By Amonna Souter-Pantsoff
Epigraph: “If you keep all your feelings pent up inside, they won’t explode, they’ll compost! Keep turning ‘em! Give ‘em air!” --Knotty Deepun
🐺Somebody Tweeted to the effect “Nobody post any more pix of their back patio with snow on it, please.”
🦊 Today is Eastern Orthodox Christmas. Merry Christmas.
💀 Don’t make the silly mistake of confusing wolf and fox emojis.
🦊We saw a pair of red foxes frolicking in our yard a few days ago. We believe their den is nearby.
💀 It’s snowing as I write. No causal connection, though, since when I stop writing, it keeps on snowing.
💀 We keep a small plastic bottle of dish detergent by the sink, and refill it from time to time from a jug kept elsewhere. A full bottle of dish detergent, even if small, is one of life’s little luxuries.
💀 Another is a full box of ice cubes when you don’t have an automatic ice maker.
💀 I would welcome examples from you of life’s little luxuries.
💀 Tundra is frozen marshland. If Siberia thaws, it will free millions of hectares of decaying vegetation to resume decaying, tossing off methane like a million cows after beans for breakfast.
💀 Global warming will speed up so much that Santa won’t have to go to Palm Beach for the off season; Palm Beach will come to him. Imagine Russia’s entire Arctic coastline with real estate prices like Miami Beach and weather to match.
💀 “Barkeep! A flaming tequila swizzle and a vodka with Ajax, hold the cherry!” --A verbose pangram.
💀 “I wonder what people who spell ‘you’ as ‘u’ do with all the time they save.” Mumblety-peg, the art of manliness?
💀 “My bed is a magical place where I can suddenly remember everything I was supposed to do.” This sort of thing was once called “fax trash,” a name not replaced in the Internet Age.
💀 “Humans are 98% water, just like cucumbers, only with angst.”
💀 “‘The finger lives for me,’ the ring thinks to itself.” --Malcolm De Chazal
💀 Let us now recall the last words of the Wicked Witch of the West: “Ohhh! You curséd brat! Look what you've done! I'm melting! Melting! Oh, what a world! What a world! Who would have thought a good little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness! Ohhh! Look out! Look out! I'm going! Ohhhh - Ohhhhhhhhhh!”
💀 I don’t know where witches go after they melt -- where the goblins go, below, below, I guess -- but surely it counts for something that the witch's last words were uttered to save others from harm (“Look out! Look out!”). If only she had found a way to express her sweet side sooner, things might have ended very differently.
💀 Journalists’ rule: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”
💀 Speaking of journalism, don’t use ALLCAPS or underlining for emphasis; use italics, bolding, and larger fonts. Allcapping and underlining are distracting clutter that make copy harder to read.
💀 And don’t use rightside justification with Word and similar programs, because they don’t work as well as book publishing software, which doesn’t leave, for example, space rivers in the text.
💀 Just as one starts the new year going to the gym, here’s a little quiz to jog the mind and memory. Can you identify the popular song for each of the following fragments? They range from easy to medium, except for Mr. McYone, for whom they’re all easy:
I got a gal
Named Thoo
She knows just what to do
__________
Tell you [woman’s name] what I’m gonna do
Build a house next door to you
Can I see you sometimes?
We can blow kisses through the blinds
__________
I axed my friends about her, but all their lips was tight
__________
I’m a road runner, baby, and you can’t keep up with me
__________
I’m not going to take it all
lying down
‘Cause once I get started I
go to town
_________
Why so worried, sister, why?
Say the silver bells of Wye
__________
May take a week
And it may take longer
They got the guns
But we got the numbers …
Your ballroom days are over, baby
__________
Watch out! You might get what you’re after!
__________
They said I shot a man named Gray
Took his wife to Italy
She inherited a million bucks
And when she died it came to me
I can’t help it if I’m … lucky.
___________
I used to care but … things have changed.
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