The Night Before X-Mess!

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Click on the audio player below to listen to my sister Cyn’s introduction.

Click on the audio player below to listen to an excerpt from The Night Before X-Mess.

A CHERISHED FAMILY TRADITION

My sister Cyn and me with our beloved Grampo

Back on August 9, 1941, my grandfather, Herb Bolsta, copyrighted two original parodies: The Night Before X-Mess and Casey at the Battiest. For many years, he

Shoot Out on Main Street

When my daughter Erin was in fourth grade, she brought this math problem, xeroxed from a textbook, home from Mr. Gustafson’s class:

SHOOT OUT ON MAIN STREET

Fumble Fingers Freddy Farnsworth and Cross-Eyed Carl Crosswhile had been feuding for a year or so. It started over a chance remark Carl made about Freddy’s no-goood dog, Lester. Freddy was sitting near Carl in the Ace High Tavern with his girl friend, Esther. Freddy misunderstood Carl’s comment, partly because Elbows Chopin was making so much noise at the piano and partly because Carl was looking at the dog and Esther at the same time. Matters became worse and finally they declared a showdown.

At high noon Carl and Freddy stood 30 feet apart in the middle of Rocky Gorge’s Main Street. A crowd gathered. Sheriff Dan Outright stood directly between them and counted to three. On the count of three Carl started blazing away. His first shot put a hole in Amos Tinsley’s new hat ($12); the second passed through Mona DeMona’s open window and killed

Anagram-orama!

One day I happened to look up at the ENCINITAS sign on the main street in town and realized that it was an anagram for NICE SAINT. How perfectly appropriate, considering that Encinitas was home to Paramahansa Yogananda for many years.

I’ve long been fascinated by anagrams, which are words or phrases created by transposing or rearranging the letters of another word or phrase.

Click here to generate your own anagrams.

I hope you enjoy my collection of anagrams below!

AWESOME ANAGRAMS

Alec Guiness = Genuine class

Princess Diana = End is a car spin

Clint Eastwood = Old West action

Slobodan Milosevic = O, I’m an evil, cold boss!

Tom Cruise = So I’m cuter

Salman Rushdie = Read, shun Islam

David Letterman = Nerd amid late TV

Dental records = sacred

“Modern Family”—Real People in a Fake House

Aubrey Anderson-Emmons and Jesse Tyler Ferguson

As Entertainment Weekly reports in its October 28,2011 issue, Aubrey Anderson-Emmons, the four-year-old actress hired to as the new Lily on ABC’s Modern Family, has a hard time separating truth from fiction. The following cub quotes from her are pretty much the cutest ever!

“The first thing she said to me and Eric [Stonestreet] when she was on set was ‘Are you real people? Because you live in a fake house,” [co-star Jesse Tyler] Ferguson recalls. “And at the end of that day, she said, ‘I think I saw you guys on Modern Family once.’ So she has no

Dog Teasing 101

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Need a one-minute laugh break? I don’t think I’ve

Steven Hall Gets a Standing O!

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Steven Hall, a fifty-three-year-old telecommunications engineer,

A Wild and Crazy Interview With Steve Martin

I love Steve Martin! Back in the mid-70s, each of his appearances on Saturday Night Live was an Event with a capital E.

In this January 2009 interview on NPR‘s Fresh Air to promote his memoir, Born Standing Up, (which I thoroughly enjoyed), Martin was both inspirational and humorous. This is the core message I took away: When you believe in yourself, you find a way to turn everything into motivation—evan what other people would find hurtful or discouraging, such as parental disdain, audience disconnect and agent criticism.

On a more superficial level, his recorded bits during this interview still make me laugh out loud!

Click on the audio player below to listen to the thirty-seven-minute

Another Fine Mess

THE LAST FOOTAGE OF LAUREL & HARDY

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The incomparable Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy

My sister and I loved watching Laurel and Hardy films when we were growing up. Genius. Pure genius. She just alerted me to this twenty-two seconds of home-movie footage of Stan and Ollie from 1956. Stan was recovering nicely from a stroke at the time and Oliver had lost 150 pounds after having a heart attack. According to one of Stan’s letters, Oliver was also

You Say “Tomato,” I Say “Oops”!

I was a clueless, self-absorbed teenage boy. (Is there any other kind?) While working at Taco John’s one evening, a guy came in and ordered two tacos, no tomatoes. As I was preparing his delicious meal, I started yapping with my co-worker and friend, Juanita. When I wrapped up his tacos and handed them to him, he looked at me disdainfully and said, “I said, ‘No tomatoes.’”

I felt my cheeks flush with a hot rush of embarrassment. I apologized profusely, took his tacos out of the bag, unwrapped them, put

The Yolk’s On Me!

THE SET-UP: When my daughter, Erin, was small, we established a sacred tradition: whenever she wanted a hard-boiled egg, she would crack it open on my forehead. Needless to say, my forehead saw a lot of action in the days following Easter every year. It’s been years since we’ve lived together so I have carried on the tradition myself, thinking of her fondly every time I cracked an egg on my noggin.

THE STORY: On the way to the Portland, Oregon, airport yesterday after a two-week visit in Salem with my college pal, Geri, I took a hard-boiled egg from my baggie of four such eggs, cracked it on my forehead, then

Tom Hanks in “Toddlers and Tiaras”

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As the dad of the best girl ever, I especially enjoyed this Toddlers & Tiaras spoof starring Tom Hanks and his six-year-old “daughter,” Sophie. It aired

Instant Karma

Yesterday, I dialed a phone number (well, I actually cut-and-pasted it into Skype) and was startled to hear Bill’s voice on the other end. I thought I was calling somebody else so it took a few seconds before I regained my equilibrium and told Bill I had called him by mistake. “No problem,” he said cheerfully. I don’t even know Bill very well; he’s my contact for writing newsletter articles for the Minnesota bank he works for. After disconnecting, I realized I had

This Little Penguin Went to Market

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Ho-hum. Just your basic “penguin goes 

Midnight on the Ocean

Snuggling with Grampo in between funny poems, songs and Cryptoquips

Ah, the silly songs of childhood. I fondly recall sitting on my Grampo’s lap and giggling as he recited “Midnight on the Ocean.” It became my favorite and I memorized it as well. As I was putting this post together, I learned that it had been written by Asa Martin and had numerous other verses. But these were the four verses that I learned and loved and I am happy to share them here.

MIDNIGHT ON THE OCEAN

It’s a song the alligators sing
While coming through the rye,
As they serenade the elephants
Up in the trees so high.
The iceman hums this ditty
As he shovels in the coal,
And the monkeys join the chorus
Up around the nothern pole.

It was midnight on the ocean,
Not a streetcar was in sight,
The sun was shining brightly
For it rained all day that night.
‘Twas a summer night in winter
And the rain was snowing fast,
And a barefoot boy with shoes on
Stood a’ sitting in the grass.

While the organ peeled potatoes,
Lard was rendered by the choir.
The sexton wrung the dishrag,
Someone set the church on fire.
“Holy smoke!” the preacher shouted,
In the rain, he

Spicy Italian Proverbs

Dan Scopazzi performs as a stand-up comedian under the name Dan St. Paul

My good friend Dan Scopazzi and I worked on a novelty book project some years back called Spicy Italian Proverbs. Dan, whose parents were born and raised in Italy, speaks Italian fluently. In fact, he dubbed some Italian dialogue in the movie The Godfather: Part III. Dan, a professional (and very talented) comedian who lives in San Francisco, performs under the name Dan St. Paul.

I hope you enjoy Dan’s collection of spicy Italian proverbs. Most of them are followed by

Miss Iowa Goes to Washington

Love this story by Jayson Stark of espn.com. One minute, Katherine Connors is relaxing in a hair salon in Iowa, the next minute she’s throwing out the ceremonial first pitch at a major league baseball game in Washington D.C.!

Katherine Connors, aka Miss Iowa, became somewhat of a celebrity at Nationals Park this past summer, thanks to Nationals pitcher Miguel Batista (photo credit: Rafael Suanes/US Presswire)

It was one of those tales that gave a whole new meaning to the expression “the beauty of baseball.”

It all started with [rookie pitching sensation] Stephen Strasburg feeling “discomfort” while he was warming up for his July 27 start for the Nationals.

Whereupon ever-erudite reliever Miguel Batista was forced to head for the mound instead and found himself getting booed by 40,000 people who hadn’t planned on turning their life savings over to StubHub to see Miguel Batista pitch.

Whereupon Batista, afterward, would utter the words that changed Katherine Connors’ life: “Imagine,” he said, “if you go to see Miss Universe, then you end up having Miss Iowa. You might get those kind of boos.” Uh-ohhh.

So the next day, 1,000 miles from the scene of the quote, Miss Iowa USA, Katherine Connors, was hanging out in a salon, getting her hair done, when the texts started.

“They said, ‘They’re talking about