Tag Archives: Humor

by Russ Nickel | January 24, 2012 · 5:00 am

Housekeeping

I have food poisoning. Which is all well and good except for the fact that it poisons not just my stomach, but my inspiration. As we all know, inspiration is the sous-chef of humor, and when the sous-chef eats a morsel of toxic orange chicken, the kitchen of hilarity is reduced to shambles, forced to serve second-rate blog dishes peppered with metaphoric excuses rather than jokes.

That’s why this week, instead of pulling the usual all-nighter to perfect something hilarious, we’re going to simply do a bit of housekeeping. I apologize for the lack of entertainment, but if you want a villain to blame, choose Panda Express.

Keep in mind that any laughter you may experience during this poison-addled post is purely incidental. However, if you need someone to lie on a couch moaning incessantly, or if by chance you have an excess of saltine crackers and no idea what to do with them, then I’m your man.

Now, onto the housekeeping. Firstly, we’ve won a few more awards over the past weeks, but until recently, I’ve been road tripping, and have had little time to consider addressing them in Thursday posts. Even squeaking out our usual Tuesday affair was a bit of a challenge, but at least I made friends with a lot of hotel night clerks who wondered why I was up until 6 a.m. in their lobbies.

Award Section of Post:

So long Middle School Bowling Champion medal. Move over Little League Sportsmanship trophy. There’s new kids on the block—even if they are inhuman, two-dimensional kids. That’s right; those new virtual children down the street are the Versatile, Liebster, and Kreativ Blog/ger Awards.

I’ve never felt so versatile, having received the award from both the hilarious Live Nerd Repeat and the alliterative Mommy’s Moments. And though I appreciate this symbol of approval, I think there’s been some sort of mistake. Reasonably Ludicrous isn’t particularly versatile. That word brings to mind images of a Swiss Army Knife or an Autobot, or maybe even Sandra Bullock that year she was in The Blind Side and All About Steve.

But so far all of our posts have been some sort of anecdotal story coupled with Sam’s art. Like a palm tree, we haven’t done a lot of branching out.

Then again, maybe I am versatile. I cooked some food one time, and I know how to skimboard. I can take care of cats reasonably well, and I’m pretty good at reading words. Maybe they’re not saying I’m versatile at blogging, but that, because of the stories I’ve told, they can tell I’m a blogger who is versatile: a versatile blogger!

Ah, well, that makes sense. Thanks guys!

As for the Liebster Blog award, Google Translate tells me that “liebster” means “dearest” in German. I guess it’s good to know that Reasonably Ludicrous is someone’s dearest blog, though I’m not sure I trust the superlative nature of this translation. After all, how can we be Live Nerd Repeat’s dearest blog if he gave the award out to seven other people? Seven!

And finally the Kreativ Blogger award, which came from Thoughts from a Jaded Heart. You see, the very title of the award is an example of itself, because they’ve spelled the word “creative” creatively. Very clever, award. Very clever indeed.

Some of these awards require you to share things about yourself. As any of my readers could tell you, this prospect frightens me, for I’ve never really put myself out there on the internet. Even so, I’ll try my best.

1. Once, when I was a baby, my parents spilled spaghetti on my head, scalding it. I think the heat burned the concept of spaghetti into my brain, ’cause I’ve loved it ever since. Science!

2. My favorite book series is George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, and the fact that the HBO show exists make me unthinkably happy.

3. I have four more things to come up with.

4. I almost got an Astronomy minor, but my brain cannot comprehend standard physics (see # 1). I have no idea how blocks slide on frictionless ramps, and springs remain mysterious forces of chaos.

5. My family used to own a pet chicken. It was evil, and its favorite activity was the pecking of humans. That being said, at least it never gave me food poisoning.

6. After some deliberation, I have decided that I dislike food poisoning.

7. I once beat a chess FIDE master, but he was only 15 and I don’t think he was paying much attention. It was during lunch break and he was playing a lot of games at once.

We’re supposed to pass this award on to 15 other blogs, but in the name of being miserly and having already awarded most of our favorite blogs, and in an effort to slow down the rapid spread of this rather positive chain-awarding, we’ll just link back to our last two acceptance posts. Check out the blogs we nominated those times. They’re awesome!

Other housekeeping!

If you like to read Reasonably Ludicrous things, we’ve added an FAQ, which should provide not only sagacious insight, but mild question and answer–based entertainment as well.

I also created a Store page with descriptions so amusing that you may be tricked into buying something. But seriously, I’m not even trying to hawk merchandise at you. I’m just kind of proud of the write-ups.

In messing around with wordpress options, I seem to have accidentally created a Gallery of my favorite artwork of Sam’s. I’m not sure what it accomplishes really, but I like looking at it.

On the right-hand sidebar, I’ve added a new links section with just one thing. It’s a video my friend made, parodying the lyrics of party rock anthem via the glory of MS Paint. I think it’s pretty awesome.

Until next time, this is Reasonably Ludicrous, signing out!

Stay tuned for next week, in which Russ overcomes his disease and writes something with actual content!

29 Comments

Filed under Administrative

Tagged as Awards, Chicken, Extended Kitchen-Based Metaphors, Food Poisoning, Humor, Physics, Sandra Bullock

by Russ Nickel | January 17, 2012 · 6:02 am

I Am a Nature God!

For the record, all of these animal encounters are 100% true.

Do you ever step outside, only to get the feeling that mother nature has it out for you, and, like the villain of a bad mystery novel, is bent on exacting only the most unexpected forms of revenge? I once felt that way. Every journey into the great outdoors was an offensive into a hostile environment filled with petal-covered trebuchets launching pollen spores at my sinuses.

I’ve collapsed from heat stroke and hypothermia, battled off armies of ticks, and nearly been struck by lightning. Cats have scratched me, birds have pooped on me, and skunks have sprayed me. Bees of both the common and bumble variety have pumped their poison into my flesh, and every time I go to Sea World I get the distinct impression that the fish are leering at me.

I began to fear nature at a very young age when some decidedly unpatriotic Raccoons laid waste to my green plastic army men. I used to love arranging those guys into epic battles between imagined nations. But one night I left my troops in a particularly dramatic tableau, and when I woke up, I found that neither The United States of Awesome nor Soviet Russ were any match for the great nation of Raccoon.

As time passed and I grew up, Nature began to raise the stakes. Every summer, unable to resist the water’s clarion call, I’d venture into the sea, only to be stung by literally hundreds of Jellyfish, apparently hell-bent on irritating my calves.

But one jellyfish is ruler of them all: The Portuguese Man of War. It’s a massive array of blue tentacles, topped with a purple, nightmarish Mohawk, and filled with enough deadly venom to kill a small yak. I’d never given the creature much thought, but one day, when I was snorkeling through the pristine Hawaiian waters, I suddenly found my neck wrapped in tentacles.

I flailed about, managing to informatively sputter “I am inside a jellyfish!” Driven, undoubtedly, by anti-poison instincts, I tore at the tentacles with my bare hands, ripping through them as if they were mere strands of gelatinous creature-parts, then high-tailed it for shore. The rest of the day was spent icing down the huge red welt trails that made it look as if I’d befallen some mishap whilst enjoying a bit of sadomasochism.

The attacks didn’t stop as I grew older. On a visit to Alcatraz, I was repeatedly dive-bombed by a fury-gull, either because I’d inadvertently gotten too close to her nest or because she was a prisoner reincarnate, displeased that I was desecrating the jail grounds of her past life. On a canoeing trip down the Colorado river, I got 48 mosquito bites in a single night, despite being covered in head-to-toe netting and repeatedly coating myself in noxious waves of bug repellant. My best friend only got 2, neither of which was on his eyelid. And once, during a solar eclipse, Fire Ants swarmed me, perhaps incensed that I had blotted out their god.

And just last spring, at the opening of X-Men: First Class, I was bitten by a black widow. I didn’t find out that that was the creature responsible until the week after, however. I only felt a tingling on my unguarded toe, and when I tried to scratch it, (unknowingly angering the spider that had made my foot his new residence), I found myself in excruciating pain. In the name of cinema, I did my best to ignore it.

But by the next morning, my foot had swollen to twice its normal size, I had the poison shakes, and my temperature was a healthy 103. I had to cancel my second ever Vegas trip, and since the movie was on a Friday afternoon, I couldn’t go to a doctor until Monday.

In the end, I concluded I’d been bitten during the wrong superhero movie. If it had starred Peter Parker instead of Beast, maybe I would’ve ended up with the ability to stick to walls instead of having giant blue feet.

But back to the list.

A Squirrel bit me while I was feeding it, prompting my mom to hysterically demand I be tested for rabies, Kookaburras are always laughing at me, and once a Coyote stole an entire pie from me on a camping trip!

For years, I was sure that nature had it out for me, that no matter what I did, the creatures of the world would conspire with clicks, chirps, and roars to rain down on me as many bites and stings as possible.

But I had it all wrong, you see. Nature doesn’t hate me. It loves me!

I AM A NATURE GOD!

You may think it’s just the leftover venom coursing through my veins talking, but for the first time I’m finally seeing things clearly. Pollen wants to party in my sinuses. The sun wants to caress me the only ray it knows how, and the raccoons thought they were defending me from an enemy army. It all makes so much sense!

If you were a skunk and all you had to offer was your spray, would you not gladly give it up to prove your devotion? Would not the bees break off their stingers in my skin, an insectoid sacrifice in honor of their lord? The Man of War was giving me a tentacle-y hug, and Mosquitoes merely think they’re following doctrine when they drink my blood. I bet they even go home and eat wafers afterward.

I was so focused on the hurts nature had enacted upon me that I forgot the joy of it all. I forgot the time that Blue Jay landed in my hand and chattered away happily as though life were a Disney film. I forgot the feeling of catching a wave beside a playful Dolphin, of petting a Cat curled happily on my lap, and of hiking through the woods, light sprinkling the forest floor with half-obscured rays that shine through the dancing leaves of the trees.

For every horrific encounter, there’s the time I was surrounded by a kaleidoscope of Monarch Butterflies passing through on their annual migration, or the night I swam in the Red Tide, the trails of my strokes aglow with surreal blue light.

Why else would a Guinea pig have made a pilgrimage to my house, if not to choose me as a master? Why else would a South African Turaco appear in my neighborhood, if not to delight us with its exotic songs? Why else, on that rainy night when I took shelter beneath the arches of a church, did hundreds of bats encircle me, wings glinting in the moonlight?

Like the rain god from So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, I am forever cursed with the unwavering love of the creatures of the world, and no matter how much I try to deny the truth, I will never be able to rebuke their devotional bites and stings.

So I might as well embrace it. Next time I see a bear, I think I’ll go say hi.

51 Comments

Filed under Stories

Tagged as Alcatraz, Animals, Bears, Deadly Venom. Vegas. Christian Mosquitoes, Disney, Humor, Jellyfish Bondage, Man of War, Nature, Plastic Army Men, Red Tide, So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, Solar Eclipse, The Birds and the Bees, The United States of Awesome, X-Men: First Class

by Russ Nickel | January 10, 2012 · 5:33 am

Fear and Hiding in Las Vegas

Vegas baby! Everybody goes, including nerds. It’s a rite of passage, and even if you don’t win real, useful money, you end up with that irreplaceable cash known as shared experience.

When someone inevitably asks, “Have you ever been to Vegas?” you’ll finally be able to nod knowingly. Oh yes. I have. No further discussion required, because what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Unless, of course, you’re friends with me and I post it all over the internet!

———

It was the last finals week of our college career. Six of us decided that rather than study for our tests, we’d put the Bachelor in Bachelor’s Degree, so we booked tickets to the city of sin.

Of course, our ragtag fellowship of truants consisted of me, three computer science majors, and two pre-med kids—not really the best at things like partying, gambling, or meeting girls. Still, we figured we should have one more go at the “college experience” everyone was always talking about.

We should have known better. The CS trio kept determining the odds of every casino game, discouraging us from throwing money at the whims of chance. If we ever happened upon some more exotic form of entertainment like, say, cocaine, the pre-med duo would sit us down and explain the negative repercussions of casual drug use and we’d avoid it entirely. Ah, knowledge, the destroyer of fun. There’s nothing worse in life than those moments when you learn the truth, like realizing Pixar movies are physically unsound or the uncomfortable conversation you have when you find out a stork didn’t drop you on your parents’ doorstep.

So, in this fashion, we meandered through Vegas, wondering what there was to do that wasn’t detrimental to our bodies or finances. Fortunately, as an artist, I can’t be controlled by logic or self-preservation, so one night I buy a yardlong, which is actually a yard long and has something like 12 shots of surgical alcohol in it.

My friends keep trying to drink it to save me from myself, but like an alcoholic Gollum, I become protective of my precious treasure and distrustful of their intentions. Defeated by my obsession, they break down and buy variously themed oversized drinks of their own.

After some unsteady shambling down the strip, we find ourselves in a Hooters, which is about the most debauched activity we can talk ourselves into. There will be girls there! We sit down and a waiter comes over to take our order. That’s “Waiter.” Turns out all the servers are men and the women are in some different part of the restaurant, completely out of view!

While we wait for our food, we compensate for our lack of hooters by browsing the stripper ads the street-side barkers had handed us, zealously debating whether Angel is hotter than Chastity, how much she’d charge, and what strippers actually do, having no real experience in the matter. Nerds that we are, we turn it into a game, in which each stripper has attack power derived from the number of stars covering her body, and a strength/weakness chart based on hair color or ethnicity.

After one particularly bawdy comment, the man sitting in the booth next to us turns and says very seriously, “Hey guys. Look, my wife, daughter, and I are just trying to have a nice meal. Do you think you could cut the stripper talk for like 10 minutes until we leave?”

Shame swallows us up and we mumble profuse apologies, then get to wondering why someone would bring his family to a Hooters in the first place. In hope of a nice meal? To avoid overhearing drunken guys talking? Maybe he thought it was a family-friendly, owl-themed eatery.

Deprived the fulfillment of our carnal desires, and having consumed another couple pints worth of rum and cokes, we decide it’s time for some actual sin. One of us calls up a stripper service on the way back to the hotel, and before we can register what’s happened, we’re told by the operator that two lovely ladies will arrive at our room in half an hour.

None of us has ever actually seen a stripper before, and at least one of us has never even seen a real live naked female of any occupation, so this is a giant leap forward for our nerdy group.

We get back to the room, and the excitement of our impending, naked Bar Mitzvah quickly wears off. Time passes. Bored, we switch on the TV and find an episode of Pokemon. This invokes group-wide nostalgia for a childhood we might soon lose, and the sobering wave of regret washes over us. After all, Misty had always been more than enough woman for our middle-school level fantasies. Would we now discard her for some card-stock charlatan?

An hour goes by, and one of us falls asleep, lulled into the world of dreams by Jigglypuff’s soothing song.

Displeased, we call the friendly stripper establishment, whose secretary says the girls got caught in traffic (it’s now 4 in the morning, but who knows what traffic is like in Vegas? Not us!).

Another hour passes, and with it, another person. By this point we’re all tired, and nobody really thinks this is a good idea anymore, so I call up the lady to cancel. At the mention of the word, the bubbly girl morphs into a Hyde-ian version of herself like a lycanthropic lust-monger, swearing by the gods of compulsory nudity that we will pay the two hundred dollars whether we like it or not, so do we want it to go to waste, or do we want to quote: “see some titties?”

Plus, like the punch-line to a bad horror movie, the girls are already inside the building!

My friend grabs the phone, insists we’re cancelling, and hangs up, but the lupine threats have sunk their teeth into our impressionable gray matter, and the indelible and primal fear of strippers sets in.

We awaken the two sleeping friends and herd them into the corner farthest from the door, then switch off all the lights, never letting our voices rise above a whisper. I never thought I’d find myself hiding from strippers, but life isn’t always predictable, and here I was.

A few minutes pass and we realize how ridiculous we’re being. Strippers aren’t so scary, even with those strange and elusive lady parts. Our bravest member convinces us that the danger is all in our minds and gets up to turn on the lights. He walks to the switch, but just as he’s about to flip it, there’s a knock on the door!

He freezes, and we hear the two girls talking indistinctly just beyond the threshold. Suddenly, the room phone starts ringing.

“Nobody answer,” I whisper, and everyone nods their consent.

“Oh crap!” whispers a friend. “They have my cell number, and if it rings, they’ll know I’m here!”

But his cell phone is across the room.

“You can’t go over there!” one of my friends whisper-shouts. “It’s too dangerous.”

“I have to do this,” says the owner, stoically.

“Let me come with you,” I say.

“No. I won’t risk you too. I’m going on my own.” He starts to army crawl toward the table near the door. We watch with bated breath, worried that the strippers will see a shadow under the door or use some stripper powers to otherwise detect him.

But he makes it to the phone and back. Like modern day Anne Franks, we huddle in fear as the hotel phone rings again and again…In hushed tones, I make the Anne Frank metaphor and all of my friends tell me I’m a terrible person. The door shudders under the force of the strippers’ plastic-surgery enhanced limbs, and we shudder in nervous unison.

———

The strippers finally departed in frustration, leaving us free to watch more Pokemon.

We lived the rest of the trip in a constant state of fear, sure that the girls’ pimp would come to beat the money out of us with his pimp fists. Every time we left the room, we’d use an elaborate series of mirrors to ensure that the hallway was clear, then sneak out as if we were an elite force of commandos.

Even though we may not have ended up with strippers, we did go to an over-the-top, vampire-themed, topless rock opera filled with magic tricks, dance, and aerial acrobatics, a show that perfectly combined our nerdy love of vampires with just enough depravity that we felt like we’d really accomplished some growing up.