Pooch Cafe by Paul Gilligan for July 05, 2010

If you don’t already have them, you will Porcho!

That’s why you need a cootie collar!

Cooties, fleas and soft stool, to be a puppy again…..

They may or not have cooties, but they are a pack of cuties.

@ElDo Disc Golf—-You old poot, no need for Zappa in here.

Don’t get this Stateside dialogue….what are cooties?

Cooties are a vaguely-defined stigma, often conceived as an unseeable insect of some sort, that are transmitted to children by contact with a member of the opposite sex. Boys generally get them from girls and girls get them from boys, but if a boy is suspected of having gotten cooties by associating with girls it’s feared that he can then pass them on to other boys. Cooties can also be caught by being particularly poor, stinky, spastic, geeky, creepy, retarded, or otherwise unpopular. It’s like the playground version of a dose of clap. There’s no sure cure (although paper cootie-catchers and rubber-band-snap innoculations have shown some efficacy as treatment), and the only protection against catching them is shunning known carriers (it’s a vicious cycle, because the condition of being shunned will itself engender cooties).

Porcho’s distress is probably baseless. You might get cooties from your opposite-gendered sibling, but not from your opposite-gendered parent; a boy might recognize that his sister is a girl, but it will never dawn on him that his Mom is a girl too.

Can I interest anyone in a pair of zircon-encrusted tweezers?

Fritzoid, are you channeling JAD?

It’s admittedly a bloviation, rotts, but I can justify it (and distinguish it from you-know-who’s) in two ways: 1) It was responding to a direct (and presumably sincere) question, and 2) My tongue was planted fairly firmly in my cheek.

^ It was also both relevant and amusing!

Pooch is my hero, sort of the anti-Pooh

It occurs to me that it would be a kick to make a big-budget Hollywood action thriller about civilization being threatened by a global epidemic of cooties. It could be done as a 1950’s-style monster movie, a 1970’s-style disaster epic, or a modern Jerry Bruckheimer apocalypse blockbuster, but it would have to be done entirely straight-faced.

“Mr. President, we’ve lost contact with London, Paris, and Berlin. CDC projections suggest that 97% of Europe will have cooties within a week.”

“Damn! What about the U.S.?”

“We’ve lost Detroit, Dallas, Seattle, and Baltimore. It’s time we moved you to a secure location.”

“No, my place is here, sharing the risk. But tell the First Lady to have the children packed and ready to relocate.”

“Sir, about the First Lady… I’m afraid I have some…terrible news…”

”NOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!”