Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: Thirteen Candles
Thirteen doctor jokes
Bear in mind I’m writing this WEDNESDAY night and I’m tired, and maybe you’ll forgive me for this no-brainer thirteen.
1. The cure for tapeworm. No, I don’t have a lisp, and I don’t know why Stickam saw fit to supply me with one.
3. Here’s an old one you’ve probably heard.
Butch goes to heaven and discovers, much to his chagrin, a horrific line leading up to the Pearly Gates. He waits. And he waits. He wonders, Is this a test? Will I get thrown in Hell if I show any impatience? And he waits longer still.
Suddenly, a man runs forward, jumping the whole line. He’s wearing a white lab coat and holding a little black bag.
Butch asks a passing angel, “Who was that?”
“Oh,” says the angel, “that was God. He likes to play doctor sometimes.”
(Hey, I’m saving the good ones for video.)
4. Rick, a pre-med, had to pass Organic Chemistry to qualify for med school. But when the professor launched into another hour of endless blather on the reactions of carboxylic acids, Rick snapped.
“Professor,” said Rick, “why do I need to know all this crap?”
“To save lives,” said the professor.
“Save lives? That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. I don’t see the relevance of an Organic Chemistry class to saving lives!”
“It’s highly relevant,” said the professor, “if it keeps morons like you out of medical school.”
5. Chuck’s phone rings. It’s his doctor.
“Chuck, I have some bad news for you and some worse news.”
“Gimme the bad news, doc.”
“You have 24 hours to live.”
“Twenty-four . . . Doc, that’s terrible! What could be worse than that?”
“I’ve been trying to reach you since yesterday.”
7. ‘Kay, I have to give you at least one inside joke. If you’re outside the biz, this will probably be meaningless to you. Sorry. Also . . . if you’re super-PC, you’ll probably find this one vaguely offensive.
Q: How do you say “fuck you” in Tagalog?
A: “Yes, Doctor! Yes, Doctor!”
8. A man goes to the doctor complaining of headache. He has smashed bananas in his ear canals, peas up his nose, and a cluster of grapes up his ass.
“Doc,” he says, “why am I having these headaches?”
Doc says, “You’re not eating right.”
9. Another inside joke. You have to know surgeons to get this one.
Two vascular surgeons are discussing their morning’s cases.
“What did you do this morning?” asks Dr. Schmidt.
“An abdominal aortic aneurysm repair,” says Dr. Barron. “And, oh, it was awful. Got into some bleeding, couldn’t stop it. The guy bled to death on the table.”
Dr. Schmidt roars, “WHO THE HELL WAS YOUR ANESTHESIOLOGIST?”
See, cuz we blame everyone else for our shortcomings. Get it? Get it?
10. A guy limps into the urgent care center and is greeted by the triage nurse.
“Hello!” she says. “How may I help you?”
“Well, it’s kind of embarrassing. I’d rather discuss it with the doctor.”
“Oh, don’t worry. I’ve heard just about everything,” says the nurse. “Besides, the doctor expects me to take a complete history before he sees you.”
“If you put it that way . . . well, look, it’s like this. I have an erection ALL the time.”
True to her word, she notes down what he has said without blushing. Then she taps her pen against the intake form and says, “Hmm. Well, the doctor is awfully busy this afternoon, but I think I could squeeze you in.”
11. In the ER, the patient clutches his groin, moaning with pain. He gasps, “I have . . . blue balls.”
The ER doc calls out, “GET THE HEAD NURSE — STAT!”
12. Hold it for me.
13. My longtime readers will remember my favorite ENT joke (audio clip — yup, that’s me telling the joke).
Leave your comment below, and I will (shall? who knows!) link you below.
The Black and White Thirteen
Black and white photos carry a potent wallop of poignancy and nostalgic feeling, don’t you think? Nearly any black and white photo makes me wistful, longing for an earlier, better time.
For example, remember when Dax Montana stopped by?
Oh, Dax. You nearly put my eye out with that, ah, outfit. Who would have thought a breast could carry such momentum.
Yes, those were the days.
Below the cut: thirteen (plus one) slices of the past. I’ve pared down the files as much as I dare, but dial-up users, you’ve been warned.
Thirteen for the short list
Erin O’Brien has a short list which keeps getting longer all the time:
“If Rally Caparas comes here and wants to have sex, it’s pretty much a done deal,” I say to the television, from whence the Weather Channel is broadcasting the Travel Update.
“Ol’ Rally made it to the short list, did he?” says my husband from behind the newspaper. “What if there’s a logistical miscalculation and he comes here when I’m home?”
“You can go for a nice walk,” I say.
One of my older patients likes to call me Dr. Phil just to irritate me. Thus, I get to be Dr. Phil on occasion. (Don’t see the logic in that? Tough noogies, as my sis would say.) When I read Erin’s short list, I thought, “This is a healthy relationship. We should all have short lists. Spouses having lots of imaginary sex with celebrities is good for a marriage.”
With that in mind, here’s my short list.
Thirteen vocabulary words or phrases
I suspect there’s a theme here, but for the life of me, I don’t see it.
1. Frottage Here and below, definitions are from Wikipedia:
Frottage is normal sexual activity without penetration that can include any form of sexual rubbing, whether naked or clothed, for arousal or orgasm.
This includes such activities as frot, tribadism, and axillary intercourse (“putting the penis in the other person’s armpit”). See link above for details. See also The Princeton Rub (those madcap Ivy Leaguers, what will they get up to next?)
Example: We had to get rid of our Chihuahua, Max, as he greeted strangers with entirely too much frottage.
Thirteen books I loved as a kid
I don’t know how well these books stand up over time. Fond memories do not often equal a pleasurable reread. Recently, I tried to reread Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain series and thought it a pale imitation of Tolkien. And I’m not even all that crazy about Tolkien.
A list like this is a biography of sorts — or, at the very least, a growth chart. Here we go.
1. Sailor Jack and Bluebell, by Selma and Jack Wasserman. I’m amazed you can still find this book online. Why do I remember it? (A) It was the first book I memorized and was able to ‘read,’ and (B) as a 4-year-old, it provided no end of chortling entertainment, owing to the wilful mispronunciation of Bluebell as ‘blueballs.’ Oh, I was quite a card.
2. Curious George, by H. A. Rey. With my sister’s help, I learned to read thanks to the Curious George series and the L.A. Herald Examiner Sunday Comics. (Oh, Prince Val, will you ever come out of the closet? And Lois was one of my early crushes. Look at the rack on her, will you?)
3. Amazon Adventure, by Willard Price. Here’s the set-up: brothers Hal and Roger travel the world with their father, who captures exotic animals for a metropolitan zoo. In this, the first novel of the series, dad gets taken out of the picture early (stabbed by spies, or something like that — I haven’t read this book in nearly four decades!) so the boys have to finish the job on their own, battling Amazonians (nothing PC about this book, no sirree), army ants, anacondas, and some sort of predatory cat.
Recently, I picked up a copy of this book, thinking Jake might like the series. Atrocious writing, laughable dialog — I couldn’t get past the first chapter. As a kid, I read the whole series.
4. Dorp Dead, by Julia Cunningham. Orphan boy gets adopted by ladder-building freak who keeps him locked up in a cage. Creeeepy. According to the publisher, this novel “dramatically changed children’s literature in the 20th century.” I don’t know if that’s hyperbole, but I do recall this book was way different than anything I’d read up to that point (3rd of 4th grade, that is).
5. Bless the Beasts and the Children, by Glendon Swarthout. Maybe I liked the tragic ending. Maybe I was a closet conservationist as a kid. Or maybe I was a twisted little perv who loved the scene in the movie when the in-crowd kids piss all over our hapless heroes. Yeah, one of those. I certainly didn’t love it for the sappy Carpenters song.
6. The Tripods series, by John Christopher. Another early introduction to tragedy — and I’m still a sap for unhappy endings.
7. Lord of the Flies, by William Golding. Even as a kid I understood that other little kids were beasts. Not me, of course. The rest of ’em. Golding merely confirmed what I had already suspected.
8. Earth Abides, by George R. Stewart. I went through a long post-apocalyptic phase wherein I inhaled Earth Abides, Erewhon, Lucifer’s Hammer, and God only knows what else. That’s about the time I saw the movie A Boy and His Dog, one of my all-time favorite SF films. What I remember best about Earth Abides: a stranger comes to live with a group of survivors. Somehow, the men in the group figure out that this new guy has VD. They ask themselves: we have a good thing going here. Do we really want to have some guy with the clap screwing our women? And so they kill him. That made a big impression on my as a kid.
Another near-apocalyptic short story I remember well and still love: Larry Niven’s Inconstant Moon, a romantic story about a man and woman on the eve of disaster. Here’s the full text.
9. Relativity, by ???. From 2nd grade until 6th grade, I must have checked this book out twenty times. In the beginning, I loved the bug-eyed looks the older kids gave me when I read it in the library. As I got older, I loved the book itself. Great explanations of the twin paradox and the expanding universe, the red-shift, and the Doppler effect. All of the math got stuck into the appendix (I remember puzzling over the Lorentz transformations — way beyond me, even in 6th grade). Those were the days, when a guy could impress girls by reading a gnarly-looking book.
10. To Live Again, by Robert Silverberg. What if you could collect the souls of famous or talented dead people and stuff ’em into your skull? And what if they didn’t particularly like being there? Sadly, my memories of this one far exceed the experience of re-reading. I tried it recently and couldn’t even get through the first 50 pages.
11. Inferno, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Thirty years ago, Niven and Pournelle took a cheap shot at Kurt Vonnegut by imagining his gravestone in hell, with the inscription, So it Goes. Well, ha-ha, Vonnegut’s still going strong (well, he’s still going, at any rate). Despite this cheap shot, I enjoyed Inferno well enough to read it a few times. It’s a modernization of Dante’s Inferno, in case you hadn’t guessed, and one of the better fictional treatments of hell, in my opinion.
12. All the old Vonnegut: Breakfast of Champions, The Sirens of Titan, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, Mother Night, Slaughterhouse Five, and especially, Cat’s Cradle. As a pre-teen and young teenager, these were my primers on cynicism, religious skepticism, and irony.
13. Xaviera! Her Continuing Adventures, by Xaviera Hollander. I lost my literary cherry to Ms. Hollander, the woman who fed my teenage obsession with sex. I don’t remember this book as being erotic, so much as nuts-and-bolts graphic. Thanks for all the woodies, Xaviera.
D.
Leave a message in the comments, and I’ll give you some cool linky love below.
Pat’s List of Literary Wunderkinds (wunderkinden? help me out, Gabriele)
Invisible Lizard has 13 of his own favorites, too
Thirteen sucky flowers from Kate (seven, actually, but since there’s multiple flowers in each photo, we’ll let her slide)
Erin O’Brien searches for her G-spot, with a little help from her friends (so it’s not a 13. so sue me.)
Technorati tag: thursday thirteen
Thirteen things I learned from Cosmo, Part Deux
That last one was so much fun, I just had to buy the August issue of Cosmo. Particularly given their headliner:
SHOCKING!
THE SEX HE CRAVES
Thousands of Men Finally Admit What They’re Secretly Aching For
Guess what: thousands of men get it all wrong. More below the cut.