Originally published October 10, 1997, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1247
Well, once again I find myself under the deadline gun. I guess the worst thing you can do for a writer is hire him, thus leaving him all sorts of cause for complaint. Which is particularly upsetting because I wanted to talk about the settling of the Planet Comics case. But that’ll have to wait until next week, and I’ll have to push back the brand new relettered Fighting American another week as well. So here, once again, is humor from the computer barrel drawn from the apparently endless gags that folks keep sending me.
From Chris C. comes the tale of:
The New Priest
A new priest at his first mass was so nervous he could hardly speak. After mass he asked the monsignor how he had done. The monsignor replied, “When I am worried about getting nervous on the pulpit, I put a glass of vodka next to the water glass. If I start to get nervous, I take a sip.” So the next Sunday he took the monsignor’s advice. At the beginning of the sermon, he got nervous and took a drink. He proceeded to talk up a storm. Upon return to his office after mass, he found the following note on his door:
1. Sip the Vodka, don’t gulp.
2. There are 10 commandments, not 12.
3. There are 12 disciples, not 10.
4. Jesus was consecrated, not constipated.
5. Jacob wagered his donkey, he did not bet his ášš.
6. We do not refer to Jesus Christ as the late J.C.
7. The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are not referred to as Pop, Junior, and the Spook.
8. David slew Goliath, he did not kick the crap out of him.
9. When David was hit by a rock and knocked off his donkey, don’t say he was stoned off his ášš.
10. We do not refer to the cross as the Big T!
11. When Jesus broke the bread at the Last Supper he said, “Take this and eat it, for it is my body”, he did not say, “Eat me.”
12. The Virgin Mary is not referred to as the, “Mary with the Cherry”.
13. The recommended grace before a meal is not: “Rub-A-dub-dub, thanks for the grub, yeah God!”
14. Next Sunday there will be a taffy-pulling contest at St. Peter’s, not a peter-pulling contest at St. Taffy’s.
* * *
Anna M. speculates:
What if Dr. Seuss did Technical Writing?
If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port, and the bus is interrupted as a very last resort, and the address of the memory makes your floppy disk abort, then the socket packet pocket has an error to report.
If your cursor finds a menu item followed by a dash, and the double-clicking icon puts your window in the trash, and your data is corrupted ’cause the index doesn’t hash, then your situation’s hopeless and your system’s gonna crash
If the label on the cable on the table at your house, says the network is connected to the button on your mouse, but your packets want to tunnel on another protocol, that’s repeatedly rejected by the printer down the hall, and your screen is all distorted by the side effects of gauss, so your icons in the window are as wavy as a souse, then you may as well reboot and go out with a bang, ’cause as sure as I’m a poet, the sucker’s gonna hang!
When the copy of your floppy’s getting sloppy on the disk, and the microcode instructions cause unnecessary risk, then you have to flash your memory and you’ll want to RAM your ROM. Quickly turn off the computer and be sure to tell your mom.
* * *
And finally, for you pet lovers out there, Anna also gives us the following tale (tail?):
A lady awoke one morning and discovered her dog was not moving. She called her vet who asked her to bring the dog in. After a brief examination, the vet pronounced the dog dead.
“Are you sure?” the distraught woman asked. “He was a great family pet. Isn’t there anything else you can do?”
The vet paused for a moment and said, “There is one more thing we can do.” He left the room for a moment and came back carrying a large cage with a cat in it. The vet opened the cage door and the cat walked over to the dog. The cat sniffed the dog from head to toe and walked back to the cage.
“Well, that confirms it.” the vet announced. “Your dog is dead.”
Satisfied that the vet had done everything he possibly could, the woman sighed, “How much do I owe you?”
“That will be $330.” the vet replied.
“I don’t believe it!!!” screamed the woman. “What did you do that cost $330????”
“Well”, the vet replied, “it’s $30 for the office visit and $300 for the cat scan.”
(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.)
• 
This one is a recent favorite of mine:
A nun was in a hurry on her way to her job at the local Catholic Charity Hospital when her car suddenly runs out of gas. Luckily, she was only a few blocks from a gas station, so she got out of her car and quickly walked there.
At the station, she asked the attendant to give her a quart of gasoline so that she could start her car and drive it over to fill it up. The attendant told her that he only had one gas can, and he just loaned it to someone else.
She told the attendant that she was in a hurry and would look in her car to find something to hold the gas. When she got back the the car, the only suitable container she found was a bedpan, which looked like it could easily hold a quart of gas.
She brought the bedpan to the station and the attendant filled it with gas. The nun got back to her car and started to pour the gas from the bedpan into her car.
As she did this, two Methodist women who had sat down on a porch across the street after the nun had left her car observed then nun replenish her tank. One of them said to the other “If that car starts, I’m converting to Catholicism.”
Three guys walk into a bar. A bunch of stuff happens, and it turns out that your mom’s a whørë.