No decoder rings yet

The United States Space Force is the newest, the smallest, and the goshdarned cutest of America’s Armed Forces. Everything they do is all about space! Like, the Chief of Space Operations, military head of the Space Force, lives in an official residence called Space House at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling, Washington, D.C. The headquarters of the U.S. Space Force is called the Space Staff. The Space Force has three field commands: Space Operations Command,  Space Systems Command, and Space Training and Readiness Command. The Space Force has its own governing doctrine; “Spacepower: Doctrine for Space Forces.” It’s all just too adorable.

Shane. Stay away.

He says he sticks his neck out for nobody but you know he’s just fronting. He acts hard because he’s been hurt. Look again closer. You can see in his eyes that before long he’ll be laying it on the line for the little people – saving the ranch, leading the charge, taking the rap, stopping a bullet. You’ll want to thank him but by then he’ll be gone. No messy goodbyes, no socks on the floor, no “Dad, we’re taking the car keys” for him, not ever. A hero is a guy who ruins it for the rest of us.

common sense

Yesterday was a day of driving the car, with a lot of the driving taking place in the hills of east Tennessee. And at one point, there was a series of terrific downpours, just blinding torrents of rain that had everybody switching on the flashers and slowing way the hell down. Then, boom, clear and dry and sunny, then wham, another monsoon. Like that. Disconcerting. But then it cleared up for real and that’s when I saw a sign that said “use caution in wet conditions,”  and I thought, well, they should have put that sign back where it’s raining.

It’s okay, I’m a dad.

One time I wanted to move this great huge rock from my backyard up to in front by the driveway to paint the house number on it. It was terrifically heavy so my plan was to put a big iron bar across a block of wood and just ootch it over a bit at a time. But my buddy Nathaniel, who is enormously big and strong, happened to stop by and he just bent over and picked up the rock and carried it over to exactly where I wanted it. And I thought to myself, “Well, better Nate than lever.”

Based on a true story

Imagine you were to make it your business to write something of marginal interest on a weekly basis and further imagine you applied the peculiar discipline of an invariant length of exactly 100 words. You might assume that the primary challenge would be to limit your verbiage so as to express yourself adequately while maintaining your self-imposed brevity. But some ideas are very small and demand few words. Today’s challenge is to expand the following content to the requisite length: To step on a raisin barefooted is an unpleasant sensation all out of proportion with the severity of the injury.

-sigh-

First, let me clarify right out front that I have no wish to minimize anyone’s suffering. No wait. That’s wrong. What I meant was, it’s not my intention to make light of the pain and discomfort that any given individual or group of individuals may be experiencing. Language is tricky. Like when non-rhotic English speakers write “erm” when they mean “um.” Or how >tsk tsk<, invented to approximate a clucking sound, is now pronounced “tisk tisk.” Language has derailed my original intent here when all I wanted to do was mention that the term Monkeypox Czar sounds funny to me.

for years I was smart

I was wrong to assume the term “pooka,” as applied to Harvey the invisible six-foot rabbit, was a cute invention of the writer; it turns out that these mythical shapeshifting critters have been around for a good long time in Ireland from whence their legend has spread. Come to find out, for example, that the character Puck in a A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of them. So the playwright Mary Agnes McDonough Coyle, who I’m guessing had a few Irish ancestors, was simply using the appropriate term to describe Elwood P. Dowd’s friend. I find that oh so pleasant.