Saturday, October 8, 2016

Murder at The Thin Grin Cafe -- The Colonel Carries On #52

by Luke Warming


Epigraph: “Between your first word and now you have spoken only nonsense. Repent and die in silence.” --Vluweg Pxbulo


It has been said that a good speaker is a good person speaking. That’s like saying a good basketball player is a good person playing basketball.



Evident sincerity is an asset to a public speaker, but it’s not the sum of the art.


Another attribute of good public speaking is called artlessness or transparency. Good speakers make their points without drawing attention to themselves.


When Cicero spoke, they said, ‘How well he speaks!’ When Demosthenes spoke, they said, ‘Let’s march!’”


Alexander the Stoat


“I warned you about hu-man-i-ty! They have multiplied beyond the Great Law! They have ruined our common home with their toxic meshugaas! They must pay the price! Violent death! Death without mercy! Mass death! Death to every last one of them! Then we shall be FREE again! Are you with me? [Roar] Are you with me? [ROAR] I said are you with me? [ROAR, followed by bestial chant ‘with you, with you, with you’] Good! Then LET’S MARCH!”


Okay, caption contest. Suggest funny captions for the pictures below. Put your entries in the comment section or e-mail me at Col.T.H.Clapping@outlook.com:


                         Left                                       Right
                        
Best wishes for a speedy recovery to troubador Roy Zimmerman, whose best-known song involves the claim that Nancy Pelosi is a thousand-year-old Nazi vampire.




The election will be decided by the votes of the members of one Morris dancing club in one swings suburb in one swing state. They have invited Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump to compete in a Morris dance-off with each other, promising to vote as a bloc for the one adjudged the better dancer by their 93-year-old senior member.


What’s the medical term for unnatural fear of Morris dancers?


When attacked by a pack of clowns, go for the juggler.


The following is a well-formed English sentence that relies on the three meanings of “Buffalo” (city, animal, to bully): “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.” If you can’t work it out, there’s a Wikipedia article on it.


Give me a home where the buffalo roam, and I’ll show you a dirty house.



"I had so much fun that I'm going back again/ I wonder what'll happen with the Space Plan called Number Ten?"


“I don’t get no respect. No respect at all. When I open a fortune cookie, it says, ‘You will hurt your foot.’


“When I get in the elevator, the elevator boy looks me up and down and says, ‘Basement?’”


Refrain of Stan Rogers’s “Northwest Passage”:




Sometimes generics say, “Compare with Tylenol” or “Compare with Claritin.” Why don’t novels do that? “Lord of the Fleas”; “Moby-Mike”; “The Moon Also Rises”; “The Scarlet Number”; “Catch-18”; “The Girl With the Dragon Breath”; “Gone With the Zephyr.” “Same ingredients as the original at a fraction of the price.” Rhett Chauffeur; Nick Poppyseed; Sam Trowel. “Compare Carmethine O’Hennessey with Scarlett O’Hara.”


This is the shirt you want to wear if you’re Goldilocks walking through the forest to visit Grandmother during deer hunting season.


I recently acquired a used wireless keyboard and mouse desktop set (Logitech MK700). The third piece, a USB receiver part number 820-002183, was lost, maybe because it looked like a memory stick. Naturally its manufacture has been discontinued and nor love nor money can find it on eBay or elsewhere. So the whole thing is useless except as a toy for playing make-believe Star Trek.




The captioning contest above is hard; “guess the true caption of the picture below” is easy, because it’s multiple choice, which vies with true/false for easiness.


A “Police use this breed of dog as a lie detector. It snarls and barks when you lie.”


B “Is it a photo or is it a painting? New process makes professional-looking paintings from your favorite photos.”


C “Nova Scotia Duck Tollers are intelligent, alert, high-energy dogs, named for their ability to ‘toll’ waterfowl into gunshot range.”


There’s a movement to abolish cash. The movers want to enable negative interest rates as a method of economic stimulus and to dry up the cash-reliant underground economy. Won’t work.


“I feel as though I’ve died and gone to the United Kingdom.” --Margery Gorrish

Apopemptic twiction: “Hesitantly I opened the biscuit tin. The smiling spider inside said, ‘Hi, Jake,’ and I knew I'd gone through the wrong dimensional door.”