I'm baffled every day. (Friday's Sunday's Poem/Hot Actor)

Twenty-Six Letters
by me.

The alphabet is weird to me.
I'm baffled every day.
I wonder 'bout the letters and
The words they let me say.

I wonder things like How 'come H?
Or Who invented L?
Or Why is there a W
When one works just as well?

The order of the letters seems
To me to be a mess.
All the vowels hiding in the crowd
And T right next to S?

What sense does that make? Fix it up!
Let them hang with friends!
Let Q and U stand together -
That begins to make amends.

And I and E pair up a lot,
But they live so far apart.
Why can't they be roommates?
C'm0n people, have a heart!

If I'd have been in charge of stuff
When society was formin'
You can bet I wouldn't muff
Things like this that are important.

Your ABCs would make more sense
If I'd been on the case.
They'd be ETAs, for one thing,
And Blickensderfer would save face.

I wouldn't make some letters
Work overtime, while others
Get to loaf and slack and sleep in
At the expense of their brothers.

Like why should C make two sounds?
While X has barely one?
And I does triple-duty,
Which hardly seems like fun.

And then there's Y, that poor thing
Neither consonant nor vowel -
Left in limbo, lonely letter,
Sobbing tears into its towel.

No, I'd have done things better.
You can bet on that, my friends.
Under me, those twenty-six letters
Would finally make sense.

________________________________________________________________

About The Poem: From now on, Friday's Sunday's Poem is going to be exclusively poems I write, and they're all going to rhyme. Unless they don't. But they're mostly going to rhyme.

I wrote this poem because I decided to do this "A To Z" challenge thing -- I'll be doing it on The Best Of Everything -- and so I wanted to do something alphabet-y, something we've all probably felt on a Saturday morning. I was going to go with my B Is For Bapple concept, but I'm still working on that, so I did a bit of Seussian poetry instead.

This poem took me 37 minutes to write. But part of that time was spent looking up which letters are most commonly used, and part of that time was spent tickling Mr F, who insisted on it, and part of that time was reading about the Blickensderfer typewriter, a typewriter that had 1/10 the parts of a standard typewriter. It was sort of the iPad of its day, only less sweat-shoppy and its version of Siri actually worked.

About the Hot Actor: It's Adam Pally, or Brad from Happy Endings. Sweetie picked him because he's funny. And he said our newest favorite line from a TV show: "Jane, I don't have time to read everything that's stuck to me."

Oh... My... God...

My...

Oh...

This is what Mr Bunches spends his nights doing.

When I went in to wake up Mr Bunches and Mr F yesterday morning, this was the scene:



That red/yellow/blue castle there is in fact Notre Dame cathedral. Mr Bunches has been watching The Hunchback of Notre Dame more or less continuously for the last few weeks, and has taught himself to build cathedrals as a result.

(He's advancing. Previously, he was hooked on Hercules and we spent a lot of time building Greek stuff. Now, he's up to the Middle Ages.)

Mr Bunches’ Victory Garden Shall Rise Again!

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of Scotts® for SocialSpark. All opinions are 100% mine.

“We shall fight in the backyard.  By the path. Just outside the house. And by the tree that we bought for $4 on sale at the end of summer and which was bitten in half by a dog… we shall never surrender!”--  Winston Churchill.

No, really, he totally said that.  Just the other day, in fact. I had a séance at which we consulted with Winston Churchill on what to do about Mr Bunches’ Victory Garden.

You may remember that last year, Mr Bunches and I engaged in a spirited round of gardening, shoveling dirt and pushing seeds into said dirt and then shoveling more dirt around, with the ultimate result being, possibly, a single sunflower that grew to about a height of 1 foot and never bloomed.

I think it was a sunflower. Certain people said it was a weed but certain people ought not to dampen certain other people’s spirits about their garden, especially when certain other people are their husbands and don’t need certain people reigning on their parade.

In short, Mr Bunches’ Victory Garden was not a complete success, but it is spring, and hope springs eternal (see what I did there) especially when I have been given Miracle-Gro® Expand ‘n Gro™ Concentrated Planting Mix to try out this year.

Miracle-Gro®, possibly because they want to associate their brand with the kind of star power I bring to the Internet, or possibly because they weren’t aware that I’m something of an anti-gardener, sent me a fee sample package of their Concentrated Planting Mix to try out.

It’s got something called Expand ‘n Gro™ and promises that it will improve the soil for up to three years, feed the plants better than native soil, and result in up to three times the usual number of flowers or vegetables.

Imagine: three sunflowers!

I’m only half-kidding.  A big problem with gardens in our area is not just that one of them was planted by me, but the fact that we have awful soil; it’s made up of 90% sand and 10% hidden Indian graveyards (according to a scientific study that never existed), so it’s tough to get plants to grow here.  But the Expand ‘n Gro (available at lawn and garden retailers in the Midwest, Northeast and Texas or at expandngro.com and Amazon.com) holds water better and actually transforms the soil. 

It’s got something called COCONUT COIR, an all natural addition made from from coconut husk. Coir fibers from places like Sri Lanka are compressed and added to the soil (By the way, this is recycling, because previously these fibers were simply tossed out).  That makes a lightweight, easy to use soil amendment which helps keep air and water available to plants.

See? I’m going to go all SCIENCE on our Victory Garden this year.  Watch out, neighbors. With this Miracle Gro Expand ‘n Gro™ stuff, I bet my garden will take over the world!

And you can try it, too -- leave a comment saying what YOU'd grow with this, and I'll mail a free sample to the best comment.

250=1, Story Five

In 250=1, each story is EXACTLY 250 words, including the title.

Higgs Boson’s adventures in space: Episode 37:

With a single tentacle-slap, Zith-Gar had managed to disarm Higgs.

The situation looked bleak.

“The situation looks bleak,” Higgs said to Zith-Gar, “But I’m not worried.”

“How can you NOT worry, Higgs?” asked Zith-Gar incredulously. “You are unarmed. I have three of my feet on your throat. Your precious Earth 2.0 is already 50% disintegrated! And you and I know, Higgs, that there is no coming back from that level of disintegration.”

“You’re going to stop all this, and release me,” Higgs said.

“I… never! Why would I ever do that?!” demanded Zith-Gar.

“Because,” Higgs said, “You’ll never kill your son-in-law.”

Zith-Gar looked down, all three of his eyes goggling. Both mouths gaped in awe.

“You DIDN’T!” it said.

“Look at my hand,” Higgs said. “No, the other one. You’ll see the wedding ring right there.”

“But, I thought… we’re not even the same species… and anyway, our mating rituals,” Zith-Gar muttered, warily looking down with his focusing eye at Higgs’ left hand. “It would kill you…”

There was no ring.

Zith-Gar straightened back up and saw that he was staring at the business end of a ray gun pointed directly at his central life organs. It looked powerful enough to pierce his pneumothorax.

“How…” it said.

“Simple,” Higgs said. “I’m Higgs Boson.” And he blasted Zith-Gar into trillions of pieces which somehow missed hitting him and left his uniform spotless. “And you never had a daughter,” he told the remnants of Zith-Gar.