MediocreMan

I Made Up a Joke · 8 December 2018

Statue of a Rooster Cock at a park in South India
by Adityamadhav83
Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

I can hardly believe it. I made up my own joke the other day!

Okay. Somebody else has probably already made up the joke, but I am claiming here and now that I made it up independently. For if I had merely heard it, I would only be able to remember the set up or the punch line, but not both. Because in my brain, never the twain shall meet. It is just how my brain works, unfortunately.

Sometimes I wonder if God wired my brain a little differently than other people when I was in my mother’s womb. That maybe He said, “This child is going to need a double dose of coordination just so he won’t be a klutz.” And as a result, He wired the speech center of my brain to my hands and feet instead of to my mouth. That would really make sense if could type with my feet, but it still make sense. After all, I can barely speak, but I can communicate by writing. Or at least it seems so. And like I have said before, I cannot tell a joke to save my life.

Which brings me back to my joke.

(By the way, I made sure to NOT look up the joke. I did not want to find out that somebody else had already delivered it and had great or poor success. Probably poor since I am not sure I have much of a sense of humor anyway. Nonetheless, I wanted to think that I have some sort of funny bone. Even if it is pretty simplistic. So if you know who actually wrote the joke in the first place, do not let me know. It is nice to be in fool’s paradise every once in a while.)

Back to the joke.

(By the way, I can envision how the joke would be delivered in real life. Since I can never finish a joke that I only remember the setup of, or I can never start a joke that I only remember the punch line of, I would need to have help. Actually, I can imagine a couple of my friends helping me even though I remember the whole joke. I would start it out and one of my friends would finish the first part. Then, the other of my friends would finish the second part. It would be quite entertaining even though I probably would not have forgotten my own joke.)

But back to the joke.

(It would actually be quite funny if I really had forgotten the whole joke by the time I finished writing this blog post. After all, I am already in several paragraphs and have said nothing about the joke except that I thought of it and can even see the delivery of it. But nothing about the joke so far. In fact, I wonder if I remember it at all. Actually, I do, but it would be ironic if I had forgotten it by now.)

So the joke. (Finally.)

Dog breeds are rather interesting. At least in the naming. After all, when you breed a Labrador retriever with a standard poodle, you get a labradoodle. So if you bred a cockapoo with a poodle, wouldn’t you get a cockadoodle? (Pause for laughter to die down.) And if you had to shampoo it, when you dried said dog, wouldn‘t you have a cockadoodle do?

Okay, it was funnier in my head. And it became even less funny when I read that a cockapoo was already a mix between a cocker spaniel and a poodle. But still, I actually laughed at my own joke. I know that is lame, but still…

Ah well, I can tell by the silence coming from the internet that my foray into joke-making has surely gone awry. But that is okay. As long as I do not keep trying, I will probably keep the few readers I have. And it was nice thinking that I had made up a joke. Still, after writing the joke and researching the foundation of the joke, it is much easier to believe that I merely thought of something that resembles a joke. But I am still claiming that I made up a joke.

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No Knife for You · 1 December 2018

A Collection of Pocketknives by Partyzan XXI
licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

I like to respond to the #SixWordStory prompts given by Writer.ly (and others) on Twitter. They are a fun way to get my writing day started. And sometimes there is a story behind the story.

My dad used to love pocket knives. He gave me many over the years. He also gave some to my siblings and my children. And he taught us how to use them properly.

Don’t cut toward yourself.
Keep your fingers out of the way.
Make sure others are out of harm’s way.

I mostly listened to those dos and don’ts, but I still cut myself. So much so that I got (and still get) teased about it. By just about everybody. So when the “Write a story about finding a knife with blood on it” prompt came from Writer.ly one day, I just wrote something about me.

“Cut your finger? No knives for you.”

Yes, I know. Seven words. Naturally, I apologized for using seven words along with the label of the prompt. #BloodyKnife. I also put the labels #AmWriting and #SixWordStory on the reply to ensure people knew it was a six-word story rather than a comment of what was happening at that moment.

(By the way. I am grateful that nobody on Twitter actually chastises me for going over the six-word limit. I usually stick to the limit, but sometimes I see the #SixWordStory as #SixishWordStory. Six is just a guideline. But that is a different story.)

At any rate. I thought this was going somewhere, but in reality, I just wanted to say that I really do know how to use knives. And I have not cut myself in quite a while even though I use knives almost every day. That statement probably does not bode well for me in the near future, but I will stand by it anyway. Besides, if it does end up being a self-fulfilling prophesy (in a negative, sarcastic way), then I will have another story.

Such is the life of a blogger. Everything is a story. Sometimes, those stories are just six (or maybe seven) words. And sometimes, there are longer stories behind those six-word stories.

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Silly Trophies · 24 November 2018

It might be silly, but everybody likes trophies.

Some people think that getting trophies is a silly thing. Especially, grown men and women vying for a silly trophy in fantasy football. But regardless of how silly it seems, it is fun. Getting your name on the trophy at the end of the season is something to be relished. And in our league, it gets relished for the whole year until the next champion’s name gets etched onto the trophy. It may not seem like much, but it is nice to have those bragging rights with the trophy on your desk or shelf.

As silly as a physical trophy for putting together a statistical football team might seem, getting digital trophies is even sillier. And yet, I look to see who gets those each week.

The three trophies awarded each week in our league are Top Player, Unreal Combinations, and High Scoring Bench. Top Player is awarded to the team that fields the highest scoring player that week. Unreal Combinations is awarded to the team that fields the highest scoring pair of players that week. And High Scoring Bench is dubiously given to the team with the highest scoring player left on the bench. The Bench trophy is a bomb like you might see in the old time comics.

In reality, I did not start looking at the trophies until about mid-season this year. I am not even sure why I looked, but I noticed something interesting when I took that first peek. Somebody had won all three trophies. I was flabbergasted. How could somebody get all three trophies? Then, I looked. My friend had started a high powered quarterback and running back and left another high scoring quarterback on the bench. I was amazed that such a thing could happen.

The even stranger thing was that I won the trifecta a few weeks later. With the same quarterback on the bench. (We had made a trade when I was looking for a backup.)

Truth be told, it is not so bad to win all three trophies when you win the game. But it is quite another thing to “win” the booby prize when you lose the game. Especially, when you would have won the game if you had not won the trophy.

Well, to make a short story a little longer, so far this season, I have won three Bench trophies. In a row. Thankfully, only one was a loss. (And despite what I said above, I may not have won even if my high scoring bench player was not on the bench.)

When all is said and done, we do not give participation trophies in our league. And nobody really cares about the weekly trophies. The only trophy that really matters is the one given at the end of the year. We all want to bask for a year in the glory of our statistical achievements. We all want to be fantasy football champion and hoist the ultimate trophy. Silly, I know. But everybody likes trophies.

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