Dan Brawner
Dan Brawner is an award-winning humor columnist for the Mt. Vernon/Lisbon SUN. He is the author of the humorous mystery, "Employment is Murder" (available on Amazon.com).
Contact Information
Articles by Dan Brawner
October 07, 2008
Conservative columnist Kathleen Parker wrote that Sarah Palin was "out of her league". Then after the Biden debate, Parker was "relieved" at Palin's performance. But Parker ought to be even more alarmed that Palin has studied to be good impostor. What if Palin actually gets the job?
June 17, 2008
Iowa's record-breaking flood had deluged cities, swept away homes and businesses, knocked out roads and bridges. But it has also brought out the heroism and compassion of ordinary people.
April 22, 2008
Okay, maybe it wasn´t "The Big One", but last Friday´s 5.2 earthquake at 4:38 a.m. was enough to get a lot of Midwesterners out of bed earlier than usual. Excited friends called, trembling with their own personal aftershocks, to confirm the experience. "Did you feel that?" they demande...
April 15, 2008
I did my taxes at the last minute again this year because I didn´t want to give myself time to think about what I was actually doing. As a conscientious consumer, the last thing you want to do while you´re paying taxes is point out what you´re getting for your money. So I decided...
April 08, 2008
Police were called to a high school food fight because a student standing outside the lunch room door heard somebody shout "Run" and he thought they said, "Gun!"
April 01, 2008
Hillary Clinton mocks Obama's speeches about hope as just words. When she is caught inventing a story about running from sniper fire in Bosnia, she replied it was "a minor blib' and ,"I say millions of words a day."
March 25, 2008
21 years ago, a little girl from Seattle wrote a letter, stuck it in a bottle and this month it finally arrived at its destination in Alaska. The story illustrates the power of enduring hope (and, of course, those tough 2-liter soda bottles!)
March 11, 2008
Symptoms may include drowsiness, stomach cramps, itching, runny nose, vomiting, vertigo, mild euphoria, flaking skin and fear of spiders. Consult your physician. Tap water may not be right for you.
A startling new Associated Press story has revealed that drinking water coming out of millions of ...
February 27, 2008
I look out the back window and see the handle of my lawn mower sticking out of a snow drift like a periscope checking to see if the coast is clear from yet another blast from the unseasonably wintery sky. But the calendar doesn´t lie and even though it may not look like it now, spring is coming. S...
February 19, 2008
The recent volley of snowstorms in the Midwest inspires residents to perform random acts of shoveling. Who can fear our murky future, knowing such people walk the earth?
February 12, 2008
Government legalese on IRS forms and Veterans Administration regulations is baffling and hilarious. Freshman congressman Bruce Braley of Iowa is trying to make government speak our language.
February 05, 2008
The Real ID Act threatens to rob Americans of their privacy. But it could be worse if biometric fingerprints become the new national ID.
January 29, 2008
Bush's economic incentive play is a temporary feel-good solution that will only end up in the hands of Chinese manufacturers and leaving us picking up cans and bottles to pay off our sub-prime mortgages.
January 22, 2008
I´ve been thinking about Noah lately. He spent forty days and forty nights on that boat with two of every screeching, clawing, grunting, burrowing, braying animal on earth (plus Mrs. Noah), with no land in sight and no way to get away from it all. If, during that time, Noah threw a particularly ob...
January 18, 2008
It is a sad day when Iowans have to be reminded to be polite. It has always been a matter of pride that regardless of individual differences, we remain civil and considerate. An Iowan would bleed to death in the street rather than inconvenience a stranger. "No, no," he´d say. "Don´t trouble yours...
December 18, 2007
I went to a newspaper convention once in which three veteran columnists warned us never to write about religion, politics or the weather. So here goes. Gee, it’s been a cold December and the ice storm knocked down my electric line. I’m still waiting for the power company to answer their blasted t...
December 12, 2007
It may be cold outside. But during this holiday season, we experience many traditions that warm the heart–such as Christmas trees with lights all aglow, the mouth-watering smells of holiday cooking, and let’s not forget the romantic tradition of kissing under the poisonous, parasitic shrub.
I’m ...
December 04, 2007
It’s a losing battle. 10,000 Iowa farms with livestock and 5,000 major livestock producing farms are all busy making something besides prime rib. If you live next door to one of these places, it’s not going to smell like roses. Sorry. That’s life. And even $23 million won’t make it go away.
Io...
November 29, 2007
Your father gave up watching television in 1986 after the dog ate the remote to his beloved 26-inch color TV from Montgomery Ward. (The dog was never the same after that. It seemed depressed and, well, kind of distant.) Now imagine the look on your dad's face when he unwraps his Christmas gift fro...
November 19, 2007
Thanksgiving is not only the day of giving thanks for our many blessings, but it is the day the president of our country takes time away from his busy schedule to pardon a couple of turkeys – now don’t get ahead of me here. I’m talking about real, actual, feathered turkeys, the kind Americans tradi...
November 13, 2007
We are entering into the season of dread. In a few short weeks, we will be forced to do battle with cold, snow, influenza, weight gain, taxes, Christmas and depression caused by sunlight deprivation. For this reason, the term “Indian summer” sounds particularly appealing.
“Indian summer” may have...
November 08, 2007
In 1917, French artist Marcel Duchamp caused a furor when he included in an exhibit a piece entitled, “Fountain”. It was a urinal. Not a sculpture of a urinal–a real, actual urinal. He hadn’t even made it, he just displayed it and called it art. (Well, he probably shined it up a little). Shortly...
October 30, 2007
Last September, after an outrageous incident of corporate pandering, not to mention conflict of interest in which the University of Iowa actually considered naming its College of Public Health for Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield in exchange for $15 million, the university is now considering a ba...
October 23, 2007
Touting his recent veto of the SCHIP bill that would have provided health care for millions of American children, president Bush said it was, “...one way to ensure that I am relevant.”
So it has come to this–the leader of the world’s only super power, having to insist he is relevant. It’s like s...
October 17, 2007
These days, developers and other nice folks are constantly thinking up new ways for us to have fun. When I was a kid, we made our own fun. We didn’t need waterslides–we played in the creek or mud puddles. That was good enough for us. We didn’t have “nature parks”–we walked around in the woods, c...
October 16, 2007
When God threw Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden for partaking of the forbidden fruit, he wasn’t angry. It was just his way of letting them know they were finally old enough to drink. And to do the other reckless things adults do.
On November 6, voters in Iowa City will get the chance...
October 03, 2007
A week or so ago I noticed my walnut trees had produced a bumper crop. Today, the walnuts are all gone. I guess the squirrels know when it’s harvest time. I had been hoping to make a deal with the squirrels, giving them all the native black walnut trees so I could have the easy-cracking Engl...
September 26, 2007
As goes Iowa, so goes the nation. Traditionally, this has been true in many things: family values, presidential preferences, rates of obesity. But Iowa has long been out of step with its weather. It’s too cold in the winter, too hot in the summer. And the other two seasons have been too sho...
September 18, 2007
“Put a knife to your throat if you are given to gluttony.” Proverbs 23.2
Obesity in the United States has ballooned to 27 percent this year, according to a recent report by the Trust for American Health, with no state showing a decline. We’ve tried fad diets, counting calories, weighing porti...
September 12, 2007
Forget about Osama bin Laden. Statistically, he’ll never get around to you. Forget about Bengal tigers. They’re big noisy, endangered animals and they don’t eat that much anyway. But the most dangerous animal on earth is lurking in your own back yard. It’s going to bite you and there is...
September 04, 2007
Do you ever get that nagging, empty feeling like something is missing in your life? Like something six billion trillion miles across?
A University of Minnesota team of astrophysicists have discovered a gigantic hole in the universe that contains absolutely nothing. The Minnesota scien...
August 28, 2007
“People who know how much they’re worth generally aren’t worth too much.”–Nelson Bunker Hunt, 1980.
Texan, Nelson Bunker Hunt made a fortune in Libya oil. Wondering what to do with all that money, he and his brothers, along with some Saudi investors, decided to corner the silver market, buying ...
August 22, 2007
I am awash in tomatoes. Tomatoes are coming from everywhere. Friends, neighbors and relatives bring bags of plump, ripe, juicy home-grown “beefsteak” tomatoes, oblong Roma tomatoes and those little cherry tomatoes that burst in your mouth and squirt joyously across the table. I am inundated,...
August 14, 2007
Apparently Iowans are not drinking enough booze. I know this comes as a shock to many Hawkeyes who are trying to do their part. But in an attempt to get us lightweights to belly up to the bar, the Iowa Alcoholic Beverages Division has taken the matter into its own hands.
As the state’s o...
August 08, 2007
“It’s unconscionable that the Department of Agriculture would think that a dead person was actively engaged in the business of farming.”
What Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) is trying to say here is that the D of A ought to be able to tell the difference between a dead farmer and a live on...
A massive ice ball from the sky crashes through a roof and reminds us that Nature is still in charge
August 01, 2007
At 5:30 a.m., on July 26, as Jan Kenkel of Dubuque, Iowa was getting ready for work, a 50-pound chunk of ice whizzed through the twilight sky and punched a huge hole in her kitchen roof.
“It sounded like a bomb!” the 78-year-old woman told the Associated Press.
The basketball-sized blob o...
July 25, 2007
Recently, President Bush underwent a much publicized colonoscopy. For the duration of the procedure, Bush transferred control of the country to Vice President Dick Cheney. (Yeah, I didn’t notice any difference either.) The nation held its breath and waited for the results.
No cancer was di...
July 17, 2007
There’s an old saying that “One man’s meat is another man’s poison.” Following the recent charges of food import contamination from China, you might say that one person’s toothpaste is another person’s antifreeze.
In April, pet owners were horrified to discover that some dog and cat foo...
July 10, 2007
We live in interesting times–that is, we might realize we were living in interesting times if only we were paying attention. For example, the Washington Post just reported that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had received a report describing in detail abuses of the Patriot Act by the FBI six...
July 03, 2007
“Who would your dog vote for?” That may sound like a dyslexic, theological bumper sticker, but an Australian shepherd named “Duncan”, residing in Federal Way, Washington, has actually become a legally registered voter. And now, he faces the same tough choices as the rest of us regarding who sh...
June 26, 2007
Washington DC lawyer Roy Pearson lost his $54 million lawsuit against his dry cleaner whom he claimed misplaced his pants. According to ABC News, Pearson, who represented himself in court, broke down and cried while questioning himself about the mental anguish of losing his pants. He claimed ...
June 20, 2007
Recently, when a 50-ton bowhead whale was killed off the coast of Alaska, a three and a half inch harpoon tip was discovered in its neck. Researchers at the New Bedford Whaling Museum dated the projectile at around 1890. They calculated that the wounded fugitive was possibly 130 years old. The ge...
June 14, 2007
Earlier this month, President Bush met for the first time with Pope Benedict XVI to improve strained relations with the Vatican and exchange gifts. In Rome, as tens of thousands of protesters marched outside and the trial was getting underway for 26 CIA agents who had kidnapped an Egyptian cleric l...
June 05, 2007
* A foolish person might say that Iowa State University football does not exist (okay, they were 4-8 last season).
* ISU football is that which nothing greater can be conceived (This must be self-evident).
* Existence in reality (i.e. not actually getting totally stomped by Nebraska) is greater ...
May 29, 2007
Tom Wayne of Kansas City, Missouri loves his books. For ten years, Wayne has been collecting thousands of volumes which he sells at his store, Prospero’s Books. Then last Sunday, he made a big pile of them outside his store and set them on fire.
Wayne’s precious books burned for nearly an hour be...
May 22, 2007
What if somebody told you this was your last chance to have any fun at all until 2024? Would you mope around, grumbling about Alberto Gonzales? Or would you party like it’s 1999?
Or rather 1990. Because that’s the last time the Midwest saw the emergence of billions of cicadas. These grotesquel...
May 15, 2007
Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb. It’s a tongue twister. It’s a goofy word. It’s a sour weed. It’s another name for nonsense. And it makes surprisingly good pie. Rhubarb grows practically everywhere and this is the height of rhubarb season. Prized for thousands of years for its medicinal qualities ...
May 09, 2007
What have we got against heroes? What have they ever done to us that we are so glad to see them fall? Maybe it started with Nixon. Or maybe Zeus. But Newsweek just released their latest poll that shows President Bush’s approval dropped to 28 percent, the lowest of any president since Jimmy Carte...
May 01, 2007
When I was growing up in rural Mount Vernon, we always had a big garden. We had a huge garden. Okay, we had a small agricultural complex. We raised literally acres of vegetables. We had carrots and onions and corn and bell peppers and cabbages, string beans, lima beans, squash, peas, turnips...
April 24, 2007
As part of its Conservative Coming Out Week, University of Iowa’s College Republicans organization planned a symbolic game of Capture The Flag” with one side as “illegals” and the other side playing the boarder patrol.
Chairman of the College Republicans, Greg Baker received 150 outraged emails c...
April 17, 2007
I’ve always thought there was something mysterious about how the US Postal Service works. It’s not so hard to understand how an email can get from New York City to Los Angeles in two seconds. But how in the world can a Mother’s Day card travel from the south side of Chicago to Tortilla Flats, Ariz...
April 10, 2007
Zach Johnson is the real deal. After Johnson, a 60-to-1 underdog, won the Masters golf tournament in Atlanta last Sunday, Augusta National Golf Club chairman Billy Payne told him at the “green jacket” ceremony that Johnson’s life had changed forever. But Zach countered, “I’m a Midwest guy from Iow...
April 03, 2007
Would you go to a Denny’s restaurant, look over the colorful menu, find some entre that looks appealing and then eat the picture? Or course not. Only somebody seriously delusional would mistake photos of food for the food itself. So then why is the Iowa legislature all lathered up about reintro...
March 28, 2007
As his old tractor bounces across the cornfield in New Hartford, Iowa (pop. 700), Sen. Grassley might look like any other Midwestern farmer. But the senior member of the the Senate Finance Committee and the man once ranked the third most powerful US senator isn’t just combing the weeds out of th...
March 20, 2007
The trouble with peace activists is that they are so nice. After enduring four years of an unnecessary war, corruption, profiteering and civil rights abuses, peace activists all across America have decided to take action...and hold candlelight vigils. The shockwaves will rock the White Hou...
March 11, 2007
Long-time speaker of the House, Thomas “Tip” O’Neill used to say that all politics is local. And it’s our local state government representatives that agonize over the stuff that’s really important to the average person–like regulating deer contraceptives and toughening the standard as to what const...
March 06, 2007
We’re adaptable. It’s what made humans a successful species. Give us an Ice Age...no problem. An Industrial Revolution? We can handle it. We’re told we need cars, TV’s, cell phones. Fine. We’re adaptable. And now, we’re being told it’s an hour earlier that it really is–in fact it’s three...
February 27, 2007
I’m not exactly saying I enjoyed the blackout following the ice storm that knocked out power to 365,000 homes across Iowa. I don’t actually like being cold. In fact, by this time of the year, I’ve just about had it with the cold. But after the wind howled and freezing rain stiffened tree branch...
February 20, 2007
A few years ago, I was visiting a friend and noticed strange scrapings on one of the cement blocks in the basement. To my horror, I was told they were made by rats trying to gnaw their way out. “With their teeth!?” I asked, wincing from the imaginary pain. Chomping an uncooked kernel of popcorn...
February 13, 2007
Hold the flowers, the chocolates and the sappy Hallmark cards! And hold the Right Guard. What really turns women on is men’s sweat.
That’s right, guys. We’ve been scammed by corporate America all this time. We don’t have to dress up or splash on aftershave or drive fancy cars. No matter wh...
February 06, 2007
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, comprised of more than 2,500 of the world’s top environmental scientists from 130 nations, meeting in Paris announced that there is a “90 percent” chance that the earth is getting warmer.
Oh, really. I wish I had known that heart-warming bit of new...
January 31, 2007
The trick in any good horror story is identifying the real monster out of all the scary possibilities. Recently, there was a news story about Ali Yusof, an orchard keeper in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia who wanted to keep pests and pilferers out of his fruit trees. So Yusof stationed--not one guar...
January 25, 2007
As Iowa’s new governor, Chet Culver took the oath of office this month, he raised his left hand instead of the traditional right hand, an action which immediately set off alarm bells. What did this mean? Was it a sign of things to come from this left-leaning Democrat? Was it the equivalent of ...
January 17, 2007
As a benevolent dictator, president George W. Bush is missing one essential quality.
When he doesn't have to bother about little distractions like laws or human rights or the long-term future of the country, a good dictator can get a lot accomplished. During his oppressive reign, Italy's ...
January 09, 2007
Recently, a car containing three customers pulled up to the drive-through window at my favorite McDonald's in southwest Cedar Rapids, Iowa, picked up their order and tossed in a dead cat.
The employees were confused. Nobody tips at McDonald's. And what were they supposed to do with a dead c...
January 02, 2007
It's been about a year since vice president Dick Cheney shot a lawyer while quail hunting in Texas. Although Cheney insists it was an accident, the circumstances surrounding the incident might end up bailing president Bush out of the disaster in Iraq.
You may recall that last February, the hawkish ...
January 02, 2007
It's January and the party is over. The Christmas tree is down, the confetti is swept into the trash. Now that we are, at least temporarily, incapable of anything sinful or strenuous, it is time to contemplate our future. New Year's resolutions are not only valuable for planning wha...