Cheap Joke of the Day 7/31/05

Cheap Joke of the Day 7/30/05

My Life, Part 1.

Hello. My name is Dr. Markward Reginald. (That's me as a strapping young chap on the left.) My friends call me "Marky Marky Mark-Mark," "Reggie," or "Fatty Boomble-atty," but you can call me "Dr. Markward Reginald."

I'm just kidding, of course; I have no friends.

I feel I would be remiss if I did not offer up for your reading pleasure- or severe discomfort, if whilst reading this you repeatedly stab yourself about the thighs with a rusty letter opener- a tad bit about myself, my life, and myself.

I was born in a replica log cabin on the banks of the Monongahela River in Fairmont, West Virginia, on June 12, 1937. My mother, Svetlana (a Spanish name which means, as best as I can tell, "sailboat") was an amateur train burglar with a passion for mangosteens. Throughout her life, she suffered from dyslexia in her right eye and general unattractiveness, but she managed to overcome these obstacles and live long enough to give birth to me, whereupon she had a small snack consisting of squirrel juice and salted twigs, and then died.

My father was Strom Thurmond. No, not that Strom Thurmond.

Okay, yes, that Strom Thurmond.

With my dear, obscure fruit-loving mother now dead and my father busy oppressing African-Americans- or, as he called them back then, "people of color"- I was adopted as a newborn by the doctor who delivered me from the womb, Dr. Millard Fillmore Reginald. (That's the name of the doctor who adopted me, not some sort of sick pet name for my mother's womb. Duh.) He took me into his care on that very first day of my life and of my mother's afterlife, which must have been very exciting for her, as she had always wanted to meet Amelia Earhart, who would vanish into oblivion and presumably join Svetlana in the hereafter only three weeks later.

But I digress. On that first day, Dr. Reginald was taking me home in his brand new 1938 Saturn Ion when he decided to change the record playing on his dashboard's Victrola. As he removed the vinyl disc which had been playing (Good Boy Jimmy Simon's latest hit LP, "The Bible is Awesome") and reached for another, he suddenly lost control of the wheel and his half-empty bottle of Jim Beam and plowed into a roadside ditch, at which point he was shot three times in the head at point blank range by a transient circus clown named Chincy.

The benevolent Dr. Reginald was killed instantly and in the crash, my tender, miniscule frame was thrown clear of the wreckage and into a soft bed of ursine urine-soaked foliage. I was quickly rescued by a small enclave of four hikers who stumbled upon me while in the midst of conducting field research for a book, The Most Unlikely Places to Find a Newborn Baby, which they would release in 1940 to universal acclaim. The hikers- Markward Vagenheim, Asthore Muckelvaney, Keezheekoni Euihtkasdqwoiysqcunvmdjehasdjhks, and Pete Smith- at first endeavored to split me into four pieces of roughly equal size, but then reconsidered when they realized that 1) this act would kill me and 2) I was worth more on the black market alive than dead.

Markward- whom I have always assumed was the leader of their group because to imagine him as some sort of lackey or second fiddle shames me unmercifully- eventually decided to take me into his home and raise me as his son in cooperation with his life partner, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Papa Hoover wasn't around much growing up, and one of my earliest memories is of him, dressed in a long red sequined evening gown and taupe lipstick and eyeshadow, beating me relentlessly with a creme brulee.

But Markward was always the father I almost never had. He fed me, clothed me, sent me off to school, helped me with my homework, played catch with me, taught me how to play chess and Yahtzee, bought me only the finest cocaine, and supplied me with some of the gentlest, most nurturing prostitutes this side of Elisabeth Shue's character in Leaving Las Vegas. But I'll mostly remember the coke.

I attended Frank Nitti High, a typical suburban West Virginia public school where for most kids 12th grade lasted into their twenties and a stranger was just a cousin you hadn't met yet. I had a very difficult time making friends; I was a plump pheasant, a ferociously unappealing and malevolent child, contrary to the flattering manner in which the camera portrays me in the photo above. But painful though it was, I did adjust, and I did attain a social standing at heights of which I never would have dared dream in my days as a hideous, flatulent youth. By the time I graduated from Nitti High, I had been voted either president or captain of dozens of student organizations, including but in no way limited to the Student Council, Math Club, Chess Club, National Honor Society, Nitti Marching Band, The Nitti Singers, Drama Club, Future McCarthyites of America, Future Ward Cleavers of America, Senator Estes Kefauver Haters Club, and the baseball, football, soccer, swimming, field hockey, cross country, track, basketball, skeet & rifle, girls soccer, gymnastics, golf, tennis, fishing, aggressive sitting, and competitive chaw-spitting teams.

As I discovered shortly before my departure from Nitti High as valedictorian of the Class of 1955, I had been aided in no small part by Papa Hoover, who in nearly every instance had "taken care of" all of my potential rivals or competition. At the start of my freshman year, I had 143 classmates. By graduation, it was just me and Ernie Richebacher, our salutatorian with a D+ average and severe paste-eating disorder.

Considering that I was, for all intents and purposes, an accessory after the fact in no fewer than 142 murders- or, as Papa Hoover always liked to call them, "people misplacements"- I thought it astonishingly generous of President Dwight D. Eisenhower- to whom I always referred by his famous nickname, "Tippecanoe"- to grant me a presidential pardon on October 10, 1955. ("Honest Abe" later called my pardoning "the biggest damned-fool mistake" he ever made. History would prove "Old Muttonchops" correct.)

As of that glorious day, I was a free and fresh-faced young haberdasher, well on my way to the vertigo-inducing pinnacles of superstardom and incalculable wealth. I had the world on a string; I was sitting on a rainbow. I even wrote a song about it.

But then, something happened. A spectacularly bad something. Really, really bad.

So bad, in fact, that it will have to wait for my next post. Just awful, though, really.

Join me next time when I will...

• ...break new ground in the "Predestination vs. Free Will" debate.
• ...peacefully co-found the new state of Palestisraeline in one hour.
• ...share with you a delightful recipe for a gingko berry bundt cake.
• ...discover a new Baldwin.
• ...insult your intelligence, and grossly overestimate my own.
• ...revolutionize the use of ellipses.

Until then...

Cheap Joke of the Day 7/27/05

Dr. Reginald welcomes you.

Greetings all!

Welcome to the new home of The Catchpenny. Our old home still exists, but it has become infested with termites and Howie Mandel, and so we've had to relocate. Also, the rent was too expensive, which is to say that it was not free.

So here we are. The Catchpenny has changed not only its habitat, but also the nature of its content and format. Until now, the 'penny has focused mostly on current events, particularly the genocide in Darfur, the White House/CIA leak investigation, and the Colin Farrell sex tape. We will still touch on- and whenever possible, mock the everloving shit out of- these topics; but added to the mix will be all varieties of creative writing- poetry, short fiction, long fiction, bad fiction, fiction that sounds like nonfiction and vice-versa, dirty limericks, angry rants, humble observations, Scientological dogma, bitter polemics, one fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish.

Please come back soon. We are lonely. And cold. So very cold.