'Tis the Season and other Jolly Thoughts

I drove by a house the other day that still had Christmas lights up. They weren't on, just up. I could understand if they were on, things happen, people don't always have time to take them down and they happen to go on when you turn on the outside lights. But when they're not on, something is amiss and I had a thought. You know those occasional news stories about a body being discovered in an apartment that police say had been dead for weeks and it took the neighbors complaining about the smell for the discovery to be made? Well, I think you see where I'm going here. I propose that once we hit February, any time the police see a house that still has Christmas lights up, they should do a body check. Because here in suburbia, ain't no one going to be complaining about the smell.

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Have you used a Kleenex recently? I don't know if these were special Kleenexes or just the regular kind (and we're talking Kleenex the brand, not Kleenex the generic term for tissues, because, well, that's why we have the word "tissue"), but they were pretty much the exact opposite of what you need a tissue for. They actually repel liquid. I kept blowing my nose, only to discover the snot would find it's way out of the inside of my nose and onto the outside. Curious, I ran some tests. Test #1, which was purely accidental, involved dropping a fresh tissue in the toilet. It floated. Floated! On top of the water! I then proceeded to poor water on a tissue slowly, to see what happened. Sure enough, the water beaded on top of the tissue.

By my count, a tissue has three primary uses (and let's all please get our minds out of the gutters, though that would only serve to enhance my point), as there are three things that come out of one's nose. Boogers, snot, and blood. Why would I use a tissue that repels the latter two? And then there's crying, which is more tangential to the tissue industry, but do you want to dry your tears with a tear repeller?

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There hasn't been a new swear word in forever. I'm not exactly sure how swear words happen. I mean, I doubt there's some sort of international committee assigned to this sort of thing. It more just kind of happens, I guess. But I think we need a new one. And since it's so hard to come up with new words and easily integrate them, I say we take an existing word. I recommend "asterisk." It sounds a little dirty and it would wreak havoc with various word censors.

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If I had a band, we'd be called the Histrionics.