whatever trifle takes my fancy. Read.
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notalwaysright_feed at 11:00am on 11/12/2025I was working at a huge construction site, but our specific job/contractor had less than a hundred workers. We’d get ready in portable trailers that were used for breaks, then meet up near the work area to have a little meeting, plan the day and do some stretches as a group. As I was walking […]
notalwaysright_feed at 10:00am on 11/12/2025notalwaysright_feed at 10:00am on 11/12/2025
Customer: "Do you have any more mini glazed croissants?"
Me: "They’re actually in the oven right now. Before I can glaze them and box them up, it’ll be about thirty minutes; they still have to finish baking and cool down."
Customer: "Okay."
And then she… just stands there.
notalwaysright_feed at 09:00am on 11/12/2025My eldest son is autistic, he randomly recalls information from long ago and makes connections between things I would miss. When he tells people about it, he only provides limited information because he doesn’t know that you don’t know what he’s thinking. One day we are playing and he suddenly stops and tilts his head […]
notalwaysright_feed at 08:00am on 11/12/2025Read Not The Eggs-pectant Result
Coworker: "Why are you hovering over the eggs?"
Me: "Someone's left a used pregnancy test inside."
Coworker: "Uh… what?!"
icanhascheezburger_feed at 09:00pm on 10/12/2025While cats were born to be predators, chasing down mice and scaling trees for shelter, now they're soft. Not only are their pelts gloriously fluffy and soft to the touch, but the average house cat's demeanor has also simmered down significantly as they have grown accustomed to human servitude. Once cats learned that they could employ humans to do all the heavy work to survive, they started to enjoy the finer things in life. Now, they are basking in the sun of the windowsill, biting the leaves of Mom's favorite pothos plant, and awakening the human family at 2 AM for their nightly kitty meowscerade.
Life is good for a house cat.
Although every kitten is capable of surviving the outdoors, with their innate abilities only masked by chonk and floof, cats choose the indoor life because they enjoy the plushy luxuries. Who can blame them? Why would a cat struggle on the streets when they can install themselves instead in the lives of a couple of bald, bipedal giants? Exactly, cats are far too smart to pass up an oPURRtunity that good.
icanhascheezburger_feed at 08:00pm on 10/12/2025Woohoo! We're getting closer and closer to the end of the year, which means we're getting closer and closer to greeting Santa Claws on Christmas Eve! Well, we won't, but your feline probably will be. I mean, they'll be hiding in the Christmas tree, remaining incognito, until the big guy in red and white decides to snack on some cookies, and then, they'll pounce. Nobody gets to enjoy milk if the catto can't. Those are the rules our cats set for hoomans, and can you blame them? I, too, would feel slighted if I wasn't allowed to do so much as give a lick to a soft, warm, snickerdoodle cookie. We all have our vices, you know…
As we enter the thick of the holiday season, you may feel your Christmas spirit waning. Running around and trying to figure out the purrfect gift for your loved ones—fuzzy or not—is a grueling task. No generous amount of hot cocoa or Christmas cookies will give us the rest that we need, so we need to bring in the big guys: cat memes. I know, I know. You've likely heard this before. In fact, you've probably heard it from me, specifically. But hey, the proof is in the figgy pudding. Scroll below!
icanhascheezburger_feed at 07:00pm on 10/12/2025notalwaysright_feed at 04:00am on 11/12/2025
It's our busiest time of the week in the shop. A customer skips the line of people at my register.
Customer: "Look, I just want to buy these two things. Just check me out next."
icanhascheezburger_feed at 06:00pm on 10/12/2025notalwaysright_feed at 02:00am on 11/12/2025Read Runaway Rollaway Requests
Guest: "Excuse me, we were supposed to have a roll-away bed in our room!"
Me: "We don't have any roll-away beds."
Guest: "WHAT?! We reserved a roll-away bed! How could you have given it away?!"
Me: "Ah, I see the confusion. We do not have any roll-away beds at all. We have never had them. There are none anywhere on the property."
icanhascheezburger_feed at 04:00pm on 10/12/2025What started as coworkers leaving for the night quickly turned into an accidental rescue. A tiny kitten appeared by the door, sending one coworker into full panic while another tried gently nudging it away. One outstretched hand later, the kitten marched straight over for pets, and within seconds, she was scooped up and purring in someone's arms. There was no plan. Just a very small, very trusting kitten and a rapidly escalating sense of responsibility.
Taking her home "just for the night" immediately turned into cuddles, lap naps, and a kitten who purred so loudly she practically vibrated. Every attempt to set boundaries was followed by, "Obviously, I'm not keeping the cat," even as she ate, snuggled, and fell asleep on her rescuer's chest. A vet visit revealed no microchip, no illnesses, and no evidence of a responsible owner. That ended the last shred of hesitation.
Named Cleo on the drive home, she settled in quickly, bonding with the resident pets and acting like she'd been there forever. Sometimes the Cat Distribution System works fast and absolutely gets it right.
notalwaysright_feed at 01:00am on 11/12/2025Read The Write-Up Is On The Wall
My table has a $150 tab, but ends up only leaving me $120.
Me: "[Manager], what do I do? They shorted me $30."
Manager: "You can pay the difference to make the check whole, or we'll mark the shortage as a "walk out" and you'll get written up."
scalziwhatever_feed at 01:39am on 11/12/2025
It’s difficult to explain Swimming to Cambodia to anyone who hasn’t seen it. More accurately, it’s actually very easy to explain Swimming to Cambodia to someone who hasn’t seen it — literally, it’s actor/writer/monologuist Spaulding Gray sitting at a desk and talking for an hour and a half — but it’s difficult to explain how him sitting at that desk for an hour and a half is so compelling and watchable. Is it because Gray himself is watchable and compelling? Yes he is, in a blue blood nebbish sort of way, but it isn’t that (or not just that). It’s also because what he’s doing, monologuing while sitting, is almost entirely at odds with the very idea of a motion picture. Spaulding Gray just sits there, talks into a microphone, occasionally gesticulates and at a couple points pulls down a map to point to things. And it’s magnetic.
Spaulding Gray himself was something of a character, a New Englander in birth and education who drifted west after college to be part of an “intentional community,” only to drift east again to New York, and a life of writing and theater, becoming a co-founder of The Wooster Group. Eventually Gray started doing one-man shows based on his life, monologues with him and chair and a desk, and a notebook with outlines of what he wanted to say but (as I understand it) no hardened script. He would just go in the direction he would go, and hopefully he would take the audience along with him. Occasionally he would do a movie or some television, because, you know, if you could, why wouldn’t you.
One of those movies was The Killing Fields, a Roland Joffe film about Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge era, and two journalists, one American and one Cambodian, caught in the crossfire. Gray did not play the American journalist (Sam Waterston did); Gray played a minor bureaucrat who gives Waterston’s character an important piece of information. A small role, but as your high school drama teacher undoubtedly told you, there are no small parts. Certainly Gray didn’t think so; he played a minor role in the film, but the film and his experiences as part of the cast gave him enough material for a new monologue, Swimming to Cambodia, which was first performed live in 1985 and then published as a book in 1986 before becoming this movie in 1987.
When I first watched Swimming to Cambodia in college, I was trying to find some familiar slot to put it in. Surely there have been “one man shows” committed to film before, albeit usually in the form of some TV special where Hal Holbrooke was portraying Mark Twain, or some British actor was glaumphing about insisting they were Charles Dickens or Winston Churchill or some such. Occasionally, and again mostly on TV (and here in the US, mostly on PBS) you might see some illustrious Shakespearean actor talk about his life, interspersed with a monologue or two from the bard.
There were also, of course, comedy concert films, of which the ones with Richard Pryor are probably the most memorable: one comedian up on a stage with a microphone and ninety minutes to two hours to kill, and an audience to slay. There are even one-man dramatic movies, although those are rare too, quirky films like Robert Altman’s 1984 film Secret Honor, where Philip Baker Hall portrays Richard Nixon rattling around his private office, offering a stream-of-consciousness monologue about how it was he came to resign.
Swimming to Cambodia was like these movies and also not like them at all. Gray is not portraying some historical personage or plucking choice words from playwrights; he’s not pacing the stage or wandering a set. He is sitting at a desk, saying his own words, talking about his own experiences. Those words are funny as often as not, and Gray, a professional storyteller, know how to pace his material like the best comedians might. But this is not a comic performance — any performance that goes into great detail about the horrors of the Cambodian auto-genocide is not one that one would (or should) describe as a nonstop laugh riot. It’s not a concert film, with that call-and-response energy that concert films, musical and comedy, often have.
So: Not precisely a one-man show, not precisely a comedy concert, but a heretofore secret third thing involving one man and his own words, done in a way that, as far as I could remember, really hadn’t been done before and, excepting Spaulding Gray himself, who did more films like this, wasn’t done again, at least not theatrically. Spaulding Gray was and is sui generis as a cinematic genre.
Of the four monologue films he did do (not counting a monologue-laden documentary after his death), Swimming to Cambodia is the first, and, to my mind, the best. It is only Spaulding Gray on the stage, but it’s not only Spaulding Gray making the film. It’s directed by Jonathan Demme, who three years earlier directed Stop Making Sense, one of the greatest concert films ever made, directed Something Wild right before this, Married to the Mob right after this, and The Silence of the Lambs right after that. There may be greater movie directors in the history of American cinema, but few have such a willfully quirky stretch of their career.
Of all of these films, it’s Stop Making Sense that Swimming to Cambodia shares the most DNA with, which is funny to say considering that in that film, the members of the Talking Heads never stop moving, and in this film, Spaulding Gray never once leaves his desk. But just because Gray is relatively stationary doesn’t mean filming him can’t be kinetic. Demme finds his ways to make movement happen, through camera choices, lighting and set design. There is a lot happening here, even if the one person onscreen isn’t moving from his chair. That kinetic style is what makes this pair well with Stop Making Sense, even if they are otherwise polar opposite films in Demme’s filmography.
Again: I can’t think of another film quite like this one, not starring Spaulding Gray. I wonder why that is, and also I don’t wonder at all. Lots of people are comedians, and lots of actors can hold a stage even without the support of another actor. But to do this sort of studied monologuing is an odd duck middle ground, and I don’t think a lot of people do it, or can do it. I don’t think a lot of people have the temperament for it, for one thing: Spaulding Gray, gone more than twenty years now, did the monologue thing on the regular, doing it before this film, and doing it well after. I saw him do it myself in the 90s, when he was touring (touring!) with his monologue, Gray’s Anatomy, which would become his fourth and final monologue film (directed by Stephen Soderbergh, as it happens).
He had a real commitment to the form, which other people don’t have, or perhaps, have not have had with the same amount of success. Perhaps it was the case that even a nation as capacious as the United States could only sustain a single breakout monologuist at a time. Gray died in 2004 and no one has climbed into the role of the nation’s monologuist since, or if they have, I regret to say I have not been made aware of it. This is a shame. The United States needs many things right now, and perhaps a monologuist is one of them.
Of all the films in this “Comfort Reads” rubric, I think Swimming to Cambodia might end up being the most divisive and even the most unpopular. I don’t think it takes any great power of observation to understand why I, who have frequently written about myself and my life, and who even takes to a stage now and again to read to people things I have written, would find this film fascinating. I, too, monologue! (Not at his level, to be clear.) But I don’t know if other people who don’t do these things will find it as interesting, and as rewatchable.
But here’s the thing: like, love or loathe Swimming to Cambodia, you’re not likely to see another film very much like it. Of all the films I’m writing about here, this one is probably the most unique. It’s worth seeing for that alone.
— JS
icanhascheezburger_feed at 03:00pm on 10/12/2025A stranded Siamese cat in the winter cold and a good hooman who saves him for the holidays. The protagonist in the story thought his roommate locked himself out of the home and was knocking, but it turns out it was an early Christmas present. The hooman opens the door to find not his roommate, but a little Siamese kitty, with singed whiskers and fur. The hooman has a dog already, but claims the cat and dog are getting along swimmingly. He brings the cutie to the vet, and decides that he's been bestowed a gift from the cat distribution service.
He figures the singed whiskers and fur was probably due to the cat trying to find a warm place to hide, like close to a fire or under a car. Imagine all the poor stray cats and dogs all alone outside for the holidays, just trying to find somewhere warm to be. If you have the opportunity to take in a stray this winter, or at least take it to the vet, then it's worth the investment for the good of animals everywhere. The cat distribution service works in mysterious ways, just like Santa does. Read the full story below.
notalwaysright_feed at 12:00am on 11/12/2025Read A Tap Dance
I stand there, hands at the scanner, waiting. She never once meets my eyes.
She places the items on the counter, still mid-conversation.
Customer: "…No, I told him already. Well, if he doesn’t like it, he can…"
I don’t scan a single thing.
Read A Tap Dance
notalwaysright_feed at 11:00pm on 10/12/2025Read Only Applicable When Buying A Lava Lamp
I have just purchased an electronic item. Eager to try it out, as soon as I purchase it, I open the box while still in the store, while walking to the exit. As soon as I do, I turn around and walk right back up to the cashier.
Me: "I think I'm going to need another one."
I show him the inside of the box. The cashier's eyes go wide.
Cashier: "Oh my…"
notalwaysright_feed at 10:00pm on 10/12/2025Read Customer Does Not Nose Best
Customer: "Oh, and do you spray stuff on your clothes?"
Me: "Uh, no, sir, we don't. Why do you ask?"
Customer: "This jacket has a weird smell on it."
icanhascheezburger_feed at 01:00pm on 10/12/2025Welcome, lovers of the internet. Being in love is basically the best feeling in the world. Just when you think everything is collapsing around you and you can't even stand on your own two feet, someone who loves you just pops up and lets you know that everything will be okay. Just like the love you have for your hooman or your cat, your cat also shares this sort of euphoria with his or her favorite kitty friend. When you look away, when you close your eyes, when you leave for work, you don't expect your kitty to go on cat dates, do you? Well, think again because they do.
When you're not home they're entertaining their cat girlfriend or boyfriend. Why do you think they have such mood swings? You come home to them peacefully sleeping one day – it's not an accident, they have a pleasant date with their cat girlfriend! And on another day you get home and they've torn up all the toilet paper and knocked over two glasses. Yeah, it's because he had a fight with his cat girlfriend about his catnip use. She is worried, and he doesn't want to admit it. Enjoy these pawdorable cat memes!
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