Sun Lakes Wriers’ Group – October 202
Get Your Laugh On!
George Stahl
Aug. 16 is a day that comes alive with one-liners, long, drawn out jokes, short jokes, puns, limericks and quips. You have the chance to showcase those talents hidden under that thick skin, that reserved shell that you decide to show your co-workers, classmates, neighbors and friends on a daily basis. On Aug. 16 no one will be able to compete with your mastery of wit. ‘National Tell a Joke Day’ is a real thing.
We are actually able to pinpoint the year that the first ever joke was told in human history. According to a professor at the University of Wolverhampton, in England, the first joke was conveniently written down so people would not only remember it, but so lawyers of the time could sue anyone who used it without the consent of the author. Unfortunately, no one knows who that author of the ancient Sumerian proverb was, so a lawsuit is highly unlikely, but not impossible. It was 3,926 years ago in the city of Babylon that the joke originated according to Dr. Paul McDonald. Bear in mind that as in anything else from an ancient language, lost in translation can be applied. The joke was based on the earliest form of toilet humor. It involves a bride and groom on their wedding night and a fart. If you chose to tell this joke at a party, it could add to the humor if you tell the backstory and then say, ‘Stop me if you’ve heard this one.’ The joke is written like this, ‘Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap!’ Hahahaha!
Being the first joke like…ever, there was nothing to compare its humor to, so it was also the funniest at the time. Ah, but then thankfully, time went on and humor evolved. No, it was still potty humor, but it was more understandable potty humor. In the 10th century of British humor this was the joke circulating around the taverns. ‘What hangs at a man’s thigh and wants to poke the hole it’s often poked before?’ Contrary to what some of you might think, at least those who have their minds in the gutter, the punch line is not that! It is…. ‘a key.’
Whether you have a potty mouth, or have a teetotaler’s delivery, Aug. 16 is bound to be a lot of laughs. Host a laugh night somewhere, swing open the doors to a restaurant with a joke, walk into your church with a smile and a palm buzzer. It’s going to be belly laughing, knee slapping, hard to catch your breath day. Leave your inhibitions aside and let your inner child run wild. You may find out that your inner child needs a spanking.
Modern Speak
Lee Murray
Are you feeling out of sorts today? Not quite at 100% of where you normally are? If so, then maybe you are discombobulated or confused or to borrow from dictionary.com, you may just be upset, perturbed, disturbed, agitated, nonplused, dumbfounded, befuddled, bewildered, or even flustered.
Ever heard of an addled or a muddled mind? That usually refers to someone who is one chip short of a tortilla plate yet those are also synonyms of discombobulate, which may be a short term rather than a long-term dilemma.
For those concerned about discombobulation, here is a lighter look at the opposite definition courtesy of a humorous sign at Milwaukee Mitchell Airport which following security checkpoints, is a recombobulation area where you can reassemble your articles taken off during screening like shoes, belts, purses, and your phones and laptops.
And on the subject of laptops, I must confess to being discombobulated each and every time the subject of high tech is broached, more specifically that of AI, which thankfully reared its head after I decided to throw in the towel and call it quits on the workday grind. I really cannot imagine making my living doing something as seemingly ubiquitous as technical computer support which to me would be akin to daily root canal surgery. But then where would we be without the IT guys at the other end of the 800 calls or those fellows from Geek Squad who show up at your home trying to fix whatever we’ve managed to botch on our computers?
Trying to talk to these fellows about what is amiss with your computer or printer is kind of like explaining to the mechanic what is going on with your car. No matter how hard you try to clearly describe what is happening with your beloved automobile, you end up feeling like the village idiot.
“Well, you see Mr. Mechanic, the thingamajig or thingamabob over here isn’t working and I keep hearing this clunk-clunk-clunk sound when I start the engine and whatever this doohickey is on the control panel keeps lighting up and this doodad on the window switch won’t work half the time.” Meanwhile the guy’s eyes glaze over pretending to understand but you feel like you might as well be speaking in mandarin Chinese.
So rather than feeling flummoxed at being discombobulated on any given day, just realize it’s all part of the human condition. Just be glad that we’re not living in the past when your grandparents might have used words like bumfuzzled for being confused or sozzled, a description of being drunk or even bumbershoot, an old-fashioned word for an umbrella.
One more benefit in living in today’s world is the ease of navigating in language and most anything else. Except with those technical experts. To those young pups, we’re just a bunch of old fuddy-duddies but to us, they only speak gobbledygook, just another old-time word for gibberish.
Snowstorms
Bill Kip
Well you can say one of my snowstorms started off on a difficult note. I was in Denver about June of 1976. I had graduated from college and had become comfortable living there. It seems as though the city somehow had overextended itself and hired at least one percent more than they had the money in the payroll. I was on the cutting list. The new found love of my job went out the door. I decided that I would try out Seattle. I knew that they had trucking there. But, after I got a union card and did a lot of sweating, I quit the job and took off to Lake Tahoe. I had an invitation to go to Lake Tahoe from a service buddy. At the time I had a Pinto, which tells about how long ago it was. I was heading West and drove through a snowstorm and was so lost I didn’t know where I was going and couldn’t see anything. The heater didn’t even put out enough heat to warm up the car. I wanted to pull off to the side of the road, but I was afraid to do so for fear of something happening. Then came the glorious sign on the side of the road that said Welcome to the state of Utah. In other words I had made it through the mountains of Colorado. But going to Lake Tahoe was nothing compared to Colorado. At times the passes getting into Lake Tahoe are closed because the authorities deem it too treacherous to drive through them. There’s one spot I know where the torrential rain or melting snow just pours across the mountain tops. One rock jutting upwards 3,000 or 4,000 feet above, I could imagine seeing a VW Bug sitting on top of that rock. It could easily fall into a valley. Throughout the Tahoe area it’s nothing to see cars covered with snow. One day I was listening to the weather report, and it reported 70 feet of snow that year and that was in just the first few months of the season. It’s nothing to have gas or power outages because of a snowstorm, or a run on the grocery store where they have run out of groceries because they can’t get the deliveries in. The one year they had so much snow it took out two highways. On one side there was so much moisture in the dirt the highway collapsed, on the other side of the highway a portion of the highway collapsed on top of the existing highway. The road workers took advantage of the collapse and were panning for gold, because it was in the area where gold had been found about a decade before Sutters Mill. So, Lake Tahoe can present dangerous conditions. As beautiful as Snow Country can be, it’s also full of dangerous treacherous conditions.