Personality Test #2

Lawyer Jokes

My Wife calls lawyers law-yers; most people say "loy-yers" she says "law-yers." She claims she's pronouncing it correctly. At any rate, lawyer jokes are fun, especially when you string together a couple dozen and split the telling with your Dad (whose voice is similar to your own... in this piece there are two deep voiced guys telling jokes). This is from circa 1999, when I was doing a lot of work on goofiness.com (I have since sold the domain name). There were a couple of times we were laughing too much to tell the jokes right and I had to edit it down. It was a lot of fun doing this, especially with my Dad helping.

Lawyer Jokes

Birthday Cakes

I've been learning guitar so I could do spontaneous audio... I tend to overproduce some of the audio, spending a lot of time tweaking. This is okay if you have time, but I don't. I also like the spontaneity and energy of doing it once and leaving it at that. So, after a couple of years of guitar, I had a story happen, wrote it up and laid it down, quickly. This was really a test, just to see how it would sound. I think it is a good format. The actual quality of this audio isn't good -- there is some clipping in about a half-dozen places -- but the format is good, and I've used it again, on a George Carlin-esque "Dirty Words" piece I'll post someday.

Listen to Birthday Cakes


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More Jokes

Here's another joke I produced:

Dozen Penguins

I loved this joke when I first heard it. What is it about kid jokes that make them so much fun? They aren't so much just funny, but funny and... something else? Innocent? Why does a gorilla have big nostrils? Because it has big fingers. See?

Hell's Bells

I arrived at AC/DC a few years late. Because of my age, they hit their popularity peak about 10 years before I was old enough to care. So, while I'm not sure how good of an influence they are on me, a trying-but-failing Christian man, I've always liked their songs. My favorite obscure AC/DC song is the mellow "Ride On."

Anyway, one night I found my old "AC/DC Greatest Hits" cassette and I was listening toand thinking about the song "Hell's Bells" and how wild it would be to hear that song 100 years ago. Back then, there wasn't any recorded music and pop music was orchestral marches and symphonies. The guitar wasn't that popular and the electric guitar was unheard. Reverb, feedback and heavy distortion and the modern drum set where also years away.

Now, this little daydream was happening around the time the HBO series Band of Brothers was debuting. So my little daydream took me to a foxhole around Bastogne, during the Battle-of-the-Bulge seige.

What would it be like to hear a song like that without all the stuff leading up to it? Would it be recognized as post-modern music, or some sort of noise that didn't resemble music at all? I mean, I'm no hardcore fan but I really like most of the popular AC/DC songs. I consider them music. But I had Chuck Berry, the Beach Boys and Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, etc. I experienced an evolution to the music. But what if I hadn't?

Hells Bells (mp3)

Public Radio Shortlists

So, I've been able to get some goofy stuff on the airwaves, too. Two of these shortlists made it on Day-to-Day, a public radio show that plays nationwide. I've had other pieces on various stations around the nation, but this is the only nationwide airplay I've had. This is all really just a hobby. It'd be a lot harder doing this for a living instead of the work I already do.

The gig with this short lists was to try to guess what the list is about before it ends (I tell you at the end).

Short list 1, Short list 2, Short list 3, Short list 4

First Audio

I've made some audio I don't have, or have on cassettes somewhere (I got to get my old demo tape online sometime!). But, this is the first piece I did for my goofiness.com web site (which I sold a few years ago... I kept the content, sold the domain name). It's called Darrell and God and basically fulfilled one of my concepts... that a good joke can be turned into an audio "story" pretty easily. All the things that make a decent story are there.

Click here to listen to Darrell and God

Hey, it's not hilarious, but I wanted to show something early.

New Personality Test

Knitting w/Spaghetti

Knitting with Dog Hair -- [link] by Natalie Kestecher -- this show is superb!

"place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best." -- Harvest of Spaghetti [link] -- this was a BBC Television special and it ended up going over so well, people sent in money to buy spaghetti seeds!

Watch a fuzzy postage stamp of the broadcast here.

Here's more a great list of Mockumentaries, and some history on the word.

Moving

I've made a few mockumentaries, simple ones. The best are the more elaborate, involving actors. I will do those one day. I have many, many ideas. Not short of ideas. Just time (and a trust fund) to do them.

3. My third mockumentary, a mockumentary about a diarist with his own revelation of strange humanity (the diarist, not his neighbors): Garbage [mp3] by Hans Anderson

2. My second mockumentary, of people with a personal risk story: SHARK! [mp3] by Hans Anderson

1. My first mockumentary, of the over-the-top first person essay: Switched Bags [mp3]