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Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
Hey, everybody.
I’m here because HR Lady, in a comment on my last post, requested a ‘nooner’. And far be it from me to turn down anything that even sounds like sex, so… here I am. In the noon hour. Whipped cream and peacock feathers by my side. Let’s all join in, shall we?
(Yes, that’s right — I’m highly suggestible, in addition to being anatomically correct and fully posable. Please, ladies, don’t injure yourselves clamoring to get a look.)
Anyway, I hope you’ll forgive me if our little ‘nooner’ today is also a ‘quickie’. Sure, I care about your needs and all, but I’ve got shit to do here at work. I’m a busy man. Plus, I’ve got a 2pm meeting with one of my bosses, and I’m pretty sure I don’t want to have her walk in here and see me typing about ‘nooners’ and ‘peacock feathers’ and ‘quickies’. At best, she’d be outraged. At worst… well, let’s just say that I’m not that eager to climb the corporate ladder. I’m pretty happy as a peon, frankly.
So, on to the matter at hand. I just wanted to let all of you know that I lost — or, more optimistically, ‘misplaced’ — my Comedy Notebook™ last night. It’s a little teeny pocket notebook that I write little lines and thoughts in, for use here or in my standup sets. (Two of which are going up tonight, by the way — I’ve just got to write the show descriptions.)
Now, because I’m here every day, and in front of a mike once or twice a week, most of the decent ideas get used in some form or another, soon after I write them in the book. But a few have fallen through the cracks, or didn’t really get off the ground, or… well, frankly, probably sucked. Still, I took the time to write ’em down, and so I’m a little bit bummed that I don’t have the book to flip through when the idea well is dry.
However, I do remember a couple of the things that were ‘orphaned so far’ in my Handy Dandy Notebook™, and so I’ll pass them along to you. I’m not sure how many I’ll be able to think of, but I’ll give it a try. Let’s see how it goes.
From a conversation with a friend a couple of months ago: Why are escalators always breaking down?
Many times when I go to a mall in Boston, and seemingly every time I use the subway, at least one of the escalators is blocked off and broken. Why the hell is that? These don’t seem like particularly complicated devices, frankly.
In the grand scheme of airplanes and computers and putting-a-man-on-the-moon, is it really that fricking hard to keep a bunch of moving stairs functioning properly? Where’s the problem, here?
I think I was reminded of this by someone else’s blog entry a few weeks ago: My mother has the hardest time with seat belts.
She always wears one, diligently, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen her wear one comfortably. She’s a fairly… um, ‘ample‘ woman (*shudder* look, it’s my mom, okay?), and so I’m guessing that she needs to get the strap just so, snaked in between, uh, you know, them.
So she stretches the thing out as far as she can, and wiggles and worms it, and tugs and pulls, and finally gets more or less settled. Then we hit a bump, or take a turn too quick, and the seat belt shifts, and she’s yanking and squirming and fiddling again. I really think she’d be happier in a baby seat, but she’s never warmed up to my suggestion.
I made up a statistic a few days ago.
(I’m telling you that, but if I manage to find a way to use this on stage, I’ll just throw it out as fact; they don’t need to know the depths to which I’ll sink for a joke, right?)
Here’s the stat, and I like it because it sounds like it could be real (though in reality, it’s probably too low): A recent study has shown that, at any given time, six percent of the people surfing the web are masturbating.
(Jeez, from my mom’s boobs to masturbation… well, shit, warm up my seat on the Bus to Hell.)
Anyway, it seems like there are a lot of places to go with that. My first try went something like this:
‘Six percent! That means that, on average, we’re ‘letting our fingers do the whacking’ for almost four minutes for every hour we’re online.
Now, folks, I spend a lot of time online, and I’ve got to say… four minutes an hour? Please! That’s ridiculous.
I can’t even last two minutes — have you seen some of the shit that’s out there? It’s hot! I’ll pull up a page, and say,
‘Oh, yeah… oh, that’s it, baby, work — *snap!* Oh. Damn.’
There’s no way I could last four minutes every hour. That’s impossible. I’ll tell you what’s happening — that average is skewed. See, for every hundred or so pimply young kids and guys like me out there, there’s one woman pulling up scans of Antonio Banderas’ bare ass from Original Sin, and ‘milking the moocow’ for three hours at a time.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course. It just throws the numbers way off.‘
Okay, that’s all I can think of for now.
Hey, on the good side, this wasn’t so short after all, was it?
(And no, I don’t say that to all the girls, thank you very little.)
On the other hand, it can’t really be a ‘nooner’ any more, since it’s after one pm. And I’ve really got to get back to work now. So you’ll just have to settle for this ‘one-er’ (stop it… don’t say it… be nice), and wait for the next installment for more hilarity.
Which might just be tomorrow’s Punchline Fever! — get those zingers ready, folks! Peace out.
Permalink | 5 CommentsWell, holiday crap on a Christmas cracker! I’m late! I’m gonna have to backdate this puppy, so it counts for Wednesday. Damn, I hate being all sneaky and underhanded like that.
(Sure, I’ll do it, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. It’s a little like dressing up in the crotchless overalls and the farmer hat on ‘Date Night’. It seems wrong, but there’s a big payoff at the end, so you just try not to think about it and get to the good part.
Okay, so I guess it’s not really very much like that at all, is it? The payoff here probably isn’t gonna be all that good. On the other hand, think of all the chafing I don’t have to go through!
Or, um, on second thought, don’t. No good can come from that, really. Just pretend we never had this little talk, would you?)
So, I have an excuse for my tardiness — most of which revolves around the fact that it’s Wednesday. Wednesdays are soooo not ‘freaky styley’ for me lately. I think I’ve bitched about this before, so I won’t bother you with it again.
(On the other hand, I also won’t bother to go find the link to my previous bellyaching. Time’s a-wastin’ already, folks — you can’t expect me to actually link to shit, too, can you? Jeepers.)
Anyway, the point is this — I left my house at well before 9am today, suffered through three meetings and a ‘working lunch’, and got back home at 8pm, just in time to run out the door for my show at the Emerald Isle tonight. It’s now a quarter till one in the morning (though I’ll fix that little red wagon when I post this entry), and I’ve been back home for… oh, basically long enough to creep up the stairs and out of my pants. And to write whatever you see so far. Wednesdays are hard!
But never mind all of that. The good news, if you’re the right-thinking sort of stand-up, do-right trooper that I know you are, is that I’ll soon be posting a link to tonight’s show, which actually went fairly well. And, as a bonus — and only because I love each and every one of you so much I could just squeeze the juice right outta ya — I’ll also post a link to my last show, from Wednesday the 3rd.
(See? See how I called that a ‘bonus’, even though really, I’ve just been lazy and forgotten to download the clip from the camera, and you already really deserved it long ago? Now that’s what a ‘tax cut’ is like, kiddies. Go tell your parents that you learned something today.)
All right; I have no idea where this is going, quite frankly. How about if I just throw a few random thoughts down here, and we’ll call it even until today tomorrow. Shit, I almost slipped up there; we’ll call it even until tomorrow. Right.
So, here are a few things that are on my mind at the moment:
It seems to me that a lot of people get away with smoking an awful lot of weed by calling it ‘medicinal marijuana’. That’s pretty cute, actually. But what I’m wondering is this: does that work for anything?
Can I just throw the weight of medical science behind any vice I’m interested in redeeming, and gain carte blanche to do whatever the hell I want? Can I claim ‘medicinal crystal meth’? ‘Physician-approved homocide’? ‘Clinically prescribed blowjobs’? Anybody know where the line gets drawn on this one?
Tonight, in my set — and, I believe, for the first time on stage — I used the phrase ‘ball sack’. I have two things to say about that. First, even though the obvious connotation is hilarious enough, is it humanly possible for any Simpsons fan to see or hear those words without hearing Principal Skinner in their head, saying, ‘Now chew through my ball sack‘? I assert that it is impossible.
Second, this is one of those magical phrases which can be made simultaneously nastier and more clinical-sounding by removing a single letter: ‘ball sac’. Sort of like ‘hey men’, only less so.
Yeah, I really don’t know where the hell I was going with that. Next!
In my quest to be ever-more annoying at my workplace, I’ve pledged to start using ‘outrageous‘ as much as possible in conversation. I’ve planned a three-prong attack on this front:
I’ll use it as an adjective in sort of a Queer Eye way, to describe a person’s clothing, hair, or attitude: ‘Those chinos are simply outrageous!’
I’ll use it to replace the words ‘funny’, ‘hilarious’, or ‘unboobered, especially when being ironic: ‘Oh, that Gallagher is so outrageous! What a classic!‘
Finally, I’ll use it as an exclamation when angered or upset, instead of using ‘bitches!’, ‘poopstain!’, or ‘cockpottery!’ (which I just made up… but that’s good, dammit!): ‘What? I’ve been fired for being too annoying? Outrageous!‘
If someone in my office hasn’t killed me by the end of next week, then they’re either a bunch of pansy wusses, or I’m not doing it right. I’ll keep you posted. Thank you, and good night!
Permalink | 2 CommentsTime for a quick update on how the ‘settling in’ to this new site is going.
There’s still quite a bit of work to do, but it’s starting to come together. You’ll still find some links back to the old site; you’ll just have to look a little further back in the archives to find them.
(No, really, go ahead and try — I dare you. Go read everything I’ve ever written, and find all the links back to Blog*Spot. Come on, it’ll be fun. I double-dog dare you.)
But apart from that — and importing all those comments from the old digs, which I’m pretty much ignoring for the moment — it’s going pretty damned smoothly. I’ve made a couple of little changes, here and there, but I think the coolest thing about my new software is all the syndication options I’ve got now. Hell, I even put a new section on the sidebar (called, dully enough, ‘Syndimacation‘) to keep track of ’em all. It’s crazy!
When I was on Blogger — way, way back a couple of weeks ago — I had an Atom feed, plus an RSS file that was badly-formatted, out-of-date, soon-to-be-history (because the host, BlogMatrix, was folding). On the cutting edge, I wasn’t.
(Well, okay, maybe for Blogger, I was. But let’s not poke fun at the old host, all right? Sophisticated or not, they were good to me for several months. There’s no need to be snarky.)
But now — now — I’ve got simply oodles of options for syndication. (Or syndimacation, even.) I’ve got the same Atom feed, but now there are two kinds of RSS output, plus a new beast called RSD. How fricking cool is that? I’ve updated every blog-tracking site that I could think of (plus a boatload that I didn’t think of, but were in the RSS Top 55 list, which I highly recommend) to use one of the new feeds. And while I was doing that, I found something really cool. And I can’t keep a secret for shit, so now I’m gonna tell all of you. But you owe me. Big time.
(Unless it’s not nearly as cool as I think it is. But I think it is as cool as I think it is, so I don’t think that’s gonna happen. At least, I think not. Or maybe I just think I think not.
Wow. Now I’m just dizzy all over. Forget I ever started these parentheses. What a friggin’ train wreck.)
Okay, so, the cool thing. It seems that My Yahoo (which I use as my home page) has recently started syndimacating RSS feeds, too. And they’ve even got an information page that tells you how to get Yahoo to pick up your own RSS feed.
So what does all this mean? Well, if you take a few minutes to add your RSS to their list, and ping Yahoo each time you post, then people can see your drivel right on their My Yahoo page. I submitted my feed, and then, erm, ‘subscribed myself’.
(Yeah, it tickled a little; please don’t try to picture it. If I weren’t double-jointed in a couple of key places, I don’t think it would have ever worked.)
Anyway, it’s way cool — there I am, headlines and all, right between ‘official’ news and the latest scoop on my favorite sports teams. It’s blog heaven, right there on my home page. You blog-slingin’ types simply must try it out. It’s a little like seeing your own name on a marquee or something. Only better, because you don’t have to go through all the trouble of sleeping your way to the top first. It’s really quite the timesaver.
And if you’re interested, make with the clickies on my ‘Add to My Yahoo’ button on the sidebar, and add me to your page, too. You can take top billing, of course; I’m happy just to be a supporting actor. It’s all good.
So, that’s my new cool toy. I’m sure the whole ‘kid at Christmas’ thing will pass soon enough, and I’ll be on to some other ridiculous thing or other. I’ll hack my content onto Salon.com, or find a way to make boobered the ‘Word of the Day’ in some online dictionary. Something like that. But until then, I’m gonna go stare at myself plastered all over my home page. Hey, it beats slow-dancing with myself in the mirror. Baby steps, people. Baby steps.
Permalink | 9 CommentsOkay, peeps and peepettes, it’s time for another Blogger Idol. Hop on and hold tight, folks; this train’s leavin’ the station… now. Woo-woo!
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Week Eight: ‘I Confess’
Aw, well, crap.
I don’t know anything about confessing. It’s just not the sort of thing I do. I get away with shit, or I get caught red-handed. There’s really no middle ground, I’m afraid. I don’t sneak off with somebody else’s beer, or answers from their test, or their new Lexus, and then come back and say,
‘Yeah, I’m sorry. I did it.‘
Sure, I’ll occasionally ‘confess’ to shit that I didn’t do, but only to my wife. And only when I’m a-hankerin’ for a spankerin’, if you know what I’m saying. But I don’t think that counts, really. I don’t even think she really believes that I’m responsible for things like high taxes, or psoriasis, or the Crimean War. But she plays along. She’s cool like that.
Anyway, I’m afraid that I really don’t know much about confessing, in the usual sense. Usually, I get nailed in the act when I try anything surreptitious and sneaky. And I’m sure as hell not gonna start now, and give myself up on the few things that I was able to get away with. You never know who reads this drivel, or who’s gonna hold a grudge when they find out that I took credit for their term paper, so they’d have to repeat a year of college instead of me. Or traded my lottery ticket with theirs before telling them the winning numbers. Or convinced the doctor that the kidney on ice was for me, not them, even when I didn’t really need a kidney. Who knows which people out there are still hanging on to hard feelings over crap like that? People can be so petty sometimes, you know?
So I’m not going to do any actual ‘confessing’ in this post. I have precious few secrets left as it is, without digging through my closet, looking for skeletons to fling out.
(Besides, that’s not where I keep the bodies, anyway. Oops, shit. I’ve said too much. Never mind the thing about the ‘bodies’, okay? Don’t make me come over there.)
Maybe I should just clam up about this whole ‘confessing’ thing, before I let something important slip, eh? I think that’s probably for the best; I’m in enough trouble as it is, from all the things I didn’t get the chance to confess to. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go tell my wife that I’m really the one behind that whole Area 51 fiasco.
Yeah, I’m running out of things to confess to, I know. Look, I’ve needed a lot of spankings; what can I say? I’m a baaaad boy.
Permalink | 4 CommentsMan, I hate clothes sometimes.
Don’t get me wrong — it’s not that I want to go without clothes.
(Trust me, nobody wants me to go without clothes. I scare plenty of children and old ladies as it is, without jiggling anything ‘flabtacular’ in their faces. The more of me that’s covered, the better.)
But I just wish that clothes didn’t have to be so fricking complicated all the damned time. I’m a fan of living a simple life, you see — sleep, work, eat, watch a couple of Simpsons episodes, write a bit, cuddle with the wife, and do it all over again. I don’t have the bandwidth for things like ‘fashion’ or ‘style’ or ‘unstained T-shirts’. That’s for rich folks.
Instead, I get by with the basics — jeans and rugbies in the winter, shorts and golf shirts in the summer. Sneakers or loafers on the feet, and big, fat, white tube socks on the ankles. And calves, and creeping up onto my knees. I’m talking way up there — any further up my legs, and my socks would need a button fly, if you sniff what I’m wafting. Of course, that’s only with jeans — with shorts, the socks get scrunched way down, or come off entirely. They’re really the only moving part in the whole production; I don’t accessorize, I don’t ‘mix ‘n’ match’, and I am not a ‘clothes hound’. ‘Keep it stupid, simple’ — that’s my motto.
And so, I would hope that my clothes would never cause me grief or embarrassment. I think I’ve made it abundantly clear that I’m not particularly interested in them, that I see their presence as a necessary evil, but that our relationship will never extend further than that. I’ve been up-front, forthright, and honest — shouldn’t my clothes get the damned hint and back off? I’m serious — I am not playing ‘hard to dress’ here!
Alas, my clothes are oblivious to my desires. Or more likely, they’re just pissy little bitches; I don’t know who jammed a stick up their collective fabric asses, but I think they’ve got it out for me. It seems at every turn that they’re catching on something, or leaping up to catch some messy bit of food, or bunching and rubbing in the most unholy of places.
(Okay, to be fair, I suppose there actually are a couple of ‘holes’ right there where I’m talking about. So maybe there are ‘unholier’ places out there, somewhere.
All I know is that if my clothes are gonna ball up and go cavorting in some of these places, I should at least get a nice dinner and some flowers first. And a little Vaseline wouldn’t hurt, either.
Not as much, anyway, and that’s the damned point, then, isn’t it?)
Now, though, my clothes have taken their despicable dealings to a new level — they’ve started a conspiracy. Yes, you read that right — a conspiracy. Those little bastards have been fraternizing with my wife’s outfits — I know they have — and have formulated a plan far more evil and embarrassing than the ‘In-The-Chair Wedgie’ or ‘Sliding-Down Zipper’ schemes could ever be. Now my clothes are playing ‘Follow the Leader’. The bastards!
See, several times in the past few weeks, I’ve gone to my closet, or my basket of clean laundry that I never put away (or my basket of ‘not-really-dirty’ laundry that I keep for emergencies) to find a shirt beckoning to me. It’s not always the same shirt; it changes, time after time. But there’s always one that seems separate from the others, or closest, or least stained. And it’s always right there, within easy reach. I’d actually have to go out of my way to grab another shirt. And, as we’ve learned, I’m not doin’ that. There’s no room in my morning routine for any of this ‘reaching’ business. I’m a busy man. A busy, lazy, apathetic, slacking man. So I go for ‘the shirt’, every time.
And it seems like every time — every beaver-lovin’, monkey-suckin’ time — the color of the shirt I put on exactly matches whatever the hell my wife is wearing. Exactly. We’re like fricking Doublemint twins, without the gum and the manic laughs. Or Thing One and Thing Two. Tweedledee and Tweedledipshit. Every fucking time.
I want to know how the hell they know. How do these shirts figure out what my wife’s gonna wear, and then arrange themselves just so, in the perfect configuration to make me absent-mindedly snatch the one that’s gonna make me look like a toothless goober all damned day long? How can they know?!
It has to be her clothes. They’re in cahoots; I just know it. Look, my wife doesn’t go into my closet. And she sure as hell isn’t gonna touch the baskets of clothes — for one thing, she doesn’t know the elaborate system I have for determining which one is the ‘clean’ basket and which is the ‘not quite so funky that I can’t wear it’ basket. And she’s not going to take her chances with playing in my dirty clothes. She once caught a whiff of one of my shirts just after I’d worked out — she swears she couldn’t taste ‘salty’ for a month after that.
So it’s not my wife doing the rearranging, and she’s not close enough to my clothes for them to see what she’s wearing. It has to be some sort of interclosetary communication going on. Maybe they’ve got a string running between them, and they’re sending messages back and forth on buttons. Or they tie notes on the legs of moths and fly ’em round-trip. Or maybe they’ve worked out a system using my boxer shorts as semaphore flags. I don’t know, and I don’t care — all I know is that it has to stop. I’m tired of the ‘Oh, did you two plan your outfits this morning?‘ and the ‘Wook at the couple wearing the same shirts! Isn’t that pwecious?‘, and especially the ‘Aw, how cutesy-wutesy. Is woo wearing your widdle married uniforms?‘
Grrr.
One more comment like that, and somebody’s getting a tube sock enema, you understand me?
But it’s not really the peoples’ fault — I myself would mercilessy and relentlessly taunt any couple who walk around in public with matching outfits. That’s the law of the West, and it’s unfortunately deserved. It’s the clothes that I have the real issue with — damned dirty clothes. They’re the ones that have to be stopped, and I can only see one way how. I’m simply going to have to start buying the ugliest, loudest, funkiest clothes around, and wearing those. Sure, I’ll look like a damned freak, but it’ll still be better than the crap I’m getting now. And I’ll be certain that nothing I’m wearing will even come close to matching whatever my wife’s got on. And finally, I’ll be free of my clothes and their tyranny.
It’s the only way, folks. So please, when you see me on the street with the polka dot sweater and zigzag-striped jeans, don’t mock me. Don’t jeer, or point, or stand and laugh. I don’t like this any more than you would, but it’s the only way. It’s either this, or I walk around naked. So just remember that I’m doing you a favor, all right? You owe me, man!
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