A good writing idea is better than sex because it just goes on and on and on and….
Nothing could explain it, but long after the world had ended, Columbia House Music Club letters continued to show up in mailboxes everywhere.
As inspired by: Keith's Tornado
“So there I was chewing my cud when all of a sudden I’m up in the air getting tossed around by the wind— I almost lost all four of my stomachs right on this guy and his kid.”
“Fine,” Henry said, “you were right and there was a bear in the attic, but can we ‘I told you so’ after we’ve found my legs?”
I’m a giant glue ball.
Days where the only worry was over that age old argument: Superman or Batman?
As Henry looked over the divorce curriculum, he noticed that classes were not only held seven days a week, but that the instructor was listed as “quite angry, despondent, jealous, depressed, lonely, brooding and vengeful with bouts of crying”, so thought he’d ask the registrar if he’d at least have holidays off, which only made the woman laugh; “No, seriously,” he said, which only made her laugh harder.
Having never seen a tornado, the boy was naturally curious as to whether there is always a cow twirling around inside of them, which I unequivocally answered, “Yes.”
“Fiction comes in many forms; some of them quite tasty.”
Remember back when we thought it was important that we be able to run long distances without growing tired… weren’t those silly, carefree times?
What sort of schedule picks two days out of the week, only two, and demands to put everything on those two days…my schedule does my friends, and so because of being absent from the house, I have forgotten what my family looks like…..and I am soo tired.
As inspired by: boot's recipe for happiness
‘Mouse’s Best Ever Biscuit Recipe is now up over on the Scwiki.
On that fateful day she resolved firmly to actualize her crypto-anarchist neo-socialist underbelly, and she rode the train without paying.
As inspired by: bakerina and her sumptuous kitchens
Apparently, all that is required to create your own piece of paradise is a handful of winesap apples, some quinces, a number of pink lady apples, a well of water, a farm full of sugar and, oh my, a lot of love, dedication and skill.
“Place your business card in the bowl for your chance to win a free trousers shortening.”
“Son, don’t be an asshole to women.”
As inspired by: grudknows's Yum Yum Yum
After receiving the call from grud that she had the package, and that it was now safely out of the clutches of the wicked Yum Yum Yum sister, Boot performed her own jammin’ version of Snoopy’s happy dance.
Inspired by Snow’s Fortune
It can’t be normal to choose “I wanna be sedated” by the Ramones as the first song played to sound check a new computer.
Be careful, my friend, you have just described my wife.
With Azazel bobbing stiffly in the water, completely at the mercy of the current, and Noah dangling over the side of the arc on the end of a long, thick rope, poking at Azazel whenever he came into reach, the battle, if you can even call it that, was slow and awkward.
I wish someone would give me a pie.
As inspired by: grudknows's Yum Yum Yum
The thought of those buttery, jammy delights sitting in a box in an undisclosed location caused the suffering, zingy woman to utter ineffectual phrases such as “mad enough to have kittens” and “angry enough to spit barbed wire”.
The sounds made by grud’s sister when she discovered a parcel addressed to Boot in the post which she is now holding for a King’s ransom - damn postal services that make you list the contents of the box on the outside!
While you’re no doubt familiar with the saying about a sucker being born every minute, you might be surprised to learn that if there were only one million rats in New York City (probably many, many more), and half of them were female (okay, why not), and each female gave birth to only one baby rat each year (although they are capable of producing approxiametely 285 baby rats per year), New Yorkers might find themselves repeating something like, “There’s a rat born every minute,” which of course they don’t say, because it’s probably something more like 2000 rats being born every minute, and who in there right mind wants to go around saying something like that?
As inspired by: Jo's Peanut-tiny and Rocklike
“Oh, look, it’s back here, behind the cheese sticks.”
As inspired by: Jo's Peanut-tiny and Rocklike
Ooh, I’m sorry; here is your brain - I only borrowed it to help me get through a Gail Godwin book.
“What do you need a new 30GB MP3 player for?” she asked, causing ‘Mouse to bite his tongue until it bled so as not to say anything impolitic about shoes, purses or kitchen gadgets.
As inspired by: Jo's Peanut-tiny and Rocklike
“When the kids are done playing with Jo’s brain, will you bring it outside for me; I’d like to use it to wash the car.”
Sorry I’ve been missing so long; I’ve been looking for my brain.
Sometimes I, wish—punctuation was not; so damn hard.
“Walk the plank, Cap’n Henry, or a fate worse than death awaits you!”
For every adult that avoided the sad sentence, stepping around with averted eyes and thin smile, there was a child, oblivious to the sadness, or perhaps not, poking at it with a stick until it broke and the words spilled out at their feet.
Keith’s stomach grumbled and gurgled at the thought of those delicious breads, pot-roasts, potatoes and that Belgian organic brioche.
It’s been years since I’ve baked bread, mostly because when I want to spend hours in a kitchen it’s to make some scented delight of the curry persuasion, but this time when I read that delicious bread-baking recipe, I found Bakerina in my head.
…I wonder if Dr. Who drank route 44’s from Sonic.
that which people fear for their behinds, I declare that “I like pie”!
A friendly smile is worth roughly one American dollar in today’s economy; some say it used to go much further.
The girl at the drive-through coffee booth will call you honey once you’ve visited at least twice.
What worried Henry was not that he dreamt of smiling people, but that when he woke up, realized he couldn’t trust them.
Some days even Keith was in awe about how fully the strange metallic bird called Scrine was embracing life.
Having said my piece, I will sleep better, even if I am the fool.
Nothing could explain it, but long after the world had ended, Columbia House Music Club letters continued to show up in mailboxes everywhere.
As inspired by: steve's good intentions
I’d like to be able to look you in the eye and tell you that, when I received the world’s saddest lemon meringue pie for my birthday and guessed his true motives in baking it, I took the high road and later gave him the gift of a cookbook or cute little ‘free baking lesson’ coupons, but the fact is, I opted for turnabout instead; I messed up my first oil change so he wouldn’t make me open my car’s hood ever again.
“I suppose if I was more of a finger-pointer I’d be blaming myself for the layoffs,” Henry’s boss told everyone at the meeting, “so let’s just all be happy that that’s not true.”
Take the Sublime Philosphical Crap Test.
“With the breakdown of the Medieval system, the gods of Chaos, Lunacy, and Bad Taste gained ascendancy.”
I need rest.
As inspired by: 'mouse's Breaking News!
“Thauutss auu shauum,” said Steve about the Bay Area meltdown, his mouth stuffed full of pot roast.
AP-Sacramento —Investigators now believe that the thermonuclear-like explosion and subsequent melt-down of the entire Bay Area was not a terrorist act, but was caused when a largely unknown website, Scrine, attempted to monetize itself by adding Google’s “context-sensitive” advertising to the Scrine website and wiki, triggering the immediate, simultaneous spontaneous combustion of all of the famous search company’s server-bots.
Between the blog, the wiki, the forum—the chat! wow!—and a new “random eyes” with every refresh, it’s tougher than ever to surf away from Scrine.
Hah-hah, it’s Friday afternoon, beer o’clock is a matter of hours away and I’ve got the afternoon off work.
I’m sure it’s only a matter time before the Google Coop calls on me to be one of their subject experts, but I’m having trouble deciding which category I should be listed under - “giants” or “bones”.
if you down a 6.8 fluid once bottle of 20 proof, but only mix it with coffee; are you really drunk?
Surprisingly, the Bible says very little about Azazel, Golgotha’s most famous back float champion, who survived the great flood in spite of Noah’s attempts to poke him under with a shepherd’s staff.
Old Mother Hubbard Keith Bubbard
went to the cupboard
to get her poor doggie a bone himself some caffeine,
When she he got there
The cupboard was bare
So the poor little doggie had none
Forcing Keith Bubbard to drive to the nearest coffee shack.
“Damn that Nell Smithers and her bony arms, she will be the undoing of me yet!”
Kathy was her propensity to…
As inspired by: boot's a call for jams
As is the case with nearly all political scandals, which often only come to light following some unlikely or unpredictable event, Australian Prime Minister John Howard was forced from office when it was discovered that he not only knew of Attorney General Philip Ruddock’s participation in the scandalous, Bakerina jam theft, but that he also had prior knowledge that the Attorney General was, in fact, a duck, and had assumed the alias “Philip Ruddock” (undisclosed sources have revealed that prior to 1973, Ruddock was known as Philip “Rude” Duck) so that he might participate in the general election, his unblinking duck eye, at that time, focused intently on serving on the Migration Regulations Committee, which he successful did from June of 1989 through August of 1993; as to why a duck who had risen to such a powerful government position would involve himself in the theft of a few jars of jam, it was Ruddock himself who said it best when he told reporters, “Have you tasted the jam?”
As inspired by: Coyote's in which Kathy considers the true potential of llamas
General Nacho Alpaca didn’t have to hunch like his other men in the scraggly bushes behind enemy lines, the Llama Gods had seen it fit to make him half the size of a normal Llama, this however didn’t stop him from being a proud, tough, patriotic defender for all Llama kind (even if he had to suffer through some inappropriate Alpaca jokes thanks to his parents clever naming at birth), and as the time for attack swiftly descended upon them, he lead his men in a roaring battle cry of “Mwa” and he knew that the Llamas would once again be victorious.
As inspired by: boot's llamas over yonder
She’d never thought much of the garden variety llama, that is until she realized that she could not afford the French Foreign Legion and had to settle for an army of llamas—but the llamas had Kathy at “mwa!”
I think a good ol’ fashioned Ballroom Blitz is what the world needs to end our llama pandemic.
has been lost to the Scwicky monster, it’s as if time ceases to exist…
After the ugly, troll-like creature with bags under its eyes stared woefully at him from the other side of the bathroom mirror for the third day in a row, Juan decided to remove all the mirrors in his house.
1. Whoever came up with the idea that a 10’ x 10’ square of concrete is a reasonably-sized patio to place just outside a home’s back door should be shot.
“Ah, I see”, said Miss Jane as she stepped gingerly over the fifth such body, “what you’re saying is, when you undertake a consultation process, you’re actually just trying to ignore me as hard as possible until I go away” …. “it appears I have dealt with this problem for you.”
I would most certainly understand if the delivery guys stole it, but why-oh-why couldn’t they at least deliver me a little note that says “dear boot, we ate your jam and it was good”.
As inspired by: goliard
“…but she always took her coffee black.”
Remember the towel.
grudknows experiencing a moment of dejection after unsuccessfully being able to burn her personal DVD gave up and visited StumbleUpon where she discovered the ’The Speech Accent Archive‘ and lost much time.
Unbeknownst to their prey, the herd of llamas belly-crawled slowly over the grassy hills, pausing occasionally to adjust the rocket launchers strapped to their backs.
actually, zombies aside, there are some things in life that only large quantities of spontaneous lunchtime sushi can provide.
Don’t tell my Korean female android, but I kind of have my eye on this.
How about that “Big Balls” song by AC/DC, and Janis’s “Mercedes Benz” and oh, I like Devo and can I have some Stevie Nicks and I love Cyndi Lauper’s voice and I want all your Green Day and where’d you get this South Park stuff—don’t put it all on, just the bitch song, they’re cool but get obnoxious if you listen too long—how come there aren’t any really good singers nowadays, just crappy pop stars with boring voices who all sound the same?
Sometimes when I’m out in public I find myself looking around at the people who aren’t saying anything, wondering if any of them have lockjaw.
And getting a new, shiny, flashy Scrine that won’t give us all tetanus because it won’t load correctly on the Internet Explorer browsers on our office computers (hint, hint Keith!).
My eye is twitching that oh-so-annoying slight twitch that only afflicts the corner of my right eye in 15-minute intervals!
There is a so-called island rule in science, which says that evolution drives larger species to become smaller on islands due to a lack of food and other resources, which for me sounds exciting, but unfortunately, brings up one important, yet unanswered question: What about Godzilla?
“Braaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaiiinnnsss…”
Jehova’s Witnesses that visit my house have very loud shoes.
i was exhorted (exhorted, i say!) to let scriners know when this little thing was released and so now i have done so: only half answered but, fortunately, the half i wanted to know, i give you The Word Detective (in which my humble entreaty nestles about half-way down, reading “Three Cheers for Whomever,” which appelation is NOT mine.)
All good liars should write fiction, but the ambitious ones, the truly great liars, they should stick to wikis.
Wiki is fun!
Suddenly, on May 20, 2006, Juan realized that he had lived 39 years on this earth and never once eaten a real marshmallow, and so he set to work with sugar, gelatin, corn syrup and the Kitchenaid mixer and (8 hours of cooling time later) remedied the situation.
Revenue agents have loud knocks, but because they are government employees, will never bother you on weekends or holidays.
stuck in some purgatorial excuse for a bar, sitting on a stool with one leg shorter than the rest, ordering another jack and coke while glancing at her phone to check the time just once more, agreeing to have her fortune read by the reformed drinker sipping his beer in the corner and flashing a deck of tarot cards dramatically: not that she believed in that nonsense, not one bit, but with the moon full and her mind downtrodden she fell prey to his charms and listened as the oldman explained…
If you hold open the back screen door too long around here, a chicken will wander into the house.
The air seemed so thin in the blackness of space, but that was most likely due to the large gapping hole in the ship that I was just sucked out of!
Henry was almost positive that the world had tumbled off of its axis the moment he discovered the new Scrine wiki
As inspired by: The Journey Begins
To think that until just the other night I’d never even been east of the Mississippi River, who would have been able to guess that I would suddenly find myself pulling away from one of the countries most historically rich cities with two nearly complete strangers, my hands gripped tightly to the oversized steering wheel of a used Snap-on delivery van, in search of America’s pot roast?
Now that the Alaska Zoo knows that Maggie the elephant has shunned her jumbo treadmill, I’m hoping they’ll sell it to me cheap, because the way I see it, I should be able to drape all my clothes over it at one time, unlike my old, regular-sized treadmill, which only holds about twenty shirts and a couple pairs of pants.
As inspired by: steve's guest scriner: Dodie Smith
“Ever since they arrived with their cake full of bugs and their spicy sausages, I’ve taken to sleeping downstairs on the pool table.”
Keep in mind that the anthropologist is first and foremost an observer, and that the concept of “discovering truth” has very little to do with anything.
The van pulls out of Boston early with the three of us - me, Steve, and Steve’s wife, who we’d both thought would be staying home, but surprises us with her enthusiasm for the pot roast tour when she quietly slips into the van this morning, slides into one of the back seats and says only, “My bags are on the porch,” which I’ll admit I first thought meant bags of potatoes, but of course ended up meaning her clothes and things, which luckily, ended up wedging between the leftover coolers just fine.
Never leave a boot alone in a room with a lot of beer and buttons that can be pushed.
As inspired by: pam's no spangles
“fuck, fuck, fuckity, fuck” (or, I’m bored and there’s no one here to play with, so it must be time for beer).
As inspired by: things I hate
Friday afternoons sometimes seem like the rest of the world has gone to bed early.
… banana cake, which is followed by…
Boot bent down and carefully picked the rodent shaped, mushy grey lump of thoughts out of the filthy water, then she took it home, hosed it off and placed it on a lofty shelf, nestled amongst the cleansing soaps of purity.
“grbribbbbbrrrkkkrrrrrrrrr” growled the coffee bean grinder, “mmmmmmmmm” purred the boot.
Now that they’ve opened that new Apple store down on Fifth Avenue, which is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, I’ll probably be spending most of my time down there because I’m sure they’ll be needing someone who doesn’t mind sitting in the last seat at the “45-foot Genius Bar”.
In every single culture I’ve ever studied, the one common thread that seems to run throughout them all is this: Stare at a man long enough and he will eventually feel the need to punch in the nose.
“You do have the gift of BSing,” he told me urgently, “The problem is: you’ve got standards, and you really just need to let them go die someplace already.”
I don’t speak any Spanish, but sometimes I use phrases like el perro gigante! just to seem more cultured than I actually am.
“The idea, Keith, is that you and I will travel around the country together eating pot roast, writing about the places we see and the people we meet along the way, as well as any thoughts or insights we might have about the pot roast, which we’ll then publish as a coffee table book.”
Grapple (that’s Grape-L) has got to be the weirdest thing ever; shame I didn’t think of it first.
Once the notion takes hold of you that you may have just met a woman capable of giving birth to potatoes, you have little hope of stopping the whirlwind of unexplainable behaviours you will find yourself engaged in over the course of the next 24 hours, which in my case, meant waking up this morning in Oregon and realizing that I had somehow just bought a house right next door to Steve and his wife…. and their pot roast.
I’ll admit that the headline, Monkeys Use Sentences, Study Suggests, caught my eye, but not without also admitting that the first thing that came to mind was: Oh good, new Scrine members!
Last night I flew out to the east coast to share an excellent pot roast dinner with Steve and his wife (with potatoes, I might add, and by this I naturally mean the dinner, of course, because it would be silly to say that Steve’s wife is “with potatoes”, although now that I’m thinking about it, I bet a woman who could give birth to potatoes would be pretty popular with the men, once word got around).
I have quite a bit of office work to catch up on today, or I’d for sure be down by the tracks, watching the hobo parade.
Inspired by Boot’s One (and the other meme-ish/playful sentence posts) and my own Wonder
I’ll start at 0+a few minutes—all the other years are up to y’all, in order or not, as you wish, from your own memories, what you’ve observed in others, wished, or just made up: 0.01 = Thumbsucking
Peering out from their bedroom door, the children giggled as Santa chastised their parents for bad behavior.
There are few experiences in life that exceed the wonder of being six years old and finding the tooth fairy has come in the night and magically slipped money under your pillow.
The farmer should try to remember that he is not so unlike his urban counterpart, the average working class stiff, considering the fact that both of them often find themselves dealing with someone else’s shit on an almost daily basis.
I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.
I set a twelve-hour pot roast to slow cook this morning, but I should have put in my contact lenses first because now I’m not sure if my fingertips touched those chipotles or not.
Minimalist Jones would hardly ever sleep,
Which isn’t saying he couldn’t;
“Lying down just wastes so much space,
That it feels like maybe I shouldn’t.”
As inspired by: Duck Poem, by Leunig
And your achievement towers like a smoking chimney stack, There’ll be a quack and right there at your feet, A little duck will stand.
how come everybody is so quick and helpful with the directions?
I swore I heard grumbling in here.
Looking at the swollen, amber, cloud-streaked, and unimaginably colossal moon, Desree couldn’t help but wonder why there weren’t more religions devoted to the worship of the moon.
The blue, yellow and white tea-towel fluttered its message in the cold, early morning breeze, though stretched tight against the fence as it was, it snapped occasionally when it met the resistance of the cable ties; whoever this Ania was, I hoped she was okay.
This man walks into a bar on Mother’s Day and finds himself perched on a barstool between an alligator who’s obviously had too much to drink and a born again Christian woman
When walking between work and the bus in an industrial area wearing totally respectable work style heels… prepare yourself for the question, ‘how much?’
In another life I was a real mother; no, not that kind, the other one.
when you live down wind from a turkey processing plant, you’ve just got to burn a lot of incense.
Do you think Coyote will be angry when she wakes up from her refreshing little siesta on my couch to find that she’s sporting a rather fine looking black sharpie Van Dyke?
There was a time, I imagine, when an anthropologist could get away and escape his work, but those languid days, I’m afraid, have long since passed.
Gods turn into angels, angels turn into people, people turn into dirt which the worms burrow through, dreaming of gods, beginning the process all over again.
Asparagam stood, staring off into space, a tear running down his chlorophyll-stained face.
Somewhere along the way my dream life became more believable than my waking life, which doesn’t bother me much as long as I stay asleep.
is posted a job listing for an art teacher at an elementary school just three miles from my house, on this the last day of the in-district transfer period, and i figure that some kind fellow has just bettered herself while simultaneously moving out of my way just as if i’d planned it all.
Last night I dreamed I was fighting a rabid skunk.
Boot glanced guardedly beneath her solicitous Scrine at the befuddling, bemusing and abstruse admixture of alphabetical articluates and was stunned speechless.
D b, e-s 1 b-z b.
“Mom, Abubakar’s sticking scarabs up his nose again!”
I’m sometimes afraid they’ll discover that lying is the thing that is actually destroying the ozone, in which case, we really are screwed.
Funny that in my dictionary the only thing separating promiscuous from Promised Land is a simple little promise.
“Abubakar, stop slouching and walk like an Egyptian.”
“One eye alone would serve me just right,”
Minimalist Jones would say when asked about sight;
“Just one in the middle, right over my nose,
Solving the problem of where my monocle goes.”
In a way, this fact is indicative of all that disappoints me about adulthood: when I eat nothing but desserts for dinner, I really pay for it later.
I suppose the main reason the NRA and the penis enlargement folks don’t team up is because it just doesn’t sound right to say: You can have my small penis when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
I’ve just heard from a reliable source that God will stop answering prayers on June 3, 2009, and the reason, if you really must know, is that this will be the day that he downloads a new ringtone for his cellphone called The Human Condition, and upon hearing it, realizes he has been duped and loses all hope.
By nightfall, almost all of the flies were dead, their corpses scattered like raisins throughout the house.
You could think of me as an average guy, lost somewhere between appropriate and innappropriate; you might also want to imagine me needing a shave.
“How many times did I tell you, Abubakar, ‘Marry a strong girl, someone like Heqet - a strong back, baby-bearing hips that’d turn Ra’s head, and a good, steady job down at the canopic jar plant’ - but no, you couldn’t listen to your poor, old mother, not once, could you?”
I need to stop leaving my supplies of poisoned raw meat in the sock drawer.
“Abubakar, if you’ve locked Okpara in the natron pit again, I will have your father feed you to the jackals when he gets home tonight.”
“My life is completely devoid of drama,” Wendy observed, “just the way I like it.”
“Abubakar, you stop trying to entomb your sister and get in this pyramid this instant!”
The spirals of colour wound up and down Becky’s arms, spurring under, over and through her skin, and as they sparked and clashed, feathers, bells and miniature castles sprouted from her pores.