A Mighty Wind Cometh (from an Empty Caveth)

by Roger White

Never let it be said that the Spouseman ignores his readers. I recently checked my inbox and found myself inundated with an e-mail, which lamented the fact that I haven’t tested you guys with a Quizzical Quotes contest in ages. I figured we’d seen the end of QQ, seeing as how the last time we did this, three of you wrote in threatening physical violence (I won’t name full names, Ronnie, Margene, and Achmed) and I ended up in protracted litigation with the estate of Aesop’s Fables claiming copyright infringement.

But.

Ye have spoken, and thee has listened. Besides, the nifty column I had drafted about the quirky personalities in my neighborhood didn’t make it past my copy editor (that being my lovely wife)—so you’re safe for now, Ronnie, Margene, and Achmed.

The object of QQ is simple: give me the more popular version of the quotes, sayings, poems, tidbits, cereal boxtops, song titles, book titles, phrases, expressions, adages, aphorisms, platitudes and proverbs you see below. For example, the more well-known version of “I’ll take freedom or croaking” is … anyone? Bueller? Come on, it’s “Give me liberty or give me death.” Dig? Dug.

First 10 of you who e-mail me at rogdude@mail.com with anything close to the correct answers win a nifty “Jesus Is Coming, Hide the Bong” bumper sticker. First 10 of you who e-mail me your PayPal account information and anything close to the correct answers win two bumper stickers and a VIP seat at my book-signing party (to be announced as soon as I hear back from my guy Larry at Self-Publish America).

So here goes. I was going to go with 50 of them, but I got tired. Sue me.

1. “You are not just puckering your lips and melodiously blowing a tune popular in the Old South.”
2. “Rap on oak.”
3. “Treading on chicken-embryo casings.”
4. “Don’t inspect a free large, solid-hoofed herbivorous quadruped in its oral cavity.”
5. “Each canine possesses its 24-hour period.”
6. “Existence in the Driving Corridor Designated for Speedier Vehicles.”
7. “What’s the latest information, feline?”
8. “Don’t mooch things off other people and don’t loan out your stuff, either.”
9. “The clock doesn’t hang around for anybody.”
10. “In what manners do I really, really like you? Where’s the calculator?”
11. “The puny, soft-spoken guys will get the third planet from the sun.”
12. “A threaded knot at the appropriate interval precludes the necessity for three squared.”
13. “Amalgamated, our posture is upright; split apart, we hit the floor.”
14. “The precipitation in the northern Iberian peninsula comes down principally on the flatlands.”
15. “A snapshot equals a lot of talking.”
16. “Devotion has no eyesight.”
17. “Consume, imbibe, and laugh it up, because two days after yesterday we could kick the bucket.”
18. “An egg-laying winged vertebrate within the extremity has the same value as five minus three in the shrubbery.”
19. “As a pair of ocean-going vessels that came within close proximity of the other after the sun went down.”
20. “Only a couple of items are sure things: pushing up daisies and governmental levies on personal income.”
21. “Confection is nice; however, alcohol has a more rapid effect.”
22. “Being really smug and happy with yourself precedes a sudden drop.”
23. “The neatest items of existence don’t necessitate a trip to the bank.”
24. “My mind processes information, so I gotta be here.”
25. “Grasp this career occupation and push it.”
26. “This is a canine-consume-canine planetary sphere.”
27. “Twelve divided by four bed linens facing the breeze.”
28. “As comfortable as an insect within a floor covering.”
29. “Getting even is sugary.”
30. “Glimmer, Glimmer, Diminutive Gaseous Orb.”
31. “The guy who is the final guy to snicker has the highest-quality snicker.”
32. “Need is the mom of contraption.”
33. “The only item we should be scared of is being scared.”
34. “OK, let’s have the guy who’s done nothing wrong hurl the initial rock.”
35. “To Assassinate the State Bird of Texas.”
36. “Clear liquid’s all around, but we can’t imbibe any of it.”
37. “Every one of the monarch’s large, solid-hoofed herbivorous quadrupeds and every one of the monarch’s male homosapiens failed in their efforts to reconstruct the egg man.”
38. “Bluntly, Red, I do not care.”
39. “I detect spoilage in the Copenhagen area.”
40. “See ya, mean globe.”
41. “Inactive appendages equal Satan’s studio.”

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.

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.

The Jury’s Still Out on This Column. Way, Way Out.

by Roger White

You’ll pardon me if I flex my whack-a-lawyer muscles again, but it’s not my fault this time. It’s true that I swore to my friends of the barrister bent that I would lay off for a while since my last acerbic attorney attack, in which I believe I opined something to the effect of the following:

“Q: So you’re stuck on a desert island with Hitler, a 100-pound rabid wolf, and a lawyer, and you have a gun with only two bullets in it. What do you do?

A: Shoot the lawyer twice.”

And, indeed, I had no intention of even intimating in this column the notion that fifteen minutes in a steamroom full of lawyers is guaranteed to produce results as mucilaginous as a great pot of stewed okra. Ick.

No, I was going to pen a nice, droll little piece about the agonies of Christmas shopping, mainly pointing out all the unfathomably extraneous must-purchase gift doodads at places like Brookstone—such as those internet-linked patty thermometers that you can insert into your burgers as you grill them to determine not only the very millisecond that the epicenter of your ground beef mound hits optimum ingesting temperature but also to pinpoint and track the temperature of each patty morsel as it works its way through your backyard barbecue guests’ digestive systems, just for fun.  This is what I was going to write about. How thoughtless gifts have come a long, mysterious way since the era of maritime-themed tie tacks and microphone-shaped soap on a rope.

Alas, that column was not to be, for again I have been sidetracked, this time by that little letter we all receive from the county clerk now and again that makes us all earnestly yearn for a hefty dose of the chicken pox: the dreaded jury summons.

Yes. So the very day I had set aside to congeal all of my yuletide shopping horror stories into a bouncy little missive for your wonder and amusement was spent instead deep in the bowels of the Travis County Courthouse listening to defense and plaintiff legal beagles grill me and approximately 50 other total strangers on whether or not we could be fair and impartial in this really twisted case of . . . ooh, sorry, I can’t divulge that information. Judge’s orders, ya know. All I can say about the case is ew, yuck, OMG, and I didn’t know such a thing was anatomically possible with a regulation-size bowling pin.

As prospective jurors, we all had to sit through five grueling hours of voir dire, which is Latin for “your embarrassing past is now on display to determine if your biased, bigoted, and emotionally disturbed personality precludes you from jury service.” The lengths some folks go to avoid their civic duty, I must say, never ceases to amaze. One lady, I kid you not, interrupted the judge no fewer than nine times with such questions as “Is the prosecutor the same thing as the attorney?” By the time this old gal was hustled away, the rest of us weren’t sure if it was an act or not, but she was unceremoniously handed a “get out of jury service free” card and awarded six free DVDs of Judge Judy Season One. One large man in front of me claimed post-traumatic stress disorder from grievous wounds received during his military service as a means of skipping out, but when pressed by one of the attorneys on the specifics of his war injuries he ’fessed up that he was beaned in the back of the head by a car part in his motorpool job. Yeah, right. Keep your seat, Mr. Purple Heart. I was Prospective Juror #18, and by the time the lawyers took turns whittling away all their undesirables, it appeared that I was seriously headed for ye olde jury box. However, a late question by the defense team saved the day. They asked me what my wife did for a living, and I proudly proclaimed that dear Sue works for, you guessed it, a downtown law firm. “You mean she works with lawyers? Like us?” “Yup.” “Do you believe this fact might hinder your ability to render a fair and impartial verdict in this case?” “Uh, probably not. Giggle. Fry ’em.” “What did you say?” “Nothing.” Then both legal teams hustled to the bench to whisper things back and forth to the judge, and the next thing I knew I was on the street.

Hoohah! I mean, darn. Oh, well. I had fully intended to serve if called upon. Heck, Twelve Angry Men is one of my favorite movies. It may have been a real kick to be Henry Fonda, or Lee J. Cobb, or Jack Klugman even. “Of course, the kid did it! They’re all alike! Hang ’em all! AHAHHA!!!” Whew. Sorry. Got carried away there. 

However, I did not emerge unscathed from my brush with our cantankerous court system. When I finally got to my car, I found my windshield papered with a nice collection of parking tickets, courtesy of Austin’s finest. Now, that’s a good scam. Where’s my lawyer?

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.