Humor
Bats in the Belfry
For the last five years, my family and I have lived off the beaten path – in a beautiful country style home set in the midst of the deep, dark woods. Situated in central Massachusetts, just South of Worcester and riding the crest of the Connecticut border, we’ve found one of those increasingly rare havens where the heavens beam a thousand points of light every time you toss open the shutters to sneak a peek at the great outdoors and the inky parchment above.
When we were seeking new shelter, we weren’t exactly in the market for solitude – just a nice rustic, yet newly constructed home on a decent slice of land that would allow our dogs and kids ample room to roam. We were coming from our modest Cape in the suburban environs outside the Brockton city center – and even though our neighborhood was ... Continue reading »
The Adventures of Gutt & Pole: Issue #1 – The Streak
As this week began on a dour note, I decided to lighten things a bit by closing it out with the next chapter in the thrilling series, The Adventures of Gutt & Pole. Y’all should know the 4-1-1 on this series by now, but for you Ed Zone newbies, I’ll give you a primer. The Adventures of Gutt & Pole is simply a vehicle for me to tell true life tales from my own life with a little bit of hyperbole sprinkled in. Call them anecdotes on steroids, most of it is real, although some of the details are pumped up for maximum pop.
The name comes from the nicknames bestowed upon my lifelong buddy Sean and I during our collegiate gig toiling at Papa Gino’s. He being the tall, thin string bean fellow received Pole. Me being the short, squat fireplug got Gutt. Pole doesn’t figure into all of these stories (he only comes in at the end of this latest installment) b... Continue reading »
My Favorite Things – ‘Top 5 Simpsons Episodes’
In honor of Homer and his clan’s long awaited arrival to the big screen, I decided to offer up a special edition of the ‘My Favorite Things’ series.
The format for this edition is going to be a little different than prior installments. Rather than grace y’all with the details of why a particular episode hit me in the sweet spot or where my life was at during that particular evening when I first caught the episode, I decided to just let the shows speak for themselves.
My criteria in selecting the Top 5 was very simple. These are the five episodes that made me laugh the hardest and more importantly, prompt me to quote from endlessly. And that’s the mark of a great episode. As all guys know, one our favorite past-times is to stand around in a group and toss Simpsons references at each other (so... Continue reading »
Pug Ugly
I ran across this article over at The Onion and thought I’d pass it along as an important safety notice. Hey, this Blog can’t be all Celebrity Miis, all the time. Sometimes I have to serve the public trust.
Anyway, true to form, the master humorists at The Onion have written a pitch-perfect satire of this most inexplicable of dogs. Yes, despite it’s slight stature I do consider these walking fire hydrants, dogs… a status I refuse to bestow upon similarly constructed canines such as chihuahas and the like. Men in Black had it spot on when they pegged this bewildering beast as Alien. These things are not of this Earth.
Part of the reason I posted this is because I’m looking to ferret my Aunt Sharon from the woodwork to get her take. A die-hard pug enthusiast, she is bound to drop the nine-to-five and go all Cindy Sheehan on the staff of The Onion once she... Continue reading »
LEGO Lore – Spiderman 2
In what is becoming a persistent theme on OB1og, Scooby Speak and The Ed Zone, I offer another LEGO astonishment. There’s something inherently cool in this mash-up of the innocent LEGO aesthetic with pop-culture antics. In past posts, we’ve seen LEGO Doom, LEGO Duck Hunt, LEGO suicides and many others.
Anyway, my buddy Joe isn’t much of a gamer, but last year he found a title for his PC that tickled the inner Star Wars geek in him. It was LucasArts’ LEGO Star Wars – which despite the simple title – focused on the latter day prequels. The difference between this game and the myriad of other Star Wars products that Lucas has shoveled out like so much Bantha poodoo is that by telling the tale through LEGO language, they re-injected the charm Lucas had lost.
Knowing ... Continue reading »
The Experiment
Editor’s Note – This is all just a little experiment of mine. If you think you have already read this post, I assure you, it’s all in your mind. What we ’scientists’ call, deja vu. If you haven’t read this post, read on and enjoy.
In parsing through the pages of my life, I have come to a curious conclusion. While I lived my life on the straight and narrow, as bland as the English diet I subsisted on in my formative years, somewhere around the age of 17 I burst from the shell kicking and screaming and ready to make up for lost time. That final Senior Year in High School may have been ‘too little, too late’ to make a run for Everybody’s All American – or Homecoming Queen 1989 – but it was just the right time to reinvent myself as I entered the hallowed halls of Zoo-Mass.
You can keep your Yorkshire Pudding. ... Continue reading »
The Adventures of Gutt & Pole: Issue #273 – The Rise of Raisinhead
*Editor’s Note – The Adventures of Gutt & Pole is a recurring series that focuses on my life with my compadres – viewed through a slightly skewed lens. In some issues, Pole is well represented. In others, Gutt is joined by a rogue’s gallery of other associates for solo stories. Kinda’ like the time the X-Men popped in on Spiderman & His Amazing Friends.
Superhero nicknames are pretty ridiculous. Oh sure, the anonymity afforded by an alias helps protect Superman’s secret identity (not to mention the sheer magic of the horned-rim – for all I know, he’s Lisa Loeb). But when you get right down to it – the fact that these superhero teams go around calling each other by their double secret code name, is a bit foolish.
Think back to that first X-Men flick, where Patrick St... Continue reading »
The Adventures of Gutt & Pole – Issue #0
The older I get, the more I grasp the concept of tempus fugit.
Time flies, baby.
After all, here I am in late July – the year more than half over – and stunned by how quickly each page seems to tear itself from the calendar.
When I was a kid, the summer seemed so blissfully long (some might argue, achingly long, depending upon how frequently they uttered the expression “I’m boo-rrrr-eedddd! What am I going to do today?”) You exited school in late June and those still-warm days of early September seemed an eternity away. Forget the Gregorian grasp on your birth date – you never really aged until you tossed the whites in storage and graduated to your next level of schooling. That step always seemed like an eternity – even when you were stuffing your las... Continue reading »
Speak n’ Spell
They’re A – E – I – O – U.
They’re the vowels.
They’re the glue.
That’s a few lines from Leap Frog’s Talking Words Factory DVD – a disc that is in heavy rotation in my home, as Colin absolutely adores Leap, Tad, baby sis Lilly and the rest of the amphibious alphabet aficionados. Yup, alliteration gets strong play as well. Anyway, here’s a cute story that I have been meaning to pass along on these pages over the past several weeks.
One afternoon, I spied Colin hard at work in the kitchen. He was a little man on a mission – going through the cabinets that we allow him access to (basically the Tupperware cabinet, the plastic utensil drawer and the compartment where we keep our bonesaw) looking for the utensils that would help serve this latest bout of make believe play. First he grabbed a bowl. Then some magnetic... Continue reading »
Big Fat Geek Meddling
Some time last month, my cousin Jason proposed we guest Blog on each other’s sites; he’d drive The Ed Zone and I’d steer the good ship Biggerboat. The trick was in figuring out the right occasion to do so. With April Fools on fast approach, I thought it might be a clever idea to guest on each other’s site by writing an article for the other site and seeing if our readers could tell the difference through the sudden change in voice. Largely, the experiment failed. However, it did make for a nice smoke screen for Plan B – my sudden relocation to Corn Country.
Anyway – in reading through the post I provided Jason – I realized there were some truths embedded that I hold self-evident. To that end, I decided to lift a good chunk and publish it there. Hey – I wrote th... Continue reading »
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