The Short Humour Site









Home : Writers' Showcase : Submission Guidelines : A Man of a Few More Words : Links

Writers' Showcase

19 Things I Learned In The First Half Of 2020
by William Kitcher

I heard something about a virus but it’s probably not that serious.
 
Never meet your heroes. Marie Curie threw up on my shoes.
 
The problem with talking to 2 idiots at the same time is that, if they agree with each other, they think that proves they’re right.
 
We may have to re-think this whole marijuana legalization thing. A young woman asked me for a light for her joint, I gave her my lighter, and she lit the joint. It was going, but she continued to light it, over and over again. Sometimes she flicked the lighter and it didn’t flame but she held it to the joint, inhaling the butane.
 
When you sleep with your fourth cousin, some wag will no doubt ask you who the first three were.
 
The English are far more subtle than North Americans. An Englishwoman will say, “I’ve had some lovely wine and it’s late.” A North American will say, “I’m really drunk.”
 
When there’s a blackout and you go to your kitchen to get your flashlight, there’s not much point in trying to turn on the kitchen light.
 
I know someone whose last name is “Lepofsky” and spellcheck doesn’t like that and instead suggests “leprosy”, and I think that’s offensive.
 
When Wolf Blitzer of CNN is on TV, and someone says, “… as I’m sure you’re aware, Wolf”, they’re actually saying, “… as I’m sure you’re a werewolf.”
 
If you can’t remember the name of someone, sometimes it works out when you forget who you were thinking about in the first place.
 
Some Americans say “United States of America” as if there’s a United States of something else.
 
I find it difficult to differentiate between people telling me that they have a “sense of adventure” or a “sensitive denture”.
 
If you already have quintuplets, two sets of twins, and two other solos, it’s time to stop.
 
Bags of French fries that tell you to flip the fries after 12 minutes in the oven don’t explain how to guarantee that all the fries get flipped.
 
Corollarily, the instructions on the noodle package say to boil the noodles for 2-3 minutes, and to not overcook them. So, if you’d planned to boil them for 2 minutes, wouldn’t boiling them for 3 be overcooking them? So what I’ve learned is to never believe instructions.
 
The saxophonist Ornette Coleman was once asked to play a C, and he asked whether it should be a happy C, a sad C, an angry C, or a regretful C. And his trumpeter said to him, “Ah, shut up, Ornette, we’re just tuning.”
 
You shouldn’t tell your Great-Aunt Allie that the bag of cashews you have is called a nutsack.
 
If someone introduces herself as “Dave’s friend”, it’s not advisable to respond with, “Any friend of Dave’s is a friend of stupidity.”
 
That person in high school you didn’t know particularly well but liked anyway and whom you never saw again turned out to be an a-hole.
 
Learning how to count is difficult but achievable.
 
This virus is turning into a bit of a problem.