Tag Archives: spoof

How To Read A Book

What are books? 

Books are stiff magazines that take raw hubris and stamp it onto thin, inedible wafers. There are well over one hundred books ever made.

Each book contains a unique combination of runes that when decoded by a  human sense can do many amazing things but cannot help one achieve everlasting life unless the spell within is effective. Besides spells, a book can tell a story about real or fake people, animals, towns or sports, and can even tell you how much pepper to add to suet to make it palatable to orphans.

How do you read a book?

Books stamped in English are read from left to right. Asking “why?” is like asking why a clown’s nose is red: it’s easy to explain and most people would leap at the opportunity to do so.

Reading English left to right mimics the voyage of the brigantine “Heart Reaper” as it made its way across the equator teaching remote societies an economical new language, while gathering fresh mullet in its holds to feed the insatiable King Cody the Beautiful. Prior to the voyage the direction books were read was up to the reader leading to mass confusion, including the popular misconception that the best way to greet someone was by saying, “Meet Hello, I’m what you aren’t.” Following months of petty arguments aboard the ship concerning the ending of the only book available (the book’s hero, the Runt, did indeed slay the Master Piper), Captain Adam recommended to the Council a standardization that would honour his voyage.

Now to the clowns. The noses we know today were the product of a dispute between two rival factions within a long forgotten circus troupe. One side was confident that round red noses would appeal to children because they resemble apples, the era’s top selling candy. Another felt fashion was the answer and pushed for something pointier. They solved their dispute the way most circuses do: by setting out two piles of sausages representing each choice and having a snake slither to the most attractive pile. Some say one pile was spiked with fresh mint to entice the snake toward the red pile while others claim it’s nonsense created by the losing half to help deflect embarrassment.

A fashionable beak created by the pointies who went on to form a famous fashion house.

A book must first be opened to be read. Bottled up heat within the book’s meat (each slice called a “page”) will escape upon opening. If captured and run though a Thermoelectric generator, a reader can produce enough heat to incubate the egg of a small gull. A book is bound by a spine. Like any mammal, if the spine is severed, the book will perish.

Once you have a book, look at each word, remember it, then move onto the next word. When you see the low dot (a “period”) quickly analyze what all the previous words meant then move onto the next chunk.

What happens if you can’t read the whole book in one go?

If you do not finish the book you must somehow mark your progress so as to continue the next time your eyes need a snack. Some classical examples are:

Whispering the page number to a child and having them remember it in exchange for salt and jacks.

Baking the page number into a loaf.

Tattooing the page number onto yourself or a piece of hard fruit

Associating the page number with something familiar in your life. For example if I left off on page 254, I would link it to my memory of father making me smoke 254 cigars after I flat out refused to go into the family cigar business

What do you do after you finish a book?

If you are able to get to the end of the book, do not worry because there are other books. The one you just read is not the only book. Do not burn the book unless it was bad. Do not eat the book unless it is tasty.

The glennmacaulay.com Style Guide

As a respected literary website, we’re always getting submissions from would-be comedians, aspiring scribes, and even railway tramps who’ve abandoned writing tall tales on the walls of boxcars with their own poo, with hopes of entering the digital age. Besides the obvious problem of forcing my scant staff of 57 interns who survive on a stipend of bread ends and unlimited candy canes to comb through thousands of submissions, the biggest issue we face is that very few are formatted properly.

In the past I’ve hesitated to make this style guide public but I recently had to turn down a promising Mark Twain spoof called “The Adventures of Tom Lawyer and Fuckleberry Hinn” because its formatting rendered it unreadable to my audience. To stop this from happening again, and from you wasting time that could be dedicated to planting bushes in funny places, I’ve copy and pasted an abridged version of the complete guide that covers the basics. If you’d like the complete version or if you’re currently working on a novel that you’d like to pitch to our Buck Fumble Books ‘n Calendars imprint, please sent a self-addressed, stamped envelope to:

345 Tree Street
Toronto, ON
O0O 0O1

Numbers

For numbers greater than ten, use figures, not words. If you need to know whether to use feminine or masculine terminology when describing a number, here is a cheat sheet:

1 – girl
2 – girl
3 – boy
4 -boy
5 – girl
6 – boy
7 – girl
8 – boy
9 – ??

To figure out the gender of numbers greater than nine containing one masculine and one feminine number, ask your parents.

If you’re planning on writing a number over 1,000,000,000  you must add an asterisk and corresponding footnote describing why you think there’s a number funnier or better.

Heights, weights, etc.

We use imperial units when talking about people, hens, gravy and anything purple (e.g. “The 12 foot woman snacked on the 40 pound hen while dabbing an ounce of iced gravy on her four inch, dark purple bruise (that she got when one of her students threw and apple at her (she’s a teacher)”).

For everything else we use the Canadian metric system, which is the same as the universal metric system except we have a unit of nothingness called a “nist”.

There is an exception for industry standards, e.g. we would never measure slop in kilograms but rather sacks.

Other

Only use exclamation points if your sentence has an explosion in it, or if you’re me. I’m the voice of the site and can yell whenever I want.

Never use the letter “b” unless you ask me for permission first! I don’t want to get into “hows? whats? whys? and whoas!” of it so let’s just say that it has something to do with what I thought was an empty promise to a woman I loved, stealthily overseen and notarized by a magistrate who held a grudge against my family because our frog farm put their toad shed out of business.

Whenever you use a word that features double letters, you must say out loud “double trouble!” You may be wondering how I’m able to enforce this rule but let’s just say the magistrate and I patched up our relationship. His legal knowledge, combined with strategically placed shrubbery in funny places, grants me the ability to move about this world unnoticed and ready to enforce the rules.

If you’re a freelance writer, please include a small tilde (˜) at the bottom right of every page, in honour of whoever this guy Lance was who apparently went to the slammer in order for writers to pitch stories to whoever they want. I’m not 100% sure that’s what “freelance” means, but the teenager who told me also taught me the code in Street Fighter that gives Dhalsim a Polo shirt and that was true.

And finally, be clear with your abbreviations! Don’t assume I know what you’re talking about. I was once about to publish what I thought was a hilarious diatribe against the hated Nut Bagel Alliance only to realize the author was actually talking about something called the National Basketball Association. I assumed the part about more “three pointers” was simply stating that nut bagel fans should abandon their favourite snack in favour of Doritos. And when they argued for more “slam dunks”, I found myself nodding at the thought of dunking a sesame bagel into a glass of almond milk, which makes way more sense than getting a bagel with almonds on it.

 

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City Toads (1990)

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You Won’t Believe What the Dude from the Countdown to Extinction Album Cover Looks Like Today!

 

Can you believe it’s been 22 years since Megadeth released the now classic heavy metal album, Countdown to Extinction?

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Those of you wondering, “what ever happened to the withered prisoner and what does he look like today?” are in luck because he recently turned up at a fundraiser in Hollywood looking AMAZING!

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Will You Buy My Grandkids? (1993)

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Friday’s gallery – engagement photos

The warrior king who runs glennmacaulay.com is back with another highly relevant Internet photo gallery, quick and easily consumable for the techie on the go.

Today’s gallery features a stunning collection of engagement photos, a modern photographic ritual that aims to capture pre-wed couples proving to their loved ones that they are more than just a vagina and a well-fitting penis. It’s also a way for photographers to take advantage of a new digital age where citizens feel the need to prove to others that they are happier and cuter than anyone else. Onto the gallery! We’ll talk after.

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Gregorby and Margoose give a not-so-subtle nod to Gregorby’s Moroccan heritage by acting out a traditional “Check Check”. Here, the male examines the female’s back thighs and lower ass to ensure she’s fit for a mule-butting while the female surveys the skies for hungry toucans. Photo by Beast

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Biv and El Chris re-enact their first kiss amongst the sauces of their forefathers. There is actually a lot more going on here than meets the eye–see those bananas? They’re pointed away from the constellation Canis Minor, communicating to us that the two love-birds are waaay into the healing powers of muck.

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Taking candid shots is another popular style of engagement photo. Jason and Jasonn had an hour long chat out on the picnic table while their photographer took snaps every thirty seconds, producing about 104 (the shutterbug took a short break to spit) hot pics. They opted for this one, which came about after Jasonn asked Jason if she preferred cumin or allspice for the hundredth time.

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George and his fiancée Iman just had to include their brood of North Boston Fire Rats, which they consider a part of the family. Iman looks a touch peeved only because the photographer yelled at them after one of the rats got into his popcorn.

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The pet trend continues in this photo of the future Mr. and Mrs. Tink. Things got a bit weird when the couple couldn’t contain themselves and started necking right there and then. While this was going on the cat sniffed the tiger skin wall hanging harder than Josef “The Schnoz” Herman during second semester mid-stinks at Odour College, North Bay campus.

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Urbanites Snarl and Friday don’t hide the fact that they love chewin’ on stew-dipped wood here in their condo kitchen. The photo was obviously staged because they’re not wearing bibs, but photography is about magic, not science.

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This couple was fairly subdued until the photographer told them to act is if they were at a salad bar that ran out of olives.

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Originally this couple wanted to eat an American flag in honour of the groom’s Latvian heritage but were convinced otherwise once the photographer brought out this baked cardboard with ham.

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Ian and Devra went through six days of make-up and glare training to get this once-in-a-lifetime shot. They aren’t portraying any particular set of characters but rather a composite of some of their favourites: Ian a mix of Vigo the Carpathian, a Crown Royal bag, Kim Mitchell and Donkey Kong, and Devra a mix of the mom from Alien Nation, Kat Von D, Powder, and Audrey Hepburn.

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Finally, we have Jones and Lady who covered themselves in flowers only to be bombarded by thousands of honey wasps. They were able to keep their cool because the photographer told them not to move or the they’d be charged four times the price. What might have been frustrating for some turned into a blessing for this pair–the venom from the wasps turned their blood into a poison that they used on Lady’s parents who had arranged for her to marry a different guy who doesn’t believe in movies.

Okay, let’s talk. What’s your favourite photo? Around the fifth photo I got kinda tired of writing captions but I forged ahead like a character in Lord of the Rings would if he or she found out that there’s a man who owns a killer set of books. Enjoy your weekend and don’t forget make fun of anyone who doesn’t know who Pearl Jam is.