Dear readers, Your Friendly (and Peaceable) Neighborhood Amoeba would like to introduce you to our new friend Seth.

Seth’s personal story is remarkable. He comes from a long line of noble and virtuous people – according to one source, that line goes all the way back to the beginnings of humanity. The Seth patriarch grew up in a turbulent household, scarred by the eviction of his parents from their first home and the violent death of his eldest brother. Moreover, his mother, who bore 56 children, was constantly either pregnant or nursing or both, and with all those kids screaming to be fed or changed or taken to the movies or be given the car keys for a night of cruising the Negev, the noise must have been unbearable. Consequently, Seth the First developed a powerful, almost ferocious, devotion to the principles and practices of peace on Earth.

A devotion that has been passed on to the descendants of Seth down to the present day.

Our Seth has a hard time understanding how the goals of peace on Earth and good will to humankind can be achieved by blaring slogans at top volume from loudspeakers in shopping malls. As far as Seth is concerned, the way people behave in the malls, with all the pushing and shoving and yelling and grabbing, is proof that the high-decibel approach to attitude adjustment isn’t working any better in America than it did in Iraq, and it’s time to try something else.

Seth has opted for the personal approach. When he perceives a violation of the true spirit of the holidays, he walks up to the person responsible and says, in a quiet voice, “Please stop. You’re giving me an earache.”

Oh. Did I mention that Seth is 6′ 5″ / 195 cm, 275 pounds / 125 kilos, built like a tank and probably stronger? That he holds a 10th degree black belt in karate, is a master of seven other self-defense codes, and has been known to tie steel bars into knots with his bare hands?

“Yes, sir. Of course, sir. Anything you say, sir.”

With our new friend around, we’re looking forward to a far quieter and more reverential Yuletide.

For the wages of din is Seth.

Don’t make us go over there.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

“Well, Reg, can’t say that I’ve heard a lot about the public school furlough days lately.”

“Told you they’d get used to it, Syd. It figures that folk would squawk when the furloughs first hit and they had to change their plans. We stay the course just a little bit more, and those same people will be telling us to keep the furloughs in place, ’cause they don’t want to have to change their schedules again. Which suits us just fine, of course. We have to pay enough to school our own brats, don’t wish to have to pay for anyone else’s.”

“The people are so easily led, aren’t they, Reg.”

“That they are. Not to mention distracted. Throw them the promise of a few bogus bargains, and they’ll curl up at your feet in the cold and wet to have a chance at getting some. Amazing how the promise of $100 off an item that was marked up $250 two weeks before Thanksgiving will make people forget about furloughs.”

“And then there’s that golfer. Guy cracks his SUV into a tree at 2 in the morning and gets a bloody nose out of it, a simple numbskull piece of driving, and there’s nothing else on the news. When they’re not busting themselves shopping, in more ways than one, John Q. Public is trying to figure out Tiger’s dirty little secrets.”

“Bless their filthy little minds, Syd. The more time they spend minding the business of Mr. Woods, the less time they have to mind ours. But you know the story that really warmed my heart?”

“You have a …”

“Syd, I’m ashamed of you. You know I have a soft spot for children. Especially ours. So you can imagine my joy when I heard that another struggling elementary school was being bought out by a private concern that specializes in children of means and sending them to the only schools that matter. The private schools. Our schools. And the staff were happy about it.“

“That is good news. Cognac?”

“That’s top drawer stuff, Syd. Don’t mind if I do.”

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

“Well, dude, I guess I won’t be offering an apartment for rent on craigslist anytime soon.”

“I guess not, dude. On account of because all you have to offer is chewing gum for rent, on craigslist or anyplace else.”

“Ewww, dude. Chewing gum for rent?“

“Why else would you be leaving it on the bedpost overnight? Speaking of ewww. I suppose I should be grateful you’re not leaving it on the mailbox. What’s wrong with craigslist, anyway?”

“You mean crookslist, dude? Lookit this. Dude lists an apartment for rent, gets three inquiries from responsible-looking tenants, and then finds out they’re trying to scam him. It’s a dangerous place, this craigslist. Who can trust it?”

“In this world, dude, you can’t even trust the trust company.”

“What’s a …”

“Later, dude. But aren’t you overlooking a couple of things in this story?”

“Like …?”

“Like, here’s a person in Honolulu trying to rent an apartment and getting inquiries from people who claim to be professionals, from places so far away that it’s practically impossible that anyone will know them. But they do claim to be professionals, professors even. And they name their University. Two minutes on Google and you’ll know whether that University has Professor So-and-So on its faculty, and probably get a contact phone or email – which had better match what the inquirer sent you, or wee oh wee oh wee oh. Why didn’t …”

“OK, that’s one.”

“And the other is, where did you get this story?”

“Um, the newspaper.”

“Right. The editorial section, no less. Where did you find it?”

“Online …”

“Because you can’t find the print version with a microscope any more. And why is that?”

“Because they’re selling papers to amoebae?“

“Very funny. You’d better hope that OC’s not in a command-X kind of mood.”

“CONTROL-X!!“

“Even with Vista?”

“Only when you don’t want it to.”

“I rest my case. No, the papers haven’t shrunk because they’re selling to protozoa. They’ve shrunk because nobody’s paying them to advertise their stuff any more. And that’s because …”

“Because why?”

“Because all the ads are going to craigslist, dude! That editor’s going to hit craigslist every chance he gets, fair or not. Before his job goes the way of all the journalists who he had to fire and are walking the streets these days.”

“D’ya think it’ll work? People will dump craigslist and pay the paper for ads again?”

“Dunno, dude. I’d like to believe people would listen to us and learn how to use craigslist safely. But they might see that chewing gum and think again.”

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

“Hey dude!”

“For the last time, dude. I am not a scarecrow!”

“Oh, lighten up, willya? It’s almost Thanksgiving!”

“It is?“

“Yeah, dude. You know, fourth Thursday in November? Same time every year?”

“How come all I see are Christmas decorations, then?”

“Look, can I help it if the sellers want Black Friday to come early this year?”

“In this economy? Those people will be lucky if it comes late. In 2010!“

“Well, hell, dude, you’ve got to give them credit for giving it the old college try.”

“You’re right, dude. They’re really trying.”

“Of course, dude. Why else do you think their rugby side’s undefeated going into this weekend’s match?”

“Why can’t they have a regular football team like everybody else?”

“Because they’ve got to try harder to survive, dude!”

“Dude, it’s a real trial, figuring out what all this has to do with Thanksgiving.”

“I was hoping to find out what you’re feeling thankful for, dude. Before I realized I was talking to the ghost of Ebeneezer.”

“I never knew him. So you’re giving thanks on this second segment of Merry Thanksgivoween, are you, dude?”

“Yeah, dude, I am.”

“I was hoping, if you were going to be giving stuff out, it’d be a bit more substantial. A Hummer, for instance. I’d love to be given one of those.”

“Sorry, dude, they ain’t makin’ em any more, and I’m fresh out. How about I give you a nice Hawaiian punch, instead?”

“Doesn’t that stuff come in funny colors, dude?”

“So do the stars, dude!”

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

“So, dude, how’s the house hunting?”

“How should I know, dude? I ain’t never seen a house in camouflage going after big game, and I’m not sure I’d want to.”

“No, dude. The big game’s in the house, on the big screen in the living room. Or it would be, if we had a house to put it in.”

“Riiight, dude. And just how many decades of Payperblaug do you reckon it’ll take you to make the $570 grand you need to buy a doll house in Honolulu?“

“Doll house, schmal house, dude. Luxury box for me, thanks. Hell, I’ll take the whole stadium. Speaking of big screens. Gnarly!“

“Dude. I hate to admit this, but I’m impressed. When you go off the deep end, you don’t just jump, you tie weights to your ankles. A stadium?!?“

“Same money as your doll house, dude. Even has a roof. Here. Read.“

“‘Pontiac Silverdome sells for $583,000 …’ But, dude, the yearly electric bill for that place is probably bigger than that!”

“Well, we’d probably have to be a little careful, that’s all. Turn off the lights when we left a room, no watching soap operas on the Jumbotron, stuff like that. At least until we got the solar panels installed.”

“Man. I’d heard that Michigan was in tough shape, but I never reckoned it was this bad.”

“Well, dude, that’s what happens when you have one money-maker in your economy, and it goes belly up.”

“Like cars, dude?”

“Yeah. Or tourists.”

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

“Hey dude! Get a load of this!“

“What?”

“President Obama’s coming back to Hawai‘i! And he’s bringing a pack of his friends!”

“I should think he’s got friends, the way he’s been throwing money around …”

“Not those friends. These are real economic summit-type friends. From 21 countries, no less. Says he wants to show that Hawai‘i is a place to do business. And …”

“He gonna muzzle all the dudes who’ve gone bust over crippling taxes and strangling regulations before they get here?”

” … he says he’s looking forward to seeing them all in flowered shirts and …”

“Flowered shirts, dude? He said flowered shirts? Not aloha shirts? In the Aloha State? He tryin’ not to mention aloha ’cause he knows damned well there ain’t any around here any more? And what about the chicks, dude?”

“Grass skirts, dude.”

“Grass skirts?!? He said he wanted to see these high-powered executive-type chicks in grass skirts?? That’s going to go over well. Not. When are we supposed to receive this beneficence, huh?”

“Waitaminute, let me check … says here, sometime in 2011.”

“Right. Two years from now. Wonderful. Way the economy’s going, Obama’s going to be entertaining them business people in grass shacks, on account of because there won’t be anything else open by then. I can hardly wait, dude.”

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba has just found out that, since April 2009 in the Untied States of America, about 4,000 people have died, and about 98,000 have been hospitalized, from influenza virus 2009 H1N1 (“swine flu”) and related illnesses.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released the figures, I read, at least partly out of concern that too few of We the People are seeking to be vaccinated against this flu virus. Of course, a lot of those people aren’t seeking to be vaccinated because they’ve already tried, discovered that there was no vaccine to be had, and have given up …

Yo. People. Don’t quit on us, OK? We’ve got to keep a certain level of hysteria going on this swine flu business, or we’re going to lose the vaccine makers we’ve got to more lucrative pursuits, like making Viagra knockoffs, and we won’t have any vaccine for anybody. You gotta help us out here, gotta keep standing in line for this stuff.

Well, folks, I hate to be quoting fairy tales at you, but this swine flu story has been at the top of the news for, like, a year now, and while there’s nothing pleasant about 4,000 dead, there’s something of a gap between that figure and the decimation of the population that was forecast in the first reports.

After all, in that same time period (extrapolating from 2005 figures), approximately 27,000 people lost their lives on the nation’s highways, and another 1.4 million were injured.

And I have seen no calls from the CDC for a vaccine against stupid drivers.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

DISCLAIMER: A work of fiction. Resemblances to living persons, or extant organizations, are for satirical purposes, or are coincidental.

=================

The threat level, as determined by the Department of Homeland Security, is orange. Please report all suspicious activity to airport personnel immediately.

“Doesn’t that blasted recording ever wear out?”

“It’s digital, Damitri. You’d wear out faster, if I took you off the scanning team and put you on announcements. Trust me on this.”

“Oh. Hi, Jack.”

“No jokes, damn you. You’re in uniform, and we’ve got to keep these airline passengers in line.”

“Seventeen rows deep and out the front door, as usual.”

“Right. That does it. Soon as this shift is over, I’m changing my name to Sigmund.”

“Good choice, Jack. Has a nice ring to it. Sigmund. Sigmund Fraud!“

“That’s Freud, Damitri.”

“I know what I said, dammit. How many years has that ‘orange alert’ been up, huh? Four years straight? Five? Six?? We got enough jackknives in the box to bankrupt the Swiss, enough toothpaste to put Procter & Gamble out of business. How much more shakedown do we need?!?“

“Enough to get the body scanners in place.”

“The body scanners?”

“Didn’t you get that memo? Look here. With these things, passengers won’t have to spend half their lives in the scanning queue stripping, and the other half putting it all back together again. They’ll just walk through this gate, and we’ll see everything. And, heh heh, I do mean everything. We’ll get plenty of material for the flesh rags, and they’re buyin’.”

“Not with pictures like that, they won’t be. Resolution’s terrible.”

“Since when have we reported all of what we know about our equipment? They want better pictures, we can deliver. And you’d be surprised, Damitri, at just how many folks have placed orders for the lower quality stuff already. This is big money just waiting to fall into our laps.”

“I dunno, Jack …”

“Damitri, you’re a good man, and we can’t afford to lose you. Tell you what. Take some vacation. Two weeks starting tomorrow. I’ll make it good with HR. Find a nice quiet spot, bring the family. The organization will cover the costs. Come back rested and refreshed and ready to Protect and Serve.”

“Protect our profits and Serve ourselves. OK, Jack. But I gotta tell you, I’m far from being the only one in the line asking questions. Angel, for instance. He was one of the first, before he vanished. What happened to him, anyway?”

“He waited too long to take his vacation. Don’t you make the same mistake.”

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

“Dude?”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t get it.”

“You called me over for that? I thought you wanted to talk about something new.”

“I don’t get it, dude, but I can pass it on to you. Here. Let me sneeze in your face … ah …”

“Nice try, dude. Y’wanna talk about somethin’, or can I go back to what I was doin’?”

“It’s about these furloughs.”

“What about ‘em?”

“Well, the teachers negotiated ‘em more than a month ago now. And it wasn’t exactly a secret that they were coming. But nobody said or did anything about ‘em until they actually happened. And now everybody’s in a uproar. How come?”

“Because, dude, being graduates of the public schools themselves, people didn’t figure out the high cost of babysitting until they actually had to pay it. Now, of course, they’re all chanting “education” when all they really want is to get their kids out of their kitchens.”

“And now it says here that the state’s Republican party wants to end them by renegotiating the teacher’s contract.”

“So they can fire some people instead of giving them all short time. Which just happens to be what they wanted to do in the first place. Lovely negotiating tactics.”

“But in the meantime, the rest of the state’s workers got contracts with furloughs too. So if the teachers go back to school on Fridays, they won’t have any schools to go to ’cause all the other workers are out on furlough.”

“Same answer, dude. They renegotiate that contract so they can fire people like they wanted to in the first place. Bottom line remains the same. Except that state employees will join the parents who got sacked from their jobs because they had to stay home with their kids.”

“But, dude! The money guys are saying that the recession’s over. Couldn’t they just raise taxes just a little bit to keep these folk working?”

“Republicans raise taxes to keep a pack of Democrats in jobs? Dude, are you getting enough sleep?“

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of its characters to persons living or dead is for satirical purposes, or is coincidental. Apologies to Jean-Paul Sartre.

===================================

Alan Baldwin: “OK, so where’s the torturer?”

Seizen Shigeta: “Shut up! You bring him in here, I’ll wring your neck.”

Kimo Kalakaua (to Shigeta): “Be still, brah. You forget where we stay?”

Shigeta: “A locked room in hell. In this heat, how could I forget?“

Kalakaua: “So you wring da haole’s neck. Where he wen go?“

Baldwin: “I never dreamed that hell would be a room in a huge Waikiki hotel, but one without even a city view. I suppose that minor amenities like toilets and bar fridges are superfluous in our condition, and A/C is too much to hope for.”

Kalakaua (to Baldwin): “What fo you stay dis place?”

Baldwin: “Damned if I … oh, shit. You?”

Kalakaua: “Dunno.”

Shigeta: “Me either. One minute, I’m leading a crucial meeting of the Hawai‘i Teachers Association, and the next …”

Kalakaua: “You one teacher union guy den!”

Shigeta: “Yeah …?”

Kalakaua: “You how come my keiki no can read!“

Shigeta: “Well, maybe if you parents actually sent us kids who were ready to learn to read, instead of spending all of their time disrupting classroom order …”

Kalakaua: “But that your job, to teach, not to be bumboss! An not fo go surf Wednesdays, neither. Teach is fo why we pay you da big bucks!“

Shigeta: “Big bucks?!? Hell made you lolo already? What’re you calling ‘big bucks’?”

Kalakaua: “You no stay in tent in Nanakuli, you make da big bucks.”

Shigeta: “Well, maybe if you people would get off the damned ice, you could get out of those tents. For your information, brah, teachers make less than just about any other field that requires a bachelor’s degree for entry. In Hawai‘i, teachers make maybe half of what they make anywhere else, when you factor in the cost of living on this rockpile. And that was before the damned furloughs. Teachers are hard to get. And if we didn’t have these little perks here and there for our members, and protect them against the likes of you, we wouldn’t have the teachers we have now!“

Baldwin (to Shigeta): “Do those ‘little perks’ include the bloated teaching bureaucracy?“

Shigeta: “Look, none of us asked to have reams of paperwork jammed down our throats! If we gotta have it, then we gotta have someone to do it!”

Baldwin: “Maybe if you did your jobs right, we wouldn’t have to have those reams of data to keep tabs on you.”

Shigeta: “And maybe if we had some resources with which to do our jobs, instead of trying to teach classes in science with chewing gum and baling wire, we’d have a chance to do those jobs and get out from under the paper pile!”

Baldwin: “And just where do you think we’re going to get those resources?”

Shigeta: “Taxes, of course.”

Baldwin: “‘Taxes, of course’. Get in line! You and everyone else on these bumps in the middle of the Pacific. Who’s going to pay them? The tax burden’s already sky-high. Between high taxes, high prices, and strangling regulations, just about every business in this state has gone broke except tourism, and the tourists are sick of getting gouged.”

Shigeta: “And how do you know this, haole? You a Baldwin, or something?”

Baldwin: “As a matter of fact …”

Kalakaua: “A Big Five bumboss?!?”

Shigeta: “Running working people into the ground for the sake of your swollen profits?!? How’s your buddy Bernie Madoff doing?”

Baldwin: “Listen up, commie. Like it or not, profits are what make it possible for society to pay teachers to surf on Wednesdays. If businesses aren’t allowed to make the kinds of money that will keep both their executives and their stockholders happy, they’re going to move or fold. And when they do, there won’t be anything left in Hawai‘i but coconuts and government. And you don’t want the government running things.”

Shigeta: “Damned right. All they do is tie us up with rules and threaten to fire us if we don’t dance to their tune.”

Kalakaua: “Government don’t do nothin’ fo us ‘cept rip up our tents and throw us in shelters. An it no even is ours!“

Baldwin: “And it taxes us to death for nothing! How come we don’t have anyone from government in here?”

Valet: (opening door) “None of them are in this hotel. The Adversary – the one you call (ptui) God – took one look at how they had to try to meet the mutually-impossible demands of the people they were supposed to govern, and decided they’d had their hell on earth. So they’re in that other place.

“Speaking of demands. The other cells are sick and tired of your bickering. If you don’t shut up and learn to get along, all hell’s going to break loose in here. Your only warning.”

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

OK. I am curious.

No. Not Yellow. Or Blue. Or even George.

I’m curious about this fad that’s shown up in a lot of online (and, I presume, TV and print) advertising lately. The fad for running single words into two or more lines. I’d like to know where it came from and, if I step on it hard enough, can I kill it?

Like in the ads for the energy drink (not the most potent one, water):

TH
AT’S
G

Or the ones for the latest exercise in useless environmental handwaving:

HOPE
NHA
GEN

I can only assume that, late one fine 11th hour before a deadline on Madison Avenue, a stressed graphic artist tried to run too many letters into too small a text box, thereby:

A. Revisiting the joke about planning ahead that has to be at least as old as the wooly mammoth;

B. Reliving the experiences of a gazillion ten-year-old kids and their first experiments with fonts in The Software That Shall Not Be Named®.

The graphic artist, being desperate, pitched his broken-word “design” to the client – who bought it.

And now it’s spreading faster than H1N1.

It has to be stopped. Has to be, I say. Before it catches on in the blogosphere.

I mean,

CAN
YOU
IMA
G
INE
IF
SOM
EON
E
TRI
ED
TO
WRI
TE
A
WH
OLE
POS
T
LIK
E
THI
S?

Hey. Let’s try this out on Twitter …

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

“So, Reg, I’ve been thinking.”

“Ah. That explains it, Syd.”

“Explains what?”

“Why all these salesmen have been wandering around looking like they’ve just been furloughed. They couldn’t get you to stop thinking, so they couldn’t sell you anything.”

“Actually, it’s furloughs that I’ve been thinking about. You know that story that’s been making the rounds about the couple who couldn’t work out the price of avocados?”

“Yes, I know the one.”

“And how that’s used as a reason why we can’t afford to be losing teaching days out of the school year here in Honolulu?”

“That does seem to be the popular opinion.”

“Well, riddle me this, then. Our avocado-buying hero graduated from a public high school, right?”

“Presumably, yes.”

“Twelve years in the classroom at our expense.”

“Surely, by now, …”

“Let’s say the public’s expense, then. Twelve years, and he still doesn’t get simple arithmetic. How much more time in school does he need?“

“Syd, I can’t tell you how glad I am that you understand this. Ever read The Hobbit?“

“Ages ago. I like to think I’ve outgrown the need for hobgoblins. Except when they come to the door at Hallowe’en. That’s this weekend, isn’t it?”

“It is. Then you won’t be surprised when I tell you for what age group Tolkien wrote the book.”

“What age group was that?”

“The British equivalent of American fifth grade.”

“Fifth grade?? You’re joking, Reg! My son was telling me that it was on the reading list for a literature course in college. And many of the students found it too tough.”

“Exactly, Syd. We keep getting told we have to keep kids in school, get them more days in school, get them into college. The rest of the world is doing it so we have to as well, to keep up. But what good does it do if all that the bachelor’s degree certifies is the ability to do grade school work?“

“Maybe.”

“Oh, right, you once hired a college football player. Didn’t work out well, did it?”

“I’d rather not talk about it.”

“Your son doing better in the job?”

“He gets by. I only intervene when I have to.”

“Which is just about every day. Like me and my daughter. They’ll learn.”

“I hope so. But what can anybody do about this education thing? We can’t keep throwing good money after bad.”

“The whole system has to get more efficient. Set the standards and stick to them. No more excuses, no more court cases, no more 9-to-5. Everybody has to buy in, teachers, parents, kids, the lot. You have to meet the need of the nation with this much time and this much money. And if you don’t make the grade, you’re out.”

“The private schools can do that, of course. But the public schools?”

“Why not? Look, there are some people who are never going to learn algebra no matter how hard they try. Why force it on them? Design programs that get them to do what they can do the best they can, and let them go do it. Wait tables, if that’s what they prefer. How much time do you have to spend in school to wait tables?”

“There are people who prefer to wait tables?”

“There sure are. ‘Dependent natures’ and all that.”

“Who said that?”

“Abraham Lincoln, no less. And who am I to argue with a god?”

“Speaking of gods, the accountants aren’t going to be very happy with this scenario. Not those who’re selling college courses to students, for sure, however useless you think those courses are.”

“The accountants get it. They’ll cope. They’re the only ones I know of who do college right. ‘Cause they worked out long ago that their path to riches is by keeping us happy and their labor scarce. So you’d best believe that they have standards, and you, student, will meet them or else. The biologists keep complaining that nobody pays them what they’re worth. Well, dammit, if they had a guild that set strict standards of admission and performance like the accountants have, there’d be fewer biologists, but they’d all be millionaires.

“And you know as well as I do; somebody who tries to cheat the system and run his business with a non-certified accountant usually gets what he deserves.”

“Chapter eleven?”

“Chapter seven. Really, Syd. You sound like somebody who needs more wine.”

“I have to admit, that Château Mouton Rothschild was a nice drop. But the bottle’s empty.”

“Indeed it is. I’ll order another. Boy! Boy!! Shiftless lazy white coon! Git your ass over here!”

“Yes, massuh.”

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

“Dude?”

” … zzzzuuhmglzzuhhWha …?”

“What do you get when you go around in academic circles?”

“Dizzy, dude. Especially when you can’t get no sleep.”

“Sorry, dude. But you did look awful funny, with your nose pressed up against the laptop screen like that.”

“Mrrrflgrrrluk.”

“Not to mention those long strings of $$$$$$$$$##########$$$$$$$$$$$$^^^^^^^^^^^ in that report you’re writing.”

“Long strings of wha … AAAAACK!”

“You’d probably be more comfortable resting your head on a pillow. In a bed. You remember beds?“

“Yeah, yeah, dude. I’ll get there. Wednesday.”

“Remember when you were telling me about ‘publish or perish’, dude?”

“Yeah …?”

“I didn’t think you meant literally! Did you …?”

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

“Waikiki?”

“Because lock lock.”

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

“What you got there, dude?”

“Flyer came in the mail. About flu season.”

“And what are we supposed to be doing with flu season?”

“Sprinkling it on your linguine.”

“NOT.”

“You may as well, dude. If you don’t, someone will do it for you.”

“Dude, that’s gross.”

“Sorry to hear you say that, dude. We were going to the pub tonight. Now we can’t.”

“Why not? The pub won’t want anybody workin’ there spewin’ germs over the grub and brewskis. They’ll send the sickies home.”

“And those workers who stay home will pay the rent how?“

“With their sick days, of course.”

“Dude, you’re clueless. These people ain’t got no sick days. They go to work sneezin’ and sweatin’, or they won’t have no work to go to.”

“But that’ll spread germs all over the place!”

“It gets worse, dude. Say you’ve got a kid, and two parents – or, worse, one – bustin’ their guts to keep the kid in sneakers. The kid gets the flu. Says here in this flyer that the parents are supposed to keep Junior home. OK. Who’s going to get fired so that someone can stay home to watch the offspring throw up? Parents’re already sweating bullets over these damned furlough days. ‘The school’s closed and I can’t afford child care’ won’t cut no ice with a boss itching to cut payroll. The kid’s not dead, she’s going to school.”

“Dammit, dude, why don’t they just load up a bunch of helicopters with the virus, spray the entire city, and get it over with?“

“What? And deny a profit opportunity to the flu vaccine makers? And what makes you think that the big money dudes whose salaries are increasing while everyone else is getting the shaft, and who get all the sick days their extended vacations could ever use, would let anything like that happen?”

“But what about us, dude?!?“

“We hope that it’s the flu, dude, and not the plague.”

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.