Road Apples
Dec. 22, 2008


Mr. Mannerly Man assembles his team

By Tim Sanders

Multitudes of readers (two) have inquired as to why we here at the Mannerly Man Institute have not yet appointed any department heads at our Gaylesville campus. The answer is that even though we’ve installed some departments in our spacious new interdepartmental Quonset hut, we thought it would be in poor taste to announce chairmanships before the first of the year, when the new semester begins. But since early announcements seem to be working out so well for President-elect Obama, we’ve decided to disclose just a few of our new appointees. Perhaps this will help distract skeptical readers from any scandals we may have been associated with in the past few months.

DSI - We are proud to announce that Mr. Durward "Flinch" Hacklespeck, a man of vast experience as a school bus driver, will be heading up our Department of Deliberate Snubs and Insults. Durward is well known locally for his catch phrase, "Why don’t you kids just go pee up a rope?"

TD - As to the much anticipated post of Chairman of the Table Deportment Department, we were fortunate to find Mr. Clifton Vincent Dribble, who spent two years working toward a degree from DeVry University in Table Deportment, with a major concentration in both chicken and ribs. Many of you may remember Mr. Dribble’s fine letter to the editor explaining his position on the napkin vs. sleeve dispute which disrupted last April’s Rotary Club luncheon.
SOB - And last but not least, we’re proud to announce that our Department of Style On a Budget will be chaired by the lovely and talented Carrie S. George, who spent several years as a valuable member of the reclamation team at America’s Thrift Store in Birmingham. She comes to our campus with an impressive resume, which she discovered in a vintage alligator purse with very little wear and only one eye. By which we mean the purse, not Carrie.

Here are some questions from our mailbox:


Q: Are you aware that if you do not pay $142.58 within a week, your account will be turned over to a collection agency?

A: Relax. Mr. Mannerly Man expects a federal bailout no later than January 1.


Q: This is a very awkward situation. I seen where my wife Doreen had ordered some mustache wax on eBay. Now my problem is did she order it for her, or for me? If she ordered it for me it would be weird, because that’s what I got her for Christmas. Then again if she ordered it for herself, now she’ll have two tubes of mustache wax which is one more than she needs. I thought about taking the mustache wax I got her back and getting her some of that Neet stuff they advertise which comes by the quart and can strip the quills off a porcupine, except that if she was to use it and then didn’t have a mustache no more, she’d still be stuck with that tube of mustache wax which she couldn’t send back. What should I do?

A: We here at the Mannerly Man Institute will refer the question to Miss George when she assumes her post in January. In the meantime we personally feel that a mustache, if it is clean and properly trimmed, can enhance anyone’s appearance. Had it not been for Oliver Hardy’s mustache, for example, he’d have looked exactly like Rosie O’Donnell. Then where would Laurel and Hardy have been, ask yourself that?


Q: Me and Sheila are going to her parents’ house for Christmas dinner. They’ll have Maw Maw and Paw Paw and nineteen or twenty aunts, uncles, cousins, and various crumb snatchers all sitting around that big table. The problem is that her whole family is food sniffers. When they start passing the pinto beans around, for instance, Paw Paw will stare long and hard at the beans, sniff the serving dish, take him a sizeable lump, and then hand the dish to Junior, who stares, sniffs the beans, gets him some, and then on it goes to Aunt Myrtle, who sniffs again, digs in, and so on and so forth. You’d think that after twelve or thirteen noses had been stuck into them pinto beans, that the rest would just vote with the majority and give the beans the benefit of the doubt, but no, they all–EACH AND EVERY ONE–gotta study them beans very carefully and sniff before they shovel any out. And the same goes for the dressing, the corn, and the turkey, too. Such snorting and honking you never heard. If you was to walk in on that bunch during a meal, you’d think half of them was beagles trailing a rabbit, and the other half was hogs after truffles. Sheila she says it all goes back to her great grandpaw and some bad potato salad he got hold of during the McKinley Administration, and therefore there ain’t nothing wrong with it. What do you think?

A: We will pass your question along to Mr. Dribble, who has probably encountered this very problem time and time again. We will add, however, that such behavior is not unusual. I had an aunt who sniffed every single forkful before she put it into her mouth. Because of this she was usually the last one at the table. She passed away in her mid-forties when she inhaled a stalk of asparagus. Many family members were glad to see her go.


Q: Every year at the office Christmas party we all gather around the piano at our boss’s house and sing Christmas carols. And every year Norm Spackler and Woolworth Coolidge get into the same argument about whether "don we now our gay apparel" has something to do with cross-dressing. This always leads to Norm making some ugly remarks about Woolworth’s stupid reindeer sweater which he wears every year, and that leads to the Prancer and Dancer gay marriage dispute, and inevitably Norm and Woolworth wind up going outside to settle it like men. Is there anything you would suggest to prevent another incident this year?

A: This could best be answered by our Department of Deliberate Snubs and Insults Chairman, but Mr. Hacklespeck is currently unavailable due to something he said to a police officer after a routine traffic stop. In a month, or possibly three weeks with good behavior, he’ll address your problem.


Please remember, dear readers, that while it costs nothing to pay someone a compliment, here at the Mannerly Man Institute it’s cash that produces results. If you can pony up fifty bucks or more, we’ll guarantee you a department chairmanship. And if we don’t have a spare department lying around, we’ll invent one. Just like our role models in Chicago, we call it Pay to Play.