Happy Birthday to the Silliepie Williepie!

On July 17th, my little brother will have a birthday.

To celebrate, I am presenting Five Fun Facts about Wubbahed.

1. Growing up, an unnamed older sibling often told the young Wubbahed, “Mom and Dad had me and said, ‘We must have another!’ Then they had you and said, ‘We need to stop.’”


2. He has been known to abandon jigsaw puzzles with only one piece remaining. He will lose interest, slump his shoulders, and say, “Where is that !@#$%@!in’ puzzle piece?” After abandoning the puzzle, his elder, puzzle-finishing brother has been known to go, “Look at this abandoned puzzle! I wonder if this piece I magically found in my pocket will fit into it? Oh, look! I finished the puzzle.”


3. Sometimes in his Executive Suite at his big time New York ad agency, he receives letters and packages addressed to “Wubba ‘Please Call Me Silliepie’ Turnage”. His personal assistant, Waylon Smithers, hands him this mail with a quiet little, “Does this mean I can now call you ‘Silliepie,’ sir?”

4. He has very delicate skin. Sometimes even the gentle wafting of a summer breeze can cause his tender skin to bruise.


5. All of his trials and tribulations have given him character.



Happy birthday, Silliepie Williepie!

P.S. Alex, hang in there. I will respond to your blog entry next.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

An Essay by M. Robert Turnage

When you are younger, summer vacation is a great oasis of sloth. When you are a grown up summer vacation lasts only a week and usually involves catching up on all the errands you have been putting off for the past three years.

Last week, I went with the family to the Oregon coast, and catching up with the family is an errand I have been putting off for the past three years.

There were six of us in all - both of the Folks, my brother, Will (aka Wubbahed aka Williepie), his lovely wife, Kat (aka Katpie), and my lovely wife, Mrs. Wonderifical-Turnage.

Why the Oregon coast?

Well, how about this:



Or this:



Or this:



It was mad glorious beautiful everywhere, even though the fishing docks smelled like… fishing docks.

On our first day there, we looked out window of our room and saw a pirate ship.



I have no idea if the boat was out there promoting a movie or not, but if the movie had adult content in it, it would have to be rated “Arrrrrrrr!”

We went on a lot of hiking trails. On one of them, my brother tried to take a picture of this ugly plant with his extremely cool Nokia N95. “I’m trying to get my macro settings to work.” With a casual, “Oh, you mean like this?” I turned on my camera’s macro settings and took this picture.



We went out in a boat for some whale watching. Whale watching is really fun, but not the best thing in the world to photograph. Whales move fast and you can’t really predict where they will come up. Plus, the pictures don’t capture the motion, noise, and sheer excitement of a whale going, “PSSSHHHHHHHHH!!!!”



Here is a great picture of the back of my Mom’s hair in crystal clear focus, while the mighty gray whale is blurry in the background. Truly, I have missed my calling as a professional photographer. Mall Santas everywhere are weeping.



Here is a sea lion on a buoy.



We went to the aquarium, which was fun, but most of the animals living there came from the harbor that was all of ¼ mile away. So we paid money to see the same sea lions that were sunning on the rocks just outside the aquarium.



Having said that, the sea lions were pretty cool. So were the sea otters.



They also had a Giant Squid-o-Meter. It looks like six of me would equal one giant squid.



While at the same time, it would take eight of my lovely wife to make one giant squid.



Sadly, during our aquarium tour the disembodied shark teeth ate my brother’s hand. While posing for this picture, other aquarium patrons just laughed and laughed at his misery.



Here is the jigsaw puzzle I finished. Sure, Mom, and Williepie did the borders and large chunks of the image, but I put in the final piece. So, technically, I finished the puzzle.



My brother accidentally left his extremely cool Nokia N95 sitting around, making it very easy for me to pick up.



It is a great little phone. In the short time I handled it, I was able to send a high-priority text message to everyone in his address book. The text message? “From now on, please do not call me Williepie – CALL ME SILLIEPIE!”

His boss seemed to appreciate it most of all.



Their big googly eyes met from across the room. With the rich smell of butter sauce in the air, they took tentative sideways-steps towards each other. Love at first sight was never this tasty.



Someone told me that the calories you consume on vacation do not count. Good Lord, I hope so.



Somewhere in there, I drank beer from the local brewery as well as a nice little concoction called Moose Drool. It tasted better than it sounds.

In conclusion, I like vacations.

Also, I Have a Giant Blue Bull Named Babe

The first thing you need to know about me and my brother when reading this story is that we put the “wuh” in “wacky.” We see an opportunity for a prank, and we commit to it. We do not divert. We do not swerve. We do not detour. We head down that Great Road of Prank full throttle, potholes be damned.

My brother and I met in New Orleans for a connecting flight to Atlanta for DragonCon ComicCON. One would think that it would be easy enough to find a direct flight from Dallas to Atlanta, but Southwest Airlines only flies out of Love Field. If you know Texas, you know that The Wright Amendment is the biggest piece of bullshit legislation next to the misnamed Defense of Marriage Act. But I digress.

My flight getting into New Orleans was delayed, so I had to run through the airport to make the flight. Wubba was already on the plane. I picked up a lunch of cold-cuts, brie, fois gras, pistachios, croissants, and hand-churned butter imported from Sweden and packed in into a cooler that I proceeded to swing hither-and-thither through the concourse as I ran. (I may have knocked over a book display at a newsstand, but I won’t admit it.)(I will admit to hitting a pug in a baby carriage with a bow on its head only because that’s just sick.)

(If you’re asking, “How did a pug get in the concourse?” this was before 9-11 when they let concealed Molotov cocktails and semi-automatic weapons on the concourse.)

(Okay, I lied about the pug, but wouldn’t it have been funny if that had happened?)(No, not "funny-ha-ha,” but "funny-seriously-Robert-get-on-with-the-story”-funny.)

(I’ve always wanted to say “semi-automatic weapon.” Thank you, internet.)

(And I’ll get back to the story when I’m good-and-ready.)

(Jerk.)

I arrived at the gate just as they were closing the concourse door in clichéd fashion, and begged the gate-keeper let me on the flight. She or he did, and as I was getting on the plane, holding aloft my cooler of foodstuffs so as not to hit the blue-hair with the weathered face sitting in first class, Wubba saw me and yelled, “Dr. Turnage! Thank Mary and Holy Joseph you made it with the heart!” The flight attendant asked me if I really was a doctor, adding that they’re usually informed when a transplant organ was going to be on board; apparently, they have a special fridge up front that they store the hearts in.

Somehow I convinced her that I was indeed a doctor. (Again - pre-9/11.)

Twenty minutes into the flight, a passenger ten rows up from us started going into cardiac arrest. The flight attendant that I duped before asked if I could do anything for the passenger, so I went up to talk to the passenger. (Remember - Wacky. And. Committed.)

The passenger was red and sweating. I pounded on his chest, and I blew into his mouth. I grabbed the nearest box-cutter, ripped open his shirt, and made an incision vertically down the center of his ribs. I took the bone-saw I happened to have with me and cracked his ribs. I reached into his chest and massaged his heart. He had already fainted from the intense pain. The passengers around us were drenched in his blood. Pieces of bone and flesh dripped from the fresh-air valves above the seats.

His heart stopped beating. I yelled to the flight attendant who had become my makeshift surgical assistant, “Get my cooler. Now! Whore!” I added the “whore” because I felt that Dr. Turnage, the character I had assumed, would be the kind of guy that would throw out wild, unsubstantiated claims about another person’s dirty sex life. “This man needs a new heart!” I would find out later that the heart had stopped beating because he had bled out.

I opened up the cooler only to remember that I wasn’t REALLY a surgeon, and that the cooler didn’t really have a heart in it. I cut out his heart with the box cutter. I opened up my container of fois gras, and just kind of shoved it into his chest. Then I sprinkled the pistachios on top. No one was questioning my obvious authority because earlier I had shot everyone’s eyes out with my concealed Molotov cocktail. Because the brie wasn’t going to be any good without the fois gras, I threw that in his chest also.

I cracked his chest back together, and sewed it up with shoestring. Lucky for me, the plane crashed in a fiery ball leaving my brother and me the only survivors, so no one found out about our little prank.

Pure wackiness.