Category: Life

To our overburdened government workers who have the day off with pay, I wish a Happy Presidents Day.

As to my fellow “enemies of the working class,” get back to work.

I heard this commercial on the radio today:

Head down to Lowe’s for the President’s Day sale, and you can save Benjamins, Washingtons, and the rest of them.

Ken Jennings on Watson:

Watson has lots in common with a top-ranked human Jeopardy! player: It’s very smart, very fast, speaks in an uneven monotone, and has never known the touch of a woman.

Devil woman took my Jeopardy! magick.

Last night, I slept a bit roughly.  Mostly because the bed was like Poland, my cats were Prussia, Russia, and Austria, and I was the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

As some of you know, I’ve taken to baking some sweet breads these days, mostly because when life gives you zucchini (and by “gives you,” I mean overruns your yard and threatens to crush your silly brick home, mortal), you make zucchini bread. But after the zucchini ran out after a successful rogue insect team insertion, I decided to try some other breads and a couple of pies. That said, I’m no Cunegonde because I’m not that pretty.

Recipes and cook books sure have a lot of different verbs in them, don’t they? The authors use the mandate tense and order me to do a lot of different things to the poor ingredients, but I am a simple man, with a simple Oster hand mixer that goes to six. As such, whatever the verb in the recipe, seriously, they can’t mean anything but “Mix at 6,” can they?

• Cream the eggs and butter? Set the mixer to six.
• Fold the nuts into the batter? Set the mixer to six.
• Combine the flour and spices? Put on a dust mask and set the mixer to six.
• Chop the walnuts? Set the mixer to six and chase them around the bowl until they’re small.

I mean, seriously, can we lose the thesaurus here and just admit that there’s nothing to it?

Also, what’s up with the order of combining things? Just pour it in the bowl and mix it at six.

Everyone remains polite when accepting the breads, anyway. Because they fear the creepy man with the mixer with the long extension cord.

Well, he’s not actually a baby. My four-and-a-half-year-old son is quite precocious. Not only has he made his first pun (watching his Christmas program, he said the little girl wearing the star was the star of the show–I know, it’s obvious, but it’s a a pun and he’s four-and-a-half), but the other day he distributed his first middle.

I made some chili for myself for lunch and put some shredded cheese on it. Then, being the benevolent despot, I put a little cheese on the boys’ lunch plates and announced, “I share the cheese because I am from Wisconsin.”

“Am I from Wisconsin?” he asked.

“No, you are from Missouri,” I said mournfully. “But you come from many generations of Wisconsinites.”

“Is Grandma from Wisconsin?” he asked.

“No, Grandma was from St. Louis. But Nana is from Wisconsin.”

“So she shares the cheese.”

Bang, just like that, proper syllogism. He closed the circuit. Wow, I am so proud.

Also, I’m sorry for burdening the rest of you Wisconsinites with that burden to live up to. If the lad ever sees you with cheese, he’ll expect you to share it.

If you don’t want to, just tell him you’re from Minnesota. Or if you see him with some and want to take it, I guess you could say you’re from Illinois.

I’m stealing some of Tam’s schtick here, but I got nothing else today.

Overheard in Nogglestead cookhouse:

She: Wild horses couldn’t have kept me away.
He: Wild horses couldn’t drag me away. Wild horses are not a very good area denial weapon.

She posts a couple of photographs from the Milwaukee Art Museum and I know exactly where they are.

Back in the olden days, my grandmother managed the gift shop, so we got in free. When I was at the university, I could get in free, too, so I went every year at least once.

In the Springfield News-Leader, they are still lavishing attention on a young professionals report I wrote about for 24th State.

In today’s installment, we have this seeming incongruence:

While York stayed in Springfield and Hopp came back, another Drury grad, Samuel Moore, took his accounting degree to Washington, D.C.

Improved public transportation and the possibility of a more compact, urban lifestyle were part of the draw, said Moore, who is legally blind.

“I bike to work and it’s a 15-minute commute door-to-door,” in Washington, D.C., said Moore, a native of Buffalo, Mo.

Of all the cities in the country that would seem to be legally blind biker friendly, D.C. is at the bottom of the list.

Boy, those Egyptians sure wanted all of their things back in one place, didn’t they?

One of the most widely debated topics in the art history world today is repatriation, or the return of “stolen or gifted” items to the home country. Should museums be allowed to keep their collections as they are, for the benefit of their patrons, or are they required to return significant works of art to the countries they originated from?

The debate continues as Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s antiquities director, recently announced his continued quest to retrieve artifacts stolen from the countries centuries ago, when the archaeological statutes that we have now weren’t in place. Hawass claims he will be relentless in his efforts, and is teaming up with other countries around the globe in order to further his mission. Meeting last week at the “Conference on International Cooperation for the Protection and Repatriation of Cultural Heritage”, Egypt and 25 other countries, including China, Peru and Italy, hope to reclaim many of these ancient artifacts from museums around the world.

In Hawass’s sights are the Rosetta Stone, currently held in the British Museum; a statue of Ramses II from Turin’s Museo Egizio; and the bust of Nefertiti from Berlin’s Neues Museum.

You know, that’s an awesome idea. Let’s put all of the priceless artifacts in one place in an unstable region. What could go wrong?

Looters broke into the Egyptian Museum during anti-government protests late Friday and destroyed two Pharaonic mummies, Egypt’s top archaeologist told state television.

You know, a certain amount of diaspora of artifacts would help prevent that sort of thing. One might argue that it would be good for all of mankind if those priceless treasures remained scattered so they could not all be lost at once.

But that does not serve the interests of the aggrieved nations, who want to bolster their reputations, their museums, and their budgets.

(For information about Alexandria I, check out the Wikipedia.)

You know what makes me feel left behind? When I encounter a set of signals, sigils, or glyphs that I don’t recognize nor understand. I’m a pretty smart guy. I have a college degree, although perhaps in the 21st century having a college degree is a symbol of not being very smart at all, particularly when it’s a B.A. with majors in English and Philosophy. But, still, I feel like a stranger in a strange land when I come upon something like this:

That’s the bottom of our dust mop cover. I took it off to launder it. I think the package might have said it was washable. Something I own is washable, so maybe this is it. So I looked for the tag that explains what one can do with it, but all I had was this.

Uh.

The first one looks like a tub, so maybe that means it’s washable. But what does the 40 mean? I should use a tallboy can of beer? I should wash it just above freezing? I have no idea. It goes into the white load with the rest of my formerly whites.

The second symbol: A triangle, prohibited or eliminated. Do not listen to The Dark Side Of The Moon while washing?

The third symbol: A tank? This garment will not protect you from authority when you’re at a protest?

The fourth symbol: A circle, x-ed out. A cryptic reference to The Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black”?

“I want to see the sun blotted out from the sky.”

The fifth symbol: A circle in a square, x-ed out? Wait a minute, maybe the circle does not represent the sun, but rather an elder god or demon of some sort. And this is some sort of warning about containing that eldritch feotid beast from beyond the laundry room. Like an Elder Sign, if only I could decipher it.

Ah, the hell with it. I threw it in the laundry with some malt liquor and then the dryer. I have no idea how many of these important Chinese tenets I violated, but I have a mostly clean dust mop head. The point was not to clean it correctly; the point was to invest enough time ranting about it while seated at the computer with a cup of coffee that I would not have time to actually use the dust mop. Mission: Accomplished.

(And in the course of researching the post, I encountered this list of the symbols and what they mean. In addition to a rant post, I have also learned something that will impress my wife when I someday dramatically interpret a set of glyphs for her. “How do you know that?” she will ask, and I will just shrug. But you and I know, gentle reader.)

“Daddy, want to play with Play-Doh?”

“Sure!”

The 21st century sure has diverged from the future offered up by RoboCop. Not in the technologies nor law enforcement attitudes.

Detroit doesn’t have that many people in it, and Old Detroit is getting bulldozed for farmland.

Crikey, in the future, I’m going to have to explain to my children what Detroit was in every Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker film.

How does a mostly stay-at-home father spend his days with two preschool children?

Building battle mechs for livestock.

The other day, I bad a couple minutes to spare, so I thought I’d do so as a proper Lileksian: I decided I’d try out the new Relics Antique Mall on Battlefield Road here in Springfield. I had about 30 minutes, and I knew I would not have time to go through the whole thing, but I’d have the chance to review the self-proclaimed Largest Antique Mall in Missouri (larger than all the other largest antique malls in Missouri, and I think they all claim it). So I turn into the driveway by the huge sign and pull into the parking lot of a large warehouse-or-manufacturing-plant-looking building stuffed between a couple of warehouse and manufacturing style facilities.

The building has two narrow glass doors on either side with no other windows on the building. As I start looking for a parking spot, I see a small 9.5″ by 11″ sign on the first door I pass: Not an Entrance. No identifiers on it. The second door has a similar sign on it, but I didn’t see it clearly. Only that neither of the doors clearly said “Entrance” or “Relics” or offered business hours. They looked like the entrances to, well, an office building or a plant of some sort. Suddenly and sullenly, I was no longer in the mood for an antiquing expedition. And I left.

Because I didn’t know where the damn entrance was.

One thing that trips my Grrr wire (and, apparently, ranting fingers) is a commercial enterprise that won’t tell me where to go for commerce. Whether its nondescript buildings holding an office I need to visit or a yard sale that has ads in the papers and signs on the corners but nothing in the grass by the house to tell me that, yes, there are things for sale way up the driveway, I just say, well, since I have children in the car with me a lot of times, these days I just say, “Never mind.”

Spend a little money for clear lettering and signage where I’m supposed to come in, or I won’t. Spread a little light pollution, for Pete’s sake. Because I’m not going into undermarked doors like this one and chancing that the Millworkers Union might impress me as an apprentice.

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. Wondering what Snooki is going to do next.”

–Oscar Wilde and Brian J. Noggle

I swear, if you affect an an in front of a word that starts with h where the h is aspirated, like an historic event, you damn well better use it the same way in your confession when you admitting to killing an hobo.

Thank you, that is all.

Resolution: To learn how to dance better.

Solution: Not sneaking into the Fred Astaire Dance Studio no matter how many times I hear its advertisements on WISN (listening to Milwaukee radio stations when you live in Missouri leads to lots of good hometown services you can’t get in Springfield). No, the solution is to study this guy:

That kid has got moves.