St. Patrick’s Humor

So, these two Irishmen walk out of a bar….
No, seriously, it could happen. 

Paddy was driving down the street in a sweat because he had an
important meeting and couldn’t find a parking place. Looking up to heaven he said,
‘Lord take pity on me. If you find me a parking place I will go to Mass
every Sunday for the rest of me life and give up me Irish Whiskey!’

Miraculously, a parking place appeared.

Paddy looked up again and said, ‘Never mind, I found one.’

****

Father Murphy walks into a pub in Donegal, and asks the first man he meets,
‘Do you want to go to heaven?’
The man said, ‘I do, Father…’
The priest said, ‘Then stand over there against the wall.’
Then the priest asked the second man, ‘Do you want to go to heaven?’
‘Certainly, Father,’ the man replied.
‘Then stand over there against the wall,’ said the priest.
Then Father Murphy walked up to O’Toole and asked, ‘Do you want to go to heaven?’
O’Toole said, ‘No, I don’t Father.’
The priest said, ‘I don’t believe this. You mean to tell me that when you die you don’t want to go to heaven?’

O’Toole said, ‘Oh, when I die, yes. I thought you were getting a group together to go right now.’

****

Paddy was in New York.  He was patiently waiting and watching the traffic cop on a busy street crossing. The cop stopped the flow of traffic and shouted, ‘Okay, pedestrians.’ Then he’d allow the traffic to pass.

He’d done this several times, and Paddy still stood on the sidewalk.

After the cop had shouted, ‘Pedestrians!’ for the tenth time, Paddy went over to him and said, ‘Is it not about time ye let the Catholics across?’

****

Gallagher opened the morning newspaper and was dumbfounded to read in the obituary column that he had died. He quickly phoned his best friend, Finney. ‘Did you see the paper?’ asked Gallagher. ‘They say I died!!’

‘Yes, I saw it!’ replied Finney. ‘Where are ye callin’ from?’

****

An Irish priest is driving down to New York and gets stopped for speeding in Connecticut. The state trooper smells alcohol on the priest’s breath and then sees an empty wine bottle on the floor of the car.
He says, ‘Sir, have you been drinking?’
‘Just water,’ says the priest.
The trooper says, ‘Then why do I smell wine?’
The priest looks at the bottle and says, ‘Dear Lord! He’s done it again!’

*****

Walking into the bar, Mike said to Charlie the bartender, ‘Pour me a stiff one – just had another fight with the little woman.’
‘Oh yeah?’ said Charlie, ‘And how did this one end?’
‘When it was over,’ Mike replied, ‘She came to me on her hands and knees.’
‘Really,’ said Charles, ‘Now that’s a switch! What did she say?’
She said, ‘Come out from under the bed, you little coward.’

****

David staggered home very late after another evening with his drinking buddy, Paddy. He took off his shoes to avoid waking his wife, Kathleen.

He tiptoed as quietly as he could toward the stairs leading to their upstairs bedroom, but misjudged the bottom step. As he caught himself by grabbing the banister, his body swung around and he landed heavily on his rump. A whiskey bottle in each back pocket broke and made the landing especially painful.

Managing not to yell, David sprang up, pulled down his pants, and looked in the hall mirror to see that his butt cheeks were cut and bleeding. He managed to quietly find a full box of Band-Aids and began putting a Band-Aid as best he could on each place he saw blood..

He then hid the now almost empty Band-Aid box and shuffled and stumbled his way to bed.

In the morning, David woke up with searing pain in both his head and butt and Kathleen staring at him from across the room.

She said, ‘You were drunk again last night weren’t you?’

David said, ‘Why would you say such a mean thing?’

‘Well,’ Kathleen said, ‘it could be the open front door, it could be the broken glass at the bottom of the stairs, it could be the drops of blood trailing through the house, it could be your bloodshot eyes, but mostly …… it’s all those Band-Aids stuck on the hall mirror.

Minutia III

Another self-guided tour through my convoluted thought processes and observations.  Please wipe your feet before entering.  You wouldn’t want to be responsible for me having a dirty mind.

Because of the *let-us-help-one-another* Mennonite mindset, this area has been the birthplace of several, large, well-known insurance companies.  In keeping with my mission of being older than everything except the local rocks, I received a renewal notice for my home insurance.  My provider included a note which bragged that they have been in business for 175 years.

I have Googled myself.  Oh, the Ego of it all. (But it felt good.)  The only person with the same name and middle initial who comes up, is a retired US Air Force colonel, who went on to become a motivational speaker.  He’s appeared locally a couple of times, a few years ago, though I didn’t know it.

Recently, I thought of a friend I had for a couple of years during my teens.  While he was a couple of years younger than me, we were both over-average nerdy, and loners, therefore, we hung out and fit together nicely.  Named for his uncle Elmer, his first name was actually Delmer (D’Elmer).  There not being a lot of Delmers in the world, I tried to look him up, and was sadly surprised to find that he had died two years ago.

He was one of the guys who helped me *adopt* the naïve young tourist in my Unreasonable Expectations  post.  He was 50 pounds heavier than skinny me, and the cool kids razzed him about being fat, but most of it was muscle.  He would dive from as high as I would, and sneak into the water like a greased seal, raising less of a splash than anyone else.

Also dead, from that same crew, was an Indian from the res.  While he was a year older than me, these two both died two years ago.  Not as surprising, but still disappointing, was a notice of the recent death of the wife of the couple who owned and ran the beach bowling alley from my Bowling For Summer  post.  She was the one who served us crisp, golden French fries when we were done swimming.  In her thirties when I was a teen, she must have been like my mother, into her nineties when she passed.  Tempus fugit!

John Wayne made a hockey movie….Whaa??  Never east of the Mississippi until 1930, he was the lead in a 1937 sixty-minute flick about the non-existent, New York Panthers, called Idol of the Crowds, two years before his break-out role in Stagecoach.  He valiantly laced up, and could skate fairly well in a straight line, but any *hockey moves* had to come from camera angles.  Usually clean-spoken, he was quoted as saying he spent two days in a hospital, probably with a sprained ankle, because, “I’m from California.  I’ve never been on (expletive) skates before!”

If time is money, does that make ATMs time machines??

I exercised my franchise and voted in the recent Provincial election.  Despite having let them waste $4/5 billion dollars, the mindless, entitled yobs in the big city voted the same rogues’-gallery back into power.  Please, Nanny-State, we’re too stupid and lazy, waste another billion or two – but take care of us.  My grandson was going to have to pay off the already existing debt.  Now I just hope that he never has kids.

Since the road which runs behind my house was the electoral boundary line, on my side were election signs for four or five different parties, while on the other side of the road were the same parties, but with different candidates.  Always interested in the word-value of names, I looked a couple up.

A candidate on my side was named Weiler.  Her name, in German, has the nice meaning of hamlet, or small village.  Her compatriot across the line was Wettlaufer.  I don’t imagine he discusses it much.  It translates to *bookie*, one who bets on races.

I took the wife and daughter to a plant nursery recently.  Patiently wandering around, waiting, (yeah, right) I ran into the Bidens.  They are small, pretty flowers with two little rabbit-ears on top.  The person/people who discovered and named them felt these little protrusions looked like teeth.  Biden = bi-den = two-toothed.  So Joe Biden is related to plants, although I suspect he was adopted.  He’s not as good-looking, and nowhere near as smart.

There’s a small hotel in the neighboring city.  It began as the manor house of the local brewing family.  It has a strip bar in it, which….I might have gone into – once – just to ask for directions.  It has become the House of God on Sundays. Some time between last call Saturday night, and two-for-one lap dances Sunday evening, a team of volunteers cover the nudie posters, and $4-a-beer signs, and turn the bar into a church.

For a few hours on Sunday afternoons, the gentlemen’s club becomes a Holy place, a social place, and a place where people in need can find safety, and trust, and food.  They may also find God, but that’s not the main goal. This is a place of Christ-like support and acceptance for strippers and druggies and drunks who, too often, find themselves excluded and unwanted in mainstream churches.  Good on ya all!

Walking past the coin-counting machine at the grocery store recently, I spotted and grabbed four discontinued pennies from the overflow tray.  When I got them home, I found that three of them were 25 Ore coins from Denmark.  I have several Danish coins, but not that denomination, so I added the newest, cleanest one to my collection.

300 – The Rise Of Curmudgeon!

So, here it is, ten months later, and we meet again at Insecurity Junction. I made it to my 300^th post, and all you lovely people accompanied me.

Despite it being intended as an ongoing retirement project for me, when I began this, I never “thought” that it would go on forever, because, as usual, I didn’t think about it at all. I just unconsciously assumed that I was full of snakes and snails, and rants and tales, and could blather forever.

LIFE HAPPENS

Being retired, whether I publish or not, there will be no great changes in my life, until something other than life, happens. I’ll keep you posted on that. Maybe I should get at that obituary blog, just in case. Perhaps I could bare my soul to Benzeknees, and convince her to format one for me, or at least provide an outline.

I’ve plodded my way to the 300 mark, much slower and more markedly than many bloggers whose posts I read (semi)regularly, but I am finding many of them slowing down, some from lack of further inspiration, but many, because life has happened.

Sparklebumps is on her third job since I met her. She started a bit before I did, and posted more often, though now they’re farther apart. Her blog count must near 400, and she just mentioned that her followers finally equalled her posts. I guess I eventually learned how to attract attention – and followers. Mine equalled out at number 273, and are now well above 300.

BrainRants lacked bandwidth, and personal time, for a year in The Suck, and has been spotty since his return. An impending transfer, and the possible need to find financial support in the civilian sphere will do that to you. We’re all gonna miss him greatly, if he has to go dark.

H E Ellis’ big promotion, and the need to keep writing on her several books, has her posting far less often, and often reruns, and others’ work. Life seems to keep Sandylikeabeach off the grid for a month at a time, and John Erickson drifts in and out of medical and weather-induced blog-coma.

On the other hand, I have recently discovered, not one, but two, bloggers who have been at this for ten years. Not posting every day, mind you, but ten years! I asked one lady how many posts she’d published in that time. She didn’t reply, but I know it’s a lot more than my paltry 300.

New bloggers continue to make the scene, and old reliables slow down, or disappear altogether. AFrankAngle commented that the number of his followers continues to rise, but the visits, likes and comments don’t seem to increase.

I was set on this course by my wife and daughter, who saw it as a way to keep my aging brain sharp through composition and curiosity – that, and keeping me out from underfoot during my retirement. I have vapidly ranted and rambled about so many different things, that you, my beloved followers and readers, must be almost as addled as I am.

I don’t have the oomph and pizzazz to have things like being invited to join Stuphblog, or Long Awkward Pause, happen to me. I have been polluting Rochelle’s Addicted to Purple site by submitting little, hundred-word stories, based on her weekly photo prompts. I’ve surprised myself, if no-one else, with my concise brevity, and have attracted several new readers and followers. It’s been fun.

New thoughts slowly form. New viewpoints, sometimes of old happenings, are found. Occasionally, old vignettes, or pieces of my childhood history, are dug out of the memory vault. I continue to enjoy assembling chunks of the language to offer them to you, and I very much enjoy when you visit, and read, and comment, and discuss.

Like Erickson, sometimes I am distracted and don’t do the visiting and reading that my interest and good manners says I should. I am very happy that so many of you forgive that, and make my self-imposed seclusion less secluded.

If you good folks feel that you can continue to follow in my doddering footsteps, I am pretty sure I can get to 400, my next plateau. 400??! Pah! The sky’s the limit. Onward and upward. Excelsior!

Do not use with alcohol. May cause dizziness, confusion or blurred vision. Your senility may vary.

Awesome!

 

I am awesome!  Not merely awesome, but epically awesome….or is it awesomely epic??  I don’t know.  I went to sit down at the computer to write this post, and I was already here, so I don’t know whether I’m coming or going.  That’s unusual.  Most times there’s more than enough people to tell me where to go,  when to leave, and what to do when I get there.

I know that I am awesome/epic, because my good blog-buddy, Ted, at sightsnbytes  delivered yet another big helping of blog award, but only because I deserve it.  The attractive, parti-colored picture of the Epically Awesome Award Of Epic Awesomeness at the top, is the reason for the title of this post.  (Tell ‘em what you’re going to do, then do it, then tell ‘em what you did.)

There are three rules; aren’t there always?  Since I’m a rugged individualist (pronounced shit-disturber), rules and I don’t always get along well.  I’ll tell you what they are, before I brush them off the WordPress.  If you receive this award, you’re supposed to pass it on to ten other worthy bloggers.  You are expected to notify them that you have done so, and then publish a post including ten, hopefully interesting things about yourself.  There isn’t even a rule that you must display the award, but I’m so awesome, I did it without being told.

These awards quickly become logarithmic.  One becomes ten, which become a hundred, which become a thousand.  Soon, it’s like the Big Bang all over again.  There’s muons, and pions, and Higgs bosons floating everywhere, and who knows what other God Participles?  I’m going to apply the Dark Matter gravity of stubborninity, and cause this to coalesce into an amusing, yet informative post.

SnB and I tend to travel in much the same blog-circles, although he orbits clockwise, while I rotate retrograde.  He has already passed this accolade on to many of the same bloggers I would have honored.  I’ll skip laziness, and claim that efficiency prevents me duplicating his efforts.  Since I haven’t had anyone charged with blogging with the intent to be awesome, I need not notify anyone.  Time saved is Miller Time.

Lastly, I’m supposed to tell you ten things about me.  Benzeknees has been asking for information about Archon, but I think it’s just so that she can do my obituary.  I’ve met a guy who can paint the Ten Commandments on a grain of rice.  If he did my entire interesting history, he’d still have room for about eight of them.  When I works, I works hard!  When I plays, I plays strong, and when I thinks, I falls asleep.  I don’t think I can get ten new facts about me, but I’ll think about it.  ZZZzzz.  Huh!  Wha’?  If the list below isn’t enough to slake your nosiness curiosity about me, try here, or here.

I need to check with SnB about which European music he likes.  I like some of the less mainstream British Rock (?).  The Beatles were creative.  The Rolling Stones had a bit more of an edge, but I went for Electric Light Orchestra, The Moody Blues, and Jethro Tull, who have presented so many musical sides, a dodecahedron would be jealous.

I like to use big words.  Well….I don’t like to, but I’ve got them in my vocabulary.  I don’t use them to make me look impressive, but in the hope that some of you will be inspired to research and use a few.  Logarithmic, parti-colored, dodecahedron, retrograde, there’s gonna be some learnin’ here before you guys go home.

Born in a town with a Great Lake in front of me, a river beside, and thin ice on the pond down the street, I was still 14 by the time I learned to swim.  I still don’t do it very well, or the “proper way”, but I can travel a fair distance and stay afloat a long time.  I spent huge amounts of each summer in the water, but it wasn’t till my swimming friends wanted me to join them at the harbor, where I couldn’t touch bottom, that I finally learned to swim.

I liked to jump off things, and would have done more if I could have afforded it.  I found out about the new sport of sky-diving at about 17.  My son says he won’t step out of a perfectly good plane, unless it’s at the terminal.  Me, on the other hand….It costs how much?  After swimming in the harbor, soon I was diving off the fishing boats.  The aft coamings were 12 feet above the water, the cabin roof, 14.  One summer, we had a drill-rig on a barge parked at the dock for about three weeks.  The tip of the tower was about 20 feet up.  I never jumped feet-first, but I would dive headfirst from up there.  Perhaps that explains some of my current confusion.

A big thank-you to SnB, for including me on his list of worthy blogs.  This award gives me another chance at a little light-hearted prose, and a valid excuse to air out (some of) my psychoses in public.  I’d also like to thank my neighbor for not pressing charges, and the nice policemen for being so understanding about that little restraining order violation.  It’s hard to get internet access in the holding cell.

Steve

Everybody, meet Steve.  Steve, meet everybody.  Steve is very quiet, because he’s dead.  We’ll get back to that in a while.  Several of the bloggers I follow have ongoing series of posts about one of the weird and wonderful characters that infest their life.  You’ve already seen why this will not be a continuing set of tales, but I thought you might have some small interest in a guy who provided carefully concealed amusement, for me, and others, for twenty years.

At about five foot, four, Stevie – but never where he could hear you call him that – was like Grumpy the dwarf, or Papa Smurf with hemorrhoids!  He strutted around like a little Banty rooster, and that’s what he always sounded like – or like KayJai – fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!  Not really depressed, just low-level pissed off at everything and everybody, all the time.  Voted most likely to be found on a tower with a sniper rifle.

He was a highly competent worker, turning huge piles of sows’ ears into silk purses all the time.  He didn’t like the raw material, but then, none of us did.  He didn’t like the machinery, or the way the maintenance department kept it.  He didn’t approve of local plant management or senior company executive policies.  Like a stopped clock being right twice a day, they eventually drove us into bankruptcy and unemployment.

While he could appear friendly, he didn’t like people, especially women.  Have you seen or heard of the movie, ”The Forty Year Old Virgin?”  When I joined his line, he was thirty-six, and wouldn’t go near one.  The earthy old woman I took over the job from, offered to take him home and make a man of him.  It was like watching the Tasmanian Devil.  I thought his head was going to spin off.

He was also nicknamed Birdman, an appellation he was somewhat proud of.  He had a huge, encyclopedic knowledge of tropical birds, parrots, cockatoos, toucans and macaws.  He owned several, which he allowed to fly free, inside his house, when visitors came over.  He was sometimes contacted by humane societies, pet stores, or other owners, about found, injured or ill birds.  Stevie nursed them all back to health.

Steve didn’t like anyone in any position of authority, especially politicians.  He had a particular hatred of the Liberal Party, and PM Pierre Trudeau.  Don’t get him talking, he never shut up.  He was always threatening to sue someone for something, but never got around to it.  He had a constant quartet of epithets that he doled out regularly.  Blow it up!  Burn it down!  Kill ‘em all!  Call my lawyer!

My friend’s line was down one day, and he came over to talk to me while I worked.  Being polite and sociable, he thought he’d acknowledge Steve.  As he walked past, all he said was, “Hi Steve.  How are you today?”  Five minutes later, he had to pry his ear out of the monologue.  “Fucking useless politicians!  They’re gonna drive this Goddamned country into the ground.  We should kill the whole bunch of those stupid assholes and burn the fucking Parliament Buildings down.”  My buddy finally escaped and came over to see me.  He said, “You know what?  I haven’t spoken to Steve in eight months, and it’s as if the conversation never ended.”

The company installed a new piece of equipment one time.  Local management came around and wanted to take a picture of it for promotional purposes.  Steve refused to continue working while that happened, like an Aboriginal, afraid that the magic box might steal his soul.  “That’s not what I get paid for.  Take a picture of it between shifts, or have someone else do this job while you shoot pictures.  I’m not going to be in your Goddamned advertising!”

A casual inquiry about his family, one day, revealed that he hated them too, mother, father and one brother.  They were all too nosy and pushy, and wanted to run his life.  He left home when he was sixteen and had barely spoken to them since.  He blamed his parents for passing on defective genes.  He was sure that he would die before his time of some weakness that he’d inherited.  Maybe he was right, maybe it was the stopped clock thing again, or maybe it was losing his job and his purpose in life.  A year after the company closed, he passed on.  As a loner who made me look gregarious, he had no newspaper obituary.  I don’t know what took him.

I don’t know about winter time, but in the summer he liked to go commando.  Working with hot vinyl, he liked to wear loose-legged track shorts.  “Hanging out with Steve” took on a whole new meaning when he balanced on one leg and reached forward.  Princess Purity, behind me finally had enough, and complained to the area supervisor, who spoke to the plant manager, who informed the union executive, who called in the union rep to have a little talk to him about baring his soul, and other portions.  He dyed his hair and “manscaped” himself years before it became common, or even acceptable.

Probably because he was so abrasive, he had trouble with the teenage boy who lived next door.  The kid would jump the fence and steal, or damage, or just move stuff around, to piss him off.  He tore out the four-foot wire fence and installed an eight foot wooden fence all around.  The kid figured out how to get over that too.  He complained to the parents a couple of times, but they denied that it was their kid, so he covertly installed video cams and a recorder.  After another invasion, he invited the parents over to see a little movie.  He told them that the next time it happened, it would be the police viewing the tape.

I’ve never seen anyone work so hard to be happy by being unhappy.  I was never one of the very select few invited to his home, but I miss him, if only because society needs a leavening of people like him to help the rest of us feel normal.

P.S.

http://granmaladybug.wordpress.com is now on the air, dispensing wit and wisdom about cats, candles and cooking.  Only the brave need apply.