Tag: squeaky toys

The Human Squeaky Toy

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

I’ve been saving this for you, a final flurry of squeaky toy zaniness. In this case, a couple of kids who swallowed the little whistle inside a squeaky toy to become, as it were, squeaky toys themselves.

Don’t laugh too hard. The boys aren’t in any distress just now, but you don’t really want to have bits of plastic rattling around in your lungs. The video does not tell us how the squeaky part will be removed… or if it even can be safely removed. I mean, this could get kind of tiresome after forty years or so.

Meanwhile–well, yeah, it is kind of funny. I remember when my sister swallowed a bunch of balloons…

The Vicar’s New Conniptions (‘Oy, Rodney’)

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

39 Romance novel cover parodies ideas | romance novel covers, romance, book humor

“Alas, dear reader!” soliloquizes Violet Crepuscular, introducing Chapter CDXLIII of her epic romance, Oy, Rodney. “What have I done? Amid the clamor of a thousand squeaky toys, who can think straight?”

They can’t get rid of the squeaky toys. All Scurveyshire is enamored with them.

But the good news is, the constant din of squeaky toys has freed the vicar from his conniptions. For the first time in many months, he can get out of bed and spin around on tiptoe until he makes himself dizzy. He can go to his window and make grotesque faces at passers-by. And he can perform a wedding!

“Quick!” he orders his new housekeeper, Mrs. Stalin. “Go find Lord Jeremy and Lady Margo and bring them here so I can marry them!”

Mrs. Stalin wipes her mustache. “You can’t marry them,” she says. “It’d be bigamy.”

Ensues a long and mostly fruitless discussion of what the vicar actually meant. Mrs. Stalin wobbles out of the room. Ever since a mad masseuse made her right leg six inches longer than her left, she has wobbled. “Try it yourself,” adds Ms. Crepuscular, “and you’ll see.”

The bad news is that by the time Mrs. Stalin returns with the happy couple, the vicar has acquired a whole new set of conniptions. They have to tie him to a chair.

“What causes these?” cries Jeremy.

“I think it’s that Mr. Gesunt who sits in the third pew and smells funny,” expounds Mrs. Stalin.”Why don’t you have Constable Chumley arrest him?”

But Chumley is going door-to-door in search of legless amphibians called caecilians, not to be confused with Sicilians. He has only just stopped looking for caecilian footprints. He thinks he may have found some Sicilian footprints, though. “Dinny yon bray frothering!” he explains.

We’ll have to leave it at that for now.

The Substitute Vicar from Zanzibar (‘Oy, Rodney’)

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

39 Romance novel cover parodies ideas | romance novel covers, romance, book humor

Introducing Chapter CDXXXIX of her epic romance, Oy, Rodney, Violet Crepuscular takes issue with “a mean-minded reader from Bad Axe, Michigan” who doesn’t think Scurveyshire has anything to fear from an invasion of caecilians–blind, eel-like amphibians inhabiting the world’s tropics.

“This nay-sayer, this spoil-sport, this tartuffe!” she writes. “I’d like to see any romance she writes! Has she ever even seen a caecilian? Of course not! Has she ever seen how caecilians react when stirred up by the clamor of a thousand squeaky toys? I do wish some of these know-it-all readers out there would just shut up and let me tell the story!”

Meanwhile, the substitute vicar has arrived from Zanzibar to fill in for Scurveyshire’s regular vicar, who is again laid up with conniptions. The substitute vicar, a Mr. Mpombo, speaks only Swahili; so no one understands when he says he’d like to cool off in the vicar’s backyard wading pool. Besides which, the din of all those squeaky toys makes it virtually impossible to hear him.

No sooner has he changed into his stylish Zanzibari bathing outfit, and equipped himself with a rubber duck and life preserver, and skipped merrily out to the pool… than he gets sucked under it, never to be seen again.

“Looks like another postponement of our wedding!” sighs Lord Jeremy Coldsore to his bride-to-be, Lady Margo Cargo.

“What? What’s that you say?” bellows the bride. “I can’t hear over all those squeaky toys.” But try as he might, Lord Jeremy can’t be heard.

“It should be borne in mind that the caecilians have a long, long way to go before they get to Scurveyshire,” Ms. Crepuscular crepusculates. “But mark my words–they’ll be very, very hungry when they get here!”

18,671 Swimming Trunks Stock Photos, Pictures & Royalty-Free Images - iStock

(And that’s only the bottom half!)

 

Here Come the Caecilians! (‘Oy, Rodney’)

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

39 Romance novel cover parodies ideas | romance novel covers, romance, book humor

Imagine the clamor of a thousand squeaky toys all being squeaked at once.

“I have imagined it, dear readers!” exclaims Violet Crepuscular, introducing Chapter CDXXXVIII of her epic romance, Oy, Rodney. First squeaked in desperation, then squeaked in triumph as the army of Sea Monkeys flees to Paraguay–“But they know not their peril,” fusticates Ms. Crepuscular darkly. They? They who?

Legless, blind, and slippery, the little-known amphibians called “caecilians” find themselves deeply stirred by the clamor of squeaky toys in Scurveyshire. “They are coming!” writes Violet.

In the meantime, the whole shire–even the forgotten hamlet of Qwlggsyff, which I just remembered–celebrates their victory over the Sea Monkeys. The Lying Tart is in danger of running out of ale. Johnno the Merry Minstrel, who discovered that Sea Monkeys just can’t stand the sound of squeaky toys, has been elected to the Swedish Parliament (they had an empty seat that no one wanted).

“Now would be a good time for us to have our wedding!” Lady Margo Cargo suggests to Lord Jeremy Coldsore. They have forgotten their tiff. “Everyone’s in such a festive mood!”

“I thought the vicar had gone ga-ga again,” replies Lord Jeremy.

“There’s a substitute vicar on his way from Zanzibar,” grafts (really, Violet!) Lady Margo. “I took the liberty of inviting him.”

“Good show!”

Perhaps Constable Chumley best sums up those few halcyon days before the coming of the caecilians:

“Yair frother me tucket, frae nucket!”

Squeaky Toys vs. Sea Monkeys (‘Oy, Rodney’)

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

The Annual Scurveyshire Fete ('Oy, Rodney') – Lee Duigon

[Editor’s Note: I have to thank Ms. Crepuscular for dedicating this chapter of her epic romance, Oy, Rodney, to Patty and me on our 44th wedding anniversary. And also for the tin of home-made toothpaste sandwich cookies.  –LD]

Violet Crepuscular masterfully–mistressfully?–sets the stage for Chapter CDXXXVII of her epic romance, Oy, Rodney. An army of restive Sea Monkeys demands new worlds to conquer! Scurveyshire’s citizens prepare to fight back with squeaky toys. And in the background lurks The Caecilian.

The what?

One of these:

“We have to face facts,” Ms. Crepuscular lectures her readers. “When you’re dealing with a caecilian, you don’t know which end is which! These South American amphibians, rarely seen even in South America, once dominated the island of Sicily. Now they’re aimed at Scurveyshire. Because the cacophony of a hundred squeaky toys inevitably attracts them!”

The squeaky toys, all of them squeaking at once, will drive the Sea Monkeys back to Paraguay. “But no one,” adds the author darkly, “has survived a full-scale invasion by caecilians. Heck, they don’t even look like amphibians!”

The honest, if not quite all there, yeomen of Scurveyshire even now stock up on squeaky toys, having not even an inkling of the catastrophe that is poised, like sharks around a dying porpoise, to descend on them–

I’m sorry, that last simile was too much for me.

Violet, you’re on your own.

 

The Sea Monkeys Arrive! (‘Oy, Rodney’)

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

39 Romance novel cover parodies ideas | romance novel covers, romance, book humor

Although the rampaging cyclops, having seen the billboards, has fled to parts unknown, the Sea Monkeys ordered by Johnno the Merry Minstrel from that shop in Paraguay have arrived in Scurveyshire. So begins Chapter CDXXXVI of Violet Crepuscular’s epic romance, Oy, Rodney.

Sea-Monkeys creator's widow sues over royalties

“Because this is a romance set in the Victorian Era,” explains Ms. Crepuscular, “the Sea Monkeys brought in to fight the cyclops look just exactly like the creatures in this advertisement, above. Yes, they can be trained–for war! Only now that the cyclops has fled, there’s nobody for them to fight. This is a problem!”

An army of Sea Monkeys with no one to fight–that’s a problem, all right. Ms. Crepuscular blames it on her readers.

“Now I’m stuck with ten thousand heavily-armed Sea Monkeys, and it’s all your fault!” she complains.

It’s a consolation that a host of ten thousand Sea Monkeys takes up not much more space than a pair of cats. In hopes that the problem will somehow solve itself, Lord Jeremy Coldsore appoints Constable Chumley to command the Sea Monkeys. He assembles them for drill on the town common, in front of the statue of a man who looks like an undernourished chimpanzee. No one knows whom it’s supposed to be.

“Yohn right!” screeches the constable. “A’ fare thee gricken–hoosh!” To his amazed delight, the Sea Monkeys execute these maneuvers flawlessly. He indicates to Lord Jeremy that they’re ready to fight and conquer. How he indicates this is one for the books.

Realizing that the Sea Monkeys could easily become a nuisance to Scurveyshire unless they’re placed on the warpath very soon, Lord Jeremy makes a rash decision to order them to attack the neighboring village of Plaguesby. “With any luck they’ll all get stomped,” he adds.

Imagine his horror when the Sea Monkeys quickly conquer Plaguesby and put it under tribute. They immediately begin agitating for a new campaign.

“Great balls o’ fire!” expostulates Jeremy. “What am I to do now?”

“Only one thing you can do, Germy ol’ hoss,” declares Willis Twombley, who has been watching these developments with undisguised interest. “Send for someone or something that’ll chase away the Sea Monkeys. The Babylonians used really scary squeaky toys for that. We can get some at the pet shop.”

Which brings us to the end of this chapter, with more suspense to come.