Blog #259                                         February 24, 2022

 

The day after we got home from our recent Florida trip, I was putting away the suitcases when I noticed an old, dusty box.  In it, I recognized my Great Grandmother’s recipes which my mother had written down so they wouldn’t be forgotten.  Cooking -- that sounded like a good idea for a Winter afternoon.  I pulled out the first recipe: Ukrainian Roasted Chicken.  The first line read, First, catch a chicken.  This seemed a bit gamey for me, so I pulled out the next recipe: Leek Soup.  Simple enough, so I read the beginning instruction: First, take a leek.    Never let it be said that I would let a little taste get in the way of a good joke.

 

Two days ago was Twosday.  They called it that because it was 2-22-22, and I celebrated this rare palindromic calendromic by getting out for a bunch of errands.  I needed some groceries and so did my daughter and so did Carol, so I put on my bearskin robe, grabbed my spear and headed out into the cruel, cold world to do a little hunting and gathering.  It felt good to be like one of my distant ancestors performing the ancient rituals of pre-historic man – killing the Wooly Mammoth, fighting off the Saber-Toothed Tiger and dragging my mate around by the hair.  Wait, did they actually drag women around by the hair?  I’m pretty sure if one of my ancestors had touched his wife’s hair, he wouldn’t have survived the afternoon, let alone the Stone Age.  I came home with everything on my list and a bucket of Kentucky Fried Mastodon.  Finger lickin’ good!

 

Hi there and welcome back.  I hope you’re feeling well and staying safe. I heard Queen Elizabeth has a case of Covid.  Now that’s what you call a royal pain.  Not Liz, the disease!  Otherwise, it looks like the Covid pandemic is easing a bit, with hospitalizations and deaths down.  But there are still other things to worry about, like shingles.  What a ridiculous name for a disease!  It sounds like some kind of building material, as if the doctor said you had acute drywall or hardening of the concrete or a pain in the asphalt.  There actually is a medical condition very much akin to construction, and a lot of my friends have it.  It’s called having a screw loose.

 

Which got me thinking that we should write a musical about mental illness.  We’ll call it Looney Tunes.  I have a few songs in mind.  How about Home, Home on Deranged?  Or the shrink’s love song to the woman with a split personality – I’ve Grown Accustomed to Your Faces.  Hey, I’m not trying to make fun of mental illness.  I grew up with the mentally ill.  Let me put it this way: my brother and sister didn’t suffer from mental illness, they reveled in it.  The two of them made the Addams Family look like Ozzie and Harriet.

 

Message from Shakespeare:  O! Let me not be mad (King Lear).  I think Pops has a little of that family nutsiness himself.  Do you know he gave me a pair of his old slippers?  What am I supposed to do with those big slippers?  And why would he give me a pair?  I need three.  Even so, he’s such a good boy.  Purr.   

 

Did you enjoy the Winter Olympics?  I have to admit that I like the Summer events more than the Winter, but Curling is great to watch on TV, especially if you need a nap.

 

The Curling rock slowly was creeping

In front of it two girls were sweeping

Now who won the day

I just cannot say

Cause long before that I was sleeping.

 

In the Iliad, Homer said all things have surfeit – even sleep, and love, and song.  To that list, I would humbly add the Olympics.  I was ready for it to end.  Carol watched every event.  She would watch baboons play Chinese Checkers if there was an announcer.  I enjoyed the skiing/shooting event (I think they call it the Biathlon).  You cross-country ski for a while, then drop on your belly and shoot a rifle at some targets.  Wouldn’t it make more sense if you shot at the competitor who’s ahead of you?  The last surviving skier wins.  We could change the name to the Die-Athlon.  The North Koreans wanted to change the format to skiing and firing a nuclear-tipped missile, but the contestants carrying the missiles kept sinking into the snow.  I would love to be in the Olympics.  When they get around to the event called Eating Popcorn while Writing a Limerick, I might have a chance.

 

Have you noticed the explosive inflation that we are experiencing?  It’s getting out of hand.  Dollar Tree has now become Dollar and a Quarter Tree, 7-11 is becoming 9-13 and First National Bank has become Second National Bank.  You know inflation is getting out of control when Disney had to change its upcoming movie to Snow White and the Nine Dwarves.  But I’m used to inflation.  Every year, my age goes up, my blood-pressure goes up and my handicap goes up.  The only thing that goes down is my height.  Maybe they can use me as one of the Nine Dwarves.  They’ll call me Rhymey.  Happy, Sleepy, Dopey, Doc, Grumpy, Bashful, Sneezy, Rhymey and Dr. Ruth.

 

I just got a text from my 20-year-old Grandson thanking me for his Valentine care package of snacks.  He had just picked it up from the student post office at Duke.  It had been there for two weeks because I had shipped it early.  I always do things early.  My High School Yearbook quip was Punctuality is the Politeness of Kings.  Well, I’d rather be known as the Early Michael Fox than the Late Michael Fox.

 

Our Weekly Word is revel (rhymes with level), which means to enjoy oneself in a lively way with drinking and dancing.  I hope you reveled in this week’s blog and will be back next week.  I’ll leave you with a little saying from Mother Theresa: We can't do great things in this life . . We can only do small things with great love.  So stay well, count your blessings and give someone some great love today.  See you next week.

 

Rhymey                Send comments to mfox1746@gmail.com

 

 

 

Blog #258                                February 17, 2022

 

We’re home from Florida now.  It was a great trip to visit with great friends.  I got very little exercise, not much sun and gained 42 pounds.  Part of the problem was that we went out to dinner every night, always eating outside.  One time, there were 15 of us – nine women on the left and six men on the right.  The waitress came to take the order.  I think I would rather deal with 900 Canadian truckers than 9 hungry Jewish women.  At one point, all the women got up and physically moved the huge table six feet to the left.  You didn’t expect them to just accept the table given to them, did you?  If God came down tomorrow and offered my wife everlasting peace and glory at a square table in Heaven, she’d say, “Let me see if Satan has a round one.”  Maybe that’s why Friedrich Nietzsche said, “In Heaven, all the interesting people are missing.”  They’re looking for a round table. 

 

If you had your little math hats on, Kiddies, you will have noticed that the women at the aforementioned table outnumbered the men 9 to 6.  That seems to be the trend, especially in Florida.  Must be the alligators.

 

Message from Shakespeare:  This tiger-footed rage (Coriolanus). I don’t have a tiger-foot.  I don’t even have enough pussycat-feet.  I was very happy when Pops came home, although I’m still a bit rabid about being left alone.  I greeted the old man with a lot of purring and a big bite on the arm.  Then I meowed all night so they couldn’t sleep.  That’ll teach him.  Purr.

 

Carol needed some lettuce, so I dropped by Schnuck’s, our local grocery.  I know, it’s a strange name.  It’s like Loser Bank or Jerk’s Hardware or Schlemiel’s Auto Repair.  I had finished picking out the lettuces, when I saw a lady, somewhere between 60 and 80, leaning against a produce case, bent over.  I asked her if she was ok.  She said she felt like fainting, so I made her hang onto my cart and grabbed a Schnuck’s employee.  Then I saw a pharmacist and grabbed her.  They brought her a chair and were dealing with her, so I moved on.  After I had finished and checked out, I went back to see how she was.  The pharmacist said they had called 9-1-1; I saw the ambulance arrive as I was leaving the parking lot.  And all I wanted was some lettuce!

 

Hi there and welcome back.  I hope you’re feeling well and staying warm.  Did you enjoy Super Bowl LVI?  Carol and I watched it at home alone.  Nobody wants to get together nowadays, and we were just as happy to bring in some pasta and relax.  Why does the NFL use Roman numerals for the Super Bowls?  You don’t hear the quarterbacks yelling “Hut-Hut XLII” or the announcers saying, “That was a XXXVIII-yard field goal.”  How did the Romans even deal with those strange numbers, especially in writing poetry?

 

The Romans resorted to tricks

When trying to write limericks

And so, when in Rome

If you’re writing a poem,

“A stitch in time always saves IX.”

 

See, the IX is pronounced “icks” and rhymes with … oh, the hell with it.  It was funnier in Roman.

 

The commercials for the Super Bowl were strange to my aged mind.  No image was on the screen for more than half a second and the product being advertised was often a mystery.  Oh well, what can you expect when you’re LXXVI.  And I could go on a whole jeremiad about the halftime show, but I’ll spare you.  Suffice it to say that listening to Snoop Dogg explains why no space aliens talk to us.

 

And speaking of being LXXVI, I really feel old today.  My daughter Jennifer called me and said she had just come back from Walgreen’s.  It was Senior Day.  My daughter at Senior Day!  Oy, I’m getting a headache. 

 

In my youth – you had a headache, you took aspirin.  You went to the corner drugstore -- Bert & Jeanette’s on Clayton Road next to Lake Forest Bakery.  Mmmmm, the smell of butter cookies wafting through the air!  Where was I?  Aspirin!  There were two kinds – the small bottle of Bayer Aspirin and the large bottle of Bayer Aspirin.  The large bottle had twice as many pills and cost twice as much.  And if it didn’t work, the only other course of action was – lie down; it’ll get better.  Now it’s different.  The pain reliever aisle at Walgreen’s is three miles long and the Tylenol section has 100 different kinds, mixtures, sizes and configurations of Tylenol.  There’s a pineapple-flavored Tylenol.  There’s a Free-Range Tylenol.  And for each one, there is a Walgreen’s store-brand version that’s exactly the same.  That makes 200 different choices.  And that’s just Tylenol!  Then there are 200 kinds of Advil, 200 kinds of Aleve, 200 kinds of Motrin and yes, there is actually aspirin.  What am I supposed to do?  It’s enough to give you a headache.

 

Don’t forget that Monday is President’s Day.  It amazes me how much time and effort half the country spends in vilifying the current President, erasing the names of old Presidents from schools and tearing down their statues – and then turns around to celebrate President’s Day by buying a sectional.

 

I didn’t get many comments from you last week, which means the blog was not very entertaining.  I understand.  I did get a comment from a lovely lady who said she read the blog while waiting for her dentist.  There’s a thought – a blog specifically directed toward people waiting at a dentist’s office.  We could call it Nothing But the Tooth or Floss With the Boss, or maybe just Bite Me.

 

The Weekly Word is jeremiad, which is a long and mournful complaint, and I’m afraid today’s blog has been a bit of a jeremiad.  But luckily it has come to an end and you can go play WORDLE now.  Good luck.  Besides, I’m exhausted.  Being clever and witty tires me out.  And thank goodness I can’t hear any of your smart-aleck comments to that!  Stay well and count your blessings.  See you next week at that little round table in Hell.  I guarantee the food will be hot.

 

Michael                          Send comments (even smart-aleck ones) to mfox1746@gmail.com

 

 

 

 

Blog #257                                February 10, 2022

 

I was so busy last week, that I forgot to talk about Groundhog Day.  It was a week ago Wednesday and here’s what happened:

 

***Punxsutawney Phil came out of his hole and saw his shadow.  We will be in for six more weeks of winter.  And how right he was!  I feel guilty that I left for Florida just before the terrible blizzard that has buried my friends in St. Louis under a foot of snow.  Sorry about that:

 

I know that you’re all in a bind

And it certainly weighs on my mind

But when I saw the snow

I decided to go

And leave all you suckers behind.

 

***Shakespeare came out of his litter box and did not see my shadow.  That meant we won’t be home for another ten days.  Poor baby!  I left you alone for two weeks.  I love you Shakey.  I even called this blog Limerick Cat just for you.  I love all animals (except mosquitos) and I hate how the human race has treated them.  While driving around here in Florida, I saw a sign.  It was a green sign, which always indicates some official message like how far it is to the next town or which dead Highway Patrol officer some bridge is dedicated to.  This sign said “WILDLIFE VIEWING AREA” with an arrow and an image of binoculars.  It’s a sad sign really.  Its obvious translation is: “A few miles down this road we actually found a place with a few animals left.  Bring your binoculars because there aren’t that many and they stay pretty much away from the road.  And hurry!  There’s a new Cracker Barrel coming next spring.”  Pretty soon the only animals left will be at the zoos and no-one will remember how they evolved or became extinct.

 

Then we wandered over to an up-scale, woke kind of grocery store.  There was a cooler case with a sign that read “Five-Star Animal Welfare Rating”.  Ok, the sign piqued my curiosity, and I went over to inspect just how humanely the animals had been treated.  They looked dead to me.  Not only dead, but dismembered and shrink-wrapped.  One package of shrink-wrapped body parts said “Fresh Young Chicken”.  Seriously? If that doesn’t bring up a scene of intense, bloody cruelty, nothing does.  Here’s a gaggle of fresh young chicks in the prime of youth with their whole lives to look forward to – snatched, plucked, butchered and pulled to pieces.  Do visions of Jeffrey Epstein come to mind?  At least we were kind to these “Fresh Young Chicks”.  We played Mozart for them and old Foghorn Leghorn cartoons before we ripped their bodies to pieces.  How thoughtful!  Pass the barbecue sauce.

 

Message from Shakespeare: Nature teaches beasts to know their friends (Coriolanus).  If he loved animals so much, he wouldn’t have left me alone for two weeks.  I hope that stupid groundhog bites the old man in his sanctimonious butt.  And I hope he comes home soon.  Purr.

 

Hi there and welcome back.  I hope you are feeling well and digging yourselves out from the snow.  We’ll drive home from Florida tomorrow and Saturday. Let’s see what else happened on Groundhog Day.

 

***Joy Behar came out of her condo and saw her shadow.  That means two weeks without Whoopi, who said the Holocaust was about man’s inhumanity to man.  You notice she didn’t say anything about woman’s inhumanity.  Go figure.

 

We’re down here in Florida for a couple of weeks because I hate the cold, and, as I age, I seem to be getting less tolerant of it.  Why did God have to invent winter?  As a contrast?  John Steinbeck wrote, “What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness.”  Maybe God made winter so we could marvel at the beauty of snow.  Or maybe He just wanted to make us shiver.

 

And yes, I called God a He.  Do I need to apologize to Whoopi for that?  It seems that God has been called Our Father, Our King for almost 6,000 years, but in the past 25 years we have changed God to Our Parent, Our Ruler.  Why can’t God be a man?  Mother Nature hasn’t been changed to Parent Nature.  Have you ever heard of Parent Goose stories?  Or Parent Theresa?  Or the Siblings Grimm?  With all the scandals going on nowadays, I guess it’s not so good to be a man anyway.  So let’s just pray to Whoever for milder weather.  Amen!  Oops, I guess I should have said – A-person!

 

And speaking of The Brothers Grimm, why isn’t it the Grimm Brothers?  It just doesn’t sound right.  Have you ever heard of the Brothers Everly?  Or the Brothers Righteous?  Or the Brothers Smothers?

 

***Joe Biden came out from hiding under his desk and saw nothing.  The room was too crowded with potential Supreme Court nominees.  Did you know that the President has a new cat?  Its name is Willow.  I’m pretty sure it’s a black female.

 

***Dr. Fauci came out from behind his KN95 mask and saw the future: sixteen more years of wearing masks.  I don’t even remember what my friends look like.  Sometimes, I just go through all my old picture albums so I can memorize the faces I will never see again.  Do I have to get a new Driver’s License photo taken while wearing a mask?  Will my grandchildren’s high-school yearbook pictures show them with a mask?  Twenty years from now, they’ll look in the Yearbook and say, “I remember Todd.  He wore a yellow mask with a red Smiley Face.”

 

The Weekly Word is sanctimonious, which means acting as if you were morally superior.  I guess I’m guilty of that once in a while.  Also guilty of being grumpy, but sometimes I think you like it when I’m grumpy because I pick on the same things that frustrate or confuse you as well. 

 

Parent Theresa once said, “Let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier.”  Thanks for joining me today, and even though I was grumpy and sanctimonious, I hope I left you a little better and happier.  At least you got a smile or two, didn’t you? Admit it and come back next week for some more.  Stay well and warm and count your blessings.

 

Michael                                    Send comments to mfox1746@gmail.com

 

 

 

 

Blog #256                                         February 3, 2022

 

The Walt Disney Company is about to release its new remake called Snow White Privilege and the Seven People Whom We Cannot Describe Without Insulting Someone.  They were going to call it Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, but, well, you know how it is.  Hi-ho, Hi-ho; it’s off to Woke we go.  They have another film in the works called The Average-Sized Mermaid.   Everyone wants to increase mental health awareness these days, so you’d think the Snow White saga would be important.  What’s more revealing of mental health issues than a house full of seven men where only one of them is Happy?  Realizing their problems, the men hire a magic psychiatrist named Snow.  Remember, it’s a Fairy Tale.  The psychiatrist uses her magic powers to make the seven men smaller so she can fit them all into her office at one time.  And that is how the men became dwarves and why, to this day, psychiatrists are called shrinks.

 

Hi there and welcome back.  I hope you’re feeling well.  I am writing to you from somewhere in Florida.  I will not disclose my location in fear of being arrested for transporting bad humor across state lines.  Since Covid began two years ago, I have done most of the grocery shopping, and I’m beginning to notice the inflation that everyone is talking about.  Before we left, I bought Shakespeare a bag of cat food which used to sell for $8.00.  Now, it’s $9.39.  I told him he had to go on a diet.

 

Message from Shakespeare:  Four legs and two voices – a most delicate monster (The Tempest).  First of all, I have three legs, not four.  Second, I’m not fat and I’m not going on a diet.  Third, I tried to sneak into one of the suitcases, but they caught me and now they’ve gone to Florida and left me alone for two whole weeks.  Is that any way to treat your favorite pet?  Aunt Abby and all her kids will come every day to feed me and play with me, but I will miss that ungrateful old man.  And, as long as I’m being catty, what’s with this thing called Limerick Oyster?  It’s a bad name.  An oyster is just two ashtrays with some snot in the middle.  He should call it Limerick Cat.  Purr.

 

 

 

The light went out in the bathroom.  It’s one of those long tube-thing lights.  Is that too technical for you?  Carol was not home, so I was on my own, a position that usually leads to disaster.  But, somehow, I pried the plexiglass cover off, got the two tubes out and took them to the hardware store where I sheepishly asked for help.  I left with the two replacement tubes and then it hit me:  I had to get them home, install them and replace the Plexiglas sheet all by myself without breaking anything.  I considered that to have about the same likelihood as my getting hit by a falling cello.  Plus, my wife was gone.  I was alone!  I could fall off the stepladder, break both legs and die of starvation!  I could have a cardiac event and not be able to call 9-1-1!  I could get hit by a falling cello!

 

Well, I got home, took a deep breath and screwed up my courage.  I told myself that I was a capable and clever man and determined to do what any capable and clever man should – wait for his wife to come home.  When she did, I asked her to hold the stepladder.  She refused.  You see, she remembered too well when her father was replacing a lightbulb and her mother was holding the ladder.  They were probably about our age at the time.  Well, her father fell and broke a hip – not his hip, the mother’s hip.  So Carol said, “I’m not going to let you fall on me.  You’re on your own, Buster.”  And so I was, but then I remembered what the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev said -- “If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything is ready, we shall never begin.”  I pressed forward and got it done with only two band-aids and a little crack in the plexiglass that you can hardly see. 

 

Do you ever have trouble with your cable?  Our cable and internet both went out one day between 11:30 and 3:00.  Carol was gone, so it didn’t affect her.  It didn’t affect me either.  I don’t watch television and I don’t use the internet very much except for emails.  It’s amazing what a Luddite and a troglodyte I am.  I’ve used troglodyte as the Weekly Word before, but I’ll just remind you it means caveman.   Luddite, therefore, will serve as our Weekly Word.  A Luddite is a person opposed to new technology or ways of working.

 

Gee, in one paragraph I called myself a Troglodyte and a Luddite.  That’s almost as many names as Biden called Trump in his last speech.  But I deserve the labels.  They come with old age.  As it says in Don Quixote, “the malignity of Time, the devourer and consumer of all things” has made me an old man.  You know you’re an old man if you spend more time shopping for deals on pills than on cars.  You know you’re an old man if your PSA score is more important than your golf score.  You know you’re an old man if sending a Bitmoji is the technological highlight of your day.  

 

Some say that to slow down the aging process, you have to act young, so when my granddaughter Charley asked Carol and me to do a TikTok, we both jumped at it.  We had no idea what TikTok was, but Charley showed us some dance moves and we all made a video.  I was so proud that even an old Luddite like me could TikTok.  We’ll remember the experience for the rest of our years:

 

When we are two old alter cockers 

Just sitting alone in our rockers

We’ll remember the day

We could stand up and say

That we were a pair of TikTokkers.

 

I presume you’ve had enough of me by now.  I’ve certainly had enough of me.  Stay well, stay warm, count your blessings and watch out for those falling cellos.  See you next week.

 

Grumpy                                   Send comments to mfox1746@gmail.com