Sexy is as sexy does. Like a box of chocolates.

“Away In Virginia, I See a Mustard Field And Think Of You”

because the blue hills are like the shoulder and slopes
of your back as you sleep. Often I slip a hand under
your body to anchor myself to this earth. The yellow
mustard rises from a waving sea of green.

I think of us driving narrow roads in France, under
a tunnel of sycamores, my hair blowing in the hot wind,
opera washing out of the radio, loud. We are feeding
each other cherries from a white paper sack.

And then we return to everyday life, where we fall
into bed exhausted, fall asleep while still reading,
forget the solid planes of the body in the country
of dreams. I miss your underwear, soft from a thousand
washings, the socks you still wear from a store
out of business thirty years. I love to smell your sweat
after mowing grass or hauling wood; I miss the weight
on your side of the bed.
– From Barbara Crooker’s Radiance

Two antennas met on a roof, fell in love and got married. The ceremony wasn’t much, but the reception was excellent.

A jumper cable walks into a bar. The bartender says, “I’ll serve you, but don’t start anything.”

A man walks into a bar with a slab of asphalt under his arm, and says “A beer please, and one for the road.”

“Doc, I can’t stop singing ‘The Green, Green Grass of Home.”
“That sounds like Tom Jones Syndrome.”
“Is it common?”
“Well, it’s not unusual.”

An invisible man marries an invisible woman. The kids were nothing to look at either.

Two Eskimos sitting in a kayak were chilly, so they lit a fire in the craft. Unsurprisingly it sank, proving once again that you can’t have your kayak and heat it too.

A group of chess enthusiasts checked into a hotel, and were standing in the lobby discussing their recent tournament victories. After about an hour, the manager came out of the office, and asked them to disperse.
“But why?” they asked, as they moved off.
“Because,” he said, “I can’t stand chess-nuts boasting in an open foyer.”

A woman has twins, and gives them up for adoption. One of them goes to a family in Egypt, and is named “Ahmal.” The other goes to a family in Spain; they name him “Juan.” Years later, Juan sends a picture of himself to his birth mother. Upon receiving the picture, she tells her husband that she wishes she also had a picture of Ahmal. Her husband responds, “They’re twins! If you’ve seen Juan, you’ve seen Ahmal.”

And finally, there was the person who sent twenty different puns to his friends, with the hope that at least ten of the puns would make them laugh. No pun in ten did.

Ignore this. Just upgrading MovableType, and making sure I didn’t blow the brains out of the rather kludged together back end I’ve created.

Yes, that’s a word. It means a fear of the Number of the Beast.

And fear it you should. Especially today: 6/6/06.

[Makes ‘666 rock hands’ and head-bangs to Appetite for Destruction.]

Given my ongoing fascination with myself, I paid $1 to have Sketch-It sketch-ify the picture on my about page.

For those too lazy to click, the original picture looks like this:

The sketched version I received, in turn, looks like this:

Which, to be frank, doesn’t really look that much like me. It does, however, look sort of like an older version of me, assuming by that point that I still have hair.

I have seen the future, and it is Joshua Newman.

Excellent.

After spending the last six hours on nonstop conference calls, I’ve moved past Johnny Cash and into Tom Waits.

With slight laryngitis, my Johnny Cash impression is currently dead on.

[An old Buddy Hackett joke]

A guy goes into a doctor’s office; he’s got a dot on his forehead.

The doctor says, ‘Oh my God, I’ve never seen this before, but I read about it in medical school.’

The guy says, ‘Well, doctor, what is it?’

‘Well, in six weeks you are going to have a penis growing out of your forehead.’

The guy says, ‘Well, doc, cut it off.’

The doctor replies, ‘I can’t cut it off; it’s attached to your brain, you’d die.’

So the guy says, ‘So, doctor, what you’re telling me, is that in six weeks, every morning when I wake up and look in the mirror, I’m going to see a penis growing out of my forehead?’

And the doctor says, ‘Ah, no, no, no, no. You won’t see it. The balls will cover your eyes.’