One of my favorite comedy segments on the Saturday Night Live TV show between 1991 and 1998 was “Deep Thoughts” by Jack Handey (creative writer and comedian). Introduced by the late Phil Hartman and read live by Handey (neither actually appeared on screen), the one-liners proved to be wildly popular. Hartman would soothingly announce “And now, Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey…”, then peaceful “New Agey” music would play while the screen showed sedate pastoral scenes and Handey would then read the Deep Thought as the text to it scrolled across the screen. Some of my favorite thoughts include:

-“If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let go, because, they’re gone, man. They’re gone.”

-“Maybe in order to understand mankind we have to look at the word itself. MANKIND. Basically it’s made up of two separate words “mank” and “ind.” What do these words mean? It’s a mystery and that’s why so is mankind.”

I can never reach the depths of Jack Handey’s “Deep Thoughts”, but here are a few of my “Semi-Deep Thoughts:”

*Many people say we evolved from apes, well if that’s the case, why don’t they have to deal with male pattern baldness? And if they have it, then they’re toupees are much better than ours.

*The latest craze to let people know what you think is called “Twitter” and your thoughts are called “Tweets”, are the people who do this activity called “Twits?”

*They say “you can’t judge a book by its cover,” especially if it’s on a Kindle.

*I remember my kindergarten teacher made us dance around a maypole in our classroom, a girl got sick and threw-up. The poor janitor had to sprinkle sawdust on the mess. They tell you not to swim right after you eat, what a load, they should have said don’t dance around the maypole?

*Sometimes I wonder why we care if water is discovered on Mars. I can hear the “Rovers” talking to each other going, “Where are they sending you today?” “Oh on another “snipe” hunt for water.” I passed a big lake yesterday with Martians water skiing, but I turned my camera off, job security you know.”

*I watched a program on TV where they said snakes are more afraid us than we are of them. Well if that’s the case why don’t we, in our encounters, hear them scream, slither-away and swear because they have to clean their laundry after seeing us?

*I’m still waiting for someone to invent the teleportation machine used in the Star Trek shows. Transporters convert a person or object into an energy pattern (a process called dematerialization), then “beam” it to a target, where it is reconverted into matter (rematerialization). Would be just my luck that they start the machine and I sneeze or twitch which causes my head to end up at my feet as I rematerialize. Boy would I be beside myself if this happened!

*Maybe you’ve seen a rare comment about train noise in this paper. Wouldn’t it be swell if the train engineer person learned to play well known melodies on the train whistle while going through town? Imagine hearing “It’s a Small World After All, “Popeye the Sailor Man” or “Wake Me Up Before You Go Go at 4am. I bet the train engineer would take requests too.

Well gotta go, my wife just hollered down to me that the new subscription to “Hair Club for Apes” just arrived in the mail. Can’t wait to see the “silverback slick-back” look.