Category: Humor

I told this horrible little story to my children recently, and they enjoyed it so much that I figured I’d share it here.

My parents took us on a lot of long car rides when I was kid, presumably as punishment (for both them and us).  I remember how incredibly boring these trips were – I couldn’t read without getting sick, and my parents would never subject themselves to the kind of music I wanted to listen to, so it was hour after hour of just sitting there watching stuff go by.

On one particularly dull trip, I brought along a little box of green “DynaMints” (these were mint candies, similar to Tic-Tacs).  For reasons that escape me now, I began to wonder what would happen if I inserted one of these mints into the nose of my sleeping older brother.  I knew I shouldn’t do it, but my scientific curiosity got the better of me, so I gently placed one in his left nostril.

Unfortunately, in his sleep he apparently decided that the little mint was something escaping from his nostril, so with a loud “SNORK” he sniffed it straight up his nose and out of sight.

This, of course, woke him up.  With eyes bugging out, he let out a terrified yell over the intense mint flavor now shooting up his nasal cavity.  To make matters worse, the green candy coating was leaking out. 

He had no idea what was going on.  I, on the other hand, knew exactly what was happening, but I was laughing waayyyy too hard to explain it to him (after all, what could be funnier to a kid than seeing his older brother screaming while green goo dripped out his nose?).  After the hysterical laughter subsided, I told him what I had done.  I don’t remember now, but he probably gave me the pummeling of my life over it (but it was worth it).

Every now and then I remind my brother of the famous DynaMint experiment, and the look in his eyes says he hasn’t really forgiven me for it.  Perhaps my strange reaction to mints is some sort of guilty response?

As a general rule, people who work by themselves develop unusual habits. I wish I could say I’m the exception to that rule, but unfortunately I’ve developed a socially unacceptable habit that never would’ve occurred if I didn’t work at home.

It’s kind of embarrassing, but the truth is that I entertain myself with my own belches. Not only do I make them unusually loud, but I also speak while doing it.

I know, it’s an incredibly childish habit, and I’ll probably lose some of my readers by admitting to it. But maybe if I confess to it here, I’ll stop doing it.

Anyway, my favorite belch word for the past few months has been “bagels.” Don’t ask me why I chose that word – I guess it just sounded right. It’s hard to spell it out, but it sounds something like this:

BAAA-AAA-AAA-AAA-GELS !!

My kids, of course, think it’s hysterical when they hear that blasting from my office. Which is probably why I keep doing it.

Not too long ago I came downstairs after a day of coding, and as I exited my office I let fly with a particularly boisterous “baaa-aaa-aaa-aaa-gels.” When I turned the corner, I was mortified to find my wife talking with one of our neighbors – a neighbor who I didn’t know too well (and probably never will, thanks to my outburst).

I’ve seen this neighbor a few times since then, and she never really makes eye contact (can’t say I blame her).

OK, now that I’ve admitted to a really dumb habit, it’s your turn :) What bad habits have you developed when nobody was around?

My family moved to Tennessee when I entered my teen years, and it was there that I met my first true love. She was a southern girl whose father was a fire-and-brimstone minister. I was 16 at the time, and to prove my devotion to her I agreed to attend one of her father’s church services.

I was completely unprepared for what I saw. The service started simply enough, but once the sermon was underway, the reverend began speaking in tongues. You couldn’t actually understand what he was saying, but a lady in the congregation was kind enough to translate his babbling into English. And to make this scene even more surreal, I should add that she had inexplicably shaved off her eyebrows and painted in ones that looked like Spock’s. I kid you not.

A few months later I attended another of his services, and it turned out that the church pianist was sick. I kinda-sorta knew how to play, so my girlfriend volunteered me as a replacement.

After my eyeballs returned to their normal size, I tried to explain that I only knew a couple of rock songs – but they were desperate for a piano player, and I was a desperate young teen, so I agreed to do it. But to repay my girlfriend for volunteering me, I said that I’d do it only if she would sing.

A short while later I found myself seated at a piano in front of a hushed church audience that was expecting something inspiring.

So I gave them what they wanted. I played “Closer to the Heart” by Rush.

To my girlfriend’s credit, she found a way to sing it like a hymn. And to my credit, I skipped my piano version of the guitar solo (it would’ve rocked, btw).

I sheepishly left the service, feeling a mixture of elation and guilt for having pulled it off. But I felt better when the reverend came up and shook my hand, congratulating me for the “inspirational music.”

PS: It’s a good thing they didn’t ask me to play again, because the only other song I knew was Iron Man, and that never sounded quite right on piano.

I seem to be unique among people I know in that mints make me sneeze.  And I’m not talking about a minor sneeze here: give me an Altoid, and I’ll sneeze half-a-dozen times with enough force to part the Red Sea. It’s a strange affliction, but at least my sneezes smell fresh.

My kids think this is the funniest thing in the world, of course.  We have a little game where I pop a mint into my mouth, and my kids both guess how many times it’ll make me sneeze.

But for real entertainment, just watch me brush my teeth with an extra-minty toothpaste.  Many times I’ve brushed my teeth and just barely spat in time to avoid decorating the countertop with minty sneeze spray.  And yeah, there have been a few times when the sneeze wins (hence the crusty drops all over my bathroom mirror).

Does anyone else have this weird reaction to mint?

I used to consider myself a nature lover, but that all changed when the crazy poopin’ bird made my car his home.

It all started one summer morning two years ago when I found my car covered with bird droppings.  My car had been used by birds for target practice before, but never like this.  The sheer amount of stuff was worthy of an entire flock of birds – but I soon discovered it was the work of a just one crazy cardinal.

The cardinal (whom my kids have since nicknamed “Frenzy”) hangs out on my car’s side-view mirror, apparently under the belief that his reflection is another male competing for his space.  Rather than peck at the mirror, though, he tries to run off the intruder by regularly marking his territory.  A lot.

After putting up with this for a few weeks, I bought a rubber snake and wrapped it around the mirror, hoping to scare him off.  The next morning there was no sign of Frenzy’s mischief – success!  But it didn’t last.  A couple days later he started hanging out on the other mirror.  So I put a snake on that mirror, too, thinking that two snakes would send him packing for good.

It didn’t work.  The next morning I came out to my car and found that he’d pooped on the snakes.

Then winter came around, and Frenzy disappeared.  Months went by, and there was no sign of him.  By springtime I’d almost forgotten about him, but he came back with a vengeance.  Apparently he’d spent the winter months at a buffet because he was more productive than ever.

So what can I do to get rid of this crazy bird?  I know that if I caught my neighbors pooping on my car, I’d shoot them.  But I can’t bring myself to harm this bird.  He’s simply doing what crazy birds do.  I just want him to do it somewhere else, that’s all.

Even though we’ve been married for over a decade, my wife Carolyn still tells me stories about her childhood that I never heard before. Carolyn grew up in a small town in Tennessee which had its fair share of unusual characters – including, as I recently discovered, her grandfather.

My wife fondly remembers her grandfather as a grouchy old fellow who looked like Archie Bunker with less hair. Despite his grouchiness, he retained a soft spot for two things in his life: his granddaughter, and his pet quail (yes, I said quail, as in the plump little bird that some people consider food).

The quail was affectionately named Goober, and it followed its master around the house, happily chirping while it hopped to and fro. Goober was a good quail, and by all accounts he lived a happy life…until his unusual and unexpected demise.

You see, one night Carolyn’s grandfather started clipping his toenails on the arm of his sofa, with the ever-faithful Goober at his feet. Thinking it was a tasty treat, Goober grabbed a toenail clipping and hopped away with it in his mouth. He tried valiantly to swallow it, but sadly, it was too large for the poor bird, and it got lodged in his throat. Before anyone could figure out how to save the struggling quail, Goober choked to death on the toenail, an unfortunate victim of hygiene.

After Carolyn told me this story, I sat back and marveled at the fact that I ever attempted a career in cartooning. How on earth could my silly little cartoons have ever competed with the real world, where cranky curmudgeons can own cute quails named “Goober” that meet their untimely end from a toenail? The real world may be more tragic than my comic strip, but it’s also a hell of a lot funnier.

I’m willing to bet that politicians who promote family values would tone down their rhetoric if they had known my two brothers and I when we were in college. We were a swell bunch of guys, of course, but we had our quirks, one of which was a complete lack of desire to clean up after ourselves. A friend of mine who came to visit the small house we shared took one look at our growing collection of rot and dubbed us “The Scum Brothers.” The name stuck.

To give you an idea of how we lived, for several weeks an offensive smell filled the place, but for some reason we couldn’t be bothered to track it down. That job was left to my girlfriend Carolyn, who discovered that the source was a neglected bag of potatoes which had grown into a huge aromatic forest in one of our cupboards. I had no idea potatoes could smell that way.

Carolyn and I had met a few months prior to that, at a New Year’s Eve party held in a nearby hotel. I remember looking all over the place for my brother Simon so I could introduce him to her, and I was just about to give up looking when above me I heard a loud “BUCCKKK-AWW-WWKKK!!!” I looked up to see my brother hanging over one of the balconies, clucking like a crazed chicken (some people sing when they drink, but Simon, well, he acted like a giant chicken). I knew that Carolyn was the gal for me when she didn’t run screaming into the night after discovering that I was related to the chicken man. (A few years later, in fact, she became my wife. We’ve since been blessed with two kids, but, luckily, no potato forest.)

My other brother, Andrew, was getting his master’s degree in archaeology at the time, and he had a wild mane of unkempt hair sprouting from his head which went all the way to his backside. The hair suited him well, since in addition to being an archaeologist, he was also the lead singer and bassist in a local thrash metal band. We used to joke that he’d dig up dead people during the week and then sing about them on the weekend.

One of my favorite memories of Andrew is when Carolyn’s niece Michelle came to visit for the first time. As Carolyn pulled into our driveway, Michelle spied a very hairy man in our rarely-mowed backyard hunched over a smoking metal cauldron which he was stirring with a large stick. When Carolyn said, “Oh, there’s Nick’s brother,” Michelle laughed because she figured she was joking. Her smile turned into a look of shock when she realized Carolyn was serious.

Now, at this point you might be wondering what exactly Andrew was doing. But there’s a simple explanation. As a budding archaeologist, Andrew practiced the art of “flint knapping,” which is the process of making stone tools like those used by our ancestors. In order to make the stone more pliable, he’d cook it for a while – hence the smoking cauldron. Chances are, though, that Michelle wasn’t thinking about flint knapping when she saw my brother cooking his rocks. Instead, she probably feared that she was about to become a human sacrifice in some bizarre suburban ritual.

The three of us are all grown up now, and for the most part we’re a lot more respectable than we were back then. But every time we get together, we magically turn back into The Scum Brothers again, and celebrate our misspent youth by cracking jokes even crasser than the ones we knew all those years ago. So God bless family values, I say, and God bless The Scum Brothers in particular, because Lord knows we need it.

I hope I’m not alone in suffering from Freudian typos. Unlike normal typos, these typos are the kind that make you wonder about your mental health. Case in point: I sometimes accidentally type “lust” instead of “list.” It’s a simple mistake – U and I are right next to each other on the keyboard – but it makes you wonder if I need to get out a little more.

My worst Freudian Typo was one that made it into the help file for the very first version of HomeSite. In a section about trouble-shooting, I recommended that users “Shut down their computer” if they experience problems. But I made a little mistake. Yep, you guessed it – I ended up asking people to “Shit down their computer” instead.

Even more embarrassing was the fact that this mistake was reported to me several months later by an acquaintance at Microsoft. Now any time I want to complain about Microsoft’s security woes, I remember how I once instructed my customers to soil their computer’s innards, which has security implications beyond those that Microsoft has to deal with.

Several years ago I made the mistake of forgetting my wedding anniversary, and I promised my wife I’d never forget it again. Since I have such a lousy memory, I instructed my computer to remind me two weeks before our anniversary, and I believe I used the phrase “Don’t forget your anniversary, butthead” as the reminder’s text to make sure it got my attention.

A few years later I decided to get a new computer, so I gave my wife my old system. Yep, you guessed right – I forgot to remove the reminder. Which meant that one morning her computer greeted her with “don’t forget your anniversary, butthead.”

Luckily, she eventually figured out that the reminder was meant for me, not her – but I still wonder what went through her head before she came to that conclusion.

PS: My wife forgot our anniversary the following year, so my record is clean now.