“Punked” is slang for being pranked or made a fool of, like “You got punked.” The term was popularized by Punk’d, the MTV hidden-camera show Ashton Kutcher created and hosted starting in 2003, where celebrities were set up with elaborate pranks. Kutcher was born in 1978, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. His career trajectory has had three tracks, going from TV star to film lead and then mega tech investor. That has left him somewhere between…
“Old comedy standards” are classic routines and joke formats that got passed around and performed for decades, the comedy version of songs from The American Songbook. Many began in vaudeville and burlesque, where comics freely borrowed each other’s bits and there was no internet to act as spoiler. The most famous routines were things like, Who’s on First?, by Abbott & Costello, the baseball wordplay bit and probably the best-known standard of all and Slowly…
You are forever hearing older people say that waking up each and every morning is a pleasure. Folk sayings like “Any day above ground is a good day,” “Growing old is a privilege denied to many,” and “Today I woke up. That’s the win; the rest is gravy.” Lots of comedians like to riff on their age, but the most famous for doing that were George Burns and Bob Hope, both of whom live to…
Kim is a game player and crossword puzzler…and sudokoer. All but crosswords and sudoko she does on her phone. She is very religious about it all and the only other thing that occupies her as much is keeping up with the various news feeds she reads. She focuses mostly on Substack, Apple News and the New York Times (NYT) for news and despite the fact that I subscribe to the NYT, the Washington Post (WAPO),…
I have stopped saying that we plan to travel less. The thought was genuine, but unrealistic. Unless Mother Nature, Father Time or Fiscal Fear overwhelm you, if you have been a traveler your whole life, it’s not sensible to think you can just throttle back as a normal lifestyle adjustment. I look around our neighborhood for comparables and find that Mike & Melisa (more homebodies than most) have just returned from their African safari, the…
By this time, everyone knows that the suspected blue wave has been a blue tsunami and all I can say is, THANK GOD! After a decade of losing our minds, losing our infrastructure, losing our most sacred institutions, losing our healthcare, losing our civility, losing our sense of propriety, losing our democratic process, losing many of our legal norms, losing our caring for the human race, losing our global respect and basically losing our way,…
Six years ago I wrote a story called The Morning After. No, it was not about The Poseidon Adventure, that kitschy movie when Red Buttons and Shelly Winters helping Gene Hackman redeem himself in an upside-down cruise ship. When I started to write this story with that title, my early warning system told me I had already used that title. It was a story about the loss of Kim’s soulmate pup, Cecil, who died during…
It’s Election Day today. As I’ve mentioned before, for sixty years I didn’t give a shit about politics. I was a ware of the political landscape and I had my views, but I simply had no time for it all, as life was keeping me busy enough and politics seemed like a game and one big distraction. I got called out for this apathetic view as a freshman in college when the bearded radical on…
Over the years, I’ve had a few encounters with pickpockets. My first one was in Rome at the Porta Portese Flea Market. Porta Portese is a 17th-century city gate on the edge of Trastevere in Rome. It’s best known for the huge Sunday flea market that runs from the gate along Via Portuense and the nearby streets. If you go early, by 7 or 8 a.m., you get the best finds and the thinnest crowds.…
The other day, we were sitting in the Delta Sky Club Lounge at JFK, the least exclusive club in the world where you almost have to try not to gain admission since everyone else seems to get in, when I realized that a first class domestic ticket doesn’t get you into the joint or any other Delta lounge at JFK. How did that happen? I’m not a fan of airline lounges anyway. They are always…