The Road to Smurfdom

You may have heard of the book "The Road to Serfdom" by F.A. Hayek. I am thinking about writing "The Road to Smurfdom" since I discovered the formula a few minutes ago.
1. Open the mail containing several ink samples among other things from The Goulet Pen Company.
2. Open another package that has a pen you have been drooling over for a while and finally got.
3. Open a sample tube of Noodler's 54th Massachusetts blue ink.
4. Find that the breather/filler hole on the Waterman Carène will be a bit higher than you like and so you tip the sample tube to try to get a good ink suction going. No, I did not pay anywhere near as much for the pen as it shows in the link I just provided.
5. Only get some bubbles with very little ink.
6. Set down the sample tube without putting on its lid while you clean up the pen with a paper towel.
7. Tell yourself that you were stupid for not trying the nice bottle of Waterman Serenity Blue ink you had on the shelf.
8. Knock over the open vial of sample ink, thereby confirming your negative self-affirmation.
9. Attempt to clean up the spill using more paper towel, Windex, and even Clorox bleach spray cleaner.
10. End up with blue hands and a now permanent blue stain on your beige colored desk.
11. Fill your new Carenè with the ink you should have used, to begin with.
12. Enjoy the new pen and realize that for this one, you need bottled ink and never sample ink vials.

You gotta be smurfin' me! 50 years?

I remember the 1981 debut in the US, but I had no idea they were that old. Ever wonder why there was only one Smurfette? I did. I had Smurf sheets on my bed, which were purchased as a joke after the neighbor's boy had them. I used to babysit for him and saw his Smurf sheets. They were kind of cute, and I remarked about the sheets, so my mother bought me a set for my bed. I often wondered why the Smurfs were blue. Perhaps they had no lungs.

Smurfs celebrate 50th birthday
By Alexandra Stadnyk, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

BRUSSELS, Belgium - The Smurfs - led by Papa Smurf and Smurfette - kicked off a year of 50th birthday celebrations Monday with Smurfberry cake and sasparilla juice.

The late cartoonist Pierre Culliford, best known by his pen name, "Peyo," first introduced the tiny blue figures in a comic strip in October 1958. He called them Schtroumpf and they became known worldwide as the Smurfs.

The Smurfs, forest dwellers who live in little white-capped mushroom homes, developed their own "Smurf" language in which nouns and verbs were interchanged.

Their debut on U.S. television in 1981 launched their global rise to stardom and made the Smurfs a household name. A Smurf is a Pitufo in Spanish, a Schlumpf in German, Nam Ching Ling to the Chinese, a Sumafa in Japan and Dardassim in Hebrew.