America’s fun­ny­man, Bob Hope, turned 100 today. Hope accord­ing to his daugh­ter Linda was a kid more than a par­ent and to all those who know him, he’s an ad-libbing, wise-cracking man who has enter­tained mil­lions through­out his life time. His ear­li­est of begin­nings were in Vaude­ville in the 1920s which even­tu­ally led to his own radio show and var­i­ous tele­vi­sion appear­ances. To Hope, tele­vi­sion was “vaude­ville in a box” and gar­nered him guest spots on The Tonight Show and the Golden Girls.

Hope knew that in order to have comedic effec­tive­ness he needed a crew of writ­ers with top-notch jokes. Among the orig­i­nal 8 writ­ers was Sher­wood Shwartz, cre­ator of Gilli­gans Island and The Brady Bunch. In ‘Amer­ica explained by Bob Hope’ Shwartz explains that he orig­i­nally was pur­su­ing to be a doc­tor and instead answered the call of Bob Hope. On a typ­i­cal evening, Bob Hope and his writ­ing team would meet at his home (rented by Woody Wood­pecker cre­ator’ Wal­ter Lantz) and brain­storm ideas. In order to remain fresh and cutting-edge Hope would pool together the best of the worst and use them on his radio show. Unlike an appear­ance at a Com­edy Club, being on the radio meant hav­ing a great col­lec­tion of jokes and mak­ing sure every­one of them was a win­ner con­sid­er­ing you can’t hear the lis­tener laugh.

His great­est tri­umph how­ever lies within his com­mit­ment to enter­tain­ing and sup­port­ing the troops dur­ing world con­flicts (namely World War 2). Var­i­ous pho­tographs and doc­u­men­taries show Hope on stage with an audi­ence of thou­sands atten­tive and laugh­ing their hearts out. To Hope, this was his great­est plea­sure because he was never sure who would be around in the com­ing days dur­ing the war.

For a man to have lived 100 years and live to tell about his adven­tures you have to applaud his per­for­mance. How­ever, for a man to make mil­lions laugh in his life­time deserves a stand­ing ovation.

Happy Birth­day, Bob.

Who is up for a game of Monop­oly? America’s favorite board game, where you con­trol land and mort­gage options. Not to men­tion try­ing to sucker some­one into not buy­ing Board­walk or Park­place so you can gain finan­cial supe­ri­or­ity. It’s a game granted, but a game that pro­vides lots of enter­tain­ment and casual bitterment.

If you’re bored of just plain Monop­oly, you might be able to find a spe­cial custom-flavored ver­sion in these var­i­ous forms: (which, by the way actu­ally exist)

Tow­nop­oly: Monop­oly tai­lored specif­i­cally for land­marks for your area.

Reli­giono­ply: This is where reli­gion and Monop­oly clash to form a spiritually-fun time.

Movieopoly: Your favorite flick but with cus­tom char­ac­ters from the spe­cific movie.

For all the hom­mies and the homettes out there, you could always play Ghet­topoly. Its descrip­tion of game­play is cap­ti­vat­ing: “Buy­ing stolen prop­er­ties, pay­ing pro­tec­tion fees and get­ting car jacked”.

Word.

Pie in a Jar is a entre­prenuer internet-powered busi­ness where any­one can pur­chase for a “mere” $19.95 a Pie in a Jar. Accord­ing to the site’s owner, he said this con­cept was orig­i­nally con­ceived by an old Gypsy woman who he found one night while tak­ing a short­cut through Graven’s Pet Semetary.

Not really the story that is dis­played on the site, but hey, I tried to add some sort of sus­pense and inter­est to how it was con­cep­tu­al­ized. In real­ity, it was an old woman who sug­gested the idea of how inge­nious it would be to sell an entire pie in a jar. I don’t believe she con­sid­ered the Inter­net as it’s start­ing grounds but prob­a­bly a more down home set­ting like along­side the road in one of those mis­shapen lemonade-type stands.

Some­times these kinds of ideas flour­ish because of their roots in the Inter­net. How­ever, it seems that every­one is try­ing to cap­i­tal­ize on the ‘Net by putting up noth­ing more than a dig­i­tal garage sale. Don’t get me wrong, Ebay and Half​.com are exactly that; yard sales on the ‘Net — yet, it seems that among the nor­mal plants there exist a few weird weeds. The sites that sell stu­pid items that only peo­ple who fre­quent yard sales would ever con­sider purchasing.

In the past few months I’ve seen every­thing from just stu­pid to insane. From ideas like “cats in a jar” where the kit­ten is placed into a jar in it’s young life and remains there until it’s grown into a cat. The idea is that the kitten’s body will con­form to the shape of the jar and for­ever remain the size of a “kit­ten” while actu­ally being full grown. Sup­pos­edly, this idea comes from an Asian prac­tice of mak­ing cats that remain in kit­ten form. Admit­tedly, I’d love for a kit­ten to stay the same but it’s insane to force the shape of it’s body to remain so small.

I’ve seen peo­ple try to sell their belly-button lint or a tile from their old kitchen floor of which they “just remod­eled”. Why would any­one buy these things? It’s sim­ple as George Car­lin would say, peo­ple love buy­ing other people’s junk. Fill­ing their house brim to brim with stuff and when they go on vaca­tion they take smaller por­tions of their stuff and ulti­mately buy more stuff on their trip.

In which case, I’ve decided to put up an Inter­net store to sell off bits of the car­pet shav­ings in my room.

“So you think you can write a bet­ter A-Team episode than those crazy writ­ers did, do you? Well, let’s start the process with some baby steps.” It’s an A-Team Mad Lib, sucka.

Speak­ing of Madlibs, the other day I pur­chased a 3-pack from the store. I didn’t even know that they were still being made. Madlibs were a fun past­time that I can remem­ber shar­ing with my cousins and fam­ily. Although, I remem­ber the urgency to com­plete the ‘lib cou­pled with the con­fu­sion as to what an adjec­tive was. “What’s an adjec­tive?”, they would exclaim. “A describ­ing word, you fool.”

Even I remem­ber what an adjec­tive is to this day, but just in case, there is a ref­er­ence chart in the book that explains the def­i­n­i­tions of verbs, nouns, plural nouns, etc. When I was in grade school (or ele­men­tary) I remem­ber learn­ing about ‘plural nouns’ for the first time. The noun was ‘rat’ and to teach us what a plural was, the teacher sim­ply added an ‘s’ on the end of the word. We were amazed how sim­plis­tic that was. I won­dered while sit­ting in my desk if I spoke in plural for the rest of my life, would it throw peo­ple off? Imag­ine walk­ing up to some­one and ask­ing them how they’re doing, they look at you puz­zled and reply, “I’m going okay todays. Doesn’t the Statue of Lib­er­ties look grand today?”

Yeah, sure buddy. Where’s the bus stop to your world? Point me in the right direction.

Click here for the A-Team slash Mad Lib experiment.

*Mr. T says, “I pity the fool who doesn’t click that link!”