BraveDragon

The dragon swooped down on the Scottish village, burning down some huts with his breath and simply landing on others. When he lay down on a grass roof it would inevitably collapse, and after crushing the furniture under his feet like beer cans, he would get bored and take off again. Apparently to save from having to constantly blow fire on everything, he also took to uprooting trees and sheds and people and carrying them around in his jaws, using them as torches to touch off bridges, abutments and small crowds. When he was tired of this he would drop the flaming remnants on the pub or the meeting hall.

Eventually, the town organized its response. Within that afternoon, the men of the village gathered a force to push back the dragon attack, a group of 50 or 60 in kilts, with pitchforks and heavy ornate doorknobs and legs from pianos that the dragon had reclined on. While 30 or 35 of the men were charred immediately, and a number just eaten, the rest did eventually manage to climb on the dragon's back and bonk it on the head till it lost consciousness (or likely just got tired) and laid on the ground.

They rolled it onto a tarp and dragged it into a nearby yard, and tied it to a stump. People gathered around, poking the dragon, and peppering it with questions. Soon talk turned to what exactly they ought to do with it, now that they had it.

"I say we drag it a few miles and dump it over the town line," suggested one villager.

"Don't you imagine it'll just fly right back!" shouted Gregor MacHudsonsmith. "Let's tie a rock to it at least! Or a coffee can, filled with dirt. As an anchor."

"Maybe if we fed it our children it would be full and leave on its own."

They were debating the various merits of their ideas when the dragon, which had had its eyes rolled back and its tongue hanging out, spoke.

"Freeee-dooom!" it shouted.

They all looked in stunned silence.

"Now see here," started Macbruce Cloudscuttle, whose leg was bitten off earlier, mid-femur (a condition that had plagued many of his ancestors), "You don't go shouting about freedom after you fly into town, eat my house, pull off the roof of the church and defile it with your waste, not to mention-"

The dragon ate him, showing surprising reach.

"Freedom," it said.

"Shut up!” said another villager, “you used my wife as a club to beat my horse!"

The dragon stopped a moment, seeming to consider this. It took a breath, its lips pursed in thought. Raising its head up over the top of the stump, it wailed out,

"Freeeee-doooooom!"

Tomorrow: Another short story

A lot of cross dresser types aren’t even gay. This has always violated some internal sense of fairness I have. If you’re going to dress up like a woman at least be gay! I fear I might be drunk enough to start talking to one some night, and he might say, “Uh, dude- back off man, I’m not queer. Like you.”
I mean, fine, if you want to dress up like a girl, it’s none of my business, but you’re trying to have the best of at least three possible worlds: you want to be a girl making out with a chick; you want to stick it in somebody; and you want to not be gay. Those three worlds are mutually exclusive, muchacho.
For some reason, this reminds me of a recurring vision I have had. In it, Bigfoot finally pulls himself out of the woods, somewhere, say, around the Veteran’s Bridge, and the first thing he sees is me, a passenger in a Ford Ranger.
“Look at this ass,” he says, with a disgusted look on his face. “F--- you, man,” he says, shaking his head. He makes some jerk-off motions towards me and, convinced that I am representative of humanity, goes back to the woods for good. Meanwhile, I am unable to alert the other occupants of the vehicle in time, as I point frantically and try to conjure up the word “Bigfoot”.

Can’t you assume that I made the best choice possible with the information on hand?

I really can’t stand it when I’m trying to complain about something and people won’t stop suggesting ways I could have done whatever I was doing differently and therefore wouldn’t have had to complain about it. What do they think this might accomplish? For example:
“I was walking down the sidewalk last night and it was really icy. Pissed me off. I slipped, like, 4 times.”
“Why didn’t you find a dry patch to walk in? Why didn’t you put down sand or salt? Why didn’t you walk down the middle of the street where the friction of the vehicle traffic would have minimized or eliminated the ice? Why don’t you have those spikes to clamp onto the sole of your boots? Why didn’t you hop on your skateboard and grab onto the back of a passing Jeep like Marty McFly? Why didn’t you construct a massive kilometer-wide solar sail using a 30 nanometer thick reflective panel of aluminum film to slowly pull you along the sidewalk using the momentum granted by the minute pressure of the stars’ radiation?”
Really, I’m not going to go for a two mile walk with a wheelbarrow full of sand, tossing handfuls in front of me as I go like Johnny Appleseed, but thanks for assuming I’m stupid.

He did throw for 47,000 yards you know

Last night was the last “Monday Night Football” game on ABC, and it made me think of a phenomenon I caught the tail end of in my life- the phenomenon of hearing someone say, in whatever context, “Howard Cosell”, and someone else feeling a deep pressing need to shout out the same two words, but in a Howard Cosell impression. It sounded pretty much like:
“Oh, I was reading this Newsweek article about Howard Co-“
“HAH…WIDD …CO…SELL!”
“…sell”.
Unfortunately, this lives on in the almost identical “Arnold Schwarzenegger Syndrome”.
All this talk about football reminds me of an incident from second grade. Once a week or so, we were given mimeographed handouts about famous and important Americans (we once went straight from learning about Martin Luther King Jr. to Billy Joel). One week, the random somewhat important person was NFL Hall of Famer Fran Tarkenton. It actually contained the sentence “Fran Tarkenton- wow!”. So I figured I’d impress my dad with my new football knowledge. When he got home that night, I casually sprinted out to his car, and casually slipped “Fran Tarkenton” into the conversation 12 or 13 times as he attempted to open his door. I’m sure he was wondering where his 7 year old son had got a hold of so much crack, but what he said was, “Tarkenton? Overrated”.

Air Conditioning: A Short Story

The prehistoric man entered a clearing and was caught off guard by the smell of semi-fresh meat.

"A deer carcass!" He exclaimed, waving the flies away from it. "Wow. I mean, seven of my nine teeth are impacted, one of my femurs snapped and re-healed in a horrible deformity, and I more or less exist in the fetid stench of my own filth. But you know, finding this deer carcass kind of makes it all worth whi-"

Just then the saber-toothed cat that had happened by decided to bite him.

"My leg! Oh no God! My good femur!"

The tiger bit the prehistoric man's leg off, mid-femur, and piled it on top of the deer carcass, carefully dragging them both away. The man sat glumly watching, leaning on his one remaining leg.

"Let this be a lesson that anything too pleasurable is dangerous, and probably causes massive wastes of electricity, environmental damage, and is a breeding ground for legionnaire's disease," he thought.

I do not have time for thees chit. I am a backyardigan, choo get it mang?

There’s a show on Nickelodeon called “The Backyardigans”. I don’t know what the name is supposed to signify, except that it’s a combination of “back yard” and “cardigan”. Anyway, I’ve been watching it a lot lately. It seems to be aimed at preschoolers. It has become obvious that two of the four characters (none of which are wearing cardigans incidentally) are black people, even though, strangely, they aren’t black or people, they are an orange computer animated moose, and a pink computer generated alien type thing with antennae. You can tell they are black people because their names are “Uneequa” and “Tyrone”. I’m surprised there isn’t a computer animated red panda named “Gonzalo Sanchez” who goes around the back yard saying “It’s si-eeesta time, mang! Where’s my tequeee-la?”

This appeared previously elsewhere

I think women might be largely unaware of the prevalence of homosexual graffiti in men's rooms. For some reason I don't think women's stalls are covered in erect-penis-with-testicles key scratches, but men's stalls sure are. Something compels a large percentage of men to make vague but graphic sexual offers to random people who will in the future be in public taking a dump. I was reflecting on this while I was in the Home Depot yesterday, ostensibly purchasing three bundles of "silver lining" color asphalt shingles and assorted other roofing materials. What I reflected on even more thoroughly was the fact that the guy in the stall next to me was asleep. I could tell; he had regular, deep breathing and occasional snoring. The only conclusion I could come to was that he was an employee, and this was the only place he could go and sleep where the boss couldn't come after him. I really don't think that justifies sitting on a toilet all afternoon while a succession of men come in and shit 16 inches from you, though. As for roofing, there is a tool we use called a "roof bully", to pull the old shingles off before new ones are installed. Based on that, I have long felt that "-bully" would be a good suffix to adopt generally. Can opener: soup bully. Wheel barrow: yard debris bully.

The Death of Eustace Tilley

The New Yorker: it’s such an oozing orgasm of smug pretension and self awareness. In the best possible way, of course. I love the way they put little dieresis marks over repeating vowels. I love the tiny little ads in the back- as far as I know, they’ve been the same ads since Dorothy Parker worked there. Omaha Steaks; the mattress-sized pool that creates its own current for you to swim against; the zero gravity upside down back saver chair. Most people, of course, say they like the cartoons. Talking animals, people at a cocktail party, 1950s style office vignettes, sad children at a birthday party, obscure references. I once submitted cartoons to the New Yorker, you know, when I was 15. No dice, although they did at least write back. The strongest one, I think, involved people assuming that Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, the man who was responsible for the original 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, had got his name “the Shake” from his bump-and-grind dancing. (Hey I was 15- it was topical and cutting). So, in that spirit, here is my attempt at the highly abstract variety of New Yorker style cartoon:

And then you moved to Chad

Accidentally farting in high school, of course, would bring anyone to near-suicide from utter shame and humiliation, but, for reasons I need not explore here on the Door Hinge, I’ve been driven to imagine circumstances that could actually make it much, much worse. Let’s paint a picture in words:

You are sitting in History of Western Civilization, 10th grade, about 15 minutes into a discussion about the Carthaginians which you have managed to seem interested in while avoiding actually being called on to participate. You sense a bit of nervous gas, but you’ve dealt with that before- it’s pretty much harmless and odorless, you figure, so you shift and slide your weight to one side and confidently prepare to discharge, when-
“I shit myself!” you involuntarily yell out, as your body forms a stiff, 45 degree angle to the floor, knocking your desk ajar. There are several seconds of silence.

No cartoon today. I'm not a cartoon machine.

I love listening to white people who can’t stop stridently insisting that they aren’t racist. They’ll awkwardly shoe-horn “African-American” into a sentence every which way. I saw Jeremy Schaap interviewing Warren Moon on ESPN the other day, and he produced a question very similar to: “As an African-American in a league where African-Americans weren’t always as accepted in the league as they were in the African-American community, not that the African-American community is monolithic in structure, of course, there is more than one African-American community, but football-wise, or in an African-American neighborhood per se, as an African-American quarterback, you faced unique African-American circumstances…word? ...African-American?”

I especially like when a white person feels they are being accused of racism, and they sputter forth some inevitable stock phrases:

“I’m the least racist person I know!” I especially like this one because even if it’s true, it doesn’t prove anything. I don’t know who you know! Maybe you work for a neo-nazi newsletter and your dad was an Imperial Dragon.

“I don’t care if you’re black, white, green, purple or whatever!” For some reason, it’s always green and purple following the real colors people could actually be.

Let the regularity begin

Ok, it's Friday, December 16th, 2005. So begins the torrent of humorous content! Only to immediately end, only to resume again Monday, if I get around to it. Enjoy today's cartoon.

First Post

Hello and welcome to "The Door Hinge- Humorous Content Updated Regularly". This is the first of the humorous content, and also something of a test. I will build up some Content and start fulfilling the promise of Regular Updates in the near future. Until then, enjoy this preview of things to come: a poorly drawn rendition of my idea for a new malt liquor product.