Sunday, June 26, 2005

Dunderschlock

‘Twas splurschtick, and the crutey bloogs
Did smire and shimple in the glood,
All floozy were the blurbitoons
And the borg clams outclued.

“Beware the Dunderschlock, my son!
The plots that suck, clichés that shock!
Beware the Jarjar Binks, and shun
The mooreanderous Documock!”

He took his clewish stick in hand:
Long time the dooksome show he sought –
‘Til he spied at last the glub marquee
And long he searched the parking lot.

Then, as in grokless awe he sat,
The Dunderschlock, in a giant frame,
Came crundering through the fatulous air
And Hip-Hopped as it came!

One, two! One, two! And threw and threw
The petroleous corn went upper-chuck!
As they rolled the creds they found him dead
Betroped in lersick spluck.

“And, hast thou seen the Dunderschlock?
I warned you, you perstickulous punk!
Kubrickish fate! Alack, alas!”
He croodled in his funk.

‘Twas splurschtick, and the crutey bloogs
Did smire and shimple in the glood,
All floozy were the blurbitoons
And the borg clams outclued.

“It seems very pretty,” Alice said, “but it's rather hard to understand!” (You see she didn't like to confess, even to herself, that she couldn't make it out at all.) “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas - only I don't exactly know what they are!”

“Well, there are plenty of hard words there,” Humpty Dumpty said. “Splurschtick means early summer – especially the period from late June through July 4th.”

“But why is it called splurschtick?” Alice asked.

“Well, it comes from the word schtick, which is a cheap stunt that an entertainer uses to attract undeserved attention. A splurschtick is a larger and more elaborate schtick, often involving thousands of people and costing many millions of dollars. They tend to occur at this time of year, hence the name.”

“I see,” Alice said. “And crutey?”

“Well, crutey means ‘cute and cretinous’. You see it's like a portmanteau - there are two meanings packed up into one word.”

“I see it now,” Alice remarked thoughtfully: “and what are bloogs?”

“Don’t they teach you anything in school? A bloog, of course, is an inflated dummy used to simulate copulation. In this context, however, ‘bloogs’ is a figure of speech for two crutey persons who engage in a sham romance for the purposes of splurschtick - a state known as bloogery. Like a marriage, bloogery can result in children … and unfortunately, it often does. Bloogs, however, require a great deal of outside assistance in order to reproduce themselves, especially from publicists.”

“How interesting,” Alice said. “But what are publicists?”

“The word publicist is a contraction of ‘pubic lice’, which sounds very nasty, but they are actually a vital biological component of bloog reproduction. They can even reproduce a single bloog, by a process known as jacko-emulation.”

“Gracious,” Alice mused. “Bloogs must be very curious creatures.”

“They are that,” Humpty Dumpty said. “Also, they make their nests on French beaches, and they live on cheese.”

“And what’s to smire and to shimple?”

“To smire is to go around the Talk Show circuit with a vacuous grin on your face, preferably while wearing overly-casual clothes and an incredibly stupid hat. To shimple is to do queer things in public, hoping that people will take photographs of you.”

“Then a glood must be a French beach, I suppose?” said Alice, surprised at her own ingenuity.

“No, the glood is the ninety-five percent of your brain that is used for absolutely nothing. The glood is the natural habitat of the bloog. Floozy means ‘foolish and sleazy’ – there’s another portmanteau for you. A blurbitoon is a shabby-looking bird with its feathers sticking out all round. Blurbitoons can be taught to repeat phrases, like parrots, but instead of ‘Polly wants a cracker’, the blurbitoon says things like ‘The feel-good movie of the summer! Incredible! Fantastic!’ and so on. In the entertainment business, blurbitoons are called ‘Quote Whores’ and are highly prized animals in spite of their unpleasant appearance.”

“And borg clams?” said Alice. “I'm afraid I'm giving you a great deal of trouble.”

“Well, a clam is a piece of empty luggage that one can stuff almost anything into – rocks, hammers, sand, and such things. But CLAM is also the term for a type of personality discovered by the author and humanitarian L. Ron Hubbard: an acronym for ‘Cute, Loaded, and Moronic’. Borg I’m not sure about. It may be a portmanteau for ‘boring but well-organized’. Or it may be a contraction of Beach Organization, which is where CLAMs wash up when they get thrown overboard by the Sea Organization.”

“I see,” Alice said politely (though she didn’t, quite). “And what does outclued mean?”

Outclue means to remove dead alien tissue from your brain, by means of an electrical appliance. If you’re not a bloog, you don’t need to worry about it – and lucky for you, because it’s very expensive. The other words in the poem are not so difficult: for example, mooreanderous. To mooreander is to wander about in an insolent and self-important manner, preferably while wearing overly-casual clothes and an incredibly stupid hat. Dunderschlock is generally a recycled television show with expensive bloogs and a rap trailer, which perstickulous people go to see even though they know better …”

“That seems a great deal for one word to mean,” Alice protested. “I’m not sure all those words mean what you say they do.”

“When I use a word, it means what I want it to mean – nothing more, nothing less.”