Yeah, falling behind here.  Since April Fools Day landed on Wednesday, WH decided to make it their hashtag game.  It was basically an excuse to pull out any one-liner or jokey headline that I had rattling around my brain.  I posted a bunch, and WH retweet almost all of them, but in the end, I only got 4 selected for the webpage.  And again, the "winners" where mostly the WH posts.  And weirdly, most of them were Trump-related jokes.  I mean, when you think fake news, you think Donald.  Check them out at:

​​​​​Weekly Humorist, a humor magazine I often submit to and occasionally get in, runs these Hashtag Games on Twitter (X), where they name a topic and we submit humorous responses.  These games play right into my gag reflex, so I always throw up something.  I've taken to setting my calendar to get online every Wednesday to "play" (and by "play" I mean submit content to their website for free--I like to think of it as pun bono work).   I always submit a bunch of them on X (Twitter) and some of them get selected for inclusion to their online site.

I've been off line for a couple of weeks, and missed a couple of games.  The last one I got into was this one.  I'm starting to realize how vague some of the prompts are; slap a thing, freaky a thing, it's all just an excuse to make up puns using the topic.  I mean, I'll try and stay on theme but eventually I just go off on a pun run.  I submitted my usual dozen + and got 8 in this time, so good for me.  Enjoy: 

​​​​Weekly Humorist, a humor magazine I often submit to and occasionally get in, runs these Hashtag Games on Twitter (X), where they name a topic and we submit humorous responses.  These games play right into my gag reflex, so I always throw up something.  I've taken to setting my calendar to get online every Wednesday to "play" (and by "play" I mean submit content to their website for free--I like to think of it as pun bono work).   I always submit a bunch of them on X (Twitter) and some of them get selected for inclusion to their online site.

At first I thought it was just Monster Movies (hence "Spankenstein) then I got the hang of it.  Fortunately slasher movies have longer titles, so it's easy to parody them.  I submitted a bunch and got 5 in, so it's all cool.

​​​Weekly Humorist, a humor magazine I often submit to and occasionally get in, runs these Hashtag Games on Twitter (X), where they name a topic and we submit humorous responses.  These games play right into my gag reflex, so I always throw up something.  I've taken to setting my calendar to get online every Wednesday to "play" (and by "play" I mean submit content to their website for free--I like to think of it as pun bono work).   I always submit a bunch of them on X (Twitter) and some of them get selected for inclusion to their online site.

This was one of those randomly vague hashtags, so it had a lot of possibilities.  And I tried them all!  Wreck synonyms.  Bad meals.  Stupid morning items.  They all kinda work, although I did lean toward the "wrecked" version of puns.  I really hit it when I took the cereal Total and made it Totalled.  That was pretty good.  Especially because one-word titles and names are hard to make a solid joke with.  I submitted a bunch and got 8 in, so all's good.   Oh, wait...Corn beef hashtag!  How did I miss that???  Oh, well, check them out at: 

This hashtag game was out of the usual topic wheelhouse for WH.  It took a minute for me to get traction, but I did pretty well, getting 7 picked.  I always  go through the other posts, both to avoid doing a pun that's already up and also to improve any I see.  There was one that just made no sense, tried too hard, so I re-wrote it as "50 First Detonates" and got on the list.  Sometimes I know I get too lost in the weeds and my joke will fall flat, sometimes I'll bend the rule (like I've seen others do--I mean is "Time After Time" really a rom-com?), or try to go a little deeper.  Like I'm very proud of having the oldest rom-com listed (Much Ado About Nothing) and that I improved on WH's "10 Things I Hate about U-boats."  Even that one poster, who is practically anonymous and blocked me on X, had an actual clever post, so, as they say, "Any given hashtag game..

As the winter games wrap up, I had some thoughts I wanted to put down...

I’ve watched the Olympics over the years, and I may be missing something here.  Take the summer Olympics.  It was a competition between nations, originally.  Like war.  So, the original Greeks just turned what they did during war and turned it into a sport; throwing spears, hurling rocks, riding horses, running away, swimming from sinking ships.  It’s the winter Olympics where I lose the thread.  I mean, I understand something like the biathlon being based on Scandinavian fighting techniques but the rest of it looks like a series of bar bets and dares.

Take ice skating; sure, people think it’s the winter version of track and field, but think about the basic premise.  Two guys are looking at a village on the other side of a frozen lake.  The ice is slippery, so walking across it could be dangerous.  Naturally, one guy says, “Hey, instead of trying to walk across the ice, why don’t we strap knives to our shoes?”  And you know the second guy was drunk when he said, “Sure!” 

Even if you think of skating as a way to get around in winter time, who was the first person to think, “how about we start jumping around while we’re on the ice?”

“Oh, and maybe spin in circles?”

“Totally!”

And don’t get me started about the first guys who stood at the top of a mountain and figured the best way down was to tie planks to their feet and slide down.

Worse, the skeleton.  I used to ride a sled down the hill when it snowed but this sport seems to have taken all the wrong lessons from it.  And the name they came up for the sled is “skeleton”?  What’s that all about?  You know a bunch of Vikings were pillaging a village on top of a snowy hill and decided they had to get down and back to the boats fast, so they ripped the skeletons out of the bodies of their victims and rode those down.  It’s the only logical reason if you think about it.

And curling.  Yeah, we’re all watching curling ironically and it seems like the kind of sport you could play while downing a can of beer but answer me this: if curling is a winter Olympic sport, why isn’t shuffleboard or bocci ball a summer Olympic sport?  The winter Olympics need curling because there are only so many variations on winter sports.  You slide on something, we get it.  It’s winter, so you’ve immediately ruled out any water sports because the water is frozen.  And, frankly, most of the sports are mostly dependent on gravity as opposed to skill.  Do they involve some skill?  Maybe, like when you learn how to turn into a skid on an icy road.

In the end, I suppose we should enjoy these winter games because once climate change eliminates winter, we’ll miss them.  Probably.

                                                                            end

​​Weekly Humorist, a humor magazine I often submit to and occasionally get in, runs these Hashtag Games on Twitter (X), where they name a topic and we submit humorous responses.  These games play right into my gag reflex, so I always throw up something.  I've taken to setting my calendar to get online every Wednesday to "play" (and by "play" I mean submit content to their website for free--I like to think of it as pun bono work).   I always submit a bunch of them on X (Twitter) and some of them get selected for inclusion to their online site.

I guess this is scatological...sewer suggests matters of the fecal kind, so we try to open the scope a bit to other bodily fluids and functions.  Some extended the range to a wider range of sewer-themed items (my alligator-pun got passed over) and now I'm kicking myself for not thinking of Mock Ninja Turtle Soup or some Ed (Won) Norton or It-themed item.  Oh, well.  But I got 6 in so that would probably have been my max anyway.

​Weekly Humorist, a humor magazine I often submit to and occasionally get in, runs these Hashtag Games on Twitter (X), where they name a topic and we submit humorous responses.  These games play right into my gag reflex, so I always throw up something.  I've taken to setting my calendar to get online every Wednesday to "play" (and by "play" I mean submit content to their website for free--I like to think of it as pun bono work).   I always submit a bunch of them on X (Twitter) and some of them get selected for inclusion to their online site.

This was a decent twist on the hashtags, despite my lack of knowledge of any video games post 1980.  And making obscure Watergate and cyclone reference would seem to be a handicap, but I got in 5, so that's pretty good.  And I even managed to get political.  I mean, villainous covers a wide range of topics.  

After signing a bill allowing schools to resume offering whole milk in schools, President Trump went on to explain that “whole milk” is a legal definition.  And that it's spelled with a 'W’.  It seems this isn’t the first time this issue has come up:


“Whole Lotta Love”- the Led Zeppelin song famously not about holes.

“(He’s Got) The Whole World in His Hands”- in addition to noting which spelling of “whole” it was, it had to be noted the hands weren’t Trump’s…because they’re so small.

“Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off”- a classic from the American songbook, this Gershwin song was not about cancelling a construction project, despite how much Trump claimed it was.

“When You’re Smiling (The Whole World Smiles with You)”-Honestly, he thought the song was about one of those toothless hobos so it’s assumed it’s not just the word “whole” he’s misunderstanding.

“Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On”- to be fair, he often confuses this Jerry Lee Lewis song with a stripper, Lotta Hole, who he knew in Atlantic City.

“A Whole New World”- not only was it necessary to explain the spelling of the title of this song from “Aladdin,” but he had to be told he didn’t negotiate a peace treaty between Agrabah and Ababwa.

Weirdly, he keeps calling the movie “Holes” “Wholes.”

                                                                                  The End

Recently our company updated our office software.  It'll be "transparent" to you, they said.  When we opened up our PCs that Monday, there was a lot of stupid changes.  I mean, I get "updating" something to make it process faster, interact with other programs better, or run smoother, but how is changing the color of stuff an "update?" And where's my cursor??? I had a lot of opinions concerning our updates.  Knowing our tech guys are deaf to our complaints, I decided to vent in a piece of prose that the Weekly Humorist thought was amusing and they published it.  So, here are my thoughts on software updates: