In The Funday Sunnies featuring Duncan this week, we see that the life of a fantasy creature is not all fun and games:

 

Professional help is where you find it, I guess.

     Mr. Cousins has been getting a newspaper on a free subscription. In addition to giving us the raw materials for what is turning into a half-decent papier-mâché replica of the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, it’s also given Moose and me the chance to catch up on current events.

     So, one of the bigger deals before Open Mike Night started up there at the U.N. has been the U.S. presidential election, or as Uncle Fun likes to call it, The Race for the White Elephant. (Yeah—I don’t get that one, either.) Apparently Barack Obama has opened up a consistent lead in the Gallup polls. I don’t figure that’s entirely due to the American voting public’s insatiable appetite for mixed messages and irrelevancies.

     I think it has more to do with how he looks now. Thanks to the combined pressures of his job and the Peter Principle, he’s gone from the glib poise of a young Bill Cosby, only—well, I was going to say “only not as funny”, but that depends on your opinion of Bill Cosby—to the harried world-weariness of the Chief of Control.

 

     And who doesn’t feel sorry for the poor old Chief, right? It’s an easy sell these days, what with international politics looking more and more like an episode of Get Smart.

 

 

    (And, by the way, am I the only one who hears Netanyahu’s voice and immediately begins to think about those old “Ant and Aardvark” cartoons?)

     But back on topic…since Get Smart seems to be setting the tone and tenor of the times (Uncle Fun taught me that expression), I think it’s time for a little Control in the White House (boy, that one writes its own punchline, doesn’t it?). At the very least, they could plunk Obama and Romney under the Cone of Silence until November 7, so we don’t have to hear them flap their gums while saying nothing.

     Personally, I think there’s enough grassroots support for a viable third-party alternative to make the ranks of Control the ideal place to look for a candidate. Remember Agent 13, the operative who brought a whole new meaning to the phrase “deep cover”?

     Anybody who’s spent that much time up to his neck in garbage ought to have no trouble getting used to Washington. He also stays out of sight most of the time, which would be a refreshing change in a Chief Executive. And nobody takes much of what he says seriously, which puts him in line with a presidential tradition that goes back at least to Gerald Ford.

     …or maybe I mean Agent 44. I can never tell those two apart.

     They could work out who was going to be president and vice-president once they sorted out who fit best into the hiding places in the Oval Office. Either way, it makes for a great ticket:

 

     And with a slogan like that, they’d pull John Kerry onside, and (much more importantly) some major funding from his wife Teresa Heinz, The Ketchup Queen.

 

     In any case, I can’t see how this wouldn’t help the Good Old U.S. of A. I mean, what could possibly happen in a country with a former spy in power…?

 

(Okay — mebbe I’m a little out of line with that one.)

Sparky

The Funday Sunnies featuring Duncan is still in the middle of a maritime idyll:

 

It’s comforting somehow to know that we mere mortals don’t have a monopoly on completely obvious jokes.

     Further proof that our dear friend Mr. Cousins is slowly but surely losing his grip: in the wee hours of this morning, during a bout of insomnia brought on (he claims) by the sound of Sparky jimmying his bathroom window, Cousins told me about another dream he’d had recently. In the dream, he was a contestant on a game show hosted by Bob Newhart. So far, so good. Somehow (since the show in question didn’t seem to involve an actual game of any sort), Contestant Cousins won the grand prize. A wooden packing crate large enough to contain a small refrigerator was then wheeled out and opened, revealing the prize to be…Pee Wee Herman. One more thing you should know: Pee Wee Herman’s face was covered in a thick coat of pancake makeup roughly the shade of mint-flavoured toothpaste.

     This is the sort of thing that could earn any psychoanalyst brave enough to take the case the naming rights to whatever Mr. Cousins is suffering from. As his lifelong friend, I do feel obligated to present some sort of defense against the charge that Cousins is turning into a hard-core nutcase. The sound file at this link establishes beyond all shadow of a doubt that he became a nutcase years ago.  

Uncle Fun

This week, The Funday Sunnies featuring Duncan dips once again into the old vacation photo album:

 

What happens in the ocean with mythical creatures stays in the ocean with mythical creatures.

     (It has become increasingly apparent to me that our good friend Mr. Cousins is in dire need of a drastic head-shrinking. I offer these recent scribblings of his as evidence: I found them in close enough proximity to the shelf where he keeps his billfold and loose change jar to qualify as being in plain view, and therefore public domain. –Uncle Fun.)

Things That Occur to You Before That Second Cup of Coffee Kicks In Department:

     Although it’s earned the label of “classic”, the 1939 movie version of The Wizard of Oz is strange and puzzling in ways that sometimes defy description. Take these lines from the song “We’re off to See The Wizard”:

 

If ever, oh ever, a whiz there was,

The Wizard of Oz is one because,

Because, because, because, because, because—

Because of the wonderful things he does.

 

     What’s weird about this is NOT the fact that the word “because” is repeated six times. (I said it nine times in a row when answering a question during my thesis defense, and still got an M.A. for my trouble.) The mind-blower about this lyric is that, as memory serves, it comes on the heels of precisely ZERO description of the Wizard’s specific powers, or any particular instances in which he put them to use—never mind whether the results were wonderful or not.

     This goes beyond mere jumping to conclusions: Dorothy is extrapolating the idea that some unnamed individual at the far end of a boulevard paved with coloured bricks has a proven track record of marvellous deeds on the strength of his job title alone.  If she’d been going to see, for example, the Chiropractor of Oz, she wouldn’t bother checking up on his credentials, or ask for a referral from either her G.P. or a close personal friend. She’d just blithely skip along with Toto, singing something along the lines of:

 

If ever your back becomes misaligned,

The Chiropractor of Oz will fix your spine,

Your spine, your spine, your spine, your spine, your spine—

Manipulating it until you feel fine.

 

     (This is why there haven’t been any musicals about chiropractors…never mind the challenges for lyricists presented by terms like “chronic femoral dysplasia” and “lumbago”.)

     Just to make it crystal clear what the real problem here is, Dorothy’s got no reliable proof to back her assertions up. She doesn’t even have uncorroborated anecdotal evidence at this point. Usually musicals are sensible enough to have someone step forward and throw in a line of dialogue citing a verifiable concrete manifestation of someone’s abstract virtues, if said virtues are about to be extolled in song. Not so in the Land of Oz. Does a Munchkin take Dorothy aside and tell her that the Wizard cured him of cancer, or reassessed the equity on his house so that he could get a second mortgage at a more competitive rate? NO. Those sawed-off little solipsists are too damn busy jockeying for position to see which of the Lullaby League or the Lollipop Guild can give Dorothy (who’s about to leave anyway) the best welcome to Munchkinland. The only person who even alludes to anything the Wizard might have done is Glinda the Good Witch of the North, and all she does is make vague references to his abilities, which she’s obviously never seen in action. Besides, she’s kind of an unreliable source of information, since her judgement is pretty seriously flawed. After all, she’s just given Dorothy a virtual death sentence by fusing a pair of ruby slippers onto her feet so that the Wicked Witch of the West can’t get her bony green hands on them by any means short of homicide.

     To recap: at the time she starts singing about it, Dorothy has no reason for believing that the Wizard of Oz does ANYTHING at all, much less anything wonderful. She’s going on blind faith, with only the encouragement of an interested party who has the not-very-well-hidden agenda of passing the buck to anyone who can correct a miscalculation that has made Dorothy’s untimely demise both imminent and highly probable. What she should be singing is:

 

That stupid bitch Glinda dropped the ball,

So now I’m forced to pay a call—

A call, a call, a call, a call, a call—

On someone I don’t know from nothin’ at all.

 

     There’s fifteen pages more of this, most of it on the subject of how not casting W.C. Fields as the Wizard was the single greatest injustice of the Twentieth Century, with a two-page digression on how Ned Sparks would have been a better Tin Man than Jack Haley, Sr. If the faintest shred of doubt remained in my mind concerning whether Ye Olde Cousins had gone well and truly off the deep end, it’s somewhere over the rainbow by now. I, for one, would be forever in the debt of anyone out there who can tell me where to obtain a serviceable cut-rate straightjacket.

Uncle Fun

This week’s edition of The Funday Sunnies featuring Duncan is another Kodak-moment holiday snapshot:

 

(Is Kodak still around to have moments for…?)

That’s it—my blog has finally flipped…

Hello, all you dreamers out there:

     Like the rest of you, Our Mutual Friend Mister Cousins, who loans us this space on the internet, also has dreams. I don’t mean the sort of thing where one wishes for limitless dominion over far-flung princedoms and heaped-up sums of ready cash. I mean ordinary, everyday—or, rather, every night—eyes-closed-while-sawing-logs-during-one’s-forty-winks-type dreams. The following is one of them—a dream that the sleeping Cousins had last night, and, for reasons known only to himself, has shared with me:

     In this dream, as part of the September drive to the pennant, the Philadelphia Phillies acquired not one, but both giraffes currently under contract to other major league teams. (This is how you can tell it’s a dream, by the way—the Phillies are out of contention this year.)

     You may look at this lovingly-crafted artist’s rendition for as long as it takes all that to sink in.

    Apparently, this seemed strange to everyone in the dream as well. For one thing, neither of the giraffes had a particularly good batting average. A simple explanation cleared up the confusion. It wasn’t just a quick-fix move by the Phillies—it was part of a long-term plan. You see, they wanted a breeding pair.

     All contributions to help Mister Cousins get the psychiatric help he so clearly deserves are greatly appreciated.

Uncle Fun

 

In this week’s edition of The Funday Sunnies, Duncan is still on holiday down by the shore:

 

If there’d been a bit of this on Jersey Shore, it mightn’t have got cancelled.