Hello. Welcome to the Weekend Gene Pool, in which you get entertained, and, in return, we get your questions and observations on a subject of our choosing, to deal with later. Today, this exciting exchange of goods and services is three-pronged. You can respond to any or all of them.
Not a perfect joke but an extremely apt cartoon. For several years my husband has been giving me a New Yorker cartoon calendar for Christmas. Last year the cartoons were increasingly so unfunny or even incomprehensible that I asked him to skip the calendar, but he gave me one anyway. So far the mix has been about the same, but yesterday's was a real winner: https://condenaststore.com/featured/a-special-welcome-meredith-southard.html
I had this very nightmare one night this week, except it was college and I had only been to the class once, at the very beginning of the year, and now it was finals and the teacher and everyone else in the class glared at me like I had some nerve for even showing up, and I wished I had not. I could not even make sense of the exam questions, or what subject it was. Panic set in. Don't know why after being out of school for so many decades I should dream this, but I hope I don't again.
That this is a universal nightmare is why the cartoon resonates. If this is the first time you have experienced it, you must be very unusual. The dream frequently also includes forgetting your locker combination and/or the geography of the school. Having been a teacher, I get the added experience of being a teacher in the nightmare and having no idea where (or sometimes even what) my next class is. In the student version, I'm always amazed that I've been carrying the textbook around in my backpack for months and have never opened it. This is especially curious since I never had a backpack when I was a student!
Backpacks certainly existed when I was in school in the '50s and '60s, but they were confined to military or hiking use. I may have had book bags or satchels, I think. I don't remember ever seeing anyone use a book strap, though; that was before my time. In grade school, I think books didn't go home much; I don't remember a lot of homework. In junior high and high school, books stayed in our lockers except for specific classes, and it would have been rare for all the books to have gone home at once (yet surely we had homework in every subject every night?). Since we ordinarily had only four academic subjects at a time, though, I guess that would have been a maximum of four books.
Yes, backpacks were for military and hikers. We had lockers, but my high school consisted of a large campus with several buildings and it was not always convenient to get to our lockers. It was a public high school, but unusual for its large campus.
My father boxed when he was young and taught us how to throw a punch. He also taught us to never start a fight, but always finish one.
The upstairs bar at Bugsy’s in Old Town used to be called The Penalty Box. (The owner, Bryan “Bugsy” Watson spent over 2200 minutes in the box during his 16 year NHL career.) We’d often go there after playing at the Mt Vernon rink. One night, Ronnie and I were the first ones there when some jar head gets in my face for no other reason than that he wanted to get into a fight with somebody. I tell him to back off, he takes a swing and I then follow my father’s advice and finish it. The bartender grabs the guy, flings him out, then sets a small bag of ice for my hand and a free pitcher of beer in front of us saying, “That guy’s been looking for a fight since he came in here. Glad you gave him what he needed.”
So, in the forty-five years that I played organized hockey, I never got into a fight on the ice, but I can say that I got into one in the penalty box.
The late (great) Norm Macdonald, known to me primarily from SNL, suggested the perfect joke would be one where the setup and punchline are pretty much the same. Not quite, but one I recently came across that makes the point. "OJ can finally rest knowing his wife's killer is dead." (Would a figurative drum sting be in bad taste here?)
This is not funny at all, but in terms of comeuppance, your Tom the Butcher story illustrates the outsized importance of headlines, and the ultimate comeuppance given to headline writers in 2016.
Every time Trump said something outrageous without proof, like Mexicans are rapists who will pay for his wall, or Hillary Clinton takes bribes from big corporations, major media couldn't wait to cover it, and major media headline writers failed every time to create the right headline, ultimately helping to elect the Drumpf.
Instead of creating the proper context (such as "Trump lies again about Clinton's record"), they printed "Trump says Clinton takes bribes").
As George Lakoff has written about extensively (he's a really good Substack follow), Trump frames the conversation, then the headline writers repeatedly re-activate the frame, rather than refute it.
Lakoff's book about mental frames has ones of the great non-fiction book titles: Don't Think of an Elephant
Oops, mine was in childhood, The neighborhood bully was facing me with his hands around my throat. i hauled off and slapped him with the flat of my hand as hard as i could. My hand stung like heck, but it was worth it to see him burst into tears and run home. He never bullied me again.
I think I'll be hearing about self-defense in the comments! Didn't include it b/c I'm not sure the puncher gets to decide what was self defense, you know? That is not casting aspersions anywhere. It's just inherently subjective.
I did have a fight in fifth grade, but was too terrified to really hit Max, who bullied me, even though my younger sister was goading me on to clobber him. Max and I reconciled, and became close enough friends that when he moved away in sixth grade, he gave me his box turtle “Eight.” (Named because Max had, in gold paint, outlined two of his back circles (whatever they are actually called) in a figure 8.)
Oops. I didn't read the poll instructions carefully enough. I selected both when in actuality I should have chosen neither because the "violence occurred in childhood".
In college, I gut-punched a drunken Egyptology major who was lumbering toward me, demanding a kiss. He dropped like a sack of potatoes. (I learned in childhood skirmishes to aim for the solar plexus.)
Not surprised you would take this stance, being the recidivist you are. If your puns as crimes against humanity oh so easily roll off your finger tips, I can only imagine what other diabolical doings you're hiding. However, absolution can be yours, I am reliably informed, for only two fondling gift subscriptions to TGP. Who says the royal couple isn't magnanimous, despite obviously favoring their love children when it comes to the Invitational.
Real men don't fondle either--not even gift subscriptions.
And if puns were good enough for William Shakespeare, who am I to gainsay their usage? As in, "How many doses of the covid vaccine do I need, Caesar?" "It's two, Bruté."
You should know better by now than to give me an opening. Eh, Mummy? (I trust in your royal magnanimity to forgive the familiarity.)
We didn't USE the inhaler back in college, Dale. We cracked it open and ate the soaked wick. Great for pulling an all-nighter. And the poll results are interesting so far.
Not a perfect joke but an extremely apt cartoon. For several years my husband has been giving me a New Yorker cartoon calendar for Christmas. Last year the cartoons were increasingly so unfunny or even incomprehensible that I asked him to skip the calendar, but he gave me one anyway. So far the mix has been about the same, but yesterday's was a real winner: https://condenaststore.com/featured/a-special-welcome-meredith-southard.html
I had this very nightmare one night this week, except it was college and I had only been to the class once, at the very beginning of the year, and now it was finals and the teacher and everyone else in the class glared at me like I had some nerve for even showing up, and I wished I had not. I could not even make sense of the exam questions, or what subject it was. Panic set in. Don't know why after being out of school for so many decades I should dream this, but I hope I don't again.
That this is a universal nightmare is why the cartoon resonates. If this is the first time you have experienced it, you must be very unusual. The dream frequently also includes forgetting your locker combination and/or the geography of the school. Having been a teacher, I get the added experience of being a teacher in the nightmare and having no idea where (or sometimes even what) my next class is. In the student version, I'm always amazed that I've been carrying the textbook around in my backpack for months and have never opened it. This is especially curious since I never had a backpack when I was a student!
They had not been invented yet when I was in school. We carried them stacked in our arms.
Backpacks certainly existed when I was in school in the '50s and '60s, but they were confined to military or hiking use. I may have had book bags or satchels, I think. I don't remember ever seeing anyone use a book strap, though; that was before my time. In grade school, I think books didn't go home much; I don't remember a lot of homework. In junior high and high school, books stayed in our lockers except for specific classes, and it would have been rare for all the books to have gone home at once (yet surely we had homework in every subject every night?). Since we ordinarily had only four academic subjects at a time, though, I guess that would have been a maximum of four books.
Yes, backpacks were for military and hikers. We had lockers, but my high school consisted of a large campus with several buildings and it was not always convenient to get to our lockers. It was a public high school, but unusual for its large campus.
My father boxed when he was young and taught us how to throw a punch. He also taught us to never start a fight, but always finish one.
The upstairs bar at Bugsy’s in Old Town used to be called The Penalty Box. (The owner, Bryan “Bugsy” Watson spent over 2200 minutes in the box during his 16 year NHL career.) We’d often go there after playing at the Mt Vernon rink. One night, Ronnie and I were the first ones there when some jar head gets in my face for no other reason than that he wanted to get into a fight with somebody. I tell him to back off, he takes a swing and I then follow my father’s advice and finish it. The bartender grabs the guy, flings him out, then sets a small bag of ice for my hand and a free pitcher of beer in front of us saying, “That guy’s been looking for a fight since he came in here. Glad you gave him what he needed.”
So, in the forty-five years that I played organized hockey, I never got into a fight on the ice, but I can say that I got into one in the penalty box.
If you have a sibling, I’m pretty sure you’ve punched or slapped them and meant to cause them harm. 😄
The rules specifically excluded childhood.
Who said anything about childhood??? 😄😄😄
Didn't read the rules.
true!
The late (great) Norm Macdonald, known to me primarily from SNL, suggested the perfect joke would be one where the setup and punchline are pretty much the same. Not quite, but one I recently came across that makes the point. "OJ can finally rest knowing his wife's killer is dead." (Would a figurative drum sting be in bad taste here?)
This is not funny at all, but in terms of comeuppance, your Tom the Butcher story illustrates the outsized importance of headlines, and the ultimate comeuppance given to headline writers in 2016.
Every time Trump said something outrageous without proof, like Mexicans are rapists who will pay for his wall, or Hillary Clinton takes bribes from big corporations, major media couldn't wait to cover it, and major media headline writers failed every time to create the right headline, ultimately helping to elect the Drumpf.
Instead of creating the proper context (such as "Trump lies again about Clinton's record"), they printed "Trump says Clinton takes bribes").
As George Lakoff has written about extensively (he's a really good Substack follow), Trump frames the conversation, then the headline writers repeatedly re-activate the frame, rather than refute it.
Lakoff's book about mental frames has ones of the great non-fiction book titles: Don't Think of an Elephant
Oops, mine was in childhood, The neighborhood bully was facing me with his hands around my throat. i hauled off and slapped him with the flat of my hand as hard as i could. My hand stung like heck, but it was worth it to see him burst into tears and run home. He never bullied me again.
I would suggest repeating the punch/slap poll with the addition of “…that was not in self-defense”
I think I'll be hearing about self-defense in the comments! Didn't include it b/c I'm not sure the puncher gets to decide what was self defense, you know? That is not casting aspersions anywhere. It's just inherently subjective.
I did have a fight in fifth grade, but was too terrified to really hit Max, who bullied me, even though my younger sister was goading me on to clobber him. Max and I reconciled, and became close enough friends that when he moved away in sixth grade, he gave me his box turtle “Eight.” (Named because Max had, in gold paint, outlined two of his back circles (whatever they are actually called) in a figure 8.)
Oops. I didn't read the poll instructions carefully enough. I selected both when in actuality I should have chosen neither because the "violence occurred in childhood".
In college, I gut-punched a drunken Egyptology major who was lumbering toward me, demanding a kiss. He dropped like a sack of potatoes. (I learned in childhood skirmishes to aim for the solar plexus.)
Next time, please gut-punch the orange button.
Sorry. At least I followed the rule about not including childhood anecdotes.
Ah Bernie --those Egyptology majors! Always looking for their mummy. (No really ---too kind. A simple guffaw would have been more than enough).
25 years ago I punched a boyfriend after he angrily picked me up by the back of the neck. Pleasant fellow.
Gene, still the naif after more than a year, eh wot? You think "rules" matter to this lot? "Rules? Rules !? We don't need no stinkin' rules!"
I know! Some people even send their entries to Comments, even when I implore them, for better readership and response, to send it to orange buttons.
Yeah. The orange buttons seem to link to sites that don't clearly fit the format of making an entry. I repeatedly get a form to 'submit a question'.
Real men don't ask for directions, and they don't read rules.
Not surprised you would take this stance, being the recidivist you are. If your puns as crimes against humanity oh so easily roll off your finger tips, I can only imagine what other diabolical doings you're hiding. However, absolution can be yours, I am reliably informed, for only two fondling gift subscriptions to TGP. Who says the royal couple isn't magnanimous, despite obviously favoring their love children when it comes to the Invitational.
Real men don't fondle either--not even gift subscriptions.
And if puns were good enough for William Shakespeare, who am I to gainsay their usage? As in, "How many doses of the covid vaccine do I need, Caesar?" "It's two, Bruté."
You should know better by now than to give me an opening. Eh, Mummy? (I trust in your royal magnanimity to forgive the familiarity.)
Wow! Some Weekend Pool. Not using that old Vicks inhaler again are We ?
We didn't USE the inhaler back in college, Dale. We cracked it open and ate the soaked wick. Great for pulling an all-nighter. And the poll results are interesting so far.
Dear god, not really? 😳
Boxing matches
I excluded that specifically.