Weekly Giggle: Kudzu Jesus

This week's essay is proving problematic. I hope to have it finished before the 4th. In the meantime, I simply must share my new favorite quotation:

"You can't spray Jesus with Roundup."

This gem of a quotation by Kent Hardison of North Carolina appears in an article reporting how Hardison found an image of the crucified Jesus in kudzu growing on a telephone pole.

Now, for those of you fortunate enough to be unfamiliar with kudzu, it's a pernicious vine that grows all over the southern United States, engulfing everything in its path. Most folks down south do their best to kill it, but it just keeps coming back. Hardison finds this symbolism appropriate. "It doesn't matter what you do, it is going to be around," he said. "Ain't that a lot like Jesus?"

Amen, Brother Hardison. Amen.

Weekly Giggle #30

Y'all are gonna get sick of my linking to Lowering the Bar, but seriously, today's post is hysterically funny. The Pentagon and CIA, both lacking in the humor department, could learn A LOT from MI6 about fighting terrorism.

Weekly Giggle #29: A Postmodern Play in Two Acts

Act 1

The scene: Tucking the boys into bed last night. Susan is lying beside Jack, and George is beside Nick. The room is dark. 

George: Nick, we're going to institute a new rule in this house. Nothing but G-rated movies.

Nick: Noooooooo!!!!!

George: Yep. There's a good one coming out soon. It's called Fluffy Puppy Finds a Rainbow.

Nick: Noooooooo!!!

George: Yep. Don't you want to see Fluffy Puppy Finds a Rainbow?

Nick: Noooooo!!!!

Jack [to Susan]: Mommy, rainbows are sooooo beautiful.



Act 2

The scene: Five minutes after Act 1, following a particularly deep discussion between Susan, George, and Nick on what happens to us after we die. Susan and George are exiting the room.

Jack: "Are we going to die?"

George: "Everybody dies eventually."

Jack: "Not us! We're Raihalas!"



The End

Weekly Giggle #28

If you love babies and their funny faces and their funny laughs, click here and watch the video. You will smile.

Weekly Giggle #27...or Something

Oh. My. Gosh.

I can't unsee this, so YOU might as well suffer with me.

Cake Wrecks occasionally does this to the blog-reading world, and I really don't know why no one has sued them yet for extreme mental anguish.

The first six pictures are bad enough, especially the "Farewell Baby Noh" with mom's leg half-eaten, but the last...

the last just...

well, all I can say in response is to quote Kurtz from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness:

"The horror, the horror."

The Cake Cannibals

Weekly Giggle #26

Our weekly giggle is brought, yet once again, by Lowering the Bar, that extremely funny legal blog I keep sending you to. Seriously, you should just go ahead and subscribe to it so you can get weekly giggles daily.

Both cases he mentions in today's post (linked below) are funny only because no one was seriously hurt. Please also click to his link on the Fountain Lady because, dang, Lowering the Bar gives excellent advice on how to deal with the embarrassing situations we put ourselves in. I'll give you a hint: it's not what either the gun safety expert or fountain lady have done.

What NOT to Do at a Gun Safety Class

Weekly Giggle #25

You know, some websites are reliable sources of giggles, and Lowering the Bar is one of them. Today's post, How the Great Kansas City Meerkat Caper Unraveled, had me and George in stitches.

Enjoy!

Weekly Giggle #24

For Nick's birthday, I baked a perfect cheesecake. After Nick, George, and I inhaled our pieces, George and I had the following conversation.


Me: When it comes to baking, I rock.

George: What about bread?

Me: Baking with sugar. I rock at baking cakes and pies and bars.

George: True. But why don’t you bake cookies?

Me: My cookies never seem to turn out how I want. Except my Angel Balls [a.k.a. wedding cookies]. Those rock.

George: I don’t consider those cookies.

Me: Why not?

George: They’re spherical.

Who knew?

Weekly Giggle #23

Go here and see the most embarrassing cakes a girl could ever have. EVER. The symbolism of the drippy cherry cheesecake...*shudder*

Cake Wrecks: Parent Appreciation Day

Lucy and Levonna, you're going to need years of counseling for this trauma. Big hugs, girls. Big hugs.

Weekly Giggle #21

Are you wondering where I've been? Well, I'm adjusting. Adjusting to a new schedule. Adjusting to chaos. Adjusting to the idea of being a Stephen Minister. Adjusting to a second wave of cold virus. Adjusting to having to give a talk in church on Sunday. Adjusting to being popular over on my Simplicity blog.

I've never been popular before. I was always the next-to-last person chosen for teams in physical education. People ignored me in the halls at school. Now, I have stamp companies emailing me asking if I want free stuff. Free stuff sounds good, doesn't it? But I've already got a lot of free stuff. I'm drowning in free stuff.

I'm adjusting to free stuff. Honestly, that's not a problem, per se. Just an adjustment.

So that's where I've been. Adjusting. Eventually, I will finish the essay I'm working on for you. It's titled "Craving White Space in a Carnival World." Well, that is the working title. It might change. And no, white space isn't some racist thing. It's a reference to empty space in graphic design. White space can be black or purple or fushia. It's just empty.

Anyway, while I'm adjusting, I thought you might enjoy this lovely post over on Cake Wrecks by Prince Hobubu. As someone who recently received a phishing email telling me that my credit card had been deleted from PayPal and I needed to re-enter the card information by clicking on a link conveniently provided in the email, I have to say Prince Hobubu's appeal made me laugh hysterically.

And no, I didn't click on the link and give these phishers my credit card information. But George and I did talk to Nick about internet safety and how bad people use the internet to steal from people. He was shocked. "Isn't that illegal?" he asked.

Yes, son. It is. But trust Cake Wrecks to make us laugh about it.

Weekly Giggle #20

Once again, Lowering the Bar gives us something to laugh about.

Judge Hands out Condoms Hidden in Acorns

I, for one, am hoping the judge was drunk when he decided to act out his little joke. But perhaps I'm being ridiculously optimistic.

Weekly Giggle #19

July is Tour de France month, and Radio Shack is a sponsor. They're airing commercials featuring Lance Armstrong. My favorite is HERE. Click on "watch commercials" and then on the "Microphone" commercial.

L.O.L. And true.

Weekly Giggle #18

Friday was Business Day at the boys' school. Fourth graders formed businesses, made products, marketed them, and sold them to the other grades. Nick and his friend Josh teamed up to make brownies and mints, which sold extremely well.

Jack's teacher gave each of her students a dollar (fake money) to go shopping. Here is her account of Jack's shopping experience:


[Jack] ended up getting watermelon. On the way out he noticed a brownie with BLUE icing and really wanted it. He literally went up to the girl selling them and batting his eyes (I am NOT making this up!) said "You know blue is my favorite color and I LOVE brownies, but I have no money." Well....who can resist that, she gave him one for free. I told Jack that his charming personality will not always get him free things in life.... I'm going to miss him this summer!

That's my boy!

Weekly Giggle #17

I just posted this little story on my stamping blog and thought I'd share it here, too.

When George and I took childbirthing class, our teacher was a German woman with a very deep, heavily accented voice. At one point, she ordered us to "exp-herience da relax-A-tion." Her voice was sooooo NOT relaxing that George and I started to giggle. Anyway, she suggested we find our happy place and meditate on it during labor. My happy place was a North Carolina beach, with the steady, peaceful waves and the pelicans flying and a Scot in full Highland dress playing his bagpipes to the rising sun. (Yes, I actually experienced this very scene on an early morning beach walk, and it was so incredibly peaceful. Well, sort of weird with the kilted Highlander, but calming nevertheless.) Ahhhh, relaxation.

Fast forward to labor. It hurt sooooo much that I could NOT find my happy place. Every time I closed my eyes to conjure that Scot by the waves, the only image my brain could pull up was of the Pacific coast, specifically some cliffs we'd visited near San Francisco in 1988. The day was overcast and gloomy, and the waves violently crashed against the cliffs with, oddly enough, a German voice-over shouting "Exp-herience da relax-A-tion!" This was NOT my East Coast happy place at all. I could not get there because my giant watermelon-size uterus was teaching me a whole new definition of pain like I'd never felt before.

I begged for the epidural man, who quickly came and took all the hyperventilating pain away. I loved him and would have married him if I weren't already having someone else's baby. God bless the epidural man.

And that is how I flunked natural childbirth.

Weekly Giggle #16

Dogs have excellent comic timing....

George [to Hoover]: Doesn’t it hurt to lie on the hardwood floor on the side with your tumor?

Hoover [George in his best Arnold Schwarzenegger voice]: It’s NOT A TUMAH!

Weekly Giggle #15

Just as I decide I'm too old to wear message t-shirts, I find this:

Mental Floss T-Shirts

My favorites?

Hyperbole is the best thing ever. [Note: this is the new tagline for QmI!]

Ambiguity: What happens in Vagueness Stays in Vagueness

I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous.

I'm an English Major. You do the math.

I avoid cliches like the plague.

Which ones are YOUR favorites?

Weekly Giggle #15

George was teaching Jack to ride his bike, and suddenly Jack put his feet down and stopped. George asked what the problem was.

Jack: There's a bee up there.

George: Just ride past him really fast. He'll never even know you're there.

Jack: You have GOT to be KIDDING me.

You can't get anything past my son, especially where bees are concerned. And yes, he rode his bike without training wheels. We're so proud!

Weekly Giggle #15

Since some of you receive my blog via your work email, I’m not titling this post as it deserves, but in our heads, let’s call it Every Sperm is Sacred. I’ve never laughed as hard at Monty Python as I did Sunday night at my dinner table.

George decided to have a tootsie pop out of the kids’ Easter baskets. The Easter Bunny—who is diabolically wicked and pagan to boot and I love him anyway—brought egg-shaped tootsie pops this year because he knows tootsie pops are one of the few candies Jack will eat. George unwrapped his grape-flavored pop and immediately saw the same thing I did, at the same time. He held it up and announced:

“This tootsie pop isn’t egg-shaped. It’s sperm-shaped.”

Don't you agree?

Now, I think we can state pretty definitively that there wasn’t a woman on the committee that named the iPad (still, its name isn’t keeping me, or George for that matter, from wanting one), but seriously, who thought the idea of sperm-shaped suckers was a good one? Anyone who’s been through fifth-grade sex education class KNOWS that shape and has giggled at cartoon images of it swimming upstream. I’m willing to bet there’s not a human over eleven years old who can eat one of these suckers with a straight face, either.

It gets funnier.

As we were giggling over the sucker’s shape, Nick walked up and asked, “What’s a sperm?”

Which resulted in helplessly juvenile giggling from the over-40 crowd in the house.

“No, seriously. What’s a sperm? I want to know what’s so funny.”

Oh, help me, Rhonda! I had a bite of peep in my mouth. I was laughing so hard I couldn’t swallow, and as the marshmallow dissolved, I felt like I’d either drown or throw up, which, in that moment, was hilariously funny and made me laugh harder.

I was completely incapable of speech, so George answered, through involuntary snorts and giggles, “I’ll tell you when I finish eating it. I can’t talk about it and eat this thing at the same time.” Then he made his sucker swim through the air.

Who knew laughing could hurt so much?

Once we got ourselves under control, we explained about sperm and egg cells and googled pictures of sperm so Nick would understand. Fortunately, he didn’t ask where sperm come from, so we were spared that much detail, but Oh. My. Gosh.

Sperm-shaped suckers. What will they think of next?

P.S. It is posts like this that keep me from putting “content-appropriate advertising” on this blog. Can you just imagine the sorts of ads that might pop up beside this? *shudder*

P.P.S. DUKE WON THE NCAA CHAMPIONSHIP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WAY TO GO, BLUE DEVILS!!!!!!!!!!!! COACH K ROCKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! BUTLER, I'M PROUD OF YOU, TOO!!!!!!

Weekly Giggle #14, Part 2

Okay, Dooce is funny, but so is my son. The following sentence was uttered with complete sincerity by Nick, my 10-year-old, at the dinner table:

"I want a work-free job."

George nearly spewed beer on me.

Weekly Giggle #14

Dooce is a bit of an edgy mommy blogger (especially compared to me, the Queen of Let the Sun Shine), but I love her. Dooce makes being a klutz funny, even when she's broken her tail bone snowboarding. This post, in which breaking her toe is only incidental, had me rolling!

Exhibit A