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Month: April 2024

Never Again Shall We Worry About The Great Text-Replacement Theory

5 Min Read

It was the greatest prank–hah! I summed it up in less than 2 sentences!

But I bragged about it, and now? Oh the never-ending consequences…


“Oh, crap. Not again!”

Just a few weeks ago, I had regaled y’all with one of the best pranks I’ve ever come up with, The Great Text Replacement Theory. That was pretty good, right?

And of course I followed that up with how Karma gave me a proper swift kick in the ass a few years later when my own progeny weaponized my greatest creation against me.

If you haven’t read all about those shenanigans, go ahead and take a quick minute or two to follow the links above and catch up. As always, I’ll patiently wait for you to absorb the proper context for what comes next…

Alright, ya back and well informed? Great! Let’s get on with the show then.

So, the problem is, you see, that in order to visually demonstrate how I pulled the stunt off, I had to go back and change the settings on my phone in the same manner I had done to my dear mother’s phone.

“So…what’s the problem with that?” you may be asking no one in particular.

Well–fun fact–the time that I typically find myself composing these masterpieces (such as the one you’re reading now) is around 1 am on a Saturday night/Sunday morning, and once I’ve put the finishing touches on it–witty and optimized title with my trademark cadence, stupid little graphic with googly eyes and my caricaturized luscious lips, opening blurb comprised of two rhyming lines and ending with an ellipsis, and similarly structured FaceBook promo ending with aforementioned title1This is a dead-on accurate description of my workflow once I’ve finished writing the main text–and takes up at least half of my time invested in each post.–I’m dead-ass tired and just want to pass out in bed.

Therefore, you can imagine how I might forget to, um…”undo” any changes that I might have made in the process of researching and producing the latest post.

And it’s always fun to discover such minor oversights well after it’s too late.

For example, the day after dropping the f-bomb post, I had to go pick up my dear ol’ mom from my sister’s, where she had been enjoying Spring Break. Naturally, with it being Spring Break and what-not, she went buck-wild…and somehow ended up with 75 pounds of salt that she needed to transport home. Seriously…it’s best not to ask any follow-up questions about that situation.

Anyways, I get this text from Mama that morning:

As you can see, I was well-justified in exclaiming aloud to myself, “Oh, crap! Not again!” It seems it’s always at the most inconvenient times, like going to pickup my online grocery order, when I realize that I’ve once again forgotten to dispose of the deceased sex workers in my trunk.

Just kidding. The ‘again’ is of course referring to having my ‘Xo’ involuntarily replaced a split microsecond before sending an otherwise clean and sincere text to my momma.

So what else could I do? I had to go into Cleaneup Mode:

Hopefully, she would naturally understand my predicament and automatically censor out my potty-words as she read the errant text. Or maybe not…

Welp, there’s not really much more profuse apologizing one can do–I mean, I’ve included the pinnacle of digital apologies: the Double Embarassed Emoji Face. What else could be expected of a son?

Oh, yeah, I guess I better reassure her that there wouldn’t be any hookers taking up her precious salt cargo space:

Having put that to bed, I promptly went and reverted my settings so that I would never accidentally cuss at my mother in my texts again…


“Oh, crap. Not again!”

Sunday morning was not the time to be making such an unpleasant discover.

A few good weeks after the previously described (and corrected) snafu, Dear Mother had absconded off to church with our younger daughter when this message from her pops up on my laptop’s Message app:

Honestly, I prefer when I get messages from other Apple users when I’m on my laptop; it’s just so much easier to type out a reply on a keyboard rather than my tiny little phone screen, amiright? Lemme just tap out a reply lickity-split and hit send!

EGADS! Unfortunately, I was little too lickity on that split and didn’t catch that tiny text at the end before I hit “send”. That’s right: on my laptop, the whole “There’s-no-better-way-to-say-Xo-than-oh-holy-f**k!” setting somehow persisted, though I had clearly turned that off on my phone (which is where I had turned it on in the first place!). And yes, I of course hit send before realizing what was happening.

Welp…time to go into full-on recover mode. Fortunately (maybe), I discovered that I could right-click and choose to “unsend” the message:

I could only pray to the Southern Baptist gods that that foul message got properly aborted before she had the chance to read it while sitting in the house of the Lord…


“Oh, crap. Not again!”

Yes, again. And the worst part is that this just happened. That’s right, in the middle of composing this very missive, I get this message–on my laptop, of course–from my maternal figure in regards to dropping off my elder daughter off at a friend’s house:

Good lord, will I ever learn my lesson? (For the record, I still can’t find any settings on my laptop where this little booger might be lurking about).

Well, at least I’ve learned that if I’m quick enough, I can unsend the message! As you can see, I corrected my mistake:

Wait–again?!? Jeez, I guess there’s only one phrase that’s appropriate for this situation: “Xo”.

(And by ‘Xo’, I mean…well, you know what I mean, wink wink…)


Content created on: 19 April 2024 (Friday)

Footnotes & References:[+]

Remember, Kids, The Best Practical Jokes Aren’t Just For Old Folks

5 Min Read

One might argue that all the best pranks indubitably involve, well, poo.

But it’s not nearly as funny when that sh*t is pulled on you…


“Hey, it’s getting close to dinner time, why don’t you text your mom and let her know what to fix for our babies?” My Beautiful Bride asked me, just as she had done a million other times when we had gone out and about later in the day while leaving our daughters at home with Grandma.

“Man oh man, this half-assed search for a new mini-van has drained the life out of me–I ain’t got no energy left for such decisions. How about corn dogs? Simple enough, right?” I lazily suggested.

“Good enough for me,” she replied. “You better send off that text before you forget though.”

I was so exhausted that I barely had enough in me to tap out the most basic of messages.

“You…can…fix…the..girls…corndogs…for…dinner….Thanks,” I mumbled along with the tapping of my fingers.

“Oh wait! I better sign off so she knows it’s really me and not someone who has kidnapped us and is just trying to lull her into thinking everything is alright on our end: ‘Xo’…and done!” I declared as I put the finishing touches on my masterpiece of a matriarchal missive.

Meanwhile, my life partner just stared straight ahead as she diligently drove us to the last car lot on our list before it closed for the day.

I sat there for a full 5 seconds trying to figure out why my subconscious was screaming at me that something was amiss.

“Wait, what?!? What did I just text my mom?!?”

I looked up from my phone to see My Beautiful Bride still looking straight ahead but desperately trying not to laugh.

l pulled my phone back out of my pocket and quickly flipped to my messages to find this:

“Fartypants?!? Why would I say such a horrible thing to my dear mother?? Especially since this beloved woman, as far as I know, never broke wind once before she was 50. (And those are laurels that no one is ever guaranteed to be able to rest upon in their golden years.)” I demurred in horror.

I turned to the person I was supposedly supposed to trust more than anyone else in the world.

“What do you know about this?? Hmm?? First, all my socks go missing out of my sock drawer this morning, then somehow the Saran Wrap I put on the toilet in the girls’ bathroom mysteriously goes AWOL before anyone used it, and now this?” I didn’t explicitly make any allegations, but I sure implied the hell out of them.

“Huh? Is something wrong? What are you going on about over there?” my personal Brutus did a poor job of feigning ignorance.

“My April Fool’s prank war with our older child has been abnormally tilted in her favor all day–methinks there’s a traitor–a spy! A mole!–in our midst!” I said as I glared at the Benedict Arnold in the car with me. “And let’s see…’Fartypants’? Oh, that’s definitely the work of a 10-year-old–but only you knew the fully story of the ultimate Oh Holy ----- prank I pulled on Mom a few years ago!”

My future first-wife howled in laughter and had to pull the car over because she couldn’t safely drive with all the tears of delight streaming down her face.

“Dammit, now I have to fix this!” I said as I tapped out an explanation to my poor mother.

“Oh, sh*t…literally! You just couldn’t stop at replacing ‘Xo’ with ‘Fartypants’? You had to go and let the kid have it automatically replace ‘and’ with ‘poopoo’? I caught it in time in the first text to Mom, but damned if it didn’t bite my ass on the second one!”

“What the crap are you talking about, Willis?” she quipped, obviously unable to resist the siren call of an excrement-based pun. “Welp! Looks like we’re here at the Toyota place–we better go look at vans we can’t afford before they shut their doors!”

I just shook my dang head in disgust as I got out of the car.

“I’ll deal with all y’all’s foolishness later…”


“We probably should get some food to-go for your mom–especially after you called her Fartypants,” snickered the butthead I was stuck with for the evening.

I sighed.

“Yes, we should show her some thanks for spending her Saturday afternoon with our little rascals. I’ll text her the menu and see what she wants.”

I face-palmed myself.

“Agggggh! Dammit I did it again!”

And Mom wasn’t slow to point that out.

To be fair to her though, this one was kinda on me for either not changing or omitting it.

But it was time to move on from all this non-sense. I was temporarily pausing my vegan moral code for some spit-roasted South American bird, and I by golly, I was going to focus on enjoying it!

I was so intent on savoring the moment, in fact, that I pulled the dagger out of my back, sat down at a restaurant table with the woman who had put it there, and acted like it had never happened. With that temporarily suspended disbelief, I truly felt like I was living in one of those “good food, good drink, good company” moments (also known as an “Olive Garden commercial”).

Unfortunately, we got so caught up in the moment that we lost track of time, necessitating me to send a quick text to our child care to let them know we would be late:

The point of the story is…you know, you should really be careful how you treat your parents. You’re just a ----- fool if you don’t think Laws of Karma won’t apply to you: everyone and their brother knows that your kids are bound to treat you in all the ways you exasperated your own parents.

No matter how clever you think you are, Fartypants


Content created on: 6/7 April 2024 (Sat/Sun)

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