writing a weekly rant

When you hear the term “cowboy poet,” do you get a sort of tingly feeling at the nape of your neck? That’s embarrassment. You are stepping up and feeling shame for people who tragically lack the ability to feel it for themselves. Good on you. But are these poor souls really any worse than the woman strumming the cittern at the Renaissance Faire or an adult collector of Star Wars action figures? Actually, now that I think about it, I’ve got no problem with any of these people. They are simply being what I myself strive to be. Harmless nincompoops.

Just spitballing here

What a great slasher movie you could make around the concept of Christmas falling on Friday the 13th. I know, right? So. Do you work with the Santa/Satan thing or lean more into Santa CLAWS? The classic “kids on a camping trip” setup won’t work where Christmas is too snowy for camping, so we’ll have to set this in Australia. That means we get to add an army of Zombie Koalas and a hero who calls people “mate.” Oh. Man. I can’t wait for somebody to rip me off and make this movie so I can rent it on VHS.

Dangerous Corner

Chesterton’s Fence, named for G. K. Chesterton, the author of The Man Who Was Thursday, which is a book I highly recommend, and who was a friend of Shaw and H. G. Wells, is the principle that you don’t take down a fence until you know what it was put up for. We all want the pearl without the grit so we try to dispense with that which we perceive as unnecessary without noting that the Marx Brothers were funnier with Zeppo along and the Rolling Stones were never as good without Bill Wyman. We’re playing Jenga with reality here.

my hovercraft is full of eels

That Monty Python sketch where the Hungarian traveler has been given an English phrasebook that has wildly inappropriate translations of things a tourist might want to say. It gets him in terrible trouble and he’s finally dragged away by the authorities, protesting loudly: “My nipples explode with delight!” So I was thinking maybe he doesn’t know what he’s saying. Maybe what comes out of his mouth is not what he wants you to hear. Maybe, I thought, he’s not really a jerk, just misunderstood. But then I thought to myself, I’d probably be a jerk too if nobody liked me.

Save The Date

An asteroid with the catchy name 2024 YR has something like a four percent chance of hitting the Moon on December 22, 2032, at about 3:19 in the afternoon UTC. That’s odds of 1 in 25. For the Powerball jackpot, odds are 1 in 292,200,000. So the smart money’s on the space rock. I’m adding 2024 YR to my list of stuff to not worry about, along with GMOs in my pancakes and microplastics. Especially microplastics. Anybody who’s ever been hit in the face with a Frisbee will tell you that macroplastics are what you have to watch out for.

Warsaw shine

It doesn’t seem right that orb and zest are actual words while vun and thort are not. Especially since we could use some new words; so many of our existing ones have to serve more than one meaning. Like the ribbon on the front of a ship (bow bow), tedious drilling (boring boring), or a wrapped laceration (wound wound). I’ve asked around and there doesn’t seem to be anyone with the authority to supervise this sort of thing. Somebody should do something. If we’re not careful, we’ll end up living in a world where we understand one another very poorly.

To Summarize

So far I’ve been a pretty good guy, not necessarily a great guy. I’ve done some rotten things. I feel bad enough to make a little grunt if I happen to think about them. Which I try not to do. Then I recall doing some profoundly dopey and embarrassing things which I feel less bad about, because at least I wasn’t being a jerk, just a dope. Okay. But really what I want to emphasize is that however many regrettable things I may have done in the past I never bought one of those J. Peterman dusters. So there’s that.