The news is unbearably sad to read and watch this week. Gunfire in the streets, rapes in the shelters, corpses everywhere, looting, disease – I’ve actually had to ration my news consumption as a mental health measure. (I did the same thing in September 2001.) For reasons I’ll probably never understand, I actually shed tears over Badger’s loss, but haven’t over New Orleans. At some level, incomprehensibility just numbs.
To stay sane, I’ve been paying extra attention to moments of comic relief:
The Boy uses ‘goodly’ as an adverb. “Look at how goodly I drew the dinosaur!” It makes sense, actually, and ‘goodly’ is an actual word (a goodly sum), so I’m not quite sure how to correct him.
The Pastafarians have constructed a perfectly wonderful, and very silly, response to the “Intelligent Design” movement. Check it out.
I’ll admit it – I stole the “Ask the Administrator” idea from Harvey, whose “Ask a Super-Villain” recurring feature always makes me laugh. This week’s interview with Modok is fun, as is this one with Magus, but my fave is this one with Batroc the Leaper (don’t ask). You don’t need to know anything about comics (I don’t) to get a kick out of these. You may make whatever academic administrator/super-villain comparisons you like.
In response to my request for knock-knock jokes, an intrepid commenter went on google and found a trove of them. There’s a zenlike simplicity to a well-formed knock-knock joke.
I recently stumbled across what must be the coolest team name in all of professional sports: a minor-league baseball team in Canada in the mid 1990's was called the Thunder Bay Whiskey Jacks. (A whiskey jack is a bird.) That’s even better than the Toledo Mud Hens!
Take care, laugh freely, and count your blessings. It’s been that kind of week.
