Oh yeah, and good luck to Patrick on that England thing. Wish we were there with him. That boy's gonna be okay.
Speaking of, well, stuff. I had some haggis at the Stakys, but the next day there were two platters side by side and the sign indicated that one was vegetable haggis. I don't know which one I had had, and didn't think to take some of both and cover my bets. So much for haggis.
I, by way of irrelevance, am on the way from Virginia to our new home in West Springfield (cue the Simps theme), Massachusetts. I have already learnt how to spel Massachusetts. Everything we own and didn't discard is in one of three vehicles, two cars and a monstrous United Van Lines truck, all wending their ways by easy steps to the rough vicinity of Geri Sullivan. The land of liberals, where Teddy is my senator. There was a statue of a civil war veteran in Westfield. A Civil War veteran from the North!
Just had to share. Not sure when I'll be connected up again; I'm using the Hampton Inn's free wireless today, while Cathy and Sarah are shopping to pass time until the motel pool is ready for Sarah's morning dip.
Penrod was definitely an important part of my youth. Two of the three books are on Project Gutenberg, as is Seventeen (my next favorite Tarkington book). That also contains racism, mostly in the form of patronizingly phrased observations of racial behavior, which he examines in the same way he looks at relationships between boys, grownups, dogs, and combinations thereof. This applies to both Seventeen and the Penrod trilogy. Everybody in his worlds had rules they had to live up to.
It was also memorable for giving me the line about how when you're a boy, anything you do may turn out afterward to have been a crime: you just don't know. Retribution and clemency are alike inexplicable.
Oh, and Penrod pencils some good, bloody fan fic in the form of his stories about Harold Ramorez the Road Agent and ____ _____ ______ ______ ______. (The dashes are Penrod's, and represent bad language.) I re-read it every few years. Booth Tarkington had wonderful powers of observation and emphathy.
They made a movie based on it, only they turned it into a vehicle for Doris Day. It's still worth seeing: On Moonlight Bay.
Mark Twain wrote some good cautionary tales, too. I wish I'd read them earlier and maybe gotten some of that silly Sunday-school pap knocked out of my head a lot sooner. I think I had a sickly fascination for the genre of stories about kids who get things given to them. I know I'm not the only one, because a lot of British weekly comics seem to be about that too. The girls' stories seem almost monotonous on the subject sometimes, though the theme was popular enough to make me wonder if they were having a depression over there when these were made (I'm thinking of ones from the sixties to the seventies in particular). But somewhere along the line I got the idea that if you're meritorious, just keep it to yourself and somebody'll be sure and spot it and give you swell stuff. I'd say more on the subject but I need to get back to waiting patiently here.
According to histories of my home town, around 1907... or maybe it was 1917, I'm not in my library... there was a pond where they took to dumping the effluent from the molasses plant. After a while, the molasses pond was full of worms that formed a solid surface, all in parallel with one another, heads in the molasses and the rest radiating out. Just a wiggly pink mass of wormitude.
The waste pond was pretty obnoxious, and it got cleaned up a good long time ago. One has to wonder just what sort of a sight it was, and try not to imagine the smell. Worms, for crying out loud.
Dick: What did you do when you fell into the vat of chocolate?
Tom: I shouted "Fire!"
Dick: Why did you shout "Fire!"?
Tom: Nobody'd have come if I'd yelled "Chocolate!"
--[Smothers Brothers single, early 60s]
ps: I might have.
Did I say 13? I meant 17. Look! It's Michael Jackson and the Runaway Bride!
At the count of two
Everything is still and calm;
Will "three" ever arrive?
The really hard thing is trying to make it a haiku instead of just counting syllables. All I know is I tried.
I understand that 13 isn't a hard and fast requirement, either. Some are shorter.
Ah, Singapore. Not that I was ever there, but when we were in Guangzhou, I ordered "Singapore-Style Noodles" from room service, and they were so darn good. Long, thin noodles in abundance along with shrimp and chicken and pork and egg and onion, and there was a brown sauce with a faint tang of curry coming off of it.
I looked for those here, and the folks at our local Chinese carry-out said those would be Mei Fun Noodles, so I get those sometimes, but of course they're not the same. More industrial, and the curry sauce is nowhere to be found.
Aw, fer corn sakes, you're in Boing Boing now, for this post.
Do they think I have time to keep reading the same post on different blogs all day?
Oh well. I'll just get on with life, I guess.
For a second, it felt like I was there, instead of snug and safe at home the whole time -- first fashionably hip, then fashionably selfish. I don't know where I am now, but I hope I'm not fashionable. Thanks for the peek at another fascinating person I'll never know.
D'OH! I seem to have assumed an initial "the," in contravention of common sense. So much for *#&@ clevertude.
...do they still have that place when you can buy a used clue for a quarter?
That's going to cause confusion. Mind if we call them all "Bruce" to keep clear?
(please pretend I signed my name and email with bruces in place of all the kips, then chuckle politely)
There's a duck sitting on three eggs in our garden. I hope she knows what she's doing.
The mulch pile is host, literally, to some fungus that comes out bright yellow, mellows to barfy looking orange, then turns grey and looks dead. I thought I saw beetles crawling on top, but what I saw turned out to look more like small, beetle-shaped dabs of molasses, which I didn't touch. I'm guessing the fungus lives inside the pile and this stuff comes up to the top. I can't tell you how the thought of trying to shovel all that up thrills me. Ghaaaah.
"I guarantee there is nothing in the Bible that justifies football."
Maybe not, but when we lived in small-town southeast Georgia, a local commentater gave an op-ed called "Bible Football," where he put together the ultimate all-star team from biblical figures. I was so impressed with it that I called or wrote the station and got a copy of his text.
I can't remember any of it now, but it was like "David would be the passer, because of his great arm. Solomon would quarterback, and with his great wisdom he'd call some amazing plays..." I stumble over the piece of paper every now and then. Not gonna throw that one out, no sir.
I was proud to be a Coloradoan the year we told the Winter Olympics to go crap on somebody else. 76? I don't know whether they'd been told that before.
Of course, I was always proud to be a Coloradoan, though I'd like to tell the theocons squatting there to go back to wherever they evolved from. A few years in the primordial ooze would do them a world of good.
I'll skip past the obvious jokes (viagra, ha ha; you may already be a wiener, ho ho) and just wish that the costume could have been pumped up by Thompson and Thomson on a two-man hand-crank mounted to a small flatbed that followed it around. With an Elvis lookalike singing, "You ain't nothin' but a hot dog."
I wonder if the Oscar Meyer vehicle is available. Didn't Little Oscar just pass away in the last twelvemonth? If so, a moment of silence.
Thanks kindly! Any time you need two more readers, just say the word and I'll give you a plug on my LJ.
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