From the Salmon

I’ll be the first to admit, this has been a pretty serious and somber destination for the last week or two. I think that’s been for good reason, and I’ve appreciated the thoughts and comments y’all have shared. I hope to be writing more this week on transformational conversation, what that looks like more practically, and what might be the proper place for outrage in all of that.

But some of you are here for the funny. And I’ve been neglecting you. So in the interest of correcting a shameful silliness deficiency, here are some of the inane tidbits I wanted to share in the last week or so that just are now only mildly inappropriate rather than stunningly inappropriate.

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A Bird on the Bridge is Worth...

I was transfixed by hurricane coverage at the beginning of last week — so transfixed, in fact, that I somehow completely missed this story.

An ostrich… Loose on the Golden Gate Bridge.

The whole story is a little surreal. But in the running for this year’s Wisdom I Never Expected to Read in the Chronicle Award is from owner Ronald Love:

An ostrich is easier to keep than a goldfish. Unless it’s been too long in the back of a van, I guess.

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A New Guest Star

Coming in 2006: For Your Consideration, a new comedy by The Christopher Guest Players (now with Ricky Gervais!)

Man, I can’t think of a better addition to this crew. But do they really ever expect to finish filming with Ricky around?

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Opposite Day

A while back, I wrote about the book Help Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed!

I’m not a parent, so it didn’t occur to me that a book like this might actually backfire when one is asked to read it for the 400th time. Take The Lorax for example. Here’s a mother who is just a little tired of speaking for the trees (via Bookslut):

I read this book to Nora every single day and she still wants more. She cluck-clucks over the glop in the Humming-Fish pond, she sighs with despair over the smoggy sky, she scolds, “No! You do not do that!” at the sight of axes felling Truffula Trees. Should I just order her Greenpeace sweatshirt now? I’m down with the environment and all, but repeated readings of The Lorax have made me want to go shoot a panda, load it in my Navigator and drive it to a national park, and then set fire to its corpse with gasoline.

Sheesh. If that’s what an overdose of Seuss can do, maybe a few hundred recitations of Help Mom! might turn your average conservative into the person I passed today driving a Prius with the bumper sticker that said “DRAFT SUV OWNERS FIRST.”

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Dance Dance Revelation

Jim outhipsters all of us and points the way to OK Go’s hilarious video for a great song, ”A Million Ways.”

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Paging Bay or Bruckheimer

(If you’re keeping track at home, this is two in a row I’m stealing from Jim. I hope he’ll forgive me.)

When you live in Chicago, you hear a lot about the Great Fire. In San Francisco, they’ve got a few earthquakes to spin tales about, but none quite like the Big One in 1904. But as a Bostonian by birth, I was a little surprised to discover a past disaster that, well, Bostonians just don’t talk about much....

The Boston Molasses Disaster of 1919

I realize this is a little on the gallows humor side, considering the events of the past week, but the details of this are too ludicrous not to share.

One day before the ratification of Prohibition, a 2.5 million gallon tank of molasses exploded in downtown Boston. The resulting 15-foot wave of molasses traveled at 35 miles per hour, upending trains, destroying buildings, killing 21 people, injuring 150 others, and flooding city blocks with 2-3 feet of syrupy goo!

I’m sure there’s a punchline in there somewhere, but honestly, with a story that bizarre, do you really need one?

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Move Over Sithy

What would a compendium of comedy be without a little morsel of McSweeney’s?

Lesser-Known Movie Prequels

There Are Plenty of Mohicans
Four Bachelorette Parties and a Friend in the Hospital
The Upwardly Mobile Tenenbaums

Enjoy them all.

And while you’re there, you may as well check out ”A Letter from The Power’ to Public Enemy. Word.

Update: Well, they’ve gone and posted something even funnier: Things Hagrid the Half-Giant Would Say if He Served Jesus Instead of Harry Potter.

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Okeydoke. That’s all for the moment.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled seriousness.