Category: Humor

Hallmalarkey Movies

It’s that time of year when Hallmark Christmas movies (and their imitators on Lifetime, Netflix, et. al.) are streaming 24/7.  In these Christmas-cookie-cutter cinematic confections, you are apt to encounter many of the items on the following list. (N.B. you can use the list for a drinking game—at your peril.)

  • A first kiss between the leads is interrupted just as their lips are about to make contact
  • A homemade ornament is made/shown/discussed (a homemade wreath can substitute if necessary)
  • A gingerbread house is constructed, or, at least, prominently featured in several shots
  • There is a Christmas ball or dance, and the female lead is the only one there in a bright red gown (about which the male lead says, “You look amazing/beautiful/stunning/…)
  • Firewood is chopped
  • Someone says, “I can’t move here! My life is in (New York/Seattle/St. Louis/Minneapolis/some big city)”
  • Eggnog is ostentatiously served
  • Two characters (usually, but not necessarily, the leads) bond while ice skating
  • A major expository scene between major characters takes place as they pick out a Christmas tree
  • A Christmas tree is decorated
  • There’s a snowball fight
  • One of the leads is a single parent or is raising a cute niece/nephew who has been orphaned
  • One or more of the main characters is mourning the recent loss of a parent/parent figure
  • One of the leads delivers a variation on the line, “Mom always loved Christmas!”
  • There’s a town tree-lighting ceremony
  • A conflict between crass commercialism and small town values drives part of the story (in a drinking game, two drinks if the villain is a real estate developer)
  • Someone says, “You can’t have too much Christmas”
  • There’s one final misunderstanding/plot crisis that is handily resolved within the final three minutes

Carols of Bad Behavior

It’s the most wonderful time of the year, featuring the omnipresent background soundtrack of holiday carols that, from sheer repetition, leads me willy-nilly to generate parodic mockeries.

Here are three:

🎵“Good King Wenceslas got high
On coke and pot and acid,
Then he awoke on Christmas morn
Absolutely blasted.
He tried to smoke the Christmas tree,
But he couldn’t light it.
Tried to kick the habit but
He just couldn’t fi-ight it!!”🎶

🎵“I polished off a 6-pack of beer,
The chips, dips, and a cheese tray.
And now I’m sprawled face down on the couch,
So I can’t see the walls sway.
My bladder’s full but I can’t get up,
The bathroom seems miles away.
Good will to all who have self-restraint,
But that sure ain’t me today!”🎶

🎵“O! come to our meeting
When we’ll exchange our stories
Of binges and benders
That we can’t quite recall.
Sadly, our families
Remember every detail
Of their humiliation
At our self-degradation
And vows of reparation
That we broke one and all!”🎶

Alternative Captions and the Holidays

Many years ago, when I first visited my future in-laws over the holidays, I saw that they had set up a small crèche as one of their holiday decorations. I may (or may not) have scandalized them by remarking, “It looks like they’re all saying to each other, ‘I’m not going to change Him; are you?’’’

In any case, flash forward some three decades and I thought that I might attempt a Nativity scene for my sometimes-annual, always-badly-drawn (for I know no other way to draw) holiday card. For its caption I came up with a related baby Jesus poopoo joke, “Gold, frankincense, myrrh…but nobody brought Pampers?” After a few hours work, it was completed.

And then I thought of an edgier caption. Poopoo jokes are always comedy gold, but given our divisive times, this is the caption with which I finally went:

Holiday card 2021 captioned "He doesn't LOOK Jewish!"However (and it seems there’s always a “however” in comedy) my pointing out the baby Jesus’ religion made me realize that at the Nativity He was just a few short days from His bris, and that led me to this:

alternative Holiday card captioned "I'm just here for the circumcision."

And, if you think that is a far-fetched reason for one of the Three Kings to “traverse afar” to attend the Nativity, you ain’t never heard of the Holy Prepuce!

The Kugel Joke

[I have heard this joke told a number of times. It is in essence a “shaggy dog” story, a long meandering narrative that is more fun in the telling, in how long one can spin it out and in which absurd directions, than in delivering its punchline, which is not much of a punchline at all. The following is the bare scaffolding of the Kugel Joke; your job is to embellish it as best you can in your own telling.]

Just as the Melish family was sitting down to Hanukkah dinner, the doorbell rang. It was their neighbor Mr. Levitz.

Not wishing to be inhospitable, Mrs. Melish set a place for him at the table beside their youngest son, and invited their visitor to sit down. Levitz sat, saying, “Thank you but I just ate.”

Dishes began to be handed around. When young Fielding Melish passed Levitz the soup, Levitz said, “Oh no, I couldn’t possibly…well, maybe just a little,” and filled his bowl.

Next came the bean salad, and Levitz said, “Really, I’m full…well, maybe just a spoonful or two,” and covered half his plate.

Then came the latkes, and Levitz said, “I really shouldn’t, but maybe one…,” and took three.

And the apple-sauce: “Just a dab,” as he ladled on a large heap.

Next came the brisket: “Oh, maybe a slice…at most!” And he took three thick slices, including the coveted end piece.

And then, finally, Fielding handed him the kugel casserole, and Levitz’s eyes lit up: “KUGEL! Now kugel I could eat!!!”

Amusements for Insomniacs

I happened to be awake just before 2AM this morning, so I put on my Apple Watch and watched to see what happened when 2AM rolled around and Daylight Saving Time ended. At exactly 2, as the second hand passed 12 on the watch face, nothing. Then, at 4 seconds past 2, the hour hand jumped back one hour.

How exciting!

(As for why California did the Daylight Saving Time Tango this year, blame politics.)

A Glimpse of Rivendell on My Wrist

I recently replaced my original model Apple Watch (sometimes referred to as a “Series 0” model) with a Series 4. I really liked my old watch, but Apple stopped issuing system updates for that model so I knew its days on my wrist were numbered. When I finished a couple of particularly big projects recently, I decided that my reward would be a new Apple Watch.

The new Series 4 is a worthy replacement. Everything (except, of course, the time) runs much faster on it. It has a much better speaker. It does ECGs. It has great battery life. It can spit water!

But my favorite feature is its slightly larger display, and its ability to run the Kaleidoscope watch face full-screen on it.

On my old watch I had created a Kaleidoscope watch face based on a photo I had taken of some jacaranda tree blossoms. The result was a watch face I nicknamed “Rivendell.”

Rivendell looked lovely on my old watch, and it continues to look lovely on my new one. But when I made a full-screen version of it for my new Apple Watch, it became mesmerizing. In fact, it’s so mesmerizing that I consume much of my new Apple Watch’s extra battery power by keeping my portal into Rivendell running on my wrist for minutes at a time while I gaze at it. It’s very calming—much more so than the Breathe app.

Rivendell Face Full-Screen
A still image cannot convey the stately Elvish grace of this slowly animating watch face.

Now, I don’t know for a fact that jacarandas grew in Rivendell, but Elrond, who ran the place, knew Gandalf, and he knew the Valar queen Yavanna Kementári (the Giver of Fruits)  back in the old country, and she is the one who basically planted all the original foliage on Middle-Earth, so if Elrond had wanted one of those purple-blossomed lovelies in his valley estate, he could probably pull a few strings.…

The Day I Didn’t Take the Pledge

I saw this story about a boy who was arrested for refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance, and it reminded me of a similar transgression from my youth.

When I was in high school, we had to say the Pledge of Allegiance at the beginning of the first class we had each day. It was the end of the turbulent 1960s, the Viet Nam war was raging, protest was in the air, and I thought the school was ludicrous to ask students to renew their pledge of loyalty to a piece of cloth every day, as though the pledge wore off sometime overnight and had to be reapplied. So one day I decided not to.

At the time, my first class of the day was German, and my German teacher and I had an interesting relationship. On the one hand, she sincerely seemed to like me, but on the other my inability not to open my mouth and crack wise at the slightest opportunity infuriated her sensibilities. Almost every day she tried (and failed) to put me in my place, usually literally with a hollered “Setzen Sie sich!”, and so she saw this refusal of mine to stand up and recite the Pledge as a particularly valuable opportunity for place-putting.

She ordered me to report to the Principal’s office to explain myself. This order wasn’t because she disagreed with my anti-Pledge stance—she was something of an anti-war liberal herself and, I think, secretly approved of my protest. Rather, it was a double-bird-with-a-single-stone opportunity for her: she could get my disruptive ass out of her class for one day, and could bedevil the school Principal, whose few fans among the faculty did not include her, with my smug adolescent attitude and anti-war sentiments.

So I marched off to the Principal’s office, which, by the way, I (and my parents) had already come to know well at this point in my academic career. As I impassively stood before his desk, he fixed me with an obsidian gaze asked me why I was there. I told him that I had refused to say the Pledge that day and that Frau Vorster had ordered me to see him about it.

“I see,” he said, and then launched into a lecture about liberty and freedom and all the flag stood for and about all the brave men who had given their lives for it over the years. He wrapped up by asking me if I would say the Pledge out of respect for them.

I told him, “No.”

Non-plussed, he asked me sternly, “Is it because you hate America?”

With feigned outrage, I replied, “No.”

“So, then, why won’t you say it?”

Finally, the jackpot question, the one that my teacher likely assumed I would answer with some anti-war sentiment or other, delivered with all the self-assured righteousness and disdain of which she knew I was capable. I told him, “I didn’t say the Pledge because we don’t have a proper flag to say it to.”

His eyes widened. “What do you mean? Of course your classroom has a flag.”

“Yes, but it’s not an American flag.”

“What?!”

“The flag in our classroom has only 48 stars,” I smugly let him know.

And it was true. I had noticed early on that the flag in my German classroom had but 48 stars—although Hawaii and Alaska had become states around ten years earlier, the school had not yet got around to replacing all the old 48-star flags in its classrooms with the current 50-star edition. “I refuse to pledge allegiance to a flag that isn’t our country’s flag!” I said proudly.

He blinked and summoned the head custodian, who said he would check, and left. We sat and waited in silence. A few minutes later he stuck his head back in the office and said, “Kid’s right. I’ll change it.”

The Principal and I stared at each other for a few more seconds, then he lowered his eyes and gruffly ordered me back to class.

My teacher nodded at me as I came back and smiled to herself, no doubt thinking that I had either kowtowed to the Principal or had been dismissed from his presence out of sheer annoyance. What she thought later that day when the custodian brought in a new flag and swapped out the old one I never bothered to ask her.