Fresh polls! Tuppence the pound!!

Hey I can make polls!  I have never made one before, but now I am.  Making one, which I didn’t even know I could because Blogger doesn't really let you do polls in your posts but guess what?  You totally can!  So here is my poll.  It is my first, brand-new sparkly ever one.  Please take it!  All of you, and eat it, that you may know life everlasting.

Question the first of my poll, which is mine and which belongs to me by R. Violet Brackets Miss Brackets:  This is my poll.  How do you like it so far?

£  I think it is just splendid, thank you for having me.

£  Nonsense, the pleasure is all mine.

£  Really, you’re too kind, and I can’t say enough good things about your poll!

£  Oh, posh!

£  No, really!  It’s very informative, and so neatly typed!

£  Oh, you!  How you do go on!

£  Uh-oh.  I think maybe I was wrong about being able to do a poll in a post.  Oh, crap. Well, press on.

£  Holding hands and long quiet walks on the beach.

Question Number Two:  As polls go, how do you think this one rates? 

£  I think it is first-rate, top-drawer, top-hole, top-flight, tops & bottoms, bottoms up, P-O-S-H POSH with a capital pee.

£   I think there's a chance you don’t have the best possible grasp of this whole “poll” concept.

£   I think you may be on to something there, Lance.

£   I think Rosy was at a “business meeting” today and had a couple lil ole martoonies for lunch.

£   Please.  I had them with lunch, not for lunch.  There’s a difference, you know.

£  “With lunch,” “for lunch” — in the vernacular of the drunkard, the two are one and the same.

£  Lighten up, Grandma.  It’s not like I came in to work tweaked.

£   Non-smoker, politically left-of-center

The third question of my poll is this:  The poll is halfway over!  How do you think it is holding up?

£   Admirably.  Admirably.

£   I think it is losing a bit of steam, but I have confidence it will rally and build to a momentous climax!

£   I have my doubts, frankly.  It could either end brilliantly, or end even more brilliantly!

£   Snort.  You said “climax.”

£    As comfortable in jeans and a t-shirt as she is in an evening gown, and looks great in both.

The final (Final) question:  “Poll" is a funny word, because it sounds like “pole,” which reminds me of:

£   The Eastern European gentleman who threw the clock out the window because he wanted to see the ess-car-go!

£   Cock.

£   The annexation of the Sudetenland, which wasn’t even funny you heartless bastard, so I don’t know what the FUCK you’re laughing at.

£   Dick.

£   Something else, which I will explain in Comments.

£   Friends first, but could be so much more!

That concludes my very first ever Blogger poll.  I hope it has given you much intense physical pleasure and a deep sense of emotional well-being, while helping you to while away many a carefree hour.  What do you think the topic of my next poll should be?  Here are some possible suggestions:  Hangovers; cock; the significance of the poll in the Medieval European agrarian economy; the difficulty of receiving unemployment checks when homeless; pistachio. 

Tell me what YOU think my next poll should be about!

Something You Might Not Have Known About Me

When I was a kid, I had this imaginary friend named Mr. Gumbo. 

Well, technically, he wasn’t my imaginary friend; he was the imaginary friend of this kid Chip Engleman, who lived across the street from us.  But Chip introduced us, and then a while later the two of them had some kind of a falling out.  I never found out the details; or rather, it was one of those situations where there are almost like, too many details?  Everyone’s got their own version of events and none of the pieces really add up and eventually you just figure screw it.  It’s probably more than I needed to know anyway. 

But I guess I was the only other kid in the neighborhood Gumbo really knew, so before too long, he was hanging out with me pretty exclusively.  Which wouldn’t have been so bad, if it had stopped there.  It was actually kind of cool at first.  I’d never had an imaginary friend before, and I was sort of getting to the age where if I didn’t have one soon, I probably never would.  And if I waited much longer, there’d be a whole lot of those “special” tests to take, and you know how those can eat into your schedule, so I figured, hey.  Imaginary friend.  How bad can it be, right? 

Little did I know.

I mean, it’s not like Gumbo was a bad guy or anything.  It was more that he had this total bug up his ass about Chip, who frankly wasn’t my favorite person in the world either, but it was like Gumbo just couldn’t fucking shut up about him.  I mean, he never talked about anything else, and of course, given the nature of their relationship, he was privy to a whole lot of information about Chip that I could have lived just as happily without ever knowing.  And of course he was just thoroughly pissed at him, so it was all filtered through this mess of conflicted emotions.  Meanwhile, he was always trying way too hard to be my new imaginary best friend.  “Oh, tell me all your secrets, Rosy!  Tell me what you wish hardest for way down deep in your tippy toes!”  Yeah, right.  So you can go rag on me to everyone in the neighborhood when we break up?  Sure.  That’s gonna happen.

Of course, looking back on it, I realize Chip must have hurt him pretty bad.  Eventually, when I was older, it dawned on me that Chip and Gumbo may have been more than just imaginary “friends,” if you know what I mean.  But at the time, all I knew was that Gumbo was a bitter, angry loser with a huge imaginary chip on his shoulder and a long list of grievances in his big pink polka-dot ditty bag, who I strongly suspected would go invisible and hide in the bathroom when I was on the toilet.  And it wasn’t just what he said, it was the way he said it.  “Chip is such an asshole, Chip is such a user, Chip Chip Chip,” in that high-pitched, slide-whistle-crossed-with-a-cuckoo-clock voice of his, which believe me didn’t help matters any.  And plus, you know.  The jingle bells.  Which of course I know he didn’t have a whole lot of control over, but sweet crap on a cracker, they just never.fucking.stopped.  Every time he moved, every time he spoke, every time he drew a freaking breath.  “Whine, whine Chip this” (jingle!) and “Blah, blah Chip that” (jingle!!)  It was enough to make you want to put the poor bastard’s head through a wall.

Anyway.  After about three months I couldn’t take it anymore and told him to get lost.  Sometimes I feel bad about it now, but I was just a kid at the time, and you know how it is.  Poor fucker just kept calling and calling, on and off for like, weeks afterward.  I never picked up, and since it was the imaginary phone, nobody else in the house ever heard it ringing, so after a while he just gave up.  Sort of pathetic, really.

Last I heard, he was crashing with the Thing that lived under Sue Ellen Gawicki’s bed, and the two of them were driving each other completely up the wall.  Which if you ask me was no more than either of them deserved.  I mean, I know it sounds harsh, but that Thing used to give Sue Ellen pluperfect hell, and she really was a very sweet girl.  I know a lot of the other kids didn’t like her, but she had a really cool sense of humor when you got to know her, and she couldn’t help it that she smelled that way.

Rock Soup

Once there was a boy known by one and all to be quite astonishingly stupid. 

“Great heavens, but you’re a stupid boy!” cried the schoolteacher, when, in the schoolroom, the boy one day produced a large and rather mouldy Stilton cheese in place of his lessons.

“That boy’s ignorance is a disgrace to my manhood,” wailed his father, who left the family when the boy took his first faltering steps at the age of seven, and they led him straight over the edge of a large and unmistakably overfull sewage ditch. 

“Oh what oh what did I ever do to deserve such a fool for a son?” wept his mother, when the boy, in an attempt to solve a particularly difficult math problem, accidentally burnt down the cowshed.

The boy was never troubled by these pronouncements, either because he was so spectacularly stupid that he didn’t understand their meaning, or because he didn’t realize they were directed at him (possibly both), but in any event he was completely oblivious to them, as he was to virtually everything else.  And so the years passed quickly and effortlessly for him. 

When the stupid boy was nearly grown to stupid manhood, it was decided that he should leave the village and seek his fortune in the wider world.  His mother took some bread and cheese, and a few small coins, tied them in a kerchief, and pointed her son in the direction of the road leading out of town.  She wiped away a tear as her son ambled off with no particular sense of urgency or purpose, and watched until he disappeared behind a dip in the rough old road.

The stupid boy walked for three days and three nights, stopping only to eat and sleep and try to work out where he was, and how he had got there. 

At the end of the third day, though it was only the first of October, a terrible winter storm blew up, covering the road in a thick blanket of snow.  The stupid boy stumbled blindly, gathering his thin cloak about his shoulders in an effort to keep warm, but the wind gusted hard and mighty and it was a terrible thing to see.  At last, frightened and confused, and with nowhere else to go, the boy presented himself at the door of his mother’s cottage just a little way down the road, which he had been walking back and forth on the whole time, simply turning when he reached one edge of the village and heading back in the direction of the other.

“Well,” sighed his mother.  “I suppose I really I ought to have seen that coming, oughtn’t I?” 

She made up a bed for her stupid son, and he passed the night there, warm and snug.

In the morning, his mother made once again to send her son out into the world to earn his keep, but such a great fall of snow covered the house and the road and the whole of the town, that no one with any heart could have turned him out in it.

Instead, the next days were spent in digging out the town, and the days after that in taking stock of supplies.  The snow had come early and caught the villagers unaware, and their provisions were in perilously short supply.  Each night the people of the village prayed that tomorrow, the sun would break through and melt the snow, so that they could travel to the next town and seek help there.  But each day the clouds remained overhead, and new snow fell.  Livestock froze in its tracks and died, and was soon eaten.  The crops had been only half gathered when the weather turned, and the rest lay frozen and buried.  Many had no firewood, even to melt ice for drinking water.  And in a few weeks time, it became clear that barring a miracle, the villagers would not last through the winter.

The desperate people gathered in the schoolhouse to discuss what they must do.  Everyone was frightened and hungry, and words quickly grew angry and threatening, when all at once, the stupid boy spoke up.  “I know what we shall do!” he cried, and so desperate and hungry were his neighbors that they ceased their quarrelling to hear his suggestion, despite knowing what a cotton-headed idiot he was. 

“We shall make rock soup!”

The villagers exchanged looks of confusion and anger.  Rock soup!  What sort of nonsense was this?!

“Listen here,” said the stupid boy.  “We have no food, and the firewood is nearly gone, but there is enough to light under a big cooking pot, and we could put ice in the pot and melt it, and then add rocks to the water and cook them, and eat them.  Rocks are plentiful!  The big men could carry the big rocks, and the women and children can find little rocks, for seasoning.”

The villagers began murmuring agitatedly amongst themselves.  Rocks?  Eat rocks?  They had never heard of such a thing.  “Here,” cried one man.  “Never mind the rocks.  Why don’t we eat this stupid youth?”

“Eat the stupid boy?” asked another, incredulously.

And then the cry was taken up by others.  “Yes!  The stupid boy!  We should eat the stupid boy.”

“Yes!” shouted the stupid boy (who really was monumentally stupid), “Eat me!”

And all the villagers sang out together:  “We shall eat the stupid boy!  Fire up the cooking pot, and we shall eat the stupid boy!”

And so they did, and he was surprisingly tasty, especially when mixed with the potatoes that one farmer had been hoarding, and the leeks of another, and salt from yet a third, not to mention a few small rocks that the women and children gathered, for seasoning.  In fact, he made a fine soup which lasted for five days.  And on the morning of the sixth, the weather warmed, and the snow began to melt, and several of the younger men, their strength restored by the nourishing broth, traveled to the next village .  There they were able to obtain desperately needed supplies, and returned home with onions and potatoes and kindling and several of the less cooperative neighboring villagers, who were cooked and eaten in much the same way as the stupid boy.

So the people of the village survived the winter, and the name of the stupid boy, and of the others they subsequently cannibalized, was never spoken again, for fear of social embarrassment and possible prosecution. 

And they all lived happily ever after, proving that even the least among us can contribute, in our own way, to the greater good of all, if only we accept our lot cheerfully.

The End

Notes on a scholarly text

I'm by no means an expert on modern economics, but shortly before his death in 2006 I had the opportunity to hear John Kenneth Galbraith speak, perhaps more cogently, compellingly and persuasively on this topic than anyone I have ever heard speak, on any topic, before or since.  It's hard to explain how he was able to make such a dry and dusty subject so interesting, especially to a lay person like myself.  But bear in mind that through his entire presentation, Mr. Galbraith was naked, covered in jam and wearing a Hello Kitty mask.  Keep in mind also that his comments were presented on a cross-town L train at approximately 4:15 on a Saturday morning, and that frankly, I'm not entirely sure it was really John Kenneth Galbraith at all, or for that matter, that Jesus has any direct impact on the consumer price index.  In fact, I was sort of drunk at the time.  Actually – you know what?  Just forget I said anything.  I don't know what the hell I was thinking about.  Sorry.