Somehow I made it. The year 2018. Is there anything special about this year? Not really. Although it will be the tenth year that I’ve been using a Content Manager for this website… Still, not really that important.
The amazing thing about it is that it’s really getting up there. We are only a couple of decades away from realizing a new era of existence. Once that is achieved, all that is around you now will be gone. A new world formed. Consciousness will evolve, and life will gain new meaning.
Look, I know it doesn’t make sense to you now. It doesn’t make sense to me either. The future is going to be fantastic. A little scary perhaps, but fantastic nevertheless. You only need to hang on a bit longer, so take care of yourself.
Of course it’s not all going to be joy and happiness. The worst part is not being able to bring everyone along. Some will get left behind. Too many friends and loved ones won’t make it. Even enhanced enlightenment can’t salve that kind of grief.
But still our future is nearly here, and we just need to be patient while we work towards that more perfect tomorrow.
An out of work mime went to the zoo in an attempt to earn money performing his street act. As soon as he started drawing a crowd, the zoo keeper grabbed him and dragged him into his office.
The zoo keeper explained to the mime that the zoo’s most popular attraction, a gorilla, had died suddenly and the keeper feared that attendance at the zoo would fall off. He offered the mime a job to dress up as the gorilla until they could get another one, and the mime accepted the offer.
The next morning the mime put on the gorilla suit and entered the cage. He suddenly realized what a great job it was. He could sleep all he wanted, play and make fun of people. He was even drawing bigger crowds than he ever did as a mime.
Eventually the crowds grew tired of him. He noticed that the people were paying more attention to the lion in the cage next to his. Not wanting to lose the attention of his audience, he climbed to the top of his cage, crawled across a partition, and dangled from the top to the lion’s cage. Of course, this made the lion furious, but the crowd loved it.
At the end of the day the zoo keeper came and gave the mime a raise for being such a good attraction as a gorilla. So day after day the mime kept taunting the lion, the crowds grow larger, and his salary kept going up.
Then one day he was dangling over the lion and slipped. He fell to the ground and was terrified. The lion prepared to pounce, so the mime started to run round and round the cage with the lion close behind.
The mime was so scared he started screaming and yelling, “Help, Help me!”
The lion quickly pounced onto the mime. The mime found himself flat on his back looking up at the angry lion.
Just then the lion spoke, “Shut up you idiot, or you’ll get us both fired!”
After finding a leak in the bathroom, the lawyer’s secretary called the plumber, who fixed it in a matter of minutes.
The bill, however, was substantial. So substantial that the lawyer called to complain. “You weren’t here for more than ten minutes,” he said, “and I don’t charge that much for an hour.”
“I know,” retorted the plumber sympathetically, “and I didn’t either, when I was a lawyer.”
Two young boys were spending the night at their grandparents about a week before Christmas.
As they prepared for sleep, the two boys knelt beside their beds to say their prayers.
The youngest one began praying at the top of his lungs: “DEAR GOD, I’M PRAYING FOR A NEW BICYCLE! I’M PRAYING FOR A NEW NINTENDO! I’M PRAYING FOR A NEW BASEBALL GLOVE!”
The older brother leaned over and nudged the younger brother, “Why are you shouting your prayers like that? God isn’t deaf.”
To which his little brother replied, “No, but Grandma is!”
Here at Flush Twice we managed to post 256 “jokes” and with the 5 still in the queue, that comes to a magnificent 261 jokes for 2017. When you combine that with the rest of the archive, we’ve accumulated 1077. That’s amazing!
When it comes to comics, there’s actually a lot there as well. There are 52 Pathos in the Plumbing episodes for this year. This brings the total up to 180, but don’t forget we also have the 134 comics from 2008 on, and the 547 prior to that for a grand total of 861 comics since I began creating them back in 2004.
Of course the numbers are nice, but the main goal is quality. I don’t mean just the funniest jokes, but quality in terms of organization, canonization, and overall readability. Is Flush Twice the greatest joke site that I had envisioned? Not by a long shot. I don’t yet have the coding skill to set that up. On the other hand, it’s objectively better better than the majority of joke sites I’ve seen… though I tend to be a little biased in my opinion.
So what’s on my wish list?
What things would I like to see for Flush Twice down the road? I’d like to find a plugin that lets visitors add tags to the jokes. Sure, I guess I could run through and tag 1077 jokes myself, but I think the readers would be able to do a more thorough job of selecting the right tags. I’d also like to recreate the original comic’s structure in the post archive. There’s 547 comics that are lumped into a few “historical pages”, but it doesn’t really give that same sense of continuity.
I think the number one thing on my wish list is that it keeps going. Obviously I’ve spent a lot of time on Flush Twice, and I’ve really enjoyed seeing how that work has grown and evolved. And while even google.com might one day cease to exist, I would like to think that Flush Twice will actually rank up there with the long term survivors.
I suppose I should start by telling you how it happened. It was an otherwise nondescript day back in February. I went to get out of my rocker-recliner and when I scooched forward to get up, the front armrests bottomed out on the floor as they always do. Unbeknownst to me, Alex just happened to be laying down there that fateful day, and his left arm managed to get pinched.
Of course he yowled the loudest I'd ever heard him yell in his entire life and shot off into the basement. I felt terrible about it, but then I had no way of knowing he was down there when I went to get up. After a short while, Alex came back upstairs, and I was able to check for injury.
Shockingly, there were no broken bones, no blood, and Alex was able to walk just fine. It almost seemed cartoonish at the time, but down the left side of his left arm was a ribbon of flattened fur. He seemed somewhat indifferent to this, and acted like he just wanted to put the whole thing behind him. Seeing as Alex didn't appear to be in immediate danger, I took a "wait and see" position.
Over the next month, the "ribbon" began to shrink inward towards his elbow. I took this as a good sign that his injury was healing naturally and everything would be fine... But things were not fine. After a month and a half, his elbow began to swell. By mid-April I had to take him in to the vet for an exam.
The vet did a fair bit of Hmmm'ing and scrunched her face a lot. She didn't want to poke it with anything for fear it might introduce something. She took some measurements and expressed a "wait and see" attitude. I then scheduled a follow up appointment two months out.
Only a month later in mid-May, the swelling on his elbow had increased to the point that it started to ulcer. I called the vet and got him in immediately. This time they tried to drain it, but it went horribly. After the first stick, Alex started squirting blood all over the place, and the vet and technician freaked out and were running around looking for towels while I had to hold my cat down in a growing pool of his own blood.
After they got things back under control, she tried again with a larger needle, and went in from a different direction. After plunging to the center of the mass, she remarked that it was solid and that the fluid had probably dispersed into the surrounding tissue. She then went on to suggest that it might even be "malignant" and recommended a biopsy. They gave me an estimate for the procedure that ran from $500 to $800. I immediately left and made an appointment with another vet that I had gone to in the past.
The next day, my alternate vet didn't have any good news. By now, Alex's arm was very infected. At first he suggested that the arm would have to come off, but after noting Alex's age, he pulled back and recommended palliative care. I pushed for a quote on the cost of an amputation, and he informed me it would be around $3500 at the lowest, and that at his age, Alex would only live another 6 months after the surgery, and to just stick with palliative care.
They gave Alex a shot of antibiotics, a shot for long term pain management, prednisolone tablets and a liquid antibiotic, along with an appointment to come back about a month later.
Over the memorial day weekend, I cleaned Alex's wound and administered his meds. Alex was still Alex though. He obviously wanted to live, so I began making phone calls. Eventually I got in touch with the Humane Society. It took week and a half to finally get in, but after looking at Alex's arm, their surgeon said that the arm was "not compatible with long term survival" and agreed to amputate it... in two weeks.
That was the longest two weeks of my life.
Every day that thing on his elbow grew bigger and bigger. In the final week, it started to split open. It looked like something out of a horror movie. The outer layer of skin died off and eventually I had to cut the hard chunk of dried flesh off with scissors. Fortunately the antibiotics prescribed by the second vet kept the wound site free from infection.
And through all of this, Alex was still Alex. He just kept on living his life like nothing was wrong. Even with that thing on his arm, he still walked normal, climbed up and down the stairs, jumped on the bed, table, dresser, et cetera. Part of me knew this cat was gonna make it, but part of me was scared that his arm was going to go septic and Alex would die.
I felt relieved on the day of the surgery. We made it through to this day! Alex would be a tripod, but he was going to live! I dropped Alex off at the Human Society and went to work expecting to pick him up between 4:00 pm and 5:00 pm.
My phone rang a little before noon. The voice on the other end informed me that the surgery had gone fine, and they didn't notice anything wrong during the procedure, but in the recovery room, Alex's heart rate began to drop, he went non-responsive, and his pupils dilated. The surgeon explained that sometimes a blood clot will break free during the surgery and make its way into the brain. Alex had had a stroke. There was nothing more they could do.
Moments later, Alex died.
Usually I show off pictures of Gail here, (she's doing find by the way). Gail is a fun dog who loves to constantly run and play, but Alex was the one that I could really count on for affection. He would hop up on my chest when I was resting in my recliner and purr. He would be there at the door to greet me when I came home. He would keep me company when I pooped. He would wake me in the morning, and insist I gave him a thorough petting before I went to sleep at night. He talked to me with his incessant meows, and made sure I never left the house without filling the food and water bowls. Alex loved to get his "full kitty massage" complete with belly rubs, and he was the kind of cat that would walk up and headbutt me to let me know I was his as much as he was mine.
Flush Twice has been around since May of 2003. It started out as a JOTD (Joke of the Day) website. New jokes were published every weekday. Over the years, good jokes were increasingly hard to come by, and eventually they got so rare that I just stopped trying to publish them.
Since 2004 there has also been an eponymous comic. I still occasionally publish a new one on Saturdays. It’s also rare anymore, but sometimes it happens.
Here lately I’ve been posting a “Link of the Day”. For the time being, I will be featuring a new website from my enormous collection of bookmarked websites every weekday. None of it is solicited promotions, and no one is paying me to feature their site. These are just websites that at one time I thought were interesting enough to add to my bookmarks folder.
I highly encourage using some kind of ad blocking extension before clicking on any of these links. You’ll also hear me say this phrase a lot about these posts: “They can’t all be winners.” But it’s better than just leaving the site abandoned.
The jokes were generously provided by friends and visitors such as yourself. I want to express my eternal thanks to everyone over the years who helped contribute to the collection.
So what is it that makes a joke funny?
It all boils down to a sudden shift in perception. The story starts you thinking one way, then the punchline turns that thinking on its ear. The art of the joke is to craft a short story that isn’t overly contrived, then deliver a punchline that suddenly shifts your perception about the story you were being told.
Many of the jokes on this site are offensive, and I make no apologies for it. Offensive jokes work by making the reader uncomfortable through the use of a taboo subject thus enhancing the underlying humor. Without the offensive element, the joke would simply not be as funny.
