Ratiocination and a rat
Bugged off on July 9, 2023.
The Stanford linguistics professor who once theorized I was the bastard lovechild of James Joyce and Stanley Unwin was at it again this week. Titled “The Joyce–Unwin theory: Stochastic streams of consciousness and aleatoric blogging,” his academic paper on yours truly was making the rounds on the Internet. It was on Facebook. It was trending on Twitter. It was tooting wildly on Mastodon. It was even being suggested for the Nobel Prize, the Ignoble Prize, and even the Grenoble Prize.
It was unclear why that random Frenchman was handing out prizes for groundbreaking linguistics studies, but some questions are best left unasked let alone unanswered. I surmised it had something to do with goats or cheese—or even goat cheese. But some goats are best left unmolested.
I tried to read the paper but it contained too many words containing the letter E, so I gave up and made myself a goat cheese milkshake. It seemed like the right thing to guzzle at the time.
My dishwasher is totally off-limits now: An angry pangolin took up residence in there on Monday and is now threatening to gnaw off more pieces of me if I open the door and disturb the scaly little miscreant. (It ate the zebra, if you were wondering.)
My toilet is also off-limits now: A sewer-dwelling rat took up residence in it on Tuesday. I was perplexedly flummoxed: Where did the furry little hairball come from? How did this muroid interloper even get into the toilet? My toilet isn’t connected to a public sewer—and I don’t even have a septic tank anymore, not since that thrush-flushing accident back in ’21. After a bout of the most erudite ratiocination, I came to the only possible conclusion: The pangolin invited the rat. I frowned. That theory only raised more questions than it answered (such as, what would be worse? Being punched by Strom Thurmond or kicked by Uma Thurman?)
But again, some questions are best left unasked. I decided to forget the whole affair. The damnable mammals could have my dishwasher and toilet, I conceded. I do have seventeen other bathrooms to choose from, and one of those toilets can certainly do double-duty as a dishwasher. A Sherlock Holmes I certainly am not, but a Hercule Poirot I just may be someday. (As soon as I figure out where all those Boglins in my fourteenth bathroom came from.)
With summer in full swing, my neighbors are now all locked in mortal combat with each other, each viciously competing to keep their lawns the most perfect, uniform, weedless, lifeless shade of green a lawn can be. Next week is the Annual Bouillabaisse Boulevard Sod-Off Competition, to congratulate whoever has the greenest grass of them all. Protesting the silliness of it all, I replaced my lawn with kudzu and told them all to sod off.
The week ended abruptly when I confused a neoplasm with a pleonasm and instead of scribbling out another line in my blog, died of cancer.