Category Archives: Humor

Verse – 2 Too Clean Limericks

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My friend Steve reads way too widely sometimes. The following are rated R or at least PG.

An Old Roué’s Laments

There are no extra-marital thrills,
My ardor grows hot and then chills,
For my wife is quite sly,
She forbids me to try,
And she counts all my little blue pills!

On computers, I never watch porn
No memory makes me forlorn:
My passwords are long gone,
I can’t get my log-on,
Drinking buddies all hold me in scorn.

– S. Robertson

Note from Steve: I pass these on, in spite of their semi-scurrilous content, because the news these days is mainly depressing and I needed a laugh and thought you might, too.
– Steve Shoemaker

The Socks in the Kitchen Sink

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Dirty sock washing

Dirty sock washing

She was washing her socks in the kitchen sink next to the hors d’oeuvres and the punch bowl after the ice skating party.

Marguerite was a bit different. Brilliant. Socially challenged. Single. The church group of singles and young marrieds was her closest thing to family. The family was used to the quirks, except for the newly married minister’s wife who’d never seen anything like this.

“What are you doing?”

“Washing my socks.”

“Why?”

“They’re wet.”

Recognizing that Marguerite was clueless, the 22-year-old minister’s wife quietly moved the splattered dish of hors d’oeuvres and the punch bowl to the long table nearby and saved her comments for later. Sometimes you have to stuff a sock in your mouth. Without room for every kind, a church is not a church.

Disclaimer: The picture is not from the church and it’s not Marguerite. It’s staged…I think.

Boy gets a life Lesson on Halloween

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Small boy dressed as Robin. I give him candy and he says “I don’t like that. I want the M&Ms in the bowl.” I say, “I already gave you candy”. He says, with more belligerence, “I want the M&Ms”. I say, “Take what you got kid. You can’t always get what you want. How’s that for a life lesson?” Diane bans me from handing out anymore candy.

– Mark Wendorf, Sanford, ME, friend and colleague with a great sense of humor. Diane is Mark’s spouse.

Verse – The Cancer Joke

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She knew cancer
better than almost
anyone else
in the hospital.
Although not an MD,
she had taught
in the Med School
while doing research
and writing books
and using her Ph. D.
to produce others.

Cancer Society money
had come to her lab
of busy bees for years.
She sat on panels
of judges that chose
who would study which
type of the deadly C.

Now the crooked cells
that had begun in her throat
had caused spots, as they say,
on her lungs and heart
and in her bones.

As a pastor married to the lab
headed by this agnostic,
I knew how to visit
folks given the death sentence:
listen, touch an arm, a shoulder,
remember good times together.

She wanted to tell me a joke.
I leaned close to hear the raspy voice
above the hissing oxygen.
“A microbiologist’s joke
is only one millionth as funny
as a regular joke.”

She raised a needle-filled hand
to touch my worried brow
bowed over her dry grinning lips.

-Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, November 5, 2013

Editor’s Note: Steve was “married to the lab” at the University of Illinois through one of its research scientists, his wife, Nadja.

Chocolate Chips

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Although I eat a small handful
right from the bowl (poured there because
there is no crinkly sound tell-tale),
just like Grandpa D did – cookies
need just half as much as are called
for on the yellow package (they,
of course, each year want more chips sold
than were the year before), so I
achieve the perfect dough-chip mix
by not following directions –
just like the old man when he’d fix
them (he taught me sales resistance…)
but then he’d put the Nestle chips
he’d saved into the Cream of Wheat
(you can’t eat too much chocolate.)

– Verse “Chocolate Chips”
– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, October 29, 2013

Football Trumps Emancipation Proclamation

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After eight months of planning for Emancipation Day celebrating the 150th Anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation at Chaska High School this Saturday (expected attendance: 600), this email arrived from one of the planners, the Chaska Chief of Police:

FYI. The Chaska football team has a “home” game, on Saturday. It’s a big one. It starts at 3 PM. Be prepared to encounter a lot of traffic, activity and parking may be a challenge.

Turns out the game is a Section 2AAAAA Semifinal with the Northfield Raiders. The Chaska Hawks are unbowed and unbeaten. Excitement is high.

We may not get into the parking lot.

The best (or worst?) laid plans of mice and men…. How did we miss this? “Lord, emancipate emancipation this Saturday.” Excedrin and Jack Daniels will be gratefully received.

Verse – limerick for fall

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When I see a mouse in a room,
I know it will soon meet its doom.
I’m quite a big guy,
But I don’t even try,
I just scream for my wife with a broom!

– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, October 11, 2013

Teaching my Daughter how to Drive

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Her brother let the clutch out much too fast
the first time he tried to start up the van
in the parking lot of the store that closed.
I told her how he lurched and jerked and ran
over the orange cones that I took to use
from soccer practice as a parking space.
The VW died, he swore, but tried
again and then again–giving more gas
and slooowly letting up the clutch. She learned
and did the opposite: the engine roared
as she held in the clutch and mashed the gas
pedal to the floor. I yelled to be heard
above the engine noise, “Let up, let up!”
and as she pulled both feet up, the car died,
of course. She threw the keys at me and cried.

She took the class at school and got an “A.”

– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, October 9, 2013

17 Pounds

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If matter never disappears but only changes form, where now are the 17 pounds that disappeared from my waistline over the last two months?

Shrinking waistline

Shrinking waistline

Okay, the picture is of some other guy 🙂

Verse – A Stain on the Moon (Brain?)

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While driving home last night, I saw

a full moon in the eastern sky.

There were no clouds wandering by

(I’m sorry, Wordsworth…), but I saw

a line, a dark smudge–vertical–

move from the upper right and fall

quite slowly (like a tentacle)

down to the lower left. 

                                               I called

my spouse at home using my cell

(risking the lives of all around),

but she saw nothing.  Could it be

a floater in my eye?  Windshield

bugs, butterflies?  Or could it be,

as some have thought, that I’m crazy.

 

-Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, September 19, 2013

Howling at the Moon

Howling at the Moon

Howl at the moon with Steve Tuesday, October 1 at 7:00 p.m. at Shepherd of the Hill Church Tuesday Dialogues: examining critical public issues locally and globally: “Emancipation: Becoming Free – Go Fly a Kite!”