Jack and the Blogstalk

Once upon a time there was a not-so-little boy named Jack, who lived with his widowed father Horace in a very small cottage. They were so very, very poor, when somebody rang the doorbell, Jack had to lean out the window and say “DING!”

Jack's father was a farmer, but the farm was doing really poorly because Horace had gotten horribly addicted to Farmville on the computer and was spending every waking minute on it.

Since Jack wasn’t quite competent enough to dig, plow or run the farm, and there was no one else to do it, soon all their money was spent, and there was none left to buy food for Jack and his father, or hay for their good old cow, Anne Bovine. She wasn’t producing milk, but they had kept as long as they could, because she reminded Horace of his late wife Shirley.

Finally, things got so bad that Horace told young Jack that he must take the cow to town and sell her. Jack was very sad, but he was a good  not-so-little boy and wanted to help his father, so he set off.

He had not gone very far, when he met a man, to whom he told his tale. The man spoke very kindly to Jack; and said he would willingly buy the cow, but that, as he had no money with him, he must give some blogging beans instead.

So Jack took off his hat, and the man filled it with beans, saying that they would grow to be a wonderful blog, and would make him his fortune.

Well, Jack took the beans back to his father Horace who called him a “dumbass” and beat him about the head and shoulders with his belt. During the beating, the beans spilled on Horace’s computer keyboard and almost immediately, a fantastic blog started filling up the screen.

“My farm!” shouted Horace in dismay. He became so overwrought that he ran from the cottage screaming and yanking off tufts of hair.

But Jack stayed there and decided to see where the blog would go.

Some days it went to strange places, and some days it went to even stranger places, but never did it leave him bored or uninspired. Best of all, it prompted him to make changes to his diet and sedentary lifestyle, and Jack transformed himself from a giant boy into a regular-sized boy.

And he lived happy – and healthily - ever after.