Don't worry, I already made your New Year's Resolution

You now have had four (4) days to act upon what you promised you'd do upon swigging a healthful liquid at exactly the first minute of the New Year. I can guarantee that if you all were anything like your volumes of idiotic letters I received last year, none of you have even started anything. I'm advising you to forget the (likely boring and stupid) things you "resolved" to do and follow my advice. That is, if you value your health enough to ensure you'll be around next New Year.

This year is the year for edification through education and that can be done by memorizing and applying these true facts:

Tooth Health is Important Now



Unless you realistically think that you'll be able to teach your young children how to whittle you replacement wooden teeth every fortnight, you should first try preserving the ones you you hopefully still have. A retainer like the one show above stabilizes teeth while not in use and is a nearly perfect wax replica of your natural features.

Learn how to care for the baby you will be having



I believe that I can safely assume that your skills planning for the upcoming baby are akin to how you handled your New Years promise to yourself. Realistic dummies can be made or purchased to allow you to practice important babyminding techniques. They can be filled will gel or sand for added realism.

Head-lice should be taken seriously



The common louse has continued to evolve, and is now more resistant to death than ever. Developing a calculated scheme of parting the hair each morning to remove lice is an important task that should be worked into the morning routine of every business professional.

Please do take care of your bodies. Despite common thought, they are expensive and difficult to mechanize, although new technology does make it possible.

Famous Chicago Cold and Flu Liquid: A Follow-Up

Some time back I issued a warning regarding certain companies to avoid. One B. T. Winningthorpe (alternate spelling: Winningthrope) took offense and wrote to me some sort of rambling family saga of loose associations and some rather boring and mostly irrelevant history. I believe he was under the impression that I would extract some sort of sympathy for him from this tale and understand his "reasons" about why his business has gone awry. Further independent investigations by myself and my loyal postman have revealed that the Famous Chicago brand is actually the third incarnation of what was originally Blythe Corn Syrup Factory and Corn Medicine Shoppe. You may remember this product:

Bythe Corn and Sulfate Starch Thrombosis Powders:

"As Sulfate Would Have It"

It was quickly removed from druggist's shelves for false advertising (as a joke or entertainment, per the US Food and Drug Act.)

Next came Improved Chicago Lung Paste:

"Expectorant Only the Best"

This product too was forcibly discontinued for mislabeling. It was, in fact, not improved and was determined to be more of a salve than a paste.

I make no apologies for providing the public with true facts and certainly make no apologies to groveling humbugs. Or hysterics.

Why I Hate Imaginary Friends

Did you know that over 43% of children today have an Imaginary Friend? This astounding figure is a sizable increase from the Middle Ages, when only 12% of children reported Imaginary Friends (this small number presumably due to the high mortality rates of the Imaginary Plague).

Studies have shown that most Imaginary Friends carry far less germs and bacteria than Actual Friends, and almost never have jelly on their faces. In fact, Imaginary Friends are physically unable to track dirt through a freshly steamed carpet, as they have no footprints!

But despite their obvious hygienic benefits, Imaginary Friends come with one significant drawback: they are (every single one of them!) unbelievably annoying. To illustrate this point, I have included several children's drawings of their irritating friends:

This Imaginary Friend had many special powers, including the ability to stay up all night singing London Bridge is Falling Down at the top of his lungs whilst simultaneously covering all the toilet seats in the house with peanut butter.

This Imaginary Friend enjoyed picking up garishly dressed, heavily-rouged girls in railway stations, and when they left in the morning, it was invariably discovered that they had used the last of the milk and stolen all the towels.

This Imaginary Friend once belonged to my nephew, Henry.
Le Mustash was an Imaginary Friend of French extraction who spent most of his time lecturing young Henry (then 4) on the finer points of Derrida and Proust, and then surprising the entire family with 8 am pop quizzes.

A Short Essay Outlining the Causes of the Anti-Astronaut Riots of 1957

It is common knowledge that astronauts are the laziest people ever (except, of course, for babies, whose laziness outweighs that of astronauts by 1700%, which is a very large number). That is why we send them into space. They are too lazy to stay on earth, but not cute enough to charm hard-working adults into caring for them.

As you surely remember, or at least learned in school, before the inception of the Space Program, people used to have to care for astronauts in their homes: brushing their teeth, rolling them daily to avoid bedsores, and worst of all, reading the newspaper out loud.

An unfortunate family burdened with the care of four Astronauts, 1955.

All of this changed during the Anti-Astronaut Riots of 1957, when ordinary people all across the nation got really fed up all at the same time and all the astronauts were summarily rounded up and shot into space. Thus coining the term "astronaut."

Mixed Meats and their Role in Neural Functioning

Brain health is as important as always, but there has been a terrifying trend of neural neglect in recent times. It has been proven, thus a true fact, that mixed meats provide the comprehensive nutrition your brain requires and are a fabulous preemptive measure against unfortunate conditions that can strike at any time. Here are some suggestions that that can be thriftily incorporated into your family’s supper repertoire.

Meat Conglomerate with Aspic-Pear Sauce

This dish of seven types of flesh stabilized with beef marrow feeds the part of your brain responsible for short-term patience, professionalism, and maths.

Pork and Offal Shavings with Sweet Headcheese Fondant

Always popular with children, this meal derives its sweetness from natural offal sugars. Its many important nutrients can improve near-sightedness, promote enzyme density and storage, and ward off seasonal pandemics.

Chipped Poultry Loaf and Livermush Spread

Easily made from any surplus poultry cuttings and chilled to form a gelatinous loaf, this dinner is perfect for strengthening weak muscles that cause post-nasal drip and encouraging the healing of minor necrotizing fasciitis wounds.

Boiled Cod Halves with Meat Slurry Sauce

This spicy dinner, packed with caloric energy, aids the flow of cerebrospinal fluid, can delay Early Onset Female Confusion Disorder, suppress wool allergies, and stunt hair growth.

Reconstituted Hog Maw Steaks with a Side of Suet Soup

A quick meal that can be stored in your pantry for years, reconstituted hog maw steaks will easily become your summer staple. The required extra chewing does wonders for strengthening a weak or diseased jaw and strips your teeth of plaque build-up and enamel.

Jellied Eel Snacks

Unfortunately, the children will want to come home from school when you start stocking jellied eels in your kitchen cupboards. A simple pine box can be easily fashioned to store several months worth of this healthful treat.

How Seances May Spread Consumption

Last night, Mrs. Vix and I attended a very strange affair known as a seance at the home of my dear friend, Mrs. Violetta Pinkhurst. The Medium, a Mr. Barrabas Scrivener, demonstrated a considerable talent for turning lights on and off and cracking his toes beneath the table.

We trembled and gasped politely, so as not to make the man feel unappreciated. Then Mr. Scrivener slowly turned his head to prodigiously vomit a wad of ectoplasm down the front of his shirt.

"Oh dear," I said. "How disgusting."

Types of Ectoplasm

It is a true fact that ectoplasm is 500 times more virulent than even the spit of a five-year old child!

Not only does it carry all of the ordinary germs present in human saliva (influenza, consumption, poor attitude), but it also contains all of the germs present in the Realm Beyond Death, including, but not limited to:

• Wailing Cough
• Religious Fever
• Heavy Clanking Chains That Must Be Dragged Across the Attic Floor
• Excessive Whining
• Infectious Transparency
  
• Borderline Personality Disorder

Remember, while spirits may cross the Divide as they choose, they rarely show the courtesy to bring along antibiotics.

Why are Babies so Lazy?

Everyone knows that babies are the laziest people on earth. They are even lazier than astronauts, people in comas and Presidents.

What you may not know is why. Why are babies so lazy?

After much study, I have come upon four primary reasons:

1. We let them. When a doting parent responds to a baby's cry they are reinforcing their child's belief that if they lay there and scream, others will do their bidding. Thus, this kind of laziness is a learned behavior. Instead, parents should empower their infants with a sense of self-sufficiency and insist that they change their own diapers and scavenge their own dinner from nearby fields.

2. Niacin deficiency. Niacin is a very important vitamin, the deficiency of which can quickly lead to extremely low levels of niacin in the body.

A child with extreme niacin deficiency

3. Labor laws.

4. They are very tired. Perhaps it is early onset narcolepsy, or simple nervous exhaustion (from all that screaming), but roughly 45% of babies surveyed responded that they were lazy because they were "very, very tired."

Visually Identifying Childhood Ailments: A Guide

It is a true fact that most doctors simply won't work with children because they are too confusing. How do you determine what is normal childhood behavior and what is an indicator of disease and disorder? I, unlike doctors, have studied children and find it very important to share my findings.

This child appears to be playing with her pets as a normal child would. Here, the indicator of disorder is in the details - note the names she's given her animals. This is a clear indicator of either Early Onset Female Confusion Disorder or Hysteria, Illogical Thought Type.

This illustration shows a boy, clearly unaware of the background ruffians, feeding a dog a hat disguised as a large hamburger. The innocence and lack of awareness of impending peer pressure (background ruffians) indicates that this boy most assuredly has PICA by proxy as well as probably Seasonal Temperature Insensitivity.


This child attempts to write on a tablet of wood with a toy rubber snake. Note that he is also sitting atop his winter sledge indoors, indicating a lack of boundaries regarding keeping indoor activities indoors and outdoor activities where they belong, which is not indoors. He may have Recreational Disorganization Syndrome (treated much like dyslexia) or its more severe counterpart, Recreational Dissociation Disorder. There is no treatment for this unfortunate condition, and his parents will spend a lifetime redirecting him to not use household swords as cricket bats, griddles as juggling implements, and so on.


Here a child tows his infant sister on a sledge, whilst waving a ham hock. Some "specialists" may be tempted to lazily diagnose this boy with Oppositional Defiant Disorder. However, we can say that this child is most (or almost) certainly suffering from monorexia, a rare condition in which a child compulsively uses food given to them in every activity apart from eating. There have been several unfortunate cases in which the family failed to treat a child's monorexia and fell into staggering debt due to the sheer amount of food being expended during playtime, math lessons, and on laundry day.

Some Useful Charts

I have provided some useful charts for your edification:

True Facts #1

1. The vast majority of fish wives are not in fact fish.
2. Laziness is the number one cause of death in America.
3. Hundreds of ships are sunk each year due to talkative gossip-mongerers.
4. My dear friend Mrs. Violetta Pinkhurst occasionally suffers from violent dyspepsia.
5. Also, this same Mrs. Pinkhurst often boasts of the irresistible effect of her bodily physique on young men. In fact, I have had occasion to overhear at least three of the gentlemen in question discuss said physique in no flattering tones, and apparently the lady's charms are quite resistible indeed.

A Short Introduction (to Everything)

Good evening, and welcome to A Universal History of Everything, the world's foremost compendium of both true facts and facts that are true. I am so excited to share with you my vast knowledge that I am, as my dear friend Mrs. Violetta Pinkhurst would say, puffed up like an organ grinder's organ. I'm sure I have no idea what that means.

But you are not interested in Mrs. Pinkhurst! No, you are here because you are interested in Health. Health and Healthfulness, as I always say. The two go hand-in-hand! (If you'll look closely, you'll even see that the words share six of the same letters!) And I, of course, am the very picture of Health.

Rising at 4:45 most mornings, I march out to greet the dawn from the stately lawns of our stately estate. Clad in my union suit and heavy woolen socks, I cue the marching band, and to the uplifting blasts of John Philip Sousa, I conduct my morning calisthenics, shouting with the french horns and counting along to the beats. At six, I pour a bucket of cold water over my head and make use of my antiseptic preparations (more details on my patented antiseptic preparations at a future time). For thirty minutes of quiet reflection I think about cereal, and then off I go to rouse good Mr. Thoroughgood from his twin bed. Because good Mr. Thoroughgood is not hard of hearing, he is most often already awake and cursing (not just because of the Sousa, but because the marching band stores its cymbals underneath his bed).

We dress in natural, breathable fibers (I recommend wicker for its tremendous breathability) and then dine heartily on a breakfast of Shredded Oatmeal doused in pasteurized milk. Generally, Mr. Thoroughgood then goes back to bed and I scoot off to the woodshed to practice my Phlebotomy. When the sun is at its peak, I wake Mr. Thoroughgood up for lunch. He drinks a glass of whisky to keep his strength up, and while we eat I read aloud the choicest selections from the most recent Hygienic Homemaker or the Journal of Unusual Disorders. Then I walk the fifteen miles into town. Whether it's a meeting of the Battle Creek Society for the Improved Hygiene of Other People or going door-to-door testing blood types, for an accomplished woman of Science such as myself, there is always work to be done.

I strongly believe in the merits of a diet based in three things: fish oil, cumin, and milkfat. With this triumvirate of nutrition, one may reasonably expect to outlive even their greatest grandchildren! It is my recommendation that every loving wife and mother should never serve a meal that does not include a combination of these three Key Ingredients to Health. In fact, I never invent a cereal that does not include all three (note: except for Ham Crunchies, which substitutes an artificial milkfat-like substance for added freshness and coloring).

And why is that, you ask?

The answer is simple: because I do not hate you. And I do not hate your family either. I wish you all a long life full of longevity during which I hope you will purchase a great deal of cereal and condescend to have your blood type tested if I should knock on your door, even if you already know what blood type you are.

That is why I will share my knowledge with you.