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Wit Love, Kath

~ My love letters about the funny side of life

Wit Love, Kath

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When enough is not enough – BWapp it!

09 Monday Feb 2015

Posted by Kath Carroll in Children, Geekery, Journalism, News, Parodies, Shopping, Technology, Travel

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Brian Williams, Burger King, childbirth, humor, Jay Leno, John Lithgow, journalism, Kate Middleton, news, Oprah, Stedman Graham

I don’t usually rush to use new technology or jump on a fad, but this Brian Williamization app—iBWapp—has me pretty excited. To get noticed today, enough is just not enough. You need flash!, glitz!, glamour! iBWapp gives it to you!  Simply type in or record one of your old, boring anecdotes, and BWapp!—you’re provided with an elaborate yarn that will have friends and acquaintances hanging on your every word.

iBWapp makes you as incredible a storyteller as Brian Williams. Image courtesy David Shankbone

iBWapp makes you as incredible a storyteller as Brian Williams.
Image courtesy of David Shankbone

Need to schmooze with upper management to secure a higher position or salary but only have an old chestnut from days gone by? Don’t sweat it—Bwapp it! Your nice, normal kid’s college application not sensational enough? Don’t worry—Bwapp it! Have an amusing story, but know it will never go viral? You know what to do—that’s right! Bwapp it!

Still unsure of the power of iBwapp? Take a look at these authentically remastered accounts, and you’ll be racing to the app store with your $1.29 in hand…well, on your credit card.

1. The Birth of a Child

Good Story:

My second child’s due date was upon me. It had been a restless, emotional day and at 9:30 p.m. as the snow and tears came down in equal measure, I resigned myself that today was not that day. But suddenly, it was. At the hospital, the baby wanted nothing to do with insurance forms, and by the time I was being wheeled to a room, she was on her way. The doctor made it just in the nick of time, and Jenny was born a few minutes later at 11:55 p.m.  Just 5 minutes more and she would have her own birthday date instead of sharing one with her mom. At some point during the proceedings, I must have hit the ON button of the TV remote because, suddenly, the room was filled with laughter and John Lithgow appeared on the screen talking to Jay Leno. It was a bit surreal, but what isn’t about childbirth?

iBWapped:

My second child’s due date was upon me. It had been a restless, emotional day and at 9:30 p.m. as the snow and tears came down in equal measure, I resigned myself that today was not that day. But suddenly, it was. We drove to the hospital in a blinding blizzard, stopping only when we were hit by a semi-tractor trailer and became part of a 45-car pile-up on I-95. With labor pains only 30 seconds apart, I jumped out of the car, and we hiked over the metallic mountain and on to the hospital. On Pequot Avenue I passed several bodies lying face down in a snow bank. I hadn’t seen bodies like that since my son and his friends made snow angels in the front yard the week before.

At the hospital, I was wheeled into the delivery room at 11:45—just in the nick of time. Imagine my delight when I discovered that John Lithgow was standing in for my regular GYN, and Jay Leno was standing by to tell jokes to help me breathe—Ha-Ha-Ha. Unfortunately, the baby was born at 11:55 p.m. Just 5 minutes more and I could have heard Jay’s big closer and Jenny would have her own birthday date instead of sharing one with her mom.

If I had to share this special day with two celebrities, these would not have been my choice, but John called it when he said, "You;re too far along for an epidural." Image of John Lithgow courtesy David Shankbone

If I had to share this special day with two celebrities, these would not have been my choice, but Dr. Lithgow did call it when he said, “You’re too far along for an epidural.”
Image of John Lithgow courtesy of David Shankbone

2. Childhood Injury

Good Story:

Once, when my sister was about 5 and I was 7, my mother took us to Burger King after our dance class. While she went inside to order, my sister and I stayed outside at the table. We were leaping from one cement bench to another when my sister slipped and hit her head on the edge of a bench.  I ran into the store to tell my mother. While my mother made a mad dash to our doctor about 30 minutes away, I had to hold a cloth to my sister’s bleeding head. Fear made me whiny and complainy, for which I received severe rebukes. Fortunately, my sister’s injury was not too bad, and the doctor fixed her up with several stitches.

WitLoveKath - Enough - Burger King Logo

Image courtesy Logopedia

iBWapped:

Once, when my sister was about 5 and I was 7, my mother took us to Burger King after our dance class. While she went inside to order, my sister and I stayed outside at the table. We were leaping from one cement bench to another when two robbers ran out of the store and knocked into my sister on their mad dash to their getaway car. My sister fell, hit her head on the edge of a bench, and became unconscious. Simultaneously while performing CPR and eating a cheeseburger, I threw my tap shoe at the fleeing felons and brought them both down in a heap right at the foot of a police officer. While my mother drove like a maniac toward home, I performed brain surgery in the back seat of the car with only Harper Valley PTA on the radio for anesthesia, saving my sister’s life. For these acts of heroism, I won the Nobel Prize for Medicine and was honored with a parade down Hollywood Boulevard. (Ok, so it was Hollywood (Florida) Boulevard. But that doesn’t have to come out until after the investigation.)

Who knew robbers were such a valued demographic? Image courtesy of supersizedmeals.com

Who knew robbers were such a valued demographic?
Image courtesy of supersizedmeals.com

3. European Vacation

Good Story:

In the summer of 2012 I traveled to London. I wasn’t there for the Olympics but we arrived a few days before the closing ceremonies. One afternoon in the lobby of the Marriott County Hall Hotel, I saw the United States Beach Volleyball champion Kerri Walsh. The next morning I rode the elevator with tennis player Andy Roddick, who, afraid, I suppose, that one of us would make a big deal of it, slouched in the corner with his hat over his eyes. And he was right, one of us was making a big deal of it—him.

iBWapped:

In the summer of 2012 I was part of the official American delegation to the Olympic Games in London, England and was a guest at the famed Marriott County Hall Hotel. There I bikini shopped with Misty May-Treanor (‘cause, really, who cares or ever hears about the other one?). Afterwards, I enjoyed a lovely afternoon at Buckingham Palace having tea and crumpets with Kate Middleton. While we played croquet she whispered the secret news the whole world had been waiting for (yes, this was 3 or 4 months before she found out herself, but it will take the fact-checkers awhile to catch up). The next morning I took a tennis lesson with Andy (if you’re expecting Roddick, you will be disappointed as this narrative is for winners only) Murray, who was soon to become the British Olympic champion. It was during this trip that I discovered my true voice and wrote my Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Great Fat Lie.

Misty May knows her way around a bathing suit shop; Kate...well, she's perfect; and Andy struggles to return one of my awesome serves. All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Misty May knows her way around a bathing suit shop; Kate…well, she’s perfect; Andy struggles to return one of my awesome serves.
All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

4. Domestic Vacation

Good Story:

The kids had just been in the pool at the JW Marriott in Washington DC during a family vacation, and I was coming back from the concierge lounge with a few snacks. As I stepped into the elevator, the only other occupant, a tall, good-looking guy, said “hello.” It was Stedman Graham. We exchanged pleasantries and exited the elevator on the same floor.

Image courtesy of stedmangraham.com

Image courtesy of stedmangraham.com

iBWapped:

In 2008 while visiting Washington DC, I rode the elevator of the JW Marriott with Oprah.

Sorry, Stedman. iBwapp chooses the upgrade, not me. Image courtesy Alan Light

Image courtesy Alan Light

Now that you’ve experienced the eye-popping, jaw-dropping excitement of iBwapp, get it for yourself. Your life will never be the same again.

 

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So, What Up Wit Wit Love, Kath?

16 Wednesday Oct 2013

Posted by Kath Carroll in The Formative Years

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Broward County, Connecticut, Florida, humor, Miami, New York Giants, news, news reports, optical illusions, tourists

Hi, and welcome to Wit Love, Kath, my love letters about the funny side of life. Here I’ll look at the quirks and absurdities of family life, national and world news, entertainment, politics (oh, wait, I just mentioned entertainment), sports, and all those unexpected, bizarre moments that make life worthwhile with humor, with skepticism, with irony, and always wit love.

I grew up in a pink stucco house in Hollywood, Florida, surrounded, not by the radiance of celebrities as in that other Hollywood, but by the relentless sun (except for the daily deluge), which produces, like a science-fiction laser, grapefruit you can use as bowling balls, dachshund-sized avocados, and toads as round as dinner plates.

School field trips were spent at Parrot Jungle (once home to Pinky, the “high-wire, bicycle-riding cockatoo,” where we each had our picture taken with 5 macaws perched on our scrawny outstretched arms); Monkey Jungle (“where the humans are caged and monkeys run wild”), and Gatorland (“when the sun goes down, the swamp comes alive”). Try fitting education like this into the Common Core.

Spending your formative years in this over-the-top, larger-than-life (see, even the adjectives are abnormally big) weirdness-incubating local does something to you. One can only witness so many middle-aged and end-aged tourists in speedos before the mind is irreversibly warped. Same goes for the absolute cemetification of every square inch of available land. Even the strip malls have strip malls. The blistering sun bouncing off all that concrete really does fry your brain.

Don’t believe me? How else to explain this recent development: towns in southern Broward and Dade counties are using the optical illusion of decreasingly spaced lines to trick drivers into believing they are going faster than they are, thus causing them to “tap the break,” according to a local official. What’s next? M.C. Escher as stairwell architect?

And when your newspaper has a regular category called “Snakebites,” you know there’s something twisted going on. Here’s the latest headline from the Miami Herald, printed Sunday, October 13: “Man Bitten by Rattlesnake in Broward County while Helping Turtle Cross 1-75.”  Couldn’t this unfortunate scout find any old ladies to help across the road? In South Florida?

With these kinds of daily, riveting reports, it’s no surprise that I became a news and comics page junkie at a young age. I read the Miami Herald before school and the Hollywood Sun-Tattler when I came home. I listened to Dan Rather before he had “courage” (I suspect he spent time in South Florida before this pronouncement, as I and my friends fully understood his counsel). Garry Trudeau taught me more about politics than any civics class, and Dave Barry and The Far Side’s Gary Larson gave me laugh-out-loud validation that I was not crazy.

In college I studied absurdist literature—the likes of Samuel Beckett and Nikoli Gogol. My adviser couldn’t understand what I saw in it, but I never blinked an eye. Two tramps eternally waiting? A human pack mule? Disembodied voices? Got it. A man who loses his nose? Check. In fact, I think it was found floating in a canal along Alligator Alley.

I now live in Connecticut, where the state flower is the rock, squirrels think they’re birds except when they’re playing kamikaze in front of a moving car, and on any given day deer, wild turkeys, chipmunks, squirrels, foxes, ground hogs, rabbits, skunks, raccoons, and/or fisher cats can parade through our yard and nom our garden. It may not be as exciting as Florida, but, hey, at least none of them are wearing speedos.

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