Cause I'm a Blonde

I have two jokes in my repertoire. I've been telling the following since I was a kid.

Me: How many elephants can you fit in a mattabooboo?

Unsuspecting person in the wrong place at the right time: What's a mattabooboo?

Me: Nothing Yogi.

Yeah, it probably wasn't even funny when I was six (except that people pretend to laugh at kid jokes) but Yogi Bear references are clearly not funny now. Especially when the listener responds, "I don't know. How many?" D'oh.

Why can't I remember more jokes? Well, thanks to the New York Times, I now know and the reason smacks of an audible "duh."

Our brains are programmed to remember patterns. This is why we can sing along to the ABCs but would have difficulty remembering any other sequence of 26 letters. Jokes, by their very nature, veer off sharply from what's expected. (Otherwise, they wouldn't be funny.) As such, it's inherent in my little brain's functionality to forget the punchline. The pattern is disrupted.

I feel so much better about myself now.

In a nice twist, this research also confirms why I often did well on exams in college after not studying, attending class or even buying the books. I would study with others, listen to them chatting about the subject matter and put key points in lyric form to songs that I knew. If luck was on my side, the answers (and songs) would come back to me during the test.

I even remember the title of one such song, Behind Mud Walls, which was sung to the tune of Charlie Rich's Behind Closed Doors and helped me ace an anthropology exam. Given that I had time left at the end of the test, I wrote the whole song for my professor on the back of my test. Brownie points!

I took an IQ test and I flunked it of course,
I can't spell VW but I got a Porsche
'Cause I'm a blonde, B-L-I-N-D
'Cause I'm a blonde, don't you wish you were me?

The Ghost in You

One of my old college housemates added a "five bands I've seen in concert" list to his Facebook page which included George Clinton, The Dead, The Pogues, Iggy Pop and Sonic Youth. I responded that I had seen three of those bands, also, but asked why he omitted the Black Flag concert that we went to together! It was a memorable evening not only because Henry Rollins delivers an intense stage performance but also because the mosh pit took up the better part of the bar.

No one was safe.

My girlfriend Berrie had to wear shorts the next morning to breakfast in the dining hall because her legs were covered with bruises and she couldn't get her pants on. I spent the whole night dodging 200 lb. men who were dive bombing the audience from the stage.

Those were the days!

SU had great concerts in the early 80s from huge shows in the Carrier Dome to smaller venues such as the Landmark Theater, the Jabberwocky and the Lost Horizon. In four short years, I saw The Who, my main man Bowie, the Grateful Dead, The Clash (Buffal0), Elvis Costello (Rochester), Joe Jackson, The Psychedelic Furs, Otis Day and The Knights, Cindy Lauper, The Cult, The Thompson Twins, etc. I wonder if there are any I'm forgetting . . .

It's amazing that I graduated given the amount of fun I was having!

Defying the Odds

I went to dinner at JoJo again last night because they have the best hummus on the planet (never mind the garlic). My girlfriends were asking how my niece, who just started her freshman year at Rice this week, was doing because they knew I was nervous for her. We started talking about the college experience including that initial fear/sadness that quickly dissipates and the wonder of co-ed dorms.

We were trying to remember if Day Hall at Syracuse University had officially sanctioned co-ed bathrooms after midnight or if that's just how it panned out (due to laziness) during the middle of the night. I commented that, on a co-ed floor of 80 kids, there were only eight girls my first year so the bathrooms were pretty much co-ed all the time -- not much you could do.

My girlfriend Christine responded, "Wait, there was a 72:8 ratio and you still never hooked up?"

Holy cow! Seriously, I've never thought about it like that before.

72 dudes and eight chicks and I never had a single date. Defying the odds, once again.