It Rolled Off the Table and On to the Floor

"I THINK a new, different kind of bowling should be ‘carpet bowling.’ It’s just like regular bowling, only the lanes are carpet instead of wood. I don’t know why we should do this, but my God, we’ve got to do something!"

–Jack Handey

Happy
Jack Handey Friday,
dear cohorts!

ABOUT ME: I do NOT

bowl.

THE ONE TIME I WENT in that direction told me the aromatics of old and new foot sweat in combination with cigarette smoke (WAIT. Please include a generous dash of stale beer, too.) did not a magical moment make. I dunno, call me sensitive? Better yet, call me totally athletically inept. I can’t even walk to the read newspapers stack to put the dated sports page on top without tripping. Which reminds me, is Timothy Leary still alive? Go ahead, expand your mind with this smitch of trivia: Leary is (Was he? Leary, that is?)godfather to Winona "Shame on you, put that back!" Ryder; he was Uma Thurman’s one-time stepfather; and Joi Ito is Leary’s so-called "godson"– a close non-traditional family-like relationship said to have been conceived by Timothy Leary for a select few of his friends.

It's a Small World After All,
tisn’t it?
"Tisn't." "Tisn't." Take a minute to say it.
"Tisn't." It's today's feel good- word!

BY THE WAY, do you remember when the sports page
was peach colored? I BEG YOUR PARDON??
My age is showing?!
***pauses to adjusts bra straps, like that will help***

I’M NOT smitten with the Super Bowl either. ***George W. Bushly-dodging hurled shoe*** Or, for that matter, watching Super Bowl people eat the eats and drink the drinks associated with game day, at the same time feverishly crawling over each other like so many lemmings trying to be "me first" at a cliff’s edge hanging over the ocean, when a major football play is about to be, making them the "up close and personal," aka The self-proclaimed Super Bowl authority. LOL! (Hmm? Should that have read "up perse and closonal"? Sorry. Please don’t quote me– I don’t know correct football jargon either, I guess.)

SERIOUSLY, THOUGH, when it comes down to the BIG game, it’s not me being the stooge over in the corner who doesn’t have a single, pigskinned clue that I fear.

IT'S

Photo credit: Richard Eldon
my sister-in-law’s meatballs.

LONG STORT SHORT: JOANNE'S MEATBALLS will nest between the Cheetos and the Seven Layer Taco Dip at the family’s special get-together this Sunday. You see, my SIL thinks she can cook, and claims to be one. THE best. The Midwest’s Julia "Sul-tee-eeens" Child. She often saddles us with her Tupperwared-inedibles, which clandestinely meet up with the garbage disposal as soon as we get home from her place. Joanne is to the kitchen what William Hung is to American Idol. I know. I know. I’m being unduly harsh. Like my sister-in-law, I can’t cook either, but unlike her, I readily admit to it. That fact immediately established me as Chief Bottle Washer at all family functions, a title Joanne should be assuming from time to time. It's the LEAST she could do. Okay. Okay. I’ll give her this much: I AM able to swallow (and I re-shingled my garage roof with them this past summer) her

Lisa Douglas

"hotscakes," but only if chased with several tall glasses of milk, after which I offer Joanne a strained, but convincing, smile of approval and a thumb’s up, all the while concealing a "Oh my God, Is my throat bleeding?" look on my face. I’m an enabler, aren’t I?

CULINARY WIZARD that she’s not, my sister-in-law will not divulge a single, solitary recipe she’s "birthed," sensing one of her "perfections" will some day rake in the BIG buck$. So, as for her meatballs go, I think I’ve been able to narrow down the makings of for you. I call them "Joanne’s Jesus-Take-the-Wheel Meatballs" and the ingredients and mechanics go like this:

MAYBE SQUIRREL (possibly lemming???) mixed with pencil sharpener shavings and Wisconsin toe cheddar (helps to give it that bowling alley aroma) held together with a funny colored, aged school paste, crock-potted and then simmered in the watery brine found at the top of the can of Spaghettios, collected over a series of consecutive months and set outside on the backyard picnic table to ferment like some sort of secret sun tea (that of which whose recipe will also make Joanne rich some day), to be tapped on days like the Super Bowl, when torturing the family’s tongue buds is also the order of the day.

EIGHT WORDS:
I do NOT want to go to there.
–-a reworking of words spoken by Tina Fey’s Liz Lemmon

Got to run to the store; I’m out of bounds!
SparkleFarkle~~~~~*

RIP, my Mollo and Drea.

Good “Comma,” or Who’s Steering These Stars Anyway?

Happy
Dog Day
Monday!

SPACE-SUITED Fido
about to be launched, boldly going where
no man has gone before, aligning planets
along the way to result in mystic crystal
revelations and minds’ true liberations...

***off key-belting***

Aquarius! Aquarius!

OOPS!

Wrong

Astrological
sign.

TODAY'S

stellared Kibble ‘n Bits

is aimed at those of you born under the Zodiac’s first sun sign Aries, and especially in the direction of Yours Tah-ruly: THE Queen of the Run-On Sentence, who hasn’t religiously followed each and every horoscope listing (Tiger Beat being the "in particular") since grade school daze, but is seriously reconsidering a return down that path, having read this dead-on predictor in a recent periodical making small talk with other magazines on my coffee table:

"ARIES (March 21 - April 19)
YOUR SHORTNESS OF BREATH and wild fainting spells will be cured this week, thanks to a series of well-placed commas."

***rabidly nodding in affirmation***

HUH? HUH?

THERE'S SOMETHING TO THIS
zodiacal compassing,

doncha thin’?

IN KEEPING WITH THE regular, but this time,
nearly backseated canine theme, on this almost
auspicious Dog Day Monday,
I present to you a Sfarkled rebus:

This

MINUS

a

PLUS

a

EQUALS

"Comma-Reignian"
aka
Me, a name I call myself!

***suddenly feeling sleaze-seized, changes into

something tacky and polyester,
sprays mouth with breath freshener and
saunters up to an invisible bar and drops
the ultimate pick-up bomb***

FIVE WORDS:
Hey, baby, what’s your sign?

***is met with random thought after
glancing back at blogs’s first image***

THAT MOVIE John Travolta made in the mid-70s,
loosely based on the "chew" character whose

comic

also included a must-follow fortune, is undeniably (at least to moi) one of the most influential and best-remembered made-for-tv movies I ever ate popcorn to.

***rereads above strip, sparking a political flashback***

HMM...

WAS IT JUST ME me,
or did anyone else notice

Hillary Clinton mouthing
along to the presidential oath last Tuesday?

And in the words of all those "Your Fearless Leader" wannabes:
"Gotta run!"
SparkleFarkle~~~~~*

RIP, my Mollo and Drea.

And a Good Time was "Hat" By All

Happy
Jack Handey
Friday!

"IF YOU WEAR a toupee, why not let
your friends try it on for a while.
Come on, we’ re not going to hurt it."
–Jack Handey

OKAY, then. Headgear it is. Since the inauguration is still lingering in the air, tell me you’re up for just one more vote? Here goes:

Did you
OR
did you NOT like

Aretha’s

"Do not open till Christmas"?

IT WAS "WHOAH!" at first sight the moment my little, green peepers gazed upon that which had kinged Ms. Franklin, and the diet Coke I was drinking Old Faithfulled out my nose. But now I’m thinking The Queen of Soul’s got to be thanking God that I had the presence of mind to drop what I was doing at the time, and do an immediate Sparkle Farkle courtroom sketch of her and her hat duet-ing at the Barack Obama presidential swearing in ceremony. Without it, I wouldn’t have been able to put in all the no-matter-where-pull-out-the-drawing-and-pour-over-it hours of the eyeballingiest scrutinization that led me to reconsider the "nay" ballot I first cast when Aretha Franklin’s bedazzled chapeau seized the day.

YEP. I’VE CHANGED my mind.
My "nay" is now a definite "yea,"
and wouldn’t it be grand if we all
started wearing hats, I mean

Hats by Lilly Dachean and Hattie Carn

real hats,

again to all our major functions? Heck, why stop there? Let’s wear them to the grocery store, too. Let’s wear them to walk our dogs. Let’s wear them while we watch TV. Let’s wear them as we hunt for the remote. Let’s wear them as we settle in to watch TV, again. Let’s w– ya know, even though I look like an idiot in absolutely anything perched on my head, I’m willing to have a go at it. Are you game? Just think, if Aretha’s headpiece resurrects a long-lost fashion trend, an excerpt from one of my favorite books might soon be chiming o’er the land.

FIVE WORDS:

"Do you like my hat?"
–a quote from P.D. Eastman’s Go, Dog, Go!

***tips looking-like-an-idiot-in hat***
Stay close,
SparkleFarkle~~~~~*

P.S. GRAB A couple of

cookies
on your way out.

PARDON? WHAT WAS THAT you asked? Why yes. Yes, you’re right. The cookies are wearing toupees.

RIP, my Mollo and Drea.

Black and White and About to Be Read All Over

"THAT’S MY dog Tige.
He lives in a shoe.
I’m Buster Brown.

Look for me in there, too. "
–as spoken by

Jerry Maren as Buster Brown,
also fondly remembered as the Lollipop Kid,
who presented Judy Garland’s Dorothy Gale
with an enormous lolli, welcoming her to
Munchkinland in the 1939 film classic,
The Wizard of Oz

Happy
Dog Day
Monday!

AND

Guess what?

Illustration credit: Richard F. Outcault, 1907

I’ve been tiged!
Get it?
Tagged.

MY FOREVER PAL, SweetPeaSurry,

literally living up to the name of

the lead "arf"

in an old cartoon favorite of mine, made off with this terrifically creative blogging idea from another friend’s post, tagging me at its guidelines’ conclusion. Here’s how it plays out:

The Instructions

and
Yours Tah-ruly Giving Them a Follow

1. Go to your documents.
***puts tap shoes on first,
so readers can hear the

making one’s way
to My Documents***

CLEATED SHOES add character, don’t you think?

2. Go to your sixth file. Mine being the one titled "Black and Whites." (I bet you’re thinking this is where my collection of old cop car images gather. ***howling like a rabid paddy wagon*** Car 54, Where are Yooou?!

3. Go to your sixth picture. Farkled pic number six equals a wonderful photo portrait of an American actress and sex symbol, whose popularity pinnacled on the 1920s Silent Screen. For her fans, she was an insatiable thirst they never wanted quenched, garnering her the title "The ‘It’ Girl." The brand was coined by English romance novelist and screenwriter Elinor Glen, who described the term "it" as "that quality possessed by some which draws all others with its magnetic force. With ‘it,’ you win all men, if you are woman– all women, if you are man. ‘It’ can be a quality of the mind as well as a physical attraction, [and also can be defined as] self-confidence and indifference, whether you are pleasing or not– something in you that gives the impression that you are not at all cold. That is ‘it.’"

4. Blog about it (and, coincidently, "It"– Dog Day Monday-wise, specifically).

***first changes the long "O" in the
pictured’s last name to an "ow" sound,
making it rhyme-able with the about-to-be-added,
remarkably blog-timely suffix***

Clara Bow-Wow,
who gave us these

TEN (Dog Day) WORDS:
"The more I see men, the more I like dogs."

5. "Tige" six friends to do the same.
TWO, FOUR, SIX, eight, ten,
I quit and you’re it! ("It"?):

Ralph Ellis
ascaffo
RottieGirl
Dogisms13
Hoeech (also situated here)
and
K.

***taking off taps***

Time for a soak; my dogs are barking!
SparkleFarkle~~~~~*

RIP, my Mollo, Drea, and Uncle LaValle

The Winters of My Discontent

"WHEN YOU GO ice-skating,
try not to swing your arms too much,
because that really annoys me."
–Jack Handey

Happy
Jack Handey
Friday!

***props up cardboard cut-out of
making-a-special-guest-blog-appearance

George
and motions for him to begin***

"Listen, (Me: Oo-ah-oo!)
Do you want to know a secret? (Me: Oo-ah-oo!)
Do you promise not to tell?, whoa oh, oh.

Closer, (Me: Oo-ah-oo!)

Let me whisper in your ear, (Me: Oo-ah-oo!)
Say the words you long to hear,
(Me: Oo-a--)

***cardboard Harrison elbows SparkleFarkle
before she can complete another Oo-ah-oo!,
signaling she should take it from here***

YEP.
ANOTHER FARKLED "UNTOLD"
finally unfolds:

I wish I could ice skate.

I MEAN really ice skate: to be able to fly on the frozen blue of winter like a snowbird with lightening-speed runners silvered to my feet, but especially backward! (the skating direction, that is, NOT how the ice skates might be laced on) Yes, my friend, we are talking SparkleFarkle’s Heaven!

AS A SMITCH, I longed to be doing

what all the other kids
were doing,

but my un-athletic self wasn’t about to cut that kind of mustard. The one time I did manage to balance long enough to attempt picking up something remotely resembling speed, the ice and I suddenly became up close and personal --my left ulna first-- leaving it nearly two of its former self. Being the panic attack that my mother was, she never let me near anything glaciated again. (Hmm...? Looking back on it, at all the birthday parties that followed my

fractured fairytale,

the other kids got ice cubes in their sodas, but not Yours Truly. Mom meant business. She probably meant well, too, but her over-protectiveness only served to fuel my ever-growing lack of self-confidence, still a rogue, omni-present, evil

Gorilla in My Midst.
Hmm. Didn’t Sigourney Weaver
star in a film by the same name?)

NEVERTHELESS, I CONTINUED TO barnacle myself to the thought of being the First Lady on Ice, but did so "mums"ly. I guess I figured it was best to spare my mother --someday to be named the Patron Saint of Worry About Anything AND Everything-- the grief. Sadly, over those younger years, the closest I got to a pair of skates was watching Sonja Henning (my older sister) conquer "the world" (split jumps); gliding my index and middle fingers around like a mini-me, over my white bed sheets, early mornings before the afore mentioned sibling sleeping next to me could wake up and mercilessly ride me about it; and playing glamor girl with my mom’s clip-ons.

You know, the kind of

earrings with
the "ice skaters"
on their backsides?

DOWN THE ROAD, I developed an
exceeding-normal-bounds fascination

for TV figure skating and ice dancing
competitions, whose

to-die-for costuming

and trend-setting "dos"
I found quite encouraging.
(In 1976, I actually wore my hair in a

Dorothy Hamill wedge.)

Ahhh... It seems like only yesterday that I feverishly watched the televised 1984 Winter Olympics; at ever twist and turn, I yearned to be Torvill to its Dean. "Bolero me!" I’d cry out in my sleep.

UNDER MY PROTECTION, my hidden, Ice Capaded-aspiration (obsession?) thrived without interruption. I recall a time when my would-be husband, thinking it would be great fun, offered to get us tickets to attend a touring ice show called Disney on Parade: Mickey on Ice. Mickey Mouse is near and dear to my heart, but knowing Walt, I figured it might be some sort of traveling rodent-cryogenics lab, and passed. "No one ever said frozen dream-clinging would be easy," I’d told myself.

THE WINTER BEFORE last, I took a deep breath before I dropping several subtle H-bombs near my husband, indicating "ice skating might be calling me, of all people," and "Wouldn’t lessons make a nice Christmas gift for just about anybody?" Something, but not enough, seeped into his gray matter. He immediately went out and replaced my daughter’s outgrown skates, and picked up a brand new pair for himself! I smiled bravely as I handed off the baton (a thermos of hot cocoa) and waved good-bye to them from the doorway as they headed to the rink. That afternoon, I wrote to Santa and asked for a case of assertiveness and a boost of self-confidence– just enough to allow myself to give me permission to be me. If he could come through for me, I knew I’d be skating by the following winter! Instead, the September before last year’s first snowfall, I made a new friend and constant companion: Candy. As in cane. An inexplicable chronic sacral joint problem insists I can no longer go it alone. This year’s mission: Google till I find an ice skate in Ms. Cane’s size, whether they match the new skates I’ll be getting or not.

SIX WORDS: Hold on tight to your dreams!

Happy Jack and stay close,
SparkleFarkle~~~~~*

RIP, my Mollo and Drea and former-Mouseketeer and Wally's girlfriend, Cheryl Holdridge .

Chain Reaction

"THEY KEEP ME chained.
It’s never explained."

–an excerpt from If you only knew how much I smell you:
True portraits of dogs by Roy Blount Jr.

Happy
Dog Day
Monday!

YEAH. I KNOW. I’ve reverted back to Mondays’ old label. Cold weather or not, I couldn’t help myself. As much as I have a thing for Perry Como and all his Hot Diggity, etc., Dog Days Monday just rolls off the tongue (dogs' or otherwise) a lot smoother, and, anyway, I felt the need to happily oblige my friends at my old TVdot stomping grounds, who seem more comfortable with referring to it as that. So, ****puts on best Walter Cronkite*** "that’s the way it is." Now, on with the show!

MY MOTHER’S BIRTHDAY is coming up. Well, not quite up up. What I mean to say is, it will be her birthday soon, but not real soon. She’ll be 73 years old on February 25th. "Hmm. Young," you say? Mom likes to insinuate that she and I are the same age. Let me clarify: She is NOT trying to be funny, NOR is she afflicted with Alzheimer’s. I say, "Listen, lady, don’t push it."

Yep.

Mothra’s

big day is 51 days away, to be exact. Pardon me? Why, yes. Yes, I do– right here in my wallet. Just give me a sec. ***grabs purse and goes for it*** Yeah, here’s a picture of my sister,

Emi, and I.
Unfortunately, we’re not so close anymore.
***laughs*** Mom use to give us rides all the time,
until we turned sixteen and did the license thing.

SO IT goes: I’ve got to start thinking NOW about what I might want to get my mother for her birthday. Here’s two fun gifts to give, as suggested by my dog, Janey:

1. Dead animals.
2. Dirty underwear you get out of the hamper.

AT THIS STAGE of the game

(You gotta know Mother’s been driving me a smitch

–okay, more than a smitch– cuckoo, lately.),

both ideas are under consideration.

FRANKLY, HAVING TO CELEBRATE your birthday during the second month of the year has got to be rough. Nobody wants to do anything when that month’s happening; January’s fanfare is a hard act to follow. February is just waiting for another month to happen– with the exception of Valentine’s Day, IF you’re a

lovah,
that is.

Yep.
There’s no getting around it.
February is

a monkey on my back
and, in my estimation, all 28 days of it suc-
WHOA, Nellie Bell!!!
WAAAY too much FEBRUARY negativity!

Sounds like I could use a new

photo credit: Millie Mott

"leash"
on life!
(At least regarding February, anyway.)

IN RECONSIDERATION, Pippi just
about perpetually wears a primate,
and she’s still smiling!
Let’s have a go at

the Glad Game,
then!

NAME SOMETHING
SENSATIONAL about this year’s February.
***budges***
I’ll be happy to!

EVERY YEAR, PUPPET (my daughter) and I set aside a day for fairy-frolic! There’s presents to open, fairy bread (and lots more sugar goo, too) to eat; and itty-bitty-magical-beings-fun to be had! ***handing out a gold sticky*** So, star your calendar: This Valentine’s Day has been designated Farkle Fairy Day 2009!

(Hmm.. She bears a striking resemblance
to Mothra, doesn’t she?
OH, NO!!! THERE I GO AGAIN!)

IT’S YOUR turn:
What would your favorite part of February be?

THREE WORDS: Name that tune!

Stay close,
SparkleFarkle~~~~~*

RIP, my Mollo and Drea.

Different “Spokes” for Different Folks

Happy Day After
Jack Handey
Friday!

(Sorry I missed the boat. Hopefully, next time I’ll manage my time a smitch better. Yeah, I know this blog is listed as being entered on Friday, January 2nd, but no kidding, where I'm pounding away at the keyboard, it's waaay early morning, January 3rd. Maybe there's a place I can re-set my blogspot clock/time zone that I've yet to come across?)

"Tired" Clown

"HAPPINESS IS NOT a circus clown
rolling around in a big tractor tire
so that his arms and legs form spokes.
Happiness is when he stops." –Jack Handey

No clown detected here.

HEY! WOULDN’T IT BE cool if
old bicycle wheel spokes

could be recycled into

harps
?

MUSIC TO THIS Farkle’s ears, I tell ya!

SPOKES... Spokes... ***becomes high pitched-whiny*** Do you ever wanna –Yep. I’m channeling my inner-Andy Rooney– grab your giant, imaginary shoehorn and wedge words into new definitions? Me, too! This from the SparkleFarkled Merriam-Webster:

spokes [spoks] n.: utterings, or re-utterings,
from those you least expect.

YEAH, YOU BETCHA you’re in for a real treat ‘cause I’ve got a few cases in point, right here, up my sleeve, the first being probably no news to anyone, but I had to start somewhere:

1. The voice of the devil emanating from the mouth of the on-screen, one-time split pea soup-spewing, swivel-headed, fourteen-year old Linda Blair in the most potent movie of the 1970s, The Exorcist, turned out to belong to actress Mercedes McCambridge. Unlike Miss Blair, Mercedes was "non-dicaprioic," a Farkled term meaning "unable to circumvolve one’s head," as opposed to "dicaprioic," a word not defined by the SF dictionary until the mid-2000s, when a variety of photos surfaced featuring

the on backward baseball cap
donned by Leo DiCaprio,

facing the same direction his head had just been pointing in: the aftermath of Mr. Dicaprio’s faster-than-a-speeding-bullet, almost unseeable, complete noggin rotation (aka the L. Blair 360*).

HERE WE HAVE the openly non-dicaprioic

Mercedes McCambridge (right), strongly
suggesting to her Lightening Strikes Twice (1951)
costar, Ruth Roman, that she might be
(at the time, a condition not yet named) dicaprioic.

2. In his attempt for excellence in the last speech in what became his final film (Giant), James Dean as the drunken Jett Rink addressing the Texas crowd who had spurned him, slurred so many meaningful words so badly, they needed to be re-recorded. Unfortunately, by this time Dean had sustained his fatal accident. James’ close friend and noted mimic, Nick Adams, stepped in and did the overdubs. Adams did the redos so perfectly, it was years before anyone knew all the words hadn’t come directly from Dean’s own two lips.

SIDE NOTE:

James Dean

measured 90 degrees, dicaprioically.

YOU GOTTA WONDER about
this last spokes, though:

3. At the end of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (I agree, great movie!), inside the B-52 headed for Russia, Major Kong (Slim Pickens), after going over the incongruous contents of the survival kits issued to him and his men, is heard to say, "Shoot, a fellah could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that." (I hope you imagined that with a heavy Southern accent!) In actuality, the original line went: "Shoot, a fellah could have a pretty good weekend in Dallas with all that." Chill Wills, known as the vocal talent behind Hollywood’s Francis the Talking Mule, and other non-credited movie voice-overs, supposedly came to the line’s rescue and overdubbed the name of the city after JFK was assassinated. As is, this example definitely fits like a (Strange?) glove when it comes to the definition of spokes, yet I find it hard to believe Slim wouldn’t have just dropped by the studio to re-dubbed himself. But if the hearsay is true, I wonder how much Wills charged for his two syllables.

Slim Pickens:
Obviously a 180* dicaprio.

FOUR WORDS:
Be-de-be-de-be-de,

that’s all spokes!

Stay close,
SparkleFarkle~~~~~*

P.S.

HONESTLY, who among us
really and tah-ruly likes clowns?!

I, for one, can’t believe I’ve got
even one gracing this blog entry.

RIP, my Mollo and Drea, and loving prayers of comfort and strength to the Travolta family.