Category Archives: Essays

This is a very boring name for me writing about the stuff that’s on my mind. I strive to make the essays more interesting than the word “essays” and this description.

Essays

“What’s the difference between…?”

A group of us were talking, and a friend said “I heard a new joke!” Then he turned to me and said “Howard’s probably heard it already, but here goes…”

Q: What’s the difference between boogers and broccoli?

A: Kids won’t eat broccoli.

We all laughed (we includes me) and then in mock astonishment my friend said “you hadn’t heard that one?”

“Not that one” I replied, “but I’ve heard lots of jokes like it. By the time you’d finished the question I had three punchlines. You used the straight one. It’s a good one though. I laughed.”

At this point everybody was eyebrows-up. Was I really claiming to have three punchlines to a joke I’d just heard? Well, yes. The “what’s the difference between X and Y?” joke is a formula with lots of formulaic punchlines. Of course, it helped that broccoli is a food. In that context I immediately knew the stock punchline had to do with eating.

I went on: “I would have gone the self-deprecatory route, and said ‘I still won’t eat broccoli.”

They laughed, and there was some groaning. Formulaically, that punchline encapsulates the ‘kids eat boogers but not vegetables’ thought, and additionally identifies me as a kid in the worst possible way.

But I wasn’t done: “And then there’s one of the earliest change-ups on the joke: ‘that explains the broccoli salad you made.'”

More groaning, but still lots of laughter. Also, I could tell that this group of people was now nervous about telling me jokes. Hey, it’s okay to tell me a joke. Just don’t call attention to the fact that I may have heard it, because that’s a setup for more jokes and a soapbox.

I later shared this experience with my 12-year-old son, and we realized that there was a self-deprecatory version of that third punchline, giving us a fourth:

A: Oh, good. You’ll like this broccoli salad just fine.

For me, THAT one is the home run. Self-deprecatory AND I’m making YOU eat the boogers. Win/win!

The operating principle here, for me anyway, is that lots of setups can deliver more than one punchline, and often a good punchline can be made into a great one, or fine-tuned for the audience, with a little exploration. Using the same basic setup, I tried this on one of my old favorites, which goes like this:

Q: What’s the difference between a clarinet and an onion?

A: Nobody cries when you chop up a clarinet.

I quickly arrived at one where the joke is on the listener (the classic change-up on the formula):

A: This explains why you’ve had such trouble learning to play the clarinet.

Now that it was personal, it was time to return to the onion:

A: I didn’t cry when I chopped up your clarinet.

I’ve talked before about how the first punchline that comes to mind is low-hanging fruit. If you want to learn how to reach further up into the tree, take some old “Dad” jokes like these and see what other punchlines their setups can lead to.

And don’t be afraid to play with the setup, too. I love this gem:

Q: What’s the difference between an accordion and a trampoline?

A: Take off your shoes before jumping on the trampoline.

As I mused upon other punchlines, my son said “is an accordion sort of like a bagpipe?” Ah, my young genius…

Q: What’s the difference between an accordion and a bagpipe?

A: Which side of the road you’re on when you hit the player with your car.

(*Note: For the record, I enjoy well-played accordions, bagpipes, and clarinets, and not only can I tell the difference between broccoli and boogers, I can tell the difference between broccoli and cauliflower, and I’ll eat both of them.)

 

Essays

On Leap Days

It’s kind of ridiculous for people to think that an anniversary or a birthday only happens once every four years just because its original occurrence was on the 29th of February.

And if not ridiculous, at the very least it’s hypocritical.
Let’s say you were born on April 16th, 1970. That was a Thursday. The following year you didn’t get a birthday because you were just a baby. Also, April 16th was a FRIDAY, and your birthday is a THURSDAY. Your birthday, Thursday, April 16th, didn’t come that year. Waaaah so sad you big baby.

I was born on the 60th day of the year, which was February 29th. The next year I didn’t get a birthday because I was a baby. Also, the 60th day of the year was March 1st.

If you to expect leapers to not celebrate something because February 29th isn’t around, you should be prepared to surrender roughly 6/7ths of your own birthdays and anniversaries.  Of course, that ridiculous (but theoretically FAIR) practice will put the leapers under an additional shadow, because the same weekday for a leap day only comes back around every 28 years. And under that system, I’m still a couple of leaps shy of turning two.  But I WILL get a birthday party when that happens, because at two I am TOTALLY NOT A BABY.

Also, It will be a Thursday.

Essays

Hot Cocoa, My Way

News of Snowpocalypse 2015 had me craving blanket forts and hot cocoa (but not necessarily snow,) and then I realized that my hot cocoa recipe is good enough to share. Here it is:

Ingredients
  • 3/4 cup Hershey’s baking cocoa (the powder)
  • 3/4 cup sugar
  • 3/4 cup water
  • a dash of salt
  • 1 tsp vanilla extract
  • Milk, and some mugs
Optional ingredients*
  • 1 tbsp Terva-Siirappi (Finnish pine tar syrup)
  • 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
Preparation

Put the cocoa, the sugar, and the water in a small pot. Bring it to a boil, stirring constantly with a whisk. It’s ready when it’s smooth — no cocoa clumps, no sugar granules.

Add the salt and the vanilla. At this point you have a standard dark chocolate syrup.

Add the cinnamon and the tar syrup. The cinnamon adds a very cozy aromatic flavor, and the tar syrup gives it a hint of smoke for some extra-very cozy. More tar means more smoke AND more sweet.

Now that the syrup is ready, take a mug, fill it partway with milk, and then microwave it for a minute or so. You want hot milk, not boiling milk. Now fill the cup the rest of the way with the chocolate syrup you’ve made. For an 8oz mug I do 3/4 cup of milk and 1/4 cup of syrup (at least when I’m talking about it publicly. It’s possible the syrup-to-milk ratio moves from 1:3 to 1:1 when nobody is looking.)

Stir. Enjoy.

(*Note: no, they’re actually not, but since you probably don’t have Terva-Siirappi on hand right now you get a pass. It’s remotely possible that the same effect can be achieved with a tiny bit of liquid smoke, but I’m not going to perform that experiment until, in desperation, I realize that I’m out of Terva-Siirappi.)

Essays

How My Project Budget Works

In 2014 I created a spreadsheet for project management that allowed me to be a little more realistic about what I can and cannot do. The result was that I had a very productive year in spite of losing four full work-weeks to influenza, and we went on to deliver two books, two slipcases, and a calendar in time for the holiday shopping season. And that last bit? That’s kind of a big deal when it comes to the bottom line here.

I’m doing it again in 2015. Here’s how it works:

  1. I carve my time up into twenty-hour blocks called, intuitively enough, “half-weeks” of work.
  2. I make a list of projects, and I guess how many half-weeks each of them will take. A convention weekend is a half-week. A big convention like GenCon Indy is a full week. The Writing Excuses retreat was 3 half-weeks, and I budgeted exactly right that time. Each project becomes a row in the spreadsheet. Each is assigned a priority based on the month in which it needs to be complete.
  3.  I include the comic, 52 weeks of which will take 52 half-weeks of work (This assumes that I’m able to bang out a week of strips in 20 hours. This is increasingly an unsafe assumption.) This got a priority of 9, because I needed it at the bottom of the list. I know that one has to get done each and every week. Duh.
  4. Oh Magog, the math. The spreadsheet balances my projected half-weeks of work, and subtracts it from the pool of 104 half-weeks in a year. The spreadsheet then tells me that I have too much on my plate, so I revise the estimates or prune projects. This happened in January of 2014, and after careful revision I had a year’s worth of work that fit inside a year, except that 8 months of work needed to fit inside of 5 months. But I could SEE this, and knuckle down accordingly.
  5. Each week I update the amount of work remaining in the tracking column for each project, and I input which week of the year it is in a cell that determines the size of the pool of remaining half-weeks. The spreadsheet then automatically calculates the balance, and usually it tells me that I need to cough up 60 hours or 80 hours of work during an upcoming week in order to catch up.
  6. I color-code the projects based on whether they’re scheduled items (Conventions or vacations that chop time out of my schedule), and whether they’re complete (lime green, with grey text — these are items I don’t need to look at or be distracted by, because DONE!)
  7. The spreadsheet sits in my Dropbox where I share it with Sandra. She can review it and see how I’m doing. She can also update it, though she never actually did that.

I know there are other tools for project management, but when I looked into them I realized that the amount of time I would spend learning how to work something I paid for was about equal to the amount of time I would spend building a spreadsheet I knew innately how to use, and could quickly reshape to fit the way I want to plan things. I don’t have a sanitized version of the spreadsheet to share, but maybe at some point I will.