Category: Humor

A Bean Burrito Saved the World

By Tippy Gnu on December 17, 2021 • ( 23 Comments )

I was abducted by aliens in Laughlin, Nevada. It’s possible. It happened. With all the illegal aliens pouring over our border these days, it only makes sense that some would come from outer space.

I had just left the the Casa Serrano Mexican restaurant, at the Riverside Hotel and Casino, and returned to my room near the top floor of the hotel. I had a doggy bag in my hand, containing one half-eaten bean burrito. I felt my stomach settle like the subsidence of the fracking fields of Oklahoma, and realized I now had that additional space I had been eagerly awaiting.

So as I gazed out the window of my room, at the colorful lights of the Laughlin strip, I tore the doggy bag open and stuffed my face with the remainders of the burrito. It was so delicious!

Suddenly a light in the sky caught my attention. The sun had just set on the town, and on the retirement dreams of thousands of disappointed gamblers. At first I thought the light was a strange glow from the moon. But then it separated into three glowing orbs. With a heavy gulp I realized we were being invaded by a fleet of UFO’s.

I was temporarily paralyzed, standing at the window, gazing into the sky at this extraterrestrial threat. I didn’t know what to do. Was this the end of the world? And then it occurred to me that my camera was sitting on my bed, just a few feet away . So I quickly grabbed it and snapped the photo you see at the top of this post.

I felt a strange, floating sensation as I pressed the shutter button. I looked down, and much to my amazement and terror, I found myself levitating. A beam of light had locked onto me, and had somehow sucked me through the glass of the window, and was drawing me closer and closer to the spaceships.

I blacked out, and floated in a kind of gelatinous darkness for what could have been forever or a few minutes. Then I came to, while lying naked on top of a table inside a round room.

A metallic gadget was strapped to my forehead. An odd, spidery-shaped figure stood over me. It had four legs, four thin arms, a long narrow neck, and very large, buggy eyes affixed to a tiny head. It spoke to me. It told me that the metallic gadget was a Vergitator, and that it translated word thoughts, making it possible for us to communicate telepathically.

I was informed that I was a prisoner of war, being held by an advance scout force. I was also told that the invaders knew I was a member of the Earth’s military defense force, because of the weapon I had pointed at their spacecrafts. I tried to explain that this “weapon” was just a camera, and that I take photos as a hobby. But my captor would not believe me, and told me that there are ways to fool the Vergitator, and that I had better stop lying and come forth with the truth.

“Take me to your leader,” came a telepathic order. I would have gladly done so, if our country only had one. But then I remembered a neighbor who plays loud music, and treats my wife and me rudely. So I directed my captor to my neighborhood. We hovered over his house, with the UFO’s making eldritch flying saucer noises. When my neighbor walked out to investigate, I pointed him out. “That’s him! That’s my leader!” And with one fell zap, a laser beam shot out from a space ship and vaporized him instantly.

The aliens then took me inside my own house to look for Earth weapons that they could analyze and learn about. They spotted my computer and made me turn it on. They saw the pictures in my photo collection and concluded that this computer was actually a teleporting machine. They began to torture me, to extract information on how this machine worked.

They wouldn’t believe my pleadings that it was just a computer, and nothing more. My torture was that I was forced to back up my data over and over and over again. The boredom damn near killed me. It was more than I could take. But suddenly Lady Luck saved me. That bean burrito finally kicked in, and I was struck with an unstoppable bout of flatulence.

Apparently, my intergalactic captors cannot handle the smell of flatulence. In fact, the chemicals are caustic to them. I saw two of the arms of one of these spidery aliens disintegrate, right before my eyes. They fled from my house in total terror, and beamed aboard their hovering spacecrafts. In an eyeblink they whizzed away, disappearing into space, from whence they came.

And there you have it. You may think I’m a hero, and maybe I am. I accept all nominations for Nobel Prizes. But truth be told, I’m not the only one to thank.

A bean burrito saved the world.

My Eulogy

By Tippy Gnu on December 12, 2021 • ( 112 Comments )

I’m getting kind of old, so I think it’s a good time to plan my final arrangements. But what the hay, no one knows when they’re going to die, so maybe it’s a good time for everyone else, too. I thought I’d start by writing my eulogy. Here’s what I want the preacher, or whoever the hell it is, to say at my services:

“Family, friends, and those who are owed money: we have gathered today to pay tribute to Tippy. Tippy lived a long life. Well, it was long enough, that’s for sure.

“When Tippy was born he was very young, and new to the whole process of birth. He prided himself on having grown up in adversity. Um, I mean, Adver City.

“He was breastfed as a baby, but preferred the bottle. Then one day his mother refused to share her whiskey, so he threw a big, crying, screaming tantrum. At that moment she decided he was an unfit child, and so she left him on a stranger’s doorstep.

“The stranger happened to be a near-sighted dog lover. She mistook him for a puppy, and he ended up being raised by her five large Saint Bernards. As he grew older and bigger and stronger, he vied for domination and emerged as the leader of the pack. This was his first, and possibly his greatest success.

“Eventually he ran away from home, carefully evading the dogcatcher. He met a beautiful young woman and began licking her leg. He lost four teeth, after being kicked repeatedly, but soon his whining and whimpering got the best of her, and she took pity. She brought this scruffy stray home, and acclimated him back to the human way of living.

“They fell in love and married, being happily married most of the time, or at least some of the time, but certainly not on those nights when he spent the whole time barking at anything that moved. And then one day he left her for that big kennel in the sky.

“And speaking of sky, let’s reflect on that. They say when you go to heaven, yer in for a surprise. Or urine something. Maybe we are all like a stream of urine, that fell from the heavens. Some of us landed upon flowers, some splashed upon mud, and then there are those like Tippy, who spattered the shoes of a drunk poised at a pissoir.

“Eventually, urine flows into the sewer. There it joins a driblet, then a runnel, and then a trilling stream. And as we live our lives, we discover we have joined not just a family, but a community of featherbrains, along with an inbred country of chowderheads, constantly embroiled in internecine warfare.

“On goes the journey of the urine stream, melding with rivers, and waterfalls, and lakes of sewage, while descending to lower and lower elevations. And in the same way, as we ourselves grow older, we feel more and more pissed off that our bodies are going downhill into a big shit pile.

“Finally the urine and shit passes through the sewage treatment plant from whence it came. And as for our own ending, our drop of sewage will eventually trickle into a glass of water, to be guzzled by a thirsty soul, endowing it with new life.”

I really do think they’ll be crying at my funeral. I owe them a lot of money.

Lights Out

By Tippy Gnu on November 22, 2021 • ( 111 Comments )

Dr. Schimpkin Schnuggles was a genius. He was a sleep researcher, and worked in the finest sleep labs in the country. Or so it said in the description of his bestselling book, The Snoozer’s Guide to Sound Sleep.

My restlessness kept me up until 1:00 am in the morning. So I finally gave up, got up, and decided to kill some time on my computer. I googled “insomnia,” and that’s how I discovered Dr. Schnuggles’ helpful book.

For a slight fee of just $37.99, I was able to download the tome to my Kindle. Slight fee, my foot! This book had better be good, or I’d never be able to sleep, worrying about all the money I wasted.

No sooner had I delved into Chapter One, than I realized what a genius this doctor was. Schnuggles advised that often it is our environment that causes insomnia. He said that light was usually the culprit, and he advised dousing any nightlights in the bedroom.

But of course! My Mickey Mouse nightlight with his glowing eyes and cheeks must be what’s keeping me awake. I’ve always had a little fear of the dark, and Mickey Mouse has been kind of a comfort to me. Nonetheless, that light was messing with my melatonin or melanin, or some damn thing, causing my cicada rhythm or circadian rhythm, or whatever the hell it was, to go all widdershins.

So I promptly unplugged Mr. Mouse, then plunged into bed. And I lay there for about ten minutes. Then fifteen minutes. No sleep. I cracked open my eyelids, and what do you know? I see light. My digital clock is glowing LED red, lighting up the whole room like a whorehouse. So I got up and found my Kindle, and propped it against the face of the clock. No more red light.

I laid back down in bed, staring at the dark ceiling. And then a twinkling caught my attention. An infernal flashing light from somewhere. I propped myself up, and realized that the modem and router to my computer had an assortment of LED lights twinkling and blinking away like a Christmas tree. I got up again, and foraged through my dresser drawer. I found some dark boxer shorts to throw over these electronic demons, then dove back into bed.

Any more lights? I decided to wait until my eyes adjusted to the dark before concluding all was clear. Or dark, that is. And what do you know, there were more lights. Little pinpricks glowing in the tenebrous gloom, emerging from my desk in the corner. I jumped out of bed and flicked on the wall switch and investigated.

My computer was the culprit this time. There’s a little tiny LED on the keyboard, indicating that NumLock was set. So I hit the NumLock key to turn that bastard off. But there was also a light on the microphone that I have connected to the computer. So I hit the off switch. But the computer case itself also had some glowing little LED’s taunting me with their cheery brightness. I went to the garage and found some black electrical tape, and smothered their cheer with a few strips.

There, that should do it. Now back to bed. But as I waited in the dark for my pupils to enlarge, I became aware of yet more tiny rays of starlight from various points in the room.

More investigating revealed some LEDs on power strips, the telephone, the TV, the computer mouse, and on a tiny little volume control knob on my stereo. I became a busy man wielding that electrical tape, dousing these illuminated invaders of my sleep. Electrical tape is hard to cut, and if you’ve ever messed with it, you’ll know what I’m talking about. I resorted to my pocketknife, which then led to a gashed and bleeding thumb.

Finally, with every goddamned LED extinguished in the room, I was able to relax in the vault of complete darkness I had created. Now, at last, at 3:46 am, I could get that restful slumber promised by Dr. Schnuggles.

But no, I still couldn’t sleep. It was very dark in there. I thought I heard a noise. Did it come from under the bed? Was it some creature that smelled the blood from my thumb? And then there was the pain. The pain from the wounded thumb. And then there was that $37.99 I so foolishly spent.

So there in the scary dark of my bedroom, I lay terrified, hurting, and angry. Finally, as dawn was cracking open the morning, I cracked open Dr. Schnuggles book again, and resumed reading. The next thing I knew, I was waking up, and the time was 4:00 pm. Alas, I’d finally discovered the secret to getting a lot of sleep. Just try reading a big, boring book.