Now that's a hug

In San Francisco, The California Academy of Sciences had a cold-blooded exhibition this summer on snakes and lizards.  Their TV ad featured a Curator wrapped by a 16-foot albino python, named "Lemondrop."  "Now that's a hug," the fellow said.

Here's something different.

http://www.amusingplanet.com/2011/07/snake-massage-spa-in-israel.html

I *like* snakes, especially when pronounced the Australian way, "Snaykes" (rhymes with "tykes').  What's your tyke on that, Might?

What the article doesn't mention is that the $80 includes a tasty snake sandwich, err, *steak* sandwich.

Snake, like revenge, is a dish best served cold.  - Klingon Proverb

I was reminded today of a philosophical quote from the 1968 Star Trek episode, "Spock's Brain." 

"Brain and brain.  What is Brain?"

My proposal for an official Mensa song: "Oh the wayward brain is a restless brain, a restless brain that yearns to ponder."  - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSPLSo3U46Q

It's like when I forgot my credentials and was challenged by security at the Portland Mensa convention this year.  "Badges? We don' got no badges.  We don' got to show you no thinking badges."  -"Treasure of the Sierra Madre"

I think it's time to go feed my brain some blood sugar.

Chow

"Mensa, etc." What it means

Mensa is an organization for people who have scored in the top 2% on standardized intelligence tests (e.g. they scored 131 or higher on an IQ test).

Their "AG" (Annual Gathering) is a national get-together. For some reason they frown on "Convention," "Conference," or other terms for their Regional or Annual "Gatherings."

This year, the AG was held during the end of June/beginning of July in Portland, Ore.

When I posted a request in the newsgroup to be a carpooler, I said I was a comedian but could suppress my humor by hanging my head out the window all the way. The entertainment chair offered me a spot in their After Hours room on the first night and I took it. I probably did 25 or 30 minutes in 2 chunks.

Did I forget to mention I'm a member? When I was young I was very smart. These days, not so much.

More to follow.

Mensa Portland 2011 AG

I *may* get into a larger description of what the title means in a different post. Suffice it to say I was performing for an audience of very bright people.

As I explained to them, I could do my regular (very funny) act or material I *never* do in clubs -- material suited to and written for *them.* I got them to agree to the latter set then launched into it.

I'll talk about that worked and what didn't later.

----------------

Hello, Smart People!
It's OK to say that, right? I'm a smart people, too.
My name is Rich Orwell and for the last 3 years I've been a stand-up comedian in San Francisco.

Before we go any farther, I'd like to acknowledge somebody who's been helping people from out of town via Yahoo get ready for the Portland experience. She's also been working tirelessly putting together the entertainment we'll all enjoy tonight and on other evenings during the AG. Please put your hands together for Joanne Reisman. (She got a big hand and stood to take a bow)
Here's another one.

========================
I talked about my bad (too short) haircut. Semi-funny.
hair
einstein w/male pattern baldness
bozo the clown
attorneys can work for me pro bozo
so less eccentric
vietnamese issues
not seen for 1 year
republican => storm trooper or hitler youth not join
but that's what happened to my hair
========================

And let me say this just once. I joined last year and nobody *yet* has come to teach me the secret handshake. And it's already been a problem.

My wife & I were challenged at the door because we forgot our credentials and I *didn't* know the handshake, so we ended up saying, "Badges? We don' got to show you no thinking badges." That was a long way to go for a Treasure of the Sierra Madre punchline, wasn't it.
========================

Thinking what to say tonight, I found myself in a quandary. I was stuck between a rock and a hard place. Then I realized I was in a *quarry*.

My choice was to do material I do every week or what I really *want* to do, the jokes I can't perform in comedy clubs.

PERFORM

who's been to live comedy shows? rules

I won't think you're applauding ME. I'll know that's happening when you rush the stage and (ladies only, please) tear off your clothes and throw roses. Did you know Portland is famous for its roses?

Famous Portland roses gardens are in Washington park, about 2 miles away. Near the zoo.

I wrote this Portland riddle:
Q; Why did the chicken cross the road?
A: To get to the other side.
Q: Why did the horticulturist cross the roses?
A: To get to the other hybrid.
[Boos]
=====================
not an AG or an RG. (for 46 years) the only gathering I've known is
woolgathering

So I haven't spent much time around Mensans. Let me hear you if you like games, and sci fi, and movies, and TV, and Shakespeare, and history, and puns, but only really GOOD puns.

Jabba the Hut exercise program
lifestyle: athletic, active, not sedentary; sedimentary

mid-day on Saturday
Have Your Photo Taken with Star Wars Characters for a $5 Donation to Charity

walks with a limp dick
[yawns -- I think there were a lot of lick dicks in the room]
========================================
Do you know the brand of plastic sandwich bags 4 out of 5 Klingon mothers prefer? zi-PLOK. <= Read it aloud to Trekkers, with accent on the last syllable; they'll get it. Glad? Only to die in bat-tle.
[good responses]
=====================
President Truman had a sign on his desk, "The buck stops here." In the original Star Trek series, Mr. Scott, the engineer, had a sign that said, "The glottal stops here." <= typically, only linguists and speech pathologists understand this one
[nothing]
========================================
Time passing in a Urologist's waiting room.
Dick-Doc Dick-Doc -- again, swinging it DOWNwards
[liked it\
=====================
for example
ENTERTAINMENT
angelina joLIP chris brown & rihanna
[nobody got it]

ENTERTAINMENT
Sheen's girls problem w/vocab
one looked like she could cross the atlantic affixed to the hull of a moving ship like a lamprey. You can't tell my audiences "lamprey."

[so what?]

Not just for mensans

Mae West goes to the Pharmacy. "Is that a pestle in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me? *You're* embarrassed??? I am mortarfied."
[ok]

ADULT
Garbanzo beans are also called "chickpeas". The difference between garbanzo beans and mangoes is that chickpeas sitting down while mangoes standing up.
[no]

Thyroid cancer
--------------------------
Casablanca
stick neck out for nobody to stick
-------------------------------------------------
My wife hates me, I tell you.

My doctor was worried I might have cancer in my thyroid.
It turns out I'm fine, but to rule it out, I needed a biopsy.
When they stuck the needle in my neck, her voodoo doll screamed.
[ok]
=====================
PRESENTATIONS [these were bits that referred to scheduled presentations]
************************************************
Friday, July 1 9AM-10:15AM
How We are Scammed By Statistics
by Ed Zaccaro
A sigma is a "standard deviation" is a foot fetish.
A *non*-standard deviation is bestiality.
************************************************

ME / WIFE
Sunday, July 3 6:15pm
Minimizing Your Risk in the Next Apocalypse
I'm not bothered by this rapture business. This is my second marriage. I'm already enjoying the afterwife

FOOD
Sunday, July 3 10am
M-Chef SIG Meet & Greet

Bad Tapioca is Off Pudding [ok]

Did you hear about the banana
that worried about getting older?
(Distraught.) Overrot. [boos and applause]

the 1st time I heard about a grilled cheese sandwich I thought it was a *gorilla* cheese sandwich
The difference between making a grilled cheese sandwich and a gorilla cheese sandwich is that for one you have to milk the gorilla [ok]

If you order your food with
"No spit" or "Light Spit,"
You'll always get it with "Extra Spit." [ok]
************************************************
YOGA
A Yoga posture (we might learn in Ken's morning classes for the next few days) is called an "asana."
The passive-aggressive Yoga posture is the "kiss my" (asana.) [nothing]
************************************************
Sunday afternoon
The Other Down Under
Enjoy slides and stories from Marcia and Steve's trip to New Zealand
The table wine is served at the Wellington (New Zealand) Military Academy is Mutton Cadet. [nothing]
************************************************
L'CHAIM
How about the Mossad's way of dealing with Nazis, the "Kurt Waldheimlich Maneuver"? It's a lot like the Heimlich Maneuver, except you do it, holding a knife. [ok]

>>>>>> The Jewish blessing that your daughter's eyebrows don't grow together, "brooke shields" [good]

Subject: Mood check
You can tell Bipolars' moods by having them spit into a glass of water. If it sinks, they're depressed. If it floats, they're phlegm-buoyant. [very good]

>>>>>> Pure Mensa

Imitation is *not* the sincerest form of flattery. "Drooling" is. [very good]

Don't Focus on the Minutiae. Take it with a Grain of Gestalt. [good]

Epistemology leads to Epistaxis [nothing]

Movies/TV
=============
Fans of I Love Lucy might understand this story. Attila returns from a campaign of raping, pillaging and plundering. He shouts to his wife, "Hi, Homey, I'm Hun!" [ok]
=====================
Yogi Bear and friends retired from making cartoons and is performing at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland -- by the way, it's a 5 hour drive south of here. Yogi has the title role in Julius Caesar, where his last line is, "Et tu, Boo Boo?" <= Now, I do a GREAT Yogi Bear impersonation, but this dies a horrible death every time I tell it. [not]
=====================
>>>>>> I want to make a movie about the Iranian revolution but I can't find people to cast aspersions. [no]
=====================
Johnny Weissmuller was throwing a party when his agent called to tell him he'd been cast in another Tarzan movie. He announced it to those assembled, saying, "Once more unto the breechcloth dear friends. Once more." [ok]

ENTERTAINMENT
>>>>>> a ballerina walks into a barre and bruises her thigh.
oh, that couldn't happen. it must have been Natalie Portman. [no. damn!]
=====================
ADULT
>>>>>>>>>>> My wife's response the first time I wished her a good night by saying, "Sleep tight. Don't let the bedbugs bite." was "We don't have bedbugs and I ALWAYS sleep tight. I do Kegels." [no. they were too old.]

ME
I take Cialis every day for E.D. The "moment was right" last week, but I slipped getting out of that damned bathtub [no. they don't watch TV)

ME
kate & william teeth
demand birth certificates. too white & too straight.
My family goes back to the Magna Carta -
1215 - now = 900 years
that's a lot of bad teeth
mine like every curry entree on an indian lunch buffet -- various shades of brown.
ETC. I whiten my teeth with Photoshop. (KILLED!)

ME
We're so poor, we're planning to cater my funeral *ourselves*. We're having my liver ground into a tasty cracker spread, "pate de fois moi." Hannibal Lecter will stop by to have it with some fava beans and a nice chi-Yan-ti. (killed)

tell you why -- David
David was what we sometimes called a "Love Child." Actually, more of a "Summer of Love" child. moved in with us. severely limiting our
decades-long lifestyle choice of in-home nudity. [good]
------------------------------------------------------
ME / WIFE
on August 1st, Ladies & Gentlemen, my wife & I will celebrate our 30th anniv.
the credit doesn't go to me or her., it goes to the pope.
Italian catholic marriages really DON't end in divorce.
It's more likely my marriage will end with a bullet to the back of my head.[p]
and that could happen [ok]

in vitro corleone ... don petri [ok]
=====================
CLEVER
The dinosaur with the largest vocabulary was the Thesaurus.
Specifically a Thesaurus named Roget. [ok]
=====================
ME / WIFE
8/1/11 was 8/1/81.
Pretty clever of her, ehh. I remember her exact words. "You forget an anniversary like 8-1-8-1, and my uncle will break your kneecaps. Very sweet. [ok]
=====================

If you're so smart, why ain't you rich, Rich?

I belong to a small group, having perhaps 200 members worldwide, called "UAMSIG."

The "SIG" part stands for "Special Interest Group." There are all kinds of SIGs, all around the world. Wikipedia's definition at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Interest_Group is a good one. You might take a break and visit their page before you continue reading this.

OK ... so do you know what a "SIG" is yet? If not, go back and follow that Wikipedia link. I'll tell you one organization that has a bunch of SIGs: Mensa, the High IQ Society. Mensa encourages its members to form groups, large and small, to learn about or promote whatever subjects interest them.

In my group, UAMSIG, the "UAM" stands for "UnderAchieving Mensans." We *may* be the smartest people you'd ever meet who never accomplished anything of significance. Not that everybody in the group fits that description. Some *have* accomplished things, perhaps enormously important things, yet feel they haven't lived up to what they *should have* done with their talents.

I, however, *am* one of those who've never done squat with their lives. What makes this a particularly egregious waste of a talented mind is that Mensa requires an IQ of 131 for membership. Eligibility, therefore, requires only that your IQ be in the top 2% of the population. The USA's population is over 300 million. If they wanted to, 6 million of those people could join Mensa.

My IQ is considerably higher. The actual number doesn't matter, but Mensa represents the highest 2%, the "98th percentile." I'm in the top third of one percent. I don't think of myself as special, because there are a lot of people as smart or smarter than I am. About a million of them in the USA.

And it's inappropriate to call myself "smart." I'm smart at taking IQ tests. And IQ tests measure only a limited set of mental skills. If I were *really* smart, I'd be doing something with it.

Hence, UAMSIG.

After I was fired from one of many jobs (maybe 25 years ago), my ex-boss was kind enough to arrange an interview for me with a "headhunter" -- an executive recruiter. Now I don't generally run around telling people my IQ. I never have. This blog post is an exception, because I want to point out how *not* smart I've been in living my life -- but sometimes (like when I had that job) what I say or do reveals I'm intelligent.

The first thing the headhunter said to me was, "I hear you're a genius." I was surprised. I thought for a moment but still couldn't think of anything better to say than, "Yes." I realized, years later, that the right response wasn't "Yes," it was "At what?" If my ex-boss had told the headhunter, and the headhunter told *me*, maybe I would have had a direction to go with my life. Of course the headhunter might have replied, "He didn't say you were good at *doing* anything; only that you're really smart." That wouldn't have done me any good.

As I said, I don't go around telling people my IQ score. About all I've used my intellect to do is write comedy material. Mensans love "word play" -- puns and such. Far too much of my comedy material is that sort of thing. Maybe that's why my act hasn't "taken off" yet.

In one or more other posts here I talk about having been a hippie in the Summer of Love in San Francisco, 1967. I'm pretty sure I smoked enough dope that summer to burn out a significant number of brain cells. Luckily (for my membership application to Mensa, anyway), I took the test a few years earlier.

Officially Smart

I'll expand this later, but yesterday I received my Mensa Membership package.

I could have joined back when I took IQ tests & the SATs 45 years ago, but never thought about it until recently.

I was wondering how my friend Gail is doing back in Chattanooga, but don't have an email address for her. One of my funniest "Oops!" moments happened when I ran into her at UC Berkeley around 1990. We had both decided to be "re-entry" students, i.e. go back & finish BA degrees after dropping out in the 1960s. Big-time coincidence.

Anyway, we went out to lunch and I was walking her back to her car when I spotted a car with a "Mensa" bumper sticker. I pointed it out and said, "What kind of idiot would put that on their car?" Yep, you guessed it. It was HER car.

It's kinda like those annoying "Proud parent of an Honor Student" bumper stickers I see everywhere nowadays. I mean, *I* could have been an honor student in High School, too, if I never discovered drugs and masturbation.

Anyway, I joined pretty-much to look her up in the members directory (accessible only to other members), but she let her membership lapse. [sigh] Now I guess I'll just have to go hug other smart people at conventions, or flash my membership card to get other folks to punch me in the face, or something,