The Ecphorizer

Uncle Hobart's Annual Basic Hygiene Lecture to the Children
Warren Fogard

Issue #35 (July 1984)


Folk medicine for the masses



Okay, kids, now listen up. Myron, put down that slingshot. If you bounce one more marble off Phoebe's coconut I'll hamstring ya. No, Reba, this is not "another old lecture about athalete's feet." I don't know anything about athalete's feet and they ain't no athaletes here anyhow.

This here is your basic hygiene lecture. Stuff that everyone should know before they go running off to the beach. Stuff like how not to eat dirt or suck on them old used popsickle handles you fine in the mud or kiss a pig. Just your basic, common, run-of-the-mill, everyday hygiene. Now shut up.

If you eat dirty stuff you'll get sick. That's all there is to it. You see, everything that's dirty has got these little animals on it. You can't see 'em unless you got a microscope, but they're there. It's a scientific fact. They're called rotifers, or linchpins, or amoebics, or sometimes bahsilly. Any time you stick something dirty in your mouth, you'll get these little animals into your culinary cistern, and right on into your blood! When they get in there, they'll fer damn sure launch a all out attack on your natural corpsuckles which are swimming around in there doing their job. You'll get sick as a dog.

When you get sick like that you'll have to go to the doctor whether you like it or not. No, Reuben, the doctor won't come to you. They don't make housecalls anymore. No, Henry, I don't think it's because they're dirty red communists, I think it's because it's just too much trouble finding a place to park the Cadillac.

Anyway, when you get in to see the doctor, and tell him what color dirt you ate, he'll probably shoot you full of these other little animals he's got called antidotes. Now antidotes are little critters not much bigger than the rotifers and linchpins, but a lot meaner. They'll climb aboard the natural corpsuckles sliding around in your blood, and if a rotifer or a linchpin tries to get aboard that corpsuckle, the antidote will kick him off so he falls unconscious into the stream and drowns. So you see the rotifers and antidotes have a grand time fighting and skipping from corpsuckle to corpsuckle and throwing molly-qs at each other while you're lying at debts door sick as a dog.

There's plenty of corpsuckles to fight over. There's white ones, and red ones, and blue ones, which I think is very patriotic of them to come in the national colors. The antidotes like the blue ones best because they don't make their little feets so hot.

When the antidotes have got all the rotifers dead, you could go ahead and get well, except that you've got a bloodstream full of dead rotifers to get rid of. Don't worry about it. Your healthy body will set up a straining station just south of your liver. There trained corpsuckles will strain out all the dead rotifers and pile them up for the garbage truck.

No, Andrea, you can't kill rotifers, or linchpins, or amoebics, or even bahsullies by bashing them with a rock so there's no use practicing on Reuben. Now it's time for your naps. I'll give you my Rabies Prevention lecture tomorrow.

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