Shtick to one thing

On the sixth day of Ventriloquist Christmas, my true love gave to me...

Six classic Shticks*

Five Funny Jokes

Four face expressions

Three corny hats

Two moving eyebrows

And a brand new Ven-tril-o-quist Dummy

***

My former comedy partner, Merriam, and Webster, his next-door neighbor and partner in his new  barbecue sauce business, define shtick as a Yiddish word meaning: 1.  a usually comic or repetitious performance or routine : BIT, or  2. one's special trait, interest, or activity : BAG

So James Brown, the King of Soul, might have sang Papa's Got a Brand New Schtick had he been born Yiddish instead of black, or been more heavily influenced by Sammy Davis, Jr.

***

If you are under 50 years old, you probably didn't get that joke. Bummer for you. It was really clever and funny.  

But, happy holidays to you anyways.

A parity parody?

With thanks to my dear friend Merriam, and his beer buddy, Webster, I offer for your consideration...

• Parity ( noun \ˈper-ə-tē, ˈpa-rə-\) : the quality or state of being equal or equivalent
• Parody ( noun \ˈper-ə-dē, ˈpa-rə-\): 1: a literary or musical work in which the style of an author or work is closely imitated for comic effect or in ridicule, 2: a feeble or ridiculous imitation.
• Par·rot (noun \ˈper-ət, ˈpa-rət\): a person who sedulously echoes another's words.

Now, to use these words properly, I submit that:

1. Because the National Football League is designed for teams to have parity among all teams, it is very hard to pick more than half the game winners correctly.  Therefore, the fact that Budding Ventriloquist Presents Gridiron Gurus (BVPGG) only got eight games correct out of 14 in week seven is actually better than what parity is designed to do.
2. Those of you that think that  BVPGG only getting eight of 14 correct makes the whole spectacle of BVPGG just a parody of football shows are just parroting the nabobs of negativism* who scoff at ventriloquist prognosticators.

You're not a ventriloquist prognosticator scoffer, are you?

Getting called a scoffer on a Tuesday doesn't bode well for the rest of the week, does it?

It's okay.  I didn't really think you were. It's just that eight out of 14 is, well, kind of lame. I was throwing that stuff out to distract from that.

***

* Nabobs of negativism is a phrase written by William Safire when he was a speech writer for Richard Nixon's vice president fist vice president, Spiro Agnew.  Agnew used it to describe the increasingly hostile news media.  Not long after using the phrase in a speech, Agnew was forced to resign in disgrace, never thereafter to run for public office.  

Agnew does, however, earn this posthumous honor:  He face does have that interesting quality that puts him on the "fact that belongs on a ventriloquist dummy" list.

Were he not dead, this might signal the rebirth of his political future.  Granted, he'd be, like, 110 years old.

Remember, it's the honor that counts. 

Thursday morning weakside linebacker

Perhaps the best advice is not to bet the house, or the car, or even a cheap plastic spatula on their advice. The gridiron gurus of Budding Ventriloquist Presents Gridiron Gurus went 6-10 in Week 3.

Particularly disturbing is that George (the older one with the white hair and mustache) sang the picks for the Cowboys, Vikings, Saints, and Packers - and got every one of those wrong.  Plans to do an episode of Budding Ventriloquist Presents Gridiron Gurus as an opera are now on hold. Plans to do an episode of Budding Ventriloquist Presents Gridiron Gurus as an opera in a foreign language are definitely reduced to a pipe dream.

***

Even if the actual football picks leave something to be desired, the ventriloquism aspect is coming along.  With every episode, I am seeing something to work on.

It's kind of a two steps forward, one step back experience. Maybe it's a one step forward and a quick dash back, then a half step that's a bit to the side effort.

But always, I feel some improvement.

***

Technical difficulties:  These posts are a little rushed right now. My laptop developed a mechanical problem and I need to get a new one.  It has screwed with when I can get some writing done.

The guys in brown already have a new one on the truck heading to me. If I started a courier service, I'd want us to be the guys in turquoise.  It's a fine, robust color - and the slogan would make for great office chatter: "Hey, have the guys in turquoise been here yet?"  I think more people at work would smile because of it.

Yes, I like alliteration. That makes me alliterate, not illiterate. I hope.

Get me a dictionary. Call Merriam. Page Webster. I said that right, right?

Hey, back at ya

There's only 23* days to go until:

Yet another thing that we Yanks know about the Land Down Under is boomerangs.

You all know what a boomerang is:  It’s a curved stick that, when thrown through the air, returns to the person throwing it unless it’s me.

It’s the ancient relative of the Frisbee, which is a disk that floats through the air into the hands of your smiling friend, or onto the neighbors roof it was thrown by me.

Being the ever responsible journalist, I wanted to make sure I was factually accurate about boomerangs, so I did what any good researcher does these days. I looked it up on Wikipedia. There was a length article that said the most amazing thing:

Historical evidence also points to the use of non-returning boomerangs by the ancient Egyptians, Native Americans of California and Arizona, and inhabitants of southern India for killing birds and rabbits. Indeed, some boomerangs were not thrown at all, but were used in hand to hand combat by Indigenous Australians.

So let me get this straight:

• Boomerangs are not always designed to come back, and
• sometimes they were made for  "not throwing"?

Yea, right. I believe I have just found proof that people just make stuff up on Wikipedia.


I suppose if I look up Paula Abdul in Wikipedia, it's going to say that her Straight Up wasn't all that great. I suppose it will say that Stefano DeMira**, the evil villain of the soap opera Days of Our Lives, is totally dead this time and is not coming back - like the 12th time he was killed was the charm that finally did him in for good, that evil dastard. But I digress...

Maybe this is where my friends Merriam and Webster come to my aid:

• Merriam says boomerang is a noun that is "a bent or angular throwing club typically flat on one side and rounded on the other so that it soars or curves in flight; especially : one designed to return near the thrower."
• Webster, who I frequently feel I owe a beer to, says that boomerang is intransitive verb that is "an act or utterance that backfires on its originator."

Neither Merriam or Webster are fluent in Dharuk (Australian aboriginal language of the Port Jackson area), though they do know the word was bumarinʸ. (Webster does seem to be speaking in Dharuk after a few Fosters, though he doesn't think so.)

Does this settle the whole throwing and returning thing?

Good.

What we 50-year-old Yanks really needed was the Youtube, where you can watch any one of a dozen or so really good videos on how to throw a boomerang.  Please, watch this video many times before you actually try to throw a boomerang, especially if you're going to do it indoors.  It still looks like a pretty iffy thing.

As far as how the non-returning, non-thrown boomerangs work, I don't think a video is needed.

***

* 23 is a prime number. As we count down, there's a lot more prime number opportunities coming. I wouldn't be surprised if I got commendations from some prime number societies for how I'm breathing new life into prime numbers.  It really was about time, but I have to say the honor has been all mine.

***

**I actually saw the first time Stefano died in 1985. It showed good could prevail over evil. I'm not sure coming back to live 10 or 11 times is as positive a message.  He did have a cool accent, and when he would say "Rrrrroman Brady" and rolled the R really hard, it sounded really cool.

Not that I miss watching daytime soaps; I'm just more partial to minty soaps these days.

***

For those of you who have an a boomerang and have never thrown it, it's probably safer to sleep with it under your pillow and make friends with it, just in case it really does come back to you when you do throw it. A boomerang looks like it could leave a lump on your noggin if it was wanting to.

I'm not saying it should be your BFF; that should be someone special - but you should have at least a positive relationship.

Rhymes with Nina... and neurasthenia

Yes, there’s a difference. A big difference.

Puppets are designed to be animated. Dolls are not. And ventriloquist dummies are a special kind of puppet made expressly for mouth and face animation.

Why am I so uppity about this? Just trying to pre-fend off charges of hypocrisy on my part. Or maybe the charges would be self-deprecation or self-condemnation. Or in layman’s terms, making a smart-alecky comment that actually applies to me.

To explain:

Sitting on the porch last night, my wife and I were talking about a dear friend. We’ll call her Eugenia* (You know – name changed to protect the innocent and all that.).

Eugenia is divorced now of a few years and is dating someone of merit. She hasn’t brought him over to meet me yet, which I’m not sure how to take. I would think having him meet her important blogger** friend would be higher on the list of things to do in the mating ritual. But I digress…

But, as the story goes, he grew up in Minneapolis and has always lived in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He’s a Minneapolitan***. One hundred percent. Yet, because he’s finding himself having to move, he’s moving to Houlton, Wisconsin, which is about 5 miles away from beautiful Hudson where we and Eugenia live.

So I’m listening to the story and I say for a joke, “I should tell Eugenia that if she helps him move and she finds his doll collection – be careful.”

It was only this morning that I realized I need to be clear about something as someone might thing this applies to me, too. Let me reiterate: Dolls and puppets and ventriloquist dummies are not the same.

No, no, no, no, no. They are not the same.

***

* Sorry, Eugenia. Look at the bright side. No one will ever figure out this post is about you. You don't look like a Eugenia.  I know what those look like. I grew up on the south side of Milwaukee - remember?

** My two buddies, Merriam and Webster, are considering replacing the words “military intelligence” with “important blogger” as the official example of an oxymoron. (Actually, they use the words “cruel kindness”, but that wasn’t as much fun. Important bloggers sometimes take liberties with facts just for humorous effect.)

*** If someone from Minneapolis is a Minneapolitan and someone from St. Paul is a St. Paulite, can’t they all generally just be called Twin Citiots? I like the ring to that.

***

About the post title:

There's a great old song called Nina.  In the song, the name is pronounced "neen-Ya", and it gets rhymed with neurasthenia - and rhymed well and well used as a word, in my humble opinion. That's a world that does not appear in any other song in any language.

And it rhymes with Eugenia.

Now you get it?

Nie przywozimy waszych piwo?

Powitanie, moja polskich przyjaciół, aby Rodzącej Ventriloquist Zimowych Igrzysk Olimpijskich zasięgu.

Welcome, my Polish friends, to the Budding Ventriloquist Winter Olympic Coverage.

You got here! And you are so welcome! Let's put on a kettle of czarnina, slice some kielbasa ,and get to talking Poland's winter olympic and ventriloquism worlds.

Poland has already picked up a medal, with  Adam Malysz picking up a silver in ski jumping.

Justyna Kowalczyk took a bronze in 2006 and is looking at a taking home a bunch  in women's cross-country skiing. Poland could medal in men's biathlon with Tomasz Sikora (2006 silver medalist).

Not only has Poland been to all the Winter Olympic Games since 1948, a native son - the Great Lester (1880-1956) - was a giant in Vaudeville. His was born in Poland as Maryan Czaijkoski.  He's considered ventriloquism's first superstar.

Thanks to my friends at Ventriloquist Central, I'm stealing this story:

For his act, Lester would often drink a glass of water while Frank spoke. On one occasion in 1925, the musicians substituted whiskey for the water as a prank. Lester drank the whiskey without any apparent difference. However, Frank Byron (his character) started coughing and shaking as if he had drunk the whiskey.

On the current Polish ventriloquism scene, there's Wojciech Glancj, or Wojie, who claims to be the only Polish Ventriloquist.  I'm still working on exactly what his connection is to a hypnotist is. I believe they get share some billings together.


But move over, Wojie, Pawel Gorka looks to be cuttting in on your territory. I'm sure Wojie actually welcomes the competition, and Poland could use two ventriloquists. Heck, what country couldn't? The Vatican?

Here's Pawel putting on some news satire. If he could be convinced to be a more serious journalist, he could have joined the BVWOC (TM) Team:

***

Why the special excitement over Poland? Well, you can take the boy out of the south side of Milwaukee, but you can't take the south side of the boy.

Growing up in an ethnically rich city, my universe was populated by lots of folks who had very few vowels in their names.  Poles, Serbs, Croatians, and Latvians, to name a few, brought a music of accents and stories and jokes to my life that you only assume are part of everyone's upbringing. Many were only second- or third-generation Americans.

Here's a classic piece of doggerel* from my youth. Even when you weren't Polish, it's amazing how many of the Polish words you wound up knowing anyway.


A week or so ago, I threatened to tell a Canadian-Polack joke as a means of baiting Poland and Canada to visit my site.  My editorial board told me in no uncertain terms I was not to do any such thing. I was so upset, I told her she could her wash the dishes by herself.

To be clear, being of German descent on the south side of Milwaukee, we told Polish jokes in the same way Swedes in the Twin Cities tell Norweigan jokes. There was no offense to it.

Granted, Sweden never invaded and occupied Norway. But you see my point?

***

*Merriam says that doggerel means "loosely styled and irregular in measure especially for burlesque or comic effect", and Webster insists on adding "also : marked by triviality or inferiority." Webster is such a nabob of negativism.

Thai one on

ยินดีต้อนรับสู่ประเทศไทยและเพื่อนของผมเพื่อการแข่งขันกีฬาโอลิมปิกฤดูหนาวนักแปลงเสียงรุ่นกระเตาะ สุขภาพ .

Welcome, my Thai friends, to the Budding Ventriloquist Winter Olympic Coverage.

The enchanted land of Thailand appears to be totally bereft of ventriloquists. Absolutely, positively, bereft.

My buddies, Merriam and Webster, define bereft as:

1. Deprived of something, or
2. Lacking something needed or expected.

Deprived of ventriloquism, which is something needed or expected. This sounds like somethng the Red Cross or the Peace Corps should be getting right on, don't you think?

But Thailand is not bereft of Winter Olympians. Prawat Nagvajara was Thailand's lone competitor in two winter games. Prewat is associate professor from Drexel University in electrical and computer engineering.

In 2002 he did not finish in the Men's 30 km, and in the 1.5 km sprint, he finished 68th out of 71. Buoyed by not finishing last in 2002, he returned to Winter Olympic in 2006.  He did not buoy quite as well that time, finishing  last in the Men's 15 km classical, 29 minutes behind the winner.

But for all that, he's a olympic record holder. He's the oldest Olympian to compete in an endurance sport.

I say that makes him a Thai national treasure.

Imagine if he learned ventriloquism too. Wow, huh?

***

Still no word from my nephew in Thailand about joining the coverage team. Maybe I need to explain it to him better. An opportunity like this takes a bit to digest.

It takes a schticker, too

As if I actually know anything, sometimes it's best to forget hunting for a joke that's not there.

I kept writing and rewriting about the notion that the Native Americans have no flag of their own to march behind at the Winter Olympics, their "nations" span the Americas, and that kind of coverage you can only find with Budding Ventriloquist Winter Olympic Coverage (TM) .

Believe me, the snippets above were the best of the search for the joke that wasn't there. And, I was only going there to throw a call-out to Rey Ortega, my new friend in the ventriloquist world.

Long story about how Rey stumbled across this online gig I have, and where the conversation started. But after I referred to myself as a "Schticker without a Cause", I asked Rey, "Is there a Native American term for 'schtick'?"

Those of you under about 35 and have no idea what "Borscht Belt" entertainment was need some background. The official Merriam-Webster definition for Schtick is:

Etymology: Yiddish shtik pranks, literally, piece, from Middle High German stücke, from Old High German stucki; akin to Old English stycce piece, Old High German stoc stick — more at stock

1 : a usually comic or repetitious performance or routine : bit
2 : one's special trait, interest, or activity : bag <he's alive and well and now doing his shtick out in Hollywood — Robert Daley>

Rey's response was:

"There is a word for schtick.

"It's Heyoka, a trickster, someone teaches people to do the right thing by doing the opposite. These people look for the deeper meanings in life and try to find ways to communicate them to the world. 

"You're a teacher disguised as a comic."

You too, my friend. Or back at ya. Or whatever the kids say these days.

Here's Rey and his buddy JC.  Rey's body "English" (funny choice of words?) is exceptional. It takes the illusion to that blurry level of  being embraced by it and forgetting that it's an illusion. His humor is infectious, too.

***

Rey's online center is The Wisdom Tree. Remember, Rey, with my BVWOC(TM)'s international appeal growing by leaps and bounds, you can't get better free advertising than this!

Well, maybe you can...

***

One of the best aspects of my ventriloquest (I love that word, and believe I made it up all by myself) is making contacts in the ventriloquist network. Now that I've mastered embedding videos, I owe Dave Markham and Steve Hurst some of this "high tech" callout, too.

***

Thanks Merriam. Thanks Webster. You two are the best. Anyone that doesn't have you two bookmarked in their browser and buy a hard copy for your latest book besides is not using the best resource around.

***

Now, the Czech Republic?  Eight from India? Jumpin' Jiminy. It's like the world has been waiting for BVWOC(TM).

***

Does the acronym work for you?  Hope so.

Long may it wave

Rather than tell the long story about my curious choice of New Year's resolution, you just need to know what it is:

2010 is the year I am really letting my freak flag fly.*

Am I going to become a much more competent ventriloquist? Of course.  That's not much of a resolution. I'm not resolving to drive safely to work, either. Some things go without saying.

My wife and teenage children, hearing my resolution, became inexplicably frightened. I'm not taking this personally, but one day my dummy might.

***

* "Letting my freak flag fly" is a concept courtesy of David Crosby in his song, "Almost Cut My Hair," on the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young 1970 seminal album Deja Vu. In the 2005 movie  The Family Stone, the concept was briefly discussed again. In 2010, your budding ventriloquist is goin' for it full-fledged and whole hog, unless vegetarianism is part of the deal.

***

The word "Pffft" is appearing on this blog with increasing frequency (For example, see Centennial Celebration).  For the benefit of both regular and any new readers unfamiliar with this word, I've prepared a video pronounciation key.**

By definition, Pffft is a celebratory expletive.

The key is complete with the correct gesticulation. Technically (what does Merriam or Webster actually know?), the accompanying hand gesture is only optional. My key shows both pronounications (left and right).

Also, Pffft has three Fs. No more, no less.

***

** The video pronounciation key is my second "movie". I'm getting more and more fascinated by the possibilities inside my cheap little camcorder.  I can foresee more "One Shot Cinema" efforts coming.

Would you expect anything less from a budding ventriloquist who's letting his freak flag fly?

***

Another quick blogger note:  When this posts, I think the archive thingy is going to fold the entire year 2009 into one item:  2009 (113).  There's something emmensely satisfying about that as a milestone. It shows some kind of staying power or determination.

Or maybe it just shows how hard-up I am for thrills.

In venting words

As I try getting used to calling a ventriloquist dummy simply a dummy, and every once in a while use the trade jargon "vent" as shorthand, there is a word play challenge I keep taking on.

At one point, I wanted to use an adjective to describe "related to ventriloquism." Like if Tom Selleck had played a ventriloquist private eye, his show would have been call Magnum, VPI (Ventriloqual Private Investigator). But "Ventriloqual" is clearly a new word (not known to Merriam or Webster), and sounded like something a drug company might be working on.

"Not throwing your voice like you used to?
Isn't it time you asked your doctor about Ventriloqual?

"Prescription Ventriloqual (bushmananddummyisum) is clinically proven to provide increased laughter and elevated levels of fun. In studies, nearly all patients showed significant improvement in overall happiness.

"As your doctor if you are healthy enough to have a dual personality.  Common side effects include slivers, hang nails, occasional tomatoes glancing off your scalp, and euphoria lasting more than 4 hours. Stop taking Ventriloqual if you experience anxiety when exposed to wood or puppets. Do not take Ventriloqual with a glass of water unless you've been taught the trick by an expert."