2020 January-June
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Filed 6/29/20
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Filed 6/23/20
Michigan Governor Appointees, I Imagine
Filed 6/1/20
Quote- Joke -Unquote
Filed 5/29/20
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Filed 5/22/20
Quote- Joke -Unquote
Filed 5/20/20
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Filed 5/14/20
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Filed 5/1/20
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Filed 4/27/20
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Filed 4/24/20
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Filed 4/22/20
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Filed 4/21/20
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Filed 4/18/20
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Filed 4/16/20
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Filed 4/10/20
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Filed 4/4/20
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Filed 4/6/20
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Filed 4/4/20
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Filed 4/1/20
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Filed 3/31/20
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Filed 3/29/20
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Filed 3/26/20
New from the Ministry of “Quotations”
Filed 3/24/20
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Filed 3/21/20
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Filed 3/19/20
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Filed 3/16/20
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Filed 3/11/20
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Filed 3/9/20
A Day Late and an Hour Short
Today is the day leap year meets daylight savings time whereby we gain a day and lose an hour. But have no fear, none of that will effect your enjoyment of terry colon dot com, which is timeless. In other words, no matter when you tune in it likely will not be updated nor up-to-date.
Still, does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care? Cue Chicago, you’re on. Yessiree, Bob, yesterday a cartoon from the 90s, today a pop music reference from the 60s. You gotta be sixty years old to get this site. Almost like Social Security. Which reminds me of an old joke… that can wait until later.
Filed 3/8/20
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Filed 3/4/20
Dumb and Dummy
–and More Joke Recycling
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Filed 3/2/20
Leap Day Special Via the Wayback-a-Tronic
Last year on these pages, if you remember, July 31st was February 29th. This year February 29th is February 29th because 2020 is a leap year. Making today Leap Day. Though we don’t do any leaping this day this year, it’s more like the the other way around since we usually skip over February 29th and go right to March 1st. To celebrate this quadrennial event, if that’s the term I want, I present a couple old bits from the daily to explain, in part, our calendar such as it is. Though you may notice I don’t get around to explaining why it’s called leap year and not, say, un-leap year or whatever. All the same, on with the program:
Calendar Changes for Better and Worse
Happy New and Leap Year. The calendar is going to be a bit different this year with that extra day tacked on the end of February. Not a big deal really, unlike the way it’s been tampered with in the past.
For instance Julius and Augustus Caesar each named a month after themselves, immodestly enough. Name your very own month, now THAT’s power. Your face on money, the populace shouting, “Hail!” and rendering things unto you all about. That sort of thing could really go to your head, if being a living god wasn’t ego boosting enough. They even forced these months into summer when the weather was nice and sunny. That’s why December, which means tenth-month in Latin, is the 12th month these days.
Imagine if this sort of calendar fiddling business was still being done by the lord high mucketymucks of our time, say for instance by American Presidents. In that case, New Year’s would be on Georgeuary 1st. Groundhog day would fall on Billuary 2nd. Then we’d have another Georgeuary in which spring would spring. The first day of the next month would be Ronpril Fool’s day. After that come the flowers of Jimmay, grads and dads of Jerrune. Happy Fourth of Dickly, everyone.
Way back when some French Revolutionaries dreamed up a decimal calendar to replace the current one. (They can also be credited with, or blamed for, the metric system.) Of course 365 days doesn’t exactly divide by 10 very neatly, but that sort of untidiness wouldn’t trouble folks who squelched dissent by removing the offending tongue, head and all. So the extra days were for one long New Year’s party. You’ve got to hand it to them for that, unless they’re handing you your head on a plate.
Forget all that. I’m satisfied with the calendar as it is. So happy New Year and all that this January 1st, 2008. And happy Leap Day this coming February 29th. I’ll see you in Thermador. If I can figure out when that is.
A-a-a-a-h-h-h, July
It’s fairly widely known July and August were renamed after Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar respectively. Quick quiz: what were the names of the months they replaced?
July was originally Quintilis, August was originally Sextilis. These fell into the whole month name by number business: September, seventh month; October, eighth month; et cetera. If you know your Latin number prefixes you can tell that Quintilis meant fifth month and Sextilis meant sixth month. (If we knew Latin we might explain why it was Quintilis and not Quintember, but as we don’t know Latin we’ll just have to let it slide.)
But wait, isn’t July the seventh month? Well, yeah. Thing was, the original Roman calendar had only ten months and lasted 304 days with unaccounted for days in the winter. We don’t know how that was supposed to work. Neither did the Romans really because it didn’t. Which is why they added January and February in about 700 BC. They tacked these new months on the beginning of the year and so the numerical month names didn’t make sense any more.
Even then the Roman calendar didn’t add up and the seasons got out of whack. So much so they sometimes added a thirteenth month, Intercalaris, to try to rejigger the seasons back in line. Then the two Caesars got involved and reformed the thing to the calendar we enjoy today. If you don’t enjoy it, that’s on you.
Filed 2/29/20
Dumb and Dummy
–and the Getting Old Jokes
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Filed 2/28/20
Way back when Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy had a top-rated radio show. Picture that, a ventriloquist act on radio… Actually you can’t picture it, it was radio. That being the case, I figure I can have an interactive ventriloquist web comic strip. Thus, the debut act of…
Dumb and Dummy
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Filed 2/27/20
Thurber’s “Sequence of Servants” (Snippet from)
When I look back on the long line of servants my mother hired during the years I lived at home, I remember clearly ten or twelve of them (we had about a hundred and sixty-two, all told, but few of them were memorable.)
…
Juanemma Kramer was one of my favorites. Her mother loved the name Jeaunita so dearly that she had worked the first part into the names of all her daughters—they were (in addition to Juanita) Juanemma, Juanhelen, and Juangrace. Juanemma was a thin, nervous maid who lived in constant dread of being hypnotized. Nor were her fears unfounded, for she was so extremely susceptible to hypnotic suggestion that one evening at B.F. Keith’s Theatre when a man on the stage was hypnotized, Juanemma, in the audience, was hypnotized too and floundered out into the aisle making the same cheeping sound that the subject on the stage, who had been told he was a chicken, was making. The act was abandoned and some xylophone players were brought on to restore order. One night when our house was deep in quite slumber, Juanemma became hypnotized in her sleep. She dreamed that a man “put her under” and then disappeared without “bringing her out.” This was explained when, at last, a police surgeon whom we called in—he was the only doctor we could persuade to come out at three in the morning—slapped her into consciousness.…
And so went life for the Thurber family of Columbus, Ohio, circa 1910. At least according to son James. As for the pic at the top, which didn’t originally accompany the story and has nothing to do with it, I tossed it in because it’s one of Thurber’s I’ve liked since I was about ten years old or so (circa 1965) after seeing it in a Book of The New Yorker cartoons, which was my and my brothers favorite reading (or maybe just looking at the pictures) when visiting Grandma and Grandpa (my dad’s parents) on Thanksgiving and/or Christmas.
Filed 2/25/20
A little More James Thurber
Apparently Thurber had a problem with Gertrude Stein’s line “Pigeons on the grass alas.” Following is a bit of Mr. Thurber’s critique culled out of “There’s an Owl in My Room” from The New Yorker, November 17, 1934.
…It is neither just nor accurate to connect the word alas with pigeons. Pigeons are definitely not alas. They have nothing to do with alas and they have nothing to do with hooray (not even when you tie red, white, and blue ribbons to them and let them loose at band concerts); they have nothing to do with mercy me or isn’t that fine, either. White rabbits, yes, and Scotch terriers, and bluejays, and even hippopotamuses, but not pigeons. I happen to have studied pigeons very closely and carefully, and I have studied the effect, or rather lack of effect, of pigeons very carefully. A number of pigeons alight from time to time on the sill of my hotel window when I am eating breakfast and staring out the window. They never alas me, they never make me feel alas; they never make me feel anything.
…
A pigeon peering at me doesn’t make me feel sad or glad or apprehensive or hopeful. With a horse or a cow or a dog it would be different. I would be especially different with a dog. Some dogs peer at me as if I had just gone completely crazy or as if they had just gone completely crazy. I can go so far as to day most dogs peer at me than way… Thus I should not have minded if Miss Stein had written: dogs on the grass, look out, dogs on the grass, look out, dogs on the grass, look out Alice.…
And much more. If you subscribe to The New Yorker you can read it in their online archives. Or if you’re a non-subscriber, find it in The Thurber Carnival page 153. Oh yes, the Thurber drawing at the top is from “The Crow and the Oriole” and not “There’s an Owl in My Room” because Thurber didn’t draw one for “There’s an Owl in My Room” and the drawing from “The Crow and the Oriole” had a bird on the grass; so close enough.
Filed 2/24/20
Still Funny After All These Years
Electricity Was Leaking All Over the House
I’m currently reading The Thurber Carnival (The Modern Library 1994) a collection of short stories and cartoons by James Thurber. Another long-gone humorist who tickles my funny bone with good old-fashioned droll humor, not unlike P.G. Wodehouse or Groucho Marx. It’s hard to categorize Thurber’s output. What we get are often short stories that read like reminiscences—only they’re not. Or maybe are “based on a true story” as they like to claim when they change the facts. I don’t actually know. The cartoons, if you can call them that, are not really jokes but amateurishly drawn humor illustrations. Or something. Anyway a sample of such is the lead-in pic at the top. An excerpt of the man’s writing output follows:
When Charlie Dreshler announced he was going marry Dorothy, someone said he would lose his mind posthaste. “No,” said a wit who knew them both, “post hoc.” Dorothy had begun, when she was quite young, to finish sentences for people. Sometimes she finished them wrongly, which annoyed the person who was speaking, and sometimes she finished them correctly, which annoyed the speaker even more.…
So, if you like your humorous writing from before it was all spoiled by political correctness and television, Thurber might be just the ticket to put a grin on your face.
Filed 2/19/20
Hey Kids, What Time Is it?
It’s that time of year again, National Puzzle Day! Who comes up with these National Whatnot Days is itself a puzzle. To tell the truth, the official puzzle day was yesterday, making this, as is often the case around here, a day late and a dollar short. Still, as somebody-or-other said, a difference which makes no difference is no difference. That’s because I don’t have any new puzzles today or yesterday. But, to celebrate National Puzzle Day there are these old bits you can go to:
Bird Spotters Rebus Guide
Picture Pun Puzzles for I-D-ing Our Fine Feathered Friends
Find the Elusiver, Mysteriouser Creatures
Another Search Game
Find the Secret Message
A different Kind of Word Search
Filed 1/30/20
Famous Deathbed Last Words
“Die, my dear? Why, that’s the last thing I’d do.”
–Groucho Marx
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Filed 1/22/20
2020 Vision
It’s a new year and you know what that means. Being 2020 it means an entire year of wordplay between 2020 the year and 2020 vision. How many forecasts, product intros and new releases this year will be “2020 Visions”? If you guessed all of them, you probably won’t be far off. Heck, you’ve likely seen dozens already. Including this one right here. At the end of the year we’ll have year in reviews called, what else, “2020 Hindsight.”
Now then, if you go with Roman numerals it’s MMXX. Another double double. Though what fun you can have with that I haven’t figured out. I have a hard enough time just figuring out what year Roman numerals even mean. They look like some sort of texter acronym or modern musical name, which I’m never up to speed on, either.
Of course none of it works if you say “two thousand twenty” instead of ”twenty-twenty” for the year. You wouldn’t do that, eh? That’s like saying 1776 as “one thousand seven hundred seventy-six.” Just ain’t right. Well, if you’re talking about a year/date, at any rate. All that aside, the new year also means one of my annual “Things that Did Not Happen” in the preceding year lists.
Top Ten Things that Did Not Happen in 2019
- I write a “Top Ten Things that Did Not Happen in 2019” list
- Uh-h…
- Hm-m-m…
- Tum ti-tum tum
- La-di-da, la-di-da
- …
- That’s it
- Not!
- Sorry. Not only is it a whole lot of nothing, it’s not even ten.
Some joke, eh? And to think I had all year to do it.
Filed 1/2/20