Monday, September 26, 2016

Life With Harmony the Cat: The Ten Commandments for Humans

I am Dictator of the House,
and you may speak to me
when I deign to notice you.
My name is Harmony and I am a cat.  Now that we have established that, I’ll get to the point.

There is a two-legged, mostly hairless creature who lives in my house.  I call her Big Human.  It has come to my attention that Big Human has often written about me, including here.  It’s only fair to give me equal time.

Typical Human (Female)
Because I do not have fingers or opposable thumbs, I have persuaded Big Human to type this into the Big Flat Thing That Does Funny Stuff.  I did this by staring at her, meowing forcefully and threatening to bite her ankles.  It works every time.

Here are my Ten Commandments for Humans.

1.                   Thou shalt acknowledge The Cat as master and obey The Cat in all things.  If more than one cat shares the domicile, thou shalt obey the Top Cat first, then all the others.

2.                   Thou shalt acknowledge that The Cat is master of the house and owner of all things therein, including porcelain figurines, Christmas nativity statues, hairpins, rubber bands, pens, pencils, Q-tips, jewelry and anything else that is in or about the house, and that The Cat is free to do anything to these items, up to and including hiding them under the furniture and knocking them off the shelves.

3.                   Thou shalt never do anything to annoy thy master The Cat, including poking him in the buttocks or blowing on his ears when he is sleeping in order to make him twitch.

4.                   Thou shalt not ignore thy master’s head butts, nose nudges and leg rubs when it is time to feed her, lest thou suffer a good swatting.

Humans have been known to
throw these at cats when they
don't have a squirt bottle handy.
5.                   Honor thy master at all times, lest she overturn trash cans or do some other mischief to gain thy attention.

6.                   Thou shalt permit thy master to kill bugs, mice, birds and other small prey, thou must not become wrathful when thy master presents thee with dead or half-dead kill, and thou must acknowledge the fine hunting lesson that thy master has just given thee.

7.                   Thou shalt present thy master with choice food of a savory character, served at the right times, with no exceptions.

8.                   Thou shalt provide thy master with attractive scratching posts or pads, or allow thy master to sharpen his claws on the recliner, the sofa or the table legs.

9.                   Thou shalt spay or neuter thy master lest thou be forced to suffer thy master to take part in loud, yowling orgies by the back fence, along with the neighborhood alley cats.

10.               Thou shalt not force thy master to abandon any chair or bed, or any spot where he is taking comfort, lest thy master turn his back on thee and give thee a cold shoulder.

If all humans who live with cats obey the above commandments, you will make us very happy.  A happy cat means a happy household.

Any questions?

Sunday, September 18, 2016

Reading for Writers



Cute Cat Picture.  Cats can't read.
There are two things that budding writers hear all the time: (1) Write what you know;* and (2) You have to do a lot of reading.  To most of us, reading is enjoyable.  There are, however, ways to make reading even more fun than it already is.  Here are some suggestions.

1.    Start a drinking game:  one swallow of beer for every cliché you come across.  It is considered cheating if you are unsure if a phrase or sentence is a cliché or not and you take a swallow, anyway, without looking it up.  You have to raise your glass or the bottle/can of beer and shout, “Shame!” before you take a sip.
 
2.       Make a list of every cliché that causes you to take a sip of beer.  When your list is long enough, write a short story or a novella, incorporating every one of those clichés.  See if you can get it published – under a pseudonym, of course.  You don’t want to be blamed for that one.
 
3.       Put 50 cents into a jar every time you read the latest bestselling novel before you start reading the work of your unknown author friends.  When the jar is full, use the funds to throw a party.
 
4.       Get up and do a victory dance whenever you come across something that you KNOW you could have written better.
 
5.       Count the number of old “New Yorker” magazines on your bookshelves in which you have been reading nothing but “Shouts and Murmurs,” and the cartoons, with the intention of reading the Fiction sections someday.
 
6.       Challenge yourself to read a book that has been turned into a popular movie without automatically picturing the stars of the movie in their respective parts. 
 
7.       Read a book that has been turned into a movie that you have seen, and eat a cookie every time you want to say, “The movie was better” or “That wasn’t in the movie.”
 
8.       Go around talking like one of the characters in a book you are reading and watch the looks that people give you.  Give yourself extra points if people step away from you.
 
9.       Go through all the books in your house.  Classify them into (A) Real Literature - Boring, (B) Real Literature – Fun, (C) Trashy Airplane Reading, and (D) Toss.  Donate the “Toss” books to your local thrift shop or church flea market.  Marvel at how neat your bookcases look and how much space you now have on them.  Buy new books to fill up the space (and maybe some nice knickknacks or real-looking silk plants, or whatever).
 
10.   Make up new lyrics to a familiar song using nothing but the names of famous authors.  Example:  To the tune of “I’m a Little Teapot,” sing “Stephen King Jane Austen Danielle Steele, Shakespeare Dan Brown George Eliot ….”
 
11.   Reward yourself with chocolate every time you are able to sit in a recliner chair and read anything without falling asleep.

If anyone has any other suggestions, please feel free to post them in the Comments section below.
 
Writer Reading
========================

*This is either good advice or a crock of shit, depending on the situation.


For more of my humor, go to Humor Outcasts.

Friday, September 9, 2016

Writing a Perfect Funny Piece if You Are a Slow Writer with ADD


Writers are ALWAYS publishing essays, and even books, about how to write.  I’m not going to do that – well, at least not this time.  I don’t know what I might do tomorrow, let alone a year or two from now.

Instead, I would like to share with you my own personal habits when writing a short piece, such as a humor essay or a short-short story.  I am not about to advise anyone else to do things this way.  You see, I am not what you would call a naturally prolific writer.  I write the same way I read – slowly.  And oh yes, I have a mild case of Attention Deficit Disorder, in addition to genetically inherited long-term low-grade Depression.  These things make trying to do anything complicated even more complicated, if you know what I mean.  So please don’t use me as a literary role model.

This is what usually happens with me when I’m trying to write a short piece, in more or less this order.  By the way, I love to exaggerate when I write humor.  Just saying.

My Ideal Reader
Get a good idea
Decide the idea is stupid.  Try to think of another idea.
Go out for a walk and pay attention to everything around you, hoping something interesting will happen and that it will be something you can write about.
Surf the Internet for ideas.
Give up for now, sit down, put your feet up on an ottoman and close your eyes.
A brilliant idea pops into your head.
Spend the next hour thinking of ways to make that idea really funny, while watching TV at the same time.
The next day, think about it again several times and come up with more funny stuff.
Sit down at the computer.  Start to write.  After a few paragraphs, stop and think up a title.  Try a few titles.  Find one that would attract YOU if you were a reader.  Use it.
Write some more.
Read what you have written.  Yuck!  It’s awful.  So is the title, which you immediately scrap, even though you have saved the piece on your computer under that title.
Do some severe cutting, pasting, adding and editing.  Take a couple of hours to do this, even though the piece is only supposed to be about 500 words long.  Make up a new, much funnier title.
Get tired of doing this.  Save your work and set it aside.
The next day, read it again.  It’s better than it was, but still not the Thurber Prize material you hoped for.
Do some more cutting, pasting, adding and editing.
Read it again.  Decide that’s as good as it’s going to get.
Look in the ever growing stash of stock photos on your portable hard drive.  Choose one that more or less illustrates the masterpiece you have just written, or that at least would be a funny addition.

Post your masterpiece, with the illustration, online.  Post links on Facebook, Twitter and every other place you can think of, and hope you get some readers.  If anyone likes your work, feel flattered.  If it doesn’t get much attention, threaten your computer with a fist, mutter a few words your mother never taught you and eat two double-chocolate muffins.

Wednesday, September 7, 2016

Awful Lessons Taught by Familiar Stories

There are fairy tales, folk tales, books and movies that have become so familiar to us that they are programmed into our nerve endings.  In most cases, we are taught to see positive messages in these stories.  On the other hand, there are multi-layers in these familiar tales, and if we look deeper into them we find some lessons that are best left untaught.  Here is a partial list of these sneaky subliminal messages.

BatmanYou can always recognize an evil person because they are the weirdest looking bunch of psychopaths on the planet.

Beauty and the Beast:  Bestiality will be rewarded.

Cinderella:  Your most important measurement is your shoe size.

Goldilocks and the Three Bears:  If you are a cute little blonde kid, it is okay to wander into a house when the occupants are out, eat their food, mess up their furniture and sleep in their beds, then, when they come home and find you, run away without even offering to clean up after yourself.

Hansel and Gretel (a):  If you get lost in a forest, you won’t freeze or starve or be attacked by a wild animal.  You just have to stay away from evil, cannibal witches.

Hansel and Gretel (b):  If you don’t have any food in the house and your kids are pestering you because they’re hungry, it’s okay to send them out into the woods to pick berries, even if an evil, cannibal witch lives nearby.
... like this one
Jack and the Beanstalk:  Breaking, entering and burglarizing is perfectly okay, as long as the victim is a giant.

Old Yeller:  It’s alright to cry buckets of tears when Old Yeller gets rabies and the kid has to shoot him.  (Yes, this is a GOOD lesson.  I just want to see if you are paying attention.)

Rumpelstiltskin:  It’s okay to get someone to do all your work for you, then stiff him on his wages.

Shrek:  It’s a lot of fun to pick up random animals in the woods and fields and blow them up into helium balloons.

Sleeping Beauty:  It is perfectly alright to sleep for 36,500 days, and no, you won’t die of hunger and thirst in the process.

Snow White:  Necrophilia will be rewarded.

Star Wars (a):  Never try to kill a wicked monster who destroys whole planets because he might turn out to be your long lost father.

Star Wars (b):  A brave, intelligent, resourceful, valiant young woman like Princess Leia is appreciated, but she will never be invited to train as a Jedi because … well … she’s a woman.  She also needs a new hairdresser.

Superman:  Forget what you hear about journalists who go after stories with all the energy they have.  Big metropolitan newspapers hire mild mannered reporters.

The Lord of the Rings:  If you think you are being spied on by a huge, fiery eye, you are.

The Terminator:  A machine that used to be a murdering monster will make a great substitute father if you reprogram his brain.

The Wizard of Oz (a):  You can kill evil, green-skinned people by forcing them to bathe.


The Wizard of Oz (b):  It is worth it to risk your life for a great pair of shoes.

ADVENTURES IN SLOPPY HOUSEKEEPING: DUSTING THE FURNITURE

I don’t know what prehistoric housewives did to keep dust off their furniture if they had any.   If they did anything at all, it must have b...