Recently in Humor Category

In my blog slacking, I never got a chance to blog about the Internet video that, well, broke the Internet, so to speak. Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is the brain-child of Joss Whedon, who is the creator of such popular sci-fi geeky TV shows as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly. I was never much of a Buffy or Angel fan, but I did dig Firefly (and the movie it spawned, Serenity), which died an altogether premature death.

Joss Whedon came up with the idea during the Hollywood writers’ strike. He wondered whether one could distribute viable video entertainment, essentially bypassing the Hollywood studio machine. Split into three acts, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog features Neil Patrick Harris as Dr. Horrible, a wannabe super villain who dreams of being accepted into the Evil League of Evil and eventually taking over the world, efforts he chronicles in his video blog. His nemesis is Captain Hammer, played by Nathan Fillion, whom Firefly fans will recognize as Captain Mal Reynolds. They also vie for the attention of Penny, played by Felicia Day, who will be a familiar face for Buffy fans.

The three acts add up to just under 45 minutes. It’s basically a musical/comic book superhero parody. And though I’m anything but a fan of musicals, I enjoyed this a great deal.

You can buy all three acts for $3.99 from iTunes. Or, for a limited time, you can see it for free at the Dr. Horrible web site. Or just watch it here:

This, of course, is one of the “seven words[*] you can’t say on TV, made famous by one of my favorite comedians, George Carlin, who, sadly, died yesterday (the list is now over 2,400).

Carlin was one of the first “grown-up” stand-up comic acts I remember seeing as a kid in middle school, and I was hooked from there. I was quickly hooked on his unique brand of irreverent, dark humor. I’ve always been a stand-up comedy junkie, and there never has been, or will be, another one like George Carlin.

*The original list, of course, being: “shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits.” No such rules on this blog, it seems.

I have always liked cats because when I was a wee young lad, my grandparents had a cat, Charlie, who was pretty much my constant companion when I’d visit. Later, after I became a lawyer, it seemed to me that a rather disproportionate number of lawyers had cats—I have two, and I know several other lawyers who have at least one. But apparently, engineers also have an affinity for cats, as demonstrated by this helpful video:

When I was a kid, I used to love to read Garfield cartoons. As I grew older, I might stumble across the occasional Garfield strip in the newspaper, and they still managed to get a smile out of me, but they tend to be rather formulaic. Garfield eats a bunch of food and annoys Jon. Garfield torments Odie and annoys Jon. Garfield lays around being lazy and annoys Jon. Guess I was easier to amuse as a kid.

Until now. Some comedic genius discovered that you can completely change the meaning of Garfield cartoons by, well, removing Garfield. Here’s an example:

That’s right — by removing Garfield from Garfield comic strips, you’re left with a portrait of Jon Arbuckle as a lonely, bitter, depressed, and even schizophrenic man. This piece of internet comedy gold is known as “Garfield Minus Garfield.”

Now that I’ve seen this, I’ll seek out the Garfield strips in the newspaper, and mentally remove Garfield from them. I’m sure it’s not what Jim Davis intended, but often the result is quite hilarious.

Yesterday, I flew up to Marquette, Michigan, to argue a post-trial motion in a medical malpractice case. Our firm’s appellate department is often called upon to handle appeals after medical malpractice trials, and we often start that off with the post-trial motions.

Despite living in Michigan my whole life, I haven’t been to the Upper Peninsula too much, and certainly not as far north as Marquette, which, by my reckoning, lies maybe five minutes south of the Arctic Circle. It’s farther away from Detroit than places like Chicago or Buffalo, so I took one of those tiny propeller planes. Amy helped me out by becoming convinced that I was going to crash to a fiery death because “those little planes crash all the time.” As if Northern Michigan is littered with commuter planes that went down before making it to Marquette.

With that uplifting reassurance, I set out for the airport at an ungodly early hour, and caught my flight to Marquette, which managed to arrive without crashing into the wilderness. Instead, it landed at the “International Airport” for Marquette, which is, well, kind of in the middle of the wilderness.

Marquette is really a very nice place, except it was very cold and there was snow everywhere. Given how far north it is, though, I almost felt like I should be watching out for polar bears everywhere I went:

ME: Your Honor, in response to plaintiffs’ assertion that …

POLAR BEAR: ROAR!!!

ME: AAAAARRRRGGGHHH!!! Oh my God, it’s EATING MY SPLEEN!!!

PLAINTIFFS’ COUNSEL: Objection, Your Honor — counsel is bleeding on my files.

Fortunately, nothing like that happened. As for my hearing, it went about as expected. What was really quite cool about the hearing, though, was the courthouse. If you’ve ever seen the movie Anatomy of a Murder, the courtroom in that movie is the one I appeared in yesterday. It is a historic site, and really quite stunning. It looks like something, well, out of a movie. (As an aside, the movie is based on a novel by John Voelker, a former Michigan Supreme Court justice from the Upper Peninsula.)

After my hearing, I made my way back through the wilderness to the airport, where I again boarded what is, in Amy’s mind, a flying death trap for the flight home. It was quite the contrast to flying out of Detroit, which has about three gazillion gates and planes flying in and out all the time. When they print on your Detroit boarding pass to check at the airport to see whether your gate has changed, they mean it (and my flight out of Detroit indeed did change gates). The gate change is also likely to require you to go to a new gate in a different ZIP code. They print the same thing on your Marquette boarding pass, but there’s only two gates there: Gate 1 and Gate 2. They’re right next to each other. Which means gate changes aren’t really a big deal. Also in contrast to Detroit, when we left, we were the only plane leaving. In fact, we may have been the only plane at the airport. No long trip to the runway. And no waiting around for anything (other than, maybe, making sure there were no polar bears on the runway). That was very nice compared to our landing at the Detroit airport, where we ended up taxiing down the runway for what seemed like three hours before getting to the gate.

Jokes about wilderness and polar bears (which don’t really live that far south — I hope) aside, I rather enjoyed my day trip to the U.P. It’s really quite a nice place, somewhere I’d like to visit again. Maybe in July when there’s a little less snow.

This picture pretty much confirms every joke I've ever made about the Ohio State University Buckeyes, who recently blew their second straight shot at the BCS National Football Championship, and who also can't, apparently, manage to spell the name of their own state correctly:

(Courtesy of my old Michigan Review chums Ben Kepple (blog post) and Lee Bockhorn (photo).)

So it seems that some guy in Poland discovered his wife was working part-time in a brothel. How did he find out, you ask? Well, it seems he was there as, uh, a customer. He spotted her during one of his visits, and was shocked to find her among the "employees," because she told him she was working part-time "at a store."

It also seems that the couple is getting divorce. Now, it seems to me that neither participant in that marriage has any right to get mad at one another. Sure it's horrible for a guy to step out on his wife behind her back to patronize prostitutes, and sure it's terrible if your wife goes out behind your back and becomes a prostitute, but if you're both doing those things at the same time, shouldn't it cancel each other out? Like in football -- when a team commits a penalty, it gets sent back a few yards as a penalty. But when both teams commit penalties on the same play, the penalties "offset," and it's like neither team committed any penalty.

Well, they say time flies when you're having fun. Apparently, it also flies when you're not having all that much fun because you've been working so much that even your bosses lament the fact that you've been working too much (mind you, they're not saying you shouldn't keep working too much, just lamenting that in a perfect world you wouldn't have to, which wouldn't be much consolation except for the fact that they seem to have it worse than you do. But I digress).

So, anyway, it's been months since I've written much of anything here. I would have guessed it'd be easier to keep this up, because I've always enjoyed, and been somewhat skilled at, writing. In fact, it's pretty much the majority of what I do -- writing thousands and thousands of words on behalf of our clients. It ought not be too hard to come home and write a few more, but for some reason, it is. I guess it's like the guy who owns an ice cream shop, and then wants anything but ice cream at home, or like the gynecologist who comes home and wants nothing to do -- well, you get the idea.

In the past, I've popped up and vowed to post more often. And you all (all two of you who read this) know how well that turned out. So I won't do that again. But I'm hoping that posting this will help get me back into the groove of posting more in the future. And I'm also hoping to post some more humorous writing, and maybe a few of you will actually enjoy it. And even if federal Ninth Circuit Chief Judge Alex Kosinski thinks that blogging is a “hateful,” “grandiloquent” waste of time, well, hey, it's cheaper than therapy.

The folks at Blame Society Productions have released episode 4 of their very funny Chad Vader series, which you may recall from my previous posts here and here:

The guys who make "Chad Vader" announced that Episode 4 will premiere on National TV:

I originally posted about this very funny Star Wars spoof here. If you haven't seen it yet, go, quickly, and check it out, and make sure you go see all three episodes. Now. Hurry. Then tune into Good Morning America on Wednesday October 11 to see Episode 4.

So what might happen if Darth Vader had a much less successful brother who was the day shift manager at a grocery store? Find out in this outrageously funny video from the folks at Blame Society Productions:

And check out the other episodes here at YouTube.

(Via Ben Kepple's Daily Rant)

Wonder no longer. Fellow TopFive List contributor, Reid Kerr, has this "Sliding Scale of Celebrity Coolness" to help us all figure it out. The scale assigns point values to celebrity conduct, such as couch-jumping and Scientology-touting, to name just a few:

• Give birth in Namibia: -1 pt
• Give birth in Narnia: +2 pts

  * * *

• Be in a Ron Howard movie: +2 pts
• Be in a Clint Howard movie: -2 pts

  * * *

• Publicly state your Scientologist beliefs: -2 pt
• Jump up and down on Oprah's couch: -3 pts
• Pretend to conceive a child to squelch gay rumors: -4 pts

Well, you get the idea. It's certainly more entertaining that watching "Entertainment Tonight."

By now, everyone has heard that scientists have found that hops, a primary component of beer, contain xanthohumol, a chemical that inhibits a protein in prostate cells that leads to prostate cancer. "The trouble is," the article explains, "you'd theoretically have to drink about 17 beers a day for any potential benefit." 17 beers a day and you fight prostate cancer? Sounds like a no-lose scenario to me! The article goes on to say that Dr. Richard N. Atkins, CEO of the National Prostate Cancer Coalition, "noted that drinking 17 beers a day can lead to alcoholism and cirrhosis of the liver."

Well, no problem, Doc, because another study has found that drinking coffee can counteract alcohol's negative effects on the liver. One cup a day, the study suggests, lowers the risk of cirrhosis by twenty percent, and four cups of coffee lowers the risk by eighty percent.

So all you need to do is chase those seventeen beers with four cups of coffee. And, apparently, according to Dr. Atkins (not THE Dr. Atkins, of course), if you throw in four large pizzas a day, you get enough lycopene from the tomatoes to help further reduce the prostate cancer risk.

So four large pizzas, seventeen beers, and four cups of coffee per day. The sound you just heard is the head of my friend Heather, the vegan cardiologist, exploding.

Seriously, though, if she were blogging here, Heather would point out that consuming four cups of coffee, four large pizzas, and seventeen beers a day would definitely reduce prostate cancer risks, because you'd likely die of a heart attack long before any prostate cancer had a chance to take hold. And, dammit, she'd be right. So I guess I'm stuck drinking beer and eating pizza rarely and in moderation. Plus, I don't even like coffee. On the plus side, I can console myself with studies that show that men who ejaculate more frequently also have lower risk of prostate cancer. That's a "treatment regimen" I think I can follow.

Reid Kerr, a fellow Top Five List contributor, has noted that these beer, pizza, and coffee findings are clearly the work of lazy, gluttonous men. Reid has a list of several humorous "other scientific advances compiled by guy scientists," such as "Having sex with overweight men reduces the risk of breast cancer by 87%," and "Weekly intake of BBQ increases SAT scores." I'd also add, "Sitting on your ass watching football lowers stress." And really, it does in my case. Unless I'm watching the Lions.

It seems that a rather effective way of treating colitis (an inflammation/infection of the colon) caused by Clostridium difficile is to [WARNING TO THE SQUEAMISH -- STOP READING NOW!] transplant stool from a healthy patient to one afflicted with C. difficile colitis:

In a surprise twist, three doctors from Duluth, Minnesota decided to use poop to help cure their patients. Doctors Johannes Aas, Charles E. Gessert, and Johan S. Bakken used a stool transplant to cure reoccurring Clostridium difficile Colitis in 16 of their patients. You read correctly. Sick patients received stool from stool donors and became healthy because of the stool transplants.

I can only imagine how this changes interactions between donor and recipient:

RECIPIENT: "I am so tired of taking shit from you!"
DONOR: "Yeah, well you didn't seem to have a problem with it when it SAVED YOUR ASS!!"

Yeah, maybe it's better for science that I left the study of science in favor of the law.

(Via MNspeak.com via Erica)

Actual footage from Godzilla movies plus rap tune "Woo-Ha!" by Busta Rhymes = Sheer Comedy Genius.

(Created by Warm Milk Comics)