(Hooray! We’ve got our book cover back! It seems they listened when Mr. Pitfall showed up with a shotgun.)
You may remember, from Chapter CDXXXIII of Violet Crepuscular’s epic romance, Oy, Rodney, that there’s a cyclops on the loose in Scurveyshire. It’s the result of another one of those pesky curses laid on Scurveyshire by the medieval sorcerer, Black Rodney. This cyclops has already picked up a whole cottage and tossed it into a nearby pond.
Ah! But Johnno the Merry Minstrel has discovered that cyclopses (cyclopes? aw, who knows) are deathly afraid of sea monkeys. “All we have to do,” he explains in Chapter CDXXXIV, “is confront our cyclops with an army of sea monkeys.”
Ms. Crepuscular complains that the above picture is much too large for her book and wants it removed. Well, she brought up the whole subject of sea monkeys, didn’t she?
“I had sea monkeys when I was eight years old,” she says, “and they were just the cutest little brine shrimp! My favorite was a shrimp named Ernest Sturdivant–and he didn’t look anything like what they showed on the box.”
But there’s a problem in Scurveyshire–the pet shop’s out of sea monkeys. “We’ll have to send away for some,” exfoliates Johnno. “There’s a store in Paraguay that specializes in them. Allow 16 weeks for delivery!”
“That’s a lot of cottages uprooted and destroyed,” gripes Lord Jeremy Coldsore, justice of the peace.
The solution is to erect a gigantic billboard announcing the eventual arrival of more sea monkeys than you can shake a stick at. It is hoped the cyclops will read it and get out of Scurveyshire while the gettin’s good.
(“These fools are ruining my romance!” complains Ms. Crepuscular. But it’s all her fault.)
You don’t want to shake a stick at sea monkeys. It gets them very annoyed. And an annoyed sea monkey is a parlous thing, ods wot.
So glad the book cover is back! I’m with Violet Crepuscular, more romance.
Never irritate a sea monkey. These things are small, but very determined.