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.

Lenticular Haiku, by Sir Archie Ferndoodle

by Roger White

Fellow time/space voyagers and other occasional devotees of “This Old Blouse,” I am more tickled than a duffel bag full of marsupials to announce the return of my dear friend, front porch sartorial mentor, and fellow breakfast-nook philologist, Sir Archie Ferndoodle (applause, applause, applause).

Yes, the former poet laureate of the Greater Southwestern Scribes Society, which meets every third Thursday in the back of Sue’s Salon in Cement, Texas, has been gently coaxed out of quasi-retirement to once again bless us with phrasings, words, syllables, parts of syllables, and renderings of nocturnal animal sounds from the Ulan Bator region as only Sir Archie can. (And remember, if you mention this column at Sue’s Salon, you get 10 percent off a five-ounce jar of Sue’s Coconut Heel Scrub with the purchase of at least $20, not including her patented Tomato-Lye Jamboree Hair Tonic.)     

As I’m sure you remember, the esteemed Fernie holds an associate’s degree in postmodern comparative limerick studies from the University of Southern Panama’s Correspondence College and has been featured five times in the American Anthology of Poetry. Just a few of his classics include “Oh, Staff Sergeant, My Staff Sergeant!,” “Why Is the Man Always from Nantucket?,” “The Squirrels Stopped Talking to Me Today,” and his latest, “A Stitch, a Horse, and a Can of Pearl,” which was the inside-cover poem in the most recent edition of the Cement Area Greensheet.

The more astute of you may have seen Fernie’s hand in the Christmas edition of “This Old Mouse.” Raise your hand if you had the notion that Sir Archie was the ghostpen behind“The Nitrous Before Christmas.” Well, you’re dead wrong; I wrote that while flying low in my dentist’s office, but I did have ol’ Fernie in mind. In fact, he may have actually inhabited my body during that whole experience, but we digress again.

So anyway, without further magoo, I give you Sir Archie Ferndoodle, who has just returned from a five-month sojourn at the Tao Sendaha Haiku Sweat Lodge, just north of Pittsburgh.

 

Lenticular Haiku

by Archie Ferndoodle

 

Hand old, withered

Extended to young happy boy who

Smiles and

Coughs up a small border town near

Flagstaff.

 

Deposit slip with no meaning flutters

In brown surge of empty day. I find Julia at

Home making love to the Buick

Again.

Better judgment whispered

Toyota, Toyota.

Toyota. Smash hindsight with

Bitter hammer of stoli rocks. Ah.

 

Three grateful invertebrates argue

On who passed

Wind while each ascends

The assistant professor’s

Mortgage.

 

 

 

Trees and earth know much more

Than they sing

To man accused of listening of listening

Of listening to Alex

Trebek and his minions. Only refuse

And then hear again, the daily

Double. Oh! Bodies of

Water for Four

Hundred.

 

Heat. No heat. Heat. No heat.

Damn toaster. Fling the

Shiny monster down the hillock to

CRASH waves of filament element

Parchment and wire. No heat toast is mere

bread and

Sorrow.

Dear Julia. I’m trading it

In.

 

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.

If I Said You Had a Beautiful Body . . .

by Roger White 

I read in the newspaper the other day that Austin-Bergstrom International Airport will soon be one of only 30 or so airports in the country to be blessed with the latest and greatest version of the full-body security scanner.

Are we special or what?

Apparently responding to travelers’ complaints that the scanners currently in use are, now let me find the exact wording so I get this right—hang on a minute, here it is—“too invasive because TSA officials behind curtains could see contours of genitalia,” your friendly TSA folks have devised the so-called millimeter wave machine. Before I get to the new-fangled millimeter wave machine, why do you suppose the TSA people needed to be behind curtains to view our genitalia? Are they too embarrassed to view our genitalia right out in public? If I know that somebody is scanning the contours of my genitalia, by golly, I want that person out in the open. To think that someone is gawking at my boys behind a curtain is a bit too lurpy for me. In fact, in all fairness we should be able to view the contours of the TSA person’s genitalia at the same time they’re looking at ours. What do ya say? Tit for tat, so to speak.

Anyway, this new contraption, according to its handlers, will not show exacting details of your naughty bits, but instead will display a “generic form with arms and legs, similar to a gingerbread man with its arms raised.” And, as we all know, gingerbread men with their arms raised don’t have naughty bits, so this should quell all the hullaballoo and rhubarb about genitalia. And anytime I can use the words “rhubarb” and “genitalia” in the same sentence, I consider it a good day.

According to the article I was reading, if this millimeter wave machine thing sees what it thinks is a potential weapon, it will zero in on the part of the body involved. It will then proceed to destroy that part of the body with a death-ray gun. I’m kidding, of course. That area of the body is then subjected to a pat-down, according to the TSA. Or, as we called it in middle school, the feel-up.

Ya know, we pay darn good money to go to the airport to be leered at and fondled, so I say it’s high time the airport people pony up some perks for the privilege. For example, if these security scanners are so precise and techy, why don’t they employ them for double duty as mole detectors?

“Mr. Davis, step right through. You don’t seem to have any weapons or terrorist liquids on you, but you do seem to have a suspicious-looking freckle below your left nipple. You might want to have that checked out. Next.”

And the little conveyor belt scanner that looks over all your personal items? They could easily fashion that into a buffer and polisher, no? So while your shoes and belt are being irradiated to see if they are concealing a nuclear bomb, they could also be enjoying a nice wax job so that they come out on the other side fresh and supple.  

Last but least, the friendly TSA folks themselves. Now look, I’m as patriotic as the next guy; I know we have to sacrifice for freedom and security; I understand we all must compromise to keep the mighty eagle soaring and to maintain liberty and justice for all and to keep Hank Williams Jr. and Charlie Daniels selling gimmicky records and all that. But, honestly, the whole attitude, TSA folks. That’s gotta go. You’re not on the front lines in Afghanistan. You’re not guarding the president or maintaining a SWAT vigil outside a desperate criminal’s hideout. You’re a half-step up from driving around the Wal-Mart parking lot in the goofy blinking golf cart, okay?

So a little courtesy, please? In fact, why can’t TSA people do some double duty themselves? I mean, we’re in the airport, the alcohol is duty-free here (whatever that means), we’re in an hour-long line. I say we have the TSA folks take drink orders while we wait.

“Please have your identification ready and remove all jewelry. And we’re having a special on top-shelf margaritas for the next half-hour. Thank you.”

That might get me flying 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.