No more ghoughphtheightteeaux
Beyellowed on January 19, 2025.
I told my plump little huzzey-muffet she could stop worrying about ghoughphtheightteeaux. I promised to never bring another ghoughphtheightteeau into the house. But she had no idea what a ghoughphtheightteeau was.
I explained: “If ‘gh’ is pronounced ‘p’ in ‘hiccough,’ if ‘ough’ is pronounced ‘o’ in ‘dough,’ if ‘phth’ is pronounced ‘t’ as in ‘phthisis,’ if ‘eigh’ is pronounced ‘a’ as in ‘neighbor,’ if ‘tte’ is pronounced ‘t’ as in ‘gazette’, and if ‘eau’ is pronounced ‘o’ as in ‘plateau’, then the correct way to spell ‘potato’ would be ‘ghoughphtheightteeau.’”
“If it’s yellow, let it mellow. If it’s brown, flush it down.”
But that hadn’t always been the rule around here. It used to be “stare it down” but it’s getting harder and harder to intimidate a turd into flushing itself. They’re getting stronger. Bolder. And I don’t know why.
This rule also broke down somewhat when we discovered someone was urinating in the back of the toilet. And it broke down completely when we discovered someone was urinating in the toilet brush holder next to the toilet. I suspected it was the gnomes again. It’s always the gnomes (except when it’s not, which is when it’s definitely gnomes).
At least no one was desecrating the urinal in our seventh-floor water closet.
President Piggy-Man, our nation’s president for life, would be reinaugurated tomorrow—likely to much fanfare, pomp, circumstance, and execration. (At least no one was execrating the urinal in our seventh-floor water closet.) My repeated letters to the White House Chief of Staff demanding they bring back actual augurs to perform the ceremonies continued to go unanswered. California was burning to the ground, and they were too busy pointing fingers and toes to take the time answer my missives.
Becasue was chittering like a chipmunk from Chittagong. I’d nary a clue what the excitement was all about, but at least she wasn’t threatening to throttle me in my sleep for making up stories about gnomes anymore. Perhaps it was all the apostrophes cropping up all over the place lately. I, ever the woodchuck, kept chucking as much wood as a woodchuck could—doing what I do best. Woodchucking seemed like the only appropriate response to the whole ordurous ordeal. No one was urinating anywhere today—not even Nurdlebutt—but there was a possibility of urinine or urinsevening. I got out an umbrella.
At least no one was defecating in the urinal in our seventh-floor water closet.
Confusion between the facecloth hanging on the wall in our bathroom and the nearby feces cloth caused much consternation when I stumbled into the bathroom at 4:04 a.m. and in the dark picked the wrong one. That was Wednesday. It wasn’t even Turdsday yet.
“Why are some police officers called ‘detectives’ and others ‘inspectors’? Why is it not ‘detectors’ or ‘inspectives’?” These are the questions that keep me staring at my ceiling at night. And then make me go stumbling around in the dark in search of a urinal to desecrate.
Friday. Everyone was atwitter—and Becasue still achitter—about my gromely little town’s upcoming gurning competition. Only three halves of a week remained until that glorious, infabdabulous day! I was atwitter too, even though that Internet birdwatching website didn’t exist anymore. Elon Musk had, quite literally, crossed it out with a big ol’ double-struck X. A strange sense of calm had overtaken me. But not the rest of the Internet. The Internet was angry. Angry, angry, and full of angry beavers. Atwitter, Twitter or not. And it wasn’t just the ongoing apostrophe catastrophe, which had started when someone crafted an A.I. algorithm to convert straight quotes into smart quotes. It turned out to be a bit… too smart. And now the world was drowning in apostrophes.
Before that A.I. could turn it into a pile of apostrophes, we took a dunk in Podunk Lake. But then it wasn’t there anymore—which I blamed on the gnomes. (Was it ever there to begin with?)
I thought about that horse we tried to milk last week. What a crazy caper that was! Oh, it had ended in failure, but there were more horses and more capers in our future. I finally knuckled under and decided to buy a real zebra rather than try to paint that stallion. And I gave up my hope of making mare cheese anytime soon. But, never one to be kept down for long, I moved on to bigger and better things—like my big little redheaded huzzey-muffet’s buttocks!
Shaboingyah!