Remember the story of Stone Soup?
A traveling beggar puts a big stone in a cauldron, adds well water, and hoodwinks the whole village into bringing vegetables and meat for a communal soup feast.
The beggar kept this scam going until one day, he woke up to find the cauldron missing.
He managed to scrape up cauldrons for the soup in the next few villages, but his luck ran out eventually.
“Okay, you don’t have a cauldron for soup,” he said. “We can make a big stone sandwich instead.”
Three cracked teeth later, angry villagers brained him with the stone.
Tag: book
The Oldest Trick In The Book
Every time my neighbor Stan says “That’s the oldest trick in the book!” I ask him “Which book?”
“Well, it’s just an expression!” Stan says. “Don’t be so literal!”
As a collector of books, I own many volumes of tricks, and the oldest trick in the oldest book involves magically turning a person into a frog.
Sadly, the first page is missing from that oldest volume, so there may be an even earlier trick, but it’s lost to history.
I show the book to Stan. “See,” I say. “This is the oldest trick.”
“Ribbit,” says Stan, and he hops away.
Multiplying
Long ago, my Christian friends tried to teach me about Jesus.
So, I sat there and listened while they regurgitated everything they’d learned in Sunday School.
I agreed that the guy sounded like a really cool dude and did some amazing things, but I never understood the whole “multiplying the loaves and the fishes” miracle.
Sure, I was good at Math, but I never figured out how someone could multiply bread by a fish.
“What’s pumpernickel times trout?” I asked them. “Or whole wheat times salmon?”
In the end, they thought me a heretic.
Whatever. Their math is still fishy.
Saucy Tim
Sometimes, I wonder if A Christmas Carol was just a CIA experiment involving hallucinogenic mustard.
The ghosts.
The memories.
The visions.
All his deep-buried secrets and fears, unleashed in a night of guilt and terror.
I mean, even Scrooge was suspicious, right? “Tis only a blot of mustard.”
If only he’d followed that suspicion instead of dismissed it so readily, the world would be a different place.
Sure, Tiny Tim would have died, but all those hookers he killed when he grew up to become Jack The Ripper wouldn’t have been brutally slaughtered.
God bless them, each and every one.
The Apple
I like to go to the store and buy a bunch of different kinds of apples.
Red. Golden. Macintosh.
All different kinds.
Then I bring them home and slice them up, making an apple buffet.
Each apple has its own unique texture, tartness, sweetness, and juiciness.
I try them all, closing my eyes and picking out slices to put in my mouth, chew slowly, swallow.
I thought about putting out caramel and honey and other things to dip them in, or walnuts and peanuts to roll them in.
But for me, the apples are enough.
Here. Have one, Snow White.
Arc
Noah sat on a stool and watched the skies darken, rainclouds growing thicker.
All around him, two of every animal stood around, stinking to high heaven and making a terrible racket.
Sadly, not enough to drown out the constant shouts of “YOU FOOL!” from his wife.
He felt something… was that a drop of rain? He held out his hand, wondered if it was raining already.
“So, are you going to load up your ARK now?” sneered his wife.
Noah looked at the gigantic, narrow wooden curve he’d built and sighed.
“I swear, I thought he said arc. Damn homonyms.”
Castaway
Joe’s ship wrecked on an uncharted island.
He had a supply of fresh water, all the fruit and fish and other good things to eat, and the weather was pleasant year-round.
Bored? Nope. His boat was loaded with books.
Nobody came searching for him, and after a few weeks, he grew used to being alone.
And he liked it.
However, every day, crabs would come up on shore and spell out HELP on the sand.
They glittered and glistened in the sun.
Joe would scatter them and brush away their telltale scuttle-trails
And he went back to reading his books.
Babel
Crawling out from the wreckage of Babel’s Tower, survivors call out for help.
Nobody understands anybody else. The Lord has shattered our language into many tongues incomprehensible to each other.
We grunt and point and shake each other in frustration.
One grabs a shovel and begins to dig.
“To bury the bodies?” I ask.
He doesn’t understand, just keeps digging.
We drag corpses into the hole, he shouts, and throws them back out.
Ah. Yes.
I see now.
I grab a shovel. Others grab theirs.
We join him and dig.
If we cannot reach Heaven, we shall certainly reach Hell!
Peach
What did you just say?
My hearing’s not so good, and I need new batteries in my hearing aids.
“Peach on earth, and good will to all men?”
Oh, you said peace, not peach.
Although, now that I think of it, peach makes a lot more sense.
I mean, have you ever been angry when eating a peach?
I haven’t. And you haven’t either.
Nobody ever has.
So maybe if we give peaches to everybody, there will be goodwill to all men?
What? You’re allergic to peaches?
Well, I guess there goes my whole “Good will” idea.
(You oversensitive jerk!)
They Walk No More
Things have been crazy here in Middle Earth.
There was a war. Lots of people and orcs and things got killed.
Some midgets and their friends chickened out and fled. They claimed they had to go off and destroy a ring.
Yeah. Right.
The noise died down, the fires got put out, we buried the bodies and repaired the damage to our homes and businesses.
Those ring-destroying heroes? Too hoity-toity for honest hard work.
They said “We’re sailing off to the West.”
Yeah, we got stuck building the boats. Them walking trees really yell when you mill them for planks.