Thinking The Lions: December 11, 2011

Friday, December 16, 2011

"Santa, Godzilla, and Jesus Walk Into A Bar." a/k/a, "The Greatest Xmas Story Ever Told"

Time to 'up the ante', as they say. For two weeks or so, I have been celebrating SUPERXmas!, and I continue to do that even though I haven't been able to post much the past few days -- I'll get caught up soon -- but with just one week left until my SUPERXmas! vacation and 8 days until SUPERXmas! itself, I've decided to keep things fresh by writing the greatest Xmas story ever told.

Heather, who blogs at My Demon Spirits, has challenged people to write their most original scary or uplifting holiday story, with the winners getting prizes ranging from a $25 gift card to leather writing journals. And so, with that gauntlet thrown down, I have, well, picked it back up, and in the grand spirit of Charles Dickens (who serialized stories) and Ray Bradbury (who wrote stories) and other people I probably shouldn't be comparing myself to, as well as the grand spirit of the annual Christmas story, I have taken on Heather's challenge and have written what I have humbly decided is going to be the greatest Xmas story ever told.

Heather's contest calls for stories of only 500 words, which I find extremely limiting. It takes me 500 words just to clear my throat, as you know. So here's what I've done. Today's story is my official entry in Heather's contest. But each day, between now and Xmas Day, I will update the story until it's heartwarming thrilling amazing uplifting scary phenomenal will-probably-feature-a-choir-singing conclusion on Christmas Day:

Is that enough ado about nothing? It sure is. Here's Part one of:

"Santa,
Godzilla,
and Jesus
Walk Into A Bar"
a/k/a The Greatest Xmas Story Ever Told.

(By me.)

No orphans were harmed in the making of this story.

And only one orphan was harmed in the telling of it.

On the street in front of Nick, who makes UFOs for a living – it’s a long story, and there’s no time to explain it right now because we’re only moments away from something really important happening -- was a tiny brass trumpet.

It was dirty.

It was covered in soot and laying in a puddle of slush next to a crumpled pack of cigarettes, and looked as though it had a lipstick smear on it, on the wrong end, and maybe some teeth marks, too.

So naturally, Nick picked it up and was just seconds away from blowing into it when the door to the bar he’d just been told to leave opened up behind him and he heard the voice of the man who’d told him to leave, saying:

“Okay, okay. So here’s this one: Santa, Godzilla, and Jesus walk into a bar…”

and Nick paused with the dirty lipstick-smeared horn up to his mouth and listened because with a set up like that who wouldn’t, and then that important thing you were told was going to happen but you already forgot about it happened:

A body slammed to the ground in front of Nick, falling into, as it happens, the exact same puddle that Nick had just pulled the trumpet out of. How’s that for irony? We’re only just getting started, too.

Sirens immediately started up all around Nick, and from both ends of the street – he was in the middle of the block – came cop cars racing towards him, almost as if they’d been waiting for just this.

(They had been.)

Nick squatted down and looked at the body in front of him. It was a large man, laying on his stomach. His face was turned to the side, his eyes closed. Somehow, the fedora the man wore, which Nick hadn’t noticed until that moment, had stayed on when the man had fallen to the puddle from wherever it was he’d fallen from.

All the buildings on the street being three stories or shorter, Nick didn’t bother looking up above him. The man had fallen straight down from the sky, Nick knew, because it had happened right in front of his eyes.

“We’ll take care of this, sir,” said the surprisingly sexy cop who was suddenly standing in front of him. Nick blinked up at her, and saw her eyes narrow in a fetchingly cute way.

“Where’d you get that horn?” she said.

Nick looked down at his hand, still poised near his mouth.

“It’s a trumpet,” he said.

The cop reached for her waist, and Nick made his second regrettable decision that day, the first being “admitting to the bartender that he had no money before he ordered.”

He ran.

The third regrettable decision he made a second later when he looked back and saw the sexy lady cop lifting up the dead bum’s jacket, and noticed the dead bum had wings.

Click here to go the NEXT Part: He calls it "Xmas."

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

"Nobody who is covered in tattoos will ever live to see 90"-- Daniel Tosh (What the H?)

Middle has tattoos, and yet doesn't see this story as a cautionary tale...
____________________________________________

A story that I think that the whole world needs to hear…
haha.

So I was visiting with some friends the other night while I was getting my tattoo touched up and my friend (who was touching up my tattoo) asked me if I had read the story online about the tattoo artist in Iowa who got the greatest revenge on his girlfriend.

I, of course, had not, so he began telling me the story. And let me tell you, for all of you who are reading this, this story is one of the best revenge stories I have heard in a very very long time.

So the story begins with a couple who have been dating for a while and the women starts to cheat on her boyfriend. A little while after she starting cheating on him he found out. He didn’t tell her that he knew and she had no idea that he had found out.

One night when she was out with her friends partying she decided that she was going to go and get a tattoo at her boyfriend's tattoo parlor. When she got there he noticed that she was beyond wasted but he didn’t want to miss his chance to get back at her for cheating on him.

Anyways, after noticing that she was wasted he had her sign a consent form saying that she allowed him to tattoo her and after she signed the consent form it was history for girl and a world of wonders to the tattoo artist/boyfriend soon to be ex-boyfriend.

It turns out that he was not going to give the tattoo that the girl had originally thought that she was thinking. She passed out from being too intoxicated in the tattoo chair and when she was passed out he decided to tattoo this to cover her entire back….

(Yep for those of you who may not be able to see it, this is a tattoo of a pile of dog poop surrounded by flies. )

When she woke up the next morning she not only had an incredible headache but she also discovered this on her back.

,
But when she tried to sue her now ex-boyfriend for tattooing this on her she was unable to do it because she had signed that little “consent form”.

Talk about revenge huh?

________________________________________________________________

Update: The Smoking Gun claims the story is bogus, a story I found when I had to get the image for this story.

Jokes.com

Daniel Tosh - Tattoos

comedians.comedycentral.com

Daniel Tosh

Comedians

Stand-Up

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Perhaps things would have been different if the kids had gotten better grades or at least not lost so many pairs of pants.

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of Sprint for SocialSpark. All opinions are 100% mine.

For the next 24 hours or so, all of my kids’ wishes could have come true.

When the older kids – Oldest Daughter, Middle Daughter, and The Boy – were growing up, one common theme we heard constantly was “Why don’t you get us a cell phone?”

(That was among the other common themes, themes which included “I didn’t do good on that test because my teacher hates kids” and “I don’t remember where I left my pants, why do you ask?”)

We never did get them a cell phone, though – not just because I’m supermean (or so I was told) but because a cell phone is a big, expensive thing to get a kid. The phones cost a lot of money, the plans cost a lot of money, and we didn’t have a lot of money.

Too bad for the kids – but too good for you and others who are looking for a cell phone – that Sprint wasn’t offering back then their very limited time offer of a 4G Android powered phone, free.

That wasn’t sufficiently emphatic, so let me say again:

FREE.

Android™ powered EVO 4G devices.

FREE.

FREE is one of my favorite words, and for the next day or so, you can make your kids’ or your wife’s or your own holiday wishes come true by getting the newest hottest phone on the market, for free.

With 4G speed. Now, I don’t know what the “g” stands for, but I know that the more g’s you have, the better and 4G is the most G’s you can get on the market. So you’ll have ALL THE G’s.

AND, Sprint is waiving the activation fees for a limited time when you get one of these phones. “Waiving the activation fee” is, of course, lawyerspeak for FREE!

A smartphone might be the ultimate present: a camera/websurfing/gaming toy that you can claim (as I do) is necessary for work but which you can then get Plants v. Zombies on so you have something to do during boring meetings. And right now, you can get them free. But the clock is running. Literally- go to the Sprint site and you’ll see the countdown clock telling you when this offer expires.

I had a double major, in law and "that is most definitely not art." (I Get Paid For Doing This)

This diagram:

is from a meeting I had this morning. You, with your lack of law schooling, may not immediately recognize what that is, so I will tell you.

It's a statute of limitations.

Let's look at it again:

Do you see it now? Over on the left there, that flat line, that's your statute of limitations beginning to run. Then, a lawsuit is filed (the large vertical line), after which the statute is tolled, and then the lawsuit ends (the second vertical bar) which means you're then you're filing more motions and some of those motions may reopen the case which reinstates the tolling period which...

... is why you pay people like me a lot of money.

Trust me.

It all makes sense if you pay me a lot of money.

Monday, December 12, 2011

SUPERXmas, Day 15: The State Holiday... er... Christmas... er... WHATEVER tree.

If you're the type of person who doesn't like all these words, you can always page down to find three videos, each about 10 seconds or less in length, that will fulfill your SUPERXmas!/ADHD needs.

For the rest of us/you/me, yesterday, I and Mr Bunches and Mr F did our usual Sunday morning routine, which was to go to the office for a while and do a little busywork before heading out for a day of fun, adventure, not having the patience to wait for a choir to perform, and eventually going to get milk.

Or, SUPERXmas!, for short.

My office is directly across the street from the State Capitol, which has been the scene of lots of controversy this year; it was relatively recently that they took the armed guards out of the building and started letting people enter without being almost strip-searched, and even that didn't reduce the tensions after our idiot governor decided to call it a "Christmas Tree" instead of a "Holiday Tree," that annual debate being the single-most-important thing that most people can think of, and if you ask me, people who worry about what the stupid tree is called are missing... well, a lot of things, but the point is one of the things they're missing.

Those people who shouted down a childrens' choir in Rhode Island, for example: What was it, exactly, that they were standing up for?

The "right" to call a tree a "Christmas tree?" That's a funny thing to stand up for, considering that evergreen trees are used in pagan rituals, too.

The "right" to have Christmas placed front-and-center in December? That's a weird thing to demand, too, given that "Christmas" celebrates Jesus' birth anywhere from four months too late to six months too late -- most people in the know have determined that Jesus was born sometime between June 17 and August 22.

So you Rhode Islanders, and others who protest what a tree is called, were standing up for the right to celebrate a pagan symbol that was adopted ("plagiarized") centuries later by your religion, and is now used to celebrate the day the government says we should rather than the real day.

Just thought you'd want to know.

I'd originally anticipated that our visit to the Whatever Tree would be brief -- it's a tree, you go look at it, and move on, kind of like when you go visit someone's newborn baby-- but I hadn't counted on the hypnotic, mystical effect the Whatever Tree would have on the boys.

As soon as we got to the Capitol, they ran forward to the rotunda where the giant tree is located, and Mr Bunches immediately noted the train that was running beneath it, and they both stared up at the Whatever Tree, and then sat down to just sit and look at it.

So, I sat with them for a few minutes. Why not? When was the last time you just sat and looked at a big public Whatever Tree?

After we sat there for a few minutes -- with Mr Bunches naming the parts of the train (Engine, coal car, box car, water car, caboose!) -- we decided to get some alternate looks at the Whatever Tree, so we went up to the second level of the Capitol, where Mr Bunches looked through the bars to see the Tree and the Train,

while Mr F hung back with me because Mr F is now afraid of heights and might be more afraid of them than I am.

Then it was up to the Third level, for an even-higher-up glimpse at the Whatever Tree, before we headed back down to the ground level, where Mr Bunches wanted to sit and watch the train for a while.

As he did that, I looked more closely at the children-made ornaments on the Whatever Tree, finding ones that celebrated:

Gingerbread Santa: At first, I thought it was African-American Santa, but there were other Gingerbread Men on the Tree:

And Christmas Royal Buckingham Palace Guard

Who might instead be Christmas Russian Hat Wearing Dancer, for all I know, and then I found my favorite Christmas Ornament of all,

Christmas Chopper Attack:

Yep. That's a Patriotic Helicopter Bombing a U.S. Tank on a Christmas Ornament. The country of origin of the Chopper is unknown, so I hope that's not Christmas Friendly Fire. But is Christmas Taliban Resistance really any better? That's for future generations to decide.

And here are the promised videos:

First up: Mr F says tree! That may not seem like much, but it really is phenomenal: