A Prophet Speaks This Very Day

 

President Russell M. Nelson.

A prophet speaks this very day;

and will we hear what he will say?

Or will our worldly disbelief

so rob us of his good relief?

A humble heart, not analytic,

will make believers of each critic!

 

Today's timericks.

 

I'm using all the brains I have to get by nowadays/I doubt if it is ten percent -- I'm always in a haze/The rest of my grey matter's on a permanent vacation/It's incommunicado at some tropical location.

Pastors want their churches open, it is plain to me/so they keep on working and collecting a fat fee/Idle clergy do not get much manna from the Lord/and empty pews give clergy but a trivial reward.

The elephant has sad old eyes/and so it comes as no surprise/when eccentrics guarantee/the animal's humanity/But if I were a pachyderm/that would really make me squirm/Since humans are so very cruel/and rarely live the Golden Rule.

Free radicals are after me/so full of rank duplicity/in my bloodstream they do lurk/doing hemic dirty work/hurry, mountebanks, to me/with your nostrums gluten free!

I love scallions, yes I do/but if I should breathe on you/your reaction is to make/faces at me like a hake/so I'll switch to garlic corm/as my staple snacking norm. 

Inside the house I wear my shoes/because bare feet are bugaboos/they pick up lint and turn all black/and I might step upon a tack/If I could float like Voldemort/I'd take 'em off like a good sport.

Today's Timericks

 

I love sauerkraut, you bet/yet I often do regret/eating it so late at night/with a fiendish appetite/I have dreams that Hitler would/call a reason for sainthood.

Sore losers come in many shapes/gnashing on their sour grapes/but the current prize goes to/a certain White House bugaboo/he's so brittle and unreal/he sounds just like a glockenspiel.  

Don't travel on Thanksgiving/that's the word from CDC/just stay at home relaxing/watching football on TV/Order Chinese takeout, with a six pack on the side/and if you grow despondent/try a little cyanide. 

state governments are trying many things to fight the plague/but somewhere 'long the line they're still a-thinkin' mighty vague/they're closing schools, then curfews start/but ask them to shut down/biznesses again and all you get's an angry frown.

Rudy Giuliani is a bedbug crazy guy/who leads his legal team to doom while hollering 'banzai!'/he hasn't got a chance in hell, but that won't stop the suits/he's filing like a madman for the client and his mutes.  

The grave shall have no victory

 

No victory goes to the grave;

Christ our Savior all will save --

some to great estate beyond,

while others their estate have pawned --

but all will resurrected be

I testify most happily. 

Today's timericks.

 

The scourge of nighttime peace and rest/Insomnia comes like a guest/unbidden and unwelcome too/who stays no matter what I do/The only way I find repose/is writing soporific prose.

Christian Krebs could just not learn/never to speak out of turn/He was fired for this vice/by a leader thick as gneiss/It just shows that solid truth/goes down with some like cheap vermouth.

Museums mild and peaceful are/only if they have a bar/where the patrons can imbibe/and avoid all diatribe/Beauty lasts forever, but/right now I prefer rotgut.

Democrats have sadly learned/that they will get badly burned/when they cry "Defund Police"/Voters want to keep the peace/They'll put up with bad cops cuz/it's better than all lack of fuzz.  

Presidents will always gripe/that the press is full of hype/Republican or Democrat/the press ignores their caveat/Is it any wonder they/wish the press would go away?

New York City public schools are closing up again/tighter than an oil drum or a Puritan's 'amen'/When they may reopen is a question for the ages/So I wonder who will pay their idle teacher's wages?

In Congress Republicans snort/their leader is coming up short/With tweet after tweet/he discounts defeat/and thinks that he's going to court.  

Love the truth and be not shaken

 

Love the truth and be not shaken;

Christ this world has not forsaken.

When all others fail and stumble,

God above sustains the humble.

Today's timericks.

 

"I suspect you could help some of the journalists cut down their longer ramblings to more focused pieces..."

James Mackintosh. Journalist, Wall Street Journal.  

A vaccine against ignorance/or maybe even greed/is what investors ought to seek/and what we ought to breed/there is no cure for folly/and inoculations fail/to keep the market steady/or the borrowing to scale.

Like a drunken sailor, Uncle Sam used PPP/to paint the nation ochre with a monetary spree/but bankruptcies are spreading and small bizness goes kerplop/with the sound of shuttered doors at ev'ry other shop. 

Cardboard boxes fill the land/Amazon is feeling grand/when recycled, all those boxes/makes good paper, mulch for phloxes/books and cups and straws galore/let's stay at home and shred some more!

The Senate's warning Zuckerberg and others of his kind/that they expect to see their platforms quickly more refined/to stop the silly rumors and the mongering of hate/otherwise the Senate will . . . continue to just prate. 

The Wand of Odemer: A Farcical Fantasy. Chapter Three.

 

CHAPTER THREE.

Designing a dragon by committee,

and dealing with the powerful

Clang Bakers' Guild.

A few days after the last chapter, just as word was beginning to spread about the wonders of socks, Brumpton summoned his demon servant Mortlock for a conference. Mortlock had been out in the park that surrounded the wizard's decrepit castle, roaring and ripping up the ground with claws that threw clods of dirt a mile or more. This was a regular activity for the demon; who might otherwise vent unwisely in the presence of his master. His master knew about this activity, which played hob with the shrubbery and fruit trees, but, as he told the demon one day when both were in pleasant moods, could he but rent Mortlock out to local farmers to harness and then plow their lands there'd be a pretty penny in it.

But no pretty pennies were in evidence today. Brows beetled once again, the wizard curtly explained to Mortlock that his bootless efforts at protecting the Wand of Odemer had led to a fine pickle of fish -- they were both in danger of the King's wrath. Not that the King could do much to a wizard as eldritch and mighty as Brumpton; it was just the look of the thing -- so embarrassing to be called on the carpet about it. So a diversion was needed -- something to keep the King from summoning a Grand Council and then discovering that the great Wand was AWOL. 

"So we are going to Clinton Hill, where I may counsel with my fellow sages and mages in complete secrecy about the matter" the wizard informed his demon servant, bidding him get things ready for the trip.

*********************

At the same time, King Tubal and Queen Wannamaker were already  involved in a diversion that promised to keep their minds off the Wand of Odemer for a long time.

The powerful and ruthless Guild of Clang Bakers had sent their Guild Master, the worshipful Osip Greenland, to haughtily inform the king that, things being as they were -- with plague raging in the North and barbarians raging in the South and pirates infesting their East coast -- the Guild was giving serious thought to replacing the King and Queen with a new set of royalty imported from a kingdom in the far West, such as Odalum.

Instead of having Greenland's head chopped off for such insulting impertinence, King Tubal graciously bowed his head and said he hoped the Guild would not be too hasty in having him and his Queen removed from their thrones. Then he offered Greenland a cup of tea.

How did this mere baker, with white flour dust drifting from his clothes, come to dictate such terms to his monarch? Very simple -- clang bread was the very bone and marrow of all Vanillia. Without it, the country would wilt away like hoar frost.

You see, clang is a very special kind of a bread. Most bread, as is well known, grows stale and moldy, becoming inedible, the longer you keep it. But clang was just the opposite -- like a fine wine or premium cheese, the longer it aged the better it tasted, and when it finally turned black after about two years it was considered more delicious and healthful than anything else in the world. It was an imperishable commodity that only grew in value the older it got. And all of Vanillia ate it at every meal. For the humble, it was often the only thing they ate. The clang bakers, who carefully guarded the recipe so that no outsider ever learned it, never charged exorbitant prices for a loaf of clang. All could afford it whenever they wanted it. And they wanted it all the time. "As reliable as clang" was a saying on the lips of everyone in the kingdom when they needed to reassure one another of something or someone who was considered iffy. And right now the King and Queen were considered iffy by the Guild of Clang Bakers, and not as reliable as a single crumb of clang -- and if they decided to pull the plug on the daily clang in protest of the King and Queen's policies and practices, the populace would undoubtedly pull the plug on the King and Queen in short order. 

"But what about our beloved Infant Heir?" cried out the Queen in anguish. 

"Well, what about the Infant Heir" replied Greenland, with a disdainful shrug. "You see one baby, you've seen 'em all. We wants no babies interfering with our internal affairs, anyways. We've lined up a swell pair of royalty in Odalum, without any offspring, and they promise to toe the Guild line -- hook, line and sinker!"

"But our Infant Heir is entitled to respect, remuneration, and rank and file protection!" the Queen continued stubbornly, ignoring the King's frantic hand signals to be quiet and let him get a word in edgewise. 

"You've had me final offer, then" asserted Greenland with a calm finality. "Things must improve in the North, in the South, and especially along the East coast -- to stop them thieving pirates from robbing us of all the incoming grain we need to make clang for the hungry masses. Do so quickly -- or start packing."

Greenland stalked out, without even touching his buttered clang and cup of tea.

"I think I'd like an apple and a slice of cheese right about now" the King said quietly to his servant, who bowed low and went out.

"Oh, how can you think about food when the Infant Heir is about to be displaced!" cried the Queen.

"How can I not?" asked the King wearily. "As things stand, it may be the last good meal any of us get for a long time to come . . . "

******************************

Once arrived at Clinton Hill, Brumpton went into immediate conference with his spell casting peers in an ancient watch tower at the edge of a poisonous green swamp, where there was no chance they could be overheard.

Now, as I said earlier, the minds of witches, warlocks, sorcerers, necromancers, and wizards, are a closed book unto me. They never allow their minds to be read by anyone, and so their thoughts are an eternal mystery. They do, however, take meticulous minutes at their meetings , and I just happen to have a copy of those particular minutes. Which I will now share with you. Unfortunately the first few pages were used to wrap up a large carp some years ago, so I will have to pick up about halfway through the meeting:

It was moved and seconded that a dragon would be summoned, refurbished, and trained to fly about the countryside causing terror and general chaos but not any damage to life or limb, in order to discompose the royal couple and postpone the Grand Council meeting until the Wand of Odemer could be located and secured.

Grimber the Great then suggested the dragon's color be green, with shades of purple down it's pointy spine. After some debate, this point was taken up and approved.

Mendenhall the Modest then suggested that the dragon be given a cast in one of its' eyes to keep it biddable, but this was shouted down by all present, and Mendenhall was escorted out of the watch tower by the sergeant at arms, and then set on fire for a few minutes to teach him a lesson.

Miss Honeypenny asked if the dragon could be used to deliver packages when not busy combusting the countryside. After considerable debate it was decided that such activities would be too demeaning for such a titanic creature. Miss Moneypenny apologized to the group for her 'daft' idea (her own word for it)and voluntarily withdrew into a corner, where she buttered willow wands for the remainder of the day. Her sister, Miss Grackle, then proposed a break for lunch and pinochle. The meeting stood adjourned until 3 p.m. that afternoon.

Promptly at 3 p.m. the matter of how many heads the dragon should have was earnestly discussed. Brumpton the Mangle Heaver stated his opinion that a three-headed dragon would not be fully appreciated by the simple folk of the countryside. Eric the Pink countered that a dozen heads might be just the thing; giving the local yokels something to tell their grandchildren about. At this point someone threw a chair at our committee leader Thurston Thundercloud, and all hell broke loose. When the dust had settled it was discovered that someone had made off with the dessert cart. By unanimous vote it was decided that whoever threw the chair did it as a distraction so they could hijack the dessert cart, and the meeting was adjourned sine die. 

An ad hoc committee was then formed, consisting of Brumpton the Mangle Heaver, Gristlebone Buttonfingers, Miss Marpole, and Black Eustace, to hunt down and capture a small and defenseless dragon to feed vitamins to until it was built up enough to begin a reign of terror swooping about and roaring like anything. The ad hoc committee decided the dragon would have no head at all, be bleached white, have its wings clipped so it couldn't escape, and be named Pooty. 

A good time was had by all.   

In the event, no dragon was ever captured or summoned or trained, or, thank goodness, named 'Pooty.' Word finally reached the sages and mages that the King and Queen were in danger of being deposed in a bloodless coup, which would keep them busier than ants at a funeral for the time being.

A few of the mages and sages angrily confronted Brumpton, upbraiding him for wasting their valuable time. But in reality wizards and witches, and all their ilk, always have plenty of time on their hands, since they rarely do much of anything for anyone else. Most are content, apparently, to perform something strange and dazzling once a year, and then call it a day. Brumpton, for instance, caused mincemeat pies to rain down on the royal castle  during the winter solstice, and could rarely be bothered to exert himself otherwise. He himself never gave an explanation as to why he had riled things up by snatching the Wand of Odemer from the evil grasp of Eustace the Black, thus starting a great and tedious cycle of recrimination and revenge -- but his demon servant Mortlock was overheard more than once saying that his master needed the wand to solve a particularly tricky jigsaw puzzle. And besides, King Tubal had commanded the finding and keeping of it -- and Brumpton was under a spell cast by King Tubal's grandfather to obey his grandson in all things. 

Or it may have been Just One Of Those Things that people talk about long after any interest in it has evaporated. Like quoits. 

Today's timericks.

 

The poet has but little say in life as lived today/He's shoved into a corner to declaim out of the way/Honored and coopted at the same time by yahoos/how often do you hear about one on the daily news?

Farmer Brown is growing rich/as crop prices start to twitch/higher than a heifer's jump/China's buying more, by gump!/soon our farmers can afford/to build their barns with gypsum board.

 In a wildlife refuge cold/drillers drill for liquid gold/they ignore the flora, fauna/dreaming of a nice warm sauna/as the wildlife drains away/drillers don't have much to say/since it's legal, they don't care/dispossessing polar bear.

Hey, Big Pharma, watcha know?/profits down and PR slow/doctors will not take the risk/of fronting for you now -- tsk tsk!/better try a brand new scheme/to sell snake oil and acne cream.

The Wand of Odemer: A Farcical Fantasy. Chapter Two.

 

CHAPTER TWO

In which the history of the Kingdom of Vanillia

is still not explained,

and probably never will be,

the author being such a 

careless narrator.

Night lay over the Kingdom of Vanillia, as its residents snored and whistled and sighed and rolled about in their beds. Candles were very dear, since they were made from elephant ear wax, so most people, even very rich people, even the King and Queen for the most part, went to bed when the sun was gone and got up when it reappeared in the morning.

There was an exception to this; a rat creeping along the dank Vault stairway in the wizard Brumpton's decrepit castle. It sniffed the air, wrinkled its nose, then climbed up a bit of crumbling mortar to fetch a bent piece of metal and wood -- the Wand of Odemer, which Mortlock had casually stuffed into a crack instead of shutting it up securely in the Vault, as his master, the wizard Brumpton, had instructed him to do.

The rat thought the object might be a bit of food -- when it comes to something to eat, rats are eternal optimists. So it bit and chewed on the Wand, mutilating and bending it until it looked like a poorly planned pretzel. Still unsure if the object were edible or not, the rat scurried back up the stone stairway with it in its mouth. It squeezed through a barred window, ran along an alley overgrown with snitchweeds, and settled down to determine once and for all if the Wand could be digested. It could not be digested, the rat finally decided, and so it carelessly dropped the Wand into a little stream that flowed at its feet and went looking for something else that offered better nutrition for a poor rat on a dark night.

The Wand of Odemer, or perhaps it might be more accurate to now call it the Pretzel of Odemer, was carried away by the stream. It's fate will be told of later on.

Returning to the rat, a strange thing happened to it after gnawing on the Pretzel of Odemer. The potent magic of the Wand, or the Pretzel, wrought a weird change in the rat; it became sentient. It suddenly realized that it was a rat, a member of the rodent family that was hunted down for food by beasts of prey, and despised and poisoned by men because it destroyed crops and spread disease.

"I didn't ask to be born this way!" the rat wailed in despair, having suddenly developed a bright squeaky voice to express itself.

The rat then decided that its name would be Rudolph, and that it would not give in to existential despondency, but instead work to become a benefactor to all mankind.  

The noble rat Rudolph at once set off to find a place where it might ponder and plan, and possibly find a bit of rancid offal to sustain itself. It settled under the floorboards of a cobbler's shop, where the remains of several dead beetles kept it going as it observed how humanity kept its feet protected with simple wooden clogs. For at that time cobblers were more carpenters than leather workers -- no one had yet thought of using something supple to wrap around the feet. So everyone stumped about in wooden clogs, and even the best made clogs occasionally contained a splinter that made the wearer wince, stop, extract the splinter, and use an assortment of bad words that were banned in Bub Town. A small band of artisan cobblers were trying to sculpt clogs out of small blocks of granite, but their efforts and originality went unappreciated by anyone who  bought a pair and wound up with amazingly painful blisters. And besides, the stone clogs weighed a ton.

And so Rudolph came up with the concept of socks.

Knowing that mankind was not yet ready to accept a talking rodent, the wise Rudolph waited for the cobbler and his wife to go to bed, and then crept stealthily into their bedroom, to whisper and cajole the cobbler into dreaming about cloth tubes to protect the feet of his customers from splinters.

The next morning the cobbler arose with something rattling around in his head -- an idea for the invention of socks. He got his wife to knit him two tubes from her woolen yarn, with one end open and the other closed, and began offering the tubes, the socks, to his customers, as protection against splinters, and as a way to keep their feet cozy and warm.

In a matter of weeks everyone in the Kingdom of Vanillia was wearing socks, or at least had heard about them and wanted a pair. King Tubal knighted the humble cobbler, who then became Sir Cobbler and lived in lofty splendor with his wife in a Mansion by the River Purn.

As for our friend Rudolph the noble rat, there is little more to tell, and what there is of it is sad. Set upon by alley cats one night after venturing out to investigate the tantalizing odor of a spoiled bloodwurst sausage, Rudolph perished ignominiously, with these words on his filthy gray lips: "The sooner the better!"

****************************

Now we had better be getting back to the wizard Brumpton and his lazy demon servant Mortlock.

The morning after their great adventure and escape from the clutches of the warlock Black Eustace, Mortlock arose with a satisfied rumble, something very much like the noise a small volcano might make just prior to exploding with moderate violence and destroying a village or two. He stretched his leathery wings luxuriously, giving a prodigious yawn that showed to good advantage his yellow fangs. He scratched himself, and had just about decided that the world was a good old place after all when a troubling thought came to him -- his master Brumpton might decide at any moment to go down to the Vault to check on the Wand. 

And the wand was not there. 

"Not good. Not good. Not good!" said Mortlock to himself as he hopped down a trapdoor to descend the stone stairway to the Vault, hoping he could remember exactly which crack in the wall he had stuffed the cursed Wand into last night.

Mortlock was not anxious to have his dereliction of duty discovered, since his master was not known for his forgiving nature. And while demons are pretty much indestructible, they can be caused to feel a great deal of pain and embarrassment. This is usually done by tickling them. They hate it. It makes them lose control of their bladders and gives them a bad case of the hiccoughs. So if you ever encounter a demon some dark and moonless night, just brandish a feather in front of its snarling, fiendish face, and in most cases the demon will head for the hills rather than try to harm you. I just happen to sell a line of demon-banishing organic feathers online, so you can visit my website, as noted at the end of this story, to order them for yourself and loved ones.

When Mortlock discovered the Wand was not where he had left it the night before he set up a wail that could be heard in the pine barrens of Fistula. Then he ran back upstairs to his room to sprint in circles, crying out all the time: "Not good! Not good! Not good!"

Brumpton finally came to his door to discover what the ruckus was all about. Looking sternly at the demon the wizard demanded to know what was causing all the hullabaloo. 

Now in the real world, not this fantasy world that I am carefully and patiently constructing bit by bit for you the reader, in the real world where we all have to live, when people make mistakes they are quick to own up to them and manfully take their medicine. But I regret to say that in the Kingdom of Vanillia servants feel very comfortable lying to their masters. And Mortlock had a story all set to go. He was a fast thinker, and his forked tongue was as smooth as pond scum.

"You may not believe what I'm about to tell you, master" began the demon, noticing how the wizard's beetling brows were about to crash into each other, "but I swear on a stack of pancakes that it's true." Mortlock stopped at this point, his red rimmed eyes bulging out of his head as if he were being strangled while a slow dribble of sulfur dripped from both ears onto the flagstone floor. He knew he had to make this whopper a good one, one of his best -- or the ostrich plume in his master's study would soon be at hand.

"Well, I'm waiting" said Brumpton impatiently.

"I went down to the Vault this morning to check on the Wand, and I discovered a large rat had gnawed its way into the Vault and was holding the Wand in its greedy mouth. I made a grab for it, but it evaded me and ran right up the stairs so fast that I couldn't catch it. It disappeared into a hole in the wall, in the wall, in the wall, and now . . . and now, I have no idea where the Wand of Odemer is!"

"Hmm" the wizard did not believe Mortlock's ridiculous-sounding tale for one second, and he had a sure way of checking its veracity.

"Come with me" he told the demon abruptly. They went into the wizard's study, where Brumpton began casting identification and tracking spells. The room filled with a purple haze as the incantations took effect.

And since, for the most part, Mortlock had unknowingly been telling the truth about the rat and Wand, the incantations confirmed his story. Mortlock, of course, had no way of knowing that his fib would not now prove fatal to him -- he was shaking so hard that his scales began shedding.

"Stop that!" commanded the wizard irritably. Now it was the wizard's turn to walk in worry circles. What would the King and Queen say when he told them he had lost the Wand of Odemer. More importantly, what would they DO? 

"We must find that miserable rat" the wizard told his demon servant. "How good are you at summoning vermin such as rats?"

It just so happened that Mortlock was very good at summoning such disgusting creatures as cockchafers, silverfish, and even rats. He could make them come to him and dance a jig in front of him until they fell dead at his feet with exhaustion. But he was not about to tell the wizard this. Not on your beebaw.

"Not very good at all" replied the demon with mealy-mouthed modesty. "I'm more of a flying cobweb demon myself -- can make 'em shoot all over the place without batting an eye . . ."

"Useless creature -- out of my sight!" cried Brumpton, throwing a small, but hardly inoffensive, thunderbolt at the demon.

"As you wish, sir" replied Mortlock, deftly avoiding the sizzling bolt as he shut the door behind him.

The wizard went over to his lectern to stand and think. And since we cannot know his thoughts, we will leave him there.