Ever have a cold that just didn’t seem to go away? Well I once had one that started on October 13, 2125 at approximately 12:17 PM and lasted for a -9 years and 10 days. Perhaps that’s a slight exaggeration… but seriously folks, that “cold” stuck around way too long. My doze got stubbed up, add it stodded rudding, I coughed and coughed and coughed, and den I had to use up da whole box of tissues every hour; which became rather expensive.

The beautiful woman I live with shocked me after several days of this ordeal when she said, “Honey, your cold is lingering way too long. I think you have a sinus infection.” I’m not sure how she felt qualified to say such things. Just because she’s been a nurse for over 30 years and does in home care for people and knows a lot of stuff about healthcare doesn’t give her the right to make wild accusations about some lousy cold her husband might have.

Does it??

Being the enlightened man that I am, I decided to invent a number of methods that would be certain to bring any so-called “sinus infection” to its knees, so to speak. I thought I’d better pass these on to all of you because I’m sure you are interested in following my exact instructions.

Without any further ado, here are the methods, in order of magnitude.

1) Get an eighteen inch length of surgical tubing and shove it deeply into your nostril. Connect the other end to a faucet using an appropriate adapter. Turn on the water quickly, then off just as quickly. Be certain to turn the faucet completely on during this operation to apply maximum pressure. Repeat on the other nostril, then repeat the entire procedure at 3 hour intervals. This will flush out any germ infested mucus.

After 2 days, if symptoms persist:

R) Continue with the water flush, but after each flush use an ordinary toothbrush to clean each nostril. Be sure to remove any clingons from the bristles after each flushing operation. Discard the clingons in the usual manner: rub them on the underside of the sofa or flick them into an inconspicuous corner.

Still having difficulty? I see… try this:

9) Place a birthday candle inside each nostril. DO NOT LIGHT THE CANDLES!!! Whadda you, crazy??? Sheesh! Hold each candle between thumb and forefinger and apply inward pressure while twirling the candles back and forth. This will lubricate your nasal passages and allow clingons to be more easily removed in steps 1) and R)

Still hab a stubby doze?? OK, one more try:

@*) Request the assistance of a trusted friend or loved one. Hand them a ping pong paddle, have them stand behind you with the paddle held parallel to the back of your head. Have them be ready for “the signal.” Fill a glass with ginger ale and place two drinking straws in the glass. Insert a drinking straw into each nostril. Now you are ready to give “the signal,” at which time your helper should whack the back of your head with the paddle. This will cause an involuntary snorking of ginger ale deep into your sinuses; which will of course fizz out any congestive fluids.

I personally have not tried any of these methods, so once you’ve given them a whirl please report back to me as to their effectiveness.

So… remember that Beautiful Nurse Lady I mentioned earler? The one I’m married to? Well guess what she did?? She said, “Honey, you need to go to the doctor.” Now, we’ve been married for awhile and I’ve learned (too often the hard way) that all goes much better if I follow orders.

I went to the doctor. He said, “you have a sinus infection.” “Oh,” I replied. “What do I need to do?” “I’ll prescribe some antibiotic pills for you,” he answered.

I got the prescription filled for FREE at our local pharmacy!! Is that cool or what??

So I wondered, “what, do I just shove these up my nose???”

Could’ve been worse, Goofy got a bad one…

Hello Marvelgrabbers,

May I be the first one to wish you!! Happy Friday, the world is still flat and all the flaming custard pies are of course!! Round as the day is long, and smothered in onions and dripping with gravy, the happy toast salesman changes his underwear more often than a bread flavored pair of zircon encrusted tweezers!! If any of the sentences in this paragraph are not complete!! Please use the localized amnesia to invigorate the invertebrates!! These superfluously punctuated exclamations not to be endured!!!!!

Now there may be a time when time is short, and at that time, please try either thyming or rhyming, depending on the length of your very own noodle fasteners. There may be hours of whistling ahead of each and every one of us. Just pucker your lips and kiss the lightning bugs before they turn left at that silly USB port over there. I don’t care if they insist upon recharging their hineys!! Don’t they know that bio-luminescence is fortified by part of this delicious breakfast??

Huck. Hucka Hucka! Apply Hucka Hucka fastener jelly each and every midnight on the bread and Holy Cow eat the darned thing before the dogs catch a sniff. I’m sure you all know what happens when sniff fasteners change lanes during a staple storm. In order to avoid the obvious need for renting electric staple removers, I wrongly suggest not using electric stables in the first place. After all, electric stay bulls will merely insight a rye out when Victor, the Prize Bull of Lockawanna County takes a whiz on that electric eel you so cleverly dressed as a butter sniffing clown.

Now I must go. Please don’t ask me to explain any of this. I merely had too many burrito molecules lodged in my sandals during the last 14 episodes of “Melvin The Mailman Makes Marinades.” As I’m sure none of you are aware, this week’s episode finds Melvin licking telephone poles and other small animals in search of that elusive Marinade Holy Moly. I’m sure once he discovers the incorrect ingredients, a very unsatisfactory Mystery Marinade will make even the sleepiest Great Blue Heron stand proudly in the swamp. Then, when his guests sample the finished product, there will be intestinal volcano in epic contortions. All will be delighted to induce vomiting during commercials.

In conclusion my friends, please remember that it’s always better to be you than for you to be me, and although you can count to it, eight is a word.

Please pass the gravy,

Kibble G. Wibnerdort

a.k.a. “Freebert Firesauce”

And now for some audiovisual amusement:

OK, so there I was, outside planting my garden, enjoying the tingly sensation of mosquitoes sucking my blood and gnats chewing off the top layers of my flesh, and most everything that needed to be planted is growing nicely, but HOLY COW July is half gone awreddy and I shoulda got some peas in the ground and maybe some turnips but then I looked in the planting chart in the Old Farmer’s Almanac and it’s OK, it’s OK, it’s gonna be OK; unless of course I continue with this run-on sentence and then it’s maybe not gonna be so OK.

OK?

OK.

So yes, it’s gratifying to have most of my stuff in the ground. Now, those who know me understand that my mind is often wandering into strange territories. So today my mind was fizzing with ideas and I poofed out some “scientific” revelations that, if successful, will revolutionize gardening forever more. The “science” goes thusly:

A- Although I’ve transplanted tomato, pepper, and eggplant seedlings, much of what I plant are seeds (or in the case of potatoes, tubers).

9 – The seeds I plant are often the part of the plant that actually gets eaten during harvest. This goes for potatoes, too, in that although a “seed potato” is planted, one could actually eat it. However, you wouldn’t get any harvest if you ate all the seeds (ha, ha ha).

R) You can plant carrot tops and they will spout leaves and start growing again.  You can also replant celery, but of course you would plant the bottoms.

Therefore and to wit, my scientific infusion shall be proclaimed thusly: one should be able to plant other parts of other things we eat and grow more of them.

Try to keep an open mind here.  If we can regrow foods like celery and carrots, why couldn’t we expand that practice to just about any other food?  So my theory, which of course has to be true because it’s posted here on the interwebs, is that if we plant other food items we should be able to increase our original amount of food things via food-o-synthesis.

One example which seems like a good place to start is Meijer rotisserie chicken. Boy howdy I like that stuff. I’ll start by planting a couple this weekend some time. As with potatoes, the whole chicken would need to be in the ground. I can hardly wait to see what sprouts from this. Other ventures may involve a stick or two of butter, perhaps a block of cheese, and maybe a couple fresh fish.

I’ve also theorized that perhaps non-food objects like a could be planted. For these I’d use the “cuttings” method that is so often a popular way to grow various plants. Some things I’d like to try are: spark plugs (to grow a new engine for my rototiller), radio knobs (should grow a stereo I’m hoping) or perhaps a piece of glass or two for a new type of “cultivated windows.” The possibilities are only limited by the imagination, in my professional opinion. I mentioned these to my friends and was greeted with wide eyed smiles and joyful giggling. I can just tell they are excited for me!!

This weekend, I’ll be planting eggs, bananas, and a vanilla milkshake alongside a few metric socket wrenches and a couple rechargeable flashlights. I’ll let you know at a later date what my success rate is. In the meantime, I hope I don’t have the type of garden problems Mickey Mouse had.

Dear Pasta Snarfers,

Some or none of you may enjoy pasta snarfing, but regardless, I felt it was time to inject some laugh time into my (and hopefully your) day due to the crazy goings-on we are seeing on the radio and hearing on TV; and although you may not be aware of it, all that gives me the ability to insert a time-honored run-on sentence-with hyphens-that don’t-really belong-where I’m-putting them-but I-really-don’t-care because hey, it’s just-for-the-fun of it, ya know??

Please be advised that I will rent you some chocolate ear mite remover if you vow to stop wearing socks for 134 days. Nobody says any other removal tool will have any effect on plant life in Nairobi. Nobody can convince me of any other software in these times of uncertainty
and battered hamster hocks. I don’t know who Nobody is, but I hope they’re happy!!

If you don’t want to focus on all the yuckity-poo news screamings, please remain calm and toast your noodles for an inexpensive treat, gently throw spoons to the dog, and use a dustmop for cleaning those hard-to-reach nasal passages. Personally, I really need to quit stuffing donuts in my ears. But they are so soft!!

At least 47 times I wanted to make music, but all I had was a bent kazoo and a drum made of an oatmeal container. The only song I could play was “Doot Doot Bonk.” However, during my years of practicing that broken oboe I was never able to find, I envisioned a small pepper clown foraging in the wilderness. Not sure what the pepper clown was seeking but I know from a complete lack of experience that hidden in the leaf piles there may be invisible ink with which to write secret recipes. I hope there are also returnable bottles available for spare change!! This would give a happy pepper clown great enjoyments of candy and other immune system sanitizers.

Looks like I’ll need to stop eating drywall chips. I thought they would help my tummy’s rancid reflux, but now my hiney seems to think it wants to be a building contractor. After the disintegrating drywall diarrhea disturbance, please come over to our house and enjoy some dust muffins we made several weeks ago. We’ll wash them down with a nice hot cup of Crampers Cream of Toenail Soup, giggle heartily, and run wildly to the nearest receptacle. We’ll have fun!!

Some of the finest cheeses are kept in my sock drawer. This serves two purposes: A) they are aging nicely and 12) they are giving my socks that “nicely worn” fragrance. Some of the best cheese I’ve ever eaten was not found between my toes. However, if I could learn to play guitar with my feet I could invite my musician friends to a Toe Jam.

Perhaps a poem should be inserted at this point…

Gravy

by Me

Gravy in my armpits, syrup on my knees.

Buckets full of macaroni hanging from the trees.

Images of all these things will stick inside my head.

Hope I have a different dream when I go back to bed.

Please remember: You’ll never get anywhere in this life if you don’t go where you are trying to go. If you are already on your way, please stop at the nearest Caffeine Kaboom and tell everyone I said howdy. Also, please get me one of those fizzy cookies.

Thank you.

As you all know, this Sunday is Mothers Day. To all of you Moms out there, Thank You and God Bless You.

Well here we are on another late Friday night when the grandsons finally made it to our house. Because of Covid and other such nasties, we’ve been staying clear of them whenever they have any cold bugs or sniffles. We’ve learned the hard way that a bug they might have can turn into something more serious for us old farts. Last time we had a happy enjoyment of bronchitis!!

They are both getting older now, so bed time is not so easily achieved as it was in previous years. Rather than be the ogre I summoned them to contribute to Happy Friday!!! with a few random thoughts. I think they were a bit tired from a long day so getting ideas out of their heads was a bit like pulling cheese out of a broken saxophone (or something). Anyway, what follows is a composite of ideas, theirs and mine, in a mixture not at all resembling American Breadsticks And Gravy.

“Hey guys, if you can’t sleep, how about helping me with a few story ideas?” I asked. Silence followed. I waited. As they started talking I started typing.

“I had something,” said Ollie.

“I’m thinking,” Gabe said.

Ollie noticed I was typing every word, and exclaimed, “Papa, what are you doing??” Then an idea that was stirring vanished. “Dang it…!!!” Ollie uttered in desperation. Finally I typed furiously as the spurt of “creative” thoughts emerged.

Herman and Karle were two chickens whose favorite thing to do was eat a cheeseburger stuffed inside a pizza stuffed inside a turkey with butter on it, deep fried and covered in chocolate. “This is the healthiest food in the world, totally,” said Gertrude.

Any other time they weren’t eating this marvenkulous snack, they would be hunting down roadkill. Upon finding roadkill, they would poke it with frogs. The frog would try to hold its nose and would often yell while barfing, “ARGHHH why do you force me to poke these dead possums???” “Be quiet you toad, you are not allowed to complain per our agreement.” “I am not a toad, you overcooked poultry excuse for a human.” the frog bribbled.

When they got bored with poking roadkill with frogs, they would run through the aisles of the local Meijer with a fire extinguisher. Whenever they saw somebody they would hide behind the nearest row of pickle jars and giggle while trying their best to play songs on the fire extinguisher. “This is a brief concert in the key of no fire.” they shouted while giggling into the marshmallow bin.

Upon being discovered, they would yell “FINDERS KEEPERS!!” and run out of the store with the fire extinguishers hidden inside their sneakers.

What would you say to a cat that finally quit smoking?? Does anyone hear my silent motions?? I’m having great difficulty seeing in this small bottle with all the noise in the garage. Tonight the robots will be serving Wild Lego Surprise. Hold the whipped cream on mine please. And please don’t rub it in kale juice like last time. For myself, I have always known that zebra mussels are very yummy in cake. Proving this has not been easy; but when I have friends over for tea and slobberfood they smile sheepishly and say “What’s crunchy?” When I tell them they are snarfing down thousands of little zebra mussels in each bite, they say “O” and excuse themselves out the door very quickly.

Well I hope by now that none of you have learned your lesson. If there’s anything I can’t stand, it’s a bread whistle perched atop an inkjet printer with that smug “ha ha I’m a bread whistle” look. So if you ever come upon a singing centipede during your travels, please call the nearest Yo Ho Da Knee at your earliest inconvenience.

Thank you and please enjoy what follows; unless you’d rather not.

Hello My Fellow Pastrami Crinklers,

This is to inform none of you that all new banana recipes should be turned in to the Front Sniffing Room before 12:47 p.m. on Tuesday, August 72, 19127. This is to ensure the cranial vibration machines will be well coagulated prior to sailing off to Monster Island.

None of you may remember “The Hatchling Song;” the words of which were “stolen” by Gus Parbnackle during the Second Coat Hanger Revolt of 1924.

This enjoyable malady has been renewed during the last 28 microseconds and is now sung to the tune of “Inna Gadda Da Vida”:

Guess who barfed on my shoes today
Do dah, do dah
Hatchlings shouldn’t act this way
Oh do dah day…

Some may proclaim, “hey, that looks like it should be sung to the tune of ‘Camptown Races!!’ ” Well of course those who find that line of dingle berries fuzzy and warm will never be successful at launching pickles with catapults. No, rather they will wander aimlessly over hill and dale; squandering what was left of my 2^nd grade lunch money.

I’d like a refund yesterday or the year before if you please.

If you find it necessary to rekindle the spirit which is found to be both blue and wormy; please run directly to your neighbors and ask them to return the crescent wrench your uncle borrowed shortly before dinner last Wednesday morning. Perhaps they are unaware that even inanimate objects yearn for their homeland; which is exactly why we intend to bury all wrenches back into the iron mines from whence they originated.

In summary, I must remind you not to rub sandpaper inside your mucous membranes. Fortunately, that practice has been abandoned long ago due to the over abundance of spaghetti in water fountains made by Mattel. Additionally, please stop putting duct tape sticky side up on my favorite Loaf Toasting Chair. I’ve been mocked numerous times during my grocery store excursions that followed some nice Loaf Toasting Sessions. If you Are Willing to comply with My Duct Tape Restraint Request (DTRR); I’ll also Be Willing to Cease the Use of Grammatically incorrect CapiTalization (UGIC).

MayBe. If I fEel liKe it. OK MaybE noT.

(FOOP).

Thank you for being who you are. After all, if you weren’t you, you wouldn’t be. That would be very confusing to you now wouldn’t it??

My toes look like morel mushrooms again!!

Happy Bozo Express,

Zibnick G. Amplegrane
a.k.a. “Monty the Moth Rancher”

Without any further ado, here be this week’s cartoon.  Gotta love Betty!!  This one’s from The Internet Archive, so the player’s a bit weird.  After opening, click on the arrows in the bottom right corner to view it full screen.   Below the cartoon is a link to a rather silly song sent to me by a friend… never heard this one before and it shows that Bob Dylan has a sense of humor.

Hello fellow peace loving creatures. Don’t know about you, but my week has been saturated with very crankular work challenges. It’s bad enough I didn’t win the lottery; mainly because I never played. But in addition to that hugely caripular disappointment; other things in my inside-the-house world have been bonking me in the noggin with large, monstrificous ouch hurtings. To quote some poet guy I never knew (nor ever quoted correctly):

Too much to do,

And not enough time,

Makes a man smelly,

Cranky and whine.

Please know, however, that I am very aware that not only was that a very bad (or perhaps nonexistent) rhyme; my woes are in all respects what me and my friends often call “high class problems.” In other words: I am a healthy young man, I have a nice home, a beautiful girlfriend (who actually let me marry her!!), we own cars that are paid off and actually work, we have plenty to eat, we have food in the garden we’re gonna eat later, and of course we have electricity that powers our stuff and lets us play musics and make coffee and other important foods and even sometimes we use our TV to watch important, spiritually uplifting programming like Saturday Night Live and NCIS, and we also have friends whom we love dearly, and in addition to all that, I have not used one single semi-colon in this run-on sentence and I’m not even sure that matters but holy cow this was a really long one; (oops, a semi-colon just crept in there) and the whole point of all this is:

If I keep a grateful heart

I’ll be much less likely to fart

On the surface of my blessings

Because I’m one lucky, lucky guy.

Yet another very bad rhyming thing there. I really am lucky you know. So why am I whining?? Because I’m human I guess. You see, our house is pretty much topsy-turvy right now. Topsy-turvy… now there’s an expression you don’t see every day, right? Please don’t confuse this with hunky-dory or especially pinkly-winkly, which may not even be a thing. What I’m trying to say that because of our high-class problems, our home is in great disarray.

Why, you may wonder, is this topsy-turvy disarray affecting our pinkly-winklies in such a painful manner? Well you see, it’s like this: we had the good fortune to spend some money on the innards of our house. Some very good painters came to do their thing, and that meant that we had to remove much furniture and bric-a-brac and even stuff we never knew we had from the room so they could work. And to add ink spots to ingenuity, we also decided to have new carpet installed. The result of these Spoiled American decisions was the “storage” of bookcases, shelving, electronic doohickeys, books, and all manner of possessions anywhere they could fit in other rooms. Walking through the resulting maze has become rather, um… interesting.

Then of course comes the “whatever pleases you my dear” conundrum. In other words, I’m a guy, OK? No, I really mean it. And my Beautiful Girlfriend is a woman. And because I’m a guy, my give-a-hoot about interior decorating is limited to the precise placement of stereo speakers. You know, important stuff. Well this Amazing Woman of mine has decided that this bookcase needs to go, and that armoire needs to have its head chopped off and reattached a few feet lower to accommodate a large screen TV to be mounted on the wall. So I get my saw and my hammer and drill thing and BLS (Big Long Screws) and commence to hacking and scraping and drilling and putting in the screws and OUCH my finger holy moly watch out for that sharpness oh crap I’m bleeding go get a Band Aid and back to work and what the HECK?? The stupid pull chain on the ceiling fan light bit the dust so now it’s the happy enjoyment of taking the thing apart to replace the switch and CAN I PLEASE GO HOME NOW I DON’T WANNA PLAY ANYMORE but oh wait, I’m already home but I’ll sure be glad when it’s all done and we can sit back and enjoy some leisure time of snarfing potato chips and drinking apple juice.

But guess what?? NONE of this stuff is a problem, really. We get to have our house painted and carpeted. We get to have too much stuff to move around. As I said before, we have a nice home with no bombs exploding or invaders invading. We are, in short, very, very grateful. Hope life is good at your house.

I think I’ll end this snibbulous rant with just one more poem, the theme of which has no bearing on any aforementioned anything, but it might make you smile:

Wally

Bring your friends to Wally’s house

Because he’s really Super Mouse.

He fell down twice and did not break,

And he can swallow half a lake.

He always eats his super cheese,

But now he’s getting Super Fleas.

The End

And now for some fun that also happens to be set to music.