What a Bunch of Mohoohoo!

While there are many things I need to blog about, there's one event which I feel compelled to share first, even though I'm pretty sure most of the hilarity boils down to "you just had to be there."

Still, it's worth a try

Last Wednesday afternoon Cap'n Cluck sent out an email to the Singles inviting us to an impromptu Game Night at her house since her parents were out of town.* She offered to provide hamburgers and hot dogs as long as the rest of us brought the other cook-out accoutrements; I was given the task of bringing buns for the hamburgers and hot dogs, but was only half successful, there apparently having been a huge run on buns at every convenience store and gas station I stopped at on my way to Cluck's. I would have gone out of my way to go get some more, but I decided to stop at Cluck's first to see if they were necessary, since I wasn't really sure how many people were going to show up. Last-minute things don't always get heavy attendance, especially when the invite goes out by email. Now, some phone calls were made, mostly by Scuba-girl and myself. Why not Cap'n C? Because poor Cluckity was in the throes of full on allergy attack resulting in her losing her voice. Out of the people I called I got several "no"s, a couple of "maybe"s, and left a few voicemails, which didn't leave me very optimistic about the turnout for the evening.

But in the end we had a pretty nice sized group show up for dinner: in addition to Cluck and myself there was The Anti-Cap'n, Magic Pants, Trouble, Scuba-girl, and the heretofore nicknameless H.Q.** We were also expecting a friend of Cluck's from Denton Bible who most of us only knew as The Cardinal, since that was the character he played at our murder mystery dinner a while back; before dinner he had texted Cluck to see what he needed to bring, and at the urging of the rest of us she responded "dessert." So, she was quite confused when he called back a little bit later and started asking why she wanted him to bring chicken. There was much confusion and going back and forth that wasn't cleared up until after The Cardinal showed up and we discovered the source of the mix-up. You see, when The Cardinal first put Cap'n Cluck's phone number into his cell, it was right after he had first learned that her nickname was Cluck, and he decided to reference that after her real name; however, for one reason or another, he didn't put Cluck, but "Chicken." Therefore, when he got her text, the message didn't say "[Cluck's real name] dessert", it said "[Cluck's real name] Chicken dessert."

Long story short***: The Cardinal brought chicken.

After dinner, H.Q. had to leave, meaning she missed out on all of the shenanigans to follow. Cap'n Cluck got out the dominoes and we started a game of Chickenfoot, the game which (as you long time blog monkeys might recall) was responsible for Cluck's nickname in the first place due to her "clucking like a chicken" rule. Unfortunately for her, the detrimental effect of her allergies prevented the good Cap'n from clucking much, resulting in much ridicule from The Cardinal. Also unfortunately for Cap'n C., she got stuck with the double-blank at least a couple of times, due to vigilant blocking of the blanks by Magic Pants in myself; when she complained my only response was "now you know how it feels!" since I had been on the receiving end of the same strategy the last time we played.

Following Chickenfoot Scuba-girl had to leave, but the rest of us soldiered on, getting out the Singles staple game Loaded Questions. I believe it was during this game that The Cardinal turned to me, tapped himself on the head, and said "It's scary that there's another one of these out there." This comment was prompted by the third or fourth instance of The Cardinal and I making the same semi-obscure reference at the same time; I assured him that there were many more out there than that, and then pointed at him and began to chant "One of us, one of us!"

I'm pretty sure he got the reference.

Sadly, I don't recall what the exact reference was that prompted his comment in the first place; I do recall a few other instances though:

• Commenting that for the question "what's the worst place to be waiting in line" he wanted to put next to a hermaphrodite with a Flock of Seagulls haircut and one nostril****
• The question: if you had a talk show who would you interview? His answer: psychic porn star midgets who were all nude*****
• Somehow Vatican City was mentioned******, prompting The Cardinal to proclaim "Vatican City, Vatican City, Vatican City!" in a tone and cadence that lead me to sing "Vatican City, we sell Vaticans . . . and that's all!"*******
• He mentioned Single Female Lawyer; I respond "With the world's shortiest skirt"
• Someone, for some reason, says "ooo eee ooo ah ah"; The Cardinal, Trouble, and I all belt out "ting tang walla walla bing bang" and carry on with the rest of the song

In other words, The Cardinal was one of my people.

Now, you would have thought that the fact that The Cardinal barely knew any of the people playing Loaded Questions he would have been at a disadvantage, but that was hardly the case; after he got done kicking our but at LQ, we decided to play a game of Beyond Balderdash. For those unfamiliar with it, it's a lot like Balderdash, where you are given an obscure word and have to make up a definition for it, only in Beyond Balderdash you are also given people's names, acronyms, dates, and movie titles. While the game is a lot of fun, I am really, really bad at it; my creativity doesn't work in ways that lend themselves to making even semi-plausible definitions. Plus, I tend to vote for the answers which entertain me the most, rather than the ones which I think are the correct ones. Anyway, we had just set up the board when one of the most recent (and subsequently nicknameless) additions to the Singles class showed up; he had been unable to come earlier due to a softball game but swung by afterwards. We did decide to cut the game short, and so only went around the table once. There were some entertaining things thrown out here and there (such as almost every entry for Spud Melin referencing either potatoes or Spuds McKenzie), but most of those pale in comparison to our final word, selected by Magic Pants.

Now, you have to understand that by the time we finally got started playing BB it was getting pretty late, and most of us were operating on little sleep and much caffeine, sugar, and allergy medication; so by the end, we were pretty slap happy. The inherent silliness of the game was magnified even more by our final word: mohoohoo. In order to get the full effect you must say the word out loud several times, in various tones and cadences; the more you say it, the funnier it becomes.

Well, it worked for us, anyways.

Here then, are the definitions which we had to choose from:

1. A white rhinoceros
2. Synonym for silliness or malarkey
3. The end part of a cow's tail
4. Cherokee word for peace and love
5. Hawaiian word for toilet
6. Cajun spice
7. Undergarment worn by a Tahitian princess during a mating ritual.

A few of the answers got some chuckles and cute remarks (The Anti-Cap'n wondered if "Cajun Spice" was the lost Spice Girl), but it wasn't until Magic Pants was reading through them again that our group had a mass nervous breakdown. For while reading back the answers a second time, Magic Pants accidentally pronounced Cherokee so that it rhymed with Karaoke; there was a pause as we all pondered what she had just said before The New Guy called her on it and we all burst into laughter. Magic Pants was embarrassed, which of course made it even funnier to me, and I couldn't stop laughing; Magic Pants tried to carry on re-reading the answers through her laughter but was having trouble. I suddenly slapped the table and cried out "this is all a bunch of mohoohoo!"

And thus the "silliness and malarkey" definition was adopted as the official definition of mohoohoo by the group. Even though I knew it wasn't the real answer, I felt obligated to vote for it; The Cardinal would thank me for the vote, which helped move him into victory in yet another game. The real answer? White rhinoceros.

After that we bid each other adieu with much mohoohoo along the way, and headed our separate ways. The Anti-Cap'n had beaten me home and had left the garage door open, so I headed in that way instead of the front door which was all part of his plan, as he was hiding in the hallway waiting to scare the crap out of me; I screamed (but not like a little girl, no matter what anyone might say) and called him a name that probably shouldn't have come from a Sunday School teacher. Luckily, my not-girly-at-all shrieks didn't wake up Biz-Z.

Suddenly not sleepy at all for some reason, I got on my computer to check my email and to jot down a couple of notes about game-night for the blog, when I suddenly had a burst of inspiration and posted the following comment on Magic Pants' MySpace page:

So, when are we going to go out and sing cheriokee at The White Rhinoceros? If you beg off again, I'll feel as low as the end of a cow's tail.

And that's no mohoohoo!

Well, that's what passes for inspiration at 12:30 AM, anyway.

However, it was nothing compared to the inspiration that Magic Pants herself must have felt the next day when she posted the following bulletin on MySpace with the simple title of "Mohoohoo."

Once upon a time, there was a white rhinoceros, also (affectionately) known as a mohoohoo. This mohoohoo decided to join the ballet, and if you've ever seen Lena the hippo doing ballet amongst all those ostriches, you would know this was a bad idea. None-the-less, the mohoohoo decided to dance, so she bought an ankle-length, pink motutu. Unfortunately for the mohoohoo, the motutu had a lot of mofrufru, so she tripped up in the middle of her dance and got a mobooboo.

Now this mohoohoo in a motutu with a lot of mofrufru and big mobooboo decided to see the witch doctor, and this is what she said, "Ooo eee, ooo ah ah, ting tang, walla walla bing bang," while sticking pins in the end of a cow's tail. And as we all know, that did absolutely no good. So after all that movoodoo, the witch doctor resorted to a psychic reading and told her to get out more.

The witch doctor suggested she go to Tahiti for a vacation. However, all those ritualistic Tahitian mating gowns can be rather intimidating for a mohoohoo in a pink motutu with a lot of mofrufru who has a mobooboo. Besides that, she had no more mobuckarooroos after having spent them all on her pink motutu with a lot of mofrufru and all that movoodoo. (Ballet and witch doctors are expensive hobbies!) So she couldn't afford the vacation.

Her next choice was to see her favorite band in concert, but the Cajon Spice Girls were performing in another country (Luxemburg, Antarctica, to be specific) and once again, she couldn't afford the trip.

So the mohoohoo wearing a motutu with pink mofrufru, nursing her mobooboo, said, "That movoodoo is a bunch of mopoopoo!" so she saw the mogoogoo dolls instead.

And with that, it was once again confirmed to me that Magic Pants is also one of my people.

*Yes, I know that sounds like we're in Junior High
**H.Q. = Honors Queen, a title bestowed upon her by the Honors students she advises at TWU during a banquet last spring; no, I'm not above thievery when it comes to nicknames.
***Too late!
****A reference that Trouble got as well
*****I only regret I didn't respond to that by saying "that goat doesn't love you."
******This comment was made during a question about picking a country which yielded answers of "Luxemburg" and "Antarctica"
*******Zinger's about the only other person I know who would definitely get that reference