Tag Archives: humor blog

How my Rainbow Head Kept Me from Being Dead/ P.S. VOICES’ Reviews Are Great News

drcrankenfuss1-with-rainbow-wig-redandwhite-260x378

Post #148 from Dr. Crankenfuss, The World’s Awesomest Raving and Rapping blogger —

You like how I look today? I thought so. But there’s a reason for it, and it probably saved my life. See, it was school spirit day and I bought this rainbow head wig online — my mom was so happy — to show my school spirit. It has red in it, so I figured it would be perfect since our school colors are red and white. To get the white, I wore a white shirt and hey, my skin’s sort of pasty and white, so there you go. Mr. School Spirit!

So I’m walking down the hall between classes, all full of myself, and this tall — and I do mean TALL, he must have been on the basketball team (for college!) — guy cuts in front of me and I trip over my own shoes and almost fall. “Nice move, cigarette head!” I said, referring to his l-o-n-n-g-g lanky head. Under my breath, I thought.

WRONG! He heard me and picked me up off the ground by my shoulders and put me against the wall. “You say something, punk?” he asked (and not sweetly either).

“No, no,” I protested. “I was praising you. I said, ‘Nice move to to get ahead.’ He thought for a second and let me down. “Okay,” he said, “but don’t try any funny stuff with me, okay?”

I had no trouble agreeing with him.

Now how this rainbow wig will save me is this. As soon as this was over, I ducked into the bathroom and took it off. He probably won’t recognize me without it. And he probably didn’t see my shirt (with my super-cool slogan on it) because he was looking me straight in the face. Believe me, I know, because our eyes never went away from each other.

See, school is full of education AND adventure. My education for the day was to promise myself to keep the insults that come from my mouth away from the ears of dangerous guys. Best lesson I had all day, maybe all month.

Glad to be alive,
Your Dude with the more careful ‘Tude,
Dr. Crankenfuss

******************************************************

VOICES: AN OWNER’S GUIDE TO THE ADOLESCENT MIND keeps getting amazing reviews at Amazon! (If you had books like this assigned to you at school, you’d be enjoying school a lot more, I promise you that.) Every poem rhymes, every poem makes sense without the teacher having to explain it to you, every poem relates to YOU — what makes you happy, what scares you, what makes you feel most any way you do. And every poem is meant for you to perform, you know you’re a real actor! Check it out. You’ll see! 

VOICES: Poems for Performance

That’s it
My message is done
Now I’ll go back
And eat that onion.

Dr. C

Dr. Crankenfuss’s Mean, Horrible, Stupid Day

Post #145 from Dr. Crankenfuss, (Usually) The World’s Awesomest Raving and Rapping blogger (but not today) –

This was a bad day.
There’s no getting around it.
It’s lucky I can barely find my head
Because I need to pound it.

I usually try to act all awesome and cool like I know what I’m doing. This is not always the case. In fact, it’s only true a fraction of the time and I’m not naming the fraction. I’m mad at myself and pretty embarrassed. Today I couldn’t get anything write. (See??)

Here’s what happened:

First off, my English teacher had me hand out some essays that had been graded. Not too bad. It’s not like I could see anyone’s grade. The teacher puts the grades on the back page. Smart teacher. But it does kind of show the teacher thinks I can read people’s names and that I know who people are, which I guess is a compliment.

Well, I couldn’t. There were at least four names I didn’t recognize. A few times I gave paper to the wrong people and they like almost threw the papers back at me. One guy said, “Can’t you read, doofus?” Anyway, I had to give back a few papers to the teacher and I felt kind of stupid. It turned out that all the mystery people were almost always quiet in class and didn’t raise their hands much to ever answer anything, but that didn’t make me feel any better. It really means that I need to notice other people more, doesn’t it?

So on the way to lunch, I decided to be nice and open one of those swinging doors for a friend. The door opened okay. It’s just that I whacked someone to my left who wasn’t looking. I almost got beat up because this dude was way bigger than me. Lucky he wasn’t in too bad a mood cause I could have been whacked (for real).

Finally in gym, we had to run five laps to warm up. That shouldn’t have been too hard. Guess again. I hadn’t tied my shoelaces and I tripped over my own feet. Smooth move, Ex-Lax. The gym teacher came over to make sure I was okay and then said he’d have to put me in the “fitness protection program.” Ha, ha! Everyone’s a comedian especially when I’m the joke.

So now I’m home and I’m kind of scared to leave my room. No telling what I might do — stub my toe on a dust bunny? Get up from the computer with my headphones still on and send me or my computer flying? I mean, the day’s not over yet. There’s plenty more bad stuff that could happen.

Maybe I’ll just go to bed early. Like 5:00.

From Dr. Crankenfuss,
the knucklehead
who shoulda stayed in bed

A woooden board has to lie? I ain’t lettin’ this one by.

Post #142 from Dr. Crankenfuss, The World’s Awesomest Raving and Rapping blogger –

When is a board not a board? I’m serious. This isn’t a little kids’ joke that can be answered with, “When it’s floating in the water next to the boat.” No, I mean a real board, like a 2×4 that is used in most any kind of house there is.

See, I have a friend who’s taking Shop—the kind where you go build stuff, not the one that teaches you how to behave at the mall—and he told me that a 2×4 is really only one and a half inches by three and a half inches. Huh? That’s a pretty big difference. Say you’re trying to fill a box with a bunch of boards—Don’t bother to ask why. Just go with me on this, okay?—and the box is a foot high, foot wide, and two feet from end to end. Like the box just below, okay.

wooden_gray_box1Nice looking box, eh? Anyway you get some two foot long 2×4’s. You’re good in math so you figure it will take three boards to go across the bottom (which would be a foot total since you multiply 3 X 4) and six boards from the bottom to the top (since 6 X 2 = 12). So that’s 18 boards in all, right?

WRONG! You would still have all this empty space left in the box. I don’t see how builders can work this way. Why isn’t a 2×4 a 2×4? It’s like they round up. Way up. Saying one and half inches is two inches is like adding 33% to it. It’s like those ice cream cartons that everyone calls half a gallon, but they’re way smaller than that. (So the companies can get more of your money without you thinking about it, see? Ooh, they ARE sneaky, aren’t they?)

Hey, if I use this strategy, it could really help me. Say I’m five feet tall. (I’m really taller, but I want the math to be easy.) I can just say, “Yo, dudes, I’m a massive six foot eight inches tall.” (33% extra). Wow, looks like I’m going out for basketball after all.

And if I go to a movie, I can just give the guy in the window $6 and tell him, “Hey, guy in the window, this may look like $6, but it’s really $8. So let me in, all right?”

Just trying to help out, ya’ know. That’s what I do, remember? Point out stuff that needs fixing. Which will make life better for all of us.

Talk to you soon, I hope.

Your Dude with the ‘Tude,
Dr. Crankenfuss

A GREAT HOCKEY IDEA THAT TURNED OUT TO BE BULL HOCKEY

Post #136 from Dr. Crankenfuss, The World’s Awesomest Raving and Rapping blogger –

Oh, Dr. Crankenfuss was ready with a great sports idea yesterday. Yes, Dr. C was going to change the game of hockey forever–revolutionize it, you know–and everybody would know his name. But it turns out he was sadly mistaken and as a result, still very few people know his name. Oh, well. I’ve got lots of time left to come up with some earth-shaking ideas. (At least, I hope I do.) Anyway, here was the idea:

I figured a hockey team could hire the biggest sumo wrestler in the world, a guy like six hundred pounds or so, and they could make him the goalie. All he’d have to do is kind of crouch, or even sit, in front of the goal and he’d practically cover the whole thing up. The other team would be so ticked off, but there’s nothing they could do. You can’t score a goal through a 600 pound wall, can you? The result would be a complete shutout for the Crankenfuss-advised team and certain fame for Dr. Crankenfuss, just like that guy who invented Moneyball for the Oakland A’s. (He was played by Brad Pitt in the movie.)

I was already set to post this idea, send it off to Sports Illustrated and maybe the Nobel Prize Committee, when I did some internet research first. Aw, drats! The idea had already been thought of and shot down on several different forums. (Type “fat goalie rules” into your search bar and you’ll find the same discussions I did.) So here are the reasons my hockey idea turned into bull hockey:

1) Even if the idea did work, it would only work for one game. Once all the other teams saw the earth-sized guy stopping all those shots, every team in the league would sign up a similar type guy within a day or two. Nobody would ever score again and the league would shut down from lack of attendance. (To give myself some credit, I thought of this one on my own before I did any web research. The ones that follow I found on those forums.)

2) The hockey goal is 4 feet high and 6 feet long. Even a super huge guy couldn’t cover all that space up. There would be little spaces left open, like at the upper corners. And–I didn’t know this before–hockey players are so good, they could hit a lot of those little spaces. Now not all the time, but enough times to still score because a guy who weighed that much wouldn’t be the most agile dude around so flailing his arms wouldn’t stop a lot of the shots. (I found this amazing video on YouTube put on by “Sports Science” that proves this beyond a doubt. And it’s really funny too. I can’t believe only half a million people have seen it. It deserves more airplay than that.)

3)The are NHL limits on how big the pads can be on a goalie. That’s so they can’t wear five-foot wide pads and stop the puck that way. The trouble for our hypothetical sumo goalie would be that the pads would be way too small for his giant body. So most of his body wouldn’t have padding on it. So the other team would slapshot the puck over and over into the poor goalie’s body at 100 miles per hour or so. You know, to soften him up a bit. Youch! After ten minutes, he would have puck sized dents in him. Heck–and this is a scene I came up with all by myself–the puck would probably get lodged into his body and they’d have to call a time out to get a rescue squad in to get the puck out. It could be jammed like six or more inches into one of his fat rolls.

So even though my idea wasn’t as original as I thought, I still learned a bunch by researching about it. So I thought I’d pass the info along. And you got to see a very cool video as well.

From Your Dude with the ‘Tude,
who’s always tried to exude
new ideas imbued
with goodness (you know, like health food),
Dr. Crankenfuss

Between football and baseball, football’s #1 and baseball’s #8 or so.

Humor Post #126 from Dr. Crankenfuss, The World’s Awesomest Raving and Rapping Middle School blogger –

Yo, peeps. If you’re watching the baseball playoffs, you’re probably watching some great baseball. You and about fifty people around the world.

Yeah, I’m exaggerizing. Millions do watch, but very few millions. Now me, I like baseball. This year I’m for the Pirates. Or Cleveland. Or Oakland. Or anybody else who doesn’t win the World Series too often. (Or ever.) Or I cheer for some team whose city is often put down. Hey, it’s easy to root for teams who usually win and who can afford to spend $25 million for one crummy player — see NY Yankees and one Alex Rodriguez — or for cities that have big tourist business, but to me it’s much more exciting to see underdogs win. I mean, who plans a vacation trip to Cleveland or Detroit?

So what do I mean by that oh so mysterious title of mine? Well, I’ll explain. I was online reading ESPN — my favorite news site — and I clicked on MLB (for Major League Baseball) to see what time different playoff games were on. But what I found out was how little interest there is even in teams’ home towns. For example, tonight Tampa Bay is playing Cleveland. At Cleveland. As you may know, Cleveland has had some pitiful press lately, what with that guy imprisoning those women for ten years and so on. You’d think they’d be going crazy over their team. But this morning there were still over 800 tickets still available for the game. (If you don’t believe me, go to this page and check it out for yourself.

HUH? They can’t even fill up their own stadium for a playoff game? Why am I using my (incredibly valuable) time to watch something that can’t even sell out where it happens.

It gets worse. There are 4-5,000 seats available for most all the games through the weekend. And Monday and Tuesday, the Dodgers and Detroit have around 10,000 tickets unsold! Those little guys (the tickets, not the players) are probably sitting around hoping someone will adopt them or else they’ll get tossed into the garbage like… well, like garbage. LA has like 10 million people or somewhere around that and they can’t sell out their ballpark? Please! Aren’t these the most important games of the year?

I don’t think football has this problem. People go crazy over the pro playoffs. Heck, on Saturday afternoons, even college games don’t have any trouble selling out. I think it’s Michigan that packs in like 108,000 people for their home games. 108 thousand?? They probably have to pass out oxygen masks for the people sitting in the top rows. They should at least provide telescopes.

Compared to football, baseball doesn’t cut it in fan support. Point made. Game, set, and match to Dr. Crankenfuss. Baseball, make yourselves more relevant or you might lose probably your most important fan. That would be me, of course.

From your dude with the ‘tude,
The sports-loving Dr. Crankenfuss