One of the main reasons for my lack of enthusism for publishing my work anywhere other than my own blog is the fear that someone with an encyclopedic knowledge of modern poetry will discover my unwitting thefts. And even if I could know for sure that all my works are original, I would probably continue to feel at some level that I am an utter fraud as a poet. (I wonder if this is why so many of my fellow poets get MFAs?)

If I want to overcome this fear, I think I simply need to retrain my ears. Surely it can’t be too difficult to learn to distinguish one’s own unique vibrations from anybody else’s. My aphid-lion days are, after all, well behind me now.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Beta versions

SCENE: The local brewpub at happy hour, back corner of the bar.

COMPUTER GEEK: Wow, he sounds just like my ex-husband: good for a while, until you start to notice all the glaring imperfections. Total alpha.

BIOLOGIST: Oh yeah, mine too! Everything had to be done his way, didn’t matter what it was. Alpha male if there ever was one.

COMPUTER GEEK: Tell me about it. The quicker I adjusted every fucking thing to his modus operandi, the smoother things went. For a while. If I kept my eyes shut and put my fingers in my ears.

BIOLOGIST: Yup. And of course the problem is I’m a bit of an alpha myself, and he couldn’t handle that. Called me the the b-word to my face.

COMPUTER GEEK: Don’t be too hard on yourself! You don’t strike me as an alpha at all, though I suppose we’re all a little rough around the edges. Still, I like to think of myself more as a beta… and that’s definitely what I’m looking for in my next man. Must. Be. In. Beta.

BIOLOGIST: Well, I’ll go along with that! I’m definitely looking for a beta this time around. But I don’t mind admitting that’s because I’m an alpha. Someone has to be! Who’d keep all the betas in line, otherwise? Not all alphas are bad — just the ones that, you know, aren’t any good. (Laughs)

COMPUTER GEEK: Oh, well, I guess that’s true. Can’t have a beta without an alpha!

BIOLOGIST: Exactly.

COMPUTER GEEK: Still, don’t you think that, ideally, we should expect to get a little better at this each time? Relationships, I mean. I’d hate to think that anyone’s just stuck in an alpha version forever, doomed to make the mistakes with the same kinds of men over and over.

BIOLOGIST: Are you saying the beta pattern represents progress? I hadn’t thought about it that way before. To me, they’re just different ways of interacting, different social styles. But you’re right, come to think of it. As they get older, every alpha does eventually become an beta, or worse.

COMPUTER GEEK: Worse? You mean better! The beta stage is when you start to get real public participation, assuming we’re a public beta. The more people you have testing you out, the faster you’ll improve.

BIOLOGIST: I guess that’s one way of looking at it. Age certainly does mellow us out — or wear us down, I’m not sure which! And I’m intrigued by this idea that the beta stage is actually what we’re designed for. Some of the new research on human aging does tend to back that up. I think traditionally we’ve just been so focused on the reproductive stage that we’ve tended to ignore the vital social roles of, for example, non-breeding females.

COMPUTER GEEK: (warily) I’m not sure reproduction is quite the metaphor I’d use, but whatever. The important thing is that you have a pretty flexible architecture to begin with. If someone’s stuck in alpha, they just aren’t reaching their full potential.

INVESTOR (two stools down): I’m sorry, ladies, I couldn’t help overhearing a little of your conversation. I have to say I am fascinated by your interpretation of alpha and beta values!

(Biologist snorts)

I’ve always been told that you should go for a high alpha and a low beta, but it sounds like you’re saying the exact opposite! What other performance factors do you look at?

COMPUTER GEEK: Well, uh, it depends. Some people just look at adoption rate, but I’m a purist: I’m looking for elegance, I’m looking for simplicity, I’m looking for ease of use…

INVESTOR: (slides over to the adjacent stool) Tell me more!

BIOLOGIST: (in a loud mutter) Why the hell are males always so obsessed with performance? Do you have any fucking idea what we were talking about?

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Agony blogs

Everyman

Here begynneth a treatyse how þe hye Fader of Heven sendeth dethe to somon every creature to come and gyve acounte of theyr lyves in this worlde, and is in maner of an amorall blogge. So might the 15th-century classic Everyman begin, were it rewritten for the 21st-century internet. And why not? This is the age of the anonymous Every(wo)man: the troll, the hacker, the file sharer, the Wikipedia editor, the YouTuber. It makes sense that a culture obsessed with celebrities would find an anti-hero in Every(wo)man, whose touching or deplorable exploits are celebrated in dozens if not hundreds of highly popular blogs and websites. Consider:

  • FMyLife
    The ultimate agony column, minus the helpful advice part: anonymous readers submit brief vignettes illustrating their personal misery, and other anonymous readers get to vote either “i agree, your life is f****ed” or “you deserved that one.” Such interactivity, whether through voting or commenting, is of course a key contributor to the popularity of Every(wo)man blogs.
  • Post Secret
    One of the classiest blogs in this list. Not only is the concept itself brilliant — get people to send anonymous postcards containing some secret or confession — but the culture that has grown up around the blog encourages creativity. Many of the postcards are objects of beauty, lending pathos to their often sordid contents.
  • FOUND Magazine
    Another high-quality site, which is actually just the online appendage to an old-fashioned, tree-flesh magazine, showcasing “love letters, birthday cards, kids’ homework, to-do lists, ticket stubs, poetry on napkins, telephone bills, doodles — anything that gives a glimpse into someone else’s life.”
  • Stall Wall Poetry
    This is a really well-done blog, with a photo and transcription of each graffito (or exchange of graffiti), the exact location (including a Google map), and a brief comment from the blogger. Very occasionally, some of the graffiti does rise to the level of poetry, but most of it seems fairly tame, perhaps because it tends to be from Canada.
  • Overheard in the Office
  • Overheard in New York
  • Overheard Everywhere
    These are sister blogs. (There’s also an “Overheard on the Beach,” but who cares about that? Actually, one Overheard blog would’ve been plenty.) Again, most content is submitted by readers, but I find it a little disappointing: if these sites are any indication, most people don’t have much of an ear for the surreal. But sometimes the merely cute almost suffices:

    Young ice cream customer: I’m going to get a large sundae.
    Competitive young ice cream customer: Oh, yeah? I once had a sundae that was so big it was…it was… (thinks about it) up to the top of Jesus!

  • Best of Craigslist
  • You Suck at Craigslist
  • Fun with Craigslist
    Ah, Craigslist — no doubt a treasure-trove for future cultural historians. It’s kind of telling that there really isn’t much difference between the first collection and the second: the worst of Craigslist is the best of Craigslist. The author of the last blog isn’t content merely to showcase found disasters, but actually elicits new trainwrecks by responding to Craigslist ads in a crank-call fashion: pro-active schadenfreude.
  • Fail Blog
    The hugely popular blog devoted to failure of all kinds. Lowbrow fun — except when it’s too painful to watch, and you start to wonder just where the humor was supposed to lie and what the hell is wrong with us that we can take such pleasure in the failures of others. There seem to be a lot of niche-specific failure blogs out there, too, such as:
  • Cake Wrecks
    “When professional cakes go horribly, hilariously wrong.”
  • PhotoshopDisasters
  • Bad Parking

The failure blogs of most interest to me as a writer are those that focus on various kinds of found texts.

  • Passive-Aggressive Notes
    We laugh nervously. The anonymous authors of passive-agressive notes seem uncomfortably familiar.
  • Crummy Church Signs
    Decades before Twitter came along, there were church signboards with movable letters. The young and hip don’t have a monopoly on shallowness, thank Whomever. But not all the signs are crummy, either: “REMEMBER YOU ARE DUST,” says one. Hell, I remember that everytime I visit Fail Blog.
  • Vanity Plates: Creepiness in 8 Characters or Less
    What to make of someone whose licence plate reads CORPSE, or BIRTH, or simply WHY? This site is chock full of unintended writing prompts for poets and fiction writers alike.
  • texts from last night
    Text messages sent under the influence of alcohol, drugs, or sleep deprivation: a wonderful concept for a blog. Authors are identified by area code, and messages are presented out of context to increase their universal appeal, according to the About page. Samples of text-message wisdom include: “the best thing about dollar beer night is beer is only a dollar” and “i just thanked the atm machine for giving me cash.”
  • Engrish Funny
    The statement in the sidebar seems a little defensive: “Remain clam. I am a licensed Asian-American who has spend 14-years lived all over Asia. Please. Just enjoy.” Most of the bad English on the site is simply the result of poor machine translations, of course; it’s the fact that it was posted in public that makes it funny, like the sign in a Japanese supermarket that reads “Hand Shredded Ass Meat.”
  • The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks
  • Apostrophe Abuse
  • Apostrophe Catastrophes
  • Literally, a Web Log
    Blogs devoted entirely to documenting a single annoying grammatical faux pas can be hit-or-miss in the humor department. Of the foregoing, only the last one really does it for me. The use of literally to mean figuratively was funny when Ambrose Bierce pilloried it a hundred years ago in Write it Right, and it’s still funny today. It’s not the mistake of a poorly educated person, as unnecessary quotation marks or a poorly placed apostrophe tends to be; it’s the mark of someone who’s full of shit and doesn’t know it. And in that category also we might also include:
  • Banned for Life
    “Tom Mangan’s collection of reviled news media cliches” (except that, as the sidebar admits, the content is in fact reader-generated). I want to like this blog, but the total lack of links to sources makes that difficult.
  • The Perplexicon
    “Intentional misspellings of brands, trademarks, and companies.” As soon as we leave Every(wo)man behind, the humor fades. For those who were expecting some sort of moral here, a la the original Everyman, I guess that’ll have to do.
Posted on by Dave Bonta

Errata

Page iv, Acknowledgements: For “All the lovely ladies at Square Peg’s Round Hole in Crested Butte, Colorado” read “Carla, without whom none of this would matter”
Page 2, line 34: For “incessant screaming” read “frequent, energetic vocalization”
Page 8, line 3: For “heavily sedated” read “diagnosed with ADHD”
Page 14, line 11: For “Napalm Death” read “Bruce Springsteen”
Page 18, line 56: For “used” read “experimented with”
Page 23, line 5: For “two six-packs and a defective condom” read “a full moon”
Page 27, line 42: For “severe depression” read “the blues”
Page 31, line 10: For “anger management classes” read “continuing education”
Page 34, line 61: For “Harley-Davidson” read “second mortgage”
Page 36, line 4: For “restraining order” read “separation”
Page 36, line 22: For “social services” read “relatives”
Page 42, line 51: For “drug mule” read “adventure tourist”
Page 43, line 14: For “prison” read “group therapy”
Page 49, line 1: For “hair implants” read “Promise Keepers retreat”
Page 51, line 34: For “heart attack” read “wake-up call from Jesus”
Page 55, line 35: For “a lonely female professional with low self-esteem” read “the new love of my life”
Page 57, line 70: For “layoffs” read “voluntary redundancy program”
Page 62, line19: For “harassment” read “witnessing to my faith”
Page 66, line 27: For “stoned” read “self-actualized”
Page 73, line 8: For “relatives” read “elder care facility”
Throughout: Replace dashes with semicolons