"Can I go in and see him now?" Dodger was about to leap back into bed, but held out just long enough to hear the doctor's reply.

"Let the lad rest," said Wauk. "He ought to be out another hour or so, with the dose I gave him. Right now, why don't you take me down to the saloon and buy me a drink or three."

Damn drunk, Dodger thought as he heard the outside door open and close, and the sound of footsteps going down the stairs. Can't even dope me up properly. It's a good thing I'm still alive.

That bastard! Make my father cry, will you?

Dodger started poking around in cupboards and cabinets.

He quickly found a gallon stoneware jug labeled CORN LIQUOR. He pulled out the stopper and smelled it. Booze, all right. Okay, what have we got here?

He spent the next hour reading definitions in an old leather-bound book called Saunders's Comprehensive Medical Encyclopedia, publication date 1898, looking up the words he found printed on bottles and jars that lined the shelves and cabinets in the examining room. "Paregoric," he discovered, was camphorated tincture of opium. It smelled nasty, so he dumped some of it in the jug of corn liquor. "Calomel" was mercurous chloride. That sounded nasty; wasn't mercury poisonous? Into the bottle went a teaspoon of calomel. "Aunt Lydia's Pink Tonic" was said, by the label, to possess excellent emetic properties. After looking up "emetic," Dodger poured in a generous dose. "Nicotine" was a poisonous alkaloid, C₁₀H₁₄N₂. In it went. A "sialogogue" was something that increased the flow of saliva. Why not? "Arecane" was a proprietary remedy and efficacious as a purgative. A "parturifacient" was used to speed up childbirth, while an "abortifacient" produced an abortion. Dodger wondered what a mixture of the two would do to a drunken doctor? "Formalin," "cryptomenorrheal," "Salvarsan," "arnicin," "myxorrheal," "leptuntic"...so many new words, so many definitions, so little time.

After a while he grew tired of reading, and felt a little hungry. In the next room, by the dentist chair, he found the remains of a Mexican lunch: chips and salsa and a cold taco. He took a bite of the taco, and in a moment was searching frantically for a drink of water. After he'd put out the fire in his mouth, he examined the bottle of Pancho's Habanero Hell (WARNING: Do not use near open flame!), then took it into the doctor's office and dumped half the bottle into the jug. He smeared a little sauce around the earpieces of the stethoscope.

He jammed in the cork and shook the jug vigorously, then opened it again and sniffed cautiously. It still smelled like booze.

For good measure, he pissed in the jug before going downstairs to join his father.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

From: First Latitudinarian Church of Celebrity Saints

Subject: November Audience Ratings

Category: Children's (age 2 to 12) periodical (weekly/fortnightly/monthly)

December 1 (King City Temple)

The November "Flack" numbers as compiled by the Trends Research Department of the Latitudinarian Church are as follows:

Admiral Platypus seems to have solidified its hold on the number-two slot in the Adjusted Audience Share rating. Barney's Boulevard, benefiting from a new writing staff, has made its way from number fourteen to number four in the past year. The top two stories continue to be the steepening decline of What the Fuck?, the once-dominant Q A offering from NLF-TV3, and the meteoric rise of Skunk Cabbage, the critically panned actioner about a tribe of zombie children. SC seems poised to make a run on those two old reliable warhorses, Peppy and Platy.

Spokespersons for NLF and the Children's Educational Workshop, producers of WTF?, had no comment when asked if the declining numbers of educational programming across the board in the past three years reflected a growing anti-intellectualism or merely a stagnation of fresh new ideas in the presentation of loftier kid-vid. Oskar Bigbird III, chairman of CEW, promised a news conference later in the week, announcing staffing changes on WTF?

It seems nothing the pundits can say will have any effects on the soaring prospects of Skunk Cabbage. Introduced a mere eight months ago, the "Li'l Stinkers" have stormed the imaginations of a huge number of Lunarian children, and are now ready for a system-wide release. Reports from retailers confirm that for the first time in many a year, sales of Gideon Peppy products were eclipsed by the SC Kids during the month of October. Full figures for November are not yet available. But it seems a safe bet that Li'l Stinkers toys, clothing, software, and other tie-ins will be the hot items this Xmas season. Quote from Gideon Peppy (with a chuckle): "It don't have me chewin' on my lollipop." He pointed to growing cries of outrage from Mars to the Cometary Zone from concerned parents' groups worried about the coming onslaught of SC Kids. Peppy refused to comment on rumors that he himself had been behind some of those protests.

More likely to put toothmarks on his Tootsieroll is the continuing failure to soar of his much-touted new series Sparky and His Gang. Ballyhooed on the Peppy Show for three months before its August launch, Sparky remains mired in the mid-forties, with a dismal 12.4 share. With the fifteenth episode currently lensing at Sentry/Sensational, rumors are that the sixteenth stanza is on hold, while (guess what?) staff changes are contemplated. Say, there's a bunch of WTF? scribes soon to be pounding the pavement, G.P. They'll work cheap.

(For daily show and theatrical numbers, key MORE)

from The Straight Shit Starpage:

Year in Review: sub-Kid-vid

"Anybody Wanna Buy a Sparky Action Mug?"

by Bermuda Schwartz

I've been telling you for two hundred years now, so why do I think you'll all of a sudden start to listen? Ever since those old phosphor dots began to chase each other across the magic glass of the kinescope in the dear departed 1940s, two things are the only things that sell on TV: good stuff, and crap. Neither one is a guarantee of success. Plenty of shows have aspired to be good, but were kidding themselves. They've all long since vanished. And some actually were good, and they're gone, too. As for crap... who can fucking tell with crap? Myghty Mytes shambled onto the screen midsummer, stinking of crap, and by the end of the month it was in the crapper. Skunk Cabbage smelled just as rank, and by Yuletide the Komical Korpses had trailed their slime into every third-rate geraldo's studio on the planet. Kids were sleeping in "Li'l Stinker" coffins, at a thousand dollars a pop, gluing trademarked live worms to their cheeks.

Who can figure it? Not me, not the pundits nor the critics nor the reviewers nor the scholars shaking their heads with dismay. Crap is crap. Some will turn out to be popular crap, and if I knew how to tell the difference I wouldn't be here writing about it, I'd be fucking rich.

But oh dear, I hear the pundits say. One of the few quality shows getting regular viewings—and of course I'm referring to CEW's What the Fuck?—is taking a nose-dive in the ratings. Woe is us! Civilization is darn sure to perish any day now.