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.

Discovery of ‘Dad Particle’ a Significant Scientific Breakthrough

by Roger White

Ponca City, Oklahoma (AP)—In a culmination of 50 years of theoretical speculation and weeks of intense media frenzy, two teams of researchers at the Fatherhood Institute for Research Nerds (FIRN) recently announced they had independently discovered evidence for the long-sought elementary particle that dictates behavior by dads and thus significantly impacts the family universe—the elemental unit popularly known as the “Dad Particle.”

To thunderous applause from a standing-room-only crowd of domestic behaviorists, journalists, and several unknown men from the soup kitchen across the street gathered at FIRN—as well as from other groups of fatherhood researchers around the world watching by webcast—the leaders of the two teams said they had definitely observed a particle they termed a “Riggs bison,” so named because this sub-atomic speck of matter found deep within the brains of fathers, interestingly enough, greatly resembles one-time tennis great Bobby Riggs riding an American bison.

 

“We have now found the missing cornerstone of fatherhood physics,” said Rolf Molf, FIRN’s director general. “We indeed have a discovery. We have observed a new particle common to all fathers. This astounding breakthrough will give wives, mothers, daughters, sons, and anyone else who might give a rat’s behind some answers as to why fathers old and young do some of the amazingly dimwitted things they do. As to why this particle looks like Bobby Riggs riding a buffalo, we have no idea.”

“Bison,” interrupted Assistant Director General Haye Seed.

“Whatever,” Molf said.

If there proves to be one and only one Riggs bison, its discovery would provide confirmation of the so-called Standard Model for Behavior of Dads (SMBD). “It appears to us that this ‘Dad Particle’ determines fundamental fatherhood characteristics, such as affinity for lying horizontal on couches during weekends, slipping an extra fiver to a grounded daughter, and watching reruns of old football games ad nauseum,” said Molf. “On test subjects, we removed the Riggs buffalo and within days these men were shopping with their wives, asking directions from service stations, and actually limiting their beer intake to one or two cans on the weekend. It was remarkable.”

“Bison,” insisted Seed.

In 1964, two groups of dad theorists each proposed that the brain of the average American father is pervaded by a molasses-like field, now called the Riggs bison field. As fermions (father-like thoughts) pass through the field, they acquire mass. And a quite tasty molasses-like flavor, at that. Without this Riggs bison field, a dad’s tendency to, say, hog the remote, would literally fall apart; even a father’s boisterous belch would no longer exist.

One of the “fysicists,” (shortened from “fatherhood physicists”) Peter Short of the University of North Ponca City, predicted that if this field were hit by the right amount of estrogen energy, it would produce a unique phenomenon, which came to be known as the “knockdown dragout.” Short was present at the FIRN announcement and said afterward: “For me, it is an incredible thing that has happened in my lifetime. Now, dads everywhere can point to this discovery and say, ‘See? It’s not my fault.’”

Discovery of the “Dad Particle” was made possible by the FIRN super collider, which took approximately an hour and a half to construct. Built atop the running track at Ponca City High School’s Wildcat Stadium, the super collider sends two dads, mounted on tricycles, in opposite directions on the 400-meter track. When the dads collide, at super-slow speed, their heads are then immediately examined via MRI. The MRI results are then X-rayed, and the result is then mimeographed and faxed to the press box.

“It was there, in the Wildcat Stadium press box, where speculation first took hold that the Riggs buffalo may have been found,” Molf said. “I still have goose bumps.”

“Bison,” Seed corrected.

 

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.