Tag: funny

Hands Across Canada

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Right now, there’s a dead hand touring Canada.

That’s not the name of a metal band; don’t don your blacks and your eyeliner and venture to the North to bang your head. No, the dead hand is the literal hand of Saint Francis Xavier. Why is it touring? For … publicity, I guess?

The story is here. Watch the video and marvel.

Here’s a thing I’ll never understand about religion. The claim is that the hand is a “relic”, which means it contains some sort of divine power. This power is bestowed, apparently, because it’s “the hand that baptized hundreds of thousands of people.” (The rest of his body, apparently, can Fargo right off.) Great, cool, awesome. I guess if you’re the sort of person who believes baptism actually does something and is therefore a thing worth doing, I can see holding in some regard a man who had done a lot of them. Of course, there is no mention of this man, or his hand, in any holy book; its divinity is tacked-on after the fact by a bunch of dudes in robes (and only dudes, let us not forget. Whether women could come up with something so ridiculous — I imagine they couldn’t — is irrelevant, because we’re talking about the Catholic church, here). But still, no, seriously, it’s a relic. It’s holy. It has powers.

By that rationale, they could sanctify my left earlobe (after my death, of course — one presumes I’d still be using it, and they could not therefore cart it around the world touting its holy powers, while I was still attached to it) if I could sufficiently convince them that God tickled it.

(By the way, it’s the hand of a dude. It did a lot more than baptize people, is all I’m saying. Consider that for a moment, and consider, then, the fact that people are pressing overpriced medallions and cards (which you can buy at the venue!) and pictures of their loved ones to the hand for blessings. [Okay, fine, the hand is tucked safely away in a glass case. But still.])

Consider the cost of this exercise. The hand has a caretaker who presumably draws a salary (we can’t just drop the thing in UPS after all — there are laws against the 2-day shipping of dead bodies and their parts). The venues that host it have to bring in volunteers to wrangle all the faithful flocking to see it. And the faithful! Imagine dropping what you’re doing to cross the countryside (this is Canada, where I understand it’s 99% countryside and 1% silly accents) and gawk at a bit of dessicated flesh attended by men in expensive suits. Then they come away crowing that this “experience” will have a tremendous effect in their lives.

Spoiler alert: the experience of being taken for a fool only positively affects your life if you learn from it.

Pretend you’re an alien. You voyage across interstellar space and come across this pale blue dot. They’re sending out radio signals, and the planet is swarmed by satellites and rocket ships and space stations and you’re thinking to yourself, hey, maybe the people of this planet have got things figured out. You look a little closer and see, I dunno, the internet and our politics and you say well, maybe not so much.

Then you train your telescopes up toward Canada and discover that there’s a whole lot of hubbub being made over some guy’s skeletal dunkin’ hand. (And we’re not talking about Michael Jordan’s dunkin’ hand, either — that at least you might have heard about. Space Jam exists, after all.) Literal worship of a dead man’s appendage.

You’re an alien. You see humans doing this.

In what universe would you not drop your spaceship into high gear and leap away at lightspeed?

Protect Yourself From the Flu With These Easy Steps

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Everybody is sick lately. Flu shot or not, you’re coming down with this stuff. I’ve had the parents of five students contact me today to tell me their kids are out for the week. My wife has just been diagnosed. Which means it’s only a matter of time now.

So here’s my guidelines for the rest of the week to keep myself healthy:

  1. Wear a mask at all times, even in the shower
  2. Avoid everybody who may potentially be infected (which is basically everybody) by means of:
    1. underground bunker in the backyard (most effective but most labor-intensive)
    2. hermetically sealed camping tent on the roof (cheap but our roof is probably too heavily slanted to sleep up there)
    3. getting one of those human-sized hamster balls to roll around in until the fever passes (I really like this idea even for non-epidemic times)
    4. You know, just hoping
  3. Detoxify surfaces often with an LBN mixture (lysol wipes, bleach, and napalm)
  4. Raid the pharmacy for all available flu shots; inject them all before sunset
  5. When possible, avoid breathing
  6. Wash hands often, again using an LBN mixture
    1. Don’t forget to scrub under fingernails
  7. Burn the house down just to make sure all the germs are gone
  8. Leave the state to avoid whatever’s left
  9. Sacrifice a Saharan spitting goat by moonlight
  10. “Appropriate” a beekeeper’s suit for everyday use
  11. Eating all the oranges for vitamin C
    1. Eating everything that’s orange, just in case

With these simple steps, I am pretty sure I can remain germ-free until spring comes. Try them out and let me know what works for you!

*receives note*

Okay, don’t *wink wink* try any of these methods *wink wink* to ward off flu symptoms.

*receives note*

Okay, the same thing I just said, but instead of winking, I’ll say “wink wink” instead.

*receives note*

Fine. No winking at all in that last statement. Even where I was obviously winking.

Stay sanitary.

Subjective Produce Experience

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I opened up a carton of grapes to find this little label on the underside of the lid:

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But shouldn’t *I* be the one to decide that, carton of grapes? Isn’t it up to ME what flavor these bulbous purple orbs hold?

Am I not master of my own taste buds? Do I not bite into the grape myself and feel it burst like a cow’s eyeball betwixt my molars?

YOU DON’T TELL ME WHAT TO THINK!

(Upon further review, the grapes were actually very tasty. Possibly even delightful-adjacent. I’ll point out, though, for the benefit of the copywriters for these particular grapes, that I don’t know what “fresh” tastes like [and neither, I suspect, do they], nor do I know what a “satisfying flavor” is [and neither, I suspect, do they].)

In fact, since noticing this odd little blurb inside the carton of grapes, I’ve noticed that tons and tons — maybe even most — ad copy is like this. It tells you — brashly, confidently, even arrogantly — what your experience of the product will be. But aren’t these things subjective? Doesn’t every single thing we experience get filtered through our own rose- or mauve- or barf-colored sunglasses? I can’t know, under any current technological parameters, what your experience is when you bite into a juicy, ripe grape. Hell, I can’t even be sure that the color you see is the same purple that I see. Your rods and cones might be all inverted and misshapen, and you actually see a blue, yellow, or (I shudder to think) brown grape. Or maybe it’s MY rods and cones that are all upsey-downsey. All I can do is assume that your experience is pretty darn close to mine and agree that we’ll use the same word to describe it, and go through our lives hoping for the best.

But I can’t know what it’s like to be inside your head.

 

And these grapes, unless they’ve made some truly staggering leaps in sentience, damn sure can’t know what it’s like to be in mine.

Truth be told, I can’t even be sure that you have any experience at all. I can’t even be sure that you’re not a robot. I can’t even be really and truly sure that I’m not a robot.

But let’s not go getting too existential. They’re only grapes after all. (And maybe I took my recent re-viewing of WestWorld too much to heart.)

*eyes the carton of grapes suspiciously*

*chomps one*

*tentatively considers grape sentience, and by extension, grape genocide*

*decides it’s worth it and eats most of the carton*

No Mo’ Snow

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After three unexpected snow days last week, we’re back to the grind for a full work week this week. As has been pointed out by many of my teaching colleagues here in the environs outside Atlanta, the last full week of school we had was in November.

The lack of routine was definitely evident getting the kids out the door this morning. Sprout #1 spent the last thirty-six hours insisting that school still might get canceled today, and Sprout #2 threw a fit that lasted from a few minutes after she was awake until the moment I pulled into the daycare parking lot, at which point she changed her tune entirely and became a pitiful, clingy mess. And when I took my leave the tantrum started up again.

And friends and family wonder why my wife and I are such sticklers about getting these two little monsters to bed on time every night, even on weekends and vacations. It’s for the same reason that I spent the entire evening last night, from two on until I fell asleep, in a scowling, muttering, slamming-the-kitchen-cabinets and passive-aggressively-dragging-my-feet sulk. Routines matter! When kids — well, ANYBODY — know what to expect, they’re almost infinitely more likely to go along with it. And even if they don’t go along with it, they’re likely to protest less. And even if the plan changes, well just being prepared for the original plan leaves them somehow better equipped to deal with the adjustments.

Needless to say, when, following a three-day weekend, you go back to school for a single day and then get three surprise days off, followed by another weekend, your routine might as well have never existed in the first place.

I hope Mother Nature keeps this in mind the next time she brews up snow for the South. We are seriously not equipped for it.

Still, I got seven hundred words written today. So there’s that.

Sprout Tells Me a Story

Pavowski3 Comments

“Dad, I have to tell you about this guy.”

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“Oh, yeah?”

“His name is Rocker Baddo.”

“Wow, that’s pretty cool.”

“Um, it’s cool, but he’s not a nice guy.”

“No?”

“Well, he’s a mean guy with powers. He catches people with his magics and his powers are being mean to animals, and he makes mean animals like dragons catch him. And he makes dragons catch other people, too.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. You’re putting this on Facebook?”

“Maybe. I’m not sure yet.”

“Okay, well, you should show someone. Put their name on the website, too.”

“Maybe I’ll do that. What else can you tell me about the guy?”

“Well, he smacks people with bombs. And he sneaks up on people to catch them. And he — you remember what I said about him that he says, when he sneaks up to scare you? He says BRRRRRRAAAARRRRRRR.”

“Wow!”

“Spell that word, too. And do you need me to tell you more?”

“If you like.”

“Okay, well, the worstest part that he does is when his stomach blows up with the little blower, it goes all over the city until everybody gets dooms right in the tower. (It’s just too long for me to sit, daddy.)”

(He gets up and starts monster-stomping around.)

“That’s okay, bud. Anything else?”

“I think there’s a lot more to tell you. Guess what? The other part is when the goats come out. After he does, he gets a lot of mean animals to come out, and after the animals come out, the animals are critters and they walk around like mean monster walkers but they’re robots. And when they blast people, people fall down. And when that happens, they put fire on you and your eyes, and then you don’t wake up anymore.”

(Jesus.)

“That sounds pretty scary.”

“Yeah, very scary.”

(At this point — he was stomping around like a mean monster walker robot, and unplugged the laptop, which distracted him enough to derail the story entirely.)

Oh, to have that amount of creativity, and the total indifference to whether it makes a damned bit of sense.