Category: Life

If you lie down with dogs, you get peed on by the incontinent dogs.

Share this moment with that special Canadian in your life.

In the long run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high. –Henry David Thoreau

Or just use a shotgun.

While driving along Big Bend Boulevard here in Old Trees, Missouri, our new home, I said to Heather, “Hey, it’s a half track.” Driving down Big Bend Boulevard. A half track. Heather didn’t see it, and she didn’t know what a half track was, so I had to explain it to her.

Fortunately, I could hold up a copy of the Webster-Kirkwood Times from this week and prove to her that my spotting a World War II era military vehicle tooling around town was not a symptom of my insanity.

Proving this was not a symptom of mental illness is not the same as proving sanity, I know, but I will take what I can get.

An unsolicited greeting from the first company my mortgage broker could sell my name to:

Our records indicate you are not participating in our recommended MORTGAGE PROTECTION COVERAGE. You may now be eligible if you are UNDER AGE 76.

The ECONOMICAL term life insurance can PAY OFF YOUR MORTGAGE should you or your spouse DIE. It provides the SECURITY YOUR FAMILY NEEDS at the PRICE YOU WANT.

Well, if I DIE, I think normal insurances WOULD help my spouse PAY HER MORTGAGE (since, by dying, it would really no longer be my mortgage, would it?), and even if I were inclined to UP MY COVERAGE, I would probably look for a REPUTABLE INSURANCE COMPANY and not some fly-by-bulk-mail OPERATOR who probably won’t even EXIST by the time I die (hopefully sometime in the twenty-second century, the later the better) and who interrupts my daily junk mail destruction with UNSOLICITED REMINDERS OF MY OWN MORALITY, IN BOLD AND CAPITALS AS APPROPRIATE.

A regular, long-time reader writes:

Bonjour,

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Si vous le souhaitez, vous pouvez faire un échange de liens avec nous,
dès maintenant, en cliquant sur le lien ci-dessous :
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Si vous n’êtes pas le webmaster du site, merci de nous en informer :
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Thanks, Eric.

I certainly hope that spam e-mail request was flattering in its native tongue.

Musings from Brian J. Noggle, February 13, 2006:

I don’t know what sort of Birkenstock-wearing Seattlite would shush the commercial-driven sugar-craving mewlings of its larvae with EnviroKidz Organic Koala CrispTM breakfast cereal (Gluten Free! Organic Cocoa!), but apparently somewhere, someone is making money providing the product.

James Lileks, today:

Look. When you put a box of “Cinnamon Toast” cereal on the table, the kid knows what he’s getting. “Gorilla Munch” doesn’t really nail it down. Particularly if the Gorilla appears to be gazing at the person holding forth the bowl, sizing him up for a game of poker. And I don’t get the part about “1% of sales donated to wildlife” – makes it sound like they send someone into the forest and throw wadded-up fifties at random animals.

Great minds think alike. Or perhaps Enivro-Kidz cereal is just that mockable that everyone except the earnest types will make fun of it at some time.

You know, upside down, Paul McCartney really looks like Sumner Redstone.

S & H Green Stamps

Granted, my mother collected them at the end of their era, but I do remember shops that advertised giving them out and the booklets wherein one could paste the stamps and redeem them later for other goods.

Kinda like Marlboro Miles, but without the lung cancer.

More proof it’s hard to be a man in the twenty-first century: these conflicting mandates:

59 Things a Man Should Never Do Past 30:

6. Hang art with tape.

Hanging Pictures on Rock-Hard Plaster Walls:

Back then, walls were finished with three coats of plaster — like the ones in your home — that dried like rock. Hooks with nails won’t go in easily. You might consider using hooks that attach with adhesive.

I guess one can avoid the conflict by only living in homes with drywall after 30 (or mud-walled hovels if that’s your personality), so it’s not a true conundrum.

Fortunately, I know men, real men, don’t check off items in these sorts of checklists of manly behavior and disobey all sorts of dicta. So I’ll just ignore both.

If the nail bends, I’m just not using a big enough hammer.

Here’s a handy hint: If there’s not room enough for your car on the other side of the intersection in heavy traffic, don’t pull into the intersection. The light will turn red, and there you will sit, without even the intelligence to feel ashamed of yourself.

Blocking the box makes you look like such a tourist that even I want to take your wallet.

If you cannot handle the stress of driving downtown, stay in Wildwood and struggle to get the Cardinals game on the radio.

Today, kids don’t have a gossamer-shrouded Age of Innocence; all they have an Age of Being Charged as a Juvenile.

You know the saying that goes, A smile is just a frown turned upside down?

Doesn’t that actually imply that a smile is a defective frown, inadvertantly inverted from mankind’s normal countenance, that of suffering, stuggle, and pain, by a fleeting and illusory displacement of normalcy by the shiny objects of transient pleasure and is subject to correction by the harsh, uncaring reality who prefers all its frowns to display correctly?

Go directly to Guantanamo! It’s Patriot Act board game:

In this send-up of “Monopoly,” players don’t pass “Go” and they don’t go directly to jail — they go to Guantanamo Bay.

Instead of losing cash for landing on certain squares, they lose civil liberties. And the “Mr. Monopoly” character at the center of the board is replaced by a scowling former Attorney General John Ashcroft.

“Patriot Act: The Home Version” pokes fun at “the historic abuse of governmental powers” by the recently renewed anti-terrorism law.

You know, I would feign some sort of indignation at this misrepresentation of government power, but honestly, how can a capitalist like me not enjoy seeing even a person with an opposing viewpoint indulging in free market profit making without the fear that either of us will be dragged from our beds tonight and summarily executed?

Besides, I still have my deck of the Clinton Impeachment card game.

Not John Carpenter’s The Thing, not Benjamin Grimm, not the Addam’s Family hand.

The Volkswagen Thing.

How can you tell if a seller is "motivated"?

He or she has a For Sale sign in the front yard of the property for sale!

No, not that Diner.

Every Sunday, I take my sainted mother out to breakfast. Well, perhaps “take” is the wrong word, since she usually drives us there in that new little roller skate of hers (I, of course, encouraged her to invest in a car I’d want to inherit, years hence, with low mileage) and she mostly pays for breakfast. So every Sunday, I go with (or perhaps sponge off) my sainted mother to a small diner in historic (if you count the outlot of a new strip mall as “historic,” but someday, it will be, when we’re all living in underground catacombs or in orbit, how we’ll long for strip malls) Oakville, Missouri, for breakfast.

But I digress. Over the course of my many hundreds of dozens of trips to that diner, I’ve learned valuable life lessons that have made me a better man, husband, and father. To whit:

• Spread your jelly thin, for there’s only one little tub of it and four halves of cold buttered toast across which you’ll want to stretch your limited supply.
• Don’t drink all the coffee in the cup, you greedy bastard. Because you probably don’t want to know the real reason why that water is brown–it has something to hide.
• Damn the masculinity, order the strawberries and whip cream on your waffle; for in thirty minutes, these strangers will have forgotten how nancy you looked, and you’ll have the satisfaction of the sweetness in your belly. Assuming, of course, you don’t finish the coffee and see what’s at the bottom of your coffee cup.
• You’ll never be Norm-al. By the time the regular waitresses remember what you want even though you order the same freakin’ thing every freakin’ Sunday, the regular waitresses will have real jobs, and you’ll have to start breaking in a new set of regular waitresses. So don’t expect them to just bring the coffee when you sit down, much less learn your name.

Well, I just have the ill luck to have been born in relatively stable years with great opulence. Some generations get real-life lessons from wars and depressions and real adversity, I get red pepper nuggets in my coffee.

And, sonny, when I was young, we liked it that way.

This book mentioned one, and when I spoke to Heather about them, she didn’t know what I was talking about. So let me explain it to you damn kids the way it was in the days before plastic could survive the sub-32 degree temperatures of Frigidaires.

The ice cube trays were metal, with a louvre fixture atop of them. Essentially, the tray itself did not have separate compartments for the individual cubes, but the louvre blades made boundaries. You poured your water in and let it freeze. Once it was frozen, you operated this lever atop the louvre which caused the blades to shift back and forth, breaking the ice cubes apart and out of their tray.

None of this little plastic twists to pop individual cubes out. In the old days, when we wanted to drop ice in our scotch, we had to freakin’ operate machinery. Which is why we drank it straight, you damn malternative-suckers.

The difference between décor and decor is about 68% in retail price.