A Class Act

A few generations back you spent most of every day hunting and gathering shoots seeds rodents larvae etc. to eat. Once you were all full, you and the gang might amuse each other with stories or music or pictures or dancing. And if one of you had said, “Hey, tell you what. I'll free you from the drudgery of dancing and singing and painting and storytelling if you'll gather enough extra food every day for me to eat,” you'd have said, “Screw that. You're talking about the fun part.” So why do we put up with it now?

Am I overthinking this?

I hate to discard pants that are still good enough for painting. I also hate painting, so I don't need a lot of painting clothes. Still, I just can't see throwing these pants away when they've got some life in them. Also, they're clean, so there's the soap, water, and energy investment to consider. If I'm going to throw them away, I should wear them once more and throw them away dirty. That's less wasteful. They're too good to toss, too worn out to give to the thrift store. As a matter of fact, they came from the thrift store.

Warning: Graphite Content

Longtime readers will be aware of my abiding interest in pencils of abnormal dimensions. It started with my groundbreaking expose of the now discredited Big Pencil of Wytheville, Virginia, which turned out to be merely a replica in sheet metal rather than an actual Very Large Pencil (VLP). I also have great affection for unusually small pencils, such as those in dainty leather loops in tiny ladies' datebooks. (Tiny datebooks- not ladies.) This all comes to mind because today is Sharpening Day. You may see me wandering around later with a dreamy smile, in a tangy cloud of cedar fumes.

Where's George Carlin when you need him?

Now we got this invasive arthropod in the Gulf of Mexico called the Asian Tiger Prawn, a giant foot-long shrimp. They eat smaller shrimp, and officials are concerned that this might damage the fragile Gulf ecosystem upon which coastal shrimpers depend for their livelihoods. But probably it just requires new tactics to harvest a shrimp that weighs a pound and a half, like punching it in the face or simply hollering, “Get in the boat! Now!” as loud as you can. And on the plus side, maybe they'll learn to eat nutria.