As we all know, UFO is short for Undead Ferocious Otters. You may see them in many places but usually not in beauty parlors. In fact, many women frequent beauty parlors primarily to reduce their risk of encountering Undead Ferocious Otters and to smoke cigarettes. Nobody bothers you about smoking when you’ve got curlers sticking out of your head, and toxic foam dribbling down onto your nose.
Do not be fooled by what you think you know about otters. I know – you used to watch “Wild Kingdom” on TV where Marlin Perkins would be cooing about the cutesie-poo little otter sliding down the bank into the water. What they didn’t show you was the otter immediately ripping the head off a baby puddle duck who was happily sunbathing on top of the partially submerged mud turtle. Instead, the camera would pan over to Perkin’s side-kick, Stan, who would be over on the next ridge swinging his stupid-looking hat at a swarm of killer bees he’d enraged by urinating under the wrong tree.
In fact otters rank behind only wolverines and Dick Cheney for general meanness and a tendency to shoot their friends in the snout with bird shot. Imagine then what an undead otter would be like. How, you ask, do the otters become undead? Scientists disagree on this issue but are quick to point out that it has nothing to do with global warming, evolution, or the fact that Britney Spears suddenly forgot how to dance. Some evidence points to an increasing number of dead otters watching “American Idol.”
Your personal safety may depend on you ability to distinguish between a regular meanie otter and an undead otter. Fortunately we have guidance here from none other than the distinguished un-naturalist and sanitation engineer, Horace Tinkleberry. “Poke ’em in the rear end and see if ya live to tell about it,” he advises. Tinkleberry should know as, over the course of many years, he has consistently fallen out of his own tree house.
Once you have definitely identified an Undead Ferocious Otter. You have these three alternatives:
1. Call Dick Cheney. He’s still got plenty of ammo and will shortly be unemployed.
2. Encourage the otter to mate with a blowfish. The result will be a blotter that you can hold in front of your face to protect your eyes.
3. Disable the Undead Ferocious Otter by singing Barry Manilow songs.
————
Mike Romeling-What the critics are saying:
For nigh on a decade, Mike Romeling has been a smudge on the literary and musical landscape of common decency. But now with the publication of “Urgent and Confidential Bulletin,” that smudge becomes a suffocating blot grown rank and torpid from feeding off its own wretched excesses. To add insult to injury, Romeling has further befouled the air with several albums of his songs that can lead only to our begging for mercy from above. I say let this goon grope his greasy groupies like a gorged gorilla and leave the rest of us decent god-fearin’ folk alone.