Tag Archives: humor

What the hell does that say?

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Have you ever noticed in news reports, or in photographs of war-torn streets in the Arab Middle East, you see (every now and then) graffiti scrawled on the side of buildings in looped and curved Arabic characters? Here’s the thing – I always assume that every single scrawling like this has a foreboding message related to Allah or Jihad. Am I being prejudiced in thinking this way?

I think news organizations should make it a policy to translate such text whenever it makes its way into one of their reports (television, newspaper, or web). Maybe some of this graffiti is just graffiti.  Maybe some are messages like “Abdullah loves Aisha” or ‘Mullah Omar is a Douchebag”

Man, if that were the case, it would affirm my faith in humanity!

Extremists and laughter

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If we could just get these people to laugh – I think that could turn things around.

To have them catch themselves laughing joyfully about something that does not involve mass calamity, blown up buildings, or dead hostages.

Rather than drone strikes, I think we should try a different approach. Let’s kidnap extremist leaders and force them to watch a few episodes of Everyone Loves Raymond, or The King of Queens, or The Office. Or at least lobby our representatives to dump some defense dollars into researching what tickles the funny bone of an extremist?.

Because laughter allows us to forget our troubles (if only for a moment) – it is a uniquely human ability (sorry, I do not think those Hyenas are actually laughing) – and genuine laughter is one of the few human experiences that provides “oneness with the moment”.

And let’s be honest, if it’s a really, really, really good laugh, one of those so-hard-you cried-and-could-not-catch-your-breath laughs, you remember it forever. It gets stored in the laugh reservoir portion of our brain, so that we can draw upon this reservoir during those times when we’re stuck in the desolation desert.

I think extremists spend their entire existence in the desolation desert and their laugh reservoirs are a big sandy pit.

If you know any extremists, tell them a joke, try to get them to giggle (do not try to tickle them – that could be dangerous).

Men and greeting cards

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Men cannot get through reading any non-humorous greeting card that contains over 5 sentences.

We are completely incapable of toughing it out in that situation. If someone is watching us, we pretend to be reading it – but rest assured we are not. If no one is there when we receive such a card, we still pretend to read it – not sure who we are pretending for. When we are done pretending to read the card, we place it on the sofa table in the standard stand up fashion – when a card is in that position, it is assumed to have been read.

Sorry, but this is all true. If you want men to read a greeting card – make it a funny one – or make it a short one.