Posts Tagged ‘Humor’

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Wage War on Christmas – A Warped Holiday Story

Friday, December 25th, 2009

(In keeping with a holiday tradition started last year, I will post our Christmas video here.  This year, I add to the tradition by writing a warped holiday story to go with it.)

Legal Notice: This story, video and all the contents therein are purely for entertainment purposes. We are in no way affiliated with the actual Christmas, actual war, punditry, the extreme left, the extreme right, the extreme middle or any other group with any agenda other than humor. Joseph Coaler Productions did not set out to offend anyone, but sometimes, feelings get hurt. We hope it’s not yours, but if it is, we take absolutely no personal responsibility for your level of outrage.

All rights reserved.

Several years ago, little Joe Coaler started noticing a trend that he thought was interesting. People in stores began saying “Happy Holidays” starting around December 1st and going through January 1st. (Some stalwarts started saying it in late November and continued until mid-January, but little Joe thought this was a bit extreme.)

Along with the greeting came bright lights, exciting and wonderful music with moving harmonies and extravagant instrumentation. There were brightly bedecked trees that smelled of lovely pine forests, large golden Menorahs with their nine flames, choirs in festive outfits, sculptures and dioramas in different sizes of an open stable filled with amazed animals and a small child in a straw bed, and everywhere he looked he saw the same large bearded man dressed in bright red. Snow, both real, plastic and flocked, lay everywhere.

Every movie, play, television show and radio program seemed to be either about the transformation of a fellow named Ebenezer Scrooge or a large green beasty called Grinch.

And shopping. Everyone was shopping. Money was being spent in amounts that boggled his little mind. He liked his mind being boggled, it felt all tingly, so he thought that this must be a good thing. The economy could always use the influx. The moving around of wealth from one to another. It made his tiny heart glow with pride in his fellow man.

But a darkness was lurking. People started talking about a war on Christmas. First in small whispers, then with louder and more strident voices. It frightened little Joe, but he could not see who was waging this war. He looked and looked, but there was no war against the season. No war against Christmas. No war against Hanukkah. No war against Kwanzaa, which had been born to Dr. Maulena Karenga in 1966. The season seemed completely unaffected by any kind of war against it. With a little study and research, he found that the warning had been being raised almost yearly since the late 1880s, but there had never been an actual war on Christmas. Little Joe was a good capitalist and realized, where there is such a need, there is a product, so he decided to take matters into his own hands.

The War On Christmas is being waged by Joseph Coaler Productions.

Joseph Coaler Productions is the brainchild of Steve Mancini and Geoff Hoff. It’s a problem child, of course.

Geoff and Steve have written the highly-touted, critically-acclaimed, laugh-out-loud-funny, satirical-serial novel, Weeping Willow and they’re currently writing the knee-slapping-hilarious, widely-popular, sure-to-be-a-legend, online-series, Poor Paul. They’re also exceptionally humble and despise hyphen abuse.

Happy Holidays to all and to all a good nightcap!

(Video first posted on http://www.WageWarOnChristmas.com in December, 2008.)

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Posted in Nonesense, Observation, Opinion, Short Story | No Comments »

Mayonnaise

Thursday, October 1st, 2009

Best Foods MayonnaiseI once bonded with a complete stranger I met at a party over mayonnaise. We were friends for years after that. She also made this odd faux sweet potato dish with boiled, mashed carrots, but that’s not the important issue, here. What’s important is that we bonded over our mutual, excessive and probably psychologically worrisome love for mayonnaise.

Now, a few definitions are in order. Miracle Whip is not mayonnaise. It couldn’t even dream of being mayonnaise in its darkest fever dreams. It is a sweet goo that people who must be excused because they don’t know any better, mistake for mayonnaise. Mayonnaise is not sweet. Also, besides something hand made like the nectar of the gods served at Cassilles Hamburgers on sixth street in downtown Los Angeles, unless the mayonnaise is Best Foods (oddly called Hellman’s east of the Rockies) Real Mayonnaise, it isn’t the best.

I realize my mayonnaise addiction isn’t rational. (What addiction is? To paraphrase Kenneth Halliwell in Prick Up Your Ears, the whole point of an addiction is to not make sense.) Roommates have been known to hide the household stash from me. In stronger days, I’ve rationed it by buying the very small, much more expensive jars. I’ve even gone great periods of time without mayonnaise, but then someone will bring a jar to a picnic or pot luck and I’m off.

I can make a salad out of anything. Ever thought of corn salad? Frozen sweet corn (thawed, of course), garlic, a touch of onion, salt, pepper and mayonnaise. Sometimes, for pep, I squeeze a very small spot of yellow mustard into it. Pea salad? Same concept, no mustard, but you can add basil, parsley and a touch of sage and thyme to that. (Just a touch, you don’t want to actually tasted the sage and thyme, it’s there for a hint not a flavor.)

I’ve put mayonnaise in mashed potatoes. I’ve put it on mashed banana sandwiches. I learned this treat from my Grandpa Hoff, who also, sometimes, added peanut butter to the mix. Also, sandwiches made from dill pickles sliced lengthwise and cheddar cheese with thinly sliced white onions and a healthy dollop of mayonnaise. Trust me on this one. I’ve converted many people to it. Not so many to the whole banana peanut butter thing. Most people simply aren’t that adventurous, culinarily speaking.

My mother used to make this warm German potato salad. She was very proud of it. No, she wasn’t German. I think it was a leftover part of the pact between Hitler and Italy before the fall of Mussolini. I hated it. First, it was warm. Second, it had no mayonnaise in it, which, as far as I’m concerned, is the main reason for the existence of potato salad. Sort of like popcorn’s only positive attribute is as a vehicle to bring butter into the system, but that’s a subject for another post. Potato salad should contain potatoes for substance, chopped celery for crunch, chopped dill pickles or olives for salt and pep, and mayonnaise. (I also like to add some spices like salt, pepper, garlic and onion, but I’m Italian, and that sort of goes without saying. I said it anyway. I’m verbose that way.)

Due to several varied health issues, I’ve given up cheese (very difficult), bread (relatively difficult), chicken skin (I usually say a small benediction over it before tossing it down the garbage disposal) and several other delectable edibles, but not mayonnaise. Perhaps some day I’ll need to. It will be a very sad day. I may have to recover with several days a-bed, wearing black pajamas and listening to Joni Mitchell and early Simon and Garfunkel albums. Until that day, I’ll continue to try to ration myself, but won’t feel too very guilty when I notice another jar has mysteriously been emptied.

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Posted in My Life, Nonesense | 25 Comments »

It’s Not Funny! -or- Serious as a Heart Attack

Saturday, July 25th, 2009

Okay, so I had a heart attack in January.  Don’t worry, my health is improving.  I was treated in a local hospital where, as I had just recently given up my insurance as a cost cutting measure (timing is everything) they made sure I was going to live, put me on a ton of medication and sent me home.  Okay, not entirely fair, I was there for five days and they did get my heart back to a normal speed (down from 177 beats per minute) and take care of the congestive heart failure (swollen ankles and lungs full of liquid.  Fun.)  They didn’t give me much information, though.  One thing they didn’t tell me, for instance, is that, when you have a heart attack, your penis disappears.  Really.  It’s not funny.

Roger Has an AttackAfter getting discharged, I got myself enrolled at County.  Thank God for County.  The bureaucracy is hell, it takes forever to get anything done, plan on spending hours on hold waiting for the appointment lady (you have to do it by phone, not in person, because she doesn’t really exist in actual time and space) but every single person I’ve encountered in the vast system is truly wonderful, caring and committed to the patients.  They actually give me information, explain to me what’s going on, what will go on, why we’re doing what we’re doing and take the time to giggle politely at my sophomoric humor.  Still no mention of the penis thing, of course, but after six months of consuming no salt or fat I’ve lost over sixty pounds and the thing seems to have come back with a vengeance, so no harm no foul, to use a phrase coined by our friends the basketball players.

I’m still on the ton of medication as I’m still in A-Fib (heart out of rhythm.  The pesky thing won’t use its whole top half, it seems.)  I’m having three procedures in the next two months, two to determine how damaged the heart is and how well it will start to heal once it’s out of A-Fib, and the third to get it out of A-Fib.  That is the one where they drug me up, shock my heart so it stops, shock it again so it starts back up in the correct rhythm, then send me on my way.  I’m both looking forward to that (it will mean I can stop a lot of the medication, especially the blood thinners, which react with everything I eat and give me hemorrhoids) and am really, really, really not looking forward to it.  (They are going to stop my heart!)

It sounds more extreme than it is.  It’s an outpatient procedure, believe it or not.  The only prerequisite is that I have someone drive me to the hospital and wait around for however long it takes to stop and start a heart, then drive me home again so I can curl up in my own bed and sleep off all the nifty narcotics they’ll give me so I don’t freak out while they’re actually electrocuting me.  I’m serious.

I must be getting to that age.  A friend of mine called to tell me he’d had heart surgery the week before, a surprise to him that he needed it until they rushed him to the hospital.  We talked on the phone and sounded like two old men on a park bench.  A lot of my conversations, now, are about my health.  When I hear myself, I want to start talking in a faux Yiddish accent.  “Pain?  You don’t know from pain.  I got pain you vouldn’t believe all the way up and down my nichtacocusoid…”  Maybe I should write a blog about it.

I recently visited my brother, his wife and their kids in Washington, DC and the kids thought it was hysterical that I made the “old man” noise every time I sat down or stood up.  I started not doing it, just to throw them off, and they’d giggle about that, too, the savages.  This is all odd, as I still think of myself as in my twenties.  Well, maybe thirties.  Wait a minute, it’s time for my medication.  Ohiee.

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

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Posted in Essay, My Life | 10 Comments »

Inspiration

Saturday, May 16th, 2009

I was moved today, studying art born of the marriage of pain and intelligence.  I was moved and inspired.

But don’t worry, I took a nap and it went away.

_______________________________
Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

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Posted in My Life, Nonesense | 3 Comments »

Usury?

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009

Once upon a time there were usury laws, which limited the amount of interest an institution (or Vinnie from down the block) could charge on a loan. South Dakota decided a good way to attract some business to their state was to do away with such inconvenient laws. Vinnie moved to South Dakota and set up business. Credit card interest rates went from a high of 10 and 12% to a high of 30 and 40%. Birds sang and small forest animals romped in the South Dakota Chambers of Commerce. Ranting bloggers mixed their metaphors.

I just received a very elegant looking letter in the mail, “You’re Pre-Qualified for an unsecured personal loan of $500 to $3,000!” from the good folks at Brookwood Loans (a MetaBank company.) Wow. Cool. In looking over their offer, I notice several wonderful benefits, very well presented in their well written sales letter: Approval in 24 hours; Money the same day; Manageable payments; No Prepayment penalty and Fixed simple interest rate. And they make it very, very simple, log on, enter the code from the bottom of the letter, fill out your information and submit your request. “It’s just that easy!” they say in bold text. That is easy, I can hardly wait to get my money.

Then I read the exciting news under the “Fixed Simple Interest Rate” section: “Your rate of interest will not change. Loans have an APR of 96%.” 

Wait, what?

96%?

I actually had to read it three times before it registered as anything besides a misprint or a joke.  96%?  Are they insane? And they list this in bold as if it were a good thing for their customers. (Emphasis not added.)  And they actually have higher rates for approval applicants that choose their manual loan funding process, whatever that may be.

Vinnie must be visibly palpitating with orgiastic glee while doing the Snoopy dance all over South Dakota.

That means if you borrow $1,000 on a 36 month loan, by the time it’s done you will have paid back $3072.24. As the song goes, nice work if you can get it. Where is that carpenter who tumbled the building all over the money changers when you really need him?

I hope no poor, desperate fool falls for this scam, although I know there are all too many out there who will never realize they now owe their soul to the company store, which is run by Vinnie in his $5,000 dollar Armani suit and diamond encrusted pinky ring. The address listed for the bank is a P.O. box. I’m not surprised, they’re obviously too smart to want anyone actually knowing where their offices are.

I hope Brookwood and MetaBank fall into a pit somewhere and dissolve into useful molecular components such as nitrogen that can be used to replenish our ravished farmlands or do some other actual good on the planet. I hope Vinnie realizes loansharking will only end in tears and enters the clergy where the only harm he can do is to small children.

So, no thank you, Brookwood, I decline your kind offer of a loan. I’m good.

Hmmm.  Maybe I should move to South Dakota.

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

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Posted in Essay, Observation, Opinion | 1 Comment »

The Future of “Texting”

Thursday, March 12th, 2009

I see a great future for the technology now called “Texting”. Fairly soon, I predict that someone will invent a voice activated texting mode, so you can simply talk, and it will transcribe what you’ve said. After that will come the inevitable “Direct Texting” where your words, rather than being transcribed and sent to the receiver, will be sent as a recording to a “Voice Mail Box”, and the receiver will actually hear your message.

In the far distant future, I expect someone will invent a way for the text message to become an actual spoken conversation between two people in real time. I would call this innovation “two-way voice interaction”. Although the technology needed for this revolution does not yet exist, never underestimate the cleverness of mobile phone company R&D departments.

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Posted in Essay, Nonesense | 4 Comments »

The War on Christmas

Saturday, December 20th, 2008

Every year, I get more and more annoyed at the tendency for people at all points on the political spectrum to manufacture issues about which they can become angry (and about which they can rile their “base” into a frenzied pitch.)  It must be part of the human condition (or at least the Western psyche, I’m not versed enough in the Eastern mind to know if it percolates there, also) to need to be outraged.

There is one manufactured issue that crops up every year, (and has, I find from my study, for over a century, with some variance in particulars) and that is the supposed “War on Christmas.”  In the last several years, this banner has been hoisted mostly by a television commentator and pundit by the name of Bill O’Reilly, who is offended, OFFENDED, by the fact that some folks have decided to be more inclusive in their holiday greeting and say “Happy Holidays” instead of the more traditional “Merry Christmas.”

There is so much wrong with this stance that it’s difficult to know where to begin.  At a store, the time of year is, by definition, a buying season, not a religious one.  The more people you include in your greeting, ipso facto, the more people available who will shop.  Also, most of the Christmas iconography (Crèches aside) are pagan, or at the very least secular, not Christian.  It can be argued (and has, often, by many Christian scholars) that The Christ was actually born in the spring and that the day of Christmas was chosen to mollify locals in Northern Europe in the Great Conversion.

Okay.  Enough logic and seriousness.  Even I am susceptible to the need for outrage.  (Damn it, why, Lord?  Why?)  In the spirit of anti-outrage, we have created something that, I think, finally brings the War on Christmas home.

http://WageWarOnChristmas.com

Now.  Let’s see if we can all become angry about something that really matters.  Like wearing pants below your underwear to show off your boxers or combing your bangs straight up to show off your forehead.

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Posted in Essay, Nonesense, Observation, Opinion, Prententious Wordplay | 4 Comments »

A Social Experiment: Controversy as Promotional Tool

Thursday, September 11th, 2008

I recently read a comic essay in Newsweek magazine in which the writer lambasted Crocs shoes (those odd, brightly colored plastic things) and the people who wear them. He got actual death threats for his efforts. This last week there has been a great, albeit artificial, political flap due to one politician using a phrase describing the proposed policies of another politician that the other politician has used on more than one occasion (once even against the proposed policies of a female opponent) because they manufactured in their minds that the comment was about their female associate rather than about their proposed policies. Got that? I love America. The phrase by the way, for anyone who hasn’t been watching any television, involved farm animals and makeup and is meant to mean “you can’t pretty up something inherently ugly”.

Well. Seeing as how Americans can get up in arms so quickly about silly things as to send death threats (and, by the way, offers of marriage) for a humor piece about shoes and vociferously obscure reasoned debate over a manufactured misunderstanding, I figured the best way to become known in the general population is to piss someone off. And to do that, I must create a controversy. 

I realize I must choose wisely, not just any controversy will do. It would seem that it must go to the heart of some widely held, deeply felt ideal. On closer inspection, however, admiration of plastic shoes may be felt deeply, but is not very widely held. There are many options. Questioning the patriotism of a true patriot wouldn’t work, a true patriot wouldn’t need outrage, so there wouldn’t be any controversy. Questioning the patriotism of a rascal would do the trick. Samuel Johnson famously said, “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” And outrage, it seems, is the scoundrel’s idiom.

That, however, is too easy, too often used, and wouldn’t get me noticed at all. I could come out against broccoli, but that one was already taken and I actually like the stuff. I could defend the vegetable content of school lunches because they contain catsup but that barely raised a stir when a well known politician tried it.

I think I have it:

People who blog are idiots.

If that doesn’t bring the juices of the on-line community (the most virulently vociferous community around) to a rolling boil, I would be greatly surprised.

People who blog assume that the very act of blogging makes them an expert, that having a blog makes their opinion more weighty than those without blogs. Without benefit of any journalism school or experience, they assume their investigative techniques are superior to those of “mainstream media” (a pejorative for reporters who actually get paid for their opinions, and whose opinions are actually read by more than just a handful of like minded blog writers.) People who blog spend countless hours pontificating to their keyboards and monitors, mindless of the fact that keyboards and monitors are not enlightened by their infinite wisdom. People who blog are probably all impotent and have problem sweat. People who blog wear Crocs. I dare you to find evidence to the contrary, evidence that I couldn’t repudiate with a swift stroke of my ergonomic human interface device.

I now await my deservedly brutal thrashing. (And any proposals of marriage you may be willing to send my way.) As the son of a broccoli hater once said, “Bring it on.”

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

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Posted in Essay, Nonesense, Observation, Opinion, Prententious Wordplay | 4 Comments »

Fabulous, Thank You, How Are You?

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008

Many years ago I got into the habit of answering the ubiquitous question, “How are you?” by saying, “Dandy, how are you?” Most people just smiled and said they were fine. I was working in a law office in Los Angeles at this time and there was one lawyer who worked there, a junior partner, tall, smart, proper, very straight and very New England reserved. When I answered his salutation with my usual, “dandy, how are you?” he looked at me for a brief moment then said, “Foppish,” and sauntered down the hall with the bearing of a man who was very secure in his intellectual prowess and dry wit. I still admire him after all these years.

I rarely say “dandy” anymore, although I’m not sure why. I have found recently that I answer that question with the word “fabulous.” A friend once said to me that he could tell how good I really was doing by how long I stretched out the first syllable. “Only two ‘A’s today?” he’d say. If it were a one “A” fabulous, it was merely a good day. A five “A” fabulous would likely send one into convulsions of ecstacy. I think I usually hover around three.

I like the word fabulous. Okay, yes, it sounds really gay, but so the hell what. And they called Frank Sinatra fabulous and no one would ever consider calling him gay. I dare you to say you’re fabulous and, at least for the few moments you’re saying it, not actually feel fabulous. It’s impossible. The vibrational tones of that particular combination of letters won’t let you. I challenged one of the tellers at the bank I go to to try it. The next time I was at her window, I asked if she had. She said she’d tried it once and it didn’t work. I said to try it one more time. The next visit I was at a different window. That teller asked me how I was and I simply said “Fine.” The first teller called over three windows to say, “well, I’m fabulous!” She smiled and so did I. She was, indeed, fabulous. It works, I tell you.

More people should say they were fabulous. The more they say it, the more fabulous they’d be. President Bush should say it. If he were fabulous he might not be so inclined to incite war and strife all over the place. Andy Rooney should say it. At least momentarily he wouldn’t be so grumpy. It probably wouldn’t last with him, but we can all savor moments.  We should start a movement. The Be Fabulous Movement.  “How are you? You’re fabulous, of course!” It would be the only acceptable answer.

I think it’s a dandy idea.

_______________________________
Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

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Posted in Essay, My Life, Nonesense, Opinion | 4 Comments »

Pothos Cuttings – a Metric for Masculinity

Tuesday, June 10th, 2008

Rooted Pothos“You are now officially an old lady,” he said to me when he saw the pothos cuttings in a vase on my kitchen windowsill. That was five or six years ago. I told him the pothos needed trimming and it was a waste to just throw the cuttings out. He shook his head sadly. They are still there. Pothos like to grow long tendrils and look sickly odd if you don’t trim them back. If you do trim them back, the plants can become full, lush and bountiful. I liked my plants lush, so I trimmed the pothos and put the cuttings in water to root.  Sometimes I then replant them. It doesn’t make me an old lady.

Steve is a guy. He loves sports and women and action movies. And grilling steaks on a raging barbeque fire. He also loves cooking a delicate spaghetti sauce, but that is how straight Italian men behave. I’m also Italian and love making a good sauce, but prefer a Scandinavian tear-jerker to an action movie and date men. When I date. Which isn’t often. (I tell people that, if being gay means you sleep with men, I’m not gay anymore. It usually gets a laugh.)

So it was with a bit of glee that I chuckled when Steve called me a few moments ago and asked if I wanted the cuttings from his pothos. They were already rooted, he said, and there wasn’t any room for them in his pot.

I reminded him of his previous response to cuttings. He said that must have been someone else. I love inconsistencies in people. It’s part of what makes good writing interesting. It’s part of what makes people interesting. As famously gay Walt Whitman once famously said, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

But the main point is that Steve is now officially an old lady.

_______________________________
Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

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Posted in Essay, My Life, Nonesense | 3 Comments »

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