Lorna Blotfarrow and the Visionary Behind The Extra Long Toothpick
Lorna Blotfarrow is a reporter for Inside of Business Magazine. She covers scandals, cash cows, business news, and whatever fallout is still happening from the U.S invasion of Iraq.
The American upper middle class has long gone without the perks of extensive leisure. When I met with Shank von Cogglesworth, CEO and Founder of The Extra Long Toothpick, I emerged with one outstanding conclusion: here’s the man who can fix the problem.
In winter of 2023, Mr. Cogglesworth returned home with friends to his wife Flarp von Cogglesworth. She thoughtfully prepared meatloaf, his favorite meal, except it was tarnished by a consistency he didn’t very much appreciate. He described it as stringy.
“Stringy?” I asked him.
“Stringy.” He confirmed.
I met with Mr. Cogglesworth on a rainy Sunday afternoon, the kind of rainy New York day you’d expect in the Spring of 1985 or 1992. He met me at a Blue Bottle uptown. At first presenting stout and sardonic, Mr. Cogglesworth turned out to be really quite delightful. He delighted me in the tale of discovering his product.
“The meatloaf was so stringy,” he lamented, “I had to reach my fist in my mouth just to get the pick back to my molars. I made a fool of myself. In front of my wife, in front of my friends, hell in front of my ancestors who came to this country with nothing but pockets of gold.”
“It was hard for everyone back then…” I noted.
He nodded and continued his story. “So I’m fisting my mouth, and I look at my wife and think, is this the man she married? And I look at my ancestors and think, is this the way they’d have wanted me to behave in front of the Kennedys?”
“The Kennedys?” I repeat.
“My grandmother was obsessed with the Kennedys. She felt they were the royals of the U.S. And thusly, she always kept special china in the cabinets should the Kennedys have arrived to our home.”
“Was there ever a feasible chance that the Kennedys would arrive to the home?” I inquire. I am a journalist after all and cannot stop to enjoy the splendor of a tale without pressing for truth.
“There wasn’t none,” he insisted. Mr. Cogglesworth spoke with a sincere wit and sensitivity to parlance.
He went on to describe the issue he felt imposed with the night of the stringy meatloaf. Mr. Cogglesworth felt it was “un-aristocratic” to fist your mouth for the string caught before your molars. And that’s when he realized—the upper middle class was destined to suffer.
“I saw it as a lack of dental composure, a mouth-erly leisure, as it were. The richest people in America have all these luxuries, they have boats, and yachts, and shrimp boats, and cod boats, and crabbing gear, but what do we have? Good school districts?”
Mr. Cogglesworth went into first gear. He began researching the effects of fisting your mouth for the string meat before your molars. His findings startled; men over 40 who semi-consistently fisted their mouths had a 1.7% increased chance of stretching their lips too wide by the time they reached 43.5. It was enough to send Mr. Cogglesworth into a spell of genius creation, obsessive innovation, and brilliant making. In other words, Mr. Cogglesworth went to Togglesworth (my editor didn’t like this but I’m going to fucking publish it whether you like it or not).
His first product flailed: a mini-crane that lifted the molars, extracted the string, and placed the molar back inside the gum.
“China couldn’t make it,” he explained.
His second product was a vacuum. It showed greater promise than the first product except it sucked out one of the test subjects’ implants. A lawsuit came and went, the whole proceeding cost Mr. Cogglesworth $745. Then one day, his wife, donning a satin pink nightgown with purple trim, tooth-picked her pearly whites in the bathroom. Mr. Cogglesworth was struck by lightning; his wife’s nightgown was a millimeter too short.
The next day, Mr. Cogglesworth took the nightgown to a seamstress. “Just a millimeter?” she asked. He confirmed. And then he was struck by a second, more fortuitous lightning; the toothpick needed but only an extra millimeter. He ran to the phone and called China. “Yes,” they said, “it’s extremely possible and easy to do this. Would that be all?” The rest is history.
Mr. Cogglesworth was born an inventor: “I was the first baby ever ‘in breach.’” Raised in Alexandria, Virginia, Shank von Cogglesworth saw the prototypical suburban life; his mother a full-time orange peel collector, his father a straw salesman, Mr. Cogglesworth insists he never wanted for anything: “I never wanted for anything,” he proclaimed to me. He played lacrosse in high school, played lacrosse at Harvard, and then played lacrosse during his MBA at Yale, where he pitched the product that confirmed his business savvy: the first ever collapsible bookmark.
“That’s when I really knew I had a penchant for the matter,” he explained to me.
Now, The Extra Long Toothpick is catalogued as one of the greatest inventions made by an American man outside of Shark Tank in the spring of 2023. The parent company, FlankBunk, is valued at a whopping $12.2 thousand, owing 6/10 of its success to The Extra Long Toothpick. The Chairman of the Board, Mariel Cogglesworth (Shank’s mother), says of the company’s success, “I always feared Shank would fail immensely. I think we’ve skirted that scenario by the skin of our teeth—literally.” When I ask Mr. Cogglesworth what he makes of his fantastic triumphs, he simply replies, “I’m destined for greatness, 1 millimeter at a time.”
His plans for the future are unclear. So far, Mr. Cogglesworth is preoccupied with pushing The Extra Long Toothpick, currently selling at $2.50 a piece. His latest achievement involved product placement in a Denny's ad, after which sales soared by 0.03%. “I don’t want to occupy myself with any other product. I decree it is my fate: to bring to the upper middle class a heightened sense of luxury and, above all, relief.”