Tag Archives: goofiness

January 9, 2016 · 5:35 pm

Disney Princesses

You know that I am bad about collecting things.  And on a cold, cold day, what better way to warm the cockles of my cold, old heart than to look at some of the pictures I have in my computer of Disney Princesses?  Don’t inform the local loony bin about this obsession of mine… they are looking for me for enough reasons already.

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Oopsie!  No tangents, please!  Back to Princesses!

 

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Those are Princes!  You big goof!  In fact, some of them are not even royalty.  Come on, Mickey!  This is too simple to screw up!  Just a collage of Disney Princesses!

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It’s getting a bit silly now, but at least silly is better than wrong.

Umm… stick with silly, please…

Ooh, much better!

Sailor Moon?  Are you kidding me?

Why do you think Tinkerbell is a PRINCESS?!!!

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No, I think not!  Don’t even try to go there!

Let me end this nonsense here by apologizing to all the many wonderful artists whose work I stole for this post.  I appreciate your wonderful talents.  But I think in pulling this whole thing together I should acknowledge that it would not have been possible without obsessive-compulsive behavior on my part, and mindlessly posting other people’s pictures on the part of everyone on the internet.  It makes it seem that artwork belongs to all of us, and not just the artists who create it and the people who have all the money.

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January 6, 2016 · 4:22 pm

New Dawns for 2016

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You may recall that one of my obsessive-compulsive collection-addictions is pictures of the dawn sky over eastern Carrollton and Dallas.  So far I have only taken two.  Through Sunday I was still sleeping late with no children to drop off at school.  Just so the numbers match, here is number two;

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So, why not three, you say?  Today is Wednesday after all?  Well, I can’t take a picture of the sunrise when it is overcast and threatening cold rain.  We may have our share of clouds on the horizon this year, with El Nino raging to the West and the jet stream dipping down to Mexico to deliver freezing Arctic blasts thanks to climate change.  Does that mean I expect bad things to be coming my way?  Of course I do.  I am old.  I have six incurable diseases, and I have survived cancer once already.  I am closer now to the day I will die than I have ever been in my life.  And now Donald Trump has the technical possibility of being elected President of the United States.  Who says Jehovah God and the Greek goddess of History don’t have bizarre senses of humor?

But despite the ill omens and the badness I anticipate, life is still good and will not be repressed.  I intend to live for all I am worth.  Have I not earned it, being a public school teacher for 31 years?  Have I not earned it by raising three wonderful kids, one of whom serves this country as a US Marine?  Have I not earned it by picking up dog poop in the park four times a day, and sometimes more off the carpet in the house for the last four years?  I believe in savoring what we have been granted, and using the gifts and abilities given to me by God.  That is why I am still blogging every day for the fourteenth month in a row.  And, miracle of miracles, I am not talking to the wind with no one really listening any more.  When I was blogging on Xanga from 2005 to 2007, I only had one or two followers that even read my stuff… and they didn’t tune in every day.  Some of you have started doing more than just looking at the pictures.  I have evidence in the comments that some of you read my posts all the way to the end.  I thought I was the only blogger that did that.  And I had 276 views last week.  349 the week before.  9651 people viewed my blog in 2015.   I have 87 views in just the three days of this week so far.  I can no longer claim to be the best-written blog that nobody ever reads.  I have to compete now with the other writers who write good stuff.  Ooh… I am doomed.  But I intend to enjoy it.  I have at least one novel in the works to be published.  I have another one already published that should be available at least on Amazon until well after I have curled up my toes and went for a final bye-bye.  Bad things are sure to happen.  But for now, the sun is still coming up every morning in my little world.

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January 5, 2016 · 3:35 pm

Grumpy Old Mike

My middle child, my son Henry, recently found an online source that said being grumpy is not as bad for your health as people think it is.  Bless his little black heart… everything on the internet is true, right?  But if it is true, it could be of benefit to me.  Mickey is not the only other me.  There is also grumpy old Mike.

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I recently wrote a poem about being grumpy.  A grumpy poet?  That could be a thing, right?  Here is what that poem looked like;

Grumpy (a poem about Grumpy life)

Dang it, you old grumpy man!

You annoy me as only a grumpy man can.

You grouse and growl and sometimes howl,

And pace the house like a cat on the prowl.

You worry me, weary me, and generally nasty be,

And of course you are… yes, you are… naturally me.

So why do you worry me, weary me, moan and make bother,

Now that you’re old, and you sound like your father?

Because you are cranky now, creaky with age,

And know you now, soon, the book’s turning its page.

And, though you complain, you do love your life,

And, loathe you will leave it, and your sweet-smiling wife.

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Yes, I come by grumpiness naturally.  It is a function of constant, nagging pain from arthritis and constant struggles with low blood sugar from diabetes.  And things go so wonderfully well all the time…

Like yesterday.  It was the first day after winter break, and so, since I hadn’t heard otherwise, I thought the kids had school.  And they go to two different schools at two different times.  So, I got up and cooked bacon for breakfast.  Wife and daughter both ate happily and only complained a little bit that the bacon was too burnt and the hash browns apparently got freezer burn in the freezer.  Then wife reminded me to check to be sure Henry actually had school before I took him.  She got in her car and took off for the school where she teaches.  Then, daughter and I got into the car and I dropped her off at her middle school.  Mere minutes later she called me on her new cell phone and told me that it was a teacher work day and no school for her after all.  So, I picked her up again.  So, grumbling and rumbling only a little bit, because why didn’t wifey tell me it was a work day only?  And then I checked on Henry’s school website.  Their last day of vacation was listed as Friday, January 1st.  That meant they did have school, right?  So I drove him all the way there in Lewisville.  There was only one other student there.  And the door was locked.  Then a principal told Henry that it wasn’t a class day.  Why couldn’t they have posted it on their screwy @#$%! website.  So, I went home again with the boy, and consoled myself that at least we did not have to do the afternoon pick-me-up-from-school tango with DFW area traffic.

This morning my wife got a good laugh at my expense.  After complaining about the slightly burnt sausages I made, I was told in no uncertain terms that I should be humble about making mistakes and not get mad when people laugh at my follies.  That was not fire coming out of my ears.  Honest, it was not.  I put on a happy grin.  But I was told it was a sarcastic smile at best, and I should stop it.  So I stopped it.  I probably won’t smile again today.  I bought a chocolate doughnut from QT, and I wrote about grumpiness as I ate it.  It helped.  I tried to find my son’s article about the health benefits of grumpiness, but, failing that, I found this article;

http://goodlifezen.com/17-sure-fire-ways-to-overcome-grumpiness/

So grumpy old Mike needs to go away now, and leave me alone.  Better days are coming.  And today the kids really are in school.

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January 2, 2016 · 5:59 pm

An Autobiography of Mickey

 

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Last night I watched again Part I of Ken Burns’ Mark Twain.   I think it reminds me of who I am as a writer.  No, I am not being all big-head arrogant and full of myself.  I devoured certain writers as a youth, consumed them whole.  Charles Dickens was my first passion, followed by J.R.R. Tolkien, and then Mark Twain.  Of all of them, Samuel Clemens is the most like me.  He was from the Midwest, born and raised in Missouri along the Mississippi River.  I am from the Midwest, born and raised in Iowa along the Iowa River.  He endured hardship and tragedy as a youth, losing his little brother in a riverboat accident, and he dealt with it by humor.  I endured a sexual assault from an older boy, and dealt with it by… well, you get the picture.  We are alike, him and I.  We both draw upon the place we grew up, the people we have known, and the events of our youth to create stories.

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It is a pretty big responsibility to follow in his footsteps, and I will probably never live to see the success and the wealth that came to him.  But I have a responsibility to the people I knew and the time that gave rise to me to tell their story.  I need to build a network of stories that resonate the truth of existence that I have been witness to.  A big responsibility… and I probably will not live up to it.  But I have to try.

Being a writer is somewhat like being cursed.  The words burn inside, needing to get out, needing to be heard.   I have stories that need to be told, and they will be told, even if only to file away in the closet again.  Like Mark Twain, I am good at feeling sorry for myself.  And the Mickey part of me, the writer part of me, is just like Mark Twain, a writer persona, and not the real man himself.  I am simply the container for something that has to exist and has to tell stories.  It is not a bad thing to be.  But the more I get to know it, the more I would not wish the destiny on others.

Forgive how sad and bunglingly boorish this post is.  But sometimes there are thoughts I simply have to think.  And as a writer, I am bound to write down the silly things that I think.

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January 1, 2016 · 9:05 pm

I Has Done a Good Thing

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In 2015 I decided I would post a blog post every single day of the year.  And so I have done it.  WordPress didn’t count every single post on the day it was intended for.  My computer clock doesn’t work right, and their day ends something like four to six hours before mine does.  (Greenwich Time?)  So some of my posts were counted on the wrong day from my point of view.  But that is just a technicality.  I accomplished this writing goal while finishing a contest novel that has made it into the final round, and I did final edits on my novel Snow Babies so PDMI Publishing LLC can make an actual book of it.

WordPress says my blog was viewed 9,500 times in 2015.   I am up to 759 followers, some of whom seem to like every post I put up.  I have gotten no real troll comments so far (probably due to the fact that the only people who look in on my humble blog are the kind that like to read the sort of stuff I write).   No readers have as yet made it their personal mission in life to try to save the world from my brain-boggling goofiness and potential for killing people by making them laugh themselves to death.  Either those readers haven’t found me yet, or my posts are not as grin-inducing as I tell myself when I am lying to myself on a semi-daily basis.

I will have posted 776 posts with the posting of this one in all the time I have been writing on WordPress.  It is a lot of wordy talkiness in printy printyness.  And I have not stopped the flow yet.  I need a break from posting, but just as I posted every day for two months before 2015, I will probably need some time to break the bad habits I have developed over the last year.  I still need to blog, because it is the only writing I do that gives me any kind of feedback beyond editors saying, “You can’t write that in a young-adult novel!” or, “People don’t actually talk like that in real life.  You can’t just go around inventing new language.”  (But Shakespeare did it… or, rather, whoever really wrote Shakespeare’s plays did it… so I have the right to try, consequences to the sanity of Western Civilization be damned.)  So I will continue to cut and paste purple paisley prose into this brain-bogglingly bumptious blog, and I will continue to illustrate it with perfectly pickled Paffooney pictures.

 

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December 31, 2015 · 4:46 pm

Wisdom of the Mickey

 

 

MickeyOne must end the year on a note that is either upbeat or regretful.  A heartfelt, “Meh,” just won’t cut it.

So here are a few particles of wisdom from the dustbowl of Mickey’s imagination.

The world is getting brighter… also hotter.  If we continue to chill on the topic of global warming, soon we will be fricasseed.

Ima mickey

You should definitely pay attention to your teachers.  They are mostly old and cranky and undervalued, and it makes them sad when they realize that no one really listens to them.

I learned this from the poet Dylan Thomas, “Rage! Rage! Against the dying of the light!”  He cursed death, and then he promptly went out and drank so much liquor, he died at a very young age.  Thank God I have lived to be old.

You are also pretty much stuck with the face that you are born with, so you better get used to it, and it has many varied uses… especially in the comic sense.

And I would also like to re-iterate the wisdom of The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery;

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It is a bit of a disappointment to an artist to realize that what is essential is actually invisible to the eye… but I know it is true.  Truth resides in words.

The only wisdom I truly possess is the knowledge that I am a fool.

Since I was a mere stupid boy, and before I grew up to be a mildly stupid man, I always yearned to have wisdom.  And wisdom comes through experience and pain.  Now, years later, I realize what true wisdom is… I’d have been better off without all that pain.

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People are a lot like rabbits, except that they are not.

They can never eat too many carrots… unless they do.  And then their skin can turn orange.

There is no beast as noble as a rabbit… except for practically every other beast.

Turtles are not as noble as rabbits.  When you challenge them to a race, they cheat.

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People really ought to be naked more.  It’s true.  If you can strip yourself down to only what is fundamentally nothing but you yourself… you begin to know who you really are.  And it is not shame to let other people see.  Oh, wait a minute!  You thought I was talking about being literally naked?  Oh, no!  Metaphorically naked only!

One should be so opaque and obtuse that other people can see acutely right through you.  It is the only thing that makes nonsense into sense.

And we need to sing and dance a little more than we do.  A good song is healthy for the soul, no matter how badly you sing it.  And even if you are old and arthritic like me, dancing a good jiggity-jig keeps the bones loose and the heart thumping.

Everyone needs to dance with their children.  And talk to them.  You can learn more from them than they can from you.  They have more recently come here from the hand of God.  And they know things that you have forgotten… and will need to remember before you return to Him.

 

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I hope my anti-wisdom has not seriously screwed everybody up.

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December 20, 2015 · 6:06 pm

Be Naked More

I admit to being a closet nudist.  By that I mean that I only walk around naked inside my closet.  I flirted with the idea of becoming a nudist once… or as they call it, a naturist.  But I have never overcome the urge not to be naked where anybody can ever see me.  I am a chicken.  Literally.  I look like a plucked chicken when I have no clothes on, especially now that I have all the little pink bleedy spots all over the lower parts of my body.  Bread me and fry me, I am done with this particular metaphor.

I come from Iowa where kids were repeatedly told never to run around like a naked Indian.  I think older people tell you that because they know from experience naked in Iowa in the winter time is tantamount to making parts of yourself into popsicles where you really really really don’t want to get all icy-frozen.  (I mean fingers and toes, of course!  What did you think I meant?)

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But I have learned from long experience of health problems that a little bit of running around like a naked Indian can actually be a beneficial thing to do.  Now, I know that you probably don’t believe I am being completely candid here, and that I may have some kind of pervert’s agenda going on the background… but I have been told it is so not only by naturists, but also by medical professionals.

(http://www.today.com/health/health-benefits-being-naked-how-stripping-down-good-you-t44911)

This link is to an article on Today, Health & Wellness written by

Sep. 25, 2015 at 11:52 AM

Jordi Lippe-McGraw
TODAY
I’m sorry I can’t make a handier link after WordPress re-did all the controls again, but here is a quote from the lead of the article that sums it up quite well;
“Well, it turns out being naked may not only be more comfortable but healthier as well. Some experts say that donning your birthday suit more often can help with myriad physical and psychological problems.”
Beauty and Beast
I have learned that sleeping naked is good for my diabetes.  My body temperature needs to be lowered at night to about 65 degrees so that metabolism-boosting brown fat will develop more easily.  Anything that can potentially control my blood sugar and reduce my weight is worth trying.
Being naked is also good for my psoriasis and skin health.  Sweat removes toxins from the skin, but when you wear binding clothing, that sweat is held close enough to re-introduce the toxins to the skin.  Hence, the parts I keep most religiously covered up are also the parts that psoriasis wants to make me itch to shreds.  I have come out of the closet enough to spend a good deal of my alone-time in my room naked as the proverbial jay-bird.  In fact, more so, because the dang jay-bird has his feathers.
And, in fact, I am pulled towards the outdoors while I am in this unfortunate jay-bird state because absorbing Vitamin D from the sunshine is good not only for my physical health, but for my mental health as well.  Being naked outdoors leads to the appreciation of more sensations and sensual connections to the environment.  Of course, this last bit is the least likely to happen because we live in the suburbs of a big, crowded and noisy city with the yellow-brown air that goes along with a thriving economy and a high concentration of oil millionaires.
Now, I am certainly aware that this post may have completely horrified you with the notion of a sickly, fat, and hairy old man wandering around somewhere in the buff, but don’t worry too much.  Just because I know it might be good for me to be naked more, it doesn’t mean I have the courage to actually try it.  But I do think about it and write about it way more than is normal, and trying it might ease up the engines of obsession.  Still, I am a chicken.  And plucked is not a good look for me.  Only time will truly determine it.

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December 15, 2015 · 5:07 pm

Playing With Dolls Again

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Yes, having hoarding disorder can be a pain.  I channel it into collecting, especially things like 12-inch action figures and Barbie Dolls.  But it becomes such a mania that even the rules don’t contain it.  These mint-in-box dolls with mutant big heads and bean bodies are part of a wacky collection that has caught hold of me with about the same ferocity as the flu.  They are Monster High dolls to go along with the TV cartoons and direct-to-video movies used primarily to sell these ultra-weird toys to little girls.  Supposedly each of the girls in the series is the daughter of a movie monster.  Operetta above is the daughter of the Phantom of the Opera.  Isi Dawndancer claims to be the daughter of a deer-spirit… a Native-American-style monster thingy.  I suppose there is a benign rationalization behind these things other than trying to get little girls to identify with and emulate monsters.  Believe me, from my years as a teacher, no little girl really needs encouragement to embrace the monster within.  And that sort of thing has negative consequences.

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Yes, the picture immediately above is of my Monster High collection as it stood a year ago.   I have now added to it.  And am admitting as reasonably as I can that it is probably evidence of looming insanity.  Let me show you the new acquisitions from the current collecting year;

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Besides Operetta and Isi, I have added the daughter of the Loch Ness Monster, the daughter of the rat king, and, apparently, the daughter of the man-eating plant from the movie Little Shop of Horrors.  What is even worse, there are more dolls out there and available to this collection.  I have followed the rules and limited my spending, but I wasted birthday and Christmas money from my mother on this stuff… and probably will do so again.  I suppose it is because I don’t spend my toy-money on more manly things like guns and political donations to Donald Trump.  But I have to satisfy my lurking doubts with the notion that the most impressive collections of things like this in museums are probably put together by fools like me with raging hoarding disorder.

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December 10, 2015 · 5:05 pm

Mickey is Magical

I have decided that since I have a tendency to write science fiction and fantasy, with a special emphasis on the fantasy part, I should actually be able to do magic.  It doesn’t take a lot of self-examination to see that it is so.

Teacher Magic

wonderful teaching

As a teacher I know several powerful magic spells.  I have the power to put teenagers into a deep and restful sleep.  All I have to do is start a lesson focus and heads drop to desks and snore-music fills the part of the room that my blah-blah doesn’t.  I also have a powerful ability to make teenagers hate things.  All I have to do is testify with my best honest-to-goodness face that something is good for them, and they will thoroughly hate it.  Protein at breakfast is good for you?  Gotta hate that.  Independent reading of books is good for you?  I have just made the entire school library radioactive by saying it.  Think what good a teacher could do if the principal would only let them say, “Illegal drugs are good for you!” or, “You should join a street gang, it would be good for you!” or even, “Racial prejudice is a good thing for our white society!”  (I know I would never actually feel good about saying those things, and I could never make the proper honest-to-goodness face, but that last thing was actually tried by a teacher I once worked with… he said it because he believed it… and even the white kids were instantly up in arms and got that teacher fired.  Come to think of it, that was the only lesson he ever taught that I actually approved of.)  An even more powerful teacher magic is to forbid things.  Anything forbidden by a teacher or a teacher’s rules is the only thing they want to do.  I was able to get kids to read more by forbidding them to read library books during lessons.  I found it strengthened the urge to occasionally catch them doing it and lecture them about how they will end up unable to flip burgers at McDonald’s because they will let interesting and complicated stuff get in the way of mindlessly doing repetitive tasks.

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Traffic Magic

I have an amazing magical power over stoplights.  I can unfailingly turn them bright red just by approaching them, no matter what color they were five and a half seconds before.  If I am in a hurry, I have the power to make that red light last for more than the three minutes that is supposed to be the maximum for the cycle.

I can also make old people (of course I mean other old people) drive slower in the fast lane by driving behind them.  I can make young guys in Bubba trucks zoom in front of me and nearly kill me simply by having a few inches of space between my front bumper and the rear end of the car I’m following.  I don’t know how they fit those big old Chevys and Ford Broncos and Dodge Rams in those little spaces which are less than half as long as their vehicles, and do it while using one hand to give me the finger out their window.  I suppose they have fold-able bones like a rat so they can squeeze through tight places.

Laughing Magic

20150105_161714 I suppose the magical power I am proudest of is my ability to magically make people laugh at me.  (Yes, they always say they are laughing with me, not at me… but we all know how humor really works.  We laugh because we are really happy that it didn’t happen to us!)  I am able to put on the clown nose and people automatically laugh almost as hard as they laugh at me without the clown nose.  I am able to say things in weird words that stimulate your brain to shout silently in your head, “That jest ain’t right!”, and you automatically think, “Funny!”  So, with all this magical power, I have concluded… I am a wizard!

space cowboy23

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December 3, 2015 · 5:02 pm

Viking Christmas Carols

 

Nerrak

Nerrak, the Christmas Viking,,, He is blue in color because he lives in upper Norway and it gets very, very cold.

I guess I need to explain the festive Christmas Viking that I included as the initial Paffooney of this post.  You see, during the Princess’ Christmas concert where she played the tooty leather pole, one of the pieces was called Sleigh Ride.  But as we talked about it at the dinner table, Henry, the Princess, and I, it was quite naturally understood to be Slay Ride.  It probably stems from too much Dungeons and Dragons adventuring.  You tend to get into an entirely too slaying-sort-of mind set.  And, naturally enough, we figured a “Slaying Song” had to be the kind of Christmas music that would appeal to Vikings and barbarians everywhere.

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Groo the Wanderer, created by Sergio Aragones

Yes, my kids and I often err to seriously demented misspelling demons and magic of most misinterpretive sort.  This led to a further discussion of why there were no Vikings named Bob.  After all, there are plenty of Canutes, Karls, Ymirs, and Siegfrieds…  so why no Bobs?

Henry suggested it was the general mistreatment of Bobs by the Vikings.

“Mistreatment of Bobs?” I asked innocently enough.

“Yes, in Viking culture, Bobs are constantly bullied.  The other Vikings insist on using them as sleds.”  Henry grinned as he said it.  “You’ve heard of Bobsleds, haven’t you?”

“Oh, of course!  Now that all makes sense… in a weird sort of way.”

This led to a sudden surge of Viking creativity and we burst into song.

Dashing through the snow
On a horse, we hoped to slay,
Swinging swords we go,
Laughing all the way (Ho, ho, ho, ho!)
Bells on Bob’s tail ring,
making Bob want to fight (while we use him as a sled)
What fun it is to laugh and sing
A slaying song tonight!

Oh, yingle bells, yingle bells
Yingle all the way
Oh, what fun it is to ride
On a horse so we can slay!
Yingle bells, yingle bells
Yingle all the way
Oh, what fun it is to ride                                                                                                    On a horse to burn and slay!

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