Clang the Clangers! It’s Contest Time Again!

by Roger White

 

Either I’m having a patella-buckling, spleen-expanding, koala-slapping case of déjà vu, or I’ve written all this before and am now simply too addled to recognize it, but here goes: You know how sometimes the gods smile upon you. Yah? True, sometimes they do. This is when things somehow turn out OK despite your astounding lack of common sense. Sometimes, however, they just grin and chuckle, leaving you to fend for yourself. They are amused at your puny efforts.

And yet other times, the gods smirk or give you that blank stare like you really screwed things up.

My advice for these times is just to act like you truly intended the outcome, no matter how calamitous. This gives the gods pause, and that brief delay in the Great Spinning Wheel of Fate (GSWoF) often provides that slim window of time in which you have a certain measure of self-determination. Like that time you were second string on the seventh-grade football team, and the coach was trying to decide whether to let you in the game just before halftime and in your excitement you simply ran out onto the field and got to play two whole plays before coach yelled at you to sit down and quit acting foolish.

Kinda like that.

This is to say that I believe the big guys are smiling at present, because just in time for the Third Biennial Oldspouse Familiar Phrase Contest (OFPhC) I have received another supply of premium glossy bumper stickers as prizes, you lucky ducks. That’s ducks, with a “d.”

For those too young, old, sensible, or hirsute to remember, the OFPhC involves a pile of phrases, quotes, movie lines, book titles, common sayings, utterances, and/or bodily function noises that I’ve rendered in a somewhat obscure manner. Your job, should you decide to accept it, is to come up with the more common version of said utterances. For example, say I give you “A Male Homosapiens For All Periods of the Year.” You say—… oh, come on. You say, “A Man For All Seasons.” Bingo! See how easy?

First three humans (I will accept cats, too) to respond at roger.white@tasb.org with the correct answers each wins a premium glossy bumper sticker (sorry, the “Ronald Reagan for Governor” ones are all gone—you get “Jesus is Coming. Hide the Bong”). And you get your name in the Gazette! Pseudonyms are fine.

Exciting, huh? OK, ready and. Go. What are the more well-known versions of these sayings:

1. She steers me to imbibe.
2. There is a lollipop spawned each 60-second interval.
3. Expired males don’t do any storytelling.
4. Feline Atop a Heated Metal Canopy.
5. A Few Prefer It Scorching.
6. Do not allow the insects in your bunk to munch on you.
7. A countenance only one’s female parent would really like.
8. Leave snoozing pups to recline.
9. Chance, Manifest Yourself as a Woman This Evening.
10. At the rear of each guy who’s accomplished something one will find a female.
11. Idiot’s precious metal.
12. Traversing the brook and through the forest, to my mother’s mother’s abode we travel.
13. The Era of the Water-Bearer.
14. A Story of a Couple of Towns.
15. Mothers, do not allow your offspring to aspire to be ranch hands.
16. Stay Upright Near Your Male.
17. Lucifer persuaded me to act as I did.
18. If I’ve informed you 16 divided by 16 times, I’ve informed you 250 times 4 times.
19. This is the manner in which the small, rounded pastry disintegrates.
20. The third planet from the sun is your bivalve mollusk.

 

Roger White is a freelance bivalve mollusk living in Austin, Texas, with his lovely female spouse, two precocious offspring units, a very obese dachshund, and a cat with Epstein-Barr. For further adventures, visit oldspouse.wordpress.com. Or not.

This Was Going to be Funny. Honest, It Was.

by Roger White

All right, you caught me. Put the flashlight and rubber-band guns down, I’m not going anywhere. I’ll talk. I tried. I really, truly tried to write this week’s column. Had my topic, had my three main points with some minor diversions, all with clever punchlines and cute little asides. There was even a comic twist and a reversal in there. We in the biz sometimes call this the counter-clockwise swirl, in deference to the great Jerry Seinfeld (played by Jerry Seinfeld). Jocular juxtaposition. Classic formula. I just couldn’t get motivated to finish the darn thing. It was going to be funny this time, too—not like usual. I was going to regale you with tales of my domestic do-it-yourself adventures gone wrong. You know, how clumsy and endearingly goofy I am at trying to fix things around the house. Oh, it was going to be a hoot. Like the time I went up in the attic to bait raccoon traps and fell through the attic floor/bedroom ceiling and caused a massive pink and avocado avalanche of insulation and raccoon droppings all over our master bedroom carpet. At least we had a Sears coupon for flashlights and duct tape–but where does one find rubber band guns anymore? Oh, lordy, it was to be hilarious, and most of it true, too, except for the part about the baby hippopotamus and the peanut butter.

But no. I just couldn’t do it. I am stalled, stagnated. Dulled into a slackjawed stupor by the Venutian heat of a summer from hell and heavy, unrelenting doses of CNN and reruns of “The Waltons” on TV Land. By the way, did you know that in the 1971 pilot for “The Waltons” – called “The Homecoming: A Christmas Story” – that the part of Grandpa Walton (later played by Will Geer) was originally played by the famed ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, father of Candice Bergen? Bet you didn’t know that.

And as we all know, Candice Bergen and then-boyfriend Terry Melcher (son of Doris Day) once lived in the very house that Sharon Tate was living in when that horrible Manson thing went down. In fact, it was Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson who introduced Manson to Melcher because Melcher was in the music business and Wilson had been impressed with some of Charlie’s songs. Creepy, huh? Yeah, I know.

You see, it’s developments like this that keep me from staying on task. I am supposed to be telling you about my uproariously amusing attempts at home repair and maintenance, like the time a friend was helping me move my mom’s heavy (and expensive) thick glass coffee table and we turned it upside-down not knowing that the glass table top wasn’t attached to the frame and the slab of beautiful smoked glass fell onto the sidewalk and smashed into a bazillion little smoked shards of dangerous, beautiful rubble. You would have laughed. The way I was going to tell it, oh, how you would have howled. And that yarn would have been factual, as well, if not for the bit about police intervention and the buxom neighbor down the street who was once Steve McQueen’s torrid lover. McQueen, by the way, starred in the 1966 film The Sand Pebbles, which also featured one miss Candice Bergen from earlier in this column. Is that fate or what?

Ah, well. Look, I’m sorry. Instead of just standing there staring, you could help me, you know. Think of something funny. How about this? DVD titles you’ll never see. Try this one: Me and My Vivisection. Right, it’s a bit on the morbid side. What’s that? Not bad, not bad. Great French Military Campaigns of WWII. Kinda obvious, though. Hmmmm. Yoko Ono Sings Perry Como. Talking with Your Teenager. No? A Wall Street Guide to Secure Investments. Good one. Now, that’s funny.

You see? If we work together, you and I, we can pull this off. We can create a new genre of participatory journalism. This, in turn, will help usher in the new era of peace and enlightenment that is to come as we near the bend to 2012 and the eventual end of the world as we know it. You see, I knew there was a reason I couldn’t finish this week’s column. It’s all about world peace. I’m glad I could help.

But please, be thinking of something for next week. I don’t want to have to do this again.

Roger White is a freelance writer living in Austin, Texas, with his lovely wife, two precocious daughters, a very fat dachshund, and a self-absorbed cat. For further adventures, visit oldspouse.wordpress.com.