Popcorn by The Colonel #15

Dad’s a Paramedic, Mom’s a Paralegal, 

and I’m a Paranoid Paranormal

■ World’s shortest science-fiction story: “The last man on Earth sat in a room locked from the outside.”

■ Condensing Shakespeare:

“Brevity is wit’s soul.”

“Question: to be or not?”


“Out, brief candle.”

“I’ll catch the king’s conscience in the play.”

“I haven’t slept for ten days -- that would be too long.” (Whoops! Mitch Hedberg)

“Now’s our discontent’s winter.”

“Why are you Romeo?”

“Beware March 15.”

“A crown-wearing head’s uneasy,”

“Let’s first kill all the lawyers.”

■ In theory, everything is related to everything else, which means you can’t really know anything unless you know everything, so nobody really knows anything, which everybody already knew anyway.

■ “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.” --Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut (also attributed to Yogi Berra)

■ "It may be all right in practice, but it will never work in theory." -- Warren Buffett, paraphrasing the academic community’s take on his investment approach

■ The most famous theory of all may be Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Einstein resisted giving easy summaries, but was not above giving teasers like: “Before my theory, people thought that if all matter vanished, there would still be time and space. But my theory says that if all matter vanished, so would time and space.”

■ Einstein also resisted quantum theory, with its reliance on randomness, although he probably never said, “God does not play dice with the universe.” He was a nonbeliever.

■ Another word for “theory” is “model,” but the latter term lacks the air of tentativeness around the former. Try it: “the heliocentric theory” versus “the heliocentric model.” Which sounds more definite?

■ Speaking of models, did you hear about the supermodel who lost power in Superstorm Sandy, and had no food not to eat?

■ Or about the three supermodels who got sick? They ate a bad shrimp.

■ This may be garbled, but supposedly Maya Angelou thinks the world will end on December 21, 2012. If she’s right, green bananas will be cheap after December 14.

■ The Colonel is postponing his political endorsements till after the election because he likes to suck up to winners.

■ The Colonel is not such a tease as to end without answering the lingering question: “What does the ‘L.A.’ in Jan L. A. van de Snepsheut stand for?” The man’s full name was Johannes Lambertus Adriana van de Snepscheut. 

■ If you guessed “Los Angeles,” you were wrong and you have a pedestrian mind, something useless in L.A., a city crisscrossed with freeways like strips of dough on a mince pie.