Foolish things.

Contest Ended

Winners: 50,42, 44, 48, 23

I have a bunch of trade paperback Prince of Fools to give away - fine fat volumes, signed and stamped.

So it's contest time. All I need from you is something foolish. A photo, a drawing, an anecdote, a video - doesn't need to be original (though source credits are good).

I'll give five copies at random to entrants, and the best entrant will get a fine mug too!

Send entries to me at empire_of_thorns@yahoo.co.uk

Contest ends November 5th.

Entries.

#56 H "Your greatest fan learning to walk in heels for a role - want's to grow up to be Jorg. And his mummy would wuvs him for it."

#55 Sam

#54 John - battle royale!

https://vine.co/v/OWL62YnWnMq


#53 G.

Conference paper submission on Nov 11th.

*buys emperor of thorns*


#52 Pavle (seriously funny clip)

#51 Jason

#50 Vivianne - a foolish conversation between friends

M - It's like they know our every move!!! We have a leak in our group.... A mole if you will allow bad punning.
K - That one is just a baby, we can still club him!


#49 Arne

#48 Sakky

Last year, in high school, I had to spend one class sitting next to the most annoying, ignorant person imaginable. He was insufferable. Not only was he a Christian who attempted to argue against GLBT* people having the right to get married, one day he spent the whole lesson (and it popped up again in a few lessons after) trying to argue with me that "Bullying (did) not exist." And that you were merely allowing yourself to be insulted. I nearly hit him with my chair.

#47 Gerry -  X is for what?

#46 Craig

#45 Robin (with 48 hour to go before exams ... this could be foolish)

#44 Josh

#43 Ryan

#42 Neil  (this really did appear in our office)

#41 Yiannis - an improved and updated cover

#40 Shawn - Just say no to steroids!

#39 Angelica - foolishly destroying WONDERFUL books

#38 Stephen M.

#37 Stephen R.

At a good-bye luncheon for an old and dear coworker who is leaving the company due to "downsizing," our manager commented cheerfully, "This is fun. We should do this more often." Not a word was spoken. We all just looked at each other with that deer-in-the-headlights stare.


#36 Vadim

#35 Haley

#34  Dusty

Here's Bramstoker Award-winning novelist Michael Knost and I being foolish at Shocka-Con, a horror convention in West Virginia where we were peddling books. (He peddled many more than I.)

#33 Carishma - foolish games...

#32 Dimitar - foolish cats

#31 Mia - Mark Laurence Fishburne

#30 Leigh - foolish nurse

My silly story harks back to my nursing days way-back-when.

I was the night duty nurse in charge of a geriatric ward and for the one night, I had a little student nurse doing her "night duty experience". 

In the small hours, when all was quiet, my student complained that she was bored. So I asked her to go around rinsing and cleaning all the patients' dentures.   A while later I looked up from my paperwork and noticed she had a plastic basin and was about to enter the bathroom with it. 

Yep. You guessed it.  She had dutifully gathered all the dentures and put them into the one bowl ... argh!

#29 Darrell (& wife's) first pumpkin moment

#28 Adam - a hospital tale

I am a man of few words, and even fewer coats, but I do own two such items. I work for the NHS and work cross-site, between two hospitals. About six months ago, I brought Coat A to Hospital A; it didn't rain, but I forgot to grab it from the hook. I went to Hospital B the next day; and, this being Britain, it thoughtfully poured down. I had neither coat, and got soaked. 

Cursing my luck, I take Coat B to Hospital B the next day, but again (can you sense a pattern?) leave it there. I travel to Hospital A, and it again rains, soaking me a second time.

That this happens once, might just be bad luck. That it has so far happened four times in just over six months, despite reminders from my wife to remember the coat, moves into foolishness territory. It has actually become a running joke at my workplace, to the extent that there is an informal pool to see which hospital I will forget each coat at; I understand the winner of the most correct guesses gets a bottle of wine.

And one of my coats, probably.


#27 Pieter - Badgers, mushrooms & snakes

#26 Sarah

#25 Filipe ... a foolish thing!

#24 Ben

#23 Joy - a note in a bookstore...

#22 Lisa - an old but cherished email

Sent: Sun, October 25, 2009 10:03:27 PM
Subject: My glass is half empty, big surprise

10pm- just off of work. Apparently I do not have enough to do while sitting in Afghanistan, deciding whether to study, watch a movie, or sleep during my 10 hours of rest. While making this huge decision, which I need to make each night (or day if I am on nights) I had a thought, and that thought turned into a theory, the theory into an epiphany. Oh yes, I will share this with you, of course. I am a sharing kind of person, as each of you know. Plus I really like being right, and after 34 years(yes I count my infancy) of being scowled at for being a "glass is half empty kind of person" (I heard that from 2 separate people this week, actually) I can finally agree with pride, YES I AM!!

    -I think that the "Glass is half full" people are not optimistic, but fundamentally stupid and naive. Why? Well, if my glass is half empty, that means it used to be full, and I drank half, and now have half left. However, if you say my glass is half full, that means someone only filled it halfway, and that is all I get. Only an idiot would be grateful and happy about getting screwed like that. See, you say, I have filled this halfway from empty. I have emptied this halfway from full. You dont tell some one you packed your bag half empty. No, you packed it half full from empty, or emptied it half way from full. I can't believe no one ever thought of this.

Please, fill my cup to it's limit, and I will empty it halfway(and then halfway again, at my leisure). Naively optimistic people can continue to be grateful for their half full cups, we can make twice as many happy that way. — Lisa H.

#21 Michael - another picture distinguished by being of the reader in question. #niceHat

#20 Dogancan

#19 Jeana

#18 Ben - a foolish foul-mouthed short story

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1o_qPDq5ZrrDP2mQwnPkFDkiKFlbe6udiA9z_u22EWuQ/edit  

#17 Raymond

#16 Miguel - I'm not sure how owning my books is foolish ... but it's an entry :)

#15 Sarah and daughter being knicker ninjas!

#15 Dom

#14 Jade - Happy snake!

#13 Stacie

#12 Bev - I can think of nothing more foolish than politics and here are some quotes about the fools and foolishness of our political system from America's great humorist, Will Rogers. 

Will Rogers' Quotes on US Politics

"A president just can't make much showing against congress. They lay awake nights, thinking up things to be against the president on."

"Congress is so strange; a man gets up to speak and says nothing, nobody listens, and then everybody disagrees."

"We all joke about Congress but we can't improve on them. Have you noticed that no matter who we elect, he is just as bad as the one he replaces?"

"We cuss Congress, and we joke about 'em, but they are all good fellows at heart, and if they wasn't in Congress, why, they would be doing something else against us that might be even worse."

"The "Ways & Means Committee" is a committee that's supposed to find the Ways to divide up the Means."

"Never blame a legislative body for not doing something. When they do nothing, they don't hurt anybody. When they do something is when they become dangerous."

"The Senate just sits and waits till they find out what the president wants, so they know how to vote against him."

"Democrats never agree on anything, that's why they're Democrats. If they agreed with each other, they would be Republicans."

"Many a politician wishes there was a law to burn old records."

"A politician is just like a pickpocket; it's almost impossible to get one to reform."

"The difference between a Republican and a Democrat is the Democrat is a cannibal. They have to live off each other, while the Republicans, why, they live off the Democrats."

"There's no trick to being a humorist when you have the entire government working for you."

#11 Alicia - the first entry containing the person submitting it!

#10 Kaushal

This actually did happen to me.

One fine morning I went to one of my classes, because hey, sometimes why not?

So I get to the lecture hall, and there's this bunch of students just sitting around outside the hall - whose door was closed. I assumed it was locked/occupied. So I also parked myself on the floor and waited,

By the by more students arrive and all joined us, like some weird protest horde. And eventually the professor arrives.

"What're you all doing here?"

"The class is locked".

So he joins us in the wait. At this point it's 8:15 (class is supposed to start at 8).

After waiting a couple minutes, he walks up to the door, grabs the handle and... opens it.

Apparently it was open all along.

The professor gives us all a withering look, like "What the fuck am I going to do with you dumbasses?"

#9 Paul

#8 Alexandros - Peekaboo!

#7 Andrew, "I saw this months ago in a newsagent window. I think they should have considered the layout a bit more to prevent me and my camera purposefully cropping their advert."

#6 Tiago - Crabstacio!

#5 Christian ... uh ...

#4 David gives you .... Billy with fish.

#3 Janine vs Old Lady

I have done many foolish things in my life, here is one of them: 

In my early eager student nurse days I spent over two hours washing an elderly patient, washing her only nightie, and rearranging her side room/isolation room so she could see out the window in her chair. I just finished when my other colleague came in to see what was keeping me so long. I beamed at her and said "look, she can see out the window now, I've tidied up all her room" she called me out of the room. "Janine she's blind, put everything back where she can find it please."


#2 Santiago - Jimmy Fallon and Robert Downey Jr.

#1 The Lolrus