To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
at 5:45 as you’re having a waking up conversation with your beautiful wife, and you somehow allude to blue dog paintings…
…and you name the call the artist Rodriguez instead of Rodrigue?
All my alleged learning and education and pomposity shot down in an instant.
Maybe you’re lucky enough not to have conversations before 8am talking about contemporary New Orleans-based American artists. Or smart enough.
Buy My Books!
Still cleaning out the old essays.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
We recently had an event that spawned the arrival of Mylar helium balloons. Fortunately, our crowd is not of the Have a Hannah Montana Inflatable Item for Your Birthday crowd, so we get a couple cards and a gift for your normal gift bearing holidays, and I’m man enough to forget the standard Wuv holidays, so we don’t deal with them on a regular basis.
Now cards are keepsakes, at least in our household or at least when they’re in my reach. You can easily put them into boxes or binders to save them for some far away days in the future when you’ve got nothing to do an empty house full of old people’s furniture, wallpaper, and cats. Cards fit easily into these storage devices. Little letters, little notes, each of these you can unfold and review, running your fingers over the creased paper. But Mylar balloons are another story altogether.
I’ve worked in the industry, tangentially, so I know how to deflate the balloons: you simply insert a straw into the neck of the balloon so that it opens the little valve and squeezing the helium out, or the helium and air mixture, or whatever mix exists after a couple of weeks in the wild. Sure, that’s easy, and it makes sense enough if you’re in the industry and you can reinflate unsold balloons the next time the season rolls around, hoping that your dated stars and designs will become retro enough to sell then.
But what do you do with a deflated mylar balloon in the household? I can’t imagine hanging them flat on the wall like old LP covers. Certainly, you’ll never reinflate them with helium, as you’ll probably never bring home a tank full of that noble gas whose natural supply is waning. Just blowing them up won’t recapture the magic uselessness of the original, and bagging up that carbon dioxide won’t reduce your footprint a toe.
I guess the only responsible thing to do with a helium-filled balloon is to do what PEBA would recommend: returning it to the wild before it’s too weak to travel to the helium balloon spawning grounds back east (that is, downwind). I only hope I’m not too late, because all of the neighbors down the block will know the source of the newly liberated “It’s a Boy!” balloons that snag in their trees, and this very piece will shoot down my story of an accidental balloon-escaped-when-I-opened-the-door-and-I-tried-to-lure-it-back-in-with-balloon-treats story.
Buy My Books!
Living in the country, it was nigh inevitable that I would have to remove a tick from one of my children someday. This spring, a warm and wet spring, I’ve killed a number on my person before they could get a good latch. So I was unsurprised to see one on my son one morning while he was dressing.
As I might have mentioned, this was my first tickendectomy. I didn’t really have time to get to eHow to find out how the Internet does it. I had to rely on the experiences of my youth to know how to remove it.
First, you put a lit cigarette to your child. At least, I think that’s what my parents did to kill the tick. Or maybe my parents just liked to put a lit cigarette to me. I dunno.
Barring that, I did get a pair of tweezers, sterilized them with an open flame, exploded the little sucker, and pulled it straight up to remove the sucking parts. It looked pretty well removed when I finished, so I salved the wound and put on a bandage and watched for infection.
I am Daddy, dammit, and I’m supposed to know immediately how to do these things. I think I did. But I’ll get better, I suppose, as this recurs. This Daddy thing and this adult man thing really have a lot in common. You’re supposed to know how to do something or handle something, you think you kinda know how, and you do it and succeed at it without knowing exactly how you knew.
However, it is a good excuse to post Brad Paisley’s “I’d Like To Check You For Ticks”, which my beautiful wife, who doesn’t listen to country music even though she grew up in the Ozarks, has never heard.
Continue reading “Emergency Tickendectomy Apparently A Success”
Buy My Books!
The worst part about moving to the suburbs is that I don’t understand the social mores of the place, the traditions, norms, and unwritten laws of behavior that guide one’s relationship with one’s neighbors. I grew up in the rain-streaked city streets and later down dusty rural dirt roads, where your relationship with your neighbor was often simpler. In the city, if you messed with your neighbor or your neighbor’s, erm, stuff, the neighbor might well shoot you dead with his nine millimeter. In the country, if you messed with your neighbor or his livestock, the neighbor might well shoot you dead with his 12 gauge. This simplicity led to a certain respect for your neighbor as well as a certain distance from those you didn’t know.
Here in the suburbs, though, the rules of behavior differ, and that confuses me. For example, many of my neighbors don’t own nine millimeters or 12 gauges and think it’s odd that someone might. Territorial rights aren’t always marked by barbed wire; instead, we have things such as mutually understood (it’s assumed) borders noted by lines in plats in the county office or by the seasonal plantings. Fortunately, though, in most of my suburban domiciles, I’ve had something of a boundary marker, such as a privacy fence that trickles into chain link. Actually, I’ve had a number of privacy fence boundaries, including those erected after I’ve moved in, so the boundary line isn’t an issue.
However, incursions across those boundaries pose an ethical dilemma. Such as the beating conundrum I confronted recently when I stepped into my slightly overgrown (gone to seed) backyard and found a Wiffle® ball amid the lush suburban saw grass. What in Suburbia was I supposed to do about it?
The neighbors on one side, hidden behind a tall wooden fence, have children. The ball could belong to them. But I don’t know about the rear abutting yards; they, too, could hold children in those hours or seasons in which I am not in the back yard cutting the grass. The ball could as easily belong to families beyond those tree-high pike pylons separating the yards.
In the city, a Wiffle® ball never gets hit anywhere but common areas or the street; if it goes into a yard, the big dog or crazy person there eats it. In the country, no one can hit the ball far enough to go into someone else’s yard. This white plastic sphere at my feet was an unknown artifact for which the lessons of my youth provided no proper recourse.
I have a son for whom I could claim the ball under the particular possession/law equation that no lawyer ever wasted a retainer teaching. But that would be theft, pure and simple.
I could march up onto the front porch of the neighbor’s house with the ball in hand and ask if it belonged to the children there, but in my old neighborhoods, the frontal approach could be confrontational. City-dwellers might fear the polite home invader or the Jehovah’s Witnesses. In the country, someone on your porch could be the IRS or the jackbooted thugs from the ATF (now the BATFE). In either case, one wrong dingdong, and they greet you with a hail of lead (now, due to safety regulations, this is sometimes steel).
Besides, I’m unclear if the door knocking behavior is covered under the suburban code of conduct, or if this unelicited contact would mark one as a pariah amongst the decklocked crowd. Perhaps word would spread of the forward and slightly creepy fellow up the block who confronted neighbors with only the provocation of a Wiffle® ball, and our family would purposefully not get invited to block parties sponsored by the local real estate agent.
I could drop the ball over a fence surreptitiously. Of course, that would assume that the ball belonged in the yard where I know children live. If it did not, I could perhaps be charged with littering or perhaps trafficking in stolen goods depending upon the demeanor of the local five-oh. Or perhaps they would see me as conducting a sortie upon their pristine green backyard with some sort of secret Wifflepon.
Torn, I knew I could not keep the ball, I could not break the code of silence maintained by community, and I could not throw the ball over the fence into an unseen backyard. So I did what any self-respecting adult male born of country and city would do if he were me.
Carefully in the early morning hours, in that period between darkness and dawn, I looked up and down the street from beside my front porch. Assured I was unobserved by early dog walkers or the fabled milkman, I crouched low and crossed the broad, blackened expanse of my asphalt driveway and deposited the ball at the very edge of the neighbor’s front lawn where its presence would tempt the children from that yard to reclaim it or claim it, where the father would pick it up or kick it into my driveway or the street when it came time to mow the lawn, and where I could have plausible deniability about how the ball got there.
Then I scurried back into my house and bolted the strange and frightening world of suburbia out.
Buy My Books!
Hey, if you like the content here at MfBJN, consider hitting the tip jar.
No, wait, I don’t have a tip jar.
Instead, why not crack out your old-timey checkbook and send some money to the Northern Michigan University James A. Igert Memorial Scholarship.
My beautiful wife and I endowed this scholarship a couple years back and structured it such that the more money it has in it and generates, the more money it gives out to students.
Don’t wait until December 31 to rack up all your charitable contribution deductions is all I’m saying.
Buy My Books!
Here’s another old essay from the hard drives.
The Daddy Watch
A while ago, I dropped my old Timex, and the fall was apparently no mere lickin’. The watch stopped, so I guess this was the Bitin’ After Which There’s No Rightin’. I’d taken the watch off and stuffed it in my pocket before a rigorous game of office foosball. After delivering a vigorous thrashing to the ball if not our opponents, I reached into my pocket for the watch. It leapt from my grasp onto the floor and into the sweet thereafter. I was in the market for a new timepiece.
I’ve worn watches off and on since high school. I’d done some time before that with the obligatory Mickey Mouse watch whose hands worked almost long enough for me to learn how to tell time. Sometime the middle 1980s, when digital watches broke the barrier from technical marvel to status symbol for middle schoolers, I got my first watch as a gift. I wore a series of digital time pieces until college, where I got a real name brand watch for Christmas as a gift from my then-current sweetheart.
I remember that the watch had real hands on it; at some point in my midpoint generation, the anachronism of hands instead of LCD digits implied some status as a grown-up. This particular model offered an elapsed-time ring that fit around the edge of the watch. You could twist the ring so that the zero lined up with the big hand. Whenever you finished your activity, you could look to see where the big hand was to see how many minutes had elapsed. Unless, of course, the minutes exceeded a full hour, at which point the digital-dependents who didn’t know what the little hand was for would be lost. The elapsed time ring lasted only a few months, until a devastating encounter with a potato bin’s edge taught me to wear the watch on the inside of my wrist. I wore that watch longer than I remained with that particular soulmate. I can’t even remember the circumstances where that watch failed, nor can I remember what it looked like when I laced that band up onto my wrist. But those salad days of collegiate vigor end like inexpensive timepieces.
After college, I continued to wear the worn timepiece from those college days until a new novia wanted to help upgrade my wardrobe or lifestyle. She bought me a newer version of the same brand watch, also with hands. She was the daughter of an executive, I was a ne’er-do-well with an English degree and a retail job. Her parents didn’t care for me, but she liked me enough to get me watch for Christmas. The watch sported a Velcro-and-fabric band which I swapped out with a decent plastic band and buckle. The watch outlived the relationship (to the young lady’s parents’ relief) and a number of nothing jobs that transmogrified into an accidentally successful career.
Ten years after that relationship ended and a dozen years after the watch was new, it hit the floor at my workplace, a hip young marketing agency where I bore a pseudo-executive title of one of the unhip departments. I married a woman who will never buy me a watch, I’ve vowed, given the demise of the relationships in which I’ve received a watch. Also, I’ve become a father, starting a family with the aforementioned wife who cannot buy me a timepiece. I was in a different era within my life.
So although I fancied myself another watch along the lines of the preceding few, with dark bands and backgrounds, when I found myself at the counter at Target, I passed over the direct replacement for my old watch-—I could have replaced the fabric sport band with the band from my defunct watch—-and I passed over the other watches of similar styles. Of course, I wanted hands on the face so I could, in decades hence, use the knowledge on trivia nights. But I glanced over the watches on their display mounts and I lit upon a silver steel model with expansion bands.
I have never owned a watch with an expansion band before; I expected that the bands wouldn’t fit as securely or as comfortably. But my father wore expansion bands, with the steel spring-loaded links stretching over the thumb to allow him to snap it onto his wrist before going out to a day’s worth of construction and remodeling. On occasion, I would find the watch and play with it, stretching the expansion band to turn the watch inside out or rolling it over and over like a tank’s tread. I once found an extra band and imagined a metallic snake creeping along the sofa or the end table. Standing before the jewelry case, my previous preferences dissolved into a warm-and-fuzzy reminisce.
Needless to say, I bought the steel expansion band watch. Its shiny exterior proclaims that it is the watch of a man, not a boy. Unlike its Macy’s counterparts from Bvlgari or Hvngari or whatever former Soviet blocs provide the Citizens for sale beneath the red star, I won’t be afraid to wear this watch every day in case I bang it into a sawhorse or drop it after a foosball game. It’s shiny enough to proclaim some maturity and status. And maybe my own son will look on the band with his imagination and find something to remember.
Buy My Books!
I found a ten dollar bill in a shopping center parking lot today, and it reminded me of an essay I wrote a couple years ago called “A Penny Found Is An Ethical Dilemma”. Since it looks like I’ve never published it here, I guess I’ll do so now. Note that keeping the ten dollar bill did not violate the ethics outlined herein.
A Penny Saved Is An Ethical Dilemma
Some Internet denizens have calculated the second-by-second earnings of billionaire Bill Gates and say that, unless he found a Madison on the ground—that is, the obsolete $5,000 bill—he would lose money stooping to pick it up. I’m not a billionaire, and I was raised with a bit of thrift and appreciation for found money, so I still stoop to pick pennies and the occasional flash of silver on the pavement. Each penny, invested wisely, could well buy me a name brand tin of cat food in retirement instead of the less tasty store brand.
Unfortunately, I also put myself through college and earned a degree in philosophy with an emphasis on ethics. Therefore, I cannot simply rely on the adage, “See a penny, pick it up, and all day long you’ll have good luck” nor my own thriftiness as a guide. Instead, I have built a complete system of morals involving the finding and keeping of pennies and other monies in the world at large.
Let’s face it, a bit of money on the sidewalk represents a piece of someone else’s property. A relatively insignificant piece, perhaps, but conceptually as much the property of someone else as an automobile. When someone cannot remember what row he or she parked in at the mall, we cannot simply take his or her car; that’s stealing, and it’s wrong. Pennies, on the other hand, have relatively low value. If we tried to turn found pennies into the local police for someone to claim, they would hold us for psychological evaluation. Besides, a person dropping a quarter while pulling out a cell phone might not miss the money or probably wouldn’t retrace the steps of the day to find it. Ergo, a single coin falls under the moral equivalent of maritime salvage flotsam. Greater denominations or collections of money—the significant thousands of dollars or whatnot—probably merit turning into the police, but negligent owners, for all intents and rationalizations, have abandoned their pennies when dropping them in public places.
But that blanket rule is too facile. As it merely supports the pick-it-up mantra, I needed something more complicated to guide my actions in other cases, to provide explanations for why I pick up coins in some places and not in others. A complex set of rules is a set of rules, not just arbitrary behavior.
For example, coins that I find on the sidewalk or in the street are fair game to fund my retirement, as these public spaces belong to everyone.
However, when I am in a place of business such as a coffee shop or a store, coins found on the furniture or on the floor are not eligible for extraction; these belong to the business owner in my mind, although I do expect that another customer or some underpaid employee will come along and scoop up the money. I did when I was working my way through college in a grocery store, but I didn’t have a degree in philosophy then. Perhaps, because I was an employee and was in the store every day, the store was not a place-of-business but a public-space or at least a common-space (arbitrary distinctions in philosophical tracts are always in italics), this stripping of a penny from the linoleum surface of someone else’s property was morally acceptable.
The parking lots of private business, though, as well as the sidewalks immediately outside and the foyers between the outer doors and inner doors remain public spaces and good sources for the random coins.
Within residential areas, the sidewalk common spaces give way to the well-manicured lawns. Pennies on the sidewalks are fair game, but coins within the lawns themselves are difficult to spot, so they belong to the homeowner. The rare exception to this rule is a coin that lies on the boundary of the sidewalk and the lawn. By “boundary,” of course, I mean “I can see it.” This boundary area could prove troublesome, but for guidance, I turned to the teachings of the masters more knowledgeable than me. I don’t mean Rand, Hume, Aristotle, or Jesus; I defer to the National Football League: “When any part of the ball, legally in possession of a player inbounds, breaks the plane of the opponent’s goal line, provided it is not a touchback.” If there’s a glimmer of concrete or other paving material underneath any edge of the coin in question, visible from any angle, it’s eligible for retrieval. I have only recently clarified this rule when I encountered a coin in such a state last week.
One wouldn’t expect the choice of whether to pick up a penny to require this much consideration nor to bear upon its choice a moral decision. However, most ones don’t have a philosophy degree like I do. While most people would pick up more pennies with lax internal rule systems, they certainly don’t get as much entertainment or food for thought as I do.
Buy My Books!
Some people find the hardest part to doing something is starting:
The hardest part is often just starting. I’ve found that it’s especially hard for me to start when a task is difficult or complex. The more importance and weight a certain activity has in my life or business, the more I seem to put off starting.
However, if I can just get moving on it, even for a few minutes, it tends to get easier.
Because I know this about myself, rather than setting the intention to finish something, I resolve myself to start. The more often I start, the easier things get finished. Overcoming that first bit of inertia is the biggest challenge (just like getting started on a run, or the first push of getting a car moving).
Once things are moving, momentum is on your side.
If only starting projects were my problem. (Aside from either using the subjunctive incorrectly or knowing about the existence of the subjunctive to know enough to worry if I’ve used it wrong. But that’s another, lesser, problem.) Continue reading “For Me, The Hardest Part Is Not Starting”
Buy My Books!
Here in the country, the word bonfire sounds almost exactly the same as pon farr.
They mean about the same thing, except the country kids suffer from bonfire more frequently than once every seven years.
Buy My Books!
Here’s a good Wookiee Suit test. When you’re stopped by a train carrying things like this:
What do you think?
I admit my dark thoughts run toward the darker side, wherein I can imagine another civil war coming, but when I see a train of military equipment moving through Brookline, my immediate reaction is still Wow, I’m proud of my country and its military and not They’re moving into position to encircle the cities in the upcoming troubles.
Buy My Books!
April is the cruelest month.
Last April, we lost the first of our quintet when our cat Ajax died. Last night, our oldest cat John Galt died. He was my wife’s cat before he was our cat, and he brought us together, sort of. Continue reading “Gone Galt”
Buy My Books!
As some of you might know, I’ve been having a little trouble with my DSL connection starting sometime last winter. AT&T operators and technicians have been very polite, for the most part, but they didn’t fix the problem yet.
Additionally, I needed a static IP address to make connections to client networks easier, and this did not go well, either, since most AT&T phone representatives only want to sell U-Verse and transfer you to tech support if you even mention static IPs. I finally got it, but at a bill rate three times what they sell it to business customers.
I sent a letter to the head of AT&T Business and Home Solutions: Continue reading “Letter to Andy Geiss, Sr. Exec. V.P. AT&T Business and Home Solutions”
Buy My Books!
As you might have noticed, suddenly everyone is all about civility. There are national media calls for it, and the city of Springfield has some sort of ten tenets of civility that it’s wasting government time and treasure on.
The local YMCA even has a banner for it with a logo that I think captures the essence of the modern call for civility:
Notice the arrow in it, just as awesome as in the FedEx logo, but to worse effect.
The circle on the left is perhaps being civil to the circle on the right, denoted by the arrow. But this civility is one-sided, and the right circle is poised to eat, Pac Man style, the circle on the left.
Doesn’t that really capture it as a modern one-sided, “You must be civil according to my rules of behavior, even as I pursue your destruction” “civility” of the 21st century?
Or maybe it’s just Atari 2600 Pac Man and Discolored Arcade Pac Man exchanging ideas and I’m reading too much into it.
Buy My Books!
My children are being raised appropriately, which means I’m letting them watch 80s cartoons like Spiderman and His Amazing Friends and The Transformers (“Generation 1” they call them to differentiate them from the later rehashes where Bumblebee is a Cylon).
This morning, my son asked me, “Why does Soundwave’s chest open up and other Transformers come out?”
“Soundwave is an audiocassette player,” I said.
Then I realized he did not know what an audiocassette player or the little tapes that go into it are.
Buy My Books!
I’ve completed the first part of my plan to use a golem who asks a riddle to protect my teeming piles of gold coins that sometimes sweat little tinkling individual coins of gold that tumble down for no apparent reason. I have the riddle. Check it out:
What type of man works in two kinds of labs?
Perfect!
Now, I’m not sure which step I should try to tackle next: crafting an unholy facsimile of a man or somehow gathering Himalayan-sized mounds of Andean treasures. Frankly, both sound a little harder than coming up with a riddle. Maybe I’ll click over to Facebook instead.
Buy My Books!
Need a check box? You can order one from this toll free number. Now you can offer your users the ability to select more than one answer for a question!
Seriously, though, when I received a check order last week, instead of putting the checks into little chipboard boxes and wrapping them for mailing, Deluxe (not living up to its name) put the checks between two sheets of chipboard and into a large plastic envelope to mail them out.
For the environment, of course. Because now instead of some cellophane and some reusable little boxes, Deluxe, like Puma, has redesigned its packaging to lower its costs and then tries to convince us it’s for the environment.
Unlike Puma, though, “Deluxe” offers to sell us the former packaging for an additional cost. Apparently, Deluxe is ready to throw over the environment if there’s an additional buck to be made.
Buy My Books!
You might ask yourself, what part of the emu produces the emu oil.
It’s made from the rendered fat:
Emu oil is an oil rendered from the fat of the emu, Dromaius novaehollandiae, a bird native to Australia.
Now you know.
Not that it makes you want to bathe with a soap made from it, though.
Buy My Books!
Last year, when I was staining my deck, I found a little hook screwed into the outside of the deck. A small hook, not something big enough to hang a plant on, but bigger than a small eyehook screw. I had no use for it, so I took it off of the deck, and I thought I might throw it away.
Well, you know me.
Since the hook was only partially oxidized, I threw it into the drawer amongst my tools that holds miscellaneous screws, eyehooks, s hooks, and whatnot.
So we have a woodburned sign that hangs from a post beside our driveway with our family name on it (“Welcome to the Smith-Wessons”). In the recent (and by recent, I mean “a couple weeks ago) wind storm, the sign blew off the post, from which it was hanging by a couple of chain links between hooks on the post and hooks on the sign. As is the wont of our woodwork in the wind, the hook from the post was missing.
So as I was rooting in the drawer for an eyehook screw to replace the missing hook, I came across the still only partially oxidized recycled screw from the deck. And I found that it was actually the same style of hook as the missing hook from the post. So a couple bits of broken toothpick and a bit of twisting later, and the sign is back up until the next windstorm.
But using that recycled screw is now going to be all the justification I need for my normal packrattery. All the times I through something in a drawer instead of into a trash can because I might use it someday (but seemingly never do) are trumped by this one time where, yes, I did actually use it.
Buy My Books!
The Weather Radio just started shrieking a tornado warning, but the weather is clear and the Internet did not show a tornado warning.
The newspaper did, however, mention a statewide tornado warning set for just that time.
The newspaper assures us, though:
If severe weather conditions exist, the drill will be rescheduled for Thursday at 1:30 p.m.
So the siren goes off at 1:30. Is it a drill? Is it really threatening weather? I guess we’ll find out soon.
Buy My Books!
A KY3 story about a defending his property with a firearm merited a mention on Instapundit yesterday. The story:
An elderly cattle rancher recently came face-to-face with three thieves on his property, and he took the matter into his own hands. The thieves might have been arrested if Vance West had been able to get someone to help him.
I love how the sheriff uses this as an excuse to ask for a tax increase.
Buy My Books!