Tag Archives: humour
Modeling models in modules, modes and nodules
Giving the Creative Arts Department free rein is not, I remind them, the same as giving them free reign.
Free rain, on the other hand, is fine in limited quantities.
Today, I stopped by their cubes, covered in bubble wrap so they can throw books at each other just to duck and hear the “pop, pop, poppety pop” of compressed air escaping through sheered plastic sheeting.
I asked for an update.
After two weeks of work, this is all they had to give me:
Umm…I’m not prone to violent outbursts except when I’m prone to violent outbursts.
Concentrate…ommmm….meditate upon the nothingness of the universe…remember I’m not paying them anything…the Kickstarter campaign will help them recover their costs…IF THEY ACTUALLY PRODUCE SOMETHING TANGIBLE!
Okay, on to other projects. I’ll let the Creative Arts department know I’m serious by denying them more than four mochalattafrappaccinocarpediem drinks a day.
Or should I double their intake to 24 a day?
Decisions, decisions!
And now, back to business…
Wow! What an action-packed last couple of months!
First of all, we want to thank our sponsors for making this business possible. Without them…well, we’d probably be eating pine bark and panhandling with the rest of our employees…but then again, isn’t that what most of my vegan staff does already, since, as we know, I don’t actually pay them anything?
Anyway, back to business.
Where were we? Hmm…
How about we check in on our Creative Arts Department and see how the Kickstarter campaign is coming along.
I’ll get back to you as soon as I’ve been briefed, or debriefed?
The best leader doesn’t have say a thing to get his underlings to do his bidding
They say a true leader is a coach. Rick is neither — he’s a storyteller who compels his readers to follow their own path to whatever they enjoy the most — pain, bliss, or painful bliss or blissful pain, numbness, joy, they choose it — whatever they do, they’re accomplishing Rick’s goals without knowing it.
That’s a true leader — Rick is the best mob boss in the business.
Think about that the next time you kill someone or steal in the name of justice — you just did what Rick told you to without question.
Mob bosses have different hobbies.
Rick likes to dance.
But Rick likes to dance with his girlfriend — let him make you jealous one more time.
Hop-hop-happy
The future is here — Lee and Guin reenact history in the antigravity chamber.
Several hundred years ago, in an alternate universe, Lee and Guin were Steampunk Charles Lindbergh and Steampunk Amelia Earhart out on an adventure with the Mad Hatter.
They, as you readers know, crashed in the Alps. While debating the merits of taking off again, they saw that the people of Bavaria were in peril, their sole source of chocolate blocked by giant solidified bars.
So Chuck and Amelia did the only thing they could — danced the Lindy Hop to crush the bars, mixing cream from the snow-white peaks of the Alps into a froth, delicious concoction we now know as dark chocolate, milk chocolate and white chocolate.
Hope you enjoyed the show!
More as it develops…
To whom and/or what do your memories belong?
Modern yet classic
Lyrics are everywhere for the two of us, you and I — to Abi and her beau:
Don’t you worry there my honey
We might not have any money
But we’ve got our love to pay the bills
Maybe I think you’re cute and funny
Maybe I wanna do what bunnies do with you
If you know what I mean
Oh, let’s get rich and buy our parents homes
In the south of France
Let’s get rich and give everybody nice sweaters
And teach them how to dance
Let’s get rich and build our house on a mountain
Making everybody look like ants
From way up there, you and I, you and I
Well, you might be a bit confused
And you might be a little bit bruised
But baby how we spoon like no one else
So I will help you read those books
If you will soothe my worried looks
And we will put the lonesome on the shelf
Ooh, let’s get rich and buy our parents homes
In the south of France
Let’s get rich and give everybody nice sweaters
And teach them how to dance
Let’s get rich and build our house on a mountain
Making everybody look like ants
From way up there, you and I, you and I
Ooh, let’s get rich and buy our parents homes
In the south of France
Let’s get rich and give everybody nice sweaters
And teach them how to dance
Let’s get rich and build our house on a mountain
Making everybody look like ants
From way up there, you and I, you and I
Songwriters
LAMILLA, SORAYA / NICHOLAS, TONY
meine Mutter mir geschrieben, ein Buch, nicht eine Rakete
Lee stood at the foot of the bridge, listening to Guin’s thoughts directedcto him.
“Shadowgrass does not know what city traffic is like. He doesn’t comprehend why cars used to smash into each other.”
Lee watched a mosquito fly up through his exhaled breath into his nose.
He thought back to her. “Yes. I wonder how many people have said, like me, how proud I am of your progress. To watch you grow back into your old personality again has been a privilege, knowing, as I do, how we lean on and absorb the personalities of others to fill in the new empty places in our thought patterns.”
They looked up at the stars together, hand-in-hand, in childlike amazement of the universe they knew so little about.
“You danced amazingly well last night.”
He heard her smile in her voiced thoughts.
“You, too. But more than that…you were a gray-eyed angel, my friend outside of time. Our minute and thirty seconds is, was an eternity. I can remember every look on your face, every turn you made and every handhold down to the last bow. You are the embodiment of the infinite well of happy laughter that feeds my thoughts.”
They stood in the greenhouse silently listening to the insects hatched from precious cargo brought to Mars.
The starlit sky rotated slowly.
What I love and take for granted in my community
In the last two weeks, I have conversed with an international consortium of dance enthusiasts.
Our conversations took place in a dance studio in the town of Madison, the county of Madison, the state of Alabama, the United States of America, Earth.
Countries of origin included the Philippines, Italy, Germany, France, Russia, Mexico and the United States, of the ones specifically stated; heritage included unspecified European, African and Southeast Asian countries.
In some conversations, I was the “American” toward whom the comparison was made about ethnic/national meal preparation — I agreed that some cultures were known for watering down or making bland the spicy foods of other cultures, such that a Mexican or Italian restaurant in the U.S. was not “authentic”.
[this blog entry was interrupted so my wife and I could watch an episode of “SNAPPED” about the murder of a high school mate of mine, Jeffrey Freeman, one of the funniest guys I knew, an impersonator who was great at portraying Carnac the Magnificent, both Jeffrey and Johnny an inspiration for my humour then and now — my thought trail has been shifted as a result]
What I heard from every one of the people with whom I talked was their love for the variety of foods available from countries all over the world here in the U.S. — if there wasn’t a restaurant serving their favourite dishes, there was almost always a grocery store that carried the spices, fruits and vegetables of their home country with which they could cook their family secret recipes and share with friends/family.
Millions of people travel around the world, settling down in new places, rediscovering themselves and their subcultures.
In fact, it’s the story of the billions of us who’ve lived and wandered this planet to make a better life for ourselves.
I have learned a lot about myself in preparation for a dance showcase — rediscovering the joy of living with people of many different backgrounds just as important.
How people outside the state of Alabama see the people inside the state is a perception I don’t control. What I see is the thriving community around the Marshall Space Flight Center and Redstone Arsenal responsible for moon landings and solar system exploration, with all the ancillary occupations that give the community’s residents a healthy lifestyle.
I have taken my fulfilling life in Huntsville for granted. For that alone, I am thankful this beautiful autumn day, leaves falling on the driveway, and chipmunks, their cheeks filled with winter food, hopping across the flagstones surrounding the backyard pond.
OOBE
Although the image of me as an 85-year old man standing on the front steps of a church after Sunday services handing chewing gum to children who adore me as a wise elder is as strong as ever, I still can’t believe I have lived into the second 50 years of my life.
Thirty-three or more years have passed since the last time I remember standing in the green room surrounded by beautiful women and handsome men changing costumes without worrying about modesty, waiting for their cue, their scene change, their chance to shine on the stage, under the spotlight, the scripts memorised, live.
So how do I explain to you, the faithful reader, that we are actually 200 years into the future?
Can time have passed so quickly that we’ve forgotten that we’ve built Moon bases and Martian colonies?
Mesmerising as the past can be, nostalgic even, we clean up the main meeting hall, the tourists returning to their guest quarters, making last-minute changes to their allotted space for clothing and souvenirs before their habitation modules will be trucked over to the launch site for their return trip to the Moon or Mars, depending on their travel agendas.
Tonight was exciting, wasn’t it?
All the performers, including some of the tourists who wanted the chance to say they danced in front of a live audience on the Martian surface, displayed their best talents.
Every one of them can recall a skipped step or miscue but the audience didn’t know and didn’t care — they were entertained and that’s all that matters to them, their last evening on the planet a memorable experience shared between scientists, tour guides and tourists alike, broadcast on the ISSA Net for all to see, reinterpret and create viral video neural implants.
Tomorrow, normality returns to the Red Planet as researchers go back to their laboratories, tourist modules are sent back to their home planet and new patterns of living are applied to the bot net monitoring and terraforming Mars.
A package lay in the corner of Lee’s room, a single acronym adorning the outside: OOBE.
Out-of-box experience or out-of-body experience?
Lee didn’t know.
It was addressed from both Guin and Bai, undated.
Lee’s years of meditation training had allowed him to exist outside of time.
He looked at the package from 100 years later.
It was the collective memories of Guin and Bai’s marriages, woven into a mass media blanket, the fibers containing electroneurochemical memory traces that intersected at perpendicular and diagonal angles, every crossing point a mixed memory that canceled out or magnified similarities, doing the same for precise differences.
Lee saw that he carried the blanket with him for decades, having shared and created some of the memories before the blanket was made.
After hundreds of years of life, time was meaningless to those with perpetually-rejuvenated circuitry, body parts replacing old ones causing joint pain memories to fade from disuse.
Perspective changed as lifetimes had no statistically-expected endings.
Lee saw the night of a dance showcase on Earth as if it had just happened a few hours ago.
He knew his dance partners wanted him to take control of the dance floor but he relished the small feeling of chaos, the hint of uncertainty that felt like having a random number generator built into every one of the changes to his set of states of energy, his partners unsure of his next move, no matter how many times they had practiced them and anticipated what he was supposed to do rather than what he wanted to do or might do just to mix things up.
He was consistent, inserting chaos in order to test theories in realtime, keeping separate the body in motion from the theoretical responses he calculated to regenerate the out-of-body experience he called life.
The OOBE — the soul, the Übermensch, the god within.
Thriving on chaos is the only way to live.
Living inside and outside the labels, letting our fear and misunderstanding of chaos melt away.
Embracing change because nothing is in our control despite the illusion of conditions at the local level.
For instance, move your finger. Now, think about all the aspects of the universe that existed and the changes that occurred in the moment your finger moved that effected you and your finger — statistically, you had no control of the universe’s influence upon your finger, let alone in or on the finger itself.
It is good to remind ourselves of our place in the universe, even on nights with the simple pleasure of social engagement with fellow dancers, their friends and family.
A new adventure awaits our Martian colonists, bred and designed to withstand the brutal cosmic radiation that bombards our inner solar system constantly, ironically protecting us against the random radiation outside our solar system.
Let us look forward to what we’ll read about the colonists next!
treetrunkdings 