And Now For Something Completely Different

Here’s some great news. My son and his wife came home from California this week. I ran out to greet them, shouting, “My son is home, kill the fatted eggplant.” His wife is vegan.

I’ve been asked where the eggplant humor comes from. It’s not demented, if that’s what you mean. It’s what you get when you cross certain strains of ethnic jokes with lawyer jokes. It awakens the dormant genome within the structure of the lawyer joke DNA.

For this reason, my favorite eggplant joke is, “How many eggplants does it take to roof a house? A: It depends on how thin you slice them.”

I raise eggplants on the side. I catch 'em in the wild using eggplant traps. They’re not easy to have around though. They go bad pretty fast. First they steal pencils, then they steal money from your wallet, and the next thing you know you have an eggplant crackhouse in the back yard.

I’ve not given up on my attempts to domesticate them despite the reports of eggplant violence in parts of Florida and the Southwest.*

It’s good to have Micah home. He is a very talented cook, but on the side he’s been making extra income as a mime. He developed a skit in which he impersonated the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. He calls it Random Acts of Silence. A lot of his punch lines seem to fall on deaf ears, he confided to me last night.

I was thinking recently how the Sixties Free Speech Movement and a Bowel Movement had a lot in common. Ever notice how a bowel movement varies in duration based on how constipated one is? Maybe if our nation hadn’t been so constipated, the Sixties would not have given us such a hard time.

The irony is, the Free Speech radicals won, and now poets can stand on soapboxes shouting the F-word and calling it poetry. This has evidently been deemed a great advance for Western Civilization.

What I don’t understand is why the list of things you CAN’T say today is longer than the original list. If it ain’t Politically Correct… you better scrub out your mouth with soap. In fact, don’t even THINK it.

TRUTH IN ADVERTISING DISCLAIMER: My son is not a mime.

PHOTO Captions
Top right: Self portrait as someone else

Left middle: Eggplant dinner dish. We've found that our eggplants really like rose petals.