Posted on March 3rd, 2010 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Comedy, Old Posts.
Also, and I don't know a gentler way of saying this, B.R. Myers is not the writer Mark Twain was. --rbr on the Well
A few gentler ways of saying Myers isn't the writer that Twain was:
1: Myers isn't the writer Twain was. (But then, who is?)
2: Myers, while a fine writer in many ways, is not the towering giant of literature that Twain was.
3: Twain -- and I don't want to overstate this, because after all Myers is young and history may judge him kindly -- was a great writer, of course, while Myers has yet to establish his possible greatness.
4: Without wishing to dismiss your comparison out of hand, or discount its relevance to the argument, I think it's worth pointing out that Twain is a great writer, and Myers is, perhaps, slightly less than great.
5: I appreciate your point regarding Mark Twain; thank you for bringing it to the table. It certainly can be said that Mark Twain's famous attack on Cooper is similar in some ways to the BR Myers piece. We would be remiss not to acknowledge that. However, I think that it is also worth noting that Mark Twain is a great writer, and that his stylistic and rhetorical skills may have much to do with the success of his Cooper piece; while Myers, though able and worthy, lacks some of Twain's vigor, concision, and insight.
6: Myers isn't the writer Twain was, IMHO.
Posted on March 2nd, 2010 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Comedy, Old Posts.
(My entry in a "literary commercial" contest.)
When I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say
'Think well upon your future:
Your life will end someday.
Stash pearls away and rubies,
Embrace security.'
But I was one-and-twenty,
No use to talk to me.
When I was one-and-twenty
I heard him say again,
'A State Farm Family Policy
Was never bought in vain;
'Tis paid in small installments,
And buys you easy sleep
Till you are one-and-ninety
And buried six feet deep.'
Posted on February 15th, 2010 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Comedy, Untruths, Old Posts.
Brad Jones was actually born Brad Bowie, but changed his name to avoid confusion with Brad Buoy, the inventor of the liferaft.
Brad Jones is feared in seven languages.
Brad Jones is responsible for all ska band names. He is still looking for bands willing to shoulder the names "Ska of the Antarctic," "The Skashank Redemption," and "F. Ska Fitzgerald."
A careless whisper of "Brad Jones" in the wrong alley could lead to the death of innocents.
Brad Jones will be down from 5 to 6AM for routine maintenance, following which it will no longer be permissible to disturb his routine.
If Brad Jones had been born a girl, his parents were going to name him Cleopatra.
Brad Jones plays without a cup. His opponents think it just makes him scarier.
If Brad Jones were granted three wishes, he'd wish for three more, but only three, because hey, be reasonable.
Remember that to Brad Jones and his people, a smile is an expression of hostility. If you wish to express your affection for Brad Jones, rub the top of his head.
If Brad Jones could only tell stories, the stories he could tell.
Brad Jones shot the sixth, seventh, and eighth Beatles.
Brad Jones is my brother, yet he's heavy.
In time, everything will be true of Brad Jones.
Posted on February 14th, 2010 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Comedy, Untruths, Old Posts.
There are more Brazilians in Brussells than there are in Sao Paulo.
There are forty-seven words for "Abba" in Swedish.
Shouting "Bronco Nagurski!" while leaping from the shower to bed in a single bound is responsible for 90% of accidents in the home.
Left-handed people are disproportionately represented in Benetton ads.
Posted on February 14th, 2010 by Scraps.
Categories: Lists, Words, Comedy, Untruths, Old Posts.
I taught Madonna to eat, sleep, drink, breathe, ride trains, open envelopes, file taxes late without penalty, drop heavy objects from tall buildings, execute perfect triple axels, throw darts accurately with either hand, compensate for the distorting effects of rear-view mirrors, cheat, fly (with or without wings), sprint backwards, extract revenge with no chance of prosecution but with full knowledge of the victim, open child-proof packages effortlessly, play accordion while retaining her friends, tighten belts, loosen sockets, chew gum in a beguiling working-class manner, groan convincingly, belch like a lady, construct origami pets of every genus, pop corn in her mouth, lead oppressed south americans to freedom, defend a field hockey goal mouth, swim, dropkick, shimmy in a corset, tap the zeitgeist in her dreams, and die in her sleep.
In return, she taught me to relax. Ahhhhhhhh.
Posted on February 9th, 2010 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Comedy.
A: Knock knock.
B: Who's there?
A: Interrupting Magritte.
B: Interrupting Ma--
A: This is not a joke.
Posted on February 6th, 2010 by Scraps.
Categories: Comedy, Old Posts.
[i'm going to post lots of old stuff, because i'm still learning to be me again.]
Hey, I've never introduced myself. I'm Scraps, but my true name is Lancelot St. Goodfellow, and I work for the New York Department of Public Spectacle as a cheese grater. In my spare time I throw pillows and conjugate verbs. Someday I hope to build a rope bridge to the future and walk across it on my elbows. I like fuzzy fruit and bald hamsters, and I hate people who are deaf or otherwise unable to pay attention to me. The sick ground chuck drops other the lazy fog. Selah!
Posted on November 1st, 2009 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Comedy, Recovery.
(The last three weeks have been a steep curve of learning; I want to write down some of it.) This homework assignment is to describe a children's drawing, a simple drawing of a birthday party. And my therapist, Alexandra, told me to make a little story also (because she seems to have got the idea that I am promising).
"It's a birthday party. The boy with the big grin in the center is probably the celebrator.* The boys to either side have (presumably) presents for him. The cake in front of the celebrator has nine candles, which either means he's nine years old, or his parents screwed up. There are plates in front of his friends, but none in front of the birthday boy. Maybe he's supposed to give a slice to each of them, and than eat the rest of it by himself.
"But it doesn't matter; the missing plate is far from the birthday boy's thoughts. (Let's call him Ralph.) He is grinning -- do you notice that the other two are not? -- not in laughter; he is grinning because the plan he has cultivated, the plan he has spent the last year, well, planning, is coming to fruition. For his right hand is reaching, grasping for the big knife; and he is going to kill the two, or at least maim them.
"And yet. The right one of the boys -- let's call him Ralph, too -- is concentrating on Ralph the Killer's (or Maimer's) face. And do you know? his hands, both of them, are under the table. Maybe he is reaching for a knife too; it could be, because we can't see under the table. Maybe he's reaching for a gun! Maybe he's reaching for a knife and a gun! One thing that is for sure: we can't know until we move a minute past . . . the birthday party."
*(Originally I used the word "celebrant", but I looked it up, and the definition was "the priest officiating at the Eucharist," so no.)
Posted on October 21st, 2009 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Words, Comedy, Oracles.
Yesterday a got a fortune cookie that said, "Come back later. I am sleeping. (Yes, fortune cookies need their sleep, too.)"
I love the first part. The second, parenthetical part, not so much. It's trying too hard, over-selling the joke.
But it's trying. It's fortune cookies like that that keep me reading them; one out of thirty, seems like these days.
Posted on September 25th, 2009 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Comedy.
I am a three-days-a-week student of Speech at Methodist Hospital. This morning I walked for the first time past the office of the doctor in charge. On the door was a button:
and in smaller letters:
I don't think it's meant to be funny. It's funny either way.
Posted on July 18th, 2009 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Comedy.
I make countless typos; even when I'm most careful now, I still make about one out of three, before correcting it. Today when emailing a friend to find another friend's email, I typoed it "elami". Somehow that struck me as funny.
Posted on July 15th, 2009 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Comedy.
from Brady Lea:
"OUCH! What the fuck are you doing?" Instructions: Grab the book nearest you. Tiptoe around until you are hiding off to the side of a doorway. Wait for someone to pass. Hurl book at them. Record what they said here, and post these instructions.
Posted on July 22nd, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Comedy.
I want to make a short film in which we're given a lingering shot of a gun on a mantelpiece, and later in the film a steroid-raged psycho tears the mantelpiece out of the wall and clonks someone with it.
Posted on July 15th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Comedy.
Another reason to love Daniel Radosh:
"I won't bluster and I won't make idle threats. But understand this, when I am commander in chief, there will be nowhere the terrorists can run and nowhere they can hide." -John McCain
Unlike other bloggers, I won't pander and I won't post gratuitous wet t-shirt photos of teenage celebrities. But understand this, after the jump, there's a picture of Miley Cyrus in the shower.
Posted on February 3rd, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Stuff, Comedy.
We have only watched the first two episodes, and it's not unusual for a comedy series to take even a full season to get its legs. So I'm certainly not writing off the series with these remarks. But for a purchase that seemed like a can't-miss -- Jeeves and Wooster played by Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie! adapted from the actual stories! -- I'm getting an uneasy feeling that I may end up watching more from duty than enjoyment.
Overfamiliarity with the original material is never a good recipe for enjoying stories transfered to television or cinema, and I'm obsessively fond of the Jeeves and Wooster stories. I knew from the start that one key element in the humor -- Bertie's narrative voice -- was unlilkely to translate, so I was prepared to let that go. All I really want is a reasonable approximation of the tone. And they've largely managed that. But they've managed it far better in the sequences when they're lifting dialogue whole from the original; rewritten scenes tend to miss a little, and the scenes created entirely new have been weak. And unfortunately, this means the best scenes have been the ones where I already knew all the jokes and incidents. (Not their fault.)
Some of the portrayals are better than others. I gather one of the odd features of the series is that the actors playing the supporting characters change from season to season; but in these first two episodes, at least, Bingo Little is perfect, and Roberta Wickham, Sir Roderick Glossop, Aunt Agatha, Honoria Glossop, and Claude and Eustace are all good enough. The imbecility of the Drones Club is perhaps played a bit broadly. Aunt Dahlia is badly underplayed, which is too bad, since she's my favorite supporting character in the series, and ought to be the most loudly and enthusiastically played. Hugh Laurie is a fine Bertie.
Which brings us to the huge problem that may well ruin the series for me: Stephen Fry's Jeeves. Fry is a very funny man, and I've always enjoyed him before. And I don't doubt that what he's doing here is funny. But it's not Jeeves, and I'm going to have a lot of trouble moving past that. Fry's Jeeves is smug. He wears a perpetual smirk, and radiates an air of superiority. Now, Jeeves as written would be hard to play for a funny man. Jeeves is largely expressionless and unreacting; the humor proceeds from the barest variations in his manner and tone. His verbal humor is as bone-dry as humor gets. Instead, Fry (and the writers) have turned up the volume, making Jeeves both more obvious and less likeable. He strikes me as more of a stand-in for a modern audience's class sensibilities than a real attempt to portray Jeeves as written, a failure of interpretation which unfortunately doesn't just affect Jeeves but the tone of the whole enterprise. Orwell noted that Americans who read a class critique in the Jeeves and Wooster stories were missing the point, but in this case they wouldn't be far off. Worst of all for the tone, they have made Jeeves sarcastic. Fry's Jeeves scores points with cutting remarks off Bertie's stupidity -- and that of his friends -- in a way that is simply cruder -- lower -- than Jeeves would ever stoop to. All of these smartass remarks are original to the television series, and, alas, none of them (so far) have been especially clever or funny: conventional put-down humor that sails over the head of the target. The literary Jeeves's dry remarks may contain implications, but he is not so baldly disrespectful, ever.
So, well. I'll continue watching, and at the very least look for my favorite segments. The singing of "Sonny Boy" was well done; I'm eager to see what they do with Gussie Fink-Nottle's address to the graduates. But I no longer have much hope that I'm going to love this series, and that's too bad, because my hopes were very high.
Posted on January 3rd, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Comedy, Books.
I can't remember why Gavin loaned me Donald Westlake's Jimmy the Kid. He probably thought I would find it funny, but there may have been more detailed reasons. Anyway, it was hilarious, and though it's taken me a couple years to get round to reading more of the Dortmunder novels, I am now obsessive about having all of them (there are thirteen so far, plus a novella), and, ideally, reading them in order.
Unfortunately, several of the early ones are incomprehensibly out of print (including Jimmy the Kid, the third one). I gather they're popular books; five of them have been made into movies, although only one of them appears to be good (The Hot Rock, made in 1972 from the first Dortmunder novel and starring Robert Redford. Among the apparently bad ones, alas, is Jimmy the Kid, which starred Gary Coleman).
Anyway, I've now read The Hot Rock, and it was nearly as funny as Jimmy the Kid. Like many first novels in series, it deviates a bit from the model that would later be established. For one thing, Dortmunder more or less wins in the end (by implication, anyway) -- though for all I know that's turned around at the beginning of the second book, Bank Shot (which was made into a movie starring George C. Scott). I may have to skip directly to the fifth book, Why Me? (made into a movie starring Christopher Lambert and Christopher Lloyd), because at least I've been able to find that one.
They're everything-falls-apart capers, a genre I love, and the plots are funny, but the best part is the dialogue. Westlake has perfect rhythm, perfect timing. The action is funny, but the scenes between the action are funnier. Westlake even uses a narrative device I dislike, changing points of view whenever it's convenient for him, and gets away with it because each point of view is eccentric and amusing and still human.
Thanks, Gavin!
Posted on December 31st, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Comedy, Quotes.
Gilbert Sorrentino, Mulligan Stew:
As far as noting "what my work and my life as a writer mean" -- how shall I speak of that? As I compose, I think sometimes of the lovely and yet terrifying phenomena of all the world: immense waterfalls falling, gigantic gales from the four corners of the earth carrying in their gritty teeth chunks of rough-hewn farmers' tables and beloved credenzas, dust and excreta from Iowa barns, the sweet simplicity of the voices of both Cohens and Kellys, laughter from gay, come-what-may places, girls with braces (glistening with their tears) on youthful teeth . . . how to speak of these things? How to speak of what the tiny, yet handsome vase from Java, the dew-touched day's eye trembling in it, means to me? Of a half-frozen sparrow, beak worrying a Carnation condensed-milk-can wrapper? Of the masculine rhythms of Dostoevski's anger and comedy and compassion? Of the memory of the memory of first love? How . . . ? How can one explain what it means to think continually of those who were truly great? Of the rough expertise of the air-conditioner repairman? Of American cities, wrapped in local mystery -- Natchez and Mobile, Memphis and St. Joe: raw towns that we believe and die in? Of The Last Supper and the wine on the table on that evening of mystery? How is it possible to articulate the surging emotions felt watching children in the playground, running, playing, gleeful on their divine seesaws? The images crowd together, mix with the emotions, judgment is suspended, one is drunk as one is drunk on wine, and laughter. One writes ceaselessly, one writes -- everything. The notebooks fill, the black ink of the recording pen sets down the rhythms of life itself, rich nuggets of symbol, image, both clear and mysterious, deep, lie buried, waiting for the moment when they will be rescued from their temporary home. Meaning is held in an almost unbearable tension on the dizzying edge of the meaningless, and there! There lies the quicksilvery truth that makes one's life as a writer meaningful and endlessly rich. The wearisome hours of staring at the white paper, the lonely white paper, the clock ticking inexorably on -- all of it is worth it as the haunting image of the emotion is wrenched free from the mulchy notebooks and transformed into sheerest beauty! But how does one explain . . . ? To recast one's life as purest art -- that is the program. That is what my life and work "mean". One would like to achieve full expression of one's inchoate and sinewy self. In one's self, in the dark shed of the untameable mind, lies the truth, waiting to be released into the line, the sentence, the story or novel. I strive for it continually.
Posted on December 14th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Badness, Comedy.
"I, for one, welcome our new [variable] overlords."
Posted on September 17th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Lists, Comedy.
Abba: The vowels in their name stood for vowels in the group members' names as well.
The Velvet Underground: Introduced zeugma into rock lyrics.
The Monkees: I think the "y" in monkey is voiced like a consonant, don't you? Yuh. Monkey-yuh. Right? So they picked up a vowel here.
The The: Still cracks me up! The The. The The The The The. The.
Van Der Graaf Generator: The doubled "a" is surprisingly common among Dutch bands, but is eschewed by Frisians.
Van Morrison: Not actually a band, but a person. His real name is Van.
Ebn-Ozn: Lost two of their vowels in a lawsuit, sparking their satiric masterpiece "AEIOU and Sometimes Y".
Styx. Name doesn't look like it has any vowels, yet it does. Look closely.
AEIOU: The only band name to have all the standard vowels of the alphabet, in alphabetical order!
XTC. Technically not qualified for the list, but I didn't think I could leave them off.
Posted on September 1st, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Comedy.
(archiving another old piece.)
Personal to roadnotes: You were in my dream last night, telling me about how you could predict the future by the patterns you saw in the stubble in your hair as it grew back between shaves. Is this true? --Misia
(Scene: Casa deSelby Bowen. Velma standing, head up, eyes closed, back straight, razor held aloft. Scraps as supplicant, bearing can of shaving cream.)
Acolyte: What news, Lady?
Seeress: I see.... righteousness and recrimination.... petulance.... a stagnant pool of blather.... a sea of ellipses.... drama.... drama.... (clutching head) Oh! the spelling.... my eyes....
Acolyte: Lady, do not go there.
Seeress: You overstep, impertinent one. We cannot deny that which is velcroed to our very souls. Bring me the leering drunken stoat.
Acolyte: (troubled) Lady....
Seeress: The stoat!
Acolyte: As you will. (proffers stoat)
Seeress: (rubbing stoat vigorously upon scalp) Ach! It is worse than I feared. Asshats are on the march, partying unashamedly in the sacred soup of the discourse. Fenderheads menace all that is barely tolerable. Infelicity abounds. Correction must be dispensed.
Acolyte: (gazing in wonder) Are the Cranky Times upon us, Lady?
Seeress: Yea, it is so. But heads will adorn pikes ere morning. Come. (sweeps imperiously from room. muttering:) "Just your opinion" my fuzzy brown butt.
.