Tag: Humor

Stuff that makes me laugh

“Dear Dr. Kim”

Advice

“Dear Dr. Kim,

I’ve been happily married for nearly forty years, and I love my wife dearly. However, I find that I seldom feel much sexual desire for her these days. It’s not that she’s ‘let herself go’ or anything like that; in fact, she’s quite a looker. And it’s not erectile dysfunction, either. On those rare occasions when we do have sex, I have no problem ‘rising to the occasion,’ as it were. I’m not looking for sex outside our marriage, either – but the fact is that I just couldn’t be bothered to have sex with anyone. What’s the matter with me?”

– Uninterested, London.

Dear Uninterested,

Nothing. Unless you have a health issue – and you may have, so get a doctor (a real doctor, not a shrink) to check you out – it’s quite normal for men’s sex drives to diminish as they get older, but sometimes a health issue like high blood pressure is at fault.

I suspect you’ve fallen prey to feelings of sexual inadequacy after reading one of those tiresome surveys which remind us that the “average” married couple has sex 7.5 times a week or some such bullshit. You need to know two things: people lie like dogs on those surveys, because no man wants to admit to a stranger that he’s not bursting with sexual energy – even if that researcher is seventy years old and looks like Hillary Clinton. So he lies and brags, and now we have to live with those fantasies. The other thing you need to know about those surveys is that the only people who are comfortable talking to researchers about their sex lives are either old braggarts or young people – and young people, as we all know, have the sex drive of rabbits.

Let’s face facts, here: the Duke of Wellington once remarked about sex that “the pleasure is momentary, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable.” Note that he said this at age 65 and not at 25, when his comment would likely have been quite different.

Finally, don’t listen to the supposed “experts” or any kind of therapists, who have a vested interest in keeping you feeling insecure. Ask your wife if your decreased sex drive bothers her. My bet is that it won’t, especially if you’ve been a faithful and loving husband in all other regards. If it does bother her, then ask her to be more aggressive about asking you for it, non-verbally. If I may be indelicate about this for a moment: few men are going to say “no” when they wake up in the middle of the night to find their wives’ mouths buried in their groin playing “find the weasel.” And please feel free to ignore absolutely everything you’ve ever read about this issue, including what I just said, and go with your gut instinct.

—Dr. Kim

“Dear Dr. Kim”

Advice

“Dear Dr. Kim,
I recently discovered that when we were still married, my ex-husband was having sex with our child’s nanny. He got her pregnant and paid her a huge sum of money after she had an abortion. What can I do to feel better?”

— Mel B, Los Angeles

Dear Mel:
I’m a little confused: are you upset because your husband fucked the nanny, or that he paid her 300 grand that he should have spent on you?
As for feeling better about the whole shambles, there’s not a lot I can say which will help you. However, I can make it easier for this situation not to reoccur in the future, by offering you this advice:

1. don’t let your next husband hire the nanny, and
2. when you hire a nanny in the future, try to hire one who looks like this:

…rather than one who looks like this:

You blithering idiot.

— Dr. Kim

No Excuse Necessary

Culture

With all the brouhaha about fake news, cooked data and other lies fed to us by politicians, scientists, government agencies, the media and so on, it should come as no surprise to anyone when I remind you all that my policy is not to trust information from any source, even when it’s apparently good news or supports one of my long-held beliefs or opinions. Like this one:

A glass of Merlot or Sauvignon Blanc could give your brain an all-over workout.
Drinking wine engages more of the brain than ‘any other human behavior’, according to one leading neuroscientist.
Professor Gordon Shepherd, from the Yale School of Medicine, said drinking wine sparks a reaction in both the sensory and emotional parts of the brain.

It is nice to have Science! endorse one of my long-held beliefs, although I must question whether Sauvignon Blanc has any of those properties (a decent cabernet or burgundy, however…).

And as I’ve always said, a meal without wine is… breakfast.

Lately, I haven’t been drinking much wine simply because I’ve been dining solo (Doc is working some insane hours at the moment), and I can’t drink booze by myself. (Can’t and not won’t. Seriously: no matter how much I may feel like a drink, if it’s not part of a social occasion the chances are excellent that at least half of it will be left untouched in the glass. I’ve been that way my entire adult life.) But if I buy those little single-serve wine bottles the next time I visit Ye Olde Liqueur Shoppe (say, this afternoon), I could probably overcome that habit and help my tired old brain out.

…even though next week I’m probably going to discover from some other doctor that drinking wine with a meal causes herpes or some such bullshit.

Screw ’em all; I’m going to do what I’m going to do, and a pox on anyone who wants to stop me. (I’ve been that way too, my entire adult life.)

 

“Dear Dr. Kim”

Advice

“Dear Dr. Kim,

Before we got married a year ago, my husband-to-be told me that after we got married, he would give up almost everything he did as a bachelor, except one thing: his Sunday morning fishing down at the lake near our house. He leaves before dawn (alone) without waking me up, and is back by about 11am before the weather gets too hot. Every Sunday. It’s starting to bug me; it’s like he wants to get away from me every week. He says it’s his chance to clear his head. I think he’s being selfish. I thought he would change after we got married, but he hasn’t. What should I do?”

—Fishing Widow, Northern Michigan

Dear Widow,
Let me be perfectly blunt, here. You said, “I thought he would change,” which is complete bullshit. What you’re really saying is, ”I thought I could change him,” and you couldn’t. He said he wanted his time alone to clear his head, and he does. More to the point, you agreed to let him have that time alone, and now you want to renege on the deal? Either you didn’t think it was going to be important, and that he’d quit eventually, or you were being dishonest and thought you could get him to stop. Well, he’s not going to stop, and you agreed to the arrangement.

My advice: suck it up, get up early with him, make him a flask of coffee to take along, and give him a loving good-bye kiss. If his time alone is that important to him – and quite frankly, I don’t think a couple hours’ solitude on a Sunday morning is excessive – then take him at his word. Which is what you should have done anyway, before you got married.

—Dr. Kim

Might Be Me

Culture

…this guy, that is; but it’s not, for two reasons: I have an alibi, and I wouldn’t be seen dead in Bristol.

This video shows a self-confessed ‘grammar vigilante’ who has been secretly correcting bad punctuation on signs and shop fronts in Bristol for the last 13 years.
By day the anonymous crusader is a highly-qualified professional with his secret known only to a handful of close family and friends.
But at night he becomes a shadowy figure who patrols the streets of Bristol, armed with his homemade ‘apostrophiser’ and purpose-built trestle.

Yes, I am a grammar Nazi like this guy. Worse than that, I am a grammar Nazi in several languages, especially in Latin, but more commonly in English.

Here’s an example of a typical Kim-the-grammar-Nazi rant:

Good grief, I hate accountant-speak (e.g. “…to 1.8% from 2.0%”).
In English (in which this report was written), we read from left to right, not to right from left; we go from point A to point B, not to B from A; we go from top to bottom, not to bottom from top; we run the gamut of emotions from A to Z, not to Z from A, and graphs (line and bar) also move from left to right along the x axis, not to right from left. (The basis for this construct is actually from the Latin idiom — “ab… ad…”, e.g. “ab terra ad astra”.)

And yes, if you look at the last sentence above, I put periods and commas outside quotation marks (where it’s not part of conversation), simply because that’s where they belong, and where all other punctuation can be found. Unless the comma or period is actually part of the quote, it should follow the quotation marks.

Observe this sentence:
The men were called “bullies,” “brutes,” “yobs,” and all other kinds of names.
Note how the quotation marks are awkwardly placed next to each other, and how the commas have no relevance to the words in quotes, which makes comprehension just a little more difficult and creates what I call a “cognitive speed-bump”. (See what I just did? The period ends the whole sentence and not the phrase, which is just part of the sentence.)
Now the sentence as it should be written:
The men were called “bullies”, “brutes”, “yobs” and all other kinds of names.
The commas are now in their proper role as separators, and not rootless nonentities drifting inside quotes.

Most American English grammar texts will differ from me and mark what I do as incorrect. I hate to say it, but I’m right and they’re wrong. Other than commas and periods, all other punctuation marks are written outside the quotes because they don’t belong inside; why should periods and commas be treated any differently? And that’s just my position on commas and periods; don’t even get me started on misspelled apostrophes. (“You mean apostrophe’s, Kim?”)

Grrrrr. Another reason I’m not the guy from Bristol is that there are no .45-caliber bullet-holes in those offensive signs. “Apostrophiser”? Bah.

 

Just Curious

General

I see that Amazon is facing an attack from the Usual Suspects who demand that they stop selling this Halloween costume.

But this isn’t about that, although I think it’s funny as hell (the protest, not the costume, which is kinda lame).

No, I’m curious to see if any of my Male Readers would be interested in getting one of these (my design and yes, I’ve trademarked it), which is guaranteed to trigger the LGBTOSTFU crowd:

Let me know, in Comments or by email, and I’ll get the thing rolling if the response is adequate.