Central Snark

and realize there can be humor even at the very end. A friend send me an e-mail with tombstone pictures. Yes I know, I need new friends. But this one was….with respect to everyone dwelling in such bone-polishing places… rather funny.

“Here lies my Wife / in Earthy Mold / Who when she Died / and naught but Scold / Good Friends go softly / in your walking / Lest she should Wake / and Rise up Talking”

Ladies, let this be a warning to you. Instruct someone else, besides your hubby, to take care of your gravestone before you move on!

There are some really good epitaphs out there and here are my favorite three (that I know of):

1. Mel Blanc: “That’s all folks!”

A great voice actor, Mel Blanc’s characters included Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Yosemite Sam and Sylvester the Cat. He died of heart disease and emphysema in 1989 and his epitaph might be one of his best-known lines.

2. Spike Milligan: “Dúirt mé leat go raibh mé breoite.”

A Gaelic epitaph belonging to an Irish comedian. It translates as “I told you I was ill.” Milligan died of liver failure in 2002. He was famous for his sense of humor which can easily be seen in films such as Monty Python’s Life of Brian.

3. Joan Hackett: “Go away — I’m asleep.”

An actress in teh 1960s and 70s (The Twilight Zone and Bonanza), died in 1983 of ovarian cancer at age 49.

Joan Hackett’s epitaph quoted a sign hung on her dressing room door.

and one that gave me a laughter belly ache:

John Yeast: “Here lies Johnny Yeast. Pardon me for not rising.”

I can’t find anything about him or his death, not even his profession … but how funny would it be if he would have been a baker?

~Penguin out!

Don’t forget to play with the Un-dead over at homor-blogs!

No, it’s not an interview with Liza Minelli.

I am back in Iceland and totally forgot it was Wednesday yesterday and as such my time to post something. Not to worry, I know the Google button like the back of my hand…whoops, where did this scar come from?

Since it seems to be the popular thing this year to defy any resolution making, I resolved to make a list of 20.

But why leave it at that? Here for your convenience is the top 12 list of what our beloved pets might try to aspire to (had they a concept of time and silly notions!)

The Top 12 New Year’s Resolutions Made by Pets*

12. Have a torrid one-night stand with a street mutt.

11. Try to understand that the cat is from Venus and I am from Mars.

10. I will no longer be beholden to the sound of the can opener.

9. Circulate petition that Leg Humping be a juried competition in major dog shows.

8. Call PETA and tell them what that surgical mask-wearing freak does to us when no one is around.

7. Take time from busy schedule to stop and smell the behinds.

6. Hamster: Don’t let them figure out I’m just a rat on ‘roids, or they’ll flush my ass.

5. Always scoot before licking.

4. Grow opposable thumb; break into pantry; decide for MYSELF how much food is *too* much.

3. Get out of the castle more, maybe swim counter-clockwise this year.

2. January 1st: Kill the sock! Must kill the sock! January 2nd - December 31: Re-live victory over the sock.

1. I will NOT chase the damned stick unless I see it LEAVE HIS HAND.

~~~~~

See, resolutions are alright, they only need to be realistic. For all those furry playmates out there I would just like to tell you this: Computer and TV screens do not exist to backlight your lovely tail and remember the bathtub is not a convenient place to store live mice for late-night snacks!

~Penguin out!

13. Paws (heh) for a moment to read Humor-dogs.com.

*[This list copyright 1997 by Chris White and Ziff Davis. The Top Five List top5@walrus.com www.topfive.com]

University lectures officially finished today…and I am embracing three weeks of final exams and pencil chewing ahead of me. But before I dive into my books without a life boat or compas for safe return, I thought it was only right I got a little seasonal. No, it’s not that time of month…I mean that time of year.

I love the Christmas season and it starts for me when I feel the smell of oranges and clementines. Yesterday Mom went shopping and brought home a basket full of oranges and so Christmas season started this year on a Monday, around tea time.

The reason I love this smell so much goes all the way back to East Germany. No, it was not a country known for its unlimited growth of various citrus fruits. I am not sure what we were known for, if anything…maybe communism and a passion for unfortunate haircuts.

East Germany was rather poor, from hindsight of course. As a kid I didn’t think I lacked anything, simply because I did not have a frame of reference to anything else but the neighbours kids, who wore the same kind of boots and Auntie Agnes did cut their hair too.

Christmas was special even back then. I always knew the Season approached when an envelop with a fancy stamp arrived. In that rather unassuming envelope was a white sheet of paper; on it was a date, some other numbers and little tickets, usually green. The date mentioned when a special delivery would arrive to our local store and the green tickets (special Christmas food stamps) showed how much had been alotted to our particular family that year.

Christmas was all about that day. The entire village would get ready early in the morning and stand in line of the still closed store. Konsum, we used to call it. The doors opened and people moved along; nobody skipping in line, we are German after all. When our family got to the front, my Mom used to give our green stamps to the lady at the counter. She would turn around and I’d see the world’s most beautiful thing: the pile of oranges. So many of them and the lady would count the appropriate amount into my Mom’s bag. I always counted feverishly with her, hoping she’d make a mistake in our favor. Never happened and to this day I can still count all the way up to 5 without much effort.

Usually there was one orange per person. The centerpiece of the Christmas table. I used to roll mine over my arms because I loved how they felt and smelled. And when I finally had eaten mine, I put the rind on top of the massive stone-oven and a smell would fill the air of the room that today has come to mean that the Season is upon me! That, and the darn Coca Cola song of wanting to buy the world a coat…

So what triggers your senses, what is an absolute must for you to feel Christmassy or just how much of a Grinch are you? Anything goes…share!

~Penguin Out!

“Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins?…So with sanity and insanity.” Herman Melville, Billy Budd

“Margret Mary Ray believed with all her heart that late-night talk-show host David Lettermn was in love with her. Caught up in this delusion, she stalked Letterman day and night for a decade, writing him letters and repeatedly breaking into his house. She camped out on his tennis court and once stole his car. The tabloids treated her delusions as a running joke. Finally, she gave up. She wrote to her mother, “I’m all traveled out,” and put herself in front of a coal train. She was killed instantly.”

You don’t have to be a psychologist to know that something was seriously wrong with her. Why am I telling you this? Well, of late our family has been devided by an issue that keeps evolving and growing more passionate as we go on.

We are talking about drug addicts. Seriously lying, manipulating and stealing shells of a person we once knew as an active member of our family. We got such a ghost in our family and the tendency to deal with that ghost reach from full fledged support, to simple ignoring all the way to utter rejection.

I think our different approaches lie in the fact that some of us think that “being an addict” is a life style choice. That there once was a decission made to engage in it and upon enjoying the rush, it became the very thing life should circle around. Children, family and job became the second or second to last place in one’s list of importance, following after self-indulgence.

Others in our family think that “being an addict” involves genetic pre-disposition. The fact that trying it once (which I did and which left me rather un-impressed) can seriously be the start for some on a road they are unable to return from. Once caught in the vicious circle, they become unable to control it, it takes them over and therefore we should treat them as patients. Sick people, mentally ill.

Nothing has been proven and I usually let these things slide by me, but the other day I thought somebody kicked a little too close and I went beserk. Putting drug addicts and cancer patients in the same field, I was lost for words until an argument ensured that involved actively smoking, causing lung cancer or such likes. Where is the difference between that and a drug addict? Both are aware of the consequences of their actions, both can have fatal results…yet society treats one case more normal and are ready to assist with every means possible, where the other is deemed a loser.

At the moment my head is spinning in many directions. Concerning the ghost in our family, I think that there comes a point in time (in this case 14 years) when the mircocosm should stop revolving around them. How long are you supposed to give, understand and set yourself up for guaranteed dissapointment? We only got one life, it is precious…I refuse to waste it on people who bring nothing to my life and leave in their wake anger, hurt and a torn family.

~ Penguin out!

What is your gut feeling in reaction to this…where should we draw the line between the two tints of a color in the rainbow? Share in the comment section!

You have to excuse me this week, I am preparing for 5 mind-boggling finals and all I need is to laugh and forget for a second that I got a few brain cells. Nothing tickles a European as much as the silliness quirkiness that Americans can display. Mind you, we have enough of our own, but it is way easier to point at others.

Alabama:
• Bear wrestling matches are prohibited.

I can understand that, why use animals, when you have enough visually equal humans to fill that role.

Alaska:
• Even though it is legal to hunt a bear, it is illegal to wake a bear and take a picture for photo opportunities.

That makes sense, guess they lost a lot of people that way!

Arkansas:
• Flirtation between the members of the opposite sex on the streets of Little Rock may result in a 30-day jail term.

I can make my peace with that! I’d feel differently if BIG Rock was concerned.

California:
Hollywood: It is illegal to drive more than two thousand sheep down Hollywood Boulevard at one time.

On account of there already being enough mewling buffoons located within the vicinity.

Colarado:
• Crippe Creek: It is illegal to bring your horse or pack mule above the ground floor of any building.

Does this include the bell boy?

Connecticut:
• In order for a pickle to officially be considered a pickle, it must bounce.

That is so boink-ist. What if it is too depressed to bounce?

In all fairness, I have not contacted the local authorities to check these bits of trivia, but I think the world is a more colorful place with them in it. If you have a few silly rules that you know off, share them with us!

~Penguin out!

The only rule at Homor-Blogs is that there are no rules (and to worship Diesel of course!)

Once upon a time, there was a little flightless waterfowl who had a hobby. Like most hobbies, hers had teeth and tentacles and soon it grew a deadline on its snout. The little flightless waterfowl was most afraid of the deadline. Every Wednesday it came back, gnashing it’s teeth, touching her flippers with its tentacles and snarling from its deadline, so she fed it but every week it got hungrier and hungrier and the poor little penguin got more and more frightend, but she was scared of the deadline, so yet again she just started to type…

and began to wonder where the terminology for “deadline” came from. Apparently, it began as a real line, drawn in the dirt or marked by a fence or rail and used to restrict prisoners in war camps. The well-known warning “If you cross this line, you’re dead!” greeting each new arrival. Eventually guards and prisoners soon were calling it by its own bluntly descriptive name, the dead line. What could be more emphatic than “dead line” to designate a limit?

It appears that many a writer has faced this problem. Hemingway once wrote a story in just six words “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” and is said to have called it his best work.

If only I could put my multitude of chaotic thoughts into a coherent sentence and be done with it. Shortest sentence in the bible? “Jesus wept!” That pretty much sums it up for me right now.

William Randolph Hearst, always in search of sensational stories, once sent a telegram to a leading astronomer: “Is there life on Mars?” it read. “Please cable 1000 words.”
The astronomer’s reply? “Nobody knows” - repeated 500 times.

Which doesn’t help me much, since I don’t know any astronomers to cable imaginative questions to. But as in any hair-pulling situation it helps to remind yourself that misery does love company. And this is where you’ll join me….

I thought it would be fun if we all tried to just type one sentence that kind of tells a story. And yes, for those ambitious of you…it can have a sub-clause or two. I’ll go first!

As he silently closed the motel door, he reminded himself just in time to re-introduce his finger to his flighty wedding band.

And let’s not forget, we all have a deadline eventually…tall dude, kinda skinny, wears black a lot …YES!

~Penguin out!

Let’s fasten our sheet belt, ‘cause it will be a dark and stormy night. Halloween is here.
Well … more there than here, we don’t have pumpkins you know!
And I can’t help being worried for you. All the young children actively engage in dayscare and your teenage daughter turns into a witch and all of a sudden takes spelling very serious.

I feel it is my duty to warn you and give you some survival tips:

1. Do not search the basement, especially if the power has just gone out. This tip is also useful to all secondary characters in any horror movie.

2. Stay away from certain geographical locations, some of which are listed here:

Amityville
Elm Street
Transylvania
Nilbog (you’re in trouble if you recognize this one),
the Bermuda Triangle
Any small town in Maine.

3.Extending a friendly hand to something suspiciously smelling of recombinant DNA technology, is never wise.

4. Never read a book of demon summoning aloud, even as a joke. Ask Faust! Oh you can’t, he’s dead!

Just remember, you have taken Halloween too far when all the skeletons in your closet have names.

There is a flicker of light in all of this though:
If a skeleton chases you down the road, just cross it. It can’t follow you…it doesn’t have the guts, you know!

Happy Halloween, everybody!

~ Penguin out!

27

I envy not in any moods
The captive void of noble rage,
The linnet born within the cage,
That never knew the summer woods:

I envy not the beast that takes
His license in the field of time,
Unfetter’d by the sense of crime,
To whom a conscience never wakes;

Nor, what may count itself as blest,
The heart that never plighted troth
But stagnates in the weeds of sloth;
Nor any want-begotten rest.

I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
‘Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

-Alfred Lord Tennyson-

This poem, and particularly this tiny section of it, has helped me through many a difficult trial. Every one of us has to deal with sadnesses and loses at one time or another.

In the wake of loss, we are haunted by things we might never understand. And would answers provide solace in the end? What we do have is memories of tenderness. There is comfort in the knowledge that not even shadows can extinguish the glow of warmth.  May that feeling make you breathe, hold you close, and give you peace whenever you experience trying times.

~Penguin out!

NOTE from Lampsha:  Those are among some of the most beautiful words ever written, Penguin.  They are indeed.  I just wanted to update everyone that Neva’s brother-in-law passed away Monday evening.  This is her dear dear sister Terri’s husband.  He has been a very special part of their family for many years and it is of course, a deep and very sad loss to them.  She will be away from TheSnark for a spell but will never be far from our hearts.  Love and good thoughts to her family. 

Ok, so today is John’s Lennon’s birthday (yesterday for you readers today!) and it almost escaped me, if it weren’t for a little island in the Atlantic ocean. Yep, Iceland has done it again and this time with style.

For no reason conceivable to me, Yoko Ono decided a year ago that she would erect some kinda Peace Tower in John’s honor on a tiny island just outside of Reykjavik. How did this happen you might ask! I have no clue, I don’t think John Lennon ever stepped foot on this mass of lava rock, nor did he ever mention us in song or writing, unless he imagined coming here via a little yellow floating device. He had a big imagination…apparently!

(the video only starts with that song, lots of interesting Icelandic stuff in there later!)

Now, I don’t mean disrespect to the artist himself…I think that would get me in all sorts of trouble I wouldn’t care contemplating. But for me Yoko Ono will always remain the woman who split up the Beatles. I also have to admit, and I am aware I could be wrong, that she might be bathing a little too much in her husband’s fame. Granted, there always seems to be some peace-related cause she seems to be pursuing.

While I drove home from work, I took a little extra route via the shores of that island and saw the blue light in the dark sky. Quite pretty really. The tower is a 40 stories-tall beam of light that will radiate from a wishing well bearing the words “imagine peace” in 24 languages. The plan is for the tower to be lit each year between Oct.9th (John’s birthday) and it is supposed to be aglow- I can only presume with love- until the 8th of December. That, plus major Icelandic holidays. I can’t help but wonder if we will be allowed to turn on the Peace Tower to commemorate the great battle of Knjufskollsjarkli.

“This is the biggest birthday present I gave to John,” she told The Associated Press last month. “He’s very, very happy about it, I know.”
Ono said she chose Iceland, the world’s northernmost country, because it is a very eco-friendly country that relies on geothermal energy.
“It’s so beautiful,” she said. “There’s a certain strangeness to it. I would like to say it’s magical.”

Around 20 o’clock this evening the couple’s son, Sean Lennon; Beatles drummer Ringo Starr; and band-mate George Harrison’s widow, Olivia joined the ceremony. And you know what, I’ll make my peace with it, it could have been worse…her present for him this year could have been a new solo-CD!

~Penguin Out!

personal note: warm thoughts and hugs to son of Snups and Bobo and Morgan’s mom!

It is only a matter of time, until an album gets published by someone who surfs at Humor-Blogs.

I know people don’t like to listen to others complain. A joke to lighten the mood or a cute, little anecdote about something involving somebody making an arse of himself is usually prefered. Not gonna happen today!

Geography has become my enemy. I don’t know what they did, but I am inclined to blame tectonic plates. Something brought me to this island and last spring I decided to enroll into university once again. Who made me? Society! And by society, I mean my mom!

Anyhoo…practical nursing it is gonna be and these are the main books for the next three months. Add to that a decent amount of articles, usually with numbers and charts, that some lonely professor deems an interesting inside. If you wanna get a real high grade, buy the professor’s newly-published book about “Species segmentation in areotropical melting niches!”, link that to brain surgery and you are golden!

It’s Human Anatomy that is bugging me the most. See, most of you know I am German and I can point to my heart, lungs and toes without problems. Now, at some point I learned the major body parts in English…but God strike me down if I know where the zygomatic bones are located. Well, I could look it up. True enough! Now my problem is that I have to learn the Icelandic varient of the human anatomy as well, and that isn’t funny when decent words like “lower arm” turns into “framhandleggur”. But the story doesn’t end here. Since we are in the medical profession, we sorta need to know the Latin words as well, in this case it would be “Antebrachium”. Now let’s look at what these words have in common…keep looking… that’s right…Nada!

I fully support that we have a universal dead language to be able to communicate about the “still alive” and about what part of the eponychium we should take, but in order to understand the Icelandic exam questions, I will have to learn something riveting as “Eyrnamergskitlar” as well. And it hurts my throat to pronounce this stuff, my laptop and papers are always drenched with fluids spitting forth from my mouth and my head hurts. I feel so sorry for myself, it is difficult to breathe. *dramatic sob*

Yet here I sit, my magic markers neatly arranged, my color-coded and cross-referenced folders open, inviting me to engulf into another chapter. And I gladly accept the challenge. Apart from the laughter in my head when I am hearing another noise of spitting sounds, silly pre-aspirated breaths and phoneme violations to produce the word “spleen” in Icelandic; I am having a ball. There is an Icelandic and Latin word for that too, you betcha!

So, I guess although I feel like a clog wearing, sushi eating, reggae listening confused German most days, globalization has its advantages: I get to bitch about it here for all of you to read. I feel better now, thanks for listening.

~Penguin out!

Careful, or you’ll lose yourself in laughter at Humor-blogs.com.