Prepare to laugh until your ribs hurt!

Two blog posts over the past week or so had me howling with laughter. The first is from The Bloggess ("Like Mother Teresa, Only Better", as she advertises herself!).

This morning I had a fight with Victor about towels. I can’t tell you the details because it wasn’t interesting enough to document at the time, but it was basically me telling Victor I needed to buy new bath towels, and Victor insisting that I NOT buy towels because I “just bought new towels“. Then I pointed out that the last towels I’d bought were hot pink beach towels, and he was all “EXACTLY” and then I hit my head against the wall for an hour.

Then Laura came to pick me up so we could go to the discount outlet together, and as Victor gave me a kiss goodbye he lovingly whispered, “You are not allowed to bring any more goddam towels in this house or I will strangle you“. And that was exactly what I was still echoing through my head an hour later, when Laura and I stopped our shopping carts and stared up in confused, silent awe at a display of enormous metal chickens, made from rusted oil drums.

Laura: I think you need one of those.

me: You’re joking, but they’re kind of horrifically awesome.

Laura: I’m not joking. We need to buy you one.

me: The 5-foot tall one was $300, marked down to $100. That’s like, $200 worth of chicken for free.

Laura: You’d be crazy not to buy that. I mean, look at it. IT’S FULL OF WHIMSY.

me: Victor’d be pissed.

Laura: Yup.

me: But on the plus side? It’s not towels.

Laura: Yup.

me: We will name him Henry. Or Charlie. Or O’Shannesy.

Laura: Or Beyoncé.

me: Or Beyoncé. Yes. And when our friends are sad we can leave him at their front door to cheer them up.

Laura: Exactly. It’ll be like, “You thought *yesterday* was bad? Well, now you have a enormous metal chicken to deal with. Perspective. Now you have it.”

There's more at the link. I almost fell out of my chair laughing at her husband's reaction! Others obviously share my amusement . . . as of this evening, there were 2,497 comments to that blog post!

The second post is from Educated & Poor.

In the summer of 1988, my sister and I encountered our first-ever condom machine in an Aynor, South Carolina, gas station restroom. Sure, we had heard about the contraception contraptions in Sex Ed class. Mom had even confirmed for us that there really was such a thing as a vending machine for condoms. But we still hadn't seen one for ourselves, and didn't think they actually existed. All we'd ever seen for sale in a bathroom vending machine were maxi-pads and tampons.

But there the machine stood, fixed to the wall in all its mute, naughty glory. I say "mute" and "naughty" because the mostly-silent implication was—and still is, to some extent—that women who plan for sex are sluts. (And those who don't plan for sex are pregnant. Mm-hmm, definitely non-slutty.) But since this was South Carolina, where of course in the late 1980s they didn't have a teenage pregnancy epidemic or people with STDs or anything like that thankyouverymuch, the condom machine's offerings were concealed by a large metal flap bearing a sign in bold letters:

THESE PRODUCTS OFFERED ONLY
FOR THE PREVENTION OF DISEASE.
ANY PATRONS WHO MAY BE OFFENDED BY
SEXUALLY ORIENTED MATTER
ARE ADVISED NOT TO LIFT THIS FLAP.

Which meant that Pixie and I were straightaway going to lift the flap. And it made a loud crrrreeeeEEEEAAAAK as we did so. There was no way that anyone outside this one-seater women's restroom wouldn't hear the cheesy haunted-house-quality noise warning the public at large that any floozies inside were most certainly perusing the rubber selection. I'm pretty sure the creaky flap had been designed that way, state public health initiatives be damned. "Better barefoot 'n pregnant than have everybody in the store know you're gonna get laid," or something like that.

The four different types of condoms in the machine nearly scalded our scandalized teenage eyes. There were plain, standard condoms; condoms bearing the dubious claim that they were "ribbed for her pleasure;" Stallion's Pride condoms "for the larger man," secreted away and SORRY, SOLD OUT; and the usual wonky fruit-flavored varieties. Creativity must have died a slow and painful death when the latex process engineers met up with the marketing team in Rubber Flavorings 101. Time after time, it's the same old boring fruits, banana jokes notwithstanding. Why don't we ever see any new flavors for condoms? Why not licorice, or root beer, or cornbread, or Slim Jims?

Again, more at the link. (Slim Jim-flavored condoms? Wouldn't that be an unintentional slur on the unfortunate males concerned - or, at least, on certain portions of their anatomy?)

I highly recommend both blog posts to put a smile on your face. Thanks, ladies!



Peter