1,000 year rant

Okay this will get posted on Monday morning but I’m planning on traveling so I’m writing it in advance which is tough because maybe things will have changed in unexpected ways in the intervening interval however although I’m actually composing this last week from your perspective by projecting what I’m currently seeing forward and from all the prevailing evidence I can predict that by the time you read this I’m pretty sure he will have decided that his fanatically loyal masked secret police would be cooler if they all wore matching shirts and my only question is black or brown?

Gartenwiesel

When you don’t have an umlaut the convention is to add a lowercase e after the vowel, like Heinrich Böll becomes Heinrich Boell. Or Moetley Cruee. The Garden Weasel was invented by a German guy named Gerhard Gütschow (Gerhardt Guetschow) who may very well be the actor Gert Gütschow who was featured in a 1988 film called “Einer trage des anderen Last” although that was an East German movie and the Garden Weasel was shown at a Cologne (Köln) trade show in 1974 and I’m not sure how permeable the border between the two Germanies was to spiky garden gadgets.

Bunny Ears

They keep trying to come up with a better technology than shoelaces for footwear closure and they keep failing and reverting to the method that we can observe on the earliest preserved prehistoric examples such as those leathery bog people. You got rubbery cords and velcro and buckles and buttons and whatever you call those weird slotted doohickies on galoshes and they all work worse than string. But what I really wanted to point out is how most people when they eat a Milky Way bar peel it and throw away the wrapper. But that’s where all the vitamins are.

Me? I'm sticking with chinchillas.

“Cracking the Code: Unveiling Strategies for Consistent Powerball Success." "LOTTERY SECRETS - They Don't Want You To Know About." "Secrets of Winning Powerball." I didn’t make these titles up. You could, hypothetically, buy one of these books. But that presupposes that you could read, that you believe there are secret methods that a shadowy “they” are keeping from you that if you only knew them you’d be rolling in dough, and most important that you accept that somebody who knows the secrets to winning billions of dollars would opt to share those secrets with any jamoke with $7.99 to spend.

plink plank plunk

Just as there are people who intentionally eat Velveeta cheese, watch Gilligan’s Island reruns, or jump out of perfectly good airplanes for fun, there are people who enjoy hearing the sound of the banjo. Not me. It’s like chewing ice cubes. It’s like stubbing your toe or a grapefruit that squirts in your eye. I admit there are talented and creative banjoists producing wonderful music. They do so in spite of the instrument. Some say the banjo was brought here from Africa but that is a vile slander and I’m tired of seeing Black people getting the blame for everything.

Rugged Individualists, Every One.

I can’t be bothered to research all the other people who surely have noticed the inherent irony in videotaping your back-to-nature wilderness homesteading experience and posting it to the internet. Face it: We are and have been connected. King Tut’s tomb contained amber beads from Lithuania, not that it was Lithuania 3,500 years ago. At least 10,000 years before that people were using obsidian tools from distant locations which they probably weren’t walking over there to get it. What I’m getting at is, it’s been a long time since anybody was really off the grid. Folks, we are the grid.

dogs are the constant

Some things get better as you go along: My ability to sit quietly and wait when it is necessary or opportune to do so. My newfound tendency to read all the directions before pressing the start button. Also, shoes in general, which these days are comfy even when brand new. Some things get worse. Among the things in life that start out really good and get progressively worse as you go along: Your lumbar spine and Star Wars movies. Also an entire box of Little Debbie Swiss Cake Rolls in a single sitting. Don’t ask me how I know this.