The Witching Hour

What is that last magical hour at work called before you are free to make your own bad decisions for your life? ANSWER: the witching hour, as inferred by the title. Would you like to know what the correct nomenclature is for all nonwork activities taking place during the witching hour? Tis called Goldbricking, my gombs.

I would like to apologize for trying to create a brand-specific synonym for friends. It didn't work out as well as I thought it would one tenth of a second before I typed it.

Ah yes, the witching hour. Since the dawn of man, this has been the most sacred of hours. A mini-holiday, really. Seven hours of half-assed work followed by one hour of sweet sweet internet surfing and time-awasting. Named after Saint Witching, an unfortunately named Flemmish monk, the historical significance has not escaped the world's attention. Legend has it that St. Witching was his monastery's gatekeeper. One day while he was busy guarding the gate for his alloted time, he fell asleep at his job for precisely the last hour before he was off for the rest of the day. Whence he awoke (some accounts say "with a start", but this is not canon), he found that a roving band of bears most vicious had attacked and killed every other member of his monastery, as was common in those ancient times. Amongst the blood and the gore, St. Witching collapsed in dispair: falling onto a pile of bear excrement. The pain of falling onto a brick of heavy metal was soon outweighed by the joy that only money can bring, for all the piles of bear excrement in the monastery (of which there were many, for bears poop a lot) held a brick of gold.

I... don't... even...

So remember, gombs, every time you goldbrick during the witching hour, you are celebrating trading your friends' lives for gold, or something. We're done here.

Nathan Jackson

Stalwarts of Gombler: Yukon Cornelius

Please, consider the following:

I have spread my dreams under your feet, tread softly for you tread on my dreams. - W.B. Yeats

This fog's as thick as peanut butter! - Yukon Cornelius

Thank you.

Let us transcend now into an appreciative countenance as we reflect on those people, places, things, and cryptids that are frequently brought up in conversation amongst the Gombler team and more or less waste everyone's not-so-precious time. This particular revolution about the earth's axis brings us the curious case of Cornelius comma Yukon. Cut to picture.

That's the fellow.

Born to a family of little means in the tiny town of Bissett, Canada, Yukon dropped out of school at a young age. He spent his teenage years working the clay part-time at a brickyard (an occupation he would later reflect on as "ironic") and running peppermint for the local crime lord known only as "The Candy Man". Unbeknownst to both Yukon and the Candy Man, they would become responsible for the town's hendiadys moniker of "Vigor and Verve", respectively.

Yukon soon discovered that those employed by the Candy Man, were owned by the Candy Man. Yukon's parents, Klondike and Saskatchewan, fell ill shortly after Yukon's 17th birthday.  As the medical bills piled up, Yukon had no choice but to accept the Candy Man's seemingly generous offer of financial help. Predictably, once his parents had recovered, the Candy Man kidnapped them both in the middle of the Canadian night (around 2:30 PM), leaving only a note scribbled on a Tootsie Roll wrapper demanding 2.5 million troy ounces of gold and 3.5 million troy ounces silver bullion in exchange for his parents' lives.

At his wit's end, the normally bombastic Yukon quietly left Bissett the next morning about two months later to begin a career in the booming field of acting. Taking the screen name "John Candy" on orders from his new master, Yukon soon became a star. Illustrate.

John "Yukon Cornelius" Candy

 

After 21 years of  sending his earnings to the Candy Man to pay for extensions on his parents' lives, Yukon realized that because he was paid in Canadian dollars, he would never be able to come up with enough money to buy the precious metals as an actor. The author opines that perhaps it took Yukon 21 years to figure this out because he dropped out of school at a young age. Thusly and righteously, Yukon proceeded to feign his own death by heart attack and, acting on a hot tip from an old prospector, turned to prospecting the deep north for the gold and silver he so desperately needed. Image, as an imperative.

That's the chap.

 

You know the rest of the story. We've all heard the heartwarming tale of Yukon Cornelius' adventures with his rowdy friends in the snowcapped mountains closest to the North Pole. It is this author and his associated company's position that a little bit of Yukon Cornelius lives in all of us. Every time a man puts off shaving his face out of laziness, somewhere Yukon Cornelius is smiling.

Nathan Jackson