Tag Archives: comedy

Out to Lunch

14 Jul

“(Name Redacted), 9, had lunch at the White House with First Lady Michelle Obama on Tuesday as the Connecticut winner of the First Lady’s 2013 Healthy Lunchtime Challenge.

(Redacted) won with his recipe for quinoa risotto with shrimp and kale.”

–  New Canaan News

Quinoa Risotto with Shrimp and Kale
A Recipe by (Name Redacted), age 9.

1. Decide to win Healthy Lunchtime Challenge with a dish nobody has time to make for lunch.
2. Look for ingredients in pantry. Discover there is nothing in pantry labeled “risotto”.
3. Call Mom for help.
4. Watch cartoons for three hours. Risotto is ready.
5. Let cool before going to White House.

P.S. In other news, I am off to camp for a few weeks. Posts will be very few and far between in that period. Enjoy your summer.

New Technique Saves Thousands on College Tuition

29 Jun

With the rising cost of college tuition, it is becoming harder and harder for families to send their kids away for a higher-level education. For that reason, more and more parents are turning towards a homeschool college education. Here is a selection of programming required by the Georgia Organization of Teaching Or Schooling Correctly at Home with On-topic, Open Learning (G.O.T.O.S.C.H.O.O.L.).

Late-Night Intellectual Conversations

Such discussions with peers are absolutely essential components of the college experience. To simulate this experience at home, stay up late with your child between one and three times a month. Fill the room with odorous smoke, and then ask big questions through the haze. What is our country doing overseas? Do we even get to decide what we do in life? What if our whole universe is just one atom in one cell in the big toe of some giant human in another world? Mind. Blown. (And you didn’t even have to poison your child’s religious upbringing by sending him/her to an accredited school.)

Social Interaction

Some say the most important thing one learns at college is how to interact with others. To meet this requirement, purchase a keg of a non-alcoholic beverage once a month. Stand around it and talk about the college experience, taking care to put yourself in their shoes. A sample conversation might go as follows:

PARENT: Woah, college rules, right?
CHILD: I have never had a real friend.
PARENT: Check it out, someone brought a beach ball! College rules!
CHILD: Every night I pray for the courage to run away.

Note: The board initially required an alcoholic beverage to be imbibed, until Georgian homeschoolers protested against requiring families to purchase and use “Satan Juice”.

Health and Nutrition

Sleep-away college offers a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for kids to teach themselves about their body and their needs. To accurately recreate such self-discovery, lock your child in a room with nothing but a crate of PopTarts for one week. This activity can also be counted toward the biology requirement, as it teaches students the importance and value of fiber.

Note: Families can determine sexual health lessons on their own. We’re not going to touch that one.

I Want to be a Paperback Typewriter (continued)

30 Jan

Paris is lovely mid-spring (I hear it’s kind of dumpy in autumn). The place was just oozing with inspiration. The narrow roads and lumpy cobblestones made my thighs ripple through my skinny jeans. The general populace glistened perpetually in a resin of lard and butter. Aside from the prostitutes and their syphilis, I could see why Benjamin Franklin came so often.

I had my caffeine passport stamped in all of the city’s most renowned cafes. Though the basic function of the establishments was the same, the difference between a coffee shop in New York and these was remarkable. Here, the coffee was Parisian. The attitude was Parisian. The people spoke Parisian. To the casual observer, it might have appeared as a similar situation as when a Midwestern tourist eats at an Applebee’s in Times Square because it’s much different from theirs back home. But to a connoisseur of places in which you sit around all day and think about writing like me, the difference was palpable.

Amidst the oohing and aahing and gawking, I finally remembered the purpose of my journey and spent some time with my typewriter. As I noisily churned through paper, I noticed that I was not the only writer in my coffee establishment du jour. But, instead of a typewriter, these people used a different device. The keys were recessed into an aluminum body, and the typebars were nowhere to be found. And there was no paper. The letters were struck into a dynamic electronic screen, which could then be adjusted as the user saw fit.

This thing was a miracle! One could write a piece, and make as many hard copies as he wished! He could backspace and move text around and look at funny cats while he worked. A dream come true!

I knew in that instant this newfangled machine would be the inspiration for my next work. So, wrested from the tedium of typewriter-dom and ushered into the space age, I packed up my computer and headed back home.

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