Overdue Limericks

And Almost-Lost Bluffs

Driven half-mad by recent revelations that the most recent ex-president of the United States is not a sound individual, and that the nation may be succumbing to a non-Muslim version of sharia (avemaria?) law, I neglected to include the traditional limerick-about-a-deplorable-male-person in my last two columns.

            So here:

            "Get out!" his Mrs. told Hugo,

            Who stood up to her and said "You go!"

                        "Thanks." "No, I meant -- "

                        He sputtered and went

            Wherever believers in Q go.

            Can a Congressman maintain a hard-on

            When word is, he asked for a pardon

                        (Without contrition)

                        For a bit of sedition?

            Not asking for me. For Jim Jordan.

            So there.

            In my last column, by the way, I inexplicably wrote "Jim Jacobs" where I meant "Jim Jordan." Apologies to all Jacobses.

            Enough of all that mess.

Last week I promised to tell about my non-apperance on "Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me," the NPR comical news quiz show. What happened is my Thursday morning flights got changed so that I would have arrived in Chicago (if ever) too late. And Adam Burke, a trenchant young stand-up who lives in Chicago, was available.

            I was lucky: the Friday return I had been booked on got canceled so drastically, I would have been forced to snatch a few hours of sleep that night on the Cinnabon counter in Charlotte. (Will planes ever run on time again? Don't tell any Republican voters what Mussolini did for the trains.)

            Just one downer: I had already written my bluff.

            The "Bluff the Listener" segment of "Wait Wait" is the only one for which the panelists write in advance. (Well, we are told the subject of the last segment, the prediction, shortly before we go on stage — the whole time I am trying to remember what rare animal it was that found its way into that preacher’s vest in Alamogordo, or whatever, I am also readying a hopefully droll response to "What will Clarence Thomas say this week, to explain how he and Ginni managed not to have children for so many years, given his doubts about the constitutionality of birth control?" Or whatever.

            Everything else expressed by panelists is off the cuff. But conjuring a snappy version of a given odd news story, or a fictional news story on the same theme, takes time. (And the stakes are high. If the listener guesses your story is real, you get a point.) So an e-mail came Wednesday night from Ian Chillag: "Weezer has a new song, but to listen to it, you have to pretend to be a record player and spin around at 33 1/3 rpm." Peter Grosz was assigned to embellish that real story. Helen Hong and I had to come up with fakes.

            My first effort:

            The notorious dueling-harpsichord duo, Kwan and Schminsk, who put the sick in harpsichord, are promoting their new album, "Plucked by Plectra," with a video in which they go at each other ferociously on their back-to-back chirpy, tremulous instruments in costumes that look like rotting shrouds. As they trade take-no-prisoners attacks on Scarlatti's something in D minor, CGI harpies (get it?) swoop down to tear off chunks of costume and flesh until --

            Too morbid. I am 80 years old. If I were fourteen, I would get humorous ideas about pimples or baseball. Hmmm. Boyhood. Second effort:

            The boy band Buster Browns has never quite clicked virally. That may change now that they have declared themselves, and their new album, to be an infectious disease. "Get It" is the album's title . . .

            Nah. How about "Buster Browns Go Gutbucket." Nah.

            So:

            Funny thing about this funk/zydeco/sawgrass fusion band, out of

Turquoise, N. M.: the name of the band is Gimmick, and yet they never have had one.

            "We didn't really realize it was a real word," says Roarke Muncy, one of the two brothers who front the group, "we just liked the sound. We are all about sound."

            "And words," says his brother Hogan.

            "Yeah, but we forget them. Anyway, somebody said to us, 'You gotta have a gimmick,' and long story short, we have one now, with the road-lizard heads."

            Implanted, in each brother's shaven scalp, a stuffed but nearly live-looking lizard.

            "Like," says Hogan, "'crazy as a road lizard,' you know."

            "And thing is," says Roarke, "when we're not appearing, we can always wear a hood."

            "Or even just a big hat," says Hogan.

            That would have done. And now it hasn't gone to waste.

Note:

Yes, yes, the Clarence Thomas prediction would presumably include the word “rhythm.”

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