This is Part Three. The story began here.

A crash and a yowling snarl split the silent, moonlit midnight on Katzenjammer Street. Ed Bream sat bolt upright in bed. Something was trying to break in downstairs. There was another crash, and a hoarse, inhuman shriek, rising in pitch until he could no longer hear it. His head ached and a dog down the street began to howl.

Ed fumbled in the closet for his shotgun and a flashlight. He whispered urgently to his wife Mary.

"I've got to go down there. Get the kids in here and lock the door."

Another crash, and the sound of a pot falling in the kitchen downstairs.

"Yes, dear."

Walking down the stairs, Ed heard the children whispering groggy questions and Mary quieting them. The crashing went on below, and a deep raspy snuffling. What was that thing? A mountain lion? He heard little Junior in the hallway above gasp "Clowany!", heard a small thump, and in a moment felt the little creature push past him and run into the kitchen.

"God damn it..."

If Clowany got hurt, the kids would never get over it. But never mind. If the thing at the door, whatever it was, if it got in, and if it got past him... He thought of Mary and the children and thumbed off the safety.

In the kitchen he shone the light on the door as it shivered under another impact. Clowany raced frantically to and fro, yelping in his tiny thin voice. Ed flipped the lightswitch and set down the flashlight. As he raised the gun, the door gave way and a full-grown clown tumbled into the kitchen, shrieking like a damned thing and leaping straight for Ed's throat. He fired, and then it reached him. He fired the second barrel into its chest as they fell.

At the foot of the stairs, Mary and the children screamed.

To be continued

teh ploral of 'crab' is 'crab'.

how ya like them aples eh?

update!

truns out my redars are wroldly types wiht wide experance of what u miht delacately call teh butarflies of love. er what hte good dr siantast calls 'migretory freckels'. which are of cuorse ploralized with a 's'. so im takin some flak he're but it dont faze me.

anothar godanm updat!

dr s is on teh trail of a californadian clowan plot!

just wroate leters to botha my senaters. not once in ether of em — not onse — did i use teh wrods 'cocksucker' or 'imbacile' or 'blodsucking tyranous parasitic pigfucking arogant worthlas timeservign sonuvabitch'. nor did i wax nostelgic about teh gracious old custom of recalign publac 'servents' form ofice by way of a tree an a rope. nor did i threten to shoot em or tar em an fether em or run em outa townn on a rail or drag em bahind a team a horsas.

so teh moare i thikn about it the more i wondar why i bothard writign at all.

update!

didn mention horsewhipign em either. or pistalwhiping em. or putting em in stocks.

culd hang em from a lampost too. dosn hafta be a tree.

update!

now dont get me worng! i liek our forma govarmant just fine. but they'res aways room for improvmant! hence my twopoint plan garanteed to birign any damocracy closar to prefection:

1. all electad oficials to be publicly horsewhiped once a year on generl princaples.

2. term limits to be anforced by hanging.

i ofar these recamendations in a spirit of selflas davitoin to the public interast.

yet anothar updat!

oooh i frogot keelhaulign!

This is Part Two. The story began here.

Dr. Pediculo, the kindly old veterinarian, lifted the trembling, frightened little clown onto the examining table as Sally and Junior stood nervously by.

"Don't worry about a thing, kids. I haven't lost a patient all morning," he chuckled, and scratched Clowany behind the ears. "You don't weigh no more'n a groundhog, do you, li'l feller?"

After the examination, Dr. Pediculo took Mrs. Bream aside.

"He's healthy as a horse, Mary. A fine specimen. Where'd you find 'im?"

"He was at the back door this morning. Junior took him in, and I didn't have the heart... Doctor? Is it safe? Will it hurt my children?"

"I wouldn't worry about a thing, Mary. When they're caught this young and home-raised they're just like any other pet. Just feed him cat food, or any old thing, and a little red meat on Sundays for his pelt."

All the way home in the car, Junior held Clowany tightly and whispered in his ear: "You're safe now, Clowany. We'll keep you safe forever."

All that long Saturday afternoon, while Mr. Bream trimmed the hedges and Mrs. Bream planted goiters around the ossuary, Junior and Sally ran and played with Clowany in the yard. That evening, Dad lit a fire in the grate, and the little clown settled down before the hearth, eyes half-open, gazing sleepily into the dancing flames. By ten o'clock, the whole family was fast asleep.

To be continued.

truns out 'abatwoir' isn teh same wrod as 'boudior' at al.

wana kep taht in mind.

One fresh spring morning, as Mrs. Bream fixed oatmeal in the sunny kitchen of the fine old gray house on Katzenjammer Street, little Junior came pelting down the stairs, ran to open the back door, and uttered a piercing shriek. She smiled indulgently.

"What is it, darling?"

"Mom! It's... IT'S A BABY CLOWAN!"

Just then, little Sally clattered into the kitchen and ran to see. It was true: Huddled on the doorstep was an adorable baby clown, sad, and hungry, and looking for a home.

"MOM, CAN WE KEEP HIM?"

"MOM MOM CAN WE CAN WE? HUH? MOM? MOM? HUH? MOM?"

Mrs. Bream was busy at the stove. "Don't be silly, children, clowns live in the mountains."

"I swear mom, it's a clowan, a baby clowan right in our yard!"

The baby clown said "eep! eep!", crept shyly into the house, and nuzzled against Junior's leg.

Mrs. Bream looked down and saw a dirty, thin, bedraggled little creature, no more than two feet tall, with long red shoes, tangled orange hair, and a smudged white face.

"I'm gonna call him Clowany!" howled Junior.

"It's not a he, it's a she!", Sally declared.

"Is not, he's a boy clowan!"

"IS NOT!"

"IS TOO!"

When the children had been soundly whipped and sent to the closet, Mrs. Bream gently set a bowl of milk on the floor. Clowany ran to the bowl and lapped up the milk with his long pink tongue. She knelt beside him and tenderly stroked his shivering back.

"We'll have to give you a bath, poor starving thing."

She stood, and called up the stairs.

"Dear?"

To be continued.

Update

Changed surname to "Bream".

Today, I wish to call your attention, to the Dozenal Society. Who are they? I do not wish to be alarmist, but they are dedicated to replacing our ancient and well-proven base-ten method of counting, with counting by the base of twelve. The international legitimacy of the metric system moves them not at all, these mathematical Jacobins: Twelve they must have. Twelve, indeed. They reason is that twelve is more easily factored than ten, but in our modern age of computers, that is nonsense. Surely, a computer could very easily find a way, to divide ten by three or by seven and get a whole number out of it. They are very clever, those boffins with their computers, and you won't see them messing about with strange radices.

Besides, you do not need to divide numbers by three, because two is company and three, is a crowd. If there are three at supper, that is one too many, or one too few, and in any case, the host should pay the bill without vulgarly dividing it among the party. The trouble is not with the currency, or with the numbering. It is with your own ill-breeding. You need to accept that it is you who have done wrong, and not the Treasury at all.

But it is worse than that. They say,

...the next really useful number [is] sixty, but this latter number is rather too large to be chosen as an every-day number base.

Well you know who counted by sixty, do you not? The Babylonians, that is who, and the Mayans or the Aztecs or one of those, and no doubt many other nations of perfectly alarming savages. And you can see, that sixty, is their ultimate goal: They defer it, merely on grounds of practicality, but quite surely as soon as they are able, they will be teaching your children the customs of ancient Babylonia, at the public expense.

Please, consider the children. It would not do to go back to the bad old days of farthings, and groats, when the lower classes could not use money because there were too many coins for them to understand, the poor ignorant creatures.

lookit ur thubms. look a lot like fignars dont they? but their stuby. an in teh wrong place. an there misign a joint. they dont look quite liek they balong to a human. oh sure their oposable but who knows waht there gona up an do some dark night whan ur asleep? there creepy an unreal but they're they are. cant ignoare em! cant get rid of em!

best not ta thikn about the damn thignns at al if u can hlep it.

this guys funy:

On one trip out there, I was accompanied by a vegan, who left the lady at the Burns Safeway sandwich counter speechless by asking if the tapenade had any meat or dairy in it. The very air in Burns has meat and dairy in it.

menwhiale teh chick dwonstrares is lisenign to a c newman. oh evaryboddys hip nowadyas.

update!

skp taht newman rekid btw. hes havin a real bad year. try thje fisrt an secant new pr0nos recs. 800 pound nutstompers bof of em. BOMP BOMP BAA NA-NA NA etc. pure genias.

concidar:

    :)
    :(
    ;-)
    :P
    8|
    @%]
    8-)

do we rely nead taht many difern ways to abreviate 'im a moron'?

dude duuuude this hambergar place in okalahoma dosnit just have a picher a bob wills — BOB F&^#$% WILLS — wihth they're foundar on teh wall. he wroate a songn about em too!

When you're feelin' blue, and hungry too
Here's a tip to make you sing
Pick up your hat, close up your flat,
Go down to the Hamburger King.

ohmagah i soooo totly wana go thare.

Mr Hynes was telling me about some of his home cooking experiments, and how he spends a large amount of time queuing for groceries at the supermarket. I simply don't understand why anyone, least of all an american, would bother.

In the first place, America is the land of the take away. They call it ordering in or carrying out or something. It is actually rather sweet, the way Americans have to give activities which already have a name in english, their own special little american name. Anyway, when Americans "order in" the sheer quantity of food which is delivered in a one person portion is quite staggering. Where I come from in England, a portion of take away food is barely enough to feed a wasp. So, if you "order in" in America, it is very good value as you get enough food to last you a fortnight. No need to shop at grotty little supermarkets then.

Better still than "ordering in" for a gentleman like Mr Hynes, would be to frequent the university canteen. There is an awful lot of snobbery in this country surrounding institution cooking. I simply don't get it. I went to public school, which, by the way is the exact opposite to what americans call a public school, there were drugs, like in america, but no guns except in the ccf shooting range, and one did not have to cart a pemission slip around in order to use the lavatory, one simply raised a hand and asked "May I use the lat?" and the master or mistress would nod in a world weary way. At my school, noone ate lunch out of a paper bag. At a british place of learning, meals are provided in a dining hall, not unlike the canteen at Mr Hynes' university.

There is a uniformity to institution food which is most comforting. It may not be cordon bleu, but quite frankly, cordon bleu is more than a little nouveau riche. Quite apart from being french, which carries with it, its own pitfalls of insect and offal recipes, cordon bleu tries way too hard in my opinion. Too fussy by half. A splendid cod mornay, served from a large aluminium tray by a woman in a hairnet, is a better friend than fancy frenchified nonsense. A mass produced Cod Mornay is reliable, it will always taste a little bland, a little wet and slightly cold. Food for the brain, not for the ego.

dr haridan is right!

excetp u shuldn wrifht off etin bugs just cuase teh frenchys do it. i mean u see a patentail snack wlakin upt eh wall. waddya just gona let it go? duno abot u but i gota keap my sterngth up. ofals ok to! a sosage is made otta ears an lips an asholes isn it? an its tasty. q.e.d.

arlinton c hyans

I would like to thank Mr. Hynes, who, even though he is only an American, has very graciously provided me with this forum to share my views with the younger generation. An American, you should know, that is a kind of foreigner, but he has been very kind, and not at all impertinent, unlike that quite frightening man at Emerald Bile.

—

A-hem, a-hem. Today I would like to talk to you about sport.

The Americans have a sport, or they call it a sport, called Professional Wrestling, which is not a sport at all, in my opinion. It is very fat men, in outlandish costumes, who if you must know behave very unprofessionally, indeed. One must ask, is this how their professional classes, learn the meaning of professionalism? By watching fat men hit each other with chairs, and jump on their heads, and other disgraceful things? You can imagine a doctor, who hits a colleague who contradicts him, with a chair, because he has been taught nothing else. That is not how doctors behave in civilized countries, at all. You cannot rely on the medical or scientific judgement, of such a doctor, or at least I would not choose to. But that is how it is, in America. You have no choice.

But what is most frightening, is that professional wrestling, is a fraud. It is staged. We know this, in the civilized part of the world, but the Americans do not. It is kept from them. There must be tens of millions of Americans, it is reasonable to infer, who follow this "sport", and it provides their moral framework, as well as their idea of interpersonal relations. And because they are all so heavily armed, it is frightening to imagine, what they will do when they learn the truth, and that they have been deceived so shamefully, for so long.

iwas in liane at a stor taday. teh poeple inhead of me we're a famly. the checkuot lady was runin al they're stuff ovar teh scanar. but some of em kept runin off an getin moare thigns. they were movin quick to an keping pace with er. aftar a hour or so teh guy bagin it all jus wlaked off an let it pile up. the rubar belt was cary9in it al downta the end of the thign. it built up an stratad falin off. i clered my throte significently a cuople times but it didn hlep. they just loked me ovar real distentlike anfignard there weapons.

whan id bean thare for three huors i set my stuff down an left. my icecrem was meltad anyhow. i looked back an they were handig it to hte checkout lady.

dr marooan says teh deleware watar gap loks like teh lake of menteith so i had a look. an i gota say im shorcked at waht i fuond:

now im not sayin taht ol gents not a real scotsmen. he culd be a ringer but ive no way a knowan. but if u look carfuly at teh picher u may notace somhtign subltly wrong about teh fish. naamely taht its mountad on a godamn board! an there just hopan u wont knotice taht elusive litl detaill. ill amit it took me a whiale to figure out what was amis. tahnk god we got bolgs to keep thease guys honest.

but so ether scotash truots haev evalved vary strange fetures inded or their stockin the lake with stufed trofies.

than again mabe im off base. i bean seign fish like that on peopals wals for years an figuared they didn come outa the lake that way but who knows? mabe theyev all been ta scotlend and cot em thare.

uppdate!

damit i was gona cal tihs 'homage to caledonia' but of cuorse i didn exacly get they're first.

upadate!

adrey hautrey coments:

Last time I was there, gathering mushrooms, I also saw dogs in jodhpurs and cats with opposable thumbs.

we gota get teh forteans in on tthis! but teh johdburs are a woryign sign. nex thign u know theyl be usign hindanburg as a stalkinghorse. atlest they wernt playign poker.

so i was waitni for teh subway an i saw some boanehead wiht gooffey eyeglasas waitin thare wearign a tshirt sayin 'mind teh gap'. lokin all smug an clevar an whatnot.

so i sat they're glarin at im for a whiale an growalin. i mean grawlin just a bit so not to be rude. ok yeah poeopal herd me but it wasn like bellowin groawlin. wasn like u cudln ignaore it if u tried. an i bared my teth a bit but we all got teth right?

but than teh train came an i had a insperation! i wen't up bahind im an as teh train came up i wacked im real hard batwen hte sholderblads! as he fell onta the tracks inforntof it i yeled 'MIND TEH GAP A-HOLE!' figure i tought him a thign or two.

an than i ran fer it.

Pepal spned a lota time wrroying abate teh homlass, but tehy dont spendany tima toll thinking abaot inscets.

A sulg is nothnig moore thanna homles snail, and yet teh carars adn worrayeeeeers oftha worrld havant got teh timaday forrem. Veen the franhc donnt eattam, because teh frannch wil putt almost anyhtnig in theer mouths but tehy are fra fusseyer wehn it comsta hands.

Wehn I wassa ltille gril, I used to cray and cray abuot teh injutsci of ittal. Wyh shoulda spiral piesa chalk on top make suhc a deferans? So, a sulg issa nodma? Tahts greate though, isent it? Peeple lvoe nmaods and ayr often going to watcham moving tehyr tnets and yruts. But if noomasd were faster, mcuh faster, then a lota people wold wtachem more. If a nomad was as fsatassa cheetah, then thre wold bea lot of pelple wthacing htem putuppa tent, and move, across the Stppee and the tnuddrtas. So I put teh sulgs on my sheos and I walked tmeh around.

I tyr not to sweate too muhc as wlee because swaet has slat innit and stla is a killa.

Nreoen

bogel. hte berand u trust.

weve got a grovy new look — but teh same low low qualety yuov aways relyed on!

nicalas cage has namd his son 'kal el'. aftar suparman. whatta a-hole.

hey zerzlesan is in fine from tehese days. sems astrelias fula maroons an dagneruous loons.

im gona come out heare as sombody who lieksks pichers a cats in sinks. deal wihth it man. im exparsin my idavidulity here! chaton a son goo hyik hyuk hyuk

p.s. silkwrom snax cortesy a teh evar wierrd scriabel terer. whence cats too.

upddate!

an also form teh same cat guy hte fabalous kitan war! tanks humbgunny! vogeu notes bonsia kiten.

uppdate!

se teh thign is the ideal cat in a sikn sould look like he poured outa hte focet. whihc tihs one does.