Running With Blood-Red Scissors -- The Colonel Carries On #25

By Willianna Poboise

Epigraph: “If kindness falls from fashion, forsake fashion.” --after Amelia Barr, novelist, 1830-1919

Folderol is a noun for idiotic actions, words, or ideas. A variant is falderal. take two at bedtime and call your morologist in the morning.

“So the caterpillars start munching the bean plants, which send out a scent that attracts parasitic wasps that lay their eggs in the caterpillars. The eggs hatch and the ravenous larvae feed fatally on the bean-phagic caterpillars, and the bean plants laugh and laugh.” --Jarna Shrile, Why Can’t We Be More Like the Laughing Beans?

“Life is larger than books, but if you don’t need larger, books may be the better choice.” --Billy O. File

“It’s a world of horrors. The worst one is that people who could stop them steadfastly look the other way and speak of other things. The hope of the world is gratuitous love lacking all restraint.” --Sir Harry O. Triggerman

I was going to do another fantasy on the Grinchy master of The Middletown Eye cracking his whip on the galley slaves, but all I could come up with was the phrase “pixel-stained wretches.”

“I will instruct the Agriculture Department to plant the magic trees that all the free stuff will grow on.” --Bernie Sanders impressionist

Some people’s first choice is Bernie, and their second choice is Nasty Naldo:

SUSAN SARANDON: “Some people feel Donald Trump will bring the revolution immediately if he gets in then things will really, you know, explode.”

CHARLES BLOW: “No member of an American minority group — whether ethnic, racial, queer-identified, immigrant, refugee or poor — would (or should) assume the luxury of uttering such a imbecilic phrase, filled with lust for doom.”

Pass it on: Susan Sarandon is filled with lust for doom. Probably a late-blooming side effect of a life of bug adruse.

Or maybe I’ve just been pranked into hyping the next Indiana Jones movie.

“Underruled!” the judge said. (Credit: Zippy)

The spelling “yada” has always been commoner than “yadda” in the expressions “yada yada” and “yada yada yada.” Ah, the joys of a life of scholarship.

The expression may have evolved from “yakety-yak,” which apparently dates to vaudeville times. It was well-established by the time of  "Yakety Yak (Don’t Talk Back)" the song written, produced, and arranged by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller for The Coasters and released on Atlantic Records in 1958, spending seven weeks as #1 on the R&B charts and a week as number one on the Top 100 pop list.

I really can’t say enough about the joys of a life of scholarship.

Someone mistakenly referred to a spending moratorium as a “monetorium.” Good mistake, but the word might better denote a money museum or Scrooge McDuck’s treasury vault.

How about a Monetary Folk Festival? Hip California bankers get down. The Alan Greenspan Experience. Ayn Joplin.

“A scholar is just a library's way of making another library.” -Daniel Dennett, philosopher, writer, and professor (b. 1942)

“Oklahoma!” is falsely credited with being the first show to make songs integral to the story. Ironically, one of the show’s most famous songs, “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” has nothing to do with the plot.

Please, no letters because I mentioned The Plot. I don’t mean, you know, that one.

The Truth Never Lies Somewhere in the Middle.

Sauron had his admirers. His fan club had giving levels: Ringers, Nazgul, Balrogs, Trolls, Wormtongues, Orcs.

“Correct English is the slang of prigs,” Fred Vincy said fictionally in Middlemarch by George Eliot, or “Girl George,” to distinguish her from Boy George.

“I have sympathy for plagiarists to some extent -- because it’s really hard to know what you’ve invented and what is someone else’s invention that you’ve absorbed.” --Helen Oyeyemi

“I suppose unconscious plagiarism is a well-trod road, and only a few of us writers take the rarer road of conscious, deliberate stealing. I take the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” --Col. T.H. Clapping, Letters from a Copyright Jail

“The beasts [Joan, a Carolina swamp dog, and Yoo-Hoo Mrs. Goldberg, a Springer Spaniel] did not like our having been gone for so long, but they handled it well.

“This week we had some excitement. On an evening walk around my neighborhood, we were strolling past a house under construction. I have to walk Joan on a leash around on the street because she can’t be trusted not to give over to her dingo-ness. But Yoo-Hoo can be off-leash.

“Anyway, Joan saw a squirrel sitting on a low chain-link fence and started to stalk it in that belly-to-the-ground crawl that predators do. I wasn’t concerned about her catching it because the squirrel could just leap to the other side of the fence and Joan was on a leash. What I hadn’t counted on was the fact that Joan and Yoo-Hoo have been working on their tactical teamwork.

“As expected, Joan leapt at the squirrel and the four-legged tennis ball went over the fence. What the critter hadn’t been counting on was a flanking maneuver by the spaniel.

“Suddenly, like the poster from Jaws, I saw the under-snout of a Springer Spaniel popping up from behind the three-foot high fence with a squirrel leaping vertically into the air, its tail just inches from the beast’s maw.

“And Joan was right there to catch the vermin on the descent. She caught the squirrel, which let loose a terrible sound, like Ariana Grande caught in a bear trap.

“I yelled something super manly like ‘Dear God NO!’ and the squirrel took advantage of Joan’s surprise to bolt up a tree. Joan sat down at the bottom of the tree, furious about the one that got away. When we got home she sat in the middle of the kitchen and pouted for an hour, refusing to look at me.”