Monthly Archives: December 2017

A Funny Thing Happened…

 

The matriarch of the Bowles family, Thelma, died shortly before Thanksgiving this year. She was 103 years old.

103. The things Thelma saw.

Charlie Chaplin made his first film in 1914. The first stone of the Lincoln Memorial was put into place. Woodrow Wilson signed a declaration commemorating Mother’s Day. Babe Ruth made his major league debut for the Boston Red Sox.

As we do so many of our kin, the Bowles honored Thelma in the little churches where she was raised. The ceremony was followed by the small, somber-but-love-filled reunions that seem to follow all hollowed departures. I used to not understand funerals. Now, it seems, I speak their language as a second tongue.

Which, before this Dinosaur Edition of Factslaps (Trump may soon be receiving a Round Earth or Sound It Out Edition soon), I’d like to make formal my funeral requests. These are my wishes, being of unsound mind and body:

  1. I want to be cremated, and have my ashes donated to science.
  2. I want multiple headstones (who says you can only have one?), dotting the nation’s unsuspecting cemeteries.
  3. I want every tombstone to read “I’m Just Resting My Eyes.”
  4. I want my funeral service to include a break dance contest.

And now, a word from our sponsors:

  • Dinosaurs lived on Earth for 150 million years. We’ve been around for just 0.1% of that time.
  • Dinosaurs are not, technically, extinct, since birds are considered by science as a type of dinosaur.
  • The longest complete dinosaur is the 27 meters (89 feet) long Diplodocus, which was discovered in Wyoming.
  • The smallest known dinosaur was about four inches (10 cm) tall and weighed less than a chihuahua.
  • Most dinosaurs are known from just a single tooth or bone.
  • The word “Dinosaur”comes from the ancient Greek and means “terrible lizard.”
  • If Earth’s history were condensed into 24 hours, life would’ve appeared at 4am, land plants at 10:24pm, dinosaur extinction at 11:41pm and human history would’ve begun at 11:58:43pm.
  • There’s a limestone cliff with more than 5,000 dinosaur footprints in Bolivia, with many dating back 68 million years.
  • The dinosaur noises in the “Jurassic Park” movie were made from recordings of tortoise sex.
  • 40% of Americans think that humansand dinosaurs lived at the same time.