​From 1999 to 2004-ish, I was one of the contributing writers for Garrison Keillor's renowned radio show "A Prairie Home Companion."  I learned a lot of things there, mostly how to spell 'prairie."  It was a solid gig and I'm proud of my work there.  But, like any other job, there were...things...

It's hurricane season, but years ago hurricane's were rarely as horrible as they are today.  But a news tradition existed that some poor reporter was going to be stationed right smack in the middle of what ever natural disaster was looming.  I decided to take on that tradition and simply exaggerate it to its logical conclusion, rabid chickens.  I had forgotten about this bit, but (despite current events), it's pretty funny.  Did GK object to the idea of NPR having a weather desk?  Who knows.  But they passed on it.

I missed last week's Hashtag game because of reasons.  But I was roaring back this week.  We're in spooky season and that's my thing!  So coming up with movie monster puns is totally in my wheelhouse (just check out some of my previous posts and bits).  I submitted a dozen or so in and got 6 up.  Weirdly, a couple of my favorites didn't make the cut, but you can check those out on Twitter itself.  Or just go here:

Trying to parody actual advice here, lusty neighbors, troubled folks, horny teens and sit-com tropes.  I like that the cheapskate sent his letter "postage due," so I was even playing around with the concept of mailing to someone for advice.

We took a mighty leap this summer, deciding to binge watch ER.  All 15 seasons.  In order.  

We had stumbled upon the show on cable one afternoon and got hooked on the 3 episode block from season 4.  So we looked it up and found MAX carried the series.  We pulled it up and dove in.  

It's odd, the older episodes are the ones remembered better.  George Clooney in a sewer with the kid?  Remembered it.  Dr. Lewis leaving the show after only a season and a half in?  Remembered that has being a big deal that an actress left a successful show so suddenly.  A whole episode about a guy with a bad heart dying?  Yup.  ER birth gone wrong.  Oh, yeah. 

It started to become apparent that they had this stellar cast, and it would seem Mark Green was the heart of the show but the story of ER was going to use the newbie Dr. Carter as it's through line (one way or the other).  

Cast members I thought had been there from the start turned up later in the season (Kerri, the bossy one).  They true constants were the support staff, the nurses which would wander in and out of episodes and seasons and suddenly re-appear after being missing for a while (they often said, "Oh, I was on night shift.")  

Then they started writing themselves into corners.  Actors wanted to leave, so they would, leaving their support cast in the lurch.  Clooney leaves Carol with twins.  Green marries Benton's old girlfriend.  Carter cycles through a number of interns and they would leave, move on or get murdered.  In a late season episode, they bring in a new desk clerk announcing the two previous desk clerks, Jerry and Randi, are gone and can't cover.  Jerry had come back only to be shot in an episode and Randi, who hadn't been seen in an episode for years, just disappeared, which was odd, because she seemed like a minor character who lasted for years on the show.

Pop culture references were frequent; SNL quotes, some current events and then they'd do the "very special" sweeps episodes where a plane crashes or they run off to Africa.  The patients coming in were essentially old people, gang members and the occasional pregnant lady.

People started leaving the show, but the cast was pretty big.  They worked in some new people.  Usually a character who had some baggage to deal with, or as a potential hook-up with one of the main characters.

The show had a habit of setting up a conclusion to one sub-plot and then totally dismissing it in the next episode.  Carol decides to earn money with a worm farm she rescued?  Next week, the worms are dead.  Sam gets a job working as a private nurse for some rich guy?  A few weeks later we are informed "it didn't work out."   Alex saw his mom shoot his dad dead, he got over it (instead of holding it over her head forever).

One mid-run episode, they introduce a character, a good looking doctor who they learn masterbates a lot.  They reason they introduced him?  So they could make a "Grey's Anatomy" reference, nicknaming the doc "McCreamy."

They had one character, a nasty surgeon, Romano, who treated everyone horribly.  But then they would have him use sign language with a toddler or pine over another character.  Then he would just nastier and nastier until they had to drop a helicopter on him to exit the show.  To be honest, we were rooting for the helicopter.  

A season or two later, they introduced another bald, nasty surgeon character, but this time he was more of a cartoon character who got into a kinky thing with semi-regular Sara Gilbert, recently escaped from "Roseanne."

The show often brought in guest stars to do a "sweeps weeks" story arc; Alan Alda, Don Cheadle, John Leguizamo, Bob Newhart.  Then later, they'd have guest stars for odd one-off stories with them as the center, Cynthia Nixon, Ray Liotta, James Woods.

As we got into season 13, they were trying to hold the show together.  All the original cast was gone.  They transition from 90s TV with an opening theme and credits to just a title card and the credits run over the first scenes.  And, then, to pull in the new viewers, the changed the theme song.  To something bad.  The original theme and soundtrack music was a driving pulse of the show, to the point that when they did a gimmicky live broadcast as the opener for season four, the had to replicate the soundtrack by having some guy with drumsticks start banging out a rhythm on set when they had a fast-paced medical trauma.

The final two seasons got weirdly nostalgic, with mentions and appearances of the early cast.  One long time nurse mentions the days when the ER was run by doctors Green and Ross, only to have another, newer cast member say, "Who?"  The character Jeanie shows up 10 years after she left, to find only 2 nurse remember who she is, but they give us updates on the long-gone characters she remembers.

Also, a lot of stunt casting as the ER goes through department heads like Spinal Tap went through drummers.  And with so many characters having had on and off relationships, they had to start blending new characters into the mix.  There were a lot of "Cousin Olivers" showing up for brief cycles.

I think the series jumped the shark mid-way through, in their version of a "bottle episode" where five of the cast have to attend an HR training session.  The teacher is late.  They shoot the breeze and two of the characters wind up in a sword fight.  Just because.

In the last season, the new head of the ER, Angela Basset, has a flashback to the time she her child died in that very ER, and Mark Green, Keri, Romano and even Jerry appear.   Then Jerry comes back to his old job, replacing the guy who was from the first episode who Jerry had replaced.

In a later episode, Carter returns because he needs a new kidney.  The donor is in Seattle.  Guess under whose care?  Ross and Hathaway!  But while they meet the new cast members who show up to get the kidney, they are never aware Carter, from their time on the show, is to be the donor recipient. Talk about viewer interruptus!  

For the season finale they brought back many of the characters from the run of the show, with cameos and guest appearances and the show even brought back one of the nurses simply to recreate the opening scene from the first episode.  And then, to bring it full circle, Dr. Green's daughter shows up as a medical student who Carter decides to mentor and they recreate a Dr. Green/Young Carter scene from the first episode.

It was a great show, that devolved into a very good show after 15 seasons.  And you have to remember, this was back when a season lasted 30 episodes or more.  But we did it.  Now we just have to catch up on all the shows we missed while we were doing it.

This is one of those ideas I had kicking around.  I had a title and needed to figure out a script to go with it.  I had fallen deep into the "commercial parody" pit here, writing things that were really too short, without fleshing out the idea much beyond the joke title.   It is a good, quick, funny bit but it didn't make the cut.  I mean, it would have been quick and painless to do.

​​Back in the aughts, Cracked magazine was owned by the same company as the Weekly World News.  During the rocky final years of Cracked, our editor, in an attempt to give the writers a pay check, had us contribute articles to WWN ("the humor magazine that nobody knows is a humor magazine.")  It took me a while to get the hang of the paper but first the editor suggested I do the "Letter and Answer" format for their Dear Abby-style advice column, except that their "expert," Dottie, was a bitch.  I struggled with the format, kinda of recycling various jokes and bits I had over the years into a letter format with a snotty answer.

So, the column became an outlet for many of my pet-peeves; telemarketers, hot-shots, diets and smokers.  Her answers aren't even that nasty.  I was still flailing with the attitude and format.  And it was going to come to ahead in the coming weeks.  I was churning out content, the checks were clearing, but I wasn't in the zone yet.

Write what you know, they say.  I know we got a Ring doorbell.  What I didn't know was that once you hook it up, you are connected to the Ring Neighborhood feed, and boy, that doesn't make me feel safer at all.  Check out some posts at Weekly Humorist:

I had forgotten that I was still steadily submitting to PHC in 2005.  Checking the files, yup, I was submitting something every week for the whole season.  Not that it did me any good at this point.  We're back to that original feeling; I was submitting in a void.  No feedback, no notes, suggestions or advice.  Send it in, listen to the show to see if they used anything, repeat the following week.  I know there were lulls when I can tell I was "phoning it in" with minor, very short, or recycled bits, I seem to be attempting to get back up to speed other weeks.  I mean, I don't recall much about this piece, but reading it, I think it's very clever and cute and very much in the PHC voice.  It is two brief ideas tied together by theme, but I often felt that you could get away with that in radio; the sentence itself is your scene change. I did misspell "there" and still think my sloppy proofreading skills may have handicapped me in some way.  Little side note; Whenever I have to mention trees, I usually work in "larch" as a nod to Monty Python.

​​​​​​​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 week was a bit of a let down for me.  Goofing on fancy coffee seems right up my alley.  I managed to pop out a dozen decent-to-good ones but only got 3 selected for the WH website.   What are you going to do?

​Back in the aughts, Cracked magazine was owned by the same company as the Weekly World News.  During the rocky final years of Cracked, our editor, in an attempt to give the writers a pay check, had us contribute articles to WWN ("the humor magazine that nobody knows is a humor magazine.")  It took me a while to get the hang of the paper but first the editor suggested I do the "Letter and Answer" format for their Dear Abby-style advice column, except that their "expert," Dottie, was a bitch.  I struggled with the format, kinda of recycling various jokes and bits I had over the years into a letter format with a snotty answer. 

I worked out a lot of frustrations in these columns.  Writing was a side-gig.  I had a full-time office job.  I had many annoying co-workers.  I'm pretty sure this guy makes multiple appearances in one form or another.  Wife's boss invited us to super-fancy wedding once.  That comes up.  Robo-calls.  Son-of-Sam jokes (too soon?).  Oh, one of the confidentials, about grapes, that joke actually had people writing in to give me grape pie recipes.  And soon after this, WWN started forwarding me actual mail that was being sent to Dear Dotti.  Honestly, I think I'm mentally blocking those letters.