Fully on the Spot (cont'd)

Fully on the Spot (cont'd)

       by Gonzo of Dubai

With that army gone,  and the next one defeated by a counter-counter feint on horseback, and one or two other of the steppe armies driven to retreat with one simple trick or another, H the Poopfingerer ruled victorious and unchallenged in his riding for many years. It was to that king that Jürge traces his roots. Hujürgon's grandmother, Mayvuld, begat Benjo (inventor of the banjo, of which more later, possibly), Benjo, through his minstracy's odd employments and misadventures, begat on Slabvejeca one named after his mother's beekeeper, Mintoj the Lucky, Mintoj begat Bigot, Bigot sired Smeeval, Smeeval engendered Brainy the Dull, and Brainy the Dull, producing no children till his eighty-fourth year, finally sowed Freytja with Brian the Hummer.

       And so on until Jürge. Jürge and Manuella decided, since it looked as if they would be childless, to leave their home and start fresh somewhere else. Maybe a change of scenery would make Many fertile. And so it happened. When they had been in Pennsylvania for no more than a few months, and with almost nothing to have been done in the sewage hold of the cotton freighter that bore them over the Atlantic other than make love, she started showing and grew and grew until a child of huge proportions dropped from her, him bawling for beer in a language reminiscent of Old English with ancient Saxon thrown in, and her screaming for someone to put her out of her misery.

       "Giept mir bitte ein biere," he roared. And Jürge did just that.

       Now, a copy of Boccacio's The Consolation of Philosophy lay at the infant's bedside and it was the first book Jürge could lay hands on. Jürge wrote in it, "Born this day to Jürge and Manuella Mulrooney a healthy son, praise God, who speaks already from his first minute out of the womb, calling for stimulants, a son whom we shall christen Tommy Douglas Mulrooney."  Many years later this child's namesake founded a political party that still has some viability and even a modicum of vitality in Canada to this very day.