The joke today

I wanted to tell you a joke today. I decided that this was allowable because of the following seven reasons:

1. It starts with an original list of seven items (you are currently on item one, only six to go), which fully qualifies it as an independent blog post. So the joke is only part of the post at the end and thus doesn't violate the "Original Material Only Rule".

2. It's not like I have an "Original Material Only Rule" which is probably why it's in quotes. No, actually I have no idea why it's in quotes. I do have an Original Material Only Rule, only it's more like a guideline and definitely not an "Original Material Only Rule".

3. It's not just any joke, but is a warm up for tomorrow's blog post. You will see this joke briefly referred back to in tomorrow's blog post. Also, it is a soccer joke designed to appeal to my readers who are World Cup fans and to make up for how I called it soccer. Anyway, what I'm saying is that it's a vaguely relevant joke, unlike the following:

4. I bought a new pair of shoes from a drug dealer. I don't know what he laced them with but I've been tripping all day.

5. Sunday is casual day at clerkmanifesto and so it's more like we're sitting around chatting except for how you're sitting quietly in another place altogether and I'm quietly typing and no one is saying anything and it's nothing like chatting at all.

6. This is my blog and I can do whatever I want, once we take in to account literally millions of tiny personal rules, limits of communication, ethics, need, and small and large aspects of the absolute limitations of art, communication, and being human.

7.  I take the core joke and spin it out into a full, original story of it's own.

8. Because there is free will, but you have to fight for it.





And here we go, but it was worth the wait because it's really funny and you will laugh and laugh and the comments below will all fill up with people telling me how they lol'd. It's just that funny.

The Joke

All the animals of the forest got together for their huge, every four years, championship Soccer game, except the animals of the world call it Football. The Creatures of the Hoof team was just destroying the Animals of the Ground team. It was six to nothing but was actually worse than that sounds. The giraffe in particular looked unstoppable. She was terrifying when she ran full bore, then she would stop and perform some graceful header that was utterly impossible to defend against.

But then, in the middle of the second half, as the vast array of animal spectators were thinking of packing up and beating the traffic back home, the tide of the game mysteriously started to turn. Every bounce suddenly seemed almost magically to go the Animals of the Grounds' way. The giraffe thudded down field only to mysteriously sprawl in the grass. Time after time the ball would land someplace inconsequential, vaguely in front of the Creatures of the Hoof team's goal, and then would mysteriously careen in to the back of the net, absolutely unstoppable. The first time this happened the Animals of the Ground's coach, an aardvark, ran out to the field to see what was going on. The team gathered around. There in the grass was the reason for the team's great comeback. A centipede, all dressed up in his tiny footballer outfit, was rejoicing his successes on the pitch.

"That was fantastic!" exclaimed the coach.

"Thank you." said the centipede humbly, high fiving all his teammates simultaneously.

"But where in the world were you for the whole first half?" The coach asked.

"Putting on my shoes."