What’s the next size up from large on this Whirlpool washing machine?
As large as your ex.
That’s just harsh.
The Next Size Up Is Yo Momma
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Category: Life
A Purchase To Panic The Wife
Ever since we moved to the country, I’ve kicked around, often aloud, the idea of getting some livestock. Goats, maybe, or sheep. Then it was a cow or to for fresh beef. I almost had my beautiful wife convinced on that one, especially after a friend of ours mentioned having a cow once or twice (and he seems so normal!). Well, we were almost picking out a breed (but not a cow name because I knew that would be bad juju–if we named the cow, sooner or later it would be in the house and getting cow treats if it mooed on command), but she encountered a woman who had cows once or twice (and she seemed so normal!), and the woman mentioned how hard it was eating something whose name you knew. So my cattle dreams ended, or at least fell dormant.
Which doesn’t mean I can’t pick up a publication like this and leave it lying around the house:
I mean, the local Meat Rabbits guy is out of business, and let’s face it, he didn’t set a high bar for business branding.
Maybe I could even come up with the 49th key to rabbit raising success. And I wouldn’t share it.
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When A Facebook Quip And Realty Collide. Not Really.
On Facebook, I said:
I don’t get my fashion tips from Buzzfeed or other Internet sites. I take my fashion cues from old Cary Grant movies.
This, gentle reader, you know is true.
I forget what bit of Internet advice I saw that set me off about this, but I know I saw something about how hipsters roll their sleeves that identified Buzzfeed as someone whose fashion advice I’ll avoid from now until when Buzzfeed is as relevant as Geocities. I took offense because I roll my sleeves the way the forefathers of this great nation rolled their sleeves if they’d have rolled their sleeves, which I’m not sure they did because eighteenth century fashion and twentieth century fashion (not twenty-first century fashion, thank you) differ.
Where was I? I don’t know.
But not soon after I made that quip, I saw an abomination that reminded me one more place I don’t take my fashion cues from: fashion ads in slick magazines. Continue reading “When A Facebook Quip And Realty Collide. Not Really.”
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The Reason My Child Said That Crazy Thing, Part I
When my youngest child was in preschool at age 3, he won a pencil for something, and he told his teacher, “My daddy can put it in the garden!”
Which made no sense to the teacher, but it does make sense, sort of, if you know my son’s daddy.
I use pencils to mark things in the garden. When I plant a root that’s going to grow into something, I stick in a single pencil. For row crops, I use two pencils to mark the ends of the rows and then tie a string between them.
I mean, I could use a Contractor’s Grade Row Marker or a My Little Hobby Farm Organic Row Marker (either available at the local home center for $4.99 each), or I can use pencils I buy at Walmart at $3 for 20. They’re yellow and easy to see, and they are cheap and expendable.
So the lad likes to work in his garden with his father, and he cannot think of anything he’d rather do with a pencil that he won than to use it in the garden.
Although this is three years ago, I’m pretty sure he feels much the same way today, since I was working in one of the garden beds today, clearing away some weeds and old growth on the asparagus (and marking the asparagus with fresh pencils), and the boy was very upset that I was planting in the garden without him.
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How Have Things Improved Thirty Years Later?
I recently read The Human Fly #15 (Marvel Comics 1978) with its cover line “War in the Washington Monument!”
The Human Fly is a stuntman who fights crime, and it’s apparently based on a real stunt man from the era who did charity events. But that’s neither here nor there.
The plot of this particular issue is that (SPOILER ALERT!) two Vietnam veterans, one confined to a wheel chair and one mentally unstable, have taken over the Washington Monument to protest the conditions at their local VA hospital where the greedy doctors enrich themselves at the expense of the suffering veterans. Don’t worry, the Human Fly prevents them from destroying the monument, but it’s still going to be closed to the public the next time you’re in Washington, D.C.
Thirty years later and many reforms later, and we’re pretty clear now it’s not the doctors who are the problem.
It’s pretty said that these particular plots can be recycled for a quarter of a century when dealing with government programs.
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A Sad Commentary On The Family, 2015
Note the family deal on this ride:
The family deal is only for three tickets, not four.
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The Source Of That Thing Daddy Always Sings
Back when my children were young, which was not so long ago and yet was a very long time ago, they’d watch a PBS program called Between the Lions which featured a segment called Cliff Hanger that had a little theme song:
Cliff Hanger,
Hanging from a cliff,
and that’s why they call him Cliff Hanger.
Ever since, I’ve been using this song for any three syllable phrase that ends in -er. Like the grocery store Price Cutter:
Price Cutter,
They’re cutting all the prices,
and that’s why they call them Price Cutter
(In the St. Louis area, you might want to substitute Price Chopper for the same effect.)
Or for the tabby I’ve nicknamed “Big Bopper”:
Big Bopper,
The bopper who is big.
That’s why they call him Big Bopper.
(Not to be confused with the recently former kitten I’ve nicknamed “Little Bopper” but who is now as large as “Big Bopper.”)
For some reason, Between the Lions came to my oldest boy’s mind recently, and he talked about a segment or episode of it at the dinner table. I said, “You know, that’s where I got the song from.” And he didn’t remember the Cliff Hanger segments or the theme song. Even though it was only a couple of years ago that he watched them.
Alas, this is why I must post these footnotes to the things I say to my children. Not just to prove that I’m not making everything up out of whole cloth, but also so that I remember in the coming years where these tropes come from.
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That Christmas Feeling
Twilight at Nogglestead with snow cover looks like this:
Which reminds me of this Christmas album:
In my memory, the album cover is more grey than blue.
Which gives me a little Christmas feeling in February.
Not to be confused with the Christmas feeling I’ll get in March when I finally get to my thank you cards, but still.
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The Default Antecedent
At Nogglestead, sometimes we’re unclear in our communications. Sometimes, we use pronouns whose antecedents are in our heads, like when we think of a particular item but call it:
That thing
Such as:
- “I’m going to bring that thing in.”
- “Hand me that thing.”
And so on. It might not be clear what “that thing” is, which can result in a communications error.
For clarity, we’ve established a default antecedent in this case.
“Where are you taking that thing?”
Whenever someone says “that thing” without an appropriate gesture or talking about something specific prior to its usage, “that thing” is replaced with “Chewbacca” in the sentence.
For example:
- “I’m going to bring Chewbacca in.”
- “Hand me Chewbacca.”
This has improved interpersonal and intrapersonal communications greatly.
Feel free to use Chewbacca yourself.
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I Scored 5 Out Of 6 On This Quiz
An eight month old article in the Wall Street Journal called The Psychology of Clutter included this graphic which looked enough like a quiz that I took it, and I got 5 out of 6:
Here’s how I did; the ones in bold are the ones I got right (although my beautiful wife might disagree with my characterization of having these traits as “right”):
- The Way Things Were: As you know, gentle reader, I am a hoarder of personal relics. I don’t like to get rid of things I got from different eras in my life, things that my family gave to me, or things that belonged to members of my family. (Cue violin.) So many of the people, of my family, who knew me when I was younger have passed away, so I don’t have anyone to share memories with, to confirm that things happened as I remember them. So I hold onto the physical manifestations.(</violin>)
- Three Sizes Ago: Also true, although I’ve not ballooned three sizes, thank you very much. I do have a lot of pants with 34″ waists, which are just uncomfortable, thank you very much, and I might get down there again. I’m pretty sure I have a couple of adult medium things that I’ll never fit in again, but I’m saving them, for in a couple of weeks (or so it will seem), I will have boys that will grow into them (briefly).
On the other hand, I have piles and piles of clothing that I’ve gotten and inherited that are not in the current heavy rotation that I’ll continue to hold onto just in case my current crop of clothing fails and I can’t afford to replace it with similar Walmart apparel for ten bucks a throw.
And I’ll continue to hold onto the scraps of things that have worn out in case I become crafty or civilization collapses and I need the material to patch the remnants of our clothing to hold us on until one more failed growing season leads us to die of starvation. Or maybe we’ll eat the clothes.
One more thing: As to this last, I have been eternally justified in holding onto these scraps of worn out things as just this very weekend, my beautiful wife hand-washed some tunics that bled dye badly, and she needed a couple of old towels to use in drying them. “Do we have any old towels?” she asked. “My darling wife, dawn of the Ozarks, of course we have old towels. We have every old towel we have ever had during our marriage and some from even before we wed,” I said (or words to that effect). And if I hadn’t saved everything like that, where would we have been in our time of need?
- Buy Then, Pay Later: No, sir, this is not an issue for me; I am not a woman. I do not buy outfits because I might need them later. I buy things to wear now.
And to prove my point, I did buy a black button-up shirt a couple months ago (like $10 at Walmart, thank you, George), but I haven’t worn it because most of the slacks and khakis I own (and the ones I wear) are black. So I bought it, and it hadn’t gotten worn yet. So I put it on with a pair of blue jeans just so I could avoid any semblance of this sort of clothes-horse based hoarding.
- ADHD Storage: This is my garage and part of my office in a nutshell. Partially complete crafts, craft supplies (and note some of this “craft” stuff involves power tools). I also pick up raw materials at garage sales that sits around waiting for usage for years. Also, then there are the completed projects that I don’t know what to do with once I’m done with them, like this:
I don’t know anyone who likes chickens, but I had a piece of wood from a garage sale to use the chicken template I had, so I did this and used a couple of hanging hooks to cover a couple holes in it and a woodburned drawer pull at the bottom. So I don’t know who to give it to as a gift, I don’t have enough to fill out a full booth at a craft fair, and I haven’t tried Etsy yet. So I’m hoarding them until I do, I guess.
- I’ve Got It Here Somewhere: Indeed I do. Fortunately, we have a big enough house with adequate storage that I can generally lay my hands on things as soon as I want them. My twelfth grade elf D&D characters? Got ’em. 1984 Milwaukee Brewers cards distributed by the Milwaukee Police Department? Got ’em. A Commodore 64? You bet. I’m a little less organized with my books’ to-read shelves, though. So I might have a copy of Jane Austen’s Middlemarch. Or I might have two.
- An 8-Track Mind: Come on, you know me. Although to be honest, I did get rid of our only eight track player last year. But I’ve got spare cassette decks, old computers, videocassette players, DVD players, and so on. Although, in most of these cases, I still use the technologies.
So I got a five out of a possible six (and possibly six out of six).
I’m very proud of my score.
How did you do?
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The Gameshows of Nogglestead
So I’m sitting in the parlor, reading nine month old Wall Street Journals (Russia is causing trouble in Ukraine! Syria is a mess! The whole middle east is going up in flames!), and my six-year-old comes into the room. He has the cover for the pegs from the Electronic Battleship game, which means the pegs are all over the floor somewhere, and a small plastic toy bin inverted, which means the toys are all over the floor somewhere. He’s banging on the bottom of the bin in a beat that I’ve heard described as quarter notes. “Guess the song,” he says.
“Jesus Loves Me,” I say, looking over my paper much like I expect Clarence Day’s father would. I’d heard him mention that song to his older brother a couple minutes ago.
“No!” he said. “It’s ‘We’re Going to Rock Out To Electric Avenue’.”
In his mind, it sounded like this:
He wandered out of the parlor and reappeared a moment later, beating on the bin with the same rhythm. “Guess the song,” he says.
“‘Rock You Like A Hurricane’,” I answer.
He looks surprised. “You’re right!” he says.
To him, it sounded like this:
“You win!” he says. Then he gives me my winnings, a piece from some random game that means the rest of the game is all over the floor somewhere.
“It’s an honor just to be nominated,” I reply. And he went off, drumming, towards the bedrooms.
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Biography of an LP: Fletch Music from the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
I bought this LP for a buck, probably, at Recordhead Music in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the early 1990s. I’d just gotten a sweet deal on a stereo with a turntable (Originally priced $20, but Gome’s mom insisted he charge me more because it had big speakers, so I paid $25 for it. After that, I bought a lot of inexpensive LPs from the era. A couple of years later, I sold it at a garage sale for about $20, but it had my copy of The Dark Side of the Moon on it, and I let Pixie, the friend who bought the stereo, keep the LP since I meant to get the album on CD. I did, more than a decade later).
Sorry, I was talking about the Fletch soundtrack here, wasn’t I?
When I bought the LP, it seemed old. Probably because it was used and it was an LP in the world where audiocassettes had taken over. But it was only five or seven years old at the time, and I’ve owned it for twenty-five years (off and on).
I bought the LP because I liked Fletch from the books, and I think I’d caught the film once or twice on cable. It didn’t get heavy rotation on my $25 stereo turntable–Billy Joel and Pink Floyd did at the time, and most of my music library was cassettes anyway.
When I graduated college and moved home with my mother, she had a large console stereo with a turntable, and since I had an English degree, I guess I expected to live there for a while, so my turntable became superfluous, and I sold it. When I moved out a couple years later, I left my albums in my mother’s custody since I didn’t have a turntable. After a while, she migrated my LPs to the garage sale bin. Apparently, nobody wanted it for a dollar, which is good, since it was not my mothers to sell. On the plus side, she did not set it on a table in her driveway the (rainy) night before the sale (unlike several boxes of my books), so it remained intact until my mother passed away and I took possession of my remaining records, her LPs and 45s, and her mother’s LPs and 78s.
After we moved to Nogglestead, we put a radio with a turntable on it in our parlor. Eventually, I brought up the LPs from the basement. We didn’t have many then–this was before I listened to LPs daily and started buying them in vast quantities at book sales, antique malls, and thrift stores. In the mornings, while preparing breakfast for our children, I’d play this album first thing in the morning.
My youngest child, three years old at the time, would come and dance to the album. Dance, to a three year old, means run around in circles while the music plays. Come to think of it, this is what dance means to me, although with more air guitar, head nodding, and rhythmic finger pointing (which explains why I am not allowed to dance). On many occasions, I’d play the LP before the child was out of bed, and he would tear out of bed, run down the hall, and begin his circling dance to Stephanie Mills before he was fully awake.
For some reason, the older brother, five at the time, started calling “The Name of the Game” the Charlie Brown song. I’m not sure why; perhaps the intro reminded him of Charlie Brown’s teacher. But his brother latched onto that and called it the Charlie Brown song for months after his brother stopped in the way the younger brother does. Where the utterance of the admired older brother becomes a badge of their alliance, where repeating it proves the younger’s loyalty to the older. Or something. Because the laddie still does it at six years old.
The other night, the younger brother repeated one of his brother’s passe quips (“Ketchup saves the day!” as the reasoning behind getting the said bottle from the refrigerator with flourish before dousing a lovingly crafted entree to make it palatable to children).
Inspired, I put the album on and recounted its history, including the Charlie Brown song.
And the younger son danced with his mother in the parlor with more sophisticated dance moves gleaned in the first grade, apparently.
So this album, just a silly soundtrack from a decent movie from a good set of novels provided a set of memories years past its social relevance and continues to provide new memories.
Not bad for a buck. Plus, it’s got a couple of fun songs from Dan Hartman and Harold Faltermeyer.
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Expiration Date Roulette
Quick, when does this expire?
Back in my grocery store days, we would assume this was April 15, 2016.
And expiration dates that did not have a year in them (and there were such things at that time) meant next year.
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Jeopardy! Is The Nexus Of All Knowledge
Because I have suffered ignomious defeats at three recent trivia nights, I’ve started recording Jeopardy! and playing along to assure myself that I still know something about trivia (and it appears I do, as I get a number of the questions right).
But the thing I’m re-learning is that Jeopardy! is the center of all human knowledge.
I knew this in the olden days. By “olden days,” I mean the period when I watched the show daily. This would have been about the time where the first child was born, where game shows presented a good short bit of television to watch while feeding a baby. This even precedes my brief stint as part of the Jeopardy! contestant pool a couple years back.
Now, what do I mean about Jeopardy! being the center or nexus of all human knowledge? I mean that when one plays along with the program, one often finds the trivia in the clues elsewhere.
Examples just from the last couple of weeks:
- A category including talking about naming the television show by the family name included a family named the Bravermans. I didn’t know it, but if I’d watched the show a couple of days later, I might have remembered it from this headline that appeared a couple of days later on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch‘s Web site:
- A clue included a photograph of Nick Offerman as character Ron Swanson, and I got it almost right (I said “Rich Swanson”). My wife asked me how I know, and I mentioned my comparison of Ron Swanson to Archie Bunker. Then, as we fast-forwarded through the commericals, Archie Bunker’s face appeared in a commercial for some collection or another. It continues to appear in commercials during the program, but I’ve not stopped to see what collection of DVDs or cable channel it’s promoting.
- A clue about books about baseball featured George Will’s A Nice Little Place on the North Side (the answer was the baseball team, the Chicago Cubs). Yesterday, I get to this book review in the Wall Street Journal (because I am in fact eleven months late in reading the physical newspaper).
- There’s a category called Europe in Latin, and I’m familiar with all the names because I’ve reading Julius Caesar (although I don’t do as well as one would hope).
These are only a few examples, but this happens all the time. I see the things from the clues on Jeopardy! elsewhere, or I get the answers because something on Jeopardy! I have recently seen in real life.
I know there’s a behavioral science explanation for it, that I’m keyed in on these bits of trivia because they’re isolated on a program I enjoy watching, but come on, this is the Internet. I have to somehow make this a conspiracy or a panic like the D-Day Crossword Panic of 1944 (which undoubtedly will be in Jeopardy! this week).
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Just Like We Imagined It In 1988
Back in the olden days, when I was young, we had a Dungeons and Dragons campaign where I, the noble Dungeon Master, allowed the players to adopt wolf (or dire wolf–forgive me, this was twenty-seven years ago, so I am a little hazy on this point) cubs and raise them.
So my brother and the two Jimmies eventually suited them up in armor and then mounted a sword on their backs so the wolves could charge opponents in attacks.
In our minds, it looked something like this:
Except that’s armor for cats.
We might need some since we had a new tabby scouting our back door last night for a possible invasion.
(Link via Instapundit.)
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The Atari 2600 Cartridges Brian J. Left Behind
I stopped by an antique mall yesterday. I’m not sure why I stop by antique malls, as I’m not one to decorate my home in antiques (except old books, of course). The only thing I tend to buy at antique malls is LP record albums, and the number of records of particular interest (1940 through 1960s jazz, big band, swing, and easy listening) diminishes as the houses of my grandparents’ generation empty out.
You don’t tend to find the things I like to collect in antique malls, and when you do, well….
I spotted the three Atari cartridges on a shelf with some old toys, so I flipped one over to see how much they were.
$3.00 each.
For Combat, Defender, and RealSports Baseball.
If they’d have been a quarter each, I would have bought them because I’m a hoarder as much as a collector, but $3.00 was a bit too much. That’s pricing for grandparents who think that their grandchildren might like them or for hipsters who want to repurpose (ahem, “upcycle”) them into art work or something. That’s not for collectors, who know these three cartridges are worth pennies each or two copies of Frampton Comes Alive.
I also passed up a couple of Coleco faux arcade tabletop games from the 1980s, Frogger and Ms. Pac Man, because they were priced at $48.50 each. Which is about the original retail price as I recall.
As you probably know, part of what I like in collecting is not just getting the things, but getting the things inexpensively. Which is harder and harder in the Internet age, brothers and sisters, since things tend to rise up to their market values on the Internet and in many garage sales and estate sales.
And beyond in formal antique malls and flea markets.
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Wives Have Forty Words For ‘No’
For a quick lesson in the subtle differences in the language of wives, one can do as I have done and suggest home furnishings found in this catalog.
“You know, we don’t really watch that television in the living room. If we removed it and moved that beat-up old trunk with the old magazines in it, we would have room for a Big Buck Hunter HD Super Deluxe instead.”
No.
“Honey, how about a Star Wars Battle Pod? They’re only $30,000. That Extultate Justi blog guy would envy us.”
No.
“What about a twin Mario Kart Arcade GP DX? The boys could play together.”
No.
“Did you know there’s an arcade version of Jetpack Joyride? You know the boys pester you all the time to play that on your phone? If we got one of those, they’d leave you alone.”
No.
Did you see the subtle differences in these examples? Maybe not, for Wife is very inflectional language. But rest assured, each of these Nos was subtly different, conveying different shades of meaning. For instance, I am pretty sure the No response to the Big Buck Hunter was, “Maybe, if you paint the living room first and sell enough QA magazine articles.”
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The Source of That Thing Daddy’s Always Going To Say
I’ve been a bit of a gym rat, off and on, for fifteen years, and although I do just enough to keep myself sorta toned and in better shape than my chair-centric lifestyle would otherwise allow, I tend to think of my self as a, well, gym rat. Regardless of whether this is true or not.
Which is why I’ve begun to use the “And I can’t stop saying ‘bro,’ bro.” line from a recent DirecTV commercial as a personal motto.
I say it after sets at the gym. I say it as a greeting. Frankly, I find myself mumbling it to myself at other seemingly random times.
As an added benefit, when I’m mumbling this to myself at the gym, nobody asks if he or she can work in between my sets.
Also, as a side note, in written communications, I’ve generally used the more Californian “brah” spelling.
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I’m Waiting for Pole Arm Fighting Competitions
The New York Times covers the rise of competitive longsword fighting on the East coast:
Outstanding. And practical for the post-apocalyptic world.
(Link via Facebook feed.)
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In 1983, This Was Unimaginable Riches
I recently received a large box of Atari 2600 cartridges from a friend who apparently got the box when a video game shop divested itself of its Atari 2600 stock. So I integrated the cartridges with my existing set, and I can say definitively that I own at least 350 Atari 2600 Cartridges.
I say at least because it’s entirely possible if not probable there are more cartridges scattered among the Ataris in their boxes.
If you’re a complete geek, you’ll want to see the list below. Continue reading “In 1983, This Was Unimaginable Riches”
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