When I was in college we had Showtime on the campus cable network.  They ran the Aspen Comedy Festival one year.  There was this one comedian who did a routine he called stand-up for both hemispheres of the brain.  He’d do traditional stand-up at one microphone, but there was another microphone on the stage and he would walk over to it at any time and say something that had nothing whatsoever to do with the rest of his monologue.  One of these out-of-left-field comments was, "Don’t you find it ironic that on Lincoln’s birthday the stores have a white sale?"  There were a few chuckles, but it clearly went over the heads of most of the audience.  He looked out and assured them, "some of these will hit you later, and that’s OK."

I call these "joke bombs."  They drop, but don’t always go off right away.  I have experienced many of them.  Some of them only have a few seconds of delay.  Some take days to go off.  I just had one go off after many YEARS and thought I’d share.

The bathroom down the hall from my office has a lone urinal which I have determined that not every user flushes after having used it.  The reason for this is that it is quite old and has no visible water trap, said trap being in the pipe below the urinal.  Traps exist to keep sewer gas from emanating from toilets and urinals.  But if you don’t flush, then what gets trapped is, well, urine.  And it smells.  So rather than stand there and do my business having to breathe in the odiferous vestiges of someone ELSE’S business, I will typically make a pre-emptive flush as I walk up to the urinal. 

This morning I did so thinking of TV’s "Ally McBeal," in which one of the characters frequently states that he "likes a fresh bowl."  (He has his favorite toilet rigged with a remote so he can flush it while on approach.)  Not having much else to think about while standing there I recalled the character’s name: John Cage.  Then I remembered his partner’s name: Richard Fish.  Then I remembered the name of their law firm, which stuck in my mind because the series uses a lot of aerial establishing shots zooming in on the Boston building in which the fictional office is purported to exist and one day while re-watching the series a couple of years ago I actually found it on Google Earth.  I marked it with the name of the Law Firm: "Cage & Fish"

Cage & Fish.

Cage And Fish

Cage An’ Fish

CageAn Fish

Cajun Fish!!!!!!

Wow.

Really?  Apparently. 

All those years, and I never "got" that until just now.

Oh, and I, too, like a fresh bowl.