Punderdome II: The Pundering

Actually this should be Punderdome III, but since I declined to blog about that one I decided to confuse everyone instead.

Once again I made a valiant effort to compete in that most Brooklyn-y of Brooklyn events, the monthly Punderdome. My so-called friend insisted I use the most demeaning pun name possible (My Little Punny) which prompted several people to approach me and excitedly declare themselves 'bronies' or ask if I knew what bronies were (which, even if I knew before, I know a great deal more detail now).

This time we didn't have the joy of seeing one of the contestants moon the audience, but at least one person competed in drag.

BUT, the really important thing is that I made it past the first round. I did have the advantage of much more useful themes: Saturday morning cartoons (I enjoyed playing in the sandbox as a child. I used to have all kinds of tiny dunes adventures) and birds (You're robin me blind! I have bills to pay!) If these trends continue, I should be winning the damn thing in two or three months.

Looks Like Nemo Found Us

I was sent home early from work on Friday because of the impending Blizzard Nemo. I had great difficulty convincing my co-workers that the storm was named after the sea captain:

 And not the fish:

 

Really, why would you name a storm after an animated clownfish? Seems like bad taste to me. A mysterious submarine pilot makes a better choice any day of the week.

Needless to say, the MTA was slow all weekend. I don't accept this constant service failure at the slightest sign of inclement weather. Oooh, there was snow. Big deal. Do you suppose the Berlin subway shuts down every time it snows? What about Moscow? The New York subway would shame even the most impoverished former Soviet republic.

It's the fault of those damn reactionaries who run the country who believe that, if people are going to demand public services, then at least those services should be underfunded and lackluster. Otherwise, what do people have to strive for?

Missing the Super Bowl

And really, I don't feel like I've lost anything.

I suppose that makes me un-American.

I know my Ravens-loving friends will never forgive me.

But the ads! The ads are incredibly expensive! And they have famous people in them!

That's nice. If I really want, I can watch them online.

I spent my day writing music and playing 'Diplomacy', which is like a much shorter version of Risk.

Punderdome

Puns! Is there any word more thrilling to the human soul?

I recently discovered a monthly pun competition in Brooklyn called Punderdome 3000.  

The format is simple: 18 contestants or pairs are given a category and challenged to make puns relating to it. They have 90 seconds to think while distracting music plays.

 The winners are given by audience reaction and can proceed to the next round.

Naturally they're not going to provide a helpful topic like 'food' or 'music'. Instead, you'll get things like 'pirate nicknames' or 'pumpkins'.

My category was 'Seasonal Affective Disorder'. My story was something like this:

So, the changing of the seasons always gets me down. I was telling my friend Thomas '[Aw, Tom], this winter...it's like you only have one old pair of shoes that you can't avoid wearing, and I feel like I'm going to [fall back] into [dis pair]. 

He said to me 'I know that around Christmas you [pine] for warmer weather, but be patient and we can [spring forward] into a new season."

Not my best work, certainly, but not bad under the circumstances. Until next month! 

A Christmas Carol

I haven't read A Christmas Carol in almost 15 years - since 7th grade, in fact. It's a short read and this year I decided to take another stab at it.

What is most surprising about the story is not the plot itself - we've all probably seen a hundred adaptations of it by now - but how vivid the setting, and by contrast how lacking in imagination is Scrooge's conversion.

It is a little strange to describe Charles Dickens as lacking in imagination, but there you are. Dickens saw, and clearly saw, the problems of Victorian England - the filth, the poverty, the wretched inequality and the exploitation of children. But he completely failed to understand why those problems came about, and how they might be resolved.

Scrooge refuses to give to charity, won't go to his nephew's Christmas dinner, underpays his clerk and forces him to toil in a freezing-cold little office. Why? Dickens' only excuse for Scrooge's meanness is that he had simply forgotten how wonderful Christmas was, and a few examples were all that was needed to bring him around (what a shame Scrooge did not have a photo album). It does not occur to Dickens, perhaps, that paying workers low wages and scrimping on coal make a certain economic sense and are not usually done out of pure spite.

Of course, if the sole reason that Scrooge is a miser is human cruelty, then the only possible remedy is human kindness - and here we see the same theme repeated over and over in his other books, that of a kindhearted rich man coming along and solving everyone's problems with bags of gold. Dickens simply can't face the idea that the system might be producing problems by design - if only people would be nice to one another, everything would be fine.  Maybe so, but for a renowned social critic a response like that is simply an evasion.