Big News! I’ve decided to turn the comment system back on. Whether or not they stay on is dependent on whether or not the spam situation is under control. If I start to see spam, then I’ll turn it off again. To leave a comment, you have to go to the article’s actual page. I really hope this works.
Just so you know, new comics will not appear in the main blogroll. You have to actually click on the “The Comic” tab. I only mention this because I put a new comic in there yesterday.
I’m also opening the site up to feed readers again… So you may be asking yourself, “What’s up? Why the sudden change of heart?” Simply put: Viewership is way down. For quite some time now I’ve been obsessed with blocking spammers and hackers, and it’s basically made Flush Twice all but invisible on the internet.
This site used to see over 5000 visits a day, and these days it’s lucky to see a hundred, and I think the site has a lot more to offer and looks a lot better than it ever has. I’ve got some new tools to make sure that hackers and spammers don’t take advantage of the site’s engine. Starting this week, I’m opening it up to all the bots and crawlers, and perhaps they’ll do me a solid and make Flush Twice more visible to people who like a daily dose of funny jokes.
Pax,
f2x
Update March 8, 2016 9:41pm: I thought I had opened the feeds, but apparently it was still borked. I was just about to commit seppuku when I found the problem… And it was actually a very simple fix. Feeds are working great, so let’s start increasing those visitor numbers. I want to see no less that 700 visitors a day by the end of the week!
Brandon’s concerns, though well meaning, were not well received by our celebrity chef. Was turning a deaf ear a mistake? Tune in next time to find out!
Of course, I’m not really sure when the “next time” will be, but I’ll leave a note in the “News” section when it’s ready.
Oh, and somebody should double check that subtitle… I think something got lost in translation.
A little old lady was walking down the street carrying two large plastic trash bags, one in each hand. One of the bags had a hole. Every once in a while, a $20 bill would come flying out of the bag and onto the pavement. A nearby police officer noticed this.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” the cop said. “Do you realize you have $20 bills falling out of one of your bags?”
The old lady looked back. “Damn!” she said. “Now I have to go back and see if I can find them. Thanks, officer!”
“Wait a minute,” the officer said. “Where did you get all this money? Did you steal it?”
“Oh, no. I earned it,” the lady replied.
“You earned all this money?” asked the cop.
“Yes,” the lady answered. “You see, officer, my back yard is right next to the parking lot of the football stadium. Every time there’s a game, those darn kids have too much to drink and then they pee through the hedges right onto my flowers! It was driving me crazy! So I finally did something about it. I got out my hedge clippers. Now, every time a guy sticks his thingy through the hedges, I jump up, grab it, hold open the clippers and say, ‘$20 or off it comes!’ ”
The cop laughed. “Very good, ma’am! Have a nice day!” he said. He then asked, “What’s in the other bag, by the way?”
The old lady leaned close to the police officer and said in a hushed voice, “Not everybody pays up!”
Dan married one of a pair of identical twin girls. Less than a year later, he was in court filing for a divorce.
“Okay,” the judge said, “tell the court why you want a divorce.”
“Well, your honor,” Dan started, “every once in a while my sister-in law would come over for a visit, and because she and my wife are so identical looking, every once in a while I’d end up making love to her by mistake.”
“Surely there must be some difference between the two women,” the judge said.
“You’d better believe there is a difference, your honor. That’s why I want the divorce.”
Two nuns were ordered to paint a room in the convent, and the last instruction of the Mother Superior was that they must not get even a drop of paint on their habits. After conferring about this for a while, the two nuns decided to lock the door of the room, strip off their habits, and paint in the nude. In the middle of the project, there came a knock at the door.
“Who is it?”, called one of the nuns.
“Blind man,” replied a voice from the other side of the door.
The two nuns looked at each other and shrugged. The decided that no harm could come from letting a blind man into the room and opened the door.
“Nice tits,” said the man, “where do you want these blinds?”
I suppose I should start by telling you how it happened. It was an otherwise nondescript day back in February. I went to get out of my rocker-recliner and when I scooched forward to get up, the front armrests bottomed out on the floor as they always do. Unbeknownst to me, Alex just happened to be laying down there that fateful day, and his left arm managed to get pinched.
Of course he yowled the loudest I'd ever heard him yell in his entire life and shot off into the basement. I felt terrible about it, but then I had no way of knowing he was down there when I went to get up. After a short while, Alex came back upstairs, and I was able to check for injury.
Shockingly, there were no broken bones, no blood, and Alex was able to walk just fine. It almost seemed cartoonish at the time, but down the left side of his left arm was a ribbon of flattened fur. He seemed somewhat indifferent to this, and acted like he just wanted to put the whole thing behind him. Seeing as Alex didn't appear to be in immediate danger, I took a "wait and see" position.
Over the next month, the "ribbon" began to shrink inward towards his elbow. I took this as a good sign that his injury was healing naturally and everything would be fine... But things were not fine. After a month and a half, his elbow began to swell. By mid-April I had to take him in to the vet for an exam.
The vet did a fair bit of Hmmm'ing and scrunched her face a lot. She didn't want to poke it with anything for fear it might introduce something. She took some measurements and expressed a "wait and see" attitude. I then scheduled a follow up appointment two months out.
Only a month later in mid-May, the swelling on his elbow had increased to the point that it started to ulcer. I called the vet and got him in immediately. This time they tried to drain it, but it went horribly. After the first stick, Alex started squirting blood all over the place, and the vet and technician freaked out and were running around looking for towels while I had to hold my cat down in a growing pool of his own blood.
After they got things back under control, she tried again with a larger needle, and went in from a different direction. After plunging to the center of the mass, she remarked that it was solid and that the fluid had probably dispersed into the surrounding tissue. She then went on to suggest that it might even be "malignant" and recommended a biopsy. They gave me an estimate for the procedure that ran from $500 to $800. I immediately left and made an appointment with another vet that I had gone to in the past.
The next day, my alternate vet didn't have any good news. By now, Alex's arm was very infected. At first he suggested that the arm would have to come off, but after noting Alex's age, he pulled back and recommended palliative care. I pushed for a quote on the cost of an amputation, and he informed me it would be around $3500 at the lowest, and that at his age, Alex would only live another 6 months after the surgery, and to just stick with palliative care.
They gave Alex a shot of antibiotics, a shot for long term pain management, prednisolone tablets and a liquid antibiotic, along with an appointment to come back about a month later.
Over the memorial day weekend, I cleaned Alex's wound and administered his meds. Alex was still Alex though. He obviously wanted to live, so I began making phone calls. Eventually I got in touch with the Humane Society. It took week and a half to finally get in, but after looking at Alex's arm, their surgeon said that the arm was "not compatible with long term survival" and agreed to amputate it... in two weeks.
That was the longest two weeks of my life.
Every day that thing on his elbow grew bigger and bigger. In the final week, it started to split open. It looked like something out of a horror movie. The outer layer of skin died off and eventually I had to cut the hard chunk of dried flesh off with scissors. Fortunately the antibiotics prescribed by the second vet kept the wound site free from infection.
And through all of this, Alex was still Alex. He just kept on living his life like nothing was wrong. Even with that thing on his arm, he still walked normal, climbed up and down the stairs, jumped on the bed, table, dresser, et cetera. Part of me knew this cat was gonna make it, but part of me was scared that his arm was going to go septic and Alex would die.
I felt relieved on the day of the surgery. We made it through to this day! Alex would be a tripod, but he was going to live! I dropped Alex off at the Human Society and went to work expecting to pick him up between 4:00 pm and 5:00 pm.
My phone rang a little before noon. The voice on the other end informed me that the surgery had gone fine, and they didn't notice anything wrong during the procedure, but in the recovery room, Alex's heart rate began to drop, he went non-responsive, and his pupils dilated. The surgeon explained that sometimes a blood clot will break free during the surgery and make its way into the brain. Alex had had a stroke. There was nothing more they could do.
Moments later, Alex died.
Usually I show off pictures of Gail here, (she's doing find by the way). Gail is a fun dog who loves to constantly run and play, but Alex was the one that I could really count on for affection. He would hop up on my chest when I was resting in my recliner and purr. He would be there at the door to greet me when I came home. He would keep me company when I pooped. He would wake me in the morning, and insist I gave him a thorough petting before I went to sleep at night. He talked to me with his incessant meows, and made sure I never left the house without filling the food and water bowls. Alex loved to get his "full kitty massage" complete with belly rubs, and he was the kind of cat that would walk up and headbutt me to let me know I was his as much as he was mine.
Flush Twice has been around since May of 2003. It started out as a JOTD (Joke of the Day) website. New jokes were published every weekday. Over the years, good jokes were increasingly hard to come by, and eventually they got so rare that I just stopped trying to publish them.
Since 2004 there has also been an eponymous comic. I still occasionally publish a new one on Saturdays. It’s also rare anymore, but sometimes it happens.
Here lately I’ve been posting a “Link of the Day”. For the time being, I will be featuring a new website from my enormous collection of bookmarked websites every weekday. None of it is solicited promotions, and no one is paying me to feature their site. These are just websites that at one time I thought were interesting enough to add to my bookmarks folder.
I highly encourage using some kind of ad blocking extension before clicking on any of these links. You’ll also hear me say this phrase a lot about these posts: “They can’t all be winners.” But it’s better than just leaving the site abandoned.
The jokes were generously provided by friends and visitors such as yourself. I want to express my eternal thanks to everyone over the years who helped contribute to the collection.
So what is it that makes a joke funny?
It all boils down to a sudden shift in perception. The story starts you thinking one way, then the punchline turns that thinking on its ear. The art of the joke is to craft a short story that isn’t overly contrived, then deliver a punchline that suddenly shifts your perception about the story you were being told.
Many of the jokes on this site are offensive, and I make no apologies for it. Offensive jokes work by making the reader uncomfortable through the use of a taboo subject thus enhancing the underlying humor. Without the offensive element, the joke would simply not be as funny.
