Patrick McManus: What in the…Outdoors?

Most books of good report tend to be novel length, with a stirring message or theme, deep, three-dimensional characters, and a devilishly exciting or clever plot.  This author has none of that.

“But wait,” you say, “how can a book be enjoyable if it has none of the above in it?” Well, at least that’s what I ask myself every time I see someone reading Twilight. (The mere thought gives me shivers.)  In any case, that’s what’s special about this guy.

Although he does write novel length detective stories, Patrick McManus’s forte is his book-length collections of short stories.  With a sense of humor that borders on the ridiculous (and sometimes obliterates it) McManus’s stories focus on outdoor hunting and fishing, and everything that can go wrong with those two.

In nearly every story, McManus features himself in some degenerating, comical way, spoofing the outdoor’s man in each and every way he can think of! But often the most enjoyable stories are the ones of his childhood as a dirt poor boy in Idaho, hanging out with semi-fictional friend Crazy Eddie and an old, curmudgeonly (if you choose to read these books, you’ll hear that word a lot) mountain man named Rancid Crabtree.  The name says it all.

As far as content goes, McManus seems to fully enjoy hinting at baser desires, (one story with Crazy Eddie and Rancid Crabtree has Rancid attempting to mold a nude woman out of clay, which fails because none of them knows what a nude woman looks like) any actual bad content seems to be missing.

Swear words nearly always appear as dashes, (“You don’t have to use dashes, I know that one,” one character might say to another) and inappropriate humor definitely takes a backseat.  Smoking is prevalent to an extent, as McManus’s stinky old pipe is credited with his success on a few occasions.

Overall, I continually find these books on the top of my must-take-on-road-trip list.  His humor isn’t appreciable by all, but those who get it will laugh out loud more than once.  And most ages who will find him funny will be fully able to handle the slight content there is.

A quick note about those detective stories.  I tried reading one, but not only did it seem to me pushing the bounds of inappropriateness, but it also didn’t seem that funny.  Those I cannot recommend.

But Pity the Geek Who Falls: Part 2

(The following is the second part of a three part treatise on two semi-not-so-secret societies. Read at you own risk.)

In the same way, another comparison that might be drawn between nerds and geeks is the way that girls react to them.  While this might not seem an appropriate criteria, the study of this topic can prove minimally enlightening, making it far more worthwhile to the reader than say, listening to a political speech. 

Believing that nerds and geeks are both separate species altogether, (a belief held by many others within the higher authorities), females have consistently taken to seemingly unfathomable endeavors in order to avoid both of them, although even their methods can’t rid them completely of their presence. (Well, there was this one girl that blew up a nerd’s building complex, but let’s not talk about her.) 

When the occasion arises that a female happens to collide with one of the representatives of either of those kingdoms, her reactions may be foretold if one is aware whether the guy is a nerd or a geeks.  (There has been discussion on whether females are a separate species altogether, but let’s not talk about that either.) 

For example, when a nerd, who is at, say, a barn dance, goes up to a girl and asks her to dance, even if that girl is not known for kindness, there is an exceedingly small chance that she will refuse him, although when a geek tries the same thing, he will be chewed up and spat out. 

Why the difference?  Generally, nerds are known for being nice guys who just don’t fit in, so out of pity, (nothing else, believe me) the girl will accept, but as everyone knows geeks are creepy.  So while the feminine mind views each them with approximately the same amount of disgust, nerds do get the best of it in the end.

But Pity the Geek Who Falls: Part 1

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(The following is the first of a three part treatise on two semi-not-so-secret societies. Read at your own risk!)

For millennia two forces have always existed, shifting the path of history in numerous ways, each of them believing themselves better than their rival.  These forces are: nerds and geeks.  Until almost twenty years ago, nerds were looked down upon in disgust, while geeks were plain creepy. 

But now, with the most recent revelations of the mystical conundrum called human fads, nerds are looked upon with awe, as they dashingly stride down the hall, waving to each person right before they walk into a wall and knock their glasses off, although geeks are still creepy.  The mysteries surrounding these two societies, no, these two races, have never and will never be fully understood, with the complexities of their similarities and differences being too numerous to unfold. 

However, there are certain things, such as the characteristics you can use to tell them apart, the ways girls react to them and the jobs they will have as adults, that are quite useful to know if you ever want to study nerdology or geekematics.  But in the end, in spite of the any differences they might have, they are still eternally entwined and reliant on each other.

Using superb methods of observation and deduction, it has been revealed that it is in fact possible to tell the difference between these two secret societies.  While both nerds and geeks practically always have pale skin (from staying indoors), generally geeks have a much more pastel skin tone from being isolated in a dark basement with only a hi-tech, customized computer, because once in a while nerds have to actually go outside, if only to rent another book from the library. 

Another way of tell them apart is by facial hair and handicap equipment.  Behind every smiling face that glistens with glasses and braces, you can be sure that a nerd lies hidden, while most people who look as if they haven’t shaved for several weeks and who are sporting cybernetic limbs are probably geeks. 

Finally, the ultimate way to tell nerds and geeks apart is by the way that the two different species express themselves. But wait, you say, how can you tell who is who by how they talk? IDIOT! I’m not referencing how they talk! Stop interrupting and let me finish!  Anyway, the final, diabolical way of telling the difference between the realms of nerdiness and geekdom is to go to a convention such as Comic-Con. 

At these places, nerds, who are always dressed up in fanatically fabulous fantasy costumes, do not hesitate in making their presence known, while geeks always wear sci-fi costumes.  All of these methods have been tried and tested and have proven reliable about fifty percent of the time in identifying nerds from geeks, proving that these methods are a valuable commodity out there in the wide world. 

Two Guys on a Porch

Sven Hurtsalot and I were sitting out on his front porch a few days ago.  We were sipping iced root beer, tanning our feet (real men do that, right) and swapping accurate retellings of the good old days.  That is if the good old days had existed in the first place.

“Once I kissed a lizard,” he said after a long lull in the conversation.

“No you didn’t,” I said.

“Yes I did.”

“No you didn’t, that was my grandmother,” I told him.

“Oh.”

It was at that point that the quality of the conversation began to diminish.  As I poured my sparkling sarsaparilla down my guzzle, an odd sensation began to grip the ends of my toes.

“I get the feeling that bare feet outside during the winter is a bad idea,” I remarked after trying to figure out what that sensation was.

“I don’t know what you’re complaining about, the bears seem to love their feet,” Sven responded, one of his toes falling off and rolling down the porch.

I took another gulp.  The wind howled by, even as huge icicles began forming on the edge of our chairs.  Clearly, the Jamaican weatherman had got the forecast wrong.  Or was that forecast for Jamaica?

At that moment, Sven’s phone rang.

“Hello,” he answered.  “Yes.  What?  No…it can’t be.  Your uncle?  His brother?  Her third cousin twice removed?  Where?  I will.  Don’t worry, it’ll only take a little bit.  You’re welcome.  Never call me again.”

“What was that about?” I asked as he hung up, flinging his phone into the yard some 4 feet away for some reason.  I could never understand his stupidity.  Now he would have to go buy a new phone.

“The pizza place just called to say that our pizza delivery guy had an accident on the highway.  He suggested we take a moment of silence.”

“That’s too bad,” I said, musing over the brevity of life.

“I know, I wanted that pizza,” Sven grumbled.

“Should we go inside yet?”

“Nah, the Jamaican weather guy said it’s eighty degrees out here, we’re fine.”

“If you say so,” I said, proving my own stupidity by hanging out with this guy in the first place.

The end.

The Kindly Old Maniac

I hate *cough* being sick, don’t you? So in lieu of illness, enjoy this masterpiece of long ago, an original creation which hopefully will get a few laughs.

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(Curse you stupid numbers that won’t go away! Sorry, technical difficulties. Enjoy!)

Part 1

Throughout the entire city, icy winds were constantly and furiously blowing, making the entire population of Wichita, which included this illustrious private eye, basically miserable.  It was about ten o’clock in the morning and I was sitting in my chair behind my desk, relaxing with a cup of stale, green coffee and last week’s newspaper.

Tentatively, I raised the cup up to my lips, giving the coffee a once over to make sure that there were no living organisms squirming about in it.  With my secretary, you could never tell.  As I was about to gulp down that repulsive fluid, suddenly a knock at my door alerted me to the presence of someone outside of it.  I was about to shout for my secretary to come and open the door, when I remembered that she hadn’t come in today. Or yesterday. Or last month.  In fact she hadn’t been here in quite a long time. 

Musing over where my coffee had actually come from, I calmly strode over to the door in order to save my building from structural damage due to the fanatic’s excessive pounding.  When I graciously opened the door, a wild-eyed maniac, with a fierce look, came bounding through. 

“Are you the owner of this hole in the wall?” he asked, eying my office with disgust.

“No, I only rent it,” I replied nonchalantly, a slight regret that I couldn’t even afford to own a dump like this. 

“Whatever,” he continued, “In any case it doesn’t really matter.  I’m here with a proposal that could help make you filthy rich.”  Instantly, I smiled a bright, warm smile at this kindly old gentleman who had come into my office.  In my most benevolent voice, I held out my cup to him and offered, “Coffee?”

Part 2

Two hours later, I was relaxing in the sitting area at the hospital, waiting for him to finish having his stomach pumped.  Who knew that my coffee would have such an effect on him?  I shuddered at the thought of what might have happened if he had actually drank it.  Finally, my potential client was escorted out of the ER by a couple of doctors creepily dressed in long, white lab coats. 

Coughing as he walked over to me, the man eased himself into one of the stairs that stood by the wall, evidently joking around by pretending to be distressed upon seeing me.  “Well,” I said, “now that we got that out of our way, what was is you were going to offer me?”  He glanced up at me and gave a slight groan. 

After a few minutes he shook his head and mumbled, “I guess you’re all I got.  Nuts.  But anyway, you see there’s this big reward out on this one infamous criminal and I mean to collect, but I need someone with police contacts to help me out so that it’s all legal.  Believe me I would use the police, but as you know, they aren’t allowed to collect the reward.  So how about it? We’d have to go trudging through quite a bit of this mud and muck outside, but it’s a good profit at the end.” 

Throughout his entire presentation, I had assumed a look of eager expectation, but upon hearing that it would involve going outside for periods of time into this weather, and some actual work, I hastily assumed my that’s-interesting-but-not-for-me look. 

Once more, smiling benevolently, I turned to him and replied, “You know, that’s real interesting, but that’s not for me.  But say, if you ever need help getting rid of the cash once you’ve caught this criminal and collected the reward, be sure to look me up.”  I warmly shook his hand and strode out of the hospital, opened the door of my car and drove away.  For some reason, he came running after me for a little while, yelling and waving at me.  Being a nice guy, who was always friendly towards people even if they were a bit eccentric, I smiled and waved back.

Part 3

It was three o’clock in the afternoon on a particularly cold winter day and I was sitting at my desk, breathing in the musty air that permeated the surroundings.  Cautiously, I reclined back in my seat, remembering that I still had to have my chair fixed as soon as I could afford it.  On my desk sat this week’s newspaper, most of it still readable. 

As I picked it up, the headline, which seemed to be quite long, caught my attention.  It read, Hard working citizen catches hard faced criminal, even without help from outside source, collects huge reward.  Rather impressed that they were able to fit so many words into a single headline, I picked it up and started to read about how this one man had sought the help of a lazy, irresponsible private eye and then, after being rejected and staying in the hospital for two weeks because of pneumonia, which he had contracted from running home through the cold weather after having his stomach pumped at a hospital, had gone and heroically collected this criminal all by himself.

On the spur of the moment, I flipped through a couple of pages and came to a picture of the man himself.  Sitting there, looking smug was a picture of the very man who had tried to enlist my help three weeks earlier.  I sat back, digesting this piece of information, wondering how dumb that guy could have been, to walk home from the hospital out in this weather.  He could’ve just used the car that he had left here when I drove him to the…Oh.  That helped explain the screaming and waving. 

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10 Things That Bug Me

It is so very tempting for a blogger to pour out his complaints on the web, hoping that someone somewhere will empathize with him (preferably someone fabulously rich).  However, the point of this blog is not to voice grievances or wile any in worthless humor, but to give serious thought to serious subjects, helping to deepen the intellectual properties of all its readers.  NOT!

Enough chatter!  Some things in life I enjoy, some things I don’t.  Most things fall into the second category.  For a list of prime examples, I present this post for your enjoyment!

1: Small garbage cans

You all know exactly what I mean! Not only do you have to take the trash out sooner (as if the curse wasn’t close enough to us already), it’s practically impossible to make a basket with your trash.

“He shoots, and it’s off the rim!”

“Curse you small garbage cans!”

2: Fat free Ice Cream

It’s ice cream. You can’t take the cream out of ice cream.

3: Cold without snow.

Me: “Hey mom, it’s negative two outside, I’m going to jump off the roof into the snow!”

There was no snow.

Two months later, after finally getting all of my casts off: “I hate cold.”

4: Multicolored hairdos.

Me stopping a middle aged woman on the street: “Lady, I hate to tell you this, but you’ve got a creepy fungus that’s turning the end of your hair purple, and man, is it ugly!”

If you value your life as you know it, don’t say that to anyone. EVER!

5: Cracked open doors

How hard is it to close a door? You would think simple, right? NOT!!

6: Fat people eating greasy cheeseburgers

If you’ve never seen a truly obese person eating a juicy cheeseburger, you might still have a chance at happiness. Otherwise, that horrifying, disgusting,  fascinating image will burn itself into your mind for all eternity!

7: Happy people

Those that think life can be joyful and filled with mirth.  Idiots.

8: Overachievers

Known affectionately in classrooms around the world as “the Nerd”. The ones who make your carefully crafted, hours in preparation, iguana presentation look like frog guts splattered over a dead log, when compared to their eighty foot tall robot lizard, leaving emotional scars that never truly…I’m sorry, *sniff*.  I think I need a moment.

9: Teenagers

I would elaborate, but frankly, it’s not worth it.

Let’s face it. It’s pretty obvious by now that what bugs me more than anything else is…

10: PIZZA WITH VEGGIES ON IT!

IT’S A PIZZA! STOP TRYING TO MAKE THE MOST BEAUTIFUL THING IN THE WORLD HEALTHY! CAN’T YOU LET ME DIE OF CARDIAC ARREST IN PEACE!!!!

There.  Now you have seen past my brutish exterior and deep down into my soul.  Laugh at me if you may, scorn my deepest fears if you will, but at least remember that I was once like you.  Then I saw a happy, fat teenager eating a juicy veggie pizza while presenting an eighty foot tall lizard robot.  Welcome to my life.

College Students Are Stupid!

Let me just say that on the whole, college students in America must have collectively the lowest IQ possible in a living organism (and that includes ducks!) Now I’m not talking about Ivy League schools, but those cheap community colleges that accept you if you have a heartbeat, however faint, and a stench. For example, read some of these questions I have heard college students actually ask. And I kid you not…these really happened.

1: When was the war of 1812 fought?

2: The Mona Lisa was filmed in Vegas, right?

3: Did World War II happen before or after World War I?

4: Is Papa New Guinea on the right or left of Sweden?

5: It’s hard to believe that the Pilgrims lived without Facebook, but at least they had Twitter.

6: (With a dead serious face) “Hey guys! Two plus two equals four, right? But two times two also equals four! How is this possible?”

7: “In my history class they brought in a guy who said he was a veteran, but when I asked him how many animals he had saved, he just gave me a strange look. Some veteran.”

In addition to those intelligent sentences that now have you rubbing out your eyes, check out these Q&A’s that I’ve either seen or heard.

Question: Who freed the slaves?

College Student’s Answer: What slaves?

Question: Give the definition of ignorance.

CSA: If you tell me what it means, I could give you the definition.

Question: If today is the 26th of January, yesterday was?

CSA: Boring.

Question: What is the capital of the France.

CSA #1: The letter “F”.

CSA #2: Either Denmark or Louisiana.

Question: If a man on an airplane is traveling at 167 kph due south  from Chicago, and a woman is driving a speedboat up the Mississippi river at 80 mph, as well as a turtle on the freeway in Dallas doing six feet per hour, while at the same time children in Africa are starving, what color is the sky going to be?

CSA: …puppies! 🙂

Remember, these people breed…and vote!

The Adventures of Bob Dooshbagh, Private Eye

Ep. 1: Trouble in Marigold

It was about three o’clock in the afternoon on that fateful day of my career as a private eye.  I was sitting in my office in Wichita, having no case to work on at the moment, breathing in the musty air that permeated the surroundings and listening to the static of the radio and the sound of my secretary filing her nails.  I stood up and walked over to where the brown pot full of black coffee was standing.

After I poured myself a cup of the strong, stale stuff, which had a faintly green look about it, I raised it up to my mouth, feeling a burning sensation as the heat of the coffee and the occasional chunk of coffee beans tore down my throat.  Someone needed to teach my secretary how to make coffee.  It wouldn’t be so bad if she had other accomplishments, but as with many other ninety year olds, her skills were limited.

I was just running around to yell at my secretary when… Trouble came through the door.  Her eyes were like marigolds.  Perfume wafted up from her dress, as she stalked gracefully over to me and asked a me, in an melodious voice, a question that I will always remember…”This isn’t the ladies restroom, is it?”

Dazzled by the shimmer of her hair and the sparkle of her eyes, I thought about rejoining with a witty comment about chocolate frogs.  With this in mind, I calmly shook my head and jauntily mumbled, “Uhhhhnu”.  She appeared a bit startled at this ravenous display of eloquence, but she pulled herself together and graciously walked out the door and out of my life.  Still somewhat dazed, I sat down and took a sip of that wondrous coffee.  It’s always amazing what can happen in a period of about two minutes in the life of a private eye.

The Ancient, Mystical and POWERFUL Secrets of Writing Humor

BOOM!! Flash, BANG! ZIIIIIPPPPPPPP! Now that I fully have your attention, I will proceed in revealing the key secrets of writing a piece that is focused mainly on humor.  Be warned though! Failure to follow the steps outlined in this paper could result in the reader’s going to law school and becoming an attorney.

Believe it or not, writing a humorous essay is very similar to writing, say, an essay on how to study wildlife. (Really, how boring is that, I mean just go out your front door, there’s wildlife everywhere, people! But I digress.) Like any other essay, the most important things in writing a humorous essay, are the creative process, actually putting it down on paper and editing.

Step 1: The Creative Process (The most relax-I mean, strenuous part)

Beginning as soon as your teacher hands you your assignment, the creative process is vital to the creation of a good essay. While a few jokes are in order, which you should use to spice up you’re story, the heart and soul of an essay is its theme.  The first part in constructing a workable theme is getting a large, comfortable easy chair.  Essentially, this relaxes your mind enough to focus on one thing at a time, so that you don’t have to resort to studying wildlife as a topic because you’re to busy to think of anything else.

Before you sit down,  go into you’re kitchen and grab as many cookies as you can find, the more peanut butter in them, the better for your cognitive process.  As soon as you have all of these items, go relax in your easy chair and do absolutely nothing for the next couple of hours.  This period of rest will sharpen your sense of humor, so that you will be able to focus in on and hone your theme to perfection.

To properly perform the task of creating a good theme, it will take several days of following the procedure above, which is of course set up for optimal performance, in order to work out all of the kinks, although in the sorry case that you have to work a moral into your theme, it could take quite a bit longer.

Step 2: Write it down (Otherwise, you’ll forget it!)

After you have worked out a proper theme, it is time to put that theme on paper.  At this time it is only a few days till you turn in your assignment, having spent several days in the lounge chair and you discover that you haven’t really worked out anything else besides the theme, due to falling asleep.  (Believe me, when my tummy’s full of cookies, I would do the same.)

But this is alright, after all, some of the best writing is done through improvisation, which works best when the mind is in a scramble.  Incidentally, the best way to improvise something for your paper is to stea-, I mean, borrow ideas from other’s work. Not that I condone plagiarism, that hideous bane of writers.  Find a way to borrow legally. (If someone is uncomfortable with, ahem, borrowing from other people, then they will not succeed in following the prescribed outline and when they apply for law school, they will likewise fail there.)

Once you have a working, borrowed idea, the next step is to elegantly dress it up with an exquisite makeover, involving numerous, fancy, unnecessary and tiresome words, just to make it look original.  Also, make sure to write any and all good, bad and ugly jokes that come to mind, so that you have them available to use.  The key component to remember if you are having a hard time with jokes, is one word…booger. 

Merely substitute a word in the title of a movie of song with “booger”, such as I’m Dreaming of a White Booger or Revenge of the Booger.  (Be sure to use alternate versions of the same phrases, such as Booger of the Sith.  It makes it much more flavorful.)  Repeat this entire process for the entirety of your paper, until it is just long enough.

Step 3: Editing (Thin jokes, fat jokes, ‘Yo mama’ jokes galore)

Finally, you have completed the exhausting processes of creating and putting it all down on paper. Thanks to modern inventions, the process of editing is incredibly simpler than it use to be, which makes me wonder how anyone back then ever did any editing at all.

In the time frame of a few seconds, you can annihilate all of your bad, ugly and unnecessary jokes with ease, although if you’re like me, all of your jokes are extraordinarily bad, ugly and unnecessary, in which case you would have to figure out a different way of eliminating excess gags. (After all, it’s your paper, figure something out for yourself for a change!)

This is also the time to make sure all of your punctuation is correct. (Imagine’ *how dumb it would@look for a pa’p’er have a l?ot of ran**dom marks on ev/en a s{e}ntence.  People can be so dumb.)

Each of these steps are essential to creating a humorous piece of work, or in this case, art. Although as before mentioned, failure to complete even one of the steps could be potentially fatal, the worst one to possibly mess up on would be the creative process, because of its tailor-made ability to hone your mind to accomplish one task.  And no, that task is not getting lazy and fat, although these side effects tend to happen.  But one must make sacrifices if one is to explore the possibilities of how to humor.