eye toll jew sew

It’s a shame that for political and economic reasons people all over the world need to learn to read and write English, a language so peculiar and inconsistent that even (and this is odd) its native users often find themselves flummoxed. Like when one is looking stern while facing the stern in the bow of a rowboat, shouting, “You scamp! Don’t cause a row, just take us into the swamp!” Or determining the proper ratio of the sides of your patio. Wait. I’m not through, though this is rough. Haven’t yet mentioned good and food, or dear and bear. Weird.

The Immortals

If Hank Williams had not died in his Cadillac at 29, if James Dean had not died in his Porsche at 24 or Clifford Brown in a different car at 25, if Johnny Ace hadn’t shot himself in the head also at 25, if Eddie Cochran had not died in a taxi wreck at 21, if Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and The Big Bopper (16, 22, 28) hadn’t died in that plane crash in 1959, there’s a pretty good chance they’d all be dead by now anyway, or extremely old. That’s something to think about, but not for very long.

What I've been talking about

I’ve been talking about nearly nothing else since I recently heard about the Axial Twist Hypothesis, which posits that you and I and everything that has ever had a spine basically has its head on backwards. What this is is an attempt to explain why we’re internally asymmetrical, why our brains control opposite sides of our bodies, and also something called Yakovlevian torque. Admittedly, I just skimmed the part about zebrafish embryos and am somewhat unclear as to what evolutionary advantage the Axial Twist confers, but I acknowledge that its absence would make it extremely difficult to button one’s shirt.

Yard Waste

Maybe we use the word “hate” too often. The kid doesn’t hate broccoli, they just don’t like eating it. Nobody actually hates Kenny G. or Nickelback, they’re just staking out their cultural real estate. But I really hate leaf blowers, especially the internal combustion ones that produce more noise than a Top Fuel dragster in order to accomplish less useful work than a push broom. Those really loud blowers are usually operated by lawn care professionals hired by homeowners who could do the work themselves with a manual lawn mower and bamboo rake but they’re at the gym. For exercise.

not debatable

If two guys came to my house with competing estimates for putting on a new roof and one was a strapping young lad and the other a slightly feeble geezer, among the things upon which I would not base my decision would be a comparison of their ages since my assumption would be that the person with executive authority is most likely not actually going to climb onto the roof to handle directly the shingle-based aspects of the work at hand. Further, if my choice was instead between two elderly men, I would choose the more well-meaning of the two.

Adventures in Haberdashery

The local paper had a Gifts for Dad ad section and a plaid sport coat caught my attention first because it was hideous and second because they were asking $795.00 for it. And I’m like O My Gawd because the likeliest way somebody would buy that for their dad is if they were using his credit card which how about make him snort Tabasco then blow his nose in sandpaper. Seriously, this jacket could make a sportscaster upchuck. And for that price you could buy 100 jackets at the Salvation Army, not one of which would be half as ugly.

changeable hawk-eagle

The first thing you need to know about the changeable hawk-eagle is that there is such a bird. Beyond that, and I’m going to copy and paste here to mitigate somewhat the awesome burden of actually typing 100 words, “the life histories of raptors from tropical Asia are generally quite poorly-known, even in the case of easily observed raptors such as changeable hawk-eagles.” You may be thinking, “This isn’t starting off in a very promising manner,” but understand there is an extremely old dog behind my chair snoring and farting and also linear thinking has never been my strong suit.

Thumbs up for thumbs!

We win the biomass derby! There are about 8 billion humans, in global terms virtual clones of one another, currently living here. According to scientists, there is no evidence that there have ever been that many of any one species bigger than an ant alive at the same time. Just for comparison, they (smart people) estimate that the T. rex population probably averaged around 20,000 at a time for about a million and a half years for a total of 2.5 billion ever. To be fair, the T. rex had those tiny arms, so sophisticated tool-making would have been problematic.

Choo Choo Charlie

Suddenly and without any proximal sensory trigger, I want some Good & Plenty candy. It turns out I can have a five-pound sack delivered right to my door for less than 25 dollars. This is, of course, from Amazon and probably five pounds is more than I need. But here’s the thing: Amazon offers me a discount if I subscribe to regular deliveries - they recommend every two months. That would be 30 pounds of Good & Plenty per annum which I’m pretty sure is more than an average person eats in an average lifetime, even assuming they like licorice.

"Let's get this over with."

It’s always the end of the world somewhere. The defenders of Masada were dead sure that their struggle would bring about the arrival of the Messiah. Jacob Bernoulli predicted a comet would destroy the Earth in 1719. (The guy they mention when explaining airplane wings was his nephew.) TV preacher Pat Robertson said the world would end in 1982. There still live among us dotards who recall that whole Y2K kerfuffle. Seeing that extinction is apt to entail a lot less work than survival, predicting the imminent end of all things may be seen as a kind of wishful thinking.

A pretty kettle of fish

“A newly opened can of surströmming has one of the most putrid food smells in the world.” I’ll explain. Surströmming is a traditional Swedish food that is prepared by marinating Baltic Sea herring in just enough salt to prevent it from rotting while it ferments in a can for up to a year. It is recommended that the can be opened out of doors, and that’s advice from people who like the stuff. Several international airlines have banned it. So it’s unsurprising that there are a lot of Italian restaurants in Sweden but not so many Swedish restaurants in Italy.

Cranky Codger Chronicals

There once was a library service called Ready Reference where you would dial a phone number and a person would look up facts in actual books and give you your answer. These were some of the finest people in the world. Now instead we have Wikipedia and YouTube, which is like going to a library where the reference section is curated by deranged bonobos. Still, on occasion you can pick up unexpected tidbits of arcane knowledge. I have learned, for instance, that using one of those chin-up bars that you install in a doorframe will lead immediately to coccyx-shattering hilarity.

Speak for Yourself

“Lead Author Professor Jianfeng Feng, University of Warwick, said: ‘Developing a healthy balanced diet from an early age is crucial for healthy growth. To foster the development of a healthy balanced diet, both families and schools should offer a diverse range of nutritious meals and cultivate an environment that supports their physical and mental health.’” I didn’t cut and paste the above to dispute the content but to question the use of the word “said.” I’m pretty sure Professor Feng never “said” what he’s quoted as saying. Nobody has ever actually “said” such a thing. It’s not how humans say.

Dumb Luck

You don’t wish an actor good luck before going onstage. What you say instead is “break a leg,” which may be derived from the German “Hals- und Beinbruch” which actually includes the encouragement to break your neck as well, because Germans. In baseball, you’re not supposed to mention when a pitcher has a no-hitter going. For good luck, Chelsea Football Club players all use the same urinal (not, I assume, simultaneously) before each match. And of course, fast-food professionals hold the superstition that mentioning MacDonald’s by name is bad luck; they always refer to it as “The Scottish Place.”

Sunday!

I can’t think of a single reason why I would wake up this morning thinking about Shirley “Cha Cha” Muldowney, but there you have it. The human brain, which fundamentally is solely tasked with keeping our reproductive organs intact until such time as they have successfully continued the species, has a tendency to use its off time to continue working aimlessly in very much the same way a lawnmower when not actively engaged in cutting grass never would. “Cha Cha” was portrayed onscreen by Bonnie Bedelia who it turns out is the aunt of MacCaulay Culkin of Home Alone fame.

Mohawks and fingerless gloves

Is it only me who thinks that the Tesla Cybertruck looks like a prop built of spray-painted plywood on a Fiat chassis in a really cheesy Italian Road Warrior knock-off movie from about 1983 where all the extras look like they escaped from a Ratt video? I think the Tesla’s designers wanted it to look futuristic but the problem is we’ve already used up the future. Like, an Amazing Stories cover from let’s say 1926 looks way more like The World of Tomorrow than any current technology here in the actual 21st century which we’re nearly a quarter through it.

No Fooling

For a long time it was thought that the apricot originated in ancient Armenia but recent genetic studies seem to indicate that the fruit was first domesticated in China. The pits contain amygdalin which in the digestive system decomposes to produce hydrogen cyanide, a deadly poison. A derivative of amygdalin, laetrile, was promoted as a cancer cure but this was pure quackery. The original Steve McQueen (not to be confused with today’s Steve McQueen, the British film director) underwent a series of treatments that included both laetrile and coffee enemas in an attempt to cure the cancer that killed him.

Save the date

Sometimes scientists postulate the existence of a substance to make their observations conform to their ideas. Like phlogiston was this imaginary stuff that escaped and created heat when you set fire to something. The ether was this all-pervasive invisible fluid through which waves could propagate across space. They’re gone now; subsequent research obviated the need for them. Now new research suggests that there’s no such thing as dark matter. As a consequence of this, the estimated age of the universe gets bumped up from just under 14 billion years to more than 26 billion. So, update your calendars, I guess.

Maybe it was Arabian

Do you remember that one television show? This one guy had this horse that lived in his garage and it could talk. The horse, I mean, but only to the one guy, Wilbur. At least, that was the story; it didn’t really happen. It was a fictional portrayal from the perspective of this poor sick crazy guy Wilbur who had this delusional belief that Ray Walston had flown in from Mars and left a talking horse in his back yard. Anyway, you know what I heard? That horse didn’t really speak English and had to learn all its lines phonetically.

I don't deserve this

Our language has a lot of words that used to mean something other than what they mean now. Words like “hysterical” or “awesome” or “terrific.” So, last night through no fault of my own for work-related reasons I was sort of required to watch the Academy Awards all the way through on an extremely large screen. The main things I learned are that the phrase “transformational journey” now means what “job” used to mean, “brilliant” is the new word for competent, and “magic” can be used in place of “profit.” In addition, the phrase “I love you” means nothing whatsoever.

Our Demands Are Not Negotiable.

1) Declare Election Day a national holiday. Move it to summer. Provide ice cream.
 

2) Eliminate the penny and use all that zinc for batteries for EVs.
 

3) Abolish daylight saving time, which was invented to make us feel powerless and stupid.
 

4) Outlaw the designated hitter rule. Two teams of nine players each: it should be in the constitution.
 

5) Revise the calendar to consist of 13 months of 28 days each, so that each day of the month always falls on the same day of the week, adding up to 364 days. The extra day? duh. Election Day.

I kinda like Ike.

Do you think of Dwight David Eisenhower as a particularly poetic person? Until now me neither but this is kind of great:

“When I was a boy growing up in Kansas, a friend of mine and I went fishing and as we sat there on the warmth of a summer afternoon we talked about what we wanted to do when we grew up. I told him I wanted to be a major league baseball player, a genuine professional like Honus Wagner. My friend said that he'd like to be president of the United States. Neither of us got our wish.”

Born to lead

Here’s a thought experiment. Put a hairbrush in a shoebox. Put the lid on the shoebox. Then start asking people what they think is in the shoebox. Maybe they’ll say, “An apple.” That would be incorrect, though. Somebody else might guess shoes, which isn’t a bad guess, or a stapler, which, why not? A bar of soap? A Hummel figurine wrapped in tissue paper? A dead Guinea pig? Eventually and inevitably  someone will ask, “Is it a hairbrush?” And, yes, it’s a hairbrush! Wow! This extraordinary person knew about – predicted – the hairbrush in the shoebox! They must be a genius.

Shrove is the past tense of Shrive

King Cake is just whatever you feel like baking smothered in sugary frosting and encrusted with granulated sugar tinted in colors which are not typically the colors of actual food. King Cake is everywhere around this time of year and you find yourself eating it constantly leading inevitably to Fat Tuesday. To me the best time to enjoy Carnival Season in New Orleans is Wednesday Gras when you can stand on the curb without the inconvenience of congested streets or the unpleasantness of being stuck in an inebriated crowd and you are less likely to be struck by flying beads.

What are the odds?

I have just read that the chances of being struck by lightning over one human lifetime are about 15,300 to one which makes this a thing about which you for all practical purposes need not worry at all. Don’t give it another thought. Your chance of winning the Powerball is close to 20,000 times worse than that; you’d be better off taking out lightning insurance on your friends and family. The odds of surviving a lightning strike are about 90%, so there’s every chance you could rake in a fat payout and still enjoy that favorite cousin or bowling partner.

Omaha and Lincoln, if you're wondering

Inspired by the example of that harbinger of tomorrow, Alabama, Nebraska State Senator Loren Lippincott has introduced legislation to make asphyxiation with nitrogen an Official Nebraska State Method of Execution. Senator Lippincott represents a place called Central City, which unless I am very much mistaken was also home to the Flash back in the 1960s. It is just a bit more than a two hour drive from Bellevue, the third biggest city in Nebraska and the second largest city in the U.S. named Bellevue. Is thinking up better ways to kill people a normal part of a Nebraska legislator’s job?

Your Partner in Progress

In today’s fast-paced business climate, where just-in-time materials strategies are driving new economies of scale in the logistics of outsourced supply-side input streams, key operators in the manufacturing sector are turning to turn-key solutions to address their downstream customer’s demands for flexibility and expertise with a widening array of off-the-shelf offerings that provide mission-critical support that allows them to leverage their key competencies for success in a global market. That’s why, to serve you better, Amalgamated Punch and Federated Chisel have joined forces to form Consolidated Punch and Chisel, the full-service one-stop resource for all your punch and chisel needs.

Size Matters

Cawker City, Kansas, is one of several places claiming the world’s biggest ball of twine. The thing is, ball of twine arguments have gotten so much media attention that they are no longer considered quirky enough to warrant the full attention of true biggest stuff aficionados. Just outside of Effingham, Illinois, (motto: “I Wonder Who’s Effingham Now”) stands America’s second biggest cross. It is 198 feet tall, which for comparison is nearly 1,358 times the height of the typical crucifix such as might be worn around the neck, which would likely escape your attention as you passed Effingham on I-57.

eeew

I didn’t write the following, just cut and pasted: “In slugs it is often impossible to distinguish closely related species using external features and so reliable identification requires dissection to examine the genitalia. Slugs produce two types of mucus: one is thin and watery, and the other thick and sticky. Some species of slug secrete slime cords to suspend a pair during copulation. In the banana slugs, the penis sometimes becomes trapped inside the body of the partner. Apophallation allows the slugs to separate themselves by one or both of the slugs chewing off the other's or its own penis.”

The Island of the Danged

We should have seen what was coming when the Captain stubbed his toe. We had at that moment disembarked and were standing on the shore surveying the island which, it seemed, was fated to be our home until such time as rescue should arrive. We were: Myself, O’Connor the industrialist and his charming daughter, Schmidt the brusque and vigorous circus strongman, and the monocled and highly decorated Prinz Kraznoffski escorting the much-celebrated chanteuse Mademoiselle Mimi. How were we to know that none of us would escape mishaps as grievous as our Captain’s, or in some cases, almost nearly as bad.