A college professor, a company CEO, and a janitor were walking along the beach when they found a magic lamp half buried in the sand. Together they rubbed the lamp and the genie emerged. “I can only grant you a wish if you can do someone else’s job for a day,” said the genie.
The professor said, “I will do the job of an elementary school teacher. What can be so hard about teaching a bunch of 6-year-olds how to read?”
The professor was teleported into a classroom. Not even an hour had gone by when the children’s screaming and naughty behavior had gotten to him. He threw all the school supplies on the floor and gave up, and the genie denied him his wish.
The C.E.O said “I bet I would make a great waiter. All you have to do is carry food back and forth. This’ll be a breeze!”
And so he was teleported to a restaurant, but after an hour, all the annoying customers drove him insane. The CEO smashed the plates on the ground and gave up. The genie denied him his wish as well.
The janitor thought for a moment and said, “I would like to be an artist.”
Instantly he was transported to an art studio where he glued all the school supplies and shattered plates to a canvas. He then sold the piece for $13 million at a gallery.
The genie was impressed and agreed to grant the Janitor his wish, but then asked how he came to be so clever.
The janitor replied, “I have a masters degree in art.”
Three men came out of a bar and piled into a taxi. They were being rather surly and disagreeable. The driver could tell that they were drunk, and decided to play a trick on them.
The driver turned the engine on and stayed there for a moment, then turned the engine off and told the three drunk men they had arrived.
The first man handed the driver a handful of pennies as he exited. The second man gave the driver a $5 bill. The third man scolded the driver and said, “Next time don’t drive so fast. You almost got us killed.”
A golfer is walking down the road carrying his clubs when he sees an Arab being held up at gunpoint. He pulls out a wedge and smashes it over the back of the robber’s head, knocking him unconscious.
“You saved my life,” says the grateful Arab. “I am a member of the Saudi Royal Family and I have the power and money to give you anything you desire as a reward.”
The golfer glances at his golf bag. “Some new golf clubs would be nice,” he says.
Two weeks later, the Sheikh’s secretary calls him up.
“We have acquired your golf clubs,” she says, “but the Sheikh would like to apologize to you in advance. Only three of them have swimming pools.”
Back when I first started FlushTwice.com, I was doing the HTML primarily by hand… and poorly at that. Up until 2008, I was using a collection of page templates designed to be easily edited for daily use, but it was a manual process and only changed when I uploaded the changes. No database, no scheduling, and no way to update the look and feel without breaking everything.
But then I found Movable Type… which was awful so I switched to WordPress, which was much easier to use and had a much better selection of themes to give my site a unique look. This opened up a lot of possibilities, but most importantly it gave Flush Twice an automated schedule. Now I could upload a bunch of jokes and comics well in advance, then sit back and let the system reveal them in time. It also allowed for users to leave comments.
But it didn’t stop there. Oh no! This baby had plugins too! Back then I only used a handful, but today over 20 plugins are required to give Flush Twice its particular look and feel. Also to track visitors, but do it in a privacy respecting way. I could have used Google analytics, but then Google would use that info to… to… Come to think of it, I don’t know why I fucking care about that, but I do.
The thing here is this: This is my site. I have complete control. No one else can mess with it. It’s mine and… What’d you say? Auto updates? What about them?
Ugh!
In the end, the control is like a rainbow. Only an illusion. WordPress and those 20+ plugins run my site, and the scary truth is, any one of them can bring my site down. All it takes is one malicious update to make the whole thing go away. Of course I could turn off the updates, but that comes with its own pitfalls as well.
And then there is the other elephant in the room. Shady plugin developers that have flooded WordPress.org with plugins as a service. You install the plugin, and they handle everything on their own server… including analytics. And of course you’ll need to pay them for their services as well, or suddenly your site doesn’t feel so good. What’s more, if their site goes down, so does yours. Trying to find a plugin that doesn’t pull this crap is becoming rather challenging.
In the end, all of civilization is built on a house of cards. Best not to startle the table.
Kudos
OK, so to start out the week, we have a few jokes from reddit, followed by a couple jokes donated by my good buddy, Big D. The submission page is still a great way to add jokes to the joke queue, but sadly it doesn’t add comics to the comic queue. I’ll have to work on that one.
“Pop, I’m nothing! I’m nothing, Pop. Can’t you understand that? There’s no spite in it any more. I’m just what I am, that’s all.” ― Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman
It was the middle of the night when Johnny’s car broke down a few miles from home. He decided to just walk the rest of the way, but to save time he would take a shortcut through the local graveyard.
As he was walking along the headstones, he heard a faint tapping noise. The deeper he went into the graveyard, the louder the tapping grew. Johnny started to feel very anxious until he saw the source of the tapping. An old man with a hammer and chisel was hunched over one of the headstones.
Relieved, Johnny said to the man, “Gee, mister, I was beginning to freak out because of that noise. I thought this place might have been haunted. What on earth are you doing here so late at night anyway?”
The old man continued chiseling and said, “They spelled my name wrong.”
A scientist built a time machine, and decided to travel back in time to ancient Rome in order to advance society more quickly.
Carrying a laptop computer, a television, and a cell phone, he went before emperor Caesar and said, “Emperor! I have brought you these gifts from many millennia in the future! Here, allow me to show you how they work.”
Caesar then turned to his guard and said, “Insanum hunc auferte ineptum.”
A soviet butcher came out, looked at the long line, and yelled, “We don’t have enough for all of you today! All the Jews, get out of the line and go home!”
After another hour of waiting, the butcher came out again and looked at the line. He yelled, “We don’t have enough for all of you! If you’re not a member of the communist party, get out of the line and go home!”
After another hour, the butcher came out again. “We don’t have enough for all of you! , unless you’re a veteran of the great patriotic war, get out of the line and go home!”
After another hour, the butcher came out. “We are completely out of meat for today! Everybody go home!”
One communist then turned to the other and said, “Yibat! What did I tell you, comrade? The Jews get all the luck!”
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.
