The Apple Hasn't Fallen Far

Okay, enough with insulting arrogant fat men for a while. In case anyone needs further explanation of the previous two posts, I'm a little pissed at Fat Charlie, the head coach at Notre Dame, who continues to not coach his team and live up to the standards he set for himself. Losing the Syracuse, which has been and still is one of the worst teams in all Division 1A college football (and has been in a close race with Duke for worst in the BCS schools), was inexcusable. I began to fall off the Charlie Bandwagon after he failed to make any adjustments at halftime during the UNC game and then backed that up by doing the exact same fucking thing during the Pitt game. I didn't get to see the Navy game, otherwise these posts might have popped up earlier. So, what you have read the past two days has been me striking out with as much fanatic vitriol as possible, but at the same time, I tried to make it funny. In Monday's post, the "interview" with Weis was me asking questions and him responding entirely in quotations by Patrick Star from Spongebob Squarepants. Yesterday's post was a recreation of the scenes where Luke Skywalker goes to rescue Han, Leia and the droids from Jabba the Hutt in Return of the Jedi, but Charlie played the part of Jabba and Jack Swarbrick--the new Athletic Director at Notre Dame--played the roll of Luke. Again, I thought it was amusing and I knew only a small subset of you loyal readers would probably enjoy it and/or even get what I was talking about. My aim was for a little jockularity.

So, there. That's what I was aiming for. I was trying to bitch and moan about the lack of results on the field (again) in a way that people who don't follow college football would still find amusing. I'm just pleased that I didn't get the half-dozen requisite "I don't like sports blogs" whines. It probably helped that this is Thanksgiving week.

Anyway, let's go with something less fat...er...sporty...shall we?

If you've read this blog for long, or you've seen my comments on your blogs, you might know that I'm a big fan of the pun. It's a beautiful thing that we in the English-speaking world have to add to our comedy repertoire. No other languages utilize the pun quite like we do, whether for clever advertisements or jokes that make you groan and roll your eyes when you finally get them. I mean, in French, you'd have to sit there and stew for a few minutes wondering which word ending in "ay" did he just say and how is it to be construed and what the hell was he even talking about. But not English. Which is probably why more and more places are moving to speak it, not so much for its simplicity, but just for the ability to make puns in your speeches.

Where the fuck was I? Oh, right. I was talking about how much I love the pun. In all the twists and turns of prose writing, I believe the pun (for me at least) to be the busty red-head sitting at the end of the bar wearing her fishnets and fuck-me boots--I love it just that much. Whenever my wife tells a story, I always try to work in a pun as a response. She does the same to me. We both have the same response in that we try to refuse to acknowledge the other's comment.

So, the other night at the dinner table, my wife was telling about how the new manager at the Ampersand (it's British Guy, you know, the one who writes in the log mimicking classic pieces of literature and who, inexplicably, loves Notre Dame football and college basketball) sent around a little memo asking for people's staff recommendations for the holidays. The hing was, he added a bunch of questions to it to get people to think about their picks so that they could pick books that would really suck the reader in and avoid Twilight, which would just suck for the reader.

So, one of the questions, as she was relating to me, was "If you were stuck on a remote island with cannibals, what piece of literature would you want with you that's not the Bible or Shakespeare?" I mulled this over some wine for a moment. Whilst thinking, my daughter, Cookie, pipes up, "You'd want a book about tv controllers."

My wife and I ignore her and I make some suggestion about a cook book or something, you know, so that you could teach the cannibals to cook food other than you. Unfazed, Cookie again pipes up with "What about a book about tv controllers?"

Again, we ignore her, and my wife offers up some suggestion, and I think it over and nod. Cookie once more says, this time a little more emphatically, "A book about tv controllers!"

Finally, my wife takes the bait. "What are you talking about," the fabulously sexalicious Boudicca asks Cookie.

"It's a remote island."

That's my girl.