Monday, March 17, 2008

Stump the Norm, Part Deuce

There was some awesome feedback to last week’s blog, so I’m going to unleash Part II of actual questions sent in by real employees in a real company and responded to in a real newsletter by the real me.

Woo-hoo!!

So without further ado, or further adon’t, here ya’ go…

· Question: How and why do people get ulcers?

· Answer: Having caused a few of these myself, I know that ulcers are caused by excess stomach digestive acids, which are triggered by physical or emotional stress, rather than by the arrival of food. Finding no food in the stomach to digest, these acids get bored and watch TV. Of course, this gives them the munchies, and since there’s nothing to eat, they start eating the stomach linings themselves, which taste really good with Tabasco sauce. That’s why your doctors tell you to stay away from Tabasco sauce and anything else that tastes good with stomach linings.

· Question: Did the married man marry Miss Right as in always, or did he marry Miss Wrong as in never?

· Answer: Um, I don’t not get this not at all.

· Question: Where did the phrase “Going to hell in a hand-basket come from?”

· Answer: To answer this question, I pulled out my handy, dandy copy of Dante’s Inferno, and while there was some good stuff in there, I couldn’t find any mention at all about a basket. So I decided to look to the Classics for our answer. And of course, by classic, I mean classic children’s stories. As you know, much truth and subliminal messages can be found in these stories cleverly hidden behind symbolism and chaos. Like, for instance, the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland. What the heck was he smoking? But back to our question, there are two famous hand basket maidens in the classics, Little Red Riding Hood and Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. Dorothy can be dismissed out of hand, because she simply used the basket to carry Toto and the Lone Ranger. So we turn our attention to Red Riding Hood. We know she was bad, of course, because she was a hood. And she wore red, like the devil. And she never took off the hood, so you couldn’t see that she had horns! I’m glad this question was brought up, so we could expose this demoness for what she is. Warn your children, and never read this book again!

· Correction: It turns out the Question of the Month last month was phrased wrong. It should have said, “Did you marry Miss Right as in always right, or did you marry Miss Wrong as in never wrong? I apologize for my error. I’m guessing that the person who submitted this was either Miss Always Right, or Miss Never Wrong. And I’m never wrong, right?

· Question: What gives a flower its scent?

· Answer: Once again, we have to go to children’s classic books for the answer to this question. I remember reading a story once about little fairy sprites that fly from flower to flower, with little atomizer bottles of Elizabeth Taylor perfume, and squirt subtle, tasteful spray onto the flowers’ stamen, where the scent lingers, sending out aroma to attract male bumblebees. These bumblebees seek out the enticing odor and fly into the flower carpels, looking for cute chick bumblebees, inadvertently picking up globs of pollen as the bumble stumbles and trips over the flower’s stigma. Finally, frustrated, they pick up the pollen, and realizing that their Queen will like it the way it smells, they fly it back to their hive, where they turn it into a sweet, sticky mess that they named Honey, in honor of their Queen.

· Question: We want to know if anyone has a really great recipe for crabcakes.

· Answer: Boy, did you come to the right place. Anyone who knows your friendly-neighborhood writer knows he was born in Maryland, home of the Chesapeake Bay blue crabs. Boy, this takes me back. Crabbing on the warm waters of the inland bay, dodging shallow sandbars, lemon sharks and horseshoe crabs. We’d throw the female crabs back in, because they were crabby. Sorry, just kidding. We’d do it to help keep the population up. Then we’d bring home three to five bushels of live crabs, steam them in huge pots, and invite a bunch of neighbors over for a crab-fest. We’d spread newspapers over the tables, and dump enormous piles of crabs on the table. You open them by the handy tab on their bottoms, pop the shells off, and spend hours picking through the white tender meat. Boy, those were the days! Oh, did I forget to answer the question? Oops, Sorry.

· Question: Do dogs have taste buds? I ask that because I have two dogs, and they eat everything that hits the floor.

· Answer: After exhaustive research, meaning I just dumped a bunch of stuff on the floor, I learned that my basset will eat tomatoes, zucchini, bread and crayons; but he wouldn’t touch black olives, pickles or red gummy bears. My conclusion? My scientific study proved conclusively that my dog won’t eat pickles. Hope this helps you. Another handy tip? Don’t ever trust your dog to watch your food for you.

· Question: Do drywall, oak trim and paint have any nutritional content?

· Answer: Huh? Um, I guess. Termites seem to think so. I’m sure if you’re building a gingerbread house or something. Never mind. I don’t know. Go ask your dog.

· Question: Are paint fumes actually harmful?

· Answer: Darn tooting they are. If you get paint fuming mad, it’s liable to roll itself up in balls, shove itself into a paint gun, then get itself shot at people.

· Question: What do you call the floppy thing under a turkey’s chin?

· Answer: It’s not a floppy, it’s a CD-Rom. Just kidding. As any fan of the old Ally McBeal show knows, the loose skin under the chin is called a wattle. The turkey’s wattle goes back to prehistoric days, back to when the turkey’s ancestor, a shared relative of the pelican (pelicatussaur), ruled the piers and seaports of the dinosaurs. Recent archeological studies have proven that dinosaurs, contrary to thought, were actually quite accomplished sea persons, or sea monsters, as it were. As the ancient pelican gradually migrated further from the sea, and modified its diet by no longer eating fish, its wattle gradually decreased until it shrunk to the vestigial skin flap we see on the modern turkey.

Norm

www.normcowie.com

The Adventures of Guy … written by a guy (probably)

The Next Adventures of Guy … more wackiness

The Heat of the Moment




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