You’ll Never Read This.

Listed on humor-blogs.com…

There’s great sanctity for free speech in my house. Well, at least in my house when I’m alone because the lovely and erudite Mrs. Sinister has a long list of things I can’t say in front of the kids. Oddly, many of the prohibited phrases have her as their subject.

But barring this, and my X-rated poetry about Brit TV chef Nigella Lawson, we hold the tenet of free expression in high regard. Among consenting adults very little is too offensive, too risqué, too inflammatory or too obviously naughty to be censored.

This protection does not extend to things that are too boring. I will vociferously defend your right to claim that you should be permitted to form amorous relations with Hoffmann’s Two-Toed Sloth. However, if you bore me while doing it, I’ll plant you in the muck like a gangland snitch.

Despite my best intentions and several hours mumbling to myself at the mall I have violated this first principle of not being exceptionally boring.

What I mean by this is that I have decided to write about Canadian politics. I can actually hear you leaving through my interweb tubes…come back! I can be funny and write about Canadian politics!

Hey guess what? The Prime Minister farted! He farted in the Privy Council! Isn’t that hilarious? In the Privy Council? Privy…he did it in the Privy Council…that’s like a joke…sort of. Damn it.

Anyway, this past week had by-elections for three seats in the federal Parliament from the province of Québec. It occurs to me that the previous sentence is about ten hours worth of civics lessons for many of you but these elections were somewhat important. At very least they were indicative. So are plague buboes, incidentally.

Canada has generationally swung back and forth between the Liberal Party of Canada and the subtly unnerving synthesis party that is now simply known as the Conservative Party of Canada. It’s like The Blob in navy blue suits.

Since 1900, the Liberals have been the most successful elected, national political party in the world. They win and they win a lot. The Conservatives in their various forms have only elected two Prime Ministers into office with majorities since 1958. When this last happened in 1984, they went from the biggest electoral win ever to the new leader losing all but two seats and locking herself in the bathroom with a bottle of Jägermeister.

The Conservative Prime Minister, Stephen Harper is, according to his wife, and early Soong-type android. Stéphane Dion (yes, he’s Céline’s dad) is the current leader of the Liberals, who are in the Official Opposition against the Conservative Party who form the government with the most seats in Parliament, but not a majority of them.

This happens, because unlike the US, we have more than two parties. To be fair, these extra parties are probably kidding and just don’t have the heart to tell us despite the fact that many people vote for them. However, they do keep the Grits and the Tories (a reader from Kentucky just died) from forming the majority needed to guarantee a full, five-year term. There has been no serious prospect for a majority government since 2000, when the two conservative parties got tired of polling each other’s electorate.

So this by-election thingy is a big deal. Any shift in electability puts the political class on election watch. Ever see the sleazy guys at a bar watching the girls drink in hopes that they will get so gooned that they put out? It’s exactly (and I mean exactly!) like that.

The province of Québec is a mystical land full of highways and things near highways. This at least is my experience driving through it. Québec is also French, and French is Serious Business. The Liberals picked Mr. Dion because (it is speculated) he’d win Québec. He’s smart, he’s a gifted policy wonk and he’s very, very Quebecois.

So of course, he lost all three seats. To add insult to injury, they even lost to the New Democratic Party, a group of pseudo-socialists whose official color is orange.

Orange? What were you thinking? How do you vote for orange? The NDP claim it’s because they, like most of Québec, are against the Afghan War. I think it’s because they handed out free flats of Labatt’s 50 and were secretly funded by the citrus lobby.

So we’re now faced with the specter of another election in which Canada’s leaders will debate about very little, but become animated like greased weasels while doing so. Harper’s sophisticated language software will seem smooth compared to Dion’s broken English and in any French events, it won’t matter because apparently Mr. Dion shares the same level of popularity with head lice.

This is depressing. I should have stuck with fart jokes.

 

 

 

 

Live Free or Go To Humor-Blogs.com !!

I Want to Fight Peggy Noonan.

Listed on humor-blogs.com…
Here’s my recipe for writing a weekly (ha!) blog; ignore, ignore, and then frantically try to come up with a subject in my vain hope of posting every seven days. Last night, when I was reduced to looking through the contents of my kitchen for an idea, I remembered that I had made a list.

I did this at the behest of my friend Paul, who writes a really nifty blog that recently stuck it to the man. Relieved, I went to my PC (Yes, I’m still using my Amiga, damn it!) and opened up the appropriate file.

Apparently, I must have just suffered a head injury on the day that I started this list. It only contained one and it made no damn sense;

“Noonan sez CDN silly.”

Other than my spelling of the word ‘says’ being from The Simpsons, I recognized none of this. My usual remedy of chain smoking while downing generous gulps of Glenlivet didn’t help – but I did beat the crap out of my neighbor. I later asked my wife, the lovely and erudite Mrs. Sinister, but she noted that she didn’t go looking for things on “that part” of the computer since finding my erotic fanfic about The Golden Girls.

Eventually I did what any serious opinion columnist would do and performed the Google Dance, guessing at what my phrase might mean. I eventually found a column from the Opinion page of the Wall Street Journal written by Peggy Noonan. Much to my surprise, I had apparently read such a thing. Initially, this just served as a reminder not to surf the Interwebs when gooned on cough medicine, but then I found this:

“In France they speak French, and in China they speak Chinese. In Canada they have two national languages, but that’s one reason Canada often seems silly. They don’t even know what language they dream in.”

What language they dream in? Maybe we should examine what language you write in? To be fair, it’s obviously English, but the kind of English indicating that Peggy is a native of the tiny village Western Rhetorical Nonsense.

I’m going to ignore that since more than 32 million people speak Spanish there, the United States is essentially bilingual already. Spanish is also recognized as an official language or ‘language of government’ to some degree in California, Arizona, New Mexico, the frightening state of Texas and in whatever the hell Puerto Rico is. I will further ignore that in 1794, a motion was presented to the United States Congress asking that laws be printed in English and in German.

Yup, German…and you thought that the French disliked the Americans for no good reason.

Further, the current President of the United States speaks Spanish, and presumably as his first language. Given the regularity with which he turns whatever he’s thinking into serial misspeaking of English, he must have come to it later in life.

In France they speak French – Peg has us nailed there and I’m proud of her. They also invented that language, so I’m even more proud of them. Same for China and Chinese, although they speak about two hundred thousand variations of it according to the number I invented since I couldn’t bother to look it up. Germans speak German – they invented that too, or maybe it invented them. It only makes sense that Peggy should expect that in the United States, they should all speak United Statesian.

What’s that? There is no such language? English is actually a foreign language and merely an accident of the flow of immigrants? English is just a grand coincidence to the American identity?

Damn – don’t tell Peggy. Can I call you Peggy?

Peggy’s oeuvre on language culminated with the following compassionate and charitable statement that in no way made me want to gag;

“We must speak the same language so we can hearten each other.”

Oh, so that’s why?

Hypothetically, I have two situations in my head and I cannot decide which is more heartening;

1. Peggy Noonan Schools for Mandatory Heartening through Forced Education spring up around the country where people can have their potential for heartening increased dramatically. Programs could also include ‘An Introduction to Cultural Assimilation As To Not Make Whitey Uncomfortable’ and ‘Who’s Your Favorite Fifty-Something Former Reagan Speech writer, Pedro?’

2. You hearten people by accepting them as they are and agree that both you and they need to work very hard to get on the same page with language, culture and education.

Personally, I think I know which one I prefer but I need someone to help me with the math since I never took Heartening and Discrete Mathematics for Rich White Women.

So when I turn of the klieg lights here in the Sinister Tower and descend into the murky depths of my peat bog for a well-earned sleep, I will think of Peggy. It will occur to me, as a Canadian, that being called silly by such a person may be a blessing rather than a slight.

Then, I will dream…of Peggy…and I will do so in English, French, Franglais and maybe in some dizzyingly forbidden combination of the three.

And I will be heartened.

 

 

Tired of Waiting for the *Next* Book of Mormon? Go To Humor-Blogs.com!

I Love Whisky.

Listed on humor-blogs.com…

David Letterman, the elder statesman of talk show hosts rightly pointed out, “There isn’t a man, woman or child alive who doesn’t enjoy a tasty beverage.”

This throwaway line is only used to give a tiny laugh while Dave drinks coffee at his desk, but it does note our universal need for hydration – really, it’s a public service. Also, according to the guys at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, it’s better than Jay Leno’s best day by about 376 percent.

But that’s another post – or maybe just a later point in this post; I really won’t know until I’m done and there’s no way that I’m coming back to change this sentence if I’m wrong.

Of course, some beverages are more easily dealt with than others. Water is pretty popular, unless it is laced with e-coli in which case it will turn your internal organs into bloody liquid during an agonizing and inexorable path to the grave – yumm-o! Milk is also pretty straightforward, but according to the entirely non-insane people at PETA, it’s also full of puss and motor oil.

To be fair, drinking milk from another species of animal is dubious at best and had to be the product of a Neolithic double-dog-dare. Just imagine trying to convince someone to go and suck on the bulbous hindquarter of a strange animal. Then imagine, to your profound surprise, that the product is not that bad. It strikes me how many people tried this before and got a delicious slurp of …well…something else. But I’m not walking down that road.

The point (not that I need one) is that I really like – nay, I love – whisky.

Like most kids from Atlantic Canada, I had easy access to alcohol by the time I was 36 weeks old. I can clearly remember my fourth birthday; surrounded by my lumberjack uncles I was presented with a case of Alpine beer and a carton of Player’s Light cigarettes. In return I had to promise never to vote for a French person and take an oath to perpetually resent Canada’s aboriginal population, but that’s another story.

I started off with Canadian Rye Whisky since it can be purchased here by the gallon for about the price of a pack of strawberry Twizzlers. Not knowing any better, I had the misfortune to mix my vile, cheap rye whisky with discount root beer. This is about as appealing as sucking the viscera from an infected spleen and I’m just guessing that the two fluids are similar in color; lesson learned.

After that, I drank it straight – I won’t use the proper term ‘neat’, as that seems fairly inappropriate considering the consequences. It should be noted that if you drink whisky with anything in it other than more whisky, then you should switch to another tasty beverage; Ovaltine leaps to mind.

I sampled Irish ‘whiskey’ in gulps and slurps for a while and then moved on to American whiskies. I consumed these from increasing larger containers, disdaining Bourbon but forming a deep bond of love with Jack Daniels. This relationship ended badly on a summer morning around 4am. I awoke in the fairway of the 16th hole of the local golf club with no shoes, half of my beard burnt off and a headache so severe that I was functionally blind in my left eye.

The effects of the headache and the burnt beard were both remedied by 16 Advil and a hot shower, but I never did find my shoes…if you see them, email me.

When I was about 20 I received a bottle of Glenfiddich for a birthday present, since I enjoyed this whisky a great deal and it made me more pretentious, I’ve been a Scotch drinker ever since. Recently, I was on vacation and went into cottage country for a long weekend of cards, food, swimming, drinking and speaking very loudly. During that wonderful long weekend, I used vast quantities of Scotch whisky to expand my consciousness and experience the following epiphanies;

1. I think that Vice President Dick Cheney should be forced to perform a cover of the 80s hit Safety Dance, complete with an expensive music video. This isn’t a political thing; I just think it would be cool.
2. When I eat certain foods, I smell bad. This is an adequate analogy for all of existence.
3. While I think it would be cool to be immortal, I think that the pressure to be a stylish and charismatic immortal would be too distracting. Instead of carrying forward generations of wisdom, learning and unique cultural insight, you’d spend all your time searching for the right coat to wear.
4. I really need to spend a little more time thinking about the premise of my blogs instead of just spraying this drivel across the interwebs.

DON’T MAKE ME COME OVER THERE!!! Go To Humor-Blogs.com!

Worst Blog Evar!1!

Listed on humor-blogs.com

In a surprising act of slow, deliberate and well-scheduled process this blog has been reviewed. For several months, I’ve been a member of Humor-blogs.com. Next to the Senate of the Roman Republic and the original cast of The Wiggles, there is no finer assembly of people ever to have lived. Seriously…many of them can lift cars with their virtuous and finely manicured hands.

Ironically, I’m in it. Yeah, I was just thinking that too.

Originally, I was beaten into joining this tiny cabal of amateur humorists by the callous and uncaring hands of a monstrous entity known only as Diesel (a name that he has apparently applied to himself intentionally…). At present count – actually from the count I made a week ago last Tuesday – the number has now risen to nearly two hundred. That’s pretty impressive, and these folks are funny.

GO THERE NOW! GO THERE OFTEN!!

In addition to being funny, some of them were kind enough to review the site, and in return for their outpouring of free advice, I will make fun of them. Since all of the reviews are ‘completely anonymous’ and therefore free from bloody revenge, I’ll just make up the names as I go.

Pepperidge E. Sausagelink writes;

“Good read for those who love to read about more news in a comedic fashion.”

I can’t argue with this – I have a strange urge to try, but I can’t.

Legendary and Perennial Flesh Bulb William Shatner added;

“…he doesn’t update as often as others, but that’s a good thing. Dan has relaxed tone and doing it everyday would hurt his blog.”

Doing it every day? Are you insane? While I’d be a lot happier, the least of my worries would be hurting my blog. The cost in fresh linens and Advil alone would run me into the poor house, not to mention that I have 2 kids running around the house…oh…pardon me, I misread that. Mr. Shatner’s comments do highlight an ongoing theme in the review; I am a lazy slug.

Union General William Tecumseh Sherman chimed in with;

“This is intelligent humor at its best!”

This is internet bribery at its best! Thanks, destroyer of Atlanta!!

Prime Minister Stephen Harper noted that;

“Awesome. Needs to blog more, way more. The captions were good. This guy is hilarious.”

I didn’t even vote for you, but thanks, destroyer of Atlantic Canada! Note the slight reinforcement of my my sluggy laziness.

Former Palestinian person Yasser Arafat won my heart with this internet-weary comment;

“More or less current events opinion pieces. Well written and pretty funny, albeit in a typical blog-snarky way.”

Yeah, well, more or less. I seem to recall that this was how Arafat responded to peace treaties too.

Legendary and dead songwriter Warren Zevon waxed critical with;

“Snarky and intelligent, and ably poking fun at both sides in the political arena. Loved it.”

And I love you, sir…carnally if you wish. I am also apparently, doubly-snarky.

Senator and equally dead Edward Kennedy (D-Vehicular Manslaughter) contributed;

“Very funny! You definitely have to follow politics to get him, but this is an extremely witty and sharp blog. “

It’s a good thing then that the Senator follows politics.

German Chancellor Angela Whatever-Her-Name-Is opined;

“I can’t decide if I have intermittent attention deficit disorder, or if this blog makes my brain hurt.”

Neither – your microwave is malfunctioning.

The Chancellor continues…

“It is my humble opinion that if this blogger were a bit more selective or economical with his/her word useage, it might make the individual posts *POP* a bit more.”

Oh, my most perspicacious and ambrosial internet colleague! The juncture at which I might have internalized a more circumspect application of the full cornucopia of my palavered lexicon has long since passed the stage where it might be more frugally effectuated.

Donna Summer crooned;

“…I had to work for the funny…”

You worked hard for the funny, so I’d better treat you right.

Marcus Tullius Cicero erupted;

“My dating life has more consistancy then his entry schedule.”

It would be exceptionally rude of me to guess how much more consistency and I don’t know for sure what an ‘entry schedule’ is, but I suspect that I don’t any advice on mine from a person who has trouble getting dates — HA!. Regardless, the Golden Tongue of Republican Rome has an excellent point first raised by William Shatner; I am a lazy slug.

Cicero goes on to say…

“I do like his take on things but it’s hard to say I’ll keep visiting if I don’t know when a new entry will be posted.”

I can’t blame you for this, but I suppose that I will have to correct the spastic nature of my posting if am to expect a loyal following. Allow me to be more concise – I shouldn’t blame you, but I do. Despite the fact that you are correct about my lazy-ass blogging, I am even now rolling sweet thoughts of disembowelment through my head. However, since I’ll be doing my best to post more, the sizzling hatred that courses through my veins will just need to be taken out on my loved ones and the small, helpless things of the world – that’s right; the Shriners…

Oberon, King of Faeries kicks in with;

“…The writing is top-notch. Having said all that, I would not read the blog regularly.”

I’m a little confused here and must conclude that Oberon and I have a different definition of ‘top-notch’. I might suggest that I am actually “high-notch” by Oberon’s standards, or perhaps even the rare and beautiful “penultimate-notch”. However, when you look to the soaring heights of Oberon’s toppiest of notches, I’m not on it.

Oberon finishes with me on this note:

“That freaky little BlogMad graphic in the left sidebar is too big for its space and it overlaps onto the content on my screen.”

Fixed that – it bothered me too. Apparently just not enough to do anything about it.

I can only presume that the following was produced by someone who owes me money;

“I really like blogs that make me feel smarter when I’m done reading them, and also entertain me at the same time. Sinister Dan’s picture captions are hilarious, and his template is pleasing to the eye. Clearly, the biggest thing that he needs to work on is frequency of posts recently. This kind of talent should express itself more often.”

Your debt is paid! This entry is so kind that I didn’t immediately notice that it marked me once more as

A) a slug

B) a slug that is lazy

Another silver-tongued debtor;

“SinisterDan is just plain laugh out loud funny, as well as obviously very intelligent. I could see him writing humorous commentary for a living.”

You’re in the black, my good and observant friend. Although that thing about writing for a living really stings if you’re not a publisher…

Astronomer Carl Sagan (or potentially my mommy) finishes this boring quotation marathon with;

“This blog had the funniest posts yet. A stellar effort all around, especially with the great links and captions!”

Billions and billions of stars!

I am, of course, thrilled to be the recipient of such consistent praise from a group of so many people who try very hard to write funny things themselves. I am also aware that in heaping such praise, it is almost without exception pointed out that I’m not holding up either my obligations or self-interest by not writing more.

Those who have read The Reasonable Ego for any amount of time have likely noticed this as a recurrent theme. Those who have read The Reasonable Ego for any amount of time have likely been under a strict, court-ordered psychiatric regimen, but that’s neither here nor there.

I will spend less time sunning myself on rocks. I will spend less time rolling in the thick, rich muck of the Atlantic Canadian coastline. I will give up the loam and peat bogs of my boyhood home and I will spend less time splayed out on the sofa in a Dorito and Guinness stupor while countless episodes of Joanie Loves Chachi play in the background.

I will try and be as good as some of you have graciously stated that I might be.

…jerks…

Want Some Funny? Go To Humor-Blogs.com!