94 thoughts on “Dumb and Dumber”

  1. 3 stooges. Not a fan. Have not seen them since about age 12. They were often the short before mo it’s at the Harbor theater.
    Dum est thing was develop 6 chronic pain conditions. 7 appts this week: 5 of them for pain. 2 for a test this morning and results discussion on Wed.
    We are under 3 flood warnings.

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        1. Combination of my usual sleep issues in summer (once the sun and the birds get up then so do I) and nasty work situation this week. But the good news is as of today, it’s 11 days until the client is in the air. Woot.

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  2. Well if this is the topic today than nobody else needs to contribute except me. If I start now, I can probably still be adding dumb things I’ve done at the end of the day. Just yesterday on my way to my other book club I dropped by the library to drop off a couple of books. As I got out of the car I thought I might as well run in and get the two books that I have on hold. Actually put my hand on the door handle and pulled and when it didn’t open I thought why is this closed its after 9 a.m. Then I remembered it was Sunday. Doh.

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      1. Well it’s not closed on Sunday due to lack of my whining about it? I ask a lot. And it’s interesting that some of the Hennepin County libraries are open on Sunday but not the one close to my house. Rats.

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        2. My neighborhood library is closed Sundays. There are other options, but I generally have to drive to them.

          It always bothers me a little that the Highland Park library, which is in a wealthy neighborhood, is open Sundays and has a teen center and lots of computers. Mine has only six computers and is closed on Sundays, and you have to request a key if you want to use the bathroom. The library personnel do a wonderful job with the resources they are given, but you can tell that the lion’s share of resources go to the wealthy neighborhoods.

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  3. And like Clyde, I don’t care for The Three Stooges. Actually I’ll go farther and say I detest The Three Stooges. I am really not good with any kind of slapstick that involves pain or hurting people. Never have been.

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  4. Sandy has her days and nights reversed. Ugh ugh ugh. It helps for me to give her a back rub. But so much pIn in my cramped arms and hands that I cannot.
    I know return you to your regular broadcast.

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  5. The list of the dumbest thing I ever did to myself is so long it’s pathetic. But the one that springs instantly to mind was the time I tried to kill a fly that had settled on my shin – with a rolling pin.

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  6. Compared to the Stooges, I’m not funny. I don’t often do dumb things, dumb physical things. I have some sort of gene that prevents me from screwing up with the physical world. My daughter got that gene, as did my grandson. I’ve never cut myself or fallen or had a major accident or broken a bone.

    When I worked as a shipping clerk I dealt daily with the physical world. The job forces you to work at top speed. I was amused to learn that you can open a tape-sealed cardboard box by smashing a fist hard on the top of the box, right where it is taped. Then one day I did that to open a box that held four gallon cans of paint, learning that some boxes should be opened the old fashioned way.

    I recently wrote about spilling a gallon of paint from the top of a stepladder. That was a Stooge stunt, although not painful.

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      1. I’m so glad you asked! The accident stunned me. A gallon is a LOT of paint. The paint can fell on a braided rug. I quickly rolled the rug up, then put a plastic tarp around it. I drove to a nearby laundromat where they had big machines, popped the rug in and sent it through two wash cycles. A few hours later I put a perfectly clean rug back in my bedroom, feeling smug about how well I’d handled it. So . . . no pain, and actually I enjoyed the experience!

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  7. I heard the comedian Robert Klein relate the time he went to a family reunion of descendents of the Three Stooges. He said they were the nicest, most thoughtful, and very cultured people. No eye gouging, slapping, or nose twisting at all.

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  8. i was thinking yesterday that i hope i get feeling back in my little finger again

    i recently smashed it sliding a big box under a railing. the box fit perfectly my finger on top of the box did not
    a little like getting getting run over by a steam roller it kind of exploded

    a couple years ago i went in to have hand surgery because i had no feeling in 3 fingers and they did carpal tunnel surgery to fix it. easy quick not to painful and in 3 weeks i was good as new with feeling back
    until…
    i was slicing onions and took 1/8 “ off the end of my finger and in addition to all the blood it started flowing it also short circuited my nerves and the fingers all reverted back to no feeling
    the doctor suggested i stop slicing the end of my finger off, gave me another surgery and my hand is ok again

    this little finger mash is a similar in that the finger healed but the feeling is messed up
    only been a couple weeks so we’ll see
    i kind of like feeling my fingers

    i also have a scar exactly in the middle of my forehead where i swung my raquetball racquet at a shot that was coming at me oddly and wound up hitting myself in the head squarely and with enough force to knock me off my feet. it was the perfect time to insert a ruby like they do in bombay but i passed

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    2. When I got bit by one of the dogs (I don’t know which one in the great “Balsamic Vinaigrette Tomato Fiasco”, it took about a year before I would say the feeling in the finger was back to normal.

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  9. Rise and Shine Baboons,

    This could be a really long list. I will stay with the last several days, because no one wants to read all that.

    I was weeding the garden Friday evening after it became choked with weeds following all the rain and heat of the last week. I bent over and jabbed myself in my arm right above the right elbow with the bamboo stake which I should have seen. Now there is a big bruise and a perfectly round abrasion. 🤪 I do this stuff a lot. During garden season I look like an abused woman which I am not.

    Friday also was the day the wrens in our wrenhouse hatched. They are squawking loudly to be fed. The parents are frantically seeking food and frantically trying to keep us, the dogs and anyone else from hearing the squawks.

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  10. Apparently accidents like this happen a lot more to some people than others. A guy who was part of my family by marriage once had a bad summer. He had accidents that cut the tendons in his wrists several times. I’m sure he did it twice, and I’m pretty sure he actually severed his wrist tendons three times in one summer. He was an impulsive guy who easily got frustrated, which he would handle by lashing out. Not good.

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    2. A friend of mine was using an angle grinder to cut some metal. The blade of the angle grinder broke and flew apart.
      (This is an 8″ flat disc, spinning at 4000 RPM on a hand held tool. Angle grinders are useful for lots of things and one of the standard warning’s is not to use it like he was. But no one pays attention to that warning…).

      When the blade flew apart, it sliced open his right hand. He was very lucky it didn’t cut any tendons or cut off a finger, but it was a deep, serious laceration. It’s pretty well healed up and he’s hoping to get the feeling back in the rest of this thumb at some point.

      Took him a few weeks to find the other half of the blade. They hosted a wedding reception for their daughter a few weekends ago and he was proudly showing everyone where he finally found it.
      Embedded in the drywall about 20′ up in his shop wall.

      So he’s paying a bit more attention to those warnings now.

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  11. Hi-
    When I start back to building sets this fall I will have forgotten most of the basic rules of carpentry. My board stretcher won’t be active yet and I’ll have to rebuild several pieces. Or make the whole thing smaller. Measure once, cut twice is my motto.
    And be sure not to invert the numbers. You know a ‘6’ can be a ‘9’ if you read it from the other side of the tape measure…
    Was I adding 3″ or subtracting?? Oh well, same difference.
    One field looks like another.
    Details only bog me down.
    I’ll bet I can get through that spot if I drive really fast!

    Hold my beer and watch this!

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      3. I had an encounter at the hardware store recently. I took a picture frame in to have a piece of plexi cut for it. The fellow took it in to the back room and was gone for a really long time. He came back eventually, having been completely frustrated by the task. It turned out the picture frame was a little off square. The long side was about a quarter inch off. The short side was an equal measure. The guy who was trying to cut the plexi told me he couldn’t make it fit, because “you can’t cut a trapezoid”. I looked at the frame, and it had a good 3/8ths of an inch of margin on all sides. So I told him to just cut it a quarter inch smaller. Not a trapezoid, not a slanted cut, just a quarter of an inch smaller. It works fine that way. but he was so focused on trying to make the plexi meet the frame on all sides, he couldn’t see the practical way to make it work.

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  12. The worst in memory was when I was sewing up a storm one summer, and managed to run the sewing machine needle through my left index finger – just the edge, but not through the fingernail. Yikes…

    I regularly cut myself while chopping things for stews and salads. I get going too fast and not paying attention. Twice in the last year I have tripped and banged my knee pretty badly – once it was very uneven sidewalk in the dark, which I don’t consider to be my fault. The other was a few weeks ago in a parking lot which had no defined curb, just a raised lip at the edge… tore my favorite jeans and ended up with a scab on left knee, just like in childhood. I think I need to slow down sometimes, and… pay attention.

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    1. 3 stooges are a modern form of the comedia del arte. Think of Punch and Judy shows in Britain. I understand people are objecting to them and they are rare. Physical comedy has been around forever. I am not sure it is so terrible. I do not like the stooges or did back then more because of the bullying and mindless repetition of the same tricks. A. It of physical comedy wisely blended into other humor is funny to me.

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      1. Good point, Clyde. The Stooges emerged from vaudeville, a comedic form popular with unsophisticated audiences. This, of course, predated movies or TV. Vaudeville acts were simple and exaggerated, cartoonish.

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      2. In the early nineteenth century, a popular form of literary humor was set in the lawless backwoods of the Southwest frontier, which in those days included Arkansas and Kentucky and the Ohio Valley. One of the comic motifs in those yarns was the fistfight, which featured the biting off of ears and eye gouging. Many of the physical pranks in those stories were excessively violent by modern standards and even, I think, by contemporary standards. Their over-the-top nature corresponded to the exaggerated tone of the narratives and lent an edginess to the humor. The characters in those narratives were portrayed as superhuman in their abilities and toughness and never were depicted suffering the consequences of that violence. In that, they were like the Stooges and the cartoons.

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        2. Much of humor from any period relies on stereotypes. The “other” that serves as the butt of the joke varies with which groups are relevant in the public consciousness, because humor must be relevant to be funny. That’s part of what makes the close reading of humor from a specific slice of time so interesting—it reveals, without filters, what people were thinking and experiencing close to the ground on a daily basis. It’s history that hasn’t been premasticated by legions of historians.

          The “ethnics” of the mid-nineteenth century included the Irish, who were doubly-damned because they were predominantly poor and because they were Catholic. Blacks were, of course the comic foil in a lot of humor but often in an objectified way because, in real life, few of them had any agency of their own. There was mock-German dialect humor but it wasn’t as patently disrespectful as the humor aimed at the Irish.

          One of the veins of humor I find interesting is the frequent portrayal of the unlettered rube, who writes as he speaks and spells phonetically (and atrociously). That humor couldn’t have been sufficiently funny if it didn’t stereotype a familiar character type—the uneducated or undereducated country person, a person of the past—who comes for the first time into contact with somewhat better educated and more sophisticated urban dwellers. This was paralleled in real life by the changes in society brought about by the industrial revolution and the migration of individuals from farms to employment in the city. It also echoed the disparity in educational opportunity and experience between city and country and the relatively new standardization of spelling brought about by published dictionaries.

          There was a humorous backlash against the stock portrayal of backwoods bumpkins as gullible innocents, especially in the writing of the southwest frontier humorists, who often pitted an educated outsider, frequently a northerner, against the horse-sense equipped backwoodsman with the city slicker coming up short in practical matters.

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        3. This is interesting information, Bill, stuff that I have never stopped to think about or consider. Thanks.

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        4. Obviously I think it’s interesting too and it’s my current area of study. American humor studies is a somewhat under-represented area despite its richness. It’s difficult for some academics to take seriously.

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    1. When I think of the cartoons that were around when I was a kid, they were all pretty violent. Think about how many things Bugs Bunny did to Elmore Fudd. Or that the Roadrunner did to the poor coyote. Even Marvin the Martian wanted to blow up the Earth.

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      1. Elmer Fudd was regularly trying to shoot Bugs Bunny, and Wile E. Coyote was trying to kill the roadrunner. The cartoons actually discouraged violence by demonstrating that violent impulses could be turned back upon the perpetrator. Not very much like the Stooges, in my opinion.

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      2. When I was in junior high there was an ice cream shop across the street where kids would gather after classes. Moore’s Dairy had the classic ice cream counter with a big Wurlitzer jukebox connected to little coin-op table units. One day I watched as a kid tore the back end of the paper off his straw wrapper. He dipped the front end in his strawberry shake, then with a puff of breath he shot a kid two stools away. The wet end of the straw paper hung on his face for moments while he did a slow burn. Then this kid crumpled the straw wrapper, walked over to the shooter and jammed the paper deep into his shake. That kid stared at his shake for a long time, his face impassive. Then he walked over behind the kid he’d shot and poured the shake over his head. All of this was done in silence, with no apparent emotion.

        I held this sequence in mind for decades, marveling at the oddness of it. I finally realized what happened. This was a setup. Had to be. And the two kids playing their roles were students of the Stooges or (more likely) Abbott and Costello. So what I witnessed was not bizarre aggression but an homage to earlier comedic styles.

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  15. OT: regular visitors to this site probably know about how I and my family have moved around recently and how we are unsure of where we want to be. This past week my daughter and her family took an extended trip to (first) the Twin Cities and then Chicago to participate in two weddings.

    I was surprised by their response. My daughter (who lived her first 18 years in Saint Paul) said, “Daddy, it was amazing. I felt like I’d come home. It was beautiful.” My grandson and sil were equally impressed with the Twin Cities. Nobody wants to pack up and move again right now, but if we go we know where we will go.

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      1. Yes, Chicago. The wedding involved people in my son-in-law’s family. Apparently it was a strange event, bringing together a super-religious family and a family of atheists. My family had most of a day to explore downtown Chicago. There is apparently an ostentatious hotel in downtown with a huge sign it that says “Trump” but the T is missing.

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  16. I plunge my arms fearlessly into the hot oven to retrieve baking or roasting objects, hence the multiple, permanent oven rack burn scars on my forearms. Teenage girl clients see them and ask me if I, too, was a cutter in my youth. They are disappointed to hear the answer.

    OT-the jelly and jam will be mailed to tim on Friday.

    OT-Heike and Feike, our mythical Frieslander gardeners, tell us that there are so many weeds in our garden it looks like no-account Belgians live at the house and it is time to get serious.

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  18. Dumbest thing? Getting married to the one I did.
    Love the Stooges. Watched the remake back in 2012. Watch early mornings on AMC.
    Learned the eye poke with my brother. Freaked out my sisters.

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  19. Several years ago, when I was much more fit than I am now, I decided to bike to the downtown library (Mpls Central) on a Sunday afternoon to browse some material to help with a project that I thought was important – no idea what it was now. I thought Sunday afternoon would be a good day to bike downtown because the car traffic would be low. Just a few blocks from the library, I crossed the light rail tracks at an angle and found myself thrown down to the street very quickly. Luckily no train was coming and some passing guy helped get me back on my feet. I walked to the library, locked my bike, and walked into the library where I asked to use the phone (I had no cell phone at that time) and called someone to pick up me and my bike. I was in a lot of pain by that time. I got home and spent the next several hours putting ice on various parts of my body and enduring spasms of pain that would shoot through my arm and leg. Man that hurt and I learned my lesson: if I must bike across the light rail tracks, do not do so at an angle, and if especially nervous, get off the bike and walk across.

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    1. 15 years ago I was crossing a railroad track on the Sakatah Trail. I was crossing at about an 80 degree angle. A family with small children and a dog were crossing on the other side of the trail about six feet from me. a child and a dog suddenly darted my way. I jerked my wheel to avoid hitting them. The wheel dropped into the channel by the track. The mother chewed me out for almost hitting their child. Two other bikers chewed her out and told her she was required to hav the dog leashed on a state trail and to hold onto their children. The father apologized to them, not to me lying on the ground. Tore up a thumb which still gives me grief. Tore up a shoulder. They wanted to do rotator cuff surgery, to make a bigger gap because mine is too narrow. Never did it. My bike surgeon says today they are much reluctant to do that.

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  20. Most recent accident was when I knocked a utility knife off the counter in the laundry room. It fell point down directly onto my bare foot, creating a deep puncture wound. After the initial shock, I grabbed my foot to try to stop the bleeding. Then I looked around for a paper towel, and tried to walk to the paper towel with my hand clasped around my foot. Then I tried to hobble to the bathroom with the paper towel clasped to my foot so I could get to the bathtub. It took awhile to stop the bleeding and even longer to clean up the blood trail from the laundry room to the bathroom.

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    1. I used to keep the covers for pots and pans in a cupboard chin high. It was a set up where they stood in end like books rather than laying flat. One evening home between baseball games in a playoff weekend I was whipping something up and reaching for a cover while I was stirring some sauce when my calphalon cover which from tThe side reminds me of odd jobs hat, came out like a record album falling from the rack. Where linda’s put a point in mine just put a 4” smile into the top of my foot. A straight line looking down but obviously deeper in the middle. I squirted it full of super glue and put a butterfly bandage n it and went back to the game with a very gimpy gait
      We had many parents with opinions at the time on that team and they were vocal. I told em the way the cut was it was going to be ok. I was right. A couple people commented afterwards they thought I was nuts but were surprised to see it heal up as I envisioned

      I was also remembering a couple of rowdy brothers who lived across the street who did the pick two. And then poked the eyes of his unsuspecting victim
      Rotten kids wrecked all your toys too

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      1. Riding my 10speed as a kid the rain gutters in the street had slots for the water to go through that were custom made to fit 10speed wheels. I was riding along at a good clip and the wheel went in all the way to fork and I over the handle bars to practice my tuck and roll. I Sang soprano for a day or two
        They changed the grates shortly thereafter. Duh

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  21. I used to have many scars on my hands and arms from various accidents from early childhood on. Almost all have disappeared.

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  23. OT – An update on a post I made a couple of weeks ago. The post was about a woman who was looking for milk, juice, cereal, bread and cold cuts to feed her three children until she could get to the food shelf. I was concerned about the kids, and somewhat alarmed that this woman’s gravatar was a middle finger salute. Several baboons were kind enough to offer advice.

    Well, I ended up bringing her some groceries. Met one of her kids, a sweet little girl, who was very excited about getting food. The mother, I’m guessing was in her thirties, didn’t have a tooth in her mouth, but seemed grateful for my help. Even asked me for a hug as I left after delivering the groceries.

    Last week I noticed another Freecycle post from this same woman. This time looking for a TV, a request I ignored. Then on Saturday yet another post from her looking for more milk, juice, bread and cold cuts to tide her over until she gets her check on Thursday. Wonder what happened to the food bank? At that point I googled her posts to Freecycle which she has been using for at least a year. She has asked for clothes and shoes for her kids on several occasions, laundry detergent, and food, also several times. While these are perfectly legitimate requests in emergencies, I was concerned that this family may need access to more services than they are receiving on an ongoing basis.

    At this point I’m even more concerned about the kids. Is cereal and sandwiches all she’s feeding them? Doesn’t she have access to social services of some kind? I realize now that the help I can offer as an individual is not going to fix whatever this woman’s problem are. She and her kids need support that I can’t give.

    I sat down and wrote her an email. I identified myself and essentially said that I’d be happy to bring them another supply of groceries but that I’d want to sit down with her to so we could figure out together whether she is tapping into whatever services are out there for her. Not surprisingly, I have not heard a word from her. I still worry about those kids, but there isn’t much I can do at this point.

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