Category: Life

This morning, while taking my children to school, our loud music scattered a couple of deer a couple houses up from us, and as I drove slowly by them, on fled from the loud music pouring from my car. Too small to leap the rail fence, it ran until it found a spot it could comfortably duck under. My oldest son, whose name has five letters so he gets to ride in the front, and I chuckled about the deer not liking Billy Idol. As I continued on the farm road, I was working on the humorous Facebook post I would make for it.

We went over a couple of large hills, and as we came down the hill and towards Wilson’s Creek, I saw in the distance a car with its flashers on on the side of the road. So I tried to figure out what was going on and slowed down. The car started moving, and I saw beyond it a truck sitting with it’s flashers on behind it, and I looked to see what was going on.

Then….IT broke from the trees and the shadows on the right side of the road.

A cow, escaped from a nearby pasture.

It moved into the left, oncoming traffic lane; apparently, it was some kind of English breed. I stayed, behind it, driving slowly because it’s impolite to pass livestock on the right. Also, I was not sure when it might decide to move into my lane.

The cow ran from the loud music pouring from my car. It was no longer Billy Idol; instead, it was Against the Current.

I’ve never seen a cow double-time it like that since Top Secret!

Someone came out on a four wheeler to get it, but I herded it into its pasture as it fled from me and turned left at the first drive. Perhaps it wasn its pasture. Perhaps it was just a quiet pasture, or at least a pasture that would be quiet when the loud Toyota was past.

I don’t know how close it was; if I was going my normal rate of speed, would I have been past the cow when it broke onto the road, or would I just have been too close to stop in time? Idle speculation at this point.

But I did get a Facebook status out of it.

Feel free to scrub it of context and submit it to “City People Are So Dumb!!!!” listicles.

So my children started their own business, again. This time (or perhaps back then since it was the day before yesterday, and their business models change quickly) it’s secure document disposal. That is, they discovered that, when you wet a piece of paper, it becomes easier to tear. So they would wet documents and tear them for a small fee.

They used a page out of the most recent copy of Forbes magazine, but left me a little note telling me what happened.

Your magazine was a victem of circumstance

Of course, it’s reminiscent of Poe’s “The Purloined Letter“.

Not a mysterious letter. Not a victem of circumstance.

That you have to look on the back of the wadded-up, torn, and repurposed piece of paper.

He wrote the note on the back of an important letter home describing an upcoming event for one of his clubs.

Which we would not have read if we hadn’t gone all C. Auguste Dupin on him.

Raising children starts out all H.P. Lovecraft from the very moment they emerge from the birth canal and then grow into Poesque mysteries as they age.

My kids asked me about the decal in the back of my pickup truck window.

As you might expect, my pickup truck’s rear graphicature represents the stereotypical country dweller in Southwest Missouri. I’ve got an old bumper sticker from around the turn of the century that says “I’m proud Bush is our President”. I’ve got an American flag so faded that you can’t tell it’s an American flag unless you’re really close. I’ve got the logo of a professional football team–the Green Bay Packers, the only team that matters and not the Kansas City Chiefs, the closest team to this corner of the state and therefore the preferred one for most of the locals.

Things go a bit awry with the Webster Groves Historical Society decal, as I’m no longer in Old Trees itself (but I maintained memberships in the historical society and the friends of the library until they stopped sending me things because I moved away).

No, the boys were asking about the Reason – Individual Rights – Capitalism decal:

It’s a little worse for wear, but it has been on the truck for longer than the Bush bumper sticker. I most likely put the decal on right away, as I have affixed a similar decal in every car I’ve owned.

The decal came from an Objectivist-themed outfit called RIC Trading. Back in the last century, I was a big-O Objectivist. I read a lot of Ayn Rand in college, of course, and I even read Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand by Leonard Peikoff. I subscribed to a magazine called The Intellectual Activist (which employed a much younger Robert Tracinski, if I am not mistaken). The magazine turned me down when I offered to write for it, but to be honest and as reasoning writers of today will tell you, I’m a little lightweight for serious philosophical diatribes. I think I saw an ad for RIC Trading in the back of the magazine, though, and I got one for my first car, a Nissan Pulsar.

Well, I bought my cars cheap and high mileage in those days, and I put ten or fifteen thousand miles a year on them, so I turned them over pretty quick. When I couldn’t find RIC Trading around for another order, I bought a bunch of them on eBay (and got a free lapel pin to boot).

As I have aged, my cars’ prices have gone up, but they’ve lasted longer as demonstrated by the current pickup truck that I’ve been driving for sixteen years and change.

But never fear: When I get my next car, I’ll have a RIC decal for it. As I’ve got a couple left, I might have enough to cover all the cars I’ll ever own.

I explained what each meant for my children. Although I’m no longer a capital O Objectivist (I don’t recognize the infallibility of Ayn Rand), I still believe in Reason, Individual Rights, and Capitalism.

Rage Fitness.

For those who don’t think Cross Fit fits their actual mood.

Me, I’m more a Minor Annoyance Exercise guy.

From an AllRecipes.com recipe for microwave quesadillas:

Aluminum foil helps keep food moist, ensures it cooks evenly, keeps leftovers fresh, and makes clean-up easy.

Remind me to not favorite that little science experiment.

I don’t want to feel old, old man, but the email spam folder no longer sends me ill-spelled come-ons for young attractive singles or Webcam ladies.

On the plus side, it meshes right in with the pharmaceutical proffers.

True fact: When I was taking a triathlon class preparing for my first indoor triathlon this winter, the coach did ask me if I have any health conditions that would impede my performance. He asked this after watching me flail about in the swimming pool for thirty minutes. (I have previously related the story.)

But medical professionals have helped me uncover the thing that will keep me from becoming a top-flight performance athlete: I am fundamentally lazy I have an underlying heart condition.

My heart is three sizes too small.

Actually, it is not, and I have no heart condition that I know of (but if I continue with these foolish mid-life athletic futilities, who knows what I might learn?).

I just have a ready-made quip for any occasion related to my athletic performance or lack of endurance.

Not only am I fundamentally lazy inclined to reserving energy, I am also full of excuses capable of reasoned, logical explanations for accomplishments of sub-optimal level.

So I’ve done my business and washed my hands like a good fellow, and I’m standing before the paper towel dispenser. It’s an automatic one. With the manual paper towel dispensers with the spring-loaded rollers where, if you can’t just pull the exposed paper towel to get it, you can push the bar or turn the reel on the side to get one. But not automatic ones. You have to discover, like in a video game, the angle at which the sensor points and the distance that the sensor can detect.

I’m all like:

But no paper towel presents itself. I spent what seemed to be twenty minutes pleading with SkyNet to give me a couple square inches of paper. In truth, it was probably only a minute. Either I lacked the proper thieves’ hand signals to steal something to rip off a towel or the device was not functional.

I left with wet hands.

Again.

When finishing your slam-bang sonnet up with a couplet that rhymes Josephus with Bocephus, remember you have to add another syllable at the end, as the stress on each is on the middle syllable (JoeSEEfus, BoSEEfus).

Although, to be honest, I probably won’t use this particular tip myself, as I’m not comfortable or natively familiar with the pronunciation of either. I mean, although it’s spelled Joseph-us, apparently it’s not pronounced that way (my beautiful wife and Wikipedia agree), and the only time I’ve heard Bocephus spoken aloud was in the song “Redneck Woman”.

Given that the song is entitled “Redneck Woman”, the pronunciation is suspect.

So it’s back to rhyming “love” with “dove” for me.

I’ve got this going for me, which is nice.

As long as I get to pick the Superman, we’re golden. I’m not quite to the Christopher Reeve level, much less the 21st century equivalents.

As some of you know, I have a cat named Isis.

As a cat owner normally does, I flatter my cat, ascribing all sorts of super powers to the cat and whatnot.

The other night, I said to my beautiful wife, “You know, there used to be a superhero Isis. She was on with Shazam!, I think.”

So, today, I go to the library so my urchins can get some books (I have enough for now, thanks), and I see this DVD facing out from the children’s videos:

So, of course, I checked it out.

The cover is not very flattering to Joanna Cameron, who stars as the young science teacher Andrea Thoma who uses a magical amulet to summon the powers of Isis.

Somehow, the Internet is not full of Joanna Cameron vs. Lynda Carter debates. Maybe there are on the DC Comics portions of the Internet. But I’m a Marvel fan, so I don’t frequent those. Funny, I don’t tend to frequent the Marvel sites much, either. But I digress.

I watched the first couple of episodes with my children, who were stunningly unimpressed with the forty-year-old Saturday morning live action children’s program special effects, and they kept shouting their own solutions to the screen, most of which involved artillery and explosives.

I, on the other hand, was swept away with nostalgia; somehow, I remembered the program from when I was five years old.

At any rate, the 1970s must have seemed like the dawn of geek culture for a while: In the middle part of the decade, there was this show, and as I remembered it bundled with the Shazam program (1975-1977); there were live action television versions of Wonder Woman (starring the aforementioned Lynda Carter), Dr. Strange, and Spider-Man; television also featured the bank-busting Battlestar Galactica; the movies had Star Wars. But the ball never really got going until the next generation came of age around 1999 or so.

Suddenly, I have the urge to watch all those old 70s superhero shows (starting with this one). We own some of the Incredible Hulk and Wonder Woman, and the rest I’d probably have to order since they’re unlikely to be available at the video store or the library (although I did get ten episodes of The Secrets of Isis, so who knows?).

Before I start raiding Amazon, I’d best sit down for a bit. If I wait, these rushes of nostalgia pass as my short attention span moves onto something else, like an urge to read all the history books about the Near East that I can lay my hands on.

From a recent set of full color mailers, which I’m plumbing far too much for blogfodder these days, we have two presumably competing dining options.

First up, we have a pizza designed to taste like a burger:

Then, in the same collection of advertisements, we come to an ad for a burger designed to taste like a pizza:

My lord, all I want is fast food that tastes better than the cardboard box it comes in. I would, however, prefer that you not get your chocolate in my peanut butter.

I am pretty sure I was a curmudgeon at fourteen years old.

When I saw this ad in last week’s full color insert for J.C. Penney’s, I thought the woman had a knife:

I guess it’s actually the Nike swoosh, but given her hand position and the color of the swoosh….

Also, my instinctive pattern-matching spots a lot of danger that does not actually exist.

This weekend, I took a trip to Kansas City, Missouri. Although I’d been there before and kinda new the route, I wanted to be sure, so I got turn by turn directions.

The man’s way.

You got that?

It’s easy to pick up and see without having to find your place on a crowded page and it’s better than having an untrustworthy voice on the phone telling me where to go.

Although, I confess, I printed a map of the neighborhood where I was going.

Because I want to know the layout of nearby streets so I know where to look for my turns and what to do if I missed them without waiting for a satellite to help my mobile device recalculating.

I may not have been a scout, but I can read a road map. Which will serve me post-apocalypse, maybe.

Today, we received our weekly or bi-monthly (I’m not sure which) full color advertising mailer. For some reason, I paid attention, and I am sorry I did, for it is evidence that the world has gone mad.

On the cover, a Papa John’s advertisement for a pizza that is like a burger:

Inside, an Arby’s advertisement for a burger that is like a pizza:

You know what? I may be an old man, but when I want one, I order it and not the other.

Don’t you like taco pizza? Shut up, he explained. Also, I might be prejudiced against the particular combination of pizza and burger because about forty years ago, I awakened at 2 am vomiting copiously after having eaten frozen pizza burgers.

Still, this is not the singularity I was promised in the 21st century.