The royal scepter should be frost-free

Gentlemen, as kings of your castles, never forget that you should make every effort to attempt to be in control of the royal scepter at all times. We've discussed the royal scepter before.

What? You don't remember? You know, the royal scepter. What's the point of being king of your castle - or even HAVING a castle for that matter - if you don't know what the royal scepter is or don't have control of it?

I'm talking about the remote control, which operates the most important device in the castle - yon royal bigscreen television.

This technology is much too advanced to allow the queen to have it in her possession, at least for extended periods of time.

First of all, she will almost ALWAYS find a black and white movie and you will have to sit there for the next hour and a half suffering through some Humphrey Bogart flick while she says, "Let me just finish watching this; there's only about 10 minutes left." Secondly, she will just take the royal scepter for granted and treat it like, oh, I don't know, the microwave or the coffee maker. See, ye members of ye opposite sex do not understand the importance of the royal scepter so they often treat it like any other ordinary utensil.

The queen at my castle is notorious for this. When I am away overlooking my vast kingdom (and by "vast kingdom" I mean the tool shed in the back yard) the queen will sometimes forget she has the royal scepter in her hand and will get up to answer the telephone or do some other trivial chore and place the royal scepter down outside the regal throne room (and by "regal throne room," I mean the den because that's where the "regal recliner" is located) and forget where she left it.

This causes the king to become sorely vexed, and if you've ever been sorely vexed you know how uncomfortable that can be. I have tried to teach the royal hounds to learn the scent of the royal scepter so they can track it down whenever the queen misplaces it and I almost accomplished it but the royal hounds could not pick up the testosterone scent of the royal scepter because yon queen had gotten her fancy store-bought scents on it, rendering the royal hound-training virtually worthless. Besides, some of the places where the queen has left the royal scepter would not have allowed the royal hounds to pick up its scent anyway.

For instance, I once returned to the castle and discovered the royal scepter was missing only to - and to quote the wise sage Dave Barry, "I am not making this up" - discover it hours later between the bottle of royal steak sauce and the bottle of royal hot mustard in the door of the royal refrigerator. It still worked but for the next week it would only tune to National Geographic specials about icebergs.

This, of course, is totally unacceptable because I need the royal scepter to use for what it was originally intended - to help me try to watch as much sports programming as possible at the same time. Screen-in-screen was a wonderful invention but NFL Sunday Ticket took it one step further with the ability to put MULTIPLE NFL GAMES on the same screen at the same time. Nothing says sports overload like watching eight football games on one big-screen television screen at once. Never has the king felt more powerful or more in control than when this occurs. This is one step away from being allowed to call the plays.

I would recommend you buy the NFL Sunday Ticket package, which, by the way, is only available through DIRECTV. So what have we learned? Well, let's recap.

1.) Keep the royal scepter away from the queen;

2.) The royal refrigerator is no place for an electronic device;

3.) Both Humphrey Bogart and black-and-white TV are dead;

4.) Most perfumes can effectively neutralize the scent of testosterone, and finally;

5.) DIRECTV can mail those commission checks to me in care of this newspaper.

(Klonie Jordan is executive editor of The Gaffney Ledger. You can contact him via e-mail at editor@gaffneyledger.com)