Bring da Funny

Posted on 17 June 2011 by Erik Hare | 15 Comments

Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies.
– E B White.

What makes something funny? It turns out that there are many different Humor Theories and none of them are funny. That may seem like a problem right there, but the irony that you expect it to be funny and it isn’t could be funny if you … Hey! Wait!

OK, so this duck walks into a bar and asks the bartender, “Why is it so often a duck?” and the bartender says, “Look, if you want to analyze stereotypes you could ask why it’s always a bar.” The duck shrugs his wings, sits down, and gets so hammered he doesn’t even remember pecking the priest, the rabbi, and the lawyer to death.

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Unwinnable Games

Posted on 15 June 2011 by Erik Hare | 18 Comments

A slow drippy blah day isn’t a lot of fun, but it’s what greeted my son at the start of Summer Vacation this morning. “Miss school much?” I ask him, knowing the answer. This is the season of constant recess, but more importantly the recess where he can pick which friends to hang with. That makes a big difference.

All during the year he had one complaint when I saw him after school. “They were at it again,” the frustration bubbled out, “We spent most of recess arguing about the rules to Foursquare rather than playing it!” There are some kids in his class who are either wannabe bigshots or control freaks or … it’s a public school, they take everyone. And they can’t even organize a simple game of Foursquare (Boxball to me as a kid) without a huge argument over which silly rules like School Bus, Poison, Hold, and so on apply.

What’s funny about this is that adults are just kids who grew older, sometimes up.

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Waiting for the “Go”

Posted on 13 June 2011 by Erik Hare | 39 Comments

“We wait. We are bored. (He throws up his hand.) No, don’t protest, we are bored to death, there’s no denying it. Good. A diversion comes along and what do we do? We let it go to waste… In an instant all will vanish and we’ll be alone once more, in the midst of nothingness!”
– Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

The economy was, once again, a big story last week as the reality of a weak job market and potential defaults in Europe swept over stocks. It was time to pay attention to things for a while before we move on and crank it up again as if nothing happened. It’s a pattern that has repeated once a quarter since the meltdown of 2008. But why are things stuck – and why does the financial world only seem to care in spurts? The answers are complex, but it seems that one world seems to have everything it needs except for a solid connection to reality. They only have to pay attention to it every once in a while, or so they think.

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The Big Scandal

Posted on 10 June 2011 by Erik Hare | 22 Comments

As nooze stories go, it has all the elements necessary to become an out of control frenzy – sex, a rising star, and the shiny-kewl allure of an internet fad. The scandal involving Rep. Anthony Weiner was bound to be horribly over-played, and it has been. Yet there is so much missing from the breathless hours already reported that it’s worth looking at much deeper.

What we was lost immediately in the frenzy was any sense of humanity and, as could be expected, a complete lack of introspection by those involved in the “reporting”.

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School’s Not Yet Out

Posted on 8 June 2011 by Erik Hare | 13 Comments

For those of us in Minnesota, there is little to talk about today except the extraordinary weather. From 102F yesterday to a predicted 48F tonight, we’re in the middle of a 54F drop in about 35 hours. This is what can happen in the middle of a vast continent.

The heat wave hit people as many different ways as we coped with a small emergency. The strangest effect was to highlight the awkward hot days at the end of the school year, the time when summer beckons to the kids before they can laze their way through the heat of the day. Oppressive heat made the classrooms warmer, recess drippier, and the slow progress of the day a bit heavier.

To me, it made the odd stillness at graduation time more pronounced. My kids are getting older and they are not little anymore. The day they move on is coming closer.

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