The eternal struggle between the good and evil sides of our souls seems so complex.
But no, it isn’t. Our decision making process is actually quite simple as the two emus show.
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
The world is harsh and terrifying. Sometimes it seems that the forces of evil will soon overwhelm us entirely. But no! All is not lost. We have tacos. Lots and lots of wonderful tacos. Tacos are tasty. Tacos are good. You need to see three tacos to boost your morale and resolve. Let the tacos’ counteroffensive against evil begin. Excelsior!
Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
Evil incarnate
Two days, I assembled tax forms. I entered some data as well. All was right with the world. Indeed, the bluebirds sang.
Not so much yesterday. The bluebirds fell to cussing as evil stalked the land.
In the form of a printer. My previous printer, which was as a goodly a printer that could be expected. It would read both sides of a two-sided document. Then it would scan or copy the forms, depending on the chore. The bluebirds sang.
But it died. The bluebirds cried. I supposedly bought the replacement model. It cost a bit more.
Little did I know that Satan had breathed a bit of his evil spirit into the new printer. It didn’t scan both sides of a page! That’s so important to me. And what the heck, how can a replacement model, a more expensive model, cost more and not do as much.
The evil onslaught continued. It took me 8.5 hours to get the printer to do any sort of scanning at all. Apparently, Hewlett Packard had not seen fit to provide 8, eight!, necessary updates. So, now I can scan, but I have to do manual steps and this takes much longer. We are living in perilous times, gentle readers. Watch your printer. Just don’t show fear. They can sense fear. When they do, they’ll ruin your print job and steal your soul. Take care.
Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
People who design printers are the most vile, evil people on this planet. If I had a dollar for every time my printer jammed or I reset my printing preferences and did not have them stick, I would be able to buy, Amazon(tm), Google ™, and Microsoft(tm) and still have money left over to buy all the gold in the world. May they rot in Hell for all eternity. And while in Hell they’d have to . . .
1) Eat nothing but lutefisk
2) Listen to an endless loop of the Barney the Dinosaur(tm) song.
3) Get paper cuts that never heal.
4*) Have the instructions for cooking something be in a foreign language.
5) Sit next to a cholicky baby that smokes and needs a diaper change.
6) Wait in line at the DMV. When they get to the end of the line, the DMV closes for the day. They come back the next day to repeat the process.
7) Gather documents and all information for taxes and assemble that information in a useful way. Every day.
8) Bite into a chocolate-chip cookies to find it really has raisins in it.
9) Ask vegans why they are vegan. If they aren’t vegan, ask them why not.
10) Wake up hungover after drinking nothing but milk the previous day.
11) Type a term paper on a keyboard that’s missing the “e” key. Retype term paper until you get it right.
12) Pet a porcupine the wrong way.
13) Talk to a conspiracy theorist about anything while in line at the DMV.
14) Wait all to attend the grand opening of the latest Star Wars(tm) movie and find out you’re actually really going to a seminar on theoretical economics.
15) Get the eternal sniffles.
16) Lose your place completely in a 171,326 page book.
17) Have someone tell you won that championship game you recorded.
18) Have chapped lips but must smile over and over again.
19) Go shopping, but every aisle is blocked by someone’s shopping cart.
20) Pilot the Ever Given(tm) super tanker through the Suez Canal.
21) Do a crossword puzzle that requires a working knowledge of Sanskrit.
22) To live in a house strewn with Lego(tm) pieces and you have no shoes.
23) Drink curdled milk.
24) Drive behind someone who goes 30 miles under the speed limit.
25) Eat meat served just the way you don’t like it.
There, I feel better now.
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
Oh my gosh. It’s Friday. So, I shall once more be dispensing bad advice As usual, the advice will stupendously bad. You know it will be so as I had overwritten the file with my previous answers and to re-answer. I mean how can you trust advice from a person who does that?
JBL asks: Will this be on the test?
Dear JBL: Yes, it will. Unfortunately, you don’t know what test. I strongly urge you to go to every school you can and take every test. If you don’t answer the question, you will get a zero for it. Indeed if you miss the test completely, you’ll fail the test and fail the course, and get kicked out of your university. And you paid a lot of money getting into that university. You won’t graduate. There will go your dream of becoming an astronaut and of being the first person on Mars. Oh, and here’s foolproof way of acing every test. Simply tattoo every fact and theorem you’ve run across onto your body. Now it’s quite possible, that the tattooed answer will be under your clothes. In this case, you’ll have to strip. If the teacher complains, say you’re allergic to clothes. If the answer is on your butt, ask the student behind you (See what I did there?) to read the answer. Ask nicely; manners are always in fashion.
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MA asks: Can yard bunnies do multiplication problems?
Dear MA: Oh yes. But they’re shy. They just don’t talk to anyone. You have to gain their trust. You have to get down to their level. This means crawling up to them and feeding them pellets. Rabbits are terrified if they talk to people as they fear by doing will stop the supply of pellets. So talk to them in a soothing voice. Tell them that you will provide gourmet pellets if they solve multiplication problems for you. This is known in economics as incentivizing the bunny.
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RAS asks: How do I teach my dog Trotsky to play chess?
Dear RAS: You must learn to speak dog. This is not as hard as it might seem given the smallness of the canine vocabulary when compared to English. Conjugating verbs verb in Dog is much easier than in Dog than in English and, my gosh, much easier than in French. To illustrate, for “Am Hungry.”
French:
J’ai faim.
Tu as faim.
Il a faim.
Nous avons faim.
Vous avez faim.
Ils ont faim.
English:
I am hungry.
You are hungry.
It is hungry.
We are hungry.
They are hungry.
Note there are six different conjugations in French: ai, as, a, avons, avez, and ont. English is easier with only three different conjugations: am, are, and is. However, Dog conjugation for “am hungry” has an elegant simplicity to it.
Dog:
Woof!
There are no cases for you (familiar or polite), for we, it, or they. That makes learning the dog vocabulary easy. Indeed the word, “woof,” is the words for literally dozens of nouns and verbs. Dog convey meaning by intoning their “woof” differently for each instance. You will need to practice your canine intonations and indeed, inflections as well. Get practicing.
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LF asks: Why can’t pigs fly?
Dear LF: They can! They can! You just need a big enough catapult. Try getting your catapult at CostcoTM; they carry everything. Get your catapult while you can. As of press time, there’s no government regulation about flinging pigs great distances in your neighborhood, but how long can that last given the government has seen fit to regulate commercial aviation.
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BRW asked: I point a red laser light at the neigbhor’s blinds when they are gone. The cats destroy the blinds chasing the red dot. Am I evil? (Taken from a meme.)
Dear BRW: Only if your neighbors are annoying. And if they’re annoying to you, they’re likely to be annoying to others on your street as well. In this case, wait until your irritating neighbors leave their house with lit candles. Point the laser beam at the candle. The cats will attack the red dot on the candle. The candle will fall to the ground. The rug will catch fire. The house will burn down. The neighbors will leave. (Gosh, neighbors is a hard word to spell. Another reason to see them go.) It’s much better to be proactive like this then to let your resentment against them fester into something serious. That benefits no one.
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LHH asks: Over the top, or under the weather: which is best for a Hump day? And are there differences by season?
Dear LHH: If you want to be over the top for weather, you need to go to the North Pole. But with global warming, you can’t guarantee solid ice for your lawn chair. On the other hand, you could be the first person to surf the pole. In contrast, you’ll under the weather at the South Pole. While the South is over a mile thick layer of ice, it is under the Earth. There is nothing underneath you. Nothing! You’ll fall. You see because of gravity, everything falls down. At the South Pole, there is no more down. The scientists at this pole meet this existential threat by constructing buildings. The ceilings on these upside down buildings prevent the people there from falling off the planet. The fear, however, persists as in this line from an angst-filled song, “Put our hands in the air like the ceiling can’t hold us.” Some polar scientists hew to a more devil-may care philosophy as evidenced by the line, “dancing on the ceiling.” If you must go outside when at the South Pole, you must, must wear boots with VelcroTM soles and stay on the Velcro paths. Otherwise, you fall off the Earth. This is true for Hump day, the other days of the week, and for the two seasons of day and night. The Laws of Physics never sleep.
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LF states: A question for Bad Advice Friday? I can’t think. (This is from memory. I overwrote the file where I answered this.)
Dear LF: Thinking is overrated. Millions of people in a few select professions never think, politicians and human billiard balls (A surprisingly popular sport) come to mind. But if you’re really having trouble thinking and would like to start again, I have two suggestions. First, join the French Foreign Legion. You’ll have plenty of undisturbed time to conjure up a thought as you’re marching under the hot Saharan Sun. However, as people join the Legion to forget, you’ll immediately forget what idea you created. But you will have started thinking again and that’s the main thing. Second, commit a crime, a crime so horrible that you will be spending years in solitary confinement. The serene, tranquil, undisturbed aura of your own is enormously conducive to thought. Try it and see!
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
Lutefisk is an abomination that proves Evil still stalks the land. It offends and destroys all the senses.
Sight: It looks like boogers or broiled phlegm.
Smell: It reeks like a rat decomposing under the cellar furnace.
Touch: It has the lovely consistency of a corpse’s innards that have finally exploded in the hot summer Sun, but you’re a dectective and have to search through the body with your glove-covered hands to find the bullet that the killer used to commit this cowardly murder.
Taste: Oh gosh, you’ll want to set your razor to its highest level and shave off your taste buds off your tongue just to prevent tasting the next bite.
Sound: After eating lutefisk, just the mere mention of it will set off PTSS.
It’s been a half century since I had lutefisk. Not enough time has elapsed.
I give up lutefisk every year for Lent. I have a will of iron. I have never even been tempted to backslide.
If you ever are invited to a dinner when lutefisk is served, my I suggest that you join the French Foreign Legion and politely send your regrets from some combat zone.
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
The stability of the entire world is threatened by an emerging superpower, Papua New Guinea.
Hah, you say. Where is Papua New Guinea? North of Australia. What does it produce? Rain, mud, and documentaries about newly discovered stone-age tribes within its borders.
What could such a country do? Buy a lot of SPAM or … conquer the Pacific Ocean.
How? I’m glad you asked. Everyone knows the best mud for beauty care comes from Papua New Guinea, or PNG. The demand for this mud in American and European spas grows fantastically every year. Soon, PNG will be awash with the world’s money. PNG can then allocate its new billions to buy used aircraft carriers, fighter planes, bombers, tanks, and landing craft listed irresponsibly on eBay.
This is where the nightmare starts PNG has a population of 4,600,000. (I counted them twice.) Even if it puts just 10% of its people in the military, it will have a striking force of 460,000. Who has the population, the might to stop them? Not neighboring Nauru with its tiny population of 11,000 and maybe soldiers.
Emboldened by this easy conquest, Tuvalu, Palau, Marshall Islands, Kiribati, and Tonga, with their combined population of 260,000 will fall like leaves in a Wisconsin autumn. This disaster will have worldwide ramifications. Does anyone doubt the Palauan contingent keeping the peace in South Ruritania will remain under such dire circumstances? No, they will go home to fight a war of liberation. The whole idea of UN peace-keeping forces will unravel. Minor skirmishes will become full fledged regional wars. So it goes.
Soon, Micronesia and Vanuatu will topple. I don’t know much about them so let’s move onto the Solomon Islands and Fiji–biggish but still smaller than PNG. We cannot let these two nations fall. We cannot let PNG monopolize the best snorkeling sites in the world. Have you snorkeled at Key Largo? Well, let me tell you, the snorkeling at Fiji is much better. And by the way, conquest of these countries would enable PNG to block all airborne and seaborne trade across the Pacific. The snorkeling industry and the world economy would collapse.
What can Americans do? Simple. Cut off the funds for PNG’s drive for conquest. Whenever getting a mud treatment at your local spa, be sure to ask for good ol’ American mud. It’s good for your face. It’s good for world peace.
– Correspondent Paul
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
Evil People
Did Hitler start a global war
And form death-armies
Because he had to augur a toilet
One too many times?
Did Stalin starve millions,
Kill millions, imprison millions
Because someone ahead of him
in the ten-items-or-fewer line had eleven?
Did Pol Pot exterminate
one Cambodian in six
Because his laptop froze
That thousandth time?
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
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