ORIGINALLY WRITTEN DAVID VOGEL
Before you read any further into this column, I am advising that you take two, or possibly three steps away from the newspaper.
This is because there is a very good possibility this article is surrounded by an invisible orb made up of particles of a friendly little virus called The Common Cold.
I am currently in possession of this fun illness, and have been for about the last month. Even as I’m typing, I am constantly making the annoying sound that can only be described as a nasal “schnork,” lest my keyboard become covered in a product called “snot,” which, while one has a cold, is produced in the nasal cavity and then creeps into every possible crevice inside the head.
The nostrils, from what I can tell, are the main warehouses for storing this product, which means the snot has a direct outlet to the outside world.
And it knows it, too. Somehow the snot decided that it had the basic freedom to just waltz out of my nose at any time and drip down onto my keyboard.
Which is why I’m warning you to move away from this column, because sure as the Lord made little green apples, The Common Cold Particles are just wily enough to figure out how to make use of the computers.
It’s my belief that any virus that has somehow figured out a way to mutate fast enough to avoid some sort of vaccination also has enough intelligence to hack into a complex system such as the Internet.
It would really be quite simple, now that I think about it. All it would have to do is work its way down to my fingertips, where it could then jump into the gaps in the keyboard.
The germs could then fuse into the wire that runs into my CPU (Cold Processing Unit), which would then convert them into little Germ Files, which could download into my word processor and copy and paste itself into this document.
Then all it would have to do is hitch a ride on the column when I send it by email to the editor, get packaged up with all the other newspaper files, get transported to the printers and literally duplicate itself into thousands of newspapers, which will spread throughout the county.
Talk about a literal computer virus!
You still haven’t moved away from your newspaper yet, have you? Scoff all you want. Just wait until you get my cold.
The fact is, my head is so full of slime that there’s not a whole lot of room left for other necessary items that need to get into my head.
This is a problem, because we are currently working on a concept called “mole” in chemistry class.
As far as I can tell, mole is a mysterious unit of measurement that lives in burrows and eats earthworms.
No, wait! Wrong mole.
All I know is, my head has been so full of mucus for the last few weeks, that any information that I’ve gotten in class has either fallen back out of my head, or become absorbed into the snot.
As you can see, this cold has become a real nuisance. And it only gets better: It’s because of this cold that I have become intimately acquainted with several different brands of toilet paper.
Not that I’m bitter, but it has been several weeks since I’ve seen an actual box of Kleenex tissues. I have, however, seen rolls of toilet paper sitting wherever it would make sense for a Kleenex box to be located. It hurts, blowing my nose with toilet paper.
Actually, our local high school has discovered that it can stretch its budget even further by using toilet paper as both Kleenex AND sandpaper in the shop classes. (Rim shot!)
The toilet paper currently stocked in my household even has little butterflies and other small designs imprinted into it. Trust me, rubbing butterflies over a sore nose is not as therapeutic as one would think.
I would like to meet the person who originally discovered that you could save money by purchasing toilet paper instead of Kleenex, because I would like to hit them over the head several times with an empty cardboard toilet paper tube.
And for those who are following the trend, let me tell you something. As complex as this concept may seem, Kleenex-like products and toilet paper were designed for two completely different areas of the body.
The advertising jingle does not go, “A nose in need deserves Charmin, indeed,” now does it? Not to mention that in those commercials where the animated bears are dancing around behind small trees, it is not their noses that they are waving back and forth.
So you may be wondering just what my point is by now. Well let me tell you, all I have to say is, I have to go blow my nose. And I would also advise you to go wash your hands, now that you’ve read through this entire infected column.
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UFO: The average pencil will draw a line 35 miles long.
Don’t ask why.
