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!

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

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

Watching the History Channel and its quirky historical documentary series certainly opens you eyes.  You learn so much, like were the Slinky came from, how M&Ms were invented and who made Cheetos famous? Usually the answer is WW II.  They did a whole episode on the creation of mass produced bread and how to make it more available to the public and easier to consume.  It was all about the race to sell sliced bread. 

Seeing it got me top thinking about how they might have approached such an endeavor. I wrote my take on the event several months ago and sent it around.  Then it sat on my hard drive until today.  Because today, July 7, back in 1928 was the date slice bread was first sold to the world!  So let's take a look at the diary of the man who made sliced bread his quest:

​​​​​​​​​​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 redo.  They did this one fairly recently.  In fact, that was pinned to the top of their Twitter feed until they ran this one.  Oh, yeah, I was away, so I missed the last couple of games and now I'm posting this from two weeks ago.  I got a respectable 5 selected, and I was the lead off for the post.  It's about as blue as I've worked, but it's not gross.  Check it out for yourself:

​​​​​​​​​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.

Only 2?  I only got 2 in?  I was robbed.   Granted, a lot of cereals have the word "pop" in it which can easily be changed to "poop," but why discount them all?  I'm annoyed they didn't use my favorite, Nort 'n Honey.  But I kinda screwed that one up, spelling it as Norton Honey, attaching a gif of Ed Norton from the Honeymooners, but I didn't include a picture of the cereal Nut 'n' Honey to better set up the gag.  Oh, and I did it because Norton is famously a sewer worker.  Yeah, I'm starting to realize that joke is too clever for its own good.  But it's not a lengthy list of "winners" this week.  Even the official WH entries seem light.  Well, here's the link to the WH page:

​​​​​​​Back in the aughts, Cracked magazine was owned by the same company that owned the Weekly World News.  During the rocky final years of Cracked, our editor (the long time editor of WWN), in an attempt to give the Cracked 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 my footing but soon I was working on some straight-forward fake news stories. 

OMG, the more things change, the more they stay the same.  Sure I was parodying the Bush Jr. administration with their jingoism and their climate-change denying, but reading this could just as easily apply to day, especially with the Canada and Mexico angles.  Now, thought, it would probably be tariffs on weather.  The White House back then was going to beat back all enemies.  And we were getting hammered by big storms (ala Katrina), so having them decide to declare war on bad weather seemed like a natural choice for them.  I can't believe I got two pages out of this.  But it reads pretty well.

And I just realized this was in the same issue as my car magnet story.  I forgot they would do that sometimes.  Good week for me.

​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 soon I was working on some straight forward fake news stories. ​

This one I can't believe got used.  This is one of my older premises, bad inventions.  I did variations of it for Cracked, The Plague, and The Staten Island Advance and this blog.  Similar bits were rejected by all the regulars.  But here it is.  This always happens.  I never throw anything out, and when I get stuck for material, I resurrect something from my dead file.   Sometimes it works.  Other times, I'm so busy trying to remember stuff, I forget to think up new stuff.  But when you are chasing a paycheck, it's an easy trap to fall into.  I simply had to pad out my bad idea with some factoids to accompany it.  At Cracked, the name of the thing was usually enough, with art.  But for WWN, it had to be a well-researched presentation.  

​​​​​​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 almost missed this one.  I kept getting interrupted while attempting to play this hashtag game.  But it was a good topic.  Except that WH grabbed all the low-hanging fruit.  And posted all their tweets.  Once I finally got into the groove, I did okay.  My biggest problem was I went too far back in sit-com history to come up with puns (Make Room for Daddy, The Phil Silvers Show).  But I entered a bunch, got a number of likes and got 6 of them included.  Check them out:

​​​​​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 skipped last week.  I didn't care for the topic and wasn't in the mood to work blue.  I'll get dark, I'll get mean, I'll get punny and silly, but doing blue material still rubs me the wrong way.  I'm a prude like that and very tightly wound.  But this week I went all in.  The crowd seems to be thinning.  I don't see a lot of retweeting.  There's one participant who posts the hashtags, but the account is set up so you can't like or retweet any of them (not that they are that good).  I managed a couple before I was forced to resort to a website to list the actual names of pastries.  Because I just call everything "pastries."   I got some good ones picked.  They ignored my bad ones.  They even included my favorite (S'ores) which actually came up late in the session.  Ten included in all.  I keep hoping this will make them more reception to my prose pieces (still very hit & miss).  Anyway, check out: