Tongue-In-Cheek ... Foot-In-Mouth

The Phone Chromosome

Billy — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 22:20:13 +0000

Guy Genes are VERY different from Gal Genes. Guy Genes are responsible for making a guy eat bean curd (a.k.a. tofu) just to impress his hot date who is sitting across from him in a romantic dimly light cozy restaurant, when suddenly, out of nowhere she picks up a piece of tofu, and to his horror, she begins to slowly and romantically move this giggling goop of grossness towards HIS guy mouth. At this point 100% of guys will allow said tofu to romantically enter their mouth, because a man’s squid-like brain has convinced him he might get lucky if he eats said tofu. And if eating said tofu is the key to canoodling, well then, so be it.

HOWEVER, 145% of the same men will spit said tofu into a nearby napkin the first chance they get, because men DON’T eat anything that sounds like it comes from in-between someone’s dirty toes (e.g., “toe-food”) even if said tofu might lead to large quantities of snuggling, because if said man gags on said tofu and becomes permanently dead on said flood of the romantic dimly light cozy restaurant, his chances of getting lucky have pretty much gone out the said romantic dimly light cozy restaurant window. Of course, I mean all this in a nice way.

Genes are also responsible for how detail-orientated you are. For example, a man will listen to a phone conversation, hang up the phone, and if asked by his wife “who was on the phone and what did they want,” a man will respond with:

“I don’t know; something about your Aunt Zelda being pursued by and a runaway bulldozer.” And this is mainly due to men being very good at filtering conversations to ONLY come away with the important issues which is worth remembering like, for instance, her “aunt” and “and a possessed bulldozer.”

But women remember every last detail. For example, a woman could listen to the same phone conversation, hang up the phone, and if asked by the husband “who was that and what did they want” (which NEVER happens, but will happen for the sake of this column, by which I mean my required word count) a woman will respond with:

“Well, it seems that John, who is my Aunt Zelda’s ex 9th ex-husband on her 3rd cousin’s sister’s brother-in-laws dog’s side of the family was just released from a federal prison after being convicted of having a lurid affair with a vending machine; a vending machine which originally agreed to date John due to a severe case of guilt brought on because after John put his money in and picked A7, the Fritos got stuck in the wire curly thingamajig, and John had to keep hugging and shaking the vending machine until shortly thereafter they began dating, and my Aunt Zelda was visiting John and his vending machine when suddenly a man dressed up like the Cowardly Lion and driving a bulldozer—he was trying to earn some extra money making appearances at kid’s birthday parties to pay to have his septic tank fixed thanks to his septic tank exploding at 3 AM and now every 10 minutes it erupts like Old Faithful in his front yard—anyway the foot of his Cowardly Lion costume fell off and landed on the gas, not the brake, and so he lost control of the bulldozer and he and it came crashing through the front door of the convenience store were John, Aunt Zelda, and John’s fiancé vending machine were, and Aunt Zelda was last seen flailing her arms running for her life down the street, with the runaway bulldozer hot on her heels, and with the Cowardly Lion frantically searching for the foot of his costume.”

Now, to the trained ear, it is clear that what the woman said to the man is pretty much what the man said to the women (“aunt” and “chased by a bulldozer.”) BUT the man did so using far LESS words. But perhaps that’s just a bias observation from a man.

Anyway, a further distinction in gender genes is that women love to talk, and they have gobs of gabbing enthusiasm for phones. So, love of talking + love of phones = lots of phone usage, which could negatively impact our national defense.

Think about it: what if the Russians launch a nuclear missile in the direction of Hoboken, which just so happens to be ground zero for the world’s crucial production of Fritos. With so many women gabbing on the phone using up all the phone lines what if no one can get through to the Frito factory and then where would we be? Fritoless, that’s were.

Genes are responsible for why men use words only when grunting or pointing are not options. Couple this with the fact that men are afraid of the phone. (Note: we men ONLY use the phone when it is absolutely necessary.) So, grunting + pointing + being afraid of the phone = very little phone usage, which means better national defense. And if two men are FORCED to use the phone to make a decision (e.g., what sporting event to go to) the phone conversation will be quick—one word or less and the guys will have planned everything and be off to the ballgame.

HOWEVER, if two women are on the phone trying to make a decision like, for example, planning a friends wedding, the conversation will take longer than it takes for a cinder block to turn into a pumpkin, and they will touch upon EVERY SINGLE aspect of the wedding including how THE friend would feel about getting married, and how THEY would feel about getting married, and who they SHOULD invite to the wedding, and who they SHOULD NOT invite to the wedding, and how those who are invited to the wedding would feel if they were NOT invited to the wedding, and how those who are NOT invited to the wedding would feel if they WERE invited to the wedding, and who should sit with who, and how those people feel who are sitting with people they don’t want to sit with, and how the people they don’t want to sit with feel about sitting with them. This can go on for months, and if they start talking about who’s catching the bridal bouquet, and how people will feel about that, nobody’s getting married.

Bill Drury is a humor columnist for The Carriage Towne News. Contact him via snail mail c/o The Carriage Towne News, P.O. Box 100, Kingston, NH 03848, or email him @ Drury1234@Verizon.Net, or to go his website @ www.billedrury.com.

Hoo-Dars

Billy — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 18:19:01 +0000

It amazes me how two creatures from the SAME species can be so DIFFERENT. For example, all men have the genetic requirement to click the TV clicker using a speed which can only be captured by slow-motion photograph. And in sharp contrast, women own breasts. Breasts are a topic of GREAT interest to men which starts the moment we are born and lasts until approximately thirty seven years after we are dead. And if you were to ask any red-blooded man about our fascination with the female frontal form he’d place the blame squarely on the shoulders of the birds and the bees, saying “it is one of Mother Nature’s ways of attracting men to woman for the procreation of the species, and it has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that we men are perverts.”

Further evidenced of our differences is that your standard woman hears and remembers everything, whereby your standard man, according to your standard woman, has “selective memories” and “hears what he wants to hear.” Admittedly, the ladies are totally correct here, but don’t tell them I said that. Shssssshhhh. Hey, look, there is ONLY so many things that can be held in a man’s brain, and when we hit full cranial capacity something’s going to leak out, like everything a woman says to a man while said man is deeply involved in watching the Super Bowl, especially if there are any New England Patriot’s cheerleaders performing fancy maneuvers featuring lots of jumping up and down and the resulting violent jiggling of their pompoms.

Okay, so, much like a man’s selective mental and hearing capabilities, men also posses selective visual abilities. For example, a man will NOT be able to detect dirt on the carpet until the day he walks into the living room and find a migrant farmer riding a heavy piece of farm equipment near the sofa. BUT a man can see a pair of boobs from incredible distances, sometimes through walls. And this is because men are naturally equipped with factory installed “hooter radar detection equipment” known in male circles as “hoo-dar.” Hoo-dar allows a man to spot hooters, and once spotted, hoodar makes it pretty much impossible for a man to stop looking at said hooters no matter what else is going on in the immediate area, to include lava flows.

Having this type of radar rolling around unsupervised in a man’s brain you would think would be nothing but an asset, and it is, trust me; however, it can sometimes lead to serious male injury, and I’m not only talking about when a man’s wife finds him “noticing” the next door neighbor sunbathing on her deck with her “bounty” both out and about, and his wife walks up behind him and begins cracking a rolling pin over his head until his head is flattened sufficiently enough so that both eyeballs are now on the same side of his head and he resembles a flounder.

Sure this smarts a bit. But I’m not talking about that kind of pain; I’m talking about real pain; I’m talking about when a trainee male (e.g., freshman on college break) goes to a topless beach for the very first time and sees teeming packs of topless women frolicking in the surf, playing volleyball, or simply lying on towels, and his mouth will open wide enough to force his bottom jaw to detach from his upper jaw, fall onto the ground, and it will have to be glued back on by his drunken buddies who are way too busy looking at the girls to pay the necessary attention required to perform delicate reconstructive facial surgery, and they wind up permanently bonding his lower jaw to his ankle.
Other injuries associated with “exposed female accessories” have been linked to men abruptly deciding to plop themselves down in the middle of a topless beach and exist by eating sand. But there are seasoned female form watching veterans out there who have seen their fair share of sunbathing a-la-natural women, and as a result, these men are far better equipped to nonchalantly view women’s assets without bringing national attention down on themselves in the form of blood hounds and wanted posters. And these men do this by using the following four-point female form watching formal:

1. Two veterans are walking down a beach. One notices a topless sunbather.

2. He comes to an immediate dead nonchalant stop and begins casually jerking his head first towards the sunbather and then snapping it back towards his friend, and then jerking it back towards the sunbather, and then snapping it back towards his friend. He continues this until his head is attached to his shoulders by one remaining strand of neck muscle.

3. The other veteran immediately realizes that the apparent seizure his friend was having was NOT a seizure, but a male non-verbal visual code for “ALERT! HOOTERS AT TEN AND ELEVEN O’CLOCK!”

4. This is when both veterans drop to the ground and start snacking on sand.
But my point here, ladies, is that we men are far more juvenile than you could have ever possibly imagined. And although your husbands adamantly agree with every single syllable in this column, they will never admit it to you; they will agree with you that I am obnoxious, raunchy, and full of bathroom humor, because they do not want to wind up owning a head shaped like a halibut.

However, men’s enthusiasm for hooters is NOT our fault; we’re at the mercy of our factory installed hoo-dar placed there by Mother Nature. And it’s not like we can just unplug the thing, because after all, just like those margarine commercials from the 1970’s stated: “it’s not nice to fool with Mother Nature.”

Silly Sicilians

Billy — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 20:58:46 +0000

Italians are a nutty bunch, and I aught to know, because I’m a Catholic cog in this dago demographic. And the leaders of this guinea group are the matriarch grandmothers. These people are VERY busy with food, and when they find out that 10 people are coming over for Christmas dinner, Italian grandmothers will cook enough food to feed the entire population of Indonesia, twice.

And so you will sit down at the table and they will come by and plop a pile of pasta in your plate large enough to tilt the earth off of its axis. And they will not be happy until EVERYONE has eaten to the point that they fall out of their chairs, land on their backs, and begin flailing their arms and legs in a vain turtle-like fashion desperately trying to right themselves. And if someone does manage to make it to their feet, granny will guilt them into eating 67 more cream-filled cannolis until they lapse into a diabetic coma.

Of course I am using the phrase, “granny will guilt them,” in the sense that Italian grandmothers are ALWAYS brandishing a wooden spoon, and if you annoy them enough they will come at you with said wooden spoon. Oh, sure, you can grab a broom and attempt to fiercely fight off granny by fencing with her. But Italian grandmothers could teach the likes of Errol Flynn a thing or two about swashbuckling.

Eventually granny will knock the broom out of your hand and beat you into a Jell-Oish congealed throbbing blob complete with eyeballs, hair, and a few broken teeth. Furthermore, it will take a trained coroner to determine that the oozing pleading pulsing mass on granny’s kitchen floor is in fact her ungrateful grandson who flatly refused to finish the three metric tons of tortellini granny dumped into his dish, because he was too occupied pumping out his stomach. Italian grandmothers are funny that way.

They are also funny about their houses. The upstairs is always intensely antiseptic. Even air molecules are made to wear little face masks. Lye soap factories should be so germ-free. And everything, from the furniture to the family pet is covered in plastic. Italian grandmothers MUST be waiting for some EXTRA special guest to show up for a visit like, for example, The Pope, or Christopher Columbus, or maybe the guy who invented pepperoni.

Italian grandmothers will greet you at the door dressed in virus protection outfits and quickly escort you, by gently grabbing your earlobe, and dragging you down into the darkened downstairs where the entire family actually lives like rodents scurrying through tunnels. Once there, she will fit you with a coalminer’s helmet, and you will then feel and inch your way around like the rest of the family. And it would not be uncommon for you to eventually come across a massive deposit of iron ore next to the television set.

Another interesting trait owned by Italians is that they are very religious plus they love Frank Sinatra. Unfortunately, your standard child isn’t too enthusiastic about either one. And this can be especially troubling when you are a youngster, like I was, who was NOT interested in learning his prayers, like I was NOT, and who was sitting in the living room forcibly practicing their prayers which they were NOT interested in, which I was NOT. And since kids are easily distracted, like I was, and with Old Blue Eyes in the back ground bellowing away, his songs leak into your head right along with the prayers, like they did with me, and you come out with an intermingling of song and prayer, like I did.

This sort of activity can get you seriously beaten, like I was, especially if you are in church, like I was, in the third pew, like I was, saying your penance, like I was, and a group of overly religious nuns walk by, like they did. They might think you are committing some sort of sacrilege to a saint, like they did, descend upon you, like they did, and whack you to within an inch of your life with their rules, like they did.

Side Note: Rulers are also made out of wood. What is it with women and wood?

EXAMPLE

Me: “Hail Mary, full of grace, fly me to the moon, the Lord is with thee, let me play among the stars, blessed art thou amongst women, let me see what life is like on Jupiter and Mars—”

Group of Nuns: “Well, what do we have her? A comedian. You just think you are so funny, a regular riot, don’t you, Bill Drury? How dare you make fun of Mother Mary!’”

Me: “But I—”

Group of Nuns: “You little blasphemer!”

Me: “Yeah, but—”

Group of Nuns: “Get him, girls! Beat his backside black and blue…little bastard!”
WHACK! WHACK! WHACK! WHACK! WHACK! WHACK! WHACK! WHACK!

Anyway, the Irish are also a nutty bunch, and I aught to know, because I’m a Catholic component in this Celtic citizenship, too. Get this: I once inadvertently mix the “Rosary” with the “99 Bottles of Beer on The Wall” song. The nuns beat my butt like a piñata.

PUSHING UP DAISIES

Billy — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 13:40:02 +0000

Whenever I start a project (e.g., cutting the grass) I do NOT bother my wife. HOWEVER, whenever my wife starts a project (e.g., everything) I always feel like I am at a rodeo, because she lassos me, drags me into the mission, and I end up the donkey doing most of the duty.

Take for instance last week. Suddenly she realized that she didn’t like the orientation of our house, and she wanted it to be moved three inches to the left. THIS WAS HER IDEA; I HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH IT! But the next thing I knew, I had a noose around my neck, I was bent over, with one corner of the house resting in my hands, straining like a donkey, and I turn around ONLY to see my wife stretched out in a lawn chair, sipping a Diet Coke, and shouting out detailed directions to ME (a.k.a. DONKEY!)

Anyway, one of the projects my wife takes to heart is yard work. She’s been digging and planting flowers until our NEW HAMPSHIRE yard now legally contains enough foliage to be officially classified by The Department of the Interior as a “tropical rain forest.” Oh, and she doesn’t like it when someone messes with her flowering flora. Note: this particular gardening gal will do absolutely anything to protect her germinating geraniums, to include covering up carnage to the cops. “Yes,” you read that last part correctly. So, if there are any officers reading this column who are involved in any missing person’s cases, I have a tip for you: they are probably buried in OUR YARD AND MY WIFE IS COVERING IT UP! And I know this because of her flowers and what almost happened the other day.

And I am not making any of this up.

It was October 19th, 2008, my daughter, Sara, who was working in the yard with my wife, came into the house holding something behind her back. I was in the kitchen.

“Daddy, I need you to look at something.”

“Okay, peanut, what is it?”

“Mommy told me NOT to show it to you but—”

“What?”

“She’s been digging and planting flowers for hours and came across something.”

“So, show it to me.”

“If I show you it, and if you report it to the police, the authorities might dig up her flowers, and she would not be happy if that were to happen.”

“HUH?”

My wife walked in. She looked at Sara. “I told you to now show him.”

“I haven’t yet, mommy.”

“Okay, what the hell is going on around here?”

“I found something in the yard, okay?”

“And—”

“It’s a bone, and it might be human remains.”

“HUMAN REMAINS! Seriously! Hand me the phone. I’m calling 911.”

“Wait. Look, if it is a human bone, they will rope off the area, and they will dig up my day lilies just to get to the rests of the skeleton. And I have worked so hard on digging and planting my flowers. So, if it is a human skeleton, what do you say we keep this our little secret?” (Wink)

“Okay (rub temples) so, let me get this straight: you’re saying that if Sara shows me the bone, and let’s just say for the sake of this argument the bone DOES turn out to be a human skull with an axe sticking out of it, I’m supposed to pretend its JUST the skull of an unfortunate squirrel, and I should JUST roll it into the neighbor’s yard, and pretend like nothing ever happened, BECAUSE your daylilies are at stake here?”

“Exactly.” (Toothy Smile)

Fortunately, the bone turned out to be nothing but an old beef bone. Well, fortunately for us, not so much for the cow.

But anyway, it was getting late and my wife asked me to please help her and Sara finish planting the flowers (did you hear the sound of the rope landing around my neck?) She told me: “all she wanted me to do was to dig a trench, a little trench, and nothing else.”

“Dig a trench, a little trench, and nothing else” she said. The Panama Canal should have been such a little TRENCH! 5,000,000 backbreaking hours later when I, the donkey, was finally finished digging the “little Drury Canal Trench,” and I’m being completely honest here, if I had stumbled across the skeletal remains of Jimmy Hoffa in his cement shoes, I wouldn’t have told nobody nothing about nothing, so fagetaboutit!

Checklist Your Way Out Of Trouble

Billy — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 18:28:44 +0000

Do you want to know a surefire way to put an end to divorce? Okay, then, I will tell you: before a woman and a man get married, it should be congressionally mandated that they must first fill out a detailed checklist, which is designed to determine if they are compatible to begin with. If they are not compatible, they need to break up right on the spot.

EXAMPLE

“I like you, John, but you checked ‘no’ on item two of the checklist—giving backrubs to your wife which will NOT lead to canoodling—so hand over the ring. And don’t let the door hit you in the butt on the way out, fella.”

If they are compatible, they are allowed to continue down the matrimonial path.

EXAMPLE

“So, you check ‘no’ on item thirty seven of the checklist—no leafy green vegetables allowed in the house. Excellent! I checked ‘no,’ too. Let’s get hitched.”

However, the woman and the man DO NOT need to agree on ALL the items on the checklist. In actuality, some items on the checklist a man and a woman DO NOT want to agree on, such as, for instance, whether or not they both like to watch sports.

Seriously, the man does not want the woman to like sports. Oh, sure, he’ll put up a good Oscar award winning front tapping on the sofa cushion urging her to sit and watch. But deep down inside the bowls of a man’s bowls the man doesn’t want the woman on the same continent as him when he is watching sports never mind sitting right next to him, because women do not understand sports nor do they watch sports like men understand sports and watch sports, as evidenced by the fact that women say dumb sports-related things when watching sports.

EXAMPLE

“Okay, Bill, for the life of me, I will never understand why baseball players have to stand around scratching and adjusting their private regions in public. Would you just look at that pitcher? I’ve seen dogs with mange scratch themselves with less enthusiasm. Doesn’t he know the stands are full and he’s on national television? God, I mean, really.”

“Relax, it’s written in their contract for them to scratch and adjust in public. You think scratching and adjusting is bad just wait till they start spitting. Now, settle down, and shsssssh.”

“Spitting! Oh, geez, I forgot about the spitting? That’s as unsanitary and gross as scratching and adjusting. This is crazy: men scratching, adjusting, and spitting, while other men paying to see them scratch, adjust, and spit. Seriously, men are idiots.”

Anyway, there are some KEY items on the checklist you simple DO NOT have a choice about, and you DO want the man and woman to definitely agree on, because if they DO NOT agree on them, the result can lead to someone getting a chair cracked over their head, usually the man. Take, for example, temperature settings.

The woman generally wants the house to be hot enough so that the wallpaper peals off of the walls. And the man generally wants the house to be cold enough to form permafrost in the dinning room. But temperate-settings conflicts are NOT limited to just in the home; temperature-setting combat also takes place in automobiles traveling around a hairpin curve at 95 miles per hour. And this has become such a delicate issue automotive manufacturers are now designing automobiles with dual-temperature control settings.
Dual-temperature control settings work on paper, but under real life driving conditions, not so much. And this is mainly due to the danger involved when one side of the vehicle is hot enough to cook a turkey on the dashboard (that would be the woman’s side of the automobile) and the other side of the vehicle is cold enough to hang slabs of raw meat from the rear-view mirror (that would be the man’s side of the automobile.)

But the dashboard and the rear-view mirror are NOT the actual dangerous parts of the automobile. The dangerous part is the section of the automobile (in-between the woman’s seat and the man’s seat) where the very hot air and the very cold air meet.

This geographical area is known in meteorologically circles as “an occluded front,” or in more common layman’s terms, “the place you do not want to be at,” because “the place you do not want to be at” has the nasty habit of producing thick fog, lightening strikes, and the occasional tornado. And if you’ve ever been driving along with fog in your face, lightening bolts zipping past your head, and an F-5 twister spinning over by the spare tire, well, it’s a little tricky to keep your eye on the road.

So I applaud the world’s automotive manufacturers for trying to resolve this touchy temperature topic. But if they really want to accomplish something, they need to design automobiles with the driver’s seat and the passenger’s seat located in different vehicles.

The Nerve of Sciatica

Billy — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 12:40:21 +0000

Sciatica, for the luckily uninfected, is a tender stabbing pain which originates in the middle of your left butt cheek and travels down all the way to China. For those of you who are fortunate enough to have NEVER experienced searing sciatica soreness, I can best characterize it here by telling you to go get yourself a good sturdy sledgehammer, hand it over to a BIG burly lumberjack, and while it rests comfortably in his lap, have him run you over with a piece of heavy farm equipment.

Sadistic sciatic has the nasty habit of producing pain all the time. BUT it notoriously hurts the most when you lie down, which means sleeping goes out the bedroom window, because every time you start to enter into sandman land, you’re rudely awakened by what feels to be a bayonet being jabbed into the center of your buttocks. The impaling pain and accompanying screams last about 7-searing-seconds, it stops, you start to doze off, when—STAB—another bayonet to the bull’s eye of your butt.

And when you suffer sciatica, you will spend HUGE gobs of your life screaming “ouch” and flopping around like a stranded perch as you try to position your body in bed in a position which will produce the least amount of throbbing agony. That was me last night: wildly flailing my arms and legs to the point that if you subscribed to the Peeping Tom method for observing your neighbors, you would have swore I was attempting to sleep on top of a bed of hot coals covered in fire ants wearing tiny asbestos suits.
Unfortunately, I was not alone in the bed; my wife was with me. And as a result of my Bruce Lee-like martial arts movements, I managed to gently wake her by kicking her in the side of the head. This did not amuse her. But what really annoyed her—actually gave her the willies—was after she picked herself off of the floor, she looked over at me and saw me lying on my back with arms and legs sticking straight up into the air (a position which only produced minor excruciating pain.) According to police report she was not quite sure if I was doing my best impersonation of a dead cockroach or if I was posing for “Ballerina Quarterly,” both of which kind of freaked her out.

CONVERSATION

Police Officer: “Mrs. Drury?”

Mrs. Drury: “Yes, Officer?”

Police Officer: “The coroner’s preliminary autopsy findings have determined that your husband either ate Raid or suffered a stoke attempting a tricky Plié.

Mrs. Drury: “Whatever: just get him out of here. He’s creeping me out.”

Police Officer: “Okay, but can I keep his tutu? It’s so pink and frilly.”

Mrs. Drury: “Get out, and take the tutu, too.”

So anyway, my dead bug position only worked for so long until the pain became overbearing. So, l gave up, inchwormed my way out of bed, hobbled downstairs, plopped myself on to the sofa, stretched out my sciatica infected left leg, turned on the television set, and began channel surfing. I landed on cable network FOX “fair and balanced” News. Not only is FOX “fair and balanced,” it also contains the hottest news anchor babes owning the BIGGEST pair of brains on the boob tube. Don’t get me wrong: I watch FOX “fair and balanced” News for the fine journalism. And that’s my Megan Kelly (FOX news babe journalist) headline story and I’m sticking to it.

But, anyway, FOX was airing a news story about the rising crime rate in England. The news reporter reported that English police officers (“Bobbies”) don’t carry guns, and that this might be a contributing factor to this rising holdup hobby. D’UH! Look, it doesn’t take a genius like Left-Wing Anti American vice-presidential candidate Joe Biden, who during a recent 2008 campaign rally, using his very unnoticeable hair-plugged hare-brain, told a man in a wheelchair to stand up, to figure out that an UNARMED Bobbie would have a difficult time apprehending an ARMED criminal, unless, of course, the Bobbie spoke to the criminal using a stern no-kidding tone.

EXAMPLE

Bobbie: “Hey, you, yes you, the guy wearing the ski mask and carrying the AK-47! Where did you get that purse? You found it? What about the old lady hanging onto it? You found it first? Finder’s Keepers Losers Weepers? Look, give the purse back to her now, and I mean right now! Do you want a time out, mister? Do you? I’m not kidding around here. Not only I will make you sit with your face facing the wall so you can think about what you did, I will tell your mother. Now, I’m going to count to three and you had better release that purse…one…two…three. Okay, that’s better. Now, turn around and put your hands behind your back. Oh, wait. What are you holding in your other hand? A pair of what? SCISSORS! Have you been running with those scissors! You have! That’s it! Get your butt in that time out chair! And I’m calling your mother right now! Stealing senior citizens social security checks is one thing, but running with scissors is a very different thing and I won’t stand for it!

Anyway, nine seconds before I had to get up and get ready for work, my sciatic soreness stopped. My leg felt great; I felt like a zombie. Sciatica has such a nerve.

Twenty Things You Don’t Want To Hear Your Doctor Say

Billy — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 12:59:45 +0000

1. Yes nurse, or should I say “Miss Obvious?” I realize I just accidently chopped off his head. Don’t just stand there, go get the duct tape.

2. Removing an appendix is so easy even a janitor can do it. You wanna bet? Okay, hey, you, yes you, the janitor. Come over here. What’s your name? You’re not sure what you’re name is? Okay, no biggie. Drop that mop and grab this scalpel.

3. Yes, John, it is time for your yearly prostrate exam. But before we get started, I’d like to introduce you to my pet gerbil.

4. Biopsy? I thought her chart read “autopsy?” Whatever, she’d need one sooner or later. The way I look at it, she’s ahead of the game. Wheel in the next patient.

5. What did you say? We’re out of what? Anesthesia? Okay, I got it. Here’s what we’ll do: we’ll wait until he falls asleep, and then I’ll cut off his gangrene leg. Don’t worry; you know how when you hook a fish in the mouth and the entire one-toothed red-necked inbred angling community tells you that the fish can’t feel it? This is pretty much what we have here, accept, of course, this time it’s a human and a, well, a leg.

6. Alrighty then, which kidney am I supposed to remove? Well, when in doubt, default to the old medical standby: “Eenie, meenie, minie, mo, catch a kidney by the toe…”

7. Nurse, hand me that knife, the one sitting next to my half empty bottle of vodka.

8. Oath, smoath. The Hippocratic Oath is only a guideline.

9. Look at the time! Seriously, just rip out his old heart and slap in this new one. What’s the big deal? I have a tee time in ten minutes. Make it snappy. Chop, Chop.

10. Honestly, I have no idea what this little red triangular hammer is used for. But one of my professors in medical school said it was vitally important that I run around whacking my patient’s on the knee with it. Plus it’s fun.

11. I’ve never actually drawn blood from a patient before. But I’m truly terrific at darts, which if you think about it, are more or less fancy needles dressed up with feathers. Now, let me draw a bulls-eye around your jugular vein and we’ll get this party started.

12. You want to know if this is going to hurt. I’m going to shove a one inch wide fifteen inch long needle directly in your stomach, what do you think?

13. Excuse me! But do you have a stethoscope hanging around your neck? No? Do you have a white smock on? No? How about a nametag? No? So, who is the doctor here? Hummm? That’s right; I’m the doctor, see the stethoscope; see the white smock; see the nametag. You don’t have any of these things BECAUSE you’re the patient. And if the doctor (that would be me) says that you need a pap smear then you need a pap smear. Do you understand me, Mr. Smith? Great, now we have what is called in medical circles as a “doctor patient relationship.” So, shut up and bend over.

14. Your test results show that you have roughly seven minutes to live. Good luck with that. Oh, make sure you leave your co-pay at the front desk. No checks. Cash only. Stop crying and asking God “why me,” and hurry up and pay your co-pay. Hustle. Hustle. Hustle. Look at my Rolex! (tap on watch crystal) You’re down to six minutes.

15. Look, I don’t know a scalpel from a monk fish, but I’m willing to practice on you.

16. This is an X-ray machine. He is an x-ray technician. And that is why his is covered head-to-toe in lead-lined clothing, hiding behind a lead window, standing in a lead room, and breathing in pure lead. He needs to take 40,000,092,987,112,009 pictures of your insides, and in order to get those pictures you can’t be shielded in lead. And if you don’t have cancer now, you will when he is done with you. But he won’t because his is protected by lead. And, yes, he will probably die of lead poisoning long before you die of cancer, but what do you want from me?

17. Look, I’ve had a really, really, really bad day. My wife ran away with the milkman who is a woman; my stocks dropped eight million points in front of my eyes, my dog was eaten by a hobo, and I haven’t been sober since before the Carter administration. And you are about to be circumcised by yours truly. I suggest you stop trembling and sit still.

18. Hey, back off fella. Replace your own stupid drip bag. Can’t you see I’m flirting with the hot nurse? Sheesh. Some people, I mean, really. So, what’s your sign?

19. Look, I was a butcher before becoming a surgeon. And I say if you’ve sliced and diced one kind of meat, then you’ve sliced and diced all kinds of meat. A short rib is a short rib, and your short ribs are right about here, tickle, tickle, tickle.

20. This is Father Michaels. I’ve lost 28 patients today alone, one who came in to have a hangnail clipped. So, before I start tinkering around your circulatory system, he will read you your last rights. Hey, come back here. Where do you think you’re going? Stop shivering, it’s only precautionary. What can possibly go wrong?

LOW FLOW CLOGS

Billy — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 13:43:56 +0000

An interesting fact about toilets: toilets just don’t explode all by themselves. Toilets need lots of help to blow up. Toilets are funny that way. And the firing pin for toilet detonation usually comes in the form of a clog.

An interesting fact about clogs: clogs just don’t occur all by themselves. Clogs need lots of help to become a clog. Clogs are funny that way. And the main clogging culprits are usually a member of your very own loving family, by which I mean your kids, who view your toilet as their very own personal wishing well, and you can pretty much find anything in a toilet, to include your son’s trombone.

And when you confront your child while holding his dripping trombone, he will provide you with the standard kid’s response, whereby he shrugs his shoulders and says the following:

“I don’t know how on earth my trombone got in the toilet, daddy, ha, ha, ha, daddy. But I hope my wish comes true, daddy.”

So you being a good understanding and patient daddy, laugh right along with your well-wishing son, while at the same time you’re figuring out the best possible method for wrapping his trombone around his skinny scrawny pre-pubescent neck without leaving behind any fingerprints.

But to be completely frank, even though my name is “Bill,” toilets back in the day could have easily sucked down the entire horn section of a BIG band orchestra, no problem. Sadly, toilets nowadays are crappy; no pun intended, well, maybe a little.

Seriously, I remember back when I was a kid. We had toilets that could create such a serious vacuum, if you were not in a different time zone when you hit the flush lever there was a good chance that you, along with the roof, and any nearby planets would be sucked down the drain.

Unfortunately, those magnificent models of toilet are no longer being manufactured, because the environmentalist crowd felt that they use too much water when in full flush. So, therefore, some weenie in some lab somewhere developed the “low flow” toilet, which sucks, well, actually they don’t suck, and that’s the basic problem, because if you have ever tried to flush anything owning a molecular weight heavier than a poppy seed down a “low flow” toilet, you are well aware of the fact that instead of hitting the flush lever once, holding onto the doorjamb for dear life, like we used to do with our old trusted toilets, with today’s “low flow” toilets you MUST repeatedly hit the flush lever so many times you’d think you were tapping out a Morse Code message, and STILL whatever it is you are desperately trying to flush won’t FLUSH!
As they say, things can be worse. We could be living in the Middle East, where I understand they do not bother with flushing toilets. They use a “low tech” approach: gravity. Middle Eastern people basically use a hole in the ground, which has some fancy Middle Eastern name, which roughly translated means “a hole in the ground.”

Not sure about you, but the thought of squatting over a hole in the ground in a manner and position normally associated with a major league catcher, for me, and it may be just me, flushes the gravity approach pretty much down the drain.

To See Or Not To See, That Is The Question

Billy — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 13:24:33 +0000

The main problem associated with getting older is that the warranties on your body parts start to run out around age 50, like, for example, the warranty on your eyeballs. And before you know it, in order to read the newspaper, you have to move the newspaper further and further away from your face until eventually you forced to hold it in a different galaxy.

I’m also finding that I cannot distinguish between different sized and shaped objects. Everything from balls to boats appears to be dark fuzzy blobs, but which look a lot alike. This can be a real problem if you are playing baseball.

EXAMPLE

“Hey, ump! Seriously, I can understand fastballs, curve balls, sliders, and knuckleballs. BUT the pitcher just whipped a battleship past my head, or it might have been a destroyer, but it was definitely some sort of boat, or maybe a whicker chair. But it DEFINITELY wasn’t a baseball. Okay, it might have been a baseball, but it was a baseball shaped exactly like a battleship, or a piano.”

Look, I’ve been writing for you long enough to know what you are thinking, you’re thinking: “Bill, get glasses.” And I’m thinking, “But I will look extremely poindextery in glasses, and I’d rather risk driving into a bridge abutment than to look a nerd.”

As a result of my unadulterated vanity, I’ve been walloped in the side of the head by handbags wielded irate women who thought that I was ogling their chests, when in reality; I thought I was looking at topographic maps of mountain ranges. I also have been spending HUGE amounts of time squinting. Squinting does seem to help some, even though walking around with your face scrunched up like you just ate an entire crate of lemons can be a little off-putting to people who do not know you, who do not know what you are doing, and who do not know that you are too much of a narcissist to buy glasses. They just think you are some sort of weirdo, but not a glasses-wearing geeky dweeb, and that is important from a vanity perspective.

Honestly, further problems can arise from not wearing glasses: becoming separated from your wife when at the mall, and then trying to nonchalantly find her without making a public spectacle out of yourself. And the trick to finding a missing spouse when you cannot see two inches in front of your face, is to casually stick your arms straight out in front of you (like Frankenstein) and violently begin moving our fingers in an attempt to feel around for your wife, and you do this while talking and saying things that will attract your specific wife over to you, well, in this case my specific wife over to me.

Before I tell you what I said, I want you to know that I said what I said out of complete utter desperation. And if any of my friends overheard me saying what I said they would have figured I had finally snapped my twig. God forgive me for my words: “Okay, honey. So, what do you say you go buy another pair of shoes? Yes, I realize you already own nine thousand gazillion bazillion pairs of shoes, but you can always use another pair. Go ahead; I will even give you some of my newspaper column money.”

While I was saying those horrid words, the dark fuzzy blobs keep moving away from me, which meant they were not my wife. Finally, one dark fuzzy blob did not move, so I felt my way over and continued with my shoe talk thinking all the time that this dark fuzzy blob was my wife. About five minutes later, the crack overdressed mall security team attempted to arrest me for trying to buy a pair of black high-heel pumps for an ATM machine. Potential jail time is what finally convinced me to get glasses.

However, once again, we fall into looking like a major pencil-neck geek, so I opted for contact lenses. Easier said than done, because contact lenses sound good on paper, but have you ever tried to intentionally put your finger into your eye socket with your eye open? Let me tell you, there was lots of blinking involved, which resulted in the contact lens sticking to the outside of my eyelid, which didn’t so much help with my being able to see stuff. Contact lenses go against everything in nature. Using them is along the lines of eating Brussels sprouts—they are good for you, but it’s just oh so wrong to eat them. I finally settled on a pair of glasses with very thing wire frames. Actually, they don’t look too bad, and most of the time I can tell one dark fuzzy blob from another.

Anyway, seriously, I don’t need my glasses for everything. In fact, I probably don’t need them when I write my columns. Okay, admittedly, the last time I tried to type my column without having my glasses on I ended up typing on the dog. And she really got annoyed whenever I hit what I thought was the “backspace” key.

But I can to do it, seriously, no kidding. And I will prove it right now. I will type with my glasses on, and then, without telling you, I will remove them, and I guarantee you that you will not be able to tell when I have them on and when I have them off. Ready? Okay, so here I am typing away, and now upoi ro;; ftt dmfpi;ut;u mp gohhtytmbt rjdufptnty om m,u sno;oyu yp po[[;poo yjr z78675675 trd ppgglssf satiaiduien,auiy oujoip.

WOULD YOU LIKE YOUR HOUSE RARE, MEDIUM RARE, OR WELL DONE?

Billy — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 11:20:25 +0000

Summer would not be summer unless I managed to accidently light my house on fire with the help from my grill. There’s just something about the smell of melting vinyl siding which makes me want to stop, drop, roll, and speed-dial the pizza delivery guy. And 2008 would not be any different. Well, it was different in the sense that in 2008 I lit the house on fire with assistance from my new propane grill, not my old charcoal grill; a charcoal grill piled sky high with charcoal, and dowsed with enough liter fluid to make the Saudi oil reserves look like a glistening stain found beneath my vehicle, which appeared because my oil pan was leaking, thanks to the highly-trained mechanic at that fast oil changing place who’s name rhymes with “Tiffy Tube” who didn’t properly tighten my oil pan bolt. Evidently, he was unfamiliar with the “right tighty, lefty loosy” concept. So, by all means, hand him a wrench and let him work on someone’s vehicle.

Anyway, I was looking through a Harriet Carter knickknackety magazine, you know the ones with all that really cool vitally important stuff like, for example, diapers for your goldfish, lighted nose hair tweezers, teeny tiny functional guillotines used to cut up limes for your margaritas, because the best thing you can do when you are slurring your words and holding onto stuff to keep yourself from tipping over, is to play with sharp metal descending objects and pretend that you are cutting the head off of little green midgets. And of course the one knickknackety thing I could not live without was a metal rack designed to hold chicken drumsticks and suspend them above a grill’s grilling surface.

Seriously, how cool does that sound? Okay, if you are someone who doesn’t worship the grill (e.g., a woman or a male ballet dancer, which are arguably one in the same) then you are probably not as enthusiastic as I am about this cooking contraption. BUT as a grilling guru, a hibachi Houdini, a Weber wizard, let me tell you, my new rack is the neatest thing since the invention of 3rd degree burn cream and skin grafts.

Okay, so here’s what happened. I walked out onto my back deck, turned on my propane grill, placed my loaded-up chicken drumstick rack in the grill, and closed the lid. Now, follow my logic here: if you put meat directly on a grill’s surface, everyone knows you will get fat dripping on the jets, resulting in flair-ups. I logically figured if I put my new chicken drumstick rack in the grill with the drumsticks suspended off of the actual grill’s surface, there would be no contact with the grill’s surface, thus no fat dripping onto the jets, thus no flair-ups. See what I am saying: logic, baby, pure and simple Doctor Spok logic. And you thought I was some sort of a dummy, which means you are either my high school guidance counselor or you are a 911 dispatcher.

Anyhow, I closed the lid, I went back into the house, and headed downstairs to work out. FORTUNATELY, my wife and daughter were home, because in, oh, about five or six minutes, I could hear loud screaming (“FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!”) coming form upstairs. I thought to myself, “I wonder why they are yelling FIRE? What could possibly be on fire? I better go check.” So, I went upstairs and came face-to-fire with an inferno featuring my grill. I quickly and calmly reacted by running around in circles, flailing my arms, and screaming “What do I do!? What do I do!? What do I do!?” That’s when logic stepped in: STOP running around in circles and PUT out the (nasty word) fire!

Problem: I’m great at starting fires, but not so great at putting them out. And the only thing I could come up with was to reach my hand behind the grill and turn off the propane knob by making sure to turn the knob in the correct “tightening” direction—to the left. ONLY KIDDING! Do I look like I work at Tiffy Tube? Okay, I put in a resume. I even wrote it in crayon, using cursive and everything, and I’m pretty sure I spelt my name right. But I haven’t heard anything yet. No news is good news, I always say.

So, anyway, I turned the knob to the right, and the propane shut off; however, fire has the nasty habit of burning things, to include my right arm, which brought along two more problems: 1) while on fire, the thoughtful and caring neighborhood kids got the great idea to come at me with marshmallows on sticks, jabbing them in my general direction, and oh sure it’s all fun and games trying to roast your marshmallow over Bill’s burning arm until someone jabs a stick into old Bill’s eyeball and then it won’t be so funny, will it, and 2) how do you look cool in front of the crowd of gathering neighbors? All kidding aside, it is extremely difficult to look cool while driving a mini van or when attempting to extinguish an engulfed body part while in public. And if you are EVER driving a mini van when your head is on fire you are really going to look like a major dork.

Well, luckily, I happened to remember something about putting a blanket over a fire to remove the oxygen and the fire would go out. So, I reached into the house with my left not-on-fire arm, felt around, and grabbed what I believed was a blanket. It turned out to be my wife’s new cashmere sweater, which produced YET another fire-related problem.

Happily, everything turned out okay. The fire was put out; my grill was sold and the money was used for a down payment on a newer cashmere sweater; the vinyl siding melted into a remarkable image of Mother Mary holding what appears to be a grilled cheese sandwich containing the face of baby Jesus (which I am now selling on eBay for three hundred billion dollars and nine cents); the neighborhood kids had a marshmallow-toasting blast, and I have a cool pirate patch over my right eye. Shiver me timbers!