Tag Archives: stock photos

Ain’t No Party Like a Star Party

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Ain’t no party like a star party, because a star party takes place far from human civilization, and you can’t play loud music or jump around because the vibrations could interfere with the telescopes and also you’re only allowed to use red lights so you don’t mess up anyone’s night vision while you’re stumbling around in the dark. Also, they’re usually freezing cold.

Technically, they’re not all stock photos but hopefully people have a good sense of humor about it and see that it’s all in good fun, or else don’t see it at all.

Tonight wasn’t feeling like a funny night but you can only do so many jokes about not feeling funny so we gave it the old college try and thought of something that was sort of like something funny but not really. Which then led to Googling “star party,” which brings us to that first stock photo. It’s crazy. He’s out there by himself and he can’t even look through the eyepiece. Clearly, it would be too much back strain. He climbed all the way up that mountain and spent an hour setting up his gear and all he can do is stand wistfully gazing at the cosmos with his naked eye, his $1000 functionally useless.

After that, finding 3 more silly looking telescope pictures to caption took a matter of moments. Telescopes are inherently unwieldy, and from experience I note that that the people vested in carting them around tend to be fairly peculiar themselves.

A Stock Photo Is Worth 1000 Inexplicable Words

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In the real world, birthday parties and boxing gloves mean something. In stock photo world, they mean something else. 

Feeling a bit out of sorts and unable to finish the 3rd fairy tale comic, I went for another ridiculous stock photo caption comic. These images all happened to come from a BuzzFeed article entitled “60 Completely Unusable Stock Photos,” and I chose them primarily to prove the headline wrong. They’re totally usable. You just have to stretch your imagination a bit.

Curated collections are always nice.

People rag on BuzzFeed, but I like it. You don’t have to sift through as much crap to get to the lols like you do on Reddit, and they actually produce some pretty credible journalism. You have to read their news section; there are good longform investigative articles on interesting topics, and you can also get the latest current events, often with original material if they have a reporter on the ground.

It’s just a coincidence that 2 photos have birthday themes and 2 have boxing gloves. In face, I reshuffled the panels to make it clearer that guy waiting to punch the little girl in panel 1 is not the same guy punching the professional in panel 4.

Even though yesterday’s comic was the funniest thing I’ve written in a while, it didn’t seem to impress any strangers on the Internet. Come on! The Man laughed out loud, and so did the Fox. I think it’s brilliant.

Even if this comic wasn’t my masterpiece, I guess I still made a decent mark on the world today. I went to read to kindergarteners and got about 27 hugs afterward. Then I made The Man some leek and potato soup and a strawberry pie that were apparently so good he had thirds of each. Cream soups are a bit rich for me, but he grew up on a dairy farm, so he’s got 34% butterfat running through his veins.

Tomorrow I will be super creative.

If Stock Photos Could Talk

 

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These things had to be said.

Some weird things are going on in my country. We’re having a difficult time being respectful to one another, and it seems like the value of human life has diminished in the eyes of many. People are hurting, but everybody hurts, and really, hurting other people doesn’t help us to hurt any less.

I try to answer hatred with love, but, admittedly, a lot of the time I fail at that and the best I can muster is sarcasm. At least I’m really good at sarcasm. But if I had 100% control over my responses, I would go with love every time.

For example: I saw the Dalai Lama speak in Tucson about 10 years ago. While we were queueing up to get into the convention center, we had to pass a protestor holding a large sign declaring that the Dalai Lama was going to hell. This upset everyone who read it, and no one really knew the right response. We all sort of uncomfortably shifted our gaze away from this person and tried–unsuccessfully, because he was also yelling–to ignore him.

Later, in his talk, the Dalai Lama discussed his own encounter with some protestors in Europe, carrying signs angrier and more virulent than the one we had seen outside. But he didn’t ignore them. He bowed to them. And they were so–surprised? enchanted? shamed?–that they bowed back.

That’s who I want to be. I want to be the person who bows to my detractor, because I know that their anger steals from them, not from me, but that my love builds us both, and that ultimately, there is nothing between me and anyone else on this planet. We’re all the same, once we look past the surface.

Anyway, yesterday was a difficult day. I couldn’t think of anything funny on my own, so I Googled “hilarious stock photos” and captioned the 4 most ridiculous ones.