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Archive for the ‘Funny (ha ha)’ Category

Aunty Donna: The Magical Dead Cat Tour (Perelman Theater, Kimmel Cultural Campus, Philadelphia, PA, October 7, 2023)

Posted in Aunty Donna, Australia, Broden Kelly, Funny (ha ha), Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, Mark Bonanno, Perelman Theater, Philadelphia, PA, Religion, Zachary Ruane on October 7, 2023| Leave a Comment »

[ATTENDED: October 7, 2023] Aunty Donna

I don’t recall what made me check out Aunty Donna one night.  But the opening skit of the first episode had me cracking up.  I’ve been a fan ever since.

The only “problem” with them is that their jokes are so vulgar, so over the top rude, that it’s hard to share them.  Especially with the kids.  I mean, even their merch–which includes a hat that says Morning Brown is hard to explain without going a bit red in the face.

So what was this show going to entail?

Well, the promo told us this

Dear Human Beings,

Hello, I am a Magical Dead Cat, the titular Magical Dead Cat from the very title of this very show. I write to you today because I have discovered the most wondrous sketch show on the popular streaming service Netflix – Aunty Donna’s Big Ol’ House of Fun. I was so impressed with said show that I issued Aunty Donna this challenge: entertain me with a 2 hour live show, one that features all new sketches, but also a few fan favourites. It MUST include a short interval, and based on availability / budget, possibly an opening act. If Aunty Donna succeeds in pleasing me with a rip-roarin’ show, I have promised to surprise them with a special, web slinging, mystery guest!
Come, sweet humans, and see if Broden, Zach and Mark are up for the task!

With loving grace,
The Magical Dead Cat.

The show also came with a warning that there would be occasional coarse kanguage.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  It was filled front to back with nothing BUT coarse language.

They opened the show by having an announcer introduce each of the three comedians.  And as each one’s name was announced they came to the front of the stage and did a high-stepping dance.  But the announcer continued to re-introduce Broden and Mark, as Zach’s face fell and the other two grew exhausted from all of their dancing. (more…)

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Eddie Izzard: The Remix Tour (Miller Theater, Kimmel Cultural Campus, Philadelphia, PA, September 14-15, 2023) [DID NOT ATTEND]

Posted in Eddie Izzard, Funny (ha ha), Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, Miller Theater, Philadelphia, PA, Religion on September 14, 2023| Leave a Comment »

[DID NOT ATTEND: September 14-15, 2023] Eddie Izzard

I saw Eddie Izzard 20 years ago in Boston.  The show was hilarious and since then she has been one of my favorite comedians of all time.

When I saw that she was coming back to the States to tour I immediately went to the Kimmel Center site to grab tickets.  But they must have been on sale for a long time already because both shows were almost sold out.

The Thursday night show was the same night as the final Palm concert ever, so I couldn’t miss that and then the Friday night show, well, let’s just say that it would have been a real challenge getting my wife and I to Philly on a Friday night for a show at the Kimmel–especially after her first full week back to work.

So I had to give this one a miss.  She tends to record her shows so I hope this one gets a release because it promised to be revisiting some of the best bits over the last thirty some years.  (more…)

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Lindsay Buroker–Sinister Magic [Death Before Dragons #1] (2020) [audiobook 2020]

Posted in Adventure, Audiobooks, Death, Dragons, Fantasy, Funny (ha ha), Lindsay Buroker, Magic, Morality, Murder, Supernatural, Tigers, Urban fantasy, Vampires, Violence, Vivienne Leheny, Werewolves on September 3, 2023| Leave a Comment »

[LISTENED TO: November 2022] Sinister Magic

I’m not sure what attracted me to this author.  I suppose she came up on my Chirp Audiobook suggestions and I was looking for something a little different.

I like fantasy, but sometimes it gets too much up its own world building of for me to get into the story.  I hadn’t really read much urban fantasy, but from the little I’ve read, I rather like it.  The stories feel contemporary and feature alternate-reality takes on things we already know.  And I rather like that.

Linday Buroker is a self-published author.  This typically raises a red-flag, but this book has almost 10,000 ratings on Goodreads, so it’s not like no one is reading her.  She is also absurdly prolific as you can see by the massive chart down below.

But what hooked me on this series was narrator Vivienne Leheny.  I don’t know much about her, but I absolutely loved her voices, her tone and her ability to really get sarcasm across (Buroker’s characters are very sarcastic).  And, amazingly, Leheny seems to read most if not all of Buroker’s books.

So, in summary, the main character is Val Thorvald.  As she says, “I’m an assassin.”  But she’s not that kind of assassin.  She only goes after “magical bad guys.”   When magical bad guys come to earth, she takes care of them. Permanently.

This doesn’t make her popular with the rest of the magical community.  But thanks to her half-elven blood, a powerful sword named Chopper, and a telepathic tiger with an attitude, she’s always been able to deal with any threats that come her way. (more…)

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Sam Ernst–The New Manifesto or The Slow Eroding of Time (2021)

Posted in Arthur B. Johnson, Books about writers, Choose Your Own Adventure, Dreams, End of the World, Funny (ha ha), Funny (strange), Huh?, Humiliation, Sam Ernst, Skiing, Unreliable narrator on July 18, 2023| Leave a Comment »

[READ: June 1, 2022] The New Manifesto

So I received this book at work and it was my job to catalog it (it has yet to be cataloged by anyone else).  But there was a problem.

The cover of the book says The New Manifesto a novel by Sam Ernst.  But you never trust the cover for the actual title of a book, you trust the title page.  And the title page says The New Manifesto or The Slow Eroding of Time Arthur B. Johnson edited by Sam Ernst.

Now the cover also has an about the author of Sam Ernst (with an author photo of the back of his head).  And the list of books by Arthur B. Johnson don’t seem to exist.  So, clearly, the author is Sam Ernest and Arthur B. Johnson is fictional,  But from a cataloging standpoint, Johnson needs to be acknowledged in some way.  Which is a pain.

Anyway, I decided to see if this book was worth all of the trouble.

I’m not quite sure.

It opens with a Foreword by Dr James L. Vanderworthy of Bradford College (also fictional).  He says that The New Manifesto is the novel that resonates with him more than any other.  The editors preface is from Ernst, he says he had a copy editing position at Smith Ralston Excelsior which led him to meet and befriend Arthur B. (“Artie”) Johnson.  It was this that inspired him to edit Artie’s words in the way we see here.  The Publisher says they didn’t really know what to do with the book, but they thank Ernst for his tireless work on it.

The book is presented in nine parts.  Many are short, but some (like part 2 An Assemblage) are nearly 100 pages.

Part 1 the Prelude is a series of 25 numbered paragraphs

1. He sat down to write
4. He was writing a book.  A book he never finished.  This is a story of failure.
18. Given the book’s title, he was finding it surprising how little manifesting was being done.

Part 2 is written in several much longer sections.  Each one is a hilarious account of the narrator’s life as he does remarkable things and then moves on.

He averts a war between two countries. He speaks neither language but found a letter from one kingdom to the other.  Had the message not gotten through, war was inevitable.  But he rowed for days across the sea to bring the message to the beacon he saw.  He walks to a war torn country and is taken for a doctor (he is not).  Because of a book he had just read, he is able to diagnose a seemingly dying patient, and as he leaves the area he inadvertently participates and wins the 1984 Sarajevo Ski Jump Competition.

After a few more adventures, including one aboard a ship, he gets a job at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where he uncovers a brilliant scientific schema because of the box elder bugs that swarm his office window. (more…)

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Kate Williams–The Babysitters Coven: For Better or Cursed [Book 2] (2020)

Posted in Babysitters, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dogs, Funny (ha ha), Magic, Monsters, Series, Set at School, Supernatural, Unfinished series, YA Books on July 10, 2023| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: hiatus

[READ: July 2023] The Babysitters Coven Book 2

I enjoyed the first book in this series quite a bit.  Then I forgot all about it.  I happened to see book 2 in the library and decided to check it out.

My daughter actually said she wanted to read it too, but I told her it was book 2, so she may go get book 1.

Book 2 picks up pretty quickly where book 1 left off with our two Babysitters/Demon slayers in the middle of the action.

Our heroine is Esme Pearl.  In book one, Esme Pearl is a babysitter.  She and her best (and only) friend Janis started a Babysitter’s Club back in junior high. There were of course four of them in the club and each girl paralleled one of the girls in the original series.  The Sitters were successful, until Cassandra Heaven showed up.  Cassandra is eccentric, to be sure.  But by the end of the book, Esme and Cassandra realize they have a connection—Cassandra’s father (a supernatural being) is the reason why Esme’s mother is more or less comatose.  It turns out that Esme’s mother was also a Sitter and was cursed—we believe by Cassandra’s father. (more…)

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Jodi Taylor–A Symphony of Echoes [The Chronicles of St Mary’s, #2] (2013) [audiobook 2014]

Posted in Adventure, Audiobooks, Death, Dinosaurs, Fears, Feminism, Fire, Funny (ha ha), History, Huh?, Jodi Taylor, Morality, Murder, Mystery, Supernatural, Thieves, Threats, Time Travel, Violence, Zara Ramm on July 2, 2023| Leave a Comment »

[LISTENED TO: January 2023] A Symphony of Echoes

This is the second book in a something-teen long series.

I sometimes wonder if I enjoy a series more for the narrator of the audio books than the quality of the books themselves.

I didn’t think that at the time of reading this, because I was swept up in the comedy and adventure and (yes, I’m saying it, time travel).  However, while looking for a cover image, I read a scathing review of this book and felt that I did agree with many of the criticisms.  I guess I just didn’t care.  And I wonder if that’s because Zara Ramm gave great voice to the lead character Max and also did an amazing job with all of the different characters (male and female from all over the place).

Book 2 continues the time travelling saga of the historians of St. Mary’s.  Like the other stories there are several seemingly random adventures that the crew must go on.  The first, in this case, is with a soon-to-be-retiring historian named Kalinda Black.  She wishes to go to Jack the Ripper times and suss out what actually happened.

Things go horribly wrong when Jack the Ripper (in some form or another) hops a ride with them back to St. Mary’s.  It’s confusion and chaos trying to fight a near invisible enemy.  And that’s before anyone realizes that Captain Farrell is missing.

It is, of course, the dastardly duo of Izzie Barclay and Clive Ronan, set in a future St. Mary’s.  In a sign of things  to come, Max realizes that they cannot kill Ronan because of time paradoxes (I am not about to go into details of that) and that Izzie is much harder to kill than it seems when Max shoots her and dumps her in an elevator.

Because the future St. Mary’s has been decimated by Barclay and Ronan, Max stays on as interim head. (more…)

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Jodi Taylor–Just One Damned Thing After Another [The Chronicles of St Mary’s, #1] (2013) [audiobook 2014]

Posted in Adventure, Audiobooks, Death, Dinosaurs, Fears, Feminism, Fire, Funny (ha ha), History, Huh?, Jodi Taylor, Morality, Murder, Mystery, Supernatural, Thieves, Threats, Time Travel, Violence, Zara Ramm on July 1, 2023| Leave a Comment »

[LISTENED TO: July 2022] Just One Damned Thing After Another

This is the first book in a something-teen long series.

I sometimes wonder if I enjoy a series more for the narrator of the audio books than the quality of the books themselves.

I didn’t think that at the time of reading this, because i was swept up in the comedy and adventure and (yes, I’m saying it, time travel).  However, while looking for a cover image, I read a scathing review of this book and felt that I did agree with many of the criticisms.  I guess I just didn’t care.  And I wonder if that’s because Zara Ramm gave great voice to the lead character Max and also did an amazing job with all of the different characters (male and female from all over the place).

As we meet Madeline Maxwell (Max), she is in a bad way.  She has few prospects and fewer coins in her pocket.  She’s pretty desperate until she gets a surprise visit from a former teacher who tells her about a job with poor pay and worse conditions.

This leads to a job as a historian at St. Mary’s Institute of Historical Research.  The cool thing about St. Mary’s is that historians travel to the past to “confirm” details of things that happened.  Essentially University researchers get to experience historical events first hand, including all of the dangers involved.  The Institute is a part of University of Thirsk. (more…)

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Bella Mackie–How to Kill Your Family (2021)

Posted in Bella Mackie, Funny (ha ha), Murder, Prison on June 30, 2023| Leave a Comment »

[READ: June, 2022] How to Kill Your Family

This looked like the perfect book to read over Fathers Day weekend.

But it’s not an instruction manual for the average person.  No indeed, the reason Grace Bernard is planning to kill her family is twofold

Her mother died when she was young.  She learned while she was growing up that her biological father Simon wanted nothing to do with her (or her mother).  He promised them the world, because he pretty much owned the world.  He was part of a very wealthy family who bought and sold companies on a whim.  He was also very publicly (un)happily married with a child and this affair with Grace’s mother could not go public.

As the book opens, Grace is in Limehouse prison.  Ironically, even though she has already killed people, she is in prison for a murder that she did not actually commit–and had no intention of committing.

Grace is surprisingly, hilariously, above everyone else.    Her cellmate Kelly is pretty trashy.  She runs scams online.  She frequently gets caught, but she’s right back out there to do it again.  She drives Grace crazy.  And Grace looks down on Kelly and everyone like her–there’s some really funny lines of abject dismissal in the book:

She’s attractive, is Kelly. Big pouty lips, which I suspect are the result of cheap filler but look all right from a distance, and lots of red hair.  Sadly, her limited intelligence means she was easy to find when a man finally plucked up the courage to stop sending her money and contacted the police.  She’d had the money sent to her boyfriend’s account, the stupid cow, and has wound up doing an eighteen month stretch as a result.  Not an elegant crime, I warrant you, but I have no sympathy for her victims either. If you are delusional enough to believe that anyone wants to see a grainy iPhone picture of your flaccid little friend, you deserve to get bled for it.

(more…)

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K. Eason–Night Watch on the Hinterlands [The Weep #1] (2021)

Posted in Adventure, Advice, Aliens, Duology, Feminism, Funny (ha ha), Gender, K. Eason, Magic, Multiverse, Political Humor, Sci-fi, Science, Violence on June 29, 2023| Leave a Comment »

[READ: April 2023] Night Watch on the Hinterlands

I absolutely loved K. Eason’s The Thorne Chronicles (How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse).  I had no idea that she had a new duology out until this book came to my desk at work.

I had audiobooked the first duology and loved the world that Nicole Poole read to me.

But now I was jumping in to the print version.  Shockingly for me I haven’t been reading many books this year.  I have gotten so into the audiobook world that I’ve been listening far more than I’ve been reading.  And in some respects it was hard to get into this book because there’s a lot of made up stuff here and you really have to get into the world and the vocabulary and it was a bumpy start for me.

This book is set in the same world as the Rory Thorne books.  Yes, that is true.  But it is set far in the future so there is no overlap with characters or anything like that.  So that was a bit of a bummer.

There’s a lot of “hard” science fiction in this story, which is probably more of the reason why it was hard to get into it.  I accepted the new world, but you have to learn so much to get up to speed with everything that it can feel like a slog even if you are flying through the pages.

There are two main characters in this book.

Lieutenant Iari is a tenju templar (which you have to learn about and which I don’t think I fully did, but tenju are rather large humanoid race with tusks).  She was orphaned during the Expansion War and joined the templars because she believed in their mission.  The war is over now and her primary purpose is to stop The Brood.  Brood are deadly, seemingly invisible monsters that have come through a rip in the Void (which you have to learn about).  The rip is called The Weep, and I feel like I never quite got the hang of how or why the Weep happened.  The one thing that was clear was that the vakari inadvertently created The Weep during the war. (more…)

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Floor de Goede–Dancing on the Volcano (2012) translation (2022)

Posted in Floor de Goede, Funny (ha ha), Graphic Novel, Humiliation, LGBTQ, Oni Press, Photography, Romance, Travel, Volcanoes on June 22, 2023| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: hiatus.

[READ: June 2023] Dancing on the Volcano

I feel like I haven’t really enjoyed that many books from Oni Press lately.  Although this one was pretty great–welcome back!

In 2004. Floor de Groete started a site doyouknowflo.nl where he published a daily comic.  he wrote about himself and his boyfriend Bas.  He loved doing it but he wanted to talk about more than just his daily life. So in 2012 he wrote this full graphic novel.  And now it is getting translated into English by Laura Watkinson.

The first chapter shows Floor (I love that he makes himself so very tiny) with a very large man, Sander.  They are working together to write an article about a volcano.  Floor is supposed to take pictures, but he is also greatly missing Bas.  It’s the first time they’ve been apart.  Sander, loves this trip and doesn’t care about Floor’s feelings at all.  Floor is easily aggravated and not afraid to let Sander know it.  Flo keeps thinking about how there’s only a few days left of the trip but he keeps missing out on all of the amazing things that Sander is enjoying (which makes him even more angry). (more…)

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