Image ©Dan Burns; created for Roger Holtz. Our choir is a lot of fun.
Is this some sort of Catholic thing?
3 days ago
"Who is your favorite author?" Aleya Deatsch, 7, of West Des Moines asked Mr. Huckabee in one of those posing-like-a-shopping-mall-Santa moments.
Mr. Huckabee paused, then said his favorite author was Dr. Seuss.
In an interview afterward with the news media, Aleya said she was somewhat surprised. She thought the candidate would be reading at a higher level.
"My favorite author is C. S. Lewis," she said.
My son has always been a talented writer - at least since he learned to type like the wind and so keep his fingers on the same page as his quick mind. This piece just resurfaced after being hidden on a hard drive somewhere for about 10 years. It was for a satire assignment in high school English, and I have a suspicion he hammered it out in about 20 minutes. All rights are absolutely reserved. Hear that, everyone? Quote with attribution only because, well, look at the title of this post.
TOAST
I'm sorry, I just have to get this off my chest. I'm 28, male, white, blond, and employed in a marketing firm. I enjoy regular trips to the gym and I have a beautiful fiance. I'm a registered democrat, and I live in a suburb of Chicago. You'd think that I'm normal, right? Wrong. I have a disease. I'm addicted to toast. I'm a toastaholic.
I'm not proud of it. I've been trying to shake it for three years now, without success. It's tearing me apart. It's already cost me my relationship with my family and several good friends, and I fear that it could become worse. Toast rules my life with an iron fist. It dictates my daily routine, where I work, the friends I keep, and even how I decorate my home and budget my money. I own 23 two-slice toasters, 21 four-slice toasters, 7 8-slice toasters, and 16 toaster ovens. Three bread company delivery trucks make large shipments to my home every week, and I subscribe to nine toast magazines, ranging from the culinary to the pornographic.
It started mildly at first. At fifteen I was at a friend's house and he offered me some cinnamon toast. Intrigued, I accepted. His recipe was to apply butter to well browned toast and add healthy amount of cinnamon-sugar to it. I tasted some, liked it, and had more. Soon it was all I would eat at home. Soon, eating toast wasn't enough, and I bought a catalogue of the Benniman's Toaster Lineup from 1985 and hid it under my mattress. Soon I was stashing bread loaves in my closet and two toasters I had bought with my own hard earned lawn mowing money behind my dresser. My parents were never the wiser.
It all led to my difficult departure from home. We were eating dinner, and I, paranoid though I was, was having toast, with jam on it. My father grew tired of watching me use all the jam and butter, and said that I was eating too much toast. Even then, I was defensive about my habit, and so I snapped back that he was being a prick, and things went from there. I stormed upstairs, defiantly packed a week's worth of clothes and all five toasters that I had at the time into a suitcase, and stomped out of the house. I haven't talked to my family since.
I'm not merely content to eat toast, however. I need to be in contact with it 24 hours a day. At work, my computer's background is pictures of toast, and I have many pinup posters of toast in seductive poses around my cubicle. I have three toasters on my desk, and even if I'm too full to eat toast, I'll pop some so that I can caress and nuzzle it. At home, when I've eaten my fill of toast, I'll open up the current issues of HotToast! Magazine and leer at the Toastmate of the month. The centerfold toast pictures are legendary among toast lovers, and many good brands of bread got their start in it.
When I go shopping, I have to be careful to avoid appliance stores, because I inevitably spend three hours in the toaster aisle staring at toasters. I've had several one night stands with toasters in this fashion, and on rare occasion I've been unable to return the toaster and been stuck with it.
I belong to a network of toast lovers that has its own pornographic toast magazine and a regular newsletter. Our magazine is equal opportunity, we show all races of toast. Whole-wheat, white, rye, whatever, it's all in there in seductive positions with shiny, well endowed toasters. We even started a toast sex hotline 1-900 number, where you could call up and hear toast popping. However, other than the enthusiastic participation of members like myself, it folded after several months.
I am writing this to bring attention to what is becoming a nation-wide problem. People that may look normal to you at the mall or at work may go home and be toast addicts. This is happening to me and many others, and I encourage parents to educate their kids to prevent it from happening to them. Thank you for taking the time to read this.
©SRJKing, 1997-2012
"Even the act of prayer among Christians, and other correspondingly apparently Extraterrestrial orchestrated organized religions, is an apparent Manipulative Extraterrestrial ruse. In the context of John Lash's research, prayer, can be viewed as an attempt to manipulate humanity into conceiving God as some kind of "supernatural" being, whose existence is toward the sky."
For The Record:
Up for auction is a delicious tuna sandwich which, miraculously, has an American flag fried on the top. This sandwich is said to protect those who possess it from terror, rapture, apocalypse, spontaneous combustion, nuclear fallout, racism, etc. One should never leave the house without this sandwich on their person.
A while ago D_____ had this idea to have his sister, a pilot, take us flying. Sounded like fun. So, on Saturday, October 6, we went to Eucharistic Adoration at church and then headed to the airport for our plane ride. He was unusually excited, but he’s crazy about planes, so it seemed like him. There we were flying around town looking for my house from the sky. After a while, I spotted the neighbors’ house, and then moved my eyes just a bit to see mine…but something was VERY different about my backyard. There, in huge red letters on my lawn: “MARRY ME?”It turns out this enterprising young man had been engineering this for several months, enlisting the entire families of the bride and groom and a large number of red tablecloths.
Shine on the Catholic Church
And the prisons that it owns.
Shine on all the churches
That love less and less.
Shine on lousy leadership
Licensed to kill.
Shine on dying soldiers
In patriotic pain.
Shine on mass destruction
In some God's name.
My Peculiar Aristocratic Title is: Her Exalted Highness Duchess Rosalind the Nimble of Throcking by Hampton |
"Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. " (The Third Man)
Bite not, lest you be also bitten. Neither drink of your own bath water, nor of the bath water of any kind; nor rub your feet on bread, even if it be in the package; nor rub yourself against cars, not against any building; nor eat sand.Click through for more.
Leave the cat alone, for what has the cat done, that you should so afflict it with tape? And hum not the humming in your nose as I read, nor stand between the light and the book. Indeed, you shall drive me to madness. Nor forget what I said about the tape.
CINCINNATI — Mike Thomas, 23, enjoys cultivating a close relationship with the Holy Spirit, but some friends say he’s become too familiar with the third person of the Trinity.Would you like a little catechesis with that whopping helping of casual presumption, sir?
When they call to ask what Mike is doing, he now tells them, "Me and HS are down at the coffee shop."
"It took me a while to figure out who ‘HS’ was, especially when I would get there and Mike was alone," says a friend.
Lately, Mike tells friends he’s "hanging with the Ghost."
"We all know the Holy Spirit is with us, but it’s hard for us to relate to him like Mike does," says one friend.
When the group heads out to dinner or a movie Mike sometimes pauses and says, "Hey guys, let’s not forget the Ghost."
When they meet new people, Mike introduces himself — and the Holy Spirit.
"It’s a little awkward when you’re meeting girls," says one friend. "They’re like, ‘Who else you got with you, Casper?’"
When Mike arrives at church for worship he has started announcing, "Woohoo! Another dose of the Ghost." He has even been heard to say during praise time, "You are the Ghostest with the mostest."
Mike also insists that people call the third person of the trinity "Holy Spirit" rather than "the Holy Spirit."
"Holy Spirit is a person, not a thing," he chides. "Do you want people to call you ‘The John Smith’?"
Friends say they appreciate Thomas’s close relationship with the Holy Spirit, even though it’s making their social lives challenging.
"We’re asking Holy Spirit to talk with him about it," they say.
1. Avoid alliteration. Always.
2. Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
3. Employ the vernacular.
4. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
5. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.
6. Remember to never split an infinitive.
7. Contractions aren't necessary.
8. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
9. One should never generalize.
10. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."
11. Comparisons are as bad as cliches.
12. Don't be redundant; don't use more words than necessary; it's highly superfluous.
13. Be more or less specific.
14. Understatement is always best.
15. One-word sentences? Eliminate.
16. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
17. The passive voice is to be avoided.
18. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
19. Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
20. Who needs rhetorical questions?
21. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
22. Don't never use a double negation.
23. capitalize every sentence and remember always end it with point
24. Do not put statements in the negative form.
25. Verbs have to agree with their subjects.
26. Proofread carefully to see if you words out.
27. If you reread your work, you can find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.
28. A writer must not shift your point of view.
29. And don't start a sentence with a conjunction. (Remember, too, a preposition is a terrible word to end a sentence with.)
30. Don't overuse exclamation marks!!
31. Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents.
32. Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.
33. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
34. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors.
35. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
36. Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing.
37. Always pick on the correct idiom.
38. The adverb always follows the verb.
39. Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague; They're old hat; seek viable alternatives.
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