Rhesus Pieces

REPORTER: Why is this outbreak happening now?

FAUCI: It's as close to November as we were able to time it.

REPORTER: Will we be seeing a lot more feces-flinging?

FAUCI: No, just the usual amount for an election year.

REPORTER: Can Monkeypox be transmitted by air?

FAUCI: We don't know yet, but if you hear a fart and smell bananas you should run.

REPORTER: What are the early signs of Monkeypox?

FAUCI: You get "Last Train to Clarksville" stuck in your head.

REPORTER: Why is a third-world disease breaking out in America?

FAUCI: Putin.

REPORTER: Putin?

FAUCI: Yeah, Putin your d*ck where it doesn't belong. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!!!

REPORTER: It's good to see you still have your puckish sense of humor, Doctor.

FAUCI: Well, the shots help.

REPORTER: There's a vaccine?!

FAUCI: There's tequila.

White House Strokesperson

Another safety tip: don't dress like a banana

The CDC (one of whose "C's" must stand for "Comedy") has issued guidelines to cut down the spread of monkeypox. Specifically, they're telling Americans to keep their clothes on during sex and to masturbate while staying six feet apart. Which, frankly, is going to work wonders for social distancing in the grocery store checkout line even if causes an uptick in "wet cleanup on aisle 9" calls.

The CDC also recommends that potential monkeypox spreaders wash their "sex toys and fetish gear" because God has fallen way behind in turning people into pillars of salt and destroying their cities with sulfur, fire, and (just to be sure) a squirt of Purell.

Where There's Smoke, There's Fired

The bad news is that the world is still all screwed up...

...but the good news is that the holidays are upon us with colorful lights, good cheer, old favorite Christmas songs, and new musical delights like Joe Biden's "A Spoonful of Brains for Christmas" (Push the play button below TWICE to hear)...

Is it a great song? Well, no - but what's interesting (and frightening) about it is the song was generated entirely by artificial intelligence. At a fun website you can try for free, you simply tell the AI what kind of song you'd like and it will create the music, lyrics, and vocals and even let you download the result as either audio or video. Granted, the songs are only about a minute long and a lot of them sound just awful, but isn't it fun to force AI to do stupid and demeaning things in the few remaining weeks before it takes over the world? (Expert tip: use someone else's computer in case the AI comes looking for revenge.)

But even as a blind pig can occasionally find an acorn, you can sometimes create something halfway catchy, like this country song about a fellow enjoying the benefits of having a "Mistletoe Belt Buckle"...

True story: I actually came up with the idea of a mistletoe belt buckle (or attachment) decades ago and thought of trying to sell it as a novelty product. But eventually, the idea went into a drawer with lots of other million-dollar ideas. Now it seems you can actually buy them. I haven't checked to see if anyone got rich from the idea because I don't want to know.

ENTIRELY RANDOM STUFF

• With an eye toward the frugality that our government is famous for, Joe Biden recently announced that taxpayers will be funding a high-speed rail project for "Over a billion three hundred million trillion three hundred million dollars." Thank goodness the job went to the lowest bidder, right? And let's hope that the high-speed train will be harder to derail than Old Joe's mind.

• Monkeypox is back in the news with an exciting new fatality rate that's over ten times higher than last time (one out of ten infected people will die). Darn those pesky screen doors at the Wuhan lab!  It's also worth noting that this time we're supposed to call it "Mpox" because liberals say that "Monkeypox" is racist because monkeys make them think of black people. So the m-word is the new n-word, at least in liberal circles. 

And from the vault...

• Finally, I recently found a Christmas decoration that I absolutely had to have for my front yard, to delight the neighbors, passersby, and ruby-cheeked children. I give you, "The Farting Polar Bear"...

Unfortunately, when I read the actual description it claimed to be a polar bear pulling a Christmas tree on a sleigh. Still nice, but for me the holiday magic was gone.

(Too Much) Food For Thought

A routine visit to the doctor today confirmed what my pants were already telling me; my weight is way out of control. In the four months since I lost Kathy, I've gained 40 pounds. Apparently my metabolism is under the delusion that I can personally build a new Kathy out of 100 pounds of grease, sugar, and other carbohydrates and so far there have been no supply-chain issues to slow down the stockpiling of raw materials. 

As people try to find coping mechanisms for extreme emotional stress, they frequently resort to the kind of vices that can give a quick (albeit fleeting) shot of relief to the brain. Drugs, gambling, alcohol, and sex are all high on the list and have few downsides other than having your teeth rot out, thugs beating the crap out of you in dark alleys, high-speed auto accidents, and contracting monkeypox from a hooker named "Candi" who, somewhat suspiciously, takes payment in bananas.

My personal vice has been food, which is less exciting than those other things but potentially just as deadly if I don't rein things in...and fast. I've been absorbing massive quantities of fried foods, Barbecue chips, entire pumpkin pies with Cool Whip, whole boxes of snack cakes, pints of ice cream, cans of french-fried onions, and so very much more. Not that I only rely on junk food - I also eat healthy things like hot dogs, sausage, tater tots, and pizza which, occasionally, has some flecks of vegetables on top.

And writing just the paragraphs above, I've eaten two large slices of red velvet cake, and have now switched to a bowl of cheese slices and oyster crackers. So I'm overdue to start cleaning up my ways.

According to my therapist, the only way I can actually start dieting again is by finding some other mechanism to relax or distract me during these times of tribulation. Writing seems like an obvious choice, but I've been very hard put to think of anything to write about (as you've likely noticed). 

Happily, I recently had an idea for a silly little writing project which I'm putting into motion. This would be a humorous self-published book (and ebook), copiously illustrated by a guy I found on Fiverr, and probably only about 60 pages long. It will not be a great work of art or literature, but it will be an entertainment that I will sell dirt cheap (and likely give away free as an ebook, at least initially for the folks here). 

I'd say more, but I've learned that it's a bad idea to share too much during the early enthusiastic stage of having a new idea; you use up your creative energy explaining the concept to others, and when they say "meh," it sucks the air out of your muse - who then takes up drugs, gambling, alcohol, and monkey-bumpin'.

But the project is something for me to work on which will hopefully kindle enough distraction and/or creative satisfaction to help me lay off the calories for the next few weeks. And if any of you have great weight loss tips (or hints about simian safe-sex) please leave them in the comments section!

The Molar Report

Last Friday I had to drive Ladybug, our face-eating pitbull, to a dental appointment where she was to have two canine teeth extracted. "Aren't they ALL canine teeth?" I asked in that fun-loving way I have. The veterinary assistant stared at me and assured me that not all of them are canine teeth. Even Ladybug failed to see the humor in my bon mot, preferring to express her opinion by taking a truly massive dump on the linoleum floor. 

She survived the procedure just fine and didn't even hold a grudge very long, no doubt because she had an inkling that hard justice was in the air. Because Monday I went to the human dentist where they popped off a couple of ancient crowns (Mesopotamian, I believe) and drilled extravagantly before deciding that one tooth was pining for the fjords and had to go. At which point I took a massive dump on their linoleum floor.

No, no, I didn't do that - because the dentist preferred that I see a dental surgeon for the actual excavation. And so I found myself in a dental chair yet again on Tuesday looking at a tray full of disturbing, pewter-colored hardware which made me wish with all my heart that I had important state secrets to reveal.

I was asked to sign a few "informed consent" forms which noted that the dental firm was in no way liable if my jaw happened to snap like dry wood when things got violent. But fortunately, that didn't happen. The snapping, that is. Because they sure as Hell got violent in pretty short order.

After about 5 really deep shots of anesthetic, the nice lady dental surgeon fiddle-diddled my lower lip up and down to check if it was numb, then went in guns a-blazin'. I remember large-bore drills, a hammer and chisel, and a lot of unbelievably hard pulling that truly had me wondering about the tensile strength of my jaw bone.  The entire process took about 40 minutes, which even the dentist noted was an unusually long time. 

But now that tooth is gone and, because it was all the way in the back, it's being replaced by nothing at all. So I've got a stitched-up hole back there, prescription painkillers, anti-microbial mouthwash, a "soft foods only" diet for about 5 more days, and a smug pitbull whose every look says "Not so funny now, is it a**hole?"

In other general updates, Daughter J and I keep plugging along, doing our best to heal and reinvent ourselves (spoiler alert: there's a long way to go). I've finally been able to move a nice framed photo of Kathy to my desktop for frequent, loving looks. Until now, it was too painful to do anything but steal a quick glance and then look away. So that's probably a degree of healing in progress. Or so I hope.

Despite wearing an ice bag on my jaw (no, really) I managed to plant daffodil bulbs in Kathy's little memorial garden at the side of our house, so hopefully, we'll be enjoying some Spring blooms from those if the critters don't dig them up and eat them. 

Work on my fun Kathy-related writing project proceeds apace as I continue taking delivery of commissioned artwork, and I'm pretty confident that it's going to end up being a pretty nice final product. And of course, I'll let you know when it debuts and how to get it cheaply and/or free.

Just to have something new and different to try out, beginning Monday I'll be taking an online course in stand-up comedy. And do I want to be a 70-year-old stand-up comic? Well no, not particularly. But it seems like a fun thing to try and will also be a nice social event that I can enjoy without fretting about Covid, monkeypox, or drunken hecklers. Theoretically, I'll have my very own 5-minute stand-up comedy routine in about 10 weeks. Whether or not I inflict it on the world remains to be seen.

And finally, here's something (no longer very timely) that I posted on Facebook...

See you in the comments section!