No country for old men?

Here is yet another Monday morning, and yet another attempt to haul my tired ass out of bed, pour myself into my car, get myself to work.

Someone told me once, "Fifty is the new 40." Meaning nowadays when people turn 50, they are more like people used to be when they turned 40. By extension that would mean that I would feel like a 50-year-old, but no, I feel my chronological age. I remember 50, and it didn't feel like this. Like everything else in our universe my parts are starting to wear out and those parts are letting me know of the wear and tear I've put on them.

I looked on some biographical web sites, and saw that Senator John McCain was born August 25, 1936, which makes him 71. If he were elected he'd be 72, then if he were re-elected and lived out his term he'd retire at 80.

On the other hand, Senator Obama is now 47, so by that sort of logic used with McCain, by the time he stepped down after eight years as President he'd be in his fifties, which means he could start a whole other career, much like Bill Clinton. It also means he'll be on the public dole, sucking down millions each year in Secret Service protection and pension.

I'm a few months older than Hillary, so she'd be barely past the age she could apply for Social Security. Does she qualify? Has she ever paid into the system? It seems, like Obama, she has done well for herself financially, and won't need to worry. Well, none of them will, elected or not.

They probably won't need to sign up for Medicare, either. Unlike civilized countries, which provide health care for their citizens regardless of age, we make our oldsters jump through hoops to get even the simplest care. A great perk of being the President is you don't have to make doctor appointments in advance ("I have serious pains in my chest." "OK, I can schedule you for six weeks from now.") Physicals, tests, you name it, on the house, baby! Come on in to the examining room, no need to take a number! We take care of those folks, but the riff-raff, uh-uh, can't do anything about you folks.

In their own respective ways, I see each candidate as an ideal age for the job; they all have maturity and life experiences. They haven't abused their bodies too bad, not based on what I'm seeing, anyway. It's only us poor working stiffs who've done that, and as I shift around in my chair and feel my aching back start to tighten in anticipation of the heavy work ahead of me for today, I'm made acutely aware of the working, and being stiff.

Scratching a little itch

I've been reading some of the modern paperbound reprints of the Little Lulu comic books of the 1950s. I enjoyed this comic in the '50s, although I'm not sure why buying a comic book about a little girl seemed to be OK, since us boys were mostly into Superman and Batman.

The Lulu stories are more like what kids are really like. Lulu seems more mature and the boys she knows are all immature. Well, they are boys, after all, and boys take a while to catch up. In the Lulu comics the boys hated girls. But I liked girls. If the other boys liked girls they'd never admit it, and truth to tell, I probably didn't either. But there was always at least one girl in any class that I was totally bonkers over, head over heels in love. They were usually petite and blonde, and without exception they thought I was icky.

When I was in 4th grade I was in love, as usual, this time with a petite blonde named Kathy. Kathy sat two rows over and at the front of the class. That placement meant she was a good reader and all around good student. I usually sat in my seat and glanced at her when I got the chance. At recess I managed to hang around the tricky bars, especially when she'd hang upside by her knees. Ah, the sight of those panties…wait, I didn't really notice those when I was 9 years old, did I? I did. I didn't know why I liked the sight of her panties or bare legs, I just did. It took me a couple more years to figure out what the appeal was, but when I did, I was down with it!

OK, OK…so I'm slowly getting to the point. Being a boy I was clumsy in a social sense. Having to talk to Kathy would have been impossible. Like what would I say? Read any good books lately? Watch Playhouse 90 on TV last night? I was a blurter, so if I said anything to her it was probably stupid and wrong. One day we had to write a story. I wrote about my dog. The teacher read the stories at home and then the next day she had a few picked out to read to the class. Not mine, though; probably the first major rejection to my writing. But the teacher said, "Kathy has written the funniest story! It's about a little girl and a witch!" My ears perked up. When the teacher read the story I recognized it immediately as being straight out of a Little Lulu comic book. It was from that month's issue, a story about Lulu and the witch, Little Itch.

Nowadays plagiarism seems like such a nasty word. Hillary Clinton used the p-word with Barack Obama, when he lifted a phrase from a friend of his and used it in a speech without attribution. I didn't know that word, but I knew when someone was claiming something that wasn't theirs. I spoke up, "That story is out of a Little Lulu comic book!" Kathy shrank down in her seat. The teacher stopped reading and looked at her. "Is that true, Kathy?" Kathy muttered something, and the teacher put the story away and started into our arithmetic lesson. Kathy turned to me and gave me the first of many looks I've grown familiar with, the female laser-eye. The laser, emitted from her eyes in a blast of heat and light, immediately took my head from my shoulders, sent it clunking to the floor, where it rolled. And as it rolled, the thoughts turning in my brain like clothes in a dryer were, "Well, I guess that does it for that relationship!"

Actually, I don't remember exactly what I thought, but I probably realized then if I wanted to score points with chicks a good idea was to not accuse them of something in front of a teacher, even if I knew it was true. Sure, I had the moral high ground, but I didn't have the babe. When it comes to women, sometimes the omission of truth isn't as bad as a lie, but a lie is sometimes necessary, even if it is to ourselves.

Keep your head

Does this look like a headless guy blowing snow? It does to me. I keep looking at it and thinking of "The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow."

I had a thing about that story when I was a kid in the 1950s. Walt Disney ruined my sleep for years, because that cartoon scared me when I saw it originally. As a little kid I didn't understand the story, didn't know the Headless Horseman was a trick played on the old schoolmaster, Ichabod Crane. When I was 12 and saw it again I understood it, and ha-ha-ha, it seemed funny then. I still think it's one of Disney's best of the shorter cartoons. Character design, pacing, drawing, and Bing Crosby narrating. But it gave me nightmares for a long time.

The guy up top with the snowblower reminds me of some old saying, "Keep your head when all about you are losing theirs."

Do the dead know when we dream of them?

My wife's father died in 2002. She told me a few months ago she'd had a dream about him. She also told me, "I believe dead people talk to us in our dreams." My wife and I are not religious in any sense of the word, and frankly, I never think about the subject of life after death. I'm of the opinion, well, someday I'll see one way or another, won't I? If I don't wake up in a lake of fire or to the sound of harps I'll probably figure it wasn't worth worrying about, and if I end up in either place I'll think, "Uh-oh. I shoulda paid attention when I was a kid in Sunday School."

Ah, but I digress. This past Sunday morning I woke up early from a dream about a deceased coworker. Jan was a custodian. She had worked herself up to a top job in the school district where we work. She was in charge of the entire complex--a former hospital--where our district offices are now located. She had a whole staff and was busy all of the time, both with helping other people and with her managerial responsibilities.

Jan was the proverbial diamond in the rough, laughing, smiling when pleased, but you also knew when she wasn't happy. Jan could be sensitive, or she could tell you dirty jokes. I met her in 1995 when she was 30, a rover custodian. She would go from school to school, filling in for custodians who were out sick or on vacation. Jan didn't have more than a high school education, but she was an extremely hard worker. She got noticed and made her rise to the top.

Jan was married at age 19 to a man 24 years her senior. She had met him at Alcoholics Anonymous, where they were both still active. Jan's sobriety was something she was proud of.


One day last year Jan made a left turn in an intersection and was broadsided by a dairy truck. Before she left work that day her assistant told her she should take a nap because she was completely exhausted. Jan was in a coma for about a week and then they pulled the life support. Hundreds of people in the school district felt like they had lost a dear friend. Jan was my friend. I met her first, then my wife Sally met her, and they became friends. They went to lunch together every couple of months.

On Sunday morning I had a dream about Jan, but I can't remember what it was about. It woke me up and I thought about it until, like smoke, it evaporated and I went back to sleep. Then I dreamed Jan was standing behind me as I was sorting mail on my work vehicle. I turned and saw her. She was wearing a blue t-shirt, had her arms crossed, and she looked just like she did when I met her years ago. I told her, "Jan, I have really, really missed you." She replied, "I know. You had a dream about me earlier this morning."


My thought to that was, "Hey! People who've died can tell when we're dreaming about them!" That woke me up, too. I told Sally about it later, and reminded her of what she'd told me about believing the deceased talk to us in our dreams.

As I was typing that previous paragraph a memory came back to me. My dad died in December 1967. Forty years ago, after his funeral, I went back to my Army station in Nuremberg, Germany. By that time I was engaged to Sally. I dreamed about Dad. He was standing on the other side of a fence. Behind him was an amusement park. He said, "Why don't you come on over the fence and join me." I responded, "Well, if you don't mind…I think I'll stay here with Sally."


So, was I talking to the departed spirit of my dad? Was I talking to the departed spirit of Jan? I've known a lot of people who have died and never dreamed of them. I don't remember a lot of dreams, though, so those I mentioned have stuck out in my mind. My rational mind tells me it's all just memory, some sort of peculiarity of the brain, putting people who meant something to us back in our heads during the dream state. As much as I think that's true there's the other side of me that wants to believe that, yeah, it's nice to think that maybe I got a chance to tell Jan I miss her. I also got a chance to tell Dad that my life would be better spent with Sally than on his side of the fence. They are comforting thoughts.

The play's the thing...

Bill Bryson, like the subject of his biography, Shakespeare The World A Stage, is a writer of great skill. You want to take every sentence, every paragraph, and linger over it. Bryson is funny and erudite, and his subject matter is always fascinating. My favorite books of his have been A Walk In The Woods and In A Sunburned Country, which have subject matter widely distant from one another, and at least as distant as his biography of William Shakespeare.

Just shows, to paraphrase the Bard, "All the world's a book, and Bryson merely writes it."

Bryson's bio is part of a series of short biographies--for modern short attention spans?--Eminent Lives, edited by a man with the wonderful name of James Atlas. What Bryson does is tell us all that is known of Shakespeare, and according to this book, not much is known about the most famous writer in the history of the English language. There are things that are written down in the contemporary records, but most of what we know about Shakespeare is misinterpreted information, guesses, deductions made from his writing, or out-and-out fabrication.

What this book does is present Shakespeare in context of his times, which sounds boring, but isn't. England during the Elizabethan era, with its plagues and pestilences, court intrigues and wars, was anything but boring. Bryson paints a vivid picture of life in London which sounds to modern sensibilities like the Seventh Circle of Hell. Life was short and brutal.

Bryson devotes the last chapter to the folks who think Shakespeare wasn't Shakespeare, but one of a laundry list of different royals or playwrights of the era. The people who follow up these theories, crackpot as they might be, are the same folks among us today who cherry pick the information about 9/11 and come up with their own conspiracies and plots. Their stories all sound good, but they fall apart under scrutiny.

Bill Bryson is the most interesting author at work today, and in this case is talking about the most interesting author of all time. We probably know more about Bryson from the dust jacket biographies of him than we do about Shakespeare, but what little we know about Shakespeare is told as entertainingly as possible in this book.

*******

I believe if Shakespeare were alive today he might be writing for the HBO series, The Wire. Unlike the Sopranos or Six Feet Under, The Wire doesn't fall into the doldrums those series fell into as they gasped out their last episodes. Where The Wire has succeeded is by including in each season a major plot involving some aspect of life in Baltimore. In Season Two it was the dockworkers, in Season Four it was the school system and a group of students, and in this, the last season, the Baltimore Sun newspaper.

The characters in The Wire are Shakespearean. The major players, the police, are actually the least interesting. The most fascinating characters are people like Bubble, the junkie trying to clean up, Marlo Stanfield, the druglord working with the most murderous pair of hitmen ever presented on TV, and the best of all, Omar Little, the gay stickup man who goes solely after drug money.

Michael K. Williams as Omar

All of these characters are deeply flawed by their criminal lifestyles, but are also understandable as being part of the environment of life on the streets in Baltimore. When I mentioned above that Bill Bryson's description of Elizabethan London read like the Seventh Circle of Hell, that's also true of the representation of life in the inner city of Baltimore. I don't know how the Baltimore Chamber Of Commerce feels about this series, but they couldn't be happy.

Like Shakespeare, the dialogue can be maddening and non-understandable, the plots can twist and turn around until they show their true purpose, but like Shakespeare the play's the thing: While you're watching The Wire you're watching major drama that builds until the ultimate conclusions, then leaves you walking away shaking your head, thinking, "Man, I'm glad I stuck that out!"

Super Tuesday

It's Super Tuesday, folks. Time to get out, get off our lazy carcasses and start making a difference.

I don't have to, since I've already voted. Sally and I are on the permanent absentee ballot voting list. In 2004 we requested absentee ballots since we were going to be out of town on election day. We got a letter from the county clerk asking if we wanted to make that situation permanent and we said, sure, why not? Anytime I can sit in my kitchen and mark an X on a ballot and not have to go out to a polling place is OK with me.

I've heard all the talk about needed change, about taking new directions in America. I'm a natural-born cynic; if Democrats win they're in for a tough time, and if Republicans win then vice versa. I don't operate under any illusions that there will be much real change in our country. The majority of people might want change, but they want it to benefit them, and that's understandable. But it means different things to different people and groups.

The whole thing with the war seems insurmountable but it's not. I'm concerned that whoever gets in will inherit the worst bloody mess since Vietnam. Remember Nixon's promise in '68 to get us out of Vietnam? Remember it took him five years to do it? If Americans really want to get out then we'll get out. How much worse can it make us look in the eyes of the world than we already look? Then, as a nation we must repeat the mantra: We will not invade other countries. We will not invade other countries. We will not invade…

Remember, if there is voting in your area, get your finger off the mouse and go vote.

Hey, ya think?

I don't know about God's wrath, but I sure do know about Mother Nature's...the snow the past week has been relentless, and the weather report for the week to come shows snow, snow, and more snow! C'mon, Ma! Let up on us!

The leaden brain

A newspaper article from last Sunday at least partially answered a question I've had for several years: If lead is bad for the human brain, then what about all of lead in gasoline that we were exposed to for many years? It wasn't until 30 years ago or so that lead disappeared from fuel, but until then we were all exposed in the form of exhaust and air pollution.

This article points out that studies show that yes, we have been affected; that lead speeds up mental decline, and advances our age by up to five years. Which means even if my body isn't chronologically eligible for retirement, my brain is.

Seriously, though, if you extrapolate on this article, how many of the people in nursing homes right now are there at least partly because of exposure to gasoline fumes? Maybe hundreds of thousands…maybe those of us from the baby boomer generation will be bulging out the walls of the Alzheimer's nursing homes, just like we bulged out the walls of schools. The situation may make the Chinese manufactured toy recalls of the past year seem miniscule if the costs of having lead in gasoline for decades are ever successfully totaled.

******

Thanks to those of you who gave me some sympathy about my toothache. It was the worst one I've ever had, thanks to an infection in my jaw. I spent an hour in the dentist's chair on Monday getting drilled. A root canal has eased the pain; antibiotics are helping the infection, the cold air outside and constant bombardment of winter weather aren't. Even if I wasn't able to retire from my job due to a prematurely aging brain I'd want out just because of the weather.

Toothache food

Toothache.

I don't get many of those, but I've had this one since Friday night. I've been lying around with a heating pad on my face, alternating Advil and Tylenol, and thinking about calling the emergency dentist. Sucks to not have dental coverage.

Since I can't eat real food I did the next best thing. I fixed myself something I thought I could eat. Here's my recipe for toothache food:

Take two slices of white bread. Tear up and throw in bowl.

Pour in ½ c. 1% milk.

Mash bread until a gooey consistency, then sprinkle on some powdered cinnamon to give it some sort of flavor and look.

Try to keep the food from falling on the counter while eating.

When you find that even near-liquified bread hurts when biting down, take out bottle of two-year-old Lortabs, prescribed during convalescence from broken sternum caused by car wreck, and take one when finished.

Next time, eat yogurt or soup that doesn't have anything chewy in it.

Talk to you when I'm better.

Baby, it's old outside

Every day in this freezing weather makes me more and more aware of advancing age. Moan. Groan.

But, everyone gets old. Well, except for my coworker who died last week. He was two years younger than me. He won't be getting old. He keeled over from a heart attack.

My other coworkers and I spend a lot of time talking about health and doctor visits, especially when someone our age dies. This is what people do when they get old. They go to doctors and worry about their health. They should worry, anyway. One of the guys in my department is a diabetic, two are pre-diabetic. One of the pre-diabetics is doing something about it, the other one is spitting in the reaper's eye, saying, "Come and get me, Big Guy." Which, of course he will, but then, he'll get all us all in the end.

Even Superman gets old.

"Whinnnnneeeeeyyyyyy!"

And here I thought I had a good item for a blog entry. Sally is reading Gene Wilder's 2005 autobiography, Kiss Me Like A Stranger. She ran across the information that the reason the horses whinny every time they hear the name of Frau Blucher, the old caretaker of the castle in Young Frankenstein, is because the word "blucher" is German for glue. Wrong, says Snopes.com, the website that debunks such stories. The word is not German for glue, but merely a common German surname.

Wilder got the name for the script from writings of Freud. Apparently even he thinks the name means "glue," or at least he did when he wrote his book.

Well, that wouldn't be the first time reality crowded out a good story.

I've written before of two coworkers from my early 1970s stint in a dried food company, Jerry and Howard. They went to see Young Frankenstein, thinking it was a serious horror film. They were indignant that it was a comedy. I guess those two were the only two people in the whole world who thought they were going to see a horror film when they went to see it, but that's what happens when you're drunk 24 hours a day, seven days a week. What Howard and Jerry did get out of it was the word "schwanstugel," used by Teri Garr as Inga, when she describes how huge the monster will be. "A man that size would have an enormous schwanstugel!" Jerry and Howard used that word until the day Howard died in a rollover crash. A joke is funny once or twice, but a hundred times every day, no.

Young, blonde and beautiful

A beautiful young blonde woman boards a plane to LA with a ticket for the coach section. She looks at the seats in coach and then looks ahead to the first class seats. Seeing that the first class seats appear to be much larger and more comfortable, she moves forward to the last empty one.

The flight attendant checks her ticket and tells the woman that her seat is in coach. The blonde replies, "I'm young, blonde and beautiful, and I'm going to sit here all the way to LA." Flustered, the flight attendant goes to the cockpit and informs the captain of the blond problem.

The captain goes back and tells the woman that her assigned seat is in coach. Again, the blonde replies, "I'm young, blonde and beautiful, and I'm going to sit here all the way to LA." The captain doesn't want to cause a commotion, and so returns to the cockpit to discuss the blonde with the co-pilot.

The co-pilot says that he has a blonde girlfriend, and that he can take care of the problem. He then goes back and briefly whispers something into the blonde's ear. She immediately gets up, says, "Thank you so much," hugs the co-pilot, and rushes back to her seat in the coach section.

The pilot and flight attendant, who were watching with rapt attention, together ask the co-pilot what he had said to the woman. He replies, "I just told her that the first class section isn't going to LA."

*******

In case you couldn't tell, that was a joke. This is not a joke: my friend Eddie Hunter has just published the 1500th blog in his Chicken Fat series. Eddie's blogs, about his family tree, hometown of Marietta, Georgia, national politics, his dog, Willow, his visits to the cardiologist, and even what ribs joints in his town are great, are always entertaining. I don't mean to stereotype, but when I read Eddie's stories, I can just "hear" him talking, telling his tales and giving observations in the tradition of great Southern storytelling. Eddie and I met via the Internet--the old Prodigy Classic, DOS-based message boards--in the early 1990s, and he was entertaining me back then, too. Thanks for lots of good reading, Ed. May you have another 1500!

I need a snowblower

Today we woke up to snow. Lots of snow! Copious amounts of snow. Tons, gobs; we were whomped. Sally and I went out about 9:00 and shoveled our driveway and sidewalk. We came in and went back out a couple of hours later only to find it had snowed yet another couple of inches, so we bent our backs over the shovels again.

I need a snowblower, but we have only a carport, and no place to keep a snowblower. The picture above is another kind of snowblower.

When we were finished shoveling Sally got out a yardstick and measured. We had 13" of the white stuff on our park strip, about 12" on the lawn. This isn't all that unusual for us, really. We get one or two storms of this type every year.

We live right off the main road to ski resorts Snowbird and Alta. When it snows like it did this morning the canyons where the resorts are usually have to be closed for a time, both to clear the roads and to shoot down avalanches. Some people have been killed this year in avalanches, more than the usual number. It isn't a way I'd like to die. Skiers tend to be adventurous, thrill-seeking, don't you think? Roaring down a hill on a couple of wooden slats, or on a snowboard, takes a certain type of individual. I'm the type of guy who always hangs on to the handrail when I go down stairs. I'm very, very careful. So others enjoy skiing, even risking avalanches, but not me.

Service with a snarl

Friday I stopped at a bakery on my route. I don't often stop there, only about once every two months. I love their lemon scones, and sometimes temptation overtakes me. When I walked into Pierre's Country Bakery the young woman behind the counter scowled at me.

Don't get me wrong…I understand that people are sometimes natural scowlers, or I might remind them of someone they hate. I try not to let it bother me too much. I knew I'd never seen her before and hadn't offended her. She asked me, "What do you want?" rather than, "May I help you?" I overlooked it. I said, "I'd like a lemon scone and coffee, please."

She told me the price and when I handed her a $20 bill she shot me another look of annoyance. Instead of counting out the change, or even handing it to me in a polite manner, she shoved a wad of bills and coins into my hand. "Sixteen or twenty ounce?" she asked. I asked her to repeat herself--I'm hard of hearing--and this time she shouted, "Sixteen or twenty ounces?!"

"Sixteen," I replied, still being as pleasant as possible. She went to the air pot that held the hot coffee and as she held down the top to draw the coffee she gave me her most glaring look yet. "Room for cream?"

"Beg your pardon?"

"I said, room for cream?!"

Yeah, sure.

When I left I felt the heat from her flaming eyeballs in the back of my head. What did I do to her, I thought.

The next school on my route has a couple of friendly secretaries, so I told them my story. One of them, Cris, told me, "You should have asked to see the manager and reported her." Ah, as I explained to Cris, I don't report people. I let other people report people. It was poor customer service, but not the worst I've ever gotten, and maybe she'd piss off someone who was more inclined to tell her boss.

When someone has a bad experience at a business they are most likely not to say anything, but they will not go back. They are also more likely to tell several friends, whereas if they have a good experience they are unlikely to tell anyone. It's human nature to talk about injustices, not everyday niceties. But it's those niceties that keep us coming back. So I'm reporting this to you. If you find yourself in Salt Lake City, Utah on 3300 South Street, right below Wasatch Boulevard, and see Pierre's Country Bakery sitting in a little strip mall, remember your old pal Postino's bad experience.

However, I know as sure as you're reading this--and if you've gotten this far then congratulations for putting up with my gasbagging--I will go back to Pierre's one day. The lure of the lemon scone is strong, even stronger than a memory of bad customer service.

Just a half hour earlier than my bad experience at Pierre's I was in a school talking with a principal who lives in Park City, Utah, where the Sundance Film Festival is currently happening. I asked her what it was like in her town right now, and she said it was awful. Maybe it's great for the stars and celebs, but it's terrible for the townfolk. She said she and her husband were on Main Street, so choked by people that, as she put it, "If someone had a heart attack they'd die because no one could get to them."

She also told me that last year she was standing in a line at her bank, patiently waiting her turn when a woman in a floor-length fur coat breezed in and went straight to the teller. The teller said, "The line is over there, ma'am, and you'll have to wait." The woman retorted, "I don't wait in lines."

When the teller caved in and helped the woman, a man standing behind the principal said, "God, I hate Sundance." Another tale of bad customer service, this time indirectly.

Short Stories

Thursday night Sally and I watched a show about Rachael Ray on E! cable network. Ray is a TV personality with an uptempo style that can get tiring. But I like biographies, whether I like the subject or not. What was interesting to me is how Ray met her husband, John Cusimano. She said they were at a party, the room was full of tall people, and she spotted Cusimano, the only other short person in the room.

Pictures of Ray with her husband show he is a shorty, so more power to you, mate.

I looked up an online short people support group, and saw the heights of famous people who are also challenged in the vertical inches achieved category. I find people as famous as the artist Thomas Hart Benton and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie were both 5 feet tall.

The most decorated soldier of World War II, Audie Murphy, who went on to make movies until he died, was 5' 5".

Sharing the lineup at 5' 4" are Houdini, Picasso, movie director Martin Scorcese, and even two of the three stooges, Moe and Larry. Curly towered over his buddies at 5' 5".

What I want to know is, how do these short people support group folks know those were actual heights? In some cases they have to be estimates. They obviously couldn't put a tape measure to the notorious Marquis de Sade to find out he was 5' 3".

I'd think that celebrities would wear lifts in their shoes, or otherwise try to obscure the fact that they are shorter than average. I can't imagine a worse thing if I were famous, having someone come up to me at an airport and say, "You're a lot shorter than you look on screen." Mae West is reputed to have been 5' tall, but you wouldn't be able to tell that from this photo.

Short people have a problem in a tall people world. Cupboards are too tall, grocery store shelves are too tall, people standing in front of them at a parade are too tall. All of that has nothing to do with Rachael Ray, though. In a tall person world, even at her height, she looms large.

Hey, Canada! Take back your cold!

Man, it has been cold lately. It's about 12 degrees F. this morning. I guess you northerners, folks in North Dakota, Minnesota, and Canada, where the cold air is coming from, would be basking in warmth at 12 degrees. Next week it's going to get cold again, down around single digits. You'll all be dressed in t-shirts and shorts, no doubt.

Every year I hear the same thing…big trough of high pressure settled over my state, sending the jet stream into Canada, and the Canucks retaliate by sending their cold air down to us.

Well, knock it off. We aren't a bunch of Sergeant Prestons of the Yukon down here. We're all sissies who can't stand the low temperatures. I don't think my furnace has shut off for a week, and whatever blower you're using Up There to send your chill Down Here, shut it off, dammit.

I Hate Wal-Mart

I hate Wal-Mart. I really do. I hate that the goods they sell are cheaper than anyplace else around so I more-or-less feel obligated to save money by buying there. If I shop at Wal-Mart I find an item for $4.00 that costs $8.00 at another grocery store. My theory is that Wal-Mart will one day run every one of its competitors out of business and then we'll all live in the United States of Wal-Mart. Not only that, by buying its cheap goods from China, they are propping up their economy to a point where Wal-Mart may be the de facto government of that country before long. The People's Republic Of Wal-Mart.

Sam Walton, wherever you are now I'll bet you're proud of yourself.

Today we had a short list of items to buy so we headed for, you guessed it, Wal-Mart. The problem is that Wal-Mart is a block from my home, and every other store is more than a mile. With gasoline at $3.00/gallon I think I'm saving money and energy. How is that for rationalizing selling your soul to Satan? Anyway, we stood in a line to make our purchases. The young woman ahead of us was paying with cash, over a hundred dollars worth of groceries, and she didn't dig out the money from her purse until she got the final tally. I didn't mind so much; she was about 21, very pretty, and when she saw she was inconveniencing me she flashed me a smile which flooded testosterone through my old veins. Pretty girls know how to defuse anger, don't they? Daddy paid thousands for her perfect teeth, and she made sure I saw every one of them from between those red, perfect lips.

The person who annoyed the hell out of me was behind me; a woman, not as young as the 21-year-old in front of me, but old enough to know better, who kept up a continuing one-sided dialogue on her cell phone. She never shut up. We heard about her personal problems for the whole time we stood in front of her. Not only that, she had a rasping, irritating voice that carried, so everyone within range could hear her and her personal stories. I want to warn everyone, SHUT UP IN CHECKOUT LINES! I do not want to hear about your new haircut, your car problems, your boyfriend problems, your PMS, your bowling score, your boss's affair with his secretary…I don't want to hear any of that. What I want to do in the checkout line is look at the covers of People and Us and see the headlines about Britney Spears. I don't know Britney, don't care about Britney, but a whole lot of people are sure interested in her problems, aren't they? She probably wouldn't have so many problems if people weren't there causing her to melt down in the first place.

Avid Photog

My wife, Sally, spent yesterday with her friend Kris in a late--way late--Christmas celebration. When Kris and Sally get together I know I won't see Sally for about 10 to 12 hours. They only see each other a few times a year, for birthdays and Christmas, and they spend a lot of time catching up. We've all known each other a long time. Kris, Sally and I went to high school together, graduating the same year.

Kris is an avid photographer, spending a lot of time with her digital camera. She gave Sally some prints of pictures she'd taken at Farmington Bay Waterfowl Refuge, on the Great Salt Lake. The first one, the snowy egret standing in the water, was from a trip out there in the autumn, but the two others, the barn owl in flight and Northern Harrier on the broken tree were taken recently on a snowy, winter day. Click on the pictures for full-size images.

Kris is not just avid about pictures, she's obsessed. She told Sally she developed the pictures at Sam's Club. The store closes at 10:00 p.m., but Kris stayed at the photo machine until midnight, without the store employees still in the building knowing it. When she went to leave she startled the manager, who had no idea she was still in the store. He had to unlock the door to let her out.

As Sally and I would say, "That's just Kris."

Happy New Year

It's 2008 already. Weren't we just worrying about Y2K and the crash of civilizations when computers went bonkers on January 1, 2000? That turned out OK. Otherwise, why do we make a big deal out of New Year's Eve and New Year's Day anyhow? They're just days on the calendar, but have significance far beyond being number one in yet another sequence of 365 days…or 366 in 2008.

As a new year treat, I've been saving up some weird photos for some occasion. I've never gotten around to figuring out a context for them, so I'll just throw them in.

First up, something I'll bet David Caruso, "Horatio Caine" of CSI: Miami, wishes he had back:In the first couple of 1981 episodes of the cop show, Hill Street Blues, he had a bit part as Shamrock, leader of an Irish street gang. He got to wear a really silly looking Irish hat and a vest with a shamrock and the embroidered name, Shamrock. Hill Street Blues was a good show, and groundbreaking for its time, but this sort of character was a throwback to a sillier time in TV.

Here are some more pictures of people with tattoos. How about Buffalo Bill, here, existing on the "fringe" or society?Or Skeletor? How'd you like to give this lad a job interview?
Watch where you're pointing your monkey, fella…
These are pictures from the website listed at the bottom of each photo. The idea is for Photoshop users to take mouths and turn them into eyes. These are four of my favorites, but visit the site for more. Any of you with Photoshop talent, have fun and join in.

Boxing Day

"I coulda been a contender..."

"Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee."

"He hit me wit' his t'underbolt!"

"Yo, Adrienne!"

OK, all you residents of the UK, you Canadians, Australians, etc., who celebrate that mighty strange (to Americans) holiday called Boxing Day. No one on this side of the pond knows what the hell Boxing Day is, or what you do on Boxing Day. If we google "Boxing Day" we get a bunch of information that further confuses us. So guess what...this is what us Yanks think of when we think of Boxing Day...guys getting the crap punched out of them!

These cartoons courtesy of Mad comics and the greatest cartoonist of all time, Jack Davis.