Column: A little bit of this, a little bit of that

And if you won’t, I don’t even care.

• Let’s talk about Mayberry’s impish hick, Ernest T. Bass. If you’ve never watched Andy Griffith, well, that’s just sad. A top-end Atlanta psychologist years ago prescribed a nightly episode before bedtime for my Burger King magnate, high-school best friend, Lester Stephenson to alleviate his business stress.

Ernest T. if you recall was a wispy, hillbilly hayseed with a penchant for throwing rocks through local business windows while guffawing and hopping around like a monkey on crack cocaine. The role seemed to come so naturally for him, one has to assume Ernest T – Howard Morris in real life, was throwing rocks through windows long before Hollywood ever discovered him. Like Cousin Eddie from the Christmas Vacation movie, no one can act that well unless they’re oddball kooks for real.

• You don’t hear much about carbuncles – the boil’s even less-attractive cousin – anymore. Surely they didn’t just cease to exist?

I remember my dad often telling of a schoolteacher in jail for almost beating a kid to death for not putting salt on his hard-boiled egg. Pop swore the hard-boiled educator died in jail from an infected carbuncle while awaiting trial.

Same thing with goiters. Seems like when I was growing up, and especially at Oral Roberts’ tent meetings our parents took us to, there were women walking around everywhere with the football-sized protrusions juttin’ out the sides of their necks.

Elaine from Seinfeld chatted up an elderly woman with an unsightly goiter, and to her shock, the old gal had once spent a wild night with Mahatma Gandhi. You can’t make this stuff up!

• You know another thing you don’t see or hear these days? Somebody snorting, “If you don’t like it, you can lump it.”

When I was a kid, that was the go-to comeback, but nobody seems to use it anymore. Another tried-and-true game-ender was when some buttinski would ask, “What’s your name?” You’d put them back on their heels ASAP with, “What’s my name? Peter McCain. Ask me again and I’ll tell you the same.”

• For my money, you can’t beat a good deviled egg. If nutrition experts could ever make up their minds whether eggs are cholesterol time-bombs or the healthiest thing to ever come out of a chicken’s innards, I’d eat deviled eggs non-stop.

Likewise, it’s hard to beat the satisfying feeling of a great yawn, but a good sneeze? Fahgettabout it! A yawn feels great; even an average sneeze stops just short of downright euphoric.

A man once died from sensory overload when he yawned and sneezed at the exact same second. Again, you can’t make this stuff up … literally!

• It sure seems like a rash of sudden deaths in Cody this year.

This is also the first time in memory that Cody has no winter bowling leagues. No direct correlation? Yeah, right, and Peter McCain has a carbuncle.