Squirrels and Politicians

In this corner, weighing one pound, 
The plump Tree Squirrel

  Next door, up on the roof, there was scuffling and shingles scraping, sounding like rapid sandpapering. 

A hawk had perfectly timed his sortie. The brown wings fanned out and stalled his descent directly above a squirrel.

  Spring-loaded talons were outstretched, poised to snap crushingly into Mr. Furry’s flanks. The scene was deadly: a PBS nature documentary, grainy CNN war footage, or an altercation on The View. The acorn muncher was a goner because there was a freeze-frame just before impact where predator pounces and life drains out of the captive.

  But … Mr. Furry had not seen any recent animal films. So, he commenced to do The Squirrel Shuffle, which he performed for my benefit, and his kinfolk back home in the old oak. He darted from one side of the roof ridge to the other. Five times, he re-crossed over the ridge, all the while moving along the housetop toward the front of my neighbor’s home.

  Three seconds later, Mr. Lucky-Day Rodent was safe. The raptor’s committed flight plan could not adjust to The Squirrel Shuffle. With frantic fluttering, the predator rose and retreated, pretending he had meant to miss the meal, and was merely out having fun. 

In this corner, weighing 13 pounds,
The Hungry Eagle

  First thoughts? What was that stupid tree mouse thinking? There he was, up on a house with no cover, at noon. There was no shadow to warn of the hawk’s approach. 

  How did he know to break into his escape dance? Some innate instinct, an ESP of sorts, Essential Squirrel Protection.

  So what does this have to do with politicians? When you consider a political contender, and like squirrels, they are all the same, please don’t support the candidate with strong convictions about anything. Go for the guy or gal who has the best record of wavering and vacillating on all issues, even the unimportant ones.

  Rule out any candidate that has any underlying family values or morals. If a statesman is indicted and subsequently exonerated, then he is a prizewinner for your vote. It shows how resourceful he can be in a tight situation.  

  To survive in this world or at midday on a roof somewhere, you have to be willing to switch positions, perhaps many times, and sometimes quickly.

Bob Simpson

Copyright 2017

Real Housewives Moves to Animal Planet Channel

Bravo Channel has announced that the Real Housewives series will be moving to the Animal Planet Channel. 

This decision comes after studies revealed that The Real Housewives shows are apparently about thin-skinned ageing drunk wolverines with push-up bras.    

Bravo is also joining with Animal Planet to incorporate cameo appearances of their Housewives stars into many of the Animal Planet’s line-up this fall. 

The Mostly Real Housewives
of New York City

Finding Bigfoot's first season opener include scenes of the Big Foot Trackers trying to return a prosthetic leg to Aviva of the Mostly Real Housewives of New York City. 

Aviva is gone this season. Rumor is that Bravo sent her hopping with her walking papers. The Big Foot trackers leave the stylish stump in the hands (the real hands) of the remaining gals.

Plans are to transfer the leg to a Do It Yourself cable show to use part of it to make a foot stool. 
  

The Real Housewives
of Beverly Hills

The Hillbilly Hand Fishing boys drop in on the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. One of the larger handed rednecks pokes his ungloved paw into a limousine window and tries to snatch a housewife. First, he chums the auto by tossing bottles of Grey Goose Vodka into the back seat. 

The action starts when something large and powerful encircles the country boy’s fishing hand and yanks the hillbilly into the dark back seat. Then the tinted window slides up and there are no more muffled sounds of a wounded animal. 

The Real Housewives
of New Jersey

Pit Bulls and Parolees feature the Parolees visiting Teresa Giudice from the Housewives of New Jersey. They make the special prison visit to offer Teresa moral support, but several of the ex-con women also inquire about the possibility of a conjugal visit. Teresa slips them special instructions that have something to do with hammers and her husband’s knees.

The Real Housewives
of Miami

Rhino Wars features a wild Rhino visiting the Real Housewives of Miami for some advice on some horn enhancement. The Rhinoceros has to be placed on antidepressants when the plastic surgeon informs her that her horn is only made of hair. “There is nothing I can do for your horn, but a tummy tuck certainly is in order.”

The Real Housewives
of Atlanta

Pete Nelson of TreeHouse Masters arrives to erect a tree house for the housewives of Atlanta. Phaedra catches Pete watching her as she climbs the Treehouse ladder. Pete Nelson goes home in shame because he made a comment about Phaedra’s Bodacious Bedonka Donka.

TreeHouse Masters fans will be happy to learn that Pete Nelson has recovered his eyesight from the temporary blindness he experienced when he raised his eyes up that Atlanta tree house ladder.

Contact

bobsimpson1947@yahoo.com

Sorry Humanity, I’m trying to quit …

The First Fist Bump Attempt

Throughout the Old Testament, God has always been characterized as a vengeful, wrathful, mercurial God. He is the one that commanded Abraham to kill his own son and then changed his mind. God laughed about that for a 1,000 years. ”You should have seen Abraham’s face. What a chump.”

Recent discovery of a lost scroll shows the reason that God was such a bastard during these times. He was real mean and ornery because he was trying to quit Smoting.

The Devil was still living at home in Heaven at the time. The falling out came later when Beelzebub borrowed God’s fiery chariot without asking and totaled it in a remote area of what is now Russia.

Old Scratch offered to hypnotize the Lord. “You are getting sleepy. You no longer feel the need to smite people, Willy Nilly.” Willy Nilly was a prototype of the first man. He was given free will and then God took it back. Hypnotism didn’t work because of that omnipotent thing that was going on.

Once the Lord got a handle on the smiting obsessions, he became a gentler God and was less likely to drop cascades of bloody toads on us poor folks down below. You should have seen how mad God became when he found out that his people were gathering the bloody toads and hickory smoking the little fellers. 

Contact: 

Bob Simpson

Largo, Florida

bobsimpson1947@yahoo.com

15 Fireworks Thoughts and Questions for July Fourth

1. Do you like Jimmy Walker, but don’t 

remember why?

2. If you can’t afford fireworks, do you push your fingers into your eyes until you see the lights flash?

3. You know exactly how large a bandage you will need this year.

4. Do you think your eyebrows will ever grow back?

5. You know from personal experience never to buy another explosive duck decoy for your retriever.

6. Did you take out a payday loan to buy fireworks?

7. Do you try to reuse the sparklers from last year?

8. Have you ever bought a finale fireworks rocket called Mules Across America?

9. Did your bottle rockets come with last rites instructions?

10. The Emergency Room in your county waives the deductible for visits on July Fourth. 

11. Does your plastic surgeon offer a special Fourth of July wrinkle remover called BoomTox?

12. Do you include your fireworks in a sensible weight loss program?

13. Your friends now call you Lefty since last Fourth of July?

14. Did you buy your fireworks from a South American Mining Company?

15. Old firecrackers that just lay there and don't go off are called Baby Boomers.

Contact: 

Bob Simpson

Largo, Florida

bobsimpson1947@yahoo.com

Kitty Ma, Pine Needles, and John Denver

PINELLAS, Point of Pines in Spanish. If you speak Spanish you know the two words. If you don’t speak Spanish, you don’t need to know them. You will probably mispronounce them in a way that will get you slapped, killed, or happily engaged to a school lunchroom employee in Miami.

Like our Pinellas pine needles, aloft or fallen, I have a point and we’ll get to it sometime soon, maybe.

Kitty Ma McLeod was a middle-class, Victorian woman. She brought up 3 boys, Norman, Hamilton, and my grandfather Robyn. Kitty Ma’s nimble, bony fingers, the blue veined mittens, fashioned hot plate trivets, coiled from humble pine needles and raffia. It was magic.

There was a folk craft renaissance of pine needle coiling in the early 1900’s. Many well-dressed, corseted ladies took classes. The art was already ancient, even when Kitty Ma was young. South Carolina barrier island folk made sweet grass coiled baskets years before the trussed-up ladies of the 1900’s appropriated the art.

Even the late John Denver wove pine needle baskets whenever he was on the road. He carried two guitar cases, one for his guitar and the other filled with crisp, golden brown pine needles and Madagascar raffia. At least that’s what he told the Customs Man.

   

         Lubbock, Texas airport, early 1967

A young John Denver is on board a commercial flight to Montana. He has pine needles and raffia with him, busily creating a new basket. Sitting in a window seat waiting for his plane to take off, John notices a Texas thunderstorm coming.

Rain is pelting the window. He wistfully watched for a while and returns to weaving his pine needle basket. Then it comes to him. Finally, we have arrived, to the point of all of this:

Mr. Denver grins, leans back, and sings, 

“I’m weaving on a wet plane.”

Did you think that Peter Paul and Mary wrote that song?

Well, you were wrong.

Here is a subject for comments. Who do you like the best?

John Denver
Denver Pyle
or 
Gomer Pyle?

Contact: 

Bob Simpson

Largo, Florida

bobsimpson1947@yahoo.com

10 Distinct Thoughts on Boogers

Hey Lincoln, did the sculptor give you any arms or hands?
I need somebody to scratch my nose.

This is not an all-inclusive-everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about Boogers report. Check with the Pueblo Documents Distribution Center in Pueblo Colorado. http://pueblo.gpo.gov/  There are several government studies available there on Boogers. Take your pick. What … you didn’t think I would use that joke?

1. I woke up this morning with a firmly packed booger on my hand, specifically on my thumb, specifically on my right thumb.

2. Normally, I would rise from bed and deliver the booger to the toilet bowl since I go that way anyway. This morning I was surprised to find no urgency to go anywhere. “But I have this booger on my finger and I can’t just flick it over the bed covers and onto the floor, even if I am a man.”

3. Mr. Booger appeared when I sneezed. This was not one of those honkers from a Cold or the Flu, the ones that leave a large yellow jellyfish quivering in your cupped palms.

4. I live in Florida, which is the finest state to reside to remain Booger-free. We have high humidity so boogers don’t form easily. Other states with low humidity, dust storms, or air pollution are where the boogers do grow. That was a 1955 Hank Aring country/folk song: I’m Agoing Out West Where the Boogers Do Grow.

I wonder why my
cell phone is so sticky.

5. My nose is an older schnoz, filled with coarse jungle overgrowth. When it gets cold in Florida and we crank up the heat, then we experience scattered boogers with a chance of intermittent snoring throughout the early morning hours.

6. The first evidence of booger-forming people appeared in the Fertile Crescent. They were hunter/gatherers … and pickers. Don’t mix this up with the Fertile Croissant. That was one busy French tart that visited every lonely soldier just outside of Waterloo in 1815. After contact with this woman, the soldiers had trouble passing water in the loo.

7. Whales never form boogers because they live in the watery environment of the ocean. Their blowholes are damper than a burka in hay fever season.   

8. The Grapes of Wrath original title was Dust Bowl Booger Pickers. “Once we get to Cal-aye-fornee, we can pick our boogers in public.”

9. The IRRC, Institute for the Recovery and Reuse of Cocaine, is investigating the harvesting and repurposing of cocaine-laden boogers. The Booger Fairy will visit California mansions with a burlap bag and a pair of stainless steel forceps for late night collections.

10. Some day, office bathrooms will not be the only sanctuary where a Booger Hoarder can relax. He, and yes there are also female Booger Hoarders, has a favorite stall in the office bathroom, where he displays his boogers on the inside panel of the stall door.

A collection can swell to over 350 boogers if the building cleaning crew takes the attitude, “Whoa. That’s not our job to remove and clean nasal production artwork on a stall door.”
I give you permission to translate that last quote into whatever oppressed people’s language you think is appropriate.

 

Summary

I hope you enjoyed this bit of nosetalgia.

Until that liberating day when a picker can come out from behind his newspaper or bathroom stall, polite society will continue to look down or more likely look up into the boulder-laden noses of these nares-do-wells.

Contact: 

Bob Simpson

Largo, Florida

bobsimpson1947@yahoo.com

Do you have a booger story to share? Add a comment. The grosser, the better. 

8 Rules for Pancakes

Wilford Brimley's Breakfast
for Bronco Busters

Attention:

Ladles and Griddlemen

There  are at least eight rules listed below for pancake enjoyment. 

I didn't give them numbers because I didn't feel like it. If you would like to print this and add numbers to your own personal copy, then I think you should do just that.

They are called hot cakes. Please ... Serve them HOT.

Pancake Eaters: Have some respect. Be at the table, buttering and syruping up those flapjacks, within one minute of them leaving the cast iron skillet.

Serve real butter at room temperature, but melt the butter if you are eating pancakes in an igloo. Never offer margarine with pancakes. Only salted real butter is allowed.

Place crisp warm endless bacon within reach of the pancakes.

Within Six Degrees of  a
Normal Hemoglobin A1C

If you serve turkey bacon, then you might as well supply margarine or “I can’t Believe It’s Not Crap.”

Pouring a small amount of real maple syrup into a bottle of Karo syrup is not acceptable. Either pony up for the 100% maple syrup or use some good old sugar cane syrup on those flapjacks.

Syrup with butter flavor is an abomination and classed together with other combo foods such as hot dogs with injected cheese sauce or peanut butter and jelly occupying the same jar. Folks that use these products often will order pizza with pineapple topping. These same people would want to know what wine to serve with little barbecue sausages.

Pancake Theory One from a 1994 epiphany at the IHOP on Dale Mabry Ave. in Tampa Florida. Whatever you do in the first thirty minutes after eating pancakes is what you end up doing for the rest of the day. Normally the writer would explain what IHOP means but if you don’t know, then you should be toasting generic-brand frozen waffles … alone.

Do not discard pancakes in the backyard as if they were crusts of old bread. It’s disturbing to have to watch fat squirrels in the morning monitoring their blood sugar levels.

If you have questions or want to add your own rules or favorite pancake story, add a comment. I would like to hear from you.

I promise not to argue or belittle you. That's what my wife is for. Just kidding Dear. 


Contact: 
Bob Simpson
Largo, Florida
bobsimpson1947@yahoo.com