Tag: humor (Page 3 of 4)

Quien Es Más Macho

October 1, 2012 / DB

Sometimes the most important questions do not get asked. Or at least they’re asked by the wrong people, never get answered, and fade away.

Yesterday, as I knocked out dishes and laundry, I listened to the American Top 40 rerun of the week. It was from September 1985. Good times for me, back then. In my first month of high school, the Royals had just caught and passed the Angels and were on their way to two more comebacks in October.¹ We were also about to move into a house, the first of my life after 14 years in apartments, duplexes, etc. I think I was drinking a lot of Cherry Coke, too, which had just hit the market.

More importantly, though, there was a certain television show that had captured my imagination, along with that of the nation. A couple stylish cops from Miami who drove fast cars and tried to battle the local drug kingpins. As important as Crockett and Tubbs² were to the fall of 1985, so was their soundtrack, headlined by a Czech electronic artist named Jan Hammer.

The biggest mover on yesterday’s countdown was the “Miami Vice Theme”, which jumped 13 spots to 21 in its second week in the Top 40. There was probably no hotter point in the Miami Vice craze than late September/early October 1985.

Which got me thinking about another artist similar to Jan Hammer, Harold Faltermeyer. Most famous for “Axel F,” his synthesizer-driven theme for Beverly Hills Cop, Faltermeyer was another central European artist (German in his case) that used the exploding possibilities of electronic music to hit the American charts.

So, after all that, I was left with a simple question: who was better: Jan Hammer or Harold Faltermeyer?

Hammer, who worked with tons of people as a session musician in the 1970s, didn’t do much else after he stopped doing the music for Vice in the late 80s. He does get bonus points for keytar use, though!

Faltermeyer handled the themes for two other huge movies: Fletch and Top Gun. He also did the music for a couple other movies. He got his start with Giorgio Moroder, helping the legendary Italian artist with the music for Midnight Express and to produce music for Donna Summer. Faltermeyer also worked with Laura Branigan, Billy Idol, Pet Shop Boys, and Bonnie Tyler, among others.

You could spend hours going back-and-forth between the Miami Vice Theme and Axel F, attempting to decide which was better. But when it comes to overall body of work, Harold Faltermeyer was much better than Jan Hammer.

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Also the last Royals postseason appearance. ↩
I have two old iPod nanos that are on their last battery legs. One is white, one is black. Their names are Crockett and Tubbs. ↩

My Wisest Choice

June 19, 2012 / DB

File under: Sometimes otherwise smart people do dumb things.

I’ve never been in a tanning bed in my (almost) 41 years on earth. Until Monday. Thanks to a meeting of two circumstances¹ I decided to take the plunge and get a little unnatural color Monday. I knew going in there were risks. S. will occassionally use the tanning beds at our gym and while she gets some color after a day or two, she often has to go through what appears to be an uncomfortable red-pink stage to get to the brown. My skin is lighter than hers and parts of it don’t get exposed to the sun very often. I tried to be careful, but I wasn’t careful enough.

I expected my chest and back to get a little roasted. I had sunscreened them both pretty well on our two trips to the pool this summer. I kind of forgot about the backs of my thighs, though. I figure I haven’t worn shorts or swim trunks with less than a 7″ inseam² in over 20 years. As such, the backs of my thighs haven’t been touched by the sun since at least high school. They got touched a little bit in the tanning bed, to say the least.

As I type this, I’m sitting on a barstool in our kitchen with my legs propped so there is no weight on the parts of my legs that got fried. I’ve been treating them generously with aloe gel. I assume the pain will go away in a few days, right?

It’s been a long, long time since I had a real sunburn, so this is a good reminder to keep lathering the sunscreen on when I am going to be outside for extended periods. And I might want to keep the long, workout shorts on next time I use a tannng bad. Or just skip the tanning bed all together.
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We will be spending a lot of time in the sun and water this weekend. We are also ending our gym membership at the end of the month and S. has a bunch of tanning sessions left on our account. ↩
Hey-oh! ↩

Fun With Nursery Rhymes

January 24, 2012 / DB

My nearly eight years as a stay-at-home parent have been filled with humorous moments that come with being the rare dad who is with his kids all day. Random kids who come up and start telling me about their potty habits. Boys who mistake me for their dad because I’m the only guy around. And, my personal favorite, kids yanking down their mothers’ shirts while I’m talking to them.

Friday, L. and I were at the library. We were sitting in a quiet corner of the toddler area, working through a stack of books she had picked out. Around us, other kids and parents played, read, and chatted.

One of the books L. picked out was a magazine for toddlers, kind of a mini-Highlights, full of short stories and poems. One of the poems was Edward Lear’s famous “The Owl and the Pussycat.” Thus, as a couple moms circled us, either chasing their kids or browsing through the board book racks by us, I read the following lines to L.:

The Owl looked up to the stars above,
And sang to a small guitar,
O lovely Pussy! O Pussy my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are,
You are,
You are!
What a beautiful Pussy you are!

I had two choices, either plow through those lines in my normal voice, and then give a Joey Tribbiani wink to any moms who looked at me. Or lower my voice and mumble through them. Obviously, I took the second route. And then I told L. it was time to go check out the movie section so we could flee quickly, just in case anyone had heard me.

Good times.

I Love Fall

October 22, 2010 / DB

So does McSweeneys.

Carving orange pumpkins sounds like a pretty fitting way to ring in the season. You know what else does? Performing an all-gourd reenactment of an episode of Diff’rent Strokes—specifically the one when Arnold and Dudley experience a disturbing brush with sexual molestation. Well, this shit just got real, didn’t it?

It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers

Shocking Poll Results

September 23, 2010 / DB

The Onion nails it.

1 in 5 Americans Believe Obama is a Cactus

”I don’t care what he says or what his people say or what anybody else says,” 48-year-old Kansas resident Jake Nolan told reporters. “The guy’s a cactus, plain and simple. I mean, Christ, look at him.”

I Trust This Won’t Affect My Grade

August 11, 2010 / DB

I have a longer Required Reading post in the works, but this link deserves its own entry.

Professors: Hot at Their Own Risk examines the challenges that attractive academics face.

The idea of appealing educators being harassed by their students seems a little gross as I approach 40. When I was in college, though, there was always that hope at the beginning of each semester that one of my classes would be taught by a hottie. As best as I can remember, it only happened once.

The graduate student who taught one of my Spanish classes was a looker. She was smart, funny, spoke four languages, had a cool sounding name, and her looks were right up my alley. Since I had trouble talking to random girls at bars or parties, there was no way I could pull off making a move on Senorita Dias. But over the semester, we established a nice rapport so there was always that tiny chance that perhaps we would run into each other out on the town and one thing could lead to another.

I know, this from the guy who walked right by the hot TV anchor he was in love with when she was staring at him a few years later.

Anyway, as I tended to do back then, I skipped a number of classes over the semester and missed some assignments. Since she was a student herself, and super cool, she opened her office at the end of the semester for everyone to come in and complete all their missed assignments after our final oral exam. When I arrived for my presentation, one of my friends from class was in the corner knocking out all of his missed assignments. This both put me at ease and gave me a shot of confidence: he struggled in class so I was going to seem fluent in comparison.

The exam was basically a conversation. The instructor would ask a question to start and our job was to carry on a conversation, completely in Spanish, for 5-10 minutes. I was in the zone! I was conjugating verbs correctly, remembering obscure words, and so on. It was going great.

I finished up and swapped places with my buddy. I worked through all my missed assignments as he struggled to put more than three words together correctly. From time-to-time our teacher gave him permission to ask me for help. I was both being generous and padding my grade!

His exam ended, he left, and I wrapped up my make-up work. The teacher said something about having missed her bus. I had driven to campus that day and offered her a ride. She seemed a bit nervous but accepted. We walked to my car and talked about our plans for the holidays. At one point she tripped over a coat hanger that was lying on the sidewalk, getting her feet caught inside. She was either very clumsy or very nervous. Was she nervous because she was hanging out with a student, or because she was interested in me, too?

We got to my car, I drove her home, we said our goodbyes, and I never saw her again. Naturally. I know a normal guy would have made some kind of move, either seeing what she was doing before she left for home or giving her a call when the new semester started. Not me, the champion of failing to pursue romantic opportunities.

“I never thought something like this could happen to a guy like me, but…”

There’s no doubting I would have blown it, but who doesn’t at least smile and say hello? Me, that’s who.

❖

Not Sure What To Think

June 21, 2010 / DB

Last Friday M. attended a birthday party¹ at one of the many local bounce places.² After bouncing for awhile, then eating pizza, cake, and ice cream, the host mom handed out tokens for the arcade area to all the kids. While I was helping M. earn some tickets so she could get another cheap, plastic toy to take home, I noticed a Pop-a-Shot. Except this Pop-a-Shot didn’t look like the games I remembered. All the graphics were black, silver, and purple and the text graffiti-styled. The net was a chain rather than a traditional net. The balls were black. Then I noticed the name.

Rapper Ballin’

What?

I wasn’t sure whether the be amused, bemused, or offended. Rapper Ballin’? Are you serious? In lily white Carmel, Indiana, no less.

None of the kids played the game. I don’t know of a bunch of 5-7 year olds sensed the irony of the game in an up-scale shopping area, were turned off by its urban overtones, or were just too little to play.

I have no qualms with game companies tweaking their goods to fit certain demographics. But Rapper Ballin’ just felt a little desperate and sad to me.

Wednesday M. will go to her fourth birthday party of the summer. Two of those were for twins. Apparently her class was loaded with summer birthdays. We’ve come home with a lot of goodie bags and asked for a lot of gift receipts at Target this month. ↩
We’ve now been to Bounce-U, Bounce Town, Bouncertown, and Monkey Joe’s. Plus the girls’ gymnastics place has added an inflatable bounce house that the classes get to run through at the end of class. I wish I had invested in inflatable bounce toys five years ago. ↩

Journalism Is Not Dead

October 13, 2009 / DB

Maybe I should move the family to remote northwest Australia. It seems like there’s exciting stuff to write about there. This is not necessarily safe for work, although it is from an allegedly legitimate news source.*

No oral sex, says ute crash waitress

”It may have looked bad when police first arrived as my girls were hanging out all over the place. I also had a $5 note wedged between my boobs so they probably just assumed I was a sex worker or something and he’d already paid me.
”But $5 is a bit cheap for a head job

(I sent this to a few friends earlier and one asked if this was Australia’s version of The Onion. I went back and checked and it seems to be a regular news site. But, I highly recommend checking out the story about the guy running over his girlfriend. Ridonkulous.)

Rumorville

May 8, 2009 / DB

I’m going to act like a typical blogger for a minute and start a rumor based on minimal evidence: I think there’s a culture of acceptance of the use of performance enhancing drugs at ESPN.

I’m not talking about glossing over the use of PEDs by athletes. I’m talking about their on-air talent. Two in particular. Hannah Storm and Sage Steele.*

(That would be Carmel High School and Indiana University alum Sage Steele. Although apparently Ms. Steele was not a big fan of her time in Carmel. Fire up the Google if you want the story.)

I’ve noticed they both go sleeveless a lot and both are completely ripped, at least in the shoulders and upper arms. Two women with muscular arms on one network? There must be something untoward going on in Bristol!

Also, would it kill either woman to eat a cheeseburger on occasion? I have three daughters and they need to learn that it’s ok not to have your ribs showing.

Wasting Time

June 19, 2008 / DB

I’d like to preface this post by reminding you all that I’m nearly 37 years old, am married, have 2.5 kids, and have a Master’s degree.

Last night, I spent about 45 minutes shooting a water gun at the mother raccoon that lives under our deck each time she peaked her head out to see if the coast was clear for her and her kits to go on their evening foraging run.