Coffee Klatch

Always take time to stop and smell the roses and sooner or later, you’ll inhale a bee.

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Each day I try to enjoy something from each of the four food groups: the bonbon group, the salty-snack group, the caffeine group and the “What-ever-the-thing-in-the-tinfoil-in-the-back-of-the-fridge-is”.

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If a motorist cuts you off, just turn the other cheek. Nothing gets the message across like a good mooning.

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Into every life some rain must fall. Usually when your car windows are down.

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Just remember: You gotta break some eggs to make a real mess on the neighbor’s car!

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This morning I woke up to the unmistakable scent of pigs in a blanket. That’s the price you pay for letting the relatives stay over.

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When I’m feeling down, I like to whistle. It makes the neighbor’s dog run to the end of his chain and gag himself.

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A handy telephone tip: Keep a small chalkboard near the phone. That way, when a salesman calls, you can hold the receiver up to it and run your fingernails across it until he hangs up.

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Do not walk behind me, for I may not lead. Do not walk ahead of me, for I may not follow. Do not walk beside me, either. Just leave me alone.

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Follow your dream! Unless it’s the one where you’re at work in your underwear during a fire drill.

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If you don’t like my driving, don’t call anyone. Just take another road. That’s why the highway department made so many of them.

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It’s a small world. So you gotta use your elbows a lot.

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It’s always darkest before the dawn. So if you’re going to steal the neighbor’s newspaper, that’s the time to do it.

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Keep your nose to the grindstone and your shoulder to the wheel. It’s a lot cheaper than plastic surgery.

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This land is your land. This land is my land. So stay on your land.

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When you find yourself getting irritated with someone, try to remember that all men are brothers and just give them a noogie or an Indian burn.

1. Two vultures board an airplane, each carrying two dead raccoons. The stewardess looks at them and says, “I’m sorry, gentlemen, only one carrion allowed per passenger.”

2. Did you hear that NASA recently put a bunch of Holsteins into low earth orbit? They called it the herd shot ’round the world.

3. Two boll weevils grew up in South Carolina. One went to Hollywood and became a famous actor. The other stayed behind in the cotton fields and never amounted to much. The second one, naturally, became known as the lesser of two weevils.

4. Two Eskimos sitting in a kayak were chilly, but when they lit a fire in the craft it sank, proving once again that you can’t have your kayak and heat it, too.

5. A dog walks into a saloon in the Old West hopping on three legs. He slides up to the bar and announces: “I’m looking for the man who shot my paw.”

6. Did you hear about the Buddhist who refused Novocaine during a root canal? He wanted to transcend dental medication.

7. A group of chess enthusiasts checked into a hotel and were standing in the lobby discussing their recent tournament victories. After about an hour, the manager came out of the office and asked them to disperse. “But why?” they asked, as they moved off. “Because,” he said, “I can’t stand chess nuts boasting in an open foyer.”

8. A woman has twins, and gives them up for adoption. One of them goes to a family in Egypt and is named “Amal.” The other goes to a family in Spain; they name him “Juan.” Years later, Juan sends a picture of himself to his birth mother. Upon receiving the picture, she tells her husband that she wishes she also had a picture of Amal. Her husband responds, “They’re twins! If you’ve seen Juan, you’ve seen Amal.”

9. These friars were behind on their belfry payments, so they opened up a small florist shop to raise funds. Since everyone liked to buy flowers from the men of God, a rival florist across town thought the competition was unfair. He asked the good fathers to close down, but they would not. He went back and begged the friars to close. They ignored him. So, the rival florist hired Hugh MacTaggart, the roughest and most vicious thug in town to “persuade” them to close. Hugh beat up the friars and trashed their store, saying he’d be back if they didn’t close up shop. Terrified, they did so, thereby proving that: Hugh, and only Hugh, can prevent florist friars.

10. And finally, there was a man who sent 10 different puns to friends, in the hope that at least one of the puns would make them laugh. Unfortunately, no pun in ten did.

Some people at Ford have put together “The Car Music Project,” through which they’ve made an entire musical ensemble out of the parts for a new Ford Focus. Click the link for more information in a brief article or click the embedded YouTube video to watch and listen. It’s pretty cool as a musical composition as well as an experiment in musical instruments.

So I’m driving to work this morning and listening to the Oldies station, 101.9 FM, and they bring up JFK’s “love child,” a guy who was born two days before the assassination and who apparently looks a ton like him. His name is Jack Worthington and he now lives in Canada. He doesn’t want any money or anything; he just wants to know for sure and is asking for DNA samples from the family so he can be tested.

To keep with the theme, and also for Valentine’s Day, the next song they played was “Love the One You’re With.” I laughed through the whole song! What a song to play on Valentine’s Day during a morning show!

Every language has consonants. Some are voiced and some are unvoiced. That means some use the vocal cords and some don’t. I’ve found some interesting ways in which the similarities have been used.

First, a quick refresher. Unvoiced consonants are those like P, T, and S, which make their sound without use of the vocal cords. Which means even someone who is mute could make the sounds. When you use the voice, they come out like B, D, and Z. You can’t use the ‘B’ sound without using the vocal cords.

J.R.R. Tolkien, who was a linguist first and a writer second, used this concept when developing his dwarvish and elvish systems of writing. Voiced and unvoiced consonants of the same “sound” were similar, but voiced consonants had and extra part or stem added on to the runes or letters, indicating they were voiced. The Cirth alphabet is a prime example.

Here’s a quick chart that compares the two types of consonants:

This semester I’m singing with the Butler University Chorale and one of their warmups is an interesting exercise that uses the consonants this way. To warm up everyone’s articulation, they’ll do a rhythmic pattern like this: F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F, V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V, F-V-F-V-F-V-F-V, V-F-V-F-V-F-V-F, and then move on to the next consonant, given them by the director right as the last set ends. It will usually consist of a mixture of four or five of them. So every time I do that particular warmup, I end up thinking of Tolkien’s Cirth alphabet. Kinda funny.

Remember how, during the opening credits of The Simpsons, Bart is always writing something on the blackboard? Every time you see something different and he’s been writing it repeatedly on the blackboard. There are several websites that list all the things Bart was being forced to write on each episode.

Here are some of my favorites:

I will not waste chalk.
I will not barf unless I’m sick.
I will not expose the ignorance of the faculty.
I will not conduct my own fire drills.
I will return the seeing-eye dog.
I will not call my teacher “Hot Cakes.”
This punishment is not boring and meaningless.
I will not trade pants with others.
A burp is not an answer.
Teacher is not a leper.
I will not pledge allegiance to Bart.
I will not charge admission to the bathroom.
Goldfish don’t bounce.
I will not grease the monkey bars.
No one is interested in my underpants.
I will not torment the emotionally frail.
I am not a dentist.
Nobody likes sunburn slappers.
My homework was not stolen by a one-armed man.
Hamsters cannot fly.
Indian burns are not our cultural heritage.
I will not use abbrev.
I will stop talking about the twelve inch pianist.
I will not mock Mrs. Dumbface.
I am not the reincarnation of Sammy Davis Jr.
Beans are neither fruit nor musical.
Cursive writing does not mean what I think it does.

Here are some tough questions and observations. [I think many of these came from Steven Wright.]
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1. If you take an Oriental person and spin him around several times, does he become disoriented?

2. If people from Poland are called Poles, why aren’t people from Holland called Holes?

3. Why do we say something is out of whack? What’s a whack?

4. Do infants enjoy infancy as much as adults enjoy adultery?

5. If a pig loses its voice, is it disgruntled?

6. If love is blind, why is lingerie so popular?

7. When someone asks you, “A penny for your thoughts”, and you put your two cents in, what happens to the other penny?

8. Why is the man who invests all your money called a broker?

9. Why do croutons come in airtight packages? It’s just stale bread to begin with.

10. When cheese gets its picture taken, what does it say?

11. Why is a person who plays the piano called a pianist but a person who drives a race car not called a racist?

12. Why are a wise man and a wise guy opposites?

13. Why do overlook and oversee mean opposite things?

14. Why isn’t the number 11 pronounced onety-one?

15. “I am” is reportedly the shortest sentence in the English language. Could it be that “I do” is the longest sentence?

16. If lawyers are disbarred and clergymen defrocked, doesn’t it follow that electricians can be delighted, musicians denoted, cowboys deranged, models deposed, tree surgeons debarked, and dry cleaners depressed?

17. If Fed Ex and UPS were to merge, would they call it Fed UP?

18. Do Lipton Tea employees take coffee breaks?

19. What hair color do they put on the driver’s licenses of bald men?

20.I was thinking about how people seem to read the Bible a whole lot more as they get older, then it dawned on me…. They’re cramming for their final exam.

21.I thought about how mothers feed their babies with tiny little spoons and forks so I wondered what do Chinese mothers use? Toothpicks?

22. Why do they put pictures of criminals up in the Post Office? What are we supposed to do, write to them? Why don’t they just put their pictures on the postage stamps so the mailmen could look for them while they delivered the mail?

23. If it’s true that we are here to help others, then what exactly are the others here for?

24. You never really learn to swear until you learn to drive.

25. No one ever says, “It’s only a game,” when their team is winning.

26. Ever wonder what the speed of lightning would be if it didn’t zigzag?

27. Last night I played a blank tape at full blast. The mime next door went nuts.

28. Whatever happened to Preparations A through G?

I rear-ended a car this morning. Right then I knew…
It was going to be a really, really bad day.

When the driver got out of his car, I saw that he was a dwarf. Not just short, but one of the “little people.”

He looked up at me and said, “I am not happy!”

So I said, “Well, which one are you then?”

That’s how the fight started.

The Patriots went down!! Another Manning has a Super Bowl ring and MVP! In one of the biggest upsets in Super Bowl history, the New York Giants overcame the predicted 25-point loss and came through in the clutch to win 17-14. Recap and details are available at NFL.com.

Most people in Indiana like to see the Patriots and Tom Brady lose, and also feel that, if it can’t be Peyton, it might as well be Eli Manning. Congrats to the NY Giants for their win and for taking out the Patriots!

Okay, it’s time for a personal update. I wrote last year about my personal spiritual journey that led to my becoming a Roman Catholic. As my family came along and began Catechism Classes last fall, we ended up questioning some of the dogmas (things you’re really supposed to believe if you’re a Catholic). Part of the questioning and learning process meant dealing with this. We ended up looking into what the Eastern Orthodox Christian Church teaches. I wasn’t willing to look any further than that because I still felt strongly the need for a connection to the ancient apostolic Christian Church.

As I mentioned in my essay (see the link below), I was concerned about discovering the ancient Church that Jesus left us. It was just getting started in Bible times, as the apostles went out to all corners of the globe, following the Great Commission and spreading the news.

Both the Eastern Orthodox and the Western Roman Catholic Churches trace their heritage back to that time and document a succession of leaders from that time to this. Their differences developed over time and were aggravated by a few events in the history of the Church. I’ll blog about those at some point, I’m sure.

Anyway, after doing more reading and talking to people and visiting a local church, we’ve begun down the path of officially entering the Orthodox Christian Church. The one we’ve been attending is part of the Orthodox Church in America, which is an autocephalous church similar to the Russian, Serbian, Romanian, Greek, etc., Orthodox Churches, but is the North American version. These all are not in conflict with each other, but are actually in full communion with each other, making up various parts of the Orthodox Catholic Church, the “One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church” mentioned in the Nicene Creed.

I’ve updated my essay about my spiritual pilgrimage to reflect these recent events. You can find it online (with a printer-friendly PDF version) here: http://coffeeklatch.pfitzinger.net/essay/

I will occasionally try to blog about what I’ve been learning about this ancient form of Christianity, which, while being the second-largest single Christian “communion” in the world, is one of the least known and understood in North America. For now, please give my essay a read (or another read) or visit some of the Orthodox Links I’ve made available in the sidebar.

Thanks.