Calendar Jokes Quotes

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld advised aspiring comedian Brad Isaac that, because daily writing was the key to writing better jokes, Isaac should buy a calendar with a box for every day of the year, and every day, after writing, cross off the day with a big red X. “After a few days you’ll have a chain,” Seinfeld explained. “You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.

Seinfeld began his advice to Isaac with some common sense, noting “the way to be a better comic was to create better jokes,” and then explaining that the way to create better jokes was to write every day. Seinfeld continued by describing a specific technique he used to help maintain this discipline. He keeps a calendar on his wall. Every day that he writes jokes he crosses out the date on the calendar with a big red X. “After a few days you’ll have a chain,” Seinfeld said. “Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.” This chain method (as some now call it) soon became a hit among writers and fitness enthusiasts—communities that thrive on the ability to do hard things consistently.

A calendar helps you plan work, gives you concrete goals, and keeps you on track. The comedian Jerry Seinfeld has a calendar method that helps him stick to his daily joke writing. He suggests that you get a wall calendar that shows you the whole year. Then, you break your work into daily chunks. Each day, when you’re finished with your work, make a big fat X in the day’s box. Every day, instead of just getting work done, your goal is to just fill a box. “After a few days you’ll have a chain,” Seinfeld says. “Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.” Get a calendar. Fill the boxes. Don’t break the chain.

His mother informed us that she had assumed his wife would be buying his advent calendars for him, now he was married, which came as something of a surprise to me, as I did not remember anything in our wedding vows about ‘To Be Your Bloody Mother From This Day Forth …’ I bought him a calendar the next year as a joke, but he didn’t seem to realise the joke part, going so far as to tell me that for future reference, he actually preferred a Thornton’s calendar to a Dairy Milk one, but he appreciated the thought. And so I continue to buy my forty-year-old husband an advent calendar every year, because apparently I am his mum now, and he is a spoilt child.

What happens when you place dollar bills in the fridge? You get cool cash. What happened to the thief who stole a calendar?

Every day that he writes jokes he crosses out the date on the calendar with a big red X. “After a few days you’ll have a chain,” Seinfeld said. “Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.” This chain method (as some now call it) soon became a hit among writers and fitness enthusiasts—communities that thrive on the ability to do hard things consistently. For our purposes, it provides a specific example of a general approach to integrating depth into your life: the rhythmic philosophy. This philosophy argues that the easiest way to consistently start deep work sessions is to transform them into a simple regular habit. The goal, in other words, is to generate a rhythm for this work that removes the need for you to invest energy in deciding if and when you’re going to go deep. The chain method is a good example of the rhythmic philosophy of deep work scheduling because it combines a simple scheduling heuristic (do the work every day), with an easy way to remind yourself to do the work: the big red Xs on the calendar.

Keep that firefighter’s body in shape for the calendar,” I joke with a grin. “Shut up,” he laughs. “You want in an in-shape firefighter when your apartment burns down, Jackson. You don’t want some wimpy kid who can’t toss you over their shoulder and haul your heavy ass out because you inhaled too much smoke.” “Romantic, Dusty. A big, strong firefighter lugging me over his shoulder like a damsel in distress.

I’ve been a bit constipated lately, you see, and the Virgin Mary calendar hangs in the bathroom. It has passages from the Bible but also recipes, quotations, and jokes.

Nakamura considered this. "I hesitate to agree, but that was probably a good idea." "A compliment! My goodness, let me mark the day on my calendar!" "That's why I hesitated to agree," Nakamura said with a note of weariness.

When Miss Petitfour made a fancy salad, Minky watched the way the lettuce leaves bent under the slight weight of the Parmesan; when Miss Petitfour had cheese toast for tea, Minky noticed how the cheddar melted into every little crevice and crater of the toast. She licked her whiskers greedily when Miss Petitfour lowered her hand to feed her snippets and smidgens, pinches and wedges, slices and crumbs. Minky loved all cheese--Swiss cheese, Edam cheese, Gruyere and Roquefort, Brie cheese and blue cheese, mozzarella and Parmesan, hard cheese, crumbly cheese, creamy cheese, lumpy cheese. Minky even had a cheese calendar that she kept with, which Miss Petitfour had given to her for Christmas. Each month there was a big picture of a different kind of cheese in a mouthwatering pose: blue cheese cavorting with pears, cheddar laughing with apples, Gruyere lounging with grapes, Edam joking with parsley.

Keep a calendar, he told him, and each day that you write jokes, put an X. Soon enough, you get a chain going—and then your job is to simply not break the chain. Success becomes a matter of momentum. Once you get a little, it’s easier to keep it going.

I left,” he agrees. “Are you mad? I thought you didn’t care.” “You’re joking.” The words come out on gasped breath. “Do you know how obsessed with you I was? I circled the days you were coming home on my calendar. I counted down. I curled my hair on your first day back that summer after your sophomore year. June thirteenth. I still remember the day. You kissed me, Theo. You kissed me, and all my dreams came true. I was so stupid. I knew I didn’t have a chance with you. You were laughably far out of my league. But I didn’t care. You begged me to come to that party. Do you remember? I was so excited,” I say bitterly. “I got all dressed up, made up an outlandish excuse, and escaped. I was late, but I thought you’d wait for me. But you didn’t. I walked into that bar and saw her. I was devastated. And worst of all, it was my fault. You never promised me anything. You kissed me once. We were kids. A kiss meant nothing. Nothing. Except I—” “You what?” “It’s in the past. I hate that I still care so much about it.

THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN. ITS CITIZENS ARE DRUNK ON WONDER. Consider the case of Sarai.1 She is in her golden years, but God promises her a son. She gets excited. She visits the maternity shop and buys a few dresses. She plans her shower and remodels her tent . . . but no son. She eats a few birthday cakes and blows out a lot of candles . . . still no son. She goes through a decade of wall calendars . . . still no son. So Sarai decides to take matters into her own hands. (“Maybe God needs me to take care of this one.”) She convinces Abram that time is running out. (“Face it, Abe, you ain’t getting any younger, either.”) She commands her maid, Hagar, to go into Abram’s tent and see if he needs anything. (“And I mean ‘anything’!”) Hagar goes in a maid. She comes out a mom. And the problems begin. Hagar is haughty. Sarai is jealous. Abram is dizzy from the dilemma. And God calls the baby boy a “wild donkey”—an appropriate name for one born out of stubbornness and destined to kick his way into history. It isn’t the cozy family Sarai expected. And it isn’t a topic Abram and Sarai bring up very often at dinner. Finally, fourteen years later, when Abram is pushing a century of years and Sarai ninety . . . when Abram has stopped listening to Sarai’s advice, and Sarai has stopped giving it . . . when the wallpaper in the nursery is faded and the baby furniture is several seasons out of date . . . when the topic of the promised child brings sighs and tears and long looks into a silent sky . . . God pays them a visit and tells them they had better select a name for their new son. Abram and Sarai have the same response: laughter. They laugh partly because it is too good to happen and partly because it might. They laugh because they have given up hope, and hope born anew is always funny before it is real. They laugh at the lunacy of it all. Abram looks over at Sarai—toothless and snoring in her rocker, head back and mouth wide open, as fruitful as a pitted prune and just as wrinkled. And he cracks up. He tries to contain it, but he can’t. He has always been a sucker for a good joke. Sarai is just as amused. When she hears the news, a cackle escapes before she can contain it. She mumbles something about her husband’s needing a lot more than what he’s got and then laughs again. They laugh because that is what you do when someone says he can do the impossible. They laugh a little at God, and a lot with God—for God is laughing too. Then, with the smile still on his face, he gets busy doing what he does best—the unbelievable.

Here is the first trivia quiz question on the Book of Common Prayer (BCP): who was the only layperson not of royal blood ever prayed for by name in the Prayer Book? Answer: Sir James Croft, Lord Deputy of Ireland, in the Dublin edition of 1551, and the fact that Sir James died in his bed three decades later, despite a risky career of double-dealing and his son’s execution for witchcraft, suggests that the prayers of the Irish faithful did him a bit of good. Second trivia question: who is St Enurchus? Answer: no one, because he is a misprint, and his original, the massively obscure St Evurtius, Bishop of Orleans, crept into the Prayer Book’s Calendar obliquely and entirely without authorization in 1604, almost certainly because his feast of 7 September happened to be the birthday of the lately deceased Queen Elizabeth I – it was some learned printer’s joke, and perhaps a little cock of the snook at the newly arrived King James I.

according to Donald Brown, a professor at the University of California, there is actually a common denominator to all human civilisations – a certain set of ‘attributes’ – which makes us fundamentally human. Brown has termed these the ‘human universals’.4 Let’s use this as a starting point. According to Brown, the human universals ‘comprise those features of culture, society, language, behaviour and psyche for which there are no exception. For those elements, patterns, traits, and institutions that are common to all human cultures worldwide.’ There are 67 universals in the list that are unique to humans: age grading, athletic sports, bodily adornment, calendar, cleanliness training, community organisation, cooking, cooperative labour, cosmology (study of the universe), courtship, dancing, decorative art, divination (predicting the future), division of labour, dream interpretation, education, eschatology (what happens at the end of the world), ethics, ethno-botany (the relationship between humans and plants), etiquette, faith healing, family feasting, fire making, folklore, food taboos, funeral rites, games, gestures, gift giving, government, greetings, hailing taxis,* hairstyles, hospitality, housing, hygiene, incest taboos, inheritance rules, joking, kin groups, kinship nomenclature (the system of categorising relatives), language, law, luck superstitions, magic, marriage, mealtimes, medicine, obstetrics, pregnancy usages (childbirth rituals), penal sanctions (punishment of crimes), personal names, population policy, postnatal care, property rights, propitiation of supernatural beings, puberty customs, religious ritual, residence rules, sexual restrictions, soul concepts, status differentiation, surgery, tool making, trade, visiting, weather control, weaving. My point here is that if your idea resonates with a human universal, you will maximise the universal appeal of your app. Solving a ‘universal’ problem creates a much bigger market opportunity than solving a geographically specific, language-related or generally niche issue not shared by a huge number of people. On the flipside, not every human universal maps to a billion-dollar idea. But the list of universals does provide a great checklist, so it’s worth checking to see if you can match apps that correspond to each one. When I was doing this exercise, I came across a fascinating example. I discovered a free app that, despite having more than 129 million downloads5 and massive daily usage numbers, has garnered very little media attention. It is called YouVersion.6 It’s a free Bible app that offers 600 translations of the Bible in 400 languages. It’s a billion-dollar opportunity that maps directly to the ‘religious ritual’ universal. It doesn’t earn much revenue today, but that just may be a matter of time.

In Siberia and Mongolia the White Moon Festival (Sagaalgan), held in mid-February, marks the beginning of spring. It starts with the new moon of that month and usually falls close to the beginning of Lent in the Western calendar (there is a joke here in Siberia that when the Russians have to start fasting, we are feasting). The White Moon is the festival of the return of the spirits. It is believed that all the shamanic and nature spirits go to the upper world for cleansing and return at sunrise on the morning of the White Moon. The spirits are welcomed with fire, sacred smoke, and offerings of food and drink, and it is customary to avoid any conflict or hostility until the moon becomes full. Thus the White Moon season is a time of forgiveness and reconciliation.