137 O’Blivious and Tales of Other People
Marty just found out he can sing Counter Tenor. But he isn't going the classical route, in fact, he's not even going the Elizabethan route. Marty's playing his banjo and singing bluegrass hits in a medium falsetto. He thinks falsetto is a form of Italian food, and tells people he's just singing a lot of high notes. Noone can quite figure this out. Kind of Tiny Tim for the Confederates. No uke, no "Tiptoe Through the Tulips." Instead, it's "Wildwood Flower," and "
That is this: No one knows more than a few of the words. It's not easy being an anthem. And it's not easy for Marty to be a countertenor because he cannot duplicate his song list in the basso range, and therefore the women in the audience do not know that he is ... um ... he has all his... um... parts.
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They got pills for blood pressure, pills for depression, pills for obsessin, pills and potions for heart burn, pills for reducing cholesterol. Now, PharmoCare has a pill to get all the rest of the pills out of your system. Costs $2.35 a dose and you take it three times a day. But it's a small price to pay, when you think about it. This is because parts of each of the pills, which are called Pill-Out, have to run around your bloodstream and lasso the little tiny parts of all the other pills.
PillOut.Com, for all the info, if you have an internet connection. Otherwise, just ask your pharmacist.
And -- yes -- chances are your HMO DOES pay for it. Surprise!
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At last... a Magzine that you can live with. No words. No pictures. No ads. Nothing. It's called "Nothing." Printed on different color stock each quarter so you can distinguish it from the others. Never out of date. Your doctor will love this publication for the waiting room. Not much substances, but have you read the competition lately?
Your first issue is free. If you don't like "Nothing" just write "cancel" on the bill and fogetaboutit.
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They have something now called the
Mattress 101. Clock setting. Eye closing. Pre-sleep Meditation. Ladies and Gentlemen! (Fanfare) (Drumroll)
The medical division has a whole curriculum on snoring, tooth grinding and over-tossing.
The History Department features "Sleeping through the ages," as a major.
But, of course, the centerpiece of it all, is the
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O'Blivious is installing a ceiling fan in the room of his daughter, who is Mary, 19, and he is doing this himself because Zipaletti of Zip's Electric wants $75 an hour for the job and this is too much, because Zip says it will take two or maybe three hours to put the thing in right and to clean up after. O'Blivious doesn't know too much about this sort of thing, but he figures he can just pull out the light fixture and wire in the fan -- which has its own light -- and then stick the thing in the ceiling, and that's that.
O'Blivious is back from The Home Depot with the fan and he has the ladder all in place and the fuse out of the box and he's ready to put the thing in, but when he gets up the ladder, he finds that they've painted the light fixture so often that it's kind of stuck to the ceiling and it takes a lot of time to pry the thing out.
Mary O'Blivious holds Dad steady and together they get out the fixture. Mary is passing tools up and down to Dad up on the ladder and all the wires and things are in the right place and it really does take only an hour or so. Damn Zipaletti, the crook!
O'Blivious puts the fuse back in the box, flips the switch and on goes the fan and the light. Amazing.
That night, when Dad's asleep, Mary gets the ladder back into her room and quietly removes the fixture... removes the shot glass, removes the pliers and replaces the fixture.
Zip had tipped her.
I'm Wes Richards, my opinions are my own, but you're welcome to them.
(c) 1999, 2006 WJR
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