LIMERICK    OYSTER

Blog #299                                December 1. 2022

 

Good gracious, it’s December already!  The calendar just keeps racing along at top speed.  The Hebrew Calendar is 11 days shorter than the solar year and uses a 19-year cycle to bring it into line, with the addition of an extra month every two or three years.  No wonder Jews are always confused.  An extra month every once in a while?  That explains why it’s so hard to get an appointment with my gastroenterologist.  He doesn’t know what month it is.

 

The calendar never bothered my father.  He lived to be 96.  My Dad was a scotch-drinker most of his life, but switched to vodka in his eighties.  Everybody loved my father.  In his nineties -- a widower, blind, living in an assisted-care facility -- he would order his monthly vodka supply by phone from a local store.  He knew their number by heart.  The manager of the store, who was 25 years old, liked my father so much that he would always deliver the order himself, then stay and talk for an hour, after which my father would try to get a better price out of him.

 

Dad was in pretty good health, and his doctor never gave him any trouble about the drinking.  In fact, he sanctioned it whole-heartedly.

 

Right now, Mr. Fox you’re on pace

To outlive the whole human race

If whatever you drink

Keeps you in the pink

Continue – and send me a case.

 

Dad would always wait for his afternoon drink until I came to visit.  He kept a bottle of Chardonnay in the fridge, and I’d pour a big glass for myself and a vodka on the rocks for him, and we would sit and talk and drink.  How nice that was!  About six months before he died, I gave up drinking alcohol, but I would still be there in the afternoon.  I poured his vodka and filled my wine glass with water.  I never told him I had stopped.

 

 

Hi there and welcome back.  I hope you are feeling well and in the holiday spirit after a nice Thanksgiving.  Besides Christmas and Hanukkah, December also brings the Miss America Pageant.  It’s only two weeks away.

 

I’m sure you know that the Miss America Organization will no longer include the swimsuit competition, replacing it with a Social Impact Statement.  I’m not sure I ever asked Carol for her Social Impact Statement when we were dating.  She had other impacts I was more interested in.

 

I wonder how many people will tune in to see which covered-up Miss America contestant is the most woke.  Probably less than the number of letters in BOREDOM.  The only audience for the pageant consists of men who want to see sexy bodies and women who want to criticize everything.  

 

I always turn the sound off when the pageant is on and just listen to my wife.  She’s better than Bert Parks!  “That one’s too short-waisted.  She’s too flat-chested.  How did her mother let her go out with that hairdo?  That gown is horrible!  Who dressed her?”  My math is pretty good:  No Bodies = No Audience.   The next change, of course, will be the name.  MISS is gender insensitive and exclusive.  And AMERICA congers up thoughts of the flag, the Constitution and the National Anthem, all things we want to avoid.   So next year the pageant will be called The Most Politically Correct Person in the Western Hemisphere and not even their own mothers will watch.

 

And December means Christmas music, and many of your local radio stations are already playing Christmas songs 24/7.  I know there’s only so much Brenda Lee and Burl Ives you can take, but Christmas songs are generally pleasant and enjoyable.  Except Frosty the Snowman of course.  Poor Frosty has become a victim of the WOKE FOLK just like Miss America.  Let’s look at the lyrics:

 

Frosty the Snowman:  The anthropomorphizing of inanimate objects disturbs a child’s ability to adjust to real-world situations.  Lose the name. 

Was a jolly happy soul:  Frosty is fat.  To display him as jolly minimizes the dangers and misery of obesity.  And how can he possibly be happy when Trump is running for President again?  Lose the jolly.

With a corncob pipe:  A pipe?  We have enough evidence of the dangers of smoking that displaying a pipe to children is criminal.  No pipe either!

And a button nose:  Most buttons are plastic and therefore not biodegradable.  No nose!

And two eyes made out of coal: Coal is a hydrocarbon and a major source of the contamination that leads to global warming.  No eyes!

 

So that leaves just a blind, nameless, nose-less, smoke-free, unhappy Snowblob.  I liked him better as Frosty.

 

Once in a while, people are angered by some of the things I say.  That’s ok, actually.  You wouldn’t want to listen to some namby-pamby loser who has no opinion and does everything his wife says and lets her pick out his clothes and goes to McDonald’s every morning and reads Moby Dick, would you?  I hope you’re not mad enough at me to get me invited to dinner at Mar-a-Lago.  I wonder what they do for a seating chart there.  Does he just say, “Jared, you’re in between the white supremacist and the antisemite?”

 

Did you watch the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show?  The French Bulldog won.  Dogs are loyal, loving members of the family who want to hug you, please you and treat you like God.  Cats are royalty who dislike you and tolerate your existence only because they have successfully trained you to wait on them.  Kind of like wives.

 

Message from Shakespeare:  And don’t you forget it, Big Boy.  That woman and I have you trained so well we could lead you around by a leash at the dog show.  But it’s nice to have a trained human to fetch for you and pet you and call you pretty.  At least that’s what Carol says.  You may deny me, but I’ll be your servant (The Tempest).

 

Our Weekly Word is namby-pamby, meaning a feeble person lacking in strength or courage.  That’s not me, of course.  I have the courage to send out this blog every week, don’t I?  And I have the courage to send another next week – if she lets me.  Stay well and count your blessings.

 

Michael                                    Send comments to mfox1746@gmail.com