Friday

Grand Canyon 5616

It’s Friday, and you know what that means, we’re going to have a brand new show! And if there are any of you out there that watched the Mickey Mouse Club show as religiously as we did then you know that the phrase “And you know what that means, we’re going to have a brand new show” was actually said on Tuesday and it was “And you know what that means, we’re going to have a special guest”. Then they’d bring out somebody to do something goofy and we all thought it was the neatest thing we had ever seen and we called our friends to see if they were watching it too. They always were. But that doesn’t fit in with what I want to say today so I changed it. I can do that because I am the Overlord of this site and I can pretty much do whatever I want to.

Friday is always kind of a lost day where you go through the motions but you’ve got the weekend off and your heart isn’t in it. You’re not sure what you’re going to do, you have no big plans really, but you don’t want to waste it. After all Monday is just a couple days away. Maybe you’ll have some people over and just hang out. It would be a good time as Aunt Pheeb and Uncle Skid haven’t got out of the hospital yet. So you could have kind of a drama free day. Everybody knows what happens when Aunt Pheeb and Uncle Skid get wind of a party.

The reason they’re in the hospital is Uncle Skid heard that there was an all you can eat Crawfish boil down at Big Leg Kathy’s Shrimp Shack out on Hwy 11 and there was a $40 prize for whoever could eat the most crawfish in an hour. He talked Aunt Pheeb into going along with him and since Aunt Pheeb had been into the gin since about quarter to seven that morning she was game. Uncle Skid thought that if they both entered and won they’d win $80 bucks and that would go a long way towards getting the boot off the Skylark so they wouldn’t have to walk when they down to Ruby’s for cigarettes.

Uncle Skid had a cunning plan to win. It seemed like a sure thing and once he explained it to Pheeb they thought they had this thing knocked. Being Skid he was already trying to figure out how he could skim a little off the top of that $40 bucks so that Pheeb wouldn’t know and he could buy that cool Eight Ball spinner for his steering wheel he’d had his eye on for months. They could still pay off the parking tickets and get the Skylark out of hock. All they had to do was win.

The way everybody with any sense ate crawfish was you grabbed one, bit the head off, sucked out the rest of it from the shell, and then threw the shell at your neighbor. This has been the excepted practice for generations. Uncle Skid, using what small amount of animal cunning he had, noticed that this took about 5-7 seconds. His plan, and this is where the brilliance comes in, was to bypass all that mechanical stuff of shucking and sucking, and just eat the whole thing shell and all. And if you didn’t have to chew that was even better yet.

Well, that was three weeks ago and they may get out of the hospital the end of this week. The 40 bucks are gone. Skid didn’t read the flyer right and missed where it said ‘whoever’, singular, not plural, eats the most etc. so the most they could win was $40, and the hospital took that before they’d even let them sit in the emergency room waiting area. It didn’t matter how loud Aunt Pheeb moaned or tried to get at the receptionist they were going to wait. Security was there, they’d had these two in here before.

It seems that when you ingest over 14 lbs. of crawfish shells it does stuff to your lower alimentary track. It all bunches up like, and forms a ball about the size of a small cat. Apparently Nature does not have a system to take care of this naturally. The staff there at Our Sisters of Eternal Misery hospital have a wall of miracles they call it, where they post the dumbest things live people have done to themselves and/or each other and this little episode is posted right up there at the top. There were Doctors, Nurses, Residents, Interns, Candy Stripers spitting milk clear across the cafeteria tables when they heard what happened.

Pheeb swears she’s going to lobotomize Skip with a bread knife and a cantaloupe baller when they get out. Skid is worried that the Skylark is now at the impound lot and he’s going to have to come up with not only the parking ticket money but now the impound fees and they’re going to be walking to Ruby’s for cigarettes for the rest of their lives.

So there it is then. Have the party now before they get out and maybe it will be one that doesn’t involve police and paramedics and the guys from Power and Lights having to re-string the neighbors electrical lines because Skid leaned that aluminum ladder against them so he could crawl up there and look over the hedge at the guys wife. We all know how that turned out.

And if a party doesn’t float your boat why not drop in at the Grand Canyon and take in the sights. It’s pretty there, mostly quiet and since the Skylark is out of commission Uncle Skid and Aunt Pheeb won’t be dropping in.

Candy-Gram

Candy-Gram3631Coyote Yellowstone River

Television has always had a larger than life effect on the animals in Yellowstone. KYEL, Yellowstone’s own closed circuit TV station has been available to the parks residents for many years now. Most animals had cable until satellite came in and now that seems to be the system of choice due to the park’s restrictions on running overhead wires.

The effects on the young animals of the park has been pronounced over the years. Many young Sandhill cranes learned to dance watching American Bandstand and young antelopes waited breathlessly for the Olympic track and field events, especially those featuring the sprinters. Sea Hunt with Lloyd Bridges was a favorite of all the young otters and of course all the young spike bulls never missed Mickey Mouse Club when Annette was on.

But TV had its dark side too. Things that were meant to be humorous were changed by certain individuals to fit their own purposes. We’re not mentioning any names here but they looked a lot like coyotes. Coyotes were drawn to the edgier, hipper, more intellectual type of humor like Saturday Night Live or SNL as we know it now. One of the skits that they particularly enjoyed was called ‘Land Shark” and featured a giant shark that used lots of different ploys to get young women to open their doors so he could eat them. While most viewers laughed at the absurdities of the situation the coyotes watched closely. They saw how they might turn this approach into a technique that would allow them to approach their intended meals in a way that would cut down on all that chasing and running and leaping to get fed. Using the right choice of words would have those ground squirrels walking right into their open jaws.

Here we see a coyote at the front door of a young well-fed ground squirrel calling “Candy-Gram” down her hallway, a favorite ploy of the Land Shark to get you to open your door. You and I laugh at the idea of this actually working but then we don’t take into account the natural dim-ness of a young well-fed ground squirrel. Sitting there on the couch, bloated and on a sugar high from eating all that grass, they are easily fooled and in this case the thought of someone actually sending her a candy-gram overcame her normal sense of caution. Too bad for her.

TV is a force for both good and evil. In this case it was, unfortunately, not used for good. The moral of this story then is, if you’re a young well fed ground squirrel and someone knocks on your door saying “Candy-Gram”, Don’t open the door. Nobody sends ground squirrels candy-grams. If you had watched SNL instead of 100 uses for fresh green grass shoots on Cooking For Rodents, you’d be safe and snug in your burrow right now.