August 23, 2008

• How I burned down my house.

  
      So it was another damp sunday morning and I had just come inside from picking up the weekly paper.  I love getting the weekly paper because it is always filled with more knowledge then I could ever possibly need for the week.  Seriously, I never have to watch the news, listen to the radio, or go to church as long as I have a Sunday paper to do those things for me.  However, as I mentioned, today was a damp sunday, and our crummy paper boy had managed to score a field goal directly into one of our rose bushes with his killer accuracy.  So at great cost to my arm, I was able to fetch it out of the roses, but after I wiped all of the blood off of the cellophane wrapper, I realized that the numerous holes caused by the rose’s thorns had allowed all the rain and moisture in the air to cause my paper to get soggy.  Anybody who has EVER attempted to read a damp newspaper knows that this simply doesn’t work.  A myriad of very important problems arises from this dilemma.

      >  You can’t look all cool and slick by leaning back in your chair and covering your face up with the paper because it will just flop over.
      >  You can’t make that annoying flipping sound that is a staple of sunday paper reading, instead you get a stomach-wrenching slosh that would make Oscar the Grouch puke his gizzards.
      >  You can’t actually read the paper because the pages become so transparent, the images and text from the back of the page bleed through and makes everything all garbled.
      >  When you finally stand up after not being able to tolerate the previous three issues any longer, you notice that it looks as though you have peed your pants due to the puddle caused by the dripping parchment.
      >  You burn your house down.

      How does a damp paper cause you to burn your house down?  That’s very simple, how do you dry your damp papers?  You put them in the oven of course.  Every does this from time to time.  Your paper is a little soggy so you just toss it in the trusty Magic Chef and wait a few minutes, and presto, dry paper!
      What!!! You’ve never done this?  Really?  I thought everybody thinks of doing this when their newspaper is wet?  Really?  Then please tell me why there is a direct advisory against doing this on the owners manual:

   

      Can you really believe they would think to include this in the operations manual for the oven?  I can just see the editor’s meeting now: 

  

      Hardly, I’m sure.  It just seems to me that this is one of those ideas that they wouldn’t have really felt the need to include if it weren’t that somebody had already burnt down their house because they left their newspaper in the oven.  Besides, do you think the kind of people that would normally do such a thing would really read their user guides anyway?

      Recipe for Burnt House
        (serving size = 1 family + pets)

  ingredients:  Newspaper, water, house, oven.

  1.     Preheat oven to 460 degrees fahrenheit.
  2.     Dampen one (1) newspaper.
  3.     Bake at 460 degrees.
  4.     Forget about newspaper.
  5.     Serve EXTRA HOT!!!!!

   

      Until next time, good luck with life.
  
     
  p.s.  the first story was actually fictional.

  • 11:18 am
  • 34 Comments