Today’s post comes from Barbara in Robbinsdale

When I lived in Brooklyn, NY, we always looked forward to trash pick-up day, because the night before, people would put out on the sidewalk all manner of items they were ready to discard. These items rarely sat there long enough for the trash people to take them – something reasonably nice was gone within an hour. I don’t remember being lucky enough to score anything, but someone certainly did.

Well, our area has a bi-annual “curbside clean-up day” for unwanted items, and today was the day.

They take:

• unusable furniture (i.e. couches, chairs, mattresses)
• general household junk (up to 100 #s per item)
• scrap metal
• appliances (!)

All you have to do is get your stuff out to the curb, and voilà! it will all disappear. It is of course necessary to take a walk some time during the day (before the truck comes) to see if anyone on your block has put out anything you might want. I saw a rather nice tea cart with glass shelves that – I’m telling you, if I weren’t moving in a coupla months… (Next time I looked, though, it was gone.) It was amazing how many people in pick-ups cruised slowly down our usually quiet street.

What timing! We are, of course, in clearing out mode because of the upcoming move to Winona, so we were racing through the house to find what all we could get rid of. Put out an old TV table, plastic shelving, a former rolling desk chair, a plow sort of thing that had a bicycle tire as its fulcrum… gems, as you can see. But our little pile didn’t hold a candle to the pictured one at the top of this post. Granted, that is two yards’ worth.

I’m just happy I managed to not bring anything home.

What would you put out on the curb, if someone would come and pick it up?

Today’s post comes from Steve Grooms.

I was a weird sort of kid. I wasn’t comfortable with other kids my age. If I saw someone walking toward me on the sidewalk, I’d cross the street, pretending to be on an urgent errand. You could call me “shy.” “Weird” might be more accurate.

One reason for avoiding other kids was that I talked to myself as I walked. I told stories,
improbable fantasies in which a kid who looked like me did heroic acts. I engaged in conversations and arguments. And I brooded about various issues.

An issue that troubled me especially in the 1950s was chewing gum.

If there is data to show how many kids chewed gum back then, I haven’t found it, but far more kids chewed than now. Almost everyone chewed. In some schools at the start of the day the teachers ran a gum patrol, walking around with tissues and ordering kids to get rid of their gum. Some kids bluffed by claiming they weren’t chewing. If they later got caught, the consequences were not pretty.

I looked down on kids addicted to gum. The act of chewing gave them a vacant, bovine expression. I wasn’t alone in this. In Hollywood films from that time, if the audience was meant to see a character as shallow and stupid that character would chew gum.

My real problem, however, was with used gum, discarded used gum. Nobody had a good way to dispose of stale gum after the flavor was gone. Some kids just spat it out wherever they were. If you walked the sidewalks of my home town you inevitably would step on a sticky, icky lump of old gum. It would adhere to the sole of your shoe, a repulsive gluey blog that you didn’t dare touch.

Kids spat out their gum because we all knew how dangerous it was to swallow gum. It was common knowledge that gum had magical powers to defeat our bodies from digesting it. Lumps of swallowed gum wouldn’t break down but would drift in our bodies, inevitably lodging in the worst possible place: the appendix. There the swallowed gum would join all the other gum you had swallowed in your lifetime, stretching the appendix until one day—kablooie—the appendix would blow.

Death by Dentyne!

And even that wasn’t the worst of my chewing gum problem. What I hated most of all was the way kids parked used gum on the underside of restaurant tables, school desks or the counters of soda grills. If you ran your hands along the under side of a table you would discover a densely packed minefield of discarded gum, all dry and hard, stuck there forever. To my mind, this was more disgusting than picking your nose in public.

And the under surfaces of virtually allrestaurant tables were covered with these nasty little gum boogers.

This depressed me. If young people were going to be so gross and lazy, I reasoned, how could anyone believe they would solve really difficult issues? I wanted to believe that my generation would get some things right that previous generations had screwed up. But all those wads of dried gum mocked my idealism. Modern kids were obviously disgusting slobs.

Now let’s move ahead about sixty years in time.

About a month ago I tested my sense that things were better. I cautiously slid my fingers under a table top in a restaurant, feeling for lumps of old gum. No gum. None! I tried it again at a different restaurant. And another. No gum. None at all!

I have proved—to my own satisfaction—that teenagers no longer defile tables and counters as they once did. Mankind has made a giant stride forward. That leaves some challenges still needing to be worked out—issues like world peace, economic justice and global warming—but I have high hopes.

When have you worried about something that turned out to be no problem?

Header photo: Statue of Bigfoot at tourist attraction near Silver Lake WA, CC by 3.0 via Wikipedia

Today’s post comes from Jim Tjepkema

Remer Minnesota has declared that it is the true home of Bigfoot and recently held a Bigfoot festival.  They claim that entire families of Bigfoot were seen in the area in the early days of the town.  It is thought that those families moved away when loggers thinned the woodlands out.  There is a blurry picture taken in 2009, and widely published, that claims to indicate Bigfoot is still found at least occasionally near Remer.

I doubt that anyone has seen a Bigfoot.  The blurry picture could be a fake.  Also, people who claim to have seen Bigfoot may have been mistaken or not truthful.  Where is the proof, expectable to scientists, that Bigfoot exists?   Is there anyone who can verify those stories that families of Bigfoot were seen near Remer many years ago?

On the other hand, is there any way of proving that Bigfoot doesn’t exist?

As an agricultural worker I heard of a number of practices and treatments that were recommended to farmers which were not supported by valid scientific research.   There were unsupported claims that farmers would be free of pest and disease problems if they used certain fertilizer programs.  In addition, a variety of untested cures were offered to solve existing problems.

Usually I was unable to get the farmers who were using untested practices and products to return to ones that were supported by proper testing.   The people who recommended those unproven practices and products had gained the trust of the farmers involved and they would hardly ever listen to me.   Anyway, how can you prove that something doesn’t work?   Practices that seem to run completely counter to those that are well established might be found to have value if the right kind of testing is used.

So, how do we know that Bigfoot doesn’t exist if that is true?  Maybe Bigfoot is very good at hiding making it extremely hard to get good evidence of their existence.   Is there a group of large creatures secretly living among us?  Given the state of the world today Bigfoot might have decided it is not wise to come out of hiding.

Have you seen Bigfoot?  

All eyes are on our neighbor to the east on this political primary day. In honor of all the stubborn, sensible and surprisingly progressive Wisconsinites going to the polls, I bring back part of a post written by gentle baboon Steve Grooms several years ago.

US Highway 2 cuts across northern Wisconsin, running east and west. It’s a famous road. Not famous is the tiny town of Oulu, which lies just north of US 2. If you want to go to Oulu, you drive a bit east of Brule to Oulu Rock and follow the big blue arrow on it to Oulu.
Oulu was created and is mostly inhabited by folks of Finnish ancestry. They have names like Aho, Lampinen, Kohlemeinen, Reinikainen and so forth. The town doesn’t have much going for it. Its one unusual feature is a glass-blowing gallery. Other than that, Oulu is another tiny unincorporated Wisconsin town just like a thousand other such tiny towns.

And yet there is one other distinctive thing, something in which Oulu’s residents take great pride: the Oulu Rock.

A very long time ago, people needed a way to spot that little road that runs north from Highway 2 to Oulu. Citizens of Oulu placed a large rock at the intersection and painted the rock white and blue, the colors of the Finnish flag. And they painted “Oulu” in large letters, with an arrow to point the way.

Not long ago, the Wisconsin Highway Department informed the folks of Oulu that their rock had to go. Highway design specifications require the erection of a standard highway sign to point the way to Oulu.

The highway bureaucrats were unprepared for the ferocity of Oulu’s response. They didn’t want no frickin’ highway sign and they didn’t need one because they already had a frickin’ rock. Almost nobody ever wants to go to Oulu, to tell the truth, and if they do want to go they probably know the way already! The Finns of Oulu told the highway department folks just where they could stick their standard highway sign.

The highway department countered with all the predictable arguments. They argued for the virtues of standardization. They said a reflective sign would be easier to read than a rock. They said they operated under mandates from the legislature and didn’t have the power to make an exception like this. They said The Law demanded that Oulu accept a highway sign. End of argument.

Cynics say you can’t beat city hall, but Oulu beat the Wisconsin Highway Department. Civic pride and Finnish obstinacy crushed the bureaucrats and their boring laws. When Highway 2 was widened recently, the Wisconsin Highway Department even helped move the rock a few feet north. And it is there today, proudly pointing the way to Oulu.

No other town in Wisconsin has what Oulu has. There are a thousand unincorporated villages in the state, but only Oulu has a highway rock. It is one of a kind.

What is YOUR “Oulu Rock”?