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From the Slushpile: You Can Always go Downton

5/26/2026

This just a odd situation for me. I wrote this piece up when the last Downton Abbey movie came out. I've watched the series (more than once), and each movie. It's a good show and I enjoyed it but it's so easy to goof on. And that's what I decided to do. It's a premise I've done before, trying to image how they could keep the cash cow alive with sequels and prequels and spin-off. I just needed a bunch of Downton Abbey puns and I was off to the races. I submitted to Weekly Humorist and was told it was accepted. Then they never used it. Frankly, I had forgotten about it until I was going through my spreadsheets for another reason.

It's time has passed, so that was no sense in submitting it elsewhere. It's a funny bit, with the WH stamp of approval, but left hanging. Well, hang no more, Downton Abbey piece, and welcome to my blog...

You Can Always Go Downton

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From the Slushpile: Some Facts About SNL’s Jane Wickline That I’m Pretty Sure Are True

5/19/2026

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This is a weird bit for me. So weird, it was rejected by my usual sites. I'll admit to being a fan of the quirky SNL troupe member Jane Wickline. She seems like she's from outside the usual SNL mold and I can't quite put my finger on what pulls me in. So, thinking on it, I decided to write it up. And, full disclosure, a lot of if came to me in that semi-dream state as you're between sleep and waking, my little Neverland of comedy. Granted, a lot of ideas come to me in that twilight time, but I actually remembered the stuff that came to me this time and wrote it down and emailed it to myself. It started with the a couple of thoughts I've been knocking around, I added some absurd bits of non sequiturs and finally, brought the bit together by adding the stalker backstory. It's like writer John Bono, who wrote about his time at National Lampoon, you have the main drive of the story, but what makes the piece work is some sort of running gag or subplot that anchors the material. It was something I also learned from Olympia Dukakis from my time at Style Without Substance. And it feeds in nicely to my SNL Fetish.

I worked on it and sent it out, but (as I suspected) it didn't click with those places, so here we are, on my blog. I hope you get a chuckle out of it.

Some Facts About SNL’s Jane Wickline
That I’m Pretty Sure Are True

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A.I.-Caramba! presents: Chef Shift

5/13/2026

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Because of lack of resources, I’ve taken to “producing” my sketch ideas with AI. This is not a recommended solution. See that logo? AI generated. And yet I had to run it through photoshop to really get it right. There were a couple of things I already had to tweak, besides. Anyway, on to more creative things:

Chef Shift popped into my head while I was working on something else...the words Chef Shift popped into my head and I just built it up from there. It's a cute idea, but once I had the basic concept of the show, I decided to do it promo-style, so I just started to create photos of chefs and kitchens and judges. But trying to get the images to move, even briefly, got too aggravating. All my dialogue was created as off-screen lines, the video I created had to be edited in the software. I ask for a rock and rock chef waving romaine lettuce and it just had the lettuce hanging in midair waiting for the chef to grab it. Ask for a kitchen full of chefs to run around panicked, and AI just has them merge into one another. I thought something simple like having a group of chefs just cross their arms would be okay. Instead, they all do the Wakanda salute. Just to get a judge to wave a chef off, his hand was upside down. So, it's stills and short shots, and narration to carry it through. I hope you enjoy!

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Leave it to the Prose: Wrestle-Maniac

5/12/2026

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So, I got roped into watching WWE Smackdown by my grandson. As we discussed the matches via Facetime, I was goofing on the various types of matches I saw, ladder matches, steel cage matches, brawls, free-for-alls and whatnot. That got me to thinking about all the money the WWE is leaving on the table (match) by not broadening their reach and coming up with new types of dangerous bouts. I wrote up some notes on the subject and submitted them to Weekly Humorist and they published it on their site. I always enjoy getting something new up. So, let's get ready to chuckle, and check it out!

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Hashtag, You're It! -# Sloshed Slasher Movies

5/5/2026

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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 an odd topic, because it basically combine two topics they've used over and over; drinks and horror movies. But it was different enough to work. There were a lot of fun ones. I went off topic a bit, submitted the Magnificent Seven & Seven (which was ignored) and then, in a bit of a stretch, I submitted Indiana Jones and the Shirley Temple of Doom. Okay, one, it's not a slasher movie (although the heart removal scene gif was used) and secondly, you can't get sloshed on Shirley Temples. But it got picked. I did 15 or so and got 8 included, so, yay me! Check out the fun from a couple of weeks ago at:

#SloshedSlasherMovies

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From the Slushpile: You Can Always go Downton

You Can Always Go Downton

From the Slushpile: Some Facts About SNL’s Jane Wickline That I’m Pretty Sure Are True

Some Facts About SNL’s Jane Wickline
That I’m Pretty Sure Are True

A.I.-Caramba! presents: Chef Shift

Leave it to the Prose: Wrestle-Maniac

Hashtag, You're It! -# Sloshed Slasher Movies

Dan Fiorella

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