the blog quebecois

He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

Allegedly compiled by high school English teachers, a number of wildly-inappropriate similes taken from student writing. I say allegedly because they're almost too good to be true. Some commenters also expressed doubts. There were claims that they came from the Washington Post, which runs contests soliciting bad writing from its readers; others thought it was the work of Jack Handey.

I had no idea who Handey was, so I googled around to learn that he was is/was a writer/performer for Saturday Night Live. No wonder I didn't know about him. I haven't watched the show since the glory days of John Belushi, et. al. (And having seen some of the same skits since, I realized why they were so hilarious -- because I was stoned out of my mind at the time. Let this be a warning of the dangers of drugs.)

Like Steven Wright, Handey makes genuinely funny absurdist observations:

Even though I was their captive, the Indians allowed me quite a bit of freedom. I could walk freely, make my own meals, and even hurl large rocks at their heads. It was only later that I discovered that they were not Indians at all but only dirty-clothes hampers.

More here.

Via The Presurfer