The Week In Tweets: Special I'M Peter Dinklage Edition!

  FAKE NEWS REPORTS!

I see Neil Young is trending.
Didn’t he used to be in a band or something?
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New York’s Museum Of Natural History Has Canceled Teddy Roosevelt & Removed His Famous Statue From Its Entrance!
“We were going to replace it with a statue of Caitlyn Jenner,” a spokesman for the museum said, “but then we found out she was a conservative.”
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The El Paso Times Opines That Beto O’Rourke Can Win The Texas Governorship By Swaying Young Voters Of Color!
“As a Democrat, I plan to continue the proud tradition of doing nothing for them,” the lanky politician promises.
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York Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul Blames 'shot from an illegal gun' for killing of NYPD officers
But what about the criminal who pulled the trigger?
“Who?”
Yeah, that’s what I thought.
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New York Governor Kathy Hochul Blames “An Illegal Gun” For The Shooting Deaths Of NYPD Officers!
The gun has since been released on a no-cash bail.
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THIS JUST IN:
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer Is RETIRING!
“Yep, I’m going from being paid to go to work and do nothing to being paid to stay at home and do nothing.”
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The MARS Candy Company Is Updating Its M&M’s Candy Characters To Reflects These Woke Times We Are Living In!
Even the yellow one?
“No, he’ll still be the stupid white guy.”
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Game Of Thrones’ Peter Dinklage Criticizes Disney For Their Live-Action Remake Of The 19th Century Classic Snow White!
“The Brothers Grimm couldn’t write their way out of a paper bag,” the diminutive in spirit actor says.
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CNN's Brian Stelter Visits An Eighth Grade Classroom For A Class On "Media Misinformation" And Is Surprised When The Teacher Points To Him As An Example!
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The Telegraph Wonders Why The Chinese Government Had To Go And Change The Ending To The Classic Movie Fight Club!
“Because we’re CHINA,” an exasperated Xi Jinping explains. “It’s what we DO.”
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Game Of Thrones’ Peter Dinklage Criticizes Disney For Their Live-Action Remake Of The Brothers Grimm 19th Century Classic Snow White!
“You can listen to me because I’M Peter Dinklage!”
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Jim Duchene

Fake News Chief Correspondent

read my RaisingDad humor column for caregivers at

Desert Exposure Magazine

desertexposure.com

The Week In Tweets: Special Where's JK Rowling? Edition!

 FAKE NEWS REPORTS!

Just saw HBO Max’s super-duper Harry Potter 20th Anniversary show WITHOUT JK Rowling.

Like The Tin Man, it was missing its heart.

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“GUILTY!” the judge said, and sentenced me to the electric chair.

“What should I do?” I asked my lawyer.

“Don’t sit down,” he said.

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The Telegraph Reports That British Jihadist Malik Faisal Akram—The Texas Synagogue Terrorist—Was Allowed To Enter The U.S. Despite Having A Series Of “Red Flag Warnings”!

Seems he correctly answered the most important question:

“Will you vote Democrat?”

“Yes.”

“Welcome to America.”

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The Bloomberg QuickTake Reports That North Korea Has Fired TWO MORE Missiles In It’s Aggressive 2022 Barrage!

“And who’s going to stop us?” portly dictator Kim Jong-Un wants to know. “Joe Biden? Don’t make me laugh. Ha, ha, ha. I SAID DON’T MAKE ME LAUGH!”

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Texas’ Future Governor, Democrat Beto O'Rourke Has Raised $7.2 Million Since Declaring His Candidacy In November!

“You know PT Barnum’s saying about suckers?” the lanky politician asks. “It’s true.”

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Alabama Football Coach Nick Saban Adds His Name To A Letter Urging Joe Manchin To Federalize All Elections!

And what’s his opinion on China’s Uyghur genocide or their poisoning of Americans with Fentanyl?

“I don’t get into politics,” he says.

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In Preparation For The Olympics China Arrests Its Activists And Warns Foreign Athletes Not To Publicly Criticize Its Inhumane Policies!

“That seems reasonable,” LeBron James says, checking his bank statement.

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I’m not saying traffic was heavy, but when I pressed in the cigarette lighter, the lady in the car in front of me had me arrested!

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Bloomberg Opinion Goes Out Of It’s Way To Discourage Americans From Getting Married!

Funny, but you would think knowing married people would be enough to discourage Americans from getting married.

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I’m not fat.

I’m just six inches too short.

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Jim Duchene

Fake News Chief Correspondent

read my RaisingDad humor column for caregivers at

Desert Exposure Magazine

desertexposure.com

The Week In Tweets: Special Too Many Funerals Edition!

 FAKE NEWS REPORTS!

Variety—Entertainment’s Premiere Newspaper—Reports That The Grammys Has Been Postponed Indefinitely!

Even the music industry is finally admitting there’s been no good music since Rock & Roll died.

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The Telegraph World News Is Reporting That American Polar Bears Are Migrating To RUSSIA!

Why?

“Free stuff, comrade,” a spokesman for the commie bears translated.

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The Washington Post Criticizes Joe Biden For Going To Too Many Funerals!

“But the food’s so good,” Biden insists between episodes of “Matlock.”

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San Francisco’s 645-Foot Tall, 58-Story Millennium Tower Has Been Tilting Over 3 Inches Per Year!

“We’re asking all our residents to stand on the other side of the building,” the luxury residential skyscraper’s management company says.

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San Francisco’s 645-Foot Tall, 58-Story Millennium Tower Has Been Tilting Over 3 Inches Per Year!

“Nothing a good earthquake can’t fix,,” California Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi assures her constituents.

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Bloomberg QuickTake Reports Ex-Georgia Representative Stacey Abrams Ditched Joe Biden & Kamala Harris At Tuesday’s Events Devoted To Her Signature Issue Of Voting Rights Because…

“…once you get the stench of defeat on you, you can’t wash it off.”

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The Bloomberg QuickTake Reports That Joe Biden & Kamala Harris Visited The Grave Of Civil Rights Icon MLK On Their Tuesday Visit To Atlanta!

“Will I be getting cookies with my MLK?” Biden wanted to know.

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Bloomberg QuickTake Reports That China—Due To The Threat Of Omicron—Is Locking Down Millions Of Citizens In Several Cities In Preparation For Its Hosting Of The Upcoming Covid-Xi Olympics!

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I’m not saying lady’s panties have gotten skimpy, but I’ve seen more cotton inside an aspirin bottle.

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My ex bragged that her new husband has “the cutest little button nose.”

She had it buttoned to his bottom lip.

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Jim Duchene

Fake News Chief Correspondent

read my RaisingDad humor column for caregivers at Desert Exposure Magazine

desertexposure.com

The Week In Tweets: Special A Naked Cher Edition!

 Fake News Reports!

I didn’t go to any New Year’s Eve parties.

   I can sit around with people looking at their phones at home.

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I see No Time To Die is trending.

How can it be called No Time To Die when James Bond finds the time to die at the end?

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Harry Potter Cast Reunites After 20 Years In HBO’s Return To Hogwarts Special!

Unsurprisingly, without JK Rowling writing their lines, they have nothing interesting to say.

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The Miley Cyrus-Pete Davidson New Year’s Eve Special FLOPS On NBC!

   “That Pete Davidson’s the kiss of death,” the former Hannah Montana complains, “and STDs.”

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Watching New Year’s Eve Live: Nashville’s Big Bash, I couldn’t help but notice that the white country group Lady Antebellum succeeded in stealing the name of the black female blues singer Lady A.

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The Wall Street Journal Wants You To Meet The Children Whose Parents Named Them After Characters In The Harry Potter Series!

Uh… maybe you should come back after they’ve stopped crying.

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As Omicron Cases Surge, Politicians Are Encouraging Everyone to Wear The KN95 Mask From Hope Health Supply!

“And it has nothing to do with the bribes they’ve been paying us,” they assure the public.

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I’m not saying my grandfather is old, because he still chases women, he just forgets what for.

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I’m not saying the economy is bad, but I’m learning a trade so I can say what kind of work I’m out of.

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I See “The Big Lie” Is Trending!

What’s CNN done now?

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Telegraph Fashion Quotes The 75-Year-Old Cher As Saying: “You don’t have to be naked to look great.”

Trust me, Cher, no one wants to see you naked.

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Jim Duchene

Fake News Chief Correspondent

 

read my RaisingDad humor column for caregivers at Desert Exposure Magazine

desertexposure.com

Taylor Streit's Christmas Carol

Taylor Streit's Christmas Carol

“Where ya going, Streit? It’s Christmas! Don’t tell me you’ll be spending it fishing? You can do that any ol' day of the year. You should be in church, my friend.”

     “Bah! Halibut!” Streit answered. “Fishing is my church,” and he went on his way, the whole exchange reminding him of a similar conversation he had decades earlier when he was but a wee laddie. The widow Kravitz, busybody that she was, had spied him walking jauntily one Sunday with a fishing rod in one hand and a jar of tadpoles in the other.

     “Streit!” she chastised. “Don’t you know better than to go fishing on the Lord’s day?”

     “I’m not going fishing,” he answered back politely. “I’m going home.”

     

     Meanwhile, when the grown Streit got to his favorite fishing spot, he was shocked to find his uncle there waiting for him.

     Because his uncle had died YEARS ago!

     "Uncle Jack!" Streit cried out happily. "What are you doing here?"

     "I'm here to warn you."

     "Warn me about what?"

     "After I leave, you'll receive three visitors."

     "Bill collectors?"

     "You'll find out," his uncle teased mysteriously as he faded away. "You'll find out."

     Streit wasn't worried.

     He lived through the sixties.

     He was used to such hallucinations.

     

     "But it wasn't a hallucination," a voice said.

     "What the fudge?" Streit yelped, only he didn't use the word 'fudge.'

     "I am the Ghost of Christmas Past," a little imp of an apparition announced itself. 

     "You're a… a… a… ghost?” Streit sputtered.

     "Not just 'a’ ghost, but 'the’ ghost. The Ghost of Christmas Past."

     "The past?” Streit wondered out loud.

     "Your past,” the spirit clarified. “Take my hand and you'll see."

     The spirit reached out.

     Streit looked longingly toward the lake. 

     "Take it," the spirit insisted.

     So Streit did.

     And immediately he found himself in the past. His past.

     "Who's that?" he asked.

     "Why, that's you as a child," the spirit explained. "The very first time you went fishing."

     "I remember," Streit said, wistfully. “My Uncle Jack took me."

     "Watch," the spirit told him. 

     Streit watched, and he saw himself as a young child, barely past being a toddler. The boy and his uncle stood together, not saying anything. Both enjoying the serenity of the moment.

      Then, in the distance, a funeral procession drove over the bridge they were fishing by. Respectfully, the uncle took off his hat, held it over his heart, and bowed his head. The boy did the same.

     After the procession passed, the boy looked at his uncle.

     "It was the least I could do," his uncle explained. "After all, we were married for thirty years."

     

     "I had forgotten all about that," Streit told the spirit, but the playful apparition was gone, replaced by an immense figure glorious to behold.

     "I am the Ghost of Christmas Present," the new specter thundered.

     "You know, you’re a pretty big guy,” Streit observed.

     The specter had never considered that before.

     “I am?”

     “Man, it would take me two buses and a train to get on your good side!”

     "Nevertheless," the specter said, holding out his hand, “we must go.”

     Streit grabbed that baseball glove of a mitt, and he was transported once again.

     "Remember this?" the specter asked.

     "No," Streit said.

     "It happened just yesterday."

     "The sixties..." Streit offered in lieu of an explanation.

     Streit saw himself lifting a bucket with two fishes swimming inside. 

     "Yikes!” both Streits cried out in surprise when a game warden showed up out of nowhere. 

     "Can I see your fishing license?" the game warden asked. It was more a statement than a question.

     "My what?"

     "Your fishing license.”

     "Oh, that," yesterday's Streit dismissed, waving the request away as if it were too silly to consider. "I don't need one."

     "You don't?"

     "No, sir."

     "You do know it's illegal to fish without a license, right?"

     "But I wasn’t fishing, officer. These fish are my pets."

     "Your pets?"

     "Yes, sir," Streit confirmed. "Every day, when the weather's good, I like to bring them to the lake so they can play with their friends. When they're done visiting, I just hold out the bucket, give them a whistle, and they jump right back in. Then we go home."

     Streit could see that the game warden was skeptical.

     "Let me prove it to you,” Streit said, and emptied the contents of the bucket out into the lake.

     The game warden waited. Nothing happened. Then, when nothing happened some more, he said, “Well?"

     "Well what?"

     "Aren’t you going to whistle the fish back?”

     Streit smiled slyly.

     "What fish are you talking about, officer?"

     

     Streit—the real Streit—chuckled proudly.

     “You should have seen the time I told him I was simply teaching my worms to swim,” he laughed.

     Only there was no one there to hear him. He was still by the lake, but he was alone. The Ghost of Christmas Present was gone. It was completely still. Even the birds were silent. Not a leaf fell.

     A black mist started to dance in front of him. Swirling, swirling, until it swirled into the form of a dark figure shrouded in a heavy black garment which concealed its head.

     "And you?" Streit asked the deathly wraith. "I suppose you're the Ghost of Christmas Future. What are you here to show me? How I wasted my life fishing?"

     The wraith, saying nothing, lifted a withered hand and pointed toward the lake. 

     "What are you trying to tell me?" Streit asked, trepidatiously.

     The wraith pointed again.

     "Is that where I..." Streit started, but stopped, too fearful to go on.

     The wraith neither spoke nor moved, it only continued pointing in the direction of the lake.

     Streit understood, and began walking toward the water, afraid of what he was going to find. When he got to his favorite spot, he turned around, half expecting the Ghost of Christmas Future to have disappeared like the others. Instead, he saw the wraith reach into the darkness of its garment and pull out a fishing rod.

     And then, like two old friends, they cast their lines into the water.

  

     by Jim Duchene

     humor columnist for Desert Exposure Magazine 

     desertexposure.com

     @JimDuchene

Somehow He Knows (Part Two)

as featured in Desert Exposure Magazine

Just before dawn the next morning, I was making my beautiful wife a cup of coffee. I had on my baseball cap with a light in front that I use for hiking. The shutters were closed. All the lights in the house were off. Only the small bulb on my cap was on. In my mind, the theme to Mission: Impossible was playing.

     Yeah, I know I sound like a nut.

     For no other reason than I had a feeling, I peeked outside and saw my father peeking back. He was looking out his front door, squinty eyes squinting.

     His front door is actually a back door. He lives in a little in-law house just in front of our main house, so his front door actually faces backward to the french doors that lead into our kitchen. Sometimes he’ll sleep there, and sometimes he’ll sleep in a bedroom we have for him in the main house, depending on how annoyed he is at me, I guess. It's not as confusing as I’m making it sound.

     He was looking straight in my direction, but could he see me?. The house was dark. I was hidden by shadows. I turned the light on my cap off and didn’t move. Music was playing on my phone, but it was so low if you didn't know it was on you wouldn't hear it.

     But my father could hear it.

     Somehow, and I don't know how it's even possible, somehow I knew he could hear it. He hears everything. Everything, that is, except the stuff he's supposed to hear. 

     I saw him open his door and take a cautious step outside. I saw him shut his door and lock it. I guess he's afraid his three year-old great-grandson will break into his house and steal his prized collection of celebrity nail clippings. Still looking in my direction, his eyes bugging out for better focus, he put on his mask and began walking across the courtyard. He stopped at the french doors and tested the doorknob.

     Dang, why didn’t I make sure it was locked?

     Turning the knob, he pushed the door in... but too late. Like a ninja, I grabbed my wife’s coffee and melted into the shadows. 

     "Heh, heh, heh," I chuckled victoriously to myself.

     Later that afternoon, I was sitting at the kitchen table, sorting out the newspaper. My father had already had his way with it, so it was a mess. You would think the least he could do would be to put it back together when he was done, but you'd be wrong. 

     My father was in the den, sitting in his favorite chair. It used to be MY favorite chair, but when my father moved in with us, it became HIS favorite chair.

     "Just sit somewhere else," my wife told me.

     That was easy for her to say because it wasn’t HER favorite chair.

     For a change, my father was watching something other than baseball. He was watching reruns of Hogan's Heroes. He likes Bob Crane. I once tried to tell him the sordid circumstances of how the actor died, but he would have none of it. 

     Meanwhile, I was still trying to put the newspaper back in order. I say "trying" because there was no sports section. No sports section? That's right, no sports section. “But why do you need the sports section?” I can hear you say. “You don’t even like sports!”

     I just do.

     "Pop," I called out to him.

     No answer. I looked up. I could see why. Bob Crane was kissing Colonel Klink's sexy blonde secretary.

     "POP!" I yelled.

     "WHAT?" he yelled back.

     “Do you have the sports section?”

     "Do I have the what?"

     "The Sports Section!"

     "The Sports Section?"

     "Yeah."

     "What would I be doing with the Sports Section?"

     I don’t know.

Sitting on it?

It wouldn’t be the first time.

     "Did you take it someplace?"

     “Take it where?”

     “Someplace.”

     "Why would I do that?"

     "To drive me nuts," is what I wanted to tell him, but what I actually said was: "Because you were reading it."

     "I wasn’t reading the newspaper."

     It was my turn to go, "What?"

     I looked at the newspaper in front of me. It was like an unmade bed with a pillow missing. 

     "What do you mean you weren’t reading the newspaper?"

     "What do you mean ‘what do I mean’? I wasn't reading the newspaper."

     I looked at my father.

My father looked at me. 

     "I... wasn't... reading... the... newspaper," he insisted.

     What do I do?

Call him a liar?

Giving me the stink eye, he was daring me to do just that. I know inside he was laughing. Not at Hogan’s Heroes, but at me. 

     He made his smack, smack, smacking noise, then turned back to the TV because Sgt. Shultz was about to give his catchphrase: "I see nothing! I see nothing!"

     I went back to the newspaper.

     I read it, but I didn't enjoy it.

     No, sir... I didn't enjoy it at all.

 

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May your troubles last as long as your New Year’s resolutions.

theduchenebrothers@gmail.com

@JimDuchene