The word amalgamation is a strange word.  It's one of those words you hear occasionally, but you might not be exactly sure what it means.  As it turns out, it means combining multiple items into one form.  But an idiom amalgamation is the combining of multiple expressions.  On the other hand, an idiot amalgamation is the combining of multiple expressions incorrectly.  For instance, take this sentence:

Changing a light bulb is as easy as falling off a log.  Once you learn how to do it, you never forget how.

That reminds me of a story about a prospector in the Old West.  I believe it took place in the Nebraska territory in the 1850s.  The man's name was Ned Phoenix, and he was originally from Buffalo, NY.  No one ever described Ned as an intelligent man.  You might say he was slow as a snail or dumb as a dodo.  After all, what would a prospector be doing in Nebraska?  All the gold was in California!

Ned was generally a quiet man, sometimes as quiet as a mouse.  You'd rarely find him monkeying around.  In fact, back when he was only knee-high to a grasshopper, his boyhood friends would be having a whale of a good time.  But Ned would stay clammed up and would hardly even speak.  He had an older sister who acted like a mother hen and herded him along to school, church, and to work in the fields.

But that was nothing compared to his older brother Robin who was mean as a snake and treated him like a pack mule.  Robin would get little Ned out of bed before the rooster crowed, and by nightfall he would be dog tired from a full day's work.

That early childhood experience made Ned a determined man.  He could be as stubborn as a mule when he set his mind to something, and that's what brought him to Nebraska.  Since prospectors in California were being shuttled in like a herd of cattle and their numbers were multiplying like rabbits, Ned decided to do something different.  After fishing around for an answer, he decided he'd head north -- as the crow flies -- to Nebraska where he would have miles of countryside all to himself.

However, Ned wasn't having much luck.  One day he was floundering about in a small creek when he saw something shiny.  He picked it up and yelled, "Gold!"  But after further examination, his heart sank when he realized it wasn't so.  If someone had been near enough to hear him, they'd say he had cried wolf.  On another day, poor Ned stumbled while overturning a rock, and he cried like a stuck pig when he fell into the water.  As he stood up, his clothes were soaked, and he looked like a drowned rat.

A few months later, Ned's luck took a permanent turn for the better when he stuck his shovel in the ground and an oil geyser suddenly erupted before him.  Ned was so happy that he started dancing like a cat on a hot tin roof.  One might think he had ants in his pants.  From that day on, Ned would be sitting in hog heaven, proud as a peacock, wealthier than he had ever dreamed. 

This goes to show that even a blind squirrel catches the early bird's worm every once in a while.