Clang the Clangers! It’s Contest Time Again!

by Roger White

Either I’m having a patella-buckling, spleen-expanding, koala-slapping case of déjà vu, or I’ve written all this before and am now simply too addled to recognize it, but here goes: You know how sometimes the gods smile upon you. Yah? True, sometimes they do. This is when things somehow turn out OK despite your astounding lack of common sense. Sometimes, however, they just grin and chuckle, leaving you to fend for yourself. They are amused at your puny efforts.

And yet other times, the gods smirk or give you that blank stare like you really screwed things up.

My advice for these times is just to act like you truly intended the outcome, no matter how calamitous. This gives the gods pause, and that brief delay in the Great Spinning Wheel of Fate (GSWoF) often provides that slim window of time in which you have a certain measure of self-determination. Like that time you were second string on the seventh-grade football team, and the coach was trying to decide whether to let you in the game just before halftime and in your excitement you simply ran out onto the field and got to play two whole plays before coach yelled at you to sit down and quit acting foolish.

Kinda like that.

This is to say that I believe the big guys are smiling at present, because just in time for the Third Biennial Oldspouse Familiar Phrase Contest (OFPhC) I have received another supply of premium glossy bumper stickers as prizes, you lucky ducks. That’s ducks, with a “d.”

For those too young, old, sensible, or hirsute to remember, the OFPhC involves a pile of phrases, quotes, movie lines, book titles, common sayings, utterances, and/or bodily function noises that I’ve rendered in a somewhat obscure manner. Your job, should you decide to accept it, is to come up with the more common version of said utterances. For example, say I give you “A Male Homosapiens For All Periods of the Year.” You say—… oh, come on. You say, “A Man For All Seasons.” Bingo! See how easy?

First three humans (I will accept cats, too) to respond at roger.white@tasb.org with the correct answers each wins a premium glossy bumper sticker (sorry, the “Ronald Reagan for Governor” ones are all gone—you get “Jesus is Coming. Hide the Bong”). And you get your name in the Gazette! Pseudonyms are fine.

Exciting, huh? OK, ready and. Go. What are the more well-known versions of these sayings:

1. She steers me to imbibe.
2. There is a lollipop spawned each 60-second interval.
3. Expired males don’t do any storytelling.
4. Feline Atop a Heated Metal Canopy.
5. A Few Prefer It Scorching.
6. Do not allow the insects in your bunk to munch on you.
7. A countenance only one’s female parent would really like.
8. Leave snoozing pups to recline.
9. Chance, Manifest Yourself as a Woman This Evening.
10. At the rear of each guy who’s accomplished something one will find a female.
11. Idiot’s precious metal.
12. Traversing the brook and through the forest, to my mother’s mother’s abode we travel.
13. The Era of the Water-Bearer.
14. A Story of a Couple of Towns.
15. Mothers, do not allow your offspring to aspire to be ranch hands.
16. Stay Upright Near Your Male.
17. Lucifer persuaded me to act as I did.
18. If I’ve informed you 16 divided by 16 times, I’ve informed you 250 times 4 times.
19. This is the manner in which the small, rounded pastry disintegrates.
20. The third planet from the sun is your bivalve mollusk.

Roger White is a freelance bivalve mollusk living in Austin, Texas, with his lovely female spouse, two precocious offspring units, a very obese dachshund, and a cat with Epstein-Barr. For further adventures, visit oldspouse.wordpress.com. Or not.