PDQ Bach! I love that Hoople exists (as Dwight Jon Zimmerman pointed out), and that Hoople is emphatically in *northern* North Dakota.
I do audio broadcasts for my school's football and soccer teams. The varsity soccer team has a deal that the best player in practice gets to choose warmup music. So I arrived at the pregame one day to find out that our center forward had chosen... Beethoven's 5th symphony. All my years of preparation finally paid off!
The intro to the game started with "It's a beautiful night for a concert, there's not a cloud in the ceiling" and sprinkled in references throughout. Problem was, I had to keep explaining the source material to my 17 year old color commentator. Jeez, you'd think they'd teach this sort of thing in schools...
What a hilarious article. As someone who once wrote a Christmas poem to clients that described Bill Clinton's foreign policy by "Oh, by gosh by golly, I'll defer to Boutros Boutros-Ghali" you can tell my favorite laugh from this piece!
All of my university papers were written on WordPerfect before being printed out on a dot matrix printer to hand in. The sound of a dot matrix printer whirring away at 5:30 am in my or a housemate's room the day before an assignment was due is one of my indelible memories of university.
I still have copies of all of those papers on floppy disks, although I no longer have any device capable of reading those floppy disks. Which is just as well, as there is no one on earth interested in reading my college papers, including the teacher's assistants who were paid minimum wage to read and grade those dot matrix printouts for my professors.
I either borrowed my girlfriend's Brother typewriter/word processor which could save about 25 pages worth of text or typed all of my papers in the computer lab and printed them on Dot Matrix. I learned to strictly regiment my writing process because the lab closed at 10 PM or something, so I could not pull late nighters.
Woof! FYI you were on such a roll you misspelled "Southern North Dakota" and in another FYI, if you didn't know it already, there really is a Hoople, North Dakota, as well as a Mott, so if you were really on the snarky ball you could have included Mott the Hoople in your (borrowing from Calvin and Hobbs) salubrious piece.
Loved the PDQ Bach reference. What’s the team name for USND at Hoople, anyway? What’s their team mascot? You can’t tell me you haven’t thought about it. Great column, BTW. Will probably get more playing time until it sustains one of those Joe Theismann Pencil Sharpener injuries in Week 3 and all the fans applaud politely but are secretly happy its era is finally over
I've come to the realization that my favorite jokes are the obscure ones. They don't even have to make me laugh, but if I read it and go "I wonder who else will get that," it's perfect. So obviously I'm in the right place. Good thing we have the internet, because you'd never get away with that sort of thing writing for a newspaper.
CB4: Straight Outta LoCash!
PDQ Bach! I love that Hoople exists (as Dwight Jon Zimmerman pointed out), and that Hoople is emphatically in *northern* North Dakota.
I do audio broadcasts for my school's football and soccer teams. The varsity soccer team has a deal that the best player in practice gets to choose warmup music. So I arrived at the pregame one day to find out that our center forward had chosen... Beethoven's 5th symphony. All my years of preparation finally paid off!
The intro to the game started with "It's a beautiful night for a concert, there's not a cloud in the ceiling" and sprinkled in references throughout. Problem was, I had to keep explaining the source material to my 17 year old color commentator. Jeez, you'd think they'd teach this sort of thing in schools...
I don't think anyone under 40 has experienced PDQ.
What a hilarious article. As someone who once wrote a Christmas poem to clients that described Bill Clinton's foreign policy by "Oh, by gosh by golly, I'll defer to Boutros Boutros-Ghali" you can tell my favorite laugh from this piece!
I used to call Marques Valdez-Scantling Boutros Boutros-Halfling. Figured I would tweak it slightly this time.
"WordPerfect for DOS"
All of my university papers were written on WordPerfect before being printed out on a dot matrix printer to hand in. The sound of a dot matrix printer whirring away at 5:30 am in my or a housemate's room the day before an assignment was due is one of my indelible memories of university.
I still have copies of all of those papers on floppy disks, although I no longer have any device capable of reading those floppy disks. Which is just as well, as there is no one on earth interested in reading my college papers, including the teacher's assistants who were paid minimum wage to read and grade those dot matrix printouts for my professors.
I either borrowed my girlfriend's Brother typewriter/word processor which could save about 25 pages worth of text or typed all of my papers in the computer lab and printed them on Dot Matrix. I learned to strictly regiment my writing process because the lab closed at 10 PM or something, so I could not pull late nighters.
Woof! FYI you were on such a roll you misspelled "Southern North Dakota" and in another FYI, if you didn't know it already, there really is a Hoople, North Dakota, as well as a Mott, so if you were really on the snarky ball you could have included Mott the Hoople in your (borrowing from Calvin and Hobbs) salubrious piece.
The PDQ Bach reference was a late addition I made at 6 AM !
I for one believe you will never run out of guard jokes...
You should have labeled this as NSFW. Good thing I read it on a break, otherwise I'd be probably in a HR meeting room because of all the laughter.
I laughed so hard I read it twice!
Highly enjoyable article!
One small reason why I quit playing fantasy football was an inability to identify which RB3 would actually become a fantasy star.
Great point on punting averages
Thanks for the tribute to the late Peter Schickele!
It was a punch-up by editor Jerry Wolper! I did enjoy some PDQ Bach back in the day.
Thrilled that there’s a slot for me at LDT3
Loved the PDQ Bach reference. What’s the team name for USND at Hoople, anyway? What’s their team mascot? You can’t tell me you haven’t thought about it. Great column, BTW. Will probably get more playing time until it sustains one of those Joe Theismann Pencil Sharpener injuries in Week 3 and all the fans applaud politely but are secretly happy its era is finally over
They should be the Harpists. Harpo Marx can be the mascot. They play the harp in front of the marching band as if someone can hear it.
That works. Thanks 😂
LT2: Where authorities believe he was in the employ of a woman only known as "Tyger Tyger." He does not talk about that time.
He was going by "Patch" at the time.
I've come to the realization that my favorite jokes are the obscure ones. They don't even have to make me laugh, but if I read it and go "I wonder who else will get that," it's perfect. So obviously I'm in the right place. Good thing we have the internet, because you'd never get away with that sort of thing writing for a newspaper.
Quick correction from your W3 write up: Velus Jones Jr was drafted in the THIRD round, not the second... :P