Meet Jack.

Laugh? I nearly hacked my family to death with an axe!

A True Fact That Nonetheless Sounds Strange In Mine Own Ears

My four-cheese veggie lasagne was a big hit at the church picnic today.

The Business

D is putting together a small retail craft venture, and she and I were talking about designing some cards. Which made me remember (don’t know why I’m in such an anecdotal mood lately, but there it is) the best business card I ever saw.

I forget the fellow’s actual name, now, which is terrible of me. He was an older man, retired; a man apparently of some means, who devoted a great deal of time to singing—with his church choir and in amateur theatricals: I met him when we were both in a production of HMS Pinafore, in which I sang Deadeye.

By way of an introduction he handed me his card, which read, in full, something like this:

CHARLES KELLER
BARITONE

...only with his actual name, you know.

Class. When I grow up, I want to be a mad old man like that.

What’s the Word?

I’ve just been accused elsewhere of having made a bon mot ¹, which, while flattering, reminds me of something that happened to me some years ago, when I was taking night courses at the College.

This was in a marketing course. As part of a semester-long exercise, the class was broken into small groups to compete against each other in a computer-simulated marketing exercise. Our hypothetical product was a word-processing software package. Each team had to come up with a name; because the simulation software was a cranky DOS-based thing, said name could not be longer than eight letters. While other teams were kicking around names like WORDPRO and WRITENOW and WORDSTAR—some of which were the actual names of existing (if obscure) products—I casually suggested that BONMOT might be cute.

My teammates—who were all day students, and much younger than I—agreed, and so Team BonMot we were. It wasn’t until the end of the semester that I learned that not one of them had the faintest idea of what the phrase meant—and (after hearing him pronounce it to rhyme with “dot”) that nor did the instructor.

¹ On the Internet, this means that you’ve insulted someone very cruelly, but done so in an amusing or witty manner, in keeping with Oscar Wilde’s dictum that a gentleman is never unintentionally rude.

Justice. Mastery. Honesty.

The citizens of a Bosnian town, deeply divided along partisan and ethnic lines, find a figure behind whom they can all rally as they struggle to rebuild in the wake of a brutal civil war.

There’s a sweet audio interview here, too.

This is kind of a beautiful story, too. It’s lovely when a young person wants to make something of himself.

The Secret Life of the Giant-Killer

I’ve done this before, but what the hell. Like any blogger worth his salt, I like to check out my stats and see how people are getting to this page. Direct links are always flattering, but what fascinates me are the random hits I get from search engines—often from folks who don’t know the trick about enclosing complete phrases in quotation marks. I’ve been compiling the weirdest ones since I started keeping stats, almost two years ago—but I was never quite sure what to do with ‘em: If I blog about these search terms, the presence of these keywords will actually attract more weirdos by pushing me up in the Google listings.

You know what? It’s worth the risk. Point and laugh at these beauties...

names of foreigner scientist

I love the ones where the searcher is obviously just flailing.

david knopfler sorrow

Oh, I think we can all guess David Knopfler’s sorrow...

riddle Little tiger with one eye On three legs, it's standing high. A flash of lightning in the sky,

See, I don’t know this one, and I’d like to.

why do girl nipples taste like onions

Um... are you sure those are nipples? For that matter, are you sure that’s a girl?

masturbation ideas context

...How much context do you need?

gut bucket dry humping the american dream

Dude’s got issues. And, I’d wager, a well-thumbed copy of the collected works of Hunter Thompson.

can your penis decrees in size

So be it decreed!

funny pictures of khadafy

He’s a laff riot, that Khadafy.

THERE'S SOMEONE LIVING IN THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT

*jumping out of chair, looking frantically behind me*

jack chick blinded gay

Oh, we should be so lucky.

ghost riders in the sky "the greatest song ever"

I beg to disagree...

trumpet fingerings "seven nation army"

...because obviously a marching-band version of “Seven Nation Army” would be the greatest song ever. Duh.

fuck is a 4 letter word

Thanks for the tip.

the toy doll barbie has a new boyfriend australian what's his name

Oh, I know this one...

BILL FRISELL ANY RELATION TO LEFTY FRISELL

Ooh! I know this one, too!

writer of the song "Purple Jesus"

Wait—you mean besides me?

"avoiding the tonic"

Sticking to straight gin, then? Sensible.

michelangelo poncing method

I don’t know what it was, but it musta worked pretty well.

distorted poems spiders in my brain

dinosaurs farts comic

Uh... okay.

bergamot mojito

lemon thyme cigarette

Suddenly, I need a drink. And a smoke.

mandolin strings tighten never use drill destroy

Faster, Randy Scruggs! Kill! Kill!

pictures of lady meteorologists naked

That’s a pretty out-there fetish, huh...?

bart simpson fucking comics

Oh God. Nobody really...would they...?

hi & lois comic strip porn

Christ. We’ve only starting plumbing the depths of this, haven’t we...

phantom ghost who walks slash

My only comfort is that there can’t be more than one person who would...

the phantom comics slash

AAAAAGHH YOU ARE KILLING ALL THAT IS GOOD AND DECENT

justine frischmann lip curl

goddam comeback elastica

Man, somebody really didn’t like The Menace, huh?

TARZAN WEARS A SPEEDO

Thanks for the tip.

a picture of something sudden and violent but brief

Just for you, friend:

Ah. After this weekend, that cheers me up immensely.

The Devil's Dictionary

CECIL GRAHAM.         What is a cynic?

LORD DARLINGTON.   A man who knows the price of everything
                                 and the worth of nothing.

Now try that definition on the libertarian.

The Door Is Locked, Just You And Me

Normal service will resume shortly.

You Want To Do Something?

Do this. Doesn't cost you a dime, doesn't sign you up for a damn thing.

Just do it, and pass it on.

All God’s Children

In every Catholic parish to which I’ve ever gone, there’s one, and just one, and he’s always the same. A mentally handicapped man, no longer young—somewhere between 25 and 50, though the curious facial cast of Down’s makes it hard to say exactly. He’s always short and barrel-y, neatly dressed though his short-sleeved shirt ill fits him. His face is a little red, and he’s always got a haircut you could set your watch by.

His voice is always improbably deep, improbably flat, improbably carrying. He joins in every response, every song.

Even the ones he doesn’t know.
Especially the ones he doesn’t know.
And always—always—precisely four-tenths of a second behind everyone else.

And he always—in every parish I’ve ever attended—goes to the Saturday 5:00 PM Mass.

He is there in the first place because the Catholic Church has a strong pro-life culture. But his presence—specifically, his uncanny, musically-ruinous lag time—tends to lead choir directors to abandon that whole “still small voice” thing for a take-no-prisoners approach. When “On Eagle’s Wings” comes around—bitch, someone’s goin’ down.