Uncle Fun and Sparky Land

 

     Despite Our Miss Moose’s objections, the shibboleth which has been cut-and-pasted into the speech bubbles of the above illustration remains truer than ever. (For those who'd like to cut and paste another tidbit of useless information into their official Uncle Fun and Sparky scrapbooks, the drawing was repurposed from an as-yet-unused pitch for a television cartoon show…maybe someday procrastination will ebb and ambition will flow, but that’s a discussion for another time. As you can tell from the remark that ended that last sentence, procrastination is very much in the ascendant, with je-m’en-foutisme rising.)

     But I digress (which is like procrastinating, if you think about it, but like all things related to procrastination, you can probably do that later). In an effort to introduce her to the joys of their semi-bohemian lifestyle (and possibly one day drive her away from it as fast as she can run), Mr. and Mrs. Cousins have put their infant daughter Ruby to work as a shill. It’s all in a good cause: promoting Kurt Fitzpatrick’s one-man show Cathedral City (directed by Mrs. Cousins; sound design and cameos via voice-over by Mr. Cousins) at the Ottawa Fringe Festival. Here’s the photographic evidence for any interested child welfare authorities that no Ruby Cousinses were harmed or unnecessarily exploited during the aforementioned shilling.

 

     Anyone who may be concerned that Ruby is less than fully aware of what’s going on should note that she has the solicitous look of someone who’s already wondering when that appearance fee she was promised is going to show up.

     Speaking of appearance fees, if any charities in Canada are on the lookout for someone to get attention for them, Ruby works for almost nothing at all. This way, if large sums of money go missing unexpectedly from your bottom line, you won’t have to enlist members of the ruling party in Parliament to ask the Prime Minister’s Office to peddle influence or defame someone’s character on your behalf in order to square your accounts. Unfortunately, this does mean you’ll have to find your own way of dealing with board members who go rogue, and maybe even submit your books to a forensic audit, but that is the way that things are done in countries where the rule of law applies equally to the rulers and the ruled.

     …and possibly even in Canada—in theory—well, that’s the way it used to be there…or so I’ve heard. 

Uncle Fun