Homer

[Icingsugar]

Raph, slaughterer of cute furry things.

I could apply for that badge too. If by cute, furry things you mean regular farm animals. I offed both moo-moo and oink-oink occationally before I went off and became intellectual. I've got a nice license, a diploma and everything.

And one rabid badger. We didn't eat him though.

And yes. Brace yourself AH. I, TFCG, am a former mutton killer.

/Ice - country boy

 

[Icingsugar]

Double post blah...

 

[Guest]

Brace yourself AH. I, TFCG, am a former mutton killer.
/Ice - country boy

Cake hombre muy peligroso:

I read TFCG as 'the former cake guy'. Am I prescient?

addio,

Perdita

 

[Icingsugar]

'dita my embracable ewe, you do know what goes on down at old Mac Donald's farm dontcha?

Just to clarify my own track record:
1# Change former to reformed.
2# They were all sick, old rams. Nothing else.
3# There wasn't really any career in it for me, I'm too squeamish. See #1

/Ice - sheep hugger

 

[SlickTony]

I got so muttoned out when I lived overseas. After I got back to the States I couldn't even look at a lamb chop for upwards of a year. I miss lamb now. It almost never goes on sale.

 

[shereads]

I used to love roast lamb...Then I bottle-fed a lamb at a ranch a couple of years ago, and when it finished the bottle, it reached up and kissed me on the nose...I can't seem to eat lamb anymore...

Funny, I didn't have a problem eating baby back ribs while watching "Babe" with my nephew...

Homer, honey, I hope you don't think this thread has anything to do with your tasty drumsticks...rest easy.

 

[SlickTony]

From what my dad told me of our ancestors, and my husband told me of his not-so-distant kin, if you were a real farmer you'd get hardened to it. But I can see where you're coming from. Perhaps if I had to raise my own stock I'd become an ovo-lacto-fish type vegetarian. Possibly still eat chicken, as friends who've grown up having to help raise chickens assure me that they are foul, evil creatures who deserve nothing more or less than to be eaten. As for fish, if they're not pretty aquarium type fish or just flat unpalatable, the proper fate of fish is the table--I fugure you're helping it to a higher plane of existence.

 

[Icingsugar]

Homer, honey, I hope you don't think this thread has anything to do with your tasty drumsticks...rest easy.

Speaking of which, I call for more Homer pics! After all, this is his thread.

 

[Guest]

Bump!

Speaking of which, I call for more Homer pics! After all, this is his thread.

I want more pics too, he must have gained a bit by now.

Perdita

 

[Rumple Foreskin]

Re: Bump!

I want more pics too, he must have gained a bit by now.

Perdita

HOMER! HOMER! HOMER! HOMER! Pics, pics, pics!

Rousing Rumple

 

[Guest]

otro golpe

Where is WOK, and besides more pics of the kid, what AV will she sport now that turkey day is past?

Could it possibly be a sheep?

Perdita

 

[shereads]

friends who've grown up having to help raise chickens assure me that they are foul, evil creatures who deserve nothing more or less than to be eaten.

Your friend never met Bessie Mae, the pet chicken that my sister and I named after our aunt's cleaning woman. She had survived a fall from a truck full of crated chickens...

Note to people who have contact with children: never challenge a child to capture an animal.

Bessie Mae lived with my grandparents whose home was chicken-friendly, and laid an egg every day for years, despite the fact that her pay was chicken feed. She was a decent, respectable bird. Not statuesque like the elegant Sarus Crane, or flashy like the Peacock. But that chicken's social skills were sufficient to train two cats and a cocker spaniel to share their dinner for years and years.

Here's to your memory, Bessie Mae. You were a tough old bird and a fine feathered freiend.

As for fish, if they're not pretty aquarium type fish or just flat unpalatable, the proper fate of fish is the table--I fugure you're helping it to a higher plane of existence.

I'm with you there. But I can't eat lobster if I have to watch it go into the pot. Even a giant bottom-dwelling sea cockroach doesn't deserve to be boiled alive.

 

[Guest]

Ella, you've reminded me of an odd memory. My father raised chickens, about a dozen at a time, and one mean rooster (he liked to attack children and he wasn't very nice to the hens either). Papi finally decided to get a new cock-o-the-walk so killed el malo for dinner. After chopping off its head he put it in a big pan and set it in the bath tub until my mother could prepare it.

I was 8. I went to the bathroom and whilst sitting on the toilet the headless cock stood up and tried walking.

For some reason I've never forgotten the color of that bathroom's walls, a lurid blue-green.

adios, Perdita

 

[SlickTony]

Oh, poor Perdita! What a frightening experience that must have been. It just goes to prove that chickens have pretty primitive nervous systems. In fact, there was once a famous headless chicken that actually survived for many years. It had to be hand-fed, of course, and eventually it died of an infection of some sort.

Bessie Mae sounds like she was a nice chicken. However, one hears a lot more stories about the others. A guy I knew from Pakistan told me about when he was a little kid during the time of the Partition. He said that since nobody was allowed out on the streets after curfew, if an errand needed to be run, you went from roof to roof, and he was frequently sent out, at the age of 3+, to buy milk or something of that nature. Some of the neighbors had this big rooster that was about the same size he was which terrorized him.

 

[Rumple Foreskin]

I was 8. I went to the bathroom and whilst sitting on the toilet the headless cock stood up and tried walking.

Perdita,

That sounds like a very polite rooster. After all, it waited until you were sitting on the toilet before scaring the shit out of you.

Rumple Foreskin

 

[Linbido]

Perdita, that's the kind of stuff that life-longs phobias are weaved of. Do you perchance have any special aversion against a) roosters, b)the color blue-green, or c)porcelain seats in general?

A similar experience at the tender age of five rendered me completely terrorized by...fish. An 11 feet cacth (still not sure what kind of fish, looked like an oversized tuna), reeled in, killed, hooked, weighed and hung up for display should have the friggin' courtsey to hang still. Especially since dad had the brilliant idea to put little me beside it for a trophy photo... *shudder*

 

[Guest]

Lin, I was lucky; my father helped me laugh at it all. I don't especially care for blue-green but it's not a phobia. I am also grateful that no one used the word cock around me; that might have been tragic .

Perdita

(ignoring Rumple )

 

[SlickTony]

A similar experience at the tender age of five rendered me completely terrorized by...fish.

Drum are perfectly terrible that way. Now, speckled trout are kind of delicate; you can put them on a stringer and tie them to a piling so they can swim about while you're getting the rest of your fishing done, and they'll still die, but drum are much harder to kill. They sometimes flop around even after you've started cleaning them. I once put some in the freezer to cool off, and as soon as I brought them out to finish cleaning them, they started flopping and banging around in the sink. I was talking to my mother on the phone while doing this, and the drums were making so much noise in the stainless steel sink she heard it and asked what it was.

 

[Rumple Foreskin]

(ignoring Rumple )

Perdita,

Oh, that you were the first lady-type person of the female sex to do that.

Rumple

 

[Guest]

Oh, that you were the first lady-type person of the female sex to do that.

Then, let me be the last (or most recent only). No more joking about cock trauma, though.

Perdita

 

[shereads]

I was 8. I went to the bathroom and whilst sitting on the toilet the headless cock stood up and tried walking.

Oh. My. GOD. I've seen that! I remember!!!!

Perdita, dear lady, my future shrink thanks you for awakening the buried memory of the day my sister and I witnessed the most horrific sight of my childhood: the headless dancing chickens slaughtered at the hand - yes, she twisted their necks off by hand - of our dearest, sweetest aunt.

<<Gak...as you read this, Shereads is experiencing the sudden onset of a lifetime facial tic plus "nervous legs">>

We were military kids who were unfamiliar with our families' farm-raised roots. I was the same age you were during the chicken dance, Perdita. Eight, maybe nine, still thought that chicken the food was different from chicken the bird, and had made a pet of Bessie Mae already...We were visiting my mother's aunts - the sweetest, cutest, gentlest of the lot was chubby-cheeked, white-haired, lavendar-scented, soft-voiced Aunt Becka.

This lovable ol' gal would be your first choice, as casting director, for the role of Lovable Ol' Gal. Until she called us kids outside to witness what she thought would be an amusing diversion for the only two children in the family who had never seen the chicken dance...

So there she was, this beloved aunt who had tucked us in and told us bedtimes stories...revealed in a new persona that was about to conduct the Slaughter of the Innocents: FIVE HAPLESS BIRDS in a small capture pen. While we stood there too shocked to breathe, much less scream- she REMOVED THEIR HEADS with her BARE HANDS! <<tuck me into bed tonight? Only if I don't see you first, old woman>> As she dropped each HEADLESS CREATURE to the ground it began to RUN around the YARD in blind CIRCLES as if SEARCHING for its SEVERED HEAD or perhaps for bloody REVENGE. Of the five, at least two ran directly TOWARD US before they finally, mercifully, bled to death.

When we could inhale again, my sister and started crying, and Aunt Becka thought we were laughing, along with our savvier country cousins who were in fact laughing at us.

And it was the cousins' laughter that led to the truly nightmarish part of this whole deranged B-movie scenario: sweet, gentle, tender-hearted old Aunt Becka had always found children's laughter contagious, so she started laughing. And by the time she realized we were crying hysterically and stopped laughing, the sound had transformed into the cackle of the witch in Snow White.

Dissolve to that evening, where of course we were served those dancing headless birds, still at last, fried up all crispy and tantalizing, for dinner. I excused myself from the table, and - how can I say this delicately - purged. Yes, I purged.

I think I'll go purge now...



Oh my god, I remember...I remember........Does anyone have the phone number of a good South Florida psychiatrist?

 

[Guest]

Jayzzussssfook, Ella. I can't tell what to do. Do you want an apology? Too late. I live on the other coast, don't know a shrink I could recommend anyway.

Awk! I'm as useless as a headless chicken.

Not dancing, though,

Perdita (no smilie for shame)

 

[shereads]

No apology necessary, Perdita. Instead, maybe we can start a support group for adult children who have witnessed The Dance of the Headless Chickens.


This could explain any number of behavioral issues.



I feel reborn! Free of my long-buried burden.

 

[Guest]

Ella, what a lark! Let's see if anyone else joins in. Then we start a thread, then we get everyone to use headless chicken AVs...

Perdita

 

[shereads]

Ahem..

Sorry, Homer. It's safe to come out now, little fella.