NOT A BOMB

According to Associated Press in ceremonies at Yugoslavia's Academy of Emotion Pictures, the American entry "Wag The Dog" received the coveted Slobby as Best *Non-Fiction* Film last Saturday. The movie tells the story of a U.S. president who has an affair with a young girl in a beret and then creates an artificial war in Albania to cover it up. After a run last summer, it was shown on TV March 26, two days after NATO (which is spelled "HATO" in Cyrillic) began bombing the Serbs, (spelled "PAIN" in Croatian).

"'A Bug's Life.' Wasn't that the Linda Tripp story?"
(Whoopi Goldberg at the 71st Academy Awards)

IT'$ FREE -- FREE!!!

YES, FREE ONE DOLLAR BILLS! Please send $4.95 to cover postage & handling. Limit 1 per order. Void where prohibited by law. Each request must be mailed in a separate envelope. Offer may be withdrawn at any time. Checks take 4-6 weeks to clear, for faster service use money order or send cash by registered mail. Please pass this offer on to your friends! (Tiny Dr Tim)

"The picture I'm quite sure I'm going to do next...
[is] about a gynecologist in Texas that's pussy-whipped.
I'm very high on that"
(Robert Altman in Entertainment Today)

AND THE SILVER AWARD GOES TO...

You -- if your ears are hairier than your head, you feel like the night before, and you haven't been anywhere; you consider coffee one of the most important things in life, sing along with elevator music, and your best friend is dating someone half their age -- without breaking the law. You buy a compass for the dash of your car, constantly talk about the price of gasoline and no longer think of speed limits as a challenge. You would rather go to work than stay home sick...

You answer a question with, "Because I said so!" and you know all the answers -- but nobody asks you the questions. You send money to PBS, you wear black socks with sandals and take a metal detector to the beach. You know what the word "equity" means, get into a heated argument about pension plans and turn out the lights for economic rather than romantic reasons.

You can go bowling -- without drinking. You can't remember the last time you laid on the floor to watch television, but you got cable for the Weather Channel; you talk about "good grass" referring to your lawn. You have a party and the neighbors don't even realize it. You sit in a rocking chair -- and can't get it going. "I'd like to thank... but I can't remember..."

"I'm not losing hair -- I'm gaining face"
(Rev. David J. Walker)

SIX RULES FOR LONGEVITY

1. Do not smoke while sleeping, or in the shower.
   
2. Drink hard liquor only when you are alone, or with somebody.
   
3. Limit yourself to two types of food -- Hot or Cold.
   
4. Never eat more than you can lift.
   
5. Never run after a streetcar or bus when you're on one.
   
6. A daily shot of scotch to ward off meteors has proven to be 100% effective.

"Re: Band Names --
how could you overlook my personal favorite,
'Grandpa Becomes A Fungus'?"
(Diana Waggoner)

A STIFF ONE BEFORE LIGHTS OUT

A man goes to visit his 85-year-old granddad in hospital. "How are you grandpa?" he asks.

"Feeling fine," says the old man.

"What's the food like?"

"Terrific, wonderful menus."

"And the nursing?"

"Just couldn't be better. These young nurses really take care of you."

"What about sleeping? Do you sleep OK?"

"No problem at all. At 10 every night, they bring me a cup of hot chocolate and a Viagra tablet, and that's it. I go out like a light."

The grandson is a little alarmed and goes to the head nurse. "I'm told you're giving an 85-year-old man Viagra with cocoa on a daily basis."

"Oh, yes," replies the nurse. "It works wonderfully well. The chocolate makes him sleep, and the Viagra stops him from rolling out of bed."

"The Melissa virus mutated into the Monica virus --
it only does laptops"

NOTES ON THE BI

Here's a refreshingly frank note I found on a piece of commercial copy:

"We're looking for a stable of tag announcers: two men and two women. We're talking scale performers here. The work will be unspectacular but probably steady as requests from the field come in. So it goes."

At this reading, I chatted with a fellow character actor who told me he had lost several recent TV series guest-starring roles because the producers said he was "Too dead on." They told his agent that when he read, "It sounded like the part had been written for him." So it goes...

[Go to next column to continue reading]

"The words most often used in radio commercials are,
in order of frequency, 'you, good, wonderful, better,
fine, best, effective, and natural,' according to a
University of Wisconsin study"
(Richard Fish)

DON'T BE A TOWEL HEAD

Instructions for using a cloth towel loop in a Universal studio restroom:

1. Pull towel down gently with both hands.
   
2. Wipe hands and face.
   
3. WARNING: Do not attempt to hang from towel, or insert your head into the towel loop.

Failure to follow these simple instructions can be harmful or injurious.

"Could you drive any better if I shoved that cell phone up your ASS?"

THOSE WERE THEE BAD OLDE DAYES

Edward Albee noted recently on NPR that "Back in Elizabethan days, there were three things that people could do for an evening's entertainment after dinner. They could go to an execution, which were sold out pretty quickly. They could go to bear baiting, which then sold out. And if they couldn't get into executions or bear baiting -- then they'd go see 'King Lear.'"

WHO'S AFRAID OF Y2K/ LA LA LA, LA LA...

Anne Hathaway became the wife of William Shakespeare at the age of 26, late for those days, as most married at 11 or 12. She was probably a June bride, since everybody took their yearly bath in May (but just to be safe, brides would carry a bouquet of flowers). The "bath" was in a communal hot tub where the man of the house went first, followed by all the other sons and men, the women, the children, and lastly, the babies. By then the water was so dirty they warned, "Don't throw the baby out with the bath water."

Before her marriage, Anne lived in a 3-bedroom house with a small parlor (for company), a kitchen, and no bathroom. Her parents had their room and Anne slept on a queen-sized bed with 2 sisters and 6 servant girls all laid together crosswise. The other bedroom, sans bed, held her 6 brothers and 30 field workers, wrapped in blankets on the floor. The men were diminutive, about 5'6", women, 4'8", so they had 27 people in the house -- but with no heating, all those bodies kept everybody warm.

The houses were topped with thick straw, and pets and other small critters (like mice, rats and bugs) lived there, and when the weather turned nasty, "it rained cats and dogs." Falling bugs and other droppings were a constant annoyance so beds were built with big posts and a sheet over the top -- our fancy 4-posters with canopies.

The floors were earthen (if you were "dirt poor"), but the wealthy had slate floors, covered with thresh in winter, often becoming so thick that when you opened the door it would spill outside. The solution? A piece of wood at the entry -- a "thresh hold."

DON'T READ THIS BEFORE DINNER

A big kettle hung over the fire in the kitchen into which mostly vegetables were tossed for a nightly stew, so it was not uncommon for food to be there for a month! ("Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old.") If they ever got hold of some pork it'd go onto a rack in the parlor, showing that a guy "could really bring home the bacon." Then you could all sit around and "chew the fat."

Most ate from trenchers -- a piece of wood with the middle scooped out like a bowl, making a great breeding ground for worms and leading to "trench mouth." (If you stayed at an Inn, they usually provided the bed -- but not "the board.") Bread was divided according to status. The workers would get the burnt bottom of the loaf, the family would get the middle, and guests would get the top -- the "upper crust".

If you were well off, you ate off plates of pewter, but sometimes lead would leach out into the food, especially with tomatoes. So they stopped eating tomatoes. (For 400 years.) They also drank from lead vessels, so if someone was really "in their cups" they 'd be "dead drunk" for a couple of days; and it became customary to lay them out on the kitchen table while the family gathered round to eat and drink, hoping they would "wake". People were often buried alive, so a string was tied to their wrist, running up through the ground and attached to a bell. The poor chap who had to sit in the graveyard all night to listen for it was on the "graveyard shift" but that way a "dead ringer" might be "saved by the bell."

"The only difference between a rut and a grave is the depth"

"WO-MEN" IN CHINESE MEANS "US"

A man is driving up a steep mountain road. A woman is driving down the same road. As they pass each other, the woman leans out her window and yells "PIG!" The man immediately leans out his and replies "BITCH!" They each continue on their way, and as the man rounds the next corner he crashes into a pig in the middle of the road and dies. (Shelley Herman)

"Ah, yes, 'Divorce,' from the Latin word meaning to
rip out a man's genitals through his wallet"
(Robin Williams)

WHY DON"T WE DO IT IN THE ROAD?

The Firesign tour continues end of this week with 4 days at the Aladdin in Portland and 4 more at the Bagley-Wright in Seattle. And could it be that Nick Danger will be making an appearance in the second act? Stay tuned...

"After making love I said to my girl, 'Was it good for you too?'
And she said, 'I don't think this was good for anybody'"
(Gary Shandling)

(4/13/99)