Anguish Lan­guish rides again

Oh, but before I get to my enig­mat­ic (to most of you, I’ll bet) sub­ject mat­ter of the day, I have to give you all an update (I’m still in shock over near­ly using that as a verb, whew) on the sto­ry I told you all about in the sum­mer, the pub­lic appeal for dona­tions to save the sur­round­ings of a Land Trust that was the orig­i­nal inspi­ra­tion for “Wind in the Wil­lows”. They’ve reached their goal, and the land has been pur­chased, plus enough extra to start all sorts of gar­den­ing and con­ser­va­tion projects. I won­der if any­one from my blog clicked on the link and donat­ed? It’s just that sort of world. But I bet I nev­er find out. Leave a com­ment on the blog, if you did, please. Oh, and that reminds me, I’ve been get­ting com­ments late­ly, which is new and excit­ing. I just love to get that email that tells me some­one’s had some­thing to say about some­thing I said. It’s all part of the self-cen­tered­ness I was lec­tur­ing you all about recent­ly, and it’s very reward­ing. Plus the peo­ple are so nice.

Any­way, I was root­ing through all my books look­ing for some­thing to read the oth­er night when I stum­bled upon my moth­er’s old copy of just about the fun­ni­est book ever writ­ten, although as my com­e­dy class is teach­ing me, not every­one finds every­thing fun­ny. How­ev­er, in this case, any­one who does­n’t think it is com­plete­ly clever is sim­ply wrong. It’s called Anguish Lan­guish, and in case you were plan­ning to run over to abe­books to get a copy, save your mon­ey (because it’s a LOT of mon­ey!) and go right to the web­site that has all the sto­ries nice­ly pre­sent­ed for you.

But I must begin again. Because you don’t know what the whole point of “Anguish Lan­guish” is, yet. Let me enlight­en you. The whole point that author Dr. Howard L. Chace makes is “water larder warts sunned lack itch udder.” Now say that fast and lis­ten, or have some­one else say it fast and you lis­ten. And then you can’t stop. Avery has been in my study at least four times in an hour try­ing to wrench this book away from me, laugh­ing over the the bird and the worm chat­ting. The worm says, “Europe oily disk moan­ing!” and then bird replies with an evil grin, “Doily board cash­es or warm!”

How many “fur­ry tales” do you think you can recite off the top of your head? How’s about “Ladle Rat Rot­ten Hut”? Or nurs­ery rhymes? Think back to “Mar­ry Hat­ter Ladle Limb,” always a crowd-pleas­er. I par­tic­u­lar­ly groove to “Sinker Suck­er Socks Pants,” but then I’ve been lis­ten­ing to the Agatha Christie sto­ry “A Pock­et­ful of Rye” on tape this week, so nat­u­ral­ly it fol­lows as night the day.

But you know what I just remem­bered? I have to con­fess that my hus­band, while prac­ti­cal­ly per­fect in every way, is not amused par­tic­u­lar­ly by “Anguish Lan­guish,” and I think that prob­a­bly that’s all right. Because he does have so many oth­er star­ling koala tees.