Can there BE a Politically Incorrect Joke?

I had the bad taste and poor judgment recently to forward to members of my writers' group a couple of jokes I received online from some rather outspoken friends. I thought they (the jokes, not necessarily the friends) were pretty funny. They were OBVIOUSLY intended as humor. I thought "writers" (of all people) would appreciate a joke -- the more outrageous and politically incorrect the better. I certainly wasn't endorsing or advocating the content.

Imagine my surprise when a couple of these literary colleagues put on their Holier-than-Thou hats and took me to task. It seems some of these incredibly articulate and smarter-than-everybody-else wordsmiths have pretty thin skins when it comes to people taking playful jabs at their sacred cows.

Well, I'm a writer, too (and therefore, in my own opinion, smarter than everybody else)(what the hell is a "writer", anyway? Can't everybody do it?), and I intend to keep on sharing my own notions of humor, tasteless as some self-righteous people might find it. That's why there's a "delete" button on the desktop, Your Collective Holinesses.

Of course, we can keep up the dialogue, too, as long as we keep personalities out of it.

Yeah, RIGHT...

A Partially Accomplished Mission

In keeping with my current obsession with submarines, I drove 60 miles from Reading to Philadelphia today, intending to tour the sub USS Becuna (SS-319), parked at Penn's Landing at the foot of Lombard Street. This, as it turned out, was not a very smart idea, because icy conditions had closed the entire seaport complex. So, instead of descending into the cozy, claustrophobic innards of Becuna, I skidded around on the ice and got a sense of how a Russian sailor must feel in Murmansk or Kamchatka in the winter. I can understand why they didn't want civilian tourists cracking their skulls on a January-glazed submarine deck, but still...

...it would have been fun to get aboard. Becuna is a pre-nuclear diesel-electric boat, upgraded after World War II as a GUPPY-class (Greater Underwater Propulsion Power Program) sub. Her WWII operations extended from 23 August 1944 to 27 July 1945. During this period she completed five war patrols in the Western Pacific and is credited with having sunk two Japanese tankers totaling 3,888 tons...

[Thanks, Wikipedia].

Anyway -- slightly crestfallen at not being able to accomplish my mission. I went to Chinatown and satisfied a sudden craving for Kung Pao chicken. This replaced the sting of frustration with the burning sensation of chomping down on whole red chili peppers. I'll get inside that sub some other day, and then I'll REALLY bore you with more than you want to know about submarines.

Here We Go Again

Happy new year to all who visit here! Stay tuned for more stuff, as the spirit moves.

The Morning After the Night Before...

'Twas the morning of Christmas, and up at the Mall,

No shoppers were shopping, no shoppers at all.

The mobs strangely vanished, the traffic at rest,

The sun's in the east, soon 'twill set in the west;

Then the world will proceed its quotidian way,

The serenity of Christmas lasts but one day.

MERRY CHRISTMAS, MY FRIENDS! KEEP THE SPIRIT ALIVE!

Merry Christmas! Happy New Year!

To all our friends out there in the blogosphere, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and ACLU-approved neutral non-sectarian season's greetings! (Of course, if it's so neutral and non-sectarian, one might be excused for wondering why we bother with the season or the greetings.) Anyway, the rough weather and the health challenges seem to have faded into the distance, for now. The only sad thing was the untimely passing-away last week of our friend and talented poet (in both Spanish and English) Awilda Ivette Castro Suarez. She lived in a dark place and hid it so well behind a wide smile and a cheerful persona that it came as a rude shock to learn she would no longer be sharing her gifts with us. We should treasure our loved ones, because we cannot know whether they will be with us tomorrow. None of us is getting out of this alive; we should live, laugh and love whenever we can -- while we can. So, blessings to all of you.

THE AUTUMN FROM HELL

I'VE BEEN neglecting this blog for several weeks, but it hasn't been for lack of excitement. Quite the contrary, in fact. The week of November 7 - 11 I spent mostly flat on my back in the hospital, having been admitted with dizzy spells and extremely low blood pressure. While I was there, they filled me with such a smorgasbord of chemicals that they grew reluctant to release me -- because now my blood pressure was too HIGH. Go figure. Things seem back in balance now, and I feel fine (he said, vigorously knocking on wood).

A week earlier, we had a freak Halloween snowstorm -- a heavy, wet one. Since most of the leaves were still on the trees, limbs came down by the score all over the area. One clipped my car to the tune of some $4,500 in body damage. Here was the scene the morning after...

Falling limbs took out power lines throughout the region; we were lucky to be in the cold and the dark for only four days. Others had no power for a week or more.

A couple of weeks before that was the pokhyelbka incident which I wrote about in the last posting.

Yes, it's been a rough autumn so far. But next week is Thanksgiving, so we'll count our blessings and be grateful for them. Best wishes for a peaceful holiday to all who visit this site.

And then -- Black Friday and all the attendant horrors of the weeks that follow. May we all keep the year-end holiday season in proper (and sane) perspective.

Pokhyelbka

A couple of weeks ago, I started to cook a lovely Russian soup called Pokyelbka on our ancient electric stove. My wife warned me not to do it, but I put the ingredients into a ceramic slow-cooker crock, and everything seemed to be going along beautifully until she tried to move the crock. Yes, the crock broke. Yes, the soup poured out. Dammit. The end result was a shorted-out stove, which was due for replacement anyway. But when the new stove arrived, it appeared that the electrical plug had shorted out, too. So...for the last three weeks, we've been subsisting on take-out food, electric wok food, and microwave food. I don't even know if I can cook any more. Or if I should...