Humor is relative
I think some of what I write is funny. Does anyone else?
Three ducks in a fountain
I was wondering why the water wasn’t turned on in a fountain where I live (it was likely shut off to keep pipes from freezing in last month’s frigid weather). That’s when I discovered the wildlife inside.
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Funny you should ask
I’ve collected some of my lighter writing to share with you this week. I hesitate to say any of it is funny.
That’s because humor is like spilt molasses. It flows where it will. You can’t contain it. It’s flexible, changeable, fleeting, insouciant, maddening. Whether you like it is a matter of taste.
I’ve written items I thought were funny before, to be met with the sound of crickets.
Humor is intensely personal. Some like slapstick, others, like me, savor a more cerebral, subtle joke.
Want both slapstick and cerebral? Try Monty Python. Or enjoy the Marx Brothers. Just make sure to stash the shrubbery, and keep track of your necktie.
Pattern and color
Technically, this is not a good photo. I had to use too much optical zoom to get close to the crow. But the composition is fascinating. Check out the patterns, the reflections, of green and black.
Kicking the banana
Once upon a time in the Safeway on Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard, I saw a produce man stocking organic bananas. As he was stacking them, a few bananas fell on the floor. He picked them up and returned them to the pile. A few more bananas hit the linoleum that he didn’t notice until he had kicked one of them. Those, too, went back on the pile.
I’m sorry for the customers who bought the dropped and kicked bananas. I’m sorry, too, for the produce guy who didn’t connect, or didn’t care, that dropping bananas ruins the fruit. A dropped banana is only good for banana bread.
Not-to-do list
Here are some thing I choose not to do. It’s aspirational. I like the idea of not doing such things. But I still do, sometimes.
I “choose” not to:
Bite my nails
Shop for nonessentials (which is most everything)
Be offended
Try to change others
Make assumptions
Drive
Eat potato chips (Doritos? Read The Dorito Effect; that’ll cure you)
Fume while stopped in traffic
Obsess over politics
Accept defeat
Be passive
Be aggressive
Judge others
Judge situations
Remember grudges
A year ago, I made up several lists of names—old-time dogs, modern dogs, squirrels, hippies, clowns, wise guys . . . (you’ll need to scroll toward the end of the posting to find these)
One category was
Plumbers
Smitty
Squeaky
Lefty
Pipes
Duke
Luigi
Ginger
Righty
G. Gordon
Let me say this about that
We’ve all known people who say things that are self-apparent. They often do so in serious tones.
They have what I consider to be “a firm grasp of the obvious.”
While I was working as an editor at The Oregonian, I noted some examples that turned up in the paper.
City spokeswoman [name withheld] said the tax proposal is a result of city revenues not keeping up with expenses.
When students ask him how to prepare for careers in law enforcement, [name withheld] tells them: “The choices you make today are going to affect you tomorrow. So try to make good decisions.”
Washington County animal control officer (or plug in any other job): “Some days, we’re very busy. Other days, it’s slow. But it’s always a challenge.”
Don’t do that! list
Sniff my crotch. Bad dog!
Walk on ice
Leave the water running
Forget to turn off the oven
Put metal in the microwave
Stand under a lonely tree in a thunderstorm
Put beans up your nose
Sniff lighter fluid
Rub fur the wrong way
Put the wool socks in the dryer
Cry over spilt milk
Turn the stereo on high
Put all your eggs in one basket
Forget to empty the lint trap
Carry coffee without a lid
Tilt the airline seat into my lap
Drink alcohol before noon
Hide your money in a skein of yarn and then forget it
Wear stripes and plaid together
Text while driving
Draw to an inside straight
Choose plastic over paper
Worry. Be happy.
According to Dave
Some of the cleverest lyrics written this side of Cole Porter were by the late Dave Frishberg, who lived in Portland. I am especially fond of “My Attorney Bernie.”
I have permission from the holder of his copyright to print a few lines. At the time I made the request, I thought they used internal rhyme, that is, a word in the middle of a line rhymes with the word at the end.* But these are just rhyming verses.
*A year ago, one of my favorite posts delved into internal rhyme, including in verses by W.S. Gilbert before he partnered with Arthur Sullivan. By the time I was done, I had brought together the Episcopal hymnal and “Lydia, the Tattooed Lady,” along with “Whatever It Is, I’m Against It!”
He’s got Dodger season boxes
And an office full of foxes
Or
Sure we blew a couple ventures
With a counterfeit debenturesLet Cole do it
As for internal rhyme, I love this quatrain from Porter’s “Let’s Do It,” where “shad” rhymes with “add”:
Electric eels, I might add, do it
Though it shocks ’em I know
Why ask if shad do it?
Waiter, bring me shad roe
And another verse from “Bernie.”
And if I’m locked up in the jail
With just one phone call for my bail
He said to call his club collect
Or deal direct-ly with his answering machine.It won’t be any news to you that you can Google or DuckDuckGo or Bing “My Attorney Bernie” and find the words of the entire song. At least, if you play it using Apple Music or Spotify, the estate will be getting a little richer.
I suggest you do that. Frishberg at the piano, singing his own song. . . . It’s funny. It’s priceless.
Newspaper humor, not an oxymoron
Some decades back, when I was working for The Oregonian, I got regular emails from Charley Stough at the Dayton, Ohio, Daily News. He headlined them “BONG Bull,” BONG standing for Burned-out Newspapercreatures Guild.
This was early Internet, so early that his offerings started as LISTSERVs (look it up).
The Bull was mostly corny humor related to newsroom life.
I kept one of his postings, from 1998, because it answers a trick question: “Can you recite the 6-Point Benday Rule?”
A little background
Benday rule was a staple of the page designer’s toolbox in the era where cold-type pages were laid out in the back shop on gridded paper. Type was printed on film in columns. The film strips were run through a machine that coated the back with wax, then pasted on the page and rolled into place with a brayer. Headlines were added separately.
Rules, such as those separating columns, were created with strips of tape.
Benday is the technology that uses dots to print color, familiar in the Sunday comics. Benday rule consists of gray dots in a pleasing pattern.
Printer’s measure: There are 6 picas in an inch and 12 points in a pica. So a 6-point rule (half a pica wide) would be 1/12 inch.
The 6-Point Benday Rule
Courtesy of Charles Stough
1. An ounce of phone book is worth a pound of shoe leather.
2. The printed version of what a person said is always what was said.
3. The first one to the editor is always right.
4. No good ever comes from saving a notebook.
5. A newspaper bears no moral obligation to honor a reporter’s promise of source anonymity; offer it freely. [This is a joke, friends. Newspapers do take anonymity seriously.]
6. Never put a greater effort into writing a story than the reader will put into reading it.
7. Somewhere, out there, there’s a freckled-faced kid swinging on a tree, playing with his dog, enjoying life, and you must find that little twerp and take his damn picture.
Addendum: Some will suggest that the 6-Point Benday Rule is a gray border of a certain width. Don’t be fooled. Respond by saying, “Oh sure, and next you’ll be sending me down to the press room for the type stretcher,* right?”
*With today’s technology, anyone can stretch type, or twist it, or make it loop the loop.
Gentle ribbing
Recently, I got a chance to trip someone up by asking about the 6-point Benday Rule. Seasoned newspaperman Eric Mortenson has his own Substack, About Half Shot, where a recent post laid out some rules for journalists. In the comments, I asked if he knew the 10-point Benday Rule (I hadn’t looked it up yet and I got the number wrong), and he bit.
I owe him thanks for helping me dust off that old posting from Charley Stough (his name could be written S’tough), who died in 2011 at age 67.
The bus has ears
Trimet’s security cameras include audio, according to new signage. I wonder, can the camera can pick up the sound of a loud fart? Better watch your manners, Trimet riders!
From silly to SAD
It’s February, the days are still short, and some people suffer from what used to be called seasonal affective disorder, or SAD. It’s now known as “depression with seasonal pattern.”
My history with SAD
I remember attending a research fair at Oregon Health & Science University in the mid-1980s, when I was the oped page editor at The Oregonian and looking for interesting topics for essays.
Some researchers had a novel notion: weak winter light could trigger depression, and strong light could alleviate it. Dr. Alfred Lewy at OHSU contributed to the groundbreaking work by Dr. Norman Rosenthal at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md.
I have been familiar with winter depression. My physician in the late 80s once noted that I turned up at about Feb. 20 every year complaining of low energy and lethargy.
For some time after learning about SAD, I and my daughters used a bright fluorescent fixture to help adjust our winter light levels. It made a difference. We found that morning exposure worked better than evening.
Diagnosis in, diagnosis out
A decade later, in the mid-90s, I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. For some reason, after that, I wasn’t troubled with season depression or some other psychological issues that once bedeviled me. It was as if the new diagnosis scrubbed them.
Or maybe the MS diagnosis gave me permission to be tired. Fatigue is, after all, the major symptom of MS in most people.
Whatever. Now I could stop beating myself up for feeling lazy and unmotivated. I could—and did—toss the antidepressants.
Not surprisingly, thinking and research into SAD have been centered at Oregon Health Sciences University. The weather in the Pacific Northwest is strikingly gray and rainy in the winter, in contrast to the sun-on-snow brightness of other parts of the North. Letting bright fluorescent light shine on us as we ate breakfast made everyone in my family feel more energetic.
Beauty shot
We had some gorgeous weather in Portland last week. I was intrigued by the words on the cab of this truck: Diamond Line. The sunbeams and reflections in this photo are like diamonds. I feel uplifted just looking at it.
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The stranger
It is February, and this month’s theme is the unknown history of the other. And while I am neither a historian or an anthropologist, I hope I pay attention.
What I have noticed is that every indigenous tradition (the relative few that I am aware of) recognizes the interconnectivity of all life.
As I notice things around me, I know that this is true. When I enter the small forest near where I live, the trees, the ivy, the shrubbery, the dirt, the blackberries, the birds, the rabbits, the snakes, the dew, the sunshine—everything that is there is a part of a whole. There is no individual squirrel. The squirrel is of the forest.
The poet David Wagoner wrote in “Lost”:
. . . The forest knows Where you are. You must let it find you.
That is what Western culture does not understand. That every living thing, every inanimate thing, every drop of rain and molecule of air—they are all connected, all part of the life force.
A month past
Now that it’s February, January’s resolution—buy nothing except food and supplies—is moot. So here’s a poem about that:
Ordering online
Push the “buy now” button Or view the cart. No! Wait! Another bright object— I didn’t know I wanted that. But add it to the cart. Am I ready for checkout? No! Not yet! Let me think, let me think… What was it I wanted? What was it I needed? Can I do without it? Never ask that question! This is my online agora. Impossible not to find My heart’s desire Here on the shelves of Amazon, Or Walmart, Mayfair or Yummy Bazaar, iHerb, USPS, Chewy— All the pretty names, And they all take plastic. Or PayPal, Or your promise to pay in installments. So, along with those vitamins, I’ll take that smart TV. Throw in a set of underwear. It’s not every day I get to shop Without turning on QVC.
One good purchase for you
I haven’t made a pitch for paid subscribers in a month, so I’m doing it now. I’m committed to providing free content, but I’d also like to profit from my work.
I’m considering a midweek posting that would only be available to paid subscribers. I’m thinking it would be about food and recipes. Not for nothing did I spend six years in The Oregonian’s FoodDay section. Plus, I am a lifelong cook and baker who likes to experiment. I’ve developed dozens of recipes, some of which I’ve shared in Becoming over the months.
What do you think? Would the prospect of yummy, original recipes, added to my already fine content, push you into paying territory?
While you’re pondering your answer, go up and poke the “like” button.
I like you!
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This month you mentioned Monty python. I enjoy Monty python especially Life of Brian because I fell and broke my leg in 2023, spiral fracture tib fib. I watch it and laugh when I'm feeling depressed and need a laugh.
Yes! Absolutely, keep it up.