Dateline—Holiday Inn; Richmond, Virginia.

Wrapping up three days of TV production here in Richmond which followed three days of radio production back home which was preceded by a couple of days of donor chats in Houston which came a couple of days after a three-day client trip to Charlotte, North Carolina.

Which tends to make me a little off balance. Why, I’m as bewildered as. . .; As bewildered as. . .

Hmmm. My euphemism/simile creation utility in my brain seems to be offline. It happens. In fact it happens more often than a. . . than a. . .  (dang it.)

It is at these times I sorely wish some enterprising soul would compile all the pithy sayings of Festus from the old Gunsmoke series and make them available in a searchable online database. Festus would be able to capture my level of disorientation. I just know it.

“Golly Matthew, that feller’s as bumfuzzled as a yearling hog in a goose-down frog strangler.”

Of course, it doesn’t actually make any sense. But it conveys the message all the same.

Here’s an entire web site that is basically a shrine to Ken Curtis, the actor who played Festus. (Sound warning: It starts playing a sound file of Ken Curtis crooning a song when you launch it.) It also features a page of little sound clips of Festus saying things like, “I’ll give it to you before you can say, ‘rat run over the roof with a piece of raw liver in his mouth.'” (No, I’m not making that up.)

Or maybe someone could come with with an automatic “Festus Euphemism Fabricator” along the lines of the Shakespeare Insult Generator. Until someone does, the internet isn’t fully living up to the hype.