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Dear Aunt Nettie: I'm curious-- do they make a big deal
out of Hanukah and Christmas at Living Dead "R" Us? |
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Dear Festive: Not the former, since the entire Town of Redbone has never had more than half a dozen people of the Hebrew persuasion at any one time. Christmas, however, is a big deal, as I've mentioned in years past. This year, for instance, the Office of Homeland Insecurity has declared us a Resource of the Last Resort. Apparently if terrorists invade Redbone we're supposed to gum them to death. Anyway, this Tommy Ridge person has sent all nursing homes in the USA a special Christmas tree which is supposed to keep us alerted, sort of like Bruce Wayne's Bat-signal or Clark Kent's Krypto-beeper. You see, right now the tree in the lobby is supposed to be in the Heightened Alert color, Yellow, which makes it look more like Chinese New Year, but, hey, it was free, right? It will never light up as Green or Blue, the color of contented cosmopolitans or fat farmers, as that would dull our knife-edge state of readiness. It may, however, go to Orange if we're likely to be invaded by the Dutch, or to Red if a Socialist candidate gets elected to high public office. What we're supposed to do in response to these changing colors isn't exactly clear. But never fear, the whole question is moot since my Nephew³² Gizmo couldn't resist the temptation and kind of rewired it so all the colors blink on and off randomly they way they're supposed to do on a Christmas tree. If Washington complains we're planning to ask for another recount of those Florida votes....
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Dear Aunt Nettie: Every Sunday, my only really free day
in the whole week, I'm torn between going to church and going to the gym.
Is there any way I can balance my mutual needs for spiritual and physical
health? |
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Dear Torn: I'm happy to announce the formation of a new church that recognizes that these desires need not be mutually exclusive. The Church of Jesuscize here in Redbone has workout programs based on spiritual themes so you can kill two birds with one stone, if you'll pardon the expression. Richard Simmons is Pastor Emeritus. A typical Sunday service might look like this: ~ Pedaling for Piety ~ Jumping Jacks for Jesus ~ Situps for Sainthood ~ Stairstepping Out of Sin ~ Treadmilling the Path to Paradise Followed by a short sermon/infomercial about the benefits of Thighmaster Theology. If you act now you can pick up a franchise/pastorship in your neighborhood. Send $1,500 to me at the address I'm sending you via e-mail and I'll see that it gets into the appropriate hands....
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Dear Aunt Nettie: Why do they call the telegraph system
at the firehouse a "Joker's stand"? |
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Dear Dedicated: It was named after the inventor, Baron Heinz Jokurständt. You see, long, long ago fire companies were loosely-organized groups of brawny beer-fueled individuals who used to fight each other over the right to put out fires and claim the reward or salvage rights. Your ordinary firehouse in those days was even more loosely-organized than its denizens. Someone might come running in from the street yelling about a fire, or a fire horn might go off somewhere in the neighborhood giving a rough indication of where the firemen should go. Then there was a mad scramble to put down the beer steins, get the fire horses in harness, pull on boots and capes and helmets, load the hoses, refill the beer steins, fire up the steam engine that drove the pumps, then chase madly off to fight the blaze. This method had obvious disadvantages, the principal one being that whatever was on fire was generally pretty far gone by the time the crew arrived, leaving them no choice but to sit around drinking beer and fighting with other fire companies. Baron Jokurständt was the mayor of Phumpherburgen, a commercial city in what used to be called Ruthenia. He was the one who harnessed the new powers of the telegraph to warn fire crews at least 15 minutes before a major fire began, so that by the time they got organized they would actually reach the scene in time to do some good, as well as to drink beer and fight with the other fire companies. Eventually professional firemen were hired, the various fire companies were merged into a single department and beer was banned from fire stations. This greatly improved the performance of the firefighters, although most of the old-timers agreed that the old way was lots more fun. ------------ REF: "A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight: Early Fire Companies as a Source of Entertainment in Pre-War Ruthenia" by Hans Luciferase, Doctoral Thesis (London & Bombay, 1921)
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Dear Aunt Nettie: Regarding
Sunday's $1,500 franchise
fee for Church of Jesuscize, I just gotta say they could save themselves
$1,500 and just go to one of those snake-handling churches and try to
outrun the snakes ! Terror burns more calories! |
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Dear Ophidiophobic: As we have reported before, "surf handling" is much, much more dangerous.
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Dear Aunt Nettie: Do you know the name of the only U.S.
battleship to be present at both the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, on
December 7, 1941, and at the D-Day invasion, on June 6, 1944? |
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Dear Historian: It was the USS Absquatulate, which waited out the Pearl Harbor attack in sunny San Diego because of a "defective" radio, and missed D-Day by 3 weeks due to a "defective" compass, which sent the ship to sunny Bilbao in north coastal Spain until the shooting had stopped and mines had been cleared. The Absquatulate (motto: "Better Safe Than Sorry") also managed to avoid the siege of Anzio, the North African Campaign, the Battle of the Coral Sea and Nazi "wolf-pack" submarine attacks due to "defective" equipment and the tactic of staying very, very close to the shores of neutral countries, preferably in South America. It was the only battleship to emerge unscathed at the end of the war, which made it the ideal choice to lead the Victory Fleet celebrations in 1945, since it was so perfectly maintained. The ship's officers and crew were also the most highly decorated in the Navy, usually with feather boas.
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Dear Aunt Nettie: I've noted that during the past
couple of weeks there have been increasing lapses in your daily column....
I'm worried that your medication may need to be altered, or that you are
simply trying to do to much, selflessly serving the public as you do,
without taking care of personal needs... Are you OK? |
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Dear Concerned: Well, thank you for caring, young person. It isn't often nowadays that you find anyone who's not concerned exclusively with money, TV, sex, drugs, software and rock 'n roll. The truth of the matter is that I'm thinking of retiring come January 1st. Giving good advice is stressful, and those of us in our declining years need to conserve our strength for more important things, like sphincter control. My biological clock ran down many decades ago, and I believe my atomic clock is winding down as well. I just don't seem the have the same atomic force I used to have, and I can feel my protons and neutrons and whatever yearning to release their component thingamajigs into the universe, perhaps to form a new planet in the vicinity of Arcturus. Besides, I'm being prompted by The Voices to combine the past 2½ years of scribbling into a definitive history of my home town. It appears that, since the death of the Town Historian from fulminating hemorrhoids a few months back, I remain the sole source of information about the early history of our fair town, and it's only fair that I set down what I remember before complete fantasy takes over. I must also confess that I've lately been diagnosed with Wisenheimer's disease, that much-feared scourge of the elderly that reduces the entire world to a bad pun. This in itself is a reason to quit my public life and concentrate on making life miserable for the nurses and orderlies and infrequent visitors. Why, just yesterday a visiting parson made the mistake of referring to my ripe old age. I lashed out with my cane and raised a few lumps on his noggin whilst accusing him in a loud voice of indecent propositions, including statutory ripe. Ahem.... Well, maybe you had to be here for the full effect....
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Dear Aunt Nettie: I wonder what the words "to retire"
might mean to you? I'd look it up in the dictionary but my eyes aren't
that good and my insurance ain't paid up just yet. |
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Dear Aging: Well, it means exactly that it seems to mean. To be safe, you should replace your tires when the tread wears down to one-sixteenth of an inch. The easy way of determining this is to use a shiny new copper penny: simply insert it into the worn tread with Lincoln's head facing the tire. If the tread lines up with the dura mater in Lincoln's brain lining, it's time to re-tire. With radial tires that means replacing all four tires; if you plan to drive in the snow I suggest all-weather or mud 'n' snow treads.
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Dear Aunt Nettie: If my company's stock price is $6.66,
do I buy or sell???? I'm so confused.... |
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Dear Leveraged: Under those circumstances you should definitely place all your securities in the hands of a trusted friend to remove the hoodoo and redirect any latent hexes. I'm sending you my mailing address under separate cover. Trust me.
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Dear Aunt Nettie: I got a new calendar in the mail
today. It got me to wondering why January 1st is used to mark the
beginning of the new year instead of some other date. What's the story? |
Dear Mensural: In the old Roman calendar spring began on March 21, the day that commemorated the birth of Jules Vernal Equinox, inventor of the old Roman calendar, who used his birthday to mark the start of the new year in his calendar system. Unfortunately, due to a calendar assembly error in 87, the Imperial Roman calendar that was published by the federal printing house that year began with Januarius I rather than Mars XXI. Rather than recall and reprint close to a million calendars, which had already been sent out to all corners of the Empire, the Roman Senate passed a decree making Januarius I the official start of the new year. Jules Vernal Equinox fell on his sword in protest, but he was smart enough to leave it on the ground in its scabbard, sustaining only a skinned knee.
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Dear Aunt Nettie: Hey, Aunt Nettie, I got a complaint.
Don't you think you should pay off all the loyal readers out here who send
you in all those questions you use? You're making scads of cash while we
toil away at our keyboards, sweating over dropped patricipial dexpressions
and the like, while you bask in the admiration of the masses, consigning
us to the shadows and treating us like serfs. What do you say? |
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Dear Aunt Nettie: I have a notion about going to
Scotland for a while and was wondering about any special considerations of
which I need to be aware? |
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Dear Voyager: There are a few points you should be aware of: 1. All the men wear skirts. 2. The national dish is haggis. Look it up. 3. The best weather there is what would be called an environmental catastrophe in, say, Hawaii. 4. No one speaks recognizable English.... 5. ...although you'll quickly learn the Scots version of "Spare change?" 6. Nothing grows there but sheep. Very thin, desperate sheep who long to emigrate to New Zealand. 7. All the really good whiskey is exported. 8. Electricity is available only in major cities. 9. The only form of entertainment is complaining about poverty and longing for death. 10. Bagpipes.
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Dear Aunt Nettie: I have heard that there's some kind
of secret meaning in the old Christmas carol, "The 12 Days of Christmas."
Any idea what it is? |
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Dear Aunt Nettie: Why is English our chosen language?
What's up with that? |
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Dear Fluent: Only monarchs "choose" the language of their subjects; in democracies the choice is voted on after a lot of campaign finance money changes hands. Sometimes democracy poses its own problems, though. Switzerland has been voting on a language for 400 years now and they keep running into a tie between Italian, German and French. Many Swiss speak English just out of spite.
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Dear Aunt Nettie: If you were to say goodbye to an old
friend, how would you do that? I suppose you could drop a way heavy
firewood load on their toes, but then what fun would that be. Is there a
perfect way to say goodbye to an old friend? |
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Dear Belle: Whenever I see an old friend who has gone past her prime, to whom life has become a burden to be endured rather than a challenge to be overcome, I use the Brewster sisters' classic recipe for compassionate farewells: arsenic in elderberry wine. They always smile at the end.
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Dear Aunt Nettie: When did the custom of sending around
poinsettias for Xmas begin? |
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Dear Euphorbic: Waldo Poinsettia ran a florist's shop in Manhattan in the 1950s. In those days Christmas was a slow time of year for those in the floral trade, and Poinsettia was looking for a way to boost sales. He got the idea of spray-painting an ordinary shrub (Bushus Ordinarius) with the new candy-apple red that had just been developed for custom cars, and the new brilliant red plants sold out on the first day. Soon he had to hire extra staff to keep up with the demand, and in 1961 sold his process technology to FTD for $50 million and retired to Florida, where he was unsuccessful in creating a market for his psychedelic metalflake potted palms.
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Dear Aunt Nettie: I saw on the news something about a
new plane being named after recently retired Senator Strom Thurmond. I
thought you had to be dead before military stuff was named after you? |
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Dear Militant: That's normally how it's done, but the naming committee decided that in Senator Thurmond's case a formal certificate of death was merely a technicality. Besides, it's not real military hardware, but a "special" plane, like the Special Olympics. Here's the whole story from my favorite news source.
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Dear Aunt Nettie: Exactly how long does a fruitcake
remain edible? |
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Dear Nauseated: You're assuming, of course, that they were edible to begin with.... Perfectly preserved fruitcakes have been found in the tombs of Sumerian princes and in the Lascaux caves. A partial fruitcake (one side had been gnawed and regurgitated intact by hyenas) was found in Oulduvai Gorge in East Africa, along with a tag that said "To Eve and tribe from Mungush and tribe." Radioisotope measurement of the jellied fruit in the cake shows it to have been created (or evolved) around December 25th, 270004 BCE. One school of paleontologists holds that the ancient rounded stromatolites still found alive in Australia are based on the original 850 million-year-old recipe.
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Dear Aunt Nettie: Do you have any heartwarming words of
inspiration for your loyal readers, now that you've reached the end of yet
another year? |
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Dear Attentive: No. Once you pass the century mark you begin to realize that life, to paraphrase Thomas Edison, is 1% inspiration and 99% dumb luck. However, if you plan to stay up and watch that silly ball drop at Times Square, you may wish to review this earlier year-end message, simply to stave off the boredom.
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