Just For Fun: Courtroom Clangers

KEEPING A STRAIGHT FACE AS A COURT REPORTER
These are from a book called Disorder in the American Courts, and are things people actually said in court, word for word, taken down and now published by  court reporters that had the torment of staying calm while these exchanges were actually taking place.
ATTORNEY:  What gear were you in at the moment of the impact?

WITNESS:     Gucci sweats and Reeboks.

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ATTORNEY:  This myasthenia gravis , does it affect your memory at all?

WITNESS:     Yes.

ATTORNEY:  And in what ways does it affect your memory?

WITNESS:     I forget..

ATTORNEY:  You forget?  Can you give us an example of something you forgot?

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ATTORNEY:  Do you know if your daughter has ever been involved in voodoo?

WITNESS:     We both do.

ATTORNEY:  Voodoo?

WITNESS:     We do..

ATTORNEY:  You do?

WITNESS:     Yes , voodoo.

No More Daylight Savings!

I don’t know about you, but around here we’re all in a dither about that hour of time we lost on Saturday night.  So… we’ve decided we aren’t gonna take it anymore!

I work right here at home, and my wife has retired, so here’s what we’re gonna do next year when it’s time to set the clocks ahead–to wit: we won’t. And I hope it starts a trend.

So as not to be totally contrarian, we’ll set them ahead 10 minutes a day; so in a mere six days, we’ll have caught up to everybody who still lets the government tell them what time it is. We’ll do that until they stop fooling around with the time.

We invite you all to join us.

Gutter Covers and Heroic Fantasy

One of the articles on this blog previewed the cover art for my book, The Thunder King. On my site stats page are listed “Search Engine Terms” that tell me how some readers wind up visiting my blog.

I was surprised today to find the term, “Gutter King Cover.” This means some poor guy was trying to buy a cover for his gutter and the computer sent him to my book instead. I would like to think he appreciated the serendipity of it all, and bought my book; but that won’t keep dead leaves from clogging up his gutter. It’ll just give him something nice to read while he’s waiting for someone to come and clean out his gutter.

I hope the man who needed a gutter cover wasn’t so put out that he didn’t buy the book. You know, folks, it’s getting harder and harder to write fantasy, these days. Fantasy was never meant for people who are already delusional. But I turn on the radio, and there’s some 30-year-old college student telling Congress–that’s the United States Congress–that her sex life is so bodacious, she can’t keep up with the cost of contraceptives, and she wants the government to force the university to pay for her birth control pills. How the dickens am I going to write a fantasy for her? She’s already in one!

My stories are written for sane people. I hope that’s not a shrinking demographic.

Was C.S. Lewis Wrong to Allow Magic in Narnia?

Some Christian readers don’t like C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia because certain characters in the stories use magic. For these readers, “magic” is the same as “witchcraft,” a practice strongly condemned in the Bible: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” (Exodus 22:18).

I don’t think we need to spend any time defending C.S. Lewis against a charge of promoting the use of witchcraft. Even so, he might have been well-advised to be more careful.

Dr. Cornelius, a dwarf, has “some small magic” which includes a sleeping spell. The magician Coriakin has a book of spells which apparently anyone can open and use (kind of like leaving a loaded gun lying around the house). Uncle Andrew makes a great deal of trouble for himself by fooling around with magic that he doesn’t understand. And there are a werewolf and a hag who intend to use magic to call up the White Witch from the dead, but are killed before they can do it.

The Tattered Flag

Sometimes when I look up from work, I notice things in my own neighborhood that I never saw before.

At the neighborhood school, practically next door to me, the American flag hangs from the pole in tatters. The wind has torn it into several flapping pieces. The school never lowers the flag, leaves it out night and day, in all sorts of weather.

When I went to elementary school, the flag was lowered at the end of each school day, folded correctly according to flag etiquette (usually by Boy Scouts), and stored in a special locker until it was run up the pole the next day–unless there was foul weather.

Am I surprised that a public school today would show such flagrant disrespect to America’s flag?

Absolutely not one freakin’ bit!

Blasphemy Night at St. George’s Church

February 16, 2012 – NewsWithViews.com

Anglicans in Canada must have been jealous of Presbyterians in the USA prancing around in animal costumes and calling it a worship service. They pondered and pondered, and finally up with something worse.

The other night at St. George’s Anglican Church in St. Catherines, Ontario, a band of giggling pagan priestesses staged The Vagina Monologues (admission, $20): and they performed it at the altar.

For those unfamiliar with it, The Vagina Monologues has been floating around since 1996, to the delight of freaks and feminists throughout the Western world. I admit that I have never seen the show, nor do I plan to see it, ever. But there are many descriptions of it on the Internet, and they all tally.

Blasphemy Night at St. George’s Church

Tomorrow at 7 p.m., at St. George’s Anglican Church in St. Catherines, Ontario, a group of feminist “priests” will perform The Vagina Monologues from the altar of the church.

I’ll have more to say about this in my column for News With Views this week. For the time being, let Christians pray for the reclamation of this church–before it becomes like the chaff which the wind driveth away.

If you don’t know anything about The Vagina Monologues, look it up on the Internet. You’ll be appalled by what these silly women propose to present from the altar.  I think I would put this on a par with Belshazzar and his concubines drinking out of the vessels from the Lord’s Temple in Jerusalem.

No, I Won’t Watch the Stupid Game!

Tomorrow I will join dozens of other Americans in not watching the Super Bowl.

Oh, no! I’ll miss Madonna’s halftime show! Thanks, but I’d rather watch ants crawling in and out of the ant-hill. The Stupid Bowl halftime show is always some boring entertainer that you’ve already seen hundreds of times, whether you wanted to or not. The real trick is avoiding Madonna altogether.

But you’ll miss the six hours’ worth of pre-game coverage! Eh? What can they find to talk about for six hours?

I have banished TV from my home, but I still have to listen to an infinite number of radio ads with Stupid Bowl themes. These are almost indescribably offensive. In most of them, adult males are portrayed as the equivalent of poorly brought-up four-year-olds, who would be almost certain to defecate on the sofa if their long-suffering wives didn’t nag them constantly. And on Stupid Bowl Sunday, the talking heads who nag you all year about healthy eating turn around and exhort you to sit on the couch for 16 hours gobbling snacks and fast food.

Somewhere along the way, they supposedly get around to actually playing a football game–not that you’d notice.

Alas! Is it come to this? Are we Americans become so tame, so lame, so empty-headed, that we can be led around by the nose, and brought to invest so much time, so much passion, so much money in a freakin’ football game? I suppose 150 years of public schooling, with its emphasis on mindless conformity, has truly done its work. If we’re told to do it often enough, by enough voices in the media, who knows what we might not do? How else do you think a community-organizing mystery man, with no more biography than a robot or a lizard-man, gets elected president?

It must be some kind of hypnotism. You are passionately interested in the Super Bowl. You are passionately interested in the Super Bowl…

No, no, no! You shall not tell me what I’m passionate about! I refuse to waste my passion on a stupid football game! (But isn’t that kind of what you’re doing now, old sport?) All right, all right–I have gotten cranked up about it. Maybe football brings out the worst in me.

But really, it’s not about football at all. It’s about cultural slavery, and marching when they tell you to march, and stopping when they tell you to stop, and, finally, drinking the poison Kool-Aid…

Splat! Goes the Writer

Yesterday it was raining cats and dogs (as usual–and I don’t even live in Seattle), and as I was going out the front door, my foot slipped on the wet doorstep, my ankle buckled, and I was launched into a swan-dive to the cement sidewalk.

It could’ve been very nasty, but I escaped with a scraped knee and nothing else. Obviously God was watching over me. But I must also thank my judo instructors of long ago, who drilled us incessantly in the art of taking a fall. After all, if you can’t fall without getting hurt, you really can’t practice judo. Even after all this time, I have retained this skill. I might’ve wound up like Humpty-Dumpty, otherwise. Certainly I would recommend this training to everyone!

Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for the signal to start writing Book #6 of my Bell Mountain Series. Our artist, Kirk Douponce, says he’s ready to start work on the cover of #4, The Last Banquet, and I’m in the process of proofreading it. Hopefully it’ll be ready for publication by the end of this summer; and then we can all get to work on #5, The Fugitive Prince… provided I continue to survive any additional falls I might take.