MR WRONG: Is your toilet running? Better go catch it!
Indignity Vol. 5, No. 134
COLUMN DEP’T.
MR WRONG: Today’s Word Is F-L-U-S-H
I DON’T LIKE puzzles. No offense, if you like puzzles, I hate the Game, not the Player, but seriously, all this Wordle and whatever, and the crossword puzzle, and then people put up pictures of their puzzle on Social Media, Jesus Fucking Christ. People only care about their own puzzle! Nobody besides you cares about your personal puzzle presentation! It’s like telling somebody all about the crazy dream that you had last night, it is not interesting to anybody except you and some fucking quack headshrinker with the meter running. Your brain was asleep and it made up a buncha bullshit based on your life and maybe something you saw for three seconds someplace or an undigested crumb of cheese or a surfeit of rarebit or something. Your dreams are as boring to others as your puzzle score! Oh, you got a four out of five but yesterday it was a three out of five? Or did you dream that about your puzzle? I wonder what that means? How fascinating!
I don’t have time for a puzzle! Right, yeah, I know, it means my brain is feeble, or I am contributing to the erosion of my already-dim brain power because I’m not sitting there doing the crossword, I am not sharpening my brain. With puzzles! Har! You know what’s a puzzle? Life! Earning a goddamn living in this economy! Putting together the stupid fucking storage shed I bought for the back yard under the deck! Well, the storage shed thing mighta been more of a challenge/activity than a puzzle, since they give you the instructions, but one thing in the assembly instructions was
Note: At least two people are needed during assembly. Remarque : au moins deux personnes sont nécessaires à l’assemblage./Nota: Se necesitan por lo menos dos personas durante el armado.
and I successfully put the goddamn thing together by myself, with no parts left over, so I defeated the instructions! That’s an achievement, during a productive use of my time!
Or howabout this? The goddamn toilet wouldn’t stop running, so I looked at a YouTube, and saw how to try and fix it. That's a puzzle, this guy on the YouTube solved my puzzle for me! I hadda plunge my hands deep inside the tank and get toilet water on ’em, but I was able to lower the thing with the screw in it and undo the top thing to clear it of debris and put it back to fix it! Toilet no longer runs excessively! That’s conserving water! Natural resources! I wonder how much time my toilet dude spends making puzzles, or if he’s out there doing Real Things such as helping people fix the running toilets of America? Also, that’s the name of my new band, The Running Toilets of America!
Like I said, I don’t have time for fucking puzzle time! It’s right up there with the Candy game on your phone or all those bullshits they advertise on teevee! Have you seen all the movie and TV stars who do commercials for these stupid moving-puzzle phone games? They’re all the same! A buncha colors and noises on your phone! Why? Your fucking phone owns you! Celebrities are feasting on your addiction! I gotta say, puzzles are better than these fucking phone games.
The real puzzle is to be somebody who makes one of those evil games, and then getting a buncha rubes addicted to it! It’s pieces of brightly-colored candy moving around! They appear to fly or fall down the fucking screen or explode or something, I don’t care!! I haven’t really studied this shit because even just typing words about it is giving me a goddamn headache! It’s like looking at a Gorgon! Aiieee! I don’t get it! Can you win money? What are you doing with your life?
Also, I did a Wordle today when I typed my column, I didn’t even do it correctly, and I got the Word, the word-le. One in a row! Oh wait, is the Wednesday Word easier than the Saturday one? Zzz-snore-le!
No offense, but if you do a Puzzle, that’s one less thing I have to talk with you about, unless me yelling at you is OK. This makes me sad, because I value conversation, and I am also even more sad on account of you, sitting there being super rude and selfish working your puzzle and not contributing anything to society, did I already say no offense? Were you even listening to me? I do look at the Jumble, though, but just the answers.
The MR. WRONG COLUMN is a general-interest column appearing weekly. No refunds. Write Wrong: wrongcolumn@gmail.com.
WEATHER REVIEW
Aberdeen, Maryland, July 23, 2025
★★★★ The limbs of the paulownia shone like copper in the light of sunrise, against the dark mass of the taller woods behind. The morning that followed had a rainy-day gloom but without the least actual rain, only a heavy humidity. Mushrooms stood above the moss of the side yard. A tiny toad hopped away from an approaching foot. Light arrived for the afternoon, and much more of it when the car climbed up out of the trees to the fields on the hilltop. The yellow in the interstate median was flowers, not yet the burnt color of late summer. The road lay so open in the sharp clear light that 74 felt like 60. Fleetingly off to the right was flat silver-blue water meandering around the green and gold of reeds. Bugs not yet extinct and gone left white flecks on the windshield. Half-faces flashed in and out in the rearview mirror as the perpendicular sun and its shadows cut and out on the cars behind. Genial currents of air stirred over the Grover Cleveland Service Area and the setting sun flattered every traveler's skin. It was good to have the windows down on both sides for the fill-up. Further along, the disc of the sun made its exit, replaced for a while by a brilliant thumbprint of orange. The smokestacks were up to such interesting things it took a moment to remember to watch for Manhattan to make its appearance. The high ruffled clouds still looked unremarkable but they seemed as if they might have it in them to do something when the moment came. The lights of the next three planes into Newark were strung along the pearly sky. Now Manhattan was a tidy diorama of itself. A flight of seagulls passed over and the clouds suddenly caught stripes of pink over blue and the towers of the city, backed by darker sky, sent the colors back again. When the car surfaced from the Lincoln Tunnel, interior lights were beginning to break up the solid facades. In a patch of streetlight by the Natural History Museum, a rat scurried out on a sidewalk that was pale with the latest round of fallen pagoda-tree blossoms.
EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
Here is today's Indignity Morning Podcast!
Tom Scocca
Here is the Indignity Morning Podcast archive!
TOM SCOCCA
ADVICE DEP'T.
HEY! DO YOU like advice columns? They don't happen unless you send in some letters! Surely you have something you want to justify to yourself, or to the world at large. Now is the perfect time to share it with everyone else through The Sophist, the columnist who is not here to correct you, but to tell you why you're right. Direct your questions to The Sophist, at indignity@indignity.net, and get the answers you want.
SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.
WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS in aid of the assembly of a sandwich selected from The White House Cook Book : A Comprehensive Cyclopedia of Information for the Home, by Hugo Ziemann and Mrs. Fanny Lemira Gillette, published in 1919, and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.
HAM SANDWICHES.
MAKE a dressing of half a cup of butter, one tablespoonful of mixed mustard, one of salad oil, a little red or white pepper, a pinch of salt, and the yolk of an egg; rub the butter to a cream, add the other ingredients, and mix thoroughly; then stir in as much chopped ham as will make it consistent and spread between thin slices of bread. Omit salad oil and substitute melted butter if preferred.
If you decide to prepare and attempt to enjoy a sandwich inspired by this offering, be sure to send a picture to indignity@indignity.net .
SELF-SERVING SELF-PROMOTION DEP'T.
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